ARTS
Prophet of modernity
Nicholas Powell on a bold exhibition which marks the centenary of Mallarmes death
The opening of Stephane Mallarmes poem 'Brise marine' — 'La chair est triste, helas! et j'ai lu tous les livres./Fuir! la-bas fuir!' — is one of the best known quotes in French literature. Yet few poets have ever been hailed as major or historical whilst being so rarely read and so little under- stood. Conveniently but misleadingly labelled a Symbolist, a recurrent nightmare for lyceens doing French Lit., Mallarme (1842-1898) has long fallen into the shadow of his more accessible and more pic- turesque contemporaries and friends Ver- laine and Rimbaud (he was, admittedly, friends with virtually everybody).
Many French efforts to penetrate a work left incomplete — MaIlarme dreamt of a crowning magnum opus he referred to as 'Le Livre' — have had unhappy results. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1952 preface for Gallimard's edition of Mallarme, for example, merely projected his own contradictions onto the poet, in whom he conveniently detected a sense of revolt searching for an issue. Recent criti- cism has contributed little more, judging by the verbose essays in the catalogue of the exhibition which the Musee d'Orsay is boldly and conscientiously staging to mark Mallarme's centenary. The show itself, however, running until 3 January in a series of rooms just opposite the two-hour-long queues waiting with Disneyland stoicism to enter the Van Gogh and Millet exhibition, is a delight. For the organisers' declared intent is not to 'explain' Mallarme but to provide a chronological and thematic look at his life and work.
The exhibition reveals the multiple aspects of a writer adulated as a prophet of modernity by avant-garde French writers, artists and musicians of his day: even Vic- tor Hugo, who was no chicken, called Mal- larme 'mon cher poete impressionniste'. It also shows a man with unerring taste in music and painting (Mallarme once declared he preferred Monet's cathedrals to Sisley's churches), who wrote brilliantly about the theatre and who, through his determination and inventiveness, did, in the end, change the course of French poet- ry virtually single-handed.
Mallarmes mother died when he was five and he was packed off to a Paris boarding school which was so snobbish that, for self-protection, he invented a title for himself, le comte de Boulainvilliers. This sad early family life is evoked with a clutter of sepia photographs. The poetry, meanwhile, is available both in the form of manuscripts in a tidy, tightly controlled hand, and in beautiful recitations on ear- phones parked at strategic points through- out the exhibition. Obscure the poetry may be; it sounds sublime. Mallanne's relation- ships with artists are evidently what lend themselves best to visual presentation, beginning with Edouard Manet's magnifi- cent portrait of the poet lolling on a sofa, cigar in hand and a dreamy expression on his face. A great admirer of Mallarme, Auguste Rodin gave him a number of plas- ter casts, including `Nymphe', 1886, also on show at the Musee d'Orsay. The poet, in return, gave Rodin advice on how best to work, quoting himself as an example: pro- ducing the same quantity, at the same time every day, and never reading what he had written the day before. Paul Gauguin, who etched a portrait of Mallartne in 1890, pre- sented him with a statue upon returning from his first trip to Tahiti, three years later.
In 1891 James McNeill Whistler, an especially close friend, also produced a fine etching of Mallarme, now in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. Claude Monet, too, was close to Mallarme, who championed the Impressionists both in friendship (he presided over a well-attended salon at his home on the rue de Rome every Tuesday evening) and in the press. Monet's haystack paintings in 1891 inspired a lyrical letter to the artist: 'You have dazzled me!' Unwise- ly, however, Mallarme allowed himself to be painted by Renoir in 1892. The result, 'I usually have that with vodka!' as uninspired as only Renoir could be, made him look, he remarked, like a banker. The poet also maintained friend- ships with artists of the post-Impressionist generation, the Symbolists and the Nabis. In 1893 Manet's sister-in-law Bernie Morisot, a late Impressionist, for want of a label, stayed at and painted Mallarmes country home at Valvins, as did Edouard Vuillard three years later. Manet, of course, was also Mallarmes collaborator, illustrating his first two books, Le Corbeau, a translation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven published in 1875 and L'Apres-midi d'un faune of 1876, on which the poet had worked for ten years. (At the same time, Manet sent Mallarme an invita- tion to view his paintings which the Salon had refused.) The engravings, stark and dramatic, are all on show at the Musee d'Orsay — work which contradicts Mang" me's bald statement in 1898 that he Was against illustrations in books because 'everything evoked should take place in the reader's mind'.
The Orsay documents show Mallarme t° be capable of low cunning, too. Loathing Oscar Wilde, Whistler tipped off Mallarme that the playwright was preparing t°, descend on his Tuesday salon and warnee him that anything witty would be pinched and recycled by Wilde as his own. 'Serra vos perles!', translatable as either 'Keep a grip on your witticisms' or 'Hang on te your twin-sets', was thus the order of the evening. Wilde came and, as soon as he went, Mallarme penned a triumphant no to Whistler, reassuring him that he and his friends had all been outstandingly dull. The subject disappointingly skimped 1/31 the Orsay exhibition, however, is the cru- cial role played in Mallarmes work by the English language. Very early on, Mallarnie declared he wanted to learn Englisht° continue Baudelaire's work of translating Poe and in 1862 spent time in England for just that purpose. He took up a career as an English teacher and hated every second of it. Ironically, Mallarme's English i'ves never very good, as we know from a letter (not on show here) sent to Algernon Sivitl- burne and which, the English poet being al the country recovering from a drinking binge, fell into the hands of the journalts,t Edmund Gosse. The Musee d'Orsay has, tt, is true, unearthed a delightful series n; coloured drawings by Mallarme, intencieu to help pupils master English propositions: tell the time and pronounce `th' — the Poi sketched a little boy, his tongue firmly P1°- truding between his teeth. But that is virtu- ally all. The difficulty of Mallarmes Poet° resides not only in the fact it is non-rep' sentational — the poet himself said he wanted to write not about things, but about the effects they produced — but to the way he treats the French language, eliminating so many of its fluid effects and giving it a sort of English grammatical chunkiness. The American scholar David Degener, cur- rently finishing a biography of Mallarmd, reckons English made Mallarind the poet he was:
Imperfect as it was, MaIlanne's grasp of English enabled him to shake up French poetry — word order is so much more impor- tant in English than in French. Before Mal- larme, French poetry was considered a sort of vehicle or packaging for conveying fine thoughts. MaBantle got interested in the actual material of which poems are made. None of the experimentation of French poet- ry since him would have been possible, other- wise. He's the father of the 20th century.
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