By Tim Mitchell.
The following is an extract from Tim Mitchell’s Albert Mérat: Rimbaud’s Seer.
In 1866, Les Chimères, Albert Mérat’s first solo poetry collection, appeared.
Les Chimères contains less of the lighter material evident in his previous joint work with Léon Valade, Avril, mai, juin, with instead a deeper exploration of nature and a more sophisticated view of women and of Mérat’s relationship with them.
It would be very hard to believe that the well-read Mérat, particularly with his interest in the revival of the sonnet and his love of Heinrich Heine, had not read Gérard de Nerval’s own ‘Les Chimères’, the group of sonnets he included in his 1854 collection of writings Les Filles du feu. He certainly would have read Nerval’s translation of Heine’s Intermezzo, which he, in partnership with Valade, would also translate — and whose model they would follow (but without rendering it into prose, as Nerval had done). Mérat also knew several of Nerval’s old friends, such as Théophile Gautier, Arsène Houssaye, Victor Hugo, the photographer Nadar and Charles Monselet (who had accompanied Nerval on some of his night-walks). Mérat’s friend José-Maria de Heredia had, when young, once met Nerval out walking in the countryside. Nerval was holding a chicken under his cloak, which he solemnly informed Heredia he was going to sacrifice to Aesculapius, the god of medicine.
In the mid-1860s, Mérat’s fellow poet Armand Silvestre was working at a dull, administrative job, similar to his own, where he toiled alongside a man called Théodore Dondey. Silvestre later recalled:
It was my colleague Albert Mérat, I believe, who said to me one day, “You know that the old Romantic, Philothée O’Neddy, works with you at the ministry?”
‘Philothée O’Neddy’ was Dondey’s anagrammatized pen-name, and Dondey had been a member, along with Nerval and Gautier, of the “Petit Cénacle” of Hugo’s young followers.
With these connections, and with many links to Nerval’s work in Les Chimères itself — not least in the symbolism inherent in it — it seems almost certain that Mérat named his collection with Nerval at least partly in mind.
Both poets had a similar regard for traditional poetry and simplicity of expression, and Mérat would also have appreciated the deeply personal nature of Nerval’s suite of sonnets in Les Filles du feu, and the deep mining in his writing of a thread of lost love and lost times that was to be a large element in his own work. This was particularly so in his 1870s collections, L’Adieu and Chansons et madrigaux.
Both poets, too, struggled for money and each were effectively “disinherited” by their fathers: Mérat by Brutus-Horace Mérat’s financial mismanagement and suicide, and Nerval by his own father’s refusal to support him once he had insisted on a literary career. Despite this lack of financial backing, Nerval, who had never known his mother, felt a strong sense of duty to his father — and so did Mérat to his own surviving parent, Joséphine. Both Nerval and Mérat loved walking through the streets of Paris and observing life there, often in their shared territory of Montmartre, parts of which were still semi-rural, but they also took much pleasure in exploring the countryside around the capital, with Meudon a favourite spot of each. Both, too, had the habit of noting down impressions as they walked, on pieces of paper that they kept in their pockets, which would later be used as the basis for poems. Each, as well, used to write in cafés. Both were particularly depressed by the darkness and dampness of winter and correspondingly excited and inspired by spring.
Mérat and Nerval also shared a love for the theatre and adored the actresses they saw on stage — whose reality could never live up to the idealistic impressions of them created in the poets’ imaginations. In 1853, when Mérat was thirteen, Nerval’s Odelettes were published, containing ‘Une Allée du Luxembourg’, a poem set in the gardens that would become Mérat’s favourite part of Paris — and overlooking which he would later live many of his happiest years. The poem’s theme of an idealised love, happened on by chance amid the beauties of nature, which seems to promise perfection but ends in loss and grief, could almost be a template for Mérat’s own love poetry.
Another, more personal link between Nerval and Mérat, though, is the former’s suicide in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne (a short walk from the Hôtel de Ville where Mérat worked from 1864), which came eight days before Mérat’s father drowned himself in the Seine. Mérat must have been aware of the closeness in time of the two events — and perhaps, too, of the fact that Nerval had earlier planned to take his life in the same way as Brutus-Horace, in the same river.
Mérat does not seem to have spoken publicly about Nerval, but this may have been due to fears about parallels being drawn between the poor mental health and suicidal tendencies that they had in common. Mérat was terrified that he would experience similar bouts of madness to those Nerval had endured, and he dreaded, too, the possibility that his life might end in the same way. Mérat would never, though, as Nerval (who had been born Gérard Labrunie) did, create a new literary identity with a new name. Nerval used his new persona to travel deep into dreams and personal mythology, but Mérat was intent on preserving his essential personality at all costs.
Richard Holmes, in his book Footsteps, says of Nerval that,
As his imagination withdrew from distant adventures, he fastened on his own memories and consumed himself until he feared nothing would be left.
It could be said that Mérat also, towards the end of his life, looked back obsessively and suffered a similar “self-consumption”, which led in part to his own suicide.
Although the renowned Paris photographer Étienne Carjat was a friend of Mérat’s, it would be Carjat’s great rival Nadar, a close friend of Nerval’s who had famously taken his picture, whom Mérat chose when he wanted his own portrait taken in 1874.
Richard Sieburth, in his introduction to the ‘Chimères’ sonnets in Nerval’s Selected Writings, says:
‘… these chimeras constitute a single whole or cycle, a composite — and fire-breathing — female body.’
Mérat’s much larger collection ranges wider and cannot be defined so specifically, but the chimera was a significant enough symbol for his collected work for him to choose it as his title. Mérat’s interest in the chimera also echoes that of Théophile Gautier, who had written his own poem, ‘La Chimère’, in which the narrator vanquishes the mythical monster. The chimera was also a subject that fascinated English contemporaries of Mérat’s such as John Addington Symonds, whose ‘Le Jeune homme caressant sa chimère (For an Intaglio)’ is the story of a young man visited by one of these fabled creatures while he sleeps and being ‘… stricken to the very core / With sickness of desire exceeding sore.’
In Mérat’s own ‘Frontispice’, which opens Les Chimères, he expresses both Gautier’s triumph and the ‘Jeune homme’’s rapture; here his own eventual victory is achieved, but only at great cost. Women, he believes, are not only both entrancing and deceptive, but also unknowable, and his chimera, in a common poetic double-symbolism of the time, co-opts ‘the solemn pose / Of the great sphinxes’.
‘Frontispice’ has several layers: it is itself the actual poetic frontispiece to his collection, but it is also a poem about its own creation and its significance as that frontispiece. It contains, too, a description of a dreamed drawing of a chimera — a parallel, illustrated frontispiece that will come to life in the mind’s eye of the reader, in a process enabling it to be “seen” in its position at the front of the book. This dreamed, depicted frontispiece takes the form of an engraving of a double-natured chimera/sphinx, itself standing on a double entrance — ‘the doorstep of a portico’ — to the collection entitled Les Chimères. Within the poem, too, Mérat dreams of how the image of the chimera will be engraved — and then come to life (a reversal of what happens in Symonds’s poem, where the chimera comes to life and is then engraved). The single chimera of the frontispiece is itself symbolic of the other chimeras that Mérat has battled in his bid to understand women and the world, as will be described in the poems that follow.
Richard Sieburth says that Nerval wrote
…in a ‘state of supernaturalist reverie’, a state in which (according to Goethe — whose Faust Nerval had translated at the age of twenty — and Heine among others), the poet’s vision turns away from the imitation of the forms of outward nature to contemplate the eidetic images and symbols that emerge from deep within the memory theatre of the soul.
Although it was a rare incursion for Mérat into the dreamed and symbolic, ‘Frontispice’ seems to come from a similar place as the one mined by Heine and Nerval, and its significant, introductory position at the front of Les Chimères shows its importance to him. Mérat would make little further use of symbols and would later reject Symbolism itself (despite long-lasting friendships with Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarmé, Henri Cazalis and other writers linked to the movement). A sustained move away from subjective realism and precision into fluidity and evocation would have had the potential to unleash demons that he needed to keep chained. This poem, though, read as it certainly was by Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud and many other poets linked with Symbolism, is, alongside Mérat’s 1869 collection L’Idole, with its adoring analysis of the constituent parts of a woman’s body, a precursor to it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Mitchell has written books on Jonathan Richman, John Cale and the New York band Television. He is also the author of a novel based on the work of Luke Haines, Truth and Lies in Murder Park, and short stories published by Unthank Books and Goldfish. As a musician, he has recorded and performed with the poet Jeremy Reed.
