Delirium (13 page)

             
There is reason to believe that both Verlaine and Rimbaud had become seriously disturbed in the course of their relationship. Their injurious knife fights, their respective states of intoxication — Verlaine blind drunk on absinthe and Rimbaud spaced out on drugs, or drugs and liquor combined — had created a legacy of estrangement and mutual friction. Now the storm was about to break. Verlaine still wanted something. If it wasn’t homicide, then it had to be an act of demonstrative violence. Was he trying to prove to his mother that he was a reluctant homosexual? A gun is also by metaphorical extension a phallus. There is nothing more counterproductive to sexual performance than constant inebriation. Verlaine had an infallible substitute, a weapon that would not become flaccid, and one that could kill. And no one thought to disarm him.

             
Rimbaud meanwhile had decided he would return to Roche and not Paris. He had just suffered the deep trauma of being shot. He wanted to go home, to be amongst familiar things, to be with his mother. Verlaine’s mother gave him the twenty francs for the journey. She must already have feared legal recriminations. Madame Rimbaud was not likely to accept the calculated mendacity that her son had been shot accidentally. Why did Verlaine have a gun, anyhow? Wouldn’t any mother ask that question? Things were fraught, tetchy; the air crackled with tension. Rimbaud was in a state of paranoid fear. This madman might level the gun at his eyes and blast him through his head. Whatever was fuelling Verlaine was still injecting red-hot adrenalin into his system.

             
They began their walk to the station. Verlaine would be left with nothing. He knew Rimbaud would never come back, that this time things had gone too far. It would be better if they were both dead, but the same old problem arose. Verlaine needed the satisfaction of knowing what he had done. He couldn’t count on that in death. The volitional control he had over his life would be extinguished. They continued towards the Gare du Midi. By ten to eight they had reached the Place Rouppe. Verlaine was running out of time. The clock hands were suddenly attached to his heart. They would remain fixed there. He took the gun out of his pocket, vehemently, maniac-ally, and shouted to Rimbaud that he was going to blow his brains out. Rimbaud jumped to one side and took off in the direction of the nearest policeman and implored help. ‘He wants to kill me,’ he shouted, pointing at Verlaine.

             
Verlaine was arrested and taken to the central police station at the Hôtel de Ville. Rimbaud, who was in a state of fever as a result of the bullet still lodged in his wrist, was admitted into hospital the following day and stayed there a week suffering from exhaustion.

             
DELIRIUM. The imploded had built to an external explosion. The hysterical nature of their relationship had been revealed to the world through a bullet. What was private, dangerously precarious in its lethal potential, had through an impassioned action entered the public domain. Verlaine was being held on a charge of attempted murder, a sentence which would later be commuted owing to Rimbaud’s evidence in court and his desire to drop all criminal charges. But the scandal had broken. Rimbaud was only eighteen. He had lived so fast, so intensely, and now he had to face an interrogation by authorities convinced from the start of his homosexual relations with Verlaine.

             
Unable to leave his bed, because of the high fever from which he was suffering, Rimbaud was visited by the examining magistrate. What we know of the emotional turbulence of his brief encounter with Verlaine in Brussels comes from the evidence given in his statement.

Q: On what did you live in London?

R: Largely on the money that Madame Verlaine sent to her son. We also gave French lessons together, but t
hese brought in practically nothing. Perhaps twelve francs a week, towards the end.

Q: Are you aware of the reasons for the dissension between the accused and his wife?

R: Verlaine didn’t want his wife to continue living with her parents.

Q: Did she not list your intimacy with Verlaine as the cause for separation?

R: Yes, she accuses us of immoral relations, but I shall not even bother to contradict such calumny.

              The bullet was extracted on 17 July. On 19 July Rimbaud, fearing the severe sentence that would be imposed on Verlaine, made an act of renunciation. He declared that he was convinced that when Verlaine purchased the weapon he had no criminal intentions, and that the latter’s action was the result of intoxication. But the revocation was unsatisfactory and came too late. Verlaine was brought before the court on 28 July and again on 8 August. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of two hundred francs. Rimbaud stayed on in Brussels to hear the verdict and then made his way back on foot to Roche. He was shattered. Lack of nutrition and proper care meant that his wrist was still painful. Paterne Berrichon tells us that he was led by police to the border and tramped back to Roche.

             
Everything must have been blown up to huge proportions, in his mind: Verlaine’s face, the sound of the gunshots reverberating in his head, the blood streaming from his wrist on to the floor. To get back and write about it was the only way he could elucidate his journey through the visionary hells. He had survived the physical experience, now he had to resume battle with the hallucinated fire he had lit in April. It was raging; and his book would be called
Une saison en enfer
.

*

Chapter Five

Torrid dog-days. The air siccative, the Ardennes unrelieved — a sky in which each oblong white cloud appeared as a messenger from the real world. Rimbaud’s hand was bandaged, his arm in a sling. The hole in his wrist, like that in the young soldier’s side in ‘Le Dormeur du val’, was a fierce reminder of the shaman’s mortality. It was a symbolic wound. The external could encroach on the internal; the incursion had marked him. A wound is a tear in the cosmic seam. Rimbaud was split open to the world. He had once again to retaliate by way of a defensive, and
Une saison en enfer
was his weapon.

             
Rimbaud’s papers had been confiscated by the Belgian police. We do not know how much of the origins of
Une saison en enfer
was lost; we shall never know Rimbaud’s entire poetic output. He did not care to collect it, and his life was itinerant. We have to imagine it, and the books he may have written are the ones we are still hoping to write. Ultimate vision, ultimate audacity, ultimate temerity. The poet as one who takes on the unknown. Octavio Paz says: ‘Poetry either leaps into the unknown or it is nothing.’

             
Shock induces a state of dissociation, disorientation. Rimbaud was out of it on his return to Roche. His past had exploded into flames, his present was intolerable and the anticipation of the future demanded that he change his life. What he suffered from was exposure. You cannot disguise a wound or the questions it provokes. Nor can you escape from a small family on a farm in Roche. There were eyes everywhere at the table. His mother’s, and those of his sisters Vitalie and Isabelle, and those belonging to his brother Frederic. They were busy with the harvest. It was live or die — the vocabulary of the land. There was hay to be brought in, there were corn sheaves to be gathered. But his wound kept him apart. It argued for the sanctuary he needed in order to write. In the journal that Vitalie kept, she noted: ‘My brother Arthur did not participate in the farm work; he found sufficient occupation with his pen to prevent him sharing in our manual labours.’

             
Rimbaud needed to be alone. Was he not engaged in writing a poem that oscillated between the immediacy of experience and the refutation of the confessional mode in which he had cast his poem? He had discovered a method of detonating the line. His images flashed with a high nervous charge. It was like being shot again each time he found the right image.

             
It was dark inside the barn. He could smell the sweat on his unwashed clothes. The sunlight chinked as tangible gold threads on the straw. His metabolism was in revolt. There were neither drugs nor alcohol to hand at the farm. Words were the only means of stabilizing his craziness. That or shouting out his pain. And he had known so much: his life had been exceptional for an eighteen-year-old. And at the time of writing he must have thought that his experience would prove of vital concern to readers, even if they were shocked by his revelations. Anyhow, there was nothing else to do but write: no distractions, no friends, a blankly inhospitable landscape.

             
And this time his poetic rage was tempered by compassion. Had he not after all put his friend and lover in prison, after their volatile hysteria had got out of hand, and had he not ruined his life? His relationship with Verlaine was a talking-point in Paris and had now reached an epic of scandal. And yet he had not wanted all this. It must have wrung tears from his eyes as the heat furnaced in the barn.

             
Some things just happen. You do not want them to and when you find yourself involved it is more like being a spectator to the action. You are still the same person when you walk away from an irrevocable blaze of temper. This one had involved a gun and his metacarpus. It had become public because Verlaine could not extinguish the incitement to violence. Either the gun had had to explode or his head would have. The shooting must have brought some relief, but not sufficient to curtail his homicidal impulse. If Verlaine had shot again, it would have been to kill. Rimbaud knew that. His hands shook while he wrote. The book he was writing would add some justification to his existence. He had transported it around in his head in London and Brussels, and now it would find completion in an isolation so magnified he might have been the last of his species left on earth. He could throw his visions against the cracked walls. Was he not after all confined like a madman to a cell?

             
Rimbaud’s alchemical journey through hell, entering by the unconscious or nigredo and living within the fermenting fragmentation of his psyche, is couched in terms of the irreconcilable conflict between good and evil. Light and dark. Rimbaud’s individuation rejects the circumscribed imposition of monotheism. His torment demanded search, an ongoing journey involving the excavation of inner space. He was terrified; but he had still to affirm the poet’s vision as the ultimate realization of imaginative truth. And at mealtimes he remained silent. What could he say to anyone about his discoveries? His mind was still full of Verlaine, who was now undergoing the deprivation of prison life.

             
He, Rimbaud, had been driven into hiding like an animal. Humiliated by the court and the police, he had to lie low. He was marked for what they considered to be a sexual aberration. Might they not come for him at any time, raise up the farm at night and march him off handcuffed? There was a price to pay for originality. Society seeks retribution from those who differ.

             
Full of contradictions and antinomies,
Une saison en enfer
is a sounding-board for all those caught up by the tide of modernity, the questioning, the scattered, the lost and above all those whose human urgency searches for a psychological meaning to life. Rimbaud attempts to break the closed circuit of life and death; he is concerned with attaining the impossible. He is both willing and reluctant to let go his hold on life and poetry. In `L’Eclair’ he writes:

             
What can I do? I know what work entails; and science moves too slowly. I see clearly that prayer gallops and light thunders... I see it clearly. It is too simple, and too unbearably hot; they will do without me. I have my duty, and I shall be proud of it in the way of several others, by putting it aside.

