It is early morning. Soft, dawning light is pouring into the room. You’re running a little late. And you need to get dressed. So you check the weather. The brittle glow from the screen says that today there will be no weather. No, not that the weather will be normal for this time of year, but that there is no weather at all. None. So there you are, standing in your room, puzzling over whether or not to open the window. And you ask yourself, “If there is no weather, then what will I wear?”
“One thing above all gives charm to men’s thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.”
I am reminded of Goethe’s remark: The tremor of aw (das Schaudern) is the best in man. Alas! this is just it; no matter how I try, I do not feel any tremor in France; I read France without a tremor.
He is fluent, subtle, elegant. He is the triumph of the euphemism. But there is no restlessness in him; one drains him at the first draught. I am not inclined to believe in the survival of those upon whom everyone agrees right away. I doubt very much if our grandchildren, opening his books, will find more to read in them than we are finding. I know that, as far as I am concerned, I have never felt him to be ahead of my thought. At least he explains it. And this is what his readers like in him. France flatters them. Each one fo them is free to think: “How well put that is! After all, I wasn’t so stupid either; that’s just what I was thinking too.”
He is well-bred; that is, he is always aware of others. Perhaps he does not attach any great value to what he cannot reveal to them. Besides, I suspect that he hardly exists at all behind and beyond what he reveals to us. Everything comes out in conversation, in relationships. Those who frequent him appreciate being taken right into the drawing-room and the study; these rooms are on one floor; the rest of the house doesn’t matter. In my case, I am annoyed not to have any hint of the near-by room in which a crime is committed or of the room in which people make love.
I have bathed, I have soaped my poor dog in my tub. I hoped that cleanliness would give some luster to his coat! But now he looks more than ever like a blind man’s dog. And I who wanted a pedigreed dog, I’ve got what was coming to me! No matter; it is time to learn once more to prefer the events that choose me to those I should have chosen myself.
Reached Cuverville yesterday. The weather is so beautiful that this day is related to the happiest days of my childhood. I am writing this in the big room above the kitchen, between the two open windows through which the sun’s warm joy surges in. Nothing but my tired reflection in the mirror hanging above my table is an obstacle to the fullest development of my happiness. (I need to learn all over again, and methodically, how to be happy. This is a form of gymnastics, like exercise with dumbbells; it can be achieved.)
Valéry’s conversation throws me into this frightful alternative: either co nsider everything he says absurd or else consider absurd everything I am doing. If he suppressed in reality everything he suppresses in conversation, I should no longer have any raison d’être. Moreover I never argue with him; he merely strangles me and I struggle back.
Didn’t he declare to me yesterday that music (he is sure of this) was going to become purely imitative; or rather, a more and more precise notation of what speech cannot express, but without any further æsethic aim: an exact language?
He also says: “Who is concerned today with the Greeks? I am convinced that what we still call ‘dead languages’ today will fall into putrefaction. It is already impossible to understand the emotions of Homer’s heroes. Etc. . . . etc. . . . “
After such remarks my thoughts take longer to rise up again than grass does after hail.
I am merely a little boy having a good time—compounded with a Protestant minister who bores him.
Absence of sympathy = lack of imagination. This goes well with ignorance of dizziness; but Gérard doesn’t know that this comes from his inability to imagine what he does not feel. This is what is often called sang-froid; merely impotence of the imagination. The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
Interrupted story. Useless to relate it in detail. Very much amused and attracted by Apollinaire’s face. At the moment of the toasts a young fool who is not given the floor when he wants to recite some of Royère’s poems goes off in the wings and breaks the mirror in the private dining-room. “Very Dostoyevsky,” says Copeau, with whom I walk home.
“He did not work rapidly, but he didn’t mind having people think he was prompt.”
He says: “Ah, those who work from nature! What impudent humbugs! The landscapists! When I meet one of them in the countryside, I want to fire away at him. Bang! Bang!” (He raises his cane, closes an eye, and aims at the drawing-room furniture.) “There ought to be a police force for that purpose.” Etc., etc. And again: “Art criticism! What an absurdity! I am accustomed to saying” (and in fact I remember hearing him say exactly the same things three or four years ago) “that the Muses never talk among themselves; each one works in her domain; and when they aren’t working, they dance.” And twice more he repeats: “When they aren’t working, they dance.” And again:
“The day when people began to write Intelligence with a capital I, all was damn well lost. There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.”
PERRON
DRIED UP LIKE
A YOUNG TREE
THAT SUCCUMBS
UNDER THE WEIGHT
OF ITS OWN FRUIT
“Already at the age of five or six little Louis used to play ‘going to school’; he had made up little notebooks, which he would put under his arm and then say: ‘Goodby, Mamma; I am going to school.’
“Then he would sit down in a corner of the other room, on a stool, turning his back to everything. . . . Finally, a quarter of an hour later, the class being over, he would come home: ‘Mamma, school is over.’
“But one fine day, without saying a word to anyone, slipping out, he really went to school; he was only six; the teacher sent him home. Little Louis came back again. Then the teacher asked: ‘What have you come here for?’ ‘Why—to learn.’
“He is sent home again; he is too young. The child insists so much that he gets a dispensation. And thus he begins his patient education.”
O “good little boy,” I understand now what made you like so much, later on, Jude the Obscure. Even more than your gifts as a writer, than your sensitivity, than your intelligence, how much I admire that wondering application which was but one form of your love!
Some people only half knew him because they saw only his pity, his affection, and the exquisite qualities of his heart; with that alone he could not have become the wonderful writer that he was. A great writer meets more than one requirement, answers more than one doubt, satisfies various appetites. I have only moderate admiration for those who cannot be seen from all sides, who appear deformed when looked at from an angle. Philippe could be examined from all sides; to each of his friends, of his readers, he seemed very unified; yet no two of them saw the same Philippe. And the various praises addressed to him may well be equally justified, but each one taken alone does not suffice. He has in him the wherewithal to disorient and surprise—that is to say, the wherewithal to endure.
There is a certain sincerity that consists in trying to see truthfully, and Jammes will never know that form of sincerity. “If water breaks a stick,” as La Fontaine says, his mind never “rectifies” it. I am well aware that it is essentially poetic not to allow the reason to intervene too quickly and that one rectifying one’s judgement amounts to falsifying one’s sensation; but art would consist in maintaining the sensation in all its freshness and yet not allowing it to prevent any other function. Odd lay-out of that mind! One cannot blame him for anything, so well aware is one that the spirit of inquiry would spoil him. He doesn’t seek, either, to see the truth about himself; and besides he would have less genius if he were less convinced of having genius.
I am saying this rather sloppily. Let me sum up: to be a poet, one must believe in one’s genius; to become an artist, one must question it. The really strong man is the one in whom this augments that.
Impossible to set down anything form the conversation. Mme de Noailles talks with an amazing volubility; the sentences rush to her lips, crush themselves, and become confused in their haste; she says three or four at a time. This makes a very tasty compote of ideas, sensations, images, a tutti-frutti accompanied by gestures of the hands and arms, of the eyes especially, which she turns skyward in a swoon that is not too artificial but rather too encouraged.
Speaking of Montfort in passing, she compares him to a tench with big pop eyes and imitates the fish when it comes against the glass of the aquarium. This very striking image makes us laugh
