Delirium (9 page)

             
Paper crackled into a ball and singed. — It is Rimbaud’s.

             
An addressed envelope shredded. — It is Verlaine’s.

             
The half-eaten baguette. — It is stolen.

             
The anger padding like thunder. — It is both of them.

             
The hysterical shriek. — It is Verlaine’s.

             
The stolen money on the bed. — It is Rimbaud’s.

             
The delirious scene in the mirror. — It is both of them.

             
And a fist banging on the door. — It is the police.

             
Let us invent a little story. It is late November 1872. Most biographers agree that Rimbaud returned to Charleville in December and went back to London in January 1873, after receiving a suicidal letter from Verlaine, who claimed to be desperately ill and dying of ‘grief, sickness, boredom, desertion’. Rimbaud knew Verlaine to be lachrymose, moribund and stupefied by liquor. We do not know if Rimbaud embarked on writing
Une saison en enfer
immediately on his return to Charleville. It seems more likely that he worked on it during his Easter stay and again in the incandescent months — July and August.

             
In my story Rimbaud visited the underground on his way back to Charleville. He was travelling light, as always. Books and paper stuffed into his misshapen coat, his drugged eyes looking for signs in the milling crowd. Who were they, the endless stream of faces pouring up the stairs and into the street? And why was he here and who was he at this moment in time? The prospect of returning home — Charleville was still occupied by the Prussians — brought the same sense of unrelieved despondency as did the idea of continuing with Verlaine in London. He had exchanged his mother’s draconian rancour for the drunken, sadistic threats of a man whom he had come increasingly to disrespect. And what was worse, he had realized Verlaine’s poetic limitations. This man would never become a seer. He did not even have the courage to drink the blood from his wounds as Rimbaud did. And, anyhow, the police were on to them, not only for Verlaine’s activities with the Communards but for the apparent nature of their relationship.

             
Rimbaud lingered in the corridor before descending into the black pit beneath London. He was cold. His boots had taken in water. He was hungry. Ravaged by drugs, he had gone for days without being aware of the necessity to eat. His money permitted nothing more than his train and ferry. Now that the hash had worn off, he would eat anything. His fingers, his toes. There were tramps begging at the entrance to the station. He was poorer than they. Who cared for his light, his inestimable inner riches? And he was by this time no stranger to derelicts. He had slept out often enough to know their camaraderie in the countryside. They were men who had fallen through a hole in their lives and had no intention of returning to the society that had disowned them.

             
As Rimbaud lingered, a well-dressed man in a cashmere topcoat brushed against him. The man’s reaction was one of disdain. It was as though he felt that the slightest contact with the poor carried with it disease. Rimbaud cursed the man in French. `Merde! Cochon!’ He would like to have run after him and thrown lice at the man’s collar. What did they know, these arrogant, bellicose men whose machinations bled the natives all over the world under the euphemism of Empire? Indigenous cultures were eradicated in the name of their sanctimonious monotheism. Rimbaud spat.

             
There was someone who kept moving into his orbit — now here, now there, now gone again. Rimbaud had seen his face once. He was not sure if it was a Negro boy or girl; the person had dyed his hair blond to accentuate his mulatto features. Had he not encountered this young man at the docks? But he could not get off with him, as Verlaine was in a menacing mood. And the attraction was not sexual. It was something else. This man was the embodiment of his dream of the androgyne. And again he was something else. He represented a twisted beauty. It was as though he knew all things without ever having experienced them. He had seen oceans, white coves, foreign ports, places where he had gone ashore with-out knowing their geographical names. The scent of lemons, mangoes, the gulf breaking into flower; he had been to those countries that Rimbaud had visited in poems. His mouth was sensual, his hands bony. He too lived on the outside of life. There was no place for him in the centre; he had to keep to edges.

             
He was just standing there, his mouth open on nothing. He could not even articulate his need. Rimbaud kept thinking he had hallucinated the man into being. He was floating rather than standing with his back to the wall, an empty palm extended into the air.

