Proust's Latin Americans

3 José-Maria de Heredia: A Cuban Conquistador

3 José-Maria de Heredia A Cuban Conquistador As a young man seeking to enter the literary world, Proust looked up to two figures as models for the type of writer he hoped to become. The first was Robert de Montesquiou. The second was José-Maria de Heredia (1842– 1905), a Cuban-born poet who became the first Latin American to enter the Académie française (figs 3.1–3.3). If Montesquiou was the prototype of the literary dandy, Heredia was a more sober type: a wealthy, elegant poet who hosted a weekly salon frequented by poets, novelists, and artists. He was born on a coffee plantation near Santiago de Cuba in 1842 to a French mother and a Cuban father who traced his ancestry to the first Spanish settlers of the Americas. He was named after an illustrious cousin on his father’s side, the poet José María Heredia y Heredia (1803–1839), the author of one of the masterpieces of Cuban literature, the “Ode to Niagara.” JoséMaria de Heredia (who always spelled his name the French way, using a hyphen between his first and middle name and dropping the accent in “María”) grew up bilingual, and at age nine he was sent to boarding school in France. At seventeen he returned to Cuba, but he had trouble adapting to life there and moved back to Paris in 1861, never to return to his native country. In Paris, Heredia settled into a comfortable, carefree life, supported by a considerable fortune and the income produced by the family’s coffee plantations . Soon after his arrival, he met Charles Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894), a poet who would become an important friend and mentor. Heredia became associated with the Parnassian movement and published his poems in Le Parnasse contemporain alongside works by Leconte de Lisle, François Coppée, and Théodore de Banville. The Parnassians rebelled against the legacy of Romanticism, arguing that poetry should focus on great historical episodes and not on the poet’s emotions, which they dismissed as frivolous. A Cuban Conquistador 135 They preferred the past over the present, heroic deeds over tales of love, and an epic register over the intimate tone favored by their predecessors. In his 1894 acceptance speech to the Académie française, Heredia criticized “cette voie toute personnelle où on a entraîné la poésie; cette façon famili ère de mettre son cœur à nu devant le public” (that entirely personal path down which poetry has been led; that familiar way of baring one’s soul to the public) and added that “ces confessions publiques, menteuses ou sinc ères, révoltent en nous une pudeur profonde” (these public confessions, whether mendacious or sincere, offend against our profound sense of decorum ). He believed that “la vraie poésie est dans la nature et dans l’humanité éternelles et non dans le cœur de l’homme d’un jour, quelque grand qu’il Figure 3.1. Nadar, portrait of José-Maria de Heredia (1842–1905), Cuban-born French poet. Inv.: ND189678906a. /Ministère de la Culture/Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN/Art Resource, New York. 136 José-Maria de Heredia soit [. . .] Le poète est d’autant plus vraiment et largement humain qu’il est plus impersonnel. D’ailleurs, le moi, ce moi haïssable, est-il plus nécessaire au drame intérieur qu’à la publique tragédie?” (True poetry lies in the eternity of nature and humanity, not in the heart of the man of a single day, no matter how great . . . The more impersonal a poet, the more truly and widely human he is. And why should the self, the hateful self, be any more necessary to dramas of interiority than to public tragedies?)1 True to his Parnassian beliefs, Heredia devoted his poetry to singing the heroic deeds of the past. He spent most of his life writing the hundred or so sonnets he published in 1893 under the title Les trophées. It was a book Proust read, admired, and often quoted, and it consecrated Heredia as one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century. A year after its pubFigure 3.2. Portrait of José-Maria de Heredia as a young man. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms. 14362, f.5, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. A Cuban Conquistador 137 lication, he...