A poet echoing Colonial America

Teresa Cader

Teresa Cader is the author of two collections of poetry. Guests, 1991, won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and The Journal Award in Poetry from the Ohio State University Press. The third section of her next book (The Paper Wasp, TriQuarterly Press, 1999) won the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award. She is on the core poetry faculty of the Lesley University Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She has just completed a third collection of poems.

An excerpt from her interview

I’ve been influenced by Emerson in my approach to history; that is, that history is inseparable from the individual. We are made up in part of accretions of history, of the lives lived before us. The green tea on the Japanese American restaurant table is loaded with history by its very placement. All beginnings are a consequence, as Valery would say. There are no mysterious historical forces wandering around the planet like robot-piloted bombers. Look around you at your friends and neighbors and family. Look at yourself. I imagine historical characters—those not related to me by bloodlines—very vividly. I feel their presences; they’re in my head.


They’re not cardboard props for ideas. I think poetry has always been a vessel for memory, collective and universal. A safe storage for the human and perishable life of a specific place or people, first, then a meeting place for communities and individuals across time. History is different inside that vessel; it’s not a collection of dates and –isms, but voices, many voices that bear individual witness to what happened as they experienced it. And the voices have breath; they live.

I don’t research anything in order to write about it. If I am drawn to something—even a word—I try to be alert to levels of meaning and associations that will extend the resonance or the dissonance of the word and the poem. While writing the poem “History of Hurricanes,” I became curious about what meanings the word “hurricane” might have, other than the obvious. I discovered a slightly bizarre definition in the O.E.D. that fit into a section of the poem I’d already drafted: “ a large, crowded assembly of fashionable people at a private party.”


In a poem dealing partly with memory, I had just written about the ninth graders in Lexington who had never experienced a serious hurricane, for whom terms like velocity were abstractions. The O.E.D. definition of hurricane fit them well. I often suggest that my students do the same kind of exploration to see if they can make their poems speak outside the ordinary parameters of association and to discover connections the poets didn’t know existed.

In my second book, I have a section that examines birth from many perspectives. I had started a sequence of sonnets about it when I was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliff College. I was aware that not a lot of quality poetry had been written about birth and that most of it looked at birth from a physical, rather than metaphysical or phenomenological viewpoint. I stumbled on the odd fact that many terms related to birth also related to grammar (“contraction” is a case in point).

That sent me straight to a grammar book, which in turn helped me form an argument in a subsequent poem.


In that same book, I have many poems about the invention of paper and printing and about language as an invention. All of that came from a seminal experience when I had an artist’s studio in the Munroe Center in Lexington where I was the only writer. I was wildly jealous of the other artists who always seemed to have something to do—stretch canvases, mix paints, fire pottery, dye cloth, scavenge in the woods for bird feathers, whatever—while all I had was a piece of paper, a pen, and some books. And often, no ideas for poems.

One day I held the paper up to the window, turned it in all directions and realized I didn’t really know what it was, where it had come from. And this was my medium! I stared at a few words that had somehow plummeted onto the page and the letters of the alphabet looked like camels struggling against a sandstorm. What were these? Where had they come from? How could it be that I was using 26 abstract shapes to say everything I wanted to say? I felt submerged in mystery and intellectual passion.


For me, that’s always visceral—my spine undulates or something—and I knew I had embarked on a very personal artistic journey. Of course I had to do research—since I really was quite ignorant—but I’m lucky that the things I learned turned me on emotionally, as well. I looked for just the amount of detail and fact I needed. I wasn’t writing an academic paper. I found one paragraph on the inventor, T’sai Lun, but I loved him and imagined him onto a terrace in ancient China.


I still feel very close to him (or the him I imagined, based on the few facts I had). His status as an outsider, his idiosyncratic vision, his persecution and the maliciousness of the petty neighbors and villagers still stir enormous compassion and caring in me. And he seems all too contemporary. The key to using research, from my view, is to inhabit it imaginatively.


I feel very deadened at times in other people’s poems if I sense that the poem exists to explicate the history. Why not write an historical essay and be done with it? I feel the same way when people try to show off a kind of learning that is fresh from Scientific American. For me, a poem has to be an experience that moves me through its use of multiple angles, sensibilities and devices. I think research can be useful to bring something alive, to uncover what hasn’t been seen or understood.


