One Toss of the Dice

by R. Howard Bloch

  The Book, folio 258.

  Harvard University, Houghton Library, ms Fr 270.

  --------------

  4000, printing × 4 = 16000 copies × 3 at 1 f = 48000 ex.

  3 f. per vol. = 12000 × 4 = 48000 f

  ------------------------------

  × 5years 240 000 f

  96 attendees × 5 = 480 (+ 20. my 20 v.)

  manuscript

  the 480 cop.

  not printed replaced by 500 f. rehearsal)

  to make can appear 48 000 cop. 240 000 cop.3

  In order to increase the revenue of the alchemical project, which was to turn printed words into gold, Mallarmé proposed using the blank spaces of The Book for “the insertion of newspaper advertisements.”4 Here is where the poet’s fantastical printing adventure revealed, alongside “One Toss of the Dice,” the influence of the poster art of the Belle Époque, with its varied type sizes, forms, and irregular spatial layout. Folios 166, 167bis, and 168 (217–219), for example, were presented as if they were a cross between a commercial billboard and daily tabloid sheet:

  ----- ----- --- poster

  advertisement gibberish

  pays for printing folio

  and paper

  hunting yacht burial baptism

  war marriage---

  --- war

  gu

  ball --- mealbomb

  theft

  ball meal dessert fire works.5

  Mallarmé computed the revenue from advertising in the overall calculation of the cost of the “orphic explanation of the earth” on folio 182 (234): “Advertising pays for printing and paper (lottery)—and the price was to be shared between the seller and the author.”6 It seemed that as long as the Grand Oeuvre was pure and isolated from the world, there would be no author; but, as soon as money was involved, the author reappeared to share in the profit.

  Beginning in the summer of 1889, six years after Wagner’s death in Venice, a number of events conspired to affirm Mallarmé’s resolve to finish The Book. Some came in the form of a warning, and others as a challenge.

  That spring of 1889, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had come down with a mysterious ailment, and Mallarmé, through the good offices of Méry Laurent, arranged for him to see a doctor. The destitute aristocrat had moved from Paris to a less expensive apartment in the eastern suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne with Marie Dantine, his cleaning woman and the mother of his son, Victor, known as Totor. A diagnosis of stomach cancer prompted Mallarmé, together with Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose conversion to Catholicism stood him in good stead with the Church, to arrange for Villiers to be moved to the Maison des Frères Saint Jean de Dieu on the rue Oudinot in central Paris. There, Villiers expressed the desire to marry Marie Dantine in order that she not be listed on the death certificate as a common charwoman, but as Mme Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. In this way, too, their son might benefit from state assistance to the children of deceased artists. Given that the shortness of the time left would not permit the publication of banns, given that Marie was from Luxembourg and not French, and given that all this took place in the middle of August when most Frenchmen were away from their desks in Paris, a timely marriage seemed nearly impossible. Yet, with the aid of a neighbor on the rue de Rome, Paul Beurdeley, a lawyer who was also mayor of the eighth arrondissement, Mallarmé managed to expedite the paperwork.

  On August 15, 1889, Villiers on his deathbed, exclaimed, “I’m getting married today, we’ll drink a bottle of champagne, and all the commotion will finish me off.”7 When the time came to sign the marriage certificate, however, it became painfully clear that the wife of one of France’s greatest literary geniuses could not even write her own name. “I’ll sign,” she said to the embarrassment of all, “as I did in my first marriage.” Huysmans and Mallarmé apparently helped her with the required signature, and the priest, after administering the last rites, arranged for Marie to spend the night among the brothers of Saint Jean de Dieu. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam died four days later; his last words were “I’m leaving so many beautiful things.”

  Unlike Henri Regnault’s death, which could be attributed to the folly of war, and unlike that of Anatole, which struck a singular cruel blow, the disappearance of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam impressed Mallarmé as part of the natural cycle of life and death. The poet, who was forty-seven years old at the time of Villiers’s death at the age of fifty-one, surely thought to himself that he might be the next to go. In fact, he had an accidental brush with death just before that of Villiers. Coming back to Valvins after visiting his ailing friend, Mallarmé missed his step descending from the train, which was still moving as it came into the Fontainebleau station.

