Baudelaire refused.
He had made up his mind: he would be a writer or he would be nothing! His stepfather at first thought he was joking. When it became apparent that Baudelaire was seriously considering a career that would lead to certain poverty, his stepfather became angry and refused to ever speak to Baudelaire again. They would never reconcile.
Baudelaire left home. The first thing he did upon securing his own bachelor pad was to procure himself a prostitute for the night. The second thing he did was to ask his half-brother how to treat the raging case of gonorrhea that he picked up from her.
This early mishap in his sex life did little to scare him away from women of the night. He once quoted an idea for an epitaph for his own gravestone to his friends that read, “Here lieth one whose weakness for loose ladies cut him off young and sent him down to Hades.”
Baudelaire’s twenties and early thirties were an unending string of mishaps. He contracted syphilis from another prostitute. He blew through his inheritance of more than 100,000 francs. He ran up numerous debts. He petitioned his parents and, later, his financial guardian for more money to buy the expensive clothes he so desperately needed. He drank wine like it was going out of style. He attempted suicide. And, somehow, he managed to find the time in his busy schedule to write and publish a handful of poems.
It was, of course, a woman who provided the inspiration for most of the poetry Baudelaire was able to write. Jeanne Duval, a Haitian actress and dancer, was the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute. Her illicit ancestry provided an extra layer of allure for Baudelaire. Although he considered Duval his “mistress of mistresses,” their relationship was rocky, and he referred to her as a “vampire,” a “black witch,” and “Beelzebub” in his poetry.
They lived together off and on, in lodgings that Baudelaire used his dwindling inheritance to pay for. He could only write his poetry at night, he said, “so as to have peace and quiet and escape the unendurable pestering of the woman I live with. Sometimes, in order to write at all, I go and hide in a public library or reading room” to escape Duval. “The result is that I live in a state of permanent irritation. Certainly this is no way to bring to fruition a sustained piece of writing.”
He dreamed of committing violent acts against her. “I am truly glad I have no weapon in the house,” he wrote. Baudelaire sought out other romantic interests to play the role of muse, but he always returned to Duval.
Finally, after ten years together, they parted ways for what looked like the last time. As he wrote to his mother, his once beautiful muse “had some qualities, but she has lost them.” He could no longer tolerate “a creature with whom it is impossible to exchange the least conversation on politics or literature, a creature WHO DOES NOT RESPECT ME, a creature who would toss my manuscripts into the fire if it brought her more money than letting them be published.” The final straw, it seems, was when she threw his beloved cat out of the house and replaced it with a litter of dogs. “The very sight of dogs makes me ill,” Baudelaire wrote.
Yet the dysfunctional couple reunited once more, against everyone’s better judgment, and Baudelaire learned to live with her and her dogs ... for a short time. In 1856, after fourteen years together, they split permanently.
Baudelaire could see salvation on the horizon: after twenty years of writing and publishing only a few short pieces in newspapers (as well as a poorly received novella), he made his poetry debut with a book of 101 poems in 1857. The collection, Les fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”), was partially influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, whose work Baudelaire had been translating into French. Les fleurs du mal was the culmination of twenty years’ worth of poetry. He had been saving his talent, he claimed, for a full frontal assault on French audiences.
Baudelaire married the dark imaginative works of Poe with the beauty he saw in the world, added a few odes to lesbianism, shook it all up, and spilled the resulting cocktail onto an unsuspecting literary establishment. “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”), wherein a young couple on a lovers’ walk encounter a rotting corpse, is typical of Baudelaire’s trademark style: “Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore / Sweating out poisonous fumes / Who opened in slick invitational style / Her stinking and festering womb.”
“You have found the way to rejuvenate Romanticism,” Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire. French poet Paul Verlaine later said Baudelaire had found a way to represent the “modern man, made what he is by the refinements of excessive civilization, his brain saturated with tobacco, his blood boiling with alcohol.”
