The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (9 page)

He has finished the story of his own private hell … he is about to say good-bye. It only remains to add a few parting words. Again the image of the desert occurs—one of his most persistent images. The source of his inspiration has dried up: like Lucifer, he has “used up” the light which was given him. There remains only the lure of the beyond, the call of the deep, in answer to which he finds corroboration and completion
in life
of the dread image which haunts him: the desert. He chafes at the bit. “When will we go …?” he asks. “When will we go … to greet the birth of the new task, the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition; to adore—the first ones!—Christmas on Earth?” (How reminiscent, these words, of that contemporary he never knew—Nietzsche!)

What revolutionary has voiced the path of duty more clearly and poignantly? What saint has used Christmas in a more divine sense? These are the words of a rebel, yes, but not of an impious one. This is a pagan, yes, but a pagan like Virgil. This is the voice of the prophet and the taskmaster, of the disciple and the initiate in one. Even the priest, idolatrous, superstitious and benighted though he be, must subscribe to
this
Christmas! “Slaves, let us not curse life!” he cries. An end to weeping and wailing, to the mortification of the flesh. An end to docility and submission, to childish beliefs and childish prayers. Away with false idols and the baubles of science. Down with dictators, demagogues, and rabble-rousers. Let us not curse life, let us worship it! The whole Christian interlude has been a denial of life, a denial of God, a denial of the Spirit. Freedom has not even been dreamed of yet. Liberate the mind, the heart, the flesh! Free the soul, that it may reign securely! This is the winter of life and “I distrust winter because it is the season of comfort!” Give us Christmas on Earth … not Christianity. I never was a Christian, I never belonged to
your
race. Yes, my eyes are closed to
your
light. I am a beast, a nigger …
but I can be saved!
You are the phony niggers, you misers, you maniacs, you fiends! I’m the real nigger and this is a nigger book. I say, let us have Christmas on Earth … now,
now
, do you hear? Not pie in the sky!

Thus he raves. “Thoughts out of season,” indubitably.

“Ah well…” he seems to sigh. “Sometimes in the sky I see endless beaches covered with white and joyous nations.” For a moment nothing stands between him and the certitude of dream. He sees the future as the inevitable realization of man’s deepest wish. Nothing can stop it from coming, not even the phony niggers who are buggering up the world in the name of law and order. He dreams everything out to the end. All the horrible, unspeakable memories fade away. And with them all regrets. He will have his revenge yet—on the backward ones, “the friends of death.” Though I go forth into the wilderness, though I make of my life a desert, though no man shall hear of me henceforth, know ye one and all that I shall be permitted to possess the truth in body and soul. You have done your utmost to disguise the truth; you have tried to destroy my soul; and in the end you will break my body on the rack … But I will know the truth, possess it for my own, in
this
body and with
this
soul …

These are the savage utterances of a seeker, a “friend of God,” even though he denies the name.

“All language being idea,” said Rimbaud, “the day of the universal language will come … This language, the
new
or
universal
, will speak from soul to soul, resuming all perfumes, sounds, colors, linking together all thought.” The key to this language, it goes without saying, is the symbol, which the creator alone possesses. It is the alphabet of the soul, pristine and indestructible. By means of it the poet, who is the lord of imagination and the unacknowledged ruler of the world, communicates, holds communion, with his fellow man. It was to establish this bridge that the youthful Rimbaud gave himself up to experiment. And how he succeeded, despite the sudden and mysterious renunciation! From beyond the grave he is still communicating, more and more powerfully as the years go on. The more enigmatic he seems, the more lucid becomes his doctrine. Paradoxical? Not at all. Whatever is prophetic can be made clear only in the time and the event. In this medium one sees backward and forward with equal clarity; communication becomes the art of establishing at any moment in time a logical and harmonious rapport between the past and the future. Any and all material makes itself available, provided it be transformed into eternal currency—the language of the soul. In this realm there are no analphabets, neither are there grammarians. It is only necessary to open the heart, to throw overboard all
literary
preconceptions … to stand revealed, in other words. This, of course, is tantamount to conversion. It is a radical measure, and presupposes a state of desperation. But if all other methods fail, as they inevitably do, why not this extreme measure—of conversion? It is only at the gates of hell that salvation looms. Men have failed, in every direction. Over and over they have had to retrace their steps, resume the heavy burden, begin anew the steep and difficult ascent toward the summit. Why not accept the challenge of the Spirit and yield? Why not surrender, and thus enter into a new life? The Ancient One is always waiting. Some call him the Initiator, some call him The Great Sacrifice …

What Rimbaud’s imitators, as well as his detractors, fail to see is that he was advocating the practice of a new way of life. He was not trying to set up a new school of art, in order to divert the enfeebled spinners of words—he was pointing out the union between art and life, bridging the schism, healing the mortal wound. Divine charity, that is the key to knowledge, he says. In the very beginning of
A Season in Hell
he had written: “… the other day, finding myself about to croak my last, I thought of seeking again the key to the banquet of old, where I might perhaps get back my appetite.
Charity is that key
.” And then he adds: “this inspiration proves that I have been dreaming!” Dreaming in hell, of course,
in that deep slumber which is unfathomable to him
. He who had “created all festivals, all triumphs, all dramas,” is obliged, during his eclipse, to bury all imagination. He who had called himself mage and angel, he who had freed himself of all ties, all claims, now finds himself brought back to earth, forced to accept, to embrace, harsh reality.
Peasant
, that is what they would make of him. Returned to the country, he is to be put out of currency … What lies, then, had he fed on in his swollen dreams? (“In the end I will ask to be pardoned for having fed myself on lies.”) But of
whom
will he ask pardon? Not of his tormentors, certainly. Not of the age which he repudiated. Not of that old goat of a mother who would put him in harness.
Of whom
, then? Let us say it—of his peers, of those who will succeed him and carry on the good fight. He is making his apologies not to us, nor even to God, but to the men of the future, the men who will greet him with open arms when we all enter the splendid cities. These are the men “of a distant race” to whom he pays allegiance and whom he regards as his true ancestors. He is removed from them only in time, not in blood or bearing. These are the men who know how to sing under torture. They are men of spirit, and to them he is linked not by antecedents—he cannot find one in the whole history of France—but by spirit. He is born in a void and he communicates with them across the void.
We
hear only the reverberations. We marvel at the sounds of this strange tongue. We know nothing of the joy and the certitude which sustained this inhuman confabulation.

