Cultural Amnesia (118 page)

The notion that there is something spontaneous about an actor who tramples Shakespeare’s grammar and syntax could
have arisen only from the assumption that Shakespeare himself thought them peripheral
to expression. There could be no greater mistake. An individual style can emerge only
from firmly grasped universal principles, even if great writers themselves sometimes try to convince us of the opposite. Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that
there was no correctness this side of originality. But he would never have countenanced the suggestion that there could be any originality without a preliminary grammar. The only question is
about the best way of acquiring it: by prescription or by example? Shakespeare probably learned it at school. Stratford Grammar School certainly taught him the parts of speech: we know that from
the way he makes Jack Cade threaten death to anyone who claims to know the difference between a verb and a noun. But Shakespeare might equally have learned it from his regular reading of the
current English translations of Plutarch and Montaigne, although he would have needed an unusual capacity to transform passive into active knowledge. In the light of what else he could do, there
is no reason not to grant him that, but a more likely explanation is that he mastered the rudiments in the classroom and then rapidly built on them through what he read: internal evidence from
the plays and poems suggests a working knowledge of at least three languages.

Writers don’t read just for the story: they read for the way the story is written, and the way the
sentences are put together is the information that sticks. It helps, however, to have been taught in the first place what a sentence is: something that conveys information only by the rules it
keeps. Grammar is a mechanism for meaning one thing at a time. Without it, you can’t even manage to be deliberately ambiguous, although to be ambiguous by accident is a result all too
easily attained.

Paul Valéry

Mario Vargas Llosa

PAUL VALÉRY

Ambroise-Paul Valéry (1871–1945) presents many parallels with T. S. Eliot, especially
in the proportions of his output. As with Eliot, there is comparatively little work in verse, but it is all of the very highest quality. Again as with Eliot, there is a large amount of
ancillary prose, much of it ranking high among the critical work being done at the time. Where Valéry departs sharply from Eliot is in the amount of prose that never saw the light.
From 1894 onward, Valéry kept a notebook, and by the time of his death there were 287 volumes of it. Even in French it has been published only in facsimile. Such semi-secret activity
was typical of him. By the age of twenty he was already recognized as a promising poet but he repudiated the ambition and stayed almost silent for a full two decades. He was forty when he was
persuaded to publish his early poems, a task he undertook only on the understanding that he would add a new, prefatory poem. This took him five years to write. Published separately in 1917,
La Jeune Parque
, together with a succeeding slim volume
Charmes
, worked to establish him as the most prominent
French poet of his time. The highlight poem of
Charmes,
called “
Le Cimetière marin
,” is
recognized by French-reading poets all over the world as the untranslatable
modern miracle of their craft. (It should be said that the Irish poet Derek Mahon has made a
stunningly good shot at rendering its music into English.) Even without publishing the notebooks, Valéry still had a full eighteen volumes of prose to give the world, and scattered
among them are some of the best essays written in his time. With solid mathematical training to back up his humanist erudition, he could take almost anything for a subject, but he was
especially good at wrting about the arts: the essay on Leonardo, and the little book on Degas, are models of the genre. Malcolm Cowley translated some of his best early essays in 1926, and
retranslated those, as well as translating some later ones, in 1958. Valéry was one of those rare poets who could write appreciative technical criticism. Kingsley Amis, an excellent
technical critic with an unfoolable ear for diction, was at his best when proving that his subject poet was overrated. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were at their best when praising each
other. Ezra Pound could be informative about Browning’s language but not without persuading you that his own was demented. Valéry kept a perfect sanity on that subject as on any
other. The homage paid to Valéry by other writers is only fitting, because nobody could quite equal him at writing about the arts out of deep and unenvious love. He knew his notebooks
were a doomed venture (“There sleeps the labour of my best years”) but he also knew that the doomed venture helped to discipline his unequalled powers of exposition. Thankfully he
was too old for the Occupation to catch him in any seriously compromising position, although he might have done better not to publish even once in the
Nouvelle
Revue Française
under the editorship of Drieu la Rochelle. If there is an objection to be made to him, it is a milder version of the objection we make to Rilke: that the
dedication to art verges on preciosity. Valéry, however, gives a better sense than Rilke of other artists than himself being fully alive. There was a generosity to him which his nation
returned in kind, as if his capacity for appreciation were in itself a national treasure. General de Gaulle came to his funeral.

Sometimes something wants to be said, sometimes a way of saying
wants to be used.

—PAUL VALÉRY,
Poésie et pensée abstraite
, FROM
Modern French Poets on
Poetry
, P. 216

T
HE SECOND
PART
of this statement is the striking one. It makes explicit a trade secret that most poets would prefer were kept under wraps. The English editor and anthologist Geoffrey Grigson once
said, with typical acerbity, that he didn’t like “notebook poets,” and that he could always tell when a poet had been writing down phrases and saving them up for future use.
Though it reminds you of Malcolm Muggeridge’s proclaimed ability to tell which women were on the pill by the lack of light in their eyes, Grigson’s complaint is a good polemical
point, but its epistemology is questionable: if the job was well done, how could he tell? In my own experience, a phrase will wait decades for a poem to form around it. Larkin kept one of his
most beautiful ideas (“dead leaves desert in thousands”) for thirty years and never completed a poem into which it would fit: strong evidence, if negative, of how his mind worked. He
found ways of saying things and the ways led to poems. For all good poets, something like that process happens. It is probably a stroke of luck, however, that the process is becoming harder to
study. When poets still had worksheets, a scholar could presume to trace the course of the seed phrase to the full blooms. I can’t believe that any poet, no matter how dedicated a techno
nerd, could compose entirely on a machine, but it is a fact that there will be fewer worksheets to study in the future: most of the
pentimenti
will be
deleted into cyber limbo.

