by Jeremy Reed
On occasions, Rimbaud would risk crossing the border into Belgium, a nine-mile walk through woods, in which a Customs officer might show up, demanding at gunpoint to know what Rimbaud and his friend Delahaye had concealed about their persons. What Rimbaud wanted from the grocery shops on the border was tobacco. And for him, this idea of breaking frontiers accorded with what he was doing on a mental plane in poetry. The journey to the border by way of La Grande Ville and Pussemange involved danger, but it was also an act of assertive rebellion. Rimbaud was stripping himself down. He was returning to the primitive. He would surprise the material world by coming at it naked. What he had inside was the imaginative equivalent of nuclear fission. What else was ‘Le Bateau ivre’ but the poetic equivalent of splitting the atom?
But Rimbaud, the child, needed help. In a second letter to Paul Demeny, dated 28 August 1871, he describes his mother ‘as inflexible as seventy-three administrations with steel helmets’. The Ardennes are killing him. There is no relief for his inner turmoil. His mother insists that he takes a job in Charleville — and her Charleville and his are very different places. His, when he thinks of it, is a sun-bleached region. No matter how much he despises the narrowness of the people, it is nevertheless a region that has served as the physical backdrop to his poetry. Its limitations had provided the raw material for ‘Le Bateau ivre’. Was it not the frustration of watching the lifeless meanderings of the Meuse which had set up the tension to create a sea, and more titan that to imagine things that man has never seen? ‘Et j’ai vu quelquefois ce que l’homme a cru voir!’
‘This is the disgusting handkerchief which has been stuffed into my mouth,’ Rimbaud imparted to Demeny in the same letter, referring to his sense of domestic and intellectual suffocation. The way out had to come. Rimbaud imagined that Paris was the right place for him to be, despite the ignominy he had suffered on his several visits there. Paris could not be worse than Charleville, although Rimbaud had not yet reckoned on genius being solitary by nature. At that moment in time, he would have been understood nowhere. When he finally scuttled to the desert, it was in the conscious realization that he would always be a pariah. And it is not an overstatement to claim that his mission was Messianic. He believed himself endowed with a prophetic message. He travelled in poverty on the roads between towns; he renounced all hope of material security. He is at the time, he tells Demeny, ‘engaged in an infamous, inept, obstinate, mysterious work, answering questions, coarse and evil apostrophes with silence, appearing worthy in my extra-legal position’. But how could Rimbaud make known what he knew? In ‘Le Bateau ivre’ he had written:
J’ai heurté, savez-vous, d’incroyables Florides
Mélant aux fleurs des yeux de panthères à peaux
D’hommes! Des arcs-en-ciel tendus comme des brides
Sous l’horizon des mers, à de glauques troupeaux!
J’ai vu fermenter les marais énormes, nasses
Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan!
Des écroulements d’eaux au milieu des bonaces,
Et les lointains vers les gouffres cataractant!
I have struck, you know, unbelievable Floridas
and seen staring from flowers panthers’ eyes
in human skin. Rainbows stretched like bridles
under the skyline to the green-grey herds!
I have seen swamps stinking in fermentation,
a Leviathan rotting in the reeds,
water avalanching into a calm,
distances cataracting blazing foam!
In ‘Le Bateau ivre’ Rimbaud had conceived a world into which he wished to escape. Escorted by sea-horses beneath ultramarine skies, pushing through violet fog towards the ‘million gold birds’, encountering green nights, delirium, electric moons, glaciers, brown gulfs, straining always towards the ineffable, he had been set free. He had created a universe: words had imploded into a self-generated cosmos. Nothing in ‘Le Bateau ivre’ could have existed without his having invented it. He had burnt a hole through the nineteenth century into the twentieth and the twenty-first. But he was still in Charleville.
His mind was huge with poetry. He could write it anywhere: on the tabula rasa of a cloud drifting across the countryside, on planes of water, on the earth, in his heart, on his mother’s backside, anywhere he chose. Or it could go on paper; and it could be sent into the world. ‘Le Bateau ivre’, together with `Mes petites amoureuses’, ‘Paris se repeuple’, and ‘Les Premières Communions’, was dispatched to Verlaine, who in his reply hinted: ‘I have something like a whiff of your lycanthropy.’ This admission was like a signature written in blood. There was someone else out there who knew what it was like to leap for the throat. But Rimbaud still had to get there. He would risk everything and regret nothing. It was September. A gold light. A hint of change in the air. Too much adrenalin in his stomach. What if it all went wrong? He was staking his life on poetry. There was the Fontemps wood near Evigny to be visited with Delahaye for a last time. Rimbaud was naturally shy, apprehensive, awkward. Part of him knew that he would never find acceptance in the Paris salons. We know from Delahaye’s book on Rimbaud that the latter read him ‘Le Bateau ivre’ on their last afternoon in the Evigny woods. Delahaye was overtaken to the point whereby he believed that ‘There seemed to be no doubt that immediate success and fame in the near future awaited him.’
And Rimbaud? Beneath it all he was still a child, no matter his cool dissociation from emotion, and his contempt for all human relations. But there was the train. Paris represented madness. He would live out his delirium and burn.
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Chapter Three
Rimbaud and Verlaine. So what? Much has been written about them, their intimate, antagonistic relationship documented by conjecture and partial evidence (unfortunately Verlaine’s wife destroyed Rimbaud’s letters to her husband), but what is important to the present book is delirium. The ramifications of the couple’s emotional incompatibility, the impossibility of their living together and at the same time the terrible fear of separation that each entertained, helped whip Rimbaud’s poetic impulse to a short, sustained frenzy. Rimbaud’s desperation with life made him insensible to the reality of the relationship, and also helped condition the sadism in his nature, which was fed into Verlaine’s nerves like a hot wire.
Whatever hopes of literary success Rimbaud may have nurtured before taking up life in Paris, were extinguished soon after his arrival there. He was shy and had cultivated arrogance as a defence; he was suited neither to obsequiousness nor hypocrisy, and who were these avuncular, socially acceptable men pretending to be poets? Rimbaud had arrived in order to set fire to the city. His mind burnt holes in paper, his images contained the primal hunger of big cats stalking prey in the jungle. What is more, he arrived in the city with lice in his hair, and an appearance so unkempt that it repelled those with whom he came into contact. At the time, Verlaine was without a proper income and was living with his seventeen-year-old wife, Mathilde Maute de Fleurville, in her parents’ house in the Rue Nicolet Montmartre. Right from the start, Rimbaud experienced hostility and condescension from Verlaine’s wife and mother-in-law, and he withdrew. Vulnerable and hypersensitive, Rim-baud’s instinct whenever he was made to feel socially inferior was to lock himself into a hedgehog’s prickly ball and say nothing. Silence was his way of expressing disdain.
So this was Paris. Verlaine, the poet in whom he had expected to find a corresponding madness, was living a bourgeois life punctuated only on occasions by violent outbursts of drunkenness. Rimbaud was disillusioned. Why should he renounce his country ways? He used to lie at the entrance to the house, or in the drive, basking like a dog in the late summer sunlight. He didn’t care that he had no change of clothes, no money, no future. He had vision. No one in that capital had conceived of a poem like ‘Le Bateau ivre’. Lautréamont was already dead. He had died unknown after placing a black rainbow in the sky which would be seen and acknowledged by all future visionaries. Lautréamont had already r
isked more than Rimbaud was to take on; his extremes broke with everything, while Rimbaud proved reluctant to sever his poetry from Catholic symbolism. Rimbaud could have starved. Less than a year before his arrival in Paris, the Goncourts had noted in their journal that a servant in a food queue was there to buy for his restaurateur employer ‘cats at six francs, rats at one franc, and dog-flesh at one franc fifty, the pound’. Rimbaud would probably have eaten rat with sadistic relish.
And far from showing deference to the Parnassians, Rimbaud outwardly manifested his contempt for their limitations. Coppée, Mendès, Heredia, Banville, Blémont, Valade — they had no purchase on Rimbaud’s genius. They regarded him as satanic. ‘Satan in the midst of the doctors’ is how Léon Valade described Verlaine’s young protégé with his blue eyes, red face and big hands and feet. They would gladly have seen the back of him, that upstart who wished to demolish their inveterate alexandrines. Nor had they any intention of publishing Rimbaud; he was quickly being consigned to the mental desert which in time was to become a physical reality.
