The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  By contrast, men who affect a military bearing, plethoric, red-blooded, sturdy males who disdain rules of decorum and half-measures and charge unthinkingly into things and immediately lose their heads, these types, for the most part, delight in the striking gleams of yellows and reds, the clashing cymbals of the vermilions and chromes that blind and intoxicate them.

  Lastly, as for the eyes of the enfeebled and the nervous, whose sensual appetites crave foods that have been smoked or pickled, as for the eyes of the over-excitable and the hypochondriac, almost all of them adore that irritating and morbid colour with its sham splendours, its acidic feverishness: orange.

  Des Esseintes’ choice could not, therefore, be in any doubt; but unquestionable difficulties still presented themselves. If red and yellow are enhanced by candlelight, the same doesn’t always hold true of their compound, orange, which flares up and often transmutes into a nasturtium red, a fiery red.

  He studied all their nuances by candlelight and discovered one shade which would not, he felt, lose its stability and disappoint his expectations; these preliminaries completed, he also determined not to use, in his study at least, fabrics and carpets from the Orient, which, now that rich merchants can buy them at a discount in large department stores, had become so boring and so common.

  He decided, in the end, to bind his walls like books, with smoothed gros-grain morocco, and with skins from the Cape that had been flattened by strong steel plates under a powerful press.

  Once the wainscotting was finished, he had the mouldings and high skirting boards painted a dark indigo, a lacquered indigo like that which coach-makers employ for their carriage panels; on the ceiling, slightly domed and also lined with morocco, like an enormous round skylight framed in orangecoloured skin, was a circle of the heavens in royal blue silk, embroidered for an old ecclesiastical cope by the Cologne guild of weavers in days gone by, in the middle of which ascended silver seraphim with outstretched wings.

  In the evening, when the arrangments were done, everything harmonised, blended and settled: the wainscotting conserved its blue, sustained and warmed by the oranges, which, in their turn, preserved their colour unadulterated, invigorated and fanned into life, as it were, by the insistent breath of the blues.

  As far as furnishings went, des Esseintes didn’t have to spend long searching, the room’s sole luxury consisted of books and rare flowers; later, he planned to decorate the remaining bare panels with a few sketches or paintings, but for now he limited himself to putting up ebony shelves and bookcases around most of the walls, spreading the pelts of wild beasts and the skins of blue foxes on the parquet floor, installing, next to a massive fifteenth-century counting-table, deep winged armchairs and an old church reading-stand of forged iron, one of those antique lecterns on which the deacon formerly placed the antiphonary and which now supported a weighty folio edition of du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis.

  The casement windows, the blue, fissured glass of which was dotted with gold-flecked bottle-bottom bosses that intercepted the view of the countryside and allowed only a faint light to penetrate, were draped in their turn with curtains cut from old ecclesiastical stoles, the sombre, smoky golden thread of which was stifled by the almost dead russet of the weave.

  Finally, on the mantelpiece, the cloth of which was also cut from the sumptuous fabric of a Florentine dalmatic, between two gilded copper monstrances of Byzantine style originally brought from the old Abbaye-au-Bois at Bièvre, was a marvellous church canon with three separate compartments delicately wrought like lace-work, containing, under its glass frame, three pieces by Baudelaire, copied onto real vellum in wonderful, splendidly illuminated missal letters: to the right and left were the sonnets bearing the titles La Mort des amants and L’Ennemi; and in the middle was the prose poem entitled, Any where out of the World. N’importe ou, hors du monde.

  Cuttings from Torture Garden

  Octave Mirbeau

  Being perfect artists and resourceful poets, the Chinese have piously conserved the love and devoted cult of flowers: one of the rarest and most ancient traditions to have survived their decadence. And, as flowers have to be distinguished from one another, they have used graceful analogies, dream images, pure or pleasurable names which perpetuate and harmonise in our minds the sensations of gentle charm and violent intoxication which they inspire in us. This is how the Chinese honour their favourite flower, the peony, according to its form and colour with such delightful names that each one is a complete poem or novel in itself: ‘Young Girl Offering Her Breasts’ or ‘The Water Sleeping Under The Moon’ or ‘The Sun In The Forest’ or ‘The First Desire of the Reclining Virgin’, or ‘My Dress is no longer completely white because the Son of Heaven left behind a little of his rosy blood when he tore it’, or how about ‘I have swooned with my Lover in the Garden’?

