by Jeremy Reed
Something of Rimbaud’s youthful desperation is expressed here. His vision was unique. How much time did he have? No one else could create the architectonics of his imagined cities and, as he saw it, no one else could save the world. His responsibility was to re-create the universe through the imagination. Most poets repeat endlessly their descriptions of an inherited world: their poems are about the actually attainable here and now. Rimbaud began by disinheriting all preconceptions. Only after renouncing the temporal world could he set about constructing a poetic future. To do this he had commerce with the past and present. ‘Apres le deluge’ is a magnificent conjugation of myth and reconstructed history.
As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided, a hare stopped in the clover and the undulating flower bells, and said its prayer through the spider’s web to the rainbow.
Oh! the precious stones were hiding — already the flowers looked about them.
In the dirty high street stalls were set up, and boats were hauled down to the sea, piled high as in old prints.
Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s Castle — in the slaughter-houses — in the circuses, where God’s seal whitened the windows. Blood flowed, and milk.
Beavers built. Coffee beakers smoked in the bars.
In the big house, its windows still dripping, children in mourning looked at marvellous pictures.
A door slammed, and, on the village square, a child waved his arms, and was understood by weathervanes and steeple-cocks everywhere, under the abrupt shower.
Madame X installed a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral.
Caravans set out. And the Hôtel Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night.
Since then, the moon has heard jackals howling across thyme deserts, and eclogues in wooden shoes growling in the orchard. Then, in the violet budding grove, Eucharis told me it was spring.
Rise, pond; — foam, pour over the bridge and over the woods; — black drapes and organ music — lightning and thunder, climb up in torrents; — waters and sorrows, rise and induce the Floods.
For since they vanished — oh! the burrowing jewels and the open flowers — we have been bored! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her fire in a clay pot, will never tell us what she knows and what we shall never know.
What Rimbaud creates in the best of Les Illuminations is a microcosm, a microstructured novel which depends for its success on dissociated sense connections. Periods of history alternate with immediate sensations in a way that had never been used before in poetry. Rimbaud is not interested in isolating a poetic theme and writing a poem around a subject, rather his poetry moves with the speed of thought. Our inner dialogue is interrupted by apprehending the external world. Rimbaud builds a poetry that advances like a shoal of fish which fans out around an obstruction and then resumes its nervous course. The power of the poet is such that he can suspend history. It is ‘the idea of the Flood’ which subsides rather than the deluge, and that event eliminated, the real happening can take place in inner space. The hare says its prayer ‘through the spider’s web to the rainbow’. It is the hare’s dynamic action which creates a new world and makes the old story of the flood seem tame by comparison. Everything in Rimbaud’s poetry is energized; inertia is his enemy. Things happen fast: ‘Blood flowed’, ‘Beavers built’, ‘A door slammed’, ‘Caravans set out’. Novellas are suggested by single lines: ‘Madame X installed a piano in the Alps.’ And what of ‘the Hôtel Splendide’ which was built ‘in the chaos of ice and polar night’?
Part of Rimbaud’s frustration, which manifests itself to the full in Une saison en enfer, is brought about by the realization that poetry always withholds the irresolvable. The field set up by a poem is a diversification rather than a narrowing of focus. One metaphor creates another. The poet’s despair is that these outriders set up alternative truths which in turn deflect from the poet’s original aim. Rimbaud’s fist cracks open to release diamonds, rubies, emeralds. They scatter and lodge where their individual trajectories cease. The images become incrustations; minerals in schist. And what does the poet do? Piss in the street. Imagine that everything will come all right in the end. Space out on drugs because the dream moves at a speed which is irreversible. Or sit there waiting? Waiting for the vision to replace reality, so that the jump out of the window is into the landscape of the poem.
