9 - 15 August 2001
Issue No.546
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 August 2001 Issue No.546 |
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Rimbaud in Yemen
-Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Paris: Fayard, 2001. pp1240;-Rimbaud, Graham Robb, London: Picador, 2000. pp551;
-Rimbaud à Aden (Rimbaud in Aden), Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Pierre Leroy (text), Jean-Hughes Berrou (photographs), Paris: Fayard, 2001. pp168
Anyone setting out today to produce a new life of the late nineteenth-century French poet and adventurer Arthur Rimbaud will need to convince the reader of four things over and above the general plausibility of the picture presented. Given the well- excavated character of Rimbaud studies, the new biographer will need to have something interesting to say about what Graham Robb, whose biography appeared last year following earlier books on Balzac and on Victor Hugo, calls "the crucial moments of Rimbaud's life": his stormy relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine; his political views and activities during the 1871 Paris Commune when a mixed bag of communists and anarchists briefly took over Paris before themselves being massacred; "his explorations and gun-running expeditions, and his financial, political and religious interactions with the slave societies of the Horn of Africa." Something on the poetry would be nice too.
Aden's Hotel Rambow, formerly the french cultural centre
Robb, like the French Rimbaud specialist Jean-Jacques Lefrère in his Rimbaud, has succeeded triumphantly in providing a prospectus of all known facts about Rimbaud, correcting certain misconceptions and substantially enlarging upon research presented by Enid Starkie in her Arthur Rimbaud (3rd edition, 1962), still a standard work on the poet in English. If finally neither he nor Lefrère quite manages to produce a wholly satisfying portrait of the poet, it is because Rimbaud has somehow slipped through the cracks in the great mass of detail that both authors, and especially Lefrère, have accumulated. Perhaps, on the other hand, it would be truer to say that the fault is Rimbaud's: did not he somehow slip through the cracks in his own life?
Rimbaud, with Verlaine, the "poet's poet," and Baudelaire, dominated nineteenth-century French poetry and through it that of Europe in general. Paris, according to the German author Walter Benjamin the "capital of the nineteenth century," at least as far as Europe was concerned, produced the fashions, literary and otherwise, to which the Western world then turned, exercising the kind of cultural ascendancy that has long since fled European shores for the United States. Rimbaud, an uncouth young man from the provinces whose astonishing precociousness had brought him to the attention of a leading cultural arbiter of the day, Paul Verlaine, arrived in Paris clutching the poems that he hoped would make his fortune: as Robb and Lefrère both point out, it is a story straight from Balzac. Rimbaud's writings never made his fortune -- gun-running between Yemen and the Ethiopian coast apparently did that -- but they did make his reputation as the leading poet of the day, ironically at a time when that poet had either renounced poetry, which he did at the age of 20, or was dead -- at 37 as a result of an illness developed while trading in what is now Ethiopia.
Rimbaud did not leave much behind him, publishing only one book, Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), himself and thrusting the grubby manuscripts of a second into the hands of Verlaine (published as Illuminations in 1886). However, what he did leave is tended with the same care by those interested in traditional European literary culture as is now afforded to the relics of modern celebrities burnt out by the newer televisual one. While Robb's portrait is an ironical sketch in the Oxford manner, Lefrère's fuller-bodied work is encyclopaedic in its scope, supplying the detail that Robb leaves out. Furthermore, both authors have much of interest to say about the final decade of Rimbaud's life, when he was based in Aden in Yemen.
Notwithstanding the four desiderata listed above, it seems unlikely that anyone now will have anything new to say about at least the first two of them, Rimbaud's relationship with literary Paris and with Verlaine and his activities during the Paris Commune. The general shape of Rimbaud's life is too well-known, and, more importantly, the source materials are too few for anything startlingly new to emerge on either score; indeed, much of the primary material employed by Robb and Lefrère in constructing their versions of events was already available to Starkie when she set out to reconstruct the poet's life in the 1930s. However, it all depends on how that evidence is used and for what purposes, for fighting started early, even when Rimbaud was still alive, as to how posterity should view the poet.
Isabelle, Rimbaud's sister, for example, made every effort to promote her view that her brother, the author of propositions vaguely threatening to the established order such as, famously, "je est un autre" [I is somebody else], "le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens" [the poet makes himself see by a long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses], and "l'amour est à reinventer" [love has to be re-invented], had later reconciled himself to Catholicism, and she, together with her husband Paterne Berrichon, tried to ensure that Rimbaud's life be seen firmly within this perspective, (Berrichon publishing his Life of Jean-Arthur Rimbaud in 1897 and Isabelle her Reliques in 1921).
Therefore, while Robb has produced by far the more readable account and has much more of interest to say on the poetry, one of the virtues of Lefrère's version is that at seemingly every turn he will stop carefully to assess the evidence. He notes, for example, that the story that Rimbaud cultivated lice in his hair when living with Verlaine and his wife in order to flick them at passing priests is not necessarily true. In fact, Malthide Verlaine, the estranged ex-wife of the poet, attributed this remark to her former husband in her Mémoires de ma vie [Memoirs, 1935], and she was not a disinterested witness. Nevertheless, subsequent biographers have repeated it, claiming that it shows Rimbaud's attitudes at the time, though Robb is more circumspect saying only that it shows how Rimbaud struck Madame Verlaine. There are many further questionable stories of this sort.
