He’s reading into Rimbaud
In the worlds of myth and literature, plenty of figures have had their “lost” years. Sherlock Holmes (after the plunge from Reichenbach Falls), the wizard Merlin (was he imprisoned in a cave or was he killed?), Shakespeare (what was his education and upbringing?) and Jesus (did he or didn’t he go to India as a child?) are just a few.
What did they do? How did they live? Such questions have lured many writers to try to fill in these tantalizing gaps with definitive evidence, but Jamie James resists the impulse to be conclusive as he examines a gap in the real life of 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud in “Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage” (EDM: 128 pp., $14.95 paper).
Rimbaud hardly had time to break into a sweat in his new Dutch colonial army uniform (he had signed on as a mercenary) before, late in summer 1876, he disappeared into the jungle in Java. There are no records for his activity until six months later, when he appeared again in Paris. Where did he go? Did he stay in Java? James has lived in Bali and Jakarta for more than 13 years — you couldn’t find someone else in a better position to research and formulate answers. In a recent email exchange, James talked about the challenges of writing his book.
You say that during the early days of his disappearance, Rimbaud was a fugitive. What do we know about his life at this period, and why do you think scholars haven’t examined it very closely?
Rimbaud’s first biographer, his brother-in-law, speculated hilariously that he hid in the jungle, where he was protected by kindly orangutans, who taught him how to survive the attacks of tigers and boa constrictors — never mind that the orangutan had been extinct in Java for 200 years, and the boa constrictor is a New World species. In the early 20th century, when Rimbaud’s reputation as the enfant terrible of modern literature emerged, scholars devoted endless ingenuity to attempts to establish his exact itinerary in Java, grasping at the wispiest of straws. Modern academics have dealt with the episode rather briskly, partly because the documentary evidence is so thin, and partly, I think, because even well-educated Westerners know so little about this part of the world.
You must have felt that you had an edge over other scholars because you’ve lived in Bali for so many years.
Unless you know a place, it’s impossible to write even the barest facts without succumbing to cliché and cultural prejudice. That doesn’t mean that I can say with any degree of confidence what Rimbaud might have done when he was here, but I do have a reasonably secure knowledge of what he would have seen and some sense of how he might have been received. One of the great mysteries of Rimbaud’s Java adventure was how he ever could have gone underground. A blue-eyed, fair-haired 21year-old Frenchman would have been an object of wonderment everywhere he went in Java. You started this book as a novel. Why did it change? Why did imagining this time in Rimbaud’s life seem better suited for nonfiction speculation than as fiction?
One thing I learned from writing this book was that I really don’t approve of novels that reanimate famous people of the past, particularly writers and artists.
There are great exceptions, of course, but most historical fiction about artists sinks to the titillating sentimentality of “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” with Michelangelo as a blustering Ayn Rand hero. It’s particularly difficult in the case of Rimbaud, because his main quality was his utter unpredictability. He was always surprising his best friends, people who had known him all their lives. The Java adventure amazed them — they wrote letters back and forth among themselves speculating about what he had done and why. What finally stymied me was writing dialogue for him. It seemed like such an act of hubris to put words in the mouth of Arthur Rimbaud. It was like writing dialogue for Bob Dylan: I kept feeling I was in danger of being tragically unhip. Java, as you describe it in your book, was an extraordinary place for the traveler. Rimbaud would have seen a landscape dotted with old Hindu temples even though, as you write, it was “a predominantly Muslim land.” Why would such an amazing experience have never seeped into his writing somehow— or did it? Were you able to find any clues in the poetry?
Actually, you touch upon the greatest Rimbaud mystery of all. Somewhere right around the time of his Java adventure, most likely before it, Rimbaud stopped writing poetry. He was just 21. But what does it mean, to stop writing? Does a writer in a dry spell stop being a writer, even if the drought lasts the rest of his life? All we know is that he never again gave a poem to anyone to read, not that we know about. He might have written hundreds of pages of poetry that he burned. It is entirely possible that the lost journals of his voyage to the tropics may turn up someday in a moldering old trunk in a country house in Java. But the basic law of literary scholarship is: You have to go with what you’ve got.