by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
Arthur Rimbaud turned his back on poetry at the age of 20, or around 1875. The rest of his life, 17 years, was spent traveling, first rambling through Europe, doing odd jobs, and finally, set up a business selling coffee and, ‘mostly outdated’ firearms in Ethiopia. He died without knowing that his last work, a prose poem Illuminations, had been published and highly esteemed. The first half of Rimbaud the poet receives adoration and the second half confusion, even some scorn; a fact one can only admit: “he surgically removed poetry from himself while still alive”, says the poet Mallarme. Author and philosopher Albert Camus goes further: “There is nothing to admire, nothing noble or even genuinely adventurous, in a man who committed “spiritual suicide” and became a bourgeois trafficker”.
I would have thought Mr. Camus would’ve got more of a kick out of Rimbaud’s biography. His strange absurd life. It is because he ‘settled’, and settled making money, that Camus writes this way; settling is spiritual suicide; you must continually live the tension of paradox. Rimbaud ought to have stayed put, perhaps even married, and then convinced his wife through philosophy that it was well and good that she should be ‘like his sister’ while he goes out playing Don Juan. I say, if you want and need and yearn after many women, then do it without any justification.
Rimbaud’s life is not like the passionate literary undergrad who you meet years later in some regular occupation. They have the mark of it on them but they know they didn’t live it for whatever reason. Rimbaud lived it, destroyed it, and floated in its wake. The second half of Rimbaud is Rimbaud after the “scum”; In a letter, Rimbaud talks about turning himself into “scum” in order to write, in order to be a seer, to create a new kind of poetry; ‘the idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering…’. He is around 16. He lets his hair grow long; swears; begins to drink; writes scatological poetry; neglects his attire; runs away from home. Encouraged by a friend, he writes to Verlaine, a poet quickly becoming respected; Verlaine responds: “come, dear soul”. Verlaine treats the young boy to opium, hash, and alcohol, and his body – and they ramble around as vagrants. So far, so good. Verlaine eventually shoots Rimbaud in the wrist after a moment of drunken high drama. All this is proverbial. Verlaine goes on to become one of the leading symbolist poets in France; Rimbaud brought Ethiopian coffee to Europe and never spoke about his “previous life”.
As interesting as it all is, I don’t really care about all that. There are books and studies on Verlaine and Rimbaud and their time bumming about London and Paris. I like the picture, the self-portrait, of Rimbaud in a fez far removed from the bohemian world, somewhere in Harar, Ethiopia. Or him joining the Dutch army to get passage to Indonesia, then deserting, hiding in the jungle, finding passage back to France without being captured for desertion (which meant death); his life in Yemen and Harar, growing bored at his trade; his last-ditch effort to leave France after his leg was amputated. Or mainly the life of his mind in transition, on the run. He had apparently entirely forgotten this earlier self which wrote poetry, instinctively wrote poetry, forced by a will a gesture of poetic mind. Rimbaud forced a silence as far as his travels and seemingly random occupations.
In 1891, Rimbaud began to feel pain in his right knee in Aden, Yemen. After being unsuccessfully treated, he made his way back to France for what he hoped would be more adequate treatment. His right leg was amputated to no avail. He died in Marseille, in agony, of bone cancer. His remains were brought back to his hometown. Home at last, 17 years clean of poetry. And then, as he seemed to have predicted, the next generation of ‘cursed poets’ found him: “I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer… He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!”
The excessive, undaunted, intoxicated adolescence becomes his ghost roaming through Modernist Paris, over the Atlantic to New York in the 60s, to the West Coast in the 70s. The illumination of a shooting star remains so on the retina; who knows about its burnt-out demise. Rimbaud succumbed to his own unknown – the horrible workers joining ship have nothing to say about it, only something between Mallarme and Camus. They act like deranged lovers, like Verlaine’s. Take a young Jim Morrison reading Rimbaud, leading to his overdose; while the more Rimbaud read and thought about expression, glorying in the symbol and metaphor, the more he moved away from it, toward stability; as stable as turning profits and travel can be. What was his home country to him? After the right leg was amputated, he was already back on the way out, back to Africa, but the death throes sequestered him in Marseille.
So, he had forgotten, they say, about his days as L’enfant Terrible. But he was only the third European to set foot in Harar, and within two years of setting up shop there, to some success, he grew lethargic, bored. All restlessness. He would only return to his France to die. His body never forgot what it undertook to become a seer.
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Other articles by Fraser include A Look At Matsuo Basho and Marcus Aurelius and Wordsworth.
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