Adolescent Passions, or, Things I am not so Sure About Anymore…

I picked up a book at the library the other day: A Season In Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud. I know little if nothing about Rimbaud. To be perfectly honest, I picked it up because of a line from a Gregory Corso poem (Marriage):

What a husband I’d make! Yes, I should get married!

So much to do! Like sneaking into Mr Jones’ house late at night

and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books

Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower

like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence

like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest

grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!

It’s a fabulous poem, and I recommend you go read the whole thing. Anyway, Rimbaud. I knew very little about him, and from the introduction I learned that he wrote A Season in Hell in 1873 at age 18, after going on a drug-fueled homosexual love journey that ended in violence, alcoholism, heartbreak and apparently, this essay. I’m not quite sure what to call it—essay, poem, rant, generalized adolescent freakout put onto paper. It’s really what so many people feel in their raging, hormonal hearts.

The remarkable things to me about this work are twofold: One, the raw passion of the work for the time. The 1870s in France were a time of political turmoil—the Franco-Prussian War, reflections of Eastern European communism. Somehow the inner turmoil in the work is even fierier than the world at the time. Secondly, the age at which it was written. I know I couldn’t turn out prose of that quality at age 18.  It feels like Salinger of the 1800s.

What I can’t decide is a) if I like it or not, and b) if it’s “good.” By “good,” I mean effective to its aims. I think it actually is decently effective at being a part of the throes of adolescent “passion as suffering.” I guess I’m just not sure whether or not the suffering stirs me much. Part of me is impressed, feels cathartic fierceness in his words. The pragmatic woman who’s passed through the gauntlet of the teenage years and the first bit of the 20s wants to say, “Hey. Arthur. Get over it, you silly man.” I’m not sure what to think.

Here’s the overture*, so that you can come to your own damn conclusions (which I would be keen on hearing):

“Once, if I remember right, my life was a celebration where all hearts were open and all wines flowed.

One night I saw Beauty in my lap. And I found she was bitter, and I called her names.

I found weapons to use against justice.

I ran away. Poverty, hate, you witches, my treasure was left in your care.

I managed to wither all human hope inside me. I attacked like a wild animal, and strangled every joy.

I called for executioners, I wanted to die chewing on their gum butts. I called for diseases, so I could suffocate in sand, in blood. Unhappiness was my god. I lay down in the mud, and dried off in the crime-infested air. I played the fool until I was really crazy.

And by spring I had the scary laugh of an idiot.

Now, a while ago, when I saw about to go Argh! for the last time, I thought I’d try to find the key to that lost celebration where—maybe—I could recover my appetite.

That key is Selfless Love. (—which goes tot show you I was dreaming.)

“You stay a hyena, etc….” shouts the demon who once crowned me with pretty poppies. “Go find death—use all your appetites, your egotism, and all the Seven Deadly Sins.”

Oh, I did too much of that. But Satan, please, don’t look so upset! And while we’re waiting for a few last-minute cowardices, here. You like writers with no talent at all for description or instruction, so take these pages. They’re for you I tore them out of my notebook of a lost soul.”

…mon carnet de damné…

What do you think? Deep? Pointless? Any good? Option D: Other?

*This being from the version translated by Robert Maplethorpe and published in 1986 by Bullfinch Press.