On November 6, 1868, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, a day boy at the Collège de
Charleville in north-eastern France, sat down at his desk, read the few
lines of Horace that were printed on the examination paper, and, recognizing
the ode, began to develop the theme in a neat hand: “Ver erat, et morbo
Romae languebat inerti / Orbilius . . . ”. He had just turned fourteen and
already had an enviable ability to banish distractions from his mind. He
wrote in the first person, but as though he were writing about somebody
else: a schoolboy, wearied by his master’s “assiduous ferule”, allows his
mind and senses to be seduced by the burgeoning spring; he lies down on a
grassy riverbank and is flown off by a flock of doves to be crowned with
laurel and to have his brow inscribed by Apollo with words of flame, “Tu
vates eris!” (“You shall be a poet!”). After three-and-a-half hours, Rimbaud
handed in fifty-nine almost perfect Latin hexameters, which were deemed
worthy of publication in the official Bulletin of the Académie de Douai.
This was just the first of several triumphs by which Rimbaud brought honour to
his school. As André Guyaux points out in his splendid new Pléiade edition
of Rimbaud’s works, letters and fragments, Rimbaud published far more Latin
verse in his lifetime than French. His father, who may be the fantasy
first-person narrator of Rimbaud’s poem, “Le Bateau ivre”, had left home
years before. His mother, whom he called “la Bouche d’Ombre”, after Hugo’s
apocalyptic poem, was a rigid disciplinarian. Arthur was always acutely
conscious of what was expected of him. Rules were like reliable friends who
could be teased or even insulted. Until 1872, he wrote his poems in fairly
regular verse, with fewer formal eccentricities than can be found in poems
written two generations earlier. In August 1870, he was mightily impressed
by Verlaine’s caesura-flouting line in Fêtes galantes, “Et la tigresse épou
/ vantable d’Hyrcanie” – a “forte licence”, he called it, as though he had
seen a classmate straddling the school wall and running away. He relished
the discipline of his Latin exercises, and the game of trying to be “as
unscholastic as possible within the confines of school” (“ut in scholâ
minime scholasticus videretur”), to quote another of his prizewinning
discours.
Rimbaud was “practising the art of obeying the rules of an academic
dissertation whilst wittily denouncing it”, says Guyaux. Instead of
relegating his Latin compositions to an appendix, Guyaux places them in
chronological order among Rimbaud’s other early work. They show the muscular
apprentice learning his trade. In one exercise, he plagiarized a translation
of Lucretius by Sully Prudhomme, but considerably improved it in the
process. In another, he fashioned a subtly erotic evocation of the graceful
young carpenter of Nazareth from a bland poem whose author, says Guyaux, has
not been identified. (It was a Vendean poet called Eugène Mordret, who had
published “Le Christ à la scie” in the prestigious Revue contemporaine.) The
“scholâ” changed, but Rimbaud continued to write poems as though they were
exercises. Even the notorious “Sonnet du trou du cul” was a cunning pastiche
of another poet, a technically irreproachable example of the traditional
blason enumerating a lover’s charms. The “Arsehole Sonnet” was written in
Paris, in collaboration with Verlaine, at the Cercle Zutique, which was a
squalid coterie of cheerful eccentrics, drug addicts and latent geniuses. As
Guyaux nicely puts it, “Rimbaud felt at home there; he was soon to be top of
the class”.
A scrupulous textual critic with relatively little interest in biographical
minutiae, and still less in Rimbaud’s post-literary adventures, Guyaux is
unusually sensitive to the poet’s unrebellious side. He precisely elucidates
the outrageous obscenities of his poetry and prose, but he also reminds us
that the schoolboy Rimbaud sent a congratulatory Latin ode to Napoleon III’s
son on the occasion of his first Communion, and imagines his discomfiture
when his classmates found out. He notes that Rimbaud failed to publish any
work – apart from a few poems and the privately printed Une Saison en Enfer
– not just because he was continually changing, or because of artistic
integrity, but because “his early ambitions were not encouraged”. Like any
writer, Rimbaud needed an audience, and many of his poems were written to
please particular readers. “Angoisse”, in the Illuminations, mentions “les
ambitions continuellement écrasées”, among which must be counted the fact
that, by the time he gave up writing poems, at the age of twenty or
thereabouts, he no longer had any readers who could understand him.
Some Rimbaldophiles prefer to enjoy his poetry in a battered paperback,
stained with evidence of bohemian adventures. The pricey Pléiade, with its
leather and gold uniform, its silky ribbons, its noli me tangere bible
paper, and finicky notes on manuscripts and variants, might appear
incongruously unRimbaldian. In fact, the proliferation of references and
Guyaux’s careful erudition chime well with Rimbaud’s passionate learning.
There is something autodidactically earnest about almost all his projects.
His first known letter, written to his favourite teacher at the Collège de
Charleville, includes a list of books that would be “very useful to me”: “1.
Curiosités historiques, 1 vol. by Ludovic Lalanne, I think. 2. Curiosités
bibliographiques, 1 vol. by the same. 3. Curiosités de l’histoire de France,
by P. Jacob, 1st series”, etc.
Even at school, he was devouring digests and dictionaries, gobbling up all the
miscellaneous wisdom that would explode in Une Saison en Enfer: “Oh! la
science! . . . Géographie, cosmographie, mécanique, chimie! . . .” Parts of
Une Saison en Enfer sound like a cautionary tale of the boy who read too
much. If one had to name a fault, says Guyaux, it would be his excessively
intellectual approach to art. Arrayed on shelves, the books that Rimbaud is
known to have read would easily have covered all the “flaking plaster” of
the room in the family farmhouse where he wrote most of Une Saison en Enfer.
(He later claimed that this was the only point of owning books.) Ten years
on, his first letters to his mother and sister from Arabia were full of
similar wish-lists, relating to other, more lucrative trades: Livre de poche
du charpentier, Dictionary of Engineering military and civil, Constructions
métalliques, Guide du voyageur ou Manuel théorique et pratique de
l’explorateur, etc.
Guyaux’s is the third Pléiade edition of Rimbaud works. His predecessors –
André Rolland de Renéville and Jules Mouquet in 1946, Antoine Adam in 1972 –
organized Rimbaud’s poems into apparently coherent collections, with titles
that the poet himself never used: “Poésies”, “Vers nouveaux et chansons”,
etc. More recent editors, following the example of Jean-Luc Steinmetz, have
tried to be less tidy. Despite the dearth of chronological data, some have
preferred to arrange the poems as far as possible in biographical order
instead of trying to separate the serious from the ephemeral: for example,
Alain Borer’s “Édition du centenaire”, in which schoolwork, sketches,
letters, fragments and poems form a chaotic scrapbook-diary. In his enormous
four-volume edition of Rimbaud’s Oeuvres complètes (volume three has yet to
appear), Steve Murphy adopts a partially chronological solution, while
emphasizing the “artificial and malleable” nature of any edition of Rimbaud.
Guyaux, too, has tried to reconcile “the old generic option with the global,
chronological option”. First come the “Oeuvres”, from 1868 to 1873, ending
with the Illuminations, the intended order of which, as Guyaux observes, is
partly a matter of guesswork. Any undated poems are placed at the end of the
supposed year of composition. Different versions of the same poem are
reproduced separately, even if the variants are so small that they could
easily have been indicated in a footnote. Poems for which no manuscript in
Rimbaud’s hand survives are printed in a smaller typeface. This is a curious
act of editorial ostentation. It means that “Le Bateau ivre”, which is known
from a copy made by Verlaine, looks less significant than some of Rimbaud’s
jokes and jottings: lacking official documents, the poet literally fades
from sight. The London poem, “Métropolitain”, begins in the usual typeface
and ends in a smaller one, because part of the manuscript was copied out by
his companion in London, Germain Nouveau.
After the “Oeuvres” come the “Lettres”, from 1868 to 1875, and then a section
titled “Vie et documents (1854–1891)”, which spans Rimbaud’s entire life.
There is a full dossier of documents relating to the “Affaire de Bruxelles”,
when a drunken Verlaine shot his impossible lover in the wrist. (Rimbaud was
trying to blackmail him.) The dossier includes the magnificently maternal
letter that Rimbaud’s mother sent to Verlaine after receiving Verlaine’s
suicide note: “You complain of your unhappy life, poor boy! But do you know
what tomorrow will bring? . . . I, too, have known great unhappiness; I have
suffered much and shed many tears; but I was able to turn all my afflictions
to profit”. There are also long extracts from the diary and letters of
Rimbaud’s sister Vitalie, who visited him in London with their mother. They
describe an almost perfect young gentleman, happy to see his family,
sacrificing valuable time at the British Museum to show them the sights,
only occasionally impatient or bored. “Arthur organizes everything in less
time than it takes to say it.” “He is so good at everything that everything
always goes well.”
