I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud (review)

Resolving to quit writing verse at the age of twenty, years before most poets reach artistic maturity, Arthur Rimbaud entered into a life that on its surface was very different, essentially becoming a merchant of fortune in Africa. This invaluable book, a companion to the earlier Rimbaud Complete, which compiled his poems, begins with the much-heralded and frequently unrevealing "seer letters," the thirty letters composed while Rimbaud was writing poetry.

But as one quickly learns, Rimbaud retains a poet's sensibility and eye, even when documenting the most mundane matters (typically, requests to his put-upon mother back in France) and seeking a financial windfall that never comes.

Year after year, in letter after letter, one moneymaking scheme after another is enthusiastically set upon, only to falter before given a chance to be carried out or succeed, yielding nothing but frustration and, frequently, debt. "It's been a long time since I've heard from you. It isn't pleasant to feel so neglected," Rimbaud writes home to his family from Aden, an almost uninhabitable outcrop of rock where the poet would be stricken with knee pain that led to the eventual amputation of his leg. But his schemes, or at least the methodology behind them, betray the obsessive nature that makes no concessions to practicality, even the practicality of doing only what is needed to accomplish a given task: "To the package" (already a sizable package of metal-forging and candle-making guides that she is sending him) "add a Telegrapher's Manual, The Little Woodworker, and House Painter's Manual," Rimbaud writes his mother.

It is tempting to think him a selfish man, giving little consideration to others, but then there is Rimbaud's own account of his struggle to return to France, soon to have his leg amputated. It is as terrible a trial of one man's dignity, bravery and loyalty to family as exists in modern literature. "I managed, with difficulty to put myself on my side and have a bowel movement in the hole I'd dug in the earth," he writes. Dragged across the desert on a stretcher by the "Negro porters" he had hired, Rimbaud is thrown to the ground when the men grow tired of their task. He imposes a fine. Eventually, having returned to France, he worries that even without his leg he will be required to perform military service.

When we comes to the last line in the last letter—"Tell me what time I should be carried on board"—the heart aches for a great man with a true poet's spirit. These are letters unlike any others.