The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  Louise Welsh was one of the Guardian’s Best First Novelists of 2002, she is the bestselling novelist of The Cutting Room, Tamburlaine Must Die and The Bullet Trick.

  Oscar Wilde was the world’s wittiest decadent, and the leading advocate of ‘art for art’s sake’ of his time. Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895 and after his release in 1897 spent three years in self-imposed exile until his death in 1900.

  John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was born in 1647 and was England’s greatest libertine. His play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery is believed to have been the first piece of pornography ever printed. He died of a variety of venereal diseases at the age of 33.

  Moments in Decadent History

  The Beginning

  God created Eve from Adam’s rib to give him a playmate. Eve then went on to eat the apple and begin the decadence movement.

  Sodom and Gomorrah

  When things got back to front.

  The decline of the Roman Empire with starring parts for Caligula (AD 12–41) Nero (AD 37–68) and Heliogabalus (AD 204–222) … setting a standard in decadent behaviour which has yet to be matched.

  61 A.D. Titus Petronius Niger, Consul of Bithynia and Arbiter of Elegance at Nero’s court, writes the world’s first decadent novel, Satyricon. Its most famous chapter is ‘Trimalchio’s Dinner’, at which a gluttonous millionaire displays the magnificence of his vulgarity. This is one of the founding texts of decadent gastronomy.

  July 13th 939 Pope Leo VII dies from a heart attack, while engaged in strenuous sexual activity.

  May 19th 1649 Oliver Cromwell establishes the Commonwealth of England and its colonies. For ten years all gaiety is outlawed, puritanical laws close the theatres and abolish the use of ritual and ceremony in religious services (the closest the majority of England’s population ever come to beauty in their lives was through the Church). Cromwell elegantly defines the part of the English character that decadence would war against.

  1659 John Wilmot, later the second Earl of Rochester, enters Wadham College, Oxford, and ‘becomes debauched’. Later he delights the Restoration court as part of the Merry Gang, along with Henry Jermyn, Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, John Sheffield, Earl Henry Killigrew, Sir Charles Sedley, William Wycherley, George Etherege, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He sets himself up as ‘Doctor Bendo’, assisting women with fertility problems (along the way supplying much of the sperm himself). He dies in 1680 from a combination of syphilis and other venereal diseases, though not before leaving versions of himself in numerous novels, plays and poems, as well as producing his own, mostly pornographic, canon.

  April 23rd 1661 Charles II is restored as the monarch, jollity is restored, horse-racing is again allowed and the theatres are re-opened with actresses appearing on the English stage for the first time. Sex re-appears in English life.

  1680s And over in France, the Sun King is on the throne. The ‘libertine’ emerges, and embraces the pleasures of the flesh to the exclusion of religion and monarchism. At this time, the fictional address ‘à Anconne, chez la veuve Grosse-Motte’ (At Incunt, in the house of the big-motted widow) is very popular.

  1689 Publication by Mr Joseph Streater of The Farce of Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The play to be sold by Mr Benjamin Crayle, bookseller. The book is banned and burnt the next year.

  November 3rd 1718 The birth of John Montagu. The fourth Earl of Sandwich has an ambivalent role in decadent history. He required sustenance during a spell at the gaming tables and ordered that his servant bring him a piece of meat between two pieces of bread. The sandwich was invented. While the sandwich has democraticised debauchery, providing fuel for countless generations to continue their ribald joys, it meant that the wealthy no longer provided the extravagant feasts that had been the mark of decadent entertaining since the time of Trimalchio.

  May 1746 The founding of the Hellfire Club by Sir Francis Dashwood, later Chancellor of the Exchequer. The fourth Earl of Sandwich was a member. Their meetings were popularly believed to be blasphemous orgies, including the taking of communion from a naked serving girl’s navel. Aleister Crowley would later appropriate the club motto of ‘Fay ce que voudras’. (Do as thou wilt).

  1782 Publication of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Laclos’ novel of sexual libertinism and corruption par excellence.

