The Cult of Beauty at the V&A

PART ONE

As you walk into the entrance lobby of the dimly-lit galleries in which the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cult of Beauty exhibition is housed you are immediately faced with an arrangement of objects which serve to conjure the spirit of the Aesthetic Movement of the mid to late 19th century which is its subject. There is a glazed dish with a peacock design made by William de Morgan, an employee of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts firm who had branched out on his own and opened his own ceramics workshops in the 1870s. The peacock’s feathers fan out to fill the left hand of the plate, following the curve of its edge, and seem to glimmer with an almost metallic sheen. There is a lengthwise photograph of a bowl of lilies by Frederick Hollyer, and a pair of andirons for the fire designed by Thomas Jeckyll in the form of sunflowers. All of these had symbolic import for the artists and followers of the Aesthetic Movement, Peacock feathers embodied a self-justificatory glorying in display and the favouring of jewelled colours. They stood for art for art’s sake, as Whistler put it. There was also something of the Byzantine mosaic quality to the feathers, which seemed designed to catch the light of the dying sun, or the decadant fade of empire towards the fin de siecle. If the peacock represented empty splendour, the lily symbolised the eternal soul, its white flowers suggested an unblemished purity, and was, for those who sported it, an indication of heightened sensitivity and attunement to spiritual rather than material values. It was the Aesthetic accessory par excellence, and was carried with a mixture of earnestness, irony and defiance in the face of Victorian convention. Its long, sinuous stem and pallid petals, which seem to droop under their own weight, also served as an analogue of the Aesthete’s ideal figure: tall, willowy and prone to draping itself decorously over the nearest piece of exquisite furniture. It was an absolute gift for the satirists and caricaturists of the day. If the lily suggested moonlight and nighttime, then the sunflower was its opposite. The flower of the summer day, it burned with bright, Apollonian light, the illumination of creation and artistic inspiration. Its yellow became one of the key colours in the Aesthetic palette. Whilst it was incorporated into various designs and paintings and was regularly carried about by Oscar Wilde, it was the lily which became the dominant symbol of Aestheticism. It was cool and distanced and a touch aloof.

There is also a bronze statue in this opening arrangement, The Sluggard by Frederick Leighton. It stands as the perfect representation of the Aesthetic figure – languid, listless and stretched into an artful disposition of limb and torso. Its modesty is minimally preserved by a miniscule fig-leaf, and is a bold indication the Aesthetic Movement looked back to the Classical world in embracing male as well as female beauty. This sometimes manifested itself in the expression of homosexual desire, and such open display of sensuality was to attract strong opprobrium and lead to a disastrous end for several of the movement’s figures, both prominent and lesser known. The intermixing of fine and applied art objects in this introductory display, the prelude to the exhibition proper, with materials ranging from bronze and wood to ceramics and iron, also indicates the wide reach of the Aesthetic Movement. More than merely visual art, it was a lifestyle, an interior design look, a fashion, a literary style and, perhaps above all, an elegantly struck pose.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The exhibition’s trail through the later decades of the nineteenth century England begins with a series of paintings which depict the search for a new ideal of feminine beauty. Some of the principal figures of the Aesthetic Movement are introduced, divided into separate groups. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler, and Frederick (later Lord) Leighton and George Frederic Watts. Broadly speaking, they can be said to represent the Romantic and Classical divisions of Aestheticism, although such distinctions are largely academic. Watts and Leighton remained firmly ensconced within the Royal Academy establishment, at the heart of the recognised art world (as indicated by Leighton’s ennoblement). Those gathered around Rossetti’s circle, and later launching themselves beyond his orbit, tended on the other hand to stand in opposition to the Academy’s dictates, whether through necessity or design. Leighton and Watts were the leading figures of a group sometimes known as the Olympians, partly due to the colossal scale of their works, which frequently extended to the monumental size of the pictures themselves. Leigton’s Pavonia, a portrait of a dark-haired figure glancing back over her shoulder, her hair haloed with a fan of peacock feathers, has been used for the V&A’s exhibition poster. It’s very effective as such, Pavonia seeming to turn to look directly at the viewer, who finds themselves standing in for some imaginary interlocutor. The name Pavonia is a paradoxical feminine version of the Latin word pavonius, which means peacock. Leighton’s classicism tended to veer towards exotica, as can be seen in his frieze-like painting The Syracusan Bride, in which a parade of female supplicants of varying ethnicity make their way along a path leading to a temple. This wedding party includes women leading tamed lions, tigers and leopards. Such classical fantasies also provided an excuse to expose a good deal of flesh, the temporal and geographical distance and air of literariness lending such displays an air of semi-respectability. Whilst Rosetti and his circle generated a significant amount of moral outrage over their supposed debasement of noble artistic values, the likes of Leighton and Alma-Tadema didn’t raise an eyebrow with their bathing scenes and sleeping beauties.

