FRANCIS JAMMES
I MYSELF am too near the tomb “by affliction and years” to be able to grieve much over his death. This success of the Good God that Jammes was, fully completed his task and, for many years past, his slipping toward Paradise was only too perceptible in his work and in his life. Should I say even that this affliction brings me one satisfaction: that of being able to let him figure in the anthology of French poets which I am preparing (and where no living men are to figure) with an abundant choice from his work.
Francis Jammes had full consciousness of his importance; in the contemporary literary movement, it is considerable and can justify his pride. I think he needed this pride to permit him to assert himself, and from his very first poems, with such an unyielding originality. Jammes made a clean break with the schools and poetic tradition. His work is not a continuation of anything; it starts anew and from the ground up; it is a spring where the thirsty, or “the pure in heart” come to drink. Jammes is delightfully genuine. And what makes it more surprising is that, for songs so new, he used the old alexandrine; but he used it with such determined lack of skill, that the old instrument, put out of tune by him, made the sounds unrecognizable.
Le pauvre pion doux, si sale, m’a dit: j’ai
Bien mal aux yeux et le bras droit paralysé …
Il économise pour se faire soigner.…1
Anyone can try new harmonies; the special property of Jammes was to bring his novelty to perfection immediately. For that matter, this novelty was not artificially obtained; it was so as not to put his voice out of tune that he put the instrument out of tune; that was all that counted with him: that his voice should be true. That of Francis Jammes did not recall any other; as genuine as the human voice can be. Now we are accustomed to it, it does not surprise us any more; when the first poems of the man who called himself a faun appeared, that voice at first seemed discord to the ears of the cultivated city folk; but soon, the exact pitch of that voice triumphed and, alongside of it, it was the voice of his contemporaries that appeared artificial, borrowed.
Jammes did not have to search. The first letters I received from him show him, from 1893, still young, already fully conscious of his savor, his virility, his gifts, with all his charming faults, his resolute obtuseness, his pride and fantasy, his irreplaceable qualities. I thought that, more than my commentaries, some of his letters from years long gone by, would deservedly interest the readers of the N. R. F. in spite of the oddities of the dithyrambs. I am adding to them some personal recollections, written a few years ago. I give them without adding anything. I should like to be able to make felt, through certain reserves, the affection that bound us and which holds such a great place in my life.
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I had already been in correspondence with him for a long time, when he came to join us at Biskra where we, my wife and I, were completing our wedding trip. He let himself be brought there by a mutual friend, Eugène Rouart, eager to introduce us to each other and to make him see the country; for he had never yet left Orthez. In our letters, we used the tu form; but when I saw getting out of the train that sprightly little being, bearded, with a ringing voice and a gimlet eye, I found him so little like what I had imagined him to be, that the tu at first gave place to vous; which seemed to have such an effect on him that the tu was taken up again.
He had taken me by the arm, very affectionately, as soon as we had found ourselves alone, on the terrace of the hotel, but I was not a little surprised by the protecting and even contemptuous tone that he assumed on speaking to me of Eugène Rouart, for whom I had much more affection than he seemed to think, and with whom I was more intimate than I could ever be with Jammes. Convinced that, no more than he, could I doubt for an instant the immense superiority of both of us over our mutual friend, he gave me to understand at once he feared that superiority would soon get our poor friend into a most painful situation.
“We should,” he said to me, “watch our remarks carefully, and say nothing too subtle in front of him, so as not to mortify him.”
The attention was, most assuredly, delicate, but showed such a lack of understanding of others, that I was embarrassed, to such a degree I did not know what to say to him. As apparent as that great fault was, yet one did not suffer too much because of it, for Jammes was a charming fellow and, at that time, did not pontificate at all. His good spirits were extraordinary. It was one continuous outburst of anecdotes about the bourgeoisie of Pau and Orthez. He narrated delightfully and with such art that one never tired of listening to him. He had parading before you a surprising quantity of puppets with preposterous gestures and droll comments, that appeared to him (and that he showed) all the more extravagant since he saw, in those he painted, only the outside.
When, the next summer, he came to pass some time with us at La Roque, my old Aunt Demarest, who did not unbend easily, was sometimes ill with laughter. But first I come back to, Biskra; in addition to his talent as a story-teller, Jammes had the gift of analogies, a gift that he often confused with poetic genius. His nerves always tingling seemed like the cords of a lute that would reverberate at the approach of every harmony; he amused himself with it; he asked, pointing to an object, when we were out for a walk:
“What does that recall to you? What does that make you think of?”—and amused us by the most unexpected analogies, most surprisingly exact, but of which none of the rest of us would have thought.
We lingered only a few more days at Biskra, then left for Touggourt, where we were to separate, for, aided by fatigue, the misunderstanding between Jammes and Rouart soon became intolerable. Jammes left us there. He left all alone, and his departure was pathetic. He was to return at once to Orthez and was persuaded he was decidedly not made to leave home. However, he readily consented to come to La Roque, and I have very pleasant memories of his stay with us.
