A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (16 page)

No wonder when the book was published in 1857 it was immediately taken from the bookstalls and its author tried for obscenity. Baudelaire never recovered from the public outrage, although he continued to write, producing minor classics like his essay on drugs and poetry, Les Paradis Artiiciels (1860), which, in a translation by Aleister Crowley, became something of an underground success in the 1960s. But his own health was failing, and his reputation as a decadent preceded him everywhere: it was not until 1949 that the obscenity conviction was finally overturned. A lecture tour of Belgium in 1864 proved a disaster, and in 1866 he suffered a series of strokes which left him paralysed and aphasic. A collection of prose poems later published as Paris Spleen were his final efforts. The syphilis contracted as an aspirant poet had entered its final phase, and after lingering in squalour in Belgium for a time, he was brought back to Paris where on 31 August 1867 he died.

Villiers de I'Isle-Adam

The name jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam is not, I suspect, one on everybody's lips, and even for students of the occult and the bizarre it is still not encountered very much these days. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is perhaps the most poignant embodiment, if we can use so robust a term for so ethereal a character, of the Symbolist ethic that came to dominate the aesthetic and philosophical consciousness of Europe in the last years of the 19th century. Barely known in his native France until the end of his life, Villiers is remembered today, if at all, for being the author of the archetypal Symbolist drama Axel in which, within a dense forest of occult verbiage and world-renouncing metaphor, there emerges one of the great one-liners of all time. When, just before downing the poison that will consummate for eternity their spiritual love, the beautiful Sara suggests to the ennui ridden Rosicrucian aesthete Axel, that they share at least one night of passion, Axel rejects the idea with disdain. "0 Sara," he cries. "Tomorrow I would be prisoner of your splendid body. Its delights would have fettered the chaste energy impelling me at this instant. But ... suppose our transports should die away, suppose some accursed hour would strike when our love, paling, would be consumed by its own flames ... Oh! let's not wait for that sad hour ..." Sara, not yet entirely convinced that suicide is their best option, and symbol of the fertile but futile vitality that Axel is determined to renounce, compresses her plea into a single cry: "Come, live!"

"Life?" asks Axel. "No.- Our existence is already full and its cup runneth over! What hourglass could measure the hours of this night? The future? ... we have exhausted it ... As for living? Our servants will do that for us.

Expecting his servants to do his living for him is an apt sentiment for a character like Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. For one thing, it was something he was determined not to do for himself, for another, Villiers came from an aristocratic family who could look back on at least eight centuries of unbroken nobility- which means, one imagines, quite a few servants. Among his distinguished ancestors was jean de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1384-1437), Marshal of France; PhillipeAuguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1464-1534), founder of the Order of the Knights of Malta; and Pierre de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (?), Grand Standard-Bearer of France in the battle of Roosebeke in 1382. Villiers never forgot the noble line of his descent, which was to him a source both of great pride and considerable inconvenience. Pride in that he could fall back on it when facing a world that invariably proved unwieldy, if not hostile; inconvenient in that it was precisely this aristocratic inheritance that prevented him from rolling up his sleeves and getting down to work when faced with an obstacle. For Mallarme, along with Baudelaire and Wagner one of Villiers' close friends, he was "The man who never was, save in his dreams." For Arthur Symons, who introduced the English speaking world to Villiers in his classic book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), he was "The Don Quixote of Idealism." For the philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, Villiers was one of a group of late 19th century writers who "hated the bourgeois world ... with a holy hatred. .. . adapted to nothing: their whole lives were spent in poverty, failure and lack of recognition. "M Even more than Baudelaire or Nerval, Villiers was a man who, while having the unmanifest light of the Ideal in his sight, was constitutionally unable to come to grips with the world. And even more than Baudelaire and Nerval, he sank into an increasingly pathetic destitution, a life of such minimal physical comfort that, were he an orthodox member of the Catholic Church he so fervently accepted, he would by now have possibly been canonized.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was born in 1838 into a family whose noble ancestry made it a target for the Revolution. Living in very reduced circumstances, their financial destiny was made even more precarious by the impracticable and invariably failed dreams of success entertained by Villiers' father, who systematically threw away what little savings and property they retained in a series of absurd get-rich-quick schemes. One fantasy, however, was shared by the entire family: the notion that young Mathias - as Villiers was known to the family - was destined to restore the family honour by becoming a famous writer, and its coffers, by marrying a rich heiress. Villiers did try to make good these expectations: the first by writing some of the most remarkable works of the late 19th century; the second by proposing to a wealthy young English woman. Reports are that the lady, introduced to Villiers by a friend with whom he had entered into a contract to provide him with a wife worth at least three million francs, was so terrified of the poet's passion and lengthy recitations that she escaped from their assignation in Covent Garden as quickly as possible. Disappointment, recriminations, and the return of the clothes Villiers had borrowed for the affair followed. Some sense of lost riches from ages long ago is always in the background of Villiers work; the interest in actual riches is evident, but like the hero of Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript, the allusion to alchemical gold (i.e., esoteric wisdom) is not to be discounted.

The three million franc wife is just one of several incidents that put Villiers' eccentricities in the same rank as Nerval's lobster. Others were his candidacy to fill the vacant throne of Greece in 1863; his frequent disappearances and equally bizarre re-appearances in Paris after several weeks absence; the reports of his occult retreats in the Abbey of Solesme; his penchant for adorning his ill-fitting and threadbare clothes with an assortment of ostentatious heraldic decorations; his need to borrow suitable dress for the aristocratic evenings he was invited to, while at the same time he was not far from starving; the duel he nearly fought when a second rate writer vilified his name in a cheap melodrama. For the first thirty years of his life, Villiers lived in relative comfort, oscillating between the world of high society and the bohemian underground, an aristocrat among the poets, and vice versa. Landing in Paris in his early twenties, his aunt financed the publication of his Premieres Poesies in 1859. Published to hardly any notice, Villiers had at least introduced himself to the Parisian literary scene, a milieu he was to occupy for the rest of his life. He made friends, Baudelaire as mentioned, and also Catulle Mendes and Jean Marras. By the 1860s, he was recognized by litterateurs like Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Theodore Banville, Flaubert, Mallarme and others; by all he was considered an exceptional character and a writer of genius although for the public at large he was a nonentity. In 1862 he published the first volume of his philosophical romance Isis, also known as Wilhelm de Strally and Prolegomenes. Like so many of his other works, this was never completed; like Coleridge and De Quincey, Villiers had the raconteur's habit of talking a good book in cafes, and later feeling too bored with the idea to set it to paper. Others who listened often did, to their profit and Villiers loss. (He was, by all reports, a considerable showman, his satiric recitations featuring the character of Tribulat Bonhomet generally bringing the house down.)

By this time Villiers had become obsessed with the melange of Catholicism, Hegelianism and the occult that would constitute his literary and philosophical world. He read Balzac's mystical novels, was a sometime disciple of Eliphas Levi, and his friendship with Baudelaire introduced him to notions of Satanism and the hermetic theme of correspondences. Hegel, however, may seem an odd bedfellow for these mystic influences, until we recall that one of the most powerful, if little known inspirations for Hegel's dialectic were the writings of Jacob Boehme. But more than any specific idea - and the breadth of Villiers' reading often exceeded his grasp - what Villiers drew from these sources was a general spirit of profound idealism, a rejection of bourgeois materialism, of progress, science and common sense: even of physical embodiment. As his translator Robert Martin Adams remarks, Villiers could "walk down a public thoroughfare like a man from another planet."" He was a creature from "another sphere," an angel fallen to earth. "Go beyond," was the family motto, and Villiers took this to heart. As he wrote in Axel, he lived "out of politeness"; it was only his good manners and aristocratic upbringing that forced him to remain in this realm at all.

A look at Villiers' life suggests that such noblese oblige provided him with the most tenuous of footings. By the 1870s, the financial support of his aunt was exhausted, and Villiers embarked on a journey to the underworld unprecedented, even by the standards of Baudelaire or Nerval. For the next twenty years he was generally cold for lack of clothes, hungry for lack of food, and sleepless for lack of a room. He salvaged what he could from rubbish bins, and begged for second hand rags. He took whatever demeaning jobs he could find, but only as a last resort. For sixty francs a month he was a sparring partner at a gym, basically getting knocked around to earn his pittance. He worked with a snake oil merchant, posing as a cripple until swallowing the quack remedy. One winter he slept at a construction site, waking one morning to the watchman's boot grinding in his face. It is said that he wrote his occult science fiction novel Tomorrow's Eve (which features Thomas Edison as a kind of Rosicrucian inventor of an artificial woman) on the bare floor of a squalid room; whatever furniture he had went to the pawnshop. His frequent disappearances were a sign that things had got even worse than this. The aristocrat in him refused to allow others to see his most pitiful degradations. After his death from cancer and general neglect in 1889, when his friend Mallarme was asked about Villiers' life, he replied: "His life - I search for anything that corresponds to that expression: truly and in the ordinary sense, did he live?"

It wasn't until 1883, with the publication of Contes cruels, that Villiers began to receive anything like the recognition he deserved. He had been writing for more than twenty years, but his noble soul refused to have anything to do with ambition and success, unless it was the ambition of genius and the success of great art. Unlike others, he would not, or perhaps could not, adapt himself to the requirements of a market. Like Poe, whose own bizarre stories were one of Villiers' models, perfection and beauty were his standards. The contrast between his goals and the milieu of their expression could not be greater: most of Villiers' `cruel tales' were written on dirty scraps of paper stained with the wine or absinthe of the cafes he inhabited. The tales were Villiers' first public success, and they consolidated his reputation as a high priest of Symbolism, too late, however, to do him much good. Throughout the collection, Villiers attacked the reigning scientific positivism and bourgeois obsession with progress, declaring his belief in an assortment of magical ideas: reincarnation, spiritualism, precognition. As.his biographer A.W. Raitt remarks, Villiers was "fascinated by the intervention in human affairs of mysterious, otherworldly forces, the existence of which in his work is a constant challenge to the assumptions of materialism ..."4"

Notes

I J.L. Talmon Romanticism and Revolt (London: Thames and Hudson, 196 7) p. 145.

2 See Colin Wilson The Craft of the Novel (London: Gollanz, 1975).

3 Letter from Abbot Johannes Trithemius to Johann Virdung, quoted in Hans Christoph Binswanger Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe's Faust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) pp. 1-2. The Abbot had other alchemical acquaintances, being the teacher of Paracelsus and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.

4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) p. 3, translated by John Oxenford.

5 Ronald D. Gray Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952) For anyone interested in tracing the influence of occult ideas on Goethe's writing, Gray's book is the obvious and indispensable start. Gray argues that Goethe's early fascination with alchemy and magic remained a core influence on his entire body of work, and his book is a meticulous examination of the occult roots of Goethe's interest in and studies of mineralogy, botany, anatomy, meteorology, as well as his literary pursuits.

6 Ibid. p. 371.

7 One thinks of Wagner's Tristan, Mahler's adagio from the Fifth Symphony, and the opening sequence of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder.

8 Arthur Versluis, Introduction to Novalis: Pollen and Fragments (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1989) p. 9.

9 John Neubauer, Novalis (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980) p. 15.

10 See the excellent introduction to Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of The Tomcat Murr (London: Penguin Books, 1999).

11 Hoffmann's tale can be seen as an essay in Blake's idea of `single vision'. In different ways, both the philistines and the insane suffer a form of this; it is only the magician and poet who can perceive reality's dual aspect.

12 A good argument has been made for Hoffmann's green snakes to have their source in his own hypnagogic experiences. See Jurij Moskvitin An Essay on the Origin of Thought (1973). This, of course, does not rule out any alchemical associations, as it is arguable that the alchemists themselves made use of hypnagogia. See Jung's writings on `active imagination'.