Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To
BooksIn his early novella, “Monsieur Teste,” the great French poet created an alter ego even more aloof and elusive than he was.By Benjamin KunkelDecember 9, 2024Edmund Wilson called Valéry “the great poet who can hardly bring himself to write poetry, who can hardly even bring himself to explain why he cannot bring himself to write poetry.”Photograph from Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / GettyOne way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally (“a record on the gramophone” in “The Waste Land”) or as a metaphor for inner states, as when he describes the hour of dusk at which “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting.” Sometimes newfangled technology seems to enter into the nature of the writing itself. John Dos Passos’s trilogy, “U.S.A.,” features passages explicitly mimicking newsreels, and even in cases where the evocation of modernity is less self-conscious something similar is often detectable: it’s not just that Hemingway’s heroes shoot a .30-06 or drive an ambulance; we also feel that Hemingway himself writes typewriter prose after an eon of longhand.The French writer Paul Valéry’s way of being a modernist—indeed, for several generations of readers, an arch emblem and theorist of literary modernism—was different. Valéry may glancingly acknowledge a phenomenon like the railway, but his lyric poetry and his sole novel-like excursion into prose, “The Evening with Monsieur Teste,” exhibit very little interest in the mechanical paraphernalia and Edisonian impedimenta of modern times, or in the social conditions that accompany them. Among the notable subjects of his most beautiful poems are a pomegranate, a bee, a tossed wine bottle, the dawn, one’s sleeping lover—things that have existed since forever. Born (and later buried) beside the Mediterranean, Valéry had perhaps his favorite lyric subject in “the sea, the most intact and ancient thing on the globe.” Generally, the attitude of this aloof, laconic writer toward “the crazy disorder” of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe was that expressed by the imaginary Chinese sage he described in an essay from 1895, “The Yalu”: “I prefer to be ignorant of your disease of invention and your debauchery of confused ideas.”Still, Valéry’s eminence as a modernist is indisputable. For Eliot, it was he “who will remain for posterity the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of the first half of the twentieth century—not Yeats, not Rilke, not anyone else.” Edmund Wilson, identifying Valéry as a crucial link between nineteenth-century Symbolism and the movements that followed it, wrote, “In the reproduction, in beautiful verses, of shapes, sounds, effects of light and shadow, substances of fruit or flesh, Valéry has never been surpassed.” Almost as telling for Wilson were the long mysterious periods in which Valéry—“the great poet who can hardly bring himself to write poetry, who can hardly even bring himself to explain why he cannot bring himself to write poetry”—published nothing at all. (In this case, a modernist aesthetic of silence concealed a private prolixity: the “Cahiers,” some thirty thousand pages of entries in notebooks, kept over fifty years, which appeared in full only after Valéry’s death.)What We’re ReadingDiscover notable new fiction and nonfiction.How do you get to be hypermodern while turning your nose up at modernity? In this effort, Valéry had a crucial model in the figure of the scientist. After all, physicists, mathematicians, and chemists are fundamentally modern types of people whose job it is to work out those laws of the universe which operate timelessly, without regard to human history. In an early essay, “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci” (1894), Valéry defined a work of art as “a machine intended to excite and combine individual formations” of a given “category of minds.” In another essay, he pours scorn on Romantic poets for their failure to be scientists: “They shunned the chemist for the alchemist. They were happy only with legend or history—that is, with the exact opposite of physics.” Worse yet, “they escaped from organized life into passion and emotion.” If you, like most people, associate poets with big, unruly feelings, then in Valéry—or so he tells you, perhaps protesting too much—you have a refutation of this hypothesis.Born in 1871, in the small Mediterranean port city of Sète, Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry was the son of a Corsican customs officer and an Italian woman. (In the “Cahiers,” this result of a binational union thinks of himself as “a grafted being”: “Grafting mathematics on poetry, rigor on free images. ‘Clear ideas’ on a superstitious trunk; the French language on Italian wood . . .”) In keeping with his inward schism between rigo
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust recounts the arresting novelty of a telephone call or an airplane sighting. For T. S. Eliot, the products of industrial capitalism can appear either literally (“a record on the gramophone” in “The Waste Land”) or as a metaphor for inner states, as when he describes the hour of dusk at which “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting.” Sometimes newfangled technology seems to enter into the nature of the writing itself. John Dos Passos’s trilogy, “U.S.A.,” features passages explicitly mimicking newsreels, and even in cases where the evocation of modernity is less self-conscious something similar is often detectable: it’s not just that Hemingway’s heroes shoot a .30-06 or drive an ambulance; we also feel that Hemingway himself writes typewriter prose after an eon of longhand.
