Gaya Scienza

Rimbaud (cont.)

It was a good surprise to read, in the first pages of a small book directed at the prospective professors of literature in France:

L'historicité de l'oeuvre [de Rimbaud] apparaît aussi sur un autre plan, car certains des besoins, désirs et fantasmes de Rimbaud ne peuvent se contenter des revendications communardes. À un moment qu'il serait vain de vouloir circonscrire, il a compris qu'il éprouvait des désirs qu'on ne qualifiait pas encore d''homosexuels', mais de pédérastiques (ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'il était uniquement attiré par les hommes, une lettre de Verlaine laissant entendre en 1875 que s'il donnait de l'argent à Rimbaud, son ami en ferait profiter des 'cabaretiers' et des 'filles'). Son oeuvre n'évoquera ces sentiments que d'une manière oblique, exception faite pour les parodies de l'Album zutique où il sera possible de prêter à d'autres ces désirs peu avouables, mais comme on l'a souvent dit (en général cependant dans le cadre d'une analyse homophobe jusqu'aux années 1960), il n'est sans doute pas fortuit que les poèmes de 1870-1871 reviennent avec insistance sur des thèmes scatologiques. Nos interprétations de Venus anadyomène ou L'Éclatante victoire de Sarrebrück suggèrent que la sodomie joue déjà un rôle dans l'imaginaire du poète, avant même Le Coeur supplicié de mai 1871 ou le Sonnet du Trou du Cul qu'il a composé avec Verlaine vers la fin de la même année. Que la pédérastie apparaisse sous des formes surtout obliques et souvent satiriques n'a rien de bien surprenant compte tenu de l'interdit qui planait sur de tels désirs, mais Rimbaud semble avoir pu ainsi au moins évoquer cette question, quitte à trouver d'autres moyens d'en parler plus tard, de manière plus voilée et aussi moins humoristique.

Rimbaud - Poésies, Une saison en enfer (collection Clefs concours, Atlande, 2009, 256p) is authored by Steve Murphy, one of the top experts in the French poet, and Georges Kliebenstein. It's a very good introduction to Rimbaud and it includes a nice bibliography with comments. According to the authors, the best general purpose edition of Rimbaud is the one edited by Pierre Brunel (Livre de Poche, 'Pochothèque', 1999). Et bien voilà.

2010.01.31

Rose-Leaves

The recent publication of a paperback French edition of Teleny in Jean-Jacques Pauvert's collection Lectures amoureuses (Paris, La Musardine, 2009, 192p) provided me with the opportunity to read the erotic novel attributed to Oscar Wilde. At Les Mots à la Bouche, where several copies were displayed in a stack, I was first attracted by the cover which features a portrait by Egon Schiele.

I was surprised by how explicit and detailed the descriptions of the sex scenes are...

Teleny was first published anonymously in England in 1893 by Leonard Smithers. According to Charles Hirsch, a French bookseller established in London who had seen the manuscript, the published version had been significantly amended by Smithers: the Prologue which introduced the characters was omitted, and the action was switched from London to Paris.

Hirsch came into possession of the manuscript after Smithers's death and in 1934 a French translation of Teleny, based on the manuscript, was published in Paris, under the Ganymède Club imprint, with an introduction by Hirsch. This is, apparently, the text of the current paperback edition. The manuscript has since been lost.

Teleny is thought to have been in part written by Oscar Wilde, with the possible collaboration of three close friends. Its composition is contemporary with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), "the most explicit novel about love and sex between men that had ever been published - at least by a respectable publisher. There had been works of pornography like The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, but these had never had the mass audience reached by Dorian Gray,"  writes Neil McKenna in his excellent, though provocative, biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London, Century, 2003, 535p), adding:

Teleny tells the story of the love affair between Camille Des Grieux and René Teleny. Like many men, Des Grieux - whose initials curiously echo those of Dorian Gray - has 'always struggled against the inclinations of my own nature' and has made severzl abortive attempts to love women. When he finally confronts the fact that he is attracted to other men, Des Grieux is disgusted and revolted. He is on the point of suicide when he is rescued, spiritually, and sexually, by the darkly handsome pianist René Teleny to whom Des Grieux is irresistibly drawn (...).

