Baudelaire and Me

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

My daughter Kathryn has urged me to stop writing so much about death. “Why don’t you write about life, Dad?” I said I’d consider it, only I don’t really have a life anymore. And, furthermore, I replied, I certainly am not going to write about all my troubles. Old men who natter about their difficulties are as tedious as Trump yammering about millions of immigrants flooding our cities and taking jobs from white folks.

Still, on reflection, it did occur to me that I once did have a life, so perhaps I could, after all, find something to say about that. For example, what the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, and I have in common.  But that will require a bit of a back story, so I’d better get started.

When I was in high school, I acquired my first girlfriend,  name of Carolyn. I won’t take the time here to describe our volatile relationship -- she was very religious while I was an atheist, and we fought all the time – but we managed to stay together until my first year at Cal-Berkeley.

When I was a freshman, within a relatively short time, I found myself very strongly drawn to the then just emerging “Beat culture” and began to identify with the lifestyle of what later came to be called “alienated youth.” I had gone from being a relatively conventional, clean-cut young man who used to attend Cal football games in a white shirt salivating after “pom-pom” girls (i.e., our cheerleaders) to becoming in effect a bearded slob, a kind of a caricature of a Jules Pfeiffer cartoon figure, who took pleasure in flouting the pretensions of bourgeois society and who came to view himself as a young existentialist. The Berkeley campus didn’t really afford a café society, much less a Left Bank, but if it had, I would have easily found a niche for myself as a denizen of that world. 

All this appalled and disgusted Carolyn, and before too long, she had decided she didn’t know me anymore and wondered how we could continue as a couple.

I myself have only very dim memories of those days and what I must have been like then, but in recent years after I had reconnected with Carolyn and began corresponding with her, she reminded me of them and told me how she remembered me during that period:

As you acknowledge, you were drawn to Beat culture. I remember a particular bar that you frequented. You took me there once and tried to pressure me into drinking a glass of beer that I did not want. Part of this Beat culture seemed to be aversion to bodily cleanliness. Instead of remaining lovers we were pulled into a destructive nagging mother/rebellious son relationship that was no fun for either of us. I was always after you to get a haircut, shave, wash your clothes, take a bath, and you responded with all the sarcasm that you are capable of. Furthermore, you just dug in your heels. I seem to remember a period where day after day you wore the same soiled clothes. I am sure that the pants were grey, and I think that the shirt was as well. The smell of sweat combined at times with the smell of beer made me gag. I wanted to cut the tie that bound us into this destructive relationship but was reluctant to hurt you. I hated not only what you had become but what I had become.

Carolyn finally broke it off—and broke my heart—but by then it was too late. I actually rued her loss in my life and mourned it for the next several years, but I was set on my course and would not look back.

I had become the alien. 

The question is, why had I been drawn to make such a drastic change in my behavior, to say nothing of the noisome attire that so repelled Carolyn?

The beginning of an answer takes us back to the men in my family.

I had grown up without a father.  Well, I had had one, and had been deeply loved by him, but he was unhappy in his marriage and left when I was six years old to go into the coast guard once the U.S. became involved in the war. Before he enlisted, however, I have a distinct memory of his taking me to the home of one of his mistresses.  Of course, I didn’t know why he left me with his lover’s little Scottie in the hall while he was apparently having a quickie with his mistress.

My father was an artist, and, as I later learned, was inclined to the life of a Bohemian once he began to live in Europe after the war. He was even a bit of a charlatan (he was in the habit of passing off his work as that of a more famous artist).  But during the war, I remember that my father would write me letters.  There is only one thing I remember his writing.  “Kenny,” he said, “whenever you go to a new place, tell people that it’s your birthday, so they will give a big party for you.” Such was my father’s Lord Chesterfield letters to his son.

My Uncle Bill, on the other hand, was a very different kind of man.

After a rather wild youth during which he rode the rails with hobos and tramps, mingled with criminals and other denizens of the demimonde, and eventually even married a hooker (who in time would leave him for a former boyfriend once her lover had been discharged from prison), he had temporarily settled down to the prosaic life as a gardener at a local college, only a few blocks from where we lived in Oakland. 

It was during this period—roughly 1943-4, when I was about 7 or 8—that I began to spend a lot of time with Bill and got to know quite a bit about his world of interests. Truly, in many ways, Bill was my first teacher and intellectual mentor.

He also loved to sing, and in later years, when I would ride around with him up in the Mother Lode country where he had joined his father for a time driving laundry trucks, we would spend many a day singing our hearts out.

