Paul Valery
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Paul Valery (France, 1871), who spent the majority of his childhood in Montpellier, did not become a full-time writer until his late 40s.
He stopped publishing in 1898. However, he kept writing (daily) his
"Cahiers/ Notebooks", a vast diary that he had started in 1894 after he moved to Paris.
The Cahiers are modeled on Leonardos famous notebooks. It is not a coincidence
that 1894 is also the year in which he published the long essays "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci".
It is neither a biography nor an analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's work: it is a personal manifesto in defense of the universal interdisciplinary mind and a philosophical discussion of the world as a complex network of interrelations. Leonardo is simply a symbol, an ideal role model.
Valery returned to this essay twice: in 1919, with the addition of a "Note et Digression/ Note and Digression", and in 1929, with the addition of "Leonard et les Philosophes/ Leonardo and the Philosophers".
He held humble jobs, first working at the War Ministry and then (since 1900, when he got married) assisting Edouard Lebey as his private secretary, with duties such as reading aloud newspapers and financial reports. The prose poem "Agathe" (1898) was only published posthumously. Valery's routine was to wake up around 5 AM and devote 3 to 4 hours in the morning to writing in the notebooks. He stated that this habit granted him "the right to be stupid for the rest of the day. After he died, his 250 notebooks were found to contain about 30 thousand pages of text, drawings, formulas and diagrams.
World War I started in 1914.
In 1917 the 45-year-old Valery broke his literary silence and published a 512-line poem, "La Jeune Parque/ The Young Fate".
It's a symbolist poem that has been often compared to Mallarme', but way more
philosophical and enigmatic than anything Mallarme' ever wrote.
The woman of the title is Clotho, the youngest of the three Fates in classical Greek mythology. She is the one spinning the thread of life, setting in motion one's existence. Her sisters/fates are
Lachesis, who determines the events of existence, and
Atropos who cuts the thread, thus ending existence.
The poem is the Fate's dramatic monologue while standing on a rocky shore
before dawn in the dark.
World War I ended in 1918. Valery, perhaps influenced by Spengler's "Decline of the West" (1918), wrote the two open letters collected in "La Crise de l'Esprit/ The Crisis of the Mind" (1919). The war, which had claimed 20 million lives, was a failure of the European mind. Scientific progress had not prevented (in fact it had enabled) the barbaric acts of the war. Europe was the most advanced civilization but it had virtually destroyed itself: four great empires had collapsed (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German). Valery employed the metaphor of Hamlet (Europe) standing on a cliff looking at millions of skulls. His employer Lebey died in 1922. That year Valery published the volume "Charmes", containing two long poems: "Le Cimetiere Marin/ The Sailor's Graveyard" and "L'Ebauche d'un Serpent/ Sketch of a Serpent". His short anti-novel "Monsieur Teste", originally published in 1896 in a magazine as "La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste/ An Evening with Monsieur Teste", and later expanded as "Monsieur Teste" in 1926, is a fictionalized philosophical self-analysis. The story is narrated by a friend. Teste is a wealthy radical intellectual ascetic who has withdrawn from society and avoids unnecessary actions. Hence he minimizes speaking. He devotes himself to researching the laws of mind. He is a detached observer of humanity. At the Opera, Teste watches the audience rather than the performance. Monsieur Teste is essentially Valerys alter ego. The expanded 1926 edition contains a letter from his wife Emilie to the narrator, in which she confesses her frustration of living with a man she loves but she cannot fully connect with. "Teste" pioneered the fictional philosophical self-analysis written by poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke ("The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge", 1910) and Fernando Pessoa ("The Book of Disquiet", begun in 1912). The essay "L'Homme et la Coquille/ Man and the Sea Shell" (1937), originally simply the preface to a book about shells, philosophical meditation on nature and life, on the mystery of form and growth, of self-organization. "Poesie et Pensee Abstraite/ Poetry and Abstract Thought", originally a lecture delivered at Oxford University in 1939, is a meditation on the nature of poetry. Poetry is a language within a language. Prose is like walking, poetry is like dancing. See also My discussion with Paul Gifford on Valery's poetry "La Jeune Parque/ The Young Fate" (1917) [p] +++ "Charmes" (1922) [p] ++ "Le Cimetiere Marin/ The Graveyard By The Sea" (1920) [p] + "L'Ebauche d'un Serpent/ Sketch of a Serpent" (1922) [p] +
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