The Valsaintes Poems of Yves Bonnefoy
[In the following essay, Grosholz finds allusions to Bonnefoy's Valsaintes country home in his verse.]
The shadow of an old house falls across the poems in Yves Bonnefoy's Pierre écrite (1965), Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) and Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987).1 The house itself is never the topic of the poems, and is only fleetingly described in some of its details now and then. In general, the diction of Bonnefoy's poetry is quite abstract, and he pointedly excludes most references to particular places, occasions, or people. Yet the house is there, indefinite but inescapable, and at some level it must haunt the reader. Certainly it has haunted this reader, although I had been reading Bonnefoy's poetry for about a decade before the house occurred to me. When I began to discern the “ghostly demarcations” it lent to the poetry, the poetry changed and deepened in meaning. And indeed, Bonnefoy has written, “Pas un mot depuis Pierre écrite ne serait le même dans ces livres, en fait ils n'existeraient pas, j'aurais écrit tout autre chose, je ne sais quoi, s'il n'y avait un Valsaintes” (private letter).
Yves and Lucie Bonnefoy arrived at the old house in Valsaintes in the summer of 1963. Like all Parisians, they had wished for a house in the country, and finally a bit of extra grant money allowed them to purchase the partly intact, partly ruinous house that the inhabitants of the nearby village Valsaintes called the abbey or château de Bolinette or Boulinette. The history of the house is obscure, but it seems to have served as a summer retreat for the monks of an abbey in a larger town, and at some point in the more recent past its chapel served as a sheepfold. Whatever the details, its past is chequered.
For about a decade, the house provided the Bonnefoys with a refuge and solace. Part of a tiny settlement on the top of a rise overlooking steeply craggy, forested hills and valleys, the abbaye de Bolinette is protected from the mainstream of modern life. The region of Haute-Provence in which it is located, west of the river Durance and town of Manosque (about an hour north of Aix-en-Provence), is quite empty, partly because the terrain is so rugged, and partly because the region has been depopulated by the flight of the region's rural poor to the big cities. Thus, the Valsaintes poems in Pierre écrite and Dans le leurre du seuil are situated (in a sense that needs to be examined more closely) within the house; they were written by the poet when he was still truly its inhabitant, at least during the periods when he and his wife could escape from Paris. Precisely for that reason, the poems speak of the house very little; it was the condition for the possibility of their existence, not their theme.
But ownership of the house proved to be a mixed blessing. Trying to care for a house in which one is not living continuously is always difficult, but the house at Valsaintes presented special problems. First, parts of it were truly in a state of ruin. The house was at first almost uninhabitable, without a functioning kitchen or other amenities. And certain of the walls and roofs threatened to collapse. Second, it was difficult and expensive to find anyone in the region willing to carry out repairs, and then the labor, when secured, was intermittent and unreliable. Third, the neighbors, peasants who probably rather enjoyed quarreling with cityfolk, invented an endless stream of petty quarrels, about right of way, contiguous buildings, access to water, and so forth.
These practical difficulties seemed trivial at first, but as they accumulated year after year they began to strangle the possibility of the Bonnefoys' life in Valsaintes. The work of reconstruction seemed endless, and the disputes irresolvable. These anxieties color the poems in Dans le leurre du seuil. As Bonnefoy writes, that book expresses “le souci créé par le lieu, devenu pour moi métaphore de tout désir, de toute illusion, de toute réflexion, de tout essai de lucidité, de sagesse” (private letter). What should have been the simplest thing in the world, to live comfortably and at peace in a lovely old house in the country, proved to be impossible. The Bonnefoys gave up their sojourns there in the mid-seventies, around the time of the birth of their daughter, who would then only encounter it via the memories of her parents.
The poems of Ce qui fut sans lumière which concern Valsaintes are thus written in a kind of exile. Indeed, when the book was published, the Bonnefoys were already trying to sell the abbaye de Bolinette. Lost in reality, the house enters these poems in a more urgent, insistent, explicit way, as the poet tries to recover it in art, knowing full well how ambiguous the recoveries of art (or dream) can be. Yet an object of reflection is still an object; and the house still stands. Instead of the poet inhabiting the house, one might say that the house inhabits the poet. Bonnefoy writes, “Avec le recul, Valsaintes est devenu objet de réflexion. J'en parle, au lieu de parler en elle” (private letter).
