In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates famously remarks that since trees don’t have opinions, they cannot teach him nearly as much as the men who live in his city. For Socrates, the examined life is necessarily social; therefore, it must be lived in the polis. The price he paid for this was his execution, after which the Platonists retreated into the Academy. In the Western tradition, philosophy has gone through alternating periods of engagement and withdrawal from public life. After the Enlightenment, the examined life seemed to call once again for isolation (for the Romantics, one could learn a great deal from trees). Life in a newly urbanized environment appeared hostile to contemplative tranquility, the opinions of others a vulgar distraction. In no other place might a young poet-intellectual have felt this more profoundly than in a city like Paris at the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1892, the young Paul Valéry, recently arrived in Paris, made the decision to abandon poetry and devote himself to the life of the mind. A generation before, Rimbaud had also made the decision to abandon poetry, though in favor of mercantile adventure. And a generation before that, Charles Baudelaire had been prosecuted following the publication of Les Fleurs du mal for its “outrage aux bonnes mœurs” (“offense to public morals”), which led to the suppression of his work. Needless to say, for the symbolistes, of whom Valéry was a devotee, resentment toward the public was par for the course, since the public in turn remained hostile to them and their work. In the eyes of those poets, life during the Belle Époque was characterized not only by peace and economic prosperity but also by decadence, tedium, hypocrisy, and ennui.

According to his biographer, Benoît Peeters, while Valéry was studying law in Montpellier, he was already proclaiming his desire to live “anywhere out of the world” and suggesting that “there’s nothing outside thought, outside the magical constructs of the mind.” He was also fantasizing about poetry written by “a dreamer who would at the same time be a judicious architect, a sagacious algebraist, an infallible calculator.” Valéry confided these thoughts to his friend in Paris, Pierre Louÿs, who was also a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé, the enigmatic poet who was regarded by those around him as both genius and prophet. Louÿs showed Mallarmé a copy of one of Valéry’s sonnets. Mallarmé wrote back deferentially, complementing Valéry for his “gift of subtle analogy, with the right music.”

Valéry would later write that those early days were marked by a “devotion to pure art.” He and his fellow travelers believed that “a sort of religion might be born, whose essence would have been the poetic emotion.” They worshiped Mallarmé, who was already known and admired in literary circles, despite being panned by some critics for the perceived difficulty of his work. Valéry described Mallarmé’s poems as “crystal systems” and sought to create poetry of similar abstract perfection—poetry that engaged the intellect through mystifying imagery. Valéry’s early poetry, collected and published later in 1920 under the title Album des vers anciens (Album of Early Verse), strains after all kinds of occluded meanings. His ideal reader was “an individual made elect by the intellectual effort of which he was capable.” One of the principles of symbolism, he maintained, was a “resistance to the facile.” He wished to create a new kind of hermetic knowledge, possessed only by the poets themselves and a select group of disciples willing to do the hard work required to gain access. But rigorous aesthetics also drove Valéry away from poetry almost as soon as he had begun.

By the time he became personally acquainted with Mallarmé, he was already losing his interest in literature: “Reading and writing were becoming dull work for me…. The study of myself for its own sake, the comprehension of that attention itself and the desire to trace clearly for myself the nature of my own existence, almost never abandoned me.” Poetry ultimately proved too narrow a form to accommodate the scope of his investigations. It was also somewhat corrupted by having to engage the public, with its mandate to instruct and entertain. Valéry’s abandonment of poetry wasn’t so much a choice as a donné, which came to him during a stormy night in Genoa in 1892: “A frightful night…my whole fate being played out in my head…between me and me.” He would later liken the experience to a night Descartes had in 1619, when he had a series of vivid dreams that revealed to him a whole new philosophy of mind.

Out of this experience came a little book, composed of fragments, about a very Cartesian character named Monsieur Teste. Teste, whose name means “head” in old French (but is also synonymous with “witness,” “spectator,” and “testicle”), is a man who could do without almost everything. He is a man with “no opinions” and “no interests,” who never laughs or says goodbye, who addresses his wife as “Being” or “Thing,” the kind of individual who “could not continue in reality for more than a few quarters of an hour.” Madame Teste, who barely knows her husband, describes him as “a mystic without God.” He is a brain-in-a-vat, a mind contemplating itself in full liberal autonomy. But in the end, Monsieur Teste eludes description, for he is barely there at all.

In some ways, Teste anticipates the characters we encounter in German literature in the 1920s and ’30s. He is reminiscent of Musil’s Man Without Qualities, or Musil himself, who, according to Elias Canetti, was so withdrawn from daily life that he never picked up a check or booked a ticket because he didn’t know how. He also bears a resemblance to Canetti’s own Dr. Kien from Auto-da-Fé, who barricades himself in his Viennese flat, surrounded by thousands of obscure texts (fittingly, the first section of Canetti’s novel is titled “A Head Without a World”). We can also see something of him in Thomas Mann’s characters in The Magic Mountain, who wax philosophical in splendid isolation.

