Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (19 page)

Exclus-en si tu commences Le réel parce que vil Le sens trop précis rature Ta vague littérature
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Poetry should be like cigar smoke: that's to say, our attention is directed not at the puffing, personalized, Hugolian smoker, or the glamorous, red-burning cigar-end, or the gathering ash, but metonymically at the curls and wisps of grey-blue sweet-smelling smoke. What is the true poetry? It is
“plusieurs ronds de fumée / Abolis en autres ronds”
(“a few smoke-rings which disappear into other smoke-rings”).

And as there is a drawing-back from naming, so there is a drawing-back from the domination, the unambiguity of syntax.
“Le Vierge,”
for instance, demonstrates the twin techniques ofcompacting, whereby magmjique implies
qui a été magnifique,
or “se délivre” implies
“qui essaie en vain de se délivrer,”
and grammatical loosening. In the final line of the sonnet,
“Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne”
(“Donned in useless exile by the Swan”), inutile manages to modify both
“l'exil
and (adverbially)
le Cygne.”
Thus propinquity counts as much as syntax; the words respond to one another chemically rather than grammatically.

In 1866 Mallarmé described himself as “a sacred spider” spinning his thread into “wonderful lace”; the following year, as “a diamond which reflects everything but which has no existence in itself.” Peter Quennell's image of the poet, in
Baudelaire and the Symbolists
(1929), connects technique with effect in a fanciful but memorable way:

He was industrious and workmanlike; day by day, on little, carefully torn squares of paper, he noted down his linguistic discoveries, storing them with others in a big wooden tea-chest against the moment when they should be embodied in a poem. For when he wrote, it was methodically; he constructed a skeleton, significant words deliberately scattered over his maiden sheet, prearranged schemes of rhyme … and within these limits the poem had only to build itself! He was like the magician whom the anthropologist sees, stringing up a row of frail hempen slipknots, in which he means to snare a favouring wind or entrap the wandering spirits of the dead.

Of course, the anthropologist has to trust the magician. That's a favouring wind you've snared there, is it? Mallarmé is one of the least translatable of the French poets: reading him in English is often like listening to a chamber work for boys' choir in a transcription for brass band.

In Huysmans's
A Rebours,
that Baedeker of decadence, Mallarmé is the favourite modern poet of Des Esseintes. (What would be the contemporary equivalent to this cultural puff? Perhaps a whole evening of televised homage.) Huysmans delights in Mal-larmé's withdrawal from a world of “universal suffrage,” “commercial greed,” and “raging folly,” in the way he just sits there

taking pleasure … in the caprices of his mind and the visions of his brain; refining upon thoughts that were already subtle enough, grafting Byzantine niceties on them, perpetuating them in deductions that were barely hinted at and loosely linked by an imperceptible thread.

Mallarmé liked to deny the charge of obscurity: replying to a generous assessment of his work by Edmund Gosse in 1893, he wrote, “The only quibble I have to make is on obscurity; no, my dear poet, except through awkwardness or clumsiness, I'm not obscure … Of course I become obscure if the reader makes the mistake of thinking he's opening a newspaper!”

We might jib at this claim (just as we jib at Graham Greene's repeated claim to be a failure), and at the reclassification of most French poetry as journalism; but Mallarmé always defended his position. Poe made the distinction between obscurity of expression— the sin of novice poets—and the expression of the obscure. “There must always be enigma in poetry,” Mallarmé (Poe's translator) wrote in 1891. “That is the aim of literature.” Difficulty yes; obscurity no. Elsewhere, Mallarmé speaks of the need for a “system of defences at the entrance to the shrine of art,” which would “keep out those who do not love it enough.” Here difficulty is a more active notion: it helps keep the muddy-footed amateur reader out of the nice clean library.

