Disaster Was My God Read online

  ALSO BY BRUCE DUFFY

  The World As I Found It

  Last Comes the Egg

  Copyright © 2011 by Bruce Duffy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Owing to space limitations, permissions acknowledgments can be found on this page.

  Jacket design by John Fontana

  Jacket illustration by Marty Blake

  Jacket photograph © Roger Viollet collection/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Duffy, Bruce.

  Disaster was my God : a novel of the outlaw life of Arthur Rimbaud / Bruce Duffy. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854–1891—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.U31917D57 2011

  808.83′82—dc22 2010041577

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53437-6

  v3.1

  For Susan

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note to the Reader

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Book One • Godlike Birds

  Book Two • Monsters Together

  Book Three • The Demon of Hope

  Epilogue

  A Final Note on the Poems and Writings Quoted

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Note to the Reader

  Although this book seeks to be faithful to Rimbaud’s character, artistic aims, and the general trajectory of his life, it is not, as fiction, captive to the facts or the strict flow of events. Quite the contrary.

  In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts—and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems—the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors. To be, if you will, more allegorical than historical, as befits a legend. I do this cheerfully, respectfully, and without apology.

  This book, then, is as represented—fiction.

  I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood. Disaster was my god.

  —ARTHUR RIMBAUD, A Season in Hell

  Prologue

  ROCHE, A FARM IN THE ARDENNES OF FRANCE,

  AUGUST 1901, TEN YEARS AFTER RIMBAUD’S DEATH

  Raising the Dead

  The gravedigger raises his pick, then drives it, with a cough, into the hard, rocky soil. And there in a black gig, not thirty feet away, sits the old woman draped in black veil, a pool of shadow watching the man’s every move. Raise the dead.

  For behind the gravedigger, laid to the side in the grass, are two now-to-be discarded grave markers, white, like upturned faces to the sun. Such was the gravedigger’s hard task today, to rebury the old woman’s two children, two of the four, a daughter gone for twenty-five years and the son, the famous poet Arthur Rimbaud, for almost ten. When clang. The gravedigger’s pick strikes another large stone.

  “Careful.” The veil stirs, revealing a glimpse of craggy face and spud-like nose. “Monsieur Loupot, there is no hurry. Obviously.”

  “Madame—”

  “Veuve. Widow,” she retorts in an unhand-me voice. “Do you forget the conversation we had earlier? You will call me Veuve Rimbaud. And as for all these rocks, do you blame the shovel? Do you blame the pick? Who, then, Monsieur? God above?”

  “Unavoidable,” replies Loupot, a solid man, beefy, mustached, and sunburned. Beery-smelling, she thinks. And the insolence of him, holding out a rock as he adds, “There is a reason, Veuve Rimbaud, why your farm is named Roche.”

  “What?” she says, now aroused, raising the veil, like two black wings. “So we surrender to the rocks? To break the legs of our cows and horses?”

  “But, Madame, please, as I have told you—repeatedly. I did not dig this grave or leave these stones. On this you have my word.”

  “Words,” she sneers, dropping the veil. “For you, Monsieur, I have but one word—dig.”

  Dig, then. For once unearthed, away they will go, these two old coffins. Away from Roche they will go to the town cimetière of Charleville, lofty, sanctified ground at the summit of the rue de Mantoue, the main avenue, where a tall budded cross stands atop an old stone arch. There, with a groan, when the church bells toll eight, an ancient watchman slowly swings shut the iron gates, then padlocks them against thrill seekers and wandering lovers—against any who might disturb the peace of this petit village.

  Stone chapels. Urns. Obelisks. Commandment-like stones. Beneath the cinder paths of this marble forest lie Charleville’s finest families: Blairon, Corneau, Demangel, Tanton-Bechefer—folk bunched in their old-fashioned suits and cravats, wilted corsages and gowns of lace, their rosaries tied like mittens round their withered fingers.

  As one might divine, however, the old woman’s family does not flow from such exalted bloodlines. Au contraire. Her people are mere peasants, granted from high, as it were, conspicuous exemption into this exclusive club. And, loath as she is to admit it, only because her dead son wrote such deathless works as “Vowels,” “The Drunken Boat,” A Season in Hell, and his cycle Illuminations, virtually all completed by the age of twenty. Consider just one, his sonnet “Vowels,” an early masterpiece written in 1871, at the age of sixteen, and this in a discipline in which, unlike music or mathematics, prodigy is almost unheard of, and all for the very evident reason that, at that age, most of us are as impulsive and unformed as we are lacking in life experience. Start there, then consider a work that in sensibility and diction is decades ahead of its time. Revolutionary, in fact. And, unlike the work of virtually any prodigy in literature, is still read, passionately admired, and even now genuinely disruptive. Poetry that comes with a sword:

  Vowels

  A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,

  One day I will tell you your latent birth:

  A, black hairy corset of shining flies

  Which buzz around cruel stench,

  Gulfs of darkness; E, whiteness of vapors and tents,

  Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, quivering of flowers;

  I, purples, spit blood, laughter of beautiful lips

  In anger or penitent drunkenness;

  U, cycles, divine vibrations of green seas,

  Peace of pastures scattered with animals, peace of the wrinkles

  Which alchemy prints on heavy studious brows;

  O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridor,

  Silence crossed by worlds and angels:

  —O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes!

