Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (16 page)

Are novelists “nicer” than poets? Flaubert, who sought objectivity in art, who proclaimed the necessary invisibility of the author, who declared in 1879 that “giving the public details about oneself is a bourgeois temptation that I have always resisted,” has despite all this been thoroughly investigated since his death and found to be a generally noble and genial fellow. Baudelaire, whose art is soaked in egotism, whose poetry gave the public details about himself ceaselessly, and who longed for the caress of fame, has been no less thoroughly investigated and turns out to be a deluded heap of spleen, lassitude, and self-pity, obsessed with the blot inflicted on his honour at the age of twenty-three when his financial affairs were (very wisely) taken out of his own hands, never to be returned.

Their differing attitudes to literary glory are instructive. At the time of
Les Fleurs du mal,
Baudelaire drew a caricature of himself gazing at a bag of gold flying towards him on a large pair of wings. He longed, he wrote to his mother in 1861, to know “some degree of security, of glory, of contentment with myself” (it is an odd triple wish: two modest, normal ambitions, and one extreme one; but then glory, like freedom, is indivisible). In a rather oddly phrased comment, perhaps suffering the contortion of envy, the poet refers to “Gustave Flaubert … who has so strangely achieved glory at his first attempt.” Compare the following encounter between Louise Colet and Flaubert. One day, under the trees at Mantes, she told him that she wouldn't exchange the happiness she was feeling even for the glory of Corneille. It was intended, no doubt, as a harmless, flattering lover's phrase, but it riled Flaubert: “If you knew,” he later wrote to her, “how those words shocked me, how they chilled me to the very marrow of my bones. Glory! Glory! What is glory? It is nothing. A mere noise, the external accompaniment of the joy Art gives; ‘The glory of Corneille’ indeed! But—to
be
Corneille! To feel
one's self
Corneille!”

Are novelists nicer than poets? Could it be a rough truth that poets are egotists who write mainly about themselves, whereas novelists diffuse their personalities and are therefore more familiar with the action of sympathy? “I'm as self-centred as children and invalids,” Baudelaire writes; and later, to the Second Empire beauty Apollonie Sabatier, “I am an egotist and I use you.” Philip Larkin used to say that he gave up fiction for poetry because he stopped being interested in other people. On the other hand, perhaps a novelist's egotism is just as great, but expressed less raucously; while “being interested in people” can turn into a frigid and parasitical activity. Novelists can also diffuse themselves so much that they cease to be there: V. S. Pritchett remarked on what boring company novelists are because they're always half-listening to the next conversation and half-thinking about their own work. At least with a poet you know where you are. Perhaps in love it's best to avoid both, and marriage bureaux should stamp on the application forms of writers Flaubert's remark to Louise Colet: “If I were a woman, I wouldn't want myself for a lover. A fling, yes; but an intimate relationship, no.” Isherwood, writing of Jeanne Duval, observed, “Few of us would really enjoy a love-affair with a genius.”

In his life, and for long stretches of his letters Baudelaire is his own worst enemy: at a low, comic level when he despatches yet another complaint to his publisher and declines to frank the envelope on grounds of poverty (never make your publisher pay the postage is the first rule of literary life); at a higher, more psychopathic level when he admits, “It's part of my nature to abuse my friends' indulgence.” Abuse it he does, mostly about money. “I am writing to you as my last two logs burn” is the refrain of Baudelaire's letters. He is always, as it were, on his last logs. The poverty was no doubt real, but also largely self-inflicted by a profligate early manhood, and prolonged by an inability to get down to work. (How the poet envied Balzac, and astutely observed that you do not necessarily start off with talent and intelligence and then set to work; as appetite comes with eating, so talent and intelligence can come, as with Balzac, through toil.)

