One Toss of the Dice
Page 24
At the end of the war, the Chrysler was miraculously retrieved in perfect condition, having spent four years under a canvas awning. Mondor recovered his collection of letters and other documents, all completely unscathed. He eventually donated them to the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, where they occupy fifty-nine linear feet of shelf space. The poet’s notes for A Tomb for Anatole can be accessed online at http://bljd.sorbonne.fr/resource/
a011429863484jFv9sT/. Mallarmé’s notes for The Book now reside in Harvard University’s Houghton Library and are available online at http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/46152340. A copy of the corrected proofs of “One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance,” mentioned in a holographic will composed the night before the poet’s death, turned up for sale in 1960 at the Parisian rare book dealer Pierre Bérès; it was purchased by an American, who either sold or donated it to the Houghton Library, where, like Stéphane Mallarmé next to Anatole in the cemetery of Samoreau, it lies entombed next to The Book.
NOTES
Throughout the notes, I have used abbreviations to refer to three frequently cited works, two different editions of Mallarmé’s complete works and the eleven-volume set of his letters:
Correspondance
Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance de Stéphane Mallarmé, 11 vol., ed. Henri Mondor and Jean-Pierre Richard (vol. 1) and Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (vol. 2–11) (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1985).
OC-Marchal (1 or 2)
Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, 2 vol., ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003).
OC-Mondor
Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
Introduction
1.Correspondance, 8:146.
2.Ibid., 140, 144, 132.
3.Ibid., 151.
4.Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 731.
5.Correspondance, 1:191.
6.OC-Mondor, 664.
7.Correspondance, 11:34.
8.These details are contained in Jean-Luc Steinmetz, Stéphane Mallarmé: L’absolu au jour le jour (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 424ff.
9.OC-Mondor, 662.
10.Suzanne Bernard, “Le ‘Coup de Dés’ de Mallarmé replacé dans la perspective historique,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 51, no. 2 (1951): 181–95; Virginia A. La Charité, The Dynamics of Space: Mallarmé’s UN COUP DE DÉS (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1987); Michel Murat, Le “Coup de Dés” de Mallarmé: Un recommencement de la poésie (Paris: Belin, 2005).
11.Mondor, Vie, 746.
12.For an excellent discussion of nineteenth-century artist’s books, see Anna Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
13.The phrases “desperately modest man” and “sweeping cosmic manner” belong to Robert G. Cohn, a teacher with whom I first encountered Mallarmé. Cohn, who was partly responsible for the revival of critical interest in the poet after World War II, died on December 16, 2015, coincidentally, the very day I sent the final manuscript of this book off to my publisher.
Chapter I: A Poet Is Born
1.Carl Paul Barbier, ed., Documents Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Nizet, 1976), 5:53.
2.Carl Paul Barbier, ed., Documents Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Nizet, 1977), 6:40.
3.Henri de Régnier, Nos Rencontres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1931), 192.
4.OC-Mondor, 1559.
5.Ibid., 662.
6.Ibid., 1383.
7.Henri Mondor, Mallarmé lycéen (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 173–74.
8.OC-Mondor, 10.
9.Mondor, Mallarmé lycéen, 176.
10.Claude Pichois, Baudelaire, trans. Graham Robb (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 324.
11.Barbier, Documents Stéphane Mallarmé, 5:322.
12.Ibid., 6:35.
13.Henri Mondor, Mallarmé plus intime (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), 102–3.
14.Barbier, Documents Stéphane Mallarmé, 5:239.
15.Ibid., 346–47.
16.Laurence Joseph, “Mallarmé et son amie anglaise,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, no. 3 (July–September 1965): 457–78.
17.Gordon Millan, Les “Mardis” de Stéphane Mallarmé: Mythes et réalité (Paris: Nizet, 2008), 100.
18.Barbier, Documents Stéphane Mallarmé, 6:374.
19.Ibid., 33.
20.Mondor, Vie de Mallarmé, 58.
21.Barbier, Documents Stéphane Mallarmé, 6:51.
22.OC-Mondor, 662.
23.Ibid., 22.
Chapter II: The Foundation of a Magnificent Work
1.Carl Paul Barbier, ed., Documents Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Nizet, 1977), 6:51.
