Free The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud by Henry Miller Page B

having nothing to look forward to except the jaws of death, deserted by all but the sister who loved him, there is nothing to do but to scream for mercy. His soul has been vanquished, it can but surrender. Long ago he had written:
“Je est un autre.”
Now the problem of “making the soul monstrous in the manner of the comprachicoes” reaches solution. That other self which was the I abdicates. It had known a long, hard reign; it had withstood every siege only to fall apart finally and dissolve into nothingness.
    “I say that you must be a Seer … make yourself a Seer!” he had urged at the beginning of his career. And then suddenly it is over, his career, and he has no use for literature, not even his own. Then the trek, the desert, the burden of guilt, boredom, rage, toil—and humiliation, loneliness, pain, frustration, defeat and surrender. Out of this wilderness of conflicting emotions, out of the battlefield which he has made of his own mortal body, there blossoms in the very last hour the flower of faith. How the angels must have rejoiced! Never was there a more recalcitrant spirit than this proud Prince Arthur! Let us not overlook the fact that the poet who boasted that he had inherited his idolatry and love of sacrilege from his ancestors, the Gauls, was known in school as “the dirty little bigot.” It was a sobriquet which he acknowledged with pride. Always “with pride.” Whether it was the hoodlum in him or the bigot, the deserter or the slave-dealer, the angel or the demon, it is always with pride that he records the fact. But in the end it is the priest who shrives him who may be said to walk off with pride. To Rimbaud’s sister Isabelle he is reported to have said: “Your brother has faith, my child … He has faith, and I have never beheld such faith.”
    It is the faith of one of the most desperate souls that ever thirsted for life. It is the faith born of the last hour, the last minute—
but it is faith
. What does it matter, therefore, how long he resisted, or how defiantly and tempestuously? He was not poor in spirit, he was mighty. He fought with every last ounce of strength that was in him. And that is why his name, like Lucifer’s, will ever remain a glorious one, why he will be claimed by this side and that. Even his enemies claim him! We know how the monument which was erected to him in his native town of Charleville was decapitated by the Germans and carried off during the last war’s invasion. How memorable, how prophetic, now seem the words which he flung at his friend Delahaye when the latter referred to the indubitable superiority of the German conquerors. “The idiots! Behind their blaring trumpets and beating drums they will return to their own country to eat sausages, believing that it is all over. But wait a little. Now they are all militarized from top to toe, and for a long time they will swallow all the rubbish of glory under treacherous masters who will never let go of them … I can see from now the rule of iron and madness that will imprison all of German society. And all that merely to be crushed in the end by some coalition!”
    Yes, he may be claimed with equal justice by both sides. That is his glory, I repeat. It means that he embraced the darkness and the light. What he walked out on was the world of living death, the false world of culture and civilization. He denuded his spirit of all the artificial trappings which sustain the modern man.
“Il faut être absolument moderne!”
The
“absolument”
is important. A few sentences later he adds: “The battle of the spirit is as brutal as the battle of men; but the vision of justice is the pleasure of God alone.” The implication is that we are experiencing a false modernity: with us there is no sharp and brutal combat, no heroic struggle such as the saints of old waged. The saints were strong men, he maintains, and the hermits were artists, no longer in style now, alas! Only a man who knew the meaning of