  “It was nighttime, I was thrown the length of my body with a wild violence, and dragged under the running board, which grabbed me by the shoulder, for seven or eight meters. I felt close to my last hour, just like Villiers,” he wrote.8 Reminded of his own mortality by the dying Villiers and by his fall, Mallarmé did not want to leave Marie and Geneviève in the kind of financial straits that befell Marie Dantine and Totor. He, in fact, tried to ease the difficulties of Villiers’s dependents even before death by organizing a subscription of five francs per month from various of his literary friends. After Villiers’s passing, Mallarmé advised his widow and son about how to hold on to the small sum collected in the face of creditors’ demands to be paid. And, again, Mallarmé recognized that the most worthy homage to the writer he considered without equal would be to complete his own life’s work, with however little time he might have left.

  Public life in Paris during the summer of 1889 was taken up by the Universal Exposition to commemorate the Revolution of 1789. It attracted 32 million visitors to the area of Trocadéro, the quai d’Orsay, and the Champs de Mars, on which the Eiffel Tower had been erected. Given his experience reporting on the London International Exposition of 1871, Mallarmé should have been interested in its French avatar. We know that he visited it quickly. “I looked in on the Exposition,” he wrote to Henri Cazalis. “I was asked to write an article, but I only came up with these words: ‘The Eiffel Tower surpasses my expectations.’ ” Much of his effort and time that summer had gone into traveling back and forth between Valvins and Paris to care for Villiers. Still reverberating from his loss, the poet vacationed with Méry Laurent and Dr. Evans at Royat in early September. He could not have failed, however, to be aware of at least one of the major events of the celebration of the centenary of the French Revolution, one where the Wagnerian project of the total work of art found its most stunning expression to date.

  Augusta Holmès, the longtime mistress of Mallarmé’s friend Catulle Mendès and one of the few women to attend one or more Tuesdays on the rue de Rome, had composed a Triumphal Ode to the French Revolution. Holmès’s Ode was performed on September 11, 1889, in the lavishly decorated Palace of Industry, an enormous hall built to celebrate machines. The epic composition called for 900 singers and 300 instrumentalists on a stage that measured 197 feet across, 164 feet deep, and 148 feet high. The hall, located between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, held 22,000 spectators. The staging had been modeled on Wagner’s innovative design of a sunken orchestra pit at Bayreuth, and the split curtain opened to reveal painted forests, mountains, and cities in the background. Incense burned around an altar to the Republic in what was a clear mix of elements from Christian, nationalist, and Masonic traditions. The first choral entry was that of the winemakers of France, who chanted, “This wine is the blood / Hot and turning red / From the earth which made us!” They were followed by the harvesters: “This bread is the flesh / Of the three-times cherished soil / That the plow tears and penetrates!” To the invocation of the bread and wine of the mass, soldiers and sailors called on France to fulfill its colonialist ambition of conquering the world. Lady Republic appeared, as lightning accompanied a call to prayer from the people, to which she replied:

  O people, here I am!

  the heights of the heavens

  Whe
re I rule forever your

  glorious destiny

  I come at your call, and

  surrounded by flames,

  I appear to your eyes.10

  By the late 1880s, Wagnerism in France had waned, and there was no visible rival to Mallarmé’s project of The Book. Yet the staggering aspiration of Augusta Holmès’s Triumphal Ode to reproduce in Paris the combined effects of ancient Greek drama and the Catholic mass must have awakened in Mallarmé some sense of the dramatic power of the “future spectacle” that he still hoped to capture in The Book.

  In February 1890, Mallarmé honored the memory of Villiers with a lecture delivered in Brussels. He spoke in the loftiest terms of the sacred calling of the poet. “A man used to dreaming comes before you to speak of another who is dead. Ladies and gentlemen, Do you know what it is to write? An ancient and very vague but jealous practice, whose meaning lies in the mysteries of the heart.”11 The lecture was not universally acclaimed. A retired general exclaimed audibly, “This man is drunk or crazy,” then left the room, where, in the phrase of one witness, “his word is law.”12 The reviewer for the Belgian newspaper La Patriote reported that “you had to be drunk to understand what remains, nonetheless, a beautiful meditation on literature, written in mourning for Villiers six months after his death.”

  Even those sympathetic to Mallarmé found the lecture difficult. Henri de Régnier reported having trouble reading it, but he also observed that when the poet read it out loud before invited guests chez Berthe Morisot later that spring, the homage to Villiers became comprehensible. This was not the case for Edgar Dégas, who apparently threw his hands up in despair, blurting, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” The painter claimed once to have asked Mallarmé how he would speak to a maid, to which the poet replied, “No differently.” On the night of Mallarmé’s reading in honor of Villiers, Dégas might still have been smarting from the poet’s reaction to his own attempt to write sonnets. “It is not with ideas that one writes verse, Dégas” Mallarmé reminded him, “it is with words.”13

  The lecture in honor of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was Mallarmé’s first public address. It would not, however, be his last. In 1893, he received an invitation to speak at both Oxford and Cambridge, which was only natural, given his occupation as an English teacher, his previous trips to London, and his growing reputation among British poets.

  The Times of London of February 23, 1894, published an article on the current state of French letters, with special reference to the Académie Française. Lamenting the conservatism of this venerable institution for the preservation of the French language, The Times noted, “Literary fashions die hard. The tradition of grace and perfect form which has so long attached to French Academical work will not disappear just yet, even though much of the new production will be mediocre and common.” The editors declared, “Still, the Academy is advancing. It has nearly elected M. Zola; who knows whether it may not soon take M. Stéphane Mallarmé, the ­Symbolist—or is it Luminist, or Décadent?—who is just about to lecture at Oxford? Then it may come to be the turn of M. Paul Verlaine himself. We move quickly nowadays; we adore today what we burned yesterday; schools and creeds in the arts follow one another with bewildering rapidity; and even the French Academy, that most conservative of bodies, is affected by the spirit of change.”14

  By the time The Times had published its report on official literary France, Mallarmé was already in England, having hosted his regular Tuesday on the rue de Rome on the evening of February 20. The poet’s first stop was Sussex Bell, Haslemere, Surrey, the estate of Mr. Charles Whibley, a literary journalist and Whistler’s brother-in-law. He wrote to Marie and Geneviève that he was working on his English with Whibley, and that in two days, “I will no longer know French, except to write to you.”15 As things turned out, the French poet became terrified at the idea of reading his talk in what he referred to delicately as “the local clause” (la clause locale), a requirement of the Taylorian Association, which sponsored his Oxford visit. The night before he was to speak, he had it retranslated by Frederick York Powell, Regius professor of modern history—“my friend for three days now and forever.” Powell would first read the English version, then Mallarmé, the French.

  The poet was astonished by the beauty of Oxford, with its medieval cloisters in the middle of parks and water, fields with cows and stags, and a dinner in a refectory “as beautiful as a cathedral.” Amid the high wood-paneled walls with portraits of distinguished graduates, he indulged in afterdinner drinks with the professors, who may have taken off their robes, but who retained their bizarre hairstyle, “a cross between the chapska and a blotter.”16

  Mallarmé’s lecture at Cambridge, however, met with bad luck. It was scheduled to take place at the same time as the performance of a visiting theater troupe. Tickets for both events had been available at a local bookshop, but only twenty people paid five shillings apiece for the privilege of hearing Mallarmé’s “proper French,” which many in France would have considered far from proper. He reported to Marie and Geneviève that the audience of Pembroke College listened religiously and applauded tactfully as he read his notes by the light of two high silver candelabra. “The lover of rare things in me was seduced.”

  Mallarmé concluded that Oxford and Cambridge were worlds of study and sport, where, “like peacocks adorning a garden, a select breed of men received salaries just for being charming people.”17 Democracies, the poet reflected, ought to create such cities for poets. Upon his return, he published a plan for doing just that in Le Figaro, on August 17, 1894. Young struggling poets were, Mallarmé reasoned, the true heirs of the successful writers who had preceded them. They should therefore share in the royalties earned by publishers of works in the public domain, such profit sharing to be supervised by a Ministry of Poetry with offices in the National Library.