Frederick Sandys - Gentle Spring

Frederick Sandys’ Gentle Spring typifies the Aesthtic’s presentation of the female subject as symbolic figure. His English variant of Botticelli’s Primavera is a pagan embodiment of the turning season, a verdant Goddess surrounded by blossoming life, a rainbow promise arcing above her head, flowers bursting into colourful life in her footsteps. Female figures are often bordered or laurelled with flowers in Aesthetic paintings, usually with traditional folk or literary import intended. Fruits of similarly symbolic weight also hang pendant, or are clutched or laid on tables, half-eaten. Sandys’ picture of Vivien (complete with fruit, flower and peacock feather array), the sorceress sometimes identified with the Lady of the Lake, also indicates the importance of Arthurian mythology to the movement, and of a dream of medieval life in general. This is particularly apparent in the work of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, although Rossetti, who had gone through his medieval period with the Pre-Raphaelites, tended now to look elsewhere for inspiration. Sandys was a follower of Rossetti’s who had produced an amusing satirical representation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood called A Nightmare in 1857. In this pastiche of John Everett Millais’ Sir Isumbras at the Ford, the armoured Millais rides a rather baleful and ragged mule identified as the critic John Ruskin (a champion of the PRB at a time when others were deriding it), with Rossetti sitting on his knee in a dress, and a tiny William Holman Hunt clinging on to Millais behind. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s brother, describes in his writings about the artistic milieu of the time how Sandys fell out with Rossetti. He felt that Sandys was cleaving rather too closely to his subject matter and style. Such borrowing was literally the case with his picture Medea of 1868 which, like Vivien, used his gypsy lover Keomi Gray as a model, and in which he borrowed the red bead necklace which Rossetti had used in his famous portrait Monna Vanna two years earlier. Sandys understandably took exception to such a view, bordering as it did on accusations of plagiarism.

Rossetti’s Monna Vanna (1866), not included here, is one of his third length portraits of women (or Goddesses) from mythology or Medieval and Classical literature. They are much more solid and physically present than the pale, ethereal and wispily evanescent women of his Pre-Raphaelite years. Those figures were largely modelled on Elizabeth (or Lizzie) Siddall, his partner and latterly his wife, who died in 1862 after years of debilitating illness and opium addiction. She stood in for the tragic, doomed heroine, the favoured female subject (or, more accurately, object) of the Pre-Raphaelites. There was a definite sense of continuity between Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Aesthetics, but there was also a shift in emphasis. Only Rossetti, of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, can really be said to have become a significant (and indeed leading) part of the Aesthetic Movement, and his work distinctly altered in its nature. The Pre-Raphaelites placed great emphasis on realism, both in terms of the representation of the world, in the accuracy of every detail, and in fidelity to historical setting. This is one of the factors which initially attracted such vociferous criticism, particularly when it came to their representation of religious subject matter. They also allowed for a degree of social and moral commentary, particularly when it concerned that abiding Victorian preoccupation, the fallen woman. The Aesthetic Movement tended to turn away from such outward concerns and occupied itself solely with the creation of dreamworlds and sensual surface appearances. The Aesthetic generally favoured interiors, as opposed to the finely observed landscapes of the Pre-Raphaelites, in which every blade of grass was scrupulously reproduced. This retreat indoors was an indication of an increasingly inward-looking nature. There was still an interest in fallen women, but now they were brought back into the studio to pose as models, and not for morally uplifting or instructive tableaux. They often ended up staying.

