World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Although Valéry himself regarded the poet’s biography as an impertinent irrelevance to the work which was his real life, to realize that Valéry’s long devotion to his “notebooks” was an elaborate Maginot, a barrier he lay quietly behind until he was ready, again, to let the enemy in, is, it seems to me, the most important thing to know about him. After such resistance, such abnegation of gifts, how surprisingly easy was the change. In 1912 Gide suggests he print his early poems. Although Valéry has already attempted this several times, he expresses reluctance. A typescript is given to him and he is, he says, appalled. A few revisions … then quite a few, whole new stanzas. He will go ahead. Perhaps an introductory poem might be composed, a few verses … It is “La Jeune Parque,” a poem which grows from 40 lines to 512, which occupies four years of work—years of war—and, preceding the volume it was expected to preface by three years, makes him famous. Completed finally in 1917, he dedicates it to Gide. Long, dense, difficult, personal, obscure: these are the critics’ words. More unsummarizable poems—masterpieces—follow to fill out Charmes, which appears in 1922. All exercises, of course, all experiments, all accidents, all unfinished …

  It is now plain that when Valéry returned to poetry it was as an altogether superior man, for what he had loved during that muffled time was not himself but a true image, an inversion, an opposite: against the vague indefiniteness of the symbolist poetry he had begun by admiring, he had placed the precision and crispness of mathematics; against practice he’d put theory, exchanging the careless literary use of ideas for their cautious, responsible, scientific employment; from the forms for feeling and desire he had turned away to study the structures of thought, working—in the phrase of Huysmans, one novelist he allowed himself to admire—always au rebours, against the grain, and consequently correcting in himself a severe and weakening lean in the direction of the mystical and romantic.

  This extraordinary straightening up produced a poet who was not only supremely skilled in practice, and sound in theory, but one who did not feel his work so beset by other subjects that he had to make a castle of himself and dragons out of everything else. Above all, it enabled him eventually to achieve poems that created in their readers strange yet richly integrated states of consciousness—the mind as the face of a Narcissus. They were indelible evaporations, works in which the shadows that words cast had more weight than the words themselves, and whose effects were—in his own wonderfully reflexive phrase—like the “frémissements d’une feuille effacée,” the shiverings of an effaced leaf.

  2

  Built slowly, with a patience appropriate to the pyramid it is, and the pharaoh who lies within it, the Bollingen edition of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry has now reached the twelfth of its projected fifteen volumes.2 More than a dozen prefaces and introductions grace it (by Eliot, Auden, and Wallace Stevens, among others almost as distinguished); twelve translators, most of them gifted, have so far contributed their labors; and if, since 1956, when it was the first to appear, the most successful undertaking has been William McCausland Stewart’s inspired version of the Dialogues, works which now seem unimprovable in English as well as French, the most difficult task has been that of David Paul, who has done the major poems, in addition to an excellent prose rendering of Idée fixe—a kind of extended conversation insufficiently ceremonious and solemn to be a dialogue. Valéry’s late, unfinished play, My Faust, is Paul’s work, too, as well as the poet’s relaxed and anecdotal pieces on the painters, Degas, Manet, Morisot. If I say that Mr. Paul has been only intermittently successful with the poems, that is praise, for Valéry’s poetry, like Mallarmé’s, is not translatable.

  And not because Valéry was merely a mouthpiece for the gods—he despised that pretense—but precisely because, while courting chance, he left nothing to it. His muse was a domestic. What are we otherwise to think of the efficient, modest maid who comes to make the poet’s bed, flit among the mirrors, find fresh water for his flowers?

  “Une esclave aux longs yeux chargés de molles chaînes.” Long, shall we say her eyes are? slow? laden or burdened? and shall we believe her chains are slack, soft, loose—what? “A slave girl, her long eyes laden with soft chains,” Mr. Paul decides to render it; yet are these words and these decisions about her eyes, her soul, her situation, or the poet’s mind? How elusive the line is, wound in music like a gift in tissue, both wrapped and wrapping fragile as a bibelot, one as precious as the other. The language is so precisely used that its object cannot be exactly seen, for nothing is easier than to paint a resemblance, follow a line a leg makes, let the world do your creative work.

