Volume 41, Number 15 · September 22, 1994
Mysteries of Mallarmé
By P.N. Furbank
A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé
by Gordon Millan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 389 pp., $35.00
Stéphane Mallarmé, who died in 1898, had to wait till 1941 for a biography. Its author was the great Mallarmé scholar Henri Mondor, who later produced the Pléiade edition. Mondor was writing in German-occupied Paris and, partly for this reason no doubt, his book glorified Mallarmé as stoic hero, victim of base ingratitude and incomprehension. The book was exceedingly long, Mondor having decided to describe this career, so outwardly uneventful, as part of the day-to-day chronicle of events on the Paris literary scene. It was not an absurd plan, but Mallarmé tends to become lost to view, and one wearies of Mondor's assumption that anyone criticizing Mallarmé must be a fool or a knave.
Review, 3973 words
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