by Baker, Phil
The English writer Edmund Gosse has left a more congenial picture of Verlaine at this period, originally published in The Savoy in 1896 as ‘A First Sight of Verlaine’. Gosse had gone to Paris three years earlier in search for Symbolist poets, which he recounts in the manner of a man looking for rare butterflies in a jungle. “I learned that there were certain haunts where these later Decadents might be observed in large numbers,” he writes, and so “I determined to haunt that neighbourhood with a butterfly net, and see what delicate creatures with powdery wings I could catch. And, above all, was it not understood that that vaster lepidopter, that giant hawk-moth, Paul Verlaine, uncoiled his proboscis in the same absinthe-corollas.”
Gosse’s safari took him to the Boulevard St.Michel, dull in the day but “excessively blazing and gay at night”; “to the critical entomologist the eastern side of this street is known as the chief, indeed almost the only habitat of poeta symbolans, which, however, occurs here in vast numbers”, (it is, he says, a bit like the eighteenth-century chocolate-house scene in London, where, “chocolate and ratafia, I suppose, took the place of absinthe”†). After three patient days he succeeds in meeting Verlaine, who seems to have been remarkably well- behaved. Instead of looking like a tramp he had a new dark suit and a new white shirt of which he was very proud, shooting the cuffs for Gosse to admire. He spoke in a low “veiled utterance” about the beauties of Bruges, and in particular about the beautiful old lace to be seen there, before reciting his ‘Clair de Lune’. Gosse always seems to have found Verlaine on his best behaviour. When he met him in London he was no less obliging. Gosse told him he was like a Chinese philosopher. “Chinese, if you like”, replied Verlaine; “but philosopher – certainly not!”
Verlaine made the fortune of the cafés where he drank, notably the Café Francois 1st, where a Belgian artist named Henry de Groux saw him in 1893: “He had his huge and perpetual sly smile … He was still sober, but installed in front of a splendid verte.” This is starting to overlap with the Verlaine of myth, the Verlaine that Bergen Applegate romanticized in Verlaine: His Absinthe-tinted Song: “he seems to have staggered out of the pages of Petronius – some vague, indefinite creature, half beast and half man – a veritable satyr … ”
1893. A basement café, Place St. Michel, Paris. The air is fetid with tobacco smoke, mixed with the pungent, acrid odour of absinthe… The wan, purplish light shed by the gas jets from the walls, mingled with the more ruddy glow from a large oil lamp hanging above the group, throws into his glass some rays of iridescent splendor. Half curiously, half questioningly, his sunken, glowing eyes peer into the greenish opalescent liquid. The look is that of man not altogether certain of his identity – the fixed gaze of a somnambulist taking on a puzzled expression at the moment of wakening. Well might he question, for into that devil’s chalice he had poured all his youth, all his fortune, all his talent, all his happiness, all his life.
There is a less indulgent picture of Verlaine in Max Nordau’s book Degeneration. Nordau analysed ‘degeneracy’ as a pseudo-clinical malaise affecting European culture, and he found Verlaine to be a prime example. It is not just his “Mongolian physiognomy”† and “madly inordinate eroticism”, or even the fact that he is a “paroxysmal dipsomaniac”. Above all it is the mystical vagueness and deliberate “nebulosity” of his poetry, with its reliance on rhyme to guide its movements and its frequent failure to make concrete sense. “The other mark of mental debility [is] the combination of completely disconnected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of sound.” Nordau finds it to be a case of what we might now call schizoid thinking, although even he has to admit that “in the hands of Verlaine [it] often yields extraordinarily beautiful results”, and he praises ‘Chanson d’Automne’ for its “melancholy magic”.
Verlaine was aware of his bad reputation. Sometimes he was defiant: “I have long been considered an absolute monster … I don’t know anyone of mark who hasn’t got his halo – in reverse”. At other times he was more defensive: “I have ruined my life and I know very well that all the blame is going to be put on me. To that I can only answer that I truly was born under Saturn …” At his most contrite he blamed the absinthe, already commemorated at the end of his poem to François Coppée:
Moi, ma gloire n’est qu’une humble absinthe éphémère
Prise en catimini, crainte des trahisons
Et, si je n’en bois pas plus, c’est pour des raisons.
