Rimbaud a biography by graham robb

I must state at the outset that my comments here do not constitute a review of Graham Robb’s biography of Rimbaud – not in any strict sense that I know, not entirely, that is. I, for one, am unable to form any conception of another life that might approach a clear and accurate approximation of past reality by grappling with only one biography. The reasons are many, and I need not recount them here. In the present case my remarks arise from a sense of the man that is a concoction of ingredients from at least three sources: Robb’s Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Nicholl’s, Somebody Else, and the elements of a biographical narrative that I formulate in response to absences and silences in these other sources. This is so, because I want most of all to end my encounter with Rimbaud, once and for all time, I hope, with a tenuous grasp of the sort of person he was and a rather definite - if speculative and erroneous - outline of the trajectory of this very interesting man’s life.

Regarding Arthur Rimbaud – my confection.
AR was, of course, a highly intelligent, imaginative and verbally gifted individual, who was born to parents of the worst possible sort – his father an absence, his mother - grasping, avaricious, narrow, mean-spirited, bigoted, cracker filth of the lowest order, a joyfully sadistic killer of souls. A woman of wealthy peasant stock, just the type that the most fervent of Joseph Stalin’s propagandists have depicted in their harshest caricatures of kulaks – except that in the case of Madame R. caricature is realistic representation.

So after papa abandons his family – small wonder – mama fixes her considerable energy and attention upon “raising” four powerless little ones, of whom AR is the second in birth order. And how does he cope? How does he manage to forefend soul-murder and save a vestige of himself for another day?

First he uses his considerable powers of observation, which extreme necessity renders even more acute, to take the measure of the very dangerous world he inhabits, which he knows is fixed and settled, a world he is utterly powerless to alter or amend. And in his early years he learns that in his very dangerous world the self is vulnerable to extermination, extinction – in every imaginable way.

And in such a world how does one survive? By hypocrisy, lies, cunning – always. But cunning is multiform. One develops the capacity to generate forms and approaches to cunning as circumstances require, given one’s own powers, which change as one – and the Other – ages, in response to threats that pervade one’s immediate environment.

As a child, AR – like Margret Fuller – went into hiding, in compartments. In one persona he becomes an outwardly compliant little boy, an altogether brilliant student, etc. He cultivates his verbal gifts, which he deployed with genius. He also develops an inviolate private sphere of the mind. “He,” the real Rimbaud retreats and hides there. What happens in that private sphere is AR’s development and preservation of self who thinks his own thoughts fearlessly – in secret. He also cultivated boundless rage, which he employed, when he could a bit later in life, in order to destroy all convention, all constraints to the self. Every threat – a target, which he engaged relentlessly, unremittingly, without concern for consequences and without remorse. Every form of extreme behavior he ever enacted is also a precise reflection (and measure) of the abuse he endured.

And so he lives a life devoted to preservation of a vulnerable and fragile self, whom he is always already at the point of loosing.

But this loss is also multiform. First one can loose oneself to bourgeois convention – and so one asserts the self in ways that defy, undermine bourgeois convention, with the intent of obliterating convention altogether, or if not that, then demonstrating in one’s own life that convention is simply that – the work of persons of a rather low, contemptible sort, certainly not the order that some absolute, transcendent being creates and imposes on man. But then, over time, life in extremis, at least of this particular life in extremis, becomes familiar, known – rather tedious, boring, and well, conventional in its own way. In Nicholl’s brilliant insight (p. 149), “A sense of disappointment and defeat, of the entropic dwindling of the unknown into familiarity”. Life that at first enacted a sense of the authentic self becomes conventional, scripted, a litany, and a threat. A threatening sense of self under siege, now under attack from another quadrant, builds.

It may well be that only persons who have been the targets of sadistic killers of souls can grasp the blinding terror and rage that such circumstances evoke. In any case, it is terrible and leads one to desperate responses. And so AR jettisons entirely whatever past his current way of life has accumulated – to the point of loosing memory of it. He escapes, seeks the unknown, a new life in unfamiliar extremes, yet once more, to retrieve his “actual nature” (Nicholls, p. 152) from circumstances that had become routine, engulfing and obliterative of the self. He escapes to “traffic in the unknown,” always in the harshest, physically most demanding and injuring conditions at the limits of human survival – Alpine blizzards, the most squalid ghettos of the urban underclasses that London or Brussels possess, jungles and deserts of other sorts, at the very farthest possible remove from a miserly peasant’s sordid, squalid, mucky little world – and LaMother, the Mouth of Darkness – where she will never seek him – now that he is gone. And the cycle returns – and returns.

In the end, AR becomes his mother in certain ways – a rather grasping, cunning trader and coffee merchant in Africa. But with this telling and vital difference – he is well known for his eager assimilation into the cultures and societies he inhabits; he is continually and unstintingly generous to those at the edges of survival. They did not need to solicit anything. AR sees, observes, understands and gives open-handedly.

And then he dies.

Regarding Graham Robb's Biography.
I'm not quite sure why it is the case that biographers seem reluctant to delineate the trajectory of their subject's life - how does it all cohere? how do even the discontinuities connect? What evidence allows one to present such a conclusion? To what evidentiary standard does that evidence rise? [I wrote more extensively on this question in my remarks on Nicholl's "Somebody Else.} I can't say that Robb doesn't try, in part, but then again, I'm not entirely sure that he does, at least not in any straightforward way that I can detect. He seems content with rather vague notions. I am not. But then, that's my problem, not Robb's, apparently.

In any case, I'll outline my take-aways, and I'm not entirely sure at this point, how much of this is Robb's, or Nicholl's, and how much of this is my elaborations on Robb's/Nicholl's conclusions and how much is my own filling in of blanks. [It's interesting, isn't it, how our sense of other persons is such a collation and confection of this, that and the other thing.]

It seems to me that throughout his life - Rimbaud's project was himself - to the exclusion, I think it fair to say, of almost any other consideration or value. It also seems to me that one might see him working out this project in three different phases of his life.

First there was the task of surviving his childhood - as I've outlined above. This focus on himself at this stage was inseparable from self-preservation into adolescence and adulthood. And I also think that he must have realized that, in parent-child relationships of the kind he survived, power shifts from the parent to the child over time - a little bit every day - as both the parent and the child age.

Then comes the second phase, when AR had come to realize that he had the power to smash his compartmented life. It might mean that he would have to endure every sort of privation, but when he left home for the first time, he also signaled (1) his willingness to endure whatever must be endured to live his life "from the inside out," as I say, irrespective of consequences, (2) his confidence, I suspect, that he could "succeed," which in this context meant, smashing constraints and in the process, "change life," and (3) his confidence that he could manage/manipulate his mother. And of course, his assessments were correct. He succeeds - and poetry was merely a tool, a means that he laid aside with not so much as a second thought when he didn't need it any longer or find it particularly useful to achieve his larger purposes. Just not worth the bother.

At some point in his late adolescence he enters a third phase of his life - most effectively presented in Nicholls, "Somebody Else". In this phase, he tires of all this smashing of convention and constraint. It had become rather routine, and well - tedious and boring, I'd say. I would say that he began to think that all this smashing was really rather easy for him, didn't present much of a challenge, actually. He realizes that there is much more in him than he had already discovered. Then he came to need an understanding of the circumstances under which life would become hard for him, really, really hard, as hard as any he could survive. Was there in him the stuff of survival under the harshest conditions that he could contrive to encounter? Here again we see in operation the sort of questions/motivations familiar to him since birth - survival and self-assertion. Perhaps this need was instinctual by that point in his life. Perhaps it didn't occur to him that life could be lived in any other way.

And then he devoted the years remaining to him and all his extraordinary energy, vitality and altogether towering, preternatural, strength of will, to discovering exactly what he was made of. This segment of his project is entirely clear in Nicholl's account of Rimbaud's life in Africa.

And then he died - in bed - from cancer of the bone, it appears. Disease and the unimaginable suffering he endured in his last months turned him into somebody else altogether - but that person wasn't AR.