The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

by Henry Miller

  I stress this aspect of his nature because it explains many of the malodorous traits attributed to him. He was not a miser, not a peasant at heart, as some of his biographers imply. He was not hard on others, he was hard with himself. Actually he had a generous nature. “His charity was lavish, unobtrusive and discreet,” says his old employer, Bardey. “It is probably one of the few things he did without disgust and without a sneer of contempt.”

  There was one other bogey which obsessed him all his days and nights: military service. From the time he begins his wandering up until the day of his death he is tormented by the fear that he is not en règle with the military authorities. Just a few months before his death, while in the hospital at Marseilles, his leg amputated, his sufferings multiplying daily, the fear that the authorities will discover his whereabouts and send him to prison rest like an incubus upon him. “La prison après ce que je viens de souffrir? Il vaudrait mieux la mort!” He begs his sister to write him only when it is absolutely necessary, to address him not as Arthur Rimbaud but simply Rimbaud, and to post the letters from some neighboring town.

  The whole fabric of his character is laid bare in these letters which are practically devoid of any literary quality or charm. We see his tremendous hunger for experience, his insatiable curiosity, his illimitable desires, his courage and tenacity, his self-flagellation, his asceticism, his sobriety, his fears and obsessions, his morbidity, his loneliness, his feeling of ostracism, and his unfathomable boredom. We see above all, that like most creative individuals, he was incapable of learning from experience. There is nothing but a repetitious round of similar trials and torments. We see him victimized by the illusion that freedom can be obtained by external means. We see him remaining the adolescent all his life, refusing to accept suffering or give it meaning. To estimate how great was the failure of the latter half of his life we have only to compare his journeying with that of Cabeza de Vaca.*

  But let us leave him in the midst of that desert which he created for himself. My purpose is to indicate certain affinities, analogies, correspondences and repercussions. Let us begin with the parents. Like Madame Rimbaud, my mother was the Northern type, cold, critical, proud, unforgiving, and puritanical. My father was of the South, of Bavarian parents, while Rimbaud’s father was Burgundian. There was a continual strife and clash between mother and father, with the usual repercussions upon the offspring. The rebellious nature, so difficult to overcome, here finds its matrix. Like Rimbaud, I too began at an early age to cry: “Death to God!” It was death to everything which the parents endorsed or approved of. It extended even to their friends whom I openly insulted in their presence, even as a stripling. The antagonism never ceased until my father was virtually at the point of death, when at last I began to see how much I resembled him.

  Like Rimbaud, I hated the place I was born in. I will hate it till my dying day. My earliest impulse is to break loose from the home, from the city I detest, from the country and its citizens with whom I feel nothing in common. Like him too, I am precocious, reciting verses in a foreign language while still in my high-chair. I learned to walk much ahead of time and to speak ahead of time, to read the newspaper even before I went to kindergarten. I was always the youngest in the class and not only the best student but the favorite of teachers and comrades alike. But, like him again, I despised the prizes and awards which were made me, and was expelled from school several times for refractory behavior. My whole mission, while at school, seemed to be to make fun of the teachers and the curriculum. It was all too easy and too stupid for me. I felt like a trained monkey.

  From earliest childhood I was a voracious reader. For Christmas I requested only books, twenty and thirty at a time. Until I was twenty-five or so, I almost never left the house without one or more books under my arm. I read standing up, while going to work, often memorizing long passages of poetry from my favorite authors. One of these was Goethe’s Faust, I remember. The chief result of this continuous absorption in books was to inflame me to further revolt, to stimulate the latent desire for travel and adventure, to make me anti-literary. It made me contemptuous of everything that surrounded me, alienating me gradually from my friends and imposing on me that solitary, eccentric nature which causes one to be styled a “bizarre” individual. From the age of eighteen (the year of Rimbaud’s crisis) I became definitely unhappy, wretched, miserable, despondent. Nothing less than a complete change of environment seemed capable of dissipating this unchanging mood. At twenty-one I broke away, but not for long. Again, like Rimbaud, the opening flights were always disastrous. I was always returning home, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and always in a state of desperation. There seemed no egress, no way of achieving liberation. I undertook the most senseless labors, everything, in short, which I was unfitted for. Like Rimbaud in the quarries at Cyprus, I began with pick and shovel, a day laborer, a migratory worker, a vagabond. There was even this similarity, that when I broke from home it was with the intention of leading an outdoor life, of never again reading a book, of making a living with my two hands, of being a man of the open spaces and not a citizen of a town or city.

  All the while, however, my language and my ideas betrayed me. I was completely the literary man, whether I wanted to be or not. Though I could get along with most any type of individual, especially the common man, in the end I was always suspect. It was very much like my visits to the library; always demanding the wrong book. No matter how large the library, the book I wanted was never in or else it was forbidden me. It seemed in those days that everything I wanted in life, or of life, was proscribed. Naturally, I was guilty of the most violent recriminations. My language, which had been shocking even as a child—I remember being dragged to the police station at the age of six for using foul language—my language, I say, became even more shocking and indecent.

