The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  But was all this little more than cosmetics and posturing? From Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan to Kurt Cobain, rock has had no shortage of dead boys, but very few that have attained the sacrificial quality of the corpses of Chatterton, Keats, Shelley, and Byron: possibly Brian Jones of the Stones (drowned in mysterious circumstances), Johnny Thunders of transvestite glam band the New York Dolls (possibly murdered, possibly overdosed), and the elegantly wasted Richey Edwards (Manics – disappeared). Neither are there in the rock scene the wanderers, the outcasts, the sinister evil recluses who lurk in the shadows of Gothic novels and the underworld of nineteenth-century London – the nocturnal visitors to clandestine clubs specializing in the perverse and the unutterable that Dorian Gray finds he is unable to resist. Pete Doherty and his crack smoking is rather too refined, rather too knowing in its illegality, and rappers consorting with gangsters and other urban lowlife is neither pretty nor wasted.

  But there is a monster who does creep around the fringes of the globe, as if cursed like the Wandering Jew to be hounded from border to border. He was a rock star – once. A magnificent, cartoonish zany in his day who aspired to supreme decadence. He didn’t find it in the rococo costumes he flounced about in, or in the homo-erotic yobbo anthems to which he strutted and fretted his hours upon the stage. He found it as he aged, when he began to yearn again for the adulation of prepubescent boys and girls. Since then, Gary Glitter has been vilified. His crimes and secrets – like the hideous crimes and secrets that lie at the heart of Gothic novels – are indefensible, inexplicable to all right thinking people, and so he is condemned to carry this crime, this terrible notoriety wherever he goes. Like Satan, his hell goes with him, and burns with the ferocity of the law – a law that seems ever more eager to exterminate him. He, perhaps, has most in common with the archetypal Romantic decadents, now that Jimmy Page has received an OBE, Mick Jagger has been knighted, and even the eerily immortal Keith Richards has invested some £60,000 in a trendy beach hut on an exclusive part of the English coast. Byron’s friends certainly feared that as successive scandals broke, he risked being lynched by a mob if he ventured out in London and, of course, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to hard labour, ruined and ultimately destroyed by his ordeal – his imprisonment was effectively a death penalty. Was the public outcry against these two as vociferous as that against Gary Glitter? Whether you like it or not, he is a true outcast – and may be the most decadent rock star on the planet.

  Memories of the Decadence

  Hari Kunzru

  At the beginning of the Decadence things were easy. Although we were bored, and though everything had been done before, we were seized with a peculiar sense of potential. Our anomie had something optimistic to it. It was the golden age of our decline.

  During the Decadence we went for promenades in the poorer quarters of the city, pausing to examine choice deformities, examples of disease or dementia. Soon we began to imitate them, at first only in mannerisms, later using make-up, drugs, prosthetics, or surgery. At length it became impossible to tell the fashionable from the afflicted. We thought this a salutary moral lesson, and took great delight in ignoring it.

  During the Decadence we ate and drank to excess, until a point came when excess went out of fashion. Then we would revert to an extreme frugality. Mathematicians told us the attractor governing our consumption was a simple period which, though occasionally disrupted by shifts elsewhere in the libidinal economy, was reasonably easy to map. Manufacturers of luxury foods and the proprietors of health farms, spas and colonic irrigation parlours learned to track the so called Bulimia Cycle, and for a time such businesses became extremely profitable. Soon however, activity became so intense that the pattern was disrupted and our predictions went awry, setting in motion a wave of bankruptcies, suicides and social ostracisms.

  During the Decadence we gave up sexual intercourse, substituting for it various kinds of fetishism. We refined our tastes, narrowing their range and fantastically increasing their complexity. Certain people became interested in abstraction, concentrating perhaps on household objects or patterns of light and shade. Such citizens were known to climax spontaneously at the sight of a safety pin or a line of red tail lights stretching forward along a dual carriageway. One celebrated roué took his pleasure entirely from the contemplation of lipstick stains on the rims of Waterford crystal champagne flutes. He claimed this stemmed more from an appreciation of colour and texture than any displacement of the presence of a woman onto the glass.

