The Late Fragments of Charles Baudelaire
These fragments I have shored against my ruins – The Wasteland
Charles Baudelaire is undeniably strange, a man of contradictions. A Catholic satanist, a metaphysical romantic whose early work was classically molded, a poor son of a rich family, an author whose mind teemed with lists of never-completed projects, who nevertheless alienated publishers by submitting already published work time after time; a violent libertine, gambler, drug addict, drunkard and syphilitic who once wrote in his notebook (quoting Emerson) that “the one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation;” a perpetual procrastinator who wrote “I’m pinning my entire fate on the ability to work uninterruptedly for several hours,” and who nonetheless counts T.S. Eliot, Nietzsche, Wilbur, Auden, and countless others among his readers, translators, and heirs. (Nietzsche even said that Baudelaire was his doppelganger.) These contradictions are, frankly, not highly visible in Les Fleurs du Mal. In that collection, Baudelaire’s concerns and obsessions are transposed into the impersonality of art. It is when we turn to his life and fragmentary works that we recognize the effort and talent his art required of him, and also the wealth of frailty that he accrued after a lifetime of investment is frustration, vice, and self-abuse.
In Richard Sieburth’s fresh translation, we meet both the familiar and the strange aspects of this abundantly strange man. The translation brings the unfinished works to our attention in a new way. It also brings to our attention both how profuse and how prevented Baudelaire’s genius truly was. Sieburth’s introduction to each section blends commentary and comparison with contemporaries with anecdote and biography. All this is very useful in better understanding the man, but it is also useful in peering behind the mask Baudelaire made for himself. (There is only one visible flaw in this volume, which is to be got out of the way at once: its introductions quote extensively from a variety of sources, the translated material refers to a variety of sometimes barely organized topics; yet the volume itself has no index.)
The first section of the book, a collection of epigrams and pensées is in some ways the least fragmentary: Sieburth translates it’s title as “Flares,” giving us an image of aphorisms shooting brightly before the eye. (A previous translator had rendered it “Squibs and Crackers.”) The French word “fusée” has a touch of menace about it. Some are fired with the true aphoristic rocket-fuel:
“Spain brings to religion the natural ferocity of sex.”
“Why democrats don’t like cats – easy to guess. Cats are beautiful, suggesting notions of luxury,
cleanliness, voluptuous pleasure, etc.”
Others fall flat:
“Scrawniness is more naked, more indecent than flab.”
Some anticipate Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian, as well as the shifting consciousness of Joyce’s Ulysses:
“The religious inebriation of great cities. – Pantheism. I am everybody. Everybody is me.
Whirlpool.”
Others give us a taste of the author’s cultivated blend of disdain and neurosis:
“Many friends, many gloves – fear of scabies.”
Or his obsessive (and often ineffective) approach to his craft:
“A bit of work, repeated 365 times, will generate a bit of money 365 times – which is to say, an
enormous sum. At the same time, glory is obtained.”
Part of the purpose of aphorism is to speak authoritatively to others. The aphorism or pensée positions itself as a declaration, an observation, a fact or impression impossible to argue with. Baudelaire was seldom in control of his habits, his money, his health; his authority over his mind alone remained. But there is a second purpose to aphorism: self-knowledge. Sieburth notes that Flares & My Heart Laid Bare, the poet’s unfinished response to Rousseau’s Confessions, “are best approached as Baudelaire’s late experiments in the discipline of dandyism – a perverse ascesis that aspires to reshape the self into a sublime object of awe and trepidation as it ceaselessly observes itself in the mirror of the page.”
My Heart Laid Bare was another attempt at self-revelation, again unfinished. It was to be a work of devastating honesty. Baudelaire spoke of it thus: “My Heart Laid Bare, into which I shall load all my angers. Ah, if this book ever sees the light, J-J’s Confessions will pale beside it.” Again, Sieburth draws our attention to Poe’s presiding spirit. The following is a quotation from Poe’s “Marginalia:”
If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own – the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and to publish a very little book. Its title should be simple – a few plain words – “My Heart Laid Bare.” But – This little book must be true to its title. . . No man dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.
One of Sieburth’s many virtues as a translator and editor is his emphasis and quotation of Baudelaire’s sources. Poe’s deep influence on Baudelaire is oft cited, but unless the reader is intimately familiar with the breadth of Poe’s writings, they may detect only a unity of tone; in fact, Baudelaire will often steal whole phrases from his American counterpart. Not only were Baudelaire’s translations of Poe “his major source of literary income,” He even worships him as a proper genius, a guiding spirit. In Hygiene, in which Baudelaire documented his rule of life, he swears “Every morning, to pray to God, the reservoir of all force and all justice, to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe as Intercessors;” Poe’s presiding spectre is especially appropriate in connection with this particular volume since Poe also betook himself to a fragmentary style: Sieburth quotes Poe writing about his own column, named “Marginalia:” “In the marginalia, we talk only to ourselves; we there talk freshly – boldly – originally – with abandonnement – without conceit.” Again, Sieburth: “Rather than being the product of philistine labor, his rapid “pencilings” were instead to be taken as an aristocratic pastime on the order of Montaigne’s Essays or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” Although Baudelaire’s method and intensity belie the name of a mere “pastime,” we certainly see the same fragmentary, essayic quality in his work, certainly, we see in it the author’s aristocratic, haughty self-understanding.
