• 14 Dec, 2025 *

Portrait of 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud (making it clear he thinks you’re dirt) by Étienne Carjat. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

My first real confrontation with Arthur Rimbaud was in a college French class, where "The Drunken Boat" was on the menu alongside Baudelaire’s "Enivrez-vous" (“Get Drunk”). Although I remember the instructor going into predictable raptures over the latter, not a single thing about the former, nor about its creator in general, remains from that class in my memory. And although I’ve read Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Illuminations more than once, to say anything at all about them, I’d still need to go back and review the texts.

That may have a lot to do with the fact that by the time those nineteenth-century poems reached me, neither the poet’s nor his poems’ rebellion, accusations, embrace of bad behavior, etc., were remotely shocking. I’d grown up, after all, in the post-punk era, when hair bands were celebrated for trashing their own guitars, Pink Floyd had long been floating inflatable pigs over power stations and at concerts, and Ozzy Osbourne had moved during my childhood from tossing offal to fans to using his own teeth to rip off a bat’s head. In poetry, Kerouac had provided a more grace-filled, if less drunken, riposte to the status quo of life and literature. And sure, it was interesting to ponder why a teen poet had tossed masterful verse-bombs into the mix and then just abandoned the whole thing—but the suicide of purposefully scruffy Kurt Cobain and his own rejection of contemporary culture spoke more particularly to my own world.

It’s surprising, then, that I’ve been fully sucked into James Ramsey Ullman’s “novel suggested by the life of Arthur Rimbaud,” The Day on Fire.1 It was Annie Dillard who got me into this, mentioning as she did in Holy the Firm that she was revisiting the novel, hoping that it would once again stir in her, as it had when she first read it, her desire to be a writer. And the book is fantastic, though I can’t explain why. It may just be because Ullman’s writing is so good, and his grasp of his material so total, that he doesn’t need to be flashy about how he’s going about telling the story; he can just let it flow. I’m not, though, sticking with the six hundred-plus pages of tiny print out of a love for the protagonist.

I can’t say whether Ullman offers an accurate portrayal of Rimbaud; the point here is the story itself, so from here on out, we’ll stick to his alias as given, here named Morel. Yes, the kid was brought up in a miserable backwater by a stingy and unloving mother. And yes, he was way too smart, creative, and (perhaps self-) educated to have had any use for school. And yes, all of his enthusiastic bubbles—belief in the Paris Commune, in promising lesser mortals, in the world of poetry and Paris—have been burst by the ugliness that comes with reality. There’s a lot to rail against, and rail he does, all in the service of his calling and its innovative results, none of which he helps the rest of idiotic humanity to understand or appreciate, since he has no faith in 99% of them. Why try? All they deserve in his mind is abuse for being who and what they are. Morel’s increasingly inebriated and spiteful trail through the world of cafés and literary circles is an intentional journey with an intentional outcome: “Out of drunkenness and narcosis came the pure radiance of art.” Alternating between bouts of severe asceticism and predictable debauchery, Morel “had encountered the Seven Deadly Sins… [and] embraced them; and in embracing, he had destroyed them. He had, by his own efforts, of his will and vision, cut down the Tree of Good and Evil,” had released his senses “of the bonds that held the senses of others.”2

In itself, it doesn’t seem all that new; the figure of the tortured and torturing poet, sacrificing himself for his work and some true thing out beyond the bounds of establishment culture, had been around long before Morel/Rimbaud. But the case of this character seems to go one step further: immolating himself, yes, but also apparently wanting to burn the entire world down in the process. Although his resentment and disgust are justified, there’s a way in which his push into the core spirit of art is pointless. Sure, he’s emerged on the other side of known morality, but what would the pure radiance of art even mean when everyone with the ability to see or experience it has been turned to useless ash?

I’m only about a fifth of the way through the book, so Morel might come to this realization when he finally decides to ditch poetry. He might even, for all I know, arrive not at bland repentance or likability, but maybe some place where he only wants to murder half the people in his path. Be that as it may, the fictional life I’ve been subject to here is (of course) vastly different than that found in the three L’Engle books I’ve read over the past week or so.

My last post mentioned the idea of love found in A Wrinkle in Time: an arduous practice-feeling-approach that has nothing to do with cozy Hallmark or romcom visions, or the sappiness found in a lot of Romantic poetry—the same brand of sentimentalism both Morel and the real Rimbaud would have scorned. And as I’ve read through the next two volumes in L’Engle’s Time Quintet, I’ve become convinced that an emphasis on this sort of love is the central point of the whole endeavor. Meg and Charles Wallace may come from the happiest of happy homes—but even though their mom has won the Nobel Prize, the rest of the village resents her for not doing the sort of “real” work that’s their lot, sitting in an office or store, and relishes any gossip that comes their way about any member of the Murry family. The good-natured Calvin has to survive a home life that sounds like something today’s child protective services would be interested in keeping an eye on. And yet, this kid who has every reason to lash out has found something to hold onto, and won’t let himself fall into his mother’s bitterness or his siblings’ bullying tactics. And of course, in every volume, the world’s on the brink of destruction, the oblivion-loving Echthroi streaking their cold deception everywhere they go. It’s a lot for a few kids to have to face up to maintaining the balance of the universe—but then they also have to get the help of extremely unloving and unlovable people to do it.

In the second book, A Wind in the Door, that means bringing the odious school principal, Mr. Jenkins, to a place where he can see and feel and even value human warmth; in the third, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, that involves the Murrys being able to uncover what lies beneath the caustic creature Mrs. O’Keefe, Calvin’s mother, has become. Neither of these unsympathetic characters suddenly turns lovable, or even likable as a result. But some hold of hatred has been broken; some understanding has been increased; some recognition on all sides of having been and thought and felt in too small a fashion has occurred. Unlike Morel, the genius Charles Wallace keeps getting reminded and relearning and accepting that he doesn’t know and can’t control everything, and that his own unaided efforts will result in failure for everyone. He and his fellow adventurers get thrown past the bounds of reason and standard morality all the time, and even get glimpses of what would probably qualify as the pure radiance of art. But they don’t get to linger in it, and they have to take that radiance back to the ugly world below—because ugly and unfriendly and unappreciative of genius as it is, it’s theirs, and it’s not their place or even their desire to see it and all its stupid, shallow inhabitants sacrificed in affirmation of their greater insight. Part, I think, of what L’Engle’s version of love entails is learning to live in and accept and be gentle with the limited world, even as you do your utmost to combat evil and hate and every degree of destructive force.

As one character says in Tilting Planet, “You have cause to be angry…. [but] Anger is not bitterness.”3 What may be a key difference between Morel and L’Engle’s protagonists is that they’ve learned (and he hasn’t) or will come to understand that one particular lesson. I can’t say anything about Rimbaud, but I’m going to speculate about what’s ahead for Morel: maybe he’ll ultimately abandon poetry not because it will have grown old or he just wasn’t writing, or because no one recognized his work (after all, he’s found Druard/Verlaine and other admirers to understand it). Maybe he’ll grasp the fact that there is no one pure radiance of art, but that, as Jed Perl recently observed about criticism, it “isn’t so much a search for truth as a [legitimate] competition between different truths”—that his brilliance can exist alongside the drivel of the pretenders, who’ll get their own when they’re forgotten and he’s remembered.4 But based on what I know so far of this irascible being, Morel’s abandonment of his calling will rather be due to his realization that serving art through bitter hatred just doesn’t make any sense, and that he’s been more invested all along in the hatred. Recognize the value, small though it may be, in that cloddish editor or naive publisher? Forget about it.

Then again, where both the real Rimbaud and his fictional stand-in are concerned, the poetry and the legend continue to fascinate and even influence any number of artists. For the work to have been produced, and to reveal and maintain its power and allure and meaning, Rimbaud couldn’t have been other than he was. As Perl said of “great criticism,” it “is by definition intemperate. The central paradox of criticism may be that its vital contributions to an open society depend on critical voices that are in some sense illiberal, extreme in their appetites and tastes.”5 That certainly seems to apply to Morel; though he’s not a professional critic and despises almost everyone, all of his bursting at the seams is crying out for a more “open society.” Had that society emerged—had the Paris Commune, for example, not been crushed, had it lived into its promise—would Morel have been able to temper his blanket intemperance, and to do so without falling into bland conformity? Would his bitterness have eased; would he have continued to write? At this point in the book, it seems his sneer has become too ingrained to imagine him doing anything but directing a torrent of ridicule at the concept of love, however defined; too much a part of him to expect even the barest civility. After all, he spits at people even as they love his work, and want to know him as well—even as he succeeds at his calling, and has proven his point about rejecting human falsity and shallowness. On the other hand, would the Murrys or Calvin finally have fallen victim to permanent rancor or resentment, had their missions gone awry? I can’t see it happening, but then again, back in Mrs. O’Keefe’s childhood, no one would have set store in any prediction of the fate that was indeed coming for her.

Maybe the question is a difference, even grounded as it is in separate experiences and commitments and ability to attain outcomes, what any of these characters want. In L’Engle’s world, it is (to put it too simplistically) peace and love and harmony. But in the case of Morel, it’s hard to say. In blowing past good and evil and so on and so forth, his efforts seem too crazed for even desire to find a place. I have no idea, then, how this character’s emotions and justifications will work themselves out, nor how anyone could’ve put up with the actual person on whom he’s based. Good thing Ullman is the master that he is, because I’m fully in for the infuriating ride.

1. The phrase comes on the title page of the novel (Valancourt, 1986).↩

2. Ullman, 159, 159–60.↩

3. Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 146.↩

4. Jed Perl, “Impassioned Ferocity,” The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025, 8.↩

5. Perl, 10. And it doesn’t fit within my essay, but I so much loved it that I’m including here Perl’s assertion that “the best critics… are believers before they’re critics,” that they’re at their work because they serve deeply held principles, holding to an “almost religious faith in some particular idea about the nature of art.” 10↩

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