Rimbaud, for all his tenacious independence and rebellion against domestic strictures, needed Verlaine as security. Because much of his correspondence was destroyed, we do not know a great deal about Rimbaud’s private response to the life he was living in London. We can only piece it together from his poems, and poetry obeys a truth quite different from that of the life which conceives it. All we know is that by the beginning of December 1872 change was imminent. Verlaine wrote to Lepelletier: ‘This week, Rimbaud must go back to Charleville and my mother is coming here.’
Verlaine faced personal ruin in France. The accusations of homosexuality were sufficient to ruin his literary career. He remained the victim of an insoluble dilemma. Part of him desired a reconciliation with his wife, while the rebel in him delighted in the notoriety that came of his relationship with Rimbaud. Still another part of him gravitated towards alcoholic dissolution and the dormant solitude attendant on heavy, unsociable drinking.
It must all have seemed unreal. So much had happened to Rimbaud in so short a time. He had abandoned his studies, renounced his home, offended the literati in Paris, lived through long nights of alchemical vigilance, experienced a ferocious relationship with an older, married man. He had tramped across roads, starved and fetched up in a foreign city. He had remained true to his belief that the visionary poet must disintegrate in order to reintegrate as the alchemical conjunctio. His hands were most likely caked with dirt. He had no change of clothes. What he ate he stole — milk bottles from doorways, fruit from street-barrows; but he could always afford bread. He had used his body as a biochemical experiment for drugs. He had written a poetry so far in advance of his contemporaries, he was already willing to accept that it was unpublishable. His papers and manuscripts were in custody, and Verlaine’s wife and parents-in-law had no intention of letting them go. He was only just eighteen. What did life want of him and he of it? Poetry had in part failed him. He had expected to see in the external world some of the changes realized in his poetry. Why was everything so painfully slow? The poetic line was fast, immediate. In his poetry he had sent out assassins into the world. `Voici le temps des ASSASSINS.’ And in the same poem, ‘Matinée d’ivresse’, he had written: ‘Nous avons foi au poison. Nous savons donner notre vie tout entière tous les jours.’ (‘We believe in poison. We know how to give all of ourselves every day.’) These lines are a long way from the inspired sentiments of youth. This is the conviction of someone willing to risk ‘poison’ or hallucinogenes in the interests of higher truth. And the words of someone who knew how to give himself completely to his art, and to expend that sacrifice each day.
Blood on the wall, enamel from a chipped tooth. — It is Verlaine’s.
A blue bruise spreading beneath the eye. — It is Rimbaud’s.
A glass smashed on the floor. — It is anyone’s.
Paper crackled into a ball and singed. — It is Rimbaud’s.
An addressed envelope shredded. — It is Verlaine’s.
The half-eaten baguette. — It is stolen.
The anger padding like thunder. — It is both of them.
The hysterical shriek. — It is Verlaine’s.
The stolen money on the bed. — It is Rimbaud’s.
The delirious scene in the mirror. — It is both of them.
And a fist banging on the door. — It is the police.
Let us invent a little story. It is late November 1872. Most biographers agree that Rimbaud returned to Charleville in December and went back to London in January 1873, after receiving a suicidal letter from Verlaine, who claimed to be desperately ill and dying
of ‘grief, sickness, boredom, desertion’. Rimbaud knew Verlaine to be lachrymose, moribund and stupefied by liquor. We do not know if Rimbaud embarked on writing Une saison en enfer immediately on his return to Charleville. It seems more likely that he worked on it during his Easter stay and again in the incandescent months — July and August.
In my story Rimbaud visited the underground on his way back to Charleville. He was travelling light, as always. Books and paper stuffed into his misshapen coat, his drugged eyes looking for signs in the milling crowd. Who were they, the endless stream of faces pouring up the stairs and into the street? And why was he here and who was he at this moment in time? The prospect of returning home — Charleville was still occupied by the Prussians — brought the same sense of unrelieved despondency as did the idea of continuing with Verlaine in London. He had exchanged his mother’s draconian rancour for the drunken, sadistic threats of a man whom he had come increasingly to disrespect. And what was worse, he had realized Verlaine’s poetic limitations. This man would never become a seer. He did not even have the courage to drink the blood from his wounds as Rimbaud did. And, anyhow, the police were on to them, not only for Verlaine’s activities with the Communards but for the apparent nature of their relationship.