  June 26th 1830 George IV, the former Prince Regent, dies after a life spent getting into debt, being bailed out by his father, and indulging his prodigious appetites: he is rumoured to have kept a lock of hair from each of his lovers; 7, 000 such envelopes were found on his death.

  1835 The writer Théophile Gautier – the dedicatee of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal – uses the phrase ‘Art for art’s sake’ in the foreword of his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, defining a way of life for decadents evermore.

  October 7th 1849 The death of Edgar Allan Poe. Death has always defined the decadent, and Poe’s death was as influential as his writing. Discovered unconscious in Baltimore, Poe lay in a coma for three days before waking to cry out ‘Reynolds! Oh, Reynolds’. He died soon after. Charles Baudelaire was fascinated by Poe, and translated much of his work into French, which would be central to decadence as defined by French writers of the nineteenth century . The idea of Poe as a creative genius destroyed by materialism, cut down by philistines, become a powerful self-image for French 19th century decadents.

  1857 Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal ( Flowers of Evil) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary prosecuted for obscenity in France.

  1860s Absinthe has become so popular in France that from café to cabaret, 5pm becomes ‘l’heure verte’.

  July 1873 After scandalizing polite Parisian society with their affair, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud move to London. A year later, Rimbaud departs for Paris and in a jealous rage Verlaine shoots him in the wrist. Verlaine is imprisoned for two years and Rimbaud retreats to write Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell). He then gives up writing poetry and becomes a gun-dealer in East Africa.

  1876 Degas exhibits his ‘Sketch of a French café’, showing the actress Ellen Andrée and the engraver Marcellin Desboutin with a glass of absinthe in the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. It is booed, and put into storage. Under the name ‘Absinthe’ it is put on show in London in 1893, where the Victorians see it as shockingly degraded, and a blow to morality.

  1877 Tuberculosis is defined by J.F. Cohnheim – decadents rejoice at the naming of their disease.

  1884 The world meets Des Esseintes, the protagonist of A Rebours (Against Nature), in the first truly ‘decadent novel of the industrial age’. Wilde imitated it for his Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Huysmans’ masterpiece was damned as ‘sodomitical’ during Wilde’s trial.

  April 16 1894 The first issue of The Yellow Book is published. Founded by Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley but conceived with the help of Walter Sickert and John Lane, the publisher of Bodley Head, the literary magazine’s home. It enjoyed modest success, but Wilde (who never contributed to it) made it infamous, after he was seen clutching a yellow volume on his arrest in 1895. It was erroneously assumed to be The Yellow Book, and Lane’s offices were attacked. It ceased production the following year. During its three brief years, it featured articles by Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, Baron Corvo, Ernest Dowson, Richard Le Gallienne, Charlotte Mew, Count Stenbock and Arthur Symons.

  1895 Wilde’s Trial: Oscar Wilde is sentenced to two years in prison for ‘a love which dare not speak its name.’ He is declared bankrupt, his wife divorces him and his two sons’ surname is changed to Holland.

  1915 D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow is seized by the police and declared obscene. This makes his next novel Women in Love (1916) unpublishable until 1920 when it is published in New York after a failed action for obscenity. It is then published in London in 1921,where a reviewer describes it an ‘analytical study of sexual depravity’ and an ‘epic of vice.’ D.H. Lawrence thought it his best book.

&n
bsp; March 1918 Through the efforts of Ezra Pound and Margaret Anderson James Joyce’s Ulysses begins to appear in serial form in the Little Review in New York. Margaret Anderson has great difficulty finding a printer but eventually finds a Serbian printer who is indifferent to the four letter words which were then considered unpublishable.

  May 1922 Joyce and Proust, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky meet for a night at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, where a dinner is being given in Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s honour. There are cameo appearances from the lesbian dominatrix Princesse Edmond de Polignac, and the Bloomsbury envoy Clive Bell. Proust died six months later, and Joyce passed out at the table, shamed by his lack of evening dress.

  1929 At an exhibition of D.H. Lawrence’s paintings in London 13 pictures are removed by the police and pronounced obscene.

  1931–32 A bored Anais Nin is introduced to Henry Miller and promptly leaves her husband to be with the novelist. Involvement spreads to his wife, June Mansfield, and Nin documents this steamy and scandalous affair in her extensive diaries

  1932–33 Random House buy the US rights from Joyce for Ulysses and agree to take the burden of the legal costs. Judge Woolsey of the United States District Court in New York ruled that Celts are, and have a right to be, hypersexual. He finds the intention and method of Ulysses legitimate, making the book for the first time freely available in English.

  1960 Penguin publish the complete unexpurgated text of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They are prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, and many eminent authors, including E.M. Forster, Richard Hoggart and Helen Gardner appear as witnesses for the defence. The prosecution barrister famously asked the jury if it were a book they would want their servants to read. This trial had a profound effect on both writing and publishing and ushered in the ‘swinging’ decadent sixties.

  1963 The Profumo Affair rocks the British establishment as sex and spying come together in the biggest scandal for many years. John Profumo is forced to resign as Secretary of State for War, not for his actions in the bedroom but for misleading the House of Commons about the nature of his affair with Christine Keeler.

  April 16th 1977 Studio 54 is opened by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager and quickly becomes the home for hedonism, exhibitionism and all-round debauchery. In 1979, Rubell and Schrager are arrested and charged for skimming $2.5million, and the club is closed with one final party, called ‘The End of Modern-day Gomorrah’, on February 4th, 1980. Later the club reopened, though with much-reduced levels of transgression, and is currently a theatre.

  June 1983 The publishing house of Dedalus is founded at an orgy in a Camberwell coffee bar… The name is inspired by the creator of the world’s first labyrinth and father of Icarus whose plunge from the sky in a glittering cascade of feathers and molten wax is an inspiration to all decadents.

  1990 An art gallery in Cincinnati is unsuccessfully prosecuted on charges of ‘pandering obscenity’ after staging Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment, (which includes several sadomasochistic portraits).

  1993 Gerry O’Boyle opens Filthy Macnasty’s Whisky Café in London, and Pogues’ frontman Shane MacGowan swiftly takes up residence, to be followed by various Sex Pistols, Bad Seeds, and novelists. While working at the pub, Pete Doherty and Carl Barat form the Libertines, and the good times roll. New owners, however, have opened a sister pub in Twickenham, somewhat undermining the legend.

  August 1994 The K Foundation (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) burn one million pounds, in £50 notes, that was unrequired profit from their incarnation as the KLF. A film made of the bonfire – Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid – was thought to have been destroyed, but a single print circulates in ghostly form.

  1998 The flavour of the Belle Epoque returns to Britain when Hill’s Absinth is imported from the Czech Republic. The importers later turn to an absinthe museum in France to recreate the original recipes, and La Fée Absinthe is born in 2000.

  December 2004 A copy of the Earl of Rochester’s play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery is sold at Sotheby’s for £45, 600.

  2006 London erupts into a riot of nipple tassles as burlesque and cabaret clubs spring up throughout the city, with the Bethnal Green Working Men’s club at the forefront.

  Further Decadent Reading

  Charles Peltz has made his personal choice of forty-five decadent books to read. The editors have supplied some information about their contents.

  1. Arthur Machen – The Hill of Dreams (1907)

  Possibly Machen’s masterpiece, the semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams follows Lucian Taylor from his home in Wales as he struggles to make a living in London. A decadent classic written in 1897 but only published in 1907.

  2. Arthur Machen – Three Imposters (1895)

  These delicately interlinked tales frame Gothic horrors within the scenery of a morally degraded London, where three young men attempt to solve a mystery.

  3. D’Adelsward Fersen – Lord Lyllian (1893)

  Forced to flee Paris for Capri after a scandal that mirrored Wilde’s, D’Adelsward Fersen fictionalised his infamous Pink Masses and the subsequent witchhunt in this bitingly satirical novel.

