The Spleen of a Dandy

...This has certainly happened in the case of Baudelaire...

...It is hard to understand his mother's obstinacy in imposing this humiliating situation upon her son after the death of the authoritarian General Au-pick...

...yet characteristically, it shows how after their parting she remained a burden on his conscience and his precarious finances...

...I'd like to set the entire human race against me...

...There is a highly courtly series of letters to Appolonie Sabatier, whose famous beauty Baudelaire admitted scared him, although his attachment to her was entirely platonic...

...The alternation of demoralization and the will to excel is probably the most striking pattern among the letters, particularly those from the later years of Baudelaire's short life...

...that should not be forgotten while reading Rosemary Lloyd's volume: "L'Albatros...

...Exiled on the ground, derided and beaten, His vast wings hinder his stride...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Baudelaire was the great advocate of Dandyism, the prince of the Decadents, the spiritual father of the Symbolists, and the first of the moderns in his ruthless self-awareness as much as in his insistence that there can be no restriction—especially no moralistic restriction—on the artist's choice of theme...

...But Baudelaire's letters, rather like Oscar Wilde's, show the vulnerability beneath the hard gemlike surface of the esthetic stance...

...In collections of correspondence the inclination is often exaggerated, since letters to publishers and editors are more likely to be preserved than personal ones...

...For long periods, when he might have earned money from works editors and publishers were ready to take, he would be seized with nervous and physical disorders that led him into deep lethargy and discouragement, and for months he would do nothing at all...

...In the end the Selected Letters, through which the earth-bound albatross walks so awkwardly and so painfully, reminds one of the poet's flight and inspires a certain wonder at the creative glory that can emerge from a miserable life...

...Meanwhile my books lie dormant, sources of income that have momentarily been lost...

...A chronicle of emotional and material dependence, it reveals how seriously Baudelaire's misfortunes were aggravated by the very person he felt closest to from childhood onward...

...Recollecting those days of childhood, he said to his mother in one of the long letters he continued to write to her in his 40s, "You were both an idol and a comrade...

...For it is a chronicle of misfortunes and frustrated intentions that in the end make it difficult to believe he did indeed write enough to fill the two massive Pleiade volumes containing his poetry and prose...

...His dormant books awakened...

...Flaubert was one of them and D.H...

...In fact, Selected Letters is less a book about Baudelaire as poet than about Baudelaire as stranded albatross...

...Once so beautiful, now comical and ugly," the albatross is tormented by his captors, who mock his awkwardness...

...These dread periods were the result of the syphilis he had contracted before his schooldays ended...

...Not surprisingly, writers generally present in their letters material anxieties that—by the very nature of literature— find little place in their poetry and fiction...

...Nevertheless, the family trust was not the only source of Baudelaire's troubles...

...But if I can ever regain the freshness and energy I've sometimes enjoyed I'll assuage my wrath in horrible books...

...And, too, people are forgetting me...

...And yet I want to live and I long to know some degree of security, of glory, of contentment with myself...

...Lawrence another...

...Nothing more...

...Baudelaire must have ingested large quantities of mercury, a favorite remedy of the day that was responsible for at least some of the symptoms then associated with chronic syphilis...

...Reading them, one understands why the introductory poem to Les Flenrs dn Mai ends with the invocatory line Eliot, rather than Baudelaire, made famous: "Hypocrite lec-teur—monsemblable, monfrere/" Itis the admission that, whatever the poet's Platonic visions when following his theories of the "correspondences" between earthly and transcendental phenomena, he shares the same human condition as other men, and perhaps because of the alien nature of his intelligence, endures it less capably...

...It is true that only one letter to his mistress of many years, Jeanne Duval, has survived, and that through the accident of its never having been delivered...

...The subject of reproach was almost always the family trust, in which Baudelaire's fortune—the inheritance from his real father—had been placed during his youthful years of extravagance...

...In 1861, at a point where he was seriously considering suicide as a way out of his troubles, he wrote to his mother: "I contemplate the years that have passed and spend my time reflecting on the brevity of life...

...It's too late for me to make even a small fortune, especially given my un-pleasing and unpopular talent...

...How much the disease itself and how much the remedies he used were the cause of his condition is hard to determine...

...Something terrible says to me: never, and yetsomething else says: try...

...The Poet is like this prince of the clouds Who rides on the tempest and mocks the archer...

...In December 1865, a mere three months before the stroke that paralyzed him and presaged his death, he wrote in gathering despair, again to Caroline Aupick: "In three and a half months I'll turn 45...

...And my willpower is constantly rusting away...

...It may be too late for me even to be able to pay my debts and safeguard enough to support an independent and honorable old age...

...Even the most intimate and personal letters, to women, are strongly tinged by Baudelaire's preoccupation with money...

...it returned periodically and ultimately killed him...

...The relationship changed when, with the death of Baudelaire's stepfather, General Aupick, she became a rather querulous widow and her son alternately cherished and reproached her...

...This sureness of the artist, this poise of the dandy, tend to characterize our image of Baudelaire, and that is the reason the Selected Letters, like any other compilation of his correspondence, is such uncomfortable and ultimately pathetic reading...

...There are some writers whose letters are the burning overflow of their creative energy...

...Arguments with the publishing fraternity over fees and production details, debits and credits, are at least as numerous as letters to fellow writers and artist friends— and those, in their turn, are frequently accounts of Baudelaire's chronic indebtedness or requests for aid...

...If ever there were a man who knew, in his youth, spleen and hypochondria, then I'm that man...

...In the last quatrain Baudelaire turns his poem toward the predicament he is always conscious of by comparing the poet to this splendid, unfortunate bird...

...Most important is the correspondence with his mother, Caroline Aupick...

...The precision of his writing was reflected in his fastidiousness regarding the way his works were published, so that in one of the letters in this collection put together by Rosemary Lloyd he tells his publisher he would sooner have a piece of his rejected than accept the displacement of a single comma...

...It was controlled by an unimaginative notary who never allowed Baudelaire enough money to pay his debts, and at times he was forced to exist in wretched circumstances, moving from one sleazy hotel room to the next, and living, as he once said, "like a wild beast, like a drenched dog...

...There is a second early poem in Les Fleurs du Ma...

...He was undoubtedly the 19th century's most important French poet and one of the most discerning critics of our age, in the visual as well as the verbal arts...

...That offers a pleasure that could console me for everything...

...Manet is touched for loans, Sainte-Beuve for favorable notices, de Vigny for a recommendation in connection with the poet's quixotic attempt to get elected to the Academy...

...He was not forgotten...

...Baudelaire— possibly remembering his own youthful voyage to the Indian Ocean—tells how sailors on their monotonous journeys sometimes capture albatrosses, "those kings of theair,"which on aship's deck seem suddenly clumsy and out of their element...