by Jeremy Reed
...I invented the colour of the vowels! — A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. — I regulated the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I boasted of inventing a poetic language accessible, one day or another, to all the senses. I reserved translation rights. At first this was a study. I wrote of silences and of nights, I recorded the inexpressible. I described vertiginous states of madness...
Rimbaud is referring here to his poem ‘Voyelles’, but more than that he is making an unmitigated claim to have invented a new language.
Critics have argued variously that ‘Voyelles’ owes its inception to an alphabet with coloured letters used amongst French children during the Second Empire, to the permutations of alchemical colours from black to white to yellow to red, or (Pierre Petitfils’s theory) that the sonnet is indebted to musical chromaticism, and the piano lessons that Rimbaud received from Ernest Cabaner at the Hôtel des Etrangers during his Paris stay in 1871. Of these theories the latter seems most probable, and more likely to have corresponded to Rimbaud’s search for a universal language. By the time Huysmans came to write A rebours, synaesthesia, whereby sense associations find a corresponding and collective synthesis, was considered to be the apogee of symbolist experiment. Whatever the germinative seed of Rimbaud’s sonnet, it is the accidental connections as a result of inspiration which succeed in conveying to the poem its oddness and originality. And in `Alchimie du verbe’ Rimbaud vindicates his method as one of omniscient inspiration. He is the creator of his poetic universe; the ancillary things that have prompted poems are filtered out as the imagination takes over. Une saison en enfer pivots on I — the poetico-centric universe. Rimbaud is both talking to himself and others. And the intensity of what he reveals to himself demands that we listen. His poetry is like the beat of a drum that sounds on the earth’s crust.
...I accustomed myself to pure hallucination: I saw very clearly a mosque in place of a factory, a drummers’ school made up of angels, carriages on roads in the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a vaudeville’s title evoked terror in me.
Then I explained my magic sophisms by the hallucination of words! I ended up by looking on my mental disorder as sacred.
I was idle, a prey to heavy fever: I envied the happiness of animals — caterpillars, which represent the innocence of limbo, and moles, the sleep of virginity!...
It is no less awesome now, than at the moment of creation, that an eighteen-year-old suffering from drug withdrawal and isolated in a barn at Roche should have found a tone so authoritative in its evaluation, appraisal and dismissal of a poetic method as to carry a conviction so unfaltering that the work reads with the gravity of the great poetic scriptures, the Upanishads, the Gita and the parables of the New Testament. The voice is already unrepeatable: it is so great that it arrests further achievement.
Rimbaud is the magus who exalts in extinguishing his own power. It is a fire-dance, each step one of immense provocation because he will never go back to the place he has left. And he is the sole witness of the psychodrama acted out in Une saison en enfer. While he is writing the poem, and even in the act of making a valediction to poetry, he is still the creator. We experience him daring the edge. He does not yet know what it is like to live without creativity, to step out of the circle into chaos. And it was not until the autumn that he was to renounce poetry.
What Rimbaud underwent in April and May was the agonized elation of knowing he had taken a method to its last frontier. The step beyond that may have led to pathological insanity; a psychosis precluding voluntary return. The barn in which Rimbaud locked himself away, shutting out the light that would be painful to his contracted pupils, was both a metaphorical threshing-floor and the contained cell within which the mystic or madman experiences vision. Rimbaud had taken on the responsibility of a shaman within a society that offered no support for the role. And this continues to be the discomforting social reprisal that the committed poet faces. A material world has rejected vision, prophetic speech and oneiric enlightenment so totally that the artist finds no help either psychologically or financially for the risk incurred by his undertaking. The imagination has come increasingly to find its support in the world of psychoanalysis and psychopathology, schools of thought that in dealing with disturbance and obsessive inner states have found themselves inextricably linked with the stuff of creative expression.