  4. Edmund John – Flute of Sardonyx (1913)

  Writing in the Uranian school, these desperately passionate odes to unsullied youth were published just before John died in Sicily.

  4. Stefan Grabinski – Dark Domain (1993)

  This collection of stories by the ‘Polish Poe’ were written between 1918 and 1922. They cover all his predelictions: the psychological, the mythical, the world of trains and railways, with mysterious travellers reacting to the relentless, hypnotic impetus of mechanical travel and the demonic and the dark, disturbing world of human sexual desire. Translated by Miroslaw Lipinski for Dedalus in 1993, new edition in 2005.

  5. Clark Ashton Smith – Emperor of Dreams (2002)

  Smith created fantastic and dense worlds, and also dabbled in poetry, sculpture and painting. A friend of Lovecraft, his stories (only published in book form forty-one years after his death in 1961), are part of the weird fiction firmament.

  6. Vincent O’Sullivan – Master of Fallen Years (1993)

  This collection of psychological supernatural tales, named for O’Sullivan’s favourite story, displays the New York writer’s horror for human nature and justifies his position at the centre of Yellow Nineties decadence.

  7. R. Murray Gilchrist – The Basilisk and Other Tales of Dread (2003)

  Before writing extensively on the Peak District, Gilchrist created suffocatingly atmospheric ghostly tales, including The Crimson Weaver, a vampire story published in The Yellow Book.

  8. Thomas Ligotti – The Nightmare Factory (1984)

  A confessed devotee of H.P. Lovecraft, Ligotti here leads the reader down dark corridors, weaving horror and reflection to enviable effect.

  9. M.P. Shiel – Prince Zaleski (1895)

  Shiel’s Zaleski, the original decadent detective, stalks humanity’s despicable errors from his tower in a deserted abbey in these three tales of declining morality.

  10. M.P. Shiel – Shapes in the Fire (1896)

  Collection of grotesque horror and detective stories heavily influenced by Poe, overlain with images of decadent extravagance, these stories are unique in style and delivery and are among the most distinctive supernatural stories of the nineteenth century.

  11. Salvador Dali – Hidden Faces (1944)

  Dali’s only novel – with illustrations by the artist – tracks a group of aristocrats in the 30s in their pursuit of pleasure, pain and decadent perfection.

  12. Montague Summers – Antinous (1907)

  Summers, a clergyman, eccentric and believer in werewolves, celebrated pederasty in this collection of poems, named for the lover of Hadrian.

  13. Leonard Cline – The Dark Chamber (1927)

  Trying to escape his tortured reality, and revisit his lost youth via various stimulants, Richard Pride trangr
esses the natural order and unleashes the primordial memory of humankind. Cline was in prison, awaiting trial, when his classic was published.

  14. William Lindsay Gresham – Nightmare Alley (1946)

  A sordid tale of carnival life, Gresham’s first novel was in 1947 made into a film starring Tyrone Power and along the way introduced the word ‘geek’ (a sideshow performer who bites chickens’ heads off) to widespread usage

  15. Vernon Lee – Hauntings (1906)

  AKA Violet Paget, the prolific author and contributor to The Yellow Book, Vernon Lee brought the femme fatale into Victorian literature with this landmark collection of supernatural tales.

  16. Fr Rolfe – Don Renato (1963)

  Rolfe worked on this historical romance, a mix of letters from Rolfe and the diary of a doomed seventeenth-century priest in Rome, from 1907–08, though it remained unpublished until 1963, largely due to Rolfe’s never-ending amendments.

  17. J.F. Bloxam – The Priest and the Acolyte (1894)

  This short story of a priest’s carnal love with his altar boy was at one time credited to Wilde, who denied authorship, describing it as ‘at moments poisonous: which is something’.

  18. G.S. Viereck – The House of the Vampire (1907)

  With this novel of a young man’s fear of losing his creativity – a novel crowded with homosexual undertones that clamour to become overtones – G.S. Viereck established his place as an early master of the vampire genre.