Horror of Life: The Suicide Letters of Charles Baudelaire

[Infinity Land Press; December 2024]

Tr. from the French and Edited by Eugene Thacker

That the nineteenth century produced more writers who wrote more, much more, than any other period in recorded history is indisputable. To say, however, that their graphomania was incredible is to forget that it was probably also incurable: a century before the discovery of penicillin, one of the common symptoms of an advanced case of syphilis was mania.

Most scholars agree that the French poet Charles Baudelaire suffered from the disease, the havoc it wreaked on his mind and body likely contributing to his early death at forty-six. Yet one glance at the bulk of his complete works suggests the efforts of a considerably longer life. Gathered into four thick volumes for Gallimard’s Pléiade imprint—two for the letters, two for everything else—the mass of his scribblings tips the scales at nearly six-thousand pages. Most English readers of a literary bent will be familiar, if only by name, with his seminal poetry collection, The Flowers of Evil, its singularly scathing, scrofulous, spleen-drenched artistry having proved sufficiently visionary to furnish his name with a sense of real literary immortality. That the breadth of his reputation rests upon the narrow spine of that one volume isn’t itself all that rare a phenomenon, yet it remains the mission, largely doomed at every step, of a small but determined coterie of translators to clear the way for more—“doomed” because, well, have you heard of another book by Baudelaire?

Enter Eugene Thacker, whose efforts as a translator and editor have lately yielded the newest comer to the chopping block. Before one can even begin, however, Horror of Life: The Suicide Letters of Charles Baudelaire presents a subtitle so comically redundant that Thacker, in his own introduction, correctly beats his readers to the punch. After all, aren’t “Baudelaire” and “suicide” unbreakably joined in the mind of anyone who knows the least bit about the man? Yes, Thacker writes, “it is really all of Baudelaire’s letters—beyond the letters gathered here—that constitute a single, extended suicide note.” And while his assertion might leave you wondering what distinguishes these from the others—more than two-thousand pages of them—encountering such a title offers its own consolation: it trains the imagination in forming others that are equally fruitless. The Difficult Poems of John Ashbery, anyone?

Questionable title aside, the contents and design of the book amount to a modern publishing marvel. One of those no-nonsense, dust-jacketless, “naked” hardcovers, Horror of Life is a pleasingly subdued bluish-greenish-charcoal gray. At a slimmish 180 pages, the book is heftier than it looks, its text printed on thick, durable, semi-glossy paper, and comes pre-installed with a sewn-in, copper-colored ribbon to mark your place. In addition to the thirteen letters that form the core of the book, Thacker provides a lengthy, scholarly, yet laymen-friendly introduction, as well as a detailed chronology of Baudelaire’s life. Interspersed throughout are dozens of standalone pages featuring the eerie art of Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak, co-founders of Infinity Land Press. Their scrappy mixed-media accoutrements are thoughtfully balanced by the book’s final section, an eleven-page, sepia-toned facsimile of just one of the many letters addressed to Baudelaire’s mother.

The letters themselves range from 1845 to 1866, one year before their author’s death. The first of them, dated 30 June, opens with the promise of an early conclusion. Baudelaire, age 24, writes:

To Narcisse Ancelle

When Ms Jeanne Lemer gives you this letter, I’ll be dead. – She doesn’t know anything about it. You’re familiar with my last will. Except for the portion reserved for my mother, Ms Lemer is to inherit everything I have, after you’ve paid certain debts, a list of which is enclosed in this letter.

A single paragraph is enough to convey a few of the key themes: death and debt were always in circulation for Baudelaire. But who’s this Narcisse? And who, especially, is Ms. Lemer? Better than footnotes, Thacker’s answers to these questions (and many others like them) are supplied in a series of one-to-two-page prefaces, one pinned to the head of each letter. Here, he writes:

In 1842, Baudelaire met Jean Duval, a mixed-race actress who also used the name Jeanne Lemer. Their on-again, off-again relationship would become a leitmotif in Baudelaire’s correspondence.

It was also at this time that Baudelaire began to accrue several substantial debts […] Dismayed by Baudelaire’s behavior, his mother and stepfather intervened. They employed Narcisse Ancelle, an accountant from the suburb of Neuilly, to take over Baudelaire’s finances and act as the family’s Conseil Judiciaire.

After coming into a modest inheritance at twenty-one (his father died when he was five), Baudelaire wasted no time spending his way into debt. It seems the life of a reprobate came naturally to him; he was always out drinking, splurging on expensive clothes, frequenting the same Parisian whorehouses in which he contracted any number of venereal diseases. On one hand, his story is the story of every young person who misguidedly digs their own financial grave; the current version simply swaps the whorehouses for fraternity houses, and implicates any number of eighteen-year-olds, sufficiently unwise in their years, consenting to future hardship in exchange for four years of socially sanctioned boozing. On the other hand, his mother and stepfather’s reaction to his instability, deciding to defer his money management to a court-appointed councilor, finds its own special resonance in the recent, protracted serialization of the drama surrounding Brittney Spears’ thirteen-year conservatorship. The keyword in either case (both stories are absorbing, if tragic) is “control.” From his early twenties till the day he died, Baudelaire felt himself to be bound in chains: he wriggled, spat venom, apologized halfheartedly, then did it all over again. This absurd cycle comes across so energetically, so convulsively, so predictably, that reading the letters sometimes feels like a spectator sport. Here is precisely the kind of unsavory fellow you wouldn’t trust with your life, but just watch how he excoriates his enemies and confesses his defects, all in the same breath: he does it with as much elegance and style as any writer could hope to achieve.

He’s at his most entertaining when complaining—especially to his mother, to whom eight of the book’s thirteen letters are addressed. But he also proves himself occasionally capable of diplomacy, even a rare measure of humility (or, at least, a perverse kind of reverse-pride). In a letter to Flaubert (to whom he felt a certain kinship, both Madame Bovary and The Flowers of Evil having been subjected to obscenity trials in 1857), he writes:

You tell me that I work hard. Is this cruel mockery? Plenty of people, myself included, think I don’t do much at all.

To work is to work unceasingly; it’s to relinquish one’s senses, one’s dreams; it’s to be pure will in perpetual movement. Perhaps I’ll get there.

There’s no doubt that he wanted to get there—to be as active in his writing life as he was in his imagination. (To the extent that his literary output was, in fact, rather extensive, it’s fair to assess his self-estimation as characteristically unsparing.) Baudelaire had the bad luck of being extremely unwell both mentally and physically at a time when useful remedies for any of his afflictions failed to exist. Second only to his financial troubles—or, maybe, the one subject to supersede them—Baudelaire’s complaints about his various ailments fill out one letter after another. His chronic depression, thought to be of the same order as Samuel Johnson’s (that is, titanic), was more than a habit of inertia; it seemed cellularly ingrained, and reading his ongoing account of the matter makes William Styron’s famous treatment of the subject, Darkness Visible, appear as precious, flat, and wilted as a pressed daisy. Ravaged by neurological issues, fainting spells, and frequent bouts of nausea, even the vomit he coughed up—“yellowy or watery or viscous or foamy”—wasn’t one thing.

Baudelaire was plainly never well, but he never ran short of the language—one which he practically invented—for expressing his distemper. Apart from Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy maintains its monumental stature in the same domain, few writers have plumbed the depths of human suffering with as much verbal savvy as Baudelaire. Some of his most treasured words will strike the contemporary reader as commonplace—and they ought to, French ones like ennui and spleen living like mice in our English dictionaries—but he had to place them before we could call them common. Other favorites include doleur (pain), désespoir (despair), oisivete (idleness), tristesse (sadness), and gouffre (abyss). Of such careful attention to diction, Thacker notes:

Baudelaire would even describe his writing as a “miserable dictionary of melancholy,” and his letters are a part of this lexicon. For Baudelaire, the letter becomes more than a convenience of communication. Even the practical urgency of appeals for loans or requests for medication were folded back into the larger project of documenting the tenebrous moods that seem to periodically invade his psyche.

If it weren’t so true, if the man weren’t so mesmerizing in spite of his tendency toward repugnance, the letters would hardly justify the book. That said, certain stretches seem specially designed to encourage a fair bit of eye-rolling. So be forewarned: these letters make for a deadly drinking game. The reader who takes a shot of hard liquor for every desperate mention of money, for every venomous invocation of the world’s cruelty, for every sentiment dripping with self-loathing, will be spewing their own foam before page nine. One question the book continuously poses is, “Do I pity the man, or do I despise him?” The answer for many is probably both.

Of course, it’s also possible to empathize (and, with the hindsight of history, to quietly exult). If Baudelaire was not, in fact, constantly slashing his wrists, it seems the thought of doing so genuinely pursued him for the majority of his adult life. Still, it’s more than a little odd that, for a book of “suicide letters,” Thacker can only point with any confidence to a single attempt that may have occurred in 1845. In reality, it’s difficult to say whether Baudelaire ever tried to take his life. Thacker, vexingly, equivocates. He remarks, for instance, how Baudelaire “possibly [made] another suicide attempt” in 1861. But who really knows?

Despite its flaws, Horror of Life remains an important contribution to the relatively small shelf of books by this author that are available in English. Even better than important, the book is persistently interesting, especially for those with a penchant for the gothic. Ambition and pain, debt and death: whether he’s writing to his mother, his publisher, or his doctor, Baudelaire swirls the drain as though the slow death were its own kind of ballet.

Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, Open Letters Review, Rain Taxi, and many other journals and magazines.