I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, Vol. 2 Book

Arthur Rimbaud might be modern literature's greatest disappointment and greatest source of bafflement.

Born to a dour, thrifty, shrewd not-quite-peasant-woman and her older, absent military officer husband, Rimbaud was born and raised in the Norman provincial town of Charleville. There he had been a dutiful child and a brilliant pupil at the local schools - his "Visionary" letters were written to one of his schoolmasters, Georges Izambard. Adolescence hits everybody pretty hard, but none harder than Rimbaud. After exhibiting increasingly rowdy behavior in town, he fled to Paris to see if he could get in on the excitement of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Even in the chaos, Rimbaud was such a nuisance that even the Paris Communards sent him back home as an indigent. After upsetting the Parisian art and cafe scene, he moved to England with Verlaine in a torrid love triangle (Verlaine was married, to a long-suffering woman). Then, soon after Verlaine shot him in a drunken quarrel, Rimbaud gave up poetry and became...a merchant.

So what happened? Well, we'll never know for sure, but what evidence we have from Rimbaud's end consists of his letters, which have all (almost) been brought together in this collection. As can be seen from his schooldays to his hectoring, demanding letters from his business days, Rimbaud "reinvented" himself in a way that is astonishing as well as perplexing. Or did he? From these letters I get the feeling Rimbaud was both more energetic and more scrupulous than most people - his efforts were unstinting and uncompromising - they just shifted from literature to money. Such shifts go on in teensy little ways all the time - every time another MFA or Ph.D. in Creative Writing is granted another career is launched. Poetry and money - they were both all or nothing for Rimbaud, and apparently he saw the two things as being incompatible. Or to put it another way, poetry is not a career, and unlike most poets, Rimbaud refused to mix the two.

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The early letters are the poetical heart and soul of this collection; they have been published and cited a gazillion times - Rimbaud was one of the great poet-letter writers, like John Keats or Emily Dickinson. But he was only inclined to write such letters a few times, when he was about 16. The letter with that bit about a "long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses" (p. 33) is a poetical talisman nowadays. But my favorite part of that same letter is this:

"...so many egoists call themselves authors, still others believe their intellectual growth is entirely self-induced! But all this is really about making one's soul into a monster: like some comprachio! Like some man sewing (sic.? Should this be "sowing"?) his face with a crop of warts." (p. 33)

Love those warts! Another good one, again to Georges Izambard:

"Charleville, November 2, 1870

...I'm dying, decomposing under the weight of platitude, of crap, of gray, of the daily grind. What else would you expect, I stubbornly continue to love free freedom, and...so many things tat are "so very unfortunate," am I right? -- I should just leave again today; I could do it: I was wearing new clothes, I could have sold my watch, and so hooray for freedom! -- But I stayed put! I stayed put! And I will want to leave again and again..." (p. 24)

"Free freedom." That's just wonderful, isn't it? My captive little soul boggles at it! It's too much, a donut with frosted frosting and glazed glazing. Without knowing what it means, I sometimes tell myself "free freedom, bub," like a kind of goad, or an explanation or an excuse. "But I stayed put!" I remind myself...

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The rest of these letters (pages 79 to 357! You've been warned) are about business matters, mostly, and constitute one of the great mysteries of western civilization - how did this brilliant poet come to be such a drudgery-bound, money-grubbing, sometimes whiny guy who was worried about his retirement fund and what the other merchants thought of him? Scholars have been at this conundrum for a century, but these letters provide most of the actual evidence.

Nevertheless, these business letters are mostly ignored, but even beyond the fact that they were written by Rimbaud, they are of interest. He was in an fascinating part of the world during a fascinating time - a kind of "Heart of Darkness" colonial character, interacting with and exploiting (and sometimes being exploited by) "natives." His life during this time - provided mainly by these letters, and by a few first-hand witnesses (fellow-merchants, mostly). Rimbaud was one of the first westerners to actually live in the interior of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) - he seems to have adopted native customs and language with, as the letter show, varying degrees of respect and shocking outbursts of racist disgust (you've been warned).

Perhaps most astonishing, after his harum-scarum youth, Rimbaud became a dutiful son. A typical letter to his family begins:


"Harar, August 5, 1881

Dear friends,

I just made the request that my firm in France pay you, in French currency, the sum of eleven hundred sixty-five rupees and fourteen anas, which would make, with the rupee worth about 2 franc 12 centimes, two thousand four hundred seventy-eight francs. However, the exchange rate fluctuates. As soon as you have received this little sum, do with it as you see best, and alert me promptly..." (p. 127)


Such drudgery! Accounts figured to the last ana and centime. Such paltry ambitions! Or so cry the poetry professors and the scholars. What happened to the world's great restless soul? Perhaps Rimbaud was just terminally restless. Towards the end of his correspondence, I kept wondering why he didn't flee the difficulties and frustrations of being a merchant of the interior and settle on the coast somewhere - Aden or Alexandria (which had a thriving literary and brothel scene - C. V. Cavafy, for example)? Rimbaud was too restless for the 19th century equivalent of a cubicle - he was always ready for the next adventure, the next push forward. And so the businessman and the poet aren't so far apart - and besides, keeping good accounts and sending money home to Mom are honorable things to do.

His death was painful, drawn-out and heroic. He got knee cancer, but didn't find competent treatment until it was too late. He managed to die in France, after a horrific journey in a litter across a couple hundred miles of wilderness, then an amputation in Marseilles that only managed to prolong his agony. His last letter was to the Director of the Messageries Maritimes, November 9, 1891. It starts out with a list of ivory tusk lots, apparently to settle his accounts with this firm. He wants to go back to Africa:

"...So send me the price for service from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralyzed: so I would like to leave plenty of time to board.

Tell me what time I should be carried on board..." (p. 357)

That's it - a Sojourner to the end, but like the Norman peasant he was, accounting for every rupee.

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So why did Rimbaud give up on poetry? I cannot give a definitive answer to this question, but I have a theory, ideas that came about from this remarkable collection and other accounts of his life. Rimbaud dropped poetry because he was disgusted by the poetry scene. There is a famous painting by Henri Fantin-Latour of Rimbaud, the disheveled beautiful wild child, sitting in a bar with a bunch of Paris's finest poetical nincompoops (and Verlaine, who was only a partial nincompoop). The condescension and derision that his youth, beauty, and more importantly, his brilliance, inspired in these pompous poetasters was infuriating - they knew he was great, but it was easier to complain about his bad behavior. He'd get the same treatment nowadays at an AWP seminar chaired by a bunch of "famous" American poetry professors. Try showing up to one of these drunk and brilliant and raving about "free freedom"! The tiny egos bolstered by even tinier talents, the boosterism and insider-trading of favors, the bad poems published and praised, the insistence on absurd credentials. It can be pretty hard to take, especially when you are as impatient as Rimbaud apparently was. And as brilliant. Again, poetry is not a career.

He was clear about this as a teenager - from another of the early letters to his influential, sympathetic and out-classed teacher Georges Izambard:

"Charleville, May 1871

And so you're a professor again. You've said before that we owe something to Society; you're a member of the brotherhood of teachers, you're on track. -- I'm all for your principles: I cynically keep myself alive, I dig up old dolts from school: I throw anything stupid, dirty, or plain wrong at them I can come up with: beer and wine are my reward. Stat mater dolorosa, dum pendet filius. I owe society something, doubtless -- and I'm right. You are too, for now. Fundamentally, you see your principles as an argument for subjective poetry: your will to return to the university trough -- sorry! -- proves it! But you will end up an accomplished complacent who accomplishes nothing of worth...." (p. 28)

I'll bet you don't find this letter quoted on your MFA Poetry Program's prospectus! "But you will end up an accomplished complacent who accomplishes nothing of worth...."

But again, why business? Again I am guessing, but perhaps Rimbaud liked the challenge, which, like sports, is based on performance and not so much, as with the arts, based on who you know and idiot bureaucracies and coteries. At its best, business can be clarifying. In business, unless the government bails you out, failure is failure and success was success, and money is the only measure of success. I think there is something there that appealed to Rimbaud - not the money itself (he lived frugally), but the ability to succeed or fail without appeal to institutionalized literary insider trading and credential-mongering. Success would be on his own terms and indisputable. Business, again, at its best, is more honest than institutionalized poetry, or at least less hypocritical - do you think you're a good cook? Open a restaurant and find out for sure...

Also, I think Rimbaud was curious - maybe he just wanted to see the World?

Poets drop out all the time - most of the time it isn't noticed because, well, they probably weren't very good poets to begin with. But this isn't always the case. As another example of a great drop-out, Emily Dickinson didn't go into business, but she too gave up trying to place her work in the face of monolithic cultural incomprehension and outright stupidity. So she stayed in her room and tied up her poems in little bundles with ribbon and tucked them in her desk drawer. Rimbaud went to Africa, via the Dutch East Indies (he deserted from the Dutch Army) and Cyprus, not really an option for a 19th century woman. Dickinson and Rimbaud don't seem all that far apart to me.

I highly recommend this book. Since I don't know French, I cannot rate the quality of the translation, but the letters English'd are just marvelous, so I am assuming Wyatt Mason did a great job translating (except maybe sew/sow noted above). I also appreciate he included most of the business letters as well (a few were left out, apparently - I wish that weren't the case). This book lives on my nightstand, a seething provocation to try harder and to be more brave.