The Collected Works of Paul Valery, Vol. 9: Masters and Friends

by Paul Valéry, Martin Turnell (Translator), Joseph Frank (Introduction)

This is an informal collection of essays and speeches on the writers who in one way or another counted for Valéry in the shaping of his mind or in his affections and Descartes, Voltaire, Stendhal, Goethe, Villon, Nietzsche, Pascal, Proust, Huysmans, Pierre Louÿs, Nerval, Rilke, Bergson, and others. The volume presents, in an appendix, the first publication in English of any extensive selection from Valéry's personal notebooks--the Cahiers.

Originally published in 1968.

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407 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (October 30, 1871 - July 20, 1945 ) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher.

His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

Valéry is best known as a poet, and is sometimes considered to be the last of the French Symbolists. But he published fewer than a hundred poems, and none that drew much attention. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry entered an existential crisis, which made a big impact on his writing career. Around 1898, his writing activity even came to a near-standstill, due partly to the death of his mentor Stéphane Mallarmé and for nearly twenty years from that time on, Valery did not publish a single word until 1917, when he finally broke this 'Great Silence' with the publication of La Jeune Parque at forty-six years of age. This obscure but superbly musical masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming pairs, had taken him four years to complete, and immediately secured his fame. It is esteemed by many in France as the greatest French poem of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valéry's heroes are delved into here, forming a portrait of Valéry more than any other thinker. My favorites deal with Descartes, and The Return From Holland where he meditates on Degas theories while musing on the compression of time and space of the train, watching his own reflection in the window as the train speeds through the dark night: "I am leaving Holland... I suddenly have the feeling that Time is beginning; that Time has started to move; that the moving train has become a symbol of Time with all its relentlessness and its powers. It devours all visible things, shakes up all mental things, flings its massive body into a savage attack on the very face of the earth, sends bushes, houses, provinces scurrying to the devil; mows down trees, shoots through arches, dispatches telegraph poles, rudely flattening in its wake all the lines it crosses, canals, furrows, roads. It turns bridges into thunder, cows into projectiles, the pebbly surface of the roadbed into a curtain of machine-gun fire. Even one's ideas, continually overtaken, and dragged along as though stretched thin by the rush of images, undergo a change like a sound whose source flies past and away."

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

On Flaubert: "This conflict between the fundamental tenet of Realism—preoccupation with the commonplace—and the will of every writer to turn himself into an exceptional being, a specially endowed personality, drove the realists to an interest in the refinements of style. They created the artistic style. They lavished a care and industry, a subtlety and virtuosity, quite admirable in themselves, on the description of the most ordinary and sometimes the most trivial of objects; but they did so without realizing that in this way they were striving for something which lay outside of their principles, a truth of their own manufacture which was completely fictitious. In fact, they placed the crudest characters, who were incapable of taking the slightest interest in color or enjoying the shapes of things, in settings whose description required a painter's eye, a capacity for feeling which belongs to the sensitive individual who responds to precisely those things that escape the ordinary man."