Part of the background to the King in Yellow stories was borrowed from the work of Ambrose Bierce, the most notable writer of horror stories to be found among Chambers’ contemporaries. Despite his intense interest in the literary representation of abnormal mental states Bierce does not really warrant consideration as a Decadent; like Poe’s work, his is the kind of thing which French Decadents would have loved to read for its eccentricity, but its aesthetic ambitions are not flaunted, its erotic elements are carefully understated, and it is devoid of any preoccupation with spleen or impuissance. But Bierce was to influence, directly and indirectly, several other writers who lived, as he did, on the Western seaboard of the U.S.A., among them Edward Markham and George Sterling.
Sterling, in particular, was Bierce’s protegé and found in Bierce one of the few men able to provide an understanding and sympathetic audience for his morbid and highly-decorated work. He was doomed to be esoteric and largely unread while he lived (and to remain so) but he enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity – or notoriety – when Bierce persuaded Cosmopolitan to publish his bizarre poetic masterpiece “A Wine of Wizardry” (1907). Like Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare this piece reacts against an arid aesthetic climate by going to extremes, but in a different direction; it is a hymn to escapism far bolder than Chambers’ “Demoiselle D’Ys” or Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams.
Sterling not only wrote Decadent verse but tried to live a Decadent life-style, from which he eventually perished – but not before he had attracted a handful of protegés of his own, among them Clark Ashton Smith, who took over where Sterling left off as the poet of American Decadence, translating a good deal of Baudelaire and writing his own imitations thereof before outdoing “A Wine of Wizardry” in his own escapist epic “The Hashish-Eater” (1922). Like Sterling, though, Smith had no hope of finding a wide audience for his work, and he was able to carry his enthusiasm into prose fiction only because of a brief period of fluky fashionability which he enjoyed in the pulp magazines Weird Tales and Wonder Stories, for which he produced some of the most lushly exotic fantasies ever written.
With Smith, the outsidest of all outsiders, the hardly-started story of American Decadence effectively came to an end, its marvellous visions cast out to the furthest reaches of time and space in search of the ultimate extremes. It was, in its fashion, an end which one cannot deem entirely inappropriate, for Smith’s was excellent work despite its absurd milieu, and may serve as a sharp reminder that Decadence never really did get the audience it needed – and perhaps deserved – even in the gloriously decadent city which gave it birth, let alone in any of the world’s other great cities.
**********
8.
ECHOES IN TIME:
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF DECADENCE
Obsolete literary fads never really die, nor do they entirely fade away. They merely dissolve into the organized chaos of potential influences, preserved in memory as treasures to be looted, follies to be satirized, and bad examples to be avoided.
Any account of the achievements of Decadence must begin by admitting that the foundations of the movement were built on sand. Its central myths were quite false, and its shocking innovations have lost their shock-value in becoming familiar. A sensitive study of history provides little evidence to support the notion that all great civilizations must crumble because the comforts consequent upon success are fatally corrosive of further ambition or effective self-defense, and modern psychology has quite outgrown the idea that genius is a species of madness. There is nothing particularly startling to the modern mind in the notion of art for art’s sake, and there is no longer the least air of mystery surrounding hashish or opium derivatives. Nobody these days talks about a cult of artificiality, but the merest glance at the contemporary genre of “shopping and fucking” bestsellers testifies to the fact that its modern equivalent is more of a religion. A contemporary essay on the defence of cosmetics, however broadly the term might be construed, could only be a conservative reaction against the shocking radicalism of greens and feminists.
One could, of course, make out an apologetic case for Decadent Movements on the grounds that they helped lay the groundwork for subsequent movements like Surrealism and Modernism, and offered useful exemplars to writers as varied as Gide, Cocteau, Céline and Genet, but that would be rather weak-kneed. The Decadents themselves certainly did not intend to be a passing phase on the way to something more worth while; they thought they were harbingers of the apocalypse, and they wanted to reach an extreme which could not be surpassed. Had they been able to anticipate the extent of their failure to achieve those extremes which were realized within forty or fifty years of their passing they would probably have been depressed – but because they were Decadents, they were no strangers to depression, and one more impuissant shrug of the shoulders would have been no big deal.
Let us, then, in remembering the celebrants of Decadence, try to discover something more appropriate to say than they they added a few extra drops to the great stream of literary history. Let us try to find something which they say directly to modern readers, which modern readers need to hear.
If we do this, we will find that there are two elements of the Decadents’ gospel which have neither been falsified nor over-familiarized. Both, as might be expected, are denials of things which the people of the 1880s would very much like to have believed, and which the people of the 1990s are still trying to believe. The Decadents were right, and are right, about two matters – one important and one admittedly trivial – which have not yet been universally conceded, but ought to be.
The important matter about which the Decadents were right is their opinion of the veneration of Nature. They thought that it was stupid; it was; and it is. Where they had to live with the legacy of Rousseau we have to live with a growing Ecological Mysticism which is a lethal pollutant of green politics and the parent of an indiscriminate hostility to exactly those aspects of technological progress which might yet save us from the filthy mess which we are making of the world. There is a widespread popular misconception to the effect that turning forests into deserts and rivers into sewers is the perogative of modern men armed with sophisticated technologies, and that if only technological progress could be reversed all would be well. In the ears of people who believe such nonsense there is no more euphonious word than “natural”, which has come to be a synonym for “good”.
The Decadents treated such ideas with a scorn which they thoroughly deserve. They recognised that all the triumphs of mankind are based in artifice, and that the principal condition of the success of human life is a secure and complete control of nature. The Decadents would have condemned as shallow fools those critics who find something perverse and unnatural in the notion of taking control of genetic processes so that we may become true governors of creation, and they would have been right to do so. The Decadents might have remained pessimistic about the actual project of deploying sophisticated techniques of genetic engineering in time to save the world from ruin, but they would have had no doubts about its propriety. If one can speak at all about a Decadent Ideal World (and one has to admit that there is a certain paradox in the notion) then that Ideal World would be a world in which people had total control over all matters of biology, including their own anatomy, physiology and physical desires; it is an Ideal which we can and ought to share, though far too few of us actually do.
The trivial matter about which the Decadents were right, although this point might arguably be reckoned as a mere corollary of the first, concerns their cynical attitude to matters of sexual morality – and, indeed, their dismissal of the ambitions of all prescriptive systems of morality. They were right-but not particularly original – when they argued that no set of rules could ever succeed in dampending the perverse curiosity of the human mind; they were right, too, to be severely sceptical as to whether that acknowledged impossibility is altogether to be regretted. The mythology of ideal romantic love which is peddled in today’s world is not much different fro
m that which was peddled in the 1880s, and there are probably no more people who think that actual contemporary relationships are accurately reflected in that mythology than there were then; that is not surprising. What is surprising is there are probably as many people, or more, who think that the world would be a far better place if the real world were more like the mythological world of romantic fiction. A healthy dose of Decadent fiction may still be capable of curing victims of that particular delusion, and ought at least to be tried.
Even the Decadents, it must be confessed, did have a tendency to regret the non-existence of Ideal Love, but their sense of tragedy was outside the common rut. They shed their fair share of tears over the fact that real people have to make do with lesser affections, which must of necessity be granted to relatively undeserving recipients. But they were also prepared to take an experimental attitude to the problem by suggesting that if the mythology turned out to be an abject failure (as it inevitably would) perhaps it might be stretched and twisted into a better shape by trial and error.
The quest for new sensations – which, inevitably, can also be seen as a search for new sins – is sometimes seen even by the Decadents themselves as little more than an elaborate process of self-destruction, but its underlying attitude of combative derision towards received mythology is perfectly healthy. We live, alas, in a world which is still obsessed with the project of finding and maintaining the perfect relationship, and where a substantial fraction of the periodical press, ads and all, is devoted to an extraordinary elaboration of the typical concerns of “agony columns”. The Decadents can tell us, as they told their own contemporaries, that all the advice about how to build the ideal relationship is not only bullshit but unnecessary bullshit, and that the only sensible reaction to the discovery that it never really works is to say “What the hell!” and try something else instead. Decadents admit that the way the cards are stacked, everyone’s life is likely to be a long catalogue of mistakes – but they point out that one doesn’t actually have to keep making the same mistake over and over and over again.
It is mainly because the Decadents say these things, which still need to be said, that there is still some point in reading them. Their stylistic coquetry is not empty even when its illusions have been stripped away; their calculated indecency still poses a real challenge. They can still be alarming and surprising, and even their constant flirtation with certain ideas fit only for the dustbin (which they were unfortunate enough to inherit from incompetent intellectuals) still has a certain redeeming quaintness. Stricken they might have been by ennui, spleen, and impuissance, but when the time came for a Big Push they were never afraid – in spite of their debilitating neurasthenia, cynical wit and calculated charm – to go over the top and charge headlong into the barbed wire.
**********
A SAMPLER OF FRENCH DECADENT TEXTS
1.
TO THE READER
by Charles Baudelaire
Stupidity, soul-sickness, and errant sin,
Possess our hearts and work within our flesh,
Our fond remorse is nursed within the crèche,
As beggars take their lice to be their kin.
Our sins are stubborn, our penitence is mean;
We fatten the confessions that we make,
We revel in the laxness of the path we take,
As though our paltry tears could wash us clean.
Cushioned by evil, Satan Trismegistus rests,
Ministering to our souls entranced,
Melting the metal of desire enhanced
By the vain sublimation of the alchemists.
The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance,
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
Like some impoverished debauchee greedily teasing
The martyred breast of some ancient whore,
We steal what joy we can as we go before,
Though the fruit has shrivelled with the squeezing.
