Today in fiction
On Oct. 22, 1954, Katsumi Hosokawa hears his first opera, Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” in Tokyo at the age of 11.
— “Bel Canto” (2001)
by Ann Patchett
From “The Book of Fictional Days”
Know when something that did not really happen
occurred? Send it to fictiondays@yahoo.com.
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Today in literary history
On this day in 1885, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother that he had decided to become a gun runner in Ethiopia, so beginning the last phase of his wild, infamous and short life. By the age of 21, Rimbaud had renounced Paul Verlaine and poetry for a vagabond tour of Europe — tutor, beggar, docker, factory worker, soldier, thief and more. By the age of 25, he had renounced Europe for Africa, becoming at first a coffee trader and then turning to gun running (and possibly slave trading) as a get-rich scheme, he tells his mother:
“I have left my job in Aden after a violent altercation with those pathetic peasants who want to stupefy me for good … They did all they could to hold on to me, but I sent them to hell, with all their offers and their deals, and their horrible office, and their filthy town … Several thousand rifles are on their way to me from Europe. I am going to set up a caravan, and carry this merchandise to Menelik, the king of Shoa [Abyssinia] …”
His partners died and there was a year of delay and baksheesh, but Rimbaud and his 100 rifle-laden camels finally set off on the four-month trek through the Afar Triangle in the Great Rift Valley. This is the area where the 3.2-million-year-old “Lucy” was found in 1974; as described by Charles Nicholl in his biography/travelogue/detective story “Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa,” it was poetic ground zero:
“These ridged, scorched, volcanic badlands across which Rimbaud struggled in 1886-7 are, in the old cliche, the ‘cradle of mankind.’ And if Rimbaud’s years in Africa seem like a flight from what he was — from Europe, from poetry, from himself — then it is surely here, on this desolate desert trek, that he reaches the furthest point of that arrow-flight, arriving at this utter privation, at this landscape of nothingness, which is also — in a quite scientific sense of which he would surely approve — the very beginning of humanity.
Nicholl retraced Rimbaud’s path in Africa, and his book — Hawthornden Prize winner in 1997 — brings the facts and the mysterious legend alive in fascinating detail. Interspersed are lines from Rimbaud, such as these prescient ones from “A Season in Hell”:
“I loved the desert, burnt orchards, tired old shops, warm drinks. I dragged myself through stinking alleys, and with my eyes closed I offered myself to the sun, the god of fire.
‘General, if on your ruined ramparts one cannon still remains, shell us with clods of dried-up earth. Shatter the mirrors of expensive shops! And the drawing rooms! Make the city swallow its dust. Turn gargoyles to rust. Stuff boudoirs with rubies’ fiery powder …'”
— Steve King
To find out more about “Today in Literary History,” contact Steve King.
