Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  A Season in Hell was his signed confession. It was not, as he saw it, a literary work per se—it was salvation itself. Incredibly for him, he wished to publish it, and still more incredibly his by-then-very-frightened mother had agreed to pay for it, at least originally. When the bill arrived, however, the old woman denied everything; she said it was too much and refused to pay, just as he in his ambivalence, in his anomie and drift, failed to hold her to her promise. And so it wound up like virtually every other poem—ditched.

  Ten days in the hospital in Marseille was all the old woman could stomach. Even as Rimbaud begged her to stay, she packed her black bag, then tied on her coal-bucket bonnet.

  “I’ve got livestock to tend to,” she insisted. “If I don’t it will be dead stock.”

  Fortunately, by then Rimbaud was a trifle more optimistic, or at least more resigned to his condition. Unlikely as it seemed, in his desperation Rimbaud believed Dr. Delpech when he promised that if he stuck it out, in six months’ time, his life would look very different. “Worlds different, if you give yourself half a chance.”

  At the same time, the patient felt more sanguine about seeing his mother again, but this time on her home ground. There he felt sure she would be in much better spirits, more open, more prepared to reconcile. Such was his hope three weeks later, when he and Isabelle boarded the train for the first leg of their journey to Charleville.

  The trip to the train station was Rimbaud’s first real introduction to this new world, really, to the world of the next century, and a fearsome place it was, lit not with gas but increasingly with electric lights that blinked and bleeped and formed actual words. Here were billboard-sized advertisements for products he’d never heard of, things like tooth powder and vanishing cream and safety razors. Never had he seen so much gimmickry for sale. Equally alarming was the state of haberdashery and millinery—all changed. Gone, during the day at least, was the top hat. Men’s hats were now minuscule, like gumdrops, while women’s hats had grown to extraordinary size—small Saturns of swirling chiffon and chenille.

  As for Rimbaud himself, who would have recognized him? White-haired, with two shawls draping his shoulder, the kufi on his head, and the Muslim mustache, the past and future of French poetry sat quite anonymous in the last seat in the car, freezing cold even in the summer. Isabelle couldn’t do enough for him now. She fetched him water. She plumped his pillows. Then, thinking he might be bored, later that afternoon she offered to read to him. He was a writer. Surely he would enjoy hearing something nouveau and creative.

  “Arthur, I’m reading a new book by Xavier de Montépin, La Porteuse de pain—The Bearer of Bread. Have you heard of de Montépin? A novel, very touching. May I read you some?”

  “Read me what?” he scowled. “Fiction?”

  “Yes, fiction—very artistic. Creative. That is what you like, is it not?”

  “No, if you will pardon me. That is not what I like.”

  Poor girl. Didn’t she realize that, having abandoned poetry, he read no “imaginative” work—novels, poetry, any of it. Newspapers. Technical publications. Journals of exploration. This is what he read. Things that were real.

  Instead, hour after hour, Arthur Rimbaud, now used to chaos, sat there propped on his pillows, watching, as it fled by, the shocking order of the French countryside, the well-tended fields, the prim houses and charming little towns—frightening.

  53 Interview

  Around this same time, at 6:00 p.m. sharp at the Café Procope, there occurred the dreaded interview between Verlaine and Champsaur, the journaliste who had skewered him in La Revue Noire.

  Still, where Champsaur was concerned, the review was hardly the sole source of Verlaine’s fury. The fact was, even before the review, Verlaine had been quite jealously aware of Champsaur—painfully so, as only a vain, unsightly man can be. And especially now when the Parisian public regarded the absurdly handsome Champsaur as the model of haute masculinity, sartorial splendor, and splashy social success.

  What Verlaine found particularly outrageous was that, even as Champsaur crucified other poets, he had yet to publish his own long-awaited first collection of verse, against which the poets of Paris had long been sharpening their knives. And yet, with no real attainments, and perhaps for that very reason, not only was Champsaur a rising star in the literary world, but he was lionized in the social pages of that pictorial hereafter, the rotogravure, the subject of line drawings, caricatures, and small items noting his presence at some soiree, or some droll comment. Photographs. Caricatures hung in bistros. Good heavens, a minor celebrity at the age of thirty-one!

