From Rimbaud right down to Patti Smith, avant-garde Modernists—encountering whose work has been described as "looking into the Abyss"—have turned to Baudelaire as a primary source of inspiration. But over the past 150 years the abyss, in which bourgeois forms and norms are rendered meaningless, has become a refuge of sorts: Nihilism, like that which it negates, is ultimately a way of resolving existential tension. That's why it's important to revisit Baudelaire, for whom the vertigo experienced at the abyss's precipice is as terrifying as it is liberating. His tension-filled ideas about the nature of the self, of truth, and of good and evil transcend and shatter the comforting received notions of bourgeoisie and avant-garde alike.
The teenaged Baudelaire was kicked out of his prestigious Parisian lycée in 1839 for, among other offenses, having bad taste in literature: the radically anti-bourgeois poet-novelists Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Sainte-Beuve in particular. Disdaining to take sides in the ongoing political struggles between Republicans and monarchists, these leaders of what eventually became known as the "Art for Art's Sake" movement recognized that the truly important struggle is between the socio-cultural forces of vulgarity and mediocrity on the one hand, and those of brilliance and wit on the other. Not kings, but the newly ascendant culture-consuming bourgeoisie—particularly liberals, who insist that art should be socially and morally "useful," among them—are the enemy. These "aesthetes" styled themselves a new kind of aristocracy, their only kingdom Beauty.
Baudelaire, whose ultra-monarchist stepfather General Aupick's day job was suppressing worker strikes and Republican uprisings in Paris, was sold. "Nothing is truly beautiful unless it is useless," insisted the preface to Gautier's erotic novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), so Baudelaire wrote rebellious poems. Sainte-Beuve's Volupte (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs. (Shortly after contracting syphilis, he made the mixed-race actress and addict Jeanne Duval his mistress.) He also aped the exquisitely anti-bourgeois dandysme perfected by Nerval (who took his flâneur pose so seriously that he was once seen walking a lobster on a leash) by running up enormous lines of credit with tailors, art dealers, and his landlord. His luxurious apartment in the Hôtel Pimodan, the haunt of the Club des Haschishins, was crammed with rare books and exotic fabrics. Baudelaire was confident that his writing career would be as lucrative as Balzac's or Hugo's... besides, he was due to inherit his deceased father's estate when he turned 21.
Thanks to the promise of his inheritance, even though his freelance writing didn't pay the bills, Baudelaire possessed that all-important means to philosophically detached meditation and criticism: free time. "It was thanks partly to Leisure that I have developed myself," he confided to his journal, "To my great detriment, however, since Leisure without an income only in-creases debts (and the humiliations that follow). But to my great profit so far as sensibility, meditation, and the inner resources necessary for dandyism [are concerned]." In 1845, just as Baudelaire had begun to pay off his debts, his scandalized parents had his inheritance impounded and turned over to a legal guardian. No longer able to afford his fabulous lifestyle, and unable to satisfy the increasingly shrill demands of his mistress for jewels, clothes, and even sex, Baudelaire began to flee from one sordid rooming house to another, pursued by creditors. Humiliated, he even attempted suicide.
Although he survived, from that point on Baudelaire was no longer the dashing young Bohemian. He shaved his goatee, cropped his long hair as short as a monk's, and adopted the all-black mourning costume for which he became famous—and which has since come to signify "Pretentious Artist." But the original Man in Black was in mourning for more than a world made vulgar by the bourgeois religion of material progress; he had come to perceive modernity (a pejorative term for Baudelaire's peers, evoking as it did bourgeois "modernization") as actually sinful.
Thus began Baudelaire's infamous "Spleen," that debilitating condition whose symptoms, according to his many poems entitled "Spleen," included an excruciating sense that time had been reduced to a crawl (a typical dandy's complaint), a paralyzing state of hyperstimulation in which it was impossible to be productive, and an acedia-like disgust with the world of everyday affairs.
Baudelaire had transcended the secular dandy's complaints about modernity, that is to say, and was now obsessed with the discrepancies between the material world and what he called "l'Idéal, an idler's paradise which he describes in the prose-poem "L'Invitation Au Voyage": "Yes, it is there we must go in order to breathe and dream and prolong the hours with an infinity of sensation... Yes, it is in that atmosphere that it would be good to be alive, yonder, where the slower hours contain more thoughts." The dandy who had played at aristocratic Leisure had become a sort of dandy saint.
Baudelaire's zine-like Salon de 1846 was a radical departure from the typical art-criticism format, since he was now more concerned with articulating his own aesthetic philosophy than with critiquing any particular paintings. Still revolted by the moralistic aesthetics of liberals, Baudelaire asked, "Have you ever experienced the same delight I have in watching [a policeman] beat up a Republican?" But he also issued a call for artists who could perceive and portray what he described as "the heroism of Modern Life," a nonsense phrase to aesthetes. Finally, in case the bourgeoisie felt left out, Baudelaire announced a forthcoming collection of his rebellious poems, to be entitled Les Lesbiennes.
Having become incredibly hostile towards the literary world, Baudelaire found it impossible to find steady writing work. (His dream of a lucrative novelist's career had ended with one short book, La Fanfarlo). However, he temporarily forgot his troubles during the intoxicating revolution of '48—the last time that the bourgeoisie and Bohemians were to join forces against a common foe. During the street-fighting, Baudelaire was even spotted brandishing a looted rifle, shouting "General Aupick must be shot!" But the establishment of the liberal Second Republic left him cold—he could already see that the bourgeoisie would be no less in control of every aspect of society under a republic than they had been under the constitutional monarchy. In '49 Baudelaire fled Paris altogether, working at provincial newspapers while he devoured the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, then an unknown American fabulist. (Poe, whose essays "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" uncannily mirrored Baudelaire's own ideas, had just drunk himself to death.) Baudelaire devoted himself to translating every one of Poe's stories, eventually publishing several volumes of these in French—thus establishing Poe's reputation forever, not just in Europe but in America, as well.
Baudelaire returned to Paris the following year and wrote "Correspondances," arguably his best-known poem. This work beautifully introduced Baudelaire's crackpot theory of "synaesthesia" (the idea that the senses can and should intermingle was enjoying a brief vogue), but its deeper significance was its prioritizing of symbol over symbolized. Inspired by the mystical theory of "correspondences," a Swedenborgian term referring to the idea that every form in Heaven "corresponds" to a form on Earth, Baudelaire had come to believe that the artist's unique ability to represent truth un-didactically, through symbols and metaphors, was of immense importance.
For Baudelaire, artistic realism was unacceptably "useful" and "moral," but he was equally impatient with what he now called "the puerile utopia of the 'Art for Art's Sake' school," whose privileging of form over content—the Ideal world over the material world, in Baudelaire's way of looking at it - he found lamentably "sterile."
In 1851, when Louis Napoleon—whom the bourgeoisie had managed to install as president—dissolved the Second Republic in a coup d'état and established the Second Empire in its place, Baudelaire's former companions in Bohemia soured on politics once and for all. Withdrawing into what Sainte-Beuve derided as the "ivory tower" of a life devoted solely to art, artists like Flaubert and Nerval declared war on bourgeois society; this was the beginning of what Lionel Trilling eventually described as the self-perpetuating "adversary culture." But Baudelaire, who no longer viewed the world as being divided between bourgeois and Bohemian, but between bourgeois and Bohemian on the one hand and true philosopher-artists on the other, would have no part of it. Trapped, if you will, between the "abyss" of Gautier's aesthetic separatism and the inauthentic "solid ground" of bourgeois vulgarity and do-gooder mediocrity, Baudelaire was a man forever on the verge.
By '57 Baudelaire had published his infamous essay "Du Vin et du Haschisch" (eventually published, with his translation of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, as Les Paradis Artificiels), which established his reputation as a connoisseur of artificial stimulants—even though he warned his readers that drugs were no substitute for meditation; his "Exposition Universelle 1855," in which he insisted that "the unexpected, the surprising, the shocking, is an essential part and the characteristic trait of [true] beauty"; and several brilliant critical essays, including (to use the English titles) "Edgar Allan Poe," "Further Notes on Poe," and "On the Essence of Laughter." Although he'd tried to launch the literary-philosophical journal Le Hibou Philosophe (The Philosopher-Owl), he'd been unable to find backing. Not only was he still living in squalor, and quarreling violently and regularly with Duval, but he had begun to suffer from the secondary symptoms of his syphilis, for which he now took large amounts of the opiate laudanum. He was ecstatic, though, because he'd finally found a publisher for a complete collection of his poems; he intended to call the book Les Fleurs du Mal.
