Paul Claudel

French poet and playwright

• Born: August 6, 1868
• Birthplace: Villeneuve-sur-Fère, France
• Died: February 23, 1955
• Place of death: Paris, France

Identity: Catholic

Biography

Paul Claudel (kloh-dehl) was born in a small town northeast of Paris on August 6, 1868. His father was a minor government employee. The family lived in the provinces until 1882, at which time, when Claudel was fourteen, his father was assigned to Paris. Claudel attended a good school in the capital and did well; however, he felt a great spiritual hunger that could not be satisfied by the positivist intellectual milieu of the time. Paul Claudel was the most influential Catholic poet and playwright in France during the first half of the twentieth century. His sister Camille was a famous sculptor.

In 1886, Claudel entered the Political Science Academy to train for the foreign service. In that same year he experienced a double spiritual shock: He was dazzled by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, and he underwent a mystical religious experience in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The result was a lifelong commitment to poetry and the Catholic faith; thereafter, Claudel never separated his religious and his artistic life.

In the late 1880’s and early 1890’s, Claudel, who had begun writing when he was fourteen, wrote two of his most important plays: Tête d’Or and The City. He began his diplomatic career in 1890, and in 1893 he left for a two-year tour of duty in the United States. From 1895 to 1909, Claudel was stationed in the Far East. These fourteen years were literarily productive. The poet wrote his finest lyric poetry during this time—most notably, Five Great Odes—as well as several plays and a good deal of important literary criticism. After leaving Asia, Claudel served in Germany, Italy, and Brazil. In 1920, he was stationed in Denmark, and in 1922 he was appointed ambassador to Japan. Claudel’s two careers, poetry and diplomacy, were equally rewarding for him throughout his life. Always writing poetry, fiction, criticism, and drama (his complete works take up one hundred volumes), Claudel served as ambassador to the United States (1928-1933) and then to Belgium until 1936, when he returned home to France to retire. For more than four decades Claudel lived and worked outside of France. He wrote extensively during his years in the diplomatic service. This self-imposed separation from France gave him the opportunity to develop his own literary interests, which were not greatly influenced by other French writers of his era. The major influences on him were Rimbaud, the Bible, and the classical Greek and Roman writers he had loved from his youth.

During the next ten years, Claudel increasingly emphasized drama, and it was primarily as a dramatist that he was admired. His theatrical masterpiece The Satin Slipper: Or, The Worst Is Not the Surest had been first published in 1928-1929, but it was not performed until 1943, when it was staged in German-occupied Paris by the director Jean-Louis Barrault with music composed by Arthur Honegger.

Claudel is still much better known as a playwright than a poet in the United States. Slowly he became a kind of patriarch of French letters, although he was not elected to the French Academy until 1946, when he was seventy-eight years old. His last years were taken up by writing poetic commentaries on the Bible; he became even more thoroughly convinced as he grew older that the Bible and religion were the sources of both grace and poetry. Claudel died at the age of eighty-six in 1955. His funeral was held in the cathedral of Notre-Dame.

Bibliography

Bugliani, Ann. Women and the Feminine Principle in the Works of Paul Claudel. Madrid: J. Porrúa Turanzas, 1977. This study focuses on the portrayal of women in Claudel’s works. Bibliography.

Caranfa, Angelo. Claudel: Beauty and Grace. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989. Clearly explains the complex relationship between Claudel’s aesthetics and his belief in Catholicism, as expressed both in his plays and in his poetry. The clearest introduction to Claudel’s religious beliefs.

Chiari, Joseph. The Poetic Drama of Paul Claudel. New York: Gordian Press, 1969. Critical appraisal of Claudel’s plays. Includes bibliography.

Griffiths, Richard. Claudel: A Reappraisal. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1970. Criticism of Claudel’s major works, with bibliography.

Humes, Joy. Two Against Time: A Study of the Very Present Worlds of Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Contains an excellent analysis of the two major French Catholic poets of the twentieth century. The paradox in the title of this book refers to the fact that both Péguy and Claudel were more concerned with the representation of the divine in this life and in the next than with meditations on social and political events.

Killiam, Marie-Thérèse. The Art Criticism of Paul Claudel. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. A look at Claudel’s critiques of art, which reflected his aesthetic sensibilities, which also found expression in his writings. Bibliography and index.

Knapp, Bettina L. Paul Claudel. New York: Ungar, 1982. Critical analysis of Claudel’s plays.

Lambert, Carole J. The Empty Cross: Medieval Hopes, Modern Futility in the Theater of Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Claudel, August Strindberg, and Georg Kaiser. New York: Garland, 1990. The works of Maeterlinck, Claudel, Strindberg, and Kaiser are compared and contrasted. Bibliography.

Longstaffe, Moya. Metamorphoses of Passion and the Heroic in French Literature. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1999. A historical and critical interpretation of the works of Pierre Corneille, Stendhal, and Paul Claudel.

Moses, Nagy. “When the Heart Speaks of Its Reasons: Cinq Grandes Odes.” Claudel Studies 21 (1994): 45-57. This American scholarly journal appears annually and includes excellent essays on Claudel’s works. This article contains a thoughtful analysis of his poetic masterpiece.

Paliyenko, Adrianna. Mis-reading the Creative Impulse: The Poetic Subject in Rimbaud and Claudel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Claudel found inspiration in the visionary poetry of the late nineteenth century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, but he transformed the agnostic Rimbaud into an orthodox Catholic believer. Palijenko explains that Claudel’s clear misreading of Rimbaud’s poetry had a profound influence on his own attempt to reconcile modernity and Catholicism in his own poetry.

Waters, Harold. Paul Claudel. New York: Twayne, 1970. Remains the best general introduction in English to Claudel’s long career as a diplomat and to his plays and poetry. Contains an excellent annotated bibliography of studies on Claudel.

Watson, Harold. Claudel’s Immortal Heroes: A Choice of Deaths. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1971. An analysis of the characters in Claudel’s work. Includes bibliographic references.