The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

  It is especially true of the Album of Early Verse, which began its existence in 1912 when Gide placed a typescript of poems from Valéry’s youth on their author’s desk, insisting he allow them to be published. Yielding to the temptation of touching up a word here, a line there, Valéry got carried away by his revisions, and after twenty years in which he had written only three or four poems, found himself practicing verse again. (The Young Fate, moreover, began with the intention of writing a forty-line “farewell to verse” to be appended to this volume of youthful poems.) More than simple touch-ups, these revisions became a veritable rewriting of the past, and a reappropriation of the idols those poems represented.

  Valéry’s endless process of revision, however, doesn’t just represent the obsessiveness of his search for the perfect word, the resonant rhyme, the musical phrase. The Album contains two versions of the sonnet “Fantasy,” a nod to the importance of variation in his conception of poetry. “A poem with variants is a scandal for ordinary common opinion. For me, it’s a merit. The intelligence is defined by the number of variants.” Liberty and possibility in the given constraints of form and rhythm; the slow maturation of an intuited rhythm or a “found” verse, as so many of his poems were born; listening patiently to the possibilities, trying them out; attention, precision, patience, literature as exercise: these are the aspects of Valéry’s supposedly “calculated” and “analytic” approach to verse, his values in an era that already valued easy gratification in literature as in all else. “There are only 2 things that really matter, that ring true—one that I call Analysis and which has ‘purity’ as its object; the other that I call Music and which composes that ‘purity.’”

  Composition, Valéry wrote in an essay on the painter Camille Corot, is “reasoned arbitrariness.” Beginning with the arbitrary, his goal was to find, through patient work, the finished poem, which he defined in 1900 as “the highest degree of necessity that human nature can obtain from the possession of its arbitrariness, as a response to variety itself, and indeterminacy of all the possibility that is inside us.” That possibility, with its accompanying liberty, was the fruit of mastery of the intellect. Monsieur Teste had been his “incarnation of possibility.” “The goal not being to create a particular oeuvre,” he noted in 1935, “but to create within oneself the person who would create, who could create—that oeuvre. So one must construct from self, in the self, the self that will be the instrument for creating a particular oeuvre.” The influence of those couple of lines from Poe was long indeed.

  Goal of a life. Arriving—even late—at clearly understanding the background of thought and incomparable sensibility against which one has lived …

  — UNTITLED NOTEBOOK, 1937

  THE FORM OF A LIFE

  “I have a sort of habit,” Valéry wrote in the preface to his translations of Virgil’s Bucolics from 1940–42, “of abandoning myself to those agents of destiny that are called Others. There is a will in me concerning only two or three absolute and profoundly fixed points. For the rest, I am easy to the point of weakness…” This statement implicitly describes a financial reality of his life after 1922: nearly all of his essays and lectures, all the poetic dialogues, even Alphabet, were written on commission. At the same time, he found an intellectual freedom in the constraints imposed by assignments, just as he had found poetic freedom in the constraints of formal meter.

  One of those absolute and profoundly fixed points was his late masterpiece, the pair of dramatic works of Mon Faust (My Faust). After Narcissus, Leonardo, Robinson (Crusoe), and the Angel, Faust is his final character, a figure of extreme self-consciousness and a “representation of the Western mind.” Faust is confronted with the figure of youth and life in his assistant Luste, the Crystal Damsel—a figuration of Valéry’s last elusive love, the young Jeanne Loviton. Their relationship, with its differences of age and degrees of fidelity, consumed his last years. It led him to complete The Angel, left unfinished since the time of Catherine Pozzi. It also led him to writing verse again.

