Gaya Scienza

Of Insdispensible things...

Peter Parker is, also, very positive in his review of Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, concluding: 'Beautifully written, ambitious in its scope and structure, confident in its execution, The Stranger's Child is a masterclass in the art of the novel.' (TLS, July 1) While The Band of Thebes writes: 'I've read the Hollinghurst, to be released here in October, and while you'll want to too, it is not so magnificent that you need to import it immediately from the UK.'

And Edmund White contrasts Verlaine’s with Rimbaud's recent translations: Poems Under Saturn (Poème saturniens, translated by Karl Kirchwey, Princeton University Press) from the former, Illuminations (translated by John Ashbery, Norton) from the latter, in the July 22 edition of the TLS. Of Illuminations, he writes: 'No one is better suited to translating this poetry than John Ashbery.' He concludes by using the words 'deft, accurate and above all beautiful.'

Maybe the FT weekend edition is not that indispensable after all, even if Rowley Leigh’s recipe of Spelt spaghetti with prawns, in the last issue, is rather inspiring...

Donald Strachey

The Financial Times is easier to find in Miami than in my small town in Connecticut. I am - almost - enjoying reading again its Life and Arts section every Saturday since arriving here. Several weeks ago Alan Hollinghurst made it to the page 3 interview . Emily Stokes had lunch with the British author in a London vegetarian restaurant, but the conversation was boring and did not really make you want to read his last novel, The Stranger’s Child, recently published in the UK (we will get it in the US in the fall). Which, thankfully, was not the case with Jason Cowley’s review a few pages below: ‘A literary myth is unraveled in Alan Hollinghurst’s most ambitious novel.’

Ian Thomson’s incipit in his review of John Ashbery’s superb translation of Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud:

Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet, was a ferocious malcontent, who free-wheeled towards self-destruction with the help of hashish and quantities of alcohol, then renounced literature altogether for a life of vagabondage (sic) in Africa. In 1891, after (sic) a botched amputation for gangrene (sic), he came home to die in a hospital in Marseilles, aged 37.

is not a good start.

***

Richard Stevenson’s Death Trick, in addition to providing a good mystery, introduces us, step by step, to Donald Strachey. We are in Albany, NY, in 1979, backrooms are finding their way to the capital of the state, disco is king, coach is called tourist class and Donald is promiscuous... At 40, he lives in a rental on Morton and drives a Rabbit. We learn that he has a mustache and humor: ‘I went into the bathroom, showered, and shaved. I spotted a single white hair in my mustache, probe around and got a grip on it, and yanked it out. I checked my armpits, chest , and groin. No change below the neck yet. That was when you'd know it was for real.’
And also that he has been an ‘investigator for nearly fifteen years - army intelligence; the Robert Morgart Agency: four years on [his] own,’ but ‘was still learning.’ He was married for 7 years before divorcing 3 years earlier. Brigit, his ex-wife, is getting married again and her new husband is moving in with her. She needs the room where Stratchey has been keeping his books in their old house in Latham.
Timmy, with whom Donald spends the first evening in the novel asking questions in Albany's gay bars (and dancing), is his lover, but ‘we don't live together.’ They spend the first night of the novel in Timmy's apartment. We will learn later his full name, Timothy Callahan, and that he is three years younger than Strachey. They have known each other for two and a half years. Timmy is of Irish catholic ascent, 'pretty consistently repelled by the darker side of gay life. He wears Brooks Brothers suits to work for the state senate minority leader's office.’
The night before moving the books from Brigit's house Timmy and Strachey make love 'with a furious intensity that was reminiscent of the night [they] first met.' Next day Timmy helps Strachey move his books. Hugh Bigelow, Brigit's new husband, gives them a hand to load the U-Haul truck. When it is almost done Brigit and Strachey find themselves alone in the kitchen. Their way to really part:

She had not liked being a victim of my self-deception, and during the last years of our marriage, the malicious humor that was part of what has drawn us together in the first place had hardened into cruelty on both our parts. I hadn't liked being a victim of my self-deception either, and I often took it out on Brigit, who dished it right back. And now here we were, in character to the awful end.

I sipped my coffee and said, "There is an equality, a symmetry about Timmy's and my sexual relationship. It has balance. In seven years you never fucked me once."

She tightened like a fist. "Yes. And you must have fucked me twelve or fifteen times." She smiled, tight-lipped, the flesh around her lower jaw quivering.

Sex. It isn't everything in a relationship. But it's plenty.

Strachey quit smoking after meeting Timmy: ‘It had suddenly occurred to me that I want to live for a long, long time.’ If they don't live together, they share the keys to their homes. Strachey takes care of his body: in addition to removing white hairs in his mustache he exercises... When they stay home they play Scrabble... And they are still pretty much in love:

I’d always loved the sight of Timmy’s milk-white skin under the bluish glow of the streetlight outside my front window, and I was sitting there running my fingers over all the different parts of him.

Regarding his tastes, he says: 'I'd always found effeminate men unappealing, but once when I'd made a crack to Brigit about "that faggy guy over there," she'd replied, "Faggy is as faggy does." Which missed the point by a mile but still left an impression on me. I tried to become more tolerant.'

At the end of the novel, when the mystery is solved, you suddenly realize that you know very little of Strachey’s physical appearance? Unless I missed something, besides his mustache, not much is provided... He is likened to Robert Mitchum and Sean Connery by Harold Snyder, the transvestite with whom he has a wild encounter in chap 14... He/She might not be objective, though.

By then Strachey moves in with Timmy, and they plan a vacation in Key West. The second volume in the series is On the Other Hand, Death. It was published in 1984.

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

The Bronx Zoo Gorillas, Rimbaud and News from John Cromer

This year, instead of going to Cape Cod to watch the whales, we went to the Bronx Zoo. My daughters were terribly impressed by the gorillas. You know how difficult it is to impress kids these days... I must say that looking at the gorillas looking at you from the other side of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall was something. An uncomfortable mixture of human and animal features, the eyes definitively human...

***

Jean-Hugues Berrou, a photographer who co-authored in 2004 a book on Rimbaud with Jean-Jacques Lefrère and Pierre Leroy, does not think that the recently discovered photo of a group of Europeans in front of the Hôtel de l'Univers in Aden includes the famous poet. He explains his reservations in an aggressive opinion piece in Le Monde dated April 28.

C'est toujours un peu inconfortable de ne pas voir la même chose que les autres. Alors évidemment on cherche à se persuader, à retrouver le droit chemin. On va voir du côté des preuves avancées. Mais là encore, vraiment rien qui puisse me persuader. Seul pour défendre l'icône, Jean-Jacques Lefrère, un très bon biographe certes, mais pas un expert en photographies anciennes ni en anthropométrie. Le texte qu'il publie dans Histoires littéraires, revue qu'il dirige, est un glissement progressif du peut-être vers le probable, pour conclure sur des certitudes : on y verrait " avec netteté " les traits de Rimbaud adulte, alors qu'il est question au début du texte d'un visage flou.

I look forward to reading Lefrère's paper in Histoires littéraires (2010, 41, J.-J. Lefrère et J. Desse : Un coin de table à Aden) to make my own opinion. The publisher, Du Lérot Éditeur, makes the following comment on it's website: 'Dans ce numéro déjà historique, la photo de Rimbaud trentenaire qu'on trouve répandue partout sur les écrans, et qu'il est donc inutile de mettre ici, une fois de plus !'

***

Alan Simpson sent me an email with very interesting news about the forthcoming sequel of Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones, Cedilla:

I thought some info might interest you. Mars-Jones now says, according to a friend who saw him at a literary festival, that the story of John Cromer may now run to four volumes and not three!  It also seems that he has (more or less) finished writing the entire story, which doesn't explain the delay in publishing Cedilla (his publisher first told me that it was due out in early 2009, a year after Pilcrow).  It is now officially scheduled for October 2010 in the UK, and appears in his publisher Faber's catalogue with the following (clearly self-penned) blurb:
"Cedilla continues the history of John Cromer ('adventures' sounds rather too hectic) begun by Pilcrow, described by the London Review of Books as 'peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic' and by the Sunday Times as 'truly exhilarating'.
These huge and sparkling books are particularly surprising coming from a writer of previously (let's be tactful) modest productivity, who had seemed stubbornly attached to small forms. Now the alleged miniaturist has rumbled into the literary traffic in his monster truck, and seems determined to overtake Proust's cork-lined limousine while it's stopped at the lights.
John Cromer is the weakest hero in literature - unless he's one of the strongest. In Cedilla he launches himself into the wi(l)der world of mainstream education, and comes upon deeper joys, subtler setbacks. The slow unfolding of themes is perhaps closer to Indian classical music than the Western tradition - raga/saga, anyone?
This isn't an epic novel as such things are normally understood, to be sure. It contains no physical battles and the bare minimum of travel, yet surely it qualifies. None of the reviews of Pilcrow explicitly compared it to a coral reef made of a billion tiny Crunchie bars, but that was the drift of opinion. Page by page, Cedilla too provides unfailing pleasure."

2010.05.02

Eyjafjallajokull, Rimbaud's Newly Discovered Photo and Tony Duvert

If you want to learn how to pronounce the name of the Icelandic volcano that has been paralyzing air travel in, to and from Europe for the past few days, take a look at the short funny paper Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels in The New York Times. I believe it's a good investment as it seems probable that the Eyjafjallajokull will continue to create trouble for months to come...

In the meantime my daughters are stranded in Paris, unable to join me for their spring holidays, and instead of spending a few days in the Hamptons, as I had planned, I stayed, lonely, in the small town where I live, with my books as sole companions, and a gloomy weather...

Coincidentally the last issue of The New Republic features a good paper by Emily Wilson (Stoicism and Us) reviewing the new biography Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Frank McLynn, Da Capo Press, 684p). The book does not seem to be worth reading. It is "pasted together by a non-specialist freelance writer," "McLynn is no philosopher, and his account of the supposed contractions within Stoicism is unreliable and muddled." But Wilson's paper is good, despite her mentioning, dismissively, "tabloid-ish modern theories, including the idea - which has been suggested on the basis of the endearments expressed in their correspondence - that Marcus and his tutor Fronto might have been lovers." Amy Richlin, who published in 2007 a new translation of the letters of Marcus and Fronto (Marcus Aurelius in Love), is not a tabloid-ish journalist...

I am eager to put my hands on two books just published in France.

Jean-Jacques Lefrère has delivered the project he alluded to in the introduction of his masterly edition of Rimbaud's correspondance in 2007. He has now put together a thick volume of correspondance surrounding Rimbaud, between the poet's death in 1891 and 1900 (Sur Arthur Rimbaud : Correspondance posthume (1891-1900), Fayard, 1213p). The cover illustration is a newly discovered photography of Rimbaud (read Arthur Rimbaud revient, en photo in Le Monde to get more details on the discovery). It is the only known picture of Rimbaud as an adult, in addition to the fuzzy photo of an emaciated sick man, taken just prior to his death.

Cécile Guilbert, a French critic I respect, recommended during a radio show I was listening to on France Culture, a literary portrait of Tony Duvert by French novelist Gilles Sebhan, (Tony Duvert - l'enfant silencieux, Denoël, 2010, p). Duvert's story is sordid, yet fascinating. A very gifted precocious author, he won the Prix Medicis in 1973, and was a recognized literary figure in the 70s, published by the prestigious Editions de Minuit, despite the pedophiliac content of his books. I remember the shock when I discovered Journal d'un innocent in 1976. In the 80s he published only two books, and thereafter retired to a recluse life in a small village of the Loir-et-Cher where he died in 2008. His body was discovered several weeks after his death...

2010.04.18

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