Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  I want to get away into your thighs and cheeks,

  You whores, the one true god’s only true priestesses,

  Whether you’re long sworn in, green beauties or antiques:

  O to live in your clefts and cleavages

  · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

  Your feet, so squeezed and sniffed and kissed and licked from soles

  To toes, each toe mouth-organed, and then the ankles too,

  With their slow veins that snake in coils toward their holes,

  Lovelier than saints’, or heroes’ feet, and what they do.

  It was, in short, a grand time to be a Brahmin bum and this bum in particular. Indeed, for the gendarmes of Paris, there was now a standing edict from none other than the prefect of the Paris police, who decreed that, no matter how outrageous and objectionable his behavior, on no account was the Immortal to be pestered, detained, or arrested. Or only as a last resort for his shambolic royal protection.

  And, indeed, at this time he did live quite royally, rent-free, in various Paris hospitals—a man quite normally healthy, you understand, or healthy enough. Here, often, he received noble guests, for example, the lofty and increasingly portly Oscar Wilde. Now there was a visit.

  It was a pilgrimage, Wilde’s homage to visit this societal Judas goat. To Wilde, Paul Verlaine was a Socrates of sorts, seducing the youth and otherwise yanking down the breeches of a hypocritical and disordered order blind to the perfect love of men and boys so sacred to the ancient Greeks. Wilde, in any case, was a man who knew how to make a scene. See him in his baggy dark evening suit–cum–lounge pajamas. Flanked by two haughty boys and advanced by a throng of doctors and nurses, down the hall he barged, the great Irish wit, a large, fleshy-shouldered man with a vast horse face and shock of dark Irish hair, and all the while switching from demotic French to English to French again. And all, you understand, in a rush of perfectly parsed, faultlessly modulated utterances.

  “Cher maître!” he cried, “my avatar!” So he began, much the same as he had greeted the American god Walt Whitman in Brooklyn, yet another invert Dionysian—truly, a new man, this white-bearded Moses aiming his staff down the long American road. Flush from the literary success of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde offered the great sodomite many charming gifts: green absinthe, pastel, licorice-scented cigarettes, and a wonderfully odiferous brick of black opiated hashish—that and two dozen alabaster roses, presented with a bow in his white-gloved hand. And, being a gentleman, Wilde did not particularly mind, and in fact quite understood, when the Immortal no sooner received these gifts than he tapped him for a few francs that, fairly needless to say, he had no intention whatsoever of repaying. As Rimbaud had taught him in his nasty urchin days, let the world pay, all these lesser poets, men of affairs, and sucker patrons. The world is our billfold!

  This is not to suggest that our poet was lazy—true, unemployable, yet in his way quite diligent, a hustler, in fact. Why, every day by midafternoon (and, naturally, after an eye opener or two), he was, no matter how ravaged from the previous evening’s escapades, at full moral attention, ready to receive God’s weak signals: even if utter crap, he always put down something. Of these scribblings, the raunchiest he sold to a fetishist who framed them among other unmentionables in his ducal dungeons. Never fear, though. No fool, our poet kept fair copies later published under his notorious Black Fowl imprint, charming numbers kept under the counter with sundry rubber novelties and photographs in the French style. Articles that, once purchased, were wrapped in slick brown butcher’s paper and tied with strong cord like a round of beef.

  It was, in short, a wondrous time, free, openly dark, and sportif, such that the all-entitled few were doing things not so much vile or evil as simply unknown and indeed unimaginable to ordinary folk. In Whitehall, Jack the Ripper was hunting trollops, with Dracula soon to arrive. In Paris, meanwhile, the normally correct hommes d’affaires who brought the poet’s porno wares, these same doughy-faced, mustached men could be seen—rapt—in the front row of the Moulin Rouge, so close they could feel the hormonal heat and smell the actually sweaty aroma of twenty flouncing girls with no underwear, none whatsoever, under hot, buttery lights. Bouncing bowler hats! Rat-a-tat! Inches from their pop eyes, skirt-raising, muff-flashing bawds were swinging their legs such that the pater familias could see clear up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe—why clear to their very orchids, some of them, as they did the cancan! Meeee-yow!