  What a jolt I got when I read that Rimbaud, as a young man, used to sign his letters—“that heartless wretch, Rimbaud.” Heartless was an adjective I was fond of hearing applied to myself. I had no principles, no loyalty, no code whatsoever; when it suited me, I could be thoroughly unscrupulous, with friend and foe alike. I usually repaid kindness with insult and injury. I was insolent, arrogant, intolerant, violently prejudiced, relentlessly obstinate. In short, I had a distinctly disagreeable personality, a most difficult one to deal with. Yet I was very much liked; people seemed over-eager to forgive my bad qualities for the charm and enthusiasm I dispensed. This attitude served only to embolden me to take further liberties. Sometimes I myself wondered how on earth I could get away with it. The people I most loved to insult and injure were those who deemed themselves my superior in one way or another. Toward these I waged a relentless war. Beneath it all I was what you would call a good boy. My natural temperament was that of a kind, joyous, open-hearted individual. As a youngster I was often referred to as “an angel.” But the demon of revolt had taken possession of me at a very early age. It was my mother who implanted it in me. It was against her, against all that she represented, that I directed my uncontrollable energy. Never until I was fifty did I once think of her with affection. Though she never actually balked me (only because my will was the stronger), I felt her shadow across my path constantly. It was a shadow of disapproval, silent and insidious, like a poison slowly injected into the veins.

  I was amazed when I read that Rimbaud had allowed his mother to read the manuscript of A Season in Hell. Never did I dream of showing my parents anything I had written, or even discussing the subject of my writing with them. When I first informed them that I had decided to become a writer they were horrified; it was as though I had announced that I was going to become a criminal. Why couldn’t I do something sensible, something that would enable me to gain a living? Never did they read a line of what I have written. It was a sort of standing joke when their friends inquired of me, when they asked what I was doing. “What is he doing? Oh, he’s writing….” As though to say, he’s crazy, he’s making mud pies all day long.

  I h
ave always pictured the boy Rimbaud as being dolled up like a sissy, and later when a young man, as a dandy. That at any rate, was my case. My father being a tailor, it was natural for my parents to concentrate on my attire. When I grew up I inherited my father’s rather elegant and sumptuous wardrobe. We were exactly the same size. But, like Rimbaud again, during the period when my individuality was asserting itself strenuously, I got myself up grotesquely, matching the inner eccentricities with the outer. I too was an object of ridicule in my own neighborhood. About this time I remember feeling extremely awkward, unsure of myself, and especially timid in conversation with men of any culture. “I don’t know how to talk!” exclaimed Rimbaud in Paris when surrounded by other men of letters. Yet who could talk better than he when unrestrained? Even in Africa it was remarked of him how enchantingly he spoke at times. How well I understand this dilemma! What painful memories I have of stammering and stuttering in the presence of the men with whom I longed to hold conversation! With a nobody, on the other hand, I could talk with the tongues of angels. From childhood I was in love with the sound of words, with their magic, their power of enchantment. Often I went on verbal jags, so to speak. I could invent by the hour, driving my listeners to the point of hysteria. It was this quality, incidentally, which I recognized in Rimbaud the instant I glanced at a page of his. It registered like a shot. In Beverly Glen, when I was steeped in his life, I chalked up his phrases on the wall—in the kitchen, in the living room, in the toilet, even outside the house. Those phrases will never lose their potency for me. Each time I run across them I get the same thrill, the same jubilation, the same fear of losing my mind should I dwell on them too long. How many writers are there who can do this to you? Every writer produces some haunting passages, some memorable phrases, but with Rimbaud they are countless, they are strewn all over the pages, like gems tumbled from a rifled chest. It is this endowment which makes the link with Rimbaud indissoluble. And it is only this which I envy him for. Today, after all I have written, my deepest desire is to be done with the books I have projected and give myself up to the creation of sheer nonsense, sheer fantasy. I shall never be the poet he is, but there are vast imaginative reaches still to be attained.

  And now we come to “the girl with the violet eyes.” We know almost nothing about her. We know only that it was his first tragic experience of love. I do not know if it was in connection with her or the manufacturer’s daughter that he used the words—“as scared as 36,000,000 newborn poodle dogs.” But I can well believe that such must have been his reaction to the object of his affection. In any case I know that it was mine, and that she too had violet eyes. It is probable also, that like Rimbaud, I will think of her again on my dying bed. Everything is colored by that first disastrous experience. The strangest thing about it, I must add, is that it was not she who rejected me … it was I that held her in such awe and reverence that I fled from her. I imagine it must have been much the same in Rimbaud’s case. With him, of course, everything—up to the eighteenth year—was packed into an incredibly short space of time. Just as he ran through the whole gamut of literature in a few years, so he ran through the course of ordinary experience quickly and briefly. He bad but to taste a thing to know all that it promised or contained. And so his love life, so far as woman is concerned, was of cursory duration. We hear no mention of love again until Abyssinia, when he takes a native woman as a mistress. It is hardly love, one feels. If anything, his love was directed towards his Harari boy, Djami, to whom he tried to leave a legacy. It is hardly probable, knowing the life he led, that Rimbaud could have loved again with a whole heart.

