on the life of Stéphane Mallarmé

To each generation of French poets during the past century Mallarmé has been a beacon, even when poets were not looking that way: sonnets in his manner exist among the juvenilia of some Surrealists, too. Mallarmé's work, after all, was densely mapped upon the discovery - after sardonic Baudelaire but before outrageous Rimband - that a gap was steadily widening between signifiers of lyrical imagination and those of convention (poetic conventions included). For all his supposed obscurity, he had arisen in horror from the deeps to flourish, not quite single-handedly, the slingshot of revolt against the Goliath of Stereotypes. Scholarly inquiry into his work began during the 1930s, Henri Mondor's great biography appeared in 1942, and since the mid-1950s the work of excavation, reconstruction, and analysis has gone ahead, with French, American, British, and German scholars dedicated to the field. Gordon Millan's biography is the first since Mondor's, but (a large but) the ground had been extensively prepared. Mallarmé's first writings were fastidiously explicated by the late Austin Gill in two volumes, The Early Mallarmé (1976, 1986). Jacques Scherer resuscitated the legendary Livre as long ago as 1957, Jean-Pierre Richard the Tomb for Anatole in 1961: between 1956 and 1984, nine volumes of Correspondence were published. Robert Greer Cohn's later books, Towards the Poems of Mallarmé, 1980, and Igitur, 1981, sound out every seed (or seme) in Mallarmé's pomegranate; and three British scholars, Gardner Davies, Lloyd James Austin, and Malcolm Bowie, have brought a razor edge of enlightened empiricism to bear on almost every facet of Mallarmé's poems, provenance, and legacy. Such recent investigations need not, even then, be allowed to obscure earlier work of lasting importance, by Emilie Noulet and Charles Mauron during the 1930s, and three decades ago by Wallace Fowlie (none of these figures, incidentally, in Millan's very select bibliography). Other studies of writers and artists of the period have also prepared the ground, notably Alan Raitt's splendid biography of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1981) and Francoise Cachin's books on Gauguin and Manet. There must be hundreds of Mallarmé chapters in books and articles in scholarly journals. There exist also seven volumes of 'Documents Stéphane Mallarmé' edited by Carl Paul Barbier. Meanwhile, too, manuscripts have been collected and most can be located. Altogether, what a labyrinth through which to squeeze, jockey, shoulder, skate, inch, and grope one's way, to emerge with a coherent biography of such a hermetic, such a mercurially elusive poet.

To a considerable extent, Gordon Millan comes through. His book is addressed less to the specialist than to the general reader, the student, the amateur, and perhaps to academic colleagues in whose erudition the lacuna is Mallarmé. Not least, it gives the impression of having been written by a pensive but not prolix expert (Millan edits the three-volume Flammarion Mallarmé), who sifts and weighs evidence, who discriminates prudently between legend and fact, between cultural environment and individual genius, and who cannot abide muddle. This expert is no data-banker. You can imagine him entranced among manuscripts, vigilant among hermeneuts, cautiously choosing his track amid a welter of opinions and arguments, then boldly carving the track out with a real pen. He does not, like some parasitic biographies of the moment, 'process information', affiliate incompatibilities, forage for gossip, shun the deep tensions and singular nuances of his subject, or try to wow his reader with self-gratifying histrionics.

Reservations that I do have, concerning the character but not the quality of the book, will become apparent as certain features of it are addressed. To start with, the account of Mallarmé's early years is focussed sharply and informatively on the family and its comfortable financial as well as social standing. In 1847, when he was five and his sister Maria not quite three, their mother Elizabeth died, possibly of the rheumatoid arthritis that afflicted several family members. Numa, the father, remained the children's legal guardian but soon married again and started another family. In 1849 Stéphane was sent to an expensive boarding school, then, when he was ten, to a Jesuit college (not far from home in Passy). There he did not do well at all. In 1856, after summer holidays with the Desmolins, his paternal grandparents (who were surrogate guardians), Stéphane entered the Lycée in Sense. Then came his sister Maria's death on August 31, 1857. Now Millan, who presumably has consulted all available documents, quotes from a much later letter of Mallarmé's to his friend Cazalis, and adds: 'nothing in these remarks (or any others for that matter)… invites us to exaggerate the effect of his sister's death, or to tie it to his as a springboard or hidden source of much of Mallarmé's work, as some critics have been tempted to do' (p. 23). He even argues that 'the immediate effect of Maria's death was if anything beneficial to Stéphane' (giving practical reasons); and then tells of Stéphane's very serious rheumatic fever of February 1859. Just before this, Millan has remarked of death generally and of child-mortality in those days: 'there is a real danger of exaggerating the impact of such an event if it is considered from the perspective of twentieth century Britain where child-mortality is far lower' (p. 22). After thanking heaven for Britain, we might take up three issues here. Given the younger Mallarmé's literary posings, letters of his need not truly reflect boyhood emotions: grief-trauma can take time to manifest itself, and not only if instantaneous grief is suppressed; Millan does not even mention the curious 'Narration francaise', or 'free composition', which Mallarmé wrote not long after Maria's death (1858). After all, Charles Mauron (the arch-exaggerator?) conjectured long ago, from a basis in his psychiatric practice, that in this juvenile text Mallarmé was supplying a key to certain figures in his mind at that time, which later matured into the 'Orphic' myth which, whether or not we travel all the way with Mauron, constitutes a large hermeneutic framework in which to identify significations latent in those poems in which a sepulchre is indicated (Mauron in 1964 listed 22 titles). Yet Millan does not so much as mention Mauron by name in this or any other context. What I suspect here is that, by trivializing the bereavements, Millan shows an astounding lack of 'psychological' insight, and that by ignoring the 'Narration francaise' (rather than openly countering Mauron) he fails to open up the larger hermeneutic context. Oddly though, a few pages later Millan writes: 'Two young girls whom Stéphane had fleetingly known but who died in their early teens - Harriet Smythe and Emma Sullivan - and indeed Maria, his own sister, haunt a whole series of poems' (p. 30). Later, too, he refers to 'images that were to haunt his imagination and permeate his consciousness… Several of the prose poems… are the product of this slow process of maturation' (p. 87).

Rather than dwell on these apparent inconsistencies, this reader is inclined to infer that Millan, deciding with all due caution to skirt Mauron's sepulchral monomyth (which is not so easily dismissed in France) commits himself and his reader to a pedestrian view of the poems - as confessional rather than exquisitely sublimated 'alterations of reality'. Convincing as it is in many aspects, this portrait of the young Mallarmé betrays a lapse of judgment in bestowing upon him, for the specious reasons given, a stiff upper lip.

A little more grown up, the adolescent Mallarmé is portrayed very kindly. Yet what a supercilious person he became, what flourishes and gestures, what simulations - and most of them defensive, for he really had become, after his early Parisian boyhood, a tremulous provincial. Millan conducts us through his first poems, up to and including 'Le Guignon', but he does not ask when and thanks to whom he first read Gérard de Nerval, whose suicide January 26, 1855) is fiercely ridiculed at the end of that poem. One would like to know more of what and how he read when he was eighteen, if that were ascertainable. But soon, after various family altercations, Mallarmé had opted to become a school-teacher, and he leaves for London, with his clandestine German girlfriend, Marie Gerhardt. Thereafter a clear, even suspenseful narrative, for which ample documentation is given, brings him back from the awful gloom of London (where he married Marie) to his first job, in Toumon, not far from Valence, where, between 1865 and 1867 he undergoes the profound spiritual crisis of which celebrated letters tell, and out of which came the 'Several Sonnets' as well as early versions of 'Hérodiade' and 'L'après-midi d'un faune'. The Tournon crisis, too, instigated Mallarmé's revolt against that 'old plumage', the French Catholic God, as well as his 'post-Christian' vision of terrestrial life, not to mention the loathing of the bourgeois in which at this stage he is Flaubert's equal.