My glory is only a humble ephemeral absinthe
Taken stealthily, fearful of treasons
And if I drink no more, I have my reasons.
In his 1895 Confessions he repented his involvement with absinthe altogether, giving a memorable sketch of his early drinking:
Yes, for three days after the burial of my beloved cousin I existed on beer, and nothing but beer. When I returned to Paris, as if I were not unhappy enough already, my boss lectured me on the extra day I had taken off and I told him to mind his own damn business. I had turned into a drunkard, and because the beer was bad in Paris, I fell back on absinthe, absinthe in the evening and at night. The morning and afternoon were devoted to the office, where they liked me no better for my outburst; and besides, out of consideration for my mother and my boss, I had to keep them both unaware of my new and deplorable habit.
Absinthe! How horrible it is to think of those days, and of more recent days which are still too near for my dignity and health – particularly my dignity, when I come to think of it.
A single draught of the vile sorceress (what fool exalted it into a fairy or green Muse?): One draught was still amusing: but then my drinking was followed by more dramatic consequences.
I had a key to a flat in Batignolles where my mother and I were still living after my father’s death, and I used it to return at whatever hour of the night I chose. I would tell my mother lies as big as my arm, and she never suspected them – or perhaps she did suspect, but forced herself to turn a blind eye to them. Alas! Her eyes are closed for ever, now. Where did I spend the nights? Not always in very respectable places. Stray “beauties” often enchained me with “garlands of flowers”, or I spent hour after hour in THAT HOUSE OF ILL FAME described with such mastery by [Catulle] Mendes; I shall speak of it again at the proper time and place. I used to go there with friends, among them the dearly lamented Charles Cros, to be swallowed up in the taverns of the night where absinthe flowed like Styx and Cocytus.
Early one fine morning (though to me it was wretched) I came back, surreptitiously as usual, into my room, which was separated from my mother’s by a passage, and undressed quietly and went to bed. I wanted an hour or two’s sleep, unmerited although, philanthropically speaking, it was deserved. I was sleeping soundly at nine o’clock, when I should have been preparing for the office and drinking my broth or chocolate. My mother came in, as she always did, to wake me.
She gave a loud exclamation, as if she wanted to laugh, and said (for the noise had woken me):
“For God’s sake, Paul, what have you been doing? You certainly got drunk again last night.”
The word “again” hurt me. “What do you mean by again?” I said bitterly. “I never get drunk, and yesterday I was less drunk than ever. I had dinner with an old friend and his family; I drank nothing but red water, and coffee without cognac after dessert, and I came back a little late because it was a good way from here. I went to sleep quite peacefully as you can see.”
My mother said nothing, but from the handle of the double window she unhooked a hand mirror which I used for shaving: she held it up to my face.
I had gone to bed with my top hat on.
I tell this story with utter shame; later on I shall have to relate many worse absurdities which I owe to my abuse of this horrible drink: this drink, this abuse itself, the source of folly and crime, of idiocy and shame, which governments should tax heavily if they do not suppress it altogether: Absinthe!
The other great source of folly, crime, idiocy and shame in Verlaine’s life was Arthur Rimbaud. This brilliant but disturbed adolescent from Charleville sent Verlaine some of his poems, and Verlaine was so impressed that he invited the sixteen year-old Rimbaud to come and stay in Paris. He went to meet him off the train with Charles Cros, but they missed each other. Before Verlaine had even returned from the station, the boy genius had already made an appalling impression on Verlaine’s wife, Mathilde, and his mother-in- law Madame Maute de Fleurville. Deeply awkward and provincial, Rimbaud was incapable of literary small talk and made up for it by being intensely surly. The main thing anyone could remember him expressing was his sneering hatred for Madame M. de F.’s cherished dog. “Dogs are liberals”, he said.