2.Ibid., 65.
3.Ibid., 67.
4.Ibid., 79.
5.Ibid., 67.
6.Ibid., 83.
7.Ibid., 104.
8.Ibid., 114.
9.Ibid., 117.
10.Ibid., 118.
11.Ibid., 131, 135.
12.Ibid., 155.
13.Correspondance, 3:232.
14.Ibid., 1:198.
15.Ibid., 114, n2.
16.Ibid., 115.
17.Ibid., 132.
18.Ibid., 139.
19.OC-Mondor, 489.
20.Bettina Knapp, Judith Gautier: Writer, Orientalist, Musicologist, Feminist (New York: Hamilton Books, 2004), 76.
21.Suzanne Meyer-Zundel, Quinze Ans auprès de Judith Gautier (Paris: Dinard, 1969), 65.
22.Théophile Gautier, “Le Club des Hachichins,” Revue des deux mondes 13 (1846): 522, 530.
23.Austin Gill, “Mallarmé fonctionnaire,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, no. 1 (January–February 1968): 6–37.
24.Correspondance, 1:240.
25.Ibid., 242.
26.Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181.
27.Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Kress (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 4:22.
28.Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (“Science as a Vocation”), in Gesammlte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen, 1922), 524–55. (This speech was originally delivered at Munich University in 1918 and published the next year by Duncker & Humboldt, Munich.)
29.Correspondance. 1:242.
30.Ibid., 222.
31.Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Livre, instrument spirituel,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 25; for French original, see OC-Mondor, 378.
32.Mallarmé, Selected Prose, 25; French, OC-Mondor, 378–79.
33.OC-Mondor, 663.
34.Guizot quoted in Laurent Theis, “Guizot et les institutions de mémoire” in Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992), 2:583.
35.Quoted in Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 15.
36.Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), verse 16,278.
37.Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), canto 33, 11. 85–90.
38.Stillman Drake, ed. and trans., Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 237.
39.OC-Mondor, 399.
40.Correspondance, 4, part 1:88.
41.Ibid., 1:205.
42.Ibid., 131.
43.Mary Ann Caws, trans. www.studiocleo.com/librarie/
mallarme/prose.html; French original, OC-Mondor, 435–54.
44.Catulle Mendès, Rapport à M. le ministre de l’instruction publique et des beaux-arts sur le mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902), 137.
Chapter III: Enchanting a Devastated World
1.Correspondance, 1:333.
2.Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace and Other Stories, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Liveright: 2015), 180.
>
3.Frédéric Mistral, Memoirs of Mistral, trans. Constance Elizabeth Maud (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1907), 304.
4.De Maupassant, The Necklace, 180.
5.Ibid., 181.
6.Maxime du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1879), 1:22.
7.Ibid., 2:351.
8.Ibid., 1:10.
9.Correspondance, 1:338.
10.Ibid., 339.
11.Ibid., 356.
12.Henri Mondor, Histoire d’un faune (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 223.
13.François Ruchon, L ’Amitié de Stéphane Mallarmé et de Georges Rodenbach (Geneva: P. Cailler, 1949), 133.
14.Correspondance, 1:342.
15.OC-Mondor, 679.
16.Ibid., 872.
17.Ibid., 668.
18.Ibid., 669.
19.Ibid., 672.
20.Ibid., 674.
21.Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 307.
22.OC-Mondor, 513.
23.Ibid., 515.
24.Ibid., 514.
25.Correspondance, 3:246.
26.Ibid., 2:26.
27.Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé on Fashion: A Translation of the Fashion Magazine “La Dernière mode,” trans. P. N. Furbank and Alex Cain (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 156.
28.Ibid., 153, 198.
29.Ibid., 61, 31.
30.Ibid., 107.
31.OC-Mondor, 743.
32.Mallarmé on Fashion, 68, 206.
33.Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 488.
34.Mallarmé on Fashion, 124.
35.OC-Mondor, 663.
36.Mallarmé on Fashion, 167.
37.Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 50.
38.OC-Mondor, 88, 91.
39.Ibid., 125.
40.OC-Marchal, 1:1278.
41.OC-Mondor, 162.
