Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
by Edmund White
Atlas & Co. 256 pages, $24.
IN 1873, when French poet Arthur Rimbaud was staying in London with his more famous lover Paul Verlaine, the spark-striking and strategically untruthful nineteen-year-old added two years to his age so that he could pass through a set of doors normally closed to minors. The doors in question, however, opened not on a club or an “adult” show but instead the Reading Room of the British Museum Library. The anecdote gives us a Rimbaud much more scholarly than we expect adolescents to be, but there’s more to it. One of the first book requests Rimbaud submitted to the traffic control desk was for the collected works of the Marquis de Sade, a request the Library turned down. An atheist, a pornographer, Sade figured among those authors whose works were, for Victorian reasons, not made available to the general public.
Rimbaud’s request implies an allegiance to that part of French literary tradition that is transgressive and sexually adventurous, a tradition that, besides Sade, includes François Villon, Rabelais, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Restif de la Bretonne, Charles Baudelaire, André Gide, and Jean Genet. From today’s vantage point it’s obvious that Rimbaud belongs to the antinomian or “immoralist” current in late 19th-century European cultural history, a trend that includes figures as distinct as Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Gide. We feel sympathy with the trend when we summon its context: a world still partly feudal, intolerantly Christian, money-mad, mindlessly genteel, imperialist, tight-laced, and anti-sexual. In 1870, intellectual good manners demanded at least a token iconoclasm—a stance less defensible now, when black-market Kalashnikovs are everywhere available, the drug trade destroys whole nations, anyone can assemble a basement bomb, and unsuspecting women from Central Europe are entrapped and sold as sex-slaves to pimps in Rome and London.
More than a decade ago, Edmund White published a highly praised and commercially successful biography of Jean Genet, which he could not have written if he hadn’t been familiar with the transgressive aspect of French literature. Because of White’s sexuality, his long residence in France, and his literary knowledge, he would have seemed among English-language writers to be the perfect choice as the author of a life of Rimbaud to replace the obsolete 1930’s forerunner by Enid Starkie. However, in 2000 the British biographer Graham Robb published a hefty, exhaustive biography of the poet, which might have put an end to any expectation that White would tackle the same subject. Things have turned out differently. The compact biography series inaugurated many years ago by the critic and editor James Atlas has given White the opportunity to revisit Rimbaud’s life and assemble his own reflections about one of the pioneers of literary Modernism, a poet admired not only for his innovative poems but also for his inadvertent role as an iconic figure in the history of the gay liberation movement. The premise of the Atlas series is that well-known authors of imaginative literature will produce an especially fresh and cogent treatment of biographical subjects whose themes and æsthetic goals overlap with the biographers’. As a result, the life traced and commented upon shouldn’t fail to shed light on the later as well as the earlier artist.
White begins the book with an account of his own teenage encounter with the works of the poet, whom he read late at night at his boys’ school: “When I was sixteen, in 1956, I discovered Rimbaud. I was a boarding student at Cranbrook, a boys’ school outside Detroit, and lights out was at ten. But I would creep out of my room and go to the toilets, where there was a dim overhead light, and sit on the seat for so long that my legs would go numb.” He goes on to reveal facts that have a bearing on his own novel A Boy’s Own Story, whose narrative concludes with the schoolboy narrator’s decision to report the misconduct of a teacher the pupil himself has seduced. It’s one of the most disturbing moments in the novel because it destroys sympathies the reader has built up for a juvenile character misunderstood and mistreated partly because of his precocious realization that he’s gay. The boy doesn’t report the seduction but instead his teacher’s marijuana habit—sufficient grounds, even so, for firing the teacher, who obviously will never have lunch at a boy’s school again. When I first read the novel, I couldn’t help wondering if this queasy episode had an autobiographical equivalent. In his introduction here, White confesses that it does, calling it the “worst thing I may ever have done in my life.” He surveys possible reasons for ratting on his teacher and then sums up: “And perhaps I was bitter and nursing my disappointment that my teacher wanted to get off with me but didn’t love me (he was married). Now, all these years later, I ask myself whether Rimbaud’s ‘satanic’ example might not have been the decisive influence on my deplorable behavior.”
