Paul Valéry | |
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 Valéry, ca. 1925 (photograph byHenri Manuel) | |
| Born | Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (1871-10-30)30 October 1871 Sète, France |
| Died | 20 July 1945(1945-07-20) (aged 73) Paris, France |
| Language | French |
| Education | Collège de France |
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| Spouse | Jeannie Gobillard |
| Partner | Catherine Pozzi |
| Children | Agathe Rouart-Valéry |
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Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (French:[pɔlvaleʁi]; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet,essayist, andphilosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests includedaphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.
Valéry was nominated for theNobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.[1]
Valéry was born to aCorsican father andGenoese-Istrian mother inSète, a town on the Mediterranean coast of theHérault, but he was raised inMontpellier, a larger urban center close by. After a traditionalRoman Catholic education, he studied law at university and then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was, for a while, part of the circle ofStéphane Mallarmé.[2]
In 1900, he married Jeannine Gobillard, a friend ofStéphane Mallarmé's family, who was also a niece of the painterBerthe Morisot. The wedding was a double ceremony in which the bride's cousin,Berthe Morisot's daughter,Julie Manet, married the painterErnest Rouart.[3] Valéry and Gobillard had three children: Claude, Agathe and François.
Valéry served as a juror withFlorence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding thePrix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to young French painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.[4]
Though his earliest publications date from his mid-twenties, Valéry did not become a full-time writer until he was fifty. Valéry had briefly earned his living at the Ministry of War,[2] before assuming a relatively flexible post as private secretary to the increasingly impaired Edouard Lebey, a former chief executive of theHavas news agency (later renamed "Agence France-Presse"). He held this position for over twenty years, until Lebey's death in 1922.[5]
In 1920, he began a tumultuous affair with a fellow poet,Catherine Pozzi, which lasted for eight years.[6]
After his election to theAcadémie française in 1925, Valéry became a tireless public speaker and intellectual figure in French society, touring Europe and giving lectures on cultural and social issues as well as assuming a number of official positions eagerly offered to him by an admiring French nation. He represented France on cultural matters at theLeague of Nations, and he served on several of its committees, including the sub-committee on Arts and Letters of theCommittee on Intellectual Cooperation. The English-language collectionThe Outlook for Intelligence (1989) contains translations of a dozen essays related to these activities.[citation needed]
In 1931, he founded theCollège International de Cannes,[7][8] a private institution teaching French language and civilization. The Collège is still operating today, offering professional courses for native speakers (for educational certification, law and business) as well as courses for foreign students.
He gave the keynote address at the 1932 German national celebration of the 100th anniversary of the death ofJohann Wolfgang Goethe. This was a fitting choice, as Valéry shared Goethe's fascination with science (specifically,biology andoptics).
In addition to his activities as a member of theAcadémie française, he was also a member of theAcademy of Sciences of Lisbon, and of theFront national des Ecrivains. In 1937, he was appointed chief executive of what later became theUniversity of Nice. He was the inaugural holder of the Chair of Poetics at theCollège de France.
DuringWorld War II, theVichy regime stripped him of some of these jobs and distinctions because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with Vichy and the German occupation, but Valéry continued, throughout these troubled years, to publish and to be active in French cultural life, especially as a member of theAcadémie française. From 1942 he became a member of the National Committee of Writers, an offshoot of the anti-Naziresistance movementNational Front.[9]
Valéry was nominated for theNobel Prize in Literature twelve times. It is believed that theSwedish Academy intended to award Valéry the prize in 1945, had he not died that year.[10]
Valéry died in Paris in July 1945. He is buried in the cemetery of his native town, Sète, the same cemetery celebrated in his famous poemLe Cimetière marin.[11]
Valéry is best known as a poet, and he is sometimes considered to be the last of the Frenchsymbolists. However, he published fewer than a hundred poems, and none of them drew much attention. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry underwent anexistential crisis, an event that made a huge impact on his writing career. Eventually, around 1898, he quit writing altogether, publishing not a word for nearly twenty years. This hiatus was in part due to the death of his mentor,Stéphane Mallarmé. When, in 1917, he finally broke his 'great silence' with the publication ofLa Jeune Parque, he was forty-six years of age.[12]
This obscure, but sublimely musical, masterpiece, of 512alexandrine lines in rhyming couplets, had taken him four years to complete, and it immediately secured his fame. With "Le Cimetière marin" and "L'Ébauche d'un serpent," it is often considered one of the greatest French poems of the twentieth century.
The title was chosen late in the poem's gestation; it refers to the youngest of the threeParcae (the minor Roman deities also calledThe Fates), though for some readers the connection with that mythological figure is tenuous and problematic.
