Baudelaire's Ennobling Revulsion
Baudelaire was the greatest poet of the capitalist epoch. Does anybody
doubt this? You would have to search for a reputable critic who would
disagree today. And yet — my God! what a wretched fellow he was.
Anybody unfamiliar with the subject would be sure the Hyslops had
rigged an invidious selection of his letters. [Baudelaire, a Self
****trait. Selected Letters, translated and edited by Lois Boe Hyslop
and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr., Oxford University Press.] They haven't
done so, yet this hundred, chosen from about a thousand that survive,
not only show him in a bad light, they never, never at all, show him
in a good one. It was unlucky for Baudelaire that his mother saved all
his letters to her. He never wrote her a decent letter and he wrote
plenty. They are all dishonest. If he is not begging her for money, he
is trying to trick her out of it by the most transparent devices and
lies. He lies about his business affairs. He lies about his love
affairs. Always he picks at the scabs of his ulcerating oedipus
complex. It is all very disgusting.
His letters to his friends are mostly concerned with literary
log-rolling and wire-pulling. Again and again he wheedles
Sainte-Beuve. Again and again he is snubbed. Precisely because he was
the kind of man his letters reveal him to be, he was not the sort that
Sainte-Beuve, that slightly seedy bon vivant, could take seriously. He
tells his guardian he will beat him up. He stages a fake suicide. He
never, not once, has a genuinely good word, never an honest one, to
say for his mistress, Jeanne. At the end, she vanishes, blind, sick,
and crippled. She may have been pretty bad — perverted and totally
masochistic himself, Baudelaire doubtless picked quite a freak — but
she put up with him for twenty years, a job which might have revolted
his guardian angel. Certainly it was not for his money, because she
got very little, and in her young days at least had plenty of
op****tunity to do better elsewhere. His love letters to other women
are absurd; the scorned and beseeching lover of a tenth-rate
provincial melodrama. Altogether he manages to put up an even worse
front than his master, Poe.
What was great about this man? He wasn't even bad, but "delinquent,"
like an incorrigible, ****fty, not very bright child of ten. However
powerful and original his published criticism of painting and letters,
in his correspondence when he writes of ideas, of literature, of art,
he seldom rises above the level of a scrapbook of demoralized
adolescence. Poe's Eureka may read like the philosophizing of Amory
Blaine, but Baudelaire does not even reach these heights. It has been
said that he admired Poe so much because he couldn't understand
English. To judge by the letters, it was because he couldn't
understand Poe. French or English, it all seemed very deep stuff to
Baudelaire. Then, too, it was profitable. He seems to have made more
money off his Poe translations than from anything else he did — at
last to sell the entire copyright for a pittance. Why was this man one
of the world's greatest writers? That is the hardest of all critical
questions to answer.
In a sense it is the fundamental critical question. It must be
answered just right. The slightest confusion leads to aesthetic and
moral nonsense. Catullus is a great writer. Céline is a great writer.
Genêt is not a "writer" at all — he is a social do***ent. ****ography
is not enough. Evil living is not enough. Demoralization is not
enough. Of course, everybody knows that Baudelaire was great because
of the magnificence of his style. But what does this mean? Here of all
places the style is the man. There is something that doesn't meet the
****d eye. For the poetry to possess such grandeur, the man must have
had it too. The qualities of his poetry are obvious enough to everyone
but T.S. Eliot. Most of them are included in his own aesthetic of
"dandyism." They are maximum tension, achieved by all sorts of means,
but especially by dynamic contrasts of both style and material — the
well-known use of classical rhythmic inflections in a fiercely ironic
sense is a good example. Mr. Eliot took this at face value. Of course
the point is that Baudelaire uses the heroic hysterics of Racine to
mock his own predicament. The Action Française nonsense about his
Catholicism is a similar error. Religion for Baudelaire is a kind of
sultry farce. The Mass is a travesty of the Black Mass, rather than
the other way around.
