Withnail and I: Psychotropic Cinema

Withnail and I: Psychotropic Cinema

by | May 24, 2020 | Uncategorized

Eternal refugees: Donald Twain and his understudy

The Gotterdammerung of Hippiedom

Acclaim can sometimes turn into condemnation.

To illustrate: young Damian – cinematographer friend – fell head-over-heels in love with Withnail and I, the British cult-movie portraying the Gotterdammerung of hippiedom. Having decided to screen it on the side of his house he invited all his friends to the opening-night of his pleasure-dome, the inauguration of his starlight cinema. Yet the summer evening’s ‘entertainment’ actually commenced a little earlier with an invocation to deities of visualization and hallucination. Before turning the projector on – and in the spirit of the film itself – my friend handed round a large tureen of freshly-brewed psychotropic mushrooms. Everyone knowingly dipped a cup or two. And after a while, in the dusk, the film began.

The destruction of Georgian Camden as film-set for the shooting of Spengler’s Decline of the West

The Wrecking-Ball

Quite early on Withnail and I presents one of the most powerful cinematic sequences of all time. For sheer thunderous energy it compares with the famous helicopter assault in Apocalypse Now. There the machine-assisted rape of a coastal Viet Cong village is reinforced by Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. In Withnail the scene is only the demolition of some Georgian terraces in shabby 1960’s Camden Town but – with a Hendrix soundtrack absolutely dwarfing Wagner’s best efforts – an image of merely local obliteration somehow becomes the final destruction of all cities. With the words ‘Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t’ we cut from the neurotic coziness of Uncle Monty’s drawing-room to the wrecking-ball against the film’s only blue sky. Now as the terrifying Hendrix rendition of All Along The Watchtower crashes and surges we seem to witness the collapse of the western world. The wrecking-ball hangs like a hydrogen bomb in the sky. Syncopated slashings of stratocaster power-chords line-up with the annihilation of the metropolis (which is also Blake’s prison ‘built with the stones of the law’). And suddenly – miraculously – the prisoners, two out-of-work actors stranded in the underbelly of London, are set free . . .

Thus Withnail gathers steam and prepares us for the horrors of Uncle Monty’s cottage in the rain.

At exactly this point in my young friend’s summertime screening cinematic hypnosis and expanding consciousness got out of hand. Just as the wrecking-ball crashed into the terrace and Jimi signalled the end of the world – just as the celebrated ‘wind began to howl’ – the entire audience rose to their feet as one man and began hurling chairs and tables at the side of the house. Bombarding the open-air ‘screen’ with a barrage of garden-furniture each guest became an individual demolitionist tearing down the urban fabric of Babylon. Under the influence of Damian’s magic potion a psychological superorganism launched its own tribute to the film in the form of a broadside of deck-chairs and sun-loungers.

Acclaim was being expressed as destruction.

‘There are gonna be a lot of refugees.’

An Experiment in Decadence

Released in 1987 Withnail rapidly sank out of sight, a resounding flop in spite of some positive reviews (though the PC brigade claimed the film was homophobic, absolutely untrue because Uncle Monty – apparently based on Franco Zeferelli – is carefully presented not as a caricature but as a complex and rather wonderful man whose loneliness happens to have spiralled out of control, someone who nurtures in himself both innate decency and a romantic imagination). Withnail was crucified at the box-office, evaluated as an eccentric farce. But then with the advent of the VHS format an underground reputation spread by word-of-mouth and the establishment couldn’t stifle the work any longer.

As if commenting on its own supresssion – and resurrection – the theme of magnificent failure resonates within the film. Yet this failure is much larger than the failure of Withnail himself, a blue-blood actor who feels entitled to stardom, but whose internal saboteur works overtime to undermine his narcissistic ambition. In the conceptual background of the film is the relationship of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, a relationship which famously imploded in Camden Town (in 1873). The project of these two quintessential French poets was an experiment in decadence conducted in an atmosphere of narcosis set against a backdrop of destitution. (With Rimbaud wanderlust bordered on vagabondage.) Inevitably – just as in Withnail – this brave enterprise went to hell. Rimbaud, who stopped writing at eighteen or nineteen, represents modern literature’s most poignant foundering, a Mighty Youth condemned to an early death. Yet – like Withnail himself, another rejected candidate for recognition – Rimbaud has enjoyed unparalleled posthumous fame, to such an extent that he’s often quoted in hiphop, where he’s seen almost as some kind of messianic figure. (Verlaine – rather like the ‘I’ of Marwood – is more obscure today, an important lyric poet perhaps but certainly no streetwise prophet.)

I’m going to be a star

Don Quixote for the Psychedelic Era

Withnail and I can also be read as Don Quixote remodelled for the psychedelic era. (The formula is timeless: a visionary overlord has to rely on a worldly-wise retainer.) The film is often simplistically described as a comedy, but just as with Cervantes’ masterpiece it actually occupies a rarefied zone somewhere between comedy and tragedy. (It is also acutely-observed social commentary with no egregious sense of taking sides.) Inimitably played by Richard E Grant, Withnail himself is a horrifying synthesis of spleen and finesse, psychosis and panache, bitterness and wit, while the ‘I’ of Marwood (never named in the film) is his relatively lacklustre sidekick (played by Paul McGann). Marwood’s courageous pragmatism is the constant foil to Withnail’s fluorescent paranoia. Yet the former’s loyalty is tested to the limits in the course of the drama, which will end (without giving anything away) with both characters defined by the dramatic role each seems destined to execute. Marwood is perfect for some realist part in the countryside of quiet stagnation which is Chekov: he’s essentially an accessible bourgeois actor. Withnail, on the other hand, is born for epic roles. He’s astrologically – almost – cut-out for tragedy. He’s a natural fountainhead of hyperbole and metaphysics. There are millions of Marwoods. There’s only one Withnail.

Thank God!

Where Grant’s character is concerned – by design – there are problems. His ‘casting’ is not straightforward and inevitable (as it is with Marwood, who we see normalised, cleaned-up and sanitized by the end of the film). No, Withnail has the tragic flaw which necessarily stigmatizes greatness. Richard E Grant’s dramatis personae is a bitch. He’s as twisted as Hamlet himself, a coward in spite of lyrical blusterings, a class-traitor in relation to his friend, an unemployable genius whose madness overboils. And in the film’s searing finale – with caged wolves symbolizing housebroken wildness and ‘civilized’ insanity – Withnail delivers Hamlet’s ‘sterile promontory’ monologue which builds to the acerbic:

‘What a piece of work is a man.’

Here, Grant gives us the Elizabethan golden age in the understated drawl of Marlon Brando. This heartbreaking coda to the movie demonstrates that if Bruce Robinson – director of Withnail – had been given the resources to cast Richard E Grant as ‘the Dane’ we would have been given an utterly contemporary and ‘marvellous’ Hamlet for our times. (Of course there exists the 1969 film-version of Hamlet in which the lead is played by Nicholl Williamson, and Ophelia by Marianne Faithful, one of the best cinematic Shakespeares ever achieved. Here we get a taste of what Grant could have delivered had he been let loose in the most demanding of all classic roles.)

Caged in compulsion with the wolves

Negative Capability

Withnail tightropes a fine line.

In the Mother Black Cap public-house sequence quite early-on in the film, McGann – regaled with petunia oil – is called ‘perfumed ponce’ by an angry thickset Irishman who (judging by the grafitti outside the pub) is very possibly an IRA member, most unsympathetic. Withnail, trying to fend off this queer-bashing Provo, first claims to have ‘a bad heart.’ (Double entendre: he can love no-one but himself.)

‘If you hit me it will be murder.’

When this fails to deter the assailant he whines:

‘My wife is having a baby.’

As Grant offers these words his demented blue eyes – red-rimmed and sleep-deprived – fill with tears. He hardly gets his line out, it’s mumbled under his breath. A brazen lie sticks in his throat and we laugh at the sublime buffoon. (We all think the same way, it’s human nature: Keep the jokes coming, look out for the clowns.) Yet there is a secret key to this sequence. The tragic fact is that, during rehearsals for Withnail, Grant’s wife lost their first child, and this loss, mirrored in the actor’s eyes, helps him to deliver one of the funniest lines in all cinema. Here is Keatsian ‘negative capability’: the dual action of two opposite forces working together to actualize synthesis beyond the categories: the formula of genius.

‘We can never get over grief but we can get around . . .’ (Richard E. Grant.)

