A genuine god in distress
Christopher Hampton
SELECTED LETTERS OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: THE CONQUEST OF SOLITUDE translated and edited by Rosemary Lloyd
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, f17.95
Vhy shouldn't I take a day off and forget about everything? Tonight I'll do in a single burst of activity everything that's urgent. And then night falls, the mind is horrified at all the things that are overdue; a crushing sense of sorrow renders you Powerless to do anything and the following day it's the same . . .' Such feelings of panic and despair are, God knows, familiar enough to writers. Even George Orwell, a notoriously industrious author, was sus- ceptible to them and wrote in the last year of his life that 'there has literally not been one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job and that my total output was miserably small.' In Orwell's case this was of course an illusion: but it is probably the most painful feature of Rosemary Lloyd's selec- tion of Baudelaire's letters, a book throb- bing with misery, that the accumulation of evidence provided by a defendant patheti- cally eager to condemn himself is in the end simply overwhelming. Like the luck- less hero of one of the Poe stories he translated so exquisitely, Baudelaire looks on appalled and helpless at the disastrous unfurling of a catastrophic life, which happens to be his own, and at the inexor- able putrefaction of what he calls 'my wound, my great wound', namely his total inability to stop wasting time. The tone of the letters is admirably consistent. The first, written when he was ten, contains a description of a sunset over mountains 'as blue as the deepest pair of trousers'; and the first to his mother and stepfather, from his dreary private school in Lyons, speaks of his 'invincible tendency towards laziness': and there is nothing in the succeeding pages which does not speak of a man of remarkable talent and sensitiv- ity paralysed by a series of debilitating inhibitions and imprisoned in a cunningly- wrought system of concentric vicious cir- cles.
There is nothing so bad in these letters that it cannot get worse. Thus the suicide note to Narcisse Ancelle, the hapless lawyer appointed to supervise Baudelaire's chaotic finances, is painful enough CI am killing myself without any sense of sorrow') in a young man of 24: but more than 15 years after the bungled suicide attempt, we find him explaining to his publisher, Au- guste Poulet-Malassis, that the only thing now restraining him from suicide is a pride which will not permit him to leave behind so many debts. A letter to his mother (his principal correspondent, a fact desolating in itself) begs for money so that he can afford to leave his mulatto mistress, Jeanne Duval Ca creature who has no admiration for one, . . . who would throw one's manuscripts on the fire if that brought in more money than publishing them'): but four years later, when she leaves him, he confesses to his mother that 'I'll always miss that woman . . . my only distraction, my only pleasure, my only companion' and now dreads 'endless years of loneliness and hazards. And nothing for the heart.'
Eventually even those previously unac- quainted with Baudelaire's life (and this book is not perhaps the place to start) will begin to anticipate: 'I've formed the firm resolution of installing myself at Honfleur and hope to do so at the beginning of February' (it will be a year before he succeeds in getting to Honfleur); `Poulet- Malassis is fired with the desire to print your admirable pamphlet' (his publisher is about to go bankrupt); 'if by a miracle . . . I were to succeed, it would give you immense joy' (his candidature for the Academie Frangaise is a humiliating fias- co); 'for many years I've dreamed of finding a man . . . who would be good enough to concern himself with my literary affairs' (he chooses an agent not only incompetent and dishonest, but actually obstructive); and, finally, 'I don't want to return to France until I can do so in glory' (he is only brought back to Paris to die, having suffered a stroke in Brussels which leaves him incapable of saying anything other than the two words `sacre nom'). The only surprising feature of his decline is how spectacularly it exceeds even his own blackest fears.
Rosemary Lloyd's edition carries a short but informative introduction, a chronology and an index. Her translation is clear and unobtrusive and her notes are useful, but of a brevity, not to say austerity, which assumes the reader has some familiarity with her subject. And indeed some fami- liarity would seem to be advisable. To take an example not entirely at random, Baude- laire refuses to write, in 1857, a piece on Crebillon fils, on the grounds that he's having enough trouble writing an essay on Laclos, an essay, Miss Lloyd informs us, which was never completed. What she doesn't tell us or assumes that we know is that Baudelaire's half-dozen pages of scrappy notes are probably the most elo- quent and suggestive of all the thousands of pages ever written about Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Miss Lloyd rightly concedes in her introduction that Baudelaire was not, like Flaubert, one of the great letter- writers: but if one agrees, as I do, with Rimbaud (a man sparing in his praise) that Baudelaire was 'the king of poets, a genuine God', these letters, however sobering, cannot fail to be deeply fascinat- ing, although their Dostoyevskian despera- tion put me continually in mind of Samuel Beckett's harsh version of one of Baude- laire's most resonant lines: 'You CRIED for night; it FALLS: now cry in darkness.'
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