Paul Valery
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (October 30, 1871 – July 20, 1945) was a French author and Symbolist poet. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama, and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.
Biography
Born of a Corsican father and Genoese mother, Valéry was born in Sète, a town on the Mediterranean coast of the Hérault but he was raised in Montpellier a larger urban center close by. After a good traditional Roman Catholic education, he studied law at university, then resided in Paris for most of the remainder of his life, where he was for a while part of Stephane Mallarmé's circle.
Valéry became a full-time writer late in life (at the age of fifty) when the man for whom he worked as private secretary, a former chief executive of the Agence Havas, Edouard Lebey, died of Parkinson's disease in 1920. Until that time, he had earned his living first briefly in the Ministry of War before assuming the relatively flexible post as an assistant to the increasingly impaired Mr. Lebey, a job he held for some twenty years. After his election to the Académie française in 1925, Valéry became a tireless public speaker and intellectual figure in French society, touring Europe and giving conferences on cultural and social issues as well as assuming a number of official positions an admiring French nation eagerly offered him. He represented France on cultural matters at the League of Nations, serving on several of its committees; Valery (1989) contains English translations of a dozen essays resulting from these activities.
He gave the keynote address at the 1932 German national celebration of the 100th anniversary of the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This was a fitting choice, as Valéry shared Goethe's fascination with science (specifically biology and the theory of light). In addition his activities as a member of the Académie française, he was also a member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, and Front national des Ecrivains. In 1937, he was appointed chief executive of what later became the University of Nice. He was the inaugural holder of the Chair of Poetics at the College de France. The Vichy regime stripped him of some of these jobs and distinctions, because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with it and the German occupation, but Valéry continued to publish and to be active in French cultural life, especially as a member of the Académie Française, throughout these troubled years.
In 1900, he married Jeannie Gobillard, niece of the painter Berthe Morisot, by whom he had three children.
Valery died in Paris in 1945. He was buried in his native Sète's "cimetiere marin", named from the title of his best known poem.
Work
Valéry is best known as a poet, but he published fewer than 100 poems, and none before 1917, when he published his long "La Jeune Parque" at 46 years of age. Until then, he had published only dialogues, articles, and a study of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1920 and 1922, he published two slim collections of verses; the latter one, Charmes (from Latin carmina, meaning "songs"), grounds his reputation as a major French poet. Valéry's technique was quite orthodox; his poems all rhyme and scan. His poem "Palme" inspired James Merrill's celebrated 1974 poem "Lost in Translation".
His far more ample prose writings, peppered with many aphorisms and bons mots, reveal a conservative and skeptical outlook on human nature, verging on the cynical. But he never said or wrote anything giving aid or comfort to any form of totalitarianism popular (in certain quarters, at least) in his lifetime. Raymond Poincaré, Louis de Broglie, Andre Gide, Henri Bergson, and Albert Einstein 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 he collected in five volumes titled Variétés.
Valéry's most striking achievement is perhaps his monumental diary called the Cahiers (Notebooks). Early every morning of his adult life, he contributed something to the Cahiers, which prompted 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." The subject of his Cahiers entries often was, surprisingly, science and mathematics. In fact, these arcane subjects appear to have commanded far more of his considered attention than his celebrated poetry. The Cahiers also contain the first drafts of many aphorisms he later included in his books. To date, the Cahiers have been published in their entirety only in photostatic reproduction, and only since 1980 or so have they begun to receive the scholarly scrutiny they deserve.
Quotations
- "We civilizations now know ourselves mortal." First sentence of the essay "La Crise de l'Esprit" (1919) included in Variétés I.
- "God created man, and not finding him solitary enough, gave him a companion so that he would better feel his solitude." (Tel Quel)
- "Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business." (Tel Quel)
- "A good poet is of no more use to his country than a good petanque player."
- "The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."
- "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
- "Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."
Selected works
- Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1895)
- La soirée avec monsieur Teste (1896)
- La jeune parque (1896)
- Album des vers anciens (1920)
- Charmes (1922)
- Regards sur le monde actuel. (1931)
- Variétés I; II; III (1936)
- Variétes IV (1938)
- Mauvaises pensées et autres (1942)
- Tel quel (1943)
- Variétes V (1944)
- Vues (1948)
- Œuvres I (1957), édition établie et annotée par Jean Hytier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade / nrf Gallimard
- Œuvres II (1960), édition établie et annotée par Jean Hytier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade / nrf Gallimard
- Prose et Vers (1968)
- Cahiers I (1973), édition établie, présentée et annotée par Judith Robinson-Valéry, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade / nrf Gallimard
- Cahiers II (1974), édition établie, présentée et annotée par Judith Robinson-Valéry, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade / nrf Gallimard
- Cahiers (1894-1914) (1987), édition publiée sous la direction de Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri et Judith Robinson-Valéry avec la collaboration de Jean Celeyrette, Maria Teresa Giaveri, Paul Gifford, Jeannine Jallat, Bernard Lacorre, Huguette Laurenti, Florence de Lussy, Robert Pickering, Régine Pietra et Jürgen Schmidt-Radefeldt, tomes I-IX, Collection blanche, Gallimard
In English translation:
- 1964. Selected Writings of Paul Valery. New Directions.
- 1977. Paul Valery: An Anthology. James Lawler, ed. Bollingen (Princeton Univ. Press).
- 1989. The Outlook for Intelligence. Denise Foliot and Jackson Mathews, trans. Bollingen (Princeton Univ. Press).
- 2000- Paul Valéry's Cahiers/Notebooks. Volumes I- . Editor-in-chief: Brian Stimpson. Associate editors Paul Gifford, Robert Pickering. Translated by Paul Gifford. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
External links
- Centre for Valéry Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
- Ressources sur Paul Valéry. — in French.
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