Graham Robb’s biography treats the life and the work as a single thing.
Still another biography of the poet who stopped writing before he was 20! Over a century after his death, the procession of biographers, translators, critics and hagiographers continues. It would seem that no definitive identification can be made (Rimbaud the symbolist, the surrealist, the Bolshevik, Rimbaud the bourgeois, the crook, the pervert, Rimbaud the prophet, the superman, the mystic, Rimbaud the Catholic, the cabalist, the atheist, etc.); the latest ”proved” avatar is forever recycled as evidence — faulty or secure — on which to base the next.
Yet this endless judiciary process ensures an immortality which has little to do with the works of Arthur Rimbaud (who took the initiative to publish only one volume, ”Une Saison en Enfer” (”A Season in Hell”), a collection of nine prose poems; all his other writing appeared under others’ auspices (he was long gone in Africa when the ”Illuminations” finally saw book form). What Roland Barthes would call the ”figure” of Rimbaud is the ghost at the banquet of literature: his radical rejection of poetry (not of writing, as Graham Robb makes clear: correspondence from Rimbaud’s last 15 years constitutes a significant share of his output) has been appropriated by literary history as his most enduringly poetic act.
What was the life that generated this figure? Born in 1854 into the bleakest French bourgeoisie (his infantry-captain father deserted his wife and four children), Rimbaud committed his early years to precocious literary exercises in defiance of his fiercely conventional mother and punctuated them by several flights from home — and several returns (sometimes under police escort). When the delinquent invaded the literary circles of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, he took up with the recently married Verlaine; Verlaine eventually shot the boy in the wrist for attempting to leave him in Brussels. In 1874, Rimbaud renounced literature and again crossed the Channel to study English in order to become an explorer and trader. After travel in Germany and the Netherlands, he deserted from the Dutch Colonial Army three weeks after arriving in Batavia (now Jakarta) and returned home. Shortly, he set out again for the East, worked for a construction firm in Cyprus, and by 1880, working for a coffee company based in Aden, explored Somalia and northeast Africa; by 1886, he was gunrunning for the king of Shewa (now the central province of Ethiopia). In his last two years he ran a successful trading post in Harar, east of Addis Ababa, exporting coffee, hides and musk, and importing guns. In 1891 he developed a tumor on his right knee and returned to France, where his leg was amputated. The disease (perhaps syphilis) spread, and Rimbaud died in 1891, at 37.
Appropriately to value this new biography, which I believe to be superior to all its predecessors in English or French (for as its author observes, ”since the last full biographies of Rimbaud . . . a great deal of new information has come to light”), some note must be taken of Robb’s previous books. They have, as it were, assisted him to insights that mean his ”Rimbaud” is more than a mere latecomer’s triumph: a study of Baudelaire’s poetry, written in French and published in 1993 (so, in ”Rimbaud” Robb is able to write of his subject, ”Few poets ever profited so richly from bad poetry”); a biography of Balzac, published in 1994 (”The brevity of Rimbaud’s work tends to conceal” his ”encyclopedic urge, which makes him a close literary relative of Balzac”); a scholarly speculation, ”Unlocking Mallarmé,” published in 1996 (”For Mallarmé, Rimbaud was the sort of attractive hooligan who could (and did) do serious damage to French literature”); and a biography of Victor Hugo, published in 1997 (”Apart from Hugo, no French poet of the late 19th century had a greater impact on imperial politics or earned more money”).
For only when we acknowledge the density, the scope and the velocity of Robb’s earlier work can we appreciate the caveat that concludes the introduction to his latest: ”I have not found the Rimbaud I expected to find, nor did I expect to spend as much time working on this book as Rimbaud spent producing four small bodies of work, each of which represents a different stage in the history of modern poetry. My only regret is that it did not take twice as long.” In 1999, just two years after his life of Victor Hugo, Graham Robb (still a youngish man) finished his new biography. In it, this fast worker provides illustrations and a family tree, a list of the poems Rimbaud published in his lifetime, a calendar of historical events in France and Abyssinia that affected Rimbaud, maps and French texts of poems quoted in his own translation. An interesting sign of the times: consultation of Robb’s Web site will bring readers ”my own computer file of Rimbaud’s complete works.”
Ultimately, though, it is not the alacrity of the performance or the abundance of useful information that makes Robb’s book the single best work to read about this haunting and haunted poet; the excellence of this biography is the consequence of a close (and responsible) reading of everything Rimbaud wrote; for the poetry Robb provides a context somewhat antithetical to earlier biographical sleuthing, which he treats, or dismisses, with considerable brusquerie: ”The great demystifier of bourgeois literature and society has been smothered in myth. . . . I have tried at least to allow Rimbaud to grow up.” But the book’s most original (and valuable) feature is a singular vision of Rimbaud’s ”life and work” as one thing, a unity not severed by a trench of silence between the poet and the adventurer. ”The process that led him to abandon poetry altogether lasted several years,” Robb observes. ”Rome was not demolished in a day. . . . Rimbaud had been giving up different kinds of writing ever since he began to write.” Robb’s holistic approach compels us to trust the poems as a kind of identity kit for the life that followed them, rather than as an abandoned impulse, a dead end; Rimbaud ”was the first poet . . . to live a homosexual adventure as a model for social change, and the first to repudiate the myths on which his reputation still depends.”
