Paul Valéry
French poet, essayist, and critic, who ceased writing verse for twenty years to pursue scientific experiments. Valéry was a member of the 19th-century poetic school of Symbolism, and its last great representative. Throughout his life Valéry filled his private notebooks with observations on creative process and his own methods of inquiry.
He insisted that the mental process of creation was alone important - the poems were a by-product of the effort. "Enthusiasm is not an artist's state of mind", stated Valéry. T.S. Eliot has compared Valéry's analytical attitude to a scientist who works in a laboratory "weighing out or testing the drugs of which is compounded some medicine with an impressive name."
The ultimate French intellectual
French poet, essayist, and critic, who ceased writing verse for twenty years to pursue scientific experiments. Valéry was a member of the 19th-century poetic school of Symbolism, and its last great representative. Throughout his life Valéry filled his private notebooks with observations on creative process and his own methods of inquiry.
He insisted that the mental process of creation was alone important - the poems were a by-product of the effort. "Enthusiasm is not an artist's state of mind", stated Valéry. T.S. Eliot has compared Valéry's analytical attitude to a scientist who works in a laboratory "weighing out or testing the drugs of which is compounded some medicine with an impressive name."
The ultimate French intellectual
T. S. Eliot hailed Paul Valéry as the representative poet of the first half of the twentieth century (“not Rilke, not Yeats, nor anyone else”). This new biography broadens the specification: the most distinguished, versatile and best-connected mind of his time; the ultimate French intellectual; le contemporain capital, whose life (from 1871 to 1945) forms the most searching prism held up to a world-changing epoch of European history.
Such large claims belong implicitly to this doorstopper of a book, over 1,300 pages in length, richly illustrated and with scholarly notes for specialist readers, as well as a serviceable index (helpful to the far greater number who will consult it as a reference work).
The thoroughness of Michel Jarrety’s research produces a plethora of evidence: private letters made available by copyright-holders, memoirs of contemporaries, recently published diaries of key figures in Valéry’s personal life, newspaper articles and reviews; the proceedings of the organizations in which he held high office, personal papers of all kinds (love poems, draft letters, invitations, bank statements, stock exchange reports – Valéry threw nothing away).
Scaling the paper mountain, his biographer has resolved to tell the whole story, and does so with chronological deliberateness, at the rate of roughly a chapter per adult year. Jarrety’s very readable narrative marshals a teeming cast of characters in an elegant and quietly dramatic life history which recounts his intellectual hero’s obscure early career as minor Symbolist poet, then as withdawn and solitary thinker, emerging to a late and paradoxical fame in 1917 with the publication of La Jeune Parque; and thence to international stardom as a roving ambassador for the Third Republic and the League of Nations.
Valéry’s circle of contacts remains dazzling. He was intimate with leading poets and writers (Mallarmé, Gide, Rilke); he worked alongside Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, John Galsworthy and Stefan Zweig; he exchanged ideas with André Malraux, Jean Giraudoux, Colette and Paul Claudel (but also with George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley); his lectures at the Collège de France were an influence on Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul de Man.
Who else with such a profile could also have had Einstein as trusted interlocutor and colleague, discussed atoms with Niels Bohr, or the crisis of representation in sciences with the likes of Paul Langevin and Émile Borel; compared notes with Ravel and Stravinsky, Degas and Picasso; collaborated with Bergson and Sir James Frazer; interacted with both Pétain and de Gaulle; interviewed Mussolini and crossed paths with an entire gallery of Europe’s interwar power-brokers?
To say nothing of the cast list of princesses, duchesses, countesses and other denizens of the cosmopolitan, high-society Paris salons who provided the writer with dinners, contacts, funding, entertainment, country-seat vacationing, confidantes and lovers.
As well as offering ample witness to the spell of Valéry’s oral “thought performances” – his rapid, illuminating, wide-ranging pertinence, masterful but graced with fantasy, humour and self-deprecating charm – the book also brings this “angelic” intelligence down to earth, warts and all, and reinserts it expertly into its various contexts of incarnation. The expanding circles of his family and friends, and his various collegialities, are expertly plotted; as is the Parisian literary scene.
