Hemmings - Baudelaire the damned: a biography

A
Biography

F.W.J. Hemmings

En somme, je crois que ma vie a t damne ds le commencement, et quelle lest pour toujours. (Letter from Baudelaire to his mother, December 4th, 1854)

Except among a few small and disregarded sects, damnation in the primitive sense of the word has today become an obsolete concept. We have to go back to the Elizabethans to find a time when it still kept its full force and meaning, and it always requires a certain effort to see things as those distant forefathers of ours saw them. If it were not that Hamlet has now become so familiar and hallowed a text, we might well think the hero slightly freakish to refrain from despatching the King when he could, for no other reason than that Claudius happens to be at his prayers when the Prince comes upon him. Hamlet wants to be revenged not just here in Denmark but in the hereafter too; so he will wait a more convenient moment, when his uncle is

about some act
That has no relish of salvation int:
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven;
And that his soul may be as damned, and black,
As hell, whereto it goes.

Similarly, it is only by a conscious adjustment that we can accept what Marlowes contemporaries had no difficulty in believing, which was that once Faustus had struck his bargain with Mephistopheles and once the forfeit fell due, nothing could save him from being damned perpetually.

Two centuries of progress and enlightenment supervened before Goethe turned back to the Faust legend which Marlowe had presented in all its medieval simplicity. For Goethe, it was too crude, and he sidestepped the issue of damnation; even though the Devil wins his wager, Faust is let off having to pay. The notion of a beneficent Deity allowing eternal torment to be inflicted on His own creatures, however disobedient and rebellious, was more than nineteenth-century liberals could stomach.

But Baudelaire was not a nineteenth-century liberal; indeed, to many of his contemporaries, including one suspects Flaubert, he appeared as something of a throwback: regressive in his moral outlook, however modern he may have been in other respects - in his aesthetic insights, for instance. It is impossible not to be struck, as one reads him, by the frequency of his use of the word damnation and its cognates; the sentence we have picked as epigraph is simply the most memorable instance that can be found in his writings: In short, I believe that my life has been damned from the beginning, and that it is damned forever.

We notice that Baudelaire does not call himself damned, but only his life; his biographer has to explain how this life came to be damned, but need not take into account the possibility that he who lived that life was and is now among the company of the damned. There is little evidence that Baudelaire seriously visualized the afterlife in conventional terms of heaven and hell, and even if he did, it is most unlikely that he would have imagined hell quite as Dante imagined it or Wyndham Lewis. As to the kind of existence reserved for humanity beyond the grave, he kept an open mind; he was curious about it, and curiously hopeful; had it been otherwise, had he seriously entertained the notion of a Catholic God sitting in judgement on the souls of the departed, no doubt he would have embraced again, before his death, the faith that he lost in his late teens. But he did believe very firmly that certain lives are damned on this earth and that his was one of these.

In the first of these beliefs he came close to what one imagines must have been, to judge by the tenor of some of his more important tragedies, the viewpoint of Jean Racine, though Racine was not an author whom Baudelaire studied closely or esteemed very highly. For Racine deals in charmed lives - charmed, however, not by some kindly spirit but by a hostile outside force which, irrespective of the struggles of his heroines, Queen Phaedra or Queen Athaliah, to suppress the wayward urgings of their natures or deflect the remorseless course of history, overcomes all their efforts. Some there are that have not grace, and are in this sense damned. The affinities between Baudelaires philosophy of life and the doctrines of Jansenism that so deeply marked Racine are so remarkable that attempts have even been made to prove that Baudelaire received, through his father, a Jansenist upbringing. The evidence, however, is too tenuous for the theory to be seriously considered.

Damnation in this sense implies predestination, and sometimes there is little that separates the two ideas, except of course that the first always leads to misfortune and misery, whereas the second can lead to greatness and glory. In a passage of his important monograph on the illustrator Constantin Guys, Baudelaire tells a story he claims to have heard from one of his friends, an artist of repute whom he does not name but who might have been Manet. When he was very small, he used to be present when his father was performing his morning ablutions; on these occasions he would contemplate, in stupor mingled with rapture, the muscles in the arms, the gradual shading of the colour of the skin from pink to yellow, and the bluish network of the veins. The images of the external world were already filling him with admiration and taking hold of his mind. Forms were already obsessing and possessing him. Predestination was prematurely showing the tip of its nose. His damnation was already accomplished. It is Baudelaire who italicizes the word.

Here damnation can almost be equated with vocation, and it might be objected that Baudelaire is straining the meaning of the word, or trivializing it. However, in his century it was almost a commonplace that a vocation for art or poetry was inseparable from moral suffering and only too often entailed desperate material privation as well. The concept of le pote maudit was given wide currency by Verlaine in the 1880s but had really been launched fifty-years earlier by Alfred de Vigny in a semi-fictional, semi-historical work entitled Stello. In this book Vigny tells the life stories of three poets, all of whom died young and in wretched or infamous circumstances: of sickness (Laurent Gilbert), of the fatal dose of laudanum that he took to escape a humiliating fate (Thomas Chatterton), and on the scaffold, sentenced for the political crime of having lampooned the Jacobins (Andr Chnier). The moral Vigny draws from his triple apologue is that no matter how society is constituted, whether the form of government is an absolute monarchy, an oligarchy, or a revolutionary committee, the poet invariably suffers.

He suffers, however, as Vigny argues, not because he is damned (which would imply persecution on a cosmic scale), but because he is an outcast, a pariah, an object of suspicion to men in power. The romantics thought that society had no room for the poet - although, curiously, there never was a period in France when writers were better represented in the corridors of power; the careers of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Hugo go a long way to disproving Vignys thesis. Whatever the truth of it, and even though he quoted Stello approvingly and found in Poe a fourth instance to add to Vignys trilogy, Baudelaire did not feel that Vigny had got to the heart of the matter. It might be indeed that the poet tended to be misunderstood and undervalued by society, but that was a relatively trivial irritation. The poet was damned, with a private damnation that had nothing to do with public reprobation, and Baudelaire needed only to consider his own case to be convinced of this. From the moment of his conception to the hour when he drew his last breath, every circumstance conspired against him: his ancestry was tainted, his birth unlucky, his parents and teachers persecuted him, his mistress betrayed him; he was racked by disease and his neuroticism made him miserable; he lost his money or, worse, it was placed in the hands of a snuffling man of the law who doled him out a starvation allowance; his works, when they appeared, were misunderstood, condemned as pornographic. Finally he had to flee his own country, and in solitary exile was struck down by the paralysis that robbed him of the power of speech and in which he dragged out miserably the few remaining months of his life before dying at the age of forty-six.