French Places, the art, literature, poetry and cultre of France
Verlaine and Rimbaud, poets of today
One 19th century French poet who did enjoy recognition, at least at the end of his life, was Paul Verlaine. No foreigner with a sensitive soul discovering the subtleties of the French language could fail to thrill to the dreamy cadenzas of
Il pleure dans mon coeur
comme il pleut sur la ville.
Quelle est cette langueur
qui pénètre mon coeur ?It weeps in my heart
as it rains on the city.
What is this lassitude
which fills my heart?and
Les sanglots longs
des violons
de l’automne
blessent mon coeur
d’une langueur
monotone.The dying sobs
of autumn’s
violins
wound my heart
with their plaintive
lament.
You instantly saw before you the cobblestones of the Latin Quarter shining black with rain, the jagged chimney pots etched against the silvery sky, the geometrical alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens with their lonely statues and fallen leaves…
Verlaine is the best-loved of all French poets, the easiest to read and memorize, the most enjoyable to recite. His simple poems don’t affect me now as they used to, but when I succumb to nostalgia, which is quite often, they can still work their magic.
He was the first poet to banish all classical rhetoric from his verse, which was the battle cry of the Parnassian movement of which he was a leader, and also the first to use very short lines, which gave each word an evocative, hypnotic effect.
Nowadays this style is familiar, but it started with Verlaine, and it startled readers used to unstoppable waves of verborrhea. The “moderns” were understandably disgusted with the grandiosity which infected French writing. Verlaine himself would say “Take eloquence and wring its neck!”.
There is, though, something spineless and simpering about Verlaine’s poetry, with all its languorous hearts and sobbing violins, which makes it almost effeminate. When I read him again today, he seems positively limp-wristed, which has much to say about the great scandal of his life, his consuming passion for the younger and manlier poet Arthur Rimbaud.
This forbidden love, along with the popular appeal of his verse, was what projected Verlaine to a fame he has never lost. It is also what makes it impossible to tell the story of either of the poets separately, even though their tempestuous liaison lasted only a few years, after which they never crossed paths again.
As a young man, Verlaine was judged unsuitable for the liberal professions, not being a very good student and too fond of drink, so his father found him a job with an insurance company which he detested. But it allowed him to spend his free time writing poems and at the meetings of the Parnassian group, which had vowed to free poetry of its classical trappings. Their slogan was “art for art’s sake”, because they worshipped aesthetic pleasure and sneered at moralistic poems which aimed at improving minds or society.
He had an overly protective mother who focused all of her attention on her only child who came to the world alive. She pickled the embryos of the others in jars and kept them on a shelf in the pantry, until Verlaine in one of his drunken rages smashed them, thus destroying all remains of his stillborn siblings.
He even tried to strangle the good woman and was arrested, but got off with a few months in jail because of drunkenness. When his first book of verse was published he seemed to settle down for some years and married a young woman from a well-off family who bore him a son.
When the revolution which entered history as “La Commune” broke out in the spring of 1871, Verlaine worked as a copy-maker at the Mairie of his quarter of Paris. Since he offered his services to the popular front as press attaché, when government rule was restored he had to flee the city with his family, because anyone suspected of being a communard was sent straight to the wall. By the time he returned months later he had been branded as an anarchist and stripped of his job. Unable to go on paying rent, they had to move in with his young wife’s very conservative parents.
As an unemployed and blacklisted poet he could have done worse, until a bomb dropped on Verlaine’s life. In the north-eastern confines of France near the Belgian border, an intellectually precocious boy ten years Verlaine’s junior called Arthur RImbaud sent him a few of his poems on the chance that they might be published in the Parnassian group’s review.
Verlaine was so impressed that he sent back orders to the “dear great soul” to come to Paris immediately, and enclosed a money order for the fare. As a fin connoisseur he certainly saw the value of the poems, but he also appreciated male beauty and when he saw the poet he fell quite stupidly in love.
After all, Arthur was everything that he was not, big and handsome and also a rude bully who easily turned violent. Verlaine, by contrast, was at heart a swooning damsel, all quivering sentiments and exquisite refinement. He thus became the first of the many worshippers of the Rimbaud cult, whose number does not cease to grow.
Just before taking leave of the dreary hopelessness of Charleville, his staid provincial town, Rimbaud impulsively dashed off a long poem for his benefactor which he called The Drunken Boat. At the next Parnassian dinner he read it aloud to the restless crowd, with the electrifying effect of a political manifesto.
It tells the tale of a fantastic journey down a river and out among the storms, the tides and the ice-floes, of a crewless boat, personified by the poet. One can imagine the Parisian scene, with the tousle-headed adolescent brandishing his hastily scribbled pages and crying out through the clouds of pipe smoke in his strong regional accent.
Comme je descendais des fleuves impassibles,
je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs
des peaux-rouge criards les avaient pris pour cibles
les ayant cloués nus aux poteaux de couleurs.As I floated down the relentless streams
the haulers dropped my towlines and set me adrift
screaming red-skins had slain them with arrows
and nailed them to totem poles, naked.
