I'm in the middle of a biography of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie. Whenever you think you've read it all as far as the horror of an artist's life goes - there's always more. Arthur Rimbaud begins life in a small provincial French town. He excels in literature and wins several poetry prizes by the time he's fifteen. His mother is a woman determined to push Rimbaud into a "good" career - and he definitely has the brains for it. For these first fifteen years - he plays at being an obedient kid but behind his placid demeanor - there is already a wild egoism waiting to emerge.
His studies of magic, alchemy, and the Cabala convince him that there is a totally original non-Christian poetry that goes back to magical sources. According to his theory - by "disordering the senses" he can tap into the neo-Platonic power behind the senses, and become a sort of God. There is already a bit of a tradition of this in France with Baudelaire - but Baudelaire believes that this "debauch" will ultimately fail and destroy the poet. Rimbaud believes that Baudelaire didn't go far enough.
By the age of 16 he has run away from home to go to Paris several times; and each time he is met with abject failure (frankly a lot of it because of his own behavior). By the time he's 21 or so - he's written his major works - and alienated Parisian literary circles; his own family; his friends; and I suppose anyone else he's come in contact with. What is worse, is that he's come to believe that his ideas about channeling God (some say the Devil) - has not worked and that he's only been writing (like every former poet) through his own prism. A Season in Hell is partly about this horrible discovery of his own failure.
His former lover, Verlaine, has been sent to jail for shooting Rimbaud in the wrist. Rimbaud has stopped writing altogether and believes that he must make a success of himself by becoming an industrialist or a scientist. He is convinced that a new world based on science will produce the utopia he's been longing for.
But again - at every point where he might have found some success he gets bored with the drudgery of the "real world." A lost spirit, set adrift in a world which he cannot accept.
It's difficult to find a single moment of peace for him. He ends up in Africa - running guns, possibly involved in slave-trading. And through all this - from the most remote locations - he continues to write to his mother:
"I'm obliged to wander over the face of the earth, tied as I am to a distant undertaking. What is the use of all this indescribable suffering, if I'm not one day, after a few years, to rest in a place that I more or less like, and have a family of my own, a son at least, whom I shall spend the rest of my life in training according to my own ideas and whom I'll see grow into a famous engineer, a man rich and powerful through science. But who knows how long I may last in these mountains here; I may lose my life amongst these people, without any news of me ever coming out again." May 6th, 1883
His problem was that he was just living at the wrong time. If he'd live in San Francisco in 1965 he might have been the next Jim Morrison. In the '50's he might have been Alan Ginsburg living in Pasaic or Jersey City.
But as it was - he was simply born 100 years too soon.
