The Decadent Handbook
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19. Gustav Flaubert – Salammbô (1862)
A novel set in Carthage after the first Punic War, is Gustave Flaubert’s tour-de-force exercise in the exotic, the morbid, the luxuriant and the violent. Flaubert’s fascination with child sacrifice, crucifixions and love unto death give his historical novel a feverish and fantastical quality. Yet it is all underpinned by the author’s meticulous research into the history and archaeology of ancient Carthage.
20. Remy de Gourmont – Histoires Magiques (1894)
A collection of decadent short stories. He liked stories about femmes fatales and Francis Amery translated some of them for Dedalus under the title of Angels of Perversity in 1992.
21/22. Marcel Schwob – Coeur Double (1891) and Le Roi au Masque d’Or (1892)
Where Wilde’s French ended, Schwob’s began, and he corrected Wilde’s errors in time for Salome’s first performance. Coeur Double was his first book of short stories, dark fantastical tales that he developed the following year in Le Roi au Masque d’Or, which features cruel counts, sickly maidens and mad scientists.
23. Barbey D’Aurevilly – Les Diaboliques (1874)
Six decadent stories which celebrate the seven deadly vices while showing no counterbalancing interests in the seven cardinal virtues. Dedalus published Ernest Boyd’s translation in 1986, new edition in 1996.
24. Aubrey Beardsley – Under the Hill (1897)
A baroque romance containing snatches of pornographic fantasy, which Beardsley did not live long enough to complete and which was too ahead of its time to have been published in full in any case.
25. Élémir Bourges – Le Crépuscule des Dieux (1883)
A lurid novel in which the evil mistress of a French aristocrat encourages his three children to taste the fruits of their inherited degeneracy, leading to an orgy of incest, murder, suicide and traumatic insanity.
26. Jean Lorrain – Monsieur de Phocas (1901)
A leading proponent of dandyism, blatant in his homosexuality in an easily scandalised Paris, Lorrain gives us Monsieur de Phocas, a man falling relentlessly into the gap between reality and hallucination, grasping at easy but dangerous pleasure during his headlong and bloody descent. A fin-desiècle classic translated into English by Francis Amery for Dedalus in 1994.
27. Jean Lorrain – Nightmares of an Ether Drinker (1895)
Lorrain again blurs his narcotic reality and poisonous cauchemar in this collection of tales, which, although fuelled by ether, contain within them foreshadowings of the author’s mysterious death from the effects of the drug years later.
28. Renée Vivien – Une Femme m’apparut (1904)
The bolt of lightning was a wealthy American lesbian called Natalie Clifford Barney, the transfixed witness was the established Symbolist poet Vivien (born Pauline Tarn in London), the result was this account of the magnetic attraction between the two women, casting Barney as Atthis, who forced Sappho into suicide. Vivien died at 34, ravaged by alcoholism and anorexia.
29. Jean Lombard – L’Agonie (1888)
The agony in question is that of the clash between homosexual desire and the strictures of society, laid in out in full in this nearly entirely forgotten epic of desire and despair.
30. Maurice Maeterlick – Serres Chaudes (1889)
This was the first collection of poetry from the Belgian Nobel prize winner, and came about after an encounter with J.K. Huysmans. It clearly reveals the writer’s turning away from Christianity, and the confusion that this rupture engendered. They were to remain his only original verses.
31. Edouard Dubus – Quand les Violons sont Partis (1892)
A crucial book of symbolist verse, sulphurously decadent. Much admired by fellow poets, Dubus was plagued by insanity, occult delusions and drug addiction, and, on release from an insane asylum, was found dead from a morphine overdose in the pissoir of Place Maubert in the Paris Latin Quarter, having published only this book and a short play in collaboration with fellow symbolist Ephraim Mikael.
32. Ernest Dowson – Verses (1896)
Ernest Dowson is the tragic poet of the Yellow Nineties. Tuberculosis and absinthe brought him an early death.Verses is his first collection followed by Decorations in 1899. His poems can be grouped into love poems, devotional verses and poems of ennui and world-weariness. Most of us know some lines by Dowson – ‘gone with the wind’ from Cynara. ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’ from Vitae Summa Brevis.
33. Georges Rodenbach – Bruges-la-Morte (1892)
Perhaps the greatest work of Belgian decadence, this novel celebrates the city of Bruges: its dark streets, its darker secrets, and the beautiful woman who wanders them. Is she the doppelgänger of Hugues Viane’s dead wife, or is she haunting him as intimately as the city itself? Translated into English by Mike Mitchell for Dedalus in 2005.
34. Stanislas de Guaita – La Muse Noire (1883)
A co-founder of l’Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix, de Guaita wrote this collection of poetry after sensibly rejecting a career in the law for mysticism and the occult.
35. Robert de Montesquiou – Les Chauve-Souris (1892)
Rumoured to be the inspiration for Huysmans’ Des Esseintes and Proust’s Baron de Charlus, and captured in oils by Whistler, the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac was a dandy par excellence, flitting between high and low society, and producing poetry from time to time in private, lavishly produced editions, bristling with symbolism.
36. André Pieyre de Mandiargues – Un Anglais decrit dans le chateau fermé (1953)
This Englishman in his chateau is not a restrained man. Sexually and sadistically, he visits his desires upon the other inhabitants of the castle, with extreme violence and perversity. Translated for Dedalus by J. Fletcher in 1998 under the title Portrait of an Englishman in his Chateau.
37. J.K. Huysmans – A Rebours (1884)
The most significant study of a decadent personality in French Literature. Dedalus will publish a new English translation by Brendan King in 2008 under the title of Against Nature.
38. J.K. Huysmans – Là-Bas (1891)
The classic tale of Satanism and sexual obsession in nineteenth-century France. Translated for Dedalus by Brendan King in 2001, new edition in 2006.
39. Octave Mirbeau – Le Jardin des Supplices (1898)
To Mirbeau: ‘Ah, yes! the Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering. What I saw today, and what I heard, is no more than a symbol to me of the entire earth. I have vainly sought a respite in quietude and repose in death, and I can find them nowhere.’ Translated into English by Michael Richardson for Dedalus in 1995 as Torture Garden.
40. Hans Heinz Ewers – Alraune: The Story of a Living Creature (1911)
A Satanist fantasy inspired by the works of Poe and de Sade which was a bestseller in Germany.
41. J.G. Ballard – Vermillion Sands (1973)
This book collects Ballard’s stories about Vermillion Sands, an artists’ colony maroooned in a languid future of unlimited leisure, high technology, and mysterious, jewel-eyed women. Half-sentient buildings drift in and out of the encroaching desert, art projects threaten the nature of reality, and the inhabitants pursue their obscure enthusiasms, all against the numbing blue skies and the desolate sands. In common with many of Ballard’s books, it’s emotionally cold, but full of sharply brilliant ideas and vivid, over-saturated images.
42. M.J. Harrison – The Ice Monkey (1983)
Creepy short stories in dank, occult London
43. Count Stenbock – Studies in Death (1893)
A decadent short story collection from the most exotically enigmatic and cursed character of the 1890s, who Arthur Symons described as ‘ inhuman and abnormal; a degenerate, who had I know not how many vices’.
44. Maurice Rolliinat – Les Névroses (1883)
After a false start in realism, Rollinat joined a fringe decadent group and turned his attention to death, the fear of it and the attraction of it, in this book of poems, subsections with titles such as souls, lusts, refuges, spectres, darkness.
45. Iwan Gilkin – La Nuit (1897)
A true poet of the night, the Belgian Gilkin was much inspired by Baudelaire and Lautréamont for this collection of poems.
For non-fiction decadent reading we suggest you try Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony (1933).
The Decadent Handbook Survey:
The 20 Most Decadent People Alive
Dedalus asked 1,000 men and women who they believed to be the most decadent people alive to mark the publication of The Decadent Handbook. They were allowed to nominate up to ten individuals. The results are as follows:
1. Pete Doherty
2. Keith Richards
3. Shane MacGowan
4. Kate Moss
5. Paris Hilton
6. P Diddy
7. Courtney Love
8. DBC Pierre
9. Mick Jagger
10. Michael Jackson
11. Hugh Hefner
12. Elton John
13. Colin Farrell
14. Russell Brand
15. Prince Charles
16. John Leslie
17. Pete Burns
18. Rt Hon Baroness Thatcher
19. Lindsay Lohan
20. Sebastian Horsley
Pete Doherty was head and shoulders ahead of any other nominee with his name suggested by over two-thirds of the voters. As one respondent wrote: “Doherty wins it for me – there’s a difference, for me, between decadence and straightforward hedonism (Keith Richards), and between being decadent and being grotesquely ostentatious (P Diddy). Doherty retains an air of innocence.”
The editors were astonished by the passionate response to our survey. Most people feel very strongly about who rightly has some claim to be described as ‘decadent’ and who does not. For many people true decadence is all about people who seek extreme experiences without any reference to personal safety or social mores – like Doherty. For others it’s about people who are profligate while in some sort of public office. That’s why Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles turned up on the list.
It’s interesting to see that people who behave outrageously are largely lionized by society. The people who nominated Doherty and Keith Richards, Kate Moss and Courtney Love, are huge fans of them. Most people’s lives are so dictated by domestic and financial worries that they feel glad someone somewhere is totally off the rails. It’s as if people who behave decadently are doing it for all of us.
Worthy Nominees Who Failed to Make the Short-list:
President Bush of America was nominated by some voters because, as one correspondent wrote, “he spends the earth’s resources as if they were his own.”
Also nominated was President Nizayov of Turkmenistan, “Surely no one else today is indulging themselves on the scale of Prezident Nizayov, Turkmenbashi ‘Father of Turkmenistan.’ He has built ice palaces in the desert, made reading his work compulsory, and renamed Wednesday after his mother. His image is superimposed on every TV channel, and a giant golden statue of him in the centre of the capital rotates constantly to catch the sun.”
Since being nominated President Nizayov has died but we felt his achievements still deserved a mention.
And Boris Johnson was backed by twelve voters because: “He has such reckless disregard for his own professional wellbeing.”
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Publishing History
First published by Dedalus in hardcover in 2006
First Dedalus paperback edition in 2007
First ebook edition in 2012
The Decadent Handbook copyright © Dedalus Ltd, Rowan Pelling, Amelia Hodsdon and James Doyle 2006 Introduction copyright © Rowan Pelling 2006
Compilation copyright © Rowan Pelling, Amelia Hodsdon and James Doyle 2006
All contributions which are in copyright , are copyright their authors unless otherwise specified.
The right of Rowan Pelling, Amelia Hodsdon and James Doyle to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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