Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

TIME STUMPS THE BEST OF INTENTIONS

            So, once again, the compulsion to watch a very old film because Youtube allows me to do so, and the discovery that what was once so highly praised can now look painfully stagey and dated in its technique. And once again that mystery of how an audience’s perceptions can change as technology and techniques change [look up the posting “Two Courses of Fury” on the index at right].

            The film in this case is Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby, made in 1932. Adapted from a French play by Maurice Rostand and originally called first The Man I Killed, then The Fifth Commandment, the film apparently had its title changed to the gentler Broken Lullaby because Paramount Pictures were afraid the original proposed titles would raise the wrong sort of audience expectations. (Although it was actually released in Britain as The Man I Killed). On Youtube I discover a beautifully restored print of it, every image clear and unscratched and with a good, un-hissing soundtrack.

Sophisticated in my appreciation of early sound films, I am fully prepared for the conventions of the time. I have reasonably high expectations of this film made twenty years before I was born because (thanks to Halliwell’s Film Guide) I know that, in the 1930s, reputable people like the documentary film-maker John Grierson and the playwright Robert E. Sherwood called it a wonderful film and rated it the best talkie so far made.

So it must have something going for it.

It begins splendidly, with the type of ironical framing and shot composition for which Lubitsch was famed. The scene is Paris in 1919 at the time the French are celebrating their victory in the Great War. There is a huge military parade. Hundreds of uniformed French troops stride by to military bands, in what are clearly NOT newsreel shots (Paramount must have spent a fortune for such scenes). But in one shot, the passing warriors are filmed from under the crotch of a veteran leaning on crutches and missing one leg. And when cannon fire a victory salute, we cut to a shell-shocked soldier in a military hospital screaming in terror.

The scene moves to a cathedral where a victory mass is being celebrated with a congregation made up exclusively of military men. (Again, a huge expense for Paramount). On the soundtrack, the priest’s voice is heard preaching a sermon about duty and victory and welcoming peace, but as the voice continues, the camera slides along at ground level, showing all the ceremonial swords the officers are wearing, poking out from the ends of the pews; and the camera shows us the soldiers’ medals and their military boots with spurs. The accoutrements of war contradict what the priest’s voice is saying. The irony is rubbed in even further when the camera tracks in to a close-up of a crucifix and the naked and dying Christ. This war-like celebration is really at odds with the Prince of Peace.

If Broken Lullaby went no further than these opening montages, then we would recognize Lubitsch’s mastery of form and understand the praise the film once won. But alas, the characters begin to speak and the spell is broken.

After the mass is over and the soldiers depart, the camera gives us a long-shot of the empty cathedral and then slowly, slowly tracks in to a pair of hands clutched in desperate prayer in one of the pews. They belong to a young, conscience-stricken French soldier Paul (Phillips Holmes) who has never got over his sense of guilt at having killed, face to face, a German soldier in a trench. (When we see a flashback of the event, it’s like a reversal of the famous sequence in the film All Quiet on the Western Front, made two years earlier, in which it is a German soldier conscience-stricken at having bayoneted a Frenchman).

Paul approaches the priest and asks for absolution after having confessed, “I murdered a man”. The priest is kind to him, tells him he only did his duty as a soldier, and grants him absolution. But the young man, hysterical in his delivery, says this is not good enough. He is accused of blasphemy by the priest when he says “Is this the best I can get in the house of God?”

Paul is a musician. He knows the identity of Walter, the German soldier he killed, and the address of Walter’s family in Germany, because he read letters he found on the corpse. He determines that the only way he can atone for his sin and set his soul at rest is to travel to Germany, meet with Walter’s family, and beg for forgiveness.

This he attempts to do.

In Germany, he is welcomed into the house of Walter’s father (Lionel Barrymore) after he is seen grieving at Walter’s grave. But he cannot bring himself to confess that he was the enemy soldier who killed Walter. Instead he lets the family – including Walter’s fiancée Elsa (Nancy Carroll) – understand that he knew Walter as a fellow musician and friend when Walter was studying in Paris before the war. On this basis, the family come to accept and then to love him. This is in spite of the film’s suggestions of continuing and fiercely anti-French feeling in post-war Germany. In one sequence Walter’s father, formerly the most chauvinistic of Germans, defies his patriotic beer-drinking friends in a restaurant, by standing up and declaring that the war their sons have just fought was pointless and has brought as much suffering and grief to French as to German. He is applauded only by a crippled young German ex-soldier, who is not part of the older (and clearly non-combatant) drinking group of patriots.

The crisis comes when at last Elsa discovers Paul’s secret. She forgives him. She gets him to swear that he will never tell the rest of Walter’s family that he killed Walter. He agrees to this. Paul and Elsa are clearly in love. Possibly they will marry.

The film ends with Paul playing his violin and Elsa playing the piano in harmonious parlour duet, to the delight of Walter’s father. Love, humanity, music and forgiveness have overcome international hatreds.

Like all synopses, this tells you nothing of the quality of the work. It merely tells you a series of events.

The sad fact is that, in spite of a few cinematic touches, Broken Lullaby becomes a very stilted and somewhat ranty stage-play after the masterly opening sequences set in Paris. I am aware that sound-recording on film was only a few years old when it was made, and that camera and recording equipment were much more ponderous and difficult to move than they were even a decade later. But allowing for all this, and even in comparison with the better films of its era, Broken Lullaby lets long, dead pauses to develop between lines of dialogue as if the actors are not used to the rhythms of real conversation. And when the dialogue comes it is as declarative as a set of headlines, spelling out themes and ideas with an embarrassing obviousness. There is no nuance here – just a message hammered.

As a small-town German doctor, Lionel Barrymore is a good small-town American doctor. By the standards of her age, Nancy Carroll was a pretty blonde actress, but of no discernible talent. Then there is the problem of Phillips Holmes in the leading role. Phillips Holmes was one of those actors who had every opportunity to become a major star, but who never quite made it. As well as starring in this, he was given the lead in Josef von Sternberg’s version of An American Tragedy and the lead in an early version of Great Expectations (eclipsed by the brilliant version David Lean made in 1946). But, well before his death in an air crash at the age of 35, he failed to click with the public and sank into minor roles – with very good reason. In Broken Lullaby he can be hysterical, as he is in the confession scene, and he can swoon away into a faint, as he does three or four times in the film. But he can never convince you that Paul is a real human being. He has only two ways of delivering dialogue – woodenly or manically. There is nothing in between.

Lubitsch was from Germany and was a stalwart of German cinema before he moved to Hollywood. On the plastic level, the studio’s version of a small German town is convincing enough. When, in the flashback scene to wartime, we see Walter’s letters, they are considerately written in English for the benefit of the English-speaking audience (a cinematic convention that would no longer “play”). But in the German small town, street signs and hoardings are in German, as Lubitsch would doubtless have insisted they be. Yet the English language and bearing of the actors constantly breaks the sense of authenticity. We cannot shake the impression that this hymn to international solidarity was strictly made in Hollywood.

So to the big mystery.

Why was it so highly praised by highbrows in its day?

The sheer film craft of the opening sequences is probably part of the reason, but I would suggest that the film’s historical context has more to do with it. In 1932, internationalism and sentimental pacifism had a huge emotional pull. We would have to be hard-hearted not to understand why, and we would have to lack all sense of context if we were to point out that Hitler was only one year away from power and that the whole attitude to war was about to change once again. So, instead of being a powerfully emotional film for us, Broken Lullaby is an historical artefact, and an illustration of how much film techniques have changed. You sympathise with its humane sentiment, but you can’t help hearing how loudly it creaks.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books 

“THE LIFEGUARD, Poems 2008-2013” by Ian Wedde (Auckland University Press, $NZ27:99). “THE BLUE COAT” by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, $NZ24:99)

            Yoking two quite different poets together in one review is a very artificial thing to do. What do Ian Wedde and Elizabeth Smither have in common, apart from being well-established New Zealand poets both, this time, published by the same publisher?

            The answer is – not a great deal. Wedde (current NZ Poet Laureate) prefers to work in longer, reflective forms. Smither is more the miniaturist. Wedde is philosophical, and when his humour comes, it tends to be dark irony. Smither bubbles and stabs with sharp observation and playful wit.

            They sit together here only by the accident of my choosing so to situate them.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

            It would be a complete misrepresentation to call Ian Wedde’s latest collection of poetry The Lifeguard a death-haunted book. Its concerns are too broad for that. But there is a distinct concern with mortality, an awareness of time’s winged chariot and an attempt to reckon up what this life amounts to in the end. Plus some wistful recalls to a past that is definitely gone.

Wedde works here in long sequences – the volume is really made up of five of them – in which he turns over his themes, looks at them from different angles, and is able to link the most varied images.

The nine-part title sequence “The Lifeguard” is sustained by the simplest of conceits. The beaches of the east are calm and superficial. There people sport and play. The beaches of the west are wild and tragic. There people drown in the surf. There is a lifeguard on each beach – he on the east is often forgotten by pleasure-seekers. He on the west is necessary and stern. But the rising sun of the east is an age-old symbol of life beginning; and the sun “going west” is an age-old symbol of death.

It is impossible for an Aucklander to read this sequence without at once contrasting benign, calm Milford, or Takapuna or Eastern Beaches, or the inner Waitemata harbour in the east; with wild black-sanded Piha and Whatipu and Bethell’s and Karekare in the west (although there is a section of the sequence with clear references to urban Wellington). But in fact Ian Wedde names no specific names. The sequence is not primarily geographical description. It is a meditation on life and death and how they are balanced and how they are approached and the fearful possibility that there might be nothing beyond them.

Contrasting potentialities of life are expressed in;

            “…days

that smash themselves against

the galloping thigh of lifeguards

on the western flanks of this god-forsaken place”

and

            “the dawns that gild the shoulders

of giggling vacationers

up all night celebrating their windfall lives

on the eastern beaches.”

In this contrast, the word “lifeguard” itself takes on a new meaning. The lifeguard is a life guide, saving us from succumbing to comforting illusions about what life is, even as we plod to our inevitable end:

“He’s idling at the tide-mark, the lifeguard,

where early-morning bathers

blink at the sunrise that surprises them

every time they see it –

every time they beach themselves anew,

streaming warm brine

from bodies that feel their mortal weight

press footprints in the sand.

Bewildered by my own dismay,

I join them as we plod

like Galapagos turtles

towards our denouement….”

The imagery may be of New Zealand (or the Galapagos), but the grasp of the sequence is universal. Classical poets peep in. In a homage to Theocritus, Cyclops becomes a one-eyed lifeguard lamenting. Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo are reworked as modern partygoers waking up to one more hung-over, self-regarding dawn. In a later section Polyphemus watches the tragic west and Narcissus the trivial east. Fears of mortality lead to a wish for oblivion and

“…the never-too-late serenades

of cicadas at summer’s end

makes me long for the gritty obscurity

of the west’s waves

or the suave silence of eastern lagoons

through which pouting fish

mutely swim…”

This in turn leads to reflections on the impossibility of imagining a nullity, a void after death. Yet there is hope in the final section of the sequence, in memory of a sailor great-grandfather, with the suggestion that somehow his hopes (for a new land) might be renewed, even in the way tides wash in and out and cleanse.

My account of this title sequence is far too schematic as, regrettably, reviews and summaries tend to be. Throughout these pages of loose couplets, Ian Wedde is in control of something far more varied, allusive and rich in imagery than I have been able to suggest here. And repeated references to a clearing in a forest do suggests that there might be an alternative attitude to life and death than a hard contrast of warm beginnings and tragic endings.

I have deliberately dwelt on this title sequence because it is the most impressive thing in The Lifeguard. The four sequences that follow it do, however, express similar concerns, as when the sequence “Help!” asks:

“What do you want me to say? That even the albatross,

whose wingspan measures dawn and dusk,

turns, sooner or later, and heads for home?”

            “Help!” also has a healthy strain of self-mocking irony with its reference to

“The draughty whine of my own voice

imploring fate to back off.”

The sequence “The Look” is a reworking of the sequence “The Sheen” from Wedde’s 2009 collection Good Business. Again, the dichotomy of east and west is alluded to, but here there is the theme of whether there is anything at all behind appearances – as seen by different referenced eyes. In both “Help!” and “The Look” the lines are longer and more languid than the couplets of “The Lifeguard”. After “Three Elegies” comes “Shadow Stands Up” a sequence of twenty poems with terser, shorter lines, with a strong autobiographical undercurrent and with specifically Auckland references (Victoria Park, Ponsonby, Albert Park etc). There are recurring images of a Link bus circling the inner city, as if life is a circle or a return to the beginning time; and there is something like nostalgia for the poet’s former self as he was in 1969. The shadow that stands up is the shadow of our former selves.

Fittingly for this whole collection, the last words of this final sequence are “traffic going west”.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

The 61 short and individual poems of Elizabeth Smither’s The Blue Coat do not form a sequence of any sort. Each is a thing in itself. But there are strings of meaning and shared themes in consecutive poems.

            Consider.

            Following on from each other there are poems about lemon tees, about roses, about daffodils, about grass, about wind in the garden. A poem about having a bra fitted; is followed by a poem about dressing and seeing a woman across the road dressing; is followed by a poem about a small child helping his mother to dress; is followed by poem about a dressing gown worn by a woman who had given birth - and then we are into poems about birth and parenthood.

            Likewise a poem about the old-fashioned way in which library books were once issued (with date-stamps) is followed by a poem ticking off a reader for marking a copy of The Great Gatsby with inane comments. And side-by-side are poems about the poet’s father’s love of Dickens and her mother clipping her fingernails.

            You see, then, that while each poem is an individual work, the sensibility of the poet brings her back to the same topics, to similar perceptions, to an insistence on the small and the local and nature as experienced in a backyard. I do not believe these poems were written in the order in which they are presented to us; but that the author has chosen to so arrange them while compiling this collection is overt acknowledgement of her interests.

There is that matter of domesticity – the small things of home life and experience which become heroic, as in the poem “Fountain”, where clipping a tall hedge is “a labour / like painting the tall sides of a green ship.” There is also the sense that life is often blessed exactly by those things that are not readily perceived or rationalised. In the poem “Leaf Flurry Tram”, there is physical and mobile beauty in the leaves kicked up in the tram’s passing, but

“Those inside are unaware

of what beauty follows them –

leaves from the track dancing up

to the passing current of air

and staying suspended

until the eddy moves on.”

Indeed there is an insistence that the small and closely-observed is the most engrossing, as when the poem “The Underside of the Miniature Plane Tree” tells us that

                        “Against a sky that

has poured greyness out for a whole day

I look up into structures so intricate

and marvellous I think the Eiffel Tower

is the merest stick drawing and the stars

(if I could see them) spaced

for rudimentary learning for a

mathematical amateur.”

            A bumblebee trapped in a jar is in the same key.

Smither is interested in high art and music (poems about piano practice; a clarinet in an orchestra; Mozart; listening to music while gardening). She finds incongruities and ironies in little things - a chipped plate from a junk-shop is made beautiful by its use; nurses in a hospital pass by patents’ grief with calm efficiency; young women tearfully say farewell on a railway platform; babies are introduced to high art by being trundled through an art gallery. Inevitably there are poems about the death of friends.

Changed mores are noted. In  “The Wedding Lawn”, bride and groom have already long cohabited and the wedding ceremony is “an old and true passion revived for a day”. But there is a providential undertone to much of this volume. Far from each other in The Blue Coat are poems about stained glass and gargoyles, religious imagery by association. The final poem is a prayer before departing from a house. 

Something Old

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.

“SOMEBODY ELSE – Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891” by Charles Nicholl (first published 1997)

           

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.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

ARTHUR RIMBAUD TWICE OVER

I am setting myself up to be a complete pompous prat this week. So what’s new?

I have just been commenting on Charles Nicholls’ Somebody Else – Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891. This is an account of how Rimbaud lived in the years after he had given up poetry altogether.

Before I read my way through Rimbaud’s poetry, I was already aware of W.H.Auden’s sonnet about Rimbaud.

After reading Rimbaud’s oeuvre, and after becoming more aware of the legend that attaches itself to the man, Auden’s sonnet troubled me, especially its last line which seemed too neat and glib (“His truth acceptable to lying men”? Which truth? Which men? What lies?). Indeed, I thought Auden was succumbing to the romanticised version of the young poet’s life and experience. So I wrote my own poem, “Harar” (the name of the place where Rimbaud lived in Ethiopia). I adopted the harsher view that, in abandoning poetry, Rimbaud was growing up.

Re-reading Auden’s sonnet now, I appreciate that it is far more ambiguous than I first judged it. Maybe the homosexual Auden had feelings about Rimbaud’s life that I don’t have but (rational man that he was) he does hint at poetry as a destructive force, and does see value in Rimbaud’s escape. My own piece basically stamps its angry foot.

Anyway, here I reproduce the two poems side by side for your comparison, which is why you can now condemn me as a prat if you will. How dare I juxtapose my effort with the work of one of the 20th century’s finest? (Auden is readable, companionable and a poet I still return to often). Okay, so sue me. But here the two poems are anyway.

RIMBAUD 

The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetorician’s lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.
Drinks bought him by his weak and lyric friend
His senses systematically deranged,
To all accustomed nonsense put an end;
Till he from the lyre and weakness was estranged.
Verse was a special illness of the ear;
Integrity was not enough; that seemed
The hell of childhood: he must try again.
Now, galloping through Africa, he dreamed
Of a new self, the son, the engineer,
His truth acceptable to lying men.

HARAR 

(“Je est un autre”) 

Why should we ever think fog and drink
are truer than rocks, sunlight
and hard blue distances?
There is more truth in a ledger
than in the greasy scraps I wrote
in shit-house and café.
My angry words a temper tantrum,
I could stamp my foot and mock
bourgeoisie, “la Mother”,
and go unwashed for weeks on end.
But soldiers who made me take it
up the arse taught truly
- there was no growth in a leap
from childhood to a pederast’s
pawing.

The desert and the distance – they are true.
And black coffee. And sunburn.
And slavers in markets.
And shipments. And the march of profit
and loss in their rival columns.
Like ants we work the world
over. I’ve left the nest, but do its business.
This is honest – names and facts.
To tell their own soft lies
leave the images and feelings.
All poets lie. My poetry is
in what I do not write.
Age filters out the lies –
fog, drink and shit-house glamour.
Kidstuff.