“IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE”

As a self-hating gay adolescent in 1950s America, Edmund White was inspired by Arthur Rimbaud. He too wanted to swap his provincial home for metropolitan Bohemia, be befriended and supported by an older man, and forego the drudgery of a long apprenticeship to make his mark while still in his teens.Like most writers, White had to wait far longer for literary success than Rimbaud, who wrote his entire oeuvre between the ages of 15 and 19. Now in his late sixties, he pays tribute to his mentor in a short monograph which, as he freely admits, draws largely on secondary sources to tell the familiar story of the prodigy who changed the course of poetry before abandoning literature, spending the last decade of his short life as a trader and gun-runner in Africa.

The Independent
March 8 2009