by Paul Auster
1981
Mallarmé’s Son
Mallarmé’s second child, Anatole, was born on July 16, 1871, when the poet was twenty-nine. The boy’s arrival came at a moment of great financial stress and upheaval for the family. Mallarmé was in the process of negotiating a move from Avignon to Paris, and arrangements were not finally settled until late November, when the family installed itself at 29 rue de Moscou and Mallarmé began teaching at the Lycée Fontanes.
Mme Mallarmé’s pregnancy had been extremely difficult, and in the first months of his life Anatole’s health was so fragile that it seemed unlikely he would survive. “I took him out for a walk on Thursday,” Mme Mallarmé wrote to her husband on October 7. “It seemed to me that his fine little face was getting back some of its color … I left him very sad and discouraged, and even afraid that I would not see him anymore, but it’s up to God now, since the doctor can’t do anything more, but how sad to have so little hope of seeing this dear little person recover.”
Anatole’s health, however, did improve. Two years later, in 1873, he reappears in the family correspondence in a series of letters from Germany, where Mallarmé’s wife had taken the children to meet her father. “The little one is like a blossoming flower,” she wrote to Mallarmé. “Tole loves his grandfather, he does not want to leave him, and when he is gone, he looks for him all over the house.” In that same letter, nine-year-old Geneviève added: “Anatole asks for papa all the time.” Two years later, on a second trip to Germany, there is further evidence of Anatole’s robust health, for after receiving a letter from his wife, Mallarmé wrote proudly to his friend Cladel: “Anatole showers stones and punches on the little Germans who come back to attack him in a group.” The following year, 1876, Mallarmé was absent from Paris for a few days and received this anecdote from his wife: “Totol is a bad little boy. He did not notice you were gone the night you left; it was only when I put him to bed that he looked everywhere for you to say good-night. Yesterday he did not ask for you, but this morning the poor little fellow looked all over the house for you; he even pulled back the covers on your bed, thinking he would find you there.” In August of that same year, during another of Mallarmé’s brief absences from the family, Geneviève wrote to her father to thank him for sending her presents and then remarked: “Tole wants you to bring him back a whale.”
Beyond these few references to Anatole in the Mallarmé family letters, there are several mentions of him in C. L. Lefèvre-Roujon’s introduction to the Correspondance inédite de Stephane Mallarmé et Henry Roujon—in particular, three little incidents that give some idea of the boy’s lively personality. In the first, a stranger saw Anatole attending to his father’s boat and asked him, “What is your boat called?” Anatole answered with great conviction, “My boat isn’t called anything. Do you give a name to a carriage?” On another occasion, Anatole was taking a walk through the Fountainebleau forest with Mallarmé. “He loved the Fountainebleau forest and would often go there with Stéphane … [One day], running down a path, he came upon a very pretty woman, politely stepped to the side, looked her over from top to bottom and, out of admiration, winked his eye at her, clicked his tongue, and then, this homage to beauty having been made, continued on his child’s promenade.” Finally, Lefèvre-Roujon reports the following: One day Mme Mallarmé boarded a Paris bus with Anatole and put the child on her lap in order to economize on the extra fare. As the bus jolted along, Anatole fell into a kind of trance, watching a gray-haired priest beside him who was reading his breviary. He asked him sweetly: “Monsieur l’abbée, would you allow me to kiss you?” The priest, surprised and touched, answered: “But of course, my little friend.” Anatole leaned over and kissed him. Then, in the suavest voice possible, he commanded: “And now, kiss mama!”
In the spring of 1879, several months before his eighth birthday, Anatole became seriously ill. The disease, diagnosed as child’s rheumatism, was further complicated by an enlarged heart. The illness first attacked his feet and knees, and then, when the symptoms had apparently cleared up, his ankles, wrists, and shoulders. Mallarmé considered himself largely responsible for the child’s suffering, feeling that he had given the boy “bad blood” through a hereditary weakness. At the age of seventeen, he had suffered terribly from rheumatic pain, with high fevers and violent headaches, and throughout his life rheumatism would remain a chronic problem.
