by Jeremy Reed
He wanted to scream and he did. There was a knock at the door. For a moment he thought it was Verlaine. He was back again. And since the marvellous occurred in his poetry all the time, he had no need to ask questions. Instead it was a threatening English voice, telling him that if he didn’t quieten down, the police would be called. The police? They would want to know the nature of his relationship with Verlaine, they would search for drugs.
The evening and the night must have been relentless, implacable, interminable. There was nothing he could do but sit like a red-eyed beast in his lair and wait for the morning. And the next day Verlaine’s letter arrived, full of the sentimentality which was inseparable from his nature. He threatened suicide. ‘If three days from now I’m not reconciled with my wife, in perfect conditions, I’m going to blow my brains out... My last thought will be for you, for you who were calling me, this afternoon, from the quayside, when I wouldn’t return, because it is necessary that I should die.’
Rimbaud found himself once again the victim of Verlaine’s deluded belief that he could resume his former married life simply by appearing to renounce his homosexuality. But Mathilde had no intention of hurrying to reunite with a man who had once set fire to her hair, beaten her up physically and dashed their child against a wall. Verlaine had been given chances and on each occasion he had burnt his boats. Mathilde would leave him to the reflection of flames on a black night sea.
Verlaine’s mother rushed to Brussels to be with her son. And Rimbaud’s mother, informed of the situation by Verlaine, wrote to him (6 July 1873) with an emotional honesty and inspiritment that suggests levels of compassion she was never to show her son.
Kill yourself, unfortunate man! To kill oneself at a time of extreme crisis is an act of cowardice; but to commit suicide when one has a loving mother, who would give her life for you, who will die of your death, and when one is also the father of a young boy... to kill oneself in these circumstances is infamy... Monsieur, I do not know the nature of your quarrel with Arthur; but I always knew that your relationship would end disastrously. Why? you will ask me. Because what is not authorized by good and honest parents cannot possibly bring happiness to the children.
How much did she know? From the nature of her letter, it seems everything. It is much to her credit that she delivers no moral imprecations against homosexuality. Possibly her experience of life with her husband had clouded her views of hetero-sexual relations, and in a perverse way she warmed to her son’s attraction to his own sex. If Rimbaud’s relationship had been with a girl, and therefore a rival to Madame Rimbaud’s psychological regime, doubtless she would have maintained an impenetrable silence. She would have disowned her son and considered her parental duties ended. But with a man it was different.
She had corresponded with Verlaine in London and seemed prepared to overlook his alcoholism and ambivalent sexuality. And her feeling towards both him and her son is that they are children. The disciplinarian in her advised Verlaine to pull himself together: ‘You must also apply yourself to work, find a purpose in life; you will naturally have many bad days still to go through; but however disillusioned you may be with men, never despair of God. Believe me, he alone knows how to comfort and heal.’
One wishes only that she could have found it in her heart to write her son a similar letter.
But Verlaine was sobering up. Suicide is an irrevocable act; it was not in his nature to make incisive decisions. He could imagine himself dead and conceive of the subsequent guilt incurred by both Mathilde and Rimbaud. Yet he would not be there to experience it. He would like to have had them believe he was dead, only to reappear and find himself the subject of profound sympathy. But of course the latter was not possible. Still intent on acting out a drama, on 8 July he wired Rimbaud to come to Brussels, Hôtel Liègeois, as he Verlaine was about to go to Spain to enlist as a volunteer in the Carlist ranks. This scheme was a way of maintaining dramatic action — Verlaine was on the edge of the heroic or cataclysmic, as he saw it — and Rimbaud must be made to suffer for having pushed him to such extremes.