The French writer Paul Valéry’s way of being a modernist—indeed, for several generations of readers, an arch emblem and theorist of literary modernism—was different. Valéry may glancingly acknowledge a phenomenon like the railway, but his lyric poetry and his sole novel-like excursion into prose, “The Evening with Monsieur Teste,” exhibit very little interest in the mechanical paraphernalia and Edisonian impedimenta of modern times, or in the social conditions that accompany them. Among the notable subjects of his most beautiful poems are a pomegranate, a bee, a tossed wine bottle, the dawn, one’s sleeping lover—things that have existed since forever. Born (and later buried) beside the Mediterranean, Valéry had perhaps his favorite lyric subject in “the sea, the most intact and ancient thing on the globe.” Generally, the attitude of this aloof, laconic writer toward “the crazy disorder” of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe was that expressed by the imaginary Chinese sage he described in an essay from 1895, “The Yalu”: “I prefer to be ignorant of your disease of invention and your debauchery of confused ideas.”
Still, Valéry’s eminence as a modernist is indisputable. For Eliot, it was he “who will remain for posterity the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of the first half of the twentieth century—not Yeats, not Rilke, not anyone else.” Edmund Wilson, identifying Valéry as a crucial link between nineteenth-century Symbolism and the movements that followed it, wrote, “In the reproduction, in beautiful verses, of shapes, sounds, effects of light and shadow, substances of fruit or flesh, Valéry has never been surpassed.” Almost as telling for Wilson were the long mysterious periods in which Valéry—“the great poet who can hardly bring himself to write poetry, who can hardly even bring himself to explain why he cannot bring himself to write poetry”—published nothing at all. (In this case, a modernist aesthetic of silence concealed a private prolixity: the “Cahiers,” some thirty thousand pages of entries in notebooks, kept over fifty years, which appeared in full only after Valéry’s death.)
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
How do you get to be hypermodern while turning your nose up at modernity? In this effort, Valéry had a crucial model in the figure of the scientist. After all, physicists, mathematicians, and chemists are fundamentally modern types of people whose job it is to work out those laws of the universe which operate timelessly, without regard to human history. In an early essay, “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci” (1894), Valéry defined a work of art as “a machine intended to excite and combine individual formations” of a given “category of minds.” In another essay, he pours scorn on Romantic poets for their failure to be scientists: “They shunned the chemist for the alchemist. They were happy only with legend or history—that is, with the exact opposite of physics.” Worse yet, “they escaped from organized life into passion and emotion.” If you, like most people, associate poets with big, unruly feelings, then in Valéry—or so he tells you, perhaps protesting too much—you have a refutation of this hypothesis.
