One Toss of the Dice

by R. Howard Bloch

  In the France all around him, tension between the accusers and the defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus came to occupy more and more space in newspapers and in popular debate. The arc of what would become the Dreyfus affair and that of “One Toss of the Dice” were, in some uncanny sense, entwined. In the summer of 1896, as Mallarmé began to write his masterwork, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the Bureau of Statistics, the French intelligence services, received a packet of thirty or forty shredded pieces of paper collected by a cleaning lady from the wastebasket of the German military attaché in Paris, Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen. Once he had reassembled the fragments of the “little blue” pneumatique, Picquart recognized that the evidence used to convict Captain Dreyfus had been falsified. It would be another three years before Dreyfus was, if not exonerated, at least pardoned. The case against him began to unravel in the spring and summer of 1898.

  That January, Mallarmé’s friend Émile Zola had published an article in Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper L’ Aurore under the banner headline “J’accuse.” In what was perhaps the most powerful speech act of the nineteenth century, Zola accused President Félix Faure and the general staff of the French army of judicial misconduct and anti-Semitism in the prosecution of the case against Captain Dreyfus. Condemned to life imprisonment, Dreyfus languished in a military prison on Devil’s Island. Within a month, the author of “J’accuse” found himself as well on trial, and he was convicted of criminal libel on February 23, 1898. To avoid prison, Zola fled to London, where he registered under the name of M. Pascal, one of the characters in The Rougon-Macquart, his epic series of novels about a family under the Second Empire.

  Mallarmé and Zola admired each other from a distance, but their views of literature could not have been further apart. Zola criticized Mallarmé for being “so constantly preoccupied with the rhythm and arrangement of words that he ends up losing awareness of their meaning.”2 Mallarmé had written to Zola on February 3, 1877, to congratulate him on the success of his novel about alcoholic decline, L’ Assommoir, with the provocative claim that the apathy of modern life may be more destructive than alcohol.3 Despite their differences in matters of art, the poet wrote to the novelist on the very day of his conviction in Paris’s supreme court to praise the courage of his intervention in the Dreyfus affair, which would divide the French into factions whose enmity has endured in one form or another to the present day. Mallarmé confided to Marie at the end of April that he felt as if he were in prison “in Zola’s place.”4 He noted that Fernand Labori, Dreyfus’s and Zola’s lawyer, summered in nearby Samois. Labori, who would be shot by an anti-Dreyfusard in August 1899 in the course of Dreyfus’s retrial in Rennes, had converted a former convent into a summer home that, in its sumptuous heyday, accommodated up to a thousand guests for lunch.5

  That spring and summer, artistic circles in and around Mallarmé were in an uproar about the rejection of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of Honoré de Balzac. The sculptor had been commissioned in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres to create the official monument to France’s greatest epic novelist before Zola. Balzac had been one of the Society’s original founders and its former president. Zola was instrumental in persuading this guild of writers to grant the commission to Rodin, who was at the time less well-known than the other contenders, Henri Chapu and Marquet de Vasselot. Yet, Rodin took an unheard-of seven years, during which time he read Balzac’s prodigious novelistic corpus and, despite his goal of creating a psychological rather than merely a physical portrait of the writer, depicted Balzac nude and clothed. He even went so far as to order a reproduction of the novelist’s writing cloak to be made by Balzac’s former tailor. When the final result in plaster was unveiled at the yearly salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1898, those who had originally bestowed the commission upon Rodin refused to accept the finished work, or to pay him. Rodin wrote a personal note to Mallarmé as the “Aeropagite,” or arbiter of taste in France, to inform him of the unhappy outcome of his dealings with the Société des Gens de Lettres. The poet, who in the “Rodin affair” was resolutely on the side of the sculptor, wrote to console his fellow artist: “nothing, caddishness above all, can touch the profound serenity of your work.”6