             
When he went up to the image, it was real. The boy’s hand tightened over his wrist. And then the light was coming at them as they went back up the stairs to the street — the cold, blue December light with its industrial reek. This slim young man led him quickly through alleys, through a blue door into a yard and up a flight of rickety stairs. He admitted them into a single room. It was bare. There was no heating, only a mattress on the floor, a huddle of blankets, a green macaw standing on a perch. There was a hookah on the floor, and the room smelt acrid.

             
They stood there shivering. There was light in this man. Rimbaud could feel its radial points in his hands, in his eyes. The Negro said: ‘I know who you are.’ And Rimbaud replied: ‘I know who you are.’ The sound of the street filled in their silence.

             
‘Livre neġre’ flashed up in Rimbaud’s mind. It was a confirmation. All of his anger, his compassion, his conflicting sexuality, his poverty came to the surface. This stranger had sprung the book on him. It would be his valediction to poetry, and also his celebration of its dynamic. Life would never come right. Poetry in the end was always expendable, no matter that it operated as an undercurrent which changed the world. Rimbaud was ill and tired. He had found this one person who recognized his identity. He had no more than an hour to express his vision of the future, and this time words were not necessary. He could still make his train connection to the ferry. Light hardly filtered through the closed curtains. Both of them wanted it like that.

*

Chapter Four

The year 1873 was to prove the most intensive, cataclysmic and combustively creative period of Rimbaud’s short-lived allegiance to poetry. It was a time of drug addiction and unsupervised withdrawal, a time of the irreparable fragmentation of his relationship with Verlaine, a time of brief hope that
Une saison en enfer
would explode across the literary scene, and as we know it, a time of disillusionment with poetry and an abandonment of his programme to derange his senses systematically.

             
Baudelaire called it ‘le guignon’ — bad luck, a leakage into the system which irreversibly poisons. Something had got into Rimbaud. The overwrought attunement of his nerves, sensitized to make of sensation a heightened reading of the world, was slackening their tension. He must often have been at breaking-point, but pride prevented him from saying so. Self-laceration was so deeply ingrained in him that he internalized pain as still another stage towards visionary experience.

             
And he was facing the addict’s continuous crisis; not only how to get the money to pay for drugs, but where to get the stuff. He must have taken a supply with him from London, and using up that quantity of opium and hashish may well have precipitated his sudden return to the capital on 12 January, far more so than Verlaine’s lachrymose threat that he would kill himself if he continued his solitary suffering in London. Verlaine’s mother may have taken her son seriously, but Rimbaud had experienced sufficient of his friend’s emotional crises to know that this was simply another false alarm. But with the fifty francs sent him by Verlaine’s mother, another escape from the constrictions of Charleville became possible.

             
Pierre Petitfils, in his biography
Rimbaud
, has drawn our attention to how both men were shadowed by the police in London, their political beliefs being as suspect as the nature of their relationship. On 26 June 1873, a note was transmitted to the Paris police prefecture which read: ‘A liaison of a strange kind links the former employee of the Prefecture of the Seine (who remained at his post during the Commune), sometime poet on the Rappel, a M. Verlaine, and a young man who often comes to Charleville, and who, under the Commune, was a member of the Paris francs-tireurs, young Raimbault [
sic
]. M. Verlaine’s family is so sure of the authenticity of this degrading fact that they are basing part of their ‘case for a separation on this point.’

             
Of course they could not even get Rimbaud’s name right, but the certainty that he and Verlaine were living together in a homosexual liaison carries a distinctly sinister undercurrent. Given that another police report, dated 1 August 1873, states that ‘These two individuals fought and tore at one another like wild beasts, just for the pleasure of making it up afterwards’, it is surprising that they were never investigated and arrested. Other occupants of the houses in Howland Street and Royal College Street must have overheard their violent physical quarrels and likewise their love-making. That their relationship evaded prosecution is peculiar in itself, and even when Verlaine was eventually sentenced for shooting Rimbaud through the wrist, there was no attempt to establish a prosecution case on the charge of sodomy. Verlaine was examined by the Belgian police and considered to have been involved in both active and passive sodomy just prior to his arrest; but the case did not pivot on this suppositional incriminating evidence.

             
In the period between January and April 1873, before Rimbaud returned to Charleville, he must have continued with the writing of
Les Illuminations
. In ‘Enfance’ he writes with the disorientation that comes of poetic delirium conflicting with the metabolic fluctuations contingent on drugs. The resultant clash and intermittent symbiosis give rise to an imagery that ignites with the combustion of petroleum. The poet’s room becomes a subterranean gallery. A basement is a hypogeum and finally a room in space — the idea of a room.

Let them rent me this tomb, whitewashed with lines of cement in relief— deep underground.

             
I lean my elbows on the table, the lamp throws a bright light on newspapers and absurd books which I am foolish enough to reread.

             
At an enormous distance above my subterranean room, houses grow like plants, and fogs gather. The mud is red or black. Monstrous city, endless night!

             
Not so high up are the sewers. At my side, the breadth of the globe. Perhaps azure pits, wells of fire. It is perhaps at these levels moons and comets, seas and fables meet.

             
In my depressed hours, I imagine sapphire and metal balls. I am master of silence. Why should the appearance of an aperture turn pale at the corner of the ceiling?

              Poetry, when its direction is flighted, when the connections made succeed by the logic of dissociation, rather than through the need to qualify individual constituents by reason, is a force that excites one’s expectation of contact with the marvellous.

             
Rimbaud suggests a universe on each outgoing breath. In his mind he is in a whitewashed, subterranean room. What is that room really like? You cannot get into someone’s head to find that out, and he can tell you only by means of the visual image. The narrator here anticipates existential absurdity. Newspapers and meaningless books kill time; they are a sedative against what man fears most — the unlimited duration of the future. Above him is the red and black mud of the city, but before he can reach the surface there are the substrata of the imagination to be encountered. Inner space informs the poet of azure pits and flaming wells. Everything is possible there — ‘moons and comets, seas and fables meet’. There is a compensation to be derived from creative depression, in that it often has the imagination realize an alternative world. Rimbaud imagines new planets, ‘sapphire and metal balls’. And given the freedom of inner space, he is paranoid about external intrusions. What is going on out there while the poet is concentrated upon himself? Even the smallest thing takes on menacing proportions. ‘Why should the appearance of an aperture turn pale at the corner of the ceiling?’ When you are on drugs, any random detail that arrests the attention may be magnified into an event of universal significance.
Les Illuminations
is full of these intimations of paranoid stress. The drug is one state of unreality, the poem another, so that at a double remove from externals vulnerability is heightened. The genius of Rimbaud for creating worlds carries with it the corresponding disappointment that he has invented a paper bird rather than one which is going to fly. Ink is absorbed by paper, no matter the imaginative reach of thought. But all the same he challenges those on the outside: ‘Qu’est mon néant, auprès de la stupeur qui vous attend?’ (‘What is my void compared with the stupefaction awaiting you?’) And who would presume to take up that challenge?

             
In ‘Vies’ from
Les Illuminations
Rimbaud exemplifies the characteristics of the omnipotent mage. His claims are similar to those which he was to recount in retrospect in
Une saison en enfer
. Having told us ‘A flight of scarlet pigeons thunders across my thoughts’, he proceeds to magnify his attributes. His writing vindicates his youth — how else could he know so much other than by the acquisition of power through the imagination?

In a loft in which I was shut up when I was twelve, I understood the world, I illustrated the human comedy. In a cellar I learnt history. At a night celebration in a northern city I met all the wives of old painters. In a Paris alley I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent building surrounded by the Orient, I finished my huge work and spent my celebrated retirement. I set fire to my blood. I am released from my duty. I must give up all thought of it. I really am from beyond the grave, and without work.