What diverse spirits he has affected, altered, enslaved! What accolades he has received, and from men as different from one another in temperament, form and substance as Valéry, Claudel, André Breton. What has he in common with them? Not even his genius, for at nineteen he ransoms his genius for mysterious ends. Every act of renunciation has but one aim: the attainment of another level. (With Rimbaud, it is a drop to another level.) Only when the singer stops singing can he live his song. And if his song is defiance? Then it is violence and catastrophe. But catastrophes, as Amiel said, bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium. And Rimbaud, born under the sign of the Balance, chooses the extremes with the passion of an equilibrist.

Always it is some invisible wand, some magic star, which beckons, and then the old wisdom, the old magic, is done for. Death and transfiguration, that is the eternal song. Some seek the death they choose, whether of form, body, wisdom or soul, directly; others approach it deviously. Some accentuate the drama by disappearing from the face of the earth, leaving no clues, no traces; others make their life an even more inspiring spectacle than the confession which is their work. Rimbaud drew his death out woefully. He spread his ruin all about him, so that none could fail to comprehend the utter futility of his flight.
Anywhere, out of the world!
That is the cry of those for whom life no longer has any meaning. Rimbaud discovered the true world as a child; he tried to proclaim it as a youth; he betrayed it as a man. Forbidden access to the world of love, all his endowments were in vain. His hell did not go deep enough, he roasted in the vestibule. It was too brief a period, this season, as we know, because the rest of his life becomes a Purgatory. Did he lack the courage to swim the deep? We do not know. We know only that he surrenders his treasure—as if
it
were the burden. But the guilt which he suffered from no man escapes, not even those who are born in the light. His failure seems stupendous, though it brought him through to victory. But it is not Rimbaud who triumphs, it is the unquenchable spirit that was in him. As Victor Hugo said: “Angel is the only word in the language that cannot be worn out.”

“Creation begins with a painful separation from God and the creation of an independent will to the end that this separation may be overcome in a type of unity higher than that with which the process began.”
*

At the age of nineteen, in the very middle of his life, Rimbaud gave up the ghost. “His Muse died at his side, among his massacred dreams,” says one biographer. Nevertheless, he was a prodigy who in three years gave the impression of exhausting whole cycles of art. “It is as if he contained whole careers within himself,” said Jacques Rivière. To which Matthew Josephson adds: “Indeed literature ever since Rimbaud has been engaged in the struggle to circumvent him.” Why? Because, as the latter says, “he made poetry
too dangerous
.” Rimbaud himself declares, in the
Season
, that he “became a fabulous opera.” Opera or not, he remains fabulous—nothing less. The one side of his life is just as fabulous as the other, that is the amazing thing. Dreamer and man of action, he is both at once. It is like combining in one character Shakespeare and Bonaparte. And now listen to his own words … “I saw that all beings are fatally attracted to happiness: action is not life, but a way of dissipating one’s strength, and enervation.” And then, as if to prove it, he plunges into the maelstrom. He crosses and recrosses Europe on foot, ships in one boat after another for foreign ports, is returned ill or penniless again and again; he takes a thousand and one jobs, learns a dozen or more languages, and, in lieu of dealing in words deals in coffee, spices, ivory, skins, gold, muskets, slaves. Adventure, exploration, study; association with every type of man, race, nationality; and always work, work, work, which he loathed. But above all,
ennui
! Always bored. Incurably bored. But what activity! What a wealth of experiences!
And what emptiness!
His letters to his mother are one long plaint mingled with reproaches and recriminations, with whines, entreaties and supplications. Miserable one, accursed one! Finally he becomes “the great invalid.”

What is the meaning of this flight, this endless wail, this self-inflicted torture? How true, that activity is not life! Where is life, then? And which is the true reality? Certainly it cannot be this harsh reality of toil and wandering, this sordid scrimmage for possessions?

In the
Illuminations
, written in melancholy London, he had announced:
“Je suis réellement d’outre-tombe, et pas de commissions!”
That was said as poet. Now he knows it for a fact. The musician who had found something like the key of love, as he puts it, has lost the key. He has lost the key and the instrument both. Having shut all the doors, even of friendship, having burned all his bridges behind him, he will never set foot in the dominion of love. There remain only the great solitudes in the shadow of the buried tree of Good and Evil where, in his
Matinée d’ivresse
, occurs that nostalgic phrase—
“afin que nous ramenions notre très pur amour.”
He wanted salvation in the form of liberty, never realizing that it comes only through surrender, through acceptance.
“Tout homme,”
said his master Baudelaire,
“qui n’accepte pas les conditions de sa vie vend son âme.”
With Rimbaud, creation and experience were virtually simultaneous; he required only a minimum of experience to make music. As the youthful prodigy he is closer to the musician or the mathematician than the man of letters. He is born with a supersensible memory. He does not earn his creation by the sweat of his brow—it is there, on tap, waiting to be roused by the first contact with harsh reality. It is sorrow which he must cultivate, not the virtuosity of the maestro. He does not have long to wait, as we know.