Baudelaire: Kinder Mischief

Baudelaire: Kinder Mischief

Lon Clay Hill, Jr.

[24 Aug 2019]

Abstract:
Beginning with a look at the “Negative Consequences of Dominating Guardians” on a Child’s Life, we then follow these considerations as we search for a deeper understanding of the ethical and aesthetic implications in appreciating the poetry of the all-to-human Charles Baudelaire as both an aesthetic corpus and as the testament of a lived-and-meaningful and therefore relevant life.

Note: This essay is the 4th essay in a series of essays that explore my own efforts to understand why many readers and critics believe that Charles Baudelaire has been the most important French poet of the modern era [roughly the past two centuries]. Indeed some critics and other artists consider him to be the most important Western poet of the modern era. Earlier essays have concentrated on a few older books that have been especially helpful for English speakers and readers who are not especially fluent in French. Future essays will concentrated on newer efforts and will also consider Baudelaire more directly as a creator of poems-to-be-heard. Essays in this series usually references to specific books and poems. This much shorter essay starts with a recognized fact: Charles Baudelaire had many struggles with himself and others during his life. We briefly elaborate how these struggles emerged and how-and-why they both affected and infected his work. The bibliography is quite sparse. Our first generic arguments (Principle #1 and its first corollary) are intended to speak for themselves — at least as rational possibilities. The implications of other tendered arguments are for readers to judge as they will.

CONTENTS:

Principle #1 — Adults seek to influence their children and guide them away from “mischief”
Corollary A. Negative Consequences of Dominating Guardians
Corollary B. Ameliorating and even Positive Responses to Overdominance
Exemplar: The Life and Work of Charles Baudelaire.
Three Touchstones of Baudelaire’s Life-and-Poetry
An Overbrief Bibliography

Principle #1 — Adults seek to influence their children and guide them away from “mischief”

All societies — and other groups which include a significant population of young children and/or teenagers within their purview — recognize in some fashion the thesis that:

(#1) Unsupervised, unattended and/or otherwise “idle” children are prone to “mischief” — behavior which may disturb adults &/or damage the children themselves or others.

This principle comes to the forefront with most toddlers (children who have just begun to walk) and continues thru their life as “minors”. After puberty, the actual manner of supervision exercised by adult parents, relatives, and other adults vary considerably with cultures, subgroups, and individual families. However, the population of incipient adults “normally” are differentiated by sexual “identity”. Indeed, occasionally groups of teenage boys may be specifically referred to as “gangs” whereas groups of teenage girls may be referred to as “cliques” [but are much less frequently labelled as “gangs”.

Author’s “Terms”: Terms such as “idle”, “mischief”, “minors”, “normally”, “identity”, “gangs” and “cliques” are the terms which I grew up with. Alternative analogues from readers own individual backgrounds and choices would presumably be favored by various readers.

Corollary A. Negative Consequences of Dominating Guardians

A significant corollary which both groups and individuals find easier to recognize in others than in themselves is the thesis that:

(A.) When parents and other authorities simply overlook &/or overrule the natural/normal/naive/legitimate sources within the individual child whose behavior wanders (deviates) from behavior which these guardians believe they are entitled to expect and require, the longterm consequences are inexorably harmful (destructive, negative, even disastrous).

There are, naturally, various complications. One, if a child who is naturally disposed to be obedient or compliant is forced to do something he/she does not wish to do, he or she may not complain or disobey in ways that the guardians recognize. In these instances, any notable negative consequences will emerge only later — sometimes only much later. Two, when a child is more inclined to question, to be rebellious, or merrly honest, conflicts may arise within a household or institution that mark those guardian-child relationships for years or lifetimes. Penultimately, all of these negative consequences are oddly and ultimately unpredictably and unevenly distributed between the erstwhile child, guardian, and outsiders. Behavior may be described by some, perhaps, as “troubled”, “disturbed”, “deviant”,  “sick”, “sinful”,“criminal”, “self-destructive” or any other number of terms which reflect both the individual’s behavior and the describer’s own perspective.

