One Toss of the Dice by R. Howard Bloch

Author:R. Howard Bloch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2016-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

Good evening, little peacock, all is OK

Mr Mallarmé

rentier

The freedom to write might have seemed exhilarating, yet Mallarmé also knew that there would be no more deferrals of this last chance to reach the goal he had set for himself almost three decades earlier. “I don’t live in Paris, but in a room,” he wrote in May 1894, “it could be in London, San Francisco, or China. . . . Writing a book today is to write one’s last will and testament.”32

As the poet contemplated retirement, the Panama Canal scandal swirled all around him. Some eight hundred thousand French men and women had invested in stock in the Panama Canal Company, which went bankrupt in 1889, and many lost their life’s savings. Beginning in 1892, however, the news began to emerge that numerous ministers (including Mardist Georges Clemenceau), members of the Chamber of Deputies, and financial middlemen took bribes from the head of the building project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to allocate government funds to aid the failing French venture as well as to hide its true financial condition. In the trial that unfolded while Mallarmé negotiated his retirement, Lesseps, his son Charles, engineer Gustave Eiffel, and Baron Jacques Reinach, who had negotiated the bribes, received long jail sentences, which were later annulled. Some historians consider the Panama Canal crisis a source of the social unrest that motivated the anarchist bombers, including Félix Féneon, of the early 1890s. Still others, among them Hannah Arendt, see in the Panama scandal an early phase of the Dreyfus affair, since the chief financial advisors of the project, Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Herz, were both Jews of German origin. Reinach fled to England, where he committed suicide in November 1892. In one of the great ironies of history, his cousin the journalist and politician Joseph Reinach would be one of the earliest and most ardent defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus immediately after his false conviction in December 1894.

Throughout his poetic career, Mallarmé had sought to reclaim for poetry what poetry had lost to music, especially to Wagner’s seductive integration of music, visual spectacle, and words. Augusta Holmès’s Triumphal Ode had gone as far as possible in the direction of the Wagnerian epic spectacle. Beginning around the time of the poet’s retirement, however, a new specter loomed on the horizon, one that threatened to surpass even Wagner, and which was arguably closer to The Book in its potential to “alter the nature of the human community” than the operatic Gesamtkunstwerk.

Mallarmé, who was a contributor to and a daily reader of Le Figaro, was no doubt aware of an article by his friend Octave Uzanne that appeared on May 8, 1893. On the first page, Uzanne recounted his recent visit to Thomas Edison’s workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where the inventor, “with the air of an old baby,” revealed his latest invention, the kinetograph. “The kinetograph will be for the eye what the phonograph is for the ear. In two years, when it is perfected, Talma, Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt .

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