GARDENER OF EVIL—Pierre Loving— Brewer and Warren ($2.50).
Unless you are a student of French literature you probably think of Charles Baudelaire as an overrated, vaguely Satanic poet who wrote a slim volume called Flews du Mai and wanted to be thought more wicked than he was. Biographer Pierre Loving does not so much correct this impression as amplify it. His story of Baudelaire and his times, written as a novel, is solid and appetizing with plenty of factual meat made more appetizing by the artistic sauce.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire, born with the haughties, found a peg to hang a life-grievance on when his young widowed mother married a man he detested, General Aupick. Stepfather Aupick believed in discipline. Stepson Charles disbelieved in Aupick. When Charles began to roam Paris with Bohemian friends, General Aupick feared for his own careful reputation. Soon they quarreled openly and Charles went off to live by himself. In his way both a dandy and an ascetic, Baudelaire astonished even the Bohemians. His first mistress was a hideous, squint-eyed, consumptive Jewess off the streets. Then he met Jeanne Duval, a beautiful Negress, and lived with her many stormy months. His hand-to-mouth existence was complicated by laudanum, which he took to stifle intestinal pains.
Contemporary and occasional acquaintance of indefatigable Novelist Honore de Balzac, Baudelaire admired the older man's dogged energy but could not emu late it. His writing, like all his activities, was spasmodic. His friends never knew what next to expect of him. Once at dinner with Jeanne in a crowded restaurant Baudelaire rose, told the company this woman had ruined his life, then tried to kill himself with a knife. Economical Poet Alexander Pope kept copies of his love letters. Baudelaire did Pope one better: sent exact duplicates to two women at once. Pierre Loving tries to explain his hero's complex character thus: "Artifice and stoicism, these were the keys to the unassailable life of the Chesterfieldian martyr and saint."
Paris, beloved of poets, got its share of affection from Baudelaire. Unhappy in it, he was less happy away, always came back. Once for a few disastrous weeks he edited a provincial conservative paper. His first editorial set his readers howling with rage, just as their wives began to howl at the spectacle of himself and Jeanne living unsanctified in their respectable midst. Once his stepfather got him a job in India, but Baudelaire got off at Mauritius, went back on the next boat.
Baudelaire's gloomy intensity and obvious poetic ability, soon made him a marked man in a Paris that swarmed with talents. One of the first Frenchmen to discover Edgar Allan Poe (whom he considered his affinity), Baudelaire was Poe's French translator, and some critics aver the translation betters the original. With no sense of money, he was never out of debt; and his poverty, complicated by Luciferian pride and creeping illness, might have brought him to an unknown end had it not been for his mother and his friends who loved him. He died at 46 (1867) in a Paris sanitarium.