UN HOMME D'ESPRIT

To discuss li tcraturc written in any tonguc other th:1 n onc's own is a

qucstionablc undcrtaking, but for an English-spcaking writer to
discuss a Frcnch writcr bordcrs on folly, for no two languages
could be more differcnt.
To di scovcr the essential and unique qualities of a language,
one must go to its poctry for it is thc poct, as Valry says, who
attempts to rcmove all thc noiscs fr om speech leaving only thc
sounds. Thc conventions of a poctry, its prosodic rules, the kinds
of verbal ornamcntation, rhymes, allitcrations, cte. , which it en-
couragcs or condenms can telJ us much about the way in which a
native ear draws this distinction. 1 vcry much doubt whethcr a
Frenchman can cvcr lcarn really to hear a linc of English versc-
think of Baudelaire and Poe- and I am perfectly certain that no
Englishman can learn to hcar French poetry correctly. Whcn J
hear a nati ve recite German or Spanish or ltalian poetry, I believe,
however mistakenly, that I hear more or less what he hears, but
if the reciter is French, I know I am hearing nothing of the sort.
l know, in an academic way, thc rules of Classical French verse,
but the knowledge docs not change my habit of hearing. For ex-
ample, to my ear, trained on English verse, the prevailing rhythm
of the French alcxandrine sounds like the anapaestic rhythm of
358
UN HOMME D'ESPRlT
The Assyrian carne down like a wolf on the fold
thus
1"e sufs bel!e, 1 ~ mo"rte;! , c:nnme ;;n r e ~ e 1 d ~ pi;,re
l know this is all wrong but it is what I hear. * Further, most
unfortunatcly, the nature of the English language forbids the use of
anapaests for tragic subjects. I am convinced that , when he goes
to hear Phedre al the Comdie Franc;aise, an Englishman, however
well he may know French, however much he admire thc cxtraor-
dinary varied and subtlc dclivcry of the cast, cannot help finding
Racine comic.
1 have known Valry's poern E/Jauche d'un serpent for over
twenty-fi ve years, reread it often with increasing admiration and,
as 1 thought, comprchcnsion, only to discovcr thc other day, on
reading a letter by the poet to Alain, that I had mi ssed the whole
point, namcly, that thc tone of the poem is burlcsque, that the
assonances and alliterations are deliberately exaggerated, and that
the serpent is in tended to sound li kc Bcckmesscr in Die M eister-
singer.
How could I, to whose ear all French verse sounds a bit
cxaggerated, hope to get this?
In prose, the difticulties of communication, though not so
formidable, are still serious enough. It is not just a matter of the
obvious translator's hcadaches, that there is no English equivalent
to esprit, for instancc, or that amour and /ove are not synonymous,
but of the entirely different rhetorical structure of French and
Engli sh prosc, so that an English rcader may cntirely ignore sorne
important effcct and be over-impressed by another.
In writing about Valry, therefore, l can only console myself
with thc thought that, if the Valry 1 admire is in largc mcasure a
creation of my own, the man who wrote- "the propcr object of
thought is that which does not exist"-would be the first to ap-
prcciate the joke.
Frorn the age of twenty, Valry made it his daily habit to risc
''' Another difficulty for my ear is the caesura; an Engl ish poet works j ust as
hard to vary its posit ion from line to line as a French poet works to keep it
in the same few places.
359
W.H. AUDEN
befare dawn and spend two or thrce hours studying the interior
maneuvers of hi s frcshly awoken mind. This hab.it became a
physiological need so that, if circumstance made him mi ss thcse
hours of introspection, he felt out of sorts for the rest of the day.
Thc observations he made during this period he wrote down in
notebooks, without a thought, he says, of their ever being rcad
by another. From time to time, however, he was pcrsuaded to
publish selections. The reluctance he expresses seems more prima-
donna-i sh than real.
1 never dreamt that one day 1 would have these fragments
printed as they stood. Dr. Ludo van Bogaert and M. Alex-
andre Stols had thc idea for me. They tempted me to do
so by pointing out the "intimatc" quality of this little ven-
ture, and by the typographical perfection of thc sample
pagcs they showed me.
Therc are times when onc has to give way to tbe pre-
posterous desires of lovers of the spontaneous and ideas
in the rough.
This does not ring quite truc, espccially when one finds him writ-
ing privatcly to a fri end ( Paul Souday) that he considers his notc-
books his real teuvre.
In any case, we may be vcry glad that he overcamc his reluc-
tance, for, takcn togcther, thcsc notes form one of the most interest-
ing and original documents of "the inner Iife" in existence.
