Rimbaud: A Biography Review

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Rimbaud: A Biography ReviewRimbaud's life has been subjected to more myth-making and sentimental drivel than any other 19th century poet, probably because his life is such a great story. Teenage visionary turns thirtysomething gun-runner - what a headline! The great virtue of Graham Robb's biography is that he pays such close attention to the details of Rimbaud's life as it was actually lived, and doesn't allow the work, or indeed the correspondence, to dictate to him the meaning of it all.
The last great English-language Rimbaud biography was Enid Starkie's, now over forty years old, and while Starkie did massive valuable research (she later claimed, in classic biographer-rebel style, that she paid for her research by granting sexual favours to wealthy Frenchmen), her tone and approach were flawed by the temptation to rewrite Rimbaud's entire life in terms of his glittering adolescence, which was after all the time when he produced his poetry. Graham Robb combines an alert and vivid appreciation of Rimbaud's genius with a scepticism about Rimbaud's published statements about himself. This is a portrait of the artist as lifelong liar and shyster, and while Robb's Rimbaud is one of the least attractive heroes ever depicted, it seems all too true in the light of Rimbaud's withering, laser-like intelligence.
While Robb is exceptionally good at showing us the young, anti-social, utterly selfish teenage genius, you can tell from his crisp prose style and sardonic wit that while he admires the poetry, he finds the boy hard to like. This seems eminently fair in view of Rimbaud's youthful lack of any sense of gratitude, morality or decent behaviour. The older Rimbaud was more inclined to honour his obligations, but Robb convincingly demonstrates how the African Rimbaud's repeated complaints of having no money don't square up to his actual dealings with banks. It seems that Rimbaud the arms dealer was not the bungling innocent of legend, but a shrewd operator who made a considerable amount of money.
Robb's Rimbaud is a more modern figure, even a more (gulp) postmodern figure than we're used to in Rimbaud studies. This is no romantic dreamer (despite a dubious epilogue, the only false note in the book, I thought); Rimbaud seems to have dreamed the worst excesses of the 20th century before they happened, and reinvented himself as a man who could feel at home in them. It's a bracing, witty, scrupulous and searching biography of an exemplary figure - the brilliant boy who helped to create our idea of modern literature, and the brutally cynical man who regarded his early achievements as a drastically stupid dead end. The Rimbaud story will always be a fascinating and chilling cautionary tale; exactly what we're being cautioned against is only beginning to become apparent.Rimbaud: A Biography Overview

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