Paul Louis Charles Claudel was a French diplomat, dramatist and poet, whose works derive their lyrical inspiration, their unity and scope, and their prophetic tone from his faith in God.
Background
Paul Louis Charles Marie Claudel was born on August 6, 1868, in Villeneuve-sur-Fère (Aisne), France, into a family of farmers and government officials. His father, Louis-Prosper, dealt in mortgages and bank transactions. His mother, the former Louise Cerveaux, came from a Champagne family of Catholic farmers and priests.
When Claudel was a year old, his family moved to the town of Bar-le-Duc. In 1881, when he was entering his teenage years, they moved again, this time to Paris.
Education
Claudel received his early education at the Lycée of Bar-le-Duc while his father was working as a civil servant. When the family moved to Paris, he entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1881, graduating from it in 1885.
During his career, Claudel received a number of honorary degrees from various universities in the United States, including Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Chicago.
Claudel made his diplomatic debut as French vice-consul in New York in 1893, serving after that as acting consul at Boston from 1884 to 1895 when he underwent a religious crisis and decided to abandon his artistic and diplomatic career and enter a Benedictine monastery. Discouraged by the Order and deeply disappointed, he left France to take up a consular post in China, including Shanghai, Fuzhou, Beijing, Tianjin—until 1908. These were among his most productive years, the years of Connaissance de l'est. He kept both irons in the fire—his diplomatic duties and his literary productivity—without diverting a single hour from the former to the benefit of the latter. Furthermore, he feared that his poetry might be injurious to his public career and published his work quietly, almost confidentially. He was recognized as a genius at once, but he long remained well known only to the literary coterie.
Later, Claudel served as a consul at Prague (December 1909), consul-general at Frankfurt (October 1911) and Hamburg (October 1913), chargé of the Economic Mission at Rome, minister plenipotentiary to Brazil (1916) and to Copenhagen (1920), and ambassador to Japan (1922-1928), to Washington (1928-1933), and to Brussels (1933-1936). While he served in Brazil during the First World War he supervised the continued provision of food supplies from South America to France.
In 1936, Claudel retired and divided the last 20 years of his life between an apartment in Paris and his Château de Brangues. Although he wrote no more poems or plays, he composed lengthy reflections on various scriptural texts. During these years, when his plays were staged, he often attended rehearsals and made changes in his texts for the stage. He died in Paris on February 23, 1955.
Although he served the French government as a diplomat for more than forty years, a period extending from the 1890s to the Great Depression, Paul Claudel is remembered as an eminent dramatist, poet, and essayist. Considered among the central figures in French poetry and drama of the early twentieth century, Claudel has attracted readers in Germany and Latin America as well as in his native France, but his appeal has generally eluded the English-speaking world.
Most of Claudel’s notable works have been translated into English. Of his many plays, among the most significant are L 'Annonce faith Marie (The Tidings Brought to Mary); Portage de Midi (Break of Noon); Le Soulier de Satin (The Satin Slipper); and Le livre de Christophe Colomb (The Book of Columbus). Among his most notable poetic writings is a collection of prose poems influenced by the years he spent as a diplomat in the Far East, The East / Know. In 1915, during World War I, he wrote Three Poems of the War; twenty-seven years later, during World War II, he presented A Hundred Movements for a Fan, a work which, as commentators have observed, seems far removed from a world in the grip of armed conflict. Another important poetic composition by Claudel which has been translated into English is Five Great Odes.
Claudel is also remembered as a prolific correspondent; indeed, his books of letters alone are regarded as a considerable literary output. Prominent among these volumes is the collection of missives he exchanged with poet and novelist Andre Gide over more than a quarter-century, translated as The Correspondence, 1899-1926, between Paul Claudel and Andre Gide. In addition, Claudel wrote numerous books of criticism in which he discussed the visual arts, literature, music, and drama. Among these works are Poetic Art, The Eye Listens, and Claudel on the Theatre.
His dramatic, poetic, and critical writings, as well as his letters—a body of work that comprises perhaps sixty volumes—make up perhaps two-thirds of Claudel’s entire oeuvre. Assorted works make up much of the remainder; but a plurality consists of writings on the central topic of his career, his preoccupation with religious faith, or more specifically a passionate commitment to Christianity. Several of these volumes have been published in English: Ways and Crossways, A Poet before the Cross, Lord, Teach Us to Pray, The Essence of the Bible, and I Believe in God: A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed.
It also must be mentioned that Claudel, as a poet and as a theorist, had a keen understanding of music and collaborated with composers throughout his life. Many of his plays were set to music, and he often embarked on writing projects with a musical accompaniment in mind.
His family, of peasant and petit bourgeois stock, was Roman Catholic but not particularly devout. An unbeliever in his teenage years, he experienced a sudden conversion at the age of eighteen on Christmas Day 1886 while listening to a choir sing Vespers in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. He would remain an active Catholic for the rest of his life.
Politics
Claudel, a conservative of the old school, but not a fascist, had right-wing political views.
Views
In his youth, Claudel was heavily influenced by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and the Symbolists. Like them, he was horrified by modern materialist views of life. Unlike most of them, his response was to embrace Catholicism. All his writings are passionate rejections of the idea of a mechanical or random universe, instead proclaiming the deep spiritual meaning of human life founded on God's all-governing grace and love.
Claudel wrote in a unique verse style. He rejected traditional metrics in favour of long, luxuriant, unrhymed lines of free verse, the so-called verset claudelien, influenced by the Latin psalms of the Vulgate.
As well as Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Charles Péguy, and Colette, Claudel revolted against 19th-century positivism, as well as against the extremes of symbolism which denied reality to the external world.
Quotations:
“I am a simple and serious man: as an artist, I despise virtuosity and fail to understand facetiousness. From Voltaire and Anatole France, the sneer has always seemed to me the stigmata of reprobation. From the moment a man is possessed by hatred for God he is no longer able to repress his laughter.”
Membership
Since 4 April 1946, Claudel was a member of the French Academy.
Personality
Claudel was always a controversial figure during his lifetime and remains so today. As a schoolboy, he was solitary and pessimistic and rebelled against the pervading philosophies of determinism and positivism, which denied man his free will and made him merely a product of his heredity and environment. As for his career, his devout Catholicism and his right-wing political views, both slightly unusual stances among his intellectual peers, made him, and continue to make him, unpopular in many circles.
Though often compared to Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Bertolt Brecht, Claudel was different from these writers of the avant-garde in his conservatism and his Catholicism; and these facts, as critics have suggested, may explain his relative obscurity in England and the United States. His sensibility—emotional, anti-rational, given to symbolism and mysticism—is antithetical to the viewpoint typically associated with the dominant mentalities in Britain and the United States, according to literary scholars.
Interests
English and Japanese literature, visual arts, music
Connections
After a long affair with Rosalie Vetch, a married woman with four children and pregnant with Claudel's child, ended in February 1905 (Vetch left him for another man), Claudel married Reine Sainte-Marie-Perrin on March 15, 1906. The couple had five children.
