1. Baudelaire.
I was walking home one evening, recently, going down Rue
Fauburg St.-Denis, thinking of chores to do and as well, as one does, as absorbing
proprioceptively the whole organism of Paris, I came upon an advertisement
video on one of those screens that you find hung up poles on well trafficked
streets, flashing pictures of pouty women advertising lipstick or smiley women
advertising cleaning products or boys with fey, distant looks in their eyes
advertising sports wear. In the repertoire of these advertisements changing one
after the other there was one that showed a face that was neither pouty nor
smiley nor ephebe, a face I knew., a face I was rather shocked to see. The
face, in fact, of Charles Baudelaire, from the famous Nadar portrait. And there
were words superimposed on this image. The words did not advertise an exhibit,
or a new book, or anything like that. The catch here was a public service
announcement warning about STDs. Baudelaire, it informed us, was a victim of
syphilis. Don’t you be too!
Baudelaire, in the latter stages of whatever medical
condition it was that put him down, was a paranoid sensitive to begin with. He knew,
as he walked the street in second hand clotes, that he was being talked about – but in his wildest
dreams I cannot image he ever thought his image would grace a public service
announcement about STDs. It is like some awful, posthumous verdict. One that he
foresaw. Here was the spirit of his disease revealed, and it was: modernity
itself. Here was the poet as butt. Every
jake and jill could feel superior. Could pass by. Laughing.
“There is a softening of the brain, that is evident”, wrote
his mother in a letter she sent from Brussels, Hôtel du Grand Miroir,
where her son lay speechless after a severe seizure.
The Baudelaire on the screen of the public health
advertisement is appropriately spectral. He seems to float there.
‘Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule !
Lui, naguère si beau,
qu’il est comique et laid ! »
2. They all went to whorehouses. Those high modernists,
those adventurers, those I-otherers.
3. I remember reading Baudelaire in high school and having
an immediate case of identification fever. I didn’t understand the poems in the Penguin
paperback translation I read, I was just in high school and had little idea who
Andromache was or what she had to do with a construction project but I did
understand the spirit, the impossible combination of sleaze, gallantry, and that
madly self-subverting oppositional spirit,
because I was an American teen
and felt like one, which is to say, I hated teenhood. Seventy years before I
picked up that book, in enclaves of literati and artists around the world,
there was a Baudelaire cult. In Britain, in Russia, in Japan, as well as in
Francophone countries. The extreme, perhaps, was reached in Russia, where a
symbolist named “Ellis” (aka L.L. Kobylinsky) suggested, during the Russian
revolution, that the solution to Russia’s problems was Baudelaire, writing to a
Menshevik senator in the Duma that Baudelaire “was the greatest revolutionary
of the nineteenth century, in comparison to whom the Marxes, Engelses,
Bakhunins and the rest of the brotherhood they created are nothing.” In Ellis went so far as to
dress himself to look like Baudelaire. In Adrian Vanner’s Baudelaire in
Russia, he cites the even more extreme case of a poet named Bagritsky who
“was so captivated by Baudelaire’s personality that his face and his entire
attitude began to recall Baudelaire: the dark eyes, the lips pressed together,
bitterly and scornfully,” which were “an exact reproduction of the picture of
Baudelaire” he had found in a book.
Ah, the Imitatio Baudelaire. Even as I was reading my
Baudelaire, in the general culture the cult had moved on to Rimbaud. It was
Rimbaud’s name that was dropped by Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. Baudelaire’s cult
status has dropped to an STD warning for the kids.
4. We owe a fine and finely grained account of Baudelaire’s
bitter sojourn in Brussels to another Baudelairian, Maurice Kunel, who
interviewed various people who met Baudelaire and went through the documents
available to produce Baudelaire en Belgique in 1912. Through his books on
Baudelaire and, later, Felicien Rops, Kunel achieved that blessed thing,
bibliographic immortality. While his book, Baudelaire en Belgique, might have a
micro-audience today, one can’t really write a biography of Baudelaire – or
Rops – without referencing him. An exoplanet circling around a distant star:
which we infer, us terrestrials, from
its infinitesimal gravitational pull on the star as we track it night after
night.
It is to Kunel that we owe the scenes in the Hôtel du
Grand Miroir, where Baudelaire holed
up during his time in Brussels, alternately dodging the landlady and her
demands for rent and sortying out in borrowed shoes that were too tight. It was to this chamber that was
brought from when he had his cataclysmic attack in Naumur, touring the Eglise
Saint-Loup in the company of his friends, Felicien Rop, the painter, and his
publisher, Malassis, who put him on board a train and tried to understand him
when he kept telling them to open the door. The door was opened. It dawned on
the two that he meant close the door. He could not remember the word, close. Or
rather, the word was occluded, in his brain, by the word open – the latter
supervened on “close”.
