by Jeremy Reed
Did it really take the surrealists to discover Lautréamont? Poetry, no matter its limited printings, has a way of filtering through to the right hands. Would not Verlaine, with his penchant for the obscene, have known of Les Chants de Maldoror, and could not the book have come down to Rimbaud like that — he suppressing all mention of it because it ran contemporaneous with his own discovery of a tempestuously implosive inner cosmos? Rimbaud and Lautréamont had both broken through the spatio-temporal barrier to locate the catastrophic fragmentation and volcanic insurgence rooted in the collective unconscious, that laval wave which gathering momentum was to break over the twentieth century as an accelerative hurricane.
The poet is always two people. Those who saw Rimbaud with his matted hair and urchin’s clothes, kicking through the streets of Charleville or hanging out with the likes of Charles Bretagne at the Café Dutherme could know nothing of the imaginative vision that was informing his inner world. Everything there seethed with perpetual fermentation. You can be speaking to someone about the fog outside, the local frontier guards, the contortionism of an adept prostitute, but all the time it is taking off inwards — the storm on which the poem rides. And there is a smell of singeing that accompanies it. Lines keep flashing up; they want the whole attention they demand, and not the poet’s dichotomized fade-in and fade-out of the picture. In the end there is nothing to do but run for empty space and unload the circuit.
In the same year that Lautréamont was to die, Rimbaud came to manifest his full poetic genius. During his last year at the College, and in part stimulated by his friendship with Izambard, Rimbaud was to put his fist through the teeth of conventional poetry. And although most English poetry has gone on pretending that Rimbaud never existed, European poetry was never to be the same again. It took a child to discover that the business of poetry is imaginative reality, the events of the inner world being hugely disproportionate in significance to those of social commentary. Most poetry which pertains to the latter is no more durable than the asterisks of rain beading the window after an abrupt shower. Rimbaud spat in the face of those who make a profession out of trivia. And today he would be playing a rakish guitar in a basement club in Berlin. He would blow the fuses on the joint and stub a cigarette into his bare shoulder. He would feed the crowd voltage and go back to his room and resume his real life, that of the subversive poet.
But that summer, the August of 1870, in the incandescent dog-days, the heat scorching the countryside around Charleville, Rimbaud struck out for Paris. It was the logical extension to poetry. The poem pushed him into exploring the physical. Its brute force had accumulated: the adrenalin banged him on to the road. The psychophysical came together as an explorative unity.
Izambard had left Rimbaud the key to his flat in the Cours d’Orleans, which meant the freedom to ransack his library; but not even this could succeed in distracting Rimbaud in a town so little conducive to his spiritual growth. He boarded a train without any money, probably not even knowing why or how he was on it, except that it was moving, and on his arrival in Paris he was arrested and taken to a police station. Locked up in the prison of Mazas, and terrified of his impending trial, he implored Izambard to help him. Interestingly he transforms his former teacher into a mother and father. ‘I hope in you as in a mother’, and later on in the letter he professes: ‘I shall love you as a father.’
This curious gender mutation and surrogate parenthood imposed on Izambard tells us much about Rimbaud’s sexual confusion. Perhaps in his imagination he regularly had Izambard change sex according to his need for him as feminine or masculine, unrealized lover or mentor. What is most fascinating about Rimbaud’s creative years, in terms of sexual orientation, is that they are unfocused. His interest in women is confined to smut and scatology, and his attraction to men is based on cruelty and brutality, and certainly not eroticism. Even Verlaine is a figure to be used in an experiment, and part of Rimbaud’s attraction to Verlaine centred upon wrecking the latter’s domestic stability and driving him towards a visionary liberation from which the lesser poet was unlikely to benefit. Verlaine’s perfect ear and the transparency of his lyric were the consummate gifts of a minor poet. No amount of forcing his sensibility or deranging his sensory perception was ever going to make him into a seer, a frenzied shaman. For Rimbaud hallucination was a way of seeing. So it is with all great imaginative poets. And while that particular faculty may be stimulated, it cannot be inherited. Rimbaud was disappointed by hashish. He saw a white moon chasing a black one across the sky. The image would have been too ordinary to have fitted into his poetry.
Rimbaud’s great battles were fought on the inner plane, the arena in which the poet contests with light and dark, truth and shadow, self and double. ‘Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes, mais la vision de la justice est le plaisir de Dieu seul’ (‘Spiritual battle is as brutal as man’s wars; but the vision of justice is God’s pleasure alone’), he asserts in Une saison en enfer. The cosmos lives in the poet’s interior. It is there that one is attentive to the roar of space. All the processional chimeras, black angels, psychopomps, archetypal tableaux, erotic possibilities, beauty, mutilation, visions of past and future worlds are contained within the geography of the unconscious. Rimbaud was in a quite different country to Verlaine, no matter that they both experienced kicks from being physically on the road.
Rimbaud’s first flight to Paris involved imprisonment. Punishment for being a poet was not new to him; his mother’s relentless severity had already impressed on him that impracticality was a luxury incompatible with her peasant blood. Her brothers were hard-drinking alcoholics. Brought up as she had been on a farm in Roche, whose meagre soil yielded indifferent harvests, and having assumed since her mother’s early death responsibility for her brothers and sister, Vitalie Cuif, the future Madame Rimbaud, was little disposed to have an itinerant son whose scholarly acumen was being visibly dissipated in the pursuit of poetry. ‘Work is further from me than my fingernail is from my eye. Shit for me,’ Rimbaud was to write to Verlaine. ‘When you see me positively eat shit, only then will you find how little it costs to feed me.’ To Vitalie Rimbaud her son’s defiant, truculent disobedience was to be viewed as an unpardonable aberration. But it was worse than that, for the resolution that he had set himself — to become a poet — was an inner conviction she was powerless to reach. Smacking his face, humiliating him, confining him to the house, treating him as a delinquent, none of these punitive measures could get inside him. Vitalie Rimbaud came face to face with the impenetrable existential wall that prevents one person having access to another’s inner life. It is no good shrieking ‘What are you thinking?’ or picking someone up by their hair, there is simply no way through. We are all solitaries situated somewhere in a space that we cannot locate. Where are we in relation to body space? Consciousness tells us nothing. It is what? The precondition to being. Wherever Rimbaud was, no one in his life seems ever to have come close to it. His psychic outback extended to Mars.
When Rimbaud took flight from Charleville for the second time, and in a country still at war, it was to set out on foot for Brussels. It was now October 1870 with its gold fall of autumn leaves, that month in which the light stays in the trees like filtered honey. The Franco-Prussian War had broken out in August, the month of his disastrous visit to Paris. Rimbaud must have felt poetry was an invincible protector, for his vulnerability on the road and lack of any financial provision were serious liabilities. But he was intoxicated by danger. Pushing himself to extremes, going without food, sleeping out in vermin-infested clothes were stages of induction towards his confrontation with visionary experience. His mind must have been massive with expectation. The roads were dust; but there was the exhilaration of sudden showers sparkling across the landscape. He would have heard the shrieking of ‘jays, busy collecting acorns, the branch-shaking gymnastics of squirrels. He was free. Somewhere along the road, half buried on the slope of a valley swollen with watercress, was the dead s
oldier who found his way into ‘Le Dormeur du val’. And Rimbaud was insatiably curious. Surely he would have dropped down into the valley to examine the corpse? He would have stolen whatever money, valuables or tobacco he could find in the man’s blood-soaked uniform. There had to be something he could sell to finance his journey. He went through Charleroi on his way to Brussels, where he begged shelter and food from an acquaintance of Izambard’s. Poems like ‘Les Effarés’, ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’, ‘Le Mal’, ‘Rages de Cesar’ and ‘Le Dormeur du val’ all owe their inspiration to this second truancy from home.
Did he sell his body on the way? Probably not. On his next flight to Paris he was raped, or more to the point gang-banged by the military. This time the elated pantheism he was near to experiencing in 1870 provided him, despite his close proximity to starvation, with an adrenalized dynamic of energy. He was nervously charged like a thief before he steals. And isn’t there in Rimbaud’s childhood behaviour the premonition of the young vagrant, Jean Genet, who was likewise to adopt a psychology of wilful self-debasement in the pursuit of imaginative truth? Rimbaud was looking for something he could not locate or yet express in the visionary language which so eloquently informs ‘Le Bateau ivre’, Les Illuminations and his ‘Negro Book’ — Une saison en enfer. The alchemical process had begun. He knew he was marked. Something he could not properly apprehend was growing in him. He must have wondered why he, the child of undistinguished parents and a provincial schoolboy, should be the messenger to what he hoped would be a future race. What could that mean to those from whom he had to beg? How do you declare yourself as an evolutive visionary? The dirt on his face, his straggly hair, his broad, red fingers must have had people assume he was bad blood on the run from home. All he knew was that the tempestuous momentum of his poetic vision forced him out into the open. What is in most young men a prompting sanctioned by sexual curiosity, so that instinctively one strays into alleys and places where sex may be realized, was in Rimbaud the desire to find the physical location that corresponded to his psychic locus. And in the process the ordinary is transformed into the marvellous. You can be looking at a door-frame from which the paint is flaking, the windowless, dead side of a building — any building — and quite suddenly it is there. A line of poetry has intersected with an incongruous external. The two are not related, but the juxtaposition was necessary to generate the tension needed for the writing of a poem.
Rimbaud picked up things with his eye on this journey. Seeing is not only a continuous visual retrieval but a form of unmonitored theft. You can raid both things and people. One can appropriate whatever catches the eye, and on a sexual plane masturbation is the means of making love to an involuntary image. Poetry is close to the latter in its function. One can internalize any woman or man of one’s choice, in Rimbaud’s case it was probably both, and it is the same with poetry. One sensitizes the idea of a thing, frictionalizes it with one’s nerves and transforms it into something else. Poetry is the most sophisticated form of psychophysical masturbation. In writing poetry one does not achieve the object of one’s desire; one compromises for an approximation. The end product is elusive, it evades the perceiver in the same way as the imagined sexual fantasy blurs in the act of retaining it.
Rimbaud’s poem ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’, written most probably on the road to Charleroi in October 1870, is impregnated with an autumnal calm. It is a poem of late sunshine. It expresses a mood one associates with Rimbaud that autumn. It is the calm before the storm; the achievement of a poetry which, while it disdains comfortable emotion or social acceptance, none the less expresses a containable tension within the poet. And a sense of placement: he has no need to counter-attack his line, for the poem follows his physical routing. And Rimbaud, who expressed such temerity on a spiritual plane, manifests an almost voyeuristic awkwardness in his real or imagined notice of girls encountered on the way. In ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ it is ‘the girl with the huge tits’ and the obvious sexual experience — ‘a kiss wouldn’t scare that one’ — who serves him with the simple dish of bread and butter and ham. The simplicity of his needs, so unselfconsciously portrayed in the poem, right down to his beer-froth turning gold in the late sunshine, has the serene properties of certainty; something that sexual intrusion would have shattered. ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ isolates a mood. It finds Rimbaud emulating adults; he is at ease in a country inn, although no doubt tongue-tied, occupying a corner by himself and viewing the company with modified paranoia. The money for his food may have come from the pockets of a dead soldier. Rimbaud would have appreciated that irony. But there is more than a mood to this poem: there is a flippancy and a customary shade of his familiar contempt. Tor eight days I’d ripped my boots up on the road,’ he tells us in the poem. And certainly his mother wasn’t going to replace them. When his clothes went to tatters they stayed that way. He cultivated lack of hygiene and a vagrant’s appearance. He seems all the time to have been going against himself, pushing his perversity to see how far he could injure the sensitive person within. He may never have intended to go to violent extremes, to follow to the end of the night in search of the midnight sun, but at some stage it got out of control. It was too late to reverse the syndrome. The I had literally become the other.
But it is still October 1870. Rimbaud wanted to change the world. The orthodox hegemony of material greed and the conformist masses subjugated to its ethic held little attraction for a young man whose life was already that of a poet. And it hadn’t changed in October 1990. The poet remains an outsider who threatens the capitalist ethos. The world of business, politics and journalism slams iron doors in the face of imaginative truth. Inner space is a proscribed sanctuary. It is thought to be dangerous to go there; man must compute his bank balance and raise his arm in salute to International Commerce.
But in those autumn weeks of ripping his boots up, taking in the last of the sun’s diminishing warmth, and writing poems which, while they hint at sex, remain on a level of mental curiosity, Rimbaud was marking time. In `La Maline’ it is again a servant-girl who he imagines teases him into kissing her. There is a pink and white peach-bloom on her cheeks. She too is a child disguised as a woman: ‘En faisant, de sa lèvre enfantine, une moue’ (`And pouting with her childish mouth’). He can feel comfortable in her presence, for each recognizes in the other the adoptive role of the adult.
The poem `Ma bohème’, from the same group written in October 1870, is an autobiographical finger-sketch of how Rimbaud saw himself at the time. `Je m’en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées;/ Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal’ (`I ran off, my fists in my torn pockets;/ My overcoat too was growing ideal’). His threadbare appearance was a way of rejecting his mother’s concern with bourgeois standards of dress. It was like taking her face to pieces each time another seam was torn or another finger holed the lining.
The photograph we have of Rimbaud at the time of his First Communion, when he was eleven, depicts the boy wearing the black jacket and home-made slate-blue trousers, together with the starched white shirt, that his mother had painstakingly prepared. But his boots, despite the attempt to polish them, are worn into leather wrinkles. Rimbaud was hard on shoes because he walked; he needed that physical momentum in order to air his inner ferment. But there is already someone far older sitting behind his eyes. Someone who has taken the boy by surprise. Extreme vulnerability and extreme contempt meet as an insoluble contradiction. The pose for the photographer’s slow release is enforced, but the boy has been unable to settle into a state of composure. No matter his resolution at this age to accept Christianity, the rebel within him is basking in corners. Later on this vulpine presentiment will stretch its sinewy body, show its wolf’s red eyes and prick up its ears. It is waiting for the time of the assassins.
In the lazy autumn light of October 1870 Rimbaud enjoyed the last sensations of innocence to permeate his childhood. His precocity, his obscenity, his disrespect for adults whatever their station in life, had whipped up a fire of rebellion in him, which wa
s to be fanned to a visionary heat in the course of the next three years.
The gold light was an interlude. Izambard was sent to Brussels, found Rimbaud at Douai, and from there he returned to Charleville in the company of a police officer. How he must have dreaded the reception that awaited him at home. His hatred of his mother was increased by the way he could mentally mutilate her. She was powerless to efface his effigial imaginings. Perhaps he saw her as a one-eyed, square-bodied ogre blocking the entrance to his street. He could do anything to her; mastectomize her, run up the cliff-face of her body to plant a flag in her skull, or he could imagine her shrunk to something so small she would sit in a mouse-hole begging for crumbs of cheese.