The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery.(Critical Essay)

Always demand proof, proof is the elementary courtesy that is anyone's due.

--Valery, Monsieur Teste

The name Paul Valery carries its own music. For those who know something of what lies behind it, the music deepens, is suggestive, and always richly complex. ("Complex" said Ravel, about his own artistic aims, "never complicated.") To know Valery only from his melodious but difficult poems--"Le Cimitiere marin," "La Jeune Parque," and others--turns out to be to know him scarcely at all. "Poetry" he wrote, "has never been a goal for me--more an instrument, an exercise, and its character derives from this--an artifice--product of will." Poetry provided him with fame, but he found his real intellectual stimulation elsewhere.

Today, Valery is perhaps best known for his aphoristic remarks, inevitably both brilliant and running against received opinion. Glimpse Valery's name on the page and one knows something immensely clarifying, possibly life-altering, awaits. "Everything changes but the avant-garde" is one example. "The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be" is another. "History is the science of things which do not repeat themselves" is a third. Without too much effort, one could record three or four hundred Valeryan remarks of equal charm and intellectual provocation.

"Remarks are not literature," Gertrude Stein is supposed to have said to Ernest Hemingway. She was wrong; all depends on the quality of the remarks. But then Stein's stricture would not much have bothered Paul Valery, who did not think "literature" a purely honorific word. For him literature is a construct, made for entertainment, instruction, excitation, and many other things that are not quite the truth. "There's always a rather sordid side to literature," he wrote in his Cahiers, "a lurking deference to one's public. Hence the mental reservations, the ulterior motives basic to every form of charlatanism. Thus every literary production is an `impure' product."

Although Valery came to public notice as a young poet, what most interested him was the intellectual operation of the mind; the search for the truth about the way the mind works in cerebration, the mechanics of its functioning, was his main passion. He sought, as he himself late in life put it, "to know the substratum of thought and sensibility on which one has lived." In his Cahiers, again, he wrote: "I would like to have classified and clarified my personal forms of thought, and learned to think within them in such a way that each new thought bore the imprint of the whole system generating it and was unmistakably a modification of a well-defined system."

The way Valery went about this enterprise is not the least astonishing thing about this extraordinary man. After a lustrous beginning as a poet--he met and early fell under the influence of that saint of modernism, Stephane Mallarme--he stopped writing poems for twenty years, beginning in 1892, when he was twenty-one. While making a living for a wife and children through employment with the French War Ministry and later as private secretary to one of the chief executives for the Paris financial conglomerate Agence Havas, he worked out his ideas, chiefly in private, in 261 notebooks which he wrote during the early morning hours.