The Valsaintes Poems of Yves Bonnefoy

The Valsaintes Poems of Yves Bonnefoy Emily Grosholz THE SHADOW OF AN OLD HOUSE falls across the poems in Yves Bonnefoy's Pierre écrite (1965), Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) and Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987). ' The house itself is never the topic of the poems, and is only fleetingly described in some of its details now and then. In general, the diction of Bonnefoy's poetry is quite abstract, and he pointedly excludes most references to particular places, occasions, or people. Yet the house is there, indefinite but inescapable, and at some level it must haunt the reader. Certainly it has haunted this reader, although I had been reading Bonnefoy's poetry for about a decade before the house occurred to me. When I began to discern the "ghostly demarcations" it lent to the poetry, the poetry changed and deepened in meaning. And indeed, Bonnefoy has written, "Pas un mot depuis Pierre écrite ne serait le même dans ces livres, en fait ils n'existeraient pas, j'aurais écrit tout autre chose, je ne sais quoi, s'il n'y avait un Valsaintes" (private letter). Yves and Lucie Bonnefoy arrived at the old house in Valsaintes in the summer of 1963. Like all Parisians, they had wished for a house in the country, and finally a bit of extra grant money allowed them to purchase the partly intact, partly ruinous house that the inhabitants of the nearby village Valsaintes called the abbey or château de Bolinette or Boulinette. The history of the house is obscure, but it seems to have served as a summer retreat for the monks of an abbey in a larger town, and at some point in the more recent past its chapel served as a sheepfold. Whatever the details, its past is chequered. For about a decade, the house provided the Bonnefoys with a refuge and solace. Part of a tiny settlement on the top of a rise overlooking steeply craggy, forested hills and valleys, the abbaye de Bolinette is protected from the mainstream of modern life. The region of HauteProvence in which it is located, west of the river Durance and the town of Manosque (about an hour north of Aix-en-Provence), is quite empty, partly because the terrain is so rugged, and partly because the region has been depopulated by the flight of the region's rural poor to the big cities. Thus, the Valsaintes poems in Pierre écrite and Dans le leurre du seuil are situated (in a sense that needs to be examined more closely) within the 52 Fall 1996 Grosholz house; they were written by the poet when he was still truly its inhabitant, at least during the periods when he and his wife could escape from Paris. Precisely for that reason, the poems speak of the house very little; it was the condition for the possibility of their existence, not their theme. But ownership of the house proved to be a mixed blessing. Trying to care for a house in which one is not living continuously is always difficult , but the house at Valsaintes presented special problems. First, parts of it were truly in a state of ruin. The house was at first almost uninhabitable , without a functioning kitchen or other amenities. And certain of the walls and roofs threatened to collapse. Second, it was difficult and expensive to find anyone in the region willing to carry out repairs, and then the labor, when secured, was intermittent and unreliable. Third, the neighbors, peasants who probably rather enjoyed quarreling with cityfolk, invented an endless stream of petty quarrels, about right of way, contiguous buildings, access to water, and so forth. These practical difficulties seemed trivial at first, but as they accumulated year after year they began to strangle the possibility of the Bonnefoys ' life in Valsaintes. The work of reconstruction seemed endless, and the disputes irresolvable. These anxieties color the poems in Dans Ie leurre du seuil. As Bonnefoy writes, that book expresses "le souci créé par le lieu, devenu pour moi métaphore de tout désir, de toute illusion, de toute réflexion, de tout essai de lucidité, de sagesse" (private letter...