Interview InterviewAround this same time, at 6:00 p.m. sharp at the Café Procope, there occurred the dreaded interview between Verlaine and Champsaur, the journaliste who had skewered him in La Revue Noire.
Still, where Champsaur was concerned, the review was hardly the sole source of Verlaine’s fury. The fact was, even before the review, Verlaine had been quite jealously aware of Champsaur—painfully so, as only a vain, unsightly man can be. And especially now when the Parisian public regarded the absurdly handsome Champsaur as the model of haute masculinity, sartorial splendor, and splashy social success.
What Verlaine found particularly outrageous was that, even as Champsaur crucified other poets, he had yet to publish his own long-awaited first collection of verse, against which the poets of Paris had long been sharpening their knives. And yet, with no real attainments, and perhaps for that very reason, not only was Champsaur a rising star in the literary world, but he was lionized in the social pages of that pictorial hereafter, the rotogravure, the subject of line drawings, caricatures, and small items noting his presence at some soiree, or some droll comment. Photographs. Caricatures hung in bistros. Good heavens, a minor celebrity at the age of thirty-one!
The curious thing, though, was Verlaine’s own slavish devotion to the society pages—and, it should be added, long before Champsaur’s star rose over the city’s sizzling electric lights. Stuffed in ash cans or lying on tram seats, the rotogravure and the society pages, these moist finds, why, they were like pornography for Verlaine, who could be seen indignantly snapping the pages, quite as if he expected to see his name among the royal, the beautiful, the mighty, or the merely rich. When again he would see mention of “that eligible Champsaur,” “the imperially slim Champsaur,” and, most irritating of all, “Champsaur the ladies’ man.”
Ladies’ man! harumphed Verlaine, giving the pages a good shake.
On the contrary, it was he, the polyamorous Verlaine, who had at his pleasure two ladies and—and—quite openly, numerous other undisguised dalliances. Despite his noble poverty. Despite his unsightliness. Now that, he thought, that was the measure of the true ladies’ man!
As for his public image, Verlaine had created a new persona, in fact a new character—indeed, in all his narcissism and utter self-consciousness, a thoroughly modern character. Really, platonically speaking, a new public Type. Move over, Whitman with your shirtsleeves rolled, pretending, great as you are, to be one of the “toughs”—please. Good for you, Oscar Wilde, rich man playing the velvet-collared aesthete in knee britches and slippers. No, no, Verlaine replied, his persona was that of the bum bohemian artist king—the clowning, brawling, life-mad public crazy, beyond common morality or arrest; a type who summoned, moreover, the deeper, fouler roots of the French character, the rough and the louche, the mob and the guillotine. Indeed, as Verlaine saw it, he was a new kind of man, swimming the rapids of a new era at speeds inconceivable before the mighty mechanization of celebrity.
Down, then, with high culture! Here was the low culture that he and Rimbaud had anticipated, in fact, the same that Rimbaud described years before in A Season in Hell:
I liked stupid paintings, door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, signs, popular engravings, old fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books with bad spelling, novels of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little books from childhood, old operas, ridiculous refrains, naïve rhythms.
True, Baudelaire loved—from afar—the gutter and his trollops but not, heaven forbid, the defiantly crude, the lovingly low, and the aggressively stupid. Low culture, then! Cheap fame. Tin-whistle songs. Sin, sensation, and erotica, all feeding the public’s insatiable fascination with the lives of playboy aristocrats, heiresses, stage beauties, frauds, freaks, hustlers, flash in the pans, and retrograde royals. Then there was the annual Paris art show, always a brawl as far as who got in, followed by howling editorials about these Impressionists, these mad Fauves, replenishing the very swamps that civilization had labored so hard to drain.
It was shameful. It was wonderful. It was Now, this roller-coaster-like descent. And, following Rimbaud’s leap, Paul Verlaine could claim some modicum of credit for the collapse.
See him now, seated at his customary table behind the diamond leaded panes of the Café Procope, in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie in the Quartier Latin. Heaped under layers of fraying wool cured to the condition of pelt, nervously Verlaine awaits Champsaur—with, at his sleeve, the hot green kiss of Dame Absinthe.
