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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 841.8
EAN: 9780226580296
ISBN: 0226580296
Label: University Of Chicago Press
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 352
Publication Date: 1999-05-15
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Studio: University Of Chicago Press

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Great Adventure
Review: Somebody Else is one of my favorite books. People tend to like Rimbaud for his excesses -- his drug and alcohol abuse. Or they admire him for being an "out" queer when to be "out" would and did earn Rimbaud social ostracism (although he did his best to earn it in every way he could). Or they admire his intelligence and the sheer brilliance of his poetry. Make no mistake about it, Rimbaud is a heroic figure, but many feel that what was interesting about his life ended when he laid down his pen.

Not so. What made Rimbaud a brilliant poet is the same quality that made his entire life interesting, even when he was marooned in Africa. Rimbaud had an insatiable intellect and a need to understand and master EVERYTHING, both inside him and in the world without. This need made him uncompromising and fearless, which is why he is so attractive. Rimbaud could be nasty and cantankerous and amoral -- which raises the question just how charming he would be if we actually knew him at close quarters. However, Nicholl's account describes a man who NEEDS to know, who will stop at nothing to learn himself and the world, all the dark recesses and all the light. Rimbaud's life is a great adventure.

In Harrar, Ethiopia, Rimbaud explores hostile territories from which no white man has emerged alive. He can do this because he has learned the language, the culture, the mannerisms -- he presents himself as a Koran scholar and his knowledge of the Koran is so extensive that he gets away with it, blue eyes and all. The character of Indiana Jones was a tourist compared to Rimbaud. Rimbaud walked the world.

The last decade of his life, we see him stuck. He is marooned in a day job he can't afford to leave. He orders books from France on every field of endeavor, he wants to be an expert on everything. You can see his dreams, to bring plumbing and civil engineering and all the accomplishments of the European civilization to Africa, but he only gets so far. He dresses like a worker, lives like a pauper, sleeping on a roof. He sends money home in the hopes of one day returning to France, not as the peasant he was born to be, but as a rich man -- which he never becomes. He organizes trading expeditions into the African interior -- 100-camel caravans -- and still, he never makes the scale of money he wants. He'll trade anything -- garments, guns, slaves, anything, without morals, without values, anything to make money -- and in the end he loses his shirt. He never achieves the legitimacy he wants as badly as he wants knowledge.

And he never finds love. You see him at the end, dreaming of the love of an innocent convent girl, an orphan, a hypothetical woman who could accept him as he is...

Rimbaud is an Icarus. His fall is heartbreaking.

Rimbaud's poetry was just one facet of his need to explore himself and the world around him. I think what Rimbaud feared most was stagnation. Somebody Else is the tale of his quest to always go deeper, always keep learning, fearlessly.

