When Arthur met Paul

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The, March-April, 2009 by Alfred Corn

IN 1873, when French poet Arthur Rimbaud was staying in London with his more famous lover Paul Verlaine, the spark-striking and strategically untruthful nineteen-year-old added two years to his age so that he could pass through a set of doors normally closed to minors. The doors in question, however, opened not on a club or an "adult" show but instead the Reading Room of the British Museum Library. The anecdote gives us a Rimbaud much more scholarly than we expect adolescents to be, but there's more to it. One of the first book requests Rimbaud submitted to the traffic control desk was for the collected works of the Marquis de Sade, a request the Library turned down. An atheist, a pornographer, Sade figured among those authors whose works were, for Victorian reasons, not made available to the general public.

Rimbaud's request implies an allegiance to that part of French literary tradition that is transgressive and sexually adventurous, a tradition that, besides Sade, includes Francois Villon, Rabelais, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Restif de la Bretonne, Charles Baudelaire, Andre Gide, and Jean Genet. From today's vantage point it's obvious that Rimbaud belongs to the antinomian or "immoralist" current in late 19th-century European cultural history, a trend that includes figures as distinct as Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Gide. We feel sympathy with the trend when we summon its context: a world still partly feudal, intolerantly Christian, money-mad, mindlessly genteel, imperialist, tightlaced, and anti-sexual. In 1870, intellectual good manners demanded at least a token iconoclasm--a stance less defensible now, when black-market Kalashnikovs are everywhere available, the drug trade destroys whole nations, anyone can assemble a basement bomb, and unsuspecting women from Central Europe are entrapped and sold as sex-slaves to pimps in Rome and London.

More than a decade ago, Edmund White published a highly praised and commercially successful biography of Jean Genet, which he could not have written if he hadn't been familiar with the transgressive aspect of French literature. Because of White's sexuality, his long residence in France, and his literary knowledge, he would have seemed among English-language writers to be the perfect choice as the author of a life of Rimbaud to replace the obsolete 1930's forerunner by Enid Starkie. However, in 2000 the British biographer Graham Robb published a hefty, exhaustive biography of the poet, which might have put an end to any expectation that White would tackle the same subject. Things have turned out differently. The compact biography series inaugurated many years ago by the critic and editor James Atlas has given White the opportunity to revisit Rimbaud's life and assemble his own reflections about one of the pioneers of literary Modernism, a poet admired not only for his innovative poems but also for his inadvertent role as an iconic figure in the history of the gay liberation movement. The premise of the Atlas series is that well-known authors of imaginative literature will produce an especially fresh and cogent treatment of biographical subjects whose themes and aesthetic goals overlap with the biographers'. As a result, the life traced and commented upon shouldn't fail to shed light on the later as well as the earlier artist.

White begins the book with an account of his own teenage encounter with the works of the poet, whom he read late at night at his boys' school: "When I was sixteen, in 1956, I discovered Rimbaud. I was a boarding student at Cranbrook, a boys' school outside Detroit, and lights out was at ten. But I would creep out of my room and go to the toilets, where there was a dim overhead light, and sit on the seat for so long that my legs would go numb." He goes on to reveal facts that have a bearing on his own novel A Boy's Own Story, whose narrative concludes with the schoolboy narrator's decision to report the misconduct of a teacher the pupil himself has seduced. It's one of the most disturbing moments in the novel because it destroys sympathies the reader has built up for a juvenile character misunderstood and mistreated partly because of his precocious realization that he's gay. The boy doesn't report the seduction but instead his teacher's marijuana habit--sufficient grounds, even so, for firing the teacher, who obviously will never have lunch at a boy's school again. When I first read the novel, I couldn't help wondering if this queasy episode had an autobiographical equivalent. In his introduction here, White confesses that it does, calling it the "worst thing I may ever have done in my life." He surveys possible reasons for ratting on his teacher and then sums up: "And perhaps I was bitter and nursing my disappointment that my teacher wanted to get off with me but didn't love me (he was married). Now, all these years later, I ask myself whether Rimbaud's 'satanic' example might not have been the decisive influence on my deplorable behavior."

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