But Monsieur Teste is foremost a projection of Valéry’s own consciousness, his desire to find a home in the crystalline heights and rarefied air of pure intellect. In the book’s preface, Valéry tells us: “I made it a rule to hold secretly as null or contemptible all the opinions and habits of mind that arise from living with others and from our external relations with other people, which vanish in voluntary solitude.” Teste, he wrote, was born “from a recent memory of such states of mind.” He represents the Cartesian dream: to live alone with the little homunculus in the head.

Here, genius is not a gift but something that can be achieved through esoteric activity. “Genius is a habit which certain people acquire.” But one certainly can’t say this about the man who, after Mallarmé, had the greatest impact on Valéry’s intellectual life—Leonardo da Vinci. Valéry’s admiration for da Vinci reveals a longing for a premodern intellect, or a premodern world, in which there was no distinction between mathematics and art. It is a wish to return to a world in which there is a pre-established harmony, where knowledge of physics could enhance poetry, just as da Vinci’s investigations into linear perspective led him to more lifelike painting. Valéry seems to have regarded his investigations into his own mind as being similarly foundational. He wanted to drill down into the principles that make something like aesthetic expression possible in the first place.

“I came to believe,” one of the narrators tells us, that “Monsieur Teste had managed to discover laws of the mind.” But what exactly that means is never made clear. In Monsieur Teste, as in much of Valéry’s work, we don’t encounter ideas so much as gestures toward the abstract notion of the intellect—as if it were vulgar to reduce one’s ideas by having to explain them. Indeed, Valéry seemed less interested in ideas than in monitoring consciousness itself, honing the tools of attention, “supervising the mechanism” (as he phrases it) that does the thinking. Reaching the bottom of consciousness and getting to the root of true aesthetic experience is a process that must be conducted in a state of wordless contemplation. This means a necessary distrust of language. (“The act of writing always requires a certain ‘sacrifice of intellect.’”) “I mistrust all words,” a friend writes to Teste in a letter, “for even the slightest contemplation shows the absurdity of trusting them.” This anticipates Wittgenstein’s “Whereof we cannot speak we must pass over in silence” and the anxious distrust of language that Susan Sontag would later dub “the aesthetics of silence.”

What exactly Valéry did during his twenty-year absence from poetry is anyone’s guess. He worked for the Ministry of War, a job that almost certainly did nothing for his intellect. He made forays into probability theory and thermodynamics. According to Peeters, the writing that Valéry did in his notebooks was often so elliptical that he himself couldn’t understand it when he reread it. The longest published work he produced during this time was his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1894). Like most of the prose works, it is slow going: Valéry chews much more than he bites off. In prose as in poetry, Valéry had a certain “disgust with ease.” “[R]esults in general,” he says in his preface to Teste, “mattered much less to me than the energy of their worker.” There’s a virtue to making one’s work look easy, but always with Valéry we get the sense that he’s committed to making it look hard. He’ll cross an ocean just to “unload a ponderous platitude,” as Edmund Wilson said of him.

At barely fifty pages, Monsieur Teste feels like unfinished business. A new translation by Charlotte Mandell, published last December by New York Review Books, contains a collection of later fragments Valéry had intended to incorporate into a revised version of the text. To the extent that Teste can be understood as a projection of Valéry’s own psyche, he personifies the impossibility of Valéry’s own ambitions to be “a witness who is pure intellect.” What it amounts to in practice is an act of vanity: an embrace of obscurity and incoherence, a retreat into a world in which all ideas remain necessarily nebulous. These are the epistemic instincts not of a da Vinci, but of a modern poet, the very thing Valéry tried to insist he was not.

Valéry labored to establish an Epicurean Garden of the worst kind—one free of sociality, wine, poetry—and the creation of Teste shows, wittingly or unwittingly, that such tranquility is cold comfort indeed. Egged on by André Gide, Valéry was eventually persuaded to return to poetry. In 1917, he published his first book of verse in decades, La jeune Parque (The Young Fate). It was a great success and immediately established him as France’s premier poet, so much so that his name would become almost synonymous with French poetry. T. S. Eliot would later say that it was Valéry “who will for posterity remain the representative poet, the symbol of the poet, of the first half of the twentieth century.” When he died in 1945, a year after a demoralized France had freed itself from the humiliation of Nazi occupation, Valéry was given a state funeral with full honors. One wonders how he would have taken this, given that he seemed to regard his most famous and fully achieved poetic work as unworthy of his talent and intellectual ambition. 

Monsieur Teste
Paul Valéry
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
New York Review Books
$15.95 | 104 pp.