Paul Claudel

 Paul Claudel is largely forgotten today, even in France. Admirers of his sister Camille remember him and sometimes blame her brother for his supposed persecution of the unfortunate sculptress. Occasionally someone will stage one of his plays. But his work as a whole, the deep breath of his poetry, the strength of his intellect, his essays, don’t stir much interest these days, they probably seem too solid, too monumental, they lack fear and doubt, they’re anachronistic. The certainty of his convictions seems compromising, old-fashioned. In his famous elegy for Yeats—Claudel probably makes an appearance just for the sake of the rhyme Claudel and well—Auden admits that the French poet was a good writer, but suggests that he must first be forgiven (presumably for some political transgression, probably his support, purely theoretical, of Franco in the Spanish Civil War) before we can actually enjoy his work. During the Second World War, Claudel, by then a retired ambassador living in the Castle of Brangues—briefly sided with Pétain and even wrote an ode in his honor (a small ode, as opposed to his five great odes), but Claudel soon grew disillusioned with the Vichy regime. Shocked by the tragedy of the Jews, he sent a courageous letter to the chief rabbi of France in December 1941, in which he stood up for the oppressed. It’s true that he had another, less attractive side, the hateful Claudel, the inquisitor—though he never actually performed such a function—who thought that all Protestants would roast in hell simply because they were Protestants. He didn’t like Germans, the sight of that country’s citizens consuming grilled sausages and drinking beer filled him with true Gallic loathing. But he counted himself among the admirers of Poland, Catholic Poland. He doesn’t seem to have been personally appealing; Iwaszkiewicz valued and translated his work, but on their first meeting, he was struck by Claudel’s artificiality. Iwaszkiewicz uses the French word facticité (Paul Valéry gave him the same impression). None of this helps us to gain entry into the writing. Claudel’s nature: He was quick to damn, to reject, and to despise; he despised Eliot, despised Rilke, and also, bearing in mind his many aversions, he seems almost physically repulsive as seen in photos, too bulky, no neck, a short, stocky man hewn from a single block of wood, a perpetually unsmiling bourgeois clad in an ambassador’s uniform embroidered with braids. After the Second World War, this humorless playwright and poet was crammed, doubtless with some difficulty, into a different uniform, that of a French Academician, likewise embroidered and accompanied by a sword, purely symbolic in principle, but in the case of this choleric Academician, one might theoretically imagine it landing actual blows—on Protestants, for example. However, anyone who looks through his great odes, Cinq grandes odes, without prejudice, or excerpts from the plays, for example the scene on ship deck in Partage de midi, will instantly fall under the spell of the poetic enchanter who hid in daily life beneath uniforms and braids. Claudel’s diary, the Journal in the two-volume Pléiade edition, is also marvelous, a great prose poem where over several hundred necessarily uneven pages, dull quotations from Latin theological texts alternate with radiant poetic observations, fruits of the purest inspiration.

Adam Zagajewski

Slight Exaggeration