The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

  “Poe had, to an exceptional degree, the feeling for the incantatory element in poetry,” T. S. Eliot writes in an essay on Poe’s influence on the trio Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, “of that which may, in the most nearly literal sense, be called ‘the magic of verse.’” The goal of poetry for Mallarmé was to rediscover the pure and incantatory force of words, their spell; how much Valéry retained from the master is evident in the very title and epigraph of his collection Charms. As a young man he revered “The Philosophy of Composition,” an essay of Poe’s that claims to explain in rational terms how “The Raven” was composed; it has been dismissed as a hoax or delusion by most English readers, but the young Valéry took it deadly seriously. Filled with dreams of ever more ambitiously composed poems, he was stirred by these lines from Poe’s story “The Domain of Arnheim”:

  I believe that the world has never seen—and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of mind into distasteful exertion, the world will never see—that full extent of triumphant execution, in the richer domains of art, of which the human nature is absolutely capable.

  There was also the sprawling Eureka, which purports to describe a total mystico-scientific theory of the universe. That double vision could not but appeal to Valéry, who in the spirit of that ne plus ultra of decadents, Huysmans’s character Des Esseintes from À Rebours, had developed an aesthetic fascination with the formal sciences. Already as an adolescent he’d had a passion for architecture, and meticulously studied works on form and ornament by Owen Jones and Viollet-le-Duc. Math in school wasn’t his strong point—a youthful dream of attending the naval academy foundered on his poor exam scores in that subject—but in 1891 the same friend who introduced him to Wagner’s music initiated him into the basic tenets of probability theory and logic. It isn’t clear how much of the details the young poet grasped, but he found the clarity and rigor inebriating.

  Now he devoted his time to studying James Clerk Maxwell’s Electricity and Magnetism, Lord Kelvin’s Constitution of Matter, Bertrand Russell and Nikolai Lobachevsky on geometry, Henri Poincaré on the philosophy of science and the psychology of scientific discovery … His goal was to “remake his brain”; he dreamed of establishing a “System,” not a fixed system but a flexible and systematic methodology, an Art of Thought. Investigations into the axiomatic bases of mathematics and the sciences were in the air of the times. “I am attempting at my own risk and peril,” he wrote in an untitled notebook from 1900–1901, “what has been attempted and accomplished by Faraday in physics, by Riemann in mathematics—Pasteur in biology and others in music…”

  As part of his rejection of poetry and the languishing metaphors of the Symbolists, he also dreamed of achieving an impossible precision and functionality of language:

  I forbade myself from using any word to which I could not attach a definite—conscious—meaning—Never use the resonances of what is found in the twilight of language … (AA, 1928)

  That perfectly transparent prose would be the language of the mind.

  Essays, Sketches, Studies, Drafts, Rough Copies, Exercises, Fumblings.

  — UNTITLED NOTEBOOK, 1903 - 1905

  The individually titled quaderni of Leonardo da Vinci were at the forefront of Valéry’s mind when in 1894 he wrote “Logbook” on the cover of a regular school notebook and began, in the hours before dawn that came naturally to him as an insomniac still fresh from the rigors of military service, observing his thoughts.

  On the first page: sketches of a tree, a flight of birds or angels, a boat breasting a wave, a nude Apollonian figure gazing at a small creature with the body of a woman, a bird’s head, and long hair sitting on the table; and a few jottings, “to cite: Faraday, Maxwell, Edison, 18th century, Wronsky,” “art criticism, the naval aesthetic, modern city” …

  On the second page, the analysis begins: “An object or event, tree, landscape, thought, movement, has its place in a classification of things as built upon the slightest act of imagination and logic. This slightest act is revealed in the emergence of geometry, in the association of ideas…” To the side, a group of trigonometric calculations and sketches evoke a question of optics and vision.

  Already on page four is the first of what the scholar Michel Jarrety has called “a breach of feeling in a space devoted to the intellect”: “… thousands of memories of feeling solitude…”

  If my work is not worthless—it is very precious; and I will keep it for myself. If it is worthless—it has no value for anyone, and I will keep it—for no one.

