Rimbaud: sophist of insanity.(Critical Essay)

Stephane Mallarme caught a glimpse of Arthur Rimbaud on only one occasion and it was the younger poet's hands that stuck in his memory. These were, he later wrote, "vast hands, red with sores" which prompted the fastidious Mallarmd to say that "there was something defiantly or perversely emphatic about him, reminiscent of a working girl, specifically a laundress." A Belgian judge was less squeamish, remarking that Rimbaud had "the hands of a strangler." As Graham Robb, his latest and best biographer, remarks wryly, "these were not the delicate appendages from which elegant verses flow."(1) Rough, country hands, adapted to rural chores, one might think, rather than to battering French literature (along with a few of its feebler practitioners), and yet, if anyone merits the questionable distinction of literary demolisher, it is Rimbaud. With only a few savage but well-aimed swings of his rhetorical wrecking ball he seemed to fracture and upend all the flimsy subterfuges of the Parnassians among whom, to his signal disgust, he found himself whenever he fled to Paris from dreary Charleville. The famous injunction of his mentor, lover, and alter ego Verlaine, "Take eloquence and wring its neck!" (Prends l'eloquence et tords-lui le cou!), might have been (and probably was) penned with cudgel-fisted Rimbaud in mind.

His coarse and oversized hands are but the most flagrant anomaly in the person of Rimbaud. The famous photographs by Etienne Carjat, taken in October and December of 1871, when the poet was seventeen, reveal a face of exquisite hostility. The boyish cowlicks of his unruly hair belie the calm coldness of his gaze, though there is something unbearably sad in the slight lift of the eyebrows and the still-childish lips. From our perspective, one hundred and ten years after his death, it is not so much Rimbaud's rebelliousness which impresses as his precocious aplomb. The rustic with the unsightly paws was also the star Latinist at the College de Charleville and could improvise prize-winning Latin poems, in perfect meter and syntax, virtually on demand. Despite his much-vaunted "delirium" and his "derangement of the senses" Rimbaud is the most classical of poetic hooligans, drawing on a rhetorical facility that might have earned him the admiration of Bossuet and Chateaubriand.

Graham Robb's superb account of this strange prodigy's unsavory life provides all that the English-speaking reader needs for a better appreciation of Rimbaud, except for the works themselves. The forty-five illustrations include most of the known photographs of Rimbaud, as well as his reputed sketch of his mother; there also are photos of his friends, teachers, literary contemporaries, and even the houses in which he lived both as a child and later in Aden and Harar. (One of the most beautiful photographs here--of a coffee merchant in Harar--Rimbaud took himself). There are clear maps to help the reader trace Rimbauds many treks through Abyssinia and the Horn of Africa. Robb has thought to include a Rimbaud family tree and a chronology of historical events. The notes and bibliography are succinct but expert, and the French texts of all lines and verses cited are given in an appendix (Robb's translations are merely serviceable and so the original texts are essential). Best of all, Robb writes gracefully and lucidly, the narrative never flags, and there are many sly and ironic asides to lighten the spectacular misery of the account. Thus, at one point, dearly exasperated by the antics of his poet, Robb observes: "While the readers of poetes maudits often identify with the poets themselves, critics and biographers tend to identify with the parents."

Robb does not dwell on it unduly, but the chief obstacle for any biographer of Rimbaud is the thick cladding of adulation which his admirers and imitators have superimposed upon him. Jean Cocteau summed this up nicely in Le passe defini, his autobiography (oddly not cited by Robb), when he remarked, in a malicious play on Rimbaud's wonderful poem "The Lice Seekers" (Les chercheuses de poux), that the poet needed to be cleansed of the "lice of exegesis" that had infested both his life and his work. Cocteau railed against the exegetes but Robb, more effectively, prefers to let the evidence speak for itself. In so doing he has given the fullest and most nuanced delousing of Rimbaud to date.

There is probably no contortion in the repertoire of revolt, from the least tic of rebellion to the most operatic spasm, that Rimbaud did not strive to embody. A Season in Hell (1873), his masterpiece, is a seething repository of mutinous attitudes. There seems to be nothing and no one whom he does not denounce, including-quite properly--himself. And when he has finished jibing at and anathematizing all social institutions, from the bourgeois family to the schools, the church, the military, and the state and, in&ed, France itself, he rebels against rebellion and, in what is perhaps the most outrageous and puzzling of his postures, slinks abjectly to the foot of the Cross. In almost the same breath he can be fierily pious and impishly blasphemous, and both stances appear legitimate from this teenager of genius, at once seraph and oaf. Rimbaud's grandest refusal, and the one for which he has been lambasted by his epigones, was of literature itself. Small wonder that this definitive rejection still smarts: For a French poet to turn his back on literature and its concomitant share of la Gloire is almost as monstrous an abomination as if he had denounced Chateau d'Yquem or forsaken roquefort.

As Albert Camus pointed out long ago, an unusually wide gap separates Rimbaud's life and work; for Camus, it was the contradiction between the furious rebel of the poetry and the (later) gunrunner of Harar, compulsively clutching his money belt, that puzzled and confounded belief. But the antinomies go much deeper. At many pages of Graham Robb's biography, I found myself won&ring whether this repellent adolescent, with his obsessive anxieties about money, military conscription, and his duty-driven mother, could be the same poet who had written such utterances as "I dreamt crusades, unrecorded voyages of exploration, history-less republics, stifled wars of religion, upheavals of custom, displacement of races and of continents: I believed in all the sorceries."

Especially ina Season in Hell, Rimbaud is the poet of crystallized attitudes, of flash-frozen poses. He &livers statements that appear throwaway and yet, the more nonchalant they seem, the more incisively they ring. He is a master of the precisely calibrated impromptu: "I shall return with iron limbs, my skin darkened, my eye furious" or "Women take care of those fierce convalescents come back from hot climes" a line that has an eerie premonitory feel, given Rimbaud's final months. He spins out day-dreams with such compression that they turn aphoristic. At these moments the reader realizes that Rimbaud is not so much a poet as a moralist and that he is the true heir, not of Baudelaire or Victor Hugo, but of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Joubert. (Paul Claudel, who saw Rimbaud as "a mystic in the savage state" was the first to comment upon the queer affinity that links the poet, particularly in his prose masterpieces, to such predecessors as Pascal.) Even his most impudent declarations have the shape and cadence of maxims; they are burrs of words that hook the memory. Moreover, by casting his purely personal visions, opinions, and experiences in the iron-clad form of the epigram, he confers upon even his slightest words the force of a factitious universality: "The best is to sleep dead-drunk on the beach" or "Slaves, let us not curse life" or "Love must be reinvented." The list could be extended almost indefinitely.