The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (7 page)

What a parallel there is between Rimbaud’s exiled existence among the natives of Abyssinia and Van Gogh’s voluntary retirement amidst the inmates of a lunatic asylum! Yet it was in these bizarre settings that both men found a relative measure of peace and satisfaction. For eight years, says Enid Starkie, “Rimbaud’s sole friend and comforter seems to have been Djami, the Harari boy of fourteen or fifteen, his body servant, his constant companion … Djami was one of the few people in his life whom he remembered and talked of with affection, the only friend of whom he spoke on his deathbed, when the thoughts of other men usually turn to those whom they have known in their early youth.” As for Van Gogh, it is the postman Roulin who stands by him in the darkest hours. His great longing to find some one with whom he could live and work never materialized in the outside world. The experience with Gauguin was not only disastrous but fatal. When at last he found the good Dr. Gachet at Auvers it was too late, his moral fiber had been sapped. “To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life.” That was the conclusion Van Gogh drew from his bitter experience. It is on this note of supreme resignation that his life comes to an end. Van Gogh passed away in July 1890. A year later Rimbaud writes to his relatives:
“Adieu mariage, adieu famille, adieu avenir! Ma vie est passée. Je ne suis plus qu’un tronçon immobile.”

No two men more ardently desired liberty and freedom than these two imprisoned spirits. Both seemed to deliberately choose the most difficult path for themselves. For both the cup of bitterness was filled to overflowing. In both men there lived a wound which never healed. Some eight years before his death, Van Gogh reveals in one of his letters what the second great disappointment in love had done to him. “A single word made me feel that nothing is changed in me about it, that it is and remains a wound, which I carry with me, but it lies deep and will never heal, it will remain in after years just what it was the first day.” Something of the sort happened to Rimbaud, also; though we know almost nothing about this unhappy affair, it is hard not to believe that the effect was equally devastating.

There is one quality which they had in common which also deserves to be noticed—the utter simplicity of their daily requirements. They were ascetic as only saints can be. It is thought that Rimbaud lived poorly because he was miserly. But when he had amassed a considerable sum he showed himself willing to part with it at the first call. Writing to his mother from Harar in 1881, he says:
“Si vous avez besoin, prenez de quoi est à moi: c’est à vous. Pour moi, je n’ai personne à qui songer, sauf ma propre personne, qui ne demande rien.”
When one thinks that these men, whose work has been an unending source of inspiration to succeeding generations, were forced to live like slaves, that they had difficulty in securing their sustenance, which was hardly more than a coolie demands, what are we to think of the society from which they sprang? Is it not evident that such a society is preparing its own rapid downfall? In one of his letters from Harar, Rimbaud contrasts the natives of Abyssinia with the civilized whites.
“Les gens du Harar ne sont ni plus bêtes, ni plus canailles, que les nègres blancs des pays dit civilisés; ce n’est pas du même ordre, voilà tout. Ils sont même moins méchants, et peuvent, dans certain cas, manifester de la reconnaissance et de la fidélité. Il s’agit d’être humain avec eux.”
Like Van Gogh, he was more at home with the despised and the downtrodden than with men of his own milieu. Rimbaud took a native woman to satisfy his affection, while Van Gogh acted as a husband (and father of her children) to an unfortunate woman inferior to him in every way, a woman who made his life unbearable. Even in the matter of carnal love they were denied the privileges of the ordinary man. The less they demanded of life the less they received. They lived like scarecrows, amidst the abundant riches of our cultural world. Yet no two men of their time could be said to have refined their senses in anticipation of a feast more than they. In the space of a few years they had not only eaten up, but eaten through, the accumulated heritage of several thousand years. They were faced with starvation in the midst of seeming plenty. It was high time to give up the ghost. Europe was already actively preparing to destroy the mould which had grown to fit like a coffin. The years which had intervened since their death belong to that dark side of life in whose shadow they had struggled to breathe. All that is barbarous, false, unlived out, is coming to the surface with the force of an eruption. We are beginning at last to realize how very un-modern is this boasted “modern” age. The truly modern spirits we have done our best to kill off. Their yearning does indeed seem romantic now; they spoke the language of the soul. We are now talking a dead language, each a different one. Communication is finished; we have only to deliver the corpse.

“I shall probably leave for Zanzibar next month,” Rimbaud writes in one of his letters. In another he is thinking of going to China or to India. Every now and then he inquires what news about the canal (Panama) ? He will travel to the end of the earth if there is hope there of eking out a living. It never occurs to him to return to his own country and begin life anew. It is always the exotic place to which his mind turns.

What a familiar chord that strikes! How often, in the early days, I dreamed of going to Timbuctoo! If that were impossible, then to Alaska or the Polynesian Islands. In the Trocadero Museum once I stood gazing for a long time at the faces of the natives in the Caroline Islands. As I studied their beautiful features I recalled that distant relatives of ours had settled there. If I could ever get there, I thought, I would feel “at home” at last. As for the Orient, that has always been in the back of my head, a longing which began early in childhood. Not only China and India, but Java, Bali, Burma, the state of Nepal, Tibet. Never once has it occurred to me that I would have difficulties in those faraway places. It always seemed to me that I would be welcomed with open arms. To return to New York, on the other hand, was a frightening thought. The city whose every street I know like a book, where I have so many friends, remains the last place on earth I would turn to. I would rather die than be forced to spend the rest of my days in the place of my birth. I can only visualize myself returning to New York as utterly destitute, as a cripple, as a man who has given up the ghost.

With what curiosity I read the early letters of Rimbaud! He has just begun his wanderings; he rambles on discursively about the sights he has seen, the nature of the land, the trifles which the folks at home always read with delight and excitement. He is certain that when he gets to his destination he will find suitable employment. He is sure of himself, everything will go well. He is young, full of high spirits, and there is so much to see in this great world. It does not take long for the tone to change. For all the verve and ebullience he displays, for all his willingness to work, for all that he possesses in the way of talent, ingenuity, doggedness, adaptability, he discovers before very long that there is really no place for a person like himself anywhere. The world does not want originality; it wants conformity, slaves, more slaves. The place for the genius is in the gutter, digging ditches, or in the mines or quarries, somewhere where his talents will
not
be employed. A genius looking for employment is one of the saddest sights in the world. He fits in nowhere, nobody wants him. He is maladapted, says the world. With that, the doors are rudely slammed in his face. But is there no place at all for him, then? Oh yes, there is always room at the very bottom. Have you never seen him along the waterfront loading sacks of coffee or some other “necessary” commodity? Have you not observed how well he washes dishes in the kitchen of a filthy restaurant? Have you not seen him lugging bags and valises at the railway station?

I was born in New York where there is every opportunity to succeed, as the world imagines. It is not so difficult for me to visualize myself standing in line at the employment agencies and the charity bureaus. The only job I ever seemed capable of filling in those days was that of dishwasher. And then I was always too late. There are thousands of men always ready and eager to wash dishes. Often I surrendered my place to another poor devil who seemed to me a thousand timse worse off than myself. Sometimes, on the other hand, I borrowed money for car fare or a meal from one of the applicants in line and then forgot all about getting a job. If I saw an ad for something I liked better in a neighboring city I would go there first, even if it meant wasting the whole day to get there. I’ve several times traveled a thousand miles and more in quest of a chimerical job, a job as waiter, for example. Often the thought of adventure stimulated me to go far-afield. I might pick up a conversation with a man en route which would alter the whole course of my life. I might “sell” myself to him, just because I was so desperate. So I reasoned to myself. Sometimes I was offered the job I went in search of, but knowing deep down that I could never hold it, I would turn round and go home again. Always on an empty stomach, to be sure. All arrivals and departures were on an empty stomach. That is the second thing always associated with genius—the lack of food. In the first place he is not wanted, in the second place there is no food for him. And in the third place he knows not where to lay his head. Aside from these discomforts he leads, as every one knows, the life of Reilly. He is lazy, shiftless, unstable, treacherous, a liar, a thief, a vagabond. He causes dissatisfaction wherever he roams. Truly, an impossible person. Who can get along with him? No one, not even himself.

Why harp on the ugly, the discordant things? The life of a genius is not all dirt and misery. Every one has his troubles, whether he is a genius or not. Yes, that is true too. And nobody appreciates that truth more than the man of genius. Every now and then you will find the genius coming forth with a plan to save the world, or a method of regeneration, at least. These are laughed off as wild dreams, as thoroughly Utopian. “Christmas on Earth!” for example. What a coke dream! Let him first prove that he can navigate on his own, you say. How can he save others if he is incapable of saving himself? The classic answer. Irrefutable. But the genius never learns. He was born with the dream of Paradise, and no matter how crazy it sounds, he will struggle to make it realizable again and again. He is incorrigible, a recidivist in every sense of the word. He understands the past, he embraces the future—but the present is meaningless to him. Success holds no bait for him. He spurns all rewards, all opportunities. He is a malcontent. Even when you accept his work, he has no use for you. He is already engaged on another work; his orientation has shifted, his enthusiasm is elsewhere. What can you do for him? How can you appease him? You can do nothing. He is beyond reach. He is after the impossible.

This unlovely image of the man of genius is, I think, a fairly accurate one. Though somewhat different, necessarily, it probably describes the plight of the unusual man even in primitive societies. The primitives too have their misfits, their neurotics, their psychopaths. We persist, nevertheless, in believing that this condition need not be so, that a day may come when this type of individual will not only find a place in the world but be honored and looked up to. Maybe this is a coke dream too. Maybe adaptation, harmony, peace and communion are varieties of mirage which will forever delude us. The fact, however, that we created these concepts, that they have the deepest meaning for us, means that they are realizable. They may have been created out of need, but they will become realities through desire. The man of genius usually lives as if these dreams were possible of fulfillment. He is too charged with the potency of them to live them out for himself; he is, in this sense, akin to those supreme renunciators who refuse Nirvana until all men are able to realize it with them.

“The golden birds which flit through the umbrage of his poems!” Whence came those golden birds of Rimbaud’s? And whither do they fly? They are neither doves nor vultures; they inhabit the airs. They are private messengers hatched in darkness and released in the light of illumination. They bear no resemblance to the creatures of the air, neither are they angels. They are the rare birds of the spirit, birds of passage who flit from sun to sun. They are not imprisoned in the poems, they are liberated there. They rise with wings of ecstasy and vanish in the flame.

Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold.

One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.