In the following sections, I will examine the way that the house at Valsaintes exists and is represented in the poems of these three books, by choosing a few exemplary poems for deeper analysis. My intentions are twofold. On the one hand, I am writing as a literary critic interested in finding for the work of Yves Bonnefoy a wider and more appreciative audience in the English-speaking world. Bonnefoy has served the English language so generously as a translator, that we owe his distinguished body of poems equally generous attention. I believe that setting Bonnefoy's poems in relation to a particular place and time may illuminate them for an audience accustomed to a more concrete level of diction and reference from its poets. I also believe in general that the circumstances of a poet's life are pertinent to the poetry, though knowledge of them is only a supplement to careful attention to the forms on the printed page, and each poem's relations to earlier poems.
On the other hand, I am writing as a philosopher. One of the issues Bonnefoy's poems raise for me is the nature of human consciousness, in particular, the way in which our awareness is constituted by a specific location in space and time, and yet always transcends that location. For our awareness is not limited to the here and now: it stretches indefinitely backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, as well as indefinitely outwards: the stars are just as present to it as the tree in the courtyard.
Indeed, our awareness is not limited to the perceptible, even granting the indefinite and perhaps infinite scope of human perception. The world of which we are aware is fraught with meaning. And meanings are constituted in part by loved things which existed but exist no longer except as they are alive in us; by possibilities once hoped for that will never be actualized; by the bright shadow of what we hope for still and await; and by the ideal things of mathematics and ethics which organize and regulate our life though they are never found within it. All these imperceptible dimensions of human life exist for us as surely as the tree in the courtyard, and demand expression. If we try to deny the imperceptible dimensions of our life, we impoverish life but we do not escape those dimensions: they return as tenacious ghosts instead of as angels. By contrast, if we acknowledge them through the expressive power of (for example) poetry, life is intensified and deepened; our understanding is increased and our emotions are purged or purified. The catharsis of art is at once a revisiting and a farewell.
I.
In the book Pierre écrite, certain poems in the section “Un feu va devant nous” are direct evocations of Valsaintes, according to the poet: “L'Arbre, la lampe,” “Les chemins,” “Le Sang, la note si,” “L'Abeille, la couleur,” “Le Soir,” “La Lumière du soir,” “La Patience, le ciel,” “Une voix,” “Nous prenions par ces prés,” “Le livre, pour vieillir.” At the risk of seeming literal-minded, I would like to suggest that if the reader imagines what life might have been like for Yves and Lucie Bonnefoy when they first arrived at Valsaintes, certain features of the poems are illuminated. In my own exercise of imagination, I make use of the brief sojourns in various places in the south of France that I've enjoyed, my memories of the landscape, of its scents, sounds, and colors, and indeed my memories of youth, of what a life of beginnings, of the repeated suspension of obligation, of pure discovery, was like.
One humble detail was that the house had no amenities: no kitchen, no bathroom, no electricity. At first the Bonnefoy's sojourns there were a bit like camping out. This meant, among other things, that the fire in the fireplace and the flame in the oil lamp assumed great importance, became visible as they rarely do for people who live in the city. Likewise, they must have noticed more acutely than usual the withdrawal of light at dusk and its return at dawn.
And this would have been all the more true because, as I imagine, the boundaries between inside and outside would have been more permeable than usual. In a derelict house, one must go outside all the time for various reasons. And in a summer house, surrounded by the quiet, wild, delicious hills of Haute Provence, one would constantly leave the windows open. Then the changing light of sun and moon, occasional bugs and butterflies and perhaps even birds, the edge of a sudden rainstorm, the pervasive smell of rosemary and thyme, and the shrill of cicadas would enter in.
And the Bonnefoys wouldn't have had much to distract them, far away from telephones and the crowded schedule of Parisian life. What would they have done with their days? Read, write, take long walks, amuse themselves as young people in love usually amuse themselves. So their sense of time was transformed. On the one hand, the excessive temporal structuring of each day by modern urban life was absent; and on the other hand, most of what surrounded them, the wild flora and fauna of the countryside, proceeded in its own inhuman temporality not along the line of history but round about in the cycles of nature.