A skullcap cuts, Erasmus-like, just above his sodden, squinty eyes. The beard is thin and leonine, the forehead a looming moon, the mouth a single crooked horizontal line as might have been drawn by a somber child on a rainy day. Somebody, obviously. And behold the proof.
For, exiting the loo, here comes Verlaine’s woman—one of the two, actually, Mathilde having long divorced him. This woman is not, heaven forbid, “the other one,” as Verlaine often refers to her. That would be the beastly Odette, a stout, red-headed harridan who beats Verlaine for money, beats him like a dog, just as he used to beat his own dear mother. Poetry at work, mais oui.
But the one who really hurts and touches Verlaine, this is the lady now returning to his table. Mistress Eugénie. Eugénie Krantz, his genie.
Beautiful-ugly, ugly-beautiful Eugénie, glued together like a broken vase, with the diverging nose, the off-plumb eyes, and the tattooing of scars and old stitches. Blurry Eugénie, flickering candle agitated in the breeze. The much-revised Eugénie, who holds Verlaine utterly in thrall, suspended as she is in that vale between beautiful and ugly. Such that Verlaine can never quite decide:
Beautiful?
Or not?
Ugly?
Or not?
Tart mouth, smart mouth. Plush lips whose lush fruit was broken, like fresh grapes, by the rival tarts who, back then, worked the same streets, most of them mothers, some with seven or eight children and a dying parent in one dank room—and a pimp squeezing her, too. Poor old chippies! Eugénie in those days was a seventeen-year-old upstart pouffiasse, a trollop with no children but rich and even royal protectors desperate for her tight pink billfold, her globelike buttocks, and goblet-like breasts. Poor old falling-apart tarts. In Eugénie’s glory days, there was no competing with her man-gripping quim as she galloped yet another gasping client to the finish.
Target the mouth—that was where the black-bonneted old trulls would descend with saps and hat pins and razors, surrounding her like a flock of buzzards, this as Eugénie, hissing like a badger, punched and scratched and bit.
Now thirty-four, bosomy plump, and dark, Eugénie has been some seventeen years on the stroll, an eternity in her profession. But even now, coming down the aisle, as much by her loud scent as by her loitering walk and downward-drawing stare, upon men of all ages and classes, she has the effect of a dog whistle. The delicious shamelessness of her, in the sheeny corsetlike dress, the wicked sharp collar, the bijoux of rings, not to mention the twitching, enterprising black bustle the size of a small trunk. But the hook, the bait, the saucy pudding—this comes with the high-heeled boots with the waxed laces. Laces that crisscross, like stitches, forty-six twisted hooks.
And to think: all this and more Verlaine had for free, baying as he climaxed, Euuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-génie.
Ah, but she is messy, Eugénie. Her talk is reckless, circular, oracular. Words no sooner uttered than they are taken back with a Delphic glare.
“Old toad,” she said, resuming where she had left off before her loo visit, “do you really think, old fool, that in this life you will do better than I? Screw better than I? See clearer than I—do you? Marry me. Then at least you will die in the arms of love and not under the reeking fat wattles of that slut.” Odette, she meant.
“Or your Rimbaud,” she continued, now broadly gesturing over the table. “Another who treated you like shit. Just as you like! So, groveling like a dog, you lick his hand? Obedient to what? To a boy long dead, or certainly so as an artist? Why, then, talk to this Champsaur? So you can torture yourself over what was?”
The old volcano roared to life.
“Assez! You don’t know how it was! What I gave up—willingly—to follow him. I remember, and yes, I did give up everything. Mad? Yes. A fool? Of course. Like rape and ruin, I followed Rimbaud, I did indeed; I followed him into the fires of hell. This, I assure you, they will never know. Or that he gave me sweet, purring caresses—again, the Rimbaud they will never know.”
“Know what, love?” said Eugénie sweetly. “Know!” She smiled, shifting an octave. “What do you recall, you whose mind is like a sieve? Really, my dear Paul, how you write anything is beyond me, for as we both know, you do not think. Unlike Rimbaud. Rimbaud, he died of thinking. Not you, mon petit—”
She broke off.
