Baudelaire: The Irresponsible Artist

There is no better representative of l’artiste maudit (the tortured artist) than Charles Baudelaire, a man whose name is synonymous with misfortune, whose short life was — by his own admission — ‘damned from the beginning’. In what F. J. Hemmings calls a superb understatement, Nicole Ward Jouve once wrote, ‘Nobody but a lunatic would recommend Baudelaire’s life as a pattern to be imitated’ — which implies, as Hemmings says, that the ‘pattern of one’s life is to a certain degree a matter of choice’. With this in mind, we must ask ourselves, to what extent was Baudelaire tortured (or accursed as the literal translation suggests) and to what extent was he just plain irresponsible?

Hemmings, in his biography of Baudelaire, gives us this concise account of all Baudelaire’s misfortunes (as he himself would have seen them):

From the moment of his conception to the hour when he drew his last breath, every circumstance conspired against him: his ancestry was tainted, his birth unlucky, his parents and teachers persecuted him, his mistress betrayed him; he was racked by disease and his neuroticism made him miserable; he lost his money or, worse, it was placed in the hands of a snuffling man of the law who doled him out a starvation allowance; his works, when they appeared, were misunderstood, condemned as pornographic. Finally he had to flee his own country, and in…