Sartre’s lost book on Mallarmé would have exceeded his Flaubert biography

Evidence

A careful study of Mallarmé’s political development has yet to be written. The belated publication of a substantial section of Sartre’s projected work on the poet, dating from 1952, suggests what we have missed: see ‘L’Engagement de Mallarmé’, Obliques, No 18-19, 1979, now available as Mallarmé — La Lucidité et sa Face d’Ombre, Paris, 1986. The disappearance of the full manuscript must be accounted a major loss. The fragment that survives makes it clear that this would in all probability have been Sartre’s true biographical chef d’oeuvre: richer in detail and sharper in focus than his subsequent account of Flaubert. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 298

Categorization

• QUESTION: What political development in Mallarmé was Sartre tracing, and why did the full manuscript vanish? Worth chasing the 1979 Obliques/1986 volume.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre’s Flaubert biography spanned 2,800 pages and stayed unfinished — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 703; Sartre read Flaubert’s vocation as a response to bourgeois exclusion — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 700