Things turned around for Verlaine after he published his first book in 1866. In 1870, he married Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. His new in-laws conveniently provided them with lodgings and support.
When Rimbaud arrived in Paris at Verlaine’s behest, they fell into each other’s arms and didn’t leave each other’s sight. Verlaine later blamed their explosive relationship on the younger man, claiming that Rimbaud had “diabolical powers of seduction.” It’s difficult to believe this was the case, for while the older poet had had homosexual experiences in the past, this was Rimbaud’s first such relationship.
They bonded over hashish and absinthe, shocking Paris literary circles with their illicit relationship. Verlaine soon abandoned his young wife and infant son to accompany Rimbaud to London. Leaving his family behind was probably for the best. Verlaine once tried to set his wife on fire; another time, he threw their infant son against the wall. (Thankfully, the child survived.)
Verlaine and Rimbaud lived together in poverty, scraping by with teaching gigs and a meager allowance from Verlaine’s mother. Verlaine’s drinking, which had caused a rift within his family, poisoned his relationship with Rimbaud. Verlaine and Rimbaud argued constantly, while rumors of their homosexual relationship spread through town.
One day, Verlaine showed up on his friend Camille Barrère’s doorstep, his face streaked in tears, “People are saying I’m a pederast, but I’m not! I’m not!” he pleaded. Of course this was a lie. Not only were Verlaine and his underage protégé romantically involved, they were also fond of swordplay: they frequently sparred in their apartment using long knives wrapped in towels to avoid causing serious injury. This was but a prelude to the violent turn their relationship was about to take.
On July 3, 1873, when Verlaine returned home from the market, his appearance inexplicably struck Rimbaud as humorous. “Have you any idea how ridiculous you look with your bottle of oil in one hand and your fish in the other?” Rimbaud said, laughing uncontrollably.
Verlaine smacked Rimbaud in the face with the fish (historians are split on whether it was a herring or a mackerel). “I retaliated, because I can assure you I definitely did not look ridiculous,” Verlaine wrote. He left London without packing his bags and returned to Paris. The penniless Rimbaud stayed at their apartment and was forced to sell Verlaine’s clothes to feed himself. Rimbaud wrote a letter to Verlaine:
London, Friday afternoon
Come back, come back, dear friend, my only friend, come
back. I swear to you I’ll be good. My grumpiness was just a
joke that I took too far, and now I’m more sorry than one can
say. I haven’t stopped crying for two whole days. Come back.
Take heart, dear friend. Nothing is lost. All you have to do is
make the return journey. We shall live here very bravely and
patiently. Oh! I beg you. It’s for your own good anyway.
Listen only to your kind heart.
Tell me quickly if I’m to join you.
Yours for life, Rimbaud
P.S. If I am never to see you again, I shall join the navy or
the army. Oh come back! My tears return with every hour.
Verlaine had decided that if his wife would not take him back within three days, he would “blow his brains out.” He wrote Rimbaud back with this information, requesting Rimbaud’s presence so that they could embrace one last time before he was rotting in the ground. Rimbaud wrote back that Verlaine’s threats were simply a tantrum, and that there was no way he would kill himself—especially over a woman.
Rimbaud’s mother, who also received a suicide note from Verlaine, wrote back to her son’s estranged lover, now in Brussels. “I do not know in what manner you have disgraced yourself with Arthur, but I have always foreseen that your liaison would not end happily,” she wrote. Rimbaud met up with Verlaine at a hotel in Brussels on the morning of July 8, where they had a stormy reunion. They pledged to work things out.
Two days later, a heavily intoxicated Verlaine bought a 7mm handgun and fifty cartridges. When Rimbaud asked what the gun was for, Verlaine only said, “It’s for you, for me, for everybody.” Rimbaud, nervous about his friend’s new purchase, decided to leave for Paris—yet he had no money to do so, so he stuck around the hotel and went to lunch with Verlaine and Verlaine’s mother.
When they returned to the hotel, Verlaine locked everyone in the room. “He was still trying to prevent me from carrying out my plan to return to Paris. I remained unshakeable,” Rimbaud said. “I was standing with my back to the wall on the other side of the room. Then he said, ‘This is for you, since you’re leaving!’ or something like that. He aimed his pistol at me.”
Verlaine fired two shots at Rimbaud. While one of the bullets missed, the other hit Rimbaud squarely in the wrist.
Verlaine pressed the gun into Rimbaud’s hand (the one without the hole in it), and threw himself onto his mother’s bed, urging Rimbaud to kill him. Rimbaud refused, and Verlaine’s mother bandaged his wounded hand. The nineteen-year-old Rimbaud, probably in shock from being shot by his mentor and lover, declined to file charges since the wound was not life-threatening.
Later that night, Verlaine and his mother accompanied Rimbaud to a railroad station. (Verlaine’s mother paid for the train ticket; it was the least she could do.) Verlaine, who had retained possession of the gun, continued to act erratically. When Verlaine reached into his coat pocket for the weapon at the train station, Rimbaud ran off, afraid that Verlaine was about to shoot him again. Rimbaud located a police officer and begged him to arrest Verlaine for attempted murder. Verlaine gave himself up to the authorities. He insisted that when he had reached for his gun, it was to shoot himself. Of course, there was no denying that he had already put a bullet through his friend’s wrist, and the police began to question the nature of their relationship.
While Verlaine was locked up in jail awaiting formal charges, Rimbaud was in the hospital with a fever—his wound was infected. Rimbaud stayed there for nine days while prosecutors interrogated Verlaine about their relationship. The court confronted Verlaine with his own letters and his wife’s accusations. They humiliated him by noting that his “penis is short and not very voluminous” and his “anus can be dilated rather significantly by a moderate separation of the buttocks.”
After Rimbaud was released from the hospital, he dropped the charges against Verlaine; the judge overseeing the case sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison anyway, in part based on the “immoral” relationship between the defendant and his accuser. While in prison, Verlaine wrote the poems that would be compiled into his masterpiece, Romances sans paroles (“Songs Without Words”), including the famous line “And here is my heart, which beats only for you.” Rimbaud returned to his home in Charleville and continued writing.
Verlaine, who spent much of his time behind bars in solitary confinement, quit drinking and converted to Catholicism. When the former lovers met after Verlaine’s release in 1875, Rimbaud took offense at his friend’s conversion. Rimbaud got Verlaine rip-roaring drunk and took delight in making him blaspheme against his faith. This reconciliation was bittersweet and ended with Rimbaud beating Verlaine unconscious. It was the last time they saw each other.
Rimbaud gave up on writing shortly after his final encounter with Verlaine. No one is quite sure why Rimbaud left his writing career behind. Was he tired of being the enfant terrible of poetry? Or did he quit out of necessity, intending to work and earn enough money to afford him the time to write at his leisure in later life? Either way, he never published another word. He died of cancer shortly after his thirty-seventh birthday.
Verlaine moved to England to teach French. He began drinking again, slipping out of class halfway through the day to sit at a local bar. One of his students recalls that Verlaine “imbibed so many absinthes that he was often incapable of getting back to school without assistance.”
Verlaine became intimate with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, a pr
ecocious seventeen-year-old who reminded him of Rimbaud. They were affectionate with each other in public, but the extent of their sexual relationship (if any) is unknown. School officials simultaneously fired Verlaine and expelled Létinois for unspecified inappropriate behavior.
Verlaine and Létinois retired to the French countryside to become farmers, but the experiment ended in bankruptcy; Létinois died in 1883 of typhoid fever. Verlaine was so hard up for cash that he pulled a knife on his own mother and tried to rob her. In 1886, she passed away, and shortly after, Verlaine’s estranged wife finally divorced him.
Verlaine continued writing and publishing poetry to greater and greater acclaim, but struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty. He moved between slums and public hospitals during his final years, and, when healthy, could be seen sipping absinthe at Parisian cafés. His ill health (rheumatism, cirrhosis, gastritis, jaundice, diabetes, and cardiac hypertrophy) meant that much of his later work was cannibalized from earlier poems. He spent his royalties on two middle-aged female prostitutes he lived with off and on, and spent his days in the company of an eccentric transient named Bibi-la-Purée, who acted as a personal assistant and drinking companion. Verlaine also passed time by befriending the next generation of Decadents, including a promising young poet named Ernest Dowson.
In 1894, Verlaine’s peers elected him “prince of poets.” Verlaine was humbled by the honor—until he learned that no monetary compensation accompanied the unofficial designation. He died two years later at the age of fifty-two, poor but celebrated. In keeping with the madcap atmosphere of Verlaine’s final years, Bibi-la-Purée ran off with the mourners’ umbrellas at the funeral service.
10
The English Decadents
“I have discovered that alcohol taken in sufficient quantity produces all the effects of drunkenness.”
—OSCAR WILDE
“I never could quite accustom myself to absinthe,” English poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) once confessed, somewhat wistfully. His contemporary, Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), however, had no such reservations about the Green Fairy.
“Dowson is very talented! I am a great admirer of his,” painter Fritz von Thaulow once said to Wilde. “But it is a shame. It’s so sad that he staggers so much and drinks too much absinthe.”
“If he didn’t do that,” Wilde replied with a shrug of his shoulders, “he would be quite a different person.” If it is difficult to imagine any of the Decadents sans absinthe, then it is virtually impossible to imagine Dowson—the prototypical English Decadent—without the drink.
Dowson was practically predestined to be a poet of ill repute. His father was friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, and the long-haired writer gave Dowson piggyback rides and played dominoes with him when Dowson was six. Dowson was then educated for a short time at Queens College, Oxford, where he was introduced to absinthe. “Whisky and beer for fools; absinthe for poets,” he later wrote. In 1887, he dropped out and moved to London, where he joined the Rhymers’ Club.
The Rhymers’ Club, founded by Irish poet W. B. Yeats and British writer Ernest Rhys, met at London pubs, cafés, and private residences. They drank, smoked, recited poetry, and discussed their mutual love of the French Decadents—a borderline treasonous love affair, due to frosty relations between Great Britain and France. “The sight of young Englishmen discovering an unworthy side of France would have been disgusting had it not been mainly comic,” Dowson’s friend Victor Plarr wrote.
Dowson was as decadent as one could get without actually being French. He was well read in French literature and counted Balzac, Swinburne, and Baudelaire among his favorite authors. He also fashioned himself after Flaubert: the idea of finding “the right word” was terribly romantic to Dowson. The Rhymers’ Club only lasted for two or three years, but its influence would be felt far beyond the two books of verse that were published as a result of the meetings.
In his twenties, Dowson fell in love with the underage daughter of a local restaurant owner. While the girl never returned his admiration, she entertained his affections for many years. When she turned fifteen, Dowson proposed to her—and, seeing the look of shock on her face, quickly withdrew his proposal. His friend Plarr said, “The love affair? We will cut a long story short by saying simply—it failed.” Dowson fared much better with prostitutes, whom he visited nightly when he had the money.
Dowson treated his sorrows with liquid therapy. “Absinthe has the power of the magicians,” he wrote. “It can wipe out or renew the past, annul or foretell the future.” An uncharacteristically sarcastic Flaubert once wrote of the drink, “Absinthe: exceedingly violent poison. One glass and you’re dead.” Luckily for Dowson, Flaubert was exaggerating—although he might have benefited from heeding the warning.
“The absinthe I consumed on Friday seems to have conquered my neuralgia [nerve pain], but at some cost to my general health yesterday!” Dowson once wrote to a friend. Rather than help his state of mind and physical well-being, it was clear to all, including himself, just how damaging his drinking was. And not just to his health: he was arrested so frequently for being drunk and disorderly that a magistrate once said, “What, you here again, Mr. Dowson?”
“Sober, he was the most gentle, in manner the most gentlemanly of men, unselfish to a fault, to the extent of weakness; a delightful companion, charm itself,” remembered Arthur Symons. “Under the influence of drink he became almost literally insane, certainly quite irresponsible. He fell into furious and unreasoning passions; a vocabulary unknown to him at other times sprang up like a whirlwind; he seemed always about to commit some act of absurd violence.”
Dowson drank as often as he could afford to, following Baudelaire’s motto: “It is necessary to be always a little drunk.” Dowson could often be found at the Cock tavern in London, a pencil in hand and a glass of absinthe on the marble table in front of him. Since he barely made ends meet as a poet and translator, he had to make do with composing his poetry on the backs of business letters. When he ran out of room on his papers, he was said to have continued scribbling on tabletops (always to be erased by the bartender).
He often skipped meals—and prostitutes—in order to keep his glass of absinthe full. “I tighten my belt in order to allow myself a sufficiency of cigarettes and absinthe,” he once wrote.
“Why are you so persistently and perversely wonderful?” Oscar Wilde once asked Dowson in a letter. These were words of high praise indeed—few writers were as successful at being degenerate as Wilde, and few paid as high a price as Wilde.
The Evening News called Wilde “one of the high priests of a school which attacks all the wholesome, manly, simple ideals of English life, and sets up false gods of decadent culture and intellectual debauchery.” It is likely the high priest of decadence had never been familiar with the “wholesome, manly, simple ideals of English life” of which the Evening News spoke. Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854, into an unconventional family. His father, a respected surgeon, was a notorious philanderer and had numerous children from extramarital affairs; Wilde’s mother was a poet and fighter for women’s rights who wrote under the pen name “Speranza.”
Wilde took up writing, and found steady work as a journalist upon graduation from Oxford. Following a self-published volume of poetry (simply titled Poems), Wilde toured the United States as a lecturer in 1882. When U.S. Customs asked the twenty-seven-year-old “professor of aestheticism” if he had anything to declare upon entering the country, he reportedly said, “Nothing but my genius.”
Thousands of Americans attended his lectures on the “Principles of Aestheticism.” Wilde, a self-proclaimed aesthete, believed in art for art’s sake. “We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art,” Wilde pontificated. In a lecture titled “The House Beautiful,” Wilde even offered practical tips on using the principles of aestheticism to beautify the home.
Were crowds really showing up
in droves to hear Wilde’s thoughts on interior decorating, or were they just trying to catch a glimpse of the strange Englishman whose “aesthetic costume” was already a source of ridicule in England? “He dressed as probably no grown man in the world was ever dressed before,” a New York Times reporter noted. Wilde wore his hair long under broad felt hats, dressed in fabulous coats of fur and velvet, and brandished an ivory cane, all the while chain-smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes. When a crowd of Harvard students showed up at his lecture in Boston wearing ridiculous garb to mock him, Wilde said, “Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.”
Upon his return to England, Wilde made a further name for himself as a successful playwright. Still, the press continued to have fun with Wilde’s effeminate dress, makeup, and mannerisms. Some reporters even noted that he spoke with a lisp, and people gossiped about his “undecided” sexuality. In fact, there was nothing ambiguous about his sexuality: while he was married to a woman and had two children, Wilde was unabashedly homosexual.
One of his longest-running affairs was with the young Lord Alfred Douglas, whom Wilde first met in 1891 when Douglas was an undergraduate at Oxford. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, vehemently objected to his son’s involvement with Wilde. “You cannot do anything against the power of my affection for Oscar Wilde and his for me,” Douglas wrote to his parents. But that didn’t stop his father from trying.
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