At the age of 16, writer Edmund White discovered the writings of
another teenager, the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
It was a match made not in heaven but in hell — Rimbaud, the
enfant terrible and author of the groundbreaking prose-poem
Une Saison en Enfer; White, in 1956 living a hell of his own as
a gay, self-loathing boarding-school student in the Midwest but with
some major ideas already in mind: run away to New York, get published,
and fall in love — preferably with an older man to take care of
him.
Rimbaud would have recognized the game plan, as White explains in
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, a handy, brief biography
published by Atlas & Co. in its continuing series of “Eminent
Lives.”
But New York wasn’t Rimbaud’s destination at the age of 15. It was
Paris, where he hoped to publish his poetry and live free — free
from the middle-class expectations of his mother in a village in
northeast France and free to live the visionary life of a poet/seer,
which in Rimbaud’s case meant a disordering of the senses thanks to
beaucoup boozing. So, goodbye to bourgeois prudishness, and
hello to whatever the deranged senses might detect and perceive. The
poet/seer’s job: to write it down.
What others detected and perceived in the young Rimbaud, despite his
obvious genius, was another matter, and a healthy head of lice wasn’t
the worst of it. “A vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty little schoolboy”
is how one observer described Rimbaud at the time, but try telling that
to the poet Paul Verlaine, who was 10 years older than Rimbaud and
crazy about the kid and his work.
More than crazy. According to White, Verlaine, no slouch himself in
the history of poetry, was a “brutal husband,” “impious wretch,”
“homicidal alcoholic,” “slacker,” and “drama queen.” Case in point, in
the drama department: the time a drunken Verlaine smashed the bottles
holding the fetuses of his mother’s two miscarriages — fetuses
she displayed in her home and fetuses Verlaine proceeded to dismember.
Why? Because Verlaine’s mother refused to fork over any more money.
Little wonder, then, that by the time Rimbaud got to town, Verlaine,
impressed by the youngster’s radical way with words and ga-ga over his
brilliant blue eyes, was, according to White, “up for anything,” which,
in 19th-century Paris and then London, meant “the lurid but exciting
depths of bohemian depravity.” Another match made in hell? Yes, but
there’s always the other side to a story, and leave it to Rimbaud to
put it not so poetically:
“He can satisfy himself on me as much as he likes,” Rimbaud said of
Verlaine. “But he wants me to practice on him! Not on your life! He’s
far too filthy. And he’s got horrible skin.”
And a trigger finger. After Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist,
police in Brussels got wind of the rumors surrounding the nature of
their relationship, so officials gave Verlaine the going-over he
apparently couldn’t get from Rimbaud. Not so poetically put, White
writes that, thanks to Belgian police work, “we know more about the
condition of [Verlaine’s] penis and anus than we do about the intimate
anatomy of any other major poet of the past.”
As for the master of obscurity himself, Rimbaud, there’s still the
abiding mystery: how to account for the fact that this “father of
modern poetry” — who went from being a Romantic, to a classicist,
a Symbolist, and a Surrealist (avant la lettre), who went from
scandal to scandal as a thug and troublemaker — by the age of 21
abandoned the literary world altogether.
Failing to be recognized for his poetry, Rimbaud turned to traveling
— to Germany and Italy, to Indonesia and Cyprus — and to a
series of unsuccessful moneymaking schemes. He then traveled to
Ethiopia and became a coffee-seller and gunrunner. He died from cancer
in Marseille in 1891, age 37.
As White writes in his fast-moving overview: “[Rimbaud] looked back
on his years of creativity (from age fifteen to nineteen) as shameful,
a time of drunkenness, a period of homosexual scandal, of arrogance and
rebellion that led to nothing.”
Not so. Ask, to name a few, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Antonin
Artaud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Neruda, Mario Vargos Llosa, Milan
Kundera, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith — and
Edmund White.