Sex with Teleny is not only profound, potent and rapturous, it is also revelatory.

Teleny has received short shrift from biographers and critics. It has often been described - unfairly - as crude and coarse. In its detailed and powerful descriptions of sex between Des Grieux and Teleny, the book is certainly extremely explicit, but it is at the same time poetic, passionate and quite beautiful, and certainly not unworthy of Oscar's hand. Unlike much Victorian pornography, the central theme of Teleny is rapture: rapture at the discovery of the erotic self and rapture at erotic fulfillment. Teleny is as much about love as about sex. From shame to rapture, Des Grieux's erotic odyssey follows that made by Oscar and by many of his friends and contemporaries.

In the first part of the novel Des Grieux gives an account of some of his not-so-satisfactory sexual encounters with women. During one of them, in a dirty brothel, he hears for the first time the expression 'rose-leaf' and he is puzzled(*):

At last, the consumptive girl, clasping with her hands the backside of the other one, and thus opening the huge pulpy buttocks, called out:

'A rose-leaf.'

Of course I greatly wondered what she meant, and I asked myself where she could find a rose-leaf, for there was not a flower to be seen in the house; and then I said to myself - having got one what will she do with it?

I was not left to wonder long, for the cantinière did to her friend what she had done to her.

Needless to say that when he gets to explore his sexuality with Teleny later on, he finds rose-leaves a 'thrilling sensation.'

Most available English editions of Teleny reproduce the text of the faulty 1893 edition. The best editions seem to be the Gay Sunshine Press (San Francisco) edited by Winston Leyland (1984) and the Gay Modern Classics (London) edited by John McRae (1986). None are currently in print.

***

Graham Robb, who wrote the best biography of Rimbaud in English, reviews on two full pages the third Pléiade edition of Rimbaud's works by André Guyaux (see Rimbaud in Pléiade, version 3.0) in the April 17th issue of the TLS (Top of the class). He calls it a "splendid edition" and mentions "Guyaux's careful erudition". He adds, though: "A scrupulous textual critic with relatively little interest in biographical minutiae, and still less interest in Rimbaud's post-literary adventures, Guyaux is unusually sensitive to the poet's unrebellious side." And: "Poems of which no manuscript in Rimbaud's hand survives are printed in a smaller typeface. This is a curious act of editorial ostentation. It means that Le Bateau ivre, which is known from a copy made by Verlaine, looks less significant than some of Rimbaud's jokes and jottings: lacking official documents, the poet literally fades from sight." This is indeed annoying for a spendid edition. In his acknowledgments Guyaux thanks Graham Robb, among others, for having contributed, through intellectual exchanges, books and articles, to his better understanding of Rimbaud's works...

***

There were two good news this week, upon my return. The first was that Maine became the fifth state to legalize gay marriage, when the Governor signed the same-sex marriage bill voted by the Legislature on Wednesday. A popular challenge will probably lead to a referendum this November or on June 2010. In the meantime the new law will be suspended... The other good news was that the Obama administration has decided to reopen the access to the Statue of Liberty's Crown starting next July 4th! It had been closed for security reasons since 9/11.

2009.05.10

(*) I discovered the lovely expression last year when reading an article on gay porn in Critique (see my blog post of March 23 2008)...

Rimbaud in Pléiade, version 3.0

The last edition of Rimbaud's Œuvres complètes in La Pléiade, edited by André Guyaux, is a disappointment...

The works are provided according to the chronological order in which they were written. This is now the standard editorial policy when publishing the poems of Rimbaud who, with the exception of Une Saison en Enfer, never produced a book. Unfortunately, André Guyaux's decision to print the text in small characters when a manuscript by Rimbaud is not available produces a strange effect when some of his masterpieces appear in incredibly tiny characters... This is the case for Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat), and some parts of Illuminations.

