Lettres à Néère (1925–1938) par Paul Valéry (review)

In 1931 Paul Valéry agreed to sit for the acclaimed artist, Renée Vautier, who wished to sculpt his bust. She was a striking, talented woman of thirty-three, and as the sessions in the sculptor’s studio progressed, Valéry fell passionately in love with the person he came to call ‘Néère’ (an anagram, and the title of a Chénier poem discussed forty years earlier with Pierre Louÿs). Valéry’s feelings were never reciprocated, yet for almost four years he became obsessed by the image of Renée as the embodiment of love in its purest form, while being constantly confronted with the impossibility of its realization. Michel Jarrety has edited this collection of 160 letters to her, drawing on his work on Valéry’s biography (Paris: Fayard, 2008) to detail the context and references to people, places, and events: it was a time when Valéry travelled widely and the letters chart well the strain of lecture tours, the constant expectation to ‘perform’, along with evocative descriptions of the varied landscapes. Renée came to inhabit Valéry’s every moment, ever more present in her absence, whether at a geographical or emotional distance, for throughout this time his own outpourings met only with her calm reserve, except when, painfully, she confided her own unreturned love for another man. He who had made himself ‘l’Ennemi du Tendre’, now found his emotional sensibility re-awakened, only to experience the vanity of hope, the torment of seeing no response in the other. The pain, the distress of love, and the devastating impact of ‘la tendresse’ are all apparent, mixed in with persistent imploring for the reply, the telephone call that seldom came. The Lettres à Néère reveal Valéry’s compulsive need to give expression to this tension in writing that veers between supplication, adoration, and despair: a combination of poignancy, tragedy, and soap-opera, in turn poetic, over-effusive, erotically charged, sentimental, comic, banal, self-mocking. The number of letters was considerable: more than thirty in 1931, twice that in 1932, and then halving in each successive year. Renée’s own correspondence has not been kept, so the evidence of her own reactions is necessarily indirect, as when Valéry writes: ‘Vous m’avez dit que je me faisais une idole’ (p. 47). It emerges, however, that while his letters were not unwelcome, her own replies were spasmodic, generally short, and reserved in tone. By January 1932 he is fully aware of the limits of the situation: ‘Je vous écris. Je suis sûr que vous ne lisez même plus jusqu’au bout ces choses que je ne puis pas ne pas vous écrire. C’est à moi que je parle’ (p. 64). Still he writes, for the only way to conjure her presence is to see her, ‘dans le miroir du papier blanc’ (p. 147). But the intimation of a form of higher love, ‘un amour qui ne peut se regarder en face’ (p. 121), which the whole situation stirred in Valéry, found expression elsewhere: in L’Idée fixe (1932), Alphabet (1976), Stratonice (project), and Mon Faust (1944).