A great demonic host, a million parasites,
Swarms and seethes within our drunken brains,
With every breath we take, the mortifying pains
Descend invisibly to spread their fatal blights.
If rape and poison, cutting blade and fire,
Have not inscribed their tale upon our souls,
To display the banality of our appointed roles,
They fail because we find the thought too dire.
But among the jackals and the carrion-birds
The monkeys, the scorpions and the serpentine,
And the monsters which screech and howl and whine,
In the infamous chaos of our vicious words,
There is one more stained with evil than the rest.
Although it makes no signs or savage cries,
It cannot rest content until the whole world lies
In desolate ruins, and sorely distressed;
It is that tedious malaise of the tired mind
Which sheds a tear while lost in opium dreams.
You know him, reader, and all his stupid schemes,
For we, my brother hypocrite, are of the same sad kind.
**********
2.
THE GLASS OF BLOOD
by Jean Lorrain
She stands at a window beside a lilac curtain patterned with silver thistle. She is supporting herself upon the sill while looking out over the courtyard of the hotel, at the avenue lined with chestnut-trees, resplendent in their green autumn foliage. Her pose is business-like, but just a little theatrical: her face uplifted, her right arm carelessly dangling.
Behind her, the high wall of the vast hallway curves away into the distance; beneath her feet the polished parquet floor carries the reflected gleam of the early morning sun. On the opposite wall is a mirror which reflects the sumptuous and glacially pure interior, which is devoid of furniture and ornament save for a large wooden table with curved legs. On top of the table is an immense vase of Venetian glass, moulded in the shape of a conch-shell lightly patterned with flecks of gold; and in the vase is a sheaf of delicate flowers.
All the flowers are white: white irises, white tulips, white narcissi. Only the textures are different, some as glossy as pearls, others sparkling like frost, others as smooth as drifting snow; the petals seem as delicate as translucent porcelain, glazed with a chimerical beauty. The only hint of colour is the pale gold at the heart of each narcissus. The scent which the flowers exude is strangely ambivalent: ethereal, but with a certain sharpness somehow suggestive of cruelty, whose hardness threatens to transform the irises into iron pikes, the tulips into jagged-edged cups, the narcissi into shooting-stars fallen from the winter sky.
And the woman, whose shadow extends from where she stands at the window to the foot of the table – she too has something of that same ambivalent coldness and apparent cruelty. She is dressed as if to resemble the floral spray, in a long dress of white velvet trimmed with fine-spun lace; her gold-filligreed belt has slipped down to rest upon her hips. Her pale-skinned arms protrude from loose satin sleeves and the white nape of her neck is visible beneath her ash-blonde hair. Her profile is clean-cut; her eyes are steel-grey; her pallid face seems bloodless save for the faint pinkness of her thin, half-smiling lips. The overall effect is that the woman fits her surroundings perfectly; she is clearly from the north – a typical woman of the fair-skinned kind, cold and refined but possessed of a controlled and meditative passion.
She is slightly nervous, occasionally glancing away from the window into the room; when she does so her eyes cannot help but encounter her image reflected in the mirror on the opposite wall. When that happens, she laughs; the sight reminds her of Juliet awaiting Romeo – the costume is almost right, and the pose is perfect.
Come, night! come Romeo! come, thou day in night!
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter
than new snow upon a raven’s back.
As she looks into the mirror she sees herself once again in the long white robe of the daughter of the Capulets; she strikes the remembered pose, and stands no longer in the plush corridor of the hotel but upon a balcony mounted above the wings of the stage in a great theatre, beneath the dazzling glare of the electric lights, before a Verona of painted cloth, tormenting herself with whispered words of love.
Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
And afterwards, how fervently she and her Romeo would be applauded, as they took their bows before the house!
After the triumph of Juliet, there had been the triumph of Marguerite, then the triumph of Ophelia – the Ophelia which she had recreated for herself, her unforgettable performance now enshrined in legend: That’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember! All dressed in white, garlanded with flowers in the birch-wood! Then she had played the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute; and Flotow’s Martha; the fiancée of Tannhaüser; Elsa in Lohengrin. She had played the parts of all the great heroines, personifying them as blondes, bringing them to life with the crystal clarity of her soprano voice and the perfection of her virginal profile, haloed by her golden hair.
She had made Juliet blonde, and Rosalind, and Desdemona, so that Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London had not only accepted blondes in those roles but had applauded blondes – and had come, in the end, to expect and demand blondes. That was all her doing: the triumph of La Barnarina, who, as a little girl, had run bare-legged across the steppe, asking no more and no less than any other girl of her age, lying in wait for the sleighs and the troikas which passed through the tiny village – a poor hamlet of less than a hundred souls, with thirty muzhik peasants and a priest.
The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) Page 8