42.Ibid., 174.
43.Ibid., 175.
44.Ibid., 163.
45.OC-Marchal, 1:1299.
Chapter IV: Tuesdays in the “Little House of Socrates”
1.Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry,” in Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 42; for French original, see OC-Mondor, 367. See also Mallarmé’s essay “Mystery in Letters,” where he writes, “Yes, I know; Mystery is said to be Music’s domain. But the written word also lays claim to it”: Mallarmé, Selected Prose, 32; French, OC-Mondor, 385.
2.Quoted in Anne Martin-Fugier, Les Salons de la IIIe République: Art, littérature, politique (Paris: Perrin, 2009), 140.
3.Correspondance, 2:159.
4.OC-Mondor, 340, 299.
5.“Mallarmé par sa fille,” Nouvelle Revue française, November 1926, 521.
6.Henri de Régnier, Figures et caractères (Paris: Mercure de France, 1901), 117.
7.Paul Valéry, “Au concert Lamoureux en 1893,” in Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Pléiade-Gallimard, 1957), 1:1276.
8.OC-Mondor, 388.
9.Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 330.
10.André Gide, Si le Grain ne meurt (Paris: Gallimard, 1928), 263.
11.Henry Roujon, La Galerie des bustes (Paris: J. Rueff, 1908), 39.
12.Edmond Bonniot, “Notes sur les Mardis,” Les Marges 57, no. 224 (January 10, 1936).
13.Édouard Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens (Paris: Messein, 1936), 25.
14.Correspondance, 4, part 1:24–25. Buffalo Bill had visited Paris as part of the Universal Exposition of 1889.
15.Carl Paul Barbier, ed., Correspondance Mallarmé–Whistler (Paris: Nizet, 1964), 104.
16.Correspondance, 4, part 1:329.
17.Correspondance Mallarmé–Whistler, 129.
18.Henri de Paysac, Francis Vielé-Griffin: Poète symboliste et citoyen américain (Paris: Nizet, 1976), 147.
19.Jean Ajalbert, Mémoires en vrac: Au temps du symbolisme, 1880–1890 (Charente: Du Lérot, 2005), 64.
20.Correspondance, 4, part 1:314.
21.De Paysac, Francis Vielé-Griffin, 147.
22.Correspondance, 6:218.
23.Bernard Lazare, Figures contemporaines (Paris: Didier, 1895), 243–44.
24.“Mallarmé par sa fille,” 522.
25.Correspondance, 3:84; Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens, 29.
26.André Fontainas, De Stéphane Mallarmé à Paul Valéry: Notes d’un témoin, 1894–1922 (Paris: Edmond Bernard, 1928).
27.Quoted in Catulle Mendès, Rapport à M. le ministre de l’instruction publique et des beaux-arts sur le mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902), 182.
28.Quoted in Roujon, Galerie des bustes, 58.
29.Camille Mauclair, Mallarmé chez lui (Paris: Grasset, 1935), 89.
30.René Ghil, Les Dates et les oeuvres (Paris: G. Crès, 1923), 209.
31.Ibid., 114.
32.Ibid., 209.
33.“Every week he gathers round him embryonic poets and authors. . . . He strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his disciples become stupid . . . , so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman disclosures have been made to them”: Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), 103.
34.Mary Ann Caws, trans. Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 122; French, OC-Mondor, 394. The authoritative book on Mallarmé and religion is Bertrand Marchal’s La Religion de Mallarmé (Paris: José Corti, 1988). Marchal treats the poet’s transformation of art into a religion in distinction to the ways in which Mallarmé’s verse and thinking about verse are in consonance with traditional Catholic theology.
35.Julie Manet, Journal (1893–1899) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), 148.
36.Cited in Correspondance, 5:371.
37.Ibid., 4, part 2:366.
38.Ibid., 2:202.
39.Ibid., 203.
40.Ibid., 201.
41.Ibid., 301.
42.Stéphane Mallarmé, A Tomb for Anatole, trans. Paul Auster (New York: New Directions, 2005), 1.
43.Ibid., 19.
44.OC-Marchal, 1:208.
45.Mallarmé, Tomb for Anatole, 46.
