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(From FB)
A photo of Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), taken in 1883. In May that year
Rimbaud wrote to his family from Harar on the Ethiopian plateau, “One of
these photographs shows me… standing in a café garden; another, with my
arms crossed in a banana garden”.
Rimbaud, France’s most revolutionary poet from the latter part of the
19th century, spent the last ten years of his life moving between Aden
and Harar (with a brief spell in Cairo), working for much of that time
for a French commercial firm run by a Marseilles coffee merchant, Alfred
Bardey. Bardey’s business went bust in 1884, leaving Rimbaud stranded
but determined to carry on trading. In one letter from Aden, Rimbaud
claims that in 1883 he bought more than 3 million francs’ worth of
coffee for his employer, “and my profit from that is nothing more than
my wretched salary”. The letters from Aden and Harar suggest that
Rimbaud was desperate to save enough money from his commercial ventures
to be able to have a family and settle down. Yet it is equally clear
that he saw himself living outside Europe (“I can’t go to Europe, for
many reasons”) and remained as deeply infected by his “vagabond
disposition”, as he calls it, as he had ever been as a youth wandering
the Ardennes countryside. In 1883 he described himself as “losing
interest” , day by day, in the way of life and even the languages of
Europe, and felt he was “condemned to wander about” for the rest of his
life. As it happens, he died less than ten years later, in November
1891, aged 37, having spent the last years of his life in almost
complete isolation in Harar, six thousand feet above sea-level.
It is these last ten to twelve years (1879–91) that are called
“Rimbaud’s silence”. Why would the most brilliantly iconoclastic poet
France had produced till then (Baudelaire excepted) give up poetry so
decisively? In a classic study from 1961 the Irish critic Enid Starkie
suggested it was Rimbaud’s period in London in 1872–73 that formed the
watershed here. In Season in Hell, which he started writing in April
1873 after coming back from London, Rimbaud was effectively repudiating
his past to move to a more active kind of life. So what did London
contribute that Paris couldn’t to jolting Rimbaud in this way?
Rimbaud of course is famous for his two masterpieces, the magnificent
prose poems that make up Illuminations (1872–74) and the anguished
self-indictment of Season in Hell. Many of the prose poems were written
in London and about London. London was an imperial, cosmopolitan,
thoroughly “modern” metropolis with no counterpart in Europe and
impressed Rimbaud no end. In “Cities” (Illuminations) he refers to the
“imperial glitter” of its buildings and writes, “The official acropolis
surpasses the most colossal conceptions of modern barbarism”. This
“acropolis” was the imperial heart of the Victorian city, and beyond it
Rimbaud would see for the first time ever a “modern industrial capital,
with its dreary streets, straggling on in sordid never-ending lines”
(Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, pp.257–8). Starkie notes his fascination for
the London docks where he and Verlaine “saw all types of humanity,
swarming from all the four quarters of the world” and heard “strange
languages spoken”. (Later, in the winter of 1875, he would start
learning “Arabic, Hindustani, and Russian” in the library at
Charleville.) Rimbaud “spent in the docks more and more time, examining
the various types of goods” and talking to the sailors whom he met
(p.256). “The docks are impossible to describe, they are unbelievable!”
he wrote to Verlaine. What resonates here is the sheer exhilaration of
being “up close and personal” with the very hub of the world economy.
“It was in London that Rimbaud formed a connection amongst sailors who
came from all quarters of the globe, that he discovered from them what
were the commercial possibilities in those distant lands…”. And it was
in the “east-end by the docks”, in the Chinese dens, that he and
Verlaine “learned to smoke opium”.
Illuminations is full of those “countless hallucinations” that Rimbaud
later ascribed to the “monstrous mouthfuls of poison” he swallowed
during his spells in London. There are images of unmatched beauty in its
prose poems, childhood memories triggered and transformed by the
“Chinese ink” and “black powder”. Season in Hell looks back at this
poetry, recapping some of it as if he were writing a biography: “I
dreamed of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of republics
with no history, of hushed-up religious wars, revolutions in customs,
displacements of races and
