The Books: Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, edited by Anne Fadiman; “A Companion of The Prophet: Arthur Rimbaud, by Enid Starkie”, by Luc Sante

Next up on the essays shelf:

Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, edited by Anne Fadiman

During Anne Fadiman’s reign as editor of The American Scholar (I had a subscription), she instituted a regular feature called “Rereadings”, where she asked authors to go back and reread a book they loved when they were young and see how the experience had changed. What was the book to them originally and what was it to them now? This book is a collection of those essays.

Luc Sante’s essay about his teenage discovery of Rimbaud is achingly honest. He does not protect himself and his adolescent yearnings. He does not try to dress it up so that he seems more cool or self-aware. I admire that. Luc Sante was a voracious reader as a child (as most writers are), and he picked up this and that from different authors. Children who read widely are sponges, they soak up EVERYthing. I was one of them. I remember so well reading the books that were “beyond” me and how confusing/illuminating/scary/awe-inspiring it was. I read “Oliver Twist” at the age of 10, 11. Much of it was far beyond my capability, but I read every word. It gave me a sense of the adult world as being complex, frightening, and definitely something I was not yet ready for. And yet I treasured those glimpses. And my dad and mum were always there to answer my questions, when I had them. Luc Sante describes his discovery of Rimbaud’s poems as being nothing less than revelatory. A lightning-flash from the heavens. A demarcation line. Before Rimbaud he was one way, after Rimbaud he was another.

He is open about how much he self-dramatized. He admits that when he was a kid he decided to be a prodigy. He saw himself in Rimbaud. Rimbaud, in all his chaos, madness, and transcendence, was the lantern lighting his way. He thought he could actually compete. (This is common with Rimbaud followers. He is so inspirational to them, he makes it seem like that brand of genius is actually accessible to regular mortals.) One day, with some Christmas money in his pocket, Luc Sante went into a bookstore and saw the biography of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie. He had only read the poems up until that point. He didn’t know anything about the man. He bought the book.

The book cracked him open like a walnut. He was devastated by it, inspired by it, frightened of it. I dated a guy once who would totally relate to this. Luc Sante was a lonely bookish kid, 15 years old, and he dragged the Enid Starkie book around with him everywhere. Maybe somewhere, in the story of Rimbaud’s life, would be a clue as to how to live that way. Of course that way despair lies.

And rereading a book that had such a major impact on him was somewhat disheartening. Because you aren’t only reading about Rimbaud then. You are reading about your SELF, your younger self, your old dreams, your beautiful innocence, your hopes. I have had that experience many times.

It is the openness of Luc Sante’s portrayal of himself that I find so admirable

Here’s an excerpt.

Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love, edited by Anne Fadiman; ‘A Companion of The Prophet: Arthur Rimbaud, by Enid Starkie”, by Luc Sante

And then I saw a thick New Directions paperback – those deadpan black-and-white covers still call to me from across a room – with a picture of a big-haired, pensive, beautiful adolescent: Arthur Rimbaud by Enid Starkie. I grandly forked over $3.25 for it. I still didn’t know much about Rimbaud. I had read the four works in the anthology I possessed – “Ma boheme,” “Le bateau ivre,” and “Voyelles,” in addition to the excerpt from A Season in Hell – again and again with emotions ranging from puzzlement to the sort of excitement that made me actually get up and do an awkward little dance, but their author was represented in neither my town’s library nor my school’s. It was overwhelming to have nearly five hundred pages about him, complete with pictures.

I read the book slowly, in part because it was dense and in part because I wanted to be seen reading it. I wrote the book as much as I read it, “absentmindedly” holding it in one hand on the street even when I was carrying a satchel of books in the other, “casually” parking it atop my notebook next to my coffee cup wherever I sat. I proudly displayed it on the subway, at Nedick’s and Chock full o’Nuts and the Automat, in garment-district cafeterias, at the juice stand in the passage from the IRT to the shuttle at Grand Central, in the bar car of the 5:30 express home (drinkless but trying to outsmoke everybody), maybe once or twice at some dump on St. Mark’s Place that advertised Acapulco Gold ice cream. There was no T shirt available then, but I was identifying my brand in comparable fashion. Rimbaud, dead for eighty years, was enjoying one of his many rebirths. The Starkie biography, first published in 1938, had only just come out in paperback (along with its bookstore companion, the Louise Varese translation of Rimbaud’s works). His name was being thrown around in all sorts of places, such as interviews with pop stars – I felt a little proprietary, as if I owned him and they were encroaching. And there was that face, of course, the detail of Fantin-Latour’s Coin de table on the cover and the (second) Carjat photograph within, which matched the work and the life and seemed utterly contemporary. He may be a bit of a conventional cherub in the former, but in the latter he is electric, with flames in those pale eyes. He was hipper than anyone alive.

But if in the fullness of my teenage fantasy I felt I must have been appointed a successor to Rimbaud – on the basis of a few biographical details merely shared by several thousand people – at most times he came to stand as a reproach to my cowardice and mediocrity. Yes, I recognized myself in various aspects of his life. Part of this was the result of a childhood immersion in Catholicism, immediately flung down at puberty and followed b y a pursuit of what I recognized was its inverse. I liked to think I was dangerous and terrible, even though the shoplifting ,pot smoking, truancy, and masturbation that were all I could muster in this regard would have so impressed no one but my poor unsteady mother. I liked to think I was illuminated, but while I could generate great clouds of smoke, imagining what my works would look like on the page and how they would be received, I couldn’t actually write what I imagined. I liked to think that I, too, could manifest genius in a quick series of slaps and then suddenly leave the room never to return, stranding traduced friends and weeping sycophants out on the ice, flicking aside poetry and culture and civilization like a long ash on a cigarette, but I couldn’t very well leave without having first entered.

My writing was pathetic and Rimbaud was unanswerable. He was a changeling, an alien. The deeper I burrowed into Rimbaud, the less I could see him or put flesh on him. I fancied that I detected aspects in myself corresponding to some parts of him I thought I understood, but they were surface elements. He was not like a conventional idol, who will reliably turn out to be contemptible in private; and even though he was my age, I couldn’t make him into a schoolyard rival whom I could find some way of reducing to tears. I had made a grave error in choosing Rimbaud as my model – he wasn’t even divisible into parts, you couldn’t be half a Rimbaud. The alternative to being Rimbaud was to be nothing. If I had chosen somebody like Jack Kerouac instead, I wouldn’t have had a problem – him I could see all too readily, laugh at his neuroses, nail his stupidities with no effort – but that was exactly why I hadn’t chosen him. I read and admired many other writers, but none was Rimbaud, who remained a perpetual admonition, a painful constant reminder of my failure, his nineteenth-century calendar mocking the years of my life. I quit writing poetry when he did, at twenty-one – although I only just now realized the coincidence – but there the chronological parallels end. He left France, I stayed in New York; he went to Aden, I moved downtown; he went to Harar, I began to write for magazines; he came home to die, I published my first book.