Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère, today I dropped into your mailbox Valéry. Tratar de vivir, the biography written by Benoît Peeters, published by Ediciones del Subsuelo (translated by Mateo Pierre Avit Ferrero). What is recounted in its pages is not exactly “an exemplary existence.” Peeters reconstructs Valéry as if he were organizing a collection of broken miniatures: everyday fragments—notebooks, digressions, renunciations—elevated to the status of secret code. The attentive reader will not find much drama, but rather a succession of equations where the vital sign is expressed as a shadow.
From the first pages, a diaphanous examination reigns supreme. Peeters does not offer a conventional biography, with a luminous childhood, troubled youth, and conclusive old age. What he creates is an oblique map of a man who spent much of his life wondering what it means to be alive. And even more, how to write about that being. For the biographer, Valéry was a mind that folded in on itself until it became form. Each diary entry, aphorism, movement of his mundane life reads like an oscillation between thought and form, between body and spirit.
The famous “Night in Genoa,” that metaphysical outburst that made the young Valéry renounce sentimental literature, is presented as a course correction in the notebook of a cartographer who has already heard the sirens and will not be fooled. The result is a man who turned consciousness into a form of interior architecture. Every subsequent decision—rejecting the novel as a genre, taking refuge in abstract thought, keeping his distance from emotions—seems to obey a discipline designed to prevent experience from contaminating clarity.
What is remarkable is the consistency with which Peeters follows this “invisible” thread. He does not dramatize or embellish. He allows Valéry to be what he was: an intelligence caught between the desire to speak and the need to remain silent. However, the book is full of passages where biographical details—his friendship with Mallarmé, a letter to Gide, a walk interrupted by insomnia, his late passion for Catherine Pozzi, his marriage full of indifference—flashes with a strange tenderness. So, despite everything, Valéry was also an uncomfortable body that aged and doubted, desired and suffered. Here we see a pedestrian Valéry, almost uncomfortably mundane, who for a moment distances himself from the glacial life of the mind. These passages are necessary interruptions in a cerebral score.
And yes, there are two Valérys, although one suspects that he would have preferred to say that there are two masks and a single will. There is the one of sculpted verses, who writes epitaphs in Carrara marble, and there is the other, who rises early with a sharp mind and writes his Cahiers relentlessly, as if consciousness were a machine that rusts if not used. Peeters does not choose between the two. He prefers chiaroscuro, the places where the poet becomes logical and the logical is overtaken by music. The former seeks perfection; the latter, clarity. Both flee from sentimentality, but by different paths. One replaces it with rhythm, the other with precision. Together, they form an entity that walks a tightrope between perception and idea.
As the book progresses, one realizes that it is not so much a matter of following Valéry’s life as of accompanying his thinking, which advances in a spiral: it returns, revises, modifies. What is interesting is not only what he decides, but also the way he doubts. The dramatic scenes—for example, his working life as a civil servant in the “Ministry of War and then secretary to an elderly disabled man”—are presented with the same composure as a theorem. Catherine Pozzi enters like a sentimental wound, Gide appears with his brilliance and shadows, and Mallarmé as that constellation that Valéry never completely abandons. There is no effusion, not even in pain. The pathos here is elegant, concealed, that of an intelligence that almost always—beyond overly amorous letters and the occasional event that contradicts it—considered emotion an unacceptable detour.
Peeters, with her clean and attentive style, knows when to withdraw. She never interprets more than the evidence suggests. He does not need to invent an accessible Valéry, nor modernize him for our fast-paced sensibilities. His merit lies in restoring him, like a piece of clockwork, leaving its mechanism exposed. Thus, Valéry. Tratar de vivir becomes more than a biography. Hypocrite lecteur, you have in your hands an essay on the effort of sustaining an identity made of ideas, a life that wanted to be pure form:
“I refuse to belong to any group, to any groupings that are not themselves but the contradiction of the intellectual. I do not sign manifestos. I do not engage in politics. For me, the intellectual is always a solitary figure, whose function, whatever his profession, is to increase the capital of the things of the mind.”
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This afternoon, as the New Orleans sky filled with that dirty blue that precedes storms of confessions, I ran into Mrs. Maribel Fortenberry, a former hotel pianist and current informal consultant on matters of lucid despair. She asked me to recommend a book “where the author thinks so much that he forgets to feel.” I gave her my copy of Valéry. Tratar de vivir, which I had been reading with pencil and superstition for weeks. “There is nothing more moving,” I told her, “than seeing a man avoiding emotion with such fervor that he ends up sculpting it.”
Maribel, who claims to have slept with the first edition of the first volume of the Cahiers under her pillow during a particularly erratic summer, replied that if this book didn’t make her cry, it would at least make her tidy her closets. And she walked down the street with the precise gait of someone seeking symmetry rather than redemption. Watching her walk away, I knew that my job—leaving books in strangers’ mailboxes—is also a way of trying to live.
