Tag: Dean Kyte

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Félix Bracquemond, “Frontispiece for ‘Les Fleurs du mal’” (1857), 26.4 × 18 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Félix Bracquemond, “Frontispiece for Les Fleurs du mal” (1857), 26.4 × 18 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The title of Charles Baudelaire’s only completed book of poetry has remained an inscrutable rebus for English translators, despite the simplicity of the title’s formulation—two nouns, one concrete, one abstract, the definite article in its plural form, and a preposition implying possession of the concrete noun by the abstract.

This simple phrase, ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, presents no obvious difficulty to translation, and yet it has confounded generations of English translators for over a century, almost all of whom have collapsed in defeat on the prosaically literal, unpoetic phrase ‘The Flowers of Evil’.

In his indispensable commentary Baudelaire’s Tragic Hero: A Study of the Architecture of Les Fleurs du Mal (1961), D. J. Mossop states that a literal rendering of the central metaphor of the title might be ‘Poems (i.e. works of æsthetic beauty) written on the subject of evil’.

But Mossop is only stating half the problem.

We see at once from Mossop’s account what the basic problem for the English translator has been—the fact that the concrete noun ‘fleurs’ (literally, prosaically, ‘flowers’) is doing double service as an abstract noun in this context—but not that the second term of the equation, the abstract noun ‘mal’—traditionally interpreted by the English-speaking peoples in an absolute moralistic sense as ‘evil’—is also doing double service in its meaning.

Baudelaire’s original intention was that his collection should be published with an allegorical frontispiece, and his friend and publisher, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, gave the commission to the engraver Félix Bracquemond, who executed a number of designs based on Baudelaire’s specifications, including the variation above.

The image was to show an allegorical figure that was both skeleton and tree, rooted to the earth, and surrounded by the Seven Deadly Sins in the form of seven weedy flowers.

None of the variations that Bracquemond produced satisfied Baudelaire, and the closest that a graphic artist would come to realizing the allegorical device that Baudelaire envisioned would be in 1866, when the poet’s idée fixe was revived by Félicien Rops and applied as frontispiece over his last, brief collection of ‘scraps’ and banned works, Les Épaves.

Félicien Rops, “Frontispiece for Les Épaves” (1866).
Félicien Rops, “Frontispiece: The Waifs (Les Épaves)” (1866), 16 × 10.2 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In addition to the emblematic intent behind the formulation ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, Baudelaire’s chosen title must be understood in light of the prefatory dedication of the collection that he makes to his ‘master and friend’, Théophile Gautier.

In her 1994 biography of Baudelaire, Joanna Richardson shows that the precise wording of the dedicatory device was carefully worked out and ratified by Gautier in collaboration with Baudelaire.

On 9 March [1857], he [Baudelaire] sent the patient Malassis ‘the new dedication, discussed, agreed and authorised by the magician, who explained to me very clearly that a dedication should not be a profession of faith – which also had the fault of drawing attention to the dangerous side of the work.’

— Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire (1994, p. 210)

As elliptical and ambiguous as the title itself, the dedication to Gautier has been the source of over a century of contention as critics have wrangled over its wording, some seeing in it Baudelaire’s propensity for base flattery towards a well-placed confrère, others his talent for the most cynical satire, laughing up his sleeve at a man of letters, powerful in his day, now diminished in history’s eyes as compared to the lowly poet supplicating Gautier for his critical protection of the work.

But in lieu of the unsatisfactorily realized allegorical image that Baudelaire intended to serve as frontispiece to the collection and explain the meaning of its title, this emblematic invocation of the ‘poète impeccable’ Gautier, whom Baudelaire calls the ‘parfait magicien ès lettres françaises — perfect magician in the field of French letters’ (my translation), is the key for the English translator to properly interpret the meaning of the elusive and enigmatic phrase ‘Les Fleurs du mal’.

Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire’s senior by a decade, had been his co-researcher in the poetic effects produced by drugs when they had both been living in the hôtel Pimodan on the île Saint-Louis in the 1840s.

In “Une collaboration Gautier-Gérard: L’Étude sur Henri Heine signée de Nerval” (1955) Jean Richer revealed that, during those years, Gautier wrote a substantial part of Gérard de Nerval’s critical study on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, in which the Baudelairean notion of ‘correspondences’ found its entry into French literature from the German Romantics.

Nous préférons vous offrir un simple bouquet de fleurs de fantaisie, aux parfums pénétrants, aux couleurs éclatantes.

We prefer to offer you a simple bouquet of fantastical flowers, with penetrating scents and flamboyant colours.

— Gérard de Nerval, “Les Poésies de Henri Heine”, Revue des Deux Mondes, Nouvelle série, XXIII (1848, p. 224 [my translation])

In that short statement we already perceive the essential traits distinguishing the poems that Baudelaire will begin to lay before the public over the next decade.

The metaphorical notion of the poem as being a ‘flower’, a proportionate, symmetrical form with its regular lines of syllables branching from a single axial stem of text, an exquisite, exotic miniature that emits an æsthetically pleasing quality to the ear, one that is sonically correspondent to the pleasing scent and colour which strike nose and eye, was thus well-established in the Parisian literary milieu by the time Baudelaire embarked upon Les Fleurs du mal.

Across the Channel, we can trace an etymological line between the Middle English ‘poesy’ (imported from the French ‘poésie’) and ‘posy’, a small bunch of flowers, a nosegay or ‘bouquet’, to use Nerval’s term for the collection of works he selects to translate from Heine.

And it should be noted, in passing, that the Greek origins of their common cognate ‘poiesis’ emphasizes the ‘artificial’ nature of the poem: it is a ‘creation’, a ‘production’—a work of art, in fine, that rivals the natural beauty of God’s creation.

The archaic meaning of ‘posy’ dating from the Middle English period of Norman influence is both ‘poetry’ and an ‘arrangement of flowers’. It is also, in this obsolete usage, ‘an emblem or emblematic device’—just like the allegorical image conceived by Baudelaire as a frontispiece for his collection and the dedicatory device he worked out in collaboration with Gautier.

There should therefore be no reason why generations of English translators, with hardly an exception, should all have collapsed in defeat upon the gauche and unpoetically literal phrase ‘The Flowers of Evil’ to translate the invocatory formula ‘Les Fleurs du mal’.

Once the ancient relationship between the concrete and abstract senses of ‘poesy’ are seen, half the battle in understanding Baudelaire’s cryptic intention with this phrase is won, and the possibilities for new, more accurate essays on the esoteric meaning of the formula increase substantially.

However, the wearisome literal-mindedness of the English-speaking peoples in seeing only ‘flowers’ in ‘fleurs’ is as nothing compared to their unsubtle Protestantism, which insists on seeing nothing but absolute evil in the second term of the equation, ‘mal’.

Given Mossop’s explanation, that Baudelaire’s poems are ‘works of æsthetic beauty’ that correspond with the floral products of divine craftsmanship, the Gordian way that all comers have attempted to square the impossible circle in their minds, blasphemously affirming that concrete examples of God’s handiwork can only be, in the condensed way Baudelaire expresses himself in this phrase, Satanic masterpieces, appears to me not only the consequence of the absurd materiality of the English language, but of our gross, wrongheaded Protestantism as English-speaking peoples.

Baudelaire, to be sure, is the most absolute moralist in poetry since Dante.

But, as Mossop puts it, ‘One’s attitude may be no less moral when one is conscious of the evil that is within one, than when one is conscious of one’s own virtue and the evil of others. One may be none the less against evil, for being aware that part of one is for evil…. Similarly, Baudelaire’s complex attitude … is not the simple attitude of being “against evil”, nor is it the equally simple attitude of being “for evil”: it is the complex attitude of being “against evil including the evil part of himself which is for evil”.’

The simplistic theology of a Luther or Calvin cannot hope to cope with the Catholic subtlety of such an involuted moral argument.

Baudelaire very clearly bore the physical stigmata of a fall from moral grace.

If he did not contract syphilis from his first sexual encounter with a prostitute at the age of eighteen, within a few such encounters, he was certainly carrying within himself the seeds of a slow-acting poison that would eventually cripple him, degrade his mental faculties, and render the most peerless singer of the French language in the last 200 years almost mute.

Thus, for Baudelaire, the condition of ‘badness’, of ‘wrongness’ signified by the word ‘mal’ is not so much moral as physical:—it is from his embodied experience of ‘doing ill’—‘the evil part of himself which is for evil’—that the ‘malady’ du mal proceeds, not from the absolute, abstract condition of Capital-E ‘Evil’ that almost all previous English translators have simplistically settled upon.

As the wording of the emblematic device dedicated to Gautier reveals, when Baudelaire calls the poems gathered in his collection ‘ces fleurs maladives’, he is not referring, in the first instance, to the absolute moral principle that encompasses all that is ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’, from sin to error.

Baudelaire’s first concern is with physical health.

Dean Kyte takes you inside The Melbourne Edition of his new book of Baudelaire translations, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, explaining the meaning of Baudelaire’s dedication to Théophile Gautier.

The titles of both of his major collections of prosody refer explicitly to the physical state of ill-health as the correspondent analogue for mental health, and the psychosomatic caduceus, the involuted double helix of the mind-body problem, the homeostatic regulation of the temporal, outer man by the eternal, inner person and vice versa, lies at the centre of Baudelaire’s conception du mal.

Hence, Baudelaire dedicates to the perfect magician Gautier ‘ces fleurs maladives’—‘these unhealthy, sickly, unwholesome flowers’—but also these ‘evil poems’, these perverse creations, these artificial ‘paper flowers’ whose ‘badness’ or ‘wrongness’ is inextricable from their formal beauty as poetry.

These are ‘fantastical blooms of imagination’—flamboyant, pungent effusions, as per Nerval—that are themselves ‘sickly’, and which induce sickness—malady—in the reader.

In 1857, the very year in which Baudelaire first published the bouquet of ‘unwholesome flowers’ he presented to Gautier, the pre-Freudian psychiatrist Bénédict Morel published his pioneering Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles, morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives.

In that work, Morel proposed a simple definition of human degeneration, one that would be frequently cited throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

… [L]’idée plus claire que nous puissions nous former de la dégénérescence de l’espèce humaine, est de nous représenter comme une déviation maladive d’un type primitive.

… [T]he clearest notion we can possibly form of the phenomenon of degeneration in the human species is to represent it to ourselves as an unwholesome deviation from a primal type.

— Bénédict Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles, morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (1857, p. 5 [my translation])

According to Max Nordau, who would adopt Morel’s definition, it is this derivation from a basic, healthy type of man that produces the ‘stigmata’—that is a technical, not moralistic term, Nordau assures us—of physical and intellectual degeneration.

The leading cause of this ‘unwholesome deviation’ from basic health, according to Morel, is poisoning—addiction to narcotics and stimulants, such as alcohol and tobacco, which alternately depress and excite the human organism, and the consumption of polluted foods.

Nordau, writing forty years after Morel, adds another etiological factor to these ‘noxious influences’ in his Degeneration (1895)—‘residence in large towns.’

Under the conditions of modern, technological capitalism in these great ‘machines à vivre’ taking their model from Paris, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, man, according to Nordau, ‘breathes an air charged with organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, and adulterated food; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement, and one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabitants of a marshy district.’

‘No matter which party one may belong to,’ wrote Baudelaire in 1851, ‘it is impossible not to be gripped by the spectacle of this sickly population, which swallows the dust of factories, breathes in particles of cotton, and lets its tissues be permeated by white lead, mercury, and all the poisons needed for the production of masterpieces…; the spectacle of this languishing and pining population to whom the earth owes its wonders, who feel hot, crimson blood coursing through their veins, and who cast a long, sorrowful look at the sunlight and shadows of the great parks.’ … Baudelaire supplied his own caption for the image he presents.  Beneath it he wrote the words: ‘La Modernité.’

— Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006, pp. 102-3)

According to Nordau, these poisonous environmental conditions attendant on modern life in great cities produce a ‘fatigue’—an escalating ‘burnout’ of the human organism—an hysterical malady that places increasing wear and tear on the brain and tissue of each successive generation of human beings undergoing the ordeal of modernity.

‘The resistance that modernity offers to the natural productive élan of an individual is out of all proportion to his strength,’ Benjamin writes, and, as Nordau notices, in no place on earth were the nerves of human beings more frayed in the nineteenth century than in Benjamin’s capital of modernity itself—the epicentre of a political revolution that, in its continuing aftershocks, had become a social, cultural, and artistic revolution.

It was in this poisonous atmosphere of addiction, fashionable excitation, debased victuals, and political volatility that Charles Baudelaire was born and lived almost all of his brief, unhappy life.

Les Fleurs du mal are therefore not, as generations of English translators have so crudely rendered them, ‘The Flowers of Evil’.

In their exoteric aspect, the ‘allegorical image’ Baudelaire intended by that title, Les Fleurs du mal are emblems of malady, of a physical debility which is correspondent with a mental degeneration and vice versa.

As stigmatized derivatives of a primal, healthy type ‘before the Fall’ of modernity, it is only in this sense that these exotic, poisonous cultivars, weedy, unnatural blooms that Baudelaire has nursed in the hothouse of his soul—itself formed in the ‘artificial paradise’ of Paris—should be regarded as the products of an absolute immorality.

The skeletal Tree of Knowledge depicted by Rops—Science in its essence—unbandages man’s eyes from the blissful ignorance of God’s Nature.

When we enter the condition of modernity, we enter an artificial paradise, a fallen place of our own making, seductive and yet poisonous, in which the generations of Adam who work in the big cities bear the marks of Science’s guilty knowledge on their bodies and in their brains.

In its exoteric dimension, the title ‘Les Fleurs du mal’ might better be rendered, as I have chosen to do so, as ‘Toxic Blossoms’: these are creations of poisonous beauty that throw us back on the secondary paradox that arises from the primary fact of their being:—From whence does the Good, the True, the Beautiful really proceed?—from God, or from the Devil?

You’ve just been reading the first draft of a ‘chapterlet’ from the critical monograph on Baudelaire which will form the introduction to my forthcoming book of translations of Baudelaire’s poems and prose poems, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms & Parisian Spleen.

All 51 pieces in the book—33 poems, 17 prose poems, and 1 short story—are now complete.

As I put the final touches to the book, my last task is to complete a 10,000-word critical monograph on Charles Baudelaire in which I explain how, in his life and work, he both prophesies and embodies the decadence, decline, and degeneration of modern man that we are now experiencing all throughout the West—and particularly in the Anglosphere.

Pre-order your copy using the links below.

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Édouard Manet, “The ship’s deck” (c. 1860), oil on canvas, 56.4 cm × 47.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Édouard Manet, The ship’s deck (c. 1860), oil on canvas, 56.4 cm × 47.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Croyez-vous que vous soyez le premier homme dans ce cas ? Avez-vous plus de génie que Chateaubriand et que Wagner ? On s’est bien moqué d’eux cependant ? Ils n’en sont pas morts. Et pour ne pas vous inspirer trop d’orgeuil, je vous dirai que ces hommes sont des modèles, chacun dans son genre, et dans un monde très riche et que vous, vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrepitude de votre art.

Do you think you’re the first man to have been laughed at? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? Have they not been made fun of? They haven’t died of it. And so as not to puff up your pride too much, I will tell you that these men are models, each in his own field and in a very rich world, and that you—you are merely the first in the degeneracy of your art-form.

— Charles Baudelaire to Édouard Manet, letter of 11 May, 1865 [my translation]

Baudelaire’s recognition of a incipient degeneracy in the art of Édouard Manet would be the most significant remark, either public or private, that the poet would make on the work of his painter-friend, and, indeed, Baudelaire’s slighting comparison of Manet to another personal friend whose genius, by contrast, he had been the first man in France to recognize—Richard Wagner—is telling. As Spengler observes: ‘Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is not, indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair for the decadent detected at once.’