The notes to the poems are too few. They are not of great help for someone looking forward to entering into Rimbaud's inner world and understanding his obscure poetry. Is it, as writes Suzanne Bernard in the foreword of her edition of Rimbaud's Œuvres, because: "To provide an annotated edition of Rimbaud's work might appear as a reckless enterprise"? She accepted the challenge, though, in her 1960 edition. Or is it because the book is aimed at insiders?

Finally, Rimbaud's attraction to men (not to use the term 'homosexuality', a word and a concept which did not exist at the time) and its influence on his poetry which is largely autobiographical, are almost absent in the commentary and notes. The Préface, otherwise uninspired, provides the only following hint:

True confession is lacking in Rimbaud's work (sic), except possibly in the Foreward of Deserts of Love: 'Not having loved women, - yet full-blooded!' The image of another desire appears later, in Illuminations, particularly in Story, Circus ou Ancient. Hermeneutics, in Rimbaud, is not only a poetic conquest. It remains closely linked to the unacceptable.

Let's take a few examples.

(1) Le Cœur du Pitre (generally known as The Stolen Heart in English) is a abstruse poem composed by Rimbaud in the spring of 1871. He enclosed it in letters to Georges Izambard, his former schoolteacher, and to the poet Paul Demeny (In the famous Letter of the Seer). "It does not mean nothing" did he warn.

Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe,
Mon coeur est plein de caporal;
Ils y lancent des jets de soupe
Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe.
Sous les quolibets de la troupe
Qui pousse un rire général,
Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe
Mon coeur est plein de caporal!

Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs insultes l'ont dépravé:
À la vesprée, ils font des fresques
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques:
Ô flots abracadabrantesques
Prenez mon coeur, qu'il soit sauvé:
Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques
Leurs insultes l'ont dépravé!

Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques,
Comment agir, ô coeur volé?
Ce seront des refrains bachiques
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques:
J'aurai des sursauts stomachiques
Si mon coeur triste est ravalé:
Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques,
Comment agir, ô coeur volé?

My sad heart slobbers at the poop
my heart covered with tobacco-spit
They spew streams of soup at it
My sad heart drools at the poop
Under the jeerings of the soldiers
who break out laughing
my sad heart drools at the poop
mt heart covered with tobacco-spit.

Ithypallic and soldierish
Their jeerings have depraved it
In the rudder you see frescoes
Ithypallic and soldierish
O, abracadabratic waves
Take my heart, let it be washed!
Ithypallic and soldierish
their jeerings have depraved it.

When they have used up their quid
How will I act, O stolen heart?
There will be Bacchic hiccups
When they have used up their quid
I will have stomach retchings
If my heart is degraded;
When they have used up their quid
How will I act, O stolen heart?

(translation by Wallace Fowlie)

The poem expresses such a disappointment and such a disgust that it must point to some personal bitter and painful experience. Several commentators have hypothesized that it alluded to a rape that Rimbaud might have suffered in a military barrack during a stay in Paris. Izambard found the poem obscene and ridiculous. André Guyaux only provides two notes: the first for 'caporal' ("A type of cheap tobacco."), the second for 'Ithyphalliques' ("The word is used by Flaubert and in the Journal of the Goncourts"). In his commentary he ignores the rape hypothesis.

(2) Les Déserts de l'Amour (Deserts of Love) is the first known prose poem by Rimbaud. It is short, either because unfinished, or because some parts were lost. In the first part, Foreword, Rimbaud writes: "Not having loved women, - yet full-blooded! - his heart, his soul, all his strength grew up in strange and sad mistakes." No note is appended to this text. In the introductory comment to the poem, André Guyaux writes: "Linked to the confession in the Foreword ('Not having loved women...') the two 'successive dreams', described as dreamed 'loves', combine the themes of purity ('maternal'), obstacles ('cushions', 'canvasses', 'laces'), definitive absence and tears in order to suggest inhibition"...

(3) The untitled poem starting with Ô saisons, ô châteaux (O seasons, O castles) is one of Rimbaud's most famous work. It was later included in Alchimie du verbe (Alchemy of the Word) in Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). No English translation of this poem retains all its mystery.

Ô saisons, ô châteaux
Quelle âme est sans défauts?
Ô saisons, ô châteaux!
J'ai fait la magique étude
Du Bonheur, que nul n'élude.

Ô vive lui, chaque fois
Que chante son coq Gaulois.

Mais! je n'aurai plus d'envie
Il s'est chargé de ma vie.

Ce Charme! il prit âme et corps
Et dispersa tous efforts.

Que comprendre à ma parole?
Il fait qu'elle fuie et vole!
Ô saisons, ô châteaux.

O seasons, O castles,
What soul is without blame?
O seasons, O castles,
I carried out the magic study
of happiness that no one eludes.

Oh! may it live long, each time
The Gallic cock crows.

But I will have no more desires,
It has taken charge of my life.

That charm! it took my soul and body,
and dispersed every effort.

What can be understood from my words?
It makes them escape and fly off!
O seasons, O castles

(translated by Wallace Fowlie)

The only note for the poem is inserted after coq Gaulois: "Robert Goffin reminds the sexual meaning of coq gaulois in Wallony and in the Ardennes and identifies lui, from the preceding verse, to Verlaine (Rimbaud vivant. Documents et témoignages inédits, Paris, Corrêa, 1937); for Sergio Sacchi, lui is more probably the poem's subject, happiness, and the coq gaulois 'the symbol of resurrection, carved in the christian canvasses of the first centuries' ('Le Chant du coq gaulois', Il confronto letterario, novembre 1993)." What is André Guyaux's opinion? We don't know, except that the more recent date of the second reference would point to its stronger relevance... A draft of the poem is however available. Rimbaud had first written: "Je suis à lui, chaque fois / Si chante son coq gaulois" ("I am his, each time / If his Gallic cock sings") which is even more explicit.

The second part of the volume, titled Vie et Documents, "intended to give a better understanding of his life", does not directly address Rimbaud's attraction to men, although it provides documents pointing, sometimes crudely, to it. Most of the known documents pertaining to the 'Brussel's affair' are reproduced. I did not see, however, the 'inverted' sonnet by Verlaine, Le Bon disciple (The Good Disciple), which was found then among some letters in Rimbaud's pockets. Verlaine had given a manuscript copy of it to Rimbaud in May 1872. It provides a rare insight into the relationship between the two lovers:

Je suis élu, je suis damné!
Un grand souffle inconnu m'entoure.
Ô terreur! Parce, Domine!

Quel ange dur ainsi me bourre
Entre les épaules tandis
Que je m'envole au paradis?

Fièvre adorablement maligne,
Bon délire, benoît effroi!
Je suis martyr et je suis roi,
Faucon je plane et je meurs cygne!

Toi, le Jaloux qui m'as fait signe,
[...*] me voici; voici tout moi!
Vers toi je rampe encore indigne!
- Monte sur mes reins, et trépigne!

* début du vers perdu.

I am saved, I am lost!
Mysteriously tempest-tossed!
Oh Terror! Spare me, Oh Lord!

What cruel Angel has gored
Me in the back just as I
Off to Heaven would fly?

Pleasing delirium, cunning fever,
I am martyred, I am Caesar.
Soaring like the falcon I fly,
Singing my swan-song I die!

You beckon, you the Green-Eyed,
Here I am, here all of me!
I crawl to you, though unworthy!
Mount on my back and ride!

(translation by Drewey Wayne Gunn in Ardennian Boy, William Maltese and Wayne Gunn, MLR Press, 2007: an astonishing erotica based on the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud, closely following their lives)

So what is Rimbaud's best edition of his Œuvres complètes? Any idea?