Bocca Bacciata - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti’s Bocca Bacciata (1859), which is included here and painted while Lizzie was still alive, is a portrait of Fanny Cornforth, one of the women whom he picked up off the street. She was what he referred to as a ‘stunner’, a word which he frequently used to describe anyone or anything whose beauty hit him with a dazing blow. Fanny as Bocca is a picture of ruddy health, sturdy and full of face, with the rosy apple by her side echoing the bloom of her cheek. She is bedecked in fine jewellery, the flowers of her necklace reproducing the corona of marigolds arrayed behind her head. The marigolds in this case stand in (in reduced form) for sunflowers. The dark, ivy-coloured green of her bodice jacket and the yellowish tinge to the flesh show two of the signature colours of the Aesthetic Movement, often used in combination. Gilbert and Sullivan would later satirize the preoccupation with these colours in their opera Patience as greenery yallery (also a punning take off of the Grosvenor Gallery, the centre for Aesthetic art exhibitions). Fanny also features in Rossetti’s Fair Rosamund, her cheek now in suggestively full flush. The bottle-glass windows behind her again provide a murky green background. The poet Algernon Swinburne, friend and sometime housemate of Rossetti, remarked of Fanny, in the context of Bocca Bacciata, that she was ‘more stunning than can be decently expressed’. Although, given his reputation for uninhibited speech, it was likely that he felt free to express his feelings in all their ripe indecency. Her free flowing hair in both the portraits betrays another of Rossetti’s obsessions. Elizabeth Gaskell commented that ‘it did not signify what we were talking about or how agreeable I was, if a particular kind of reddish brown, crepe-wavy hair came in, he was away in a moment…He is not mad as a March hare, but hair-mad’. Fanny was given free run of the house, coming and going as she pleased whilst ostensibly holding the position of housekeeper. Many of Rossetti’s friends blamed her for the regular disappearance of household items and money, but he didn’t seem unduly concerned. The muse must, after all, claim her due, the wages of inspiration.

Algernon Swinburne by William Bell Scott

Turning right, we come across objects relating to the early years of the arts and crafts movement, and the close-knit group of Rossetti, William Morris, Jane Burden (who became Jane, or ‘Janey’ Morris), Edward Burne-Jones and Algernon Swinburne. Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones had cheerfully collaborated on the ill-starred (because ill-prepared) creation of a mural for the Oxford Union, an endeavour which might have failed artistically but which brought them all closer together. They were joined there by Swinburne, an Oxford undergraduate at the time and already a rebelliously inclined poet who, like Morris, was somewhat in awe of Rossetti (as much as a poet as an artist). A dramatic portrait of Swinburne by William Bell Scott depicts him standing before a Romantic seascape, a small compact figure with a wild mane of red hair, which somehow looks too big for his head, sculpted by the wind. It’s one of the pictures which provides the inspiration for Elizabeth Hand’s novel Mortal Love, which brings one of Rossetti’s ‘Goddesses’ to life, both in the fin de siecle period and in the modern day. The cover features a detail from Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata (The Garlanded), one of his portraits of Alexa Wilding (another woman Rossetti invited in from the streets), who in this case is playing a highly ornate harp watched over by two angels. Swinburne appears as a character, and Hand gives squeaking, high pitched voice to his eloquent profanity. It is a marvellous meditation on the destructive potential of pursuing artistic inspiration, of being consumed by the burning, mesmeric gaze of the muse, and serves as the ideal reflection on the Aesthetic and Decadant period and its subsequent influence (not least on the kind of literary fantasy which Hand writes).

The Red House - Philip Webb

The desire to create objects which combined functionality with beauty and which were produced in a craftsmanlike fashion was a reaction to a perceived ugliness manifested in the mass-produced products of the industrial revolution. The entire Aesthetic Movement, with its emphasis on refinement and highly cultivated taste, can be seen as a recoiling from the influence of industrialised production and the uniformity which it fostered. Its favouring of fey fragility and anti-athleticism countered the brute force and thunderous noise of the factories which powered the industrial revolution. They were retreating from the birth of the modern world into a golden age fantasy of their own dreaming. The extension of the artistic outlook to the decoration of the home is exemplified by The Red House in Bexleyheath, now an oasis amongst barren acres of dull suburbia (I should know, I grew up nearby). It was built for William and Jane Morris by Philip Webb, who also created some of the interior furnishings, alongside Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who painted wooden panels and helped design hangings and stained glass. It became a regular meeting place in what was something of an Edenic period for the group. It is represented here by two of Webb’s bronze candlesticks and a wooden bureau decorated with murals by Rossetti, and there are also examples of Burne-Jones’ stained glass near at hand.