Rimbaud lingered in the corridor before descending into the black pit beneath London. He was cold. His boots had taken in water. He was hungry. Ravaged by drugs, he had gone for days without being aware of the necessity to eat. His money permitted nothing more than his train and ferry. Now that the hash had worn off, he would eat anything. His fingers, his toes. There were tramps begging at the entrance to the station. He was poorer than they. Who cared for his light, his inestimable inner riches? And he was by this time no stranger to derelicts. He had slept out often enough to know their camaraderie in the countryside. They were men who had fallen through a hole in their lives and had no intention of returning to the society that had disowned them.
As Rimbaud lingered, a well-dressed man in a cashmere topcoat brushed against him. The man’s reaction was one of disdain. It was as though he felt that the slightest contact with the poor carried with it disease. Rimbaud cursed the man in French. `Merde! Cochon!’ He would like to have run after him and thrown lice at the man’s collar. What did they know, these arrogant, bellicose men whose machinations bled the natives all over the world under the euphemism of Empire? Indigenous cultures were eradicated in the name of their sanctimonious monotheism. Rimbaud spat.
There was someone who kept moving into his orbit — now here, now there, now gone again. Rimbaud had seen his face once. He was not sure if it was a Negro boy or girl; the person had dyed his hair blond to accentuate his mulatto features. Had he not encountered this young man at the docks? But he could not get off with him, as Verlaine was in a menacing mood. And the attraction was not sexual. It was something else. This man was the embodiment of his dream of the androgyne. And again he was something else. He represented a twisted beauty. It was as though he knew all things without ever having experienced them. He had seen oceans, white coves, foreign ports, places where he had gone ashore with-out knowing their geographical names. The scent of lemons, mangoes, the gulf breaking into flower; he had been to those countries that Rimbaud had visited in poems. His mouth was sensual, his hands bony. He too lived on the outside of life. There was no place for him in the centre; he had to keep to edges.
He was just standing there, his mouth open on nothing. He could not even articulate his need. Rimbaud kept thinking he had hallucinated the man into being. He was floating rather than standing with his back to the wall, an empty palm extended into the air.
When he went up to the image, it was real. The boy’s hand tightened over his wrist. And then the light was coming at them as they went back up the stairs to the street — the cold, blue December light with its industrial reek. This slim young man led him quickly through alleys, through a blue door into a yard and up a flight of rickety stairs. He admitted them into a single room. It was bare. There was no heating, only a mattress on the floor, a huddle of blankets, a green macaw standing on a perch. There was a hookah on the floor, and the room smelt acrid.
They stood there shivering. There was light in this man. Rimbaud could feel its radial points in his hands, in his eyes. The Negro said: ‘I know who you are.’ And Rimbaud replied: ‘I know who you are.’ The sound of the street filled in their silence.
‘Livre neġre’ flashed up in Rimbaud’s mind. It was a confirmation. All of his anger, his compassion, his conflicting sexuality, his poverty came to the surface. This stranger had sprung the book on him. It would be his valediction to poetry, and also his celebration of its dynamic. Life would never come right. Poetry in the end was always expendable, no matter that it operated as an undercurrent which changed the world. Rimbaud was ill and tired. He had found this one person who recognized his identity. He had no more than an hour to express his vision of the future, and this time words were not necessary. He could still make his train connection to the ferry. Light hardly filtered through the closed curtains. Both of them wanted it like that.
*
Chapter Four
The year 1873 was to prove the most intensive, cataclysmic and combustively creative period of Rimbaud’s short-lived allegiance to poetry. It was a time of drug addiction and unsupervised withdrawal, a time of the irreparable fragmentation of his relationship with Verlaine, a time of brief hope that Une saison en enfer would explode across the literary scene, and as we know it, a time of disillusionment with poetry and an abandonment of his programme to derange his senses systematically.