              The unorthodox manner of achieving knowledge and vision is one calculated to enrage pragmatists. Rimbaud had found in the imagination a faculty that undercut intellectual conventions. Moreover, he speaks as one who is reincarnated — he can remember finishing his immense work in the Orient. The building in which he lived suggests that he was rich then, and poor now. What he gained in another incarnation must be carried on at great suffering to the poet. The gifts carried forward are part of an invisible heritage. They are activated by memory: and recall is one of the chief constituents of the imaginative process.

             
In
Les Illuminations
Rimbaud is all the time telescoping vision into possible fictions that reduce the universe to something containable. Because the imagination is inexhaustibly expansive, the poet has in some way to shoot it down like a low-flying aircraft. And in the process he shoots himself down. He is the blackened survivor who finds himself on a beach at the end of the world. But the place is one he has imagined. There might be a single white villa cut into the cliff; a gold lion standing on the headland, a woman with a swathe of blonde hair playing the piano at the water’s edge. Where is that? For the poet it is a place called home. And it is located in a habitable inner space.

             
Rimbaud gets to the lost country in so many ways. Sometimes it is situated beneath a lake or in the sky, or it becomes specific by reduction. And it is always the visual quality of his work which allows the imaginative to be located in the physical.

When the world has been reduced to a single dark wood for our dazzled eyes — to a beach for two faithful children — to a musical house for our clear understanding — I shall find you.

             
When there is only a single old man left on earth, serene and beautiful, living in unimaginable luxury — I shall be at your feet.

             
When I have realized all your memories, when I am the girl who can bind your hands — I shall suffocate you. (‘Phrases’, op. cit.)

              What Rimbaud possesses is the film-maker’s art. In order to focus on the image, he reduces the world to what can be contained within the poetic lens. There is nothing else for viewing but ‘a single dark wood’, a still that excludes all other detail. And the sequence follows on in a series of frames: ‘a beach for two faithful children’ and then ‘a musical house for our clear understanding’. One: two: three. Each image creates a consecutive microcosm. You can get there in the imagination by easy jumps; and this is how good poetry functions. When the visual landscape becomes peopled, it is with a clearly identified solitary — ‘a single old man’ — who is the sole occupant of Rimbaud’s metaphoric planet. And part of his own insecurity, his search for a father-figure, is evident in his supplication to this man of unimaginable wealth. But having achieved the realization of sharing this last man’s memories, Rimbaud by an abrupt mutation of gender becomes the girl who binds the man’s hands and suffocates him.

             
Rimbaud and Verlaine. Verlaine and Rimbaud. What was happening to them? London and the British Museum; the at-tempt to learn English sufficient for them to teach French to private pupils. Always the need to keep on top of things so as to conceal their respective imbalances. With that in mind, Verlaine wrote to Emile Blémont:

...We are learning English accordingly, Rimbaud and I, in Edgar Poe, in collections of popular songs, in Robertson, etc. etc. And also in shops, bars, libraries. We are gluing up our mouths to aid our pronunciation. Most days we go for long walks into the suburbs and countryside, Kew, Woolwich, etc., for we are familiar with London now. Drury Lane, Whitechapel, Pimlico, Angel, the City and Hyde Park, no longer hold the attraction of the unknown.

              By April, both men had left London. Verlaine, who was still in a state of equivocal emotional turmoil over his wife, went off to stay with an aunt at Jehonville in Belgium. Rimbaud, who was without money and sufficient English for him to remain by himself in London, departed to join his family in Roche. It was still another return in a pattern that did not allow for alternatives. Boredom, a flatland, the iron stove of a mother, a farm at Roche worn to a state of disrepair, and above all the huge isolation, all of these things provided the negative charge that Rimbaud countered by writing
Une saison en enfer
. He arrived at Roche on Good Friday, 11 April. He brought with him no credentials. He had no book to show, no security in life, his relationship had been with a man and so could not be talked about; he was once again penniless. Regarded by his family as a degenerate urchin, how he must have fumed! All they were concerned with was the loss of a stable and barn which had burnt down, and a tenant farmer who had left without paying the rent. Rimbaud’s sister Vitalie recorded his home-coming in her diary: