The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) Read online

  It is certainly true that Decadent literature overlaps several other genres and movements, and that many of its key works can equally well be discussed under other labels. At least some of the Decadents were interested in Symbolism and helped to develop its techniques; others were on the fringes of Naturalism, espousing a cynical and somewhat grotesque version of seedy realism. It is also the case that the great majority of writers who produced Decadent works also produced work of very different kinds, many temporarily adopting a Decadent sensibility by way of experiment only.

  The situation is further complicated by the fact that there are some interesting literary accounts of the Decadent personality which were set down, with horrified disapproval, by writers who were anything but Decadent in their own outlook. There were also writers for whom Decadence itself was a matter of pure artifice, who championed all manner of lurid perversion in their work while living entirely respectable private lives. The most wholehearted Decadents were, of course, those whose lifestyles were as Decadent as their works, but they constitute the nucleus of a much larger phenomenon whose edges are very blurred indeed.

  The ideal type of the Decadent personality is an artist who rejoices in his power to analyse and display his own curious situation; life itself must become for him a kind of art-work – an exercise in style – because there is nothing else it can be. This ideal type is rare enough, however, that one might easily make a case for its non-existence in the purest possible form. This is not entirely surprising, given the inherent self-destructiveness of the philosophy.

  There is a sharply ironic paradox in the fact that a creed which puts such a heavy emphasis on the comforts of artificiality proved to be desperately uncomfortable for all of its most fervent adherents. Many of them did indeed destroy themselves, aided by the scorn of their enemies; others set out more-or-less hastily on various roads to Damascus in search of magical renewals of faith which would restore the layers of spiritual insulation they had earlier discarded. While braver Decadents perished the more cowardly relented, but either way a Decadent Movement could not help but be a short-lived affair.

  History cannot offer us a single example of a thoroughly successful Decadent career, but this is hardly surprising, given that the philosophy of Decadence has so little room in it for success. It was almost de rigeur for a writer to die young, in miserable circumstances, before he could be considered seriously as a true champion of Decadentideas. The work which the Decadents produced, however, contains a challenge to commonplace ideas of health, beauty and goodness which deserves to be carefully weighed and taken seriously. Any idea for which people have been willing to mortify themselves deserves that much, even if we eventually come to the conclusion that they were fools to do it.

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  2.

  RENEGADE ROMANTICS:

  THE BIRTH OF DECADENCE

  The whims of fashionability are such that literary movements hardly have time to be born before someone is reacting against them and someone else is trying to transcend them. So it was with French Romanticism, whose triumphant arrival in Paris was trumpeted by the claque which turned out at the first night of victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830. Prominent among these enthusiasts was the young Théophile Gautier, who had made certain that he would not pass unnoticed by wearing a shocking pink waistcoat. Gautier, born in 1811, was to follow up this coup de theatre by becoming the most fervent and extravagant of the French Romantics, and the author of the (inevitably) unfinished Histoire de romantisme. He was also the writer whose wildest experiments in Romanticism tested the optimism of the Romantic outlook to destruction.

  Dissenters from the Romantic Movement were legion, but in respect of the subsequent emergence of the Decadents two are of particular importance. One was Anatole Barbier, whose scathing attacks on political corruption and other assorted social evils influenced Hugo, but who had too little faith in the rewards of idealism to become a Romantic himself. The other was Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve, whose association with Hugo was close enough at one time to allow him to fall hopelessly in love with the elder poet’s wife, but whose subsequent adventures in literary criticism led him to denigrate his former idols.

  Barbier’s three most important collections, Iambes (1831), Il pianto (1833) and Lazare (1837), while condemning life in modern Paris and lamenting the sad decline of Italy from its glorious past, popularized two terms which were later to become central to the Decadents’ philosophy: ennui and spleen. Barbier was no Decadent himself; he was dead set against the enervation and debauchery arising from ennui and had not the slightest sympathy with its capricious and spiteful extension. Men of a splenetic disposition, according to Barbier, inevitably go completely to the bad, under the influence of drugs, drink and sexual perversion. But Barbier’s attack on the Decadent personality was satirical, and it left open the possibility of removing the sarcastic tone and converting demolition into celebration. Barbier laid the groundwork for the so-called Parnassian poets who could not stand the emotional heat of Romanticism, electing instead to adopt a more detached and studious approach to its typical imaginative products; but the echoes of his work, deformed and transmogrified, also resound in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, the foundation-stone of Decadent sensibility.

  Saint-Beuve deserted Romanticism for a species of critical eclecticism which regarded a poet’s work as a map of his personality; his criticism became a form of psychological portraiture. Though founded on the principle that a writer’s work should always be approached sympathetically, this manner of procedure led inevitably to a situation where the critic found himself condemning the work of men whose morals he did not much like. Before he embarked upon this path, however, Saint-Beuve produced a curious and condemnatory self-analytical work of his own: the novel Volupté (1834), which became an important model of the contradictory impulses out of which Decadent sensibility might easily grow. The disastrously apathetic hero of the novel, Amaury, is caught between his ideal passion for the unattainable Mme. de Couaën and his lustful adventures with the whores of Paris. Unable to sustain the philosophical tensions in his life, he eventually renounces his uncomfortable scepticism, recommits himself to the Catholic faith, and emigrates. This account of temporary flirtation with the possibilities of Decadence, followed by reinvestment in the old values, foreshadowed the actual career of many a Decadent writer – most notably Huysmans.

  The plight of Saint-Beuve’s Amaury is frequently reflected, usually in much lighter tones, in one of Gautier’s favourite plots. Gautier never tired of writing delicate fantasies in which idealistic young men, frustrated by the crassness of the modern world, escape into liaisons with fabulous supernatural women: the eponymous courtesans in “Omphale” (1834) and “Arria Marcella” (1852), and the Egyptian Princess Hermonthis in “Le pied de momie” (1840; tr. as “The Mummy’s Foot”). Even when the attentions of these femmes fatales promise to be literally fatal, as in the case of the hectic affair between a novice priest and a vampire in “La morte amoureuse” (1836; tr. as “Clarimonde”), the loss of supernatural ecstasy is regarded as a tragedy of matchless proportions.

  Gautier himself seems to have lived in uneasy suspension between the allure of ideal love and the second-rate consolations of real-life sex; he nursed a determinedly high-minded passion for the dancer Carlotta Grisi while making a mistress of her sister Ernesta. In his art and his life alike he revealed the hopeless folly of the Romantic idealization of love and its promise of eupsychian fulfilment. Only one of Gautier’s fantasies – Spirite (1865), which he wrote specifically for Carlotta Grisi – concludes with a satisfactory consummation, but it is (necessarily) postponed until the afterlife.

  Gautier’s importance as a precursor of Decadence is secured by three works: Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834); Fortunio (1837) and “Une nuit de Cléopâtre” (1838; tr. as “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”). All three provide portraits of characters who are recognisably Decadent and whose Decadence is treated sympathetically.

  Mademoi
selle de Maupin is a long and teasing essay in studied eroticism in which the hero’s search for ideal passion is confused by his confrontation with the eponymous heroine in male disguise; his arguments in justification of the presumed homoerotic attraction are then applied to the heroine’s seduction, while in male guise, of a page who also turns out to be a girl in male clothing. The flirtatiousness of the novel, augmented by its careful prefatory essay supporting the doctrine of art for art’s sake, saved it from demolition by the charges of indecency which were inevitably brought against it, and allowed it to prepare the ground for the more intense celebrations of homoeroticism to be found in the works of Verlaine and Lorrain, and for the paeans of praise for Lesbianism which were to be sung by Baudelaire and Pierre Louÿs.