Most of sucb documcnts are concerned with thc so-called
personal, that is, with the confession of si ns and vices, memories
of childhood, thc fcclings of tbe subject about God, the weather,
his mistrcss, gossip, self- reproach, and the ordinary motive for
producing them is a dcsire to demonstrate that their author is more
interesting, more unique, more human than other folks .
For the personal in this sense, Valry had nothing but con-
tempt. l t is in what they show, he believed, that mcn differ , what
they hide is always thc same. Confession, therefore, is like undress-
ing in public; cveryone knows wbat he is going to see. Further,
a man's secrets are often much more. apparent to others than to
himself.
UN HOMME D'ESPRIT
One of Gide's most obvious traits, for example, was his tight-
fistedness; after reading his journals, onc is curious to know if he
was aware of this.
A cultivation of memory for its own sake, as in Proust, was
incomprehensible to Valry, who prcfcrred to forgct everything in
his past that was just a picture, retaining only what he could
assimilate and convert into an element of his present mental life.
As for confiding one's sullcrings to papcr, he thought it responsible
for all the worst books.
Thc task which Valry set himsclf was to observe the human
mind in the action of thinking; the only mind that he can observe
is, of coursc, his own, but this is irrelevant. He is not a philosopher,
except in the etymological meaning of that word, nor a psychol-
ogist insofar as psychol ogy is concerned with hidden dcpths-
for Valry, humani ly is confincd to the skin and consciousness;
below that is physiological machinery-but an amazingly kcen and
rus observer of conscious processes of thinking. For this neither
a special talent, like a talent for mathematics, nor esoteric Jearning
is required, but only what might be called intellectual virtue,
which it s possiblc for every man to dcvclop, if he chooses.
For the culti vation of such an E1hique sporli ye, as Valry
once called it, one must devclop a vigilance that immcdiately
distinguishes between fietions and real psychic events, betwccn thc
seen, the thought, the reasoncd and the felt , and a prccision of
description that rcsists all temptation to fine literary effects. Hencc
Valry's repeated attacks on thc popular notion of "profundity."
A thought, he says, can properly be callcd profouncl only if it pro-
foundly changcs a question or a given situation, and such a thought
is never found at the bottom of the mind which contains only a
few stock proverbs. Most people call sornething profound, not
becausc it is near some important truth but because it is distant
from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to thc eye, silence
to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is. Ths kind of
profundity is a literary effect, which can be calculated like any
other literary effect, and usually deplorable. For Valry, Pascal's
famous remark about the silence of the eterna) spaccs is a cl assic
instance of literary vanily passing itsclf off as observation. If
Pascal was genuinely interested in stating a truth, thcn why, Valry
W.H. AUDEN
maliciously asks, did he not also writc: "The intermittent hubbub
in the small corners whcre we li ve reassures us."
After reading his notebooks, we know no more about Valry
as a person than bcfore- we are not told, for cxample, that he
suffered from depressions-he has only shown us that he was a
good observer and that he expressed bis observations in precise
language. To judgc if his observations are true or false, we have
only to repeat the experiment on ourselves. For instance, he says
that it is impossible consciously to put a distance between onesclf
and an object without turning round to sce if onc is succeeding.
I try, and I find that Valry is right.
Valry's atti tude to life is more consistent than he admits, and
bcgins with a conviction of thc essential inconsistcncy of the mind
and the need to react against it. The following three notes might
be taken as mottoes for all his work.
Cognition reigns but does not rule.
Sometimcs I think; and somctimes I am.
I invoke no inspiration except that element of chance, which
is common to every mind; then comes an unremitting toil,
which wars against this element of chance.
Yalry's observations cover a wide rangc of subjccts. As one might
expect, the least interesting, thc ones in which he sounds lcast likc
Valry and most like just one more French writer of mordant
aphorisms, are those concerned with !ove, self-love, good, and evil.
