What does an author do when his hero is a nasty piece of work?
Novelist Bruce Duffy on how he came to terms the hard way with Arthur
Rimbaud, who is the star of his new novel, "Disaster Was My God."
Aug 1, 2011 4:43 PM EDT
Here's a dilemma. You're a writing fiction based on the life of an
historical figure, and although you can stretch the truth, you cannot
change the fundamental nature of your hero, a man roundly known at
times to have been nasty, sadistic, and arrogant—even a jerk.
This describes my essential predicament with the central character of
my latest novel, the French prodigy-poet Arthur Rimbaud, punk avatar
and hero to rockers like Jim Morrison and Patti Smith. To better
convey Rimbaud's massive contradictions, let's look past his warts for
the moment. First the prodigy piece.
Child prodigy is not uncommon in music, Mozart being the most dazzling
example. Prodigy likewise is relatively common in mathematics and the
sciences. In letters, however, prodigy is extremely uncommon for the
simple reason that a writer needs—beyond art—some requisite level of
life experience and maturity.
Picture, then, a boy from the sticks of the French Ardennes who in the
early 1870s, by the age of 16 and 17, is writing classic poems like
"Vowels" and "The Drunken Boat." What's more, quite unlike any 19th
writer you can name, even the greatest, this boy writes and thinks
like a fully formed 20th-century being. Rimbaud is the rightful father
of Dadaism and Surrealism, a poet who defied logic, broke into free
verse, then, still more daringly, into prose poems like "A Season in
Hell" and his revolutionary "Illuminations." Consider the opening of
the first illumination, "After the Flood:"
As soon as the idea of the Flood has subsided,
A hare stopped in the clover and the swinging cow bells, and said its
prayer to the rainbow.
The precious stones were in hiding, and already the flowers were
beginning to look up.
The butcher's blocks rose in the dirty main street, and boats were
hauled down to the sea, piled high as in pictures.
Imagine, then, standing on this wind-swept height as Rimbaud did,
almost out of your mind with the sheer power of your mind. Then
imagine, at around age 20, giving it up forever, all of it, poetry,
idealism—even hope.
Rimbaud's like somebody in my own family, the prodigal brother I never
had, the family scapegoat and outlier.
- Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud.
By Bruce Duffy. 384 pages. Doubleday. $27.95. -
You see, people love to mythologize the early, wildly idealistic
Rimbaud come to change the world and revolutionize the one thing he
never really had—love. The Rimbaud I struggled with, by contrast, was
the nasty, precocious adolescent who brought new meaning to the term
enfant terrible, attacking friends with knives and flinging lice on
unwitting priests. But far and away the biggest problem was the later,
turncoat Rimbaud, the angel who amputated his own wings. How was I to
tell this part of the story, much less the later period in which he
was selling guns in Africa, arming, with scarcely a second thought, a
vengeful, murderous king?
And why was I making it so hard for myself, especially after the
troubles I'd taken on with my first novel, The World As I Found It,
based on the life of the great 20th-century philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein. As main-character material, Wittgenstein likewise was
highly problematical. Born and raised in Vienna and educated in
Cambridge, the logician was a mental drill sergeant who destroyed the
core of Bertrand Russell's mathematics. Indeed, Wittgenstein once
wrote in almost ecstasy of his method, "I destroy, I destroy, I
destroy."
And yet 20 years later, far from profiting from this experience, here
I was, trying to create that oxymoron, a likeable Arthur Rimbaud. The
same questions nagged me. What causes readers to stick with novels
with frightening or repellent main characters—Dostoevsky's Crime and
Punishment, for example. How do such books give pleasure? Do we like
Dostoyevsky's arrogant ex-student Raskolnikov killing an old woman, a
pawnbroker—a parasite, he thinks—with an axe? Or take Richard Wright's
brave masterpiece Native Son. What are we to think when Richard
Wright's black protagonist Bigger Thompson dismembers, then shoves
into a furnace the body of a young white woman, whom he has
accidentally suffocated? Why stick with such protagonists? Yet as
readers we do. Taking us inside such darkness, the author has made the
inexplicable humanly understandable, even as the story goes over a
cliff.
In the case of Rimbaud, it's clear his later life presented a
formidable barrier, as evidenced by the fact that, more than a century
after his death, nobody has done a comprehensive fictional treatment
of what, at first glance, would seem obvious material. Other than a
couple of cameo appearances, all we have, really, is the 1995 film,
Total Eclipse, in which Leonardo DiCaprio—a dead ringer—plays the
handsome young Rimbaud. Not surprisingly, the film concentrates almost
exclusively on the iconic boy genius, striking faraway poses.
In any case, I tossed my doomed first effort—three years of work.
Then, after further months of struggle, finally ready to throw in the
towel, at last I had a breakthrough. This came when I recalled how,
years after his death, Rimbaud's mother, a tough, cold old peasant who
had raised four children without a husband, had him exhumed—him and
her favorite, a daughter named Vitalie who had died more than 20 years
earlier at the age of 17.
The result was the book's prologue, set in 1901, a decade after
Rimbaud's death. Long abandoned by her husband, Madame Rimbaud—or
Widow Rimbaud, as then she insisted on being called—is another piece
of work. We find her sitting in her carriage in the August heat, still
fuming about his fame, the intrusions and hungry stares, the mad
adoration from all these poets and professor-types peppering her with
questions. Draped under a black church veil, the old hen insists on
watching as the gravedigger unearths, like eggs, her children, two of
the four. Bound they are for the exalted town graveyard where the
wealthy slumber, and then for only one reason, these bumpkins—his
fame. For the old woman, this is odious enough, but now her curse is
to have his own statue, in the town square no less, the devil bronzed
in the guise of some frolicsome imp! And then it hit me: This is the
story of a monster raised by a witch.
Looking back, though, something else was blocking me—me. In the
Wittgenstein novel, I had written in depth about Europe without ever
having been there—at the time I thought it would be more fictional
that way. Here, by contrast, I not only went to France but to
Ethiopia. There I traveled across the desert to Rimbaud's centuries-
old walled trading town, Harar, then east, toward Somalia. Here I
found a tribal Jurassic Park of wrecked vehicles and roaring smuggler
trucks, a world in which tribal combatants still castrate their
victims and virtually every male past puberty comes packing an
automatic weapon.
Pilgrim foreigner. Under the desert heat I felt half dazed, to the
point that one day, as if it were the most natural thing, I thought,
Why don't they just shoot me? Well, why not? A carload of German
tourists had been killed the week before; there was nothing to stop
them. Here I had done journalistic stories in Haiti, Bosnia, and
Taliban Afghanistan, yet none of that quite prepared me for this
tribal reality, beyond all law or help. I felt like one of those water
striders, supported by the barest membrane of humanity, when a
chilling thought came over me: Rimbaud spent 10 years like this.
Finally, at the age of 37, marooned in Abyssinia with a cancerous knee
swollen the size of a beehive, Rimbaud organized his own rescue—him
and his hoard of gold. Carried on a litter across more than a hundred
miles of hostile desert, he reached the Sea of Aden and the ship that
would carry him home to France, there to have his leg amputated and be
reunited—unhappily—with his long-suffering mother. Here, too, Rimbaud
depended on younger sister Isabelle, the same who would later reinvent
him, or try, with her astounding hagiography, Arthur Rimbaud: Saint
Among the Savages. In any case, some six months after his return to
France—literally in his final hours—the rebel accepted Christ and took
the sacraments. But never was he reconciled with the god of poetry.
Face it, it's hard to read correctly the motivations of a genius so
singular and precocious, much less to do so decades after the fact.
Once the writing is done, it is equally hard to honestly factor in
your own turbulent, not always noble emotions, much less to explain
what is it about you—your own darkness and turmoil—that compels you to
enter the psyche of such a disturbing hero? By now, liking him is
almost beside the point. Rimbaud's like somebody in my own family, the
prodigal brother I never had, the family scapegoat and outlier. Lord
knows.
In the end, however, one reality seems to me indisputable: I could not
have brought to this book the level of reality and ruthlessness or élan
—or the perverse joy and humor required—had hard experience not taught
me how close our body double, the SOB, can really be. Closer than we
dare admit.
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Bruce Duffy is the award-winning author of the critically-acclaimed
The World As I Found It, a fictional life of Ludwig Wittgenstein and
Last Comes The Egg. Besides his researches in Ethiopia for his new
novel, he has done reporting that has taken him to Haiti, Bosnia and
Taliban Afghanistan. His first novel was recently released in the New
York Review of Books Classics series. He lives with his wife in
Bethesda, Maryland.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at
editorial@thedailybeast.com.
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