A Season in Hell

The test is subtractive, and a book this compressed is hard put to pass it; it mostly resists. Each part is a stage of one trial: the prologue’s verdict, the inheritance of “Mauvais sang”, the poison of “Nuit de l’enfer”, the two crimes confessed in the two “Délires”, the love and the poetics, three short attempts at escape in “L’Impossible”, “L’Éclair” and “Matin”, and the leave-taking of “Adieu”. Remove “Alchimie du verbe” and the book loses its confession of the poetics; remove “Vierge folle” and it loses the other self who judges him. What the test can take lies in “Mauvais sang”, whose eight movements wander, from the Gaul to the crusader, the convict and the landing of the whites, and could lose one without loss, and in “L’Impossible” and “L’Éclair”, which argue the same case twice.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a self that has refused its inheritance, Christianity, the West, family, work and its own vocation, cannot step outside it, and remains “esclave de mon baptême”, the slave of its baptism, even in revolt. “Je me crois en enfer, donc j’y suis”: he believes he is in hell, and so he is there, and damnation is shown as a condition of belief, not a place. The second disclosure is rarer: the visionary programme is examined by its maker, found to be a sickness, the disorder of his mind held sacred, and set aside with “Cela s’est passé”, that is over. The Vierge folle’s “La vraie vie est absente” names a modern condition that has held. Held off the top because the disclosure is partly private, carried in allusion to a life the reader must reconstruct, and because mood, revolt, disgust and longing, at times stands in for meaning.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached often, and in more than one key. The dreadful: “Nuit de l’enfer”, a mind in the fire, with its hallucinations and its broken cries to God and to Satan. The lyric: the songs of “Alchimie du verbe”, eternity found again, and “Ô saisons, ô châteaux”. The dawning: “Matin”, with its Christmas on earth, and the close of “Adieu”, where at dawn, armed with an ardent patience, they will enter the splendid cities. The first sentence of the prologue, a life that was a feast where all the wines flowed, is a summit in its first line. Held a step from the top because the elevation is broken by design into sarcasm and stammer, and parts of “Mauvais sang” and “L’Impossible” run on argument rather than height.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The book is a katabasis, a descent and a return, and it is framed as a season, opening on a remembered feast and closing on “L’automne déjà!”, autumn already. The figures bear load. Satan is the dedicatee, offered these hideous leaves from the notebook of one damned. The parable of the foolish virgin and the bridegroom, from Matthew 25, is turned in “Délires I” into a marriage in hell. The Gaulish ancestors and the pagan “race inférieure” are set against baptism; the poet is the alchemist of the word; Christ is the thief of energies. The particular stays particular: the love of two men in Paris and London, the farm, the wound, the poems of 1872. Held below the top because the self-myth sometimes overwhelms the archetype, so that the reader sees the poet posing in the figure, and because the second movement of the myth, salvation, is refused as much as built.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is the French prose poem of Aloysius Bertrand and of Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose, the Romantic confession of Rousseau and Musset, and the Christian literature of conversion and damnation. The turn is large on each count. The prose poem, a sequence of small detached pieces, becomes a single dramatic book with one voice, a plot of descent and return, and an argument. The confession becomes a trial in which the confessant is also prosecutor and judge. And a poet of eighteen, whose verse of the year before had broken the rules of French prosody, quotes that verse in order to condemn it: the swerve turns on its own author. The stake was real and paid: a book printed at his own cost, left unpaid for and almost unread for thirteen years, written out of a scandal that had ended in a shooting, and followed within about two years by his leaving literature. Held off the very top only because the prose poem and the confession were given forms, not invented ones.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is a notebook of the damned and is written as one: broken sentences, exclamations, dashes, sudden changes of address, to Satan, to God, to “vous”, voices that interrupt one another. What it knows is that the self cannot hold one position long enough to be saved or damned, and the oscillation is the knowledge; a verse narrative or a reasoned memoir would lose it. “Délires I” gives the poet only through the voice of his victim, so that the reader knows him as the other knew him. “Alchimie du verbe” sets the verse inside the prose as evidence, and the change of medium is the verdict: song is what he was, prose what he now is. “Adieu” calms the syntax as it reaches its resolve. Held off the top because in “Mauvais sang” and “L’Impossible” the fragment sometimes becomes a container for argument rather than its instrument.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence, not promise: a century and more of reading has not closed it. Claudel read it as the instrument of his conversion and its author as a mystic in the wild state; the surrealists read it as revolt; Étiemble’s Le Mythe de Rimbaud, from 1952, set out to strip the legend from the texts, and the texts outlasted the stripping. The open questions are the work’s, not its reputation’s: whether “Adieu” renounces literature or renews it; whether “Matin” and “Adieu” end in conversion, in modern secular labour or in neither; whether the Vierge folle is Verlaine, a parody of Verlaine or a part of Rimbaud himself; whether the “nègre” of “Mauvais sang” is a colonial stereotype, its mockery or both; how far “Alchimie du verbe” is honest self-judgment and how far a new pose. The formal depth yields too: the revisions of the 1872 poems inside the book reward comparison line by line. Held a step down because some of the yield has come from the life and the legend rather than the page.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The field is French poetry of the nineteenth century, and through it the poetry of Europe. The force is high: the book reorganised what the prose poem could do, a whole book, one consciousness, an argument and a drama of voices, and made the poet’s critique of his own art a subject of the poem. The reach was delayed, and it is shared. Almost no one read the book before 1886, and much of Rimbaud’s influence runs through the Illuminations, the letter of the seer and the figure of the poet who stopped, so that this book carries only its part of it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: from 1886 the Symbolists took Rimbaud as a master; Claudel followed, then the surrealists, the long line of the first-person prose poem of crisis in French and beyond, Henry Miller’s The Time of the Assassins, the Beat poets, and much of later popular culture’s idea of the poet.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole, in an edition its author corrected and saw printed; nothing is lost, and drafts of three of its sections survive besides. Presence runs to about a hundred and fifty years, and since 1886 it has been continuous and wide: in print in France throughout, taught in French schools and universities, translated many times into English, by Varèse, Fowlie, Schmidt, Bernard and Mason among others, and into most literary languages, and in use by poets and musicians. Charged against it are the first thirteen years, when the edition lay in a Brussels printer’s stock and the book was close to unread, and the share of its presence that belongs to the legend of its author rather than to reading of the text. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the colonial and Communard allusions are history, and the book is read for what pressed through them. A century and a half is not the survival of millennia.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Rimbaud’s French. The command of the prose sentence is very great and of a new kind: the short declarative that turns, as when the Gaulish ancestors leave him the pale blue eye, the narrow brain and the clumsiness in combat; the sarcastic aside; the litany; the abrupt cut. The prologue holds an aesthetics in two sentences: “Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux”, one evening he sat Beauty on his knees, and “Et je l’ai trouvée amère”, he found her bitter. The revisions of the 1872 poems are made with exact care, and the verse is the work of a master of French song. The plaintive, self-abasing voice of the Vierge folle is a second register, perfectly held. Charged: some of the raggedness is fatigue rather than design, in parts of “Mauvais sang” and “L’Impossible”, where the prose repeats and slackens.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: a song of “Alchimie du verbe”, far from birds, flocks and village girls, and the parodic war cry of “Mauvais sang”, “Les blancs débarquent. Le canon!”; or the plaint of the Vierge folle and the clipped resolve of “Adieu”. One law governs them: the damned self tries each identity, pagan, convict, saint, lover, alchemist, worker, and is thrown back by the law of its inheritance. Every part obeys it, and the range is wide: lyric, dramatic monologue, satire, visionary night, sermon. Charged: the law is sometimes held by tone more than by structure, and the book’s contradictions, though meant, now and then become mere changes of mood. The ending, between conversion and secular labour, leaves the governing question unresolved by design, which costs a little as coherence where it gains as depth.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what a short book holds, and it holds more than its length suggests. Consciousness, fully: a mind in crisis, most exposed in “Nuit de l’enfer”. Ancestry and race: the Gaulish blood, the “race inférieure”. History: Gaul, the crusades, the Church, the West with its science and its progress, colonial conquest. The sacred: baptism, Christ, Satan, conversion and its refusal. Love and sexuality, in a marriage of two men and the cry that love is to be reinvented. Labour, loathed in every trade and then hailed in “L’Éclair”. Art itself, in “Alchimie du verbe”; the natural order, in the songs and the seasons. One voice joins them, and they are held, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the family, the state and the social world are glimpsed rather than inhabited: the book’s world is one consciousness and what it carries, and a short form holds that much and no more.

Score: 8.0 / 10