Mick Hartley

I was never a particular fan of Peter Ackroyd, and this review of Edmund White's new biography of Rimbaud doesn't help:

He had a double personality, with duty and instinct invariably at odds. As he wrote in a letter, “Je est un autre” or “I is someone else”.

That's as facile a comment on "Je est un autre" as I've seen. And here he is on the older post-poetic Rimbaud:

Rimbaud travelled, hoping to achieve success in the import and export trade – partly, perhaps, to please his mother. He travelled incessan-tly and never found peace. He took up various occupations only to drop them at the first available opportunity. He never really knew who he was. Then he moved to Africa, where he remained for the rest of his short life. He ordered books of a practical nature, such as hydraulics or brick-making. When he was asked if he still wrote poetry he replied that it had all been “hogwash”. Eventually he became a gun-runner in Abyssinia.

His was a strange and tormented existence. He despised everyone, including himself. He was reserved and suspicious. “Face it,” he wrote to his sister, “our life is just one long misery. What are we living for?” He returned to France at the very end, to have a cancerous leg amputated. At the age of 37 he died a convert to Catholicism, and lies buried in the family crypt. He had come full circle, but it was a circle of fire and suffering. This book contains it.

He despised everyone, including himself. Just like that? A bit glib, isn't it, for one of the more complicated figures in 19th Century literature? If you want a beautifully intelligent book on Rimbaud's later years as a trader in Ethiopia (not just a gun-runner, but yes, he did that), I'd recommned Charles Nicholl's "Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91". And no, there's no evidence that he converted to Catholicism on his death bed beyond the word of his pious and deeply conservative sister, and given Rimbaud's independence of character it's highly unlikely.