Messieurs. Now do you see? Do you see what I, a woman alone, must contend with?”
“But, Madame, in the interest of science—”
“As the esteemed mother of such a—”
Bigwigs. She knew at once what they wanted.
“Good heavens, Messieurs. Can you be asking to feel …
my
brain?”
“Twenty,” bid the Otter.
“Thirty! And you’ll be
vite-vite
about it, too.” Muttering, she stuffed her needlepoint into a bag. “But mind you, Messieurs, be careful, very careful of my large bumps.”
“Bumps, Madame?” At this they shivered like wet dogs.
Picture it, they thought. Years from now, in the Musée de la Société phrénologique de Paris, in the Halls of Madness, in cloudy, piss-colored specimen jars, there they would bob, like prehistoric eggs. Two brains. Mother and son. Peasant and genius, opposite sides of the same moon.
“Easy, Madame,” said the Otter, raising the great calipers.
But at this, she sprang. Snagged her nestling by the collar—
up
. Then, with a smirk, left them high and dry. Left money on the table, too—a first. Moments later, as promised, three sharp reports are heard:
“God the Son!”
“God the Father!”
“God the Holy Ghost!”
Slap! Slap! Slap!
R emarkable thing, though. The boy was not the usual mathematical or musical prodigy, say, like the seven-year-old, periwigged Mozart dressed in blue satin and white knee britches, mesmerizing kings and queens as his tiny fingers swept up and down the keys of his little pianoforte. Rather, he was that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities—a prodigy of letters.
And by sixteen—and then writing his own poems—Arthur Rimbaud was not merely dazzling or surprising, say, like young Thomas Chatterton, dead at seventeen, a century before this time. By then—not that anyone then knew it, of course—Arthur Rimbaud had anticipated, and exceeded, Dada and Surrealism, had checkmated and rewritten fifty or sixty years of future poetry, had barged headlong into the twentieth century, and then with the recklessness and bravado practiced, in France at least, only by painter provocateurs like Honoré Daumier or Paul Gauguin.
Go on. Stand them all up. Name one. Anyone. What other nineteenth-century writer managed to break through to the twentieth?
Poe—a first dark industrial explosion, an inventor of forms, the detective story for one, but in diction thoroughly nineteenth century. Baudelaire—a dazzler and an outlier dancing on the razor’s edge of beauty and perversion, yet stylistically still in the classical mode. Mallarmé—a lord of sonoric discipline and a boundary stretcher but still a flowery, rather precious nineteenth-century effusive. Wilde—very close, at least in humor, and a great master of prose, but in poetry (savefor “Ballad of Reading Gaol”), a hothouse, late Romantic when the parade had long passed. As for the titanic, hairy-chested Whitman, that great liberator, hankering, gross, mystical, nude, however magnificently the bard sprawls and swims, his long, powerful lines still teem with the prolixity and Yankee gimcrackery of that age.
And Emily Dickinson? Ah, but she was her own century.
Not so Rimbaud. Indeed, by his teens, at his height, the boy had rid himself of the florid, bowdlerizing earnestness of his time, with its pieties and fripperies and oddities of punctuation. In fact, with one shrug, he pretty much had freed himself from the prevailing notion of poetry, which, however artfully, was finally written in the language of common sense. Meaning, at least on a basic level, that pretty much anybody could read and understand it, just as anybody could see what typically was all too evident. True, there were exceptions to the boy’s harsh judgments—precious few, like Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine. But otherwise, what was the
point
? the kid wondered. Where was the power and mystery? Who would ever want to be
that
kind of poet? An obvious poet. Really, a butler poet with white gloves holding a
“But, Madame, in the interest of science—”
“As the esteemed mother of such a—”
Bigwigs. She knew at once what they wanted.
“Good heavens, Messieurs. Can you be asking to feel …
my
brain?”
“Twenty,” bid the Otter.
“Thirty! And you’ll be
vite-vite
about it, too.” Muttering, she stuffed her needlepoint into a bag. “But mind you, Messieurs, be careful, very careful of my large bumps.”
“Bumps, Madame?” At this they shivered like wet dogs.
Picture it, they thought. Years from now, in the Musée de la Société phrénologique de Paris, in the Halls of Madness, in cloudy, piss-colored specimen jars, there they would bob, like prehistoric eggs. Two brains. Mother and son. Peasant and genius, opposite sides of the same moon.
“Easy, Madame,” said the Otter, raising the great calipers.
But at this, she sprang. Snagged her nestling by the collar—
up
. Then, with a smirk, left them high and dry. Left money on the table, too—a first. Moments later, as promised, three sharp reports are heard:
“God the Son!”
“God the Father!”
“God the Holy Ghost!”
Slap! Slap! Slap!
R emarkable thing, though. The boy was not the usual mathematical or musical prodigy, say, like the seven-year-old, periwigged Mozart dressed in blue satin and white knee britches, mesmerizing kings and queens as his tiny fingers swept up and down the keys of his little pianoforte. Rather, he was that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities—a prodigy of letters.
And by sixteen—and then writing his own poems—Arthur Rimbaud was not merely dazzling or surprising, say, like young Thomas Chatterton, dead at seventeen, a century before this time. By then—not that anyone then knew it, of course—Arthur Rimbaud had anticipated, and exceeded, Dada and Surrealism, had checkmated and rewritten fifty or sixty years of future poetry, had barged headlong into the twentieth century, and then with the recklessness and bravado practiced, in France at least, only by painter provocateurs like Honoré Daumier or Paul Gauguin.
Go on. Stand them all up. Name one. Anyone. What other nineteenth-century writer managed to break through to the twentieth?
Poe—a first dark industrial explosion, an inventor of forms, the detective story for one, but in diction thoroughly nineteenth century. Baudelaire—a dazzler and an outlier dancing on the razor’s edge of beauty and perversion, yet stylistically still in the classical mode. Mallarmé—a lord of sonoric discipline and a boundary stretcher but still a flowery, rather precious nineteenth-century effusive. Wilde—very close, at least in humor, and a great master of prose, but in poetry (savefor “Ballad of Reading Gaol”), a hothouse, late Romantic when the parade had long passed. As for the titanic, hairy-chested Whitman, that great liberator, hankering, gross, mystical, nude, however magnificently the bard sprawls and swims, his long, powerful lines still teem with the prolixity and Yankee gimcrackery of that age.
And Emily Dickinson? Ah, but she was her own century.
Not so Rimbaud. Indeed, by his teens, at his height, the boy had rid himself of the florid, bowdlerizing earnestness of his time, with its pieties and fripperies and oddities of punctuation. In fact, with one shrug, he pretty much had freed himself from the prevailing notion of poetry, which, however artfully, was finally written in the language of common sense. Meaning, at least on a basic level, that pretty much anybody could read and understand it, just as anybody could see what typically was all too evident. True, there were exceptions to the boy’s harsh judgments—precious few, like Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine. But otherwise, what was the
point
? the kid wondered. Where was the power and mystery? Who would ever want to be
that
kind of poet? An obvious poet. Really, a butler poet with white gloves holding a
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