Disaster Was My God

by Bruce Duffy

  “But, cher maître,” protested Champsaur, clearly horrified, “more important than your wife? Your child?”

  No answer. That was his answer.

  Verlaine then described the journey, the train to Charleville, then the wagon that took them by night, through the thick fog, to the Belgian border. Verlaine was a Parisian, a poodle—never had he even been in the woods, let alone at night, crossing penniless into another country. And why? For what? he thought, fuming that Rimbaud could not bed down in a nice, dry, charming barn—oh no, he had to pick a damp, smelly barn packed with steaming, stinking cows. Sucking eggs. Drinking from streams. Wiping themselves with leaves.

  “But where are we going?” Verlaine demanded the second day, almost weeping, he was so wet and wrung out.

  “A la chasse des anges.” Hunting for angels.

  “Stop it! This is hopeless! Pointless!”

  And it was pointless. For Rimbaud, pointlessness was the very point. But then, the third night, for Verlaine, something shifted as a thick fog descended, fog and soft rain that fell like a spider’s web over his hands and shoulders. He thought of a phrase that Rimbaud had said the night before, “Soft rain falling on the town.” Nothing special. No deep import when he first heard it, but now those six words were like a musical phrase, a talisman, a lure. Fog filled Verlaine’s lungs. Wet shoes. Burrs speckling his trousers. Steaming wet and cold, Verlaine was so hungry and miserable—so overpoweringly lonely—that suddenly he understood what Rimbaud had meant by an “objective” poetry. For suddenly Paul Verlaine wasn’t lost in the fog, he was the fog. Heart beating, he pulled out—like bandages for a wound—a soggy wad of paper and his crumbling pencil. And oddly the fog acted like an eraser, as he realized that the issue wasn’t what to say but rather what not to say in the usual way. Extraneous words fell away, and those that remained gleamed, deeply struck like nails:

  Falling Tears

  Soft rain falling on the town.

  —Arthur Rimbaud

  Falling tears in my heart,

  Falling rain on the town

  Why this long ache,

  A knife in my heart?

  Oh, soft sound of rain

  On the ground and roof!

  For hearts full of ennui

  The song of the rain!

  Or again, the next day, when he overheard the ownerless wind intimating the soul:

  Fresh, frail murmur!

  Whispers and warbles

  Like the sigh

  Of grass disturbed …

  Like the muffled roll

  Of pebbles under moving water.

  This soul lost

  In sleep-filled lamentation

  Surely is ours?

  Mine, surely, and yours,

  Softly breathing

  Low anthems on a warm evening?

  “Hats off!” mused Champsaur. “And the musique!”

  “Dear, dear,” chided Eugénie, “fawning now, are we?”

  “The point,” returned Verlaine, “the point is, with my Brussels poems, in these landscapes—thanks to Rimbaud—I came to that place where the artist vanishes. As he himself vanishes in his prose pieces, his Illuminations.”

  “For which he receives no royalties,” broke in Champsaur.

  “Assuming Rimbaud would even own the work.”

  “Well, he might like the money.”

  “The point,” said Verlaine testily, “the point is, Rimbaud wanted these poems, his prose poems, to be crazy and innocent, but most of all innocent, innocent, innocent—that’s what he said. And invisible. Here you have no real sense of the author. No, these poems, these dreams, they are entirely anonymous. The leaps of logic. The lack of antecedents. The swirl of imagery and willfully absent transitions. But what I most marvel at is how these poems so stubbornly resist meaning, while always presenting new meanings. Ice. To me they are like white hard ice—gleaming, pure, and slippery. Here is my favorite. A modern version of Genesis—turned on its head:

  After the Flood

  As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided,

  A hare stopped in the clover and swinging flower bells, and said its prayer through the spider’s web to the rainbow.

  The precious stones were hiding, and already the flowers were beginning to look up.

  The butchers’ blocks rose in the dirty main street, and boats were hauled down to the sea, piled high as in pictures.

  Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house, in the slaughterhouses, in the circuses, where the seal of God whitened the windows. Blood and milk flowed.

  Beavers set about building. Coffee urns let out smoke in the bars.

