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 cafés 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."