HOWZAT

(Pause.)

This is funny and rueful and deft in performance, but it does not work to the same perfect pitch as the French. (Was it affected by the Lord Chamberlain’s office?) Performance touches on ritual at one end of the spectrum, on playing at the other, as Beckett recognized with his characters’ ceremonious and repetitive procedures. In a letter he wrote in 1937, Beckett raises the question of the ritual power of words when he wondered if there might not be “something paralysingly holy in the vicious nature of the word that is not found in the elements of the other arts”, while towards the beginning of Malone Dies, Malone tells us, “People and things ask nothing better than to play, and certain animals too”.

Mallarmé’s interest in English as a language never became as central as Beckett’s use of French, nor did his command of the foreign tongue reach Beckett’s supreme artistry. But both men were language teachers: Mallarmé taught English at various lycées, first outside Paris, then in the capital, while Beckett taught French at Campbell College in Belfast for nine miserable months in 1928. After two years as a lecteur in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Beckett became a lecturer in French at Trinity College Dublin. Neither writer liked teaching – Beckett, who was nocturnal, was reproached for his timekeeping; Mallarmé was subject to constant criticism for his distracted and chaotic classes. But the formal understanding of languages that comes through teaching and translation gives both Mallarmé’s poetry and Beckett’s prose translucency, control, compression, resonance, and in Beckett’s case especially, stirring emotion under the lucid syntax and the pitch-perfect lexicon.

There are further reasons as well for looking through Mallarmé’s English at Beckett’s French. Beckett made frequent references to Mallarmé’s line, “le vide papier que la blancheur défend” (the empty page which whiteness defends), and in 1932, when he was reading Mallarmé’s poems, renowned achievements of formal perfection, he railed in a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy in most revealing terms:

"I don’t know why the Jesuitical poem that is an end in itself and justifies all the means should disgust me so much. But it does – again – more & more. I was trying to like Mallarmé again the other day, & couldn’t, because it’s Jesuitical poetry . . . . I suppose I’m a dirty low-church P.[rotestant] even in poetry, concerned with integrity in a surplice. I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind."

Maybe Beckett did not consistently hold this view of Mallarmé, and indeed Mallarmé’s occasional writings take him close to the nervous and visceral immediacy which Beckett craves: that integrity of the body responding involuntarily before the nerves transmit signals openly to consciousness. Mallarmé shows an analogous desire for this erotics of language, a sense of language as sound, as music, as havoc, as nonsense, an understanding of modes of communication that defy semantics. He tried various approaches to overcoming his difficulties in teaching English. Hoping to capture the attention of his pupils, he turned to English’s near-unique richness of nursery rhymes and made versions of them in French prose – with extended, mock-earnest commentary and scrupulous grammatical notes, solemnly expanding on each rhyme’s possible significance. But his efforts did not meet with approval. In 1880, a government inspector, making the rounds of the classrooms, happened to enter M Mallarmé’s when the pupils were chanting a variation on “Tell Tale Tit”: “Liar liar lick spit / Your tongue shall be slit / And all the dogs in the town / Shall have a little bit”. The inspector was scandalized: “Since M. Mallarmé remains a professor of English”, he wrote, “Let him learn English . . . . It’s tempting to ask oneself if one is not in the presence of a sick man”.

It is a clue, however, to Mallarmé’s other pedagogical masterpieces that “Liar liar lick spit” is not the opening of the version that most English children know, which opens more usually, “Tell tale tit . . .”. Mallarmé’s failures in the classroom did not stem from lack of effort: Thèmes anglais contains a gathering of a thousand English phrases, proverbs, adages and saws, all conscientiously marshalled in order to illustrate a rule of English grammar: first the definite article, then the indefinite, first the possessive pronoun, then the relative pronoun, etc. The contrast between the austerely dry objective of the examples and their fantastical oddity, the disjunction between the scrupulous lexical and grammatical rigour and the free-association lexical chain of words, achieve an exhilarating absurdity. A native speaker of English would know precious few of these locutions at the very most, and use them – never. The ones that you might know you would find stale; and you would have done so then, in the late nineteenth century – since some of the proverbs Mallarmé cites were already archaic by the seventeenth. He was using an anthology he had come upon in Truchy’s bookshop to glean a myriad equivalents to “My postilion has been struck by lightning”, regardless of current usage.

What is entirely seductive about his lists is their irreducibly foreign character. But this strangeness turns his collection into a kind of prose poem, sometimes beautiful, sometimes weirdly comic: “Under water, famine; under snow, bread. / Prettiness makes no pottage”. These enigmas are offered to illustrate how, where French uses a definite article, English does without. Besides “Who can shave an egg?”, phrases such as “You can’t hide an eel in a sack” are included in order to illustrate the use of the indefinite article. The quirkiness of these rules inspires a riddling sequence:

It is hard for an empty bag to sit upright.

To cut down an oak and set up a strawberry.

Undone, as a man would undo an oyster.

You ask an elm tree for pears.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now