"I WILL WANDER FAR AWAY, A VAGABOND IN NATURE..."

One of my pseudonyms is Daubmir, as you may see from my profile at right. "Daubmir" is an anagram of Rimbaud, a favourite poet of mine since adolescence.

So, I now wish to consider & appraise Rimbaud, because it makes me feel young again, and lyrical, and nostalgic... and here's an interesting piece by journalist and critic Ruth Franklin

Arse Poetica

When Rimbaud was good, he was very, very good
By Ruth Franklin

(writing on The New Yorker)

What poet’s life lends itself better to myth than Arthur Rimbaud’s? By the age of sixteen, he had written one of the most celebrated poems in French literature. Soon he was shocking bohemian Paris, living on absinthe and hashish and openly having an affair with Paul Verlaine. He wrote his masterpiece, Une Saison en Enfer (“A Season in Hell”), in a few months’ fevered productivity but supposedly cast almost all the printed copies into the flames. (When the allegedly burned books were discovered in the publisher’s archives a decade after Rimbaud’s death, the poet’s literary executor asked that they be destroyed in order to “give the appearance of truth” to the legend.) In the years that followed, Rimbaud wandered the globe, working odd jobs from circus cashier to African gunrunner. But he never wrote another word.

Normally, a poet’s work proves a useful antidote to the mythologizing tendency, but the material that Rimbaud left behind is both limited and ambiguous. His complete works—fewer than a hundred short poems, the seven-thousand-word prose text Une Saison en Enfer, and the prose poems known as the Illuminations, as well as approximately two hundred and fifty letters and a handful of other texts—barely fill two volumes. The poetry ranges from inspired to truly puerile; many of the letters contain outright lies, while others are fragmented or of dubious authenticity. Secondary sources present additional problems: the memoirs of Rimbaud’s relatives, friends, and ex-friends are a cacophony of quarrels, often apocryphal, while critics have tended to use him as a mirror for their own preoccupations. In the words of the biographer Graham Robb, he has been resurrected as “Symbolist, Surrealist, Beat poet, student revolutionary, rock lyricist, gay pioneer, and inspired drug-user,” and invoked by artists from Picasso to Jim Morrison. Yet the crucial questions about Rimbaud’s life and work remain unanswered: How could he write poetry like this at such a young age? And why did he give it up?

The past few years have seen a proliferation of works that strive to give a fuller treatment of Rimbaud. In addition to Robb’s biography—the most exhaustive study published in English in more than fifty years—there is now the Modern Library’s Rimbaud Complete, translated and edited by Wyatt Mason. The bilingual first volume, which was published in 2002, includes all of Rimbaud’s poetry as well as uncollected writings ranging from Latin school compositions to fragments of poems reconstructed by his acquaintances. This is now joined by I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, the largest sampling of the poet’s correspondence yet to appear in English. In his introduction to this second volume, Mason argues that the letters act as a corrective, serving to “muddle the sexy myth by clarifying the sober man.” They may clarify all too much. Not only do the letters reveal that Rimbaud could often be obnoxious and demanding; worse, they show that after he stopped writing poetry he apparently never gave it another thought. Camus once wrote, “To sustain the legend, one has to be unaware of these decisive letters,” and concluded that “they are sacrilege, as the truth sometimes is.”

The legend begins at the moment of Rimbaud’s birth on October 20, 1854, in the small town of Charleville. Some say he was born with his eyes open, as a sign of the seer that he would become; others claim that the future traveller surprised the midwife by crawling toward the door. As a child, Rimbaud showed little interest in the usual boyhood pursuits, but his school compositions earned him a reputation for genius. Entering a regional poetry contest at the age of fifteen, he slept through the first three hours, then he had breakfast brought to him, and, handing in his poem as time was
called, won the competition.

Rimbaud’s first few surviving letters date from about this time. From the start, they demonstrate the peculiar mixture of peremptoriness and ingratiation that would characterize his relationships throughout his life. Even on a scribbled note to his teacher Georges Izambard, Rimbaud’s flair for the dramatic is apparent, his handwriting full of swirls and flourishes. Writing a few months later to the poet Théodore de Banville, the editor of the anthology Le Parnasse Contemporain, he is both self-deprecating and infatuated with his own promise. “Cher Maître,” he wrote, “Try to keep a straight face while reading my poems: You would make me ridiculously happy and hopeful were you, Maître, to see if a little room were found for [them] among the Parnassians. . . . Ambition! Such madness!”

