Unacknowledged prophet
Peter Ackroyd
The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud Henry Miller With an introduction by Anthony Burgess (Quartet £7.95) Henry Miller's essential view of Arthur n Rimbaud is in some ways a familiar one: the young poet who refused to submit to the claims of the world, the young man inno-
cent combined the harshness of the With the arrogance of the infantilist
even abandoning his own poetry in order ti° remain intact'. If he was Orpheus, then he Was one who tore himself to pieces — h�Pure a spirit that its image has survived s death and even overshadows his Poetry. But the abiding interest of this book lies not in Miller's elegiac analysis of the poet's genius, but rather in his self-examination through the medium of Rimbaud. He discovered his poetry at the age of 36 when Pe was living, unknown to the world and aps oto himself, in a basement in ooklyn. For this is primarily an account f Miller's own 'season in Hell' and, with 0,101Y indirect reference to Rimbaud, .he describes the hatred of the place in which he was born, his dislike of his parents, his s°11tetnpt for school and for conventional 1113eletY, his extreme self-absorbed bookish- ness From childhood, I was in love with the sound of words, with their magic, their Power of enchantment.' then, at a relatively late sta in his wife (though not in his writing), heed isco- of,.d Rimbaud and saw in him the secrets .nis ow_ n divided and difficult nature:he writes of Rimbaud's 'audacity and timid- TY6 his obsessiveness, his morbid fears. ti ro.ughout the book this personal connec- c'n Is the most important, since Rimbaud becomes Miller's emblem; that act of collaborative understanding, springing from self-identification, is perhaps the artist's best contribution to criticism and, since it comes from so intimate an understanding, it gets closer to genuine analysis than the work of more sober or 'objective' critics. 'We see above all,' Miller writes of Rimbaud, 'that like most creative individuals he was incapable of learning from experience.' And again: 'It is curious to note . . . that it is precisely the men who deal in revelations — self- revelations — about whom there is the greatest mystery.' This is well put, and once again it is also consonant with the portrait of Miller which emerges from these pages: himself a divided spirit, dissatisfied, obsessive, a man of great pride who, while he professes to despise the 'little man', is constantly asking for his art to be accepted by the world.
It is for this reason that he is less concerned with the poetry of Rimbaud than with the personality behind it, and so this book becomes in part a meditation on the nature of the artist as 'outcast'. It is not an entirely novel view, and it is of course susceptible to the charges of naivety or sentimentality, but in Miller's account it is couched in such lyrical or at least plangent language that it still carries a certain amount of power. His other generalisa- tions, formed at that moment he turns his eyes from the spectacle of Rimbaud and himself, are not quite so interesting: as Anthony Burgess says in his introduction, Miller 'was not the brightest man who ever lived'. His discussion of atomic physics and the threat of apocalypse, for example, are now so familiar that they do not quite carry the weight of terror which Miller invests in them (although it ought to be remembered that this book was composed in 1945).
But, perhaps more importantly, Miller loses some of his sharpness when he enlarges upon the 'role' of the writer in the contemporary world. It is in this capacity that he uses Rimbaud as an emblem of spiritual life, and emphasises what seems to be the characteristic plight of many American writers: the hunger for spiritual consciousness or revelation in a world which seems to provide no room for such things. Some of his words read almost like a paraphrase of T. S. Eliot who was exercised about the same matters: 'Hell is whatever, wherever, one thinks it to be. If you believe you are in Hell, you are. And life, for the modern man, has become an eternal Hell for the simple reason that he has lost all hope of attaining Paradise.' In passages like these, The Time of the Assas- sins ceases to be a work of biographical criticism and becomes almost a spiritual tract: 'One thing is certain, God does not want us to come to Him in innocence . . . It is our privilege to elect for God with eyes wide-open, with hearts brimming over, with a desire that outweighs all desires.'
But the problem is that, in the absence of proper spiritual discipline or a coherent language of belief, the religious aspiration itself becomes diffuse or threnodic: it seems to be Miller's aim, instead, to raise literature itself into a substitute for reli- gious belief. His faith in the vatic role of the poet is therefore immense,but he asserts rather than argues the point; in the same way, when he compares Rimbaud to religious leaders — 'Is there not something just as miraculous about Rimbaud's appearance on this earth, as there was in the awakening of Gautama, or in Christ's acceptance of the Cross . . — the im- mediate response is surprise (or even derision) rather than acceptance. The deification of the poet is also, in part, a protective manoeuvre — the gesture of a man who believes that the full significance of his own work has not been accepted, that his art is one which the modern world conspires to ignore or to destroy. His fury at the 'little man', and at a world running out of control, is fuelled by the belief that his contemporaries refuse to attach that significance to literature which he feels is owed to it.
The despair which he then experiences is one which he attempts to fill with poetry, with the words which so enchanted him as a child; but they cannot properly bear the importance attached to them. And there- fore he remains perpetually dissatisfied and divided, raising up Rimbaud as a sym- bolic figure, carrying all the ills which the world had heaped upon poets. But the myth is overblown and somehow empty: Miller's grandiloquence feeds on husks and catches at shadows, as Rimbaud is lost from sight in a mist of hyperboles. As a study in that poet the book remains in- teresting, however; but as a general state- ment about the nature of art and of the artist, it aspires to a profundity which is not in the end attained.
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