Rebel, rebel

HIS lover and fellow poet Paul Verlaine called him an “angel in exile”. It was a perception that few others shared. When Arthur Rimbaud arrived in Paris in 1871, 16 years old, filthy and unknown but clutching a draft of his first masterpiece, he quickly began making enemies. Those who offered the runaway bumpkin hospitality regretted it. One host was rewarded with a glass of milk spiked with a fresh helping of Rimbaud's semen. The little charmer addressed established literary figures as “cunty” or “ink-shitter”. Stabbing those who annoyed him soon became a reflex.

What Rimbaud lacked in social skills, however, he made up for in sheer outrageous genius. In a poetic career that lasted barely five years he produced some of the most audacious, beautiful and influential poetry of the 19th century—arguably of any century. For Edmund White the Frenchman is nothing less than “the father of modern poetry”.

Mr White, though, does not set out to argue that case. Instead, he offers a slideshow of key moments in Rimbaud's short and largely unhappy life, together with thoughtful readings of “Le Bateau Ivre”, “Une Saison en Enfer” and “Illuminations”. The life falls neatly into three segments. First came the dull rural childhood with its occasional bids for freedom, then the riotous years of hard drinking and sexual adventuring with the married Verlaine, with whom Rimbaud lived, off and on, in France and England, for most of his masterpiece-writing years. The third and final phase began when Rimbaud—not yet 21—abandoned both Verlaine and verse. After a few false starts and odd-jobs, he took off for East Africa, where he eked out a living as a trader until shortly before his death, in a Marseille hospital, at the age of 37.

Two things set Mr White's book apart from other Rimbaud biographies. First is the extent to which he identifies with his hero. Second, and more significant, is his emphasis on the relationship with Verlaine, to the extent that the book reads almost as a dual biography. Verlaine's poetry is too often overlooked by admirers of the older man's more charismatic and innovative protégé. Mr White is also right to point out that, critically speaking, Verlaine now seems “perfectly digested”, while Rimbaud, ever the outlaw, remains “inedible”. Deliciously so, he might have added.