His friends eventually took Baudelaire to a hospital, where
he spent 15 days, his condition worsening. When he left, the doors of the entry
suddenly and violently slammed shut. According to Kunel’s source, the sisters,
stupefied, fell to their knees on the flagstones of the courtyard and prayed to
God. “In order to banish their anxiety, an exorcist was summoned. Dressed in a
white robe, waving an aspersorium in his hand, the priest sprinkled holy water
and prayed out loud, conjuring away the spirit of evil from the room that had
been abandoned by the invalid.”
A scene from a B movie. A giallo.
5. Felicien Rops
met Baudelaire in Brussels. They were introduced by the publisher, Auguste
Poulet-Malassis, who had found, in
Belgium’s lax enforcement of censorship, an incentive to publishing all the
erotic material he wanted, all the notorious
French writers, and even the most cursed of poets. Poulet-Malassis had been
arrested during the 1848 revolution – he’d been caught, armed, on a barricade
– and one of the men he was marched off with “was shot and killed before
him’ on Rue Racine before the garde national brought him to prison. A man being
shot before you cools a man’s spirits. The publisher admired Louis Blanc - he
admired Proudhon – and for their sake, partly, and partly his ideals, and
partly his youth, he was in prison for six months until he was released. He
hopped it back to his home town, Alencon, in Normandy, where he took up
publishing. When he next tested the air in Paris, the 2nd Republic had
dissolved, and the writers he hoped to publish were subject to a regime of
censorship that was too cumbering for his ambitions. So he hopped it again,
this time to Belgium, and as we said. Here, the very incompetence of the police was
an aid to the promotion of culture, especially if that culture included drawings
of naked women and men, and sly or even frank presentations of fucking. As Rops once said, « Les anciens ne
reculaient pas devant un bel accouplement et ils « avaient raison. Il y
aura de tout. » Like many a lefty
publisher before or since – Girondias, Al Goldstein - he printed political pamphlets for his
conscience and porn to make a living. It is a long tradition, this overlap of
wankery and advanced views.
5. Rops was living well from his inheritance. He’d founded a
newspaper and found a wife, Charlotte Polet de Faveaux, who came with a castle:
the Chateau de Thozée in the small town of Mettet. The newspaper did not take
off, given that it made too many demands on Belgian literati, but at least the
writing of Rops friends and his first caricature saw the light of day, and
those who made it their business to know, knew. Charlotte had a child, who died, and another,
a boy, Paul, who survived. Rops threw himself into caricature, illustration and
painting. And, to Charlotte’s dismay, into being a general cocksman. That
eventually undid the marriage: they separated their properties in 1875.
Charlotte lived long after that, dying after Paul did, in 1929.
Her last letter to Felicien, in part: “You don’t want to see
me anymore, Felicien, and so be it. You will never see me again ! ... It
is you, yourself, Félicien, who ought to have demanded a separation many years
ago. Your life at the moment is certainly far from that which you have been
preparing for two years, with so much patience and cruelty, but it seems to me
that it must be a comfort for you to be free and not lie to me ceaselessly. This
last horrible liaison, the eighth that I ‘ve known of since our marriage, has
been a punishment for you for the others, and it has killed me! Since you don’t
want to see me anymore and have asked me not to write to you, I want my last
words to you to be a pardon. My love for you was too pure and too great for me
to ever feel any feeling of hatred, or of
a vengeance unworthy of me. “
The Gavarni of Belgium. The Daumier of Brussels. Plaudits he
was accorded.
7. Baudelaire, when Rops met him, was busy and down at heels.
The Baudelarian blues. The usual thing. It
had started off, as many of Baudelaire’s fugues did, with feverish plans,
worthy of a Balzac character. Of Rastignac. Putting out the book of translations of Poe, writing
a new book of poems, giving a series of lectures. “Je veux travailler à
Bruxelles comme un Démon”. He’d conjured
up the demonic, and he knew all too well what that meant.
Baudelaire had come up
on the train to Brussels in 1864 with his friend, Nadar. Nadar was not
only a photographer, but also a aeronaut. He was going to Brussels to make an
ascent and fly to the coast and maybe over the channel. He invited Baudelaire
to come along on Le Geant, his balloon. Baudelaire decided not to, but
he did observe the pumping the air into the balloon. Nadar took with him a M.
