On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, his taciturn employee had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. Until that moment, for all Bardey or anyone else in his circle knew, this man was simply a clever trader who kept neat books. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. His name was Arthur Rimbaud.
What Bardey learned about Rimbaud that day is still what most people know about Rimbaud. There was, on the one hand, the dazzling, remarkably short-lived career: all of Rimbaud’s significant works were most likely composed between 1870, when he was not quite sixteen, and 1874, when he turned twenty. On the other hand, there was the abrupt abandonment of literature in favor of a vagabond life that eventually took him to Aden and then to East Africa, where he remained until just before his death, trading coffee, feathers, and, finally, guns, and making a tidy bundle in the process. The great mystery that continues to haunt and dismay Rimbaud fans is this “act of renunciation,” as Henry Miller put it in his rather loopy 1946 study of Rimbaud, “The Time of the Assassins,” which “one is tempted to compare . . . with the release of the atomic bomb.” The over-the-top comparison might well have pleased Rimbaud, who clearly wanted to vaporize his poetic past. When Alfred Bardey got back to Aden, bursting with his discovery, he found to his dismay that the former wunderkind refused to talk about his work, dismissing it as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting.”
That Rimbaud’s repudiation of poetry was as furious as the outpouring of his talent had once been was typical of a man whose life and work were characterized by violent contradictions. He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his home town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”
These paradoxes, and the extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay that Rimbaud’s story can evoke, are at the center of a powerful mystique that has seduced readers from Marcel Proust to Patti Smith. It had already begun to fascinate people by the time the poet died, in 1891. (He succumbed, at thirty-seven, to a cancer of the leg, after returning to his mama’s farm one last time.) To judge from the steady stream of Rimbaldiana that has appeared over the past decade—which includes, most recently, a new translation of “Illuminations,” by the distinguished American poet John Ashbery, and a substantial novel that wrestles with the great question of why Rimbaud stopped writing—the allure shows no sign of fading.
Depending on your view of human nature, either everything or nothing about Rimbaud’s drab origins explains what came later. He was born in October, 1854, in the town of Charleville, near the Belgian border. His father, Frédéric, was an Army captain who had fought in Algeria, and his mother, Vitalie Cuif, was a straitlaced daughter of solid farmers; it was later said that nobody could recall ever having seen her smile. To describe the marriage as an unhappy one would probably be to exaggerate, if for no other reason than that Captain Rimbaud was rarely in Charleville; each of the couple’s five children was born nine months after one of his brief leaves. When Arthur was five, his father went off to join his regiment and never came back. The memory of the abandonment haunts Rimbaud’s work, which often evokes lost childhood happiness, and occasionally seems to refer directly to his family’s crisis. (“She, / all black and cold, hurries after the man’s departure!”) Vitalie, devoutly Catholic, took to calling herself “Widow Rimbaud,” and applied herself with grim determination to her children’s education.
At school, Rimbaud was a star, regularly acing the daunting prize examinations. (One exam required students to produce a metrically correct Latin poem on the theme “Sancho Panza Addresses His Donkey.”) Not long after his fifteenth birthday, he composed “The Orphans’ New Year’s Gifts,” the first poem he published. It’s a bit of treacle—two children awaken on New Year’s to realize that their mother has died—but it is notable for its thematic preoccupation, the absence of maternal love, and its precocious technical expertise. It seems likely that Rimbaud inherited his gifts and intellectual ambition from his father, who, while serving in North Africa, had produced an annotated translation of the Koran and a collection of Arab jokes. Rimbaud, who seems to have retained a romantic view of his father, sent for these texts when he moved to Africa; a formidable linguist, he became fluent in Arabic as well as a number of local dialects and even gave lessons on the Koran to local boys. His mother’s glumly concrete practicality (“Actions are all that count”) stood in stark contrast to these cerebral enthusiasms. It’s tempting to see, in the wild divergence between his parents’ natures, the origins of Rimbaud’s eccentric seesawing between literature and commerce.
Certainly the teen-rebel phase that began when he was around fifteen looks like a reaction to life with Vitalie. The frenetic pursuit of what, in one letter, he called “free freedom” runs like a leitmotif through Rimbaud’s life: few poets have walked, run, ridden, or sailed as frequently or as far as he did. Late in the summer of 1870, a couple of months before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away from Vitalie’s dour home and took a train to Paris: the first of many escapes. Since he didn’t have enough money for the full fare, he was arrested and jailed on his arrival and, after writing a plaintive letter to a beloved teacher back in Charleville, Georges Izambard (and not, as far as we know, one to his mother), he was bailed out and slunk back home. The pattern of flight and return would recur up until his final return, a few months before his death.