In April, Mallarmé went off to the country for a few days with Geneviève. His wife wrote: “He’s been a good boy, the poor little martyr, and from time to time asks me to dry his tears. He asks me often to tell little papa that he would like to write to him, but he can’t move his little wrists.” Three days later, the pain had shifted from Anatole’s hands to his legs, and he was able to write a few words: “I think of you always. If you knew, my dear Little Father, how my knees hurt.”
Over the following months, things took a turn for the better. By August, the improvement had been considerable. On the tenth, Mallarmé wrote to Robert de Montesquiou, a recently made friend who had formed a special attachment to Anatole, to thank him for sending the child a parrot. “I believe that your delicious little animal … has distracted the illness of our patient, who is now allowed to go to the country … Have you heard from where you are … all the cries of joy from our invalid, who never takes his eyes … away from the marvelous princess held captive in her marvelous palace, who is called Sémiramas because of the stone gardens she seems to reflect? I like to think that this satisfaction of an old and improbable desire has had something to do with the struggle of the boy’s health to come back; to say nothing … of the secret influence of the precious stone that darts out continually from the cage’s inhabitant on the child … How charming and friendly you have been, you who are so busy with so much, during this recent time; and it is more than a pleasure for me to announce to you, before anyone else, that I feel all our worries will soon be over.”
In this state of optimism, Anatole was taken by the family to Valvins in the country. After several days, however, his condition deteriorated drastically, and he nearly died. On August 22, Mallarmé wrote to his close friend Henry Roujon:
“I hardly dare to give any news because there are moments in this war between life and death that our poor little adored one is waging when I allow myself to hope, and repent of a too sad letter written the moment before, as of some messenger of bad tidings I myself have dispatched. I know nothing anymore and see nothing anymore … so much have I observed with conflicting emotions. The doctor, while continuing the Paris treatment, seems to act as though he were dealing with a condemned person who can only be comforted; and persists, when I follow him to the door, in not giving a glimmer of hope. The dear boy eats and sleeps a little; breathes. Everything his organs could do to fight the heart problem they have done; after another enormous attack, that is the benefit he draws from the country. But the disease, the terrible disease, seems to have set in irremediably. If you lift the blanket, you see a belly so swollen you can’t look at it!
“There it is. I do not speak to you of my pain; no matter where my thought tries to lead it, this pain recoils from seeing itself worsen! But what does suffering matter, even suffering like that: the horrible thing is … the misfortune in itself that this little being might vanish … I confess that it is too much for me; I cannot bring myself to face this idea.
“When my wife looks at the darling, she seems to see a serious illness and nothing more; I must not rob her of the courage she has found to care for the child in this quietude. I am alone here then with the hatchet blow of the doctor’s verdict.”
A letter from Mallarmé to Montesquiou on September 9 offers further details: “Unfortunately, after several days [in the country], everything … grew dark: we have been through the cruelest hours our darling invalid has caused us, for the symptoms we thought had disappeared forever have returned; they are taking hold now. The old improvements were a sham … I am too tormented and too taken up with our poor little boy
to do anything literary, except to jot down a few rapid notes … Tole speaks of you, and even amuses himself in the morning by fondly imitating your voice. The parrot, whose auroral belly seems to catch fire with a whole orient of spices, is looking right now at the forest with one eye and at the bed with the other, like a thwarted desire for an excursion by her little master.”