  — UNTITLED NOTEBOOK, 1900 - 1901

  THE NOTEBOOKS

  Valéry’s attitude to the inherent formlessness of his growing numbers of notebooks was always ambivalent. They began as the search for his System; generally he saw them as a purely private exercise. At times he dreamed of shaping them into a finished work, a treatise or theory, or even extracting their essence into a novel. At times he was resigned to their pages being his “only oeuvre”; when in 1908 he discovered Ernst Mach’s book Knowledge and Error, which seemed, on a superficial reading, to contain “two or three of the dearest, most original, most central, of my ideas,” he almost gave them up entirely. He envisioned an organized collection of excerpts, and also an entirely unorganized one. “If I take fragments from these notebooks,” he noted in 1935, “and set them one after the other with ***’s, and publish them, the ensemble will make up something. The reader—and even I myself—will form them into a unity. And that formation will be, will create, something else—unforeseen until then, in some other mind or my own.”

  On three occasions, in 1898, 1908, and 1921, he tried to classify their pages along thematic lines. The third attempt resulted in a series of overlapping categories that evolved through the following years and thousands of typescripts and folders. (Some wealthy patrons had hired him a secretary.) Ego, analysis of himself. Ego Scriptor, himself as a writer. Poetry and Poetics. Theta, on religion and spirituality. Eros. System. Language, Philosophy, Memory, Bios, Dream … Nothing more definitive came of this classification in his lifetime. In 1973, however, it was used as the basis for the first presentation of the notebooks for a general readership, the Pléiade edition, which reproduces about a tenth of the classified texts, running to some three thousand onionskin pages.

  Among Valéry’s thirty categories are the PPA, the “petits poèmes abstraits” or “little abstract poems.” Some of these pieces had appeared, revised or expanded, in those little volumes of fragments published in his lifetime. Here we see them in their first spontaneous form—and there are plenty of unsuspected gems. Whispered psalms and cries of frustration, the undisguised pain of sleepless nights and lucid evocations of the joy of waking, subtle parables and even the two-line “Complete Poem,” which, for a poet who considered his most formal poems as ever unfinished, is a bold statement indeed.

  Their material, like the analytic passages that surround them, is the mind, its acts and operations, perceptions and sensations and memories. Their language has the same feeling of detachment and lack of literary workmanship as the rest of the notebooks. Writing, in these abstract poems, has been freed from any obligation to achieve a literary form, and approaches a pure écriture, as the French would say. There is nevertheless a unique kind of poetry to these fragments, from the early pages that are “elliptical to the point of obscurity,” as the French critic Benoît Peeters writes, to the more concrete and often sensuous texts of later years.

  The distinction is important. A poem for Valéry is a literary object whose form and beauty is constructed in words and exists in the poem itself. In the PPA and the other passages of Eros, Theta, etc., that share their poetry, form or beauty is discovered in the world, in a perception or a thought, and is abstracted—from the Latin abstrahere, “to draw away”—by words that attempt a transcription using the light, superimposed charcoal strokes of a sketch. (The notebooks, it’s worth noting, are also filled with sketches and watercolors.) Valéry had begun by
seeking the language of the mind. He came to call the voice of the notebooks the language of solitude, in opposition to the language of discourse or literature:

  The thought of solitude has no such sentences. Its sentences are terribly bare. If such ones do come to mind, it flouts them, or else it is no longer solitude, but rather comedy, theater, and for some public. (Untitled notebook, 1936)

  There are exceptions that prove the rule, namely the rare pages that bear the marks of “numerous additions, the sign of a veritable poetic revision,” as Michel Jarrety notes about an early draft of L’Ange (The Angel). These are Valéry’s true prose poems, a few of which were drafted in the notebooks but which need to be distinguished both from the PPA and from the pieces that were published in Tel Quel and Mélanges; the latter, for all their being qualified as prose poems, are simply PPA dressed up for the public.

