France’s punk poet laid bare

18 January 2009  By Peter Murphy

Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel

By Edmund White

Atlantic Books, €20

There can be no juicier subject for a literary biographer than Arthur Rimbaud - punk prototype, queer icon, rebel inkster and, ultimately, enigmatic absconder and wilful deserter of his own extraordinary art.

The facts, such as they are: Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud grew up in the rural French town of Charleville, near the Belgian border, the son of an absentee military father and a severe, starchy mother. An outstanding scholar, in pubescence he began composing tearjerker poems and stories indebted to Victor Hugo, then quickly graduated to merciless parodies of established Parisian literary figures such as Théodore de Banville.

At the age of 15,he caught the eye of Parnassian poet Paul Verlaine by sending him his bawdiest verse (the name Rimbaud, Edmund White tells us, derives from the same etymological root as the terms for ribaldry and prostitution) .

Thereafter, he moved to Paris, seduced the elder poet away from his wife, and the two proceeded to stagger from Communard barricade to boulevard to bar, their senses deranged by absinthe and hashish.

So far, so blah-blah-bohemian, but by now Rimbaud was also well on his way to revolutionising 19th century poetry with stunning symbolist masterpieces such as The Drunken Boat, Les Illuminations, and the splenetic, schismatic screed A Season In Hell, a work which contained the germ for great Modernist song-poems such as Ginsberg ’s Howl and Dylan’s Desolation Row.

Having lobbed a pipe bomb into the citadels of French letters, he quit the craft at 21, setout for Africa to make his fortune as a gun runner and slave trader, and died of syphilis on his return to Marseilles in 1891.

In the century after his death, generations of angel-headed hipsters and self-styled poetic upstarts invoked Arthur’s name and donned the famous Carjat portrait as their mask. Velvet jacket? Tousled hair? Insolent stare? Check, check, check.

Since the Beats, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, there have been more new Rimbauds than new Dylans (Bob himself briefly became one circa Blonde On Blonde): Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, Mike Scott, Richey Edwards, Jim Carroll. ‘‘Go, Rimbaud!" was Patti Smith’s battle cry on her incendiary debut Horses, while Leonardo DiCaprio essayed the enfant terrible opposite David Thewlis’s Verlaine in the 1995 film Total Eclipse.

Edmund White’s book is not the most comprehensive biography of the poet, and it does pale a little when compared to Graham Robb’s exhaustively researched but eminently readable doorstep Rimbaud, published eight years ago.

And yet, it’s as though we never tire of hearing the tale of Rimbaud retold, with every fresh horde of youngsters gathering to sit at the feet of their ravaged elders, beseeching them to tell us again the one about how Rimbaud and Verlaine, at the height of their dysfunctional love affair, stabbed each other as a prelude to getting it on in cheap hotels, hovels and assorted holes in the wall.

One might beware of any biography that begins in the first person, but White, a gay, bookish student from Michigan who longed to move to New York and fall in love with an older benefactor like his literary hero, confines his own autobiographical prejudices to the prologue.

Besides, the subject of amorphous identity is hardwired into Rimbaud’s life and work, allowing multitudes of transgressive penslingers to see themselves in the Rorschach blots of his verse.

In an elegant but concise comment on the fluidity of the self, the poet wrote: ‘‘I is another’’, a statement used by Todd Haynes as epigraph and overriding theme for his Dylan biopic I’m Not There.

So, as a cultural avatar alone, Rimbaud would have merited multiple biographies, but there’s the added allure of the work itself, which has lost none of its occult power. The depth of Rimbaud’s love affair with language allows his ideas to skip generations like a virus.

The poems are, to paraphrase Flaubert, as violent and original as ever, and his aesthetic insights remain vivid, not least his synesthetic colour-coding of vowels (‘‘A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins’’) and the exquisite observation that ‘‘In everything any man wrote . . . is contained . . . the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak’’.

The tone of White’s book is learned but friendly: he manages to penetrate and illuminate the subject’s linguistic alchemy while casting a fond but unsentimental eye over the train-wreck of the man’s life. Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel is a skilfully condensed and pacey reiteration of a myth that falls somewhere between Icarus, Orpheus and Elvis.

Peter Murphy is a novelist and contributing editor with Hot Press magazine. His first novel, John The Revelator, will be published by Faber &Faber next month