The Sharp Side

Very few writers give up. The trajectory of a literary career commonly involves discovery, success, the writing of the work for which the writer is remembered, and then a tailing off. Writers soldier on to the bitter end. Joseph Conrad went on turning out novels long after he’d lost the ability to create the sort of fiction for which he is nowadays remembered. Hemingway, after those impressive early works, went on to write excruciating tosh like Across the River and into the Trees.

Shakespeare gave up. But then he wrote for money. Having made enough for a comfortable retirement, he quit. He had no interest in writing as self-expression. The final part of his life was not devoted to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reloaded. If he’d needed the money he might have done it, but he didn’t. Besides, Shakespeare’s Sonnets were not a commercial success. There were no further editions in his lifetime. What the reading public preferred was raunchy stuff like Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. In his retirement, gardening and hawking would quite possibly have seemed a lot more interesting to Shakespeare than writing.

Rimbaud provides the exemplary example of a writer who packs it all in. What is even more astonishing than this case of a writer who quits is how early, in his case, it happened. Before his twenty-first birthday he had changed the course of French literary history. As Arthur Symons put it in his pioneering monograph The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899):

He catches at verse, at prose, invents a sort of vers libre before anyone else, not quite knowing what to do with it, invents a quite new way of writing prose, which Laforgue will turn to account later on; and having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his own and the next generation are to busy themselves with developing, he gives up writing, as an inadequate form, to which he is also inadequate.

Rimbaud: modernist. His poetry finds a new space for literary attention: the commonplace and the everyday. Ham sandwiches. Beer. Farting. Head lice. But he also finds a new poetic language, with a place for everyday slang, everyday obscenity. His education taught him how to write Latin verse; his earliest poems mimic the famous (and now forgotten) French poets of his teenage years. Mysteriously, single-handedly, he becomes the originator of the modernist lyric. But, as a modernist, he also doubts the enterprise. The solidity and linearity of conventional literatures seem fraudulent and false. The fragmentary beckons. In the prose poems, as Graham Hough once remarked, ‘the firm outlines of pictorial presentation or narrative or logical sequence all disappear, and meaning arises uncertainly, through a film of unanalysable suggestion.’ Or as Symons put it, ‘he kneaded prose as he kneaded verse, making it a disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical thing.’

In T.S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ a voice, announcing that twenty years have passed (‘largely wasted’), reflects on a difficult encounter with language:

Trying to use new words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

The inner logic of modernism is silence. But whereas almost all modernists attempt to write about their engagement with that logic, seeking out ‘a different kind of failure’, Rimbaud accepted it. He gave up on literature. From the age of twenty-one he abandoned poetry and literary prose. From that time he neither wrote it nor read it. That vertiginous awareness seems to have required another kind of rejection: of both France and European society generally.

Rimbaud ended up in Africa. And the book to read about that is Charles Nicholl’s Somebody Else. As an account of life after literature, it is far more compelling than a yarn-spinning novel. Rimbaud pared away everything from his past, including politics:

You send me the latest political news. If only you knew how little I care: for over two years now I haven’t touched a newspaper. All those debates are incomprehensible to me now.

He spent years in Harar, in Somalia (or Somaliland), which Nicholls, who followed the Rimbaud trail, describes as ‘a long way from anywhere’. Rimbaud learned to speak fluent Arabic. He read the Koran. He reinvented himself as a trader – a man of practicalities. When an associate who had been back to France discovered that Rimbaud had once been a poet and had a growing reputation, he was astonished. When he confronted Rimbaud with the news, the ex-poet furiously replied, ‘absurd, ridiculous, disgusting’. His writing was a thing of the distant past, an unpleasant memory. The only writing that mattered to him now was concerned with specifics: data, geographical information, inventories. A portable theodolyte. A pocket-sized aneroid barometer. A surveyor’s line. Purchase and retail prices, potential profit. The transport of 1,755 rifles and 750,000 rounds of ammunition.

Seizing the goods of a debtor, Rimbaud discovered that the man’s widow had already disposed of the valuables. All that was left was worthless. It included 34 notebooks in which the man had written his memoirs. Rimbaud burned the lot. This he later regretted, having then learned that ‘certain property deeds were shuffled in among these confessions.’

Human lives are ragged and repetitious and lack the neat trajectories of those consoling fictions which, lacking novelty, involve dramatic climaxes and heart-warming resolutions. Illness forced Rimbaud back to France and a dismal ending. There were just two mourners at his graveside: his sister Isabelle and his mother. A fiction would end the narrative earlier than that, at the moment when Rimbaud crossed the lunar landscape of the obscure and remote salt lake of Assal, 500 feet below sea level. In the words of Nicholls,

if Rimbaud’s years in Africa seem like a flight from what he was – from Europe, from poetry, from himself – then it is surely here, on this desolate desert trek, that he reaches the furthest point of that arrow-flight, arriving at this utter privation, at this landscape of nothingness…