  In Fortunio, whose eponymous hero comes to Paris from the East, establishing for himself an exotic microcosm where tropical lushness is simulated by cunning artifice, we see for the first time the Decadent flourishing in his unnatural habitat, more-or-less content to drift on the tides of ennui, buoyed up by the elaborate contrivances of artifice. Like Gautier’s fabulous femmes fatales he is only a dream which cannot persist, but he is – or is supposed to be – a powerfully attractive dream. Equally magnetic is Gautier’s Cleopatra, who similarly enjoys an existence made almost unbearable by comfort and luxury, and seeks momentary distraction in the arms of a lover who is then put to death; his execution is incorporated into the aesthetic experience, making it whole. Unlike the author, this particular heroine has no delusions at all about the value of ideal love, and is happy to savour her own callousness in a fashion which was later to be recapitulated and intensively recomplicated by Octave Mirbeau in Le jardin des supplices.

  Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s early novella La Fanfarlo (1847) fits readily enough into this tradition of prose fiction; its Amauryesque central character is the victim of a similar apathy and takes a similar delight in impossible dreams, but his attitude to his own status as the corrupt child of a corrupt age is very different from Amaury’s, and far beyond anything Gautier could bring himself to endorse. He is fascinated by his own state of mind and the tendencies enshrined therein, morbidly delighted by his perverse inclinations. This was the step which carried Baudelaire over the edge of the precipice into free fall, and made him the first true Decadent.

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  If one particular moment can be set aside to mark the birth of Decadent literature, it occurred in 1857, when the first edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was issued. It is not simply the contents of the book which determines this, but the reaction which it caused. The pump of scandal had been primed by those poems which had previously been published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1855 and the publication of the book was the signal for legal action to proceed. The Court imposed heavy fines and ruled that six of the hundred-and-one poems were to be suppressed as obscene.

  It is in retrospect possible to recognise this action as a tribute to the collection’s effectiveness, but one can easily understand that the author found it impossible to rejoice. Opposition increased his feelings of alienation but weakened his Decadent resolve, and though some of his most brilliant productions were yet to be penned he never quite recovered the full impetus of that first bouquet of flowers of evil. The use of the courts to suppress Decadence was, of course, to be repeated with much greater success in England, where Oscar Wilde would presumably have been hung, drawn and quartered had the law still permitted that extent of judicial persecution.

  The fact that these prosecutions were carried forward so swiftly, and in the absence of any genune injury, is the best testimony we have to the real force of the Decadent challenge to alternative moralities and ideologies. As Wilde himself observed, one can measure a man far more accurately by his enemies than his friends: friendship is frequently false but enmity never is, and one can always be certain that while half one’s friends are certain to desert one in a time of crisis, not a single enemy will refrain from gloating. The merit of the Decadent’s assault upon the society in which he found himself, and the honesty of his response to its aspirations, is proven by the fierceness with which his ideas were condemned.

  Baudelaire became the first writer to express the Decadent sensibility in such wholehearted and uncompromising terms because he was the first to experience it so fully and so sharply. The cruelly paradoxical forces which thus shaped his character are easy to read in his biography. His father, born in 1759, and his mother, born in 1793, came from different worlds. From his father – who had been tutor to an aristocratic family and had absorbed enough of their elegance and refinement to have sided with them against the Revolutionists – Baudelaire inherited refined tastes and the expectation of a considerable legacy of money which, though long anticipated and partly spent, was ultimately withheld from him (save for an inadequate dole) by his step-father and half-brother, whose standards of respectability he had begun to disappoint while he was still a clever but troublesome schoolboy. When he expressed his intention to be a writer he was packed off to India in the hope of removing him from evil influences, but he never reached his destination, returning to France in 1842 after spending a few weeks in Mauritius. This seems to have been construed by his relatives as evidence of his irresponsibility, which was soon compounded by the extravagant lifestyle which he attempted to take up on his return to Paris; they quickly took measures to ensure that he spent the rest of his life in unnecessary poverty. His attempts to make a consistent living with his pen were always resentfully half-hearted.

  Baudelaire’s relationships with women provided little solace and much heartache, and the love-poems which he wrote are redolent with pain and frustration, whether they refer to his sexual liaison with the “Black Venus” Jeanne Duval, or to his attempts to pursue sanitized Platonic love with the uncaringly capricious actress Marie Daubrun and the Salon-keeper Mme. Sabatier. Nor could he find any real release from his misery in his experiments with drugs; Flaubert complained of his book on hashish and opium, Les Paradis artificiels (1860), that what had begun as a pioneering exercise in natural science had been sidetracked by a preoccupation with the spirit of evil supposedly incarnate in these substances, and Gautier later commented that Baudelaire had been initially reluctant to involve himself in the “experiments” undertaken by “le Club de Haschichins” – which included Gerard de Nerval as well as Gautier – on the grounds that a flight from necessary sorrow must be inherently Satanic. Baudelaire declared on his own account that he wrote Les Paradis artificiels to demonstrate that seekers after artificial paradises inevitably create private hells.

  Baudelaire’s miseries were further compounded by the fact that his work was not well-received by his contemporaries – at least, not openly. He was a candidate for the Academy in 1861 but was forced to withdraw. Sainte-Beuve, whom he idolized – in 1844 Baudelaire wrote an “epistle” in verse proclaiming that he had imported the story of Amaury into his heart, absorbing all its “miasmas” and “perfumes”, and that he had become a practitioner of the same “cruel art” – ignored him save for an off-hand remark condemning his work as “folly”. Gautier, who understood him far better, carefully hoarded his own praise until after Baudelaire’s death, at which point he belatedly added an enthusiastic Notice to the 1868 Les Fleurs du Mal. Others were openly scathing, including Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose own cynical dandyism was saved from being thoroughly Decadent only by his devout Catholicism; he remarked that the only two possibilities open to the man whose soul was revealed in Les Fleurs du Mal were conversion to Catholicism and suicide. (Baudelaire had already wounded himself attempting suicide in 1845, and appears always to have regarded himself as an “incorrigible”, though permanently lapsed, Catholic.) It seems probable, in fact, that the only poet who gave Baudelaire a reasonable measure of moral support while he was alive was the only one who condescended to give an oration at his funeral: his long-time friend Théodore de Banville, the Parnassian inheritor of Gautier’s mantle as the premier champion
of art for art’s sake.

  Given all this, it is not surprising that Baudelaire’s vivid verses and ornate poems in prose are so full of lamentations – but they are not mere cries of despair. What is quintessentially Decadent about them is the way in which they harness personal tragedy to the greater context, attempting to use analysis of the personal predicament to reach a more perfect understanding and aesthetic appreciation of the state of the world.

  It is easy enough to feel sorry for Baudelaire, but pity is out of place when contemplating the poets of Decadence; how could they have become poets of Decadence unless they were torn apart by the contradictions which others managed to avoid? How, if Baudelaire had not had his comforts eked out, could he possibly have laid claim – as he did in the most celebrated of his several poems entitled “Spleen” – that he had more memories than if he had lived a thousand years, crowded as secrets in his unhappy brain? How could he have likened himself to a graveyard churned about by worms of remorse? And how, if he had only harboured such feelings for brief intervals of alienation, couldhe possibly have learned to savour the sensation as he did? If he had made a better living, he would only have been one more Parnassian among many; as it was he became the primary inspiration of the whole Decadent Movement.

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  3.

  GENIUS AND MADNESS:

  THE ATTRACTIONS OF DECADENCE

  Even when one accepts that Baudelaire would have been a less interesting poet had he not led such a tortured life it remains rather surprising that he became a role-model for an entire movement. In order to understand this more fully, it is necessary to pay some attention to the other intellectual currents of the day.