Of his delirium, Rimbaud writes in ‘Alchimie du verbe’:
...None of the sophistries of madness — the madness that gets locked up — was forgotten by me: I could say to them all again, I have the system. My health was threatened. Terror came upon me. I would fall into heavy sleeps which lasted several days, and, when I woke up, my bad dreams continued. I was ripe for death, and my weakness led me down dangerous roads to the edge of the world and Cimmeria, a land of darkness and whirlwinds...
I find Rimbaud’s hell or encounter with madness more convincing than Dante’s Inferno with its emphasis on physical retribution as a source of continuous suffering in death. Rimbaud’s infernal states are spontaneously evoked; they are part of the modern psyche with its incorporation of drug experience and chaotic personal fragmentation, and most importantly the alienation of the creative individual in the face of material capitalism. Rimbaud is so much a part of the catastrophic momentum of the twentieth century that his poetry marches hand in hand with the future. And in many ways we are all confronted with a spiritual desert, an exodus towards the waste places which reflect our depleted inner, reserves.
In ‘Alchimie du verbe’ Rimbaud confronts the notion of multiple lives. We are one and many. Our ability to create alternative lives for ourselves is constant. We invent the fiction we adopt each day. I am one and many. We are all in states of metamorphosis, either conscious or unconscious. Most of us realize the alternative selves we might have had. The options are numerous; we have somehow to elect a choice which seems most fully to realize the potential within us. And we have empathy, which is a transferable quality. We can think ourselves into what it is like to be an animal, another person, the opposite sex, and if the need to identify with another life becomes obsessive, we can act out the part. Rimbaud evokes this state of confusion and in doing so has us question the premises of self-identity.
...To each being it seemed to me that several other lives were due. This man does not know what he is doing: he is an angel. This family is a pack of dogs. In front of several men, I talked out loud with a moment out of one of their other lives. — In that way, I have loved a pig...
In states of acute nervous crisis I have seen similar metamorphoses take place. There was a man I knew whose unresolved and tormented homosexuality manifested itself for me in the manner of seeing him as a failed woman. One breast was tucked into a low-cut white satin dress. Anxious as he was to divest himself of this uncomfortable role, his image changed to that of a wolf challenging the night from a rocky place in the hills. And who was I in his eyes? And so on. Madness comes about when we accept a misidentity for a permanence.
By this time both Rimbaud and Verlaine were bored by inaction. Verlaine seems to have accepted that the fissure which had opened between him and his wife was now unbridgeable, and Rimbaud was seeking any distraction which would free him from the monotony of the countryside around Roche. These two figures, who by rights should not have met again, were now hurried back into a false union which was to explode into an almost homicidal mania by midsummer.
By way of Liége and Antwerp, the two travellers set sail for Harwich and, after making their way back to London, rented a room at 8 Great College Street in Camden Town. Still living on the generosity of Madame Verlaine, they once again entertained the idea of giving French lessons to private pupils. These were crazy times. They overreached circumspection and had it known to the Communards in London that theirs was a sexual relationship. Rumour was abroad of ‘unspeakable relations’.
Rimbaud smashed the mirror with his fist. Verlaine had ruined his l
ife. He could never embark on a literary career. He took a glass splinter and jabbed it into his wrist. Nothing happened. Verlaine, rising from a drunken sleep, went for him, hands reaching for his throat, only to be repulsed by a violent kick in the groin.
Rimbaud cursed everything that had made his life into a condition of torment: his mother, his father, his upbringing, his alcoholic lover, the brutal solitude that came from living in London, the insults he had received when first he went to Paris, the disparagement meted out to his poetry, the black wall that opposed his future. Verlaine would have throttled both Rimbaud and Mathilde with his right and left hands. Each of them had contributed to his ruin, his volatile alcoholism. He wanted his mother’s comfort, a new beginning in which he was free to choose a way of life suited to his indecisive and overwrought sensibility. If he stepped back far enough, the shadows in his life might disappear. Rimbaud hated everyone. They had all tricked him. He had expected so much; and he had ended up poor, reviled, inescapably a product of his peasant upbringing. He struck his boot against a wall, wishing it was Verlaine’s face.