  At Oxford, Mallarmé encountered the essayist, art critic, and novelist Walter Pater, who taught classics and philosophy, and who shared the poet’s belief that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” At Cambridge, where Poe once lectured to Whistler, Mallarmé was interviewed on the topic of the present state of French men of letters. His interviewer, R. A. Neil, a librarian at Pembroke College, was struck by the poet’s unassuming manner, describing him as “a man of modest height, casual in his dress, who speaks English badly, completely simple and liebenswürdig (amiable), full of anecdotes and wit, intensified when he lifts his eyebrows.”18 They must have discussed Paul Verlaine’s visit to England the previous year. Mallarmé recounted to Neil the story of the difficult beginning of a public lecture that Verlaine had delivered, the location unspecified. With the audience all gathered in the absence of the lecturer, someone asked the security guard if he had not seen someone who looked like Verlaine. “Oh,” the guard replied, “a man who matches that description tried to get in, he said he was supposed to give a lecture, but I found he was not presentable and didn’t let him enter.”

  Mallarmé’s Oxford lecture was also poorly attended, yet he was reassured by how well behaved the two or three professors, a few students, and the ladies were, with “correct and long applause at the end.” But, the poet feared that his lecture has been on too high an aesthetic plane, and he lamented that he could have delivered it without preparation, “on an empty stomach, during the day in a frock coat.” He wondered if it was worth the trouble to have made the long trip in order to distract sixty people from the world of studies or to provide an occasion to hear spoken French.19 Mallarmé may have wondered about the context of these English lectures, but “Music and Letters” and “Crisis in Poetry” remain among the most important literary essays of the nineteenth century.

  Like a messenger from the Greek gods warning of impending doom or a newsboy selling the Daily Sun with headlines proclaiming the outbreak of war, Mallarmé arrived in Oxford and Cambridge to announce, “I bring the most surprising news. Nothing like it has ever been seen. There has been an attack on verse! Governme
nts change; yet prosody has always remained untouched: either because in revolutions, it passes unseen, or because the revolutionaries fail to convey the belief that it might ever change.”20

  When the French poet proclaimed an “attack on verse,” he was referring to traditional alexandrine verse, inherited from the neoclassical seventeenth century and, beyond that, from the High Middle Ages, where it first appeared in the thirteenth-­century Roman d’Alexandre. The alexandrine, a twelve-syllable line, usually divided by a caesura between the sixth and seventh syllables, was every bit as strong an organizing principle of French national identity as the flag, the national anthem, or the constitution. Yet, increasingly, as the long nineteenth century began to sound a drumbeat, at first faint but ever louder with the approach of modernity, the alexandrine was threatened by the vers libre, or free verse: poetry that does not respect regular patterns of rhythm or rhyme, and which may involve irregular line length. Heinrich Heine, Walt Whitman, and Arthur Rimbaud had experimented with free verse earlier in the century, as had Jules Laforgue, the Symbolist poet who was impressed by Leaves of Grass and who, in turn, would influence Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The Mardist Gustave Kahn, a Jew from Lorraine and ardent Dreyfusard, claimed in the 1880s to have invented the looser form.

  However much earlier or contemporaneous poets may have experimented with free verse, none attacked the alexandrine more violently than Stéphane Mallarmé, who worked quietly on the notes for A Tomb for Anatole and for The Book until “One Toss of the Dice” would take the shape of an attack—yea, an annihilation—of traditional poetic form. The beginning of the process of the dissolution of uniform meter, with justified lines of poetry singly spaced in stanzas separated by a double space, began shortly after Mallarmé’s proclamation of an “attack on verse.” In writing to Charles Bonnier, a teacher of French at Oxford who had initiated his English tour, Mallarmé spoke of a decision to “put in a line of poetry only very short whole phrases, interrupted on purpose, solely to counterbalance other long sentences; to erase duration, only to restart.”21