Disaster Was My God (17 page)

In a time when most poems were still earnestly literal and picturesque and “about” things—and written in a profusely fussy antique style—here was a poet modern in his vertigo and anomie, modern in tone, and modern, indeed, before anyone precisely knew what modern was. To more hidebound sorts, all this was new and raw, if not
wrong
. For certainly, the poet did not insist on being a “poet,” say, like Wordsworth standing exalted in his cape on a windswept crag overlooking the moors. His words could have been set to music. They drummed like rain and pulled against reason; they ached like real pain in the dark, almost dumb way of deep sadness. His true themes, then, were loss and
murk, guilt and dread and, yes, moments of unalloyed joy and pleasure, even lust, so much like our own. It was—what? More mortal. More destructive and confused and conflicted. More
something
. But new, that was the thing—new.

This man, our guide—shameless, penniless, and a convicted criminal—was, by most norms, the last one whom any sensible person would have picked for the role of “Prince of Poets.” Indeed, once so named, our hero was plucked from the gutters, washed, flea-dipped, and shorn. Then, in a set of borrowed tails, our Lazarus was stuffed in a horse cab and off he went, bleakly sober, to a glittering dinner, where he was formally declared
Immortal
.

Oh, never mind that later that night he hocked the tails for a piece of tail—indeed, for a three-day howl in the lowest scuppers of the Left Bank. It was too much. In much the way hunting hounds are so deliriously compelled to roll in dung and dead things, somehow, the poet had to throw the pack off his scent.

And what a howl it was, to see this new-minted Caesar carried on all fours by four whores, laureled, lewd, and pink. And by the way, just to set the record straight, it is historically inaccurate that on the third night of these escapades, it was Toulouse-Lautrec
—alone
—who rode the bard’s hairy back, waving the moist brassiere of a nursing mother—a “milker,” as they say, for those who relish that sort of kink. For in fact, there were
two
little people bucking on the poet’s back. The second, a she, was none other than that celebrated dwarf Mouée-Mouée, an intimate of Tom Thumb’s and
une fille aux pieds
, so-called, with her almost prehensile, penis-plying feet. Succulent perfection, with just a hint of crud in the petal-like moons of her toenails.
Whiff!
Ah, this put hot spunk into our poet’s pen! Sweet inspiration!

·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·

It was, in short, a grand time to be a Brahmin bum and this bum in particular. Indeed, for the gendarmes of Paris, there was now a standing edict from none other than the prefect of the Paris police, who decreed that, no matter how outrageous and objectionable his behavior, on no account was the Immortal to be pestered, detained, or arrested. Or only as a last resort for his shambolic royal protection.

And, indeed, at this time he did live quite royally, rent-free, in various Paris hospitals—a man quite normally healthy, you understand, or healthy enough. Here, often, he received noble guests, for example, the lofty and increasingly portly Oscar Wilde. Now
there
was a visit.

It was a pilgrimage, Wilde’s homage to visit this societal Judas goat. To Wilde, Paul Verlaine was a Socrates of sorts, seducing the youth and otherwise yanking down the breeches of a hypocritical and disordered order blind to the perfect love of men and boys so sacred to the ancient Greeks. Wilde, in any case, was a man who knew how to make a scene. See him in his baggy dark evening suit–cum–lounge pajamas. Flanked by two haughty boys and advanced by a throng of doctors and nurses, down the hall he barged, the great Irish wit, a large, fleshy-shouldered man with a vast horse face and shock of dark Irish hair, and all the while switching from demotic French to English to French again. And all, you understand, in a rush of perfectly parsed, faultlessly modulated utterances.

“Cher maître!”
he cried, “my avatar!” So he began, much the same as he had greeted the American god Walt Whitman in Brooklyn, yet another invert Dionysian—truly,
a new man
, this white-bearded Moses aiming his staff down the long American road. Flush from the literary success of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, Wilde offered the great sodomite many charming gifts: green absinthe, pastel, licorice-scented cigarettes, and a wonderfully odiferous brick of black opiated hashish—that and
two dozen alabaster roses, presented with a bow in his white-gloved hand. And, being a gentleman, Wilde did not particularly mind, and in fact quite understood, when the Immortal no sooner received these gifts than he tapped him for a few francs that, fairly needless to say, he had no intention whatsoever of repaying. As Rimbaud had taught him in his nasty urchin days, let the world pay, all these lesser poets, men of affairs, and sucker patrons. The world is our billfold!

This is not to suggest that our poet was lazy—true, unemployable, yet in his way quite diligent, a hustler, in fact. Why, every day by midafternoon (and, naturally, after an eye opener or two), he was, no matter how ravaged from the previous evening’s escapades, at full moral attention, ready to receive God’s weak signals: even if utter crap, he always put down
something
. Of these scribblings, the raunchiest he sold to a fetishist who framed them among other unmentionables in his ducal dungeons. Never fear, though. No fool, our poet kept fair copies later published under his notorious Black Fowl imprint, charming numbers kept under the counter with sundry rubber novelties and photographs in the French style. Articles that, once purchased, were wrapped in slick brown butcher’s paper and tied with strong cord like a round of beef.

