We’re travelling backwards in time a few years from Stein’s era to the period when Symbolist, Decadent and Impressionist movements were at the cutting edge of literature - so the last two decades of the nineteenth-century and the early years of the twentieth. The writers we’ll be looking at are a fairly mixed bunch, yet in practice these three schools (mainly of poetry) tend to bleed into one, so I’ll refer to them in future by using Symbolism as a catch-all term. Each movement carries the conviction that art is a refuge or sanctuary, where meaning inhabits a transcendent realm somewhere inside the artist’s imagination; a place where he doesn’t have to look at things conventionally, somewhere he’s at liberty to be who they want, and where his art will not be created or judged using received standards. So at worst, Symbolism can be dreadfully precious and self-indulgent, a conclusion it’s easy to arrive at from the poet Stephen Mallarme’s assessment of the era: “We are currently witnessing,” he wrote in 1888, “ . . . an extraordinary performance, unique in the history of poetry: each poet going into his own corner to play, on a flute very much his own, whatever tunes he wishes, for the first time poets do not sing by their music stands.” Which, depending on your point of view, may or may not be a good thing. Symbolism was a late offshoot of Romanticism, which, as we’ve seen, places the writer and the writer’s biography centre stage in its conception of meaning. But whereas your Romantic poet of the early nineteenth-century would be out in the open communing with nature or swimming the Dardanelles, his Symbolist descendants were more likely to be found alone in a dimly-lit velvet-draped garret writing poetry and maybe even sucking on a hookah pipe. So their Romantic hero of choice would more likely be the opium-addled De Quincey than a fresh air freak like Wordsworth or a Byronic fitness fanatic. You couldn’t just get to this imaginative realm by the simple expedient of venturing outdoors and saying hello to Mother Nature. It’s somehow much more cerebral and claustrophobic than that. It’s not so much about Pantheism as VISIONS. Step forward Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, according to to the esteemed critic Edmund Wilson, between them form the crucial bridge between the Romantics and the Symbolists. Poe favoured the creation of “ultra-Romantic effects” that aspired to “the indefiniteness” that forms “an element of the true music”. The resulting meaning would be “vague and therefore . . . spiritual,” as reality becomes confused with the imaginary realm, and even the senses themselves merge into a single act of blurry perception. It’s a whole other world, in which shapes resolve themselves only to vanish again, in much the same way as they do in an Impressionist painting. Or when you forget to put your glasses on. As Wilson notes, Coleridge’s Xanadu, as described in his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ is not a bad metaphor for this elusive state; A damsel with a In a vision once I saw: It was an maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there . . . To “build that dome in air” Coleridge has first to be entranced, almost hypnotized by his recollection of the damsel’s music into a visionary frame of mind. Then he can get to work. But this isn’t sculpting meaning out of rock like the Hemingway method we looked at earlier; it’s vivid, yet somehow insubstantial, conjured rather than made, fleeting rather than graspable. Yet it’s none the less affecting for all that. So, if you’re planning on emigrating to this artistic nirvana, it helps to know how to get there. And first you’ve got to bone up on your prophets, because that’s the tradition you’re trying to become part of. The roots of the transcendental element in symbolism lie in the long tradition of visionary literature, whether religious or secular, that stretches back to antiquity, and the OED definition of ‘visionary’ is most apposite to the sorts of writer we’re looking at here. Dating back to the seventeenth-century, it of course means the ability to see beyond the physical world. But early on in its evolution, it also came to be associated with ideas of unreality, impracticality, notions that exist only in the imagination and can’t be given concrete form. And this is the tension that exists within all visionary literature: how applicable are these visions to life as we live it, and do they benefit anyone other than the visionary himself? In short, is he a prophet or a nutter? Naturally, many visionaries don’t give a toss what you call them; the inspiration is often its own justification, so the rest of us can take it or leave it. The less successful Symbolist/ Decadent/ Impressionist poets would fall into this mindset - it’s another manifestation of the “art-for-art’s sake” brigade. Drunk with the idea of being a poet, or intoxicated by the sonorousness of language, their meaning becomes, as one critic puts it, a desperate attempt to “charge an epidermic experience with profundity” (isn’t that wonderful?). So basically, their art, for all its transcendent pretensions is an exercise in superficiality, and language is decorative rather then essential. But there are visionary artists who sincerely believe that communication with a transcendent realm not only gives an added spiritual dimension to their work, but can help explore reality more intensely and thoroughly. And king among these must surely be the poet/ painter/ engraver William Blake, who constructed an entire inner cosmos to help explain what was going on in our own. In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake wrote; If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite. This I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. Everyone from Aldous Huxley to The Doors have piggybacked on this idea that art’s main business is to find the key that will unlock the “Infinite”. But how to do it? Obviously, if you’re a visionary it’s no problem - it comes and finds you, although access to the inner realm can’t be willed, and tends not to run to a fixed timetable. Blake was always seeing visions - and he wasn’t wearing a long cloak, carrying a staff and sporting a long beard atop a mountain in the way prophets are often represented in art. He could just as easily have been doing the washing-up at his home in Lambeth. Visions were part of the fabric of his everyday life. But what of those who can’t pretend to have the gift? How do they connect? Huxley was one of the more conscientious seekers after the Infinite, however, and, borrowing Blake’s phrase ‘The Doors of Perception’ as the title of his thesis, characterized the writer’s dilemma thus: To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large--this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially fruitful." He is the man who feels that "what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. "We talk," he wrote in middle life, "far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future-all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether [itals mine]. The other man’s grass is always greener: writers have often envied artists and musicians for having a more direct link to meaning through their chosen media, which don’t necessarily have to engage the conscious mind to transcend the literal - look at Coleridge’s damsel with the dulcimer. But all the writer’s got at his disposal are clunky old words which are somewhat earthbound and can never express their meaning with the immediacy and vibrancy that’s possible with colour and sound. But he can at least try and make his language aspire to that condition: if he can only a) find this realm where the mind can be “at Large” and then b) translate it into his writing, he will have achieved Blake’s ambition. All he has to do is free his mind - and then he’ll automatically start creating true art. It’s as if there’s a world somewhere through the looking glass which is more conducive to artistic endeavour. The French poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire also suspected this: in his poem ‘Les Fenetres’, he wrote: Looking through an open window from outside, you never see as much as when you look through a shut window. Nothing exists more profound, more mysterious, more creative, more shadowy or more dazzling than a window lit up by a candle. For some it was a door, for Baudelaire a window. Either way it’s an aperture of some sort, a portal to be passed through. I mentioned earlier on in this section that writing often resembles a journey; well, in many respects, what’s being represented here is the ultimate artistic journey to truth, with the writer as the solitary aesthetic pilgrim passing beyond the literal and into a “pure” realm of meaning. Time for some more artist figures who tried to incorporate this quality of transcendence into their lifestyles: in 1884 JK Huysmans published his seminal novel ‘A Rebours’ (translated as ‘Against Nature’ - a telling title if ever there was one) which features a somewhat effete would-be artist, Des Esseintes, who became a role model for this type of aesthetic quest. He refuses to live in the real world with its “waves of human mediocrity”, and spends most of his time alone reading Baudelaire and Mallarme, whose work he feels is most sympathetic to his ambitions. And we should note that Huysmans wasn’t writing satire - this was the real deal as far as he was concerned; fellow poet Arthur Symons approvingly described ‘A Rebours’ as ‘the breviary of the Decadence’. It’s a book that even puzzled Oscar Wilde; in the opinion of his fictional character Dorian Gray, ‘Against Nature’ is "the strangest book he had ever read. . .There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint, or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner." The answer to Dorian’s dilemma is that he was reading both the above; Symbolist art tended to be strongly rooted in the spiritual, but a spirituality that wasn’t necessarily accessed through saintly behaviour - more like any kind of behaviour that would give rise to transcendent perceptions. In fact, spirituality was viewed as a smorgasbord of any kind of transcendence that was aesthetically, not necessarily philosophically attractive to the artist, so God and Paganism could be accorded equal rank. Pound, ever the intelligent observer, marked this tendency in his poem ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, in which he detects “Image partially imbued/ With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore, and the Church”; it was wine, dancing and religion that attracted the artist, to which he could have added drugs and sex if he’d wanted to complete the set. So if you weren’t a genuine visionary, you could at least have some fun practising to be one. And so it was no wonder that it attracted solitary intense young men into its ranks; it was the closest thing the nineteenth-century ever got to rock’n’roll. You could behave as outrageously and anti-socially as you wanted, all in the name of art, as long as you had an overdeveloped nervous system and considerable reserves of energy. Modelling your artistic vision on Baudelaire, whose seminal collection of “Satanic” poetry ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ was banned in France, and imitating the behaviour of Arthur Rimbaud (not the sort of bloke you’d take home to Mother), you’d be well on your way to being a Symbolist. And if you don’t believe me, here’s a brief resumee of Rimbaud’s biography: Rimbaud believed the poet was a seer; his job was to unnerve the senses. And to do that, he decided he needed to live a reckless life and write free verse that didn’t rhyme. His challenging behaviour really got going in 1871, when he met fellow poet Paul Verlaine, who was married at the time and ten years his senior. Establishing himself in the Verlaine household, he occasioned considerable scandal by embarking on a homosexual affair with his landlord. Outrage followed outrage, with Rimbaud's drug taking and generally unclean living eventually alienating everyone except Verlaine, who in 1872 left Mrs V and ran off with his boyfriend to London. A year later the poets had a tiff in Brussels which ended in Verlaine shooting his lover in the wrist. Rimbaud called the cops, and Verlaine was sent to prison for 18 months. And all this before Rimbaud had reached the age of 20 - at which point he gave up writing poetry altogether, but not before leaving behind some hugely influential collections of verse. In many respects, the spirit of Symbolism as an alternative lifestyle choice is still very much with us, alive and well in the usually male, floppy-haired, indolent, poetry-writing semi-alcoholic, oversexed yet for some reason disgruntled English student who fancies himself as something of a rebel. Oh, OK then, me 25 years ago. Or, as we’ll see later, in the American Beat poets of the 1950’s; musos like Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison in the 1960’s, both of whom cited Rimbaud as an influence; and with the New York art/punk crowd in the 1970’s, whose ranks include Rimbaud’s most loyal devotee, Patti Smith, who reckons art will never see his like again.