Customer Reviews

Arthur Rimbaud (Outlines)

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Benjamin Ivry's short, but informative tome is a refreshing outline on one of France's most controversial poets. Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a L'enfant terrible, writing all his major works before the age of 20! In Ivry's illuminating biography, the reader gets to understand the motivating factors behind his wrenching verse. Unlike many Rimbaud books, Ivry's book delves into the torrid, temultuous affair the young poet had with the older poet, Paul Verlaine. Their stormy affair is one of the most renowned in gay literary history. Ivry pulls no punches in his description of their near fatal relationship and through this understanding, we see where the pain and the power of his verse emanated from. He offers a fount of information on this rarely understood young artist and the demimonde of French literary society at the turn of the century. He also deconstructs many of Rimbaud's most infamous poems, so that even the novice can understand the power of his words. Stocked with rare photos and art, this wonderful little book also has an extensive bibliography!

In the early 1950s, Rene Etiemble published a doctoral dissertation of monumental proportions, "Le Mythe de Rimbaud", which enumerated the numerous, variegated and, ultimately, misleading and false mythologies which had been propogated about Rimbaud in the decades following his death in 1891. Etiemble devoted more than twenty years to researching and refuting these myths, including the myths of Rimbaud the seer, the Catholic, the Communard, the homosexual, the scoundrel, and the martyr. As Enid Starkie suggested in her definitive biography, Etiemble's work had a salutary effect on modern approaches to Rimbaud by showing that "no single one of these descriptions accurately fits him." The result, among other things, was to shift the focus of Rimbaud studies from hagiography, on the one hand, and demonization, on the other, to an exploration of Rimbaud's revolutionary poetic language and expression.

More than fifty years after Etiemble's watershed dissertation, Benjamin Ivry has written "Arthur Rimbaud", a brief, fascinating, but ultimately somewhat disingenuous biographical gloss on Rimbaud's life. Ivry's book is the first in a series of books to be published by Absolute Press, books intended "to explore and portray the various and often unexpected ways in which homosexuality has informed the life and creative work of the influential gay and lesbian artists, writers, singers, dancers, composers, and actors of our time." It is, in other words, a book which has an agenda--an agenda which once again seeks to fit the enigmatic nature of Rimbaud's biography into a mythology, this time a mythology of Rimbaud as a founding saint of modern gay culture. Thus, Rimbaud's brilliant, complex and poetically difficult masterpieces, "Une Saison en Enfer" and "Illuminations", works which are laden with symbol and mystery, with a radically innovative poetic vitality, are reduced by Ivry to the product of Rimbaud's erstwhile homoerotic relationship with Paul Verlaine. Every aspect of Rimbaud's brief life as a poet, in Ivry's depiction, is driven by Rimbaud's "gayness", by his love for Verlaine, by his presumed disinterest in women. Never mind other aspects of Rimbaud's biography--his severe mother, his absent father, his religious upbringing, his revolutionary poetic work itself! Moreover, while the book contains a useful bibliography, it is devoid of footnotes, so it is impossible to ascertain the veracity of the speculations which permeate Ivry's text.

Having said all of this, I also must say that Ivry is an outstanding writer--his prose sparkles--and this little book is definitely worth reading if you have an interest in Rimbaud because it provides fascinating details on Rimbaud's relationship with Verlaine and others. In particular, the book extensively discusses the gay aspects of Rimbaud's life and poetry and Rimbaud's influence on subsequent writers from Cocteau to Kerouac to Jim Morrison. These are aspects of Rimbaud's life which are not explored very closely by Starkie's definitive biography and, if you read Ivry's book with some degree of skepticism, it provides a fascinating and provocative complement to the standard treatment of Rimbaud's life

I wanted to like this book, dealing as it does with a poet who more than anyone else discovered the boundaries of language, and then redefined it in a way which has since been much imitated, but never equaled. This book is beautifully produced and written in a chatty and engaging, if a little defensive, style - Benjamin Ivry does seem too intent at times at forcing Rimbaud into the role of militant gay icon when this was only one aspect of his life - and the photos and bibliography are excellent.

However, there are several unforgivable errors, ranging from the glaring (Rimbaud had his right leg amputated, not the left) to the merely annoying (quotes from a couple of poems are misattributed). Also, Ivry seems at times so carried away with his subject that he relies too much on supposition to prove a point: for example, there is absolutely no evidence that Verlaine commissioned Rosman's famous painting of a bed-ridden, gunshot-wounded Rimbaud.

What I did like about this book was the final chapter, a fascinating collection of quotes from gay artists, poets, writers and film-makers through the years, proving that, as Eugene Borza once said about Alexander the Great, there are as many Rimbauds as there are those who profess a serious interest in him.

I was very pleased to find in this book not just a reliable short introduction to Rimbaud's life and work but also some unknown (to me) details about the lives and works of Rimbaud's circle, as well as the writer's effect on later generations -- for a short, inexpensive book on the subject this is peerless.

I wanted to like this book, dealing as it does with a poet who more than anyone else discovered the boundaries of language, and then redefined it in a way which has since been much imitated, but never equaled. This book is beautifully produced and written in a chatty and engaging, if a little defensive, style - Benjamin Ivry does seem too intent at times at forcing Rimbaud into the role of militant gay icon when this was only one aspect of his life - and the photos and bibliography are excellent.

However, there are several unforgivable errors, ranging from the glaring (Rimbaud had his right leg amputated, not the left) to the merely annoying (quotes from a couple of poems are misattributed). Also, Ivry seems at times so carried away with his subject that he relies too much on supposition to prove a point: for example, there is absolutely no evidence that Verlaine commissioned Rosman's famous painting of a bed-ridden, gunshot-wounded Rimbaud.

What I did like about this book was the final chapter, a fascinating collection of quotes from gay artists, poets, writers and film-makers through the years, proving that, as Eugene Borza once said about Alexander the Great, there are as many Rimbauds as there are those who profess a serious interest in him.