In recent times we have invented the (possibly spurious) concept of celebrities who “invade their own privacy.” Something parallel may occur in a published correspondence, with the letter-writer unintentionally assassinating his own character. Letters, even the most solemn, are written for the moment; their function is individual, not sequential or cumulative; they normally involve a variety of recipients. But when the letters become a book read with an objective heart by a single dweller in a later civilization, then what a cold judgement may ensue—the colder because the confession is written in the accused's own hand. The sequential printing of letters spotlights every moment of sly hypocrisy and blatant contradiction. So on one page Baudelaire is fulsomely congratulating Ernest Feydeau on
Fanny
(“Contrary to those who complain that your novel violates modesty, I admire the decency of expression which increases the depths of the horror and that excellent art of allowing so much to be guessed”); six months later he is telling his mother,
“Fanny,
an
immense success,
is a disgusting book, an absolutely disgusting book, an absolutely disgusting book.” He calls George Sand “a genius” when writing to ask her to fix a job for an actress friend of his; she does her best, fortunately ignorant of the opinion Baudelaire confided to his
Intimate Notebooks:
“She has, in her moral concepts, the same profundity of judgement and delicacy of feeling as a concierge or a kept woman … It is indeed proof of the degradation of the men of this century that several have been capable of falling in love with this latrine.” Baudelaire wrote a flattering review of
Les Misérables,
then roundly despised Hugo for taking it at face value: “The book is disgusting and clumsy,” he reported triumphantly to his mother, Mme Aupick.

“On this score I've shown that I possess the art of lying. To thank me he wrote an utterly ridiculous letter. That proves that a great man can be a fool.”

But of course, in proving that a great man can be a fool, Baudelaire is equally demonstrating that a major poet can be a hypocrite and a toady. Neither Hugo's gullibility nor Baudelaire's smirk makes what they wrote less good, and part of the reader's job is not to let his or her reactions to the poet's life and character short-circuit estimation of the poems. This may prove difficult, since Baudelaire's life is deeply infused in the work, and since the ideal of beauty he pursued in
Les Fleurs du mal
was both “sinister and cold,” as he proudly put it in a letter to his mother. The temptation is to translate our moral queasiness about the life into aesthetic queasiness about the work. But then we are doing no more than Baudelaire's sailors do to the albatross: grounding the bird and mocking it, incredulous that something so majestic in flight could struggle so awkwardly on the ground.

Baudelaire was not a great letter-writer; his correspondence contains no equivalent of the Flaubert-Colet love letters (his addresses to Apollonie Sabatier read like the lifeless exercises of one taking an amatory correspondence course), or of the Flaubert-Sand exchanges on aesthetics; when he writes about his work he is more likely to be complaining about misprints—even the thickness of a character in one word of a dedication—than about the nature or meaning of a poem. And yet, and yet … as this correspondence proceeds, for all the cadging letters and tedious procrastinations about why the poet can't go and live with his mother, something almost heroic begins to emerge. As things get worse, as time begins to run out, as illness increases, as Baudelaire becomes ever more starkly the victim of his own personality, as it becomes clear that each new and frantic plan to sort out his finances is doomed to fail and that glory with its winged bag of money is never going to fly through the window like the angel of the Annunciation, something tragic and clarifying comes over the correspondence. I once knew a neighbourhood greengrocer who had suffered all his life from a disfiguring skin disease; his children knew his face only as a piece of gaudy patchwork. In his late fifties, he got cancer. The drugs he was given had the unexpected side effect of clearing up his skin complaint: so as he lay dying, his children were able to see their father's true face for the first time.

Something like this happens with Baudelaire. The egotism remains sturdy, but is increasingly purified of affectation. “After he left me,” the poet writes about a visit from Charles Méryon in 1860, “I wondered how it was that I, who have always had the mind and the nerves to go mad, have never actually gone mad.” “Oh my dear mother,” he writes the next year, “is there still
enough time
for us
both
to be happy?” Clearly not; and the attainability of that long-sought glory (let alone “security” or “contentment with myself”) is receding too. “Something terrible says to me:
never,
and yet something else says:
try.”
It is evidently to be never—or never in his lifetime, at least. In an extraordinarily powerful letter of 6 May 1861, in which he characteristically rails at his mother for not appreciating his work, and uncharacteristically celebrates his happy childhood with her, the brutal intransigence of this mother-son bond is put in the plainest terms:

We're obviously destined to love one another, to end our lives as honestly and gently as possible. And yet, in the awful circumstances in which I find myself, I'm convinced that one of us will kill the other, and that the end will come through each of us killing the other. After my death, you won't go on living: that's clear. I'm the only thing you live for. After your death, especially if you were to die through a shock I'd caused, I'd kill myself— that's beyond doubt.

