Radiant Days (29 page)

I’ve tried to stick to the facts as much as I could (considering this is a fantasy novel). But I made two speculations based on information I turned up during my research.

The first is that I think Rimbaud might have seen the aurora borealis, or northern lights, in mid-October 1870, when he was sleeping rough during one of his sojourns from home. I found an old newspaper account of the aurora’s appearance at that time, and later found another reference to an October sighting of the aurora in Paris, described in a first-person account of the events surrounding the 1870 Siege of Paris. To me, Rimbaud’s great, hallucinatory poems “Vowels” and “The Drunken Boat” seem as though they might easily have been inspired, in part, by the aurora’s spectral light display.

My second speculation comes from reading several eyewitness accounts of a Parisian policeman who was tortured, then thrown into the Seine on February 26, 1871. Graham Robb’s chronology puts Rimbaud in Paris at that time, in or near the area where the event occurred. Of course there’s no way of proving that Rimbaud
witnessed this, or that it influenced his writing. But again, it was very easy for me to
imagine
him seeing it, and to imagine that it might indeed have fueled some of the violently surreal words and images of “The Drunken Boat.”

Arthur Rimbaud’s extraordinary, event-filled life didn’t end when he stopped writing poetry. He traveled around the world, and spent many years in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as a trader and, according to some, a gunrunner for the Abyssinian emperor. But for those adventures, you’ll need to read his biographies or Rimbaud’s own letters. He died on November 10, 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, of what was probably bone cancer. The previous day, hallucinating from his illness—his leg had been amputated, a grievous fate for someone who was a great walker—he dictated a letter requesting that he be put upon a ship conjured from his delirium, called the
Aphinar
, so that he could return to Egypt.

Please send me the cost of the voyage from Aphinar to Suez
, he wrote.
I am completely paralyzed, so I want to leave in plenty of time. Please tell me when I should be carried on board
.

Even with his last words, he was embarking on another journey.

—Elizabeth Hand

August 19, 2011

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bertall (Charles-Albert d’Arnoux).
The Communists of Paris, 1871: Types, Physiognomies, Characters
. 1897. [Can be read online via Google Books.]

Bingham, Denis.
Recollections of Paris
. 1896. [Includes Bingham’s account of the Siege of Paris; can be read online via Google Books.]

Borer, Alain.
Rimbaud in Abyssinia
. Translated from the French by Rosemarie Waldrop. William Morrow, 1984.

Clayson, Hollis.
Paris in Despair
:
Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870–1871)
. University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Gibson, William.
Paris During the Commune, 1871: Being Letters from Paris and Its Neighborhood
. 1872. [A first-person account; can be read online via Google Books.]

Horne, Alistair.
Seven Ages of Paris
. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Jeancolas, Claude.
Passion Rimbaud: L’album d’un vie
. Les editions Textuel, 1998.

Lissagaray, Prosper Olivier.
History of the Commune of 1871
, translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling. 1886. [Can be read online via Google Books.]

Mason, Wyatt, editor and translator.
I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
. Modern Library, 2003.

Miller, Henry.
The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud
. New Directions, 1946.

“An Oxford Graduate” (Markheim, Henry William Gegg).
Inside Paris During the Siege
. 1871. [First-person account of the Siege of Paris; can be read online via Google Books.]

Rimbaud, Arthur.
Collected Poems
. Translated with an introduction and notes by Martin Sorrell. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Rimbaud, Arthur.
Complete Works
. Translated by Paul Schmidt.
Harper & Row, 1967.

Rimbaud, Arthur.
Illuminations
. Edition Critique avec introduction et notes par H. De Bouillane de Lacoste. Mercure de France, 1949.

Rimbaud, Arthur.
Illuminations
. Translated by John Ashbery. W. W. Norton, 2011.

Rimbaud, Arthur.
A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat
. Bilingual edition; English translation by Louise Varèse. New Directions, 1945

Rimbaud, Arthur.
Selected Poems and Letters
. Translated and with an introduction and notes by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock. Penguin Books, 2004.

Robb, Graham.
Rimbaud: A Biography
. W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Ross, Kristin.
The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
. Verso, 1988.

Starkie, Enid.
Arthur Rimbaud
. Revised edition. New Directions, 1961.

Steinmetz, Jean-Luc.
Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Enigma
. Welcome Rain Publishers, 2001.

White, Edmund.
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.
Atlas & Co, 2008

Whitehurst, Felix M.
My Private Diary During the Siege of Paris
. 1870. [Another first-person account that can be read online via Google Books.]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, as ever, my gratitude to my agent, Martha Millard, sole proprietor of the known universe’s only full-service literary agency.

To my editor, Sharyn November, an incalculable debt of thanks for encouraging me to write this book, and staying with me during the years it took to complete it.

To my copy editor, Kathryn Hinds, my heartfelt thanks on an extraordinary job.

To William Sheehan, who read several drafts and offered suggestions for improving each one.

To my brother, Patrick Hand, who helped me reconnoiter Washington, D.C., after too long an absence from the City of Trees; William Roesing, who shared his knowledge of the C&O Canal, and walked with me there; David Streitfeld, who prescribed the proper dose of Auden when needed; Judith Clute, who pointed me to Rimbaud’s house in Camden Town; and my late friend Russell Dunn, Rimbaldian comrade in arms for thirty-seven years.

To Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Bob Stinson,
shantih
.

Most of all, my love to my partner and compass, John Clute, who traced Rimbaud’s footsteps with me along Royal College Street and beyond.

Born in San Diego,
ELIZABETH HAND
grew up in Yonkers and Pound Ridge, New York, before heading to Washington, D.C., to study playwriting and anthropology at Catholic University. For a number of years she worked at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, but in 1988 quit her job to write full-time and moved to the coast of Maine, where she lived in a 400-square-foot lakefront cottage with no indoor plumbing or running water (it now has both, and is her office).

She is the author of twelve novels and three collections of shorter fiction. Her book
Generation Loss
won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for best work of psychological suspense. She has also received two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, the James M. Tiptree Jr. Award, and the Mythopoeic Society Award. She is a longtime reviewer and critic whose work appears regularly in the
Washington Post
, the
Village Voice
, Salon, and the
Boston Globe
, among others. She has two children and continues to live in Maine, where she is at work on her next novel.

Her Web site is
www.elizabethhand.com
; she can be found on Twitter as
www.twitter.com/Liz_Hand
; and blogs at
lizhand.wordpress.com