Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.
Please get out your violin and
play a sentimental accompaniment, as I am about to sing one of my favourite
songs. It goes like this. We should
remember writers for what they write, not for how they spent their lives.
The words on the page – they are the things that make writers worthy of note.
So strictly speaking, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) should be remembered for Les Illuminations, Le Bateau Ivre, Une Saison en
Enfer and perfect (and much anthologised) sonnets like Le Dormeur du Val.
Yet, in spite of the literary
creed I profess, there are some writers whose legend manages to detach itself
from their work. The reputations of poets who die young (Chatterton, Keats,
Shelley, Owen etc.) are particularly prone to this phenomenon. And Rimbaud’s
legend is known by people who have not read a word he wrote – or at least they
have not read a word he wrote in the original French.
Here is the rebellious teenage
poet, the ultimate enfant terrible,
who blazed up with fully-formed works at the age of 15 or 16, wrote furiously
and with inspiration for three years or so, and then stopped writing forever at
the age of 19. It wasn’t death that felled him. He simply detached himself from
poetry, detached himself from former bohemian friends, and went off in quest of
an “ordinary” life as far as possible from his old haunts. Dying at 37, he had
written no poetry for 18 years.
He has become an archetype (and
regrettably also a cliché) – the inspired teenage poet who got lost in the
adult world. Even before more recent poseurs got hold of Rimbaud’s image (see
my rude comments below), the teenage Dylan Thomas in the 1930s was already
describing himself as “the Rimbaud of Cymdonkin Drive”, conscious homage to a
fellow adolescent poet with a reputation for thumbing his nose at convention.
Rimbaud was becoming somebody
teenage scribblers aspired to be.
Pieced together in numerous
biographies, Rimbaud’s brief career as a poet is well documented. But what
happened to him after the poetry stopped? This is what concerns Charles Nicholl
in Somebody Else. Nicholl is an
Englishman with a taste for literary mysteries. The only other of his books
which I have read is The Reckoning
(1992), a convincing and detailed attempt to reconstruct what really happened
when Christopher Marlowe was murdered. Somebody
Else is specifically about Rimbaud’s last eleven unpoetic years in Africa.
The title comes from Rimbaud’s famous “Je est un autre” (“I is somebody else”),
a statement about the distinction between an author and the voice he adopts on
the page. But Nicholl has apparently chosen the title because Rimbaud clearly
became “somebody else” in a more literal sense once he ceased to be the
adolescent poet.
In order to get Rimbaud to
Africa, however, Nicholl has to spend the first quarter of his book telling us
of Rimbaud’s earlier life. So we get rehearsed the good little Catholic boy
from Charleville (there is a famous photograph, often reproduced, of Rimbaud on
the day of his First Communion); the runaway, uncouth teenager in Brussels,
Paris, London; the whole of his homo-erotic relationship with the older, and
vacillating, Paul Verlaine, including their explosive bust-up; and the strong
probability that the vagrant teenager was traumatised after being buggered by
soldiers. The isolate Rimbaud is such a unique figure that we tend to forget
his adolescent story was played out against the background of the
Franco-Prussian War, with troops tramping through city and countryside as the
boy’s negligent and absent soldier father had once done.
Rimbaud’s fierce and defiant
slovenliness is dwelt upon (in which particular the teenager was at least the
equal of the noisome Ernest Dowson). Despite a famous romanticised painting
showing Rimbaud at table with Verlaine and other poets, the reality seems to
have been that most of Verlaine’s café friends saw Rimbaud as an unwelcome,
intruding, crude, loud-mouthed kid. In terms of either camp-ness or adolescent
irony (they tend to be very similar), so much seems implied by the way Rimbaud
referred to his over-controlling mother as “la Mother” (using the English
word), and Verlaine and Rimbaud habitually called London “Leun-deun” when they
were scraping a living there.
Thus far the first quarter of
Nicholl’s book. At which point it must perforce become a minute searching of
fugitive documents and scraps of evidence as Nicholl reconstructs Rimbaud’s
post-poetic life. Nicholl unearths a lot, and is fair in warning us when he has
had to speculate.
After a couple of aimless years
wandering in Europe; after joining the Dutch army, travelling to Java, and then
deserting; Arthur Rimbaud headed for Africa. Here he really did become
“somebody else”, putting poetry totally behind him, never again having the
least interest in it, being impatient with arty people, and becoming a very
professional and enthusiastic trader. He was first based in Aden. Then he
worked mainly in Ethiopia (it was at the time of his sojourn there that
Ethiopia first turned itself into an indigenous empire). He reckoned his
accounts. He settled in Harar. He wrote dry reports for his employers of his
transactions and travels. He was taciturn, sun-tanned, rangy, and sociable
enough. He might for a while have had an Ethiopian mistress. Sometimes he
talked of marrying, and of having children and settling down – but he never
did. He was restless, he was never domestically settled, yet he was methodical
in his work.
From this book, you get the
distinct impression that the chief attraction of Africa to him was that it was
not Europe and it did not contain Europe’s chattering intellectuals, artists
and poets. You are also aware that Rimbaud’s fairly humdrum life in Africa
would hold no particular interest for us had Rimbaud not once been the
adolescent poet. Nicholl makes no reference at all to the wishful idea of some
commentators that Rimbaud was trying to earn enough money to live independently
and return to the literary life. There is not a scrap of evidence for this. But
there is much evidence that he frequently wished he had a son; and wanted that
son to be an engineer – something constructive and pragmatic and 180 degrees
away from poetry in cafés and the cloudy lyricism and pawing of Verlaine.
Finally Somebody Else gives us Rimbaud’s premature end. His right leg
became infected and cancerous. He underwent a painful portage from Harar to the
coast, and an equally painful journey to Marseilles. His leg was amputated. He
made a brief visit to his native Ardennes, then a train trip back to
Marseilles, where he died.
And here we come to a point of
contention where Nicholl could possibly be quite wrong.
Nicholl admits that Rimbaud’s
last real caregiver and faithful friend was his little sister Isabelle, who was
a devout Catholic. But Nicholl is sceptical of the account (for which Isabelle
is the only source) that Arthur was reconciled to the church in his last week
of life, and died a pious death. Possibly Nicholl is right to be sceptical, but
it is just as likely that he rejects Isabelle’s account (by which some earlier
biographers have set great store) mainly because it spoils the image of the
rebellious teenage poetic genius. In response, I would say that by the age of
37, Rimbaud was no longer the kid he had once been, and his working life for
the best part of 15 years had been one of un-rebellious conformity and
alienation from bohemianism. Like Baudelaire before him (and like James Joyce
after him), his reaction to the Catholicism in which he was raised was very
complex and was never a matter of simple rejection. In short, Isabelle’s story
of his end is just as likely to be true as not. We simply do not know.
Nicholl is probably on surer
ground when he dismisses the claim that Rimbaud was ever involved in the slave
trade when he was in Africa. In her detailed 1938 book Arthur Rimbaud (which I have before me as I write this notice), the
English biographer Enid Starkie seemed to produce good evidence that Rimbaud
was involved in both gun-running and the slave trade. Nicholl revisits her
evidence and makes a good case for discounting it. In an odd sort of way, I’d
have to say that Rimbaud’s not
being a slave-trader also damages the legend. There are, after all, those
deluded fans, who wish to associate literary figures with unforgivable
wickedness because it puts them in “the Legion of the Damned” or some such
tired phrase, and gives them a perverse glamour. (Incidentally, Nicholl devotes
some pages to telling us how much French biographers of Rimbaud detest
Starkie’s book, and have made up a rude name for the Englishwoman.)
Having quarrelled a little with
some aspects of Nicholl’s book, I now have to admit the two things that really
bug me about it. First, Nicholl is far too keen to see ‘prophetic’ elements in
Rimbaud’s poetry, which he interprets as specifically foretelling Rimbaud’s
later life in Africa. This is very dodgy as both interpretation and literary
criticism. The real achievement of the young poet gets lost. Second, he
trivialises and demeans his subject with glib references to, and comparisons
with, pop icons like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and the like, as if
Rimbaud really was merely the precursor of the Beats, free-verse improvisers
and those American teens who think poetry just means letting it all hang out
while posing for a camera with a sulky look. This is where I have to put in my
nasty comment about poseurs attaching themselves to Rimbaud. The myth of the
adolescent poet who rode on sheer wild inspiration leads to inanities like Edmund
White’s superficial short biography Arthur
Rimbaud: Double Life of a Rebel, which tries to set up Verlaine and Rimbaud
as the dream gay couple from SoHo and Rimbaud’s poetry as “proto-punk”; or
Christopher Hampton’s ridiculous 1967 play Total
Eclipse [made into a forgettable movie in the 1990s], which presents
Rimbaud’s long literary silence as a tragedy.
Frankly, I see no tragedy. Sure,
there is something touching in the fact that the only verifiable images we have
of Rimbaud in Africa are two indistinct photographs, which could be of anyone.
There’s an effect of tantalising mystery to this. But my chief impression in
reading Rimbaud’s poetry is of an adult intelligence inside a teenage
sensibility – and when that teenage sensibility was gone, the adult
intelligence moved on. Le Bateau Ivre
and Une Saison en Enfer are works of
literary genius because they are such brilliant and clear expositions of an
adolescent mind. Beyond that adolescent sensibility, Rimbaud ceased to be a
poet.
As an excellent critic of his own
work, one of Rimbaud’s best decisions was to stop writing when he had nothing
more to say. This was not tragedy. It was clear judgement and evidence of a man
growing up.
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