by Bruce Duffy
And look at Frédéric, frightened of this woman whom he could crush. Stammering, “If he—if he—if he—”
“Maman—” intercedes Arthur.
“Shut your mouth!”
Without even looking, she backhands him—knocks his head back, such that he feels drenched in hot vomit, the vomit of shame. His shuddering, ear-ringing shock. Clutching his throat, in panic he thinks, I’ve swallowed my Adam’s apple. But for her, this is comical, his girly histrionics. Guffawing back at him:
“You’re not hurt! Lord in heaven! Two babies I have—”
“You’ll see!” rails Frédéric, raising his fist. This is her biggest fear—them, turning on her like two curs.
“I’ll get the chicken axe!” hollers Frédéric. “You’ll see, you old bitch!”
“You,” she sneers. “And I’ll have you thrown in the asylum! In chains.”
He kicks the door. “I’ll cut my own throat! In the village square! With the axe!”
“—In chains! Drooling on yourself, do you hear me? Drooling—”
“—With a sign around my neck! Blaming you, you bitch!”
And so it is spring again. Blooming, blowing spring again. The crushing weight of spring again. O, the earth having to resurrect itself again.
Again, the thick-armed, anvil-footed ploughman.
Again, singing the same stupid plough songs.
Again, ripping open the dead ground. Crushed rye heads. Dead seasons. Bones.
And yet, for Arthur Rimbaud, from the black muck erupt pale green stitches, the first true lines of a new voice—his:
The Sun, hearth of tenderness and life,
Pours burning love over the delighted earth,
And, when one lies down in the valley, one smells
How the earth is nubile and rich in blood;
How its huge breast, raised by a soul,
Is made of love, like God, and of flesh, like woman,
And how it contains, big with sap and rays of light,
The vast swarming of all embryos!
And everything grows, And everything rises!
—O Venus, O Goddess!
Flesh? Blood? Sap? Embryos! His diction is scandalous. Disgusting. At this time, no one ever would have used such runny, prurient words. Reading this, the boy feels happy and stunned—freed. But as suddenly, hearing her yelling again, he peers out the window. And look, down in the black muck, clad in leather slop apron, here is Frédéric stumbling along in his enormous wooden barn clogs, which resemble two foul potatoes. See him now, wrestling down the hill, wobbling in a wheelbarrow, a green and steaming heap of cow slops.
Or rather, Frédéric is racing behind the violently jerking handles of the now ominously wobbling honey barrow bouncing its gelatinous contents. Which—being Frédéric—upends its liquid contents, straw and manure, rr-araugh, as if a giant had retched.
Again, Frédéric’s screams of rage.
Again, his sisters peeping out their window.
Again, Arthur lowering his quarto edition filled with obscene comments by the many valiant lads before him who died of boredom reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars, on the subjugation of his ur-French precursors. Who, in battle, might have sounded much as Frédéric does right now:
“Merde! Goddamnit! God damn you, God!”
A window flies up. Rrr-augghhhhhh. Wrath pours down:
“Blasphemer! Get up, idiot! Blame yourself, not the Lord!”
“I’ll cut my throat!!”
“I said, finish it!”
“I’ll finish it, you bitch! I’ll finish myself!”
Finish it? thinks Arthur. It’s unfinishable, this tarry slop pit Frédéric is filling at the foot of the barn. And look. Floating in the family cesspit, before his eyes, he can see his forebears, the Gauls, bellies bobbing, gazing at their twisty black toes. And staring down at his brother, Arthur can feel them, a line of hairy-backed idiots going back to the Middle Ages. Why, clear back to the days of consul Julius Caesar, grandmas and grandpas and aunts and uncles and half-wit cousins. Folks roaring, gamboling drunk on the feast of Saint Michel, if they were lucky. Otherwise, people half starved, snoring away the winter in snow-whomped, manure-banked, beast-packed huts. And the horror is, Arthur feels them. Smells them under the ground, coughing and slapping and picking at themselves. Peasants! And all he can think is, How? How he can be of them?
When, from the room below, Arthur hears his little sister Vitalie—all feeling—exclaim, “Poor Frédéric.”
And what does he feel for his brother? Anything? But does one need to feel to write a poem? he wonders. And who, then, would be doing the feeling? He or the so-called poet? Was not feeling actually a form of feeling? he wonders. Peculiar boy. These were some of the strange questions then churning through his mind.
For the problem is—the boy’s worry is—that he does not feel sufficiently.
Or rather, that he feels insufficiently.
Or rather, that he does not feel in the same place or with the same heart as other people do—normal people.
For suddenly, he can’t take Communion without wanting to spit it out—Christianity, like a bad tooth.
But these are just early symptoms. Lately, spooked, he wonders why he feels this thing fluttering inside him, this newly risen angel all but breaking his ribs as his mighty wings unfold.
But the trouble is, it’s so unpredictable. How It—because it’s an It—can be so scarily, twitchingly present. And as suddenly gone. And as terrible as his fear of It’s taking over, there’s the fear, once gone, that this angel-devil, this demon, this power or deceiver might never return, and what then? Then who would he be? A prize what? For just as this new double being, this nasty, ravenous caterpillar, is gnawing out his insides, so he also feels the buried child within him dying. He stinks. Everything about him stinks. And however wicked he is, what no adult will ever understand, once it was pure innocence that drove him. Joy, even.
Joy. Can an adult even imagine such an Edenic state? How in school early on, when he answered a question, unraveled a line, made a leap, how he felt such joy that he would bounce, actually bounce, as if from the baby still coiled inside him.
He wonders why he feels so abominably—cold.
That’s it. So cold, so high, so criminally arrogant, looking down upon all creation. Peering backwards through life’s telescope at these—these ants of people. Even his hands. Insect feelers that write.
Then what happens? At a word, a sound, the strum of light, flicker of leaves—as suddenly, he is God peering down on life, in all its helplessness and ridiculousness. For look: one miserable Sunday, after another boring sermon, as the boy exits the church, there it is.
See it, glistening in the sun, where the wagons wait and the hitched horses slumber with one rear hoof raised. Look! Cow droppings on perfect ripe blackberries.
Shit on fat, black blackberries!
Biting his lip, insanely he squeezes himself. It’s their own private joke, him and God—the last thing any of his bowdlerizing contemporaries would ever notice, or think, much less write, in their stupid nosegay poems larded with these rarefied, artified feelings. About them, the poets, having feelings! Or, deeper still, with so many of his French contemporaries artfully resisting feelings.
I write because I feel
And I feel because I long
And by longing have profound thoughts.
I feel so you can share in my experience,
A poet such as myself having such majestic
Feelings on your behalf.
For I, and I alone, have ever felt such feelings.
But what is greater, then I resist all feeling, the poetic expression of it, Pure art, because I hold it all inside.
But what about the counterargument, thinks the boy, plain nasty unfeeling, without all the phony, putrid, arty language? In a flash, he can see it, a new poem entitled “First Communions,” one of the first productions of what might charitably be called his angry, bratty, scatological stage.
And yet a strong, clear light shines through with an unfussy style and a sense of reality that only a country boy would have:
Really, it’s stupid, these village churches
Where fifteen ugly brats dirtying the pillars
Listen to a grotesque priest whose shoes stink
As he mouths the divine babble:
But the sun awakens, through the leaves,
The old colors of irregular stained-glass.
The stone still smells of the maternal earth.
You can see piles of those earth-clotted pebbles
In the aroused countryside which solemnly trembles,
Bearing near the heavy wheat, in the ochreous paths,
The burned trees where the plum turns blue,
Tangles of black mulberry and rosebushes covered with cow droppings.
Blasphemy! All in the voice of a young girl, a feminine alter ego who, extending her tongue in Communion, feels an overpowering nausea—nausea at the putrid kiss of Jesus.
And it’s all written, thinks the boy, written all across the sky. Written even before it is written.
Look up, poets! From the ass of heaven, down it falls, a heavy brown mass of pure feeling. Thump.
17 Bad Apple
This same Arthur Rimbaud is now a brain for hire, forging, for the school’s dolts—those who can pay—essays that mix Attic mastery with the most deliberately boneheaded mistakes. Which, being dolts, they copy word for word. And so the class is roaring-laughing, as, like a pistol shot, Master Delporte’s supple cane smacks the miscreant’s desk. Dark hair splattering, the master is now shaking Rimbaud’s work for hire in the fat, freckled face of the woeful Jacques Sorel, whose ample cheeks are painted with two livid red handprints—slap, slap!
Again, the cane smacks Sorel’s desk, inches from his quivering nose.
“Abominable plagiarist! Do you presume to insult my intelligence by claiming—liar!—that it was you, imbecile, and not he who wrote this?” Indeed, he is pointing his cane, that rapier of pain, at the pure puzzlement of the wrongly accused Arthur Rimbaud. “Moi?”
Beginning to make trouble in school, to goof off, the prize boy has now morphed into the rebel hero. A Byzantine. A brigantine. Lurid strange.
Delahaye, Gorgeon, Doinel, sometimes Lalande, like a pack of dogs, they all follow Rimbaud after school. Circumscribing vast circles around Charleville, they talk, his followers, about poems and particularly stupid, grotesque, or simply ridiculous people—and, of course, girls, although this goes nowhere; why, in Charleville, the girls are so locked up, so stuck up, that it’s thrilling just to have a girl turn up her nose at you!
As they walk, sometimes the boys make up serial poems, each taking a line, then trying to top the other. Round the town they troop, one rolling-gaited, orangutanlike organism with ten feet. The so-called Poet’s Circle.
“And there, in a long and lovely space.”
“She forced him to see, without a trace.”
“That’s a stupid line!”
“Two stupid lines,” cries Delahaye, the drum major. “Arthur! Give us a line.”
Squinting, the kid looks like a grasshopper working up a spit. “Delahaye,” he says very slowly, “I am not thinking of merely a line. I am thinking of a poem. Complete.”
“Called what?” Delahaye plants his feet in the road. He is a fleshy, well-loved, well-fed boy whose prosperous family keeps a store. And, much to Arthur’s chagrin, Delahaye’s blue-eyed mother, so pretty and well dressed, she utterly adores her son. Imagine that.
Arthur is still squinting, pondering.
“The title of the poem?” he says. “A trifling point as yet—who knows and who cares? I told you, it’s already written—”
“Listen to him,” challenges Delahaye. “Then what, prithee, is it about?”
“About?” The kid stares two holes through him. “What an idiotic question. Do you think a poem is merely ‘about’ what it’s about?”
But Delahaye, unlike the others, does not kowtow to him. “Oh, bullshit. If it is written, Rimbaud, then what is it about?”
The hands jiggle, ever the marionetteer. “Well, I suppose”—goggling for effect—“I suppose, Delahaye, that it is about two children. Two orphans.”
“And?”
“Well, they’re poor. Miserably poor, with no father—”
“Ah,” cries Delahaye to the other boys. “So you see, it begins just like every Rimbaud poem, ‘Once upon a miserable time …’ ”
“And their mother dies. And they’re so horribly poor—”
“The nose. Watch his nose! Sure sign that he’s lying—”
“And they are so poor and so shut-up, the children think the funeral wreaths are”—now he has them—“New Year’s decorations!”
“New Year’s decorations!” cries Doinel. “From a funeral? That’s dreadful!”
“And stupid,” seconds Delahaye. Who two beats later says, “Write it down.”
“Not yet.” The kid walks on. “I’m waiting.”
“Rimbaud, you’ll lose it! You’ll just think of something else.”
“Quite the contrary. Write it too soon and you will lose it.”
“Then you have written it.”
“No, but I can see all the words. The rest is mechanical. As I say, I just haven’t written it down:
—A mother’s dream is the warm blanket,
The downy nest where children, huddled
Like beautiful birds rocked by the branches,
Sleep their sweet sleep full of white visions!…
—And here—it is like a nest without feathers, without warmth,
Where the children are cold and do not sleep and are afraid;
Delahaye snorts. “Sure, Rimbaud. Bare like your house at Christmas. No decorations and no presents. And you insisting your poems are the expressions of a new objective poetry! Objective, my ass!”
18 Life in the Veal Pen
But after these interludes, back he went to the veal pen, as he thought of it. And little wonder. For even now, in the fetid depths of the barn, le veau, the spring veal, can he heard bleating.
No, le veau, superfluous male, you were not born to run and graze—to grow muscles, sprout balls, then go wild, chasing small children across the meadow. No, le veau was not to be red-blooded but delicately pink-fleshed—was to be kept bloodlessly anemic and weak in his reeking pen, where only a few stray splinters of light can pierce the fetid gloom. Separated from mother and herd, for five or six months—eight at most—le veau was a subterranean albino, a mushroom in the dark.
Le veau, however, was anything but starved, or not for milk. Pails and pails of milk he had, but not from the delicious speckled teats of his mama, whoever she was. Spoiled milk, watery cheese, and butter slop, all was ravenously licked up in the same pen in which his neck remained pinioned between two posts worn smooth and stuck with bits of hair and flesh. NaaaaHH—kicking. NaaaaHHH—so batty the calf licked even the bent nail in the wall until his tongue bled. Anything to feel anything.
But le veau hadn’t entirely given up. The battle was on when his hole was mucked out and not least when he made his first and last transit, drooling pink foam, as three farmhands dragged him out into the sun’s blinding white terror. All this the boy felt in his own veal pen, in the gabled apex of the house with its lone, ogre-eyed window, the same through which he stared for days, writing poems. Letters, too, dreaming of what le veau dreamt of—escape. And he was cagey.
Hearing the dreaded bam bam bam up the stairs, quickly Scheherazade would hide away what he was writing—really writing. For now his ready nib was scratching many messages. All masks. Pretending on foolscap to be seventeen when for a fact he was naïve fifteen. Pretending, above all, to be breezy and worldly-wise when he was anything but. Charm ’em. Baffle and bamboozle ’em. But be delivered! Here is part of what he wrote to Théodore de Banville, leader of the Parnassian poets and a man said to be sympathetic to the young and aspiring:
Cher Maî
tre,
We are in the months of love; I am seventeen. The age of hope and dreams, they say—and now I have begun, a child touched by the finger of the Muse—excuse me if this is banal—to express my good beliefs, my hopes, my sensations, all those things dear to poets—and this I call the spring.
If I send you some of these verses—and this thanks to Alph. Lemerre, the good publisher—it is because I love all poets, all good Parnassians—since the poet is a Parnassian—in love with ideal beauty. It is because I esteem in you, quite simply, a descendant of Ronsard, a brother of our masters of 1830, a real romantic, a real poet.
That is why. This is foolishness, isn’t it? but still?
In two years, in one year perhaps, I will be in Paris—Anch’io, gentlemen of the press, I will be a Parnassian! I do not know what is inside me … that wants to come out.… I swear, cher Maître, I will always worship the two goddesses, the Muse and Liberty.
Do not frown too much as you read these verses …
Then he hears the girls shrieking, “Arthur! Arthur, do something! Frédéric has gone mad again.”
The boy throws open his window. Pigeons diving. Wind exploding, and look! It’s Frédéric on the attack, waving the chicken axe as storms of Roman arrows rain down. And, seeing their great leader, out of the brakes and thickets, up from the hills, raising swords and blowing horns, up rise the Gallic hordes, wild men with buttered hair and broadaxes, thwock!
Old bitch!
Thwock! Thwock! Thwock! Thwock! Attacking the great craggy black oak, Frédéric Rimbaud is hacking her apart, when over the fields a voice can be heard, a voice almost singing, as if she were Demeter or the Virgin Mary:
“Frédéric Rimbaud. God sees you, Frédéric Rimbaud. Do you think that God does not weep—weep—to see you hurting his poor old oak tree? Frédéric Rimbaud, who would dare to raise a hand to his poor old mother? Return to your work!”