Paul Valéry

in full
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
born Oct.
30, 1871, Sète, Fr.
died July 20, 1945, Paris
French poet, essayist, and critic. His
greatest poem is considered La Jeune Parque
(1917; “The Young Fate”), which was followed
by Album de vers anciens 1890–1900 (1920)
and Charmes ou poèmes (1922), containing “Le
Cimetière marin” (“The Graveyard by the
Sea”). He later wrote a large number of
essays and occasional papers on literary
topics and took a great interest in
scientific discoveries and in political
problems.
Valéry was
born at a small Mediterranean port where his
father was a customs officer. He was
educated at Montpellier, where he studied
law and cultivated his interest in poetry
and architecture. He was a diffident youth,
and his few friends at this time were
Gustave Fourment, who became a professor of
philosophy, and the writers Pierre Louÿs and
André Gide. His early literary idols were
Edgar Allan Poe, J.-K. Huysmans, and
Stéphane Mallarmé, to whom he was introduced
in 1891 and whose artistic circle he came to
frequent regularly.
Valéry
wrote many poems between 1888 and 1891, a
few of which were published in magazines of
the Symbolist movement and favourably
reviewed, but artistic frustration and
despair over an unrequited love affair
prompted him in 1892 to renounce all
emotional preoccupations and to dedicate
himself to the “Idol of the Intellect.” He
disposed of most of his books, and from 1894
until the end of his life he would rise at
dawn each day, meditate for several hours on
scientific method, consciousness, and the
nature of language, and record his thoughts
and aphorisms in his notebooks, which were
later to be published as the famous Cahiers.
Valéry’s new-found ideals were Leonardo da
Vinci (“Introduction à la méthode de Léonard
de Vinci” [1895]), his paradigm of the
Universal Man, and his own creation,
“Monsieur Teste” (Mr. Head), an almost
disembodied intellect who knows but two
values, the possible and the impossible (“La
Soirée avec Monsieur Teste” [1896]).
From 1897
to 1900, Valéry worked as a civil servant in
the French War Office; from 1900—the year of
his marriage to a close friend of Mallarmé’s
daughter—until 1922, he was private
secretary to Edouard Lebey, director of the
French press association. Valéry’s main
daily duty was to read out the chief events
from the newspapers and the Paris Stock
Exchange to the director, and he thereby
became a well-informed commentator on
current affairs.
Pressed by
Gide in 1912 to revise some of his early
writings for publication, Valéry began work
on what was intended to be a valedictory
poem to the collection La Jeune Parque,
centred on the awakening of consciousness in
the youngest of the three ancient “Parques,”
or “Fates,” which traditionally symbolized
the three stages of human life. He became so
engrossed in the technical problems it
presented that he took five years to
complete the long symbolic work. When
finally published in 1917, it brought him
immediate fame. His reputation as the most
outstanding French poet of his time was
quickly consolidated with Album de vers
anciens, 1890–1900 and Charmes ou poèmes, a
collection that includes his famous
meditation on death in the cemetery at Sète
(where he now lies buried).
Valéry’s
most idiosyncratic works are all variations
on the theme of the tension within the human
consciousness between the desire for
contemplation and the will to action: in
“Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de
Vinci” and repeatedly in his notebooks, he
contrasts the infinite potentialities of
mind with the inevitable imperfections of
action; in La Jeune Parque, he shows a young
Fate by the sea at dawn, uncertain whether
to remain a serene immortal or to choose the
pains and pleasures of human life; in “Le
Cimetière marin” he broods by the sea at
noon on Being and Not-Being, on the living
and the dead; his many letters regularly
complain of the conflict in his own life
between the dictates of public life and his
desire for solitude.
Valéry
wrote no more poetry of consequence after
1922, but his place as a major writer was
secure. Though his fame was first
established, and still largely rests, on his
poetic achievements, and though he devoted
considerable attention to the problems of
writing poetry, he consistently claimed that
poetry in itself did not much interest him,
and that literary composition, like
mathematics and the sciences, served him
only as mirrors to the workings of his own
mind. His essays and prefaces, more often
than not written quickly to order, were the
fruits of his regular meditations and reveal
his interest in a remarkably wide variety of
subjects: writers and writing, philosophers
and language, painters, dancing,
architecture, and the fine arts are all
reexamined with refreshing vigour. He
retained an abiding interest in education,
politics, and cultural values, and two
remarkably prescient youthful essays on the
Sino-Japanese conflict (“Le Yalou,” written
1895) and the threat of German aggression
(“La Conquête allemande,” 1897) reveal the
same anxious awareness of the forces
menacing Western civilization as his very
last public lecture on Voltaire (delivered
in 1944).
After the
death of Lebey in 1922, the formerly
retiring Valéry became a prominent public
personage. His erudition, courtesy, and
dazzling conversational gifts made him a
much sought-after society figure, and he was
as much at ease in the company of the
foremost international writers and
scientists of the day as with generals and
heads of state. Valéry was greatly
interested in the state of modern physics
and mathematics, and through extensive
reading and, often, personal acquaintances
he became well versed in the work of such
scientists and mathematicians as Maurice,
duc de Broglie, Bernhard Riemann, Michael
Faraday, Albert Einstein, and James Clerk
Maxwell. He made lecture tours all over
Europe and delivered speeches on a number of
national occasions. He was elected to the
Académie Française in 1925, was made
administrative head of the Centre
Universitaire Méditerranéen at Nice in 1933,
and became professor of poetry, a chair
created especially for him, at the Collège
de France in 1937. On his death, he was
given a full state funeral.
Though he
made much of his preoccupation with
intellectual problems and incurred the
particular displeasure of the Surrealists
for his scathing attacks on poetic
inspiration, there is ample evidence in
Valéry’s work that he remained all his life
keenly responsive to the pleasures of the
senses: the voluptuousness of his female
nude studies (“Luxurieuse au bain,” “La
Dormeuse,” and the picture of Eve in
“Ébauche d’un serpent”), the warmth with
which he writes of the lovers’ embrace (“Le
Cimetière marin,” “Fragments du Narcisse,”
“La Fausse Morte”) or of the sun, sky, and
sea, which he had loved since his
Mediterranean childhood—all show that he
must not be too closely identified with his
arid Monsieur Teste. The distinctive feature
of his prose and poetry, even when he is
dealing with the most abstract of subjects,
is sensuousness; his prose is aphoristic and
graceful, his poetry rich in natural images
and allusions, always classical in form,
and, at its best, as sinewy, subtly
rhythmical, and melodious as the very best
verse of the great dramatist Jean Racine or
the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine.
Robert Donald Davidson Gibson