The dynamics of the ascent to fame are acutely observed and wryly told. Jarrety highlights Valéry’s passivity: he owed to the initiative of friends every significant step in his social existence (his marriage, his job at the Ministry of War, his post as private secretary to the paralysed Director of the Havas News Agency, his accession to the Académie française); and he is perpetually driven by the anxiety to make ends meet.
Valéry was mortgaged to the salons: for contacts and support, stimulus and income. His regret at “missing” the Nobel Prize concerned the prize money of 70,000 francs: the price of the squadrons of secretaries he never had and the car he never owned. His health paid a predictable price. His success generated incomprehension and envy (Cocteau spoke of him maliciously as a chevalier d’industrie, “swindling the pants off publishers and society ladies”).
All of which throws light on the myth of a Valéry cast in the image of his programmatic hero of the pure mind, Monsieur Teste: a myth conceived by the youthful idealist who launched the “System”, later re-essentialized and popularized by Breton, to whom the icon of a reserved and self-enfolding intellectual potency was singularly fascinating.
We learn here, too, that Teste’s creator himself often “mythifies” the recurrent crises that punctuated his career, in proportion as they are dynamic or foundational (the famous “secular conversion” of the “Nuit de Gênes” is a case in point). Such glimpses of the mythic dimension of the poet’s rationality will further undermine the cliché of Valéry’s “intellectualism”.
The splendid account given of his subject’s interaction with the public events of his time illustrates what is perhaps the most significant achievement of the book: its ability to generate fruitful continuities. Valéry did military training as a reservist in the post-1870 “Army of Revenge” and was a clerk at the French War Ministry, working in artillery procurement at the time of the Dreyfus Affair.
He had previously worked in London as a translator for Cecil Rhodes’s Chartered Company, whose coolly audacious appropriation of vast chunks of Africa fascinated and appalled him; and he meditated publicly on the Spanish–American and Sino–Japanese wars.
“La Jeune Parque” was written to the thunder of the big guns of the Great War; its author talked military strategy with Marshal Pétain, whose reception address to the Académie française Valéry composed with trepidation. His elder son was ministerial aide in Edouard Daladier’s Cabinet as the slide towards a new war became critical.
Having glimpsed Hitler at Brownshirt rallies at Munich in 1938, Valéry followed the news of the invasion of the Sudetenland in 1939 as vice-president of the Franco-Czech Friendship Association.
He dined once with his fellow Academician Pétain in Vichy, while dissuading the Academy itself from all collaborationism, and edging the Vichy government towards acknowledging the greatness of Henri Bergson at the time of the French Jewish philosopher’s death in 1943. (He also managed to get Walter Benjamin released from internment, but could not prevent Robert Brasillach from being executed at the Liberation.)
Referred to their time and place, obscure or sensitive episodes receive decisive illumination: the case of Valéry’s anti-Dreyfus stance at the turn of the century; or the logic of his navigation between collaboration and resistance after 1940. The modulation of his early right-leaning patriotic and nationalist fervour into ardent commitment to a value-led, “cultural” or “civilizational” concept of “Europe” becomes transparent: at once a response to the shipwreck of nation-state nationalism, a reaction to the ethical shock of the First World War, an expression of his missionary commitment to a saving Idea, and a practical attempt to give Europe the “politics of its [artistic and scientific] thought”.
Jarrety offers a rich account of this leitmotif running through Valéry’s endless colloquia, conferences and encounters in the framework of the League’s Committee for Intellectual Co-Operation, as well as at the Centre méditérranéen (a university institute created for him in Nice, and which its director conceived as a teaching and research tool in the service of the European Idea).
He chronicles the nobility and promise of this commitment in the 1920s, its crisis in the 30s and the delivery of its “bitter fruits” in the chaos and cruelty of defeat and occupation. “That civilization which was our raison d’être is struck down in the heart of the country which, as well as might be, kept it alive”.
One cannot read Valéry’s epitaph on pre-war French rationalist idealism about politics, Europe and human nature without seeing why the post-war world had to begin again.