The poem is written in the first person, and is the soliloquy of a young woman contemplating life and death, engagement and withdrawal, love and estrangement, in a setting dominated by the sea, the sky, stars, rocky cliffs, and the rising sun. However, it is also possible to read the poem as an allegory on the way fate moves human affairs or as an attempt to comprehend the horrific violence in Europe at the time of the poem's composition. The poem is not aboutWorld War I, but it does try to address the relationships between destruction and beauty, and, in this sense, it resonates withancient Greek meditations on these matters, especially in the plays ofSophocles andAeschylus. There are, therefore, evident links withle Cimetière marin, which is also a seaside meditation on comparably large themes.
Beforela Jeune Parque, Valéry's only publications of note were dialogues, articles, some poems, and a study ofLeonardo da Vinci. In 1920 and 1922, he published two slim collections of verses. The first,Album des vers anciens (Album of old verses), was a revision of early but beautifully wrought smaller poems, some of which had been published individually before 1900. The second,Charmes (from the Latincarmina, meaning "songs" and also "incantations"), further confirmed his reputation as a major French poet. The collection includesle Cimetière marin, and many smaller poems with diverse structures.
Valéry's technique is quite orthodox in its essentials. His verse rhymes and scans in conventional ways, and it has much in common with the work ofMallarmé. His poem "Palme" inspiredJames Merrill's celebrated 1974 poem "Lost in Translation," and his cerebral lyricism also influenced American poetEdgar Bowers.
Valéry described his “true oeuvre” to be prose, and he filled more than 28,000 notebook pages over his lifetime.[13] His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms andbons mots, reveal a skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical. His view of state power was broadlyliberal insofar as he believed that state power and infringements on the individual should be severely limited.[14] Although he had flirted with nationalist ideas during the 1890s, he moved away from them by 1899, and believed that European culture owed its greatness to the ethnic diversity and universalism of the Roman Empire.[15] He denounced the myth of "racial purity" and argued that such purity, if it existed, would only lead to stagnation—thus the mixing of races was necessary for progress and cultural development.[16] In "America as a Projection of the European Mind", Valéry remarked that whenever he despaired about Europe's situation, he could "restore some degree of hope only by thinking ofthe New World" and mused on the "happy variations" which could result from European "aesthetic ideas filtering into the powerful character of native Mexican art."[17]
Raymond Poincaré,Louis de Broglie,André Gide,Henri Bergson, andAlbert Einstein[18] all respected Valéry's thinking and became friendly correspondents. Valéry was often asked to write articles on topics not of his choosing; the resulting intellectual journalism was collected in five volumes titledVariétés.
Valéry's most striking achievement is perhaps his monumental intellectual diary, called theCahiers (Notebooks). Early every morning of his adult life, he contributed something to theCahiers, prompting him to write: "Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day."[citation needed]
The subjects of hisCahiers entries often were, surprisingly, reflections on science and mathematics. In fact, arcane topics in these domains appear to have commanded far more of his considered attention than his celebrated poetry. TheCahiers also contain the first drafts of many aphorisms he later included in his books. To date, theCahiers have been published in their entirety only as photostatic reproductions, and only since 1980 have they begun to receive scholarly scrutiny. TheCahiers have been translated into English in five volumes published by Peter Lang with the titleCahiers/Notebooks.
In recent decades Valéry's thought has been considered a touchstone in the field ofconstructivist epistemology, as noted, for instance, byJean-Louis Le Moigne in his description of constructivist history.[19]
One of three epigraphs inCormac McCarthy's novelBlood Meridian is from Valéry's "Writing at the Yalu River" (1895):"Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time".[20]
In the bookEl laberinto de la soleda byOctavio Paz there are three lines from Valéry's poem "La jeune parque":
Je pense, sur le bord doré de l’univers
A ce gout de périr qui prend la Pythonisse
En qui mugit l’espoir que le monde finisse.
("I think, at the golden brink of the universe, / Of that longing for death which possessed the Sibyl / And which feeds on the hope that the last days are near.")[21]In Ray Bradbury’sFahrenheit 451, the book-burning fire chief Beatty quotes Valery:
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
FromIntroduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci.
Oscar-winning Japanese directorHayao Miyazaki's 2013 filmThe Wind Rises and theJapanese novel of the same name (on which the film was partially based) take their title from Valéry's verse "Le vent se lève... il faut tenter de vivre !" ("The wind rises… We must try to live!") in the poem "Le Cimetière marin" (The Graveyard by the Sea).[22][23] The same quote is used in the closing sentences ofAnthony Burgess's 1962 novelThe Wanting Seed. "Le Cimetière marin" is also quoted in the French comic "Le concombre masqué: Comment devenir maître du monde?", authored by Mandryka and published in 1980.
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