Rimbaud's Disappearance
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Rimbaud wrote his prose poem, A Season In Hell, shortly after breaking with Verlaine. A rambling mixture of poems and rants, alternately self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, the work has become famous today. But at the time, his self-published edition went completely unrecognized. Boxes of unsold copies were discovered in the printer's warehouse after his death. One of the most curious things about the work, a portion of which is used by Steven Gerber in the concert's central section, is that it can be read not only as a history of his life up to that time, but also a blueprint for his later travels and trading work. It is as if Rimbaud writes his biography, and then sets out to enact it.
A year or two later, Rimbaud disappeared from society. He was still in regular touch with his mother and sister in Charleville, but as no Parisian artist ever visited such an unsophisticated place, word of his whereabouts never reached the larger world. In place of news were wild rumors. Félix Fénéon:
A notice from Paul Verlaine wants to give news about Arthur Rimbaud: this fugitive soul has gone to Asia, dedicating himself to works of art. But the news is contradictory: he was said to be a pig merchant in the Aisne, king in Africa, canvasser for the Dutch army in Sunda. And while the work, finally published, excites many and scares a few others, the man himself becomes indistinct. Already his very existence is contested, and Rimbaud floats as a mythical shadow over the Symbolists.
Anatole France:
"This young poet only shone for a moment. It was his destiny to disappear at the age of twenty. Ostend terris hunc tantum fata. We don't know what became of him. Some believe that he is a pig merchant in the Aisne, others affirm that he is a king in Africa. Finally, it is rumored that he died recently in Africa in the service of an ivory and skin trafficker. What uncertainties! The life of Arthur Rimbaud mixes with the fables like that of Orpheus."
The Englishman George Moore gave this lyrical but relatively inaccurate account of the aftermath of the affair with Verlaine:
"The blossoms fell, but those who love beautiful French verses have treasured them: La Saison en Enfer, Le Bateau Ivre, Les Premières Communions, La Mort des petits Poux — strange titles, strange as the poems, strange as the life of the poet — the miraculous boy who came to Paris when he was fifteen, with such a poem as Le Bateau Ivre in his pocket — that extraordinary boy who has fled from civilisation, and whose brief life is involved in legend and mystery, fantastic and impenetrable. We know that it befell him to meet Verlaine almost immediately after his arrival; how or where there are no means of discovering. It is certain, however, that Verlaine was the hourly companion of the younger poet for some years, and it is therefore impossible not to speculate sometimes how much the genius of the poet who has since realized his aestheticism depended on the genius of him who made formal renunciation of the laurel wreath.
"Rumour has busied itself with this friendship, but little is known - one fact only, and that is written on the sky of palest legend in letters of blood. It is known that one night, in a house of ill-repute in Brussels, in some drunken quarrel that had suddenly sprung up between them, Rimbaud was stabbed by Verlaine. For this crime Verlaine spent two years at Mons. Rimbaud was taken to the hospital, where, after lingering some weeks between life and death, he eventually recovered. The poets only met once again. The account we have of this meeting rings strange and hollow as an old-world story. For the story is that in the years that had divided them Rimbaud had learnt to understand the immediate necessity of repentance, and it was only in the vain slight hope of inducing his friend to follow him into a purer life that he consented to see him again. But Verlaine's hour of grace had not yet come, and he sought to dissuade the young disciple from his resolve to abandon the vain glory of art, and consecrate his life to the redemption of his soul. But Rimbaud closed his eyes and ears to allurements and temptations, bade Verlaine farewell, and left Europe to immure himself for ever in a Christian convent on the shores of the Red Sea; and where it stands on a rocky promontory, he has been seen digging the soil for the grace of God."
Rimbaud did have a few final encounters with childhood friends, including Ernest Delahaye:
"His cheeks, once so round, were now hollowed, quarried, hardened. The interval of two years had changed the fresh, rosy, English child’s complexion which he had had for so long into the dark hue of a Kabyle, and over his brown skin, a novelty which amused me, there curled a little dark-blonde beard. His voice had lost the shrill and rather childish timbre which I had hitherto known, and had become grave, deep and suffused with a calm energy."
According to Charles Nicholl, a Rimbaud biographer:
"[Delahaye] would hardly have recognized him, he says, were it not for his ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ blue eyes, which were quite unchanged. Other Charleville friends also noted the change, and saw in it a kind of isolation. ‘His contact with his friends was broken,’ said Louis Pierquin. ‘Long before his final departure, his silence and detachment struck us.’ And Ernest Millot would later sum up this impression with the following reverie:
"I imagine myself meeting him one day, somewhere in the middle of the Sahara, after several years of separation. We are alone, and going in opposite directions. He pauses for a moment.
"‘Hello, how are you?’
"‘Fine. Goodbye.’
"And he continues on his way: not the slightest emotion, not a word more."