At the private end of the spectrum, we get a sober, authoritative and near-complete account of Valéry’s love life – the first to be published. The “two or three capital Events of my secret life” have, of course, been coming to light progressively over the past twenty years: the adolescent obsession with Mme de R(ovira) in the early 1890s, reactively generating the “System”; the mid-life cataclysm of his affair in the 1920s with Catherine Pozzi; the final erotico-mystical drama of “tenderness”, projected by the septuagenarian poet on to the worldly Jeanne Loviton, who left him for a rich, collaborationist publisher in May 1945, thus providing the “axeblow” which killed him later that year.
Jarrety retraces and extends this series: the Duchesse Edmée de la Rochefoucauld and the academic Émilie Noulet; but also the sculptress Renée Vauthier, and, platonically, the nun Jeanne Deléon (“there is no doubt she loves me in eternity”). Each relationship is analysed in its own context.
Valéry is rooted in nineteenth-century dualisms (sex and marriage; flesh and spirit). His semi- “arranged” marriage from 1900 to Jeannie Gobillard, though deeply affectionate and even faithful – he refused in 1924 to leave her for Catherine Pozzi – generated a deficit of intellectual companionship, of sexual and affective intensity, of unsatisfied spiritual longing.
Jeannie belonged to the circle of painters around Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, and had Stéphane Mallarmé as an unofficial guardian. (It was the wish of “le Maître” to see the couple united that first brought them together.) Then there were Jeannie’s illnesses; but also the birth of three children (Valéry was a fine father to the first two, neglecting the third, born just as his fame set in). Most seriously perhaps, there was the tension between mobile, free-thinking intellectual stardom and a domesticity ordered by a strictly orthodox feminine piety.
One clue to contextual understanding, and one major dimension of empathy with his subject, is perhaps missing. Jarrety downplays the “vertical” axis of Valéry’s own parallel and rival construct of spirituality, powerfully stirred and illustrated (as he himself notes parenthetically) by these amorous excursions.
The celebrated “mysticism without God”, the very form of his subject’s awareness and writing on Desire, gets scant mention: its origin in the prose poem of 1888 entitled “Enterrement de Dieu” remains undisclosed; the encounter of 1909–10 with St John of the Cross, whose imagery powerfully imprints
La Jeune Parque, is passed over in silence. Yet Valéry himself tells us in 1942 that he came across the Spanish poet and mystic by chance, in a library, in the seventeenth-century French translation of Fr Cyprien de la Nativité, and was fascinated by the interplay between the apparently artless lyricism of the poetry and the hidden subtlety explicated in the treatises of mystical theology. Jarrety’s Valéry is bounded, albeit with scruples of equity, by a mimetically conventional account of Third Republic “religion”.
More generally, one can regret that the interface between the man and his creative work is generally little explored, beyond pointers to genetic context useful to specialists, and a summary helpful to non-specialists. This is particularly true in relation to the “System”, but true also of the most beautiful and profound poem that made Valéry’s reputation.
“La Jeune Parque” was written to the thunder of the big guns of the Great War; its author talked military strategy with Marshal Pétain, whose reception address to the Académie française Valéry composed with trepidation. His elder son was ministerial aide in Edouard Daladier’s Cabinet as the slide towards a new war became critical.
Having glimpsed Hitler at Brownshirt rallies at Munich in 1938, Valéry followed the news of the invasion of the Sudetenland in 1939 as vice-president of the Franco-Czech Friendship Association.
He dined once with his fellow Academician Pétain in Vichy, while dissuading the Academy itself from all collaborationism, and edging the Vichy government towards acknowledging the greatness of Henri Bergson at the time of the French Jewish philosopher’s death in 1943. (He also managed to get Walter Benjamin released from internment, but could not prevent Robert Brasillach from being executed at the Liberation.)
Referred to their time and place, obscure or sensitive episodes receive decisive illumination: the case of Valéry’s anti-Dreyfus stance at the turn of the century; or the logic of his navigation between collaboration and resistance after 1940. The modulation of his early right-leaning patriotic and nationalist fervour into ardent commitment to a value-led, “cultural” or “civilizational” concept of “Europe” becomes transparent: at once a response to the shipwreck of nation-state nationalism, a reaction to the ethical shock of the First World War, an expression of his missionary commitment to a saving Idea, and a practical attempt to give Europe the “politics of its [artistic and scientific] thought”.