A contributory factor to Rimbaud’s psychological detachment from reality — he always lived on the outside — was the inherent cruelty in his nature, a side of him which was to feed mercilessly on Verlaine’s indecisive character. Henri Mercier remembered seeing Rimbaud outside a theatre, concealed amongst the coach-horses, intently blowing smoke into one of the animal’s nostrils. And this act was not intended as a joke; Rimbaud had singled out an animal in order to torment it maliciously. Later on he would do the same to Verlaine with a knife. Poetic commitment and the nervous charge generated by writing often create in poets the need for weird, unstabilizing compensations. Creative energy is rarely bivalent in its dualistic properties; it is nearly always ambivalent. The poet in receipt of inspiration may well react by attempting to subvert his gift. He may adopt a way of life that appears negative as a deliberate challenge to the source that involuntarily fuels his work.
Rimbaud quickly became an itinerant lodger, sleeping on floors, making do with whatever was offered him for a night, a week or a month. It was not until Verlaine paid for Rimbaud to have a room in the Rue Campagne Première that he occupied an independent address. It was here that he was able to pursue his belief in the systematic derangement of the senses, for he now lived in a permanent state of intoxication, either stoned on hashish or blind drunk on absinthe in the cafés of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Rimbaud called absinthe ‘that sage of the glaciers’, and his natural violence was undoubtedly exacerbated by excesses.
Verlaine also became violent under the influence of absinthe; but his reasons for getting drunk were very different from those of Rimbaud, for Verlaine saw alcohol as an anaesthetic for his tortured sexuality, whereas for Rimbaud it was a stimulant to incite hallucinated vision. Verlaine would return home to Mathilde after a night’s drinking and beat her black and blue. He split her lip, set fire to her hair, and was the more enraged by her passive behaviour, her pacific response to his emotional and physical savagery. Mathilde knew it was not Verlaine who was beating her, but Rimbaud. It was the mockery Rimbaud made of Verlaine’s relationship, and the violence with which he contested it, that were projected into Verlaine’s compacted fists, his obscene mouth. Rimbaud’s derisive voice must have reverberated in his head.
Again, it was the element of sadism in Rimbaud that appeased itself by instigating Verlaine’s domestic ruin. Young as he was, Rimbaud could discern Verlaine’s weaknesses, and the sado-sexual furore at the centre of their relationship was exploited by Rimbaud as a means of further weakening his prey. It is doubtful that Rimbaud ever loved anyone; but at the time he needed Verlaine as a companion on the road, and as someone on whom he could vent his fury. Despite Verlaine’s having made a small name for himself amongst his Parnassian contemporaries, Rimbaud had already overtaken his friend’s achievements, and it was obvious to him that Verlaine lacked the inner credentials and mental ferocity needed to become a seer.
Something of the hysterical nature of Rimbaud and Verlaine’s relationship at this time is recounted by Porché in ‘Verlaine tel qu’il fut’. Porché tells us that, one evening at the Café du Rat Mort, Rimbaud asked Verlaine to place his hands flat on the table. When the latter had done so, Rimbaud pulled a knife from his pocket and quickly slashed Verlaine’s hands. Not content with that, he followed Verlaine out into the street, and again set about him with the knife. The scandal of their relationship spread, and Rimbaud, who cultivated a propensity to shock, was gratified to see Verlaine’s marital relations irretrievably ruined.
And there is reason to believe that Rimbaud was too powerful at this time, and that there was an imbalance in his adept’s oscillation between light and dark. The magician’s attraction to the black art, to a concourse with evil and the authoritative power it generates, must have appealed to Rimbaud with his desire for overreach through sensory disturbance. It is unlikely that Rimbaud had the money, discipline or knowledge to practise alchemy in the manner of following through the metallurgical permutations from black to white, to yellow to red. His method was to raid books rather than read them. But there is every sign in his work of his being acquainted with the potency of alchemical symbols, and of having undertaken the alchemical mutations on a spiritual level. Rimbaud was searching for a state of madness which could be translated into poetry. Alchemical gold is contained within the black or, as it is termed, the nigredo. Rimbaud at this time of his life seems to have situated himself within alchemical black.
