The Satyr Saint

...Even if he was not the greatest since Dante, Verlaine was sincerely a Christian poet He was also??and this Wilde refrained from mentioning in the repentant mood that produced De Piofundis??capable of brutal violence and viciousness, his prison sentence was not, as m Wilde's case, for a harmless homosexual peccadillo, but for his liability to fits of rage m which luck alone prevented him from committing homicide Ironically, while Wilde became an outcast from the literary world of England (it was years after his death before his works regained respectable consideration), Verlaine, wandering through Pans streets in the dress of a vagabond, paiading his degeneracy, was still revered for his achievements Veilaine has already appeared in England, where one of the main cnticisms leveled against it by the Times Liteiaiy Supplement was that Miss Richardson dwelt too much on the details of the poet's life and too little on a critical examination of his poems The charge, it seems to me, misses the point of biography to portray the man who did the work, and thus enable the reader to approach it with a deeper understanding of the creative process The work itself is quite another matter, and its assessment is the task of the critic as such Some authors felicitously combine the roles of biographer and critic, and for them we can be thankful, nevertheless, it is graceless to blame the writer who succeeds admirably in one for not seriously attempting the other...

...The Satyr Saint_ Verlaine By Joanna Richai dson Viking 432 pp $10 00 Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Liteiatwe", authoi, 'Mohandas Gandhi" "Two of the most perfect lives I have come across m my own experience are the lives of Verlame and of Prince Kropotkm, both of them men who have passed years in prison the first, the one Christian poet since Dante, the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia " So, from his own prison cell, wrote Oscar Wilde, whose name is curiously absent from Joanna Richardson's new biography of Verlaine Not that Wilde met him often ??we have, in fact, the record of only one encounter, and by the time Wilde in his turn became a vagabond in the Latin Quarter, Verlaine was already dead Yet there are many parallels between the two men, not least being the duality of personality that Miss Richardson brings out as an important feature of Verlaine's nature...

...In this atmosphere, Verlaine never ceased to be respected as a poet no matter how pathetic or repulsive he appeared as a man Students and younger writers treated him with understandable reverence for his rejection of bourgeois standards as well as tor his poetry, lespectable bourgeois, among them doctors in the hospitals where he spent so much of his later life, were proud to help him, waiters pampered him despite his method of tipping, the leverse of Proust's legendary largesse, professional clochards like Bibi-la-Puree protected him, and prostitutes motheied this aged child, the Chief of Police instructed his men never to touch Verlaine during his last decade, no matter what extraordinary scrape he might become involved in, his peers elected this shambling, ragged, vomit-stained vagabond "The Prince of Poets" at a solemn conclave gathered in the historic Cafe Procope All this speaks not only for the greatness of Verlaine but even more for the greatness of the 19-century French civilization that nurtured him I am inclined to think we shall not see its like again, and most assuredly not in France...

...Indeed, Miss Richardson's portrait of Verlaine depicts him as the central figure in a kind of genre canvas that reveals much about the French culture of La Belle Epoque, including its great homogeneity Unlike the current sharp division between culture and counterculture, turn-of-the-century Pans enjoyed an extraordinary symbiotic sohdanty, spreading into wide sections of the population and giving sustenance to its major artists...

...The main facts of Verlaine's life, particulaily his relationship with Rimbaud, aie already well known Though Miss Richardson's findings do not sensationally change the essential pattern, she provides a wealth of fresh detail and she reconsiders familiar matenal with less bias than earlier biographers Verlaine re-mains a better poet than a man, and only the kind of inverted sentimentality that writers like Wilde purvey could ever see him as a saint, even granting him the comic image of Pan sanctified I found of particular interest the painstaking way that Miss Richardson traced Verlaine's links with England, especially literary influences such as those of Tennyson and??incongruously??of Hymns Ancient and Modem, which made Verlaine more comprehensible to English readers in the 1890s than any other contemporary French poet The relationships of British painters like Turner and Constable to French groups like the Impressionists have been well explored, but so little has been done concerning the English influence on the Decadents and the Symbolists that we are inclined to see merely the reverse impact of French writers on English poets from the Yellow Nineties to T S Eliot...