Jarrety offers a rich account of this leitmotif running through Valéry’s endless colloquia, conferences and encounters in the framework of the League’s Committee for Intellectual Co-Operation, as well as at the Centre méditérranéen (a university institute created for him in Nice, and which its director conceived as a teaching and research tool in the service of the European Idea).
He chronicles the nobility and promise of this commitment in the 1920s, its crisis in the 30s and the delivery of its “bitter fruits” in the chaos and cruelty of defeat and occupation. “That civilization which was our raison d’être is struck down in the heart of the country which, as well as might be, kept it alive”.
One cannot read Valéry’s epitaph on pre-war French rationalist idealism about politics, Europe and human nature without seeing why the post-war world had to begin again.
At the private end of the spectrum, we get a sober, authoritative and near-complete account of Valéry’s love life – the first to be published. The “two or three capital Events of my secret life” have, of course, been coming to light progressively over the past twenty years: the adolescent obsession with Mme de R(ovira) in the early 1890s, reactively generating the “System”; the mid-life cataclysm of his affair in the 1920s with Catherine Pozzi; the final erotico-mystical drama of “tenderness”, projected by the septuagenarian poet on to the worldly Jeanne Loviton, who left him for a rich, collaborationist publisher in May 1945, thus providing the “axeblow” which killed him later that year.
Jarrety retraces and extends this series: the Duchesse Edmée de la Rochefoucauld and the academic Émilie Noulet; but also the sculptress Renée Vauthier, and, platonically, the nun Jeanne Deléon (“there is no doubt she loves me in eternity”). Each relationship is analysed in its own context.
Valéry is rooted in nineteenth-century dualisms (sex and marriage; flesh and spirit). His semi- “arranged” marriage from 1900 to Jeannie Gobillard, though deeply affectionate and even faithful – he refused in 1924 to leave her for Catherine Pozzi – generated a deficit of intellectual companionship, of sexual and affective intensity, of unsatisfied spiritual longing.
Jeannie belonged to the circle of painters around Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, and had Stéphane Mallarmé as an unofficial guardian. (It was the wish of “le Maître” to see the couple united that first brought them together.) Then there were Jeannie’s illnesses; but also the birth of three children (Valéry was a fine father to the first two, neglecting the third, born just as his fame set in). Most seriously perhaps, there was the tension between mobile, free-thinking intellectual stardom and a domesticity ordered by a strictly orthodox feminine piety.
One clue to contextual understanding, and one major dimension of empathy with his subject, is perhaps missing. Jarrety downplays the “vertical” axis of Valéry’s own parallel and rival construct of spirituality, powerfully stirred and illustrated (as he himself notes parenthetically) by these amorous excursions.
The celebrated “mysticism without God”, the very form of his subject’s awareness and writing on Desire, gets scant mention: its origin in the prose poem of 1888 entitled “Enterrement de Dieu” remains undisclosed; the encounter of 1909–10 with St John of the Cross, whose imagery powerfully imprints
La Jeune Parque, is passed over in silence. Yet Valéry himself tells us in 1942 that he came across the Spanish poet and mystic by chance, in a library, in the seventeenth-century French translation of Fr Cyprien de la Nativité, and was fascinated by the interplay between the apparently artless lyricism of the poetry and the hidden subtlety explicated in the treatises of mystical theology. Jarrety’s Valéry is bounded, albeit with scruples of equity, by a mimetically conventional account of Third Republic “religion”.
More generally, one can regret that the interface between the man and his creative work is generally little explored, beyond pointers to genetic context useful to specialists, and a summary helpful to non-specialists. This is particularly true in relation to the “System”, but true also of the most beautiful and profound poem that made Valéry’s reputation.
We are not “signposted” towards the creative achievement of the thinker or the poet, i.e. towards what won the celebrity which merits a biography of this size. By default, the life itself becomes the main point.