  And so, like a crazy hurdy-gurdy, it was starting that pagan cult of self and self-consciousness and rules to be violated, all because there still were rules—all this was starting up. Starting up, too, because extreme fame was technologically possible. Roaring, in fact, the rotogravure and steam-driven rotary presses, all propelling starlets and scandals, cads and low-road royalty, low life and the hot life, with moving pictures soon on the way! And our boy, goat that he was, eating on both sides of the fence, why, he was one of the earliest pioneers of public debauchery, a lover of long-mustached Paris sewer men, butcher boys, parlor maids, and even the stray clochard when he was especially hard up. Indeed, putting aside his poetics, in terms of degradation and derangement, truly it could be said that our Immortal, like de Sade and Byron and Baudelaire before him, was among the very first to set it off.

  That is, once the great ur-punk Arthur Rimbaud had first set him off. Flick! Rimbaud was that match.

  For see how far the Immortal had traveled, or fallen rather.

  Twenty-odd years before this time, the outlaw was a son-in-law, poor thing. And trying so hard, Verlaine was, in his droopy tie, top hat, and briskly shined shoes. Here was a nice, if tippling, young man lavishly supported by his in-laws, with a love-bedazzled young wife barely past puberty. He even had a job of sorts.

  Of course being a poet, it was the usual ceremonial dumb poet job, some scrivener sinecure in which one could arrive late, then return from lunch respectably drunk. It was a living, but barely, laboriously copying some mind-numbing legal document with a scraping goose quill. Copy a bit, blow on some drying dust, then snooze half the afternoon on a green and greasy desk blotter. It was 1866, and with no other choice, he was rigidly, officiously correct and entirely bourgeois—still ages away from the incorrigible antics of his later years. It was indeed a narrowly circumscribed and straitjacketed time, tight-collared, gloved, bonneted, girdled, top hatted, and hoop skirted, although well medicated with the various opiated restoratives then available, especially for the female set. For these reasons, it was an age prone to hysteria, palsies, and female catatonia, not to mention the saintly “invalid mother” who, unable to take it anymore, blew out the candle of life and took to bed. For the husband, on the other hand, there was always alcohol, mistresses, and, for those on a budget, aging prostitutes. And so the men, wife beaters, sots, and boulevardiers, with ready means of escape, clubs and mistresses and bistros and such—the men were just fine. Tip-top. Never better.

  It was, then, a world utterly tied off. And, in the Immortal’s case, ready to blow. For who was he then? God knows. A mamma’s boy trying, against nature, to be good, he was living on the first floor of a small manse in Montmartre with his adoring bourgeois princess and, living over them, controlling them, his overbearing father-in-law and still more formidable mother-in-law. Zeus and Hera, he called them.

  But he was a professional, our boy. He had made his debut. He got on. Why, he even had a modest poetical reputation of sorts. Two salons welcomed him with a small retinue of devoted, able enough, but otherwise forgotten versifiers who did their bit. In fact, he was then one of a school, the Parnassians—anti-Romantics, reacting against all those feelings, especially when they were the English feelings: Coleridge and Shelley, Keats and Byron, stormy giants who for decades had stolen the show while taking the stuffing out of the next generation—especially in France. And so under the banner of art for art’s sake, the Parnassians wrote deliberately smaller poems. Gems. Artfully wrought, classically correct, airl
ess, and rigorously unfelt poems like the following stanza, taken from the Immortal’s first slender volume, Poèmes saturniens, AD 1866:

  Pushing the narrow sagging gate aside,

  I walked into the little garden-bower

  Which the sun, that morning, softly glorified,

  Bespangling with wet sparks the smallest flower.

  Or this from another sonnet:

  I suffer, suffer fiercely: the first groan

  of the first man driven out of Eden

  is an eclogue by contrast with my own!

  And the small cares you have are like the play

  Of swallows, my dear, in the lovely heaven

  Of afternoon, on a warm September day.

  Paul Verlaine, arise then! A lapdog no longer, wasting your life, crocheting such metrical doilies.

