Jammes, Francis

JAMMES, FRANCIS. - French poet, b. at Tournay on 2 Dec. 1868, d. at Hasparren on 10 Nov. 1938, after having lived there for almost forty years. The son of a registrar's clerk who had come to France from Guadeloupe, he did his studies at Bordeaux and, after his father's death (1888), moved with his mother to Orthez, in Béarn, where he entered a notary's office. In that tranquil provincial atmosphere he gave to the press his first faint essays (Six sonnets, Vers, 1891-93): in Apr. 1895 he felt himself "invaded" by the inspiration that dictated to him the dialogue poem Un jour, published by the Mercure de France the following year through the good offices of A. Gide.

With the subsequent La naissance du poète (Brussels 1897) and La mort du poète, this first part of his work was collected under the title De l'Angélus de l'aube à l'Angélus du soir (1898): it was a new voice, attentive to the small everyday things, full of sympathy for all the miseries and sorrows in the life of simple folk, of the poor, of animals, with a sort of gentle and resigned melancholy. With its measures, its extremely prosaic yet always light and moving tone, his poetry was not long in being savored and felt as the freshest voice in that end of the century which already showed the poetic exhaustion of the decadentist and symbolist generations. That tone soon acquired wide diffusion in Italy as well, with the crepuscular poets: particularly clear and perceptible is J.'s part in the fortunate and highly composite work of Guido Gozzano.

The theme of one of those early lyrics ("J'aime dans les temps Clara d'Ellébeuse") found development in a novella on the melancholic story of that young girl, as dreamy and romantic as her name (Clara d'Ellébeuse ou l'histoire d'une ancienne jeune fille, Paris 1899); a novella followed by two others, almost forming a trilogy of three unhappy love stories (Almalide d'Errémont ou l'histoire d'une jeune fille passionnée, 1901, and Pomme d'Anis ou l'histoire d'une jeune fille infirme, 1904). A nostalgic vein, in which passionate romanticism and an impulse toward faith are equally present, inspired two new collections of verse: Le deuil des primevères (comprising the Elégies, La jeune fille nue, Le poète et l'oiseau, Quatorze prières, Paris 1901), Le triomphe de la vie (containing the paganly rustic novel Jean de Noarreau and the sensual dreams of Existences; published in 1902). There was nevertheless becoming ever clearer the poet's yearning toward faith, toward the God of the humble, "He who fashions the leaves one by one": the conversion was accomplished, according to his own confession, on the day of the Annunciation of 1906, and was announced that same year in Clairières dans le ciel, and, even earlier, in the Église habillée des feuilles.

The conversion did not mark a change in J.'s inspiration, but rather an even gentler and more dreamy resumption of the themes and tone already known, with a total resignation to Providence, a faith "of the carbonated kind." He did not shrink from the attempt to attain a different and broader measure, in the Géorgiques chrétiennes (1911, a rustic poem in a somewhat biblical rhythm), in La Vierge et les sommets (1919; richer in literary exercises, and often in archaicizing mannerisms), in the Tombou de Jean de la Fontaine (1921; a parodic overturning of the Fables); but the themes remained essentially provincial and modest: Le poète rustique (1920), Quatrains (1923-25), Ma France poétique (1926), Les nuits qui me chantent (1928). Only the satirical tone was occasionally taken up again in the Antigyde ou Elie de Nacre (1932), against his old friend.

Enzo Bottasso