The Decadent Handbook E-Book

Rowan Pelling

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 486

Beschreibung

The ultimate lifestyle guide for those who want to transform the spirit of the age

Das E-Book wird angeboten von und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

The Decadent Handbook

The ultimate lifestyle guide for those who want to transform the spirit of the age, or failing that, ignore it altogether.

Wayward and debauched advice from the free spirits of our age, including Hari Kunzru, Salena Godden, Maria Alvarez, Michael Bywater, Louise Welsh, Tom Holland, Helen Walsh, Lisa Hilton, Belle de Jour, Joe Boyd, Nicholas Royle and Robert Irwin.

The contributors (those still living by the time of publication) have chosen to be remunerated with La Fée Absinthe, the true spirit of decadence.

Contents

Title

The Decadent Handbook

The Anti-Contribution Sebastian Horsley

Introduction Rowan Pelling

Decadent Theory

A Brief History Alan Jenkins

My Decadent Career Anne Billson

The Flaming Heart Becomes a Fount of Tears Philip Langeskov

Foucault’s Smile Professor Nicholas Royle

Decadent Outcasts Nick Groom

Memories of the Decadence Hari Kunzru

Scotland and Decadence Stuart Kelly

Snowball Maria Alvarez

Decadent Lifestyle

The Decadent Household Lisa Hilton

The Decadent Mother Rowan Pelling

The Fashionable Side Xavior Roide

Hearts of Darkness Vanora Bennett

Pissing in Space Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray

Mad Monday Helen Walsh

The Wheeled Dance of Death Robert Irwin

Decadent Girl About Town Catherine Townsend

The Players’ Lounge Mark Mason

Vermin Jacob Polley

Decadent Drinking

The Last Big Drinky Salena Godden

Absinthe Phil Baker

The Lost Art of the Bender Erich Kuersten

Decadent Anti-heroes

The Debauchee Earl of Rochester

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young Oscar Wilde

Against Nature J.K. Huysmans

Cuttings from Torture Garden Octave Mirbeau

Decadent Culture

UFO Club Joe Boyd

Performance Mick Brown

Decadent Cinema Isabelle McNeill

The Child Nicholas Royle

Hooked on Classics Michael Bywater

Bonnington Square John Moore

Dead or Alive in Leeds Stevie Boyd

The Decadent Set-list Dickon Edwards

Decadent Travel

The Decadent Traveller Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray

Fast-Food and Fellatio Christopher Moore

El Hombre Indelible Dickon Edwards

Part of the Process Karina Mellinger

Decadent Sex

Forbidden Fruit Elizabeth Speller

The Cow Shed André Pieyre de Mandiargues

Pony Girls Tom Holland

The Story of B Belle de Jour

Househusband Brock Norman Brock

The Art of Roman Decadence William Napier

Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh Robert Irwin

Lobster Guillaume Lecasble

Carrion Jeremy Bourdon

Confessions of a Flesh-Eater David Madsen

In the Gallery Hélène Lavelle

Decadent Gastronomy

The Decadent Sausage Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray

Brekadence Malcolm Eggs

Eats Andrew Crumey

Portrait of an Englishman in His Chateau André Pieyre de Mandiargues

St Agatha Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray

A Renaissance Dessert David Madsen

The Art of Cooking a Murder Victim Guillaume Lecasble

Decadent Death Styles

Death Styles Jad Adams

Primordial Soup Christine Leunens

Alice, the Sausage Sophie Jabès

My Funeral Louise Welsh

The Last Word Sebastian Horsley

Dear Reader Sebastian Horsley

Appendix

Contributors

Moments in Decadent History

Further Decadent Reading

The Decadent Handbook Survey: The 20 Most Decadent People Alive

Copyright

Rowan Pelling ably assisted by James Doyle and Amelia Hodsdon at an editorial meeting. Photo: Sean Gibson.

The Anti-Contribution

Here is my piece (unpaid) for Rowan Pelling’s and Dedalus’ book on decadence. Perhaps you could use it as a Z-list celebrity endorsement?

What the fuck does a mummy from Cambridge know about decadence? Doesn’t Rowan realise that not believing in the future is the essential mark of the decadent? That the worst of children is that they give you the greatest disadvantage of them all; hope?

Choking hope and being a nappy slave is not decadent. Smoking dope on Jim Morrison’s grave is not decadent. Exploiting writers and their petty vanities is also, by the way, not decadent.

Decadence is for heavyweights. You need to possess the resources of character, the resilience of mind and the physical stamina to make of decadence a kind of moral virtue and spiritual strength. It is not for silly lightweight school girls.

HRL. His Royal Lowness. Sebastian Horsley

Introduction

Rowan Pelling

Sebastian Horsley poses a good question in the letters that preface and finish this book, or what we term the anti-contribution: ‘What the fuck does a mummy from Cambridge know about decadence?’ While I would like to pretend that life in the ancient university town where I reside is a riot of orgiastic, drug-fuelled nihilism, the procession of buggies and Sainsbury’s bags outside my window suggests otherwise. I have never seen a velvet-cloaked dandy on the cobbled streets, let alone an aesthete leading a lobster on a string. And despite the proximity to Norfolk, reports of goat sodomy and incest are surprisingly rare.

The truth is what I know about decadence is much the same as your average armchair sybarite. I would doubtless fail the practical examination but might score a few points in the appreciation and theory papers. What would-be hedonist doesn’t enjoy the vicarious pleasures and perversions of the decadent movement in the arts? For those readers unfamiliar with the guiding tenets, the decadents were a diverse body of writers, artists and philosophers whose work and ideas flourished in the second half of the 19th century. They were less a formal entity than a loose-linked grouping of collaborators and individuals, whose guiding mantra was ‘Art for art’s sake.’ Their philosophy was typified by pessimism, mysticism, idealism, elitism and, for many of the movement, a certain elaborate artifice in the wardrobe department. Since they had no faith in the future, rationalism or the relentless onward grind of industrialism, the decadents sought extreme sensation or sentiments to save them from the atrophying perils of social convention. The decadent movement was a major force in the evolution of Symbolism and thereby, ultimately, Surrealism.

