Anatomy of Addiction

By Melvin Maddocks

BAUDELAIRE: PRINCE OF CLOUDS by ALEX DE JONGE 240 pages. Paddington Press. $10.95.

Young Charles Baudelaire set out to shock the middle class and, alas, succeeded. One hundred and ten years after his death the author of the first body of modern poetry, Les Fleurs du Mai, is customarily remembered as the original Bad Boy Artist.

Thanks to Manet's etchings and a few haunting daguerreotypes, the poet's face is more familiar than his work. Eyes: piercing and "as brilliant as drops of coffee," to borrow Baudelaire's own phrase. Face: as angled with cutting edges as an ascetic on a fast. Mouth: mocking and self-mocking, with lips shaped for sneers and blasphemies. Dress: black with dazzling white shirt and pale pink gloves--Satan as dandy. Add a setting (thick carpets, low lights, leather volumes of the more decadent Latin poets, the fragrance of hashish everywhere, a black girl coming out of the bedroom like Venus rising from the sea) and voila: the essential Baudelaire myth.

The hand-tinted legend has displaced the coruscating verse--a fault, says this terse, canny biography, of the poet himself. According to Alex de Jonge, a Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford, Les Fleurs du Mai is "Pilgrim 's Progress in reverse," and so was Baudelaire's life.

At 21 Charles inherited a modest fortune of 100,000 francs, roughly the equivalent of $100,000 today. In a year and a half he had squandered half of it. Through a court order his mother appointed a financial guardian of what was left, and for the remainder of his short life--23 more years--Baudelaire was legally a minor who spent more ink on wheedling letters to Maman than he did on poetry.

Two years before he died, Charles computed that he had earned only 15,982 francs and 60 centimes from more than two decades of scribbling. The reigning critic of the day, Sainte-Beuve, referred to Baudelaire as a translator and journalist rather than a poet. Small wonder the writer identified himself with that other 19th century comet, Edgar Allan Poe ("not a kindred spirit but a twin"), whose work he introduced to France. Indeed, Baudelaire made more money from his Poe translations than from his own poems, essays of self-scrutiny (Intimate Journals) and art criticism (The Painter of Modern Life).

Black Venus. In the areas of personal consolation, reports de Jonge, the self-styled Prince of Clouds did no better. "He had acquaintances but no friends," observed one acquaintance. For 19 years Charles sporadically lived with Jeanne Duval, his "Black Venus," an actress of little distinction but a first-class nag--the last person to appreciate the extraordinary poems she inspired, like The Promises of a Face. More briefly a "White Venus" entered his life: Apollonie Sabatier, a famous salon keeper of the day. She elicited a series of poetic love letters--including To She Who Is Too Gay and The Spiritual Dawn. When, after five years, Apollonie wrote him a valentine, Baudelaire cut and ran. He could put a woman on a pedestal or in the gutter, but there was no middle ground. "I have odious prejudices about women," he confessed.

Was his sexual behavior a consequence of syphilis acquired in youth? Possibly, says de Jonge, but Madame Baudelaire was a more likely cause. Charles, an only child, adored her to distraction. His career as a long-distance sensualist began with the click of her jewelry, the textures of her silks and satins, the perfume from her furs. He wrote of "the green paradise of infant love," defining genius as "childhood rediscovered at will." Underneath the mask of decadence, the prematurely aging face with its repertoire of grimaces, was a youth of retarded innocence, a closet Dorian Gray.

The biography accurately describes Les Fleurs du Mai as an "anatomy of addiction"--of men and women hooked on drugs, alcohol and every variation of sex. Baudelaire himself drank to the brink of alcoholism and took 150 drops a day of laudanum--twice the dose fatal to a nonaddict. Yet the drug Baudelaire was most addicted to was hope: luxe, calme et volupte--the elegance of Islamic paradise, a Christian's heavenly peace and a pagan bliss of the senses. Baudelaire chanted of this blessed trinity while he suffered the diseases of the age: poverty, rage and soul-withering ennui.

How alive are his incantations today? In 1857, the same year Flaubert was prosecuted for the alleged obscenity of Madame Bovary, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs for "offending public morality" with Les Fleurs du Mai. The theme of Flaubert's novel--the bored-to-adultery housewife--is the stuff soap operas are made of 120 years later. Today, Baudelaire's tragically ignored poems retain their original capacity to lacerate the skin of the mind.

His greatest poem, "Voyage," in a brilliant translation by Robert Lowell, concludes: "Only when we drink poison are we well--/ we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,/ to drown in the abyss--heaven or hell,/ who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new."

Those lines are a prophetic summary of the modern temper; small wonder that Wallace Stevens wrote of Baudelaire, "His stanzas hang like hives in hell." It is to be hoped that Alex de Jonge's book will help to dispel the poet's legend and resurrect his verse for a wider audience. But that hope, too, may be a drug. In which case, Baudelaire still wins, screaming over the gulf of a century: "Hypocrite lecteur--mon semblable --mon frere!" (Hypocrite reader--my double--my brother!). Melvin Maddocks

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