bouquins refermes sur le nom de Paphos. “My folios closing on the name of Paphos, What fun, with nothing but genius, to elect A ruin blest by a thousand foams beneath The hyacinth of its triumphal days! Let the cold come, with silence like a scythe! I’ll wail no dirge if, level with the ground, This white, bright frolic should deny to all Earth’s sites the honor of the fancied scene. My hunger, feasting on no mortal fruits, finds in their studied lack an equal savor. Suppose one bright with flesh, human and fragrant! My foot upon some snake where our love stirs the fire, I dream much longer, passionately perhaps, Of the other fruit, the Amazon’s burnt breast.”
Mes bouquins refermes sur le nom de Paphos, Il m’amuse d’elire avec le seul genie Une ruine, par mille ecumes benie Sous l’hyacinthe, au loin, de ses jours triomphaux. Coure le froid avec ses silences de faux, Je n’y hululerai pas de vide nenie Si ce tres blanc ebat au ras du sol denie A tout site l’honneur du paysage faux. Ma faim qui d’aucuns fruits ici ne se regale Trouve en leur docte manque une saveur egale: Qu’un eclate de chair humain et parfumant! Le pied sur quelque guivre ou notre amour tisonne, Je pense plus longtemps, peut-etre eperdument A l’autre, au sein brule d une antique amazone. How close this is to Keats’s:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. Parodying the Grecian Urn in terms of Mallarme’s Amazonian metaphor, we have: “Felt breasts are round, but those unfelt are rounder; therefore, absent paps, swell on.” And the Keatsian formula can be applied just as well to Paphos. “Seen archeological remains are interesting; but those unseen are more impressively like what the ruins of Aphrodite’s birthplace ought to be.” All of which, in a judicial summing up, may be said to be, on the one hand, profoundly true and, on the other, completely false. Unvisited ruins, ditties of no tone, the solipsistic love of non-existent bosoms—these are all chemically pure, uncontaminated by those grotesque or horrible irrelevances which Mallarme called “blasphemies” and which are the very stuff and substance of real life in a body. But this kind of chemical purity (the purity, in Mallarmean phraseology, of dream and Azure) is not the same as the saving purity of the Pure in Heart; this renunciation of irrelevant actuality is not the poverty in which the Poor in Spirit find the Kingdom of Heaven. Liberation is for those who react correctly to given reality, not to their own, or other people’s notions and fancies. Enlightenment is not for the Quietists and Puritans who, in their different ways, deny the world, but for those who have learned to accept and transfigure it. Our own private silences are better, no doubt, than the heard melodies inflicted upon us by the juke box. But are they better than Adieu m’Amour or the slow movement of the second Razumovsky Quartet? Unless we happen to be greater musicians than Dufay or Beethoven, the answer is, emphatically, No. And what about a love so chemically pure that it finds in the studied lack of fruits a savor equal or superior to that of human flesh? Love is a cognitive process, and in this case nuptial knowledge will be only a knowledge of the lover’s imagination in its relations to his physiology. And it is the same with the stay-at-home knowledge of distant ruins. In certain cases— and the case of Paphos, perhaps, is one of them—fancy may do a more obviously pleasing job than archeological research or a sightseer’s visit. But, in general, imagination falls immeasurably short of the inventions of Nature and History. By no possibility could I, or even a great poet like Mallarme, have fabricated Salamis-Famagusta. To which, of course, Mallarme would have answered that he had no more wish to fabricate Salamis-Famagusta than to reproduce the real, historical Paphos. The picturesque detail, the unique and concrete datum—these held no interest for the poet whose advice to himself and others was: “Exclude the real, because vile; exclude the too precise meaning and rature ta vague litterature,” correct your literature until it becomes (from the realist’s point of view) completely vague. Mallarme defined literature as the antithesis of journalism. Literature, for him, is never a piece of reporting, never an account of a chose vue—a thing seen in the external world or even a thing seen, with any degree of precision, by the inner eye. Both classes of seen things are too concretely real for poetry and must be avoided. Heredity and a visual environment conspired to make of Mallarme a Manichean Platonist, for whom the world of appearances was nothing or worse than nothing, and the Ideal World everything. Writing in 1867 from Besancon where, a martyr to Secondary Education, he was teaching English to a pack of savage boys who found him boring and ridiculous, he described to his friend Henri Cazalis the consummation of a kind of philosophical conversion. “I have passed through an appalling year. Thought has come to think itself, and I have reached a Pure Conception… I am now perfectly dead and the impurest region in which my spirit can venture is Eternity… I am now impersonal and no longer the Stephane you have known—but the Spiritual Universe’s capacity to see and develop itself through that which once was I.” In another historical context Mallarme could have devoted himself to Quietism, to the attainment of a Nirvana apart from and antithetical to the world of appearances. But he lived under the Second Empire and the Third Republic; such a course was out of the question. Besides, he was a poet and, as such, dedicated to the task of “giving a purer meaning to the words of the tribe”— un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.
“Words,” he wrote, “are already sufficiently themselves not to receive any further impression from outside.” This “outside,” this world of appearances, was to be reduced to nothing, and a world of autonomous and, in some sort, absolute words substituted for it. In other, Mallarmean words, “the pure cup of no liquor but inexhaustible widowhood announces a rose in the darkness”—a mystic rose of purged, immaculate language that is, in some sort, independent of the given realities for which it is supposed to stand, that exists in its own right, according to the laws of its own being. These laws are simultaneously syntactical, musical, etymological and philosophical. To create a poem capable of living autonomously according to these laws is an undertaking to which only the literary equivalent of a great contemplative saint is equal. Such a saint-surrogate was Mallarme—the most devout and dedicated man of letters who ever lived. But “patriotism is not enough.” Nor are letters. The poet’s cup can be filled with something more substantial than words and inexhaustible widowhood, and still remain undefiled. It would be possible, if one were sufficiently gifted, to write a sonnet about Salamis-Famagusta as it really is, in all the wild incongruous confusion left by three thousand years of history—a sonnet that should be as perfect a work of art, as immaculate and, though referring to the world of appearances, as self-sufficient and absolute as that which Mallarme wrote on the name of Paphos and the fact of absence. All I can do, alas, is to
