Books: Cultivated Hysteria

INTIMATE JOURNALS OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (128 pp.)—Translafed by Christopher Isherwood, introduction by W.H. Auden—Marcel Rodd ($3).

Something of Baudelaire is in every present-day neurotic whose longing for escape leads to lost weekends and the psychiatric ward. Baudelaire’s own lost weekend lasted more than 20 years, but instead of cracking up, he never gave way finally to despair. In fact, he became its almost contemptuous familiar. The random reflections of his Intimate Journals reveal more than the great lyric poet of Fleurs du Mal (1857); they show the nature of the man who somehow dodged the inexorable shooting-down of the fugitive. The Intimate Journals, self-pitying and frequently obscure as they are, are nonetheless a document of man’s search for his soul.

Baudelaire’s parents tried to check his dissipations and steer him into a commercial career, but succeeded only in drawing him from respectability into the Latin Quarter. He was soon living in wild extravagance with a “saucer-eyed” mulatto prostitute and seeking in absinthe and opium an antidote to what he considered the horrors of the Steam Age. He was, he wrote, a victim of “Acedia, the malady of monks,” the deadly weakness of the will which leads to sloth and idleness. He fought against it with terror, filled his Journals with resolves to “work like a madman.”

Despite debauchery and the misery of mounting debts, he worked with a jeweler’s patience on his “poetry of departure.” Instead of honor and recognition, his Fleurs du Mal brought him ignominy, and a court order suppressing six of the poems as obscene. Five years later came the crisis in his long descent towards damnation; on Jan. 23, 1862, he wrote, “I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror . . . and today I have received a singular warning. I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.” Baudelaire was dying slowly of syphilis.

In a fine introduction W. H. Auden says, “The last few pages in My Heart Laid Bare, which follow this entry, are some of the most terrifying and pathetic passages in literature. They present a man fighting against time to eradicate a life time’s habits of thought and feeling, and set himself in order and acquire a history. . . . To the eye of nature, he was too late. As he spoke, the bird stooped and struck. But, to the eye of the spirit, we are entitled to believe he was in time — for, though the spirit needs time, an instant of it is enough.”

Christopher Isherwood calls Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals “a warning and an inspiration to us all” and pays them the tribute of an excellent translation.