Robert Pinsky is a poet who uses history and obviously does research here and there, but both are in service of something much larger and, paradoxically, much more intimate and language-driven. I guess one of the worst traps of research is that it can make people feel superior—like on the playground, “I know something you don’t” and then they start strutting on the page. To be contrary, I’d also say that we wouldn’t have Eliot or Pound without their hunger for knowledge, traditional and esoteric, and their willingness to study.

The line you quoted is from a poem called “Poetics of Birth,” a sestina that argues for a metaphysics of birth, displays abundant frustration about not being able to establish that without a diatribe, and finally parodies the enterprise, in the process arriving at the deeper connections between art, birth and death. The poem struggles, and I hope succeeds, at finding a way through the morass of received ideas and language about birth.

In Guests, especially, personal history and story are very much at the center of many of the poems. I think it’s a tricky thing – this question I would like to ask. There is much talk in interviewing about the personal history as it relates to the writing. I would like to ask you about Poland – and where that writing started for you. I suppose that skirts dangerously close to assuming that the author and the speaker are the same in your poetry – but I feel that Guests is really grounded in this space of personal history, Could you illuminate the connection between your life, the work and the history.

Guests is the only book of mine in which this figures, but it is not surprising that it was a series of obsessions with exile, immigration, lost identity, the making of an artistic self, and the massive suffering of both World Wars that laid the bedrock for these poems. In the first lengthy review of this book in The Journal, which had awarded it its annual first book prize in 1991, the reviewer noted that many poems take the stock characters in much contemporary poetry—“mother,” “father,” “grandmother,” “grandfather,” and the “self-absorbed, ubiquitous “I,” and drive “beyond their concrete and emotional immediacy into the world of ideas.” This reviewer also noted that the poems “drive us into confronting history, into confronting its ramifications on our present moment and into what it has made us become.”


But let me put it in my own words. I do not see any individual as separate from history. Biography and history are completely entwined. In that sense, I have a very Emersonian view.

If you are asking about my personal history in relation to Poland, I’m happy to answer that, but it’s complicated. I feel that I am a product of two cultures, Central European and American and that I don’t belong to the same shared cultural experiences that many of my peers have. I don’t write about American pop culture because I grew up in a house that didn’t allow it. We didn’t have TV, went only to classic foreign films, lived in a working class neighborhood and had books like Leaves of Grass and Poems from the Chinese. And yet, we were fairly poor and ethnic.


My father was born in Poland in 1913, my grandfather escaped in order not to fight for the Austrians in WWI (Poland didn’t exist; their section “belonged to Austria), and after a lengthy stay during the period of independence, my grandmother and some relatives escaped just as the Nazis were invading.

Polish is a language in my blood. Part of the family didn’t speak English. I grew up with history as a personal companion, not an abstract idea.

I won’t recount the losses and horrors. It was a complicated history, too. We became Protestants, my brother later converted to Judaism. When his cantor greets me, it’s in Polish with an admonition—“Why aren’t you speaking Polish to me?!” He was saved by a Polish family. When the realities of WWII all became more universally discussed, I had questions for history, arguments with history, and confusion about identity.

I don’t discuss Poland at all in The Paper Wasp and I never intended to write about ancestry, per se. When Guests won The Norma Farber First Book Award, Mary Oliver talked about the book’s concern with loss of country, consequences of war and the disassociation of people from people. My mother’s side of the family is Irish—my great aunt looks like Seamus Heaney in a black funeral dress—but I don’t write about them because I can’t feel the larger consequences of their history.

I know about that, of course, but the suffering wasn’t present-day enough for me to incorporate it into my identity. I do have a set of very odd stories to tell but no interest in telling them in poetry. I’m beginning a project to translate Polish poems—because Polish poetry is among the best in the world, not because I called my grandmother babci.

I’m suspicious of trends because I’m afraid of mass thinking and proscribed ways of being an artist. I don’t think it’s a question of age, although younger poets do seem to write more familial poems. Later, most of those people are dead.

