Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben), page 36
Monsieur Venus is the product of an incubus. Jacques Silvert is Sporus to the cruelly passionate female Nero—a vulgar, smiling, passive Sporus with soft lamblike eyes. Raoule de Vénerande, a sort of female Des Esseints, falls in love with this exquisite porcine creature—falls in love as in Shakespeare’s sonnet: A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted.
Raoule de Vénerande is cousin to Nero and that legendary, terrible Gilles de Laval, the sire of kings, who died at the stake. . . . As for the castrated and detestable Jacques, a ridiculous Ganymede to his vampire lover, he is a curious clinical case, and could be a patient of Krafft-Ebing’s, or Molle’s, or Gley’s. The florist’s androgyny is explained by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium,42 and Krafft-Ebing would classify him as a case of “eviration,” or transmutatio sexus paranoia. . . .
A woman, a delicate, intellectual, cerebral young woman reveals terrible secrets to us: that is the highest praise, and the most tempting of attractions. Yet note that in her works we enter a most hard and unknown country—unnatural, forbidden, perilous.
There is a portrait of Rachilde at twenty-five. In profile: her throat is naked to the swelling of her breasts; her hair is rolled up at the back, at the nape of her neck, like a black serpent, and upon her brow, it is cut in the fashion of some years ago, straight across, though covering her entire forehead. Her gaze—such a gaze!—and eyes that say everything and know everything. A delicate, slightly Jewish nose, and a mouth—oh, mouth! companion of the eyes. And in it all, the divine and terrible enigma of Woman: Mysterium. On her white bosom lies a spray of white rosebuds.
I know of one man who, while he was in Paris, refused to be presented to Rachilde, for fear of losing another youthful illusion. Today, Rachilde is Mme. Alfred Vallette; she has put on weight, and is not the enigmatic dominatrix of the portrait of twenty-five years ago, that adorable and fearsome god-daughter of Lilith.
Married to Alfred Vallette, she is the “lady of a house” today, but she has not stopped producing intellectual offspring. She writes novels, stories, reviews.
Rachilde has a quick critical sense, and with her woman’s swift and skillful perspicacity is able to discover in the works she analyzes the most hidden meanings. . . .
“In our days,” says Rachilde, “there are instigators of ideas (as before there were meneurs de loups),43 because in this ‘modern’ era of ours, a thousand times more sinister than the bloody Middle Ages, there is need of apparitions a thousand times more flagellant; and those meneurs, driving their murderous ideas to the murder of old theories, old principles, madly throwing open the eyes of the spirit, are also precursors of the Angel. Those who fail to understand that the time is coming when the herders of ideas shall come, one after another, with astonishing swiftness, over the shadowy horizon, are quite mad.” And am I not right, then, in calling Rachilde Mme. Antichrist? She understands, she knows, and she is also an omen, a portent. . . .
LE COMTE DE LAUTRÉAMONT
His real name is not known.44 “Comte de Lautréamont” is a pseudonym. He says he is from Montevideo, but who knows the truth of that shadowy life, which was perhaps a nightmare dreamt by some sad angel martyred in the empyrean by the memory of celestial Lucifer? He lived a life of misfortune and hard luck, and he died a madman. He wrote a book which would be unique, except for the prose pieces of Rimbaud—a diabolic, mocking, howling, cruel, terrible, strange book, a book in which one hears, at once, the groans of Pain and the sinister hissing of Madness.
León Bloy was the true discoverer of the Comte de Lautréamont. Furious St. John of God said of the sores on the soul of blasphemous Job, that they were filled with light. But today, in France and Belgium, no one outside a tiny group of initiates knows the poem called Chants de Maldoror, into which is poured all the horrific anguish of the wretched yet sublime poet, whose work it was my fortune to make known to Latin America in Montevideo. I will not advise our youth to drink from those black waters, however much they might see the marvels of the constellations reflected in their depths. It would not be prudent for young spirits to have much conversation with that spectral man, whether on account of his literary “dash” or in search of new delights. There is a very sensible piece of advice in the Kabbala: “There is no need to judge the specter, for soon enough one will be one.” And if there is a dangerous author in this regard, it is the Comte de Lautréamont. What hellish, rabid Cerberus bit that soul, down there in the regions of mystery and darkness, before it was incarnated in this world? The cries of the theophobe make all who hear them shiver. If I were to take my muse near the place where the madman is caged and shouting into the wind, I would put my hands over her ears.
Like Job, his sleep is tormented and he is tortured by visions. Like Job, he might exclaim: “My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.”45 But “Job” means “he who weeps”; Job wept, yet poor Lautréamont does not. His book is a satanic breviary, impregnated with sadness and melancholy. “The evil spirit,” says St. Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life, “delights in sadness and melancholy because it is sad and melancholy, and will be so for all eternity.” Even more: the man who has written the Chants de Maldoror might very well have been possessed. We must recall that certain cases of madness, today classified by science with technical names and set down in the catalogue of nervous disorders, were and still are seen by the Holy Mother Church as cases of possession, and in need of exorcism. “Soul in ruins!” Bloy exclaims, with words moist with the tears of compassion.
Job: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.”
Lautréamont: “I am the son of man and woman, or so I am told. I find that strange. I thought I was more than that!”
The author with whom he has most points of contact is Edgar Allan Poe. Both had the vision of the supernatural; both were persecuted by terrible enemies of the spirit, infernal “hordes” that drive a man to alcohol, madness, or death; both felt an attraction toward mathematics, one of the three roads, with theology and poetry, that can lead a man to the Infinite. But Poe was celestial, while Lautréamont was infernal.
Listen to these bitter fragments:
“I dreamt that I had entered the body of a pig, that it was not easy to get out again, and that my feet were sunk into the most horrible of mudsties. Was this some recompense? Object of my desires: I no longer belonged to humanity! That was how I interpreted it, as I experienced the most profound joy. But I searched and searched, trying to remember what act of virtue I had committed to merit this wondrous gift of Providence. . . . But what man knows his innermost needs, or the cause of his pestilential delights? This metamorphosis never appeared to my eyes as anything but the high, magnificent repercussion of a perfect felicity that I had so long been waiting for. At last, the day had come when I was transformed into a pig! I tried out my teeth on the bark of a tree; I eyed my snout with delight. There was not the slightest particle of divinity in me; I was able to raise my soul to the immense height of this ineffable voluptuousness.” . . .
Hear again the macabre voice of this rare visionary. In this little prose-poem he is speaking of dogs at night, which jangle the nerves. The dogs howl: “sometimes like a child crying out in hunger, or a cat wounded in the belly, under a roof; like a woman giving birth; like a dying man assailed by the plague, in the hospital; like a young woman singing a sublime melody—they howl at the stars of the North, at the stars of the East, at the stars of the South, at the stars of the West, at the moon, at the mountains, which look, from a distance, like gigantic boulders, lying in darkness; at the cold air they breathe in lungsful, that turns the inside of their noses red, burning; at the silence of the night; at owls, whose oblique flight brushes their lips and noses, and who are carrying a mouse or a frog in their talons, sweet living nourishment for their chicks; at the rabbits that disappear in the blink of an eye; at the thief who flees on a galloping horse after committing his crime; at the serpents that part the grass and make the dogs’ flesh crawl and their teeth chatter; at their own barking, which frightens even them; at the frogs, which they burst with one gnash of their teeth (why did they leave their pond?); at the trees, whose leaves, softly soughing, are yet further mysteries they do not understand, although they peer at them with intelligent eyes; at spiders suspended between their long legs and that scurry up the trees to save themselves; at the crows that have not found anything to eat during the day and so return to their nests on weary wing; at the rocks on the ocean’s bank; at the fires that look like the masts of invisible ships; at the muffled sound of the waves; at the big fish that swim by, showing their black fins, and then plunge into the abyss; and at the man who enslaves them. . . .
“One day, with glassy eyes, my mother said to me, ‘When you are lying in bed and hear the howling of the dogs in the countryside, hide in your sheets. Don’t laugh at what they are doing; they have an insatiable thirst for the infinite, like I do, like all humans, for the figure pâle et longue. . . .”
“And I,” he continues, “like those dogs, suffer a yearning for the infinite. I cannot, I cannot fill that need!” It is irrational, delirious, “but there is something down deep that makes reflective men shiver.”
He is a madman, no doubt about it. But we must acknowledge, too, that the deus drives oracles mad, and that the divine fever of the prophets produced similar fits, and that the author “lived” that, and that this is not a “literary work,” but rather the cry, the howl, of a sublime being martyred by Satan.
He almost mocks beauty itself—like Psyche, out of hatred of God—as we can see in these following comparisons, which I have taken from other little poems:
“The grand duke of Virginia was beautiful, as beautiful as the memory of the curve traced by a dog running after its master.” . . .
The beetle, “as beautiful as the trembling of the hands in alcoholism. . . .”
The adolescent, “as beautiful as the retractable talons of a bird of prey,” or even “as the muscular movements in the ulcers on the soft parts of the posterior cervical region,” or perhaps . . . “as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. . . .”
The fact is, oh serene and happy spirits!, this is a cutting and abominable “humour.” . . .
He never thought about literary glory. He wrote only for himself. He was born with that supreme flame of genius, and it was that flame that consumed him.
The Prince of Darkness possessed him, entered his soul by way of sadness. He allowed himself to fall. He abhorred Man and detested God. In the six parts of his work he planted a sick, leprous, poisoned Flower. His animals are those that remind one of the workings of the Dark One: toads, owls, vipers, spiders. Despair is the wine that intoxicates him. Prostitution is for him the mysterious symbol of the Apocalypse, glimpsed by exceptional spirits in all its transcendence. “I have made a pact with Prostitution, in order to sow disorder in families . . . Ay! Ay!” exclaims the naked woman, “someday men will be just. I will say no more. Let me depart, let me go hide my infinite sadness in the depths of the ocean. There is nothing but oneself and the hateful monsters that seethe in those black abysses, monsters that do not scorn me.”
And Bloy: “The indisputable sign of a great poet is the prophetic ‘unconscious,’ the disturbing faculty of speaking, to men and to time, words never heard before, and whose meaning the poet himself cannot fathom. That is the mysterious stamp of the Holy Spirit upon sacred or profane brows. However absurd it may be today to say that one has discovered a great poet, and discovered him in a madhouse, I must in conscience say that I am certain I have done just that.”
Lautréamont’s poem was published seventeen years ago in Belgium. Nothing is known of its author’s life. Great “modern” artists of the French language speak of the volume to one another as a symbolic, rare, indiscoverable prayer book.
IBSEN
It has not been long since intellectual explorations of the Pole began. Leconte de Lisle has gone off to contemplate Nature and learn the song of the runoja;46 Mendès, to see the midnight sun and converse with Snorr and Snorra, in a poem of blood and ice. In those distant boreal regions strange and hitherto unheard-of beings have been discovered: tremendous poets, cosmic thinkers. One of these beings has been found in Norway, a strong, rare man with white hair, a shy smile, and a profound gaze who writes profound works. Is he, perhaps, possessed of Arctic genius? He is indeed perhaps possessed of Arctic genius. He seems to stand as tall as a pine tree; he is small of stature. He was born in his mysterious land; the soul of the earth there, in its most enigmatic manifestations, revealed itself in him when he was but a child. Today he is an old man; upon his head much snow has fallen; the halo of glory sits upon his brow like a magnificent aurora borealis. He lives far away, in his land of fjords and rain and fog, under a sky of capricious and elusive light. The world sees him as a legendary inhabitant of the polar realm. There are those who think that he is extravagantly generous, shouting to other men from his cold retreat the words of his dream; there are those who believe him to be an unapproachable and stand-offish sort of apostle; there are those who think he is mad. Great visionary of the snows! His eyes have looked upon the long nights and red sun that bloodies the dark winter; they have gazed upon life’s night, the dark side of humanity. His soul shall be bitter unto death. . . .