He died hard. But he is still a hero, and still a role-model. He stopped making art in order to live. And his life was a piece of art.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A Season in Hell
Review: I've never really appreciated Rimbaud's poetry. Perhaps that's understandable, given that I'm not a linguist and that, for me at least, there's always something a little suspect about poems in translation. This is no doubt my loss. However, I've always liked a good read, and the one about Rimbaud, poet and traveler, who gave up his muse while still in his teens and left Europe for Africa, where he was rumored to be a gun runner and slaver, is a damned good tale. Charles Nicholl, author of "Borderlines" and "The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe,' does it ample justice in his memoir "Somebody Else," subtitled "Arthur Rimbaud in Africa: 1880-1891." Actually, the first quarter or so of the book is given over to the poet's formative years, including his well-documented relationship with Paul Verlaine, the older poet who came under the spell of Arthur's often-violent persona (and strikingly beautiful eyes), regarding him as the quintessential poète maudit. Readers familiar with the Agnieszka Holland film, "Total Eclipse" (1995) may be forgiven for interpolating an image of Leonardo DiCaprio for that of the real Rimbaud, but one look at the Carjat photograph on the cover of Nicholl's book should be enough to set them straight. More reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn in "Sylvia Scarlet" than the ever-wholesome DiCaprio, the photo hauntingly portrays Rimbaud's "hooded frightening eye" and somewhat cruel mouth at age seventeen. But Nicholl is more concerned with the "somebody else," also portrayed on the cover of my Vintage (1998) edition of the book: a Rimbaud self-portrait (the poet briefly took up photography in Harrar), arms folded and wearing a white smock, that has him looking, a year or two shy of thirty, more like a product of Bedlam than Hollywood. This is the man who turned his back on poetry and dedicated himself to exile, settling for eleven years in East Africa, where he developed a single-minded desire to succeed at some aspect of trade. Whether he became a gun runner or slaver (Nicholl is ambivalent on both points, but his apology for slavery as it existed in the late 19th century fails to convince) is still debated, but Rimbaud's early death, at age 37, in 1891, renders the question essentially moot. "Somebody Else" is meticulously researched (quotes from later travelers such as Evelyn Waugh and Lawrence Durrell are especially welcome) and a pleasure to read. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the "other" Rimbaud.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Fill in the Blanks
Review: Any attempt to chronicle Rimbaud's Africa years is an exercise in filling in the blanks- Rimbaud himself seemed intent on essentially disappearing. Nicholl's work is relatively short, but he manages to extensively mine the archives for the right nuggets. The book is well referenced - (sources are extensive and as complete as they can be), and at times quite poetically written.
Nicholl is thoughtful with his subject and careful to tell us what is fact, what is rumor, and what is his own conjecture. He also gives us a look at what the social and political landscape was at the time of his writing (1997) for the relevant stomping grounds.
Still, it is not an "easy read" due to the complexity of it all- the elusive subject, the many cameos by traders and natives, the deliberate enigma of Rimbaud. Nicholl also pulls passages from A.R.'s poetry to highlight his accidental prescience - fun, but a bit contrived. (Dare I be the first to say that the majority of Rimbaud's poetry is not good? That the minority that stands out is so brilliant that we tolerate the drivel and obscenity in hopes of finding another gem?)
Yet there is a pull to the book, no doubt the same powerful forces that draw us to the work and life of A.R., always pulling us in as he runs faster and farther away.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Well-Written, But What A Downer
Review: As another reviwer has already stated, this book will not definitively answer the question that so many lovers of Rimbaud ask. To wit, "Why did he stop writing?"-But the book is a well-researched and well-written account of Rimmbaud as "un autre," somebody else than a poet...But it's all so grindingly depressing. Yes, Rimbaud had incredible endurance and will and courage. But he had no business acumen as the accounts of his many endeavors in the world of commerce amply illustrate. The book is essentially a tale of his slow degeneration in body, if not spirit.-I used to have a friend who loved Rimbaud more than I do who would call me in the middle of the night drunkenly, tearfully asking me why he quit. Well, there was nothing I could say at 3 A. M. that he would remember the next morning.-But what I feel is that the answer lies in Rimbaud's most famous poem, "Le Bateau Ivre." At the end of the poem, he says that, after all the exhilarating and mystical insights, after all the rapturous visions amidst the mad seastorms, there is nothing he would like better now then to return to being a litle boat being pushed across a placid pond by a little boy. Rimbaud had been through more hell in his life by the end of his teens than would fit in the lives of many a tortured soul.-It's really not so remarkable when you consider it that, his poetry unrecognized, his soul tortured by the relationship with Verlaine and the other atrocities and privations he endured that the young man would flee the literary world that had given him nothing but anguish in the end.-Unfortunately , the world to which he fled offered little in the way of compensation, as this book sadly chronicles. I recommend this book to those who, like myself, had no clear idea of exactly what Rimbaud DID after he stopped writing besides vague ideas of his being a gun-runner, slave-trader and amputee (This book, by the way, casts serious doubts over whether he was ever either of the former two, except perhaps when forced to do so by bad luck and necessity).-So, all in all, a sad but informative work.-I still think the last lines of "Le Bateau Ivre" are the key to why he stopped writing. But, as is commmonplace, you can't go home again, as those last lines express a yearning for. This book is an excellent chronicle of the alternative Rimbaud was forced to accept.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Odi et Ami
Review: Arthur Rimbaud was one of the most brilliant poets the human race has ever seen. He belongs in the company of Callimachus, Sappho and Catullus, the spoiled child from the north whose frank and erotic poems scandalized Rome: odi et amo, Catullus had written. I hate you and I love you. That says it all. About Rimbaud as well.

Rimbaud was an illusion, a ghost, someone we conjure up and then spend the rest of out lives trying to shake off. Dead for more than a hundred years now, Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry for a few brief years, while he was still in his teens, from about 1870 to 1873. He could never have imagined the extraordinary influence his slim collection of poems would have over the following century. Rimbaud. however, abandoned the world of literature at a very young age. When he was nineteen, he gave in to a mixture of rage and pride, and threw his marvelous talent onto a bonfire, along with his manuscripts. By the time his anger had eaten its way through his soul, he could not speak of poetry without contempt. He lived another eighteen years, wandering from one end of Europe to the other and as far afield as the East Indies. He joined the Dutch Colonial Army and was sent to Java, but deserted and returned to France. He got work in Cyprus, as an overseer of a stone quarry, but his temper got the better of him, "I have had some quarrels with the workmen," he wrote, "and I've had to request some weapons." He collapsed with typhoid and hurriedly returned home.

