Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence From Dedalus)

by Jean Lorrain

  And the figure vanished.

  Astarté is the name of the Syrian Venus; Acté is the name of a liberated slave; Alexandria is the city of the Ptolemies, of courtesans and philosophers. Astarte is also the name of a demon!

  Paris, 28 July

  I leave for Egypt tomorrow.

  Thus ends the manuscript of Monsieur de Phocas.

  AFTERWORD

  Some Observations on Monsieur de Phocas

  Monsieur de Phocas is a kind of portmanteau text gathering together Jean Lorrain’s ideas about the darker side of his life in that fin de siècle Paris which a posthumous collection of his articles dubbed la ville empoisonnée: the Poisoned City. The manuscript left behind by the eponymous antihero as he sets off for the mysterious East is a catalogue of all the Poisoned City’s horrors and ignominies, and a testament to the darkly seductive magnetism of its suburban low-life, as experienced by a nobly-born, fabulously rich, contemptuously aloof and direly neurasthenic character – a character who is in some strange sense the spectre (or ‘larva’) which Jean Lorrain occasionally glimpsed when he looked at himself in a mirror, lurking behind the painted and powdered mask which was his face.

  Like Huysmans’ A rebours, the novel is cast as a first-person account of the adventures of a nobleman who supposedly embodies the entire malaise of an epoch – an epoch whose reality repels him while certain aspects of its art entrances him. Both authors were aware that they had a cause in common, but they were both fully aware that their two central characters – fantastic extrapolations of their contrasting personalities – could hardly have been more different.

  Jean Des Esseintes – Huysmans’ noble alter ego in À rebours - is eccentric and neurasthenic, but he is also very methodical. His opposition to the values of the world from which he is trying to isolate himself may be exaggerated to the point of grotesquerie, but it is closely reasoned and it is underpinned by an articulate and ingenious philosophy. His adventure in the construction of a private world, drawing on the resources of all available artifice, is meticulously planned; he has a blueprint for an ideal existence which he sets out to actualise with the utmost care. It is, to be sure, an impossible project for which he is constitutionally unsuited, and which he has in the end to abandon, but his endeavours are both constructive and heroic, and the subversive moral homilies which spice his account are as deft and as witty as they are eloquent.

  The Duc de Fréneuse, who eventually elects to become the humble Monsieur de Phocas, does not at first glance look like any kind of ideal self-projection, although the fact that the author chooses to distance himself from the narrative by posing as its editor hardly constitutes a convincing deception. Fréneuse is quite clearly as mad as a hatter; lest anyone should fail to notice this, the sole ‘editorial interjection’ within the body of his manuscript calls the reader’s attention to the fact that the dates do not make sense. This underlines the claim that the various contradictions in the manuscript are deliberate on the part of its true author if not on the part of its notional author. Fréneuse’s alienation from his contemporaries is entirely negative; he is horrified, terrified, inconsistent and sick, and he has neither a philosophy to underpin his situation nor a plan to help him deal with it. He is prone to outbursts of moral rage – aimed as often as not at himself – but there is little trace of wit or deftness in his commentary. Instead of making plans of his own, he looks to others for salvation, and then agonises helplessly over the merits of their advice.

  At first sight, these contrasts might be taken as evidence that Monsieur de Phocas is simply a less careful, less original and less worthwhile book than À rebours – as, indeed, the world at large considers it to be – but the matter is not quite as simple as that. The disordered nature of the manuscript which forms the bulk of Monsieur de Phocas may be a convenient artefact, but it is an artefact nevertheless; it has a particular significance.

  The difference between the two books reflects a difference between the two men. It seems that Huysmans really did think that some solution to his existential predicament might be found if he could only figure it out, whereas Lorrain appears to have given up any such hope almost before his career got under way. Despite what Edmond Goncourt seems to have thought, it was probably not the accident of his doomed infatuation with Judith Gautier which ruined him, but something much more deep-seated which he came to believe unalterable and ineradicable. It ought to be noted that in this matter Huysmans was probably wrong and Lorrain was probably right. Huysmans ultimately tried to find the kind of salvation via religion which he had mockingly advocated in the climax of À rebours, but a reconciliation with a worn-out faith on the part of one who has supposedly seen through the sham of his decadent era is an ignominious confession of abject failure. Lorrain’s early recognition that he was never going to be accepted by the social elite, and his bitter acknowledgement of the horrific absurdity of his sexual inclinations – which were not merely homosexual but ran very definitely to what would now be called ‘rough trade’ – were accurate and honest, however depressing.

