Mallarme: The Poet and his Circle (review)

Abstract

If our icy and altitudinous Mallarmé has been "terrassé" for some time now by critical readings attentive to social, political, cultural, or other more frivolous aspects of his performances, Rosemary Lloyd's Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle extends further the arena of his earthy interactions into unexplored territories of occasion and friendship. Lloyd proceeds quite pointedly from Mallarmé's own admonition that poets work collectively or in community on a single book by exploring the "epistolary bridging of minds" (48) so central to his thinking and development over the years. As Lloyd explains, "Mallarmé's aesthetics . . . as a reading of these letters reveals, are frequently the outcome not just of the master thinking alone in a closed room but of a continuing debate that is in part a debate among friends discussing central questions in private letters or small groups, and in part that of a much broader intellectual social context" (35). To flesh out the contours of these private and public debates, The Poet and his Circle features an intense scrutiny of Mallarmé's ongoing correspondence with others - friends whose discussions shed new light on the corpus - and it pays special attention to the poet's unique gift for reading and for understanding just what his contemporaries were attempting to accomplish. Ulti-mately, Lloyd's discussion presents the figure of a Mallarmé ever determined, in letters and elsewhere, "to control his life, and with it his posthumous image" (226), but one who was also tuned in generously to the literary, artistic, and intellectual concerns of his times.