Something went terribly right in the education of Arthur Rimbaud. A prize pupil, marvellously proficient in the logic of Latin verse, he deformed the whole system of French education, learning to scatter his brilliance with a cunning that left Joyce in the shade. Prize after prize distinguished his short academic career, and the books he won he sold for money, in order to buy other books. But he learned that money could buy other pleasures, and so books became a currency that bought him freedom.
As always with Rimbaud, freedom was paradoxical. It led to the tyranny of addiction. Words turned into wine, into absinthe, into joy; and for Rimbaud joy was only a delaying, a distillation of sorrow. He grasped early that metaphor was the only meaning. And for all his magnificent, terrifying intelligence he did the stupid thing - he decided to tell the truth. Unfortunately everyone believed him, for a time.
But what a time. As a teenage prodigy Rimbaud had such power. His dirty, northern voice dazzled Paris. The peasant was a true Parnassian. He had found the secret of alchemy. Greece had relocated its genius. The whole of European lyricism was born again in Charleville. A boring town, a boring time, everything would be saved by this disciplined, anarchic voice, torching all that had gone before in French literature, knowing in his heart of hearts that nothing would change.
In this complex, subtle, witty biography Graham Robb dares to disbelieve everything I revere about Rimbaud. This book drove me back to his poetry, in prose and verse, so that I could argue against the cold eye he casts on the career of a poet I've adored since I stumbled through the first stages of my literacy in the French language. His love of the poetry is critical, domineering and ruthless. His role model as biographer is Rimbaud's terrible mother. A savage Jansenist, she effectively destroyed her son as surely as she destroyed her marriage. It seems to be Robb's mission to forgive her, because that lack of love led to an absent father and the poems, at their greatest, Robb reads as charts to locate the man who was a "missing person who never existed".
This is the most troubled reading of Rimbaud's life yet recorded, but to its credit it is also the funniest. The mad affair with Paul Verlaine is treated with a correct respect for its lunacy. If Robb is never judgmental writing about their homosexual passion, he still lets neither away with anything. Rimbaud knew every trick of every trade, and the older Verlaine was a very willing apprentice. There was something lovely in their strange loyalty to each other, something tragic in their frightened denials that theirs was a physical relationship and something great in that they provoked magnificent poetry out of each other. The farcical ending - Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the arm - was the only one possible.
Most biographers of Rimbaud lose energy after he stops writing, before he was 20. Robb is determined to yoke together the careers of the wild poet and the colonist Rimbaud became in Africa. Not the least important aspect of this book is Robb's steadfast refusal to sentimentalise Rimbaud's experiences after leaving France. The Herculean energy that vitalised the poetry Robb diagnoses as typifying Rimbaud's ruthless, exploitative and extremely successful mission to make himself a rich man. As with the poetry, Rimbaud let no one and nothing stand in his way when it came to making a franc.
It is to Robb's credit, though, that his analysis of Rimbaud's character pinpoints the essential difference as well between Rimbaud the poet and Rimbaud the business man. In Africa Rimbaud did what he wanted to do, not as in his previous existence, when he did what he was possessed to do. It is no accident that the most moving moment in the book occurs when Rimbaud, years after abandoning literature, receives a review of his poetry published for the first time. He kept it, despite his professed contempt for his writing.
Graham Robb has written a terrific book. It is well researched, hard, protective and opinionated. Rimbaud was a deeply damaged man who harmed anyone mad or brave enough to come near him. There is much, personally and politically, to turn one's stomach against him. But such is the scale of Robb's achievement in depicting this seductive monster that its last line is overwhelming: "Rimbaud died the following morning at ten o'clock". The waste, the wonder of an extraordinary man are deeply felt.
Frank McGuinness's new version of Barbaric Comedies by Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan continues at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin until the 21st of this month