The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  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 th
e 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.