One benefit of this will be that scholars will jump to fewer conclusions. A poem’s binding energy
can be supplied by its last retouchings. Australia’s first great modern poet, Kenneth Slessor, would carry his next-to-final draft of a poem with him for weeks on end—a draft in which
all the alternatives for words on which he had not decided appeared above and below it, like a club sandwich. Luckily no scholar ever got his hands on one of these documents, or whole speculative
books would have been written on why and how he made his choices. In reality, the final choices are infinite and begin at the beginning. Sometimes the phrase that started it
all is struck out at the finish, having done its work in a way that is beyond examination even by the creator. Gianfranco Contini loved the study of variants, but he was a qualified philologist,
and his critical conclusions would be pale without their scientific content. Croce was probably overstating the case when he called variants
cartaccia
(waste paper), but he had a point. The critic does well to speculate about how a poet might have an idea and look for a way to say it. But the critic is on shaky ground when he intrudes on the
real mystery, which happens when the poet thinks of a way of saying something and starts looking for a larger meaning to which it might contribute. There is nothing mysterious about the order of
events: nobody is amazed that a composer thinks of a fragment of a melody, or of a harmony, before he thinks of a structure, and it would not be stunning if we were somehow to be told that
Michelangelo had the idea of God touching Adam’s fingertip long before Julius II had the idea of repainting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But there is a mystery, and an insoluble one,
to how the smaller unit of inspiration sets off in search of the larger one that will incorporate it. Artists spend a lot of time waiting for that to happen: while they wait they must trust to
luck; and it is no wonder that some of them get very nervous, and fall into bad habits. Until now, what the nervous poet did in his notebook—changing a word, changing it back
again—was available to the scholar. In the cyber age there will be no such archives of first and second thoughts, unless, as some strangely confident techno freaks assure us, nothing ever
really
gets deleted, and it is all still there somewhere. In which case, Valéry’s idea will never cease to be a departure point for
speculation.

With the artist, it happens—this is in the most favourable
case—that his internal urge to produce gives him, all at once and without a break between them, the impulse, the immediate exterior aim and the technical means to reach it. Thus there
is established, in general, a regime of execution. . . .

—PAUL VALÉRY,
Introduction à la poétique
, P. 58

But trying to translate this is hopeless:
un
régime d’exécution
sounds like a firing squad, when what he means is a climate of possibility, a feeling on the artist’s part that he knows what he wants to do
and is already getting it done, simply by letting the general shape or tone of the project form unbidden in his head. I have heard poets call it “being inside the poem” and some of
them even claim, plausibly, that it alters their rate of breathing. It can certainly alter their rate of smoking. In my own case, for what the news is worth, when a poem is completing
itself—when the new ship on the slipway is fitting itself out, when every part insists on relating itself to every other part, and when nothing must be allowed to interrupt—I actually
feel as if I am suffering from sunburn. The virtue of Valéry’s brief treatise is that it makes you feel less absurd for having been so caught up. He gets at the soul of the subject
through the body of the poet. He must be talking about the body because he is not talking about the conscious mind. “
Tout ce que nous pouvons définir
se distingue aussitôt de l’esprit producteur et s’y oppose.
” (Anything we can define distinguishes itself instantly from the productive spirit and opposes it; p.
39.) In other words, the artist gets into a clever but clueless state where no amount of science can meet the case.

My copy of the little book
Introduction à la poétique
—a flat,
floppy and not very glorious-looking glorified pamphlet by Gallimard—is from the tenth edition, published in 1938, on the eve of the nightmare. I bought it in Cambridge in 1967. It was one
of the first books in French I ever read to the end. It helped that the text was very short. But even as I stumbled through with the dictionary ever present, I could tell that I was on to
something. I underlined things, put stars in the margin, added knowing comments about the provenance of Valéry’s ideas (“Croce was here!”). It was a book I loved, and I
love it still. The author of one of the great modern poems, “
Le Cimetière marin
”—its play of tones is the nearest thing to a Degas
pastel wired for sound—Valéry had generously given the succeeding generations the most valuable kind of encouragement, by saying that he had no real idea of how he did it. Better
than that, he said that having no real idea of how to do it was the only way to do it. (In our own time, Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what
he’s doing.) “One conceives, for example,” Valéry says
on page 27, “that a poet might legitimately fear altering his original virtues—his
immediate power of composition—if he were to analyse them.” It was a rationale for the irrational. He didn’t mean that just getting yourself into a vague state would produce a
poem, in the same way that, in the Impressionist era, untalented painters thought that if they let their eyes go out of focus and painted what they saw, they would produce Impressionist
paintings. But he did mean that the state of being creative would always feel beyond analysis. After that, I learned to trust in my sunburn, and took its absence as a sign that the poem was not
yet finished after all, no matter how long I had worked on it.