A Season in Hell & Illuminations Read online

  He explained, too, what he was working on (“I’m doing some little prose pieces under the general title The Pagan Book or The Black Book”). He said he’d love to send these pieces to him but cried poverty (“I already have three: it costs too much!”). And then, in closing, made a request: that Delahaye ship him something tantalizing, something to sustain him in the wasteland of the French countryside, for “The French countryside is death.” And yet, Rimbaud asked neither for sex (in the form of illicit erotica); nor drugs (to feed his supposed program of seerdom); nor the nineteenth-century equivalent of rock and roll, whatever that might have been. On second thought, actually, Rimbaud did ask for the nineteenth-century equivalent of rock and roll, or what he might have viewed as such: Rimbaud asked his friend to send him more books.

  It is a short list, but a list nonetheless and one that gives us more insight than we might imagine into those “little prose pieces” he was writing. In the May letter, he told Delahaye that “my fate rests with this book for which I still have a half-dozen horror-stories to make up. How does one make up atrocities here?” Well, it helps to have sources. Joyce could not have written Ulysses without Homer, nor Cummings his poetry without Sappho’s, nor Pound his without both those examples and Confucius’s teachings to boot—sources upon which to draw and distort, writers with whom to conspire. Thus Rimbaud told Delahaye, “I’ll soon send you stamps so you can buy and send me Goethe’s Faust … [and] see if there is any Shakespeare.”

  Whether or not these were sent and, if sent, received is another of history’s shortfalls: we just don’t know. But reading Rimbaud’s prose pieces themselves, which is to say reading the book we know Rimbaud was writing that May—the book, A Season in Hell, that you now have in your hands—it is quite clear why he would have wanted what he demanded. That A Season in Hell was the book he was writing is known to us with any certainty is because, on the final page of the first edition, we find the following:

  April-August: the season (and a half) when Rimbaud wishes us to understand that he wrote the seven thousand words that comprise the most important French poem of the nineteenth century. Not “most important” because it was the first or only such hybrid work; but because it was the first, in its content, to look both forward and backward through history and literature, using a knowledge of the two to write a poem very much about the present culture, a culture viewed, of course, through the agreeable myopia of a single reporter’s gaze. The poem unfolds, therefore, in that reportorial first person, but in a language that no one would mistake for having come from the newspaper. Which is not to say that the prose is purple, only deliberate, leached of sentimentality, hard-edged, distilled into soliloquies, nine of them (the three that had been written by May; the half-dozen he wrote thereafter). Reading this progression of monologues delivered, as it were, from the lip of the stage, one could well understand how profitably their writer’s time would have been spent reading, say, Lear’s hoarse regrets; and Othello’s proud furies; and Hamlet’s half-mad calls.

  Of the poem’s nine parts, all but one are by the same speaker. A brief overture describes a fall from grace (“Long ago, if my memory serves, life was a feast where every heart was open, where every wine flowed”) and concludes with the storyteller clearing his throat (“watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned”). A tour of human inadequacy follows, a meditation on being that depicts, in a series of what one might more aptly term evocations than scenes, identity’s destruction, the stampeding of self beneath the footfalls of history. For, at its most basic, A Season in Hell is very much what Ezra Pound would call, fifty years later when describing what he believed modern poetry should be: a poem that included history. As such, Rimbaud’s long poem is modernism’s true first throb. But the history here is personal, or is, at least, told as if history were only personal, as if civilization were always a genealogy of self (“My Gallic forebears gave me pale blue eyes, a narrow skull, and bad reflexes in a fight”). For the modern reader who knows a little too much about Rimbaud’s bio, though, the poem, as it continues on, becomes harder to read. We see surprising suggestions from the eighteen-year-old, which seem prophetic: “I’m leaving Europe,” the voice of the poem says, and we cannot help but think of how Rimbaud would soon leave Europe himself, for Africa and places where, as the voice of the poem continues, “unknown climates will tan my skin.”

  For in July of 1873, nearing that August border when we are told the poem was brought to an end, Rimbaud was shot, in the wrist, by his lover, Paul Verlaine. And yes, therefore, inevitably, once Rimbaud returned yet again to recuperate in the rural boredom of his mother’s barn, sitting, we can imagine, with a crudely bandaged arm in which a hole was slowly healing, that his wounded present was very much before him as he wrote this poem. It would not be wrong, therefore, when reading the poem’s fourth monologue, the only one spoken by a different voice, to suppose its tonal source, its jilted whine (“How I suffer, how I scream: I truly suffer”) might have a recent basis in Verlaine, now faraway in jail.

  And yet, to read the poem only this way would be a pity, for it has a larger purpose, a more mythic register and reach, one that extends well beyond the easy graspings at biography: Rimbaud was drawing on deeper reserves. A life of reading and thinking is not undone by a single shot, and a poem this rich is not explained by a single loss. Rimbaud had wanted, remember, for Delahaye to send him, in May, Goethe’s Faust. This suggests he had the fate of the soul in his mind well before he suffered his most memorable wound. For the season Rimbaud’s Hell resides in was neither late spring nor early summer; not love’s loss nor a farm’s torpor. His Hell was all of these, and so much more. His was informed by Persephone’s—Persephone, who was stolen away to that darkness while tending flowers in a field; although she was returned safely, she could not return completely: because she had eaten six seeds from a pomegranate, that infernal fruit, she had to spend six months every year below the world. And in those six months without her, the world wilted and still does, and what is green goes gray, until she returns again from her dark season. This is a myth that rhymes with Christendom’s the Fall: a taste of fruit so succulent as to leave us forever cast out from a second bite as good. Rimbaud knew these stories, of course, and now was writing his own: about the murders of experience, about the havoc of living in an unamenable world. When, ten years earlier, Baudelaire wrote his epochal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” he may as well have been describing Rimbaud’s eventual accomplishment:

  And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very sure that this man, such as I have depicted him—this solitary gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call “modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory. (Jonathan Mayne, tr.)

  Toward the end of A Season in Hell, the voice of the poem says: “I never really let myself dream of the joy of escaping modernity’s tortures … since the advent of science and Christianity, man has been playing with himself, proving facts, puffing with pride every time he repeats his proofs, and acting like this is some sort of life! What subtle, idiotic torture; and the source of my spiritual wanderings.” Rimbaud, like so many since, wanted to say goodbye to all that, everything that kept him from what was most human. A Season in Hell found a form for that forceful desire to shed what is worst in us, which is to say our puffed-up proofs. Other breaths followed, though, prose poems we have come to call Illuminations, fragments that were Rimbaud’s last works, traces of a genius running out of time and mind for poetry. They are postcards to readers from a reader, things seen and imagined, before Rimbaud at last left the darkness of writing, finally—and
we will never know whether gratefully or regretfully—behind. A Season in Hell, though, was this poet’s great last gasp.

  —Wyatt Mason

  Winter 2005

  CHRONOLOGY

  1854

  Born 20 October in Charleville, son of Frédéric Rimbaud, an infantry captain, and Vitalie Cuif, daughter of landowners.

  1860

  Frédéric leaves Vitalie and their four children, never to return.

  1861–1869

  Rimbaud enrolled in school, first Institut Rossat, then the collège de Charleville. Skips a grade, exhibiting academic gifts. Wins numerous regional and national competitions for schoolwork. Acquires reputation for excellence.

  1870

  Begins principal period of poetic production, which, by all signs, runs its course by 1874.

  January: Georges Izambard hired by the collège to teach rhetoric. Develops a mentorial relationship with Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s first poem is published, “Les Etrennes des orphelins,” in La Revue pour tous.

  May: Rimbaud writes letter and sends poems to Théodore de Banville, noted Parisian poet. Asks for encouragement; no response from Banville is known. In July, eruption of Franco-Prussian war.

  August–November: Rimbaud runs away to Paris, where he is jailed. Upon release, retreats to Douai, home of Izambard’s aunts. Remains several weeks. Fetched by Izambard at Rimbaud’s mother’s insistence. Rimbaud returns reluctantly, remains briefly, flees again, mostly on foot, around the region. Returns to Charleville in November. Schools remain closed due to war.

  1871

  Flees to Paris in February, returning in March. War comes to a close with the declaration of the Commune in Paris, to which Rimbaud may or may not have been a witness. In May, writes the so-called “seer letters.” Summer: writes “The Drunken Boat.” Letters to Banville and to Paul Verlaine, another noted poet. Verlaine responds enthusiastically: “Come, dear great soul, we call to you, we wait for you.” Sends money and arranges for Rimbaud to come to Paris.

  September: Rimbaud leaves for Paris. Put up by Verlaine, then by Banville and by Charles Cros. Becomes acquainted with Paris literary life. Acquires reputation for brilliance and brattiness. Develops relationship with Verlaine, to the consternation of Mathilde, Verlaine’s wife. Volatility.

  1872

  Verlaine leaves wife, flees with Rimbaud. Reconciles with wife, leaves wife again, moves to London with Rimbaud. Melodrama.

  1873

  Winter: Rimbaud and Verlaine in London. Summer: upheaval, ending in July in Brussels, where Verlaine shoots Rimbaud in the wrist. Police interrogate. Verlaine given a penile/rectal exam, from which it is inferred he is a participant in “unnatural practices.” Sentenced to prison: two years. Rimbaud returns to family home. October: at M.-J. Poot, Brussels, Rimbaud has his Une saison en enfer printed; takes a handful of copies, leaving over five hundred at the shop, to which he never returns.

  1874–1879

  Sees Verlaine for the last time in February 1875 upon his release from prison; gives him the manuscript of the poems known today as Illuminations. December 1875: death of sister Vitalie, of synovitis. Travels: to London, Stuttgart, Milan, Marseille, Paris, Vienna, Holland, Bremen, Stockholm, Alexandria, Cyprus, in search of work as a tutor, teacher, soldier of fortune, and foreman.

  1880

  Leaves Europe, to which he will not return for eleven years. March: employed as construction foreman in Cyprus. Leaves suddenly in June, in uncertain circumstances. Later a colleague, Ottorino Rosa, will claim in a memoir that Rimbaud told him he threw a stone that inadvertently struck a worker in the head and killed him.

