Prince of Poets

VERLAINE: FOOL OF GOD (394 pp.)--Lawrence and Elisabefh Hanson--Random House ($5).

Poet Paul Verlaine was the youngest of four children--the three others, stillborn, were kept pickled in bottles by their doting mother. This might have dispirited Paul; instead, he grew to manhood with a sunny nature and an easy-breezy charm. Far from being rebellious, he always obeyed instantly--particularly when ordered by his instincts. At about 16 he discovered brothels, and thought them so sensible and wonderful that he never wearied of visiting them. Soon afterwards he discovered alcohol, took to it with the same enthusiasm. By the time he settled into his job as a Paris civil servant in 1864, while writing poetry on the side, Verlaine had achieved an odd condition: he embraced everything life had to offer so matter-of-factly that his intellectual friends found him rather bourgeois.

These were the happiest years of a poet who was destined to change the nature of French poetry. His mother and foster sister idolized him, and he accepted their protective adoration as a permanent fixture of his life. When his foster sister died, Verlaine went to pieces, changed from a gaily dressed, monocled dandy into a shabby, unshaven lout. This made him feel remorseful, and, rushing into a church after an absinthe bout, he hammered on the confessional box and shouted: "I must confess! I must receive absolution!"

Deprived of absolution--there was a queue at the box, and Verlaine had never had to wait for anything before--he decided to be redeemed by the love of a pure angel. For this he selected 16-year-old Mathilde Maute, prim and pretty authoress of a poem beginning, "How powerful is a woman's tear!" Verlaine so worshiped her that he stopped going to brothels, and when their marriage had to be postponed, suffered what he perplexedly called "a disappointment that one might almost describe as carnal."

Weird Wonder Boy. The marriage was "a ghastly error." Out of bed, Mathilde was "naive, vain and stupid." In bed, it never occurred to her that Verlaine's "tigerish love" hid a yearning for motherly protection. When friends came to the house one day in Mathilde's absence, he was in a small closet, locked in the housemaid's shielding arms.

The fate of the marriage, along with the fate of Verlaine as a poet, was decided by the appearance in Paris of the weirdest wonder boy known to literature. At 17, Arthur Rimbaud was already a poet of genius. He had a face like an angel's and a satanic determination to undergo what he called "a long, immense and deliberate derangement of all the senses . . . seeking every possible experience." Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre took Verlaine's breath away. In the cafes the "child Shakespeare" insulted every poet he met, interrupted their readings-aloud with sharp cries of "Merde!" One day he denounced a critic as an "excreter of ink." The critic took prompt revenge by noting that, at a subsequent first night, among those present was "the saturnine poet Paul Verlaine who gave his arm to a charming young person named Miss Rimbaud."

The New French. The implication was clear. Two years later, ostensibly charged with wounding Rimbaud with a pistol during a quarrel, but in effect charged with homosexuality, Verlaine was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at hard labor. Later a Paris court awarded Mathilde a separation decree. These catastrophes, in the opinion of British Biographers Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, proved the making of Verlaine. Stripped of both wife and friend, he went straight to the prison chaplain, asked to be received back into the church. He "happily began to write religious poems" and, on his release from prison, lived for years without love or liquor. He explained: "I'm fighting to put down that old Me."

Most of Verlaine's greatest poems (La Bonne Chanson, Sagesse, Romances sans paroles) express a medley of sensuality, longing and faith. Verlaine learned a "new" French--strong, vigorous and plain. He and Rimbaud broke down "the barrier between poet and reader by using French as it was then spoken"--not as courtiers of the past had spoken it. They changed the monotonous, end-of-line rhyme, throwing the stress not where elegance demanded it, but "where the sense lay." Where Verlaine used the old end rhyme, he made it run rather than halt--and how hauntingly and simply he did it is seen in the opening stanza of one of his loveliest poems, evoking an autumnal mood to the sobs of violins:

Les sanglots longs Des violons

De I'automne Blessent man coeur D'une langueur Monotone.

Lord of the Wards. Verlaine did not stick to his reformed way of life. Absinthe and syphilis drove him into a public hospital, where he "was looked after like a child [and] had absolutely no responsibility." This being the condition he had always sought, Verlaine developed a passion for hospitals. Propped up on pillows, he "wrote his way through reams of hospital paper, pouring out poems, prose [and] presided in state over all the affairs of the ward." Young poets and admirers came daily to his bedside, listened rapturously while the Master, his hospital nightcap jauntily askew, recited his poems aloud. Then they tiptoed out, after "carefully depositing under the inverted chamber pot a bottle of brandy, or a flask of absinthe, some cigars or tobacco."

All good things come to an end. Eventually Verlaine could no longer afford the luxury of a public hospital; his poems were making too much money. Yet the journalists who flocked to interview him found him indescribably shabby. Where was the money going? It was a long time before they discovered that the "Prince of Poets" was supporting three retired prostitutes named Philomene, Eugenie and Caroline, and living with each in turn. No scandal could shake the dignity of the great man, who now referred to himself in the third person, saying: "He has little left to him except his poverty, but he insists that this at least shall be respected." It was. When he stumbled home drunk, a proud gendarme escorted him, explaining to passersby: "Monsieur Verlaine has to be in that condition to write."

The Hanson husband-and-wife team has long specialized in biographies of 19th century artists, including Van Gogh, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Their principal weakness has always been to pull out the stops too much and overdramatize the tragic element. The present work is their best book because Verlaine was not only, as he said, "I'Empire a la fin de la decadence" (the Empire in the last stages of its decline), but also a man who tempered every tragedy with a humor ranging from the ironical to the hilarious. His funeral (he was 51 when he died) was one of the best farces ever staged. Fellow Poet Catulle Menees carried one cord of the pall with one hand, dexterously skimmed through a newspaper with the other. Seven literary men delivered seven magnificent orations. Philomene and Eugenie were both present, bathed in tears. Only Caroline was unavoidably detained. She was stark naked in front of Verlaine's house in the Rue Descartes, shrieking that she was his muse.

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