I have just finished reading The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, and they have left me very sad, sad for days, in fact, as I trudged through the final, banal, exhausting, bourgeois two thirds of the book. Such a waste! I could gather some telling quotations from the letters of his post-poetic existence, could mine the veins to pull out some durable ore, but the whole prospect just leaves me sighing and broken. No matter how transgressive his youth, no matter how wild his poetry, how vile his passions, how bitter his refusal, to read his endless letters of complaint and hopelessness to his mother, to watch him importune his family again and again to send him some money, some books (on mechanics, not poetry), even to see him — seemingly — mature and cease his endless demands upon his family, to read his reports on the Abyssinian situation and pretend to see some flashes of the brilliance left behind, all that is too much, too little. I doubt that I shall ever be able to read Rimbaud effortlessly again.
I recall watching a teleplay in France about Rimbaud’s late life, my viewing companion and I both agreeing that it was turgid and lifeless and boring. Now I know that the reality upon which it was based was even more boring. Yet the worse thing, is that tragic ennui of someone who appears to have forsaken his talent completely, to have shut himself off from all commerce with literature after having left Verlaine with his final poetry in 1875. It is as if Dr. Seuss had become a salesman for a medical supply house, and never so much as doodled again. Or perhaps Rimbaud was furiously writing poems all the while, only to burn them as unworthy or to reject them for any one of a myriad manic reasons. God, I would like to think so! But instead I am faced with the actual evidence, the letters of his life, collected and hoarded by those with a bent and a talent for such, and the letters are not pretty.
Do they reveal a spoiled brat who never knew anything but running away? A selfish sod who squandered his gift? A deeply disturbed man who could not bear to face what he’d done with his youth? A prematurely middle-aged failure who teased himself with dreams of one ‘big score’ which would enable him to return to his abandoned home on terms of a tentative triumph? No, no, no, and no. Oh, I can convince myself that I see all these things in these letters. And if I were to read a biography of Arthur Rimbaud — but I never, never read biography — perhaps if I were to read of his life I could make these letters fit into some sort of pattern, could find some meaning worth knowing that would explain away all the banalities, the complaints, the boredom. But the truth is, the letters do not explain anything. The early letters are heady with a sophomoric purpose and verve, though even in these one gets the feeling that to be beholden (or thought so) to M. Rimbaud might be unpleasant. He is too pushy, too quick to presume on an imagined favor. But even this! At least he seems driven by something, to have a spirit he himself struggles to contain, but once he departs for Africa — all is lost. He finds a loneliness which must have attracted him as much as the vibrant call of Paris attracted him as a youth from his provincial town in the Ardennes. As much as he complains of the heat, the boredom, and the wearying existence he chooses for himself, he explains the impossibility of his return to France. I would love to be an exegete, to draw out several parallels where no lines exist, to state that when Rimbaud sees return to France as impossible, he is also speaking of his simultaneous longing and loathing to return to poetry. But the evidence is not there.
What is there, instead, is page after page of his too formal letters to his mother, his importuning and wheedling and idle dreams — not of the richer poetry he desired for Delahaye, wherein pretty flowers will be made to give space as well to the seagull’s turd — but instead his dreams are of making 10,000 francs, 30,000 francs, perhaps then he can return to France. There are a hundred lessons in this book — Don’t Stop Believing, Be True To Your Gift, Better To Burn Out Than Fade Away — but every one of the lessons is a lie. It is not a nihilistic existentialism which I am left with, reading these missives, but a disturbing unshakeable sadness. What waste! I can say. But then I must say it of everyone and everything. The story reads all too much like those people who showed such promise in high school, but then we all have to get along, have to take a job to feed the child we now have, have to make compromises. But there is no compromise here. No child, either to care for or even to abandon. For even that would be a definite act. Instead, Rimbaud lived in one of the more treacherous parts of the globe, doing fairly well it seems (which meant not dying or losing everything), and yet… And yet nothing.
It is not the waste. It is the easy renunciation of all that came before, with no signs that it meant anything. No hint of regrets beyond the usual petty regrets we all have of purchasing (or not purchasing) that house last year when the market was bad (or good), of forgetting to keep the paperwork on that major purchase when the time came to use the warranty. It is as if Rimbaud the poet never existed. Perhaps then he did not. After a decade of trying to “make it” by trading in eastern Africa, Rimbaud was finally forced off the continent by a horrific inflammation in his knee, leading him to Marseille where his leg was amputated. After a painful and lengthy “recovery”, he died, sixteen or seventeen years after his last known poem. He was thirty-five years old.