Part 5

LAUTRÉAMONT

He was a young man of savage and unexpected originality, a diseased genius and, quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane and in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form and not the quality of the intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume and all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.

Such was the adventure of the amazing stranger, self-adorned with this romantic pseudonym: Comte de Lautréamont. He was born at Montevideo in April, 1846, and died at the age of twenty-eight, having published the _Chants de Maldoror_ and _Poésies,_ a collection of thoughts and critical notes of a literature less exasperated and even, here and there, too wise. We know nothing of his brief life: he seems to have had no literary connection, the numerous friends apostrophized in his dedications bearing names that have remained secrets.

The _Chants de Maldoror_ is a long poem in prose whose six first chants only were written. It is probable that Lautréamont, though living, would not have continued them. We feel, in proportion as we finish the reading of the volume, that consciousness is going, going--and when it returns to him, several months before his death, he composes the _Poésies_, where, among very curious passages, is revealed the state of mind of a dying man who repeats, while disfiguring them in fever, his most distant memories, that is to say, for this infant, the teachings of his professors!

A motive the more why these chants surprise. It was a magnificent, almost inexplicable stroke of genius. Unique this book will remain, and henceforth it remains added to the list of works which, to the exclusion of all classicism, forms the scanty library and the sole literature admissible to those minds, oddly amiss, that are denied the joys, less rare, of common things and conventional morality.

The worth of the _Chants de Maldoror_ is not in pure imagination: fierce, demoniac, disordered or exasperated with arrogance in crazy visions, it terrifies rather than charms; then, even in unconsciousness, there are influences that can be determined. "O Nights of Young," the author exclaims in his verses, "what sleep you have cost me!" And here and there he is swayed by the romantic extravagances of such English fictionists as were still read in his time, Anne Radcliffe and Maturin (whom Balzac esteemed), Byron, also by the medical reports on eroticism, and finally by the bible. He certainly had read widely, and the only author he never quotes, Flaubert, must never have been far from his reach.

This worth I would like to make known, consists, I believe, in the novelty and originality of the images and metaphors, by their abundance, the sequence logically arranged like a poem, as in the magnificent description of a shipwreck, where all the verses (although no typographie artifice betokens them) end thus: "The ship in distress fires cannon shots of alarm; but it founders slowly ... majestically." So, too, the litanies of the Ancient Ocean: "Ancient Ocean, your waters are bitter. I greet you, Ancient Ocean. Ancient Ocean, O great celibate, when you course the solemn solitudes of your phlegmatic realms ... I greet you, Ancient Ocean." Here are other images: "like a corner, as far as the eye can reach, where shivering cranes deliberate much, and soar sturdily in winter athwart the silence." And this terrifying invocation: silk-eyed octopus. To describe men he uses expressions of a Homeric suggestiveness: narrow-shouldered men, ugly-headed men, lousy-haired men, the man with pupils of jasper, red-shanked men. Others have a violence magnificently obscene: "He returns to his terrified attitude and continues to watch, with a nervous trembling, the male hunt, and the great lips of the vagina of gloom, whence ceaselessly flow, like a river, immense dark spermatazoae which take their flight in the desolate ether, concealing entire nature with the vast unfolding of their bat wings, and the solitary legions of octopuses, saturnine and doleful at watching these hollow inexpressible fulgurations." (1868: so that one cannot class them as phrases fancied from some print of Odilon Redon). But what a theme, on the other hand, what a story for the master of retrograde forms, of fear and the amorphous stirrings of beings that are near--and what a book, written, we might say, to tempt him!

Here is a passage, at once quite characteristic of Lautréamont's talent and of his mental malady:

"With slow steps the brother of the blood-sucker (Maldoror) marched through the forest.... Then he cried: 'Man, when you come upon a dead dog, pressed against a milldam so as to prevent it from issuing, go not like the others, and take with your hands the worms that flow from his swollen belly, considering it with astonishment, opening a knife, and then cutting a great number of them from the body, as you repeat that you too will be no more than this dog. What mystery seek you? Neither I nor the four fins of the sea bear of the Northern Seas have succeeded in solving the problem of life.... Who is this being, near the horizon, that fearlessly approaches, with troubled oblique bounds? And what majesty blended with serene gentleness! His gaze, though kind, is piercing. His enormous eyelids play with the breeze and appear alive. He is unknown to me. My body trembles as he fixes his monstrous eyes on me. Something like a dazzling aureole of light plays around him.... How fair he is.... You should be powerful, for you have a form more than human, sad as the universe, beautiful as suicide.... How! ... it is you, toad!... great toad ... unfortunate toad!... Pardon!... What do you on this earth where are the accursed? But what have you done with your viscous fetid pustules to have such a sweet air? I saw you when you descended from above, poor toad! I was thinking of infinity, and at the same time of my weakness.... Since then you have appeared to me monarch of the ponds and marshes! Covered with a glory which belongs only to God, you have departed thence, leaving me consoled, but my staggering reason founders before such grandeur.... Fold your white wings and gaze not from on high with those troubled eyes." The toad rests on its hind legs (which resemble those of a man) and, while the slugs, woodles, and snails flee at the sight of their mortal enemy, gives utterance to those words: "Hearken, Maldoror. Notice my figure, calm as a mirror.... I am but a simple dweller of the reeds, 'tis true, but thanks to your own contact, taking of good only what is in yourself, my reason has grown and I can converse with you.... As for myself, I should prefer to have protruding eyes, my body lacking feet and hands, to have killed a man, than to be as you are. For I hate you! Adieu, then, hope not to find again the toad in your passage. You have been the cause of my death. I leave for eternity, to implore pardon for you."

Alienists, had they studied this book, would have classified the author among those aspiring to pass for persecuted persons: in the world he only sees himself and God--and God thwarts him. But we might also inquire whether Lautréamont is not a superior ironist, a man forced by a precious scorn for mankind to feign a madness whose incoherence is wiser and more beautiful than the average reason. There is the madness of pride; there is the delirium of mediocrity. How many balanced and honest pages, of good and clear literature, would I not give for this, for these words and phrases under which he seems to have wished to inter reason herself! The following is taken from the singular _Poésies_:

"The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusions, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the innoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience, cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks, simoom of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pédéraste, phenomena of the aquarium and the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camelias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness and scorning himself with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies, vague vistas that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin and their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin and Dumas _fils_, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania,--before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us and bows us down." Maldoror (or Lautréamont) seems to have judged himself in making himself apostrophised thus by his enigmatic Toad: "Your spirit is so diseased that it perceives nothing; and you deem it natural each time there issues from your mouth words that are senseless, though full of an infernal grandeur."

TRISTAN CORBIÈRE

Laforge, in the course of a reading, sketched some notes regarding Corbière which, though not printed, are nevertheless definitive, as for instance:

"Bohemian of the Ocean--picaresque and tramp--breaking down, concise, driving his verse with a whip--strident as the cry of gulls, and like them never wearied--without aestheticism--nothing of poetry or verse, hardly of literature--sensual, he never reveals the flesh--a blackguard and Byronic creature--alway the crisp word--there is not another artist in verse more freed of poetic language--he has a trade without plastic interest--the interest, the effect is in the whip stroke, the dry-point, the pun, the friskiness, the romantic abruptness-- he wishes to be indefinable, uncataloguable, to be neither loved nor hated; in short, declassed from every latitude, every custom hither and beyond the Pyrenees."

This doubtless is the truth: Corbière all his life was dominated and led by the demon of contradiction. He supposed that one must be differentiated from men by thoughts and acts exactly contrary to the thoughts and acts of the mass of men; there is much of the willful in his originality; he labored at it as women labor over their complexion during long afternoons between sky and earth, and when he disembarked, it was to draw broadsides of stupefaction. Dandyism à la Baudelaire.

But a nature cannot be developed except in the sense of its instincts and inclinations. Corbière had inherently to be something of what he became, the Don Juan of singularity; it is the only woman he loves; he mocks the other with the clever phrase "the eterna madame."

Corbière has much wit, wit at the same time of the Montmartre wine-shop and of the blade of past times. His talent is formed of the braggart spirit, uncouth and humbug, of a bad impudent taste, of genius thrusts. He has the drunken air, but he is only laboriously clumsy; to make absurd chaplets, he shapes from miraculous, rolled pebbles works of a secular patience, but in the dizaine he leaves the little stone of the sea quite naked and rough, because at bottom he loves the sea with a great naiveté and because his folly for paradoxical things gives way, from time to time, to an intoxication of poetry and beauty.

Among the never ordinary verses of _Amours jaunes_, are many that are admirable, but admirable with an air so equivocal, so specious, that we do not always enjoy them at the first meeting; then we judge that Tristan Corbière is, like Laforgue, a little his disciple, one of those undeniable, unclassable talents which are strange and precious exceptions in the history of literature--singular even in a gallery of oddities.

Here are two little poems of Tristan Corbière, forgotten even by the last publisher of the _Amours jaunes_:

PARIS NOCTURNE

C'est la mer;--calme plat--Et la grande marée Avec un grondement lointain s'est retirée.... Le flot va revenir se roulant dans son bruit. Entendez-vous gratter les crabes de la nuit.

C'est le Styx asséché: le chiffonier Diogène, La lanterne à la main, s'en vient avec sans-gêne. Le long du ruisseau noir, les poètes pervers Pêchent: leur crâne creux leur sert de boîte à vers.

C'est le champ: pour glaner les impures charpies S'abat le vol tournant des hideuses harpies; Le lapin de gouttière, à l'affût des rongeurs. Fuit les fils de Bondy, nocturnes vendangeurs.

C'est la mort: la police gît.--En haut l'amour Fait sa sieste, en tétant la viande d'un bras lourd Oû le baiser éteint laisse sa plaque rouge. L'heure est seule. Écoutez. Pas un rêve ne bouge.

C'est la vie: écoutez, la source vive chante L'éternelle chanson sur la tête gluante D'un dieu marin tirant ses membres nus et verts Sur le lit de la Morgue ... et les yeux grands ouverts.

PARIS DIURNE

Vois aux deux le grand rond de cuivre rouge luire, Immense casserole où le bon Dieu fait cuire La manne, l'arlequin, l'éternel plat du jour. C'est trempé de sueur et c'est trempé d'amour.

Les laridons en cercle attendent prés du four, On entend vaguement la chair rance bruire, Et les soiffards aussi sont là, tendant leur buire, Les marmiteux grelotte en attendant son tour.

Crois-tu que le soleil frit donc pour tout le monde Ces gras graillons grouillants qu'un torrent d'or inonde? Non, le bouillon de chien tombe sur nous du ciel.

Eux sont sous le rayon et nous sous la gouttière. A nous le pot au noir qui froidit sans lumière. Notre substance à nous, c'est notre poche à fiel.

(Tr. 41)

Born at Morlaix in 1845, Tristan returned there in 1875 to die of inflammation of the lungs. He was the son (others say the nephew) of the sea romancer, Edouard Corbière, author of _Négrier_, whose violent love for the things of the sea had such a strong influence upon the poet. This _Négrier_, by Edouard Corbière, captain on a long-voyage vessel, 1832, 2 vol. in-8, is a quite interesting tale of maritime adventures. The fourth chapter of the first part, entitled _Prisons d'Angleterre_, (the convict ships) contains the most curious details about the habits of the prisoners, about the loves of the _corvettes_ with the "_forts-a-bras_"--in one place, the author says, where "there was only one sex." The preface of this novel reveals a spirit that is very proud and very disdainful of the public: the same spirit with some talent and a sharper nervousness,--you have Tristan Corbière.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born at Charleville, October 20, 1854, and from the most tender age showed traits of the most insupportable blackguardism. His brief stay in Paris was in 1870-71. He followed Verlaine in England, then in Belgium. After the little misunderstanding which separated them, Rimbaud roved through the world, followed the most diverse trades, a soldier in the army of Holland, ticket taker at Stockholm in the Loisset circus, contractor in the Isle of Cyprus, trader at Harrar, then at Cape Guardafui, in Africa, where a friend of M. Vittorio Pico saw him, applying himself to the fur trade. It is likely that, scorning all that lacks brutal gratification, savage adventure, the violent life, this poet, singular among all, willingly renounced poetry. None of the authentic pieces of _Reliquaire_ seem more recent than 1873; although he did not die before the end of 1891. The verses of his extreme youth are weak, but from the age of seventeen Rimbaud acquired originality, and his work will endure, at least by virtue of phenomena. He is often obscure, bizarre and absurd. Of sincerity nothing, with a woman's character, a girl's, inherently wicked and even savage, Rimbaud has that kind of talent which interests without pleasing. In his works are pages which give the impression of beauty one feels before a pustulous toad, a good-looking syphillitic woman, or the Chateau-Rouge at eleven o'clock in the evening. _Les Pauvres â l'èglise, les Premières Communions_ possess an uncommon quality of infamy and blasphemy. _Les Assis_ and _le Bateau ivre_,--there we have the excellent Rimbaud, and I detest neither _Oraison du soir_ nor _les Chercheuses de Poux._ He was somebody after all, since genius ennobles even baseness. He was a poet. Some verses of his have remained living almost in the state of ordinary speech:

Avec l'assentiment des grands héliotropes.

(Tr. 42)

Some stanzas of _Bateau ivre_ belong to true and great poetry:

Et dès lors je me suis baigné dans le poème De la mer, infusé d'astres et latescent, Dévorant les azurs verts où, flottaison blême Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend, Où, teignant tout à coup les bleuités, délires Et rythmes lents sous les rutilements du jour, Plus fortes que l'alcool, plus vastes que vos lyres, Fermentent les rousseurs amères de l'amour.

(Tr. 43)

The whole poem marches: all of Rimbaud's poems march, and in _les Illuminations_ there are marvelous belly dances.

It is a pity that his life, so poorly known, was not the true _vita abscondita_; what is known disgusts from what can be understood of it. Rimbaud was like those women whom we are not surprised to learn have taken to religion in some house of shame; but what revolts still more is that he seems to have been a jealous and passionate mistress: here the aberration becomes debauched, being sentimental. Senancour, the man who has spoken most freely of love, says of these inharmonious liaisons where the female falls so low that she has no name except in the dirtiest slang:

"When in a very particular situation, the need results in a minute of misconduct, we can perhaps pardon men totally vulgar, or at least banish its memory; but how understand that which becomes a habit, an attachment? The fault may have been accidental; but that which is joined to this act of brutality, that which is not unforseen, becomes ignoble. If even a passion capable of troubling the head and almost of depriving one of liberty, has often left an ineffaceable stain, what disgust will not a consent given in cold-blood inspire? Intimacy in this manner, that is the height of shame, the irremediable infamy."

But the intelligence, conscious or unconscious, though not having all rights, has the right of all absolutions.

... Qui sait si le genie N'est pas une de vos vertus,

(Tr. 44)

monsters, whether you are called Rimbaud,--or Verlaine?

FRANCIS POICTEVIN

Like all writers who have achieved an understanding of life, Francis Poictevin, though a born novelist, promptly renounced the novel. He knows that everything happens, that a fact in itself is not more interesting than another fact and that the manners of expression alone have significance.

I recall something to this effect reported by Sarcey apropos of the lamentable Murger: "About gave him a subject for a novel; he made nothing of it. He was decidedly a sluggard." It is very difficult to persuade certain old men--old or young--that there are no _subjects_; there is only a _subject_ in literature, and that he who writes, and all literature, that is to say all philosophy, can arise equally from the cry of a run-over dog as from Faust's exclamations as he questions Nature: "Where seize thee, O infinite Nature? And thou, Breasts?"

The author of _Tout Bas_ and of _Presque,_ like any other person, could have arranged his meditations in dialogues, order his sentiments into chapters divided at random, insinuate through pseudo-living characters a bit of gesticulating life and have them express, by the act of kneeling on the flag-stones of some familiar church, the virtue of an unrecognized creed: in short, write "the novel of mysticism" and popularize the practice of mental prayer for the "literary journals." By this means his books would have gained him a popularity which certainly he now lacks, for few writers among those whose talent is evident are so little esteemed, less known and less discussed. Poictevin disdains all artifice save the artifice of style, a snare into which we are content to fall. Whether he notes the delicacies of a flower, a little girl's attitude, the grace of a madonna, or the cold and quite hard purity of Catherine de Gênes, he wins us with sure strokes, by that very preciosity with which some clumsily reproach him. This preciosity is rigorously personal. Apart from all groups, as remote from Huysmans as from Mallarmé, the author of _Tout Bas_ works, one would say, in a cell, an ideal cell he carries with him while traveling; and there, standing, often kneeling, he pours out his poems and prayers in phrases that have the unique musical quality of a Byzantine organ. Less phrases than vibrations, vibrations so peculiar that few souls find themselves attuned. Music of Gregorian plain-chant, such as one listens to in a sumptuous Flemish church, with sudden fugues of exalted prayer that soar aloft towards the high lines and hurl themselves against the painted vaults, kindling old stained-glass windows, illuming the lines of the darkened cross with love. The mystic monk, the true mystic, Fra Angelico, and Bonaventura a little, live again in the pages of _Presque_ with its chatoyant spirituality, more than in all the pseudo-mystic literature of our time. Would not the author of _Recordare sanctae crucis_ find more satisfaction in this prayer than in the patronizing and fructiferous deductions; "Here below the Christ appears the most adorable, most absorbed figure of the eternal substance, scented with all virtues; a figure with dulcet blues, the burning clear yellows of topaz or chrysanthemum, the blood-red hues of future glories. And despite my daily relapses, I compel myself, according to Jesus' word to the Samaritan, to adoration in spirit and in truth," Poictevin has entered the "Garden of all the flowerings" of which Saint Bonaventura sang,

(Crux deliciarum hortus In quo florent omnia....)

(Tr. 45)

and kneeling, he has kissed the heart of roses whose rosary is of blood,--the blood of the great torment. While Morning, fair-haired youth, delivers moist adolescence to folly-driven women, he goes towards a priestly peace, to masses of solitude, and one of the graces gathered is that his soul becomes impregnated with the "interior light, _claritas caritas_."