Another characteristic of Baudelaire is his overpowering gravity. Poe
is always frivolous. Baudelaire is always in deadly, terrifying
earnest. The motte of his mistress, the hallucinatory streets of Paris
in the autumn evening, "lit with prostitutes," the s****y hiss of
taffeta petticoats, the stale sweat of poverty and lust, everything is
given the life and death significance of an induced paranoia. And the
verse echoes this mortal concern. Through it all beats the measuring
out of ultimate crisis, the tones of his cloche fêlée. Compare them
with the bell strokes of [Tennyson's] In Memoriam and you sense
instantly the difference between the pathos of sentiment and the
pathos of total tragedy.
Even so hasty a characterization makes apparent what it is that makes
Baudelaire great. Homer was as professionalized as an acrobat. Butler
thought Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey. Certainly Homer never stood on the
walls of Troy beside his infant son and resolved within his own heart
the ruin of all bright things. He let other men do it for him. His job
was to record the acts of heroes. So too with Aeschylus and Sophocles.
With the arrest of industrial and commercial civilization at the level
of the French Restoration, French official culture disintegrated into
a congeries of lies, like a heap of evil jackstraws. The only heroes
society has to offer are confidence men. Where the poet preserves an
awareness of his prophetic responsibility, where he insists that
poetry still is a symbolic criticism of values, he is forced to become
his own tragic hero. Society can only provide the cast for bitter
comedy — Jonson's Volpone, Machiavelli's Mandragola. What is the
nineteenth-century novel, from Balzac or even Choderlos de Laclos, but
the representation of this malignant mockery? Anyone who pretends to
mount and manage the fall of Agamemnon or the parting of Titus and
Berenice in terms of the coming century and a half of revolutions
betrayed is a self-convicted fraud.
It sounds glib to say that Baudelaire embodies within himself the
"contradictions of capitalism," as though he was a sort of ambulatory
Falling Rate of Profit. Perhaps it can all be traced back to
economics, but the tragedy of the modern world, the metaphysical
horror, the Social Lie, the World Ill, these are catch phrases masking
total moral breakdown, the alienation of man from his work, from his
fellows, and from himself. Organized society in our epoch simply has
nothing good about it. It is deadly fraud from start to finish. We are
so used to it that we forget, or we never face, what writers like
Veblen, or Riesman, or Wright Mills mean in actual human terms.
Baudelaire or Céline face the monster all the time. They can never
forget for an instant. The horrors of a world where man is wolf to man
struggle all through every moment in the very bloodstream, like
leukemia.
Does this mean that, as the Marxists used to say, all great writers of
the past two centuries have been revolutionaries, conscious or
unconscious? Certainly not. Such a notion only reveals the lack of
what the Russians, in signs warning you not to spit in the subway,
call "culture." Léon Blum had a career and a program; Céline had a
life and a work of art. Leon Trotsky said that, long ago, in the best
thing he ever wrote. In the final showdown, all our revolutions have
turned out to be careers for some and programs for others. The stuff
of life, of art, is not only vaster far than all programs and careers,
it is the material of a different qualitative world altogether.
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus could ennoble and purify the Greek
community in ways that we can hardly realize — however well we may
understand them. The hero, Baudelaire, enables us to endure a
predicament we understand only too well with at least some kind of
dignity. It is, in fact, a very considerable dignity, greater than can
be comprehended in the term "Dandy" unless we want to give it the very
special connotation he gave it — the meaning of tragic hero of the
modern metropolis. But there is none of this dignity in the letters;
just the terrible fires of shame out of which that dignity was forged.
We can pity; but as Yeats said, the poetry is not the pity.
KENNETH REXROTH
1957
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This essay — a review of a collection of Baudelaire's letters —
originally appeared in The Nation (20 July 1957). It was reprinted in
Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays (New Directions, 1959). Copyright
1959. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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