By late September there had been no improvement, and Mallarmé now centered his hopes on a return to Paris. On the twenty-fifth, he wrote to his oldest friend, Henri Cazalis: “The evening before your beautiful present came, the poor darling, for the second time since his illness began, was nearly taken from us. Three successive fainting fits in the afternoon did not, thank heaven, carry him off … The belly disturbs us, as filled with water as ever … The country has given us everything we could ask of it, assuming it could give us anything, milk, air, and peaceful surroundings for the invalid. We have only one idea now, to leave for a consultation with Doctor Peter … I tell myself it is impossible that a great medical specialist cannot take advantage of the forces nature opposes so generously to a terrible disease…”
After the return to Paris, there are two further letters about Anatole—both dated October 6. The first was to the English writer John Payne: “This is the reason for my long silence … At Easter, already six hideous months ago, my son was attacked by rheumatism, which after a false convalescence has thrown itself on his poor heart with incredible violence, and holds him between life and death. The poor friend has twice almost been taken from us … You can judge of our pain, knowing how much I live inside my family; then this child, so charming and exquisite, had captivated me to the point that I still include him in all my future projects and in my dearest dreams…”
The other letter was to Montesquiou. “Thanks to immense precautions, everything went well [on the return to Paris] … but the darling paid for it with several bad days that drained his tiny energy. He is prey to a horrible and inexplicable nervous cough … it shakes him for a whole day and a whole night …—Yes, I am quite beside myself, like someone on whom a terrible and endless wind is blowing. All-night vigils, contradictory emotions of hope and sudden fear, have supplanted all thought of repose … My sick little boy smiles at you from his bed, like a white flower remembering the vanished sun.”
After writing these two letters, Mallarmé went to the post office to mail them. Anatole died before his father managed to return home.
* * *
The 202 fragments that follow belonged to Mme E. Bonniot, the Mallarmé heir, and were deciphered, edited, and published in a scrupulously prepared volume by the literary scholar and critic Jean-Pierre Richard in 1961. In the preface to his book—which includes a lengthy study of the fragments—he describes his feelings on being handed the soft red box that contained Mallarmé’s notes. On the one hand: exaltation. On the other hand: wariness. Although he was deeply moved by the fragments, he was uncertain whether publication was appropriate, given the intensely private nature of the work. He concluded, however, that anything that could enhance our understanding of Mallarmé would be valuable. “And if these phrases are no more than sighs,” he wrote, “that makes them all the more precious to us. It seemed to me that the very nakedness of these notes … made their distribution desirable. It was useful in fact to prove once again to what extent the famous Mallarméan serenity was based on the impulses of a very vivid sensibility, at times even quite close to frenzy and delirium … Nor was it irrelevant to show, by means of a precise example, how this impersonality, this vaunted objectivity, was in reality connected to the most subjective upheavals of a life.”
A close reading of the fragments will clearly show that they are no more than notes for a possible work: a long poem in four parts with a series of very specific themes. That Mallarmé projected such a work and then abandoned it is indicated in a memoir written by Geneviève that was published in a 1926 issue of the NRF: “In 1879, we had the immense sorrow of losing my little brother, an exquisite child of eight. I was quite young then, but the deep and silent pain I felt in my father made an unforgettable impression on me: ‘Hugo,’ he said, ‘was happy to have been able to speak [about the death of his daughter]; for me, it’s impossible.’”
As they stand now, the notes are a kind of Ur-text, the raw data of the poetic process. Although they seem to resemble poems on the page, they should not be confused with poetry per se. Nevertheless, more than one hundred years after they were written, they are perhaps closer to what we today consider possible in poetry than at the time of their composition. For here we find a language of immediate contact, a syntax of abrupt, lightning shifts that still manages to maintain a sense, and in their brevity, the sparse presence of their words, we are given a rare and early example of isolate words able to span the enormous mental spaces that lie between them—as if intelligible links could be created by the brute force of each word or phrase, so densely charged that these tiny particles of language could somehow leap out of themselves and catch hold of the succeeding cliff-edge of thought. Unlike Mallarmé’s finished poems, these fragments have a startlingly unmediated quality. Faithful not to the demands of art but to the jostling movement of thought—and with a speed and precision that astonish—these notes seem to emerge from such an interior place, it is as though we could hear the crackling of the wires in Mallarmé’s brain, experience each synapse of thought as a physical sensation. If these fragments cannot be read as a work of art, neither, I think, should they be treated simply as a scholarly appendage to Mallarmé’s collected writings. For, in spite of everything, the Anatole notes do carry the force of poetry, and in the end they achieve a stunning wholeness. They are a work in their own right—but one that cannot be categorized, one that does not fit into any preexistent literary form.