Two days after the iconoclast’s arrival in the capital, France was defeated by Prussia and the Second Empire fell; soon after he got back home, the Paris Commune was established. Stuck in Charleville while great things were happening in the world (“I’m dying, decomposing under the weight of platitude”), the once model schoolboy let his hair grow long, sat around mocking the passing bourgeoisie, and smoked his clay pipe a lot. His yearning to break away now made itself felt in the poems he was writing. Some of these, as Izambard once put it, could have “the cheek to be charming.” (“Off I would go, with fists into torn pockets pressed. . . . Eh, what fine dreams I had, each one an amorous gest!”) But the desire to break out could express itself as well in a kind of literary vandalism. He’d already mocked the poetic conventions of the times (one early poem gives the goddess Venus an ulcer on her anus); to the period of frustrated ennui following his first escape, we owe such poems as “Accroupissements” (“Squattings”), which in elegantly metrical verse describes the effortful bowel movements of a priest, or “Les Assis” (“The Sitters”), which pokes vicious fun at the habitués of the town library where Rimbaud himself spent hours. Occasionally, he stole books.
However illicit the acquisition of those volumes, it reminds you that Rimbaud’s restless intellect continued to seethe. As Wyatt Mason points out in the vigorous and sensible introduction to his translation of the poet’s letters, as much as we now like to romanticize Rimbaud as a Dionysian rebel, spontaneously tossing off revolutionary verses, the fact is that he made himself a poet by following a distinctly Apollonian trajectory—“a long, involved, and sober study of the history of poetry.”
The combination of adolescent rebellion and poetic precocity yielded, in May, 1871, a grand statement of artistic purpose. In two letters, one to Izambard and the other to his friend Paul Demeny, also a poet, Rimbaud set out what he had come to see as his great project. To Izambard he wrote:
The sixteen-year-old went on to make an assertion that Graham Robb, in his idiosyncratic yet magisterial 2001 biography, refers to as the “poetic E=mc2”: “Je est un autre” (“I is someone else”). His insight, plain perhaps to us in our post-Freudian age but startling in its time, was that the subjective “I” was a construct, a useful fiction—something he’d deduced from the fact that the mind could observe itself at work, which suggested to him that consciousness itself, far from being straightforward, was faceted. (“I am present at the hatching of my thought.”) He suddenly saw that the true subject of a new poetry couldn’t be the usual things—landscapes, flowers, pretty girls, sunsets—but, rather, the way those things are refracted through one’s own unique mind. “The first study of the man who wishes to be a poet is complete knowledge of himself,” he wrote in the letter to Demeny. “He searches his mind, inspects it, tries it out and learns to use it.”
In this letter, he tellingly added the adjective “rational” to “derangement of all the senses”—here again he was more Apollonian than we often think—and further asserted that this project required a new kind of poetic language, in which one sense became indistinguishable from another, sight from touch, hearing from smell: “summing up everything, perfumes, sounds and colors, thought latching on to thought and pulling.” In one of his most famous poems, he assigns colors to each vowel: “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue.” Here, as so often, he was following the example of Baudelaire, the great iconoclast of the previous generation and the champion of synesthesia.
“Thought latching on to thought and pulling” is an ideal way to describe the workings of the major poem he produced during this crucial period, “Le Bateau Ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”). The poem is characterized by a formal correctness (it’s composed of twenty-five rhymed quatrains of alexandrines, the classic French six-beat line) placed in the service of a destabilizing fantasy—a dream of liberation from correct form. It ostensibly describes the downstream journey of a vessel that has lost its haulers, its rudder, its anchor, wandering to and fro and witnessing bizarre sights en route to nowhere in particular. (“Huge serpents, vermin-plagued, drop down into the mire / With black effluvium from the contorted trees!”) But as you make your way through the poem, each stanza seeming at once to latch tightly on to the last and yet move further into imaginative space, it seems to expand into a parable about life and art in which loss of control—of the boat, of the poem itself, of what we think “meaning” in a poem might be—becomes the key to a kind of spiritual and aesthetic redemption:
Here, the two faces of Rimbaud’s desire to break out—the charming and the destructive—seamlessly come together, as the desire for consummation melds with a desire for annihilation: “Swollen by acrid love, sagging with drunkenness— / Oh, that my keel might rend and give me to the sea!”
