The Flowers of Evil, page 2
Baudelaire’s outsize impact is notable because his public career had such limited success during his short life. Little read yet much misunderstood, he survived, just barely, on the margins of the literary world. He never commanded a large audience, though he achieved unwanted notoriety from an obscenity trial. By the time of his death in 1867, however, he had attracted a coterie of admirers who would guide the course of late nineteenth-century French poetry—most notably Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. This devoted cult soon spread Baudelaire’s posthumous reputation beyond the poet’s own sad fantasies. Rimbaud declared him “the first seer, the king of poets, a true God.” Algernon Charles Swinburne elegized him as his strange and somber brother of “Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous.” Stefan George translated Les Fleurs du mal into German and trained his circle of young intellectual elites in Symbolist principles.
By 1924 poet-critic Paul Valéry would claim that Baudelaire was the most widely translated French poet, the only one whose work could cross borders to win an international audience. “Though there may be French poets greater and more powerfully endowed than Baudelaire,” Valéry observed, “there is none more important.” In 1939 Walter Benjamin confirmed that verdict, declaring that “Les Fleurs du mal was the last lyric work that had a European repercussion; no later work penetrated beyond a more or less limited linguistic area.” Benjamin overstated his case—Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry had already begun to exercise its enduring international fascination—but he had made a cogent observation. Baudelaire’s posthumous reputation had become the monolith of French poetry, tall enough to be seen from abroad. He had eclipsed his contemporaries; if they were to be seen by posterity, it was mostly in relation to him.
Baudelaire’s influence cannot be separated from his position in the artistic vanguard of Paris, the cultural center of nineteenth-century Europe. While the arts thrived from St. Petersburg to Madrid, creators and critics across the continent looked to Paris for innovation and excellence, not only because of the city’s wealth, size, and sophistication, but also, paradoxically, because it was in constant cultural and political turmoil. Revolutionary reformers battled social conservatives; secular progressives contended with religious traditionalists. No faction could establish a lasting victory. The vitality of these ineradicable conflicts charged French culture with special energy. The violent dialectic created a milieu more diverse and creative than any other city in Europe or the Americas. Paris was the laboratory for new ideas and cultural institutions—not only in literature but also in painting, sculpture, architecture, opera, theater, and dance. Artists everywhere wanted to come to Paris. Like Hollywood a century later, Paris was where the money and fame were.
Nowhere was the accelerated creativity of Paris more evident than in poetry, which possessed special cultural authority and was expected to articulate the spirit of the times. As French history changed, so did French poetry; each emerging movement offered the vision of a new age. Although Romanticism dominated English and German poetry for most of the nineteenth century, in France the movement was only a single episode in a cycle of artistic innovation. As the century began, French poetry was still dominated by Classicism, which emphasized simplicity of style, clarity of expression, traditional form, and strong emotion held in restraint. Then in rapid succession came Romanticism, Parnassianism, Decadence, and Symbolism. (In fiction, France was also the epicenter of Realism and Naturalism.) The rapid rise of these movements expressed the literary energy of Paris, where successive waves of young writers gathered in cafés, taverns, and salons to argue art and ideas. Meanwhile newspapers and journals—the mass media of the age—had ever more pages to fill. The growth of print media fostered a new urban class of writers. For the first time, a large number of writers could survive without official patronage.
The competing aesthetics of the period merged (and sometimes collided) in Baudelaire’s work. He absorbed and assimilated aspects of different literary schools, transforming them into a personal poetics that resists classification. Baudelaire’s great achievement was to break the hold of Romanticism, though he was, by nature, a romantic. He created a new poetic style and sensibility that rejected the empty gestures of late Romanticism without losing its heroic energy. He fashioned a new vocabulary of images to describe the modern metropolis in ways that endowed it with sinister beauty and mystery.
