The Day on Fire

Suggested by the life of Arthur Rimbaud"", this biographical novel becomes- in Ullman's hands- an extraordinary and moving document of a man possessed, gifted, but for the greater part of his life- unmotivated. The slender thread of factual record informs a live, at times repellent, portrait of the man he calls Claude Morel, but where Morel's story departs from Rimbaud's is not evident to the reader. Born in the Ardennes of northern France, his childhood dominated by a strange mother and his need to escape her, Claude finally reaches Paris- there to become a drifter, and in a second return, a depraved waster, involved with another poet- Maurice Druard (recognizably Paul Verlaine), but writing, ceaselessly, brilliantly, with a decadence then virtually unknown. Their relationship ends with a shooting- and from then on Claude becomes even more of a wanderer, up and down the length of France, then briefly as a soldier of the Dutch in Asia, a deserter, a hunter, trader, perhaps a slaver, a pilgrim. Finally a teacher at the court of the Lion of Judah, Menelik, he returned to France to die in Marseilles. A haunting tale with an obsessive fascination, it is a tragic book, symbolic of waste, frustration, lost genius. Ullman has used Rimbaud's own work as an integral part of his text.