Taking the ‘fresh air’ in Regent’s Park

Counterculture Pirates

Some connoisseurs of the film feel that Richard Griffiths (1947-2013) is the real star of Withnail and admittedly his performance as Uncle Monty is a tour-de-force. A bumbling cyclops threatening intercourse per anum never exuded such conviviality. From his class-vantage Uncle Monty views the poor, cornered Marwood as little more than a curly-headed rent-boy. And yet his predatory visit to the cottage in the dead of night has been catalysed by the treacherous Withnail who has told his uncle that his friend is a ‘toilet-trader’. (This betrayal is the price of admission to the social ranks who take weekend-breaks dans la nature.) We can just imagine Richard Griffiths drooling Verlaine over his crumpets: ‘O, my boys, my boys, we inhabit un paysage choisi, this promised land, this England, mother of trees!

Another great engine of Withnail often goes unsung. A character and a personality in its own right this is the machine which propels the road-trip aspect of the film: a six-cylinder one-eyed Jaguar XK, a 3.8 litre shamanic vehicle of liberation. Steering for action in the rain-curtained Lake District this gun-metal grey battlecruiser of a car sails our counterculture pirates down waterlogged motorways of fate, Marwood in his tip-down dark glasses, Withnail in the death-seat, way-too-cool for shades. It’s this low-slung Jag with its single windscreen wiper which powers the adventure of outsiderhood which is Withnail. The car seems totemic, a camper-van wouldn’t have served. This sleek but damaged pirate-ship is the physical badge of the film’s ‘spiritual nobility’: the vessel of a true rite-of-passage.

Withnail and I is psychotropic cinema, to be screened forever in a pleasuredome of ice. Or failing that, an open-air summertime picture-palace (with no seating-arrangements this time around, with guests encouraged to adopt lotus-postures on the lawn.)

Grant incubating venom in a spare moment on-set

The original bad-boys on the doorstep in Albert Street, Camden Town. Robinson is extreme left and Viv MacKerrel – inspiration for the character of Withnail – is centre back.

  McGann and Grant know the chemistry is working

A page from Robinson’s original novella which was never published but reworked as the legendary film-script

We’ve come on holiday by mistake

Follow Me:

Arthur Rimbaud: The Golden Dawn

Arthur Rimbaud: The Golden Dawn

by | May 4, 2020 | Uncategorized

The lost manuscript of Rimbaud’s Promontoire. Note that someone – but not the poet – has added the word Illuminations in the lower right corner of the manuscript. Under this is another word, this time written in Rimbaud’s hand.

Promontory

The golden dawn and the sensational evening find our brigantine anchored out in the roads opposite this villa and its outbuildings, which form a promontory as extensive as Epirus and the Peloponnese, or the vast island of Japan, or Arabia! Temples illuminated by the return of theories, immense views of modern coastal defenses; dunes illustrated with warm flowers and bacchanalia; great canals of Carthage and embankments of a degenerate Venice; mild eruptions of Etnas and crevasses of flowers and glacial waters; wash houses near stands of German poplars; mounds in odd parks where the head of a Japanese tree bows down; and circular facades of Royals or Grands of Scarborough or Brooklyn; and the railways flank, undermine and dominate the outlay of this Hotel, chosen from the history of the most ornate and colossal constructions of Italy, America and Asia, whose windows and terraces now full of lights, drinks and rich breezes, are wide open to the souls of travellers and nobles – who allow, during daylight hours, all the tarantellas of the coast – and even the ritournellas of the illustrious valley of art – to decorate in a miraculous way the facades of the Promontory Palace.

A wonder-of-the-world: St Pancras Railway Hotel as Rimbaud would have known it in 1873. Here we are looking west, but from Great College Street the view of the newly-opened terminus would have been from the north. Rimbaud would have sighted down the great trainshed, which we see here in profile, stretching out to the right. (From Pentonville Road looking west: evening (1884) by John O’Connor.)

The Roofscape

The unthinkable happened in two phases.

I’d seen the main landmark from the roof of the derelict. Gazing south across the housetops towards Bloomsbury I’d looked up – from Rimbaud’s Promontoire – and visually traced the Gothic silhouette of Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras Railway Hotel. This seemed to mirror ‘in a miraculous way’ Promontoire‘s coastal palace of military aspect. I observed – at dawn and at nightfall – this Red Fort somehow transported from India to London, this Castle Gormenghast in the distance with it’s many substructures and ‘dependencies’. I saw the justness of comparing it to a headland ‘as large as Arabia’. I saw the rightness of conceiving it as nothing less than  ‘the vast island of Japan’. But had Arthur Rimbaud ever set foot in Kings Cross?

A line in Wallace Fowlie’s introduction spoke of intermittent trips to Brussels and London. That was all I knew.

I dismissed the Promontoire identification. Surely the whole point was that Rimbaud’s prose-poem was non-specific, all-inclusive, encyclopaedic? Yet, amid all the plurals of ‘Temples’, ‘dunes’, ‘canals’, ‘Etnas’, ‘laundries’, ‘odd parks’, ‘Royals’, ‘Grands’ etc, I noted that Rimbaud introduced his main landmark as ‘this villa’: singular. And another point struck me. Promontoire might be an exercise in spatio-temporal synthesis, an experiment in topological compression, but the ‘villa’ was described as ‘flanked, undermined and dominated by railways’. In other words, though the coastal structure seemed classical, ancient – biblical and pagan – it was clearly situated in the modern world. Or, if Rimbaud’s superstructure was outside time and space, its architectonics referenced antiquity and modernity.

The ‘castle as the universe’ is a constant motif in fairytales and folk-mythology, looming large also in Arthurian literature. A complex of roofscapes, towers and spires captures our experience of a multiple-faceted reality.

The Second Wave

In Promontoire Rimbaud tells us that he ‘finds’ himself observing ‘this villa and its dependencies’ from his brigantine ‘out in the roads, opposite’ the shoreline. (The phrase ‘out in the roads’ is a maritime expression meaning ‘lying offshore’ and I use it – playfully – in my translation feeling that if Rimbaud had found such a double-meaning in French the term might have appeared in his extraordinary poem, a poem which – as I hope to show in a moment – should rightly be considered the mother of all the Illuminations.)

In the days and nights following the rooftop vision of the promontory-palace as St Pancras Railway Hotel, I started reading about the poet’s life from Enid Starkie’s pioneering biography, acquired almost immediately after the revelation. Then, in the second phase of a rite of passage, less than a week after the first epiphany, I located Rimbaud’s brigantine architecturally ‘anchored’ in Royal College Street. His pirate-vessel, his Drunken Boat – ‘notre brick’ – was only a hundred yards from my derelict. (The French poet-laureate studied English assidiously, so the playful crossover from ‘brick’ as in ‘housebrick’ to the French ‘brick’ – for brigantine – would have certainly appealed to someone who constantly resourced maritime images in his work.)

The original identification of 8, Royal College Street as Rimbaud’s brick-and-mortar pirate-ship was triggered by my first (post-midnight) visit to the house when I noticed immediately its strange prow-shaped parapet – west-facing at the front of the house – a feature unique to this Georgian property. Naturally, after a few more fanatical reconnoiterings, I knocked on the door one sunny spring morning. (At this point there was still no plaque on the house.) A gentleman who looked like Rowan Atkinson – vaguely hyperthyroid eyes in a mobile, Machiavellian face – answered the door, looked me up-and-down. To my amazement he seemed to know exactly why I’d come. When I mentioned Rimbaud he said immediately: ‘I smell his pipe at night. It’s extremely pungent!’

The faithful were clearly hammering on his front-door quite frequently.

The initial map of subjective interpretation began to make sense in the light of the second revelation. The pirate-ship of all time reminded me of my own derelict. I strode the deck more proudly under the black flag of the squatocracy, scanning around with my poetic telescope.

There was plenty to see.

We saw ourselves as nonviolent levellers of direct action, we saw ourselves as visionary demographic outlaws setting up new paradigms of urban living. In the shadows of the towerblocks of Somers Town we were living in ‘the miraculous valley of art’.

In subsequent psychogeographical explorations of the quarter, trying to block the monoxide fogs and project myself back into late Victorian times, I noted – ghostly revenant – that, approaching 8, Great College Street from the west presented a view of the ship-like frontage from as far away as the High Street itself, a distance of a good few hundred yards. King Street (as it was before it became Plender) ran in a straight line from Camden High Street all the way to the doorstep of the ‘household in Hell’.