And the plot succeeded. On the proceeds of selling their clothes and a few possessions, Rimbaud arrived in Brussels on 9 July, Verlaine having meanwhile moved into the Hôtel de la Ville de Courtrai in the centre of the city. Rimbaud found himself once again faced by Verlaine and a woman, only this time it was the latter’s mother and not his wife. He sensed that he was to be the subject of humiliation and all of his prickly, obstinate Cuif blood rose to the defensive. To counteract Verlaine’s drunken scheme of enlisting, he had decided that his future lay in returning to Paris. To have said Charleville would have been to admit defeat. And, anyhow, he had not given Paris a sufficient try. During his stay there in 1872 he had been angry, destitute, engaged in a process of sensory derangement. He had wanted to outrage the literary world and he had succeeded in his design. Perhaps he hoped that the book he had begun in April and May would establish his name as a poet. He would show Verlaine that he could succeed alone. His genius was meteoric; it would light up the century.
But for the moment Rimbaud was trapped. The presence of Verlaine’s mother prevented honesty of expression. And there was a rift. Perhaps for a time he felt strong in the belief that he would regain his independence and be free of Verlaine’s lachrymose dypsomania. But Verlaine was not going to make things easy. He wanted to force the issue; he was drunk, belligerent and looking to blame Rimbaud for the dissolution of his marriage and his premature redundancy as a poet. The night was taken up in bitter argument, in as much as Rimbaud could attempt to reason with a man who was little more than a gelatinous sponge of absinthe. Something of the twisted fury of their love is evident in the emotional deadlock. Neither wanted to be the first to break, although this time Rimbaud must have been firm in his intention to leave for Paris the next day. He must have been nervous, urinating excessively, breaking out into cold sweats from the absence of drugs, strung out over the void on a breaking thread. When Verlaine passed out from alcohol there was the long summer night to endure, broken by snatches of sleep, livid hallucinations, panic that the next day would be a repetition of what they had already suffered.
The next day Verlaine went out early. He had noticed a gunsmith’s shop in the Passage des Galeries St Hubert. We know from the evidence given at the trial that he purchased a 7 mm, six-cylinder revolver and a box of fifty cartridges. He spent the morning drinking and loaded the revolver in the latrine of the Café Rue des Chartreux. We do not know whom he intended to shoot; but it was an accelerative step to the momentum of his Brussels drama. Whatever he did, news of it would get back to Mathilde. It might finally persuade her to come to his assistance.
Rimbaud was resolute. He would leave for Paris at ten to four. He wanted to be out of it. Verlaine was still whipping himself into an intoxicated fury, locking Rimbaud in the hotel room and going out for another drink to fortify his courage. Verlaine’s mother interceded once and offered to pay Rimbaud’s train-fare to Paris. Time was running out. Three-thirty. There was less than twenty minutes dividing Verlaine from a blank, loveless future. He had to make an example of someone for the losses he had suffered. In his fury, he blamed this obstinate peasant boy, so intractable in his obduracy, for inciting him to this savage retribution.
There was fierce shouting. Neither would concede. Verlaine locked the door. ‘Now try to go!’ he threatened Rimbaud. And something in him snapped. A red tiger raced through his blood. He fired three shots. The first hit Rimbaud in the left wrist, while the other two went wide and embedded themselves in the wall.
Verlaine promptly ran into his mother’s room and threw himself on her bed. It must have been huge in his head. Homicide. Mania. Rimbaud’s face breaking up like a red meringue. But it was only his wrist, although the bleeding was copious. When Rimbaud appeared, Verlaine threw the gun at his feet saying: ‘Here, unload it in my temple.’
Rimbaud was taken off to St John’s Hospital where his wound was treated and bandaged. No one in the ho
tel seemed to have heard anything, and Rimbaud’s injury was explained away as, an accident. The gun had automated itself while Verlaine was cleaning it. No one at the hospital could have believed this. The sort of violent altercation that had occurred lives as a charge, a current on the skin. It is there as an animation in the voice, a dilation of the pupils. Verlaine’s mother must have told the lie with her anxiety over her son’s unpredictable conduct.