2009.03.29

New York, Iran, Keynes, Rimbaud

People mistakenly think it's OK and easy to be gay in New York, said Andrew Velez of the Queer Justice League at a protest outside Major Bloomberg's Upper East Side residence a Saturday last month, as reported by New York Blade. Gay men have recently been arrested in Manhattan video stores. At least 30 'false arrests' have occurred in 2008 in six porn stores. Young attractive undercover police officers would agree to consensual sex outside the premises with older men in the stores. On their way out they would offer them money, then arrest them for prostitution... One case is being investigated by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. Paul Schindler writes in the Op-Ed pages of Gay City News (Stop the Arrests):

The accounts given by several of those arrested; the ages of the men and the fact that some of them were tourists staying in expensive Manhattan hotels; and the relationship of those arrests to enforcement actions, under the nuisance abatement statute, aimed at closing the video establishments make clear what is going on.

Doug Ireland wrote a long and very interesting article in the a previous issue of Gay City News on an upcoming book by Janet Afary, a leading Iranian scholar in exile (Iran's Hidden History). Sexual Politics in Modern Iran is to be published at the end of March by Cambridge University Press. In her book Janet Afary 'details both the long history of homosexuality in that nation and the origins of the campaign to erase its traces.' Almost two years after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous tirade at Columbia University, 'In Iran, we don't have homosexuals,' it is a refreshing perspective.

In these uncertain times I am embarking on a long journey: the three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes by Robert Skidelsky. Published between 1983 and 2000, this still unsurpassed account of the life of the great economist who lived through the Great Depression was the first to take into consideration his homosexuality. Skidelsky published an abridged one-volume version of his book in 2005: John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (Penguin, 2005, 1056p). In the introduction he writes:

No one who has read Keynes's correspondence with Lytton Strachey or Duncan Grant can doubt that homosexuality for him was not just a sexual preference, but part of the 'good life' as he then defined it; and while no one would want to argue that knowledge of Keynes's sexual and emotional leanings gives one a better understanding of his economic theory, there are interesting connections to be made between his economic outlook and what Schumpeter calls his 'childless vision.'

Barely arrived in Paris I rushed to buy the new edition of Rimbaud's Complete Works in the Pléiade collection, still hot from the presses. The volume, edited by André Guyaux, is divided in two parts: Oeuvres et lettres (1868-1875) provides, in chronological order all poetry, including the full text of various known versions of some poems (not only variants), as well as his correspondence for the period. Vie et documents (1854-1891), the second section, includes, along with a biographical summary, Rimbaud's correspondence from 1877, as well as other documents contributing to a better understanding of his life (the files from the Brussels Affair, excerpts from Vitalie's letters and journal during her trip to London with her mother to join Rimbaud in the summer of 1874, etc). I haven't had time to dig into the book yet in order to provide a meaningful review. I am surprised that, in his Préface, Guyaux does not directly address Rimbaud's sexual attraction to men... I will come back to it in the coming weeks.

2009.03.01

Edmund White's Rimbaud

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (New York, Atlas & Co., 2008, 256 pp.) by Edmund White could have been a good book. It is, the more so, a disappointment... It's a 'digest version' of Rimbaud's life, as Richard Hell rightly puts it in the New York Times Review of Books. It's best selling point is that it's a quick read... Nothing new is revealed (but this is really not the point of the life series edited by James Atlas in which the book is published). Nothing except the mention of the short satirical sketch about Bismark published under a pseudonym in a local newspaper during the winter of 1970 and recently discovered... Not a big deal...

White provides a honest account of Rimbaud's life, understating, as far as I understood, that Rimbaud's relationship with Verlaine was his unique lifelong homosexual experience. He dismisses all hints pointing to other homosexual relationships... He even seems more prudent that Rimbaud's great biographer Jean-Jacques Lefrère...

Only the first chapter - a few pages - is a bit personal. White remembers how he discovered Rimbaud when he was  sixteen, in 1954. "As an unhappy gay adolescent, stifled by boredom and sexual frustration and paralyzed by self-hatred, I longed to run away to New York and make my mark as a writer; I identified completely with Rimbaud's desires to be free, to be published, to be sexual, to go to Paris."

Edmund White could have written a strongly personal book. Instead we are left with a dry, if politically correct, volume...

2008.10.19

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...

***

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...

***

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