Valéry: La Poésie Engagée

It is difficult now to write of Valéry. It is not because so much of his work cannot be procured and one has to depend for his latest writings on fragments scattered in English journals. That does not matter: his later writing would tell us little or nothing that cannot wait; there was, as Gide has said—and as Valéry’s own words about himself declare—a massive consistency, an unshakeableness in him that prevents our being curious about any last retouching. Nor is it because of his actual death. To his friends he was a loyal and extraordinary figure; his acquaintances report a wit and a courage—both intellectual and moral—which make us realize that this man was not only the finest writer of his time but also a person whose going is a human loss. We, who knew him only by his writing, knew all this somehow from his work. We mourn his death. But it is not that which makes it difficult now to write of Valéry.

That difficulty lies partly in our times and partly in one’s self. The difficulty of assessment is temporal. Appreciation is related to the moment. That does not mean that one’s appreciation is subject to stock-market fluctuations, nor that one is concerned with the empty rubrics of “greatness,” “French classicism” and the like. Enough of that has been poured out and it is all true with the vapid truth that characterizes most funeral orations, the vapidity that shows the honest poverty of the speaker. But appreciation, evaluation, is subject to time and place. It is no vulgar question of “more or less” that bothers us. Rather, at different times we would put different answers to the questions, “of what kind, how, why?”

In 1939 perhaps the matter would have been simple. One could have spoken of the inheritor of the symbolist tradition, the poet whose work revealed an intricacy of meaning that made others seem crude and at the same time a tightness of control that made others seem weak and rambling. One could have spoken of the austere thinker, the analyst, who never betrayed his mathematical and scientific training by indulgence in the fanciful or the unreflected, who never transgressed against his innate scepticism by devotion to a system or a scheme. Perhaps in 1939 one would have been more disposed to dispute Gide’s belief that Valéry’s prose had more value than the poetry. One would point out that Valéry’s poetry did what that of practically no other contemporary can do. Its suggestions were so multifarious that they invited the reader to fulfill his own function as interpreter and yet its subtlety was so compact that it kept the reader from extravagant divagation. It was poetry that carried out one of Valéry’s own conceptions of poetry: “Poetry is the effort to represent, or to restore, by the means of articulate language, those things or that thing which cries, tears, caresses, kisses, sighs, etc., try obscurely to express, and which objects, insofar as they have the appearance of life or of supposed design, seem to want to express.” And the prose might then have seemed sometimes flat. M. Teste was a remarkable example of modern myth-making. But he might have seemed barren, the works on Leonardo even dry. La Conquête Méthodique, La Crise de L’ Esprit, Regards sur le Monde Actuel—they were the warnings of an intelligent man who proposed no answers.

But in 1946? The poetry is no less beautiful, but is it a beauty that we want today? We recall how in speaking of his own poetry he used the words “exercises,” “calcul,” and in speaking of poetry in general he used the terms “fête,” “jeu.” “La fête finie, rien ne doit rester.” Is there a lack of seriousness here that hardly consorts with our sense of crisis? And then there is the anecdote told in the November issue of Horizon by someone who had had an interview with him a few months before his death.

“Here he related with feline savagery an incident at one of his last lectures at the Collège de France. A young man had come up to him and said that he had once greatly admired Le Cimetière Marin, but that now since he realized that it was not “la littérature engagée’ he could not enjoy it any more. ‘La littérature engagée‘— the phrase seemed to rattle from the back of his palate—’What rubbish! There were always moments in the history of civilization when literature seemed to have responsibilities—perhaps this was one of them—but they soon blew over,’ and as he spoke one felt that all the authority of the 19th Century was behind the remark.”

What are we to think? Is this Olympian mockery? Is “all the authority of the 19th Century” in the person of a disciple of Mallarmé, merely saying over and over again that art is for the sake of art? There is another voice in the land today. Jean-Paul Sartre has written in the issue of Horizon for last May:

“For us, the writer is neither a Vestal nor an Ariel: he is ‘in it up to the neck’ whatever he writes, branded, committed, even in the most distant withdrawal. … I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repressions which followed the Commune, because they wrote not a single line to prevent them. … We will not make ourselves absolute by reflecting in our works desiccated principles which are sufficiently empty and negative to pass from one century to another, but by fighting passionately in our time, by loving it passionately, and by consenting to perish entirely with it.”

In his essay on dictatorship Valéry has said: “I know almost nothing of practical politics where I presume that one finds everything which I flee from. Nothing could be so impure, that is to say, so mixed up with things the confusion of which I dislike, such as bestiality and metaphysics, force and law, faith and personal interests, the positive and the theatrical, instincts and ideas.”

The contrast would seem to be clear between the proponents of “responsible” and “irresponsible” literature. And most people today would have little doubt whom they would favor. Yet doubts come into mind whether they would be right.

In the first place Valéry was not personally irresponsible. It was he who, in his radio talk the night of September 3, 1939, made the simplest and most convincing statement of why France had to fight. His homage to Bergson, prounced before the Academy during the occupation, was intellectual defiance for which he was deprived of his position as director of the Mediterranean University Center at Nice and of his chair of poetry at the Collège de France. And there was another episode connected with the Academy and Pétain which I wish Gide had not omitted from his tribute, which demonstrates his utter integrity.

Nor was Valéry’s conception of the functions of the poet as remote from actuality as his mocking and sophisticated words might indicate. In 1927 he was speaking of Verhaeren and said: “He became by the war invested with the supreme function which a poet can exercise. … A people overcome by misfortune discovers in the poet a necessary man, the man whose work will be for it the symbol of its existence and the messenger of its hopes.” And, as Professor Gustave Cohen has recently reminded us, he offered to his country as testimony of greatness and service, at the moment of Verdun, La Jeune Parque.

La Jeune Parque, “the most obscure poem in the French language,” and Verdun! What relationship can be discovered between these two phenomena? I confess that the question is baffling and that the only answer I have is tentative, partial, and apparently ridiculous. Yet the problem is of drastic importance. How are we, sane men and not schizophrenes, going to put together in one piece the activities of reading, let us say, Mallarmé, or writing poetry like Valéry’s, and those of active participation in or active response to the shattering events of our times? I am convinced that Valéry had more completely an answer than any other poet of our times, but I can offer only the beginning of an exposition of that answer.

It lies perhaps in his conception of language. One quotes rightly over and over again:

Honneur des hommes, saint Langage,
Discours prophetique et paré,
Belles chaines en qui s’engage
Le Dieu dans la chair égaré.