The Aesthetic Movement always tended to be dominated by forceful and charismatic personalities, from Rossetti and Morris to Whistler and Wilde. Rossetti’s brother William Michael was a much more restrained personality, his unostentatious christened names seeming to predestine him for a more prosaic and steady life than the impulsive and temperamental Dante Gabriel. He maintained a 49 year career with the Inland Revenue, reaching distinguished high office, something which allowed him to support the less stable fortunes of his artistic friends and acquaintances when needed. Although he was one of the original seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he never produced any significant artistic work. But he was a sensitive and perceptive editor, critic and biographer, and has left us with some insightful first hand literary portraits of the artists he knew so well, written with a generosity which nevertheless allows for a certain amount of reading between the lines. Of Morris, he notes that ‘he was turbulent, restless, noisy (with a deep and rather gruff voice), brusque in his movements, addicted to stumbling over doorsteps, breaking down solid-looking chairs the moment he took his seat in them, and doing scores of things inconsistent with the nerves of the nervous’. As for Algernon Swinburne, William discreetly observes that ‘no man has a more vigorous command of the powers of invective, to which his ingenuity of mind, and consummate mastery of literary resource, lend a lash of the most cutting and immedicable keenness’. He remarks of Burne-Jones, on the other hand, that ‘his manner was very gentle, and utterly alien from any vaunting self-assertion. He was never in strong health, yet to call him an invalid might be going too far’.

Weeping for a Wombat

William shared a house with his brother for a while, along with Swinburne and the poet George Meredith. The Tudor House on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, alongside the Thames embankment, was one of a series of exemplary Aesthetic houses, although from all reports it was often in something of a state. William comments on his brother’s notorious habit of accumulating a menagerie of strange and diverse pets which roamed his garden. Amongst those he enumerates are ‘a barn-owl named Jessie…dormice, hedgehogs, two successive wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, armadillos, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer…a mole…Virginian owls, Chinese horned owls…a raven, chameleons, green lizards and Japanese salamanders’. He passes over the Brahmin bull, which even Rossetti swiftly realised was an impractical proposition. Naturally, he also acquired a peacock or two, which were a particular pest for the neighbours. Apparently, they caused such resentment that a clause was added to future tenancy agreements to the effect that peacocks were not allowed on the premises. Rossetti wasn’t the most attentive pet owner, and most of his creatures were sadly short-lived. He was particularly devastated by the death of his wombats, creatures for which he seems to have had a particular fondness. They appear in many sketches, and on the frontspiece for the edition of his sister Christina’s lengthy poem Goblin Market which he illustrated (an exquisite page of which is on display here). He drew a rather touching ‘Self-Portrait of the Artist weeping at the Wombat’s Tomb’, in which the wee beasty lies on its back, paws curled up on its round belly. A noble classical tomb in the background reads 6th November 1869.

Morris was initially keen to follow in Rossetti’s footsteps, but like any emulating protégé, he soon found his own means of expression, which was directed towards design and writing rather than painting. He was, in fact, best known during his own lifetime as a poet. The shop with ‘The Firm’ of Morris, Marshall and Faulkner and Co. set up in Oxford Street to display their wares – chairs, tiles, cabinets, porcelain, stained-glass and tapestries – did much to inspire the idea of the beautifully decorated home. This was furthered by the opening of Liberty’s home furnishings and costume store in 1883 (unsurprisingly, it is one of the sponsors of the exhibition), which offered relatively affordable style (partly due to the fact that many of its goods were machine-made). The handmade ideal was always destined to be impractical, particularly if Morris’ desire that his goods were to be affordable by the ordinary worker was ever to be realised (it wasn’t). Once his business grew, he too adopted elements of machine production. Some degree of compromise was inevitable if this was to be a lasting proposition, and he could use the machinery of the industrial age on a human scale, and for noble ends.

