Something to Declare Read online

  By 1876 Courbet is still uncomprehending about what has happened, or rather why. “Was it,” he asks senators and deputies in an open letter, “to punish me for having refused the decoration under the empire that I must carry a cross of a different kind?” This is perhaps no more than a turn of phrase, though an interesting one from the painter who called one of his self-portraits Christ with Pipe. If the French state didn't crucify Courbet, it certainly did its best to break him: his property was requisitioned, his pictures stolen, his assets sold, his family spied upon. He continued to paint, and to fight his corner, from Switzerland. Occasionally he would summon up all the old boastfulness: “At this moment I have more than a hundred commissions. I owe it to the Commune … The Commune would have me be a millionaire.” But his last years— cut off from family and friends, increasingly obsessed with those who had betrayed and denounced him—were sad and stressful. Eventually, worn down, he agreed to a negotiated deal with the French government according to which he promised to pay off the cost of rebuilding the Vendôme Column over thirty-two years. “I must go to Geneva to get a passport at the consulate,” he wrote optimistically in May 1877; but renewed turmoil in France kept him an exile until his death that December.

  If you sit at one of the café tables on the Place Humblot in Ornans today and look across the clear, shallow, fast-flowing Loue, you will notice on the side of Courbet's maison natale the faded letters of the word brasserie. This is apposite. Alfred Stevens told Edmond de Goncourt that the painter's consumption of beer was “terrifying”: thirty bocks in an evening. He also pre ferred to lengthen his absinthe not with water but with white wine. On various occasions Courbet's friend Etienne Baudry sent 62-litre barrels of brandy to the exile (Courbet's sister sent only “splendid socks,” to which he replied with gifts of a sewing machine for her and a pepper-grinder for his father). Alcoholic abuse resulted in dropsy, causing the painter's body to swell to enormous proportions. The fearsome new technique of “tapping” produced twenty litres of water, marginally more effective than the older system (steam-bath plus purging), which had rendered “eighteen litres from the anus.” There is an extravagance and challenging realism about Courbet's end, as there was about his life and his art.

  (c) Mallarmé

  In 1896, on the death of Verlaine, Mallarmé was elected Prince of Poets by the review La Plume. He accepted the honour but declined the dinner. It was, at this moment of public triumph, an entirely typical gesture. In part it reflected his finely calibrated sense of propriety—the death of a great poet should not be even the indirect cause for celebration—but it also had a wider, longer echo. Mallarmé had devoted much of his existence to Refusing the Banquet.

  Compared to other nineteenth-century French writers, Mallarmé had scarcely any “life” at all. No legend attached to him; there is no syphilis or bankruptcy, no exotic travel or homosexuality; set beside the rackety, dissolute, self-deceiving life of his co-partner in Symbolism, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, no existence could seem more measured, more careful, more buttoned-up. His rebellion against his upbringing consisted of giving up the traditional family career in the Records Office and becoming a schoolmaster. (His three-volume English grammar, Thèmes anglais, belongs next to Arthur Koestler's Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowl edge in the library of unexpected hack work.) He married at twenty-one. His rebellion against this marriage, twenty years on, came in the form of a liaison with the former actress Méry Laurent. But Méry had an American protector in Thomas Evans, one-time dentist to Napoleon III; Mallarmé exquisitely withdrew. His life was one of flights untaken and feelings suppressed, the inner life and the late-burning lamp. If he weren't so French he could easily be English.

  Gauguin etched him as a bureaucrat, or perhaps a fastidious convict; Manet painted him in a boneless, deliquescent slouch; Munch made him look like Conrad (Mallarmé's daughter thought the portrait resembled a head of Christ printed on a handkerchief); Degas had him leaning against a wall, hands in pockets, looking down at Renoir in a stiffness of pose explicable by the fifteen-minute photographic exposure. All show him as late-middle-aged, which is normal, given the operation of fame, but also apt. From his earliest letters he sounds like a fifty-year-old waiting to grow into that age.

  Aesthetically and emotionally, his life was fixed early on: a mixture of daunting maturity and premature renunciation. At twenty he met his wife, Marie, a German governess dangerously close to him in temperament. “She's unhappy … and bored,” he explained to his friend Henri Cazalis, “I'm unhappy and bored. From our two melancholies we could perhaps make a single happiness.” They ran off together to England—“the country of the false Rubens paintings”; she declared herself ruined; he suffered acute guilt; they married. Icily clear-minded, Mallarmé wrote to Cazalis:

  If I married Marie to make myself happy, I'd be a madman. Besides, can happiness be found on earth? And should one seek it, seriously, anywhere but in dreams? … No, I'm marrying Marie solely because she couldn't live without me and I would have poisoned her limpid existence … I'm not acting for myself, but for her alone.

  It doesn't take much hindsight to observe that such emotional altruism at age twenty is storing up trouble for later; but it's all part of Mallarmé's deck-clearing and hatch-battening. He became a schoolmaster even though he didn't much like teaching: he commanded little respect in his post at Tournon and was frequently “worsted by paper darts and cat-calls.” He became a husband even though he believed that “serious marriage is too primitive” and that the best way to look on the institution was as a means of acquiring “a home, that's to say a little peace, and a ‘tea-maker,’ to quote De Quincey” Happiness lay in the dream, and the dream was poetry.