Corollary B. Ameliorating and even Positive Responses to Overdominance

The author & others believe and, sometimes, will “argue” that:

(B.) ALL is never lost. One of the wonders of human existence is that human beings sometimes emerge from extraordinarily difficult circumstances into a life where an abused minor makes significant contributions to those around them and to the common weal.

The actual lifetime responses of actual individuals to life’s difficulties are complicated beyond the resources of any human being to describe usefully except in inherently incomplete terms. Suffice it to say that the our own responses to various problems change with circumstances and with experiences which most of us can describe in only moderately consistent fashion. Furthermore, the gamut of responses varies from superlatively described zeniths [highest (“heavenmost”) exemplars of the mind, heart, spirit and soul, e.g., creative, inspired, foreseeing, genius, gifted, saintly, kind, loving, brave, prophetic, …] to those nadirs which drop into abysses inhabited by Hearts of Darkness within human selfs (egos, spirits, souls…).

Author’s Thoughts [“Wonders”]: I usually prefer — when I think there is a reasonable chance of being understood — to think that many of these wonders are actually small or large “miracles”. However, I am also aware that many reasonable and ethical humans believe that these wonders are more accurately described as inevitable oddities within an enormous universe governed by random “natural” processes. However, in this discussion I need the reader to concede (at least for purposes of discussion) that human beings experience as positive events and situations which are inexplicable in terms of any explanation which is less complicated than a 1 page proof in a calculus text or the book itself.

Exemplar: The Life and Work of Charles Baudelaire. Influences, Predispositions, Alchemy, and Despair from his Life which bleed into his Poetic Marvels (and Failures).

Charles Baudelaire’s life was marred by an early physical separation from his beloved mother soon after his father’s death when he was nearly 6 years old. Less than 2 years later his mother she remarried and he was soon dispatched to boarding school. In the rather conservative French Roman Catholic educational cultural enclaves where he received his formal education, Baudelaire was quite talented, solitary, a mischief maker, and sometimes quite resolute [“defiant” to his educational guardians]. He was expelled shortly before his expected graduation after swallowing some “prohibited” notes written by a fellow student.

Baudelaire’s subsequent behavior was all-too-frequently self-defeating. As a very young man (~20) he contracted syphilis after consorting with “loose” women at brothels and elsewhere. In time the syphilis became a primary contributor to his early death at age 46. Also, as young man he inherited a goodly sum after his stepfather’s death — and then proceeded to squander approximately one-third of his inheritance within a year. Consequently, his remaining funds were placed in an unusually tightly managed trust which contributed to his lifetime of poverty as an adult. During his last 25 years he was continually at war with his lovers (esp. Jeanne Duval), his mother, and others. His travails are represented in his poetry — produced in Baudelaire’s words by artistic “alchemy” which transmuted his “blood” into artistic gems and treasure. Some of Baudelaire’s favorite terms for describing his attitude towards the world are Spleen, Ennui, and Melancholia [terms appearing in his his signature work “Les Fleurs du mal” and elsewhere. At time he describes his frequent dives into sadness, desperation, and despair by an [inconsistently utilized] “Satanism” which in itself is an ill-disguised, dichotomized, and quite negative version of the already very conservative French Roman Catholicism of his educational guardians. This venue of Roman Catholicism was already overweighed by a theology of Original Sin characterized by a literal reading of the “Sins” of Adam and Eve. All of these matters were ingredients of the life of this premier poetic maestro.

However, I think it is quite clear that an approach that simply appreciates Baudelaire’s poetry as art for art’s sake and takes his self-descriptions as more or less accurate reflections of his actual aesthetic practice are being taken for a ride. Furthermore, such incomplete admiration does not represent the ethical relevance (in addition to the artistic merit) of Baudelaire’s poetry for an audience that does not live in an aesthetic bubble. [Granted that other audiences may very well inhabit their own cultural “bubbles”]. Baudelaire’s shallow dips and deep dives into sadness and pain are frequently partially not only affected by his personal travails (his “Douleur”), in some instances they are infected by maudlin self-pity, masochism, and audience-directed entreaties tinged with mendacity. Baudelaire struggled with his despair and was often able, somewhat inconsistently, to rise above that despair. However, I would argue that Baudelaire was a great and at times premier poet for reasons that transcended his own ability or the ability of many of his most fervent admirers to articulate.

Three Touchstones of Baudelaire’s Life-and-Poetry [Master Wordsmith, Musical Tonality, Witness]

I believe that the three most important characteristics that made Baudelaire an excellent poet and, sometimes, a/the premier maestro of “Western” poetry of the past two centuries are:

(1.) Baudelaire was a premier sensorial wordsmith.— His abilities to simultaneously describe (and use as metaphors and symbols) the nuances of our experienced world (smell, touch, hearing, sight…) are almost unmatched among poets and other writers.
[Among his admirers there is an almost uniform appreciation for this Baudelaire hallmark — and I am happy to join the chorus.]

(2.) Baudelaire’s poem express a lovely musical tonality. This tonal ambience has been noted by others much more sensitive to musical nuance than I. This quality of his work has also been articulated by others far much more talented than I to describe these musical features. His admirers include artists of all stripes — painters, musicians, novelists, other poets, etc. Furthermore, one simple fact speaks even more to this issue than the very useful commentary by other artists. A number of Baudelaire’s poems have spurred and inspired musical work creations by renown composers. Debussy’s Cinq Poèmes comes immediately to mind.

[I would only stress here that even when the announced theme of a Baudelairean poem is consistently pessimistic, the actual poem as heard is much more soothing than the poem’s written text standing alone. Two poems which illustrate this principle are Á celle qui est trop gaie (A young beauty is reminded that the yawning grave awaits) and La Vie Antérieure (A poet fanned by naked slaves is still entrapped in a secret douleur.)]

(3.) The “narrator” of Baudelaire’s poems is usually some embodiment of the poet himself — an artist, a king, a dandy, a wounded bird, or simply “the narrator”.  This narrator is never a mechanical recorder — he is always an existential and interested witness. This witness may be watching, listening, and smelling as well as “Speaking” — but he is a witness. His own motives, however, are quite disparate — and they are usually displayed in various tensions between the  poems “facts”, the poem’s “narrative” and the poem’s audible “tonality.” It is the combination which makes the poem. One word that marks a special quality in Baudelaire’s poetry which he himself rarely uses is the word misercordia, the Latin word used in Roman Catholicism which is often best rendered in English as “mercy” or “compassion” and, perhaps, most clearly displayed in poems such as L’Albatross, Le Cygne, and Confession. This compassion is not always on full display — but even in his more pessimistic poems of the night, various outcasts (tired workers, poorly paid servants, old whores, exhausted lovers) in the background remind us that Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have declared that his message was directed towards those who “the good and the just” have chosen to scorn. Occasionally, however, for whatever reasons [frustration, despair …?], Baudelaire strikes me as having dropped into a truly black hole of the spirit. His Abel et Caîn strikes me as a dead-end — while exquisitely worded there is little if any tension, there is no fire! Abel et Caîn might be an interesting “product” had it been produced by Hal, the Robot of 2001. The poem Femmes Damnées (Delphine and Hippolyta) is, to my mind, an even darker descent into the lowest realms of Purgatory. After describing in great detail and with implicit praise the passions of the younger of two lesbians (Delphine), the “narrator” jumps into the Abyss by injecting the words of some internal “Grand Inquisitor of the Mind” [my words, not Baudelaire’s] to justify the eternal damnation of the two women. To insist that the “Beauty” of this poem is not disfigured by this rote condemnation is as foolish as to believe that “children in cages” are consistent with the democratic aspirations of the USA as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address and embodied in the Statue of Liberty. There is a reason why almost nothing of artistic value was produced by the Nazi’s (The poetry of the Fascist forerunner, Stephan George, could be considered an exception) or by Communists within the Soviet Ideological Spell (East Germany’s Bertolt Brecht would be a rare exception). And, I would argue, it is simply not true that Baudelaire’s personal foibles do not tinge the “beauty” of his poems.

In summary, I argue, then that the combination of verbal craftsmanship, rhythmical musical stress and assonance, and a narrative often inconsistently reflecting the reality of his often painful life allowed Charles Baudelaire to produce some wonderfully beautiful poems — as well as many good and excellent poems, prose-poems, and aesthetic essays. However, a few of his poems were so marred by his all-too-human weaknesses that — however, well-worded and psychologically interesting they may be — they are aesthetically mediocre at best.

I would not expect anyone with different taste, experiences, and weltanschauung to necessarily agree with me on any particular major of minor point of this essay. However, I do believe that we should follow those principles of “Archaeological” psychology articulated by Michel Foucault (namely that the nexus between a man or a woman’s life and work is always important and deserves examination). There are too many loose strands in the record for us to simply assert that we can “simply” appreciate an artist’s work such as Baudelaire without regard to the person’s existential engagement with his/her outside environment and the struggles within the person’s soul. [Work by Walter Kaufman on the gifted philosopher (and sometime poet), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche provides us a good example of how a biographically sensitive commentator can help us to better appreciate the philosophical importance of a philosopher. Likewise, likewise a biographically sensitive commentator could also help us to better understand the genuine merits of an artist-such-as-Baudelaire’s work and its relevance for our lives.]


Supplemental Note
A Biographically “infected” Poem: Specimen#1 — Bénédiction.
 
In actual fact, Baudelaire’s tortured relationship with his mother took many turns. A full study of letters between mother and son and relevant documents would place some real constraints on the implications in his poetry for understanding their relationship. Baudelaire’s frequent reference to strong, implacable female idols seem to be born — in large part by relationships to both his mother and his consort of many years, Jeanne Duval. Nevertheless, the total fury expressed in the poem Bénédiction is on its face dominated by palpable and ferocious Rage. In this poem, the mother of the “poet” shakes her fist at God and soon “prepares herself in the depths of Gehenna the auto-da-fé sacred to maternal crime” [Waldrop translation.] One can and should, of course, note that the artist is not to be literally confused with his poetic creation. However, in this instance, one wonders just who is in Hell (Gehenna). And, furthermore, this is one of those situations when one would not be terribly surprised if the author stepped out of his book and revealed himself to be the perpetrator of an equivalent crime. More precisely, we can certainly believe that there are more than likely a number of terrible nightmares born of actual painful events which generated the imagery.

Brief Bibliography [6 books].

The 7 cited poems can be found in several of the flowing sources. In fact, one can find all the poems in either the 1964 selection by Fowlie or the 2006 translations by Waldrop. However, I would recommend the Fowlie 1964 selection [or its 1991 republication] as an initial starting point for those who want to both get a sense of the text and to begin to understand Baudelaire’s French. The 1991 Cosby “translations” are superb for getting the sense and the verve of Baudelaire. They are, however, quite properly labelled as “renderings” by the author— they are independent poems in English which attempt to translate the sense-&-tone of Baudelaire’s poems [rather than look for the “closest” individual words].    

Charles Baudelaire (1955). The Flowers of Evil: A Selection. Marthiel & Jackson Mathews, Editors. New Directions: New York, New York. 186 pages, paper . [53 poems w. facing English translations; some notes on translators]

Charles Baudelaire (1964). Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies by Charles Baudelaire. Wallace Fowlie, Editor & Translator. Bantam Books: New York. 299 pages, paper [=xiii + 291]. [52 poems, 14 prose poems, prose (essays, reviews, letters…) w. facing English translations.]

Charles Baudelaire (1968). Baudelaire. Francis Scarfe, Editor & Translator. Penguin Books: Middlesex, England; Baltimore, MD, USA.  282 pages, paper. [143 poems w. smaller print plain English translations below.]

Charles Baudelaire (1991). The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen. William H. Crosby, Translator-&-Editor. BOA Editions, Ltd: Rochester, NY, USA. 510 pages, paper.

Charles Baudelaire (1963,1964,1992). Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies [Dover Dual Language]. Wallace Fowlie, Editor & Translator. Dover Publications: New York. 291 pages, paper. [Baudelaire (1964) republication w. minor alterations]

Charles Baudelaire (2006). The Flowers of Evil. Keith Waldrop, Translator-&-Editor. Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, CT, USA. 221 pages. [English only]

Poems Cited: Á celle qui est trop gaie; Abel et Caîn; Bénédiction; Confession; Femmes Damnées; L’Albatross;  Le Cygne;