Born in 1871, in the small Mediterranean port city of Sète, Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry was the son of a Corsican customs officer and an Italian woman. (In the “Cahiers,” this result of a binational union thinks of himself as “a grafted being”: “Grafting mathematics on poetry, rigor on free images. ‘Clear ideas’ on a superstitious trunk; the French language on Italian wood . . .”) In keeping with his inward schism between rigor and poetry, Valéry dutifully studied law as a young man in Montpellier and, at the same time, sent off a pair of poems to the Paris address of the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose elusive, dreamlike verse is about as far from a cut-and-dried legal language as can be. Mallarmé’s brief reply, saluting “mon cher poète” for his “gift for subtle analogy, with fitting music, . . . which is everything,” was a document that Valéry, according to his biographer Benoît Peeters, could recite to the end of his days. In 1891, the young man departed for the capital, taking the train with his mother, to sit at Mallarmé’s feet. (In 1900, he would marry a woman, Jeannie Gobillard, who first noticed him and his sad eyes at Mallarmé’s funeral.) Valéry settled in his mentor’s Paris, where he was to spend most of the rest of his life, holding down day jobs, first at the Ministry of War and later at a news agency. But the notion of literature that he elaborated when off the clock soon departed from Mallarmé’s Symbolist cloudiness. The proper goal of the writer, as he explained in a letter to a friend, was to dispense with imprecision: vague words “like volition, memory, ideas, intelligence, time, etc., etc.!,” might suffice for daily use, but the writer “must seek to find more subtle instruments.” Valéry had it in mind to work out “a System (in the physio-chemical sense)” that accurately reflected the conservation and transformation of those forms of energy known as thoughts.
Among the major products of this intention were Valéry’s youthful essays on literary technique, in which he rejects subjectivity and enthusiasm (“not an artist’s state of mind”) as the wellspring of literature. Instead, he sets up a sort of Newtonian mechanics of poetic language: “Whatever image or emotion is formed” in the reader’s mind “is valid and sufficient if it produces in him [the] reciprocal relation between the word-cause and the word-effect.” The real fireworks went off in the reader, then, not in the writer, and their exact trajectory and combustion, their bright colors and expiring patterns, were like “the mysterious bodies which physics studies and which chemistry studies: I always think of them when I reflect upon works of art.” Such would-be scientific treatises in fact functioned more like manifestos, and decisively influenced Eliot and Ezra Pound’s generation to favor a poetics of the objective sensuous image over one of the dramatic declamatory mood. Eliot is following Valéry’s dictates when he writes of the “objective correlative” necessary to produce a given effect on the reader, while Imagism was the name Pound and his associates adopted for a movement founded on the French poet’s lessons.
In Valéry’s own creative work, the chief outcome of his characteristic stress on objectivity and rationality was “The Evening with Monsieur Teste,” a novella (to use a familiar term for what remains a distinctly strange book) first published in 1896. The fictional Teste—the word is Old French for “head”—is a spectral rationalist, a phenomenon of pure reason compelled only by inconvenient biology to put on trousers and sit at a café. Valéry continued to pay visits to his alter ego in prose fragments that he produced for the remainder of his life. At the time of his death, in 1945, he was apparently planning a new and complete edition of “Monsieur Teste,” and it’s this slender posthumous compendium of observations by and about Valéry’s vanishing line drawing of a man that forms the basis of the new English-language “Teste,” elegantly translated by Charlotte Mandell (New York Review Books). (It suggests something of Mandell’s achievement that Valéry allows that his text would “present almost insurmountable difficulties to anyone who wants to carry it into a foreign language.”) Over all, it’s a pleasure to meet M. Teste, even if one feels that an effort to shake his hand would leave you grasping at air.
In the preface to his short book, Valéry situates the origins of Teste in a fanatical pursuit of linguistic and intellectual exactitude, never mind the teasing hints at the French for “testicle” and “testify” that flutter about his character’s surname. Mistrustful of “even the rather precise work of poetry,” Valéry recalls rejecting “not only Literature but also almost the whole of Philosophy, as belonging to the Vague and Impure Things I denied myself with all my heart.” (Set aside for now the paradox of putting all one’s heart into such bloodlessness.) At the time of his first acquaintance with Teste, Valéry says, he could “think only with disgust of all the ideas and feelings engendered or stirred in humans merely by their ills and fears, their hopes and terrors, and not freely by their pure observation of things and themselves.” Disdain for the midden of human emotions lay behind the parturition of Teste—“born one day from a recent memory of such states of mind”—from Valéry’s own head. Teste emerges, full grown, as a sort of scientist of himself: “He observes himself, he manipulates, he does not allow himself to be manipulated.”