Robb is quite as hard on the academy and its interpretive rituals as on his frequently wacky predecessors in biography: ” ‘Une Saison en Enfer’ should be read first of all without the dubious aid of a description (including this one). . . . The so-called obscurity . . . is partly an effect of the critical instruments brought to bear upon it”; ”excuses made for Rimbaud are also excuses made for the colonial enterprise as a whole and, more recently, for the secular evangelism that underlies the academic enterprise.” Similarly, Robb sees Rimbaud’s African field bulletins as an implicit criticism of the languages of commerce and diplomacy (and his conduct in business activities as a criticism of the inadequacies of other traders): ”The refusal to adopt contemporary prejudices, which makes the ‘Illuminations’ such an excitingly alien work, also made its author an unusually proficient explorer.” ”There was more accurate detail and analysis in Rimbaud’s report than in several years’ worth of diplomatic despatches,” Robb writes of Rimbaud’s account of one 1887 journey. ”It helped to shape French policy and thus the modern history of East Africa.”
And it had all started with ”Le Bateau Ivre” (”The Drunken Boat”), written when Rimbaud was 16 and arguably the single greatest French lyric poem of the 19th century, a 100-line text that the scruffy, precocious runaway from Charleville brought with him to Paris as his introduction to Verlaine. This great metaphor of a life, composed in what Robb significantly calls ”the waiting room of Rimbaud’s youth,” has made the boat’s peregrinations familiar to most French schoolchildren, though many of the poet’s pioneering journeys are completely unknown. Robb explores this region of the ”life” to exemplary effect — what he calls ”the brute shock of verifiable information” has illuminated Rimbaud’s years in Africa in surprising detail.
By such light we learn that Rimbaud is the converse of that other great laureate of exotic disintegration, Joseph Conrad, who claimed to have ”known Rimbaud’s verses” in 1899, and who as young Jozef Korzeniowski may have met the poet in Marseilles in 1874. Conrad’s prose is the imaginative result of his multifarious seafaring; Rimbaud’s feats of imperial capitalism are the consequence of his poetry, the fierce accusations of a lost boy endlessly rewriting his vanished father’s career. Robb is exemplary here: ”The fantastic curriculum vitae of ‘Une Saison en Enfer’ and the chaotic identity parade of the ”Illuminations” belong to the same story: the search for a missing person who never existed”; Rimbaud’s life is ”a meticulous progression towards childhood, when words were not heavy with preordained significance, and when the future was a blank page.” We learn from Robb never to read the poems as the result of biography, but rather to entertain the biography as the malign deposit of the poems. Again: ”With the ‘Illuminations,’ Romantic poetry enters the world of the airport lounge, the theme park, and the third-world resort. The seer had turned into a sightseer.”
I suppose Verlaine’s role in Rimbaud’s metamorphosis, and his behavior during that transformation (which after all had a lot to do with him), would have made anyone impatient. Yet I am startled by Robb’s treatment of this great poet; surely Verlaine merits a rhetorical respect as dignified as the kind Robb awards Rimbaud in analogous circumstances. Verlaine is too easily dismissed as the ”grand old enfant of French letters . . . about to be readmitted to the Hpital Broussais with a cocktail of complaints: rheumatism, heart disease, diabetes and syphilis.”
Yet the voice of a scandalized society, even so complacently registered, is a member of the chorus in Rimbaud’s head; and as Robb observes, ”It would be his great achievement, in ‘Une Saison en Enfer,’ to allow all these voices to have their say.” Indeed, one of Robb’s further ascendancies over the earlier biographers is to discern in Rimbaud’s transactions with literature (and with colonial imperialism) his great range of intonation — from, in the early work, an ”exaggerated conformity to common aspects of puberty,” to a scathing sense of humor, which is the effective key to Rimbaud’s universe throughout (Verlaine being ”the ideal sidekick,” Robb concedes, ”the whimpering Laurel to Rimbaud’s ludicrously ambitious Hardy”), to the last words of the dying 37-year-old amputee from his hospital bed in Marseilles, astonishingly congruent to Frank O’Hara’s poem ”To the Harbormaster.” ”Please therefore send me the tariff of services from Aphinar to Suez,” Rimbaud dictated to his sister Isabelle. ”I am completely paralyzed, and so I wish to embark in good time. Tell me at what time I must be carried on board.” He died the following morning at 10, and the rest is not silence but the noise of our attempts to answer the question Why did he stop? and the even more teasing question Why did he start?
Robb’s superb book will not supply answers, but it will make such questions irrelevant to a luminous yet explicit vision of the continuous life of a man who willfully placed himself, as De Quincey once said of Coleridge, ”in collision with all the interests that were in the sunshine of the world.”
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