The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

by Henry Miller

  At the age of twelve it is said that Rimbaud’s piety was so exalted that he longed for martyrdom. Three years later, in Soleil et Chair, he exclaims: “Flesh, marble, flower, Venus, in thee I believe!” He speaks of Aphrodite throwing upon the vast universe “infinite love in an infinite smile.” And the world, he says, will answer, will vibrate “like an immense lyre in the shudder of an immense kiss.” Here we see him reverting to the paganism of innocence, to that lost golden period when his life was “a banquet at which all hearts opened, at which all wines flowed.” It is the period of self-communion, of indescribable longing for the unknown—“l’éblouissement de l’Infini.” In short, the period of incubation, brief but profound, like the bliss of samadhi.

  Another three years and, only eighteen, we find him at the end of his poetic career, writing his Last Will and Testament, so to speak. The Hell he describes so vividly he has already experienced in his soul; he is now about to live it in the flesh. What heart-rending words, in the section called “Morning,” from a youth of eighteen! It is gone already, his youth, and with it all the youth of the world. His country lies prostrate and defeated; his mother wishes only to get rid of him, strange, impossible creature that he is. He has already known hunger, destitution, humiliation, rejection; he has been in prison, has witnessed the bloody Commune, perhaps even participated in it, has experienced vice and degradation, has lost his first love, has broken with his fellow artists, has surveyed the whole field of modern art and found it empty, and is now about to consign everything to the devil, himself included. And thus, thinking of his wasted youth, as later on his deathbed he will think of his whole wasted life, he asks piteously: “Had I not once a youth pleasant, heroic, fabulous enough to write on leaves of gold: too much luck! Through what crime, what error, have I earned my present weakness? You who maintain that some animals sob sorrowfully, that the sick despair, that the dead have bad dreams, try to tell the story of my downfall and my slumber.* I myself can no more explain myself than the beggar with his continual Pater and Ave Maria. I no longer know how to speak.”

  He has finished the story of his own private hell … he is about to say good-bye. It only remains to add a few parting words. Again the image of the desert occurs—one of his most persistent images. The source of his inspiration has dried up: like Lucifer, he has “used up” the light which was given him. There remains only the lure of the beyond, the call of the deep, in answer to which he finds corroboration and completion in life of the dread image which haunts him: the desert. He chafes at the bit. “When will we go …?” he asks. “When will we go … to greet the birth of the new task, the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition; to adore—the first ones!—Christmas on Earth?” (How reminiscent, these words, of that contemporary he never knew—Nietzsche!)

  What revolutionary has voiced the path of duty more clearly and poignantly? What saint has used Christmas in a more divine sense? These are the words of a rebel, yes, but not of an impious one. This is a pagan, yes, but a pagan like Virgil. This is the voice of the prophet and the taskmaster, of the disciple and the initiate in one. Even the priest, idolatrous, superstitious and benighted though he be, must subscribe to this Christmas! “Slaves, let us not curse life!” he cries. An end to weeping and wailing, to the mortification of the flesh. An end to docility and submission, to childish beliefs and childish prayers. Away with false idols and the baubles of science. Down with dictators, demagogues, and rabble-rousers. Let us not curse life, let us worship it! The whole Christian interlude has been a denial of life, a denial of God, a denial of the Spirit. Freedom has not even been dreamed of yet. Liberate the mind, the heart, the flesh! Free the soul, that it may reign securely! This is the winter of life and “I distrust winter because it is the season of comfort!” Give us Christmas on Earth … not Christianity. I never was a Christian, I never belonged to your race. Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger … but I can be saved! You are the phony niggers, you misers, you maniacs, you fiends! I’m the real nigger and this is a nigger book. I say, let us have Christmas on Earth … now, now, do you hear? Not pie in the sky!

  Thus he raves. “Thoughts out of season,” indubitably.

  “Ah well…” he seems to sigh. “Sometimes in the sky I see endless beaches covered with white and joyous nations.” For a moment nothing stands between him and the certitude of dream. He sees the future as the inevitable realization of man’s deepest wish. Nothing can stop it from coming, not even the phony niggers who are buggering up the world in the name of law and order. He dreams everything out to the end. All the horrible, unspeakable memories fade away. And with them all regrets. He will have his revenge yet—on the backward ones, “the friends of death.” Though I go forth into the wilderness, though I make of my life a desert, though no man shall hear of me henceforth, know ye one and all that I shall be permitted to possess the truth in body and soul. You have done your utmost to disguise the truth; you have tried to destroy my soul; and in the end you will break my body on the rack … But I will know the truth, possess it for my own, in this body and with this soul …

  These are the savage utterances of a seeker, a “friend of God,” even though he denies the name.