Verlaine could not see a way out. Rimbaud, Mathilde, his mother: something had to happen. If only he were rich, had fame or a means of escape. He was writing again, but the relationship had been deleterious to his creativity. Rimbaud was too powerful. He had lost the confidence to write. He had tried for a self-obliterative sensuality; and now that too had disappeared. It was blood on the walls, knife-marks tattooing the chest and ribs.
At the time, Rimbaud’s mind must have been explosive with Une saison en enfer. But London was not the place to engage in a poem that owed its origins to a ferocious confrontation with his childhood, occult beliefs, ancestors, homosexuality and drug addiction. He needed to root this poem in the securely indigenous. As is so often the way, the return to an inherited physical landscape provided the poet with the tension necessary to promote extreme psychic risk. The tumbledown barn at Roche was to become the stage for Rimbaud’s universal drama. He needed constriction against which to rage.
Both men were near to desperation. Rimbaud, for all his arrogant defiance and seeming indifference to suffering, hated cities. He preferred to be out on the road, embracing the future under the empty spaces of the skyline. The oppressive streets of Camden Town, the invincible xenophobia manifested by the English, the lack of café life, all of these things must have been additionally hard for him to bear.
I imagine Rimbaud as frightened and vulnerable. He must have been excitably paranoid, for he was after all engaging in illicit sex and taking drugs, which could have led to his arrest. And there was the constant lack of money as well as the internal doubts as to the efficacy of his poetic method. What did life want of him? Why was he different? He had gone along with the inner voice and it had ruined him. And there was something about the nature of his experience that presented insurmountable obstacles to the future. What was it? Had he lived all his life already? The shadow was big. It had dropped on him in April at Roche, but he had warded off its pernicious presence by celebrating his destruction in poetry. Yet now it had returned. A rift in him was opening. He must have feared for his sanity. Opium was beginning to generate involuntary visions in him. He had almost kicked the habit in the painful withdrawal months of April and May; and now he could not tell whether he had started smoking again or if the flash-backs were as a consequence of narcotic poisoning. There was another world going on somewhere else. Had he not written ‘La vraie vie est absente’? What he saw now were nations in the sky, a black ape frozen into coitus with a white girl in a solid block of ice, flames raging in the streets, crewless ships drifting into fog, Verlaine’s open mouth revolving like a whirlpool, sucking the room in, swallowing the bed, the wardrobe, and Rimbaud was suddenly a little green frog hopping to meet the quickening revolutions of that insanely stretched mouth. And when he dived in he was swallowed by a cavernous hall. His mother was sitting naked on a block of stone. She was writing down his thoughts. She knew them without his having to speak. She knew everything: their sex habits, their theft, their mad ravings, their knife fights. When she looked up at her son, her mouth became a snake’s head and tail at the corners. And there were people watching up in the gallery. They stood with their heads bowed, their wrists in manacles. Drops of blood fell from a great height. He had to avoid them, for they burnt a hole into the floor and hissed fiercely on contact with stone. Their blood was molten; and all the time his mother went on taking down his thoughts. And now she was writing with blood. It was his own. She dipped her nib into a wrist vein. He felt nothing. She was going to use him up, carry on writing until his eight pints of blood were spread in parallel lines across reams of paper. It went on drop by red drop...
Something had to break. Verlaine still imagined he would find sympathy in Mathilde; he continued to delude himself that he had only to renounce Rimbaud and the immediate reparation of his marriage would ensue. He saw his wife as malleable, pusillanimous, pliant to his needs, but it was a delusion fostered by absinthe and a tedious egomania.
‘If only you knew how fucking silly you look with that herring in your hand.’ Rimbaud shouted this out of the window as Verlaine was returning home with a herring in one hand and a bottle of salad oil in the other. It was fuel for conflagration.