While fellow writers offered words of praise, critics were not so kind. In the words of one journalist, Baudelaire had invented littérature charogne—carcass literature. “Never, in the space of so few pages, have I seen so many breasts bitten—nay, even chewed!” one reviewer wrote. Even Baudelaire’s more straightforward love poems were groundbreaking in their rejection of sentimentality.
Les fleurs du mal was too dark and erotic for the reading public, at least according to authorities. They took Baudelaire, the publisher, and the printer to court on charges of blasphemy and corrupting public morals, using the same laws that had been (unsuccessfully) applied to Flaubert. This was the minister’s chance to get back at the artistic class and avenge the judicial system’s loss in the Madame Bovary case.
Officials confiscated copies of the book from a warehouse in preparation of the trial. When a reporter saw Baudelaire on the streets wearing a solemn black suit, the reporter sarcastically quipped that the writer was “in mourning for Les fleurs du mal; it was seized yesterday evening at five o’clock.”
The atrocities in his poems were no different from what newspapers published every day, Baudelaire protested. “It is impossible to scan any newspaper, no matter the day, month, or year, without finding on every line evidence of the most appalling human perversity,” he wrote. “Every newspaper, from first line to last, is a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, lewdness, tortures, crimes by princes, crimes by nationals, crimes by individuals, a debauch of universal atrocity. And this is the disgusting appetizer that civilized people take at breakfast every morning.”
Although his mother praised his book in a letter to Baudelaire’s half-brother, she must have said something to Baudelaire about the tawdry content: Baudelaire responded to her with a venomous letter. “Always you join with the mob in stoning me,” he wrote. “All that goes right the way back to my childhood, as you know. How is it that you always contrive, except in money matters, to be for your son the reverse of a friend?”
Baudelaire and his publisher were found innocent on the charges of offending religious morality, but the judge ruled that six of the poems offended public decency. They were forced to remove the offensive poems and pay a fine of 300 francs, which was reduced upon appeal to 50 francs (still more than Baudelaire had made from the book’s sale, before it was banned). The removal of the poems meant the book would have to be reprinted. To justify the second printing, Baudelaire set out to write a new batch of poems to replace the ones that were pulled.
His stepfather passed away the same year Les fleurs du mal was released. Baudelaire attended the funeral and tried to mend relations with his mother, to no avail. For years she had supported him emotionally and financially, and she was disappointed with how he treated her.
Despite their chilly reunion, Baudelaire dreamed of moving from Paris to his mother’s country estate, where he wouldn’t be bothered by meetings with editors, publishers, and writer friends. In other words, everything that had so long attracted him to the city now repelled him and was keeping him from putting pen to paper. “I detest Paris and the cruel life I have led there for over sixteen years, which has been the one obstacle standing in the way of the fulfillment of all my projects,” he wrote. This was, however, just the latest excuse for his lackluster writing career.
Poets have long been known to suffer for their art and dramatize that suffering. “I have myself an inner weight of woe, that God himself can scarcely
bear,” wrote poet Theodore Roethke, with only modest exaggeration. For Baudelaire, there was only one way to relieve this existential suffering: “One must always be intoxicated. That is the point; nothing else matters.… Intoxicated with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please.” Baudelaire skipped the virtue, relying mostly on wine and opium for his own intoxication.
While Baudelaire was a student, a physician had prescribed him laudanum as part of a treatment program for syphilis. Predictably, like Coleridge, De Quincey, and countless other patients, Baudelaire quickly picked up on opium’s pleasures. “Here in this world, narrow but so filled with disgust, only one familiar object cheers me: the vial of laudanum, an old and terrifying friend,” he wrote in his poem “La Chambre Double” (“The Double Room”).
Like De Quincey, he couldn’t help but praise the drug even as he condemned it. Opium and other “poisonous stimulants seem to me not only one of the most terrible and most dangerous means at the disposal of the Prince of Darkness in his attempt to enlist and enslave mankind, but also one of his most perfect devices.” It was only natural that Baudelaire should translate De Quincey’s Confessions of English Opium-Eater into French. Baudelaire tacked his own commentary on hashish onto the back of the translation and called the volume Les paradis artificiels— artificial paradises.
