Abstract
“Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations” sees Tom Verlaine as a Romantic rather than situating him among the avant-garde. Drawing on those Romantics who, like Keats, do not write with immediate reference to their historical context, Verlaine constructs songs that constellate past eras in relation to the present. In particular, his song “Postcards from Waterloo” draws a parallel between the creation of punk as a cultural category and the early nineteenth century’s retrospective construction of Romanticism. The chapter argues that Verlaine’s vein of Romanticism changes from his early work with Television to his later solo work, especially Words from the Front (1982), an argument supplemented by a comparison of Verlaine’s strain of Romanticism to Patti Smith’s. It concludes that however useful historical contextualization may be, an interpretation of Verlaine’s music also needs to recognize his untimeliness, as he creates his own context with reference to the Romantic era.
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Notes
- 1.
G.W.F. Hegel , Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), 325.
- 2.
Philip Shaw , Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 101.
- 3.
All details of the Waterloo reenactments are from Nat Segnit , who reports that estimates of the death toll range as high as 53,000, making the battlefield (which was a mere five square miles) ten times more dense with bodies than the Battle of the Somme. See Nat Segnit , “Blast from the Past: The Battle of Waterloo Turns 200,” Harper’s (December 2015), 30.
- 4.
Tom Verlaine, Words from the Front, Warner Brothers BSK 3685, 1982,
rpm. - 5.
Any discussion of Verlaine’s “career” should acknowledge his resistance to this conceptualization of a musician’s life. When asked how his life should be retrospectively summarized, Verlaine said simply, “Struggling not to have a professional career” (Ben Sisario , “The Return of Tom Verlaine,” New York Times, May 18, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/arts/music/18verl.html). Verlaine’s failure to finish many of his albums or to take advantage of his commercial opportunities is a notorious feature of his professional life.
- 6.
Tom Verlaine, Postcard from Waterloo, Virgin VS 501, 1982,
rpm. - 7.
Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle , Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 2.
- 8.
Television, “Marquee Moon,” Marquee Moon, Elektra 7E-1098, 1977,
rpm. - 9.
Bryan Waterman, Marquee Moon (New York: Continuum, 2011), 3. “Parable of absolute self creation” is Waterman’s quotation from Rosalind Krauss.
- 10.
This chapter’s Benjaminian approach is well described in the fourteenth of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where Benjamin notes that both the ruling class and revolutionaries dress themselves up in the costume of the past, thereby belying the sense of history as “homogenous and empty time.” See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1968), 261.
- 11.
In this sense, the aim of this chapter is much closer to that of the other, earlier book on Television: Tim Mitchell’s more purely literary-critical approach (compromised though the book is by a publisher who failed to understand how footnotes work and accidentally forgot to print a key chapter). See Tim Mitchell , Sonic Transmission: Television, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell (London: Glitter, 2006).
- 12.
Karl Marx , “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 146.
- 13.
Vivian Mercer , “The Uneventful Event,” The Irish Times (February 18, 1956), 6.
- 14.
I owe my sense of this contrast to Amy Gaeta.
- 15.
Waterman’s book begins by noting the many possible narratives rooted in the creation of CBGB as a punk club.
- 16.
Waterman, 171.
- 17.
“The American Rimbaud” is a comparison made so often between other artists and the French poet that, as of this writing in June 2017, Google lists 3540 results for the phrase “the American Rimbaud” alone!
- 18.
Mitchell, 47.
- 19.
On Romantic nostalgia and the dream, see Michael Sayre and Robert Löwy, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 22.
- 20.
The Kinks’s “Waterloo Sunset” is in this mold, a very English song that consciously rejects the opportunity to “wander” Verlaine’s persona often embraces; the song rejects the urban setting into which Verlaine’s flâneur plunges himself. Marking his internal Elba-like exile, Ray Davies’s defeated persona responds to London’s nervy excitements by looking away. Something Else by the Kinks, NSPL 18193, 1967,
rpm. - 21.
Waterman , 114–15; he correctly points to “an ambivalence toward Warholism [in Verlaine and Smith] that would become more pronounced on the scene over time” (91).
- 22.
Robert Pattison , The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (OUP, 1987), 192–93: “When the credos of Symbolism are translated into the practice of rock, as in Tom Verlaine’s lyrics, the rock purist applauds the effort as revolutionary, though the manifestos that first announced the revolution are a hundred years old. Nineteenth-century Romanticism retains its first vigor in the aesthetic of Masscult.”
- 23.
Mitchell, 99.
- 24.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream,” in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 251.
- 25.
A near-anagram of Television, the brilliant and fractured song “Elevation ” appears on the group’s first album, Marquee Moon.
- 26.
Tom Verlaine, Flash Light, I.R.S. Records IRS-42050, 1987,
rpm. - 27.
Waterman, 130.
- 28.
Patti Smith, “Somewhere Somebody Must Stand Naked,” Rock Scene (October 1974), 21.
- 29.
The Richard Hell archive at NYU contains a large archive of ready-to-mail postcards, all of them blank.
- 30.
Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 60–61. Emphasis in original.
- 31.
Selected Letters, 63, 148.
- 32.
Linking anti-machismo to his preference for silences and fractures in his playing, Verlaine opined in an interview that “Eddie Van Halen and all that boys’ band music is just whacking off, [as though they were saying] ‘look at my fingers! They never stop moving.’” Interview with Max Bell, “Tom Foolery,” The Face (July 1984). On verbal silences, see Waterman’s excellent commentaries at 16–17 and 120.
- 33.
Tom Verlaine, Elektra 6E–216, 1979,
rpm; Dreamtime, Warner Brothers BSK 3539, 1981, 
rpm; Words from the Front. - 34.
In a great moment on Easter , Smith defiantly proclaims, “I am an American artist” as though stealing Americanness back from its flag-waving claimants. She, too, is an American—which is not an identification with the center but an arresting claim from the margins. Patti Smith, “Babelogue ,” in Easter , Arista AB 4171,
rpm; Patti Smith,
Collected Lyrics
, 1970–2015 (New York: Ecco Press, 2016), 85. - 35.
Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, The Night (London: Aloes Books, 1976).
- 36.
Waterman, 128.
- 37.
Television, Adventure, Elektra 6E–133, 1978,
rpm. The production of this single track involved Television’s only lavish studio operation, a prodigal spending of their record company’s final funds on a melancholy
and graceful recording. A very different recording of the track, which suggests the urgency and crisis at the heart of the band’s breakup, is the breathtaking, bracing opener of their final San Francisco show,
Live at the Old Waldorf
, Rhino RHM2 7846, 2003, compact disc. - 38.
Waterman, 170.
- 39.
For an interpretation of Television as Decadent rather than Romantic, see Mitchell, 18–19. This designation is much closer to the truth than the more common classification of Television as avant-garde, but still misses the Romanticism that Verlaine’s lyrics frequently invoke.
- 40.
Mitchell, 86.
- 41.
Verlaine and Jimmy Rip, Music for Experimental Film, Lorber, 2007, DVD. Ever interested in film roles, Richard Hell recorded in a notebook that he wanted to play Roderick Usher (Entry for 1979 in New York University’s Richard Hell Papers, Series 1A, Box 1, Folder 6).
- 42.
Qtd. in Mitchell, 97, 118.
- 43.
Pattison , 192. In an interview Tom Verlaine defines his poetry “just sort of gestures or something—just certain moods or something” (Mitchell, 25).
- 44.
Zach Schonfeld , “Rev. of Dreamtime/Words from the Front,” www.popmatters.com/review/tom-verlaine-dreamtime-words-from-the-front/.
- 45.
“Theresa Stern ,” Wanna Go Out? (New York: Dot Books, 1973).
- 46.
Box 1, Folder 10, Journal 1983.
- 47.
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me (New York: Penguin, 1996), 166.
- 48.
Book accompanying Various Artists, Ork Records: New York, New York, Numero Group 060, 2015, compact disc, 120.
- 49.
There are two recordings of “What I Heard ,” neither of which have intelligible lyrics. I am grateful to Keith Allison, manager of the unofficial Television website, for sharing his recordings with me. In correspondence, Lloyd wrote me to say that he did not remember the lyrics, but reminded me that the song was Verlaine’s composition.
- 50.
On Waterloo as a paradoxical wound in the British cultural imagination, see Shaw, 6.
- 51.
Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), 1.
- 52.
Thanks to Amy Gaeta for drawing my attention to Wojnarowicz’s series.
- 53.
“I Just Want to Have Something to Do,” in Road to Ruin, Sire, SRK 6063, 1978,
rpm. Pattison
notes that the Ramones’s
lines are “appeals to sensation rather than sense,” because Joey Ramone does not pretend that there is any reason, beyond sound, for “Vindaloo” and “you” to be conjoined with one another (200). - 54.
Borges , “The Aleph,” The Vintage Book of Latin American Short Stories, ed. Carlos Fuentes and Julio Ortega (New York: Vintage, 2000), 13.
- 55.
Entry for 10/11/83 in New York University’s Richard Hell Papers, Series 1A, Box 1, Folder 6.
- 56.
ABBA , Waterloo, Polar Records POLS 252, 1974,
rpm. - 57.
John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 334–36.
rpm.
rpm.
rpm.
rpm.
rpm.
rpm; Dreamtime, Warner Brothers BSK 3539, 1981, 
rpm; Words from the Front.
rpm; Patti Smith,
Collected Lyrics
, 1970–2015 (New York: Ecco Press, 2016), 85.
rpm. The production of this single track involved Television’s only lavish studio operation, a prodigal spending of their record company’s final funds on a melancholy
and graceful recording. A very different recording of the track, which suggests the urgency and crisis at the heart of the band’s breakup, is the breathtaking, bracing opener of their final San Francisco show,
Live at the Old Waldorf
, Rhino RHM2 7846, 2003, compact disc.
rpm. Pattison
notes that the Ramones’s
lines are “appeals to sensation rather than sense,” because Joey Ramone does not pretend that there is any reason, beyond sound, for “Vindaloo” and “you” to be conjoined with one another (200).
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I am obliged to Caroline Roberts for her research collaboration among the Hell Papers in New York; to Amy Gaeta for excellent suggestions on two early versions of this chapter, many of which I have adopted; and to the editor and reviewer of this volume for their thoughtful feedback.
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von Morzé, L. (2018). Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_7
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