  During the erotic phase of the Decadence, combinations of time, place, mood and the presence of physical objects became ever more specific. An increasing percentage of resources were dedicated to sexual research and organisation. Orgasms began to require corporate sponsorship, a trend which reached its apogee in the meticulously-planned bacchanals at Nuremberg, Jonestown and Hyde Park. The latter, in which an estimated two hundred thousand people participated in a ritual designed solely to produce the little death in a middle-aged software billionaire, was considered the highpoint of the movement. A cluster of massively-parallel processors were connected to a variety of front-end delivery devices. When triggered they instantiated patented pleasure-algorithms in the crowd, causing runaway positive feedback which was gathered into a series of giant cells, amusingly styled to represent luminous linga and yoni. When the charge had accumulated to a sufficient degree it was fed back via a fibreoptic core to the Park Lane hotel suite where the entrepreneur lay, bathed in the glow of his hi-res monitors. The crowd themselves, devotees of the influential cult of auto-erotic consumption, financed the event through ticket sales and the purchase of various items of merchandising. The energy generated by their activity produced a small quantity of almost-clear seminal fluid on the raw silk sheets of the billionaire’s bed, and augmented his bank balance by an estimated twelve and a half million pounds. It was thus considered a success and plans for a two-hundred date world tour were drawn up, only to be scotched by his premature death from skin cancer in a Hawaii tanning dome. Soon afterwards, a fashion for feverish masturbatory interiority gained favour, inaugurating a rage for Keats, broom closets and antique printed pornography. Boarding schools were set up throughout the country. The days of the megabacchanals drew temporarily to a close.

  The involvement of large numbers of people in organised sexual experimentation necessitated the development of information networks, directories and algebraic search engines dedicated to matching those of compatible tastes. Nymphets were put in touch with elderly professors, cyborg freaks with the manufacturers of Japanese industrial robots, those interested in coercion with those who wanted to be coerced. This last category caused some problems among purist dominants, for whom the desire to be coerced disqualified some candidates from consideration as slaves, concentration camp inmates or members of religious orders. A standard disclaimer form was quickly developed. Willingness to sign meant automatic barring as an involuntary submissive. These questions of consent were handled by the Society of Sadean Solicitors (SSS), whose obsessive fascination with the Byzantine complexities of this area of law never once led them to waive their exorbitant fees.

  During the Decadence, eroticism itself was only a passing fad. The information network which grew up to enable efficient sexual contact became itself the object of our interests. Connoisseurs of classifications, indices and filing systems paid astronomical sums for rare databases. We became collectors of objects, not from any particular interest in the things themselves, but simply for the opportunities they presented us for cataloguing. Some citizens rejected computer automation altogether, taking great pride in feats of card-indexing. Cross-referencing by hand became an art as much appreciated as sculpture or the programming of combat games.

  We soon developed an acute awareness of taxonomy. Classification according to phylum, genus and species became de rigueur, not just for biological material, but in many other fields as well. Televised public debates were held over the correct designat
ion of common phenomena. They were conducted along the lines of mediaeval theological disputations, and took place in a studio mocked up to represent the cloisters of the twelfth-century University of Bologna. The only anachronism was the pair of bikini-clad girls who operated the digital scoreboard.

  We engaged in a passionate love affair with hierarchies, all the more intense for our awareness that they were meaningless, even ridiculous as tools for understanding our distributed, networked world. As the ebbs and flows of our frenzied culture became more extreme, we turned to the verities of dead, static systems to comfort ourselves, soothing the ache of the data pumping faster through our bruised, red-raw flesh. We relearned Abulafia’s Caballah and studied the circular taxonomies of the Catalan, Ramón Lull. We rejected Watson and Crick for Paracelsus and John Dee, embraced Galen and the four humours, studied the Tree of Knowledge, the Body Politic, the Great Chain of Being and the angelology of the Scholastics. We wept at the beauty of the Metaphysical Grammarians, and yearned to know the true Hebrew God spoke to Adam before the flood.

  Eventually the cult of learning collapsed altogether and with it, the preoccupation with self-definition which had driven the entire early period of the Decadence. Citizens no longer cared to record or understand the minutiae of their personal experience. They left themselves unexplored. After the collapse of all extant systems of knowledge, a feature of the early decadent period, subjective experience had become the only reference point for establishing meaning or value. Ceasing even to ask what one wanted thus became considered the most advanced form of transgression. Embracing this we conducted the pursuit of pleasure in a lacklustre, half-hearted way. If we stumbled on something we liked, it was purely by chance. Maybe we would return to it. More often than not we would limp off somewhere else. There were many casualties. Service industries suffered dreadfully. Aesthetics collapsed as a discipline.

  During this critical period of the Decadence, we did whatever we could to avoid the act of choice. We chose our political leaders via a lottery, and organised our social lives by an ingenious system of random number generation. Many citizens abandoned even their most basic body functions to chance. Gambling disappeared as a pastime, since none of us were interested in beating the odds.

  Pure randomness soon fell into decline. Some definition returned, though our codes were still fuzzy, unclear and imprecise. The vague vogue, as it became known, lasted some time, though the inexact measuring systems in use during this phase render impossible any accurate statement of its length, impact, or intensity. It was a time of rumour, myth, superstition and nameless fear. Certain revisionist scholars have accordingly refused to recognise it as a historical entity, since it seems in so many ways continuous with the rest of our troubled, fluid times.

  Having exhausted the most arcane possibilities of body and mind, having become bored with boredom itself, we began to adopt postures of total commitment. Ideologies were formed, wars fought, and causes died for, all in a spirit of absolute hedonism. We believed because it pleased us to believe. Our crusades and jihads were as bloody as any in history. We performed breathtaking acts of self-sacrifice and exacted violent retribution on our enemies. Bizarre monotheisms arose, whose fiery ill-worded theologies afforded ample opportunity for schisms, heresies and apostasy. There were public crucifixions. Young men with faraway eyes held their hands in flame rather than sign documents of recantation. Soon totalitarianism swept through our cities, bringing tanks and napalm in its wake. We covered the earth in ashes. The devastation ushered in a period of mourning, during which we wept rivers of tears, planted trees and erected monuments whose poignancy matched the vastness of our remorse. Joy followed hard on the heels of our mourning. Lassitude followed joy. Our prophets and scientists ran simulations to predict the next lurch of our communal whims, but each time their code was outdated as soon as it was compiled. The cycle ran faster, cults and movements swarming like flies on a carcass, paradigms blooming and withering like exotic cancers. Soon there was only speed, a sensation of pure intensity.

  Then one day the Decadence ended. We began to be moderate in all things. Our decisions were considered, the product of sound judgement. Our institutions stabilised and prepared themselves for steady growth. We quoted maxims to each other. ‘A little and often’. ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’. Now our economists have quelled the speculators, advocating co-operation and a sound industrial base. We believe in the family, in community and an undefined spirituality, though if you asked us we could not tell you why. Debating is of no interest any more. We want a quiet life. ‘All to the good’, as we often say to our neighbours. We are content. And yet … And yet there is something stale in the air. Citizens whisper in the social clubs. They say that it cannot last.

  Scotland and Decadence

  Stuart Kelly

  Decadence, like most artistic phenomena, is easy to recognise and hard to define. To account for its lack is even harder, even though its absence may be just as conspicuous. And it should be stated at the outside: Scottish decadents are as elusive as a certain Loch’s putative plesiosaurus.

  Ironically, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘decadence’ enters the English language thanks to a Renaissance text, The Complaynt of Scotland. Published in 1549, and sometimes attributed to the Dundee-born Protestant scholar Robert Wedderburn, The Complaynt is a fierce and witty polemic, pressing Scotland’s claims as an independent, sovereign country. The word occurs in a passage where Dame Scotia is, as one might expect from the title, complaining: ‘my triumphant stait is succumbit in decadens, ther can nocht be ane mair vehement perplexite’.

  Is there a glimpse here as to why the phrase ‘Scottish Decadence’ seems ever so slightly oxymoronic? At the opening of The Complaynt, the narrator argues that ‘the varld is neir ane ende’, and the eschatology of the Reformation stressed the imminence of the apocalypse. Decadence could be understood, if not actively enjoyed, as one of the ‘signs of the end of the age’; a quite literal fin-de-siècle. ‘Carpe diem’ took on a different meaning – not ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ but ‘repent: for ye know not the hour’. Although it failed to usher in the Great Reckoning, the Reformation radically reshaped the Scottish mindscape. On the ecclesiastical level, church décor bypassed the baroque and headed straight to minimalism – the almost kitsch redeployment of Catholic iconography present in works by Gustave Moreau, Swinburne and Dowson was far less feasible in Scotland. Industriousness, restraint and gravity became the cardinal virtues; fecklessness, self-indulgence and frivolity the mortal sins. Most importantly, however, the Reformers had won.

  The success of their theology left a crusading imprint on writers who ostensibly rejected the Protestant work-ethic: even a writer as dismissive of conventional mores as Alexander Trocchi still launched a ‘revolutionary’ programme, Sigma, ‘the Invisible Insurrection in a Million Minds’. The idea that the world could be changed, and that there was an artistic duty to do so, unites such diverse writers and thinkers as Geddes, Buchan and MacDiarmid. Art for art’s sake was never sufficient. Scottish forms of rebellion – most notably, drunkenness – reacted against ‘Calvinist’ austerity, but, by self-consciously behaving ‘badly’, left its moral dominance intact. Take, for example, James Boswell, whose every sexual escapade was immediately followed by earnest bleats for forgiveness. Even the characters in such contemporary works as Trainspotting and Morvern Callar, who are sexually and chemically explorative, have a sense of moral code. Their escapes are desperate, not decadent.

  Many of the themes associated with decadence were similarly stymied by the Kirk. There’s more than an element of truth in the old joke that the Church of Scotland disapproves of sex standing up for fear it might lead to dancing. Scotland did have a nascent theatrical tradition – indeed, John Knox himself saw a play where an actor played Knox – but a Puritan element found fault even with a play as numbingly moral as the Rev. Home’s Douglas. The revival of theatre in the 20th century conformed to the crusading ethic;
with politically explicit works such as 7:84’s The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, or Communicado’s Jock Tamson’s Bairns. For an aspiring poet of the 1890s, there were very few chorus girls to woo.

  Certain ‘ostentations’, such as cosmetics, gourmet foods and dilettantism, were indubitably frowned on by the Church; but, as importantly, the Scottish economy was such that there were fewer opportunities for conspicuous consumption. A Marxist reading of the curious absence of decadence might suggest the notion that both fiscally and by moral inclination, Scotland had no leisure class.

  Across this predominantly dreich landscape, a few isolated figures gleam. Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) may have been the ‘English Opium Eater’, but he spent more than half his life in Edinburgh: usually, it must be said, impecuniously. He contributed to Noctes Ambrosianae, the irreverent satire in Blackwood’s Magazine; a highlight of which is the description of James Hogg’s experimentation with opium. Another, briefer, guest was the ‘Great Beast’, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), who quit Welwyn Garden City for a retreat on the banks of Loch Ness before relocating to Sicily.

  Indigenous Scots, if they were inclined to bohemian pursuits, tended to explore this fascination outside of Scotland. John Davidson (1857–1909) is known now, if at all, for ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, which inspired T S Eliot. He was, however, a contributor to The Yellow Book, a chronicler of the demimonde in Fleet Street Eclogues, and the author of a series of remarkable, rebellious Testaments. The gloriously hedonistic Norman Douglas (1868–1952), author of South Wind, is most closely associated with the Mediterranean, not his Aberdeenshire birthplace.