  Every word in the poem has a dozen causes, so that when the poet suggests that this slave, maid, and muse of his can busy herself in his room, pass in and out of his sight without disturbing its preoccupied “absence,” as glass passes through sunlight (“Comme passe le verre au travers du soleil”) without having to set in motion the machinery of the mind (“Et de la raison pure épargne l’appareil”), it is painful to hear Mr. Paul say instead: “As a windowpane traverses the sunshine/Leaving intact the appliances of pure reason,” because now only the bare “idea” remains, rather stricken and emaciated, too, as though it had lain sick in a cell for some time.

  A maid straightening a room: all right, we can translate that. And to the extent a writer achieves his effects through the invention and manipulation of fictional things and people (a skill which is not a linguistic one), these effects can be suggested in another tongue or even in another medium.

  Thus it is possible for me to tell you that in one of Valéry’s poems there is a rower on a river. Rhythmically bending and straightening as he must, seeming to move the world rather than himself as he passes between the banks and beneath bridges, his eyes wander downcast in a landscape of reflection.

  On the other side of the sky, philosophers—and others momentarily like them—are combining their concepts in amusing, instructive, or dazzling ways, and to the degree these concepts can free themselves of the language in which they were originally expressed, they can travel without too much wear and tear. Plato was an artist of ideas, as Valéry suggests all philosophers should be, and that the body is a prison for the soul is one piece of philosophical poetry with which you and I can fairly easily acquaint ourselves without knowing much Greek.

  With regard to “The Rower,” then, I can indicate how Valéry imagines objects and their reflections, like Narcissus and the puddle-picture of himself he loved, to be like the images of burning which smoked the walls of Plato’s cave; I can describe how, in the poem, the boat’s prow is urged to divide the world which seems painted in the water, shattering its calm so that of such a massive stillness no memory will remain. But Valéry bitterly objected to this kind of poetic play with ideas in Pascal and in other philosophers because he suspected them, lest reason fail, of using the methods of poetry, like the welcome lies of politicians, to persuade, and in this way debasing both truth and beauty. In Pascal, because he was not only a splendid writer but a fine mathematician, this Jansenist unscrupulousness was intolerable.

  Of course I don’t need to translate the poem’s exterior design because I can exactly reproduce it; yet rhyme schemes, stanza forms, and even meters, not to say the sounds of words, their multiple associations and other shades, the syntax of the language, the tone of the “voice”—detached or angry—shared techniques, shared subjects and concerns, with all their risks, his very personal quirks, like the crotches of trees, as well as the traditions which the poet is a human and historic part of: all these—and many more—make their claims, often quite stubbornly and without any evident justice.

  Valéry liked to think of forms as arbitrary obstacles set up simply for the sport, and he was happy to believe that the sport itself was one of resolution, harmony, wholeness; one in which the poet, by consciously calculated and successive steps, creates out of artificial and even antagonistic materials an object as mysteriously complete, continuous, and beautiful, as the shell
of a mollusk or a spider’s snare. Yet not an object like theirs designed to trap or protect, but one simply willed—made to be because the soul is finally satisfied only by what resembles it in its supremest dreams, when it is invincibly principled, and consequently something so inwardly radiant that, like the contours of a resting woman’s body, as he writes in one poem, it has to be, itself, alive … alive to return our gaze. And yet it must also be an object as theirs sometimes is, since it must seem, against the actuality of its contrivance, instinctive, seamless, easy … as though exuded through a tube or spun from a gland. But no words of mine can convey the loveliness of style and idea contained in his finer essays, “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” for example, or “Man and the Seashell.”