Veronica Veronese - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The perfection of interior design was indicative of a general turn inward. Aesthetic painting largely avoided landscape, with portraits, historical, mythological or real, tending to be located inside. When it did venture outside, space was often filled with dense thickets and tangles of branch and vine, which gave the feeling of enclosure. The heavy green draperies of Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese and the dark wood of the furnishings give the room a shadowed, self-enclosed feel, the outside world completely blocked out. Veronica is left to sit idly caressing the strings of the violin on the wall, lost in some inner reverie. Nature, when it appears, is confined to vases or cages, as with the nasturtiums and canary here. As Whistler put it one of the more direct of his carefully sculpted epigrams, ‘nature is usually wrong’. It had to be extracted and re-arranged in order to form the perfect compostion. The yellows of the marigold and canaryoffset the predominantly tones of the curtains and the velvet green dress which Veronica wears. Whilst the model here is Alexa Wilding, the dress belonged to Jane Morris, whom Rossetti would later paint in countless guises, and with whom he would share an intimate and passionate friendship. Rossetti’s own room at Tudor House, Cheyne Walk is partially reproduced here, glimpsed through vertical peep-show slots to lend an authentic sense of voyeurism. Blue china plates are arrayed on shelves above the fireplace. Rossetti and Whistler vied with each other in their obsessive collection of blue china, and the craze spread to become one of the defining and most widely taken up elements of the Aesthetic repertoire. Oscar Wilde, whilst at Oxford, also amassed a fair few examples, and admitted ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china’. An offhand and amusing quip, but also an insightful one. The Aesthete defined him or herself through their objects, until the objects began to control them. There’s a certain irony in the fact that Aesthetes sought to distance themselves from the commercialism of burgeoning mass-production, but accumulated fashionable objects with an enthusiasm which anticipated the consumer age whose seeds were being sown around them.

At home with Rossetti - Cheyne Walk interior. Painting by Henry Treffry Dunton

Rather more ominously, there are a couple of phials secreted amongst the blue china and brass plates, placed within easy reach. These might perhaps have contained the opiate drug chloral, to which Rossetti increasingly became addicted, and which, in combination with the whisky with which he washed it down, helped to wreck his health and lead to his early death. There is a chaise longue or sofa, upholstered in green velvet on one side of the fireplace across which to drape oneself (characters in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are always flinging themselves onto sofas upon entering a room). On the other side is a rectilinear Chinese chair with a moon design, a lute casually laid against it. It is illustrative of the pervasive influence of the Far East on Aesthetic taste. There are also heavy tapestried drapes to add an additional layer of medieval ambience to the diverse assemblage, and to shut out any external light or sound which might intrude on this artificially created tableau. This is the living space as artistic installation and by extension, life as art.

the Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love - Simeon Solomon

Rossetti and his circle were dealt a glancing blow by a well-publicized attack published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, pseudonymously penned by the poet Robert Buchanan. He accused Swinburne and Rossetti in particular of perpetrating what he called a ‘fleshly school’ of poetry and art, which displayed ‘morbid deviation from healthy forms of life’ and lacked what he deemed the necessary qualities of virility and tenderness which characterised ennobling art. These were the first signs of the negative and even actively hostile attentions which the Aesthetic Movement would increasingly attract; the accusations that it revelled in deviant, immoral sensuality. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Morris and Swinburne began to go their own ways. Morris even seemed to be in partial agreement with Buchanan, although for different reasons. He later opined, in an 1888 essay ‘The Revival of Handicraft’, that the Aesthetic Movement had retreated from any social engagement and indulgently lost itself in a passive contemplation of beauty, whether in its art or in the mirror. Another victim of stern Victorian censure was Simeon Solomon, the young Jewish artist shoes franky homoerotic illustrations and paintings aroused the displeasure of the critical and moral establishment, and who was arrested in 1873 and imprisoned for homosexual practises. Shamefully, his friends, including Rossetti and (in particular) Swinburne, who had encouraged him in the free expression of his sexuality, shunned him after his arrest, not wishing to be seen with someone who could damage their own artistic careers with the taint of association. His fate was a precursor of the Wilde’s martyrdom towards the end of the century, which also saw him shunned by many of his ‘friends’, and which effectively brought the Aesthetic Movement to an end. But Solomon didn’t share Wilde’s elegant and relatively swift decline, cushioned in a haze of absinthe and advocaat in the Hotel D’Alsace in Paris. He died alone and broken in the workhouse in 1905 (five years after Wilde’s exquisitely timed passing at the end of the century whose later years he had done so much to define) after years of poverty and alcoholism. His line drawing The Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love (1885), included here, contains all the tenderness Buchanan might wish for, but not in a form of which he would approve.

