"Late Fragments" is a literary gem that provides readers with a captivating glimpse into the lesser-known but equally profound works of Charles Baudelaire. Edited and introduced by Richard Sieburth, this collection presents Baudelaire's late poems, drafts, and prose fragments in all their radical and aphoristic glory. Baudelaire's departure from the conventional aesthetic of unity and harmony in favor of disjunctions and fragmentary writing is brilliantly showcased in this volume, offering a fresh perspective on his evolution as a poet and thinker.

Richard Sieburth's substantial introductions to each work add depth and context to Baudelaire's writings, shedding light on their genesis and reception history. As readers delve into these pieces, they'll discover the unconventional beauty and the often challenging nature of Baudelaire's late work. The fragments are a testament to Baudelaire's willingness to explore misanthropy, raw emotion, and radical thought, pushing the boundaries of traditional lyricism. "Late Fragments" not only enriches our understanding of Baudelaire's oeuvre but also offers a unique opportunity to witness the creative evolution of a literary icon.

This collection is a must-read for admirers of Baudelaire and lovers of poetry alike. "Late Fragments" unveils a new dimension of his artistry, demonstrating his daring and avant-garde approach to literature. Baudelaire's late writings are both a challenge and a delight for readers, inviting them to explore the complexities of human emotion and the boundaries of poetic expression. Richard Sieburth's meticulous editing and insightful introductions make this volume an indispensable addition to the canon of Baudelaire's work and a treasure for anyone passionate about the evolution of modern poetics.

5 of 5 stars
Pub Date: 17 May 2022
#netgalley #baudelaire #latefragments

(Content warning for a surprising depth of animosity towards Belgians)

They say no man is a hero to his valet, and much the same may go for completist readers. Editor and translator Richard Sieburth does his damnedest – and his introductions are often more entertaining than the fragments themselves, though admittedly he is able to have it both ways by quoting the best bits of the texts proper too – but even he sometimes has to admit that Baudelaire's last, incomplete work is often repetitive, nasty, and/or just plain dull. In places the fault isn't even really Baudelaire's; past a certain point I can see the argument for releasing an incomplete book to the public, but there's incomplete and there's incomplete, and I certainly wouldn't want my sketchiest review notes available to the world, especially if other bits of a to do list from the same draft were thrown in too, as happens here:
"Pick up copies at Michel's.
Write to Mann.
to Willis.
to Maria Clemm."

But then just as you're thinking of abandoning the whole enterprise as strictly of interest to professional scholars, an adjacent page reminds you what Baudelaire could do: "These great gorgeous ships, imperceptibly rocked (dandled) by placid waters, these sturdy ships, lying there idle and nostalgic, aren't they asking us in a silent tongue: when are we due to set sail for happiness?" And so, like every quixotic voyage for that impossible destination, on you read. Still, you could quite profitably just read the Sieburth sections and keep the rest by the loo for dipping (not like that, though it would fit nicely with the scatological fixations of the Belgian section, on which more later). The first quarter of the book is an account of the circumstances surrounding the great poet's final work, which is a solid piece of scholarship but a masterpiece of black comedy. Hell, even the acknowledgments describe the delays in the book's production as "compounded by the mimetic contagion of Baudelaire's own habits of procrastination", which is the sort of excuse that lets you know you're in for a treat. And so it proves, a series of parodically unwise decisions and snubs like something from an Edward Gorey pastiche of the literary life. A series of poems in Le Figaro, aimed at the demographic which should have been perfect, are cancelled after two instalments because "according to the director, my poems were simply proving too boring to everybody". When he does get published, he still loses venues by pushing his luck and submitting the same texts over and over to different editors, some reprinted as many as four times, all without disclosure. The desperate search for inspiration: "such was Baudelaire's need to induce amazement at all costs that when he came home at night, he would go to sleep beneath his bed simply to astonish himself". Alas, farce eventually collapses into tragedy as the poet's faculties fail, and ultimately the man who redefined what French could do is reduced to the single exclamation 'Crénom!' which "he deployed to indicate either eager affirmation or furious disagreement, or sometimes both at once". And then, of course, to silence. Though there remained plenty for others to say about him, peers and posterity both, which Sieburth presents with a mixture of apology and amusement. TS Eliot notes Baudelaire's "mulish determination to make the worst of everything." Gautier, anticipating modern hatewatching, observes that "Baudelaire just remains on in Brussels, where he's bored stiff, for the sheer pleasure of telling all of us just how bored he's been." Perhaps the best summary is Walter Benjamin's to Andre Gide, saying that Baudelaire was "a bad philosopher, a good theoretician, but only as a brooder was he incomparable."

And what do you get if you hack your way through these gloomy thickets? Some sections are pretty much devoid of appeal, not least "HYGIENE. ETHICS. CONDUCT", which is filled with pap like "To do one's duty every day and place faith in God for the morrow", or praising work as a more restorative use of time than pleasure. It's a disappointment, if hardly a surprise, to find a former rebel turned rightward in old age, but here, as with the misogyny (George Sand is "a big fat idiot"), what really stings is how unimaginative he is about it, indistinguishable from untold thousands of self-satisfied idiots then, before and since. At least his loopier ultramontane tendencies have a little more fizz to them, although when Sieburth writes that "Baudelaire admitted no middle ground between the apocalyptic Counter-Revolution of Joseph de Maistre or the sacrificial Terror of Robespierre", it did remind me that we still have plenty of people who feel analogously, on both sides, and frankly the appeal has worn a bit thin. Some of the prose poems which have been published elsewhere are here too; the jackpot is surely Let's Beat Up The Poor, which turns out to have a hitherto suppressed final line that adds yet another layer to its twists and turns, albeit not without the risk of coming across a bit 'Aaaaaah'. Here is the source for one of his most widely quoted lines, "the sole and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude that one is doing evil" – which, as with "the act of love greatly resembles torture or a surgical procedure" obviously invites the reply 'Only if you're doing it right'. But elsewhere, the erstwhile poet of depravity comes out with lines like "The more a man cultivates the arts, the fewer hard-ons he gets. He makes a marked distinction between mind and beast. Only brutes get hard-ons, and fucking is the lyricism of the masses." There's a certain distant family resemblance to Wildean paradox there, but it feels too sincere, doesn't it? There are also lists of projects unrealised beyond the title or the merest sketch, and the intro to that section suggests it's here "that he most comes to resemble his master Joseph Joubert, of whom Blanchot would write 'He never wrote a book. He only prepared to write one, resolutely seeking the exact conditions that would allow him to write it. Then he forgot even this plan...In this he was one of the first completely modern writers, preferring the center to the sphere, sacrificing results to the discovery of their conditions, and writing not in order to add one book to another but to take command of the point from which it seemed to him all books issued, the point which, once it was found, would relieve him of the need to write any books whatsoever.'"
Which is a hell of an excuse, isn't it? Perhaps I should also jot down the various half-ideas I know would never actually work, then declare them to be "like a string of promises or resolutions – made to be broken. Or like a series of dice throws that will never abolish chance." As per a quote from Mallarme, "to suggest it, that's the dream", and it's true that I love in a story where we get the titles or synopses of further stories which will never be written, and how such hints can somehow be better than writing them. Even here, though, bathos creeps in, with the same titles appearing repeatedly in overlapping lists, and suddenly they don't feel like glimpses into the great library of the unwritten so much as desperate blags. There's a temptation to exempt some which have the first scraps of flesh on their bones, like the idea of a man who discovers a grand conspiracy and yet can't decide whether to save the empire or destroy it - "Perhaps a comedy", Baudelaire thoughtfully concludes. Even then, though, it would have stood or fallen in the execution, and looking at most of this stuff, you know which seems more likely.

And then there's Belgium Disrobed. Just as the 1844 appointment by Baudelaire's family of a conseil judiciaire to manage his finances opens up a hitherto unguessed correspondence with the struggles of Britney Spears, so, until I read this, I'd never particularly bracketed Baudelaire with my gran. But for a woman born at the tail-end of the Great War, she was remarkably non-racist, with one glaring exception: her feelings on "the fucking Belg". So I can't help thinking she would have loved this sprawling mess of splenetic notes and angrily underlined stories from local newspapers, all determined to prove that the Belgian "should be classified somewhere between the Mollusk and the ape". Of course, the note of farce remains, not least in the very concept of writing an epic anatomisation of the sins of Belgium. Beyond that, though, Baudelaire's own increasing suspicion that he was, after all, a man living in Belgium. The fact that he was pinning his financial hopes on something which could clearly never be published even under the liberal Belgian dispensation which so irked him; nor could he afford to go back to France to get it published there, and he knew it. At times there's a hallucinatory Francis Bacon power to his denunciations: "Gaping cloaca. Formless mouths. Unfinished faces." Sometimes he almost attains the heights of GK Chesterton's similarly uncharitable, but much more controlled, assessment of Brussels: "Belgium is without life, but not without corruption." In places, he even skirts self-awareness: "Why the French who have resided in Belgium won't tell the truth about this country. Because, given how French they are, they don't want to admit they were had." But then he'll go within a page or two from "Let us be on our guard against that dangerous Parisian penchant for over-generalization" to "All Belgians, without exception, have empty skulls." Suggesting the craziest belief of the local atheists is that mere humans could create a language doesn't stand up very well after a century or so of people doing just that; "Scum scummier than any known scum" is almost as lazy as the George Sand material; and the fixation on "Chairs without crossbars" is baffling.

The really bonkers thing, though, is again thanks to Sieburth, who makes clear that while repetitive and spiteful and in many places outright unhinged, this was not wholly the bizarre rabbit hole it might seem. At the time, Belgium had the first passenger railway and biggest industrial power per capita after Britain. Its parliament was already gridlocked, and Baudelaire's obsession with it as a land of imitators was not entirely his; it was known for endemic piracy and counterfeiting, with the French Ministry of Education sending Gerard de Nerval on a secret mission to investigate (though sadly there's no mention of whether he took his lobster – it would make a much better film if so). Hell, while I was reading this section, I found the following in a Guardian review of an ostensibly unrelated book about the idea of the normal, and suddenly Baudelaire's rage at Belgian conformism didn't seem quite as outlandish either:
"So when did “normal” become a desirable human trait? The story begins with a Belgian astronomer and statistician named Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1847), who took published data on the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers and plotted them on a graph in order to determine the ideal “average man”. “He also set in place the belief that any deviation from the centre of the bell curve was some kind of aberration,” Chaney writes."
Sieburth doesn't mention that specifically, but does suggest that many of Baudelaire's complaints about Belgium can be taken as "uncannily prophetic of contemporary America". I'd suggest that's too narrow, when really they apply to much of the modern world. Allegedly the place is a democracy and liberal - but returns on investment in mills and factories are 40%, coincidentally the same as the life expectancy of the labourers. "Constitutions are made of paper. Manners and morals are everything." "Belgians measure the value of artists by the market value of their paintings." People who assume you must not believe what you're saying, because they can't understand it. Baudelaire's prediction of a future where governments "resort to methods that would cause men of today to shudder, callous though they already be" have proven all too accurate, but here it becomes clear that it wasn't just the hecatombs he saw coming, it was the general grubbiness and venality too. Of course, on the plus side, after only about a century his Fleurs Du Mal would be allowed to be published in full in France; hell, now the title even gets borrowed for an episode of a kids' cartoon (Les minijusticiers, if you're interested), it's so much part of the furniture. And for all that assimilation, you really would do much better turning there than here if you want to spend some time with Baudelaire the great and radical poet, as against the fogey going on loony whose remnants are contained here. Still, sparsely scattered as they may be, Late Fragments does have its moments, even if many of them are Sieburth's or other, intermediary commentators', like the idea of a chain of inheritance or something more, a shared selfhood, running from Poe through Baudelaire to Nietzsche. Occasionally, though, Baudelaire does offer those inspiring, frustrating hints of still having something until nearly the end: "Life is a hospital where each patient is driven by the desire to change beds."

(Netgalley ARC)

*I received an ARC of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

Late Fragments is the first English collection of Baudelaire’s late poems and fragments. Those of you that, like me, knew little of Charles Baudelaire will find in it an enchanting, telling submersion into his late work. Those of you that knew him, and the importance of his contribution, will find plenty new to explore.

The book is, of course, not a mere collection of poems, but an odyssey; this is a heavy tome that requires literary attention and time, and that will be most cherished by those that love the written work and its study. Not only does it showcase the genius of one of Modernity’s most important poets; it also exhibits the exquisite commentary and work of Richard Sieburth, Late Fragment’s translator and editor. Sieburth’s introductions and footnotes add context and deeper analysis to each page, stimulating the reader’s curiosity.

Studying a poet’s fragments, especially those penned near the ends of their lives or careers, is a fascinating mirror on which to see and question them, and oneself. What made them scribble these thoughts? What made them stop, lines unfinished? Late Fragments contains dozens upon dozens of opportunities upon which to ponder these thoughts, and a plethora of other musings.

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Sidenote: I’ve been irremeably disarmed and charmed by the cover design; kudos to Yale University Press, and the designer, for it.

A wonderful collection of the poet’s late work. The introductory essay and footnotes were extremely helpful to gain a better understanding of Baudelaire’s writing.

The collection of work by Charles Baudelaire was created by him at the ending years of his life. They are rough and jagged and beautiful in their own rights. I totally loved reading the book.