The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  Turn inward. Unlike a single night of hard boozing, you will fluctuate between moments of complete madness and perfect clarity. Why? During a typical night of pounding booze your psyche tends to go into hiding, it will hold its breath and try not to inhale the madness you would expose it to. But during a bender it will realize it has to come up for air, leaving you in a unique condition to examine the brightest and darkest memories of your life. Enjoy the fresh if somewhat grimmer perspective, you will come away with an understanding of concepts you never even caught glimpse of.

  Examine the bottle in your hand. Read the label. Did you know Jack Daniels was invented by a 16-year-old minister? Commute with your demons, it is your co-conspirator of the moment. Soon it will be your brother.

  Wander the room. See things you never noticed before, the way a lamp hangs, the way it throws noir light on an ashtray left by a long forgotten girlfriend. You realize you’ve gotten to know the surface you so well you’ve neglected the inner you. Bring light to all those dark corners you forgot about, remember what you used to be, what you still are. Pull books from shelves you haven’t read in years, remember what they did to you. You’re also in the perfect state to browse old photographs, to get back in touch with old emotions. Also revel in the nihilistic notion that all these fine feelings will most likely be forgotten until the next bender.

  Have a seat. Refresh your drink, have a cigarette. Outside your room you can feel forces moving against you, do not check your messages, do not answer the door. This is your world now, you are sovereign and have no need of counsel. At this moment comes the realization that no one owns your time but you. As long as the booze holds out.

  Sooner or later, however, things can begin to crumble. You may find yourself in bed wondering how you got there, and if you will be able to get a glass of water to your lips without vomiting. You may hyperventilate, suffer heart palpitations, sweat, shake, hallucinate and lose circulation in your face and limbs, but mainly you will vomit – vomit – vomit! Just remember to rehydrate, force some bland food down and drink some more alcohol as quickly as possible. You may keep throwing it up, but damn you, force it down.

  You will find at this juncture that it takes more alcohol just to lose your shakes than it used to take to get you wasted. Now you are truly, ‘Leaving Las Vegas’.

  Days will melt into nights and back into days and you may lose track of time. Don’t turn on the news, it’s hoarse shouting will depress you. Now you may start wondering how long you should keep it going. Some people, famous and otherwise, have kept benders going for years, especially British theatre actors and American writers. Stephen King claims he wrote his best novels while on one long bender, drinking a case of 16-ounce tallboys a night while cranking out bestsellers he barely remembers writing. Now he’s in AA and writes pap he does remember.

  Of course, long term benders do not always work out for the best, poet Dylan Thomas’ exit being one of the more famous examples. Dylan culminated a decade-long bender on a New York sidewalk where, on his knees, he told a young woman: ‘I have just drunk 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record. I love you.’ He promptly died of what the autopsy called ‘insult to the brain’ (and a compliment to the lady).

  I know nothing about dying, unfortunately, but I can explain how to stop if that’s the option you choose. 1) Utilize every hangover cure you know. 2) Keep moving; clean your messes, do the dishes, shower, exercise, take a long walk, etc. 3), Drink beer. As Albert Finney says in Under the Volcano, ‘Theresh nething bedder t’sober wunnup, thin beeah.’ Open the shades, listen to your answering machine messages and vow never to drink again. Around 5 or 6 pm you may need some form of sedative – preferably a Valium but Advil will do in a pinch. Wait until most of the booze is out of your system before taking anything heavy, as it could easily cause death, or worse, more vomiting.

  If all goes well, you will be a shattered mess by the next morning. Force yourself out of bed, take a long, cold shower, and start drinking Gatorade. Maybe you will have to stay home from work. If you’re lucky, maybe you don’t even have to work, maybe you’ve already been fired. Regardless, by late afternoon, you will feel good enough to eat some lunch.

  So what, you may ask, are the benefits to such self-destructive behaviour? Well, none really. Or … are there? Think back to the height of your bender. Everything was numbed, timeless bliss. You let yourself go, utterly. You became swept into the sea. You practically drowned and you miraculously returned. You could have kept going, but you turned back. On the slow raft ride to eternity, you sailed long enough to relax, but not long enough that you couldn’t get home. You caught a glimpse of heaven and a glimpse of hell. You drank of what lies beyond pleasure, pain and petty mortal striving.