  From 1938 to 1945, he wrote for Loviton the more than 150 deeply personal poems of Corona and Coronilla, intended for “a private edition of two copies.” Two or three made their way into the section “Diverse Pieces from Every Period” that was appended to later editions of Poésies. The rest were only published in 2009 after decades of being intentionally overlooked both by scholars and by Valéry’s heirs. They are far from great poetry, but are interesting for many reasons, not least for containing some of the few examples of true free verse that Valéry attempted. And the concession of an equal place for love in art is a significant final development in Valéry’s intellectual adventure. “It is strange,” he noted in 1939, “that the only poems I can write now are dedicated to Eros— —Setting sun…”

  A failed book might be an interior masterpiece.

  —E 10, 1910

  “The notebooks are my real oeuvre,” Valéry wrote to his friend Paul Souday. If so, they were an impossible one, whose form was their very formlessness. They are the very opposite of the concrete oeuvre of his collected Poésies, so carefully composed, almost a closed system. Selections of excerpts, from Tel Quel and Mélanges to modern editions including this one, can offer only a distorted view.

  It’s hard not to think of the man, friend and father figure, whose influence was so decisive for Valéry, even though he refused to be seen as that man’s disciple: Mallarmé. There is a world of distance between the mature Valéry’s idea of literature as exercise, his essential skepticism, and Mallarmé’s literary absolute. For the older poet, life itself was meant to result in a book, while for Valéry writing a book was valuable only as far as it contributed to the development of one’s inner life. But even after his youthful fervor for Mallarmé’s absolute had passed, Valéry continued to revere his friend as a model of uncompromising artistic probity and single-minded application to an ideal. Mallarmé’s life was predicated on nothing less than the search for the Grand Œuvre, the Great Work. “What is it? It’s hard to say: quite simply a book, in many volumes, a book that is a book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of the inspirations of chance, no matter how marvelous … I would go further, I would say: the Book, deeply persuaded there is only one.” (Mallarmé in a letter to Paul Verlaine, 1885)

  Mallarmé’s idea of the oeuvre was situated at the far limit of the feasible, and at times frankly crossed over into the realm of abstract forms and the artist’s phantasmagoria. After years of sterility and introspection, it seems he was approaching that limit with his last cryptic poems and the “magnificent impasse that is A Throw of the Dice,” as the philosopher E. M. Cioran calls Mallarmé’s final text, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, which had such long-lasting repercussions on modern poetry. Valéry, not incidentally, was the first person to read—and hear read aloud—the finished drafts with their exploded syntax and radically unconventional typographical disposition.

  Cioran makes a revealing remark in his tough-love essay “Valéry Before His Idols”: “The Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci proves that Valéry, from the beginning, was perfect, I mean perfectly mature, as a writer…” Valéry himself recognizes that Teste and Leonardo, written in the first few years of the notebooks, contain all the conclusions that might have been drawn from their elaboration. “In sum I do nothing but redraw what I thought with my first intentions,” he notes in 1939. “And these notebooks are the successive tracings.” The insights of the notebooks could be derived from first principles, but then they had to be lived.

  I came to believe that Monsieur Teste had managed to discover the laws of the mind that we are ignorant of. Surely he must have consecrated years to that search: just as surely, more years, many more years had been devoted to ripening his inventions and to making instincts out of them. Finding is nothing. The hard part is adding oneself to what one has found. (An Evening with Monsieur Teste)

  The ripening of his inventions did not yield the “System” Valé
ry dreamed of developing at the beginning. Nor did it make him wiser, or happier, or safer from the hazards of love or fortune. He never became Monsieur Teste.

  Mallarmé’s oeuvre was unrealizable; its philosophical and linguistic stakes were simply too high. “So the Grand Œuvre,” Valéry wrote in 1933, “is for me the knowledge of the work itself—of the transmutation—and individual works are its local applications, particular problems.” Yet Valéry’s Grand Œuvre, too, was in a sense unrealizable. In the end, he made that very impossibility into an aspect of the work itself, and its formlessness into form, as the extreme limit of the Western mind’s quest for self-consciousness and formal perfection. Doing so, he went one step further than Mallarmé, from the impossible oeuvre to the negative one. The haunting realization of this poetic via negativa is found in the pages of a notebook from 1942, in a famous passage known as “Station on the Terrace”:

  [ … ] And I saw, above all, the value and the beauty, the great excellence, of everything I have not done.

  Here is your oeuvre—said a voice

  And I beheld everything I had not done.

  And I saw more clearly than ever that I was not the one who has done what I have done—rather, I was he who has not done what I have not done—What I have not done was therefore perfectly beautiful, in perfect keeping with the impossibility of being done [ … ]

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Valéry’s writings have been translated, and more important, have been read, many times by many different poets. Who can imagine more different readers than a young André Breton, who found in Monsieur Teste his “great enigma” and in “Anne” and “The Spinner” his first lyric models, and Rainer Maria Rilke, who drew from Charms the inspiration he needed to complete the Duino Elegies after a decade of sterility? Between James Joyce’s special appreciation for The Young Fate and Walter Benjamin’s for Le Dialogue de l’arbre (Dialogue of the Tree), which he called “the only text I know, written in the form of a Platonic dialogue, which except for the originals has meaning and beauty…”? Rilke devoted years to translating poems from Charms; Paul Celan produced a magnificent translation of The Young Fate, encouraged by Rilke’s wager that it couldn’t be done. Nor were English and American poets deaf to Valéry’s music. T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters are often mentioned, but echoes and citations can be heard from Wallace Stevens’s “Palm at the End of the Mind” to Richard Wilbur’s “punctual rape of every blessed day,” from Frank O’Hara’s serpents and his wind that “rises / to embrace its darling poet” to Robert Lowell’s New England transposition of “A Cemetery by the Sea”:

  … A country graveyard, here

  and there a rock, and here and there a pine,

  throbs on the essence of the gasoline.

  Some mote, some eye-flaw …

  Auden, too: “I had known Valéry’s poem ‘Ebauche d’un serpent’ for over twenty-five years, re-read it often with increasing admiration and, as I thought, comprehension, only to discover the other day … that I had missed the whole point, namely, that the poem is burlesque…” The epigraph to Cormac McCarthy’s violent masterpiece Blood Meridian is taken from Valéry’s early essay “The Yalou.” This translation can’t possibly hope to encompass, to evoke, such fundamentally different readings. Still, it has to keep them in mind, for while Paul Valéry may be a less visible figure today, his influence was felt almost everywhere in twentieth-century literature. (And also philosophy; witness his importance for Adorno, Derrida, Barthes …)

  One of Valéry’s first and best commentators was the French philosopher Alain, who published facing-page commentaries of The Young Fate and Charms. Alain writes of the former: “What I find remarkable about this springtime is that it isn’t imitated from any literary genre; it is born directly from the poem’s movement and its rhymes (entrailles, ‘gut’; écailles, ‘scales’); it climbs from the source to the tree like sap itself…” This is the joy of Valéry’s poetry, so consciously, mindfully crafted, and yet so attuned to the arbitrary force and the music of language. The result is a dense texture of assonance, internal rhyme, double meanings and shifting images, “resemblances” that “flash from word to word” many lines distant. The words of one poem are always echoing, or answering, or questioning, those of another. Nor is the sense of etymological density an illusion: Valéry is on record as taking his etymological dictionary wherever he went.

  The challenge of translating the poems in verse has been capturing their sense of necessary arbitrariness and arbitrary necessity. My choice of using regular English meter has as much to do with experiencing a similar set of formal constraints, of exercise, as characterized Valéry’s work, as with re-creating a semblance of their complex rhythms. Paul Schmidt wrote of translating Rimbaud, “I was out to master his poetry, to grasp his thought … I ran after him. I sought out streets and houses he had lived in. I drank and drugged myself in taverns and in alleys he had known. My derangements went beyond his, and on and on…” Paul Valéry’s drugs were cigarettes and strong coffee; the closest I came to identifying with the great poet was waking early to confront a blank piece of paper and the pre-dawn sky, in search of a few hours of intellectual freedom before the demands of the day, pushing around words, trying out rhythms in an act of eternal revision. But Valéry turned translator himself in his last years, and he puts the feeling of working within another’s words far better than I can:

  I had, before my Virgil, the feeling (which I know so well) of the poet at work; and distractedly, a little here, a little there, I began discussing with myself this illustrious work set in its ancient glory as freely as I would have done with an unfinished poem on my table. At times I discovered, while playing with my translation, the desire to change some aspect of the venerable text. This was a state of naive and unconscious confusion of the imaginary inner life of a writer from the century of Augustus with my own. It lasted a second or two of real time, and amused me. Why not, I said to myself, returning from that brief absence. Why not? At the end of the day the problems are always the same—that is, the same attitudes: the intimate ear straining to hear the possibilities, what will be whispered “by itself,” and, once whispered, become desire; the same suspense and the same verbal precipitation; the same orientation of the implicit, interwoven vocabulary, as if all the words in one’s memory were awaiting the moment to try their chances in the voice … (“Variations on the Bucolics of Virgil,” 1942)

  A few caveats about the prose from the notebooks. There are passages divided into lines resembling verse, but there is nothing of free verse about them. French vers libre has a characteristic rhythm of its own—as with Valéry’s contemporary Paul Claudel, for instance, or his friend Francis Viélé-Griffin, who was a translator of Whitman—that is absent from these texts. They, too, are prose, but lineated prose that takes advantage of the line for semantic rather than rhythmic reasons. Valéry attempted true free verse only a few times in his life, once in a youthful pastiche contained in a letter to Pierre Louÿs, and in a few of the private, sentimental poems of Corona and Coronilla from the last years of his life.

  Finally, while this translation offers some poetical gems from the notebooks, such passages represent only a small part of their many pages. The rest is analytic, autobiographical, contemplative, critical, and so much else, a gold mine of insight into Valéry’s life and poetic process. The excerpts that punctuate the introduction (as a sort of literary incidental music, if you will), and which were chosen to illustrate the poet’s own view of his life and work, offer just a glimpse of this fascinating material.

  * * *

  There is a rich critical bibliography on Paul Valéry in French. Two works were indispensable to my understanding of the poet: the excellent recent biography by Benoît Peeters, Valéry, Tenter de vivre (Flammarion, 2014), and Michel Jarrety’s comprehensive scholarly biography Paul Valéry (Fayard, 2008). Furthermore, I am grateful to both these scholars for taking the time to share their insight into Valéry’s work, and to P
rofessor Jarrety in particular for graciously allowing me to use his edition of the Poésie perdue (Gallimard, 2000) as the starting point for my selection. Responsibility for any omissions or errors of judgment is of course my own.

  There exist a number of translations of Valéry’s works in English, and I have learned from all of them. The reader who wishes to go further will find no dearth of good material. The twelve-volume Bollingen Collected Works of Paul Valéry (ed. Jackson Mathews, Princeton University Press, 1957–1975) devotes separate volumes to the Dialogues, the Plays, and Monsieur Teste, and various thematic selections of essays. David Paul’s translation of the Poems in that series includes many of the occasional pieces and early and late poems which I have not translated here. More recently, a group of English scholars has published a landmark five-volume translation of selections from the Notebooks (ed. Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, and Robert Pickering, Peter Lang, 2000–2010), including Stephen Romer’s sensitive renderings of the PPA, which are an object lesson in justesse.

  My thanks are due to Lisa Bevevino and my sister Miriam Rudavsky-Brody for rereading many of these translations, and to Nick Romeo for his helpful comments on the introduction. I am greatly indebted to Dick Davis and Andrew Stuart for their encouragement, and to Jonathan Galassi for his stimulating critique and unflagging support through every stage of this project.