The section of “Late Prose Poems and Projects” contains over a hundred titles of unwritten poems, unencumbered by a single line of actual poetry, each jostling for the poet’s attention alongside drafts for prose poems that Baudelaire actually did write, as well as over fifty novels and short stories; (presumably to be styled after Edgar Allen Poe,) all or most left unwritten. Baudelaire’s love of the grand gesture, the shocking contemporary vignette, and his attention to particular and often bizarre instances of aesthetic attention are evident in titles like “The Roccoco Sphinx, “The Goldfish,” “Hell on Stage,” “Suicide in a Bathtub,” “Church Chants,” “The Hurdy Gurdy,” “Self-Cuckoldry or Incest,” and “Elegy for Hats.” The last of these is appended with the poet’s extensive notes, of which I quote the smallest portion:
“The Toquet features a pom-pom or tassel.”
“The Longueville, a Lavalliere hat with a single plume drooping behind it, fluttering through
space.”
“Bonnet strings . . . Plumes, marabou trims, aigrettes. . . Hatbands made of feathers or flowers.”
“The hats make one think of heads, a gallery of heads. Because each hat by its specific features
evokes a head in the mind’s eye. Severed heads.
How sad it is, all this solitary frivolity! The depressing sensation of mindless, carefree ruin. A
monument of gaiety in the desert. A wanton frivolity.”
The progression of thought is interesting in itself; minute, novelistic attention to detail, followed by the remembrance of death, followed by a sweeping renunciation of the vanities the poet has taken such care to remembrance.
The “prose poem” may not have been invented by Baudelaire. But he through his notoriety and posthumous acclaim, helped to popularize it. At a guess, his work in the genre certainly inspired some of the young T.S. Eliot’s early experiments. However, Baudelaire’s deity Edgar Poe also wrote a “prose poem” called “Eureka.” In contradistinction to Baudelaire’s short, filmic vignettes, Poe’s work is a 143 paragraph essay “On The Material and Spiritual Universe.” The gentle reader may be thankful that Poe’s influence on Baudelaire extended no farther than it did. Nevertheless, we may understand the “prose poem” as Baudelaire practiced it to be an extension of Poe’s own principles. In Poe’s thought, poetry is something separate and distinct from verse. In this Poe stands in the tradition of Sidney. Verse “cannot be better designated than as an inferior or less capable Music.1” Poe held that “the long poem does not exist,” being “a flat contradiction in terms.” He continues:
A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, thtough a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags – fails – a revulsion ensues – and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.2
Later in the essay, he speaks on the topic of rhythm: “Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected – is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute necessity.” From this principle alone, that “Taste” is the “sole arbiter” of Poetry, we derive, to speak frankly, the near-utter decadence of poetry in our own day. But we also get the contradiction in terms that is the “prose poem.”
“Belgium Disrobed,” the last section in the volume, is by turns absorbing, repetitive; inflammatory and dull. Baudeliare’s (partly senile) hatred for each and every person, institution, custom, meal, and attitude of Belgium is troubling. It marks in a way his own intellectual downfall, drawing attention to the flaw in his self-appointed role as judge and critic of all things; (not because he was wrong per se; if even part of Baudelaire’s excoriations are accurate then there were truly aspects of Belgian culture to be disliked) but because he permitted the barbarism of his surroundings in exile to obsess him past the point of nausea. As dog returneth to his vomit, Baudelaire repeats again and again, with the tiresome frustration of a true crank, the same observations:
“When a Belgian addresses himself to ten persons, he always directs his remarks to a single one
of the listeners and, if need be, turns his back on the rest of the company.”
“A Belgian never yields the right of way to a woman on the sidewalk.”
“Criminality and immorality of Belgium.
Here criminal acts are far more ferocious, more mindless than elsewhere.
Rape of a fourteen-month old child.
Phenomenal immorality of the parish priests, recruited from the hideous race of peasants.”
“Dog eaten alive. Price of admission: 20 francs. . . The man who earns a handsome living at
fairs by eating live dogs. Audience made up of women and children.”
“The Belgian manages to eat his soup all on his own, with a spoon. He even knows how to
deploy forks and knives, though he is so inept that he would prefer to rip his prey apart with
his teeth and filthy claws.”
“Dogs, the negroes of Belgium. . . Sadness of the animals. The gods are no more petted here
than are the women. Impossible to get them to play or frisk about. If one tries, they act as
surprised as the prostitute whom one addresses as Mademoiselle. . . But what tireless workers
they are! I have seen a very fat strong man plop himself down in a cart to have himself pulled
up a steep slope by his dog. It’s truly the dictatorship of the savage in those uncivilized
countries where the male does nothing.”
These quotations give the reader a certain ludicrous, shocked enjoyment. But when, in various permutations, more of same is repeated again and again ad nauseam, we start to realize the limits of the project. If accomplishes anything, Belgium Disrobed gives us a negative vision of it’s author. Everything Baudelaire seems to have despised about the age, modernity, and the human race finds its locus in Belgium. For Baudeliare, Belgium is an omphalos of evil; of liberalism, of extortion, anti-heroism, malignity, philistinism, irreligious, and pretention. Very little was proof against his transcendental disdain.
That disdain lasted more or less until the end of his life. Baudelaire was struck by aphasia, and ended his life unable to pronounce more than one or two words. The most notable was “Crenom!” a shorter explicative derived from the blasphemous oath “Sacre Nom!” (The closest English equivalent would be “God Damn!”) This word was made to do yeoman service, working as both a sign of violent appreciation, and violent disapproval. Baudelaire had always considered himself to a doomed, indeed a damned soul; dogged by misfortune, disease, and opposition. He had lived all his adult life under the shadowy wing of his own self-fulfilling prophecy. He died a near mute, close to insanity, having received the last rites of the Catholic Church. His friend and publisher Malassis said of his condition: “He has lost his memory of language and figurative signs, and no one can tell to what extent his whole mind has been affected by his partial paralysis. Trousseau’s Clinique medicale has something very sad to say about his condition: “Whenever you see an aphasic who appears to be in possession of his mental faculties even though he has lost the ability to express himself, remember how many times you have said of certain animals: If only they could speak.”