There is reason to believe that both Verlaine and Rimbaud had become seriously disturbed in the course of their relationship. Their injurious knife fights, their respective states of intoxication — Verlaine blind drunk on absinthe and Rimbaud spaced out on drugs, or drugs and liquor combined — had created a legacy of estrangement and mutual friction. Now the storm was about to break. Verlaine still wanted something. If it wasn’t homicide, then it had to be an act of demonstrative violence. Was he trying to prove to his mother that he was a reluctant homosexual? A gun is also by metaphorical extension a phallus. There is nothing more counterproductive to sexual performance than constant inebriation. Verlaine had an infallible substitute, a weapon that would not become flaccid, and one that could kill. And no one thought to disarm him.
Rimbaud meanwhile had decided he would return to Roche and not Paris. He had just suffered the deep trauma of being shot. He wanted to go home, to be amongst familiar things, to be with his mother. Verlaine’s mother gave him the twenty francs for the journey. She must already have feared legal recriminations. Madame Rimbaud was not likely to accept the calculated mendacity that her son had been shot accidentally. Why did Verlaine have a gun, anyhow? Wouldn’t any mother ask that question? Things were fraught, tetchy; the air crackled with tension. Rimbaud was in a state of paranoid fear. This madman might level the gun at his eyes and blast him through his head. Whatever was fuelling Verlaine was still injecting red-hot adrenalin into his system.
They began their walk to the station. Verlaine would be left with nothing. He knew Rimbaud would never come back, that this time things had gone too far. It would be better if they were both dead, but the same old problem arose. Verlaine needed the satisfaction of knowing what he had done. He couldn’t count on that in death. The volitional control he had over his life would be extinguished. They continued towards the Gare du Midi. By ten to eight they had reached the Place Rouppe. Verlaine was running out of time. The clock hands were suddenly attached to his heart. They would remain fixed there. He took the gun out of his pocket, vehemently, maniac-ally, and shouted to Rimbaud that he was going to blow his brains out. Rimbaud jumped to one side and took off in the direction of the nearest policeman and implored help. ‘He wants to kill me,’ he shouted, pointing at Verlaine.
Verlaine was arrested and taken to the central police station at the Hôtel de Ville. Rimbaud, who was in a state of fever as a result of the bullet still lodged in his wrist, was admitted into hospital the following day and stayed there a week suffering from exhaustion.
DELIRIUM. The imploded had built to an external explosion. The hysterical nature of their relationship had been revealed to the world through a bullet. What was private, dangerously precarious in its lethal potential, had through an impassioned action entered the public domain. Verlaine was being held on a charge of attempted murder, a sentence which would later be commuted owing to Rimbaud’s evidence in court and his desire to drop all criminal charges. But the scandal had broken. Rimbaud was only eighteen. He had lived so fast, so intensely, and now he had to face an interrogation by authorities convinced from the start of his homosexual relations with Verlaine.
Unable to leave his bed, because of the high fever from which he was suffering, Rimbaud was visited by the examining magistrate. What we know of the emotional turbulence of his brief encounter with Verlaine in Brussels comes from the evidence given in his statement.
Q: On what did you live in London?
R: Largely on the money that Madame Verlaine sent to her son. We also gave French lessons together, but these brought in practically nothing. Perhaps twelve francs a week, towards the end.
Q: Are you aware of the reasons for the dissension between the accused and his wife?
R: Verlaine didn’t want his wife to continue living with her parents.
Q: Did she not list your intimacy with Verlaine as the cause for separation?
R: Yes, she accuses us of immoral relations, but I shall not even bother to contradict such calumny.
The bullet was extracted on 17 July. On 19 July Rimbaud, fearing the severe sentence that would be imposed on Verlaine, made an act of renunciation. He declared that he was convinced that when Verlaine purchased the weapon he had no criminal intentions, and that the latter’s action was the result of intoxication. But the revocation was unsatisfactory and came too late. Verlaine was brought before the court on 28 July and again on 8 August. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of two hundred francs. Rimbaud stayed on in Brussels to hear the verdict and then made his way back on foot to Roche. He was shattered. Lack of nutrition and proper care meant that his wrist was still painful. Paterne Berrichon tells us that he was led by police to the border and tramped back to Roche.
