Description
SELF-SIGNED MANUSCRIT, partly unpublished.
The first part of the text appeared in No. 44 of July 1945 of the Fontaine magazinethe second part entitled after the event, was not published.
"Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry would undoubtedly have been a great poet if he hadn't realised what a privilege it is to be a dunce and if he hadn't immediately combined the charms of the dunce with the mastery of the teacher. One day he said to me: "Now that I'm in the Académie, I'm going to bring in the scoundrel". By scoundrels he meant the real poets, the ones who disrupt the class, hide alarm clocks in their desks, give the ruler a hard time and get themselves expelled from the school for lèse-majesté. Its straight line was tortuous, meandering without a break and straight only in its essence. The precious reptile that makes up its interlacing likes to bite its own tail and, with a last mischievous touch, to represent the sign of nothingness. For Paul Valéry's pessimism is expressed solely through a love of exercise and a kind of discouragement on the part of an ethereal soul at having to endure gravity. His solemn study of the nocturnal world in which the work hatches is always accompanied by the winks and giggles of the bad pupil who, knowing that he is capable of botching the work of others in a minute, in a way hovers over them and is unable to take their discipline seriously: he never adopted that poetic and historical allure that is so harmful, with which the future alone is charged and ridicules those who imagine it indispensable to their immediate visibility. Invisible it was and remains insofar as the best of us remains incomparable and opposes an enigma to the unspeakable reading which swears only by comparison. One of Paul Valéry's great privileges is his innate, almost magical sense of place. How many poets throw their wealth into disarray and don't know how to make the most of it? Just think of the Comtesse de Noailles, who is constantly finding and confusing things because of her total ignorance of perspective and values. When Paul Valéry finds 'le lait plat' (flat milk), he first finds it and then, according to the method I advocate, looks for the angle from which his discovery will best illuminate itself. This phenomenon of setting up is one of the first secrets of poetry, and Paul Valéry has tracked down its economy by rereading Malherbe, Racine and Mallarmé. The philtre he pours us drop by drop is composed of simples - but their virtue (the virtue of simples) only becomes effective with doses and cooking.
We could write endlessly about Paul Valéry, his science, his mischievousness, his encyclopaedic incredulity, his schoolboy naivety, his pursuit of mysteries, the caution with which he approached them and carried out his experiments as an alchemist. That's not your role. Others are doing it. He called me the salt of the earth. It is up to us to say a farewell to him that he would approve of and to quote this letter from Paris in which Roger [illegible] tells me about his funeral: 'there were few people. When Ronsard died the [illegible] funeral said that his birth, in 1525, had made up for the disaster of Pavia. Now Valéry was born in 1871, but everything degenerates poets and royal honours! Jean Cocteau"After the event
As an afterthought, and having jotted down these few lines, I have just heard the radio report of Paul Valéry's funeral from a fisherman's hut. The pomp, the procession, the torches, the Palais Chaillot, were so out of keeping with the decor of fishing nets, planks, vegetables and pine needles of this deserted and somewhat wild coast that Valéry showed himself to me in the most human form. He was not one of those people who attend their own funeral. Already at the funerals of the Countess de Noailles and Giraudoux I had been certain that they were pulling me by the sleeve and dragging me away from the church to chat around a table. It is Paul Valéry, so cheerful, so little solemn, that I am evoking while honouring him with a letter and funeral voice. He preferred a lunch surrounded by people where you could linger. If there was a crowd, he knew how to reduce the guests to the state of ghosts and keep their volume only to the people he wanted to hear. He went from an extreme tiredness that hollowed him out, cost him, ruined him from top to bottom, to an incomparable vivacity of the eye, the fuse and the moustache. The moult split him in two right down to the soul. He was not afraid of his secrets being discovered. The others couldn't use them. He spread them out, illuminating the deepest chambers with good humour. For a single mechanism drove his speeches and his chatter. You might as well say that his speeches had the grace of his chatter and his chatter the singular penumbra of his speeches.
For the public, his work sculpts it and begins it. For us, it is a friend who is thrown, dead, from this ship on which we are all crossing together".
