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”.
Michel Jarrety
PAUL VALÉRY
1,366pp. Fayard. 52euros.
978 2 213 61515 8
Paul Gifford is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of St
Andrews and Visiting Research Fellow of the Girard Foundation, Stanford
University.