He has extremcly intcresting things to say about our conscious-
ness of our bodies, about those curious psycho-physical expres-
sions, laughing, crying, and blushing, about the physical behavior
of people when they are concentrating on a mental problem. He
is excellent on drcams-he observes, for instance, that in dreams
there is "practically no present tense." But for poets, naturally,
and for many others too, J believe, his most valuable contributions
are his remarks on the art of poetry. A critic who docs not himself
write poctry may be an admirable judge of what is good and bad,
but he cannot have a first-hand knowledge of how poetry is written,
so that not infrequently he criticizes, favorably or unfavorably,
sorne poem for achieving or failing to achieve sornething that thc
UN HOMME D'ESPRIT
poet was not intcrested in doing. Many poets have written defenses
of poetry against charges that it is untruc or imrnoral, but sur-
prisingly few have told us how they wrote. There are two reasons
for this: the poets are more interested in writing more poems and,
lcss laudably, they, like lawyers and doctors, have a snobbish
reluctance to show the laity the secrets of their mystcry. Behnd
this snobbcry, of coursc, les the fear that, if the general public
knew what goes on, that a poem is not sheer logomancy, for
instancc, or that an intensely cxpressive love poem does not neces-
sarily presuppose a poet intcnsely in love, that public would lose
even thc little respect for poets that ir has.
lt is unfortunate that onc of Valry's few predecessors, Poe,
should have used as his case history of composition a poem, "The
Raven," which does st rikc the readcr as "contrived" in a bad way,
which means that it is not cont ri vecl cnough. The form Poe em-
ployed for the poem, which demands many fcminine rhyrnes, has
in English a frivolous cffect out of key with thc subject. A readcr,
who wishes to cling to a more magical view of the poetic process,
can fine! reasons to confinn his illusion. Valry's achievements as a
poet makc his critica! doctrines harder to wish away. His state-
mcnts are obviously intendcd to be polemical. He dislikcs two
kinds of wr.iters, thosc who try to impress with sonorous or violent
vagueness, and naturalistic writers who would simply record what
thc camera sees or their strearn of accidental thoughts. For Valry,
all loud and violent writing is comic, Jike a man alone in a room,
playing a trombone. Whcn onc reads Carlyle, for instance, one gets
the irnpression that he had persuaclcd himself that it takes more
effort, more work, to write fortissimo than piano, or universe than
garden.
Of the Zola school of naturalism Valry disposes very neatly,
by asking what kinds of scents pcrfumers would bottle if they
adopted this aesthet ic.
For Yalry, a poem ought to be a festival of the intellect, that
is, a game, but a solernn, ordered, and significant game, and a
poet is sorneonc to whorn arbitrary difficulti es suggest ideas. It is
thc glory of poetry that the lack of a single word can ruin every-
thing, that the poet cannot continuc until he discovers a word
say, in two syllables, containing P or F, synonymous with b r e a k ~
W.H. AUDEN
ing-up, yet not too uncommon. The formal restrictions of poetry
teach us that the thoughts which arise from our needs, feclings,
and expcricnces are on!y a small part of the thoughts of which we
are capable. In any pocm sorne Iines were "given" the poet, which
he then tried to perfect, and others which he had to calculate and
at the same time make them sound as "natural" as possible. It is
more becoming in a poct to talk of versification than of mysterious
voices, and his genius should be so well hidden in his talent that
the rcadcr attributes to his art what comes from his nature.
Needless to say, Va!ry found very little in the French poctry
of his age which seemed to him anythng more than a worship of
chance and novelty, and concluded that poetry was a freak sur-
viva!, that no one today would be capable of arriving at the notion
of verse if it werc not already there.
In his general principies 1 am convinccd that Valry is right
past all possibility of discussion, but I cannot help wondering if
l should also agree in daily practicc as much as 1 do, if I were a
Frenchman trying to write French poetry. For polemical reasons,
probably, Valry overstresses, T think, thc arbtrariness of poetic
formal restrctions, and ovcrdramatizes the opposition between
thcm and the "Natural." lf they really were pure!y arbitrary, thcn
the prosodies of differcnt languages would be interchangeable,
and the experience which evcry poct has had, of being unable to
get on wth a poem becausc he was trying to use the "wrong"
form for this particular poem until, havng found the rght form,
the natural form, composition proceeded freely, would be un-
known. Whle it s true that nothing which is without effort and
attention is likely to be of much val ue, the reverse proposition s
not true: it would take an immense cffort, for example, to write
half a dozcn rhopalic hexameters in E nglish, but it is virtually
certain that the result would have no poetic merit.
To an English poet, French poetry seems to suffer from a lack
of formal variet y, as did E nglish poetry between 1680 and q8o.
Any form, be it the French alexandrine or the English heroic
couplct, however admirable a vchicle originally, tends to exhaust
its possibilities in the hands of two or three masters, and their
successors must either find quite dfferent forms or be doomed to
rcmain epigoni. If it is rare to find a modern French poem that
UN HOMME D'ESPRIT
. . . . not forget that Valry
1s. not wntten m verse ( and_ one m_ust osie brute), while
h1mself wrote qutte a lot of what he Ctllled P
1
. h oetrv the lack
l n Eng s P - '
formal poems are stlll common In m oc CI , be partly
. f F h verse
of resilience in the offical forms
0
rene
1
. h eems an anar-
. h p. eh Eng IS s
responsible. * By companson ":
1
t rcn ' if 't stimulates thc
chic amateur Janguage, but tlus very anarchy, d. J . g structures.