Baudelaire had harsh words for hashish, the drug he had tried with Balzac at the Parisian hashish club. “Hashish, like all other solitary delights, makes the individual useless to mankind, and also makes society unnecessary to the individual,” Baudelaire wrote. “What hashish gives with one hand it takes away with the other. It gives power to the imagination and takes away the ability to profit by it.”
The book was a minor hit, but Baudelaire’s excessive moralizing on hashish did not help him reach a wide audience eager for tales of decadent drug use. His revised edition of Les fleurs du mal, with twenty new poems that sprouted in place of the six banned by authorities, was released in 1861 to little fanfare.
Additionally, Baudelaire found himself lumped together with Algernon Charles Swinburne, a British poet whose earthy poetry similarly outraged critics. When Swinburne published Poems and Ballads in 1866, an anonymous critic accused him of following in Baudelaire’s footsteps “as a slave to his own devil, a dandy of the brothel.” The critic accused Swinburne and Baudelaire of being part of a “school of verse-writers spreading the seeds of disease,” nicknaming them “The Fleshly School” because of their obsessions with desires of the flesh. The two poets never corresponded; Baudelaire was too wrapped up in himself to truly be part of any larger artistic community.
Baudelaire sought refuge from his disappointments by doubling down on his religious beliefs. Although he had always been a devout Catholic, few would have guessed it based on his poetry and behavior. As one reviewer had written about the first edition of his book, “The poet who caused the flowers to blossom has only two alternatives to choose from: to blow out his brains … or to become a Christian!”
Part of the reason he turned to the Catholic faith with a renewed vigor was that the burden of his own guilt over drugs and sex was simply unbearable for him to carry on his own. Past moral failures affected his daily life: he couldn’t shake his opium addiction, and he felt the complications from syphilis on his fragile nervous system almost every day.
His love-hate relationship with sex is best dramatized in a story told by Léon Cladel. Toward the end of Baudelaire’s career, he acted as something of a mentor to Cladel (a terrifying thought). They met in cafés to discuss life, love, and literature. During one meeting, the pair was joined by a beautiful young blonde who was starstruck in the presence of Baudelaire, whose infamy following his obscenity trial was not without its perks. The three of them retired to Baudelaire’s nearby hotel room, where the woman began stripping her clothes off for the men. Cladel, sensing he had overstayed his welcome, bid the woman and his mentor good night. However, as he closed the door upon exiting, he overheard Baudelaire telling the woman, “Right, now you can get dressed again.” Was Baudelaire taking the moral high ground in his relations with women following his spiritual reawakening? Or had his venereal diseases left him unable to perform in the bedroom?
The one person who could have answered this question, his mistress of mistresses, Jeanne Duval, died in 1862 from complications of syphilis. Baudelaire never learned of her fate.
Weakened by years of laudanum use and sick with syphilis, Baudelaire suffered a stroke while vacationing in Belgium in 1867. He died in a nursing home a short while later at the age of forty-six. In a final indignation, the poet was buried beside his deceased stepfather; Baudelaire’s name appears on their shared gravestone almost as a footnote beneath his stepfather’s name and long list of civil service accomplishments. Baudelaire’s mother lamented her son’s early passing, saying that if he had accepted his family’s guidance, “he would not have won himself a name in literature, it is true, but he should have been much happier.”
French authorities officially reversed the decision to suppress Baudelaire’s poetry in 1949, and the banned poems were reinstated to Les fleurs du mal a hundred years after their first publication.
9
The French Decadents
“One had, in the late eighties and early nineties, to be preposterously French.”