The single flame of a lamp or a candle has such integrity of shape, such visual allure, such liveliness, that poets have often taken it as a metaphor for the human soul. In “L'Arbre, la lampe” (Pierre écrite, 201), Bonnefoy writes about the soul-flame just at the moment of dawn, when it pales in the light of the sun, its great Original.
L'arbre vieillit dans l'arbre, c'est l'été.
L'oiseau franchit le chant de l'oiseau et s'évade.
Le rouge de la robe illumine et disperse
Loin, au ciel, le charroi de l'antique douleur.
O fragile pays,
Comme la flamme d'une lampe que l'on porte,
Proche étant le sommeil dans la sève du monde,
Simple le battement de l'ame partagée.
Toi aussi tu aimes l'instant où la lumière des lampes
Se décolore et rêve dans le jour.
Tu sais que c'est l'obscur de ton cœur qui guérit,
La barque qui rejoint le rivage et tombe.
The poem is located within the house, with the dreamers who have just woken up, or who sense the end of a long, wakeful night: the house is furnished with a lamp, a red dress perhaps cast carelessly over a chair or table, and perhaps also a bed, since Bonnefoy often uses the word “barque” as a figure that not only indicates some kind of journey or transition, but also stands for a bed. After all, the activities of passengers in a bed, dreaming and making love, often contribute to important spiritual voyages. Yet the walls of the house are porous: the tree and the sky are present, and birdsong enters as well. Indeed, the second stanza uses the flame of the lamp as a kind of middle term between the soul and the surrounding world, “l'âme partagée” and the “fragile pays.”
This poem seems to be a poem of solace, of reconciliation and hope, especially when taken in contrast to his earlier poem “Aube, fille des larmes, rétablis” (Hier régnant désert [1958], 143). Though it uses many of the same images as “L'Arbre, la lampe,” it seems to be simply an expression of grief. The place of this earlier poem is an enclosed room, where a lamp goes out beside one who has died, and the poet can only ask, “Le navire des lampes / Entrera-t-il au port qu'il avait demandé, / Sur les tables d'ici la flamme faite cendre / Grandira-t-elle ailleurs dans une autre clarté?” And the dawn, whom the poet petitions as “Aube, fille des larmes,” has not yet come.
By contrast, the place of “L'Arbre, la lampe” integrates inner and outer with its suggestion of open windows. It integrates day and night by taking dawn as its moment. And the poem combines regret or grief with consolation because of the way its two implied protagonists, the speaker and the “tu,” understand the dawn. Dawn is ambiguous for the soul; the lamp does not go out before dawn, nor does the light of dawn wholly overpower it: “Toi aussi tu aimes l'instant où la lumière des lampes / Se décolore et rêve dans le jour.” Dawn makes possible alteration and creativity, the power of dream which draws as much upon darkness as upon the light. The very ambiguity of dawn is the source of the poem's hopefulness. Related imagery appears in the erotically charged poem, “Le Sang, la note si” (Pierre écrite, 204), where the last stanza begins, “Ainsi vieillit l'été. Ainsi la mort / Encercle le bonheur de la flamme qui bouge. / Et nous dormons un peu.” Conversely, the poems “L'Abeille, La Couleur,” “Le Soir,” “La Lumière du soir,” “Une Voix,” and “Une Pierre,” take the ambiguous moment of sunset, when day mingles with night, as their setting, to similar purpose (Pierre écrite, 205, 206, 207, 209, 213).
Yet though these poems are often given a quite explicit temporal tag, the poet also insists that something strange is happening to the time inhabited by the two implied protagonists. Their awareness of time is transformed in the moment of reconciliation or integration or revelation. One way of describing this transformation is that time becomes spatial: instead of a succession in which the to-come and the has-been are lost, time opens up sideways. The river becomes a lake. This odd damming of time is implicit in the poem “L'Arbre, la lampe,” which holds the passing moment of dawn suspended throughout the whole of the poem, but it is more explicitly carried out in other poems.
