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.

T.S. Eliot and What The Thunder Said

 

What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern

Jed Rasula (University of Princeton Press: 2022)

This is not a formal review, just a response.

The center of the broad range of events and people in this book is 1922, the year of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, although it covers history from decades earlier and goes forward to decades later. I wanted to read it in 2022 although it came out late in the year. I succeeded, finishing on New Year’s Eve.

Anyone who wants to know how The Waste Land became such an essential poem in English (defining what Modernist poetry in that language was broadly considered to be) and beyond should certainly read What the Thunder Said. The book explains a lot about how and why the poem became what it became, and what and who it changed. The reaction it caused, the effect on critics and writers, the elements of media sensation of the time, those are all here. I appreciated the way the book brought the Modernist 20s alive again even after all that has been written about them.

Oddly maybe, one of the most interesting things to me was how often the book moved away from Eliot and The Waste Land, which taken together are not the subject of even half the book’s pages. That’s not the fault of Rasula as scholar (he is impressively informed) or an error; he wants to put the poem in a larger context to help readers understand why it felt so new at the time. He starts with Richard Wagner and and Nietzsche and reaches forward to 1971, the year that The Waste Land manuscripts were published.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling that the shortage of pages on Eliot and his poem results partly from the fact that there’s not as much to say about them as there was for many decades. Eliot and The Waste Land have received about all the coverage and literary analysis they need. Although recent revelations about Eliot’s long-running connection with Emily Hale (revelations that seem like they appeared after most of Rasula’s book was already written) are going to lead to some new criticism about Eliot’s motivations and sources, and (given our own time and place) probably some criticisms of his character, there’s really not much more to be said about the place of Eliot and his poem in English-language poetry.

Rasula mentions the issue briefly, but my sense is that the centrality of Eliot’s poem began being displaced even in his lifetime, at least and especially in the U.S. Eliot did not end up a hero for the Beats or for the New American poetry or for the counterculture that both helped usher in. By the 1960s Howl was rivaling and had maybe surpassed The Waste Land as the most famous 20th century American poem (and book of poetry), although Rasula calls Howl in “hindsight… clearly an idiomatic update on Eliot’s vision” and not the rebuke to Eliot that it was sometimes taken to be (Rasula 281).

Eliot’s story as poet and as a person with feelings, the crisis of soul that prompted the poem and resulted in Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, and his story as a dominant poet-critic for the next 40 years, is hardly a triumph of the radical new, however much the poem originally brought that with it. It’s not even especially inspiring or tragic; it feels kind of sodden and restrained, a bit of a tightly wrapped bring down, like Eliot himself could be. What the Thunder Said also tells the story of Eliot the poet as carefully crafted institution, guarded by institutional rules and regulations that he significantly controlled. As I can imagine Patrik Ourednik saying, “And that too was modern.” By late in his life, Eliot and his poem were already beginning to seem too wedded to the past, more a guarded monument and less a harbinger of the future. I guess that means that the height of The Waste Land's prominence was really about 40 years, although it obviously continues to hang on in university curricula that still have a place for Modernism or Modernist poetry.

For myself, I appreciated most the cultural and historical contextualizing of Rasula’s book. The thumbnail sketches of various writers and their publications that the book sometimes races through were more or less interesting to me depending on how often I had heard those writers’ stories before. But why, and how, and for whom the poem became so central made for me a fascinating historical study. It made me want to pick up and read Eliot’s work again. Almost.

Maybe though, like Rasula seems to be showing but not quite saying, The Waste Land just isn’t as interesting as it used to be, especially for those of us who have read it many times and moved on.

Rasula’s book helped fill in what I didn’t know about how The Waste Land became so crucial in 20th century English language writing, and even beyond English. But it didn’t (nor was it trying to) make a case that there’s any more to the poem than people already understand. Speaking for myself, What The Thunder Said left me feeling that I’m unlikely to return to Eliot as more than a writer of historical significance whose life and work now belong definitively to the past.

The Waste Land shocked and changed people in its own time. It’s great to know why, and knowing that knocked some of the dust off and brought the poem alive again for me for a moment. But its original magic feels now, at least to me, like it’s still floating back in the post-World War I waste land that, to its credit, and in some ways even against Eliot’s understood intentions, it pushed American and European culture to move beyond.