the poet as cold fish: Paul Valery

 

“He painfully wrote  Jeune Parque, pulling it out little by little from a world of erasures, and then the following poems with a large enough facility.” – Thibaudet

On beach 72, between Carnon and La Grande-Motte, I stood on the beach and let the ripples die between my toes and looked out at the Mediterranean and I thought of you, Paul  Valéry.

Valéry is, to me, the least sympathetic of the “great poets”. In Thibaudet’s book on Valéry, he distinguishes between those poets “who know how to make verses because they are poets … and those who are poets because they know how to make verses.” The first are guided by some inner vocation – some inner fun, I think – and the latter are guided by their sense of forms – some exterior fun, or at least business. Valéry he puts in the latter camp. Myself, I think these two types struggle within the soul of every poet, but it is true that Valéry did everything to make himself seem like the coldblooded trap-maker of poetry. His great lines of verse are so evidently intended, so evidently erased enough before they came together.

The seashore to which the small fishing towns, such as Sète, cling – a seashore totally transformed by the State in the postwar era, when leisure for the masses was being invented – is in Valéry’s cold blood. The breeze that comes up from it rustles the trees over the sailor’s cemetery in his most famous poem, which considers the death of the supreme egotist, with all the dead sailors around as an appropriate décor – that breeze comes from out there. In Valéry’s time the sailors in the fishing fleet were subject to tragic turns of event – of e-vent, of the wind.

In 1910, for instance, the Sète newspaper reported  that “a bark belonging to a family of fishers of the pointe du Barou went to a funeral service in Pomerols, and sank in the etang of Thau as the result of an unlucky wind. The bodies of the poor souls were found and a subscription was raised for the benefit of six children, orphaned by that catastrophe.”

Yet in contemplating the “gulf” from the sailor’s cemetery, Valéry does not extend his imagination to the sailor’s lot, which is why I say that the cemetery serves as décor for the more pressing matter of the death of the ego. “O my silence!” – that is the subject of the poem. Not for Valéry the working out, in some opium fever dream, the mariner’s fate. I suppose this is where I feel something subtly repulsive in the poem that, contra Thibaudet, I do not feel in Mallarme.

You can get used to the cold. Swimming about in the water of the Mediterranean here in the morning, I certainly got my share of that. But living in that cold – oh my silence! – well, it isn’t for me.