A Season In Hell

Between The Ears, BBC Radio 3’s occasional ‘radiophonic’ slot, gave a repeat airing to an abridged adaptation of Rimbaud’s symbolist/decadent (the two terms seem to alongside a blurred boundary) prose poem A Season In Hell (Une Saison en Enfer), read by Carl Prekopp from a translation by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock, which you can listen to here until Saturday 26th June. Composer Elizabeth Purnell provided the music, which included three songs sung by Robert Wyatt, and the shifting contours and transformations of the soundscape. There’s been a long and fruitful tradition of radiophonic fusions of word and sound at the BBC, going way back to the 1957 productions of All That Fall, which Samuel Beckett had written specifically for such a treatment, and Frederick Bradnum’s Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, which was subtitled A Radiophonic Poem, the first use of such a term. The success of these productions, both made under the aegis of Desmond Briscoe, who was joined on the latter by Daphne Oram, led to the formation of the Radiophonic Workshop, in which they both played key roles, a year later. The Workshop would further experiment with experimental and concrete poetry in the 60s and 70s, an area of their work which is often overlooked in the understandable enthusiasm for their creation of a very British form of musique concrete and electronic music. Sound sometimes takes precedence over words or gives them a more associational meaning in programmes such as the 1960 collaboration with Brian Gysin on an adaptation of the cut-ups and permutated poems from his collection Minutes to Go, or Lily Greenham’s 1975 piece Relativity, which took Einstein’s energy/mass equation as its launching point. Interestingly, Greenham voiced the aim of her piece in terms akin to Rimbaud, pointing out ‘how a sentence can be given shape and driven in a musical sense beyond its meaning’. Perhaps one of the most readily available examples of the Radiophonic Workshop’s excursions into word and music is The Seasons, with music by David Cain and poems by Ronald Duncan, which was released as a BBC Drama Workshop album in 1969, and tracks from which are given a regular airing on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday afternoon show on BBC Radio 6. You can find it here, in fact.

In this sense, Rimbaud’s work, and A Season In Hell in particular, is ideal for a latter-day radiophonic approach, given its avowed intent to create ‘a poetic language that would one day be accessible to all the senses’, as he puts it in Alchemy of the Word, the second of the poems Deliriums. It’s almost as if he were waiting for the possibilities that a well-equipped modern sound studio provide. His famous statement of artistic abandonment from the ‘Lettre du Voyant’ to Paul Demeny in 1871 required the poet or artist to achieve a visionary state through ‘a prolonged, absolute and rational derangement of the senses’, something which he achieved through a combination of hashish, absinthe and possibly, during expeditions to the East End whilst he was living in London with Paul Verlaine, the smoking of opium. The results of reaching a level at which he ‘found (his) madness sacred’ are recorded in A Season in Hell in terms of hallucinatory transformations and a synaesthetic kaleidoscope of impressionistic collisions. He literally spells out such an apprehension of the spectrum of sound with his vowel colours from The Alchemy of the Word: ‘A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green’, although he slyly notes that he ‘withheld the translation’ for this new ‘poetic language’. ‘In the Farewell’ section of the poem he remembers, now in a spirit of having failed, ‘I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new bodies, new tongues’. The addition of sound furthers the advancement of a synaesthetic language, the attempt to move beyond the limitations of the written word. It allows the words to move into that wider dimension which he was seeking with his colour vowels and which led to him proclaiming, as he looks back at the damage which he inflicted on himself through the intensity of his quest, that he had been ‘damned by the rainbow’. If nothing else, Rimbaud was capable of producing great epigrams. ‘Morality is a weakness of the brain’ is another good one.

Elizabeth Burnell produces some great sounds to colour the words. She occasionally distorts and adds echo to the voice to enhance the mockery and torment of Rimbaud’s self-critical inner demon, and also produces a chorus effect to underline the self-aggrandising rallying calls or denunciations of his more grandiloquent statements. These latter make him sound as if he is addressing a stadium crowd from a triumphal balcony, a hint of the enormity of his ego. There are sounds of oceanic engulfment which might also be the rush of fiery blood as he offers ‘a few leaves of the notebook of a soul condemned to hell’, and the sounds of the ocean return throughout, possibly an indication of the passage across the English Channel on the way to London, where many of the experiences which informed the poem were gained, and where some of it was also written. As he describes his Night of Hell (Nuit de L’Enfer), which follows o from his announcement ‘now comes the punishment’, Burnell underlies his torments with a molten rumble of a drone which threatens to erupt in an engulfing flood of magma, and surrounds him with a swarm of jabbing trumpets. There are metallic clanging sounds which are introduced in the Bad Blood (Mauvais Sang) section in which he imaginatively explores his Gallic ancestry of pagan peasantry, and which could approximate the forging of swords (and of the language and culture of those who wield them which he has inherited), although the mutability of all sounds, in keeping with the general aura of synaesthesia, mean that they also morph into the clinkin. These sounds recur when he makes his claims for having developed a new poetic language in Alchemy of the Word. There are also the sounds of bird song which occur on several occasions, a wood pidgeon cooing as he recalls his childhood, ‘the road in all weathers’ and suggesting a bucolic paradise lost. After the initial roar of noise which introduces the programme, there is a ringing harmonic, a pure note like a singing wine glass or a clear sine wave tone. It is the fundamental from which all the words and sounds and chaos arise, the noise of life, and into which they all fade back at the end, dwindling into imperceptibility but implicitly eternal. It’s an idea which Pete Townshend hovered around in his abortive Lifehouse project, and which was expressed in the song Pure and Easy (now released on the CD reissue of Who’s Next after previously being thrown into the Odds and Sods collection). ‘There once was a note, pure and easy/Playing so free, like a breath rippling by’.

