Black Gold by Antony Wild

Author:Antony Wild [Antony Wild]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

12

HARAR AND RIMBAUD: THE CRADLE AND THE CRUCIBLE

empereur, vieille démangeaison, tu es nègre … (‘emperor, old itch, you are a negro …’)

RIMBAUD, Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell)

The only certain things in this world are coincidences.

LEONARDO SCIASCIA

Rimbaud must surely be a suitable anti-hero for a dark history of coffee. He crops up in three of the obscure outposts that feature in the story – St Helena, Batavia, and Harar, the cradle of coffee itself. And, improbably, he became a coffee trader, making him history’s one and only celebrity coffee merchant. Above all, his dark, restless, visionary nature could have been born in the same crucible that brought forth the mysterious alchemy of coffee. Napoleon, all high deeds and daring, has been our hero thus far, with coffee running like a trapped nerve through his Empire and Exile. Rimbaud, inspired and deranged, is his polar opposite, but voluntarily chose the same exile’s fate.

By giving up the giddy success of his literary career at the age of twenty, Rimbaud achieved the kind of immortality usually granted to the prematurely deceased. The great puzzles have always been why did he do it, and is there any glimmering in his subsequent career of the incandescent genius that characterized his youth? It has been suggested that his renunciation was an act of supreme arrogance, in that he believed himself to have already accomplished everything that he was capable of. The bulk of his writings after 1875 consists of letters to his family, often on the subject of money, and business correspondence, which are fascinating only because they have no literary merit whatsoever: it is as if he had deliberately excised that aspect of his sensibility.

Rimbaud has been the single most influential figure on late twentieth-century rock lyrics, and his practice of the ‘derangement of the senses’ found obvious, if rather crass, parallels in the drug culture associated with the music business. Bob Dylan’s post-Newport sixties lyrics owe much to the poet, and Jim Morrison virtually recreated himself in his image, both as a lyricist and in terms of his Dionysian excess. Patti Smith also acknowledges a debt. Rimbaud has been more written about than any other French nineteenth-century writer, and the loyalty of his fans is legendary: some have so desired to emulate their hero that they have sought to have a leg amputated in Marseilles, a fate that he suffered shortly before his death.

Rimbaud was born in a provincial town in northern France in 1854. His father was a soldier who abandoned his family, whilst his mother was of stern, bourgeois Catholic stock. The young Arthur excelled at school, where he was considered an exemplary pupil, although one astute master noted that his angelic looks and penetrating light-blue eyes could not conceal a character that could all too easily run to the bad. Which, indeed, it proceeded to do, spectacularly, even within the terms of his less conventional contemporaries, who considered his violent affair at the age of seventeen with the older fellow-poet Paul Verlaine utterly scandalous.

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