The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  The arrival of my coffin should be as carefully timed as the star turn’s entrance onto a variety stage. Once the crowd is warm, but before they’re too drunk to appreciate the sheer majesty of my coffin, set atop an ebony coach led by black blinkered stallions with nodding ostrich plume headdresses. There will be no pious requests for no flowers please at my send-off. I want gangster wreaths with tributes spelt in flowers.

  The general holiday will mean that from the badlands of the East to the genteel West End the streets will be lined with old and young, perhaps a few souls will even travel over from Edinburgh.

  The dancing clubs and majorette troupes of Glasgow will have donned their devil costumes, topped their batons with plastic skulls and bring up the wake shaking their booties to the rhythm of the Maryhill women’s drum group. No bagpipes please. And finally, a sombre line of Hell’s Angels on Harleys each one topped by a black and red silk pennant will give a last glare to the crowd to remind them of who I am – was.

  The picture gets hazy towards the end. I imagine other writers, friends and enemies, my publisher and agent among the throng and realise that I want to outlive them all. After all I know that once they’ve thrown me in the ground they’ll all head to the pub and as the drink flows the conversation will soon drift from me to them…

  The Last Word

  Dear Rowan,

  What the fuck does a mummy from Cambridge know about decadence?

  You don’t even fuck! I was on my way to a brothel the other day when I met you: ‘Would you care to join me my darling?’ I said. You looked at me as if I had just dribbled sherry trifle in front of starving Biafrans. ‘Er, um, no thank you,’ you stumbled. Whore licks? Off home for Horlicks more like.

  What is the point of a woman who doesn’t fuck? It’s like a bank without money. A lighthouse without a light. Christianity without Christ. The only brilliant thing about women is the fact that they are guaranteed to have on them at any time, any place, a pair of tits for sucking and a cunt for fucking. But what of you? You quiver and shiver, but never deliver. Let me tell you baby, a woman who doesn’t fuck, doesn’t do anything else.

  I wouldn’t even object if you were a nun. Halibut. In decadence as in religion, the blasphemers operate shoulder to shoulder with the believers, enjoined by passion. It’s the don’t knows you want to watch out for, the in-betweens, the lukewarm. And because you, Rowan, are neither hot nor cold I will spew you out of my mouth.

  It is intolerable. You pose as outré but you are about as decadent as the St Trinian’s hockey team. You are a non swimmer working as a life guard. A sheep in sheep’s clothing. A gong at a railway crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train whooshes by.

  In the 1830s, one gentleman, when charged with pushing his pregnant mistress into the Seine defended himself by saying, ‘We live in an age of suicide; this woman gave herself to death.’ That’s decadence, Miss Pelling. Put your brat in an orphanage and come down here bitch and milk my fucking cock.

  So fuck you – I’m not appearing in your crappy book. Every word in it is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. You want me to be an electric eel in a pond of goldfish? Pah! My work is not companionable. And there is no such thing as costarring with Sebastian. Especially with straight-to-video performers. Middleweight, middlebrow, middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class, middle-of-the-road, middle-England, middling twats.

  All of you have learned to write but evidently can’t read. If you could read your stuff you’d stop writing. If asked to sign your book, I would whip out my cock, and piss all over it. ‘There. There’s my fucking signature.’ I would say.

  In the absence of piss I have used ink.

  HRL His Royal Lowness. Sebastian Horsley.

  Dear Reader,

  There are losers who borrow books from the library; there are more enterprising losers who have stolen them from the library (or the remainder bin) - but you, a loser who has actually bought this book?

  Was it difficult wading through these shallows? Was its attack like being stoned to death with popcorn? Was it like watching a chicken try to fly?

  You deserve everything you didn’t get. Reading about decadence is like dancing about architecture. Writing describes the unlived life. Reading is a lonely and private substitute for experience.

