It's a surprising thing to find yourself, or something
you've written, as a source for part of a famous dead poet’s biography. Especially a famous dead French poet with an exotic, volcanic life. I’m
speaking of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891).
I wrote an essay for a magazine about
Rimbaud's time late in his short life as a coffee trader in Ethiopia, about how
he got there, unlikely as that was. I was thinking about writing something else
about Rimbaud, so I promptly went to everyone’s convenient source of choice,
Wikipedia. Lo and behold, there it is, citation number 64, a reference to the
article I'd written seventeen years ago and nearly forgotten.
It made me think of how strange it is the places we end up
in our lives. Here was this enfant
terrible, possessed of extraordinary poetic powers, who ended up in a small
house in Harar, in what is now eastern Ethiopia, having abandoned poetry forever
some fifteen years earlier, counting his money, forever suspicious that local
merchants were cheating him out of a few pennies, or whatever currency they
used.
But that’s not the way it began.
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Arthur Rimbaud
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He sprang full blown as a poet from a small city in northern
France. He was writing lasting poems by the age of sixteen. Arthur Rimbaud was
a poet whose life was like one of those Roman candles that goes astray
and sweeps erratically across the sky with the possibility of crashing into a
house or a person or you. Everything about his life was dramatic,
self-destructive and extreme.
He wrote incendiary, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes fearlessly
sexual, frustratingly complex and often incomprehensible poetry in the remarkably brief period he
wrote poetry. Which is to say, from the age of sixteen to the age of nineteen
or twenty. His most famous poems are "The Drunken Boat" and "A
Season in Hell." (For pure exquisiteness, I love his early poem, "Au Cabaret-Vert".) Nothing had ever been seen like this in French poetry
before, even from Baudelaire. After the age of twenty or so, Rimbaud stopped
writing altogether. No one knows why. The rest of his life, he was a wanderer. He
went in search of something he could never find, because it wasn't there. He
looked for it in Paris, in Indonesia, in London, in Cyprus, in Yemen.
And, finally, in Ethiopia.
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Rimbaud by Picasso
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Some artists love Rimbaud because his chaotic, fiery life
gives them validation for their own self-generated chaos. Or what they would like their own to be.
(I am sometimes a passenger on that ship.) And Rimbaud's life was as chaotic as any
self-destructive American artist's has even been, if not more so. Typical is
the affair he had with the (married) poet Paul Verlaine that ended with
Verlaine, in a rage, shooting Rimbaud in the wrist. As Allen Ginsberg said,
"Rimbaud seems to be a complete turn-on catalyst to every poet in small
town isolated, or big megapolis, staring at the city lights over the
roof." What that means to me is:
don't let those small town minds stop you from becoming the comet that you are.
So you destroy a few things, or lives, along the way. You're an artist. Yes, an
artist! A pass for crashing through life! But, really, Rimbaud harmed himself more than anyone else. Verlaine, after all, was responsible for his own life and marriage.
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Rimbaud in Ethiopia
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The last years of his life Rimbaud spent exporting coffee
from Ethiopia—an astonishingly able linguist, he learned the two languages spoken there, Amharic and Harari, quickly—and smuggling guns. All he cared about was money. In those later years,
someone realized who he was (Rimbaud had become famous in Paris without knowing
it) and asked him about his poetry. "Disgusting!" Rimbaud replied.
One of his last letters, written to his sister from a
hospital in Marseilles, where he was soon to die at the age of thirty-seven,
says, "Our life is a misery, an endless misery. Why do we exist?"
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