I am a wild overachiever. I was probably not meant to write collections of poetry but to make numbers collections for my father’s friends back in Atlantic City. Having grown up in such a place, I have always been drawn to resort towns. It is not surprising then that in late adulthood I wound up staying for a week in Sète, France on the Mediterranean coast near Montpellier.
Sète was not always a resort: it was and remains one of France’s principal fishing ports. With its harbors and canals abundant with commercial and personal craft, much of its life still revolves around the sea. It is the entry and exit point in the Mediterranean for the Canal Sur le Midi and has thrice weekly sailings by ferry boat to Morocco. Sète is not a very well-known place compared to its neighbor Montpellier. In fact, Sète was not named Sète until the 1920s when it was still called Cette and sometimes Sette—certainly not a propitious appellation which tempts me to distort Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland: “there is no there there” into “there is no this there.”
Henry James did not visit Sète proper on his A Little Tour of France in 1883, but he did transfer trains at the station in “Cette,” ate at “the buffet of the train station,” and reflected upon Matthew Arnold’s maudlin poem, ‘A Southern Night” of which the opening lines begin:
The sandy spits, the shore-lock’d lakes,
Melt into open, moonlit sea;
The soft Mediterranean breaks
At my feet, free.
Dotting the fields of corn and vine
Like ghosts, the huge, gnarl’d olives stand;
Behind, that lovely mountain-line!
While by the strand
Cette, with its glistening houses white,
Curves with the curving beach away
To where the lighthouse beacons bright
Far in the bay.
James notes that he was in “Cette” after dark and “missed the sight of the glistening houses, and had to console myself with that of the beacon in the bay, as well as with a Buillon of which I partook alone at the buffet” on his way to stay the night in Montpellier.
The train station, a different structure than in James’ day, remains located on the main line to Paris as well as west to Bordeaux and east to Marseille. There, at the station, at the end of my visit, while waiting for the train to Marseille, a shifty fellow, who had been eyeing my luggage and found it unsatisfactorily bulky, attempted to steal someone else’s bag. It was quite a sight as another passenger grabbed him and a melee ensued that included the rail workers on the track.
It’s hard to say who invented the concept of the resort. I wager it was the British during the times of tuberculosis, who left their damp and dreary London dwellings for the pastels of the Mediterranean, creating hotels along the sea whose British names like the Bristol or the Cornwall still light their marquees. To this day, the majority of Sète’s non-French visitors come from the UK. French people did not take the holidays they now famously enjoy until the paid vacation began in the 1930s when they discovered their own resorts. The word resort itself derives from Old French meaning to “fall back” or “return” or “appeal.”
Sète does not present itself as elegant or sophisticated like Cannes or seedy and thrilling like parts of Marseille, but decidedly middle class. Some of its neighborhoods have the possibility of sketchiness the way port towns often are. But if some low life resides here, other than the would-be thief I encountered at the station, I did not find it. Instead, I entertained myself by eating in the many restaurants that line the quays along its attractive canals. When I am in France, I generally eat a pescatarian diet, and the fish I have sampled in Sète seemed like they jumped from the sea onto the grill, swam through a sauce, and then onto your plate. For reasons of allergy, I cannot consume the abundant and diverse fruits de mer—but I have enjoyed the local fish soup served with grated gruyere, rouille, and crusty bread.
When I decided to come to Sète, I did not know Arnold’s poem or that the town had its own literary heritage. I had to leave the Paris apartment I rented to allow the owner its use while she attended an antiquary show. Fancy that. I had found Sète on the map of France while engaged in my “real estate porn” addiction, looking at apartments by the sea where I might like to live. I did not know that two illustrious poets—Paul Valery and Georges Brassens—were born there and made it their point to be buried there as well. It is also notable they were as different as could be, by Levi Strauss’ definition the cooked and the raw.
Figure 1: Paul Valery’s Tomb
Although the poet, essayist, and philosopher Paul Valery (1871-1945) has been esteemed to be the most important poet of 20th century France, his influence in the United States—especially among contemporary poets—has not attained a similar significance. Most American poets’ interests lie more in the Dadaists and Surrealists, such as Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, and Paul Eluard. For me, Valery’s poems seem a bit too Romantic and rhetorically overblown, and their careful French syllabics and rhyme schemes are nearly untranslatable, although there have been noble attempts. His years are not dissimilar to those of WB Yeats, whose poetry evolved from the early Romantic work into a more modern voice. Valery never achieved the latter, and one is tempted to claim that his archaic sensibilities pleased his more conservative critics.
His poem, Le Cimitiere Marin, “Cemetery by the Sea,” is both descriptive of the location and is the literal name of the extensive graveyard set above Sète on the heights of Mont Saint Clair. It is not in fact “by the sea” but has a lovely and dramatic view of the town, the port, and the Mediterranean. Barbara Gibbs’ translation from “An Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Valery” sets the mood of stanza one:
This tranquil roof with walking pigeons, looms
Trembling between the pines, among the tombs;
Precise mid-day the sea from fire composes—
The sea, the sea, forever rebegun!
What recompense after a thought is one
Look on the calm of gods the sea disposes!
Oh dear, one gets the general idea. Here is a very serious poem composed of 24 intricately rhymed sestets on the nature of life, death, and the purpose of existence—written some 25 years before the author’s death—rife with exclamation marks and classical allusions.
Consider the final two stanzas of C. Day Lewis’ translation, and we are back where we started from.
Yes, mighty sea with such wild frenzies gifted
(The panther skin and the rent chlamys), sifted
All over with sun-images that glisten,
Creature supreme, drunk on your own blue flesh,
Who in a tumult like the deepest hush
Bite at your sequin-glittering tail — yes, listen!
The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges
This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.
Perhaps Gibbs and Day Lewis are the most grandiloquent of Valery’s many translators, but such excess seems typical in scale. More recent attempts at free verse translations do not fare much better in such lofty wind. It is fitting then, that the family tomb in which the great man is buried appears to me monumental and somewhat imperious. It amazes me that “Cemetery by the Sea” is considered his most personal poem. The Musee Paul Valery nearby offers a somber and high-minded collection of the great man’s writings and its galleries for the display of notable artists only reinforce my opinion.
Figure 2: Cimitiere Marin
Espace Georges Brassens, on the other hand, is a lively shrine to the life and music of Georges Brassens (1921-1981). Going through its exhibition halls and listening to the audio guide is a remarkable experience, fitting of the humility and spirited humor of its namesake. I particularly was smitten by the wall of record jackets from the fifties and sixties and the photographs of his family. His mother, of Italian heritage, came from one of many fishing families that emigrated in the 19th century. Some must have found the city’s canals and pastel buildings familiar. Valery’s own mother was of Venetian descent.
I initially discovered the name Georges Brassens in random ways. While researching the Porte de Lilas for a book I was writing, I came upon the film Porte de Lilas in which Brassens plays a leading role. I could not find a print with English subtitles, but even in my weak understanding of the French language and its particular idioms, I could tell immediately the charm of the man. The following year, in the days before Airbnb, I rented an apartment from a textile artist deep in the Vaugirard neighborhood of Paris. The park at the site of the former slaughterhouse is named for Georges Brassens. Afternoons I would bring my lunch there. Like discovering a word you had never heard before, suddenly I found references to Brassens and his songs everywhere I went.
France has no trouble thinking a songwriter can also be a popular poet—like maybe Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen—but France’s tradition of respect elevates such songwriters into poets such as Brassens, the Belgian Jacques Brel, or my favorite downbeat soul, Leo Ferre. Brassens was essentially an autodidact, rudimentarily learning music at home from his mother, then evolving his individual style. Of a different social order than Valery,’s family, he was not well educated but spent his adult life in deep communion with the poets he loved. When he departed Sète he lived in what were slums of Paris, enjoying the bonhomie of the bohemian. His humor and championing of the people earned him their deep affection. French culture is filled with these characters.
Figure 3: Georges Brassens Grave
Sète hosts two major cemeteries, the orderly one on the heights of Mont St Clair called Marin where Valery is buried, and the lower one close to the Thau Lagoon named Le Py. In Brassens’ day, the former was reserved for the well-off and the latter a depository for the bones of the poor. Brassens, like all singers of the chansons populaire, allied himself with the poor, and, necessarily, the left. He spent a brief time as an anarchist, then drifted from the movement, believing it had no solutions for the future, although his personal anarchistic tendencies would last his lifetime. There is nothing rigidly ideological about his songs—his enemies were the pompous and self-satisfied, and their singer had a strong sense of self-irony.
Likely because of my upbringing in Atlantic City, I gravitate more towards the accessible rather than the lofty and formally hermetic, “the language of cats and dogs” as my fellow Jersian, William Carlos Williams, phrased it. For me, the spiritual realm is something the fortune tellers on the boardwalk represent. The intellectual plane in poetry, I leave to philosophers such as Valery. “Cemetery by the Sea,” sits like a Sphinx, like his great man’s grave itself.
While Valery gorgeously describes the Le Cimitiere Marin, a landscape of metaphoric significance, Brassens localizes in Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète,” Petition to Be Buried on the Beach at,” his song about arrangements for his death that would occur some 15 years after its composition in 1966.
Let my corpse be brought to the land of my birth
In a sleeper car on the “Paris-Méditerranée” line
Terminus at Sète.
He describes the family tomb where he ultimately will be buried
Packed like a sardine tin,
Alas, my family tomb is not brand new.
I fear that someone might get out
Half-way in, he asks permission of the “master” to be interred on the Corniche, closer to the sea. Brassens song is full of puns, and he also employs sestets, perhaps gently mocking Valery.
All respect due to Master Paul,
I, a lowly singer, outdo him only on this
May he pardon me for my request—
Even if his poems are better than mine,
My burial spot is more marine than his
And may disgruntle the locals.
This tomb sandwiched between sky and water
Won’t add sad shadows to the picture
But an indefinable charm.
Women will use it to get out of the wind
And change into bathing suits, and little children
Will play there: “incredible, a sand castle!”
Figure 4: Cimitiere Le Pi
Then he asks the city for a pine tree to be planted near his grave, “to protect from the risk of sunburn / Those good friends who have come upon my resting place.”
Brassens concludes his poem
Poor royal Pharos! Poor Napoleon,Poor departed notables, stately at the Pantheon,
Poor ashes of consequence!
You will envy a little this festival-maker
Who dreams as he peddles his paddleboat on the waves
Who spends his death on vacation…
The image of playing in the sea, being “on vacation” in death, resonates an appealing vision of resort to those who have labored throughout their lives and have come to a resort-like Sète to take their holiday. Invoking the Pharos and Napoleon, he counters the classical allusions found in Valery’s poem. Brassens knew his audience well: it was people like himself. His grave, near the saltwater lagoon of Thau, a working pond where people still make their living from cultivating and harvesting mussels, rests a few kilometers from the beaches along the corniche outside of Sete and the sea, where, on his paddleboat, the “festival-maker…spends his death on vacation.”
Being from Atlantic City gives a person like myself both inspiration and a little competitive streak—even regarding the afterlife—so I wrote this poem:
LINES FOR MY FUNERAL
When I die bind my body in a Cadillac
Trunk and drive across the wetlands
Back to the shore where I left
No trace of my departing gestures.
Hostages to health and ill fortune,
So many friends of mine have died;
They sang and typed and printed
Words deathless to me now.
If forced to make my will, I will
The sand all I have left. Bury me
With toy shovels beneath bright striped
Umbrellas and make a fort above my grave.
Then bet on black, my loves.
Let the wheels spin in the casino light.
Like the lost piers of childhood,
Let the tide take my bones in a storm.
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