IF YOU HEAD DOWN Plender Street in Camden Town, North London, straight ahead, just before you turn into Royal College Street, is a terrace of four smallish Georgian houses of sepulchral aspect. The paint on their façades has peeled oddly; it is as if they were afflicted with psoriasis, flakes of dead skin dropping off them.
If you were to look very sharply before your turn, you would see on the central house, No8 Royal College Street, an inscribed tablet, the same colour as the paint, and easy to overlook.
This unofficial plaque, placed there in the mid-1950s by an unknown hand, records the brief stay of the notorious French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud in 1873. They had escaped from Paris a year earlier when the 28-year-old Verlaine’s sexual relationship with his terrifyingly brilliant young house guest, then 17 and already the author of some of the most original and ambitious verse in the French language, became public, forcing the older man to abandon his wife and child and flee.
London, huge sprawling city of fog, home to every shade of political refugee, its vast population uncounted and largely unknown, seemed an ideal place to get lost, to pursue the cauterising passion that gripped them. Both were at the height of their poetic powers, writing poems that remain central to 19th-century French literature. Their work was as different from each other’s as their temperaments, and their life together was punctuated by savage arguments, sometimes descending to physical violence. Rimbaud was working on his great prose poem A Season in Hell, whose title might as well be a description of their time in London. (Typically, at the same time Verlaine was writing his exquisite Romances Sans Paroles, some bearing English titles: Spleen, Green, Street).
During their first stay, they lodged in Howland Street in Fitzrovia, drinking in the city’s monstrous beauty and the country’s strange language: “Dans le brouillard rose et jaune et sale des sohos/ Avec des indeeds et des all rights et des haôs!/ le feu du ciel sur cette ville de la Bible!” (“In the pink and yellow and dirty fog of the Sohos, with ‘indeeds’ and ‘all rights’ and ‘hos’! O heaven ‘s fire fall on this city of the Bible!”).
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Early in 1873, under pressure from home, Rimbaud returned to his mother, and Verlaine to his wife. Almost immediately, they found each other again and returned to London, this time taking lodgings in the much rougher Camden Town (“It’s very lively,” Rimbaud wrote. “You’d think you were in Brussels.”)
They were desperately poor. Describing themselves as “deux gentlemen parisiens”, they advertised for both French and English students in The Daily Telegraph, offering lessons in French, Latin and literature, and promising “perfection, finesse”. (They seem to have found at least one pupil, whose account of his lessons, if it existed, would make fascinating reading). Mrs Alexander Smith was their landlady in what was then Great College Street, where they stayed in two very small rooms at the top of the house. It was in those rooms that the strains of their relationship finally became insupportable.
The climactic scene of their stay is typical of their life together, painful, comic and grotesque in equal measure. Verlaine had gone to the market in Camden Town to prepare supper, and procured a couple of kippers and a bottle of oil with which to cook them. It was a hot summer’s day and, as he laboured back to Great College Street, the kippers at arm’s length in front of him, Rimbaud, sitting on the window ledge of No8 to cool down, caught sight of the older man as he hove into view, and started laughing.
When Verlaine was in earshot, Rimbaud shouted out to him “Ce que tu as l’air con!” (“What a **** you look!”). It is on just such phrases that relationships finally founder. With every attempt at dignity, Verlaine walked silently into the house, silently packed his case and silently walked out of the door, while Rimbaud tried — and failed — to make him see the joke. Verlaine hailed a cab, which took him to St Katharine Docks, where he boarded a boat to Calais.
Rimbaud, following in a second cab, arrived in time to see the gangway being raised; from the shore he implored Verlaine to come back, then trailed home to Great College Street where he remained alone for five more days. Shortly afterwards they were briefly reunited in Brussels. At the end of a long day of acrimony and accusation, Verlaine shot Rimbaud through the left wrist; he was arrested and imprisoned. They never met again.
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The house in Royal College Street, built in the early 1800s in the development of the Marquis of Camden’s estate, is a wonderful memento (the only one remaining — the house in Howland Street was demolished in the 1930s) of the fruitful if nightmarish stay in England of these extraordinary men, of the work they did there and of their affair. Although scarcely role models (their fist fights with bare razors concealed in their sleeves are best not tried at home), their hungry, angry passion for each other was certainly a great love, and — pace Brokeback Mountain — there are few enough gay grands amours in the public domain.
It would be wonderful to preserve the house in which they loved, wrote and fought in its present form: there is some kind of poetic rightness in the dilapidation of the façade, something true to the rickety destinies of the two writers.
But realistically it needs to be restored. The present owner is the Royal Veterinary College (after whom the street is named) — another French connection since it was founded by a Frenchman. The college is keen to sell the houses — which are Grade II listed — to someone who will restore them, particularly No 8, which might become a study centre, or at the very least a place in which the lives and work of the great poètes maudits are remembered and celebrated.
Anyone interested in purchasing the house should contact Mr Ian Mehrtens, Director of Estates, The Royal Vetinerary College, Hawkshead Lane, North Mymms, Hatfield AL9 7TA (01707 666919).