Millan's account of the crisis period is sensitive and detailed. Friendships to which letters attest, as well as the solitude in which Mallarmé was immersed, are counterpointed by a reminder of Mallarmé's brief refreshing visit (April 1867) to his friend Lefébure, who was living in Cannes: the Mediterranean scenery seems to have banished some of the ghostly horrors, which he had experienced in his body as well as in his soaring intellect. 'You'll be terrified to learn,' he wrote to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (September 24, 1867), 'that I arrived at the Idea of the Universe through sensation alone' (translated by Rosemary Lloyd). Millan does not quote or emphasize the somatic allusions in Mallarmé's letters, but he does chart very skilfully the extraordinary zigzags between illumination, neurasthenia, school routines, and direst penury, amidst which Stéphane and Marie, now joined by Geneviève (born November 19, 1864), tenaciously held their ground.

Poems that appeared in Le Parnasse contemporain in 1866 eventually jeopardized Mallarmé's teaching position, which was fragile anyway because of his 'inadequacy'. One inspector reported as follows: 'In his first year Special Education class, fourteen pupils all working together could not translate for me: "Give me some bread and water"… In the senior classes the teacher has them translate King Lear from the text. Inevitably, the pupils understand nothing…' (p. 144).

Sharp as all the details are, clear as the movement of the narrative is, misgivings arise when Millan brings certain poems into the compass of this 'Crossroads' chapter and the next one, 'Besancon and Avignon' - those were the next two stations on the poor schoolmaster's way eventually leading to Paris. His juxtaposing (via passages from letters) of life-situations and poems of the period enables one to glimpse reflections of the former in the latter. But what of the decisive shift toward 'objectivity' that marked Mallarmé's poetic practice after 1866-677? Intriguing as such glimpses are, the poems are exorbitant, thus misconstrued if read so as to tease out of them some vestiges of 'real life'. As texts, they elude the reach of positivist exegesis. The prosodic refinement, polyphony, and connotative density they had attained by the time they were published several years later, made them anamorphs, enigmas, spells, alephs hovering in the azure abyss. The kind of reading that correlates 'Don d'un poème' ('Je t'apporte l'enfant d'une nuit d'Idumée') with the 'end of February 1865' and 'neglecting his wife and child', or 'Prose pour des Esseintes' with Mallarmé's recuperation in Cannes with Lefèbure, will certainly help flummoxed readers to see where and how Mallarmé's anamorphs may have begun: but surely Millan might have stepped occasionally here out of his role of straight biographer, and, as editor of the Flammarion volumes, have deftly unveiled some of the penetralia of the poet's secret art, his sublimated wording. And of course that is not all: Mallarmé was a poet of what Eliot called the 'high dream', and in his very long oneiric vision the starry heaven did encompass in its circuit a furnished room, credence, ptyx, and all, for being carnally absent from which the Stygian Cogito, 'master' of nullities, as in the 'Sonnet in ix,' can articulate that much more transparently his 'evocative sorcery'. As biographer, Millan seldom lapses into academic banality, and his image of Mallarmé's diurnal life does present a man, intelligible, vexed, driven by his vast 'Dream': but as interpreter of the poems he often invites a reader down a blind alley. I found myself wishing, more than once, for a different correlation, an external one, even one from the history of shamanism, but at least one that might have touched horizons interior to the idiolect of the poems, say with Yeats' statement of 1908, which surely echoes Mallarmé in his, hermetic mode: 'All art is in the last analysis an endeavour to condense out of the flying vapour of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for art's sake' (Preface to Collected Works in Verse and Prose).

One of Millan's triumphs - if that is not too portentous a word - is to have kept his narrative on line, with a clear conceptual contour, throughout Mallarmé's years in Paris, 1871-98. So many activities, enterprises; relationships, financial problems, deadening work at school, literary-political challenges, births and deaths, dispensing of opinions on work by younger poets. The contour could have been kept just as clear, even then, if Millan had admitted much more detail (as author of an earlier biography of Pierre Louys he must know his way among the abstrusest nooks and crannies of the period). It must be said that he does take some short cuts. So as to arrive at some conclusions before running out of space, I will have to follow his example, and in doing so suggest where his narrative does or does not satisfy my curiosity.

