Beholden to Friendship

...How much they leave out can become clear in reading this volume of letters, for Valery's skepticism and his coldness, as we can readily see, were based on a host of avowals, of convictions, of desperate yet lucid gambles...

...V. is an uneven creature, lost in the incessant feeling that he has not said his 'last word.' This feeling proves nothing, but I always have it...

...Combined with all these attitudes was an openness to experience that made him conscious of politics, social life and scientific advance in a way that is unique in all of modern literature...

...They were both living in the provinces and yearning for Paris, they were both poets, and they were both devoted adherents of the symbolist religion of art which Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme had established in French letters...

...That's why I have sought more constant things.' He is amused by people's opinions of him, "the gentleman who will never do anything, or a poet who dies young, or a fraud, or a bore (the last two are quite correct)," but he asks: "And what about me, my real opinion of myself...

...People believe that something fundamentally true comes out when a person lets himself go...

...Literature, to him, was "a problem, an application, not an objective and not a fundamental point.' He was interested in discovery, conquest, and therefore he mistrusted the task of writing, the demands of a public which took "himself away from Himself...

...Certainly Thibaudet's epigram isolates the qualities of intellectual energy and glistening frigidity that characterize one aspect of Valery's writing, while Eliot is safe when he stresses his insistent, mocking analysis of modern certainties...

...How true this is can be experienced by anyone who reads this book...

...Of all possible feelings," he says at one point, "the strongest in me is that of security-or, if you prefer, infinite defiance...

...The common mistake is to believe that a man who gives way is truer (or more sincere, as people say rather stupidly) than a man who resists...

...The others have a right only to that part of us in which we are others to ourselves...

...This is, however, Valery's book...

...Or when he describes a bicycle trip: "I thought of nothing at all, except the rain, the beginnings of which I could read on my handle-bars...

...he says, while writing his essay on Leonardo, that "one must subject the great Flying Man to this format...

...Nevertheless, Gide grows in stature, for here we see him in an unusual light, humble, receptive, conscious of the greater genius of his friend, yet doggedly holding to his own view in the face of Valery's overwhelming brilliance and devastating critical insight...

...When he reads Poe's Eureka or Leonardo's notebooks he is able to point to the astounding foreshadowings of great scientific theories which are sketched by the sensibilities of these two geniuses...

...What contempt...

...They believed in me, who didn't believe in myself...

...Alain seems to echo Eliot, though with a more humanistic concern, when he deplores Valery's inability to ignite "the spark of human love...

...How many times have I seen him, from the Peyrou, crossing from the sea to the west, breaking the circles of the pure sky...

...And later: "We have come to the point of no longer reflecting on anything that is unwritable...

...My pride lies in the fact that I attracted that great and inestimable interest they have shown in me.' Valery had one characteristic that sets him apart from almost all other writers, however talented and interesting: He was incapable of writing a boring sentence...

...Gide was a romantic sensualist in formation, as yet unaware of the homosexuality which was to be so important in his emotional life, while Valery, with the precociousness of genius, was already questioning the dogmas of the religion they both revered, hesitating, as Robert Mallet says, "between the appearances of literature and the realities of the mind...

...Between the opposed poles of sensibility and the mind, the social and the individual, the enduring and ephemeral, Valery lived out his adventure, his epic...

...They seem to mime the hunt, for one never sees what they catch...

...As Gide with admirable candor said to Robert Mallet, editor of the French edition whose excellent preface has also been used in the American one, his own letters will inevitably seem dull and colorless when compared to Valery's...

...Everything he said is valuable, because everything he said issued from his consciousness of himself, his devotion to a faith in the pure spirit that was higher and nobler than the transitory things around him...

...Valery sifts everything, preserves what is precious, discards what is flashy and inconsistent...

...In each of these reactions to this key figure of modernism, there is a kernel of truth...

...It is also aimed at much that now passes for profundity in current literature, and reading Valery can serve as a valuable antidote...

...I can have no confidence in what comes and goes...

...He is tough-minded, merciless toward himself and his craft, yet the rarified atmosphere in which he lived is at once invigorating and cleansing, above all today when we are witnessing a recrudescence of all the romantic junk which he spent his life examining, exposing, re-forming into a viable, sharp instrument of the mind and the sensibility...

