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Anna de Noailles was, during the Belle Epoque, a well known  poet, novelist and public figure. She has subsequently dropped almost completely out of view and when I first came across a poem of hers in an Anthology of French Poetry not a single full-length book was in print in French. For me, however, it was love at first sight : I found in her, apart from considerable technical ability, all the fire and controlled intensity which I admire in poetry and a stance towards life which, if not quite my own, is certainly one that I respect. The poem in question was  L’Empreinte which I have translated as follows

The Trace I Wish to Leave

I aim to thrust myself against this life so hard,
And clasp it to me fiercely, leaving such a trace,
That when the sweetness of these days I must discard
The world will keep awhile the warmth of my embrace.

The sea, spread out across the globe so lavishly,
On stormy days my fitful memory will sustain,
And in its myriad, random motions ceaselessly
Preserve the acrid, salty, savour of my pain.

What will be left of me in heath and windswept coomb?
My blazing eyes will set the yellow gorse on fire,
And the cicada perched upon a sprig of broom
Will sound the depth and poignancy of my desire.

My joy and restless passion will not die with me,
Nature will breathe me in, making of me a part
Of all that lives, while sorrowing humanity
Will hold the individual profile of my heart.

(The orginal French, along with translations of other poems and articles and commentaries on Anna de Noailles, can be found on the website www.annadenoailles.com )

Anna de Noailles admired Nietzsche, at the time still relatively unknown outside Germany, and espoused his philosophy, in some respects taking it further than Nietzsche did himself (though she lacked the philosophic finesse and scope of the German philosopher). I have, in my own website (www.sebastianhayes.co.uk) written of the fundamental dichotomy between life-affirming and life-denying philosophies, the first epitomized by Nietzsche and the second by Schopenhauer and studied this conflict in three ‘Novels of Love and War’  (Gone with the Wind, War and Peace and A Leaf in the Storm).

Nietzsche was prepared to go very far in accepting, indeed applauding, what one might call the biological basis of life which includes struggle, self-assertion, passion, pain and suffering as well as joy. For Schopenhauer, on the contrary, life, especially human life, was a horrifying spectacle of self-delusion and futile striving after the unattainable from which the only permanent release was  the quiescence of the Buddhist Nirvana, and the only temporary release an attitude of resignation assisted by the soothing powers of music (which Schopenhauer considered the highest of the arts).

Anna de Noailles, like Nietzsche, considered that to live life to the full it was necessary to decisively reject any hope (or fear) of personal survival and expressed this in about as extreme and concise a way as has ever been done before or since in her poem L’Ame et le Corps. Surprisingly, this poem was written when she was in her maturer years, not during  during the first flush of defiant youth as one might expect.

The Soul and the Body

The soul was first conceived in order to demean
The body, the domain of dreams and reasoning,
Sole source of our desire, of all that’s heard and seen,
For when it stops, it marks the close of everything.

They foist the soul upon us, so we cannot see
What’s underneath our feet, and in our cowardice
Deny our squalid end, the grim reality
That when the wine is drunk, there’s nothing but the lees.

O shattered bodies, eyes whose fire is at an end,
I shall not now commit the shameful  treachery
Against your greatness and your beauty to pretend
That you are as you were for all eternity.

No. I refuse all hope, distrust sublimity,
I am an outcast from your world and  I invite
The chill of your ignoble tombs, so mean, so small,
For I declare, on contemplating that vast night,
That once our blood is cold, it is the end of all.

Though Anna de Noailles wrote a good number of poems on fairly innocuous themes like the beauty of Nature — like Wordsworth she published too much — some of her more trenchant poems are almost too much for me, let alone her contemporaries. For example, she opens her poem Exaltation with these lines

I have the taste for what is ardent and intense,
Delirious crowds and bodies, a heroic role
In life, such bitter, acrid smells are like incense
To my tumultuous heart and my excessive soul.

It is difficult, not to say impossible, for anyone today in the post-Hitler era to admit so frankly to an enthusiasm for “delirious crowds and bodies”, but there is no point in denying that the excitement of such scenes is intense and contagious as anyone who has been on a mass demonstration knows. To be fair to Anna de Noailles, her social and political views were extremely advanced for her time and class — she refused to give way to the anti-semitic hysteria which swept through France at the time of the Dreyfus affair and even had the courage  to publicly oppose France’s entry into World War I,  though she somewhat modified her stance later out of a concern for the troops. In any case,  people of that era cannot be expected to have anticipated the rise of Nazism — though  I certainly feel  that today the out and out  admirers of Nietzsche, and for that matter Darwin, are being  dishonest and cowardly in refusing to admit that both these thinkers  prepared the ground for Nazism, whether they would have approved the eventual outcome or not.

Given the trenchant views of Anna de Noailles on certain subjects which  scandalized, though at the same time, fascinated the French intelligentsia who were still by and large  Catholic at the time, I must admit to being a little disappointed when I came to find out more about her actual life. In flagrant contrast to the poete maudit image, she seems to have been rather too  successful for my liking  : born a Greek/Roumanian princess, she married a French Count, was an admired beauty sculpted by Rodin and hosted a select salon attended by Proust, Gide, Valery, Rostand, Cocteau — you name them.  At least one young man  reputedly committed suicide because of her and she attracted the intermittent life-long attention of one of the most prestigious  public figures of the day, Maurice Barres, novelist and extreme Right-wing politician, seemingly becoming his mistress though the affair was carefully hushed up.

All this is not quite what I expected and indeed is  one of the reasons for her passing out of fashion. The Dadaists actually staged a mock trial of Maurice Barres, condemned him to death and hanged his effigy after the end of World War I.  Anna de Noailles did at least have the integrity of not allowing this somewhat unappealing individual to influence her social and political views : she had several Jewish friends, for example.

Anna de Noailles shows, in her writings, a preoccupation with death which is medieval rather than modern, since it is the process of physical disintegration which at once horrifies and fascinates her  — I go into this in more detail in my article on the Anna de Noailles website (www.annadenoailles.com) entitled Liebestod.  Thankfully,  Anna de Noailles just managed to escape the twentieth-century snake-pit of psychoanalysis and she never declines into the obsessive  self-absorption and self-pity of such female writers as Anne Seton and Sylvia Plath with whom she has superficial affinities.

Technically, Anna de Noailles resisted ‘modern’ literary techniques such as ‘free verse’ and ‘stream of consciousness’. Dionysian in philosophy and stance, she is Apollonian in style — a powerful combination.

For those who wish to find out more about Anna de Noailles  there exists a scholarly  full-length study by Catherine Perry, Persephone Unbound : Dionysian Aesthetics in the Works of Anna de Noailles.  The principal French biography, alas currently out of print, is by Claude Mignot-Ogliastri who has also edited two volumes of Anna de Noailles’ very interesting Correspondence.

It would seem that a long overdue revival of interest in Anna de Noailles has commenced, since there now exists a Cercle d’Anna de Noailles, (http://cercleannadenoailles.fr) founded by M. Alexandre d’Oriano with President, Mme Eugenie de Brancovan, the only surviving member of the de Noailles’ family, I believe. Also, Buchet/Chastel have recently brought out one of Anne de Noailles’ novels, Les Innocentes ou la Sagesse des Femmes. I can well imagine that one day soon there will be a Hollywood film based on the life and times of this fascinating and talented Belle Epoque femme fatale.