Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, the Rebel as Poet 0822314428, 9780822314455

Citation preview

RIMBAUD AND JIM MORRISON

WALLACE FOWLIE

RIMBAUD AND JIM MORRISON

Frontispiece art:

Top: Detail from Un Coin de Table by Fantin Latour, Musées Nationaux, Paris, © PHOTOR. M. N.

Bottom: Photograph of Jim Morrison © Frank Lisciandro

Other books by Wallace Fowlie Journal of Rehearsals: A Memair

Aubade: A Teacher’s Notebook Sites: A Third Memoir Memory: A Fourth Memair Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie A Reading of Proust Chargcters from Proust: Poems A Reading of Dante’s Inferno Mallarmé Rimbaud: A Critical Study André Gide: His Life and Ar! Paul Claudel Stendhal The French Critic Climate of Violence Dionysus in Paris

Age of Surrealism Clowns and Angels The Clown’s Grail (Love in Literature)

Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbeolism Translations in bilingual editions Complete Work of Rimbaud Seamarks by Saint-John Perse Sixty Poems of Scéve French Stories

Baudelaire Mid-Century French Poets Translations without the French

Two Dramas of Claudel A Poet Before the Cross by Claudel The Miser by Moliére Classical Frenck Drama (five plays)

RIMBAUD AND JIM MORRISON

WALLACE FOWLIE

© 1994 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the

United States of America on acid-free paper o

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Excerpts from Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Maorrison by Jim Morrison copyright © 1988 by Wilderness Publications are reprinted by permission

of Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts fromn The American Night

by Jim Motrison copyright © 1990 by Wilderness Publications ave reprinted by permission of Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

To Frank Lentricchig

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/rimbaudjimmorris0000fow

Contents

My Journal on the Two Rebel Artists 1

Rimbaud

35

The Myth of Childhood The Work of Rimbaud “Le Bateau Ivre” Une Saison en Enfer: The Poet’s Destiny

Interpretation: Rimbaud and Picasso Viclence: Rimbaud and Nietzsche

Les llluminarions

The Poet and the Angel Conclusion: Rimbaud in the Sorbonne

|11

Jim Morrison His Life His Death

73

After His Death Pere-Lachaise

Jim the Poet

44 Conclusions:

Masks of the Modern Antihero—Rimbaud and Jim Morrison 119

Bibliography Index

Contents

127 129

x

My Journal on the Two Rebel Artists

During the eighties and through June 1991, 1 gave in several places a talk, in various versions, on Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. This began when [ was invited by a few fraternities at Duke University (where I teach three courses on Dante, Rimbaud,

and Proust)

to speak to them

about my

interest in Jim Motrison and about his reading of Rimbaud. Then colleges

and universities invited me to rehearse my story and answer questions about it. Finally a few high schools asked me to come and “do my thing.” These were my best audiences, the most eager to hear a college teacher speak about the Doors. At one high school in Chapel Hill, North Carclina, three hundred students crowded into a large classroom.

That momning I began my talk by saying: “You probably know the

songs of Morrison better than I do. Please correct any mistakes | make. |

realize that you and college students are keeping Jim’s story alive. I have often wondered why you still listen to the Doors, who have not performed as the Doors, with Jim Morrison, since his death in 1971.

1

imagine you like the music, the poems of the songs, fim’s voice, and his rebelliousness. Perhaps also you are puzzled by the mysteriousness of his death in Paris.” As soon as 1 said that, a youngster in the last row jumped to his feet,

pointed his hand at me, and yelled out: “He’s not dead. He's in Africa.” His

schoolmates looked at me then with some suspicion. [ knew I had to hold

my owt, and said, “If that is true, it will help my talk, because Rimbaud

went to Africa.” (1 had already explained that my interest in Jim Morrison

came from his reading of Rimbaud.) I continued to speak directly to this fellow and pointed out that there was a death certificate, signed by a Paris doctor. The boy’s answer came immediately and as strong as ever: “No doctor has been found who corresponds to that signature.” This was new

to me, and I asked the student, “Where did you learn that?” “In the last

issue of Rolling Stone.” I checked that issue the next day, and he was right. In giving these talks I have learned more about my subject. Fans of Jim Morrison are everywhere, and 1 hope there will be more readers of

Rimbaud as the result of these talks and possibly of this journal, which 1 was anxious to write before the year 1991 was over. It was an anniversary year: the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jim Morrison (19431971), and the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-~1891).

In that year the French minister of culture, Jack

Lang, organized a chaine poétique, a network of poems of Rimbaud. He

sent the poem “L’Eternité” to the prime minister, Michel Rocard, with the

request that Rocard send another poem to a friend, and so on until ali 134 poems were distributed throughout the country. The French are great preservers of their cuiture. This year the poet

will be honored in many ways. From Charleville in the north, where Rimbaud

was born,

to Marseille, where he died, activities are taking

place. Many of Rimbaud’s “heirs"—Claudel, Mallarmé, André Breton,

and René Char—have written about him. Once he was considered a

séducteur of the French youth by way of his rebellious ideas, but today he is considered a modem hero, indeed the founder of modernism. According to an opinion poll published by the Globe, a new French monthly, one out of five high school students identifies with Rimbaud. The two anniversaries of 1991 brought together the names of Rim-

baud and Jim Morrison, who are the subject of this journal and of the study that follows. Rimbaud died in the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception in Marseille at the age of thirty-seven. Jim Morrison died in

Paris on July 3, 1971, in an apartment on the rue Beautreillis, at the age of

twenty-seven. It 1s said in 1991 the grave of Jim Morrison in the Cemetery of Pére-

Lachaise was the fourth most visited site in the Paris area—after VerMy Journal

2

sailles, the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower. On Wednesday, July 3, the date

of his death, a crowd of about one thousand French students and fans of

Morrison gathered outside Pére-Lachaise. The police, fearing 2 disturbance, had closed the cemetery. The fans pelted the police with beer bottles and set a car on fire after smashing it through the main gate. Twenty-one people were arrested and two police officers and one cemetery employee were slightly injured in the confrontation, which ended

early Thursday, July 4.

On many occasions | prefaced my talk by saying to the audience that

it may seem strange, even impertinent, for a French teacher to propose a

topic that involves the American rock singer Jim Morrison. [ ended my

apology by saying that the real subject of this discussion is the relationship between the French symbolist poet Rimbaud and Jim Morrison,

founder and lead singer of the Doors, the rock concerts in this country and Europe from 1966 Rimbaud was a rebel turning against those pare us for life. He turned against his family (one his case), against his teachers in the College de

and roll band that gave to 1970. forces that usually premember of his family, in Charleville, against his

priests in the parish church of Notre Dame, against the society of Charle-

ville when he was able to observe it, and finally, when he began writing

poetry at the age of fourteen or fifteen, against the way French poetry was being written in the nineteenth century. He was a rebel whom Jim Morrison admired, whom Morrison read

and studied and on whom to some extent he modeled himself. Rimbaud

in his teens had the same ambition to be a poet that Morrison had in his

twenties. Several times during the last two years of his life, Jim Morrison

said to close friends he hoped to be remembered as a poet rather than as a

rock singer.

On March 1, 1991, the film The Doors was released. [ was able to see

it on that opening night in Durham, North Carolina, thanks to two of my students who had been looking forward to it with the same expectations [ had felt. Jim Tinnemeyer and Tim Hohman were as silent as 1 was

throughout the film. Alterwards, we stopped at Pyewacket restaurant for

a snack and then began to discuss the film. I felt it might not be a success, and they agreed halfheartedly. In the talks I gave after March 1, I included remarks about the flm. 3

My Journal

In one of the opening scenes, Val Kilmer plays Jim the dreamer and poet

on the sands of a desert, first, and then on the sands of a beach, where

space and sky and ait seem infinite. There he meets Ray Manzarek and sings to him a few bars of one of his songs. The plan to work together ina

band is hinted at in this beach scene. Then, as the career of this charismatic rebel unfolds, we see Jim more and more in closed-in places: in the Whiskey Go-Go bar, in recording studios, in theaters where lines of

policemen watch him. Almost from the beginning, he foresaw and willed the loneliness of his death in a Paris bathtub.

From this film, it is hard to imagine when Jim Morrison would have had time to read Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Joseph Campbell, or when he

would have composed his poems. The name of Rimbaud is never mentioned, and yet three or four lines of Rimbaud are quoted at important

moments in the action of the film. One in particular was a favorite of the surrealists and of Jim: “The poet makes himsel{ into a visionary by a long

derangement of all the senses.” Un long déréglement de tous les sens describes and explains Jim’s activity in many of the scenes. Oliver Stone, the director of the film, also identifies himself with

Jim. Stone, a director, screenwriter, and chronicler and historian of the

sixties—that very turbulent decade—has received three Oscars for Mid-

night Express, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July. For him, the decade began in 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Stone dealt with that event in his next film, JFK. In a few interviews given a month or two before March 1991, he said

that he heard the Doors for the first time in Vietnam. The first song in

the film was “Break on Through to the Other Side ” These words would seem to have more than one meaning. “The other side” could mean

death, or possibly a life more fully experienced. In Jim’s life story, it could mean the cutting of the umbilical cord and thus the separation from the family. For Stone, that song was an anthem, like the Marseillaise. “In

Viemam,” Stone said, “we were on the edge of life and death. Jim in that

song spoke to us directly about the earth, life, death, and fear” Stone felt at that time that the Indian spirit was part of jim. Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist of the Doors, has reported that on stage during a concert from time to time Jim would rip out a yell which Ray called a possessed Indian yell.

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4

In a brief scene near the beginning of the film, we see Jim as a young boy, four or five years old, intrigued and perhaps frightened by an Indian on the side of the road, probably killed in a car accident. Jim believed the spirit of that Indian had entered his body. At critical moments in the film, the face of the Indian appears before Jim. Jim often referred to himself asa shaman when he felt himself metamorphosed into an Indian priest who

uses magic to cure the sick—magic here meaning drugs (peyote, in this

case) and tribal dancing, In performances both drugs and dancing were used by Jim when he believed he had the power to heal the depressed, the despondent, the discouraged members of his audience who came to be cured by his songs and his presence on the stage. In using the word “shaman,” Qliver Stone expressed his belief that

Jim, like every good poet, speaks to our subconscious. Jim was in touch with a higher world and always reaching for more. Two legal parties that formed after Jim'’s death, the three surviving

members of the Doors and the parents of Jim and of Pamela Courson, his

girlfriend, fought for some time over the idea of a Jim Morrison flm.

When Stone was at tast granted permission to make a film, many restrictions were imposed upon him. Pamela Courson was with Jim in Paris at

the time of his death. She inherited the writings and poems which Jim had been working on there. After Pam’s death in 1974, her parents inherited the so-called “lost writings.” They refused to allow Stone to use the poems. When he began shooting the film, he said: “If my flm is a failure, it would have been saved had ! the right to use the poems.” Jim’s

father asked that no film be made about his son. Characters and events in real life have been altered or combined in the film. No novel, no poem, no flm can be totally accurate in a biographical sense. In preparing the scenario, Stone has said that he

worked largely from transcripts of interviews. He spoke with approx-

imately twenty people who had known Jim. He talked ar length with Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore. He spent many hours listening to the albums of the Doors. For him, The Doors is the story of a young man who wants to break

all the limirts of life. When he has done that, he does not know what to do next. He strove always to become someone else. This trait is one associ-

ated with Rimbaud, who went to Alrica in order to cease being a poet and 5

My Journal

to become someone else; a trader, an engineer, perhaps. At the end of his life, Jim went to Paris in order to become exclusively a poet. Stone went 10 Vietnam to become a soldier in the infantry. At the end of the anniversary year, in November or December 1991,

the Doors planned to publish a big book, to be called The Doors Com-

plete.* In late spring Danny Sugerman, manager of the Doors and author

of two important studies on Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive and Wonderland Avenue, sent me a preview of the future book, which contains the music and lyrics of the fifty-nine songs forming the perma-

nent repertory of the Doors. Many of the lyrics are by Morrison, some are

by Robby Krieger, but all of the songs, music and lyrics both, represent work done by all four musicians in close collaboration. When Mr. Sugerman sent me the preview edition of The Doors Complete and his own book Wonderland Avenue, he telephonied me from Los Angeles at my home in Chapel Hill to speak of his interest in my studies and translation of Rimbaud and in the lectures he knew I had been giving. At that time he explained that the definitive edition of The Doors Complete would have the fifty-nine songs, followed by a large number of photographs of Jim Morrison. At the end of the telephone

conversation he asked me if I would be willing to write the preface to the book. My first reaction to this unexpected request was: “There are many

critics who can write more intelligently than I can about the music of those songs.” He replied, “We know that, but we think you know what

the poems come from, and we would like you to stress that in the preface.” I spent a large part of the summer preparing to write the preface by rereading Rimbaud, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and Joseph Campbells Hero with a Thousand Faces—books that Morrison had studied carefully. At the end of the summer [ sent Danny Sugerman a thirty-page essay, which [ called “Jim’s Place in the History of Poetry and Mythology.” I was apprehensive about the essay’s reception in Los Angeles. Two weeks went

by before Danny called to say: “I have now read your essay. The Doors have read it and four lawyers. We want to publish it and promise not to change a word. We think that Jim would have liked it. We plan to use *Unlortunately, this book was never published.

My Journal

6

your full title at Duke University in order to add a little dignity to rock

and roll.”

Danny then added one final word, “We prefer that you do not speak about the contents of the preface until the book comes out. We mean, in any of the public talks you may be giving. But it is all right for you to mention the general thesis of the preface.” By “general thesis” 1 believe Danny referred to my efforts to trace the tradition of the poet who sings

his own songs to large, enthusiastic audiences. This tradition goes back to

antiquity, to the Greek poets-who in their dithyrambic songs celebrated the death and rebirth of the god Dionysus. Dionysus, the god of wine and

orgiastic behavior, has been associated with Jim Morrison in our day and the adjective “dionysian” used by many critics in their comments on Jim’s

performances. The dithyramb has a strong beat both in the line of the poem and in the music. In the twelfth century in southern France, the Provencal poets, called

troubadours, wrote their love poems, set them to music, and sang them in the aristocratic courts of Provence.

In Dante’s time, in the late thir-

teenth and early fourteenth centuries, the Iralian poets imitated Provencal

poets and performed in several courts of northern Italy, again before

aristocratic audiences. In our time, Bob Dylan was one of the first rock singers who composed his own poems and sang them to ever-increasing popular audiences. The Doors in the late sixties performed largely before university audiences throughout our country and before youthful au-

diences in Mexico. A European tour included concerts in Frankfurt, London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Stockholm. Twenty years ago, on July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison died mysteriously

in Paris. On July 8 he was buried in the cemetery of Pére-Lachaise, which

he had visited a few days earlier in order to see the graves of people he

admired: Chopin, Balzac, Proust, Modigliani, Edith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt, and Oscar Wilde. 1 visited Jim's grave twice, in 1980 and 1982.

Both times I asked the gatekeeper if he could estimate the number of

visitors who came to his grave each year. Each time the gatekeeper replied, “We estimate that each year approximately seventeen thousand young people [rom several countries visit Morrison’s grave. Itis by far the

most visited grave in Pére-Lachaise, and theretore the most visited grave

in Europe.”

7

My Journal

To these statistics concerning Jim Moirison, [ would like to add a

story about statistics concerning Rimbaud. One of the oldest publishing houses in Paris, Le Mercure de France, in 1912 brought out the hrst

edition of his poems, called LOeuvre compléte. It was far from complete,

but it was a handsome book, with good printing on excellent paper, and

it contained a preface, destined to become famous and controversial, by Paul Claudel. For several years this edition was kept in print, always inexpensively priced. When the cost of books went up considerably, this first edition retained its original price. 1 used it when 1 first began teaching Rimbaud in Vermont, and my students at Bennington College were appreciative of the appearance of the book and its price. A few years ago ] had to call at the office of Le Mercure de France ona very minor business matter. Unexpectedly, | found myself in the ofhce of

the director, a M. Hartmann. 1 apologized for troubling him, but since I

was there, and since he appeared cordial, I told him how curious I had been about his edition of Rimbaud and asked him how he had kept the price so low for so many years. I remember that he smiled then and said: “Since you have come from quite a distance, I'll let you in on a house secret. We lived on the book for several years.” I was puzzled by that statement, and probably appeared so to the director.

“Let me put it in figures,” he said. “For twenty years we sold an average of thirty-two copies a day of the Rimbaud volume. This included,

of course, sales throughout the world, in South America, for example,

where French books have a good market.” From this the director drew a conclusion. He believed that a few young people every day somewhere in the world are discovering the poems of Rimbaud and are eager to own their own copy of the book.

1 agreed with him, and with further recent statistics 1 have been able

to collect (the Pléiade edition in Paris and a few bilingual editions like my

own), | believe it is safe to claim that Rimbaud is the most widely sold modern poet. The rock music world paid considerable attention to Rimbaud in the sixties and seventies. It is almost impossible to approach Rimbaud with impartiality. Either his work appears too difficult on first reading and is dropped by the lazy reader, or the attraction to this young rebel is so strong that readers of every age, young and old, tend to praise him and explain him in hyperMy Journal

8

bolic terms. In the heyday of surrealism, André Breton called him “the god of adolescence.” A few years later, in wartime, Albert Camus called

him “our greatest poet of revolt.” During his relatively brief life, Arthur Rimbaud moved about considerably in a geographical sense. At a time in French history (about 1870— 1890) when the French people on the whole did little traveling, Rimbaud’s journeys were at first vagabond flights that did not go far beyond

his home in Charleville. He went to Paris, to Brussels, to London. In the

space of four years, between, the ages of sixteen and rwenty, he produced the whole of his literary work. After he stopped writing poetry, before he was twenty, his life became an epic, and he literally lived the voyages he had written about as voyages of his mind and his imagination. His brilliant precociousness was foltowed by a sudden renunciation of literature. This act has been the source

of many conjectures and legends which every student of Rimbaud has tried to solve. During the last ten years of his life, 1880—1890, Rimbaud lived and

worked under bad conditions for various business firms in Africa and Asia. The last year of his life, 1891, was a period of intense physical

suffering due to a tumor on his right knee. He made an agonizing retum to France, to Marseille, where, in the Hospital of the Immaculate Concep-

tion, his leg was amputated. He died in the hospital in November, age

thirty-seven, and was burtied in Charleville, where today his grave is

visited by many of his readers from every country. Their numbers do not at all equal those of the pilgrims who visit Jim Morrison's grave in Paris.

But the pilgrimage to Charleville may last longer than the pilgrimage to Paris.

Rimbaud’s early poems, writtenn when he was fifteen and sixteen, are about his first escapes or flights from home. On the second escape, he took off for Belgium, directly north. Much of this trip was made on {oot.

Several poems were written about it. One of them he calls “Ma Boheme.” He has found a way of speaking about himself that is half ironic and half pathetic. This style he will continue to develop in the later poems. The gesture at the beginning of “Ma Boheme,” “My fists in my tom pockets” (mes poings dans mes poches crevées) is an attitude of defiance, almost of hostility. “My inn at the Big Dipper” (mon auberge a la Grande 9

My journal

Rimbaud by Delahaye

Qurse) is his way of saying that he slept under the stars. The ending of the

sonnet is a poetic-mythological touch. The lacings of his shoes he looks

upon as his lyre. He is Orpheus in the Ardennes, when, seated on the side

of the road on those fine September evenings, he rhymed and plucked like strings the lacings of his wounded shoes, one foot near his heart.

(The posture might well be that of a hippie guitarist.) [ other poems, such as “Au Cabaret-Vert,” he celebrates a real inn

which for Rimbaud in his wanderings becomes a symbol of happiness and freedom. The beer mug (la choppe) occupies an important place in these poems. The drinking of beer from a generously sized mug would seem also to symbolize

the new

happiness Rimbaud never did find.

freedom the poet is looking for, a

This introduction is part journal, part memoir. During these past few

years my memoir has become a narrative whose plot is a renewed study of

Rimbaud and the curious relationship between Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The name Jim gave his band, the Doors, comes from a line of William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything then would appear to man as it truly is, infinite.” Aldous Huxley used the line for the title of his novel The Doors of Perception, and later Jim Morrison named his band The Doors: Open and Closed. Eventually the words “open and closed” were dropped.

Blake's line could easily be a line of Rimbaud. It has helped me,

encouraged me, to unite these two figures, because it seems to mean that if our senses, our powers of perception were sharpened, we would realize that we live in two worlds simultanecusly: a world of matter—the physical universe—and a world of the spirit—a spiritual universe that is

eternal.

I had been teaching Rimbaud for some time and had always found

his language and his style sympathetic and exciting. 1 admired the

accelerations in the movement of his lines, in the energy of the poems, in

the tenstons coming from the language and the experience which the language expressed. So, when the University of Chicago Press suggested 1 attempt the translation of a complete Rimbaud, I accepted, with all the inevitable worries that accompany any such project. Rimbaud’s French is complex and exacting. By that time in my career, | had done enough translating to know that any translation is a self-incrimination. But [ was 11

My Journal

beginning to believe—this was the early sixties—that Rimbaud, in his work and in his life, was more universal than I had once thought. [ knew in advance there would be difficulties in Rimbaud’s vocabulary—words from the dialect of the Ardennes region in northern France,

words often based on German words. But especially I knew of the many startlingly beautiful but mysterious lines in Les [lluminations. This part of Rimbaud’s work had already been translated by an excellent translator, Louise Varése, the American wife of the French composer Edgar Varése. They lived on Sullivan Street, in the Village in New York. 1 wrote to Mrs. Varése about my undertaking and asked if 1 might consult her about words and phrases (approximately twenty in all) that were giving me

trouble. She graciously set a date for my visit. When I showed her my list,

she turned to a notebook and showed me the same list of words thar had puzzled her.

I then said to Mrs. Varése, “You have a French husband, who was a

friend of Apollinaire. Couldn’t he help you with those words?” “No, he doesn’t understand thém.” She and 1 talked about the words and guessed possible meanings from their contexts. It was a delightful, if discouraging, wvisit I still remember vividly.

At that time, Etiemble, because of his gigantic thesis “Mythe de

Rimbaud,” was the leading authority on Rimbaud. | had met him once in

Chicago and twice in Paris and felt [ could write to him for help with my list of words. T explained in my letter what I was doing and asked if I might send him a list of words and phrases whose meaning eluded me. His answer came immediately: “No, I cannot help you. | am rereading

Rimbaud and have decided that I don’t understand a single sentence he wrote.” This, of course, was gross exaggeration. He wanted no more discussions about Rimbaud.

Despite these serious warnings, I began to translate, Two years later I

was fmishing the work in Nice, during the winter of 1965-66.

I had

joined the faculty at Duke in 1964, with the understanding that [ would have a semester free in 1966 to complete my translation. I was preparing my typescript for the printer—and was still uncertain of my translation of about eight phrases. I knew that a book dealer and collector of manuscripts, letters, and especially pictures of Rimbaud lived in Nice. My Journal

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Rimbaud by Picasso

Collection of the author

Henri Matarasso had in fact in 1962 published a biography, Vie d'Arthur Rimbaud, a well-documented book for that time. [ wrote to him from the Hétel Atlantic where 1 was working and asked permission to meet him

and discuss certain words of the poet [ was translating before sending the manuscript to the publisher. Two days later ! received a card from him:

“Heureux de vous aider. Venez mercredi a deux heures.”

On opening his door that Wednesday at two, Matarasso said, before shaking hands and saying hello, “I wish you had come yesterday, when

Picasso was here for lunch.” To myself 1 said, | would have come on Tuesday had you invited me then. Matarasso explained, as he pulled me inside the house, “On Picasso’s

arrival yesterday, [ asked him if he would do a sketch of Rimbaud for my collection.” (It seemed that Picasso was the only major painter of the day who had not done a portrait of Rimbaud.) Picasso had answered, “Yes, of course, give me a photograph.” Matarasso gave him a small photograph of

Rimbaud at sixteen. Picasso held the photograph in his left hand and with his right tacked a piece of white paper on the wall. In two minutes, 13~ My Journal

according to Matarasso, after sharpening his pencil on the right side of the sheet of paper, Picasso drew a skeich. He followed the photograph but made changes in the face. Picasso’s Rimbaud is a more vigorouslooking youth, and his hair was changed into the punk style of today. With great pride, Matarasso placed the drawing on a large table. 1 looked at it eagerly and listened to all that Matarasso said about the picture. Greed grew in me then, and 1 heard myself asking: “Do you think it would be possible for me to use this sketch on the cover of my book of translations?” With no hesitation, Henri Matarasso replied, “Yes. Picasso was good

to me. He signed the picture and gave it to me. I will have a lithograph

made for you and send it to you at Duke University with permission to

have it reproduced on the cover of your book.” Soon after my return to Durham, I received what 1 thought was a lithograph copy of Picasso’s Rimbaud. The University of Chicago Press was delighted to use it for the cover of my book. This was the first commercial use of the drawing. Later, it was reproduced on T-shirts: Picasso’s portrait covering the chest of the wearer, and at the top of the shirt the words

Go, rimMBAUD.

Some

years later, when

I moved

into a

retirement center in Chapel Hill, a gentleran from the North Carolina.

Museum of Art asked to come to my rooms to see my pictures. He kept returning to the portrait of Rimbaud and fnally said to me: “That is no lithograph. It is the original sketch.” 1 was puzzled and wrote to Mata-

rasso in Nice to ask which he had sent, the original or a copy. His answer: “The original—1I thought you would recognize it.” The story is important for the narrative [ am writing. The book came

out in 1966. lts cover bore the Picasso Rimbaud and reminded me of my labors in Nice and the generosity of Henri Matarasso. During the following three years, 1967-69, 1 received a few letiers—not more than five or six—from people 1 did not know. They were principally remarks about the translations. One of those letters, a brief one, was signed “Jim Mor-

rison.” | am ashamed to say that in 1968, when I received that note, 1 did

not recognize the name.

In class the next morning, while waiting for the last few students to take their seats, 1 casually asked: “Do you recognize the name Jim Morrison?” My students were shocked by my ignorance. “Don’t you My Journal

14

know the Doors? He’s the lead singer.” My stock dropped low that

morning in my classroom. 1 had lost favor. To recuperate and to steady

my nerves, [ held up the letter and said: “Give me a chance! Let me read this letter to you.”

Dear Wallace Fowlie,

Just wanted 1o say thanks for doing the Rimbaud translation. 1 needed it because I don’t read French that easily. . _ . [ am a rock singer and your book travels around with me. ,

The class was quietly attentive by this time, and I said to them, “There is one more sentence, a post-scriptum at the bottom of the page:” That Picasso drawing of Rimbaud on the cover is great.

After class that momming, I went to the archivist librarian at Perkins

Library at Duke and added Morrison’s letter to others [ had given to the library. There were letters [ felt might be useful to future scholars after my death: a large number from Saint-John Perse (letters of corrections and

suggestions about my translation of Amers); many letters from Anais Nin; a few from André Gide when [ was writing my dissertation on Ernest

Psichari; several letters from Jean Cocteau concerning chapters from his books [ had translated for George Braziller, the New York publisher; and a

few very precious leiters from Jacques Maritain.

Some years later, in 1980, when [ was a visiting teacher at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, a basketball player, Charlie Browne,

was taking my course. At the end of the first meeting of the course, he came up to the desk and said, “I think I may like this course. I'll take i, but on one condition.” | was a bit startled; no student had ever said that to me. But I was curious, too, and answered, “What's the condition?” “You must come to every basketball game. I'll leave a ticket for you at the ticket office, and T'll check to see if you used it.” I accepted the deal (Charlie was a good student), and [ attended all the games. 1 learned more

about basketball and enjoyed following the strategies. Charlie and a tew

of the players lived in a house close to mine. He often invited me to listen to some of his rock music records. [ had put off accepting the invitation because 1 had not been attracted to that type of music. Just before

Christmas holidays began, Charlie, one morning in class, handed me a 15

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large, florid-looking book, “This is for you, a going-away present. I want you to read it over Christmas. Then you may be more willing to listen to my records.” I looked at the book and read the title in large print on the cover: No One Here Gets Out Alive. | thought immediately to myself that Charlie was trying to tell me to get away from Holy Cross before the Jesuits hemmed me in. Then I read the subtitle and realized the book was a biography of

Jim Morrison, written by two admirers of the singer, Jerry Hopkins and

Daniel Sugerman. 1 did indeed read the book during Christmas vacation.

There are many references in that book to Morrison’s constant reading of

Rimbaud. It occurred to me then that the singer had written my Rimbaud translations. | had fortunately preserved the Christmas vacation, feeling somewhat repentant, I asked might listen to his records, and [ began hearing in the poems the influence of Rimbaud.

to me about letter. After Charlie if 1 of Morrison

From that day on, items concerning the Doors have come to my attention in a steady succession, In Paris, in 1969, the poems of Jim

Morrison appeared in two volumes in an excellent collection called 10-18. These were bilingual, the English original and the French translation: “Seigneurs et nouvelles créatures” (Lords And The New Creatures),

and “Une Priére américaine et autres écrits” (An American Prayer, pre-

ceded by the songs from the albums The Doors, Strange Days, Waiting for the Sun, The Soft Parade, Absolutely Live, and L. A. Woman.) These poems were translated by Hervé Muller, a good friend of Jim who spent time with him and helped him during the last difficult days of his life in Paris. From various newspaper articles in 1989 and 1990, we learned that Daniel Sugerman, one of the authors of the biography, was writing a film scenario about his relationship when he was fifteen with Morrison, whom he worshipped and stayed close to. The director of Platoon, Oliver Stone, expressed a desire to direct the film and help with the scenario. These were the first intimations of the making of a film about Jim Morrison.

As a part of this memoir which is both personal and historical, 1 would like, without leaving Morrison, to move to a broader picture of Rimbaud and rock music. One of Rimbaud’s strongest poems, and one Morrison especially liked, is a sonnet called “Oraison du soir” (Evening Prayer), more proMy Journal

16

vocative than the other poems written between 1870 and 1871. In theme

and vocabulary, it announces an opposition to the established order of society and the conventional language of poetry. This is certainly one

reasor {or its appeal to Jim. Moreover, it is a self-portrait of the poet. Seated at a calé table, the poet says in the opening line: “I live seated like an angel in the hands of a barber” (je vis assis tel qu'un ange aux mains d'un barbier). Traditionally a large white cloth covers a man seated in a barber shop. And traditionally an angel is painted or imagined wearing a white robe. These opening words of the sonnet are aimost a declaration of a young man scorning a life of action. The self-portrait of Rimbaud, seated at a café table, a Gambier pipe in his mouth and a beer mug in his

hand, is very much like a famous painting of Edouard Manet in the Louvre, Le Bon Bock. In the

sonnet

the

drinker

is a dreamer,

and

the dreams

zare so

numerous that the glasses of beer too become numerous. The poet tells us

that he drank thirty to forty glasses of beer and then had to go outside to

relieve himself with the consent of the 1ali heliotropes in the garden.

The last tercet of the sonnet opens with a solemn biblical line, “the

Lord of the cedar and the hyssops” (le Seigneur du cédre et des hyssopes). In this poem the Lord is invoked at the moment of urination. The scene in the Rimbaud

sonnet returns in fames Joyce's Ulysses, when Stephen

Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, after drinking several cups of tea in Bloom's

kitchen, urinate in the garden behind Bloom’s house.

I had often wondered whether Joyce was deliberately using Rimbaud’s poem in his scene. On one chance occasion [ had the opportunity of verifying this possibility with two authorities. Mary and Padraic

Colum, close friends of Joyce, came to the United States some years ago to give readings from Finnegans Wake in several American universities. I

attended one of those readings. During the reception afterwards, 1 ap-

proached Mr. and Mrs. Colum and asked them if Joyce had been familiar

with the Rimbaud sonnet. Mary Colum answered without hesitation: “He

did indeed know the poem, admired it, and used it in the passage of Ulysses.”

Years later Jim Morrison admired it, and one of his fans copied out, among other graffirt, two lines of my translation on a gravestone near Morrison’s; *] piss toward the dark skies, very high and very far./With the 17

My Journal

consent of the large heliotropes.” I saw those lines with some surprise on my first visit to Jim’s grave in Pére-Lachaise. On my second visit they had been replaced by a supplication in Italian: “Caro Jim, aiutami di trovare Rosalinda” (Dear Jim, help me find Rosalind). Already Jim was being used as intercessor in heaven.

I believe that Rimbaud uses the word “angel” for the first time in his writings in the first line of the sonnet. There he calls himself “the angel.” Later, in Une Saison en enfer, he calls himself by two titles: mage et ange.

Magus in the literal sense is “priest” and “angel,” in the Rimbaud sense, a man relieved of the strictures of morality. Rimbaud’s use of the word “angel” throughout his work after the poem of 1870 appealed to rock singers and to those young people who surrounded the musicians and whom we used to call “flower children.”

They saw in Rimbaud a man (an adolescent, really) purified of the world’s

corruption. That is the meaning of “rebel” they gave to Rimbaud anid later to Motrison.

Bob Dylan was one of the first rock singers to speak of Rimbaud in

his songs, to recommend him and to exalt him. In the first song of his album Blood on the Tracks he sings: “Relationships have all been bad,/

Mine've been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud.” Rolling Stone recently reprinted an interview with Bob Dylan by Allen Ginsberg. At the end of

some very significant questions, Ginsberg finally asked, “Do any poets turn you on?!” “Only two,” was Dylan’s answer: “Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud.”

This phenomenon of Rimbaud’s appeal to the rock music world is not easy to explain or analyze, but [ believe it will have to be assessed and explored in any future study of spirituality in today’s world. There is now a video about the Doors called Dance on Fire. 1t is a

good hlm, with clearly recorded music, some taken from concerts of the Doors. Jim is the star, singing many of his most famous songs. And there

are fine shots of the other musicians. Rimbaud is used in two recent films, one lwalian and one English,

which have been more popular in Europe than in America. Teorema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, without mentioning the name of Rimbaud, quotes

lines from the poems, especially the prose poem Déserts de 'amour. And in the Beatles’ second film, Help, one of the early episodes is an outside My Journal

18

mourttain snow scene featuring a black grand piano in the snow. The four

Beatles surround the piano. I saw the film first in Nice. When the snow

scene came on, 1 thought instantly of Rimbaud’s prose peom, Aprés le déluge, that has the line T had translated as: “Madame X installed a piano in the Alps.” 1 was startled by this scene and its obvious relationship to Rimbaud. During that vacation in Nice [ had been seeing signs of Rim-

baud everywhere and had begun to believe my mind was weakening, so I

returned the following day to watch Help a second time. When the scene came on, | realized the sound track went very low. But if one listens

carefully, onie can hear Ringo, who is seated on the piano bench, recite the

line of Rimbaud in French: “Madame X établit un piano dans les Alpes.”

My reaction as a French teacher to Ringo was: “How bad his French is!” That quotation was proof to me that the Beatles knew the literary source

of their snow scene. Rimbaud’s literary career lasted only four years. The parallels be-

tween the French poet and the American singer-poet are striking: attitudes of rebellion, the seriousness of the rebellion, the absence of a father

(Rimbaud’s father was a military man who deserted his family when Rimbaud was seven; Jim’s father was an admiral in the United States

Navy), the themes of violence and pathos in both poets.

Morrison had marveled at Rimbaud’s ending his career at nineteen

and had sensed, thanks to his constant preoccupation with death, that

the end of his own career would come not much later. He accepted the belief that the driving force behind the authentic artist is his self-isolation and even his self-immolation. Like Rimbaud, Jim rejected authority in every form. Once in Los

Angeles, in 1969, when he was led off the siage by two policemen because of outrageous behavior, they said to him backstage: “Why do you

behave that way? We like you and we wanted to hear your songs. But we can’t allow you to behave that way in Los Angeles.”

[t is reported that Jim replied with these words: “Let’s just say [ was

testing the boundaries of reality.” The two policemen probably did not realize that those words of Jim were adapted from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.

In commenting on the name of his group, Morrison once made a

remark that was almost a manifesto concerning his work: “1t'sa search, an 19

My Journal

opening of one door after another. . . . It’s a striving for metamorphosis.

It’s like a purification ritual in the alchemical sense.” These words may have been inspired by Rimbaud as well as by Blake—words from Une Saison en enfer, on poetry being the alchemy of the word (Valchimie.du verbe).

Gene Youngblood, in Los Angeles Free Press (December 1, 1967), has

brilliantly condensed his thoughts about the music: “The Doors’ music is music of outrage. It speaks of madness that dwells within us all. It is more surreal than psychedelic. . . . Morrison is an angel, an exterminating angel.” When, in 1968, I received the brief letter from Jim, 1 had no idea it

would lead me into a world | knew very little about. But my study of that

world and the discoveries I made there, which are the substance of this

writing, have helped me to realize that a culture, even a pop culture, is transferrable and translatable from country to country, from continent to continent.

With the year 1991 over, my lectures on Rimbaud and Jim Morrison are over too. The various forms of the lecture and the places where | have given it played a large part in my life for five years. The writing of these pages is both synthesis and conclusion. How did it begin? What was the genesis of these travels? That patt is totally clear in my mind. Wherever | have taught during the past sixty-two years, my schedule always included

a study of the French symbolists. It would begin with Baudelaire and

center largely on Mallarmé. A shift of emphasis began with the publica-

tion of my translation of Rimbaud, followed shortly by the letter from Morrison in 1968. Two years later my course listing at Duke called for

“French Symbolists and T. 5. Eliot.” For the flier announcing the course 1

suggested using a copy of Picasso’s Rimbaud. 1 decided to give more attention to Rimbaud that semester than 1 ever had previously. I planned to give one new lesson on “Rimbaud and Rock Music” which T had never given before. That year there were four or five graduate students in

English who had enrolled. One of them, Richard Fusco, sat at the end of the last row from which he could see the entire room (116 Old Chemistry). When the time came for the new lesson, I explained to Mr. Fusco the nervousness 1 felt about giving such a lesson and asked him if he would

My Journal

20

watch the reactions of the students and tell me afterwards whether they seemed for or against such a novelty

That morning, despite my apprehension or perhaps because of it, 1

became very much involved in the lesson and paid less attention to the

attitudes of the students. Mr. Fusco waited for me at the end. With great

seriousness, he said, “Your students always follow you closely and take careful notes, but this time, believe me, they were with you every minute.

I could tell they were exhausted at the end of the hour. Keep this lesson in

your course.” That spring was the begianing. During the fall and spring of 1989,

three or four fraternities asked me to give an informal talk on Morrison (and Rimbaud). I accepted each invitation and was helped by the questions they asked. [ was always surprised by their acquaintance with the Doors. Their girlfriends were allowed to come on those special evenings, and they seemed to know the songs as well as the boys. The hrst invitation outside of Duke came [rom the Translation Center at the University of Texas, in Dallas. Rainer Schulte was the leading spirit at that center. Five years earlier he had invited me to speak on the problems | had encountered in translating Amers (Seamarks) by

Saint-John Perse. [ had enjoyed giving that talk in Dallas and accepted the

invitation to give a second talk, which I called “Translating Rimbaud for a

Rock Singer.” Rainer was amused by the title and asked who the rock

singer was. | suggested we leave it a mystery and hope for a surprise when the time came to reveal the name. The following year, Professor Taylor Cole at Duke invited me to give a talk to his seminar. This had become for me an annual fall celebration,

to participate once a semester with a small group of students studying political problems of modern Europe. The one requirement Taylor imposed on me was to speak on some aspect of French culture. One of my earlier talks had been on sociological problems in Proust’s novel. This time [ announced as my topic “Rimbaud: Poetics, Politics, Rock.” Alfter describing very briefly Rimbaud's position in French poetry, | spoke of his relationship with the Paris Commune of 1871, and as the concluding part (which interested the students the most), I related as best I could the poet’s refationship with rock music and popular culture.

21

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When Paris surrendered to the German invaders in 1871, a revolt

was organized against the new conservative French government. It was a

revolt of workers in Paris, small artisans and shopkeepers. Two months later, on May 21, the government forces put down the revolutionary

movement (the Commune) after eight days of massacres and destructien

of the city by fires. Karl Marx, in London at that time, called the Commune a communist uprising.

Emest Delahaye, a close friend of Rimbaud in Charleville, has written that Rimbaud participated in the actual fighting of the Commune. [t is difficult to prove this, but it is certain that during the spring of 1871, an inner turmoil was going on in Rimbaud that corresponded to the political revolution of the Commune. Rimbaud was expecting a new age to begin: a new attitude toward poetry and a new political-sociological world. Of all the Rimbaud poemns directly inspired by the Commune, “Les

Mains de Jeanne-Marie” is the most successful and the most moving. In it

Rimbaud recalls the action of women from the working class who literally fought in the streets during the week of May 21-28 when they helped defend the barracks on the Place Blanche, the Place Pigalle, and the Barignolles. In earlier poems of 1870, Rimbaud had spoken out against the con-

cept of the Empire and against all “Rages de Césars.” At the time this prisoner of the Germans. Rimbaud order to show that Napoleon III oppressors of the people.

tyrants in one of his strongest poems, sonnet was written, Napoleon [Tl was a put his title in the plural, (“Césars”) in was merely a symbol designating all

Car I'Empereur est solll de ses vingt ans d'orgies!

11 s'était dit: “Je vais souffler la Liberté

Bien délicatement, ainsi qu'une bougie!” La Liberté revit.

[For the Emperor is drunk on his twenty years' orgy! He had said to himself: “T will blow out Liberty

Very softly, like a candle!”

Liberty lives again. |

Our age has often been called one of revoit. Rimbaud has given, in his literary work and in the example of his life, one of the most vibrant My Journal

22

expressions of this revolt. There was nothing unusual about his life, save

that the major events, transpiring when he was a pracricing poet, un-

folded swiftly. He is still associated with the theme of flight and poetry of

exploration. In his practice of poetry, Rimbaud laid the basis for a new opening out onto a supernatural and surreal world, an art that later will be assoctated with Claudel (the supernatural) and with René Char (the surreal.)

Between 1988 and 1991, the audiences [ spoke to about Rimbaud

and Jim Morrison were student audiences, largely of college age. Rim-

baud was not familiar to them, but Jim Morrison was. On several occa-

sions a French teacher would telephone me to ask if I would be willing to speak to the students on some aspect of French literature. I always

accepted. But then the teacher, as a warning, would express a worry: “1tis increasingly dithcult for us to urge students to attend a lecture not related to their courses. Do you by chance have a topic that might attract them?” “Yes, 1 have one: Rimbaud and Jim Morrison.” “Who is Jim Morrison?”

“Let me suggest that you hang up and ask a few students if they

would be interested in a lecture involvinJim g Morrison.”

The professor would hang up—and an hour or two later would call back: “They would be excited to hear a lecture about Jim Morrison. Please

tell me who he is.”

My mission was clear: those students would have to hear something about Rimbaud if they came to my talk. The proselytizer in me always

comes to life at such moments.

1 often had lunch with a group of

students. There would be a few French majors, but there would also be a

few fans of the Doors. I have special memories of four of these campuses.

Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, once invited me to

speak there on the subject of “writing autobiography.” [ was gratihed when a second invitation came to give my Rimbaud-Morrison talk. My talk was to be in the evening and open to all members of the community. I arrived mid-morning in order to prow! about the campus—one of the most spectacular | have seen—meet a few of the professors, and prepare myself for the exercise. On arriving [ found a telephone message for me 23

My Journal

from the hospital in town. I dialed the number and found myself talking with a psychiatrist. He explained his position as director of a clinic in the hospital for troubled teenagers, each of whom had a serious psychological problem.

“We have about twenty-five, boys and girls, who have committed thernselves for help and who will not be released until they are cured. They take classes in the morning, to keep up with their studies. We like to have in the afternoon some kind of therapy—f{or relaxation. These kids are crazy about the Doors. Would you be willing to come this afternoon, meet them, and talk with them very simply about Jim Morrison?” I promised ’d be there and entertain them as best I could. I took with me a set of pictures 1 had taken at the grave in Pére-lachaise. Those twenty-five youngsters crowded about a large table where 1 placed the pictures and books of Jim’s poetry. They talked as much as [ did. When | distributed two poems

of Rimbaud,

we read them

together. This was

done reverently when I told them Jim had read those poems. The hour passed quickly and they began to leave the room. One boy, called Joe, obviously wanted to stay after the others had left. When we

were finally alone, 1 said, “I think you wanted to talk with me.” “Yes, [ have something [ wanted to say to you. In my room at home

here in Greenville, 1 have a large picture of Jim Morrison that almost covers one whole wall.”

I told him that 1 too had a big picture of Jim on one of my walls at home. He continued his explanation: “1 was born the day that Jimn died in Paris.” I added up the years in my mind and asked him how old he was.

“Fifteen” was the answer. Joe’s story was not over. “Almost every day when | am at home, | play at least once my favorite song, ‘Light My Fire.’ ]

love that song and keep playing it when I can.” Then he looked up at me and asked, “Do you know why 1 am here?” “No, I did not ask the doctor about any of you.”

“Well, let me tell you. Sometimes when [ listen to that song, 1 can't

keep myself from going outside and starting a fire. ] am a young arsonist. Twice the fire engines had to come to put out the fire | had started.”

[ said to myself then, this boy has misundersiood the poem. “Fire”

means “love,” and moreover the poem is not by Jim, but by Robby Krieger. By singing it so often, Jim made ir his song. I was about to say all My Journal

24

that, but I caught myself and did not disillusion Joe. He was continuing to tell me more. “I know how bad this habit is. The doctors here are helping me. They teil me I have a good chance for toal recovery. I will stay until 1

am cured.” We

talked a few minutes longer, and then left the room together.

Before I left the clinic, I spoke briefly with Joe's doctor and told him about

the song—its real meaning and its author. He was very glad | had not said that to Joe. It might have upset him. He then assured me he would be able to use the information at the end of the treatment, when Joe was ready to

leave the clinic.

4

Young Joe’s was a poignant story. | remember it more clearly than I remember that evening’s lecture at Furman. Prior to the lecture, there was

a dinner at which [ talked with a few of the professors [ had met on the earlier visit. Seated beside me was a drama professor whom 1 did not

recognize. He introduced himself by saying quite simply, “They put me here beside you because 1 was once, at ucLa, Jim Morrison’s teacher in

playwriting.” My first thought was that this man should be giving the lecture and not me. I said this to him, and he graciously answered, “No,

we are all anxious to hear what you have to say tonight.”

[ asked him about Jim’s ability as a drama student. “He was not (00

gifted as an actor, but was interested in writing. When the time came for

him to choose a topic for his term paper, he asked my permission to rewrite Waiting for Godot, Beckett’s play that was talked about that year.

Jim planned to rewrite it in terms of the Civil War, changing

the cast from

Beckett's two tramps, and the master and slave, to three characters:

General Grant, General Lee, and a slave.”

[ asked him if he had kept the term paper. “No, 1 did not keep it— although it was an interesting experiment—and I have regretted ever

since that | did not file it away. Today it would be an esteemed document

for any study of Jim Morrison.”

The invitation to Clemson University in South Carolina scheduled

my talk on the late afternoon of my seventy-ninth birthday in 1987. [ had two friends on the faculty whom 1 visited the evening before. Tt was

evident to me from our conversation that they were worried about the

size of the audience. How many students would come? All of the students 25

My Journal

turned out for a football game. For other events students would attend if 2 few of the football players attended. My friends were pessirnistic. The name Rimbaud would not attract them, and it was not known if they were fans of the Doors. Moreover, a Spanish play was being performed that evening. The schedule was too crowded. 1 did my best to pacify my friends by assuring them that if only a few students tumed up, 1 would enjoy talking to them—and talking with them about my subject. [ had a light lunch alone, rested for an hour in my room, and then went to the hall at about four o'clock. The lecture was to be at four-thirty. I like to become acquainted with the room or the hall where 1 am to speak. It is helpful for me to know the proportions of the room, the number of seats, the number of rows, the lectern—is it strong enough for nie to hold on to, is the lighting strong enough but not too strong? These

talks have become for me the epilogue to my acting efforts at Bennington and elsewhere. | had felt that this lecture, which might well be my last, was appropriately about a very successful American performer: Jim Morrison. The students knew this better than their teachers and parents.

A few students began coming in at about 4:10. For the next ten

minutes a fairly large number of stragglers entered cautiously, quizzically. If they looked at me—1 was seated alone at the end of the first row—I

would greet them and thank them for coming. This surprised them and may have caused them to doubt my validity. But they stayed. Then, at 4:25 on the dot, a large number

of students, about hfteen, came in

together—large fellows obviously from the foothall team. They sat down

in my row and in the row behind me. Those closest to me spoke. “Are you

giving the talk on Morrison?” [ said, “Yes, and I'm glad you have filled up these front rows. Some of

your professors were afraid not many students would come today.” One of the athletes said then: “They'll come now that we are here,

Look. They're pouring in.” Another, sitting behind me, added some information. “We're all fans

of the Doors. We love those songs and we've read a good deal about Jim Morrison. But I must say we didn'’t think that a French professor from Duke would know any more than we do. And who is this other guy in

your title?”

By this time, the hall was filled, and the dean who was to introduce

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26

me, appeared and performed his duty. Thanks to those two front rows, | felt very much at ease. What they had said to me before the lecture helped me to state, even plead my case. “I realize you know the songs of Jim Morrison better than I do, and you are interested in his career and his death. But you may not know anything about Rimbaud and the influence

of the French poet on Jim. I am glad to have the chance to add to your

knowledge about a great singer-poet.”

By that time the notebooks appeared and were placed on the righthand side of their half-desks. Each of the football players had his notebook opened and his pencil poised. It was like a class meeting. This was something new in my peregrinations. I soon noticed that the notes they

took were on my remarks about Rimbaud. Jim's story was familiar to

them; my attitude toward Jim was similar Rimbaud, and they accepted all the points rebel. “The Hero as Rebel” was the title of young men had grown up with the songs in tried to explain that Rimbaud had played

to theirs. The mystery was that made Rimbaud into a my talk at Clemson. Those the repertory of the Doors. | a similar role in my life, as

inspirer, comforter, and revealer.

By this time in my own wanderings (escapes?), my talk was fast becoming a mix of poetry, music, mythology, parental misunderstanding, hlial unrest, ambition, success scomed, success hoped for. Bur such a

medley of themes was not too unlike the themes of their daily conversations after class, during lunch, or in the locker room.

The questions following the talk were first about the grave and Jim's death. I exhibited the pictures [ had used in the Greenville clinic. Was he really dead? The name of the Paris cemetery puzzled one fellow. He hnally asked, “Why s it called “Father the Chair?” I had then to play the pedant and gave him the origin, the name of the French Jesuit, Frangois d'Aix de la Chaise,

after whom

the cemetery is named.

“But why

choose

that

priest?” My weak answer to that question (I hoped it was not 1o

inaccurate): “He was famous in the seventeenth century as Louis XIV’s

confessor.” A few of those Clemson football players had read very carefully Morrison’s biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. One of them wanted to know if the graves near Jim's were graves of really famous people. “1

recognized a few names,” he said, “Chopin and Proust, but not many 27

My Journal

others.” | answered that they were all celebrities. Between us we wereable

to recite most of the names: the writers Balzac, Colette, and Oscar Wilde; an actress and a dancer, Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan; two

composers, Chopin and Bizet; and three painters, Delacroix, Ingres, and

Modigliant. The student’s last question was: “Do they still have those signs

between the entrance and Jim’s grave, with arrows on them saying, “Jim straight ahead?” 1 reported that the signs seem to have disappeared, but the name “}Jim” is on several tombstones, with a small arrow pointing in

the right direction.

In November 1990, two professors in Washington, D.C., one a French prolessor, Jack Frey, whose work on Hugo I knew, and one a

teacher of linguistics, Peter Morris, invited me to spend a few days in

Washington, meet with classes at George Washington University, and give the Rimbaud-Morrison lecture to students of George Washington

and Georgetown. In the English classes I visited in the morning, the students asked me about my memories of T. S. Eliot and Henry Miller! The jump back and forth between those strong personalities was something of a trial. The students laughed, but kept on with their questions—

gossipy questions which [ tried to convert into more literary thoughts. Biography is still very strong in literature classes. The teachers of these classes had been trained to ignore biography Today they are being pummelled by their students, who are starved for knowledge of a writer’s life and character and habits. The books a writer has read are not as important for students as his love life, or its absence.

As these classes went on, [ promised to reveal this or that fact on the

condition that they promise to attend my afternoon talk. They proclaimed glibly: “We've all decided to go to that talk, so don't worry. . . . But why didn’t T. S. Eliot become a Roman Catholic rather than an AngloCatholic?”

At the afternoon session [ was glad to recognize some of the morning students—especially those who had asked embarrassing questions. They were sitting in the front row and grinning as they said to me, before 1 began the talk, “Will there be some good revelations in this lecture?” “No,” T replied. “It will be about geographical wandering of two My Journal

28

.

poets, about poems and music, and about old myths that poets reincar-

nate.”

When the talk began, all jokes were put aside and good attention was

paid to my efforts to interest the audience made up of students from two

universities. When the time for questions came, I had something of a

surprise. They focused not on Jim Morrison, but on Rimbaud, and not at

all on Rimbaud the rebel. The students were puzzled by the achievements of so young a poet. “What sort of an education did Rimbaud have?” “How was a guy of

sixteen and seventeen able to write the way he did?”

These questions turned me into a defender of the French educational system. Even at the Collége de Charleville, Rimbaud had a decidedly

classical education based upon a study each year of Latin and Latin

literature. He began his career of writer as a high school pupil (lycéen)

writing poetry in Latin. The first thirty pages in the Pléiade edition of the complete works of Rimbaud are his Latin poems, for which he won

several awards. As judged today by latinists, his Latin is good. He followed the rules of Latin prosody, and the themes he used were lyric themes and subjects related to history. Rimbaud was what the French call an externe libre, a pupil who lives at home and attends the classes at the collége. His compositions were probably done at home, and were written with keen interest and excitement. One of the longest poems in Latin is called “Jugurtha,” alter the Numidian king in North Africa, near Carthage, who fought the Romans

in the first century 8.c. With a fine sense of history, Rimbaud established a parallel between the ancient Jugurtha and his descendant Abd-ekKader, the Arab emir of the nineteenth century whe tought the French

and who at the end became

their friend. This is the subject ot the

colonization of Algeria. The students urged me to move closer to Rimbaud as a French poet. The transition was not hard to make. It appears, 1 told them, that Rimbaud began writing poems in French at fourteen and fifteen. But he

already had a background in his study of French poetry and poetics, and

a fairly good knowledge of history. Precociousness in any poet is hard to

explain. Classroom readings and readings done outside of school help to

explain the sophistication of his allusions, of his vocabulary, of his strong 29

My journal

metaphors. The study and the writing of poetry were his life during his teenage years. In the English tradition, the example of John Keats always comes to mind. He died at the age of twenty-six (although he wrote for more years than Rimbaud did). Even so, the richness of his allusions and his erudition are spectacular.

A few of the students at George Washington had read Rimbaud, and 1

deliberately pointed out words and phrases that Rimbaud had taken from

James Fenimore Cooper and Jules Verne. Rimbaud’s close reading of

Baudelaire was an education in itself for a beginning poet. It did me good to review with those students what is known of Rimbaud’s readings, of

his scholarly attainments, and of the excitement he felt about the poets he

studied in class and outside of class.

Four months later, in March 1991, 1 gave the talk again, this time in home territory at Duke University. In early January 1 was to begin my course on Dante. 1 had been preparing the course, revising some of the lessons, and preparing a few

new ones, especially one on Florence in Dante’s Time and Florence

Today. | had enrolled 140 students, seventy in each of two sections. A Duke police officer had driven me to the campus. In the familiar class-

room, 116 Old Chemistry, I had put an outline of the first lesson on the board and sat down at the front table to look over my notes. it was an hour before the students were to arrive.

Strange feelings I had that January moming became stronger. |

imagined they came

from tension,

from the excitement

over the first

meeting with two classes, from worry that this first meeting was not well enough prepared and might not reach the students as 1 hoped it would. Then the feelings took me over. [ knew instinctively what it was—

something 1 had never experienced before: a stroke. 1 put my hands on the table. Their ruddiness was white. Then all my body turned cold. No warmth was in it. What was happening to my blood? I stayed quiet with the thought this may be death. The spirit seemed to be leaving my body. I worried about the shock this might give the students. Perhaps the premedical students might help me. I had to make an effort to get out of the

rOOom.

The next thought helped me over this small crisis. “A stroke?” What My Journal

30

is the French for “a stroke?” The word came 10 me in the context of a scene in Proust which I had discussed several times with different classes

in this very classroom. Une attaque. Proust, in Le Cété de Guermantes,

called it une petite attaque, “a mild stroke.” Marcel was in the Champs Elysées with his grandmother. They were walking together on the advice

of Dr. Boulben, who had told her to go out as much as possible. When

they were close to the public toilets, she suddenly left her grandson and

entered the pavillon. She stayed there a very long time. When she came

out, she gripped Marcel’s hand. She knew there was no need to hide from

him what he had guessed: she had had a slight stroke (elle venait d'avoir une petite atiaque). The scene is brief, humorous (because of the marquise, who is in charge of le petit pavillon ancien), and sad because it is a first warning, a

first sign of the grandmother’s death, soon to come. But it is uppermost a scene of the love between the boy and his grandmother. Proust makes this love the most poignant and the most noble of all the loves described

in his novel,

As a result of my own insignificant petite attaque, 1 withdrew from teaching the Dante course that spring semester. I felt fully recovered from

the scare and the physical effect in a2 week’s time. But it was too late to

return to the classroom. Michael Mezzatesta, director of the Duke Art

Museum, suggested [ give my Rimbaud-Morrison talk in the north gallery of the museum—partly to demonstrate that | was still able to function.