Rimbaud was influenced by Baudelaire and by his own study of the occult. He was impressed by Baudelaire’s thoughts on dreams: “To dream magnificently is not a gift granted to all men. It is through dreaming that man communicates with the dark dream by which he is surrounded.” Rimbaud believed that the writer must be a mystic seer, akin to a medium, and that writing and thinking simply come through us, as dreams do. It is not that we think, but that we watch our thoughts taking place, and not so much that we speak, but that something speaks through us. It is an attitude to the mind that leads directly to automatism and to early surrealism. Individuality and conscious talent were pernicious illusions, like the ego: “I”, said Rimbaud famously, “is an other”. Rimbaud followed the more extreme tendencies in Baudelaire’s writing without any of the reservations that Baudelaire himself had about them. For Rimbaud, it was not enough merely to “be drunk” all the time, as Baudelaire seemed to recommend. He pursued a programme of wilful madness: “The poet must make himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” The faculties had to be opened up: “They must be roused! Drugs, perfumes! The poisons taken by the Sybil!” He was hardly likely to be deterred by the bad reputation of absinthe; on the contrary.
Rimbaud behaved at times like a man possessed. He didn’t simply suffer from head lice, for example, but kept them handy to throw at passing priests. He encouraged Verlaine to mistreat and abuse his wife, and seemed determined to destroy their marriage. He disrupted a poetry reading by saying “merde” (shit) at the end of every line, and when the photographer Carjat tried to shut him up, he attacked him with Verlaine’s swordstick. Drinking with Verlaine and some friends in the Café Rat Mort†, Rimbaud told Verlaine to put his hands on the table because he wanted to try an experiment. When Verlaine did so, Rimbaud slashed at them with a knife. On another occasion they were drinking with Antoine Cros when Cros, who had been away from the table, noticed his beer was bubbling unpleasantly. Rimbaud had put sulphuric acid in it.
Verlaine’s wife Mathilde was distressed by the violent infatuation that had sprung up between Rimbaud and her husband. One day, while they were away travelling together, she found some disturbingly strange letters from Rimbaud in Verlaine’s desk. She told the Cros brothers about these letters, and Antoine said that in his opinion Verlaine and especially Rimbaud had both become deranged by their absinthe drinking.
Rimbaud’s biographer Enid Starkie describes him in the cafés on the Boulevard St.Michel, keeping himself in a more or less permanent state of intoxication. He also liked a café on the Rue St.Jacques called the Academy, as he wrote to his friend Delahaye:
Parmerde, Junish 72
Mon ami
…
There is a drinking place that I like. Long live the Academy of Absomphe, despite the waiter’s ill-will! It is the most delicate, the most tremulous of garments – this drunkenness induced by virtue of that sage of the glaciers, absomphe! If only, afterwards, to lie down in the shit!
Around the same time he wrote ‘The Comedy of Thirst’, a poem which suggests the deliberate self-undoing he sought through drink, quite distinct from the would-be happy drinking practised or attempted by Verlaine. The Comedy of Thirst contains a number of dialogue voices, including ‘Friends’ in the third section:
Come, the Wines go to the beaches
And the waves by the millions!
See the wild Bitter
Rolling from the top of the mountains!
Let us, wise pilgrims, reach
The Absinthe with the green pillars
The poet replies:
Me: No more of these landscapes.
Friends, what is drunkenness?
I would just as soon, or perhaps even prefer
To rot in the pond
Under the horrible scum
Near some floating bits of wood.
The idea of thirst often recurs in Rimbaud’s work, partly as a metaphor for desire. As for metaphorical drunkenness, his best known work is probably the ‘Drunken Boat’, about a voyage of extreme abandonment, oceanic dissolution, and final disillusionment.
…
Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to children
The green water penetrated my hull of fir
And washed me of spots of blue wine
And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling hook.
And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent
Devouring the green azure where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks
…
Rimbaud came to look back on his literary career with disgust. At nineteen he recalled his earlier opinions and deranged experiences in the prose poem, A Season in Hell:
…
I liked stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets, back- drops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old- fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little books from childhood, old opera, ridiculous refrains, naïve rhythms… I believed in every kind of witchcraft.