In general, the result of both authors' weighing and re- weighing of the evidence is to show that the relationship between Rimbaud and literary Paris was pretty much what one had taken it to be, and as Rimbaud himself had described it (bad), and that Rimbaud's activities during the Commune, as opposed to his rhetoric, were either negligible or non-existent. In this respect, Rimbaud was far less compromised when reaction set in than was Verlaine, who had briefly held a position under the Commune, his twenty-four-year-old friend, the poet Raoul Rigault, being appointed Chief of Police and publishing the names and addresses of police informers under the previous regime of "cartoon idiot" Napoleon III in the newspapers. Isabelle Rimbaud later made every effort to distance her brother both from the Commune and from Verlaine; later still, however, the left-wing British writer Terry Eagleton, quoted by Robb, has wanted to do the contrary and "rescue Arthur Rimbaud for a Left that is in dire need of him." The truth is that nothing said or done by Rimbaud at this time "amounts to political engagement" (Robb). Rimbaud regretted that the Commune had not burnt the Louvre, as it had sundry other symbols of the Cartoon Idiot's regime, in order to "force humanity to confront the irreparable destruction of this symbol of its dearest and most evil pride." But this is hardly an attitude that anyone really needs, leftist or otherwise.
Rimbaud spent the last decade or so of his life based in Aden in Yemen, living in that country considerably longer than he ever did in Paris. Starkie, whose habit of always siding with Rimbaud's mother is gently guyed by Robb, only had the fruit of her own research in East Africa, snatched during Oxford long vacations, to go on when discussing Rimbaud's activities in Yemen, and she tends to dismiss the interest Rimbaud took in those activities as well as the reader's potential interest in them, much as "Widow Rimbaud" herself would have done. Both Robb and Lefrère, on the other hand, have been able to use 50 years of subsequent research to feed their accounts of this period, and both devote considerable numbers of pages to doing so.
One result of this is that the centre of gravity of Rimbaud's life changes. Earlier, one could have been forgiven for seeing in it an allegory of the nineteenth-century artist shipwrecked in bourgeois society, and this is more or less what British playwright Christopher Hampton, now more usually known for his screenplays, did in his 1969 play Total Eclipse, often revived, which ends without Rimbaud even having left Europe. Today, however, having digested the results of more recent research, it might be truer to see Rimbaud in the mould of the independent European "trader" of the kind memorably described by the Anglo-Polish writer Joseph Conrad in his novella Heart of Darkness (1899) and elsewhere. Such men, operating in the final decades of the 19th century during the European "Scramble for Africa" and for much else, set up trading stations in societies that had often hitherto been largely, or entirely, closed to external penetration, such societies, in turn, falling under the explicit political control of one or other of the European powers.
Rimbaud was based in Aden, then a British port attached to a hinterland that was gradually falling under colonial control, in order to trade in coffee. However, the area immediately across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa, comprising what are now the separate states of Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia, was then being opened up to European penetration, particularly as a result of recently established, but short-lived, Egyptian political control in the area. There was a civil war in this area then called Abyssinia, and not only individuals, but also states, were watching from the sidelines, thinking that there would be rich pickings. Rimbaud, basing himself in Harare to the east of the present Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, undertook to supply arms to one side in the conflict.
It used to be thought that he had not made a success of this, largely because in his surviving letters home he complains continually of his poverty and misery. Yet, as Robb is able to show, Rimbaud was always deliberately vague about how much money he was making and what he was doing with it. On a trip to Cairo in 1887, Rimbaud deposited the sum of 16,000 francs in the Crédit Lyonnais Bank (around $70,000), which was no mean amount, particularly when added to what he was at the same time repatriating to France and banking elsewhere. If Rimbaud really was being "swindled" by the Abyssinians to whom he was supplying arms, as he frequently claims he was, where did this money come from? On this same visit, Rimbaud published accounts of the situation in Abyssinia in Cairo's Le Bosphore égyptien newspaper, and Robb describes these as containing "more accurate detail and analysis than several years' worth of diplomatic dispatches." Rimbaud apparently also became fluent in Arabic.
Ten years ago there was great excitement among Aden's francophone population because it was believed that the house that Rimbaud had lived in in that city had at last been positively identified. Swiftly renovated, it was turned into a French cultural centre. However, as the detailed maps and nineteenth- century photographs in Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Pierre Leroy and Jean-Hughes Berrou's photo-essay Rimbaud à Aden show, this house could not possibly have been Rimbaud's. Not only was it in the wrong place, but it had also been built several decades after the poet's death, and so, stripped of its cultural associations the building was then turned into a hotel, Aden's Hotel Rambow.
This sorry episode should perhaps stand as a cautionary tale, both Lefrère and Robb thinking further investigation in Yemen, Ethiopia or Cairo unlikely to turn up further Rimbaud memorabilia. It is interesting, though, that at the same time that Rimbaud, who had come to view French literary life with unutterable contempt, was being feted as the leader-in-exile of various new Parisian "movements," from the Decadents to the Zutistes, the ex-poet was writing instead on prospects for trade in Abyssinia for what was at the time a leading Egyptian newspaper. Few until now will have seen the need to recognise in Rimbaud not only an outstanding poet, but also an outstanding geographer. For his account of Harar and of the surrounding part of Africa is only the second ever attempted, after reports made by the great English traveller and polymath Sir Richard Burton following his expedition of 1855.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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