Season in Hell

ARTHUR RIMBAUD--Enid Starkie--Norton ($3.75).

Between 15 and 19, Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry whose slashing irony and pure music still influence poets. At 19 he wrote Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), an obscure, agonized hodgepodge in which Rimbaud addicts* trace the wrestlings of his Andre Gide-like puritanism with his Andre Gide-like passions. But from then until he died, at 37, in a Marseille hospital, Arthur Rimbaud never wrote again. This amazing break with his genius, his lone-wolf prowlings through the lower depths of Europe, his gunrunning in Africa and Asia form a vague, provoking literary legend of which even the surer facts have been concealed, exaggerated, distorted, hushed up by shocked relatives or embroidered by starry-eyed admirers of his relations with famed Symbolist Poet Paul Verlaine.

Enid Starkie has tried to separate some of the sheepish facts from the goatish fictions, to lift some of the fogs, prune some of the poison ivy out of the laurels. With unhurried, neutral efficiency she shows how this sensitive son of an army captain and a penny-pinching peasant became first a debauched child poet, then a "wild boy" whose Russia was all Europe, then a castaway by the Red Sea.

Rimbaud was brought up by a tight-fisted mother who was open-handed only with her slaps. Until he was 15, she took him to school every day so that he would not tarry with naughty schoolmates. During the dislocations of the Franco-Prussian War, Rimbaud, who was already writing verse, ran away to Paris. There the penniless poet, little more than a pretty-faced child, slept in a barracks: the soldiers "assaulted" him. This shocking experience, which sent him shuddering home, caused not merely a "revulsion," says Author Starkie, but a sensual "revelation." At home, Rimbaud set out to shock the respectable citizens. He would stroll, dressed like a tramp, down the main street during the sacred aperitif hour, smoking a short pipe and, "what was considered most outrageous of all," smoking it bowl downwards. During the Paris Commune, Rimbaud picketed his native shops, shouting: "Beware! Your hour is at hand! Order is vanquished!" When Poet Verlaine, who admired Rimbaud's verse without having seen Rimbaud, sent him a ticket to Paris, nobody was sorry to see him go.

Rimbaud shocked Verlaine's respectable family at once by getting Verlaine drunk every night. When Verlaine's wife found on Rimbaud's pillow "little insects which she had never seen before," her husband laughed. Explained Verlaine: Rimbaud keeps "such parasites in his hair to have them handy to throw on the priests" he passes. But it became necessary for Verlaine to rent a separate room for Rimbaud. There the two poets somewhat absinthe-mindedly achieved that "long et raisonne dereglement de tons les sens" (long and calculated derangement of all the senses) which was Rimbaud's purpose in debauchery.

After Verlaine in a drunken fit tried to strangle his wife, hurled his infant son against a wall, the poets migrated to London. But derangement of all the senses began to bore even Rimbaud. The Infernal Husband, as Rimbaud later styled himself, took to brutalizing the Foolish Virgin, as he called Verlaine. Even in Paris, Rimbaud had once told his friend to place his hands on the table, then slashed them with a knife. "Verlaine," says Author Starkie with typical restraint, "immediately got up and left the cafe." In London, Verlaine could stand such unkindnesses no longer: he ran away. Although Rimbaud overtook him as the Ostend boat was about to sail, Verlaine just shook his head: he would not get off. Hysterical. Rimbaud wrote Verlaine imploring him to come back, threatened in a postscript: "If I cannot see you again I shall enlist in the army or the navy."

In Brussels, when Rimbaud caught up, Verlaine shot him in the wrist. When he tried another shooting the next day, Rimbaud ran for a policeman. Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to two years' hard labor. Rimbaud hurried home, wrote Une Saison en Enfer.

For the next six years Rimbaud wandered back & forth across Europe. In Marseille he worked as a stevedore. In Vienna he begged in the streets. He enlisted in the Dutch army, was sent to Java, where he deserted three weeks later, disappeared in the jungle, reappeared in Liverpool. To catch a ship for Egypt he crossed the Alps on foot in winter. "No precipices were now visible, no mountains, nothing but the blinding whiteness. . . ." His face was masked in icicles, but he reached Genoa alive. In Suez he gathered loot pirated from wrecked ships. In Cyprus he was foreman of a labor gang. All this before he was 25.

A French coffee exporter gave Rimbaud a job at his store in Aden, "that horrible rock." Rimbaud began to pinch pennies like his mother. With small capital he started running guns to Ethiopia, slaves to Arabia. His little house, the site of which Evelyn Waugh found a few years ago at Harar, was a gathering place for French traders, Italian explorers. Rimbaud's bluntness and sincerity, outrageous to Europeans, charmed the Ethiopians, won him the confidence of Emperor Menelek's nephew.

But Rimbaud had contracted syphilis: his right leg began to swell until he was unable to use it. He returned to France to die in agony.

*Of whom Anthony Eden is one.

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