Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  He shook his cane at her. “Miserable, faithless whore!”

  “Well,” she sniffed, “unlike you, at least I bloody well get paid for it.”

  Tock. Tock. Tock. Fuming and muttering, Verlaine started again, then stopped suddenly, leaning on the cane, blinking with emotion.

  “What, love?” asked Eugénie, now playing the wife. “What?”

  “Rimbaud. Damn him, I still can’t believe he’s dead. Really dead. And the madness of him—I mean to leave it all. Art. Reputation—”

  “And you—”

  “So laugh at me!” He paused, shaking his head. “But … but I thought, fool that I was, I actually thought, we would be together, the two of us—forever. God help me, I actually thought so, and I still feel the same disbelief. The same grief. Leaving what—poems? Was that the whole point? Bloody poems?”

  They walked on, man and mistress, and for five years more the carnival of Verlaine’s life continued, until he, too, died—died at the age of fifty-one. Died pretty much of everything, having burnt the candle at both ends, and the middle, too.

  How satisfying, though. The many great and famous men who had avoided, or carefully managed their relations with, the old pariah—if only to escape the inevitable tap for money—well, the mighty turned out in force, as death redeemed him, such that people could step back, actually in awe of the Master and his contribution. No longer was he a clown, a drunk, or a pervert. He was genius in an age that idolized genius, just as he was Paris itself.

  Candles were lit in his room, where he lay in his bed in his nightshirt—cheap party candles, the only ones anyone could find in his flat. A death mask was made. Then, after the newspapers reported his death, came the crush, the famous and the lowly. Mallarmé left a bunch of violets. A photographer was dispatched from Le Monde Illustré. Young men drew lots to keep vigil over the body, then, alone in the middle of the night, snipped off small pieces of his hair. And amid the crowds that tramped through his small dim chambers, many remembered the flitting lemon canary. The canary that wouldn’t stop singing—Eugénie’s canary.

  Even Verlaine would have been flabbergasted at the outpouring on the day of his burial. When the casket was taken to the Cimetière des Batignolles, a quite lengthy walk, people lined the streets and every man tipped his hat. There, behind the hearse, representing the people of the streets was Verlaine’s chimney-sweep majordomo, Bibi-la-Purée; clean as a baby, too. As for Eugénie—who had to be separated, twice, from her rival, Odette—she was accompanied by a phalanx of prostitutes and courtesans. And behind them? A crowd of several thousand. Poets, writers, artists, and musicians, Verlaine’s cortege brought forth a river of people cloaked in black and crepe, knots of people flowing steadily up l’avenue de Clichy, to the Batignolles cemetery.

  As for the Widow Rimbaud, she lived on, quite healthily, until her death in 1907, at the then astounding age of eighty-two.

  Isabelle by then had a husband, Paterne Berrichon, one of Rimbaud’s first biographers, a hack, quite honestly, but nevertheless a good husband who not only made Isabelle happy but, more importantly, made good her escape from Roche. Isabelle and Berrichon, then, were present for the widow’s burial—just them and the priest and two gravediggers: five in all. Such were the widow’s wishes, to be laid to rest just as she had lived, essentially alone.

  But here is what speaks through time in that old cemetery with its cinder paths and gray mortuary houses veined with moss. There, at the head of the knoll in the plot of the Rimbauds, although three are buried, only two headstones stand, those of seventeen-year-old Vitalie and Arthur. As for the Widow, she who prepared the bed, she lies before them, prostrate, as it were, under a milky slab of marble. Clearly, whatever she said in life, and however much she pushed her younger son away, in death she wanted him close to her. Very close.

  At hand, in fact. Two subterraneans of once boiling force, here they lie, love and hatred, hope and betrayal, forever coiled like figures in some heavenly constellation. Gaze down upon them, then, and wish them ease, mother and son lying forever under the blue night sky. Together at last and, who’s to say, perhaps even at peace.

  A Final Note

  on the Poems and Writings Quoted

  There has been no monkeying with the poems and writings quoted.

  All the poems and letters quoted are taken verbatim from noted English translations, most from Wallace Fowlie’s Rimbaud. Cuts are noted with ellipses.

  To be sure, Rimbaud has many fine English translators, but Professor Fowlie’s 1966 classic remains my hands-down favorite.

