From Publishers Weekly
French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) posed as a dandy and bohemian to protect himself against the world, writes Richardson in this scholarly yet dramatic biography. Also the biographer of Verlaine, Stendahl and Victor Hugo, she regards Baudelaire as "among the most profoundly Catholic of poets," his Fleurs du mal not so much about evil as a wrestling with sin and repentance, the war between flesh and spirit. The poet's ambivalent devotion to his manipulative mother, Caroline Defayis Aupick, his idol and companion-a relationship, according to the author, fraught with emotional blackmail and jealousy-led to his failure to commit himself wholly to any other woman. Amid his isolation, deep depressions and sense of abandonment, he sublimated love into a sensuous appetite for beauty, celebrating both the lost innocence of childhood and the daily heroism of ordinary people in the modern metropolis. Richardson's searching, incandescent portrait clarifies both the life and the art. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This superb revisionist biography, meticulously documented but with a narrative as enthralling as a novel, shows Baudelaire from the perspective of his mother, whom he never forgave for remarrying after the death of his father. Richardson makes readers sympathize with this loving woman, who cherished both her ardent and sucessful husband, Jacques Aupick, a career soldier and diplomat, and her irresponsible, paranoid postadolescent son. Richardson effectively rehabilitates General Aupick, "finally to be remembered by the hatred of the stepson with whom capricious fortune had endowed him." Her depiction of Baudelaire's self-destructive lifestyle makes even more mysterious the grandeur of his accomplishments, achieved under the most forbidding circumstances. Richardson, whose translations of Baudelaire's poetry (1975) are disappointing, cites prose in English translation and poetry in French. Recommended for literary collections.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at Binghamton
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at Binghamton
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