Baudelaire called it ‘le guignon’ — bad luck, a leakage into the system which irreversibly poisons. Something had got into Rimbaud. The overwrought attunement of his nerves, sensitized to make of sensation a heightened reading of the world, was slackening their tension. He must often have been at breaking-point, but pride prevented him from saying so. Self-laceration was so deeply ingrained in him that he internalized pain as still another stage towards visionary experience.
And he was facing the addict’s continuous crisis; not only how to get the money to pay for drugs, but where to get the stuff. He must have taken a supply with him from London, and using up that quantity of opium and hashish may well have precipitated his sudden return to the capital on 12 January, far more so than Verlaine’s lachrymose threat that he would kill himself if he continued his solitary suffering in London. Verlaine’s mother may have taken her son seriously, but Rimbaud had experienced sufficient of his friend’s emotional crises to know that this was simply another false alarm. But with the fifty francs sent him by Verlaine’s mother, another escape from the constrictions of Charleville became possible.
Pierre Petitfils, in his biography Rimbaud, has drawn our attention to how both men were shadowed by the police in London, their political beliefs being as suspect as the nature of their relationship. On 26 June 1873, a note was transmitted to the Paris police prefecture which read: ‘A liaison of a strange kind links the former employee of the Prefecture of the Seine (who remained at his post during the Commune), sometime poet on the Rappel, a M. Verlaine, and a young man who often comes to Charleville, and who, under the Commune, was a member of the Paris francs-tireurs, young Raimbault [sic]. M. Verlaine’s family is so sure of the authenticity of this degrading fact that they are basing part of their ‘case for a separation on this point.’
Of course they could not even get Rimbaud’s name right, but the certainty that he and Verlaine were living together in a homosexual liaison carries a distinctly sinister undercurrent. Given that another police report, dated 1 August 1873, states that ‘These two individuals fought and tore at one another like wild beasts, just for the pleasure of making it up afterwards’, it is surprising that they were never investigated and arrested. Other occupants of the houses in Howland Street and Royal College Street must have overheard their violent physical quarrels and likewise their love-making. That their relationship evaded prosecution is pec
uliar in itself, and even when Verlaine was eventually sentenced for shooting Rimbaud through the wrist, there was no attempt to establish a prosecution case on the charge of sodomy. Verlaine was examined by the Belgian police and considered to have been involved in both active and passive sodomy just prior to his arrest; but the case did not pivot on this suppositional incriminating evidence.
In the period between January and April 1873, before Rimbaud returned to Charleville, he must have continued with the writing of Les Illuminations. In ‘Enfance’ he writes with the disorientation that comes of poetic delirium conflicting with the metabolic fluctuations contingent on drugs. The resultant clash and intermittent symbiosis give rise to an imagery that ignites with the combustion of petroleum. The poet’s room becomes a subterranean gallery. A basement is a hypogeum and finally a room in space — the idea of a room.
Let them rent me this tomb, whitewashed with lines of cement in relief— deep underground.
I lean my elbows on the table, the lamp throws a bright light on newspapers and absurd books which I am foolish enough to reread.
At an enormous distance above my subterranean room, houses grow like plants, and fogs gather. The mud is red or black. Monstrous city, endless night!
Not so high up are the sewers. At my side, the breadth of the globe. Perhaps azure pits, wells of fire. It is perhaps at these levels moons and comets, seas and fables meet.
In my depressed hours, I imagine sapphire and metal balls. I am master of silence. Why should the appearance of an aperture turn pale at the corner of the ceiling?
Poetry, when its direction is flighted, when the connections made succeed by the logic of dissociation, rather than through the need to qualify individual constituents by reason, is a force that excites one’s expectation of contact with the marvellous.
