IN 1871 Arthur Rimbaud wrote: "je est un autre" ("I is another"). Still 17, he was no stranger to self-transformation. Chafing at the dullness of provincial Charleville, he had written a clutch of precocious and brilliant poems, soon to include Vowels and The Drunken Boat. At Verlaine's invitation he set out for Paris, where he hoped to join the Communards.
His lice-infested person and provocative manner wrought havoc on the older poet's household. Verlaine abandoned his wife for Belgium and London with Rimbaud, calling his wife "a flea to be squeezed between the fingers and chucked in the pisspot". Small ads placed by Rimbaud in The Times soon offered conversation classes in French with a "gentleman, most respectably connected", but the reality of life with Verlaine was one of lurid bohemian excess.
The affair ended with Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the wrist, for which he spent two years in prison. Rimbaud's record of this period can be found in A Season in Hell A slim collection of prose poems, Illuminations, followed, after which - as suddenly as he had begun - he stopped writing. He was barely 20.
Unlike most other books on Rimbaud, it is only at this point that Charles Nicholl's Somebody Else really gets started. Becoming what Verlaine called "l'homme aux semelles de vent" ("the man with soles of wind"), he travelled in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Denmark. In 1876 he enlisted with the Dutch Colonial Army and sailed to Sumatra, where he deserted after 13 days. On his return to Europe he worked for a French circus and as a labourer in a quarry on Cyprus; there is even an apocryphal visit to Cork.
But it was a trip to the Arabic port city of Aden in 1880 that marked his decisive break with Europe and transformation into the somebody else of Charles Nicholl's title. He became a coffee trader, and was 5901 by his firm
Harar in Abyssinia. A self-portrait taken in 1883 shows him standing in a baggy cotton suit in front of a banana plantation, arms crossed, his face a grainy blur. He soon became restless and explored the Ogadine region, the first European to do so. Rimbaud had by no means stopped writing: in addition to a report to his travels for the Societe de Geographic, he also wrote regularly to his mother and sister in France.
BUT there was no going back to the Rimbaud of old. References to his growing celebrity in Paris elicited cries of"absurd, ridiculous, disgusting"; his poems were "rineures", ("slops"). A prodigious linguist, he studied the Koran and took an Abyssinian mistress.
Expanding his business interests, he took on a gun-running contract for Menelik, King of Choa and an ancestor of Haile Selassie. After a difficult journey inland, Rimbaud was swindled by Menelik and returned empty-handed to the "unimaginable fatiques and abominable privations" of Harar.
Thoroughly Africanised, he was drawn back to Europe one last time in 1891. A tumour developed on his right leg and in the absence of any medical care in Harar he had no alternative but to sail to Marseilles, where the gangrenous limb was amputated. After a brief period at home he set out for Africa again; this time he got no further than Marseilles. His last letter, to his sister, breaks off "Tell me at what time I must be carried on board He died as he had lived, in transit.
Rimbaud's self-invention as a writer is a remarkable story, but his self-invention as an African in the 1880s is hardly less so. Somebody Else tells that story.