Rimbaud - The Double Life of a Rebel

Edmund White, Rimbaud - The Double Life of a Rebel (Atlantic)

Whoever 'they' are, they say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The little I knew about Rimbaud had suggested he was not my type at all, seemingly over-rated, juvenile, flashy, rambling and unpleasant. But I thought I'd take Edmund White's account of him for the Christmas holidays as a bit of entertainment and see what happened.
White is a fine writer who has not let me down before and he does great service to Rimbaud here, too, by overturning the most assumative of my assumptions and it just goes to show that you can't make any judgements until you have something more solid than hearsay and prejudice to go on.
It might just be the respective biographers who are responsible for all this re-organizing of judgements in French C19th poetry but whereas I thought I liked Baudelaire until reading the book by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Edmund White has taken Rimbaud in the opposite direction.
Rimbaud was a dedicated radical aesthete, devoted to his anti-bourgeoise agenda and a genuinely out of order misfit that puts more recent puny hell-raisers to shame.
It is his friend, Paul Verlaine, who is presented in this version of events as hopeless and dependant although it has to be said that both halves of this unworldly couple were drama queens incapable of maintaining themselves that kept on running back home to their mothers whenever anything went wrong or they ran out of money, which was most of the time.
Rimbaud's poetics move on from Baudelaire with new forms and an insistence on impersonality, the dark interest in the exotic and the wilful 'systematic disordering of the senses' and the 'double life' referred to in the title here designate the 'wild rebelliousness' and 'dry-eyed realism' as contradictory.
So, rather than ever credit Ezra Pound with quite so much of the invention of the modern or modernist in poetry, it is to Rimbaud I'll be going in the new year to see if the poems hold up to the sympathetic claims made for them here. Yes, of course, the boy was a nightmare and the litany of self-styled wannabe wild boys that cite him as vital to their very art (the likes of Kerouac and Jim Morrison) mean he's got even more to answer for than he thought. But the most convincing part of the story is the coda, after abjuring poetry at the startlingly early age of, was it 24, he lives on in an even more adventurous style, as an entrepreneur in all kinds of things, largely in Africa, and whenever asked about poetry, he doesn't even want to talk about it,
Rimbaud had nothing but scorn for his previous literary life. When his boss, Bardey, for instance, asked him about his time in London, he dismissed it as 'a period of drunkenness'. And when another curious colleague in Africa asked him about his career as a poet, Rimbaud said, 'Hogwash [rincures]- it was only hogwash'.
And that, after being such an ardent revolutionary in the subject, is the part I found the most heroic.