  So far as we know, Lorrain never sought sexual partners among his own friends or in his own social class; he went slumming instead, and if the evidence of Monsieur de Phocas is reliable, it seems that he despised himself for it. Given his awkward sexual tastes and his craving for acceptance by the haut monde to which Robert de Montesquiou and Sarah Bernhardt belonged, the possibility of his ever discovering a half-way satisfactory relationship or a contented way of life was probably ruled out a priori. If ever a man was damned, it was he, and the fact that contemporary Paris could hold up a mirror in which he could readily perceive the relative success of others slightly more blessed undoubtedly increased his chagrin. It is not surprising that the darkest of all his fabular contes — which became increasingly dark as his career advanced – is a bizarrely transfigured and inverted version of the myth of Narcissus: Narkiss, first published in 1898, in book form 1909. Nor is it surprising that his archetypal image of the Decadent personality should be a man fatally and irredeemably obsessed by a mirage. Given that he was not only narcissistic but proud, it is understandable that in his darker moods he would flirt with self-hatred, and with the notion – both direly horrible and perversely comforting – that he might be mad.

  We must remember too that Jean Lorrain knew full well – although many readers apparently overlook the fact – that À rebours is first and foremost a black comedy. Although it contains fewer jokes, Monsieur de Phocas is also a black comedy; its grotesquerie is calculated and its irony cuts much deeper than may initially be apparent. The conclusion at which the Duc de Fréneuse ultimately arrives is, of course, no redemption at all; it is best regarded as the blackly ironic climax of a conte cruel.

  Monsieur de Phocas was a long time in gestation. Lorrain produced a kind of prototype for it in the title story of his collection UN démoniaque (1895), in which one M. de Burdhe (to whom acknowledgement is wryly and obliquely made in the text of the novel) offers an account of his similar obsession with a certain elusive gaze. The subject-matter of several other short stories and articles is also absorbed into the text – for instance, ‘L’homme aux têtes de cire’ from Buveurs d’âmes. What is new, however, is the way in which the contending forces surrounding the Due, pulling him forcibly in different directions with scant regard for the authority of his own vacillating will, are incarnated as actual persons (or, at least, as the images of persons). The most powerful and the most problematic among these forces – and hence the most interesting – is materialised as the odious Englishman Claudius Ethal.

  Several commentators – including Lorrain’s biographer Philippe Julian and the only English commentator to have writen extensively about Lorrain’s work, Jennifer Burkett – have suggested that Ethal is based on Oscar Wilde. This identification is undoubtedly encouraged by the fact that Ethal arrives in Paris having exiled himself to Paris in the wake of a lawsuit involving one ‘Lord Kerneby’ but it would probably be a mistake to take it too
seriously. Lorrain was an admirer of Wilde, and used one of his ‘Pall-Malls’ to launch a searing attack on the English hypocrisy which had condemned Wilde to hard labour and wrecked his career. Lorrain met Wilde in the early 1890s, when his friend Marcel Schwob – also a writer of supernatural vignettes and wryly dark contes – brought Wilde to dine at his house; Lorrain thought that occasion sufficiently auspicious to invite Anatole France as well. Although Lorrain seems not to have renewed this acquaintance when Wilde came to Paris after serving his sentence, there is no reason to suppose that his attitude to the English writer was such as to licence the kind of parody that would have been involved in transforming him into Ethal. We need not accept the Duc de Fréneuse’s view that Ethal is an archetype of evil – he gives a rather different account of himself, which is rather more convincing than the Due’s paranoid and rumour-based fantasies – in order to recognise that if Ethal were based on any real person the characterisation would be horribly unflattering.

  The text itself gives us a different account of the manner in which the character of Ethal might have been inspired. He is explicitly linked to a painting by Antonio Moro of the dwarf kept as a jester by the Duc D’Albe, and he does indeed function as a kind of jester, whose malicious buffoonery masks an all-too-perceptive wisdom. Ethal’s rival within the plot, Thomas Welcome – who has a very different notion of how the Due’s existential malaise can be cured – is likewise associated with a painting, but this time a purely hypothetical image produced by Ethal himself. Welcome thus becomes a kind of ‘secondary creation’ – the better aspect of the equivocally threatening Ethal (the text is always telling us how inextricably bound together they are).

  The most useful key to the decoding of these symbols is undoubtedly the names attached to the characters. Lorrain rarely gave his characters realistic names and was fond of sometimes convoluted wordplay. To an English reader there is nothing in the least abstruse about ‘Welcome’, but French readers would probably have found the other two names more obvious in their implication. ‘Fréneuse’ is an adjectival modification of frénésie (the actual adjective is frénétique), straightforwardly translatable as ‘frenzied’. ‘Ethal’ is superficially reminiscent of étal (a butcher’s meatstall; étalage refers more generally to window-dressing and vulgar ostentation) but if that name too is regarded as a calculatedly-botched adjective then the noun from which it comes is surely éther.

  Ethal’s role in the plot – he is a ‘thought-reader’ who gets inside the Due’s head and feeds his fantasies, all the while pretending to be working towards a cure for all his ills – might easily be regarded as a phantasmagorical extrapolation of the role played in Lorrain’s life by ether. If we elect to interpret things according to this pattern, then Thomas Welcome’s alternative cure – although studiously couched in terms of the familiar Decadent rhetoric regarding the virtues of culture unspoiled by civilization – becomes suspiciously akin to the kind of cure by climate which was the nineteenth century’s most hopeful treatment for tuberculosis. The fact that Welcome’s travel brochure – according to Ethal, at least – deceptively neglects the forces of ‘base prostitution’ may be taken to reflect the awareness (which no Decadent was without) that the sun can do nothing at all for syphilis. It is no coincidence that the figurine of Astarte which features in the plot has a death’s-head superimposed on her genitals, nor that Fréneuse suspects at one point that the ‘mouth of shadow’ whispering ideas of murder in his ear might be the voice of this death’s-head.

  If it is seen in this light, the Duc de Fréneuse’s struggle is essentially an internal one, and given that we are conscientiously reminded that his account has gaping logical flaws – the most striking of which are the nonsensical dating of the last few entries and the curious business of the letter which is supposed to provide an ‘alibi‘ – we may be entitled to wonder whether Claudius Ethal has any existence outside the feverish brain of the Duc de Fréneuse. Perhaps he is a mere hallucination conjured up by stress: the externalisation of an enemy within. The ‘murder’ would thus become one more fantastic vision, one more desperate gyration in the Due’s frenzied but hopeless quest to find someone or something to turn to. .

  If the names of the characters really are so vital within the symbolic scheme of the novel, much must hang on the explanation of the one name which seems to have no obvious function save to be symbolic. There must, after all, be some reason why the Duc de Fréneuse opts to become Monsieur de Phocas, and why the author thinks this move sufficiently important to generate the title of the story. It is probably not significant that the word ‘phocas’ actually exists in English, even though Jean Lorrain probably knew that Phoca was the Latin name applied in the Linnaean classification to the genus of seals, and might conceivably have known that Spenser had used ‘phoca’ as a trivial noun referring to a kind of sea-monster. Perhaps the Due’s change of name and new-found sense of purpose could be metaphorically linked to that of a group of mammals which reverted to the sea and thus to a more ‘primitive’ way of life, but the more obvious play is phonetic: the Due de Fréneuse changes his name because he has got his life, and his predicament, ‘in focus’ (focus itself was not commonly used in French at the turn of the century, but the adjectives focal and focaux were fairly familiar in technical discourse).