A low-key jazz arrangement backs his statement ‘I became a fantastic opera’, and this sets the tone for the songs which feature in the Alchemy of Words section. These are sung in inimitable style by Robert Wyatt, whose loose, jazzy style suits the words perfectly. The first song is Loin des Oiseaux, in which he is accompanied by a hallucinatory, quavering accordion sound. He sings the second and third verses in French, perhaps feeling that the sounds of the words within the context of the song are more important than the meaning; or perhaps just expecting us to make a little more effort to be more multi-lingual. Here are the words in English, from the translation by Enid Rhodes Peschel: ‘Remote from the birds, from flocks, from country girls/What did I drink, while kneeling in that heath/Surrounded by new growth of hazel trees,/Within a mild green mist of afternoon? What could I drink in that young river Oise,/- The voiceless elms, the flowerless turf, dark sky-/From yellow gourds, far from my cherished hut?/Some golden liquor that induces sweat. I made a doubtful signboard for an inn./- A storm arose and stalked the sky. At night/The forest water drained itself in virgin/Sands, God’s wind cast drift ice on the ponds; Weeping, I saw gold – and could not drink’. The second song is Song of the High Tower, which is accompanied by piano haloed by a sparkle of high, tinkling sounds which suggest intoxicated bedazzlement and the glimpse of a mirage-like paradise in the blurred distance (‘Let it come, let it come, the time we dote on’ sings a female voice – Burnell’s own, perhaps). Wyatt sings the whole song in French this time. In English, it reads thus: ‘I have endured so patiently/That I have lost all memory./My many fears and sufferings/Have taken flight into the skies./And now the health-destroying thirst/Is darkening my blood and veins. Such is the meadowland/Delivered to oblivion,/All overgrown, and flowering/With frankincense and tares,/Amid the frantic buzzing/Of the filthy flies’. The third song, ‘O Seasons, O Chateaux’, is sung in English until verse three, from where it reads: ‘Hail to it, every time/the Gallic cock announces dawn./ Ah! I shall have no more desire:/It has taken charge of my life entire./ That charm has captured soul and body/And dissipated my endeavours./ Alas! The hour that it flies/ Will be the hour of my demise’.

Verlaine and Rimbaud

The poem is essentially a progression of thought in motion, a quality which the radio production brings out particularly well. Rimbaud goes through wild mood swings, and contradicts or undermines his own statements and claims in an ongoing inner dialogue. Forces of self-aggrandisement, self-doubt and self-loathing battle each other for the key to knowledge of the self through which an apprehension of the true nature of the world can be gained. At one point he is proclaiming that ‘the poets and the seers will be jealous/ I am a thousand times richer than them’, the next deriding his efforts as a waste of time (‘so much for my fame as an artist and storyteller’). He veers from peaks of ecstasy and world-conquering ego, to wallowing in self-pity and revelling in his own degradation, convincing himself ‘I reek of charred flesh’, and recalling his ‘skin gnawed by dirt and plague, worms seething in my hair and armpits’. It’s all very self-absorbed, of course, and risks reducing the world to a mere reflection of the poet’s own particular neuroses, which can seem like an amplified version of the world-view of any despondent teenager. Rimbaud wrote Seasons in Hell when he was 18, and it bears the arrogant certainty of youth as well as its violent mood swings. Carl Prekopp, who reads the poem, captures a convincing air of brattish precociousness and the no doubt infuriating know it all conviction. It’s possible to have some sympathy for his patron, travelling companion and lover Paul Verlaine, who he drove out of his mind to such an extent that he ended up shooting him, thankfully with no great accuracy.

If viewed as an act of world building, the construction of artificial realities, Seasons in Hell becomes more acceptable, and allows you to revel in the play of imagination, the power of language to effect transformations of perceived reality. Perhaps it’s more digestible fare for someone who reads science fiction and the literature of the fantastic in general. Samuel Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand was intended as a diptych of novels, to be accompanied by a further volume entitled The Splendour and Misery of Bodies, of Cities. It never saw the light of day, in the end, but the influence of is clear in the title, and there are many Rimbaud-like characters in his early novels. At the end of A Season in Hell, Rimbaud envisages a time when ‘we will enter the splendid cities’ (the line which Delany draws on) and it’s easy to imagine these as the cities of science fiction dreaming. He also puts his faith in science, having dwelt on ‘pagan blood’ and the Christianity with which he was raised. Towards the end, after he has put the madness of his youth behind him, he declares ‘one must be absolutely modern’, and its easy to see in this the roots of a futurism and streamlined modernism, a Things to Come art deco. Rimbaud himself talks of his ‘dreams of monstrous loves and fantastic universes’, and professes his love of the more popular art forms, amongst which he lists ‘idiotic paintings, motifs over doorways, stage sets, mummers backdrops, insides, popular colour prints, unfashionable literature, church Latin, erotic books with poor spelling, the novels our grandmother’s read, fairy tales, small books for children, old operas, nonsensical refrains, galumphing rhythms’. Who knows what his modern day choices might be.

Before first Communion

Rimbaud’s influence can be felt, for better or worse, in the work of many popular artists, who often respond as much to his youth and wildly rebellious attitude as his small body of work. The Surrealists admired his life, including his later years in Africa, as a work of art in itself. He’s exerted an influence in the world of rock and pop music which is certainly rare amongst nineteenth century poets, perhaps his only rival being William Blake. Elizabeth Burnell’s music acknowledges this influence with an initial opening crescendo of formless noise, rising bass rumble and guitar feedback squall building to sensory overload. His appeal to the 60s and 70s countercultures lies partly in his youthful image. He was only 18 when he finished Seasons in Hell in 1873, and it proved to be his valedictory work. In the final section, Farewell (Adieu), he makes his mind up to ‘bury my imagination and my memories’, and declares himself ‘firmly back on the ground, eager for the rigours of the real’. He tells us in The Impossible that ‘I’m about to disappear, to give you all the slip’, and the fact that he did so with such success, settling after an itinerant life in Abyssinia and scorning any contact with the literary world in which his poems were making a belated impact, fixes his artistic persona in a state of eternal youthfulness. His offhand comment (again in the Farewell section) ‘who cares – I’ll make it to 20 if everyone else has the same plan’ has the ring of the ‘hope I die before I get old’ cult of youth.

Patti and Robert- Rimbaud in NY

Patti Smith relates, in her recent book on her early years in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, how they would read his poems to each other. Her song Easter imagines the young Rimbaud walking to his first Communion with his brother Frederic and sister Isabelle, a scene inspired by the picture of the two young boys solemnly posed with white armbands tied above their elbows. The song Horses replaces Chuck Berry’s Go Johnny Go with Go Rimbaud. Bob Dylan also regarded Rimbaud in iconic terms, perhaps due to his association with Allen Ginsburg, and in his song You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, he ruefully observes ‘Situations have ended sad,/Relationships have all been bad/Mine’ve been like Verlaine and Rimbaud.’ Elizabeth Hand, in her short story Wonderwall, has her protagonist, a young woman with a clear resemblance to Patti Smith living the Bohemian life in New York with her Robert Mapplethorpe like room mate, David. She writes ‘Je suis damne par l’arc-en-ciel’ (I have been damned by the rainbow) on her wall and reads Le Lettre du Voyant. She pushes through some sensory wall in a nightclub after a determined and sustained derangement of her faculties, and encounters a young man who may or may not be Rimbaud. He looks over the scene with interest, noting ‘cela s’est passe’. It’s as if he’s saying this particular dream is over, it’s become a routine, an empty ritual. The narrator has her moment of epiphany: ‘I was nineteen. When Rimbaud was my age, he had already finished his life work. I hadn’t even started yet. He had changed the world; I could barely change my socks. He had walked through the wall, but I had only smashed my head against it, fruitlessly, in anguish and despair. It had defeated me, and I hadn’t even left a mark’. The makers of the programme choose to end their adapatation with the penultimate paragraph. Rimbaud leads the way towards a shining future, and foretells the time when ‘at dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the cities in all their splendour’. He is then absorbed into his own myth, which these and others have drawn on ever since.