Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie
était un festin où s’ouvraient tous les coeurs,
où tous les vins coulaient…
Once, if I remember well, my life
was a feast where all hearts opened
and all wines flowed…
—from “A Season in Hell” by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Louise Varêse (A New Directions Paperbook, 1952)
When I was young and foolish, as compared to now, when I’m old and foolish, I was swept away by the wild life and overheated poetry of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, now known almost entirely by his last name, like Ovid (Publius), Chaucer (Geoffrey), or Shelley (Percy Bysshe). He was born October 20th, 1854, and when I saw his birthday coming up I went deep into the dusty darkness of our liquor cabinet and came up with a bottle of absinth, a dangerous liqueur that Rimbaud was fond of (now spelled “absinthe,” tasting like Pernod, or licorice). I wanted to drink a toast in remembrance of his brilliance, his influence, and his tragic life.
Rimbaud was a precocious comet who flamed across the literary skies when he was 15 years old, and then, astonishingly, gave up writing poetry when he was 21 — but not before posting the road signs for the Symbolists, Dadaists, and Surrealists who were to follow him. In short, he invented modernism.
I don’t remember if Mlle. Vincent, my formidable (I love that word in French — for-me-DOB-la) high school French teacher, ever mentioned Rimbaud’s name. Too hot to touch, maybe. But later at Hamilton College, our French professor Marcel Moraud began a class passionately declaiming Rimbaud’s rhymed quatrains from “Le Bateau Ivre” (“The Drunken Boat,” which of course appealed to us), “Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles…” — “As I came down the impassible rivers…” We scruffy teenagers, Rimbaud’s age exactly when he was writing, were ready to listen.
Rimbaud was the most prize-winning student in the schools of Charleville, a “bleak city” in northern France, when, to his middle-class family’s chagrin, he left a promising future and ran away to Paris at 15. He wanted to meet the poets whose work he was memorizing. (One hundred years later, in the 1960s, a fair number of my brightest students at Florida Presbyterian College — now Eckerd — followed his lead by hitchhiking toward San Francisco to meet the Beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, though some of them graduated first.)
Rimbaud’s idea was to embrace visionary, surreal truth, leaving behind practical, rational thought entirely. (Look where that’s taken us: Behold President Trump!) Precociously, he wrote the following when he was 16: “dérêglement de tous les sens, toutes les forms d’amour, de souffrance…” — “derangement of all the senses, all the forms of love and suffering…” One can see how this would appeal to rebellious young artists, but where can they go today? Rimbaud’s head would simply have exploded in our era. He believed purity might be found in the “starving artist,” taking literally the truism that “money is the root of all evil.” I of course urged my students to stay in St. Pete, but had obviously been corrupted by a salary with pension.
His short, scandalous — and prolific — years in Paris culminated in his being shot by his lover, the somewhat older poet Paul Verlaine. Rimbaud was just wounded, though this incident was eerily recreated by the Beatnik guru William Burroughs (best known for his surreal novel Naked Lunch), who drunkenly shot and killed his then-wife Jean Vollmer.
At age 21, Rimbaud stunned Paris by renouncing poetry; he reinvented himself, traveling the world as a merchant salesman of tobacco and arms, though he didn’t prosper as a capitalist, either. On November 10th, 1891, with all his meager money in a money belt, he died of cancer, receiving last rites at a hospital in Marseille. He was just 37 years old. Still, though both life and poetry failed him, Rimbaud was a singular genius who gave us a lot, and deserved better.
Arthur, here’s looking at you.
This article appears in Nov 8-15, 2018.