Prodigious Prodigy

ARTHUR RIMBAUD (491 pp.)--Enid Sfarkie--New Directions ($10).

Seventy-one years ago, a poet was dying of gangrene in a Marseille hospital: one of his legs was amputated, the other might have to go. "Have yourself chopped up, torn to bits, shredded," he wrote to his sister, "but don't let them amputate you ... To have to perform acrobatic stunts all day long for the mere semblance of existing!" Soon after, Arthur Rimbaud was dead; he had just turned 37.

Rimbaud was the classic beautiful boy, whose fatal charm somehow carried within itself the seeds of disaster. Yet this boy, who stopped writing poetry at 21, reshaped the poetic idiom of his time, and left his imprint on the generations to come. For Rimbaud perfected, if he did not invent, the prose poem, into which he poured the visions of fiis subconscious: "I have stretched ropes from belfry to belfry, garlands from window to window; gold chains from star to star, and I'm dancing." Today, the influence of Rimbaud is visible in the works of such diverse poets as Nobel Prizewinner St. John Perse and Beatnik Allen Ginsberg, in the prose effusions of novelists as different as Henry Miller and William Faulkner.

Great Damned. The son of an army officer, Rimbaud was born in 1854 in the town of Charleville in northern France.

He was a born rebel, and by the time he was 13, he was exasperated alike by the provincial dreariness of Charleville and the tyranny of his mother. In a heavily underscored entry in his diary, he formulated his doctrine: the poet should be a revolutionary and antiChristian, a seer and a magician, "the great sufferer, the great criminal, the great damned--the supreme savant." This was to be achieved by "the systematic upheaval of all the senses." At 16, he fled to Paris.

He was angelic-looking, penniless, tattered, and an instant success in Paris' literary cafes. The aging Victor Hugo hailed him as "Shakespeare enfant" another poet called him "Satan amidst the doctors." Paul Verlaine, then 27 and already an established poet, fell helplessly in love with him.

Verlaine abandoned his young wife and child, and for the next few years he and Rimbaud loved and fought all over northern France. England and Belgium. During this period, Rimbaud wrote his best poems, The Illuminations, which combined a child's joy in nature with the hallucinations of a youth dabbling in occult sciences and dope: naivete, depravity and delusions were fused into poems that might be the joint work of Orpheus, Freud and Hans Christian Andersen.

The Wanderer. Finally, in a monumental quarrel that turned into opera briffa, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist.

Verlaine was jailed for two years; Rimbaud, whose poetry still went unrecognized by the public, became progressively more disenchanted. He gave up poetry and threw himself into languages and science. He became a wanderer, enlisting indiscriminately in armies and circuses. He was a bricklayer in Cyprus, a stevedore in Marseille, a deserter from the Dutch army in Batavia; a trader, gunrunner, explorer and attempted slave trader in Africa. In 1891, grievously ill, he returned to France to die. Enid Starkie, a lecturer at Oxford, has devoted most of her energy to Rimbaud, and this book is a revised and expanded version of her magnum opus. As a biography, it is the ablest assemblage of a tale many of whose pieces will never be found; as writing, it is often awkward and repetitious. But the story alone carries the book. Rimbaud embodied in his short life some of the great prototypes: the fallen angel, the artist-outlaw, the prodigal son. He continues to be worshiped by religious writers as a saint, by revolutionary poets as a supreme rebel. But he was mostly a poet and a suffering human being, and to the latter, at least, Miss Starkie's book does ample justice.

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