  The curious thing, though, was Verlaine’s own slavish devotion to the society pages—and, it should be added, long before Champsaur’s star rose over the city’s sizzling electric lights. Stuffed in ash cans or lying on tram seats, the rotogravure and the society pages, these moist finds, why, they were like pornography for Verlaine, who could be seen indignantly snapping the pages, quite as if he expected to see his name among the royal, the beautiful, the mighty, or the merely rich. When again he would see mention of “that eligible Champsaur,” “the imperially slim Champsaur,” and, most irritating of all, “Champsaur the ladies’ man.”

  Ladies’ man! harumphed Verlaine, giving the pages a good shake.

  On the contrary, it was he, the polyamorous Verlaine, who had at his pleasure two ladies and—and—quite openly, numerous other undisguised dalliances. Despite his noble poverty. Despite his unsightliness. Now that, he thought, that was the measure of the true ladies’ man!

  As for his public image, Verlaine had created a new persona, in fact a new character—indeed, in all his narcissism and utter self-consciousness, a thoroughly modern character. Really, platonically speaking, a new public Type. Move over, Whitman with your shirtsleeves rolled, pretending, great as you are, to be one of the “toughs”—please. Good for you, Oscar Wilde, rich man playing the velvet-collared aesthete in knee britches and slippers. No, no, Verlaine replied, his persona was that of the bum bohemian artist king—the clowning, brawling, life-mad public crazy, beyond common morality or arrest; a type who summoned, moreover, the deeper, fouler roots of the French character, the rough and the louche, the mob and the guillotine. Indeed, as Verlaine saw it, he was a new kind of man, swimming the rapids of a new era at speeds inconceivable before the mighty mechanization of celebrity.

  Down, then, with high culture! Here was the low culture that he and Rimbaud had anticipated, in fact, the same that Rimbaud described years before in A Season in Hell:

  I liked stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets, backdrops 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 operas, ridiculous refrains, naïve rhythms.

  True, Baudelaire loved—from afar—the gutter and his trollops but not, heaven forbid, the defiantly crude, the lovingly low, and the aggressively stupid. Low culture, then! Cheap fame. Tin-whistle songs. Sin, sensation, and erotica, all feeding the public’s insatiable fascination with the lives of playboy aristocrats, heiresses, stage beauties, frauds, freaks, hustlers, flash in the pans, and retrograde royals. Then there was the annual Paris art show, always a brawl as far as who got in, followed by howling editorials about these Impressionists, these mad Fauves, replenishing the very swamps that civilization had labored so hard to drain.

  It was shameful. It was wonderful. It was Now, this roller-coaster-like descent. And, following Rimbaud’s leap, Paul Verlaine could claim some modicum of credit for the collapse.

  See him now, seated at his customary table behind the diamond leaded panes of the Café Procope, in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie in the Quartier Latin. Heaped under layers of fraying wool cured to the condition of pelt, nervously Verlaine awaits Champsaur—with, at his sleeve, the hot green kiss of Dame Absinthe.

  A skullcap cuts, Erasmus-like, just above his sodden, squinty eyes. The beard is thin and leonine,
the forehead a looming moon, the mouth a single crooked horizontal line as might have been drawn by a somber child on a rainy day. Somebody, obviously. And behold the proof.

  For, exiting the loo, here comes Verlaine’s woman—one of the two, actually, Mathilde having long divorced him. This woman is not, heaven forbid, “the other one,” as Verlaine often refers to her. That would be the beastly Odette, a stout, red-headed harridan who beats Verlaine for money, beats him like a dog, just as he used to beat his own dear mother. Poetry at work, mais oui.

  But the one who really hurts and touches Verlaine, this is the lady now returning to his table. Mistress Eugénie. Eugénie Krantz, his genie.

  Beautiful-ugly, ugly-beautiful Eugénie, glued together like a broken vase, with the diverging nose, the off-plumb eyes, and the tattooing of scars and old stitches. Blurry Eugénie, flickering candle agitated in the breeze. The much-revised Eugénie, who holds Verlaine utterly in thrall, suspended as she is in that vale between beautiful and ugly. Such that Verlaine can never quite decide:

  Beautiful?

  Or not?

  Ugly?

  Or not?

  Tart mouth, smart mouth. Plush lips whose lush fruit was broken, like fresh grapes, by the rival tarts who, back then, worked the same streets, most of them mothers, some with seven or eight children and a dying parent in one dank room—and a pimp squeezing her, too. Poor old chippies! Eugénie in those days was a seventeen-year-old upstart pouffiasse, a trollop with no children but rich and even royal protectors desperate for her tight pink billfold, her globelike buttocks, and goblet-like breasts. Poor old falling-apart tarts. In Eugénie’s glory days, there was no competing with her man-gripping quim as she galloped yet another gasping client to the finish.

  Target the mouth—that was where the black-bonneted old trulls would descend with saps and hat pins and razors, surrounding her like a flock of buzzards, this as Eugénie, hissing like a badger, punched and scratched and bit.

  Now thirty-four, bosomy plump, and dark, Eugénie has been some seventeen years on the stroll, an eternity in her profession. But even now, coming down the aisle, as much by her loud scent as by her loitering walk and downward-drawing stare, upon men of all ages and classes, she has the effect of a dog whistle. The delicious shamelessness of her, in the sheeny corsetlike dress, the wicked sharp collar, the bijoux of rings, not to mention the twitching, enterprising black bustle the size of a small trunk. But the hook, the bait, the saucy pudding—this comes with the high-heeled boots with the waxed laces. Laces that crisscross, like stitches, forty-six twisted hooks.

  And to think: all this and more Verlaine had for free, baying as he climaxed, Euuuu​uuuuu​uuuuu​uuuuu​u-génie.

  Ah, but she is messy, Eugénie. Her talk is reckless, circular, oracular. Words no sooner uttered than they are taken back with a Delphic glare.

  “Old toad,” she said, resuming where she had left off before her loo visit, “do you really think, old fool, that in this life you will do better than I? Screw better than I? See clearer than I—do you? Marry me. Then at least you will die in the arms of love and not under the reeking fat wattles of that slut.” Odette, she meant.

  “Or your Rimbaud,” she continued, now broadly gesturing over the table. “Another who treated you like shit. Just as you like! So, groveling like a dog, you lick his hand? Obedient to what? To a boy long dead, or certainly so as an artist? Why, then, talk to this Champsaur? So you can torture yourself over what was?”

  The old volcano roared to life.

  “Assez! You don’t know how it was! What I gave up—willingly—to follow him. I remember, and yes, I did give up everything. Mad? Yes. A fool? Of course. Like rape and ruin, I followed Rimbaud, I did indeed; I followed him into the fires of hell. This, I assure you, they will never know. Or that he gave me sweet, purring caresses—again, the Rimbaud they will never know.”

  “Know what, love?” said Eugénie sweetly. “Know!” She smiled, shifting an octave. “What do you recall, you whose mind is like a sieve? Really, my dear Paul, how you write anything is beyond me, for as we both know, you do not think. Unlike Rimbaud. Rimbaud, he died of thinking. Not you, mon petit—”

  She broke off.

  For here he came, the rodentlike Bibi-la-Purée, followed, in his sleek coat and faultless hat, by the hunter Champsaur, who with a distinct look of shock curtly bowed to Eugénie, then thought better of offering Verlaine his hand. Instead, Champsaur dropped his hat. Then, literary fetishist that he was, he dropped an unblemished green-cloth notebook with R on the cover—R for Rimbaud. Pure provocation.

  “Quick, cher maître,” said Champsaur, to break the tension, “the first word that comes into your mind when I say Rimbaud.”

  Verlaine grinned, surprised.

  “Running. Always running.”

  “Bien.” He smiled broadly. “And the second?”

  “Destroying—God destroying.”

  Eugénie looked up suddenly. In her hand was a sinister-looking implement, a nail file, was it? “Hear me, pretty boy,” she said. “If, in any way, you hurt this man—”

  “Madame—”

  “—Bitch to you,” said Eugénie, displaying … what? An ice pick? It was. “Go on. Just try to humiliate him again, just try.”

  “I—I quite understand.”

  Clearly unsettled, Champsaur sat down and opened the green notebook. “And now, cher maître, let us begin with that first word—running.”

