BIOGRAPHY

RIMBAUD

Graham Robb

Picador, #20

Rimbaud was a rogue. Fortunately for literature he was also a rogue genius. A butterfly who defied logic and turned into a caterpillar. One of the many pleasures of this thoroughly researched biography is that one follows this biological regression with captivated curiosity to the prosaic end of a poet's life.

Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud was born on October 20, 1854 in the rural village of Charleville, France. His parents separated when he was six and he was reared in his maternal grandfather's house. Educated locally, his first literary venture, at the age of 13, was to address, ''under the strictest secrecy'', 60 Latin hexamiters to the Imperial Prince on the occasion of the latter's First Communion. This piety was quickly followed by a conversion to republicanism and devoted anti-clericism.

By 1870, encouraged by his bewitched teacher Georges Izambarad, he adopts the lifestyle and philosophies of Rabelais and Hugo. He runs away to Paris. Is arrested, imprisoned, and sent home. This becomes a habit. At the age of 16 he declares ''the poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of the senses''. Well, he was also impatient, so the disordering began immediately. He introduced himself to the salons of literary Paris side by side with the revolutionary communards. He was invited to come and visit by the then established poet Paul Verlaine (1844-96).

Verlaine, 10 years his senior, fell in love. Their passionate and often violent homosexual affair was carried on in Flanders, Belgium, and England. It was a brutal tryst. It ended in Brussels in 1873 when Verlaine shot and wounded the infuriatingly fickle younger man. Verlaine was jailed for two years and then returned to his wife. Meantime Rimbaud was at home with mother.

After a few comparatively quiet and industrious months he completes the manuscript of Une Saison en Enfer (1873). Not having the money to pay his Belgian publisher, he collects six author's copies and circulates them among friends. Then he goes walkabout around Europe. In 1877 the one-time violent pacifist enlisted with the Dutch Colonial Army. After a few months he deserted in Batavia. Travelling via Ireland, he returned again to mother.

In 1880, with bogus credentials, he became a salesman for Alfred Bardey's merchandising company in Harar (Abyssinia). Naturally he deviated into gunrunning and hinterland exploration and exploitation. In early 1891 he contracted cancer, lost a leg, and, on the 10th November of that year died in the Hopital de la Conception, Marseilles. He was 37. Fred was dismayed to find letters vilifying him among his employee's papers. No one else was much surprised. This was the arch-thief of reputations. The greatest of ''disorderers''.

This is the biographical skeleton to which Graham Robb gives flesh. It is a wonderful and rewarding figure of work. Matched only by this Manchester-born (1958) author's previous biographies of Balzac (1994) and Victor Hugo (1997). The latter won the Whitbread Biography Award.

Well illustrated, this hefty book (pp552) also carries maps of the Frenchman's peregrinations in Africa. The French texts of the verses, vividly translated by Robb himself in the main text, are but one of many informative appendices. The main text is also thoroughly annotated. All in all, an exemplary academic tome. But it is more.

Robb, quite rightly, emphasises the manipulative nature of his subject. This is a literary demon. A deviant with rhetoric. The movement from those early Latin exercises to the diamond sharp prose-poems of Illuminations is given magnified focus. It is also given a biographical context, and here comes the surprise. Inside the scarecrow image lies a careful craftsman. A keeper of literary ledgers.

Rimbaud's real and true disciple is his fellow Frenchman Jean Genet. Reading the latter's autobiographical Thief's Journal (1954) one is struck by the camouflaging quality of great writing. Scatology given the reason of rhyme by the dictates of a controlled mind. So it is with Rimbaud according to Robb. There is a wry street-wise acceptance by the author that, despite the image, it is the recording imagination that rules. This is a book that avoids romantic hagiography and is a pleasure to read and re-read.