Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  Kipling appeared to have a more genuine and less forced friendship with a third writer, Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon’s Mines, encouraged perhaps by the metric similarity of their extravagant names: Rudyard was the name of the lake on whose shores his parents had met, and his rather Scandinavian-sounding surname inevitably recalls the Vikings; as for Haggard, whose first name was Henry, his surnames mean, literally, “gaunt horseman”. In the Kipling household, his visits were awaited with great anticipation, especially by the children, who would follow Haggard around “like hounds”, wanting him to tell them “more South African stories” (these children, it has to be said, were clearly insatiable given that, despite having a father whose favourite occupation was telling stories for children, they nevertheless demanded still more from Mr Haggard). Both writers discovered “by accident” (Kipling’s words) that they could work comfortably in each other’s company, and so, from that point on, they would visit each other, each bearing a sheaf of papers under his arm, even writing some stories in tandem. It seems positively dangerous that so many cruel, exotic stories should emerge from one room.

  One of those stories “The Man Who Would be King” was apparently the favourite story of both Faulkner and Proust, which would have been enough in itself for its author to pass if not into the history of literature, at least into the history of readers and writers. Apart from that, and long before, his books of stories had been devoured first in his native India and then in the rest of the English- and non-English-speaking world. His popularity was so immense that when, in 1898, he fell ill with pneumonia shortly after arriving in New York, and people feared for his life, crowds would gather at his hotel door to hear the doctor’s report, as if Kipling were a national hero. He recovered, but not so his oldest daughter, Josephine, who bade farewell to life at the age of six, a death that only touched the waiting crowds through the grief of her father. Many years later, Kipling’s son John was lost at the Front, having joined up at eighteen. Two years passed from the time they were informed that he had been wounded at the battle of Loos and was missing (although Kipling assumed he was dead) and receiving details of the brave circumstances in which he had died and his death being made official. His body was never found.

  Rudyard Kipling was not one for jokes: he hated any intrusion into his private life, avoided having photographs taken (although quite a number have been preserved), refused to give an opinion on the work of his contemporaries (which means that we have no idea who, in literary terms, he respected and who he did not), and would never talk about things that were of no interest to him. The writer Frank Harris, of whom Kipling wrote, “I discovered [him] to be the one human being that I could on no terms get on with,” is not perhaps, for that exact reason, a reliable source, but, nevertheless, he recounted how, on one occasion, he had an argument with Kipling about the improbability, in one of the latter’s stories, of an accident provoked by the sudden appearance, on the very edge of a precipice, of an Indian with a pair of oxen and a load of firewood. The apparition caused one of the characters to fall over the edge and that was how the story ended. According to Harris, “To end a psychological discussion by a brutal accident was an insult to the intelligence.” “Why?” countered Kipling. “Accidents do happen in life.” Harris insisted, judging that it was simply too improbable and that “in art, the improbable is worse than the impossible”. Kipling’s answer was very simple, but enough to put an end to any objections: “I see the Indian,” he said.

  Perhaps it wasn’t so strange that he, and not the American Harris, should see the Indian since, as he himself confessed, the happiest years of his life had been those of his early childhood in Bombay, surrounded by native servants who granted his every whim and by a world of vibrancy and colour which he always missed in England, especially when, at the age of six, he was transferred to Southsea, near Portsmouth, for his British education. In the autobiographical text published posthumously and entitled Something of Myself, he gave the name “The House of Desolation” to the place where he and his sister Trix lived for several years, separated from their parents, who stayed on in India, which gives a double idea of the Dickensian childhood the young Rudyard experienced in his non-native country. He was so tormented, it seems, by the woman who ran the house and by her bully of a son that when his mother visited him and went up to his bedroom in the middle of the night to see him, the first reaction of little Ruddy (that is what his family called him) was to cover his face with his arm. One imagines, therefore, that he was accustomed to being awoken with blows.

  It is not clear why Kipling’s parents entrusted their children to such a harmful place, but it is worth remembering (not that this exculpates them) that, in a story, Kipling said of a child of six very similar to himself: “It never entered his head that any living human being could disobey his orders”; and one of his aunts pointed out that, as a child, he was much given to tantrums and would scream unstoppably when angry. It must be said, however, that, fortunately, almost none of that putative childhood despotism passed into his adult life, although, as mentioned before, he was never one for jokes: during one of his long stays in America, his other brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, even more given to tantrums and doubtless to heavy drinking as well, got into an argument with him and, in the heat of the discussion, threatened to kill him. Regardless of whether the death threat was serious or not, Kipling went straight to the police and the brother-in-law ended up behind bars.

  Kipling always seemed older than his years: although nowadays youthful looks tend to last far longer and are no real measure, there is a photo of him at sixteen (and still at school) which is almost frightening: he’s wearing a peaked cap, metal-rimmed glasses and a sparse moustache, and resembles a man of forty-five. He has a somewhat nobler appearance in the photographs taken of him in maturity and old age, with his abundant white moustache, bald head and the same faithfully retained metal-rimmed glasses.

