Stéphane Mallarmé - Divagations

Divagations

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

The Authors 1897 Arrangement

Together with

Autobiography

and

Music and Letters

Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2009.

The translation of Mallarms Mimique (Mimesis) previously appeared in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, copyright 1981 by the University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission.

Design by Annamarie McMahon Why

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mallarm, Stphane, 18421898.

[Divagations. English]

Divagations: the authors 1897 arrangement ; together with Music and letters / Stphane Mallarm ; translated by Barbara Johnson.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-674-02438-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-674-03240-8 (pbk.)

I. Johnson, Barbara, 1947 II. Mallarm, Stphane, 18421898. Musique et les lettres. English. III. Title.

PQ2344.D5E5 2007

848.807d22 2006043745

For B.D.L., who made me want to live.

B.J.

Paris, Monday, November 15, 1885

My dear Verlaine,

I am late for you, because I was trying to find the unpublished works of Villiers de lIsle-Adam, which I lent hither and yon. Enclosed please find the almost-nothing I located.

But precise information about that dear old fugitive I dont have: even his address. Our two hands simply find each other, as if they had last clasped each other the night before, at the bend in a road, every year, because God exists. Besides that, though, hes always right on time at meetings, so if you want him for your Potes Maudits [Poets of the Damned] or Hommes dAujourdhui [Contemporary Men], look for him at Vaniers, where hes sure to have a lot to do, with the publication of Axel. Hell be there at the appointed hour, I guarantee. Literarily, no one is more punctual than he is; its up to Vanier to get his address, or Darzens, who has recently represented him with that gracious publisher.

If all else fails, youll walk with me some Wednesday at dusk, and suddenly hell join us, and all those details about his civil status, which Ive forgotten, will be available, since they concern the man himself.

Now Ill turn to me.

Yes, I was born in Paris on March 18, 1842, on the street that is today called the Passage Laferrire. My paternal and maternal families present, ever since the Revolution, an uninterrupted series of functionaries in the Administration and the Registry; and even though they were almost always at the top of their profession, I escaped a career that was planned for me from birth. In several of my ancestors, I find traces of a taste for holding a pen for something other than recording Acts: one, no doubt before the creation of the Registry, was in charge of bookstores under Louis XVII saw his name at the bottom of the Kings Privilege in the original French edition of Beckfords Vathek, which I had republished. Another wrote mocking verses for womens Confirmations and Almanacs of Muses. As a child, I knew, deep in the interior of a family Parisian bourgeoisie, Monsieur Magnien, a second cousin several times removed, who had published a rabid Romantic volume called Ange [Angel] or Dmon or something, which I occasionally come across now, listed at a very high price, in the catalogues booksellers send me.

I call my family Parisian because weve always lived in Paris, but our origins go back to Bourguignon, Lorraine, and even Holland.

I lost, while still a small child of seven, my mother; then was adored and cared for by my grandmother; then I went through numerous boarding schools and high schools, a Lamartinian soul with the secret ambition of one day replacing Branger, whom I had met at a friends house. It seems that this plan was too complicated to be put into execution, but I kept trying to fill hundreds of notebooks with verse, which were always confiscated from me, if I remember correctly.

When I entered into life, it was impossible, as you very well know, for a poet to live from his art, even by lowering it several degrees, and I have never regretted it. Having learned English simply to be a better reader of Poe, I left for England at the age of twenty, mainly to get away; but also to speak the language and teach it, to settle down in a quiet spot and need no other living: I was married and it was urgent.

Today, more than twenty years later, and despite all the wasted hours, I believe, with sadness, that I made the right decision. Its that, besides the verse and prose pieces I wrote in my youth and those that followed and echoed them, pieces which have been published all over the place every time a new Literary Review started up, I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction, the way they used to burn their furniture and the beams from their ceilings, to stoke the fires of the Great Work. What would it be? Its hard to say: a book, quite simply, in several volumes, a book that would be a real book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of chance inspirations, however wonderful... I would even go further and say the Book, convinced as I am that in the final analysis theres only one, unwittingly attempted by anyone who writes, even Geniuses. The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the poets only duty and the literary mechanism par excellence: for the rhythm of the book, then impersonal and alive, right down to its pagination, would line up with the equations of that dream, or Ode.

There, now, is the admission of my vice, laid bare, dear friend, which I have many times rejected, my spirit bruised and tired; but I am possessed by it and I will succeed, perhapsnot in drafting the whole of it (one would have to be I dont know who for that!) but in showing a fully executed fragment, making its glorious authenticity glow from the corner, and indicating the rest, for which a single lifetime would not suffice. To prove, by means of these finished pieces, that this book exists, that I knew what it was I couldnt accomplish.

Nothing, however, is so simple, and I made haste to collect the known pieces, which have, from time to time, attracted the attention of charming and excellent mindsyou first and foremost! All this had no immediate value for me other than keeping my hand in: however successful these pieces may be, as a whole [word missing], they barely make an album, not a book. The publisher Vanier may well rip those shreds away from me, but Ill merely stick them on pages as one collects pieces of cloth to commemorate an occasion, immemorial and precious only to oneself. With that damning epithet album in the title, the Album de vers et de prose could go on indefinitely (next to my personal work, which, I think, will be anonymousthe Text there speaking on its own, without the voice of an author).

Those verse and prose poems can be found, or not, besides in the opening volumes of certain Literary Reviews, in out-of-print Luxury Editions of Vathek, the Raven, the Faun.

Ive had to grab whatever offered itself as a lifeboat in hard-up moments, but apart from those potboilers (Les Dieux Antiques; Les Mots Anglais [Antique Gods; English Words]) about which the less said the better, concessions to needs or even to pleasures have not been frequent. Nevertheless, despairing of the recalcitrant book of myself, and having unsuccessfully dragged proposals and sample chapters all over, I undertook to writecovering dress designs, jewelry, furniture, theater programs, even dinner menusmy own fashion magazine,