The originality of the poem was undeniable, even if it was youthfully raw and athletic and in spite of the opening allusion to North American savages, one of the Romantics’ favourite themes. But the novelty-hungry Parnassians admired the Dantesque symbolism and the dream-like images, surging forward like the currents of river and sea. The incoherency alone must have amazed them, in those innocent times before it became fashionable to be unclear.
The Verlaine-Rimbaud story is traditionally told as follows, and often even more briefly. Verlaine left his wife and child for Rimbaud and fled with him to London and then Brussels, where they had a drunken fight which ended with Verlaine shooting and slightly wounding Rimbaud and going to prison for two years. Rimbaud then gave up poetry for good and shipped out to Ethiopia where he became a gun runner, not returning to France until his leg became infected, and dying there after it was amputated, at 37 years of age. News reached him from Paris, a few years before he died, of the recognition finally being given to his poetry but left him indifferent.
That was what I learned in the text book which I was given at the Sorbonne, about these two desperate individuals who left us poems which still sing to our souls 150 years after they were written, which is to say a great deal. What astonished me most, though, was that the homosexual nature of the poets’ liaison, although never mentioned by name, was evoked quite openly, as it was in all school books for students even younger that we were at the Sorbonne. The French were as conventional as anyone else, but they seemed to think that great artists stood above conventional morality.
It wasn’t until many years later that I read the biographies, and above all the letters exchanged between the two and those that knew them. They made Verlaine and Rimbaud seem more human since they were no different to many other 19th century aesthetes. The age of industry brought with it the age of alienation!
The text books suggest that Rimbaud impulsively sought out Verlaine because he recognized in him a sister soul who could understand his poetic longings. In reality, Rimbaud was advised by his school teacher to write to another more prestigious member of the Parnasse group first, the literary critic Théodore de Banville, because wanted to have his poems published in the group’s review, and thought the older man he would have more say in the matter.
After Banville and another member failed to respond, he was told to try Verlaine, who succumbed. At last Rimbaud was on his way out of desolate Charleville, on a wild jaunt that lasted two years in three countries, all at Verlaine’s expense, and not only financial.
Rather than admire Verlaine as a person, he despised him for being a degenerate. As for his poetry, it is hard to imagine the radical Rimbaud not sneering at all those hearts and violins, just like me! He was aware that by leaving his mother’s home and throwing himself at the mercy of fate in Paris he might, as he wrote in a letter, end up “starving on a heap of stones”, and when Verlaine received him with open arms he knew he had found a protector.
After Verlaine left his own home, because of Rimbaud, he was thrown into penury, but his devoted mother came to the rescue by sending him an allowance, which kept the two of them from starving. Over the few years they were together, Rimbaud cost Verlaine a lot of money, as Verlaine’s mother bitterly pointed out in her court declaration in Brussels, after the famous shooting.
Rimbaud used his talent for poetry to get ahead, just as others would use some more mundane skill, for the good reason that it was what he did best. Like Verlaine he had a forceful and devoted mother, to whom Rimbaud owed much of his literary facility since she took his education personally in hand at an early age.
Vitalie was a very Catholic lady who was determined to prevent her brilliant boy from sliding in the same direction as her irresponsible husband, an army officer who had done the colonial campaign in Algeria. Captain Rimbaud chose for himself a bride who was neither pretty nor young but who would bring him a handsome dowry, because she was a prosperous farmer’s daughter and also, of course, because she had few chances of finding a husband.
Soon after she gave birth to their fourth child, the wayward captain wearied of family life and deserted her. As well as fearing his bad influence on the boys, she worried about the bad blood on her own side of the family, since her two brothers were incorrigible drunkards and wastrels.
Since her other son soon showed signs of heading the way of his dissolute uncles, she placed all her hopes in Arthur. He was good at writing, so she drilled him in the Classics. She would send him to bed without supper if he failed to correctly recite 50 lines of Virgil or Horace. Such discipline, with his natural gift, won him many school prizes for poetry, making him a sort of poetic Mozart, whose feet didn’t reach the ground when he played his own sonatas.
At age 13 he wrote, in great secret, an ode in Latin to congratulate the Imperial Prince (the only child of Napoleon III) on his First Communion. He was publicly praised by his headmaster for this, in spite of his growing reputation as a trouble-maker.
There is a photograph of Rimbaud as a small schoolboy among his classmates, with a ferocious pout and steely gaze, like a murderous midget. One of his teachers left this perspicacious report, “He is obviously highly intelligent, but I don’t care for the expression of his eyes and his smile, it makes me feel that he will come to no good. One thing is certain, whatever comes out of that head of his will astonish us. He will be either a good genius or an evil one!”
Vitalie’s intention was to make of him a respectable church-going gentleman, and she dreaded the evil influences of modern literature. When she found Arthur reading Les Misérables she wrote an indignant letter to the schoolteacher who had given it to him, to accuse him of introducing her son to the indecent, immoral novels of this godless new writer, whose name she misspelled “Hugot”.
Verlaine’s wasn’t the first door he knocked on, and neither was Rimbaud’s journey to meet him his first visit to Paris. The lure of the capital, which was then being carved up by breathtaking boulevards and studded with modern monuments, was so great that he had already run away from home twice to get there on foot and by train, getting caught without a ticket and locked up in jail before being sent home by the police. The second of these flights was at the time of the 1871 uprising, because he wanted to join the rebels. Instead, it seems that he was raped by a drunken bunch of them, which can only have further exacerbated his young imagination.
At first, after Rimbaud’s dramatic eruption on the scene, Verlaine tried to make him part of his family life. He put up the strange visitor in his in-laws’ house, presenting him as a budding poet in need of patronage, but Rimbaud shocked everyone with his coarse manners and tramp-like appearance and had to be removed. For a time, Verlaine farmed him out to several literary friends, but even they were soon sick of the arrogant brat.
Finally, Verlaine moved out of his home to devote himself completely to what was called his “immoral” love for the all too willing Rimbaud. But his in-laws’ indignation and the already public scandal became so alarming that, to salvage what was left of his good name, he persuaded Rimbaud to return home to Charleville. Verlaine promised his deeply wounded wife that the whole thing was forgotten and resumed his life as a “bon père de famille”, such as it was. When drunk he beat her, and his infant son too!
But after Rimbaud had cooled his heels for a few weeks in Charleville, he turned up in Paris again and quickly persuaded Verlaine to run away from it all and start a new life with him in Brussels. Verlaine’s mother lived there, so they would have a place to stay until they found work and became independent…
Verlaine’s long-suffering wife followed in his wake, with her own mother in tow, in an attempt to save their marriage. Divorce was a great disgrace which stained the reputation of the families involved, and especially that of the guilty party, in this case Verlaine, and all the more so because the cause was not the usual form of infidelity.
Sanity momentarily prevailed and the unfaithful husband meekly agreed to give up his madness and return to hearth and home. But just as the threesome approached the Brussels train station he balked like a horse and ran back to his lover, leaving his wife to go home without him, in what must have been a heart-wrenching scene. His wife immediately started the lengthy divorce proceedings, which was what Verlaine dreaded because it meant the ruin of his career as a respectable man of letters.
Finding no work to sustain themselves in Brussels, Verlaine and Rimbaud decided to move to London where they could give French lessons. London also seemed more inviting because many of Verlaine’s cronies from the uprising of the previous year, les communards, had taken refuge there and were sure to help them get started.
But before long the French exiles were shocked to see how their old friend and his young companion – Rimbaud was barely 18 – behaved. They drank and fought and then made up like a pair of frenzied lovers, quite unlike the conduct one expected of political exiles. When one by one his friends turned their backs on Verlaine, he knew that word would soon get back to Paris of what was going on, and strengthen his wife’s case against him. Terrified, he walked out on Rimbaud after a violent quarrel and rushed back to his mother’s house in Brussels.
Rimbaud was left penniless and friendless in Camden Town and soon wrote begging Verlaine to forgive him for being so unpleasant. Verlaine in the meantime had bought a gun which, he said in his answer – affectionately calling it a “rivolvita” instead of revolver - was to shoot himself with if his wife refused to take him back. Needless to say, when he read Rimbaud’s imploring letter he summoned him to Brussels, in a famous telegram.
At the home of Verlaine’s mother, the two began drinking and were soon quarrelling violently. Rimbaud said he was fed up and made for the door, which was when Verlaine cried, “So you think you’re leaving, do you?”, took out the revolver and fired. One of the two shots wounded Rimbaud in the wrist.
Horrified at his own action, Verlaine threw himself on the floor and begged Rimbaud to forgive him, even asking him to take the gun and put him out of his misery. In the general relief that the damage from the bullet had been minimal, Madame Verlaine persuaded her son to let Rimbaud return home as soon as possible, and in view of the fact that he was broke she gave him the money for the fare back to Charleville.
Next morning the three of them walked to the station with, as Rimbaud explained in his police statement, Verlaine walking ahead of Rimbaud and Madame Verlaine. As they approached the station – the scene was identical to the one with Verlaine’s wife, the year before, except that this time it was Rimbaud who was leaving – Verlaine began jabbering “as if he were mad”, with his hand in the pocket where he kept the gun.
Rimbaud took fright, thinking that he might fire at him again. He ran away down the street until he found a policeman, whom he begged to arrest Verlaine, showing him his bandaged hand to prove that he was dangerous. But by the time the three appeared in court, Rimbaud had withdrawn his accusation.
The judge, however, was more concerned by the fact that Verlaine had abandoned his wife and child to indulge in a forbidden passion than the attempted murder, and sentenced him to two years in jail. The Parisian police also communicated that Verlaine had taken part in the 1871 insurrection, which sealed his disgrace – he was an enemy of society, as well as good morals. Both men denied that there was anything guilty about their friendship, in spite of the constant quarrels and reconciliations, but the Belgian police had Verlaine undergo a medical examination which apparently showed that there was evidence of sodomy.
Verlaine was released almost a year early for good conduct, by which time he had written a booklet of poems, full of Christian devotion. In prison he had been “born again” as we say today, although for the rest of his life he would sway between sinfulness and saintliness, with longer bouts of the former than the latter.
The two met one last time, just after Verlaine’s release. Rimbaud was giving French lessons in Stuttgart and Verlaine went to see him there, as Rimbaud wrote to a friend, “clutching a rosary”. They began drinking, he said, and three hours later Verlaine “had renounced his god and we had drawn blood from the 98 wounds of J.C.”. When Verlaine went back to Paris, he took with him the manuscript of Rimbaud’s latest work, Illuminations, which he would publish on his own ten years later, long after Rimbaud had gone to Africa.
But then they fought again, at a distance and for a purely material reason. Soon after the meeting in Germany, Rimbaud wrote saying he was broke and asking Verlaine to send him money immediately. Verlaine resented the imperious tone and instinctively refused. Rimbaud fired off one last missive to his benefactor full of insults, and from then on refused to answer any of the many letters which Verlaine sent to him, wherever he was in the world.
Verlaine for a short time was a teacher at a school in France, where he fell in love with one of his pupils, a poetic adolescent like Rimbaud. They ran away to the countryside to live as farmers, on a farm bought for them by Verlaine’s mother. After this mad venture failed, and the boy died of a fever, Verlaine drifted back to the Latin Quarter. When his mother died he was left not only bereft but destitute, and sank into the existence of a homeless alcoholic, sleeping under bridges and in public hospitals.
In the last few years fame finally came his way, as much because of the legend which had grown up around his scandalous affairs and eccentric behaviour as his poetry. Young poetry-lovers began to read him all over France and, although literary fame was seldom rewarded with riches in those times, from then on he could at least afford to drink himself to death in comfort, largely thanks to a group of friends and admirers who paid him a monthly allowance. He would say, towards the end of his life,that he “dreamed of Rimbaud every night”.
The last – and certainly the most famous - photograph of Verlaine, taken in a tavern, shows a hideous, bald-headed satyr of a man slumped back in the corner of a canapé, looking at the camera as if in a daze. Before him is a bottle of water, a glass of cloudy white absinthe and, at one end of the marble table top, an expensive-looking hat and cane.
What Rimbaud did, not long after their last meeting and before he reached the age of twenty, was to turn his back on poetry altogether. First, though, he made a desperate last effort to conquer the literary world with a collection of prose pieces, more like a furious denunciation of society, art and fate than literature, called Une Saison en Enfer, which he had printed at his own expense.
In fact, he used a loan from his mother for the printer’s advance payment, in the hope of finding a publisher with the sample copies to get an advance with which he could pay her back and pay the printer for the rest of the books. He went to Paris to distribute the edition among the people he knew there, all of whom he had befriend through Verlaine. He found to his dismay that none of them wanted anything to do with him or his book, judging that he was guilty of leading their dear Verlaine to his ruin. Most of the 500 copies remained unpaid at the printer’s in Brussels, until they were discovered there in the following century.
For the next five years Rimbaud roamed Europe on foot, in such a succession of adventures that Verlaine, who followed all his adventures from afar, dubbed him “the man with shoe soles of wind”. He wandered through Germany and Austria and Italy, returning each time to his mother’s house, or being escorted there by the police, or carried there on a stretcher, hungry and sick. Once he was robbed by a coach driver in Vienna and had to beg in the street for his supper, until he was arrested and deported for being penniless.
He even travelled to Sweden working as an interpreter with a French circus, but wound up penniless there too and had to be shipped home. Within a few years, the oval-faced angel had, according to a childhood friend of his, already become the gaunt, square-jawed man we see in the few blotchy photographs taken of him in Africa.
Very little is known of him during those vagabond years, until he shipped out of Europe altogether. He had made the great decision of his life, to seek gold and one day return rich, like so many ambitious young men of his generation. He would bury his dreams of poetry and become a man of action. Ever since he was a schoolboy he had been attracted by the exploits of the great adventurers and engineers who were carving inroads of civilization in the primitive lands. It was the age of Jules Verne, when everything seemed possible.
So, what seemed like a sudden about-face to me then, from what I learned in my text book, had actually been brewing for as long as Rimbaud had been writing poetry. Verlaine was horrified that the poetic prodigy he had just discovered wanted nothing more than to study at the polytechnical school of Paris to become an engineer, especially since engineer meant everything that aesthetes such as Verlaine dreaded.
By the time Rimbaud wrote what would be his farewell to literature, A Season in Hell, he prophetically, but as usual optimistically, saw his new life abroad all before him. “I will return with limbs of steel, suntanned skin, fury in my eyes. I will have gold, I will be indolent and cruel… women will fuss over me, as they do over all adventurers who come home from the tropics to recover from their diseases”.
Poetry was a childish activity unworthy of the man of action he was becoming, and anyway, it was materially useless, as his failures had shown. Rather than tame the beast by singing in its ear, he would wrest it to the ground, but since there was no room for unconnected conquerors in Europe, he would have to cross the sea.
He tried to enlist in the United States navy but was rejected, then put to sea with the Dutch navy and travelled to Indonesia where he deserted. He worked in Cyprus as a construction foreman, and after nearly dying of typhoid fever and being once more carried back to his mother’s house, he made his way to Aden where he found work overseeing the selection of coffee beans. From there he crossed the gulf to Abyssinia where he became a trader of ivory, tools and guns, of anything that could turn a profit.
I read with amazement how Rimbaud, the child genius who had already given up writing when he was my age, turned himself into a hard-nosed businessman whose declared goal was money and prestige. Until his death he wrote to his school friends and his mother, firmly expressing his intention to return to Europe wealthy, marry and have a son he could bring up “according to the precepts of science” so that he would become a respected engineer – in other words, a bourgeois!
He never wrote a poem again, but instead concentrated his intellectual energies on learning Arabic and the native tongues of the region, and writing reports for geological reviews. The other Europeans respected him as an efficient, well-organized administrator, but described him as stand-offish and cold. It may be presumed that he had numerous native mistresses since, according to his biographers, he married two of them and contracted syphilis.
He had some friends among his associates and customers, one being the father of the future Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie who worked in Abyssinia at the time. The only man who ever won his admiration was not Verlaine, as one might think, but a Swiss engineer who worked in Abyssinia at the time. Rimbaud’s former persona as a rebellious poet must have seemed astonishing to these potentates and businessmen, if they were heard of them while he was still alive, which is unlikely.
But in spite of Rimbaud’s diligent working methods and Nietzschean willpower, as well as the excellent reputation he took pains to build up among his associates, it all ended in tragic failure.
After 11 years of living like a hermit and working himself to the bone to make enough money to retire in comfort, he fell sick, not from fatigue or a tropical disease, but a hereditary infection in his knee which took several other members of his family to the grave. He had to be carried on a covered stretcher across the desert, in great discomfort and pain, and then sail back to France to be treated.
His leg was amputated in Marseille and after trying to walk with a crutch at his mother’s house, a tumour developed in the stump. In his delirium he insisted on sailing back to Abyssinia, but in Marseille became so sick that he was taken back to hospital where he died, at the age of 37.
The only sign of a disinterested object of Rimbaud’s affection was his servant, who accompanied him on the gruelling trip across the desert. Before Rimbaud died he bequeathed a sum of money to him, which his sister faithfully had transferred to Cairo, where he had left the man to await his return. But in the meantime the African himself had died so it was paid to his family. Life, as Rimbaud wrote to his mother, was nothing but disappointments and calamities. Arrogance had finally and fully given way to self-pity.
It is almost impossible to believe that the methodical, steel-nerved survivor he became could, scarcely ten years before when he was a wistful sixteen, have written the poem that follows, Sensation, which sings the pagan pleasures of life like an Impressionist painting. Even with the inherent beauty of the French language stripped away by my flat translation, the sheer joy is still contagious.
Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue.
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien
mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
par la nature, - heureux comme avec une femme.
In the blue dusks of summer, I’ll go along the paths
pricked by the wheat, with the grass underneath.
Dreamily, I’ll feel the freshness around my feet
and let the wind bathe my free-blowing hair.I will not speak, I will not think
but infinite love will rise up in my soul
and I will wander far, very far, like a gypsy
over the land, as happy as if I were with a woman.
How could anyone blessed, or cursed, with such finesse, become so brutish by the age of twenty? When a boyhood friend asked him if he still thought about literature, this is the answer Rimbaud gave hime. “He looked as shocked as if I had suggested that he still played with a hoop and answered gruffly, ‘I gave all that up a long time ago’.”
When he went to Africa, Rimbaud not only willingly renounced poetry but all earthly pleasures, sacrificing everything for work and profit. What an end for a hedonist, carrying his profits in a belt pouch he made for himself and counting it obsessively, before squirreling it away in an array of bank accounts!
In Abyssinia he sewed his own clothes, the white pyjama-like outfit which he wears in the few photographs of him there. He ate little and never drank alcohol. He lived on the cheap like a native, his only indulgence being to order books from France, technical and geographical books only, which he frugally considered to be “a useful expense”. Certainly, he was never known to waste his time reading, much less writing, poetry again. The insolently sensuous anarchist had turned himself into a self-mortifying, ever-toiling monk!
Many have tried to explain what is called the enigma of Rimbaud, why he abandoned an art at which he excelled. It has been suggested that he dreamed of changing the world and that, after so many failures, “he realized that a steaming locomotive can do more to change the world than a poem”. Others, such as myself before I took a closer look, think that he exchanged poetry for adventure because it seemed more real to him, or that he had simply burned all the art out of himself, that his inspiration ran dry.
But none of the parts of these different puzzles really fit together, or when they do, there is always one missing. Contrary to accepted wisdom, it is possible to love and make art and also be a man of action who knows how things work, because I myself am a good example of this ambiguity. Power and sensitivity are only antagonistic because specialization, the scourge of our times, has made people believe that there is an organic difference between the supposedly helpless intellectual and cunning entrepreneur.
If a man has art in him it will always come out in some form or the other - unless he has learned to abominate it as the cause of his destruction, which is obviously what happened to Rimbaud. The only explanation I can find, therefore, is a much more human one, guilt. The very notion would be repugnant to Rimbaud’s admirers because he is supposed to be the ultimate hedonist, the anarchist who prescribed “the derangement of all the senses”, who cried out “Je veux la liberté libre!”. How could he recant, and go over, as it were, to the other side?
But Rimbaud’s admirers refuse to accept that the teenage rebel they cherish was just that, someone who struck out at his society when he was seventeen and then tried to make peace with it when he was 25. Neither can they imagine what it meant then to be raised by a devoutly Catholic mother in an environment steeped in mysticism, in spite of the political fall of the old regime. In the 19th century godlessness was still more of a theoretical proposal than a general attitude largely taken for granted, as is the case today.
Even though Rimbaud rejected the teachings of the Church, he could still fear God. He had been taught to believe in Hell, and he knew that his reckless acts – committed in a time of great upheaval, and under the influence of Verlaine – were also moral crimes for which he would have to pay.
He called his last collection of nine prose pieces “a season in Hell” because he had lived through it, as he said in one of them, with “the mad virgin” Verlaine, to whom he played “the infernal husband”. When his mother asked him what the title of this suspicious book which he wanted to print with her last savings meant, he answered curtly “Just what it says”.
Rimbaud made a cult of sufficing entirely unto himself, which is why he chose self-punishment to redeem himself. He had transgressed against all the laws of the society into which he was born: he had been cruel and violent, he had taken advantage of others, and above all he had blasphemed. He had brought shame upon his mother and broken her well-concealed but clearly existent heart. He had been a plaything of the devil and, once he had broken away from him, was filled with shame and self-loathing.
After many disastrous attempts to survive away from his mother’s home in other parts of the world, Rimbaud condemned himself to a life of exile in a place which resembled Hell on earth, the Horn of Africa. He was not so different to Verlaine, who converted to Christianity in the hope of clearing his name with God and his fellow men, even though he spent the rest of his life lapsing back into vice. Rimbaud, being more radical by nature, burned the last bridge behind him by going so far away and taking up such a different sort of life that returning was unthinkable. He studied the Koran, and is said to have converted to Islam. While dying he was heard murmuring the Islamic plea for mercy, Allah karim, God is generous. Was it not like Rimbaud to kneel before the most powerful god to save his soul?
But the worst of all his sins, for a man of his times, was sodomy. The admirers of Verlaine and Rimbaud indulgently overlook what they might otherwise think of as a sordid relationship because they believe that being poets makes it somehow innocent and romantic. But I fail to see how it was different to many relationships which are common today, between an unattractive, wispy gentleman ready to provide for a handsome, rough-mannered youth whom he would dearly like to resemble, and endure all the humiliation and expense that generally follow.
Consider the letter Rimbaud wrote after Verlaine fled London, just before the disastrous reconciliation in Brussels. It seems to have been scrawled by a desperate gigolo who has been deserted by his benefactor after one hysterical quarrel too many. Delirious promises of heaven and threatening demands for money follow one another in pitiful succession.
“Come back, come back, I swear I’ll be good. I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly, you don’t know how sorry I am. What I said – in that awful moment – was all lies, I swear. When I cried out for you to get off the boat and come back, why didn’t you? If you don’t want to come back now, do you want me to follow you, to go where you are? Come back, I want to be with you, I love you… Answer quickly, by Monday night I have to get out of here and I don’t have a penny left, I can’t even pay for a stamp to send this. If you don’t do something I’ll be forced to sell off all your clothes…”
Rimbaud accompanied Verlaine to Dover, it seems, and tried to persuade him to stay - just as a few days before Verlaine would try to prevent Rimbaud from getting on the train in Brussels! The next year, when Verlaine got out of prison, the two met in Germany where Rimbaud was teaching French. Rimbaud welcomed him by sneering at his new-found faith and, soon after they parted, writing to demand money. When Verlaine reacted with unexpected stinginess, Rimbaud wrote him an insulting letter, which was the effective end of their friendship.
Some time later Rimbaud tried to blackmail him, threatening to broadcast the truth about their immoral friendship if Verlaine did not send him the money he needed… to take music lessons! How deep had they sunk, in the abyss of chaos and despair?
It is not true, either, that Rimbaud was transformed into someone entirely different from his youthful self. Rather, two disparate personae had always lived inside him, the dreamer and the doer, and when one failed the other naturally took over. Had he not written the phrase je serai capitaliste, over and over again like a litany in one of his school compositions?
Capitalism was the monster-creation of the 19th century, that put huge power in the hands of nameless but energetic men, and it was only natural that an ambitious boy like Rimbaud would worship it. The Paris uprising which he supported was to prevent any more tyrants from taking power, not poor men from obtaining wealth.
Verlaine, though, was outraged by such material longings in a fellow poet, and after their estrangement, when he was not sighing nostalgically about his lost lover, called him a crasseux, which is as much as to say a “filthy” traitor. He even wrote a poem making fun of Rimbaud, phonetically reproducing his hissing northern accent as, according to Verlaine, he solemnly declared that “an engineer who works abroad is always highly respected”.
There is, truly, something cringingly ridiculous about the author of Le Bateau Ivre looking up to the man who built the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway, no matter how difficult it was. But greatness only belongs to those who do not fear ridicule, and Rimbaud’s actions were never impeded by the slightest self-consciousness.
Although he gave up poetry he went on writing, from his African solitude, long grievous letters to his family and school friends, who vainly tried to make him come home, something he could not do, he said, until he had made enough money to live on for the rest of his life. He also wrote geographical reports on his travels in uncharted regions of Abyssinia, which, although arid and dull as literature, were gratefully used by the French government in its colonial endeavours.
While in England he often expressed his admiration for the natives, not because they were liberal but because they were the champions of industry and imperialism. He returned to London after Verlaine went to prison to improve his English, which was the language of trade and therefore would be necessary when he shipped out to the colonies. But once he was in Africa, he complained about the English too with their abolitionism, because they were constantly trying to prevent him from trading slaves.
Neither is it true that he was an enemy of the family institution, in spite of what his writing suggests. During his last English stay he received the visit of his mother and sister, and spent two weeks dutifully showing them London and explaining the mysteries of la vie anglaise, like any other well-behaved young man. His mother remained a rock of stability in spite of her sufferings, and he depended on her more and more, sending back his savings from Africa so that she could astutely administer them until he made his triumphant return.
Even from afar, he took his family responsibilities very seriously, writing stern letters advising his sister to marry a respectable, hard-working man if one presented himself. He reprimanded his alcoholic brother for resorting to street peddling to make drinking money, since his mother refused to give him more than room and board. He had brought shame on the family, as Rimbaud himself had done before.
But he never gave in to his family’s most ardent wish, which was for him to repent of his sins before God like a good Christian. Instead, the little we know of him during his final years suggests that he turned to a far fiercer faith, Islam.
He seemed to have decided to complete the work which his father had begun, while on duty in Algeria. Captain Rimbaud had left unpublished manuscripts about life among the Arabs, as well as military reports on Muslim society. He had even translated the Koran into French, and left an annotated version which his son now requested to be sent him in Africa.
Other Europeans who lived in Harari, the inland town of Abyssinia where Rimbaud had his trading post, told how he became so immersed in studying the Koran that he would discuss the subject with the local men. For a time they put up with his curious commentaries on their holy book because they thought he was mad, which placed him above religious law, but once he annoyed the crowd so deeply that they gave him a thrashing. It was a time when Europe’s misfits and discontents were being drawn to Eastern religions, and in this also Rimbaud stood among his century’s pioneers.
Rimbaud and Verlaine seem very different, when we read their poems and look at the photographs taken of them. But they had much in common too. Both had domineering middle-class mothers who loyally supported them, and fathers who were army captains whom they saw little of, Verlaine’s because he died and Rimbaud’s because he fled.
They were both protected middle-class boys who dreamed of becoming famous poets. But most significantly, they both belonged to the first generation of humans who could be called the children of the age of science. Although they lived a century before my time, in many ways I think of them as poets of today.
They sent their desperate messages asking for love or money across the English Channel by telegraph and rushed towards and away from one another on smoke-belching trains and ships. Rimbaud ventured from Cyrus to Yemen via the recently built Suez Canal, one of the great engineering feats of all time.
Both men’s faces were captured photographically, placing them among the very first subjects of the lens. That in turn made them at least passive participants in the sweeping triumph of technology which has not ceased since. Who would rather discover the face of Rimbaud or Verlaine in a painted portrait, no matter how masterful, than in one of Nadar’s photographs, if a choice had to be made between the two?
Rimbaud even ordered a camera to be sent to Africa from France, at great expense, because he hoped to get rich as a portrait photographer, then a very lucrative profession. Imagine our poet taking pictures of wealthy businessmen and their families for a living – it’s even worse than slave trader and merchant of elephant tusks! But he failed in his endeavour, to judge from the poor quality of the pictures of himself which he sent home to his mother, and there was no further news of the project. He failed in his endeavour, to judge from the poor quality of the pictures of himself which he sent home to his mother, and there was no further news of the project.
But his mere fascination shows that he warmly welcomed the revolution which soon disinherited the art of painting of its social purpose. After the final glorious sun-burst of the Impressionists, whose very name comes from their own fascination with the machine which would soon take their place, the role of painting shrivelled to what it is today, little more than a vehicle for one man to communicate his feelings to a few other men of his own mind.
The two poets were also the privileged products of the modern educational system, in its embryonic form. Rimbaud won prizes and praise for his Latin hexameters, and several of his younger teachers befriended him as if he were an equal, in the new egalitarian spirit. When Verlaine sank into poverty at the end of his life, France’s new Cultural Ministry came to the rescue with an allowance, much like our modern grants.
Their very mothers were a new kind of woman only previously seen in the form of a rare Pompadour or Sevigné. They wrote highly literate, strongly opinionated letters, each bemoaning her son’s fate at the hands of the other’s. That did not prevent them from writing to one another in civilized terms, even sympathetically. They could not vote, but mentally they were already the equals of men.
These are all things which, in a more advanced state, make life in our current world relatively enjoyable and safe, no matter how hard we try to wreck it all. A frustrated artist can’t even run off to Abyssinia any more, because in its place is a country called Ethiopia which has hospitals where, if Rimbaud’s fate befell him, he could have his leg cured, and if he couldn’t it has airports from which he could be flown home to have it done there.
I may not be the best judge of Rimbaud and Verlaine - or perhaps I may be, for precisely the same reason - because neither of them were ever heroes of mine. For me, they are fascinating, colourful minstrels standing in the shadow of a far more cultivated and philosophical poet, Baudelaire. Particularly, I find Rimbaud’s ranting against the established order of things and raving about his own mental and physical prowess a muddled, megalomaniac bore. It’s true he was a visionary, but it is no less true that any avant-garde is fated to become tomorrow’s old hat. There will always be an audience for mumbo-jumbo because only a few can claim to understand it, but poets should stick to the job of writing beautiful, moving poems.
This said, there are glowing exceptions to the stylistic stereotypes in which their names are trapped, and I have translated two of them here. I love them because they musically say something about being alive on the face of the earth.
The first, by Rimbaud, is a nostalgic ode to the innocence of youth which begins with the irresistibly candid words On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans. The strange thing is that it was written not by a middle-aged man looking back, but a stripling scarcely older than the narrator. The title is simply “Story”, in French Roman.
You can’t help being silly when you’re just seventeen. On a fine evening, with the lager and lemonade flowing in the cafés, you set out under the trees of the promenade.
The linden trees smell sweet in the sweet nights of June! The breeze is so soft you close your eyes just to feel it on your lids. The breeze bears the noises of the city, and the aromas of wine and beer…
Summer night, seventeen years old! Even the sap in the trees makes you tipsy, like drinking champagne.
Suddenly, in a pale beam of sunlight, a charming mademoiselle appears before you, a fluttering white ribbon trimmed with blue. Mincing along beside her ferocious father, she shoots you a glance like a thunderbolt, disdainful but not indifferent…
You are in love. The summer is all yours, from June to August. You are in love. Your sonnets make Her giggle. Your friends desert you, saying you are demented. And then the adored creature deigns to send you a letter! Soon, her kiss throbs on your lips like a tiny bird.
That night, you go back to the glittering cafés, and order a mug of lager, or perhaps a glass of lemonade. You can’t help being silly when you’re just seventeen, and the linden trees are blooming on the promenade.
The other is by Verlaine, a word picture – very uncharacteristic for him - which paints the horror and excitement of the big city, that hideous and irresistible new invention, which the author first decries and then exalts as an inferno which he would never trade for the purgatory of the provinces. I have included the French because this poem is far less familiar to poetry-lovers than the one by Rimbaud.
Le bruit des cabarets, la fange des trottoirs,
Les platanes déchus s'effeuillant dans l'air noir,
L'omnibus, ouragan de ferraille et de boues,
Qui grince, mal assis entre ses quatre roues,
Et roule ses yeux verts et rouges lentement,
Les ouvriers allant au club, tout en fumant
Leur brûle-gueule au nez des agents de police,
Toits qui dégouttent, murs suintants, pavé qui glisse,
Bitume défoncé, ruisseaux comblant l'égout,
Voilà ma route - avec le paradis au bout.The din of the taverns, the slime of the streets,
the scrawny trees shedding their leaves in the sooty air.
The omnibus, a groaning storm of iron and mud,
lurching between its wheels,
slowly rolling its green and red eyes.
The workmen headed for the wine shops,
puffing their pipes in the nostrils of the gendarmes.
Dripping rooftops, oozing walls,
crumbling pavements, overflowing gutters.
That is the road I walk – with heaven at the end.
xxx
