Rimbaud: A Biography

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When he was not yet 17, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) electrified Paris's literary society with the incendiary poems that later made him the guiding saint of 20th-century rebels, from Pablo Picasso to Jim Morrison. "A Season in Hell," "The Drunken Boat," and the prose poems of Illuminations were epochal works that changed the nature of an art form--and yet their author abandoned poetry at age 21 and spent the rest of his short life as a colonial adventurer in Arabia and Africa. "He was writing in a void," explains British scholar Graham Robb. "In 1876, most of Rimbaud's admirers either were still in the nursery or had yet to be conceived." Hardly surprising, since the poet was a difficult and frequently unpleasant person to actually know. The Parisian poets who took him under their wing soon discovered that Rimbaud was ungrateful, crude, and as scornful of their precious verse as he was of the Catholic Church, bourgeois proprieties, and everything else his disapproving mother held dear. Rimbaud's stormy affair with Paul Verlaine estranged the older poet from his wife and, eventually, from most of his artistic friends as well. In Robb's depiction, the poet possessed from his earliest youth a restless, searching intellect that permitted no compromise with convention nor tenderness for others' weaknesses. The author doesn't soften Rimbaud's "savage cynicism" or gloss over his frequently obnoxious behavior, yet Robb arouses our admiration for "one of the great Romantic imaginations, festering in damp, provincial rooms like an intelligent disease." Like Robb's excellent biographies of Hugo and Balzac, this sharp, subtle, unsentimental portrait is both erudite and beautifully written. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
In this robust biography, Robb (Balzac; Victor Hugo) contemplates the life of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) as if the French poet/ vagabond's deeds were those of a mythic hero. Rimbaud's every impulse is viewed as the expression of a coherent, wildly innovative vision of the world; his artistic accomplishments are assumed to have redeemed his devious and destructive tendencies. Thus, when the academically gifted Rimbaud produced other students' homework for a price, the burgeoning genius was operating "a parasitic service industry feeding on the education system," which Robb posits as a "splendid achievement for a child of fifteen." When Rimbaud spread his own excrement on the table of a Parisian caf? as if it were plaster for a fresco, he was making the critical point that "flat canvas and oils could not compete with the three-dimensional kaleidoscope of reality." And when discussing the poet's use of blackmail to secure the attentions of his lover, poet Paul Verlaine, Robb dryly notes that Rimbaud "never allowed conventional morality to ruin a practical arrangement." The author seldom admits ambiguity. He is most effective in his effort to blend Rimbaud's early life as a bohemian social deviant with his subsequent 16-year career in Africa as a fledgling anthropologist and explorer. Rimbaud's childhood wanderings through the French countryside matured into caravans across the deserts. His youthful willingness to venture the unmapped lifestyle of the homosexual prepared him to encounter the exotic cultures of Abyssinia. His literary works, from "Le B?teau ivre" to "Voyelles" and "Une Saison en enfer," invariably focused on fluctuation, on moments of departure. According to Robb, these poems were crowbars that pried Rimbaud loose from family, tradition and society. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The model modern writer was a late-nineteenth-century French teenager, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), who grew up fatherless under the heavy hand of a cold, irascible mother. No one knew what to do when he began flouting every rule he could, for he was the most gifted student his small town had ever seen. At 15, he jaunted off to Paris to promote himself to the avant-garde poets of the time, such as Paul Verlaine, who took him for his lover so passionately that, culminating the most famous homosexual lovers' quarrel in history, he shot him. At 19, Rimbaud gave up poetry to pursue a life of wandering opportunism that, given his lifelong chutzpah, was entirely in character. He made and lost fortunes in Africa, and men and women in bed, and rebellious young writers have rallied to his call for "derangement of the senses" ever since. Robb is an exciting writer, a good scholar, and a literary enthusiast, and although he avoids the artificiality of fiction, he makes Rimbaud as vivid as a novelistic antihero. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Richard Howard, New York Times Book Review, 19 November 2000
Superb...the single best work to read about this haunting and haunted poet.


John Simon, Washington Post, 26 November 2000
Wit, elegance and thoroughness characterize this book...[a] fine new critical biography.


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After tackling biographies of Victor Hugo and Honor￯﾿ﾽ de Balzac, Robb now adds to the long list of books that try to make sense of the legendary French poet and iconoclast Arthur Rimbaud. As a teen in the 1870s, Rimbaud traveled from a small town in France to take Paris by storm with his revolutionary poems and attacks on conventionality. He wooed the renowned poet Paul Verlaine away from a wife and child and into a flamboyant relationship that ended with Verlaine in jail and Rimbaud sailing for Africa. But fame has a way of pursuing those who shun it, and Rimbaud became legendary as a poet in Paris even as he set off to be an explorer and trader in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Robb betters Enid Starkie's definitive biography of Rimbaud; he has a livelier style and provides English translations of some of the poems (with the original French in an appendix in the back). Robb questions conclusions to which other biographers have jumped but also takes some leaps himself, including relying on hearsay to support his interpretations of events. Occasionally, he sounds as overly dramatic as his subject. Sometimes he relies on facile psychology (Rimbaud's father's abandonment of his family is blamed for much of Rimbaud's behavior), but he still manages to deliver a compelling explanation of a very complex man whose legend has obscured the facts of his life. —Kevin Grandfield Read all 12 "From The Critics" >


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