  “All language being idea,” said Rimbaud, “the day of the universal language will come … This language, the new or universal, will speak from soul to soul, resuming all perfumes, sounds, colors, linking together all thought.” The key to this language, it goes without saying, is the symbol, which the creator alone possesses. It is the alphabet of the soul, pristine and indestructible. By means of it the poet, who is the lord of imagination and the unacknowledged ruler of the world, communicates, holds communion, with his fellow man. It was to establish this bridge that the youthful Rimbaud gave himself up to experiment. And how he succeeded, despite the sudden and mysterious renunciation! From beyond the grave he is still communicating, more and more powerfully as the years go on. The more enigmatic he seems, the more lucid becomes his doctrine. Paradoxical? Not at all. Whatever is prophetic can be made clear only in the time and the event. In this medium one sees backward and forward with equal clarity; communication becomes the art of establishing at any moment in time a logical and harmonious rapport between the past and the future. Any and all material makes itself available, provided it be transformed into eternal currency—the language of the soul. In this realm there are no analphabets, neither are there grammarians. It is only necessary to open the heart, to throw overboard all literary preconceptions … to stand revealed, in other words. This, of course, is tantamount to conversion. It is a radical measure, and presupposes a state of desperation. But if all other methods fail, as they inevitably do, why not this extreme measure—of conversion? It is only at the gates of hell that salvation looms. Men have failed, in every direction. Over and over they have had to retrace their steps, resume the heavy burden, begin anew the steep and difficult ascent toward the summit. Why not accept the challenge of the Spirit and yield? Why not surrender, and thus enter into a new life? The Ancient One is always waiting. Some call him the Initiator, some call him The Great Sacrifice …

  What Rimbaud’s imitators, as well as his detractors, fail to see is that he was advocating the practice of a new way of life. He was not trying to set up a new school of art, in order to divert the enfeebled spinners of words—he was pointing out the union between art and life, bridging the schism, healing the mortal wound. Divine charity, that is the key to knowledge, he says. In the very beginning of A Season in Hell he had written: “… the other day, finding myself about to croak my last, I thought of seeking again the key to the banquet of old, where I might perhaps get back my appetite. Charity is that key.” And then he adds: “this inspiration proves that I have been dreaming!” Dreaming in hell, of course, in that deep slumber which is unfathomable to him. He who had “created all festivals, all triumphs, all dramas,” is obliged, during his eclipse, to bury all imagination. He who had called himself mage and angel,
he who had freed himself of all ties, all claims, now finds himself brought back to earth, forced to accept, to embrace, harsh reality. Peasant, that is what they would make of him. Returned to the country, he is to be put out of currency … What lies, then, had he fed on in his swollen dreams? (“In the end I will ask to be pardoned for having fed myself on lies.”) But of whom will he ask pardon? Not of his tormentors, certainly. Not of the age which he repudiated. Not of that old goat of a mother who would put him in harness. Of whom, then? Let us say it—of his peers, of those who will succeed him and carry on the good fight. He is making his apologies not to us, nor even to God, but to the men of the future, the men who will greet him with open arms when we all enter the splendid cities. These are the men “of a distant race” to whom he pays allegiance and whom he regards as his true ancestors. He is removed from them only in time, not in blood or bearing. These are the men who know how to sing under torture. They are men of spirit, and to them he is linked not by antecedents—he cannot find one in the whole history of France—but by spirit. He is born in a void and he communicates with them across the void. We hear only the reverberations. We marvel at the sounds of this strange tongue. We know nothing of the joy and the certitude which sustained this inhuman confabulation.

  What diverse spirits he has affected, altered, enslaved! What accolades he has received, and from men as different from one another in temperament, form and substance as Valéry, Claudel, André Breton. What has he in common with them? Not even his genius, for at nineteen he ransoms his genius for mysterious ends. Every act of renunciation has but one aim: the attainment of another level. (With Rimbaud, it is a drop to another level.) Only when the singer stops singing can he live his song. And if his song is defiance? Then it is violence and catastrophe. But catastrophes, as Amiel said, bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium. And Rimbaud, born under the sign of the Balance, chooses the extremes with the passion of an equilibrist.