For here he came, the rodentlike Bibi-la-Purée, followed, in his sleek coat and faultless hat, by the hunter Champsaur, who with a distinct look of shock curtly bowed to Eugénie, then thought better of offering Verlaine his hand. Instead, Champsaur dropped his hat. Then, literary fetishist that he was, he dropped an unblemished green-cloth notebook with R on the cover—R for Rimbaud. Pure provocation.
“Quick, cher maître,” said Champsaur, to break the tension, “the first word that comes into your mind when I say Rimbaud.”
Verlaine grinned, surprised.
“Running. Always running.”
“Bien.” He smiled broadly. “And the second?”
“Destroying—God destroying.”
Eugénie looked up suddenly. In her hand was a sinister-looking implement, a nail file, was it? “Hear me, pretty boy,” she said. “If, in any way, you hurt this man—”
“Madame—”
“—Bitch to you,” said Eugénie, displaying … what? An ice pick? It was. “Go on. Just try to humiliate him again, just try.”
“I—I quite understand.”
Clearly unsettled, Champsaur sat down and opened the green notebook. “And now, cher maître, let us begin with that first word—running.”
On the theme of running—flight, escape—Verlaine told this Champsaur many things, things then new and even revelatory, but he did omit certain details. For example, how, on one of their highly artistic forays fleeing Paris, Verlaine, drunk, of course, and under the boy’s direction, had been forced to raise the necessary funds from his mother. Naturally, for such a sensitive, intimate transaction, Rimbaud waited downstairs, holding his horse, so to speak. Still, the young poet could scarcely have failed to hear the ruckus above him.
“Où est le pognon?” roared Mme. Verlaine’s youngest son, swaying by the fireplace. “Where’s the bloody money?”
Had Rimbaud ventured up those long stairs, he would have seen that his bibulous paramour held in his unsteady hand the choicest of the family vintage. Indeed, he was holding up a jar of brackish fluid, grain alcohol, in which a wee white figure could be seen slowly bobbing, back and forth. Bawling, his mother grabbed for the bottle he held so cruelly over her head.
“Paul Verlaine! Put your brother down!”
“Of course,” he sneered. “When you give me the goddamned money.”
“Stop it, you’re drunk, you’re just upset! Now put poor Pierre down—”
“Down? Down, did you say?”
Smash. Wee Pierre. There he lay on the floor, a lard white tadpole lying in a hairy mass of spawn and broken glass. Which, for Verlaine, after all those boyhood nights praying before these gluey relics—well, it felt so soaring! So liberating! To the point that little brother grabbed the second of the three heirloom jars. Rearing back, he smashed it against the family hearth, then, legs wobbling, pitched over, mesmerized by the starry debris. Well, goddamn. It was little Edith. “Good!” he cried.
“Good riddance, shrimp!”
“Horrid child!” cried Mme. Verlaine, now dancing hysterically. “Paul! Paul Verlaine! Look what you’ve done!”
“Done? You better cough up that money, woman. Think I’m done?”
In his hand, he now had his eldest brother, Bertrand, the size of a pig’s knuckle, easily the most brilliant of the four—could have been a Pasteur. “Christ,” said his little brother, “I need a goddamn drink!” And twisting off the lid, held forth the vile tankard—a brotherly toast!
“Money! Or down he goes! Wee Bertrand! Like an escargot!”
“But just how strong was his hold on you?” asked Champsaur.
“All but irresistible,” replied Verlaine. “And his youth was certainly a large part of it. Consider. He arrives during a time, frankly, of mediocrity with a style and a vision unlike any other. He belongs to no school. He is not another arriviste. No compromises. No emotional entanglements or obligations to his elders. And he had no respect, no fear—none. Compare him with Baudelaire in that regard. Renegade though he was, at least in print, Baudelaire at bottom was a thoroughly craven Christian; in no way was he ready, as Rimbaud was, for hell and damnation.”
“But why did you stay?” asked Champsaur. “I mean why, when virtually everybody else fled. Why you?”
“Because I loved him. I was not competitive; I knew from the start that I was not of his order. Nor were they, any of them, and they all knew it. That was why they hated and feared him. Well,” he sighed, taking a long swallow, “among other reasons.”
“And you say you were not writing?” asked Champsaur.
“That was my other shame. Rimbaud so shocked me—his work so shocked me—that for months, artistically speaking, I was dazed. Had no idea who I was. None.”
“And when did that change?”
Verlaine never hesitated. “Belgium. When Rimbaud ordered me to Belgium.”
“Ordered you?”
“Ordered me. To the front, as it were. Just as if I were a soldier. My wife, Mathilde, was sick, you see. Very sick. So with all good intentions, I went to the druggist to get my wife some medicine. But when I turn the corner, whom do I see but Rimbaud! Who says to me, ‘Come on, we’re leaving for Belgium.’ Just like that. ‘But my wife is ill,’ I told him. ‘I need to bring her medicine.’ ‘Screw your wife,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of hearing you whine about her. Your kid, too. Now, come on, right now.’ ‘But I don’t have a ticket,’ I said. ‘I am your ticket,’ he said. And, Monsieur, with just the clothes on my back, I left.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“But, cher maître,” challenged Champsaur, “your duty to your wife! Your son.”
“ ‘Pick,’ said Rimbaud. ‘Them or me.’ No doubt this sounds shameful, crazy, morally destitute, and I won’t deny it. But honestly, at the time it seemed a higher duty. And had I stayed, I would have missed out on my Belgium poems. My very best. Immortality itself.”
“But, cher maître,” protested Champsaur, clearly horrified, “more important than your wife? Your child?”
No answer. That was his answer.
Verlaine then described the journey, the train to Charleville, then the wagon that took them by night, through the thick fog, to the Belgian border. Verlaine was a Parisian, a poodle—never had he even been in the woods, let alone at night, crossing penniless into another country. And why? For what? he thought, fuming that Rimbaud could not bed down in a nice, dry, charming barn—oh no, he had to pick a damp, smelly barn packed with steaming, stinking cows. Sucking eggs. Drinking from streams. Wiping themselves with leaves.
“But where are we going?” Verlaine demanded the second day, almost weeping, he was so wet and wrung out.
“A la chasse des anges.” Hunting for angels.
“Stop it! This is hopeless! Pointless!”
And it was pointless. For Rimbaud, pointlessness was the very point. But then, the third night, for Verlaine, something shifted as a thick fog descended, fog and soft rain that fell like a spider’s web over his hands and shoulders. He thought of a phrase that Rimbaud had said the night before, “Soft rain falling on the town.” Nothing special. No deep import when he first heard it, but now those six words were like a musical phrase, a talisman, a lure. Fog filled Verlaine’s lungs. Wet shoes. Burrs speckling his trousers. Steaming wet and cold, Verlaine was so hungry and miserable—so overpoweringly lonely—that suddenly he understood what Rimbaud had meant by an “objective” poetry. For suddenly Paul Verlaine wasn’t lost in the fog, he was the fog. Heart beating, he pulled out—like bandages for a wound—a soggy wad of paper and his crumbling pencil. And oddly the fog acted like an eraser, as he realized that the issue wasn’t what to say but rather what not to say in the usual way. Extraneous words fell away, and those that remained gleamed, deeply struck like nails:
Falling Tears
Soft rain falling on the town.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Falling tears in my heart,
Falling rain on the town
Why this long ache,
A knife in my heart?
Or again, the next day, when he overheard the ownerless wind intimating the soul:
Fresh, frail murmur!
Whispers and warbles
Like the sigh
Of grass disturbed …
Like the muffled roll
Of pebbles under moving water.
This soul lost
In sleep-filled lamentation
Surely is ours?
Mine, surely, and yours,
Softly breathing
Low anthems on a warm evening?
“Hats off!” mused Champsaur. “And the musique!”
“Dear, dear,” chided Eugénie, “fawning now, are we?”
“The point,” returned Verlaine, “the point is, with my Brussels poems, in these landscapes—thanks to Rimbaud—I came to that place where the artist vanishes. As he himself vanishes in his prose pieces, his Illuminations.”
“For which he receives no royalties,” broke in Champsaur.
“Assuming Rimbaud would even own the work.”
“Well, he might like the money.”
