Now, shelve for a moment the question - central though it is - of whether Morrison's songs and other effusions are of adequate artistic merit to warrant such a study. (For all we know, Wet Wet Wet may have been influenced by Goethe or Holderlin, but would anyone of sound mind give a hoot?) Whether or not Morrison was anything more than a hysterical boozer with aspirations greatly in excess of his gifts, Professor Fowlie's book proves beyond reasonable doubt that the lead singer of the Doors knew Rimbaud's work well, plagiarised it, and, above all, made the disastrous attempt to live his life in accordance with Rimbaud's well-known maxim that Le poete se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonne dereglement de tous les sens (the poet makes himself into a visionary by a long, vast and reasoned disordering of all the senses).
But Jim Morrison was not the only rocker to have had a crush on Rimbaud. In fact, a full history or pre-history of rock music would have to go back well beyond Delta blues or hill billy wailing. You might even argue that the whole business really began on 20 October 1854, when Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville. Consider some of the evidence. Bob Dylan did not merely drop an allusion to the doomed affair of Verlaine and Rimbaud on Blood on the Tracks, he spent much of the mid-Sixties plundering Rimbaud's kitty of images for his best albums - for example, the poet and critic Peter Robinson has pointed out how much a song like 'Visions of Johanna' owes to Les Chercheuses de poux.
In Backbeat, the recent film about the Beatles' early days, Stu Sutcliffe's initiation into the heady currents of Continental decadence comes when Astrid Kirchherr reads to him from Une Saison en enfer. When Sutcliffe tries to tell John Lennon about his exciting new discovery, Lennon proves to know about Rimbaud already, and dismisses him caustically as nothing more than a sex maniac, so randy he would have copulated with a tree. In real life, though, something of Rimbaud must have rubbed off on Lennon and co. Rimbaud is one of the luminaries gathered on the cover of Sgt Pepper, and according to Beatles obsessives, there is a scene in Help] where you can hear Ringo - of all the Fab Four] - massacre the French phrase Madame X etablit un piano dans les Alpes, which is a line from the first of Rimbaud's Illuminations.
And then there is Marc Almond's setting of Mes Petites Amoureuses on Absinthe, and the complete recorded works of Patti Smith . . .
To be sure, it's doubtful whether many of those among the legions of rock and rollers who have been Rimbaud fans - even the ones who plundered him most sedulously - could have articulated the reasons for his being a great poet. What they, what most young people respond to most keenly in Rimbaud is his thrilling legend and his sullen good looks. Rimbaud is the James Dean of the poetry-reading classes, which is why Andre Breton was acute in calling him 'the God of adolescence'.
In this sense, Rimbaud's legacy to the late 20th century might be described as a kind of aggressive cultural attitude, less that of the voyant than that of (another favourite Rimbaldian term) the voyou, or hooligan: he has bequeathed us a grimy image of what John Major would call Yob Culture.
Indeed, since Rimbaud soon came to despise both his own writing and the literary world in general, his ghost is doubtless smirking at the news that the most celebrated of all his admirers in Mr Major's Britain should be a professional footballer, Eric Cantona, and roaring with laughter at the rumour that M. Cantona's own fans, mishearing the name 'Rimbaud', should have flooded the player with photographs of Sylvester Stallone playing his most bloodthirsty role. (Personal guarantee: this piece will contain no further allusions to the Rimbaud / Rambo pun.)
Still, Rimbaud's profound contempt for literature has not kept subsequent writers away from him. On the contrary, like poor obsessed Verlaine who would always crawl back to his beloved Arthur no matter how badly he was spurned, they just can't seem to leave him alone. Christopher Hampton has dramatised the Rimbaud / Verlaine affair in Total Eclipse, while the London of Iain Sinclair's fiction echoes with the footsteps of their brief stay in the capital. Channel 4 has just broadcast an essay about Rimbaud's Ethiopian years by the travel writer Charles Nicoll; the same period of Rimbaud's life has inspired Margaret Drabble's novel The Gates of Ivory and certain key passages in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines.
After Songlines, Chatwin went on to work with the composer Kevin Volans on an opera, L'Homme aux semelles de vent (Verlaine's description of his lover) or The Man Who Strides the Wind (text by Roger Clarke), about Rimbaud's painful last days. Such examples could be continued until they spill off the page, since Rimbaud's arrogant gaze can be seen flashing out from, inter alia, apocalyptic autobiographical prose by Henry Miller (The Time of the Assassins), a late scene of Joyce's Ulysses, paintings by Frank Auerbach and a sketch by Picasso, poems and translations and essays by Sereni and Montale and Robert Lowell and Antonio Tabucci, and even from the films of Jean-Luc Godard (Pierrot le fou, which quotes L'Eternite), Pasolini (Theorem, which quotes Deserts de l'amour) and Fellini (Satyricon, which also quotes L'Eternite) . . .
In Une Saison en enfer, Rimbaud recalls that Depuis longtemps je me vantais de posseder tous les paysages possibles (for a long time I boasted of possessing every possible landscape). That may have been a childish brag, yet Rimbaud's spirit has certainly taken posthumous possession of artists from all around the world. His brief life offers the building blocks for all kinds of myth, and if it is Rimbaud the Young Soul Rebel or Rimbaud the Handsome Thug that appeals to rock stars, there are plenty of legends left over for the rest of us.
Among them: (a) the myth of supernatural precocity: Rimbaud created his entire literary output by the time he was 18. Others have written young, and died young (Chatterton, Keats) but there is no other writer in history who has managed to complete an entire ouevre both revolutionary in its own day and supremely influential on posterity before completing his teens; (b) the myth of the artist as occultist: Rimbaud was a known scholar of alchemy and other, still weirder forms of rejected knowledge; (c) the myth of the artist as man of action: Rimbaud turned slave trader and African explorer; and above all (d) the myth of the artist as exemplary renouncer of art.
It is hard to say which aspect of Rimbaud's life is the more astonishing - his ability to write as he did, or his decision to stop writing and disappear off to the Abyssinian desert. He once invoked the need to be absolutely modern, and nothing about him is more modern, more prophetic of the coming century than Rimbaud's renunciation of poetic language, and almost of expressive language itself. (His letters home are startlingly flat and dull.)
It anticipates Duchamp giving up art in favour of chess, Wittgenstein's periodic flights from philosophy into humble labour, Paul Valery's long detour into mathematics, T E Lawrence's 'mind suicide' in the ranks of the RAF. Dazzling as his poetry can be, Rimbaud would now seem a very different figure had he done the obvious and carried on writing verses, however visionary, into a ripe and respected old age. As it is, nothing so becomes his poetry as his manner of leaving it. Without that strange and frightening grand refusal, he would not be nearly so restless or haunting a member of the Living Dead.
'Rimbaud and Jim Morrison' by Professor Wallace Fowlie, Duke University Press, pounds 9.50.
(Photograph omitted)
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