The Mask of Sanity

by Hervey Cleckley

  The pathology and perversion of axiomatic human values demonstrated by Praz in the literary productions he discusses are indeed profound. If these productions represent the life experience of the authors, accurately reflect their taste and judgment, it is difficult to refrain from asking why they should be accepted as intellectual or spiritual superiors qualified to enlighten or inspire ordinary men and women.

  If Baudelaire or Swinburne achieves a genuine excellence of art in poetry, need we concern ourselves with its substance, with what human values it proclaims or implies, or with what kind of personal experience it embodies or reflects? Can we appraise the worth of this poetry as art entirely apart from its content? If the viewpoints and emotional reactions that produced it are psychotic or obviously perverse, must we say that this is irrelevant, that it has nothing to do with the greatness of the poet? Or of the poetry?

  Perhaps this can be done by the critic of art who in his role ceases to react as a human being. To the ordinary man, and probably to the physician, esoteric attempts to isolate art from biologic experience, to consider it without reference to the personal emotion it reflects or evokes, are likely to appear speciously mystical and unenticing.

  Baudelaire’s actual life is reported as that of a feeble and affected eccentric, a wastrel apparently without normal passions or friendships. Dyeing his hair green and sometimes leading a live lobster through the streets on a pale blue ribbon, he lived, at times, in an atmosphere chiefly of vexation and disgust, with an ignorant mulatto girl for whom his attachment is said to have been “cerebral rather than sensuous.”23 Some of his biographers concluded that he may have been sexually impotent. His reported disdain for ordinary morality was apparently surpassed by his repulsion at prospects of physical relations with beautiful and intelligent women.23,243

  Can it be said, despite his unenviable personal career, that Baudelaire’s art establishes him as a very great man, a lofty spirit resplendent above the ordinary and deserving our reverent admiration? Before trying to answer such a question is it not reasonable to inquire into what sorts of judgment and feeling, what evaluations of experience—ethical, esthetic, or otherwise—are reflected in this work? If we find in it wisdom and beauty, something to sustain or enrich lesser men, it might be argued that we should ignore the conduct of his life and bow our heads in acknowledgment of his message.

  Praz credits Baudelaire’s poetry with having given “a psychological turn to the refinements of perversity”248 and in it finds a vividly persistent taste for joy in damnation, an insistence on achieving religious beliefs in order to enhance the shame and horror of desecrating them. Here the sexual mate emerges scarcely at all except in terms of derisive obscenity or hideous monstrosity. Not occasionally but pervasively we see that “inversion of values which is the basis of sadism, vice [representing] the positive active elements, virtue the negative and passive. Virtue exists only as a restraint to be broken.”243 Actual voluptuousness is travestied, achieving little or no recognition except in perverted forms of physical brutality or moral abuse. Praz not only speaks of but amply illustrates Baudelaire’s “inexhaustible need to be occupied with macabre and obscene subjects.”243 His works are shown to abound in enthusiastic references to nearly all those defilements, reversals, butcheries, and abortions of basic human feeling embodied in the Black Mass and apparently relished there so avidly by J. K. Huysmans.43,219 The fraudulent or counterfeit is regularly accorded superiority over the actual. Baudelaire states that it is his purpose to “extract beauty out of evil.” It is doubtful if such an extract can be made beautiful or valuable through being renamed, however melodiously, or through being welcomed, however lyrically. Ignominy is rapturously embraced and pronounced sublime. Ennui is accepted as an esthetic triumph. Perhaps nothing is more typical of how this genius reacted to life than his famous statement: “Woman is natural, that is to say abominable.”243

  A recent biographer speaks of Baudelaire as “a soul of such profound spirituality and a mind of such heightened sensibility.”23 We are also told that, “through his own sufferings he came to understand the sufferings of mankind.”23 Do his works really reveal this spirituality and understanding? Have the courts who during his life condemned Les Fleurs du Mal as “an outrage upon morals and decency” been proved stupidly wrong?

  “I have loved overmuch,” Swinburne says. The youthful and the naive often believe him. The surging rhythms of his verse, the sumptuous imagery, the cumulative efflorescence of his alliteration readily stir the uninitiated. Many who encounter Swinburne during high school or college assume he speaks for the hot desire of youth, that the fervor of his poetry is a quintessential fervor of Eros. He is often pictured by the unsophisticated as a gallant, vital figure, the sensuous and virile bard of passionate love and physical ardors. Even those who ordinarily reject poetry, having vaguely relegated it to the province of bookish pedants or to the effeminate, sometimes respond to lines from “Dolores” or “The Garden of Proserpine.” During the imperious urges, the inarticulateness, and the confusion of a first love, they may find in Swinburne an intensity that seems to match their wildest aspirations. His brilliantly ringing lines must, they believe, represent a noble pagan vigor, a spirit so strong and vital that it sweeps through ordinary restraints and conventional artificialities. His voice is often taken to be the mighty voice of a lover calling on life to flood and fecundate parched deserts of asceticism and negation, on nature to flower in ultimate fulfillment.

  In the vivid urgency to consummate amorous desires which society insists they defer and only dream about for so long, the normal boy and girl may read from the following lines in “Dolores”:

  By the ravenous teeth that have smitten

  Through the kisses that blossom and bud,

  By the lips intertwisted and bitten

  Till the foam has a savour of blood.

  By the pulse as it rises and falters,

  By the hands as they slacken and strain,

  I adjure thee respond from thine altars,

  Our Lady of Pain.

  They often find reflected in this something of the vigor of their natural impulses. Anticipating sexual fulfillments that must be delayed, they normally picture these fulfillments as hot blooded, wholehearted, and breath-taking. Perhaps such a term as our Lady of Pain is surprising, but, after all, sorrow is often mentioned in connection with love. The heart aches and in separation there is suffering.

  Continuing, they find Swinburne thus speaking of a female figure:

  As of old when the world’s heart was lighter,

  Through thy garments the grace of thee glows,

  The white wealth of thy body made whiter

  By the blushes of amorous blows,

  And seamed with sharp lips and fierce fingers,

  And branded by kisses that bruise;

  When all shall be gone that now lingers,

  Oh, what shall we lose?

  Normally oriented young people will probably assume that the poet is referring to sexual ardor. What matters an accidental bruise or abrasion from embraces and caresses exchanged in the joy and vigor of amorous consummation? Ordinary readers may be puzzled when the female is referred to thus:

  Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;

  Thou art fed with perpetual breath,

  And alive after infinite changes,

  And fresh from the kisses of death;

  Of langours rekindled and rallied,

  Of barren delights and unclean,

  Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid

  And poisonous queen.

  Perhaps they are puzzled. But after all, poetry, they remember, is not necessarily literal like a blueprint or like a pamphlet giving instructions about how to repair radios. Their uncertainties are dissolved in the stimulation of

  Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,

  And thy limbs are as melodies yet,

  And move to the music of passion

  With lithe and lascivious regret.


  They will probably continue to feel that Swinburne is dealing with the passions they feel even after he says

  I could hurt thee—but pain would delight thee;

  Or caress thee—but love would repel;

  And the lovers whose lips would excite thee

  Are serpents in hell.

  After all, the real speech between lovers is seldom exact. Literally inappropriate words are often risked to convey opposite meanings, perhaps through efforts to register intensity about what cannot be adequately defined or soberly conveyed as a matter of fact.

  From what is known of Swinburne’s life, it seems unlikely that he could have “loved overmuch.” He apparently had little or no interest in normal relations with women. This was so conspicuous that his close friend Rossetti is said to have bribed a particularly enterprising and alluring lady with ten pounds to evoke in him some amorous response. After her best efforts she confessed her failure and returned the money.243 After repeatedly showing himself unable to avoid disastrous drinking or to handle his ordinary affairs with minimum competency, the poet spent nearly all his adult life living with his bachelor friend, and protector Watts-Dunton, who apparently acted as an informal guardian or voluntary lay attendant.23,243

  The evidence according to Praz strongly indicates that Swinburne habitually sought bizarre satisfactions and shames in “queer houses” where flagellation was practiced as a substitute for, or a mockery of, biologically oriented sexual relations. Since early in life he pored over the writings of the Marquis de Sade, for whom he is said to have maintained not only a strong affinity but, indeed, hero worship. The poet’s writings copiously illustrate his concept of sensual pleasure and of “love” as painful brutality and foul humiliation. It is difficult to find in them, or from what is reported of his life, anything to indicate that he enjoyed an appreciable awareness of what women mean to ordinary men, or of human love.243

  Praz presents strong evidence that in Swinburne’s poetry recurrent reflection of a most malignant sadism become at times frankly cannibalistic and that he projects perversion and morbid derogation into the surrounding universe. When Swinburne writes of “the mute melancholy lust of heaven,” according to Praz, “heaven merely reflects the mute melancholy lust of the poet himself.”243

  Depicting in “Anactoria” what he apparently means to be taken for sexual love, Swinburne is sometimes explicit:

  I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated

  With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead.

  I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,

  And no mouth but some serpent’s found thee sweet.

  I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,

  Intense device, and superflux of pain;

  Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake

  Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache;

  Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,

  Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill;

  Relapse and reluctation of the breath,

  Dumb tones and shuddering semitones of death.

  Ah that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed

  To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast!

  Ah that my mouth for Muses’ milk were fed

  On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled!

  That with my tongue I felt them, and could taste

  The faint flakes from thy bosom to the waist!

  That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat

  Thy breast like honey! That from face to feet

  Thy body were abolished and consumed,

  And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!

  …Oh that I

  Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die,

  Die of thy pain and my delight, and be

  Mixed with thy blood and motion into thee!

  Would I not plague thee dying overmuch?

  Would I not hurt thee perfectly? not touch

  Thy pores of sense with torture, and make bright

  Thine eyes with bloodlike tears and grievious light?

  Strike pang from pang as note is struck from note,

  Catch the sob’s middle music in thy throat,

  Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these

  A lyre of many faultless agonies?

  It may be that Baudelaire, or that Swinburne, shows sufficient mastery over the rhythms, and the other technicalities of poetry to be correctly classified as a genius. Is it, however, even sane to argue that the basic tastes and judgments expressed or implied on human life in the lines just quoted should be accepted as superior to those of the ordinary man? Regularly reversing the most axiomatic human orientations, do these not stand as expressions in art of what has been unforgettably illustrated in conduct by such figures as Jack the Ripper, Gilles de Rais, and Neville George Clevely Heath?19,61,219 Can these tastes and judgments be regarded as anything but obvious manifestations of disease, of disease that is uninviting and malignant?

  Praz, in his detailed and serious study, offers impressive evidence of the influence exerted by earlier exponents of the pathologic and perverse on subsequent artists and literary figures of similar inclination. The Marquis de Sade apparently is accepted as true prophet or seer by Baudelaire and Gautier: these in turn profoundly influence Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, d’Annunzio, Octave Mirbeau, J.K. Huysmans, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and scores of others.243

  If we conclude that some men accepted as superior to the common stature of humanity prove, on closer acquaintance with their artistic works, no less than with their lives, to be not great and admirable figures in the ordinary meaning of such terms, how shall we try to explain their continuing recognition as remarkably inspired or enlightened personages? An attempt to answer this question adequately would lead us far afield. One point, however, may be briefly noted.

  If there are among those commonly accepted as geniuses some who could be better classified as apostles of disease and negation, it is scarcely surprising that they continue to gain disciples. The malignant perversions of the Marquis de Sade are accepted by Baudelaire and Swinburne as a rich gospel of estheticism. The schizoid misogyny of August Strindberg, listed in encyclopedias as Sweden’s foremost literary figure, prompts him to hail publicly and reverently as a genius the pathetic Viennese youth, Otto Weininger, who expressed a similar schizoid misogyny in fantastic terms shortly before taking his own life.4 Pathologic reactions expressed in art apparently appeal to persons similarly disordered. Finding the normal premises of human life unacceptable, the ordinary biologic goals invisible or illusory, they seem to welcome the viewpoint of those who in poetry or philosophy reflect a life rejection they share. It is not difficult to see how such viewpoints may appear as manifestations of superior esthetic sensibility, as a special wisdom, to new cults of intellectual defeatists and deviates who gather in succeeding generations.

  In the “Cool Cat Era,” a magazine article written in the early 1950’s, Helen Lawrenson portrayed among certain avant-garde Greenwich Village groups an effeteness and emotional vitiation peculiarly uninviting.178 The “young futility set” she describes apparently regarded themselves as advanced intellectually and esthetically by virtue of their extraordinary capacities for achieving boredom.

  They don’t dance; they don’t flirt; their laughter is a mechanized device infrequently used; and their conversation is of a genre that is utterly forgettable…

  For the great, outstanding quality about this cool-cat generation is its overpowering inertia. Everything is simply too much effort and what’s the use, anyway?

  Down through the ages, the one never-changing mark of youth has been its enthusiasm. This is probably the first generation in history that hasn’t got any. That is what strikes you most forcibly when you see its members in the slightly dank bars where they cluster like fungi. You look at them and listen to them—all young and bright enough, with handsome men and pretty girls—and suddenly you realize the incredible, the sh
ocking, the obvious fact: they aren’t having any fun! Sex, liquor, dope, perversion—they try it all, and it’s all so much spinach. This is not youth on a spree, or the classic wild oats of the younger generation…

  Their attitude toward sex is possibly the strangest in the history of youth. By and large, they think it’s a lot of bother. In the bars they inhabit, you almost never see a young man panting over a pretty girl, oblivious to all else, straining every nerve to convince her that she’s the most beautiful creature he ever saw and that he’s madly, rapturously in love with her. That is for squares. What you may see is an attitude of: “Well, sex is a bore. Life is a bore. I don’t really feel anything but you’re here and I’m here and we can’t think of anything else to do, so let’s give it a try.”

  Most of the time, they don’t even make that much of an effort at courtship. When you hear an apparently healthy young man in his early twenties say, with a faintly nauseated look, “I had sex last Thursday,” in exactly the same tone as if he had said, “I ate some cottage cheese and it didn’t agree with me,” you begin to realize that something has certainly gone haywire…

  Things have come to a pretty pass when young girls are so bored with men that they prefer dope. But even the please-pass-the-heroin set finds its own routine anything but sheer pleasure. They spend a lot of time screaming, or retching endlessly, until they manage to kill themselves one way or another, and they’re cool forever…

  These are the archetypes of the “cool cats,” the new cult of youngsters whose attitude toward life, toward love, toward themselves is one of frantic apathy. There are probably more of them in the Village than anywhere else, because the Village has always been the unofficial headquarters for rebellious youth. What makes this group different from all its predecessors is that the chief thing it seems to be rebelling against is life itself…