Disaster Was My God

Prologue

Epilogue

Although this book seeks to be faithful to Rimbaud’s character, artistic aims, and the general trajectory of his life, it is not, as fiction, captive to the facts or the strict flow of events. Quite the contrary.

In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts—and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems—the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors. To be, if you will, more allegorical than historical, as befits a legend. I do this cheerfully, respectfully, and without apology.

This book, then, is as represented—fiction.

Prologue
  

ROCHE, A FARM IN THE ARDENNES OF FRANCE
,
AUGUST 1901,
TEN YEARS AFTER RIMBAUD’S DEATH

Raising the Dead

The gravedigger raises his pick, then drives it, with a cough, into the hard, rocky soil. And there in a black gig, not thirty feet away, sits the old woman draped in black veil, a pool of shadow watching the man’s every move. Raise the dead.

For behind the gravedigger, laid to the side in the grass, are two now-to-be discarded grave markers, white, like upturned faces to the sun. Such was the gravedigger’s hard task today, to rebury the old woman’s two children, two of the four, a daughter gone for twenty-five years and the son, the famous poet Arthur Rimbaud, for almost ten. When
clang
. The gravedigger’s pick strikes another large stone.

“Careful.”
The veil stirs, revealing a glimpse of craggy face and spud-like nose. “Monsieur Loupot, there is no hurry.
Obviously.
”

“Madame—”

“
Veuve
. Widow,” she retorts in an unhand-me voice. “Do you forget the conversation we had earlier? You will call me Veuve Rimbaud. And as for all these rocks, do you blame the shovel? Do you blame the pick? Who, then, Monsieur? God above?”

“Unavoidable,” replies Loupot, a solid man, beefy, mustached, and sunburned. Beery-smelling, she thinks. And the insolence of him, holding out a rock as he adds, “There is a reason, Veuve Rimbaud, why your farm is named Roche.”

“What?” she says, now aroused, raising the veil, like two black wings. “So we surrender to the rocks? To break the legs of our cows and horses?”

“But, Madame, please, as I have told you—repeatedly. I did not dig this grave or leave these stones. On this you have my word.”

“Words,” she sneers, dropping the veil. “For you, Monsieur, I have but one word—
dig
.”

D
ig, then. For once unearthed, away they will go, these two old coffins. Away from Roche they will go to the town
cimetière
of Charleville, lofty, sanctified ground at the summit of the rue de Mantoue, the main avenue, where a tall budded cross stands atop an old stone arch. There, with a groan, when the church bells toll eight, an ancient watchman slowly swings shut the iron gates, then padlocks them against thrill seekers and wandering lovers—against any who might disturb the peace of this
petit village
.

Stone chapels. Urns. Obelisks. Commandment-like stones. Beneath the cinder paths of this marble forest lie Charleville’s finest families: Blairon, Corneau, Demangel, Tanton-Bechefer—folk bunched in their old-fashioned suits and cravats, wilted corsages and gowns of lace, their rosaries tied like mittens round their withered fingers.

As one might divine, however, the old woman’s family does not flow from such exalted bloodlines.
Au contraire
. Her people are mere peasants, granted from high, as it were, conspicuous exemption into this exclusive club. And, loath as she is to admit it, only because her dead son wrote such deathless works as “Vowels,” “The Drunken Boat,”
A Season in Hell
, and his cycle
Illuminations
, virtually all completed by the age of twenty. Consider just one, his sonnet “Vowels,” an early masterpiece written in 1871, at the age of sixteen, and this in a discipline in which, unlike music or mathematics, prodigy is almost unheard of, and all for the very evident reason that, at that age, most of us are as impulsive and unformed as we are lacking in life experience. Start there, then consider a work that in sensibility and diction is decades ahead of its time.
Revolutionary, in fact. And, unlike the work of virtually any prodigy in literature, is still read, passionately admired, and even now genuinely disruptive. Poetry that comes with a sword:

Vowels

But then just a few years beyond this time, at twenty or so—at the point when most careers have barely begun—Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing. Utterly stopped. Stopped forever, an act itself as rare as literary prodigy. Even more troubling, Rimbaud ended his career by denouncing
—in
writing, and indeed in one of his greatest works, the long prose poem
A Season in Hell
—the cheap sophistry of writing and the cheat of art itself: