Delirium by Jeremy Reed

Author:Jeremy Reed [Reed, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2014-03-14T20:00:00+00:00

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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

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