In 1865 Mallarmé wrote to Cazalis sympathizing with his friend for having had to endure ignorant critical comment from an aunt. Hearing about this
lèse-majesté
distressed Mallarmé, “so deeply do I feel that art is for artists alone. If only you knew how it hurts me to water down my thought and weaken it to make it instantly intelligible to a room of indifferent spectators!” Art, then, not just for art's sake, but for artists' sake, a further (and more limiting) refinement. Huysmans imagined the perfect Mallarméan prose poem becoming “an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world, an aesthetic treat available to none but the most discerning.” Such exclusivism was endorsed by the fine-binding aspect of this literary movement: Mallarmé wanted his edition of Poe produced with “pious sumptuousness”; Des Esseintes's account of
“L'Après-midi d'un faune”
is two-thirds textual analysis, one-third crypto-sexual gloat over the exquisite Japanese felt book covers and twin-hued bookmarks. This section of
A Rebours
concludes:

The truth of the matter was that the decadence of French literature, a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious whims that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last hours, determined to make up for all the pleasures it had missed, afflicted on its death-bed with a desire to leave behind the subtlest memories of suffering, had been embodied by Mallarmé in the most consummate and exquisite fashion.

In his understandably appreciative response, Mallarmé told Huysmans that there was “not an atom of fantasy” in his book, and called the novelist “more strictly documentary than anyone else.”

Mallarmé's letters divide as firmly as his life did into two periods: provincial obscurity and Parisian success. The correspondence of the neurotic, ambitious schoolmaster is in fact more enthralling than that of the urbane and revered man of letters. After he reaches Paris there is less annotation of his work and less elaboration of his feelings (though many of his letters to Méry Laurent remain embargoed); instead, Mallarmé is courtly, wise, and unfailingly—even irritatingly—appreciative of other writers' work. Paris, and Parisian success, brought out his skittishness, his teasing and schmoozing. The Selected Letters should be accompanied by the Selected Envelopes, composed at a time when the leisurely postman would respond good-naturedly to an address in conundrum-form:

Va-t'en, messager, il n'importe Par le tram, le coche ou le bac Rue, et
2
, Gounod à la porte De notre Georges Rodenbach
*

The poet of
“L'Après-midi d'un faune”
was also editor of the fashion magazine
La Dernière Mode
and wrote sixty-one little verse offerings to accompany gifts of glacé fruit at the New Year. This playful aspect is given visual corroboration by two of the strangest literary photographs ever taken. They show Mallarmé, in three-piece suit, floppy butterfly tie, and broad black hat, posing as a French peasant against a painted rustic backdrop. In one shot he is wearing clogs, carries a hay rake over his shoulder with lunch pail attached, and is trying to look like a jaunty farm labourer. The poet of ultimate refinement playing at “real life”:

Exclus-en si tu commences Le réel parce que vil …

“I need men, Parisian women friends, paintings, music …” While still marooned in the provinces, Mallarmé criticized Taine for his view that “an artist is merely man raised to his greatest possible power, whereas I believe that it is perfectly possible to have a human temperament utterly distinct from one's literary temperament.” This notion—so baffling to the reductive biographer—is confirmed by Mallarmé's own case. Where the work is erudite and abstruse, the man was courtly and accessible. Such a mix is often a powerful social aphrodisiac: Mallarmé became one of the most admired and loved writers of his day, the familiar of Manet and Degas, Whistler and Swinburne; the young Gide testified to his enormous charm.

After he was elected Prince of Poets in 1896,
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the newspapers had a label to stick on him, “a kite's tail with which I try to escape in the streets, having no other means of hiding myself than by joining the Mardi Gras parade.” Celebrity meant that the press was free “to make the hermit a buffoon,” and the poet of “intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader” was approached for his views on the bicycle, and for his contribution to a symposium on whether or not the top hat was ugly. He obliged good-humouredly, indeed seriously: “A bicycle,” he told readers of
Le Gaulois,
“is not vulgar when wheeled out of the garage, and soon becomes sparkling in its rapidity. Yet whoever mounts it, man or woman, reveals something disgraceful, that of human being reduced to mechanical object, with a caricatural movement of the legs. Too bad!”