And the sex he practised with Verlaine by way of the dark passage was another process towards ultimate mystic illumination. Rimbaud who advocated the abdication of the ego — `Je est un autre’ — pursued a schizoid search to inhabit a tenable double. And it is well known in magic that the imagination excited by sexual currents can be set to function at astral levels. It can work for the poet independent of him, and serves as a reservoir of radioactive energies. This emptying out, this voluntary letting go a hold on reality that the poet achieves in order to be in touch with inspirational forces, or for Rimbaud dementia, entertains the risk of possession by good or evil. It is a form of transference. The poet or adept is waiting for an energy build-up which he would not otherwise have been able to achieve. And when the current builds, the effect is one of shock. Rimbaud must have appeared devastating at such times, reified by an image, manic in his assertion of unmediated occult ambience. In his book Cults of the Shadow, Kenneth Grant tells us:
Radioactive energies released by magicians using the Ophidian Current are so potent that when functioning to the full extent of their magical capacity few people can support their physical presence. Crowley’s aura, for instance, was highly charged in this way; it inspired in some people a quite inexplicable dread. MacGregor Mathers described his encounter with High Adepts in terms suggesting similar conditions, and it is well known that Eliphaz [sic] Levi inspired panic-terror in the spirit-medium, D.D. Home.
It is this characteristic that must have been the root cause of Rimbaud’s domination of Verlaine. He could paralyse the weaker man by an influx of energy. His Luciferian qualities were infallible. Verlaine’s ‘infernal bridegroom’ (to use Rimbaud’s term, époux infernal) was capable of slitting his jugular. In Une saison en enfer Rimbaud describes himself through Verlaine’s imagined empathy:
‘...I belong to a distant race: my ancestors were Scandinavians: they used to slash their bodies, drink their own blood. — I want to knife my body all over, tattoo it, I want to be as hideous as a Mongol: you will see, I shall howl in the streets. I want to become mad with rage. Don’t show me jewels, for I shall crawl and writhe on the carpet. I want my wealth stained with blood. I shall never work... On several nights, his demon seized me, we rolled on the ground, I wrestled with him! — Often at night, drunk, he lay in wait in the streets, or in houses, to scare me to death. — ‘They will really cut my throat; it will be disgusting.’
When Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer, it was as a valediction to poetry. But we can rec
eive this passage as suggestive of the delirious state in which he lived out his visionary quest, and as a portrayal of the tempestuousness of his relationship with Verlaine. Although the latter believed absolutely in Rimbaud’s untutored genius, Ile was at the time resentful that Rimbaud had interposed between him and his wife, and at times of grievance, when the couple lacked money, or were numbed by the cold in squalid London rooms, Verlaine’s emotional scar must have opened. It is then they must have fought physically, Verlaine vehemently accusing Rimbaud of having ruined his life.
Rimbaud seems briefly to have generated the occult energy we associate with fascination. Levi and Crowley possessed it, and so too did Mick Jagger in the late sixties with his adoption of a Lucifer persona when performing songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Midnight Rambler’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’. At the time of the murders and brutal maimings at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Freeway concert in December 1969, the Luciferian character that Jagger was able to project was something of which Rimbaud would have approved. For while the surrealists claimed Rimbaud as their precursor, so too must he be seen as the progenitor of the revolutionary youth who turned music into a social weapon in the sixties. Rimbaud, like Lautréamont, stands on the threshold of the cataclysmic changes which have dominated the twentieth century: the great wars, internal and external, the re-evaluation of the roles played by sex and religion, gender and work, the psychoanalytical interpretation of dream and the collective unconscious, all are anticipated by these two young poets whose vision apprehended a new universe. Rimbaud is always in the background of change. On the day the world ends, his face may well look out from billboards on the freeways. Arthur Rimbaud photographed by Carjat: reincarnated as X: now believed to be living in Beverly Hills. An indestructible survivor.