First, something new: Millan quotes extracts from the unpublished diary of a devoted younger poet, Henri de Régnier. These extracts are illuminating, most especially so the one that traces the outline of a story Mallarmé had in mind, concerning Poet and Woman (June 1888), De Régnier and Mallarmé were walking on the Champs Elysées, and the latter has begun to improvise:

the woman… a chance to say what I want to say, and it will be terrible, women won't like me after that… You see, Régnier, our Soul is a woman like that who wants to be kept expensively but who gives us nothing on which to live… The Poet… approaches her and says: Fine I accept everything and allow you to enjoy your work, but do not be haughty with me. I don't want you to strut around with that warlike hair, and he undoes her hair and tells her everything… Suddenly out of the carriage, from the beautiful lady's lap, where she held it hidden, there jumps a little dog and it is the dog whom I address, saying to him what I could not say to her, her for whom he is adequate and of whom he unjustly deprives me… Oh it will be cruel and terrible, I shall say it all.

Who would have thought it, but Mallarmé here seems to have stored, in his exorbitant imagination, something like the composite shadow of a Laforgue, a Robert Walser, even of a Kafka. Other extracts (and other sources) give much more detail, too, on the 'Mardis', those Tuesday evenings in the Rue de Rome, than is commonly accessible. The relationship with the 'redoutable outsider' Manet is discussed at some length, but here no new ground is broken, I think: Mallarmé's visit or visits to the colour-photography studio of Charles Cros had apparently no interest for Millan. Last but not least, after a narrative bristling with particulars about Mallarmé's fragile health, London contacts, lectures in Belgium, Oxford, and Cambridge, on his insomnia, his unfinished writings, on Marie's impaired health, on his piteously brief time of retirement and his refuge in Valvins, Millan transposes his discourse into a new key. A propos 'Un coup de dés' he writes that, in principle, Mallarmé - with his mariner's cap and little sailing boat at Valvins - 'rightly saw himself neither as a Symbolist poet nor for that matter as an exclusively modern writer, but… rather as belonging to the long tradition of myth-makers and story-tellers stretching back as far as civilization itself,' briefly as the 'Seafarer' who is the master-figure in 'Un coup de dés'. And he concludes'… when all seems lost, a constellation slowly begins to appear in the empty sky. Each star spins across the desolate blackness, coming miraculously to a halt. In perfect position, like a set of dice thrown by some expert hand…'

Far be it from this amateur to pass adverse judgment on the conduct or matter of Millan's discourse. It has a richness of its own, and an economy of its own. However, it does present Mallarmé's life and poetry through an aperture that is limited, even narrow: he seems to have cut some corners unnecessarily. His discussion, for instance, of the lingering death of Stèphane's and Marie's son at the age of eight (he died in October 1879): having dismissed the thought of grief at the two childhood bereavements, Millan scants attention to the extremely delicate jottings ('scribbles', he calls them) which document stages in Mallarmé's shock and torment in A Tomb for Anatole. Paul Auster's fine translation and introduction (North Point Press, 1983) might reveal to English-language readers precisely how crass it is to dismiss these raw, naked sketches as 'scribbles'. Somehow Millan succeeds in acquainting the reader with the magnitude of death in Mallarmé's cosmos, but he never ushers us into the states of grief experienced to the ultimate by the poet himself. By no means incidentally, indeed I suspect symptomatically, he describes as a 'yellow canary' the cage bird that Robert de Montesquiou presented to Anatole to cheer him up: actually the bird was a female parrot (perruche), with a dawn-rose belly, her plumage 'reflecting gardens of precious stones' (thus she was called Semiramis). Might it not be that, for Mallarmé, Anatole's death, horrible in itself (from cardiac complications of rheumatic fever), opened wide the trauma of the earlier deaths, and exacerbated too (see the priest's evil-minded letter, p. 230-1) Mallarmé's fierce detestation of French Catholic kitsch, its false consciousness, its representing that 'monster', the bourgeoisie? Millan's prudent and empirically regulated narrative converts perhaps some other flaming creatures into yellow canaries. The remarkable Judith Gautier, for instance, appears only as 'wife' of Catulle Mendès, whereas she wrote independently numerous articles on Wagner, translated from Chinese, and was a novelist in her own right. Nor does Millan discuss the apparent anomaly of Mallarmé's devotion to Mendès (of whose venereal disease he had been apprised by Henri Cazalis in 1861) and whose manipulative sycophancy toward first Baudelaire and later Flaubert makes Mallarmé's amity toward him seem at first opportunistic and later ingenuous.

