Paul Ambroise Valéry

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Paul Valéry. (credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.)

(born Oct. 30, 1871, Sète, France — died July 20, 1945, Paris) French poet, essayist, and critic. A student of law, Valéry wrote many poems during 1888 – 91, some published in magazines of the Symbolist movement. After 1894 he wrote daily in his notebooks, later published as the famous Cahiers. He revised his early work to create his greatest poem, La Jeune Parque (1917). It was followed by Album de vers anciens, 1890 – 1900 (1920) and Charmes ou poèmes (1922), containing "Le Cimetière marin," which established him as the outstanding French poet of his time. His works are typically variations on the theme of the tension within the human consciousness between the desire for contemplation and the will to action. He later became a prominent public personage, writing many essays and occasional papers on literary topics and taking a great interest in science and political problems.

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Paul Ambroise Valéry (1871-1945), often regarded as the greatest French poet of the 20th century, was Mallarmé's successor in the hermetic and intellectual tradition and the challenger of all advocates of spontaneity, inspiration, or sentimental effusiveness in poetry.

Paul Valéry was born in Sète, on the Mediterranean, on Oct. 30, 1871, of a French father of Corsican descent and an Italian mother. As a boy, looking out over the sea, he dreamed of becoming a ship captain. But he was too deficient in mathematics to qualify for the Naval Academy, so after attending the lycée at Montpellier, where his father had moved, he went to the University of Montpellier as a student of law. Literature, however, interested him more than jurisprudence. In 1890 he met Pierre Louÿs and André Gide, who spoke to Valéry about the literary life of Paris.

Symbolism was the fashion of the day, and the young provincial, who had been writing verse with increasing zeal for the past 5 years, was eager to make contact with the capital. He sent two of his poems to Stéphane Mallarmé, who praised them, and during the next 2 years Valéry published a number of poems in avant-garde magazines. Then, in the course of a night of violent lightning and thunder in the fall of 1892 while visiting relatives in Genoa, the promising young poet had a psychological experience that reoriented his life. For reasons not entirely clear, Valéry came out of this crisis with the decision to dedicate himself solely to the pursuit of knowledge. He went to Paris and, in a bare hotel room, spent his days studying and meditating problems of mathematics and psychology.

However, if Valéry had renounced poetry, he had not renounced the company of poets. Gide, Louÿs, and Henri de Régnier visited him, and he went to the Rue de Rome on Tuesdays, when Mallarmé received. Nor had Valéry, during what is referred to as his period of great silence, renounced all writing. In 1894 he began La Soirée avec M. Teste (The Evening with Monsieur Teste), a strange account of a man who strives to live by intellect alone. In 1895 the Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, which posited an ideal of intellectual and creative ability, appeared. He had also made the first entries in the notebooks in which for 50 years he set down his reflections. However, he published no new verse.

The question of gainful employment was settled provisionally by an appointment in the War Department. The job did not please Valéry, and in 1900, the year of his marriage, he gave it up for a position as private secretary to an administrator of the Havas newspaper agency. For the next 20 years Valéry spent 3 or 4 hours a day in this service, an employment that assured him a livelihood yet left him adequate leisure for his own work. He occupied the early years of the century with his family (he had a son and a daughter), with his friends, and with the social and cultural events of the capital.

In 1912, at Gide's urging, Valéry assembled some of his old poetry for publication. It needed a little touching up, he decided, and in so doing he found himself once more composing verse. La Jeune Parque (The Young Fate) began as an exercise. When all of its 500 verses had been written and the work presented to the literate of Paris (1917), the acclaim was unanimous.

In the postwar period Valéry published poetry and essays and gave speeches. As usual, he attended plays, recitals, and dinner parties. The pattern of his life was fixed. He complained about his social chores and his health and worried about money, but he could not complain about lack of recognition. In France and abroad he was received everywhere as one of the greatest men of letters. He was made a member of the French Academy in 1925 and appointed to a chair of poetry at the Collège de France. During World War II, in spite of discouragement and privation, he carried on his duties much as before. He died in Paris on July 20, 1945, and was given a state funeral.

Although Valéry differs from Henri Bergson in many respects, he resembles the philosopher in being more interested in how the mind arrives at its goal than in the goal itself. All his studies of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, art, architecture, literature, and the dance were for the purpose of understanding the mind at work. He often felt that his quest was futile and that to renounce accomplishment or action for knowledge was a wrong choice. The question of doing versus knowing was for Valéry a lifelong preoccupation: it is a major theme in his writing; it was a major factor in his long silence; and it is really the key to his psychology as an artist and as a man. Valéry prepared 250 drafts of The Young Fate. He believed that vigor, precision, and cool skill created a poem, not inspiration.

