Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  When, stumbling down the embankment, he jumped back, his heart blurting into his neck. It was a boy, a sprawled, twisted, open-mouthed, upside-down boy soldier under his upside-down rifle. Two angry black stains on his blue coat. Gray clouded-over eyes. Hoo, the kid snorted. Drew in sharply his loosening guts—farted. Then, not knowing what better to do, he pulled out, like bandages, his sweaty-soggy wad of writing paper, white and blowing in the wind.

  When, whump, he lost his footing, then slid down the muddy embankment as the poem flooded up into his eyes. That’s sick, he thought, you can’t just write about this kid lying here dead. But then through this same dialectic, with new practicality, he stood up, legs spraddled, harvesting the kid’s pockets. Nasty buzzard. Especially since the kid was French. Sharply, he pulled the corpse up by the lapels, then patted the boy down, lard cold. Then, as he dropped him, he felt the empty lungs expiring, that and the twisted, frightening way the agate-eyed boy turned away, almost shrugged, as if now he just wanted to stay dead.

  Crap. Two franc notes, a broken clay pipe, and a little rosary that hadn’t exactly served him. But wait, he found a plug of cheap tobacco, sniffed it, then stuffed it in his back pocket. But finally, after he’d taken everything, a voice told him he had to do something for the poor son of a bitch. So, with a shudder, he closed forever the clouded-over eyes.

  “Night, brother.”

  And although the very next day he would be caught ticketless on the Paris-bound train—beaten freely by the conductor, then the gendarmes—despite the black eye and cut-up mouth, he didn’t return home empty-handed. Clear as newspaper dispatch and cold beyond pity, here’s the record—mostly true, save for the improved scenery and night turned to day:

  The Sleeper in the Valley

  It is a green hollow where the river sings

  Madly catching on the grasses

  Silver rags; where the sun shines from the proud mountain:

  It is a small valley which bubbles over with rays.

  A young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare,

  And the nape of his neck bathing in the cool blue watercress,

  Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under clouds,

  Pale on his green bed where the light rains down.

  His feet in the gladiolas, he sleeps. Smiling as

  A sick child would smile, he is taking a nap:

  Nature, cradle him warmly: he is cold.

  Odors do not make his nostrils quiver.

  He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast,

  Quieted. There are two red holes in his right side.

  22 Destroy

  “Dehors, bon sang—out! When will you get out? I’ll not support a lazy, nasty, drunken brute!”

  Witness Mme. Rimbaud, mezzo-soprano, on the stairs, singing—to the upper boxes of heaven—her heir-banishing “Marseillaise.”

  How quickly times change. Fully one year has passed, and for the kid, as with any other adolescent, it has been a year of rapid costume changes, of renounced ideas and dizzyingly brief phases. Yet one thing has not changed: despite a string of three- and four-day breakouts, his sixteen-year-old teeth still retain their death lock on the Original Tit.

  But it wasn’t merely Mme. Rimbaud upon whom the little brute had spat. Now, in Charleville, people began to see scrawled on the village walls—in infernally backward letters, as if written by the devil—MERDE A DIEU. Shit be to God. And so les Carolopolitains, as the denizens of Charleville were called (and even as they experienced that buttery French form of schadenfreude at the widow’s rude comeuppance), now they, too, wanted the little prick gone.

  There was also the matter of his deranged appearance. Hair: greasy, long, and stringy. Manners: nasty to nonexistent. Clothes: stinky sheeny. Add to that the now unrecognizable bowler hat, the floor-dragging coat (swiped), and (swiped too) the clay pipe—le brûle-gueule, the mouth burner—that he smoked upside down, dribbling ashes. A loiterer, a vandal and teller of lewd tales. A mooch and a swiper of drinks. So les Carolopolitains now saw their fallen star.

  And yet he was not merely a disgrace; he was a willed disgrace. For even as he demolished the old effigy of Prince Perfect, by the week, if not the day, he was molting, forgetting, shedding, disowning, even while remembering, as it were, new forms. Reckless expression and irrationality. Obscenity. Obscurantism. The scatological. Really, childishness combating the stupefying effects of what might be called adultishness.

  And yet, very importantly, he was deciding, with guillotinelike swiftness, what he hated or merely found boring, and all while realizing the very things he would not do, or be, or give the reading public—as if he much cared about that.

  Particularly nauseating to him was the overly artistic, the idolization and trivialization of “art”—of art as “pursuit,” or a “calling,” or, still worse, a “profession.” In fact, in his rants about contemporaries—the fossils, the academicians, the dead, and the imbeciles—he rankled at the mere technicians, the same who, as he put it, insisted on zoological principles when he wanted a five-winged bird. Meaning that, almost by the month, he would renounce everything, reverse course, then lash himself to another mast, bound for some new destination.

  But what of his contemporaries? As counter-Romantics, the Parnassians fled emotion, or at least genuinely emotional emotion of the base and vulgar variety experienced by ordinary humans. Sculptors of the word, they were all about form. As for subject matter and imagery, they thrilled to the bygone glories of antiquity—heraldic horses and mythological beasts and gazeless statues of chiseled alabaster. Here, to make it more concrete, examples are warranted. Accurate examples. And so, in an effort to elevate sense over some perhaps contrived metrical structure, the following poem excerpts—all taken from Rimbaud’s immediate contemporaries—are rendered in prose. Take this passage, for example, from the work of their putative leader, Théodore de Banville, the same to whom the boy had sent his first self-conscious appeal the year before:

  Sculptor, seek with care, while awaiting inspiration, a flawless marble with which to make a lovely vase; seek for long hours its form and engrave in it no mysterious loves nor divine combats. No Heracles victorious over the monster of Nemea, nor birth of Cypris on the scented sea …

  There was the equally rococo José-Maria de Heredia, who wrote with great flourish about the queenly Ariadne and Bacchus, the god of the grape, bringing vast orgy in his wake:

  … And the kingly monster, flexing its broad loins, beneath that beloved burden paws at the sandy arena, and, brushed by the hand that trails the reins at random, roars with love as it bites the flowers of its bit.

  Letting her hair cascade down the arching flank, amber clusters amid the black grapes, the Bride does not hear the muted bellow …

  There was also Théophile Gautier, tapping his magic wand before rendering in webs of purest spun sugar:

  Symphony in white major

  Curving the lines of their white necks in tales of the North we see swan-maidens swimming on the old Rhine, singing near the bank.

  Or, hanging on some branch the plumage that clothes them, they display their glossy skin, whiter than the snow of their down.

  Among these women there is one who comes down to us sometimes, as white as the moonlight on the glaciers in the cold skies …

  There were others, of course. “For us, a sorrowful generation consumed by visions and insulted by his angelic sloth,” Rimbaud wrote, “Musset is fourteen times worse! O the tedious tales and proverbs.”

  Indeed, for our teenage apprentice, his contemporaries—with two conspicuous exceptions—fell into three categories: the dead, the imbeciles, and the merely innocent—let us not pause overmuch.

  Paul Verlaine, though, was a real poet, he declared. But Baudelaire, he said, was the first seer, the king of poets, a real god. Consider this from Baudelaire’s “Consecration,” a poem that—quite aside from its vitriolic power and clarity—spoke of feelings the boy could not fail to notice:

  When by
an edict of the sovereign powers

  the Poet enters this indifferent world,,

  his mother spurred to blasphemy by shame,

  clenches her fists at a condoling God:

  “Why not have given me a brood of snakes

  rather than make me rear this laughing-stock?

  I curse the paltry pleasures of the night

  on which my womb conceived my punishment!

  Since I am chosen out of all my sex

  to bring this scandal to my bed and board,

  and since I cannot toss the stunted freak,

  as if he were a love-letter, into the fire,

  at least I can transfer Your hate to him,

  the instrument of all Your wickedness,

  and so torment this miserable tree

  that not one of its blighted buds will grow!”

  Or this from Baudelaire’s “Lethe”:

  Sullen, lazy beast! creep close

  until you lie upon my heart;

  I want to fill my trembling hands

  with your impenetrable mane,

  to sooth my headache in the reek

  of you that permeates your skirts

  and relish, like decaying flowers,

  the redolence of my late love.

  In drowsiness sweet as death itself

  let my insistent kisses cloud

  the gleaming copper of your skin.

  I want to sleep—not live, but sleep …

  The boy’s harsh judgments made him no less harsh with his own work. “Burn it,” he ordered his old friend Delahaye, shoving at him another mass of papers. And Delahaye promised. But, like many a designated burner, Delahaye lied and dithered and kept it safe. And although, on some level, Rimbaud knew this, he had achieved his primary objective. He had gotten it out of him, and away from him, like a tapeworm pulled from his guts. So much for the Muse.

  But then, out of all this negativity, came something positive, a revelation that no poet or artist of his time ever had had, or could have had. A transformation of this magnitude required tremendous pressure and fracture, bad blood, bad history. In short, a role for which the kid was perfect.

  First, he had the screwup advantage. Having left the collège with no baccalaureate, not only had he failed spectacularly but he had done what no local child had ever done—willfully turned himself into a lewd public menace. No interest in bathing. No job. No girl. And yet, despite his outward rebellion, as the boy knew too well, he was stuck, awaiting further orders for a mission that remained unclear.

  Looking for clues toward his great project, he had ransacked the school library and stolen every book he could stuff down his trousers. And yet, as we’ve seen, he found little to love, and almost nothing to teach him—other, of course, than what he parodied and stole from lesser poets with neither acknowledgment nor apology. As the young vandal wrote around this time, “Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.”

  It was then that he experienced the first shocks of this revolutionary project. It came one day when he actually saw himself, like a face in a pool—saw the child self, now grown, that all his life he had harbored. Of course many a child harbors—at least for a while—an imaginary friend. But upon taking up residence, Rimbaud’s double had remained hidden in him, much as the boy Rimbaud had once hidden in his father’s military tunic, a fortress of blue and gold braid that smelled of sweat and the tropics. That is, until his mother found it and burnt it. Threw it, evil thing, on a pile of straw, smoking and stinking like horsehair as she turned it with a pitchfork.

  Hiding, then, was the only solution. At school, during the morning roll call, when the boy said “present,” he was in fact absent—his double did the prize boy’s grind work. And so until now, without fully realizing or acknowledging it, he was two: the one who wrote it and the one who then unwrote it, refuted it, then gave it away, another bastard left on a church stoop.

  It was then, in his doubleness, that the first great revelation hit him: Je est un autre. I is someone else.

  I is someone else? In 1871, this was gibberish. Fractured grammar. Crazy talk. Other than the denizens of asylums, people, like blocks of stone, were whole beings with names and jobs and addresses, not separate compartments and selves—why, selves wasn’t even a concept. And so, like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus, his manifesto was born in a revolutionary letter, written in one frenzied night, then sent to the two people who might appreciate it, his pal Demeny and Georges Izambard, his former teacher, who found a fat letter in his morning post. What was the man to make of this? It was Rimbaud’s now famous letter of the voyant—the seer. Seeing, in this case, far into the next century, how art would be waged, art as war, war as art. It began, familiarly enough, with a round of insult:

  Cher Monsieur!

  You are a teacher again. You have told me we owe a duty to Society. You belong to the teaching body: you move along in the right track. I also follow the principle: cynically I am having myself kept.…

  In reality, all you see in your principle is subjective poetry: your obstinacy in reaching the university trough—excuse me—proves this. But you will always end up a self-satisfied man who has done nothing because he wanted to do nothing. Not to mention that your subjective poetry will always be horribly insipid.…

  Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet.…

  For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes it stir in the depths, or comes onto the stage in a leap.…

  The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place.

  It was mad, of course. Why, at one point the boy said the poet soul must be made “monstrous,” then added: “Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.” Warts! thought Izambard. Well, there was only one thing to do with such nonsense and that was to do what any sensible person would have done under the circumstances. Izambard put the letter in a box, then promptly forgot all about it.

  23 Two Poles

  But, other than colossal laziness, there was another reason Mme. Rimbaud couldn’t get this poltergeist out of her house. For late that summer, as the war was winding down, after yet another failed breakout, the kid returned with two uncharacteristically autobiographical poems. Two poles, one describing something wonderful and the other something horrible. Two facts as different as heaven and hell.

  First, the happy poem, the happiest, most beatific and unself-conscious poem that he had ever written or would write.

  In fact, had the other poem not happened—or rather, had the tragedy behind the poem not happened—well, who knows, the boy’s writings might have pointed toward a life of projective joy. Or at least a degree of serenity before the facts of who he actually was.

  Green—green was what invaded him that day when he came upon a green inn called the Green Cabaret. All green. Green the willows and the grape arbor, green the gables. Green the walls, the chairs, the tables—green everything, a green as green as his hunger as he stared through the green window. But greenest of all was the buxom young serving maid dressed all in green in a dirndl with green flounces. Who then bent down to serve a man—slyly down, sweeping him with bosom, braids, and ribbons. When, wham, dinner was served.

  At the Cabaret-Vert

  For a week my boots had been torn

  By the pebbles on the roads. I was getting into Charleroi.

  —At the
Carbaret-Vert: I asked for bread

  And butter, and for ham that would be half chilled.

  Happy, I stretched out my legs under the green

  Table. I looked at the very naïve subjects

  Of the wallpaper.—And it was lovely,

  When a girl with huge tits and lively eyes

  —She’s not one to be afraid of a kiss!—

  Laughing, brought me a plate of bread and butter,

  Warm ham, in a colored plate,

  White and rosy ham flavored with a clove

  Of garlic—and filled my enormous mug with its foam

  Which a late ray of sun turned gold.

  It was God’s gift—a beam of green, unalloyed joy. Such joy that, two days later, even half starved and mosquito bitten, the kid woke again into that wondrous state when God moved in him like a river and shook the trees. It was a feeling of overflowing, a command to attend and shut up. All followed by a sunny day that made him feel like a dizzy, giddy child, not so much running as falling forward.

  War? In this touched state, even with war still on, there was no fear. Like the air in the air and the wind that moved the trees, nothing touched him but everything went through him—even the artillery shells going whu-ump miles away. As for the nearer ones, they tore like sheets and exploded with a palpable pressure on the eye—that close, and it was wonderful, roaring over the next hill like the distant crash of the sea.