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Harold Pinter Poetry

To My Wife

I was dead and now I live
You took my hand

I blindly died
You took my hand

You watched me die
And found my life

You were my life
When I was dead

You are my life
And so I live

Harold Pinter
June 2004

A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud

The Prodigy Burned Out. Why Not Blame Mom?
By CARLIN ROMANO
DISASTER WAS MY GOD

A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud

By Bruce Duffy

360 pages. Doubleday. $27.95.
Few artists willingly give up their art. Remember Nureyev’s continuing to dance despite a damaged body that could no longer take him to the heights? Young artists who make a splash are even less likely to change course, typically seeking to climb higher, the faster the better.

So Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned his groundbreaking poetry after four spectacular years in his teens and died at 37 in 1891, still stands out, the angel and enigma of French literature. His champions, from André Breton to John Ashbery, have celebrated him as the forerunner of literary Modernism, a rebel against tepid rationalism in poetry. Yet precisely because his devotees insist on Rimbaud’s poetry as a revolutionary feat, his later disdain for it remains a puzzle and a rebuke. Why did he stop writing poetry at 20 and become an adventurer who spent a decade in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as a merchant and gun runner before his death in a Marseille hospital?

Enid Starkie, in her classic 1936 biography, attributed Rimbaud’s “maladjustment” to his supposed rape by French soldiers, a surmise rejected by Edmund White in his 2008 study. Graham Robb, in his 2000 life of the poet, dismissed aggressive guesses about Rimbaud’s thinking. Even if Rimbaud is now a hero to Beat poets, intellectual rock stars, gay activists and teenage rebels (Breton called the writer “a veritable god of puberty”), Mr. Robb argues that the scant evidence means “there are at least as many Rimbauds as there are personae in his work.”

Bruce Duffy, however, comes to the task with a novelist’s freedom. In his 1987 novel, “The World as I Found It,” he sought to capture the equally challenging figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In “Disaster Was My God,” his third novel, he takes a crack at the enduring Rimbaud mystery.

As the director Agnieszka Holland did in her nervy 1995 film, “Total Eclipse,” in which a young Leonardo DiCaprio brought Brat-Pack impudence to portraying Rimbaud, Mr. Duffy focuses on the headlines of this poet’s eventful life. Mr. Duffy, though, has the luxury of hundreds of pages of play-by-play, and it makes that life more comprehensible.

Here, as in all renditions of the story, Rimbaud, the brilliant, sneering student from Ardennes hits Paris and turns things topsy-turvy among the Parnassian poets of the time. Declaring that the poet must become a “seer” through a “derangement of all the senses,” he reinvents poetry’s mission while advancing free verse, raw diction and phantasmagoric imagery. (“A hare stopped in the clover and swinging flower bells, and said its prayer through the spider’s web to the rainbow.”)

Rimbaud’s brawling affair with his mentor, Paul Verlaine, destroys Verlaine’s bourgeois marriage and scandalizes literary Paris. The two storm off to London and Brussels, where Verlaine shoots and wounds Rimbaud and goes to prison for it. The relationship over, Rimbaud renounces literature and begins a restless post-literary life, ending up a businessman in Africa.

Mr. Duffy’s strategy is to flesh out the intense relationship biographers have established between Rimbaud and his rigid Roman Catholic mother, to elevate it to equal status with the connection to Verlaine, which dominates Ms. Holland’s film.

That approach allows Mr. Duffy to supply answers to the question, “How, in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life — unwrite it?” Mr. Duffy suggests, for one thing, that Rimbaud wanted to impress his mother, who didn’t care for all that literary rot.

When his boss in Africa inquires about his former calling, Rimbaud refuses to discuss his “inanities.” He explains: “Yes, I wrote them, I suppose, but so what? I cannot help them now. They are like children, or rather, estranged children.” He says he no longer reads “any of that creative nonsense.”

Mrs. MacDonald, an Englishwoman whom Mr. Duffy invents to accompany Rimbaud on his final journey to the hospital in Marseille, extracts more information when she first asks: “Why, ever, did you write poems, Mr. Rimbaud? A man such as yourself.” And persists: “Surely you can tell me. Purely entre nous.”

“I do not think of it — ever,” Rimbaud replies. Sounding more post- than pre-Modernist, he asks: “What do I care who might like my little monsters? These things, these mere artifacts, these youthful slops, they are not me,” adding, “there is no ‘author,’ so-called.”

As for Verlaine, he gets a blunt answer to the mystery of Rimbaud’s career change when he meets him for the last time, in Germany, 18 months after the shooting.

“Art is stupid and a lie and, above all, useless,” Rimbaud tells him. The mature Rimbaud shuns “the clever, the arty, the smug” and is “increasingly horrified by the cynicism, the selfishness and the rampant irresponsibility of writing.” Instead he has turned to “Newspapers. Technical publications. Journals of exploration,” things he considers real. (He sounds a bit like Philip Roth, who recently announced that he didn’t read fiction anymore.)

Mr. Duffy’s take on the Rimbaud mystery shapes a novel that both annoys and pleases. The author’s fondness for Americanisms — thumbnailing young Rimbaud as “a chicken-hawk’s dream,” for instance — can make it seem as if Rimbaud ran off to Times Square rather than to St.-Germain.

At the same time, Mr. Duffy’s hyperbolic prose style — not quite David Foster Wallace, but still wordy — grows on you. It’s also fun to hang around with Rimbaud and Verlaine without being stabbed or shot.

“Disaster Was My God” delivers a Rimbaud who forces literary true believers to ponder an unwelcome thought: that artistic ambition may sometimes be, as the guidance counselors say, just a phase that troubled teens — even geniuses — go through.

Carlin Romano, critic at large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and a professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College, is the author of “America the Philosophical,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.

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A Five Minute Hamlet

We could imagine a five-minute version of “Hamlet.”

Scene One: Hamlet moping at court, dressed in inky black, with a mixture of grief for his dead father and seething loathing of his bloated, boozing uncle, Claudius, who has married his seemingly virtuous mother, Gertrude.

Scene Two: Horatio, a rather close college chum on a surprise visit. The guards turn up and tell Hamlet they’ve seen his father’s perturbed spirit wandering the battlements of Elsinore Castle. Hamlet is amazed and decides to watch for the ghost that night.

Scene Three: The ghost of the father (who of course has the same name as his son) tells Hamlet that he was not bitten by some serpent, but murdered by his brother Claudius. The ghost asks for vengeance, “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest.”

Scene Four: Hamlet runs from the battlements into the chamber of his “parents” and slaughters Claudius with a rapier and dagger, but leaves his mother “to heaven,” i.e. she gets to live with the prick and sting of bad conscience over what she has done.

Scene Five: Hamlet becomes King of Denmark, defeats the invading armies of Fortinbras. He marries his childhood sweetheart, Ophelia; Laertes is the best man. Gertrude withdraws to a nunnery in England and Polonius meets a younger woman and they hatch the novel idea of founding a Danish colony in the new world.

Exeunt.

What’s wrong with this picture? And why is it that rather than being a five-minute melodrama, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play? Why, when hearing the truth from the ghost’s mouth is Hamlet neither able to speak it to anyone unambiguously nor act on it?

Philosophers, literary critics and psychoanalysts have offered diagnoses for Hamlet’s procrastination. For some, Hamlet simply cannot make up his mind: he waits, hesitates and is divided from himself in his “madness,” all the while dreaming of a redeeming, cataclysmic violence. In this view, Hamlet is a creature of endless vacillation, a cipher for the alienated, inward modern self in a world that is insubstantial and rotten: “Denmark’s a prison,” Hamlet sighs. For others, Hamlet is the great melancholic who is jealous of Claudius for realizing his own secret desire — to usurp the place of his rival in the affection of his mother.


Leif Parsons
For still others, Hamlet is not so much a bather in the black sun of depression, but rather too much in the sun of knowledge. Through the medium of the ghost, he has grasped the nature of that which is — that is, himself, his family and the corrupt political order that surrounds him. Here, Hamlet is a kind of anti-Oedipus: whereas the latter moves ragefully from ignorance to knowledge (and his insight requires the loss of his sight in an act of self-blinding), the great Dane knows the score from the get-go. But such knowledge does not lead to action. Perhaps action requires veils of illusion, and once those veils are lifted, resignation sets in.

Whatever the truth of these various interpretations — and there is much to be said for them — there seems to be a significant disconnection between thought and action in the person of Hamlet. Consider the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. After contemplating suicide as an attempted “quietus” from a “weary life,” Hamlet ponders the dread of life after death, “the undiscovered country,” and how this possibility puzzles the will and makes us endure our present sufferings rather than risk ones we do not know. He continues:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.


Thought and action seem to pull against each other, the former annulling the possibility of the latter. If, as Hamlet says elsewhere, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” then thinking seems to make things rather bad. Resolution, then, dissolves into thin air. Speaking of thin air, we might notice that when the ghost makes his second and final appearance, in a scene of almost unbearable verbal and near-physical violence, with Hamlet raging at his mother for her inconstancy, he says that, “This visitation/is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.” Hamlet confesses to being a “tardy son” who has not committed “Th’ important acting” of the ghost’s command.

The ghost, stepping between Hamlet and his mother, asks Hamlet to step between her and her fighting soul and speak. For a moment it seems as if he might— “dear mother, you are sleeping with your husband’s murderer.” But as she mumbles the word “ecstasy,” Hamlet careens into the most pathetic of adjurations, begging Gertrude not to sleep again with Claudius, laying down arms before the truth, once again. “Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,” the ghost says.

Such is the curse of self-consciousness: extraordinary insight whose companions are melancholy, alienation and paralysis.
The only way in which it appears that Hamlet can attempt to close the gap between thought and action is through the ultimate conceit — that is, through theater itself, through play. The purpose of “The Mousetrap,” the play within the play in Act III, is to produce a thing that will catch the conscience of the king. But, as Hamlet is acutely aware — and, one naively presumes, that enigma we call “Shakespeare” lurking in the wings is even more acutely aware of this — a play is nothing, at least nothing real. It is, rather, “a fiction … a dream of passion.” Theater is “all for nothing.” What are the sufferings of Hecuba, or indeed Hamlet, to us? Yet, Hamlet would seem to be suggesting that the fictional ground of theater is the only vehicle in which the truth might be presented. As A.C. Bradley said, Hamlet is the only Shakespearean character who we could think had written Shakespeare’s plays.

The trap works and the mouse-king’s conscience is caught. The dumb show reenactment of Hamlet Senior’s murder pricks the king’s conscience and he flees the theater calling for “light.” We then find Claudius alone confessing his fratricidal crime, “O, my offense is rank.” On the way to his mother’s bedroom, to which he’s been summoned, Hamlet passes Claudius kneeling in futile prayer. With Claudius genuflecting, head bowed, it is clear that now Hamlet could do it. With one swoop of his sword, thought and action would be reconciled and Hamlet’s father revenged. But at that precise moment, Hamlet begins to think and decides that this is the wrong moment to kill Claudius because he is at prayer and trying to make his amends with heaven. It is “hire and salary,” he says, “not revenge.” Hamlet then fantasizes about killing Claudius at the right moment, “When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, or in th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed.” He sheathes his sword and moves quickly to meet his mother.

Yet it is not that Hamlet cannot act. He kills Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Ophelia (in a certain fashion), and eventually Claudius, too. But the first death is inadvertent — he hears a noise from behind the arras and suddenly strikes and then insouciantly asks, “Is it the king?” having just left Claudius alive seconds earlier. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die in his stead offstage, an act of self-preservation that even impressed Freud given Hamlet’s otherwise massive inhibition. Poor Ophelia’s suicide is something like a tragic casualty of Hamlet’s unrelenting cruelty toward her — his killing of her father is the coup de grâce in her unfolding psychosis. And the intended victim, Claudius, is only murdered when Hamlet has been hit with the poisoned rapier and knows that he himself is going to die: “I am dead, Horatio,” he repeats in three variations in a little over 20 lines. The dying Laertes spills the beans about the plot with the poisoned rapiers and wine — “the king’s to blame” — and Hamlet stabs Claudius to death after just one line”s reflection, ‘The point envenomed too?/ Then venom do thy work!”

If thought kills action, then action must be thoughtless — such would appear to be Hamlet’s credo. The cost of Hamlet’s infinite self-reflexivity is incapacity of action. Such is the curse of self-consciousness, which gives us extraordinary insight into ourselves but whose companions are melancholy, alienation and paralysis. Another consequence: there is little left to Hamlet of eros. So follows the savage dissolution of Ophelia as his object of love.

Is that it? Are we left with the unanswerable ontological question: “To be, or not to be?” Or, “if philosophy could find it out,” might there not be another moral to draw from the play? A different line of thought is suggested by the deeply enigmatic speech given to the ever-trusty Horatio just before Hamlet is about to fight with Laertes in a conflict that he intuits will cost him his life.

We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.


Generations of readers have interpreted these lines in relation to a Christian idea of Providence and linked them to Hamlet’s earlier words, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends.” This might be correct, but perhaps these words can withstand another, slightly more skeptical, gloss.

Our thought here is that a possible response to the question, “To be, or not to be?” is “Let be.” But what might that mean? It is the defiance of augury, or omen, that is most interesting in the preceding passage, the refusal of any ability on our part to predict the future, to foresee the course of events. But if that is true, then the second verse might be intended slightly ironically: “What, you mean, there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow?” The point might be that if there is any providence at work, then we know nothing of it. Such knowledge is the unique attribute of the divinity of whom we mere mortals can know nothing, rough-hew him or her how we will. Knowing nothing, letting be, means for Hamlet that “the readiness is all.” Is this, then, how we might understand the knot of negations that crowd the next lines of the text? If it be now, then it is not come and if it is to come, then it is not now. The wisdom here seems close to Epicurus: when death is, I am not; when I am, death is not; therefore why worry?

Perhaps the gap between thought and action can never be bridged. And perhaps this is the lesson of Hamlet for modern philosophy and for us. But such skepticism is not a reason for either depression or the “antic disposition” of seeming madness, Hamlet’s endless oscillation between melancholia and mania. It might allow for something else, for example the rather grim humor that punctuates “Hamlet.” Think of the Dane’s endless puns and the extraordinary scene between Hamlet and the clown who also doubles as a gravedigger. Everyone knows the “Alas, poor Yorick” speech, but what is less well-known is the way in which Alexander the Great becomes the bunghole in a beer barrel. Hamlet provides the precise reasoning:

“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?”

If we are Hamlet-like creatures, divided against ourselves between thought and action, then perhaps this division can be borne by humor, indeed a rather noir comic realism.

The readiness is all, provided we can cultivate a disposition of skeptical openness that does not claim to know aught of what we truly know naught. If we can cure ourselves of our longing for some sort of god-like conspectus of what it means to be human, or the construction of ourselves as some new prosthetic God through technology, bound by the self-satisfied myth of unlimited human progress, then we might let be. This, we would insist, is why we need theater, especially tragedy— “absent thee from felicity awhile.”

In Hamlet’s final words, “The rest is silence.”