Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
By Edmund White
Atlantic Books £16.99 208 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59
Among France’s poètes maudits, or “accursed poets”, none is more celebrated today than Arthur Rimbaud. Born in 1854, the troubled and precociously talented Rimbaud wrote his first significant poem, “The Drunken Boat”, aged 17. He composed his revolutionary works, A Season in Hell and Illuminations, in the four frenzied years that followed. Disappointed by their reception, he abandoned literature for good at 21. He spent the next 16 years drifting around Europe, then Africa, where he traded coffee and ran guns until he contracted the infection that killed him at the age of 37.
In the introduction to his slim biography, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, American author Edmund White recalls discovering Rimbaud as a teenager at boarding school. He remembers feeling “buoyed up by the sensual delirium” of “The Drunken Boat”.
Later, upon learning of Rimbaud’s affair with the older (and married) poet Paul Verlaine, he felt some kinship. As “a desperate, self-hating homosexual, as an aspiring writer, as a sissy rebel”, White hoped also to escape the ennui of his world. “I, too, wanted to forego years of apprenticeship and shoot up to the top as a prodigy, not a drudge. I, too, wanted to make men leave their wives and run off with me.”
It is this personal connection to his subject’s tormented life that makes White’s biography so lively. He is particularly fascinated by the destructive, if ultimately predictable, pattern of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine, and sees in it the key to much of Rimbaud’s wild poetic imagery.
A deep aversion to sedentary life plagued Rimbaud from early on. “A biographer …could fill his pages with nothing but his ceaseless comings and goings, his itineraries.” White avoids this, while successfully conveying a sense of the poet’s intensely peripatetic life.
In passing, he debunks some of the widely held misconceptions about the original enfant terrible of French poetry. He was not, for instance, raped by soldiers in Paris, as one of his earlier biographers has assumed.
White, a novelist, essayist and biographer of Jean Genet and Marcel Proust, deploys his characteristic transparency of style. He puts simplicity at the readers’ service, yet is not afraid to offer his own startling imagery. Of one of Verlaine’s poems he writes that it was “as if he’d reduced thousands of rose petals to a few drops of what perfumers call ‘Rose Absolute’”.
The mostly spare and unaffected prose occasionally tips into modern vernacular. One of Rimbaud’s youthful poems is described as “a piece of soft-core kiddie porn”. White calls Verlaine a “drama queen”. Yet rather than alienating readers from the subject, such anachronisms bring immediacy to it.
Further immediacy is added by White’s efforts to make Rimbaud’s tribulations as current as possible. He compares the homophobic ostracism suffered by Rimbaud to the rejection of homosexuals by American and European radicals in the 1960s.
Reporting how Verlaine endured a humiliating medical exam to “confirm” his homosexuality, White remarks: “If the reader imagines that such examinations belong to the era of pseudoscience in the nineteenth century, he or she should be reminded that in the English town of Cleveland, from January to June 1987, more than five hundred children were forcibly removed …from their parents’ homes by social workers because two doctors had [wrongly] determined that they’d all been buggered by their fathers.”
The biography skims, too briefly, over the later years of Rimbaud’s life, after he had forsaken literature, homosexuality and absinthe. White is more interested in Arthur, “the genius from hell”, than in Arthur the adventurous gun-runner. His meander through Rimbaud’s poems shines a light on some of the most beautiful verses in modern poetry. As to why Rimbaud remains the most intriguing of 19th-century French poets, White is in no doubt. “He was impossible to assimilate and therefore remained endlessly fascinating for future generations”.