  And Clara, who recounted these charming things to me, cried indignantly as she stamped the ground with her small feet in her little yellow slippers.

  ‘And they consider these divine poets who call their flowers “I swooned with my Lover in the Garden” to be apes and savages!’

  The Chinese are right to be proud of their Torture Garden, perhaps the most absolutely beautiful in all China where there are many marvellous gardens. The rarest and the most delicate and robust species of flora are collected from the mountain snow line and the parched furnace of the plains as well as those mysterious and wild plants which hide in the most impenetrable forests and which popular superstition considers as being the souls of evil genies. From mangrove to saxatile azalea; from horned and biflorous violet to distillatory nepenthe; from voluble hibiscus to stoloniferous sunflower; from androsace invisible in its rocky fissure to the most wildly tangled liana – each species represented by numerous specimens which, gorged upon organic food treated to the rituals of gardening experts, assume abnormal forms and colourings, the wonderful intensity of which, with our sullen climates and insipid gardens, we are unable to imagine.

  Clara pointed out strange plants growing in the ground across which water gushed forth from all sides. I approached. On high stalks, scaly and stained black like snakeskins were enormous spars, kind of funnel-shaped cornets with the dark violet of putrefaction inside, and the greenish-yellow of decomposition outside, like the open thoraxes of dead animals. Long, blood-red spadices, imitating monstrous phalluses, came forth from these cornets. Attracted by the corpse-like odour that these horrible plants exhaled, flies hovered in concentrated swarms, swallowed up at the bottom of the spar which was adorned from top to bottom with silky projectiles that enlaced the flies and held them prisoner more effectively than any spider’s web. Along the stem, the digitalised leaves were clenched and twisted like the hands of men under torture.

  ‘You see, darling,’ declared Clara. ‘These flowers are not the creation of a sick mind or a delirious genius – they’re of nature … Didn’t I tell you that nature loves death?’

  We had now entered into bamboo palisades along which ran honeysuckle, odorous jasmine, begonia, mauve tree ferns and climbing hibiscus that had not yet blossomed. Moonseed wrapped itself around a stone column with its countless liana. At the top of the column the face of a hideous divinity grimaced, its ears stretched like bats’ wings, its hair ending in fiery horns. Incarvillea, day-lilies, moraea and delphinium nudicaul concealed the base with their pink bells, scarlet thyrses, golden calyxes and purple stars…

  Here and there in the indentations of the palisade, appearing like halls of verdure and flower-beds, were wooden benches equipped with chains and bronze necklaces, iron tables shaped like crosses, blocks and racks, gibbets, automatic quartering machines, beds laden with cutting blades, bristling with steel points, fixed chokers, props and wheels, boilers and basins above extinguished hearths, all the implements of sacrifice and torture covered in blood – in some places dried and darkish, in others sticky and red. Puddles of blood filled the hollows in the ground and long tears of congealed blood hung from the dismantl
ed mechanisms. Around these machines the ground had absorbed the blood. But blood still stained the whiteness of the jasmines and flecked the coral-pink of the honeysuckles and the mauve of the passion flowers. And small fragments of human flesh, caught by whips and leather lashes, had flown here and there on to the tops of petals and leaves. Noticing that I was feeling faint and that I flinched at these puddles whose stain had enlarged and reached the middle of the avenue, Clara, in a gentle voice, encouraged me:

  ‘That’s nothing yet, darling … Let’s go on!’

  We reached an avenue leading to the central pond and the peacocks, which hitherto had followed us, suddenly abandoned us and scattered with a great noise through the flower-beds and the garden lawns.

  The broad avenue was bordered by dead trees on both sides – immense tamarinds whose massive bare branches interlaced in hard arabesques across the sky. A recess was hollowed out in every trunk. The majority remained empty but some enclosed the violently contorted bodies of men and women subjected to hideous and obscene tortures. Some sort of clerk dressed in a black robe stood gravely in front of the occupied recesses with a writing-case on his chest and a police register in his hands.

