Monday 30th March 1874, and a young man dressed smartly for the City, in a new top hat, is striding past Waterloo Station in London. He proudly shoots his cuffs to display the cuff-links sent by his beloved brother. In the evening he will write to thank him, while reminding him that, with his recent pay rise, he is now the wealthier, and he should have kept the money for himself. He sniffs the buttonhole that his landlady’s daughter smilingly placed in his lapel, standing so close, in the hall of their adorable house, her face illuminated by the sunburst transom window, wishing him, ‘Many Happy Returns!’ How lovely that sounded to ears used to clotted Dutch!

It is his twenty-first birthday. He has every prospect of rising to the top of the family business. He is in love. And by the summer he will have made enough progress in this, the greatest city in the world, to ask his beloved to marry him. And success is important, because as the eldest son of a poor clergyman with three unmarried daughters, who had just spent money he can ill afford to excuse the three brothers from conscription into the Dutch army, the family depends on him.

Stepping out, he collides with a young man about his own age, similar enough for Picasso to remark on ‘the striking resemblance, especially the keen and penetrating eyes’ in their photographs. Perhaps, for a moment, those eyes lock, their lives connect, there is a flash of recognition between these expatriates.

Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh meets French poet Arthur Rimbaud, outside Waterloo Station. Fanciful? And yet quite possible. For several months in 1874, Vincent lived in Brixton, and walked each day to and from his place of work, Goupil, sellers of paintings and fine art prints, in Southampton Street. And Rimbaud lived in Stamford Street, close to Waterloo Station, scuffling a living. Twice a day, they were close.

I want them to meet. The nineteen-year-old Rimbaud is about to say goodbye to poetry, leaving a body of work that a hundred-and-fifty years later, still reverberates, and begin the long journey that will lead him to Africa. Vincent is within months of being sacked, and about to begin the long journey to his artist destiny. I want there to be words between them, a Sistine ceiling fingertip touching, the passing on of a spark that will fire Vincent’s late, marvellous years.

Or maybe their eyes don’t meet. For they inhabit different worlds. Rimbaud is scruffy, down-at-heel, on his head ‘an object in soft felt that had no name in any language’ pulled low over his eyes. Maybe he tries to bum a few coppers for a drink. More likely he swears, pushes past, hands deep in his pockets, head down, off to his first day at the cardboard-box factory, where he will work for a futile month, his head still alive, although fading, with the inner worlds (Illuminations) induced by absinthe-drinking, hashish-smoking, sexual transgression, rebellious and antisocial behaviour in the long, boundless and systematic derangement of the senses that his poetic manifesto had demanded. He is, at nineteen, about to write his last poem, the final piece in a revolutionary body of work.

While Vincent, a conventional City employee, had left the suburban villa half an hour early, intending to stand on Waterloo Bridge in the spring sunshine, and make a gentlemanly sketch of ‘The View’, to send home to the rectory. The paintings he will paint, that will transform art, and the way we see the world, are far in the future.

And yet … Henry Miller, in The Time of the Assassins, his meditation on Rimbaud, draws attention to the similarities between them. He writes this, of the genius, applying it to both men: ‘[he is] born with the dream of Paradise, and no matter how crazy it sounds, he will struggle to make it realisable again and again. He is incorrigible, a recidivist in every sense of the word. . . . What can you do for him? How can you appease him? You can do nothing. He is beyond reach. He is after the impossible.’ And this: ‘Conditioned to ecstasy, he is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. . . . He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone.’ And: ‘His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe.’ It is of this flame I speak.

So, rewind. With the audacity of the experienced dodger, scruffy Rimbaud has deftly stolen an apple from the fruiterer’s cart, and is lifting it smiling to his open mouth, when he sees well-dressed Vincent looking at him, and freezes. Their eyes meet, blue on blue, they spark, entangle, a confusion in both, the world stops for a moment; and then, eye to eye, bold as brass, Arthur saunters over, pocketing the apple, says, ‘stand me a drink?’ And for some reason, unknown to him, the sketch forgotten, Vincent says, ‘No. But I will buy you breakfast.’

Unregarded in their lifetimes, they will be acknowledged after their deaths as great artists. More than that, each will become an icon of the creativity and the destructiveness of artistic genius, enduringly fascinating, dozens of books will be written about each and his brief creativity, each will become the type of a romanticised artist hero.

It was Miller’s Time of the Assassins that alerted me to the similarities in their lives.

They were born a year apart, in 1853 (Vincent) and 1854, and they both died aged 37, far from home, and miserably. Vincent’s last letter to his brother: ‘I risk my life for my work, and my reason has half foundered in it.’ One of Rimbaud’s last letters to his sister: ‘I am a dead man, I’m crippled for life. Life is an endless misery! Why do we exist?’ In their short lives, they were each creative for hardly five years, and critically and commercially unsuccessful: Rimbaud gave away the ten copies of his one, self-published book, A Season in Hell. Vincent sold one painting. And both, very soon after their deaths, were exemplified, even mythologised as suffering, neglected geniuses, dying – one literally, the other metaphorically, being long dead to literature – for their art.

Rimbaud has ever since been the poet as young rebel, snarling, swearing and fornicating his way through a scandalised and uncomprehending literary establishment, shining brightly, briefly and then burning out, while at the same time revolutionising poetry; so that Henry Miller could write: ‘I think the Rimbaud type will displace in the world to come the Hamlet type, and the Faustian type.’

While Vincent is the dogged, unpromising loner, the self-taught late-developer who, isolated, paints masterpiece after ignored masterpiece, before killing himself in frustration, just before the arrival of the fame that will break auction-house and blockbuster-show records.

They are exemplary figures as tragic geniuses, tragic in the more formal sense of having fate against them, and bringing their fate upon themselves.

Both spent significant, influential times in England, and in Belgium. Both got shot. Both had difficult, elastic relationships with their families, repeatedly leaving in hope, and returning in failure, spending most of their twenties miserably at home, before finally breaking away, never to return. Both had mothers who, even in their sons’ posthumous fame, consistently devalued and utterly ignored their work. Both had fraught but decisive relationships with older artists named Paul. Neither married, nor had children, only ever living, briefly, with another, their social inferiors (Rimbaud with a native woman, Vincent with a prostitute). Both were fiercely independent and yet notably vulnerable outsiders, hard-headed, strong-willed, stubborn, uncompromising, self-obsessed, manipulative, acutely sensitive, socially inept, and unreasonable. They are both acknowledged as great artists, geniuses of their art.

And yet, such differences! Rimbaud wrote all his poetry from 15 to 19, and spent the rest of his life as a serial failure. Vincent spent his first thirty years as a serial failure, and painted all his great paintings from 32 to 37. Rimbaud the brilliant sprinter, the small-town genius who hoovered up every school prize, wrote and sent a 60-line ode in Latin to the French Emperor’s son at 13, read his way through and absorbed verse from the ancient to the contemporary by 15 (‘one must always be modern’ he would write later). At 16 he wrote a manifesto of the poet as seer, which he proceeded to put into practice. At 17 he was taken up by Paris literary society, then quickly (everything happens quickly in Rimbaud’s early life) banished for seducing one of their number, Paul Verlaine, breaking up his marriage, getting him sent to jail. He wrote his last poem at 19. He spent the rest of his life ignoring literature, trying and failing to make his fortune, the last ten years in Africa as coffee export-clerk, explorer, trader, and gun-runner, before having his gangrenous leg amputated, and dying.

Vincent the dogged stayer, a talentless dullard who managed only a couple of years of school, the despair of his family, failing at every job: salesman in his uncle’s art-print business, teacher, preacher, bookseller, student, evangelist, before turning in his late twenties to art and thereafter living off his brother, fighting with Paul Gauguin, who had been bribed to live with him, cutting off his ear, spending time in a mental asylum, then shooting himself.

II

What would they have said to each other, these awkward boy-men?

Rimbaud voraciously wolfing down the food placed before him, as he had wolfed down the curriculum books at school; consumed poetry, from the ancient to the latest Parnassians by fifteen, dismissing most of it as ‘rhymed prose, a game, the flabbiness and vainglory of innumerable idiot generations’; read his way through and absorbed books on alchemy and magic. (Smuggled to him by his one adult friend in Charleville, Charles Bretagne, big and bearded, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Vincent’s one friend in Arles, the postman Roulin. Coincidences.) By seventeen was indulging in alcohol- and drug-fuelled sadomasochistic sex with the poet Paul Verlaine. All in his quest for a new kind of poetry.

Belching, and packing his short pipe with the spittle-damp tobacco rummaged from ashtrays and the floor, he disappears into a cloud of noxious smoke. Vincent lights his more-fragrant Dutch tobacco (English tobacco he finds ‘rather a gloomy weed’). He has written to his brother Theo, recommending pipe-smoking, ‘the pipe is my friend. It does me a lot of good when I am out of spirits. As I am quite often nowadays.’ That had been when he was in The Hague. He is happier in London. Whereas for Rimbaud it is the cloud of smoke that is his friend. A place to hide when, as often happens, shyness overwhelms him and he blushes; a mystification into which he can withdraw, enigmatic; and a weapon in his war on bourgeois gentility he had used that first, disastrous evening in Paris, with Verlaine’s prim in-laws. Their looks, first of shock, then of contempt for this peasant as he sat, elbows on the table, puffing foul smoke into their faces! He’d show ’em. Their world, shaken by the Commune, would, he was sure, be destroyed by the new consciousness, the new language of poets, ‘Their outrageousness a multiplier of progress!’ Had he really written that? He had believed it. At first lionised in Paris literary circles, ‘Christ among the doctors!’, then vilified, ‘more like Satan among the doctors!’, and finally, worst of all, ignored. The turned backs, the cold shoulders when he returned to the café Taboury, with his book, his one book, his account of his ‘season in hell’. Frozen out, a freezing of the heart, Paris, city of light, clarity. But the clarity of the formal, of rhymed prose, jogging along, complacent Alexandrines harnessing and bridling any original talent. At least in London, the city of dreadful night, with smoke and fog, there was mystery and imagination, dreaming and hallucination, the future.

They sit, like two locomotives, fires fed, steam up, each in his billowing cloud of smoke. Similar, and yet so different.

Rimbaud’s belly full for the first time since returning to London. The last time, he had been here with Verlaine, a true poet, a confrère, a beloved, a man of means. They had mixed with the refugees from the Commune, even lived in the room of the hero Vermesch, who had been sentenced to death. Verlaine had been a figure in the Commune, whereas Rimbaud had been back in Charleville after enduring a horrific assault, writing his ‘poet as seer’ manifesto. He had missed the great days of the Commune, the murderous end in la semaine sanglante. Should he have been there, fighting and if necessary dying at the barricades, one of the Enfants perdus, the brigade of fighting boys? (It is hard not to see a similarity between the flood of lost youngsters into Paris in 1871, and the rush of ‘disinherited children’ to San Francisco and London in 1967, Paris and Berlin in 1968; if not quite tragedy repeated as farce, then politics repeated as theatre.) Would that have been a better fate? No, his life had unfolded, he had emerged, he had been chosen – the piece of wood had awoken to find itself a violin, and the infinite had played its tunes on him, and he had written his poems, and fulfilled his destiny. But now, back in London, with Nouveau, who is as nervously weak as Verlaine, but with less talent, fewer contacts, and no money, where is he heading? Today Nouveau can work for both of them, making hat boxes. Today Rimbaud is on strike. And this young man in the unsuitable top hat is intriguing, to Rimbaud the seducer.

Vincent, in the moment before he meets Rimbaud, wants to change nothing in his life. He has his job in a thriving business. His brother also works for Goupil, in The Hague. Why should they not be like their uncles, and collaborate in a great enterprise in the art world? He has his quiet room, in a family house, so cheerful after the anxious gloom of home, so peaceful after the ugly furnishings, rowdy Germans and noisy parrots of his first lodgings. Already he has helped Eugenie, the landlady’s daughter, in the garden, sowing poppies and sweet peas. How gaily she laughed at the earnest way he measured out the rows, placed the seeds carefully, one by one, as she scattered them freely, crying, ‘they are flowers, Vincent, flowers may burst forth anywhere!’ Oh how, in that moment, he had wanted to take her in his arms, declare his love! After the embattled isolation of home, an island of icy bourgeois Protestant piety in a sea of earthy Catholic peasant licence, how reassuring to look up from his gardening and to see similar houses with similar people doing similar things. Similar lives. The possibility of belonging. He was gradually learning, after the isolation of home, how to play his part, at work, at his lodgings. He keeps in touch with colleagues in The Hague, has even sent an illustrated letter to gerant Tersteeg’s little daughter, writes to the Stockums with news of London life, adding poems from his wide reading.

Here, in this suburban house in Brixton, he can fit himself into the given, with the mother and her daughter, be the man of the house. For, as he has read in Michelet, the man must look after the women, and they in return will give him their gratitude and fidelity. Of course, Eugenie is engaged, and Sam is a fine young man. But once she knows Vincent’s intentions, and understands his position and prospects, how could she refuse him?

And Mrs Loyer! How he admires her. He loves to pronounce her name the French way. It all fell into place that first day, when she welcomed him into her house, and the house smelled like a home. As he had just read in Michelet’s l’Amour (his ‘gospel’, he tells Theo, urging him to read it): ‘There is no such thing as an old woman – every one of them, no matter what her age, if she is good and loving, treats man to a glimpse of the infinite. And not only to the infinite of the moment – often that of the future. She breathes upon him, and it is a gift. All who see him afterwards say, without being able to explain it, ‘what! is he possessed? He is a born genius.”’

And that first Sunday looking down from his room at Mrs Loyer in the garden, as he read in l’Amour: ‘I see yonder a lady walking pensively in the small garden; it is already stripped of its blooms, but sheltered, like those we see behind our cliffs in France, or in the dunes of Holland …’ And he was seeing image upon layered image: the welcoming home of the Stockum’s in The Hague; the new home of Willem and Caroline behind the dunes of Scheveningen; in Mrs Loyer he saw Eugenie, thirty years on, she and he long married, he in Tersteeg’s position as gerant of the thriving Hague gallery. For, having learned the business thoroughly in London, and Paris, he would have been welcomed back as Uncle Cent’s rightful successor, and with his new wife. Sat by the window, reading on: ‘The fallen leaves have unveiled statues.’ They would certainly have statues, as Uncle Cent had at Prinsenhaage, commissioned from the finest artists! ‘Their opulent art contrasting with the simple yet modest and dignified attire of the lady, black or grey silk brightened by a lilac ribbon.’ How his dear wife had smiled when, on a sudden impulse, he had bought it for her that day! ‘Without ornament, she is none the less elegant; elegant for her husband and simple for the benefit of the poor. She reminds me of one of Philippe de Champaigne’s ladies’ (How Vincent had admired that painting in the Louvre when staying at his uncle’s opulent house in the avenue de Malakoff) ‘who had found her way into my heart, so ingenuous, so honest; intelligent and yet simple, without the subtleties with which to keep herself clear of the snares of the world.’ Mrs Loyer has had to negotiate those snares, since her husband’s death; Eugenie will have Vincent to protect her. ‘The woman has stayed with me for thirty years.’ His heart pounds as Eugenie joins her mother in the garden. He imagines himself making her happy, here in this world.

Vincent had sat entranced as Mrs Loyer one evening, the three of them sat around the fire, told the story of Jean-Baptiste Loyer, a refugee from Provence who had married her in London, but then fallen ill with consumption. Wanting to die in France, the three of them had gone to Normandy and lived in a cabin by the sea. Each evening he was carried to the water’s edge to watch the sun set into the sea. Near death, he made his confession before family and friends, and all wept at his just and pure life. In a last moment alone with his wife, he said, ‘I have loved you’, and died. The flames had flickered on her dreamy face, sparkled in the tears in her eyes. He sees Mrs Loyer in this: ‘In her beautiful eyes is a deep melancholy – that of age, of the heart’s sorrows, or perhaps of the climate. Hers is the vague and distant look of one who always had before her eyes the vast North Sea, the great grey sea, utterly deserted but for the flight of a seagull.’

And he saw Eugenie in this: ‘The older one grows, the more he sees that the most truly charming woman is she who feels most, who gives herself without reservation, and is happy because she has nothing more to give.

‘Who would not have a modest, simple woman, who is unaware of her own goodness, who sees nothing of her own merits, and always imagines she is tolerated and excused? What a happiness it is for the man to deny this; and who would not feel the necessity of constantly reassuring her?’ A gentle tap on his door, ‘Mister Vincent? Tea’s ready.’

How delightful it had been to send that extract from Michelet to the Stockum-Haanebeeks, as a hint that he has found his Caroline, only too aware of how plainly he had shown his feelings for Caroline, that day they all walked along the Rijswijk canal. A pang, even now. She was so full of high spirits, laughing, filling her hair with flowers, and once taking his arm and pressing herself against him as they walked so that he almost fainted with her warmth and fragrance so close, looking with those big brown eyes into his, saying, ‘Vincent, always so solemn! Look around at this beautiful day!’ throwing her arms wide, and the sun hitting the diamond of the engagement ring he hadn’t noticed, blinding him.

But Willem is a fine fellow, with a good job. And Vincent too would soon have a fine career, and a home much more like Willem’s parents’, serious yet so much more fun-loving (such pageants and plays they put on!) than his own dour family home. And yet so much love between his parents. And his mother, too, is the woman in the painting, in the book. No woman is old.

