However illicit the acquisition of those volumes, it reminds you that Rimbaud’s restless intellect continued to seethe. As Wyatt Mason points out in a vigorous and sensible introduction to his 2003 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:
I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a Seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. And I’ve realized that I am a poet. It’s really not my fault.
The sixteen-year-old went on to make an assertion that Graham Robb, in his idiosyncratic yet magisterial Rimbaud: A Biography (2000), refers to as the “poetic E=mc2”: “Je est un autre,” “I is someone else.” The young poet’s 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 the phrase “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 onto 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:
The wash of the green water on my shell of pine,
Sweeter than apples to a child its pungent edge;
It cleansed me of the stains of vomits and blue wine
And carried off with it the rudder and the kedge.
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, together with 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”), quarreling, 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 Graham Robb 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: 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 Rimbaudlike 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:
He was hardly more than a child. His mysterious delicacies had seduced me. I forgot all my duty to society, to follow him.… I go where he goes. I have to. And often he flies into a rage at me, me, the poor soul. The Demon! He is a demon, you know, he is not a man.
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, 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 postapocalyptic calm after the crisis evoked in A Season in Hell. The opening gives you a sense of what’s in store:
No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure, Than a hare paused among the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.
Oh the precious stones that were hiding,—the flowers that were already peeking out.
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”:
He has known us all and loved us all. Let us, on this winter night, from cape to cape, from the tumultuous pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from glance to glance, our strengths and feelings numb, learn to hail him and see him, and send him back, and under the tides and at the summit of snowy deserts, follow his seeing, his breathing, his body, his day.
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, the new fictional reimagining of Rimbaud’s life, made his 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 re-interring 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. (I liked the way he refers to the young Rimbaud as “the kid.”) 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 marvelous 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, which imagine the two finally lying “forever coiled like figures in some heavenly constellation.”
More problematic, i
nevitably, is the representation of Rimbaud himself. The interior of an artist’s mind is notoriously difficult to represent on the page. (The gold standard, perhaps, is The Death of Vergil, the dense 1945 masterwork by the Austrian writer Hermann Broch, which submits the ancient poet to a Joycean treatment, imagining, in the minutest detail, his thoughts as he lies dying in Brindisi.) 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.”
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