The subject matter of the fragments requires little comment. In general, Mallarmé’s motivation seems to have been the following: feeling himself responsible for the disease that led to Anatole’s death, for not giving his son a body strong enough to withstand the blows of life, he would take it upon himself to give the boy the one indomitable thing he was capable of giving: his thought. He would transmute Anatole into words and thereby prolong his life. He would, literally, resurrect him, since the work of building a tomb—a tomb of poetry—would obliterate the presence of death. For Mallarmé, death is the consciousness of death, not the physical act of dying. Because Anatole was too young to understand his fate (a theme that occurs repeatedly throughout the fragments), it was as though he had not yet died. He was still alive in his father, and it was only when Mallarmé himself died that the boy would die as well. This is one of the most moving accounts of a man trying to come to grips with modern death—that is to say, death without God, death without hope of salvation—and it reveals the secret meaning of Mallarmé’s entire aesthetic: the elevation of art to the stature of religion. Here, however, the work could not be written. In this time of crisis even art failed Mallarmé.
It strikes me that the effect of the Anatole fragments is quite close to the feeling created by Rembrandt’s last portrait of his son, Titus. Bearing in mind the radiant and adoring series of canvases the artist made of the boy throughout his childhood, it is almost impossible for us to look at that last painting: the dying Titus, barely twenty years old, his face so ravaged by disease that he looks like an old man. It is important to imagine what Rembrandt must have felt as he painted that portrait; to imagine him staring into the face of his dying son and being able to keep his hand steady enough to put what he saw onto the canvas. If fully imagined, the act becomes almost unthinkable.
In the natural order of things, fathers do not bury their sons. The death of a child is the ultimate horror of every parent, an outrage against all we believe we can expect of life, little though it is. For everything, at that point, is taken away from us. Unlike Ben Jonson, who could lament the fact of his fatherhood as an impediment to understanding that his son had reached “the state he should envie,” Mallarmé could find
no support for himself, only an abyss, no consolation, except in the plan to write about his son—which, in the end, he could not bring himself to do. The work died along with Anatole. It is all the more moving to us, all the more important, for having been left unfinished.
1982
On the High Wire
I first crossed paths with Philippe Petit in 1971. I was in Paris, walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse, when I came upon a large circle of people standing silently on the sidewalk. It seemed clear that something was happening inside that circle, and I wanted to know what it was. I elbowed my way past several onlookers, stood on my toes, and caught sight of a smallish young man in the center. Everything he wore was black: his shoes, his pants, his shirt, even the battered silk top hat perched on his head. The hair jutting out from under the hat was a light red-blond, and the face below it was so pale, so devoid of color, that at first I thought he was in whiteface.
The young man juggled, rode a unicycle, performed little magic tricks. He juggled rubber balls, wooden clubs, and burning torches, both standing on the ground and sitting on his one-wheeler, moving from one thing to the next without interruption. To my surprise, he did all this in silence. A chalk circle had been drawn on the sidewalk, and scrupulously keeping any of the spectators from entering that space—with a persuasive mime’s gesture—he went through his performance with such ferocity and intelligence that it was impossible to stop watching.
Unlike other street performers, he did not play to the crowd. Rather, it was as if he had allowed the audience to share in the workings of his thoughts, had made us privy to some deep, inarticulate obsession within him. Yet there was nothing overtly personal about what he did. Everything was revealed metaphorically, as if at one remove, through the medium of the performance. His juggling was precise and self-involved, like some conversation he was holding with himself. He elaborated the most complex combinations, intricate mathematical patterns, arabesques of nonsensical beauty, while at the same time keeping his gestures as simple as possible. Through it all, he managed to radiate a hypnotic charm, oscillating somewhere between demon and clown. No one said a word. It was as though his silence were a command for others to be silent as well. The crowd watched, and after the performance was over, everyone put money in the hat. I realized that I had never seen anything like it.