Although his friend Flaubert had just been tried on obscenity charges for Madame Bovary, Baudelaire was deluded as to how his book would be received. To him, Les Fleurs du Mal was proof that the philosopher-artist could transform seemingly "evil" subject matter (sex both straight and queer, erotic fetishism, drug and alcohol use and abuse, death, poverty, violence, and a revolt against bourgeois forms and norms in general) into beautiful "flowers" through a masterful command of lyric form. Alas, he was vilified in the press as a satanic pornographer, and tried on charges of blasphemy and obscenity. Although he managed to escape with a light fine, he wasn't allowed to publish his book until he'd removed a few particularly offensive poems. (The book finally appeared in '61, 20 years after he'd begun writing poetry.) Worse, he'd been forced to plead that the subject matter of his poems shouldn't be taken seriously. At the end of his life he was still complaining that "I have put my whole heart into that atrocious book... It's true that I shall [always] say the opposite, that I shall swear by all the gods that it's work of art for art's sake, monkey tricks, juggling, [but] I shall be lying through my teeth."
In '58 Baudelaire began Mon Coeur Mis à Nu (My Heart Stripped Bare), "which I shall fill with all my anger," and which would prove "that I feel myself alien to the world and its worships"—abandoned a few years later, it's considered one of Western literature's great missing works. He also began to experiment with injecting prose elements into his poetry, seeking to approach the sort of dissonant harmony which he so admired in the music of Richard Wagner. Through this "poetry in prose," Baudelaire was able to explore his ideas about the nature of the self, of truth, and of good and evil without being as sententious as the moralistic artists against whom he had always struggled. He had great hopes for what he called this "kaleidoscopic" new medium, and wrote some 50 pieces—collectively entitled Spleen de Paris—before his death.
By '61 Baudelaire had published his final Salon, in which he explicated his theory of the artistic imagination. He had also written "The Painter of Modern Life," a tour de force containing incisive chapters with titles like "The Artist: Dandy, Flâneur, and Child," "Modernity" (in which he articulated his idea of a beauty which is always both vulgar and sublime), "The Dandy" (in which he insisted that "dandyism is not, as many shallow-minded people seem to think, merely an immoderate taste for fine dress and elegant surroundings [but an] aristocratic superiority of [the] spirit"), and "In Praise of Cosmetics." Baudelaire also published an article on Wagner, whose opera Tannhäuser had just been booed in Paris, claiming that in the vertiginous grip of Wagner's dissonant harmonies he had felt himself "released from the bonds of gravity." Like almost everything else he'd done, these efforts were largely ignored.
40 years old and still living in abject poverty, Baudelaire finally attempted to re-enter bourgeois society, by announcing his candidacy for the French Academy. Any hopes he might have had that his old friend Sainte-Beuve would support him were shattered, however, when that eminent critic described Baudelaire's life's work as "a strange sort of kiosk, very ornate and artificial but yet elegant and mysterious, where Poe is read, [and] where the intoxicating effects of hashish are sought as a subject of rational analysis, and where opium and a thousand abominable drugs are drunk in precious porcelain cups." At the height of his powers, Baudelaire had been dismissed as a frivolously morbid aesthete.
After suffering a minor cerebral stroke, Baudelaire had become afflicted with the sensation that he was falling, surrounded on all sides by nothingness. In his journal, he wrote that "morally and physically I have always been haunted by the sensation of the abyss [and] I have cultivated hysteria with enjoyment and terror. Now, I am in a constant state of vertigo." The poems he wrote in the '60s - including "Le Goût de Néant" ("The Taste for Oblivion"), "Anywhere Out of the World" (the title is from Poe), and "Le Gouffre" ("The Abyss")—were about the damned life of the poet and his longing for death.
In '63 Baudelaire fled to Brussels, where he'd been hired to speak on Art for Art's Sake and artificial stimulants. After languishing in a Belgian hotel for a couple of years—his Spleen, his physical ailments, and his poverty conspiring to leave him in a stupor—Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke. He died, in Paris, on the 31st of August, 1867.
How shall we understand?
"Pascal's abyss went with him, yawned in the air - / Everything's an abyss! Desire, acts, dreams, / Words! I have felt the wind of terror stream / Many a time across my standing hairŠ / My spirit, haunted now by vertigo, / Yearns for extinction, insensibility." - from "Le Gouffre" (1861)
Following Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre describes "consciousness" (the lucid knowledge that the received forms and norms of life are radically contingent) as being "a vertigo of possibility"—vertigo, in his formulation, being "dread to the extent that I am not afraid of falling over a precipice, but of throwing myself over." In Baudelaire, an exercise in "Existential psychoanalysis," Sartre contrasts the brave tone of the poet's published work with the abject nature of his letters and journals, concluding that "[Baudelaire] was free, which meant that he could look for no help either inside or outside himself against his own freedom. He bent over it and became giddy at the sight of theŠ bottomless abyss without walls and without darkness." Although Baudelaire was lucid enough to stare into the "abyss" of his own freedom, in other words, existential vertigo prevented him from leaping bravely off the precipice.
Although the image of the abyss appears constantly in his poems and journals, for Baudelaire the abyss is always either a metaphor for his own heart or mind, or a terrifying reality—as far as I know, he never uses it to describe a state of total freedom or nihilism. Even if he had done so, however, it is unlikely that Baudelaire would have offered metaphors like Kierkegaard's ("leaping") or Nietzsche's ("soaring"), for instance, to describe the best way to grapple with the loss of absolute notions of truth, reality, and morality. For Baudelaire, it is the artist-philosopher's curse and duty to remain on the precipice of the abyss, to suffer from vertigo.
In his late poem "La Voix," Baudelaire recounts that as a child he'd heard a voice (which he ignored) urging him to wallow in the pleasures of the material world, and another (which he obeyed) inviting him to travel - inwardly - "far beyond the range of the possible and the known." From that moment, he solemnly intones in a Poe-like voice, was sealed his "disastrous fate":
"Always, behind the tedium / Of finite semblances... / I see distinctly another world... [and therefore] / I smile at the saddest moments; I weep amid gaiety; / I take facts for illusions—and often as not, with my eyes / Fixed confidently upon the heavens, I fall into holes..." For Baudelaire, then, the received forms and norms of bourgeois life seem absurd not because of a lucid vision of Sartrean "Noth-ingness," but because of an ever-present vision of the beautiful Ideal world described in "L'Invitation Au Voyage" (see above).
This disorienting state, in which one constantly sees the Ideal superimposed upon the material world—as though being forced to watch a double-exposed film—helps explain the perversely "betwixt-and-between" nature of the ideas expressed in Baudelaire's critical essays, in the aphoristic notations in his journals, and in his prose poetry. Baudelaire suffered from a kind of hermeneutic vertigo in which binary oppositions such as real/unreal, truth/falsehood, self/loss of self, moral/immoral, and even bourgeois/bohemian were rendered absurd.
An Existentialist might describe Baudelaire's perverse ideas about the self, truth, the nature of reality, and good and evil as "slimy," a term from Sartre's Being and Nothingness which describes a state in which one is trapped between meaningless bourgeois existence ("Being") and that absolute freedom which gives birth to authentic values ("Nothingness")—but "vertiginous" is a better adjective, suggesting as it does the simultaneously thrilling and terrifying quality of Baudelaire's thought.
It's important to stress, again, that Baudelaire is not Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Although Nietzsche admitted that his own triumph over nihilism was the triumph of a "convalescent" who hoped to be made stronger by having become so sick, and although Kierkegaard cast himself (or rather one of his pseudonymous selves) as someone who could only observe the "movements of faith" made by those persons able to leap across the abyss of meaninglessness, both of these thinkers suggested that the abyss was a danger which could be conquered—even if that meant conquering-through-embracing, or something. Baudelaire, on the other hand, is no acrobat, no eagle: For him the abyss—if we can describe his vertiginous double-vision as an abyss of sorts—always remains terrifying. Of course, terror has its pleasures...
How shall we be?