It is an enduring mystery of criticism why Baudelaire, so sensitively attuned to the etiolation of forms that would, in time, mark itself out as the pathological trait of modern art—and so quick, moreover, to perceive the chthonic correspondences between his project of a modern, urban poetry and the work of artists in other media whose formal æsthetics bore similarities to his own—should have signally failed to see that it was Manet—not Constantin Guys—whom future historians and critics would deem to have embodied Baudelaire’s own notions of modern artistic heroism, as the quintessential ‘Painter of Modern Life’.

Beaucoup de gens attribueront la décadence de la peinture à la décadence des mœurs. …

Avant de rechercher quel peut être le côté épique de la vie moderne, et de prouver par des exemples que notre époque n’est pas moins féconde que les anciennes en motifs sublimes, on peut affirmer que puisque tous les siècles et tous les peuples ont eu leur beauté, nous avons inévitablement la nôtre.

… [N]’a-t-il pas sa beauté et son charme indigène, cet habit tant victimé ? N’est-il pas l’habit nécessaire de notre époque, souffrante et portant jusque sur ses épaules noires et maigres le symbole d’un deuil perpétuel ? Remarquez bien que l’habit noir et la redingote ont non seulement leur beauté politique, qui est l’expression de l’égalité universelle, mais encore leur beauté poétique, qui est l’expression de l’âme publique ; — une immense défilade de croque-morts, croque-morts politiques, croque-morts amoureux, croque-morts bourgeois. Nous célébrons tous quelque enterrement.

…

Le spectacle de la vie élégante et des milliers d’existences flottantes qui circulent dans les souterrains d’une grande ville, — criminels et filles entretenues, — la Gazette des Tribunaux et le Moniteur nous prouvent que nous n’avons qu’à ouvrir les yeux pour connaître notre héroïsme.

…

La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère ; mais nous ne le voyons pas.

Le nu, cette chose si chère aux artistes, cet élément nécessaire de succès, est aussi fréquent et aussi nécessaire que dans la vie ancienne : — au lit, au bain, à l’amphithéâtre. Les moyens et les motifs de la peinture sont également abondants et variés ; mais il y a un élément nouveau, qui est la beauté moderne.

Car les héros de l’Iliade ne vont qu’à votre cheville, ô Vautrin, ô Rastignac, ô Birotteau, — et vous, ô Fontanarès, qui n’avez pas osé raconter au public vos douleurs sous le frac funèbre et convulsionné que nous endossons tous ; — et vous, ô Honoré de Balzac, vous le plus héroïque, le plus singulier, le plus romantique et le plus poétique parmi tous les personnages que vous avez tirés de votre sein !

Many people will attribute the decadence in painting to the degeneration of customs. …

Before we investigate what the epic side of modern life may be and prove, through example, that our era is not less fruitful in sublime motifs than antiquity, it may be averred that since every age and nation has possessed its proper beauty, we, inevitably, have our own.

… Has it not its beauty and its native charm, this oh-so-maligned suit? Is not the suit essential for our age, suffering and bearing upon its very shoulders, puny and black, the symbol of a perpetual mourning? Note well that the black suit and frock coat have not merely their social beauty (which is the expression of universal equality), but also their poetic beauty, which is the expression of the public spirit:—an immense cortège of undertakers – political morticians, romantic embalmers, middleclass funeral directors. We are all of us celebrating some sort of burial.

…

The spectacle of fashion and of the countless floating existences which circulate in the bowels of a great city—crooks and whores—the court reports and tabloids prove to us that we have merely to open our eyes to meet with our brand of heroism.

…

Parisian life is abundant in marvellous and poetic subjects. The marvellous surrounds us and suckles us like the air, but we do not see it.

The nude, that object so dear to artists, that essential ingredient of success, is just as common and indispensable as it was in antique life: in the bed, the bath, upon the stage. The means and the motifs of painting are equally abundant and varied; but there is a new element—modern beauty.

For the heroes of the Iliad do not come up to your ankle, O Vautrin, O Rastignac, O Birotteau!—and you, O Fontanarès, who haven’t dared to recount to the public your chagrins under the tail coat, funereal and wracked with sobs, that all of us wear. —Nor you, O Honoré de Balzac; you, the most heroic, the most original, the most romantic and poetic of all the characters you have drawn forth from your heart!

— Charles Baudelaire, « Salon de 1846 », Curiosités esthétiques (1868, pp. 193, 194, 195, 196-7, 198 [my translation])

It is clear that Baudelaire sees the essence of modern beauty as crime—committing le mal.

The heroes of modern life, far superior to the strong men of antiquity, are the decadent, elegant criminal masterminds of the Balzacian social network of the city, the dandiacal flâneurs for whom the funereal uniform of the black frock coat is a democratic disguise that allows the artistic observer to take the total measure of the urban scene, du grand monde au demi-monde.

L’ordre social, l’action de la société sur l’individu, dans les diverses phases et aux diverses époques, ce réseau d’institutions et de conventions qui nous enveloppe dès notre naissance et ne se rompt qu’à notre mort, sont des ressorts tragiques qu’il ne faut que savoir manier. Ils sont tout à fait équivalents à la fatalité des anciens ; leur poids a tout ce qui était invincible et oppressif dans cette fatalité ; les habitudes qui en découlent, l’insolence, la dureté frivole, l’incurie obstinée, ont tout ce que cette fatalité avait de désespérant et de déchirant : si vous représentez avec vérité cet état de choses, l’homme des temps modernes frémira de ne pouvoir s’y soustraire, comme celui des temps anciens frémissait sous la puissance mystérieuse et sombre à laquelle il ne lui était pas permis d’échapper, et notre public sera plus ému de ce combat de l’individu contre l’ordre social qui le dépouille ou qui le garotte, que d’Œdipe poursuivi par le Destin, ou d’Oreste par les Furies.

Social order—the action of society upon the individual—in various phases and during various epochs; this network of institutions and conventions which catches us in its toils at the moment of our birth and is only broken at the hour of our death, furnishes the mainspring for tragedy which the dramatist need only know how to manipulate. These institutions and conventions are perfectly equivalent to the ‘destiny’ of the ancients; their gravitas possesses everything that was invincible and oppressive in the ancient notion of ‘fate’. The customs that flow from them—insolence, frivolous cynicism, stubborn unconcern—is replete with all that ‘fate’ had in it to inspire heartbreak and despair: If you truthfully depict this state of affairs, modern man will tremble from his incapacity to extricate himself from it just as the man of ancient times used to quiver beneath the obscure and sombre power from which he was forbidden to escape, and our modern audience will be more moved by the individual’s fight against the social order which seeks to strip or strangle him than by Œdipus pursued by Destiny, or Orestes by the Furies.

— Benjamin Constant, « Réflexions sur la tragédie », Revue de Paris (1829, p. 136 [my translation])

Echoing the insight of Benjamin Constant nearly two decades before him, Baudelaire is of the view that urban crime is the sole field of heroism available to men possessed of any spirit of adventure in modernity.

And artists—whether of word or paint—are the supreme outlaws, the supreme non-conformers to the social order.

The dandy-flâneurs, those ‘æsthetic terrorists’ of the bourgeois order who act in resolute defiance of the safetyist constraints of the law—who seek to break the social network of the civilized community binding them to impotence from birth to death, and who refuse to serve the metropolitan machine in the slavery of ‘gainful employment’, preferring instead what I call ‘productive indolence’—those elegant, artistic, criminal souls, deserters of their society but drawn like moths, by grace of their macabre curiosity, to it—to be the ironic witnesses of its criminal beauty, its crime against humanity—are the only heroes in modern life equal to the ancients.

Manet, a dandiacal flâneur as given as Baudelaire to Balzacian survey of the great machine à vivre that was the modern metropolis of Paris, wore the uniform of the fashionable man about town for his undercover excursions into observation of its many strata and facets.

Baudelaire had no lack of opportunities to observe Manet at this idle labour and know that, with the appropriate changes being made, Manet’s visual style and technique was the counterpart to his own literary approach to the modern urban scene of Second Empire Paris.

As two dandy-flâneurs, the poet had often been the painter’s Balzacian bosom companion—the Paul de Manerville to his Henry de Marsay—on sketching expeditions to the jardin des Tuileries.

With his black stovepipe, his exuberant black silk bowtie, his prematurely greying locks and his Satanic profile, Baudelaire would more than once provide Manet with the subject for a snapshot-like sketch that, in its curious caricatural indefiniteness, would trace with ‘vague precision’ the smeary mark that Baudelaire would leave on the margins of the vast, Balzacian tableau of modern Parisian life, a figure in the background, like Vautrin, only afterwards to be recognized as the absolute centre of the cultural scene for the whole nineteenth century.

Édouard Manet, Musique aux Tuileries (1862), oil on canvas, 76 cm × 118 cm, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. (Baudelaire’s portrait is circled in red.)
Édouard Manet, Musique aux Tuileries (1862), oil on canvas,
76 cm × 118 cm, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. (Baudelaire’s portrait is circled in red.)

Thus, as David Carrier, summarizing the position of critics who have lamented Baudelaire’s stunning failure of perspicacity in appreciating the revolutionary rôle that Manet would play in the art of the future, regretfully puts it, ‘it is embarrassing that a great critic failed to see the value of the work of a friend.’

‘It has been alleged,’ writes Joanna Richardson, ‘that Baudelaire did not appreciate Manet at his true worth. … It might indeed be said that Delacroix concealed the modernity and the stature of Manet from him.’

Baudelaire was caught up as a partisan in the great controversy that would preoccupy French art during the second third of the nineteenth century, and which would only retrospectively appear to history as a minor theatre of conflict, a very distant skirmish from the front lines of avant-garde battle that were then drawing themselves behind Manet and in opposition to his sure sense of what constituted modern beauty.

This was the great contest between the primacy of line—precise, classical draughtsmanship as personified by Ingres—and the vibrancy of colour as the expression of romantic emotion, and personified by Baudelaire’s enduring hero, Delacroix.

Manet resolved the problem of line and colour in a novel way that nevertheless looked back—with ambiguous irony—to the classical models claimed by the two masters. Manet’s lines, as in Olympia (1863), were often gross in their salience, an infantile perversion of Ingres’ tin-type kind of design, his fields of unbroken colour vibrant but inharmonious to sensibilities that admitted that Delacroix, despite his lack of draughtsmanly clarity, achieved something poetic and musically suggestive in his tonal arrangements.

In « Le Peintre de la vie moderne », Baudelaire would call genius ‘childhood wilfully, skilfully regained’, and in the novelty of Manet’s visual style, an apparently infantile—even imbecilic—degeneracy of facture that was, in fact, meticulously laboured over as a way of expressing the spectacle of modern Paris in its marvellous, poetic welter of instantaneous impressions, the painter proved that he possessed the ‘lively sense organs and the analytic spirit which enable him to impose order upon the sum of visual materials unconsciously amassed’ which Baudelaire ascribed to Guys.

Manet was half a generation younger than Baudelaire and was thus somewhat removed from the pitched contention between neo-classical line and romantic colour: Born on 23 January 1832, Manet was ineluctably destined, like Baudelaire, to be pilloried by the establishment in his lifetime, shunted to the margins of Parisian society as a stubborn madman one could do nothing with, only to become posthumously influential, lionized for the moral determination of his conscientious rebellion against the artistic mores of the Second Empire, vindicated as the most intransigent stumbling-block upon which the future edifice of modern art would be founded.

January 23rd is a sinister and potent date.

The Sabian symbol for the third degree of Aquarius, coinciding with the Sun’s transit through it on this date, is ‘A deserter from the navy’: That image symbolizes the rebellious—indeed, criminal—abandonment of a rigid, hierarchical structure, an established institution, an ark-like architecture that is designed to safely carry one over ‘le gouffre’ (to use a word we frequently encounter in Baudelaire’s maritime poetry)—the bitter abyss, the hellish, mazy chaos of the waves that are ever under man’s feet.

In his refusal to serve a structure he sees as foundering, the rebellious deserter who jumps ship chooses to become an uncompromising outlaw of society.

In their youths during the 1840s, both Baudelaire and Manet had been forced by their respective families to quit what the older man’s stepfather called ‘the slippery streets of Paris’ and take long, exotic sea voyages—brutal separations designed to quell the rebellious desires of their hearts for poetry on the one hand and painting on the other.

Manet had been forced on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro by his father—a judge—to qualify for induction into the Navy. Manet studiously failed the entrance examinations twice, his non-conforming Aquarian spirit refusing to submit to his father’s authority as it would later refuse to submit to the established judgments of the Académie des beaux-arts.

In the end, by his strategy of ‘compliant resistance’, going along with his father’s dictates while secretly sabotaging them by his intransigent determination to do nothing but become a painter, Manet would get his own way and be allowed to enter to atelier of Thomas Couture.

Baudelaire’s stepfather, the maréchal du camp Aupick, ‘violently disturbed’ by young Charles’s avid pursuit of ‘the perdition of the streets of Paris’, would bundle the aspiring poet off to India, hoping that the exoticism of the East would return a matured young man inclined to read law—or at least, as mother and stepfather muttered between themselves, privately recognizing that they were up against a similarly stubborn case, a poet who would write of honourable subjects and not the ambulatory muses of the Parisian streets.

Baudelaire jumped ship in Mauritius, and within eight months would be back on the ‘slippery streets’ of the capital, returning, as Manet would do some seven years later, as indissuadable from the mad career pathway he was determined to pursue as when he had left, but bringing to his vision of the modern Parisian spectacle all the decadent exoticism he had absorbed in Cape Town, Mauritius, and Réunion.

Thus, January 23 is a date that portends criminal rebellion, the radical overthrow of all monolithic structures of orthodox ‘right thought’ designed to float us, as in an ark, safely over the raging sea of life.

On the same date in 1862, his friend Manet’s thirtieth birthday, the forty-year-old Baudelaire would do what he would hardly ever do in the pages of his Journaux intimes, and mark this fatal date as a dark and potent inflection point in his life.

J’ai cultivé mon hystérie avec jouissance et terreur. Maintenant, j’ai toujours le vertige, et aujourd’hui, 23 janvier 1862, j’ai subi un singulier avertissement, j’ai senti passer sur moi le vent de l’aile de l’imbécillité.

I have cultivated my hysteria with relish and dread. Nowadays, I always feel vertigo, and today, 23 January 1862, I suffered a singular presentiment:—I felt the wind of the wing of mental degeneration sweep over my being.

— Charles Baudelaire, « Mon Cœur mis à nu » (1864, p. 130 [my translation])

And on the same date 121 years later, in the wastes of Australia, I would enter this world of ennui.

You’ve been reading the first draft of the second ‘chapterlet’ in the critical monograph on Baudelaire which will form the introduction to my forthcoming book of translations of Baudelaire’s poems and prose poems, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms & Parisian Spleen.

This book is on the verge of being born and will be out before Christmas. I urge you to purchase copies in your choice and quantity of formats now using the payment buttons below, with invoicing for shipping to occur when the first batch of orders goes to press at the end of this month.

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Édouard Manet, “Olympia” (1863-5), oil on canvas, 130.5 cm × 190 cm, musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863-5), oil on canvas, 130.5 cm × 190 cm, musée d’Orsay, Paris.

L’usage social de la liberté littéraire deviendra de plus en plus rare et précieux. Les grandes démocraties de l’avenir seront peu libérales pour les écrivains ; il est bon de planter très haut des poètes drapeaux comme Baudelaire.

On pourra les agiter de temps en temps afin d’ameuter le petit nombre des esclaves encore frémissants.

The social use of free literary expression will become increasingly rare and precious. The great democracies of the future will be very illiberal for writers; it is therefore good to plant poets like Baudelaire upon the highest eminences as standards.