The guiding lights of the decadent movement are generally held to be the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (bards of pessimism, disease and the grave), and amongst the most infamous prophets were the writers Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Husymans (both of whose work is represented in this book) and our cover artist, the extraordinary Aubrey Beardsley. Whenever you see a young man with lacquered hair clad in a purple shot-silk suit stroll past you in the street, clutching a bottle of whisky in one hand and a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal in the other, you have the decadents to blame. Just look at Pete Doherty and Russell Brand.

The Decadent Handbook is therefore envisaged as an anti-lifestyle guide for people who wish to transform the spirit of the age, or, failing that, ignore it altogether. It’s for all those who seek respite from the worst banalities of modern existence: property ladders, yummy mummies, footie daddies, loyalty cards, friendly bacteria, Glade air freshener, decking, Coldplay, The Da Vinci Code and Natasha Kaplinsky. The Handbook seeks not to instruct, but to offer diverse inspirations – from Tom Holland on the joy of pony girls to Louise Welsh on the hedonistic funeral. And while the spirit of the book is firmly rooted in the decadent movement of the 19th century, its tendrils spread back and forwards in time. We can hardly consider decadence without a glance at the Romans or a word from the Earl of Rochester. Nor can we omit that modern-day heir to the libertine tradition, the rock star. Joe Boyd takes us back to the UFO club in the 1960s, while John Moore remembers the class-A dividends of chart success. If it’s sex you’re looking for (and who isn’t?), one-time call girl Belle de Jour takes a whipping. And I challenge you to find a better piece of writing on the lost days of a bender than Salena Godden’s ‘The Last Big Drinky’: a story so vividly rendered you can taste the whisky. On a more lateral plane of decadence lurks Jake Polley’s sinister tale ‘Vermin’, a reminder that no force is more callous and amoral than animal instinct. These are just a random selection of the vices on offer.

It seems to me that The Decadent Handbook is an apposite book. It’s a good time to consider what we mean by ‘decadence’ in an age where there’s much loose talk about ‘the decadent West’. Do the inanities of Big Brother, binge drinkers and celebrity hair extensions really signal a new age of Sodom and Gomorrah? Do you see Bacchanalias in Hyde Park? Aren’t lazy tags sullying the good reputation of decadence, which requires talent, aptitude and dedication to perfect? Because there’s an inbuilt irony in most decadent pursuits (as Maria Alvarez points out in her essay ‘Snowball’), which means you cannot become debauched without considerable effort. It takes application to become a drunk, a serial seducer or a drug addict, and more outré excesses take great feats of imagination. Look at the artist Sebastian Horsley, the very model of the modern decadent, whose letters sandwich this volume: he paints, he writes, he broadcasts, he swims with sharks and flies to the Philippines to have himself crucified; all this frenzied activity alongside the drugs, the whores and the pink velvet suit. Truly he is tireless in his pursuit of decadence. I feel exhausted just to think of him. (But it was ever thus; when Byron lived in Venice he spent the hours up to midnight engaged in conspicuous displays of pleasure-seeking, then retired and wrote until dawn.) Occasionally I wonder if it’s not a little more decadent to lie here on my Cambridge sofa scoffing Hobnobs and cheerleading Sebastian on his way, than to scale the depths of depravity myself. In our opening chapter ‘Decadent Theory’ Anne Billson, Hari Kunzru and Nick Groom explore such arguments, while Alan Jenkins’ poem ‘A Brief History’ is a magnificent evocation of art and immorality over two centuries.

No publisher has done more to keep the decadent tradition alive than Dedalus, the originators of this volume. I first encountered Dedalus when I was editing The Erotic Review magazine and a friend told me that if I was ‘looking for sex, perversion and depravity’, I should get hold of their catalogue. I did and was duly captivated by their mix of classic decadent literatures and contemporary fiction that wilfully trampled the boundaries of normality. I was also impressed by the rare and excessively non-commercial devotion to translating Continental writing. As the publisher’s manifesto stated: ‘Dedalus has invented its own distinctive genre, which we term distorted reality, where the bizarre, the unusual and the grotesque and the surreal meld in a kind of intellectual fiction which is very European.’ I swiftly ordered Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau, Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen and Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh by Robert Irwin. It was the beginnings of a decadent library. Some months after that I met two of the founders of Dedalus on a train en route to a literary festival. We bonded over a shared fondness for strong liquor and forceful debate and I accepted an invitation to become one of the company’s many honorary directors. This book comes out of that collaboration – and several cases of red wine.

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this book (spurred on only by the promise of absinthe and a party), but particular praise must go to those who helped in the commissioning and editing of this book: James Doyle, Amelia Hobson and Susanna Forrest. Although the biggest debt of gratitude is reserved for the extraordinary Eric Lane, who has been the engine-room of Dedalus since its inception and is my absolute number one hero (or is that anti-hero?) in publishing.

Dedalus and I hope The Decadent Handbook will be a useful companion for anyone hoping to embark on a life of debauchery, aesthetic refinement and their constant shadow companion, terminal ennui; that it will amuse wicked uncles, teenaged Goths, latterday flâneurs and Cambridge mummies. Or, failing that, The Handbook aims to further enervate the reader on his or her chaise longue, who is too fatigued for decadence themselves, but nonetheless likes to think that someone, somewhere is still lying in the gutter looking at the stars.

Decadent Theory

A Brief History

Alan Jenkins

1886

Bring me the hypodermics, nurse, that I

Might feel again the riotous joy of youth

Although I may not stir from this divan,

Sequestered from the world by gorgeous drapes

Of organdie and velvet; bring me, from

Their attic prison, two of the youngest boys

That they might entertain me here a while

With re-enactments of old Zeus’s rapes

In various guises, bringing to their aid

Such gentle toys as I have furnished them with,

Then have them offer themselves up to me

For the grateful tribute of my sacrifice.

Their visible song, made of perfect sound

And exceeding passion, clothed with the wind’s

Fair wings, will soothe me to my needful sleep

Borne on the swansdown billows of that dream

Vouchsafed by thee, divine poppy! O thou

Alone who can bring comfort to my soul

Which else would linger in the world of shades

And everlasting darkness! Summon forth

Such visions as I never hoped to see

On earth, not though I swooned here in the arms

Of pale ambrosia – exquisite embrace:

Rose-petals scattered by the slender nymphs

Who glide in veils diaphanous through glades

On little moonlit feet will be my bed,

Their silken breasts a pillow for my head

As with heavy-lidded eyes they drink the dew

From off each other’s maiden lips, and strain

To cool their burning veins. You! Girl, come here …

1976

‘The clubs are closed now. Most of the old set

Did themselves in, or hopped it – Kenya, Jo’burg,

Brazil, that sort of thing. Not a single debt

Got paid, of course. Then there was that fiasco

With Lucky and the nanny … They’ll never get him though –

Not the newshounds or the police johnnies, oh no.

Christ, that lot are far too thick. I have my own ideas

But what’s the point of dredging up old muck?

I still like to play the odd hand now and then

If I can find somewhere … congenial. You know, civilized.’

‘At one time we’d all drive down to someone’s place

In Surrey. Everyone’d be there. In those days

It didn’t matter what you did – the chicks’ brains

Were in their boxes anyway … I had one once

On a lawn somewhere, she was, like, so far gone

She never even knew … Then Brian went in the pool,

The deep six, and the heavies moved in, raids,

Busts, the whole bit. Just think, it could’ve gone on

And on – that would have been really cool.

Now it’s all, like, chains and razor-blades.’

‘There were seven of us down at Strangeways

And Diana filmed the whole thing – just turned up

With a camera, little hand-held job’ – ‘Hand-job? Sorry!’ –

‘And started shooting. What a hoot! After dinner,

Things got pretty hot, and, well, they wanted her

To pack it in at first, but then, well, we all got

Into it. We’re all there, anyway, for posterity,

What you can see of us – completely tonto. I can tell

You, if it got into the wrong hands … I mean,

It’d be no joke. Jamie’s putting it on video.’

‘If all the girls here – oh, come off it, dears –

Were laid end to end , I wouldn’t be at all surprised! …’

‘He was brilliant at first but now he’s not so keen …’

‘Wasn’t her aunt the duchess of something, Saxe-Coburg …’

‘Problem is, the money’s getting burned up …’

‘Wonderful Miranda’s got the most amazing stuff …’

‘I’m not sure there’s anybody here I’d trust …’

‘It was more a boff de politesse than a fuck …’

‘No good when things began to get a little rough …’

‘That’s good – fear in a handful of happy dust …’

1856–2006

My life is killing me. It’s making me thin,

To sit in this room translating Baudelaire,

My spiritual room, in which the stagnant air

Is faintly tinged with blue and rose, in which I’m lapped

By idleness – the soul’s long bath, blueish, roseate,

Scented by regret and desire; where even the furniture

Is prostrate with languor and the draperies speak

A silent language, the language of flowers, of skies,

Of the setting sun. But it’s making me thin, not as thin

As the woman who looks eighty – she’s eighteen – on the street

Begging loose change for some dope, a bar of soap

Or her bag of whippet-bones on a rope; not as thin

As the boys in the AIDS ward on St. Mary’s, as the stare

Behind the hand that spray-scrawled Kill all fairies

On the wall outside; not as thin as the light

At the end of the tunnel – that’s the underpass –

To the heap of rags and plastic bags who lies curled

On its stinking floor, as the page of the News of the World

That drapes her, as the arse of the crack-head who rapes her,

As what comes out of it … Not as thin as this sort of shit:

Wine lends its atmosphere of luxury to even

The filthiest hovel, conjuring the porticos of heaven

From the vaporous red-gold of its bouquet,

Like a sunset in a clouded sky; opium magnifies

Everything, makes boundless space and time, defies

Every limit put on the infinite by our feeble senses

And brings a new depth to the pleasures it enhances

And fills the soul to overflowing with a sombre joy.

None of that is equal, though, to the poison that pours

From those terrifying, fatal green eyes of yours,

Those lakes wherein my soul trembles, sees itself reversed –

My dreams flock to those bitter depths to quench their thirst.

And none of this equals the prodigal wonder of

Your juices, that gnaw at my unrepentant soul and plunge it

In forgetfulness, vertigo, the brink of death, the pit …

Not as thin as the last-ditch best-shot final pitch

Of the guy whose life’s on the skids, going down the tubes

With his job, home, wife and kids; as the understanding in their eyes,

As his whisky, as the unpolluted water in his cubes of ice;

Not as thin as the likelihood of truth coming from the lips,

The thin lips of the suits who talk freedom of choice,

As the new white whine, the sound of attitude, as pity at the latitude

Of Westminster or Wood Lane, as the thin bat-squeak of a voice

In the last book by the latest scribbler to sell himself on TV;

As the presenter’s heels, as her words, as what she feels

When she wonders for a moment what they’d look like together,

As he’ll look one day standing twitching in the wind and rain

Of her inner weather, as the eye of the needle, as the vein;

As the fibre-optic probe that will one day find

My days are numbered, as the stuff that fills my mind:

Strange, dusky goddess, your smell a mix of Havana

And something musky, a voodoo fetish from the savannah

Created by some witch-doctor Faust,

Sorceress with ebony flanks, and long-lost daughter

To pitch-black midnights: the best wine is water,

The best opium harmless compared to your lips

That love dances on; when desire’s caravanserai slips

From its camp at dawn and sets out towards you,

Your eyes are the oasis where even boredom drowns;

From those vast rooflights on your soul, shadowed by frowns,

Pitiless, you pour liquid fire. I can’t take much more

But neither can I get my tongue around your shore

Nine times, like the Styx, nor can I, hungry Megaera,

Be Proserpine in the hell of your bed, break you

And bring you to heel; and nor can I make you,

Or your loose, heavy hair, a censor in the gloom

Of an alcove, release a less primitive, untamed perfume,

The spell that’s cast over the present by the past –

It’s the same as when some adoring lover plucks

Memory’s exquisite flower from the flesh he fucks …

There was a thumping at the door, and a ghost came in –

A bailiff to torture me in the name of the law, an editor’s pimp

Wanting more – and he’s thin, thin as the smokes

That help me forget the state I’m in, The North, the South …

Thin as the thin black worm of fear that eats my gut

And secretes a thin sharp taste of loathing in my mouth;

Thin and sharp as the blades with which I cut thin lines, already cut

With bicarb of soda, washing powder, worse – to feel sharp, so sharp

I could cut myself, and write these lines of verse

In my own blood on my own thin skin.

My Decadent Career

Anne Billson

It all started with a book – Dreamers of Decadence, a study of 19th century Symbolist painters by Philippe Jullian. I was an impressionable young art student and horror film buff, and this was the sort of art I fancied: vampires, severed heads, femmes fatales. I decided decadence was right up my street. Shortly afterwards I sold my first drawing – Salome clutching the severed head of John the Baptist, heavily Rotring-inked in Aubrey Beardsleyesque black and white – to a friend. It earned me 50p, and with the money I bought my very first copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which I liked because it was full of poems about vampires, femmes fatales and spleen. My decadent career was launched.

I soon realised that if I wanted to be truly decadent, I would have to leave home; decadent artists didn’t live with their parents. I rented a room in Camden Town, so tiny there was no room for anything other than a wardrobe, chest of drawers and single bed, which meant I was forced to do most things without getting up. I proceeded to live what I imagined was a life of decadence. I covered the walls with pictures from my favourite horror films. I drank crème de menthe for breakfast, ate tinned octopus and Walnut Whips for dinner. I cut my hair like Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box and wore Biba green lipstick and dressing-gowns made of Chinese silk. I trawled second-hand shops for black dresses and fake ocelot coats. I read Proust because the illustrations were by my decadent mentor, Philippe Jullian, whose biography of Robert de Montesquieu, model for the character of the Baron de Charlus, was also a mainstay of my library. I devoured Huysmans, Mirbeau, Wilde, Poe. I listened to Scriabin, because one of his piano sonatas was known as ‘Black Mass’, and to Roxy Music, because there were name-checks in one of the band’s songs to ‘the sphinx and Mona Lisa’, both featured in the Dreamers of Decadence list of symbolist themes. I slept by day and lived by night, when I would build scale cardboard models of black rooms filled with skeletons and rubber snakes. I composed poems about my knees (‘Patella Pantagruella’) or went for nocturnal walks along the canal to perform elaborate ceremonies that would involve reciting magic spells and flinging stuffed vine leaves into the water.

I didn’t know anyone else like me.

I kept a diary, but had nothing to put in it apart from post-adolescent stream-of-consciousness ramblings about suicide, dreams and unrequited yearnings. I was always reading about absinthe and opium, but my personal narcotics intake was limited to Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes (never inhaled), Fribourg and Treyer snuff and, on special occasions, Night Nurse. My attempts at being a femme fatale repeatedly fell at the first hurdle – none of the men I met seemed terribly keen on the green lipstick, and then later, when I switched to more conventional holly red, I found myself with a devoted following, not of the lovelorn writers and artists I’d envisaged, but of schizophrenics, drug addicts and repressed homosexuals who would burst into tears in public places or rub broken glass into their faces when I refused to sleep with them.

Of course, many years and one fin-de-siècle later, I look back at my adorable decadent self and realise that I wasn’t decadent at all – I was just young, and rather naïve. Now I live in an attic in Paris with a bottle of absinthe in my cocktail cabinet, a real human skull on my bedside table, a faded tattoo on my ankle, two incurable diseases in my system and a never-ending supply of handsome young French men who seem strangely keen to sleep with me. I’ve written two books about vampires and one about ghosts, Proust is buried in the cemetery just up the road and the Mona Lisa is only a short Metro hop away. Now I am no longer naïve but cynical and cruel. Now I’m decadent without even trying to be.

But I still don’t know anyone else like me.

The Flaming Heart becomes a Fount of Tears Illness and the Modern Decadent Condition

Philip Langeskov

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’

There is almost nothing to be said for the decadent who has not been seriously ill, or at least given the appearance of being so. This should come as no surprise and, if you have come this far, you will, I am sure, be disinclined to argue the point: chances are, you won’t have the strength to in any case. No, decadence and illness go hand in hand, and they go, for the most part, merrily. It is a careless, casual relationship, a symbiosis invariably bringing joy to both parties. The decadent has a lust for experience that is all consuming, seeking out new vistas of consciousness, constantly looking for a higher plane; illness, meanwhile, has a lust for bodies whose attentions are elsewhere directed. Were a couple ever so well matched?

There is a famous shot of Verlaine, taken some years before he fell prey to the languorous violence of his final illness, (pulmonary congestion, since you ask). He is sitting in the corner of a café in the midst of an Absinthe-induced stupor. His shoulders are huddled, pushed back, as if in the awful imaginative presence of angels and of devils. One need only look into his eyes to glean that he is not there to seek out the repetitious drudgery of the quotidian Parisian existence. No, he, like all decadents, is looking through life – looking actually beyond existence – shaking the nameless void by the lapels and requesting more. Life is life, but a Decadent life is living. Sitting in a café, Verlaine might have said, is all very well, but sitting in a café rapt by hallucinations is infinitely better. It is, though, the great irony of the decadent existence that this very lust for life, this quest for the visionary experience, leaves the decadent prey to the illnesses and diseases that deprive him of the life he wishes so exquisitely to enjoy. It is the diabolic exchange – give me life and I will give you my life – and it is entered into freely but with the accidental certainty of purpose. For the decadent, merely being alive is worthless; it is better to be dead. Yet, in order to live life to the fullest, it is necessary to embrace death.

