Romantic Realist

...Similarly, the early past of Jeanne Duval, the poet's mistress and the "Black Venus" of Les Fleurs du Mal, remains impenetrable...

...Still and all, admirers of Baudelaire should have this volume on their shelf because it contains everything significant about him that is known to French scholars...

...Pichois is possibly the leading Baudelairean of our day...

...In such cases inadequate criticism serves biography badly...

...Only Pichois' name is on the cover, while the title page includes a reference to "Additional research by Jean Ziegler...

...And now, although the book has no erratum slip, we are told in an accompanying information sheet for reviewers that "the book is co-authored by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler...

...Pichois' book, in fact, has clear limitations he is not unaware of, since he actually draws the reader's attention to them...

...Pichois seems to lay a claim to originality in his remark that Eugène Crépet's Etude biographique, revised by Jacques Crépet, "has never been replaced" and has "until now been the only reliable biography of Baudelaire...

...Publishers cannot expect reviewers to spend time correcting their errors...

...At Vanderbilt University in the U.S...

...It forms an exceptional, if oblique, autobiography to which this book does not add much...

...Both names are to be cited when attributing authorship...

...Like many writers who lived obscure and, on occasion, deliberately furtive lives, Baudelaire left a broken trail behind him that makes new biographical material difficult to find...

...One never gets the sense of being in the presence of perhaps the greatest poet of the 19th century, or of the remarkable mingling of romanticism and realism he embodied...

...A few of these people are more closely identified than before, but his relations with the women he may have been involved with are not greatly clarified...

...The result of the collaboration is a volume whose accomplishments call attention to its deficiencies...

...Ultimately we must turn to the correspondence for the most complete picture of Baudelaire's life...

...For while Sartre's Baudelaire, say, is a hollo w and windy book that contributes almost nothing to a serious study of the poet, Enid Starkie's 1971 English biography was sensitive and competent and did justice to Baudelaire's personality, literary environment and work...

...he heads the Baudelaire Center...

...The French edition was published in 1987...

...That extraordinarily sad and moving volume was compiled from the definitive collection in French, La Correspondence de Baudelaire, edited by Claude Pichois and published by Gallimard in 1982...

...In his Foreword Pichois seems to give his collaborator a more active role when he says that " I and Jean Ziegler felt that it was time to write a new biography of Baudelaire...

...A worse omission is the lack of critical attention to Baudelaire's writings...

...And Pichois does place his subject rather well in Haussmann's Paris and its literary world...

...The contention simply underlines the parochial character of French literary scholarship...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock A few years ago I reviewed in these pages Rosemary Lloyd's excellent collection, Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude (NL, 7/14-28, 1986...

...This biography is not intended to be a history of Baudelaire's thought," he informs us—and indeed, it is so concerned with personal relationships and practical matters like debts and publications that, once the poet's boyhood has been discussed, there is little about his later intellectual development...

...His own work, he implies, will henceforth occupy that space...

...Furthermore, one must register a protest against the unbelievably bad verse translations that accompany Baudelaire's splendid poems when they are quoted...

...In France, where he has a chair at the Sorbonne, he has edited the definitive Pleiade edition of the poet's work...

...That "strange classic of unclassical things"— as the percipient publisher Pierre Jules Herzel once called him—is not fathomed in these pages...

...Admittedly, this is not the first duty of a biographer, yet it is difficult, for example, to get the great row over Les Fleurs du Mal into perspective without a somewhat fuller account than the one Pichois gives here of the merits and demerits of the poems that provoked prosecution...

...But the creator, as distinct from the man, is a mere apparition in this book...

...There is some confusion about the actual authorship...

...Ziegler is the grandson of Eugène Crépet, who knew Baudelaire in his last years and was his first biographer...

...No w a biography under his name has appeared...

...I mention this to do justice to Ziegler, and to remind readers that he should be remembered whenever, for convenience, I use the name Pichois...

...So a great deal of the information in Baudelaire has been gathered from published statements made during its subject's life, or shortly afterward by friends, acquaintances and enemies...

...the present translation, done by Oxford Baudelaire scholar Graham Robb, came out in England last year...