What do you think?
Rate this book
Baudelaire
A controversial figure in his lifetime, Baudelaire's name has become a byword for literary and artistic decadence. At the same time his works, in particular his book of poetry Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), have been acknowledged as classics of French literature. This is an account and an interpretation of Baudelaire's work; of his life; of his times. And it is a biography not of his outward life alone but of that inner personality which is reflected so intimately in his poetry. Insight, scholarship, awareness, and unrivaled knowledge both of Baudelaire's work and of the world he lived in, all combine to make this a book of major interest and of major importance.
712 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1971
4 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Read
April 15, 2021I’ve owned this book for decades, carried it from east coast to west coast and back again and all about as well. Yet I didn’t read it – indeed, actively avoided reading it - until quite recently, much to my chagrin after I had read its first twenty or thirty pages. I wondered: why did I do that?
Not because critics savaged Starkie’s book at the time of their publication – or even later. They didn’t – or at least I don’t recall that they did. And not because the generality of academics dismissed either Starkie’s other biographies of French literary figures of the 19th century or her critical studies of their works. That didn’t happen either, if I remember correctly.
I can only think that my reluctance had to do with my disinterest during those years in all things French. Disinterest up to the point I found myself scaling Mount Proust successfully – and delightedly, as it turned out - after ten or twenty attempts over the decades. Successfully only after I read seven biographies of the great MP, one right after the other in the order of their dates of publication, earliest to most recent. Even before I took up his novel once more, I had begun to understand why – as certain of his first readers wondered – Proust needed fifty pages to tell us that he had turned over in his bed.
Since then, I read the biographies (in English) of notable French writers who lived and worked during the nineteenth century: Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Zola, and Proust, among them. And now Baudelaire.
But for what reasons did I avoid Starkie’s biographies? I can only think that I thought, stupidly, more recent studies would be more “complete” and “final.” After all, Starkie published her biography of Baudelaire in 1957. Not quite as old as I, but nearly so. Nonetheless, too old. What nonsense!
My list of the great virtues of Starkie’s live of Monsieur B.:
1. In her introduction Starkie describes her sense of the four stages along the trajectory of Baudelaire’s life. It doesn’t concern me particularly that other biographers might view the matter differently. What interests me is that Starkie has grappled with primary sources, and I mean every scrap of paper that CB (or anyone who knew him) covered with words. And the result – a detailed description of the circumstances of his life but also, and much more importantly, the development or, perhaps more accurately, change in the emotional, psychological and imaginative compartments of his inner life. Moreover, she applies her schema clearly and consistently in the story she tells over the 500 pages that follow.
As I read other biographies – currently Joanna Richardson’s life of CB – I’ll be looking for differences in the patterns that different biographers observe. I can’t imagine, however, that any honest biographer will ever claim that CB’s choices and behaviors (in late adolescence and adulthood) were anything other than entirely impulsive and altogether self-destructive - until he neared death, that is.
Moreover, insofar as I can tell, there’s no point in reading only one biography of anyone. I, for one, don’t feel that I’ve developed a sense of a person long dead that I find satisfactory, even convincing, until I’ve made my way through at least four or five biographies and preferably a dozen.
2. The story that she tells is astonishingly vivid and engrossing. Sensory detail abounds. Moreover, many of her pages are filled with CB's writing (letters, journal entries and poems) – which is quite visual, i.e., enables us to see scenes and enter into those places quite as if we were present.
3. She is careful to corroborate much of what CB wrote with evidence she found in the letters, journals and published memoirs of others, including especially his mother and the many, many of CB’s contemporaries who inhabited (or haunted) the Parisian world of letters. CB must have been quite an impressive – even intrusive – personality. Scores and scores of memoirs that recount episodes in his life survive. Starkie presents on many of her pages the accounts that she has found in these sources.
I imagine that if, before I read Starkie’s biography, I had resurrected the little French that I had mastered, long ago and far away, I would have finished the book with a much fuller understanding of her subject. But I didn’t. So unfortunately, I skipped page after page of text that I couldn’t decipher. Furthermore, I don’t understand her reasons for leaving long passages in French (CB's poems apart) and then translating equally long – and meaningful – passages into English. But there we are.
A brief digression. I’ve read five of Janet Malcolm’s books of essays, in which she denounces biography as the “flawed genre” – as if, among biographies, differences in evidence adduced or interpretation, frequently most definitely not “nice,” reveal the genre's foundational deficiencies. She fulminates but doesn't explain - at least not to my satisfaction. Why, moreover, does she appear to think that her ostensibly non-fiction “profiles” of character are free of these same flaws? I say “appears” because she insisted in writing and publishing these articles even while (and in the same pieces in which) she inveighs against biography. So why does she continue to write and publish at all? And besides what piece of non-fiction doesn't she deem flawed in ways she deems unacceptable? And why should perfection interest me, anyway, even if it existed? Odd. But never mind. That’s altogether another story.
Not because critics savaged Starkie’s book at the time of their publication – or even later. They didn’t – or at least I don’t recall that they did. And not because the generality of academics dismissed either Starkie’s other biographies of French literary figures of the 19th century or her critical studies of their works. That didn’t happen either, if I remember correctly.
I can only think that my reluctance had to do with my disinterest during those years in all things French. Disinterest up to the point I found myself scaling Mount Proust successfully – and delightedly, as it turned out - after ten or twenty attempts over the decades. Successfully only after I read seven biographies of the great MP, one right after the other in the order of their dates of publication, earliest to most recent. Even before I took up his novel once more, I had begun to understand why – as certain of his first readers wondered – Proust needed fifty pages to tell us that he had turned over in his bed.
Since then, I read the biographies (in English) of notable French writers who lived and worked during the nineteenth century: Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Zola, and Proust, among them. And now Baudelaire.
But for what reasons did I avoid Starkie’s biographies? I can only think that I thought, stupidly, more recent studies would be more “complete” and “final.” After all, Starkie published her biography of Baudelaire in 1957. Not quite as old as I, but nearly so. Nonetheless, too old. What nonsense!
My list of the great virtues of Starkie’s live of Monsieur B.:
1. In her introduction Starkie describes her sense of the four stages along the trajectory of Baudelaire’s life. It doesn’t concern me particularly that other biographers might view the matter differently. What interests me is that Starkie has grappled with primary sources, and I mean every scrap of paper that CB (or anyone who knew him) covered with words. And the result – a detailed description of the circumstances of his life but also, and much more importantly, the development or, perhaps more accurately, change in the emotional, psychological and imaginative compartments of his inner life. Moreover, she applies her schema clearly and consistently in the story she tells over the 500 pages that follow.
As I read other biographies – currently Joanna Richardson’s life of CB – I’ll be looking for differences in the patterns that different biographers observe. I can’t imagine, however, that any honest biographer will ever claim that CB’s choices and behaviors (in late adolescence and adulthood) were anything other than entirely impulsive and altogether self-destructive - until he neared death, that is.
Moreover, insofar as I can tell, there’s no point in reading only one biography of anyone. I, for one, don’t feel that I’ve developed a sense of a person long dead that I find satisfactory, even convincing, until I’ve made my way through at least four or five biographies and preferably a dozen.
2. The story that she tells is astonishingly vivid and engrossing. Sensory detail abounds. Moreover, many of her pages are filled with CB's writing (letters, journal entries and poems) – which is quite visual, i.e., enables us to see scenes and enter into those places quite as if we were present.
3. She is careful to corroborate much of what CB wrote with evidence she found in the letters, journals and published memoirs of others, including especially his mother and the many, many of CB’s contemporaries who inhabited (or haunted) the Parisian world of letters. CB must have been quite an impressive – even intrusive – personality. Scores and scores of memoirs that recount episodes in his life survive. Starkie presents on many of her pages the accounts that she has found in these sources.
I imagine that if, before I read Starkie’s biography, I had resurrected the little French that I had mastered, long ago and far away, I would have finished the book with a much fuller understanding of her subject. But I didn’t. So unfortunately, I skipped page after page of text that I couldn’t decipher. Furthermore, I don’t understand her reasons for leaving long passages in French (CB's poems apart) and then translating equally long – and meaningful – passages into English. But there we are.
A brief digression. I’ve read five of Janet Malcolm’s books of essays, in which she denounces biography as the “flawed genre” – as if, among biographies, differences in evidence adduced or interpretation, frequently most definitely not “nice,” reveal the genre's foundational deficiencies. She fulminates but doesn't explain - at least not to my satisfaction. Why, moreover, does she appear to think that her ostensibly non-fiction “profiles” of character are free of these same flaws? I say “appears” because she insisted in writing and publishing these articles even while (and in the same pieces in which) she inveighs against biography. So why does she continue to write and publish at all? And besides what piece of non-fiction doesn't she deem flawed in ways she deems unacceptable? And why should perfection interest me, anyway, even if it existed? Odd. But never mind. That’s altogether another story.
November 15, 2021
A bit of a slog, but definitely worth the effort. In some places Starkie's writing is overly-academic, but in others - particularly when it comes to the personality and life of Baudelaire rather than Baudelaire the poet - it has a lyricism that itself borders on the poetic. There are two major problems with the book. But neither are Starkie's fault, so I don't think it's fair to mark her down because of them. The first is, all the poems and much of Baudelaire's prose writing (but not the letters) are in French. If, like me, you don't read French then you are going to miss out on a great deal. Most of the poems I could find in English translation online. But, unless I typed it into Google translate, the prose I had to pass over. Like I say, this isn't Starkie's fault. When she wrote the book in the 1950s most educated people could speak and read French fluently. The other major flaw also relates to the times Starkie was writing in. Being a lot more strait-laced and innocent, much of the salacious detail relating to sex, drug-taking, Satanism, etc., is either downplayed or hidden behind academic language or the vernacular. So, one gets little sense of Baudelaire's supposed diabolical reputation. A more contemporary biography would deal with such matters much more heads on. Nevertheless, a remarkable piece of work, covering both the life and the work in forensic detail.
April 14, 2008
Entertaining and easy to read. A good biography of the controversial French poet. My only complaint is that the author is a bit too much of an apologist for some of Baudelaire's personal problems.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews