Damnedest of the Damned

THE DAY ON FIRE (701 pp.)--James Ramsey Ullman--World ($5.95).

Most of today's young poets lead three-baby, two-martini lives at the universities where they serve as assistant professors. The snowy-souled coeds they shepherd through seminars must be highly skeptical about French Poet Arthur Rimbaud's formula for creative success: "Systematic derangement of the senses," sometimes through ordinary alcohol, more often with absinthe, sexual inversion and hashish.

Rimbaud was indisputably the damnedest of the damned, but his biographies cloud into vagueness just as they become most fascinating. At 19, after four years of systematic "derangement" and blazing creation, Rimbaud wrote his bitter valedictory, A Season in Hell, then abandoned poetry--and his homosexual menage with Poet Paul Verlaine. During the next 18 years, until his death in 1891, he left only traces of wanderings that took him to Stuttgart as a teacher, to Java with the Dutch army, to Abyssinia as a trader, gunrunner and, probably, slaver. Now James Ramsey Ullman (The White Tower) has come down from the mountains long enough to try to fill in the gaps. In his fictionalized biography, Rimbaud becomes Claude Morel; Charleville, his home town in the Ardennes, becomes Cambon; and Verlaine becomes Maurice Druard.

Voyou & Voyant. Novelist Ullman takes up Claude's life when, at 15, the boy begins the first of his vagabond journeys, part flight, part search, that never lead him to a permanent dwelling place, never free him completely from a grim, autocratic mother. Claude is small and soft-bodied, physically still a child but already, thanks to an understanding teacher, a fast-maturing poet. He stows away on a train to Paris. Drunk with wonder, he prowls this incandescent city, perches on curbstones to scribble his poems. He sleeps on pavements and swipes food from the markets. Caught and jailed, he is raped in his cell by a vagrant pederast. In shock and shame, Claude is brought home to his raging mother.

He runs away twice more, and each time returns sick, hungry and shaken by sexual collisions. Townspeople call him a voyou--a hooligan--and he plays the part to the hilt, scrawling obscenities in front of the church. But, barricaded in his room after a night of sousing, the voyou is also a voyant--a seer. One day a summons comes from Paris; a friend has mailed samples of Claude's work to famed Poet Maurice Druard. The older writer leaves his wife, and with him Claude lives in a green haze of absinthe. Egged on by Druard. the 17-year-old boy becomes the merde-shouting outrage of the Left Bank.

Still Buried. After the experiment in systematic derangement ends in scandal and squalor, Claude makes his way back to Cambon. He is weak and ill. In the writing of A Season in Hell, he chokes down his poetry and his past. His exit line: "No more words. I bury the dead in my belly."

Mountaineer Ullman has stuck to the few known facts of Rimbaud's story, has imagined the unknown credibly enough. But in the end, he has after all unearthed only Claude Morel. Arthur Rimbaud and his bellyful of bitter dead still lie buried.

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