Stéphane Mallarmé (review)

Those who feel that Mallarmé's life hangs off him rather awkwardly, like an ill-fitting coat, who look upon his teaching career as something spectral and half-hearted, will find in Roger Pearson's wonderfully balanced biography the wherewithal to make everything count. Pearson's account of Mallarme's early years, up to his marriage with Marie Gerhard, in Chapter 1, sets the tone; it is certainly informed by the awareness of what he will become, but not intrusively or pre-emptively so; the restive, sometimes rather brittle, emotionally precarious vicissitudes of this life are allowed to breathe their own air. The second chapter covers the years of teaching at Tournon (1863–66), the tentative elaborations of Hérodiade and the Faune, the plans for the Great Work. Mallarmé's preoccupations with these schemes, with the widening circle of poetic acquaintances and correspondents, with the crucial spiritual journal that his letters became, give the photograph of the two-year-old Geneviève a certain power of mute appeal and that of the 'pendule de Saxe' a strenuous wish to be more than a token token. Pearson is the master of discreet and implied truths. He also brings a light touch that runs deep to his treatment of the late 1860s (Chapter 3: 'Chasms'), to those months acutely troubled as much by ills physical and neurological as by anguishes and ambitions metaphysical. It is from these months that date Mallarmé's often overlooked plans for an academic grounding in linguistics and the first flowering of sonnets, which Pearson explores with telling penetration. As the chapters further unfold, one might suppose that their suggestive titles ('Tombs', 'Tuesdays', 'Toasts', 'Dies') predict a thematic treatment; but they are more leitmotivic indices than narrative programme. Despite its funerary shadows, Chapter 4 is illuminated by Mallarmé's rich friendship with Manet and the delights of La Dernière Mode, while the fifth chapter, for all its celebration of the ritual of rue de Rome gatherings, has its eye on another ritual: the theatre, and the dispute beween the theatre of poetry, with its other forms of corporeal writing (mime, dance), and Wagnerian music drama, between myth and legend. Chapter 6 ('Toasts') shows Mallarmé engaged multifariously in the socialization of writing: banqueting, lecturing, being interviewed, writing the world into verse, on any surface, on occasions both special and quotidian. All this, and the final chapter's Un coup de dés, reminds one how indispensable Mallarmé was to poetry's reimagining itself into a modernity beyond vers libre. The brief epilogue sketches out Mallarmé's posthumous publication history and rayonnement; our thinking still has a long way to go to catch up with what his writing makes possible. There are some forty illustrations, chosen with exemplary thoughtfulness: alongside the inescapable iconography (Manet, Whistler, Degas, Gauguin), and the manuscript pages, one finds, for example, an image of inscribed 'galets', Pierre Louÿs's outline of the apartment in the rue de Rome, Verlaine's portrait-sketch, photographs of Mallarmé at the helm and of his boat moored 'absently' at Valvins. These images provide moments of unexpected discovery and atmospheric recueillement. In this wonderfully judicious account, one's only regret is the absence of an index.