"Number is all, and in all. Number is within the individual. Intoxication is a number." - from Baudelaire's journal
Crowded city streets were still an unsettling new phenomenon when Baudelaire began writing in and about Paris. Writers and social thinkers from Engels to Dostoyevsky suspected that the 19th century urbanite was losing him- or herself in such crowds—that, somehow, being constantly observed by total strangers eventually estranges one from oneself. Baudelaire was fascinated by Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd," in which a convalescent—whose recent illness has bestowed upon him a keen eye for the evanescent details of everyday life—observes a strange half-smile upon the faces in the crowd surging outside the café window: the smile of the walking dead, whose very selves have been irretrievably scattered. And, as we know, the young Baudelaire admired flâneurie, that anti-bourgeois way of walking idly through crowds which preserves the self by keeping it tightly self-contained, contemptuous, "closed."
We are all flâneurs now, of course. Each of us is more highly individualistic than the next; each of us is superior to everyone else at the mall. In "The Painter of Modern Life," however, Baudelaire posits the existence of someone with "an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur." This person is "the perfect flâneur" (by which he means something like "the evolved flâneur"), for whom "it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite." Unlike the ironically detached flâneur so admired by aristocratic aesthetes, this detached-yet-engaged stroller is perfectly able to "shift at will between postures of aloofness and surrender." Baudelaire expands on this idea in the prose-poem "Les Foules" ("Crowds"), written at the same time as "Painter," repeatedly using the word jouissance (literally, "pleasure," but slang for sexual pleasure) to describe the incomparable ecstasies available to such a person, as in the line "He who can marry the crowd knows feverish jouissances which will be eternally denied to the egoist (shut up like a coffin)..."
But although the Baudelairean self is "open," the engaged flâneur is still a flâneur, and is therefore also always "closed." As "Les Foules" puts it, "The poet enjoys [jouit] this incomparable privilege, that he is able - at will - to be both himself and another." In "Painter," Baudelaire searches for the perfect simile for such a subject, finally declaring that "we might liken him toŠ a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of [the crowd's] movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an 'I' with an insatiable appetite for the 'non-I'."
The kaleidoscopically expanding-and-contracting self of the "engaged flâneur" is simultaneously multiple and singular, diffuse and contained, open and closed—and it derives unspeakable thrills from these vertiginous movements. The Baudelairean self is a protean, democratic "not-I" organized around an aloof, inelastic core: the aristocratic "I."
What shall we believe?
"[The engaged dandy] is a master of that only too difficult art—sensitive spirits will understand me - of being sincere without being absurd. I [might even] bestow upon him the title of philosopher." - from "The Painter of Modern Life"
As we've already learned, to the person who sees the Ideal superimposed upon the material world, the received "facts" of life are revealed as illusions, and that which is tragically important to most people seems absurd. Baudelaire illustrates this idea in the sci-fi-like prose-poem "Chacun Sa Chimère" ("To Each His Chimera"), in which the narrator spies a line of staggering men, each burdened with a monstrous Chimera (Illusion) without realizing it. But although Baudelaire's lucidity allowed him to see that what most people consider "normal" and "natural" are artificial constructions, he had no Platonic desire to reveal the capital-T Truth behind appearances. In fact, his dandyish cult of artificiality (a reaction against the hippyish naturalism of the Romantics) prompted him to say that the artificial is superior to the natural. The very idea of a "Truth" which can be apprehended and expressed in a straightforward manner is a bourgeois idea, and therefore insufficient.
Baudelaire was fascinated with Swedenborgianism because it seemed to blend the philosopher's rigorous skepticism toward received notions and modes of perception with the artist's unique ability to find the perfect symbol to express his own unique notions and perceptions. A perfect and complete vision of the Ideal is not Baudelaire's idea of truth, however; nor is its inverse, the ability to portray the material world with perfect realism: "I find it pointless to represent that which is," he sniffed, "because that which is does not satisfy me." For Baudelaire, truth is always a combination of the Ideal and the material, the eternal and the transient—truth is, in other words, always symbolic. The Baudelairean symbol is no longer a signpost pointing to the Truth; it is truth itself.
Baudelaire describes the shock of pleasure with which the philosopher-artist discovers these symbols as (following Sainte-Beuve) volupté. But volupté, despite what bohemians have always believed, isn't enough. In "Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris," Baudelaire notes that he has resolved to "inform myself of the why and wherefore, and to transform my volupté into knowledge." That is to say, although Baudelairean knowledge always begins with volupté, the artist's child-like ability to find an eternal newness in the everyday must be combined with the philosopher's mature powers of reason and analysis. The artist may perceive the truth (in the form of symbols), but only the philosopher-artist can make meaning.