The preface may conclude with Valéry’s reference to this impossibly rational man as “a monster,” but such language should not deceive us as to his attitude toward his creation. For Valéry, Teste counts as a monster only in the way that a biologist would regard a unique specimen: as a notable mutation with the potential to engender a new lineage. The reality is that Valéry overwhelmingly portrays Teste in an admiring light and an emulative spirit—an exemplar of pristine rationality who compels “the use, if not the creation, of a forced language, sometimes one that is vigorously abstract.” Teste, dispassionately interested in himself simply as the human subject most available to his investigations, studies his soul as a mathematical combinatory of possibilities. Obsessive speculation on what a person such as himself might feel or do meanwhile entails that Teste feels and does very little. He speaks, Valéry’s narrator notes, in “muted” tones and makes only “sober” gestures. At the restaurant Teste frequents, no one notices this man of about forty, who is neither young nor old. When he eats, it’s “as if he were taking a purgative.” Teste makes his living in the most passive way, from “modest weekly speculations on the stock market,” and is an austere conversationalist: he never smiles, he says “neither good day nor evening,” and “one noted that a large number of words were banished from his discourse.” Valéry’s narrator is enthralled: “He, so real! so new! so free of any deception or illusion. . . . How can one not feel enthusiasm for one who never said anything vague?”
You will perhaps be surprised to learn that this fantastically impersonal person is a married man. But the second of the four sections of the original “Teste” consists of a letter to the narrator from Mme. Émilie Teste about her peculiar husband. It turns out that, despite M. Teste’s precise observations of his own being, he all but eludes observation by others. Mme. Teste, who should know, says that “by his profound absorption and by the impenetrable order of his thoughts, he evades all the ordinary calculations people make about the character of their fellows.” The upshot is marriage as a sort of ratification of mutual solitude and incomprehension. “Actually,” Madame notes, about Monsieur, “one can say nothing about him that isn’t wrong the moment it’s spoken!” Is this love? you might ask. Sounding very much like her spouse, Émilie Teste lodges her reservations about the hazy word “love,” which is “so undetermined in its ordinary usage and hovering between so many different images, it is completely meaningless when it comes to the relations between my husband’s heart and my person.” Predictably, perhaps, the estranged soul mates are happy together. Often, Mme. Teste reports, “the urge to sing seizes me and soars up; I fly, dancing with improvised joy and unfinished youth.” Besides, the sex sounds good: “Monsieur Teste thinks that love consists of being able to be animals together—complete license for inanity and bestiality.”
The third section of Valéry’s curious portrait of his ego ideal treats us for the first time to Teste’s own unmediated reflections, excerpted from his “logbook.” Here we encounter one of the book’s more famous lines: “I confess I have made an idol of my mind, but I have found no other.” This means that Teste consecrates himself to a basically hypothetical existence. Even his thoughts are not so much thoughts as they are notions about possible ideas. He boasts or confesses that he doesn’t read the newspapers, which would only lead him “to the very threshold of those abstract problems where I am already my own ground”—but he does not cross the threshold and identify these problems. Similarly, he claims to be “infinitely aware of power” without telling what this awareness entails. A typical entry reads, “Admirable mathematical kinship of humans—What can one say of this forest of relationship and resemblances?” At any rate, he refrains from sketching any single tree within the forest.
The rest of “Monsieur Teste” consists of kindred pensées from Teste and his fond acquaintances: meditations on the grandeur of meditation itself, speculations on the noble vocation of speculation. If the entire exercise sounds very arid, so it is. There are no real characters in “Monsieur Teste,” Teste being only an abstract universal self, and his friends and his wife mere observers of the man. Nor is there any drama or plot to this non-story of a mind testifying to its own operations. (“Monsieur Teste is the witness,” reads one entry in its entirety.) But, if we concede the book’s dryness, we also have to concede that this literary Atacama Desert is nonetheless a thrilling landscape, not least for being practically uninhabitable.
It’s not that this odd book begot no successors. Plotless and contemplative rather than narrative and descriptive, “Monsieur Teste” is certainly not a novel or novella in the ordinary sense; it’s more like a lightly fictionalized intellectual diary. But if “Teste” seems to have been the first book of its kind, it was hardly the last. In 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal produced his “Lord Chandos Letter,” in which a fictional seventeenth-century aristocrat confesses to Teste-like doubts about the adequacy of language to convey experience. In 1910, Valéry’s friend Rainer Maria Rilke published “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” first called “The Journal of My Other Self” and narrated not by Rilke but by his alter ego Brigge. Fernando Pessoa’s posthumous “Book of Disquiet,” composed from the nineteen-tens to the thirties, also comes to mind: a thick sheaf of philosophical and psychological fragments ascribed to Pessoa’s stand-in Bernardo Soares. Like Valéry, the writers of these extraordinary works of prose were poets. In each case, the fractional difference between the writer’s actual self and his alter ego seems to have given him license not so much to confess (these are not salacious or even, really, very personal books) as to think and feel as he otherwise could not, as if it were impossible to say what was happening inside oneself if one’s official self were the place where such things had to happen.
Even so, Valéry’s “Teste” did not inaugurate a new branch of literature along the lines he had laid out. The prolonged, preliminary thought of a scientific literature of pure possibility evaporated as soon as it hit the ground. The technical psychiatry and neurobiology of later times necessarily lacked Valéry’s poetry, and the poets themselves could never make good on his scientism without ceasing to write poetry.
In Valéry’s own career, too, “The Evening with Monsieur Teste” was remarkable for the sterility it appears to have imposed. After 1898, he didn’t publish a word for almost twenty years. When his long poem “The Young Fate” came out, in 1917, Valéry, at forty-five, was no longer exactly young. A subsequent collection, “Charmes,” from 1921, features the short poem “The Steps,” in which the poet hears the footfalls of a lover as she approaches with a kiss. Its final stanza suggests, in hesitant octameters, a sort of key to Valéry’s infatuated aloofness from experience:
The translation is by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, from “The Idea of Perfection” (2020), an excellent selection from Valéry’s poetry and notebooks. And the lines illustrate how much of the sweetness of being is, for Valéry, the simultaneous sweetness of not being—how far the anticipation of life goes toward constituting life’s actual incarnation.
Valéry’s renewed enthusiasm for poetry, in “Charmes,” seems to have been occasioned by the married poet’s intense love affair with a fellow-poet, Catherine Pozzi. The lapse into passion and verse of this heretofore literary positivist, inventor of the all but bodiless “man of glass” M. Teste, probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, even to readers of the final version of “Teste.” In a last fragment, the eponymous researcher of himself speaks of “syllogisms impaired by agony, thousands of images bathed in pain, fear mingled with lovely moments from the past.” Agony, pain, fear: these are the inexpungable residue of Teste’s probabilistic exercises, an indivisible remainder that carries over from one calculation to the next—and perhaps the motivation for engaging in such desperately abstract exercises in the first place. The ultimate effect is paradoxical: the more that Valéry eliminates the ghost of pain and passion from the logical machinery of his work, the starker and more affecting the moans and cries of the ghost become. It may not be a general law of literature that the writer will end up emphasizing the strong emotions inside his or her work precisely to the extent that he or she tries to eliminate them—but Valéry the would-be scientist would probably appreciate any research into the phenomenon’s wider application.
Data relevant to the investigator of his own particular case would surely include Valéry’s great poem “The Cemetery by the Sea,” about the graveyard in his home town of Sètes, where he himself was buried, a few months after the end of the war in Europe. Little if anything is more memorable in the work of this programmatically objective and rational writer than the lines with which, in wild tones of anguish and exultation, Valéry informs the residents of the cemetery’s tombs and mausoleums that the real devouring “worm,” the nameless organism that “truly gnaws” on human flesh, is “not for you asleep beneath the slabs” but preys, instead, on living people like himself:
For all that he vaunts his taste for precision, Valéry’s most eloquent word is surely this stammering it, it, it. ♦
