Wild Child

More than a century after his death, the poet Arthur Rimbaud continues to fascinate, dazzle and intimidate readers and critics alike. Rimbaud was born in 1854 in the French provincial town of Charleville, where he soon made a mark as a brilliant literature student. For about four years, starting from the age of 16, Rimbaud wrote poems so powerful that they expanded ideas of what language can do in verse. He made his way to Paris, where he was recognized mostly as a hell-raiser and uncouth provincial, rather than as the great writer he was. About the only person to fully understand his value was another poet, Paul Verlaine, with whom he formed a notorious sadomasochistic sexual relationship. Ultimately dismayed by the world’s lack of attention, even after he had written such mighty masterpieces as “The Drunken Boat,” “A Season in Hell” and “Illuminations,” Rimbaud at 20 abandoned poetry and went off to Africa to work in the import-export field, which made him even more miserable than he was as a starving poet at home. He died in appalling pain at 37 of a neglected case of gangrene.

If this were all, Rimbaud would not have inspired generations of acolytes, including rock star Jim Morrison, nor would he have been memoralized in the 1995 film “Total Eclipse” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud. More than just his youth and beauty in portraits and photographs, Rimbaud’s brilliance, energy and immense will are admired by legions of fans. His adversities impress fans as much as the words he wrote, always prey to the dilution of translation and enigmatic in the original. To some admirers with only a vague idea of the poems, Rimbaud transcends literature and dwells in the domain of myth. Overturning idols and breaking all the rules, experimenting with alcohol and drugs, refusing to abide by the conventions of middle-class life, Rimbaud is a powerful precedent.

For Rimbaud, literature was consciously an intense interlude, not a permanent self-definition. This made it possible to take all the risks and achieve all he did during the short time in which he wrote. He wasn’t worried about burning out. Rimbaud “had” to burn out, as the Romanian French writer E.M. Cioran justly pointed out: “In Rimbaud everything is unimaginable and abnormal, except for his ‘silence.’ . . . Rimbaud’s effervescent period should be imagined as an unusually long ecstasy but which once exhausted could by no means begin again. His ‘silence’ is only an entry into a different order of existence, in a state that one grasps better using categories of asceticism than those of literature.”

Natural and sometimes morbid curiosity has moved many writers to examine what happened to Rimbaud after he stopped writing. After all, such a rare genius in literature must have led a life of some interest even though he was no longer creating poems. There have been dissenters to this view, like the poet Yves Bonnefoy, who wrote a book about Rimbaud that omitted the painful final years as of no public interest. But most biographers have dwelt on them, sometimes as a springboard for their own fantasies. The French writer Alain Borer’s “Rimbaud in Abyssinia” starts with an airline flight to Africa in order to follow in Rimbaud’s footsteps, but the author gets sidetracked by ogling a stewardess who, according to Borer, resembles Nastassja Kinski. Rimbaud’s homosexuality, emphasized by a number of well-informed recent writers, is conveniently ignored by those who find that it conflicts with their own fantasy lives. One of the most cogent writers on Rimbaud, Steve Murphy, points out that these writers force Rimbaud into “a heterosexual vision of the world which was certainly not his.”

Ambiguous both in literature and life, Rimbaud has had few truly sensitive and understanding biographers. Two new efforts, by Jean-Luc Steinmetz and Graham Robb, could not be more different in approach, proving once again that Rimbaud seems to permit, or even require, dramatically different approaches to understanding him. Steinmetz is a poet and professor at the University of Nantes who has produced patient and thorough editions of Rimbaud’s poems and a monumental life of the poet Stephane Mallarme. Steinmetz’s “Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Engima,” is a careful weighing of the evidence on the subject that treads softly on many difficult matters. Steinmetz is careful to note when we cannot be sure of the truth of either the meaning of a certain poem or a particular fact in Rimbaud’s life. He is well aware of all the foolish statements that have been made about Rimbaud over the years--one wry French writer, Rene Etiemble, compiled several volumes of these writings, which still make amusing and instructive reading.

Steinmetz has a poet’s tolerance of the excesses and bad behavior of colleagues, and he is refreshingly nonjudgmental about the Verlaine and Rimbaud affair. He does, however, make some controversial statements about Rimbaud’s homosexuality, claiming to find that the misogynist Rimbaud was more involved--emotionally if not sexually--with women than most writers think. Steinmetz’s book, like Jean-Yves Tadie’s recently translated life of Marcel Proust (Viking), takes for granted a knowledge of French literature that some American readers may lack; in fact, some French readers lack it as well these days. With Steinmetz, one can be assured of being accompanied through the hectic, alarming and often baffling life and work of Rimbaud by a fully informed guide who has the good taste to get out of the way and not write a book about himself in guise of a life of someone else. This modesty and helpfulness are among the volume’s most attractive features.

In comparison, the British author Graham Robb’s “Rimbaud” is posturing, swaggering and self-referential in tone. Robb’s previous lives of swashbuckling writers like Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac were suited to a monumentally egoistic approach, but here the subject does not fit the writer. Robb should have tackled Emile Zola or Anatole France instead of the minefield of Rimbaud’s life and work, where so many subtle judgments are necessary about life and art. Among Robb’s howlers are the notion that Rimbaud’s giving up poetry has “caused more lasting, widespread consternation than the breakup of the Beatles” and that the “list of his known crimes is several times longer than the list of poems published by Rimbaud himself.” He refers to Verlaine’s important poetry collection, “Fe^tes Galantes” as “deliberately inconsequential” and the lovers are compared to Laurel and Hardy, with Verlaine as “the whimpering Laurel to Rimbaud’s ludicrously ambitious Hardy.” Robb calls Rimbaud’s immortal lyric “l’Eternite” “anorexic.” He writes of Steinmetz--whose book appeared in French before his did--that he “cannot be trusted to have undertaken proper research.” He is also scornfully dismissive of the late Enid Starkie, whose pioneering and still useful books laid the groundwork for Rimbaud research in English-speaking countries and inspired generations of Rimbaud fans from W.H. Auden to Henry Miller.

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Robb focuses to best effect on the last years of Rimbaud’s life, when the details of his business as a merchant are exposed, although the information here is much the same as in a previous British book, Charles Nicholl’s “Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891” and Nicholl offers a sense of misericord that Robb lacks. Like a deceptively unfaithful translation that “reads well,” Robb’s book is an energetic read but ultimately untrustworthy. Its panache has motivated enthused, if ill-informed, reviews, with the notable exception of a critique by the rock performer Patti Smith, writing in the VLS, the book review supplement of The Village Voice. Rimbaud may be a rare literary subject in which a rocker’s judgment may outweigh that of a professional biographer.

By contrast, Steinmetz’s book has yet to attract much attention. Readers who manage to find Steinmetz’s book will find the effort well worth it, as this is a lasting contribution to anyone’s bookshelf on French literature.