  Jim Morrison of the Doors, Rimbaud’s bastard seed—the same man now buried in Père-Lachaise—was another Fowlie fan, so much so that he wrote Professor Fowlie a number of searching letters before his death at the age of twenty-seven. No doubt Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and now younger artists have pored through the same translation, still undiminished in its power to thrill and incite, perplex and disturb.

  Please, read the poems. In any language they are ageless.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped and urged me along with this project. Louis Ross and John Shill, both Washington-area psychiatrists, were my first readers four years ago, and their criticisms, then fundamental, forced me to wholly reimagine my fractured main characters—this time with the abandon they deserve.

  Thanks, too, to my oldest friend, Slaton White, for his enthusiasm and keen observations. Bill Schultz brought similar energy, and my close friend Judy Watson was especially helpful in offering a woman’s perspective. Others who were kind enough to read and comment were my oldest readers, Jay and Gay Lovinger, my daughters, Lily and Kate, novelist Barbara Esstman, and my close friend Peter Kilman. Thanks, too, to my wonderful colleagues at work and the leader I write for. And thanks above all to my Maxwell Perkins Prize–winning agent, Amanda (“Binky”) Urban, and to her make-it-happen assistant, Alison Schwartz. It was Binky who brought me to Doubleday, pairing me with my wonderful new editor, Gerry Howard, and his very talented assistant, Hannah Wood. After thirteen years without a publisher, it is good—as Gerry puts it—to be “back around the campfire.”

  Special thanks also go to Mme. Joan Le Gall, retired from the University of Toronto, and her son Michel Le Gall, formerly of St. Olaf College. Fluent French speakers, they helped me address a host of cultural, linguistic, and historical issues as I completed the manuscript. The medal, though, goes to my wife, Susan Segal, a psychotherapist with a keen sense of character and the bestiary of human nature. Lucky is the author with twenty-four-hour psychiatric care!

  Another lucky break as I tried to imagine the Rimbauds’ dairy farm: Much of the book was written in Manns Choice, Pennsylvania, on a farm long owned by my wife’s family. Thanks to Garry Wilkins, a local dairy farmer who answered my many cow questions and, at one point, even let me help “pull” (birth) a calf. I also greatly appreciate the company of my pal Rodney Ferguson, Fred Bisbing, and the other good folks up the hill at the Buffalo Rod & Gun Club.

  Finally, I must acknowledge my mentor and former professor, the distinguished poetry critic Marjorie Perloff. Almost forty years ago, it was Marjorie who placed Wallace Fowlie’s Rimbaud into my hands and even checked off her favorites. What a gift. And what a lifelong influence Marjorie has been—incalculable.

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Anvil Press Poetry: Excerpts from “Openers” from Paul Verlaine: Women/Men, Femmes/Hombres translated by Alistair Elliot. Published by Anvil Press Poetry in 2004. Reprinted by permission of Anvil Press Poetry.

  David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc.: Excerpts from “Lethe” and “Consecration” from Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French by Richard Howard, translation copyright © 1982 by Richard Howard. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc.

  Oxford University Press: Excerpts from Paul Verlaine: Selected Poe
ms translated by Martin Sorrell (1999). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

  Penguin Group (UK): Excerpts from French Poetry, 1820–1950: With Prose Translations selected, translated, and introduced by William Rees, copyright © 1990 by William Rees. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group (UK).

  Random House, Inc.: Excerpts from I Promise to Be Good: Letters from Arthur Rimbaud translated and edited by Wyatt Mason, copyright © 2003 by Wyatt Mason. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  University of California Press: Excerpts from “III. After Three Years” and “VII. To a Woman” from Selected Poems, Bilingual Edition by Paul Verlaine, translated by C. F. MacIntyre, copyright © 1976 by C. F. MacIntyre. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

  University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from Rimbaud: Complete Work, Selected Letters translated by Wallace Fowlie, copyright © 1966, copyright renewed 1994 by Wallace Fowlie. Reprinted by permission of University of Chicago Press.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bruce Duffy is the author of the critically acclaimed The World As I Found It, a fictional life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Last Comes the Egg. His first novel, World, was rereleased this year in the New York Review of Books Classics series. He has reported on such places as Haiti, Bosnia, and Taliban Afghanistan. In researching this book, he also traveled to Rimbaud’s town Harar, and to the still lawless desert tribal lands near Somalia. He has three children, Lily, Kate, and Sam, and he lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Susan Segal, a psychotherapist.