The Lonely Rebel

As happened with Byron in English literature, so Baudelaire fulfils a symbolic role in modern thought – either as a Promethean hero, one who snatched fire from the caverns of the unconscious mind, or as a diabolist, an enigmatic monster who combined extraordinary depravity with unusual literary powers. Undoubtedly Baudelaire’s own writings, Manichaean in their religious tendency, have fostered both myths. He was greatly preoccupied with the situation of the artist as a dedicated rebel; he explored the disorder of the senses brought about by orgiastic sexual experience and drug addiction; he tended to dramatise his own conflicts on a cosmological scale.

One could (and many critics do) all too easily accept the dramatic mask of the poems as a true self-portrait. Therefore it is very salutary to read this wide selection of Baudelaire’s letters, in which the man emerges, lucid, unhappy, solitary to an extreme, yet possessing deep affections and loyalties. Hispage 348 torments of self-accusation and melancholia, induced it seems much more by ill health and financial difficulties than by the immediate effect of women or opium, are heavy reading. They resemble some of the terrible last letters of Dylan Thomas. One cannot help asking – Need this gifted writer have undergone such miseries for the lack of a few hundred pounds?

Like Dylan Thomas, Baudelaire was a leaner, a man who retained the deep dependence of childhood. His letters to his mother express the uneasy, ambivalent dependence; and it may well be that his disturbed relation to the Church stemmed from the same source. But in that very area where his conduct has come under most fire, his relation to his mistress, Jeanne Duval, he shows himself no egocentric dandy, but a mature lover of heroic generosity, supporting her in illness, forgiving her frequent unfaithfulness. It is a heart- warming record, though often horrifying in its detail. The annals of literary failure and success, the anecdotes of fastidious flirtings with blue-stockinged empresses of the salon, seem trivial in comparison.

1958 (176)