Baudelaire in Chains: A Portrait of the Artist as a Drug Addict [Illustrated] (Hardcover)

The French decadent and rmantic poet Charles Baudelaire, who died in 1867 aged 46, spent much of his adult life in the grip of a miserable complex of physical and mental afflictions. At times he was gripped by lethargy and ennui that made it impossible for him to put pen to paper for weeks on end; at others he suffered from mysterious cramps, vomiting and other physical torments. When he had money, he spent it profligately; his romantic attachments were histrionic and masochistic; he spent most of his life in poverty, lurching from one chaotic living arrangement to the next. His belief that he was consumed by a sickness of the soul emanating from a doomed core of rottenness and decay, informs much of his poetry and essays. Most of his biographers have accepted the view mooted by some at the time that Baudelaire was afflicted with syphilis, which he contracted during his days as a young dandy-about-town and which accounts for his procession of physical and mental agonies and his early demise. Frank Hilton's interesting idea is that he didn't have syphilis at all, but a lifelong and largely concealed opium addiction that explains his condition much more plausibly. 'Baudelaire in Chains' is his attempt, employing a more up-to-date and better informed model of drug dependency than most previous biographers, to reinterpret the poet's life along these lines. There are enough references in Baudelaire's letters and other writings to laudanum, the tincture of opium widely available from pharmacists at the time, to make it clear that he certainly had recourse to it on occasion, and perhaps for more protracted periods. He also spent many years on a translation and commentary of Thomas de Quincey's magisterial 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the most thorough exploration of the inner life of the opiate addict at the time (and in many ways still unsurpassed). Although Baudelaire is equally famous today for his use of hashish, thanks to his fine essay on its effects included in 'Les Paradis Artificiels', Hilton correctly observes that there's no evidence that he took it more than once, and that his incongruously hellish description of its aftermath that led him to denounce it as a blasphemous 'forbidden game' indicates a transposition of the more problematic effects of opium on to this solitary and otherwise apparently benign experience. Yet the evidence that Baudelaire's life was dominated by an addiction to opium remains, as Hilton himself acknowledges, thin. He never publicly admitted to a lifelong dependency or attempted reframe his malaise around the way that de Quincey did; nor does he even confide his narcotic bondage to his private letters, notebooks and diaries in the manner of Coleridge. Indeed, he regularly records in these that he has 'no idea' why he is sometimes highly productive and at other times little more than a zombie, or what causes his attacks of gastric distress and loss of appetite to appear and then to vanish. If he was not only immersed in de Quincey but simultaneously dependent on opium, this lack of curiosity and self awareness seems inexplicable. The lack of evidence is compounded by the fact that Hilton does rather too good a job of locating the characteristic of the drug addict in Baudelaire's early life, far back into his childhood and long before he could have been taking opium... ... This is a lively, provocative and crisply written book, full of incidental interest and, almost despite itself, an accessible introduction to its saturnine subject. --Fortean Times

Un texte vivant et plaisant à lire . . . un angle nouveau et original