In March 1880, when he was twenty-five, he left France for the last time. He found work in Cyprus again, as foreman of a construction gang in the mountains. He got involved in another quarrel and, it seems, threw a stone which hit a local worker and killed him. Rimbaud fled, traveling through the Red Sea, ending up in the British port of Aden, a sun-baked volcanic crater perched at the gateway to the Indian Ocean on the coast of Yemen. He spent the next eleven years in exile, working as a trader in Aden and Abyssinia.

Charles Nicholl's book is chiefly the story of those years, from the time Rimbaud disembarks at Aden in 1880 to his death in Marseilles in 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, from the cancer which had started in his right leg. It is very stylish, thoroughly researched, and shows a great deal of insight into the character of this angry and bitter man. Arthur Rimbaud's adolescent rebellion was so brief and the flowering of his talent so violent and astonishing that it has overshadowed his essential character. His life is often seen through a romantic blur, and the astringent view of his career that Nicholl presents in this book is a useful corrective.

Rimbaud was born in the northern French town of Charleville in October 1854, the son of an army captain and a farmer's daughter. There were two younger sisters and an older brother. The father, who had spent some years in Algeria and in different parts of France, found provincial life stifling and family life difficult. He was often absent. Rimbaud was six when his father left for the last time, never to return.

His mother was a dour, hard-working woman of peasant stock, impatient with her husband's fecklessness, and embittered by his final desertion. For most of his life Rimbaud was like his mother--devoted to hard work. As a child he was obedient, studious and even rather prim. In his final school examinations he swept the board, winning all the prizes in his form except for two.

In his sixteenth year, everything changed. Two catastrophic public events shook France, and a private calamity changed Rimbaud forever. The French emperor Napoleon the Third declared war on Prussia in July 1870. The German armies swept through north-eastern France, the countryside where Rimbaud had grown up, and within six months the French had been defeated.

In the aftermath of the Armistice in January 1871, the people of Paris, republican to the core and disgusted with their government, set up a Commune. Eventually French government troops put it down, killing twenty thousand French men and women in the streets of Paris in a single week in May. Rimbaud had run away from home to join the Commune, though it's unlikely he was there during that week of horror.

Rimbaud though, had his own, personal nightmare to live through. At some time during this visit to Paris he was raped, perhaps gang-raped, probably by a group of soldiers at the Babylone barracks. The evidence is indirect but, as Charles Nicholl says, and most biographers agree with him, it is persuasive. Rimbaud went home to Charleville in a state of profound shock and confusion. He sent batches of his poems to important poets in the capital, Banville and Paul Verlaine among them. Verlaine summoned him to Paris and to his fate. It was September 1871 and Rimbaud was sixteen; Verlaine twenty-eight. The two men--rather, the man and the schoolboy--became lovers. The older poet Banville lent Rimabud an attic flat for a while as a favor to Verlaine. Rimbaud became friends with the musician Ernest Cabaner, who also put him up for a while, the novelist Jules Claretie, and the poets Charles Cros and Germaine Nouveau. These bohemians were scandalizing the bourgeoisie with their sexual indiscretions, their immodest writings and their indulgence in absinthe and hashish and opium. Rimbaud outdid them in every respect.

He made many enemies. Verlaine's future biographer Lepelletier disapproved of his influence on his old friend Verlaine, and Rimbaud responded by calling him an obscenity. When Lepelletier told Rimbaud to shut up, the boy threatened him with a table knife. He called poor Banville yet another obscenity, he stabbed the photographer Carjat with a sword-stick, he repaid the hospitality of Cabaner by going into Cabaner's room when he wasn't there and committing an unspeakable act. In short, Rimbaud was as arrogant and bad-tempered as one could get.

In July 1873, less than two years after they had first met, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in a fit of drunken jealousy. The boy was wounded in the wrist, and Verlaine burst into tears and begged his forgiveness. The next evening while they were out walking in the street Verlaine turned ugly again and pulled the revolver from his pocket. This time Rimbaud called out to a passing policeman. They were in Brussels; the police discovered evidence of their homosexual relationship, and incriminating letters. Rimbaud tried to take back the charges, but it was too late. Verlaine was sentenced to two years' hard labour in a Belgian jail.

Odi et amo. It is a phrase that sums up, not only Rimbaud's work but his life as well.

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