  Verlaine is reputed to have said of Rimbaud that he never gave himself, either to God or to man. How true this may be each one has to judge for himself. To me it seems that nobody could have desired to give himself more than Rimbaud did. As a boy he gave himself to God, as a young man he gave himself to the world. In both instances he felt that he had been deceived and betrayed; he recoiled, especially after his experience of the bloody Commune, and thereafter the core of his being remains intact, unyielding, inaccessible. In this respect he reminds me much of D. H. Lawrence, who had quite a little to say about this subject, i. e., about preserving intact the core of one’s being.

  It was from the moment he began to earn a living that his real difficulties set in. All his talents, and he possessed many, seemed of no use. Despite all reversals, he pushes on. “Advance, advance always!” His energy is boundless, his will indomitable, his hunger insatiable. “Let the poet burst with his straining after unheard of and unnameable things!” When I think of this period, marked by an almost frantic effort to make an entry into the world, to gain a toehold, when I think of the repeated sallies in this direction and that, like a beleaguered army trying to burst out of the grip in which it is held like a vise, I see my youthful self all over again. Thrice in his teens he reaches Brussels and Paris; twice he reaches London. From Stuttgart, after he has mastered sufficient German, he wanders on foot across Würtemberg and Switzerland into Italy. From Milan he sets out on foot for the Cyclades, via Brindisi, only to suffer a sunstroke and be returned to Marseilles via Leghorn. He covers the Scandinavian peninsula and Denmark with a traveling carnival; he ships from Hamburg, Antwerp, Rotterdam; he gets to Java by joining the Dutch army, only to desert after a taste of it. Passing St. Helena once in an English vessel which refuses to stop there, he jumps overboard but is brought back before he can reach the island. From Vienna he is escorted to the Bavarian border by the police, as a vagabond; from there he is brought under another escort to the Lorraine border. In all these flights and sallies he is always without money, always walking, and walking usually on an empty stomach. At Civita Vecchia he is set ashore with gastric fever brought on by inflammation of the walls of the stomach caused by the friction of his ribs against his abdomen. Excessive walking. In Abyssinia it is excessive horseback riding. Everything to excess. He drives himself inhumanly. The goal is always beyond.

  How well I understand his mania! Looking back upon my life in America, it seems to me that I covered thousands and thousands of miles on an empty stomach. Always looking for a few pennies, for a crust of bread, for a job, for a place to flop. Always looking for a friendly face! At times, even though I was hungry, I would take to the road, hail a passing car and let the driver deposit me where he liked, just to get a change of scene. I know thousands of restaurants in New York, not from visiting them as a patron but from standing outside and gazing wistfully at the diners seated at the tables inside. I can still recall the odor of certain stands on street corners where hot dogs were being served. I can still see the white-robed chefs in the windows flipping waffles or flapjacks into the pan. Sometimes I think I was born hungry. And with the hunger is associated the walking, the tramping, the searching, the feverish, aimless to and fro. If I succeeded in begging a little more than was necessary for a meal I went immediately to the theatre or to a movie. All I cared for, once my stomach was filled, was to find a warm, cozy place where I could relax and forget my troubles for an hour or two. I would never save enough for carfare in those circumstances; leaving the womblike warmth of the theatre, I would set out in cold or rain to walk to the remote place where I happened to live. From the heart of Brooklyn to the heart of Manhattan I have walked countless times, in all kinds of weather and in varying degrees of starvation. When utterly exhausted, when unable to move another step, I have been obliged to turn round and retrace my steps. I understand perfectly how men can be trained to make forced marches of phenomenal length on empty bellies.

  But it is one thing to walk the streets of your native city amidst hostile faces and quite another to tramp the highway in neighboring states. In your home town the hostility is merely indifference; in a strange town, or in the open stretches between towns, it is a distinctly antagonistic element that greets you. There are savage dogs, shot guns, sheriffs and vigilantes of all sorts lying in wait for you. You dare not lie down on the cold earth if you are a stranger in that vi
cinity. You keep moving, moving, moving all the time. In your back you feel the cold muzzle of a revolver, bidding you to move faster, faster, faster. This is your own country, too, in which all this happens, not a foreign land. The Japs may be cruel, the Huns barbarous, but what devils are these who look like you and talk like you, who wear the same dress, eat the same food, and who hound you like dogs? Are these not the worst enemies a man can have? The others I can find excuses for, but for one’s own kind I can find no excuse whatever. “I have no friends there,” Rimbaud often wrote home. Even in June, 1891, from the hospital in Marseilles, he repeats this refrain. “Je mourrai où me jettera le destin. J’espère pouvoir retourner là où j’étais (Abysinnie), j’y ai des amis de dix ans, qui auront pitié de moi, je trouverai chez eux du travail, je vivrai comme je pourrai. Je vivrai toujours là-bas, tandis qu’en France, hors vous, je n’ai ni amis, ni connaissances, ni personne.” Here a footnote reads: “Cependant la gloire littéraire de Rimbaud battait alors son plein à Paris. Les admirateurs, qui lui eussent été personellement tout dévoués, étaient déjà nombreux. Il l’ignorait. Quelle malédiction!”