Critics and ethical philosophers have interminably debated the question of whether literature shapes the values of its readers and the decisions they make. If you believe it can, White’s confession is available as evidence. Actually, in Rimbaud’s case, it’s not the poetry (which includes no satanic hot tips, or almost none) so much as the rebellious life itself that has inspired imitators from the Beats to Jim Morrison to Patti Smith. If, as Auden believed, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” then perhaps we can still say that biographies of poets do. I can think of several Rimbaud wannabes I’ve known who acted out exemplary disasters under the influence of the venerated poète maudit—no matter that their poetry didn’t remotely measure up to his. Still, anyone believing great art justifies a disastrous life can go ahead with a full heart and sign on for Rimbaldian excess in the enterprises of absinthe, substance abuse, sexual irregularity, anti-bourgeois behavior, and colonial adventurism. The ticklish part is making sure beforehand that one’s writing is extraordinary enough to offset those excesses. Language forgives those by whom it lives, but not the others. The story about how Rimbaud gate-crashed the Reading Room reminds us, too, that he was extraordinarily well read in the classics. In fact, at school he won prizes in Latin composition as well as mastering the difficult rules of traditional French prosody. The typical contemporary Rimbaud follower overlooks that part of their hero’s preparation. Rimbaud’s being a hellion, a radical, and a visionary didn’t mean he couldn’t also produce a sonnet in alexandrine verses.
The essence of genius is implausibility, and it’s still hard to believe that a penniless, dirty, seventeen-year-old, the rebellious younger son of an uneducated widow who ran a farm in the provinces, could suddenly appear in Paris without personal connections to anyone there and, within a short time, despite staggeringly nasty behavior, be folded into one of the leading literary coteries of the day. Granted, most of the writers he met managed to hold him at arm’s length and in fact their amused condescension eventually soured into scorn—but not until after Rimbaud had made himself, for good or ill, unforgettable. Unforgettable certainly to Verlaine, who never entirely moved on from the encounter with his own private tornado, years after they were no longer in touch. To his credit, Verlaine displayed no lasting resentment—neither at Rimbaud’s disruption of his placid existence as a middle-class husband and respectable man of letters, nor at the loopy, bric-a-brac portrait Rimbaud painted of him in A Season in Hell. More than any other person, he made sure that Rimbaud’s poetry was circulated, published, and praised. It’s a course of action we wouldn’t expect to see nowadays, but Verlaine was himself a genius, though of a different kind; and pettiness isn’t one of genius’s character traits.
He also probably suffered from lingering guilt over having fired on Rimbaud and wounded his teenage wrist while the two brawling poets were holed up in a cheap hotel in Brussels. It’s likely that both flyweights had become bored with slugging it out day after day in the limited arena available between a brass bed and a marble-topped washstand. At some point Verlaine was seized with the inspiration to take things to the next dramatic level. Because firearms and hospital were involved, the police had to be called in and charges brought, which led to conviction and short-term imprisonment for the Parnassian gunman. On the other hand, when Rimbaud had, earlier on, given Verlaine minor flesh wounds with a penknife, no authorities were summoned nor legal action taken.
The narrative of this couple’s chaotic years together is uncomfortable on several counts, and it may not, finally, be such a bright idea to hoist them aloft as heroes of gay liberation in its early stages. This is all the more true considering that neither poet ever purported to be “homosexual,” partly because the word hadn’t yet been invented. There is no evidence that Verlaine had extended relationships with men after the conclusion of his fling with Rimbaud. Meanwhile, the latter wrote several poems dealing with women in flirtatious terms and had affairs with at least one, an Ethiopian woman remembered only by the name Mariam. Possibly there were also some sexual encounters with men during Rimbaud’s long sojourn in Aden and Ethiopia, in particular with a faithful retainer named Djami Wadaï, who was remembered in his will. It’s true that Wadaï was married and a father, but marital status is seldom an insurmountable barrier in societies that have evolved in equatorial climates. However, because no record of physical intimacy between the two men has survived, surmises on the topic are just that.
Once we turn to the last phase of Rimbaud’s life, when he gave up writing, sailed to Africa, and became a colonial trader, different sets of judgments have to be weighed against each other. At one time it was the norm for his biographers to make ironic comments about their subject’s haplessness as a colonial businessman in Africa. Graham Robb confirms that in fact Rimbaud did rather well in his business ventures, though at enormous cost to comfort and health. But I don’t see that there is much to admire in the spectacle of a European who, with ironclad discipline, ascetic self-sacrifice, and the requisite authoritarian behavior toward the Africans he employed, managed to extract profit from a land where most of the population scraped by at subsistence level. You can say that he got his just deserts when the harsh life he led in Ethiopia for more than a decade resulted in the development of a crippling inflammation in his kneecap, a cancer that eventually spread throughout his leg and killed him. But his sister in France died of the same illness many years later, which may mean that he had an inherited susceptibility. I notice that Edmund White rather scants this part of Rimbaud’s life, either because Robb has already written about it exhaustively or simply because Rimbaud begins to interest him less once he abandons literature altogether.
I have to say that Rimbaud’s decision to become one more exploitative French colonial dampens the enthusiasm I feel for his poetry. His flight from the metropolitan centers of European culture where he had flourished as a poet was surely a tragedy for him and for that culture. On the other hand, his poems several times prefigure just such an escape from the civilized world, for example, “The Drunken Boat.” But that work concludes with a vision of a return to Europe and to the innocence of childhood. In his letters from Africa, Rimbaud assured his mother that, once he’d made his fortune, he planned to return to France some day and marry a “nice local girl.” Death intervened, so we will never know if this stated intention was sincere or merely a fib designed to assuage a controlling parent. My own guess is that, despite the rigors of life in Ethiopia, Rimbaud was more at ease there than he would have been as a solid, married bourgeois in the French provinces. That existence would have been another “Season in Hell,” and not only for him but the naïve partner he would have persuaded to share it. His early death was a misfortune, but it obviated another death of a different kind. As for his many failures and misdeeds, one of his own poems (“Chanson de la plus haute tour”) neatly puts it this way: “Ô saisons, ô châteaux,/ Quelle âme est sans défauts?” (“O seasons, O castles,/ Whose soul is without defects?”)
Although Rimbaud had renounced literature, his contacts in France let him know that his poetry was being read and admired in Paris. There was even a small “school” of experimental poets who based their theories on Rimbaud’s sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”), a poem in which Rimbaud had synaesthetically assigned colors to each French vowel. The negligible poet is often a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles such as a poetic theory, which can be used as a pretext to grind out dull examples in support thereof. None of Rimbaud’s unsummoned followers in the Vowelist movement have survived in anthologies. It’s not possible to take Rimbaud’s color scheme seriously, when you consider that those five letters of the alphabet are used for nine distinct vocalic sounds in French, excluding diphthongs and nasalized vowels. Besides, it has always struck me that what’s interesting about that sonnet is not its arbitrary attribution of color to vowels (an attribution so subjective as to have no force outside the poem), but instead, the intricate play of consonant sounds as they interact with an a-e-i-o-u spectrum—one that may or may not register as a coloristic palette capable of engaging the reader’s visual ear.
His true legacy has proven to be a large number of figures in poetry and prose who responded to the larger contours of his vision and his spectacular range of literary techniques: Mallarmé, Rubén Darío, Gide, Apollinaire, Breton, Eliot, Hart Crane, Genet, Lowell, Bishop, Ashbery, Duncan, Ginsberg, Gunn, the British poets Craig Raine and Alan Jenkins, and others, including, apparently, Edmund White. Not all readers have the patience to get through Robb’s 500-page biography, which is witty to the point of tedium; and for them White’s distilled, clearly written life of Rimbaud provides an incisive introduction with valuable insights about that life and its literary legacy. Also, readers of White’s fiction will find that it provides new access to some of his aims and preoccupations. One not entirely incidental value of the Rimbaud saga is to serve as a danger signal. If readers can make use of it in that way, so can the biographer; to judge by his introduction, White has done exactly that.