Enclosed were three samples of the fifteen-year-old’s latest work, among them “Sensation”:

Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths, Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass: Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot, Will let breezes bathe my bare head.

Not a word, not a thought: Boundless love will surge through my soul, And I will wander far away, a vagabond In Nature—as happily as with a woman.

Like Monet’s Impression: Sunrise, the painting that launched the Impressionist movement just a few years later, this miniature lyric distills the works of its antecedents in an altogether original way. The use of “blue” to describe the summer nights (an early draft had the more conventional “fine”) looks ahead to the surrealist Rimbaud of the next few years; the lines that follow, with their emphasis on what the speaker feels rather than on what he sees, submerge the clichés of the Parnassians’ nature poetry in an ecstasy of sensuality.

In May, 1871, Rimbaud wrote the two letters that have come to be known as the Lettres du Voyant  (“Seer Letters”)—the only explicit statements of his poetic credo. The first, addressed to Izambard, begins by insulting the teacher’s “dry-as-dust subjective poetry” and includes a singsong ditty that crudely depicts anal intercourse. “Right now, I’m encrapulating myself as much as possible,” the sixteen-year-old wrote. (Mason here substitutes a cognate for Rimbaud’s coinage “je m’encrapule,” which actually makes the poet sound overly scatological; others have translated it as “making myself scummy” or “lousing myself up.”) “Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer. . . . It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. . . . I is someone else” (“Je est un autre”). The second letter, sent to Izambard’s friend Paul Demeny, repeats and elaborates on the soon-to-be-famous pronouncement. “The first task of any man who would be a poet is to know himself completely; he seeks his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it,” Rimbaud wrote. “The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses. Every kind of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only essence remains.” Much has been made of the fact that Rimbaud added the qualifiers “long, involved, and logical” to this second call for the “derangement of all the senses,” nudging at the doors of perception rather than battering them down. But the sense is much the same: Rimbaud intends to turn his psyche inside out, to undergo whatever spiritual, emotional, and physical tests he can devise. “Je” becomes “un autre” by deconstructing what it means to be “Je.”

Rimbaud could not manage this on his own. In September, 1871, he again sought a patron, writing to Paul Verlaine, whose poetry he knew and admired, with a sampling of his latest work. “Come, dear great soul,” Verlaine wrote back. “We await you; we desire you.” Rimbaud’s train fare to Paris was enclosed.

The twenty-seven-year-old Verlaine was an alcoholic, a “dilettante homosexual” (as one Rimbaud biographer calls him), and a violent man who repeatedly assaulted his pregnant bride, Mathilde. The introduction of Rimbaud into the household caused additional strain, and Verlaine was forced to find lodging for him among friends. Rimbaud’s odd behavior (one of his hosts discovered him naked on the rooftop, hurling his clothes onto the street) and horrific personal hygiene earned him a reputation as a difficult house guest. At a gathering of the group of poets known as the Vilains Bonshommes (Nasty Fellows), he interrupted one poet’s reading by yelling “Merde!” at the end of every line, and stabbed another with a small sword. But, even as Verlaine’s friends were appalled by these pranks, copies of the extraordinary Le Bateau Ivre (“The Drunken Boat”), soon to become Rimbaud’s most famous poem, were circulating among them. “Unless this is one of fate’s nasty little tricks, we are witnessing the birth of a genius,” one of the Nasty Fellows commented.

Le Bateau Ivre begins, somewhat abruptly, in the voice of the boat. (Banville’s suggestion that Rimbaud should have started more conventionally, with a simile—“I am like a drunken boat”—drew a scornful response.) Its crew killed by “yawping Redskins,” it is free to wander the seas on its own: “Sweeter than sour apples are to infants / Were the green waters my pine hull drank.” Few geographic features mark the boat’s course; instead, its journey is described solely in images: “the low sun stained with mystic horror,” “green nights ablaze with snow,” “blue and yellow heavings of phosphorescent song!” The boat begins to disintegrate, and the visions grow darker: “solar lichen and gobs / Of azure snot,” “a lunatic plank escorted by black seahorses.” Finally, with a triumphant
cry—“Let my hull burst! Let me sink into the sea!”—the boat breaks up:

Bathed in your weary waves, I can no longer ride In the wake of cargo ships of cotton, Nor cross the pride of flags and flames, Nor swim beneath the killing stares of prison ships.