...Wit sprays his pages like a ceaseless fountain of energy and exuberance...

...Alain, who considered him the finest poet of his generation, felt that he lacked the ultimate courage, which was "perhaps a sort of reconciliation with himself that would embrace all of mankind, a generosity that delves deeper than mere understanding...

...even in the dumps Valery can think of just the right phrase to hit the nerve of recognition in himself and his correspondent: "I am turning white,' he says, "like a piece of chocolate...

...We also see him in the role of a true friend, insisting that Valery publish the poems and essays that were to seal his fame...

...They drew me, and shaped, in spite of me, a personage worthy of their friendship, their quality, their talents...

...His distrust of literature was held in the name of the greater spiritual freedom that had been embodied for him by the genius of Rimbaud and Mallarme...

...Or when he probes his own mind: "I make honest comments, I smoke, I get bored, I exhaust myself at night, I exercise with dumbbells, I begin to work out my calculations, I go back to my system, time goes by, the days become oxidized, and now and then, a terrific trumpet call that lasts for a second.' And Gide is always there with Valery, kind, responsive, intelligent...

...Thibaudet described Valery the poet as "a steam engine that produces ice...

...And in each of these varied fields he is constantly being receptive and aware, delicate and analytical...

...We shall not see their like soon again, and this too justifies Valery's lifelong resistance and skepticism...

...Or he can epitomize a lifetime of skepticism about literature in a flashing series of sentences: "Between the public and myself I find that one must interpose 'form,' demonstration, the will to objectivity-everything that sends the others back to themselves...

...They often do...

...When he examines politics it is the formlessness and the chaos that disgust him...

...When Valery goes to London it is the City and its commerce that attract his attention...

...Or a flock of gulls: perpetually above a patch of water outlined by the quay, twenty-five very mechanical seagulls playing at looking for their dinner, and whirling, not taking any account of the hurricane, round a center, always the same, like a cluster of gnats...

...I don't trust it...

...That adolescent tie, cemented in long walks and talks, in a typically romantic ritual in a country graveyard, sitting on tombstones, chewing rose petals and talking of eternal things, was always precious to these worldly, world-weary men...

...T. S. Eliot stigmatized him as the great modem skeptic, too skeptical even to believe completely in the art he practiced and explained with such consummate adeptness and profundity...

...As he said, quoting Diderot, "Ideas are my whores I'm fed up with them, and at bottom, I have never liked anything but the action-the intellectual action-they imply...

...In his old age Valery sang the praises of that friendship in unforgettable language: "I owe to my friends almost everything I am...

...He knew that poetry began in solitude and ended in a public game, though he never ceased to regret the solitude that made the game possible...

...Or he can sum up a whole intellectual attitude: "Man is absurd by what he searches for, great by what he finds...

...Despite these and other, more crucial differences, a life-long friendship was formed between them, and Self-Portraits: The Gide/Valery Letters: 1890-1942 (University of Chicago Press, 340 pp., $10.00), which covers 50 years and traverses youth, marriage, jobs, family troubles, literary politics, wars and political convulsions, social canonization and the rigors of old age, is a magnificent monument to the strength and lastingness of that adolescent emotion which brought these diverse, finely conditioned personalities together...

...man is surprises, and I am deletions...

...Yet they all leave out a good deal that matters...

...And later yet, in his last letters: "Man is repetition, and I am constancy...

...That remark about sincerity is aimed straight at his esthetic and moral doctrines...

...I think that this habit eliminates in its customers two-thirds of the possible mental operations...

...Thus, when he receives a gift of dates from Gide, his words are precise and wonderful: He has, he says, "an enormous weakness for that sticky fruit, whose half-liquid and almost fleshy sugar is imbued with a special silk round a bone predestined for mouths...

...But after all that can be said and criticized about him, I am most attracted to the strange, lovable, sensual man who appears in these pages...

...Moreover, in these letters Valery shows us his intimate side, and the picture evoked is bewildering and touching, glittering and somber, playful and deep...

...Gide came from a rich, landed family, Valery from a middle-class family with an illustrious past but no money...

...that the creature in pajamas is truer than the 'gentleman.'" This was the sort of drubbing Gide normally took at Valery's hands...