Other works by Valéry are Le Cimetière marin (1920; The Graveyard by the Sea), which offers a good example of his poetics; Odes (1920); Album de vers anciens (1920); and Charmes (1922). His prose works include five collections of essays, all entitled Variété (1924-1944; Variety).

Further Reading

Excerpts from Valéry's Notebooks are in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Mathews (1956-1975). Henry A. Grubbs, Paul Valéry (1968), provides an excellent discussion of the poet's life and work together with a critical bibliography. Other recommended studies are Elizabeth Sewall, Paul Valéry: The Mind in the Mirror (1952); Jean Hytier, The Poetics of Paul Valéry (1953; trans. 1966); and Norman Suckling, Paul Valéry and the Civilized Mind (1954).

Valéry, Paul (1871-1945). French poet, essayist, and thinker, Valéry is famous not only for literary works such as La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste (1896) and major poems of the Symbolist and post-Symbolist epoch, but also for the vast analytic enterprise of his Cahiers, the hundreds of notebooks written nearly every day at dawn for over 50 years, largely without thought of publication. Here, lyrical prose poems and snatches of self-analysis alternate with pages of more abstract or generalized reflection on the functioning of the human mind.

Valéry was born where he would most like to have been born, he tells us: the port of Sète on the French Mediterranean (his mother was Italian and his father Corsican), and indeed he describes in ‘Inspirations meditérranéennes’ (one of the many essays collected in Variété), how the three ‘deities’ of Sea, Sky, and Sun moulded his thought in its characteristic sense of universality. Valéry figures as a kind of intellectual Robinson Crusoe building a self-taught way of thinking tested constantly from his own experience and revived in its potentiality by primitive astonishment in the natural world.

Thwarted in his early desire to go to sea (insufficient mathematics to join the navy), he instead read law at the University of Montpellier, moving permanently to Paris in 1894. There, having worked for a short time in the War Office (1897-1900), he married Jeannie Gobillard, niece of the painter Berthe Morisot, becoming in the same year (1900) the private secretary to Édouard Lebey at the Agence Havas—an occupation which offered him the time and means to pursue his writing free of the need to make it a livelihood, right up to the death of his employer in 1922, the initial year of publication of his main collection of poems, Charmes. From then on his career developed with unusual rapidity, and he received a series of public honours: president of the PEN Club (1924), member of the Académie Française (1925), honorary degree from Oxford University (1931), administrator of the Mediterranean University Centre at Nice (1933), president of Intellectual Co-operation at the League of Nations (1936), professor of poetics at the Collège de France (1937), where, holding a specially created chair, he lectured during the Occupation on the Jewish philosopher Bergson (1941) and, not inappropriately, gave his last lecture, in December 1944, in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Voltaire. On his death in July 1945 a state funeral was held in Paris, and he was buried in Sète in the ‘graveyard by the sea’ which had inspired his most famous poem, ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (1920).

Valéry's earliest published verse appeared in the Symbolist review La Conque (1891), encouraged by his friendship with the young Symbolist poet and editor Pierre Louÿs, who introduced him to Gide (the beginning of a 50-year correspondance) and to Mallarmé, whose poetry he at once admired and despaired of ever equalling. Together with Poe's theory of poetic composition as an art of lucidly calculated linguistic effects, Mallarmé's poetry was to have a deeply formative role in allowing him to characterize and differentiate his own. In 1892, however, with the coming to a head of a severe crisis in values, Valéry rejected poetry and literature altogether as demanding a sacrifice of the intellect, devoting himself instead to the Cahiers (unlike Mallarmé, he was always to refuse poetry a place superior to other human languages like mathematics and science).

Centred on the famous ‘nuit de Gênes’—the night of a violent thunderstorm when he felt himself divided between ‘self’ and ‘self’—the crisis of 1892 provides an important signpost. Humiliated by the overwhelming power of ‘irrational’ ideas and images, Valéry began to concentrate not so much on the content of his thoughts and feelings as on the power of the conscious mind to observe them in action, in other words on secondary consciousness (‘le Moi pur’): that profound note of existence which, once we have heard it, seems to dominate and shape a whole human life. It is from this period, in fact, that emerged both the mythical figure of Monsieur Teste and the essay Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1895), where the universal Renaissance genius is chosen to exemplify the ‘central attitude from which both the undertakings of knowledge and the operations of art are equally possible’. Comparing the ‘nuit de Gênes’ to the mental crisis in which Descartes is said to have formulated his ‘cogito’, Valéry saw himself in possession of an intellectual method based on observation and understanding of the limits and possibilities of the mind experienced ‘from within’ as a unique source of self-reconstruction or improved mental yield.

Far from denying emotion, such an ideal was based precisely on the uncontrollable power of the sensibility, in turn a dynamic interaction of body, mind, and world. Indeed, it was his own unusually acute sensitivity which led Valéry to place such a high value on the experience of love—a potential masterpiece of co-ordinated intellectual and emotional energies which he explores symbolically in the figures of Faust and Lust in Mon Faust (modelled on the resources for dialogue in a single mind). Never mere rationalism, such a unity is none the less the fruit of self-awareness, ‘rational’ in its judgement and use of the human material from which, as in the act of poetic composition (the process of which, for Valéry, was always more important than the product), the human mind is able to construct itself anew.

Valéry's return to poetry in 1912 after what used to be called misleadingly the ‘Great Silence’ is similarly instructive from the point of view of the deep coherence of his work, and indeed of his own achievement of the ‘central attitude’ he attributes to Leonardo. Revising his old poems at the suggestion of Gide and Gallimard (the collection was published as Album de vers anciens in 1920), he intended to add a poem of some mere 30 lines as a kind of valediction to literature in general. Instead, he found himself composing what turned out to be the intensive four-year ‘exercise’ of ‘La Jeune Parque’, an immense dramatic monologue (published in 1917) of no less than 500 lines modelled on the contralto voice in a Gluck recitative, and in which, in a language as full of imagery and verbal music as possible, he attempts to convey the modulations of consciousness in a single night. This entails, if we turn to the ever-present symbolic level of the poem, the interaction of ‘Être’ and ‘Connaître’, the two great poles from which the human individual ‘self’ is ceaselessly recomposed (hence the characteristic Valéryan emblem of the ‘ouroboros’ or serpent biting its own tail). Here, as in the relatively more rapidly written poems of Charmes (1922; their title is derived from the Latin carmina, magic songs or hymns), Valéry paradoxically increases the power of the poem to resonate in the reader's sensibility by rejecting the Symbolist vers libre and maximizing the constraints of language: classical prosody in its richest, most varied forms (see for instance ‘Fragments du Narcisse’, ‘Ébauche d'un serpent’, and ‘Le Cimetière marin’). The research of the Cahiers of the time into the conditions of the living/thinking human being, their sense of recurrent phases or cycles, in particular, provides a constant background to the poems, which are festivals of the intellect where abstract ideas are ‘musicalized’ in sensuous, universally dramatized form.

Valéry's subsequent literary works include: L'Âme et la danse and Eupalinos ou l'Architecte in 1921 and 1923 (mock-Socratic dialogues extolling the dance as the epitome of pure, flame-like movement, or architecture and music as arts of pure form); Pièces sur l'art and Regards sur le monde actuel in 1931 (in the latter Valéry foresees many of the problems facing Europe because of its blind nationalism, and analyses the effect on that precious mental freedom he felt so essential to our humanity of the radical transformations brought about through technology); L'Idée fixe ou Deux hommes à la mer, a brilliant pirouette of ideas on mental obsession, also in dialogue form, in 1934; Degas Danse Dessin in 1938; collections of ‘Voltairean’ aphorisms such as Mélange, Tel quel, and Mauvaises pensées et autres in 1941, 1942, and 1943; Dialogue de l'arbre in 1943; the fifth and final volume of the essays of Variété together with Propos me concernant in 1944; and the unfinished play, Mon Faust, in 1946.

Famous in his lifetime for the eloquent lucidity of both his poetry and prose, Valéry is now receiving more and more attention as the innovatory thinker revealed in the Cahiers themselves (first published in facsimile version in 1957 and 1961 in 29 volumes of some 30, 000 pages, and translated into many languages throughout the world). Here he can be found, in the field of mathematical thinking alone, anticipating by several decades the application of mathematical models to mental processes. Prefiguring Wittgenstein, Valéry also attacks traditional patterns of religious thought and philosophy for generating problems purely linguistic in origin, and, while pursuing a certain mystic resonance in human experience, orchestrates his crucial early insight into ‘points of view’ and our tendency to confuse mental imagery with the ‘real’. Rivalling Freud in their distinctive approach to dreams, emotion, memory, and the unconscious, the Cahiers are emerging in turn as one of the most significant works of the 20th c., testimony to the limits and aspirations of a would-be universal human ‘self’.

[Christine Crow]

Bibliography

• P. O. Walzer, La Poésie de Valéry (1953)
• J. Hytier, La Poétique de Valéry (1953)
• Paul Valéry: Cahiers, ed. J. Robinson, vols. 1, 2 (1973-4)
• C. G. Whiting, Paul Valéry (1978)
• C. M. Crow, Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice (1982)

Quotes:

"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."

"Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows."

"If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. nothing in the paper today , we sigh."

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

"Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature."

"Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science."

See more famous quotes by Paul Valery