An Anthology [antikvár]

Introduction It was Monsieur Teste, the arch cynic, who knew well that the mind which consents to fame is a mind flawed. Valéry's own ambition at twenty, as at forty, was to avoid this error, to safeguard his secrets, to choose anonymity. He was the bourgeois from the provinces leading a life without events and conforming in exterior things to the general face of his age ; not for him the voyages to the East, the various wanderings of a Claudel or a Gide. At the same time he sought to inhabit an island of the spirit of which he was the Robinson, a domain his alone that he could codify and control. "My desire was for life as simple, and for thought as complex, as possible," he wrote; again: "Events are the froth of things, but my true interest is the sea." One hardly needs to recall the major shift in his position shortly prior to, and during, the First World War; how, by a singular concourse of circumstances—his revision of adolescent verse at Gide's urging, his rediscovery of Racine and Mallarmé—he became engrossed in the composition of a poem that he intended to be 30 to 40 lines in length but expanded into the 512 alexandrines of La Jeune Parque. Its publication in April 1917, when he was forty-five, marked the end of his so-called silence : not a period in which he abandoned writing—far from it—but one in which he eschewed publication, and was appreciated by only a handful of readers as the erstwhile poet, by fewer still as the