—VICTOR PLARR
The mid-1800s saw the onset of a new conservative movement in England, ushered in by a change of leadership in the royal family. The Victorian era lasted from Queen Victoria’s crowning on June 20, 1837, until her death on January 22, 1901. It was an affluent and peaceful time. The “enlightened” morals that had accompanied the Enlightenment were reined in, as romanticism and mysticism gave way to religious evangelism.
Youth, of course, would have none of it.
Long-haired young men such as Robert Louis Stevenson declared they were ready to “disregard everything our parents have taught us.” Stevenson’s parents were less than happy with his behavior: “You have rendered my whole life a failure,” his father told him. His mother dramatically added, “This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.” While Stevenson would eventually go on to write the gothic horror novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was also notable as a harbinger of things to come as the Victorian era of expansion and prosperity wound down.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new generation of writers with wild hair and even wilder prose emerged with the intent to scandalize the populace. The press branded the cadaverously thin, pale young men “decadent.” The youths adopted the name and wore it as a badge of honor. The poor working class watched with wonder as the Decadents, who appeared to them to have been born with all the advantages in the world, revolted. As Arthur Symons, editor of the Decadent-friendly journal The Savoy, observed, “The desire to ‘bewilder the middle classes’ is in itself middle-class.” Many of the Decadents were French, and those who weren’t were obsessed with French culture.
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)—pale, disaffected, young, middle-class, and French—fit the decadent bill perfectly. Victor Hugo called him an “an infant Shakespeare,” and for good reason: Rimbaud produced his best work as a teenager, and by age twenty-one had given up on literature altogether.
As a child, Rimbaud ran away from home multiple times to escape his overbearing mother. When he turned sixteen, Rimbaud entered his rebellious teenage phase: he drank alcohol, stole books, spoke rudely to adults, and grew his hair long. “Parents: You have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own,” he wrote in a tantrum. In summary, he acted like an adolescent. Unlike your average teenage rebel, however, Rimbaud was an absurdly good poet.
Rimbaud started writing poetry in his early teens, encouraged by a tutor his family had hired, and published his first poem when he was only fifteen. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that he had to “derange” his senses to achieve true, poetical vision. “The sufferings are enormous,” he wrote to his form
er teacher Georges Izambard, “but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have recognized myself as a poet.” He believed in “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined by French poet Désiré Nisard earlier in the century. When one of Rimbaud’s friends encouraged him to write to Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Rimbaud sent the established poet some of his poems.
Verlaine replied with a one-way ticket to Paris. “Come, dear great soul,” Verlaine wrote back. “We are waiting for you; we desire you.”
Verlaine’s unhappy childhood can best be summed up with this anecdote: although he was the only child in his family to survive childbirth, his mother held on to her miscarried fetuses. Once, in a fit of rage, Verlaine smashed the jars containing the pickled corpses of his brothers and sisters. Let’s just say that tensions flared after this incident. To say he was happy to leave home for college is an understatement.
He started college with the goal of becoming a lawyer, gave up, and settled for a bachelor’s degree. What he really wanted was to be a poet like Charles Baudelaire. But after his father, favorite aunt, and beloved cousin all died, Verlaine spent his early twenties in a drunken haze. “It was upon absinthe that I threw myself, absinthe day and night,” he wrote, calling the green-colored liquor a “vile sorceress.”
Since the mid-eighteenth century, European distilleries had been churning out new and novel intoxicating spirits such as brandy, gin, and rum. The Decadents’ drink of choice, however, was la fée verte: absinthe—the Green Fairy. The anise-flavored liquor was extremely high in alcohol (ranging from 55 percent to 72 percent by volume) and was alleged to have hallucinatory effects. “The first stage of absinthe is like ordinary drinking,” Oscar Wilde wrote. In the second stage of drunkenness, “you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.” While many creative types indulged in absinthe for inspiration, the high alcohol content led many of them, including Verlaine, to become run-of-the-mill alcoholics. He worked at an office during the day and spent his nights drinking, “not always in very respectable places.”
Literary Rogues Page 7