  He was only forty-one when, in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he accepted despite having turned down in his own country the post of Poet Laureate, the Order of Merit and various other titles. Kipling was unfortunate, though, for during the voyage to Stockholm, the King of Sweden died, and so Kipling arrived to find a devastated country in which everyone was wearing formal dress (the official sign of mourning), which rather shook him and put a damper on the festivities.

  He was not a vain or presumptuous man, he rarely went to the tailor’s, although he did always change for supper, because “after all, that was what you did, and what you did was probably the most sensible thing to do”. His poem “If ” was so famous that it more than once got him into trouble with his favourites, children, who, when he visited schools, would often reproach him for having written it because they were so frequently obliged to copy it out as a punishment. In his own lifetime, he was accused of being an “imperialist” writer, to which he would respond by saying that he was perhaps “imperial”. Some of his public statements did not help him much either, for example, when he declared that “at the end of the war, there must be no more Germans”. He suffered from duodenal ulcers and, shortly after his seventieth birthday, he suffered a major haemorrhage and had to be taken to Middlesex Hospital, where he died on January 18, 1936. His ashes lie in Westminster Abbey. He was admired and read, but perhaps not very loved, although no one ever said a word against him as a person.

  Arthur Rimbaud Against Art

  HARDLY ANY PICTURES of Rimbaud remain, and those that do are ghostly images, of Rimbaud as an adult, of the man who had nothing to do with literature and lived on the Somali coast, employed in the most various and poorly paid of
jobs. Perhaps that is the second reason why we still think of him almost exclusively as the terrible, rebellious adolescent of his brief years in Paris and his months in London. His abandonment of poetry at an uncertain age (let’s say around twenty) has stirred the timid imagination of every precocious writer since, tempting them to do the same thing at some point, normally, hélas, at a rather more advanced age: by comparison, however, every other precocious writer has been a late bloomer.

  The main reason why Arthur Rimbaud has passed into literature’s memory as a ghostly child prodigy lies precisely in his abandonment of poetry and the mystery surrounding it. Not that this was the first radical change in his life. It is as if every few years Rimbaud grew tired of being who he was, an idea that finds poetical support in his famous words “Je est un autre” (“I is someone else”), which has found such success in the world of quotations. He went from being a studious child and brilliant pupil to becoming an iconoclastic lout, doubtless impossible to get on with. His hagiographers often bemoan the incomprehension with which he was greeted by the literary world of Paris (bohemian or not), but, if truth be told, it is perfectly easy to understand why the very people who might have been his colleagues and companions avoided him like the plague and yet were quite happy to read his poems a few years after they had met him, which is, of course, what posterity does (posterity always has the advantage of enjoying the work of writers without having the bother of putting up with the writers themselves). According to contemporary accounts, Rimbaud never changed his clothes and therefore smelled disgusting, left any bed he slept in full of lice, drank constantly (preferably absinthe), and rewarded his acquaintances with nothing but impertinence and insults. He deeply offended a certain Lepelletier by calling him “un salueur de morts” (“a greeter of corpses”) when he spotted him accompanying a funeral cortège. This would not have been quite so wounding were it not for the fact that Lepelletier had just lost his mother. When another man named Attal approached him and, as a friendly gesture, gave him some of his poetry to read, Rimbaud, after glancing briefly through it, responded by spitting on those beautifully metered, rhymed and handwritten poems. When another poet called Mérat, whom Rimbaud had admired from the distance of his native village, Charleville, published a sonnet sequence to celebrate all the physical beauties of woman, Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine wrote an obscene sonnet of their own, expressively entitled “Le Sonet du Trou de Cul” (“Sonnet on an Asshole”). One evening, at a literary supper graced by the most important writers of the day, Rimbaud insisted on punctuating every line read by the great men with the word “Merde! ” Carjat, the photographer, finally lost patience with him, and shook him roughly and threatened to hit him, but the prodigy, despite his rather frail build, was undaunted: he unsheathed his friend Verlaine’s sword-stick and nearly skewered that pioneer of a then still uncertain art.

  That, of course, was not the only occasion on which Rimbaud found himself embroiled in violent incidents, although, in most instances, Verlaine was involved as well, which might lead one to think that it was his poet friend and lover, ten years his senior, who had violence in his veins. Their respective mothers each used to blame “the other one” for the irregular, dissolute life they both led, but, in the case of Verlaine, his family had rather more reason to feel bitter, since he not only had a mother, but also a wife, a child and parents-in-law. The title of provincial genius bestowed on Rimbaud by Verlaine might not have led Verlaine’s family to expect a dandy, but neither could they have expected what they found: a coarse young peasant in full, ungracious adolescence, his face red from exposure to wind and sun, and wearing clothes that were already far too small for him, a mop of hair that looked as if it had never seen a comb, and, by way of a tie, what appeared to be a piece of dirty string slung round his shirt collar. He arrived with no luggage, with no toothbrush or even a change of linen. The irruption of such a person into the prim and proper world of the Mauté de Fleurville family was seen as a bad omen, an augury, which, it must be said, proved to be the case.