  After The Angel, probably the best-known prose poems are the twenty-four letters of Alphabet, a few of which appeared in magazines in Valéry’s lifetime. Their hour-by-hour, letter-by-letter unfolding of the day reads as a highly literary setting of the same impressions of waking, sleeping, love, the mind in the body, which are the material of the PPA. Their sentences are carefully crafted, the springs of their syntax wound tight. By contrast, the PPA are not poems to be rewritten, revised, brought to perfection via a painstaking process. They are words of the moment, exercises in selfhood, and for all the interest of individual pieces, their real beauty is cumulative, in movement:

  Consciousness seems like a mirror of water which shows the viewer now the sky, now the depths; and often the water is jostled and stirred, and makes a multitude of mirrors and transparencies, an inextricable image … (A, 1909–1910)

  I had the desire or intention of making the Idea of the living—thinking?—being sing.

  — C, 1942

  THE POEMS

  Valéry’s lyric poetry was born of a single intense period, and is defined by a single arching movement from the shadowy Symbolist half-light of the Album of Early Verse, already pierced by a “crack of day” (“Fantasy”), through the dawn song of The Young Fate to the morning light that opens Charms and gives way in the rest of the volume to the complex lighting of day. Though mostly written in fewer than ten years, they form, like Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a single work constructed over a lifetime, from his Symbolist years in the early 1890s, which they subsume and refigure, to his later years, which they prefigure and render mute.

  Everything hinges on The Young Fate. The images, themes, and problems of the lyric poems all find their nexus here: those of the early work are mirrored and brought to conclusion, if not resolved, while others are posed only to be worked out fully in Charms. The Fate herself began as a Helen, picking up a thread from a youthful sonnet; indeed there is a continuity, “a thread (your golden finger vies for it with dawn),” that runs through all of the female figures—Helen, Anne, Semiramis, the Pythia, Eve in that masterpiece of self-parody “Sketch of a Serpent.” A thread of waking, of consciousness filling the body and feeling the flow of flesh and blood; the first steps of thought from the shadows, where Anne retreats from the sun’s rays, to the first light where we see Semiramis “racing forth” to meet the day and where the Fate, too, will find her footing on the edge of extreme lucidity.

  Also a thread of music. The Young Fate began in 1912 with an intimation of Gluck and Wagner and Valéry’s friend Debussy, and its painstaking composition over three years, fragment by fragment, was in search of what Valéry called a “continuous music.” Leaving behind the simple correspondences of the Symbolists, the images shift like states of consciousness in an impressionistic psychological tone poem. “In the Fate and the Pythia,” he noted in 1937, “I tried to hold myself to the task of following the psychological sensation of consciousness; with the functioning of the body, as perceived by the Self, used as basso continuo to incidents or ideas.”

  Our story, our moment, our body, our hopes, our fears, our hands, our thoughts—are all strange to us. All are exterior …

  — X, 1923

  The most important male figure is Narcissus. While Valéry famously described The Young Fate as “an autobiography in form,” he also explained in a 1941 lecture that “the theme of Narcissus is a sort of poetic autobiography”: from the first Symbolist sonnet of 1890, which became “Narcissus Speaks,” to the revisions of that poem for the Album of Early Verse that quickly took on a life of their own to become the “Fragments of Narcissus,” and from the numerous analytic and poetic passages in the notebooks to the 1939 Cantata of Narcissus with music by Arthur Honegger.

  Narcissus represents “the simplest of all Dramas,” Valéry reportedly told his friend and admirer Rilke: that of the mind and the body. There is a reminiscence and a critique of Symbolism’s play of mirrors and moonlight, and of the more subtle mirrors of Mallarmé. There is the meeting of self and other, and of the self with others. There is a figuration of the impossible, longed-for union of the mind with itself, and the renunciation and separation that follows. Yet the exact meaning of Narcissus as a poetic figure is, like his own image on the water, unstable, a shifting of superimposed allusion and impression. A poem for Valéry, after all, was not the versification of an idea but “that prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning.”

  In the second of the “Fragments,” the duality of Narcissus’s solitude with himself is belied by an increasingly tangible, female, third presence. Due to the reticence of Valéry’s family to authorize the release of supposedly compromising passages from the notebooks, the details of this presence remained somewhat obscure until 1987, when the journals of Catherine Pozzi were published. Far more than a socialite, never quite an intellectual, the highly cultivated and largely self-educated Pozzi floated in an ambiguous limbo in Paris society. She was tall, a little awkward, mildly ecstatic, and also rich thanks to her father, a famous surgeon whose salon had been a cross-section of late-nineteenth-century culture (his portrait by John Sargent now hangs in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles). Other than her journal, she is known for a slim set of six posthumously published poems, one auto-biographical short story, and an unfinished metaphysical treatise. When Valéry met her in 1920, she broke through the devoted somnolence of his marriage and the intellectual defenses he had erected against emotion. For the first time it was real life that held the promise of the true union of “Self with Self.”

  Their affair inspired some of the most beautiful passages of the first fragment, including the eight lines he considered the most perfect of all he had written:

  Ô douceur de survivre à la force du jour,

  Quand elle se retire enfin rose d’amour,

  Encore un peu brûlante …

  O joy to have survived the force of day

  When it withdraws, wearing the crimson flush

  Of having loved, still burning …

  The second and third fragments, with their more explicit drama of union and disillusionment, were written in the course of their tumultuous affair. The promise proved false, and with it died a dream of Valéry’s, long denied, of finding his perfect “other”; the poem remained fragmentary and was published as it stood. “I cannot write poems any longer,” he noted in 1924, “after five years in which I wrote ‘a lot.’ My poems are made of words. I crossed a zone of words just as the Earth crosses the swarm of the Leonids and believes in shooting stars.” (άλϕα, 1924)

  Their successive separations and reunions went on until 1928, exhausting them both. Suffering becomes a predominant theme in the notebooks. A new figure, already present in Valéry’s poems and the notebooks, gradually takes over Narcissus’s importance: the Angel. This affectionate sobriquet, originally given him by the painter Edgar Degas, whose friendship and influence were as important to Valéry as even Mallarmé’s, developed in Valéry’s private language into the sign of strangeness and the infinite distance between the self and others, the estranging quality of his gaze. “Angel = Stra
nge, estrange = stranger…” Now perched on the edge of the fountain where Narcissus had lately been swooning, the Angel becomes the figure of a particular kind of failure. Its greatest expression is of course in the prose poem The Angel, begun in 1921 and which he returned to in the last year of his life as a final word on the illusion of perfect knowledge and the undeniable need for a more real and human Other:

  And he examined himself in the universe of the marvelously pure substance of his mind, where ideas all lived at equal distances from each other and from himself, and in such perfect harmony and so quick in their correspondences that were he to disappear, it seemed that the system, sparkling like a crown, of their simultaneous necessity, might continue to exist alone in its sublime fullness.

  And for an eternity he went on knowing, and never understood.

  Working on a stanza,—I am unsatisfied ten times, twenty times, and returning to it without end I familiarize myself not with my text—but with its possibilities, its harmonics. The initial idea, the words on the page, all matter little. And it is precisely this liberty that is poetry …

  — E, 1917

  One of Valéry’s most frequently cited one-liners was that a poem is never finished, only stopped in time by outside circumstances—such as an editor.

  This is true for The Young Fate, whose hundreds of pages of drafts and endless revisions were for him a metrical refuge from the uncertainties of the First World War. Louÿs and Gallimard literally had to force Valéry to stop working on the manuscript and hand it over for publication.

  This is also true of the poems of Charms. Yes, in the wake of The Young Fate, the ode that soon split into the two poems “Dawn” and “Palm” “came in a single stroke … I found myself in a state of acute virtuosity, after four years of hard alexandrines! These little lines of 7 syllables flowed so easily in two or three weeks that I was nearly … shocked.” Still, the rest of the pieces were patiently and painstakingly worked and reworked, rhyme by rhyme, over five intense years. Considered by many critics as the century’s most perfect poem, “Le Cimetière marin” (“The Cemetery by the Sea”) was reportedly torn out of his hands by the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, where it first appeared, its final form anything but final.