Georges Barrel instead of the poet. Baudelaire watched the Le Geant lose
its anchor and drift up skyward from the Jardin Botanique. A shape in the sky
above Brussels. The shape that came down
at midnight, that same day, near Ypres, never making it across the channel.
Baudelaire went back to his plans. Always the poems, always
the letters to Mama, always the money. The Flowers of Evil had been published,
had been fined for lewdness (300 francs), had been censored and re-published
and been not reviewed by Sainte-Beuve. A slight that Baudelaire overlooked. His
plan for a lecture series on the current state of the arts in France. Like Mark
Twain’s Duke and Dauphin in the wilds of Arkansas, Baudelaire took the view
that the yokels of Belgium would enjoy a little splash of up to date culture. Paris
culture. Gautier. His maître. In the event, they didn’t show up.
8. Rops had run into Poulet-Malassis on one of his jaunts to
Paris. All of his life, Rops was a traveler. He went to Lapland. He went, in
the 1880s, to New Orleans, with the two women he lived with. Had children with.
Sisters, Leontine and Aurelie Dulac . Eventually, their mother moved into the
nest.
He went to the Côte d’Azure and Tyrol. In Lapland, he caught
malaria.
Poulet-Malassis fell in love, in a way, with the “beautiful
Fely.” Rops was two years younger than Baudelaire, but already knew of him – as
anybody would who was in the business of caricature and engraving. Baudelaire
had written of Gavarni and Daumier – perhaps he would write about Rops?
Baudelaire made a laborious joke at their meeting, but Rops understood that the
joke was more than a joke – it was an initiation. He responded with the kind of
gravity, carrying the joke along, that Baudelaire appreciated.
Specifically, when the waiter asked what they would take,
Baudelaire had responded: I think a bath. And Rops had said, a bath sounds
good. They didn’t laugh. It was funnier not to laugh. They were kin spirits in
that non-joke joke. Even if Baudelaire’s
own Rabelaisian side, his fun boy side, had long been sloughed from him by
disease and circumstance. The Baudelaire who had walked around the Ile St.
Louis in his pyjamas had been forgotten, buried under debts, affairs, and the
continual drama with his mother and her uncomprehending husband, and the poems,
and the apocalypse, and Swedenborg and Joseph le Maistre.
Rops later wrote: “… we found each other through a strange
love, the love of the first crystallographic form: the passion for skeletons.”
In a letter from Brussels, Baudelaire, in his eternal bitch
mode, wrote: “As to conversation, that great that unique pleasure of a
spiritual being, you can go all around Belgium but you’ll never find a soul who
speaks.
Rops spoke. And there was a spark. Rops
and Baudelaire were spiritual descendants of the left hand of John Webster. A
Baroque sub-vibe. As Eliot puts it:
“Webster was much possessed by
death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under
ground
Leaned backward with a lipless
grin.”
Leaning backwards in the throes of passion or the cataclysm
of death – and weren’t these surrenders similar?
9. Rops was the child of a prosperous factory owner in Namur
Belgium. The product? Printed cloth. Felicien,
the only child. His mother died. His father died. He was left, at twelve, to
the care of an un-sympathetic uncle. A
story told of all artists, in all times, all orphans. Even those whose parents
died well after the point that the artist had left the broken shell of the egg.
He left the moeurs of his forefathers behind as soon as he discovered sex and
drawing, but he did appreciate the textiles
his whole life through. He once wrote that his painting “arose out of brocade
and the sewing machine”. Like Mallarme, he adored women’s fashions, he adored
the peripherals, the fans and shoes. He bordelloed up the female kit, as he saw
it, in certain of his drawings and paintings. He was a man with an eye for
stockings. And a man with an eye for stockings is never going to live up
entirely to Baudelaire’s credo of the shock. The fetishist domesticates the
shock, finds scenarios for it.
A curiously feminine strain
in beautiful Fely. We should put in the balance as we ponder the sheer misogyny
that you can’t get away from in the high mercury modernist field – that field
that held itself to be opposed to the established values of the bourgeois
social order, to the virgin and the mother, while continually stumbling over
the virgin and the mother, inverting them, running from them. Never getting
over the virgin and the mother. While interpreting the emancipation of women
solely in terms of the emancipation of hetero desire. While continuing the
tradition of a two step objectification: of taking the look of a woman away
from the woman, first step – the male gaze is always a colonizer - a step of
compliments and striptease; step two, cramming that look down her throat.
Aggression, hypocrisy, what hetero man among us would escape whipping?