  Always it is some invisible wand, some magic star, which beckons, and then the old wisdom, the old magic, is done for. Death and transfiguration, that is the eternal song. Some seek the death they choose, whether of form, body, wisdom or soul, directly; others approach it deviously. Some accentuate the drama by disappearing from the face of the earth, leaving no clues, no traces; others make their life an even more inspiring spectacle than the confession which is their work. Rimbaud drew his death out woefully. He spread his ruin all about him, so that none could fail to comprehend the utter futility of his flight. Anywhere, out of the world! That is the cry of those for whom life no longer has any meaning. Rimbaud discovered the true world as a child; he tried to proclaim it as a youth; he betrayed it as a man. Forbidden access to the world of love, all his endowments were in vain. His hell did not go deep enough, he roasted in the vestibule. It was too brief a period, this season, as we know, because the rest of his life becomes a Purgatory. Did he lack the courage to swim the deep? We do not know. We know only that he surrenders his treasure—as if it were the burden. But the guilt which he suffered from no man escapes, not even those who are born in the light. His failure seems stupendous, though it brought him through to victory. But it is not Rimbaud who triumphs, it is the unquenchable spirit that was in him. As Victor Hugo said: “Angel is the only word in the language that cannot be worn out.”

  “Creation begins with a painful separation from God and the creation of an independent will to the end that this separation may be overcome in a type of unity higher than that with which the process began.”*

  At the age of nineteen, in the very middle of his life, Rimbaud gave up the ghost. “His Muse died at his side, among his massacred dreams,” says one biographer. Nevertheless, he was a prodigy who in three years gave the impression of exhausting whole cycles of art. “It is as if he contained whole careers within himself,” said Jacques Rivière. To which Matthew Josephson adds: “Indeed literature ever since Rimbaud has been engaged in the struggle to circumvent him.” Why? Because, as the latter says, “he made poetry too dangerous.” Rimbaud himself declares, in the Season, that he “became a fabulous opera.” Opera or not, he remains fabulous—nothing less. The one side of his life is just as fabulous as the other, that is the amazing thing. Dreamer and man of action, he is both at once. It is like combining in one character Shakespeare and Bonaparte. And now listen to his own words … “I saw that all beings are fatally attracted to happiness: action is not life, but a way of dissipating one’s strength, and enervation.” And then, as if to prove it, he plunges into the maelstrom. He crosses and recrosses Europe on foot, ships in one boat after another for foreign ports, is returned ill or penniless again and again; he takes a thousand and one jobs, learns a dozen or more languages, and, in lieu of dealing in words deals in coffee, spices, ivory, skins, gold, muskets, slaves. Adventure, exploration, study; association with every type of man, race, nationality; and always work, work, work, which he loathed. But above all, ennui! Always bored. Incurably bored. But what activity! What a wealth of experiences! And what emptiness! His letters to his mother are one long plaint mingled with reproaches and recriminations, with whines, entreaties and supplications. Miserable one, accursed one! Finally he becomes “the great invalid.”

  What is the meaning of this flight, this endless wail, this self-inflicted torture? How true, that activity is not life! Where is life, then? And which is the true reality? Certainly it cannot be this harsh reality of toil and wandering, this sordid scrimmage for possessions?

  In the Illuminations, written in melancholy London, he had announced: “Je suis réellement d’outre-tombe, et pas de commissions!” That was said as poet. Now he knows it for a fact. The musician who had found something like the key of love, as he puts it, has lost the key. He has lost the key and the instrument both. Having shut all the doors, even of friendship, having burned all his bridges behind him, he will never set foot in the dominion of love. There remain only the great solitudes in the shadow of the buried tree of Good and Evil where, in his Matinée d’ivresse, occurs that nostalgic phrase—“afin que nous ramenions notre très pur amour.” He wanted salvation in the form of liberty, never realizing that it comes only through surrender, through acceptance. “Tout homme,” said his master Baudelaire, “qui n’accepte pas les conditions de sa vie vend son âme.” With Rimbaud, creation and experience were virtually simultaneous; he required only a minimum of experience to make music. As the youthful prodigy he is closer to the musician or the mathematician than the man of letters. He is born with a supersensible memory. He does not earn his creation by the sweat of his brow—it is there, on tap, waiting to be roused by the first contact with harsh reality. It is sorrow which he must cultivate, not the virtuosity of the maestro. He does not have long to wait, as we know.