“His nose is strong, his cheeks red and prominent, his chin vigorously marked; his large gold spectacles, his thick white beard into which the lower part of his face is sunken, give him l’air brave homme, the appearance of a provincial magistrate, grown old in the job. All the poetry of his soul, all the splendor of his intelligence has taken refuge in the long, thin, slightly sensual lips, at whose corners there is an expression of haughty irony; his gaze, which is veiled and as though turned inward, is now sweet and melancholic, now swift and aggressive, disquieting, tormented, and under it one trembles, for it seems to delve into one’s very being. The brow is especially magnificent—square, solid, of powerful dimensions, a brow heroic and genial, as broad as the world of thoughts it contains. And dominating the whole, and accentuating yet further that impression of ideal animality that one feels in his entire physiognomy, there is a wavy shock of white, untamable hair. . . .
“A man, in a word, of special essence and strange appearance that disquiets one and is striking, overpowering; his equal, there is none—a man one could never forget, though one lived a hundred years.”
All men have an inner world, and superior men have one that is superior, and thus the great Scandinavian found his treasure trove within his own inner world. “I have looked for everything within me; everything has arisen from my heart,” he says.
It was within himself that he discovered the richest lode in which to study the human principle. He performed a vivisection upon himself. He put his ear to his own breast, his fingers to his own pulse. And everything arose from his heart. His heart! The heart of a sensitive and nervous man. It beats for the world; he is sick with humanity.
His vibrating organism, predisposed to collisions with the unknown, was further tempered in that realm of phantasmal nature, the alien atmosphere of his native land. From out the shadows, an invisible hand seized him. Mysterious echoes called to him from the fog.
His childhood was a flower of sadness. He was anxious, filled with daydreams; he had been born with illness. I picture him, a silent, pale child with long hair, on cloudy, misty days. I picture him in the first shivers produced by the spirit that must have possessed him, in a perpetual twilight or in the cold silence of the Norwegian night. His tiny child-soul, squeezed into a hard home; the first spiritual blows against that small, fragile, crystalline soul; the first impressions that caused him to see the evil of the land and the harshness of the road ahead. Later, in the years of his young-manhood, more harshness. The beginning of the struggle for life and the revelatory vision of social concern. Ah! he recognized the hard machinery and the danger of so much toothed noise, and the error in the direction of the machine, and the perfidy of the bosses, and the universal degradation of the species! And his soul became a tower of snow. And within him there appeared the fighter, the combatant. Armored, helmeted, armed, the poet emerged. He heard the voice of the peoples of the earth. His spirit went forth from its restricted sphere of nation; he sang foreign struggles; he called for the nations of the North to unite; his word, which was hardly heard within his own land, was rendered dumb with disillusion; his compatriots did not know him; for him there were only stones, satire, envy, egoism, stupidity; his land, like all native lands, was a hard stepmother that swatted at the prophet with her broom. . . . Yet after disenchantment his young muse found songs of enthusiasm, life, love once more.
In the years of the first struggles to earn a living, he had been a pharmacist. Then a journalist. Then director of a traveling theater company. He traveled, he lived. . . . He was poor; he didn’t care; he loved. He was mad with love; so mad that he married. The sweet daughter of a Protestant pastor was his wife. I figure the good Suzannah Thoresen must have had hair of the most glorious gold, and eyes divinely azure.
After his Catilina, a simple essay of his youth, the playwright emerged.... Let us hear something from The Vikings at Helgeland, that rare and visionary work:
HIÖRDIS
The wolf there—close behind me; it does not move; it glares at me with its two red eyes. It is my wraith, Sigurd! Three times has it appeared to me; that bodes that I shall surely die to-night!