. . . t new an JVtn
propcr revolt aganst 1t, can gtve nse
0
d
1
' ' e finished bis
, . . t ' 11 won er Il'
Would Valcry I somct1mes patno tea Y ' f . tongue
' . . . esourccs o ow '
poctic career so soon if he had had thc vust
1
. Hables
. . . .
1
h
1
ts common sy '
with all the prosodic possthilitics w 11c
permit, to play with'> t thc notebooks.
But thcn, of coursc, we mght not havc go . r)lt well h a ve
1
l b1nner m1g
It is fitting that the man w 10se cnuca ' . ' tten pas
h 1 :1 have wn '
carried thc device Vade retro, Musa, s ou e r
1
vocatons to
. f
1
t beaut1 u 111 '
enfants de mon sllence, one o t le mos M
1
)!TI he somc-
.
1
d use w 1c
the Muse in any language. H1s wors nppe , ' f poetry or, if
. t 1 . s thc M use o . .
times called Laura, was no , perla p., . . h . 1 sclf-rcnewal
M
. f ISig t ano .
so, only accdcntally, but the use o 11
whom he daily expected in the dawn hours .
Mv mind thnks of my mind,
M y past is forcgn to me,
My name surprises me,
M y body is a pure idea.
What I was is with all other selves .
And I am not even what I am gmng
to be.
. . an C1ive but small satis-
Aside from the money, htcrary succcss e, o h t docs literary
. For w. a
fact10n to an author, e ven to hts vanity h ha ve not read
success mean? To be condemncd by pcrsons V:d o f t llent Therc
. . , . . . dcVOI O '
h1s works and to be ImLI<lted by pcrsons h nning but the
. J tl at 'lre wort WI
are only two kmds of Iterary g ory
1
' . t have becn the
writer who wins eithcr wll never know. One IS
0
ork sorne oreat
1

0
whose w o
wri ter, perhaps a quite minor one,
t ste is more indulgent
* About some things it would seem that French .a , l'ne J'aime la maeste
English. Thus Valry, whil.e admitting that De. because .of its
des soufirances humaines ts nonsense, allows Jt,
0
way with a similar hne.
beautiful sound. An Enghsh poet could never get a
W.H. AUDEN
master gcnerations later finds an essential clue for solving some
problem; the othcr is to bccomc for someonc clsc an example of
the dedicated lifc,
being secretly invoked, pictured, and placed by a stranger
in an inner sanctum of bis thoughts, so as to serve him as
a witness, a judge, a father, and a hallowed mentor.
lt was this role, rather than that of a literary nfluence, which
Mallarm playcd in Valry's life, and I can vouch for at least one
life in which Valry does likewise. Whcnever 1 am more than
usually tormcnted by one of those horrid mental imps, Contradic-
tion, Obstination, lmitation, Lapsus, Brouillamini, Fange-d' Ame,
whenever I fed myself in danger of bccoming un homme srieux,
it is on Valry, un homme d'esprit if ever there was one, more
often than on any other poet, I believe, that I call for aid.
ONE OF THE FAMILY
I never enjoy baving to find fault with a book, and when the
author s someone I have met and like, 1 hate it. Lord David
Cecil posscsses all the qualifications for wrting a first-class biog-
raphy of Max Beerbohm-an understanding )ove of bis hero,
the industry and scholarship to insure that tbe facts are both cor-
rect and complete- but his Max is not nearly so good a book as it
could have been. What he has published should, 1 feel, havc been
his first draft, wbich he should then have spent anotber six months
condensing to at least half its present volume. As it is, he has given
us a ponderous, repetitious Victorian tome of four hundred and
ninety-six densely printed pages. So expansive a commemoration
is singularly unsuited to the man who once counscled a prospective
biographer thus :
My gifts are small. I've used tbem very well and dis-
creetly, never straining them; and the rcsult is that I've
made a charming Jittle reputaton. But this reputation is a
frail plant. Don't over-attend to it, gardener Lynch! Don't
drench it and deluge it! The contents of a quite small water-
ing-can will be quite enough. This I take to be superfiuous
counsel. 1 find much reassurance and comfort in your
phrase, "a little book." Oh, keep it little!--in due propor-
tion to its theme.
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