Charles Baudelaire, a life in writing

Abstract

Paradox is a way of being, at times a painful one: no poet's life illustrates this point more than Baudelaire's. Born with the richest constitution, endowed with the highest possible talent for writing, lucid to the point of near infallibility, this poet was at the same time not only a master of self-delusion, but also the craftsman of his mostly miserable existence. Reading his correspondence is an ordeal, so clear is the self-destructive leaning driving him again and again to place himself in impossible (financial) situations, which, in turn, bear heavily on his literary work. Such is the obsessive regularity with which Baudelaire creates for himself circumstances which he then vainly craves to escape from, that one comes finally to ask oneself if the need to despair doesn't belong to the very essence of his creative drive. Sartre's 1947 essay on Baudelaire, accusing the poet of 'mauvaise foi' (bad faith), recognises the paradox, but utterly fails to explain it. If Baudelaire's literary existence is to be described in terms of 'choice', surely it must be an unconscious one. Rather, if one wishes to apply Sartrean categories to Baudelaire, the notion of 'objective neurosis', as developed in the monumental biography of Flaubert, would be appropriate: it implies a parallel between the class contradictions in which, following Marxist analysis, a bourgeois would find himself and the personal constellation to which he owes his identity. Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821, the son of Francois Baudelaire, a former priest who had left the Church to work for the State, and of his wife Caroline Archenbaut Defayis, his junior by thirty-four years. The dominant fact of the poet’s youth was his father’s death in February 1827. It had at least a double consequence for his son: it lifted or lowered the barrier which any child must experience in his desire for independence and increased his possessiveness of his mother.