The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  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 decaden
t 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 impre
ssionable 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.