Ambroise
Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (1871-1945) was
born in Sète on the French Mediterranean coast: his
mother was Italian, and his father of Corsican descent. After
a brief visit to London, the family moved to Montpelier, where
Paul
Valéry followed
an lacklustre record at the local lycée with
enrollment at the Faculty of Law. Here he began or widened
his diverse interests — music, literature, painting and
science — and had his first poem published. In 1891 Valéry
started a friendship with Pierre Louÿs and André Gide, and
a year later he met Mallarmé in Paris. In 1892 a profound
emotional
crisis in Genoa led him to impose a regime of analytical and
critical reflection, which led to his Cahiers,
notebooks written in the early hours of every morning for
the following 51 years. He took a renewed interest in science
and mathematics, reading Faraday,
Maxwell,
Kelvin,
Riemann,
Lobatchevsky,
Russel,
Cantor
and Poincaré,
but was still much immersed in literature. On a visit to London
in 1894 he met contributors to The Yellow Book and
other writers, returning to Paris to become a member of Mallarmé's
Tuesday evenings until the latter's death in 1898. The years
1896 to 1900 saw the publication of La Soirée avec Monsieur
Teste, translations for Cecil Rhodes' Charted Company,
work at the War Ministry, and marriage to Jeannie Gobillard,
whom he had met through Degas.
The couple had three children. Valéry's appointment as private
secretary to Edouard Lebey, a director in the Agence Havas,
now gave him time for private study. He largely gave up poetry
to concentrate
on the Cahiers, but a request for a republication of
earlier poems led him to begin work in 1913 on La
Jeune Parque, one of the great
poems in the French language, which was followed byLe
Cimetière marin in 1920 and Charmes
in 1922. His position in French intellectual life was established,
and in the years that followed, losing his secretarial employment,
Valéry undertook manylecture
tours in France and abroad. He was elected
to the Académie Française, became a Director of the
Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen at Nice, and corresponded
with many writers, artists and scientists. German occupation
removed Valéry from his Centre Universitaire post,
but he met De Gaulle on liberation, dying in July 1945. After
a state
funeral he was buried in the family grave in the cemetery
by the sea at Sète.
Valéry's
poetry
Valéry's
early poetry was in the Symbolistmanner,
but later, after his 20 year break from poetry, became more
analytical and uncompromising in its search for ultimates:
"Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of
its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind,
of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between
the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."
Valéry
stressed the mental process of creation, the poems being a
by-product, though a perfect one: Valéry
was exacting writer, taking days to find the right
word.
A similar intensity
marked his private studies, which were not to master any branch
of the sciences or mathematics, but to investigate the relationships
between them, and how each expressed a different aspect of
the human mind. The mind is a moment in the response of
the body to the world, he once said.
In his Le cimetière marin, the sea is a symbol
for the understanding between man and nature, which is profound
but not wholly logical, the poet giving shape to what is nevertheless
abstract and impersonal. Fame and financial necessity made
Valéry into a popular public speaker, noted for his sharp
wit.
Everything changes but the avant-garde, he said. Books
have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals,
weather, and their own content. Politics is the art of preventing
people from taking part in affairs which properly concern
them.
Valéry's
approach topoetry
Valéry
was one of many who broadened the scope of French poetry
— Saint John Perse, Claudel,
Peguy,
Fargue,
Jammes,
and did so by trying to remove the emotional and quotidian.
Verbal formulae based on a mathematical model were what
was needed: exact expression and absolute clarity that came
from self analysis and reflection. I have sought,
he said in later life, to know the substratum of thought
and sensibility on which one has lived. For 20 years
Valéry
wrote no poetry at all, and only seeing how bad had
been his early efforts made him to start again and then
be done with the matter. In fact La
Jeune Parque was followed by several poems, long and short, but
after their collection in Charmes, Valery turned
back to being "his own and only confidant," taking
up the Cahiers, which eventually grew to 26,000 pages.
Poetry requires precision, but Valéry could not abide any form of vagueness, sentimentality,
or technical shoddiness, and made his verse aspire to the
condition of music, a Symbolist aim, of which he was the
last great exponent. Obscure as the poems are, worse at
times than Mallarmé's,
they exploit the peculiarly musical quality of the French
language, which makes them even less
translatable. Ideas and individual words are not difficult;
the broad themes and images come across; but to appreciate
them properly unfortunately requires familiarity with the
French tongue and the rules its sets for its poetry.
