I Promise to be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
Ed. and tr. by Wyatt Mason
Modern Library, $24.95

This second and final volume of Arthur Mason's Rimbaud Complete is best described as historic grime—a sort of dull smudge left by the luminous. Besides the opening entries scattered with poetry and the few flights of his inventive invective, there is nothing of Rimbaud's lyrical illuminations in these letters. They are full of boredom and business, a"really stupid, tiresome existence," as he himself puts it in one letter. But the underlying narrative of the correspondence that spans his adolescence to death is astonishing. After the meteoric outpouring of his youth, Rimbaud abandons poetry to run with lion hunters, trade ivory, musk, and guns. The poet's deflected genius finds outlet in photography, topography, and the investigation of every skill and trade imaginable (indicated by endless requests for books and supplies). He survives "one thousand perils" through the African desert only to end legless and paralyzed. It's hard to believe that all this could result in letters that seem written by, well, a traveling salesman. Alas, it did.

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