We will be able to wave them from time to time so as to riotously rouse the small number of slaves still trembling for freedom.

— Guillaume Apollinaire, introduction to L’Œuvre poétique de Charles Baudelaire (1924) [my translation]

In May of 1865, the talk of tout Paris was the scandal of the Salon, the inclusion of Édouard Manet’s Olympia in the annual exhibition of painting and sculpture held by the Académie des beaux-arts. Two years earlier, Manet had been in the thick of an agitation, his provocative canvas Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe serving as a convenient standard behind which a group of disaffected artists could rally, petitioning the Emperor, Napoléon III, in protest at their rejection by the jury. Now Manet was at it again with something that had been accepted by the jury but which was—if possible—even more outrageous a slap in the face than his Luncheon on the grass had been.

Manet had expected trouble, but from a different quarter, his other entry in the Salon of that year, a history painting showing the Saviour being insulted by the Roman soldiers, going unremarked as compared to Olympia, an uncompromising nude of a contemporary Parisian prostitute so offensive in her frankness that she excited embarrassed ridicule from visitors to the Louvre when she did not actually excite physical attack. Manet, a naïve revolutionary with an earnest desire for the respectability of the Académie, was nonplussed. He wrote his friend, the poet Charles Baudelaire, who had frequently covered the Salon as an art critic of exquisite though outré tastes, seeking guidance and reassurance.

Je voudrais bien vous avoir ici mon cher Baudelaire, les injures pleuvent sur moi comme grêle…. J’aurais voulu avoir votre jugement sain sur mes tableaux car tous ces cris agacent, et il est évident qu’il y a quelqu’un qui se trompe.

I very much wish you were here, my dear Baudelaire, for insults rain on me like hail…. I should have liked to have your healthy judgment on my paintings, for all these cries grate on me, and it’s clear that someone is in the wrong.

— Édouard Manet to Charles Baudelaire, undated letter of early May 1865 [my translation]

The 44-year-old poet was then in Brussels, where he had been for over a year, escaping his Parisian creditors, attempting to sell the rights to his works to Belgian publishers, giving scarcely attended lectures on modern French art to the uncultured Bruxellois, drinking heavily, and roundly hating the place, which he condemned in poems and pamphlets. Sick, penniless, within a year of suffering a mysterious crisis that would leave him partially paralyzed, almost mute, and barely sensible, two years away from his death, Baudelaire had little time for Manet’s complaint. Hearing without sympathy his friend’s lament from the capital of fashion and culture, on 11 May, 1865, Baudelaire fired off an exasperated epistle from the Godforsaken Belgian backwater to the man whom future generations would acknowledge to have been the reluctant, unfairly crucified father of modern art.

Croyez-vous que vous soyez le premier homme dans ce cas ? Avez-vous plus de génie que Chateaubriand et que Wagner ? On s’est bien moqué d’eux cependant ? Ils n’en sont pas morts. Et pour ne pas vous inspirer trop d’orgeuil, je vous dirai que ces hommes sont des modèles, chacun dans son genre, et dans un monde très riche et que vous, vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrepitude de votre art.

Do you think you’re the first man to have been laughed at? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? Have they not been made fun of? They haven’t died of it. And so as not to puff up your pride too much, I will tell you that these men are models, each in his own field and in a very rich world, and that you—you are merely the first in the degeneracy of your art-form.

— Charles Baudelaire to Édouard Manet, letter of 11 May, 1865 [my translation]

Those last, emphasized words would be prophetic, not merely of Édouard Manet’s destiny to embody the title that his friend had incorrectly or churlishly ascribed to another, lesser artist, to be ‘the Painter of Modern Life’, but it would equally be prophetic of the destiny of Baudelaire himself: By the end of the century, this poet, mocked and derided in his lifetime for his own pretensions to academic respectability as a troubadour of prostitutes, would be regarded by the physician and social critic Max Nordau as having been the fountainhead of degeneracy in modern life and the chef d’école in the Decadent movement of modern poetry, and early in the next century, T. S. Eliot would declare that modernism in poetry had definitively begun with Charles Baudelaire.

What you have just read is the proposed first ‘chapterlet’ of the critical monograph that opens my forthcoming book of translations drawn from the works of Baudelaire: Malediction, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms & Parisian Spleen.

With 96 per cent of the poems, prose poems—and fiction (!)—of Charles Baudelaire now translated and in place, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is on-track for release before Christmas.

Pre-orders for the book in three formats—the hardcover dust jacket “Melbourne Edition”, the Economy Softcover version, and the PDF eBook—are now being accepted at an early-bird price.

Select your choice and quantity below to secure your copies in the desired formats, with invoicing for shipping to occur when the first print run occurs in a month’s time.

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Taking you line by line through the last three verses of Baudelaire’s « Les Phares », Dean Kyte explains the paradoxical relationship that damnation has to praise in Baudelaire’s thought.

My new book of translations drawn from the works of Charles Baudelaire, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen, is fast coming to press.

And in today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur, I take you inside the softcover version of the book as I explain—with due reference to Baudelaire—the rationale behind my choice of such a bitter and pitiless title.

As I say in the video, what appears on its face to be a title utterly alienating in its satanic vituperation is in fact the highest possible homage that Baudelaire can render to God’s majesty, and the proof of his most fervent belief, as a heretical Catholic, in the Supreme Being.

Thus, at a plutonic hour of human history where faith in God and human goodness could not be more ridiculous, I too assert, in taking this title, my quixotic faith in what is highest in man by ‘praising with sharp damnation’ what is lowest in our species, we irredeemable children of the tribe of Cain.

For there must no longer be any doubt in our present year, even to the somnambulistic billions who would make ‘the Woman Question’ and ‘the Jewish Question’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suddenly ‘the Human Question’ of the twenty-first, that Baudelaire’s apocalyptic prophecy of modernity—a veritable ‘Age of Iron’—has now properly revealed itself in our day.

The time could not be more right for the apparition of this book.

One hundred twenty-one years to the very day of my birth, Baudelaire writes in his journal that ‘today … I suffered a singular alarm: I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.’

Charles Baudelaire is the Alpha of the dandy-flâneur, the man, in modernity, who still seeks to be a ‘man’—to live heroically in the strength of all our human frailties and the humility of our profound limits—and I am the Omega, the decadent result of two centuries of societal degeneracy in the West, the last quixotic figure, in the armour of my hat and suit, to intransigently ‘hold the faith’ in that utterly discredited, unconscionable project of embodying ‘Homo Occidentalis’ in all his risible nobility.

So, as a mad Aquarian, an avatar of the New, destiny has elected me for a task, chers lecteurs;—to be the ‘postrunner’ of this great fallen angel of modernity, this great albatross of a luciferic intellect who found his wingspan so vast he couldn’t walk easily among us, and interpret to the Anglosphere, as an evangelist after the fact, the poetry and prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire.

And I’m pleased as punch to advise you that Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is on the verge of seeing the light of day.

I explain the origins of the book’s title in the video above, but here below, I am posting for the first time the line-up of fifty pieces I have selected from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris to take the field as the Baudelairean ‘dream team’ and represent our poet.

So, here we go…

From Toxic Blossoms (Les Fleurs du mal):

  • “To the Reader” (« Au Lecteur »)

From “Spleen and Ideal” (« Spleen et Idéal »):

  • “Blessing” (« Bénédiction »)
  • “The Albatross” (« L’Albatros »)
  • “Elevation” (« Élévation »)
  • “Correspondences” (« Correspondances »)
  • “The Venal Muse” (« La Muse vénale »)
  • “The Faithless Monk” (« Le Mauvais moine »)
  • “Illfated” (« Le Guignon »)
  • “Past Life” (« La Vie antérieure »)
  • “Beauty” (« La Beauté »)
  • “The Ideal” (« L’Idéal »)
  • “The Giantess” (« La Géante »)
  • “The Jewels” (« Les Bijoux »)
  • “Hymn to Beauty” (« Hymne à la Beauté »)
  • “You’d let all mankind dally in your alley…” (« Tu mettrais l’univers entier dans ta ruelle… »)
  • “With her raiment, sinuous and nacreous…” (« Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés… »)
  • “The Possessed” (« Le Possédé »)
  • “An Apparition” (« Un Fantôme »)
  • “I make a gift of these verses to you so that if my name…” (« Je te donnes ces vers afin qui si mon nom… »)
  • “Vespers” (« Chanson d’après-midi »)
  • “Spleen” (« Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle… »)
  • “Warning” (« L’Avertissement »)

From “Parisian scenes” (« Tableaux parisiens »):

  • “The Sun” (« Le Soleil »)
  • “The Swan” (« Le Cygne »)
  • “To a Passerby” (« À une passante »)
  • “Evening Twilight” (« Le Crépuscule du soir »)

From “Wine” (« Le Vin »):

  • “The Soul of Wine” (« L’Âme du vin »)

From “Toxic Blossoms” (« Les Fleurs du mal »):

  • “Epigraph for a Condemned Book” (« Épigraphe pour un livre condamné »)
  • “The Two Wellbred Girls” (« Les Deux bonnes sœurs »)

From “Rebellion” (« Révolte »):

  • “Litanies of Satan” (« Les Litanies de Satan »)

From “Death” (« La Mort »):

  • “A Connoisseur’s Dream” (« Le Rêve d’un curieux »)
  • “The Journey” (« Le Voyage »)

I have selected fully one-fifth of the total number of poems published in the three editions of Les Fleurs du mal which Baudelaire, and then his mother, saw through the press.

At least twenty per cent of every section of Les Fleurs du mal is represented in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, and because Baudelaire’s poetry collection is a psychological novel with a narrative order, in selecting at least a fifth of the poems from every section, I have taken care to choose those works which I think best highlight the themes of that section and carry the overarching drama forward.

The figure of one-fifth includes the six pieces that were struck from the first edition as obscene, banned in France, and were only subsequently available in Belgium among Les Épaves (1866).

One of the censored poems, « Les Bijoux », is included, and as you can see, that piece, which I published in my first collection of Baudelaire translations, Flowers Red and Black (2013), is listed in orange.

With the exception of « Spleen », the titles in orange are works from the earlier book which are still in the buffer awaiting revision.

As this post goes to press, I am about to start revising « Spleen », which I also translated in the years preceding the publication of Flowers Red and Black but declined to include in that book, so this poem will see the light of day for the first time in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.

And the word ‘revise’ in this instance basically means ‘completely rewrite’.

While I was translating Baudelaire’s short story, « La Fanfarlo » between February and April, instead of working on the few remaining poems I have left to translate, I began to revise the pieces from Flowers Red and Black, but in every instance I found myself writing completely new translations of these existing poems.

So it’s going to be interesting when I look at “The Jewels” again in a couple of weeks, because this is by far my most well-known translation of a work by Baudelaire, the piece that often cliched sales of Flowers Red and Black. Is this poem going to run true to form with the rest of the book and am I going to see the text in a whole new light?

What I can tell you for certain is that a revised version of “The Jewels” will include a translation of the newly revealed ninth verse that was discovered in 1928, written in Baudelaire’s hand, in a first edition of Les Fleurs du mal which he gave to a friend but only made public when that copy came up for auction in 2019.

You will also notice that, in the list above, there are three titles in red: « Le Cygne », « Les Litanies de Satan », and « Le Voyage ».

These are the last outstanding selections from Les Fleurs du mal that I am yet to translate. They’re Baudelaire’s most famous poems; they’re among my longest selections, and they’re going to be the greatest tests of my interpretative abilities.

So that’s Les Fleurs du mal. Now let’s look at what you can expect to read from Le Spleen de Paris.

From Parisian Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris):

  • “To Arsène Houssaye” ( « À Arsène Houssaye »)
  • “The Stranger” (« L’Étranger »)
  • “The Artist’s Confiteor” (« Le Confiteor de l’artiste »)
  • “A Troll” (« Un plaisant »)
  • “Twin Suite” (« La Chambre double »)
  • “The Buffoon and the Venus” (« Le Fou et la Vénus »)
  • “At an Hour after Midnight” ( « À une heure de matin »)
  • “Crowds” (« Les Foules »)
  • “Invitation to the Journey” (« L’Invitation au voyage »)
  • “Hungry Eyes” (« Les Yeux des pauvres »)
  • “The Magnanimous Gambler” (« Le Joueur généreux »)
  • “Sozzle Yourself” (« Enivrez-vous »)
  • “Windows” (« Les Fenêtres »)
  • “The Port” (« Le Port »)
  • “Lost Halo” (« Perte d’auréole »)
  • “Anywhere Out of the World ” (« N’importe où hors du monde »)
  • “Epilogue” (« Épilogue »)

One-third of the total number of pieces from Le Spleen de Paris will be featured in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, including Baudelaire’s prefatory letter to Arsène Houssaye—which ought to be considered a prose poem in its own right—and the poem that Baudelaire appends as epilogue to the collection.

I was convinced that these two pieces—which I had no previous intention of translating—needed to be included when I was in Brisbane in December. Reading Sonya Stephens’ insightful little book Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (2000) at the State Library of Queensland convinced me that these were inescapable framing texts.

And you’ll notice we have one text in red: « Le Port ». After I complete the revision of « Spleen », that short, pretty little prose poem is next on my list.

So, if you’ve been keeping count, chers lecteurs, you’ve clocked 49 pieces and I promised you fifty. What’s the big 5-0?

“Fanfarlo” (« La Fanfarlo »)

The translation of Charles Baudelaire’s only known original short story is now complete.

The longest, most ambitious translating project I’ve undertaken in any language was completed to my satisfaction at the end of last month after 134 hours and seven drafts of work.

A task I approached with trepidation and misgivings, thinking I would be merely giving the reader a ‘bonus’ text that was still going to cost me time and sweat, I now believe to be one of the major selling points of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.

One of the reasons I think this version of « La Fanfarlo » will last for quite a long time as an introduction to what is, for English readers, an overlooked part of Baudelaire’s œuvre is my decision to include footnotes to the text.

I found that there were three types of instance where a footnote would aid the reader’s understanding, the most important being the occasional footnote that takes you inside my process as a translator, shows you clearly what the French is and how it can be variously interpreted, and what ultimately informed the choice I’ve gone with in the text based on my intimacy with Baudelaire’s typical modes of thinking and expression.

So, 86 per cent of the poems, prose poems—and fiction—of Charles Baudelaire that you will shortly be reading in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is now locked in.

And this week, apace with my final revisions and translations, I pulled out my trusty essay plan and began plugging in points and sources for the last remaining major task before this book goes to print:—my contribution, an 8,000-word critical monograph on Baudelaire that I hope will serve to honourably introduce the man, the myth, the œuvre to the English-speaking world.

What I’ve written about Baudelaire on The Melbourne Flâneur, I’ve written off the cuff.

But what I write in the critical monograph introducing Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, I intend to be my definitive statement on Baudelaire—at least for the next ten years, when I will have doubtless more translations of his work to offer the English-speaking world.

When I published Flowers Red and Black in 2013, I had no idea that people would see such a close connection between Baudelaire and myself, as parallel lives across centuries, souls who cannot take quiet desperation.

I am truly the ‘mon semblable, mon frère’ (‘my double, my brother’) whom he salutes in the last line of the very first poem of Les Fleurs du mal, « Au Lecteur »—a fraternal spirit of revolt.

What I say about Baudelaire in the critical monograph will be the fruit of some seventeen years of working intimately with the thoughts of a literary mind that is as much a black mirror to my own as Edgar Allan Poe’s was to Baudelaire’s.

And I intend it to stand the test of future times and tastes as Baudelaire’s critical essays on Poe have proven their lasting value as perspicacious insights into that poor unfortunate’s life and work from a fraternal spirit who knew the horror he was experiencing only too well.

I am now taking pre-orders for Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, and I invite you to get onboard now.

The price point I am looking at for the softcover version advertised in the video above is $A32.00, exclusive of shipping.

(For my American readers, that’s approximately $20.50 in your yanquí dinero.)

For that price, you’re going to receive:

  • A 180-page illustrated softcover edition with pages printed in full colour
  • Autographed and wax-sealed by me as a guarantee of authenticity
  • Handwritten, personalised inscription from me to you
  • Complementary custom bookmark

My proposal to you is to purchase now to guarantee your copy at that price point in the initial print run, and after I go to print, I will invoice you for shipping.

And by pre-ordering, you will also join the community of consumers who have already committed to purchase Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments. I’m sending emails on a monthly basis to my readers, staying accountable by keeping them up to date with my progress towards publication—and taking them inside my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process, the joys and vagaries of writing, designing and publishing this book with exclusive content not posted here on The Melbourne Flâneur.

So, avail yourself of the order form below and book your ticket to Cythera on the Baudelaire boat.

“Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments” [softcover]

Personally signed, sealed and inscribed by author. Comes with custom bookmark. Pre-order your copy and join an exclusive community of readers anticipating the release of Dean Kyte’s new book!

A$32.00

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Dean Kyte walks you through the dust jacket for the hardcover edition of his new book of Baudelaire translations, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.

June 2025 sees the scheduled release of my new book of translations drawn from the works of Charles Baudelaire, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen.

As I explain in the video above, the book features one-fifth of the total number of poems published in the three editions of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), plus one-quarter of the prose poems from Le Spleen de Paris (1869).

But in addition to the 47 poems and prose poems I’ve selected as representative examples of Baudelaire’s flâneurial philosophy, as a bonus, I’ve also chosen to translate the M’sieu’s only work of fiction—“La Fanfarlo” (1847), adding significant value to this volume as a complement to the selections I have made from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris.

At nearly 11,000 words in the original, “La Fanfarlo” is the most ambitious translation project I have undertaken in any language.

For the past month, I’ve been deeply engaged in hewing out a version of the source text in English, and as this post goes to press, I’m immersed in the third of five drafts, approximately half-way through the process of bringing this story to life in English.

The value of “La Fanfarlo” is chiefly documentary: preceding the bulk of Baudelaire’s œuvre as presented in the first two parts of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, this ‘long short story’ will retrospectively show the 25-year-old poet first rehearsing the ideas and turns of phrase we recognize more brilliantly expressed in the poems and prose poems.

Published in January 1847, the story is a fictionalized account of Baudelaire’s first meeting with the Creole actress Jeanne Duval (c. 1820—after 1862), the Haitian beauty the poet would call his ‘Vénus noire’, and who, as his muse and mistress, is the recognizable inspiration behind at least four of the poems I’ve translated in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments:—“Les Bijoux”, “Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés…”, “Un Fantôme”, and “Je te donnes ces vers afin que si mon nom…”.

Jeanne Duval is ‘la Fanfarlo’ of the story’s title—an exotic dancer who has her hooks sunk deep in a Parisian dandy, M. de Cosmelly.

This gent’s wife, Mme. de Cosmelly, is a minor aristocrat from Lyon, where, in her innocent girlhood, she was once friendly with a rakish young man who has grown into Samuel Cramer, Parisian poet-about-town, a dandy-flâneur who is clearly Baudelaire under another name.

“La Fanfarlo” begins in imitation of Balzac’s novella “La Fille aux yeux d’or” (1835), with Samuel crossing paths with Mme. de Cosmelly in the jardin du Luxembourg.

But then it morphs into a curious variation on the plot of Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), with the virtuous Mme. de Cosmelly—who is like a strange combination of the marquise de Merteuil wrapped in the girlish wile of Cécile de Volanges—plotting with Samuel, who fancies himself a novice vicomte de Valmont.

Mme. de Cosmelly engages the poet to take Fanfarlo off her husband’s hands and thus deliver him back into the amorous arms of his neglected wife—who gives Samuel to believe that she will bestow her gratitude upon him in the appropriate way.

As I’ve been working on translating this story over the last month, I’ve conceived of “La Fanfarlo” in several different ways. One of them is as a prophetic manifesto of Baudelaire’s artistic intent as a poet.

At the time the short story was published, Baudelaire was beginning his career as a journalist in Paris’s artistic milieu. While a few of the poems that would later appear in Les Fleurs du mal had been published in Parisian newspapers, Baudelaire was mainly known for his two lengthy reviews of the Salon exhibitions in 1845 and 1846.

In fact, the cover of Le Salon de 1846 advertises the imminent publication of the work that, eleven years later, would see the light of day under the allegorical title of Les Fleurs du mal.

Conversely, in “La Fanfarlo”, written in the months after Baudelaire’s Salon review was published in May 1846, his hero’s one claim to literary fame is as the author of a juvenile collection of sonnets—Baudelaire’s speciality—published under the equally inscrutable and difficult to translate title of “Les Orfraies”.

Le lendemain il la trouva, la tête inclinée par une mélancolie gracieuse et presque étudiée, vers les fleurs de la plate-bande, et il lui offrit son volume des Orfraies, recueil de sonnets, comme nous en avons tous fait et tous lu, dans le temps où nous avions le jugement si court et les cheveux si longs.

Samuel était fort curieux de savoir si ses Orfraies avaient charmé l’âme de cette belle mélancolique, et si les cris de ces vilains oiseaux lui avaient parlé en sa faveur ; mais quelques jours après elle lui dit avec une candeur et une honnêteté désespérantes :

— Monsieur, je ne suis qu’une femme, et, par conséquent, mon jugement est peu de chose ; mais il me paraît que les tristesses et les amours de messieurs les auteurs ne ressemblent guère aux tristesses et aux amours des autres hommes. … De plus, j’ignore pourquoi vous chérissez tant les sujets funèbres et les descriptions d’anatomie. Quand on est jeune, qu’on a comme vous un beau talent et toutes les conditions présumées du bonheur, il me paraît bien plus naturel de célébrer la santé et les joies de l’honnête homme, que de s’exercer à l’anathème, et de causer avec des Orfraies.

The next day, he located the lady, her head inclined by a gracious and almost studied melancholy towards the flowers of the parterre, and offered her his volume of Raptorsongs, a collection of sonnets of the type we have all written and read in days when we were so short in judgment and long in hair.

Samuel was most curious to discover if his Raptorsongs had charmed the soul of this beautiful melancholiac, and if the cries of these dreadful birds had spoken to her in his favour.  But a few days later, she told him with a disheartening candour and honesty:

—Monsieur, I am merely a woman, and consequently, my judgment is a thing of small worth.  But it appears to me that the passions and distresses of you authorial gentlemen hardly bear resemblance to the loves and sadnesses of other men. … Moreover, I know not why you so cherish funereal subjects and anatomical descriptions.  When one is young, when one has, as you do, a great talent and all the presumed conditions for happiness, it seems to me much more natural to celebrate health and an honest man’s joys than to practise anathema and to declaim in piercing cries.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, p. 9 [my translation, third draft])

Thus, the piercing cries of birds of prey which form the discordant music of Samuel Cramer’s sonnets in “La Fanfarlo” will, a decade later, become the ‘noisome posy’, the ‘toxic blossoms’—which is how I have chosen to translate Les Fleurs du mal in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments—and the title Baudelaire devises from Cramer’s recueil is prescient in its sinister ambiguity, anticipating the multiple insinuations that other translators have unimaginatively reduced to the literal phrase of ‘the flowers of evil’.

Baudelaire is barely commenced upon the project that will become Les Fleurs du mal. Yet he anticipates the critiques that will be levelled against his poisonous bouquet and rehearses them in “La Fanfarlo” by placing them in the mouth of Mme. de Cosmelly.

He also articulates his rebuttal—the rebuttal he might have given at his future obscenity trial—by ventriloquizing his self-defence through Samuel.

Madame, plaignez-moi, ou plutôt plaignez-nous, car j’ai beaucoup de frères de ma sorte ; c’est la haine de tous et de nous-mêmes qui nous a conduits vers ces mensonges. C’est par désespoir de ne pouvoir être nobles et beaux suivant les moyens naturels, que nous nous sommes si bizarrement fardé le visage. Nous nous sommes tellement appliqués à sophistiquer notre cœur, nous avons tant abusé du microscope pour étudier les hideuses excroissances et les honteuses verrues dont il est couvert, et que nous grossissons à plaisir, qu’il est impossible que nous parlions le langage des autres hommes. Ils vivent pour vivre, et nous, hélas ! nous vivons pour savoir. Tout le mystère est là.

Madame, pity me—or rather, pity us; for there are many brethren of my kind.  It is the hatred of everything—and of ourselves—which has led us to these lies.  It is out of the despair of impotence to be noble and beautiful through natural means that we have so bizarrely farded our faces.  We have so applied ourselves to over-refining the human heart, we have so abused the microscope so as to study the hideous growths and shameful warts with which it is covered—and which we inflame with pleasure!—that it is impossible that we should speak the language of other men.  They live to live, and we, alas!—we live in order to know.  The whole mystery lies in that.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, p. 10 [my translation, third draft])

This eloquent plea is, moreover, perspicacious to an extraordinary degree in that it reveals Baudelaire’s total awareness of his malady—his absolute inability to make his way in the world as either man or poet—so young in life. Through Samuel to Mme. de Cosmelly, Baudelaire throws himself upon the mercy of a future court of public opinion just as, following the adverse finding against him at his obscenity trial, he would seek the clemency of the Empress Eugénie.

In another of its dimensions, I see “La Fanfarlo” as rehearsing elements of the future ‘novel of realistic intrigue’—which is the umbrella term I apply to all subspecies of the crime novel, from the detective story to the spy thriller—any work of genre fiction that depends for its motive upon the revelation of a concealed truth.

Baudelaire is a proto-noir writer: his flâneurial ethos, drawing on the contemporary influences of Balzac, Eugène Sue, and Poe, braids the æsthetic strands of Gothic fiction and Romanticism with the emergent rational sensibility of science characteristic of the over-civilized city-man that, later in the nineteenth century, will produce the novel of realistic intrigue as the quintessential literary investigation of modern, metropolitan life.

I will go further than this and posit that Les Liaisons dangereuses is a proto-crime novel—perhaps the first crime novel—and specifically a proto-roman noir.

Noir as a literary and cinematic æsthetic rather than a genre in its own right is a stylization of the genre of realistic intrigue so as to produce the humane mood—the experiential atmosphere—associated with the commission of true acts that demand dissimulated concealment.

Which is to say that rage, fear, greed, melancholy, remorse—the whole gruesome psychology of cardinal sin associated with crime—are the transcendent subject of noir rather than the plot-based mechanics of the generic mystery or detective story.

In the pre-revolutionary epoch described by Les Liaisons dangereuses, well before Napoleon instituted the world’s first official police force in Paris to regulate public morals, ‘crime’ is a purely moral, ethical transgression rather than the legal matter that the generic novel of realistic intrigue will make of the humane dilemma to commit or not to commit.

Thus, understood in this way, Les Liaisons dangereuses—which we know from some illuminating notes that Baudelaire read with avidity—is a prototypical work of crime fiction, and, more specifically, of the stylistically abstracted and æstheticized variant on the novel of realistic intrigue we call the roman noir.

One of the archetypal tropic situations of noir—one which we see repeated in Baudelaire’s life, in his poetry, and in this single short story he chooses to commit to paper—is the triangular configuration of a man uncomfortably posed between two women, the good, domestic, ‘Madonna’ type, and the whore, the bad girl, the femme fatale who lures him into crime’s moral morass, the emotional place of wrongdoing where noir resides.

In “La Fanfarlo”, Baudelaire rehearses this archetypal trope of noir which we will recognize, a century later, more properly worked out in the romans noirs of David Goodis or in a movie like Pitfall (1948).

Even if she has a vestigial quality of the marquise de Merteuil, we may imagine Mme. de Cosmelly, ‘virginally maternal’, as pre-emptive of the presidential Apollonie Sabatier, to whom Baudelaire would later dedicate some of his most tender and reverential odes to women in Les Fleurs du mal.

As viewed from Samuel’s perspective, she is described throughout the story as a ‘femme honnête’, in spite of her Machiavellian trickery. In the parlance of the day, a woman’s ‘honesty’ is a function of her sexual purity—and as continently amorous wife, Mme. de Cosmelly is set up in distinct contrast to Fanfarlo—the femme fatale kept by her husband, incontinently available as a ‘fille publique’ upon the stage.

As per the triangular sexual dynamics that René Girard will later brilliantly identify as characteristic of the French nineteenth-century psychological novel, in “La Fanfarlo” Baudelaire sketches out the tropic plot of the later noir thriller, and it is precisely the æsthetic emphasis on the triangular structure of the psychological motive forces beneath the superficial mechanics of the plot that distinguishes noir from the generic crime, mystery, or detective story.

The moral dimensions of crime, the consequential human interest element of ethical transgression—beyond the bloodless legal mechanics of justice—that are implicit in this triangular structure of diverging, equivalent, but oppositional psychological forces, the ambiguous positioning of Samuel Cramer between Mme. de Cosmelly and Fanfarlo, between madone et putain, is what, I think, places this story in the primordial region of the nascent novel of realistic intrigue.

As primitive femme fatale, la Fanfarlo contrasts as a Dabrowskian ambivalent ambitendency in Samuel’s desires with the madonal/maternal Mme. de Cosmelly.

As a transparent disguise for Jeanne Duval—the second most important woman in Baudelaire’s life after his mother—the description he lavishes on Fanfarlo is the first sketch of the Baudelairean feminine ideal we will later recognize in the pages of Les Fleurs du mal—a totemically Orientalist representation of the fetishistically artificial femme fatale—literally ‘noire’ in her glorious négritude.

Elle fut accusée d’être brutale, commune, dénuée de goût, de vouloir importer sur le théâtre des habitudes d’outre-Rhin et d’outre-Pyrénées, des castagnettes, des éperons, des talons de bottes, — sans compter qu’elle buvait comme un grenadier, qu’elle aimait trop les petits chiens et la fille de sa portière, — et autres linges sales de la vie privée, qui sont la pâture et la friandise journalière de certains petits journaux. On lui opposait, avec cette tactique particulière aux journalistes, qui consiste à comparer des choses dissemblables, une danseuse éthérée, toujours habillée de blanc, et dont les chastes mouvements laissaient toutes les consciences en repos. Quelquefois la Fanfarlo criait et riait très-haut vers le parterre en achevant un bond sur la rampe ; elle osait marcher en dansant. Jamais elle ne portait de ces insipides robes de gaze qui laissent tout voir et ne font rien deviner. Elle aimait les étoffes qui font du bruit, les jupes longues, craquantes, pailletées, ferblantées, qu’il faut soulever très-haut d’un genou vigoureux, les corsages de saltimbanque ; elle dansait, non pas avec des boucles, mais avec des pendants d’oreilles, j’oserais presque dire des lustres. Elle eût volontiers attaché au bas de ses jupes une foule de petites poupées bizarres, comme le font les vieilles bohémiennes qui vous disent la bonne aventure d’une manière menaçante, et qu’on rencontre en plein midi sous les arceaux des ruines romaines ; toutes drôleries, du reste, dont le romantique Samuel, l’un des derniers romantiques que possède la France, raffolait fort.

She was accused of being brutal, common, devoid of taste, of wanting to important into the theatre some customs from across the Rhine or beyond the Pyrenees—castanets, spurs, heeled boots—quite apart from the fact that she was as bibulous as a grenadier, that she bore too much affection for small dogs and her concierge’s daughter—and other such dirty laundry drawn from her private life which are the daily lifeblood and confections of certain small newspapers.

They would oppose him with that particular tactic of journalists, which consists of drawing comparisons between unlike things—an ‘ethereal dancer’ – always habited in white – and whose ‘chaste movements’ could not disturb the peace of any conscience.  Sometimes, Fanfarlo would direct very loud tears and laughter towards the stalls in finishing off a leap above the footlights;—she would even dare to walk in dancing.  Never would she wear those insipid gauzy dresses which permit everything to be seen and nothing to be imagined.  She was fond of stuffs which made a sound—long, crunchy, sequined, metallic skirts that it was necessary to raise very high with a vigorous knee; clowny blouses.  She would dance—not with earrings, but with pendants hanging from her ears;—I might almost dare to say, with chandeliers.  She might willingly have fastened to the bottom of her skirts a host of bizarre little dolls—as the old gypsy women who tell your fortune in a menacing manner do, and whom one encounters at the height of noon under the arches of Roman ruins;—all kinds of amusements, moreover, over which the romantic Samuel—one of the last Romantics that France possesses—went very much mad.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, pp. 22-3 [my translation, second draft])

Thus, expressionistic to a Germanic degree, Fanfarlo primitively anticipates Sacher-Masoch’s Wanda von Dunajew, the gilded, metallic, mineral divine slatterns of Klimt, the deformed, degenerately angular mutant beauties of Schiele, and the utterly artificial fräulein flappers of Wedekindian Weimar Kinema.

As in the developed film and roman noir, Samuel falls prey to the fatal woman—but the fatality of la Fanfarlo’s arachnid trap is ‘les Limbes’ of common-law marriage. Just like the bohemian Baudelaire, a sexual liberal who was more than a century ahead of his time in his interracial proclivities, Samuel commits the only scandal available to the sexually un-scandal-izable French by ‘living in sin’ with his mistress.

In an original re-inversion of the later canons of law and order inverted by noir, Baudelaire’s hell is that of bourgeois convention and respectability, as Cramer succumbs to what he considers the ‘maladie d’araignée’—the ‘spider sickness’—of pregnancy.

In fine, the ‘bad girl’, Fanfarlo, leads the fallen hero off the straight path of art and into the inferno of domesticity as the father of twins rather than dangerously liberating him from the impotent prison of the hearth.

In the character of Samuel Cramer, so scrupulously delineated in the opening pages, Baudelaire curiously anticipates archetypal figures of the later, established genre from Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe—and even to James Bond.

When Baudelaire is writing “La Fanfarlo”, the detective story is still so new a genre as to not even have that name. Indeed, the whole idea of a ‘detective’, that quintessentially flâneurial professional who can only bud up under conditions of late-civilized, urbanized modernity, is still yet to be fully articulated in the collective imaginary.

Baudelaire’s poetic hero, Edgar Allan Poe, writes the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—set, significantly, in Paris—in 1841.

The first, plagiarized translations into French of Poe’s short story are published in the Paris newspapers in June and October 1846, and an ensuing lawsuit brings the name of Poe to the attention of the Parisian public for the first time—and doubtless to Baudelaire’s.

It is perhaps not insignificant that Poe’s detective, Auguste Dupin, is a chevalier—a knight—in the Légion d’honneur. In a conspicuous non sequitur diatribe to Mme. de Cosmelly, Samuel rails against the chivalrous, medieval romances of Sir Walter Scott, comparing them very disfavourably to the modern, psychological approach taken by ‘nos bons romanciers français’.

And yet, as Francis S. Heck observes in his article “Baudelaire’s ‘La Fanfarlo’: An Example of Romantic Irony” (1976), in his short story, Baudelaire burlesques the chivalrous romantic plot of a novel by the ‘ennuyeux’ Scott—just as he is burlesquing Les Liaisons dangereuses.

In some sense, as a dandy-flâneur, as a free-floating, mobile agent in the social scape of Paris, the poet Cramer fulfils the as yet undefined rôle of a private detective: He is charged with a secret mission by his Dulcineac ‘client’, Mme. de Cosmelly—the typical society dame who will later come through Sam Spade’s and Philip Marlowe’s pebbled glass door, setting the Scott-like plot of a detective novel in motion.

And like Spade or Marlowe, in the meta-ironic style with which Baudelaire limns Samuel Cramer, this knight-errant going forward in his lady love’s service with a Valmontian ethical flexibility and a latitude of action to guide him through the social strata of Paris is more than usually quixotic.

The popular notion of a ‘private investigator’ of confidential matters that Poe first posits with the archetypal figure of C. Auguste Dupin not yet being articulated as a definitive ‘type’ in the physiognomy of modern urban life, Samuel Cramer nevertheless fulfils the prototypical rôle of a ‘private inquiry agent’, an unofficial investigator in Mme. de Cosmelly’s behalf, and a champion in defence of her domestic interests.

But even as we first encounter Samuel, Baudelaire’s description of his digs overlooking the jardin du Luxembourg, in one of the most fashionable quartiers of Paris for a free-floating social aspirant allied with—but not quite of—the élite, foreshadows Sherlock Holmes’s ‘rooms’ at 221B Baker Street in Marylebone.

Un jour chaud et doré se précipita dans le cabinet poudreux. Samuel admira comme le printemps était venu vite en quelques jours, et sans crier gare. Un air tiède et imprégné de bonnes odeurs lui ouvrit les narines, — dont une partie étant montée au cerveau, le remplit de rêverie et de désir, et l’autre lui remua libertinement le cœur, l’estomac et le foie. — Il souffla résolûment ses deux bougies dont l’une palpitait encore sur un volume de Swedenborg, et l’autre s’éteignait sur un de ces livres honteux dont la lecture n’est profitable qu’aux esprits possédés d’un goût immodéré de la vérité.

Du haut de sa solitude, encombrée de paperasses, pavée de bouquins et peuplée de ses rêves, Samuel apercevait souvent, se promenant dans une allée du Luxembourg, une forme et une figure qu’il avait aimées en province, — à l’âge où l’on aime l’amour.

A warm and golden light rushed into the dusty study.  Samuel admired how quickly the spring had come—in a matter of days, and without warning.  An atmosphere, mild and steeped in pleasant scents, opened the portals of his nostrils, a fraction of which, having mounted to his brain, filled him with dreams and desires while another licentiously stirred his heart, stomach and spleen.  He resolutely snuffed out his two candles, one of which was still twitching atop a volume of Swedenborg while the other was guttering above one of those shameful books whose perusal merely profits spirits possessed with an immoderate appetite for truth.

From his lofty solitude encumbered with papers, paved with books, and peopled by his dreams, Samuel would often glimpse, strolling in an allée of the Luxembourg Gardens, a face and figure that he had loved in the countryside at the age when one is in love with love itself.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, pp. 4-5 [my translation, third draft])

In that brief but vivid sketch—in which we also recognize Baudelaire’s own tastes for the occult, alchemy and esotericism, to which his poems and prose poems give ample testimony—the Faustian magus style of Samuel’s chambers is not dissimilar to Dupin’s muffled bibliothèque or Holmes’s platonic realm of pure rationality, where the science of the chemistry kit is perfectly reconciled with the art of the violin.

As a primordial essay at the archetypal hero of the novel of realistic intrigue, Samuel evokes Holmes in his domain as much as he evokes Bond in his person.

In one of his mythic dimensions, the figure of James Bond accomplishes a modern type that has its first clear personification in the Romantic figure of Lord Byron.

We know that Baudelaire, as the latest poet of Romanticism, was deeply impressed by Byron’s heroic example—as were many of his contemporaries across the Channel, including his friend and mentor Delacroix, who interpreted some of Byron’s verses on canvas.

On the whole, the Parisians, adopting the mode of dandyism that had commenced in London, were much more receptive to English trends in the nineteenth century than the reverse, the islanders displaying their usual xenophobic suspicion for Continental fads, particularly those originating with the frivolous French.

As a translator from English, Baudelaire, like his contemporaries, was deeply immersed in cultural trends across the Channel and held a deep reverence for the well-worked consumer products of English artisanry and manufacture, which appeared to him, as to his cronies, to represent the nec plus ultra in good taste.

Of course, Ian Fleming’s James Bond is an utterly slavish advertisement for the sophisticated English gentleman, and a significant part of the charm of the Bond novels as examples of the genre of realistic intrigue resides in the inclusion of actual ‘marques’—brand names that testify to Fleming’s exquisitely snobbish good taste.

I contend that a straight line can be drawn from Lord Byron to James Bond that leads through Sherlock Holmes and passes equally through the character of Samuel Cramer as an entity clearly emulative of Byron but anticipating the refined, recuperated dandyism of Bond.

Bond completes the Byronic Übermensch that Sherlock Holmes would appear to be, except for his absence of heart, his invulnerability to the fairer sex. In the modern English literary tradition where chivalry is gradually sublimated to the modern project of science, commerce, engineering and empire-building, Byron, the heroic Romantic, a nobleman kicking against all these bourgeois pricks, ultimately becomes Bond, the romantic Hero, eminently middle-class but an aspirant to democratic nobility via the meritocracy of dandyism.

Samuel Cramer, who is as much a pseudonymous disguise for Charles Baudelaire as James Bond is for Ian Fleming, is this Byronic Übermensch burlesqued: The poet, quixotically hobbled by his romantic spleen, is charged by Mme. de Cosmelly as her agent in the secret mission to break up her husband’s affair by seducing la Fanfarlo.

And, uncannily, just as Bond, true to his cryptically middle-class origins, is not even an Englishman at all, being the product of a Scot out of a French-Swiss woman, so too does Baudelaire make a point of Samuel’s exotic mixed heritage, imparting the soupçon of something extra to the je-ne-sais-quoi of his dandyism.

Samuel Cramer, qui signa autrefois du nom de Manuela de Monteverde quelques folies romantiques, — dans le bon temps du Romantisme, — est le produit contradictoire d’un blême Allemand et d’une brune Chilienne. Ajoutez à cette double origine une éducation française et une civilisation littéraire, vous serez moins surpris, — sinon satisfait et édifié, — des complications bizarres de ce caractère.

Samuel Cramer, who, in days gone by,—in the good old days of Romanticism, that is,—signed some romantic fantasies with the name of Manuela de Monteverde, is the contradictory issue of a pale German and a tanned Chilean woman. Add to this double origin a French education and a literary culture and you will be less surprised—if not satisfied and edified—by the bizarre complications of his character.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, p. 1 [my translation, third draft])

Like Bond, who continues to impersonate the perfect Englishman in the imagination of a public ignorant of Fleming’s antecedents for him, Samuel’s mixed heritage is operationalized by Baudelaire to contrast—or exotically harmonize—a traditionally phlegmatic, Northern – even ‘masculine’ – side of this idealized version of himself with a more spontaneous, Southern – ‘feminine’ – side.

One could argue that Bond’s superheroic success at every endeavour is at least in part a function of the reconciliation of masculine and feminine, of rational and responsive elements of ‘race’ in his character: he unites the ‘imperturbable’ Scot with the sophisticated French-Swiss and—like nineteenth-century dandies in Paris such Baudelaire and his creation Cramer—effectively ‘passes’ for an Englishman.

So, in many ways, “La Fanfarlo”, as a work contemporary with Poe’s detective stories, written alongside the very birth of the genre of realistic intrigue that defines the modernity that Baudelaire himself would give the name to, is a fascinating exploration of primordial forms and structures in the Zeitgeist of mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

The work is by no means a success: Baudelaire demonstrates that he has no particular talent for fiction as he has an indisputable genius for poetry and the kind of perspicacious philosophical observation that comes through in his critical writings.

Though this work may not be great fiction, it is a subtle and penetrating study written in a suggestive and æsthetic style which would not have seemed out of place in the nineties. It is chiefly interesting now because, with rare insight and a singular power of self-analysis, Baudelaire has studied his own personality in the person of Samuel Cramer the hero; it does not show enough experience and diversity of knowledge of human nature to be great fiction.

— Enid Starkie, Baudelaire (1933, p. 130)

After “La Fanfarlo”, Baudelaire’s career as a fictioneer would be solely restricted to the handmaiden’s rôle of translator as he threw himself with holy zeal into the mission of setting versions of Poe’s extraordinary tales before the French public—versions that are still considered definitive, and which are studied in French high schools today.

“La Fanfarlo” tells us an enormous deal about Baudelaire—about his life, about his relationships with women—in a medium—that of fiction—he would never again explore in his own behalf, and thus, it throws a documentary sidelight on the vision of his character I have traced in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments through my selections from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris.

This ‘long short story’ will thus add considerable value to the volume as a unique document that throws another facet of interpretation upon the poems and prose poems.

With the completion of the translation of “La Fanfarlo” next month, I will be ready to open the doors to pre-orders of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments in a variety of formats ahead of its release in June.

You can register your interest in being notified when I am ready to accept down payments for pre-ordered copies of the book by entering your email address into the registration form below. That will put you on the mailing list of prospective collectors, and I will send you the first ‘chapterlet’ of the introductory monograph I am writing for the book to give you a taster of what to expect in June.

Front cover image of the softcover edition of “Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from ‘Toxic Blossoms’ and ‘Parisian Spleen’”, by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Dean Kyte.

Dean Kyte’s new book of translations from Baudelaire, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen, is on track for release in June.

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Block Court, Collins Street, evening.
Shot on Kodak Ektar 100. Shutter speed: 30. Aperture: f.2.82. Focal range: ∞.

“Office at night”: A ficción by Dean Kyte. The tracks below are best heard through earphones.

The year 2024 has been a landmark literary year for your Melbourne Flâneur.

Among the many achievements, after four years of patient plotting, planning, and pre-production, a formal commencement was made on production of the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast, an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne project which began to manifest itself during the epic Coronavirus lockdown of 2020.

“Office at night”, track 11 on The Spleen of Melbourne audiobook, was written while your Melbourne Flâneur was dodging the CV all over NSW in the winter of 2021. It is one of eight ‘experimental previews’ for the podcast I wrote, recorded, and sound-designed during the years of pre-production as I got a progressively firmer handle on both the literary and the auditory ‘style’ I am going for in the podcast.

I’m calling that style (at least in its auditory aspect) ‘audio noir’—although such a term is not the best French.

But I believe that I have found in the soundscapes cobbled together from the more than 400 recordings I have made all over Melbourne, Victoria, and points even further afield in the last two years, an auditory approximation of the pseudo-documentary style of post-war film noir, adapted, in its turn, from the pseudo-documentary principles of Italian neorealismo.

The ‘Italian connection’, the conceptual influence of a ‘new realism’ in cinema, derived from the documentary, on the fictional audio project that has emerged as a sub-project of the prose poems on The Spleen of Melbourne album, is a key theoretic base in my thinking, for in its literary dimension, as narrated texts intoned over these cinematic soundscapes, the style I have developed for The Melbourne Flâneur podcast has its ‘French connection’ too:—the post-war Nouveau Roman.

Over the past fifteen months, I’ve been taking you, book by book, through the work of the novelist who—along with my dear, adored Henry James—has shared with the Master co-regency as the chief stylistic influence on the podcast.

His theoretic principles ‘towards a new novel’ I have applied in experimental previews such as “Office at night”, and have eventually mastered and perfected as, in 2024, I wrote the first four canonical episodes of this dark documentary on contemporary Melbourne life, of which “Office at night” is an ‘interstitial episode’, taking place halfway through the series.

In 1963, the novelist in question, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was at the height of his international celebrity and his influence on Western culture.

In the ten years to that date, from the incomprehension that greeted his first published novel, Les Gommes (1953), Robbe-Grillet had quickly taken the citadel of French literature, going from dismissed madman to dean and spokesman for a diverse school of avant-garde French writers, many of whom were, like Robbe-Grillet himself, published by Les Éditions de Minuit.

The literary press of Paris, for want of a better term, said that the Minuit school of novelists were engaged in the project of writing a ‘nouveau roman’—a ‘new novel’—and the term, pejorative at first, signalling a definite break with the pre-war tradition of the French psychological novel that had come down from Balzac, stuck to the group.

Robbe-Grillet seemed the most iconoclastic of the Nouveaux Romanciers to the critics—and he was also the most charismatic, the most good-humoured in taking and batting back broadsides, and the most gregarious, showing a generosity towards the work of his fellow novelists exceedingly rare in a writer, taking their part and arguing the collective case of the group.

This movement from margins to mainstream-adjacent put Robbe-Grillet in a powerful personal position, both in French letters and, as the cachet of being a cutting-edge French novelist has a profound modishness for the Anglosphere, eventually globally. It led Robbe-Grillet to pen a mystifying screenplay for Alain Resnais in 1961 and, in 1962, to make his début as a filmmaker, becoming one of the few novelists in history to have a second career as a film director.

Robbe-Grillet’s coup was accompanied by the publication in the French press of a small corpus of articles in which he tentatively put forth the case for a new kind of novel that diverged radically from the French tradition and was adapted to the actual conditions of post-war life.

In 1963, with his star at its apogee, Robbe-Grillet collected these essays in a single volume, which he published under the title Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel).

Ces textes ne constituent en rien une théorie du roman ; ils tentent seulement de dégager quelques lignes d’évolution qui me paraissent capitales dans la littérature contemporaine. Si j’emploie volontiers, dans bien des pages, le terme de Nouveau Roman, ce n’est pas pour désigner une école, ni même un groupe défini et constitué d’écrivains qui travailleraient dans le même sens ; il n’y a là qu’une appellation commode englobant tous ceux qui cherchent de nouvelles formes romanesques, capables d’exprimer (ou de créer) de nouvelles relations entre l’homme et le monde, tous ceux qui sont décidés à inventer le roman, c’est-à-dire à inventer l’homme. … [E]n nous fermant les yeux sur notre situation réelle dans le monde présent, elle nous empêche en fin de compte de construire le monde et l’homme de demain.

These texts in no way constitute a theory of the novel; they merely attempt to clarify some evolutionary lines that appear essential to me in contemporary literature. If, in the course of many pages, I voluntarily employ the term ‘Nouveau Roman’, it is not to designate a school, nor even a defined and established group of writers potentially working in the same direction. It is simply a term that conveniently encompasses all writers seeking new novelistic forms capable of expressing (or creating) new relationships between man and the world, all those who have made up their mind to invent the novel—which is to say, to invent man. … [I]n closing our eyes to our real situation in the current world, [the systematic repetition of past novelistic forms] prevents us, at the end of the day, from constructing the world and the man of tomorrow.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « À quoi servent les théories », Pour un nouveau roman (1986, p. 9 [my translation])

Thus, for Robbe-Grillet, the Nouveau Roman is not a new ‘genre’ of novel (in the sense that we Anglophones [mis]understand the word ‘genre’) but an essentially earnest attitude of certain authors dissatisfied with the outmoded tropes of the great nineteenth-century psychological novel.

In Robbe-Grillet’s view, all authors who strive to break out of the moribund formulæ that have come down to us, generation after generation, from Balzac;—all writers who seek to grasp a ‘new reality’ rather than a ‘new realism’;—are fundamentally engaged in the project of writing a ‘New Novel’.

Before he became a novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a scientist, an agronomist. For him, rather than being a defined genre of postmodern, avant-garde fiction, the Nouveau Roman, in its experimental capacity, is a ‘recherche’—a scientific investigation, but also a search, a quest.

The ‘chercheur’ (the scientist, but also the novelist as seeker, as querent) is engaged in an investigation of the world of today, of man’s relationship to the world of modernity, of his relationship with other people, and ultimately, under the conditions of the post-war moment, with himself.

Mais nous … qu’on accuse d’être des théoriciens, nous ne savons pas ce que doit être un roman, un vrai roman ; nous savons seulement que le roman d’aujourd’hui sera ce que nous le ferons, aujourd’hui, et que nous n’avons pas à cultiver la ressemblance avec ce qu’il était hier, mais à nous avancer plus loin.

But we … whom [the critics] accuse of being ‘theoretical novelists’, we do not know what a novel—a ‘real novel’—ought to be. We only know that the novel of today will be what we make it today and that we are under no obligation to maintain its resemblance to what it was yesterday but to push ourselves further still.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet. « Nouveau roman, nouveau homme » (as cited in ibid, p.115 [my translation])

The form of this scientific investigation into the current circumstances of postmodern life is ultimately reflected in the ‘form’ of the novel itself, in the individual form that each ‘new novel’ takes, shaped as it is by the writer’s earnest, intellectually honest attempt to ‘discover’ its form.

And I have certainly experienced this with the nouvelles démeublées—the ‘unfurnished short stories’—I have written, attempting to assiduously follow the theoretical principles Robbe-Grillet outlines in Pour un nouveau roman.

I have alternately called nouvelles démeublées noires such as “Office at night” ‘literary crime fictions’ as I have attempted to articulate to myself how the form of these ‘New Short Stories’ operates as a function of their function.

These are not necessarily ‘crime fictions’ in the way we understand the genre of ‘crime’. Rather, as the nature of the mystery story is to discover a hidden truth in the fabric of the text, the nature of the literary investigation I am engaged upon in the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur is essentially scientific, detectival, as I probe ‘the mystery’ of their essential form, attempt to dynamically discover, in the course of writing each story, what the ‘shape’ of that final story actually is as an image, as a rotatable, circumnavigable, eminently flâneurial mental object hanging abstractly in conceptual space.

The principle of ‘unfurnishing’, of taking successive couches of description out of the texts, leaving only the resonance of their traces, reorganizing the sub-imagery of the total tableau, reveals radically different ‘shapes’ and ‘forms’ from draft to draft as the short story condenses progressively to a sharp, pregnant point.

Robbe-Grillet implies that the social-scientific art form of the novel is consubstantial with the shape of man himself. To construct a new novel that accurately describes our actual conditions post-modernity is to build the abstract, conceptual form that reflects the man of today. As it advances ‘plus loin’, that current form goes beyond outmoded constructions of the human identity, culturally engendering the world and the human being we are becoming and must become to surmount the existential crises of post-modernity.

Moreover, the Nouveau Romancier, particularly the New Novelist of the Robbe-Grilletian type, concerned exclusively with a scientifically rigorous description of the phenomenal world, is in creative search of himself.

He searches for himself in the lines and pages he writes without preconception of what the novel that reflects him must be, and as such, the essential question of the scientific investigation that the Nouveau Roman represents originates from a fundamental research question about the self.

Il sent la nécessité d’employer telle forme, de refuser tel adjectif, de construire ce paragraphe de telle façon. Il met tout son soin à la lente recherche du mot exact et de son juste emplacement. … Et lorsqu’on lui demande pourquoi il a écrit son livre, il n’a qu’une réponse : « C’est pour essayer de savoir pourquoi j’avais envie de l’écire. »

He feels the need to employ a particular form, to refuse such an adjective, to construct this paragraph in a certain way. He puts all his care into the slow search for the exact word and its precise placement. … And when we ask him why he wrote his book, he has only one response: ‘I wrote it in order to try to understand why I felt like writing it.’

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « À quoi servent les théories » (as cited in ibid, p. 13 [my translation])

Why do I write? Why do I feel like writing this? Why do I want to write it in this way?

The Nouveau Romancier, in seeking honestly to grasp the reality of the present moment, is in search of himself, of his own actuality as he writes the work, and in placing every word, building every line and page, he dynamically constructs his present self in the present as he creates the novel, and, as the shaped artefact of a book that others will read in a ‘future present’, he is also culturally constructing the consciousnesses of tomorrow by his honest research into his own.

In fine, the Nouveau Romancier, in creating a new literary form of present-day novel, is inventing himself. He is also inventing the audience of the future who are bored with the moribund paradigms and formulæ of today’s generic entertainment, of phony ‘realism’, of didactic moral education in books and movies that are still beholden to the creaking mechanics of the nineteenth-century psychological novel.

I feel it myself most profoundly: A new audience is struggling to be born—in the Anglosphere most especially—and having lived for a century under the tyrannical cultural imperium of the United States—which effectively staged a coup, dragging the English language across the Atlantic and installing it wholesale in New York and Hollywood—readers and moviegoers keep frustratedly looking to America for mythos when the myth of America is effectively exhausted and irrelevant to our present postmodern conditions.

And yet, when I read the nouvelles démeublées from The Melbourne Flâneur at côteries and gatherings, shorn of their ‘audio noir’ soundscapes so that these ‘unfurnished short stories’ are merely bald, naked texts dependent upon my delivery for their effect and impact, I have seen people sit up straight in their chairs the way a dog will twist its head when you make an unfamiliar sound.

A profound signal is being sent to them.

The dark, brutally inhuman vision of human beings walking the streets of Melbourne as objects in an expressionistic world of objects—of architectural structures, like the office at night, that signify in the phenomenal plasticity of their material forms—seems to speak to people of the future we are presently living.

I’ve even tried this on the street a few times, experimenting with the stories’ ‘stopping power’ in live streetside performances, and have been myself surprised to see people utterly arrested and fascinated by the images being built in their minds of a Melburnian world they recognize from their actual experiences, but which is made expressionistically new.

So, what I have drawn from Robbe-Grillet specifically? What stylistic techniques peculiar to his brand of the Nouveau Roman are particularly crucial in disrupting outmoded ways of seeing the world and our relationship to it in stories?

Firstly, as we have seen throughout this series, and as Robbe-Grillet makes explicit in several essays in Pour un nouveau roman, description, which is generally deprecated in novels, conversely occupies a very privileged position in Robbe-Grillet’s novels.

The rôle of description, as an essential narrative tool in the novelist’s arsenal of æsthetic strategies, has become even more diminished in the twenty-first century than it was when Robbe-Grillet was publishing these articles in the mid-twentieth, with postmodern novelists typically receiving the utterly bogus advice, derived from screenwriting practice, that they should ‘show, not tell’.

In my article on the collection Instantanés (1962), I wrote that the salient rôle played by description in Robbe-Grillet’s work as a unique strategy for advancing the story linked these short stories to the imagistic practice of prose poetry.

And as, in the suite of nouvelles démeublées which comprise The Melbourne Flâneur, and which are derived from the prose-poetic praxis of The Spleen of Melbourne, I am concerned with reducing each story down to a singular, crystalline image like the one in “Office at night”, what ‘plot’ emerges from the concatenation of these images, what ‘human drama’ may be inferred from the conceptual arrangement of them as a cinematic sequence, is significantly reliant on the documentary description of streets, buildings and other concrete structures, patterns of traffic and patterns of behaviour that are typical of contemporary Melbourne life.

Then too, Robbe-Grillet identifies time as the novel’s real subject since at least 1900. The apperception that time is of a materially different quality under conditions of modernity is a fundamental subject for a new novel to address honestly.

However, Robbe-Grillet’s stylistic approach to time is typically undoctrinaire. He employs time in a technical, grammatical sense.

As I wrote in my article on Dans le labyrinthe (1959), the French present tense is as characteristic of Robbe-Grillet’s style as the imperfect is in Flaubert’s version of a ‘new novel’, and the conditional mood is characteristic of Proust’s take on same.

In English literature, the present tense is not generally used as the default operational tense of an extended narrative. We are used to novels written in the simple past tense, with the past progressive being subbed in, à la Flaubert, to change it up a little. To read an extended narrative written in the present tense in English often feels uncomfortable.

In French, however, employment of the present tense in fiction is not uncommon and feels natural. As an æsthetic strategy, however, Robbe-Grillet, takes stylistically foregrounds the present tense as much as he does description, and the two are linked.

The perception of time, the instability of what appears to be solid, is a key quality in modern literature, and chez Robbe-Grillet, this takes the form of a ‘self-effacing description’, one that appears both to write itself, to build itself up, and to ‘rub itself out’, to demolish itself as it is read.

Given the ‘étrangeté’, the foreignness of the present tense in English narrative accounts, and the fact that the style I have developed in The Spleen of Melbourne and The Melbourne Flâneur is so heavily inflected by my identification with French literature, resolving the question of tense in describing the Melbourne of my actuality has been an interesting one.

I have found that there are certain very specific uses—two, in fact—to which the English present tense can be put in fiction without the short story sounding as though it is an assignment stodgily produced by a creative writing student.

Where, for instance, there is a certain ‘shallowness’ in the décalage—the necessary lag—between an event occurring in real-time and the account given of it, the present tense in English can be surprisingly effective, lending a documentary effect to a narration which, having been written, clearly takes place in the past.

So, in my literary experiments following Robbe-Grillet’s principles as set forth in Pour un nouveau roman, an honest intellectual investigation directed simultaneously inward and outward—outward to the world, seeking to accurately describe its phenomenology in order to go inward to myself, describing my flâneurial experiences of it—I am doing my best to renew the novel via the short story—‘to Make Literature Great Again!’

On répète, de l’extrême droite à l’extrême gauche, que cet art nouveau est malsain, décadent, inhumain et noir. Mais la bonne santé à laquelle ce jugement fait allusion est celle des œillères et du formol, celle de la mort. On est toujours décadent par rapport aux choses du passé : le béton armé par rapport à la pierre, le socialisme par rapport à la monarchie paternaliste, Proust par rapport à Balzac. Et ce n’est guère être inhumain que de vouloir bâtir une nouvelle vie pour l’homme ; cette vie ne paraît noire que si — toujours en train de pleurer les anciennes couleurs — on ne cherche pas à voir les nouvelles beautés qui l’éclairent. Ce que propose l’art d’aujourd’hui au lecteur, au spectateur, c’est en tout cas une façon de vivre, dans le monde présent, et de participer à la création permanente du monde de demain. Pour y parvenir, le nouveau roman demande seulement au public d’avoir confiance encore dans le pouvoir de la littérature, et il demande au romancier de n’avoir plus honte d’en faire.

We repeat that, from the extreme right to the extreme left, this new art is unhealthy, decadent, inhuman, and dark. But the ‘good health’ on which this judgment is based is that of blinkers and disinfectant—that of death. One is always decadent in relation to the things of the past: reinforced concrete as compared with stone, socialism as compared with absolute monarchy, Proust as compared with Balzac. And it is hardly ‘inhuman’ to want to build a new life for man: this life only appears dark if—perpetually boohooing over faded colours—we do not strive to see the new beauties that illuminate it. What today’s art offers to the reader and moviegoer is, at any rate, a way of living in today’s world and participating in the permanent creation of tomorrow’s world. In order to arrive at this place, the new novel only asks that the public maintains its faith in the power of literature and that the novelist no longer feels shame about creating it.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « Du réalisme à la réalité » (as cited in ibid, pp. 143-4 [my translation])

Where the old formulas of books and movies designed to ‘entertain’, ‘educate’, or ‘tell the truth’ about life in antiquated forms are dead—and are felt to be dead—in the West, the Nouveau Roman, among writers of good faith and goodwill, is an essentially creative, participatory enterprise of research in which readers—unafraid of the radical ambiguity of our times—‘complete’ the unfurnished work presented as a sincere investigation into self and world by the author.

And thus, as Robbe-Grillet says, the only sincere ‘political engagement’ the Nouveau Romancier can have is the engagement he shows in his enterprise, in the rigour of his research for a new self and a new world, in the intellectual honesty with which he asks himself the question: ‘Why do I write this?’

Redonnons donc à la notion d’engagement le seul sens qu’elle peut avoir pour nous. Au lieu d’être de nature politique, l’engagement c’est, pour l’écrivain, la pleine conscience des problèmes actuels de son propre langage, la conviction de leur extrême importance, la volonté de les résoudre de l’intérieur. C’est là, pour lui, la seule chance de demeurer un artiste et, sans doute, aussi, par voie de conséquence obscure et lointaine, de servir un jour peut-être à quelque-chose — peut-être même à la révolution.

Let us thus restore to the [Sartrean] notion of ‘engagement’ the only meaning it can have for us. Instead of being of a political nature, commitment is, for the writer, the full awareness of the current problems in his own language, the conviction of their extreme importance, the will to resolve them from within. For him, there lies the only chance of remaining an artist and, doubtless, by means of obscure and distant consequence, also of perhaps one day serving something—maybe even revolution.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « Sur quelques notions périmées » (quoted in ibid, p. 39 [my translation])

I am deeply conscious of the moribundity of English, its absolute inability, after more than a century of degradation, to convey meaning.

When the meaning of the good old-fashioned English word ‘woman’ has to be litigated in the House of Commons, you know that the language I am writing and you are reading is effectively dead.

Thus, in the prose poetry of The Spleen of Melbourne project and the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur that have emerged from it, written with respect to the principles of the Nouveau Roman outlined by Alain Robbe-Grillet in this book, I am doing my level best to reform, to renovate—to renouvelate—English by bridging the Channel, reconciling it, in one of its lines of descent, with French.

I am creating the language of the future, enacting a one-man revolution that will one day be the lingua franca of literary Franglish.

The feedback in response to my experiments ‘towards a new short story’, wresting literary English out of the cold dead hands of the Amerloques and dragging it, by force of my own will, down under, at least encourages a tentative hypothesis pointing in that direction.

To support my efforts to make literature great again, I invite you to purchase a copy of the “Office at night” single. If you’re in the States, you might be particularly interested to hear what noir sounds like ‘down under’, in the most Parisian city on Australian soil.

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Before the former Colonial Bank in Euroa, the Melbourne Flâneur confronts the image of himself in the form of a fellow refugee from modernity.

Occasionally in mes flâneries, I meet the image of myself, bemisted in the palimpsest of signs.  I turn a corner at random in that grey hedgemaze of clouds which is our labyrinthine reality and find an uncanny anachronistic icon reared high against the sky, holding itself aloof above the fog of everyday ways we stumble and blunder through.

I love the statuary that old architecture makes, these dépassé neoclassical deities mutilated by time.  I remember seeing a painting by Russell Drysdale once—Hill End, painted in 1948, the portrait of a dilapidated bâtiment abandonné.  Two storeys of wounded brickwork, a peeling plaster peau, two doors to nowhere and a wroughtiron balcon, like a jetty projecting into air, presented the proud proue of its profile to the pitiless chastisement des éléments australiens, a fulgurant hellciel of merdescent orange grimacing under the bloodmauve nuages.

Such is le flâneur, heir apparent to a vanished patrimony, un visionnaire de l’invisible.  Rimbaudian dreamer in search of his bohemia, he goes, battered bateau ivre, réfugié de la modernité, holding the holes of his tattered dignity together, this aristocrat of the gutter, as he stumbles parmi les épaves, le nez en l’air, his eye anchored in the stars.

Undulant Ulysse, I port my only arm, la rame de la caméra, à l’épaule.  Avec ça je peins l’image blême—à peine visible—de moi-même que je vois dressé dans le bleu brumeux.  And like Albert Ryder, pale cavalier and blue pilot across many a dark, moonlit bar, je vois—là-haut! là-haut!—my eternal home, au-delà des nuages qui passent, marvellous vagabonds like myself.

I remember being affected by the vermiculated detail of the end brickwork of the façade, abutting nothing, in the Drysdale, as though a whole row of these hôtels had formed un rue-mur parisien, a barricade against the barren Australian hellscape, and now only this last brick existed in that invisible wall, fort of imported European sophistication and tradition, an antique stumblingblock, a toe of that colossus, les restes melted into airy ruins.

C’est moi, la dernière pierre d’un passé dépassé.

—Dean Kyte, “Ma Bohème”

The annual mountain of administrivia associated with running a small enterprise surmounted, I warmly welcome you back, chers lecteurs, to another financial year of splenetic, prose-poetic rants, rambles and ruminations on French literature, film, and the æsthetic philosophy of flânerie in an Australian context here on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog.

And I commence to cudgel your eyes and ears anew with my Baudelairean clairvisions of Spleen and the Ideal down under by humbly submitting as Exhibit A in my literary crimes against English, seeking to rebridge la Manche and reconcile it with French, the cinepoem above, hybridgeously digital and co-written in the colourful light and movement of Kodak Super 8 film.

“Ma Bohème”, an entry in The Spleen of Melbourne project, explores the intersection of art, the shiftless rôle of the dandy-flâneur drifting amidst the ruins of modernity, and the pastoral extension of Melbourne beyond itself into country Victoria—all themes I recently shared with The Hague-based Romanian flâneuse Patricia Hurducas in an interview on her Substack blog The Flâneurs Project.

In “Walking in Melbourne with Dean Kyte”, we discuss these and other topics, including my own history with the notion of flânerie, my relationship with Charles Baudelaire, my love of Bellingen, and what, in capsule form, my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy of flânerie contains and entails.

I heartily recommend you to check out not only Patricia’s interview with me, but her interviews with other flâneurs from Amsterdam to Vilnius, from Austin to Vienna, and even from exotic Kuwait-City.

For regular readers, viewers and auditors of The Melbourne Flâneur, I think you will find The Flâneurs Project a refreshing complement to this vlog: Whereas I deal with French language and literature and Parisian culture in these pages, and my name has become linked with Baudelaire’s as a translator and interpreter of his work, Patricia speaks German and is versed in the Berlin current of flânerie represented by Walter Benjamin.

She also completed a Masters of American Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin, looking at those Amerloque authors within what I call the ‘flâneurial corpus’ of literature.

In the small world where certain men and women walk about their cities in sousveillance of the Balzacian comédie humaine, Patricia has been a post of observation in the field long tracked by my flâneurial radar.

I have been aware of her work for some years now, and as one of the leading feminine entrants into the field of psychogeographic urban exploration, I have looked seriously at her work as a potential source for an article I intend to write one day when the subject is a little less politically fraught; viz.—Is female flânerie even conceptually—let alone practically—possible?

We touched tantalizingly on this delicate issue in a recent Zoom call I had with her, and in the half-hour or so where time zones in two hemispheres happily, conveniently collided, I felt an interesting shift inside myself as I listened to Patricia relate to me her own history and experience of flânerie as a young woman from post-Communist Romania ambling about the cities of Western Europe.

I knew that Patricia would be a good source to cite and refer to when the furore around what a woman actually is dies down a little and I can diplomatically put what I still expect to be a controversial argument a little more piano piano.

So allow me, dear readers, to earnestly buttonhole you and urge you to show some support to Patricia at Substack, where you can subscribe to follow The Flâneurs Project.

And as we commence our sixth year of exploring French literature and flâneurial cinema together on The Melbourne Flâneur, batting steadily towards a century of posts on this vlog, if you want to show some support to me in my ongoing work, today is the best possible day to do it—for today is Bandcamp Friday!

Bandcamp Friday was an initiative started by BC in March 2020 to support artists on the platform during the pandemic. It’s been so successful that they have kept it going, with $120 million being given directly to artists and labels by their fans to date.

For today only, you can download the soundtrack of “Ma Bohème” in your choice of format for $A2.00 using the link below—or you can name your own price at the checkout—and Bandcamp will waive their share of the revenue and pass all the pognon directly on to your Melbourne Flâneur.

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The Melbourne Flâneur has just joined AirChat. You can follow Dean Kyte’s flâneries @themelbflaneur.

The challenge for this post comes from Rebecca Bardess, one of my co-conversants on AirChat, a new social medium that allows for asynchronous voice-to-voice conversations.

Rebecca, a pioneer of the Blogosphere (remember when that was a thing?), has challenged the members of the Blogging channel on AirChat to write a post without any regard to SEO.

‘I want you to look at the real conversations that you’re having on AirChat and elsewhere, the real stuff, and what inspires you and then journal on your blog, just kind of like, these are my thoughts for today….’ she says.

I feel myself inwardly groaning at the challenge already.

What?—no talk of film or French literature? no explications of aspects of my complicated æsthetic philosophy of flânerie?

This isn’t even going to be what I call (with an eye towards SEO) a ‘lifestyle post’—one of those occasional, more informal entries where I talk about what it’s like to be a Melburnian flâneurial writer.

Nope. This is pure stream-of-consciousness rambling, and I have no idea where this post is going.

O.K., Rebecca:—‘the real stuff’, the real conversations I’m having on AirChat and elsewhere. What is inspiring me there?

The first words that leap to mind are that ‘it’s all about the vibe’: When I think back on the first couple of chits I posted on AirChat more than two months ago, I feel like my voice is stiff and shy—like someone arriving at a party where he knows no one and who is seeking to introduce himself to people when the party is well underway.

But after more than two months on this platform, having asynchronous ‘voice-to-voice’ conversations with people in all parts of the world, the barriers to authentic communication are largely down and some of the playfulness that only my most intimate IRL conversational partners get to experience in face-to-face chat starts to shine through.

And as demonstrated by the current debate in the Film Channel on who, among directors, might be the GOAT, a certain ludic spirit attends even my participation in serious attempts at collective sensemaking.

As one of the few Australian accents to have taken to AirChat, I was surprised and moved to hear that, despite a small following, my voice is regarded in certain quarters as one of the most significant sources of signal on the platform.

Of course, since AirChat is still in its early days, hardly anyone apart from the co-founder, Naval Ravikant, has what might yet be considered a ‘large’ following, but as a user in the Australia Channel noted, those Aussies who have adopted this social medium early account for 0.0006% of the population.

That’s less than 200 people.

Anyone who has been in a real-life rap session with me knows that I’m not nearly as eloquent in conversation as I am on the page. I tend to talk around my points rather than land a direct blow on them. I often need a bit of labyrinthine conversational runway before I can find the right path to approach what I am trying to say.

What can I say?—I’m a writer, not a speaker.

The time to think, to draft and to craft a message is where my forte lies. And yet, on occasions when I have read my writing aloud, I’ve often been told that I have ‘a good voice’—a compliment I take as graciously as possible because, to quote Canadian chanteuse Diana Krall, I don’t think that I have a particularly ‘pretty voice’.

But it’s also the case that however incompetent I feel as a conversationalist, there’s something in my Proustian longueurs and labyrinthine searchings for my point that my conversational partners seem to find compelling when we get a good rap going between us.

And so, as someone who is paradoxically precise in his written communication and yet scatty in his conversation, it should be strange that I have been an early adopter of a social audio medium in these days when an ill-formed thought or informal word can be so costly.

But the early adopters of AirChat are all people of goodwill, genuinely committed to reviving the moribund art of civilized conversation. This has caused me to state that what Naval styles as a ‘dinner party in your pocket’ is really more like a salon: We early adopters are the leaders of fashion and culture meeting in Mr. Ravikant’s drawing room, modelling the future etiquette of a new ‘informal formality’ with one another.

And as a flâneur, as a graceful wanderer through, loiterer within, and observer of the social scene, perhaps I am the perfect creature of this conceptual drawing room designed by Naval: As a passive assistant at others’ conversations and as an active interlocutor in my own, I navigate the channels and topics aired on the platform, whether grave or gay, with the grace of the dandiacal flâneur who finds himself in his natural element—the crowd.

And this is perhaps entirely appropriate for, as I wrote in the preface of the second edition of my Œuvres back in January, ‘The flânerie is an ambulatory intellectual parcours; an investigative promenade through some embodied thought, feeling, idea, impression, sensation, experience, memory, dream, or intuition….’

Not only have I found a social medium that suits the peripatetic quality of my thought, one that I can engage in during my random peregrinations, but the varieties of channels of thought that the feed opens up to me is one that I can indulge in flâneuristically, whether as active participant in a conversation or passive assistant at the conversation of others, floating in and out as one might wander through the rooms of an enormous house where a party is going on.

But this platform may not be for everyone, and I wonder if it has the capacity to scale.

Despite Naval’s concerted efforts to limit performativity, which has been one of the significant externalities of social media, because users are thrown back on the unvarnished nakedness of their own voices, there is definitely a sense early on that when you press down your thumb on the record button you are in some literal sense ‘stepping onto the public stage’.

And as a couple of users have noted, with the damage that has been done to Generation Z’s social skills, there are unfortunately few young people on this app, which I think is probably a prerequisite for mainstream take-up.

If all of your social interaction has taken place behind keyboards and avatars, pressing the record button and speaking in your natural voice to a stranger on the other side of the world might be too confronting for most young people.

I hope that changes in the short to medium term, for it’s ‘the real stuff’, the real conversations that are being had on AirChat, that have been inspiring me these past several weeks. I would love young people to be able to experience a genuine human pleasure that all their living forebears know: the positive joy of having a truly generative conversation with a partner of goodwill.

You can check out my feed to listen in on the conversations I’ve been having or follow my flâneries on AirChat @themelbflaneur.

By on

The former Port of Melbourne Authority Building, 29-31 Market Street, at night. Photographed by Dean Kyte.
The former Port of Melbourne Authority Building, built between 1929 and 1931, at 29-31 Market Street.
To enjoy the full, immersive experience of the ficción, be sure to use headphones to listen to the track below.

Market Street was quiet at that late hour.  He stood casually at the corner of Flinders Lane, waiting for the lights to change.  The darkness and the muted rumours of the traffic in Collins and Flinders Streets gave this corner of Market Street, between them, a peaceful air, like an isle of repose cleaving the strong current of a river.

The lights changed, but he did not move.

He held himself in readiness to cross, but, like a mannequin, he did not break his pose of relaxed attention, as if he could not hear the staccato chatter of the walk signal beside him.

It cut out abruptly, settling back into its quiet, regular cluck.  He hit the call button again and continued to wait, as if he had only just arrived at the pedestrian crossing.

Across the street, the doorway of the Port Apartments was a tall, golden rectangle unblemished by the telltale shadow of human movement.  He gave no sign of being aware of this fact as he gazed around, turning his head regularly in both directions, as if cautiously preparing himself to take the negligible risk of stepping off the sidewalk and crossing the empty street.  Nevertheless, he was conscious of the flight of marble steps inside the heavy bronze streetdoor leading up to the foyer, across whose regular, foreshortened recession of greyish, horizontal shadows no oblique, concertina’d form passed.

One could also see, from that angle, the left-most margin of the foyer door, a column of translucent squares rendered triangular by the bronze diagonals dividing the lights, smaller versions of the diamond muntins that graced the windows of the old Port Authority Building’s ground floor.  Through that dark lattice of crisscrossing lines, as through the organic volutes springing obliquely from a potted fern before it, no movement marred the subdued but warming yellow of the foyer within.

The 58 tram, snaking its way towards West Coburg, passed before the Port Apartments like a curtain drawn across its doorway.  Warning the empty night of its turning manœuvre with a double clang of its bell, the tram slithered around the corner into Flinders Lane, trailing a wake of noisy lights.

Like the agitation of a curtain in a window, through the strobing double panes glazing the trailing second carriage as it swung away, he saw the penumbrous edge of a slender silhouette, elegant in its curvature, briefly mar the crisp gold border of the doorway as it slipped away into Market Street, the soupçon of fugitive movement masked by the departing tram.  The staccato click of heels rang in rapid report from the opposite sidewalk, making off in the direction of Flinders Street.

He started after it, crossing the street diagonally at something faster than a jog, gathering momentum as he reached the tramtracks.  The urgent sound of his footsteps was swallowed in the mounting rumble of a City Loop train charging across the Viaduct in Flinders Street.

The engine of the silver BMW roared to life beside the Immigration Museum and its wheels screeched forward, pawing asphalt.  Two lights like crosshairs blinked briefly against the dark granite of the Port Authority Building’s plinth as it passed.  Accompanying them, the cough of muffled gunfire.

By on

In this prose poem from The Spleen of Melbourne, Dean Kyte takes a nostalgic flânerie up the so-called ‘Paris End’ of Melbourne’s Collins Street as he reminisces about his last night in the Ville Lumière.

‘The Paris End’:—it’s one of those magick phrases which evoke the sweet life of flâneurial streetlife for me.  And whenever I treat myself to a flânerie up ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, like someone raising and lowering their shades, I shuffle the rosetinted souvenirs de Paris over les scènes melburniennes before my gaze.

When I saw the rougetainted Regent Theatre lit up to fête Moulin Rouge!, like le coup d’un souvenir enfoui, the farded façade dans la place Blanche floated up, suddenly unballasted, and I remembered standing on the little asphalt île de la place on my dernière nuit à Paris.  Then I knew what the phrase ‘the Paris End’ meant to me; it meant ‘la fin de Paris’.

—Dean Kyte, “The Paris End”

Last Monday night as I was hiking up Foveaux Street to The Carrington Hotel (your Melbourne Flâneur’s Sydney ‘office’, his lubricated lieu de l’écriture in the barbarous Harbour City), puffing hard as I approached the lip of Riley Street, Conte before me glowing redly in the dusk, I realized with a thrill of satisfaction so rare in my life that my whole relationship with France and the French language has undergone a quantum change in the last two or three years.

As I laboured up the hill, in my mind’s eye I saw myself more than a year ago frequently taking this flânerie up Foveaux Street to The Carro, the 1,300-page Gallimard edition of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s complete Romans noirs cuddled to my breast.

In a moment of expensive madness I had acquired the Manchette for a portrait of Monash upon discovering Sydney’s Abbey’s Bookshop and its feast of foreign-language books on the first floor some months before. I knew nothing of M’sieu Manchette; I was literally judging this hundred-dollar book by its cover—a print, by Gérard Fromanger, of the Parisian café Le Paillard rendered in an inky blue with the red silhouettes of some hinky flâneurs fogging up the boulevard des Italiens before it.

Manchette, I suspected, would be un type sympa—or at least, he would be a writer sympathetic to my cause of a Melburnian literature flâneurially evocative of Paris, of the nouveau roman written under the guise of the roman noir.

My mission on those nights, as on this, was to enjoy a good dinner and a Guinness at The Carro, masticating my Manchette over my parma and pint, and then, my wits sufficiently elevated by the brew, to debrief my brains of the day’s doings in my journal.

And now as I was grappling up the escarpment of Foveaux Street over a year later, another wad of dough freshly blown on bloody French books from Abbey’s, the red neon and the green bricks of Conte burning provocatively—like the Negroni they serve there and the Absinthe they ought to—in the sympa Sydney dusk, that small, irrational feeling of bien-être the flâneur occasionally feels when there’s no objective reason for contentment with his ennuyé life now descended on me.

Ah! comme la vie est belle!

I’m not quite sure why Conte should bring this feeling of the flâneurial merveilleux out of me: Did it, in its ‘italienneté’, recall Fromanger’s depiction of the boulevard des Italiens on the cover of the Manchette?

Or, in its position à l’angle, on the plateau of Riley Street, ahead of me as I marched the martyrizing hill of Foveaux Street as I had once climbed steeper streets in Montmartre, throwing its deep red and green over the corner, did it recall to me my beloved Cépage Montmartrois, the ‘sein d’or’ whose catalyzing golden light upon the rue Caulaincourt I immortalized in my first book Orpheid: L’Arrivée (2012), the golden bosom where I went to write every night in Paris over a demi de bière—indeed, where I learned this Parisian habitude, which has served me so well en Australie, of writing in bars and cafés?

Or was it simply that, one night, diverted from The Carro and into the boisterous bosom of Conte, I had, with my Manchette, sat at the bar, swooning over my Negroni and a piatto di prosciutto beneath the Italian movie posters, looking as keenly up at the red one-sheet for Blowup (1966) over the bar, hypnotized by it as if it were the movie itself?

Je ne sais pas.

What I know is that something has fundamentally changed for me in my relationship with France and its language during the last few years.

I’m hard pressed to put a date to it, and I only became conscious that a major phase shift had occurred in January this year, on my forty-first birthday, when I found myself sitting in Chloe’s Room, at Young & Jackson, arguably ‘the nation’s pub’, writing my first poem in French, moved by the French muse who holds court in this very Australian bar.

Like one of the archeologists who have dug up the corner behind Young & Jackson as part of the Metro Tunnel works, cataloguing the international artefacts that went into the soil of the city as the gold was coming out of it during Melbourne’s ‘marvellous’ period, in The Spleen of Melbourne, I have been at pains to unearth a ‘chthonic French connection’ between Melbourne, one of the major cities born of the nineteenth-century, and Paris, the first city of flânerie, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.

It’s a connection still very much buried to the eyes of my countrymen.

While the British colonial influence still lies on the surface of everyday life in Melbourne, with the lion and unicorn of the Royal Coat of Arms gracing everything from the portico of the Immigration Museum to the masthead of The Age, the French connection lies at a deeper, subtler stratum—deeper even than the Chinese, Greek and Italian influences on Melbourne life.

One has to dig back into the literature of the nineteenth century, when Paris was indisputably the capital of the civilized world, or the first half of the twentieth, when it was still coasting on a century of accumulated cultural prestige even after World War II, to perceive where and how Melbourne owes a subtle debt to French culture.

The clues to that subterranean French influence upon our civic life are buried in plain sight: they’re in the mansarded roofs of various town halls and the oblique allées of public gardens, the stone quays which pen the Yarra and the plane trees lining Collins Street.

Indeed, the eastern end of Collins Street, between Spring and Swanston, just barely retains into the twenty-first century its nineteenth-century designation as ‘the Paris End’, the prestigious address of doctors during the marvellous period, then, in the twentieth, with all the connotations of fashion that the magic name of Paris had conferred upon it, the favoured address of milliners, couturiers and cosmeticians.

Everyone important in the monde de la mode from Helena Rubinstein to Helmut Newton has either hung out their shingle or just plain hung out in ‘the Paris End’ of Collins Street, the most fashionable thoroughfare in this nation for nigh on two centuries.

To see these chthonic clues to the French influence upon our civic life, one has to have a constant eye to Paris: she must forever be in one’s consciousness, as she is in mine, for one to perceive these subtle analogies between the Mecca of modernity and her cultural colony at the nethermost ends of the earth.

Paris is always ‘devant mes yeux’, perhaps now more than she ever was, even when I was writing daily of my remembered experiences in her streets in Orpheid: L’Arrivée.

She has truly become the ‘moveable feast’ promised and prophesied by Hemingway as the eternal boon of the man lucky enough to have walked her streets, sat in her cafés, and loafed in her parks in his youth.

Doubtful that I will ever lay eyes again upon this city more beloved by me than any woman I have ever known, somehow the longer I have lived in exile from Paris in the country of my nativity, the more subtly French, the more subtly Parisian I have become.

It is a fact that certain writers and artists can live a very great deal on their memories, and in the exile of return to their homelands, the places of their actual experience are subtly, albeit marvellously transformed—as the façade of Conte momentarily was—by analogy with Paris.

Edward Hopper, for instance, though a painter, was no mean expert in French poetry, keeping abreast of literary developments in France even after he had ceased to go there for the living tutelage that the streets of Paris provide the artistic student of life.

Condemning himself to his native New York, Hopper had absorbed enough of the French spirit of life to infuse his visions of the local scene with some curious quality, apprehended at first as a weird novelty by his fellow countrymen, but later recognized as an authentic vision of American life in the first half of the twentieth century.

C’est très bien de copier ce qu’on voit, c’est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l’on ne voit plus que dans sa mémoire.  C’est une transformation pendant laquelle l’ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c’est-à-dire le nécessaire. … Voilà pourquoi les tableaux faits de cette façon, par un homme ayant une mémoire cultivée, connaissant les maîtres et son métier, sont presque toujours des œuvres remarquables.

It’s all very well to copy what you can see, but it’s even better to draw what you can no longer see, except in memory. A transformation is worked upon the base material of actuality in which genius collaborates with recollection. You only reproduce what has struck you, which is to say, that which is essential to the image. … That is why paintings made in such a manner by a man with a cultivated memory, one who knows both the Old Masters and his trade, are almost always remarkable works.

—Edgar Degas (my translation)

Such artists hold themselves aloof from the circumambient culture of their countries and yet are more in the vital current of the nation’s life than their fellow countrymen, for the gift of the supple, subtle French language gives them an alternative grille through which to view the humdrum actuality before their eyes.

In the days when I wrote my first book, I did everything to keep myself insulated from the common life of Australia, to focus only on my memories of Paris, terrified that I would lose some detail which was, as Degas says, ‘essential to the image.’

Probably the work which marks the climax of my jeunesse, I still think Orpheid: L’Arrivée is a ‘remarkable’ tableau of the rue Caulaincourt in Degas’s sense, almost Rousseauian (by which I mean le Douanier, not Jean-Jacques) in the naïveté of its ‘weird novelty’, but I think the approach of hermetic insulation from the common life de l’Australie was wrong to take, though perhaps necessary and inevitable for a young man still learning his métier.

In those days, I needed my eyes and ears to be blindfolded and plugged against the actuality of my prosaic surroundings with media that reminded me of the poetry of my life in France. I couldn’t take on any new sensual experiences in these climes until I had gotten the results of the Parisian experiment in flânerie down on paper in a form I was substantially satisfied with.

But one grows, and the harder one works in youth to master the craft of writing, the more the RAM expands and the wider one’s capacities grow to register and retain those ‘essential traits’ of life which Degas says mark out the remarkable works of the artists of genius—for as Proust is at pains to impress upon us, the greater part of artistic genius lies in memory.

One is more able to take into oneself the poetic riches that lie in prosaic banality and the material conditions of one’s life are marvellously transformed by their analogy with the places and experiences of memory.

At mid-life, reconciled to my exile in the country of my birth, I now carry a bit of Paris, a morceau of its moveable feast, about with me as I sweep my fashionable path through Melbourne’s streets, unnoticed by my countrymen except as novel spectacle.

How do I do it? How do I subtly maintain the flâneurial ethos I acquired in Paris here en Australie?

The simple answer is the language, which provides me with a point of view, one of critical removal upon the currents of cultural life around me.

I think it’s fair to say that if one comes to a foreign language much beyond the age of easy acquisition in childhood, one will always be a ‘student’ of it to some extent, the more so if one comes to a foreign language in adulthood, as I did to French.

As Henry James—whose prodigious command of the language had been easily acquired in his Continental childhood—once wrote to a young French author, enjoining diligence upon him in his study of English: ‘One’s own language is one’s mother, but the language one adopts, as a career, as a study, is one’s wife, and it is with one’s wife that on se met en ménage [“one makes a common life”].’

I’ve been an earnest ‘student of French’ now for about two-fifths of my life, but it seems that at some point in the last few years, I became substantially less of a ‘student’ than I had been: having joined my life to the French language some quinzaine d’années ago, somehow my ‘wife’ and I have truly become one, body and soul, only lately in our marriage.

More than half my reading diet these days is composed of books in French, and when Abbey’s Bookshop isn’t getting a substantial tranche of cash out of me for crisp, virginal volumes like the Manchette, I’m on the hunt in thrift stores and secondhand bookshops for old books that have been passed around as once I prowled the booklined quays of Paris for saucy finds.

And just as, ‘in my day’, the bouquiniste on the quai des Célestins used to be a good place to go for a disreputable pute of a book, in Melbourne, if you like to get your tongue around a little French, certain lieux in the City of Yarra and the City of Darebin can be depended on to furnish an encounter with a vieille fille ‘on the shelf’.

Though I have largely given up the fetishistic desire which possessed me in my youth to acquire new books, I find at mid-life a resurgence in that desire when it comes to French literature: to have a naughty French novel in my satchel to whip out at an idle moment in my flâneries, to be able to momentarily set a bit of Paris before my eyes as I sit on Melbourne’s Metro, puts me simultaneously in the swim of two cultures.

To be able to excavate my copy of Camus’s L’Étranger (1942)—another Abbey’s trouvaille—from my Commie officer’s mapcase recently made the interminable trajet on the Lilydale line more bearable. At least I could fill the time by substituting Meursault’s ennui for my own.

Then too, in place of consuming much local media, I listen to a great deal of Radio France and watch French movies. I think I was partly inspired to write my first poem in French on my birthday after seeing Coup de chance (2023) at Palace Kino, in the Paris End.

Having failed to quite catch Woody Allen’s Whatever Works (2009) in Paris, posters for which frequently tantalized me in my flâneries through the Quartier latin, to immerse my eyes and ears in—of all improbable things—two of my favourite things in the world combined, a Woody Allen movie and a French film, probably helped to inspire me after a morning of frittering my fric away on Balzac, Chateaubriand and Adamov.

Listening to the world through the medium of a language where one is perpetually the amorous student is actually more fruitful for a writer than paying attention to his own media.

It is not merely that, in training the ear trumpet far afield and listening to what is going on in the Francophonic world, ignoring what is going on closer to hand in Australia, I hear a perspective on global events that is not parochially Anglocentric, but when I do happen to tune in to a few minutes of Australian media, I’m often surprised at the comparative puerility of what the media is propagandizing as ‘mainstream’ Australian culture.

The one exception to this is Australian cinema. I find I’ve been getting a lot of value lately out of revisiting the Aussie films I reviewed twenty years ago as a film critic on the Gold Coast, and this engagement with an aspect of our culture that has always struggled (under the Anglophonic imperium of Hollywood) to be ‘mainstream’—even domestically—supports my diet of French cinema.

In the interplay between French and Australian films, I find the questions I ask myself as a writer, with respect to literature, even more keenly put: Does Australia have a ‘national cinema’ that is equally an ‘art cinema’ the way that the French have a proud national cinematic tradition? Have we yet produced a stylistic storyteller who has written the national myth in images?

The films that represented us at Cannes in the years I was writing for magazines—the domestically decorated Somersault (2004), for instance—now seem to me interesting and instructive failures, fruitful clues for a writer and filmmaker embedded in the subterranean stream of his society and yet able, via the supple and subtle French language, to view the mainstream trends on the surface of Australian life with some critical distance.

In some significant sense, the prose poems of The Spleen of Melbourne project in their visual form, as hybrid Super 8 and video ‘cinepoems’ like “The Paris End”, constitute my own practical attempts to wrestle with those theoretic questions.

And what becomes clear to me as I begin to show and perform pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne is that, like the epiphany in Foveaux Street, what is felt by the flâneur walking the streets of this country as an inward experience of total sensual derangement à la Rimbaud is outwardly experienced by his fellow countrymen as ‘surrealism’: the supple and subtle French language putting a gloss of romance upon places familiar to Melburnians renders these recognizable places ‘new’ to their eyes.

Thus it is that I’m in the swim of two cultures at once. Becoming less of a student and more of a master of French in the last few years has allowed me to see a subterranean dimension of Australian life and bring it to the surface of my country’s vision.

And it could well be that, like Edward Hopper with respect to New York, in seeing what is quintessentially ‘Parisian’ about Melbourne, I am seeing something that was always there as a chthonic layer of our culture, but that only future eyes will recognize as an authentic vision of Australia’s present.

There are now nearly forty pieces in The Spleen of Melbourne project and I’m getting on towards the next iteration of the collection as a thematically navigable Blu-ray Disc of films and videos. You can support me in that endeavour by purchasing the soundtrack of “The Paris End” for $A2.00 below—or by naming your own price at the checkout, if you feel more generous.

The advantage is that by purchasing the soundtrack to the video, not only do you get access to unlimited streaming and/or high-quality download in your choice of audio format, but you can also opt in to become one of my fans on Bandcamp, where I occasionally post new pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne project which don’t have an audio or video component, as well as other photos and prose poems from my flâneries around this country exclusively for my fans on the Community tab.