Mallarme: The Poet and his Circle (review)

Lloyd, Rosemary. Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999. Pp. 258. ISBN 0-8014-3662-1

If our icy and altitudinous Mallarmé has been "terrassé" for some time now by critical readings attentive to social, political, cultural, or other more frivolous aspects of his performances, Rosemary Lloyd's Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle extends further the arena of his earthy interactions into unexplored territories of occasion and friendship. Lloyd proceeds quite pointedly from Mallarmé's own admonition that poets work collectively or in community on a single book by exploring the "epistolary bridging of minds" (48) so central to his thinking and development over the years. As Lloyd explains, "Mallarmé's aesthetics . . . as a reading of these letters reveals, are frequently the outcome not just of the master thinking alone in a closed room but of a continuing debate that is in part a debate among friends discussing central questions in private letters or small groups, and in part that of a much broader intellectual social context" (35). To flesh out the contours of these private and public debates, The Poet and his Circle features an intense scrutiny of Mallarmé's ongoing correspondence with others - friends whose discussions shed new light on the corpus - and it pays special attention to the poet's unique gift for reading and for understanding just what his contemporaries were attempting to accomplish. Ulti-mately, Lloyd's discussion presents the figure of a Mallarmé ever determined, in letters and elsewhere, "to control his life, and with it his posthumous image" (226), but one who was also tuned in generously to the literary, artistic, and intellectual concerns of his times.

Divided into four chapters separated by five interludes and framed by an introduction on "Corresponding" and a conclusion on "Remembering the Dead," Lloyd's book develops chronologically filling in periods traditionally cast as "barren" with a full agenda of plans representative of Mallarmé's continually evolving aesthetic and intellectual work. From the early correspondence of the sixties, in Chapter 1, we learn that letters were the only forum for the poet's critical ideas and that they provide, therefore, Mallarmé's own "reader's tour of his verse" (43). Chapter 2 considers Mallarmé's activities and plans between 1871 and 1884 when his move to the capital thrust him into the worlds of vastly different writers: Léon Cladel and Léon Hennique, Huysmans, Zola and Anatole France, but also the Provençal poets, and the English writers, John Payne, Arthur O'Shaugnessy, Swinbourne, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Louise Chandler Moulton. This widening circle of correspondence indicates the degree to which Mallarmé was devoted to questions of genre, to problems of translation, and to the concept of "an international society of writers" (92) joined across the seas.

Focusing on considerations of other art forms, Chapter 3 paints Mallarmé at the very center of Parisian cultural life even as his " 'L'Après-midi d'un Faune' was at-tracting sneers from the Parisian press" (93). Lloyd reflects on his fascination with the contemporary painters Manet, Morisot (one of few women ever invited to the Mardis, she declined), Renoir, Whistler, Redon, Monet and Degas, and on the para-mount influence of the Lamoureux concerts. In addition to her adroit insinuation of issues shaping the poetry - Impressionism and pleinairisme, the unclassifiable in an age of maniacal classification, or a Wagnerisme newly tempered by the attitudes of Augusta Holmès and Judith Gautier - Lloyd invokes manifold logics of relationship that open poems for us in new ways. The poems appear lavishly in their entirety allowing sparks to fly back and forth from verse to letter. Their translations bear witness to a translator who, like Mallarmé himself, enters these works "through familiar doors and windows" (130). Projects undertaken if never brought to fruition also grace these pages and shape new directions for further study: drawings for the "ill-fated Tiroir du laque" (147...