Yanny Hureaux: Un Ardennais nommé Rimbaud (2003)

This really is a masterful work by Yanny Hureaux, a novelist, journalist and writer of many local books around Ardennes subjects, who taught in Charleville-Mézières, Rimbaud's place of birth, for some years and is passionately interested in the literature and culture in general of the area. Arthur Rimbaud is seen here very much as a regional writer: nothing parochial about that: D. H. Lawrence was a regional writer as well as a national, even global, writer.

I studied Rimbaud a little at university, and was only taught that he gave up poetry at a very early age to become a gunrunner in Africa, and of course there's truth in this, although I found out nothing more. Yanny Hureaux knows a great deal about Rimbaud's travels, but more importantly he sees things from a local point of view. Certainly we follow Rimbaud on his many travels, but from the vicarious point of view of learning of his letters home – those received by his mother Vitalie and his sister Isabelle when he was in, for example, Cyprus or Aden.

For if we are with him when he is away, it is indirectly in Charleville-Mézières or the farm in tiny Roche (Vitalie's place of birth), with mother and sister, reading quotations from his letters and imagining mother and sister following place markings on a map showing his movements.

Reading this book made me think of Marie Nimier's La Reine du silence, in which (as a fatherless daughter) she muses on how many fatherless writers there are, making me think of Georges Perec, Camus, Sartre, Jean Rouaud, Marguerite Duras, the adolescent Laurent Mauvinier, and many more that don't instantly spring to mind. But Rimbaud's father wasn't dead, merely absent, one of the many who just walk out on their families and don't return. Loss and/or existential anguish is frequently present in their work.

Verlaine is also present here, occasionally also seen from a geographical distance, but more present as a son of the Ardennes, born in Metz but seen here in the late seventies and early eighties – after leaving jail for shooting Rimbaud and teaching in England for a short time – working as a répétiteur in a school in Rethel, living with ex-pupil Lucien Létinois in Coulommes-et-Marqueny and then on a farm with him in Juniville: all three towns are in the Ardennes.

The picture on the front cover is of course a detail from Fantin-Latour's Coin de table, which is of a Vilains Bonshommes dinner: Verlaine sat to Rimbaud's right and Léon Valade to his left.

A treasure of a book.

(Hureaux – unsurprisingly, as this book is essentially about Rimbaud – doesn't mention the time that Verlaine taught in William Lovell's school in Stickney, Lincolnshire, although it's worth mentioning. His English wasn't very good and he had a thick French accent which made his pupils make fun of him, but both Verlaine and his pupils came to really like each other. Verlaine also enjoyed going to Boston every weekend, where his purported visit to the Roman Catholic chapel in Horncastle Road seems just to have been an excuse to sample the drinks in the local pubs. He started there in March 1875 – shortly after his release from prison – and left in June 1876.)

My Arthur Rimbaud posts:
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Yanny Hureaux: Un Ardennais nommé Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud and the Vilains bonhommes, Paris 6e
Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau ivre' sculpture, Paris 6e
Arthur Rimbaud, Parc Balnéaire du Prado, Marseille
Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières cemetery
Arthur Rimbaud in Roche
Arthur Rimbaud quotations, Charleville-Mézières
Arthur Rimbaud memorial, Charleville-Mézières
Arthur Rimbaud murals in Charleville-Mézières
Rimbaud and Verlaine in Camden Town
Arthur Rimbaud museums in Charleville-Mézières
Arthur Rimbaud in Attigny
Arthur Rimbaud and Hervé Tonglet in Charleville-Mézières