Paul Claudel


Paul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism. Claudel was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in six different years.

Biography

He was born in Villeneuve-sur-Fère, 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. Having spent his first years in Champagne, he studied at the lycée of Bar-le-Duc and at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1881, when his parents moved to Paris. 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: "In an instant, my heart was touched, and I believed." He would remain an active Catholic for the rest of his life. He studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies.
, modeled in 1884 and cast in 1893
The young Claudel seriously considered entering a Benedictine monastery, but in the end began a career in the French diplomatic corps, in which he would serve from 1893 to 1936. He was first vice-consul in New York, and later in Boston. He was French consul in China, including consul in Shanghai, and vice-consul in Fuzhou, consul in Tianjin , in Prague, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Rome, ministre plénipotentiaire in Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, ambassador in Tokyo, Washington, D.C. and Brussels. While he served in Brazil during the First World War he supervised the continued provision of food supplies from South America to France.
Due to his position in the Diplomatic Corps, at the beginning of his career Claudel published either anonymously or under a pseudonym, 'since permission to publish was needed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs':11 This led to him remaining 'an obscure author' until the editors of the Nouvelle Revue Française recognised his work and began a long collaboration with him.':12
In 1936 he retired to his château in Brangues.
After a long affair with Rosalie Vetch, a married woman with four children and pregnant with Claudel's child, ended in February 1905, Claudel married Reine Sainte-Marie-Perrin on 15 March 1906.

Work

At the age of 18 Claudel discovered Arthur Rimbaud's book of poetry, Illuminations, and underwent a sudden conversion to Catholicism. Together these two events would have a profound effect on him, leading to work towards 'the revelation through poetry, both lyrical and dramatic, of the grand design of creation' 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. His language and imagery was often lush, mystical, exhilarating, consciously 'poetical'; the settings of his plays tended to be romantically distant, medieval France or sixteenth-century Spanish South America, yet spiritually all-encompassing, transcending the level of material realism. He used scenes of passionate, obsessive human love to convey with great power God's infinite love for humanity. His plays were often extraordinarily long, sometimes stretching to eleven hours, and pressed the realities of material staging to their limits. Yet they were physically staged, at least in part, to rapturous acclaim, and are not merely closet dramas.
The most famous of his plays are Le Partage de Midi, L'Annonce faite à Marie focusing on the themes of sacrifice, oblation and sanctification through the tale of a young medieval French peasant woman who contracts leprosy, and Le Soulier de Satin, his deepest exploration of human and divine love and longing set in the Spanish empire of the siglo de oro, which was staged at the Comédie-Française in 1943. In later years he wrote texts to be set to music, most notably Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher, an "opera-oratorio" with music by Arthur Honegger.
As well as his verse dramas, Claudel also wrote much lyric poetry, for example the Cinq Grandes Odes.

Reputation

Claudel was always a controversial figure during his lifetime, and remains so today. 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.
His address of a poem to Marshal Philippe Pétain after the defeat of France in 1940, commending Petain for picking up and salvaging France's broken, wounded body, has been unflatteringly remembered, though it is less a paean to Pétain than a patriotic lament over the condition of France. As a Catholic, he could not avoid a sense of satisfaction at the fall of the anti-clerical French Third Republic. However, accusations that he was a collaborationist based on the 1941 poem ignore the fact that support for Marshal Pétain and the surrender was, in the catastrophic atmosphere of defeat, emotional collapse and exhaustion in 1941, widespread throughout the French populace. Claudel's diaries make clear his consistent contempt for Nazism, and his attitude to the Vichy regime quickly hardened into opposition.
He also committed his sister Camille Claudel to a psychiatric hospital in March 1913, where she remained for the last 30 years of her life, visiting her seven times in those 30 years. Records show that while she did have mental lapses, she was clear-headed while working on her art. An exhibition of her bronzes in the Swiss Foundation Gianadda from 16 November 1990 until February 1991 shows clearly what can be considered only a small proof of the timeless beauty of her sculptures, inspired by a genuine talent. Doctors tried to convince the family that she need not be in the institution, but still they kept her there.
Despite in his earlier years sharing the old-fashioned antisemitism of conservative France, Claudel's response to the radical racialist Nazi kind was unequivocal, writing an open letter to the World Jewish Conference in 1935 condemning the Nuremberg Laws as "abominable and stupid." His daughter-in-law's sister married a Jew, Paul-Louis Weiller, who was arrested by the Vichy government in October 1940. Claudel went to Vichy to intercede for him, to no avail; luckily Weiller managed to escape and flee to New York. Claudel made known his anger at the Vichy government's anti-Jewish legislation, courageously writing a published letter to the Chief Rabbi, Israel Schwartz, in 1941 to express "the disgust, horror, and indignation that all decent Frenchmen and especially Catholics feel in respect of the injustices, the despoiling, all the ill treatment of which our Jewish compatriots are now the victims... Israel is always the eldest son of the promise , as it is today the eldest son of suffering." The Vichy authorities responded by having Claudel's house searched and keeping him under observation. His support for Charles de Gaulle and the Free French forces culminated in his victory ode addressed to de Gaulle when Paris was liberated in 1944.
Claudel, a conservative of the old school, was clearly not a fascist. The French writers who were attracted by, and collaborated with, the Nazi "New Order" in Europe, much younger men like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, tended to come from a very different background to Claudel's: they were nihilists, ex-dadaists, and futurists rather than old-fashioned Catholics.
An interesting parallel to Claudel, for Anglophones, is T. S. Eliot, whose later political and religious views were similar to Claudel's. As with Eliot, even those who dislike Claudel's religious and political beliefs, have generally admitted his genius as a writer. The British poet W. H. Auden, at that time a left-leaning agnostic, acknowledged the importance of Paul Claudel in his famous poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats". Writing about Yeats, Auden says in lines 52–55:
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac wrote a song "La soeur de Paul" pour Mareva Galanter/2010.
George Steiner, in The Death of Tragedy, calls him one of the three "masters of drama" in the twentieth century.
Paul Claudel was elected to the Académie française on 4 April 1946.
The chapter of the French National Honors Society at Syosset High School is named after Paul Claudel.