The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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“A Brotherhood Based on Contempt”
The writings on Poe constitute Baudelaire’s most detailed vision of aesthetic community and the public good of art, turning the vocabulary of civic humanism into an unremitting attack on fundamental hostility of bourgeois liberalism to beauty. Baudelaire first encountered Poe’s tales in 1847, and between 1852 and 1865 he published three long critical essays on Poe and five volumes of translations, well over fifteen hundred pages altogether.17 In both bulk and seriousness, this encounter is almost unprecedented in modern literature, even more so given the extent to which Baudelaire’s translations and critical advocacy gave Poe a status in France out of proportion to his then-marginal place in the American tradition. Baudelaire’s letters reveal a long-running obsession with gathering information about Poe and popularizing his work in France. Baudelaire hunted down volumes of Poe’s writings, hounded visiting Americans to question them on nuances of translation, and encouraged his friends and literary contacts to promote Poe’s work in print.
Critics have tended to read this obsession psychologically, and many of Baudelaire’s comments on Poe do indeed point to a kind of autobiographical labor. In a letter to his mother, from 8 March 1854, Baudelaire remarks on the “close resemblance … between my own poems and those of this man,” a resemblance he describes as “rather strange [singulier]” (C 1, 269; SL 66). Baudelaire took the title for his unfinished autobiographical notes, Mon cœur mis à nu [My Heart Laid Bare], from an entry in Poe’s Marginalia.18 The autobiographical reading of this obsession, however, tends to downplay the otherwise unmistakable political thrust of Baudelaire’s writings on his American double. Baudelaire first encountered Poe’s writing in the Fourierist journal La Démocratie pacifique, which published a translation of “The Black Cat” in 1847. The unsigned editorial headnote to the translation suggests that the story is evidence of just how far reactionaries will go to defend their belief in the “natural perversity” of humanity (OC II, 1200). Baudelaire would come to reject socialism’s own vision of human nature after 1852, but he never ceased to regard Poe’s work as politically significant. The Poe essays epitomize Baudelaire’s civic humanism, at once establishing a bond of sympathy with an “unknown sympathizer” and finding in that writer’s life a political lesson for the scattered family of “proud anchorites” Baudelaire addresses.
It is often noted that Baudelaire defines Poe as a seminal poète maudit, driven, somewhat like Baudelaire himself, by a philistine public into drunkenness, poverty, and despair. More precisely, however, Baudelaire defines Poe as a writer deeply hostile to his political context. As Jonathan Culler has noted, “It is clearly important to Baudelaire that Poe is a foreigner, not only a stranger to France but a stranger in his own country.”19 Poe’s sense of his estrangement from American culture is a running theme in Baudelaire’s writings on the topic. America, for Poe, was “a vast prison,” an “antipathetic atmosphere” marked by childishness, bad taste, and an all-consuming obsession with money (OC II, 297; PML 70–71). Poe is an exotic in his native land, going through life “as if through a Sahara desert” and changing his residence “like an Arab” (OC II, 271; BOP 63). Devoted to beauty and the supernatural, scornful of democracy, human goodness, and the belief in progress, Poe lives his life as “an admirable protest”; he is “like a slave determined to make his master blush” (OC II, 321; PML 95). The only national traits Baudelaire attributes to Poe are faults. In a letter to Sainte-Beuve, for example, he claims that Poe is “American only insofar as he is a charlatan [jongleur]” (C 1, 345; SL 84). Elsewhere, he notes the “altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute” that Poe gave to drinking (OC II, 314; PML 88).20
Reflecting more than just a bad fit between the writer and his context, Poe’s work arises from the writer’s opposition to his native land and to modern conditions of literary production: “this man found himself singularly alone in America” (OC II, 299; PML 73). Although Baudelaire laments this solitude, he also sees in it a model for aesthetic community. An outcast in America, Poe is exemplary in his determination, against all odds, to seek out community through writing and discussion. Baudelaire’s first extended engagement with Poe’s work, an essay entitled “Edgar Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages [Edgar Poe: His Life and Works],” which appeared in two installments in the Revue de Paris in 1852, was a selective translation, largely unacknowledged, of two obituary pieces on Poe by the American critics John M. Daniel and John R. Thompson.21 The passages original to Baudelaire incongruously characterize Poe as a victim of changes in literary sociability brought about by the French Revolution. In one original passage, for example, Baudelaire describes the changing relationship among drinking, sociability, and literary creativity before and after the Revolution. He contrasts the joyous and sociable drinking in the seventeenth-century circle of Marc-Antoine de Saint-Amant with its increasingly melancholy circumstances in subsequent centuries. The eighteenth-century school of Rétif de La Bretonne drank together, but as if in anticipation of the Revolution, “it was already a group of pariahs, a clandestine society [un école de parias, un monde souterrain],” increasingly alienated from the broader populace. Postrevolutionary writers drink alone, and their drunkenness has “a somber and sinister character” (OC II, 272; BOP 64). “There is no longer a special class,” writes Baudelaire, “which takes pride in associating with men of letters.” Modern writers have only their own fearful visions, recovered through intoxication, for “companions [conaissances]” (OC II, 272; BOP 65).
When Baudelaire revised the 1852 essay in 1856 under the new title “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres [Edgar Poe, His Life and Works],” and published it as the introduction to his first volume of translations from Poe, Histoires Extraordinaires, he cut or condensed the passages about lost traditions of literary sociality, but the specter of postrevolutionary literary life continues to shape his depiction of Poe. In the 1852 essay, the baleful effect of the Revolution on writers—the loss of aristocratic patronage and the rise of market competition among artists—were felt as a loss of traditional forms of sociability. In the 1856 essay, Baudelaire’s Poe seeks in vain to recover or reimagine some version of that sociality. He is one of those “classless beings [êtres déclassés]” who can breathe only in the world of letters (OC II, 302; PML 76), but he does not want to live there alone. Having lost his position at the Southern Literary Messenger, for example, Poe continues to dream of “a Magazine of his own, he wanted to feel at home,” to have “a haven for his thought” (OC II, 304; PML 78). Poe equates home not simply with writing but with publication, sharing his work with like-minded, if unknown, readers. Baudelaire also puts a striking emphasis in his informal canon of Poe’s writings—those he translates and names in his essays—on the hoaxes and dialogues. A relatively small part of Poe’s collected writings, these literary forms have an outsized place in Baudelaire’s discussion of Poe because they explicitly describe or depend on literary sociality. Baudelaire’s Poe is a trickster who engaged his audience no less through his editorial work than through the hoaxes he concocted to fool the credulous American public. Baudelaire translated most of the notable hoaxes, as well as all Poe’s most significant dialogues: the three “angelic dialogues” (“The Power of Words,” The Colloquy of Monas and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), the two mesmeric dialogues (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “Mesmeric Revelation”), and “Some Words with a Mummy.” He also translated Poe’s work of speculative cosmology, Eureka, and quotes these lines from its dedication in his third major essay on Poe, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe [Further Notes on Edgar Poe]” (1857): “I offer this Book to those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities” (OC II, 321; PML 95).
As his interest in the dialogues and hoaxes suggests, Baudelaire saw something inherently social in Poe, a “singular” sense of sympathy to which the letters attest, and which suffuses the tales. He is, for Baudelaire, the supreme poet of social bonds put under pressure, of sociality rendered uncanny. Poe’s murderers seek out auditors for their stories, and his detectives solve cases by reading minds rather than gathering material evidence. Like such famous tales as “Ligea” and “Morella,” the dialogues Baudelaire translated all concern the extension of sympathy after death. Baudelaire even construes Poe’s notorious drunkenness as a form of outsider sociality. Reworking his history of literary drunkenness from the 1852 essay, Baudelaire suggests in the 1856 essay that drinking is for