Most of my mother’s siblings had finished high school, but not Bill. Because of his adventurous spirit, he had left home early and had managed only to complete the eighth grade. Yet, he had somehow come to acquire a great many books and was apparently an omnivorous reader. I can still recall his little gardener’s hut being crammed with books, which he would enthusiastically talk to me about and would urge me to read. I remember he had many books on what was then called “free-thinking” (i.e., atheism), on the materialistic-oriented science of the day (I can still remember one by the then-famous German biologist, Haeckel, he thrust upon me) and on socialism. I don’t think Bill himself was a member of the Communist Party, but I’m sure he was sympathetic to the Russian experiment, as of course many Jews were then. In any case, it was this worldview that Bill introduced me to, and for many years, it would form the bedrock of my thinking about religion and politics.

Bill, like other members of my family, married more than once – he had three wives.  So did his father, Bert, my grandfather. I grew up in a cohort of four cousins (including myself). One of them, an internationally famous jazz pianist, was married four times, and had had a Brazilian girlfriend. Same as me – I also had four wives and a Brazilian girlfriend along the way.  Similarly, for another cousin, who eventually became a well-known UFO researcher and author.  We were not a conventional family.

And then there was my stepfather, Ray, who was a military man with a temper.  He was never cruel to me (though I am sure I was trying to him), but he was bellicose and very controlling, used to giving orders and having them obeyed. Half-Italian and half-Jewish, with bulging muscles and tattoos, Ray was completely alien to me.  I avoided him as much as possible and felt rebellious much of the time I had to live with him and my mother.

A side bar here, but an important one. Although my entire family was Jewish, no one was religious; they had all rejected orthodox Judaism. So I never grew up with any religious indoctrination. Indeed, I wasn’t even aware that I was Jewish until I was seven years old. But, all the same, Jews are the archetypal outsiders. People often find us Jews “alien” and decidedly “other.” I remember Carolyn telling me, on learning I was Jewish, that she thought the only Jews were in the Bible and were called Hebrews.

You can see that with this background where I was likely to head and the kind of person I would become once I got to college.  But now, I must hasten to move this story along to the years when I was a young psychology professor at the University of Connecticut. By then, I had married another psychologist named Elizabeth who gave birth in 1963 to our daughter, Kathryn.

In those first years of my professional life, I managed to bury the remnants of my alienated youth and assumed a new persona. I was clean-shaven, I got along well with my students and colleagues, and I was advancing in my career. Within a few years, I had been elected chairman of my division of social psychology and I had begun to take my place on some of the important committees of my department. I was also promoted quite quickly to the rank of associate professor, and not long after that was awarded tenure. Professional life was good, too.

By now, I had given up my gin-guzzling ways, and was imbibing sherry and scotch at departmental parties like the proper academic I was learning to be, and settling for getting a bit tipsy rather than drunk. On the surface, life was pleasant enough.

But under the surface, things were roiling and I was heading toward some kind of crisis.

Gradually, I became aware of how inauthentically I was living. I was continuingly playing parts or assuming identities that I knew were false. I did not really feel like a professor. Instead, I was experiencing the truth of one of George Orwell’s dicta to the effect that every teacher sooner or later realizes that he is an imposter. Moreover, I was becoming disillusioned with my professional specialty of social psychology. I had become very critical of some of its then current practices and fads, and my graduate classes particularly gave rise to a kind of corrosive cynicism that my students could not help detecting. I felt that I was in the process of some kind of defection—but to what?

Most alarming of all, I became aware of how hollow my marriage to Elizabeth had become. It was as if I were play-acting the happy husband and father. Well, I still loved my daughter very much, but I realized I no longer loved Elizabeth and hadn’t for a long time. I was just pretending that things were solid between us when in truth they were fractured. I felt as if I were dying.

I developed—or imagined that I developed—symptoms. I found myself unable to think clearly. I thought I might have a brain tumor. I underwent a terribly botched spinal tap, which was inconclusive. The doctor put me on tranquillizers afterward. After taking just one of them, I vowed not to take another—and I never have. I was deeply unhappy, and I didn’t know if I could go on. I thought about resigning my position or at least asking for a leave of absence.

By then, Elizabeth had grown alarmed at my condition and my state of mind. We started talking about getting a divorce.

 

Around that time, a new post-doc student came into our department. She was blonde, beautiful and Southern—the first of several gorgeous Southern women in my life —and I fell for her.  I found myself cutting out some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and placing them in her mail box. Meanwhile, my marriage to Elizabeth was quickly unraveling, and it wasn’t long before we had agreed to separate. By then, it was understood that Elizabeth would move out and I would continue to take care of Kathryn.

Not long after Elizabeth had left, I was making love to my Southern belle. For the first time in years, I was feeling passion again. 

The affair didn’t last long, but there were soon other women in my bed. I was like the proverbial “kid in the candy store,” and suddenly I was free to pursue and consume whatever delicious sexual favors that came my way. And I did. I started sleeping around, mostly with graduate students or women I met at parties. I had a number of “one-night stands” in those days, and, to be vulgar, I had a ball balling those women. I was in my early thirties by then, and it was the first time in my life I was really able to enjoy sex freely. I made the most of it. 

My department, however, was rather scandalized by my behavior, once the word got around about me. Moreover, the divorce between Elizabeth and me was apparently the first one to take place in the history of our department, and many people were sad and even shocked about it since a number of my faculty members had liked Elizabeth and had thought well of me. Now, it was almost as if I had become—or had chosen to be—a pariah. 

Well, who cared? I had tenure. I would do what I wanted. Besides, by this time, I was feeling a lot better. Whatever had been troubling me mentally was lifting. Indeed, I can still remember the feeling of exhilaration I experienced when Elizabeth had left our house. Finally, I was free—free to be myself again!

When I had first arrived at the university, I had, like my colleagues, dressed up and gone to take my lunch at the faculty club where I would be privy to learned discussions about mortgages, investing, plumbing problems and departmental politics. It wasn’t long before I was thinking to myself—“Why I am sitting with these men? Is this really what professors are all about?” 

But after breaking up with Elizabeth, I found my friends elsewhere. I began to hang out with graduate students (and to sleep with some of them), and I started patronizing the cafes around campus that catered to what was then, in the days of the so-called “counter-culture,” disaffected academics of radical leanings and similarly inclined students. These were the sorts of people I felt a sense of kindredness with; I belonged with them. On Sunday mornings, I would sometimes bring Kathryn, who was perhaps only 3 or 4 years of age then, with me to one of these cafes where I would read the Times. Sooner or later, if I hadn’t already run into some of my friends there, a young woman would usually drift by, taking pity on a young dad, and help me pass the time. Or even go shopping with me to buy clothes for Kathryn.

And, in general, I was passing my time differently now, too. One of my girlfriends had taught me to smoke dope, and another had induced me to attend folk music concerts. I was making friends with Dylan, Joan Baez, The Beatles and The Stones, and Judy Collins, too (whose husband, I had heard, had once taught at UCONN). Even my once neatly trimmed hair was becoming as long as a hippie’s. 

By now, I would only wear casual clothes to class—putting on a suit always made me feel as if I were donning a costume, anyway— and I would frequently lecture while sitting on a small table rather than standing behind a lectern with my notes. “Call me Ken,” I would tell my students on the first day of the semester. I was Mr. Informal rather than Dr. Ring. I was never “cool,” exactly, but I was approachable, warm and humorous, and I was well liked by my students. 

My fellow colleagues, however, with only a few exceptions, had begun to look at me askance. They could see I had crossed over. I was a traitor. But I had found my way back to myself — no matter what the cost. 

Which brings me, finally, to the 19th century poet, Charles Baudelaire, the man who wrote the notorious Les Fleurs du Mal.

Early in my correspondence with Carolyn, she told me about the reasons we had broken up. As you might remember, they had largely to do with the fact that within a short time after becoming a college student, I had changed from a conventionally-minded, clean-cut teenager into someone who, in her eyes, had become a dissolute lout. She could neither understand nor countenance this drastic alteration in my personality and behavior, and given its persistence and my intractability, she soon dismissed me from her life. For my part, though I felt her loss keenly, I had no intention of trying to rectify my behavior for her sake or anyone else’s. To me, I was just behaving in a way that had quickly come to seem natural to me. I had already learned to identify with the radical fringe and alienated youths like myself. 

The question again is why.

You might think that I have already provided the answer. That is, you might simply assume, as I had in later years, that I had even then begun, however unconsciously, to embody and express the more artistic side of my nature and was drawn to outsiders like myself in what was an unknowing imitation of my father’s own proclivities. But as I was to discover, this could not possibly be the entire answer. This shift in my character didn’t just have to do with my father’s personality and lifestyle. Instead, it had everything to do with an incomparably greater artist: Charles Baudelaire.

Since Baudelaire’s life and work are so well known, I need only summarize some of the most basic facts about him. Born in 1821 in Paris, he was to become the most celebrated poet of his age and forever influence the course of French poetry. Regarded as the first true poet of modernity, Baudelaire was drawn to the seamy side of life. He lived with an uneducated prostitute for many years, and regularly consorted with the habitués of the underclass. Although born into well-to-do circumstances, he lived most in his life in wretched squalor and penury and died at 46 after years of misery and intense suffering from syphilis, which he had contracted at an early age.

He is best known for his seminal book of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), which posterity would come to honor as the most important volume of French poetry to be written in the nineteenth century. But he was also celebrated as an art critic and a translator. It was Baudelaire, for example, who first translated many of the works of Poe into French and was responsible for creating the virtual cult of interest that the French were to have about this American author. He was also the friend and partisan of many of his era’s great artistic geniuses, such as Delacroix, Manet and Wagner. Overall, his work in the field of literature, as poet, critic and translator, during his brief and tormented lifetime was of incomparable value and significance.

But, for us, it is not Baudelaire’s work that is of primary relevance here. At least not for what is the real subject of this blog. Instead, we need to examine Baudelaire’s particular family constellation.

Baudelaire’s father, Joseph-François, was 61 when his son was born. Earlier in his life he had been a priest and a tutor to the children of an aristocratic family into whose lives he became deeply enmeshed. He was well educated, had beautiful manners, and had come to know a number of the leading intellectual figures of his day, such as the philosopher, Helvétius, and the philosopher and politician, Condorcet. 

Baudelaire’s father was also very interested in art, had a taste for and a modest talent at painting, and had artistic ambitions. When he was a student at the Sorbonne, he had also sought out the company of artists, and even after he retired, he devoted much of his time to sketching and painting. 

Joseph-François took an active and loving interest in educating his son to whom he was very close. This is how one of Baudelaire’s biographers, Joanna Richardson, describes it:

He had taught his son about art, as they admired the prints and pastels in the rue Hautefeuille, the statues in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He had no doubt taught him history…He roused his interest in music…and taught his son the rudiments of Latin…Joseph-François had himself written numerous pieces of verse…It was from him that Baudelaire inherited his love of literature and art, his patrician manners, his style and sensuality; father and son had a natural affinity that went beyond ties of blood. It was an irreplaceable relationship.

Unfortunately, it was not to last long. Joseph-François died shortly before Baudelaire turned six. It was a crushing loss to the boy. Afterward, he always carried a portrait of his father wherever his nomadic life took him. He was devoted to his memory.

Baudelaire’s mother, Caroline, was his father’s second wife, and she was much younger than he. Well-educated and intelligent, she had grown up as the ward of a very privileged family, the father of whom had long been good friends with Baudelaire’s father. After his first wife had died, Joseph-François elected to marry Caroline.

 

Caroline’s early upbringing, including the death of both of her parents by the time she was seven, resulted in her always suffering from poor health. In addition, she was a nervous woman, somewhat melancholy in disposition. Hypersensitive, too, she was given to emotional outbursts. In many ways, we can see in her the seeds of her son’s morbid personality structure. 

Although Joseph-François had been kind to his wife during their few years together, it is obvious that she had never loved him. She didn’t even see to it that he was properly buried, and his gravesite has never been located. The only person she had ever truly loved and doted upon was her son, and now he was hers entirely. From all accounts, it was especially after his father’s death that Caroline sought to bind Charles even more deeply to her, and for the rest of their lives they had a very powerful and complex love-hate relationship.

However, the time of their exclusive mutual intimacy was to be short-lived. Not long after her husband’s death, Caroline became involved with an up-and-coming soldier, got pregnant by him, and finally induced the soldier, one Jacques Aupick, to marry her. She was then 34, he, 38 and in his prime. Aupick would go on to have a very distinguished military career. For much of it, he was a general, and for that reason he is often referred to as General Aupick. Later in life, he became a diplomat, first serving as an envoy and minister to Constantinople and, after declining an offer to be ambassador to the London court, settling instead for the equivalent post in Madrid. During the course of their happy thirty-year marriage, Caroline became very submissive to her husband. He ruled; she obeyed. He was a soldier, after all, and a prominent one. One of his orders was that he didn’t want any children to hamper his life. Charles was farmed out, sent to boarding schools, dismissed. He never recovered from this abandonment. Within a year, he had lost both his father and his mother, and he had gained an enemy for life, someone he would actually later try to strangle and to whose existence he never became reconciled. He could never forgive his mother for what she had done.

Still, at the outset and well before their vicious and lifelong rupture, Aupick tried to befriend his stepson. He truly wanted to help him. However, he was incapable of seeing and appreciating who Baudelaire was, much less of nurturing the talents that would later turn his stepson into the greatest poet of his age. Again, Richardson is very good at summarizing the essential problem in their relationship that was to cause such terrible damage to Baudelaire and to alienate him forever from his stepfather:

The problem was that Aupick was guided by the military virtues of honor and duty, by piety and patriotism, by a bourgeois belief in regular hard work, in the value of paternal authority. Had Baudelaire chosen to enter a profession, Aupick was prepared to use all his influence to help him; but the single-minded officer from Saint-Cyr could not understand the artistic temperament. He could not comprehend a boy who showed small regard for discipline, and an early devotion to literature and painting. Baudelaire was patently the son of Joseph-François. Aupick could never give him what Joseph-François would have given him. Aupick’s rigid code of behavior, his lack of sensibility, were to bring much grief in his childhood. In his early manhood, they were to cause an irreparable breach between them. 

So how did Baudelaire respond to all this in his “early manhood?” He became a rebel, of course. He chose to disidentify completely with the values of his stepfather, and in fact to defy them, to mock them. Instead, he affiliated himself with society’s renegades, with its outcasts, with its artists and poets, and turned his back forever away from bourgeois values. He thus became everything that was alien to his alien stepfather.

That is the Baudelaire portion of this blog. Now, let’s come to me and consider the parallels.

1.  My father, like Baudelaire’s, was an artist.

2.  I was very close to my father to begin with also.

3.  My father left my family and me at almost the exact same age, around six, at which Baudelaire’s father had died.

4.  My mother never mourned my father’s departure; she had never loved him either. 

5.  She was, like Caroline, a hypersensitive and nervous woman. 

6.  She, too, forged a close and very intimate bond between with me after my father had left.

7.  Like Caroline, however, as soon as she could, she made a precipitate marriage to afford her security and protection.

8.  Like Caroline, too, she married a military man used to barking orders and having them obeyed.

9.  Just as Caroline had done, my mother became very submissive to my stepfather, who quickly came to dominate our lives, and she remained under his control until his death.

10.  I, too, resented my stepfather, and found him entirely alien to me.

 

Is it any wonder that I rebelled, too, in just the way I did?

There is seemingly a fundamental archetype involved here, having to do with initial closeness to an artistic father, an emotional but submissive mother, an artistically-inclined son, and an overbearing and dictatorial military stepfather. All this conduces to a response on the son’s part of rebellion, disidentification and an overly strong affiliation with the anti-bourgeois elements of society. 

No wonder, then, when I suddenly found myself for the first time with models of identification for my alienation, I quickly bonded to and started to conform to the youths of my generation who represented my father’s artistic and iconoclastic Bohemian values.

Now, it need hardly be said that in pointing out these parallels, I scarcely mean to be comparing myself to Baudelaire. After all, while both my personal and professional life might well be characterized as unconventional—some might even describe them as wayward, it not wanton —I have only an average and not very original mind and some modest talents; Baudelaire was a genius. It’s obvious that I don’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Baudelaire, so don’t think I am putting on airs. And of course there are many, many differences between Baudelaire’s life and mine. Cela va sans dire!

But what we have in common are some crucial features in our family constellation so that in that respect at least, we were led to follow a somewhat similar path of psychological development, our very different levels of intelligence notwithstanding. 

In any event, it was only by reading about Baudelaire’s family history that I was finally able to understand some features of my own development, the very ones that had appalled and puzzled Carolyn when I first began to manifest them. Now she will know why it was almost ordained that I follow the path I did in life, and so do I. 

And now you do, too.

***********************

Even though this is a very long blog, I still had to truncate the story of my early years and omit many crucial details that would have made my story more understandable.  But this is only a blog, not a book. The full story can be found in my book, My Father, Once Removed. But, alas, that book is not commercially available.  Sorry….

Still, I hope you found this blog of interest and at least you could learn a little about Baudelaire. But, then, I’m not altogether convinced it was wise or prudent to write this story about “life.” Maybe I should stick to writing about death?  You can let me know, preferably before I die.