  For the translator, alas! Valéry’s verse succeeds. It’s so fastened to the word, so confined to the tongue which expresses it, there’s no remainder. Such was his intention, and to pretend, when all else fails, by freer, more expansive measures, to find some poetic corollary elsewhere is like hunting through the music of the Balinese for the musical equivalent of Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. Mr. Paul does not obviously wander away, but what is near and what far in this connection? Here is a poet so careful he seems always to be walking upright on his own life as though it were a swaying wire. To render him, then, as if he were forgetful and a bit careless about his budget: how shall we measure this departure?

  “The Rower” is a poet struggling upstream against time and the temptations of a pleasurable drift. His oars part him from the repeated grip of the river:

  Je romprai lentement mille liens glacés

  Et les barbes d’argent de sa puissance nue.

  Mr. Paul, who with the less famous poems has sometimes taken the first meaning to fly by, not troubling himself about the sense of the whole, construes this pair as follows:

  Piece by piece I shall break a thousand icy bonds,

  And the silvery barbs of her naked potency,

  which is, first, careless (you don’t break bonds “piece by piece”), and then incorrect (barbes refers to a lappet, a kind of apron, here), so that the consequence is confusion, and the central meaning of the line, the sexual exposure of the river by violation of its surface, is lost. In the final verses of the poem, too, Mr. Paul interprets the poet’s critical concluding act of defiance as … well, it simply isn’t clear. The rower is passing beneath bridges whose darkness oppresses him.

  the mind

  Lowers its sensitive suns, its ready eyelids,

  Until with a leap that clothes me with jewels

  I plunge into the disdain of all that idle azure.

  You should have to have a court order to use “azure” in English. The early poem, “Helen,” begins “Azur! c’est moi …,” which Mr. Paul renders, “Azure, it is I!” Lowell quite properly avoids the word. “I am the blue!” his poem cries, which isn’t right either, but—never mind—the poem that follows is a brilliant one, if not by Valéry.

  Then to transcribe these famous lines of “The Cemetery by the Sea”:

  Midi le juste y compose de feux

  La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!

  in which Valéry describes the light of the noon sun falling with the kind of impartial light we get in certain classical paintings—everywhere in a rain of right angles—so that the quiet sea has no slopes with which it can contrive a shadow, and consequently seems composed of fire; a fire, indeed, like that which is said to consume the phoenix, death and birth proceeding so continuously that nothing appears to change—to transcribe these lines as

  Justicer Noon out there compounds with fires

  The sea, the sea perpetually renewed!

  is to replace a delicate balance of ideas with simple awkwardness. And as the poet’s shining wine subsides in its glass, the remainder remains sweetly sticky still, like flat pop.

  Valéry always insisted that his interest in poetry lay in the work, not in the poem: in the successive acts of composition which were, for him, like the moves of a dancer passing gracefully from one position to another. And if poetry stood to prose as dancing did to walking, as he liked to say, then it did so because, like dancing, its motions served no master but the mind at play which designed them; because it became a continuum: there was the art! by seeking minuter and minuter modulations, by the steady overlay of straight lines, to achieve the curve first, and then the circle—a visible summation of many nearly invisible steps and decisions.

  Shatter a stone and the bits you make are simply further stones, but break a seashell or a poem and every piece will continue to declare itself a fragment of some whole. Dancing supervenes upon the serious business of walking the way a child’s skip-a-longs and fence-balancings accompany him as he makes his imperfect way to school. Unlike prose, poetry is not a kind of communication, but a construction in consciousness. Words in ordinary speech and trade … they disappear before their messages do, disposable as Kleenex; but the cry of fire in a crowded room, if it is eloquently framed and sweet enough, will snuff all sense of burning. The form will hold us there.

  … and we become a light white ash.

  Through long years of patient dedication Valéry advanced by means of even detours toward the outline of a powerful poetic theory, and I am convinced, as Auden remarks in one of the several excellent introductions to The Collected Works, that “In his general principles … Valéry is right past all possibility of discussion.”

