Disaster Was My God (22 page)

And yet, very importantly, he was deciding, with guillotinelike swiftness, what he hated or merely found boring, and all while realizing the very things he would not do, or be, or give the reading public—as if he much cared about
that
.

Particularly nauseating to him was the overly artistic, the idolization and trivialization of “art”—of art as “pursuit,” or a “calling,” or, still worse, a “profession.” In fact, in his rants about contemporaries—the fossils, the academicians, the dead, and the imbeciles—he rankled at the mere technicians, the same who, as he put it, insisted on zoological principles when he wanted a five-winged bird. Meaning that, almost by the month, he would renounce everything, reverse course, then lash himself to another mast, bound for some new destination.

But what of his contemporaries? As counter-Romantics, the Parnassians fled emotion, or at least genuinely
emotional
emotion of the base and vulgar variety experienced by ordinary humans. Sculptors of the word, they were all about form. As for subject matter and imagery, they thrilled to the bygone glories of antiquity—heraldic horses and mythological beasts and gazeless statues of chiseled alabaster. Here, to
make it more concrete, examples are warranted. Accurate examples. And so, in an effort to elevate
sense
over some perhaps contrived metrical structure, the following poem excerpts—all taken from Rimbaud’s immediate contemporaries—are rendered in
prose
. Take this passage, for example, from the work of their putative leader, Théodore de Banville, the same to whom the boy had sent his first self-conscious appeal the year before:

There was the equally rococo José-Maria de Heredia, who wrote with great flourish about the queenly Ariadne and Bacchus, the god of the grape, bringing vast orgy in his wake:

There was also Théophile Gautier, tapping his magic wand before rendering in webs of purest spun sugar:

Symphony in white major

There were others, of course. “For us, a sorrowful generation consumed by visions and insulted by his angelic sloth,” Rimbaud wrote, “Musset is fourteen times worse! O the tedious tales and proverbs.”

Indeed, for our teenage apprentice, his contemporaries—with two conspicuous exceptions—fell into three categories: the dead, the imbeciles, and the merely innocent—let us not pause overmuch.

Paul Verlaine, though, was a real poet, he declared. But Baudelaire, he said, was the first seer, the
king
of poets, a real god. Consider this from Baudelaire’s “Consecration,” a poem that—quite aside from its vitriolic power and clarity—spoke of feelings the boy could not fail to notice:

Or this from Baudelaire’s “Lethe”:

The boy’s harsh judgments made him no less harsh with his own work. “Burn it,” he ordered his old friend Delahaye, shoving at him another mass of papers. And Delahaye promised. But, like many a designated burner, Delahaye lied and dithered and kept it safe. And although, on some level, Rimbaud knew this, he had achieved his primary objective. He had gotten it out of him, and away from him, like a tapeworm pulled from his guts. So much for the Muse.

But then, out of all this negativity, came something positive, a revelation that no poet or artist of his time ever had had, or could have had. A transformation of this magnitude required tremendous pressure and fracture, bad blood, bad history. In short, a role for which the kid was perfect.

First, he had the screwup advantage. Having left the
collège
with no baccalaureate, not only had he failed spectacularly but he had done what no local child had ever done—willfully turned himself into a lewd public menace. No interest in bathing. No job. No girl. And yet, despite his
outward rebellion, as the boy knew too well, he was stuck, awaiting further orders for a mission that remained unclear.

Looking for clues toward his great project, he had ransacked the school library and stolen every book he could stuff down his trousers. And yet, as we’ve seen, he found little to love, and almost nothing to teach him—other, of course, than what he parodied and stole from lesser poets with neither acknowledgment nor apology. As the young vandal wrote around this time, “Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.”

It was then that he experienced the first shocks of this revolutionary project. It came one day when he actually
saw
himself, like a face in a pool—saw the child self, now grown, that all his life he had harbored. Of course many a child harbors—at least for a while—an imaginary friend. But upon taking up residence, Rimbaud’s double had remained hidden in him, much as the boy Rimbaud had once hidden in his father’s military tunic, a fortress of blue and gold braid that smelled of sweat and the tropics. That is, until his mother found it and burnt it. Threw it, evil thing, on a pile of straw, smoking and stinking like horsehair as she turned it with a pitchfork.

Hiding, then, was the only solution. At school, during the morning roll call, when the boy said “present,” he was in fact absent—his double did the prize boy’s grind work. And so until now, without fully realizing or acknowledging it, he was two: the one who wrote it and the one who then
un
wrote it, refuted it, then gave it away, another bastard left on a church stoop.

It was then, in his doubleness, that the first great revelation hit him:
Je est un autre
. I is someone else.

I is someone else?
In 1871, this was gibberish. Fractured grammar. Crazy talk. Other than the denizens of asylums, people, like blocks of stone, were whole beings with names and jobs and addresses, not separate compartments and selves—why, selves wasn’t even a concept. And so, like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus, his manifesto was born in a revolutionary letter, written in one frenzied night, then sent to the
two people who might appreciate it, his pal Demeny and Georges Izambard, his former teacher, who found a fat letter in his morning post. What was the man to make of this? It was Rimbaud’s now famous letter of the
voyant
—the seer. Seeing, in this case, far into the next century, how art would be waged, art as war, war as art. It began, familiarly enough, with a round of insult:

It was mad, of course. Why, at one point the boy said the poet soul must be made “monstrous,” then added: “Imagine a man implanting and
cultivating warts on his face.” Warts! thought Izambard. Well, there was only one thing to do with such nonsense and that was to do what any sensible person would have done under the circumstances. Izambard put the letter in a box, then promptly forgot all about it.

23
Two Poles

But, other than colossal laziness, there was another reason Mme. Rimbaud couldn’t get this poltergeist out of her house. For late that summer, as the war was winding down, after yet another failed breakout, the kid returned with two uncharacteristically autobiographical poems. Two poles, one describing something wonderful and the other something horrible. Two facts as different as heaven and hell.

First, the happy poem, the happiest, most beatific and unself-conscious poem that he had ever written or would write.

In fact, had the other poem not happened—or rather, had the tragedy behind the poem not happened—well, who knows, the boy’s writings might have pointed toward a life of projective joy. Or at least a degree of serenity before the facts of who he actually was.

Green—green was what invaded him that day when he came upon a green inn called the Green Cabaret. All green. Green the willows and the grape arbor, green the gables. Green the walls, the chairs, the tables—green everything, a green as green as his hunger as he stared through the green window. But greenest of all was the buxom young serving maid dressed all in green in a dirndl with green flounces. Who then bent down to serve a man—slyly down, sweeping him with bosom, braids, and ribbons. When,
wham
, dinner was served.