At the end of “L'Abeille, la couleur” (Pierre écrite, 205), Bonnefoy mentions one of the sounds of the Provençal countryside, the hum of bees: “Et tout ce bruit / D'abeilles de l'impure et douce éternité / Sur le si proche pré si brulant encore.” Unlike the sound of human talk or a melody, which carries one forwards through time, the archaic, undifferentiated hum of bees seems to hold one suspended in time which pools and circles, as long as no distractions intervene. This is not the transcendent eternity of Christianity, but a more modest timelessness, “impure et douce.” Similarly, in “Le Soir” (Pierre écrite, 206) the poet describes the way time slows as one gazes into a fire on the hearth at evening as “l'éternité de la sauge”; and in “La Lumière du soir” (Pierre écrite, 207) he describes the quietness of lovers this way: “Et le temps reste autour de nous comme des flaques de couleur.” It is as if time extended outwards all around, like the hills of Haute Provence around the abbaye de Bolinette.
The poem “Le Livre, pour vieillir” (Pierre écrite, 217), the final poem in the section “Un feu va devant nous,” has two stanzas. In the first, time opens out, extends itself, pauses. In the second, the soul surrounded by such pastures of time is itself transformed: like the flame of the lamp in “L'Arbre, la lampe,” it alters and dreams.
Etoiles transhumantes; et le berger
Voûté sur le bonheur terrestre; et tant de paix
Comme ce cri d'insecte, irrégulier,
Qu'un dieu pauvre façonne. Le silence
Est monté de ton livre vers ton cœur.
Un vent bouge sans bruit dans les bruits du monde.
Le temps sourit au loin, de cesser d'être.
Simples dans le verger sont les fruits murs.
Tu vieilliras
Et, te décolorant dans la couleur des arbres,
Faisant ombre plus lente sur le mur,
Etant, et d'âme enfin, la terre menacée,
Tu reprendras le livre à la page laissée,
Tu diras, C'étaient donc les derniers mots obscurs.
II.
The poems in Dans le leurre du seuil are each quite long, and yet without any obvious narrative framework. This makes them difficult to discuss in a few brief pages, since they resist summary. Nonetheless, the way in which the house at Valsaintes enters into “Deux Barques,” “La Terre,” “Les Nuées,” and “L'Epars, l'indivisible” provides a thematic focus for reflection. I'll limit my comments to “La Terre,” which in virtue of its important features may stand for the others.
When one has tried very hard to make something happen and then failed in the attempt, one must live through a process of renunciation. Like forgiving, renouncing is slow and difficult work for the spirit; one may forgive or renounce superficially and quickly, but the true act takes a long time to ripen. But it often then happens that a completed renunciation brings with it unexpected gifts or recompense. Something new comes to take the place of the thing renounced; and the thing renounced proves to exist still in a different mode, conferring on life greater richness of meaning.
In “La Terre” (Dans le leurre du seuil, 271-88), the house at Valsaintes is a great source of anxiety in so far as it is still in the poet's possession, but simultaneously it is a source of wisdom in so far as the poet comes to understand that it must be relinquished. The place is really falling apart; the vocabulary of the poem is permeated by words about decay, erosion, rust. There are also allusions to finally ineffective attempts at reconstruction, which seem rather to increase the material disorder of the house. As I read it, the poem begins with the return of the Bonnefoys to the house after a certain period to find it in disarray; perhaps the visit is one of their very last.
What greets them is the light of Provence, which has been watching over the house better than its human caretakers.
Je crie, Regarde,
La lumière
Vivait là, près de nous! Ici, sa provision
D'eau, encore transfigurée. Ici le bois
Dans la remise. Ici, les quelques fruits
A sécher dans les vibrations du ciel de l'aube.
They are also met by the spectacle of an almond tree in bloom, which the poet cannot fail to take as an intimation of immortality, a vision of transcendence: “l'à jamais de la fleur éphémère.” And yet it must be the homely, terrestrial kind of transcendence, since a tree is a tree.
Je crie, Regarde,
L'amandier
Se couvre brusquement de milliers de fleurs.
