In the letter below, Stéphen Mallarmé writes to Henri Cazalis, a fellow Symbolist poet. Always avoiding the personal anecdote, Mallarmé focuses the whole of his attention on abstract ideas involving form and subject, mentioning his wife (German governess Maria Gerhard) and daughter (Geneviève) only in brief passing. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his famous essay on “The Poet of Nothingness,” noted that “even after killing God single-handedly, Mallarmé still sought divine approval. Poetry still had to remain transcendent even though he had eliminated the origin of all transcendence. With the death of God, inspiration could only derive from corrupt sources.” The struggle becomes apparent in this letter.
To Henri Cazalis
February 1865
I received your fine poems which I like wholeheartedly. They’re as distressing as everything that exists, but shouldn’t they be? How often we’ve already reread them, Marie and I!
I’m not distinguishing between those in verse and those in prose, because your verse, when all’s said and done, is your winged prose, just more rhythmical and more caressed with assonance. To some extent, it’s like a random dream, and doesn’t give that impression of a deep study one finds in modern poets. There’s not the shadow of a criticism in that remark.
If you were to publish a volume of verse, I’d be worried; but, in your work in prose, those unfinished lines, with their harmonies and their rhymes, will merely provide so many wing-beats for the mind as it seeks to soar yet higher!
But what beautiful things there are in them! That distress you feel at the hour when dreams and the pillow must be left and you must enter the cold day which holds no secret and whose monotonous emptiness you know in advance!—“The Poor,” so lovely because it is nothing other than a cry of a soul in love with Beauty, a soul which suffers at the sight of an evil so marked with ugliness—but it doesn’t conclude, stopping when the torrent of tears has been shed! The sad herd of women in the hospital, laughing, laughing.—Everything, in a word.
I had a good chat about you with that monkey, Emmanuel, whom I surprised the other day in Avignon. He told me he owed 6 francs to a tailor, 24 sous to a grocer. What’s distressing is that he owes his housekeeper 2 francs 50, and times are hard, and he’s desolate at not having visited me on New Year’s Day. After which this poet read me poems I considered very fine, if you accept his somewhat slack style and his rather diffuse thought.
My pen is writing on its own at the moment. I’m so gloomy I can’t think and yet, tonight, while the fat-bellied lawyers dance like bottles on the water, at the Sub-Prefect’s Ball which I’m avoiding, I want to begin an important scene of Herodiade. Pity me.
Geneviève, who is already laughing, her mother who is amusing herself downstairs with her, and I all embrace you from afar for your fine poems.
From Selected Letters of Stephen Mallarmé. Translated by Rosemary Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
FURTHER READING
Recent translations of Mallarmé.
Samples of Cazalis’s poetry, which he published under the pseudonym of Jean Lahor.
Mallarmé on the author’s eclipse.