  August: in Aden, Arabia, hired as a clerk in the trading firm of Mazeran, Viannay, and Bardey. November: sent to work for the firm in Harar, Choa, in Africa.

  1881

  In Harar. Expedition into the interior in search of ivory. Finds the climate in the region unpleasant.

  1882

  Returns to Aden in service of the firm. Ponders a change of employment. Promoted instead.

  1883

  Returns to Harar, now as director of the agency. Various expeditions into the interior.

  1884

  Firm in bankruptcy. Harar and Aden branches closed. Firm reestablished in July by Alfred Bardey. Rimbaud’s services retained. Returns to Aden.

  1885

  Continues to work for Bardey. Sells coffee and various goods. October: ends partnership with Bardey. Allies with another trader, Pierre Labatut, to form a caravan of arms and munitions for sale to the king of Choa, Ménélik. Prepares caravan: delays.

  1886

  Labatut falls ill: cancer. A new partner, Soleillet, dies. September: caravan at last departs.

  1887

  March: finds the king in Entotto, and liquidates caravan at what Rimbaud deems disastrous disadvantage. July: back in Aden. August: Massawa, to cash the king’s checks. On to Cairo for a month, where he deposits money at a branch of a French bank, Crédit Lyonnais. In Aden by the end of the year. First complaints of knee pain.

  1888

  Various arms caravans. Partnership with César Tian, an Aden merchant, to begin a firm in Harar.

  1891

  February: debilitating knee pain. March: seeks local medical attention. April: unable to walk. Borne on a litter to the coast, a twelve-day trip in terrible weather. May: Arrives Marseille, hospitalized. Mother arrives soon thereafter. May 27, right leg amputated above the knee.

  July: released from the hospital, returns to the family home in Roche. August: condition worsens, returns to Marseille. Hospitalized again, for good. Weeks pass, disease spreads, limbs fail, delusions come.

  November 9: dictates final letter, sister Isabelle at his side.

  November 10: dies, at ten in the morning.

  RIMBAUD’S YOUTHFUL TERRAIN

  RIMBAUD’S ADULT TERRAIN

  Cover of the first edition of Une saison en enfer.

  LONG AGO, IF MY MEMORY SERVES

  Long ago, if my memory serves, life was a feast where every heart was open, where every wine flowed.

  One night, I sat Beauty on my knee. —And I found her bitter. —And I hurt her.

  I took arms against justice.

  I fled, entrusting my treasure to you, o witches, o misery, o hate.

  I snuffed any hint of human hope from my consciousness. I made the muffled leap of a wild beast onto any hint of joy, to strangle it.

  Dying, I called out to my executioners so I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called plagues to suffocate me with sand, blood. Misfortune was my god. I wallowed in the mud. I withered in criminal air. And I even tricked madness more than once.

  And spring gave me an idiot’s unbearable laughter.

  Just now, having nearly reached death’s door, I even considered seeking the key to the old feast, through which, perhaps, I might regain my appetite.

  Charity is the key. —Such an inspiration proves I must have been dreaming.

  “A hyena you’ll remain, etc.… ” cries the demon that crowns me with merry poppies. “Make for death with every appetite intact, with your egotism, and every capital sin.”

  Ah. It seems I have too many already: —But, dear Satan, I beg you not to look at me that way, and while you await a few belated cowardices—you who so appreciate a writer’s inability to describe or inform—I’ll tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned.

  BAD BLOOD

  My Gallic forebears gave me pale blue eyes, a narrow skull, and bad reflexes in a fight. I dress as barbarically as they. But I don’t butter my hair.

  The Gauls were the most inept animal-skinners and grass-burners of their day.

  They gave me: idolatry, a love of sacrilege, and every vice: anger, lust—glorious lust—but above all, deceit and sloth.

  I find even the thought of work unbearable. Masters and workers are all peasants. There’s no difference between a hand holding a pen and a hand pushing a plow. An age of hands! —I’ll have no part in it. Domesticity goes t
oo far too fast. Begging—despite its inherent decency—pains me. Criminals are as bad as eunuchs: so what if I’m in one piece.

  But. Who made my tongue so truthless that it has shepherded and safeguarded my sloth this far? Lazier than a toad, I’ve gotten by without lifting a finger: I’ve lived everywhere. There is not a family in Europe I don’t know. —Which is to say families like mine which owe everything to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. —I’ve known every young man of means.

  If only I had one predecessor in French history!

  But no, none.

  It’s clear to me that I belong to a lesser race. I have no notion of rebellion. The only time my race ever rose up was to pillage: like wolves on carcasses they didn’t even kill.

  I know French history, know the Church’s eldest daughter. Had I been a boor, I would have journeyed to the holy land; in my head are roads through Swabian plains, views of Byzantium, ramparts of Jerusalem; both the cult of Mary and of pity on the cross comingle in me amidst a thousand profane visions. —I sit like a leper on broken pots and nettles, at the foot of walls eaten away by sun. —Later, I would have been a mercenary bivouacking beneath German nights.