The Midnight Gardener
byHarper, $3.50.
The life of Charles Baudelaire, the mid-nineteenth-century prophet of Decadence, has an immense if morbid fascination. Mr. White’s fictional treatment opens with Baudelaire’s coming of age and centers on his fourteen-year liaison with the mulatto actress, Jeanne Duval, surely one of the most terrible human relationships ever recorded. The book lacks the precision, range, and insights of a good critical biography, but it will have a broader appeal to those more interested in Baudelaire’s exotic personality than in his work.