Unknown to Rimbaud, Verlaine had been planning his departure for weeks. He was looking for the smallest legitimate provocation to erupt. His case was packed and ready. Something of Rimbaud’s drug estrangement is evident in the way that he had failed to notice Verlaine’s plans for an imminent departure. They were clearly living in very different mental spaces. But Verlaine was gone. Travelling either by bus or underground he got to St Catherine’s Wharf for the Antwerp boat. There was a delay before the full force of the shock hit Rimbaud and, travelling in pursuit, unable to believe that Verlaine had acted so finally on what was after all no more than a customary altercation, he arrived to see the boat weighing anchor. Verlaine was probably drunk. He could make no decision without anaesthetizing himself with alcohol. His plan was to call a meeting with his wife in Brussels. If that failed, he would blow his brains out. Whether this action was intended for Mathilde or Rimbaud is unclear. And because Verlaine suffered from DT, no one was prepared to believe it.
Rimbaud found himself deserted in London. He was left without money or provisions, thrown in again upon himself and faced with the inexhaustible need to find material support for his life of spiritual aspiration. Often it is hard to find the money even for a bus-fare. The editorial whiz-kid sprinting up from the provinces to London in a BMW, would be unaware that Rimbaud’s destitute predicament can inflict anyone who pursues poetry as a commitment and not an avocation. Broken down, threatened by everything inside and out, Rimbaud wrote a letter (4 July 1873) intended for Verlaine:
Come back, come back, dear friend, my only friend, come back. I swear I’ll be kind. If I was mad with you, it was only a joke, and one I couldn’t stop. I am more sorry than words can ever say. Come back, everything will be forgotten. How terrible that you should have taken that joke seriously. For two days I haven’t stopped crying. Come back. Be brave, dear friend. Nothing is lost. You have only to make another journey. We’ll live here again, courageously and patiently. Ah! I beg you. It’s for your good, too. Come back, you’ll find all your things here.
I hope you realize now that there was nothing serious in our argument. What a terrible moment! But why didn’t you come when I signalled to you to get off the boat? Have we lived together for two years to come to this! What are you going to do? If you don’t want to come back here, would you like me to come to you?
Yes, I was in the wrong.
Oh! you won’t forget me will you?
No, you can’t forget me.
As for me, I still have you here.
Listen, answer your friend, aren’t we to carry on living together?
Be brave. Reply to me quickly.
I can’t stay here much longer.
Don’t read this except
whole-heartedly.
Quick, tell me if I must come to you.
Yours, all my life.
Rimbaud must have feared madness. There is a love that comes from incompatibility, both partners fearing to exchange the irreconcilable for the unknown. Everything in their lives together must have streamed through Rimbaud’s consciousness with extraordinary clarity. The tempestuous audacity of their initial love, things said and done, hopes, aspirations, poverty, humour, despair, viciousness, brutality, accusations, and always the face of Mathilde, Verlaine’s wife who had so often interposed in their relationship. Verlaine hated her but he blamed Rimbaud for implanting that emotion in him. And was he not made to feel a failure because he lacked characteristics that Verlaine had known in his wife? They could never be happy because Verlaine had known and loved this woman.
For the first few hours Verlaine’s absence was an unreality. There had to be a mistake. He would be back on the next crossing. But Rimbaud had insufficient money to wait. Whatever their differences there had always been two of them; one could protect the other. Now there was nothing but this huge fear enveloping him, picking him up in its talons, threatening to suffocate him. Rimbaud was paralysed. The only place that offered respite was home, but how could he get there? He was convulsing. What if he lost his mind and found himself homeless and without identity in the underground? Even the prospect of Roche and his unwelcoming mother must have been consolatory. And when one is hysterical, which means in inner flight, one imagines that one can get to a place just by thinking oneself there. Rimbaud must have thought of the leaky old barn where his presence scared rats, of the old days in Charleville when he and Delahaye were free to roam the countryside and imagine a future that was still open-ended. But his had happened. He had run clean up against a wall. He was trapped in a sticky black net. It was tightening over him so that he could not breathe. And the terrible poverty of the room and house. He was going crazy and Verlaine wasn’t there to listen or to receive the blame.
