By Stuart Mitchner
Today is Flannery O’Connor’s birthday. The author of Everything That Rises Must Converge would be 101. I’m a week late for Stéphane Mallarmé, “the most mysterious of poets” according to a blurb on the jacket of One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (Norton 2017). The title of R. Howard Bloch’s book indicates how easy it is to overlook Mallarmé, who was born on March 18, 1842. Here’s a 320-page study of the poet and his name isn’t even on the cover. Otherwise it’s a striking design and the blurbs are plentiful, beginning with Paul Auster, who says Mallarmé is “the bridge, the poet who took us from what was to what would be. It is impossible to imagine twentieth century literature without him.”
The poem’s full title, “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” (“Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”), made the mysterious poet a good bet for a weekly gamble based on dates, along with John Keats’s “magic hand of chance.” Consider the back story — a search at the library that almost came to nothing because the book wasn’t on the shelf and a librarian had to go find it for me, and why was she frowning when she handed it over? Why that stern glance, as if I had nefarious motives?
Stéphane and Stephen
It was as though the name Mallarmé had been a tip passed to me in the library of the interzone, a dark horse I’d never have bet on if I hadn’t recently encountered Mary Shaw, the author of Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé. When I entered the grand casino of the internet, where the inviolable essence of Chance is writ infinitely large, my personal set of dice was loaded with fortuitous associations left over from my student-days’ preoccupation with James Joyce. How else explain why I scored an essay on Marshall McLuhan in which Stéphane Mallarmé is hailed as Joyce’s “fabulous artificer, the modern Daedalus,” making him an odds-on favorite for the source of Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.
And who appears in the library chapter of Ulysses but the poet found and presented to me in the Princeton library? In the ensuing discussion of Shakespeare with Stephen at the center, France “produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmé” who composed “the prose poem about Hamlet that says il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même … reading the book of himself.”
A Mallarmé Surprise
The French connection that began for me with used Penguin paperbacks of Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low took me through the fascinating nooks and crannies and wooden galleries of Balzac’s Paris, where I found Baudelaire and Rimbaud, intrigued by their links to the likes of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Edgar Allan Poe. While there appeared to be no room for Mallarmé in that company, a blind throw of the dice turned up John Simon’s 1991 New Criterion essay on the legacy of Arthur Rimbaud, whose “scandalous capers” receive only two pages in One Toss of the Dice, where the author assures us that Mallarmé’s sole vice is “smoking cigarettes, cigars, and a pipe.”
After giving Rimbaud his centenary due at great length, Simon surprised me by ending with this extraordinary outpouring about “Mallarmé, who may be in the bloodstream of all modern poets, whether they know it or not. He gave the word, beyond its meaning or meanings, over and above its sound, its shape on the page…. Phrases became multivalent, forming strange, recondite, chiseled yet unstable relationships, proffering signification with one hand, withholding it with the other. The high priest was behind each verse, an abstruse smile on his lips, an intoxicating music in his chant. It is the music, in the later poems, of the emperor’s nightingale brought to its highest mechanical perfection, inferior to the warblings of the real one only for those who prize folk poetry above all other, who hold Anonymous to be the greatest poet of all.”
A Centenary Missed
My only excuse for failing to celebrate Flanney O’Connor’s 100th last year is that I marked her 90th on this date in 2015 with a full column. In “The Dreary Chair She Sat in Glowed,” I quoted Bruce Springsteen’s response to the New York Times when asked to name one book that “made him who he is today.” After remarking that O’Connor’s stories had “landed hard on me,” the Boss mentioned “the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters” and that made him “feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.”
O’Connor’s stories “landed hard” on me at the American Library in New Delhi. Lightheaded after reading my way through Everything That Rises Must Converge and the title story in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, I knew something like the “swirling” and the “reeling” and “the earth barely beneath us” as I walked into the blindingly bright Indian afternoon. O’Connor’s fiction and India had become one and the same; the spiritual intensity of her writing, like the life-and-death extremes of spirituality surrounding me in that country, was so overwhelming and so vivid that it didn’t matter whether I understood Catholicism or Original Sin any more than I understood Hinduism or Buddhism.
“Revelation”
The vision that followed me out of the American Library the day I discovered O’Connor occurs at the end of “Revelation,” a long story most of which takes place in a doctor’s waiting room where a smug, hugely fat woman named Mrs. Turpin, thankful to be who she is, with “a little of everything and a good disposition,” is physically and verbally attacked by a disturbed girl who calls her “an old warthog” and tells her to go to hell. At the end, standing in the “pig parlor” on her hog farm, the woman lifted her head to see “a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven.” She saw “whole companies of white trash” and “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” At the end of the procession she saw “a tribe of people” like herself and her husband “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
As the story ends, “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”
Referring to “the vision” in a letter written on May 15, 1964, three months before her death at 39, O’Connor says she likes Mrs. Turpin: “You got to be a very big woman to shout at the Lord across a hog pen.” The letter ends like the story, albeit with a humorous turn. Having just had another blood transfusion (“I have declared a moratorium on making blood”), the terminally ill author recalls coming home from the hospital earlier that month “hearing the celestial chorus” singing “My Darling Clementine.”
“The Emperor’s Nightingale”
After reading these and numerous other samples of O’Connor’s visionary wit, I have no doubt she’d have been amused by the idea of Mallarmé as “the emperor’s nightingale brought to its highest mechanical perfection,” not to mention the notion that “Anonymous” may be “the greatest poet of all.”
One of Mallarmé’s most quoted lines begins the poem “Brise Marine” (“Sea Wind”): “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres” (“The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read”).
I’ve saved the last word for the composer Maurice Ravel: “I consider Mallarmé not only as the greatest French poet, but also as the ‘only’ one, since he has made the French language poetic, which was not intended for poetry. The others, including the exquisite singer Verlaine, have dealt with the rules and limits of a very precise and formal genre. Mallarmé exorcised this language, as a magician that he was. He liberated winged thoughts, unconscious daydreams, from their prison.”
Back to the Jacket
In crediting poet J.D. McClatchy with the translation of the poem reprinted in One Toss of the Dice, the jacket copy refers to “a literary masterpiece” that launched “the modernist movement, contributed to the rise of pop art, influenced modern web design, and shaped the perceptual world we now inhabit.”