  Decadent Anti-heroes

  The Debauchee

  Earl of Rochester

  I rise at eleven, I dine about two

  I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do;

  I send for my whore, when, for fear of a clap

  I fuck in her hand, and spew in her lap;

  Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall asleep,

  When the jilt growing bold, to my pocket does creep;

  Then slily she leaves me, and to revenge the affront

  At once both my lass and my money I want.

  If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk

  What a coyl do I make for the loss of my punk?

  I storm, and I roar, and I fall in a rage,

  And missing my lass, I bugger my page:

  Then crop-sick, all morning I rail at my men,

  And in bed I lie yearning till eleven again.

  Phrases and Philosophies for the

  Use of the Young

  Oscar Wilde

  The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

  Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

  If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.

  Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

  A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

  Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

  The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

  Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

  Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

  In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

  If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

  Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

  It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

  No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.

  Only the shallow know themselves.

  Time is a waste of money.

  One should always be a little improbable.

  There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.

  The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

  To be premature is to be perfect.

  Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

  Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

  A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

  In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

  Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

  One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

  It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature i
s soon found out.

  Industry is the root of all ugliness.

  The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

  It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

  The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

  The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

  Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

  There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

  To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

  Against Nature

  J.K. Huysmans

  More than two months passed by before des Esseintes could immerse himself in the silent repose of his house at Fontenay; purchases of every kind compelled him to walk the streets of Paris again, to scour the city from one end to the other.

  And what researches he had undertaken, what meditations he had given himself up to, before confiding his house to the decorators!

  He had long been expert in the sincerities and deceptions of colour. In days gone by, when he still entertained women at his home, he had constructed a boudoir in which, amid dainty pieces of furniture carved from pale Japanese camphor-wood, and beneath a kind of tent of rose-tinted Indian satin, bare flesh blushed delicately under the prepared lighting filtering through the material.

  This room, in which mirrors on the wall echoed each other and reflected a whole series of pink boudoirs as far as the eye could see, had been celebrated among whores, who took delight in immersing their nudity in this bath of warm rose, made aromatic by the scent of mint given off by the wood of the furniture.

  But, even putting aside the benefits of that artificial atmosphere, which seemed to transfuse new blood into skin tired and worn by heavy make-up and by nights of dissipation, he savoured particular pleasures on his own account in these languorous surroundings, pleasures which somehow energised memories of past afflictions and old anxieties and made them more intense.

  Thus, out of hatred and contempt for his childhood, he had suspended from the ceiling of this room a small, silver wire cage in which a captive cricket sang, as they had amid the ashes of the fireplaces at the Château de Lourps; when he listened to this sound, so often heard in the past, all the constrained and silent evenings spent next to his mother, all the neglect of his suffering and repressed boyhood stirred up within him; and then, to the jerkings of the woman he was mechanically caressing and whose words or laughter would break into his fantasies and rudely recall him to reality of the bedroom, a tumult would arise in his soul, a need to avenge the miseries he’d endured, a rage to defile the memories of his family by shameful actions, a furious desire to lie panting on cushions of flesh, to drain to their utmost dregs the most violent and the most bitter of carnal frenzies.

  Again, at other times, when in the grip of depression, when, during rainy autumn days, he was assailed by a hatred of the streets, of his home, of the muddy yellow sky and the macadam-black clouds, he would take refuge in this retreat, setting the cage lightly in motion and watching it endlessly reflected in the play of the mirrors, until it seemed to his dazed eyes that the cage was not moving at all, but that the whole boudoir was reeling and turning, filling the house with a rose-coloured waltz.

  And in the days when he had felt impelled to draw attention to himself, des Esseintes had designed marvellously strange furnishings, dividing his drawing room into a series of alcoves, each decorated with a different wall-hanging that related by a subtle analogy, by a vague harmony of joyful or sombre, delicate or crude colours, to the character of the Latin or French books he most loved. He would then seclude himself in whichever of these recesses the décor of which seemed to him to best correspond with the essence of the work which the caprice of the moment had led him to read.

  And lastly, he had had constructed a high-ceilinged room, intended for the reception of his tradesmen; they would enter, sit themselves side by side on church pews, and then he would climb up into a magisterial pulpit from which he would preach sermons on dandyism, entreating his bootmakers and tailors to conform, in every particular, to his briefs in matters of style, threatening them with pecuniary excommunication if they failed to follow, to the letter, the instructions contained in his monitories and bulls.

  He acquired a reputation as an eccentric, to which he gave the finishing touch by wearing suits of white velvet and waistcoats embroidered with gold thread, by inserting, by way of a cravat, a bouquet of Parma violets in the open neck of his shirt, and by giving notorious dinners to men of letters, at one of which, inspired by the eighteenth century, he organised a funeral repast to celebrate that most trivial of mishaps that can afflict a man.

  In a dining room hung in black that opened onto the garden of the house, now transformed with its paths powdered with charcoal, its little pond bordered with basalt and filled with ink, its shrubberies laid out with cypresses and pines, dinner had been served on a black tablecloth, adorned with baskets of violets and black Scabiosa, and lit by candelabra from which green flames blazed and by chandeliers in which wax tapers flared.

  While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests had been waited on by naked black women wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth sprinkled with tears.

  From black-bordered plates they had eaten turtle soup, Russian rye bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviar, salted mullet roes, smoked black pudding from Frankfurt, game with sauces the colour of liquorice and boot polish, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, plum-puddings, nectarines, grape preserves, mulberries and black-heart cherries; from dark glasses they had drunk wines from Limagne and Roussillon, from Tenedos, Val de Peñas and Oporto; and after coffee and walnut brandy, they had savoured kvass, porter and stout.

  ‘A farewell dinner for a temporarily dead virility’ was what he had written on the invitation card, which looked just like a burial announcement.

  But these extravagances in which he had once so gloried burned themselves out in due course; now he was filled with contempt for such puerile and outmoded displays, for his abnormal clothes and his bizarrely embellished apartment. He dreamed simply of composing, for his own pleasure and no longer for the astonishment of others, an interior that would be comfortable, albeit decorated in a rare style, of fashioning for himself a unique, calm setting, adapted to the needs of his future solitude.

  When the house at Fontenay was ready, appointed according to his plans and desires by an architect, when all that remained was to determine a scheme of furnishing and decoration, he devoted himself afresh to a lengthy review of the whole range of colours and shades.

  What he wanted were colours whose expressiveness would be enhanced by the artificial light of a lamp; it little mattered to him if, by the light of day, they were insipid or crude, for it was at night that he lived, feeling that then one was more oneself, more alone, and that the mind only grew animated and active with the approach of darkness; he found, too, a peculiar pleasure in being in a richly illuminated room, the only person up and about amid shadow-haunted and sleeping houses, a kind of pleasure in which an element of vanity entered, perhaps, a wholly singular satisfaction known to late-night workers, when, drawing aside the window curtains, they perceive that everything around them is extinguished, that all is silent, that all is dead.

  Slowly, one by one, he selected the colours.

  By candlelight, blue tends toward an artificial green; if it is dark, like cobalt or indigo, it turns black; if it is light, it turns grey; if it is a soft true blue, like turquoise, it grows dull and cold. So, unless it was combined with some other colour, as an auxiliary, there could be no question of making blue the dominant note of a room.

  On the other hand, iron greys look gloomier and heavier still; pearl greys lose thei
r azure and metamorphose into a dirty white; browns become lifeless and cold; as for dark greens, such as emperor and myrtle green, they have the same properties as deep blue and merge into black. There remained, then, the paler greens, such as peacock green, vermilion and lacquer, but there again light banishes their blues and preserves only their yellows, which in turn have a false tone, a hint of cloudiness, about them.

  There was no need to spend time thinking about tints of salmon, maize and rose, the effeminate natures of which were contrary to all ideas of isolation; and finally there was no need either to consider violet, which loses its colour, only the reddish tones holding their own at night, and what a red! a viscous red like the dregs of cheap wine. Besides, it seemed to him pointless to use this colour, since by ingesting santonin in the right dose everything looks violet, and this way it was easy to change the colour of his hangings without even touching them.

  These colours disposed of, only three remained: red, orange, yellow.

  Of these, he preferred orange, thus by his own example confirming the truth of a theory which he declared had an almost mathematical exactitude: that a harmony exists between the sensual nature of a truly artistic individual and the colour which his eyes see in the most unique and vivid fashion.

  Disregarding entirely the generality of men whose gross retinas perceive neither the cadence peculiar to each colour nor the mysterious charm of their gradations and nuances; and disregarding, too, the bourgeois, whose eyes are insensible to the pomp and splendour of strong, vibrant tones; considering, therefore, only people with refined pupils, cultivated by literature and art, he was convinced that the eyes of those among them who dream of ideal beauty, who demand illusions, who prefer shades in their bedroom, are generally caressed by blue and its derivatives, such as mauve, lilac and pearl grey, provided always that they remain soft and do not overstep the bounds where they lose their personalities and are transformed into pure violets and blunt greys.