Everything must have been blown up to huge proportions, in his mind: Verlaine’s face, the sound of the gunshots reverberating in his head, the blood streaming from his wrist on to the floor. To get back and write about it was the only way he could elucidate his journey through the visionary hells. He had survived the physical experience, now he had to resume battle with the hallucinated fire he had lit in April. It was raging; and his book would be called Une saison en enfer.
*
Chapter Five
Torrid dog-days. The air siccative, the Ardennes unrelieved — a sky in which each oblong white cloud appeared as a messenger from the real world. Rimbaud’s hand was bandaged, his arm in a sling. The hole in his wrist, like that in the young soldier’s side in ‘Le Dormeur du val’, was a fierce reminder of the shaman’s mortality. It was a symbolic wound. The external could encroach on the internal; the incursion had marked him. A wound is a tear in the cosmic seam. Rimbaud was split open to the world. He had once again to retaliate by way of a defensive, and Une saison en enfer was his weapon.
Rimbaud’s papers had been confiscated by the Belgian police. We do not know how much of the origins of Une saison en enfer was lost; we shall never know Rimbaud’s entire poetic output. He did not care to collect it, and his life was itinerant. We have to imagine it, and the books he may have written are the ones we are still hoping to write. Ultimate vision, ultimate audacity, ultimate temerity. The poet as one who takes on the unknown. Octavio Paz says: ‘Poetry either leaps into the unknown or it is nothing.’
Shock induces a state of dissociation, disorientation. Rimbaud was out of it on his return to Roche. His past had exploded into flames, his present was intolerable and the anticipation of the future demanded that he change his life. What he suffered from was exposure. You cannot disguise a wound or the questions it provokes. Nor can you escape from a small family on a farm in Roche. There were eyes everywhere at the table. His mother’s, and those of his sisters Vitalie and Isabelle, and those belonging to his brother Frederic. They were busy with the harvest. It was live or die — the vocabulary of the land. There was hay to be brought in, there were corn sheaves to be gathered. But his wound kept him apart. It argued for the sanctuary he needed in order to write. In the journal that Vitalie kept, she noted: ‘My brother Arthur did not participate in the farm work; he found sufficient occupation with his pen to prevent him sharing in our manual labours.’
Rimbaud needed to be alone. Was he not engaged in writing a poem that oscillated between the immediacy of experience and the refutation of the confessional mode in which he had cast his poem? He had discovered a method of detonating the line. His images flashed with a high nervous charge. It was like being shot again each time he found the right image.
It was dark inside the barn. He could smell the sweat on his unwashed cloth
es. The sunlight chinked as tangible gold threads on the straw. His metabolism was in revolt. There were neither drugs nor alcohol to hand at the farm. Words were the only means of stabilizing his craziness. That or shouting out his pain. And he had known so much: his life had been exceptional for an eighteen-year-old. And at the time of writing he must have thought that his experience would prove of vital concern to readers, even if they were shocked by his revelations. Anyhow, there was nothing else to do but write: no distractions, no friends, a blankly inhospitable landscape.
And this time his poetic rage was tempered by compassion. Had he not after all put his friend and lover in prison, after their volatile hysteria had got out of hand, and had he not ruined his life? His relationship with Verlaine was a talking-point in Paris and had now reached an epic of scandal. And yet he had not wanted all this. It must have wrung tears from his eyes as the heat furnaced in the barn.
Some things just happen. You do not want them to and when you find yourself involved it is more like being a spectator to the action. You are still the same person when you walk away from an irrevocable blaze of temper. This one had involved a gun and his metacarpus. It had become public because Verlaine could not extinguish the incitement to violence. Either the gun had had to explode or his head would have. The shooting must have brought some relief, but not sufficient to curtail his homicidal impulse. If Verlaine had shot again, it would have been to kill. Rimbaud knew that. His hands shook while he wrote. The book he was writing would add some justification to his existence. He had transported it around in his head in London and Brussels, and now it would find completion in an isolation so magnified he might have been the last of his species left on earth. He could throw his visions against the cracked walls. Was he not after all confined like a madman to a cell?
