Return to the Dark Valley by Santiago Gamboa

Author:Santiago Gamboa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2017-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

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Although this happened in Paris—modern, cosmopolitan Paris—Europe at the end of the nineteenth century was a straitlaced, intolerant world. The strange, almost marital bond between these two men, who apart from anything else were of widely different ages, was hard to swallow for everyone, even poets.

Even half a century later.

Rimbaud’s principal biographer, Enid Starkie, whom I admire so much, uses terms like “sodomite” to refer to Verlaine, and describes the nights on Rue Campagne-Première as “orgies.” She also says of Verlaine that he is “weak and depraved,” and in mentioning the scandal in Paris speaks of “the most monstrous immorality” (the quotation marks are mine, not hers). Of course, Starkie was writing in the 1940s, not all that long after the events, and she was an Irish Catholic.

The situation is so embarrassing for some critics that, out of admiration for Rimbaud and Verlaine, they have opted to deny it. As if accepting their homosexuality would detract from their genius. But to claim that their relationship was not romantic and sexual is like trying to blot out the sun with one finger, since even among their contemporaries it was common knowledge. Starkie herself quotes a report on the first night of a play by Coppée in which another writer, Lepelletier, a friend of Verlaine’s, wrote the following:

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