ARTHUR RIMBAUD—Enid Starkie—Norton ($3.75).
Between 15 and 19, Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry whose slashing irony and pure music still influence poets. At 19 he wrote Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), an obscure, agonized hodgepodge in which Rimbaud addicts* trace the wrestlings of his André Gide-like puritanism with his André Gide-like passions. But from then until he died, at 37, in a Marseille hospital, Arthur Rimbaud never wrote again. This amazing break with his genius, his lone-wolf prowlings through the lower depths of Europe, his gunrunning in Africa and Asia form a vague, provoking literary legend of which even the surer facts have been concealed, exaggerated, distorted, hushed up by shocked relatives or embroidered by starry-eyed admirers of his relations with famed Symbolist Poet Paul Verlaine.
Enid Starkie has tried to separate some of the sheepish facts from the goatish fictions, to lift some of the fogs, prune some of the poison ivy out of the laurels. With unhurried, neutral efficiency she shows how this sensitive son of an army captain and a penny-pinching peasant became first a debauched child poet, then a "wild boy" whose Russia was all Europe, then a castaway by the Red Sea.
Rimbaud was brought up by a tight-fisted mother who was open-handed only with her slaps. Until he was 15, she took him to school every day so that he would not tarry with naughty schoolmates. During the dislocations of the Franco-Prussian War, Rimbaud, who was already writing verse, ran away to Paris. There the penniless poet, little more than a pretty-faced child, slept in a barracks: the soldiers "assaulted" him. This shocking experience, which sent him shuddering home, caused not merely a "revulsion," says Author Starkie, but a sensual "revelation." At home, Rimbaud set out to shock the respectable citizens. He would stroll, dressed like a tramp, down the main street during the sacred apéritif hour, smoking a short pipe and, "what was considered most outrageous of all," smoking it bowl downwards. During the Paris Commune, Rimbaud picketed his native shops, shouting: "Beware! Your hour is at hand! Order is vanquished!" When Poet Verlaine, who admired Rimbaud's verse without having seen Rimbaud, sent him a ticket to Paris, nobody was sorry to see him go.
Rimbaud shocked Verlaine's respectable family at once by getting Verlaine drunk every night. When Verlaine's wife found on Rimbaud's pillow "little insects which she had never seen before," her husband laughed. Explained Verlaine: Rimbaud keeps "such parasites in his hair to have them handy to throw on the priests" he passes. But it became necessary for Verlaine to rent a separate room for Rimbaud. There the two poets somewhat absinthe-mindedly achieved that "long et raisonné dérèglement de tons les sens" (long and calculated derangement of all the senses) which was Rimbaud's purpose in debauchery.