Rimbaud had it pegged at the very beginning of A Season in Hell, where he writes ‘my life was a celebration where all hearts were open and all wines flowed’, only to recognise a few lines later that, for the celebration to be worth anything, it had to come at a cost: ‘I called for diseases, so I could suffocate in sand, in blood.’ Open hearts invite illness. Ernest Dowson, too, recognised the bargain. When he ‘cried for madder music and stronger wine,’ it was the cry – the howl – of the decadent on the point of disintegration. The result for Dowson, both in the poem and in life, was to be ‘desolate and sick of an old passion.’ But, lest the modern Decadent simper with neglect, it was not simply the fin-de-siècle masters who recognised this. Even Lloyd Cole – dear, sweet, Lloyd Cole, with his eighties stubble and his smouldering eyes – saw the scorpion in the flower bed. His lost weekend in a hotel in Amsterdam, which hints, magnificently, at the prodigious consumption of drugs followed by numerous acts of transgressive sex, came at a cost: ‘double pneumonia in a single room.’ The message is clear: in order to live, the decadent must be careless of life. Yet being careless of life does not – cannot – mean suicide. Suicide is, comparatively, like keeping an appointment or completing a business transaction; it is an action deliberately entered into. And one cannot, of course, be deliberately careless; it implies caring about being careless, and that simply will not do. No, there is a significant distance between taking your own life and allowing your life to be taken because you are occupied elsewhere. If there were not, the gates of Decadence would be open to any whim-struck chancer. For the record, both Rimbaud and Dowson succumbed to illness: Rimbaud was taken, first by greed and then by synovitis of the right knee; Dowson fell at the feet of alcoholism and was scooped up by tuberculosis. Lloyd Cole, the exception proving the so-called rule as it so often does, is still alive.

Some see this carelessness as exhilarating, and they are, movingly, absolutely correct. Others see it as foolhardy. Devotees of this camp succeed in both having a point, while utterly failing to grasp the point. They will tell you that Oscar Wilde was foolish to sue the Marquess of Queensbury for libel, as such an action could only bring attention to a lifestyle he knew to be wrong in the eyes of the laws of the day. Oscar, if he were here, would probably tell you that he could do nothing else, not because he was backed into a corner, but because the tenets of his soul were such that he could not flee from his exhilaration: it was worth too much to surrender, even if it cost him his life; and, in a round about sort of way, it did. Oscar would also tell you – and this, like all good things, runs counter to perceived opinion – that he did it, not because Bosie told him to, but because he was busy being in love; and, being busy in love, he forgot to put the latch on the back door and, lo and behold, in snuck illness. (A point about Oscar’s illness: some say that we will never know what took him; others say that he simply died; others still, Richard Ellman included, say that consumption consumed him. I favour the latter, not least because it fits my argument.) To take sides here, to form a judgement on what is right and what is wrong is, of course, necessary, but to enter into a dispute would be futile: it would be like an atheist arguing with Christ over the existence of God. The point, though, remains sound. And Wilde, whose reputed last statement – ‘either the wallpaper goes or I do’ – is synonymous with saying ‘make my life better or let me die’, would have recognised it.

Thinking of Oscar, as you frequently should, invariably brings things round to The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is no bad thing. The bargain at the centre of the piece – in short, to be always young at the cost of the soul, while a portrait moulders, as the body might otherwise, in the attic – provides a glimpse into the playground of the Decadent’s imagination. It is the equivalent of making the mixture, baking, having and eating the cake, all in the same elegant motion. Imagine, for a moment, that the offer had been made to the real Rimbaud, the real Verlaine or the real Dowson; imagine that they had been offered the opportunity to ravage the body and yet have a body that did not suffer ravages, a body that did not, in short, fall ill. What might they have done? The tragedy for all decadents is that, although they are unrealistic, they are real; Dorian Gray’s bargain, however, is simply unrealistic.

Of course, Decadence and illness did not simply arrive hand in hand, just as Verlaine and Rimbaud were not born in the same bed. No, they were brought together by time and circumstance. And, as little is truly original, the example of history played a part. Decadence – or at least the Decadent moment with which we are concerned here – is often seen as the midway point between Romanticism and Modernism, a spiritual way station on the route to our collective contemporary consciousness. I’m happy not to argue. Some might wish to claim, too, that these two movements neatly bookend the high water mark of what is often called ‘Modern Decadence’, Romanticism at one end, Modernism at the other. (The books, the meat in the sandwich, are provided, of course, by the aesthetic exhortations of the period 1865–1895.) The Romantics gave Decadence the chance to flourish. In dismantling the ornate formality of the second Augustan age, they allowed a little bit of dirt to creep under the fingernails of life. Without the Romantics, Decadence itself would have come as too much of a shock and would, unpalatable as it might seem, most likely have been still born. The Moderns, in their turn, put breath to the sickly embers of Decadence and gave it flame one last time.

The world, by this time, of course, had become almost immune to death, the catastrophe of the Western Front making the Decadent bargain seem little more than the game it always was; the game, however, had become less fun. When the Moderns died, so too did the Decadent moment. The game was up, you see, and the Decadence we have today can often seem little more than a treading of the well worn path alongside the Amazon: it is fun while it lasts, but it brings us precious little that we did not know already. It is cause for alarm, but not undue panic. The Modern Decadent can take courage from the fate of the modern explorer and, although no longer able to be the first, can be just as extravagant, just as elegant and just as incandescent as the great originals.

If Romanticism provided Decadence with the foot stool it needed to reach the stars, it also provided some quite spectacular examples of illness. The early Decadents took note, as, I am sure, will you. John Keats, the greatest of the English Romantics, was also the most ill. The two are not unconnected. There is a case to make that Keats was the Romantic Decadent without equal. Those who dispute this, never saw little Johnny with a glass in his hand. ‘Fill for me a brimming bowl, and let me in it drown my soul,’ he wrote in 1814, leaving the reader in little doubt where he stood, both mentally and physically. Keats’s example did not stop at imbibation, either. (Allen Ginsberg, by the way, who would have liked to have been a decadent, but never quite made it despite his lunging references to tubercular skies, was not the first to trace the influence of Keats on Rimbaud, among others.) No praise, surely, is high enough for the man who, contorted by hunger and fatal illness, could throw, from the window of his Roman villa, a bowl of Spaghetti simply because he thought it could have been better made. If the Decadents needed an example of perfect carelessness in the pursuit of exalted existence they would surely have looked no further. It is a footnote worth noting that, after slamming the pasta to the floor of the Spanish Steps, the food in Keats’s house improved considerably, or so Joseph Severn tells us. Another footnote: the glorious gesture did little for Keats’s health; he had already been too careless with his life. A few weeks later, Keats coughed blood for the last time.

Keats, of course, lived in an age when tuberculosis – like many illnesses – jumped from host to host with abandon. As the eminent physician, Lord Brock, made clear in his admirably elegiac pamphlet, The Tragedy of the Last Illness, to contract tuberculosis in Keats’s day was most assuredly to begin the preparations for death: ‘The fundamental fact of its infective nature was not known nor could be known or understood until 1882 when the tubercle bacillus was discovered by Theodore Koch’. As Brock also notes, since the Second World War advancements in science and medicine have been such that, in the developed world at least, tuberculosis as a fatal illness has virtually been conquered.

This brings us to the thorny and often posed question of how one can be decadent in the modern age, an age in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to become genuinely ill. Where there are thorns, of course, there are frequently roses to be found. While it has been noted that Decadence in the modern world is, generally speaking, little more than a clamber over fields already muddied by the footsteps of others, this is not the same as to say that Decadence is redundant. And while it must be acknowledged that the Modern Decadent’s chances of finding an untouched blade of grass on which to lie are diminished still further by the widespread provision of healthcare; a provision which robs even the poor of many opportunities palely to sicken. Even in acknowledging such considerations one can see a solution. To find it, we must refer back to the opening line of the piece, which, in recognition of general indolence, is repeated below.

‘There is almost nothing to be said for the decadent who has not been seriously ill, or at least given the appearance of being so.’

The italics are my own, and they are there because it is the second clause of that statement that must interest us here: the suggestion that assuming the characteristics of serious illness is as valuable a decadent experience as actually being seriously ill. Moralists will squirm at the thought – they’ll squirm at anything – but, if it should make you pause, dear Reader, you have not been paying attention and you should probably return to the beginning of the book, if not the beginning of your life, and start again.

Allow me to explain by considering the case of Ernest Walsh. Ernest Walsh was a poet, an Irishman and an American, but not in that order. He lived in Paris in the 1920s, when the good people were dead and all that remained was to step on it and join them. Ernest stepped on it and, in September 1926, he began what his lover, Kay Boyle, would later describe as ‘the terrible process of dying by haemorrhaging.’ A month later he was dead, ravaged, at the age of 31, by tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis, as you should by now be aware, is the Emperor of Decadent diseases. The long, slow, wastefulness of its course allows the victim both to wallow in suffering and to create a substantial body of art by which to be remembered. Nor has it any peer in terms of visual effect: the pallid skin, the sunken, sallow eyes, the fevered brow. It is, in short, a look that will never go out of fashion. The symptoms of tuberculosis – the hacking cough, the rasping expectoration of blood, the agonies of sleeplessness – can, like the look, easily be simulated: it requires little more than a dusting of make-up and a night or two of disordered sleep; a red handkerchief – a requisite in any case – would not go amiss. While fakery is, broadly speaking, to be condemned, it has its justifiable moments.

So, let those who were becoming concerned that Decadence had had its day march on; let them march on with renewed confidence, if not vigour. Let them go forth and be ill – but, for God’s sake, as Keats might indeed have written, let them do it well. For those who continue to doubt, there is, always, the Lloyd Cole songbook: ‘Spin, spin, whisky and gin, I suffer for my art…’

Foucault’s Smile

Professor Nicholas Royle

Decadence, as its Latin etymology suggests, involves a falling down or falling off (de-cadere). Whether it is a question of art or behaviour, the fall is as sure as night. But to whom does it happen? When? And for how long? Decadence is, first of all perhaps, an experience of reading. And of a double fall. Hence the doubling up of art and behaviour, aesthetic and real. It seems to entail, as in the joys of Oscar Wilde, a sense of being beside oneself. No decadence without a witness, even if it is another within the self. This is in part why the academic, even more than the poet or painter, can appear the decadent figure par excellence. The critical or philosophical thinker, in particular, crystallizes the view that decadence, in art or life, is as much a matter of who reads and how, as it is of the purportedly decadent subject or object per se. The pleasure of reading leads irrepressibly towards decadence. At its most extreme (bliss or jouissance), as Roland Barthes says in The Pleasure of the Text, the reader ‘is never anything but a “living contradiction”: a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall.’

It would be possible to demonstrate that, whatever their apparent moral or didactic character, the most decadent works of art are those in which the fall is most critically dramatized and probingly tendered. Here, above all, it would be a question of a fall that has no end, or at least that entails a fundamental derangement of time. Works, in other words, such as Breughel’s Icarus (about which Auden writes with such tenderness and dispassion in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’) or Milton’s Paradise Lost (that epic lapse of ‘the devil’s party’, as Blake noted). But, in the limited space available, here are simply a few words concerning the academic who, perhaps more than any other in the past century, has attracted the label of decadent: Michel Foucault. I never met him, but a few years after his death I happened to be in Sweden, teaching at the University of Uppsala, where he had been a lecturer many years earlier.