All this explains why Baudelaire turned away from prose and poetry. As the critic Margery Evans has noted, unlike the linear novel (a medium in which Baudelaire could possibly have made his fortune); and unlike poetry (a medium which the bourgeoisie had stopped regarding as a means of communicating serious ideas), the prose-poem's form is linear and capricious. The prose-poem is an arabesque—which Baudelaire describes in his journal as "the most spiritual of designs." Prose poetry, then, was Baudelaire's attempt to invent a medium which could express his vertiginous idea of truth, which is sincere without being bourgeois, and absurd without being meaningless.
What shall we do?
"Les Fleurs du Mal... must be judged as a whole, and then there follows a terrifying morality!" - Baudelaire, letter, 1857
"To be a useful man has always seemed to me something very ugly," Baudelaire writes in his journal—an expression which the culturally conservative sociologist Daniel Bell has used to sum up the avant-gardist adversary culture and its rage against bourgeois norms of morality, work, and consumption. However, Baudelaire didn't reject morality altogether, as another journal note indicates: "When I say 'moralists,' I mean Pharisee-like pseudo-moralists." "Moralist" is a pejorative for Baudelaire, that is to say, only because the term has been spoiled for him by hypocrites. As his own description of Les Fleurs du Mal suggests (above), Baudelaire's brand of morality is one which the bourgeoisie would find terrifying.
In an article on the recent establishment of a series of prizes to be awarded to "healthy" and "instructive" works of theater, Baudelaire describes a book for children by the William Bennett of that era: "As I read [this book] what do I find but goodness constantly being rewarded with lollipops, and wickedness invariably being made ridiculous by inevitable punishment. 'If you behave yourself you will get a yum-yum'—that is the whole basis of this sort of morality." The utilitarian "counting-house morality" of the bourgeoisie—which traveled with modern capitalism from Ben Franklin's America to Europe—is still with us, of course, and Baudelaire's anatomy remains helpful. In "Further Notes on Edgar Poe," for example, he writes that "the dullness and vulgarity of [most people's] minds" has produced "the heresy of The Didactic, which includes as inevitable corollaries the heresies of Passion, Truth, and the Moral."
By "Passion," Baudelaire refers to the bourgeois vice of sentimentality. He couldn't stomach what he called "les entrepreneurs du bonheur public," professional do-gooders who oozed sympathy for the poor. In his journal Baudelaire writes that "There is a certain cowardice, or rather, a certain softness in men of good intentions"—sympathy, that is to say, is not a virtue but a vice, because it only serves as a shield between helper and helped. Instead of feeling sympathy, Baudelaire proposes instead that one should suffer: "It is in this gift for suffering," he writes of Wagner, "which is common to all artists but which is all the greater as their instinct for the beautiful and the exact is more pronounced."
A lack of material well-being is not the root of human suffering, as do-gooders seem to think; a lack of proportion and harmony in life is. Since artists are particularly sensitive to proportion and harmony, their suffering serves as a sort of moral conscience: "Poets see injustice, never where it does not exist, but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever," Baudelaire argues in "Further Notes on Poe," "Thus the poetic irritability has no reference to 'temper' in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to wrong...."
Baudelaire also rejects the bourgeois idea of "the Moral," which insists that it is one's duty to be "kind" to those who suffer. In his early sonnet "Le Rebelle," Baudelaire describes a "sinner" (his ironic term for a dandy saint) who is seized by an angel and lectured: "'I'm your good angel, and I'll make you care. / Know then that you must love, and with good grace / The poor, the warped, the mean and dull of mind. / At Jesus' feet a carpet you shall place / Of loving-kindness woven; —for to be kind / Is loveŠ'" and so forth. The poem ends: "But, being damned, the wretch still answers: 'No!'" Baudelaire, who described his own life as "damned," uses that adjective to describe the person whose thoroughly unsentimental brand of morality is superior to that of those who instruct him to be "kind."
