Authors: Jeremy Reed
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’)
Something of Rimbaud’s youthful desperation is expressed here. His vision was unique. How much time did he have? No one else could create the architectonics of his imagined cities and, as he saw it, no one else could save the world. His responsibility was to re-create the universe through the imagination. Most poets repeat endlessly their descriptions of an inherited world: their poems are about the actually attainable here and now. Rimbaud began by disinheriting all preconceptions. Only after renouncing the temporal world could he set about constructing a poetic future. To do this he had commerce with the past and present. ‘Apres le deluge’ is a magnificent conjugation of myth and reconstructed history.
As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided, a hare stopped in the clover and the undulating flower bells, and said its prayer through the spider’s web to the rainbow.
Oh! the precious stones were hiding — already the flowers looked about them.
In the dirty high street stalls were set up, and boats were hauled down to the sea, piled high as in old prints.
Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s Castle — in the slaughter-houses — in the circuses, where God’s seal whitened the windows. Blood flowed, and milk.
Beavers built. Coffee beakers smoked in the bars.
In the big house, its windows still dripping, children in mourning looked at marvellous pictures.
A door slammed, and, on the village square, a child waved his arms, and was understood by weathervanes and steeple-cocks everywhere, under the abrupt shower.
Madame X installed a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral.
Caravans set out. And the Hôtel Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night.
Since then, the moon has heard jackals howling across thyme deserts, and eclogues in wooden shoes growling in the orchard. Then, in the violet budding grove, Eucharis told me it was spring.
Rise, pond; — foam, pour over the bridge and over the woods; — black drapes and organ music — lightning and thunder, climb up in torrents; — waters and sorrows, rise and induce the Floods.
For since they vanished — oh! the burrowing jewels and the open flowers — we have been bored! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her fire in a clay pot, will never tell us what she knows and what we shall never know.
What Rimbaud creates in the best of
Les Illuminations
is a microcosm, a microstructured novel which depends for its success on dissociated sense connections. Periods of history alternate with immediate sensations in a way that had never been used before in poetry. Rimbaud is not interested in isolating a poetic theme and writing a poem around a subject, rather his poetry moves with the speed of thought. Our inner dialogue is interrupted by apprehending the external world. Rimbaud builds a poetry that advances like a shoal of fish which fans out around an obstruction and then resumes its nervous course. The power of the poet is such that he can suspend history. It is ‘the idea of the Flood’ which subsides rather than the deluge, and that event eliminated, the real happening can take place in inner space. The hare says its prayer ‘through the spider’s web to the rainbow’. It is the hare’s dynamic action which creates a new world and makes the old story of the flood seem tame by comparison. Everything in Rimbaud’s poetry is energized; inertia is his enemy. Things happen fast: ‘Blood flowed’, ‘Beavers built’, ‘A door slammed’, ‘Caravans set out’. Novellas are suggested by single lines: ‘Madame X installed a piano in the Alps.’ And what of ‘the Hôtel Splendide’ which was built ‘in the chaos of ice and polar night’?
Part of Rimbaud’s frustration, which manifests itself to the full in
Une saison en enfer
, is brought about by the realization that poetry always withholds the irresolvable. The field set up by a poem is a diversification rather than a narrowing of focus. One metaphor creates another. The poet’s despair is that these outriders set up alternative truths which in turn deflect from the poet’s original aim. Rimbaud’s fist cracks open to release diamonds, rubies, emeralds. They scatter and lodge where their individual trajectories cease. The images become incrustations; minerals in schist. And what does the poet do? Piss in the street. Imagine that everything will come all right in the end. Space out on drugs because the dream moves at a speed which is irreversible. Or sit there waiting? Waiting for the vision to replace reality, so that the jump out of the window is into the landscape of the poem.
Rimbaud, for all his tenacious independence and rebellion against domestic strictures, needed Verlaine as security. Because much of his correspondence was destroyed, we do not know a great deal about Rimbaud’s private response to the life he was living in London. We can only piece it together from his poems, and poetry obeys a truth quite different from that of the life which conceives it. All we know is that by the beginning of December 1872 change was imminent. Verlaine wrote to Lepelletier: ‘This week, Rimbaud must go back to Charleville and my mother is coming here.’
Verlaine faced personal ruin in France. The accusations of homosexuality were sufficient to ruin his literary career. He remained the victim of an insoluble dilemma. Part of him desired a reconciliation with his wife, while the rebel in him delighted in the notoriety that came of his relationship with Rimbaud. Still another part of him gravitated towards alcoholic dissolution and the dormant solitude attendant on heavy, unsociable drinking.
It must all have seemed unreal. So much had happened to Rimbaud in so short a time. He had abandoned his studies, renounced his home, offended the literati in Paris, lived through long nights of alchemical vigilance, experienced a ferocious relationship with an older, married man. He had tramped across roads, starved and fetched up in a foreign city. He had remained true to his belief that the visionary poet must disintegrate in order to reintegrate as the alchemical conjunctio. His hands were most likely caked with dirt. He had no change of clothes. What he ate he stole — milk bottles from doorways, fruit from street-barrows; but he could always afford bread. He had used his body as a biochemical experiment for drugs. He had written a poetry so far in advance of his contemporaries, he was already willing to accept that it was unpublishable. His papers and manuscripts were in custody, and Verlaine’s wife and parents-in-law had no intention of letting them go. He was only just eighteen. What did life want of him and he of it? Poetry had in part failed him. He had expected to see in the external world some of the changes realized in his poetry. Why was everything so painfully slow? The poetic line was fast, immediate. In his poetry he had sent out assassins into the world. `Voici le temps des ASSASSINS.’ And in the same poem, ‘Matinée d’ivresse’, he had written: ‘Nous avons foi au poison. Nous savons donner notre vie tout entière tous les jours.’ (‘We believe in poison. We know how to give all of ourselves every day.’) These lines are a long way from the inspired sentiments of youth. This is the conviction of someone willing to risk ‘poison’ or hallucinogenes in the interests of higher truth. And the words of someone who knew how to give himself completely to his art, and to expend that sacrifice each day.
Blood on the wall, enamel from a chipped tooth. — It is Verlaine’s.
A blue bruise spreading beneath the eye. — It is Rimbaud’s.
A glass smashed on the floor. — It is anyone’s.