I think I explained earlier how The Paper Wasp came to be written. Obsession. Being turned on to things I don’t understand. Wanting to feel a mastery over birth, as opposed to being made to feel out of control. Weird—but ideas turn me on, too. Not as good as sex but somewhere along the continuum.

I didn’t see the book as personal history. It was criticized once for not being intimate enough. Before the birth sonnets, I was writing a long sequence on the Russian poet and historian Eugenia Ginzburg who spent 18 years in the gulag and lost her son. Being pregnant, I found that the material depressed me. I had read her journals, which are marvelous, and I was obsessed with finding out how she managed to survive.

I had to put that sequence down. After the birth of my daughter and the taming of my fears about whether she was choking or suffocating or having SIDS, I returned to Ginzburg and saw that Eugenia had survived because she had memorized so much Russian poetry. It’s something I think about all the time: poems as saviors, literally. Poetry about what you might have when almost everything else has been taken away from you.

The newly finished collection, History of Hurricanes, has a poem about the link between the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the Solidarity movement in Poland which was prompted by my visit to a club in Krakow playing James Brown and by listening to my Polish friends sing every verse of “We Shall Overcome.”

But there is history in this book: I live one block from where the American Revolution started. I imagined a Minuteman losing his child to a hurricane, having no idea that such a storm was coming. I imagined a couple in contemporary Japan, etc. Those people are very real to me. I imagine that’s the way a playwright experiences life.

I do find that I am obsessed with capturing certain movements of my mind and my language. This book also deals more directly with personal suffering, but got at through various, non-linear angles of vision, not straightforward narrative. I am interested in the way fragments can unleash new language; I explore different kinds of leaps that can be made when I refuse the proven. I am a poet of connections, so while I am not interested in arriving at a unified thought or non-conflicting reality, I am fascinated by finding connections that arise from disunity, multiplicity, previously unidentified coherence and dissonance.

I like the multiplicity I find inside myself. I like to be traveling on several different wavelengths simultaneously. I’m interested in spare multiplicity, too, that is, allowing contradictions to form new meanings, but in the terse, breakneck speed of an insight.

Time is not linear, nor is history, nor is your life nor mine. Now you’ve got me wondering how I came to think this way, aside from the traumas of history I witnessed in the daily lives of my father and relatives. And I think I have one clue: I grew up obsessed with Colonial America and early American history. I read volumes and volumes of biography and was really thrilled by it.

Those figures were the mainstay of my imaginary play: they were people I felt close to, whose clothes, habits, ideas, candlesticks I knew deeply. Of course, it was romanticized. I had no idea about slavery in the colonies. I think this obsession helped me to separate from my working class, impoverished life (again, if going to Ingmar Bergman movies equates in any sensical way in American culture to being working class). Neither of my parents went to high school.

But I found a world of high-principled ideals and risk-taking that suited my personality, my deeply instilled ideas about justice, fairness and democracy in the new world. I never connected this before with the colonial characters weaving through my third collection.

I do like braiding strands of things. Juxtaposition creates new and unexpected meanings. I love the effects of tapestry. Very little is certain in a vacuum. Tapestry is a way to access complexity, ambiguity and multiple interpretation and response. It can also be revisited, each time yielding new entry and exit points, new paths through it.

Myths are crucial as a way of getting at the truth but truth is multiple, not singular, as well as evolutionary, and cannot be contained in any vessel. I mentioned the Minuteman who doesn’t know a hurricane is coming. I think about those people when I watch Weather 5 and Dickie Albert showing me a radar image of a hurricane that is headed toward Boston. They’re buried all around me. Apparently Native Americans could read the storm signs better. But then where are their graves? I experience a sense of their loss every time I cross the town Green.

There are also the ignorant teens who don’t comprehend history repeating itself. And that is both a life cycle issue and a cultural one. In “Anywhere,” a Zen Scholar and Master are having the same conversation in the past that the speaker is having with her daughter in the present. Emily Dickinson’s solitude stands for a wonderful ability to preserve one’s work, but for me the peace in her room was transcendent.