We settled on Wednesday, March 20, at 7:30 .M. The poster he used 1o

announce it, in addition to the title “The Rebel as Artist,” added a few

words indicating that I would make reference to Oliver Stone’s new film, The Doors.

| prepared a drastic revision of the lecture in order to bring the story

of Jim Morrison up to date by giving some of my impressions of the film.

Many of the students who might attend the lecture would have seen it and would expect some comments on it. It would be for me a return to Duke after two months’ absence. On March 13, a week before the date of the lecture, I received in the

same mail two

threatening letters. The writers, anonymous,

who

ob-

viously knew one another, wrote approximately the same letter. “We just wanted to say that we intend 10 come to your lecture in the museum. It 31

My Journal

you dare to say anything good about that filthy film, we will pelt you with tomatoes and eggs.” My first thought was: How can [ prevent the north gallery from being messed up? 1 worried more about the museum than about myself. A few students had called to ask if I needed a ride to the museum that night.

After telling them a police car would pick me up, [ asked them to be on the lookout for two roughnecks who might cause a disturbance. “Don't worry, sir, we'll jump on them and get them out of the room before they

have a chance to do any damage.” [ arrived at the museum an hour early in order to check the seats, the lectern, and the lighting. A guard was there, who let me in. I told him

about the letters, and he said, “Nothing will happen, I am sure. There are always cranks for every occasion. But I will $tand in front of the audience, a lirtle distance from your left, and [ will spot any trouble at once.” With those words I forgot about all possible embarrassment and put my mind on the opening words of my talk. Michael Mezzatesta allowed me to wait in his office until it was time for the lecture. “It’s a big crowd,” he said, “about four hundred students and older friends in the university. Shall we go in?”

I walked up the right-hand side. Frank Lentricchia, whom I have

known since 1964 when he was a graduate student at Duke, held out his hand. We shook hands, and that made me eager to get on with my talk. My Dante students were there as well as old friends at Duke whom | had

known since my first year there.

[ had timed the new version of my talk to exactly fifty minutes. Throughout those fifty minutes, 1 was plagued with the desire to interrupt the ordered notes on the lectern before me and add an anecdote, an illustration, a further comment. This had never happened to me before. In the back of my mind was the conviction that this would be the last talk. How might I work in thoughts and stories | had deleted? I might never

have the chance again to speak about them. [ would never again have such a warm audience that would allow me to speak five, ten minutes long thaner usual. One story in particular from the Rimbaud lore tempted me because had never brought it up in class or outside of class. Much more than a

story, it was a moving testimonial from an older poet to a younger one. My Journal

32

Rimbaud probably never knew who Mallarmé was. He had cut himself off

from all literary activity and all literary circles at a time when Mallarmé was finally being acknowledged as the major poet of the day. And yet there had been one meeting, one occasion when Mallarmé and Rimbaud were in the same room. Not together, it is true. Rimbaud

paid little attention to what was going on in the room. But Mallarmé

observed carefully the young poet from Charleville. Twenty-five years later he remembered his observations and wrote about them in a letter. It is an assessment, a disguised homage to Rimbaud that has not been surpassed by the critics who Tollowed Mallarmé. This unique meeting took place on Saturday, June 1, 1872, at 6:30 p.M. in the Hotel Camoéns on the rue Cassette in the Montparmasse

quarter of Paris. It was the monthly dinner for the Paris poets, called “les Vilains Bonshommes,” Verlaine had probably insisted that Mallarmé be invited, and Verlaine brought with him young Rimbaud.

The Chap Book, a magazine published in Chicago, appeared also in French. Harrison Rhodes, the adjunct director who may have attended

some of the Tuesday evenings at Mallarmé’s apartment on the rue de

Rome, had requested from Mallarmé an article on Rimbaud. This article did appear in the issue of April 15, 1896. It is reproduced in the Pléiade

edition of Mallarmé in the group of prose pieces: Médaillons et Portraits.

Mallarmé refers to the three bodies of Rimbaud's work: Une Saison en enfer, Les [luminations, and the poems. Rimbaud had for the older poet the brilliance of a meteor (éclat d’'un météore). It was the beaury of a light, soon extinguished. Yet the personality of this boy who passed by so quickly still remains; ce passant considérable. Then Mallarmé, as if speaking directly to Harrison Rhodes, said: 1

did not know him, but [ saw him once, at one of the literary banquets. He

was tall, strong looking, almost an athlete, the oval face of an exiled angel, unruly light brown hair, pale blue eyes, large hands of a peasant that had written beautiful unpublished poems.” After mentioning four poems of Rimbaud, Mallarmé says that Rim-

baud in 1872 at the age of seventeen was on his fourth visit to Paris. Much

of the article is a briel biography of Rimbaud: Charlevilie, the poet’s

mother, the collégien, winner of prizes in rhetoric, the story of Verlaine, the room on the rue de Buci where Rimbaud appeared naked at the 33

My Journal

window as he threw his clothes into the street. “At last Rimbaud appeared

as a mythological god.” After a brief survey of Rimbaud’s life, Mallarmé

speaks of his death in Marseille in 1891 and his burial in Charleville.

Mallarmé does not agree with those readers of Rimbaud who had always hoped that the poet would return to his writing career. Rimbaud’s was a unique adventure in the history of art. Too precociously touched by literary ambition, before reaching manhood, he had exhausted a stormy fate and was blocked off from any possible future. The last sentences are a meditation on Rimbaud's destiny, which Mallarmé sees as that of a vagabond. A wall and the curtain of a hospital symbolized Rimbaud’s silence. The entire career was noble, carried out with no compromise: the career of an anarchist. These pages of Mallarmé, written in April 1896, five years after Rimbaud’s death, are the most penetrating and the loftiest of all such tributes to the man who walked from city 1o city, from country to country,

in search of an absolute or a happiness which he never found. Ce passant considérable, this notable passer-by. This same phrase might well be applied to Jim Morrison, a latter-day admirer of Rimbaud, who set off on his poetic quest in the 1960s and who discovered that his own happiness was as elusive as Rimbauds.

My Journal

34

Rimbaud

The Myth of Childhood If poetry often preserves reflections and memories of a childhood halt lost

or transposed, the poetry ol Arthur Rimbaud is childhood itself. The first poems of Rimbaud are his last and the only ones he wrote. Between his birth on October 20, 1854 and

the last graduation

ceremony he attended at the Collége de Charleville on August 6, 1870, his childhood and early adolescence formed a single unified period of fifteen years. Between the sixth of August, when Rimbaud walked off

with all the prizes at graduation, and July 10, 1873, date of the revolver shot fired by Verlaine, Rimbaud led his life of a poet. This second period of three years of literary life would not have been what it was without Rimbaud’s particular adventures in childhood.

A fulfillment in his life followed the Brussels drama when Rimbaud

wrote his farewell to literature, Une Saison en enfer, and then, at the age of

nineteen, he began the third period of his life as traveler, adventurer, merchant, and trader, which ended with his death on November 10, 1891.

The first childhood, which is the subject of his finest poems, was spent without love or affection. Later in his life, two persons were to have particular importance for him, Georges Izambard and Paul Verlaine. Only one person, his mother, inhabited with him his childs world. Mme Rimbaud, a woman of limited intelligence and great pride, closed her son off from the universe and isolated him in his feelings of rebellion. Rather than finding in his mother comprehension

and love, young Arthur

encountered constant reprimand and hardness. His father, an army captain, disappeared soon after the boy’s birth. The child must have felt guilty in experiencing all the impulses to love which usually attach a child to life. Rather than attaching himself to life, he hurled himself againstit. The picture of the Rimbaud family group going to eleven o’clock mass on Sunday reveals the desert of affection in which Arthur grew up. Leading the way, the two little girls, Vitalie and Isabelle, hand in hand: in the

second line the two boys, Frédéric and Arthur, also hand in hand, and each one holding a blue cotton umbrella; closing the line, Mme Rimbaud,

at the correct regimental distance. The procession continued its way,

despite the ironic comments of the spectators. Rimbaud

36

This picture shows the first mask of submissive boy, of the pious and studious carried to mass an umbrella of blue cotton watchful eye of his mother. The other mask

Rimbaud, that of the docile child who on Sunday always cloth and walked under the of the young boy was that of

the rebel whose scatological images blasphemed. At a very early age

Rimbaud forgot what his natural features were like. The masks of docility and irritability were the two countenances of young Arthur. At times such rebellion is natural for children. In describing his childhood, in the first book of his Confessions, Saint Augustine says, "1 used to fly into a rage at my elders who were so unruly!” But children, despite their moments of rage, do not renounce the love which directs them and gives them the first intuition of beatitude—maternal love in

Saint Augustine, for example, or the love for a little girl which Dante

relates on the first page of his Vita Nuova. At the age of nine, Dante saw for

the first time the young girl who was destined to direct his life and finally lead him to love of God. He saw her clothed in a red dress, and he knew instinctively that this youthful Beatrice, as her name indicated, was his beatitude. These pages of childhood memory might be compared with a page of

Rimbaud which is 2 memory of his seventh year. It is a poem, not only on

“Les poétes de sept ans,” which is its title, but also on the mother whose severity and injustice were responsible for the sout of her child being

given over to loathings (livrée aux répugnances). The real world evoked in

this poem is the mother whom Arthur had to obey hypocritically because he did not love her. He tried to escape from her by hiding in the latrine,

but she called him back. He tried to escape by playing with other children

in the garden, but she sent them away. All that remained for him was a flight of his spirit. The boy learned to escape maternal domination only in

his thoughts. The last image of the poem about this seven-year-old poet, recalled so lucidly by the poet of fifteen, is the image of the boy alone in his room stretching himself out on pieces of canvas. This was a game

which had the meaning of a spiritual voyage, because his physical contact with the canvas evoked the sails of great ships and prophesied to a child’s imagination the real departure of {ree men. Young Arthur had to learn how to improvise and play impurity and to cultivate his hate. He had to forge 2 mask which would conceal all his 37

Rimbaud

unused tenderness of an “exiled angel.” He condemned and cursed the affectionate part of his nature in a voluntary exercise of schizophrenia For all boys there exists a central drama: the entrance inte adolescence. This drama of a physical and psychological change is celebrated by primitive tribes as the solemn rite of puberty, but it is passed over in

silence by the civilizations of our time. The boy enters the world of people

whom he thinks he might love, by whom he wants to feel himself loved.

Saint Augustine, in speaking of his own adolescence, says, “And what charmed me except loving and being loved?” This small Latin formula,

nisi amare et amari, summarizes the dilemma of this period of amorous uncertainty when the boy leaves the world of his family for the world of love which is to be conquered. The most dramatic aspect of adolescence is the discovery of this new kind of love, which is concupiscence. Saint Augustine says of this intuition: “I no longer knew how to distinguish between the sweet light of tenderness and the blackness of sensuality.” The saint’s arrival at Carthage marks the period of dissipation and sensual excess: “To Carthage then 1 came.”

Arthur Rimbaud had never known the experience of love in his paternal house. He had begun by loving what was not offered. His poem,

which serves as a major document, “Les Poetes de sept ans,” tells us how vainly he had loved small urchins of his own age, how ideally he had loved the laborers whom he watched returning home at nightfall, how violently and sensuously he had fought with a small girl, daughter of one

oi the workmen. These child memories of love are ephemeral, hostile,

grotesque. The adolescent drama of Rimbaud was darker than Dante’s

was. At the age of eighteen, Dante saw Beatrice again, this time clothed in white. This brief meeting, which consisted of a simple greeting, either a

word spoken or a nod of the head, 100k place in a street in Florence,

In both the Confessions and the Vita Nuova, between the solitude of

adolescence and the meaning of a man’s vocation, are projected either the dreams or the realities of sexual life. This sexual life may be active and lascivious, as in the case of Saint Augustine, or it may be passive and

idealistic, as in the case of Dante. Rimbaud knew a substitution for love which takes place in the lives of adolescents destined to become artists,

namely the love for a master. In Georges Izambard, Rimbaud found a Rimbaud

38

director he admired and gratitude, and affection pupil felt for the young when, in Milan, he met

a friend in whom he had confidence. Respect, are all parts of the sentiment which the young teacher. Augustine noted the same experience Ambrose and began to love him (et eum amare

coepi). And Dante also did not fail to name in L'Inferno his master Brunetto

Latini, for whom he had a great affection. In the short phrase Dante addresses to Brunetto, “You have taught me how man makes himself eternal,” there is a key to the sentiment so difficult to express, the affection of gratitude. Rimbaud, too, felt at a very young age the prestige of letters, a form of love to Wwhich he was to confide his heart and his

Innocence.

Alter the restricted cosmos of the paternal home, where Rimbaud’s childhood was spent in dark revolt, and after the larger cosmos of the world, where his adolescence was lived in his poems, came the cosmos of

the spirit. In {orcing the secret of adolescence, he discovered poetry; and

finally, in forcing the secret of the spirit, he discovered—the infinite?

God? the East?

Some artists attain to the cosmos of the spirit only by a practice of

violence. They are the artists who know hell and spezak of it familiarly: Dante, Dostoievsky, Blake, Rimbaud,

Henry Miller, and Jim Morrison.

The vocabulary used by these men opens up their passage through the

flames. This is the violence of the spirit {not that of passion) in which the artist becomes the accuser of a wayward society. Augustine discovered very young the philosophy which finally led

him to sainthood. Dante discovered very young the theology he never

ceased using in the service of his art. Rimbaud discovered the domain of the visionary, which is different from the cosmos of the priest, as in Augustine, and from the cosmos of the poet, as in Dante. Georges Izambard arrived in Charleville for the first time in January 1870 to teach the advanced course in literature at the College. He was twenty-one. He had spent his childhood and school days in Douat, in northern France. A love for literature, and especially for modemn poetry, enlivened his teaching. In Izambard’s first class he noticed the pupil Rimbaud, a boy only

five years younger than himself. His fivst impression was that of observing

a reincarmation of Tom Thumb; Rimbaud was still small in stature. But it 39

Rimbaud

did not take long to discover the quality of Rimbaud’s mind and of his wrifing.

Rimbaud was seduced intellectually by 1zambard, and Izambard seduced by the admiration of a gifted pupil. Mme Rimbaud behaved felt as most mothers do in similar circumstances. She was flattered the young teacher had singled out her son for special attention. But

was and that her

early gratitude became jealousy when she realized that the teacher was so

ably indoctrinating the mind of her son that he was becoming aware of the narrowness of her pattern of living. Rimbaud’s first letter to Banville, in May 1870, reflects his feelingsat that time about poetry. Théodore de Banville was the leading Parnassian poet in Paris. Rimbaud sent him the manuscript of a poem. Much of the excitement of writing poetry for Rimbaud was the excitement over

thoughts of publishing it. He hoped to appear in the magazine Le nasse contemporain in company with the poets of the day. Izambard Rimbaud’s chief source of knowledge about contemporary poets current periodicals. The German invasion began, and Izambard left for Douai at the

Parwas and end

of the school term, on July 24, to join the army. This separation— Rimbaud stood alone on the platform when the train pulled out—was perhaps the boy’s first deep experience of grief and loss. In his letter of

August 25 to his friend in Douai, many elements of the relationship are

revealed. With the man’s disappearance from Charleville, the dullness of

the drab provincial town was more apparent than ever. Attitudes which

Rimbaud disliked were exaggerated by the pompous and ludicrous mili-

tary parades. Alternating attacks of depression and fury wasted his summet. Because of the war, the postal service had stopped sending books to the bookstores. Rimbaud was slowly stagnating in what he felt to be an exiie in his own country. His one escape was [zambard'’s room in Charleville, to which he had the key. There he read all the books of the teacher’s

small library. By the end of the summer, he had exhausted his supply. One

escape remained: a real flight. Rimbaud boarded the train for Paris on August 27. He was arrested in Paris because he was without a full train ticket and without money. From prison, on September 5, he wrote a brief letter to [zambard, demanding his help in no uncertain terms. He had failed to receive help from his mother or from the police in Charleville. Rimbaud

40

[zambard was his last chance. The tone of the letter is that of a command

(“je vous 'ordonne”} and almost that of cajolery as well. He writes that he

has loved Izambard as a brother and now is ready to love him as a father.

[zambard sent a letter begging the governor of the prison to release the

boy and enclosed money for the return train fare, Rimbaud returned home by way of Douai, where he stayed with Izambard and his friends, the elderly Gindre sisters, from September 10 to September 25. From Charleville he continued to write to Izambard at Douai. His

letter of November 2 proves his renewed unrest and boredom. “Je meurs, je me décompose dans la platitude” (I am dying and decomposing in the

midst of platitudes). His escape to Paris and his sojourn at Douai served to exaggerate all that he loathed in Charleville. He speaks now of his

affection for Izambard and of his desire to do something with himsel{ in

order to merit this friendship. To work hard at his verse and to become a poet would be one way of expressing his gratitude. This determination

still involves some naive egoism, and he justifiably signs his letter “ce sans-coeur Rimbaud” (your heartless Rimbaud).

The intimate pupil-teacher relationship was over at this time. The next experience in his life, the Verlaine episode, was destined to bring out

in the boy’s character quite different traits. In his important letter to Izambard of May 12, 1871, the first version of the “Lettre du voyant,” his tone is already more haughty and dictatorial. He chides lzambard for attaching too much importance to his academic career, for his conserva-

tism, for his lack of real rebellion against society. This letter marks a further separation between the man and the boy because it contained the manuscript of an important poem, “Le Coeur volé,” which Izambard

failed to understand.

For approximately nine months 1zambard strongly influenced the

life of Rimbaud. These were the months when he feit deep dissatisfaction

with the society of Charleville. The picture he gives in the poem "A la

musique” of the military band playing on the public square, with an audience of obese retired dignitaries, captures much of the placid, dull atmosphere against which Rimbaud was revolting. They were the same months when the insistence of sexual desire was beginning to be felt. In the poem “Roman” he describes the stalking of girls under the linden trees, the early love poems, the lust aroused by the spectacle of bare flesh. 41

Rimbaud

Rimbaud never took unfair advantage of Izambard’s friendship. This

was an impeccably honorable relationship. After repudiating maternal discipline, he accepted the fraternal advice of his teacher until the time when he had exhausted all the lessons both in and outside of school and

turned to the more lurid horizon of Paris, where a celebrated poet was

waiting for his visit. The clue to the kind of experience which forced this transition from [zambard to Verlaine is in the poem “Le Coeur volé” (The Stolen Heart),

inserted in the letter to Izambard of May 13, 1871. Rimbaud considered other titles for the poem: “Coeur supplicié” and “Coeur du pitre,” tound

on a manuscript dated June 1871. The “heart stolen,” “heart tortured,”

and “heart of a clown” are the same heart of a boy who, still in his sixteenth year, was submitted to scenes of sodomy, probably in one of the

Paris barracks where he considered enlisting in the army of the commu-

nards. The act was forced on Rimbaud, or observed by him, or imagined

by him.

The poem is a triolet, composed of three stanzas, each one of which is

formed on two rhymes. In the frst stanza: Mon triste coeur bave a la poupe Sous les quolibets de la troupe Qui pousse un tire général

[My sad heart slobbers at the stern Under the jeering of the soldiers Who break out laughing]

int the second stanza:

Leurs quolibets l'ont dépravé

Au gouvernail on voit des fresques Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques.

[Their jeerings have depraved him On the rudder you see: frescoes [thyphallic and soldierish]

the boy’s heart is insulted by obscene wall drawings. The third stanza: Quand ils auront tari leurs chiques Comment agir, & coeur volé? Rimbaud

42

[When they have used up their quid How will I act, O stolen heart?]

describes the horror the boy is suspended in (or is observing) until the experience is completed. Whether this extreme interpretation is possible

or not, the barracks scene translates a physical revulsion on the part of Rimbaud. Verlaine's cordiality was well known. Rimbaud had sent him poems from Charleville, and in return, Verlaine invited the boy to Paris at the

end of September 1871. By this time Rimbaud was certain he was a poet and was indulging himself in the greatest of poetic ambitions. His first evening in Paris with Verlaine was painful for all concerned. Verlaine and

his wife Mathilde, who was to give birth to a son the following month,

were living at 14 rue Nicolet, in Montmartre, the home of Mathilde's parents. M. Mauté, Mathilde’s tather, was away art the time. Mme Mauté, her daughter, and another guest, Charles Cros, a poet and friend of

Verlaine, made useless efforts to engage Rimbaud in conversation. The

boy had grown quite tall and demonstrated all the awkwardness of a

suddenly increased stature. His hands were large and red like a peasant’s, His face was dark from the summer sun, his light brown hair was thick

and unruly, Everything marked him as the provincial adolescent: his

Ardennes accent, the insolent expression on his face, his stubbornness in not answering questions.

He had counted on an intellectual intimacy and affection with Verlaine, whose invitation to come to Paris had been sufficient to enflame

any aspiring boy poet: “Venez, chére grande dme, on vous attend, on vous

désire.” The sentence must have been in Rimbaud’s mind as he looked at the people seated around the dining table on that first meeting: the pregnant wife, the mother-in-law, the doctor-poet Cros, and Verlaine

himself. Even before he lit his pipe at the end of the meal and then abruptly left the table to retire into his bedroom., he must have vowed to deliver Verlaine {from the ties of family and middle-class life. After a period of two to three weeks, Rimbaud left the Verlaine household. By the middle of December 1871 he was occupying a room,

rented for his use by Verlaine, on the rue Campagne Premiére in Mont-

parmnasse.

43

Rimbaud

Even before Rimbaud’s arrival in September, matters had been going

badly between Verlaine and his wife. The birth of 2 son on October 30 does not seem to have remedied the separation that was growing between them. Verlaine’s habit of drinking was becoming excessive. His consumption of absinthe had already brought on fits of delirium tremens during

which he had struck his wite. The friendship between Verlaine and Rimbaud developed in their frequenting of cafés and their drinking together. With the disappearance of his timidity, Rimbaud exercised more and more power over Verlaine. The iconoclastic force of the boy's temperament served to make him a personality in the midst of older men. Fantin-Latour’s 1872 painting Le Coin de table shows Rimbaud’s face in the midst of poets and painters much older than himself. After six months in Paris, Rimbaud returned to Charleville in April 1872. Two months later he was back in Paris, where he ucc—u.pied a room,

first on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and then on tue Victor Cousin. During the months of May, June, and July, he composed some of his prose poems for Les lluminations. On July 7, when the two men left for Belgium by way of Arras, Charleville, and Brussels, the most dramatic year of their lives began, which was to culminate on July 10, 1873, with the shooting scene

in Brussels.

They had hardly been in Brussels a week in July 1872 when Verlaine’s wite and mother came to lead the repentant husband home. Verlaine escaped from the train that was taking him back to Paris and returned to Rimbaud. That was the final effort of reconciliation between

Verlaine and Mathilde. After two months in Brussels, Verlaine and Rim-

baud left on September 7 for London, where they lived for six months, except {or one period of three weeks in December and January when Rimbaud returned to Charleville. They gave French lessons in London

but existed mainly on money sent to Verlaine by his mother. In February 1873, Rimbaud was back in Charleville, but they were again together in London at the end of May 1873. Quarrels became frequent. On July 3

Verlaine abandoned Rimbaud in London and went to Brussels. A brief note on the fourth of July revealed Rimbaud’s desire to patch up the break. Verlaine telegraphed Rimbaud to join him in Brussels. After a few Rimbaud

44

days in Brussels, Rimbaud stated that he was going to leave for Paris.

Verlaine, angered, fired two shots at Rimbaud. One bullet wounded the boy’s left wrist. The two men, with Verlaine’s mother, who had come up from Paris, went to the Hopital Saint-Jean, where Rimbaud’s wound was

dressed. Later in the evening, when Verlaine tried to prevent Rimbaud’s

leaving, the police were called. Verlaine was condemned to two years’ tmprisonment by the Brussels court on the charge of attempted manslaughter. He spent eighteent months in the prison of Mans. Neither Verlaine nor Rimbaud ever acknowledged the charge of homosexuality made about them by friends and relations. In print they both repudiated the accusation. The principal documents on their relationship are certain poems of Verlaine and sections of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer.

Behind the lovers’ quarrels, the scenes of drunkenness, the revolver

shots, and the police trials, the meaning of Rimbaud'’s odyssey emerges. He was seeking power and the use of power through knowledge of sin, of intoxication, of poetry. Verlaine was always the man of velleities, uncertain of his projects and his sentiments. There was no retreating from Rimbaud’s flights, as each new flight became more dangerous than all the others, like the flights of Jim Morrison.

The story of Verlaine and Rimbaud in London and Brussels is one of the myths of the modern artist. This story is recast in literary form by James Joyce in the Dublin odyssey of Leopold Bleom and Stephen Dedalus. The two men are really one man: the man who bends to the century (Verlaine-Bloom) and the man who surpasses the century (Rim-

baud-Stephen), one hero who seeks to know love by what is beyond love.

The theme of voyage and flight is one of the most persistent in

literature of every period. Homer’s Odyssey in antiquity, Dante’s Com-

media in the Middle Ages, Rabelais’s Pantagruel in the Renaissance, and

Anabase of Saint-John Perse today are examples of extensive use of the voyage symbol. Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer (1873), Eliot’s The Waste

Land (1922), and Saint-John Perse’s Seamarks (1958) are spaced like tandmarks of the modern epic. They are voyages in the Baudelairian

sense where the goal is self-exploration.

After the Brussels drama, when Rimbaud abandoned the writing of

poetry, his life itself became an epic and he literally lived the voyages of 45

Rimbaud

his memory and imagination. The years between 1874 and 1880 were spent in a series of attempted flights. In 1874, Rimbaud was twenty-one years old. In May of that year he was once again in London in company with a notorious bohemian, Germain Nouveau. After Verlaine was re-

leased from prison, the two poets had a final meeting in February 1875 in Stuttgart, where

Rimbaud

ruthlessly derided Verlaine’s new religio:us

attitudes. During the next few months Rimbaud moved about aimlessly, hrst along the Rhine, then in Milan and Siena. By October he was back in Charleville, where he settled down to a period of intense linguistic study. In April 1876 a serious quatrel with his mother and brother caused him to leave home. He joined the Dutch army, reaching Java, where he deserted and escaped as a sailor on a British ship. On the last day of the year, he arrived in Charleville,

almost

unrecognizable

to his mother

because of his deeply tanned skin and his thick fair beard. The following year, 1877, further erratic travels led him through

Germany, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Marseille, and Rome. The winter and

the following spring he spent with his mother in Charleville. Then he traveled to Switzerland, Genoa, and Egypt. By 1879 he reached the island of Cyprus, where he was engaged as an interpreter for a group of workers. An attack of typhoid fever caused him to return to Roche, near Charleville. This was the end of Rimbaud’s period of vagrancy. That winter he was twenty-five. His cheeks were hollow and his hair was turning grey. Rimbaud spent the ten years between

1880 and 1890 largely in

Aden, in the southern tip of Arabia, and in Harrar, in inland Abyssinia, In December 1883, he returned to Aden, published an article for the Société de Géographie, and studied scientific treatises on hydraulics, mechanics,

and astronomy. In 1884 he was living with a Harai woman in Aden. He does not mention her later, but he does talk, even on his deathbed in Marseille, about his servant and constant companion, the boy Djami. There were two contestants for power in Abyssinia: John, king of Tigré and emperor of Ethiopia, and Menelek, king of Shoa. Rimbaud engaged in the traffic of arms with Menelek. He undertook an expedition through the territory of the savage Danakils, was cheated and robbed in Shoa, and in May 1888 began a gun-running trade, with his center at

Rimbaud

46

Harrar. Here, with Djami as his chief comforter, he seems to have tried to establish something like a permanent home. This decade in Rimbaud’s life represents the triumph of the avaricious Ardennes peasant strain in him. He took on, to a certain degree, the personality of his mother, against whom he had revolted as a child

and adolescent. The one hundred-some letters which Rimbaud wrote to his family between August 17, 1881, and April 30, 1891 are the letters of a terse, hardheaded businessman. They contain no reminiscence of the poets style or sensibility. The existence they describe is that of the wilful employee determined to amass a fortune and attain independence. For

ten years Rimbaud believed doggedly in the bourgeois virtue of “security.” He lived austerely, he worked hard, and he saw few people in his foreign solitude. He remained the trader bent upon enriching himsell. Here he failed miserably. After ten years of labor and sweat in the intense heat of Abyssinia, he had saved only twenry thousand francs. In February 1891, when Rimbaud was still at Harrar, a tumor formed

on his right knee. By the middle of March he was confined to bed, and by the end of March he decided to go to the European hospital at Aden. The

swelling in his leg increased during his hospitalization at Aden. On May 9 he left for Marseille, where he arrived thirteen days later. In the Hdpital de I'Tmmaculée Conception his leg was amputated. Mme Rimbaud came to

Marseille after the operation for just a few days. This was the first meeting between son and mother in twelve years. In July, Rimbaud made another painful trip from Marseille to Roche, where he spent a month. During the return trip in August he suffered from every jolt of the train. The disease had spread to other parts of his body. At the Marseille hospital it was diagnosed as carcinoma. Rimbaud's sister Isabelle had accompanied

him to Marseille and

remained there until his death. Rimbaud depended on her, on her presence and her attentions. The only documents on the final weeks of Rimbaud’s life are letters exchanged between Isabelle and her mother. On

two occasions Rimbaud received the visit of a priest. Isabelle was at his side when death came on November 10. Rimbaud’s body was moved to Charleville. The funeral service was a high

mass, after which only the mother and sister accompanied the cothin to

47

Rimbaud

the cemetery. No friends and no writers were present, although ten years later, in the square of Charleville, a monument to Rimbaud was erected. The statue was damaged twice by the Germans in their invasions in 1914 and 1940. Rimbaud himself had witnessed the eatlier German invasion ot 1870

Catholics whom Rimbaud’s work deeply affected, men like Claudel,

Jacques Riviere, and Daniel-Rops, have interpreted much of the boy’s

poetry in the light of the man’s possible religious conversion. His writing

is of such a nature that atheists and Catholics, mystics and surrealists can find doctrinal confirmation in it. Whereas the religious problem is ever present in Rimbaud's work, it is unsolved and exists as a threat to any secular peace or vision. The man at the end of his life came to the end of his voyages by possibly submitting himself again to the religious faith of his early childhood, but his art remains a supreme example of quest and flight, of blasphemy and prayer, of innocence, and hell.

The Work of Rimbaud Rimbaud inherited a rich literary legacy. Experience and form are impossible to dissociate in art. The malady of romanticism between Rousseau

(Réveries d'un promeneur solitaire, 1776) and Hugo (Les Contemplations,

1856) followed the stages of an ordinary malady, but with Baudelaire (Les Fleurs de mal, 1857) it broke out into two manifestations, one of which

was felt by Rimbaud and articulated by him with savagery. With Baudelaire, rwo phases of the same disorder entered their extreme development of spleen and idéal.

“Le Bateau Ivre”: (The Drunken Boat: the Poet’s Imagination) In August 1871, when Rimbaud wrote this poem, he was sixteen years

old and living with his mother, his brother, and his two sisters at 7, quai de Moulinet in Charleville. The poem marks the beginning of his period

of most mature and significant writing, and represents an achievement in

the history of French lyric poetry.

Rimbaud

48

Genesis of the Poem

A little over a year’s poetic activity preceded the composition of “Le Bateau ivre.” Rimbaud had written poems in Latin and had received prizes for his skill in executing classical hexameters. In French he had written jong and short poems on themes of mythology, love, and violence, some of which reveal parnassian ancestry. May 1871 seems to have been one of the most fertile months in Rimbaud’s life. This was probably the month in which he wrote “Le coeur volé” and his first major poem, “Les Pogtes de sept ans.” May was also the month in which he wrote his two letters to Izambard and Demeny on the function of the poet. In these lettres du voyant he formulated a poetic creed of which “Le Bateau ivre” was 10 be the first successful illustration. In Rimbaud’s childhood experience there was no great river and no great ocean. But there was a small boat on the Meuse River. Where it

flowed near the college there was a small island, and midway between the

island and the shore floated a raft used by the workmen

from

the

tanneries. A small boat for the use of the tanners was attached to the shore

by means of a long padlocked chain and an iron stake. After school,

Arthur and his brother often threw themselves into the boat, pushed it out into the river as far as the chain would permit, and then, leaning first to the right and then to the left, would cause the boat to rock as in a storm. Arthur would lie down flat and look down into the depths of the

river water. This often repeated scene on the Meuse plays its own part in

the storms and contemplations of “Le Bateau ivre.” Another kind of experience, important in the genesis of the onehundred-line poem, is that of Rimbaud as reader. No precise allusions are in the poem, but it contains many reminiscences. Several of the images have literary sources, but they have been subjected to Rimbaud’s own

personal experience. Two authors above all seem to have stimulated the boy-poet: Chateaubriand and Hugo. Les Natchez and Atala of Chateaubriand, with their

scenes of Indian torture and North American forests, and the pictures ot the sea in Hugo’s Travailleurs de la mer are two rich sources, both in

language and vision. James Fenimore Cooper’s La Prairie, in its French

translation, and Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous la mer were popular 49

Rimbaud

novels of adventure widely read by boys at the time. They provided Rimbaud with further images of prairies and solitary figures sinking into the sea. The work of two poets should be added to these titles. “Les Odes funambulesques” of Banville, because of their technical brilliance, and " “Le Voyage” of Baudelaire, because of its symbol of the sea, left their mark

on Rimbaud. Phrases from the Latin poets exist: Horace’s levior cortice

(plus léger qu’un bouchon, “lighter than cork™). More important are biblical verses from Job, chapters 32 and 38, which abound in questions the ancient Hebrew visionary might have asked the youthful poet of the

Ardennes who had defined his vocation as that of visionary: “Hast thou

entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?” The vision of “Le Bateau ivre” may well be the answer to questionings which had sunk into the boy’s subconscious alter his read-

ing of Job: “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou

seen the treasures of the hail?”

The real introduction, however, to “Le Bateau ivre” is the earlier

poem, “Les Poétes de sept ans.” There we learn something of the mental and psychical activity of the boy Arthur which finally becomes projected and crystallized in his art. There we learn about his Bible readings, his dreary Sundays, his revolt against maternal domination, his efforts to love children and workmen. But espectally we learn about the successful

adventures of his childhood, those of his imagination: the novels he invented about lite (les romans sur la vie), the litany of exotic lands (foréts, soleils, rives, savanes), the power of pictures (journaux illustrés), and of

fictional sailings which converted prairies into sea billows. “Le Bateau ivre” is a complete intellectual autobiography. All of

Rimbaud’s past is in it, and, prophetically, the general lines of his future. The Poem

Not only for convenience’ sake, but because they seem to follow a design, the twenty-five stanzas of the poem may be divided into four parts. L. The first five stanzas serve as an introduction and announcement

of the major theme: liberation. The boat speaks; it is clearly the symbol of the poet who in his intoxication has discovered a release from the world of conventions. The first step in the boat’s liberation is the disappearance Rimbaud

50

of the haulers, who had been seized by Indians and nailed naked to colored stakes. This places the scene in North America, possibly by the Mississippi, where the savages crucify in a ritual of blood, sadism, and

uproar the foreign invaders seeking to impose an unholy order and

commercial exploitation on a pagan civilization. After losing its haulers, the boat loses its crew and cargo. [t is now able to follow its own will and teel the freedom of the river waters. It has a child’s lust for the disorderly and the noisy, a lust which is a natural self-affirmation. There are not even

any shore lights to direct its course through the domains of excitement and haste and fracas. The pure element of the sea, limitless and powerful, enters into the very being of the boat, and its taste is like that of hard apples to a child, the taste of danger and stolen fruit. With the crashing of the water on the deck, the last elements of direction and control disappear. Anchor and rudder are swept into the sea. The liberation is complete. The poem of the sea can begin. 2. The second section (stanzas six through fifteen) begins with the temporal staternent “Et dés lors” and is a long litany of what the boat saw

in its disordered and uncharted voyage. The sound of litany is in the simple verbs at the beginning of each stanza: “je sais,” “j'ai vu,” "j'ai révé,” “j'ai suivi,” “j’ai heurté,” “j'ai vu” (I know, I saw, 1 dreamed, [ [ollowed, ! struck against, [ saw).

The

first verb affirms the new

knowledge

ol

violence and peace, of the lightning-drenched evening sky and the doveswarming sky of dawn. The second verb affirms the new vision of the setting sun when its rays stretch out across the water like long ceremonial figures of ancient actors. The third affirms a dream of polar nights when light seems to mount from the snow as yellow phosphor mounts up from the ocean depths. The fourth affirms the boat’s quest for the unseizable power and the unseizable form of the ocean swells. The fifth and sixth verbs affirm the boat’s collision with the mainland and the subsequent

vision of sea monsters caught in the gulfs along the coast. This, the longest section of the poem, is the boat’s discovery of the universe: of its

splendor, its gigantism, its violence. Each sensation leads to another in a wild chase for sensation. 3. The third section (stanzas sixteen through twenty-two) interrupts the tone of violence and vision and serves as a transition from the mad ornateness of the second section to the pathos of the final movement. The 51

Rimbaud

boat suddenly becomes conscious of itself in the midst of its voyages. The freedom of the boat has brought itself against an impasse. It feels itself to be a woman on her knees, humbled and quieted. Then begins a period of self-examination. Around this woman, now a “bateau perdu,” drowned men sink silently into the sea, and the skies collapse over the boat. “Je regrette I'Furope” (I miss Europe) is the honest confession. The boat misses its origins. Throughout the nights and days of this drunken voyage, the boat’s real Vigor has been asleep. The visions were mental and unreal. They were experiences of dispersal and indulgence. Behind them, the reality of a boat’s function waited soberly for the last excesses to spend themselves. 4. The last section (stanzas twenty-three through twenty-five) nar-

rates the rising up of his real desire, divested of imagination. Rimbaud’s

return to the small street puddle, known to him as a child, on which he

could sail a paper boat and which he could encompass with his thin arms is the return to his origin and his personal experience. The simplicity and pathos in the final image of the mud puddle in a European street are the return of sobriety. Interpretation

1. literal: The distance between the vovage of the drunken boat through its grandiose décors and the small boat at the end of a chain on the Meuse River is cosmic. The composing of “Le Bateau ivre” was the literal experience; it hardly relates one. The will to be a poet and a visionary is the real experience of the poem. In the letter to Izambard (May 12, 1871), Rimbaud stated his creed emphatically: “One must be

strong and be born a poet, and 1 have recognized myself as a poet.”

2. moral: The world is both our fortune and our peril. To realize fully

the voyages which a boy’s imagination invents would equate the realization of a failure, and this is the moral meaning of the poet, whose final

scene is not a triumphant vision but a humble and pathetic scene of

reality: the sea becomes a puddle, the boat becomes a paper boat as frail as a butterfly, intoxication becomes sadness. 3. spiritual: Twice in the poem the word “love” is used. In both

instances it is associated with the sea. The ocean is first that place “where Rimbaud

52

the bitter rednesses of love ferment.” Secondly, love is the bitter element which has swollen the boat with intoxicating torpor. The anagoge or

spiritual meaning of modern works of art is their prophetic quality. Rim-

baud’s destiny is announced in this poem he wrote at the age of sixteen.

The boy Arthur is already the legendary character who, after traveling

throughout the world, will return 1o the land of his origin in order to die there. The experience of love is immobilization, far different from the restiess motion of the drunken boat of Rimbaud’s subsequent voyages. F)

Une Saison en Enfer: The Poet’s Destiny Rimbaud began the composition of A Season in Hell in April 1873, when

he was at Roche, a small village in the Ardennes. There his family occupied a dilapidated house inherited from his maternal grandfather. He had just returned from London, exhausted by the excesses of his life there. His indulgence in tobacco, alcohol, and hashish had fostered irritability, fever, and even hallucinations. A letter written by Rimbaud from Roche in May to Ernest Delahaye in Charleville states that the poet was working regularly on the new piece

which was composed of brief stories in prose to which he was giving the general title “Livre palen, ou Livre negre.” This letter is proot of the

importance Rimbaud attached to the new writing and the belief thar it

marked a turmning point in his life. “My fate depends on this book for which I still have to invent a half dozen terrible stories.” There is no indication that during the five months when he was composing the work Rimbaud ever considered it would be his final book. He continued intermittently to work on it after he went to London at the end of May. After the July lawsuit, Rimbaud, his arm in a sling, returned to the farm at Roche (July 20, 1873), and, using the attic as a retreat, completed the work in the same place he had begun it five months earlier. In October it appeared in brochure form in Brussels. Five hundred copies were printed, of which Rimbaud received ten. These he distributed among friends. It has often been written that Rimbaud burned the remaining copies of the edition in a desire to make more definitive this flight from literature. This is a false legend. The 490 copies remained 53

Rimbaud

closeted at the printer’s until 1901, when a Belgian bibliophile, Léon Losseau, discovered and bought them. Rimbaud was doubtless unable to pay the printing bill of this one book which he himself had wished to

| publish. Une Saison en enfer is the metaphysical autobiography of Rimbaud as well as a major text in the history of modern literature. It appears to

be a work of “confession,” and like other confessions, such as those of

Saint Augustine, Cellini, Montaigne, and Rousseau, it involves other genres: autobiography, philosophy, psychology, history, theology. Rim-

baud’s confession differs from all the others, not because it does not contain all the foregoing modes of knowledge and speech, but because of its brevity and the explosive quality of its language. The violence of the work is not in the ideas, concepts, and facts, but

rather in the rhythms, in the movements of the phrases, and in the symbols which flash out from the text. Any confession must necessarily

deal with the theme of evil, with the struggle of a single man against a world of evil. Une Saison is no exception. But it is a strange narrative where metaphysics takes first place of importance and where the mean-

ing of evil is constantly being converted into the meaning of action and the meaning of words. Poetry is the art where the articulation of a phrase,

its physical rhythm and breath, is as vital as the meaning of its words. This applies to so much of Une Saison, where the meaning of human

suffering is communicated by means of the tempo—its viclence and unevenness, its precipitation and delicacy, its blatancy and secretiveness—that the work may be defined as the poem of a confession. Preface

The opening page bears no title, but it is clearly a preface where all the

themes of the subsequent work are sounded. It contains strange images and characters who gradually become familiar as the work progresses. The confession is to cover the entire span of Rimbaud’s nineteen years:

{rom the most recent escapade (“Recently, on the verge of giving my last

croak”™), which doubtless refers to Brussels, back in time to the earliest

memories of childhood (“Long ago my life was a banquet™), which are serene and happy. Rimbaud

54

Rimbaud’s drama of rebellion is expressed in the second sentence:

“One evening [ pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and | cursed her.” This would seem to record in the boy that a mysterious

aberration has set him off from society and armed him against ordinary

justice. This would not necessarily be sexual. A sense of being “different” automatically turns a boy into a victim, and this character of the victim is the first mask of the poet. He is the hyena, the animal of the night to be tracked down. Rimbaud's wild beast recalls Vigny's wolf, Musset’s pelican, Gautier’s hippopotamus, Baudelaire’s albatross. They are all names

for the artist, the One further the conventional flight as a search.

sacrificial scapegoat. element completes the prelude. The poet’s flight from world into the dark world of himself is not so much a [n every dream of his subconscious, Rimbaud is going

to seek and track down his innocence. He calls it first his “treasure.” which has to be sheltered in witchcraft (poetry), in poverty (exile), and in

hate (revolt). This search for original purity is the key 1o Une Saison, and

one of the keys to Shakespeare's A Winter’s Tale, to Joyce's Finnegans Wake,

to Eliot’s Little Gidding. Art is a retrogression in time, an effort to recaprure

childhood and its pure oneness with the universe which Pavel Tchelit-

chew has painted in his great work of metamorphosis called Cache-Cache (Hide and Go Seek).

“Mauvais Sang” (Bad Blood) In the first section of the work, which is the longest, Rimbaud describes

himself as being attached to his past by singularly strong and inevitable bonds. He has inherited from his Gallic ancestors both physiological weaknesses and spiritual habits of thought which have determined, and are continuing to fashion, his drama. He is held by two kinds of past: the distant past of the sacrilegious and pagan Gauls and the immediate past of nineteenth-century bourgeois values where the son inherits his father’s fortune and then transmits it to his son. The inferior race of Gauls was

converted into medieval crusaders, who were followed by three centuries

of modem France, designated by three words: la raison, la nation et la science. These were the landmarks of modermn progress: reason in the 55

Rimbaud

seventeenth century, the nation in the eighteenth, and science in the nineteenth.

This first vision of the poet as microcosm, in which he sees himself in

all his roles of the past—leper, Gaul, crusader, son-heir—is suddenly supplanted by a vision of the poet as macrocosm, in which he sees himself in the future, This is only one of several passages in Rimbaud of prophecy. He foresees his flight from Europe, the darkening of his skin under tropical suns, his return to Europe with gold on his person, and his condition of infirmity, nursed by women. Between these two periods of time, the past and the future, Rimbaud remains immobilized by the present. The image of the poet as victim is

now heightened by the image of a convict (forcat} chained to a wall. The artist tries to adjust himself to the general moral code of a society of which he is not so much a memberas a prophet and interpreter. Rimbaud, like

Ham, son of Noah, must leave his country and found another race in

another land. The mask of Rimbaud as convict becomes the mask of Rimbaud as black. The very color of his skin will separate him from other men and from their justice which cannot apply to one ditterent from them.

“Nuit de 'enfer” (Night in hell) Rimbaud's announcement of his search for innocence is tmmediately

foliowed by a passage describing a realistic plunge into hell. Only the

damned know fully what they have lost. This is the literal domain of fire which enclosed the sinner, infinitely more fearful than the prison of the convict and the desert of the hyena. The convict and the hyena had been exiled by the world, but now the poet finds himself in the role of sinner

which is a self-willed exile from the Creator. The new terror is eternal. “I am hidden and I am not hidden.” He has escaped from the world only to

be seen by the world.

“Délires I (Delirium 1)

The first of the “deliriums” maintains the same traditional fiery setting of hell, but Rimbaud no longer appears alone in it. The meditation of the Rimbaud

56

preceding passage becomes now a drama with two characters: the infer-

nal bridegroom (Rimbaud), and the foolish virgin (Verlaine). The entire section, except for the first and last lines, is spoken by the Verlaine character. This fragment, the closest in quality and dramatic intensity to a scene

from Dante’s Inferno, is more than a circumstantial reporting on the homosexual relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. That story

certainly exists in the scene, but in so bold and obvious a manner that its

stgnificance, like that of Dante’s poem, must be found in some degree of

symbolism. Rimbaud is at all times too ornate a writer to be satisfied with a literal transcription of experience. So, we read, first, Verlaine’s story of

loving a boy, of renouncing his marital duty, of following the boy from

city to city, of their drinking in low dives, of their lovers’ promises and

quarrels, of the madness of the liaison. “Délire I" is the story of carnal man, which is begun through a belief that true life is somewhere else. “La vraie vie est absente” is the supreme

statement of the romantic agony. “Love is to be reinvented” is a corollary

of the first and a further redefinition of the romantic void. “Délires 1I: Alchimie du Verte”

After the story of carnal love, we read in the second delirium the story of the visionary, the poet’s drama, “alchemy of the word.” The subject matter of these two délires is man as procreator and artist, frustrated in both roles, unable to achieve the re-creation either of his body or of his vision.

All the landscapes of Rimbaud’s early life are recalled: the backdrops of the circus clowns, the Latin he learned in church, fairy tales and pornographic books, the colors of each vowel as remembered from an old alphabet book, the water of the Oise, the workmen bathing at noon in the river. There are examples of the many experiences dammed up in the boy which emerged in his poetic inventions. The poet, as Rimbaud now

identifies him, is the man who first looks at reality, then turns away from it and into himsell. Then he discovers that all reality is inexpressible and that his notations and poems at best will be imperfect replicas. Since no literal transcription of reality is possible. Rimbaud finds himsell playing the 57

Rimbaud

magician of hallucinations who casts spells over his words. He discovers that experience can be related only by words which are strange and

foreign to the experience. A factory, then, can be better transcribed by the word “mosque.”

Rimbaud calls this the sacred disorder of his mind. The poet is a hierophant. He must first traverse a long period of dryness in which nothing is accomplished. These are images of death and arid neutrality. For the mystic, joy is the result of this period of aridity. For the poet, vision is the result, and the knowledge that of joy he can give only a clownish expression. There is no need for the mystic to interpret: he lives serenely and purely what he knows to be reality. But the poet interprets

and rushes to the cosmic expression of his vision, as the clown covers his

manhood and disguises his tragedy. Almost at the end of this passage on the alchemy of the word,

Rimbaud inserts a poem, usually referred to by the title “L'Eternité.” It is

one of his most spectacular lyrics and was referred to often during the anniversary year of 1991. Two film directors have felt the beauty of the

poem and have used the stanza:

Elle est retrouvée!

Quoi? Péternité. C'est la mer mélée

Au soleil, [It is found again!

What? Eternity. It is the sea mixed with the sun.]

These last two lines appear revised in a manuscript: C’est la mer allée Avec le soleil.

[It is the sea gone off With the sun.]

At the end of Pierrot le fou by Jean-Luc Godard, when Pierrot is fleeing, the Rimbaud stanza is flashed on the screen. And at the end of Fellini’s Satiricon, when the story we have watched becomes art—a series of Rimbaud

58

frescoes—Encolpio flees from the city to the seashores where sunlight blends sea and sky, and we hear and see the words of Rimbaud’s poem.

“L'Impossible” (The Impossible) In the four remaining passages of Une Saison, all of which are brief, Rimbaud recapitulates some of his themes. The rich orchestration of the

middle section becomes thinner as certain insistencies of the poet grow in clarity. “LImpossible” is the most specific of these final themes. The flights of the poet are his expldnations. His powers of reason have broken down under the effort of spanning the distance and customs between the West and the East. The boy, born in the occidental marshes, in the midst of Christian restlessness, tried to return to the first wisdom of the East, to

the placidity and nirvana of the Orient. This was one kind of purity to attain: the philosophy and purity of Eden, which is a repose of the spirit

almost forgotten by men of the West.

“L’Eclair” (Lightning) Without the spirit by which one attains God, a man activates the deep

Christian restlessness by all the assumed roles of work which are flashes of attainment and false seconds of purity. Thus Rimbaud has known ail the masks of modern man, from the clown to the priest, by which he thought to disguise his desire for purity and revolt against death in the Western world. “Matin” (Morning)

But Rimbaud ended in the real hell of the Christians. His particular kind of suffering came from the absence of grace. The purity he was seeking was that of morning hope and of the first Christmas mass. “Adieu” (Farewell)

This is the farewell of autumn. Ahead lies the Christmas mass and the rebirth of purity. The cycle is completed because the first sentence of Une 59

Rimbaud

Saison spoke of the wine of feast days and of a child’s purity. The entire work is the narration of states of being between purity and sin and repentance.

The feast days of purification, the buming cities of Sodom and Gomotrah, and the dying of all nature at the end of autumn symbolize the states of being in the life of Rimbaud. They are his memories of the season, the summer of sin and flaming heat—a season which remem-

bered the Feast of the Nativity and the rebirth of early spring, and which looked ahead into the depletion of autumn. Throughout his season he forgot to be the sinner and played his roles of magus and angel. Now he is thrown back to the reality of the earth and to his primal role of peasant. In the final line of Une Saison, he tells us he is a man and therefore able to know truth, not uniquely in his soul and not uniquely in his body, but

uniquely and simultaneously in both his body and in his soul.

Interpretation: Rimbaud and Picasso Les Saltimbanques is a painting done by Picasso in Paris. Picasso has given

us a clear expression of his cosmology in his painting of acrobats. In the landscapes of Rimbaud’s hell we find the setting for his most personal experiences. These two works of prose and painting, one composed by a French adolescent who vituperated against France and escaped from his country and the other by a Spaniard who had assimilated a great deal of French culture, are works governed by the same metaphysical problem of being. Who is man? is the general question. Rimbaud is asking this

question in the opening pages of Une Saison. Am | a beast, a victim, a

Gaul? Am | castrated or leprous? Am I a convict or an amoralist? Am 1 a clown, a prophet, or an angel? | Picasso’s acrobats appear in a group of five together, with another

apart from the group. Not one is looking at another. Each is solitary in his

being and caught up inwardly in some questioning of himself: the young

man at the extreme left, dressed as Harlequin; the fat man next to him

who wears the clown’s hat; the adolescent wearing only a pair of trunks

and carrying a drum on his shoulders; the young boy who is the tumbler: the little girl holding Harlequin’s hand; and the mother, apart from the Rimbaud

60

group, at the extreme right of the painting. The gracefulness of their bodies contrasts with the restlessness of their thoughts. It is impossible to say whether they have finished a performance or are about to begin one. Like the characters of Pirandello, they are seeking some pattern of their destinies. The figure in the very center of the canvas, the adolescent who is

almost naked, is approximately the same age Rimbaud was when he wrote Une Saison en enfer. He is looking toward the left in the direction of his small brother, whom he does not see under his elbow. Like Rimbaud

of Une Saison, Picasso’s adolestent is looking at this past, at his mother and his childhood, while beside him, in the other direction, stand the

symbols of his future: young manhood and older manhood. He is solicited by a love for the vast freedom of the spirit. He is therefore, as Rimbaud was also, the angel.

He is angel in the new sense created by the contemporary artist: that

being who lives more with the invisible than with the visible. He is

Rimbaud believing he is outside of this world. He is the nude drummer boy of Picasso looking into all the invisible hosts of the cosmos. The flights of Rimbaud are comparable to the ceaseless wanderings of the clown from village to village, and like the frantic gestures and somersaults

of their performances.

Violence: Rimbaud and Nietzsche The essential violence in Rimbaud’s nature prevented him [rom becoming a bohemian. No laziness was in him, no useless and flaccid posing. His violence was committed with intent and purposefulness. There is a photograph of Rimbaud taken at his first communion. It shows the features of a young boy not fixed on the spiritual experience he has gone through but irritated by the fuss of a new costume and a public cerernony. In the contraction of his eyebrows and the intenstty of his eyes, young Arthur is wrestling with some part of his spirit which is dissaus-

fied. There has been a bending of his will, but no submission of his spirit

has followed the reception of the sacrament.

Rirbaud resembles Nietzsche in denouncing what both interpreted 61

Rimbaud

in Christianity as the morality of enslavement. Rimbaud’s line in “les Premiéres communions,” “Christ eternal thief of energy,” paraliels Nietzsche’s in Ecce Homo: “I would rather be a satyr than a saint.” The modem

artist yearns to see himself as the homunculus, the little man who is physically crushed by the world. The heroes whom Henry Miller talks about the most are all the same type of passionate clown: Rimbaud and Lawrence, Charlie Chaplin and Saint Francis. On the homunculus the shadow of doom announced by Spengler | and Lawrence falls more tragically than on the proud. Oswald Spengler, the prophet of cyclical history, D. H. Lawrence, the psychologist of love and sex, and Henry Miller, the visionary who perceives his wisdom in the microcosm of the heart, are all contained in the boy-prophet Arthur

Rimbaud and in Jim Morrison, the rock singer who strives to “break on through to the other side.” Rimbaud and Nietzsche were born at almost the same historical moment, and they testify to the same fermentation of revolt and ecstasy. Both refer to unhappy memories of childhood and youth, and both believed in a life of voyage and displacement. After combatting bourgeois values manifested in the family and in the state, Rimbaud attacked Christ

as the thief of power. And Nietzsche, after his attacks on Wagner and Schopenhauer, flailed Christ as the prophet of humility and pity.

Nietzsche’s sentence in Ecce Homo, “1 do not wish to be a saint, 1

would rather be a clown,” has had a curious history in artists who followed him, as well as in Rimbaud. In the writing of Apollinaire and Cocteau and in the paintings of Picasso, Rouault, and Tchelitchev, the discipline and the mask of the clown have become lessons in spirituality.

The character of the clown is the new fusion of Apollo, god of serenity, and Dionysus, god of intoxication.

The visionary in Rimbaud is the vagabond in the most sharply modern sense of the word. He is the hitchhiker setting out to corrupt and to be corrupted. The key is in the poem “Vagabond,” where Rimbaud talks about returning to the primitive state of offspring of the sun.

Vision is a form of prophecy. When Rimbaud says in “Parade,” “1 alone have the key to the barbarous procession,” he defines the poetprophet as the man who speaks of the Eternal, of God present in all his creatures. He sees the invisible spectacle (parade) going on behind the Rimbaud

62

real one. Behind the gestures of the young actors, he sees the dangerous resources of their intent. This image of the circus in “Parade” is the comédie magnétique, which becomes a vision revealing the false demigods of our history, those whom

Auden admonishes when he writes, “Prohibit sharply the rehearsed responses.” Rimbaud saw behind the “rehearsed responses” of our modern Molochs and bohemians, and behind the costumes of Cherubino and

the gigolo.

Chronologically, Rimbaud’s vision comes between Walt Whitman's

mid-nineteenth-century vision of the agrarian frontier and Hart Crane’s twentieth-century vision of industry and mechanization. These three

poets resemble one another temperamentally in their unrest and in their flights. Rimbaud’s vision is surrounded by the fertility symbol of Whit-

man’s land and by the nonfertility symbol of Crane’s bridge. The remembrance of a lost faith, as highly imagistic and powerful as Catholicism, is at the soutrce of Rimbaud’s moral struggle in Une Saison en enfer and of his visions in Les Illuminations.

Les Hlluminations

The manuscript of the Illuminations is a collection of pieces unnumbered and without dates, except one (Bruxelles, Boulevard du Régent), written berween 1872 and 1873, in Paris, London, and Belgium. They were given first to Verlaine, who was responsible {or the title, meaning “colored plates,” and then passed into the hands of Charles de Sivry, who pub-

lished them in the magazine La Vogue in 1886. Twelve of the pieces are in

verse, and the other thirty-four are in prose. Five additional pieces were

written probably between December 1872, when Rimbaud left London, and January

1873, when

he returned there. Anorher page of prose,

“Bethsaida, la piscine des cing galeries,” which deals with the gospel story of Jesus at the pool of Bethsaida, was written between February and April 1873.

Les Hlluminations is today the most mysterious part of Rimbaud’s work. First his poems were recognized, and then Une Saison en enfer. The

art of the prose poems is oracular. Nature 63

Rimbaud

is the starting point for

Rimbaud as it was for Baudelaire (“la nature est un temple”). In these pages of Rimbaud a natural object ends by symbolizing human life. They appear today the most serene and the most philosophically penetrating ot all that Rimbaud wrote. Rimbaud’s city is always a vision, that of a poet’s unreal city, imag-

ined as something incompatible with ordinary life. Its gigantism, fist, separates it from the usual world. The life of the European capitals may have inspired such pictures. The poet is fascinated by the tumultuous aspect of cities, by the unceasing movement in the streets, by bizarre magnificent constructions, such as those that would captivate a boy brought up in the Ardennes. Their basis may be in Rimbaud'’s knowledge of Paris, London, and Brussels, but their poetic form makes them into cities of the future. Similar feelings are in Mortison: “People are strange, when you're a stranger.”

By use of the dream, Rimbaud adds his testimonial to the belief of

Nerval, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé that the purest disinterestedness of

poets manifests itself in the dream. The very emergence of Rimbaud’s

cities from the darkness, from a lower darkness, makes them analogous

to the birth of poems out of the unconsciousness of the poet. In order to reach the dream pictures of his cities, Rimbaud must have suppressed what the surrealists would call his conscious faculties, Nine of the Iluminations are centrally concerned with the vision of the city. “Ouvriers” is a poem on the suburbs, and hence on the approach

to the city. “Les Ponts” is literally that: the bridges that lead directly into the city and that give a vision of complexity, and the cacophony of confused sounds. “Ville” is a sober poem, composed of deliberate and factual statements in which the poet calls himself a citizen of the metrop-

olis. In “Orniéres” the enchantment begins. It is closely comparable to the

fairy world of other poems, where an ambulatory circus metamorphoses

the city. Then two intricately detailed poems, both called “Villes,” provide

grandiose synthetic pictures of the dream cities. There remain three poems, far more difficult to characterize: “Métropolitain,” “Barbare,” and

“Promontoire.”

Each of the five stanzas of “Métropolitain” names its subject: the city,

the battle, the countryside, the sky, the poet’s sirength. The large figure of other writings, of “Mémoire” and of “Aube,” dominates the final stanza, Rimbaud

64

and again the poet struggles with her, as if she were mother or spouse.

“Force” is the culminating word in the scene of the struggle: the snow, the ice, the black flags (of the army?), the blue rays (of the sky?), the dark

perfumes from the sun. One of the most densely written pages of Rimbaud, “Promontoire,” appears as one solid paragraph—almost as one solid sentence. There are actually two sentences, the first an exclamation of four lines, and the second a twenty-line period, provided with semicolons, which unfolds as solidly as the rock-bound promontory which is its proud subject.

Water is the first notation." The promontory is seen from the ship as

dawn breaks. In the second sentence, the theme of gigantism is emphasized with geographical specifications: Carthaginian canals, Venetian em-

bankments, and Etna-like volcanoes. Even America is here, represented

by Brooklyn. Hotels, placed like promontories, are decorated with the art of men and overlook the world and travelers from all countries. “Barbare” is the apocryphal message. It is one of the rare instances when Rimbaud repeats words and phrases to achieve an incantatory

effect. We have remurmed to barbarism, to a time before time, such as that

predicted in “Mauvais Sang.” As if he alone were left in the vanishing world, the poet recovers from the fanfares of hercism. The images are metallic and

incorruptible.

Fire burms everything in the poem.

The

isolated words are recognizable, but they are not joined in familiar ways.

The total effect is one of multiple new growths and new flashes rising up

from the burnt and buming world. This is the end of the ciry. Especially in the famous definition of the origin of art as combining

Apollonian and Dionysian elements does the philosophy ot Nietzsche

recall Rimbaud’s poetic theory and practice. The measured, luminous

construction of so many of the Illuminations testifies to the Apollonian power to create harmonious beauty, which Nietzsche illustrates with the

example of Greek sculpture. The rapid fulgurant collapse of landscapes, cities, and dreams in the poems has in it something of the drunken Dionysian frenzy threatening all forms.

The philosopher and the poet, in the exceptional attention that has been paid to them during this century, testify to the deep ambivalence in the creation of any major art, to the strange combination of opposites

required by the work, whether it is called Apollo-Dionysus or the spleen65

Rimbaud

idéal (of Baudelaire).

Nietzsche

believed

that an artistic creation

is

prompted by something which the artist lacks. Homer, for example, would have created no Achilles if he had been an Achilles. Taken sepa-

rately, Une Saison appears largely Dionysian and Les [ltuminations largely

Apollonian. Combined, they illustrate Nietzsche’s doctrine that art is both a response to suffering and a celebration of life.

The Poet and the Angel By making of poetry a language capable of translating his visions, Rimbaud created his character of an angel, of a man renouncing his habits and native atmosphere for another atmosphere consecrated to a total kind of solitude. Between the spiritual world and the material world there are no real barriers. Angels were created at the same time as man. They

are pure spirits, intermediaries between God and the world. The relation-

ship between an angel and a man is so close that man often strives to

develop the angelic part of his nature and to surpass his human condition. This is sometimes called “angelism”—the angelic pretense in man

whereby he tries to dilate his self and reach a knowledge more intuitive than his human intelligence. The prose poems of Rimbaud often appear to be exercises or stratagems by which the poet is attempting to efface the material world in order to reach the supernatural. Here the poet takes his place beside Plato

and Plotinus. But for man to know more than his greatness brings with it a grave peril. In Rimbaud we see Prometheus the fire-stealer as well as Icarus, the one who fell after having risen high and close to suprasensible

realities.

Rimbaud marks a central stage of development in the history of modern French poetry, berween Nerval and Claudel, a stage that is best described as a resanctification of human speech. His work, so abruptly and dramatically interrupted when it seemed compelled by a mystical silence, was succeeded by the writings of Mallarmé, which have given a more serene confirmation to the inevitable poetic failure. The intolerance

of the adolescent rebel was followed by the longer vigilance of Mallarmé, with his incomparable mastery of poetic form. Rimbaud

66

s

Rimbaud willed himself free as a man and as a poet, only to find that his freedom resulted in a solitude such as only an angel could bear.

Childhood wounded him and made him a poet. He changed the world.

And today, one hundred years after his death, he is not so much a poet as

he is the world he invented, the climate he invented.

Conclusion: Rimbaud in the Sorbonne On January 12, 1952, in the Salle Liard, René Etiemble's defense of his thesis, “Le Mythe de Rimbaud,” was a major event of the season. The

large hall was crowded with students, professors, writers, and notables

from Paris society. The jury was composed of Professors Levaillant, Carré, Bruneau (who presided), Jasinski, and Dédeyan. Each in tum complimented Etiemble on the enormity of his task and spoke about some aspect of the principal thesis and the complementary thesis. Levaillant, first, praised the indefatigable scholar. For twenty years Etiemble had been working on his investigation. His subject had been accepted by the Sorbonne in 1937. Since that time he had lived in the United States (where he taught at the University of Chicago), in Central America, and in Egypt. He had

accumulated sixteen thousand fiches, or items, on the myth of Rimbaud—a prodigious documentation, even for a thése de doctorat at the Sorbonne. He had read in several languages and discovered practically everything published about Rimbaud between 1869 and 1950. Etiemble had studied every attempt to make of Rimbaud what he called a myth ora fable disproving or controverting the truth. Etiemble’s well-known polemical style had not been softened or altered for the writing of “Le Mythe de Rimbaud.” The thesis bears not on the work of Rimbaud but on the commenta-

tors, who are legion. Etiemble argued that each of the literary myths of Rimnbaud is based on some error of interpretation. For the symbolists it was particularly “Le Bateau ivre.” For the surrealists it was the prose work

Un Coeur sous une soutane (A heart under a cassock). The Catholic myth of Rimbaud’s deathbed conversion was promulgated by his sister {sabelle. Etiemble sees the myth of Rimbaud as a completely organized religion, 67

Rimbaud

with its forms of worship, its sacred books, its sacred interpretations. He calls the eyewitnesses of the poet’ life the “evangelists™ Verlaine, Isabelle,

her husband Paterne Berrichon, a school friend, Ernest Delahaye. These

were responsible for the first exaggerations, for the method by which each school in turn has appropriated Rimbaud: symbolists, surrealists, fascists, communists, existentialists. Finally, when Rimbaud has been treated as demon, angel, magician,

prophet, nothing human remains: he must be a god. This is the result, for Ftiemble, of the curious combination of hagiography and scandal characterizing the works of the poet from Charleville. I had the privilege of being present at the Sorbonne soutenance, and 1 remember that on the whole the members of the jury showed respect for Etiemble. At one moment, Levaillant, realizing the candidate’s passion for truth, quoted Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. Dédeyan, the Sor-

bonne professor of comparative literature, reminded Etiemble that in his thesis he claimed the birth of other literary myths—Lorca, T. E. Law-

rence, Genet, and Artaud—and asked whether Lautréamont should not

be added to the list. Etiemble replied thart in a recent stock-taking, Rim-

baud surpassed Lautréamont and Mallarmé combined, and that he feared

the Artaud myth, promulgated by the Revue K, where the named Artaud

was considered to be a mysterious contraction of Art(hur} Rimb (aud).

[ remember that during the second half of the soutenance, Professor Carré, in his praise of Etiemble’s work, called it the most extensive

investigation on a quasi-contermnporary writer. Jasinski, the last of the jury

to speak, was the most critical, the most adverse to the idea of the thesis and especially to the spirit in which it had been written. He even suggested that Etiemble did not like Rimbaud and was perpetrating in his thesis some kind of vengeance on the poet who must have harmed him when he was young! In describing the thesis as a whole, he used the word canular, {from the language of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which

designates an elaborate trick of mystification.

This word canular must have struck the imagination of Etiemble,

who, trom Montpellier, where he resumed his teaching at the university,

sent to the weekly newspaper Arts a letter on the question of whether the myth of Rimbaud is a canular. At the time of the soutenance, the word had amused him.

Rimbaud

68

He had known that the rules of the game demanded that the jury inflict some degree of torture on the candidate-victim. But with the report that the sociologist Roger Caillois had also exaggerated the use of “myth” or “religion” when it was only a question of verbal inflation, Etiemble

began wondering if he himself were the real creator of the myth and whether he had been decetving himself during the twenty years’ labor. Etiemble reread his two thousand pages without having his convictions altered. In applying the word “myth” to the first part of his “Structure du mythe”—the various characterizations of Rimbaud—he was

using the term in its loosest connotation of error, collective lie, or illusion. But in the second part of his thesis, he used the word in the fuller sense of

legend in its relationship with the supernatural and involving some kind of rite. That twenty authors had spoken of Rimbaud as the myth of Satan,

and that André Breton, in the surrealist exhibition of 1847, had erected

an altar to Léonie Aubois d’Ashby, the mysterious heroine of “Dévotion,” one of the Hluminations, helped to justify Etiemble’s second use of the word in the central part of his thesis. The sacrament of suicide had been

initiated by the two surrealists Vaché and Rigaut and by the American Hart Crane in the name of Rimbaud.

Caillois wonders whether the postage stamps bearing the face of

Rimbaud (from the Fantin-Latour painting) have affected the idolaters. A suicide is neither a rite nor a sacrament unless it is performed in some ceremony and fulfills some theological function. Otherwise it is simply a gesture of revolt or despair, far more philosophical than religious. To substantiate his viewpoint, Caillois recalled the activity of the bobbysoxers in relationship to Frank Sinatra. Societies were formed, insignia

created, fainting and collective manifestations observed. The writer Joseph Delteil, who

once lived for some years near

Montpellier, participated in the debate in a letter sent to Arts. Rimbaud is not a god, according to Delteil, but he is not an ordinary poet. On the day

Rimbaud chose Harar rather than the Académie Frangaise or the Island of

Guernsey, he instilled in every artist an uneasy conscience. The fact that Rimbaud turned to hard manual labor after writing such a book as Une Saison en enfer marks the outstanding logic of the poet’s life. Each week in Paris the critical debate grew more complicated. [t 1s a familiar undertaking for a critic to write about a poet. Etiemble’s book 1s 69

Rimbpaud

more unusual: a man writes on the men who write on a poet. Then Caillois wrote on Etiemble, and in Arts the playwright Arthur Adamov wrote on Caillois and on Etiemble’s personal view of Rimbaud. He feared that Ftiemble had not gone beyond the stage of pure documentation, the establishment of a gigantic card index. The facts of Rimbaud’s life are both clear and ambiguous: his precociousness as a poet at fifteen; the revolt he waged against his family, his city, and all bourgeois standards; his study of the occult sciences; his flair for shocking; his vagabond life with Verlaine; his denunciation of rationalism; his poetic work, with its important innovations in the art of the

prose poem; his flight from Europe and existence as a merchant-adventurer in Africa; his painful return to France; and his death in the Marseille hospital. It would be difficult to oind a poet’s lite more susceptible than Rimbaud’s to varying interpretations, capable of engendering an entire body of legends, unless one thinks also of Jim Morrison. Morrison has

generated legends, and the facts are hazy. One could devote a whole book to the legends of Jim Morrison—down to the film by Oliver Stone. 1t is the legend of Rimbaud that attracted Morrison, just as it is the legend of

Morrison that attracted Stone. The legends became more important than the reality.

The precociousness of Rimbaud as a poet had been confirmed. The

struggle he waged with his mother was a fact, but there is nothing unusual about his revolt. Most boys would have behaved in the same way,

given the same conditions. His sullenness and unbearable behavior in literary groups in Paris might easily have masked the typical timidity and gaucherie of a young fellow from the provinees. The only real documents on the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine are the writings of the two poets. What remains of Rimbaud after all the errors have been rectified and the disguises removed is the twenty-year-old poet-creator of a new work, who renounced all literary activity and who held to his word to the end.

Rimbaud

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11 Jim Morrison Hear the voice of the Bard! Who Present, Past and Future sees Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word, That walked among the ancient trees. Rlake Songs of Experience

© Frank Lisciandro

1. His Life James Douglas Morrison was born on December 8, 1943, in Melbourne, a

small town in Florida. He was the first of three children. Six months after

Jim's birth, his father, Steve Morrison, who in 1967 became the youngest

admiral in the United States Navy, was assigned to duty in the Pacific. This was the first of several pericds of the father’s absence from his home. Admiral Morrison devoted his life to his naval career, which took him to various parts of the country, including Washington, D.C., Albuquergue, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Jim, with his sister Anne and

brother Andy, grew up in the restricted community of military bases. Their mother Clara was the dominant figure in the lives of the three children.

At the time of the Korean War, the admiral was sent off to the Pacific

for a year. Jim was then ten. He was studious, a bit chubby, and on good

terms with his teachers because of his polite behavior and his intel-

ligence. At eleven he was expelled from the Boy Scouts (where his mother had placed him) for having tormented the leader. When Jim reached thirteen—by then the family had moved ten times—they settled in a town in the northem part of California. In early adolescence Jim became more difficult, more provocative. The counterculture magazine Mad interested him, and soon he was

reading authors of the Beat Generation. Another move for the family brought them, in 1957, close to San Francisco, considered at that time

the center of the Beat Generation.

In some

of the bookstores, Allen

Ginsberg and Gregory Corso recited their poems. These men were “rock”

figures belore rock was recognized. In fact, Jim disliked rock at the beginning. For music he preferred Negro spirituals, which he heard in some of the poorer bars on the cutskirts of the city. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, was one of his favorite books. He was fascinated by the character Dean Moriarty, a wandering cowboy and rebellious spirit of the fifties. The book was first published in 1957 and

epitomized the Beat philosophy. Jim used to quote the last sentence: “I think of Dean Moriarty, 1 even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father he

| never found.” His English teacher at George Washington High School in AlexanJim Morrison

74

dria, Virginia, remembers that James Morrison was the only pupil in his class who had read and understood James Joyce’s Ulysses. Jim used to ask

his teacher about such strange books that the man felt the boy was inventing them. They turned out to be treatises on demonology written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At fifteen he began keeping a diary, and soon notebooks were filled with brief entries, ideas or poems, which six years later would reappear in the early lyrics he wrote for songs. He enjoyed mystifying his teacher and classmates with excuses for his lateness in getting to class——he had been kidnapped by gypsies, or he had to be operated on for a brain tumor. Even in high school, he was already fascinating the gallery. The stories about Jim when he attended Florida State University are numerous, partly true, partly legendary. They seem today to have been fashioned as predictions of his future career. On the campus of Florida State, he shared an apartment with five other students. He idolized Elvis Presley at that time and would turn up the volume when the radio played

his records. His apartment mates stood this for three months and then forced him to leave. The following year he enrolled in the film department of the University of California at Los Angeles, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg were students there. Weekends Jim spent on the beach at

Venice, the hippie center. There he took for the first time 1sp and amphetamines. The friends he made there were among the most rebellious in the university. One of these new friends was Dennis Jakob,

who would become the assistant to Coppola when he shot Apocalypse

Now. Jim and Dennis made plans to make a film on the life of Rimbaud, in which Jim was to play Rimbaud. The project was never carried out. Both fellows had a hard time meeting the college routine, the hours ot classes and other obligations.

Frank Lisciandro met Jim at ucLA, where he, Jim and Ray Manzarek were students of film. Frank became a close friend of Jim's and has

written about “Jim’s undying interest in hlm,” particularly in its theory, history, and politics. At ucLa Jim made his first film. It had no visible plot and was considered a disaster by most. In Jim’s first book of poems, Lords and the New Creatures, there are several passages on him: 75

Jim Morrison

Cinema is the most totalitarian of the arts . . .

Each film depends upon all the cthers and drives you on to others. The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death. Cinema is created by men for the conselation of men. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

One day in July 1965, on the beach in Venice, Jim mentioned to Manzarek that he was writing songs and recited “Moonlight Drive.” This was the beginning of the rock band The Doors. The name comes from Blake: “There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are doors.” The jazz drummer John Densmore was found at a meditation center. When the group added Robby Krieger on guitar, they

made their debut at the London Fog on Sunset Strip. They played at Gazzarri's and the Whiskey a Go-Go bar. By then Morrison was something of a stage performer with a solid group of fans. The club manager at the Whiskey made them leave when the Doors performed “The End,” with its most explicit Oedipal ending. After that dismissal, they played at Gazzarri's club on the Strip. One night when there was a sparse audience, Jim sang “When the Music's

Over” He freaked out, screamed, and threw his mike stand on to the ground. When asked why he did that, he said, “You never know when

you're giving your last performance.” By this time the Doors were ready to record. They had tunes that had been hoarded up since their ucrLa days. This first album was ready by the fall of 1966, but the release was held off until January 1967. Ray, John,

and Robby had decided that Jim would be the focus. But Jim gave credit

to the group as a whole for the compositions. All four band members were to share the revenue equally. Jim was the one who attracted the fans, They liked the eerie songs, the Freudian symbolism with its suggestion of

sex and death. John Densmore, in his excellent book Riders on the Storm,

speaks of the kindred spirit that he found with the others. “Jim was mysterious. 1 dug that,” he wrote. He enjoyed listening to their talk about

French new-wave cinema. “See 400 Blows, John,” they urged. He was

puzzled by the title, but it turned out to be Truffaut’s Les 400 coups. He was mpressed by Jim’s tatk about Nietzsche and his quotations from Rimbaud and Blake. Jim’s lyric “Break on Through to the Other Side” Jim Morrison

76

helped him to make up his mind to join Ray and Jim. What was “the other side? the void? the abyss? When

this first album,

called The Doors, was released, the four

musicians had no idea it was to become a classic and their biggest seller.

Jim seemed to be pleased with “The End.” “This is the end, beautiful friend.” It illustrated his dark side, the dark stream of consciousness in his

temperament. After “Break on Through,” the opening song, which is fast and loud, the second, “Soul Kitchen,” has a more quiet thythm: “I'd really

like to stay here all night.” The third song, “The Crystal Ship,” is a beautiful ballad, addressed to a girl: “Oh tell me where your freedom lies.” The last cut on side one, “Light My Fire,” a lyric by Robby Krieger, was destined to become a major hit of the Doors. San Francisco had become the symbol of the counterculture move-

ment. A huge crowd attended the performance of the Doors in the Fillmore Auditorium. Many had come from the crowd in Golden Gate

Park, site of a celebration of “the new spirit of consciousness.” There the poets had held forth: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Michael McClure, who later became a close friend and advisor of Jim Morrison.

This time the reviews said the Doors was a band to watch. There

were changes in their dress: Ray wore a sport coat, Jim leather pants, and

Robby and John exhibited the flower-child style—dyed shirts and Nehru

jackets.

Three weeks later the Doors played again at the Fillmore, this time

on a program with the Grateful Dead. At the Avalon, a psychedelic ballroom in San Francisco that had to be filled with bodies to absorb the sound, “The End” received considerable attention. The other Doors felt

that Jim was coming into his own that night. In fact, they felt that about themselves. Beginning with the lines: There’s danger on the edge of town . . . Ride the snake, he's old And his skin is cold

and then: The killer awoke before dawn,

he put his boots on, he took a face from the ancient gallery 77

Jim Morrison

the crowd was in a trance. As John Densmore wrote: “We knocked them out.”

Even after this success, the Doors were surprised that San Francis-

cans liked them. The lyrics of other bands spoke of love and peace. The tyrics of the Doors were about sex and death. Jim dressed all in black, no flowers in his hair. In 1967 many young men began dressing like Jim in black leather. They invited the Doors to parties that at first they attended. Densmore compared them to scenes out of a Fellini film. The summer of 1967 was a period of traveling from coast to coast,

trying to make it in New York. In July, “Light my Fire” hit first place on the charts, and the Doors began making plans for new engagements. This was to be their way of life for the next few years. They were well known in New York because of the favorable reviews given to the album by the New

York Times, Newsweek, and Vogue. Time magazine quoted a statement of

Jim’s which had been used in the Elektra Records-New York biography as well as in Stone’s film: “I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, and chaos.” These are words of Rimbaud, Artaud (Theater of Cruelty), and

possibly Lautréamont. Ray had a close friend, Dorothy, who was with him before the Doors

became tamous. They were inseparable. She attended rehearsals, dinners, recording sessions. The other three, Jim, Robby, and John, were still

looking for the ideal girl. One of the first concerts with reserved seats was given at the Village Theater on the Lower East side. All four Doors were apprehensive. The

theater was packed that night. The manager had told John Densmore to

limit the playing to thirty minutes. John had no time to tell the others before the curtain rose. Jim took hold of the curtain and rose up with it. Halfway up, he let go and dropped to the stage. Immediately he took hold of the mike and started to sing “Break on Through.” They were asked to stop after thirty minutes but ignored the request and moved into “The

End,” which usually lasted fifteen to twenty mimites. They did cut the song by five minutes. This was one of their first oppositions to backstage managemerit. When they returned to Los Angeles, Jim met Pamela Courson at the

Whiskey a Go-Go Bar. She was a redhead with green eyes, a short, shy girl who had come to Hollywood “to find herself.” She was nineteen, and her Jim Morrison

78

© Frank Lisciandro

father was a high school principal. Jim talked with her at the bar. They took an apartment together in Laurel. The other Doors hoped that this

relationship would help quiet Jim and stabilize him. Ray and Dorothy bought a house. Robby and John were roommates in Laurel Canyon. Jim was working on new lyrics. The words of one of them began

with: “People are strange when you're a stranger / Faces look ugly when you're alone.” When Jim hummed a few bars of the music he had worked

on, Robby Krieger, who was with him, felt it would be a hit. Jim was

excited that he was writing again.

Work started on the second album in August 1967. The Doors were

being advised about managers and contracts and about establishing the

legality of owning their own songs. and they were rehearsing the songs that were to make up the new album, Strange Days. The lyrics were more and more about the dark side of man and about loneliness. The Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper was soon to be released. The Doors knew that the Beatles had bought up ten copies of their first album. The two bands were so different that there was no sense of rivalry. The San Francisco rivals of the Doors, the Jelferson Airplane, asked 79

Jim Morrison

to visit the recording studio. When they arrived, Jim was singing “The

Hotse Latitudes™: “When the still sea conspires an armor . . . / And the

first animal is jettisoned. . . ." By now the studio was a familiar place for

the four men. Jim and the othets seemed more relaxed, more confident.

One day they saw a woman in a corner of the control room. They won-

dered how she had gotten in. It was Joan Didion, who was to write exten-

sively about the Doors in an article that first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and later in her book The White Album. She praised the musi-

cianship of the three instrumentalists, and then described the fourth, Jim

Morrison, in his black vinyl pants, who arrived late for that session. During these recording sessions Jim became more and more unreliable, his personal life more and tnore secret. In speaking with a Time magazine interviewer, he called the Doors “erotic politicians,” at a time when he was being called “the Dionysus of Rock and Roll.”

The first big song after “The End” was “When the Music’s Over.” Jim

did not turn up the night it was being recorded. The following day he appeared in the studio and sang his part for the song. It worked well. Jim

was proud of this lyric. He was attached to the three-line section: Before [ sink into the big sleep, I want to hear, | want to hear

The scream of the butterfly.

This phrase about the butterfly came from the sign on the front of a porno theater in New York. Jim had noticed it on the marquee. His borrowings came from many sources, as diverse as Blake, Rimbaud, and an adult cinema.

Strange Days was released in October 1967. The single chosen from

it was “People Are Strange.” The critics found that the themes and images in this album were stronger than those in the first album. The music was considered as erotic as in the first album, but more terrifying. The Doors had gained confidence from their first success. “Horse Latitudes”

goes back to Jim’s high school notebooks, “When the Music’s Qver,” the

long piece in the album, has some of the favorite phrases of Morrison’s fans: “Dance on fire as it intends / Music is your only friend until the end.” After a year and a half of performances, the Doors had moved from crowded dives to ten thousand-—seat arenas and then to eighteen Jim Morrison

80

thousand-—seat arenas. Robby gave more and more solos on his guitar.

John became more dramatic with his drumsticks. Ray's style, with his

head bent over the keyboard, did not change very much. Jim performed acrobatically. He moved more on stage or talked to people in the balcony

and jumped off the stage. As the crowds got bigger, Jim felt he had to do

more, such succeeded “an electric At the

as falling on the stage and writhing like a snake. He usually in getting responses from the audience. Ray once called Jim shaman.” end of the year, in December 1967, trouble began in New

Haven, Connecticut. Belore the concert there, Jim had been maced in a dressing room by a policeman. Jim told the audience about the incident

and taunted the police standing in front of the stage. They came on to the stage and dragged Jim off. He spent the night in jail and was then acquitted. In the minds of the Doors, especially Ray, the scene marked the beginning of serious trouble with the authorities, and the possible end of all that the group had worked for. A few months after the New Haven episode, in February 1968, there

was talk of a third album. Tt was hard to find time for rehearsals, for work

on new songs, and for writing new songs. The Doors had become big

business. Paul Rothchild, in charge of the albums, felt they needed a new hit, and suggested a song they had written two years before, could be that hit: “Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?”

Once, in the studio, Jim asked on his drums. When John began “Five to one, one to five / No one what “Five to one” meant, Jim did

John to play something very primitive a strong 4/4 beat, Jim began to sing: here gets out alive.” When John asked not answer, but Paul Rothchild said he

thought it meant that by 1975, there would be five young people to one old person. This song was to be the final song in the third album. This album, Waiting for the Sun, took a long time 1o make. Technically it is considered a fine album. But it was not as exciting a performance as albums one and two. “The Unknown Soldier” was one of the hardest songs to record. Rothchild was having trouble with Jim’s attitude and

appearance. He was trying to get as much tape on Jim as possible, before

the singer gave up cormpletely. He encouraged the others, especially John,

to stay with the show. He used to say: “There’s the Beatles, the Stones, and the Doors.”

81

Jim Morrison

The first single from the third album was “Hello, 1 Love You,” and the second was “Unknown Soldier”: “Wait until the war is over / And we're both a little older . . . / And it’s all over for the unknown soldier.” This was an aritiwar song. [ronically, Vietnam was called a “rock-and-roll war” because the soldiers in Vietnam chose to listen to the Doors records to help them survive.

In July 1968 the Doors had a really big engagement in the Hollywood Bowl. There was worry about the acoustics in an outdoor amphitheater. Walls always helped bounce the sound off. Additional amplifiers had to be constructed. The Doors were helped by a movie crew of ucLa film school {riends of Ray and Jim. Mick Jagger and the Stones’ producer, Jimmy Miller, were to attend the concert. They occupied one of the reserved boxes. A welcome roar from eighteen thousand spectators greeted

the four men when they came on stage. But it was far from one of their best concerts.

[t was said that Jim had taken acid just before going on. And he wore, for the first time in a concert, a gold crucifix around his neck. When John asked him later why he wore the crucifix, Jim replied, “I like the symbol visually, and it may confuse people.”

Because the Doors had something of a reputation in England, they

took off in August 1968 for seventeen days on their first trip to Europe.

They were engaged to play the Round House, an old bara in northern

London, for two nights, with the Jefferson Airplane. They performed welt both nights.

They were becoming more sensitive to the feelings of their audience and therefore began to change the choice of songs they had decided on.

On stage they would quarrel with one another about what the next song

should be. In Copenhagen, for example, Jim wanted one song, but Ray

began to play another, and they all followed him. It often fell to John

Densmore to decide. He had developeda sensitivity to the audience, to

when they wanted a change of pace, or when they seemed bored.

At Frankfurt, the two promoters who were in charge took very good

care of all their needs. When the curtain went up that night, the audience seemed to be anticipating an exciting evening. But the first two songs, “Break on Through” and “Back Door Man,” were followed by silence. It was the same with the third song. Then Jim began to chide and mock the Jim Morrison

82

audience. He threatened to hurl the mike stand audience showed no fear of such a threat. Perhaps acted out by Jim, was what the young people of forget since the war, Back home in the fall of 1968, there were an

into the crowd. The the scene of violence, Frankfurt wanted to increasing number of

skirmishes between the Doors and the police. In Minneapolis the four

players began using bodyguards. In Phoenix the management pulled the electric plugs after one hour’s playing. The young audience sided with the

musicians and began destroying the seats. The Phoenix Gazette reviewed the concert and made it appear like a typical political riot.

Similar occurrences took place at the concerts in Chicago and Cleveland. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Jim commented on what were called the “riots” at the Doors’ concerts. He insisted there were never any real riots. At times, he confessed, he had tried to start a few minor riots, to

stimulate activity, because people always enjoy running around at a rock

concert and moving up closer to the stage. A real riot, he said, is a “violent

thing.” The Doors never had much of that. In December the Doors were rehearsing for their fourth album, to be

calied The Soft Parade. One of their biggest concerts was played at the Forum in Los Angeles. It seated eighteen thousand. At the party afterwards, Michael Lydon from the New York Times interviewed Jim. Lydon knew that the concert was to be followed by a still bigger one in Madison

Square Garden. He had been surprised that some of the young people at the Forum had dared to laugh at Morrison. The lead singer agreed that the situation was changing for the Doors, that their greatest successes

were perhaps behind them. They now had to play too often. They had to rehearse too often in the studio, where it was difficult to create new songs. In the early days, when they played the clubs, they had more time to work together, After these later concerts, each of the four musicians tended to take off alone in his own direction. It they could get to an 1sland by themselves, perhaps then it would be possible to recover their old

vitality and again start creating.

This was the time {1968-70) when Jim was composing and prepar-

ing to publish his first book of poerns, The Lords and the New Creatures. In January 1970, rehearsals for the fourth album were going on and

inevitably creating tension and even disagreements among the players. 83

Jim Morrison

Paul Rothchild was anxious to have new songs. He was aware that the third album, Waiting for the Sun, had led some fans to question the belief that the Doors were the avatars of the avant-garde. When The Soft Parade appeared, these fans charged that the Doors had “sold out.” However,

from today’s perspective, the album was not in the least a failure. The Soft Parade was costly to make. Something of a jazz influence can

be heard on the record. This had been a dream of Ray and John. George Harrison, one of the Beatles, came to see Elektra’s new studio. Jim always

took a long time to move from the vocal booth to the control room in order to hear the playback. He seemed to John, who has written of this, to be shy about hearing his own voice. The title song, “The Soft Parade,” begins with the line: “When [ was

back there in seminary school” and the phrase about “petitioning the

Lord” is contradicted by the line “You cannot petition the Lord with prayer.” Jim would sing these lines in such a strong way that John, because of his Catholic background, was worried about the implied blasphemy. Playing live had become for the drummer a new religion, but he worried about the power he possessed, about the power they all possessed. It was power over a public that might make them vulnerable. Can you give me sanctuary!

[ must find a place to hide . . . The man is at the door.

The words and music of The Soft Parade were by Jim. It was a new Jim, as

Danny Sugerman says in Ne One Here, more serious and more boyish at the same time. He had the habit now of reading fragments from The Lords and the New Creatures at moments during the program. To all of the players, perhaps because of this greater sense of power, a performance

seetned to turn into a drama. In the book of poems, there are passages about the shaman who leads a religious meeting, who tries by means of drugs, chants, and dances, to enter a trance.

In the seance, the shaman led. . . . He acrs like 2 madman.

The night of January 24, 1969, at Madison Square Garden, twenty thousand people roared welcome to the Doors when they came to the Jim Morrison

84

stage. The great worry that night for John, Robby, and Ray was over Jim. Would he be sober enought for the concert? Afrer a good beginning, they agreed to play “Unknown Soldier.” }Jim was singing well. When, in the song, he was “shot,” he fell to the floor and did not move. When he began

to move again, he resembled a shaman recovering from a fit. As usual, the last number that evening in New York was “The End.” This is the end, beautiful friend.

It hurts 10 set you free . .. Lost in a Roman wildemess of pain.

The metamorphosis here was Jim as QOedipus, Jim as actor in a Greek tragedy.

In 1969, because of his heavy drinking, Jim was becoming hard to

control. An early sign of Jfim's drinking problem had occurred at the

University of Michigan in 1967. There, Jim had been drunk. The night of the performance he missed cues and cursed out the students. John was so incensed that he left in the middle of a song. He was {ollowed by Robby.

Jim then began to sing one of his lyrics, “Maggie M'Gill, She Lived on a Hill,” a blues song. Ray accompanied him on Robby's guitar. The boos from the audience became so strong that Ray and Jim too left.

Several changes were made following this incident. In 1968 Bill

Siddons becarme manager. The Doors no longer felt like a group. Jim was

turning against the public image he had made of himself. John Densmore believed Jim’s poem “The Celebration of the Lizard” marked this change in Jim when he began to create another image of himself: [ am the Lizard King [ can do anything . . . For seven years [ dwelt In the loose palace of exile . . . Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth.

It is a mysterious poem which may provide the explanation of why Jim bought a lizard-skin suit and thus helped to form a new legend. It was a curious and tense time in the history of the Doors. Jim was teasing his audience, and the audience was teasing and provoking him. 85

Jim Morrison

Was he still the medicine man, or was he more simply a confused young man, not knowing what to do? Fame and fortune he had.

When, during a performance, they had difficulty in deciding on the

next song to play, they would fall back on “When the Music’s Over,” one of the most dramatic and provocative in their repertory. It had become a theater piece which they ali enjoyed performing, and it seemed to predict the end of the Doors. There is a prediction at the beginning: “When the music’s over / Turn out the light.” The word “agony” is not too strong to describe the crisis Jim was

going through at this time. At the end of a concert, rather than staying together to celebrate, they would separate: Ray and Dorothy would disappear; John and Robby might go off to a club to hear music. Jim

usually ended up in a bar. His career was slowing down, and the conviction was growing in him that he would not live much longer.

Before the Miami concert in March 1969, there had been bad signs that a major disaster was building up: disagreements between the pro-

moters of the concert and the Doors’ manager Bill Siddons; a change in the price of tickets; a message from Jim in New Orleans. He had missed

his plane, and would not reach Miami until seven p.mM. The Doors were to

begin their set at eight. The audience came at seven, and the other band that opened the show began their set immediately to keep order in the audience.

The success which the Doors had known thus far was not enough for

Jim. In Antonin Artaud’s book The Theater and its Double, Jim had read

that each performance should be out of its complacency. Jim had not yet reached the begin their part of the program. rowdy. Jim fAnally appeared, very

a risk. The audience should be shaken

hall when the Doors were supposed to People had begun to sound mad and drunk. The four musicians made their

way to the stage. John suggested they open with “Back Door Man.” After a

tew lines into the song, Jim stopped singing and talked directly to the crowd about himself, about being leonely, about needing love. This un-

usual public confession surprised the audience.

The three musicians.

worried about Jim’s behavior, began playing “Five to One.” Again, Jim sang 4 stanza of the poem to the thirteen thousand people who were

packed into a hall that normally held seven thousand. Both John, in Jim Morrison

86

narrating this scene (in Riders on the Storm), and Danny Sugerman, in his

account {in No One Here), indicate that the language Jim used in speaking

to the crowd after he stopped singing was strong and especially vile, so

much so that the audience was shocked. Jim’s state of drunkenness was probably not enough to justify the gross taunts. Thanks to Artaud, had become interested in The Living

Theater of julian Beck and his wife Judith Melina. The actors often appeared naked on stage where they performed their improvised plays or

sketches. The reasons Julian Beck gave for this behavior were Artaud’s: the need to shake up the auditnce, to move them out of their usual halflethargic state.

Jim was demoralized and did his best to demoralize his audience. There are several accounts of the event, and they agree that what transpired that evening in Miami seriously interrupted the career of the group. Jim urged the fans to come onto the stage. A policeman and Jim

exchanged hats. Jim was thrown into the audience, where he formed a snake dance. A large crowd followed him. Back on the stage, Jim pulled his shirt off and threw it to the audience. He began to open his pants, and

later said he thought he had exposed himself. When the warrant was issued for Jim's arrest, he was charged with

lewd behavior, indecent exposure, and with simulating oral copulation.

News of this episode was publicized everywhere: “Lizard King exposes

himself!” Immediately an extensive tour of the Doors encompassing

twenty cities was canceled. The manager Paul Rethchild reported succinctly, “The bottom fell out.” False friends, jealous musicians, and lawmen used Jim as a scapegoat, as a blatant example of immorality. It would be more justified to

explain his behavior as a misuse of power. Politics and personal shame had combined with other elements to bring about the chaos which

characterized the Miami conicert and all that followed. The Doors were banned everywhere. President Nixon gave his support to those who

organized rallies to condemn the Doors. The date of the Miami show was March 1, 1969. Twenty-two years later to the day, on March

1, 1991, Oliver Stone’s film The Doors was

released throughout the country. This brought back memories of the

concert at the Dinner Key auditoriurmn in Miami, when Jim appeared 87

Jim Morrison

bearded and holding a lamb. What happened that night is still unclear save that Jim and the audience acted as if in a frenzy. At the trial, the

major question asked was; “Did Jim expose his penis to the crowd?” All

the witnesses said “No,” but the six jurors declared Jim guilty of two charges. The statement made by Jim before Judge Goodman was simply, “1 was only exercising freedom of artistic expression.”

Mexico was a place where the Doors were allowed to play. In the

contract with the Mexican government they were permitted to perform

four nights in a disreputable club, called the Forum, and not allowed to

perform in the bullring of Mexico City. This was in June 1969. The Mexican press did not favor this visit from the Doors. El Heraldo called them “hippies” and “undesirables.”

Danny Sugerman reports that those performances were among the

best they ever gave. Jim had grown a full beard and was warmly welcomed despite the bad press. The first night the Mexicans were puzzled in their reactions to “The End.” But on the other nights they called for the

song. When Jim sang: “Father / Yes, son,” the young men in the room

supplied the following words in the song: “1 want to kill you.” To explain the popularity of the song, Jim was told that Mexico is an Oedipal country, where Mother Church dominates. Most of the July concerts had been canceled. However, there were

two shows in Los Angeles. For both shows the theater was sold out. It

would seem that the Miami scandal had been somewhat forgotten. Jerry Hopkins published a long interview he gave to Jim. An essay by a young

playwright, Harvey Perr, appearing in the Los Angeles Free Press was a new

appreciation of the Doors. Perr wrote of the simplicity of the songs. He was one of the first critics to speak of Jim as an authentic poet in the Walt Whitman tradition in American poetry. For him the revolutionary mes-

sage of the Doors songs transcended the more limited rock music.

Jim’s interest in filmmaking continued, especially when he drew up

plans with his friends, Frank Lisciandro and Paul Ferrara. The film they

hoped to make had a title by the end of summer 1969: HWY. Some of

Jim’s friends believed that he might succeed James Dean and become the motion picture star of the seventies.

At the pretrial hearing on November 9, 1969, Jim entered a plea of

Jim Morrison

88

“not guilty.” The trial was set for April 1970 but was pushed back to August. The verdict of the six-week trial was handed down on September 20. Jim was sentenced on October 30 to six months, but the case was on

appeal when he died.

The title of the fifth album, The Morrison Hotel, came from a real hotel

in a run-down section of Los Angeles, where a room rented for $2.50 a night. This album put the Doors back in favor with the critics. Ever since the Miami buffoon of Blues,” jim got myself

incident, Jim had been portrayed in the hippie media as the Rock and Roll. In the lead song of the new album, “Roadhouse announced a new [ife style. “When [ woke up this momin’, I a beer . . . / The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”

“Peace Frog” is autobiographical, with its memories of childhood and its apocalypse-like recall of the unending Vietnam War and the conflicts it created in America.

Blcod on the streets of the town of Chicago . . . Indians scattered on dawn’s highways . . .

Blood in the streets of the town of New Haven.

In this album named aiter him, Jim acknowledged himself as the author of several lyrics: “Roadhouse Blues,” “Waiting for the Sun,” “You Make Me Real,” “Peace Frog,” “Blue Sunday,”“Ship of Fools,” “Land Hel,”

“The Spy,” and “Maggie M'Gill.” He named himself coauthor with Robby Krieger of two songs: “Queen of the Highway” and “Indian Summer.” The album made the future of the Doors look promising. The new direction they were taking was closer to the tradition of the blues.

Paul Rothchild was the producer of the hfth album, and he showed excitement and pleasure as the recordings were made. One of the songs, “The Spy,” showed an unusual side of Jim’s nature, the voyeur: “1 am a spy in the house of love.” All four men

enjoyed the rehearsals for this

recording. For the ballad, “Maggie M'Gill,” they worked hard to get a

southern, country sound:

Miss Maggie M’'Gill she lived on a hill . . .

S6 she went down to Tangie Town . . . I've been singin’ the blues ever since the world began.

89

Jim Marrison

Jim was good as a bluesman, but most of his fans wanted him to remain the young handsome prince wearing his lizard-skin suit. Some of the critics called Morrison Hotel the major event of rock music in 1970.

During the 1969—70 tour the Doors recorded an albumn that contains six songs not available on other recordings. This somewhat uneven album, Absolutely Live, is a collector’s item today and is notable for two

songs in particular. The first, “Build Me a Woman,” is an improvisation: “Give me a woman, make her ten feet tall . . . / Don’t make her ugly, don't

make her small.” The second notable song, which had been announced and delayed

for a long time, “The Celebration of the Lizard,” is an ambitious poem of

Jim’s, pretentious at times but demonstrating an important metamor-

phosis of the poet. L. A. Woman was the Doors’ sixth and last album. Rehearsals for the recording of the ten songs on the album were going on during the fall of 1970. Paul Rothchild was the producer of this collection, which is close

to the music of the blues. When he was not intoxicated, Jim was serious

and cooperative during the sessions.

“Been Down So Long” is a blues song, of which the first part (the lyric is by Jim) is the theme of depression, a plea for liberation. The ending is a plea to the girl to serve him sexually. Well, I been down so long so goddamn long . . . Come on and set me free . .. Baby, won’t you get down on your knee and give your love to me. The Italian &lmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni, well known for his

first English-language film, Blow-up, came to some of the rehearsals for L.

A. Woman. Jim wanted Antonioni to use the song “L'America” in Zabriskie

Point, which Antonioni was shooting. He explained that the “I’” meant Latin or Central America: “I took a trip down to LAmerica / to trade some beads lor a pint of gold.” (“Beads” meant money, and “gold” meant marijuana.)

The title song, “L. A. Woman,”

which runs seven minutes,

has

petsonal and literary allusions. In its lyrical quality and musically, it is one of the Doors’ strongest songs. It was a collaborative work and gives a Jim Morrison

90

picture of a decadent Los Angeles. “City of Night” may be a reference to a book by John Rechy. It ends with a mysterious line: “Mister Mojo risin.’

“Mojo” is a biack slang word for sexual potency. “Mr. Mojo risin’” is an exact anagram of “Jim Morrison.” An anagram traditicnally conceals a message. Here it might be: Jim rising again. This was announced in the song when, ironically, Jim was fast deteriorating. He was giving poor

performances and boring the audience with stories. It was hard for Ray,

John, and Robby to acknowledge this, but they were already feeling that the public lite of the Doors was.over.

The lyric of “Hyacinth House” was written by Jim. This is almost an hermetic poem about the poet’s need for a “brand new friend.” The Greek myth of the boy Hyacinthus is in the poem, and it merges with the poet’s need for a new life. In the myth, Hyacinthus was loved by Apollo, who

slew the boy. To memorialize his love, Apollo causes a flower (the hyacinth) to grow from the bloodstained grass. It is a resurrection piece,

the capture of a new life. The flowers of the myth are the songs of the Doors. They came out of tragedy and found their life in the form of art. The final song of the album is “Riders on the Storm,” used by John Densmore as the title of his book on his “life with fim Morrison and the

Doors.” “Storm™ is a facile symbol for life: we come into the world naked

at birth and thereafter experience the threats of violence and death. The words and music of this song are the cooperative work of the Doors. It

has a rich, complex literary background. One senses in it Nietzsche’s and

Artaud’s violence of life; Rimbaud’s endless moving about in his search for peace; and especially Hart Crane’s poem “Praise for an Urn,” where

the poet in exile inherits the eyes of the sad clown Pierrot and the laughter of Gargantua, Rabelais’s giant. In the second stanza of the Crane poem, the thoughts of the poet are described as his inheritance, and there we

find the line, almost the title of the song: “Delicate riders of the storm.” Paul Rothchild did not like the song, but the band recorded it with their engineer Bruce Botnick. This final album was released in 1871. Jim Morrison died a few months after its release. Critics on the whole look upon it as the weakest

of the six original albums. It may not preserve the true importance of the Doors to rock and roll, but radio programmers play the album, and

especially “Riders on the Storm.” 91

Jim Morrison

2. His Death

The Doors were working on recordings, and Jim was planning a move to

Paris, if he could be released from his six-month jail sentence. Pariswould

mean a chance to work on his poetry and possibly to become involved again in filmmaking. He had aged since his arrest. At twenty-seven, his once handsome face was heavily bearded, and he had put on weight. He believed at that time that the Miami bust was the end of his performing career. To several people he had said that he hoped his trial might be turned into a freedomof-speech issue. At Miami he claimed that he gave a theatrical performance and reminded his interviewers that there was nudity in the film of the Woodstock festival and frontal nudity in the musical Hair, He wanted

to return to the kind of music the Doors had played ini clubs, a type closé

to blues music. Jim no longer felt like a rock star. He had begun to be

more and more self-deprecating. His major accomplishment had been to turn rock and roll into a form of theater. At the beginning of the fatal year 1971, Jim Morrison was the idolized lead singer of one of the most famous rock bands in the United States. Their success surpassed that of the Grateful Dead. The Beatles no

longer performed. The Rolling Stones were not always approved of by the American public. Only a few months after that high point of fame and success in January 1971, Jim had given up the image he had made of himself as the seductive black-leathered prince and had cut himself off from the other three players in the band. On March 13, 1971, Jim and his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, moved

into a modest apartment at 17, rue Beautreillis, a small street between the Seine and the section of La Bastille. The reason he now gave for living in Paris was to be a writer. His new appearance made him unrecognizable.

Afternoons, seated at a table at the Café de Flore, he drank beer alone.

Almost no one approached him. If anyone did speak to him, he replied politely and quietly, at times expressing his conviction that literature and music were being absorbed by television, which was turning people into voyeurs. He spent time each day in his apartment at his typewriter, surrounded by notebooks and newspaper clippings.

Jim Morrison

92

On April 5, Jim and Pam left Paris for a trip which took them to the wine country around Bordeaux and then to Madrid, where Jim wanted to see a painting of Hieronymus Bosch in the Prado. From there they went to Morocco to visit Tangiers and Marrakech. At the beginning of May they were back in Paris, where they found their apartment on rue Beautreillis occupied. For a few days they stayed in a hotel on the rue des Beaux-Arts,

a customary stopping place for rock stars. One night, in a state of delirium from excessive drinking, Jim fell from the third floor of the hotel

onto the top of an automobile. . Thanks to a student, Gifles Yepremian, who recognized Jim, we know the events of Friday, May 7. Jim had been drinking in a nightclub called Rock and Roll Circus which Mick Jagger had frequented. Jim was thrown out of the club by two bouncers. Gilles saw Jim kicking against the door and demanding to get back in. When he recognized Jim, he offered to take him home in a taxi. The first taxi driver refused when he saw Jim’s condition. A second taxi did agree to take them. On crossing a bridge, Jim yelled to the driver to stop. He wanted to jump into the Seine.

Uneasy about what he should do, Gilles gave the driver the address of a friend, Hervé

complained

Muller.

When

the taxi reached

this address,

the driver

that there was no tip. This was explained to Jim, who

immediately pulled out a mass of five hundred—franc bills and put them into the hands of the chauffeur. Terrified at seeing so much money, the man gave it all back to Jim. It took some time for Jim, leaning on Gilles, to climb the six flights to

Muller’s apartment. [t was two in the moming when Jim and the student walked into the apartment and awakened Hervé Muller, who was sleeping with his friend Yvonne. Jim fell onto the bed in a drunken stupor. The next day he invited Gilles, Hervé and Yvonne to lunch at a restaurant near the Hotel George V, where Pamela joined them. During the luncheon Jim was impressed by a Cozrsican vin rosé and decided with Pamela the following week to visit Corsica. However, in Marseille, he lost his passport, his driver’s license, and his billlold. They were obliged to return to Paris. There he met up with two well-known film directors, Jacques Demy and Agnés Varda. He had first met them in

1968, when Demy invited Jim to act in one of his films and Varda tried to

93

Jim Morrison

use him in her film Lions Love, which she was shooting at that time. These

two efforts to make Jim into a film star failed. Varda believed he had no

desire to submit himself to the discipline involved in the making of a film. For Agnés Varda and her family, Jim Morrison remained the legendary hero of the sixties. He had, she said, the beauty of 2 Renaissance

character. She loved the texts of the songs he wrote for the Doors. She remembered that at ucta he had been a film student of Alain Ronay. Jim had fascinated her daughter when she was eleven. For her film, in which she hoped Jim would have a part, she used the two actors-scenarists ot Hair, Jim Rada and Jerome Ragni, and Andy Warhol’s favorite actress, Viva.

Alain Ronay pleaded with Jim to act in his film Parking, his version of

the myth of Orpheus. Both Ronay and Varda believed Jim was Orpheus when they heard him sing in the Forum in Los Angeles. She remembered

his provocative posturing on the stage, but also the unusual quiet he created when, once, he stopped singing, sat down on the edge of the stage, and smoked a cigarette. The public held its breath. That silence, Varda said, was like the silence just before the last breath is drawn.

During the last days of June, when a few friends approached him at

the Flore, he usually spoke about his poems, and from time to time would interrupt the conversation to jot down notes on bits of paper

which he then slipped into his pockets. In the first days of July, he could

be seen on the terrace of a café, in company with Pamela and his friend Alain Ronay.

There are two distinctly different accounts of Jim’s death on July 3. The first is an official report given by Pamela which is filed in the Paris city hall. This account is summarized briefly here. Pamela and Jim returned that night to their apartment on the tue Beautreillis about 1:30 a.m. Jim seemed in good health and good spirits. They listened first to some records and then fell asleep about 2:30. Pamela was awakened by Jim’s difficult breathing. She had to shake him several times before he woke up. He would not allow her to call a doctor

but said he would take a bath, and that would relax him. Pamela again fell

asleep, and when she woke up, Jim was not in bed. She went to the bathroom. He was in the bathtub and seemed to be sleeping. His head

Jim Morrison

94

was above the water. Without any success, she tried to pull him out of the bathtub. Then she telephoned Alain Ronay and asked him to call an ambulance. The ambulance men entered the apartment at 9:24, at exactly the same

time Alain Ronay arrived in company

with Jacques Demy

and

Agnes Varda. Pamela had telephoned these friends for help. They and Hervé Muller had given hope to Jim for a new life, a creative life that would not depend on his gifts as a singer-performer.

When his friends found Jim's body, they immediately realized he had died. They stretched the body on the dining room floor and administered

a cardiac massage. The police arrived at 9:47. Alain Ronay gave whatever

information he could to the police. He said that Jim had been drinking heavily, but he was not taking drugs. The death certificate was signed at 2:30 the following afterncon. The legal doctor (médecin légiste), Max Vassille, came at 6:00 p.M. He did not order an autopsy. The official document states that Jim Morrison died from cardiac arrest following pulmonary congestion. This account is given by Oliver Wicker in the new French magazine

Le Globe. Wicker claims that the account has prevailed for twenty years, but that today there seem to be obvious incoherences and contradictions in it. Sam Bernett, manager of the Rock and Roll Circus in July 1971, swears that Jim Morrison was in his nightclub throughout the night of July 3—4. Hervé Muller, the French biographer and Iriend of Jim, also

swears that Jim was there waiting for a supply of heroin for Pamela. It is probable that Jim took heroin that night, more than his bad health could stand. The toilets of the Rock and Roll Circus communicated with the toilets of the neighboring Alcazar club, where Jim was found unconscious. Two people helped transport him back to his apartment. According to Muller, they were Jean de Breteuil, son of an aristocratic French family, and Marianne Faithfull, a former friend of Mick Jagger's. The American biographer Albert Goldman gives a similar version in an article which appeared in the United States in April 1990. He believes these two

people joined Pam and Jim in the Rock and Roll Circus that night of July 3—4 and transported Jim’s body to his apartment. John Densmore repeats

this story in his book. Two days after Jim’s death, Jean de Breteuil and

95

Jim Morrison

Marianne Faithfull flew to Tangiers. Four days later Pamela and Alain

Ronay left Paris. Oliver Wicker tells the story this way, and there seems to

be good reason to believe him.

After His Death In February 1969 Jim made out a will leaving everything to Pamela in

the event of his death. Three years later Pamela died. Her father, Columbus Coursen, became the executor of Jim Morrison’s will.

In 1980, considerable attention was paid to the Doors because of the film Apocalypse Now, in which Francis Ford Coppola used the song “The End” in a spectacular way. In the same year, a biography of Jim Morrison was published by two devoted and admiring friends, Jerry Hopkins and Daniel Sugerman. The title they used, No One Here Gets Out Alive, comes

from the song “Five to One.” This is the basic book on Morrison and on the history of the Doors. 1t is the narrative of a genius and the tragic way in which his life went out of control. | Soon Hollywood became interested in exploiting the cinematic pos-

sibilities of the story. Oliver Stone demonstrated his interest as early as 1984. The three surviving Doors had liked the way Stone treated the sixties in his film Platoon. There was strong opposition from the farnilies of Pamela and Jim, the Coursons and the Morrisons. Wearied by arguments and discussions lasting two or three years, they finally gave their consent, despite the fact that Stone was a controversial director. His film, The Doors, was released on March

1, 1991. The American press was

largely hostile. The critical appraisal in Paris, London, and Rome was far

more favorable, far more understanding of Stone’s attempt to demonstrate how the singer-poet, in the space of a few years, was changed into a

legend. The legend which the film depicts has been accepted by a generation too young to have known Jim as the singer-performer in the

concerts of the Doors. For Stone himself, Jim was a god, a Dionysian hgure who in ancient Greek myth was a seducer of women and a companion of satyrs. More pagan than Christian, Jim incamnated the

Indian spirit who in his function of shaman has to intoxicate himself. By dancing he was able to put himself into a trance. In the most successful Jim Morrison

96

concerts, the audience was riveted to the lead singer who, to many, resembled a cherub rocker, with his black ringlets of hair.

The songs he sang were a blend of blues and beat poetry. Stone believed in Jim’s verses. Throughout most of the film, we see Val Kilmer playing Jim before the drinking had taken him over and while his relationship

with the band was still intact. Then the alcohol and the drug addiction

take over, and the end of the film is a myth in itself, a ritual of self-sacrifice,

Jim’s persona had everything to do with the principle of Dionysus,

the dark, self-defeating eroticism. In speaking once of his typical audience and trying to explain his movements on the stage and his singing,

Jim said: “1 can take their trip for them.” Was he conscious of uttering the sacred formula of the sacrificed god, Dionysus or the Fisher King, the one

whose death would restore health and fertility to the community? 1 believe Jim was conscious of the myth and of how it applied to his performances and to the demons that were gradually taking him over.

Jim gave, he was reticent and modest about In most of the interviews

defining himself and his work. He downplayed the myth even when it

had begun to take possession of him. A legendary figure recreates himself. This was the accomplishment of Jim Morrison, who had only a hlm student’s knowledge of Rimbaud, of Nietzsche, and probably of Artaud.

Singing for Jim was the creation of poetry and music and the creation of characters on the stage.

“Living on the edge” is perhaps the phrase that best describes the activity and attitude of Jim during his last two years. [t means, | presume,

“on the edge of life and death.” Once in an interview explaining the

meaning of his poem “Horse Latitudes,” Jim discussed the metaphorical

meaning. “Work horses for the New World were once carried by ships

from Spain. In a turbulent sea, the ship had to throw overboard some of its cargo. The heaviest of the cargo were the horses, and in order to hurl them into the sea, they had to be coaxed to the edge of the deck, and from

there jettisoned.”

When the still sea conspires . . . True sailing is dead . . . ... the first animal is jettisoned Legs furiously pumping . . . In mute nostril agony. 97

Jim Morrison

Gene Youngblood, a music critic for the Village Voice, became one ot the principal defenders of the Doors. Jim thought that Youngblood was the first to understand him. He approved of the critic’s opinion that the music of the Doors was more than rock. It was closer to a ritual sexual exorcism. He spoke specifically of the playing of “Horse Latitudes.” A phrase complementary to “living on the edge,” this time from

Rimbaud, was known to Jim: “Voici le temps des Assassins.” jim had

probably read Henry Miller’s book on Rimbaud of which this sentence

serves as title, The word “assassin” always intrigued Jim, especially when

he learned that the word in Arabic means “hashish smoker.” Rimbaud gave up writing poetry at twenty, after giving to France 2 new form of poetry. And today, he is being celebrated in France. The war in his lifetime was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In speaking of this war, Rimbaud wrote that his country was rising up, but he preferred to see it sitting down. Huge massacres were carried out in the Vietnam War of the sixties and in Desert Storm in the nineties. Some of the intellectuals

and artists dissented, but there was no Picasso (who once opposed the war in Spain), no Jean-Paul Sartre (who once opposed the war in Algeria). Since Jim Morrison's death, his fans in France and those fans from

other countries who live in Paris remember, more than the accounts of his death, his interest in Paris. There, in his last two years, he seemed to begin

a new phase of his life, a phase that was gradually to be destroyed by alcoholism. It would seem that in Paris Jim was trying to shake off his

fame, his identity as a rock star, His drive then was toward the creation of

poetry, in a city where he was able to evoke Baudelaire and Rimbaud. When the address of his apartment was leamed, the fans visited the rue Beautreillis but did not mark the large doors that open at number 17. Hervé Muller, a twenty-two-year-old economics student, recognized

Jim by chance coincidence and befriended him, thanks to his friend Yves Yepremian. At the bar Alexandre, 53 avenue George V, Muller took photographs of Jim in Paris. He knew that Jim felt lonely and lost. At times Jim would turn aggressive, as if he were fighting demons (Jim had the habit of speaking as much of demons as of angels). With Hervé, Jim enjoyed talking about European films and French literature. Usually he avoided any talk about the Doors, although once he said that twenty-

Jim Morrison

98

seven was too old to be a rock star. One day Jim was excited by receiving

the new album L. A, Woman.

Rue Beautreillis is in an area of Paris called the Marais. Once a very

elegant neighborhood, it had fallen into decay at the time of Jim's visit to

Paris. Today it has been renovated with art galleries and fashionable shops. The Musée Picasso opened there in 1980, on rue de Thorigny. Jim

walked around the Ile Saint Louis in order to visit the Hotel Lauzun, 17

quai d'’Anjou, a dark apartment house of classical style, where Charles Baudelaire lived as a young dandy. Today it is a museum, owned by the .

city ot Paris.

Montparnasse, on the left bank, was Jim's favorite section of Paris.

Briefly he had taken a room at the small hotel on the rue des Beaux-Arts

where Oscar Wilde had once lived and where he died. It was called the Hétel d'Alsace when Wilde lived there. Jim knew something of the café life in the Saint-Germain part of Paris, and something of the legends there concerning Picasso (Café Le Select), Sartre (Café des Deux Magots), and

André Gide (la brasserie Lipp). When he stopped at La Coupole (102

boulevard du Montparnasse), he was told that Zelda Fitzgerald had eaten

there.

Hervé Muller, who pointed out that never once did he see Jim in leather, believed that he was deliberarely trying to destroy his “angelic”

appearance as he wandered about Paris. There was no trace of the Lizard King, no trace of the singer who, for the flower children and for thou-

sands of young people in America, had represented the rebel, singing and acting out their frustrations and their hopes. His voluntary exile in Paris, where he was aware of the voluntary exile of other American exiles such

as Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Henry Miller, ended with his death on the night of July 3—4. For his fans then, he was something of a blues

singer, something of a crooner, something of a shaman. Twenty years

later, he is still thar figure for a new generation of young people. Alter his death, he appears even stronger as a rebel figure with a cause. Like

Rimbaud, he became a legend who was larger than life. Jim would have been gratified if he had known that in 1976 a

bilingual edition of Lords and New Creatures (Seigneurs et nouvelles créatures) appeared in Paris. Two years later, in 1978, a second bilingual book

99

Jim Morrison

of poems was published in Paris, in the highly thought-of series 10/18:

Jim Morrison, Une Priére Américaine et autres écrits, translated by Hervé Muller.

The most publicized American celebration of Jim, after his death, was Oliver Stone’s film The Doors. This film is a big production, with a large cast and large crowds in the concert scenes. Val Kilmer came as close as an actor could in miming Jim and singing like him. His performance has been universally praised by the movie critics. And yet the character of

Jim is barely sketched in the film. There is very little of the complex torment he knew during the four years of the concerts. The other Doors and friends of Jim do not always agree with Stone’s work, although he did follow quite closely the facts as they appear in the biography of Hopkins and Sugerman.

|

Pére-Lachaise

The past twenty years also contain the story of the gravesite in the

cemetery of Pére-Lachaise. The main entrance is on the boulevard de Ménilmontant. One hundred thousand graves are crowded together in

this cemetery. Until very recently, after Jim's burial in division six, the grave was badly cared {or. In the map of the cemetery, which may be purchased, Jim is listed as one of two hundred celebrities. The company he keeps now is impressive. He is close to the two composers Bellini and Chopin. A bit farther off are the graves of Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, and the surrealist painter Max Ermnst. On my hrst visit to Jim’s grave, 1 came upon a somewhat rowdy

scene. A drinking party seemed to be in progress. Empty wine and beer

bottles littered the ground. Some of the group were sitting on the ground; others sprawled on nearby tombs. I could barely make out the inscription: "Jimm Morrison 1943-1971.” Deciding not to join the party, 1 moved

off, map in hand, to find Marcel Proust’s grave. When I found it, [ was

glad no one was there, because [ was able, with no distractions, to recall a tew of the happy scenes in his novel A la récherche de temps perdu: Léonie, at her window, watching the goings-on in Combray; Marcel contemplat-

ing the hedge of hawthomns along Swann’s way. Only one solemn scene Jim Morrison

100

came to my mind (perhaps because [ was at the grave of a great novelist): the death of Bergotte after he had examined Vermeer’s painting Vue de

Delft.

When [ returned to Jim’s grave, the party had broken up. Two years

later, I paid my second visit to Pére-Lachaise. That time, the scene was

one of reverence: three or four fellows were playing guitars and parts of Jim’s songs. I did notice that the bust of Jim had been Perhaps none of the bad aspects of the gravesite, the drinking grathei scrawled everywhere, was a desecration. The fans wanted

singing stolen. and the to leave

messages to Jim and to toast him with the words: “He is still alive.”

[n 1991, almost as part of the twentieth anniversary of his death, the appearance of the grave has greatly changed. This was brought about by Admiral Morrison and his wife, who, on visiting the grave of their son, had it cleaned. They installed a new bronze plaque on the headstone, with a Greek inscription: “Faithful to his spirit.” Thus they announced publicly a reconciliation with their son after twenty years of silence. Peace

has been made with the rebel son. This turnabout meant also that the parents had finally acknowledged that it was fitting for Jim’s body to remain in Paris, in Pére-Lachaise, close to tombs he had visited the day before he died. The administrator of Pére-Lachaise, Jean Jacques le For-

estier, has said that the city of Paris will honor Jim’s wish to remain in Paris.

During the summer of 1991, Jim became the only star in the 110 acres of Pére-lachaise. I received a card from one of my colleagues at Duke who was showing the city of Paris to his son, age hfteen. The boy insisted on making the obvious pilgrimage to Jim’s grave. His father wrote on the card: “Teenagers don’t think there is anything else worth seeing in

that cemetery, and perhaps not in Paris. It was a pleasant and hushed

atmosphere,

several dozen

graffiti were out of place.”

people present in the morning; only the

Jim the Poet For his youngest

fans today, Jim is still a cult figure, but they are

beginning to pick up now on his poetry. His fans in the sixties and 101

Jim Morrison

seventies saw him as a charismatic figure, were theatrical, a ritual theater opening up death, they recalled phrases and thoughts the seriousness of poetry. He had taught a

a singer whose performances a vision of freedom. After his he had expressed concerning generation of fans that poems

and songs survive the death of civilization. This belief coincides with the

strongest doctrines about the power of poetry in France of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is fairly certain that the many studies already published on Jim the singer-poet in the anniversary year will be followed in the years ahead by studies on Jim the poet. The lyries of the songs and the poems published

by Jim himself in Lords and New Creatures, form one part of his work which is well known today. The “lost poems,” now published by Frank

and Kathy Lisciandro in two volumes, Wilderness and The American Night,

are being read by young fans as well as by academic literary scholars. Jim made a clear distinction between “lyrics,” written to be set to music, and “poems,” which were not destined for a musical setting.

As a student and a teacher of poetry over many years, | have, at times

unconsciously and at other times very consciousty, tried to give expression to my own belief about poetry, about what it is, what it tries to accomplish, about the poet himself, the artist engaged in this art of versemaking.

Certain types of poetry—probably the highest forms—exist by themselves without any need of historical or biographical notes. They are

firm structures that transcend history and biography. And then there are

other types of verse that are closely related to the character of the poet

(his ecstasies, his tragedies, his obsessions) and to the problems of his

age—rpolitical problems, wars and victories, famines and other catastrophes. The meaning or even the value of such poems might be lost or misunderstood if necessary facts are not made clear. In reading poetry, we learn to read either in the light of timelessness or in the light of social

justice or injustice as experienced by one generation. These are fairly obvious and simple matters that [ will try to keep in mind as [ discuss, in the final part of my essay, the poetic art of Jim -

Morrison. But there are other matters, more abstract, more philosophical,

that arise in any study of poetry. These 1 do not want to avoid because

they are thoughts about poetry that 1 have come to cherish. I try to Jim Morrison

102

formulate them in teaching a class on Baudelaire, and then the next week I must reformulate them in teaching a class on Rimbaud. Jim Morrison was a menacing son-figure. He is this not only in the

song “The End,” but in all the songs of violence and destruction (“People

Are Strange,” “When the Music's Over,” “Five to One,” “Peace Frog”). But

more than the Oedipus figure, he illustrated and embodied the typical narcissism of the male. He watched his image in the fountain (the watery faces of his audience) over which Narcissus leans, eternally anxious, eternally enraptured. |

This is the mode of existénce ofan artist. The natural rendency of the human soul is toward the protection of the ego, and such a tendency is

more closely manifested in the artist. It lies in self-portraits painted by Picasso and Rembrandt, by George Rouault and Jean Cocteau. It lies in the self-portraits that T. S. Eliot gives us in Prufrock, and that William Butler Yeats gives us in his poem “Among Schoo! Children.” The piano music which Erik Satie composed for Parade is a self-portrait, and the last

movement of his ninth symphony is a self-portrait of Beethoven. On a far

more humble level, Jim Morrison gives us his self-portrait in “Break on

Through,” in “The Crystal Ship,” and in the mini-epic song so often

referred to, “The End.” All of these examples are of artists ingeniously reflecting on their art and at the same time mirroring the traits of their character. Artists are masochists. Their defects, their sufterings, and their obsessions give both light and substance to their art. Art is often defined as the telling of truth. Thus art explains the artist and his world. But art is also mystification.

Narcissus sees himself in the water of the pool and is drawn to himself, but he has no understanding of that mystery. Why is he in love with himself? The myth is alive, and its mysteriousness is still intact.

Art gives charm and beauty to terrible things. That is its power and its glory. It is hard for us to accept the truth that art is doom—a harsh

doom for the artist who survives in his art but not as a living human being. The absoluteness of this destiny is apparent in John Keats and John Milton. as well as in the far more simple example of a rock singer who

helped to compose the lyrics and the music of his songs.

Artists are a touchy folk. They are a vain crew even if they appear as sober as the vice-president of an insurance company, or as well dressed as 103

Jim Morrison

the chief editor of a London publishing house, or as intoxicated as a

singer of a rock band. Whatever physical appearance they give on the stage, on the screen, on the street, or in the office, they know when they

face the white paper for their real work that their unconscious mind is a lost continent which may give them flashes of wit and grossness and metaphorical beauty. When used in their art and thus made public, such unexpected gifts may cause their readers and their spectators to look

upon them not as artists but as maniacs. Artists will accept this tag

because they are aware that the unconscious mind knows nothing of logic, nothing of tradition, nothing of proprieties. The absurdities of chance may correct and even ennoble errors of taste. After all, art does not deal with the absurd by converting it into something totally simple. Art is a teacher, probably a better teacher than philosophy. What does art teach? There is no answer to that question. Nothing about that problem can be said. And this is sad for the human race, because we are such natural prattiers, speaking far in excess of what should be said. And yet some thoughtful people with rich memories will insist that

there are answers—but not those that come from our mind, which is a dark cave of drifting beings. They are answers that we remember from

very old texts, words of wisdom that come down to us from vanished civilizations. And we repeat, sometimes in our own words: all is vanity . . . we walk in a vain shadow. . . . Qur hearts are too corrupt to know

such things as truth, Homo homini lupus: 2 man is a wolf to men. The secrecy, the mysteriousness of every human life is of course what we are speaking of when we refer to Jim Morrison. 1 believe 1 have used in

some context or other in this essay al! the names that have been given to

him, names used by critics and interviewers and by close friends. The list is long, and that itself is ample proof not only of the secrecy of his life but the practice of concealment. He may have been unaware of his own secrets, unwilling to fathom the drives of his nature and the motives of his

actions.

The names given to Jim the most often (some of which he used

himself) were Dionysus, the Lizard King, the shaman, the dark angel.

One name, Mr. Mojo Risin’, is an anagram of his real name. It occurs in the song “L. A. Woman” as a deliberate secret code, an unknown characJim Morrison

104

ter except for the initiated. Jim is Oedipus only in *The Fnd,” and then only for those listeners familiar with Sophocles. It is surprising to me that Narcissus is used so seldom, since the youthful figure described so carefully, so tenderly by Ovid is more justifiable than all the others. Two names that hark back to Greek civilization remain. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty (corresponding to the Roman goddess Venus} had a son whose name was Eros. In Greek mythology,

Eros excites sexual desires in gods and men with his arrows and torches. Jim used the word “erotic” when he called the members of his band

“erotic politicians.” By his movements and actions on the stage and by his style of singing, he was a modem-day Eros. However, there are two forms

of love in the Greek-Christian tradition: eros, the dark force in a man’s soul, the dark eros of sexual love whose goal is self-satisfaction; and Agapé, a love feast, 2 selfless love for the beloved when the self of the lover is transcended.

These

two

forces of love, one selfish and self-

seeking, the other charitable (caritas) and loving, continue to struggle

with one another for domination in a man's soul.

One final name 1 would like to add to the impressive list, because, ro my knowledge, it has never been applied to Jim. As far as | can ascertain, it is not the name of a god, or even of a minor god. It is a general term

designating in Greek a young man, an adolescent: kouros. 1 remember its

use in two of Iris Murdock’s novels: The Nice and the Good and A Fairly

Honorable Defeat. The word is applied to a youth attractive to men and woinen. At times it is in praise of beauty. At other times it is hurled almost

as a curse at those youths who insolently torment older people. This name | suggest as representative of the nonhypocritical innocence of Jim when he was not aware of the power of his appearance and his personality. Jim did not have the habit of speaking of individual poems of Rimbaud. It is impossible to know if he ever paid attention to one of the

last poems Rimbaud wrote: “Un Pauvre songe” (A Poor Man Dreams). This poem seems to me one of the most perfect in the technical sense: three stanzas, five lines in each stanza, six syllables in each of the hfteen lines, and an unusual rhyme scheme in each stanza: abbaa. One thinks of Verlaine's skill in prosody, but the sound effects in the Rimbaud poem are more subtle, more harmonious. The poem, written at the end of the 105

Jim Morrison

poet’s career, is a survey of his life, his ambitions, and the impossibility ot reliving his wanderings. It might easily be considered a farewell piece, a song that is at once nostalgic and accepting of his fate. In the first stanza Rimbaud hesitates to believe one Evening he will drink in an old town and die happier than he has ever been. His patience will be rewarded. Peut-étre un Soir m'attend

Ot je boirai tranquille En quelque vieille Ville, Et mourrai plus content: Puisque je suis patient.

The second stanza seems to refer to his suffering—will it quiet down?—and to his hope of acquiring money. Will he choose the north or the south (“land of vineyards”)? But dreaming is shameful. St mon mal se résigne, St j'ai jamais quelque or, Choisirai-je le Nord

Ou le Pays des Vignes? -—Ah! songer est indigne.

The third stanza continues the second: dreaming is pure loss. If [ become again the old traveler, the green inn will never be open to me. Puisque c’est pure perte! Et si je redeviens Le voyageur ancien,

Jamais l'auberge verte Ne peut bien m’étre ouverte.

Rightly he calls himsel{ the Traveler, the wanderer in his early years. He had written about the “green inn” in a sonnet (“Au Cabaret vert™), and

there it was a resting place in his wanderings where he was happy, certain

that he had found a new freedom. But this early experience cannot be repeated. The inn later would not open. The simple words of this poem and its delicate musical versification, are in keeping with the understanding of himself he had reached. In the hrst album of the Doors, I find three very simple songs which Jim Morrison

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bear similarities in their simplicity and in their story to “Un Pauvre songe.”

1. “Soul Kitchen” expresses the poet’s desire not to wander any more, but to sleep all night in “your soul kitchen.” If the girl turned him out, he would have to wander, “stumbling in the neon groves.” 2. “End of the Night” is about a night journey: Take the highways to the end of the night. The poem is about those who are “born to the endless night,” those who have no patience with an inn or a kitchen, whose fate, like that of an outcast, moves in external exile.

3. “Take [t as It Comes™’is a poem of good counsel which, as Danny Sugerman tells us, is dedicated to the favorite guru of the Doors, the Maharishi Mashesh Yogi. The advice is in the words: “You've been movin’ much too fast.” Rimbaud had said that One Evening would come when he would stop his wanderings. And here Jim sings: “Time to walk, time to run / time to aim your arrows at the sun.”

The themes in “Un Pauvre songe” and these three brief poems of the Doors are similar. Rimbaud’s carefully composed poem is a work that exists by itself, by its own perfection, as the poet, ashamed of his dreams, causes in the reader a similar shame over the fantasies thart fill his life: the

ending of his voyages, the peacefulness of a calé in some old city. The lyrics of the Doors are not that type of poem. They were composed with the musical setting in mind, with the large audience in mind, a world that will accept the casualness, the familiarity of the language, and that will respond 1o the strong rock beat of the music. Words and music were often composed at the same time. The rehearsals then would strive to reach the effects that would instill great excitement in the listeners, who

could easily be led to participate in the performance. Lyrics, music, and audience seduction represent an art very different {rom the poem that comes at the end of a long tradition of French poetry, where a universal theme (liberation, love, death) is presented once again in a fixed form

that will speak to a single reader and to generations of readers who understand the intricacies of the composition and enjoy contrasting the modern success of a Rimbaud with the earlier successes of a Baudelaire.

The lyrics of the Doors cannot be separated from the music written for them and performed for audiences during a relatively short period of time. That is, of course, the fate of rock bands and of pop culture. 107

Jim Morrison

[solated lines of the lyrics are well known by the older and the younger generations, those young people between the ages of fifteen and thirty. They are good lines which are remembered and quoted and may be remembered for some time: Oh tell me where your freedom lies (“The Crystal Ship”)

I'm a spy in the house of love (“The Spy™

I'm a changeling, see me change (“Changeling”) [ am the Lizard King (“The Celebration of the Lizard™)

No one here gets out alive (“Five to One”)

Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name (“Hello, T Love You") 1 want to hear the scream of the butterfly (“When the Music’s Over”) This is the end, beautiful friend (“The End”)

Break on through to the other side (“Break on Through™)

The simple titles of many of the songs are signs, symbols almost, of recognition and friendship that the new generation of the young experience---“Riders on the Storm,” “Hyacinth House,” “Ship of Fools,” “The Soft Parade,” and especially the titles of the two songs that are the best loved and the most often played today: “Touch Me” and “Light My Fire.”

The lyrics, most of which Jim Morrison worked on at least in part, are the mark of two decades in the history of American music and poetry. Their themes are many because they are related to the jubilations and the torments of the young. They are the collaborative work of four musicians who spoke so directly to people in large crowded masses that the people, especially the rebel youngsters, appropriated them and grew up with them. They are public property now.

At times, during the concerts, Jim sang these songs in such a way that he made them sound sacrilegious. He was.condemned for sacrilege. To this condernnation, T would answer: sacrilege is a very important human activity. We are not good people, and the best we can hope for is to be gentle, 1o forgive each other and to forget the past. In so many of the songs, Jim is singing: Death happens, love happens, and all human life is compact of accident and chance. In other, more philosophically worded songs, he is saying that human law is only a very rough approximation to

justice.

Jim Morrison

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To many in the audience attending a Doors concert, Jim appeared on

the stage as an almost naked kouros who created for them a moment

outside their ordinary life, a moment given by a god to those who were

sad or deprived or unappeased.

In 1988, seventeen years after Jim's death, thanks to the collabora-

tion of Pamela’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Courson, and two close friends of

Jim, Frank and Kathy Lisciandro, a first volurne of “lost writings” of Jim

Morrison was published by Villard Books in New York. Wilderness, as the

book is called (the word is at the end of one of the poems), was an event in

the history of American poetry, and especially in the history of rock and

roll.

Some of these poems are versions of lyrics we know as songs: “L'America,” for example, “Soft Parade,” “Horse Latitudes.” The obsessive themes in Jim’s mind return over and over in these pages that seem sketches for poems, rough drafts of poems or pensées, rather than poems.

Mr. and Mrs. Lisciandro have edited these texts with great care, and often

reproduce pages of the manuscript in Jim’s handwriting.

What are these themes, these subjects which may be read on the pages of Wilderness?

“Wilderness” is the last word on page hiteen, which opens with “The grand highway” and then lists the types of people who crowd highways:

“lovers, searchers, leavers so eager to please and lorget.” Jim sees the

highway as that place where people are leaving home to search for

something or someone, Night travelers and day travelers form a civiliza-

tion apart from the more static and more established civilizations. Farther along in the book (pp. 40-41), a poem called “The Fear” is about man as a “cold hiker” on “The Lonely HWY," the traveler “afraid of Wolves and his own Shadow.” This is perhaps the most frightening picture of the highway which Jim gives in his songs and poems. It is somewhat related to a rite of passage where a boy is seeking manhood. This poem also has a threatening note, because manhood may mean “enlightenment in a gun / To kill childhood.” The highway is often the site of melodrama and even tragedy. The

text on page 180 refers to “Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding.” In five lines on page 71, he calls the Indians his ancestors. From

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Jim Morrison

them he has inherited “a fear of sex, lamentation for the dead, and an

abiding interest in dreams and visions.” Jim in such lines permits us to look into his psyche. These poems in Wilderness assemble most of the roles or metamorphoses Jim sings and speaks of in other writings, such as “The shaman calls,” on page 74, and on page 124, his three roles when he is the singing actor in a concert: “The bitter Poet-Madman is a clown / Treading the boards,” Jim as clown is given greater prominence than Jim as poet and Jim as madman.

In my first reading of Wilderness, 1 anticipated finding echoes of Rimbaud, reminiscences of the prose poems, I found only one text which unmistakably recalls specific passages in Rirnbaud. It is the first text in the section called “Jamaica,” (p. 151), which begins: “The hour of the

wolf / has now ended.” The wolf would seem to signify destruction, the end of the old world fated to be destroyed by the ancient flood of Genesis.

Jim writes: “A new world begins.”

Cocks Crow. The world is built up again, struggling in darkness.

This opening of Jim’s text is not unlike Rimbaud’s parable in Les Illuminations, called “Apres le déluge,” where the French poet describes the flood as having restored the world to its primitive innocence. A Franciscan simplicity has descended over everything. Flowers are growing out of the wet earth, and a hare says its prayer to the rainbow. “Un liévre . . . dit sa priére & l'arc-en-ciel.” Jim's poem ends with: The flood has subsided . . .

Wild folks in weird dress

by the side of the hiway

And Rimbaud’s poem ends with reference to a queen or a witch who will take over the new world and “who will never tell us what she knows and what we shall never know.”

[n both of these texts, it is possible to sense a reference to the birth

Jim Morrison

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trauma from which we spend some of our early childhood recovering.

The flood of each birth resembles the original flood when the world was

destroyed and resurrected virginal. The world is a mother who speaks to the poet without offering any explanations of what she says. A poet is not necessarily a contemplative. He is a questioner and can only ask his

mother for the secret of the existence she has given him. But the mother is life and not its philosopher. At the end of it all, the poet is alone. Rimbaud’s influence is more faint in “As to the Drowning Man” (p. 161), but one thinks of “Apres le déluge” because of water words:

“drowning,” “an arroyo” {a stream), “three drops suffice.” At the end of the text, Jim addresses his friends and asks them not to lock at him

“ranting like some incomprehensible child.” On four of the last pages in Wilderness (p. 204-7), the poems are closer to an autobiography. Jim sketches his life with reference to the

history of Rock, which coincided with his adolescence. These pages are

valuable, more than as poems, for any biographer of Jim. After adolescence, he came to Los Angeles, to iilm school. Summers

were spent on the beach at Venice. He summarizes the drug habit, which had just begun, in the words “Drug Visions.” When the making of records

began, he recalls the mature voice of Elvis at nineteen. He says that his

own voice retained “the nasal whine of a repressed adolescent.” His voice produced nothing in between a scream and a “sick croon.”

The third page is a trenchant self-analysis: “Road Days.” These are

the days of travel for the Doors, on the road or in planes. Jim feared “plane death.” His nights were without fear: “A girl, a bottle, and blessed sleep.” In describing the nights of the greatest successes, he uses bold and proud words when he claims: 1 have ploughed

my seed thru the heant of the nation Injected a germ in the psychic blood veins.

This is a fuller analysis of Jim's effect on audiences than the usual cruic’s statement that Jim had become a sex symbol in the country.

The result of this experienice is disappointing (shamelul, although he

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does not speak of shame). His art has become a business. For a time he Jim depicts his life and career in was 4 “Prince of Industry.” Courageously, the harshest terms. 1t is a text of avowal, of confession,

On the last of these pages, (p. 207), Jim lists the roles he has played publicly in what he calls “the Bull Ring Arena.” He calls himself first “a natural leader.” Indeed, he was the lead singer and the main attraction, the leader of the crowd. Then he uses the sacred word “the poet.” He

moves then to two others: “a Shaman with the soul of a clown.” With these terms, he calls himself the curer,

the medicine

man,

and the

entertainer, the figure on the stage who may call forth from the crowd jeers and laughter. But he will have the last word in the debate between himself and the crowd: “I drink so 1/ can talk to assholes.” Without the skill of Rimbaud, Jim sketches patterns on these pages that recall Rimbaud’s roles he lists in Enfance IV. Je suis le saint (1 am the saint) Je suis le savant {I am the scholar)

Je suis le piéton de la grand’ route (I am the wanderer along the highway)

These roles of characteristics are continued in Une Saison en enfer, especially in the section “Mauvais Sang” (Bad Blood):

From my Gallic ancestors | have blue-white eyes, a narrow skull, and clumsiness in

wrestling. From them 1 inherit: idolatry and love of sacrilege, oh! all vices: anger,

lust—Tlust that is grandiose—and especially deceit and sloth.

These assumptions of various roles and metamorphoses which are discussed in the writings of both poets are indicative of the young seeking an identity strong enough for them to feel both attached to and detached from their society. As they test one role after another, they are aware every

moment of their vulnerability. They are also aware of a tutelary deity

standing behind them: a tall, slimn, long-nosed Greek Kouros (which may

be seen in the National Museum at Athens). They would not know his

name or origin. It is suthicient that this unknown, invisible figure makes them feel continuous. [t helps them ward off the evil of indifference. After Jim Morrison

112

each testing of role and defeat, the young learn that they have great

powers of recovery.

Rimbaud used the word “hell” in a theological sense. He wanted only one season there, because he knew that in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. Even if Jim Morrison did not use the word “hell,” he

would have understood its meaning. He exemplified this gift for change

which the young have. They also have a sharper eye than their elders for what is rotten in society and hence feel the need to purify it by attacking the plague of indifference which prevents any change of character and strengthening of personality, Two years after the publication of Wilderness, the second volume of Morrison’s “lost writings” appeared bearing the title The American Night,

also published by Villard. These are poems and entries bequeathed to Pamela Courson and which were left to her parents. The work of compilation by Frank and Katherine Lisciandro. On the whole, I find the texts in this second

epigrams and diary at her death in 1974 and editing was done volume stronger and

more significant than those of the first. The poems are presented in ten groups, some brief and others longer. Each bears a title,

The opening section, “An American Night,” speaks of promises made to the poet as a child which have not been fulhilled: Where are the {easts

we were promised

Where is the wine The new wine.

These questions are very close to the opening of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell: “Long ago . . . my life was a banquet . . . / where all wines flowed.” In part two, “Poems from Tape Noon," are images associated with Mor-

rison'’s return, and in his *Welcome to the American Night,” we see that

“hitchhikers line the Great Highway." In “This [s My Forest,” there is “a leaping clown.” The dark American night can make connections and bring about a series of metamorphoses: “The form is an angel of soul/ from horse to man to boy/and back again.”

Part three is one long piece, almost in the form of a scenario: “Celebration of the Lizard.” Before Jim identifies himself with the Lizard 113

Jim Morrison

King, we see familiar animals: “Lions in the street and roaming / Dogs in heat. . . .” There are reptiles too, and games called “go insane.” Then, with sounds of whistles, rattlesnakes, castanets, and cries of assent, the poet

proclaims: “1 am the Lizard King / 1 can do anything.” A prophecy ends

the poem as the music fades: “Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth /1 want to be ready” It is a scenario, or, perhaps still better, a metamorphosis.

Part four, “The Soft Parade,” is a continuous piece about “seminary school and prayer” and the need to hide: Can you give me sanctuary

I must find a place to hide . . .

The Man is at the door.

Death is imminent as the soft parade of a cobra, a leopard, and lions begins. At the crossroads, on the edge of town, there will be scenes of violence. Part five, “Poems from the Village Reading,” is a group of poems

recorded in Los Angeles in 1970. Mr. Lisciandro tells us that he has traced

the origins of the poems to Jim’s notebook. Some were written as early as

1964. The longest poem in the group is “Lament for the Death of My

Cock.” It is a curious piece, somewhat hard to follow, because Jim uses the lament to state a kind of philosophy: “Death and my cock are the world.” The guitar player, a wise satyr, is called upon to sing an ode for

the lament. The lament turns into a procession, and the poet invites all to

join: “lustiul salesmen, militant dandies, the order of monsters.” Part six, “The Hitchhiker,” is ironically called “An American

Pas-

toral.” It is an ambitious set of pieces in the form of a film where the

hitchhiker, a young boy named Billy, has to keep moving from place to place because the violence he perpetrates on others—sexual violence and

murder—{orces him to outwit and escape the law. A scene in a nightclub resembles Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker. A man picks Billy up in his car. Billy shoots him to preserve his honor., There are some other scenes of similar violence. At the end he is seen returning to his old gang, who greet him with “Hiya, Clown Boy.” Billy has played several roles: the hitchhiker, the kid, the killer, the clown hoy.

Part seven, “Poems for Dry Water,” is a collection of lighter poems Jim Morrison

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that speak of love in various places. In a dim cave, at first, an insane theater scene. Then a bazaar, crowded with dancers where a low cave is called “Calipah.” In the long poern “Untrampled Footsteps,” the wanderer is looking for his girlfriend, who “lives in the city under the sea” Part eight, “Lyric Verse,” consists of the lyrics of a few of the most

famous songs of the Doors: “Moonlight Drive” (the song that Jim sang to Ray on the beach, which delighted Ray so much that he wanted to organize a rock band), “Soul Kitchen,” “When the Music’s Over,” “There’s Blood in the Streets,” “The End,” and “L. A. Woman.”

Part nine, “Notebook Poems,” at seventy-four pages the longest section in the volume, has sketches of American life, especially of young

fellows eager for experience with girls and with grass. Disc jockeys take

pills to stay awake. There are seduction scenes in big cars, death, games

played by handsome cats, Texas radio, and the Big Beat. The action is swift in these brief poems, some of which are sociological documents. In

“The Sidewalkers Moved,” for example, where cops appear with plastic

shields and cafés take in their tables, we are suddenly in Paris, in front of

the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and then we are on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, close to the Seine. The cops attack: “Join us at

the demonstration.” Violence is frequently part of the poem, as it is in “Mystery of the Dreams,” where “the Killer lurks in his world.” The violence of copulation is softened by classical allusions: My feathered son flew too near to the sun.

Jim’s zoo is often present: Leopard snakes dance . . . Swift lions of doubt . . . Horse latitudes

At time Jim strives too hard to startle: Skin-divers float

in the uterus . . . The sea is a vagina which

may be penetrated at any point. [15

Jim Morrison

Newspaper headlines often stimulate Jim to make his own kind of comment: Gold head lines w/Ali Khan, (Onassis

the prancing clown will bring the empire down. After thinking of the great enchanters, Christ, Mochammed, and Buddha,

the poet demeans himself:

a mindless wit am [ dickless, looking at the sky.

The persistent picture is Jim the wanderer who warnts to be called home.

Here the poet is the child coming home for play (or from play).

Part ten, “Paris Journal,” comes from the title Jim wrote on one of his

notebooks. These are poems about his observations and his memories. In Notre-Dame he has watched the nuns begging for money, holding out small velvet sacks, as they move from chair to chair. He remembers “beat musicians, beat poets and beat wanderers.” Jim has now become a lonely man searching for a lost paradise. Loneliness is in life and in death also. The last lines in the book— possibly among the last lines Jim wrote—are: The Hitchhiker stood

by the side of the road.

The image of the wanderer is the strongest self-portrait in The American

Night.

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IV Conclusions:

Masks of the Modern Antihero— Rimbaud and Jim Morrison

The youthful rebel lives in a world apart. Middle-class society, from

which

he usually comes,

has many

names

for him:

rascal, hoodlum,

rufhan—in English. The French use the stronger word voyou, for which

there is no exact equivalent in English. It combines the idea of being

badly behaved with that of a tendency toward criminal action.

However, the young rebel does not live alone in that special world of his. He represents a long lineage, and he has a brother in modern times

who never remains very far away from him. This brother is at various

times called clown, acrobat, or tool. Once he was called a juggler. He has

even been called by the polite name of Harlequin. And from time to time, fate lends him the pretentious name of poet.

Two species of rebel may be distinguished: the poor rebel, bom

among the people and spending his life at some distance from bourgeois comforts, and the rich rebel, born in the bourgeoisie and spending his life

ar some distance from the ill-famed dives of the real voyou. Both types are

the taciturn men of society. The clown performs mute rites, as poetry

always celebrates some wilfully silenced voice. The rebel and his brother the clown teach us that true fantasy does

not exist, and that joy in its pure state is not human. An inexplicable fate seems to reign at the birth of men, and each life appears to be either

privileged or damned. The rebel remains free in his flights. The voyou is

the man who escapes from everything that normally holds back other men; studies, family, civic duties, religious practices. The voyou is the

adventurer of space, of impassable roads, of the immense freedom of

cities and felds. At the birth of French poetry, long before Rimbaud’s time and

Mortrison’s interest in Rimbaud, there came into existence a first model of

this clownish voyou, whom I like to ¢onsider founder of a race of men

who live outside of their real life and whose sole vigor was their poetry. [

refer to a brief work from the end of the twelfth century, written in the

language of the Tle de France. Its author is unknown, but the piety he put in his story and the sympathy he had for his hero prove that he under-

stood the clown’s vocation and the poet’s vocation, which are perhaps identical.

The title of the poem, “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,” reveals the paradox of this double vocation: the man who amuses the public in the open

air, and the other adventure of the same juggler, piety. In leaving the open world of the street and the city square for the silent and closed world of

the monastery, the juggler discovers that his vocation of an acrobat is his one sanctification and the one reality of his life. The new love for God by which he wishes to live is bound up with his clown’s tricks. He has to serve Our Lady in the one trade he knows. The purity of his intention—

his dance will be a kind of prayer—converts a popular amusement into a religious celebration.

At night in Our Lady’s chapel, where he believes he is alone, he

dances before the statue of the Virgin and performs for her his hardest

and most fatiguing tricks. All the juggler’s agile and comic movements

which once delighted or bored the holiday public are now converted into an act of adoration.

The twelfth-century juggler was a prefiguration of the fifteenthcentury poet Frangois Villon. Both knew a voyou's existence. The juggler existed for a mocking transitory public which he could hold only by the grotesque elements of his dances. Villon knew a public of voyou friends

and criminals who heeded only the coarse and obscene parts of his ballades. When the juggler died, his art disappeared with him. Villon's art began to live after the poet’s death.

Conclusions

120

Villon was more of a voyou than the juggler of Notre Dame. His heart seemns limitless when we consider the diverse roles he played: martyr, lover, sinner, poverty-stricken criminal, hanged culprit, voyou.

Almost three centuries separate the juggler and Villon; three more centuries separate Villon and Rimbaud. In Rimbaud, the leading voyou of

modemn poetry, we see the same desire (or perhaps the same suffering) to play multiple roles and to hide behind multiple masks. The life of Rimbaud was an uninterrupted series of departures. No poet has elaborated more than he on the theme of {light and evasion. He knew the life of the tramp and the vagabond as Villon had known it, and like Villon also, he knew hunger and poverty. He begged along the

roadside and at the doors of houses and barracks. He was the man predestined to leave Charleville and the banks of the Meuse, as Dante had to leave Florence and the banks of the Amo. And vet, at each step of the poets’ voyages, the same uneasiness

overcomes them. Rimbaud in Paris, at the home of Verlaine, and in the

midst of some of the celebrated poets of the century, resembled the medieval juggler among

the monks.

We

think instinctively of Jesus

among the doctors in the Temple, and of Baudelaire’s albatross in the midst of the sailors who torture and mimic him. Today Rimbaud is a leading mythic literary figure. His life story has all the elements necessary for the creation of a myth. Before he was twenty, when he gave up all literary activity, he had reached stylistic maturity and a proficiency in French and Latin. After a few years of wandering across Europe, he abandoned Europe for Abyssinia, where he

engaged in various trades. He explored unmapped territory for the French Société de géographie. Because of bone cancer, his leg was ampu-

tated. His life, precocious and meteoric, is often compared with that of Mozart, who died at thirty-five.

He has become the poet of young people, as Jim Morrison has become the poet-singer of young people. The thirst of these two men for

freedom, for adventure, and for self-expression appeals to the young and to anyone who yearns for freedom and new beginnings. A Rimbaud barge (Le bateau ivre) left Charleville in September 1991, floated down to Marseille, and then returned to Paris by November for a

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Conclusions

Rimbaud “happening.” One hundred cross-country runners relayed a

the 245 miles between baton containing Rimbaud’s sonnet “Ma Bohéme” Charleville and Paris. The year 1991 was also an anniversary year for Jim Morrison, the twentieth anniversary of his death. The generation of the young belonging to the counterculture of the sixties elected Jim as a superstar. They followed the activities of the Doors. They knew its history from 1966,

when Jim sang “Moonlight Drive” to Ray Manzarek on the beach in

Venice, to the release of the first album, The Doors, in 1967. The reviews

of that album showered names on the superstar: “a sexual shaman,” “a surf-born Dionysus,” “a hippie Adonis.” The counterculture was a form of radicalism which rejected the norms of middle-class life in America and welcomed a new hedonism associated with sex, drugs, and rock music.

The new generation of young people in 1991 still listen to the Doors and speak of their brief history of {our or five years. Jim's death in Paris and his grave in Pére-Lachaise have made him into a stronger myth than ever. When his death was announced, Ray Manzarek doubted that Jim was dead, and that doubt still remains in the minds of the young. All is quiet now at the gravesite. Jim's parents have had the grave relaid in grey

marble, with matching headstone. The gravesite remains a2 meeting place for young people from around the world. The young are able now to view the counterculture from a historic perspective. They are less held by the evil side of sex and drugs which the

hlm shows and recall critical statements made by Jim about the artist: “I see the role of the artist as shaman and scapegoat. People project their

fantasies on to him and they come alive.” They realize now that Jim was both literate and primal, a primitive spirit who fused rock music with a rich literary background. They read Danny Sugerman’s new book, Wonderland Avenue, in

which he tells of how he discovered the Doors and met Jim when he was

twelve or thirteen. He became Jim’s office boy and protégé. He became addicted to drugs and describes this addiction in great detail. Jim gave him books to read and encouraged him to write creatively. Danny was sixteen when Jim left for Paris. He never saw Jim again. Wonderland

Avenue is the account of Danny’s life until his twenty-first birthday.

All three of these voyou poets—Villon, Rimbaud, and Jim MorriConclusions

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son—have expressed the self-conscious histrionic rejection of youth.

Each one, in his own terminology and in terms of his own age, discovered

how mysterious the psyche is and failed to find any adequate science that might explain it. Is this the traditional pessimism of the young? Rather, I would call it the belief that nothing in the world is intact and absolutely

beautiful. Everything is contaminated and muddled and slimed over and

cracked. They learned that plain truth is so implausible that most people instinctively mix in a little falsehood. In spite of the brevity of the lives of these poets, they have been

disguised by all the colors of legend. There are many undiscovered details

in these biographies. It is possible we lack the most important facts to understand their drama. Their poetry is only the vestige of some vaster

drama of man. In poetry, we are offered the reflection of fires.

The child and the poet spend their richest hours in the realm of the

imagination. The imagination of a child is autenomous, without respon-

sibility, whereas the imagination of the artist is charged with all the meaning of life. In the heart of this being we have been calling clown or voyou or wanderer, his imagination exists thanks to an immense courage.

The courage of his imagination is the temporal and spiritual measurement of every artist. Compared with the poetry of Villon and Rimbaud, Morrison’s work appears as a reflection of great poetry. But the reflection is obsessive and subtle. His place is among those men whose numerous departures in life,

whose instability and restlessness, have immobilized them for us. Gra-

tuitous images spring up in Jim'’s verses like reflexes and answers to the

subconscious law of chance and free association. The visions we have of

the juggler in the midst of the monks, of Villon among criminals, of Rimbaud among the Parnassian poets in Paris, are not'unlike the vision of Jim,

who with his voice and lyrics cast a spell over a huge crowd of listeners.

All these men knew the same danger, which is that of the acrobat, of

falling into the public looking at them. (Anatcle France, in the early

twentieth century, recast “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” in the form of a

short story and emphasized this danger which a suspicious audience creates for the artist.)

The voyou-clown, of all men, is the most incomplete and the most

solitary, but he has revindicated his rights in modern art, where he has 123

Conclusions

attained a tragic attitude and a spiritual fervor that other literary heroes do not possess. Modern painters, for lack of real angels in their imagination, have replaced them with clowns. Watteau’s Gilles counts mnumerable descendants on the canvasses of Picasso, Cézanne, and Rouault. Composers like Erik Satie and Stravinsky have written their best music for clowns (Parade and Petrouchka). And poets have been reincarnated countless times in the clown who survives by some mysterious principle

of angelism (Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Jim Morrison).

T. S. Eliot, in his poem “The Hollow Men,” described the tragic existence of the clown, whose body, like Petrouchka’s, is stufled with

straw, and whose soul, like the souls of Villons hanged criminals, is

tormented:

Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men The stuffed men.

Each man,

even the voyou, even the clown, is irreplaceable. Human

dignity resides in the most imperfect human struggling. Evil and grace both besiege man.

nature, provided it is

At the best moments in his performances, Jim was not merely the symbol of sex, drugs, and eccentricity. He was trying to combat complacency in his audience, to point out its dangérs by his singing and his lyrics. Some of those lyrics are still today mysterious and disturbing. Thanks to The Living Theater and his study of Antonin Artaud, Jim's concerts became a2 modern Dionysian rite, After the Miami scandal, Jim became the persecuted artist. He had gone beyond the permitted clowning and thus, at least to some extent, betrayed his vocation. Mallarmé’s sonnet “Le Pitre chatié” (The Punished

Clown) is, in the tradition of French symbolists, a text which depicts a clown’s revolt against his calling. Clown and poet are bound together in this poem, where le pitre is Hamlet and Harnlet is le pitre. The poet, the most secretive, the most personal of heroes, is able to pass into the characterization of the clown, as Virgil once passed into the shepherds who sang in his verse. The acrobat (saltimbangue) is attached to this tent as the poet is Conclusions

124

attached to the white paper. This sonnet of an apostasy begins with two words in apposition: yeux and lacs. The eyes of the public wartching the clown are called lakes, into which the clown may disappear. In order to move into the lake, he cuts an opening (une fenétre) in the canvas of the tent. He is reborn in the lake, but not as the performer. He is compared to Hamlet, the supreme theater hero, who wills his escape from Denmark. The clown-poet has turned swimmer in the lake, but he propels himself through

the water comically, like a frog. He is naked now,

stripped of his costume. This hero, as he swims, is struck by the rays of the sun. It is a scene of punishment because he has given up the costume

and make-up of the performer. Suddenly he realizes that the tent from which he has escaped, and the costume and the grease-paint he has lost, were the sanctification of his calling,

The theater {the circus) is the microcosm of life where each person

plays a part. The stage was that place where Jim Morrison had learned to

live and perform and make real for others his vocation. There were moments, at the end of his life, when he revolted against the stage and his vocation of rock singer. After singing countless times “Riders on the Storm,” where we hear

the ominous phrases “there’s a killer on the road™ and “our life will never end,” Jim, by his death, revised the title of the song, and answered the command: Ride out the storm. He did this by establishing a relationship between the spirit of rock music and a sense of freedom, of liberation in the unfolding of his own

life and in the society of the young he knew. As they listened to the Doors,

the young learned something about the meaning of apocalypse, so that when the Coppola film Apocalypse Now was released, they were prepared 10 understand it. They wondered then if it was possible to love the victims of Vietnam in the great ranks of the dead.

125

Conclusions

Bibliography

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, 1949,

Complete Works of Rimbaud. Bilingual edition. Translated by Wallace Fowlie. University of Chicago Press, 1966, John Densmore, Riders on the Storm. Delacorte Press, 1990.

Jerry Hopkins and Daniel Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive. Warner Books, 1980.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road. Penguin Books, 1957, Jim Morrison, The Lords and the New Creatures. Paris edition 10/18, 1976. An American Prayer. Paris Edition 10/18, 1978, Wilderness. Villard Books, 1988. The American Night. Villard Books, 1990.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872. Modern Library, 1910.

James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky, Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison. William Morrow, 1991, William Ruhlmann, The Doors. Smithmark Publishers, 1991,

Danny Sugerman, Wonderland Avenue, New American Library, 1988

Index

Adamov, Arthur, 70

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 12, 62, 124 Artaud, Anteonin, 68, 78, 86, 91, 97,

124

Auden, W. H., 63 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 90 Balzac, Honoré, 7, 22 Banville, Théodoere, 40, 50 Baudelaire, Charles, 20, 30, 45, 50, 55, 64, 66, 98, 99, 103, 107, izl

Beck, Julian, 87 Beckett, Samuel, 25 Beethoven, Ludwig, 102

Bellini, lacopo, 100

Breteuil, Jean de, 95 Breton, André, 2. 9, 69 Browne, Charlie, 15, 16

Caillois, Roger, 69, 70 Campbell, Joseph, 4 Camus, Albert, ¢

Cellini, Benvenuto, 54 Cézanne, Paul, 124

Chaplin, Charlie, 62

Char, René, 2, 23

Chateaubriand, Frangois, 49

Chopin, Frédéric, 7, 27, 28, 100 Claudel, Paul, 2, 8, 23, 48, 66 Cocteau, Jean, 15,62, 103

Cole, Taylor, 21

Bemett, Sam, 93 Bernhardt, Sarah, 7, 28

Colette, Sidonie, 28

Berrichon, Paterne, 68

Colum, Padraic, 17

Bizet, Georges, 28

Blake, Williarm, 11, 20, 39, 73, 76, 80

Bosch, Hieronymus, 93

Botnick, Bruce, @1 Braziller, George, 15

Colum, Mary, 17

Cooper, James Fenimore, 30, 49 Coppola, Francis Ford, 75,96, 125

Corso, Gregory, 74 Courson, Columbus, 86, 109 Courson, Pamela, 3, 78, 92, 93, 94— g6, 109,113

Hugo, Victor, 28, 48, 49

Crane, Hart, 63, 69, 91

Cros, Charles, 43

Huxley, Aldous, 11

Daniel-Rops, Henri, 48

Ingres, Dominique, 28 [zambard, Georges, 36, 38—42,49,52

Dante. 1, 7,30,32,37-39,45, 57, 121

Jacob, Dennis, 73

Dean, James, 88 Delahaye, Emest, 22, 53, 68 Delteil, Joseph, 69

Jacob, Max, 124

Jagger, Mick, 82, 93, 95

Joyce, James, 17, 45,55, 73

Demy, Jacques, 93, 95

Densmore, John, 5, 76, 78, 79, 81,

Duncan, [sadora, 28

Keats, John, 30, 103 Kennedy, John F., 4 Kerouac, Jack, 74 Kilmer, Val, 4, 97, 100 Krieger, Robby, 5, 6, 24,76, 77, 79,

Fliot, T. 5., 20, 28, 45, 55, 103, 124

Lang, Jack, 2

Ernst, Max, 100

Latini, Brunetto, 39 Lawrence, D. H., 62 Lawrence, T. E.. 68

31,95

Dickinson, Emily, 18 Didion, Joan, 80

Djami, 46, 47

Dvlan, Bob, 7, 18

81, 85, 86,89, 91

Etiembie, René, 12, 67-70 Faithfull, Marianne, 95, 96

Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), 67, 78 Le Forestier, Jean-Jacques, 101 Lentricchia, Frank, 32 Lisciandro, Frank, 75, 88, 102, 109, 113,114 Lisciandro, Kathy, 102, 109, 113

Fantin-Latour, Henri, 44

Fellini, Federico, 58, 78 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 77

Fitzgerald, Zelda, 99

France, Anatole, 123 Francis, Saint, 62 Frey, Jack, 28 Fusco, Richard, 20, 21

Loseau, Léon, 54

Lydon, Michael, 83

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 2, 20, 31, 34, 64, 66, 68

Gautier, Théophile, 35 Genet, Jean, 68

Manet, Edouard, 13 Manzarek, Ray, 4, 75, 76, 81, 83, 86,

Gide, André, 15, 99

Ginsberg, Allen, 18, 74, 77

91,115

Godard, Jean-Luc, 58

Maritain, Jacques, 15 Marx, Karl, 22

Goldman, Albert, 95

Matarasso, Henri, 13, 14

Harrison, George, 84

McClure, Michael, 77

Hemingway, Ernest, 99 Hohman, Timothy, 3

Menelek, king of Shoa, 46 Mezzatesta, Michael, 31, 32

Hopkins, Jerry, 16, 88, 96, 100

Miller, Henry, 28, 39, 62, 98, 99

Index

130

Miller, Jimmy, 82 Milton, John, 103

Satie, Erik, 103, 124 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 98, 69

Modigliani, Amadeo, 7, 28 Montaigne, Michel, 54

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 62 Schulte, Rainer, 21

Shakespeare, William, 55

Mortis, Peter, 28

Morrison, Andy, 74

Siddons, Bill, 85, 86 Sinatra, Frank, 69 Sivry, Charles de, 63

Morrison, Anna, 74

Morrison, Clara, 74

Spengler, Oswald, 62 Spielberg, Steve, 75

Morrison, Steve, 74, 101

Mozart, Wollgang, 121

Muller, Hervé, 16,93, 95, 98, 103

Stein, Gertrude, 99, 100 Stone, Oliver, 4—6, 16, 31, 70. 78, 87,96,97, 100

Musset, Alfred, 55

Stravinsky, Igor, 124

Nerval, Gérard de, 64, 66

Nietzsche, Frederic, 4, 61, 62, 653,

Sugerman, Danny, 6, 7, 16, 84, 87,

66, 76,91, 93

88, 96, 100, 107, 122

Nin, Anais, 15 Nouveau, Germain, 46

Tchelitchew, Pavel, 55, 62 Tinnemeyer, Jim, 3

Pasolint, Pier Faolo, 18

Truffaut, Frangois, 76

Perr, Harvey, 88

Perse, Saint-John, 15, 21, 45

Varda, Agnés, 93-93

Pial. Edith, 7, 100

Varése, Edgar, 12

Picasso, Pablo, 13-15, 20, 60, 61, 62,958,909 103,114,

Pirandello, Luigi, 61 Presley, Elvis, 75

Varese, Louise, 12

124

Vassillo, Max, 95 Verlaine, Mathilde, 41, 44 Verlaine, Paul, 18, 33, 36, 41—46, 57,63, 70,105-121

Proust, Marcel, 1, 8, 21, 27, 100

Psichari, Ernest, 15

Vermeer, Jan, 101

Verne, Jules, 30, 49 Villon, Francois, 120124

Rabelais, Francois, 45, 91 Rada, Jim, 94 Ragni, Jerome, 94

Wagner, Richard, 62

Rechy, John, 81 Rembrandt, Ryn, 103 Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud,

Warhol, Andy, 84

Watteau, Jean Antoine, 124 Whirman, Walt, 63, 88 Wicker, Oliver, 93, 96

Frédéric, 36 Isabelle, 36, 47, 67, 68 Mme., 36, 37, 47 Vitalie, 36

Wilde, Oscar, 7, 28, 99, 100

Racard, Michel, 2

Yeats, William Butler, 103

Rothchild, Paul, 81, 84, 87, 80-91

Yepremian, Gilles, 93, 98

Rouault, Georges, 62, 103, 124

Youngblood, Gene, 20, 98

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 48, 54

131

Index

About the Author

Wallace Fowlie is the author of many books: scholarly studies on Proust, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Gide, Claudel, Stendhal, and Dante, as well as The

Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie, Characters from Proust {poems), and Journal of Rehearsals:

A Memoir (Duke University Press), for which he

received the first Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, given annually by

the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters “to single out

recent writing in book form that merits recognition for the quality of its prose style.” Subsequent volumes in his series of memoirs published by Duke University Press are Aubade: A Teacher’s Notebook, Sites: A Third Memoir, and Memory: A Fourth Memoir.

Wallace Fowlie is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of French Literature, Duke University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fowlie, Wallace, 1908— Rimbaud and Jim Morrison : the rebel as poet / by Wallace Fowlie. p.

cm.

Includes index. ISBN 0-8223-1442-8 ISBN 0-8223-1445-2 (pbk)

_

1. Morrison, Jim, 1943—1971—Knowledge—Literature. 2. Rock music—United States—History and criticism. 3. Rebels (Social psychology) in literature. 4. Songs, American—History and criticism. 5. Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854—-1891—Influence. 6. American poetry— Erench influences. 1. Title. PS3363.08746Z66 811°.54—dc20

1994 93-37313

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