  Tell us, then, how your Hansel, Arthur Rimbaud, fooled the old Witch with a knucklebone, then ran away, a demon angel with his soul on fire. Sing to us of unquenchable angers—of literature as a blood sport, a criminal enterprise, and war by other means. Sing, heartbroken even now, of the teenage Pied Piper who wrecked your marriage, destroyed your reputation, spent the better part of your inheritance, then led you, a grown man, into the whirlwind, beyond which lay the portals of immortality.

  Sing, great shade, of the monsters together.

  16 Heaven-Sent Turd

  Patience. Before Rimbaud meets Verlaine, we first must better understand what will propel the little freeloader to Paris, to ride roughshod over Verlaine and terrorize its frankly timid poet population. How could a mere child incite such uproar, setting salon teacups rattling? And this from a kid who, only months before at the Collège de Charleville, had been model-meek and compliant—eerily so.

  Back, then, to 1870. Back to the time when Rimbaud is fifteen and a half, just before war breaks out. Back to that cold, drafty house with the mansard roof, where the floorboards creak and churn—like the boy’s bowels—beneath the crushing weight of Mme. Rimbaud’s near-constant agitation.

  Bam bam bam. Down the stairs.

  Bam bam bam. Up again.

  Again and again—and a night prowler she was, too.

  God! The boy would think, nervously biting his thumb while hunched over Cicero’s De divinatione, doesn’t the old witch ever get tired?

  Never. For hearing something, anything, with her freak ears, once again she’s bellowing up the stairs:

  “Arthur, are you hard at it?”

  Observe the boy now in the relatively sunny before—before things explode—when his life is as normal, relatively speaking, as it ever will be. Perfect eyes. Perfect hearing. Perfect skin. Hair still cut, nails clean: studious, well dressed, polite. Perhaps most amazing under the circumstances is that fact that behind those angelic blue eyes burns a soul remarkably intact, million-leaved like a great oak lifting its branches, aroused, in the evening wind. And yet, to some, this largeness of soul, this whatever it is, is intimidating, and even threatening. Leaving his mother with just one way to control him: keep him employed.

  “Arthur, I said hard at it. Hammer and tongs!”

  Look at him running to the landing. Blond, pale, and sturdy, he is a psyche awaiting further instructions. Heart beating, he hollers down the narrow, crooked stairs built by the drunken hands of his maternal grandfather, a collector of beef fat and intestines, offals then laboriously boiled to produce nitrates for the manufacture of the munitions used to cut down, by the hundreds, the mutinous masses who rose up in 1848. Je m’y mets, he hollers—I’m at it. And so, historically speaking, the Cuifs, say what you will, are profiteer guardians of the public order, solid, crafty, and taxpaying—even while drunk, in the case of Mme. Rimbaud’s father, whose ear holes could have housed a family of warblers. Cuif père had never failed to profit from any investment. Nor would his daughter—not with this kid into whom she had sunk tutors, suits, and books. Why, into whom she had sunk everything, even as she felt him slipping. Yelling again:

  “I don’t hear anything up there!”

  “Hear what,” he says, “the sound of me thinking? Calm down, I’m working.”

  “None of your cheek, boy! Don’t make me come up there.”

  Worse is the increasingly hidden and unknown nature of his “work.” Which for her, of course, is not work at all. And so Mme. Rimbaud has many choice names for her son.

  Big shot!

  Genius boy.

  Prince Milksop!

  The Spoiled Prince.

  Never mind that studying is his job. At any time on any given day, if only to wake him up—or because a cow has miscarried, or because her piles are throbbing, or because she’s had more bad dreams, or just because—here she comes, rumbling up the narrow attic stairs, bam bam bam. When BAM, every time, he jumps as the door batters back. Jumps, you see, because he has to wait. Because if he turns and peers around, even in the slightest, she will accuse him of dawdling and daydreaming while here they toiled, and all so he, Genius Boy, could think his great thoughts and sit on his royal fanny! And so, to wake him up, she’d give him a shove or whack. Wake up. Grow up, mooch, and never forget: you’re going to make us a pile of money someday.

