Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 Book

A very interesting book, I would say. It's a mix of biographical narrative through which Nicholl interweaves reflections on the possibility of realizing a "complete and accurate" biography of anyone as well as bits and pieces of a memoir of his research and the writing of this particular volume. I find this sort of biographical work highly satisfying if for no other reason than than it forces the reader to confront and acknowledge a very simple fact - that a biography that pretends to "objectivity" is fraudulent - or the work product of a self-deluding writer. Of his own book Nicholl writes (p. 5): "It is not, of course, a definitive account: it is more like some scratchy old home-movie. The faces around him have blurred. There are jump-cuts due to lack of information. There are guesses." And for another few pages Nicholl writes again and again of the guess-work that his narrative documents.

And so for those of us who care about biographical narrative this book raises, by example, a host of questions regarding the proper objectives of biography and the methods one might reasonably employ to achieve those objectives. I could cover scores of pages with words, words, words of my current views on the subject - always subject to revision at the turn of every page. But this is neither the time nor the place for that. But I will state what I discern to be Nicholl's views on the subject, if not expressed directly, then indirectly by example and through the qualifiers that he interlards liberally in his narrative.

As far as I can tell - today, at this moment - one might assert reasonably that Nicholl has adopted a rather low evidentiary standard - not by choice, of course, but by reason of necessity. For example, (p. 35) "Those who knew him cannot agree; their reminiscences seem faintly untrustworthy; indeed the poems have in themselves - as do the later African letters -- a curious timbre of rumour, as if the young man who wrote them cannot be trusted either, as if these experiences he recounts are momentary reveries, hoaxes, fumisteries. It is hard to reconstruct Rimbaud because he was so unconstructed, so much in flux; 'there is nobody here, and yet there is somebody.' "

So to what evidentiary standard does Nicholl's book rise? Well, several. Where the evidence is clear and compelling, for any reasonable reader, that is, Nicholl tells us so, and uses it in that way. Where he can only draw conclusions founded on less conclusive standards, "preponderance of the evidence," he tell us that as well. Where there is "some credible evidence," even less conclusive, NIcholl deploys even that in a responsible manner. When he gives us his informed guesses, we know that as well.

So what are we left with? In my estimation, all that can be had.

But I am alerted, however, to the possibility of applying the rules of evidence that apply in criminal and civil procedure to the writing of biography. One seeks clear and compelling evidence, of course, and where it can be found, the biographer, like Nicholl, uses it appropriately, and so on.

One quibble, not so minor - which will appear in due course.

I am the sort of reader, an engineer by education, trade and livelihood, who happens also to hold a Phd in history - a long story. But I insist upon two characteristics of successful biography, and these demands are a product of my education and taste, namely, (1) a clear and precise (not to say objectively/scientifically accurate) depiction of the trajectory of a life (I hate metaphors), and (2) an assessment of the evidentiary standard to which the biography rises.

I have the sense that Nicholl began his project with those intentions (as his introduction suggests) but that at some point the demands of focused research and writing distracted him. He forgot, it seems, that he owes his readers not only gripping narrative but also clear conjectures of the place and significance of the events that concern him in the context of AR's life course, about which I think Nicholl harbors only very tentative and vague notions. For example, NIcholl writes (p. 12) "his whole life is a story of departures and flights, of disappearances and reappearances." Lovely words, but insufficient in my view - certainly unsatisfying. He writes further (p. 283): "There is also a drastic sense of exertion throughout Rimbaud's life ... and this physical driving of himself reaches a climax in Africa. ... There is an element of iron will-power in this ... He pushes himself, punishes himself, to the point of exhaustion and beyond."

All true enough, I think, but more can and should be said. How and why did AR's life assume that form? Under what circumstances? Forced/prompted by what circumstances? And why Africa? Why life in extremis at the limits of human endurance? And on and on. I think there are answers to these questions - that derive in part from the preponderance of the evidence that Nicholl can adduce, in part from "some credible evidence" and in part from the promptings of his sense of the man. All admissible in the court room over which I preside - so long as the evidence is properly collected, tagged, presented - and molded into a complete, coherent, plausible and defensible argument. We have no other choice if we choose to reconstruct the lives of persons who interest us.