Baudelaire did not entirely break with tradition. He crafted an elegant classical style—dense, lyric, and original—to express lurid, repugnant, and even obscene subjects that French literary conventions had either excluded or confined to treatment in the low style. He developed an aesthetic capacious enough to assimilate the novelties, shocks, and conflicts of metropolitan life. He imbued sordid scenes with religious grace. His synthesis of traditional and innovative elements, always animated by the author’s desperate sincerity, conveyed the strange and startling beauty of modern Paris.
Baudelaire’s posthumous fame has not been limited to the page. Like Vincent van Gogh, his life has come to embody the myth of the doomed and alienated modern artist. The unhappy particulars of his existence—poverty, depression, public censure, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual license, and disease—personify the poète maudit, the “cursed poet.” His untimely death from syphilis canonized him as a new sort of tragic hero, the suffering artist who sacrificed all for creative freedom in a heartless bourgeois world. Baudelaire’s identity as the ultimate doomed artist brings him into places modern poetry doesn’t normally go. There are Baudelaire coffee mugs, T-shirts, and caps. There are posters, pillowcases, corsets, hoodies, socks, and beach towels. There are plaques, statues, rings, and medallions. One can buy a shot glass bearing his image and declaration: “Il est l’heure de s’enivrer! Pour n’ être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse!” (It is the hour to get drunk! Not to be the martyred slave of Time. Get drunk; get drunk without stopping!). What other French poet has enough celebrity to qualify for product endorsement? One can’t buy a Paul Valéry corset or a Théophile Gautier hoodie.
Baudelaire died childless and unmarried, but literature even gave him a family, at least in name—the three Baudelaire children—Violet, Klaus, and Sunny—the long-suffering protagonists of Lemony Snicket’s witty thirteen-novel cycle, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even young adult readers know that children named Baudelaire are doomed to a miserable existence—les enfants maudits. None of this cultural bric-a-brac matters to literary scholars—as Snicket’s alter ego, Daniel Handler, acknowledges in his afterword to this volume—but its profusion will strike the average reader as significant. There is something singular and unruly about Baudelaire’s legacy that can’t be confined to the pages of a book.
Neither Baudelaire’s artistic innovation nor his lyric genius, however, adequately explains the mesmerizing impact of his work on posterity. Victor Hugo had equal poetic talent and considerable originality, yet his verse remains unread outside France. There is something fundamentally different about Baudelaire’s imagination. Les Fleurs du mal portrays the author’s experience—and indeed the author himself—with extraordinary candor and unabashed intimacy. Yet the poems have a strange ambiguity that permits contradictory interpretations. The reader can enter Baudelaire’s pysche but not make complete sense of it.
Walt Whitman famously declared: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” In comparison with Baudelaire, Whitman’s contradictions seem simple; the reader can discern how the Good Gray Poet feels about any subject. Baudelaire, however, offers contradictions beyond reconciliation. It isn’t that his sense of his own existence is confused, though his life was demoralized and disorderly. His ambiguity arises from his refusal to simplify his experience or allow it to be resolved into any one thing. He does not condescend to the reader (or himself) by pretending that human existence is reasonable or consistent.
Baudelaire took pride in the intellectuality of his creative process. (He developed his position from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition,” which described the composition of “The Raven” as a series of conscious, intellectual decisions.) His versification displays impeccable classical logic. His poems bristle with ideas and opinions. But those external qualities are deceptive. His modes of thought are rarely analytical; they are intuitive, emotional, and even visionary. He presents experience with vivid and unfiltered immediacy. The formal and rhetorical perfection of his verse gives it a surface rationality that belies the agitation and puzzlement underneath.
A conventional myth of modern society is that the individual possesses a unified consciousness; a personality is assumed to be a single entity in which all parts form an indivisible whole. Contemporary neuroscience, however, has demonstrated that human consciousness is an unstable republic of conflicting impulses, instincts, and appetites in perpetual flux. Baudelaire understood, or at least intuited, this unsettling reality before the scientists and psychologists. His poems pull the reader into the vacillation of his consciousness as experienced from the inside.
