Six: ARTHUR RIMBAUD
Six: ARTHUR RIMBAUD
I
In the Paris of the late eighties, when men of letters met for a p’tit verre or a glass of coffee at a boulevard café, a question was often asked that had no answer but a shrug—what in heaven’s name had become of Arthur Rimbaud, the poet? The older men remembered him well, this overgrown, unmannerly whelp of eighteen who had suddenly appeared among them from some dull town in the Ardennes, and had made his way into the literary heart of things; they remembered the sensation which had followed Verlaine’s publication of his poetry.
What liberties the boy had taken with the spirit and the forms of verse; the young wipe-nose-on-his-sleeve had disordered the whole world of poetry with his free rhymes, his poems in prose, his prose in poems, and his raving sonnets on the colours of vowels. “I accustomed myself,” he had said, “to direct hallucination, and managed quite easily to see a mosque where stood a factory, a school of drums kept by angels, wagons on the roads of heaven, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters and mysteries, a whole vaudeville, in fact, lifted heads of terror before me.” He had written of a day in spring, “Lying sprawled in the valley one feels that the earth is nuptial and overbrims with blood.” A strange eighteen-year-old! Some remembered the boy in his square-cut, double-breasted jacket of the seventies, his little, flat, pancake hat, pipe, and long, womanish hair hiding the back of his collar and touching his shoulders.
And now the younger generation were reading him with enthusiasm, copying his mood and manner, and annoying their elders with questions about him. Tell us of Arthur Rimbaud. Is he still alive? Did he ever actually exist? Is he simply a ghost whose name Verlaine has chosen as a pseudonym?
“Dead crazy, or king of a desert island,” said the bookish Vanier to a young student stirred by the reading of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. “On several occasions there have been rumors of his death,” said Paul Verlaine. “We can not confirm the news, and would be saddened by finding it the truth.”