Rimbaud Revealed Chapter 6 - The Finale!

Poètes maudits (cursed poets) To Arthur Rimbaud by Annabelle You were the only poet who was really cursed, forced as you were to live your life in four years time. No wonder it turned out to be such an intriguing mess. Was it the hashish, the absinthe or just your lust for Paul that made you write like this? Or was it your unhappy childhood, nothing but frustration, that brought out your inimitable style? It must have been a higher power that used you, ruthlessly, to plant his thoughts inside your giddy head. Why didn't he have pity on your looted soul? He must have seen you struggling with his final words. All I hope is that your suffering has brought you to a place where you can watch us being puzzled by your inexplicable legacy... CLICK HERE for Isabelle's letter to her mother informing her of Arthur's conversion to Christianity. Le Vaincu (he who has been conquered) The doctor's at the hospital at Marseilles diagnosed Rimbaud's disease as carcinoma. To Isabelle, who asked for their opinion, they answered: "He's very ill indeed, poor fellow, and is fast slipping away. It's only a question of weeks, or months at best, unless some unforeseen complication intervenes and that would end everything more quickly. As for recovery, that cannot even be considered, for there is not hope of that". That was the doctors' verdict, as communicated to Isabelle, but to Rimbaud himself, in an effort to raise his sinking spirits, they promised cure, and endeavoured each day, to make him believe that he was indeed better. Rimbaud, who had always wished to face the truth, with fierce and savage joy, without being deluded in anything, was now being deceived at the ultimate crisis of his life, concerning his own death. His mother sent no words of affection and sympathy to her child who was dying so far away from her. Isabelle wrote to her mother, but didn't receive an answer, so she wrote again, this time in great distress: "My dear mother, I beg and implore you to answer me, or to get someone to write me even a note on your behalf. I'm almost out of my mind with the anxiety in which I live. What have I done that you should be so cruel to me? Are you ill, or something, that you don't answer? If so you had better tell me and I'll come right back to look after you, although Arthur begs me not to leave him until he dies. What has happened to you? Oh! If I could only go at once to you! But without knowing exactly whether you're ill or not, I can't leave my unfortunate brother, who swears, if I leave him, to strangle himself or to commit suicide somehow." Her mother then sent a short note, excusing her delay in replying on the score of all the work that had to be done on the farm, of the endless difficulties she was having with the labourers and the harvesters! Who can tell what was going on in Madame Rimbaud's mind? It was probably more than she could have borne, to sit by, with hands folded idly in her lap, and watch Arthur die, the finest of all her flock, in whose future her early dreams had been centred, and in whom, latterly, she had begun again to hope. Nine years after his death she wrote to Isabelle, forgetting all the worry and anxiety he had caused her for so many years: "My poor Arthur, who never asked me for anything, and who, by his work, by his intelligence and by his good conduct had amassed a fortune, and amassed it very honourably, never cheated anyone; on the contrary they made him lose a great deal of money, they still owe him, and the poor child was very charitable, which is well known." It is not true, as critics allege, that she had always hated him and that she did not forget her grudge even as he lay dying. When he was in Abyssinia she was always anxious for him. When Arthur didn't answer some of her letters to him in Harar she wrote in great distress: "Arthur, my son. Your silence has lasted a long time, and why this silence? Happy those who have no children, or who, having them do not love them or are indifferent to what happens to them." Rimbaud's calmness of mind did not continue indefinitely. He clung tenaciously to life, deceived by the fair words of the doctors. He still dreamed of recovering sufficiently to enable him to go to Aden, for there, he was convinced, he would get well. It was Isabelle's presence at Marseille that prevented him from making immediate arrangements to leave, for he did not believe that she would be willing to accompany him to the Red Sea Coast and he felt now that he could no longer live without her..... Isabelle was with her brother all day and far into the evening too, as long as the hospital authorities allowed her to remain beside him. The evening, when the candles were lit, was the best time of the day for him; he was then comparatively free from pain and she used to sit and talk to him, or allow him to talk, in the flickering light, until the sister in charge turned her out at nine o'clock. Isabelle had not yet accomplished her great and proud mission, her brother was not yet in the condition in which she wished to hand him into the keeping of the Almighty. So far all her attempts to turn his thoughts to religion had been in vain. In spite of all she would like us to believe, he remained, until the last day, violently anticlerical and opposed to Catholicism. Little by little she wore down his resistance and she was able to write to her mother on 28 October, less than a fortnight before his death, that all was now well and that her brother was converted (as she explains with pride to Verlaine in Total Eclipse!). "My dear mother, God be blessed a thousand times! I experienced on Sunday the greatest happiness I could ever have had in this world. It is no longer a miserable damned soul who is dying beside me; it is a martyr and a saint; one of the Chosen." There had always been in Rimbaud a thirst for religion and a longing for the certainty of belief. The struggle expressed in 'une Saison en Enfer' had been partly between his reason and his desire for faith, and he had given the victory to reason. Nevertheless without religious faith he had remained for the rest of his life a maimed figure. It does not come as a surprise that he should have returned, at the end, to the comfort of belief. By now his body was kept free from pain with morphia. He was now sacrificing the last shreds of his pride; he was finally laying down his arms. His conversion was perhaps the final humiliation of his pride, the ultimate chastisement of the man who had dared to think himself the equal of God........... With the laying down of his arms the hard outside shell broke, allowing the imprisoned poet to escape; the poet who had seemed to shrivel up and die, but who had only slept for nearly twenty years, until the light from beyond this world, the light that seems to fall on those who stand on the threshold of the grave, touched his eyes and he awoke. He ended his last days in what those around him thought was a dream. As Isabelle sat beside him and saw his life gently ebbing to its close he told her what he was seeing and described his visions in language he had seemed to have forgotten. Now the imagination of his boyhood seemed to have returned to him and the words with which to render his experience. "Sometimes he became a voyant," says Isabelle, "a prophet. Without losing consciousness he had the most marvellous visions. He saw columns of amethyst, angels in marble and wood; countries of indescribable beauty, and he used to paint these sensations, expressions of curious and penetrating charm." A few weeks after his death she was startled to find in Illuminations - which she had not yet read! - the same visions and dreams, but she says that those of his deathbed had greater depth and tenderness. In his delirium, or in the long nights when he could not sleep, he used to talk to Isabelle of Harar. He talked at great length of Djami, Djami his one friend, his only friend. One of his last thoughts was for the Harari boy, and he begged that he might be sent three thousand francs out of his estate. But Djami never received this legacy; he must have died almost as soon as his master, dying perhaps in the famine of 1891, or killed in some savage raid...... On November 10th, Arthur Rimbaud died, less than three weeks after his thirty seventh birthday. Isabelle alone was at his side, for his mother had remained in the north. When all was over, Isabelle travelled back to the Ardennes with the remains of her brother. As soon as the body arrived in Charleville, Madame Rimbaud went to the parish priest and ordered a funeral 'de premiere classe'. There were no speeches at the graveside of the man who, at that very moment, was being acclaimed in Paris as the greatest poet of his age; there were present none of those who had known him and who had been his companions in his early youth; not even Verlaine, with whom he had spent the most vital and passionate years of his life, was there to bid him farewell. Rimbaud was as solitary in his commital to earth as he had been through his life. In 1901, when the tenth anniversary of Arthur's death was celebrated in his native town by the unveiling of the Rimbaud Monument in the Square de la Gare, Madame Rimbaud had not yet forgiven 'literature' for the part it had played in her son's ruin, and she refused to be present at the ceremony. Isabelle wrote: "It is not only Arthur's literature that she hates, but every literary and scientific work which could not be put into the hands of a child of fifteen of mediocre intelligence. Although I have left Arthur's works lying about, I doubt if she has ever read them. It is just as well that she should be ignorant of them for, given their style and their inspiration, she would dislike them intensely. She is totally uninterested in any question concerning them and even unaware of them, keeping firmly to the unalterable decision which she reached formerly--- Nothing that anyone might say or think - no question of tenderness, affection or pity - would make her deviate from the path she had thought fit to choose............" And finally.... Conclusion... In 1936 France celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Symbolist Movement and, at the same time, the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Illuminations in La Vogue. In that half century Rimbaud's work did not cease to grow in significance and importance. Few poets in the world today are the object of more passionate study and interest. Rimbaud's writings are often a trial of understanding and interpretation, and they are thus a rich source for those in search of texts to support their doctrine. In Rimbaud - as in the Bible - confirmation of almost every theory can be found. When Rimbaud's life is fairly viewed as a whole, little that is bad or vicious can be imputed to him. In his Paris and London days, according to conventional standards, he was dissolute and immoral; but these were standards which he did not accept. He was depraved because he wished to be so, because it was part of his philosophy. When he came to believe that this had been an error, no hermit in the desert could have surpassed the austerity of his living. As for the immorality of his homosexuality, the only relationship of this nature which he is known to have had, was the one which occurred when he was seventeen and came under the influence of a man, ten years older than himself, who was weak, self-indulgent and vicious, and who was known to have practised homosexuality before he ever met Rimbaud. Rimbaud was, at that time, an unhappy adolescent, over-developed intellectually and under-developed physically, and he was left with a sense of guilt and frustration. In any case, modern psychology should, by now, have produced a saner outlook on the question, especially in connection with a youth of that age. Rimbaud's career is a tragic example of the ultimate waste. Perhaps his work would never have arisen without this waste; perhaps that is the price which we have to pay for it. The mysteries and the methods of genius cannot be reckoned and maybe the meteorlike quality of Rimbaud's art was its essence, its only possibility of birth. He seems to have been an unfortunate man whose breath was fire which burned up everything which came into contact with him and everything turned to ashes in his hand. There was, in him, the fatality of failure. It can but be hoped that life was in reality only the ante-room to a world where everything was made good to him...... Rimbaud was primarily an adventurer. His first adventure had been in books; next he had escaped on his gypsy wanderings, his first material adventures. The greatest had been exploration of the heavenly regions, and everything proved tasteless to him. This world was too small a place to satisfy him. He said to his sister: "I should like to wander over the face of the whole world, which is not so very big after all, then perhaps I'd find a place that would please me a little..." Rimbaud brought many of his reverses on himself by being incapable of adapting himself to life, and most particularly by his great pride. His pride and arrogance were too great and he was never able to learn anything from his failures. He lacked that quality which is one of the vital ingredients of great genius.... - humility and simplicity - He had a further weakness, the curse of instability. He could do nothing thoroughly, go to the bottom of nothing and he mastered nothing in the end. He always wanted to advance too fast and he could never wait to lay the foundations solidly; the palace had to rise instantaneously, as if by magic. Indeed in everything he relied more on the power of magic charms than on his own efforts. His swiftness and impatience ripened his gifts too quickly and they became atrophied, like windfalls from a tree. He revolted against everything. Against social conditions, against accepted religion, against art, and against the whole condition of life. This fanatical desire for freedom, a further outcome of his pride, was morbid in its extreme manifestations. He could bear no man's hand on his shoulder; he preferred to destroy himself. Rimbaud was a man more naturlly gifted with artistic possibilities than any poet in French literature, but when he discovered that, it did not bring him the ideal for which he thirsted. Just as he would not accept the humble position of ordinary Christian, in the same way he could not accept the position of mere poet. He made then what seems to have been a tragic mistake, the greatest of his many mistakes, that of abandoning literature. The time of his greatest poetic creations was the only period of his life when he was more or less happy, his only time of joy and fulfilment. With his habitual violence and lack of consideration for himself, he cut out what was his greatest asset, his one human 'raison d'etre' (reason for being) and he remained in hell forever afterwards. And tragicly, in the end, he came to realize that he had wasted himself and his life. It was the same treatment, on the spiritual plane, as that to which he subjected his body, on the physical plane, at Harar, when, refusing to see the gravity of his condition, he bound his diseased leg tightly and tortured himself with violent exercise. He killed his talent through obstinacy... Fate did show him one kindness....to make him cease at the peak of his achievement; it made it impossible for him to produce less than his best. Rimbaud increased the evocative power of poetry, independently of the sense it conveyed; words with him are no longer intended to bear their dictionary meaning; they are no longer to express a logical content, or to describe; they are a form of magic charm, they are intended to evoke a state of mind and soul. Rimbaud left out all the unnecessary words, all the connecting links, leaving only the essential vision itself, and this vision is not always easily seen by others. In endeavouring to reach the unknown, Rimbaud did in fact give poetry an evocative power that has been equalled by few other poets. Rimbaud felt acutely, had violent intuitions, violent enthusiasms, but he rarely gave himself the time to reflect deeply. But it must be remembered that he was probably no more than twenty when he ceased to write and that by then there had been no time to know himself or others fully. Most of what he knew he had obtained through his reading. He was inspired with brilliant conceptions, he was seized with wild enthusiasms and like the slum child on its first visit to the country, he rushed from flower to flower, smelling each one in turn, then dropping each bloom to wither on the ground while he flew on to the next - the most beautiful of it all seemed - at the far end of the meadow. In 'Illuminiations' is found expressed, man's eternal longing for spiritual satisfaction and beauty. 'Une Saison en Enfer' is the hell of doubt which is always with us, the age-long struggle between the angel and the beast, and few writers have expressed it in such a poignant and moving manner, the bitterness of the cry that bursts from us; while in 'Le Bateau Ivre', we find all the nostalgic longing of human nature, its aspirations and its passionate desire to escape from outworn values and to sail towards new hopes. 'Le Bateau Ivre' is freighted with the suffering of a stricken world, with its infinite weariness with all that surrounds it; it carries on board the world's ardent longing to escape to the open sea from the stifling stench of the port, there to wash itself clean from all that has soiled and defiled it and to find a newer and cleaner self. The ship speeds along, far out to sea, sailing as it were between two skies, two infinities, drawn upwards by the beam of light; but may it not, like Rimbaud's craft, come hurtling down again, may it not prove like his 'un bateau frele comme un papillon de mai' (a boat fragile like a butterfly in May) .......... a fragile paper boat which a sad child launches on a cruel sea only to be swallowed up by its devouring waves.......... From Le Bateau Ivre: But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: sharp love has swollen me up with heady languors. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom... Thus ends months of work and dedication to Rimbaud's story by my friend and fellow passionate Leonardo supporter, Annabelle. To her I am eternally grateful!!