Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel - Hardcover

White, Edmund

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1934633151 ISBN 13: 9781934633151

Publisher: Atlas, 2008

Synopsis

The distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White brings his literary mastery to a new biography of Arthur Rimbaud.

Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, but just as dramatically eventful and accomplished. Even today, over a century after his death in 1891, his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon, marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the Symbolist movement in poetry. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while running guns in Africa. He was thirty-seven.

Edmund White writes with a historian's eye for detail, driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject. White delves deep into the young poet's relationships with his family, his teachers, and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine. He follows the often elusive (sometimes blatant) threads of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's poems (in those days, sodomy was a crime) and offers incisive interpretations of the poems, using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.

About this title

About the Author

Raised in the Midwest and Texas, Edmund White is a renowned author and literary and cultural critic. He is the author of biographies of Genet and—in the Penguin Lives series—of Proust, and of eight novels including Hotel de Dream. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of numerous awards and honors. He teaches at Princeton and lives in New York City.

Reviews

Starred Review. Here is a lean, incisive biographical-critical book by one of our outstanding literary commentators. In compelling personal writing, White (Genet: A Biography) shows how one of the heroes of French culture, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), led a double life—in many forms. He who famously declared, I is another, abruptly abandoned the literary life, virtually as a teenager, for more than 15 years until his death. Unconventionally beautiful, from a provincial middle-class background and something of a mama's boy, the lover of Paul Verlaine was bisexual and secretly craved conventional worldly success even as his aesthetic was in the Symbolist art-for-art's-sake mode, portrayed by White as part shaman, part alcoholic and drug addict, part Catholic saint, Rimbaud remains a phenomenon in world literature. Included in this literary biography are White's superb translations of works he is discussing and fresh insights into Rimbaud's destructive relationship with Verlaine in particular, as well as with other poets, family, friends and business associates. This is a disturbing and original portrait of a man White sees as a fallen angel who misbehaved even in hell. (Oct. 6)
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White is fully on his mettle writing about the writer who sustained him when he was a frustrated, literary, 1950s gay teenager who yearned for the world cultural capital of New York. Rimbaud (1854–91), of course, was White’s perfect role model, for in similar straits, he actually took off, at 15, for the world cultural capital of Paris and pretty much created deliberately modern poetry. “Rimbaud invented obscurity,” says White, also the prose poem, then abandoned literature completely at 20 and spent his remaining 17 years trying to be some kind of success, primarily in desert Abyssinia, of all places. White doesn’t comment on the self-destructiveness it’s hard to miss in Rimbaud’s behavior all along but explains his poetry so tantalizingly that even hardened modern-poetry loathers may be tempted to give Illuminations and A Season in Hell another try. He also argues that Rimbaud was a modernist in his drive to succeed, idolization of machinery, and chronic restlessness as well as his antinomian poetics. One of the best products of the currently booming brief-biography genre. --Ray Olson

Yeats once said that the writer must decide between the life or the work, but Arthur Rimbaud�teen-age prodigy, archetypal rebel, African adventurer�chose both. Although White notes that �a biographer of Rimbaud could fill his pages with nothing but his ceaseless comings and goings,� his own account is slim and skillfully blends action and analysis. White declares his personal infatuation�even speculating that an affair with a teacher as �an unhappy gay adolescent� may have been inspired by Rimbaud�s example�but he is clearheaded about his idol�s shortcomings. Rimbaud�s contempt for bourgeois life certainly made him an impossible visitor: if he wasn�t selling the guest-room furniture, he was using the magazine in which his host�s poetry had just appeared as toilet paper. White ultimately agrees with those of Rimbaud�s acquaintance who saw him not �as an angel or a devil but as an obnoxious boor.�
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Edition details

• Publisher: Atlas
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1934633151
• ISBN 13: 9781934633151
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256