domination of Verlaine. He could paralyse the weaker man by an influx of energy. His Luciferian qualities were infallible. Verlaine’s ‘infernal bridegroom’ (to use Rimbaud’s term, époux infernal ) was capable of slitting his jugular. In Une saison en enfer Rimbaud describes himself through Verlaine’s imagined empathy:
‘...I belong to a distant race: my ancestors were Scandinavians: they used to slash their bodies, drink their own blood. — I want to knife my body all over, tattoo it, I want to be as hideous as a Mongol: you will see, I shall howl in the streets. I want to become mad with rage. Don’t show me jewels, for I shall crawl and writhe on the carpet. I want my wealth stained with blood. I shall never work... On several nights, his demon seized me, we rolled on the ground, I wrestled with him! — Often at night, drunk, he lay in wait in the streets, or in houses, to scare me to death. — ‘They will really cut my throat; it will be disgusting.’
When Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer , it was as a valediction to poetry. But we can receive this passage as suggestive of the delirious state in which he lived out his visionary quest, and as a portrayal of the tempestuousness of his relationship with Verlaine. Although the latter believed absolutely in Rimbaud’s untutored genius, Ile was at the time resentful that Rimbaud had interposed between him and his wife, and at times of grievance, when the couple lacked money, or were numbed by the cold in squalid London rooms, Verlaine’s emotional scar must have opened. It is then they must have fought physically, Verlaine vehemently accusing Rimbaud of having ruined his life.
Rimbaud seems briefly to have generated the occult energy we associate with fascination. Levi and Crowley possessed it, and so too did Mick Jagger in the late sixties with his adoption of a Lucifer persona when performing songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Midnight Rambler’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’. At the time of the murders and brutal maimings at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Freeway concert in December 1969, the Luciferian character that Jagger was able to project was something of which Rimbaud would have approved. For while the surrealists claimed Rimbaud as their precursor, so too must he be seen as the progenitor of the revolutionary youth who turned music into a social weapon in the sixties. Rimbaud, like Lautréamont, stands on the threshold of the cataclysmic changes which have dominated the twentieth century: the great wars, internal and external, the re-evaluation of the roles played by sex and religion, gender and work, the psychoanalytical interpretation of dream and the collective unconscious, all are anticipated by these two young poets whose vision apprehended a new universe. Rimbaud is always in the background of change. On the day the world ends, his face may well look out from billboards on the freeways. Arthur Rimbaud photographed by Carjat: reincarnated as X: now believed to be living in Beverly Hills. An indestructible survivor.
In the absence of Rimbaud’s correspondence with Verlaine, the one reliable account of his life in Paris, and of the poetic vision to which he aspired, comes from a letter Rimbaud sent Ernest Delahaye in June 1872.
Now, it is at night that I work. From midnight to five in the morning. Last month, my room on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince looked out on a garden of the Lycée St Louis. There were enormous trees under my narrow window. At three in the morning, the candle went pale; all the birds cried at once in the trees: it is over. No more work. I had to look at the trees and the sky, fixated by that indescribable hour, the first in the morning. I could see the lycée dormitories, absolutely still. And already the jerky, sonorous, staccato noise of carts on the boulevards. I smoked my hammer-pipe, sitting on the tiles, for my room was a
‘...I belong to a distant race: my ancestors were Scandinavians: they used to slash their bodies, drink their own blood. — I want to knife my body all over, tattoo it, I want to be as hideous as a Mongol: you will see, I shall howl in the streets. I want to become mad with rage. Don’t show me jewels, for I shall crawl and writhe on the carpet. I want my wealth stained with blood. I shall never work... On several nights, his demon seized me, we rolled on the ground, I wrestled with him! — Often at night, drunk, he lay in wait in the streets, or in houses, to scare me to death. — ‘They will really cut my throat; it will be disgusting.’
When Rimbaud wrote Une saison en enfer , it was as a valediction to poetry. But we can receive this passage as suggestive of the delirious state in which he lived out his visionary quest, and as a portrayal of the tempestuousness of his relationship with Verlaine. Although the latter believed absolutely in Rimbaud’s untutored genius, Ile was at the time resentful that Rimbaud had interposed between him and his wife, and at times of grievance, when the couple lacked money, or were numbed by the cold in squalid London rooms, Verlaine’s emotional scar must have opened. It is then they must have fought physically, Verlaine vehemently accusing Rimbaud of having ruined his life.
Rimbaud seems briefly to have generated the occult energy we associate with fascination. Levi and Crowley possessed it, and so too did Mick Jagger in the late sixties with his adoption of a Lucifer persona when performing songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Midnight Rambler’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’. At the time of the murders and brutal maimings at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Freeway concert in December 1969, the Luciferian character that Jagger was able to project was something of which Rimbaud would have approved. For while the surrealists claimed Rimbaud as their precursor, so too must he be seen as the progenitor of the revolutionary youth who turned music into a social weapon in the sixties. Rimbaud, like Lautréamont, stands on the threshold of the cataclysmic changes which have dominated the twentieth century: the great wars, internal and external, the re-evaluation of the roles played by sex and religion, gender and work, the psychoanalytical interpretation of dream and the collective unconscious, all are anticipated by these two young poets whose vision apprehended a new universe. Rimbaud is always in the background of change. On the day the world ends, his face may well look out from billboards on the freeways. Arthur Rimbaud photographed by Carjat: reincarnated as X: now believed to be living in Beverly Hills. An indestructible survivor.
In the absence of Rimbaud’s correspondence with Verlaine, the one reliable account of his life in Paris, and of the poetic vision to which he aspired, comes from a letter Rimbaud sent Ernest Delahaye in June 1872.
Now, it is at night that I work. From midnight to five in the morning. Last month, my room on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince looked out on a garden of the Lycée St Louis. There were enormous trees under my narrow window. At three in the morning, the candle went pale; all the birds cried at once in the trees: it is over. No more work. I had to look at the trees and the sky, fixated by that indescribable hour, the first in the morning. I could see the lycée dormitories, absolutely still. And already the jerky, sonorous, staccato noise of carts on the boulevards. I smoked my hammer-pipe, sitting on the tiles, for my room was a
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