Perhaps Vincent places L’Amour on the café table in front of him. (It is always with him.) A jolt of recognition from Rimbaud, for it is the same edition as his school-prize copy of Michelet’s La Mer. He remembers writing of his father’s leaving, when, for a moment, he almost felt something for his mother, who was so often the implacable Mouth of Darkness to him. That poem – how odd, the way his poems keep coming back to him, as if, unread by others, they have never left him!: ‘Madame stand too upright in the meadow, where threads from the harvest snow down; parasol in hand; crushes the flower, too proud for it. Children reading their book of red Morocco in the flowering grass. Alas, he, like a thousand white angels scattering on the road, goes off beyond the mountain! She, all cold, and dark, runs after the departing man!  Longs for firm young grassy arms! Gold of April moons in the heart of the holy bed. Joy …’

And writing of the time when the boat the children played in was fixedly moored on the river, unmovable. When he could only imagine. As he imagined his father, the Zouave, heroic in Africa, as he imagined, reading in that red morocco La Mer of sea voyages and far-off places, real colours and smells, not the drabness and boiled cabbage, the greyness and bad drains of Charleville, ‘Forests, suns, riverbanks, savannahs!’ Lying beneath a piece of household linen and imagining it a sail! Such imaginary journeys as a child! And such visionary journeys as a poet! ‘I offered myself up to the sun, the God of Fire.’ He remembers, sitting opposite this stolid Dutchman, a time when he could write, ‘Sometimes I see in the sky endless beaches covered with joyous white nations. A huge golden vessel, above me, waves its multi-coloured flags in the morning wind. I have created all celebrations, all triumphs, all dramas. I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages.’ Now fading. Almost gone … ‘I believed I’d acquired supernatural power. So! I have to bury my imagination and my memories. An artist’s and storyteller’s splendid glory, thrown away.’

The boat, that boat he had played in. anchored on the Meuse, had suddenly – Le Bateau Ivre, his first real poem! – unhitched and surged downstream. ‘The river let me go where I wanted.’ Invited to Paris by Verlaine, the only poet he admired, he had read it, nervous, red-faced, his adolescent voice alternately hoarse deep, then cracking to a squeak, he read pell mell, too fast, big hands, at his first meeting of the Vilains Bonhommes in the café near St Sulpice, each sheet flying away. (To appear a century later in foot-high words on a wall nearby. Another story.) The passion of his reading as he relived every moment of its creation! Followed by the tepid, patronising applause, ‘what an interesting effort, and from such a wild boy!’ Had they not heard ‘I who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues the rut of Behemoths and the dense Maelstroms’? ‘In truth I’ve wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking. Atrocious all moons, and every sun bitter. Bitter love has swollen me with drunken torpor. O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea’? They patronise, ‘And the boy’s never even seen the sea! Quite remarkable!’ As these so-called poets – minor functionaries more like – had forgotten, maybe never had, the vividness of their childhood imaginings, when the imagined is real, and the real world is adamantine, black, implacable, and wrong – and, surely, illusory? How could something so awful, be real? When love was tender and gentle and colourful, and as gently-flowing as the Meuse on a summer afternoon. Until …

The mocking cruelty of the girl. He had wanted only to be with her, beside her, to feel the radiant warmth of her skin, breathe in the scents of her astonishing young femaleness, feel a warmth and tenderness he had never known. She had brought her maid. To tease and mock the brilliant schoolboy, the gauche young man. And she had left, with a rustling sweep of her dress, and a tinkling laugh of triumph, left him tongue-tied, red-faced and mortified. And with the realisation that this was where being the sleek-haired swot, the star pupil got you. He’d soon change that. And Paris would surely be different.