  He was born a seed and he remains a seed. That is the meaning of the night which surrounds him. In him there was light, a wondrous light, but it was not to shed its rays until he had perished. He came from beyond the grave, of a distant race, bringing a new spirit and a new consciousness. Does he not say—“it is wrong to say je pense; one should say on me pense”? And is it not he who says—“genius is love and the future”? Everything he says in connection with the I of the genius is illuminating and revelatory. This one I find most significant … “His body is the release of which we have dreamed; the shattering of a grace thwarted by a new violence.”

  Let me not be accused of reading too deeply. Rimbaud meant everything he wrote “literally and in all senses,” as he once explained to his mother or sister. True, he was referring then to A Season in Hell. Nevertheless…. It was with him as it was with Blake and Jacob Boehme: everything they uttered was true, literal, and inspired. They dwelt in the Imagination; their dreams were realities, realities which we have yet to experience. “If I read myself,” says Boehme, “I read God’s book, and you my brothers are the alphabet which I read in myself, for my mind and will find you within me. I wish from my heart you would also find me.” That last utterance voices the silent pra
yer which Rimbaud is constantly sending forth from the wilderness which he created for himself. The “benevolent” pride of the genius lies in his will which must be broken. The secret of deliverance lies in the practice of charity. Charity is the key, and Rimbaud was dreaming when he realized it, but the dream was reality and this reality only makes itself felt again when he is on his deathbed, when charity becomes the sweet sister which escorts him to the beyond, broken but redeemed.

  During the “Night in Hell,” when he realizes that he is the slave of his baptism, he cries: “O Parents, you contrived my misfortune, and your own.” In the dark night of the soul, during which he proclaims himself a master in phantasmagoria and boasts that he is going to unveil every mystery, he renounces everything which would link him with the age or the land he was born in. “I am ready for perfection,” he states. And he was, in a sense. He had prepared his own initiation, survived the terrible ordeal, and then relapsed into the night in which he was born. He had perceived that there was a step beyond art, he had put his foot over the threshold, and then in terror or in fear of madness he had retreated. His preparations for a new life were either insufficient or of the wrong order. Most commentators think the latter, though both are possibly true. So much emphasis has been laid upon that phrase—“long, immense, logical derangement of all the senses.” So much has been said about his early debauches, about his “Bohemian” life. One forgets how utterly normal that was for a precocious youth bursting with ideas who has run away from an intolerable home atmosphere in the provinces. Rare creature that he was, he would have been abnormal had he not succumbed to the potent appeals of a city like Paris. If he was excessive in his indulgence it is only to say that the vaccination took with a vengeance. It was not such a long time he spent either in Paris or in London. Not enough to ruin a healthy lad of peasant stock. For one who was in revolt against everything it was in fact a salutary experience. The road to heaven leads through hell, does it not? To earn salvation one has to become inoculated with sin. One has to savor them all, the capital as well as the trivial sins. One has to earn death with all one’s appetites, refuse no poison, reject no experience however degrading or sordid. One has to come to the end of one’s forces, learn that one is a slave—in whatever realm—in order to desire emancipation. The perverse, negative will fostered by one’s parents has to be made submissive before it can become positive and integrated with the heart and mind. The Father (in all his guises) has to be dethroned so that the Son may reign. The Father is Saturnian in every phase of his being. He is the stern taskmaster, the dead letter of the Law, the Verboten sign. One kicks the traces over, goes berserk, filled with a false power and a foolish pride. And then one breaks, and the I that is not the I surrenders. But Rimbaud did not break. He does not dethrone the Father, he identifies himself with him. He does it as much through his godlike assumption of authority as through his excesses, his ramblings, his irresponsibility. He goes over into the opposite, becomes the very enemy whom he hated. In short, he abdicates, becomes a vagabond god in search of his true kingdom. “To emasculate oneself, is not that a sure way of damning yourself?” (This is one of the many questions he poses during his agony.) And that is precisely what he does. He emasculates himself by abdicating the role for which he was chosen … Is it possible that in Rimbaud the sense of guilt was atrophied?