Two memories specially haunt from my visit to that beautiful old town. Following a talk I gave called ‘After Foucault’, a group of us were having drinks and, towards the end, I asked if anyone there had any memories of Foucault. An elderly lady who had not spoken until that moment then became animated and recounted her experience of having once been invited to a party at his flat. The nice detail of this night-out was that she was also at this time supposed to be looking after a young woman visiting Uppsala, a cousin of the British Queen. So she took the Queen’s cousin along with her. I remember the old lady’s expression as she related what happened when a smiling Foucault opened the door: such a scene was revealed, of bodies in action behind the host, that she felt she had no option but immediately to hurry Her Majesty’s cousin away. Pressed by others for further details of what exactly she and the other young woman had witnessed that night, she could not be induced to say another word. The other enduring memory is of the university’s old anatomy theatre. In order to view this perfectly preserved seventeenth-century edifice it was necessary to get special permission; a woman unlocked the door and left me with the strange privilege of being alone in that remarkable place. Rather like a visual parallel to the ancient Greek amphitheatre where you can sit on the highest tier of seats and hear an actor whisper on the stage far below, so in the old anatomy theatre at Uppsala the circular structure of tiered seats meant that wherever you sat you felt yourself to be right on top of the dissection table. It was an eerie epiphany, as if I were suddenly a witness to the very essence of modern decadence. In a flash I realized that Foucault had been here and also seen this, and that his theory of the panopticon (notions of modern power and all-seeing surveillance based on Jeremy Bentham’s essay of 1787) had the anatomy theatre at Uppsala as its primal scene. I was falling onto the very cadaver.

Decadent Outcasts

Nick Groom

I remember a few years ago Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones admitting in an interview, ‘Yeah, most of the time I am pretty wasted.’ Nothing else really needed to be said after that throwaway remark – being ‘pretty wasted’ seems to sum up the decadence of certain rock bands. It is an image of reckless foppishness, a vision of intoxication, a grand carelessness and ritualistic squandering of genius. Not the Beatles, of course – there’s nothing decadent about those four moptops – but the aspirations of Led Zeppelin and the New York Dolls, the Manic Street Preachers and Babyshambles, even Roxy Music and Suede. It’s an image that derives from a handful of notorious writers who lived and died some two centuries ago.

The irresistible painting of the poet Thomas Chatterton lying dead on his bed is the degree zero of rockstar suicides. If you want to live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse, you’ll never better this pre-Raphaelite icon. The myth of Chatterton – a maverick, outlaw poet who forged arcane verse and, starving to death in a garret, killed himself out of pride – has haunted the imagination of writers and painters since the eighteenth century. English opium eaters such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey were fatally attracted by Chatterton’s self-destructive career and the rumours that fuelled his posthumous celebrity. Chatterton was an opium eater (it may have been an accidental drug overdose that actually killed him), a vegetarian, and radical in his politics; he dressed outrageously, seemed to have a mesmeric effect on young girls, and, like a prototypical French dandy, lived – and died – in a brothel. And amid all this he wrote dreamlike poetry of the most sultry exoticism, of pagan rites performed in fantastical landscapes:

Three times the virgin swimming on the breeze,

Danc’d in the shadow of the mystic trees:

When like a dark cloud spreading to the view,

The first-born sons of war and blood pursue;

Swift as the elk they pour along the plain;

Swift as the flying clouds distilling rain.

Swift as the boundings of the youthful roe,

They course around, and lengthen as they go.

Like the long chain of rocks, whose summits rise,

Far in the sacred regions of the skies;

Upon whose top the black’ning tempest lours,

Whilst down its side the gushing torrent pours.

Like the long cliffy mountains which extend

From Lorbar’s cave, to where the nations end,

Which sink in darkness, thick’ning and obscure,

Impenetrable, mystic and impure;

The flying terrors of the war advance,

And round the sacred oak repeat the dance.

Furious they twist around the gloomy trees,

Like leaves in autumn twirling with the breeze.

So when the splendor of the dying day,

Darts the red lustre of the watry way;

Sudden beneath Toddida’s whistling brink,

The circling billows in wild eddies sink:

Whirl furious round and the loud bursting wave

Sink down to Chalma’s sacerdotal cave:

Explore the palaces on Zira’s coast,

Where howls the war song of the chieftan’s ghost.

(‘Narva and Mored’)

In Chatterton’s lines one glimpses the strange sunless seas of Coleridge’s drug-inspired dream, ‘Kubla Khan’, and discovers the sources of De Quincey’s nightmares:

I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

(Confessions of an English Opium Eater)

With the Romantic poets here we have decadence avant la lettre: decadence was not a recognizable aesthetic, and yet already it suffused the imagination. One can see it in the infinite decayed ruins pictured by Piranesi, in the obsessive fascination with tortuous Gothic novels and their barely repressed sexual passion and rampant orientalism, and in the rise of eroto-occultist societies such as the Monks of Medmenham, who slaked their twisted lust in blasphemous orgies where whores were hired and dressed in the habits of nuns. As massive leaps were made in science and technology and the body was increasingly reduced to a sort of biological machine, there grew cravings for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts, and a desire for refuge in what Charles Baudelaire was to call the ‘artificial paradises’ of drink, drugs, and dreams – such worlds, it was claimed, were the true reality. And it was the writers of the time who imagined this dark and teeming new world into existence.

Poets like Lord Byron seemed to be driven by almost demonic powers. He tossed off the sprawling epic poem ‘Don Juan’ by dictating to his servant every morning as he shaved; magnetically charismatic and always impeccably turned out, he was a sexually voracious predator on whom the first English vampire novel was based; he fled the country in the wake of truly scandalous rumours about, variously, his persistent adultery, incest with his half-sister, homosexuality, and sodomizing his new wife (the last two at least being capital offences); he toured Europe with an entourage of fellow writers Percy and Mary Shelley and shared their groupies. ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, as his lover Lady Caroline Lamb memorably described him, he seemed to be the epitome of the anti-hero: brilliant, beautiful, and deadly.

Byron was also a typical Romantic poet in that, like Chatterton, he died young. There is a fatal inevitability about the whole movement – a pervading sense of loss, failure, transience, and waste, mixed however with a delicious gruesomeness. After Percy Shelley’s body was recovered from the Gulf of Spezia where he had mysteriously drowned, his rotting corpse was cremated on the shore. The heart was snatched from the smouldering carcass on the orders of Byron and kept by his ‘jackal’, Edward Trelawney. After ten years bitter argument it was eventually delivered back to his wife Mary, author of the macabre novel Frankenstein. She kept it in her bedside table, wrapped in a copy of a poem her husband had written to John Keats, following that poet’s own premature death.

Suicide was also fashionable following the death of Chatterton, and Goethe fuelled the craze with The Sorrows of Werther. This intensely dark novel ends with the protagonist, inescapably weary of life, shooting himself, and supposedly inspired some two thousand young men to do the same. Werther was certainly on the mind of the morbid poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, collector of skulls and author of a grotesque revenge tragedy called Death’s Jest Book. Beddoes too died in mysterious circumstances – possibly poisoned by his own hand. Others, however, explored mortality in other, more practical ways: the languorous art critic and painter Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was, as Oscar Wilde declared, an artist in pen, pencil, and poison – to fund his connoisseur’s taste in engravings and objets d’art he allegedly murdered his mother-in-law and sister-in-law for their life insurance dividends.

These writers entranced the emerging decadent sensibility like the flowers of evil, or the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. They seemed invested with a sort of satanic majesty, free from the restrictions of conventional morality; they revelled in carnality, they were enticingly cruel; they were dazzlingly tempting – to read them was like dining with the damned. Later writers from Alfred Lord Tennyson to John Betjeman – even the fallen poets of the First World War – just didn’t have the same heady mix of sensual excess, personal tragedy, and good looks. Hence the reinvention of the image of the Romantic poet by hedonistic rock stars in the sixties and seventies – photos on album covers showed effeminate dandies staring out with rude and belligerent intent, while the rumours that surrounded the recordings and tours created an unholy new trinity of sex & drugs & rock’n’roll. It was essentially a revival of the dark side of the Romantic aesthetic – and, as before, was similarly spiced up with blood, Satanism, the occult, and even death, suicide, and murder.

The sexual exploits of rock bands often went beyond the predictable debauching of impressionable young teenagers and passing groupies around. When the Rolling Stones were busted for drugs at Keith Richards’ mansion Redlands, the divinely named Marianne Faithfull, a descendent of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (the author of Venus in Furs who gave his name to ‘masochism’), was discovered wearing nothing more than a bearskin rug that seemed to keep slipping off in front of the arresting officers. And then rumours began circulating that Mick Jagger had been arrested while eating a Mars Bar from her pussy (an incident repeatedly denied but nevertheless alluded to in the Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg film Performance). Led Zeppelin, in contrast, had a taste for live seafood, using red snappers and octopuses and even sharks to pleasure their lucky girls.

Both bands also became embroiled in tales of diabolical trysts. The Stones’ recording of the mad samba, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ with lines about piles of stinking corpses, and the rape-and-murder style of ‘Gimme Shelter’ seemed like a ghastly prophecy when a fan was killed at the Stones’ gig at Altamont. Led Zep’s guitarist Jimmy Page, meanwhile, cultivated his interests in the ‘Great Beast’ Aleister Crowley by buying Boleskine, Crowley’s house on the banks of Loch Ness, and writing the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising; likewise, rumours later attributed deaths in and around the band (including that of drummer John Bonham) to Page’s meddling in the occult – all of which added to his allure.

But was all this little more than cosmetics and posturing? From Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan to Kurt Cobain, rock has had no shortage of dead boys, but very few that have attained the sacrificial quality of the corpses of Chatterton, Keats, Shelley, and Byron: possibly Brian Jones of the Stones (drowned in mysterious circumstances), Johnny Thunders of transvestite glam band the New York Dolls (possibly murdered, possibly overdosed), and the elegantly wasted Richey Edwards (Manics – disappeared). Neither are there in the rock scene the wanderers, the outcasts, the sinister evil recluses who lurk in the shadows of Gothic novels and the underworld of nineteenth-century London – the nocturnal visitors to clandestine clubs specializing in the perverse and the unutterable that Dorian Gray finds he is unable to resist. Pete Doherty and his crack smoking is rather too refined, rather too knowing in its illegality, and rappers consorting with gangsters and other urban lowlife is neither pretty nor wasted.

But there is a monster who does creep around the fringes of the globe, as if cursed like the Wandering Jew to be hounded from border to border. He was a rock star – once. A magnificent, cartoonish zany in his day who aspired to supreme decadence. He didn’t find it in the rococo costumes he flounced about in, or in the homo-erotic yobbo anthems to which he strutted and fretted his hours upon the stage. He found it as he aged, when he began to yearn again for the adulation of prepubescent boys and girls. Since then, Gary Glitter has been vilified. His crimes and secrets – like the hideous crimes and secrets that lie at the heart of Gothic novels – are indefensible, inexplicable to all right thinking people, and so he is condemned to carry this crime, this terrible notoriety wherever he goes. Like Satan, his hell goes with him, and burns with the ferocity of the law – a law that seems ever more eager to exterminate him. He, perhaps, has most in common with the archetypal Romantic decadents, now that Jimmy Page has received an OBE, Mick Jagger has been knighted, and even the eerily immortal Keith Richards has invested some £60,000 in a trendy beach hut on an exclusive part of the English coast. Byron’s friends certainly feared that as successive scandals broke, he risked being lynched by a mob if he ventured out in London and, of course, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to hard labour, ruined and ultimately destroyed by his ordeal – his imprisonment was effectively a death penalty. Was the public outcry against these two as vociferous as that against Gary Glitter? Whether you like it or not, he is a true outcast – and may be the most decadent rock star on the planet.