This poem has been interpreted as everything from a pre-Freudian expression of the poet’s longing for his absent father to a chronicle of drug-induced hallucinations. What can’t be debated is Rimbaud’s musical ear for the assonances and long, open vowels of French. He famously celebrated these sounds in the sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”), which, influenced by contemporary theories about synesthesia, assigns a color to each one: “Black A, White E, Red I, Green U, Blue O.”

Anyone who knows Rimbaud’s work only from anthologies will be quite surprised to learn what else he was writing in Paris, especially once he installed himself among the group of artists known as the Zutistes (from “zut,” meaning “damn”). His contributions to the group’s communal journal are mainly parodies of other poets, including one cowritten with Verlaine titled “Sonnet to an Asshole”: “Dark and wrinkled like a violet carnation / It breathes, humbly lurking in moss.” Rimbaud may have written one of the most melodious and visionary poems in the language, but he also had a wicked gift for obscene pastiche.

In the summer of 1872, Verlaine and Rimbaud ran away together for the first time, inaugurating a tumultuous series of meetings and partings. This first idyll lasted only a few weeks before Verlaine returned to his wife, but by September they were together again, this time in London. They walked around the city, read at the British Museum, and placed newspaper ads seeking work as tutors: “Leçons de Français, Latin, Littérature, en français, par deux Gentlemen Parisiens.” Rimbaud probably wrote much of the Illuminations in London, and during a visit home he began Une Saison en Enfer.

Both works are written in prose—mainly—but otherwise very little connects them. Une Saison en Enfer is narrated in a highly dramatic voice that takes on multiple personas. It presents itself as a confessional account of the speaker’s sojourn among the condemned, but the story it tells is deliberately cryptic. “Dear Satan,” the narrator exhorts early on, “you who so delight in a writer’s inability to describe or inform—watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned.” Given Rimbaud’s later years in Africa, it can be tempting to find the seeds of his wanderlust in the many references to journeys. “My day is done: I’m leaving Europe,” the speaker announces at one point. “The marine air will burn my lungs; unknown climates will tan my skin.” More popular, but almost as preposterous, is the reading of  Une Saison en Enfer as a demonic diary of Rimbaud’s
relationship with Verlaine. This interpretation rests largely on the section called “Foolish Virgin.” “He was very nearly a child,” this character (presumably Verlaine) says of the Hellish Husband. “His mysterious ways seduced me. . . . He’s doubtless a demon, for he is certainly not a man.” Finally, the poem has been read as Rimbaud’s renunciation of poetry, even though some of the Illuminations postdate it. In the section titled “Alchemy of the Word,” Rimbaud presents a version of his poetic manifesto. “I invented colors for vowels!” the speaker exults. “I regulated the shape and movement of every consonant, and . . . flattered myself with the belief that I had invented a poetic language that, one day or another, would be understood by everyone, and that I alone would translate.” By the end
of the poem, though, it seems clear that Rimbaud is rejecting love, not writing. “Why was I seeking a friendly hand? I have an advantage now: I can laugh off truthless loves, and strike down duplicitous couples with shame . . . and now I’ll be able to possess truth in a single body and soul.” This is a hymn to a new self-sufficiency, but Rimbaud himself did not yet seem to know what he would do with it.

The Illuminations, a grouping of some forty prose poems on subjects ranging from a circus sideshow to city life, overlap chronologically with Une Saison en Enfer; most of them were probably written between 1872 and 1874, though possibly later. Within the space of only a few years, Rimbaud had moved from the exquisite patterning of “Sensation” and “Le Bateau Ivre” to this far looser, more imagistic form. Some of the poems seem vaguely descriptive of Rimbaud’s time in London, but the collection resists an overarching framework even more strenuously than does Une Saison en Enfer. They are united only by their style: a series of images as tactile as they are visionary—“seraphic centauresses,” “harvested flowers as big as guns and goblets,” “a Baghdad boulevard where groups were singing joyously”—and often summed up by an oracular last line. “What will become of the world when you leave? No matter what happens, no trace of you now will remain.”

The relationship between the two poets ended in chaos. One of the few surviving letters from Rimbaud to Verlaine (much of their correspondence was destroyed by Mathilde), dated July 4, 1873, reveals an unusually abject Rimbaud alone in London; Verlaine has returned once more to his wife. “Come back, come back, dear friend, only friend, come back. I promise to be good,” the letter opens, and ends, “My life is yours.” Verlaine responded with a telegram summoning Rimbaud to Brussels.They quarrelled for a few days, and then Verlaine went out, bought a gun, and returned drunk. When Rimbaud said he intended to return to Paris, Verlaine shot him in the arm. Verlaine was arrested and subjected to a humiliating examination at the hands of the police doctors, who stated
in their report that his body showed “traces of habitual pederasty.” He was sentenced to two years in prison. Rimbaud saw him only once more, in early 1875, after Verlaine’s conversion to Christianity. “Verlaine arrived here the other day, clutching a rosary,” Rimbaud wrote to a friend. “Three hours later he had renounced his god and reopened the 98 wounds of Our Savior.”

The next six years of Rimbaud’s life are only sketchily documented. He was back in London in 1874, and spent part of the year working as a tutor elsewhere in England. In Stuttgart, the following February, he gave Verlaine a copy of the Illuminations, intending him to pass them on to a mutual friend to have them printed. His peregrinations took him as far as Indonesia, in 1876, as a recruit in the Dutch Colonial Army, which he deserted two weeks after his arrival. Robb tentatively dates one of the Illuminations to this period, but perhaps only because it sounds so like a farewell to poetry:

For sale: living places and leaving places, sports, extravaganzas and creature comforts, and all the noise, movement, and hope they foment! For sale: mathematical certainties and astonishing harmonic leaps. Unimaginable discoveries and terminologies—available now.

He circled around Europe several more times, picking up languages (at one point he was teaching himself Russian from a Greek-Russian dictionary). An extraordinary letter describes his ascent of the Alps in a straight narrative of a kind not seen either during his poetic period or during the time he spent in Africa:

The road, which is never wider than six meters, is filled the whole way with nearly two meters of fallen snow, which, at any moment, might collapse, covering you with ameter-thick blanket you have to hack through during a hailstorm. And then: no more shadows above, below, or beside, despite being surrounded by these massive things; no more road, or precipices, or gorges or sky: just whiteness out of a dream, to touch, to see or not to see. 

In December, 1878, Rimbaud found work in Cyprus as a quarry supervisor. His first letter from Cyprus, in February, gives evidence of the isolation that would mark the rest of his life: “The nearest village is one hour away on foot. There is nothing here but a jumble of rocks, a river, and the sea. There are no houses. No soil, no gardens, no trees.” One could add: no poetry. This is as literary as Rimbaud will ever allow himself to be from now on. By May of 1880, he had a new job supervising the construction of a palace for the governor-general, but a few months later he reported to his family that he had left Cyprus “after disagreements with the paymaster and my engineer.” At best, this was a
half-truth. Ottorino Rosa, who became friendly with Rimbaud in Africa, reported that he “had the misfortune, when throwing a stone, to strike a native worker on the temple, killing him instantly.” Rosa implies that it was an accident, but, if so, why did Rimbaud flee so quickly and so furtively?

Shall I offer you African chants? Houri dances? Shall I disappear?” the narrator of  Une Saison en Enfer asks. The accomplished Arabist that Rimbaud would become might have been amused by his teen-age dreams of the exotic, but the last part, at least, was right. When his poetry began to resurface in France in the eighteen-eighties (thanks to Verlaine, who made renewed efforts to publish it), he had vanished so completely that he was often referred to as “the late Arthur Rimbaud.”

Rimbaud arrived in Aden in August, 1880, and almost immediately found work in the office of Alfred Bardey, a coffee trader. He seems to have had a talent for business. “I have the complete confidence of my employer,” he wrote to his family. During the next eleven years, he travelled back and forth between Aden and East Africa, establishing a base for the company at Harar, in Abyssinia, and from there leading treks farther into the interior. The majority of his letters from these years—there are more than a hundred and fifty in all—were sent to his mother and sister, Isabelle, whom he addressed formally as “Dear Friends.” Requests for books, scientific instruments, or other favors are the common theme. His demands were endless: at one point he wanted a special gun for elephant
hunting; later his mother spent a small fortune on photographic equipment. The sheer volume of this correspondence, which often included specific instructions on how the materials were to be sent, gives some sense of how maddeningly difficult his often contradictory orders must have been to accommodate. At one point, his mother apparently refused to continue supplying him. “This is not the way to help a man who is thousands of leagues away from home, traveling among savage peoples and without a single correspondent where he resides,” Rimbaud responded angrily. “If I can’t even ask my family for favors, who the hell am I supposed to go to?” He then requested a few more books.

Rimbaud’s life in Africa was not as bleak as this rather self-pitying tone suggests. Charles Nicholl’s engaging account of those years, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-1891, reveals that he was remembered vividly by a number of friends as a charming conversationalist and a scrupulously honest businessman who immersed himself in the culture of the region. During his time in Harar, he lived with a local woman for a year and a half, and he also had a servant of whom he was sufficiently fond to make the only beneficiary of his will. There are numerous testimonials to his learned discussions of the Koran and to his deep interest in Muslim cultures. (Rimbaud used a seal stamped “Abdoh Rinbo,” which, as Abdoh is an abbreviation of Abdullah, means that Rimbaud was calling himself “Rimbaud the servant of Allah.”) Nor was he “without a single correspondent.” Mason has chosen to exclude from his edition more than thirty letters that Rimbaud sent to Alfred Ilg, a Swiss trader, arguing that these letters are of interest mainly for the information they contain about Rimbaud’s business dealings. But the excerpts that others have published show that the frequent contact—thirty-three letters in a few years is a lot, considering the circumstances—led to a warm relationship between the two men, and that even these business letters were marked by Rimbaud’s
humor and keen descriptive powers.

The central professional event of Rimbaud’s African career was an expedition that he led to bring arms to King Menelik of Choa, in the heart of Abyssinia. Stymied by various obstacles, including the death of two men whom he had lined up as his partners, Rimbaud spent a year organizing the caravan, which finally departed in the fall of 1886. It was a disaster. Throughout the four-month journey, Rimbaud was beset by men who claimed that Pierre Labatut, one of Rimbaud’s would-be partners, had died owing them money. When he finally reached Menelik, the King seized the merchandise and forced him to liquidate the caravan at a ruinously low price. This setback seems to have thoroughly disillusioned Rimbaud. “I am bored all the time,” he wrote to his family in 1888. “And if that weren’t bad enough, there’s the matter of living without one’s family, without intellectual pursuits, lost in the midst of all these Negroes whose lives one is trying to improve and who, themselves, are trying to take advantage of you and make it impossible for you to sell your wares without delays.” His mother had continually pressured him to get married, to which he normally replied that he didn’t have time to look for a wife. But in August, 1890, his tone changed abruptly. “Could I get married at your house next spring?” he asked her. “But I wouldn’t be able to stay there, nor abandon my work here. Do you think I could find someone who would be willing to follow me in my travels?”

He may already have sensed that his travels were nearing an end. In February, 1891, back in Harar, he was troubled by a pain in his right knee that rapidly worsened; he asked his mother to send stockings to treat varicose veins, but when they arrived his leg was too swollen for him to put them on. By the time he realized that it would be necessary to return to Aden for treatment, he could no longer walk. A crew of sixteen servants carried him on a litter for the nightmarish eleven-day journey to the coast, which he documented in a tersely written diary. (A sample entry: “Porters proceed badly. At 9:30 stop in Arrouina. Throw me to the ground on arrival. I impose a 4 thaler fine.”) From Aden, he sailed to Marseille, where he learned that he had cancer. On May 22, 1891, he telegrammed his mother, “Today, you or Isabelle, come to Marseille by express train. Monday morning they amputate my leg. Risk of death. Serious matters to settle.” The surgery seems only to have increased his suffering. He died in Marseille six months later.

Are the Africa letters actually “sacrilege,” as Camus believed? Certainly, they do not paint a complimentary portrait of Rimbaud, revealing an almost completely unreflective and mercantile—in a word, prosaic—man. Critics have tended to dismiss the second phase of his life, to pretend that Rimbaud in Africa was literally “someone else.” No real poet, they worry, could have abandoned his art without so much as a glance back.

But the more difficult question that Rimbaud’s life raises is what to make of an artist whose career ends before he reaches maturity. It is disconcerting that a teen-ager should have created the fantastic visions of “Le Bateau Ivre,” the surrealism of “Voyelles,” the imagery of the Illuminations—and then dispensed with poetry altogether. The life of the artist should be the most compelling bildungsroman of all; the portrait of an artist as a young man implies that he has already grown older. The Nasty Fellows thought they had been summoned to the birth of a genius, but what they actually witnessed was the death of one. 

Years ago I created a special multilingual portal on Rimbaud, which is still very much active and contains all possible & imaginable works by/on Arthur Rimbaud and affiliates:

PORTALE RIMBAUD / RIMBAUD PORTAL