« Today, 23 January 1862, wrote Baudelaire in his notebook, I was subject to a singular premonition, I felt pass over me the breez of the wing of imbecility. »
“ In 1863, the Figaro inserted an extract from a violent attack by Pontmartin against
Baudelaire. In 1864, Figaro condescended to publish a series of the poems in prose. Only, after two
publications (7 et 14 February),
Villemessant [the editor] ended this fantasy and here is the reason he gave to
the author, to explain this measure : : « « Your poems bore everyone.
»
- La
Vie doloureuse de Baudelaire, by Francois Porche
I recently re-read one of my favorite books of the nineties, James Buchan’s
Frozen Desire, an essay on money that gives as much weight to paintings of
Judas, the life of Baudelaire, and Raskolnikov (the final dire dialectical
figure at the end of laissez faire) as it does to Adam Smith, Keynes and Simmel
– and of course it ignores the horrid Milton Friedman, God rest his soul.
About Baudelaire, Buchan quotes Proust’s phrase that Baudelaire sympathized
with the poor as a form of anticipation – which is so wholly lovely that it is
almost spoiled by going on (which, after all, is what determines, more than
voice or rule, the way a line of poetry runs – it is only over when it is over
for good – when nothing on that same line could be added that wouldn’t stain or
destroy it – and thus the blank is part of the poem - and thus we fall down the
poem as we fall down a ladder, rung by rung). Buchan adds that in the end, as
Baudelaire was reduced to rags (but never dirty underwear, according to his
biographer Porche), he compiled lists in his last journals. He listed all his
friends. They were all prostitutes.
“Here the epoch has arrived of that long haired, graying Baudelaire, his neck
enveloped – as per his hypochondria – with a violet scarf; the Baudelaire that
was see walking like a shadow, a huge notebook under his arm, in company with
the old Guys, at Musard’s, at a casino on the rue Cadet, at Valentino’s. To
Monselet who, one evening, in one of those low dives where workers danced,
asked him what he was doing there, he replied: I’m watching the death’s heads
pass by (« Je regarde passer des têtes de mort. »).”
In these circumstances, when the old bird has almost molted its last feathers
and the street reaches out its arms at night to take back its own, there is a
moment of collapse and flight. This is when Baudelaire made his journey to
Belgium. A complete disaster. And it is when he encountered an article by Jules
Janin about Heine, in which Janin, praising Heine, still reproached him for
being unreasonably melancholic at times – a point that Janin extended to all of
contemporary literature. Where was the gaiety, the song? Where was that lie
that eventually became La Traviata? Let’s have a little happy art, for a
change. And of course, lets have no unexplained irony – irony is always being
chased out of the city, fed hemlock, and in general fucked in the ass and
thrown in the gutter – it is the dread of the Janins of the past, just as it is
the dread of the Janins of the present. Baudelaire wrote Janin a letter – which he
never sent him. It is a fantastic document, one of those texts in which
something blazes out that … it is unfair to call prophetic, as though it were
high praise that someone in the past anticipated our moo cow and nukes culture.
What blazes out, just as what blazes out of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, is the world within the world of the sibyls of modernism …
It is difficult
to translate because it is as dependent on sound as one of Baudelaire’s prose
poems. Here’s a bit:
Quant à toutes les citations de petites polissonneries françaises comparées
à la poésie d’Henri Heine, de Byron et de Shakspeare, cela fait l’effet d’une
serinette ou d’une épinette comparée à un puissant orchestre. Il n’est pas un
seul des fragments d’Henri Heine que vous citez qui ne soit infiniment
supérieur à toutes les bergerades ou berquinades que vous admirez. Ainsi,
l’auteur de l’Ane mort et la Femme guillotinée ne veut plus entendre l’ironie ;
il ne veut pas qu’on parle de la mort, de la douleur, de la brièveté des
sentiments humains
2.
Yesterday,
I visited the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was an impromptu visit – I was going to
a nearby library to return some books. I saw and photographed Sartre and Beauvoir’s
tombstone, which was pleasingly strewn with old metro tickets, cheap flowers,
and an old paperback copy, bizarrely enough, of the first volume of Proust’s In
Search of Lost Time. I noticed on a marker that this was where the cenotaph of
Baudelaire was, so I also took a look at it – it was, unfortunately, the kind
of structure that no bum could leave a metro ticket on. More’s the pity.
It is odd that – at least as I remember it – Sebald, in his last novel, Austerlitz, part of which is set in Belgium, never mentions Baudelaire. Could I be forgetting something? The 1887 edition of the Oeuvres Posthumes contains a biographical introduction by Eugène Crépet that explains the peculiar horror that overcame Baudelaire in 1864 as he familiarized himself with Belgium – it was another piece of his habitual bad luck that he chose to flee from France to, of all places, Belgium. It was the kind of place, as he explains in a letter, where the only thing that could possibly move the people to revolt would be raising the cost of beer. He was tortured by the stink of Brussels – Crépet explains that Baudelaire had an extremely developed olfactory sensibility – and the ugliness of the people and the yawning lack of conversation.
By March, 1866, the devil that had tracked Baudelaire through his life, condemned all his books to failure for various reasons – here a press goes bankrupt, there the critics condemn him, and of course there is that most comic of volumes, Fleurs de Mal, a bunch of filth that can’t compare with the beautiful and healthful lyrics of a Musset – began to pursue its endgame. Baudelaire started suffering more and more visibly from some mental derangement. On a train going to Brussels, Baudelaire asked for the door to the compartment to be opened. It was open. He meant to ask for it to be closed, but he couldn’t find the words for that phrase. They came out backwards. In an article in the Figaro, 22 April, 1866, a journalist noted that Baudelaire’s symptoms were “so bizarre that the doctors hesitated to give a name to this sickness. In the middle of his sufferings, Baudelaire felt a certain satisfaction in being attainted with an extraordinary illness, one which escaped analysis. This was still an originality.” His mother took him to Paris, where he was confined to an asylum. By this time he couldn’t speak, except to say non, cré nom, non. He tried to write on a small chalkboard, but he couldn’t shape the letters. He could, however, gesture, and did.
At his death, a few journals noted, with satisfaction, the death of a degenerate who would now no longer bother the public with his childish pornography. The kind of things you’d expect in, say, the NYT today. Same complete nullity, the same numbskull public intelligence, that combination scold and lecher that is the voice of a million articles, with the point being to erect a wall, a protective blankness, to keep at bay any doubt the consuming animal might form about the system in which it moves and breathes.
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