Chapter V: “There Has Been an Attack on Verse!”
1.OC-Mondor, 663.
2.Ibid., 875.
3.OC-Marchal, 1:1049.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid., 1029.
6.Ibid., 1037.
7.Correspondance, 3:343.
8.Stéphane Mallarmé, Lettres à Méry Laurent, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 52.
9.Correspondance, 4, part 2:542.
10.Cited in Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 120.
11.OC-Mondor, 481.
12.Cited in Robert Guiette, “Max Elskamp et Stéphane Mallarmé,” Le Mercure de France, no. 1161 (May 1960): 254.
13.Quoted in Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Pléiade-Gallimard, 1960), 2:1208.
14.The Times (London), February 23, 1894, p. 7.
15.Correspondance, 6:227.
16.Ibid., 230.
17.Henri de Régnier, Les Cahiers inédits, 1887–1936, ed. David J. Niederauer and François Broche (Paris: Pygmalion, 2002), 377. See Correspondence, 6:227ff. for Mallarmé’s account of his trip to Oxford and Cambridge and his essay “Cloîtres,” published in OC-Marchal, 2:247.
18.Carl Paul Barbier, ed., Documents Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: Nizet, 1971), 3:260.
19.Correspondance, 6:232.
20.OC-Mondor, 643.
21.Correspondance, 7:144.
22.G. H. Fleming, James Abbott McNeill Whistler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 290.
23.Carl Paul Barbier, ed., Correspondance Mallarmé–Whistler (Paris: Nizet, 1964), 232.
24.This testimony is taken from the documentary history of
the affair by Whistler, Eden Versus Whistler: The Baronet and the Butterfly; A Valentine with a Verdict (Paris: Louis-Henry May, 1899), 22.
25.Le Soir, May 27, 1894, cited in Correspondance, 6:287.
26.Correspondance, 9:106.
27.Henry Roujon, La Galerie des bustes (Paris: J. Rueff, 1908), 52–53.
28.Lettres à Méry Laurent, 81.
29.Ibid., 72.
30.Correspondance, 6:138.
31.Lettres à Méry Laurent, 151.
32.Correspondance, 6:267, nl.
33.A.-M. Bloch, “Psychologie: La Vitesse comparative des sensations,” Revue scientifique 13 (1887), 586.
34.See Christophe Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Cinématographe, 1893–98,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 120 (January 2005): 128–47.
35.Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet and Chantal Rittaud-Hutinet, Dictionnaires des cinématographes en France (1896–1897) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), 349–50.
36.Jean-Jacques Meusy, Paris-Palaces ou le temps des cinémas (1894–1918) (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2002), 20.
37.OC-Mondor, 878.
Chapter VI: “There, I’ve Added a Bit of Shadow”
1.OC-Mondor, 882.
2.Ibid., 407.
3.Gabrielle Delzant, Lettres—Souvenirs (Paris: Lahure, 1904), 286.
4.Robert Harborough Sherard, Twenty Years in Paris: Being Some Recollections of a Literary Life (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs, 1905), 390.
5.Hervé Joubeaux, My Mallarmé is rich: Mallarmé et le monde anglo-saxon (Paris: Editions d’Art Somogy, 2006), 10.
6.André Gide, “Verlaine et Mallarmé,” La Vie des Lettres 5 (April 1914): 12.
7.“Entretien recueilli par Maurice Guillemot” in OC-Marchal, 2:715.
8.Gustave Guiches, Au Banquet de la vie (Paris: Spes, 1925), 201.
9.OC-Marchal, 2:455.
10.Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. Stephen Hudson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931).
11.Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, ed. P. Agaësse and A. Solignac (Paris: Desclée de Brower, 1972), 123.
12.Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 42; for French original, see OC-Mondor, 368.
13.Augustine, De Genesi, 164.
14.Mallarmé, in sync with both Plato and the Fathers of the Church, speaks of an Idea or the Word. “The Word [Le Verbe] is a principle which is developed through the negation of all principle, chance [le hasard], as the Idea, and is found forming . . . , itself, the (spoken) Word [la Parole], with the help of time, which permits its scattered elements to be gathered and to be joined according to rules governing such diversions”: OC-Mondor, 854.