In these last years the reflex of professional grovelling continues, as does the relentless solipsism: when Manet writes to say that he has contracted cholera, Baudelaire gives the matter two dutiful sentences of sympathy before plunging into his own publishing problems and his own bouts of neuralgia. But the self-obsession is tempered by self-knowledge. It is now that he writes, “It's part of my nature to abuse my friends' indulgence”; now that he confesses to being, at the age of forty-three, still at the stage of the “ashamed child” with his mother; now that he compares himself to Shelley in terms of memorable unlovability During these final years, spent in Belgium, an unexpected humour emerges, too, as if, having loathed the world and its imbecilities so long and so hard, exhaustion has thinned hatred to a splenetic chuckle. “Rubens is the only kind of gentleman Belgium could produce, by which I mean a churl clad in silk.” Mme Meurice “has fallen … into democracy, like a butterfly into gelatin.” “All I've got out of my trip to Belgium is the chance to get to know the stupidest race on earth … and the habit of continuous and complete chastity …
a chastity, moreover, that has no merit whatsoever,
given that the sight of a Belgian female repels all thoughts of pleasure.” (Things had obviously changed by Simenon's day.) There is even the odd comic incident: “Would you believe that
I
could
beat up
a Belgian? It's incredible, isn't it? That I could beat up anyone is absurd. And what was even more monstrous was that I was completely in the wrong. So, my sense of justice taking the upper hand, I ran after the man to give him my apologies. But I couldn't find him.”

These lighter moments are brief, and deceptive: merely another patch of skin clearing up while elsewhere the cancer rages. In March 1866 a stroke paralysed Baudelaire and left him speechless. When Nadar came to visit him and argued against the immortality of the soul, the poet could only point his fists at the sun in impotent protest. He died in 1867. The following year his mother had a copy of his
Oeuvres complètes
sent to Flaubert. The novelist with the parallel life replied: “I am very touched by your sending me the works of your son, whom I greatly loved and whose talent I appreciated more than anyone.” Mme Aupick, twice widowed and now having endured the death of her son (why isn't there a verb for that catastrophic event?) herself died in 1871. Another year and she would have completed the chronological symmetry: Mme Flaubert died in 1872.

(b) Courbet

In 1991 the Musée Courbet in Ornans held an exhibition of the “erotic” work of André Masson. It was mostly grim stuff: juvenile, facile, and often plain nasty, a reminder that dredging the male subconscious sometimes brings up little but dead dogs and rusty torture equipment. But for those who trudged through the gallery there was an unexpected reward at the far end. Alone and unsignalled was Courbet's rarely seen
The Origin of the World:
a splayed female nude, from breast to mid-thigh, painted for the Turkish diplomat Khalil Bey, and which latterly hung in Jacques Lacan's country house.
*
Despite decades of subsequent erotica and pornography it is still extraordinarily potent. Edmond de Goncourt, who for decades loathed Courbet's work, finding
“ce Jordaens moderne”
altogether too vulgar, his nudes “untrue,” and who after attending a joint private viewing in 1867 of Courbet's tribadic
Le Sommeil
and Ingres's
Bain antique
(both also painted for Khalil Bey) dismissed the two painters as
idiots populaires,
was won round by
The Origin of the World.
He saw it for the first time in 1889, ten years after Courbet's death, and offered “honourable amends” to one who could render flesh as well as Correggio. It is painted with a lush delicacy, and the effect is intimidatingly realistic. No, it's not like that, it's like this, the painting seems to declare. And the fact that it continues to make this declaration when surrounded by twentieth-century erotica, that it is capable of rebuking the future as well as its own past and present, is a sign of how alive Courbet's work remains.