A royal road indeed!

The image of the ‘prowed’ house would have imprinted itself early in Rimbaud’s second ‘London pilgrimage’.

The house of Arthur Rimbaud in Royal College Street (or Great College Street as it was in his day) very much as I first found it in the early spring of 1973. (But at that time there was no plaque in evidence.)

Climbing Gormenghast

Still – at this time – there was no bigger vision.

I didn’t – yet – really suspect that Rimbaud might have found something extraordinary in Kings Cross St Pancras. (Shall we call it ‘the place and the formula’?) I was troubled by the transmutation of this shabby zone into something otherworldly: the shimmering cityscapes of Promontoire.

With the poet’s Collected Works in my hand I climbed every morning through the hatch of a dim, dusty attic and explored a little spillway between the chimney-stacks. Topside, swaying on the west-facing front parapet, or reclining on the silver-grey sloping roof-tiles, or walking up and down speaking Promontoire aloud Rimbaud’s words became increasingly supercharged. Soon I knew the poem by heart in both French and English. As invocation deepened the sorcery intensified. It seemed that – cycling Promontoire as a prayer or a mantra or a magic spell – I could slip through some hairline crack in the everyday world and enter the zone of Anima Mundi: the mindspace of the living universe.

For the first time since losing the guitar to tendonitis, dynamism came back, energy took over, enthusiasm flooded the sensorium: everything changed. Now my single reason for living stared me in the face from the Collected Works. I even dreamed of Rimbaud’s miraculous text. No archeologist excavating a Sumerian palace-library and finding lists of kings from before the Flood was ever more deliriously excited than I was – handling the precious ‘clay tablet’ of Promontoire.

I sensed there were more meanings beneath the sand. There was more information under the Promontory Palace.

Curious ideograms on a Sumerian clay tablet (retrieved from the western deserts of Iraq).

The Order of the Golden Dawn

Once again I went back to the very beginning. (Now I began an inch-perfect analysis of Promontoire.)

For a long time I’d been aware of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeats’ involvement in ceremonial magic had interested me greatly for quite a few years. Now I had learned that the Golden Dawn’s Inner Temple – the oratory of the esoteric Second Order – had once been located in Kings Cross St Pancras, at 62, Oakley Square to be precise. (Oakley Square is roughly equidistant from Pancras Church and 8, Royal College Street.) Unlike the Isis-Urania Temple, founded in 1888, Oakley Square was the headquarters of the order’s operative adepts and active magicians. The Golden Dawn’s magical workings happened here. (The outer-order Isis-Urania Temple in Hammersmith was only for theoretical and novitiate studies.) Three streets away from Pancras Church certain rites were performed – some lasting many days and nights – rites specifically designed to immanentize – to bring about – the new age called the Aeon of the Child.

Who named the Order of the Golden Dawn? (This question occured to me late one night.) Was there a way to link Rimbaud to the naming?

A bridge was created by a close friend of WB Yeats. This obscure individual was an outer-order Golden Dawn satellite: the minor poet – but fairly important critic – Arthur Symons. It emerged that in the autumn of 1893, on the night of November 19th, Paul Verlaine – at the invitation of Arthur Symons –  caught the night-boat to London in order to deliver – on the 21st – what turned out to be the most laidback disquisition ever heard by earnest late-Victorian literateurs. By this time – only three years before his death – Paul Verlaine was a bibulous ruin, moving about deliberately on a stout stick. His lecture amounted to a series of detours through personal reminiscence and belletristic anecdote during which he also mumbled quite a number of his poems. But in spite – or perhaps because – of being three-quarters drunk, he hypnotised his audience that night in ancient oak-panelled 14th century Barnard’s Hall (situated – interestingly – directly above the Fleet River, immediately south of Kings Cross in Fetter Lane).

The important point here is that just before this period Verlaine’s reputation had sunk very low indeed, thanks mostly to his alcoholism. (He hadn’t produced any new work for many, many years.) And yet he had quite recently cleverly resurrected himself by publishing – for the first time – Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. In Barnard’s Hall he must have spoken about this achievement, an event which set literary Paris ablaze. Necessarily that night he regaled his listeners with some account of the Promethean boy who had turned French literature upside-down, the Mighty Youth who destroyed the Parnassians. (A mythological subject!) With all the lyrical murmuring and mumbling that went on it is just possible that, in the course of his ‘lecture’, Verlaine recited something by the legendary Rimbaud. Something from the London-inspired Illuminations possibly?

Was W.B  Yeats in the audience that night?

It is hard to imagine his absence. If he wasn’t in attendance, he certainly heard all the news from Symons. So the term ‘the golden dawn’ could very possibly have filtered across to the magical order from Rimbaud’s Promontoire.

The Lord of Two Horizons

I have mentioned that according to the Western Magical Tradition (to which Rimbaud and Yeats – as most-important English-language poet of the last hundred years – both belong) there is an association between Kings Cross St Pancras and the formula of a golden sunrise, a sacred aurora, a daybreak of spiritual light. I have also referenced (in Arthur Rimbaud: The Brigantine) the fact that the iconography and symbolism of the child-martyr Pancras allow us to compare him/her with other child-pantocrators such as the Chinese Pan Ku, the Celtic Mabyn and the Egyptian Horus.

In his iconography Horus is represented with one finger sealing his lips. (I find it interesting to reflect that apart from his poetry Rimbaud is most famed for his silence.) And Horus – who in Golden Dawn symbolism presides over the Aeon of the Child – is also called the Lord of Two Horizons. (In fact the very word ‘horizon’ has come to us – via the Greek ‘horos’ for landmark or boundary-stone – from the ancient Egyptian god-name.)

The two ‘horizons’ of Horus are dawn and dusk. When the adolescent god is titled ‘Lord of Two Horizons’, Egyptian cosmologers are believed to be referring to the rising and setting sun in one divine ‘person’. And the hermetic implications of Promontoire’s opening phrase accord even more profoundly with the symbolisms of Egypt because the solar child-deity Horus rides the two horizons in a sunship. Clearly there is a direct equivalence between Rimbaud’s brigantine and the solar barque of Horus, the child-deity who becomes Pancras in Christian cosmology, the patron saint of teenagers and truth. And the sacred watercraft of Horus could be described as a pirate-ship because Horus is outcast, an adolescent warrior for truth, the avenger of his absent father, Osiris. (Set – or Satan – is the uncle of Horus and murderer of Osiris, so Hamlet too can be seen as a sort of Horus-figure, isolated from the establishment, driven to extreme actions.) In one pungent myth the young god Horus is homosexually raped by his power-mad uncle.

An ‘outcast warrior for truth’ sums up Rimbaud. He asks our entire civilization to turn back, to think again and live from the heart. He proposes that consciousness is a transmission from the Other (‘I is another’) and he promises that if we can transcend self-image we will reinvent love and experience ‘Christmas on Earth’. Yet his dream of transforming the world begins with transforming himself into the alchemical ‘sunchild’. This means achieving an inner balance which is beyond male/female duality, an individual androgyny which builds on the strengths of both sexes, which overcomes the war between matriarchy and patriarchy.

‘What was I saying about a friendly hand! One fine advantage is that I can laugh at old lying loves, and strike with shame those lying couples – I saw the hell of women down there – and I shall be free to possess truth in one body and one soul.’

The philosophical cross of the Order of the Golden Dawn

The Mother of all Illuminations

I imagine Rimbaud, that most cosmological of poets – who hides scholasticism and learning under incredible lyricism and casual vernacular – walking back to Great College Street from the British Museum where he has just spent a blissful afternoon in the reading-room immersed in Ethiopian genealogies and Egyptian creation-myths.

He is interested in the unbroken line from King Solomon down to the Emperor Theodore, the bloodlines of the Solomonic dynasty. Studying African Christianity he’s tracing mythological connections between ancient Ethiopia and pharaonic Egypt. Fascinating obsession, fixation. (The figure in the modern world who most resembles Rimbaud is Bob Marley. In a later article I’ll discuss the light of Rastafari; and probe why Arthur Rimbaud is a significant inflence in hiphop.)

As he walks, in his mind is the first line of a new poem. It remembers a recent crossing on the Ostend ferry yet it reaches up into skies of cosmology. It glides on a sea-crossing to the white cliffs yet it’s down-to-earth and grounded in the strange zone of Pancras. (Where he finds himself at present, lucky circumstance.)

It goes something like this:

The golden dawn and the magical dusk find our sunship out at sea…

I want very much to continue as soon as possible with the process of putting Promontoire under a critical microscope, looking at this key text with high-magnification. There is much more material to consider. But for now I will close this present essay with the details of a discovery – not mine – which need to be disseminated among true Rimbaudians everywhere. In the 1961 Faber edition of her seminal biography, Enid Starkie includes a new passage which does not appear in the book as it is issued in 1938 (by Hamish Hamilton). Here is the quote in its entirety:

‘It is not known if the title Illuminations, which seems to bear the hallmark of Rimbaud’s genius, was certainly his – though this is highly probable. The word is written on one of the poems, Promontoire, but not in his handwriting, and it is not known who put it there. However, underneath that word, which is in the plural, can be faintly seen, in certain photographs, but not in all, the word Illumination in the singular, in another hand, and I agree with De Graaf in thinking that it is very similar to Rimbaud’s. The manuscript of the poem has disappeared.’

Postscript.

An astute reader has written within a few hours of my posting ‘AR: The Golden Dawn’ pointing out a minor inconsistency in my argument. I am not a historian of the Order of the Golden Dawn; but still I feel I should have noticed this simple error; and I thank my correspondent for drawing my attention to the flaw in my line of reasoning. Verlaine’s London talk on the 21st November 1893 happened five years after the founding of the Golden Dawn, so he could not have been the carrier of the name. It seems that the Ordo Hermeticus Aurorae Aureae styled itself the Golden Dawn from day one in 1888. (As I say, I’m not a historian of the order and this is where my confusion lay, I could find no exact details about the very beginnings of the operation. A long time ago I studied the  Golden Dawn and its precepts quite closely but these days my mental filing-cabinets on the subject are all cleared out and emptied away.) Having said all this and de-bugged the essay – I trust – I would still draw attention to the fact that Verlaine’s edition of Illuminations appeared in 1886, two years before the birth of the GD. So Rimbaud might still be the source of the name, though admittedly it could also have come through various neo-Platonic philosophers and their schools.

The house of Arthur Rimbaud today, showing the ‘prow’ of the ‘brick‘, the brigantine. (I am not aware of any other Georgian house in London having a similar pyramidical feature.) A brigantine was a small two-masted vessel often associated with piracy. It is believed that Rimbaud and Verlaine occupied the top floor at number eight.

The room in Barnard’s Inn, Fetter Lane, where Paul Verlaine delivered his poetic lecture in 1893. Fetter Lane in Holborn lies directly above the underground River Fleet, London’s most important lost river. The Fleet also runs beneath Royal College Street.

Follow Me:

Arthur Rimbaud: The Brigantine

Arthur Rimbaud: The Brigantine

by | Apr 17, 2020 | Uncategorized

Rimbaud (in Paris) by Forain

Gold in the Soul

Perhaps in spite of the efforts of all poets literature is powerless in the modern world. Maybe that’s why Arthur Rimbaud gave up.

But did he give up?

I don’t believe that Rimbaud ever ceased to be a seer. For me his deathbed ’Aphinar’ letter proves that he never abandoned inner vision. How so? Because this last heartbreaking letter, dictated to Isabelle and addressed to ‘Monsieur le Directeur’, is really written to someone other than the corporate kingpin of the ‘Aphinar’ steamship company. (Biographers have speculated that ‘Al Fanar’ was intended – the Arabic word for lighthouse – and this seems very likely. Certainly an ‘Aphinar Line’ never existed.) With one leg amputated and his groin on fire, Rimbaud is addressing the source of all light the night before he dies in the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception. Rimbaud is talking to God on his deathbed in Marseille, asking if he has any cosmic credit left, asking if he can hope for anything after death. Naturally he frames the question in terms of business-dealings because he’s so out-of-his-mind on morphine that buying and selling become metaphors for living and dying, in the same way that ‘sailing home to Ithaca’ becomes an allegorical journey for Odysseus. In fact Rimbaud is asking in the most poignant way imaginable whether he is spiritually worth anything, whether there is still any gold in his soul. He is already in the judgment-halls of the afterlife watching the feather of his extraordinary purity being weighed against the heaviness of his experience.

If poetry has become ’an idiot’s game’ (to paraphrase Eliot) and even the ‘unacknowledged legislators’ of Shelley have been shut down, still a new world is coming.

And Rimbaud knew it.

A distressed (and Rimbaudian) waysign in Pancras churchyard

Shamanic synchronicities

I would like to enlarge on my first encounter with Rimbaud. This is a narrative I have never told though I have wanted to tell it for a very long time. Yet because of its strangeness I have hesitated, thinking always that some day or other I would write a long poem about my experience of ‘standing on the rooftop of the universe’, if I may put it that way. Now, just recently – after the Place Vendome – I feel the decision has been taken for me and I have to attempt to capture a once-in-a-lifetime moment when metaphysical windows of coincidence opened, when connective synchronicities suddenly came into play.

To begin this exploration of what happened to me many years ago I need to discuss that enigmatic area of London where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived once upon a time. This is often called Camden Town but in fact Royal College Street is halfway between Camden Town and Kings Cross (where the trains leave for Paris from St Pancras International). As a matter of fact the house of Arthur Rimbaud is only a ten minute walk from the continental terminus.

When I first engaged with the zone of St Pancras back in the winter of 1972 it was a post-industrial wasteland, an urban limbo of tinned-up derelicts where meths-drinkers burned banisters and floorboards by night, where marginals and misfits, artists and musicians congregated against the backdrop of the three-day week. I was one of several hundred maladjusted artists washed-up on an island of non-conformity. I was another Robinson Crusoe shipwrecked in the vast ocean of London. We were insular and defiant, we thought of ourselves as a Commune. We had a basement community restaurant where plates of brown rice were served for pennies every evening. We had a street-festival and a street-magazine (which I edited). An old air-raid siren mounted on a rooftop warned of squad-cars approaching down Royal College Street.

Pancras Old Church in Kings Cross. The foundation is described in Vatican archives as ‘the head and mother of all Christian Churches, under Highgate, near London’. The north-wall is made of Roman tiles, the altar-stone of St Augustine is here. The house of Arthur Rimbaud is only a few steps away.

The Arthurian Mysteries

Within eight weeks of arriving in this place I went through a lifechanging psychogeographical initiation. Later on I came to understand that many hidden forces operate in this part of London. For instance a lost river – the Old River of Wells, also known as the River Fleet – lies buried beneath Kings Cross St Pancras. Once upon a time its waters ran down from Hampstead Heath, where Rimbaud and Verlaine – like John Keats before them – loved to walk. Nowadays the lost river still flows under Royal College Street. Running south it continues beneath St Pancras Old Church and joins the Thames beside St Paul’s Cathedral (where the watercourse gives its name to Fleet Street). In antiquity the Fleet river was regarded as sacred. The Pancras Waters were bottled-up in wooden bottles and sold all over Elizabethan London in Shakespeare’s times. The chalybeate waters of the Old River of Wells were reputed to be healing and restorative. Spas were distributed all along the river’s length. But with industrialization the holy river was buried alive and forgotten. By the end of the 18th century it had more or less disappeared. (In certain places – like Argyle Square where Rimbaud stayed in 1874 – you can still hear the lost river running under the streets.)

Kings Cross St Pancras has another magical aspect. The zone is surrounded by a ring of fire-hills. These ‘high places’ were ritually sanctified long before Christianity arrived in Britain. Primrose Hill and Parliament Hill, St Michael’s Mount and the Penton of Pentonville circle Kings Cross St Pancras as places of power. (Underneath the Penton is the mysterious earth-chamber known as Merlin’s Cave, linked to the Arthurian cycle playing out in London.) What vitalities are we attributing to these high places? Today we talk of terrestrial magnetism and atmospheric electricity, telluric forces and geomantic phenomena. But ancient pagan poets would have had described such cyclic and cosmic energies differently. In dynastic China they would have sung of dragon-forces and dragon-roads. Walking the ‘lung-mei’ with drummers and dancers they would have written poems about ‘escorting the dragon through the land’.

Antiquaries have detected significant remains of megalithic structures in Kings Cross. (When Stephane Mallarme visited this area some time after Rimbaud’s stay, he was shown what he was told was ‘the oldest wall in Britain’.) Legends of London mysteriously refer to two ancient cities underneath Kings Cross. These are Troynovant and Cockaigne. From the older of these two cities, Cockaigne, the Cockneys of London derive their name. Later, as described in the old chronicles of Britain Troynovant was founded by the Trojan exile, Prince Brutus (who also founded Paris, named after Helen’s lover). According to the chronicles Prince Brutus gives his name to Britain and builds his city in the area now known as Kings Cross. (In The Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser says that Troynovant – New Troy – is built ‘in the hollow of the hills under Highgate.’)

Laser tracks for future trains? St Pancras Railway Hotel (built 1872). Image from ‘Crossing Kings Cross’ by Magdalena Jetelova.

The Pirate-Ship

These are some of the hidden aspects of the zone of London where I found myself cast away. All of these forces – as I am now aware – played some part in my initiation. But it took a shaman to come and clear my vision, to open my path in one vertical moment.

In the winter of 1972 I was passing through an abyss of depression after a self-inflicted catastrophe had suddenly ripped my young life to shreds. I had seriously damaged the tendons in both arms by overpracticing the classsical guitar. (Chromatic octave scales, difficult on the fretboard, actually triggered my self-created disaster.) Unable to play any more – hardly able to speak – I found myself on Desolation Row, living in the derelict houses behind Kings Cross.

One morning in February 1973 I stood on a rooftop overlooking Kings Cross reading Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. (I still have the edition I held in my hands the day everything in my life changed forever.) I was reading Promontoire. Suddenly I looked up from the page and saw the parallels! The landscape of Kings Cross echoed the text. The skyline of London was encoded into Promontoire.

‘The golden dawn and the tremendous evening find our brigantine anchored out in the roads, opposite this villa and its dependancies, which form a promontory as extensive as Epirus and the Peloponnesus, or as the large island of Japan, or Arabia! Temples lighted up by the return of theories, tremendous views of modern coastal defences… and … railways flank, hollow out, and dominate the outlay of this hotel…’ 

I knew nothing of Rimbaud’s life at this point. A week or so earlier I had discovered his poetry (through Antony Scaduto’s biography of Bob Dylan). Knowing not one thing about this poet whose poem had just capsized reality I ran that winter’s day to Compendium (a wonderful bookshop in Camden Town that seeded the development of Camden Lock). There I found the famous Enid Starkie biography (still perhaps the deepest study of this poet). I took it ‘home’ to my derelict and suddenly forgot all my terrible devastation. My insanity and my self-pity vanished as I turned the pages of that magical book. Some time after midnight – in a thunderstorm – I came to the chapter called The Brussels Drama. With an astonishment even greater than I had experienced on the rooftop I now saw Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine appear out of sulphurous Victorian fogs and take up residence at 8 Royal College Street.

Their address was printed on the page right in front of me.

Now I was given to understand that a hundred years previously the poet who wrote Promontoire had actually lived here in Kings Cross St Pancras! I knew Royal College Street, a hundred yards from my derelict. Running out in the midnight rain I found the house. It was a decrepit Georgian affair with an utterly unique parapet which unmistakeably suggested the bow of a ship.

The brick of Promontoire!

The brigantine!

The pirate-ship.

The bespoke plaque commemorating Rimbaud and Verlaine’s stay in Somer’s Town in 1873. This appeared on the house in the early 80’s, the gift of two mysterious – and forever anonymous – brothers. (Official plaques are usually circular and blue.)

 The Promontory Palace

All followed from the revelation on the rooftop of my derelict. Rimbaud pointed the way and I had to follow.

From him I learned that Baudelaire’s mother was born in Kings Cross (nee au Somer’s Town). Through him I learned that William Blake made Pancras Old Church the centre of his London cosmology, the midpoint of his revolutionary Jerusalem, city of imagination and political freedom. From him I learned that Pancras Old Church is the seed-foundation of the Celtic church. Through Rimbaud I learned that Thomas Chatterton had fallen into an open grave in Pancras churchyard only three days before his death (at the age of seventeen!). From Rimbaud I learned that Shelley had passed through some kind of supernatural gateway here, an experience which utterly changed this poet’s life. Through Rimbaud I learned that WB Yeats had lived in Kings Cross for twenty-three years, the mystical years of his most esoteric work, A Vision. And from Rimbaud I learned that the Order of the Golden Dawn (Promontoire again) had its inner temple next to Pancras Old Church.

As William Blake says, drawing a rectangle round Kings Cross:

The fields from Islington to Marybone
to Primrose Hill and St John’s Wood
were builded over with pillars of gold
and there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

Even the ‘Japanese tree‘ of Promontoire I found in Pancras Churchyard (where Thomas Hardy’s initiation took place). Even the laundry ‘surrounded by German poplars‘ I found, though it’s gone now (gone, but not forgotten). And of course, as I saw initially from the rooftop, the Palais Promontoire (the Promontory Palace) is Scott’s Pancras Railway Hotel, completed in 1872, the year of Rimbaud’s first visit to London. (Naturally the Palais is the whole universe too, but that doesn’t preclude its foundation in this world. In fact it’s more alchemical to think of this double-aspect.) From the top floor – or the roof – of 8 Royal College Street this magnificent neo-Gothic monstrosity would have completely dominated Rimbaud’s skyline.

From Pentonville Road looking west: evening (1884) by the Irish painter John O’Connor. This painting shows St Pancras Railway Hotel much as Rimbaud would have seen it 11 years earlier, except that his view would have been looking south.

Pancras: Transcultural Sunchild

In my rite-of-passage Rimbaud wasn’t pointing at himself. Via Promontoire he directed my attention to St Pancras. And as I pursued many lines of enquiry into the subject of earth-mysteries and ancient cosmologies I always came back to one primal question: Who was Pancras?

(This question always leads me back to Rimbaud.)

Pancras is the androgynous mystery-saint of Christianity, the patron-saint of teenagers and truth. And if one traces the beginnings of Christian symbolism in Egyptian cosmology – an extremely fascinating thing to do – Pancras becomes identical with Horus, the child-deity of the Egyptian trinity. Similarly, in the oldest creation-myth of China, Pancras becomes the child-demiurge, Pan Ku, who dies an early death – self-martyred – exhausted by prodigious acts of creation. (Sound familiar?) He is the transcultural Sunchild of all cosmologies, spontaneous, exuberant and androgynous. He/she is the divine child: the inner child at the collective level.

Based entirely on the revelation on the rooftop I worked obsessively for twenty-three years on the theory of my epic poem Vale Royal. Much of that time I lived like an urban gypsy, a scholar of the derelicts. (Once, just for fun, I calculated that over a period of sixteen years I had lived in nearly a hundred different addresses. In those days books were my only ballast. When an eviction-order came one loaded one’s library into a taxi and moved on.)

 

Vale Royal (Goldmark, 1995) about which the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott said: Vale Royal moves with the ease and the clarity of a fresh spring over ancient stones, making its myths casual, even colloquial – an impressive achievement.

The Patron Saint of Teenagers and Truth

As surely as if he dictated it himself my epic poem Vale Royal came to me through Arthur Rimbaud. At long last – and after a terrible battle – the poem was published by the only man in England who would publish it – Mike Goldmark – printed by Martino Mardersteig at the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona – the finest printing press in the world – and launched at the Royal Albert Hall in 1995. Allen Ginsberg did me the honour of coming over from New York specially for the launch, and he and Paul McCartney performed Skeletons in the White House that night, McCartney riffing on guitar as Allen rapped his rebel lines to the beat.

Fifteen years after the launch of Vale Royal I chained myself – with fellow-poet and Rimbaudian Niall McDevitt – to the railings of 8 Royal College Street to stop the house of Arthur Rimbaud being gutted for flats. And, thanks to our timely intervention (and some help from Graham Henderson of the Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation) the house has been perpetually willed to the British nation – and more importantly saved for the planet – as most significant shrine of modern poetry.

The house of Arthur Rimbaud today, showing the ‘prow’ of the ‘brick‘, the brigantine. (I am not aware of any other Georgian house in London having a similar pyramidical feature.) A brigantine was a small two-masted vessel often associated with piracy. It is believed that Rimbaud and Verlaine occupied the top floor at number eight.

Octagonal Stone of Free Speech on Parliament Hill overlooking Kings Cross St Pancras, an atavistic marker referencing the open-air parliaments of the pre-Christian Druid religion.

Follow Me:

Arthur Rimbaud: Love’s To Be

Arthur Rimbaud: Love’s To Be

by | Apr 5, 2020 | Uncategorized

The Place Vendome image side-by-side with the Carjat studio portrait. Note that Rimbaud tilts his head down on the left, making his nose look wider than in the Carjat, where his head is slightly thrown-back, a standard studio technique to achieve exactly this more aristocratic look.

Christmas on Earth

I’m chanting – eyes closed – under my breath:

Love’s to be.

Over and over I’m breathing a spell, letting it drift in my bloodstream, work in my spine, cycle over and over:

Love’s to be!

Slowly I surface from five times deeper than sleep. The world seems more tranquil. Has it been reinvented? I hear the old-fashioned sound of children at play on the green, how quaint, how charming. They should be locked up in classrooms. Isn’t that so?

All schools should be under trees. (Who said that?)

The sun is shining. I look up. For the first time this century vast skies are clear of contrails, those white cancellations which cross-out the blue, which slash our atmospheres horizon-to-horizon, the whip-scars of our self-hating civilization. Has the selfish giant who writes human destiny – out of limited identifications – gone to sleep? Has he swallowed his own toxic marker-pen? For the first time this century clean turquoise skies are clear of poisonous transports, thundering machines. The jets which service our restlessness have been grounded. The big planes which relay jetlagged industrialists back and forth across the international dateline sit idle near runways where grass begins to grow.

Should I weep?

These big dreamy skies make me think of the eyes of Rimbaud. In his eyes we see the light of the oversoul, in his eyes we see the possibility of ‘Christmas on Earth’. Rimbaud dreamed that we could ‘reinvent’ love.

Bruno Braquehais’ main image of the demolition of Napoleon’s column in the Place Vendome. The Communard Rimbaud stands on the plinth nearest to Napoleon, scowling into shot with his feminine baby-face.

After the Pandemic

Our world has changed in just a few weeks. In March we were living under a capitalist system, now in April some sort of quasi-socialist dispensation is in place. With world-populations under house-arrest many are saying that democracy has died. with so many businesses destroyed by self-isolation Covid-19 could be the beginning of guaranteed basic income. (We’re seeing ramped-up digital surveillance; mobiles are fast becoming pocket-informers.) It would seem that  governments are trying to act selflessly,  putting the sick and the elderly first, funding vastly-accelerated medical research.

Yet the heartening scenario of what humans can do together is overshadowed by the question of what remains to be done. When this pandemic is beaten the real work begins. One in ten people on this planet perishes from drinking foul and contaminated water. (That’s more than all the wars put together.) Seven-hundred and eighty-five million souls slake their thirst each day with stagnant filth, refresh their children from a putrid source. (Can anyone imagine fighting C19 fevers with ditchwater?) Yet suddenly, when the developed world is threatened, governments are trying to act responsibly. If such principled actions and mobilizations had happened before the pandemic struck we might not be in the present apocalyptic situation.

Capitalism is flawed. The price of an individual claiming his or her freedom is fiscal slavery for the collective, this we know. It is scientifically proven in Das Kapital. On the other hand, socialism also is broken. Marx based his theory of rapid social change on Hegel when he would have done better to use a Darwinian model. Nature evolves gradually over time. Revolutions are sudden spikes of chaos creating vacuums of power to be occupied by monsters and tyrants. Revolutions have changed everything except the human heart.

Rimbaud doesn’t like what he sees as he gazes at us from the Place Vendome.

Picasso’s Boy With A Pipe alongside Braquehais’ image of Rimbaud in the Place Vendome. In my next essay I will be investigating Picasso’s most arcane portrait, said by Sir John Richardson to be based on Verlaine’s poem about Rimbaud, Crimen Amoris.

Overcoming the Plague

Arthur Rimbaud dreamed not of a revolution but of something far more impresssive: a transformation.

The children sing to you: Change our fate, overcome the plague.

Cosmic socialism could not persecute the Falun Gong simply because their disciplines are non-reductive. And altruistic capitalism could function in the way medieval monasticism related – comfortably – to the marketplace. Yet while nature transforms and man’s possibilities are infinite, we’re throwing away our most precious resources. The loneliness of the modern world means that the streaming of pornography is the only solace for isolated males addicted to self-stimulation. The internet is hypersexualized; it is 60-70% pornography.  Dirty servers – euphemistically called ‘the cloud’ – running on carbon-based fossil-fuels contaminate our skies (and our souls, in some cases).

Love is not here yet.

It’s on the horizon. It’s recently come a bit closer, like Rimbaud himself.

Unconditional love is within reach.

Love’s to be!

AAD in front of the House of Arthur Rimbaud in Kings Cross St Pancras, Central London. Rimbaud lived here for seven or eight weeks while writing Une Saison en Enfer in 1873. AAD’s epic poem Vale Royal unlocks the psychogeography of this mystic zone of London to which many visionary poets have been drawn, among them William Blake, WB Yeats, Shelley and Chatterton, who (dying at 17 in Kings Cross) can be considered the English Rimbaud.

A Dark Place

I have travelled with Arthur Rimbaud for many years. He changed my life in a supernatural manner when I was in a dark place, turning twenty. Two decades later I stood on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall in front of five-thousand people to recite the prologue of an epic poem which had taken twenty-three long years to write, years spent living on the streets of London, years spent meditating in derelicts. That poem, Vale Royal, was – in a sense – dictated to me by Arthur Rimbaud. (I will go into this elliptical history in a later piece.) In another – more famous – example of theophanic intervention, Paul Claudel was transformed on Christmas Day in 1886 when Rimbaud seemed to lead him into Notre Dame Cathedral. There – as an atheist – he went through a spiritual initiation which made him the greatest Catholic poet of the 20th century, the man who visibly stood up against the Nazis, condemning them as ‘wedded to Satan’, ‘utterly demonic’.

Do I think of myself as a Rimbaud scholar? Yes, but my approach to his biography is less individual, more universal. I base my understanding of this poet at archetypal levels. Over the years I have come to regard his emergence onto the world-stage as nothing less than mythical. His unique presence in contemporary world-culture makes him a Mighty Youth: an Absalom, a Hermes. I see him as messenger, winged runner between dimensions. Rimbaud is an interpreter of the multiverse, decoding the realities folded into our world. For all these reasons – and many more – I believe that this Christlike poet has appeared in the Place Vendome for revelatory purposes. The greatest Frenchman (like the greatest Englishman, William Blake) has a message for us in the time of plague.

Through the Spirit we go to God. Heartbreaking misfortune.

Rimbaud began with a doctrine of excess, driving himself at any cost to become a seer. He ended – only three years later – by saying the words above, his wonderful irony coming to bear on the fact that our five senses are circumscribed and limited but human superconsciousness is infinite. Rimbaud is teaching that death – in the context of the multiverse – represents the supreme misunderstanding. He says that death is a false interpretion based on partial data and incomplete experience. Yet the ‘absolutely modern’ seer adds that the manner of our dying is very real; and he asks us not die miserable deaths.

A bad death would be one where the meaning of life dawns too late; where an ego-driven individuality understands only on the threshold of the unknown that if unconditional love had allowed forgiveness – and freedom! – an experience might not have involved monotonous repetitions.

The plague could come back if we don’t transform.

Chant the Aquarian prayer with me:

Love’s to be!

Rimbaud in the Place Vendome with his nameless friend (who places his left hand on Rimbaud’s shoulder). The small man in front of Rimbaud may be Jules Andrieu.

Follow Me:

Arthur Rimbaud: The Third Man

Arthur Rimbaud: The Third Man

by | Mar 27, 2020 | Uncategorized

The enigmatic trio of the Place Vendome. The ‘third man’ stands closest to the camera, smiling.

Positive choreography

In Bruno Braquehais’ group-portrait most probably showing Arthur Rimbaud in the Place Vendome the poet is the psychological focus of the plinth-group. An inverted triangle comprises the poet himself, his friend from the 88th regiment (who places his left hand on Rimbaud’s left shoulder in a cordial and protective gesture) and a third man who stands in the foreground almost like a herald. I’d now like to examine the identity of this last figure.

The third man is the nearest person to the camera, which works to his advantage because in this position his height is amplified by his proximity. In fact we don’t realize how small he really is because of this clever photographic positioning. (The placement of this individual contributes to the argument for a completely choreographed ensemble where selected characters are represented in symbolic poses. Note also how the middle-distance group of Communards are distributed in geometric symmetry, strung like beads on the guard-rope which defines the central third of the composition. A triangle touching both ends of this rope will have its apex exactly in the centre of the photograph, while its two lower points neatly bisect the lower corners. This layout of this image has been proportioned for visual harmony.)

The third man thrusts himself importantly into the foreground yet at the same time he seems to make it clear that he doesn’t consider himself worthy of standing on the plinth. His kindly and intelligent face wears a slightly bashful expression. This individual seems to say he’s proud to be near Arthur Rimbaud but we note that he consciously places himself so as to obscure only the giant while leaving the visual path to the poet clear. By his act of stepping-aside our view of Rimbaud is absolutely unimpeded. (One more argument for careful choreography.)

Bruno Braquehais’ main image of the demolition of Napoleon’s column in the Place Vendome.

A man of Napoleonic stature

The third man smiles quite broadly but a heavy moustache blocks this expression. (He looks a bit too genial for a soldier.) While Rimbaud holds his rifle correctly by the butt, shouldering it menacingly – ready-for-action – this man rests his rifle more casually on the ground. This fusil – with bayonet affixed – is almost as tall as its diminutive bearer. We notice a white collar at the third man’s neck; also a watch-chain half-way down his chest: both these suggest some kind of military bureaucrat. We note too that he carries no ammunition, unlike the poet who slings his cartridges to his left in a small lightweight metal case, well out of the way yet easily accessible on his hip. The fact that the third man carries no live ammunition could denote an administrative role in the Communard military structure.

So who is this third man in the plinth-group? I want to suggest that this person who steps forward so authoritatively towards the camera – as if to say ‘I created all this!’ – is the man who actually signed the bureaucratic order which triggered the demolition of the Vendome Column. I want to speculate – more recklessly than any banker – that this small stocky figure with the genial expression and the bushy moustache is none other than Jules Andrieu. Who? (Even some Rimbaud fanatics have never heard of Jules Andrieu.) If I am correct in this surmise then another significant link has been found which makes the identification of the boy-soldier as Arthur Rimbaud much more probable.

Jules Andrieu. In the studio portrait (left) it is important to note that lighting and camera-angle have flatteringly hidden the prominent and chubby cheeks which are so much a feature of the Place Vendome shot. We are also looking at a younger Andrieu in the studio-portrait. (He appears here to be about twenty-five or so, whereas during the Commune he is thirty-three.)

Jules Andrieu’s photograph of the Place Vendome, post-demolition. Andrieu’s Parisian sequence Disasters of War is a photojournalistic masterpiece, like Braquehais’ Paris During the Commune. It is highly likely that the two photographers – working in a new and very specialized field – knew eachother professionally and even socially.

A polymath and an autodidact

Jules Louis Andrieu was born in Paris in 1838 and he died in exile aged only 46 in Jersey. He is usually described as a ‘short, shaggy-haired man’ who ‘smiles easily’. (We have two portraits of Andrieu and he smiles in both of them, unusual facial language for the time.) Jules Andrieu was something of a polymath and an autodidact (like Rimbaud himself). A poet, a linguist, a teacher, an occultist and a civil-servant, he was also a prolific author and a photographer. Before the Commune he worked for the Paris Prefecture in a fairly subordinate position in the municipal administration. Yet in his spare time he gave free lessons in secondary education to working-class Parisians, openhandedly sharing his passion for poetry, history and philosophy. In 1860 he published Palmistry: a Study of the Hand, Skull and Face. Six years later his History of the Middle Ages appeared. In 1867 followed Philosophy and Ethics. At some point during this period, as a habitue of the poetry cafes of the Latin Quarter, Andrieu met and became friends with Paul Verlaine.

Now, in 1871, the Commune’s utopian reverie begins, and Andrieu, with his altruistic curriculum vitae, is immediately appointed chief of staff of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris. Now he rubs shoulders daily with Verlaine who is elected head of the press bureau of the Central Committee. But it is Andrieu, and not Verlaine, who becomes what Graham Robb describes as ‘ringmaster of the republican Parnassians’. (The ‘Parnassians’ were a post-romantic, pre-symbolist poetry movement probably started by Theophile Gautier. De Banville, Mallarme and Verlaine all belonged to this group which was mercilessly swept away by Rimbaud.) Robb describes Andrieu as ‘an encourager and facilitator’. Robb also expresses the interesting opinion that Jules Andrieu’s poetry is valuable and worth reading. (At this point I have not read him myself and so cannot comment, but Robb’s bibliography mentions two collections both of which will have to be explored, both aesthetically and forensically.)

We know that later, in London, Andrieu and Rimbaud will become extremely close, so close that Verlaine will have an episode of jealous rage about their intimacy. (Andrieu’s contemporaries all hint at his homosexuality.) We also have Delahaye’s testimony that in exile Andrieu becomes Rimbaud’s ‘favourite intellectual brother’. In London, these two banished poets discover that they have much in common, sharing not only the craft of making poems but a fascination with mysticism, folklore and alternative history. In fact, as evidence of the closeness between Rimbaud and Andrieu, as proof of how long their friendship endures, we have the recently-discovered ‘Splendid History’ document, turned up among family-papers by the great-grandson of Andrieu, Alain Rochereau. This is a letter from Rimbaud to Andrieu written on the 16th of April 1874. It is addressed from 30 Argyle Square in London’s Kings Cross St Pancras district. (This is the small hotel where Rimbaud’s mother and sister stayed with him for several weeks while he attempted – rather half-heartedly – to find work in England, still effectively an exile, still unable to return to France.) In the ‘Splendid History’ letter Rimbaud sets out a plan for a visionary and alternative historical text which the poet hopes Andrieu is going to help him publish. (I intend to look at this extraordinary letter in detail in a future essay.) From the dating of this correspondence we know that Rimbaud’s friendship with Jules Andrieu lasted long after the ‘London pilgrimage’ period. While Rimbaud was writing his ‘Splendid History’ letter in Kings Cross St Pancras in 1874, Verlaine was languishing in a Belgian prison cell looking back to 1873 and the crisis in Camden Town. (In fact Argyle Square is only a ten minute walk from Great College Street, where the Infernal Bridegroom and the Foolish Virgin descended into the relational insanity delineated in A Season in Hell.)

The point that I am trying to make here is that contact between Rimbaud and Andrieu – however glancing – might just have been initiated during the seven weeks of the Paris Commune. And it is possible that if that such contact was made Rimbaud might have referred to it in his first letter to Verlaine, the text of which has been almost completely lost, destroyed by Verlaine’s wife Mathilde. We have only fragments of this crucial first letter, so we don’t know exactly what connections Rimbaud used in reaching out to the famous Parnassian. But the tone of his letter is warm, intimate and autobiographical, very different in style to a letter previously written to Banville. It is just possible that Rimbaud – knowing that Andrieu was close to Verlaine –  might have mentioned some (even anonymous) contact made during the Commune (when most aritsts making political statements used pseudonyms). 

These are necessarily tentative speculations, but how could contact with Jules Andrieu have actually happened?

Jules Andrieu in a second studio portrait (left). Once again clever lighting and camera-angle have hidden the chubby cheeks which are so much a feature of the Place Vendome shot. Both studio portraits would seem to be taken at least eight years before the Communard group-portrait in the Place Vendome.

Hands full of horsepower

It is not difficult to imagine a man like Jules Andrieu spending a lot of time in the poetry cafes of the Latin Quarter. As a man of influence under the new pre-socialist regime his project is to cast a cultural dragnet through the literary underground of Paris hoping to discover some new voice which truly articulates ‘the resurrectionary mythology of the Commune’ (Graham Robb’s phrase.) We can easily suppose that in one of these atmospheric smoke-filled dives he witnesses a young hoodlum called Jean Baudry – or is it Alcide Bava? – reciting the most inflammable verses he has ever heard. This baby-faced soldier-poet in the uniform of the Paris Irregulars is declaiming a seasick poem of mysterious violence. Nautical imagery amplifies an orgiastic nightmare in which the stern of a vessel is rammed in a nauseant assault. As the baby-faced poet howls his Stolen Heart a subterannean gas-lit den begins to sway side-to-side like a drunken ship. (Someone spews quietly in a corner.) Now the mass-hypnosis intensifies with a poem titled The Hands of Jeanne-Marie. As the grim singer chants a hymn of rage to the anger of Parisian working-class women he suddenly seems to become one of them. (His huge red hands flail the shadows as he declaims his republican battle-song.)

More fatal than machines
these hands full of horsepower.

Andrieu is left breathless. Stunned, he has just seen some transgender petroleuese set fire to the fabric of reality, burn down the sky. When the demented recitation finally subsides he goes over to a candlelit table  where the young poet sits with a bulky companion who seems to act like a personal bodyguard. Andrieu introduces himself, not as a poet but as a photographer. (Andrieu’s valuation of his own verse has just sunk several octaves lower.) He elegantly compliments the adolescent genius, then mentions casually that the following day, a colleague and close friend of his – the deaf-mute ‘collodion-gunner’ Bruno Braquehais – is planning to capture the demolished Napoleon lying in the rubble of the Place Vendome. Would this young poet deign to appear in the composition? Gustave Courbet has promised to be there.

The young poet gives a surly grin and mumbles something non-committal. (He enjoys the street-game of pussyfooting around.) Andrieu, baffled, plays his ace-card:

‘I’m the one who signed the demolition-order!’

The revelation has no impact. There’s zero response. An infernal adolescent grimace remains firmly superimposed on the baby-face.

Doomed brother-Communards

Like the Commune itself our dream has been brief.

If the third man is really Jules Andrieu then we know that the plinth-grouping is intentional. If Jules Andrieu as-it-were introduces Rimbaud then the symbolism of Braquehais’ masterpiece is complete. Now we see ‘the resurrectionary mythology of the Commune’ expressed by the mighty youth of armed revolution, backed-up by his best friend (Hercules of the warm-heart) and introduced to the world by the Communard chief-of-staff.

To conclude.

I have a notion about the crowbar, that crowbar so obviously placed as a prop right next to the third man, the emblematic and phallic crowbar which screams ‘I toppled a military dictator. Deal with that!’ I want to speculate – if possible without crashing the literary stock-market – that it just might have been Jean-Arthur himself who suggested to Andrieu the employment of some ugly stage-furniture. As the poet about to invent literary symbolism it would have been a nice ironic gesture on the poet’s part to provide the miniscule Jules Andrieu with the lever which brings the Second Empire down. That crowbar gives Jules a bit of extra weight, makes a small man seem a lot more substantial.

It’s just a vague suspicion.

But isn’t life itself a second-guess?

Andrieu’s crowbar is the symbolic lever which has turned the Second Empire upside-down.

Follow Me:

Arthur Rimbaud: Racing the Clock

Arthur Rimbaud: Racing the Clock

by | Mar 23, 2020 | Uncategorized

Picasso’s sketch of Rimbaud

No paper-trails

Based on Rimbaud’s movements in the spring of 1871 there is one possible chronological objection to the authenticity of the Place Vendome images. This argument suggests that the poet is unlikely to be in Paris on the 16th of May for the demolition of Napoleon’s Column because one of his date-stamped letters proves that on the 15th he’s a hundred-and-fifty miles away in Charleville. However, though rail links are obviously compromised at this time, some of Rimbaud’s biographers believe the ‘man shod with the wind’ could just have managed to be in Paris on the 16th. And yet, as we will see, this is not absolutely essential to the argument for his appearance in the Braquehais images.

There have been many misunderstandings about Rimbaud’s activities in April and May of 1871 partly because of the internecine chaos sweeping northern France at this time. Sequential precisions fly out the window as two separate governments begin a fight to the death over Paris. Then – as I’ve just mentioned – a question-mark hangs over transport options as train timetables vaporize in the ultimate lunacy of a civil war. And finally there’s the biographical stumbling-block: Rimbaud doesn’t leave a paper-trail. Intense and infrequent, his letters reveal next to nothing about his day-to-day affairs. (Arthur Rimbaud wasn’t on Facebook.)

Jean-Luc Steinmetz, perhaps Rimbaud’s most illustrious biographer, himself a French poet of distinction, clearly defines the poet’s timetable during the crucial seven weeks of the Commune. He writes:

‘There are two strongly circumscribed periods of time – April 17th to May 12th and May 15th to May 28th – during which he could have gone to Paris and demonstrated his solidarity with the insurgents.’

(Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma, p.59)

The Vendome Column about to come down

Postliminary images

The Vendome Column falls on the 16th of May. We realize from Jean-Luc Steinmetz’ calculations that Rimbaud can indeed witness the actual demolition if he races to Paris the day after writing ‘the letter of the Seer’ in Charleville on the 15th of May. In this scenario he rides a train part way to the city –  perhaps to the outer suburbs – slips through Versaillais lines and enters the metropolis. However, against a backdrop of collective pandemonium this journey is more likely to take a few days. Which means that Rimbaud cannot be present when the column comes down on the 16th of May. (Though Steinmetz deems it possible.)

But another possibility opens up if we conservatively suppose that Rimbaud gets back to besieged Paris on either the 17th or 18th of May.   (We know how frantic he is to be there. In a letter dated the 13th of May he says that ‘mad anger drives me towards the battle of Paris where so many workers are dying as I write to you now.’) Arriving on the 17th he misses the climactic moment of the Commune by one day. Yet though this disappointment matters greatly to him it doesn’t matter at all to us, because of course the Vendome Column still lies across the square; and will continue to lie there for many long months, until 1873 in fact. And the poet is still in time to be captured by Bruno Braquehais because his photographs are not taken on the 16th! The Braquehais images are clearly postliminary. Every detail of these images betrays the fact that they are carefully orchestrated group-portraits, artificially composed and thoroughly choreographed. The Braquehais photographs are taken several days after the actual toppling of the Emperor. It’s a mistake to challenge the authenticity of the Braquehais images based only on the date of the actual demolition.

The actual fall of the Vendome Column on the 16th of May, 1871

Smoothly Driven

There exists one photograph – of unknown provenance – which does seem to record the immediate aftermath of demolition. We note that in this shot a vast crowd of soldiers (and maybe civilians) is in a state of great turbulence and excitement. Here no one has dared to ask the mob to hold still through a long exposure-time. Naturally the result is a blurred sea of forms in which we can make out the ghost of a face here and there. Hundreds of people appear in this composition, ranks upon ranks retreat into the background. In the foreground there is debris and dust everywhere. From extreme left to extreme right people jostle against a crowd-barrier in the form of a long rope slung on stakes. We can safely assume a circular multitude completely surrounding the military idol. If it weren’t for the stout line holding them back this excited rabble would be dancing on the fallen god. Almost certainly this is the 16th of May. As we look at this image we can almost hear the Marsellais roaring out a thousand throats.

There is nothing composed about this raw image. (If Rimbaud is here we certainly can’t see him.) Compare this turbulent, seething photograph with the relative tranquility of the Braquehais image and immediately we understand that the Rimbaud group-portrait is shot several days after the event, when the fuss has died down, when the mob has dispersed, when the first delirious excitement has subsided.

So, erring on the side of caution, if we allow a driven Rimbaud four days to make the difficult journey to Paris, this means that he arrives on the 17th or 18th of May. Now the movement of the clock runs smoothly and easily. Now the chronologies work properly. Because, before the beginning of Semaine Sanglante (which commences on the 22nd of May) there exists an interval of almost a week during which Bruno Braquehais has the opportunity to set up a complex photgraphic procedure; and Arthur Rimbaud has time to get to Paris.

The fallen idol of military France. (Image of unknown provenance, thought to be taken on the 16th of May 1871.)

The handsome renegade of the Place Vendome stands as tall as he can, the franc-tireur incarnate. With his rifle-butt raised in his right hand and his bayonet pointing at God’s blue sky he challenges all the basic premises. Europe is going to hell and has to change. As poet and freedom-fighter he dreams of transformation. The free-state of Paris will show the rest of the world. A new order of cosmic socialism is coming.

Beside him stands the one true friend he can trust. Everything seems possible at this moment. Holy Paris may be encircled with devils, just as Troy was surrounded long ago.  But he is the Trojan prince who has slept with Beauty. And now – like Hector – he guards Her under seige. He and his companions may be outnumbered, they may be encompassed by demonic enemies. But his muse is immortal. She cannot die.

In my next piece I plan to analyse the triumvirate, to decode the mystery of the Third Man who stands in front of Rimbaud and his nameless friend.

Please stay tuned!

The enigmatic triumvirate of the Place Vendome. The ‘Third Man’ stands closest to the camera, smiling.

Follow Me:

Pin It on Pinterest