Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed

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Late Fragments

by
Charles Baudelaire

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Title:	Late Fragments
Author:	Charles Baudelaire
Genre:	various
Written:	(1860s) (Eng. 2022)
Length:	427 pages
Original in:	French
Availability:	Late Fragments - US
	Late Fragments - UK
	Late Fragments - Canada
	in Œuvres complètes - Canada
	Fusées · Mon cœur mis à nu · La Belgique déshabillée - France
	in Œuvres complètes - France
	in Sämtliche Werke 7/8 - Deutschland
	Il mio cuore messo a nudo - Italia
	Pobre Bélgica - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

	directly from: Yale University Press

Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed
Translations of:
- Fusées (Flares)
- Mon cœur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Bare)
- Pauvre Belgique (Belgium Disrobed)
Translated and with introductions by Richard Sieburth
Parts have been previously translated by, among others, Christopher Isherwood (in Intimate Journals (1930), Norman Cameron (My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings (1950), and Rainer J. Hanshe (My Heart Laid Bare (2017) and Belgium Stripped Bare (2019))

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Our Assessment:

B : fascinating mix, with excellent but text-overwhelming supporting essays by the translator

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
London Rev. of Books	.	16/3/2023	Ian Penman
The NY Rev. of Books	.	7/4/2022	Ange Mlinko
Wall St. Journal	.	8/7/2022	Sam Sacks
The Washington Post	.	11/5/2022	Michael Dirda

From the Reviews:

"Baudelaire’s final project looks like something W.C. Fields might have conceived during a more than usually pestilential hangover. (...) His prejudice is entirely without humour or discrimination. He’s made up his mind: nothing can possibly compare to Paris. (...) There’s something quite sad about it, like seeing someone you know having an alcoholic breakdown in the street, spitting and swearing at everyone and everything around them. Sieburth would have us believe it’s a grand satire, comparable to Swift. For me it’s nearer to Derek and Clive. This is Baudelaire with his dandy’s mask off, and it isn’t pleasant. There’s an awful strain of misogyny, and a weird fixation on bodies relieving themselves. It’s all rather excremental. (...) Baudelaire’s fragments frequently look less like serious literature and more like the delusive autofiction of a long-time drug addict: a superficial busyness of plans, schedules and endless to-do lists. (...) There are occasional flashes of the lovely prose stylist he once was." - Ian Penman, London Review of Books

"Sieburth’s lengthy introductions to each section carefully prepare the reader for the bombshells that follow. (...) The intensity of Baudelaire’s scorn increases with each section." - Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books

"Not only does it reprint the scribblings, random observations, inventories and disjecta membra of France’s second greatest poet (...) all this inchoate material is given context by Sieburth’s learned, elegantly written commentary. He is the perfect guide to these “fractured, almost cubist shards of a self-portrait, (...) Baudelaire’s jottings are bluntly honest, usually provocative, frequently ugly and misogynistic. Self-lashings alternate with self-help cliches. He practically flaunts his divided soul, torn between Sin and Redemption.presented in notations that often barely rise to the level of achieved sentences.”" - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Late Fragments collects several of Charles Baudelaire's late projects and efforts, practically all then only published posthumously. As translator Richard Sieburth notes in his Introduction, while Baudelaire seemed to almost always be bubbling over with ideas, he was less than impressive in his follow-through, not managing to actually complete very much -- hence also, as the title makes clear, most of what is assembled here is fragmentary. Among the bits presented here is a 'List of Titles' -- suggesting some (well, many: there are 112, though some are listed twice) projects he wanted to flesh out -- many promising-sounding, such as: 'Self-Cuckoldry or Incest', something on 'The Poet and the Historian (Carlyle and Tennyson)', 'My Beginnings', 'Symptoms of Ruin', and, simply: 'Death'.
       Sieburth presents the material in several sections: a first part of 'Brevities' collects Flares, Hygiene, and My Heart Laid Bare, a second part of 'Works in Progress' collects Late Prose Poems and various Projects, while the third part presents Belgium Disrobed. Seven Appendixes collect a variety of other odds and ends.
       The volume as a whole comes with a lengthy Introduction by Sieburth, as does then each individual part. Introductory and explanatory, this material provides a great deal of information about Baudelaire and his work -- both what's collected here and more generally. Accessible and informative, it all makes for a helpful companion-read to the text(s) but is perhaps too close to them: this is material (and presentation) that is better suited for a separate volume, a study of the 'Late Fragments'. With an often close reading -- including lengthy quotes from the material itself, including bits and pieces in their entirety -- Sieburth does more than merely introduce the texts, getting to much of the material before the reader has a chance to get to Baudelaire's words themselves. Given the fragmentary nature of much of the material, context is certainly helpful, but there is arguably -- certainly to my mind -- much too much of it here (the here being the issue; it would make for a great separate companion volume). (The texts are also footnote-annotated -- and for the most part that would suffice.)
       Sieburth's Introductions do contain a lot of interesting information and perspective -- including titbits such as that:

It is estimated that Baudelaire's lifetime earnings from his literary work amounted to 14,000 francs -- 9,000 coming from his translations of Edgar Allan Poe and 5,000 from his original works -- roughly the equivalent of the salary that a midlevel bureaucrat of the period would have earned over three years of employment.

And his summings-up of some of the works give a good sense of what the reader can expect and how the pieces might be seen:

His Flares and My Heart Laid Bare, which blend explosions of misanthropic (and rottenly misogynistic) ugliness with sparks of aphoristic beauty, are best approached as Baudelaire's late experiments in the discipline of dandyism

And:

Flares and My Heart Laid Bare are in a sense Baudelaire's commonplace books, containing quotations, recipes, prayers, sayings, reading notes, marginalia, and samplings of literary and journalistic styles.

In the collection of Hygiene-flares, Baudelaire does suggest -- or remind himself -- to:

Always be a poet, even in prose. The grand old style (nothing more beautiful than the commonplace).

Here and throughout, practically all is prose -- including then some very prosaic prose-poems -- but most of the bits are, at best, small and carefully formulated, along with much more that isn't more than mere jottings. It makes for a very mixed bag of collections in the first part here, from pithy claims -- "God is a scandal -- but a profitable one", or: "Commerce is, by its very essence satanic" -- to well-turned little put-downs such as: "This man is so unelegiac, so unethereal that he would revolt even a notary".
Of particular interest are the bits where Baudelaire seems to be trying to convince himself:

Set to work immediately, even if the work be mediocre. It beats dreaming.

Or, for example:

     Do every day what duty and prudence commend.
     If you worked every day, your life would be more bearable.
     Work six days without respite.

Some is outright personal -- such as when he wonders: "Is my egoistic phase now over ?"
Already in My Heart Laid Bare there are prompts -- ideas for larger works -- such as:

     The story of my translation of Edgar Poe.
     The story of The Flowers of Evil, of the humiliation of being misunderstood, and of my trial.

     The story of my relations with all the famous men of my age.

And then there are a variety of basically title-lists, of 'Poems to do', as well as for novels and short stories. In a few cases, there's parenthetical embellishment, suggesting some of where these might be going, such as:

58 Honeymoon Nights (The trials. The new pair of boots. The prayer)
[...]
79 The Awaiting Father (Clown costume and toys, perhaps a short story)
[...]
89 Unknown Apartments (Places known and unknown, yet recognized. Dusty apartments. Moving days. Rediscovered books)
[...]
95 Sentenced to Death (for a misdeed forgotten by me but suddenly regained, after the Sentence)

       But even some where simply the title is given show their potential, such as: 'To Those Philosophers Who Enjoy Masked Balls' .....
       Some ideas are more worked out: there's quite a bit of (hat-related) material in his 'Notes for the Elegy for Hats, for example -- and also the wistful observation: "How sad it is, all this solitary frivolity !" Mostly, however, there's only the grain of the idea -- a fascinating compendium, yet also disappointing in only being able to hint at what might have been .....
       The eleven prose poems Sieburth includes here are the most substantial pieces -- and finished ones at that; some were even published during Baudelaire's lifetime (but more refused, and then published (slightly) posthumously). These are full-fledged little stories or anecdotes, certainly more prose than poetry; appealing enough, but a bit out of place in the otherwise so fragmentary collection.
       The pièce de résistance of the collection is, without a doubt, the section 'Belgium Disrobed', consisting of the Argument for the Book of Belgium and then Selections from Belgium Disrobed. (Unfortunately, Sieburth limits himself to only a "substantial selection from Baudelaire's notes toward this unfinished book, slightly edited down in order to avoid their nearly verbatim repetition of identical observations", and only summarizing the newspaper clippings Baudelaire included.)
       Baudelaire never settled on a title, but the list of 'Possible titles' already gives a good idea of what Baudelaire intended here:

The true Belgium. Belgium stark naked.
Belgium disrobed. Ludicrous Capital.
A Capital of Apes.

So too his observation in his 'Preliminaries': "France seems quite barbaric, seen up close. But go to Belgium, and you will become less critical of your own country". What follows is a national take-down (with an emphasis on -- though certainly not limited to -- Brussels) of Bernhardian levels.
If early on he just bashes Brussels' blandness, by the end he's concluded:

The Belgian has been hacked into stumps, yet still lives on. He's a worm one has forgotten to squash.
He's totally bête, but as resistant as a mollusk.

For good measure, he notes things such as: "Belgian hatred of all literature, and especially of La Bruyère".
His contempt, here as elsewhere isn't limited to Belgians; he's nasty about women throughout and -- while writing favorably of cats -- sums up also:

     The tyranny of the weak/
     Women.
     Children.
     Dogs.
     Belgium.

His attack on Belgium is so over the top, and so comprehensive, that its effect is largely comic; it's certainly impossible to take seriously. Presented in a shorthand of fragments, a fully written-out version as he apparently had planned would likely have resembled one of de Sade's monstrous works, but even as is it is, in its own way, spectacular. Horrible, certainly, and yet grand, too, in also being so obviously heart-felt (much as Thomas Bernhard's raging against Austria). A bizarre but fascinating piece of work.

Late Fragments is an interesting book -- or rather two, Sieburth's extensive commentary in his introductions a (too dominant) second part that almost suffocates the collection of Baudelaire's odds and ends. As Sieburth's accompanying essays suggest, the works of Baudelaire collected here are of greatest interest as a reflection of the writer's biography -- their literary merit is uneven, tending more towards being curiosities, though with some fine flashes -- but nevertheless they would likely be more enjoyable if allowed to stand more on their own, the footnotes that are provided certainly adequate annotation. (Sieburth's pieces are very good, indeed welcome, too -- just not here .....)

- M.A.Orthofer, 11 August 2024

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Links:

Late Fragments:

Yale University Press publicity page
Folio publicity page
Gallimard publicity page
Contra Mundum publicity page
Contra Mundum publicity page
Adelphi publicity page
Hyperacuity — Baudelaire's Late Fragments by Bret Schneider

Reviews:

Charles Baudelaire:

Charles Baudelaire at books and writers

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of French literature
See Index of Books Written Before 1900
Other books from Yale University Press - The Margellos World Republic of Letters under review

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About the Author:

French author Charles Baudelaire lived 1821 to 1867.

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