In this section, the edition is slightly less compendious. Vitalie’s diary and
letters occupy sixteen tightly packed pages, yet Rimbaud’s advertisement in
The Times of November 7 and 9, 1874 – a precious glimpse of the disappearing
poet – is only paraphrased, though there is no doubting its authorship,
since drafts of the advertisement were found among Rimbaud’s papers: “A
PARISIAN (20), of high literary and linguistic attainments, excellent
conversation, will be glad to ACCOMPANY a GENTLEMAN (artists preferred), or
a family wishing to travel in southern or eastern countries. Good
references. – A. R., No. 165, King’s-road, Reading”. The rough drafts and
calculations made by Rimbaud in a school notebook when he was ten years old
are reproduced in full, but there is nothing from his lists of English and
German words and expressions, which probably date from the period when he
stopped writing poetry.
These vocabulary lists belong with the other notes and fragments. They might
have provided a fitting end to the section of “Oeuvres et lettres” – the
poet in his warehouse of words, trading in his “verbal alchemy”, stocking up
on words from Exchange and Mart or a similar publication: “perfect in points
and markings”, “silver appliqués never taken out of parcel”, etc. They might
also have allowed some further identification of his readings. One list
appears to have been compiled from John Charles Tarver’s Royal
Phraseological English–French, French–English Dictionary. Another contains
phrases – intended for what purpose? – from one of Webster’s dictionaries:
“to color a stranger’s goods”, “to bring to the gangway”, “to lay the land
(to cause it apparently to sink by sailing from it)”, etc.
Once the poetry dries up, Guyaux understandably shows less interest. His
concise and elegant introduction ends in 1875. He talks of “the purgatory of
the letters and the hell of the commercial comptes and mécomptes”
(“accounts” and “miscalculations” or “disappointments”). Since the
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is devoted to “great works” of “literature and
philosophy”, Rimbaud’s report on the Ogaden region, and traces of the book
he was apparently intending to write on Abyssinia, no doubt deserve less
attention than his poems, even if he is now known to be an important figure
in the exploration and exploitation of East Africa. But his letters from
Aden and Harar, with their coolly described horrors and their skeletal
style, have been pored over and admired by so many other writers that they,
too, belong to the history of literature. They also contain some
retrospectively illuminating evidence of Rimbaud’s cunning disguises, his
savage self-pity, his dogged and ingenious self-destruction.
Many of these letters, which are scrupulously but sparely annotated by Guyaux,
with a useful glossary of Amharic words by Kiflé Sélassié Béséat, would have
deserved the editorial shrinking treatment given to “Le Bateau ivre”. Almost
two-thirds of the hundred or so letters that Rimbaud sent to his family from
Africa and Arabia are known only from the bowdlerized edition published by
his sister Isabelle and his posthumous brother-in-law. The surviving
manuscripts show that Rimbaud’s brutal cynicism was toned down:
sanctimonious phrases were inserted, and, as Guyaux points out, his earnings
(already considerable) were exaggerated. Yet some of the inserted phrases
have no obvious hagiographical value and support Isabelle’s claim that she
incorporated into the letters passages from her own private correspondence
with Arthur, which she subsequently destroyed.
All editors of Rimbaud’s complete works have had to report the continuing
absence of his supposed masterpiece, a five-part work in prose titled “La
Chasse spirituelle”, which Verlaine left behind in Paris when he ran away
with Rimbaud, and which Verlaine’s in-laws either threw away or kept as
incriminating evidence of his affair. This work of “strange mysticalities”
may have been one of several inspired by Rimbaud’s biblical and theological
readings: the title had been used, two and three centuries before, by
writers whose obscure mysticism might have appealed to Rimbaud. Guyaux’s
edition does, however, contain two new items. There is an interestingly
different version, in Rimbaud’s hand, of the poem “Mémoire”, titled “Famille
maudite”, with the words “D’Edgar Poe” above the title. The manuscript came
up for auction in 2004. It was found in papers that once belonged to
Verlaine’s in-laws, which suggests that “La Chasse spirituelle” may yet come
to light.
The second new item, rediscovered in 2007, and previously known only from a
description by one of Rimbaud’s friends, is a short prose satire from a
Charleville newspaper, Le Progrès des Ardennes. “Le Rêve de Bismarck
(Fantaisie)” was published on November 25, 1870, during the Prussian siege
of Paris. It describes a drunken Bismarck puffing at his pipe as he runs a
greedy finger over the map of France. He falls asleep; his head slumps on to
the embers of his pipe, and he “carbonizes” his nose. Like so much of
Rimbaud’s perversely moralistic work, the end of this “fantaisie” has a
distinct echo of his mother’s unforgettable voice: “Voilà! fallait pas
rêvasser!” (“That’s what you get for daydreaming!”).
Rimbaud
OEUVRES COMPLÈTES
Edited by André Guyaux with Aurélia Cervoni
1,101pp. Gallimard. 49euros.
978 2 07 011601 0
Graham Robb’s books include Balzac: A biography, 2000, and The
Discovery of France, 2008.
