730
PARTISAN REVIEW
mania of the life of Jesus, it is important to remember that a decalco–
mania of a religion is not a religion.
The writer Joseph Delteil, who has lived for some years in his
vineyard near Montpellier, participated once in the debate by a letter
sent to
Arts
on February 8. Rimbaud is not a god (Delteil thanks
heaven for that!) but he is not an ordinary poet. For Delteil the ques–
tion of Rimbaud's humanity comes first. The day when Rimbaud chose
Harrar, rather than the Academie
Fran~aise
or the Island of Guernsey,
he instilled in every artist an uneasy conscience. The fact that Rim–
baud turned to hard manual labor after writing such a work as
Une
Saison en Enter,
marks the outstanding logic of the poet's life.
Each week
in
Paris the critical debate grew more complicated. It
is a usual thing for a critic to write about a poet. Etiemble's thesis is
more unusual: a man writes on the men who wrote on a poet. Then
Caillois writes on Etiemble, and in
Arts
of February 15, Arthur Adamov
wrote on Caillois and on Etiemble's article of January 25. In reading
this latter article, Adamov grew angry because he could find nowhere
Etiemble's personal view on Rimbaud. He develops Etiemble's notion of
myth by claiming the existence of a myth whenever there exists an iden–
tification between a few men and a single man who takes on for them
a character symbolic of what they would like to be. Each creative artist
whose work transcribes the particular torment of its age, becomes an
idealized picture whose formation and success are indeed worthy sub–
jects of study. Adamov fears that Etiemble has not gone beyond the
stage of pure documentation, the establishment of a gigantic card in–
dex. Adamov's criticism joins that of others
in
finding an irritated im–
passioned style in Etiemble's writing which impairs the pure objectivity
of his research. The difficulty is in the differentiation among the var–
ious cults of Rimbaud: the Catholic apologists, Andre Breton's fetish–
istic attitude, the narratives of personal recollection. Perhaps more from
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