The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (8 page)

T
here is a passage in
A Season in Hell
(the section called “The Impossible”) which seems to provide the clue to the nature of the harrowing tragedy which Rimbaud’s life describes. That this is his last work—at the age of eighteen!—has a certain importance. Here his life divides evenly in two, or to look at it another way, it completes itself. Like Lucifer, Rimbaud succeeds in getting himself ejected from Heaven, the Heaven of Youth. He is vanquished not by an Archangel but by his own mother, who for him personifies authority. It is a fate which he abetted from the very beginning. The brilliant youth who possesses all talents, and who despises them, abruptly breaks his life in two. It is an act at once magnificent and horrible. Satan himself could not have devised a more cruel punishment than Arthur Rimbaud meted out to himself in his invincible pride and egotism. At the very threshold of manhood he surrenders his treasure (the genius of the creator) to “that secret instinct and power of death in us” which Amiel has described so well. The
“hydre intime”
so deforms the image of love that only defiance and impotence are discernible finally. Abandoning all hope of recovering the key to his lost innocence, Rimbaud plunges into the black pit in which the human spirit touches nadir, there to parody Krishna’s words: “With this myself I establish the whole Universe, and remain for ever separate.”

The passage which reveals his awareness of the issue and his choice, which is necessitous, runs as follows:

“If my spirit were always wide-awake from this moment on, we would soon arrive at the truth, which perhaps even now surrounds us with her angels, weeping! … If it had been awake up until now, I would not have given in to degenerate instincts, to a forgotten epoch! … If it had always been wide-awake, I would be sailing in full wisdom! …”

What it was that sealed his vision, and thereby brought about his doom, no one knows—and probably no one ever will know. His life, for all the facts at our disposal, remains as much a mystery as his genius. What we see clearly enough is that everything he prophesied about himself in the three years of illumination vouchsafed him is fulfilled in the years of wandering when he makes of himself a desert. How often in his writings appear the words desert, ennui, rage, toil! In the second half of his life these words attain a concrete significance which is devastating. He becomes everything that he predicted, everything that he was frightened of, everything that he raged against. The struggle to free himself of man-made fetters, to rise above human laws, codes, conventions, superstitions leads him nowhere. He becomes the slave of his own whims and caprices, a puppet who has nothing better to do than chalk up a few more trifling crimes to his credit in the log book of his own damnation.

That he gives in at the end when his body is but “a motionless stump,” as he puts it, is not to be dismissed with the sceptic’s sneer. Rimbaud was the rebel incarnate. It required every known degradation and humiliation, every form of laceration, to break the stubborn will which had been perverted at the source. He was perverse, untractable, adamant—until the very last hour. Until there was no more hope. He was one of the most desperate souls that ever stalked the earth. True, he gave up from exhaustion—but not before he had traveled every wrong road. At the end, having nothing to sustain his pride any longer, having nothing to look forward to except the jaws of death, deserted by all but the sister who loved him, there is nothing to do but to scream for mercy. His soul has been vanquished, it can but surrender. Long ago he had written:
“Je est un autre.”
Now the problem of “making the soul monstrous in the manner of the comprachicoes” reaches solution. That other self which was the I abdicates. It had known a long, hard reign; it had withstood every siege only to fall apart finally and dissolve into nothingness.

“I say that you must be a Seer … make yourself a Seer!” he had urged at the beginning of his career. And then suddenly it is over, his career, and he has no use for literature, not even his own. Then the trek, the desert, the burden of guilt, boredom, rage, toil—and humiliation, loneliness, pain, frustration, defeat and surrender. Out of this wilderness of conflicting emotions, out of the battlefield which he has made of his own mortal body, there blossoms in the very last hour the flower of faith. How the angels must have rejoiced! Never was there a more recalcitrant spirit than this proud Prince Arthur! Let us not overlook the fact that the poet who boasted that he had inherited his idolatry and love of sacrilege from his ancestors, the Gauls, was known in school as “the dirty little bigot.” It was a sobriquet which he acknowledged with pride. Always “with pride.” Whether it was the hoodlum in him or the bigot, the deserter or the slave-dealer, the angel or the demon, it is always with pride that he records the fact. But in the end it is the priest who shrives him who may be said to walk off with pride. To Rimbaud’s sister Isabelle he is reported to have said: “Your brother has faith, my child … He has faith, and I have never beheld such faith.”

It is the faith of one of the most desperate souls that ever thirsted for life. It is the faith born of the last hour, the last minute—
but it is faith
. What does it matter, therefore, how long he resisted, or how defiantly and tempestuously? He was not poor in spirit, he was mighty. He fought with every last ounce of strength that was in him. And that is why his name, like Lucifer’s, will ever remain a glorious one, why he will be claimed by this side and that. Even his enemies claim him! We know how the monument which was erected to him in his native town of Charleville was decapitated by the Germans and carried off during the last war’s invasion. How memorable, how prophetic, now seem the words which he flung at his friend Delahaye when the latter referred to the indubitable superiority of the German conquerors. “The idiots! Behind their blaring trumpets and beating drums they will return to their own country to eat sausages, believing that it is all over. But wait a little. Now they are all militarized from top to toe, and for a long time they will swallow all the rubbish of glory under treacherous masters who will never let go of them … I can see from now the rule of iron and madness that will imprison all of German society. And all that merely to be crushed in the end by some coalition!”

Yes, he may be claimed with equal justice by both sides. That is his glory, I repeat. It means that he embraced the darkness and the light. What he walked out on was the world of living death, the false world of culture and civilization. He denuded his spirit of all the artificial trappings which sustain the modern man.
“Il faut être absolument moderne!”
The
“absolument”
is important. A few sentences later he adds: “The battle of the spirit is as brutal as the battle of men; but the vision of justice is the pleasure of God alone.” The implication is that we are experiencing a false modernity: with us there is no sharp and brutal combat, no heroic struggle such as the saints of old waged. The saints were strong men, he maintains, and the hermits were artists, no longer in style now, alas! Only a man who knew the meaning of temptation could speak thus. Only a man who valued discipline, the discipline which seeks to raise life to the level of art, could thus extol the holy ones.

In a sense, Rimbaud’s whole life may be said to be a search for the proper discipline, one, to be sure, which would give him freedom. In the beginning, as innovator, this is obvious enough, even though one may quarrel with the sort of discipline which he imposes upon himself. In the second half of his life, when he has broken with society, the purpose of his Spartan discipline is more obscure. Is it merely to become a worldly success that he endures all those hardships and privations? I doubt it. Superficially he may seem to have no greater goal or purpose than any ambitious adventurer. That is the view of cynics, of failures who would love to have as company such a great figure as the engimatic Rimbaud. To me it seems that he was preparing his own Calvary. Though he may not have understood it himself, his behavior comes close to resembling that of the saint struggling with his own savage nature. Blindly, perhaps, he seems to be making himself ready to receive the divine grace which he had rashly and ignorantly spurned in his youth. One may also say that he was digging his own grave. But it was never the grave he was interested in—he had a supreme horror of the worms. For him death had already made itself all too manifest in the French way of life. Remember his terrible words … “to lift with dry fist the lid of the coffin, to sit down, to suffocate. Thus, no old age at all, no dangers; terror is not French.” It was fear of this living death which made him choose the hard life; he was willing to brave every terror rather than surrender in midstream. What then was the purpose, the goal, of such a strenuous life? For one thing, of course, it was to explore every possible phase of life. He thought of the world as “full of magnificent places that could not be visited within the lives of a thousand men.” He demanded a world “in which his immense energy could work unhampered.” He wanted to exhaust his powers in order to realize himself absolutely. In the ultimate, however, his ambition was to arrive, even if utterly beaten and exhausted, at the frontier of some dazzling new world, a world which would bear no resemblance to the one he knew.

What other world could this be than the shining world of the spirit? Does not the soul always express itself in terms of youth? From Abyssinia, Rimbaud once wrote in despair to his mother: “We live and die by another pattern than we could ever have designed, and that without hope of any kind of compensation. We are lucky that this is the only life we shall have to live, and that that is obvious …” He was not
always
so certain that this is the only life. Does he not wonder, during his season in Hell, if there may be other lives? He suspects there are. And that is part of his torment. Nobody, I venture to say, knew better than the young poet that for every failed or wasted life there must be another and another and another, without end, without hope—until one sees the light and elects to live by it. Yes, the struggle of the spirit is just as sharp and cruel as the combat of battle. The saints knew it, but the modern man laughs at it. Hell is whatever, wherever, one thinks it to be. If you believe you are in Hell, you are. And life, for the modern man, has become an eternal Hell for the simple reason that he has lost all hope of attaining Paradise. He does not even believe in a Paradise of his own creation. By his own thought processes he condemns himself—to the deep Freudian hell of wish fulfillment.

In that famous
Letter of the Seer
which Rimbaud wrote in his seventeenth year, a document by the way which has created more reverberations than all the writings of the masters … in this letter which contains the famous prescription for the poets to come, Rimbaud emphasizes that, to follow the discipline laid down, involves “ineffable torture, for which all his (the poet’s) strength is needed, all his superhuman strength.” In the pursuance of this discipline, he adds, the poet comes to stand forth “as the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed one—and the supreme savant!—for he arrives at the
unknown!
” The guarantee for this immense reward lies in the simple fact that “the poet has cultivated his soul, already richer than all others.” But what happens when the poet comes to the unknown? “He ends by losing all understanding of his visions,” says Rimbaud. (Which is what happened in his own case.) As though anticipating such a fate, he adds: “Still, he has seen them, hasn’t he? Let him burst with his palpitations—with the unheard of, nameless things he has seen. Then let other horrible workers come after him; they will begin at the horizons where he expired.”

This appeal, which had such an effect upon those to come, is noteworthy for many reasons, but chiefly because it reveals the genuine role of the poet and the true nature of tradition. Of what use the poet unless he attains to a new vision of life, unless he is willing to sacrifice his life in attesting the truth and the splendor of his vision? It is the fashion to speak of these demonic beings, these visionaries, as Romantics, to stress their subjectivity and to regard them as breaks, interruptions, stopgaps in the great stream of tradition, as though they were madmen whirling about the pivot of self. Nothing could be more untrue. It is precisely these innovators who form the links in the great chain of creative literature. One must indeed begin at the horizons where they expire—“hold the gain,” as Rimbaud puts it—and not sit down comfortably in the ruins and piece together a puzzle of shards.

At the age of twelve it is said that Rimbaud’s piety was so exalted that he longed for martyrdom. Three years later, in
Soleil et Chair
, he exclaims: “Flesh, marble, flower, Venus, in thee I believe!” He speaks of Aphrodite throwing upon the vast universe “infinite love in an infinite smile.” And the world, he says, will answer, will vibrate “like an immense lyre in the shudder of an immense kiss.” Here we see him reverting to the paganism of innocence, to that lost golden period when his life was “a banquet at which all hearts opened, at which all wines flowed.” It is the period of self-communion, of indescribable longing for the unknown—
“l’éblouissement de l’Infini.”
In short, the period of incubation, brief but profound, like the bliss of
samadhi
.

Another three years and, only eighteen, we find him at the end of his poetic career, writing his Last Will and Testament, so to speak. The Hell he describes so vividly he has already experienced in his soul; he is now about to live it in the flesh. What heart-rending words, in the section called “Morning,” from a youth of eighteen! It is gone already, his youth, and with it all the youth of the world. His country lies prostrate and defeated; his mother wishes only to get rid of him, strange, impossible creature that he is. He has already known hunger, destitution, humiliation, rejection; he has been in prison, has witnessed the bloody Commune, perhaps even participated in it, has experienced vice and degradation, has lost his first love, has broken with his fellow artists, has surveyed the whole field of modern art and found it empty, and is now about to consign everything to the devil, himself included. And thus, thinking of his wasted youth, as later on his deathbed he will think of his whole wasted life, he asks piteously: “Had I not
once
a youth pleasant, heroic, fabulous enough to write on leaves of gold: too much luck! Through what crime, what error, have I earned my present weakness? You who maintain that some animals sob sorrowfully, that the sick despair, that the dead have bad dreams, try to tell the story of my downfall
and my slumber
.
*
I myself can no more explain myself than the beggar with his continual Pater and
Ave Maria. I no longer know how to speak
.”