Paris Spleen. Charles Baudelaire

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      Both Hoffmann and Bertrand give a bow to the seventeenth-century artist Jacques Callot, probably to warn readers of grotesqueries they will encounter. Bertrand adds (for balance, we may suppose) the name Rembrandt.

      Since much Baudelaire criticism seems to sell Bertrand short, let me say at once that I think Gaspard de la Nuit a wonderful book. It is, in Baudelaire’s phrase, “singularly different” from his own poems. But that is no reason to deny that it helped Baudelaire settle on what his own poems in prose might be.

      The third book of Gaspard (“The Night and Its Marvels”) is a series of eleven poems on death in which death is presented with as much raillery as anything in Paris Spleen. Scarbo, the disgusting dwarf psychopomp, presumably gets his name from escarbot, slang for a dung-beetle.

       Scarbo

      “Dying, whether absolved or damned,” murmured Scarbo in my ear this night, “your winding sheet will be a spider’s web, and I will bury in it, along with you, the spider.”

      “Oh,” I made reply, eyes red with weeping, “give me at least, for shroud, an aspen leaf, to cradle me in the lake’s breath.”

      “No!” cried the dwarf in mockery [le nain railleur], “but you can be fodder for snails who, evenings, hunt flies blinded by the setting sun.”

      “Would you prefer then,” I continued, still in tears, “would you prefer me to be sucked up by a tarantula’s elephantine trunk?”

      “Well all right,” he said then, “console yourself: with gold-speckled snakeskin I will wrap you like a mummy,

      “And from where I deposit you, propped upright against a wall in the dark crypt of Saint Benign, you will be able to hear at leisure the wailing of babies in Limbo.”

      AND AFTER?

      For half a century, French prose poems clearly echo those of Baudelaire. (With exceptions, such as the lovely chinoiserie of Judith Gautier’s Book of Jade, in versets, published the year of Baudelaire’s death. Or, of course, the unique prose epic Songs of Maldoror.)

      And not just the French: Oscar Wilde and Turgenev are in the vein (Yeats considered the style of Wilde’s prose poems affected).

      Mallarmé, after reading the twenty prose poems Baudelaire published in 1862, answered two years later with a couple of his own — dedicated “to Charles Baudelaire” (who, note, was still alive). By his 1897 collection Divagations, these had grown into a group of thirteen prose poems, labeled “Anecdotes or Poems.”

      This is one of those dedicated to Baudelaire, but in its final version:

       Autumn Complaint

      Since Maria left me for another star — which? Orion? Altair? you, green Venus? — I’ve always cherished solitude. Such long days I have passed, alone with my cat. By alone I mean without a material other, my cat being mystical companion, a spirit. So I may say that I have passed long days alone with my cat and, alone, with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence; for since my lucent being is no more, I have loved strangely and peculiarly all that is suggested in the word fall. My favorite time of year is the last languid days of summer, the cusp of autumn — and of the day, my hour of stroll while the sun hesitates before disappearing, its rays brazen on gray walls and on windows coppery. In literature likewise, my spirit’s voluptuous insistence remains in the poetic death-throes of Rome’s last moments — but stopping short of any whiff of Barbarian rejuvenescence, and no jabbered childish Latin of earlier Christian prose.

      I was reading one of those dear poems (whose gross makeup charms me more than youth’s rosy cheeks), running my hand through a fur purely animal, when below my window an organ-grinder sang out with languor and melancholy. He played in the lane lined with poplars, whose leaves now seem sad to me even in spring, since Maria, decked with candles, passed her last time that way. Instrument, truly, of the sad: the piano sparkles, the violin illuminates strings torn, but that hurdy-gurdy, in memorial twilight, dragged me into desperate dreams. Murmuring now a joyously vulgar air, making merry suburban hearts, a tune out of date and banal: how could its recurrences reach my soul to make me weep, like some romantic ballad? I savored it slowly and threw no coin from the window, for fear I might do something mad, or might find that the instrument was not singing alone.

      And I will only mention here the best known of Paris Spleen’s offspring, the Illuminations of Rimbaud and A Season in Hell. Vastly influential they have been; among the Modernists, their influence in some ways eclipsing that of Baudelaire’s.

      In France the prose poem, after Reverdy and Max Jacob, becomes omnipresent. And American poets, in recent years, seem to have gotten the idea.

       paris spleen

      FOR ARSÉNE HOUSSAYE

      Dear friend, I send you a work no one can claim not to make head or tail of, since, on the contrary, there is at once both tail and head, alternating and reciprocal. Consider, I beg you, how admirably convenient this combination makes it for each and all — you, me, the reader. We may stop whenever we like, I my daydream, you the manuscript, the reader his reading — whose stubborn will I would not hold to the unbroken thread of some superfluous plot. Cut out any vertebra and the two pieces of this serpentine fantasy will easily rejoin. Chop it into many fragments and you will see how each is able to exist apart. Hoping some of these stumps will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I make bold to dedicate to you the entire snake.

      I’ve a small confession to admit to you. In leafing through, for at least the twentieth time, the famous Gaspard de la Nuit of Aloysius Bertrand (a book known to you and to me and to a few of our friends, don’t we have the right to call it famous?) that the idea came to me to try something analogous, applying to the description of modern life — or, rather, to a certain modern and more abstract life — the procedure he applied in painting a life long gone, strangely picturesque.

      Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamt the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness.

Above all, it’s from being in crowded towns, from the criss-cross of their innumerable ways, that this obsessive ideal is born. Have you yourself, dear friend, not attempted to translate into song the strident cry of the Glazier,¹ and to express in a lyric prose all the distressing possibilities his cry sends even to the dormers through the street’s upmost haze?

      But, truly, I’m afraid my jealousy has not ended happily. The work hardly begun, I realized that not only did I remain far below my mysterious and brilliant model, but also that I had made something (if this can be called something) singularly different, mischance anyone else would doubtless brag about, but which profoundly humiliates a mind that considers the poet’s highest honor to have accomplished just what he proposed to do.

      Your most affectionate, C. B.

1. Houssaye’s “La Chanson du Vitrier” is in prose.

      I

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