Always demand proof, proof is the elementary courtesy that is anyone’s due.
—Valéry, Monsieur Teste
The name Paul Valéry carries its own music. For those who know something of what lies behind it, the music deepens, is suggestive, and always richly complex. (“Complex,” said Ravel, about his own artistic aims, “never complicated.”) To know Valéry only from his melodious but difficult poems—“Le Cimitière marin,” “La Jeune Parque,” and others—turns out to be to know him scarcely at all. “Poetry,” he wrote, “has never been a goal for me—more an instrument, an exercise, and its character derives from this—an artifice—product of will.” Poetry provided him with fame, but he found his real intellectual stimulation elsewhere.
Today, Valéry is perhaps best known for his aphoristic remarks, inevitably both brilliant and running against received opinion. Glimpse Valéry’s name on the page and one knows something immensely clarifying, possibly life-altering, awaits. “Everything changes but the avant-garde” is one example. “The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be” is another. “History is the science of things which do not repeat themselves” is a third. Without too much effort, one could record three or four hundred Valéryan remarks of equal charm and intellectual provocation.
“Remarks are not literature,” Gertrude Stein is supposed to have said to Ernest Hemingway. She was wrong; all depends on the quality of the remarks. But then Stein’s stricture would not much have bothered Paul Valéry, who did not think “literature” a purely honorific
