Pierre Louÿs 1870-1925
biography
Louÿs' refined evocations, not to say re-inventions, of the society of Hellenistic Greece proved extremely popular in both France and the English speaking world, especially due to the somewhat risque nature of such works as Aphrodite (1896) and Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894). He lived his entire life in Paris, travelling occasionally around the Mediterranean coast where so many of his works of art were set. He had close friends among the writers of his day but otherwise kept among himself rather apart from literary cliques except for that of Mallarme.
Paul Valery wrote the following account of his friendship with Louÿs for the journal Les Nouvelles Litteraires in June of 1925:
At the Grave of Pierre Louÿs
How can I possibly talk about Pierre Louÿs? Don't imagine that I have the heart to paint a portrait at a time like this. How could I deliver an eulogy, produce a study of his work, collect my memories, in my present shocked and shattered state, or distinguish between what interests the public and what has overwhelmed me with such confusion and grief? How could I give voice to the foolish monologue, the senseless lament that goes on of itself inside of us over a man who has just died; a man dead yet so close, so well known to me, so alive, so present still, still thinking and speaking, but in a world now horribly brought to an end?
Yesterday, under the impact of a few words, it seemed as though a huge fragment of life had fallen away from me, uncovering some great gaping, smarting wound, where hundreds of memories appeared suddenly exposed and as though maddened by the sudden light of death, rushing in unimaginable disorder, as if trying to repair the loss suffered by my heart and grasping despairingly at the past. In place of the unthinkable event, there came this swarm of memories which would not accept the fact of death.
For my friendship with Pierre Louÿs was an event of capital importance in my life. One chance in a thousand brought me to know him, and my life was completely changed. How often we used to talk about our first meeting! The result, so far as I was concerned, was that almost at once I felt impelled to write. My new friend insisted that I should take as a duty, as a sort of virtuous exercise, what I had sometimes practiced for pleasure without allowing it to become a burden. Most of my early verse was simply written to be exchanged for his, or to fill up space in the little review which he had founded and which only published verse. It was he who sent to Heredia and Henri de Regnier my first efforts, written a long way away from Paris. And it was he who one evening introduced me to Stephane Mallarme.
At that time he was the shyest, the most imperious, the most tactful, and the most obstinate of young men, with a seductiveness and an elegance which I have never come across in anyone else. At first he was very reserved, with an almost diplomatic air of mystery about him, and exquisite manners, infinitely careful over forms and nuances, stuttering in a very low and gentle voice those gracious words which hold us and reveal nothing to indiscreet listeners. But once trust had been established, the real Pierre emerged. His great gifts, his endless curiosity, his vast and astonishing culture which he constantly nourished, his enthusiasms which sometimes verged on the fanatical, his devastating and irresistible whims, the charming surprises he arranged, and all the characteristics of a person who was absolute in his friendships, his admirations, and in their opposites, dominated by the unswerving, unconditional, truly mystical devotion that he felt for the perfection of our art, were displayed with such vivacity that the rest of us, by comparison, always seemed in some degree less young, less ardent, less determined, less versatile; and we felt ourselves under the sway of his passions.
He was a charming tyrant, and being himself the slave of what he found most beautiful in art and in things, he had a marvelous gift for imposing his own gods and his own idols.
Who among those of us who were his friends does not owe much to him?
The most famous of them all, Claude Debussy, found in Pierre Louÿs support, counsel, even instruction or essential insights into literature - in short, the invaluable mainstay of his career in all its aspects, at all times, in all its difficulties, even those of fame.
I could mention names, call on the living and the dead .... Let it suffice to say that his highly personal influence, his powers of stimulation, the repercussions of his will and his intellectual vitality were great. He had a genius for recognizing his own.
This is not the moment to speak of the great artist he was, or of his books. Neither emotion nor haste is fitting for a clear consideration, with the rigor that he himself would have wished, of a work so subtle, so masterly, so lovingly pushed to the last extremes of grace, without a thought for time, trouble, or the number of experiments or revisions. When a man has devoted so much energy and ardor, so much patience and thought, to his work, he is entitled to expect that he will be long and carefully studied by those who follow him. The time will come for such respect.
Today, beside the grave of my friend, I feel that I have a duty to perform. Since we are concerned at present with his memory, and since the fate of his name and his reputation will henceforth rest in the hands of those of us who have known him, I think it incumbent on me to bring out a thought which had tormented him for many years, and to which he often returned in his solitude. Although famous, Pierre Louÿs felt that he had not had the proper kind of recognition. Because one part of his work attracted so many readers who were all too susceptible to descriptions of love, he was convinced that people ,misunderstood his spiritual aspirations and the guiding principles of his thought. Whatever is erotic and voluptuous in the pages he wrote, all those charming bodies so deliciously portrayed in their tenderest attitudes, with their gentlest beauties, their graceful or passionate gestures, these have easily won for Bilitis and Aphrodite a host of worshippers.
But such people could only see what they saw. The majority saw nothing in those splendid books but apologies for the flesh and its pleasures. Neither the care and labor required to write such an admirable style, not the knowledge implied in his descriptions, nor the bitterness and despair that went into them, revealed to their eyes the true feathers of the author. They thought him simply as a devotee of pleasure, though the writer of a rather fine and pure style. Their error was shared by people of a very different stamp. I mean those whose frigid or gloomy temperament and whose disgust for things of the flesh roused them to such fury against the work of Pierre Louÿs.
Pierre suffered at being reduced to the sort of character which both parties so naively saw in him. He complained that they misunderstood him and did not recognize the real passions of his mind, which were those of an artist. I can bear witness to his complaints and was sufficiently well placed to know that there was substance in them. Thirty years ago, the word "artist" meant for us someone who lived apart, a dedicated person, at once victim and priest, a person who was singled out by his gifts and whose virtues and weaknesses were not those of other men. He was the servant and the apostle of a divinity whose nature was just beginning to be understood. At the dawn of our thinking life, we had found ourselves among the ruins of accepted beliefs. As for positive knowledge, the way in which it had recently been abused metaphysically, and the disillusionment caused by such paradoxical and fanciful use of verifiable discoveries, had put us on our guard against them. But our unknown and unchallenged god was the one who reveals himself through the works of man in so far as these are beautiful and gratuitous. He is a god, he calls for a spirit of renunciation and sacrifice; and the faith in him gives a universal and clearly defined meaning to the pure and naive pride which is indispensable for the creation of masterpieces. The martyr, the elect of this god, the artist, necessarily believes that all virtue lies in the contemplation and cult of beautiful things, and all sanctity in creating them. That is something which could never have been suspected by the majority of Pierre Louÿs's readers, and still less by his enemies.
But though he had sunk into solitude and gloom, he would sometimes turn back to his youth, which had been dedicated to the god of whom I have spoken. And he would invoke against his fame, which seemed to him unjust and unworthy, the magnificent letters he had written to me many many years ago. They were filled with an altogether religious exhalation; all the great men of poetry and music were celebrated in them, invoked like the names of the blessed, the most enviable of beings. One particularly beautiful letter contained an account of a stay at the Grande Chartreuse, a week's retreat, but a retreat in his own manner, a retreat with the thoughts and the desires of an artist, with the vows and the introspection of a poet...
I believe that he had no deeper or stronger wish, during his years of silence and isolation, than to make known one day the person he really was. He wanted to confess the faith of his adolescence, show himself a man of that faith, and he planned a book on himself and on the ardent years of his life, whose title would have been this: When I Was Nineteen.
I do not know whether a line of it was ever written.
selected works in translation
There is almost of nothing of Louÿs' in print today. Most volumes I have of his work have been privately printed by the Pierre Louÿs Society
A New Pleasure in The Book of Masks; Arkhive Two translated by Andrew Mangravite (Atlas Press, 1994)
Aphrodite translated by Willis L. Parker (Illustrated Editions Company, 1932)
Byblis, Leda, A New Pleasure translated by M. S. Buck (Privately Printed 975 copies, 1920)
Collected Works of Pierre Louÿs no translator listed (Liveright Inc. - The Pierre Louÿs Society, 1932)
Dialogues of the Courtesans translated by Guy Daniels (Cercle des Editions Privees, 1973)
writing
excerpt from -byblis
The moon had risen, red like blood behind the tall, black lines of the pines. Byblis could hardly see it. It seemed to her that a damp veil rested upon her long eyes. An eternal silence slept in the woods.
And there was a great tear which filled the corner of her left eye.
Byblis had never wept. She believed that she was going to die, and sighed, as the divine relief mysteriously assisted her.
The tear extended, trembled, enlarged; then suddenly rolled down her cheek.
Byblis remained motionless, her eyes fixed, before the moon.
And now a swollen tear filled the corner of her right eye. It enlarged like the first, glided upon the lashes, and fell.
Two other tears were born, two burning drops which left moist traces on her cheeks. They reached the corners of her mouth; a delicious bitterness enervated the weary child.
So, never more would her hand touch the hand of Caunos. Never more would she see the shadowy glow of his regard, his dear head and his young hair. Never again would they sleep, side by side, enlaced upon the same bed. The forests had forgotten his name.
An outburst of despair dropped her face into her hands; but such an abundance of tears wet her burning cheeks that it seemed to her as though a miraculous spring was carrying away all her sorrows like dead leaves upon the waters of a torrent.
The tears, born gently within her, mounted to her eyes, floated, overflowed, glided in a warm sheet over her cheeks, inundated her narrow breast, fell upon her closed legs. She no longer felt them round, one by one, between her long eyelids; they had become a continuous and gentle stream, an inexhaustible flow, the effusion of an enchanted water.
Meanwhile, awakened by the moonlight, the immortals of the forest hastened up from all sides. The bark of the trees became transparent, revealing the forms of nymphs; and even the shivering naiads, quitting their waters and rocks, were seen in the woods.
They thronged about Byblis, calling to her, frightened by the child's floods of tears which had traced in the earth a deep, sinuous line which slowly moved toward the plain.
But already Byblis heard nothing more, neither the voices nor the steps nor the night wind. Little by little, her attitude became eternal. Under the flood of tears, her skin had taken the smooth, white tint of marble bathed by the waters. The wind no longer stirred her hair along her arms. She had devolved into pure stone. A shadowy light still lingered for a moment in her vision. Suddenly, this flickered out; but the fresh tears still ran from her eyes.
It is thus that Byblis was changed into a fountain.
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