Delirium
Jeremy Harding
- Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl
Vintage, 336 pp, £7.99, May 1998, ISBN 0 09 976771 6
- A Season in Hell and Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Treharne
Dent, 167 pp, £18.99, June 1998, ISBN 0 460 87958 8
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, poet and ex-poet, took a 41 shoe – about a seven and a half in British sizes, an American eight. We have his own word on this, in a letter written shortly before his death at the age of 37, requesting a stocking for varicose veins. The jaunty teenager smoking a pipe in Verlaine’s famous sketch – dearer to Rimbaud’s admirers than the simpering soul in Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of the same year – has elegant legs. But of the eight pairs hidden from view in the Fantin-Latour, Rimbaud’s were surely the toughest, the most serviceable, when it came to getting about. Nimble feet on peasant legs which, against every impulse of peasant culture, drove him away from the farmyard across the dank pastures of Northern France and Belgium, and a few years later, down through Italy, racking up great distances in the course of a day.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 18 · 17 September 1998
From John Coleby
In Cyprus in 1968-72 I heard the story of the building of the Governor’s Summer Residence in the Troodos in 1879-81, which followed on from the initial British Survey begun in 1878 after the island’s cession from the Ottoman Empire. The officer in charge of the Survey was Captain Herbert Kitchener, Royal Engineers. Rimbaud, as Jeremy Harding remarks (LRB, 30 July), was on the island at this time, working first in a quarry and then as supervisor on the site of the villa’s construction (according to my Cypriot informant). I am not sure that Kitchener and Rimbaud actually met during those months in 1879-80, but it seems quite possible; Europeans were not so thick on the ground in the interior of Cyprus in those days. If they did, there might have been an interesting interaction, as both were expatriate loners of ambiguous sexual orientation. Does anyone know of any other evidence? It has intrigued me for years, especially as Rimbaud left the island under some sort of cloud.
John Coleby
Crondall, Hampshire
Vol. 20 No. 22 · 12 November 1998
From Christopher Hitchens
I can be of some help to John Coleby (Letters, 17 September) in his quest for traces of Rimbaud in Cyprus. The British Governors’ old summer retreat in the Troodos mountains now serves, as does the former colonial residency in Nicosia, in the office of Presidential mansion. As a luncheon guest there in the summer of 1984, during the tenure of President Kyprianou, I asked about a plaque to Rimbaud of which I’d once heard and was taken by one of the staff to the rear of the house. Rather narcissistically, perhaps, I had myself photographed in front of the weathered piece of stone that can still be seen, and the resulting sunlit shot requires, for decipherment of the ipsissima verba, the strong magnifying glass that my own frame does not. The best I can do with a good lens is this: ‘Arthur Rimbaud, poète et génie français, au mépris de … nommée a contribu … ses propres mains à la construction de cette maison MDCCC … ‘
I take this to say that ‘the French poet and genius Arthur Rimbaud, heedless of his renown, was not above helping to build this house with his own hands.’ The inscription does not give the provenance of the plaque. Perhaps, therefore, Rimbaud was more than the supervisor on the site and shared also in the joys of manual labour. Mr Coleby says that Rimbaud ‘left the island under some sort of cloud’, which put me in mind of Anthony Blanche’s variation on this theme: ‘I left school under a "cloud", you know. I can’t think why it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light.’ In the case of the ‘poète et génie’, we may allow ourselves to imagine a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. But the possible Kitchener connection leaves a very gruesome taste in the mouth.
Christopher Hitchens
Washington DC
Vol. 20 No. 23 · 26 November 1998
From Graham Robb
At the risk of replacing the ‘very gruesome taste’ in Christopher Hitchens’s mouth (Letters, 12 November) with a different though equally unpleasant taste: the ‘cloud’ under which Rimbaud left Cyprus in June 1880 – if there was a cloud at all – had nothing to do with Kitchener. According to Rimbaud’s letters and the Cyprus Gazette, he was hired to supervise the construction of the new governor’s summer residence in the Troodos Mountains. Later that year, Rimbaud gave two contradictory explanations for his sudden departure: ‘arguments with the paymaster general and the engineer’; the ‘company ceased operations’. Years later, in Africa, the word was that Rimbaud had ‘committed some kind of misdemeanour on a Greek island’.
The Italian trader, Ottorino Rosa, who rode alongside Rimbaud on long expeditions at the end of the 1880s and who was generally defensive of his reputation, heard Rimbaud talk about his time in Cyprus as part of his troubled past: ‘There, he had the misfortune, when throwing a stone, to strike a native worker on the temple, killing him instantly. In fear, he took refuge on a ship that was about to sail [for Egypt].’ This brings to mind a phrase in Rimbaud’s letter of 24 April 1879, when he was working as a foreman at a stone quarry 16 miles east of Larnaca: ‘I’ve had quarrels with the workers and have had to ask for arms.’
The only definite example of a homosexual relationship in Rimbaud’s life is his ‘season in Hell’ with Verlaine. Acts of violence, on the other hand, are commonplace.
Graham Robb
Oxford
From John Coleby
I am glad to learn from Christopher Hitchens that the inscription to Rimbaud on the Summer Residence in the Troodos Mountains is in French. It is clearly the work of his compatriots, retracing the steps of ‘the Master’ some time after his death.
John Coleby
Crondall, Hampshire