  But then just a few years beyond this time, at twenty or so—at the point when most careers have barely begun—Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing. Utterly stopped. Stopped forever, an act itself as rare as literary prodigy. Even more troubling, Rimbaud ended his career by denouncing—in writing, and indeed in one of his greatest works, the long prose poem A Season in Hell—the cheap sophistry of writing and the cheat of art itself:

  For a long time I had boasted of having every possible landscape, and found laughable the celebrated names of painting and modern poetry … I dreamed of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of republics with no history, of hushed-up religious wars, revolutions in customs, displacement of races and continents: I believed in every kind of witchcraft.

  His abandonment of art, poetry, style, vocation, belie
f—all of it—fell like a curtain on his life, a total eclipse, deliberate and irrevocable. As he had calculated so brilliantly, it was deeply disturbing to art’s believers, the hero-rebel turned traitor. A self-defrocked priest. A willed disgrace, if not an artistic suicide. And worst of all, a man who, some time later, after years of drifting, went on to sell guns in Africa, on the edges of the slave trade. Most preferred to forget this Rimbaud, the cynical gunrunner, in favor of the young genius, the bad boy Rimbaud. For what on earth had happened to him? Had he turned yellow? Lost his mind? Who could square the two images? After all, writers may stop writing for a while or find themselves blocked, but where is the poet or writer, or artist of any type, who renounces his or her craft as folly and fakery—a lie? Who then refuses even to read poetry or novels? Who wants none of it. Any of it, or France or Europe, either.

  I grew accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummers made up by angels, carriages on roads to the sky, a parlor at the bottom of the lake; monsters, mysteries. The title of a vaudeville conjured up horrors before me.

  Then I explained my magic sophisms in the hallucination of words!

  At the end I looked on the disorder of my mind as sacred. I was idle, a prey to heavy fever. I envied the happiness of animals—caterpillars representing the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity!

  No matter: now, in death, Rimbaud, in Charleville at least, is utterly redeemed—arisen, in fact. Once the town pariah, he is now Charleville’s chief claim to fame. Why, soon to have his own statue! A monster made cherub. Actually cute!

  Morons, thought the Widow. Needless to say, she wanted nothing to do with their little charade. And yet, note the site the Widow has picked to nest her small brood, the old social climber. Why, there it lies even before the graves of Charleville’s former bigwigs, at the vertex of the cemetery’s two diverging gravel paths—the first grave a visitor will see. Trip over, in fact. Here the brother and sister will rest under two baroquely ornate markers, even as the old mother lies almost prostrate before them, beneath a great icelike slab of Carrara, the marble of Michelangelo. Night! And stone! And at this one thought, of this bull of rock crushing her bones, the Widow Rimbaud will feel a shiver, then a fatal tingle. To think! That at the summit of this packed necropolis her son’s idolators, the loose-tongued, the easily led, and the snoops, that they will see these seven letters beetling back at them in warning, evoking the dignity of the noble, the God-fearing and now never-to-be forgotten name:

  RIMBAUD

  Stop, then. Look down upon this name, once so blighted. Feel lucky. Hug your life like a child and be of good cheer. For perhaps in this life you will be wiser or better or more fortunate than this man and his small troubled family. Or failing that, blessed with better children, or at least better balanced children. Dominus vobiscum! Et cum spiritu tuo.

  Back, then, to Roche, ancestral farm of the famille Rimbaud. Back to this disinterring, to this Pietà scene where the mother, Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Rimbaud, sits perched in the antique black gig with two dented, now cross-eyed brass lamps.

  As for this cloaking veil draped over her, this is against the gnats—gnats, she will tell you—not an attempt to hide the face of some old shoe weeping on virtually the worst day in all her life. For what can you—any of you—know of the sufferings of an old woman who has been called by God? Spoken to in days of dark, silent, overflowing ecstasy, like those bald-pated saints you see in illuminated manuscripts, robed men with tiny flames over their heads, blessed by the Holy Spirit. Many, many times as a girl and young woman she, too, was so blessed, only to have God utterly and summarily ignore her. Suddenly deaf to her. Punishing her for what crime she does not know! As she would read in her missal, from the Psalms:

  My God, my God, look upon me: why have you forsaken me? O my God, I cry out by day and You answer not; by night, and there is no relief …

  But imagine: God was silent to her not for one year or two or even a string of years but for forty-five years, three months, and now thirteen days, a lifetime of darkness and privation. Why? she wondered, weeping as she prayed through this blear darkness. How could God be so cruel? Why? To test her faith? Was that it, as a priest told her once? But still, for forty-five years? To yearn but feel nothing of Your Holy Presence? To pray and hear nothing? To give—to give endlessly, like a fool—all to receive Your Holy Contempt? Paralyzed, then enraged, then despairing, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud’s suffering old mother, she would think it was her, her unworthiness, her mothering, her ignorance, her two terrible sons. There was, there had to be, a reason.

  When lo, two months before this time, early one morning, Mme. Rimbaud’s forty-five-year drought finally broke. The old woman was just waking up, dawn breaking, golden still and cool, when suddenly she heard Him—Him!—a surging river of force so strong her jaws clenched in ecstatic ache:

  LIFT THESE BONES. THEN BRING THEM TO ME. YOU, THEIR MOTHER.

  You, their mother. She knew exactly what God meant by this utterance. She—she personally would have to shoulder their untombing, and not merely with hirelings, gravediggers, undertakers, and other such riffraff—no! And so against all argument she refused the services of an undertaker, without whom two gravediggers flatly refused to take her money. Never when the mother insisted on being present, and especially not with the daughter, also called Vitalie, in the ground for twenty-five years. Please, Madame, they reasoned, this was surgeon’s work, carried out, often, with small spades and even teaspoons. But certainly not with the departed’s mother present! Never! Unheard of! Madness!

  In her stubbornness, the Widow likewise refused the offices of a priest, believing, in a kind of ecstasy, that God was moving through her, not through his various earthbound flunkies, these priests, sanctified know-nothings for whom, as men, she had no high regard. The blow, however, was when her other daughter, her forty-year-old daughter, Isabelle, the scatterbrain, refused to accompany her, willful girl—and never you mind about Rimbaud’s brother, just one year older, banished years before as an idiot no-good and a bum. Much to her vexation, this is not the same Isabelle whom she had bullied and ordered around for years when the two worked the farm together. Now married, freed, Isabelle is no longer so pliant or scatterbrained. Now she is like a nun who has left the order, talking back to Mother Superior.

  “Mother, why are you doing this? It’s ghoulish. Ridiculous. Leave them be.”

  “Because God told me, daughter,” insisted the old woman. “Have I ever told you that God told me to do anything? Well, then. Did Noah hear God’s voice, then ask hirelings to build his Ark? Did Noah ever do such a thing?”

  “The Ark, Mother, wasn’t morbid.”

  “Morbid! When here you two”—meaning Isabelle and her husband and literary collaborator of five years, Paterne Berrichon—“when here you two are both writing Arthur’s, what do you call it, biography? Stirring up gossip! To stir this pot of this stinking?”

  “To correct his memory, Mother. To stop the gossip, the lies!”

  “What—so your ridiculous brother becomes even more famous?”

  Fame: for the old woman this was the true plague, his would-be acolytes and the curious now descending on her with their impertinent questions. Scruffy littérateurs and journalists. Threadbare poets. Pince-nez professors and similar busybodies from Paris, Bordeaux, London, Brussels. All knocking on her door. Accosting her on her street. Shocked that he, their god, could have sprung from such as her. And all with the same idiotic questions:

  But why did he stop writing?

  Did he stop?

  But how could he just … stop writing?

  And why to Africa?

  And did he not return with manuscripts?

  And you are quite sure, Madame, there are no other manuscripts? Hmmm?

  Add to this the many rumors heaped on her. That just before his death, when he returned from Africa, he brought back a great final outpouring of poems, indeed, the futu
re of poetry, which she then burned like witches in a great bonfire upon a wintry hill. Whoof.

  The Widow, then, is the only Rimbaud present at the disinterring, and not merely to observe, for this is her land, beautiful rolling country, green pastures, oak and aspen and silvery river birches—hers, all hers.

  There, to the east, peering out in four directions—vigilant like her—is the craggy, mansard-roofed farmhouse in which she raised her four children, then lived for years more, running the dairy farm with her daughter, Isabelle, the dizzy one, as she thought of her. That is, until four years ago, when, surely on the last train out of spinsterhood, Isabelle was married and the old woman was forced to give up the farm. Renting to a serflike tenant, the feckless Mercier, the Widow then took a small flat in town. Ah, but see it now, below, Roche, in all its sweep. Surrounded by trees and deep hedgerows, her whole world can be seen, the house and the two once-spotless barns that her tenant farmer, the aforementioned Mercier—crétin—has left to choke with manure.

  And see down there, see that brown horse, the gelding, now staked to a chain, eating a circle in the grass, c’est la vie since he can do nothing else. And who staked him today after she drove out from Charleville? Who dragged, by her own shoulder, seventy-six years old, the heavy chain? And who then banged the stake with a great mallet, this as bald Mercier the tenant (hoping she would not raise his rent!) begged her:

  “Veuve Rimbaud, please, in this heat! You should not be doing this!”

  “Ce n’est rien.” She whacked the stake harder, with steam.

  “Madame—Veuve Rimbaud, please.”

  “Away—”

  Whack and whack—victoire. Pleasure immense, to show these two males how an old woman can toil like the stallion, like a fiend, never helpless.