Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know

The French poet Arthur Rimbaud mightn t have been the first rock star that dubious accolade could ve gone to anyone from Baudelaire to Byron to Blake to late Roman emperors like Caligula, Commodus, Nero or Heliogabalus but he was perhaps the first one to so completely embody all the contradictory myths we have come to associate with icons and iconoclasts like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Richey Manic and Kurt Cobain.

Certainly, even a cursory scan through Graham Robb s new biography Rimbaud confirms that, at the height of his teenage rampage, the original architect of the language of revolt made the Gallagher brothers look like Westlife.
Like Mozart, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was a wild child prodigy, exhibiting a ferocious intellect and precocious literary skill. Born in 1854, and growing up in the poor provincial French town of Charleville, the young Arthur was proficient at Latin, mastered classical French poetry and prose forms to the point of being able to parody them without mercy, then quickly developed a shocking originality, beautiful and bawdy, that marked him as a spectacular successor to Baudelaire.
Almost inevitably, Rimbaud s family background is a textbook rock n roller s case history of abuse and abandonment. His father, like Jim Morrison s, was a military man not much given to domestic life, and deserted the family when the boy was six. His mother on the other hand, was a strict religious fanatic in the habit of locking up her sons for hours without food or water.
At the age of 15, Rimbaud moved to Paris, catching the eye and ear of Paul Verlaine by sending him his lewdest and crudest verse. Soon, he had seduced the elder poet and wrecked his marriage, and the pair became infamous in the capital (Robb dubs them the Adam and Eve of modern homosexuality ), reeling along the Rue Campagne-Premihre in a haze of rum, sodomy and the hash, not to mention copious quantities of absinthe.
The young poet once pulled a stunt worthy of Iggy at his most debauched when, tired of Forain s championing of paint as an artistic medium, he took a dump on the table and proceeded to paint his own masterpiece in this powerful impasto .
Then of course, there s the fact that Rimbaud preferred the passive role in his relationship with Verlaine, the reason being that, even by 19th century Parisian standards, the latter was too dirty a bugger to bugger. In fact, the couple set the standard (or rather, lowered it) for dysfunctional sinbiotic rock n roll relationships on a par with Sid n Nancy s last days in the Chelsea.
When down and out in London and Brussels, the poets would stab each other with knives wrapped in towels as a prelude to a hot night of sodomy. A drunken Verlaine even tried to shoot his young lover in July of 1873, hitting him in the wrist. Rimbaud filed no complaint, but his companion was still charged with attempted manslaughter and served 18 months in prison.

Robb relates such tasty titbits with with and relish, but not at the expense of the demonic genius of works such as Les Illuminations and A Season In Hell, not so much visionary as hallucinatory verse which provided a seed bed for Modernism, the Beats, and of course, the more high-minded species of rock n roll lowlife.
Indeed, the Alchemy Of The Word passage from A Season In Hell pretty much prophesises the many grotesques, gypsy queens and angel-headed hipsters that would parade through Ginsberg s Howl and Dylan s Desolation Row , not to mention Patti Smith s first four albums and almost every Doors opus:
I grew accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drummers made up of angels, carriages on roads in the sky, a parlour at the bottom of the lake; monsters, mysteries At the end I looked on the disorder of my mind as sacred
And then, unbelievably, Rimbaud quit at 21, never to write another word.
Usually, this is where biographers clock off, reducing the rest of his 15 years to a coda along the lines of he absconded to Africa, took to gun-running and died of a tropical disease . Robb puts flesh on the legend by stressing the fact that Rimbaud prospered after giving up poetry, becoming a shrewd and successful trader and amassing an estimated fortune of some #100,000 in Aden and Harar.
Sure, his vanishing created the template for every beautiful loser from Jim Morrison to Richey Manic (and whenever a kamikaze rocker enters a downward spiral of drink, drugs and depression, you can bet the phrase A Season In Hell will crop up somewhere in dispatches), but the hard-nosed merchant he later became suggests that Chuck Berry/Rolling Stones/Wu-Tang-style mercenary tactics are as legitimate a part of bohemian mythology as any dressed-to-kill-yourself/death-is-a-dandy ethic.
Instead, he opted for capitalism over capitulation, making shitloads of money running guns or from the slave trade, before dying of syphilis in Marseille in November 1891.

Rimbaud is published by Picador at #20 sterling.