Ghéon was our guest when Jammes came to join us. To tease him a little about his knowledge of natural history, that he liked to advance, and which did not appear to me very exact, we had agreed, Ghéon and I, to call the wasps “scorpion-fish.” There was a great abundance of them at that season: they entered by the open window of the dining-room, where, as soon as Jammes was seated, Ghéon exclaimed:
“Another scorpion-fish!”
Jammes, who saw nothing more than a wasp, surprised and disturbed, confessed his ignorance. “Scorpion-fish and wasp! Can they be confused? There is no relationship between them!” But soon Jammes. joined our game, to find that the name scorpion-fish indeed fitted them very much better; then, starting off, he proposed rebaptising many things, and finding for each object a name unexpectedly adequate. Thus we framed an extraordinary lexicon that entertained us all through his stay; eye-glasses became cavalry; a watch-key, a time-jack; some rather mediocre bordeau that my wife was serving at table was called outsider; but a rather remarkable burgundy was baptised by Jammes “nipon.” For this little game, the names found by him always seemed to us the best.
Jammes showed himself extremely attentive to my Aunt Demarest; rather flattered, moreover, I think, by the success he had with her; entertaining himself by making her laugh and sometimes shocking her a little.
“Madame Demarest, what does this remind you of?” he asked her at table, pointing out with his finger a peach, in a fruit dish, that a slug had spoiled considerably; it was a sort of peculiar cavity, yellowish and very ugly looking. My aunt fixed her “cavalry” on her nose, leaned over, examined a little, then declared simply that it didn’t remind her of anything. So Jammes, in his ringing voice, declared:
“The foramen of the priest’s ear.”
“Ah, Monsieur Jammes …”
And the servant who was serving us, bent double, stifled her laughter in a napkin.
After supper we organized a little game of squails around the big table in the reception room. They were little quoits of black and white box-wood that had to be thrown with a flip as near as possible to a metal jack, standing in the middle of the table, dislocating the opponents as much as possible, and playing the game with partners. Jammes called my aunt “the Talleyrand of the blacks,” which flattered her a great deal, for she played skillfully.
My aunt did not get up early, but when we took a walk in front of the house after breakfast, she could sometimes be seen at her bedroom window. She was a little near-sighted, and didn’t even see the deep bow Ghéon made to her. So Jammes said to him:
“Useless, dear friend.… Madame Demarest doesn’t recognize anybody before ten o’clock in the morning.”
That was the time she came down. But before that we had already left for our walk.
One day when Ghéon, Jammes and I had driven to Trouville, and were walking rapidly on the beach, Jammes, particularly excited, became suddenly worried; his face darkened; his eyes filled with tears. His silence bothered us, for until then he had not stopped talking.…
“No, there is nothing the matter with me.… But suddenly, I surprised a heliotrope scent.… And that scent awakens memories in me.…”
Then silence again; a silence we respected, and the walk ended without any one of us three saying a word. On our return, Jammes shut himself up in his room. And it was that night he composed one of his most beautiful Elegies (“In the abandoned domain where the great wind …”).
That elegy referred to another walk we had taken the evening before, in an “abandoned domain,” which served later as the scene for my Isabelle. Almost everything I relate in that book is authentic, and, when I was younger, I might have known the remarkable inhabitants of that chateau which I called “la Quartfourche,” and that, in reality, is called Formentin.
The next morning, when Jammes read me the lines he had composed during the night, as great as might be my admiration, I could not refrain from pointing out to him some imperfections that seemed to me to detract a little from his poem. He retired to fix it up; came back at the end of an hour:
“Dear friend,” he said to me, “I wanted to correct it but … I don’t know whether I have the right.”
I remained for a few moments without understanding. However, the sense of the words was clear: this poem having been written under the dictation of inspiration, every touching-up should be considered impious. Indeed, one can not imagine a mind more incapable of criticism, of himself as well as of others. And even the word “incapable” seems to me inexact. The spirit of criticism, according to Jammes, was always an attack on liberty, and immediately blanched love, religion and poetry.
I again encountered this self-sufficiency, later, under particularly painful circumstances. Charles-Louis Philippe had just died. The N. R. F. immediately prepared a special number for the man who had been one of its most important collaborators. Each one of Charles-Louis Philippe’s friends, themselves collaborators on our magazine, had it in his heart to render homage to the deceased, whom we admired and loved above everyone. Jammes, who made a profession of particular liking for Philippe, into which there entered too a little of his cult for the poor and unfortunate, was one of the first notified. His homage was to appear at the head of the number and soon he sent it to me. I was staggered. A painfully scornful condescension was spread all over the first lines. The article itself was proper; but that insulting preamble formed a sort of head-piece, that appeared to be unpublishable. I wanted to ask Jammes to remove it, as one does before a tomb. Distrustful, however, of my own feelings, and fearing to bring in an exaggerated touchiness of friendship, I ran to find Arthur Fontaine, to show him Jammes’ manuscript, ask his advice and counsel, knowing his close connection with Jammes, and that Jammes would be ready to listen to him. But Fontaine knew Jammes even better than I. And although he was just as affected as I by that incongruous manifestation, he communicated to me his fears that Jammes would refuse to change anything in his text. As a matter of fact, I received from Jammes, shortly afterwards, a telegram withdrawing his contribution, rather than change a single word of it. Jammes’ prose was replaced to advantage by an admirable poem of Claudel’s that we received at the last minute.
