The one who spoke slowly (slow, soft) because he sought to be precise without ceasing to be ethereal: Philippe Jaccottet. Each of his annotations does not aspire to transcend a moment but to cut it out in its singularity, a light among trees or a chance encounter. A point of anchorage through which to let things pass and glimpse. Small fortresses in the precariousness of minutes. The fleeting as an instance of rare magic that extends between two times. Jaccottet (1925-2021) never wished to make explicit everything he believed in the practice and devotion of literature, so as not to place himself beyond the reach of others and perhaps of himself: "Starting from nothing. There lies my law. Everything else: distant smoke."
The Swiss poet called his notebooks La semaison (The Sowing), where he collected exceptionally common phenomena and recorded palpable things in pursuit of an intangible reverse side. Almost skittish from such attentiveness, pastoral, porous, given over to the innocence of perception (to the naivety of the real) and to the ingenuity of translation, he glosses the visible in a delicate rereading. He records with flights of fancy a particular flower, a concentrated mountain. A push and pull to fix a color (a crossing of tonalities, never flat or solid) or to stamp out a shadow. Chromatic and climatic episodes, shifts of light. Dissipations and premonitions. Spartan craftsmanship to keep the spirit at bay: "To feel oneself a grain of a very old plant whose root can no longer be seen." The ascesis is ascetic, stripped of embellishment, yet sometimes, inescapably, it proffers a description like a bowl of mist.
Everything in Jaccottet is a sketch, a first draft. The addiction and duty to examine "the secret law of appearance," as he said of Hopkins. The gratuitous grace—the supreme value—of a bird gliding obliquely, of a snow-covered tree. A poet in passing, hence perhaps his sense that "to correct would be somewhat artificial, therefore almost dishonest," though he judged it "an authentically irrational scruple." It is strange because there is much that is concrete and yet his journals and notebooks are difficult to grasp (this is a compliment). Could it be the temporal leaps? As if all his pages were a dream log. He never ceased to wonder how to enter into things; as though he were perpetually prolonging the urgent question of at what moment to throw oneself from a horse that has bolted and gallops blindly, defying every gesture of the rider.
He is sustained by a credible tone, a virtue he pointed to on more than one occasion: "One cannot avoid the impression that Joubert knew how to capture, in his finest moments, even the inflection by which a kind of truth is made immediately palpable." His favored adverb: inexplicably. Poetry allows escape, and not only from the univocal or from the temptations of grandiosity.
In verse and in prose, Jaccottet illustrates what a poem produces in its reader, analogous to the effect of untamed nature on those who pass through it. (He courts nature so ardently that a certain animism enters the picture.) Are the poems in these notebooks—apart from the proper poetry volumes—more like drafts? Do they invite less demanding readings? They come across as frayed yet unscathed. Jaccottet probes, insinuates from simplicity, like the secular prayer of the haiku. It is the discreet hunting of the moment of a poem's inception. Another poem exemplifies the times when a poet (Wallace Stevens) brings in a clichéd line to add resonance; he allows himself to slip it in among others that are far from clichéd, not only so that it may be tolerated but to magnify the total impression.
If it is hard for a good or excellent novelist to be seen as a great critic (and above all the reverse), it is even harder for a poet—despite the fact that two centuries ago Baudelaire debuted this bifocal gift, and was followed by more than a few, from Eliot and Pound to Brodsky and Bonnefoy. As happens with writers who remain close to other people's books, his way of reading defined him entirely. The author of La semaison was gentle and cordial but cutting in his reviews; he knew how to praise generously and to be contagious. The form of his curiosity is highly persuasive. One notices his will to take a book somewhere else, and his doubts are always significant. On his admired André Dhôtel: "I never found a writer (apart from Supervielle) who seemed to me more naturally simple, modest, less of a 'writer.'"
He touched on central, extremely difficult points when he praised John McGahern for "the achieved fusion of violence and sobriety, of realism without obviousness and of mystery without verbiage; texts that are neither 'literary' nor 'anti-literary,' that use words without detours, without hesitations, but not without art, texts that are intelligent without being intellectual, painful without being pathetic… a concrete force and above all that appearance of something natural." In French, he said, "when the concrete world enters a book, it does so tumultuously, ostentatiously, as in Céline, however worthy of admiration that may be."
But that was precisely what the exceptional Genevan critic Jean Starobinski celebrated in Jaccottet: "Without pretense, without artifice, without masks. We can receive, without any cunning, this word that offers itself to us without detours." Jean-Pierre Richard, the French essayist co-opted by the Genevan school of criticism, wrote of Jaccottet: "We will be tempted to catch this life at its closest to its enigma." He knew with what undercurrents he was operating behind the scenes: "Each work is realized in an uncertainty deeper than what the skill of its means allows one to see."
Always highly critical of himself in his notebooks and in his letters to his revered colleagues Gustave Roud, André Dhôtel, and Maurice Chappaz, Jaccottet mortified himself excessively, yet he was not unaware that it is somewhat discourteous (through immodesty) and intrusive (by discouraging the interlocutor from interpreting) for the one who speaks to also sell the magnitude of what he says.
He was born an hour from Geneva and ended up three hours away, on the other side, in a French village. A supreme example of what is called an intelligent gaze, he would often half-close his ultramarine eyes and read his poems in a cadenced manner. He always kept himself outside, at a cautious distance. One draws closer indefinitely, as when it seems the rain will never stop.
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