Rereadings

by Anne Fadiman

  My turn. The story of one of my infatuations.

  For a long time I considered myself master of every possible landscape, and looked down on famous painters and modern poets.

  I liked idiotic paintings, doorway moldings, decorative backdrops, carnival banners, signs, cheap prints; outmoded literature, Church Latin, illiterate pornography, mildewed novels, fairy tales, children’s books, old operas, silly ditties, naive rhythms. I dreamed up crusades, unrecorded voyages of exploration, republics with no histories, aborted wars of religion, revolutions in behavior, migrations of races and shifts of continents: I believed in every kind of magic.

  I invented the colors of vowels!—A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green—I set the form and motion of each consonant, and using intuitive rhythms I decided I had invented a poetic language that would someday apply to all the senses. I reserved the translation rights.

  At first it was an experiment I wrote silences; I wrote nights; I jotted down the inexpressible. I froze the dizzying whirl … .

  Poetic castoffs played a major part in my alchemy of the word

  I practiced elementary hallucinations: I clearly saw a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummers made up of angels, coaches on the roads in the sky, a parlor at the bottom of a lake, monsters, mysteries. A title on a marquee would set phantasms before my eyes.

  And then I explained my magical sophistries with hallucinated words!

  I ended up thinking my spiritual disorder was sacred I was idle, prey to fevers. I envied the bliss of animals: caterpillars, who stood for the innocence of limbo; moles, for the sleep of virginity!

  (translation mine)

  I understood willed hallucination; I intuited synesthesia without knowing the word; I knew all about imaginary history and every kind of junk literature. The paragraphs were unlike anything I had ever read, and they were intended for me specifically. I leafed back a few pages and found the information: “1854—1891—Poète, né à Charleville.” Charleville is in the French Ardennes, on the Meuse, a river I knew well, and near the Belgian border, in fact quite close to Bouillon, where I had cousins. The rest of the biography was mostly lost on me, aside from a few key words: “Charleroi,” “Bruxelles,” “enfant prodige.” There were many points of contact between this Arthur Rimbaud and me. Maybe there was something more to the pattern; maybe I was his echo, his reincarnation! I bought the book.

  That bookstore—all I have now is a vague impression of a large, fluorescent-lit, faintly antiseptic room, like the library of a technical institute—looms in retrospect like Ali Baba’s cave. I left with two books (the other was André Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir, bought under a fortuitous mis-impression), and together they furnished me with my permanent literary foundation; Rimbaud was not the only figure I encountered as a result. I was thirteen, and it was the Summer of Love, and the world and I were changing in synchrony. Girls and music and cigarettes and discontent were all happening to me; just out of my reach were sex and drugs and politics, and glamour and fame and the wide world. A year later I won a scholarship to a Jesuit high school in New York City, and the wide world let me in. Every morning I would take a seven o’clock train from the little clapboard suburban station where I was the anomaly in a crowd of suits, and an hour and a half later I stood in the middle of everything. The school quickly came to seem rather beside the point.

  I don’t know whether it sounds more like a boast or an admission to say that I have always been a good student as long as I was setting the lessons myself. In school I slept or doodled or looked out the window or fine-tuned my fantasy life. Such activities could not sustain Greek or trigonometry, however, and after a while I was expelled. But outside of school I was an eager pupil. I learned from walking around the city, from sitting in cafeterias, from going to the movies, from reading anything that landed under my nose. I learned in bookstores, especially in Wilentz’s Eighth Street Bookshop, the beacon of literary hipness in the Manhattan of the 1960s. I had little money to buy books, so I read snatches of them on the spot; and books led me to other books, sometimes just through physical proximity.

  I was armed with a nice chunk of Christmas money, at least five and perhaps as much as ten dollars, one day in late 1968 or early 1969 when I walked into the bookstore bigeyed with expectation. At long last I was in a position to buy something, and at first I was dazzled, wanting to take home everything from Narcissus and Goldmund to A Child’s Garden of Verses for the Revolution, the euphoria giving way to calculation and then to disappointment. What, finally, was good enough for me to spend actual money on? And then I saw a thick New Directions paperback—those deadpan black-and-white covers still call to me from across a room—with a picture of a big-haired, pensive, beautiful adolescent: Arthur Rimbaud by Enid Starkie. I grandly forked over $3.25 for it. I still didn’t know much about Rimbaud. I had read the four works in the anthology I possessed—“Ma bohème,” “Le bateau ivre,” and “Voyelles,” in addition to the excerpt from A Season in Hell—again and again with emotions ranging from puzzlement to the sort of excitement that made me actually get up and do an awkward little dance, but their author was represented in neither my town’s library nor my school’s. It was overwhelming to have nearly five hundred pages about him, complete with pictures.

  I read the book slowly, in part because it was dense and in part because I wanted to be seen reading it. I wore the book as much as I read it, “absentmindedly” holding it in one hand on the street even when I was carrying a satchel of books in the other, “casually” parking it atop my notebook next to my coffee cup wherever I sat. I proudly displayed it on the subway, at Nedick’s and Chock full o’Nuts and the Automat, in garment-district cafeterias, at the juice stand in the passage from the IRT to the shuttle at Grand Central, in the bar car of the 5:30 express home (drinkless but trying to outsmoke everybody), maybe once or twice at some dump on St. Mark’s Place that advertised Acapulco Gold ice cream. There was no T-shirt available then, but I was identifying my brand in comparable fashion. Rimbaud, dead for eighty years, was enjoying one of his many rebirths. The Starkie biography, first published in 1938, had only just come out in paperback (along with its bookstore companion, the Louise Varèse translation of Rimbaud’s works). His name was being thrown around in all sorts of places, such as interviews with pop stars—I felt a little proprietary, as if I owned him and they were encroaching. And there was that face, of course, the detail of Fantin-Latour’s Coin de table on the cover and the (second) Carjat photograph within, which matched the work and the life and seemed utterly contemporary. He may be a bit of a conventional cherub in the former, but in the latter he is electric, with flames in those pale eyes. He was hipper than anyone alive.

  But if in the fullness of my teenage fantasy I felt I must have been appointed a successor to Rimbaud—on the basis of a few biographical details merely shared by several thousand people—at most times he came to stand as a reproach to my cowardice and mediocrity. Yes, I recognized myself in various aspects of his life. Part of this was the result of a childhood immersion in Catholicism, immediately flung down at puberty and followed by a pursuit of what I imagined was its inverse. I liked to think I was dangerous and terrible, even though the shoplifting, pot smoking, truancy, and masturbation that were all I could muster in this regard would have so impressed no one but my poor unsteady mother. I liked to think I was illuminated, but while I could generate great clouds of smoke, imagining what my works would look like on the page and how they would be received, I couldn’t actually write what I imagined. I liked to think that I, too, could manifest genius in a quick series of slaps and then suddenly leave the room never to return, stranding traduced friends and weeping sycophants out on the ice, flicking aside poetry and culture and civilization like a long ash on a cigarette, but I couldn’t very well leave without having first entered.

  My writing was pathetic and Rimbaud was unanswerable. He was a changeling, an alien. The deeper I burrowed into Rimbaud, the less I could
see him or put flesh on him. I fancied that I detected aspects in myself corresponding to some parts of him I thought I understood, but they were surface elements. He was not like a conventional idol, who will reliably turn out to be contemptible in private; and even though he was my age, I couldn’t make him into a schoolyard rival whom I could find some way of reducing to tears. I had made a grave error in choosing Rimbaud as my model—he wasn’t even divisible into parts; you couldn’t be half a Rimbaud. The alternative to being Rimbaud was to be nothing. If I had chosen somebody like Jack Kerouac instead, I wouldn’t have had a problem—him I could see all too readily, laugh at his neuroses, nail all his stupidities with no effort—but that was exactly why I hadn’t chosen him. I read and admired many other writers, but none was Rimbaud, who remained a perpetual admonition, a painful constant reminder of my failure, his nineteenth-century calendar mocking the years of my life. I quit writing poetry when he did, at twenty-one—although I only just now realized the coincidence—but there the chronological parallels end. He left France, I stayed in New York; he went to Aden, I moved downtown; he went to Harar, I began to write for magazines; he came home to die, I published my first book.

  Rimbaud has been dead for 13 years now, or 113 by everyone else’s reckoning. I’ve read everything he ever wrote several times over, some of it many times, and I still feel as though I’m far from getting to the bottom of much of it, Illuminations in particular. I’ve been to his house in Charleville-Mézières and the museum across the street, and thought that maybe I should have done so as a teenager, since while the artifacts are terribly moving, the way the French have of institutionalizing their dead artists is a wonderful homeopathic antidote to hero worship. Charleville is filled with Rimbaud junk merchandise, and in the suburbs you find here and there a sterile landscape traversed by a Rue Arthur-Rimbaud or a housing project with an immense blowup of the Carjat photograph on the wall of its inner court, and politicians quote him in their speeches, and television presenters cite him as if he had been some stuffed owl in the Academy rather than someone who would have caused them to call the police. Had I been a child in France, I would have been made to memorize “Le dormeur du val,” and that would have been the end of it. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to the poem and wouldn’t have wanted to hear any more about him.

  I can reread the Starkie biography today, with him doubly interred, and no longer feel as though I will have to set the book down at some point and go put on music and think hard about something else, because the race is over now. Our parallel has been shattered by time and circumstance. I can contemplate in tranquillity just how wildly outmatched I was. Rimbaud, I see now, was never a kid, or at least never a kid poet. At fourteen he wrote a Latin verse in which Phoebus descends from the heavens to write “TU VATES ERIS” (you shall be a poet) on his brow, but that was merely in the service of rhetorical convention. Kid poets are composed of either wet flopping emotion or hollow technical showing off; and if they are ever to amount to anything, they will as they mature slowly lean out and grab hold of the other branch. Rimbaud arrived fully equipped. And Rimbaud never had a Rimbaud. He killed his idols. He swallowed his influences whole; imitated them while improving upon their work; and if they were still alive, made a point of flinging in their faces the fact that he was better at being them than they were.

  I’ve known a couple of people who have reminded me in some way or another of what Rimbaud must have been like, one of them the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who, well before he became famous, seemed to live on a parallel plane, so absorbed in his art and its demands that like a heat-seeking missile he would blithely and apparently unconsciously vaporize anything that stood between him and his target. Rimbaud in the flesh, I can see now, was a snot-nosed pest who talked fast with a grating whine, who made fun of everybody in the room and knew that nobody could successfully answer back or hit him without losing face, who came to your house and ate everything in the fridge before disappearing abruptly and would come around again only when you had something he wanted. You would probably have to have been in love with him to tolerate him for long. Quite beyond lacking his genius, I could never have been anything like him. As a teenager I was constructed entirely of doubt, most of it self-doubt, and I am not much different today. I am larger and slower and older than Rimbaud, even though I am technically a century younger. Having outlived him, I feel like one of those companions of the prophet, those friends of the brilliant young dead who go on to spend the rest of their lives reselling their anecdotes and testifying in documentaries. I remember Rimbaud, all those drunken nights, I will say, gazing wistfully off camera. And I will silently realize, not without rancor, that now, finally, I can tame him.

  KATHERINE ASHENBURG

  Three Doctors’ Daughters

  The Sue Barton Books, by Helen Dore Boylston

  In the winter of 2001, my father lay near death in something like the family firm. The teaching hospital in Rochester, New York, in which he was a cardiac patient was where he had trained as a medical student, worked as a doctor, and taught in the medical school. His picture is on the wall in the psychiatric wing. Teaching a course in the nursing school, he met his future wife, my mother. Their five children were born within the hospital walls, and two of them graduated from its medical school.

  In the familiar corridors of Strong Memorial Hospital, I lectured my two younger sisters with the bossiness of the firstborn: “The patient has very few visual stimuli. It’s important to comb our hair and put on lipstick before we go into Daddy’s room.” “Even if the patient appears to be unconscious, don’t assume he can’t hear you.” For a while my sisters, one of whom is a pediatrician and the other a family therapist, bore this with patience. Finally, they noted sarcastically that they had missed the years when I had become a nurse. Where was all this expertise coming from?

  Everything I know about nursing I learned from the seven Sue Barton books, which I read in the 1950s, from the age of ten until I was twelve or thirteen. These juvenile novels, written by Helen Dore Boylston between 1936 and 1952, covered Sue’s career from her studies at Massachusetts General Hospital through her jobs as a visiting nurse in the slums of New York City and a rural nurse in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Each cover had a picture of Sue, wearing a different, distinctive nurse’s cap to indicate her current status.

  February turned into March. Our father had survived one heart attack, two strokes, and three operations, but he could not talk, sit up unassisted, or feed himself. Nurses appeared at intervals to press buttons on the flotilla of machines attached to him, to put in lines, to draw blood. They fed him puréed substances so neutralized they came pressed into cunning, identifying molds—a pea pod, a corncob, a carrot. Male and female, the nurses wore colored, pajama-like outfits that would have astonished the starched-white-uniformed Miss Barton. As I watched them, more and more of Sue Barton resurfaced.

  Other than the agreeably tradition-soaked life of a nursing student and the maxims that bemused my sisters, my main memory of the books was the dialogue between Sue and Bill Barry. A tall, dark intern who comes to Sue’s aid on her first, confusing day in the hospital, Bill becomes her husband, but only after many vicissitudes and four books. To a preadolescent, the sparkle of their conversation—and the sense that the speakers were equals in strength—was irresistible.

  Forty years after reading Boylston’s series, I remembered it as better written, more mature, more fully rounded than most girls’ novels. When I mentioned Sue Barton to women of my generation and they asked, “Was she like Cherry Ames?” (the heroine of another nurse series), I responded with more heat than necessary, “Don’t mention that name in the same breath with Sue Barton!” This was hardly an original bit of literary criticism, since every reading girl in the 1950s knew the crucial distinction between the Sue Barton series and those devoted to Cherry Ames or Trixie Belden or Nancy Drew: Boylston’s books were library books, whereas when I asked my local librarian why she didn’t stock Nancy
Drews, she responded, “Because they don’t have enough literary merit.” She was right. To lump Nancy and Sue together would have been like equating a synthetic, assembly-line wallet with one hand-sewn of fine Florentine leather.

  By midsummer, my father was at home learning to walk, talk, read, and write again at eighty-three. Now that the crisis that had inspired so many memories of Sue was over, rereading her seemed imperative. Not sure whether I was about to burst a bubble, lance a boil, or encounter an old friend, I went to the library’s main branch to borrow all seven Sue Bartons.

  The Rochester Public Library hasn’t kept its checkout cards from the 1950s—a shame, because I’d love to know how many times I placed a Sue Barton title on the golden-syrup-colored wooden counter, signed “Kathy Ashenburg” on a stiff piece of orange paper, and waited for the librarian to stamp my due date. How often did I carry the cellophane-protected books, emblazoned with Sue’s “vivid” face (a favorite Boylston epithet), out of the branch library on Monroe Avenue? From there it was a short walk down Dartmouth Street to our house, a big clapboard Queen Anne behind a porch with Ionic columns.