Among Rops’ Satanic works that attracted the notice of the aesthetes,
wankers, bibliophiles and cops was one entitled Pornokrates. It is a famous aquarelle,
showing a Rubenesque woman, bare bum and bosom and her naked pubis – no figleaf
- but wearing stockings and a sort of
hat. She has a band over her eyes, while she holds a leash attached to a pig. Rops was pleased with this image: « I
took the occasion to see and to kiss the black silk stockings, with red
flowers, of a beautiful girl whose lover is in Monaco. I made her nude like a
goddess, I put a long pair of black gloves on her beautiful long fingers, which
I kissed, and I put on her hair one of those great Gainsboroughs in
black velour, with gold trimming, which gives to the girls of our epoch that
insolent dignity of the women of the seventeenth century. And there it is ! my Pornocratie.
We get it.
Rops, from years of working on caricatures for magazines and
newspapers and illustrating books, was inclined to art that has a “we get it”
moment. Usually, what survives is mystery: we don’t get and we will never get
Mona Lisa’s smile. But Rops, fortunately, cannot be summed up by the “we get it”
moment. This is overlooked by those who snob the curiosa. The monstrous is
simply, for him, an aspect of the most attractive.
Another anecdote about Rops, about the desire-become-flesh
for the flesh-become-fetish. About experience. It is told by Camille Lemonnier
in his memoir of Rops. Lemonnier was fleeing in the face of the armies mobilized
in the Franco-Prussian war. Rops, a Belgian national, followed the French
armies as an artist-reporter. They met after the battle of Sedan, and shared a
meal, and then a blanket, in a poor hut. This is what Lemonnier recalls of Rops’
conversation.
“What a book one could make about this! Yes, that plain
littered with human brains, the dead lying in the grass, making dung for the
harvests of tomorrow, the almost voluptuous smell of the vast “pourrissoir”[a
combination of pissoir and pourri – rot], giving me the impression of the earth
in rut… And to illustrate that, like a vast fresco of a cemetery, with the cute
mortal rictuses on the faces of all the stiffs… Look, it is one of the
affectations of our old sensibilities not to see what is comic about death,
what makes it a cold, bracing, terrible comedy. Well – I saw three stiffs in a
patch of woods, fallen with their noses in the air, with the black holes of
their nostrils in contrast with the greenish pallor of their faces, like clown
makeup; with their hands and limbs awkwardly bent under them, just like clowns
in a circus farce. Man, even so, I’m getting goosebumps as I talk about this.”
One imagines Rops’ vision in dialogue with the vast fresco
that was really made – or in a sense produced, like a movie – by Anton von
Weber in Berlin. A panorama of the battle of Sedan that was analyzed by Dolf
Sternberger in his book, Panorama, or Aspects of the Nineteenth Century, which
came out of Nazi Germany like an odd escapee – published in 1937 in Frankfurt.
Sternberger, the student of Adorno’s, who was accused by Walter Benjamin of
ripping off his own work in progress, Passages.
Von Weber’s panorama is a proto-cinematic attempt at the immersive
experience, minus the scent of the earth in rut, minus the fields strewn with viscera
and beshitted uniforms.
10. Baudelaire, in conversation with Courbet, exaggerating
his anti-nature polemic:"...speak to me of the always changing Parisian
skies, which laugh or cry as the wind wills, without ever allowing their
changes of heat or moisture to profit the existence of stupid cereals.”
11. In Calasso’s eccentric book, The Baudelaire Folie, Rops
is only mentioned once. Manet is mentioned often, but never centered – instead,
Calasso chooses to center Ingres, Baudelaire’s anti-thesis. Calasso mentions
the famous phrase in Baudelaire’s letter to Manet – a letter Manet was proud of:
“You are but the first in the decrepitude of your art.”
The code word, here, is decrepitude. From crepitus, to creak, to croak. The sound
of a crow – or Raven. Poe’s Raven, like a heraldic symbol, certainly lies underneath
this phrase, in a letter written from Brussels and Baudelaire was working on
getting out his Poe translations.
12. At the end of his life, Rops, living with blindness and the
two Dulac sisters, was working on an autobiography, culled from bits of his correspondence.
He proposed calling it: “Memoirs to ruin [nuire] the history of art of my time.”
One could line up similar references to the anti-creative impulse running
through modernism. A phrase from a letter by Rops’ friend, Stephane Mallarme –
and lifted from that letter to entitle a very good recent book about Dada from Jed
Rasula:
“My work was created only by elimination, and
each newly acquired truth was born only at the expense of an impression which
flamed up and then burned itself out, so that its particular darkness could be
isolated and I could venture ever more deeply into the sensation of Darkness
Absolute. Destruction was my Beatrice.”
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