Eating His Words : The life and times of one of France’s most iconoclastic poets : BAUDELAIRE: The Life of Charles Baudelaire, <i> By Joanna Richardson (St. Martin’s Press: $35; 602 pp.)</i>

The notorious career of one of France’s most iconoclastic poets began, not with the controversial appearance in 1857 of “Les Fleurs du Mal”--which unleashed a fire storm of criticism and nearly a century of acrimonious litigation--but with an altogether less significant incident. At the age of 18, a characteristically arrogant Baudeliare thumbed his nose at the Draconian authorities of his strict and tightly regimented boarding school when he refused to surrender a note that he had been circulating behind his teacher’s back. Rather than compromise his fellow students, he ripped it into small pieces and then, to the utter amazement of the stern disciplinarian who stood waiting impatiently, hand outstretched, stuffed them in his mouth, swallowed them and then burst out into contemptuous laughter.

Although it was certainly not the last time he was destined to eat his own words, it was regrettably one of the very few occasions in which he was to derive much nourishment from them, for Baudelaire was not only a rebellious writer but a scandalously underpaid one. In a fit of despair at the end of his short and miserable life, he once estimated that, over the years, he had scraped together from the sale of his poems, translations and essays a measly 15,892 francs and 60 centimes, or a total of one franc and 70 centimes for every day of his literary career. “Note those sixty centimes,” he scoffed, “two Havana cigars!”

Joanna Richardson, the first non-French author to receive the prestigious Prix Goncourt (for her biography of Judith Gautier), has written a meticulously researched and highly readable biography of a syphilitic outcast whose abject poverty, tumultuous love life and extravagant tastes in fine food and expensive art forced him to live a marginal existence as a bankrupt fugitive perpetually on the run from his creditors. Richardson documents the extraordinarily complicated life of this feckless poseur in rich if occasionally gratuitous detail. She focuses in particular on Baudelaire’s suffocatingly intimate relationship with his bewildered mother, who lovingly nurtured and then callously ignored his lifelong dependence on her, which reached classically Oedipal proportions. Richardson combs through the extensive correspondence of this most prodigal of sons and weaves together her own commentary with generous excerpts from miscellaneous documents to create a narrative that functions both as a perceptive piece of literary criticism and a psychologically acute portrait of a poet who, when he was most deeply in hock, seems to have been little more than a dissipated tramp.

Charles Baudelaire was born in 1821, the son of a lapsed Catholic priest who lived the carefree existence of an 18th-Century roue, a cultured epicurean who passed on to his son his love of art, an obsession that was to contribute to this incorrigible spendthrift’s prohibitively expensive, if somewhat indiscriminate, tastes in painting. After his father died in 1827, his mother married Colonel Jacques Aupick, a dour and inflexible career diplomat who, disgusted by his high-strung stepson’s eccentricities, attempted to impose his own militaristic standards of discipline and honor, values that Baudelaire disavowed again and again for the rest of his life in his frequently ferocious assaults on bourgeois respectability.

By the time he came into his inheritance from his father in 1842, he had already developed the unique style of exorbitant preciosity and outrageous foppishness that led him to squander over half of a very considerable fortune in little more than 18 months, funneling extravagant sums into elegant clothing, which he maintained in immaculate condition long after their cuffs had frayed and their collars worn thin. This period of insane recklessness would no doubt have ruined him altogether and landed him once and for all behind the bars of a debtors’ prison were it not for the timely intervention of his stepfather, who brought this spending spree to a grinding halt by seeking what was known as a conseil judiciaire . Much to his humiliation, Baudelaire was from then on forced to appeal, cap in hand, to an uncompromising attorney who doled out a meager monthly allowance that just barely enabled him to pay the rent of the dilapidated fleabag hotels in which he eked out a precarious existence as a poet, art critic and translator of Edgar Allen Poe. In the course of his adult life, until his death at the age of 46 in 1867, he changed his address in Paris some 30 times, moving to six different apartments in a single month in 1855, migrating from one seedy, cockroach-infested dump to another in his restless efforts to evade the hostile pack of creditors that dogged him wherever he went.

Addicted to ether capsules and laudanum, the medicinal form of opium he used to numb himself to the ravaging effects of syphilis, Baudeliare cultivated the persona of a cynical voluptuary, an amoral aesthete who shocked his friends by dying his hair green and sprinkling his conversation with non sequiturs (in a remark reminiscent of Oscar Wilde, who indeed was heavily indebted to Baudelaire, he once informed an acquaintance that he detested the countryside because he found the green of the trees--if not of his hair--”too insipid”). Intoxicated with what he called “the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing,” he refused to settle down and marry but instead struck up a life-long liaison with Jeanne Duval, the “Black Venus” of “Les Fleurs du Mal,” a mixed-race prostitute who was addicted to drugs and alcohol and who made incessant demands on him for cash, which Baudelaire, whose life was constantly in a chaotic shambles, dutifully procured by scrounging off of his indignant mother.

It was in the sordid squalor of run-down garrets that this “Petrarch of the horrible,” as his contemporaries called him, produced one of the most voluptuous books of poetry in the French language, “Les Fleurs du Mal,” which one reviewer described as “an Eden (created) out of Hell, where Death walks with her sister, Sensuality.” The famous 19th-Century critic Sainte-Beuve, who was at best a tepid admirer of Baudelaire’s work, begrudgingly praised the collection by likening it to “a bizarre kiosk, very ornate, very over-done, but elegant and mysterious: a kiosk in which one grows drunk on abominable drugs in cups of exquisite porcelain.” Lassitude, drunkenness, boredom, satiation, jadedness, enervation and listlessness are words that were frequently applied to these hauntingly morbid lyrics, which contrast so dramatically to the tenement slums in which they were conceived.

While many critics recognized the genius of “Les Fleurs du Mal,” the book was immediately confiscated by authorities for offending public morals. These accusations were specifically directed against a series of demonic motifs that were misconstrued as satanic and sacrilegious, a paradoxical allegation given that virtually every poem in the collection is suffused with Baudelaire’s deeply Catholic sense of sin and remorse. The litigation in which the book was snarled was so intense that it was only in 1949, some 90 years after its original publication, that French publishers could legally print the collection in its entirety, including the infamous set of suppressed lesbian poems, which ultimately proved to be far more shocking to the public than the poet’s supposed doctrinal heresies.

Richardson’s definitive biography is obviously the product of immense scholarship and can be faulted only on two grounds. First, as a frequently dogmatic Freudian, she exaggerates the importance of Baudelaire’s Oedipal involvement with his mother. She documents the pathological intensity of their relationship with dozens and dozens of nagging letters in which he woos and courts this soft-spoken and utterly ineffectual prude, not with demonstrative displays of incestuous affection, but with shameless attempts to mooch off of her ever-dwindling widow’s pension. The centrality that these letters play in Richardson’s narrative eclipses other aspects of her subject’s life, looming as large as they do simply because the manipulative and querulous dialogue that mother and son maintained over the years left an immense paper trail. His friendships and love affairs, however, while far less richly documented, were no less important.

Secondly, Richardson presents her subject in a literary vacuum as a psychological specimen, a tangled web of neuroses and complexes isolated from his literary precedents as well as from the decadent writers who followed in his footsteps. Along with his febrile mentor Edgar Allen Poe and his good friend Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire helped invent an entire aesthetic that was to mutate over the decades into the hot-house sensibility of the fin de siecle movement, a school that became the foundation of modern camp after it was lovingly burlesqued by such figures as Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank. It is this historical context that is so sorely missing from this otherwise magnificent biography. While Baudelaire was a linchpin in the development of a key aspect of the modern sensibility, Richardson fails to throw much light on his pivotal importance as the major literary precursor of everyone from Whistler, Beardsley and Huysman to Rossetti, Swinburne and Genet.