The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  Perhaps the closest – close, but no cigar – Scotland came to producing a genuine ‘decadent’ was Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). He was, of course, profoundly affected by his Calvinist upbringing, and, despite his ill-health, no one could deny the vigour of his travels in the Cevennes, the United States and Samoa. It is in his aesthetic and critical writings, especially his contretemps with Henry James, that his stake in a decadent sensibility lies. Art, for Stevenson, was unreal. It was illusive, artifical, self-contained and perfect, in contrast to Life’s messiness, open-endedness, actuality. With more sunlight, a different doctrinal inheritance and more money in his pocket, he might have been a Caledonian Huysmans.

  Snowball

  Maria Alvarez

  If debauchery is the Don Juan of vices, then decadence is Count Dracula. True decadence of spirit is seldom what it appears.

  Sometimes it’s mistaken for addiction – hardly a vice, much though censorious types confuse it as such. The excess of depravity is a vice, but one that requires far too many copious exertions to be properly decadent. It takes determination, cash and sheer dedication to be a debauchee. Guzzling four bottles of Krug for breakfast is hard grind; not to mention all those sexual acrobatics with partners of both genders on a daily diet of old Bolivian marching powder. In fact, the whole thing smacks of one of Satan’s practical jokes: an interminable X-rated territorial army drill.

  Decadence hovers above all this, in its own shadowy realm of perfumed rottenness, sucking the life-blood of the other vices for its death-in-life existence.

  Many moons ago, I was an idle part-time graduate McJobber. My companions were a pair of young unemployed actors. Our afternoons were invariably whiled away in a backwater pub in west London, followed by bottles of whisky back home pilfered from the (absent) landlord’s cache.

  We took to wondering what it would be like to have enough money to be really debauched. As poor people, we began with banal visions of an apocalyptic cornucopia of drink, drugs, oysters, and orgies in Claridges.

  Yet after a while, this imaginary surfeit grew tedious. It all seemed a mite too much bother. One more line of coke … yawn … one more threesome with Torvill and Dean … yawn. (Evidently, we were growing dangerously twisted.)

  We invented an imaginary butler, Mr Snow – Snowball for short. An impeccable gentleman’s gentleman, Snowball resembled Sir Ralph Richardson in his dotage. Apart from the usual domestic duties, polishing our trainers and so forth, Snowball was required to indulge in all the debaucheries and pleasures we had grown too tired and bored to enjoy ourselves. Our amusement consisted in making up tasks for Snowball to do. ‘Snowball, will you orgasm with Ms Sharon Stone for me, I’m too tired to carry on.’ Or ‘Snowball, there’s a case of exquisite Armagnac in the cellar. Do drink it all in one day, there’s a good chap.’ Or, ‘Snowball, could you watch this Horny Housewives Go Deep Throat nonsense for me, I need a nap?’

  Needless to say, Snowball always set about his duties with exemplary solemnity and efficiency no matter how trivial the request: ‘Snowball, will you choose a diamond cock-ring from Aspreys and send it to the nice farmer from the Archers “with best wishes on your birthday from your greatest fans” etc etc.’

  We had moved beyond cheap vicariousness to the austerely decadent satisfaction of knowing that the business of enjoyment was being enacted for us – by proxy.

  At the time, however, being young, greedy and irreverent, we were not given to the examined life and took little notice of the implications of our game, the fact that in our comic fantasy we’d chanced upon the very nucleus of decadence: its sensual and moral atrophy.

  Time did not stand still. Unfortunately, we had to let Snowball go. The actors got work; I moved to a trendy area of London and found myself in a boho environment whose tentacles spread here and there to wealth and privilege.

  I began to be intrigued by the reputation of one particular individual, Diego, who gave infamous parties in his Chelsea home and whom I’d yet to meet. A felicitous birth mixture of Eurotrash, aristo and oil-rich Middle East, he had serious dosh. The stories abounded. He had set off on holiday to Sardinia only to return a day later due to the excessive heat. Another time he’d chartered a yacht and promptly left it moored somewhere full of revellers while he removed himself to a hotel. More often than not he’d order sumptuous meals for a whole group of people, invariably leaving for a mysterious meeting before the starter – but always having taken care of the bill. Though only 28, he owned a Bentley, which was rusting in the garage and employed a butler.

  Diego sounded like Snowball’s rightful master. In retrospect, it was the prospect of experiencing our dutifully debauched butler scenario in actuality that excited me most.

  Diego’s parties were reputed to be glitteringly louche affairs. Out of sheer bad luck, I was always absent when any of my friends attended. After several months the longed-for calling-card arrived. As was Diego’s laid-back wont, someone got a call around eleven o’clock about a party at his place. The troops were assembled in several cabs to descend on SW3.

  Languid beauties flopped around on sofas spilling ash on Aubusson carpets. I couldn’t see the host. I enquired excitedly about the butler. I learned to my disappointment that the latter had done his job ordering the drink from Harrods and had been sent away to his obscure granny flat for a good night’s sleep.

  Finally the host appeared, apologising for being late for his own party. He’d been dining somewhere near Whitehall. Impeccably dressed in an unflashy Saville Row suit, he had, also, impeccably modest manners. His wife was Swiss and tortuously silent. Tall and reed-thin, she brought to mind the kind of fragile nineteenth-century beauty who used to take the waters at Baden Baden. Neither of them seemed the slightest bit tipsy, though they appeared faintly fatigued, in that way that people who’ve never enjoyed a chip butty do.

  It took no more than one of the languid beauties to ask Diego to summon ‘Sooncome’ and – hey presto – a huge hamper of class A drugs was ordered. They were to arrive with the intriguing ‘Sooncome’ in a black BMW (courtesy of the man’s earnings from Diego and his retinue). Sooncome had derived his nickname from his trademark response on the phone when asked for a delivery, which was ‘yeah soon come, blood.’ Naturally, he took great delight in spinning out his arrival over several hours.

  Once Sooncome had been called everyone, except our hosts, grew fidgety and fractious during the long wait. If anything, Diego increasingly assumed the role of a benevolent monarch. Sooncome arrived to much general jubilation. He was of Jamaican origin and sported a gold tooth and a diamond incisor. But in a ceremonial way, he was Snowball, fulfilling his function – if not terribly promptly. Fuelled by Sooncome’s wares, the party guests listened with rictus grins to the dealer’s non-stop right-wing orations on moral philosophy, comparative government, the psychology of policing, and the most economic way of inflicting knife-damage on ‘the enemy’. Little wonder this lot liked him. He must have reminded them of their fathers. It took me a while to realise that our hosts had disappeared some time before. In fact, Diego had greeted Sooncome with affable courtesy, paid him, and absented himself. I imagined him holed up with a mini Himalaya of powder in his bedroom. In the spirit of sociological research, I sneaked off down the corridor to investigate further. The door was slightly ajar; I peeped through it into a vaguely Oriental-looking bedroom. The host was seated on an armchair, talking quietly to his wife and a friend. They were all drinking tea. This, I gathered was what he invariably did as soon as Sooncome arrived. Or retired straight to bed. From time to time he might condescend to take a line; but the problem was that he simply loathed sticking things up his nose.

  I was also informed that at the end of these soirees, Sooncome would disappear with a blue-blooded gal or two. Sometimes expensive escort girls were summoned to the mix (usually, courtesy of Diego’s wallet.) They too would often end up with Sooncome. Whether because he held out the promise of more drugs or because he was possessed of physic
al stamina to equal his verbal one, I never found out.

  All those years earlier in our daft imaginings we had stumbled on the essence of decadence. A falling off from vitality (as the dictionary puts it), in spiritual terms it’s the bastard child of ennui: a state of aestheticised satiety, an attenuating decay. No wonder it has always been associated with aristocracy and idle riches – the sinister lustre of Götterdämmerung. Hegel pointed out that the master classes depend on their ‘slaves’ to do the business of functioning and existing for them, thus making the exchange a paradoxical one in which the master’s role is rendered psychologically slavish. I’d elucidate on this interesting theory further except, reader, I can’t be bothered. (It’s catching this decadence lark. Thank God Snowball never existed. )

  Postcript

  Several years later I learned that Diego had ‘fallen.’ Unable to stand the excessive noise of the parties and averse to nasal penetration, he hit on the idea of injecting smack with a tiny coterie. Anything to die for real, I suppose.

  Decadent Lifestyle

  The Decadent Household

  Lisa Hilton

  Location

  Whether caducious castle or corrupt cottage, the location of your decadent pad is of crucial importance. The Sussex coast is to be avoided at all costs; since it is principally inhabited by earnest middle-aged women writing whimsically earnest novels about middle-aged couplings in whimsical beach huts. Whitstable and Brighton are similarly unsuitable as being packed with irritatingly cool media types, but Whitby has potential, as do the bleaker marches of Lancashire. Provincial towns are a no no, and the bible de decadence, A Rebours, warns of the terrifying consequences of locating to suburbia; dcadent domiciles must be either intensely urban ie inner London, or profoundly rustic. Not even Baudelaire would have been capable of behaving louchely in Clapham or Surrey. Decadent homes must be either rented or inherited (mortgages are for the weak), and should be selected entirely on aesthetic grounds, with no reference to convenient tube stops, gyms or primary schools. Everyone you want to see will come to visit anyway, and the neighbours are bound to move.

  Decorating Tips

  Decadent decor is considerably more challenging nowadays than a red light bulb and a skull on the bureau. Only women’s magazines think red velvet is decadent. The architect Lutyens is rarely considered a degenerate fellow traveller, but he insisted that the drawing rooms of all his homes be painted glossy black. Pistachio lends a summery touch to the ceiling, as gold is much too obvious, and there should be plenty of low, inviting upholstery, preferably featuring obscure and endangered species. Zohar on Via Brera in Milan will make you anything in zebra, proper baby-calf vellum or galuchat (gossamer fine ray skin),but if you can’t run to the real thing, Peter Jones fabrics department has a great selection of fakes. Before you splutter, Peter Jones is a very decadent place to go shopping. Think about it – it represents everything people who want to be cool claim not to aspire to. Just never, never, resort to leopard; it is as imaginative as Jade Jagger. Get your grape cutters and corkscrew in gloriously vulgar solid silver from Tiffany and have your candles imported from Diptyque on the Boulevard St. Germain. In an inversion of William Morris’s principle, have nothing functional that is not beautiful, a dictum which should be extended to visitors and spouses.

  Around the Home

  If you are a drug user, be houseproud. There’s nothing more distressing than snowy surfaces and skanky teaspoons cluttering up the place. A small Venetian mirror can be designated for snorting, and cut-up sari silks, available inexpensively from Southall market, make colourful and attractive tourniquets for guests who may have forgotten their own. A crème Brule torch (Peter Jones again), is easier on the eye and the fingers than stumps of putrid candle. Other kitchen equipment can be minimal, unless you are seriously proposing to cook something (see Clapham above), but you might want a refrigerator to keep bottles and rose petal jam at the correct temperature. If you ever feel up to eating, many companies now deliver oysters and foie gras fresh to the door. Piles of Caravagesque fruit look charming, and may also be consumed for vitamins, though bananas are rarely attractive. Lobsters are an excellent food for children as they are very time-consuming to eat, combining essential nutrition and instructive play.

  Your home should contain none of the following: house-plants, television sets, anything from IKEA, recipe books or framed prints from art galleries, photographs of happy family moments, scatter cushions and nubbly organic soap with bits of bouquet garni sticking out, copies of Elle Deco.

  Entertaining

  ‘Wisdom,’ wrote the libertine philosopher St Evremond, ‘is given us principally that we might learn to handle our pleasures’. Proper debauchery requires planning, and with a little forethought, you and your guests should be able to despoil one another in a pleasant and relaxing atmosphere. A servant is useful, preferably one with no legal status or command of English to minimise the risk of complaints to the police. When you entertain, the twee anxieties of placement may be avoided by shaping each guest’s initial on a black plate in their drug of choice. Dressing for entertainments is de riguer, though it is customary for the hostess to be served naked on a silver platter with the dessert course. Children, lightly painted in gold or silver body make-up, may be used as plate holders or andirons, but don’t put the little dears too close to the fire lest they burn and scream disagreeably. A variety of cocktails should be offered, though absinthe is no longer smart. Very good vintage champagne, adulterated with Guinness or slivovitz, is delightful when poured from a china teapot. A chamber pot should be provided beneath the table for the gentlemens’ use, rinsed first with pure orange flower water to avoid odours. Floral arrangements are a difficulty – lilies are simply too Edgar Allen Poe, and red roses remind one of cheap package holidays to Agadir. Garish plastic flowers can be wiped clean easily and provide an original touch, so give the servant a tenner and ask it to buy something nice.

  If your house is large enough for Saturday to Monday parties, the convention is that the host should first fuck the lady with the bedroom on his right.

  The Decadent Mother

  Rowan Pelling

  Vanessa always loathed the very thought of children. ‘They’re creepy, like dwarves,’ she said to her hairdresser. She was tricked into motherhood at the age of thirty-nine after her Harley Street gynaecologist told her, ‘One more abortion and you’ll need a hysterectomy.’ Even so, she knocked back gin in a scalding hot bath every night for a week – all to no effect. ‘What do old wives know,’ she muttered, ‘they probably all had ten kids.’ The brat stuck fast through the vodka martinis, the all-night raves, the cocaine brunches and thirty Gitanes a day. Even her drug dealer’s startlingly large cock, ramming her hard as she stared in bored silence at the wall, failed to dislodge the brute.

  ‘The baby seems small,’ said the technician who carried out the five-month scan, her mouth pursed tight as a cat’s arse. ‘Good,’ said Vanessa, ‘the smaller the better. Who wants to squeeze a stuffed turkey out of their cunt?’ Not that she had any intention of squeezing. She told her young, tanned obstetrician, ‘I’m not too posh to push, I’m too rich.’ ‘Too much of a bitch, you mean,’ he said with a vulpine smile. Three minutes later they were both on his couch.

  Vanessa told no one she was pregnant except the doctors and her dull, industrialist husband. ‘How foolish he looks when he’s pleased,’ she thought, ‘and the child’s not even his.’ When, at five months, a vulgar mound swelled beneath her concave ribs, she sent an email to friends saying: ‘Going into rehab; back in a while.’ She would rather die than wear a maternity frock in public. So she abandoned her West End flat, the Soho basements and Brixton lovers, and went by cover of night to Surrey.

  She had never known ennui like the marital home. Her husband emptied the drinks cabinet and halved her allowance. In listless silence, all day and most of the night she watched the procession of corpses on Sky News and CNN, looking for clues – would death be better than this
? At regular intervals she jabbed her stomach viciously to make the baby stir. ‘If I’m sodding awake, you should be too,’ she shouted at her belly.

  As Vanessa would later boast, she was tipping out the Paracetemols when the new couple at the Grange asked her to ‘drop by for happy hour.’ ’Linda and I like to get to know the neighbours,’ said Keith, a hire-van magnate, the tip of his pink tongue visible between his laser-white teeth. He served large gins from the bar in his lounge.

  ‘A small one won’t harm the babby,’ Keith said.

  Two hours later they were in the hot tub playing ‘truth or dare’. The next Thursday Vanessa dropped by for ‘home movie night’ and in the weeks to come she would marvel at Linda’s versatility. Sometimes the party was joined by Elaine, a blonde WPC, who dispensed Es from a phial labelled ‘multivitamins’.

  At eight and a half months pregnant, Vanessa was driven by her husband to the Portland Hospital, where her obstetrician groped her once for luck before performing an elective caesarean. ‘Don’t hand it to me!’ she shrieked as a tiny, mewling, blood-stained bundle was thrust at her face. ‘And don’t think,’ she said looking directly at her spouse for the first time in months, ‘that I’m going to let that thing suck my nipple.’

  A big-boned maternity nurse was hired; her face as smooth and ugly as one of the plastic trolls that had sparked a brief playground craze in Vanessa’s childhood. (She would later prove to be a kleptomaniac with a severe personality disorder. Her replacement, a pretty Serb, would leave the child in his cot, day after day, until the wood was gnawed to splinters round the top of the frame.) Nurse and child were dispatched to the attic floor, where Vanessa couldn’t hear ‘all that bloody wailing’. She hired a personal trainer, Mark, and bought amphetamines and coke from Elaine, and in under four weeks she was back in her jeans. To celebrate, she fucked Mark in the master bedroom. ‘He could barely string two words together,’ she told her hairdresser, ‘but even his cock had muscles.’