The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

by Henry Miller

  “How boring! What am I doing here?” writes Rimbaud in one of his letters from Abyssinia. “What am I doing here?” That cry of despair epitomizes the plight of the earth-bound. Speaking of the long years of exile which Rimbaud had prophesied for himself in the Season, Edgell Rick word remarks: “What he sought when he broke out from his human shell was the means with which to sustain himself in the condition of transcendent purity, of godlike disillusionment in which he emerged.” But one never breaks out of this human shell, even in madness. Rimbaud was more like a volcano which, having spent its fires, becomes extinct. If he did emerge at all it was to cut himself off at the height of adolescence. There he remains, poised on the peak, a sort of jeune Roi Soleil.

  This refusal to mature, as we view it, has a quality of pathetic grandeur. Mature into what? we can imagine him asking himself. Into a manhood which spells enslavement and emasculation? He had blossomed prodigiously, but—to flower? To flower meant to expire in corruption. He elects to die in the bud. It is the supreme gesture of youth triumphant. He will permit his dreams to be massacred, but not to be sullied. He had had a glimpse of life in its splendor and fullness; he would not betray the vision by becoming a domesticated citizen of the world. “Cette âme égarée parmi nous tous”—that is how he described himself more than once.

  Alone and bereft, he carried his youth to the uttermost limits. He not only commands this realm as it had never before been commanded, but he exhausts it—all that we know of it, at least. The wings with which he soared rot with him in the tomb of the chrysalis from which he refused to emerge. He dies in the womb of his own creation, intact, but in limbo. This quality of the unnatural is his special contribution to the saga of renunciatory acts. It has a monstrous flavor, as “the part of fortune” always has when usurped by the demon. The element of arrest (Narcissism), which is another aspect of the picture, introduces a fear greater than all others—the loss of identity. This threat, which was ever with him, condemned his soul to that oblivion it once despaired of ever attaining. The dream world enfolds him, smothers him, stifles him: he becomes the mummy embalmed by his own artifices.

  I like to think of him as the Columbus of Youth, as the one who extended the boundaries of that only partially explored domain. Youth ends where manhood begins, it is said. A phrase without meaning, since from the beginning of history man has never enjoyed the full measure of youth nor known the limitless possibilities of adulthood. How can one know the splendor and fullness of youth if one’s energies are consumed in combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors? Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is youth’s only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up for sacrifice? What of the dreams of youth? Are they always to be regarded as follies? Are they to be populated only with chimeras? Dreams are the shoots and buds of the imagination: they have the right to lead pure lives also. Stifle or deform youth’s dreams and you destroy the creator. Where there has been no real youth there can be no real manhood. If society has come to resemble a collection of deformities, is it not the work of our educators and preceptors? Today, as yesterday, the youth who would live his own life has no place to turn, no place to live his youth unless, retiring into his chrysalis, he closes all apertures and buries himself alive. The conception of our mother the earth being “an egg which doth contain all good things in it” has undergone a profound change. The cosmic egg contains an addled yolk. That is the present view of mother earth. The psychoanalysts have traced the poison back to the womb, but to what avail? In the light of this profound discovery we are given permission, as I see it, to step from one rotten egg into another. If we believe this it is true, but whether we believe it or not it is pure, unmitigated hell. It is said of Rimbaud that “he scorned the highest satisfactions of our world.” Are we not to admire him for that? Why swell the ranks of death and decay? Why breed new monsters of negation and futility? Let society scotch its own rotten corpse! Let us have a new heaven and a new earth!—that was the sense of Rimbaud’s obstinate revolt.

  Like Columbus, Rimbaud set forth in search of a new route to the Promised Land. The Promised Land of Youth! In his own miserable youth he had fed on the Bible and on the Robinson Crusoe sort of books which children are given to read. One of these, one he was particularly fond of, was called L’Habitation du Désert. Singular coincidence, that even as a child he is dwelling in that wilderness which is to be the substance of his life. Did he then, even in that remote time, see himself apart and alone, stranded on a reef, decivilizing himself?

  If any man saw with the right and the left eye it was Rimbaud. I speak naturally of the eyes of the soul. With the one he had the power of seeing into eternity; with the other he had the power of seeing into “time and the creatures,” as it is written in The Little Book of the Perfect Life.

  “But these two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their work at once,” it is said. “If the soul shall see with the right eye into eternity, then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as though it were dead.”

  Did Rimbaud close the wrong eye? How else are we to account for his amnesia? That other self which he put on like a suit of armor in order to do battle with the world, did it make him invulnerable? Even armored like a crab, he is as unfit for Hell as he was for Paradise. In no condition, no realm, was it possible for him to remain anchored; he can get a toehold but never a foothold. As though pursued by the Furies, he is driven relentlessly from one extreme to the other.

  In some respects he was as un-French as it is possible to be. But in nothing was he more un-French than in his youthfulness. In him the gauche, callow traits which the French loathe were combined to an extraordinary degree. He was as incongruous as a Viking would have been in the court of Louis XIV. “To create a new nature and a correspondingly new art” were, as has been said, his two ambitions. For the France of his day such ideas were as valid and tenable as the worship of a Polynesian idol. Rimbaud has explained, in the letters from Africa, how impossible it was for him to resume the life of a European; he confessed that even the language of Europe had become alien to him. In thought and being he was closer to Easter Island than to Paris, London or Rome. The savage nature which he had manifested from childhood developed more and more with the years; it revealed itself more in his compromises and concessions than in his revolt. He remains the outsider always, playing a lone hand, scornful of the ways and methods he is obliged to adopt. He shows more desire to trample on the world than to conquer over it.

  While the zebus dreamed he dreamt too, be sure of it. Only we do not know those dreams of his. We hear only of his complaints and demands, not of his hopes and prayers; we know his scorn and bitterness, but not his tenderness, his longing. We see him preoccupied with a multitude of practical details and we assume that he had killed the dreamer. Yes, it is possible that he stifled his dreams—since they were too grandiose. It is also possible that he played at being sane with the cunning of a super-madman—rather than expire at those radiant horizons which he had opened up. What do we know actually of his interior life in the latter years? Nothing, practically. He had closed up. When he rouses himself it is only to emit a growl, a whine, a curse.

  To the anabasis of youth he opposed the katabasis of senility. There was no in-between realm—except the false maturity of the civilized man. The in-between was also the realm of limitations—cowardly limitations. No wonder that he saw the saints as strong men, the hermits as artists. They had the strength to live apart from the world, defiant of all but God. They were not worms who bowed and groveled, who said yes to every lie for fear of losing their peace or security. Nor did they fear to lead a totally new life! However, to live apart from the world was not Rimbaud’s desire. He loved the world as few men have. Wherever he went his imagination preceded him, opening up glorious vistas which of course always turned out to be mirages. He was concerned only with the unknown. To him the earth was not a dead place rese
rved for penitent, sorrowful souls who have given up the ghost, but a live, throbbing, mysterious planet where men, if they but realize it, may dwell as kings. Christianity had made of it an eye-sore. And the march of progress was a dead march. About face, then! Resume where the Orient in its splendor left off! Face the sun, salute the living, honor the miracle! He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals. With every piercing shaft he hit the bull’s eye. No one had keener vision, truer aim, than the golden-haired boy of seventeen with the periwinkle blue eyes. A bas les vieillards! Tout est pourri ici. He fires point-blank right and left. But he has no sooner laid them low than they stare him in the face again. It is no use shooting at clay pigeons, he thinks to himself. No, the task of demolition demands deadlier weapons. But where is he to get them? At what arsenal?

  It is here that the Devil must have stepped in. One can imagine the words he chose … “Keep on this way and you’ll land in the bug-house. Do you suppose you can kill the dead? Leave that to me, the dead are my meat. Besides, you haven’t even begun to live. With your talents the world is yours for the asking. What makes you superior is that you have no heart. Why linger among these rotting, walking cadavers?” To which Rimbaud must have said: “D’accord!” Proud, too, that he had wasted no words, man of reason that he was. But, unlike Faust who had inspired him, he forgot to ask the price. Or perhaps he was so impatient that he did not wait to hear the terms of the bargain. It is even possible that he was so naive that he did not suspect there was a bargain. For he was always innocent, even as a lost one. It is his innocence which leads him to believe that there is a Promised Land where youth reigns. He believes it even though his hair turns gray. Even when he leaves the farm at Roche for the last time it is not with the idea of dying on a hospital bed in Marseilles but to set sail again for foreign lands. Always his face is turned toward the sun. Soleil et chair. Et à l’aube c’est le coq d’or qui chante. In the distance, like an ever-receding mirage, les villes splendides And in the sky the peoples of the earth marching, marching. Everywhere fabulous operas, his own and other men’s: creation yielding to creation, paean succeeding paean, infinitude swallowing infinitude. Ce n’est pas le rêve d’un hachischin, c’est le rêve d’un voyant.

  His was the most terrible deception I know of. He asked for more than any man dared and he received infinitely less than he deserved. Corroded by his own bitterness and despair, his dreams turned to rust. But for us they remain as pure and untarnished as the day they were born. Of the corruption he passed through not a single ulcer adheres. All is white, glistening, tremulous and dynamic, purified by the flames. More than any poet he lodges himself in that vulnerable place called the heart. In all that is broken—a thought, a gesture, a deed, a life—we find the proud Prince of the Ardennes. May his soul rest in peace!

  C O D A

  Rimbaud was born in the middle of the nineteenth century, October 20th, 1854, at 6:00 A.M., it is said. A century of unrest, of materialism, and of “progress,” as we say. Purgatorial in every sense of the word, and the writers who flourished in this period reflect this ominously. Wars and revolutions were abundant. Russia alone, we are told, waged thirty-three wars (mostly of conquest) during the 18th and 19th centuries. Shortly after Rimbaud is born his father is off to the Crimean War. So is Tolstoy. The revolution of 1848, of brief duration but full of consequences, is followed by the bloody Commune of 1871, which Rimbaud as a boy is thought to have participated in. In 1848 we in America are fighting the Mexicans with whom we are now great friends, though the Mexicans are not too sure of it. During this war Thoreau makes his famous speech on Civil Disobedience, a document which will one day be added to the Emancipation Proclamation—as a rider. Twelve years later the Civil War breaks out, perhaps the bloodiest of all civil wars—but see what we gained! From 1847 until his death in 1881, Amiel is writing his Journal Intime, which is the logbook of the sick man of Europe erroneously called Turkey. It gives a thoroughgoing analysis of the moral dilemma in which the creative spirits of the time found themselves. The very titles of the books written by the influential writers of the 19th Century are revelatory. I give just a few … The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard), Dreams and Life (Gérard de Nerval), Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire), Les Chants de Maldoror (Lautréamont), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), La Bête Humaine (Zola), Hunger (Knut Hamsun), Les Lauriers sont coupés (Dujardin), The Conquest of Bread (Kropotkin), Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), The Serpent in Paradise (Sacher-Masoch), Les Paradis Artificiels (Baudelaire), Dead Souls (Gogol), The House of the Dead (Dostoievsky), The Wild Duck (Isben), The Inferno (Strindberg), The Nether World (Gissing), A Rebours (Huysmans) …

  Goethe’s Faust was not so very old when Rimbaud asked a friend for a copy of it. Remember, the date of his birth is October 20th, 1854. (6:00 A.M. Western Standard Diabolical Time.) The very next year, 1855, Leaves of Grass makes its first appearance, followed by general condemnation. In 1860 Baudelaire’s work on les stupéfiants appears, also followed by condemnation and suppression. Meanwhile Moby Dick had come out (1851) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854). In 1855 Gérard de Nerval commits suicide, having lasted till the remarkable age of 47. In 1854 Kierkegaard is already penning his last words to history, in which he gives us the parable of “The Sacrificed Ones.” Just four or five years before Rimbaud completes A Season in Hell (1873), Lautréamont publishes privately his celebrated piece of blasphemy, another “work of youth,” as we say, in order not to take these heartbreaking testaments seriously. (How many authors in this 19th Century publish their first works privately!) By 1888 Nietzsche is explaining to Brandes that he can now boast of three readers: Brandes, Taine and Strindberg. The next year he goes mad and remains that way until his death in 1900. Lucky man! From 1893 to 1897 Strindberg is experiencing a crise, as the French put it, which he describes with magistral effects in the Inferno. Reminiscent of Rimbaud is the title of another of his works: The Keys to Paradise. In 1888 comes Dujardin’s curious little book, forgotten until recently. In the same year Edward Bellamy’s Utopian document is published. By this time Mark Twain is at his height, Huckleberry Finn having appeared in 1884, the same year as Against the Grain of Huysmans. By the fall of 1891, the year of Rimbaud’s death, Knut Hamsun is directing discussions in which “the right of the obscure and the mysterious in literature” is being fought over. In that same year Gissing’s New Grub Street is launched. It is an interesting year in 19th Century literature, this year of Rimbaud’s death; it ends a decade in which a number of writers important to the 20th Century are born. Here are a few titles of books which appeared in the year of 1891, curious books in that they differ so widely one from another … Gö;sta Berling, The Light that Failed, The Little Minister, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Les Cahiers d’André Walter, Le Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Là-Bas, The Fruits of Civilization, The End of Sodom, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Sixtine (roman de la vie cérébrale) …

  What a century of names! Let me include a few I have not mentioned … Shelley, Blake, Stendhal, Hegel, Fechner, Emerson, Poe, Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Mallarmé, Tchekov, Andreyev, Verlaine, Couperus, Maeterlinck, Madame Blavatsky, Samuel Butler, Claudel, Unamuno, Conrad, Bakunin, Shaw, Rilke, Stefan George, Mary Baker Eddy, Verhaeren, Gautier, Léon Bloy, Balzac, Yeats…

  What revolt, what disillusionment, what longing! Nothing but crises, breakdowns, hallucinations and visions. The foundations of politics, morals, economics and art tremble. The air is full of warnings and prophecies of the débâcle to come—and in the 20th Century it comes! Already two world wars and a promise of more before the century is out. Have we touched bottom? Not yet. The moral crisis of the 19th Century has merely given way to the spiritual bankruptcy of the 20th. It is “the time of the assassins,” and no mistaking it. Politics has become the business of gangsters. The peoples are marching in the sky b
ut they are not shouting hosannahs; those below are marching towards the bread lines. C’est—l’aube exaltée ainsi qu’un peuple de colombes …