What might an unsentimental and anti-moralistic morality look like? In the prose-poem "Assommons les Pauvres" ("Bludgeon the Poor"), for example, the narrator-dandy throws down books full of simple recipes for making poor people "happy, wise, and rich in twenty-four hours," and goes out into the street. He meets a beggar and proceeds to beat him up, in order to force the man to prove that he's worthy of being helped. Suddenly, "O miracle! O bliss of the philosopher when he sees the truth of his theory verified!" the beggar turns on him. There is no wall of sentiment between helper and helped here, no cowardly hiding behind charity. Baudelaire's morality is as "beyond good and evil" as Nietzsche's, if not more so.
In dandyism, Baudelaire found not a way to detach himself from the world, but a way to practice a vertiginous morality whose radical unsentimentality and anti-utilitarianism most of us would find terrifying.
Further Reading
"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939) and "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1955) by Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (Shocken, 1969) and Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). The suicidal idler Benjamin, who briefly made his living translating Baudelaire, became obsessed with the flâneur, Modern Life, Paris, and Spleen. He intended to write the masterwork The Paris of the Second Empire in the Works of Baudelaire, but his own Baudelairean refusal to make himself useful got in the way.
Baudelaire by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Martin Turnell (New Directions, 1950). You know Harold Bloom's theory that every writer must wrestle with his "strong original"? Baudelaire, Sartre's "original," was clearly the inspiration for Roquentin (Nausea), who stares into the abyss of his own freedom but cannot accept responsibility for giving his world a new meaning. Existentialism demands that we sweat night and day in order to live an authentic life; Baudelaire, at heart an idler, wouldn't have found authenticity payment enough for all that work.
Baudelaire by Enid Starkie (New Directions, 1958). The definitive Baudelaire bio is organized both thematically and chronologically, boasting such features as, just for example, three chapters on the years between 1842 and 1844 (on Baudelaire's dandyism, on the "Black Venus" Jeanne Duval and his poems about her, and on the years between 1842 and 1844 (on Baudelaire's dandyism, on the "Black Venus" Jeanne Duval and his poems about her, and on his early, successful years as a journalist). If not quite the sort of intellectual portrait of which the late Richard Ellman was capable, this is still essential.
Baudelaire by Pascal Pia, trans. Patrick Gregory (Evergreen Profile Book 22, Grove Press, New York, 1961). Not intended to be an exhaustive biography, this installment in Evergreen's fabulous Profile series zooms in sharply on some important themes in Baudelaire's life and writing. (Chapter titles include: "First Humiliations," "The Fragrance of Women," "Bash Him Down, the Enemy of Roses!," and "Baudelaire as Prophet.") Come on, Grove Atlantic, let's see what you can do!
Baudelaire the Damned by F.W. J. Hemmings (Scribner's, 1982). "From the moment of his conception to the hour when he drew his last breath, every circumstance conspired against him: his ancestry was tainted, his birth unlucky, his parents and teachers persecuted him, his mistress betrayed him; he was racked by disease and his neuroticism made him miserable; he lost his money or, worse, it was placed in the hands of snuffling man of the law who doled him out a starvation allowance; his works, when they appeared, were misunderstood, condemned as pornographic. Finally, he had to flee his own country, and in solitary exile was struck down by the paralysis that robbed him of the power of speech and in which he dragged out miserably the few remaining months of his life before dying at the age of forty-six." 'Nuff said.
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, ed. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New Directions, 1989 edition). I hesitate to list the various translations of Baudelaire I've used in writing this article, since translation is at best an imprecise science, which makes it hard to recommend any particular works. I like this one because the editors have chosen what they consider to be the best English translations of Baudelaire's poetry from the past century, and because it also includes all the same poems in the original French. Robert Lowell's translations stand out.
Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads, part of the "Cambridge Studies in French" series, by Margery A. Evans (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Evans's study of Paris Spleen is a masterful exploration of Baudelaire's use of intertextual parody and the arabesque, the central themes of his prose-poems (the city, prostitution, madness, savagery, the kaleidoscope, musical harmony), and his anti-linear brand of morality. The series seems to contain other excellent Baudelaire studies, but I don't have 'em.
Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism 1790-1990 by Gene H. Bell-Villada (Bison Books edition, 1998). In this superb history of what the author calls "aesthetic separatism," Bell-Villada argues persuasively that the idea of "l'art pour l'art" was particularly attractive to poets like Gautier and Baudelaire, whose medium (poetry) and rhythm of production (leisurely and careful) conflicted with the modes and rhythms of the newly industrialized literary market. And that's just the beginning.
