Mallarme: The Poet and His Circle

More a book about the poet and his correspondents than his immediate literary circle, this study focuses on how Mallarme (1842-1898) used his letters to try out ideas and lines. Lloyd, an Indiana Univ. professor of French and Italian, edited Mallarm 's selected letters in 1988, and contextualizes the letters she analyzes here with the major events in the poet's life. As the book develops, and Mallarme escapes uncongenial teaching in the provinces and settles in Paris, Lloyd deals more with his relationships in the flesh, largely through his Tuesday at-homes (his Mardis) where intellectuals gathered and exchanged literary, artistic and even musical gossip. Among his friends were Manet, Debussy, Whistler and Degas, along with his poetic muse, Mery Laurent. (Lloyd unconvincingly speculates at length as to the exact nature of their relationship, and elsewhere apologizes for Mallarme's seeming indifference to Zola's fate during Zola's ""J'accuse"" trial.) While not a replacement for Gordon Millan's 1994 biography (or the untranslated Henri Mondor life), or for the letters themselves, the book places Mallarme within the blazing late-19th-century Parisian artistic ferment and offers credible looks at the origins of his endlessly complicated and beautiful work. (Dec.)