But before that poet’s entry to Paris, he had gone there, a sixteen-year-old runaway, to a Paris in ferment, in the ferment between siege and Commune. Invited cheerily into the barracks by the defenders of the city, this baby-faced, soft-fleshed innocent, a child. Offered a drink, given a smoke, asked about himself. Used to being outrageous in the small-town café, he talked with bravado: how quickly the mood changed, from boisterous drunkenness to violent desire, focussed on him, the pack mentality, the egging on, the laughing mouths now jeering, the fun now lust, the back-slapping hands now groping, the mouths slobbering and breathing hard, the madness that takes over in lust, when there’s a focus, an object for their lust, desiring what is available, despising it for its availability, the soft and white and helpless, how unspeakably they acted. Afterwards, their guilty, self-justifying coming-to, stepping back and silent as he got slowly to his feet, each garment pulled onto his spittle- and semen-stained body a cover, another layer, so that, dressed, he was as armoured as the despised, black-clad mother. He would never weep again for his body. His body no longer him, now his instrument. But his heart, his tortured heart, still red and beating and reaching out, the heart-revealing poem from the boy who never revealed his feelings, himself, sent to the one person he trusted, to understand that crucial central line, ‘take my heart, let it be bathed’. Izambard, who instead of bathing, comforting, had taken it for yet another adolescent provocation, and replied to Rimbaud’s most heartfelt poem with a crude parody, sent to the ‘heartless’ boy with the dismissive line, ‘you see? Anyone can be absurd.’ Absurd. ‘The Tortured Heart’ became ‘The Stolen Heart’. Out of this world Rimbaud fled, into the occult, the alchemical, the magical. Would this young man, in his absurd top hat and yet his workman’s face, understand any of this?

The poet must be a seer, the voyou become voyant (the hooligan become a seer), one who transforms his soul (no hearts in this work) by the ‘systematic derangement of the senses’, by becoming a criminal, a patient, a damned one, until, soul purified to the quintessence (his body, his self the vessel of alchemical transformation), he arrives at the gold of the unknown, which will be a new, universal language. The poet, Thief of Fire from the gods, will bring something of the language of the gods into the earthly realm, within the understanding and experiencing of humans. And man will be transformed. And woman will be liberated. What Baudelaire had explored hesitantly, he, the new poet, Rimbaud, would reveal fully.

Such had been his intention, his manifesto. And such he had carried out. The Drunken Boat was the first, tentative step. Did they not, these ‘poets’, as they listened, not hear their verse dissolve into irrelevance, see their insubstantial Parnassian world fade away? But for them Greece was The Embarkation for Cythera, with an Aphrodite smooth and untouched as marble, the lovers players in a fête galante. Not for them the restless reality of Greek verse, the real poetry, when verse and music, Apollo and Dionysos came together to rhythm, to make rhythmic, the Action, in a poetry at the very edge of understanding. Not the complacent clip-clop of their rhymed prose, flabby and vainglorious from two thousand years of Christian sentimentality, poetry as a gentlemanly occupation taken up by ‘daring’ clerks to express their egos. For the true poet must be born a poet, without choice. If brass wakes up (how important, that ‘waking up’!) to find it is a trumpet, wood a violin, it must prepare itself for the fierce breath blown through it, the torturing bow. Not to play, but to be played. The poet as instrument not of the ego but of I – and I is another … Verlaine the only one who heard. And for Rimbaud the only reasonable response to their tepid, polite verse was contempt, disgust, parody; by adding merde to each line as they read aloud, he could at least killed the alexandrine! His only possible action had been to go on alone, through successive derangements, level upon level of meaning, leaving poems at each level, breadcrumbs, as signs of his having passed that way, on towards the unknown. Accompanied by Verlaine, the foolish virgin.

Verlaine, in love (how easily some fall in love; as if not being in love is abnormal, an absence of the necessary, so they fall in love with the next loveable thing they encounter, strange), along for the ride, the adventure (feeling guilty after the Commune, at having kept his head down, and then marrying protecting power), the transgression, to thumb his nose at the in-laws. Enjoying the pleasure and pain of debauchery equally, because with each he felt. (Or felt he felt?) Enjoying the self-forgetting, because he knows he’ll wake up where he was. Whereas Rimbaud was striving for change, wanting, risking waking up somewhere else, someone else. Hence Verlaine’s repetition. And Rimbaud’s contempt for repetition. Rimbaud had thought he was changing himself. In fact he was discarding bits of himself. Each tatter of cloth, piece of decoration, layer of skin, strip of flesh, each illumination that fell away, each poem left, revealed not a changed being, but the adamantine and unchangeable. What fell away was his adolescence. What was left was, is, will be, his adulthood.

What surprises Rimbaud, sitting in this cheap and fug-filled café, surrounded by the poor, the worn-out and ground-down, who crouch low, face near the plate as they eat with the chained cutlery in this animal atmosphere of smells and noises, eating as slowly as they dare, trying to be invisible to the proprietor’s eye, hoping it will slide over them, not catch onto them, the harsh voice, ‘hey you, you’ve finished, you’re costing me money sat at that bench – out!’ wanting to stay in somewhere as long as possible before he turns them out into the nowhere of the vast and hostile city, its terrible void, where they are invisible, is how close he had got. And that sitting opposite is this definitively-dressed and yet undefined, unformed young man, who he somehow knows is still able to change, can approach, even arrive at fulfilling that intention, that manifesto.

His drunken boat had set out from where Baudelaire’s ‘Voyage’ had ended, and headed far into the unknown. And yet that crewless, rudderless boat, on which he had been swept along, ‘bathing in the Poem of the Sea, infused with stars and milkiness, devouring the green azure’, experiencing such wonders that he wished the keel to burst and drop him into the sea – instead had landed him, a sad child once more, squatting by a cold, black puddle, launching once more his paper boat, ‘fragile as a May butterfly …’

That had been a first try. But later, at last, after many trials, he had woken up from his visionary experiences not a seer, a new man, in the beyond, but back in this world, hungover, wounded, worn out, as sad and ignored as that small child. Abandoned by men. But, infinitely more terrible, abandoned by the gods, by the muse, by words. ‘No more words.’ ‘I can no longer speak.’. Without that promised language that would be ‘of the soul, containing everything, scents, sounds, colours, thoughts hooking into thoughts and pulling …’ Had he, then, rather than being inspired, been merely intoxicated? The drunken adolescent. Was this the wage of sin, of blasphemy? It didn’t matter. What matters is where he is. ‘My life is not heavy enough, it flies and floats far above action.’ ‘I who called myself angel or seer, exempt from all morality, I am returned to the soil, with a duty to seek, and rough reality to embrace. A peasant.’ ‘I am master of silence.’ Poetry had been his adolescence: his adult life will be action, ‘that precious focus of the world.’‘I’m quitting Europe.’ Following his father to Africa. ‘I will return with limbs of iron, dark skin and a furious eye; people will think, to look at me, that I am of a strong race. I will have gold: I will be idle and brutal. Women nurse these fierce invalids, home from hot countries. I’ll be mixed up in politics. Saved.’

And yet … ‘Had I not once lovely youth, heroic, fabulous, to be written on leaves of gold, with good luck and to spare?’ ‘I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.’ ‘I lived like a spark of gold of pure light.’

And he had had those Paris May nights. When, in his little room under the tiles he had written through the night, alone, undisturbed, under the moon and stars, a visionary, those poems, the words coming through him – the violin being played! – taken over, and yet so awake, awakened, so fully alive! Worlds upon worlds, infinities and eternities, visions beyond compare. And yet all in the here-and-now of those precise and yet elastic moments, remembering how the straw-seated chair felt and creaked, reaching up to touch the tiles cooling through the night, the only measure of time passing, until the first birds foretold dawn, and then the cacophony in the trees beneath his window, the candle dimming, the night departing, the words, the pages, the poems, there. Then climbing naked out onto the tiles, the Thief of Fire greeting the rising Sun God. And leaning out, smoking, emptied and yet full, watching vacantly as daytime Paris came slowly to life. Down at five to buy hot bread as head-down workers tramp past. The cleansing water bubbling up into the gutters, the sweep, sweep of the big brooms. That’s the time. And then down to the bar, for a drink. Or two. Absinthe, the slowly dissolving sugar (as he slowly dissolved), the clear becoming cloudy (as he was becoming cloudy), to slow the speeding brain, to allow sleep. Intoxication was before and after: while writing he was inspired. If only they had understood …

But then the journey through hell, ‘the old hell, the one whose doors were opened by the son of man.’ He had believed that the Christian could revert to pagan. He can’t. Christ cannot be uninvented. And yet somehow he must be gone beyond. ‘Will there ever be the end of superstition, Christmas on earth?’

Is there anything he can tell, pass on, to this innocent in front of them? Is there anything in him, inside the conventional inhabitant of the uniform? He touches his pocket, the last copy of A Season in Hell. Give it to him? No, each must experience his own crucifixion, his own descent into hell. He has fulfilled it, his life as a poet, in the seer letter, in Le Bateau Ivre, in the full flood of expression in the Paris poems, when he said all there is to say. The attempt, with Verlaine, to create a companionship of poets – which had at least got Verlaine writing again. And then the descent. He had consumed his adolescence. He had leaped, but in the leaping he had not taken off, but fallen to earth, Bellerephon, with a new realisation of his earth-boundedness, ready to embrace rough reality. But at least he is still intact, unlike most of the castrates around him. (Is this young man a castrate? No. There’s something about him, something intact.) He had recounted that fall in Saison. Now, apart from occasional visions in the city, he has nothing left to say. He will give them to Verlaine, if he sees him after he comes out of prison, and that will be it. Not a life of writing, but a writing life, however brief – hanging around in the dead literary world, whether fighting them or joining them, is a waste of time, of a life. Leave with these words: ‘The song of the heavens, the marching of peoples! Slaves, let us not curse life.’

And yet, in his seer letter, he had written this, of the moment when the poet becomes ‘the Supreme Knowing One!’ when ‘he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul more than anyone! He arrives at the unknown, and when, bewildered, he finishes by losing the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Although he’s killed in the leaping by the unheard of and the unnamable, other appalling workers will come; they will start at the horizon where he collapsed!’ Was this young man the artist who would take it up, take it on, practise real art, start where he had fallen …?

Within a couple of months, Vincent’s world is crumbling. In August, Theo is questioning him about a lapse, and Vincent is replying ‘mind your own business.’ By November his mother is writing to Theo that ‘Vincent has strayed from the path, [and] cannot but feel unhappy.’ Vincent’s sister Anna stays with him at the Loyers and later, when they have moved to new lodgings, says that his unhappiness is because Eugenie rejected his proposal of marriage. This becomes the family story. (The extended Van Gogh family always has its official ‘story’; it even has its family chronicler, who carefully sanitises the record in the interests of bourgeois propriety.) And is taken up by Jo Van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow, in her ‘Memoir of Vincent’ that accompanies her edition of the letters: ‘He apparently spoke to Eugenie of his love. Alas, it turned out that she was already engaged to the man who boarded with them before Vincent came. He tried everything to make her break this engagement, but he did not succeed. With this first great sorrow, his character changed; when he came home for the holidays he was thin, silent, dejected – a different being.’

And yet he told Theo, when he first moved in, that Eugenie was engaged. My imaginings about Vincent’s feelings for Eugenie are just that. The quotations I have used from L’Amour are ones that he sent in letters to family and friends, with no reference to Eugenie, and just showed his happiness in the Loyer household, where their acceptance of him, at a time when he was deeply homesick for the Zundert parsonage, touched him, and made him happy. Certainly Naifeh and Smith, in Van Gogh: The Life, their comprehensive biography, see little evidence for rejection by Eugenie as triggering the crisis that would eventually lead him to become a painter. In its playing out of a commonplace romantic trope, they see rather the adolescent romanticising of Anna which, because she was there, she could ensure became the family record.

Having got rid of one theory of Vincent’s behaviour change, I now propose another. With not just little, but absolutely no evidence. An example of counter-factual history, of the ‘what if?’ school. Buttressed by one coincidence: after spending time with Rimbaud, both Verlaine and Nouveau experienced extreme religious crises. Rimbaud writes of his first meeting with Verlaine after his release from prison, ‘Verlaine arrived here the other day, clutching a rosary. Three hours later he had renounced his god and reopened the ninety-eight wounds.’ But, Rimbaud gone, he resumed his religiosity. Nouveau, after a spell in an asylum, spent the rest of his days as an itinerant religious poet. Meeting Rimbaud could be an explosive experience. Perhaps he caused an explosion in the brain of the impressionable Vincent. Very soon Vincent’s letters were developing a biblical strain; he even denounced his once-beloved Michelet, replacing him with Thomas à Kempis. Within a year he was a full-blown religious zealot, which he continued to be for the several years until he took up art.

Rimbaud wants to escape from writing, from creativity, imagination, words. He wants to make a life in the material world. This morning, in the cellar room he’s sharing with Nouveau, he had written, ‘I am the master of silence.’ But then, his attention caught by the lightening of dawn in the window, he had written, ‘why should the appearance of a window turn pale at the corner of the ceiling?’ Each time he tries to stop, the genie, the source of words, appears. And there it is, about to come in, enter him, bring forth more words. He wants to stop the words, become a master of silence, get on with his life in the material world. This morning he had fled the words towards the hat-box factory. And then he had met this so-different and yet mirror-image of himself. And now, siting opposite it, him, he will talk into this mirror (how rarely he talks!) until he has talked himself out, and can fall silent. Of course in the process he may have infected this impressionable youth. But had he not written that the new visionary will take up where this visionary, having leaped into the unknown, has perished? This is the perishing of Rimbaud the artist. What happens to this young man, on the opposite side of the table, is not his concern. He begins to talk.