  And just what the fuck have you done? Have you fucked a 1000 prostitutes? Or sold your body to the lowest bidder? Have you run a brothel? Cut off the end of your own finger or come over your own sister? Deliberately electrocuted yourself or jumped out of an aeroplane on amphetamines? Surely you have you swum naked with the great white shark or been crucified with real nails? Have you been buggered by a mass murderer? Have you fucked an old lady? Or what about an amputee with no arms or legs? A limbless trunk full of your own spunk? Even a blow up doll would be a start. Have you played Russian Roulette? Or been shot at by a whore? Or what about eating a big bowl of your own faeces? Or even a big bowl of fuck? Surely you’ve made a million in a year and spent a million in a year? Or smoked £100,000 of crack? Injected heroin into your cock? Watched someone die? Overdosed your girlfriend? Jumped off a cliff? Had a shot in the dark, a shot in the arm, a shot in the head? Have you fucked in a church and prayed in a brothel?

  No, I didn’t think so. I have. The hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn’t elevate me to the depths of depravity.

  But you? What of you sad reader? Sitting there with your book. What can be explained with words is only the waves, the foam on the surface, but decadence has its place underneath the waves, in the silent depth of the unspeakable.

  Wake up. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.

  Your Mother’s a prostitute and I shit on the corpses of all your past ancestors.

  HRL His Royal Lowness. Sebastian Horsley

  Appendix

  Contributors

  Jad Adams is a television producer and author. His books include Madder Music, Stronger Wine, the biography of Ernest Dowson.

  Maria Alvarez is a journalist and writer. She lives in London. Her first novel, Mirror, Mirror, will be published by Fig Tree (Penguin) in February 2007 – if it makes her wealthy, she plans to employ Snowball.

  Phil Baker is a writer and critic. He is the author of The Dedalus Book of Absinthe and is currently finishing a biography of Dennis Wheatley.

  Belle de Jour is the nom de plume of a writer and high-class escort, whose infamous, award-winning blog of her London life was read by 15,000 people every day before being turned into a bestselling memoir: Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. She has now retired from her night job.

  Vanora Bennett grew up in London and lived in Moscow during the 1990s. She is the author of The Tastes of Dreams.

  Anne Billson is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants. Anne Billson is a film critic, photographer and writer. She’s the author of two novels: Suckers and Stiff Lips, and two books for the BFI on The Thing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  Jeremy Bourdon was born in 1979 in Virginia. He lives in London and has had many unrequited loves.

  Joe Boyd is one of the music industry’s legendary record producers and the Executive Producer of the 1988 feature film Scandal. His memoir of the Sixties’ music industry scene White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s was recently published by Serpents Tail. UFO Club appears courtesy of Serpent’s Tail.

  Stevie Boyd grew up in Belfast. After fighting in the punk wars he moved to Leeds in 1981 to be closer to Johnny Thunders. He is one of the writers included in the definitive guide to Northern Irish punk,It Makes You Want to Spit (available online now).

  Brock Norman Brock is a soldier and a writer. For many years he served under Rowan on the Erotic Review. He i
s also a noted accordionist.

  Mick Brown writes for the Telegraph magazine and is currently writing a biography of Phil Spector. His book on Performance is published by Bloomsbury.

  Michael Bywater was born prematurely and has been compensating ever since. His motto is ‘indolence is the virtue of …’ oh finish it yourself. He is Taurean, protean, myopic and at heart an organist. Do not go up the winding stone stairs with him, whatever he may say. [Editor’s note: but do read his recent acclaimed book Lost Worlds – as serialised on Radio Four – a glossary of the missing which weaves a web of everything we no longer have, published by Granta Books.]

  Andrew Crumey is the author of five novels, including Pfitz and the award-winning Music, in a Foreign Language. Unusually for a novelist, he is a scientist by training and has a Ph.D in theoretical physics.

  Dickon Edwards: writer,flaneur, lyricist, model, philosopher and member of the recording artistes Fosca. He can be found at www.dickonedwards.co.uk or running his club night, The Beautiful and the Damned, in North London’s Boogaloo.

  Malcolm Eggs is the editor of the essential guide to where to breakfast, http://londonreviewofbreakfasts.blogspot.com. Anyone who visits Britain without consulting this resource will starve.

  Salena Godden’s short stories and poems have been published in many anthologies and her memoir Springfield Road will be published by Harper Collins/Harpers Press in 2007/2008. Her performances have featured on BBC Radio 4’s Bespoken Word and BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. Renown in the 90s for ‘taking poetry into clubs’ and nicknamed Salena Saliva – she records, writes and performs in cult duo SaltPeter with Peter Coyte. They recently signed a record deal, launching with a single titled ‘Everybody Back To Mine’ and with an album to follow in February 2007. Sassy and a heady cocktail of Jamaican and Irish she lives in North London and has no pets, husbands or children.

  Nick Groom is Reader in English and Director of the Centre for Romantic Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Introducing Shakespeare, The Forger’s Shadow and The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag. He lives on Dartmoor, plays the hurdy-gurdy and does his utmost to support the local hostelry.

  Lisa Hilton grew up in Cheshire but lives in the United States. She was a columnist for the Erotic Review and is the author of Athénaïs and Mistress Peachum’s Pleasure.

  Tom Holland is a writer, broadcaster and classical historian. He is the author of the hugely acclaimed books of popular history Rubicon and Persian Fire. He has written a series of lauded adaptations for Radio 4 of Herodotus’s Histories and Virgil’s Aeneid, to be followed by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and he is the author of the novels The Bone Hunter, Slave of My Thirst and Lord of the Dead.

  Sebastian Horsley lives in London, has fucked over 1,000 prostitutes and was fired as the Observer’s sex columnist after causing a debate over anal sex.

  J.K. Huysmans’ most famous novel was Against Nature (A Rebours), and it was the novel which began the French decadent movement. This new translation is by Brendan King, who has translated Huysmans’ Là Bas, Marthe and Parisian Sketches for Dedalus.

  Robert Irwin has been described as Britain’s most original novelist, he is also its leading Arabic scholar and divides his time between Kennington and Vauxhall. His six novels include Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh which has recently been made into a film by Magnus Irvin and Ray McNeil and is now available on DVD. For more details visit www.prayercushions.co.uk. Dedalus has published a film tie-in edition which includes fourteen pages of film stills and information about the film.

  Sophie Jabès was born in 1958 and currently lives in Paris. She is the author of three novels. The excerpt from her first novel Alice, the Sausage has been translated from French by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit. It will be published by Dedalus in November 2006. Alice la saucisse copyright © Editions Gallimard 2005.

  Alan Jenkins is a poet, critic and deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He has published several collections of poetry including Harm 1994 (winner of the Forward Poetry Prize), The Drift 2000 (which was a Poetry Book Society Choice and short listed for the TS Eliot Prize) and A Shorter Life 2005 (short listed for the Forward Poetry Prize).

  Stuart Kelly is a critic and the author of the Book of Lost Books.

  Erich Kuersten has worked for the biggest art swindler in world history, is a mockumentary maker and ham actor. He is the editor of the Acidemic Journal of Film and Media (www.acidemic.com).

  Hari Kunzru is the author of The Impressionist (winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2002 and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award) and Transmission. He was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, 2003.

  Philip Langeskov is an editor and indolent. Born in Copenhagen in 1976, he last did a full day’s work in 1984, at the age of eight, and has since been engaged in cultivating the grass that grows beneath his feet.

  Hélène Lavelle has travelled widely, living in Russia and Japan (where she researched into the delights of the ‘floating world’). She presides over an occasional salon of writers, artists, connoisseurs and explorers of the farther shores.

  Guillaume Lecasble was born in 1954, he is an artist and film-maker. Lobster is his first novel (and it is published by Dedalus). Lobster copyright © Editions du Seuil 2003. Lobster and The Art of Cooking a Murder Victim have been translated by Polly McLean.