“The point,” said Verlaine testily, “the point is, Rimbaud wanted these poems, his prose poems, to be crazy and innocent, but most of all innocent, innocent, innocent—that’s what he said. And invisible. Here you have no real sense of the author. No, these poems, these dreams, they are entirely anonymous. The leaps of logic. The lack of antecedents. The swirl of imagery and willfully absent transitions. But what I most marvel at is how these poems so stubbornly resist meaning, while always presenting new meanings. Ice. To me they are like white hard ice—gleaming, pure, and slippery. Here is my favorite. A modern version of Genesis—turned on its head:
After the Flood
As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided,
A hare stopped in the clover and swinging flower bells, and said its prayer through the spider’s web to the rainbow.
The precious stones were hiding, and already the flowers were beginning to look up.
The butchers’ blocks rose in the dirty main street, and boats were hauled down to the sea, piled high as in pictures.
Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house, in the slaughterhouses, in the circuses, where the seal of God whitened the windows. Blood and milk flowed.
Beavers set about building. Coffee urns let out smoke in the bars.
In the large house with windows still wet, children in mourning looked at exciting pictures.
A door slammed. On the village square the child swung his arms around, and was understood by the weather vanes and the steeple cocks everywhere, under the pelting rain.
“Astonishing,” said Champsaur. “And I agree. Compared with the traditional poem, there is almost nothing to grasp onto. An ice wall.”
“Well, fifteen years ago, Rimbaud’s poet peers, myself included, had even less of an idea how to read, react to, or even follow something like this. It broke all the rules. Prose was the least of it. They had no precedent. Even Baudelaire’s wonderful prose poems—his models, I suppose—even these are really just sketches. Well described and realized, of course, but finally unmysterious. Entirely realistic. They don’t achieve the level of dream and fracture. They don’t pull you into another reality, as these do.”
“And do you think Rimbaud is still writing?” asked Champsaur suddenly.
Verlaine never hesitated. “No, absolutely not.” He shook his head vehemently. “Oh, I’ve read the speculation, but I assure you, Rimbaud is not writing. Not a word. I would bet money on it.”
“But, cher maître,” protested Champsaur, “how can you know this?”
“Because Rimbaud is so inflexible by nature. Hardheaded peasant. Not writing is now his vocation, just as writing once was.”
“So you believe he will never return?”
“To France, perhaps. But to poetry, never. I would be shocked.”
“Well,” broke in Eugénie, with a barbed glance at the man who refused to marry her, “if Rimbaud were to return, this one would run off with him.”
“Enough,” said Verlaine.
“Let me further assure you,” she insisted, “only men are this way, this stupid, this blind. This is why the male creature needs floozies like me.” She looked directly at Champsaur. “Men want to be thrilled. Do you not agree, Monsieur?”
“I do so very much appreciate your time, cher maître,” said Champsaur with a shocked glance at Eugénie, electric, as if she had invisibly goosed him. Uncomfortably, he turned more fully around to face his subject. “And here is my final question, cher maître. Why did Rimbaud stop writing—in your opinion.”
Verlaine took a drink, then sighed a long sigh at a question that vexed him. “Well, one big reason, perhaps obvious, is he grew up. Think about it. When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make-believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naïve as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world—quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for a while I suppose I did, too. But of course, there was no revolution of love. The world didn’t change. Woman was not freed. The human heart was the same, no better, no worse. Leaving what? For him, meaningless words on a page. Words that died in his mouth. Suicide, in a way.”
“Dear, dear Paul,” purred Eugénie. Clearly irritated, she was like a cat flicking her tail, ready to claw. “Like most men, you always want the romantic answer, when a simpler one will do. Admit it. At twenty, great genius that he was, Rimbaud was simply burned out. A dead volcano. Shot his wad.”
“And—and perhaps you are right,” admitted Verlaine touchily. “But the fact remains, the child in him died, and when he did, Rimbaud, in his insane pride—in his rage and his shame—told me he wished he had never given his manuscripts away. Not because he wanted them, but so he could have burned them. Like heretics. Every last word.” Verlaine nodded, as this sank in. “Believe me, I do not romanticize this part.” Verlaine sat there like a piece of bruised fruit, damaged and he knew it. He sat there for some time as lonely people do, then said, “Rimbaud was a man crushed. Abandoned by God. Killed storming the heavenly citadel. Overly romantic?—perhaps. But this, Monsieur, is what I saw, and this is what I believe.”