  ‘It’s the avenue of the accused,’ Clara told me. ‘And these people you see standing here come to take the confessions which only prolonged suffering could tear out of the wretches … It is an ingenious idea. I really do believe they got it from Greek mythology. It’s a horrible transposition of the charming fable of the wood nymph trapped in the trees!’

  Clara approached a tree in which a woman who was still young was growling. She was hanging by her wrists from an iron hook and her wrists were held between two blocks of wood clasped with great force. A rough rope of coconut thread covered with pulverised pimento and mustard and soaked in a salt solution was wound around her arms.

  ‘That rope is kept on,’ Clara was kind enough to explain, ‘until the limb is swollen to four times its usual size…’

  Shadows descended across the garden, trailing blue veils that lay lightly over the bare lawns and more thickly over the flower-beds whose outlines had clarified. The white flowers of the cherry and peach trees – whose whiteness was now moon-like – had elements of slippage and wandering, the strangely stooping aspect of phantoms. And the gibbets and gallows raised their sinister casks and black frames in the eastern sky that was the colour of blue steel.

  Horror! Above a flower-bed, against the purple of the dying evening, endlessly turning on the stakes, slowly turning, turning in the void and swaying like immense flowers with stalks visible in the night, I saw, endlessly turning, the silhouettes of five tortured men.

  ‘Clara! Clara! Clara!’

  Ah yes! The Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, personal interests, hatreds and lies, along with laws, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism and religion. These are its monstrous and hideous flowers – instruments of eternal human suffering. What I saw that day, what I heard, exists and cries out and yells outside that garden, which for me is no more than a symbol of the whole earth. I have vainly sought a lull in crime and a rest in death, but I have found them nowhere.

  Decadent Culture

  UFO Club

  Joe Boyd

  John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins and I opened the UFO Club in Mr Gannon’s Irish dance hall in Tottenham Court Rd in December of 1966. It soon became the epicentre of London’s psychedelic revolution. Pink Floyd were the resident band for the first few months, succeeded as crowd favourites by Soft Machine, Arthur Brown, Tomorrow and the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah band. By the summer, Hoppy was in prison on a trumped-up charge and UFO had been run out of the West End by the police at the urging of the News of the World. But for a few months in the spring of 1967, it was glorious place to be of a Friday night.

  Besides the Floyd, we booked The Exploding Galaxy dance troupe, avant-garde jazz outfits such as Sun Trolley, and ten-minute comedies by The People Show. Yoko Ono cast her Bottoms movie mostly from UFO audiences, who signed up for it in a book by the door. One night she asked for a contact microphone on a long lead, an amp and a stepladder. When the place was packed we cleared some space in front of the stage for the ladder, taped the mic to a pair of scissors, plugged it in and cranked up the volume. Yoko emerged from the dressing room leading a beautiful girl in a paper dress who smiled serenely atop the ladder as Yoko cut the garment off her, the amplified scritch-scritch of the scissors booming across the club.

  A uniformed bobby turned up one night, asking to be allowed in to collect clothes left behind by a man being held in custody. This made sense: half an our earlier, a naked guy had bolted past me up the stairs and disappeared into the night. Hoppy and I agreed that an exception could be made, so I told the audience we were going to let the fuzz in to look for the clothes and turn on the overhead lights (murmurs and booing). As the crowd spread out in a wide circle, some garments could be seen scattered around the floor. The young bobby seemed to blush as he glanced at the crowd, a vivid cross-section of ‘London Freak’ circa May 1967: long hair on the boys,flowered dresses on the girls, Arabian or Indian shirts, a few kaftans, jeans, even a few white shirts and khaki slacks. Many were tripping; most were laughing or grinning.

  The laughter grew as it became clear that his hastily-gathered armful contained more than was required to make his prisoner decent: two or three pairs of underpants (gender undetermined), a couple of shirts, a bra, several socks etc. As he made his way to the door, the working-class constable regarded us with amazement, not hatred. We, in turn, regretted that he could not grasp why we took drugs and danced in the lights, lived for the moment and regarded our fellow man with benign tolerance, even love. That was the theory, anyway. Tested, it would come undone in the ensuing years, even as the bobby’s mates donned kaftans, rolled joints, and joined the crowds at festivals.