Music was central to Baudelaire’s method. He considered poetry an art of enchantment. A poem should cast a verbal spell that suspends the reader in a trance state of heightened attention and receptivity. That momentary enchantment allows the reader to experience contradictory thoughts and emotions, to feel hidden suggestions and connections that are never fully disclosed or resolved in the poem. The reader interprets the poem—not as a deliberately constructed puzzle, but as a shared experience still in the process of being understood. The verbal music gives the experience a feeling of order beyond the ambiguous scenes and sentiments the poem expresses.
Baudelaire’s method places the reader in a more important position than had either the pellucid works of French Classicism or the personal declarations of Romanticism. Of course, readers also had to interpret those poems, but the authors and the tradition gave them careful instructions. When Alphonse de Lamartine announces that he loves a woman, that statement becomes a reliable basis to interpret everything that follows, even if the poem contains some complications. When Baudelaire announces he loves his mistress Jeanne Duval, the assertion is, to quote Flann O’Brien, “nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.”
Baudelaire’s interpretive difficulty was part of his attraction, especially when it combined with his exquisite music and sensational subject matter. He called for strong readers, and they came. His ambiguity became his legacy; it prefigured the aesthetics of Symbolism, which refined elements of Les Fleurs du mal into a style that worked by suggestion rather than statement, music rather than paraphrasable meaning. Symbolism needed even stronger readers. Their advent made Modernist poetry possible.
This ambiguity explains why Baudelaire can be credibly championed by Catholics as a religious poet and by Existentialists as a nihilist. Marxists praise him as a proto-revolutionary who expressed the alienation of the urban masses, and Decadents as an aristocratic hedonist who dismissed bourgeois morality in his search for forbidden pleasures. He is both the Symbolist poet of pure imagination and the patron sinner of Satanism.
Baudelaire is all of these things because he allows the reader to collaborate in the ultimate interpretation of his work. His imagination is not Shakespearean; Baudelaire lacks the “negative capability” of assuming different personalities. He is always and only himself—a real artist in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Whether transgressive or traditional, sacrilegious or sacramental, Baudelaire eludes explanation. Yet he never eludes the reader. He meets the reader boldly, face-to-face, unembarrassed by his flaws and failures. He knows his songs have made him beautiful.
II
Baudelaire was born in the Latin Quarter of Paris on April 9, 1821. His parents were an oddly matched couple. His father, Joseph-François, was sixty-two years old at the time of the poet’s birth. His mother was thirty-four years younger. Joseph-François Baudelaire was a product of the ancien régime. Ordained a priest before the Revolution, he had been a teacher and later a tutor for an aristocratic family. During the Reign of Terror, like thousands of other clergy, he renounced his vows under the threat of imprisonment, exile, or execution. An educated man with influential connections, he obtained a lucrative civil service position in the Senate bureaucracy and then married. He had one son, Claude Alphonse—the poet’s half brother. In 1819, after the death of his wife, the prosperous and cultivated widower married again. His new bride was the twenty-six-year-old Caroline Dufaÿs. An impoverished orphan from an educated family, Dufaÿs probably had few prospects for a respectable marriage. The match may not have been passionate, but it was comfortable and affectionate. It also proved brief. The elder Baudelaire died in 1827, when the poet was six.
The young Charles spent his early years in a large house set in a maze of medieval streets on the Left Bank. (Most of the neighborhood was demolished in subsequent renovations of Paris.) The house, which had turrets and high-ceilinged rooms, was full of antique furniture, books, and paintings. The poet remembered his father as a gentle and elegant man who took him on walks to the Luxembourg Gardens. Even after his father’s death, Charles’s childhood was loving and secure. He was the object of his widowed mother’s devoted attention. He also had a large legacy from his father, which he would inherit at twenty-one. The boy lived in what he later called “the green paradise of childhood loves.”
