The Boy Who Picked the Bullets up (iii) and Panthers in the Skins of Men (i)
from novelist Charles Nelson and the United States Navy
My teacher Harold Bloom argued as a young man and assumed as an old one that an artist never acknowledges his predecessor. Following old weird Harold we may then notice that Arthur Rimbaud was the poet who did not influence the novelist Charles Nelson.
Each of his 2 novels, the entire oeuvre, takes its title from the OG poète maudit. The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up is Paul Schmidt’s version of the first line of the poem that begins: L’enfant qui ramassa les balles.
Each of the 4 parts of that novel also takes a subtitle from one of Arthur’s poems: Democracy, The Hanged Men Dance, Evil, and in conclusion The Boy etc. Charles named his next and last novel Panthers in the Skins of Men following Paul’s translation from Le Bateau ivre:
J'ai heurté, savez-vous, d'incroyables Florides
Mêlant aux fleurs des yeux de panthères à peaux
D'hommes ! Des arcs-en-ciel tendus comme des brides
Sous l'horizon des mers, à de glauques troupeaux !
We may also take it that Paul the translator did not influence the novelist either. Charles dedicated the first novel to Paul. Kurt Strom, narrator and protagonist of both novels, addresses many if not most of the letters of the epistolary, first, one to a Paul,
who flies from Colorado to visit the wounded Kurt in New Orleans on the second page of the second novel, then mails him textbooks and novels in French and 4 other languages. To review, following Harold we know for sure two authors whose work did not influence Charles Nelson: the poet Arthur Rimbaud or his English translator Paul Schmidt.
Harold expounded his view from Sigmund Freud’s fear of death at the hands of the father, from Kabbalah, and from the swerve that Lucretius saw as the origin of the world from atoms. Hey, I just work here.
I call Harold’s critical approach, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Disobey to run like Toto to reveal the true prime mover of our story, who paradoxically is a humbug. The lion confronts the old fraud and gains his true courage, the Tin Man wins his heart, and Scarecrow gets his brains credentialed.
Dorothy goes home to Kansas where she wakes up from her dream surrounded by her family as well as her dog and friends. She’s not in Oz any more. So what is my Harold telling us about Charles Nelson and his Kurt Strom the Navy corpsman gobbling knobs through every branch of service?
That indeed he has nothing to do with Arthur the bad boy poet. The train-wreck and his boyfriend Verlaine were mascots among the marginal and militant gay writers of Charles’ day but reading his Kurt we find rather an honest and honorable man who volunteers to serve his country and has a gentle good time off-duty.
What was Charles’ hidden influence? I don’t hear a specific one here, as I often do, as Harold always did, though never with anything to do with Viet Nam. My first guess is that Charles swerved away from all those authors among our veterans from the United States who have presented us with an alter ego who
arrived at the Republic of Viet Nam already hurting, got hurt again, and have not yet healed at home. Charles the novelist corpsman is instead fucking cheerful. His Kurt’s family is fucked up, his war is fucked up, his country is fucked up. What did you expect?
The world is fucked up. You cope. In Kurt’s case you have as much sex as you can with men who have not yet had sex with other men. I don’t know what that’s about yet. But it is not, as the poet Bob sang, like Verlaine and Rimbaud.
Oh, hey. It occurs to me after 40 years. Harold wrote about a vast range of literature which we may therefor conclude did not influence him. But hey, guess what nation and what American war I never heard him say a word about?