Delirium (5 page)

             
Why was his mother desperate about him at this time? It is unlikely that he had access to drugs in Charleville — this was to come later in Paris — but clearly his aberrations had become ungovernable. Did he interfere with his sisters? Did his mother catch him masturbating? As a behaviour trait in Paris, he excreted into his host’s milk bottle. It is possible he did the same at home. But there had also been trouble with his former teacher Georges Izambard. Ever since Rimbaud had sent Izambard ‘Le Cœur volé’, with its undisguised admission of homosexuality, a wedge had come between the two; a division which was to prove final. Izambard had written in response to Rimbaud’s poem and poetic theory: ‘You devised some incoherent and heteroclite thoughts, from which a small, monstrous foetus is born, which you then put in a glass jar... And be careful, with your theory of the seer, that you don’t end up in the jar yourself, a monster in the museum.’ Rimbaud’s reply to his teacher’s inevitable caution must have been violent and obscene, for Izambard was sufficiently miffed as to send it to Madame Rimbaud. Izambard may have been intending to clear himself of any possible intimations of homosexual conduct with Rimbaud, who may himself have set a rumour abroad, and thus wanted to come clean before the latter’s mother. How better to vindicate himself than to point to Arthur’s homo-erotic poetry and to the psychotic notions inherent in his poetic theory? One can imagine the storm at home; Rimbaud’s hysteria, his nervous frustration, must have had him spring at his mother like a cornered rat. They were all trying to interfere with his mind. Those whose limitations extended to monotheism, provincialism, inveterately inherited moral values. What could Rimbaud with his Messianic quest have to do with this?

             
He continues:

             
This future will be materialistic, as you see. — Always full of Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to endure. — Essentially, it will be Greek Poetry again, in a way.

             
Eternal art will have its functions, since poets are citizens. Poetry will no longer lend rhythm to action; it will be in advance.

             
There will be poets like this! When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man — up till now abominable — having given her her freedom, she to will be a poet! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? — She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive and delicious; we shall accept them, we shall understand them.

             
Meanwhile, let us ask the
poet
for something
new
— ideas and forms. All the smart alecks will soon think they have satisfied this demand: — but it is not so.

              The prophetic note inherent in Rimbaud’s visionary prescriptions, which demand both a return to the intuitive response of primitive poetry and a means of projecting into the future — ‘let us ask the poet for something new’ — is a dramatic anticipation of certain modes of thought which have become a pattern in the twentieth century. Rimbaud had already dismissed his century as inert, immobile and little likely to improve. By mid-century poetry is usually stuck in a rut, and a plethora of derivative poets continue to live off the major voice from an earlier time. Like Lautréamont, Rimbaud was already living in the century he was never to reach. He would have poetry live in advance of action, rather than be the reflective principle commenting on the age’s discoveries. It is up to the poet to get there first. ‘And there will be poets like this!’ he assures us. They were to come in number in another time, another place. Rilke, Trakl, Apollinaire, Breton, St-John Perse, Eliot, Neruda, Montale — these are a few who have brought a new poetics to bear on the twentieth century. And Rimbaud envisages the psychosexual emancipation of women. She too has a vital part to play in the discovery of the unknown. Once she has freed herself from man’s ‘abominable’ denial and repression of her inner motives, she will more closely respond to the poetic summons than man, with his overriding impulse towards warfare and territorial imperatives.

             
Rimbaud was looking for a new race, a people who would invent the future according to the instruction of vision. The world could be imagined into existence. The atman, the supra-human, was he who cultivated his visionary faculties for the arrival of a new dawn.

             
Rimbaud knew himself capable of undertaking the heroic task set the poet, one even more daring in its social implications than Shelley’s animated conviction that the imagination represents creative fire. Shelley’s
Defence of Poetry
comes close to Rimbaud’s
Lettres du voyant
in its declared Promethean beliefs that the inspired poet re-creates the world. Poets are in Shelley’s words, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. But Shelley’s upbringing, his classical education, his mythomania, would never have allowed him to go as far as Rimbaud. To conceive of the poet as ‘the great criminal’, and to suggest that women have as important a part to play in imaginative discovery as men, are ideas that link Rimbaud not only with the succeeding century but with ongoing continuity. There will never be a poetry in which Rimbaud does not play a part.

             
In reality he was too poor even to stamp his letters. His mother believed that if she deprived him of money he would either return to his studies or be forced to find a job. He consented to neither. If he was questioned, he replied: ‘Shit’. He threw lice from his hair at Charleville antagonists, and gave readings of poems such as `Accroupissements’, ‘Les Premières Communions’ and ‘Le Cœur volé’ at Charles Bretagne’s house. Someone had to be shot down. Banville was a good target; the florist poet whom Rimbaud had begun by tolerating was ripe to receive a satellite message of Rimbaudian insolence. Having satirized Banville in his poem `Ce qu’on dit au poëte à propos de fleurs’, he thought it necessary to remind the eminent poet of his existence.

             
Sir and dear Master

             
Do you remember receiving from the provinces, in June 1870, a hundred or a hundred and fifty mythological hexameters entitled
Credo in unam?
You were kind enough to answer!

             
The same imbecile is sending you the above verses, signed Alcide Bava. — I beg your pardon.

             
I am eighteen. — I shall always love Banville’s verses.

             
Last year I was only seventeen!

             
Have I made any progress?

             
                                                        ALCIDE BAVA.

             
                                                        A.R.

              Had Banville made any progress? By writing ‘Le Bateau ivre’, Rimbaud had not only given support to his poetic theory but at a stroke had liquidated his contemporaries. As if in preparation for another autumnal departure, he had written ‘Le Bateau ivre’ in August 1871. No matter the case put forward for the poem being influenced by Rimbaud’s reading of such books as Michelet’s
La Mer
, Jules Verne’s
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
(Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), Poe’s sea stories like
The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
and
A Descent into the Maelstrom
, Baudelaire’s
Le Voyage
, and whatever other fabulous accounts of the ocean he may have derived from literary sources, ‘Le Bateau ivre’ is more than all of these the undertaking of a great inner journey. Everything that had happened to this boy who was still not seventeen is compounded into the poem’s violent and multi-coloured mosaic. It is the culmination of Rimbaud’s childhood obsessions, and provides the metaphorical vessel for his flight not only from Charleville but from the visible world. We know biographically that as a child Rimbaud used to push a boat out into the green river Meuse, as far as its mooring-chain would permit, and that at home he would stretch out on a piece of canvas In his room, imagining sails, sea-roads, tropical islands, the spiritual freedom that comes with leaving the earth behind. And this poem, so fiercely innovative, so charged with visionary colour, was to be the credential with which he would face the Parnassians in Paris. Moreover, it was the poem he was to send to Paul Verlaine by way of an introduction to his inflammatory genius.

             
What was it like for Rimbaud in that intolerable August of 1871? He had written a poem so powerful, so far in advance of anything he had known or seen, a poem which remains one of the great works of imaginative lyricism; but he was no one outside his own estimate. The lapidary fire that blazes in the aqueous quatrains that make up ‘Le Bateau ivre’ had been living in his head for how long? He had no idea. It was enough that he could do it without inquiring into the poem’s source. He ate little, he was growing physically, his clothes resembled a tramp’s, there was no one with whom he could discuss the trauma attendant on being raped, and his obscenity was viciously scatological.

             
On occasions, Rimbaud would risk crossing the border into Belgium, a nine-mile walk through woods, in which a Customs officer might show up, demanding at gunpoint to know what Rimbaud and his friend Delahaye had concealed about their persons. What Rimbaud wanted from the grocery shops on the border was tobacco. And for him, this idea of breaking frontiers accorded with what he was doing on a mental plane in poetry. The journey to the border by way of La Grande Ville and Pussemange involved danger, but it was also an act of assertive rebellion. Rimbaud was stripping himself down. He was returning to the primitive. He would surprise the material world by coming at it naked. What he had inside was the imaginative equivalent of nuclear fission. What else was ‘Le Bateau ivre’ but the poetic equivalent of splitting the atom?

             
But Rimbaud, the child, needed help. In a second letter to Paul Demeny, dated 28 August 1871, he describes his mother ‘as inflexible as seventy-three administrations with steel helmets’. The Ardennes are killing him. There is no relief for his inner turmoil. His mother insists that he takes a job in Charleville — and her Charleville and his are very different places. His, when he thinks of it, is a sun-bleached region. No matter how much he despises the narrowness of the people, it is nevertheless a region that has served as the physical backdrop to his poetry. Its limitations had provided the raw material for ‘Le Bateau ivre’. Was it not the frustration of watching the lifeless meanderings of the Meuse which had set up the tension to create a sea, and more titan that to imagine things that man has never seen? ‘Et j’ai vu quelquefois ce que l’homme a cru voir!’

             
‘This is the disgusting handkerchief which has been stuffed into my mouth,’ Rimbaud imparted to Demeny in the same letter, referring to his sense of domestic and intellectual suffocation. The way out had to come. Rimbaud imagined that Paris was the right place for him to be, despite the ignominy he had suffered on his several visits there. Paris could not be worse than Charleville, although Rimbaud had not yet reckoned on genius being solitary by nature. At that moment in time, he would have been understood nowhere. When he finally scuttled to the desert, it was in the conscious realization that he would always be a pariah. And it is not an overstatement to claim that his mission was Messianic. He believed himself endowed with a prophetic message. He travelled in poverty on the roads between towns; he renounced all hope of material security. He is at the time, he tells Demeny, ‘engaged in an infamous, inept, obstinate, mysterious work, answering questions, coarse and evil apostrophes with silence, appearing worthy in my extra-legal position’. But how could Rimbaud make known what he knew? In ‘Le Bateau ivre’ he had written:

              J’ai heurté, savez-vous, d’incroyables Florides

             
Mélant aux fleurs des yeux de panthères à peaux

             
D’hommes! Des arcs-en-ciel tendus comme des brides

             
Sous l’horizon des mers, à de glauques troupeaux!

              J’ai vu fermenter les marais énormes, nasses