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Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91

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As another reviwer has already stated, this book will not definitively answer the question that so many lovers of Rimbaud ask. To wit, "Why did he stop writing?"-But the book is a well-researched and well-written account of Rimmbaud as "un autre," somebody else than a poet...But it's all so grindingly depressing. Yes, Rimbaud had incredible endurance and will and courage. But he had no business acumen as the accounts of his many endeavors in the world of commerce amply illustrate. The book is essentially a tale of his slow degeneration in body, if not spirit.-I used to have a friend who loved Rimbaud more than I do who would call me in the middle of the night drunkenly, tearfully asking me why he quit. Well, there was nothing I could say at 3 A. M. that he would remember the next morning.-But what I feel is that the answer lies in Rimbaud's most famous poem, "Le Bateau Ivre." At the end of the poem, he says that, after all the exhilarating and mystical insights, after all the rapturous visions amidst the mad seastorms, there is nothing he would like better now then to return to being a litle boat being pushed across a placid pond by a little boy. Rimbaud had been through more hell in his life by the end of his teens than would fit in the lives of many a tortured soul.-It's really not so remarkable when you consider it that, his poetry unrecognized, his soul tortured by the relationship with Verlaine and the other atrocities and privations he endured that the young man would flee the literary world that had given him nothing but anguish in the end.-Unfortunately , the world to which he fled offered little in the way of compensation, as this book sadly chronicles. I recommend this book to those who, like myself, had no clear idea of exactly what Rimbaud DID after he stopped writing besides vague ideas of his being a gun-runner, slave-trader and amputee (This book, by the way, casts serious doubts over whether he was ever either of the former two, except perhaps when forced to do so by bad luck and necessity).-So, all in all, a sad but informative work.-I still think the last lines of "Le Bateau Ivre" are the key to why he stopped writing. But, as is commmonplace, you can't go home again, as those last lines express a yearning for. This book is an excellent chronicle of the alternative Rimbaud was forced to accept.

Any attempt to chronicle Rimbaud's Africa years is an exercise in filling in the blanks- Rimbaud himself seemed intent on essentially disappearing. Nicholl's work is relatively short, but he manages to extensively mine the archives for the right nuggets. The book is well referenced - (sources are extensive and as complete as they can be), and at times quite poetically written.
Nicholl is thoughtful with his subject and careful to tell us what is fact, what is rumor, and what is his own conjecture. He also gives us a look at what the social and political landscape was at the time of his writing (1997) for the relevant stomping grounds.
Still, it is not an "easy read" due to the complexity of it all- the elusive subject, the many cameos by traders and natives, the deliberate enigma of Rimbaud. Nicholl also pulls passages from A.R.'s poetry to highlight his accidental prescience - fun, but a bit contrived. (Dare I be the first to say that the majority of Rimbaud's poetry is not good? That the minority that stands out is so brilliant that we tolerate the drivel and obscenity in hopes of finding another gem?)
Yet there is a pull to the book, no doubt the same powerful forces that draw us to the work and life of A.R., always pulling us in as he runs faster and farther away.

Arthur Rimbaud was one of the most brilliant poets the human race has ever seen. He belongs in the company of Callimachus, Sappho and Catullus, the spoiled child from the north whose frank and erotic poems scandalized Rome: odi et amo, Catullus had written. I hate you and I love you. That says it all. About Rimbaud as well.

Rimbaud was an illusion, a ghost, someone we conjure up and then spend the rest of out lives trying to shake off. Dead for more than a hundred years now, Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry for a few brief years, while he was still in his teens, from about 1870 to 1873. He could never have imagined the extraordinary influence his slim collection of poems would have over the following century. Rimbaud. however, abandoned the world of literature at a very young age. When he was nineteen, he gave in to a mixture of rage and pride, and threw his marvelous talent onto a bonfire, along with his manuscripts. By the time his anger had eaten its way through his soul, he could not speak of poetry without contempt. He lived another eighteen years, wandering from one end of Europe to the other and as far afield as the East Indies. He joined the Dutch Colonial Army and was sent to Java, but deserted and returned to France. He got work in Cyprus, as an overseer of a stone quarry, but his temper got the better of him, "I have had some quarrels with the workmen," he wrote, "and I've had to request some weapons." He collapsed with typhoid and hurriedly returned home.

In March 1880, when he was twenty-five, he left France for the last time. He found work in Cyprus again, as foreman of a construction gang in the mountains. He got involved in another quarrel and, it seems, threw a stone which hit a local worker and killed him. Rimbaud fled, traveling through the Red Sea, ending up in the British port of Aden, a sun-baked volcanic crater perched at the gateway to the Indian Ocean on the coast of Yemen. He spent the next eleven years in exile, working as a trader in Aden and Abyssinia.

Charles Nicholl's book is chiefly the story of those years, from the time Rimbaud disembarks at Aden in 1880 to his death in Marseilles in 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, from the cancer which had started in his right leg. It is very stylish, thoroughly researched, and shows a great deal of insight into the character of this angry and bitter man. Arthur Rimbaud's adolescent rebellion was so brief and the flowering of his talent so violent and astonishing that it has overshadowed his essential character. His life is often seen through a romantic blur, and the astringent view of his career that Nicholl presents in this book is a useful corrective.

Rimbaud was born in the northern French town of Charleville in October 1854, the son of an army captain and a farmer's daughter. There were two younger sisters and an older brother. The father, who had spent some years in Algeria and in different parts of France, found provincial life stifling and family life difficult. He was often absent. Rimbaud was six when his father left for the last time, never to return.

His mother was a dour, hard-working woman of peasant stock, impatient with her husband's fecklessness, and embittered by his final desertion. For most of his life Rimbaud was like his mother--devoted to hard work. As a child he was obedient, studious and even rather prim. In his final school examinations he swept the board, winning all the prizes in his form except for two.

In his sixteenth year, everything changed. Two catastrophic public events shook France, and a private calamity changed Rimbaud forever. The French emperor Napoleon the Third declared war on Prussia in July 1870. The German armies swept through north-eastern France, the countryside where Rimbaud had grown up, and within six months the French had been defeated.

In the aftermath of the Armistice in January 1871, the people of Paris, republican to the core and disgusted with their government, set up a Commune. Eventually French government troops put it down, killing twenty thousand French men and women in the streets of Paris in a single week in May. Rimbaud had run away from home to join the Commune, though it's unlikely he was there during that week of horror.

Rimbaud though, had his own, personal nightmare to live through. At some time during this visit to Paris he was raped, perhaps gang-raped, probably by a group of soldiers at the Babylone barracks. The evidence is indirect but, as Charles Nicholl says, and most biographers agree with him, it is persuasive. Rimbaud went home to Charleville in a state of profound shock and confusion. He sent batches of his poems to important poets in the capital, Banville and Paul Verlaine among them. Verlaine summoned him to Paris and to his fate. It was September 1871 and Rimbaud was sixteen; Verlaine twenty-eight. The two men--rather, the man and the schoolboy--became lovers. The older poet Banville lent Rimabud an attic flat for a while as a favor to Verlaine. Rimbaud became friends with the musician Ernest Cabaner, who also put him up for a while, the novelist Jules Claretie, and the poets Charles Cros and Germaine Nouveau. These bohemians were scandalizing the bourgeoisie with their sexual indiscretions, their immodest writings and their indulgence in absinthe and hashish and opium. Rimbaud outdid them in every respect.

He made many enemies. Verlaine's future biographer Lepelletier disapproved of his influence on his old friend Verlaine, and Rimbaud responded by calling him an obscenity. When Lepelletier told Rimbaud to shut up, the boy threatened him with a table knife. He called poor Banville yet another obscenity, he stabbed the photographer Carjat with a sword-stick, he repaid the hospitality of Cabaner by going into Cabaner's room when he wasn't there and committing an unspeakable act. In short, Rimbaud was as arrogant and bad-tempered as one could get.

In July 1873, less than two years after they had first met, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in a fit of drunken jealousy. The boy was wounded in the wrist, and Verlaine burst into tears and begged his forgiveness. The next evening while they were out walking in the street Verlaine turned ugly again and pulled the revolver from his pocket. This time Rimbaud called out to a passing policeman. They were in Brussels; the police discovered evidence of their homosexual relationship, and incriminating letters. Rimbaud tried to take back the charges, but it was too late. Verlaine was sentenced to two years' hard labour in a Belgian jail.

Odi et amo. It is a phrase that sums up, not only Rimbaud's work but his life as well.

I've never really appreciated Rimbaud's poetry. Perhaps that's understandable, given that I'm not a linguist and that, for me at least, there's always something a little suspect about poems in translation. This is no doubt my loss. However, I've always liked a good read, and the one about Rimbaud, poet and traveler, who gave up his muse while still in his teens and left Europe for Africa, where he was rumored to be a gun runner and slaver, is a damned good tale. Charles Nicholl, author of "Borderlines" and "The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe,' does it ample justice in his memoir "Somebody Else," subtitled "Arthur Rimbaud in Africa: 1880-1891." Actually, the first quarter or so of the book is given over to the poet's formative years, including his well-documented relationship with Paul Verlaine, the older poet who came under the spell of Arthur's often-violent persona (and strikingly beautiful eyes), regarding him as the quintessential poète maudit. Readers familiar with the Agnieszka Holland film, "Total Eclipse" (1995) may be forgiven for interpolating an image of Leonardo DiCaprio for that of the real Rimbaud, but one look at the Carjat photograph on the cover of Nicholl's book should be enough to set them straight. More reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn in "Sylvia Scarlet" than the ever-wholesome DiCaprio, the photo hauntingly portrays Rimbaud's "hooded frightening eye" and somewhat cruel mouth at age seventeen. But Nicholl is more concerned with the "somebody else," also portrayed on the cover of my Vintage (1998) edition of the book: a Rimbaud self-portrait (the poet briefly took up photography in Harrar), arms folded and wearing a white smock, that has him looking, a year or two shy of thirty, more like a product of Bedlam than Hollywood. This is the man who turned his back on poetry and dedicated himself to exile, settling for eleven years in East Africa, where he developed a single-minded desire to succeed at some aspect of trade. Whether he became a gun runner or slaver (Nicholl is ambivalent on both points, but his apology for slavery as it existed in the late 19th century fails to convince) is still debated, but Rimbaud's early death, at age 37, in 1891, renders the question essentially moot. "Somebody Else" is meticulously researched (quotes from later travelers such as Evelyn Waugh and Lawrence Durrell are especially welcome) and a pleasure to read. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the "other" Rimbaud.

I have been influenced by Rimbaud since I was about 15. I learned of him through reading "No One Here Gets Out Alive", the biography of Jim Morrison. That led to Rimbaud which was a huge turning point in my life. It was when I decided to become a poet. The Rimbaud influence retains its lustre two decades later. One thing I always had a hard time dealing with was his renunciation of literature. It always seemed inexplicable to me that someone with that kind of gift could just suddenly turn his back on the muse. It is a dilemma that always conflicted with my reverence for Rimbaud's writing. This is what piqued my curiosity for this book. I immediately placed it on my 'to read' list. I wondered if it could shed some light on this startling decision. I ordered my copy and devoured it once it came in. This book is an enthralling read. It is a fascinating tale of travel and adventure. Rimbaud was certainly living on the edge during these years. His caravans through East Africa are truly the stuff of legend. His ventures from Aden to Harar and Dhibouti et al are amazing. It is interesting to learn how he mastered languages and became like a native. His business savvy is also intriguing. Who would expect the same infidel who spent a season in hell could possess such a degree of business acumen. I was surprised when I learned that he developed an interest in photography during his stay in Africa. It is a shame that he did not get to develop his photography skill before his illness. It reveals that perhaps some interest in the arts still beat in his heart. This interest does suggest that he might have ultimately returned to literature had he not fallen ill and died prematurely. It is tragic that he wasn't able to live longer. This book was an eye opener in a lot of ways. Charles Nicholl did an outstanding job writing this book. I still do not fully understand his renunciation of literature but this book did illuminate many points on his quest for adventure and his desire to become somebody else. This book is a great adventure story and an essential read for anyone who wishes to learn more about Rimbaud.

Charles Nicholl's study of Arthur Rimbaud is engaging, fascinating and rewarding. We can't but deeply sympathise with this person's endless foils and struggles when searching for self. The narrative proclaims that that self might've been somewhere, or somebody else. But of course it wasn't. Rimbaud was never not himself: tireless explorer of what it is to be.

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Thank you Charles for "illuminating" this mystery man. You give readers such great insight into character and local in your marvelous biographies. "The Lodger" Shakespeare. "Flights of the Mind" Da Vinci and "Somebody Else" Rimbaud are all terrific reads. Orville Stoeber

This review really answered a lot of questions about Rimbaud, and gave his legend a needed demystification. Put a lot of Rimbaud's poetry into context of a troubled adolescent seeking a father figure, freedom from a domineering mother, and of course alcholism...I for one found Rimbaud's poetry and legend among the cultural elite to be a bore, but his life was very exciting. A good read....