On Thursday 8 May 2008 the author of this website, Sebastian Hayes, gave a talk on the French nineteenth century poet, Arthur Rimbaud, at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London. Since there was to be a commemoration of the 1968 Paris ‘Student Revolution’ on the following Saturday at the same venue, the author angled his talk with this in mind.

Sebastian Hayes started by stating in advance that, considering the audience and the moment in time, he was not going to emphasize the specifically literary importance of Rimbaud, or his command of style, though these matters were briefly dealt with in his essay Rimbaud Revisited 1968 — 2006 which appears in his recent book, Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer, A New Translation with Notes (available online from http://www.brimstonepress.co.uk). However, he did want briefly to disperse two myths, firstly that there was anything particularly remarkable in Rimbaud destroying his early work, and, secondly, that Rimbaud had a sensational sex life (as one might perhaps imagine from the recent film).

As to the first, Sebastian Hayes pointed out that it is not rare for young authors to destroy part or all of their work, either through genuine distaste, disappointment concerning publication or as a ploy to gain attention. The author himself destroyed all his writings, including Diaries, and all the books he had with him in a bonfire when he was about twenty-eight — a volume of Arthur Rimbaud and the novelette Manon Lescaut were the only books to escape the auto-da-fe. A university friend of the author, Ian Watson, informed us one day that he, likewise, had burned all his poems. What is remarkable in the case of Rimbaud is the quality of the work destroyed (or left forgotten by him) and the subsequent resolve of the writer : Rimbaud never went back to literature after his nineteenth year and even stopped reading poetry and fiction. In a letter to his mother from North Africa, the older Rimbaud confessed that “if I had a son I would want him to become an engineer, not an artist” and when Delahaye, a schoolfriendof Rimbaud’s dared to ask him if he still did any writing, Rimbaud looked at him “as if I had asked him if he still played with a stick and hoop” (Delahaye).

 Far from leading an extravagant sexual life, Rimbaud as an adolescent was shy with girls and is only known to have had one long-standing relation with a woman, Argoba, an Ethiopian girl in Harar. Argoba was not ‘noble savage’ like Gauguin’s Tahitian mistresses : she dressed in European clothes, was a Catholic and liked smoking cigarettes! In Sebastian’s opinion, Rimbaud’s celebrated liaison with the French poet Verlaine was much more of an emotional than a sexual affair, and there is no evidence whatsoever that Rimbaud had any other homosexual relations. Rimbaud can certainly be claimed as a pioneer of the ‘sexual liberation’ of the Sixties but, like Moses, he never entered the Promised Land himself. (One wonders what he would make of the scene today — not much I reckon.)

The author went on to say that Rimbaud’s main preoccupation, not to say obsession, was to find a way of ‘changing the world’ by some sort of total revolution which would not only be social and political but also individual, psychological and cultural. (The English equivalent is Blake.)  Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), Arthur Rimbaud’s most important work, is the record of the total collapse of such  utopian hopes. The rest of Rimbaud’s life was miserable : “It is as if, once he had renounced the idea of being a ‘damned soul’, he became instead a ‘damned man’ “(Rimbaud Revisited, p. 62).

The author then made the connection with May ’68 in France, the West’s longest General Strike and France’s ‘Cultural Revolution’. It was a thoroughly Rimbaudian movement, so much so that when the author (who was living in Paris at the time) came across slogans such as ‘Prenez vos desirs pour des realites’ (‘Consider your desires to be realities’) and ‘La revolution sera une fete ou ne sera pas’ (‘The revolution will be a festival or will not take place at all’), he actually wondered if they were not taken from some recently discovered manuscript of Arthur Rimbaud. But no, they came from the Situationnists, Guy Debord mainly. The May ’68 movement had an absolute quality ‘Ce que nous voulons — tout!’ (‘What do we want ? Everything !’) that the adolescent Rimbaud would have thoroughly approved of, and the Rimbaud of Une Saison en Enfer would have equally thoroughly rejected as megalomania.

The author said, or to be more precise intended to say to his largely Left-wing audience, that it would have only been too easy for him, as a ‘veteran of May ’68’ to say what a great moment in time it had been and “if only we could recover that spirit again”. But, as it happens, the author had very mixed feelings about May ’68 and the social and political movements of the Sixties generally even at the time. Their legacy long-term effect on the West has been largely bad, not to say disastrous. Never perhaps has there been a decade which promised so much and delivered so little. The cultural legacy has been narcissism, irresponsiblity, amorality, superficiality and self-centredness. The Sixties movements were a rebellion without a cause. But if you want to change the world you must have a cause, and you must make some attempt to translate this cause into reality within your own personal life.

Sebastian Hayes concluded by saying that ‘revolutionary’ movements in the West since May ’68 have failed completely for two reasons : 1. the revolutionaries have largely lost contact with the working class (half the time they can’t be bothered to work and live on the dole), and 2. there is a complete lack of any coherent moral or ethical perspective. Those who consider themselves revolutionaries must show people that there is ‘another way to live’, something different from the present materialistic, selfish life-style spreading across the globe. The roots of contemporary irresponsibility and selfishness do not lie in the Thatcher era but should be traced right back to the Sixties themselves and, if not to May ’68 itself (which was idealistic in style and aims) at least to its immediate aftermath.

Sebastian Hayes emphasized, in the subsequent discussion, that during May ’68 he did not personally see a single person smoking hash, tripping with LSD or even drunk, and that he did not know of any sex orgies going on in the Sorbonne — most of the time people were too excited and/or too frightened to be capable of sex. On a previous occasion when Sebastian spoke about May ’68 to a similar gathering, the audience was incredulous and aghast when he said this, as the present one was in part. On the contrary, Sebastian added, during May ’68 and just afterwards, there were always endless earnest discussions going on late into the night about how a ‘revolutionary’ should behave in life, including how he or she should conduct his or her personal relations. Sebastian said that ‘La revolution sera une fete ou ne sera pas ‘ is not sufficient and needs to be coupled with the requirement that the ‘revolution’ — supposing the term has any meaning these days — should introduce a new and better form of morality that people really put into practice on a day to day basis.     Sebastian Hayes

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