Misia Sert, another woman, who was, by her own account, very close to Mallarmé in his last years, is not even mentioned. Misia was about 24 at the time. Mallarmé used to take her boating, tell her fabulous stories, show her the stars, and listen rapt to her piano playing of Beethoven and Schubert. She and her husband, Thadée Natanson, ran La revue blanche, to which Mallarmé often contributed: they were also neighbours at Valvins for some time, entertaining at weekends numerous artists, including Vuillard (an ex-pupil of Mallarmé's) and Toulouse-Lautrec, who once donned Mallarmé's bathing suit (much to the latter's annoyance). Misia published her memoirs in 1952: her life was revealed in all its splendors and miseries by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale in 1980. Two men who likewise receive attention more scant than they deserve are Villiers de L'lsle-Adam and Felix Fénéon - Mallarmé's devotion to both is amply documented in the literature. Villiers might have been portrayed in much more detail, insofar as Mallarmé regarded him - for all his café confabulations, and in all his self-inflicted penury - as a kindred spirit. Moreover, I still want to know if Mallarmé read Hegel in 1866-7, or if Villiers lent him his own copy of Augusto Véra's beautifully limpid book on Hegel's philosophy, a second edition of which had appeared in 1862. Fénéon, whose brilliant but self-effacing early work as an art critic has been described in minute detail by Joanna Ungersma Halperin (1988), and whose anarchistic activities in the 1890s appear (but only appear?) to have remained beyond Mallarmé's purview, surely deserves fuller treatment, especially since conversations with him (as the sole meticulous analyst of Post-Impressionist painting in the 1880s) must have modified and enriched insights that Mallarmé had gained from Manet and his work, up till Manet's death in 1883. For many years, too, Fénéon did much of the editing for La revue blanche; he was moreover a close friend of Laforgue's - and Millan says nothing of Mallarmé's interest in the latter's work.

Penultimately, what of 'magic'? Mallarmé wrote in the English National Observer in 1892 about the sensational demise of Abbé Boullan: it was rumoured that he died by magic. (Judith Gautier for a time took lessons in magic from Eliphas Lévi.) Was Mallarmé, who in his article claimed that poets always deal in magic, in any way touched by the 'wars' in Paris between rival magic factions? The immensely complex fabric of cultural life in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War is not Millan's main concern: his concern is to keep Mallarmé firmly in the foreground, as an individual of genius, solitary but gregarious. I only suggest that some conjectures, at least, might have indicated, where relevant, more features of the middle ground and background. Did he, for instance, attend not only Wagner concerts but also the Lamoureux concerts of the new Russian music that was, along with the Russian novel, all the rage? Did he, as quixotic shaman of an 'inner' theatre, ever sally forth to see Sarah Bernhardt? Did he attend the first performance of Ubu Roi on December 10, 1896 - perhaps not, since he doesn't mention it in letters, yet he was in Paris at that time.

Finally, the plates. In Henri Mondor's Documents iconographiques of 1947, there are 89 plates; since then an even wider selection of material has become available. Millan (or his publishers?) chose only 18, and some are of mediocre quality. If the rather ugly large print of the book had been smaller, so much more detail (and not mere legend, gossip, or bric-à-brac) might have amplified Millan's aperture: if more and better plates could have been included, at least one of them should have been the delightful photo of Méry Laurent, entertaining Mallarmé and Gervex, herself at the piano, behind her Manet's 'The Execution of Maximilian' - a master-image of the period that would, with all its salon paraphernalia and boxing-in of things, have fascinated Walter Benjamin. Another should surely have been a photo of little Anatole, smiling, in his sailor suit, quizzing somebody.

CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON