FRENCH LITERATURE

MARK FORD

Graham Robb

RIMBAUD 562pp. Picador. £20.

TLS£18. 0330482823

Profit without honout

The unpalatable truth about Rimbaud' s years in Africa

In late 1883, the Aden-based coffee exporter, Alfred Bardey, fell into conversation with a fellow passenger, a journalist called Paul Bourde, on an outbound steamer from Marseilles. Bardey happened to mention his company's representative in Harar, and was astonished to learn from Bourde that his extremely capable, if somewhat taciturn, employee featured in a much-discussed anthology published that year, Les Poètes maudits, edited and introduced by Paul Verlaine.

Bourde scribbled an admiring note for the reclusive poet, which Bardey handed over the next time they met. "But far from being flattered," Bardey later recorded in his memoir of his dealings with Arthur Rimbaud, "he got angry and made a grunting noise .... He would never allow me to mention his former literary works. Sometimes I asked him why he didn't take it up again. All I ever got were the usual replies: 'absurd, ridiculous, disgusting, etc'." Some years later, when questioned about his early career by another Abyssinian adventurer, Rimbaud curtly dismissed his poetic oeuvre as dishwater or slops.

Yet several acquaintances testify to the many hours he spent engaged at his desk in his various residences in Harar and Aden, and the hope that some masterpiece might yet surface from his years as a trader will probably never altogether evaporate. Was he at work only on his accounts, on the bitterly negative letters he fired off like bullets to his mother and sister in Charleville, on his terse report of his 1883 journey into Ogaden that he published in the Société de Géographie the following year? In a letter of 1873, he spoke of the prose poems collected in Une Saison en enfer as "petites histoires"; had he completely abandoned the realm of the fictional during his years as an expatriate?

Not quite, suggests Graham Robb in his clear-eyed new Life of the poet. In his many letters home, which have struck most readers as relentlessly precise and factual, Rimbaud - so Robb argues - consistently lied about his earnings from his various business transactions, and in particular disguised the enormous profit he made on his gun-running expedition into Choa (in present-day Ethiopia) of 1886-7. Previous biographies - the most recent of which is Charles Nicholl's Somebody Else (reviewed in the TLS, July 25, 1997) - have represented this particular episode as a disaster, and taken his anguished tirades about his perilous financial circumstances at face value. Robb, on the other hand, is convinced that Rimbaud - who had an excellent reputation for accounting among his associates in Aden - made from the Choa trip alone at least 33,750 francs (£100,000 in today's money) and possibly almost twice this amount.

Writing home, Rimbaud attributes the supposed failure of his arms venture to the unlucky death of his partner, Pierre Labatut, from throat cancer in the midst of their protracted preparations. On arrival in Choa, he was pursued at every turn by Labatut's creditors, and then cheated by the wily King Menelik. "If my associate had not died," he laments while recuperating from his exertions in August 1887 in Cairo, "I would have earned about thirty thousand francs; whereas now I have the fifteen thousand  for two years. I am not lucky!" A Beckettian litany of complaints about his physical condition follows: rheumatism in the back and left thigh and right shoulder, arthritic pain in the left knee; his hair has turned totally grey, he is "excessivement fatigue", his life itself is in jeopardy. Even his paltry savings are a source of grief: "I fear losing the little I have. Just think that I continually carry about in my belt sixteen thousand and a few hundred francs in gold; it weighs about eight kilos and gives me dysentery."

But Rimbaud had arrived a couple of weeks earlier in Egypt carrying two credit bills worth over £100,000. He travelled without a passport - perhaps in an effort to evade Labatut's creditors - and was apprehended by the border officials in Massawa. "His behavior", the French consul wrote in a letter requesting information on M Raimbeaux from the consulate in Aden, "is somewhat suspicious", but a week later the same official is recommending Rimbaud to a friend in the capital as a "very honorable Frenchman". On arrival in Cairo, where he stayed seven weeks in a hotel with his servant, he deposited 16,000 francs at the Credit Lyonnais (at 4 per cent interest). As regards money matters, perhaps all his letters to his cunning, avaricious, misanthropic mother really prove is that her son was a chip off the old block.

Robb's careful number-crunching may seem a far cry from the alchemy of the word, the systematic derangement of the senses, the revolution anticipated in the voyant letters in which the seventeen-year-old Rimbaud declared "Je est un autre". He comes no closer than any other commentator to explaining this great anomaly of Western literature - why and how Rimbaud came to write so well so young, only to abandon poetry around the age of twenty, spiritually and physically: 490 of the 500 copies of Une Saison en enfer which he had printed in Brussels in 1873 were left moldering in the warehouse until almost a decade after his death, and he made few efforts to preserve copies of the poems he composed during his vie de boheme, though it appears he did leave a sheaf of writings at Verlaine's house in Paris before their elopement. Alas, after her husband's flight to Brussels and London, Mathilde jemmied open Verlaine's locked desk drawer, where she found letters from Rimbaud "so peculiar they must have been written by a madman",  some incomprehensible jottings, and a sealed envelope marked "La Chasse spirituelle, by Arthur Rimbaud". Verlaine later described this prose text as "full of strange mysticalities and the most acute psychological insights", but it made no impression on the exasperated Mathilde, who disposed of it with the rest of the sinister, crazed effusions of her husband's corrupter.

Over the past couple of decades, postcolonial theory has made us generally accustomed to analogies between the questing Romantic imagination and the colonial enterprise. Robb's emphasis on the political contexts of Rimbaud's African years is welcome, and often enlightening. Rimbaud's "trafficking in the unknown" regions of Abyssinia played a significant role in the opening up of the country to Western exploitation, and the guns he transported to Choa were vital to King Menelik's campaign to subdue rival tribes and expand his power base; in a further twist, it was King Menelik who first defeated a European nation in open battle in Africa (the Italians at Adwa in 1896).

Robb sternly reminds us in his introduction that, "apart from Victor Hugo, no French poet of the late 19th century had a greater impact on imperial politics or earned more money" than Rimbaud, though he never actually discovers what happened to that money after the poet's death. His financial researches are also salutary in forcing us to acknowledge how much imaginative capital, so to speak, is invested in the notion of Rimbaud as an unsuccessful trader. The Rimbaud legend has no difficulty accommodating the possibility that the poet may have killed a man (while working as a foreman in Cyprus in 1880), or been involved in the slave trade, but is discomforted by the thought of Rimbaud assiduously stockpiling profits in the hope of one day founding a bourgeois dynasty back in France. Yet, as Robb suggests, many of the same qualities underlie his poetic and commercial careers: in both, Rimbaud was intrepid, steely, unillusioned, a superb manipulator of others, knew all relevant languages, and could act whatever part was required.

The explorer Borelli recalls how, after concluding a deal, Rimbaud would dismiss his adversary "with a derisive look on his face and then, half-laughing, he would wink at me in an amusing fashion". Here we see him making use of the "acute psychological insights" which Verlaine praised in La Chasse spirituelle, but his letters from Mrica offer few clues relating to his penchant for "strange mysticalities". Rather he seems to have embraced the wonders of contemporary technology. "I should like", he writes to a maker of precision instruments, in 1881,

"complete details on the best manufacturers, in France or elsewhere, of mathematical, optical, astronomical, electrical, meteorological, pneumatic, mechanical, hydraulic and mineralogical instruments." He bought a camera, and a graphometer, and ordered books on railway construction, on metal-working, surveying and engineering. And when he imagined some distant future reward for all his sufferings, it came in the image of a scientifically educated son. "What is the point of these trips back and forth", he lamented to his mother in a letter of 1883,

the fatigue and the adventures with unfamiliar

races, and the languages I memorize, and the endless discomforts, if I cannot one day, after a few years, settle down in one fairly pleasant place, and found a family and at least have a son whom I will spend the rest of my life raising in accordance with my views, forming and strengthening him with the most complete education that can be found at that time, and whom I will see grow into a famous engineer, a man made powerful and rich by science?

It is the urge to acquire knowledge by venturing into the unknown that most obviously links the two halves of Rimbaud's life, even if that knowledge then proves incommunicable. "He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends up losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them! Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things . . ." , he wrote to Paul Demeny in the second of his voyant letters. Yet equally strong was the urge never himself to be known. Travelling, both in his poetry and his life, allowed Rimbaud to adopt and then drop identities at will. From the time he first ran away from home to Paris, when he was sixteen, to his final doomed attempt to return to Africa on one leg over twenty years later, Rimbaud was nearly always either on the move, or contemplating future journeys, to Zanzibar or Madagascar, to China and Japan. Despite the fantasy of settling down and rearing an engineer-son, Rimbaud knew in his bones "that living always in the same place, I will always find wretched" (letter to his family of 1885). "Les Fleuves m'ont laissé descendre ou je voulais", he exults in "Le Bateau ivre", written just before his assault on literary Paris in 1871. The realization that "Je est un autre" allowed him to metamorphose from the Pamasssians' foul-mouthed prodigy to a mercenary in the Dutch Colonial Army in Java (from which he deserted), to a language teacher in Reading, England, to a construction overseer in Cyprus, to a coffee-trader in Aden, to arms merchant in Abyssinia.

Graham Robb's biography is the fullest yet in English. He incorporates the most significant recent developments in French Rimbaud scholarship, particularly in relation to the status of letters once held to be, or now exposed as, forgeries, and skillfully separates ascertainable fact from the beckoning shadows of legend. The book is fluently written, well paced, and excellent on cultural and historical contexts. Robb enjoys pointing out the distortions to the record committed by Rimbaud idolaters over the years, but is also keen to defend the poet

from those, like his first English biographer, Enid Starkie, who feel he betrayed both literature and his true vocation. His Rimbaud is, above all, tough; for instance, while most commentators dwell lyrically on the poet's dreamy, averted gaze in the famous Etienne -Carjat portrait photograph of December 1871 - which features on the cover of almost all Rimbaud books, including this one - Robb urges us to consider instead Carjat's photo of about two months earlier, which shows a pudgy, defiant adolescent glaring at the camera as if intent on mischief.

It was this photo, he reminds us, that seemed to two of Rimbaud's closest friends, Ernest Delahaye and Georges Izambard, the most lifelike, as Carjat himself came to discover; after an especially rowdy gathering of Verlaine's poetic coterie, Les Vilains Bonshommes, Rimbaud, then at his most hellraising, stabbed the photographer in the stomach with a sword-stick.

However it is told, Rimbaud's death can't help seeming both heroic and absurd. "Je suis un homme mort," he wrote to his sister from his hospital bed in Marseilles after his right leg had been amputated, "je suis estropié pour toute ma vie." It was probably a kind of cancer which caused his knee and lower leg to start swelling atrociously in early 1891. By the time he decided to leave Harar, he was in such pain he had to be carried by sixteen porters on a makeshift litter the 200 miles to the coast at Zeila, where he was winched on to a steamship. Yet even these sufferings seem to have been bearable in comparison with the month he spent trapped back in his mother's farmhouse in the Ardennes. In late August, he left the maternal home for the last time, bound in theory for Harar, accompanied by his sister. They reached Marseilles, where he returned to the Hopital de la Conception. On November 9, the night before he died, he dictated to Isabelle the following letter:

Item 1 tusk only - Item 2 tusks - Item 3 tusks - Item 4 tusks - Item 2 tusks M. Le Directeur, I should like to ask whether I have left anything on your account. I wish to change from this service today. I don't even know its name, but whatever it is, let it be the Aphinar line. All those services are there all over the place and I, crippled and unhappy, can find nothing - any dog in the street could tell you that.

Please therefore send me the tariff of services from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralyzed, and so I wish to embark in good time. Tell me at what time I must be carried on board.

TLS OCTOBER 20 2000