“Among these exquisites, these dandies of word and syntax, there is a madman madder than the rest, and that is the nebulous Mallarmé, who maintains that one should never begin a sentence with a monosyllable.” Edmond de Goncourt can always be relied on for the contrary view, and his splenetic exasperation in the
Journal
is comical, but not absurd. Mallarmé wasn't mad—few writers can have been so high-minded and purposeful—but his extreme refinement, his ethereal costiveness, strained vitality from his work. The more poetry moves towards music, the farther it moves away from life; though of course Mallarmé's aesthetic is well defended, and one person's “life” may be another person's “unpoetic vulgarity.” In the middle of an aesthetically anguished and grammatically contorted letter to Cazalis, for instance, after announcing his “Work” as the third great beauty to follow the
Venus de Milo
and the
Mona Lisa,
Mallarmé drops in this paragraph:

Since we've reached these heights, let's go on and explore them, then we 'll do our best to descend from them. This is what I heard my neighbour say this morning, as she pointed to the window on the opposite side of the street from her: “Gracious me! Madame Ramaniet ate asparagus yesterday.” “How can you tell?” “From the pot she's put outside her window.” Isn't that the provinces in a nutshell? Its curiosity, its preoccupations, and that ability to see clues in the most meaningless things—and such things, great gods! Fancy having to confess that mankind, by living one on top of the other, has reached such a pass!!

The poet's nose-holding fastidiousness extends equally to sex. When Cazalis is fretting over whether or not to marry an English girl called Ettie Yapp, Mallarmé, the connoisseur of renunciation, recommends the acquisition of a “tea-maker” but rebukes his friend for overemphasizing the physical: “You see it [marriage] too much in terms of lingam fiction.” Not just the statement, but the phrasing, is significant; sex is one of those things best left to people in hot climates.

Huysmans, via Des Esseintes, praised Mallarmé's “lofty scorn.” A refined aesthetic which declares itself above the battle is intrinsically conservative. In 1863 the poet went to a meeting in support of Poland (where the rebellion against Russia had recently been crushed) and was primarily struck by the way in which the workers applauded frenetically when addressed as
“gentlemen.”
“I don't like workers: they are vain.” What of the bourgeoisie? “They are hideous, and it's quite plain that they have no soul.” Which leaves the aristocracy, by which he means “the nobility and the poets.” “As long as the former have money and the latter have beautiful statues, everything will be fine.”

The poet, for Mallarmé, is a statue owner rather than an indulger in lingam fiction, and his answer to the old poser about what you would save from your burning house is predictable: “Henri, don't you think that the man who made the
Venus de Milo
is greater than the one who saves a race, and wouldn't it be preferable that Poland should fall rather than see that eternal marble hymn to Beauty lying in pieces?” Happily, such choices don't often arise (and if they did twenty-one-year-old aesthetes would probably not be consulted). Polish freedom against the
Venus de Milo?
Shouldn't the Poles have a vote in it?

The “lofty scorn,” combined with a topographical preference for “the purest glaciers of Aesthetics,” produced moments of farcical solemnity, especially when Mallarmé was in league with Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, whose grip on reality wasn't always tenacious. In 1867 they planned an attack on that reliable enemy, the bourgeois, to show him

that he has no existence independently of the Universe—from which he thought he could separate himself—but that he is one of its functions, and one of the vilest at that—and I'll show him what he represents in that Development. If he understands it, his joy will be forever poisoned.

The plan seems to have been to write a book which the bourgeois would gobble up but then choke on (the scheme has zoomed off into metaphor already): “I'm eagerly awaiting your sugary mixture, which will make him feel so nauseated he'll vomit himself: you're right, we'll avoid the courts, all the art will lie in making him judge himself unworthy of living.” The idea that Mal-larmé and Villiers (of all duos) might come up with something to make the bourgeois auto-destruct with self-loathing must be filed in the most arcane section of the Department of Empty Threats.