Ici
Le noueux, l'à jamais terrestre, le déchiré
Entre au port. Moi la nuit
Je consens. Moi l'amandier
J'entre paré dans la chambre nuptiale.
The house is still porous; the tree enters inside, and the poet stands with the tree in the courtyard, arrayed in a different version of primavera.
Yet nonetheless the house is in terrible shape. The language of light and the whiteness of the almond tree changes into that of a sacrificial, consuming flame which plays upon the house and its disordered contents: “Flamme le verre / Sur la table de la cuisine abandonnée, / A V. / Dans les gravats. / Flamme, de salle en salle, / Le plâtre, / Toute une indifférence, illuminée.” And a bit later in the poem, the flame of dispossession seems to consume the house itself, seen from without.
Regarde,
Ici, sur la lande du sens,
A quelques mètres du sol,
C'est comme si le feu avait pris feu,
Et ce second brasier, dépossession,
Comme s'il prenait feu encore, dans les hauts
De l'étoffe de ce qui est, que le vent gonfle.
Regarde,
Le quatrième mur s'est descellé,
Entre lui et ta pile du coté nord
Il y a place pour la ronce
Et les bêtes furtives de chaque nuit.
With the growing realization that the beloved house really can't be retrieved, the poem more and more moves towards images, not of nothingness exactly, but of the impalpable, invisible, and imponderable that accompanies our life, that completes it and gives it meaning. For this is the residue of the house, as it slips away.
Aujourd'hui la distance entre les mailles
Existe plus que les mailles,
Nous jetons un filet qui ne retient pas.
Achever, ordonner,
Nous ne le savons plus.
Entre l'œil qui s'accroît et le mot plus vrai
Se déchire la taie de l'achevable.
O ratures, o rouilles
In my ear, the last line echoes Rimbaud's “O saisons, o châteaux,” but as an ironic inversion.
Nothingness is not an easy poetic subject. As the poem progresses, Bonnefoy tries again and again to articulate it using the vocabulary of flame, of light, of eros, even of godhead.
Regarde,
Ici fleurit le rien; et ses corolles,
Ses couleurs d'aube et de crépuscule, ses apports
De beauté mystérieuse au lieu terrestre
Et son vert sombre aussi, et le vent dans ses branches,
C'est l'or qui est en nous: or sans matière,
Or de ne pas durer, de ne pas avoir,
Or d'avoir consenti, unique flamme
Au flanc transfiguré de l'alambic.
Instead of persisting in the illusion that the house can be saved, or of closing the door behind him and trying to forget, Bonnefoy here goes through a poetic process of renunciation that prepares the way for further grieving and for further imaginative recollection. The house will be built, or rebuilt, of poems.
But another kind of recuperation is at work in “La Terre.” As the poet labors to give nothingness a habitation and a name, “le rien” attracts the word “dieu” and that word gives birth, as it were, to the word “enfant.” The poem alludes at various points, always indirectly and inexplicitly, to the relationship between Yves and Lucie Bonnefoy, that persists in the midst of the dissolution of the house and in the face of their growing awareness of mortality, an awareness that suddenly deepens as one approaches the half-century mark.
Et soyons l'un pour l'autre comme la flamme
Quand elle se détache du flambeau,
La phrase de fumée un instant lisible
Avant de s'effacer dans l'air souverain.
Again, at the risk of seeming literal-minded, or of projecting my own experience on the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy, I see the child who appears so often in “La Terre” as a reference to or a premonition of the birth of their child, an event which roughly coincided with the completion of Dans le leurre du seuil. It often happens, who knows why, that when we give up something precious, consenting to the constraints of mortality and truly thinking, imagining, and feeling our way through the loss, that life suddenly offers us something unexpected. Reality is in many ways much larger and more imaginative than we are. In this case, as it seems to me, the life of the Bonnefoys offered them a child, and the child is in the poem.
It appears in the play of sunlight on water, upon the sacrificial stone, in the midst of the flowering almond tree.
Et vois, l'enfant
Est là, dans l'amandier,
Debout
Comme plusieurs vaisseaux arrivant en rêve.
And the poet is the pilgrim soul, in search of the god-child who naturally arrives in a stable.
Je consens. Moi le berger,
Je pousse la fatigue et l'espérance
Sous l'arche de l'étoile vers l'étable.
Moi la nuit d'août,
Je fais le lit des bêtes dans l'étable.
Moi le sommeil,
Je prends le rêve dans mes barques, je consens.
III.
I conclude this essay with a consideration of the poem “Les Arbres” from the first section of Ce qui fut sans lumière (17-18); as Bonnefoy has noted, all the poems of this section were written directly apropos of the house at Valsaintes, as he tried to absorb its loss. On my sole visit there, I came to understand this poem in a new way simply by virtue of standing next to the old house. I saw with my own eyes the terrace and the trees, the steep slopes behind the house and the way the sunlight fell on the walls. “Oh,” I said to myself, “that's what he meant about the long shadow of the trees.”
Nous regardions nos arbres, c'était du haut
De la terrasse qui nous fut chère, le soleil
Se tenait près de nous cette fois encore
Mais en retrait, hôte silencieux
Au seuil de la maison en ruines, que nous lassions
A son pouvoir, immense, illuminée.
As in Pierre Ecrite, the hour of sunset attracts the poem; the poem both suspends itself in time and moves towards dusk. As in Dans le leurre du seuil, the sun is imagined as a kind of housekeeper in the Bonnefoys' absence. But by contrast here, their visit exists in the poem at three removes: it is about shadows, shadows remembered, and they seem to have been cast during a fleeting visit after the Bonnefoys had ceased to live in the house, perhaps while they were in the region, looking in on their property which had not yet been sold. The tone is fraught with nostalgia.
Look, says the poet, how the sun casting shadows appears to combine things that we know are spatially separate: the couple, the trees, the terrace wall.
Vois, te disais-je, il fait glisser contre la pierre
Inégale, incompréhensible, de notre appui
L'ombre de nos épaules confondues,
Celle des amandiers qui sont près de nous
Et celle même du haut des murs qui se mêle aux autres,
Trouée, barque brûlée, proue qui dérive,
Comme un surcroît de rêve ou de fumée.
As in the earlier two books, the image of a boat reenters. The conceit of the poem is that the terrace is the prow of a boat, drifting with its two voyagers on the currents of time. But the oak trees far away on the other side of the ravine seem motionless, as if they were the shores of eternity.
Mais ces chênes là-bas sont immobiles,
Même leur ombre ne bouge pas, dans la lumière,
Ce sont les rives du temps qui coule ici où nous
sommes,
Et leur sol est inabordable, tant est rapide
Le courant de l'espoir gros de la mort.
Thus the poem poses various degrees of separation. The two people, and the two people and the house, are separate; but the sun as physical agent and the poet as artist each joins them, at least as shadows, and they sit quietly together on the terrace, content to be so joined. The more serious separation is that between time and eternity, “le sol inabordable,” a separation which the vast landscape around the abbaye de Bolinette makes plausible. But finally the warm sun, “hôte silencieux,” and the poet struggling to renounce what once offered him protection and solace, bridge the gap, at least for the moment of a stanza. After all, the moment of a stanza, artificial as it is, can always be revisited by the reader and thus has some aspect of timelessness.
Nous regardâmes les arbres toute une heure.
Le soleil attendait, parmi les pierres,
Puis il eut compassion, il étendit
Vers eux, en contrebas dans le ravin,
Nos ombres qui parurent les atteindre
Comme, avançant le bras, on peut toucher
Parfois, dans la distance entre deux êtres,
Un instant du rêve de l'autre, qui va sans fin.
The way the couple touches gently, sitting side by side, registers as well a harmony in their apprehension of the invisible, as the visible world of house, ravine, and forested slope registers the interplay of time and timelessness, the actual and the possible, the real and the ideal. And the reader too is included, for the poem also affirms the possibility of communication, not just about rocks and trees, but about the greater reality that despite our dissipation grants us meaning, and despite our separateness hold us, gently, together.
Note
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Pierre écrite and Dans le leurre du seuil are included in Poèmes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1978); Ce qui fut sans lumière (Paris: Mercure de France, 1987).
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