  Permanence and repeatability were two qualities which Valéry thought essential. Sensations are usually simply used, or canceled by others, and those which we wish to prolong belong, he said, to “the esthetic infinite.” He only glimpsed another possibility: that as the demand for culture grew it would be necessary to create along other lines, for poetry is presently composed as the paper in picnic plates is shaped. When the beans have been consumed, and the plates scraped, they can be ditched or burned. New ones appear in the stores every day, some with dashing designs, and so sturdily constructed they can carry a glass. Tomorrow, too, there will be further festivals, clean blankets and new friends, fresh glass.

  Perhaps Valéry rather naïvely believed the novelists when they announced (as Zola, for example, did every day in the press) their plans to make to the world a present of reality … believed, that is, in the sincerity of their pretensions, although shocked by their performance. Perhaps his commitment to excellence was too great, and in poetry the sacred purity of vocabulary, narrowness of subject, the neatness of small forms and the satisfaction of their palpable tightness, shut his eyes, as a cat’s eyes shut, in self-centered satisfaction.

  In any case he did not understand Flaubert; he took little interest in Proust; about the great works of Mann and Joyce he was very noticeably silent, and of such exemplars of oddity as Gertrude Stein I doubt he ever heard; but there were, in the works he did examine, so many pages of “information,” so many events, traits, qualities, and verbal formulations which could just as well have been otherwise—so much invented gossip, so many inexpressive details—that he failed to observe what his own attitudes had helped make possible: how the techniques of the modern novel were rapidly becoming the strategies of the long poem, and that original forms were being designed for such extended breaths—new chests were necessary, and larger lungs.

  Edmund Wilson once wrote that Valéry’s prose, “in spite of the extravagant respect with which it is treated by his admirers, is by no means so remarkable as his verse,” but I find myself unable to agree. The curve that carried Valéry away from poetry a second time, and plunged him, as it seemed, in notoriety (he threw open doors and cut ribbons, made addresses, lectured, wrote testimonials and prefaces, responded to requests, modestly discussed his own successes, and in 1925 accepted election to the French Academy), led him at the same time to create his dialogues, the “Eupalinos” among them, one of the most original and moving pieces of prose in any language.

  The empirical distinction between poetry and prose is a wholly illusory one, a fact of which
Valéry was at times perfectly aware, for the French have pioneered the prose poem; Valéry admired Rimbaud’s, and wrote not a few himself; he also dabbled in the story, wrote “Monsieur Teste,” of course, made jots of plots, especially fancying the kind of flat, weird, metaphysically menacing situations Lettau could find stimulating, as Borges certainly did.

  Valéry could never quite give himself up to prose (prose as he had got in the bad habit of defining it), and this accounts, at least in part, for the flicker in his thought which one often finds in the essays. Perhaps his mind was too playful, perhaps it danced when it should have walked or harshly stomped, yet what is striking in even his most occasional pieces—let alone the famous ones like “The Crises of the Mind” or “The Outlook for Intelligence”—is his remarkable prescience, so that even brief asides (“Perhaps waste itself has become a public and permanent necessity”), made in 1940, or 1932, or 1929, fall further over and into the present than any wholesome shadow should. It’s not just his style alone that sometimes causes the scalp to prickle.

  I suspect that Valéry’s success as a wise man was not due to his Leonardo-like ambitions, because his studies were not as universal or as thorough as he liked to let on, and the central concern of his life was a stubbornly restricted one; nor was it because he reasoned like a Teste, for his mind was essentially metaphoric in its operation (what he knew and liked most about architecture, for example, was almost wholly embodied in the very idea of “building”); and although his sovereign detachment certainly helped him and he was instinctively right about what to despise, he was particularly a master of the side-long look, and the practice of composition over many years had taught him to attend to “little” things and small steps, for there, in scrupulosities only a spider might otherwise pain itself with, were the opportunities for genius. It is Valéry, himself, who writes: