Pagan blood returns! The Spirit is near. Why will Christ not come to my aid, covering my soul with nobility and freedom? Too bad. The Gospel’s over and done with! The Gospel! The Gospel.
I’m avid for God. Since the beginning of time I’ve belonged to a lesser race.
And here I am on the shoreline of Brittany. Let the lights go on in the cities at dusk. My day is done; I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs; godforsaken climates will char my skin. I’ll swim, trudge the grass under foot; I’ll hunt. Above all I’ll smoke; drink liquors as fierce as molten metal, like my dear ancestors around their fires.
I shall return with limbs of iron, dark skin, a furious aspect. From my mask I’ll be thought to belong to a mighty race. I shall have gold: I shall be slothful and brutal – the ferocious invalid back from the tropics, fussed around by women. I’ll be embroiled in politics. Saved.
Right now, I’m damned. My country appals me. The best course of action: drink myself comatose and sleep it off on the beach.
– From A Season in Hell.
I first met James at a nightclub in Norwich. We were talking about what poets we liked and I listed Rimbaud. He either said he hadn’t read anything by him or he asked what my favourite poems by him were. I think it was the latter – I think he told me that they read Rimbaud sometimes at Automatic Society.
‘Oh, erm, ‘Le Bateau ivre’, and, Une Saison en Enfer…’ I said. I was excited, I could hardly get my words out, shouting above the vibrating bass of the deep house music that beat out of the dark in the next room. I couldn’t remember the English titles of the poems. The seat was sticky. James drank some water and asked me if I was on MD.
‘No, no, I just really like Rimbaud.’
The first time I spoke to another friend from university, Leo, a group of people were stood out on the Suffolk Terrace walkway – Suffolk Terrace is one of the on-campus accommodation buildings at UEA – passing joints around in the dark. I was talking about Charles Baudelaire. Leo joined in.
‘I think he’s the sort of poet you’re expected to grow out of.’ I said.
‘No, you grow out of Rimbaud, man; you progress to Baudelaire.’ he replied, and I agreed. He told me another time that someone told him to only use ‘said’ and ‘asked’ in dialogue attribution.
These two memories from my first year at university are significant in a couple of ways; they show that any lit student that thinks they’re a bit cool wants to talk about Rimbaud, and it shows that any lit student that thinks they’re a bit cool is scared Rimbaud isn’t as cool as he was when we were doing A-Levels. There’s a slight uneasiness around Rimbaud – the same as around Jack Kerouac; everyone thinks they discovered them at college, when no-one around knows who they are – until you get to university, and find out everyone thought the same as you. Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac are seen as too obvious, like listening to a ‘Best of Bob Dylan’ when you could be listening to Woody Guthrie B-Sides.
Before I begin properly writing about Arthur Rimbaud’s life and poetry, I want to say that writers like Rimbaud and Kerouac aren’t clichés – they invented the clichés they are mistaken for. Both are archetypal in their own way. Cynics think they’re overdone and juvenile, like having Bob Marley and Che Guevara posters in student bedrooms, but I don’t see how this devalues their work. I don’t understand why cynical and little-known writers are better. People like to exercise a crude ‘I-know-something-you-don’t-know’ power over others when talking about art and literature – people who think about books rather than feel. Ranting is overdone and juvenile in blogs, I’m going to stop now.
As with all my favourite writers – and this makes me wonder if I actually know anything about literature – my interest begins and is largely made-up of a fascination with their life. Their work often comes second. Before I read anything by Rimbaud, I read that he influenced a lot of my favourite artists. (I wrote an article for A-Level English Language called ‘Rimbaud’s Legacy’; Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Pete Doherty are a few of the artists that have said they were influenced by Rimbaud, and I wrote about all of them in the article.) Next, I saw a photograph of him – the famous one, the one that can be seen on the cover of the Penguin Selected Poems and Letters book in the photograph at the top of this post. I decided I looked like him at the time. I think I probably did. In 2012 or maybe early 2013 I posted on tumblr: ‘My projected literary career is so far based entirely around looking a little bit like Rimbaud’. It was when I read behind and around that photograph, though, that Rimbaud became, I think, my favourite poet. I’ve spent more time reading Graham Robb’s Rimbaud – a huge and exhaustive biography – than I have reading Rimbaud’s poems. I believe that his life was a poem, and that the all of the poems are burning, beautiful footnotes.
I couldn’t begin to go into all of the facts or the legends of Rimbaud’s life, but for anyone who hasn’t heard of him or doesn’t know much about him, I’ll give an outline. He was born in Charleville in 1854 – I think the same year as Oscar Wilde was born. His mother was a very strict Catholic, who put huge pressure on him and his brother to perform well academically. I can’t remember about his brother – I think he had a brother – but Arthur Rimbaud was a student particularly gifted with literature and language, French and Latin. He began to write poems and win awards at fifteen or sixteen, and sent a few to Paul Verlaine, a poet he admired. Shortly after he went to Paris, I think to study under him, although I’m not sure who turned out to learn more from who. I’ve just realised I’ve never read anything by Paul Verlaine. In Paris, Verlaine and Rimbaud began a tumultuous, absinthe- and hashish-fuelled love affair, to the anger and sorrow of Rimbaud’s mother and Verlaine’s wife, which ended in Brussels with a drunk Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the hand. The best part of it all is that Rimbaud gave up poetry at twenty or twenty-one and became a mercenary, explorer and trader in northern and eastern Africa. He died aged thirty-seven on the way to France to receive treatment for cancer in his knee, I think.
I haven’t gone into all of the offensive and surreal legends about Rimbaud as a young poet in Paris, London and Brussels, there’s too many, but you can read about them online. I’d highly recommend Robb’s Rimbaud too. My favourite story about Rimbaud, though, is that he was visiting a prominent Parisian poet, I think that’s who he was visiting, and whilst he was there the poet began drinking a cup of milk. The poet or artist or whoever they were left the room for a moment, and Rimbaud allegedly got up, wanked and ejaculated into the guy’s milk, sat down and then watched him return and drink the milk.
This is a long post so far, not very 21st Century. These ‘Specials’, focusing on the whole life and work of a writer that I think has had a particular effect and influence on my life will be longer than the ‘/’ articles. They’re the new type of post I was trying to come up with, aiming to avoid monotonous repetition.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing about Rimbaud, now I’ll see if I can say something about his poetry, which, although I have admitted never came first in my fascination with Rimbaud, still is a huge part of it. I do actually care about literature.
Rimbaud was called, I think by Victor Hugo, ‘the infant Shakespeare’, but I think that this is a weak comparison, and definitely not a compliment to Rimbaud. Shakespeare did not perform open heart surgery on the rules of composition, he didn’t try anything new, he was just good at writing more of what people already liked. I read yesterday, in George Orwell’s essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’ that King Lear is heavily based on an earlier play called King Leir. Hugo couldn’t have made the comparison, but ‘the infant Stein’ or ‘the infant Dalí’ might have been more accurate – but, of course, Rimbaud was sixty or seventy years ahead of his time.
The connection I made between Gertrude Stein and Rimbaud comes from the way I see their experiments with language. Early in his life as a poet, Rimbaud aimed to create a language of colours.
– ‘Vowels’ from Poems 1869-1871.
I’m not sure if being able to read the original French would help to understand this or not. Perhaps the interpretation of the different sounds as colours is too personal to Rimbaud to transfer it to another’s mind. What impresses me about it, what I love about it, is that it takes literature away from ideas and towards feelings. There is no absolute colour of ‘A’ to everyone – Rimbaud just feels it to be the black of the fur-corset of dazzling flies. Not only does Rimbaud feel, he finds new ways to feel. This ‘feeling’ is beginning to sound vague and like a half-conceived idea, but I think it’s the most important thing about any kind of writing but poetry in particular. There should never be any ideas in poetry. But I think there always are.
What I’m writing is hardly a ground-breaking interpretation of Rimbaud’s work, but I’m trying to give an overview of what I like about Rimbaud and what I hope you might like too.
At the very start I mentioned ‘Le Bateau ivre’ and ‘Une Saison en Enfer’. I’ll talk about them and leave it at that – I used ‘Vowels’ to show that Rimbaud was a prematurely born Modernist. I’m using these two to show he’s a great poet, perhaps my favourite.
‘Le Bateau ivre’ – ‘The Drunken Boat’ – I think was the poem that Rimbaud first read to all of the Symbolists or Parnassians or whoever it was that had gathered for Verlaine’s presentation of the genius boy from the Ardennes. Maybe it wasn’t. Apparently he read quietly, childishly, mumbling through the poem and looking down. I really like this detail – the poem is hard and bright and confident. My favourite line from it – perhaps an obvious choice but, as I was saying to start with, obviousness is irrelevant when genuinely responding to a piece of art – is:
‘What men have only thought they’d seen, I’ve seen’.
Told from the point of view of the abandoned and mostly wrecked ‘drunken boat’, the word ‘men’ differentiates between the boat and humanity, but it strikes me as Rimbaud speaking, perhaps to the audience of middle-aged, semi-successful and pleased-with-themselves men before him, men who think of themselves as visionaries and artists and poets – men whose names have been forgotten.
The poem is colourful, it smells too. I like it, and I fully think that the drunken boat is Rimbaud, an obvious interpretation perhaps, I don’t know. I see the poem as a promise of greater art, though – a prophecy. It’s forceful, but it feels almost as though the force of the poem comes from it being pushed forward by the crackling energy of the poems still inside the young Rimbaud, poems like A Season in Hell.
Before I stopped smoking weed, me and a few of my friends went into the woods on the far side of the lake at UEA to smoke. I’d had a few pints beforehand, and I think I’d had some really weak weed the last time I’d smoked, and for some reason assumed that this would be the same, and I smoked it fast and heavily.
I remember it all very clearly – it was time to go, we’d finished. But I couldn’t move.
‘I’m trapped in an idiot’s body,’ I kept saying, ‘I know how frustrating this is for you all, but I just can’t move.’ I recall being exceedingly polite, I think trying to avoid offending or annoying them and making a bad situation worse.
When I tried to move I felt sick, but not sick in a way I’ve felt before or since. Sick like I’d been poisoned. One of my friends tried to pick me up and drag me along, and I think I said that if I was moved I’d die. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t think I believed that, but I felt like that. They got me out of the dark woods eventually somehow, tired, gabbling gibberish and feeling like every drop of moisture had been sucked from my body. After a while I remembered A Season in Hell:
‘I’ve swallowed a tremendous dose of poison. – Thrice blessed be the counsel I received! – My tripes are on fire. The strength of the poison racks my limbs, deforms me, knocks me flat. I’m dying of thirst, suffocating, I can’t cry out. It’s hell, eternal torment! See the flames rise! I’m seared to perfection. Come on, demon!’
Maybe I tried to talk about it. I doubt anyone understood.
This is the first thing I’ve ever written about the experience, though, and it’s hardly creative – Rimbaud’s ‘disordering of the senses’ doesn’t seem to work for me. Bukowski’s argument that drink doesn’t put you down but lifts you up is more in line with my outlook on narcotics and writing, I think. Anyway, that was my season in hell, perhaps not a season, more of a long weekend. Before my time there, and after, though, A Season in Hell has been my favourite Rimbaud piece. A long prose-poem split into several sections. It’s endlessly rich, it’s as much of Rimbaud’s soul as he was ever going to manage to contain on the page. It’s hot to touch.
I’ve written over two-thousand words and I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near explaining how I feel about Arthur Rimbaud and his poetry. Irvine Welsh once said something about style over substance being terrible, but substance without style being infinitely worse. It was Rimbaud’s style that began my interest. Artists I admired were all just Rimbaud fan-boys too, I realised. Jim Morrison became a ripoff, Pete Doherty became a ripoff, even Jack Kerouac did, although not infamous for drug-use as much as those other two, he smoked his fair share of ‘tea’ and even went to Mexico to try to cultivate a heroin habit before getting scared and rushing back to America and the advice of William Burroughs. If they’re ripoffs, I’m a ripoff of a ripoff. I suppose Rimbaud’s a ripoff too, of Baudelaire, and I’m sure there are others that influenced him that I don’t know about. ‘Ripoff’ is perhaps the wrong word. There’s nothing cynical about those three of my creative heroes emulating, or taking inspiration from, Rimbaud – they feel something about him as an icon of poetry, and they feel something about what he has to say and the way he says it. Anyway, Rimbaud’s style drew me in, I’m sure of that. I wanted to know more about him, then I wanted to be like him, maybe even be him. It was all about him at first. Then the substance kicked in. I realised he was a great writer – something which, because he was so fucking cool, I just sort of assumed previously. With works like A Season in Hell, every single word is carved in stone. Black granite. None of it moves, none of it exists without his total conviction. He is the epitome of poetic style as an individual, as an icon, and his poetry is substance of a colossal weight. He has so much of both that it is obscene.
Perhaps it is because he was so young when he was a poet that a lot of literature students or just people who take an interest in literature write him off after sixth form, seeing him as a pre-rock’n’roll cliché, a model of the height of pathetic, pretentious artistic-wankerdom. Perhaps he was too cool – so cool he became a parody of the starving artist in the way that Elvis Presley was too cool and became a parody of the rockstar. Whatever the cause, I see Arthur Rimbaud as a credible poet, a credible artist. More than that, I see Arthur Rimbaud as a great poet, with a far-reaching and enriching influence upon many forms of art. I don’t know what makes a genius, but I think he might have been one, that or an arrogant lowlife. Actually, I think he was both.
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