The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

  It is a uniform variable, continuous …

  I feel myself in my shadow, which is the act of waiting, and I tell myself this, which says nothing …

  Between the feeling of my weight, of my supports, there must be my body.

  Between the feeling of my body and the objects illuminated before my eyes, this dazzling white paper—this is spoken voicelessly … this, which says nothing.

  It is Possibility—as palpable as the emptiness of a blank page, as the space between words spoken very slowly.

  It is not an abstraction.

  Whatever takes place on this emptiness will be as if drawn by chance.

  Consciousness is the slave of everything. But it is also my ability to not be what I am. Or rather, to never be that which it tries to call What I am—or ME.

  Untitled notebook [XXIX, 197], 1944

  Reaching the point of wisdom—that is, of limpid observation and untroubled gaze—where death would mean as little to us as it does for the nature of life, which dissipates beings as it creates them, torments and tortures them as it nurtures them, makes them sensitive as it makes them heavy and mobile, and in sum is ignorant of each one as each is ignorant of its immense production and perceives neither its foresight nor its contradictory ways, nor the meaning of its development and this mixture of genius, blindness, variety, and mechanical monotony which it presents to us, we who judge it after ourselves.

  “No Jokes” [XXIX, 276], 1944

  _____________

  Difficilis descensus Averno: “It is difficult to descend to Avernus,” an inversion of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid (VI, 128): facilis descensus Averno, or “it is easy to descend to Avernus.” The Cumaean Sybil had her oracle by Lake Avernus, where Aeneas descended to the underworld.

  Matutina: Morning prayer, as in the Latin office Laudes Matutinam or Matutinae.

  Quis me sustenit?—Quis me audiet: “Who will sustain me?—Who will hear me?”

  B.: For Beatrice, a name for Catherine Pozzi in the notebooks.

  δU: i.e., an infinitesimal part of the Universe (notation from calculus).

  Ad Ed: for Edmée de la Rochefoucauld, friend of Valéry and interpreter of his works.

  Avenio: ancient name for Avignon.

  Elegy: written at the time of Valéry’s fervent but ultimately platonic relationship with the sculptress Renée Vautier, the inspiration for his dialogue L’Idée fixe.

  Grasse: town on the French Riviera, near Cannes and Nice. In 1933, Valéry was appointed president of the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice, a post he held until 1941, when his funeral elegy for the Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson caused him to be stripped of all public positions.

  May 15 40 Malmaison: Valéry was recovering from bronchitis in Rueil-Malmaison, a western suburb of Paris. Germany had invaded the Netherlands on May 10, and France responded by sending troops; Valéry’s two sons and his son-in-law were serving in the French army. The battle ended on the fourteenth, and the Netherlands surrendered the following morning.

  “Hérodiade,” “Afternoon of a Faun,” “On Gautier’s Tomb”: all poems by Mallarmé.

  L’Ange

  Une manière d’ange était assis sur le bord d’une fontaine. Il s’y mirait, et se voyait Homme, et en larmes, et il s’étonnait à l’extrême de s’apparaître dans l’onde nue cette proie d’une tristesse infinie.

  (Ou si l’on veut, il y avait une Tristesse en forme d’Homme qui ne se trouvait pas sa cause dans le ciel clair.)

  La figure qui était sienne, la douleur qui s’y peignait, lui semblaient tout étrangères. Une apparence si misérable intéressait, exerçait, interrogeait en vain sa substance spirituelle merveilleusement pure.

  — « Ô mon Mal, disait-il, que m’êtes-vous? »

  Il essayait de se sourire : il se pleurait. Cette infidélité de son visage confondait son intelligence parfaite ; et cet air si particulier qu’il observait, une affection si accidentelle de ses traits, leur expression tellement inégale à l’universalité de sa connaissance limpide, en blessaient mystérieusement l’unité.

  — « Je n’ai pas sujet de pleurer, disait-il, et même, je ne puis en avoir. »

  Le Mouvement de sa Raison dans sa lumière d’éternelle attente trouvait une question inconnue suspendre son opération infaillible, car ce qui cause la douleur dans nos natures inexactes ne fait naître qu’une question chez les essences absolues ; — cependant que, pour nous, toute question est ou sera douleur.

  — « Qui donc est celui-ci qui s’aime tant qu’il se tourmente? disaitil. Je comprends toute chose ; et pourtant, je vois bien que je souffre. Ce visage est bien mon visage ; ces pleurs, mes pleurs … Et pourtant, ne suis-je pas cette puissance de transparence de qui ce visage et ces pleurs, et leur cause, et ce qui dissiperait cette cause, ne sont que d’imperceptibles grains de durée? »

  Mais ces pensées avaient beau se produire et propager dans toute la plénitude de la sphère de la pensée, les similitudes se répondre, les contrastes se déclarer et se résoudre, et le miracle de la clarté incessamment s’accomplir, et toutes les Idées étinceler à la lueur de chacune d’entre elles, comme les joyaux qu’elles sont de la couronne de la connaissance unitive, rien toutefois qui fût de l’espèce d’un mal ne paraissait à son regard sans défaut, rien par quoi s’expliquât ce visage de détresse et ces larmes qu’il lui voyait à travers les larmes.

  — « Ce que je suis de pur, disait-il, Intelligence qui consume sans effort toute chose créée, sans qu’aucune en retour ne l’affecte ni ne l’altère, ne peut point se reconnaître dans ce visage porteur de pleurs, dans ces yeux dont la lumière qui les compose est comme attendrie par l’humide imminence de leurs larmes. »

  — « Et comment se peut-il que pâtisse à ce point ce bel éploré qui est à moi, et qui est de moi, puisqu’enfin je vois tout ce qu’il est, car je suis connaissance de toute chose, et que l’on ne peut souffrir que pour en ignorer quelqu’une?

  « Ô mon étonnement, disait-il, Tête charmante et triste, il y a donc autre chose que la lumière? »

  Et il s’interrogeait dans l’univers de sa substance spirituelle merveilleusement pure, où toutes les idées vivaient également distantes entre elles et de lui-même, et dans une telle perfection de leur harmonie et promptitude de leurs correspondances, qu’on eût dit qu’il eût pu s’évanouir, et le système, étincelant comme un diadème, de leur nécessité simultanée substituer par soi seul dans sa sublime plénitude.

  Et pendant une éternité, il ne cessa de connaître et de ne pas comprendre.

  novembre 1921–mai 1945

  The Angel

  (1945)

  A sort of angel was sitting beside a fountain. He gazed at himself in the water and saw a Man, in tears, and was greatly astonished to appear in the naked wave as this prey to an infinite sadness.

  (Or if you prefer, there was a Sadness in the form of a man who could not find his cause in the clear sky.)

  The face, which was his own, and the pain depicted there, both seemed completely strange. Such a piteous appearance provoked, and exercised, and questioned in vain, the marvelously pure substance of his mind.

  “O my Pain,” he said, “What are you to me?”

  He tried to smile at himself: he cried. The unfaithfulness of his face confounded his perfect intelligence; and he saw there an air so particular, an affectation of his features so accidental, their expression so inadequate to the universality of his limpid knowledge, that they mysteriously wounded its unity.

  “I have no reason for crying,” he said, “and in fact I am incapable of having one.”

  The Movement of his Reason in its light of eternal waiting found that an unknown question had suspended its infallible operation; for what causes pain in our own approximate natures only causes, in such absolute essences, a question to be born;—while for us every question is, or will be, pain.

  “So who is this being,” he said, “who loves himself to the point of torment? I understand all things; and yet I
clearly see that I suffer. This face is indeed my face; these tears are my tears … Yet am I not that force of clarity of which this face and these tears, their cause and whatever might dissipate their cause, are merely imperceptible grains of time?”

  But for all that these thoughts occurred and propagated through the sphere of thought in all its fullness, for all that resemblances shone out and contradictions declared themselves and were resolved and the miracle of clarity was endlessly achieved, for all that the multitude of Ideas sparkled with the light of each one like the jewels they are in the crown of unifying knowledge, still nothing that might resemble a pain revealed itself to his faultless gaze, nothing which could explain that anguished face and those tears he saw through his tears.

  “The pure being that I am,” he said, “Intelligence that effortlessly absorbs all creation without being affected or altered by anything in return, will never recognize itself in this face brimming with sadness, in these eyes whose light glows tenderly as if with the moist imminence of tears.”

  “And how can this handsome weeper suffer so, he who is mine, and part of me, when my gaze encompasses his entire being, for I am knowledge of all things, and the only possible sorrow is from not knowing something?

  “O my astonishment,” he said, “sad and charming Head, is there therefore something other than light?”

  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.

  November 1921–May 1945

  REWRITING THE PAST

  A Note on Album of Early Verse

  In a way, putting Album of Early Verse, Poems 1890–1900 at the beginning of Valéry’s work is misleading, and not only because of its late publication date. Even the volume’s subtitle only tells a half-truth. The poems here often bear little resemblance to their original versions; some have been completely refigured, and their sensitivity and lyricism belong as much to the poet’s maturity as to his youth.

  Yet youth, for all their revisions, is what they represent. Most of them were written during the two and a half feverish years when Valéry took an active part in Paris literary life through the intermediary of his friends Pierre Louÿs and André Gide, and many were first published in Louÿs’s limited-edition literary review La Conque or the avant-garde revue L’Hermitage. They show the deep influence of the Symbolist and Decadent movements, and the revisions of 1916–1920 were a chance for Valéry to call into question, and at times undermine, his models.

  The collection also includes a number of poems written between the crisis of 1892 and the ostensible end-date of 1900: “A Clear Flame …,” “Valvins,” “Summer,” and “Anne.” Moreover, the great “Evening Profusion,” whose opening sonnet also dates from the 1890s, was largely composed at the same time as the poems of Charms, as was the entirety of the volume’s last poem, “Semiramis’s Aria.”

  Two anthologies, published in 1900 and 1906, respectively, played an important role in keeping alive the reputation of Valéry’s younger writings. A. van Bever and P. Léauteaud’s Poètes d’aujourd’hui (Poets of Today, 1900) included seven poems: “Helen,” “Narcissus Speaks,” “Bathing,” “The Spinner,” “Episode” (under the title “Fragment”), “Summer,” and “Valvins,” while G. Walch’s Anthologie de poètes français (Anthology of French Poets, 1906) contained “The Spinner,” “Narcissus Speaks,” and “The Poem Lover.”

  Album of Early Verse was first published in 1920 by A. Monnier et Cie, which is to say Adrienne Monnier, Valéry’s friend and supporter and an important Modernist publisher and bookseller. The poems “Orpheus,” “Fantasy (Variant)” (later “Same Fantasy”), “Caesar,” and “Evening Profusion” were added in the 1926 edition (Stols, Maastricht); in 1927 the volume was taken over by Valéry’s main publisher, the N.R.F. of Gallimard. “The Vain Dancers” was added in 1931.

  By following the Pléiade text of Valéry’s poems, I knowingly set aside the edition of 1942, the last published under Valéry’s supervision; the differences are slight and generally noticeable only in the French, with two exceptions. The 1942 version of “The Vain Dancers” is so completely rewritten that it constitutes a new (and to my ear, less successful) poem. The 1942 version of “Summer” contains six new stanzas, and I have included a full translation in the following notes, since this is the version that appears in modern paperback editions in France.

  These notes rely heavily on Jean Hytier’s notes to the Pléiade edition of Valéry’s works (Gallimard, 1959), Michel Jarrety’s biography Paul Valéry (Fayard, 2008), and two important studies in English, Susan Nash’s Paul Valéry’s Album des Vers Anciens: A Past Transfigured (Princeton University Press, 1983), and James Lawler’s The Poet as Analyst: Essays on Paul Valéry (University of California Press, 1974). Letters to Louÿs and Gide are excerpted from the volume Correspondances à trois voix, edited by Peter Fawcett and Pascal Mercier (Gallimard, 2004).

  THE SPINNER / LA FILEUSE

  First published in the seventh issue of La Conque (September 1891), and significantly revised for the 1900 Anthologie and again for the Album. This poem is a careful rereading of the Symbolist poet Henri de Régnier’s long poem “Prélude,” in which Hercules addresses his muse, Omphale, as well as Régnier’s source, Victor Hugo’s “Le Rouet d’Omphal” (“Omphale’s Spinning-Wheel”). Another source of inspiration was Gustave Courbet’s painting The Sleeping Spinner, which hangs in the Montpellier Museum of Art.

  HELEN / HÉLÈNE

  First version published as “Hélène, la reine triste” (“Helen, the Sad Queen”), signed M. Doris, in Chimera, August 1891, and republished in the eighth La Conque, October of the same year. It responds to a poem of the same title by the Parnassian Leconte de Lisle, and another by Henri de Régnier.

  ORPHEUS / ORPHÉE

  This poem was first published, disguised as prose, in the last paragraphs of Valéry’s article “A Paradox on the Architect” in L’Hermitage. Louÿs didn’t notice the hidden form of the poem; Gide did. The sonnet was added to the Album only in 1926, and while some scholars hold that it was an important influence on Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, in view of its late publication Judith Ryan suggests in Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge, 2004) that Rilke was in fact influenced by the original article.

  BIRTH OF VENUS / NAISSANCE DE VÉNUS

  Published as “Celle qui sort de l’onde” (“She Who Emerges from the Waves”) in a student magazine, the Bulletin de l’Association générale des étudiants de Montpellier, December 1, 1890. Reprinted in L’Hermitage in June 1891, and in Le Geste in September 1897.

  FANTASY, SAME FANTASY / FÉERIE, MÊME FÉERIE

  A decidedly Symbolist first version was published in the December 1890 issue of L’Hermitage, titled “Blanc” (“White”). An intermediate revision was published in January 1914 in the magazine Les Fêtes, and the final versions in the 1920 and 1926 editions of the Album. Valéry in a letter to his friend Albert Dugrip, to whom “Blanc” was dedicated: “I feel the Parnassian that once was Me dissolving and evaporating. Maybe I need to write things that are vaporous, fine and light like violet wisps of smoke and that make one dream of everything…”

  BATHING / BAIGNÉE

  The only poem of the Album composed during the months of crisis that began in winter 1892. First published in the August 1892 issue of Le Syrinx, and barely revised for the Album. Contains a number of references to Mallarmé’s poems, notably the “Canticle of St. John” and “Hérodiade.”

  THE SLEEPING WOOD / AU BOIS DORMANT

  First published as “La Belle au bois dormant” (“Sleeping Beauty”), along with a Provençal translation by the young felibre Jos
eph Loubet alias Fortunet de Bello-Visto, in La Cigale d’or, June 1891; then in La Conque, November 1891. In a letter dated June 29, 1891, Gide writes, “I also read [to Régnier] the sonnet ‘Sleeping Beauty’ which, how ridiculous of me, I believed you had translated from the Provençal; so that both of us, going into raptures over it, were astonished that this Mr. de Bello-Visto was not better known. Only this morning, rereading it again, for love of it, did I realize my earlier stupidity. I don’t regret it, since it showed I was in no way biased—when I admired your sonnets. I loved it without knowing it was yours, that is to say, sincerely.”

  The circumstances of its composition are evocative. On March 2, 1891, Valéry writes to Louÿs, “As for me, the past few days I lowered myself to writing a sonnet for a gracious person who asked too many times for one. Here it is. Laugh at this piece of sugar candy, and don’t show it to anyone.” Nothing is known about this “gracious person,” a certain Jeanne Gérard, except what can be surmised from a sort of prose poem appended to another letter to Louÿs a week later:

  She was still weary and troubled, my slender beggar of verse, a long Berenice, in black yesterday, with her forehead graced by those pale blue flowers of obscure fatigues from which virgins wither without a cause, and her solitary eyes were more solitary than ever, softened by the shyness of her smile.

  In your garden, Berenice, I gather yesterday a future memory, and the divine thought opens to me all the labyrinths of this garden and its sweet hiding places.

  Never did such a languid evening, among those with whom we always meet, ever share your dream so fully with my own.