Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (New York, Atlas & Co.,
2008, 256 pp.) by Edmund White could have been a good book. It is, the
more so, a disappointment... It's a 'digest version' of Rimbaud's life,
as Richard Hell rightly puts it in the New York Times Review of Books.
It's best selling point is that it's a quick read... Nothing new is
revealed (but this is really not the point of the life series edited by
James Atlas in which the book is published). Nothing except the mention
of the short satirical sketch about Bismark published under a pseudonym
in a local newspaper during the winter of 1970 and recently
discovered... Not a big deal...
White provides a honest account of Rimbaud's life, understating, as far as I understood, that Rimbaud's relationship with Verlaine was his unique lifelong homosexual experience. He dismisses all hints pointing to other homosexual relationships... He even seems more prudent that Rimbaud's great biographer Jean-Jacques Lefrère...
Only the first chapter - a few pages - is a bit personal. White remembers how he discovered Rimbaud when he was sixteen, in 1954. "As an unhappy gay adolescent, stifled by boredom and sexual frustration and paralyzed by self-hatred, I longed to run away to New York and make my mark as a writer; I identified completely with Rimbaud's desires to be free, to be published, to be sexual, to go to Paris."
Edmund White could have written a strongly personal book. Instead we are left with a dry, if politically correct, volume...
2008.10.19
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