visionaries. Lautréamont had already risked more than Rimbaud was to take on; his extremes broke with everything, while Rimbaud proved reluctant to sever his poetry from Catholic symbolism. Rimbaud could have starved. Less than a year before his arrival in Paris, the Goncourts had noted in their journal that a servant in a food queue was there to buy for his restaurateur employer ‘cats at six francs, rats at one franc, and dog-flesh at one franc fifty, the pound’. Rimbaud would probably have eaten rat with sadistic relish.
And far from showing deference to the Parnassians, Rimbaud outwardly manifested his contempt for their limitations. Coppée, Mendès, Heredia, Banville, Blémont, Valade — they had no purchase on Rimbaud’s genius. They regarded him as satanic. ‘Satan in the midst of the doctors’ is how Léon Valade described Verlaine’s young protégé with his blue eyes, red face and big hands and feet. They would gladly have seen the back of him, that upstart who wished to demolish their inveterate alexandrines. Nor had they any intention of publishing Rimbaud; he was quickly being consigned to the mental desert which in time was to become a physical reality.
A contributory factor to Rimbaud’s psychological detachment from reality — he always lived on the outside — was the inherent cruelty in his nature, a side of him which was to feed mercilessly on Verlaine’s indecisive character. Henri Mercier remembered seeing Rimbaud outside a theatre, concealed amongst the coach-horses, intently blowing smoke into one of the animal’s nostrils. And this act was not intended as a joke; Rimbaud had singled out an animal in order to torment it maliciously. Later on he would do the same to Verlaine with a knife. Poetic commitment and the nervous charge generated by writing often create in poets the need for weird, unstabilizing compensations. Creative energy is rarely bivalent in its dualistic properties; it is nearly always ambivalent. The poet in receipt of inspiration may well react by attempting to subvert his gift. He may adopt a way of life that appears negative as a deliberate challenge to the source that involuntarily fuels his work.
Rimbaud quickly became an itinerant lodger, sleeping on floors, making do with whatever was offered him for a night, a week or a month. It was not until Verlaine paid for Rimbaud to have a room in the Rue Campagne Première that he occupied an independent address. It was here that he was able to pursue his belief in the systematic derangement of the senses, for he now lived in a permanent state of intoxication, either stoned on hashish or blind drunk on absinthe in the cafés of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Rimbaud called absinthe ‘that sage of the glaciers’, and his natural violence was undoubtedly exacerbated by excesses.
Verlaine also became violent under the influence of absinthe; but his reasons for getting drunk were very different from those of Rimbaud, for Verlaine saw alcohol as an anaesthetic for his tortured sexuality, whereas for Rimbaud it was a stimulant to incite hallucinated vision. Verlaine would return home to Mathilde after a night’s drinking and beat her black and blue. He split her lip, set fire to her hair, and was the more enraged by her passive behaviour, her pacific response to his emotional and physical savagery. Mathilde knew it was not Verlaine who was beating her, but Rimbaud. It was the mockery Rimbaud made of Verlaine’s relationship, and the violence with which he contested it, that were projected into Verlaine’s compacted fists, his obscene mouth. Rimbaud’s derisive voice must have reverberated in his head.
Again, it was the element of sadism in Rimbaud that appeased itself by instigating Verlaine’s domestic ruin. Young as he was, Rimbaud could discern Verlaine’s weaknesses, and the sado-sexual
And far from showing deference to the Parnassians, Rimbaud outwardly manifested his contempt for their limitations. Coppée, Mendès, Heredia, Banville, Blémont, Valade — they had no purchase on Rimbaud’s genius. They regarded him as satanic. ‘Satan in the midst of the doctors’ is how Léon Valade described Verlaine’s young protégé with his blue eyes, red face and big hands and feet. They would gladly have seen the back of him, that upstart who wished to demolish their inveterate alexandrines. Nor had they any intention of publishing Rimbaud; he was quickly being consigned to the mental desert which in time was to become a physical reality.
A contributory factor to Rimbaud’s psychological detachment from reality — he always lived on the outside — was the inherent cruelty in his nature, a side of him which was to feed mercilessly on Verlaine’s indecisive character. Henri Mercier remembered seeing Rimbaud outside a theatre, concealed amongst the coach-horses, intently blowing smoke into one of the animal’s nostrils. And this act was not intended as a joke; Rimbaud had singled out an animal in order to torment it maliciously. Later on he would do the same to Verlaine with a knife. Poetic commitment and the nervous charge generated by writing often create in poets the need for weird, unstabilizing compensations. Creative energy is rarely bivalent in its dualistic properties; it is nearly always ambivalent. The poet in receipt of inspiration may well react by attempting to subvert his gift. He may adopt a way of life that appears negative as a deliberate challenge to the source that involuntarily fuels his work.
Rimbaud quickly became an itinerant lodger, sleeping on floors, making do with whatever was offered him for a night, a week or a month. It was not until Verlaine paid for Rimbaud to have a room in the Rue Campagne Première that he occupied an independent address. It was here that he was able to pursue his belief in the systematic derangement of the senses, for he now lived in a permanent state of intoxication, either stoned on hashish or blind drunk on absinthe in the cafés of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Rimbaud called absinthe ‘that sage of the glaciers’, and his natural violence was undoubtedly exacerbated by excesses.
Verlaine also became violent under the influence of absinthe; but his reasons for getting drunk were very different from those of Rimbaud, for Verlaine saw alcohol as an anaesthetic for his tortured sexuality, whereas for Rimbaud it was a stimulant to incite hallucinated vision. Verlaine would return home to Mathilde after a night’s drinking and beat her black and blue. He split her lip, set fire to her hair, and was the more enraged by her passive behaviour, her pacific response to his emotional and physical savagery. Mathilde knew it was not Verlaine who was beating her, but Rimbaud. It was the mockery Rimbaud made of Verlaine’s relationship, and the violence with which he contested it, that were projected into Verlaine’s compacted fists, his obscene mouth. Rimbaud’s derisive voice must have reverberated in his head.
Again, it was the element of sadism in Rimbaud that appeased itself by instigating Verlaine’s domestic ruin. Young as he was, Rimbaud could discern Verlaine’s weaknesses, and the sado-sexual
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