  The poet sailed very little, if at all, between June and August 1898. Paul Valéry visited his mentor for the July 14 holiday and reported that “on the sill of a window, which opened onto the calm landscape, Mallarmé had spread out the magnificent proof-sheets of the great edition composed at Lahure’s. He did me the honor of asking me for my opinion about certain details.”7 The Lahure edition of which Valéry spoke would have been the authoritative copy of “One Toss of the Dice” meant to appear with illustrations by Odilon Redon; it had occupied the poet’s attention ever since the original publication two years before in Cosmopolis. Valéry wrote to André Gide that in the course of this visit, Mallarmé “changed his shirt in front of me, gave me some water for my hands and poured a bit of his cologne over me himself.”8 Whistler, too, came to Valvins. The poet, the painter, and Geneviève took long walks along the Seine. Mallarmé, who was once categorized in an interview about cats as a “catophile,” suggested that Whistler paint the Mallarmé family’s old black cat, Lilith. The artist managed to place only a couple of strokes of ink on paper when Lilith scampered under the table.9 It was a perfect lesson, in the mode of “One Toss of the Dice,” about the difficulty of capturing the essence of things on canvas or in print.

  Having published two years before “One Toss of the Dice,” which was as close as he ever came to a version of The Book, Mallarmé returned to the unfinished epic poem Hérodiade and, apparently, to The Book, to which he referred in a letter as “jottings for the dream,” both conceived in the psychic crisis of his midtwenties. Sometime, too, in August, Mallarmé responded to an interview conducted by Le Figaro: “Your ideal at age twenty?” “I chose to write,” the poet wrote, “to which I was faithful, in order that my life might have a meaning. This implies . . . removing daily from my native illumination the perilous [hasardeux] layer of dust that gathers under the name of experience. Fortunate or vain, my choice at age twenty survives intact.”10

  Mallarmé’s faith in the redeeming power of poetry sustained him throughout a lifetime of economic difficulty, professional frustration, and personal loss. “One Toss of the Dice,” in turn, nourished from the outset the literary works, painting, and music that would, over the course of the century following its publication, come to define modernism in the arts. The poet’s urge to reconcile the shape of his verse with its meaning, along with his modeling of the effects of time simultaneity in his difficult body of works, struck to the core of twentieth-century art, and would surface in twentieth-century scientific thought as well.

  Of all the poets of that first generation not to have known Mallarmé personally, Apollinaire put forth in his Calligrammes a striking example of graphic poetry in the wake and mode of “Un Coup de dés.” Guillaume Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky could not have been more unlike Mallarmé when it came to lifestyle or the contents of his works. By the age of twenty-one, he was earning a living as an author of such pornographic novels as Mirely, or the Little Hole That Doesn’t Cost Much; Memories of a Young Don Juan; and The 11,000 Penises. The last was a play on the Catholic veneration of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, in which the French word for “virgin” (vierge) mixes with the word for “stick” (verge), which is slang for the male member. At one point, Apollinaire founded a literary review, Aesop’s Feast; when it failed, he changed the name to The Immoralist’s Review, and continued to edit it out of a building owned by the Catholic Church. The poet and pornographer nourished the legend that began to grow around him of an obscure foreign birth, of market expertise coupled with financial fraud, of formidable appetites, and a capacity for conversation. Apollinaire loomed as a poet, editor, journalist, bohemian, and overall exotic personality, yet one who still visited his mother every Sunday for a meal and to pi
ck up his clean laundry. He was known for his art criticism, having invented the term “les peintres cubistes,” and for a futurist manifesto proclaiming “suppression of poetic grief . . . syntax, punctuation, lines and verses, houses, boredom.”

  In 1914, Apollinaire fought two duels and began Les Calligrammes, which continued Mallarmé’s project of concrete visual poetry. That same year, he volunteered for military service, and, in March 1916, was wounded by a shell while reading in a trench. The poet survived the operation to remove the shrapnel that had lodged in his brain but died on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice ending World War I, a victim of the pandemic Spanish flu.