  In the large house with windows still wet, children in mourning looked at exciting pictures.

  A door slammed. On the village square the child swung his arms around, and was understood by the weather vanes and the steeple cocks everywhere, under the pelting rain.

  “Astonishing,” said Champsaur. “And I agree. Compared with the traditional poem, there is almost nothing to grasp onto. An ice wall.”

  “Well, fifteen years ago, Rimbaud’s poet peers, myself included, had even less of an idea how to read, react to, or even follow something like this. It broke all the rules. Prose was the least of it. They had no precedent. Even Baudelaire’s wonderful prose poems—his models, I suppose—even these are really just sketches. Well described and realized, of course, but finally unmysterious. Entirely realistic. They don’t achieve the level of dream and fracture. They don’t pull you into another reality, as these do.”

  “And do you think Rimbaud is still writing?” asked Champsaur suddenly.

  Verlaine never hesitated. “No, absolutely not.” He shook his head vehemently. “Oh, I’ve read the speculation, but I assure you, Rimbaud is not writing. Not a word. I would bet money on it.”

  “But, cher maître,” protested Champsaur, “how can you know this?”

  “Because Rimbaud is so inflexible by nature. Hardheaded peasant. Not writing is now his vocation, just as writing once was.”

  “So you believe he will never return?”

  “To France, perhaps. But to poetry, never. I would be shocked.”

  “Well,” broke in Eugénie, with a barbed glance at the man who refused to marry her, “if Rimbaud were to return, this one would run off with him.”

  “Enough,” said Verlaine.

  “Let me further assure you,” she insisted, “only men are this way, this stupid, this blind. This is why the male creature needs floozies like me.” She looked directly at Champsaur. “Men want to be thrilled. Do you not agree, Monsieur?”

  “I do so very much appreciate your time, cher maître,” said Champsaur with a shocked glance at Eugénie, electric, as if she had invisibly goosed him. Uncomfortably, he turned more fully around to face his subject. “And here is my final question, cher maître. Why did Rimbaud stop writing—in your opinion.”

  Verlaine took a drink, then sighed a long sigh at a question that vexed him. “Well, one big reason, perhaps obvious, is he grew up. Think about it. When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make-believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naïve as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world—quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for a while I suppose I did, too. But of course, there was no revolution of love. The world didn’t change. Woman was not freed. The human heart was the same, no better, no worse. Leaving what? For him, meaningless words on a page. Words that died in his mouth. Suicide, in a way.”

  “Dear, dear Paul,” purred Eugénie. Clearly irritated, she was like a cat flicking her tail, ready to claw. “Like most men, you always want the romantic answer, when a simpler one will do. Admit it. At twenty, great genius that he was, Rimbaud was simply burned out. A dead volcano. Shot his wad.”

  “And—and perhaps you are right,” admitted Verlaine touchily. “But the fact remains, the child in him died,
and when he did, Rimbaud, in his insane pride—in his rage and his shame—told me he wished he had never given his manuscripts away. Not because he wanted them, but so he could have burned them. Like heretics. Every last word.” Verlaine nodded, as this sank in. “Believe me, I do not romanticize this part.” Verlaine sat there like a piece of bruised fruit, damaged and he knew it. He sat there for some time as lonely people do, then said, “Rimbaud was a man crushed. Abandoned by God. Killed storming the heavenly citadel. Overly romantic?—perhaps. But this, Monsieur, is what I saw, and this is what I believe.”

  54 Love Conjugated

  “Will you kindly bring your brother here for supper?” cried Mme. Rimbaud to the ceiling. Not Arthur, but your brother. Forever sixteen.

  As one might surmise, with Arthur’s homecoming the old woman’s world was almost cosmically out of whack. It started with Isabelle, the exalted Isabelle—the “governess,” her mother now called her—now that she was done with being a dairy maid, factotum, and drudge. In her place, two had to be hired, a barn man and a maid. Or rather, four people, as fast as Mme. Rimbaud dismissed them.

  Owing to his infirmity, Arthur was given a large ground-floor room, which, he being Arthur, had to be painted—painted in earthen African tones, then hung, per his orders, with funereal curtains, to better block the pestilential French light. The “cave,” his mother called it. His pretend Abyssinia, she told Mme. Shade, filled as it was with infernal wall hangings and other tribal savagery. Oh yes, she added, and his Abyssinian harp, another annoyance. It was with this harp that he soothed and distracted himself. Plucking one string, he would wait for as long as a minute, then pluck another, trying to coax, to pinpoint and better portend his changing mood.

  Dooor​rroww​www.

  Drumm​mmmmm​mmmm.

  Toinn​nnggg​ggggg​ggggg​ggggg​ggggg​ggggg.

  Mon Dieu! cried the Madame to Mme. Shade. Listen to him! He’s losing his mind!

  Patience, advised her vaporous confidante. Savor this time. He has not much left.

  Tgggg​hhhhh​rrrrr​tttth​hhhhh​hhhhh​h-owwww.

  Then, as if Madame had not been inconvenienced enough, Isabelle said Arthur needed a larger, more suitable gig, one with more room for his legs—leg, rather. Here, remarkably, the old woman did not stint. Straightaway, she procured a sturdy carriage with a black bonnet, in which Isabelle could be seen erect at the reins, hair tied up and wearing prim new clothes for her new station: long skirt, button shoes, and a wasp-waisted blouse closed at the throat with a cameo of carved white bone on a dial of pale blue.

  But who was this apparition beside her, this large hump draped—even in July—with innumerable shawls, topped off with a droopy felt hat pulled almost over his ears. Past the weeping, raging stage, Rimbaud was in the stubborn, irritable, often transfixed phase, still trying to make peace with his disability, these jaws now closing around him.

  “Thank you,” he said to Isabelle one morning on their daily trip to Charleville.

  Isabelle stared in shock; her brother no more thanked her than her mother did. “I’m your sister,” she protested. “This is what sisters do.”

  “Thank you all the same. Thank you.” Rimbaud sat staring at his one foot, imagining if the one foot were somehow two feet. Thinking, If only I had been nicer, kinder. If only I hadn’t been me.

  They were now entering Charleville. Clopping down the narrow cobbled streets, they passed the collège, the boulangerie, and the sweetshop, then went down to the small bridge where every day Isabelle would stop the horse, that, like a small boy, Arthur might peer down into watery dark slithers where, sometimes, he would see the shadowy back of a trout pointed like a compass needle into the current. Flickers, flecks, the hypnotically waggling weeds, green hairs streaming. Here was the river of “The Drunken Boat” and “Memory,” of which he remembered not a word, although he did recall, vividly, the feeling of writing, the buzzing heat, the shock and sometimes sweet oblivion of being absorbed in it—it and not himself. As he had written so thrillingly in “Genie,” one of the Illuminations and far and away the happiest:

  He is affection and the present moment because he has thrown open the house to the snow foam of winter and to the noises of summer, he who purified drinking water and food, who is the enchantment of fleeing places and the superhuman delight of resting places. He is affection and future, the strength and love which we, erect in rage and boredom, see pass by in the sky of storms and the flags of ecstasy.…

  He knew us all and loved us. May we, this winter night, from cape to cape, from noisy pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from vision to vision, our strength and our feelings tired, hail him and see him and send him away, and under tides and on the summit of snow deserts follow his eyes, his breathing, his body, his day.

  “But what about your friend Delahaye?” asked Isabelle, returning to a frequent topic. “Or—what was his name—Fourier, Foyatier, was it? Did I not hear that name?” Her brother sat silently, as if he had the mumps. “Arthur,” she said at last, “say something. Please let me contact them for you. Someone.”

  “Absolutely not.” He looked indignant. “Not until I get better.”

  “Oh, come now, can you be so vain? These are your friends.”

  “No, is that not clear? When I am better.”

  Better? she wondered. Did he believe that? Could he believe that? For now there were further troubles in his shoulder, his right shoulder, a shooting pain that he described as being like a needle, a knitting needle, running almost arterially down his arm and down his side. It was the arm he blamed—three attempts on the crutches and that was it. Collapsing on his bed that last time, he threw down his crutches and never again picked them up. Refused. Am I getting sicker? Am I going to die? Although he pretended otherwise, he knew it was a milestone in the wrong direction, indeed a realization so painful that, quite honestly, he forgot all about it.

  Picture him, then, one leg pinned, sitting in his pajamas in the sepia shade of his room coaxing moanlike sounds from his Abyssinian harp, six strong strings attached to a resonator of dark stretched skin sewn with darker gut. Rimbaud plucked it, then listened. Mouth open, an almost ecstatic expression on his face, he sipped not just the sound but the feeling. Remarkable, really. However tentatively, Arthur Rimbaud was transmitting feelings, hungry, lonely feelings that buzzed in his mother’s ear:

  Derrrrr-owwwwwn.

  Dwwwo​ooooo​oonnn​nn.

  Drrrrrrrrrrph-oowwwwwwwww.

  The harp was not his only means of escape, for even in those weeks of slow decline Rimbaud was able—in balletic mental leaps—both to banish reality and put the future in bright suspension. I will marry. Perhaps I will marry. I might marry. So he would think as Isabelle took him once again on his daily ride, down to the park and the village green, upon which, on a gentle rise, stood the white bandstand. Magic lantern. On those summer evenings so long ago, as the band played, almost inflated with sound and light, he remembered how the white cupola would be surrounded by people. Families picnicking. Trolling soldiers and girls—Madeleine, Joséphine, Marie. Why had he fled the battlefield of ordinary life, he wondered—girls, safety, normality? Happiness, even. Why?

  “Arthur,” said Isabelle, “no argument this time. Let’s go to the concert this Sunday. Please.”

  “Isabelle,” and he closed his eyes, exasperated. “No.”

  “No! With you the answer is always no.” She turned provocative. “Why? Because some know you to be famous? Is that it?”

  He glared. “I am not famous. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Look at you. At any suggestion that you’re famous or have a reputation, you get testy. Why? Don’t just stare at me. Why?”

  “Must I be forced to hear and talk about this,” he erupted finally, “something I have long disowned? Honorably disowned!” He grew more strident. “Is this not my right?”

  “But Arthur, I’ve never heard of a poet—any writer—disowning his every word. And nearly
twenty years later, there are those who think your work is good. Brilliant. Great, in fact.”

  He gripped the leather seat. “Good or bad is not the point! I am Arthur Rimbaud, merchant and explorer. Why can you not understand this? Accept this?”

  Isabelle couldn’t stand it, her hero raising his voice at her. Turning away, she sat hunched over, hugging herself, near tears at his stubbornness and negativity.

  “No, I can’t accept it. It’s horrifying to hear you talk this way, to think this way. A writer renouncing his work. Saying it’s all meaningless. Stupid. Pointless. It frightens me. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  But Rimbaud’s desires were now exceedingly clear and simple. In fact, he now had a discernable vocation. That is, if it would have him.

  However tardy or unlikely, it was Rimbaud’s wish to be a son to his mother. Nothing halfhearted about it. They would forge an all-new relationship—this time an adult relationship. For look, he realized one day, between them there was now plenty of money, plenty for all three of them, him, his mother, and Isabelle. Brilliant! He couldn’t wait to tell his mother. She was free. Time to let go of the dairy and her myriad moneymaking schemes. Her son was home. Home at last to protect her.

  But this late dream, it sprang from a still deeper, more unexpected impulse, and this was to have what he had never had—love. Not his mad, ruinous love with Verlaine or, worse, the revolutionize-the-world love of his poet days—his Waterloo. No, what Rimbaud wanted now was human love, family love, mother love—ordinary love, on a human scale. And just as he needed this from her, so Mme. Rimbaud could feel in him an as yet unspecified need, as palpable as it was relentless. He needed. It made her irritable. After five weeks, the only reason there hadn’t been a blowup was because of Isabelle, always hovering, forever in the middle, trying to keep the peace. But then one morning, guiltily, Isabelle left to visit a sick school friend in the nunnery. Rimbaud was thrilled. At long last! Here was his chance to be alone with his mother.