Tristan Corbière
Laforge, in the course of a reading, sketched some notes regarding Corbière which, though not printed, are nevertheless definitive, as for instance:
“Bohemian of the Ocean—picaresque and tramp—breaking down, concise, driving his verse with a whip—strident as the cry of gulls, and like them never wearied—without aestheticism—nothing of poetry or verse, hardly of literature—sensual, he never reveals the flesh—a blackguard and Byronic creature—alway the crisp word—there is not another artist in verse more freed of poetic language—he has a trade without plastic interest—the interest, the effect is in the whip stroke, the dry-point, the pun, the friskiness, the romantic abruptness— he wishes to be indefinable, uncataloguable, to be neither loved nor hated; in short, declassed from every latitude, every custom hither and beyond the Pyrenees.”
This doubtless is the truth: Corbière all his life was dominated and led by the demon of contradiction. He supposed that one must be differentiated from men by thoughts and acts exactly contrary to the thoughts and acts of the mass of men; there is much of the willful in his originality; he labored at it as women labor over their complexion during long afternoons between sky and earth, and when he disembarked, it was to draw broadsides of stupefaction. Dandyism à la Baudelaire.
But a nature cannot be developed except in the sense of its instincts and inclinations. Corbière had inherently to be something of what he became, the Don Juan of singularity; it is the only woman he loves; he mocks the other with the clever phrase “the eterna madame.”
Corbière has much wit, wit at the same time of the Montmartre wine-shop and of the blade of past times. His talent is formed of the braggart spirit, uncouth and humbug, of a bad impudent taste, of genius thrusts. He has the drunken air, but he is only laboriously clumsy; to make absurd chaplets, he shapes from miraculous, rolled pebbles works of a secular patience, but in the dizaine he leaves the little stone of the sea quite naked and rough, because at bottom he loves the sea with a great naiveté and because his folly for paradoxical things gives way, from time to time, to an intoxication of poetry and beauty.
Among the never ordinary verses of Amours jaunes, are many that are admirable, but admirable with an air so equivocal, so specious, that we do not always enjoy them at the first meeting; then we judge that Tristan Corbière is, like Laforgue, a little his disciple, one of those undeniable, unclassable talents which are strange and precious exceptions in the history of literature—singular even in a gallery of oddities.
Here are two little poems of Tristan Corbière, forgotten even by the last publisher of the Amours jaunes:
PARIS NOCTURNE
C’est la mer;—calme plat—Et la grande marée
Avec un grondement lointain s’est retirée....
Le flot va revenir se roulant dans son bruit.
Entendez-vous gratter les crabes de la nuit.
C’est le Styx asséché: le chiffonier Diogène,
La lanterne à la main, s’en vient avec sans-gêne.
Le long du ruisseau noir, les poètes pervers
Pêchent: leur crâne creux leur sert de boîte à vers.
C’est le champ: pour glaner les impures charpies
S’abat le vol tournant des hideuses harpies;
Le lapin de gouttière, à l’affût des rongeurs.
Fuit les fils de Bondy, nocturnes vendangeurs.
C’est la mort: la police gît.—En haut l’amour
Fait sa sieste, en tétant la viande d’un bras lourd
Oû le baiser éteint laisse sa plaque rouge.
L’heure est seule. Écoutez. Pas un rêve ne bouge.
C’est la vie: écoutez, la source vive chante
L’éternelle chanson sur la tête gluante
D’un dieu marin tirant ses membres nus et verts
Sur le lit de la Morgue... et les yeux grands ouverts.
PARIS DIURNE
Vois aux deux le grand rond de cuivre rouge luire,
Immense casserole où le bon Dieu fait cuire
La manne, l’arlequin, l’éternel plat du jour.
C’est trempé de sueur et c’est trempé d’amour.
Les laridons en cercle attendent prés du four,
On entend vaguement la chair rance bruire,
Et les soiffards aussi sont là, tendant leur buire,
Les marmiteux grelotte en attendant son tour.
Crois-tu que le soleil frit donc pour tout le monde
Ces gras graillons grouillants qu’un torrent d’or inonde?
Non, le bouillon de chien tombe sur nous du ciel.
Eux sont sous le rayon et nous sous la gouttière.
A nous le pot au noir qui froidit sans lumière.
Notre substance à nous, c’est notre poche à fiel.
(Tr. 41)
Born at Morlaix in 1845, Tristan returned there in 1875 to die of inflammation of the lungs. He was the son (others say the nephew) of the sea romancer, Edouard Corbière, author of Négrier, whose violent love for the things of the sea had such a strong influence upon the poet. This Négrier, by Edouard Corbière, captain on a long-voyage vessel, 1832, 2 vol. in-8, is a quite interesting tale of maritime adventures. The fourth chapter of the first part, entitled Prisons d’Angleterre, (the convict ships) contains the most curious details about the habits of the prisoners, about the loves of the corvettes with the “forts-a-bras”—in one place, the author says, where “there was only one sex.” The preface of this novel reveals a spirit that is very proud and very disdainful of the public: the same spirit with some talent and a sharper nervousness,—you have Tristan Corbière.