Jammes’ attitude was very painful to me, to such a degree that my friendship for him was cooled off considerably by it. It was very lively at that time, although I have never been able to take him entirely seriously; and I knew how wounding and cruel certain uncompromising manifestations of his humor could be. I was not the only one of his friends to suffer from it. “I have just received a letter from Jammes,” Raymond Bonheur wrote me one day, “which will be one of the sorrows of my life.”
More capable of pity or of compassion, if you wish, than of real sympathy, Jammes was too full of his own importance to be able to understand anyone else. And I am not sure he understood himself very well, or that he did not invent himself a little; the most evident impulse of his heart, I mean the one that brought him out the most, was not always the most natural, or at least the most spontaneous. One day when we were taking a walk together, we surprised a little hare down in a ditch. At first Jammes, instinctively, raised his cane to kill it; but almost at once, collecting himself, composing himself:
“Oh, the poor little thing. He’ll have to be taken off the road; he might get hurt.”
For the great love he professed for animals often gave way to the instinct of the huntsman; that was one of the contradictions of his nature, which, without his suspecting it, made his richness, and fed his poetry. (Like the secret debate between piety and sensuality.) In the little garden of his first house at Orthez, where I had been to pass a few days with him, a puff of wind brought to us the odor of burned powder, like what one smells after fireworks or shots. Anybody else would have thought, doubtless: “Why, that smells like powder.” Jammes exclaimed:
“That smells like game.”
I remember that remark was later the joy of Jacques Rivière. He saw in it one of those subconscious leaps of the mind, the most character-revealing, and I think he was right.
Jammes readily confused with kindness, a sort of nervous sensibility, which certainly disposes one toward it, but does not necessarily lead one to abnegation.
At Biskra, on a certain evening when we had been visiting the Negro village, we were attracted by the cries and laughter of a group of children who were frisking about on the square. Having approached, we saw they were amusing themselves with the vain efforts to fly that an unfortunate sparrow, held back by a string on its foot, was making. We wanted to free the bird at once, and bought it from the children. Jammes, standing a little apart, pretended, in order to reassure my wife, to give the bird its liberty; but coming up to me, he whispered:
“I have him in my pocket. He can not fly. Don’t tell Madame Gide. I am trying to strangle him.… I feel him struggling. Ah! How it hurts me! It is horrible!”
That trip in Algeria had taken Jammes as far as Touggourt and it was there he left us to go back to Orthez as quickly as possible. We had made the long trip from Biskra to Touggourt in the stage. We were accompanied by Athman, from whom Jammes had just composed this short fragment that, moreover, I have quoted elsewhere:
My dear friend Athman
the trees that bear almonds
the fig-trees and black currants
are to be seated
under when fatigue is great.
One remains without moving at all
on closing one’s eyes.
One is lazily happy.
The garden, one hears below
limpid water that sings
like an Arab woman.
One is so comfortable lazy
on closing one’s eyes
as if one were asleep,
one is so comfortable, Athman,
that one thinks he is dead.
Jammes made fun of him; he explained our proverbs to him, and what the following meant: “Un bon tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras.”1
“The tulores,” he told him, “are a sort of fat trombone from which can be gotten only frightful sounds. The tiens is a kind of little flute.…”
Athman couldn’t stop laughing and lent himself to the game.
It was in memory of this trip that Jammes later made me a present of an extraordinary cane. He had gotten it himself, I believe, from an old shepherd in the Pyrenean foot-hills. Cut from an extremely hard wood, it ended in a dog’s head, roughly carved. Jammes had carved on it with a knife, in capital letters, the following lines:
A bee sleeps
On the heather of my heart.
A squirrel had a
Rose in its mouth. A donkey
Treated him like a fool.
A nightingale loved a wasp
He ate her with a kiss.
The first two lines appear as an epigraph printed at the head of his letters of 1894.
I have guarded the cane preciously. It is there in the corner of my room. I can not see it without reliving the past. It helps me bring back to life a figure who was dear to me, a friend whom I have never entirely lost.
1 The poor, gentle dominie, so dirty, said to me: “My eyes hurt so much, and my right arm is paralysed.” He economises to have himself treated.… Translator’s note.
1 “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Literal translation: “One good thing you have is worth more than two things you will have.” Translator’s note.