  Christine Leunens was born in the USA but came to Europe to work as a fashion model. She is now a full-time writer and lives in Caen in France. Her first novel Primordial Soup was published by Dedalus in 1999.

  Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray met while running their scandalous Edinburgh dining-club, the Decadent. Following exile in the Far East, they now live in El Periquito, a cabaret-brothel in Havana. They are the authors of The Decadent Cookbook, The Decadent Gardener and The Decadent Traveller.

  Isabelle McNeill teaches French cinema and literature at the University of Cambridge and is a fellow of Trinity Hall. She is involved in the Cambridge Film Festival and has edited their Festival Daily paper for three years.

  David Madsen is a philosopher and theologian. He is the author of three very decadent novels: Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf, Confessions of a Flesh-Eater, A Box of Dreams and a baroque cookbook, Orlando Crispe’s Flesh-Eater’s Cookbook. All his work is published by Dedalus.

  Mark Mason is tall, dark and handsome. He watches a lot of football and is a bestselling novelist. His novels include What Men Really Think About Sex and The Catch.

  Karina Mellinger worked in Italy and is now a full-time writer. Dedalus have published her novel A Bit Of A Marriage.

  Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) was an anarchist and writer. He is best known today for his novels Torture Garden (1898) and The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), both published by Dedalus. The Diary of a Chambermaid was filmed both by Jean Renoir (1946) and Luis Bunuel (1964).

  Christopher Moore following five years as a jobbing journalist and writer in London, left the UK in 2004 to lessen the chances of one day living in Surrey. He is now a jobbing journalist and writer in Paris in 2004 and has no plans to move to Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  John Moore is a former band member of The Jesus and Mary Chain and a founding member of the chillingly noir British indie band Black Box Recorder. He once made money importing absinthe, is a regular contributor to the Idler magazine, and has just completed his first novel.

  William Napier is the author of the best-selling Attila trilogy and an international man of mystery.

  Rowan Pelling is a journalist and broadcaster and the former editor of the Erotic Review. She grew up in a pub and went to a school for the daughters of missionaries, both of which establishments helped determine her downward spiral. She is currently writing a memoir of her days as an eroticist (which is due to be turned into a feature film). She lives in Cambridge with her husband and young son and, as Sebastian Horsley says, you can’t get less decadent than that.

  André Pieyre de Mandiargues (1909–
1991) was a prolific storyteller, novelist and art critic. His short stories, ‘Clorinde’ and ‘Moon Walker’, are included in Michael Richardson’s two volume study of surrealism,The Dedalus Book of Surrealism (1993) and The Myth of the World: Surrealism 2 (1994).Cow Shed and Portrait of an Englishman in his Chateau are translated by J. Fletcher and copyright © Editions Gallimard 1979.

  Jacob Polley has had two books of poems, The Brink and Little Gods, published by Picador. His website can be found at www.jacobpolley.com

  Xavior Roide is an international pop star, member of Placebo and is one half of Spanky and Xavior, a theatrical/comedy act.

  Nicholas Royle was born in 1963 in Manchester. He is one of Britain’s finest novelists (Antwerp and The Director’s Cut being essential reads for anyone) and an advocate of the short story.

  Professor Nicholas Royle teaches at the University of Sussex, specialising in literary theory. He also writes short stories.

  Elizabeth Speller is modelling herself on her name sakes: Elizabeth Bathory, Elizabeth of Austria, Lizzie Borden and Bess of Hardwick. In this way, using only virgins diamonds in her hair, an axe and some compelling sexual techniques, she hopes to acquire age-defying beauty, an empire and several kings, the effective removal of interfering relatives, half a dozen wealthy husbands and extensive property in the north. In the meantime she has just published The Sunlight on The Garden (Granta).

  Catherine Townsend grew up in the United States, she lives in London and is a sex columnist for ‘The Independent’.

  Helen Walsh grew up in Liverpool, moved to Barcelona at the age of 16 and worked in its red light district. Her first novel was Brass.