  The Duc de Fréneuse was probably not the first character in French literary history to put matters into clearer focus by virtue of an act of murder, and he was most certainly not the last; he is an obvious literary ancestor of Mersault, the alienated central character of Albert Camus’ existentialist classic L’étranger (1942; tr. as The Outsider) with the one vital difference that Camus took the idea far more seriously. Had Colin Wilson known of the existence of Monsieur de Phocas when he wrote The Outsider (1956), his celebrated study of angst-ridden literary anti-heroes who seek solutions in behavioural extremes, he might well have used the text as his starting-point instead of L’Enfer (1908; tr. as The Inferno) by journalist-turned-novelist Henri Barbusse. Barbusse must, of course, have been familiar with Jean Lorrain’s work, although he was born too late to be a Decadent himself.

  We know, of course, that whether the writer of the enigmatic manuscript which forms the major part of Lorrain’s novel joins Thomas Welcome in Benares or not, he has no hope whatsoever of making any kind of satisfactory contact with the magical gaze which fascinates him. He might have brought his vision of Astarte into sharper focus (although that is dubious, given that her genital region is carefully screened from view in the final vision) but she is and will remain as elusive as ever. Whatever ‘fervour’ the virile races of the un-Decadent East might possess, and whatever effect that fervour might have on the way they live, it is not something that can be shared by the Duc de Fréneuse, nor even by Monsieur de Phocas. Ethal or no Ethal, Welcome or no Welcome, the author of the manuscript is damned.

  All the honest Decadents knew, at least by the time they found out what had actually happened to Arthur Rimbaud when he put an end to his saison en enfer by going to the East and hurling himself into a very different way of life, that there was no way out of their particular blind alley. All of them had mixed feelings about this, but in general they were ironically content to accept the verdict – Huysmans was something of a traitor to the cause. There was no escape from the Poisoned City, once its poison had been absorbed; the only consolation to be found was in palliative measures: all those art-works, comforts and petty luxuries which could transform the horrors of life just as the paints and powders which so fascinated Jean Lorrain could illuminate ravaged faces.

  Alas,, as Jean Lorrain unfortunately found out, even palliative measures can be fatal.

  Francis Amery

  APPENDIX

  The Works of Jean Lorrain

  Sang des dieux (1882) [poetry]

  La Forêt bleue (1883) [poetry]

  Modernités (1885) [poetry]

  Viviane (1885) [drama]

  Les Lépillier (1885) [novel]

  Très Russe
(1886). [novel]

  Les Griseries (1887) [poetry]

  Dans I’oratoire (1888) [articles]

  Sonyeuse (1891) [stories]

  Buveurs d’âmes (1893). [stories]

  Yanthis (1894) [drama]

  Sensations et souvenirs (1895) [stories]

  UN démoniaque (1895) [stories]

  La Petite Classe (1895) [articles]

  La princesse sous verre (1896) [conte]

  Une femme par jour (1896) [articles].

  Poussières de Paris (1896) [articles]

  Ames d’automne (1897) [stories]

  Contes pour lire à la chandelle (1897) [contes]

  Lorelei (1897) [conte]

  L’Ombre ardente (1897) [poetry]

  Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897) [novel]

  Ma petite ville (1898) [stories]

  Princesse d’ltalie (1898) [conte]

  La Dame turaue (1898) [novel]

  Heures d’Afrique (1899) [travel book]

  Madame Baringhel (1899) [articles]

  Vingt femmes (1900) [stories]

  Histoires de masques (1900) [stories]

  Monsieur de Phocas (1901) [novel]

  Poussières de Paris (second series 1902) [articles]

  Princesses d’ivoire et d’ivresse (1902) [contes]

  Le Vice errant (1902) [novel]

  Quelques hommes (1903) [stories]

  La Mandragore (1903) [conte]

  Fards et poisons (1904) [stories]

  Propos DDEs simples (1904) [stories]

  La Maison Philibert (1904) [novel]

  Le Crime des riches (1905) [stories]

  L’École des vieilles femmes (1905) [stories]

  Heures de Corse (1905) [travel book]

  Madame Monpalou (1906) [novel]

  Ellen (1906) [novel]

  Théâtre (1906) [drama]

  Le Tréteau (1906) [novel]

  L’Aryenne (1907) [novel]