  Not that Verlaine had brought to this marriage of convenience a tranquil, responsible life before or after: he had given himself over entirely to two vices rather frowned upon by families: drunkenness and sodomy. At that time, however, what with a wife who was herself barely out of adolescence (Mathilde was seventeen at the time) and the imminent birth of a child, Verlaine was trying to toe the line. Nothing could have been more unsuited to such an attempt than the arrival of that wild child whose declared intent was to practise the equally often quoted “dérèglement de tous les sens” (“disordering of all the senses”). When the baby was born, Verlaine spent the next three days behaving in what he believed to be a model fashion; this consisted in returning home for supper and spending the evening with his wife. On the fourth day, however, he came home at two in the morning, drunk and belligerent; he lay down to sleep on the new mother’s bed, with his feet on the pillow, which means—because he did not remove his boots—that Mathilde had to lie staring at the mud on them for hours.

  Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine was a succession of incidents, with Mathilde in the middle or, all too often, relegated to the sidelines. Verlaine needed both of them and could not do without either of them entirely, despite his brutality (to her) and his mawkishness (with him)—an unbearable combination. One example of the former is that whenever Verlaine used to come home drunk, his fixed idea was to try and set fire to the cupboard where his father-in-law kept his ammunition for hunting and which was in the room next to Mathilde’s, against the wall that touched her bed. On one occasion the threat of fire breaking out above her head was even more direct: “I’m going to burn your hair!” he told her, holding a lighted match in his hand. Apparently, he only managed to burn a few loose strands before the match went out. Another time, he held a knife to her throat, and, on another, slashed her hands and wrists. Rimbaud shared this liking for incisions, except that this time Verlaine was the victim: one night, in the Café du Rat Mort, he said: “Put your hands flat on the table; I want to try an experiment.” Verlaine trustingly did as he was told. Rimbaud took out a knife and slashed at Verlaine’s hands several times. Verlaine stormed out of the café, but Rimbaud followed him into the street and stabbed him again. Just as Verlaine wounded and insulted Mathilde, so Rimbaud insulted and wounded Verlaine, but none of them could ever bring themselves to leave. The violence reached its climax with Verlaine’s famous three revolver shots in Brussels. Two missed, but the third caught Rimbaud in the wrist. The matter would have gone no further, but, only a few hours later, on the way to the station from which Rimbaud was intending to travel back alone to Paris, Verlaine, in the presence of his own mother, who, for some foolish reason, was accompanying them, once again flew into a rage and began brandishing the gun which, strange to relate, no one had taken from him. Afraid that this time he might not miss, Rimbaud summoned a policeman, and the result of that natural gesture of cowardice was that the Mauté de Fleurvilles’ son-in-law was condemned to two years’ hard labour, despite Rimbaud’s belated attempt to withdraw the charge. They at least managed to get the charge reduced from “attempted murder” to “criminal assault”. Nonetheless, it seems ironic that in a letter to Verlaine shortly before this episode, Rimbaud should have written: “Only with me can you be free.”

  Rimbaud was a highly gifted person who never made the most of his gifts, although they helped him learn various not very useful things very quickly, among them numerous languages such as German, Arabic, Hindustani and Russian, and, later, the more useful of the indigenous languages that surrounded his adult life in exile. He also learned to play the piano in a very brief pe
riod of time, even though he first had to practise for months on an imaginary one, for when his mother refused to hire an instrument, Rimbaud cut out a keyboard on the dining-room table and practised on it for hours on end in complete silence. This story seems to be true, or at least more so than some of the others that have become incorporated into the legend: they say (but one suspects that he himself was the source) that as soon as he was born, the nurse laid him down on a cushion for a moment while she went off to fetch the swaddling clothes. When she returned, however, she found that the infant was no longer there, but was crawling toward the door to begin his life of wandering.

  Since the publication of Enid Starkie’s excellent biography, we now know quite a lot about his near-nomadic, post-literary life: about the coffee exporter, the foreman, the colonist, the explorer, the expeditionary, the gun-runner and possible slave-trader. Numerous letters from his Abyssinian years have survived, and they give the impression that Rimbaud had, for the second or third time, wearied of being who he was. His appearance changed, he became burlier, grew a beard and moustache, and the only thing that remained unchanged were his striking blue eyes, which, even when he was at his coarsest and most slovenly, gave him the poetical look so essential to youthful versifiers. He wanted to get rich quick, then curbed his aspirations and hoped merely to make enough money to stay where he was, that is, to live in reasonable comfort in Abyssinia. He wanted to get married and have children, but could never settle on a firm candidate. In a letter to his mother, he asked: “May I come home and get married from your house next spring?” The desire was genuine enough, but vague, for he added: “Do you think I could find someone willing to come out here with me?” Shortly before, when he was thirty-three, he had written to his family: “My hair is quite grey. It seems to me that my whole life is decaying … I’m terribly tired. I’ve no work and I’m terrified of losing the little money I have.” He led a frugal, austere existence, and all his plans met with failure. He would scrimp and save like a peasant, then invest everything in some risky enterprise that required enormous effort, or else he would be cheated in a business deal or take pity on those about to cheat him, lose everything, and thus be back to scrimping and saving and to those slow plans of his. Nothing turned out well for him.