The Asian artist, poet and fishermen represent a Taoist way of approaching nature and the mutability of our lives. I don’t choose characters so they can represent things—I’m too engaged with them for that—but I do often see the link afterwards. I had to have Eugenia Ginzburg give me her survival skills.


It was fun to put that quote in a section focusing on Erasmus’ treatise on children’s manners. I like language that moves through multiple registers—I love opera and street talk, Shakespeare and Bobby McFerrin, Kiri Te Kanawa and Latin—and I like the way they make themselves present in a poem. I hear an echo and it’s right—that phrase seems right for this poem because one of the subjects is class manners, wanting a little mobility based on a wide range of class-distinguishing manners. I like to be many people when I write a poem, to notice how my sensibility processes different kinds of language. I enjoy unexpected juxtapositions that create wit or genuine surprise. Finally I like to mix up the sense of where the poem is coming from, to defeat predictability.

I felt that I didn’t fit into popular American culture and that had a silencing effect. At home, there was a dividing line of sorts; my father and I shared a number of intellectual passions that my mother and brother did not. My early writing, poems and short stories, seemed to exaggerate the gap. At least I thought they did, so I learned a second level of being mute. It seemed safer—and I was protecting myself as a writer.

Recently, I read about how Emily Dickinson’s father encouraged her intellectual genius but was horrified when she wanted to publish poems, he didn’t consider it proper for a woman. It wasn’t that way in my house, but the culture on the shelves and elsewhere was one of famous men doing anything for the sake of their art—a sort of divinity denied women.

Class issues do not totally go away, either. It’s a long leap from parents who didn’t go to high school to applying for college oneself. Now try vocalizing the fact that one wants to be a writer. But the only real way I can get at what I think is to write it. Only a fraction makes it into speech—an exaggeration, of course, but I often worry nothing is going to come out of my mouth.

I don’t know how specific to be. I was showing a fellow poet a group of poems I was considering trashing and he not only liked “Aria” a lot, he suggested sending it to Peter Davison at the Atlantic. Peter accepted it and said it reminded him of Thomas Hardy. All poets benefit from other eyes. I distrusted the poem because I wrote it in a few swoops of the pen, but also because I thought it might be too easy or simple. Actually it seemed to write itself without any conscious direction from my brain, so my brain was not pleased.


I do trust my own voice. I like the multiplicity I find inside myself. I like to be traveling on several different wavelengths simultaneously. I’m interested in spare multiplicity, too, that is, allowing contradictions to form new meanings, but in the terse, breakneck speed of an insight.

One night I opened a hand-stitched notebook I found on a shelf near my bed and decided to write in it. I had no plan. I usually write on the computer. I loved the feel of the pen again. After a throwaway page, I begin to write in the book each night.

Right away, the writing became a response to the notebook itself. I read on the flap that the binding was Coptic. That reminded me of a lovely Coptic Christian woman from Egypt I’d met at a party years ago. I let my mind associate. The work arrived in couplets. I was moved by the simple painting of Ma Lin on the cover, the short lyric by Wang Wei, the notion of the Tao in brushstrokes.

My poems began to take in more of the notebook, its own separate integrity. I was in dialogue with it, listening and responding. I planned no encounter in advance. It took about ten days to write. In many places the book turns intimate and self-revelatory but always as part of the dialogue, with Wang Wei and Ma Lin, and the poem and painting as presences I felt keenly. Of course, I did a lot of editing, of moving sections around and changing titles. I dropped two sections. I wrote the sequence in bed, just before sleep, so that my sleepiness would make it easier to ride an alpha train of images and associations.

Good writing is about being alert, to yourself, to what lies just beyond your comprehension. Hopefully, in a given book or collection of books, you’ve mastered what puzzled and prompted you, what wouldn’t give you a break. And then, quietly one day, there you are. The buzz saw is resting on the log. You’re leaning back and noticing the quality of the air. Something is done (for now).

Writing beyond your last work means not intentionally hanging onto the work that now seems right—in order to keep reproducing it—but rather opening oneself again to the unknown with its obsessions, experimentations, discoveries, and journeys of the self. It should be an organic process, a matter of living as a poet, not simply a higher rock course on the poetry wall.

. I use a lot of imagery. I like to blend sensual and intellectual matters, to create feeling-infused thought. I think of place as intimate. If I can’t treat it that way, it’s decoration, a stage prop. Each of my three books is quite different, however, and some of my earlier narrative poems evolve in a way that the poem’s discoveries are more embedded or bottom-heavy in terms of where they occur in the poem.

In my recently finished collection, History of Hurricanes, many poems are, for example, elliptical and begin at odd angles, already deep inside the work yet to be written. In my poem “For years,” my title is followed by the opening line, “I kept the secret hidden from myself.” That seems to be the poem’s power center. My strategies and language are often metaphysical. It’s the way things come together in my head and on the page.

Lately, my speakers just start talking, but their speech is loaded with mundane and esoteric, traditional and eccentric phrases and questions. I am a poet of context, however, a poet of history. My temporal and spatial planes intersect all the time, sometimes wildly.
I would like to ask some questions about motherhood. Being a poet and a mother can be a very tricky combination.


The first is a career question – I know that you are in a sort of second phase of your career now. I wonder if you could talk about the career as it has developed through your time as a mother of young children. Your first book came out just after your first child was born. There are so many added constraints on women as they maneuver careers and raising a family.


Actually, I’ve had two careers. My first poem in a major publication, TriQuarterly, was published when I was a Master’s degree student in public administration at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. (I was also a research assistant at MIT in new communication technologies, taking courses in things like telecommunications technology and public policy.) I had gone to the Kennedy School after a Master’s degree in English and after many years working in anti-poverty programs.

I served as associate director of the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Program. By then, I was writing seriously and looking for a way to do consulting part-time to support my writing. I honestly believed the cable companies’ lies that arts and community programming would become serious venue on cable. After working as a consultant in an international firm assessing new communication technologies, I became associate director of the Kennedy School’s new multi-million dollar national awards program on innovation in government. After three years, I was publishing regularly and I wanted to stop administrative work. I was lucky: I received my first fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship from the Bunting Institute at Radcliff. While at the Bunting, I wrote major parts of my first book and gave birth to my first daughter in 1987. My book came out in 1991. After that I did consulting for the Ford Foundation and Harvard and taught at MIT and Emerson. I have a complicated view of the poetry/motherhood issue. I partly resent the fact that we have to ask the question—obviously there’s divorce, financial struggle, social and emotional crisis, health issues, etc. that can entrap a mother—but I think women and society keep leaving the partners off the hook and keep demanding that only women bear the brunt of the burden of care. France has wonderful, cheap, government-subsidized childcare. Some men really do try to equalize home responsibilities. Women writers, though, have to treat their writing like a career when they have kids: the work, as well as the artist really suffers otherwise. I was no model of what I’m espousing: we moved from Cambridge to Lexington and yes, I published an award-winning book, but I was also losing ground in an insidious way. fter the birth of my second daughter, I realized I didn’t have the solitude I needed. I published my second book, but within five months, I got a serious and mysterious neuromuscular illness after contracting Lyme. I lost some years in there, when I didn’t have the supports to take care of myself, my writing and my family. The short answer is that I absolutely need to write. I adore my children, but I think I could have fought back against those constraints and been more creative about circumventing them. I could have gotten much more help than I did. I would offer the suggestion that women with children treat their writing as a job they have to show up for, making it a two-career household right away, if two adults are there. Bill Matthews singled parented for many years; he got up at five, or started working at ten, or whatever, but he kept writing –and teaching. Now if you think about that, isn’t it absurd that a female writer with children who has a partner isn’t getting or demanding time to work. My children have read my first two books. They’re also savvy about the way poems speak. I don’t think I have written anything to worry about. On the other hand, I feel a natural sense of boundaries around them—their private life, their foibles and successes, their hurt and anger are off limits. I would never write anything that would shame them. Of course, everything I do embarrasses them, but that’s different.

Some poems

by Teresa Cader

History of Hurricanes

Because we cannot know— we plant crops, make love in the light of our not-knowing

A Minuteman prods cows from the Green with his musket,

his waxed paper windows snapping in the wind,

stiletto stalks in the herb garden upright—Now

blown sideways—Now weighted down in genuflection,

not toward,

And a frail man holding an Imari teacup paces at daybreak in his courtyard in Kyoto

a cherry tree petaling the stones pink and slippery

in the weeks he lay feverish

waiting for word from the doctor, checking for signs—Now

in the season of earthenware sturdiness and dependency

it must begin, the season of his recovery

No whirling dervish on the radar, no radar, no brackets

no voices warning—no Voice—fugue of trees, lightning

Because we cannot know, we imagine

What will happen to me without you?

I know some things I remember—

the Delaware River two stories high inside the brick houses

cars floating past Trenton like a regiment on display

brown water climbing our basement stairs two at a time

Like months of remission—

the eye shifts

the waxed paper windows

burst behind the flapping shutters—

and how could he save his child after that calm,

a man who'd never seen a roof sheared off?

Across town the ninth graders in their cutoffs:

Science sucks, they grouse. Stupid history of hurricanes.

No one can remember one;

velocity, storm surge—

abstractions the earth churns as Isabel rips through Buzzard's Bay

A hurricane, as one meaning has it:

a large crowded assembly of fashionable people at a private house

The river cannot remember its flooding—

I worry you will forget to check

the watermarks in time

An echo of feet on stone is all the neighbors

knew of their neighbor,

a lover of cherry trees

and of his wife who prayed for him at the shrine,

her hair swept up in his favorite onyx comb

Petrified Light
I studied the tiny insect trapped in amber at the Museum of Science.
Seventy-million-year-old pine resin from the once tropical Baltics,
Petrified into a sarcophagus of honey light. There you are, I said.
To the bug, my alter ego. To the amber, my weight of captivity
And stasis. No one heard me mouthing off to the exhibit case.
My daughter watched a series of balls bong their obstacle course,
Plinging bells and tilting pulleys. My husband studied the underbelly
Of a fake lightning bug in the next exhibit. Amazing,
He complimented the frog whose belly glowed with glow worms,
And the syncopated sex rhythms of tropical lightning bugs who flash
In unison. So much cellular insight for a Sunday afternoon. Awe
Was the thing I didn't have: hard floors and sore instep, maybe. Awe
Is what the exhibits design for. The three foot Black Widow caught my
Peripheral. Whoa, I said to my ordinary. To my stubborn. To fear's
Onion smell welling up in my armpits. What we have here is a bodyCreated for me. A creature of wild and deadly desire. Bad.
The New Creation
And then there was the nothing that is something else.
We saw what was created and could not be entirely
Displeased. It was good in its way, the morphine drip
Unhooked, the blood bags and oxygen removed.
In the beginning, we had not wanted this night.
Earth was enough, lichen clinging to its rock,
Worm snug in its wormhole. We loved our image,
Our dominion over every creeping thing.
Were we misled? Did we misunderstand the gift?
Who said we should just let her go, let her drift down
An uncharted river and call it good, a blessing
From God. This much at first, absence of pain.
And then, day returning to day, night to night,
A fitful peace descending on the plains as the storm
Edged across the mountain clefts, hurling
Its lightning elsewhere, and we were alone.

Six Entries on the Invention of Paper
1
It begins with a wasp on a terrace in ancient China:a man invents paper after watching the waspspin its white nest from mulberry bark.
2
Perhaps he has found bamboo too unevenfor letters in black wax.Perhaps he is weary of verticality.Perhaps he is ashamed of his private longings.
3
When his neighbor calls to him, “Ts’ai Lun,what are you boiling in that large pot?”he does not show him linen rags found in a basket,old fish nets hauled off the docks,mulberry bark stripped from the neighbor’s tree.
4
His neighbor sees thin sheets of pulp strewnacross the terrace, drying in the sun. He does not perceive them as treasures.He is annouyed with the clutter. His children are forbidden to set foot on the terrace.He whispers about Ts’ai Lun in the tea shop.
5
One evening after an inquisition at court—The inventor has been implicated in palace unrest—Ts’ai Lun comes home, drinks poison, and goes to bed.
6
On a table lie stacks of the white sheets.The mulberry tree looks seamless in the moonlight.The wasp is poised to devour some workers at dawn.

The ultimate French intellectual

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

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.

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.

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.