His childhood paradise was destroyed by two events. Eighteen months after Joseph-François’s death, Caroline remarried. Her new husband was Major Jacques Aupick, an ambitious soldier and diplomat. The couple lived mostly apart for three years while Aupick filled ambassadorial positions abroad. Then, in December 1831, the new family moved to Lyon. The resulting domestic drama has fascinated the poet’s biographers. It became a classic Oedipal struggle that could have been scripted by Sigmund Freud. Young Charles, usurped from the monopoly of his mother’s attention, resented the stern and practical Aupick. Their relationship remained polite if unaffectionate, but the poet’s rancor erupted in his teenage years. Even after they broke off relations, Aupick’s conspicuous power and success filled Baudelaire with rage and bitter jealousy.
At school in Lyon, young Baudelaire missed Paris. He disliked his new city, his school, and the locals. Lyon, he later declared, was “a bigoted and fussy city where everything, even religion itself, has to have the calligraphic clarity of a cash register.” In 1836, the capable Aupick was promoted to colonel and assigned to Paris, and his stepson was transferred to Lycée Louis-le-Grand in the capital. Although Charles was a prize student, he turned moody, cynical, and stubborn. In his final year he was expelled for refusing to give his teacher a note that had been passed to him in class. The colonel handled the dilemma of his difficult stepson efficiently. Charles boarded with a tutor to finish his baccalauréat, the French high school degree.
Baudelaire now had to plan his future. His well-connected stepfather suggested a diplomatic career. Charles declared he must pursue literature. Whatever affection that still existed between the two stubborn men was exhausted in the acrimonious exchange. A compromise was reached; Baudelaire would read law. His half brother had prospered as a lawyer and magistrate. There had also been lawyers in his mother’s family. Charles moved to the Latin Quarter, ostensibly to begin legal studies; instead he devoted himself to literature and the pleasures of Paris.
Full of youthful confidence, Baudelaire plunged into bohemian life. He set himself an ambitious reading program. He met writers and painters. He attended plays, concerts, and cabarets. He visited bars and brothels. He drank heavily and smoked hashish. He also contracted venereal disease. He financed his indulgences by borrowing money against his future inheritance. Baudelaire’s early adult years in Paris were a period of immense intellectual and artistic growth, but they also established a pattern of dissipation that would burden and eventually shorten his life.
The poet’s mother and the newly promoted General Aupick worried about their wayward son. They soon realized his legal studies were a sham, and they understood the temptations young men faced in Paris. When they learned that Charles was borrowing money against his expectations, the family felt an intervention was necessary. His parents decided that a long ocean voyage would both help Charles mature and get him out of his detrimental Parisian haunts. In 1841 the reluctant poet boarded the Paquebot-des-Mers-du-Sud bound for India. The voyage proved arduous and uncomfortable. The ship was cramped and filthy, the equatorial heat oppressive. Near the Cape of Good Hope, a violent storm broke the mast and carried away much of the rigging. Slowly the damaged vessel drifted to Mauritius, where the crew spent two weeks making repairs. When the boat stopped next on Réunion, the depressed and homesick Baudelaire refused to continue.
The young poet lingered two months on the lush volcanic island until a boat arrived headed for France. Although the trip had not matured Charles, as his stepfather had hoped, the voyage had nourished his imagination. He had experienced physical danger and privation. He had watched sailors trap, torture, and eventually eat an elegant albatross. He had witnessed the beauty of tropical landscapes and sailed countless leagues of sea and sun and sky. He would never forget the images of his interrupted journey.
In February 1842 Baudelaire reappeared in Paris, to the astonishment of his family. He had returned, he claimed, full of wisdom but with empty pockets. Two months later he came of age and inherited a substantial legacy of approximately one hundred thousand francs, made up of land, investments, and cash. The young poet resolved to live in style. He rented a large apartment, which he filled with furniture and art. He bought stylish clothes and hosted friends at fine restaurants. No city offered so many pleasures, both coarse and cultivated, as Paris, but they came at a cost. Within a year Baudelaire had to sell his land to cover his expenses. His family watched his extravagance with horror and took careful account of his dwindling patrimony.
