Paul Valéry

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For other people of the same name, see Valery.

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (French IPA: [vale'ʀi]) (October 30, 1871 – July 20, 1945) was a French philosopher, 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.

1 Biography
2 Work
3 Quotations
4 Selected works
5 External links
6 See also

[edit] Biography

Paul Valéry, drawn by himself.

Valéry was born of a Corsican father and Genoese mother 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 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 then, Valéry had first briefly earned his living at the Ministry of War before assuming the relatively flexible post as 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; Valéry (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 to his activities as a member of the Académie française, he was also a member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, and of the 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.

During World War II, 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 throughout these troubled years to publish and to be active in French cultural life, especially as a member of the Académie française.

In 1900, he had married Jeannie Gobillard, a friend of Mallarmé's family, who was also a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. The couple had three children: Claude, Agathe, and François.

Valéry died in Paris in 1945. He is buried in the cemetery of his native Sète – the cemetery celebrated in his famous poem le Cimetière marin.

[edit] Work

Valéry is best known as a poet, but he published fewer than 100 poems, and none of note before 1917, when he published his la jeune Parque at 46 years of age. This obscure masterpiece, composed in 512 exquisite alexandrine lines, had taken him four years to complete, and immediately secured his fame. It is esteemed by many in France as the greatest French poem of the 20th century. 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 the Latin carmina, meaning "songs"; the collection includes le Cimetière marin), further confirmed his reputation as a major French poet.

Valéry's technique is quite orthodox, in its essentials. His verse rhymes and scans in the traditional ways, and has much in common with the work of Mallarmé. 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 intellectual diary, called the Cahiers (Notebooks). Early every morning of his adult life, he contributed something to the Cahiers, prompting 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 subjects of his Cahiers entries often were, 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 about 1980 have they begun to receive the scholarly scrutiny they deserve.

[edit] Quotations

On a toujours cherché des explications quand c’était des représentations qu’on pouvait seulement essayé d’inventer, Paul Valéry

"We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent"

Ma main se sent touchée aussi bien qu’elle touche ; réel veut dire cela, et rien de plus, Paul Valéry

"My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more"

"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."
"The future is not what it used to be."

[edit] Selected works

Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (1895)
La soirée avec monsieur Teste (1896)
La jeune parque (1917)
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.