There is, of course, a sizeable paradox about the mere fact of a biography of Valéry, let alone the Balzacian scale of this monument. In terms of literary theory, Paul Valéry represents the complete opposite of the type of criticism predicated on the supposedly explanatory association of “l’homme et l’oeuvre”.
Nor is this paradox without resonance. Professor Jarrety, who is a disciple of Barthes and Blanchot, shows us in Valéry the major, if appropriated, precursor of French formalist thinking about writing and literary language. There is no contradiction here; just an under-negotiated “conversion” of viewpoint, and an unresolved existential tension – which Valéry’s greatest poem, precisely, explores.
In real life, Monsieur Teste’s creator, unlike his hero, had visibility thrust upon him; and he espoused this paradox in a conscious dialectic of surfaces and depths, as the fruitful form of himself (“sociable on the surface, singularist and separatist in my depths”).
The poet of 1917, representing in the poem his own inner modulation in time, spoke of an “autobiography in the form”. This is a good paradox, posing key questions to all biographers, and, up to a point, justifying this one. All theory, as Valéry knew, is, in the end, “a carefully dressed-up fragment of some autobiography”.
"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." (from Littérature, 1929)
Paul Valéry was born in Cette (now Sète), the son of a Corsican customs officer, Barthelmy Valéry, and Fanny Grassi, who was the daughter of the Genoese Italian consul and descended from Venetian nobility.
Valéry spent his childhood in the port town of his birth, and remained through his life close to his Mediterranean origins. He was educated in Sette and at the lycée in Montpellier. He studied law at the University of Montpellier, and obtained his licence in 1892.
There is, of course, a sizeable paradox about the mere fact of a biography of Valéry, let alone the Balzacian scale of this monument. In terms of literary theory, Paul Valéry represents the complete opposite of the type of criticism predicated on the supposedly explanatory association of “l’homme et l’oeuvre”.
Nor is this paradox without resonance. Professor Jarrety, who is a disciple of Barthes and Blanchot, shows us in Valéry the major, if appropriated, precursor of French formalist thinking about writing and literary language. There is no contradiction here; just an under-negotiated “conversion” of viewpoint, and an unresolved existential tension – which Valéry’s greatest poem, precisely, explores.
In real life, Monsieur Teste’s creator, unlike his hero, had visibility thrust upon him; and he espoused this paradox in a conscious dialectic of surfaces and depths, as the fruitful form of himself (“sociable on the surface, singularist and separatist in my depths”).
The poet of 1917, representing in the poem his own inner modulation in time, spoke of an “autobiography in the form”. This is a good paradox, posing key questions to all biographers, and, up to a point, justifying this one. All theory, as Valéry knew, is, in the end, “a carefully dressed-up fragment of some autobiography”.
"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." (from Littérature, 1929)
Paul Valéry was born in Cette (now Sète), the son of a Corsican customs officer, Barthelmy Valéry, and Fanny Grassi, who was the daughter of the Genoese Italian consul and descended from Venetian nobility.
Valéry spent his childhood in the port town of his birth, and remained through his life close to his Mediterranean origins. He was educated in Sette and at the lycée in Montpellier. He studied law at the University of Montpellier, and obtained his licence in 1892.
Mathematics fascinated Valéry, but before his voluntary service in the infantry he had been prevented from becoming a candidate for the Naval School due to his weakness in this subject. After moving to Paris he became a regular attendant at Stéphane Mallarmé's literary 'Tuesday evenings' and the older poet's favorite disciple.
Valéry's other early idols were Edgar Allan Poe, whose poems he also translated, and J-K.Huysman. Mallarmé's influence is seen in Valéry's masterpiece LA JEUNE PARQUE (1917). Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, Valéry started to write in notebooks, which were published posthumously in 1957-60 in CAHIERS (Notebooks).
After a passionate attraction for a young Spanish girl, Valéry went through a personal crisis. During a violent thunderstorm, as he later reported, he decided to free himself "at no matter what cost, from those falsehoods: literature and sentiment." In 1896 Valéry was employed in London by the press bureau of the British South Africa Company.
He then worked for three years in the artillery munition bureau of the French Army. In 1900 he married Jeannie Gobillard, a niece of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot. In the same year he joined the Havas news agency to became the private secretary of Edouard Lebey, a key executive of the company, who was afflicted with paralysis agitans. Valéry held this position until 1922.