The truth of Rimbaud's life was only slightly less farfetched than the rumors. He joined the Dutch merchant marine, deserted in Indonesia and made his way back working on a whaling vessel. He served as a recruiter for the Danish army. He tried several times to join the US Navy. After stints as a work foreman in Cyprus, he drifted south to Aden, a colonial outpost at the center of the East African trade network.
A year or two later, Rimbaud disappeared from society. He was still in regular touch with his mother and sister in Charleville, but as no Parisian artist ever visited such an unsophisticated place, word of his whereabouts never reached the larger world. In place of news were wild rumors. Félix Fénéon:
A notice from Paul Verlaine wants to give news about Arthur Rimbaud: this fugitive soul has gone to Asia, dedicating himself to works of art. But the news is contradictory: he was said to be a pig merchant in the Aisne, king in Africa, canvasser for the Dutch army in Sunda. And while the work, finally published, excites many and scares a few others, the man himself becomes indistinct. Already his very existence is contested, and Rimbaud floats as a mythical shadow over the Symbolists.
Anatole France:
"This young poet only shone for a moment. It was his destiny to disappear at the age of twenty. Ostend terris hunc tantum fata. We don't know what became of him. Some believe that he is a pig merchant in the Aisne, others affirm that he is a king in Africa. Finally, it is rumored that he died recently in Africa in the service of an ivory and skin trafficker. What uncertainties! The life of Arthur Rimbaud mixes with the fables like that of Orpheus."
The Englishman George Moore gave this lyrical but relatively inaccurate account of the aftermath of the affair with Verlaine:
"The blossoms fell, but those who love beautiful French verses have treasured them: La Saison en Enfer, Le Bateau Ivre, Les Premières Communions, La Mort des petits Poux — strange titles, strange as the poems, strange as the life of the poet — the miraculous boy who came to Paris when he was fifteen, with such a poem as Le Bateau Ivre in his pocket — that extraordinary boy who has fled from civilisation, and whose brief life is involved in legend and mystery, fantastic and impenetrable. We know that it befell him to meet Verlaine almost immediately after his arrival; how or where there are no means of discovering. It is certain, however, that Verlaine was the hourly companion of the younger poet for some years, and it is therefore impossible not to speculate sometimes how much the genius of the poet who has since realized his aestheticism depended on the genius of him who made formal renunciation of the laurel wreath.
"Rumour has busied itself with this friendship, but little is known - one fact only, and that is written on the sky of palest legend in letters of blood. It is known that one night, in a house of ill-repute in Brussels, in some drunken quarrel that had suddenly sprung up between them, Rimbaud was stabbed by Verlaine. For this crime Verlaine spent two years at Mons. Rimbaud was taken to the hospital, where, after lingering some weeks between life and death, he eventually recovered. The poets only met once again. The account we have of this meeting rings strange and hollow as an old-world story. For the story is that in the years that had divided them Rimbaud had learnt to understand the immediate necessity of repentance, and it was only in the vain slight hope of inducing his friend to follow him into a purer life that he consented to see him again. But Verlaine's hour of grace had not yet come, and he sought to dissuade the young disciple from his resolve to abandon the vain glory of art, and consecrate his life to the redemption of his soul. But Rimbaud closed his eyes and ears to allurements and temptations, bade Verlaine farewell, and left Europe to immure himself for ever in a Christian convent on the shores of the Red Sea; and where it stands on a rocky promontory, he has been seen digging the soil for the grace of God."
Rimbaud did have a few final encounters with childhood friends, including Ernest Delahaye:
"His cheeks, once so round, were now hollowed, quarried, hardened. The interval of two years had changed the fresh, rosy, English child’s complexion which he had had for so long into the dark hue of a Kabyle, and over his brown skin, a novelty which amused me, there curled a little dark-blonde beard. His voice had lost the shrill and rather childish timbre which I had hitherto known, and had become grave, deep and suffused with a calm energy."
According to Charles Nicholl, a Rimbaud biographer:
"[Delahaye] would hardly have recognized him, he says, were it not for his ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ blue eyes, which were quite unchanged. Other Charleville friends also noted the change, and saw in it a kind of isolation. ‘His contact with his friends was broken,’ said Louis Pierquin. ‘Long before his final departure, his silence and detachment struck us.’ And Ernest Millot would later sum up this impression with the following reverie:
"I imagine myself meeting him one day, somewhere in the middle of the Sahara, after several years of separation. We are alone, and going in opposite directions. He pauses for a moment.
"‘Hello, how are you?’
"‘Fine. Goodbye.’
"And he continues on his way: not the slightest emotion, not a word more."
The truth of Rimbaud's life was only slightly less farfetched than the rumors. He joined the Dutch merchant marine, deserted in Indonesia and made his way back working on a whaling vessel. He served as a recruiter for the Danish army. He tried several times to join the US Navy. After stints as a work foreman in Cyprus, he drifted south to Aden, a colonial outpost at the center of the East African trade network.