  On the theme of running—flight, escape—Verlaine told this Champsaur many things, things then new and even revelatory, but he did omit certain details. For example, how, on one of their highly artistic forays fleeing Paris, Verlaine, drunk, of course, and under the boy’s direction, had been forced to raise the necessary funds from his mother. Naturally, for such a sensitive, intimate transaction, Rimbaud waited downstairs, holding his horse, so to speak. Still, the young poet could scarcely have failed to hear the ruckus above him.

  “Où est le pognon?” roared Mme. Verlaine’s youngest son, swaying by the fireplace. “Where’s the bloody money?”

  Had Rimbaud ventured up those long stairs, he would have seen that his bibulous paramour held in his unsteady hand the choicest of the family vintage. Indeed, he was holding up a jar of brackish fluid, grain alcohol, in which a wee white figure could be seen slowly bobbing, back and forth. Bawling, his mother grabbed for the bottle he held so cruelly over her head.

  “Paul Verlaine! Put your brother down!”

  “Of course,” he sneered. “When you give me the goddamned money.”

  “Stop it, you’re drunk, you’re just upset! Now put poor Pierre down—”

  “Down? Down, did you say?”

  Smash. Wee Pierre. There he lay on the floor, a lard white tadpole lying in a hairy mass of spawn and broken glass. Which, for Verlaine, after all those boyhood nights praying before these gluey relics—well, it felt so soaring! So liberating! To the point that little brother grabbed the second of the three heirloom jars. Rearing back, he smashed it against the family hearth, then, legs wobbling, pitched over, mesmerized by the starry debris. Well, goddamn. It was little Edith. “Good!” he cried.

  “Good riddance, shrimp!”

  “Horrid child!” cried Mme. Verlaine, now dancing hysterically. “Paul! Paul Verlaine! Look what you’ve done!”

  “Done? You better cough up that money, woman. Think I’m done?”

  In his hand, he now had his eldest brother, Bertrand, the size of a pig’s knuckle, easily the most brilliant of the four—could have been a Pasteur. “Christ,” said his little brother, “I need a goddamn drink!” And twisting off the lid, held forth the vile tankard—a brotherly toast!

  “Money! Or down he goes! Wee Bertrand! Like an escargot!”

  “But just how strong was his hold on you?” asked Champsaur.

  “All but irresistible,” replied Verlaine. “And his youth was certainly a large part of it. Consider. He arrives during a time, frankly, of mediocrity with a style and a vision u
nlike any other. He belongs to no school. He is not another arriviste. No compromises. No emotional entanglements or obligations to his elders. And he had no respect, no fear—none. Compare him with Baudelaire in that regard. Renegade though he was, at least in print, Baudelaire at bottom was a thoroughly craven Christian; in no way was he ready, as Rimbaud was, for hell and damnation.”

  “But why did you stay?” asked Champsaur. “I mean why, when virtually everybody else fled. Why you?”

  “Because I loved him. I was not competitive; I knew from the start that I was not of his order. Nor were they, any of them, and they all knew it. That was why they hated and feared him. Well,” he sighed, taking a long swallow, “among other reasons.”

  “And you say you were not writing?” asked Champsaur.

  “That was my other shame. Rimbaud so shocked me—his work so shocked me—that for months, artistically speaking, I was dazed. Had no idea who I was. None.”

  “And when did that change?”

  Verlaine never hesitated. “Belgium. When Rimbaud ordered me to Belgium.”

  “Ordered you?”

  “Ordered me. To the front, as it were. Just as if I were a soldier. My wife, Mathilde, was sick, you see. Very sick. So with all good intentions, I went to the druggist to get my wife some medicine. But when I turn the corner, whom do I see but Rimbaud! Who says to me, ‘Come on, we’re leaving for Belgium.’ Just like that. ‘But my wife is ill,’ I told him. ‘I need to bring her medicine.’ ‘Screw your wife,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of hearing you whine about her. Your kid, too. Now, come on, right now.’ ‘But I don’t have a ticket,’ I said. ‘I am your ticket,’ he said. And, Monsieur, with just the clothes on my back, I left.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “But, cher maître,” challenged Champsaur, “your duty to your wife! Your son.”

  “ ‘Pick,’ said Rimbaud. ‘Them or me.’ No doubt this sounds shameful, crazy, morally destitute, and I won’t deny it. But honestly, at the time it seemed a higher duty. And had I stayed, I would have missed out on my Belgium poems. My very best. Immortality itself.”