In 1892 Valéry experienced the "revolution of the mind" during a stormy night in Genoa. He turned his back on writing poetry and dedicated himself to gaining "maximum knowledge and control of his intellect." The very act of writing, he decided, was one of vanity. During these silent years as a poet he published two prose works.
In INTRODUCTION DE LA MÉTHODE DE LÉONARD DA VINCI (1894) he stated that "all criticism is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects." LA SOIRÉE AVEC MONSIEUR TESTE (1896) was the first of. the numerous pieces of the Teste cycle.
The painter Edgar Degas, who called him 'Monseur Angel', refused the dedication of the book. M. Teste (Mr. Head) is an intellectual monster, whose whole existence is given up to the examination of his own intellectual process. The work was published in Le Centaure, and reprinted by Paul Fort, in his periodical Vers et prose.
Valéry's mathematical and philosophical speculations were interrupted in 1912 by André Gide' and the publisher Gaston Gallimard, who persuaded Valéry to collect and revise the poetry he had written in the 1890s. "A poem is never finished, only abandoned," had Valéry himself once said. Valéry's original plan was to produce a poem of some forty lines, but he finished with one of his major works, La Jeune Pataque, which brought him immediate fame.
Une esclave aux longs yeux chargés de molles chainesChange l'eau de mes fleurs, plonge aux glaces prochaines,Au lit mystérieux prodigue ses doigts purs;Elle met une femme au milieu de ces mursQui, dans ma réverie errante avec décence,Passe entre mes regards sans briser leur absence,Comme passe le verre au travers du soleil,Et de la raison pure épargne l'appareil. (from 'Intérieur')
A slave with the long eyes charged with soft chains
Change l' water of my flowers, plunges to the nearest ices,
the mysterious bed lavishes its pure fingers;
She puts a woman in the middle of these walls
Who, in my revery wandering with decency,
Passes between my glances without breaking their absence,
As glass through the sun passes,
And of the pure reason l' saves; apparatus. (Translation)
With the CHARMES OU POÉMES (1922) Valéry attained the status of most significant contemporary French poet. In his most famous poem, 'Le Cimetière marin', the poet meditates as he looks at the cemetery by the sea at Sette where his parents - and he himself ultimately - are buried. He initially feels that he loves and envies the stillness of death, but comes then to the famous lines: 'The wind rises!... We must try to live!'
Lebey's death left Valéry without employment, and he had to earn his living by publishing his writings. He lectured, wrote prefaces to ancient and modern works, and contributed to periodicals. However, Valéry was horrified to find out, that his letters to Pierre Louÿs were sold without his own consent on the rare-book market.
The letters were retrieved by Julien-Pierre Monod, the grandfather of the director Jean-Luc Godard, and published in 1925 with the title QUINZE LETTRES DE PAUL VALÉRY À PIERRE LOUŸS ÉCRITES ENTRE 1915 ET 1917 RECUEILLIES ET PUBLIÉES. Eventually Monod began to manage the poets money, organized his lecture tours, and served as his secretary. Valéry referred to him as his "minister".
Valéry's 'mélodrames' Amphion and Sémiramis, with music by Arthur Honegger, played at the Paris Opera in 1931 and 1934. Valéry was elected to the Académie Française in 1925 and in 1933 he was made administrative head of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen at Nice. On Anatole France's death Valéry was admitted to the Academy, but instead of composing an 'éloge' about France he broke the precedent by unconventionally criticizing the author. Whereas France had occupied himself with politics and finally declared himself a Communist,
Valéry was not a political thinker. Also France represented to many French literary people all that was outmoded. Valéry was appointed in 1937 professor of poetry at the Collège de France. In 1939 he wrote the libretto for Germaine Taillefer's Cantate du Narcisse. He died in Paris on July 20, 1945.
His last principal work was the Faust fragments on which he began to work in 1940. Between the years 1957 and 1961 the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique published a facsimile reprint of his Cahiers. Selections from the Cahiers appeared in 1973 in two large volumes.
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