  The first man I knew to take hallucinogens was Eric Von Schmidt. (You can see Eric’s photo on one of the record jackets beside Sally Grossman on the cover of ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ and hear Dylan blurt ‘I learned this song from Ric Von Schmidt’ on his eponymous first LP.) Mail-order packages of peyote buds from Moore’s Orchid Farm in Texas arrived periodically at the Von Schmidt apartment near Harvard Square. He would cook them up in a pot and invite friends over to drink the soup. They would stack some LPs on the record player – Ali Akhbar Khan, Lord Buckley, Chopin, The Swan Silvertones, Lighting Hopkins – then drink the potion and try not to be sick. If you couldn’t keep it down you weren’t, in Eric’s view, calm enough (‘centred’ had not yet been used in this context) to deserve the high. It was an experience meant for an intellectual and spiritual elite, not the masses (although he certainly would never have put it that way).

  The market is too efficient, of course, to limit transcendence to people who can stomach peyote. Down the street from Eric’s flat in 1962 was the laboratory of Professor Timothy Leary, who advertised in the Harvard Crimson for volunteers to take LSD at $1 an hour and was determined to become the Johnny Appleseed of hallucinogens. By 1967, pure, powerful LSD tabs were still available while adulterated, amphetamine-laced concoctions were starting to be widely distributed. Few bothered about how elevated the experience might be.

  In June that summer, a News of the World reporter tipped off Scotland Yard about a ‘drugs-and-sex orgy’ at Keith Richard’s place and was rewarded with a ringside seat at the raid. It has become the stuff of legend: Mars bars, threesomes, Marianne Faithfull naked under a fur rug etc., a symbol of out-of-control decadence. The media stopped winking and grinning about ‘Swinging London’ and started wallowing in horror stories about teenagers being led astray. ‘Sgt Pepper’ was the world’s soundtrack that month and powerful Establishment figures were horrified by the implications of influential pop stars’ open fondness for drugs.

  For the UFO audience, the Stones’ bust represented the sinister collusion of circulation-seeking editors, treacherous grasses and killjoy drug squads. Jagger and Richards may have been wealthy superstars, but the
y were counter-culture heroes, too. Hoppy had also been busted that spring (after a plainclothesman reached, conjuror-like, behind his sofa and pulled out an evidentiary plum) and had just been sentenced to eight months in Wormwood Scrubs. Ads and editorials in the International Times, posters around UFO and grafitti in Notting Hill Gate reminded everyone of the injustice. A bucket was passed at the club, the money going to a legal defence fund for drug busts.

  On the last Friday of that momentous month just before Tomorrow took the stage, I found myself in conversation with Twink and a few others. Hoppy’s jailing outraged us and the behaviour of the NotW seemed like the last straw. We decided to close the club after the first set and parade through the West End, finishing off with a protest in front of the NotW building in Fleet St. The West End at 1am on a Friday night was nothing like as busy as it is today, but there were quite a few ‘normals’ about, and they gaped as we rounded Picadilly and headed for Leicester Square, then down through Covent Garden towards Fleet St. Our destination was a letdown: the News of the World building was dark and silent. Firebrands among us started planning a blockade of the Sunday paper and an assault on their vans the next night.

  The long walk in the night air, the hostile stares from the ‘straights’ and the threats from the police had energized everyone, so the club was packed and buzzing when Tomorrow hit the stage about 4am. The unity of spirit between audience and musicians was tremendous: Twink had been at the head of our 200-strong column. Tearing into ‘White Bicycle’, they had never sounded tighter. At some point Skip from the Pretty Things took over on drums as Twink grabbed the microphone and plunged into the audience. Howe’s playing moved to another level of intensity, sending the dancers leaping into the cones of projected light as Twink crawled along the floor, hugging people and chanting ‘revolution, revolution’. Everyone was high – on chemicals or adrenalin or both. You really did believe in that moment that when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake. The tide of history was with us and music was the key.