One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern by R. Howard Bloch

 

I had been anticipating reading One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern (2017) by R. Howard Bloch for quite awhile, but kept putting it off for reasons not worth discussing. And now I’ve finally had a chance to read it.

And my feelings? Disappointed!

Much of the book is a surprisingly tepid and cursory biography. It makes Stéphan Mallarmé and his environment feel by turns boring and pompous, maybe because the tone of this book is too often that way. There are a lot of quick and no more than semi-necessary tangents into larger historical situations that fill out the pages. The prose is often dull in its phrasing even as it tries to be dramatic. The name-dropping details are not particularly revealing regarding any of the people whose names get dropped.

I did appreciate the implication that Mallarmé, like many artists, led a relatively ordinary, often tedious life engaged with many banalities of his time, though with its fair share of illness, pain, and economic privation (though hardly more than that of many people in 19th century France). And Mallarmé’s work in women’s fashion was a fascinating element of his often difficult work life. But Bloch’s urge to make the story of Mallarmé’s daily life into the dramatic, special case of an artist often felt at odds with the ho-hum prose and facts of the narrative.

There are a few good chapters or sections of chapters. Some of the historical context of war and other upheavals of the 1870s is made fascinating, and the time right before and when Mallarmé’s famous poem “One Toss of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” is finally published (1897) has some genuine excitement. Those were for me the highlights of the book.

The close-reading chapters that follow the presentation of Mallarmé’s poem in French and a new English translation are pretty mind-numbing and overblown both, although I was surprised to learn that Mallarmé thought English, not French, was the language of the future. And the concluding chapter, which spends a lot of time quickly and boringly summarizing a lot of Modernist and even later works and says “Mallarmé came before it all!” feels in those summary paragraphs like an overwrought Wikipedia entry that isn’t very convincing. The details about his death and the tributes to him are presented with some shock and poignance, but there’s nothing especially memorable about the book’s analysis of them.

I did learn some things about Mallarmé and his poetry from this book, but on the whole it felt like a worthwhile 100-150 pages padded into nearly 300 pages. The goal of a major publishing house book like this is obviously, at least in part, to make Mallarmé’s essential Modernist poem fascinating to a larger mainstream audience. Unfortunately, I finished Bloch's One Toss of the Dice feeling that it was just as likely to turn readers away as it was to convince them that they’ve discovered the fountainhead of Modernism.