  In Les Calligrammes, Apollinaire stripped poetry of all rhetorical ornament. The rhythm base of poetry—its relation to music, measure, beat, and time—disappeared. Like the disposition of type that took the shape of a listing boat or a constellation in “One Toss of the Dice,” the layout of the calligrammes reproduced the actual subject of verse. Their original title, “lyric Ideograms” (Idéogrammes lyriques), captured the poet’s desire, a Mallarméan ambition if ever there was one, that alphabetic writing take on the visual power of the hieroglyph.

  In May 1897, just a week after the appearance of “One Toss of the Dice,” Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated that wireless signals were capable of crossing open water. Apollinaire, who was fascinated by the telegraph, composed his calligramme “Wireless” (“TSF”) to mimic the shape of radio waves dispersed in all directions. The words on the page are like snippets of telegraphic speech and sound, including political slogans (“Vive le Roy,” “Vive la République,” “Down with priests”), slang expressions and sexual innuendos, street utterances (“Stop driver,” “Move on please ladies”), and newspaper advertisements (“Proprietor of 5 or 6 apartments”).

  The verses of the calligramme “It’s Raining” are aligned diagonally with a vertical pitch, as if the lines of poetry were sheets of rain falling from the sky to the ground. The elegiac tone and the evocation of lost loves contained in the words themselves render, like tears, a liquidation of sentiment and a freeing from the past: “listen to it rain while regret and disdain cry an old music / listen to the falling of the cords [liens] which hold you back from top to bottom.” The play on the French expression “raining cords,” equivalent to the English “raining cats and dogs,” is reproduced in the typographic bands that stretch from top to bottom of the page, and are doubled by reference to the cords or sentimental ties which bind.

  In his masterwork, “Zone,” Apollinaire picked up the Mallarméan ambition of being at once in and outside of chronological time. The title “Zone” referred to the border between France and ­Switzerland, where Apollinaire found himself in 1912; to the periphery or zone surrounding Paris, where much of the narrative of the poem takes place; and to the zone to which the marginalized urban dweller is displaced by the city’s seeming lack of center. The varied length of lines in “Zone” and its uneven stanzas, from one to twenty-nine lines, its lack of punctuation, its abrupt transitions, work, as in Mallarmé’s epic poem, to obscure traditional time and space relations. “Zone” is a pan-Parisian, trans-European, global poem in which we move instantaneously through the city—from the Eiffel Tower, across bridges, down familiar streets, such as the rue Aumont-Thiéville and avenue des Ternes; to the Gare Saint-­Lazare, the Jewish ghetto on the rue des Rosiers and the rue des Écouffes, Montmartre, and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame; on to the Mediterranean, Marseilles, Coblenz, Rome, Amsterdam, and Gouda; to the Near East; then, at the end, all the way to the Far East.

  Guillaume Apollinaire, “It’s Raining”

  As in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, which joins two distinct cultural zones—a classical triad of muses on the left two-thirds of the canvas, and two women with the faces of African masks on the right—Apollinaire superimposes a shared “Greek and Roman antiquity” upon a communal Christian religious past: “God who dies Friday and rises on Sunday.” Within the Catholic past, “Zone” contains elements from the medieval past, such as “Notre Dame has seen me at Chartres,” which mingle with elements from the present: “The most up-to-date European is you Pope Pius X.”

  Along with Apollinaire’s cubist poem, cubist painting followed the trail of simultaneity blazed by Mallarmé’s masterwork. The loss of Renaissance perspective and the flattening of pictorial space, as well as the dissolving of the substance of objects—whose outlines are broken, whose parts are fragmented into smaller areas within larger masses, whose seemingly distinct planes dovetail and overlap with one another—go hand in hand with the global syncretism of “Zone” and the splicing of enclaves of meaning in “One Toss of the Dice.” The presentation of a single object from multiple points of view collapses time into space in a way that, like Mallarmé’s virtual simultaneous syntax, makes it seem as if one is at once part of punctual chronological time and the flow of endless duration.

  In autumn 1913, the futurist journal New Men (Les Hommes nouveaux) published a visual and verbal poem by Blaise Cendrars, a Swiss novelist, and Sonia Delaunay, a Russian painter, both living in Paris: “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France.” This design poem, like a multicolored version of “One Toss of the Dice,” was printed on a single sheet of paper, seven feet long, in an edition of 150 copies, which, unfolded and placed end to end, attain the height of the Eiffel Tower. An accompanying advertisement described “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian” as a “simultaneous book,” in which text and image were meant to be read at the same time. Apollinaire’s commentary on Cendrars and Delaunay’s syncretic color poem emphasized the identity of their ambition with that of “One Toss of the Dice”: “Blaise Cendrars and Mme ­Delaunay-Terk have carried out a unique experiment in simultaneity, written in contrasting colors in order to train the eye to read with one glance the notes placed up and down on the bar, even as one reads with a single glance the plastic elements printed on a poster.”11

  Simultaneity was part of the Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist Manifesto of 1912, which stressed the “synthesis of what one remembers and what one sees.”12 Fellow futurist Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog in Motion of that same year showed the blurred feet and tail of a dog, the sweep of a leash, and the steps of the dog’s master, all presented as a series of motions, which the viewer sees simultaneously, but which he knows unfold sequentially through time. So, too, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which combines the cubist overlapping of fragmented semisolid planes with the futurist commitment to motion, captured on a single flattened plane the dynamic steps of a figure through the successive stages of a single continuous action. Duchamp’s 1913 painting was the heir not only to the intermittent stop-motion of cinema but also to “One Toss of the Dice.”

  The legacy of Mallarmé’s masterwork extended to modern music, and was especially felt in the works of Erik Satie. Like Apollinaire, the composer could not have been further from Mallarmé in temperament or life course. Satie was born in 1866 in the coastal town of Honfleur of a French father and an English mother, who died when the child was two. Raised by grandparents, Satie joined his father at the age of twelve in Paris, where he entered the music conservatory. When the time came for the obligatory year of military service, Satie joined the army and contracted bronchitis on purpose in order to be discharged. Around that time, be began work on his first musical composition, “Les Gymnopédies,” and to play piano at the café Le Chat Noir. Upon his father’s death in 1892, Satie moved to Montmartre to an apartment rigged up as a musical studio and religious shrine, which he called “the closet,” and, after a brief infatuation with the Rosicrucians, founded his own religion, the “Metropolitan Church of the Order of Jesus the Conductor.” With the small inheritance his father had left him, the increasingly quirky composer bought a dozen identical corduroy suits and presented himself, well dressed, for election to the Académie Française.

  In 1898, the composer moved across Paris to Arcueil, carrying a ch
est, a bed, and his suits in a wheelbarrow. He continued to play in the music and dance halls of Montmartre, often walking the six miles from home with a hammer in his pocket for protection. Satie made an infinitesimal income from the publication rights to his compositions, noting that he earned seventy-three centimes in the first quarter of 1903. Some large proportion of the money he made from his piano playing was spent on drink, as he grew increasingly eccentric. He was seen wearing a clay pipe in his suit pocket with the stem in his ear. In cafés, he demanded the bottom portion of cognac out of a graduated carafe. He applied for a scholarship to the Schola Cantorum, France’s institute of sacred music, which he attended, graduating first in his class in 1908. While continuing to compose fanciful piano pieces—“Irksome Example,” “Agreeable Despair”—the composer turned to politics, joining the radical-socialist party of Arcueil, where he organized a series of musical events for children, wrote a social column in the local newspaper, “A Fortnight in Society,” and offered free music lessons every Sunday at ten a.m. Satie’s only other musical work of this period is Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, written in response to Claude Debussy’s criticism that his music lacked form. Then, after seven years of complete silence, Satie began in 1910 a series of humorous pieces, including “Sketches and Annoyances of a Fat Good Fellow in Wood,” “Chapters Turned in All Directions,” “Unappetizing Chorale,” “Dried Embryos,” “Next to Last Thoughts,” and “Bureaucratic Sonata,” often with such facetious notations on scores as “Like a nightingale with a toothache” and “Turn page with an amiable and smiling finger.”