Delirium

by Jeremy Reed

  In the absence of Rimbaud’s correspondence with Verlaine, the one reliable account of his life in Paris, and of the poetic vision to which he aspired, comes from a letter Rimbaud sent Ernest Delahaye in June 1872.

  Now, it is at night that I work. From midnight to five in the morning. Last month, my room on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince looked out on a garden of the Lycée St Louis. There were enormous trees under my narrow window. At three in the morning, the candle went pale; all the birds cried at once in the trees: it is over. No more work. I had to look at the trees and the sky, fixated by that indescribable hour, the first in the morning. I could see the lycée dormitories, absolutely still. And already the jerky, sonorous, staccato noise of carts on the boulevards. I smoked my hammer-pipe, sitting on the tiles, for my room was a garret. At five o’clock I went downstairs to buy bread; it was the time. Workmen were up and about. For me, it was time to get drunk in the bars. I returned to my room to eat, and went to bed at seven in the morning, when the sun makes the wood-lice crawl out from under the tiles. What has always delighted me here is the early morning in summer and the December evenings.

  We know this room was in the Hôtel de Cluny, Place de la Sorbonne. It was in that stifling hole that Rimbaud pursued his stages towards attaining poetic madness. He longed for the cool rivers of the Ardennes and for the countryside around Charleville. The torrid summer scorched him: he referred to Paris as Parshit. And how many times did he and Verlaine make love in that attic, soured by the reek of sweat, peppered by termites, foul with the acidic stench of urine rising from the courtyard. Rimbaud wanted everything and nothing. Absolute material power and starving asceticism. Neither would have made him happy. And at least in Verlaine he had a lover who understood the poverty attendant on being a poet. With his stinking body, ragged clothes and lack of money, Rimbaud could not have embarked on a relationship with anyone else even if he had tried.

  Rimbaud’s letter to Delahaye tells us things about Rimbaud which the latter may have been realizing for the first time when writing the letter. Very often you do not keep pace with what you are doing until you crystallize it through words. In this letter Rimbaud is in the process of recollecting himself. Drugs can take you so far out that you live independent of who you are. You can go on doing things without ever knowing that it is ‘you’ who are really involved. The journey back is one of dissociation. You have been sitting up five days and you thought it was only five hours. What a gain and what a waste!

  For Rimbaud it was night. He was in passage. `Maintenant, c’est la nuit que je travaince.’ He is in crossing. The journey from dark to light is one of work. The adept celebrates the dawn only after his work has reached a temporary conclusion. In June the light comes at three. Rimbaud notices it only by the diminution of candlelight. He experiences the drug user’s sense of too much light, the rush that burns. Suddenly the window is white. Birds are in confabulation. Day has broken on another reality. It is not his, but the drug wearing off means he is a part of it. There is nothing to do but smoke, listen to the dawn traffic and then go down to the street, half starved, strung out, looking first of all for the appeasement of wine, bewildered by the workaday world — the men already travelling across the city to their various jobs. The poet takes a baguette back to his room. What else can he afford? His pockets are in tatters.

  We are privileged to have Rimbaud’s intimate portrayal of a typical working night during his Paris stay. He seems to have acquired a drug dependency during the years 1872-3, for, when Rimbaud returned to Roche in the spring of 1873, Paterne Berrichon, relying on information given to him by Rimbaud’s sister Isabelle, tells us that his skin was grey, his pupils contracted, his body suffering from malnutrition. He would lie on his bed for hours, shut up in the dark, raving. The ‘Mauvais sang’ (Bad Blood) from Une saison en enfer, was his own bad blood, the cells craving for narcotics. What he took was hashish and opium; he may well have had access to morphine. He must have stolen to get the money to score.

  When Rimbaud left Paris in July 1872, a month after writing to Delahaye about his nocturnal life there, it was without his having achieved the literary fame that he had thought so easily within his reach. The next six months were to be a time of psychic and physical upheaval. With Verlaine he visited Brussels, and in September of that year the two of them took up residence in London. And it was probably there that he wrote most of the experimental prose poems that have come down to us as Les Illuminations. Both he and Verlaine were deeply disturbed, and no matter the consolidation that their relationship appeared to afford, the combined leakage of Verlaine’s self-pity and Rimbaud’s resolution to derange himself in the interests of poetry must have created a negative charge inimical to every hope of a positive future together. Dependent on Verlaine’s mother for money and whatever little they could earn by teaching French to English students, their lives appeared to be mutilated by an irreversible poverty. And Rimbaud had hoped for so much from poetry. While Verlaine was preparing his collection Les Romances sans paroles for his publisher Lepelletier, Rimbaud undertook his work without the incentive of publication. His writing was directed towards no public; its dynamic anticipated a still unrealized future. Part of Rimbaud’s impetuosity, his impatience with poetry as a form capable of containing his imaginative volatility, is reflected in his self-destructive behaviour at this time. He had overtaken himself; poetry was and still is trying to keep track with his fearless assault on the imaginal sanctum regnum.

  ‘Peut-on s’extasier dans la destruction, se rajeunir par la cruauté!’ Can man reach ecstasy through destruction and be rejuvenated by cruelty?’) Rimbaud’s ‘Conte’ in Les Illuminations poses the question relevant to his own emotional battlefield at the time of his shared life with Verlaine. Something of Rimbaud’s state of delirium, induced by drugs and poetic tension, sounds like a drumbeat through these elliptical and often hermetic allegories in which his imagery crystallizes to a lapidary brilliance around physical shifts of landscape which impart to the reader the sensation of looking out of an aircraft window at the visible changes of terrain.

  Throughout Les Illuminations Rimbaud uses hallucination as a means of seeing. And maintaining that pitch, whereby the psyche introjects sensory experience before it can be rationalized by interpretation through the external world, imposes an inflammable strain on the nerves. Its demands are those made on the dervish, and one suspects that Rimbaud would have found an exalting influence in the thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet, Rûmî, had his works been known to him. The transcendent vision that Rûmî cultivated was one in which the barrier between man and God was extinguished. Rûmî’s mystical illuminations find a correspondence with Rimbaud’s: both are poets intent on achieving a vision of truth through sensory intoxication.

  In ‘Conte’ Rimbaud tells us that the Prince, who adopts Rimbaud’s sadistic persona, ‘amused himself by cutting the throats of rare animals. He set palaces on fire. He fell on people and hacked them to pieces. — The crowd, golden roofs and the beautiful creatures continued to exist’. In this passage Rimbaud accentuates the contradiction at the heart of poetry. What takes place as an imaginative reality activated by the poet’s nervous charge and directed towards a homicidal destruction is neutralized by extraneous evidence. The poet’s world is one of dualities. The transformations he causes to take place happen somewhere else; and nor is action on the inner plane parallel to that which happens on a temporal dimension. Poetry anticipates the future, but there is a time-lag. Things happen too quickly and too radically in terms of inner space. The poet can create or annihilate within that context; but in his lifetime he may not see his vision realized. Psychic travel moves at the speed of light and eliminates logical connections. The arc pursued by the poem is meteoric; it burns off excess in flight and earths itself in a place where it will be discovered at the right time.

  Les Illuminations is full of references to the alchemical work; the transformation of the ego into the sublimated psyche. ‘Metropolitain’ concludes with
an affirmation of the mystic’s power. ‘In the morning when, with Her, you fought in the dazzle of snow, the green lips, the ice, the black flags and blue rays, and the purple perfumes of the polar sun — your strength.’ The experience described here is analogous to that encountered in Rimbaud’s alchemical night ‘Matinée d’ivresse’. ‘We have been promised that the tree of good and evil will be buried in darkness, that tyrannical honesty will be exiled, so that we may flourish in our pure love: It began with feelings of disgust and it ends — since we could not seize eternity immediately — with a riot of perfumes.’

  Rimbaud’s demand is one of immediate knowledge; his aesthetic doctrine approved of dynamic change. In his discourse with the work he had been promised that a new love would replace ‘the tree of good and evil’, and within the poem it had. Part of Rimbaud’s disappointment with poetry can be attributed to the time-lag he felt disrupted the action of conceiving the poem, and the failure of that vision to make good in the socio-economic ethos in which the poet lived. Rimbaud’s battle is fought within this tension field. He uses delirium to counteract temporal inertia. His poetic world is one of heightened colour, magnified sensory stimuli, a universe in which the imagination is sovereign. He constantly resembles someone who paints in a dream, and on awakening is distraught to find that the world is unaltered by his private action. He runs out into the street searching for his violet skies, black ice, green clouds, only to find a washed-out blue sky tenting the city, the ordinary day going on with its uneventful people. And by way of retaliation, the poet only further intensifies his intrinsic findings. He creates in order to contravene the natural order of things, the poem working in dialectical opposition to reality. Rimbaud’s genius is inseparable from attack. Failing to find the world altered by his vision, he sets about deconstructing the latter. There are times when Rimbaud reminds me of Jackson Pollock, whose drunkenness and physicality in his handling of paint demanded a brutal confrontation with his canvas.

  During the autumn and early winter of 1872 Rimbaud and Verlaine struggled to survive in London. Verlaine was besieged by blue court papers dealing with his wife’s justifiable demands for separation and a claim for yearly maintenance of twelve hundred francs. But the undertones were worse. Mathilde had been advised to bring court accusations of homosexuality against her husband, an offence which at the time involved not only literary and social ruin but could also carry with it a prison sentence. Moreover, Rimbaud was still a minor. Verlaine could be accused not only of abduction but illegal sex: in a word, paedophilia.

  In the poem ‘Vagabonds’ in Les Illuminations Rimbaud expresses an irritated compassion for his maudlin, intoxicated friend. Rimbaud had clearly outgrown the relationship; poetry had failed them both in terms of its providing for them in the material world. Rimbaud’s dream of discovering a universal panacea through his studies as a mage had resulted in acute poverty. His boots leaked, he slept in his clothes for additional warmth, and whatever money came to him he immediately spent on liquor and drugs.

  Poor brother! What terrible nights I owed him! ‘I had no deep feeling for the affair. I played on his weakness. Through my fault, we would return to exile and slavery.’ He believed I had a weird form of bad luck and innocence, and he added disquieting reasons.

  I would reply by jeering at this satanic doctor, and would end by leaving through the window. I created, along the countryside streaked with bands of rare music, mirages of a future night parade.

  After that vaguely hygienic distraction, I would stretch out on a straw mattress. And, almost every night, as soon as I was asleep, my poor brother would get up, his mouth dry and his eyes protruding — just as he dreamt himself to be — and would drag me into the room howling his deranged dream.

  One can accept this as dictated by the mood in which Rim-baud wrote, with all the fluctuating contradictions and immediate impulsion this entails, but for all that there is an authenticity here, if not honesty, and one feels that this is how it was. Their nights must have been terrible. One can imagine Rimbaud frozen into a mood of defiant and intractable hostility likely to enrage a man who is seeking consolation for his distraught emotions. And what is more, Rimbaud probably increasingly denied Verlaine sex (‘I had no deep feeling for the affair’), thereby severing the one form of communication that might have led to a temporary reconciliation of hostility. Verlaine wanted both his wife and Rimbaud, and as the latter had been instrumental in insisting that he break with his wife, so Verlaine saw the vacuum open in which he anticipated himself alone. To the recipient, experiencing derision in the face of emotional suffering is comparable to having needles prodded into a wound. Verlaine must have accused Rimbaud of being satanic, of having invoked evil into their lives: his mouth must have been raw and monotonously obscene. And to accentuate Verlaine’s fury, Rimbaud would exit by way of an open window, leaving his friend with the additional fear that he might not return. But for Rimbaud this temporary escape has an almost hallucinogenic quality. The ‘countryside’ in the city is ‘streaked with bands of rare music’ — he is somewhere else just by placing himself there in his head. For Rimbaud it is always the future that is important, what he sees are ‘mirages of a future night parade’. His leap through the window is a projection into another time.

  And to what did he return? Smashed glass on the floor. Verlaine’s ugly imprecations, the sexual pleading of a dipsomaniac. Rimbaud was too strong to sink to this sort of thing. His excesses were taken as part of a poetic experiment, but he kept in control. He was always bigger than it, whereas for Verlaine absinthe was like a glacial pyramid around which his diminutive figure wandered, all the time decreasing in stature.

  During this time Rimbaud may well have visited the Chinese opium dens by the river. His fascination for ships was not unlike that of Hart Crane’s, and both men looked on the sea and sailors as a source affording access to ineffable mysteries. Crane’s ‘The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise’ belongs to the same thalassic mythology as Rimbaud’s ‘And at times ineffable winds would lend me their wings’ from ‘Le Bateau ivre’. Both poets conceived of poetry as inextricably linked with the out there — the expansive skyline.

  It is possible that Rimbaud formed connections with sailors and dockers at this time — the cosmopolitan nature of the docks with their multifarious commerce was likely to stimulate his desire for travel. Rimbaud’s great sea voyage had been undertaken as an imaginative journey; now he could see the big ships put in, smell the salt on their hawsers, watch the excitement of men come ashore from all quarters of the globe. There was commerce, profiteering, and there were drugs, animals, exotic cargoes, squalor, slavery, sexual liberties. Rimbaud was fascinated by this other world, which seemed to combine action with dream, voyage with contemplation. When he writes of the sea it is with the verbal opulence that St-John Perse was later to adopt in his extravagant oceanic mosaic, Amers.

  Ladies strolling on terraces by the sea; children and giants, magnificent blacks in the green-grey moss, jewels standing on the rich soil of groves and thawed gardens — young mothers and older sisters whose eyes are full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses whose walk and clothes are tyrannical, foreign girls and those who are serenely unhappy. (‘Enfance’, Les Illuminations)

  It is noticeable how one perception follows another, not so much as a stream of consciousness but as a collision whereby the friction generated by an image corresponds to an immediate visual successor. The feeling of disorientation that one undergoes in reading Les Illuminations is not dissimilar to the surprise connections made when one is spaced out on drugs. Things happen a long way away, and then surprise one by coming up close. Disjunction and conjugation of visual images are under such an accidental state. You can be preoccupied with a crack in the ceiling which expands to a seismic flaw with houses tilting lopsidedly above a valley — it is there and it is real — before the importance of a matchbox or table item takes over. The poetic image marries the earthquake and the matchbox. And it happened when?
A minute, an hour or a year ago? There is no time for the user until the metabolism alerts the body to the insistence of renewing its need.

  What did Rimbaud do in his London days? Verlaine’s letters tell us that the two spent a lot of time walking around the city, drinking in the inhospitable bars, but expression of external events has little to do with time. It is a way of saying something happened today that makes me locatable to others. Rimbaud was secret and versatile. It is said that he worked on a street-stall in Paris on one of his first visits to the city. It is possible that he lived a double life and in doing so deceived Verlaine. He needed money to maintain his state of intoxicated vigil, and when you are that far up, and often not functioning, money has to be got fast and often inexpediently. Theft and prostitution are ways of cutting corners to raise immediate money. And Rimbaud, who had embarked on a ruthless system of psychophysical experimentation, would have viewed both exigencies as further means towards provoking the derangement he saw as necessary to truth. Verlaine was too drunk, too preoccupied with his etiolated marital affairs to be concerned with real time. The latitude granted to Rimbaud is a biographer’s fiction; he was there, he was anywhere.

  You are still at the temptation of Anthony. The struggle with diminished impetus, faces of a child’s insolence, collapse and terror. But you will begin this work: all harmonic and architectural possibilities will rise up about your seat. Perfect, unlooked for creatures will offer themselves for your experiments. The curiosity of forgotten crowds and idle luxuries will circle dreamily around you. Your memory and your senses will serve to feed your creative impulse. What will become of the world, when you leave it? At all events, nothing of present aspects. (‘Jeunesse’)