…
I grew accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummers made up of angels, carriages on roads in the sky, a parlour at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries. The title of a vaudeville conjured up horrors before me.
…
My health was threatened. Terror came. I used to fall into a sleep of several days, and when up, I continued the saddest dreams. I was ripe for death, and along a road of dangers my weakness led me to the edge of the world and Cimmeria, a land of darkness and whirlwinds.
…
He was finished with literature at the age of twenty, and turned to science and commerce, travelling to Africa and becoming a trader in coffee and guns. Verlaine tried to make Rimbaud’s work better known, and championed it in his study, Les Poètes Maudits. Rimbaud the man was largely forgotten by the time he died. He had effectively disappeared, and many people assumed he had died years earlier. On his deathbed he had extraordinary visions: “columns of amethyst, angels in marble and wood; countries of indescribable beauty and he used, to paint these sensations, expressions of curious and penetrating charm.” Having always been violently anti- clerical, he seems to have made a bizarre late conversion to Catholicism†. Rimbaud was to be a major influence on the Surrealists, and Breton lauded him in the Surrealist Manifesto as “Surrealist in the practice of life, and elsewhere.”
† Ratafia was a popular almond cordial or liqueur.
† Verlaine’s eyes and cheekbones were often described as looking Chinese or Mongolian.
† The Dead Rat Café, which had crockery bearing a picture of two rats fighting a fatal sword duel, complete with top-hatted rats as their seconds.
† At least, he did according to his sister. It has been disputed.
Chapter Five
Genius Unrewarded
Twenty absinthes a day: Charles Cros’s 1869 book on communication with other planets. Cros also invented synthetic rubies and the phonograph.
Charles Cros, poet and inventor, seems to have been a genius in the most mainstream sense of the word. In her biogr
aphy of Verlaine, Joanna Richardson tells us that by the age of eleven Cros was already a gifted philologist, and taught Hebrew and Sanskrit to two professors at the College de France. He waited until he was twenty five before showing the world the automatic telegraph that he had invented, at the Paris International Exhibition in 1867. He also gave his outline of a colour photography technique to the Académie des Sciences, and he invented the phonograph eight months before Edison. In 1869 he published an essay on communicating with other planets. By now he was also publishing poetry, and he had met a woman named Nina de Callias; this was to be the decisive relationship in his life. She had parted from her journalist husband, Hector de Callias, because of his addiction to absinthe, and she now presided over her own intellectual and Bohemian salon, where Verlaine would not only read his poetry but even sing and act in comedy dramas. It was here that Cros met Verlaine in 1867, and they became friends.
Cros and Nina broke up in 1878. He married another woman, but his own absinthe addiction increasingly took him over. He became an habitué of the Chat Noir, a café opened in 1881 by a failed painter named Theodore Salis. Salis also wanted to run a kind of salon: he not only had his waiters dressed in the outfit of the Académie Française, but he personally insulted each customer as they came in. Cros would drink as many as twenty absinthes a day at the Chat Noir, and he died one night in 1888 while finishing a poem. Nina had predeceased him; she died insane in 1884.
André Breton includes Cros in the Anthology of Black Humour, and in his biographical entry he reminds us that Cros was also the first man to artificially synthesise rubies. Lacking the capital and the character to develop his inventions commercially, Cros never made any money from them. He lived and died in poverty.
Still, Cros has had some unexpected admirers. The American illustrator Edward Gorey had a taste for Cros’s writing and translated some of it. He illustrated Cros’s rhyme for children, ‘The Salt Herring’, which has something remarkably bleak under its deliberately silly surface. A rhyme about nothing, it is the story of a blank white wall against which a man leans a ladder and bangs in a nail, tying a string to the nail and then tying a dried herring to the string, which continues to twist in the wind ever after. Weirdly desolate, like some of Gorey’s own work, it was described by Breton as a feat of “making the poetic engine run on empty”.