It was, in short, a wondrous time, free, openly dark, and
sportif
, such that the all-entitled few were doing things not so much vile or evil as simply unknown and indeed unimaginable to ordinary folk. In Whitehall, Jack the Ripper was hunting trollops, with Dracula soon to arrive. In Paris, meanwhile, the normally correct hommes d’affaires who brought the poet’s porno wares, these same doughy-faced, mustached men could be seen—rapt—in the front row of the Moulin Rouge, so close they could feel the hormonal heat and smell the
actually sweaty aroma
of twenty flouncing girls with no underwear,
none whatsoever
, under hot, buttery lights. Bouncing bowler hats! Rat-a-tat! Inches from their pop eyes, skirt-raising, muff-flashing bawds were swinging their legs such that the pater familias could see clear up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe—why clear to their very orchids, some of them, as they did the cancan!
Meeee-yow!

And so, like a crazy hurdy-gurdy, it was starting that pagan cult of self and self-consciousness and rules to be violated, all because there still
were
rules—all this was starting up. Starting up, too, because extreme fame was technologically possible. Roaring, in fact, the rotogravure and steam-driven rotary presses, all propelling starlets and scandals, cads and low-road royalty, low life and the hot life, with moving pictures soon on the way! And our boy, goat that he was, eating on both sides of the fence, why, he was one of the earliest pioneers of public debauchery, a lover of long-mustached Paris sewer men, butcher boys, parlor maids, and even the stray clochard when he was especially hard up. Indeed, putting aside his poetics, in terms of degradation and derangement, truly it could be said that our Immortal, like de Sade and Byron and Baudelaire before him, was among the very first to set it off.

That is, once the great ur-punk Arthur Rimbaud had first set
him
off. Flick! Rimbaud was that match.

F
or see how far the Immortal had traveled, or fallen rather.

Twenty-odd years before this time, the outlaw was a son-in-law, poor thing. And trying so hard, Verlaine was, in his droopy tie, top hat, and briskly shined shoes. Here was a nice, if tippling, young man lavishly supported by his in-laws, with a love-bedazzled young wife barely past puberty. He even had a job of sorts.

Of course being a poet, it was the usual ceremonial dumb poet job, some scrivener sinecure in which one could arrive late, then return from lunch respectably drunk. It was a living, but barely, laboriously copying some mind-numbing legal document with a scraping goose quill. Copy a bit, blow on some drying dust, then snooze half the afternoon on a green and greasy desk blotter. It was 1866, and with no other choice, he was rigidly, officiously correct and entirely bourgeois—still ages away from the incorrigible antics of his later years. It was indeed a narrowly circumscribed and straitjacketed time, tight-collared, gloved, bonneted, girdled, top hatted, and hoop skirted, although well medicated
with the various opiated restoratives then available, especially for the female set. For these reasons, it was an age prone to hysteria, palsies, and female catatonia, not to mention the saintly “invalid mother” who, unable to take it anymore, blew out the candle of life and took to bed. For the husband, on the other hand, there was always alcohol, mistresses, and, for those on a budget, aging prostitutes. And so the men, wife beaters, sots, and boulevardiers, with ready means of escape, clubs and mistresses and bistros and such—the men were just fine. Tip-top. Never better.

It was, then, a world utterly tied off. And, in the Immortal’s case, ready to blow. For who was he then? God knows. A mamma’s boy trying, against nature, to be good, he was living on the first floor of a small manse in Montmartre with his adoring bourgeois princess and, living over them, controlling them, his overbearing father-in-law and still more formidable mother-in-law. Zeus and Hera, he called them.

But he was a professional, our boy. He had made his debut. He got on. Why, he even had a modest poetical reputation of sorts. Two salons welcomed him with a small retinue of devoted, able enough, but otherwise forgotten versifiers who did their bit. In fact, he was then one of a school, the Parnassians—anti-Romantics, reacting against all those
feelings
, especially when they were the
English
feelings: Coleridge and Shelley, Keats and Byron, stormy giants who for decades had stolen the show while taking the stuffing out of the next generation—especially in France. And so under the banner of art for art’s sake, the Parnassians wrote deliberately smaller poems. Gems. Artfully wrought, classically correct, airless, and rigorously
unfelt
poems like the following stanza, taken from the Immortal’s first slender volume,
Poèmes saturniens
, AD 1866:

Or this from another sonnet:

Paul Verlaine, arise then! A lapdog no longer, wasting your life, crocheting such metrical doilies.

Tell us, then, how your Hansel, Arthur Rimbaud, fooled the old Witch with a knucklebone, then ran away, a demon angel with his soul on fire. Sing to us of unquenchable angers—of literature as a blood sport, a criminal enterprise, and war by other means. Sing, heartbroken even now, of the teenage Pied Piper who wrecked your marriage, destroyed your reputation, spent the better part of your inheritance, then led you, a grown man, into the whirlwind, beyond which lay the portals of immortality.

Sing, great shade, of the monsters together.

16
Heaven-Sent Turd

Patience. Before Rimbaud meets Verlaine, we first must better understand what will propel the little freeloader to Paris, to ride roughshod over Verlaine and terrorize its frankly timid poet population. How could a mere child incite such uproar, setting salon teacups rattling? And this from a kid who, only months before at the Collège de Charleville, had been model-meek and compliant—eerily so.