Moi seul

Roy Fuller

Moi Paul Valery translated by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (Routledge and Kegan Paul E8.50) I suppose I shouldn't be reviewing this book. It is the fifteenth and final volume of the collected works in English and, alas, the first I've investigated. Also, since I have scarcely even a schoolboy's French, my conception of

Val6rY's poetry is sketchy in the extreme. Yet, if before one expired one was going to make any effort about Valery (and others may be in like. case), here surely was the ideal introductory oPPortunity, for this book contains autobiographical and biographical sketches, notebook reflections on his own work and character, and selections from his correspondence with

Gustave Fourment, a boyhood friend, and with Andre Gide. The book begins auspiciously for the tyro With a short piece printed from a hitherto

unpublished typescript headed 'Autobiogaphie'. Though in style little more than laconic jottings, these pages are extraordinarily effective, giving a vivid idea of Valery's idea of himself, e.g. as to his military service: "I was of nervous temperament. No muscles. I do not know how I stood it." The following half dozen Pieces read well, too. Valery visited England at

an early age and met such litterateurs as Gosse and Henley. There is here a remarkable account of his going to Box Hill to dine with Meredith. After a curious experience at the deserted Box

Hill Halt, unnerving for a young Frog, he strived at Meredith's domain where tea was being taken out of doors: He walked with difficulty resting on a stick. When within three paces from me, raising and shaking his cap as a sign of Welcome, he missed his footing and fell full length in front of me, I have the strange recollection of having picked up with

Wonderful ease the very thin body of this rather tall man.

Then follows the Valery-Fourment corresPOndence, mostly dating from the'nineties. The Valery-Gide correspondence which succeeds it is also of an early date, with the unfortunate consequence that these sections,

making the most substantial part of the book, are cluttered with 'nineties rubbish, such as "1 'Lave lost my beautiful crystalline vision of the world, I am an ancient king; I am an exile from

PhYself." They also contain much boring Gallic rhetoric. The translation adds to one's exacerbation, though perhaps to be so condemnatory without ariY sort of check with the original is unfair. But te'en at the pretty rare colloquial moments of he correspondence one often remains unillumined (what can "a cold piss like you" mean?), While constantly longing to supply a more Precise word (Montesquiou's tortoise was surely inlaid with, not "paved in," gold). Occasionally, a truly poetic observation seems to have been blurred through the Englishing the grey weather in the coloured glass panes tUrns the heart as the sea is turned by the Porthole") but about this one . must be less clogrnatic.

It is amusing, if disappointing, that the Gide

side of the correspondence, certainly as given here, is in the same inflated, precious vein. Gide's journal of a not much later date often refers mordantly to the exhausting effect Valery's conversation had on him. He notes on the 9th February 1907, for instance, that he was thrown "into this frightful alternative: either consider everything he iValeryi says absurd or else consider absurd everything I am doing." When we come, in the present volume, to the selected extracts from Valery's notebooks under the title 'Remarks About Myself' we are reminded again and again that he was not the kind of writer (or, for that matter, the kind of man) to feel any obligation to be 'interesting' or 'human' or to practice the low style:

My imagination never moves on the common average human plane . . . What interests me most is not at all what matters to me most .. That is why I would begrudge the effort expended in writing a novel.

And again: I cannot write a normal literary work. For that, I would have to diverge too far from my own nature, which is non-literary . . . 1 find against myself, as a writer, that I am not interested, am even annoyed by writing what I have seen, or felt, or grasped. For me that is finished. I take up my pen for the future of my thought, not for its past.

There is also an awe-inspiring account of how as soon as he wakes up his ideas start to .gush out — "a normal, almost physiological function".

So it is not surprising that the translators are so constantly tested and (I fear) found wanting. Where on the infrequent occasions in the notebooks section, the abstractions are punctuated by cOncrete observation — as in a fine Coleridgean description of cigarette smoke — the standard of intelligibility and the reader's interest are dramatically increased. Probably Valery is one of those figures best appreciated through the eyes of others — we must recall Gide's account of some committee meeting just before the last war where the Iliad is mentioned and Valery

leans towards me and in a low voice;

"Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?"

Dominating a sudden protest, I find it more .. friendly to reply:

"Yes the Chanson de Roland," which makes him agree at once.

Gide's journal entry on this occasion goes on to say that "Valery's system involves a sort of austerity (and this is what makes him so admirable in my eyes) and renunciation of which I do not feel at all capable." We may be confident that at the back of Gide's mind in writing this was Valery's twenty-years abandonment of poetry — for after his precocious success in the times and manner of the 'nineties he left the stage completely, and then reappeared as a_'modern' poet, steeped in difficulty, in 1917.

Quite apart from the value of his own poetry he is surely a personage of value to the general notion of poetry — and not merely because he kept quiet when he hadnothing to say. His formidable brain-power, scientific bent, lack of cosiness and of self-advertisement (and here he reminds one of a very few similarly austere poets, such as the American Laura Riding) — these qualities are vital to poetry, though the reverse is often thought to be the case. Valery's Apollonian side is clearly and fascinatingly brought out by a short (too short) interview of 1927, printed in the present volume. The silence-breaking poem La Jeune Parque Valery characterises as "a work of the will in which I

amassed problems of prosody and poetry in order to overcome them." And his couple of pages on anti-automatism, hard labour, denial of importance "to considerations of innovation and tradition, originality and banality" and to "systematic surprise" should be pinned up wherever poetry is practised or published.