  Side by side with the rather self-inflicted personal and professional adulthood comes the genuine and astonishing maturity of his aesthetics. The “new poetics” he was to proclaim and pursue all his life are there from the beginning. It is a twenty-two-year-old provincial schoolmaster who announces the famous dictum: “Paint, not the object, but the effect it produces.” Over the next months he declares reflection more valuable than impression as the source of art; lauds concision and arrangement as key elements in the poet's method; admonishes Romanticism by asserting that a writer may have a literary temperament quite distinct from his human temperament. Even his formal innovations are in train: when he writes in 1865 that “the most beautiful page of my work will be that which contains only the divine word Hérodiade,” he is already predicting the tweezer-careful layout of Un Coup de dés.

  Some of this “maturity,” however, felt more like old age. He is “splenetic and miserable” in Tournon, temperamentally “sterile and crepuscular”; he declares himself “an old man, finished, at twenty-three.” Lethargy and self-disgust quicken into nervous exhaustion and a full-blown spiritual crisis, a struggle with “that old and evil plumage” as Mallarmé—characteristically painting not the object but the effect—refers to God. The young poet thought he had his life successfully compartmentalized, but the lids are lifting on all the pots at the same time. Socially, he is longing for the metropolis (“I need men, Parisian women friends, paintings, music”); emotionally, he is discovering the fallacy of trying to construct a single happiness from two melancholies; physically, he is exhausted; spiritually, he is in revolt; aesthetically, he is elaborating a difficult and rarefied poetic, dreaming a Work which will (he announces with no sense of vanity, but rather of impersonal inevitability) be the third leg of Beauty whose first two parts are the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. The pots boil over at the same time, all across the stove; the art is made from a fearsome scalding. “And now, since I've reached the terrible vision of a pure work of art, I've almost lost my reason and the sense of the most familiar words.” He is twenty-six.

  Mallarmé's poetry, like his life, began by selecting what it had to reject. For a start, Hugo (or Hugolianism), personality verse, poetry as a vent for the emotions. He gives a whack of the cane to his friend Eugène Lefébure for writ
ing love poetry: “The truth is that Love is only one of thousands of feelings that lay siege to our souls, and mustn't take the place of fear, remorse, tedium, hatred and sadness.” This is a rather ambiguous rebuke, given Mallarmé's domestic circumstances; but then, literary principles often spring from psychological compromises. His other main rejection was of those aspects of poetry deemed novelistic: poetry as documentary, as narrative. In the first half of the nineteenth century the novel— despite Balzac—was still a junior literary mode. Poetry was dominant, imperialistic. If this created a problem for novelists—until Flaubert led the liberation struggle—it did the same for those poets who saw their art as less sweeping and less proprietorial. Writing to Zola in 1877 to congratulate him on L'Assommoir, Mal-larmé offers a double-edged compliment: “It really is a great work and worthy of an epoch in which truth has become the people's version of beauty!” Mallarmé's art is not concerned with “the people's beauty,” any more than it is with “thinking” or “meaning” as conventionally understood:

  I think that to be truly a man, to be nature capable of thought, one must think with one's entire body, which creates a full, harmo nious thought, like those violin strings vibrating directly with their hollow wooden box. As thoughts are produced by the brain alone … they now appear to me like airs played on the high part of the E-string without being strengthened by the box—which pass through and disappear without creating themselves, without leaving a trace of themselves.

  As for “meaning,” Mallarmé explains his poem “La nuit appro-batrice”to Cazalis thus:

  It is inverted, by which I mean that its meaning, if there is one (but I'd draw consolation for its lack of meaning from the dose of poetry it contains, at least in my view) is evoked by an internal mirage created by the words themselves. If you murmur it to yourself a couple of times, you get a fairly cabbalistic sensation.

  The key phrase in this—and a fairly crude one by Mallarmé's normal standards of diction—is “dose of poetry.” It makes the poetic act sound like the plying of a magic syringe. Some poor, untrained clump of words is hanging out at the track, wondering if it will ever make the grade; then along comes Mallarmé with the pot Belge and the EPO.

  Elimination, concision, impersonality (“My personal work which I believe will be anonymous, since the Text would speak by itself and without the author's voice”), the broadening of “thought,” the narrowing of “meaning,” the “dose of poetry.” Naming an object, he was to say in a newspaper interview of 1891, destroys three-quarters of the pleasure of poetry: thus the swan trapped in the ice in “Le Vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui” is first evoked as “le transparent glacier des vols qui n 'ont pas fui” (“the crystal ice of flights never taken”). The point of such indirection isn't to create a crossword puzzle (though that aspect is inescapably present), but to create space, dream-time, between the reader and the subject. In “Toute l'âme résumée,” Mallarmé's light, self-mocking art poétique of 1895, the injunction to débutant poets runs:

  Exclus-en si tu commences Le réel parce que vil Le sens trop précis rature Ta vague littérature*

  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. T
his 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: