I, Baudelaire

About the Book

((All info in cover bio))

About the Author

To Plato, the unexamined life is not worth living. To Baudelaire, irony and the supernatural win out in life's end-game. In character, his spirit in Limbo contacts the living on the one day of the year when the dead may do so, Halloween, followed by All Saints Day, -- all to rehearse his plea to save his soul comes Judgment Day. The son of a priest who self-defrocked during the French Revolution, Baudelaire is now revealed by Canon Law to be "ex damnato coitu", "sacrilegi" yet "toleratus" till Judgment Day. What a light on the Baudelaire mystery! He is a new child, peasant-aristocrat, charlatan, lover, poet, drug-tempted student, journalist, heir to a fortune, deadbeat, novelist, art critic, adult-minor, and Edgar Allan Poe's doppelganger, identified with Hamlet fixated on his mother and with streaks of genius. He encounters all the stages of love and syphilis, le mal du siècle, the AIDS of today. To justify his suffering and all of humanity's, on Halloween he seeks help from original sin and such master spirits as Einstein, Darwin and Freud. T. S. Eliot wrote that Baudelaire was a greater person than was dreamed of. Baudelaire's life colors and shades his writing even as Van Gogh's life does his painting. In our time of drugs, doing one's own thing, incredible scientific progress with the media trumpeting for a return to old virtues even as the arts push for new limits, there is a demanding correspondance to Baudelaire's day. His spirit tells a modern cautionary tale. J. William Miller, the author, was born in Rochester, New York on July 9, 1914. He attended Cornell University on scholarships, took a Ph. D. there, and taught at the University or Maine, Rutgers University and New York University among others. He wrote radio scripts and co-authored scripts for network TV. He is author of MODERN PLAYWRIGHTS AT WORK published by Samuel French, Inc.