Whatever else it is—and many find its inscrutability insurmountable—“The Drunken Boat” is the work of a poet who has achieved his mature voice. In September, 1871, Rimbaud made another bid to escape Charleville. He wrote a letter to Paul Verlaine, who, like Baudelaire, was one of the few poets whom Rimbaud admired, and enclosed a number of his poems. It was not long before he received the older poet’s invitation to come to the great city, expressed in words that proved prophetic: “Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you.”
The rules of poetry weren’t the only things that Rimbaud broke when he arrived in Paris. Among other things—bric-a-brac, dishes, and furniture in the various homes where he was offered hospitality, and where his boorish behavior inevitably led to his eviction—he broke up Verlaine’s marriage. The two men apparently became lovers soon after Rimbaud’s arrival, embarking on an affair that scandalized Paris and made literary history. Verlaine’s brother-in-law, for one, was never taken in by the angelic face and striking pale-blue eyes; he dismissed Rimbaud at once as the “vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty little schoolboy whom everyone is in raptures about.”
Between the autumn of 1871 and July, 1873, the couple wandered from Paris to Belgium to London and, finally, back to Brussels again, drinking absinthe, smoking hashish, engaging in outrageous public displays of affection (one newspaper article cattily referred to the younger man as “Mlle Rimbaud”), quarrelling, and—as Verlaine once boasted—making love “like tigers.” They apparently liked to puncture each other with knives, and jointly composed a poem called the “Asshole Sonnet,” complete with beautifully wrought, anatomically minute descriptions of that orifice. Many readers and biographers see the couple as what one critic calls “the Adam and Eve of modern homosexuality,” but the evidence suggests that, as far as Rimbaud was interested in anyone other than himself, he was interested primarily in women. (Later, in Abyssinia, he lived with a strikingly good-looking local woman; she wore Western clothes and smoked cigarettes, while he wore native costume.) It is hard to escape the feeling that Verlaine, an ugly man whose appearance Rimbaud made cruel jokes about, was a kind of science experiment for the poet, part of his program of “rational derangement of all the senses,” his strident adolescent ambition to “reinvent” love, society, poetry. Indeed, for someone who uses the word “love” so often in his poetry, Rimbaud comes off as a cold fish; the tenderer emotions seem hypothetical to him.
Whatever the nature of the relationship, the period of their affair was one of tremendous growth for Rimbaud, whose work was undergoing a dramatic evolution. Entranced, at one point, by the charmingly simple lyrics of eighteenth-century operas, he wrote a number of poems so delicately attenuated, so stripped of descriptiveness, that they seem to have no referent at all. (“I have recovered it. / What? Eternity. / It is the sea / Matched with the sun.”) But the tranquillity of the verse was not reflected in everyday life; by the time the pair were living, impoverished, in London (they took to placing desperate ads for their services as French tutors), the relationship had seriously frayed. After a catastrophic scene that ended with Verlaine running off to Belgium, Rimbaud—more terrified of being poor and alone, you suspect, than of losing his lover—joined him in Brussels. There, on July 10, 1873, after yet another drama, the distraught Verlaine, who had been making suicide threats, used a revolver he’d intended for himself to shoot his lover in the arm.
And then, as the French writer Charles Dantzig puts it in a tartly shrewd essay on Rimbaud, “our anarchist called the police.” Following an official inquest that included a humiliating medical examination, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison. Rimbaud went home to his mother.
This sordid emotional cataclysm surely goes some way toward explaining Rimbaud’s desire for a new life: it’s hard not to feel that, perhaps for the first time, he realized that deranging his and other people’s senses could have serious and irreversible consequences. Home at Vitalie’s farm, a chastened Rimbaud spent the summer of 1873 hard at work on the text he’d begun earlier that year. This collection of “atrocious stories” in prose, as he described them in a letter to a friend, would become “A Season in Hell,” his best-known work and a founding document of European modernism.
If you were to take Dante’s “Inferno,” Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground,” a pinch of William Blake, and a healthy dash of Christopher Smart’s madhouse masterpiece “Rejoice in the Lamb,” throw them into a blender and hit “purée,” you might well find yourself with something like “A Season in Hell.” On one level, it looks like a narrative of abasement and redemption, tracing the story of a Rimbaud-like artist who has wantonly corrupted his childhood innocence (“Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed”) and, after wallowing in a rehearsal of his sins, seeks a kind of healing. Interlaced with political slogans (“Wealth has always been public property”) and grandiose vatic pronouncements (“I am going to unveil all the mysteries”), much of “A Season in Hell” is, as one indulgent critic said of Rimbaud’s work, “aggravatingly beautiful and too frequently hermetic.” Most interesting are what look suspiciously like verbatim quotes from his life with Verlaine. The older poet appears as a character called “the Foolish Virgin,” endlessly bemoaning his involvement with the seductive youth:
Ultimately, “A Season in Hell” is a kaleidoscopic evocation of a man who comes to terms with the limits of the self; a heavy sense of failure, of wrong paths taken, hovers over the vignettes. Even the overweening and narcissistic fantasies of artistic transcendence (“I became a fabulous opera”) are reoriented, in the end, toward reality: “I who called myself angel or seer, exempt from all morality, I am returned to the soil with a duty to seek and rough reality to embrace!” It is this understanding—that fantasy and romance must be eschewed—that leads to the famous closing utterance: “One must be absolutely modern.”
If “A Season in Hell” is seething, anguished, and dialogic, Rimbaud’s next, and final, work speaks with an air of quiet authority and calm. It feels like the writing of someone who’s forgiven himself. Rimbaud and Verlaine met one last time, in 1875, when Rimbaud was living in Germany. When he handed his former lover a sheaf of papers to take back to France, they had no title; “Illuminations” is the name under which Verlaine, ever generous to his ungrateful ex, eventually published them. The word was meant to evoke the minute illustrations on old manuscripts, and it’s easy to see why. These strange, exquisite prose poems—a “crystalline jumble,” as John Ashbery calls them in the preface to his new translation (Norton; $24.95), which, like the work itself, is sometimes willful but often has its own crystal purity—are intensely visual, bringing before your eyes fleeting images that have the oddness, the intensity, and the subterranean logic of dreams. Scholars have long argued over which poem was written first, but it seems clear that “Illuminations” begins in a kind of post-apocalyptic calm after the crisis evoked in “A Season in Hell.” The opening gives you a sense of what’s in store:
(This passage offers some examples of how Ashbery sometimes squeezes too hard. In the original, the notion of the Flood simply “took its seat again,” the bellflowers are just “moving,” and the flowers don’t “peek,” they just “look.”)
Reading this remarkable and, it must be said, often incomprehensible work (“Since then the Moon has heard jackals cheeping in thyme deserts”) can be a startling, frustrating, and yet exhilarating experience. Among its more uncanny features is the way it often seems to look ahead to the twentieth century. One vignette suggests the grandiose architecture of Hitler’s dream Berlin: “The official acropolis beggars the most colossal conceptions of modern barbarity. . . . With a singular taste for enormity, they have reproduced all the classical marvels of architecture.” Another prefigures the visual puzzles of M. C. Escher: “A bizarre pattern of bridges, some of them straight, others convex, still others descending or veering off at angles to the first ones, and these shapes multiplying.” Rimbaud, who had found the industrial vigor of London exciting, was never more a seer than he was here.
There is much more—not least, a description, delicate as rice paper, of what may or may not be ideal love. (“It’s the friend who’s neither ardent nor weak. The friend.”) In a final section called “Génie,” whose haunting, incantatory rhythms Ashbery renders more precisely and more beautifully than any previous translator, the poet exhorts us to embrace the vaguely Christlike figure of the title—perhaps the same genie who appears in an earlier section, described as holding “the promise of a multiple and complex love”:
Ashbery, for whom this translation was clearly a labor of love—there is no shortage of fine English versions—calls this “one of the greatest poems ever written.” It was, very probably, the last poetry that Rimbaud ever wrote. He was twenty years old.
Defending the opacity of “Illuminations” in his biography of Rimbaud, Graham Robb writes, “Fortunately, aesthetic pleasure can often be derived from a mere impression of complex thought: Einstein’s blackboards, Wittgenstein’s propositions, Rimbaud’s prose poems.” It wouldn’t be the first time that someone talked about the Viennese philosopher and the Ardennais poet in the same breath. Bruce Duffy, the author of “Disaster Was My God” (Doubleday; $27.95), a reimagining of Rimbaud’s life published last month, made his fictional début in 1987 with a novel about Wittgenstein, “The World As I Found It.” Although the new novel treats the entirety of Rimbaud’s life—it begins with his sour-faced mother reinterring his body in the Charleville cemetery, ten years after his death, and unfolds as a series of flashbacks—its real preoccupation is, inevitably, the question that continues to haunt admirers of Rimbaud. As Vitalie watches the gravedigger at work, she thinks of the journalists and professors who have come calling over the years, asking, “But why did he stop writing?”
There are many lovely touches in Duffy’s novel. Rimbaud at one point sits “like a tongue awaiting Holy Communion”; Vitalie in the graveyard arranges some small bones as if they were silverware on a table. More important, Duffy persuasively penetrates the layers of myth and produces characters who suggest the real people they once were. By far the most impressive—and, in its way, the most moving—of these characterizations is that of Rimbaud’s mother, who here emerges not as the familiar harpy of many biographies but as a figure of almost tragic stature, a woman as tormented as she was tormenting. Duffy has the marvellous idea of making Vitalie the real seer in the family: she hears voices and has prophetic dreams. The notion that Rimbaud somehow owed his visionary poetics to his difficult parent has a nice psychological irony. The central emotional drama of the novel is, in fact, the ongoing war of attrition between the son and the mother, resolved—in the only way possible for these two implacable characters—in the final, very moving lines of the book.
More problematic, inevitably, is the representation of Rimbaud himself. The interior of an artist’s mind is notoriously difficult to represent on the page. Although Duffy has some nice evocations of the boy-poet’s “cycloning brain,” they feel as if they come from outside the organ in question, rather than from within; too often, the author has to fall back on the ungainly device of interjecting reminders of Rimbaud’s greatness. (“What other nineteenth-century writer managed to break through to the twentieth?”) This cheerleading gets wearisome—as do some misfired attempts at freshening the period drama with contemporary locutions: “Two-seat fat,” “cooties of feeling.”
But Duffy gets one thing absolutely right. Toward the end, there’s a scene in which the alcoholic Verlaine, accompanied by his prostitute pal Eugénie, consents to give an interview to a journalist who’s burning to unravel the mystery that pervades the novel: “how a poet of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write.” At one point, the bustling Eugénie interjects with her own theory: “Rimbaud was simply burned out. A dead volcano. Shot his wad.” Verlaine, who seems to be speaking for Duffy here, has a larger insight. “Well,” he says, “one big reason, perhaps obvious, is he grew up . . . the child in him died.”
Indeed, the mystery of Rimbaud’s renunciation may not be such a mystery after all. The apparently irreconcilable extremes of his thought and behavior are easier to account for when you remember that Rimbaud the poet never reached adulthood: violent oscillations between yearning and contempt, sentimentality and viciousness, are not unheard of in adolescents. (The Surrealist André Breton described Rimbaud as “a veritable god of puberty.”) Like J. D. Salinger, another beloved celebrant of youthful turmoil, Rimbaud may simply have found that, as he grew up, the urgency of his subject was gone. There was nothing left to say.
The peculiarly adolescent quality of the poet’s life and work, the desire to rebel against whatever milieu he happened to find himself in—the schoolboy against school, the wunderkind against his admiring hosts, the poet against poetry—undoubtedly accounts for his particular appeal to teen-agers. (One statistic that Rimbaldians like to cite is that one in five French lycéens today claims to identify with the long-dead poet.) A striking feature of many of the translations and biographies of Rimbaud is the seemingly inevitable prefatory remark, on the part of the translator or biographer, about the moment when he or she first discovered the poet. “When I was sixteen, in 1956, I discovered Rimbaud,” Edmund White recalls at the start of his nimble “Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel,” by far the best introduction to the poet’s life and work; Graham Robb observes early on that “for many readers (including this one), the revelation of Rimbaud’s poetry is one of the decisive events of adolescence.”
Ashbery, too, was sixteen at the moment of impact, as was Patti Smith, the author of what is, perhaps, the most moving testament to the effect that a reading of Rimbaud might have on a hungry young mind. “When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes in an introduction to “The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry,” “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” The anthology, she adds, “became the bible of my life.”
I suspect that the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him. I recently did an informal survey among some well-read acquaintances, and the e-mail I received from a ninety-year-old friend fairly sums up the consensus. “I loved Rimbaud poems when I read the Norman Cameron translations in 1942,” she wrote—Cameron’s translation, my favorite, too, is among the very few in English that try to reproduce Rimbaud’s rhymes—but she added, “I have quite lost what it was that so thrilled me.” In 1942, my friend was twenty-one. I was twice that age when I first started to read Rimbaud seriously, and, although I found much that dazzled and impressed me, I couldn’t get swept away—couldn’t feel those feelings again, the urgency, the orneriness, the rebellion. I don’t say this with pride. Time passes, people change; it’s just the way things are. On the day before his death, a delirious Rimbaud dictated a letter to the head of an imaginary shipping company, urgently requesting passage to Suez. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you miss the boat. ♦