  Worse, she had two lumps: the genius-idiot to study, and the idiot-idiot—this would be Arthur’s brother, Frédéric—to be the genius-idiot’s whipping boy. Frankly, to do what, to her mind, Frédéric was born for, to muck and haul and chop. Why, Frédéric’s maman even had a shining vision for her elder son—that of a Paris sewer man in gum boots, rain hat, and oilskins. Picture him, in his small boat, a gondolier poling through Hades of merde, using a specially developed shovel-cum-paddle, un rabot, both to propel himself and to unclog the converging headwaters of the city’s stupendous waste streams. This subterranean Seine, it needed men with long soup-strainer mustaches and strong stomachs, indomitable men who could break the blockages caused by logs, murder victims, parasols, butcher slops, and so forth. And don’t overlook the wine corks of Paris, thousands and thousands of corks that, once cleansed of that in which they had been stewed, could be cut down for perfume bottles, then sold to the unsuspecting—yet more revenue! A pension, too! And, of course, steady money for her in her old age. Such were her maternal dreams for Frédéric.

  Never mind that Frédéric, but a year older, is of normal, if not above normal, intelligence. Because Frédéric is not Arthur-grade, he is, for her, l’ours de la famille—the family bear. Whose labors allow Genius Boy hours of study undisturbed in his Olympian aerie.

  Alas, like his long-departed papa, Frédéric is also a drunk-in-training, subject to frightening violent fits. Blackouts, too. Meaning that Frédéric must be kept busy, always, while Arthur studies and the Rimbaud sisters, “the two mice,” mostly hide in their room, whispering with the sound of crackling paper. As one might expect, except for supper, minor chores, and prayers, the girls are never seen, just as they never question, sass, or rock the boat. In short, each child has a favored mode of egress against the mother’s near-constant ingress. A way to magically disappear.

  But what of Madame, now gripped with the terrifying night sweats of menopause? Clammy blankets. Fevered dreams. Rape, pursuit. Thick, gruesome cocks held in much-aggrieved fists … and that smell.

  Then there is her fear of the all too real, as that morning years ago when her father no sooner pulled out than he spat, “Merde!” And, looking down, she thought, I’m bleeding to death! “See, Papa,” she cried, “see what you did! God has seen and now I’m going to die!” “Stupid bitch,” he replied, “you’ve started your monthly.” Squatting, he wiped himself on the bloody sheet. “Now clean it up!”

  Such is Madame’s mental proscenium circa 1870. Two teenage males. Males in rut, making horrid sounds and leaving these stains. For which—beyond confession, Communion, and abstinence—there is but one remedy: hard work. Work like good lye soap. Work is the way. It is The Farm Way, and The Farm Way is The Hard Way. And so, to show them, every spring, up from the depths of the barn she would emerge with a swarmi
ng basket and a bucket brimming with water. Time for that dreaded annual chore, which, being as there were no real men present, naturally fell to her. And so on her watery knees—as her daughters wailed—one by one, hard by the elbow, she plunged them into the cold, clear water. Spring: time to drown the barn’s gush of kittens, some scarcely the size of mice.

  And so it begins again. Every day again.

  Again, the boy is up in his attic roost, reading for a lark the puerile Caesar’s Gallic Wars, possibly the dullest, most megalomaniacal book ever conceived. Veni, vidi, vici, I came, I saw, I conquered. Yet another French humiliation: horn-helmeted wild men crushed under the massed shields of Caesar’s legions. Corpses piled in smoking heaps. Vultures feasting. Golden armbands raised to the sky—Hail Caesar! When again, downstairs, the Caesarina can be heard bellowing.

  “Arthur! Working?”

  “Working!”

  “No tricks!”

  “Working! Working!” He smacks the book. Goddamn!

  Then deep from the bowels of the house, he hears:

  “No, Frédéric, you will do it. You, I said! Arthur is at his work.”

  “But it’s always my turn.”

  “Because I said it is your turn! Now out with you! Out!”

  Then, bam bam bam. It’s Frédéric, shoving him in the back.

  “Merdeux! Leaving me to shovel your shit! Tell her, you bastard. Stick up for me! Just once!”

  “And say what? What?”

  Bam!

  Here she is, flying across the room, slapping Frédéric with both hands. Hysterical, like a bird trapped in a window, she is sputtering, raging, erratic. “Get down! Get down those stairs, you!”