The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) (9 page)

It is not surprising, in view of this, to find German studies of decadent aristocracy presented in a style more reminiscent of de Roberto than D’Annunzio.
Ricarda Huth’s
Erinnerungen von Ludolf Ursleu dem Jungeren
(1893; tr.
as
Unconquered Love
) is one example.
The period produced some exotic and impressionistic poetry, notably that of Max Dauthenday, but Symbolism made less impact than a belated renewal of native
sturm und drang.
The nearest thing to
spleen
and
impuissance
which German writing produced was Jakob Wassermann’s
trägheit
(sloth), which was extensively discussed in
Caspar Hauser
(1908).

The most significant work of the
fin de siècle
period in Germany which invites discussion on account of its Decadent elements is Frank Wedekind’s play
Lulu.
Evidence of the strength of German taboos is provided by the fact that the work was not published in its proper from until 1962, but it was known in bowdlerized and divided form as
Der Erdgeist
(1895; tr.
as
Earth Spirit
) and
Die Büchse der Pandora
(1902; tr.
as
Pandora’s Box
).
The play is an elaborate account of the destructiveness which can overcome the sexual impulse in a society where it is rigidly repressed, dressed up with various
baroque elements in order to mask and excuse its underlying ferocity.

Mention must also be made, however, of the slightly later writings of Hans Heinz Ewers, who wrote poetry, short stories and novels in a determinedly Decadent vein.
Two of his novels featuring the Decadent anti-hero Frank Braun enjoyed considerable commercial success; the better of them is
Die Zauberlehrling
(1907; tr.
as
The Sorceror’s Apprentice
), in which Braun seeks relief from boredom in persuading a peasant girl that she is a saint, and then must watch as she pursues her career to the bitter end of martyrdom; this was followed by the stylistically-exotic
Alraune
(1911), which inverts the theme by producing a female incarnation of evil.
Ewers later added a third novel to the series,
Vampir
(1922; tr.
as
Vampire
and
Vampire’s Prey
) in which Braun is infected with vampiric compulsions.

Wedekind became an important precursor of German Expressionism and his work came to seem much more important andprophetic when, in the years following Germany’s humiliation in the Great War, Berlin suffered a dramatic inversion of former intolerance and experienced a virtual epidemic of calculated Decadence.
Ewers, having been an ardent German patriot campaigning for his country in America during World War I, was converted to Nazism but could not adapt to the pressures of that creed as well as D’Annunzio adapted to Mussolini’s Fascism, and seems to have ended his life as an official non-person.

Ewers was not the only German writer to go to America; most of the others, for obvious reasons, never came back.
It is probably worth noting as an afterword to the story of absent German Decadence that one of the most interesting works of American Decadent fiction was written (in English) by an emigre who, like Ewers,
subsequently became a Nazi.
George Sylvester Viereck’s
The House of the Vampire
(1907) is a homoerotic fantasy of enervation by psychic theft which has strong echoes of Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray.
Viereck’s poetry is also in a distinctly Decadent vein, and he went on to write with Paul Eldridge a series of popular novels featuring the erotically-inclined adventures of the Wandering Jew and other immortals.

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It is hardly surprising that the search for American Decadents shouldfirst stumble across a European emigré; America is the last place on Earth which one would expect to provide fertile soil for literary Decadence.
It was the nation most thoroughly infected with the mythology of progress and the home of the frontier spirit; in the eyes of every right-thinking American, decadence was a purely European problem – even though America had in Edgar Allan Poe the writer who had inspired Baudelaire more than any other.

Poe had no followers in his own country as enthusiastic as Baudelaire and Andreyev.
Such accounts of hereditary decadence leading to exotic perversion as “Berenice” and “Morella” had far greater influence in France than in Poe’s native land.
The Poesque elements in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work are strictly subdued by moralism, although the curious fantasy “Rappaccini’s Daughter” may have given Baudelaire the cue which led him to call his seminal work
Les Fleurs du Mal.
Later generations tended to regard Poe as an un-American wimp, and this, combined with a rigid puritanism which considered almost all French fiction indecent and all pretensions to literary style effete, was even more powerful as a disincentive to would-be Decadents than
the intellectual climate in turn-of-the-century Germany.
It was an attitude which infuriated some of the more cultured immigrants, for its absurd self-righteousness as well as its idiocy, and it may be credited with having eventually produced, by way of angry reaction, one of the most determinedly and extravagantly Decadent of all literary productions: the novella
Fantazius Mallare
(1922) by the Russian-born Ben Hecht.
Like most suspect literary productions of its day this was issued in a limited edition for “private circulation” to “subscribers” because it could not be openly sold – a fate which overcame almost all French fiction, Decadent or not.

Despite its lack of promise as host to a Decadent Movement, however, some American writing was marginally infected by the spirit of Decadence.
Gautier was first translated in the U.S.A.
in 1882 by Lafcadio Hearn, a writer of similar stylistic ambition and morbid interest.
He was, however, too much of an outsider to survive happily in America and in 1890 he went to Japan, where he spent the remainder of his life writing essays and stories based in Japanese mythology, in languidly lapidary prose.
Another writer briefly infected with Francophilic enthusiasms was Robert W.
Chambers, who was an art student in Paris in the late 1880s.
The influence of his Parisian experiences is elaborately displayed in his first two books,
In the Quarter
(1894) and
The King in Yellow
(1895).
It is revealing that the stories are feeble except for a group in which the corollary influence of Poe is displayed in no uncertain terms – the first four items in the second book are a group of powerful baroque horror stories, among the best of their kind; while the fifth, “The Demoiselle D’Ys” is a heavily sentimentalized Gautieresque timeslip romance.
The same impetus, slightly weakened, can be seen in one subsequent collection, the
Mystery of Choice
(1897), but
Chambers was then thoroughly reinfected with the attitude of his native culture and his work became carefully commercial and utterly trivial.

Part of the background to the
King in Yellow
stories was borrowed from the work of Ambrose Bierce, the most notable writer of horror stories to be found among Chambers’ contemporaries.
Despite his intense interest in the literary representation of abnormal mental states Bierce does not really warrant consideration as a Decadent; like Poe’s work, his is the kind of thing which French Decadents would have loved to read for its eccentricity, but its aesthetic ambitions are not flaunted, its erotic elements are carefully understated, and it is devoid of any preoccupation with
spleen
or
impuissance.
But Bierce was to influence, directly and indirectly, several other writers who lived, as he did, on the Western seaboard of the U.S.A., among them Edward Markham and George Sterling.

Sterling, in particular, was Bierce’s protegé and found in Bierce one of the few men able to provide an understanding and sympathetic audience for his morbid and highly-decorated work.
He was doomed to be esoteric and largely unread while he lived (and to remain so) but he enjoyed a brief moment of celebrity – or notoriety – when Bierce persuaded
Cosmopolitan
to publish his bizarre poetic masterpiece “A Wine of Wizardry” (1907).
Like Hecht’s
Fantazius Mallare
this piece reacts against an arid aesthetic climate by going to extremes, but in a different direction; it is a hymn to escapism far bolder than Chambers’ “Demoiselle D’Ys” or Arthur Machen’s
Hill of Dreams.

Sterling not only wrote Decadent verse but tried to live a Decadent life-style, from which he eventually perished – but not before he had attracted a handful of protegés of his own, among them Clark Ashton Smith,
who took over where Sterling left off as the poet of American Decadence, translating a good deal of Baudelaire and writing his own imitations thereof before outdoing “A Wine of Wizardry” in his own escapist epic “The Hashish-Eater” (1922).
Like Sterling, though, Smith had no hope of finding a wide audience for his work, and he was able to carry his enthusiasm into prose fiction only because of a brief period of fluky fashionability which he enjoyed in the pulp magazines
Weird Tales
and
Wonder Stories,
for which he produced some of the most lushly exotic fantasies ever written.

With Smith, the outsidest of all outsiders, the hardly-started story of American Decadence effectively came to an end, its marvellous visions cast out to the furthest reaches of time and space in search of the ultimate extremes.
It was, in its fashion, an end which one cannot deem entirely inappropriate, for Smith’s was excellent work despite its absurd
milieu,
and may serve as a sharp reminder that Decadence never really did get the audience it needed – and perhaps deserved – even in the gloriously decadent city which gave it birth, let alone in any of the world’s other great cities.

**********

ECHOES IN TIME:
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF DECADENCE

Obsolete literary fads never really die, nor do they entirely fade away.
They merely dissolve into the organized chaos of potential influences, preserved in memory as treasures to be looted, follies to be satirized, and bad examples to be avoided.

Any account of the achievements of Decadence must begin by admitting that the foundations of the movement were built on sand.
Its central myths were quite false, and its shocking innovations have lost their shock-value in becoming familiar.
A sensitive study of history provides little evidence to support the notion that all great civilizations must crumble because the comforts consequent upon success are fatally corrosive of further ambition or effective self-defense, and modern psychology has quite outgrown the idea that genius is a species of madness.
There is nothing particularly startling to the modern mind in the notion of art for art’s sake, and there is no longer the least air of mystery surrounding hashish or opium derivatives.
Nobody these days talks about a cult of artificiality, but the merest glance at the contemporary genre of “shopping and fucking” bestsellers testifies to the fact that its modern equivalent is more of a religion.
A contemporary essay on the defence of cosmetics, however broadly the term might be construed, could only be a conservative reaction against the shocking radicalism of greens and feminists.

One could, of course, make out an apologetic case for Decadent Movements on the grounds that they helped
lay the groundwork for subsequent movements like Surrealism and Modernism, and offered useful exemplars to writers as varied as Gide, Cocteau, Céline and Genet, but that would be rather weak-kneed.
The Decadents themselves certainly did not intend to be a passing phase on the way to something more worth while; they thought they were harbingers of the apocalypse, and they wanted to reach an extreme which could not be surpassed.
Had they been able to anticipate the extent of their failure to achieve those extremes which were realized within forty or fifty years of their passing they would probably have been depressed – but because they were Decadents, they were no strangers to depression, and one more
impuissant
shrug of the shoulders would have been no big deal.

Let us, then, in remembering the celebrants of Decadence, try to discover something more appropriate to say than they they added a few extra drops to the great stream of literary history.
Let us try to find something which they say directly to modern readers, which modern readers need to hear.

If we do this, we will find that there are two elements of the Decadents’ gospel which have neither been falsified nor over-familiarized.
Both, as might be expected, are denials of things which the people of the 1880s would very much like to have believed, and which the people of the 1990s are
still
trying to believe.
The Decadents were right, and are right, about two matters – one important and one admittedly trivial – which have not yet been universally conceded, but ought to be.

The important matter about which the Decadents were right is their opinion of the veneration of Nature.
They thought that it was stupid; it was; and it is.
Where they had to live with the legacy of Rousseau we have to live with a growing Ecological Mysticism which is a lethal pollutant of green politics and the parent of an
indiscriminate hostility to exactly those aspects of technological progress which might yet save us from the filthy mess which we are making of the world.
There is a widespread popular misconception to the effect that turning forests into deserts and rivers into sewers is the perogative of modern men armed with sophisticated technologies, and that if only technological progress could be reversed all would be well.
In the ears of people who believe such nonsense there is no more euphonious word than “natural”, which has come to be a synonym for “good”.

The Decadents treated such ideas with a scorn which they thoroughly deserve.
They recognised that all the triumphs of mankind are based in artifice, and that the principal condition of the success of human life is a secure and complete control of nature.
The Decadents would have condemned as shallow fools those critics who find something perverse and unnatural in the notion of taking control of genetic processes so that we may become true governors of creation, and they would have been right to do so.
The Decadents might have remained pessimistic about the actual project of deploying sophisticated techniques of genetic engineering in time to save the world from ruin, but they would have had no doubts about its propriety.
If one can speak at all about a Decadent Ideal World (and one has to admit that there is a certain paradox in the notion) then that Ideal World would be a world in which people had total control over all matters of biology, including their own anatomy, physiology and physical desires; it is an Ideal which we can and ought to share, though far too few of us actually do.

The trivial matter about which the Decadents were right, although this point might arguably be reckoned as a mere corollary of the first, concerns their
cynical attitude to matters of sexual morality – and, indeed, their dismissal of the ambitions of all prescriptive systems of morality.
They were right-but not particularly original – when they argued that no set of rules could ever succeed in dampending the perverse curiosity of the human mind; they were right, too, to be severely sceptical as to whether that acknowledged impossibility is altogether to be regretted.
The mythology of ideal romantic love which is peddled in today’s world is not much different from that which was peddled in the 1880s, and there are probably no more people who think that actual contemporary relationships are accurately reflected in that mythology than there were then; that is not surprising.
What is surprising is there are probably as many people, or more, who think that the world would be a far better place if the real world were more like the mythological world of romantic fiction.
A healthy dose of Decadent fiction may still be capable of curing victims of that particular delusion, and ought at least to be tried.

Even the Decadents, it must be confessed, did have a tendency to regret the non-existence of Ideal Love, but their sense of tragedy was outside the common rut.
They shed their fair share of tears over the fact that real people have to make do with lesser affections, which must of necessity be granted to relatively undeserving recipients.
But they were also prepared to take an experimental attitude to the problem by suggesting that if the mythology turned out to be an abject failure (as it inevitably would) perhaps it might be stretched and twisted into a better shape by trial and error.

The quest for new sensations – which, inevitably, can also be seen as a search for new sins – is sometimes seen even by the Decadents themselves as little more than an elaborate process of self-destruction, but its underlying attitude of combative derision towards
received mythology is perfectly healthy.
We live, alas, in a world which is still obsessed with the project of finding and maintaining the perfect relationship, and where a substantial fraction of the periodical press, ads and all, is devoted to an extraordinary elaboration of the typical concerns of “agony columns”.
The Decadents can tell us, as they told their own contemporaries, that all the advice about how to build the ideal relationship is not only bullshit but
unnecessary
bullshit, and that the only sensible reaction to the discovery that it never really works is to say “What the hell!”
and try something else instead.
Decadents admit that the way the cards are stacked, everyone’s life is likely to be a long catalogue of mistakes – but they point out that one doesn’t actually have to keep making the
same
mistake over and over and over again.

It is mainly because the Decadents say these things, which still need to be said, that there is still some point in reading them.
Their stylistic coquetry is not empty even when its illusions have been stripped away; their calculated indecency still poses a real challenge.
They can still be alarming and surprising, and even their constant flirtation with certain ideas fit only for the dustbin (which they were unfortunate enough to inherit from incompetent intellectuals) still has a certain redeeming quaintness.
Stricken they might have been by
ennui, spleen
, and
impuissance
, but when the time came for a Big Push they were never afraid – in spite of their debilitating neurasthenia, cynical wit and calculated charm – to go over the top and charge headlong into the barbed wire.

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