Gaya Scienza

Rimbaud's Photo (cont.)

Jean-Jacques Lefrère's paper in Histoires littéraires on the recently discovered photo of Rimbaud in Aden is convincing (Un coin de table à Aden). In the picture, the former poet is in the company of six other individuals, on the veranda of the Hôtel de l'Univers. The opinion piece he published, together with the book sellers who found the picture among a lot of old books two years ago, Jacques Desse and Alban Caussé, over the week end in Le Monde leaves no doubt as of its authenticity.

Qu'on ne s'y trompe pas : la démarche, face à un tel document, doit demeurer rationnelle. Sur l'authenticité, il n'y a pas lieu de reprendre ici tous les éléments que nous avons donnés dans l'article d'Histoires littéraires, qui est en libre consultation sur le site de la revue. Au-delà de la ressemblance attestée par la comparaison avec les photographies connues du poète en sa seizième ou dix-septième année, tout rattache cette image à l'entourage, pourtant restreint, de Rimbaud à Aden. Quels sont les noms des compatriotes que ce dernier fréquentait dans cette ville ? Ce sont ceux qui reviennent régulièrement dans sa correspondance : Alfred Bardey, l'employeur des premières années ; Jules Suel, qui finança une partie de la caravane d'armes destinée à Ménélik ; César Tian et Maurice Riès, qui furent les associés des dernières années, pour citer les principaux. Or, cette photographie vient des archives de Suel et était jointe à un billet de celui-ci à Bardey. De surcroît, il nous est permis de donner quelques éléments renforçant l'authenticité.

The photo was found in Jules Suel's archives. Since it was made public last month at the Salon du livre ancien in Paris, two of the characters sitting with the younger man thought to be Rimbaud have been identified: Alfred Bardey and Maurice Riès are the bearded men on the left. Suel, Riès and Bardey were among Rimbaud's acquaintances in Aden...

This summer the Arthur Rimbaud Museum in Charleville-Mézière is organizing an exhibition on the poet's stay in Aden. A great excuse to visit the Ardennes...

2010.05.09

Ô saisons, ô châteaux

The New York Times published this Friday in the Escapes section a paper titled His Sanctuary From Glamour dedicated to the country house Harlan Bratcher, chief executive of A/X Armani Exchange, owns in the Hudson Valley north of New York city. In the first paragraphs of the article, we learn en passant, as happens regularly in the Times, that he shares his retreat with his partner, Toby Usnik...

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While waiting for the upcoming new edition of Rimbaud in La Pléiade I have been reading Jean-Jacques Lefrère's Arthur Rimbaud (Paris, Fayard, 2001, 1242 pp.), the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of the poet. J.-J. Lefrère, one of the most renown specialist of Rimbaud, has recently published a volume of Rimbaud's correspondence (Paris, Fayard, 2007). He is also an hematologist and a professor of medicine...

The biography is written in a lively style, which is nice considering the thickness of the book, and reads like a novel...

Very little is known of Rimbaud's inner life. He was a lonesome boy and a lonesome man. Lefrère has written a very factual account of the poet's life, based on documents he quote extensively, and, contrary to many of his predecessors, never tries to infer what his subject might have felt or thought. What we know, for that matter, is enough to make his life a fascinating story. At the end, though, there is frustration, the more so for a gay reader. Lefrère, while addressing adequately Rimbaud's homosexuality, seems a bit uneasy with it at times, and makes some surprising comments... "Alcoholism and homosexuality were not for Verlaine a voluntary upsetting of one's senses, the result of some artistic concept, but a surrender, full of doubts and remorse, to inclinations he fought against his entire life." For Verlaine... Was it for Rimbaud? "Why avoid the question, when it arises: did Rimbaud remain homosexual  during his 'second life'? Yes why? For Robert Goffin, a poet and member of the Académie royale de Belgique, Lefrère tells us, "Arthur Rimbaud's works can only be brought to light and understood through his homosexuality." Goffin wrote a book on the poet certainly worth looking at.

In fact Lefrère does not avoid the discussion, first in a several pages in one of the chapters dedicated to Rimbaud's second stay in Paris (chapter XI, Le repas des communards). "Few, if any, of the two poets' scholars would still contend that their relationship was platonic, or that it was a mere 'transient experience' for the sake of poetry," concludes Lefrère regarding the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. His description of the relationship is clearly an homosexual one. For the period before met Verlaine and thereafter no documents are available, and Rimbaud's closest friends have denied any homosexual encounter. Poet Germain Nouveau's interaction with Rimbaud (they spent sometime together in London in the spring of 1874) raises questions which will probably never be answered ... For the last part of his life, in Africa, nothing. Lefrère quotes several contradictory, and unreliable, testimonies. For many years, and until his return to France after contracting the disease he would die from, he kept with him a young servant, Djami Wadaï, from Abyssinia. In his will Rimbaud took care of him... Also, although he was never involved with slave trade, contrary to what has sometimes been written, he once questioned one of his business acquaintances if he could get him two boy slaves...

I am not sure Edmund White's book, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, to be published in October, will bring much more. An unknown text from Rimbaud was discovered last May in an old collection of l'Ardennais: a short newspaper article titled 'Bismark's Dream'. But the probability of finding one day something more intimate is  very low...

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By the way, there is an interesting exhibition (together with a catalog even more comprehensive) at the Whitney Museum in New York: the Polaroids photographs Robert Mapplethorpe took between 1970 and 1975. On view through September 14th.

2008.08.17