So who might be best prepared to read Nicholl's biography? My sense is that one should have a sense of the entire life before one grapples in greater detail with the events of the last segment of AR's foreshortened life. I read Graham Robb's, Rimbaud, before I read Nicholl, and it helped. I can't imagine how I would have gotten through the details of AR's life as trader, coffee merchant, explorer, orientalist, etc. without knowing - however tentatively - what those events MEANT in the context of AR's life course. Perhaps others could and can - I don't happen to be one of those persons.

AT END.
So what can we make of AR's eleven years of experience in Africa (1880-91)? What do these years MEAN if we interpret them in the context of the course of his life?

Nicholl isn't very helpful. Nonetheless, I've had to gain some sort of closure with AR, and so I offer my hypothesis. In my remarks concerning Graham Robb's biography of Rimbaud, I describe what I take to be "the trajectory" of AR's life. Here I modify and amplify that characterization somewhat.

My sense is that after AR grew weary of outrageous and self-destructive behaviors, all focused on the complete obliteration of convention and constraints imposed by external authority, which he encountered first of all in that monster of a kulak mother of his, he began to wonder - what am I made of? Certainly something extraordinary - it appears, but it's all been rather easy so far. What gifts, talents, potential do I possess that I've not even begun to discern, much less to employ and develop? How and when will life get hard for me?

[By the way, as far as I can tell, AR was no poet. He composed poetry and prose poems, to be sure, but poetry served the purposes of his larger project for a while, and when poetry wasn't useful any longer for that purpose, AR didn't reject poetry, he simply stopped without so much as a second thought. Rejection would have consumed time and energy that he felt no need to expend.]

And so during the years that remained to him, after he put poetry, Verlaine, bohemia and general vagabondage out of mind, he placed himself in extremely dangerous circumstances, often life-threatening. At first in Europe, say 1875-80, with interruptions at points when illness, injury rendered him altogether unable to carry on. At home, of course, with LaMother.

Eventually these experiments allowed him to discover just so much in himself, and I have the sense that AR realized that there was more - but what? and how much? So he disappeared from France once more - and for the last time - without a word.

By a series of accidents and coincidences, he landed in Aden, attached himself to a mercantile house, and began to trade in coffee. And in a matter of a few years, he is trading on his own account, and undertaking trading expeditions (caravans) in and through the most dangerous regions of East Africa. Nicholl describes the dangers, hazards and challenges of caravaning in this region brilliantly. Let us say that success there - no, mere survival in the desert, among slavers, bandits of every kind and description, all armed to the teeth and death everywhere - required that he become that much more cunning, scheming, audacious, mendacious, avaricious than any of the most hardened natives of the region, who prided themselves in slaughtering Europeans, harvesting their testicles, displaying them in piles as trophies. Really.

Nicholl's account of AR's last gun-running caravan, which he led as owner and master, proves beyond any quibbling that he could best even the most vicious among the savage marauders in the east Africa of his day. [AR had been developing this gift for cunning, dissembling and mendacity from the age of ten, if not earlier, in order to survive his mother, with soul and self intact.]

And he used every one of his gifts - developed certain of them to a degree that he could never have attained in any other circumstance. He went native completely and, I think, willingly - not a matter of policy and the politics of assimilation, but out of curiosity and interest. He even began to urinate in the squatting position customary among men there. He became fluent in Arabic and a host of local dialects. He became a revered scholar of the Koran - an expert interpreter, a wandering preacher, one whom local elders welcomed to their debates. Of course, these skill served to burnish his brand, let us say. Then he mastered every form of treachery that any stakeholder in that region's vast complex of corruption might interpose, in every imaginable form, to extort, to extract bribes, to sell permissions, approvals, and on and on. Then there was the need to curry the favor of the great slave trading families, who commanded the trade routes. And of course they all wanted what he had: guns and ammunition, which he had contracted to deliver to King Menelik of Shoa, who would become the Emperor of Ethiopia. There seemed no end to the obstacles, privation, mortal dangers that he did not encounter and overcome during the 18 months that that last gun-running mission/caravan consumed. And in the end he lived - and he made a great deal of money, which in the end became his measure of achievement, of successful self-realization.

So I think that in Africa he learned what he was made of; he recognized, realized, developed, as fully as any set of circumstances on this planet would permit, the components of his "actual nature." And over these extraordinarily eventful years - this extraordinary man completed the project that he had been driven to under undertake and complete from childhood. In the end, I believe he became as contented as he could be. And in 1891, at thirty-seven years - he died - in bed.