Arthur Rimbaud is one of those writers whose life of mythic proportion influences more people than his writing. The demonic youth who mastered poetic styles like a virtuoso and then invented his own before the age of 21, only to disappear into the searing heat of Africa to seek his fortune as a merchant, seems to have led two disjointed lifetimes. A challenge to any prospective biographer; there have been many. Was there a need for one more when this appeared in 2000?
As Graham Robb writes: “Many biographers of Rimbaud obviously preferred the sentimental, schoolboy adventure stories of Rimbaud’s early memorialists to the poet’s own savage cynicism. . . . I have tried at least to allow Rimbaud to grow up” (xvi). To me, he succeeded.
Robb is an excellent writer. Among his strengths are the amount of research he conducts and his skill at creating the overall arc of his account. This is the second of his books that I’ve read. In the first, The Discovery of France, his strength was mitigated by a curious feature of his writing: the logic of the structure of some of his paragraphs is difficult to scan; I had to re-read them to get the sense. While this bothers me less than its opposite, verbosity, this trait slows me down.
There were fewer instances of this quirk in this book than in Discovery, but here’s an example: When Robb writes in the middle of a paragraph “This may not be entirely misleading . . . ” (6), I had to read the paragraph twice to see that “this” was not an explication of what came before, but was the introduction of what was to follow. I grow impatient when my grammar software busts me for what it calls an “unclear antecedent,” now I see what that means.
Here’s a slightly different example, from the introduction (xiv): “Unlike so many privately respectable anti-heroes, Rimbaud led an exemplary life.” When I read it the second time, I realized Robb had subverted the ordinary usage of “exemplary life.” To me, it indicates that Robb is not a sloppy writer; he has a lot to say, and he’s meticulous about what he writes. It sometimes feels, though, as if too many contrasting thoughts are packed into one paragraph.
Robb’s love of antithesis often pays off, however. Here’s an example, describing the school Arthur and his brother began to attend: “If the environment had reflected its pedagogical aims, the Institute Rossat would have been preparing its pupils for a life in prison. It was Arthur’s first taste of freedom . . .” (17). This thought returns hauntingly during Rimbaud’s final years in Abyssinia, where the slave-trade was still rampant in the late nineteenth century, but it is Rimbaud who complains incessantly of being enslaved.
The twin poles of freedom and captivity formed the core of Rimbaud’s personality, so Robb, with his love of paradox and antithesis, in addition to his profound knowledge of French literature, is his ideal biographer. He traces the conflict and compulsion in Rimbaud's nature to his family constellation: the absent father, the demanding mother who withheld love. Some readers may feel this makes the book an exercise in psycho-biography, yet Robb cites contemporaries who observed that, if one knew the mother, it was understandable that Arthur took to the road. Harder to comprehend, perhaps, is how regularly he returned, including in his final illness, after more than a decade in East Africa.
Robb researches his books thoroughly. In this one, he has digested a wealth of primary and secondary literature about an author whose output, in comparison, was minuscule. Robb interacts particularly with Enid Starkie, who wrote eight decades ago what was long the standard biography in English. In some cases, based on evidence, he differs from Starkie; in at least one other case, again based on assiduous research, he defends Starkie on a point on which others have sharply disagreed with her.
The broad outlines of Rimbaud’s bi-polar life—path-breaking poet in his youth, African gun-runner in his maturity—are familiar to any of the millions, such as I, for whom the poet was an intensely private adolescent discovery. Robb convincingly revises the tale of the second half. The conventional view, rooted in Rimbaud’s letters home, written in his chronically discontented and self-condemning manner, is that his time in Abyssinia brought paltry returns. Robb investigates and finds that Rimbaud reaped enormous profits.
Enormous profit of a different kind is what I reaped in reading this masterpiece of biography. ( )

A lengthy in depth biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. I had read "The Illuminations" one of his key works of poetry though I have to say did not remember much about it. Also Rimbaud was one of Jim Morrisons' literary models in his music and poetry. Rimbaud obviously was a genius but like many his life was one of great tumult and struggle. Much to his own making he lived his younger years in utter squalor, poverty, and rebellion. Later he drifted his way to east Africa to get involved in gun trading and other forms of commerce. Beyond his early writing he pretty much vacated poetry and though recognized by the poetic circles primarily of France he never amounted to much on a larger scale until after his death at a relative early age. ( )

3397 Rimbaud, by Graham Robb (read 30 Jan 2001) Because I so enjoyed Robb's biography of Victor Hugo, I decided to read this book. Rimbaud had an interesting life, spending much time in what is now known as Ethiopia. He was an obnoxious person during his poetry-producing years, and no matter how great a genius he was I would have had nothing to do with him. The book is well-researched and well-written and I do not regret reading it. ( )