             
My life is worn out. Come! let’s pretend, let’s be idle, o pity! And we shall exist by amusing ourselves, by dreaming of monstrous loves and fantastic universes, complaining and quarrelling with the world’s appearances, clown, vagrant, artist, bandit — priest! On my hospital bed, the smell of incense came back to me so strong; keeper of the sacred aromatics, confessor, martyr...

             
In that I recognize my filthy upbringing. But what of it!... I’ll let go my twenty years, if the others do likewise...

             
No! no! at present I revolt against death. Work seems too slight to my pride: my betrayal to the world would be too brief a torment. At the last moment I would attack right and left...

              The contradictions are never resolved, and the poem represents the experience of living out the conflict between belief and disbelief in the validity of poetic expression. Rimbaud’s poem has no subject in the sense of preconceiving a condition about which he will write. Its involvement is with immediacy and not detachment. The poem progresses according to the dictates of his psyche. It is a poem about an inner wound, and that wound is the realization that the poet has no place on earth. Capitalist ethics and nations concerned with the belligerent dominance of empires have no room for prophetic speech, oneiric journeys, the celebration of shamanism. Rimbaud’s poem discovers the unrestrainable terror that has become translated into massive wars and racial persecution in the twentieth century.

             
It took an eighteen-year-old to do this, in a region so backward they might have stoned him for his discoveries. Rimbaud, and before him Lautréamont, was preparing the way for Freud and Jung. Together they detonated what has come to be the fall-out of the unconscious. Their powerful images remained constellated in inner space, awaiting the more clinical vocabulary that psychology was to give to the inner narrative.

             
Just another day. Heat. Boredom. Unaccountable mania. And although his wound had healed, a sort of shadow blood remained prominent in Rimbaud’s mind. The orgasmic heat of his love for Verlaine had turned into an unalchemized, scalding reminder of his mortality — the red streamers chasing down his wrist and forming dark stars on the hotel floor. ‘Hard night! The dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing behind me but that twisted tree!... Spiritual combat is as brutal as the battle of men; but the vision of justice is God’s pleasure alone.’

             
Rimbaud’s greatness lies in the fact that he went unprotected. He had nothing between him and madness but a sheet of paper. And who would understand? He knew that he was writing for future generations, sacrificing his ego for its dispersal into the collective unconscious. His work would arrive one day, but who would he be then and where would he be? Not here but over there in the ambiguity of whatever death means.
Une saison en enfer
is not only a farewell to poetry but a valediction to life.

             
Rimbaud never made concessions; the idealism of his youth — and he had believed absolutely in the redemptive faculty of poetry — had met with formidable opposition. At an age of expansive trust he had met with betrayal. It had started with his mother, at school even Izambard had expressed incomprehension, the poetic consensus in Paris had rejected him, and now the law had interposed between him and Verlaine.

             
And how has it changed? Poets may have scuttled into adopting the role of respectable bureaucrats or academics, thereby diluting their art, but the committed poet has ranged wide of these capitulations to the State and still faces the same vulnerability, the same risk, the same angular profile presented to a society seeking the round-shouldered figure of conformity.

             
Rimbaud’s
Une saison en enfer
generates black gold. He is suspicious of the substance he has delivered. Alchemical birth involves psychophysical convulsions: delirium. The inner heat and the outer. The athanor and the golden lions of the sun. Rimbaud’s pains were burns, scald-marks on his cells.

             
And in ‘Nuit de l’enfer’ Rimbaud pronounces the physical torture involved in his mystic discoveries. He has to transmute the poison within him to potable gold.

I have swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison. — Three times blessed be the idea that came to me! — My entrails are burning. The poison’s violence racks my limbs, deforms me, throws me to the ground. I am dying of thirst, I am choking, I cannot cry out. This is hell, the eternal torment! Look how the fire rises! I am burning as I should. Come on, demon!

              Rimbaud’s encounter is that of a dervish or epileptic; one who is transported by violent physical contortion to extreme states of altered consciousness. And Rimbaud is describing a condition known and suffered. There is never exaggeration in his writing, only the realization of truth. And the getting there is always by way of the volatile present. The past is valuable to him only in so much as it intensifies the immediate. Otherwise it is dead. His is a new poetics, one that ruthlessly comments on mental and physical pain as a subject-matter which finds corroboration in the external world.

             
But he was writing with the awareness that he might never return to poetry. What was there to take him back? In three adolescent years he had achieved what no other poet had man-aged to do before him, and that is to make a poetry out of experience which might have been considered deranged or a subject for psychopathology. Neither Tasso, Hölderlin, Nerval, Baudelaire nor any of the English Romantics had dared translate madness into poetry. If they wrote about breakdown, or mental estrangement as in the case of Clare and Smart, it was with the detachment of perceiving an imbalance objectively. Rimbaud differs in that he creates a poetry out of a deranged state of mind without any such qualification. He is the least compromising poet in the history of poetry.

             
The hallucinations are innumerable. In truth it has always been the matter with me: no faith in history, a blank drawn over principles. I shall not enumerate on this: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am a thousand times the richer, let me be as avaricious as the sea.