All posts tagged Edgar Allen Poe

Illuminations by Walter Benjamin (1968)

Walter Benjamin was the most romantic of all the Western Marxists.
(Western Marxism by J.G. Merquior, page 117)

Brief biography

Walter Benjamin was born in 1892 to an affluent Jewish family in Berlin. In the late 1920s he developed a reputation as a literary critic and by the early 1930s as a Marxist critic of not just literature, poetry, theatre and film, but of modern society.

He became friends with the famous communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, and their friendly correspondence and mutual criticism has become famous among literary types.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Benjamin fled Germany for France and, when Nazi Germany invaded France in the summer of 1940, he fled south hoping to escape to Spain. When paperwork screwups prevented him from crossing the border into Spain he took his own life on 26 September 1940 at the age of 48.

‘Illuminations’ made him well known

Known to the literati in Germany, for a long time Benjamin was unknown in the English-speaking world. This began to change with the publication of this selection of short-ish essays, in German in 1955 and then translated into English in 1968. The book contains the following essays:

  1. Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting
  2. The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens
  3. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov
  4. Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death (see separate review)
  5. Max Brod’s Book on Kafka: and Some of my Own Reflections (see separate review)
  6. What is Epic Theatre?
  7. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
  8. The Image of Proust
  9. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (see separate review)
  10. Theses on The Philosophy of History (see separate review)

The volume is introduced by the German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906 to 1975). (I summarise her introduction in a separate review.).

The collection was first published as a Fontana paperback in 1970 and I bought a copy of the 1983 edition when I was a student. Throughout the 1980s more of Benjamin’s works were translated, including his book-length study of Baudelaire, his autobiography and so on – and by the 1990s he’d become a staple of courses of literary criticism, appearing in the ‘Marxist criticism’ sections of introductions to literary criticism, having ‘Short introductions to…’ and pocket summaries devoted to him, being repackaged and summarised for easy consumption in student lectures and seminars. Although great, he has also become something of a cliché.

Benjamin’s line

Benjamin was an eccentric. His take on literature, society and history was distinctive and original. Although he was very sympathetic to Marxist thought, he never joined the Communist Party and was criticised by the high priests of Western Marxist criticism, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who set up the influential Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in the 1920s, which survived the war and went on to define Marxist culture criticism in the post-war decades. For them, Benjamin lacked both political commitment and philosophical rigour.

One aspect of this was that, alongside his Marxist worldview Benjamin was very interested in theology, especially Jewish theology and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, although he was never a practicing believer.

Thus his works, at moments, present an attractive combination of Marxist terminology underpinned by a more theological and even mystical worldview. It’s this mix of influences and insights which stopped him from being a dry and boring ideologue (cf Adorno and Horkheimer) and therefore easier to consume (hence his popularity with students and lecturers). But he still strains for a kind of philosophical transcendence which is sometimes hard to follow, and he wrote in German, a notoriously heavy and dense language.

Which is why, although many of his ideas are attractive when you can make them out, often entire stretches of his essays go by without you getting a clear understanding of what he’s on about. He has moments of great lucidity and insight but be aware that he has whole pages where it’s hard to make out his meaning.

1. Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting (1931)

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!

The collection starts with an easy one, a very approachable chatty talk about the joy of opening his packing cases of books after two years in storage which develops into

Every passion borders on the chaotic but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memory. (p.60)

For the book collector reviewing his collection brings a chaos of memories.

Books can be treasured as objects, but also as the scenes for their stories – not only the obvious stories they contain, but the stories of how the collector came by them. Collected books are like a ‘magical encyclopedia’ of these stories.

When a collector handles his objects, he looks as if he’s seeing through them into a remote past as though inspired.

Books have their destinies but so do the individual copies of books, and the most important moment in a book’s fate is its encounter with the collector.

Children love collecting things, all kinds of random objects. Thus each time a collector acquires a book he reawakens the wellsprings of childish joy.

The mode of acquisition for a collector is to borrow a book and never return it.

Also important is the idea of never actually reading the book. Most book collectors with large collections have read only a fraction of the collection. That is good.

Buying books from catalogues can lead to disappointment or happiness; the excitement is in the gamble. (I experience the same thing buying second hand books off ebay: sometimes they arrive in surprisingly pristine condition, sometimes so bent and stained and full of hair or sand that I pass them onto the charity shop or even, in really grim cases, throw them away.)

Buying a book is a way of setting it free from the doldrums of a shop or warehouse.

To a book collector the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves. (p.64)

There is no living library that doesn’t contain a number of items from fringe areas such as stick-in albums, or typescripts.

The soundest way of acquiring a collection is via inheritance. The collector has the responsibility of an heir, and ‘the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility’.

The phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Although a public collection is more socially useful, only in a private collection do the objects ‘get their due’.

Books don’t come alive in the collector; it is the collector who comes alive in his books.

Commentary

Reeks of belle-lettreism and bourgeois nostalgia. It is unusual for Benjamin in being almost entirely comprehensible.

2. The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens (1923)

Like a lot of Benjamin, this is a strange mixture of the incomprehensible and the disconcertingly obvious. When he asks ‘Is a translation meant for readers who do not understand the original?’ surely the answer is…er…yes.

When he implies that translation can translate the meaning but often that’s the least part of a literary work, which is about style and presence and rhythm (‘the unfathomable, the mysterious, the poetic’) and so on… that also is surely very obvious.

Ditto when he says that a translation comes after the writing of the original. Or when he says that the task of translation is distinct and different from the task of the poet. Or when he says the work of the poet is primary, that of the translator, secondary. All pretty obvious…

But then he goes from the apparently banal to the difficult-to-understand. He calls translation a ‘mode’ and then spends a page considering the quality of ‘translatability’ which leads up to:

If translation is a mode, translatability must be an essential feature of certain works. (p.71)

Pages go by made up of statements like: ‘The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history’, and it’s difficult to tell whether this is a casual aside or a central part of the argument, let alone whether it has any truth to it. I struggled to understand these passages:

To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory. (p.73)

He says the kinship of languages lies not in their historical connections but in their shared intentions, which you can half understand, if you sidestep the more obvious point that anyone saying anything has an intention of some kind. When he says that ‘Translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages’, this sounds profound but if he means that translations are always imperfect and unsatisfactory, is sort of well known.

We know we are in an impractical world of mysticism when he writes that translation’s goal is:

undeniably a final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation. In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air… It cannot live there permanently… yet, in a singularly impressive manner, at least it points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment of languages. (p.75)

He seems to be saying that the act of translation gestures towards a kind of ultimate language, the language of Truth which lies hidden behind the actual languages of the world. You can see how this is a mystical or poetic thought.

He makes the obvious point that translators are faced with a spectrum of operation, from fidelity to license, with extreme pedantic literalism at one end, and the attempt to recreate the effect of the original, even it means using words with different meanings altogether, at the other.

He seems to come to the extremely banal conclusion that the best translation is the one which transparently recreates the effect of the original, although its hard to tell from his obscuring language:

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, it does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.

The essay seems to be haunted by the notion of the ultimate Pure Language, which hovers behind all actual languages, clearly a mystical or gnostic or Kabbalistic notion. Which explains sentences like this, which are interesting as a certain type of rhetoric but can’t, you feel, have very much practical use for actual translators or, indeed, for anyone who doesn’t believe in the notion of a pure language hovering behind all the actual languages in the world.

It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his recreation of that work. (p.80)

3. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov (1936)

A prime exercise in Kulturpessimismus – Benjamin pessimistically claims that the art of storytelling is dying out among us, the communicability of experience is decreasing, oh alas and alack! He associates this with ‘the great silence’ of those who returned from the Great War.

He references the German proverb that someone who has gone a journey has a story to tell. This is profoundly true of so much fiction, which describes journeys, quests and odysseys.

There are maybe two archetypal storytellers, the man who stays put and tills the soil and knows all the local folk tales; and the sailor who goes to sea and beings back stories of exotic lands.

Who was Nikolai Leskov?

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (1831 to 1895) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, and held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is credited with creating a comprehensive picture of contemporary Russian society using mostly short literary forms.

Leskov came to writing late, at the age of 29. Previously he had worked as a travelling salesman for a British company which gave him an overview of Russian society.

Thoughts on The Novel The novel could only come about after the invention of printing. Previously people told stories, communicated life learnings which could be repackaged orally. A communal activity. The novelist sets himself apart by sitting in a room conceiving a thousand and one details to make his narrative artistic. Benjamin gives us typically challenging apothegms:

To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. (p.87)

But now both folk telling and the novel are being destroyed by the press, the vehicle of the bourgeoisie under capitalism.

He makes the distinction between intelligence and information. As you might expect, storytelling expresses intelligence (close to wisdom) while the press conveys information. Information can be quickly verified, which only emphasises its usefulness. But teaching us to focus only on the useful and communicable, the press destroys our ability to share experiences.

This made me stop and reflect that we live in an age (2026) overwhelmed and flooded with information but displaying pitifully little intelligence and no wisdom.

No event already comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. (p.89)

Information and commentary destroy storytelling. The best storytelling leaves things out, forcing or letting the reader join the dots and draw their own conclusions, ‘and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude which information lacks’ (p.89).

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.

Storytelling is characterised by moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.

A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.

[Benjamin cites a story from Herodotus but this made me think of the Bible, the whole point of the Bible stories being that they are so elliptical and allusive that they still spill new meanings two and a half thousand years after being written down.]

The less psychological analysis a story has, the more it benefits from a ‘chaste compactness’.

To assimilate a story you need to be mentally relaxed. A symptom of this mental relax is boredom, the mind is empty. This allows it to receive the story and let its implications percolate through an undistracted consciousness.

And this, of course, is why in Benjamin’s opinion storytelling is dying out, it’s because we are all too distracted and saturated by shallow, profoundly unsatisfying ‘information’. [It occurs to me the information is like junk food, quick and sensational. Everyone now knows that social media feeds are dopamine hits and junk food stimuli for minds which now are never at rest, which never stare out the window and wander, achieving the state of openness which Benjamin is describing.]

Storytelling is characterised by retelling and each retelling adds a layer or patina over the story, adding to its depth and richness.

Death used to be commonly experienced, in the Middle Ages for example, and stories are validated by death.

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

This is the kind of teasing thought which makes Benjamin a pleasure. The essay on translation is, I think, bad, strains too much, is pretentious, and he never makes clear enough the notion of the Pure Language which underpins it. Here, by contrast, this meditation on the nature of storytelling in the modern age is full of directly useful insights (for example the basic difference between wisdom and information), and then of what you could call teasing or secondary insights, phrases you know have meaning even if you don’t immediately understand them.

The relationship between the storyteller and the chronicler, especially the early medieval chroniclers with their super-brief entries and their belief in Christian eschatology i.e. the end of the world.

Epic poetry is written under the aegis of Mnemosyne, the muse of memory. The narrator starts his narrative by invoking memory and memory plays a part in the structuring of the story, the in the many memories of the storyteller who assembles it, and in the folk memories of the audience who listen to them.

A story is told in companionship. A novel is written, and then consumed, in private. It is the most intimate of the art forms and profoundly anti-social.

The first true storyteller is the teller of fairy tales. Benjamin cites Ernst Bloch (as he cited György Lukács a little earlier.) This is raised because Leskov’s stories are often close to fairy tale.

Benjamin talks about the righteous man as he appears in some of Leskov’s stories and this sound like a religious figure and idea, maybe a distinctively Jewish idea (?). Christians talk about a holy man, a saint.

Storytellers have a traditional sympathy for ‘rascals and crooks’. So many stories are about cunning types who defeat rules and laws. Think of the cunning slave in every ancient comedy. My favourite fictional character is Falstaff. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp permanently at odds with the police and the po-faced.

He throws off a powerful apothegm:

A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.

And ends with a portentous punchline:

The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.

Like a lot of Benjamin, this sounds great but I’m not sure what it means or how long it lasts.

4. Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death (1934)

See separate review.

5. Max Brod’s Book on Kafka: and Some of my Own Reflections (1938)

See separate review.

6. What is Epic Theatre? (1939)

Introduction

Benjamin was personal friends with the famous Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898 to 1956). When Brecht fled Nazi Germany to Denmark, he invited Benjamin to join him, though Benjamin decided to go to Paris.

Brecht pioneered a dramatically new approach to theatre which he called epic theatre and really caught on in the West after the Second World War. Firstly, it is highly political, with an anti-bourgeois and communist leaning. Second, it not only dispenses with but deliberately breaks all kinds of rules: for example, there’s minimum staging and often scenes and settings are conveyed by big placards reading COUNTRYSIDE or OFFICE. Similarly, actors often swap roles. In the same spirit most of the action is non-naturalistic and punctuated by speeches or songs.

The general idea was that bourgeois theatre lulled its audience into believing in the story it’s telling and thus conceals the power basis, exploitation and oppression inherent in bourgeois capitalism. Epic theatre, by contrast, set out to disrupt and subvert all the conventions of theatre and, by doing so, force the audience to think about social and political realities. As with revolutionaries going back at least as far as Percy Shelley in 1818, the basic idea is that people are asleep regarding the many oppressions of capitalist society and need to be woken from their slumber. The use of the word ‘woke’ in recent discourse is just the latest variation on a very old idea: we know the Truth; you need to wake up to it. In the first part Benjamin writes:

Epic theatre appeals to an interest group who ‘do not think without reason’. Brecht does not lose sight of the masses, whose limited practice of thinking is probably described by this phrase.

The masses’ limited practice of thinking. There, in a nutshell, you have what could be called communist condescension or progressive pompousness.

Benjamin’s essay

In this short essay Benjamin set out to explain Brecht’s aims in epic theatre which was, in the 1930s, still known to relatively few people.

Relaxed audience Unexpectedly, Benjamin starts by saying it requires an audience which is relaxed and so can pay attention to the issues raised in the play. The aim of epic theatre is to avoid sensation and people losing themselves in the spectacle. Instead, they are to be kept at a distance.

Avoiding sensation One way to avoid sensation is to use well-known plots or stories. Hence Brecht’s most recent play, about the well-known life of the astronomer Galileo (written in 1938). Benjamin casually mentions the placards and posters which are held up to convey the change of scene or passage of time.

The sage He digresses on the role of ‘the wise man’ in Brecht’s plays, asserting that the sage appears throughout Western drama, but the figure of the wise man is of a special kind in Brecht. He is a representative of the contradictions found in modern society, he is a walking embodiment of the famous dialectic.

Avoiding Aristotle Aristotle’s analysis of Greek tragedy started a 2,000-year-old tradition, the kernel of his theory being the idea that tragedy purges individuals and the community of pent-up or suppressed emotion by witnessing terrible suffering enacted on stage, a process Aristotle called catharsis. Well, Brecht comes from a different place altogether. He isn’t a rival to Aristotle, he exists in a parallel universe. And here we hit some paydirt quotes:

The special character of the relaxed interest of the audience for which the performances of the epic theatre are intended is the fact that hardly any appeal is made to the empathy of the spectators. Instead, the art of the epic theatre consists in producing astonishment rather than empathy.

To put it succinctly: instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function.

The task of the epic theatre, according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions. This presentation does not mean reproduction as the theoreticians of Naturalism understood it. Rather, the truly important thing is to discover the conditions of life.

(One might say just as well: to alienate [verfremden] them.)

This discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through the interruption of happenings

And this is the famous alienation technique of Verfremdungseffekt. We are meant to be continually detached or distanced from what’s going on onstage; instead of being gripped and enthralled, as you’re usually meant to be at the theatre, instead we’re meant to be astonished at the abuses of power we see dramatised, and forced to think about power relationships in our own lives and society.

Gestures Epic theatre tends to have actors perform gestures and then perform them again, until the artifice of gesture itself becomes clear.

Theatrical excitement wears off after a few hours. Brecht wanted the audience to be permanently enlightened as to the inequities of their society.

Pauses The action of epic theatre is punctuated by pauses for the audience to react critically i.e. to take in what they’ve just seen. The actors take part in this pause, stepping out of character for the duration.

The actor must be as relaxed as the audience i.e. not get up in the usual histrionics of acting. Detachment.

For centuries there has been an orchestra pit between the raised stage and the audience. Epic theatre fills in the pit. The play, the drama, the actors and the ideas are all rendered approachable.

7. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939)

At 40 pages this is the longest essay in the book, with 6 pages of Benjamin’s own notes.

Some of the premises of the essay are invalidated because he is speaking very precisely to the situation in 1938 when he says that lyric poetry (like storytelling, like everything) is declining and falling – ‘the climate for lyric poetry has become increasingly inhospitable’ etc. Eighty or so years later all these generalisations are historical, now.

Maybe it’s because the nature of experience has changed. He says the philosophers of the first part of the twentieth century have been trying to cut through to what real experience is and summarises a few, including Henri Bergson.

This in turn digresses into a reprise of the Leskov essay’s distinction between storytelling based on knowledge and the news media which pump out depthless information. Then another digression:

In seeking a more substantial definition of what appears in Proust’s memoire de l’intelligence as a by-product of Bergson’s theory, it is well to go back to Freud.

So he gives us a summary of Freud’s post-war essay, Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920) and quite a technical passage on the nature of memory, before skipping off to quote the French poet Paul Valéry (1871 to 1945) on the subject of memory.

The gist of the Freud passage is Freud’s later theory that the chief purpose of the ‘mind’ is to control the incessant stimuli the human organism is bombarded with. If experiences do get through the defences they are often forgotten or repressed. Anxiety dreams indicate places where psychic traumas are trying to return.

Benjamin associates these ideas of trying to protect yourself from trauma with Baudelaire’s nervy poems about trying to survive in the swarming streets of mid-nineteenth century Paris, with its risk of shocks and startling sights around every corner. Remember the poem about the blind. And the lost swan.

Which brings Benjamin on to Friedrich Engels and a passage in his classic book ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ describing the incredible crowds in contemporary London, the largest, most congested city in Europe. Engels describes what these people have lost in terms of contact with nature and natural feelings.

So by now the essay has settled down to being about the central importance of the crowd, the mass, la foule, in Baudelaire’s poetry, whose impress is everywhere obvious and yet which he rarely if ever directly describes.

Then Benjamin gives a long quote from a story by Edgar Allen Poe describing the London crowds. See what I mean by his essays progressing by digressing, one thing leading to another? And the use of long quotes for this leads onto a long quote from a short story by E.T.A. Hoffman. ‘The Cousin’s Corner Window’, about the city crowds. Then an anecdote about the German poet Heinrich Heine’s horror at walking along a boulevard.

Some stuff about newish technology such as the match, later the camera, later still the film camera, all of which, in different ways, trigger and record shocks which (you realise) are turning out to be the central concept of the essay.

Benjamin then quotes a passage from Marx about the way the ultimate experience of alienation for a worker is working on a production line, and compares production line behaviour to the automaton-like behaviour of masses in a crowd, as described by Poe.

Benjamin makes a rather strained comparison between the addiction of the gambler and the experience of the worker at the production line, based on the dubious notion that gambling itself becomes a compulsively repeated activity.

The aura of a work of art

Towards the end of the essay he introduces the idea of an aura which surrounds an original work of art, and which has (like everything, alas) declined in the age of the camera. So what is this ‘aura’?

If we designate as aura the associations which, at home in the memoire involontaire, tend to cluster around the object of a perception, then its analogue in the case of a utilitarian object is the experience which has left traces of the practiced hand.

So the ‘aura’ is the psychological traces, prompted by involuntary memory, comparable to the traces left on the pot by the potter’s hand. This is a reasonably understandable idea but hard to really believe in…

Also, note that the whole concept of the aura appears solely so that Benjamin can point out that it is, because of the modern world, in decline. Just like lyric poetry is in decline and the art of storytelling is in terminal decline. Benjamin is an arch pessimist. It’s not an accident but really fundamental to his entire world view that the modern industrial world with its technological innovations, industrial production, newspapers and films, is killing off the old traditional arts.

His entire position is one of lamenting and repining and mourning and regretting. In other words, for all that he drops in occasional references to Marx, deep down he comes across as a bourgeois conservative who likes things the old way. The contrast between his gloomy pessimism and the dynamism of the Russian constructivism of the first decade after the revolution – an approach which thrilled to the overthrow of all the old modes and the invention of whole new ways of thinking, writing and broadcasting – couldn’t be greater.

The subject of the essay Only in the last sentences does he reveal what the essay has really been about: namely, finding evidence in Baudelaire’s writings for ‘the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock‘ (p.196).

Filled though it is with interesting ideas, I don’t think the essay has persuaded me that either shocks, in particular, and certainly not the fuzzy notion of the aura, are central to Baudelaire’s poetry. Nowhere in the whole essay does Benjamin even mention Baudelaire’s descriptions of lofty, sensual pleasure which are what appealed to me as a schoolboy.

The notion of the ‘aura’ will go on to be central in his most famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ which is included in this selection but which I review in a separate blog post.

8. The Image of Proust (1929)

We have already met Proust as a star player in the essay on Baudelaire, now he has an essay of his own. Marcel Proust (1871 to 1922) was the author of the monumental, multi-volume novel, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ which is also translated as ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ It is what it says on the tin, an extremely long, subtle, lyrical evocation of the memories of its aristocratic characters.

So Benjamin’s essay kicks off by focusing on memory and the distinction made in the Baudelaire essay by voluntary and involuntary memory, the first a conscious effort to remember something, the second triggered by an unexpected source such as a sound or scent or flavour.

And distinguishes between the event itself, the thing we experience, which is finite in the continual flux of our experience; and the way that, later on, we remember it, which is potentially infinite.

For an experienced event is finite – at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.

The handful of events which we choose to remember out of the tens of thousands which have occurred to us are infinite because they have a numberless amount of connections to everything else in our lives. And because they form the scaffold of our self, which is bottomless.

Benjamin remarks that the text is like a tapestry woven from these two types of memory.

It partakes of the dreamworld in that there is a huge amount of repetition, in fact the stories told in the book are very samey.

Benjamin suggests that there are two types of memory, the hymnic and the elegiac. One celebrates heights of bliss and happiness, the other mourns their loss. [Obviously, the second is more common in literature: it is the weaker, sentimental option. In a sense Benjamin’s entire oeuvre is sentimentally elegiac for the lost certainties of his bourgeois childhood.]

Benjamin detects in Proust the twin poles of flattery (to the aristocrats he moved among and adulated) and curiosity about every aspect of their lives (which had the subtle effect of undermining them).

As a snob, Proust mercilessly dissected the world of snobs. For Benjamin the distinguishing feature of this class is the steely gaze with which they ignore the entire world of production i.e. how all the goods they consume are made and manufactured.

It excludes from its world everything that has a part in production, or at least demands that this part be gracefully and bashfully concealed behind the kind of manner that is sported by the polished professionals of consumption. (p.211)

[The same, in a different mode, could be said of all Oscar Wilde’s characters. In their unremitting focus on the ‘top 10,000’ in society, maybe Proust and Wilde are parallel cases.]

He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us… (p.213)

9. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

See separate review.

10. Theses on The Philosophy of History (1940)

See separate review.

Credit

Illuminations by Walter Benjamin was published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1955. The English translation by Harry Zohn was published in 1968 by Harcourt, Brace and World Inc. It was first published in Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1970 and published in Fontana paperbacks in 1973. Page references are to the 1982 Fontana paperback edition. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

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Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers (1927)

‘Pardon my Stevensonian manner.’

‘Begin right at the beginning, if you will, please. I have a very trivial mind. Detail delights me. Ramifications enchant me. Distance no object. No reasonable offer refused…’
(Wimsey’s rambling manner)

‘I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit—not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.’ (Chapter 4)

‘You’re a noticing one, aren’t you?’ said Mrs Cropper. ‘Make a good waiter, you would—not meaning any offence, sir, that’s a real compliment from one who knows.’
(Chapter 10)

Plot summary

This is the third Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It is a very long, convoluted story about a will which involves understanding a complex family tree which goes back to the late eighteenth century.

It opens with Wimsey and his good friend, Detective Charles Parker, having a meal in a cheap Soho restaurant and arguing about the behaviour of a doctor in a murder case. Their argument prompts a chap dining alone at the next table to introduce himself as a doctor who has had a similar experience and Wimsey promptly asks him to tell his story.

He was physician to an elderly lady dying of cancer who’d had several operations. She was attended by a nurse who he fell in love with and he thought the old girl had months left to live. But then the woman’s great-niece dismissed the nurse, and two servants, replaced her with a new nurse and took over full-time care of her herself. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the old lady died, leaving everything to her great-niece.

The physician was, understandably, suspicious and insisted on a post-mortem and full inquest. However, both found no evidence of foul play and his conscientiousness rebounded on him as the small village community closed ranks to defend the great-niece and accuse him of meddling, throwing in the idea that he had neglected caring for the lady because of his affair with her first nurse. His clients started to drop him and eventually he was forced to sell the practice altogether which is why he finds himself unemployed in a cheap restaurant in Soho.

Wimsey is immediately grabbed by this (to be frank) boring and banal story and won’t let it go. The unnamed physician finishes his story and leaves without introducing himself or giving the names of any of the people in his tale.

So Wimsey gets in touch with a new character, a spinster lady named Miss Alexandra Katharine Climpson, to investigate, by going to Somerset House and searching for deaths which match these circumstances. (It is typical of Wimsey, and Sayers’ sense of humour, that Wimsey pranks his friend Detective Parker by inviting him to come and meet old Miss Climpson in phrases which make it seem as if he has taken a mistress and set her up in a swanky flat, which Parker believes until the door to the flat in question is opened by a sweet little old lady, and he turns to see Wimsey’s face beaming at him.

After a lot of sifting Miss C identifies the participants as follows: the old lady who died was Miss Agatha Dawson; her great-niece is Mary Whittaker; the doctor who talked to them in the restaurant is Dr Edward Carr; the nurse he fell in love with and who was then dismissed is a Miss Philliter; the two servants who were dismissed are Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed. The small town where this all took place is Leahampton in Hampshire.

Wimsey then instructs Miss C to go down to Leahampton, take a room somewhere and make enquiries among the old gossips of the town about the Agatha Dawson affair – which she promptly does, taking a room with Mrs Budge of ‘Fairview’, and attending tea parties with the vicar, Mr Tredgold and his charming wife, and meeting such village luminaries as Miss Murgatroyd, Mrs Peasgood and so on. ‘Gossip’ is the word the characters themselves use.

‘It really is terrible, living in a little town like this,’ went on Miss Findlater, ‘so full of aspidistras, you know, and small gossip. You’ve no idea what a dreadfully gossipy place Leahampton is, Miss Climpson.’ (Chapter 5)

Miss C writes back to Wimsey that there’s no sense of foul play or no more than circulates in any circle of gossipy old ladies. At the same tea party she meets Miss Whittaker and is immediately impressed:

The first impression which Miss Climpson got of Mary Whittaker was that she was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that ‘does well’ in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored—not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure. (Chapter 5)

Miss C discovers that clever Miss Whittaker has a fan, an acolyte, the devoted Miss Findley who is encouraging her plan to quit Leahampton and set up a chicken farm where they can both live close to the soil (!)

Despite Parker pointing out that there is no evidence of any crime being committed, Wimsey is intrigued and decides to put a ‘fishing’ advert in the press to see what happens. It reads:

Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed, formerly in the service of Miss Agatha Dawson, of ‘The Grove,’ Wellington Avenue, Leahampton, are requested to communicate with J. Murbles, solicitor, of Staple Inn, when they will hear of SOMETHING TO THEIR ADVANTAGE.’

What happens is that a few days later the dead body of Bertha Gotobed turns up in undergrowth in Epping Forest. The local cops think she died of a heart attack since there are no marks on the body, no sign of foul play. But Wimsey is galvanised. He is now convinced that someone murdered Miss Dawson and is now covering their tracks by bumping off any witnesses.

Bertha’s landlady is called in to identify the body and confirms that the other Gotobed sister, Evelyn, got married and moved to Canada with her husband.

In a tree nearby Wimsey finds a very posh ham sandwich wrapped in paper, posher than Bertha’s class, alongside a bottle of Bass beer. And in her handbag a £5 note, again much above her station. In those days you could trace notes and the cops identify this one as one of a series paid out to a Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street.

So off Wimsey and Parker go to question her, Wimsey frivolously posing under the pseudonym Mr Templeton. Mrs Forrest is rich and self-possessed and explains that she is in the process of divorcing her husband and has an active lover. Wimsey makes a fuss about fixing drinks for them (behind a fashionable screen) and takes the opportunity of secreting a glass she’s handled out the window in order to retrieve it later and get her fingerprints and see if there are any fingerprints on the beer bottle: there aren’t…

Parker is still puzzled why Wimsey cares so much about the case and Wimsey explains that he has an entire library of books about murders and murderers, but they are only about the ones we know about. What about the thousands and thousands who get away with it because no crime is even suspected? This may be one of those. He is interested in it:

‘Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive or clue.’ (Chapter 8)

The plot is long and convoluted and long before the end I was wondering why I was bothering. Suffice to say it is about the old girl’s money, about the will she left, and involves her very extended family in so convoluted a manner that the book requires an extensive and confusing family tree of the Dawson family to help you understand…

Cast

  • Lord Peter Wimsey
  • Mervyn Bunter – his faithful man servant (served under him in the Great War)
  • Detective-Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard – ‘He’s the one who really does the work’, a ‘restraining presence’ on Wimsey’s over-exuberant impetuosity – ‘When he worked with Wimsey on a case, it was an understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and soul-destroying was done by Parker’
  • Dr Edward Carr – doctor to Miss Agatha Dawson
  • Agatha Dawson – old lady dying of cancer, had had several operations, was reckoned to last another 6 months or so, but her great-niece dismissed her nurse, and two carers, the Gotobed sisters, and then Miss D suddenly dies
  • Miss Whittaker – the niece
  • Miss Findlater – devoted fan of Miss Whittaker, ‘a slight, fair girl, with a rather sentimental look—plump and prettyish’ – a ‘very gushing and really silly young woman’
  • Nurse Philliter – original nurse and carer for Miss Dawson, fell in love with Dr Carr, became engaged, was then dismissed
  • Miss Katherine Climpson – ‘a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward’
  • Sir Andrew Mackenzie – Chief of Scotland Yard
  • Mr John Murbles – solicitor and friend of Wimsey, featured in ‘Clouds of Witness’, resident at Staples Inn
  • Superintendent Walmsley – officer in charge of the scene of Bertha’s body
  • Dorcas Gulliver – landlady of the murdered Bertha Gotobed
  • John Ironsides – was to have married Miss Bertha, a clerk on the Southern Railway
  • Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street – classy lady one of whose five pound notes was found in Bertha’s purse, getting divorced and has a lover yet inexplicably tries to seduce Wimsey
  • Mrs Piggin – landlady of the Fox and Hounds in Crofton
  • Jim Piggin – husband and landlord
  • Ben Cobling – 87, Miss Clara Whittaker’s groom for forty years
  • Mrs Cobling – 85, ‘a delightful old lady, exactly like a dried-up pippin’
  • Mr Probyn – Miss Whittaker’s solicitor and managed all Miss Dawson’s business in Croftover Magna, now retired to the Villa Bianca, Fiesole
  • Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission
  • the Rev. Hallelujah Dawson – ‘an elderly West Indian of… humble and inoffensive… appearance’
  • Esmeralda – Cockney street urchin who protects Wimsey’s parked car for half a crown
  • Mr Towkington of Gray’s Inn – expert on property law – ‘a large, square man with a florid face and a harsh voice’
  • J. F. Trigg – solicitor in Bedford Row
  • Mrs Marion Mead – false name Mary Whittaker gives to the lawyer Trigg when she invites him to the empty house in Hampstead
  • Sir James Lubbock – scientist consulted by Wimsey in the research for his book, ‘The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum, or 101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death’
  • Sir Charles Pillington – Chief Constable of Hampshire
  • Mr Andrews – local photographer roped in to take photos of the body of Vera Findlater
  • local doctor – a ‘tutster’ who examines the body of Vera Findlater
  • Dr Faulkner – sent by Scotland Yard to double check the local man’s verdict, ‘a lean, grey badger of a man, business-like and keen-eyed’
  • Mr Stanniforth – Sacristan of the church of Saint Onesimus
  • Dewsby – head of the fingerprint department at Scotland Yard

Wimsey trivia

Wimsey is 37 (Chapter 15).

In the first book Wimsey very much smoked a pipe. Now he smokes stylish cigarettes, Sobranes. And cigars. Parker smokes a well-worn briar pipe.

Lord Peter paused, in the very act of ringing the bell. His jaw slackened, giving his long, narrow face a faintly foolish and hesitant look, reminiscent of the heroes of Mr P.G. Wodehouse. (Chapter 6)

Wimsey has bought a new car:

‘The new Daimler Twin-Six,’ said Lord Peter, skimming dexterously round a lorry without appearing to look at it. ‘With a racing body.’

Wimsey’s blether

In a characteristically arcane literary reference, Wimsey nicknames his new car ‘Mrs Merdle’ because it is very quiet or ‘makes no row’, and Mrs Merdle, in Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Little Dorrit’, is an arriviste i.e. newly rich, and causes a minor scandal by very noisily taking his seat in the theatre and his wife tells him to stop making a row. To be honest, this reference is so obscure I don’t really understand it…

But that may be part of the point of Wimsey’s countless fleeting cultural references, part of the point is the speed with which he drops them and races on, leaving most of his interlocutors thinking he’s mad.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he said apologetically, ‘I haven’t come to sell you soap or gramophones, or to borrow money or enroll you in the Ancient Froth-blowers or anything charitable. I really am Lord Peter Wimsey—I mean, that really is my title, don’t you know, not a Christian name like Sanger’s Circus or Earl Derr Biggers. I’ve come to ask you some questions, and I’ve no real excuse, I’m afraid, for butting in on you—do you ever read the News of the World?’
Nurse Philliter decided that she was to be asked to go to a mental case, and that the patient had come to fetch her in person. (Chapter 4)

Or else talks in elliptical telegraphese as here when he summarises his theory about Bertha Gotobed’s demise:

Said Wimsey: ‘We suggested shock, you know. Amiable gentleman met at flat of friendly lady suddenly turns funny after dinner and makes undesirable overtures. Virtuous young woman is horribly shocked. Weak heart gives way. Collapse. Exit. Agitation of amiable gentleman and friendly lady, left with corpse on their hands. Happy thought motor-car; Epping Forest; exeunt omnes, singing and washing their hands. Where’s the difficulty?’ (chapter 8)

Or just general-purpose facetiousness, as here when he rings up Dr Carr:

‘Hullo! hullo—ullo! oh, operator, shall I call thee bird or but a wandering voice?… Not at all, I had no intention of being rude, my child, that was a quotation from the poetry of Mr Wordsworth… well, ring him again… thank you, is that Dr Carr?… Lord Peter Wimsey speaking… oh, yes… yes… aha!… not a bit of it… We are about to vindicate you and lead you home, decorated with triumphal wreaths of cinnamon and senna-pods…’

Presumably this is intended to be funny and endearing but well before I was halfway through this novel I’d concluded that Wimsey really is a tiresome berk and to give up reading any more.

‘Be thou as chaste as ice and have a license as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. I am not a dangerous driver. Buck up and get your leave. The snow-white horsepower foams and frets and the blue bonnet—black in this case—is already, in a manner of speaking, over the border.’ (Chapter 11)

‘Sorrow vanquished, labour ended, Jordan passed. Buzz off, my lad. No, Charles, I will not wait while you put on a Burberry. Back and side go bare, go bare, hand and foot go cold, so belly-god send us good ale enough, whether it be new or old.’

He often sounds a bit like the Fool in King Lear i.e. so arcane and scatter-brained as to sound mad.

‘Well, well—we’ll have a spot of lunch and write a letter to Mr Probyn and another to my good friend Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission to get a line on Cousin Hallelujah, Smile, smile, smile. As Ingoldsby says: ‘The breezes are blowing a race, a race! The breezes are blowing—we near the chase!’ Do ye ken John Peel? Likewise, know’st thou the land where blooms the citron-flower? Well, never mind if you don’t—you can always look forward to going there for your honeymoon.’ (Chapter 12).

Or:

‘Well now, as to the medical problem—the means. I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids). Even I am baffled. But not for long! (he cried, with a magnificent burst of self-confidence). My Honour (capital H) is concerned to track this Human Fiend (capitals) to its hidden source, and nail the whited sepulchre to the mast even though it crush me in the attempt! Loud applause. His chin sank broodingly upon his dressing-gown, and he breathed a few guttural notes into the bass saxophone which was the cherished companion of his solitary hours in the bathroom.’
Parker ostentatiously took up the book which he had laid aside on Wimsey’s entrance.
‘Tell me when you’ve finished,’ he said, caustically.

It’s almost as if he’s brain damaged.

Wimsy’s flippancy

Sayers loses no opportunity to make Wimsey frivolous and flippant. He is given to extended comic fantasias, satirically quoting poems, adverts, newspapers headlines, in youthful high spirits, while his interlocutors have to wait until he’s quite finished before they can get a word in. And the reader, also, has to wait before he gets to the point.

This can get tiresome. Take this reply to Parker who says there’s nothing to the death of this old lady, to which Wimsey is saying that, on the contrary, he suspects there is. But this is how he puts it

‘You’ve got an official mind, Charles,’ replied his friend. ‘Your official passion for evidence is gradually sapping your brilliant intellect and smothering your instincts. You’re over-civilised, that’s your trouble. Compared with you, I am a child of nature. I dwell among the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove, a maid whom there are (I am shocked to say) few to praise, likewise very few to love, which is perhaps just as well.’ (Chapter 6)

All of which is a humorous misapplication of a famous poem by William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways if, humorous, that is, you find this kind of long-winded, literary byplay humorous. In the same way that the following quote is a humorous reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’.

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying the same thing, Charles. It bores me so. It’s like the Raven never flitting which, as the poet observes, still is sitting, still is sitting, inviting one to heave the pallid bust of Pallas at him and have done with it.’ (Chapter 14)

Bookishness

Like Agatha Christie, Sayers has her characters repeatedly make references to books, crime stories, murder mysteries and so on, thus emphasising the artificiality of the entire story.

‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’

‘Outlet,’ said Wimsey, energetically, ‘hi! taxi!… outlet—everybody needs an outlet—97A, St. George’s Square—and after all, one can’t really blame people if it’s just that they need an outlet. I mean, why be bitter? They can’t help it. I think it’s much kinder to give them an outlet than to make fun of them in books—and, after all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.’ (Chapter 3)

‘That’s so. Well, there’s only one thing that could prevent that happening, and that’s—oh, lord! old son. Do you know what it works out at? The old, old story, beloved of novelists—the missing heir!’ (Chapter 11)

‘[She] gets the said minions to polish her off before she can do any mischief.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’ (Chapter 11)

Or references to specific books:

At intervals the patient Bunter unpacked himself from the back seat and climbed one of these uncommunicative guides to peer at its blank surface with a torch—a process which reminded Parker of Alan Quartermain trying to trace the features of the departed Kings of the Kukuanas under their calcareous shrouds of stalactite. (Chapter 12)

Epigraphs

Of course the most bookish thing about this novel is the epigraphs. Each of the 23 chapters is prefaced by epigraphs from a deliberate and show-off range of sources, including half a dozen or more from Shakespeare, George Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Don Quixote, Samuel Butler, Tennyson, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, as well as outliers such as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the popular novelists Gilbert Frankau and Edmund Pearson, the 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, the statesman Edmund Burke, 18th century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

As you can see, this is an ostentatiously eclectic and showy selection.

Sherlock

This bookish referentiality is epitomised by repeated references to Sherlock Holmes, as if invoking his name somehow lays his ghost, whereas it tends to do the opposite and trigger comparisons of the present novel with Conan Doyle’s masterpieces, against which it mightily suffers.

‘Good gracious!’ cried Charles, ‘it’s perfectly obvious—’
‘Shut up, Sherlock,’ said his friend,

‘Anyhow, curious cases are rather a hobby of mine. In fact, I’m not just being the perfect listener. I have deceived you. I have an ulterior motive, said he, throwing off his side-whiskers and disclosing the well-known hollow jaws of Mr Sherlock Holmes.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I told you I’d be turnin’ up again before long,’ said Lord Peter, cheerfully. ‘Sherlock is my name and Holmes is my nature.’ (Chapter 4)

‘I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids).’
(Chapter 19)

Lesbians?

Delving deeper into the Dawson family, Wimsey and Parker discover that old Agatha lived for many years with Clara Whittaker, a fierce, mannish rider to hounds. Is there any hint that they were lesbians? Or was two unmarried women living together for many years taken at face value a hundred years ago?

Lord Peter and Parker looked with considerable interest at the rather grim old woman sitting so uncompromisingly upright with the reins in her hand. A dour, weather-beaten old face, but certainly handsome still, with its large nose and straight, heavy eyebrows. And beside her, smaller, plumper and more feminine, was the Agatha Dawson whose curious death had led them to this quiet country place. She had a sweet, smiling face—less dominating than that of her redoubtable friend, but full of spirit and character. Without doubt they had been a remarkable pair of old ladies. (Chapter 11)

And here’s her devoted old groom remembering her:

‘Straight as a switch, with a fine, high colour in her cheeks and shiny black hair—just like a beautiful two-year-old filly she was. And very sperrited. Wonnerful sperrited. There was a many gentlemen as would have been glad to hitch up with her, but she was never broke to harness. Like dirt, she treated ’em. Wouldn’t look at ’em, except it might be the grooms and stablehands in a matter of ’osses. And in the way of business, of course. Well, there is some creatures like that…. The Lord makes a few on ’em that way to suit ’Is own purposes, I suppose. There ain’t no arguin’ with females.’

And his wife’s view:

‘Often she used to say to me, ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we’re going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen.’ And so it turned out, sir, as you know…’

And the Chief Constable’s:

He put his hand down behind the cushions of the car and pulled out an American magazine—that monthly collection of mystery and sensational fiction published under the name of The Black Mask.
‘Light reading for the masses,’ said Parker.
‘Brought by the gentleman in the yellow boots, perhaps,’ suggested the Chief Constable.
‘More likely by Miss Findlater,’ said Wimsey.
‘Hardly a lady’s choice,’ said Sir Charles, in a pained tone.
‘Oh, I dunno. From all I hear, Miss Whittaker was dead against sentimentality and roses round the porch, and the other poor girl copied her in everything. They might have a boyish taste in fiction.’

The female perspective

Old spinster Mrs Climpson is given a number of insights or perceptions about the female experience. Early on she has a sad piece of autobiography about the severe limitations placed on women of her generation, which reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s powerful feminist polemic, Three Guineas.

‘A dear old friend of mine used to say that I should have made a very good lawyer,’ said Miss Climpson, complacently, ‘but of course, when I was young, girls didn’t have the education or the opportunities they get nowadays, Mr Parker. I should have liked a good education, but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women. Very old-fashioned, you young people would think him…

‘My dear father would be surprised to find his daughter so business-like. He always said a woman should never need to know anything about money matters, but times have changed so greatly, have they not?’ (Chapter 3)

And other miscellaneous insights from an ageing spinster’s point of view:

With her long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses, Miss Climpson was able to dismiss one theory which had vaguely formed itself in her mind. This was no passionate nature, cramped by association with an old woman and eager to be free to mate before youth should depart. That look she knew well—she could diagnose it with dreadful accuracy at the first glance, in the tone of a voice saying, ‘How do you do?’ (Chapter 5)

And:

Miss Findlater has evidently quite a ‘pash’ (as we used to call it at school) for Miss Whittaker, and I am afraid none of us are being flattered by such outspoken admiration. I must say, I think it rather unhealthy—you may remember Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on the subject?—I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather WOMAN-RIDDEN existence! It has such a bad effect, as a rule, upon the weaker character of the two… (Chapter 8)

And:

‘If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.’ (Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit—fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, ‘I’ll ask the wife.’ Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman.)

Miss Climpson had little difficulty in reconstructing one of those hateful and passionate “scenes” of slighted jealousy with which a woman-ridden life had made her only too familiar. “I do everything for you—you don’t care a bit for me—you treat me cruelly—you’re simply sick of me, that’s what it is!” And “Don’t be so ridiculous. Really, I can’t stand this. Oh, stop it, Vera! I hate being slobbered over.” Humiliating, degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes. Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable selfishness wearying of its victim. Silly schwärmerei swamping all decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred.

Miss Findlater the feminist

She talks to Miss Findlater who is a feminist:

‘If you only knew what a stupid lot they are! Anyway, I’ve no use for men!’ Miss Findlater tossed her head. ‘They haven’t got any ideas. And they always look on women as sort of pets or playthings. As if a woman like Mary wasn’t worth fifty of them! You should have heard that Markham man the other day—talking politics to Mr Tredgold, so that nobody could get a word in edgeways, and then saying, ‘I’m afraid this is a very dull subject of conversation for you, Miss Whittaker,’ in his condescending way. Mary said in that quiet way of hers, ‘Oh, I think the subject is anything but dull, Mr Markham.’ But he was so stupid, he couldn’t even grasp that and said, ‘One doesn’t expect ladies to be interested in politics, you know. But perhaps you are one of the modern young ladies who want the flapper’s vote.’ Ladies, indeed! Why are men so insufferable when they talk about ladies?’

‘I mean to be an old maid, anyhow,’ retorted Miss Findlater. ‘Mary and I have quite decided that. We’re interested in things, not in men.’

‘Men’s friendships—oh yes! I know one hears a lot about them. But half the time, I don’t believe they’re real friendships at all. Men can go off for years and forget all about their friends. And they don’t really confide in one another. Mary and I tell each other all our thoughts and feelings. Men seem just content to think each other good sorts without ever bothering about their inmost selves.”
Probably that’s why their friendships last so well,’ replied Miss Climpson. ‘They don’t make such demands on one another.’

‘I cannot help feeling that it is more natural—more proper, in a sense—for a man and woman to be all in all to one another than for two persons of the same sex. Er—after all, it is a—a fruitful affection,’ said Miss Climpson, boggling a trifle at this idea, ‘and—and all that, you know, and I am sure that when the right MAN comes along for you—’

‘Bother the right man!’ cried Miss Findlater, crossly. ‘I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.’

The male view

‘We talked for some time, Inspector, and I will not conceal from you that I found Miss Grant a very interesting personality. She had an almost masculine understanding. I may say I am not the sort of a man who prefers women to be brainless. No, I am rather modern in that respect. If ever I was to take a wife, Inspector, I should wish her to be an intelligent companion.’

Or our boys being more conventionally sexist:

‘When a woman is wicked and unscrupulous,’ said Parker, sententiously, ‘she is the most ruthless criminal in the world—fifty times worse than a man, because she is always so much more single-minded about it.’
‘They’re not troubled with sentimentality, that’s why,’ said Wimsey, ‘and we poor mutts of men stuff ourselves up with the idea that they’re romantic and emotional. All punk, my son. Damn that ’phone!’

Or Mrs Piggin, landlady of The Fox and Hounds in Crofton:

‘They don’t make them like that nowadays. Not but what these modern girls are good goers, many of them, and does a lot of things as would have been thought very fast in the old days,’

Newspapers

Christie mocks newspapers, giving her fictional newspapers satirical names. Mind you, so did lots of comic authors. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, William Boot works for the ‘The Daily Beast’. Anyway, in this story Detective Parker reads his news in the Daily Yell. Less humorous alternatives are the ‘Evening Views’ and the ‘Evening Banner’.

It girls

Never had he met a woman in whom ‘the great It’, eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.

Elinor Glyn was a bestselling author of popular romances which were often a trifle racy. She popularized the concept of the ‘It girl’, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture ‘

Credit

‘Unnatural Death’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1927.

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Posted by Simon on October 31, 2025

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The Secret Sharer: An Episode from the Coast by Joseph Conrad (1909)

Plot

The first-person narrator has only just been given his first command, as captain a ship which, as the narrative opens, has just been towed down the Meinam river and anchored in the Bay of Siam. The next morning it is scheduled to sail south through the archipelago and into the Indian Ocean.

Not only is it the narrator’s first command but the rest of the crew have served together for at least 18 months and all know each other well. In other words, he feels like, and is treated as, the outsider, the stranger of the crew.

Overnight he appoints himself to the first watch and sends his officers off to bed. Before they go, the second mate remarks that the ship’s rigging they could see some distance away, as the sun set, belongs to the Liverpool ship Sephora carrying a cargo of coal. Then they go off to their cabins.

While quietly walking the decks, observing the vast calm flatness of the Bay, the narrator notices the rope ladder over the side hasn’t been taken up. It was last used by an officer on the tug who towed them down the river and took their last letters with him.

Now, looking down, the narrator sees what looks like a naked corpse bobbing in the sea alongside the ladder. When he says something the corpse moves and lifts his head. In a normal voice i.e. not hailing it, the narrator asks the man to come up which he does, then goes to get a spare sleeping suit to hide his nakedness. Two points: the stranger is now dressed identically as the captain, in the latter’s second sleeping suit, so that anyone coming across them would think he was seeing a figure and its reflection in a mirror. And so, from this point onwards the narrator describes him as his ‘double’.

Second thing is that, somehow, the captain both dresses him and invites him down into his cabin without waking anyone, without alerting his officers, without informing anyone. As the minutes tick by he realises what a strange thing this was to do, how difficult it will be to latterly tell anyone, and how the situation is forcing him into a secret collusion with the stranger.

The stranger openly tells his name, which is Leggatt. And explains that he has swum all the way from the Sephora, stopping off at a couple of the small islets in the Bay on the way. Why? Because he killed a fellow crew member, and proceeds to tell his story. This crewman was a particular type, well known and disliked at sea:

He was one of those creatures that are just simmering all the time with a silly sort of wickedness. Miserable devils that have no business to live at all. He wouldn’t do his duty and wouldn’t let anybody else do theirs.

The climax of their feud came when they were rigging a fore-sail as a last desperate expedient after many of the mainsails had been blown off in a terrible storm, and the cur made yet another remark, at which Leggatt hit and felled him, then grabbed his throat just as a big sea hit the ship and washed them across the deck. The sea took minutes to clear at which point the rest of the crew found the two still locked together, with Leggatt’s hand round the other’s neck who was quite dead.

There was a near riot, Leggatt was nearly lynched but locked in a cabin where he was kept prisoner for seven weeks. Only now as they docked in the Bay was the sailor who brought him his food slack enough to forget to lock the door. Leggatt ate the food then strolled out into the deck and, nobody spotting him, jumped overboard and swam. A strong swimmer he made it to the nearest islet before the crew had launched a boat, and hid when they came close to the islet. Once they gave up their search (it was a dark night) and rowed back to the ship, he set out swimming towards the lights of the narrator’s ship, and here he is.

Something in Leggatt’s story touches a chord in the narrator. He realises Leggatt was doing the best for his ship, in fact claims that his act of setting the reef sail saved his ship and the 20 crew aboard it, and yet if he’s handed over to the authorities he’ll be convicted and hanged.

This speaking of heart to heart reminds me of the less fortunate bond which develops between the evil Gentleman Brown and Jim in Lord Jim, when the former describes how just one mistake may damn a man, unwittingly reminding Jim of his great moral lapse. Something similar here…

Anyway, the narrator explains that he is almost as much a stranger on the ship as the swimmer, then they both realise they are exhausted. He helps the swimmer into his bed, pulls to its curtains, then falls asleep on the couch. Just like Jim, an almost unconscious act sees him committed and compromised.

Next morning begins his life of secrecy for the steward knocks and enters with his morning coffee making the captain panic lest the steward see the curtained bed. When the steward returns a little later the captain is red-faced and embarrassed. When he steps out on deck he sees the steward conferring with the first and second mate, and they stop talking when they spot him coming. In other words the senior crew already think that something’s up and this makes the captain evermore nervous and self conscious.

And, as is his way, Conrad rams the central idea home with multiple variations on the same words and phrases:

  • It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror.
  • It occurred to me that if [the second mate] were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would think he was seeing double.
  • I was doubly vexed.
  • I felt dual more than ever.

Now the captain’s cabin happens to be L-shaped with the door opening into the small part of the L where the captain has his desk and chair and receives visitors, with the longer part accessed by a door and called the state room, extending to the side of the door i.e. out of sight of anyone appearing in the doorway. So the man he starts referring to as ‘the secret sharer’ is able to hide over the next few days in the long part of the L.

Next day a dinghy arrives bearing the captain of the Sephora. The narrator invites him into his cabin and hears him out as the other captain, Captain Archbold tells the story of the murder on board his ship and the young man who got away. Obviously there is a huge irony in that the secret sharer is sitting quietly, hidden in the back of the long L, just a few yards away as the Sephora’s captain says all this.

(Incidentally, during this colloquy the narrator lets slip a very important fact, remarking that the other captain’s name was something like Archbold but at this distance of years I hardly am sure. Aha! So the narrator is setting this story down, in whatever manner he’s doing it (written text, telling it to someone) years after it occurred.)

Anyway the interview with the captain is edgy because he thinks the other suspects him of something. He thought about pretending surprise at everything the man said but decided this level of playacting would be beyond him and so settled for blasé acceptance. Although he does put on one deceit, which is to pretend he is hard of hearing, forcing the other captain to speak up, so that his secret sharer can hear everything.

Still the man has a funny mood about him. It’s only later that the narrator realises that he, the narrator, bears a passing resemblance (‘a mysterious similitude’) to Leggatt, and is of the same age, and so the Sephora‘s captain might have been disconcerted (another aspect of the double theme).

To allay what he feels are the man’s suspicions the narrator insists on very loudly showing him his bathroom and his stateroom, announcing it loudly enough to give the secret sharer time to hide. Now he’s riled, the narrator insists on giving the Sephora’s captain a guided tour of the entire ship, presenting it as a new young captain’s pride in his command, with the sub-text of making it abundantly clear that Leggatt isn’t aboard, before seeing the doubtful man over the side and into his dinghy. The captain hesitantly says he’ll probably report the man’s loss as suicide, jumping overboard and drowning etc.

But unfortunately the four crew who came aboard with the Sephora‘s captain had mingled with his crew and spread the news about the murder and the runaway murderer to all his hands. Now if he’s discovered there’ll be no talking his way out of it, and so the tension is ratcheted up to very intense. His second mate quizzes him about the story and the narrator is aware he is giving unsatisfactory answers even as he speaks, only making the man more suspicious.

He can’t wait to get below, away from his suspicious crew and realises that ‘on the whole I felt less torn in two when I was with him’ (p.202).

For the 24 hours since they anchored the ship has been becalmed but now a wind gets up and the narrator has to take command and start giving orders. Over the next four days he lives increasingly on tenterhooks, going through a ridiculous rigmarole whereby the secret sharer hides while the steward serves coffee and cleans the bathroom, then slips into the bathroom before the steward comes back to tidy up the stateroom.

On deck the narrator finds himself going to whisper something in the ear of the first mate, as if whispering to his secret self, causing the man to shy back. He catches the mate making the ‘mental’ sign, tapping his forehead to the chief engineer. The steward, subjected to the narrator’s apparently random whims and panics, becomes quite demoralised.

Slowly the narrator begins to wonder if he’s going out of his mind. On several occasions he discovers the sharer sitting so silently and still he wonders if he’s hallucinating him. And at moments like this the story seems to be channelling an Edgar Allen Poe tale of the macabre.

Eventually the sharer, in one of their whispered encounters in the cabin, declares he wants the narrator to steer his ship in among the islands off the coast of Cambodia. And this leads to the thrilling climax of the story when the narrator insists on taking the ship not only in among the islands, but perilously close to land in order to give Leggat, for whose survival he now feels entirely responsible, as good a chance as possible of swimming to land. With no wind she risks drifting ashore and comes so close to the vast dark shape of the legendary mountain Koh-ring towers over the ship and terrifies the crew, all of whom he’s ordered up on deck.

Only when he sees the hat he gave to the secret sharer floating in the water does he realise the Leggatt, as they’d arranged, had slipped out of the cabin, through the sail lofts and shimmied down a rope into the water, only then does the narrator order a change of course away from land, to the vast relief of the crew, and only then does he truly, for the first time, step into his command.

Conradian hyperbole

Conrad easily display what you could call a cosmic mentality by which I mean his descriptions easily become hyperbolic, invoking the world, the earth, all nature, the universe and so on. If you like this sort of thing it gives the stories a huge symbolic power. Those who don’t like it so much criticise it as overblown.

just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor.

with tropical suddenness a swarm of stars came out above the shadowy earth, while I lingered yet, my hand resting lightly on my ship’s rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted friend. But, with all that multitude of celestial bodies staring down at one, the comfort of quiet communion with her was gone for good

‘It was a sea gone mad! I suppose the end of the world will be something like that.’ (p.203)

Then stillness again, with the great shadow gliding closer, towering higher, without a light, without a sound. Such a hush had fallen on the ship that she might have been a bark of the dead floating in slowly under the very gate of Erebus. (p.215)

A queer interpretation

Maybe it was intended to be, and in Conrad’s day was read as, a sort of macabre psychological study, almost verging in the horror genre, what with its claustrophobic doppelganger (recalling those late-Victorian doubles, Dorian Gray or Jekyll and Hyde, among many others).

In the modern age it’s hard not to read it as a gay story, a story about a gay man in a crushingly heteronormative world who has to keep his identity and/or lover secret from absolutely everyone, who lives a double life, who goes in terror of making the slightest slip which reveal his true character to the World of Men. And the burden of having to be one thing to all men out on deck, when all he wants to do is slip back into his cabin and the luxury of privacy.

At night I would smuggle him into my bed place, and we would whisper together… (p.205)

A sudden brisk shout, ‘Mainsail haul!’ broke the spell, and in the noisy cries and rush overhead of the men running away with the main brace we two, down in my cabin, came together in our usual position by the bed place… (p.208)

We remained side by side talking in our secret way – but sometimes silent or just exchanging a whispered word or two at long intervals… (p.209)

Our eyes met; several seconds elapsed, till, our glances still mingled, I extended my hand and turned the lamp out. (p.213)

Our hands met gropingly, lingered united in a steady, motionless clasp for a second… No word was breathed by either of us when they separated. (p.213)

A non-queer interpretation

The Secret Sharer is, apparently, Conrad’s most interpreted story. A simpler interpretation is that the narrator’s Freudian unconscious somehow emerges in physical form, or at least that’s his story. Of course nobody else on board ever sees him, so he may well not exist in the real world; he may well be more like the ghost the narrators describes him as.

The emergence of his unconscious into such a prominent role signals the narrator’s nervous anxiety on taking over his first command. The secrecy is symbolic of his attempts to get a grip on his irrational fear and anxiety. The other officers noticing his odd behaviour is just that because he does behave oddly and badly, to begin with.

On this reading it is the near shipwreck on one of the islands around Koh-ring which signals the narrator’s successful initiation, a rite of passage. Whatever actually happened that imperilled his ship, the event acquires a huge psychological importance because passing through it successfully allows him to suppress his unconscious fears, which had come to life in the shape of a ghostly doppelganger, back into his unconscious, to reintegrate conscious mind and unconscious terrors, the ego and the id, and thus emerge, blooded and seasoned, for the first time as the captain in command of himself and his ship.

The foreyards ran round with a great noise, amidst cheery cries. And now the frightful whiskers made themselves heard giving various orders. Already the ship was drawing ahead. And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command. (p.217)

The shadow (a term in Jungian psychology) has been rejected, overthrown, thrown overboard, leaving the captain with the self-knowledge he so sorely lacked at the start of the story (‘a stranger to myself”) and able to act in the world.

Notes

Leggatt says he comes from a parsonage in Norfolk, as did Jim in Lord Jim and the similarities don’t end there. Like Leggatt, Jim is involved in a scandal at sea, goes on the run (well, to escape his notoriety in distant ports) and is helped by a friendly captain (Marlow).

The Sephora is mentioned in an anecdote in Lord Jim, chapter 13, where it is said to have sunk after a collision, during which one particular crew member swam back to the ship to valiantly rescue a young woman paralysed with fear on the deck.

The L-shaped room becomes associated with L for Leggatt or, if the entire thing is a phantasy, does the L-shape suggest the name of his imagined double to the narrator’s troubled mind?

Credit

Written in 1909, The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad was first published in two parts in Harpers magazine in 1910. Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition of ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’, revised and republished in 2008.

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A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)

Artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes…with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.
(À rebours, chapter 2)

It was to him that this voice, as mysterious as an incantation, was addressed; it was to him that it spoke of the feverish desire for the unknown, the unsatisfied longing for an ideal, the craving to escape from the horrible realities of life, to cross the frontiers of thought, to grope after a certainty, albeit without finding one, in the misty upper regions of art!
(Chapter 9 cf p.117)

The title, the French phrase ‘A Rebours’, translates into English as ‘Against the Grain’ or ‘Against Nature’.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, born in 1848 to a French mother and Dutch father (hence his unfrench surname) supported himself with a steady job as a minor civil servant in Paris (where his colleagues knew him as simply ‘Georges’), while he wrote novels to amuse himself.

His first three novels followed the school of Naturalism led by the great Émile Zola. But he bridled at the documentary grimness and the extensive sociological research demanded by this style and so, in his fourth novel, A rebours, struck out in a new direction.

He was as surprised as anyone when it took Paris by storm. Its depiction of a neurasthenic aristocrat who retires to a house of his own design to experiment with an exquisite life of the senses immediately struck a chord with members of the Aesthetic movement, not only in France but Britain and across Europe. The poet Paul Valéry called it his ‘Bible and his bedside book’.

In the 1890s the Aesthetic movement intensified into what came to be known as the Decadence, the conscious exploration of the darker, morbid side of life, exaggerated into fantastic visions. Literature took on the tones of melodrama in British works like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in a consciously literary work like Heart of Darkness, even in fairly ‘straight’ works like the more melodramaticSherlock Holmes stories, and, of course, in Oscar Wilde’s ‘scandalous’ contribution to the genre, The Picture of Dorian Grey.

In France with its strong counter-revolutionary Catholic tradition, they took these things more seriously and intensely. Words like ‘blasphemy’ and ‘sin’ in the mouths of Oscar Wilde characters were little more than a style accessory; but in the minds of genuine Catholics they denoted real and soul-threatening facts. Anyway, A Rebours became a kind of handbook for the Decadent Movement, a breviary, a missal, a set of instructions.

Arguably, ‘the Decadence’ is best understood via key paintings in the parallel style of Symbolism, particularly the over-ripe paintings of Gustave Moreau and the strange works of Odilon Redon. In England, maybe the most ‘decadent’ products in any form were the amazing drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and the notorious Yellow Book (1894 to 1897).

A rebours

So what is À rebours about?

Prologue [early years and fast living in Paris] (8 pages)

Well, it starts with a brief prologue limning the personality of the central character, Jean des Esseintes. The book is going to be about him and him alone. Des Esseintes is the weak and weary, worn-out, last scion of a once-great aristocratic house, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. His childhood was plagued with illnesses. His parents hated each other. His father was absent most of the time. His mother spent most of her time lying in a darkened bedroom, subject to nervous attacks if exposed to even the slightest light or noise. Abandoned and crushingly lonely, the young Jean spent most of his time in the library, living through books.

In fact the Prologue is unexpectedly funny in a savage satirical way, taking the mickey out of de Esseintes’ wretchedly unhappy parents, the teachers at his Jesuit school who don’t know what to do with the bright unfocused boy and then his various attempts, as an adult, to find his tribe, to find a group of people to fit in with. He tries four or five different types (his actual family, starting with tedious cousins; sensible but dull men his own age; fast-living aristos; the literary set; so-called ‘freethinkers’) and finds them all unbearably boring. He has become ‘a jaded sophisticate’ (p.111).

During his Paris years Des Esseintes:

  • wears a suit of white velvet with a gold-laced waistcoat, and a bunch of palma violets in his shirt front instead of a cravat
  • holds a black-themed funeral dinner, held in honour of his dead virility, described in a page which is worth reading and rereading for its (literally) black humour

Des Esseintes tries sex: he attends unconventional dinner parties where the women strip off; he beds singers and actresses; he takes mistresses already famed for their depravity; he pays for call girls with specialist skills; eventually he seeks satisfaction in the gutter, among the filthy proles. The effort was making him weak and shaky but still he tried ‘unnatural love affairs and perverse pleasures’ but, in the end, he emerged disgusted with the whole thing and himself, and ill with boredom.

The key thing to emphasise is that the excesses of these bachelor debaucheries have made him ill, exacerbating his many boyhood ailments:

The excesses of his bachelor days and the abnormal strains put on his brain had aggravated his neurosis to an astonishing degree and still further diluted the blood of his race. (p.94)

He has become:

a feeble, broken-down, short-winded creature (p.111)

And so it is that, utterly worn out, trembling with nervous exhaustion and disgusted by people and contemporary society, by ‘the money grubbing ignominy of the age’ (p.194), Des Esseintes sells the big ancestral home, the Chateau de Lourps, selling off the setting of his bored miserable childhood, and retires to a house he has had completely redesigned and refurbished to his tastes on the outskirts of Paris (‘on the hillside above Fontenay-aux-Roses’). He seeks a solitude and silence which are ‘a well merited compensation for the years of rubbish he’s had to listen to’ (p.132).

Now the narrative proper begins and turns out to be a series of chapter in each of which Des Esseintes explores, in obsessive detail, aspects of the worlds of sensual pleasure, esoteric knowledge, the exquisite and beautiful and perversely tasteful, carrying out a syllabus of ‘delicious, atrocious experiments’ (p.129). The narrative is, in other words, ‘almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes’s aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.’

Des Esseintes’ weakness

The key thing to emphasise is that Des Esseintes is no swaggering Byronic buccaneer. He is pale and wasted. He is ill. He is weak:

sapped by disillusionment, depressed by hypochondria and weighed down by spleen.

All he wants is absolute peace and quiet. All his pleasures are solitary, slow and virtually silent. He is the extreme opposite of the sex and drugs and rock and roll lifestyle. He brings the two old servants from the ancestral home with him but makes them wear felt slippers, all the doors are oiled and all the rooms soundproofed because his nerves are so poor. It is not a lusty virile decadence, but the exquisite mental pleasures of someone on their last legs. The house really is a retreat from the world.

You might expect Des Esseintes would organise riotous feasts packed with elaborate dishes, but that is to mistake his mental and physical frailty. In reality, his stomach is so done in by his previous fast living (referred to and dismissed in the Prologue) that he can only manage the plainest of fare: breakfast consists of two boiled eggs, toast and tea. (Mind you, he has breakfast at 5pm, lunch at 11pm, and toys with a simple dinner at dawn; decadents, like symbolists, being unhealthily attracted to the night.)

Not exuberant sensuality, but boredom and spleen, and underneath everything, profound ill health, are the keynotes of the whole thing.

Chapter 1 (7 pages)

The decoration of the house, its fabrics, colours and designs, the walls lined with leather, the mouldings and plinths painted deep indigo, the massive 15th century money-changers’ table, the tall lectern, the windows of blue-ish glass dressed with curtains cut out of old ecclesiastical stoles

Chapter 2 (8 pages)

Describes the pipes, ducts, aquarium and dim windows Des Esseintes rigs up in his dining room so as to feel like he’s in a steamship on a grand cruise. This leads into a dithyramb in praise of artifice and artificiality:

Travel struck him as a waste of time since he believed that the imagination can provide a more-than-adequate substitution for the vulgar reality of actual experience.

And:

There can be no doubt that by transferring this ingenious trickery, this clever simulation to the intellectual plane, one can enjoy, just as easily as on the material plane, imaginary pleasures similar in all respects to the pleasures of reality. (p.35)

Which leads up to the declaration that, contrary to several thousand years of aesthetic theory, which has drummed home the message that the true artist needs to return to nature, that nature is truth etc etc, contrary to all this Des Esseintes insists that the artificial is always superior:

As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. (p.36)

Which leads on to the amusing thought that Nature is a clapped-out old crone, a cliché, serving up the same stereotyped old special effects, red sunsets, glistening moonglow etc etc yawn. What is needed is the new aesthetic of complete artificiality.

(This passage amounts to a manifesto in praise of Artifice and, more than specific passages about jewels or flowers, is probably the ”Bible’ part of the book, the bit which other authors read again and again. It certainly lies behind, or is virtually repeated, in Oscar Wilde’s essays about the superiority of art over nature.)

Chapter 3 (13 pages)

A prolonged, descriptive and hilariously opinionated review of his encyclopedic collection of Latin literature, from Plautus to the tenth century. Particularly funny are his contemptuous dismissals of the classics, Virgil, Horace, Cicero et al, witness:

the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace’s vulgar twaddle, for the stupid patter he keeps up as he simpers at his audience like a painted old clown… (p.41)

Later in the book, discussing French literature, he explains this at further length:

Imperfection itself pleased him, provided it was neither base nor parasitic, and it may be that there was a certain amount of truth in his theory that the minor writer of the decadence, the writer who is incomplete but none the less individual, distils a balm more irritant, more sudorific, more acid than the author of the same period who is truly great and truly perfect. In his opinion, it was in their confused efforts that you could find the most exalted flights of sensibility, the most morbid caprices of psychology, the most extravagant aberrations of language called upon in vain to control and repress the effervescent salts of ideas and feelings. (p. 185).

He prefers more heterogenous authors of the later, ‘Silver Age’ such as Petronius (he gives a plot summary of the Satyricon) and Apuleius (author of The Golden Ass) before moving on to consider numerous obscure works of early Christian literature.

Chapter 4 (10 pages)

Des Esseintes needs a centerpiece to bring out some of the colours in a rare oriental rug he owns and has the bright idea of gilding and then embedding the shell of a tortoise with gemstones and placing it on the rug. This leads in to a review of the colour and meaning of jewels, which is itself punctuated by a description of the ‘mouth organ’, a device for mixing amounts of expensive liqueurs so as to produce symphonies of flavour on his palate. He even devises mixes of flavours to mimic the effect and instrumentation of classical music (symphony, string quartet etc).

For some reason the chapter ends with a farcical anecdote about a raging toothache which kept him up all night till he rushed off at opening time to the first cheap dentist he could find who tugged and tugged at the septic molar like a fairground huckster. In its crude farce, this episode is oddly out of kilter with the solemn intensity of most of the book, but then Huysmans didn’t realise he was writing a book which would become a ‘Bible’.

Chapter 5 (15 pages)

A long description of, then meditation on, the painting of Salome Dancing before Herod by top Symbolist painter, Gustave Moreau. In his view Salome appears as ‘a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hothouse of impiety’ (p.68). Then further analysis of Moreau’s watercolour of her, titled ‘The Apparition‘.

In his red boudoir des Esseintes has a series of engravings by Jan Luyken, titled ‘Religious Persecutions‘, a collection of the most disgusting and horrifying tortures humans can impose on each other, which make him choke with horror. Other works of art he loves include:

Plus numerous works by Odilon Redon which plunge deep ‘into the horrific realms of bad dreams and fevered visions…exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium’, reminding Des Esseintes of the many fever dreams of his own sick boyhood (p.73).

As a break from modern artists, he has a lurid Christ by El Greco which he loves gazing at.

This segues into a passage describing how he’s decorated his bedroom. Bedrooms come in 2 types, one for the pleasures of the flesh, the other restrained and monastic. Having got sex out of his system in Paris, Des Esseintes makes his bedroom into a chaste retreat. Characteristically, he seeks to mimic the effect of a plain and worn monastery but by using exquisite and expensive materials. This is dryly funny but what I took from the description is that:

like a monk he was overwhelmed by an immense weariness, by a longing for peace and quiet (p.76)

Chapter 6 (6 pages)

Sitting quietly in front of a quiet fire he has two memories, both satirically funny:

When one of his group of bachelors back in Paris, D’Aigurande, announces he intends to get married, Des Esseintes is the only one who supports him but not out of common goodwill. The reverse. When he hears that the bride-to-be plans to move into one of the circular flats in the new blocks of flats lining the new boulevards, he knows there’ll be comedy ahead and indeed there is, as the new couple struggle to find furniture to fit the shape and layout of the flat, leading to endless arguments, the wife eventually moving to a new normal-shaped flat where none of their rounded furniture fits, D’Aigurande spending more and more time out seeking distraction while she has an affair. This was precisely the cruel entertainment Des Esseintes had anticipated and then relishes.

The second memory is deliberately monstrous. Des Esseintes comes across a street urchin who asks him for a light. Instead Des Esseintes takes him to a high class brothel and pays for him to have sex with one of the whores. The madam of the house asks why. Des Esseintes shares his sadistic plan, which is to pay for the boy to have sex there every fortnight for a few months, and then abruptly cut him off. The idea is to get him addicted to the high life so that, when he’s suddenly deprived of it, it forces him into a life of crime, leading him eventually to murder some bourgeois householder returning home to find it being burgled by the boy. The madam is shocked, but then she has a lot of odd clients. Anyway, back in the present Des Esseintes is chagrined because although he scours the Police Gazette, he never sees a report about the boy. He feels cheated.

Chapter 7 (12 pages)

Living such a retired, solitary life, Des Esseintes is puzzled and discomfited to discover that many of the questions about life which he smothered during his Paris years, now return to haunt him. Although he was raised by Jesuits, he thought his scepticism secure, but now he’s starting to wonder. Creating the atmosphere of a monastic cell, living a chaste life, reading Christian writers in Latin, he finds his scepticism becoming wobbly.

He comes to realise that his tastes, for artificiality and eccentricity, stem from the subtle sophistical studies of his boyhood education. Weeks pass and he finds his head full of theological speculations, or, their converse, morbid fantasies of grotesque blasphemies.

(Only in Catholic countries is this kind of extremism possible. England with its tea party Church of England never inspired the same fanatacism or morbidness. Anger, yes, as in controversies about Tractarianism, Anglo-Catholicism etc. But no Anglican speculated about putting holy oil and wine to depraved sexual uses as Huysmans does.)

Then these moods leave him, he finds his feet again, reinforces his scepticism by reading (the philosopher) Schopenhauer, disgusted and appalled at the spectacle of a world of pain. The world isn’t guided by a benevolent Providence but is the mangled product of aimless, blind striving.

Now his illnesses come back to haunt him. Terrible headaches, a nervous cough which wakes him in the early hours, searing heartburns. He almost gives up eating, forces himself to go for long walks in the country, puts down his books but almost immediately falls prey to excruciating boredom. He has an idea: to fill the house with hothouse flowers.

Chapter 8 (11 pages)

The flower chapter. In Paris he collected fake flowers, exquisite copies. Now, tired of fake flowers that look like real ones, he wants to collect real flowers that look like fakes. Suffice to say he likes flowers with diseased perfervid colouring, as if stricken with syphilis or leprosy. Sounding very like Oscar Wilde, Des Esseintes declares that:

‘The horticulturalists are the only true artists left to us nowadays.’ (p.102)

That night he has an atrocious nightmare in which he is accompanying a working class woman somewhere when a horse gallops ahead of them, turns and reveals the rider to be a half skeleton, half blue and green demon, with red pustules round the mouth, the figure of Syphilis. The nightmare unfurls through many scenes until the climax when he finds himself embraced by a demon woman, covered in pustules and, as she pulls him (and his erection) closer, her vulva changes into a red wound in the shape of the Venus Flytraps delivered to his houses earlier, the sharp teeth, the glistening digestive juices as she pulls him closer…and he wakes up in a fearful sweat.

Chapter 9 (11 pages)

The nightmares continue, evidence of Des Esseinte’s mounting neuroses. He tries a variety of cures but nothing works. He is all the more irritated as most of the rare flowers he bought at such cost have died. To try and soothe his nerves he reviews his art collection, enjoying the savage skill of Goya’s Caprices, Rembrandt.

Iller than ever, he tries the novels of Charles Dickens, supposedly good for convalescents but is revolted by the stereotyped virginity and chasteness of its young people. This sets off an equal and opposite reaction, and he finds himself shaken by images of perverted lust. He has a small box of purple bonbons, improbably named Pearls of the Pyrenees, which trigger memories of female moments, french kisses, debauches, conquests, sex – ‘Morose delectations’.

He remembers his affair with an American trapeze artist who turned out not to be the agile athlete he hoped for in bed, but prim and Puritanical. The affair with a ventriloquist. One night he placed statues of the Sphinx and the Chimera in his bedroom and had her pitch voices into each, reading out a script from Flaubert. But all the time he is fighting a losing battle against his impotence. He tries having sex with children but their pained grimaces are too samey and boring (p.116). Lastly he remembers being picked up by an attractive young man with whom, apparently, he had a homosexual relationship for a few months.

Like everything else, these memories leave him ‘worn out, completely shattered, half dead’.

Chapter 10 (12 pages)

The chapter on perfumes, the most neglected art of all, displaying Des Esseintes’ usual encyclopedic knowledge and exquisite discriminations, as he sets out to educate himself in the ‘the syntax of smells’, ‘the idiom of essences’, until his sense of smell has ‘acquired an almost infallible flair’.

He gives a history of perfumes which accompany and match French history, certain scents associated with the reigns of Louis 14, 15 and 16, with Napoleon, the restored monarchy etc. Descriptions of his experiments, mixing and mingling rare scents and aromas to create landscapes of the senses, reams of poetic prose describing the aromas he creates on the bed of a vision of a great meadow and swaying linden trees.

Suddenly he has a blinding headache and has to throw open the window to clear the room of its stifling atmosphere. In a brisk mood he decides to sort out the tumble of cosmetics he owns, in his bathroom. Most of these were bought at the insistence of a woman he had an affair with, who loved her nipples to be scented, but couldn’t achieve climax unless she was having her hair combed, or when she could smell soot, wet plaster or the dust thrown up by a summer rainstorm.

One thing leads to another and now he quotes a 2-page-long prose poem he wrote inspired by a visit to this woman’s sister on a day of rain and mud and puddles, which sounds like this:

‘Under the lowering sky, in the humid atmosphere, the houses ooze black sweat and their ventilators breathe black odours; the horror of life becomes more apparent and the grip of spleen more oppressive; the seeds of iniquity that lie in every man’s heart begin to germinate; a craving for filthy pleasures takes hold of the puritanical, and the minds of respected citizens are visited by criminal desires.’ (p.127)

‘Decadent’ enough for you? In fact the prose poem reaches the rather complicated conclusion that invalids, worn out be their debauchery in Paris, often head to the countryside to recuperate, where they die of boredom. He suggests that with a little imagination, their doctors could use perfumes to create the atmosphere of Parisian brothels, thus giving their patients the pleasant impression of being back in their Parisian fleshpots without any of the enervating physical requirements!

But when he throws open the windows he smells again a strong scent of frangipani and, in his weakened state, wonders if he is possessed by some evil spirit, and falls fainting, ‘almost dying’, across the windowsill. It cannot be emphasised enough how the entire narrative is based on Des Esseintes’ almost complete mental and physical collapse.

Chapter 11 (14 pages)

As a result of this collapse his terrified servants call a doctor who declares there’s nothing wrong with Des Esseintes before our hero shoos him out of the house. Suddenly, on a whim, based on his earlier attempt to read the novels of Dickens, des Esseintes conceives the mad idea of going to London. He has the old servant pack his things and is off in a cab to the train station within hours. Next thing he knows he is at the station and engaging a cabbie to take him to a bookstore to buy a guide to London. But as they trot through the streets of Paris Des Esseintes has a vivid and very enjoyable vision of London, the London of fogs and non-stop rain, and soot and rumbling tube trains and miserable pedestrians.

At the bookshop he peruses guidebooks to London, mostly noting lists of paintings hanging in London galleries. He likes the most ‘modern’ works and it is interesting to see that, for a super aesthete like des Esseintes, this means John Everett Millais and George Frederick Watts.

Having bought a guide he goes to the Bodega, a big wine emporium, where he finds himself surrounded by Englishmen about whom he is entertainingly rude:

There were laymen with bloated pork-butcher faces or bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, winy cheeks, stupid bloodshot eyes and whiskery collars as worn by some of the great apes. (p.137)

Drifting into a reverie he superimposes on all these faces the names and characters from Dickens’ novels, imagining the hooting of tugs behind the Tuileries are those of boats on the Thames. He then takes the cab through the filthy rainy Paris weather to a warm tavern near the station for the train to Dieppe and boat onto Newhaven.

Here Des Esseintes stuffs himself with an unusually large meal (thick greasy oxtail soup; smoked haddock; roast beef and potatoes; several pints of ale; stilton, then a rhubarb tart; a pint of porter followed by a cup of coffee laced with gin).

There are many English men in the tavern but also some English women, about whom he is also amusingly rude:

Robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette-knives, cheeks as red as apples, long hands and long feet. They were enthusiastically attacking helpings of rump-steak pie – meat served hot in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust like a fruit tart. (p.140)

Eventually the bad weather outside, the warmth inside, the effect of an unusually heavy dinner,  and being surrounded by English men and women contribute to the growing sense that there’s no need to go to London. In his imagination he’s already been.

After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn’t he already in London whose smells, weather, citizens, food and even cutlery were all about him? (p.143)

Only a ninny can imagine it is necessary, interesting or useful to travel abroad. And so, with a certain inevitability, he takes the cab back to the Gare de Sceaux, and a train back to Fontenoy, arriving (comically) with:

all the physical weariness and moral fatigue of a man who has come home after a long and perilous voyage.

This is broadly funny. Des Esseintes barely seems the hero of a satanic novel of moral debauchery any more, but a figure of fun, a comically etiolated, knackered, degraded version of the dashing hero of many an adventure novel by his compatriot Jules Vernes.

Chapter 12 (22 pages)

The second longest chapter, a review of French Catholic prose literature.

Des Esseintes (slightly comically) returns to his books as if after a long absence when he has, in fact, been away for one day. It’s a return to the mode of hyperaesthetic review which we’ve seen in the preceding chapters.

Obviously, not only is his book collection of rare and tasteful books, but he insists on having them specially printed – on special paper, printed with hand-made fonts, bound in rare and precious bindings. It is an orgy of exquisite taste, requiring specialist vocabulary such as ‘mirific’ and ‘blind-tooling’.

It is here that he gives a page-long dithyramb to the patron saint of decadence, Charles Baudelaire, who went further than anyone before him to explore ‘the symptoms of souls visited by sorrow, singled out by spleen…[at the age when] the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth have drained away.’ (p.147)

In Des Esseintes’ opinion, few other writers compare; certainly, he is not impressed by the ‘classics’ such as Rabelais and Corneille, Voltaire, Diderot or Rousseau. Pascal he likes for his austere pessimism and ‘agonised attrition’.

When it comes to the nineteenth century literature, he divides it into two classes, Catholic and secular. Catholic writing is good for stating abstract concepts and intellectual distinctions but the general run of Catholic writers is dire.

He is humorously rude about a set of women Catholic writers for their banality (it’s worth mentioning that Huysmans drops casually insulting comments about women throughout the book). Catholic writers generally have fallen victim to a conventional and frozen idiom, drained of all originality – with the exceptions of Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, the Abbé Peyreyve, the Comte de Falloux, Louis Veuillot, Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam, the Abbé Lamennais, Comte Josephe de Maistre, Ernest Hello and others he singles out.

Reading about these priests and polemicists makes me eternally grateful that England is (or was) a Protestant country, untroubled by the bitter and savage arguments about the role of Catholicism in public life which divided France, and the bitter splits which divided French Catholicism (between Ultramontanists and Gallicists). The bitter divides and the spiteful bigotry underlying French society were to come spilling out in the grotesque Dreyfus Affair a decade after this book was published (1894) whose antagonisms reverberated on to the time of the Great War.

A Catholic writer who went too far for the Church authorities was Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808 to 1889). Des Esseintes likes d’Aurevilly’s more extreme works because they feed his taste for ‘sickly books, undermined and inflamed by fever’ (p.160).

Discussion of d’Aurevilly’s novels A married priest and The devils leads into a meditation on the fact that sadism only really makes sense within the context of Catholic faith. Sadism is a form of sacrilegious rebellion, a spiritual as much as a physical debauch. Without a God and Church to defy, it’s just being cruel.

Des Esseintes shares the fruits of his investigations into the Malleus Maleficorum and the Black Mass, describing a naked woman on all fours whose naked rump has been ‘repeatedly soiled’, serving as the altar from which the anti-congregation take a demonic host printed with the image of a goat, and so on.

Yes, of the entire canon of French Catholic prose, d’Aurevilly is the only one des Esseintes really enjoys reading because his works offer:

those gamy flavours and unhealthy spots, that bruised skin and sleepy taste which he so loved to savour in the decadent writers, both Latin and monastic, of olden times. (p.165)

(See my review of d’Aurevilly’s best known collection of stories, Les Diaboliques.)

Chapter 13 (12 pages)

There’s a heatwave. Feeble Des Esseintes is prostrated. He can’t eat, is almost choking with nausea. He takes down a bottle of Benedictine liqueur which he describes in a half-page prose poem, visions of medieval monks at their alembics.

Going out into the garden to recover his strength he sees a bunch of working class boys fighting in the lane which triggers negative thoughts. What’s the point of the scrofulous little brats being born in the first place? Why does society sell the means of contraception but locks up anyone who has an abortion? Maybe fornication should be banned outright. Then ‘a dreadful feeling of debility came over him again’ (p.172).

He tinkers with a few more liqueurs but they sicken him. We learn that, during his florid Paris heyday he tried hashish and opium but they only made him sick. He would have to rely in his imagination to carry him to other worlds.

He goes back indoors to seek relief from the heat, slumps into a chair and plays with an astrolabe he bought on the Left Bank. Now his mind drifts, reminiscing about walks around Paris, it dawns on him that licensed brothels are slowly being closed down and invariably replaced with taverns. This suggests to him that men tire of walking in, paying, having sex and walking out again. Too easy. In a tavern, on the other hand, you encounter women who you have to banter with, overcome, barter with, in some kind of degraded joust. If you score, there’s more of a sense of achievement. What idiots men are! Des Esseintes reflects, and goes to find some food for his troubled stomach.

Chapter 14 (23 pages)

French secular literature. At one point Des Esseintes worshipped Balzac but, as his health failed, Balzac came to seem too healthy. He changed to Edgar Allen Poe. He wants to be lifted ‘into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion’ (p.180). Hating modern life, as he does, he comes to dislike books which record it, from Flaubert to Zola. Instead he turns more and more to the fantastical, to the artificiality of Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. He wants to escape the dullness and stupidity of his age, and fancy himself in another era, another world.

Then begins his review of nineteenth century French literature, starting by admiring Flaubert’s Salammbô, then analysing Edmund de Goncourt. What he, Des Esseintes, seeks in a book is ‘dream-inducing suggestiveness’ (p.183). After considering Zola he makes a major point about the appeal of minor, lesser writers. They are less consistent, less predictable and so more likely to include quirks and oddities which reveal strange corners of psychology and style.

Then the poets. He has a page on Paul Verlaine, who he describes as mysterious, vague, eccentric. And so on to Tristan Corbieres, Theodore Hannon. He no longer likes Leconte de Lisle and even Gautier no long appeals: they don’t make him dream any more, they no longer up vistas of escape. Hugo and Stendhal no. Nobody comes close to the pleasure given him by Edgar Allen Poe. The closest anyone comes is the Contes cruels of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, a few of which he summarises (and which I recently reviewed).

Finally, his servant has filed his small collection of contemporary books on his shelves and leaves Des Esseintes with a specially printed selection of the finest poet of his times, Stéphane Mallarmé. Above all, des Esseintes loves the fineness of Mallarmé’s prose poems which is Des Esseintes’ favourite literary form. Verlaine, Mallarmé, represented the delicious decadence of the French language.

It is very symptomatic that Des Esseintes associates aesthetic excellence with illness, decline and collapse. Thus a little hymn celebrating the idea that the French language itself has finally reached the end of the road, is in terminal decay, since decay, decadence and death are his standard trope.

The truth of the matter was that the decadence of French literature, a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious whims that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last hours, determined to make up for all the pleasures it had missed, afflicted on its death-bed with a desire to leave behind the subtlest memories of suffering, had been embodied in Mallarmé in the most consummate and exquisite fashion…this was the death-agony of the old tongue which, after going a little greener every century, had now reached the point of dissolution… (p.199)

All this is, in my opinion, actually a very suburban prejudice. Every generation likes to think it is the last one, that things are going to the dogs, can’t carry on this way, everything’s collapsing – whereas, in fact, rather disappointingly, things do just keep carrying on. It is a very common prejudice.

Then again, in the context of the narrative, you could argue that Des Esseintes’ opinion of the collapse of the French language really only reflects his own physical collapse. Like all his other opinions, it is highly subjective and self-referential.

Chapter 15 (11 pages)

Des Esseintes had had his servants install a food digester to cater to his sensitive stomach. It works for a while then wears off and symptoms of illness return – eye trouble, hacking cough, throbbing arteries, cold sweats, and now aural delusions i.e. he starts hearing things which aren’t there. He hears the school bell and then the hymns he learned at his Jesuit school.

Which segues into lyrical praise of medieval plainsong and Gregorian chant. As he himself notes quite a few times, not least in the passage about sadism, quite a few of the things Des Esseintes likes are meaningless without the context of Roman Catholicism. Sometimes he is deliberately rebelling against it, as in his fondness for blasphemous writers, but other times he is very sensitive to the true Christian spirit, with no irony.

And so it is here, where he deprecates almost all classical music as showy and straining for ‘popular success’ (a thought designed to make any true aristocrat shudder); only plainchant is the true ‘idiom of the ancient church, the very soul of the Middle Ages’ (p.202).

The only religious music he really approved of was the monastic music of the Middle Ages, that emaciated music which provoked an instinctive nervous reaction in him, like certain pages of the old Christian Latinists. (p.203)

He is hilariously rude about public concerts where:

you can see a hulking brute of a man waving his arms about and massacring disconnected snatches of Wagner to the huge delight of an ignorant crowd. (p.204)

Or you are forced to listen to:

contemptible cavatinas and objectionable quadrilles, sung with full orchestra accompaniment, in churches converted into boudoirs, by barnstormers bellowing away up in the roof, while down below the ladies waged a war of fashions and went into raptures over the shrieks of the mountebanks. (p.203)

The only ‘modern’ composers he can bear are Schumann, but above all the songs of Schubert which speak to his high-strung nerves, which wake a host of forgotten sorrows and thrill him to the marrow.

One day he sees his face in the mirror and is appalled. His face is shrunken, covered in wrinkles, hollow cheeks, big burning watery eyes. He is not at all like the image chosen for the cover of the Penguin Classics edition, the painting by Giovanni Boldini of the dashing, dapper Le Comte Robert de Montesquiou – that gives a completely misleading image of a dandy at the height of his powers, whereas the whole point is that Des Esseintes is a man utterly at the end of his rope.

He has his man rush to Paris to fetch an eminent and expensive doctor then falls to hypochondriac fretting and then into a doze. The doctor enters his bedroom unannounced, inspects him, writes out a simple prescription and leaves with barely a word.

Turns out the doctor has prescribed peptone enemas which appear to require the servant to place a tube or syringe up his anus and inject nutrition. Des Esseintes is overcome with hilarious glee, regarding this as the acme of the artificial way of life he has been seeking all his life. What could be more ‘against nature’ and a rejection of the whole messy way of stuffing our faces and chewing revolting foodstuffs which nature has condemned humanity to?

True to form, it crosses Des Esseintes’ mind that the ideal connoisseur could create dishes and combinations of flavours to be included in the mixture of nutrients being injected up his bottom – a thought which surely anticipates the Surreal blasphemies of a writer like Georges Bataille.

Slowly Des Esseintes recovers his strength till he can walk about his house unaided, though with a stick. As his health revives he renews his interest in interior decoration, coming up with ever-more byzantine new combinations. However, on his next visit his doctor informs him he must give up this reclusive, super-nervous, anxious way of living, return to Paris and live like other people, take his pleasures in ‘normal’ enjoyments, to which he whines:

‘But I just don’t enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy.’

Tough. It’s life or death. Keep on living as he is, and he’ll lose strength, go mad and die.

Chapter 16 (9 pages)

The doctor insists he needs a change of scene, to mix with society, to have friends. And so with great reluctance, Des Esseintes has his precious belongings packed up ready to ship back to a new apartment he is to rent in Paris.

This triggers a review of possible companions: all the young squires he used to run with will be married by now and having affairs; the money-grubbing bourgeoisie are beneath contempt, spreading all around them ‘the tyranny of commerce’; the aristocracy as a whole is dying out, ‘sunk into imbecility or depravity’, selling off their ancestral homes, their vices and crimes all too often leading them to court and then onto gaol like common criminals. He is disgusted by the way the Church, also, has caught the commercialism of the age, advertising all kinds of tacky products in Sunday supplements, Trappist beer, Cistercian chocolates.

He wants to believe, he wants to have faith, but the modern writings and even practices of the Church have been corrupted and adulterated. And so – after a bilious and very funny diatribe against the revolting bourgeoisie – the last pages of the book turn into a plea to God.

‘Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!’ (Final sentence, p.220)

So the book ends in such a way as to drive home the simple idea that the entire Decadence is a kind of disappointed Catholic faith, so angry with its disillusion that it turns to childish debaucheries and blasphemies in order to spite its disappointing parent. Unable to escape its firm foundation in Catholicism, À rebours ends with a surprisingly sincere prayer.

More incidents than you’d expect

From this summary you can see that the text is emphatically not simply a series of encyclopedia entries on a set of luxury topics (art, literature, jewels, perfumes etc), but that Huysmans goes to some lengths to shake his narrative up and vary it with real-world actions and events.

In the the ‘present’ of the narrative this includes the visits of various tradesmen and a doctor, and the big episode of the trip to Paris in chapter 11. A bit more subtly, the narrative is broken up with plenty of memories of active events: such as relationships with various lovers (trips to the circus to see the acrobat), the farcical trip to the dentist, memories of the visit to the sister-in-law of a lover which inspired his prose poem, the time he took the street urchin to the brothel, and so on.

Decadent rhetoric

Obviously the book is drenched in the rhetoric of ‘decadence’, with liberal use of classic adjectives and phrases from the genre. I made a list, curious to see how many times he could recycle the same basic ideas, and the answer is, quite a few times:

  • horror
  • spleen
  • filthy pleasures
  • tortured
  • fiendish
  • diabolical
  • voluptuous pleasure
  • licentious obsessions
  • new and original ecstasies
  • paroxysms celestial and accursed
  • atrocious
  • drunk with fantasy
  • abominable
  • ghastly screams
  • glaring infamies
  • delights
  • hideous hues
  • spine-chilling nightmare
  • foul uncontrollable desires
  • dark and odious schemes
  • fear
  • morbid depravities
  • monstrous vegetations of the sick mind
  • diseases of the mind
  • the burning fever of lust
  • the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime
  • self-torment
  • bitterness of mind
  • incest
  • disillusion and contempt
  • weary spirits and melancholy souls
  • gloomy ecstasies
  • melancholy madness
  • sacrilegious profanities
  • secret longings
  • atrocious delusions
  • insane aspirations
  • disgust
  • mystic ardours
  • cruel revulsives
  • secret reveries
  • occult passion
  • monstrous depravities
  • anxiety
  • anguish
  • terror
  • nightmares of a fevered brain
  • delicious miasmas
  • dream-like apparitions
  • inexorable nightmare
  • sexual frenzy
  • painful ecstasy
  • new intoxications
  • despairing appeal
  • stifled sob
  • mystical debauch
  • a dying love affair in a melancholy landscape
  • exquisite funereal laments
  • steeped in bitterness and filled with disgust
  • obstinate distress
  • tormented by anxiety
  • torrent of anguish
  • this hairy death’s head
  • incoherent dreams
  • dark venereal pleasures
  • subtly depraved and perverse type of mysticism

Of Moreau:

He himself remained downcast and sorrowful, haunted by the symbols of superhuman passions and superhuman perversities, of divine debaucheries perpetrated without enthusiasm and without hope. (p.69)

So an impressive collection of over-ripe and melodramatic language. But two other themes stand out and are less remarked on:

1. Decadence = exhaustion

Overcome with infinite fatigue, he slumped helplessly against the table. (p.167)

The keynote for me, is not the perversities and damned thoughts etc etc so much as the relentless tone of exhaustion. Des Esseintes only goes into retirement because his nerves have been shredded by his fast-living Paris lifestyle, and our hero is continually trembling on the brink of passing out, when he’s not having nightmares, night sweats, trembling and shaking as he lifts a cup of weak tea to his white lips.

And this air of exhaustion is something he seeks out in art and literature. The painter Luykens was, he tells us, a fervent Calvinist who:

composed and illustrated religious poems, paraphrased the Psalms in verse, and immersed himself in Biblical study, from which he would emerge haggard and enraptured, his mind haunted by bloody visions, his mouth twisted by the maledictions of the Reformation, by its songs of terror and anger. (p.71)

Obviously a lot is going on in that passage but for me, the key word is haggard. And what he likes in the later Latin literature which he collects is the sense of breakdown and decay. Half way through the book I started making a separate collection of key words on this theme

  • feeble
  • broken-down
  • short-winded
  • fainting
  • feverish
  • weeping
  • choking
  • spluttering
  • sick room routine
  • ailing
  • anaemic
  • debility
  • alarming weakness
  • apathy
  • bored inactivity
  • exhaustion
  • organic diseases
  • intellectual senility
  • last stammerings
  • exhausted by fever

In his discussion of the author Barbey d’Aurevilly Des Esseintes makes the candid remark that he is ‘really interested only in sickly books, undermined and inflamed by fever’ (p.160). It’s not too much of a stretch to call Decadence the aesthetic of illness.

Comedy

Given the book’s reputation as the Bible of Decadence, it’s unexpectedly funny.

He is savagely funny about his dull cousins in the Prologue. He is ferociously snobbish about the bourgeoisie, about shop-keepers and butcher’s wives and their meretricious, banal tastes.

He doesn’t just carry out a survey of Latin literature from Plautus to the tenth century, he massacres some of the most famous names in the classical canon, rubbishing Virgil and Horace very amusingly, and in a manner which must have been designed to render traditional Latinists apoplectic.

In a deliberately offensively funny section, the passage in praise of The Artificial, he first of all states that surely the most exquisite creation of nature is woman (‘the most perfect and original beauty’) but then goes on to say that, has not Man now produced something more dazzling beautiful than the most beautiful woman, being…’the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway’ (p.37), a deliberately offensive notion which anticipates the posturing of Marinetti’s Futurists 30 years later.

Then there are the hilarious descriptions of ugly English men and women in the aborted journey to London chapter (‘Robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette-knives’) and the thumping contempt the ignorati who attend public concerts, in chapter 15.

Maybe the one central theme of the French literature which is now regarded as canonical, from Flaubert and Baudelaire, through writers like Huysmans, through the Surrealists and on into the Existentialists, is their hatred of the bourgeoisie. Witness the diatribe against the filthy middle classes on almost the last page of the book. French authors will do anything to escape the taint or accusation of having bourgeois tastes. Whereas the same hatred of the middle classes just isn’t in evidence in English literature, lots of which is written virtually in praise of the middle and upper middle classes – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Henry James, E.M. Foster.

Robert Baldick’s translation (brings out the comedy)

The translation I read is pretty old, the 1959 Robert Baldick one published by Penguin Books. However, unlike many translations of nineteenth century classics, it is immediately likeable and entertaining. Apparently:

Huysmans’s work was known for his idiosyncratic use of the French language, extensive vocabulary, detailed and sensuous descriptions, and biting, satirical wit

and this is exactly what comes over in Baldick’s translation. He uses a wider vocabulary than you might expect – I mean I was entertained by his unusual and out-of-the-way words – and certainly brings out Huysman’s biting wit. I laughed out loud at several places in the short Prologue, where he describes young men of his own age as ‘docile, good-looking ninnies, congenital dunces who had worn their masters’ patience thin’. In addition Des Esseintes:

discovered the freethinkers, those bourgeois doctrinaires who clamoured for absolute liberty in order to stifle the opinions of other people, to be nothing but a set of greedy, shameless hypocrites whose intelligence he rated lower than a village cobbler’s.

And the venom of his contempt is funny. Or the snobbishness. Like his refusal to use any of the obvious jewels on the tortoise because they are the kind worn by vulgar businessmen or upon ‘the tubulous fingers of butcher’s wives’ (p.55).

This snobbery is also evident in the passages about Goya and Rembrandt who he is embarrassed at liking because the rest of the world likes them too, and there is nothing worse than sharing the same taste as the ghastly bourgeoisie and having to listen to their inane praise of works of which, as an initiate, as a superior being, you have such a better grasp and appreciation (p.108).

If the mob start liking something, Des Esseintes hastily drops it and worries that his ‘taste’ (i.e. aristocratic superiority) is failing him. Throughout the book the adjective ‘aristocratic’ is a word of unqualified praise. Among other things, the Decadence was deeply elitist.

I bought this paperback when I was 17, alongside my edition of Baudelaire’s poems, desperate to enliven my humdrum suburban existence with the Flowers of Evil. Forty years later, some of Des Esseintes’ passages, like the rant against Virgil, his amusing abuse of middle-class taste, and even more in the farcical toothache scene, made me smile or even laugh out loud. When I was a stricken teenager I thought life was a tragedy and books like this fed that feeling. Now I know it’s a comedy and mostly what I find in them is different flavours of comedy.

French literature is more sexually open than English

Quite apart from anything else, the novel demonstrates the vast difference between French and English literature of this time in regard to women and sex. Huysmans doesn’t describe the sexual act itself, but he freely describes going to brothels, the charms of the different ladies, of attending parties where women strip off, he mentions breasts and nipples and even, apparently, what one of his lovers required in order to climax.

Absolutely none of this could have been written by or even hinted at by English authors, who subjected themselves to a ferocious self censorship. Same with Americans, possibly even more Puritanical. It’s significant that of the many lovers des Esseintes reminisces about, by far the most frigid and unsexual was American (the disappointingly prudish and passive acrobat, page 112).

I’m not sure when English writers caught up with French ones in terms of candour and honesty about sex: would it have been the 1960s, maybe? On a deeper level, it seems to me the English still haven’t caught up with the best Continental authors in capturing a genuinely relaxed, at-ease-with-themselves attitude towards bodies and sex.

Credit

À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans was published in French, in Paris, in 1884. All references are to the English translation by Robert Baldick published by Penguin paperback in 1973.

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Cruel Tales by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1883)

It is so amusing to play the dandy! I prefer that to playing cards.
(The narrator of ‘Maryelle’, page 216)

This book contains 27 short stories, vignettes, squibs and satires. Someone online commented that they are not cruel tales at all, and certainly anyone expecting the thrill or horror of Edgar Allen Poe will on the whole be disappointed (with a handful of possible exceptions). Much more accurate is the title of used by a 1920s translation of the same collection, ‘Sardonic Stories’. They are more about irony, satire and sarcasm than anything cruel and macabre – in particular, satire of the Paris literary and theatrical worlds which de l’Isle-Adam tried all his life to break into with impressively consistent lack of success.

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) spent his entire life thinking his writings would make him famous and restore the fortunes of his aristocratic family, which he insisted was ancient and venerable. This didn’t happen. Instead he churned out novels and plays which nobody cared about while living in sometimes abject poverty, associating with a series of illiterate working class mistresses who bore him various children. Only in the last years of his life, with the publication of the ‘Cruel Tales’ in 1883, did he begin to garner some critical recognition.

Like so many French writers, de l’Isle-Adam despised his countrymen. As an aristocrat he was contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, as a monarchist he was contemptuous of democracy (in 1881 he stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a candidate for the Legitimist party), and as a Catholic he was contemptuous of science and materialism. He was, in other words, a reactionary berk.

A reactionary berk convinced of his own ineffable superiority to the rest of the human race, on account of his aristocratic family and his superb talent, even if the rest of the human race was too ignorant to recognise it. Outraged pride and lofty superiority run through the stories like a silver thread. I liked A.W. Raitt’s note pointing out that de L’Isle-Adam was well known for stopping in his walks around Paris to admire himself from all angles in shop windows and mirrors. He fancied himself a great actor, a championship boxer, as well as a writer and playwright and exquisite soul.

1. The Bienfilâtre sisters (10 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam drolly paints a dry picture of a famous café on a Paris boulevard, habituated by eligible young men and packed with courtesans. Two leading figures among the latter are the Bienfilâtre sisters, Olympe and Henriette. They have been working girls since young in order to support their parents, poor concierges, which allows de L’Isle-Adam to ironically describe them as dutiful daughters who honoured their engagements and could hold their heads high.

With further irony he then describes how one of the sisters, Olympe, fell from the straight and narrow of her profession when she (gasp!) fell in love! With a poor student called Maxime. Her work went to pot. Her sister had to pick up the slack. Other courtesans at the café talk behind her back. Henriette is ashamed. The family who have always eaten together, are now reduced to three in Olympe’s absence. There’s a funny scene where Henriette confronts her sister in the café, while all the other habitués pretend not to be listening, and delivers a rhodomontade made up entirely of Daily Mail-style bourgeois clichés and recriminations: ‘should be ashamed…owes a duty to her class…running off with a youngster like that…you’re not in this world to enjoy yourself but to work, young lady…what about her poor parents…’ etc etc.

Finally her guilty conscience (at ceasing to be a prostitute, at throwing away a good honest living in order to ‘fall in love’) strikes her down with illness and she takes to her bed. She calls for a priest and confesses her’ sin’ of falling in love and so straying from the straight and narrow, the path of purity (all ironic terms applied to her previous career as a prostitute).

At that moment the door is flung open by Maxime who bursts in chinking coins in his hand. His parents have sent him the fees for his exams. Olympe feebly stretches out her hand to him. The priest takes this as a moving sign of her true repentance. In fact it is joy that her lover has come true and has coughed up some cash. And with this beatific knowledge filling her soul, she expires.

This is a genuinely funny ‘story’, the sustained irony of the premise maintained right till the end. It was originally published in 1871, 20 years before Oscar Wilde used the same kind of satirical irony in a story like Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891).

It establishes a major theme, in fact the fundamental worldview which underpins the stories, which is that de L’Isle-Adam assumes his readers to be as au fait with the cynical realities of Paris nightlife, with prostitutes and dissolute aristocrats and starving poets and so on as he is, so as not only not to show the conventional bourgeois horror at the subjects he tackles, but to take pleasure in his detached, ironic treatment of them.

In later stories he describes characters who are so blasé and over-familiar with every possible kind of ‘scandalous’ affair, with the plots of umpteen melodramatic novels, plays and operas that, when they actually find themselves in situations which could come from such productions, they not only feel they are acting a part, but observe themselves acting a part, and award themselves marks out of ten for their performances (most notable in ‘Sombre Tale, Sombre Teller’).

2. Véra (11 pages)

Powerful description of an aristocrat, the Comte d’Athol, whose wife passes away just six months after they were married, who leads the mourning and sees her body laid in the family tomb, returns to his grand apartments on the Faubourg Saint-Germain, tells his loyal retainer Raymond to dismiss the other servants, to refuse all invitations and visitors, and then immerses himself in a visionary state where he pretends his wife is still alive. It has the dreamlike intensity of Poe story but described in the sumptuous prose of late-Romanticism toppling over into the Decadence.

3. Vox populi (4 pages)

A prose poem designed to mock the fickleness and stupidity of the masses, the mob, ‘the people’. It zeroes in on three moments in recent French history – an 1868 review of Napoleon III’s birthday, the start of the Siege of Paris in 1870, the Commune of Paris March 1871 – on which the masses shouted the inane slogan of the times – Vive L’Empereur, Vive La Republique and Vive Le Marechal – all of which is counterpointed by the unchanging plea of an old blind beggar ‘Please take pity on a poor blind man’.

The moral being that the fickle face of politics and popular enthusiasms come and go, but the human condition remains the same. Or as Jesus said, the poor are always with you. Justifying de L’Isle-Adam’s lofty, aristocratic disdain for the people, the mob, the bourgeoisie, liberalism and all the other disgusting symptoms of the late-19th century world.

4. Two augurs (14 pages)

A satire on the press where a writer presents himself to the jaded philistine editor of a successful paper. The ironic twist is that the writer is proud of being a third-rate poetaster who’s produced a long-winded article bloated with complacency and bridles when the editor starts praising the quality of his work and then – horror of horrors – has the temerity to call him ‘a man of genius’, when all he’s aiming at is to churn out 5th rate bilge.

All this is a rather contrived satire on the world of the press, papers and magazines which, of course, de L’Isle-Adam himself occupied but which for so long refused to acknowledge what he considered his own genius. Sour grapes.

5. Celestial publicity (5 pages)

A satire which deadpan praises a magnificent new invention developed by M. Graves, which allows the projection of crude adverts onto the heavens. The satire is as much in the breathlessly enthusiastic tone, the tone of adverts and promotional bumf for the new technologies beginning to flood late-Victorian life, as in the (horrifying) plan to turn the heavens into advertising hoardings.

6. Antonie (2 pages)

Very short vignette describing a courtesan at a drinking party of men who, amid the drinking and banter, ask her who the locket she wears between her breasts is dedicated to. She opens it to show a lock of hair, teases the men for a minute who all want to know what heroic lover enjoys such devotion – before revealing that it is her own hair, which she wears as a gesture of fidelity (i.e. to herself). Very droll.

7. The glory machine (16 pages)

Similar to the machine which projects adverts into the sky, this satire takes the same excited tone about a new machine which produces glory. Unfortunately it then turns into a long tedious explanation of what ‘glory’ means in the world of poetry (alas) and explains the composition of ‘claques’ in Paris theatre. Laboured and boring.

A thing like this isn’t a story at all so much as a sustained expression of de L’Isle-Adam’s sour grapes and resentment.

8. The Duke of Portland (7 pages)

This is obviously intended to be one of the macabre stories. The Duke of Portland returns to his grand house by the sea, continues to host dinners and parties for all the best people but never attends them himself, sends a letter to Queen Victoria after reading which she gives him permission not to attend the House of Lords or carry out any official functions and a year later his fiancée arrives by boat on the beach at night to discover him dying and he dies as she is with him. His secret? On a trip to the Middle East he met a leper who gave him the disease, hence the letter to Victoria and his seclusion and the sadness of his fiancée.

It seemed obvious from this one that de L’Isle-Adam is much better at the wordy trappings of the Gothic tale and melodrama than he is at devising an actual plot.

9. Virginia and Paul (5 pages)

Many of de L’Isle-Adam’s pieces start with a sort of prologue describing the theme or subject of the story – Paris boulevards, the life of a courtesan, death and mourning – in general and poetic terms before finally arriving at t(often slender) plot.

Here there is over a page asking the reader to remember the emotions, the images and objects associated with their first love, before it finally arrives at the ‘story’ which concerns two young lovers, both aged just 15. They are cousins, he has slipped out of his parents’ house to climb over the wall into the grounds of her boarding school and they gushingly mix expressions of first love with clumsy talk of practicalities, like trying to conceal their love when they are with their families and how Paul can extract money from his father so they can run away.

Maybe the point isn’t the 3 or so pages devoted to their naive dialogue, but to the last paragraph which suddenly switches the perspective and reveals that the narrator (improbably enough) has been eavesdropping this little scene, which is not very likely in practical terms (how? if it’s happening on the other side of a high wall and, presumably, hidden in bushes) but is really just a pretext for him to deliver a little paean:

Oh youth, springtime of life! May God bless you, children, in your ecstasy – you whose souls are innocent as flowers, and whose words, evoking memories more or less similar to his first rendezvous, bring tears to the eyes of a passerby! (p.76)

10. The eleventh-hour guest (25 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam’s stories are 1) often barely stories at all, with very little narrative and 2) very contrived. He is proud of their contrivance. As far as I can make out, the show of contrivance is part of the aim. Their artificiality is to be prized.

The story is that one night he and his friend are in a box at the opera when, in the interval, three well-known ladies about town invite them out for dinner. At that moment the narrator spies a gentleman he recognises from somewhere, they get chatting and then, on a lordly aristocratic whim, they decide to invite him along. There follows an interesting description of what such an evening in a private room at a posh Parisian restaurant was like, with detailed descriptions of the meal, actions and banter of the six characters.

The last-minute guest is, as you might expect, mysterious, given to gnomic sayings, and insists on being referred to as Baron Saturn, which they playfully agree to. As the hour draws late he says he needs to leave as he has an urgent appointment in the morning. It’s only after he’s left, that another friend turns up and tells them who their mystery guest was. Turns out he is one of the most notorious unbalanced monomaniacs of the age and obsessed with public executions. Turns out h travelled widely in the East (Orientalism!) where he bribed his way to being allowed to carry out public executions and tortures. On his return to Europe he wrote to all the heads of state of the continent asking to be allowed to apply the exquisite tortures he had learned in the East to western criminals and condemned men.

In this he consistently failed but it is said that he quietly bribed executioners in some European countries in order to take their place. Still, he manages to get advance notice of executions across the Continent and then rushes to be present t the scene, at the foot of the scaffold soaking up the grisly thrill of the moment.

This puts a damper on the previously light-hearted party and as the hour of 6am approaches, when that morning’s execution is scheduled to be carried out, they all feel a ghost walking over their graves. Voodoo spooky.

The ‘story’, such as it is, is garnished with reflections about psychology, about perception and meaning, which feel pregnant with the Symbolist movement which was just about to be christened. (Symbolism was given its name when Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto in the Paris newspaper ‘Le Figaro’ on 18 September 1886). It contains paragraphs like this:

The sound waves of the nervous system have mysterious vibrations…They deaden, so to speak, with their multiple echoes, the analysis of the initial blow which produced them. The memory makes out the atmosphere surrounding the object, but the object itself is lost in this general sensation and remains stubbornly indistinguishable. (p.83)

As the Wikipedia article on Symbolism explains:

Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to ‘plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description’ and that its goal instead was to ‘clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form’ whose ‘goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal.’… As Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, ‘to depict not the thing but the effect it produces’.

Or, as de L’Isle-Adam puts it:

Objects are transfigured according to the magnetism of the human beings who approach them. Things have no significance for people other than that which the latter are able to give them. (p.84)

The Naturalism of Émile Zola and his followers strives to depict the world and everything in it exactly as they are, with full realistic descriptions. Symbolism has the diametrically opposite aim of trying to capture the feelings and moods (sometimes verging on hallucinations) which the world, and especially particularly powerful objects or experiences, evoke in us.

11. The very image (4 pages)

A very short text which is a premonition of Kafka.

A man is hurrying through Paris ‘on business’ when he finds himself next to a hospitable-looking building and pops inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers around which sit blank-faced people, and realises that the hostess of the place is none other than Death (!).

He hears the rumble of cab wheels outside, exits, gets into the cab and announces his destination. He arrives at another building, goes inside to find the atrium has a glass ceiling, there are pillars on which are hung coats and mufflers, marble tables laid out bearing portfolios of official papers and the same blank-faced people i.e. a complete repetition of the first experience.

At this point you expect some kind of cunning payoff as you might have in Kafka or, especially, Borges, but instead the narrator goes out, gets into his cab which he asks to take him home, and (rather limply) vows to stop rushing around ‘on business’.

Is it an allegory implying that the ordinary bourgeois running round Paris on business is living a kind of living death? That ‘business’ is the death of the soul and the antithesis of the sensitive refined thoughts which de L’Isle-Adam is at such pains to show off in these stories?

12. The impatient mob (8 pages)

The title reflects de L’Isle-Adam’s (comical) contempt for the mob, the masses, the people, in all their forms. This is another tale long on atmosphere and looming symbolism and short on actual story. It describes the population of Sparta crowding to the city walls because rumour has reached them that the vast army of the Persian Empire under Xerxes I has crushed the Greek army sent to stop it at the Battle of Thermopylae. The story describes a sole Spartan warrior who is spied descending from the hills and staggering across the plains towards the city. The entire city starts booing and shouting insults because a Spartan soldier was meant to come back holding his shield or dead on it, while this one doesn’t carry a shield and is taken to be a coward. They throw stones at him and the city cook spits a gob of phlegm at him. Utterly exhausted, ashamed and humiliated the soldier lies down in the dirt and lets himself be attacked by the ominous flock of black crows flying overhead. In the morning nothing is left of his body except the bones picked clean. And so the city never gets to learn that the Spartans won and that this man had been stripped of his spear and shield by his generals all the better to run faster back to the city and tell his countrymen of their victory. Never trust the masses, you see.

This is such a cheesy reversal, such a heavy moralising twist, that it reminds me of the cheesy payoffs of lots of cheap science fiction stories.

13. The secret of the old music (5 pages)

The Paris orchestra prepares to play the new piece by an unnamed ‘modern’ composer (strongly hinted to be Wagner) but discovers it has a part for the Chinese pavilion, an instrument it doesn’t possess and nobody can recall having been played in their lifetimes. But some of the musicians think they know an old guy who might have one so they visit him in his apartment (surrounded by versions of the instrument and sheet music) and persuade him to come along to rehearsals the next morning. But he finds the new music so difficult he protests against it, halting the rehearsal to declaim that Music is finished and promptly falling into the bass drum. Maybe this is meant to be funny.

14. Sentimentality (9 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam was a member of the Parnassian group of poets:

Parnassianism was a group of French poets that began during the positivist period of the 19th century (1860s to 1890s), occurring after romanticism and prior to symbolism … As a reaction to the less-disciplined types of romantic poetry and what they considered the excessive sentimentality and undue social and political activism of Romantic works, the Parnassians strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and (neo-)classical subjects that they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.

This, then, explains the emotional detachment, the clinical approach, and the occasional classical subject matter of L’Isle-Adam’s ‘stories’.

This isn’t really a story but a dialogue designed to demonstrate and show off Parnassian values. The young poet, the Comte Maximilien de W– and the well-known beauty Lucienne Émery are sitting on the Champs Elysees. They are romantically involved. She asks him to explain why he, as a Parnassian poet, gives the impression of performing everything, of acting out feelings and emotions. Why can’t he be more like ordinary people? He explains that a poet and artist like himself feels things so deeply that he is lost for how to behave and so ‘acts’ feelings with the appropriate gestures which the ignorant masses would understand.

Very casually, she, also a devotee of this Parnassian way of living, informs him that this is their last hour together as she is leaving him for another man, who she’s meeting later the same night. True to his philosophy of deep feeling kept under clinical self-control, the Comte barely flickered an eyelid, possibly going just a shade paler before congratulating her on her choice. There’s a bit more explanation of art and feeling etc before he hails her a cab and she drives off. He walks home, files his nails, writes a few lines of verse, opens a new book, then calmly takes a small pistol from his cabinet and shoots himself through the heart. Émery has since that day worn mourning black.

15. The finest dinner in the world (9 pages)

I think de L’Isle-Adam’s obvious contempt for people would stop him being considered a major writer. In this little vignette two notables in an unnamed provincial town bet each other they can produce the finest dinner in the world. Maitre Percenoix goes first and produces a 13-course marvel which astonishes the 17 provincial worthies invited to enjoy it. At its climax his bitter rival, Maitre Lecastelier, stands up and says he will serve up one even better in exactly one year’s time.

The joke or gag or point of the story is that one year later Lecastelier serves the same bunch of (lampooned) provincial notables exactly the same dinner down to the last detail BUT…into each napkin he has slipped a 20 franc piece. These fall out as the guests open the napkins and each guest, in a provincial bourgeois way which de L’Isle-Adam mocks, hurriedly slips it into their pockets or purses, pretending they never saw it.

The joke is that, as they leave, and for days afterwards, all the guests for some reason feel that, although the menu was identical to the one laid on by Percenoix, the Lecastelier dinner really was better but, because of their bourgeois hypocrisy, none of them will admit why.

16. The desire to be a man (10 pages)

A variation on the Parnassian theme of ‘true’ feeling. The protagonist is Esprit Chaudval, the famous tragedian, getting on a bit now as he’s turning 50. Wandering the streets of Paris as the restaurants shut down he catches sight of himself in a mirror and poses and preens as he has done all his professional life. His hair is turning grey. It’s time to retire. In an incongruous and improbable development it turns out that he has applied to be a lighthouse keeper. He has just received a letter answering his application, now opens it and squeals with pleasure, then catches himself acting.

It dawns on him that he’s acted so many parts but, deep down, never really felt anything and he finds himself saying that he needs to be a man. Because of the histrionic way his (and de L’Isle-Adam’s) mind works, the old actor thinks the best way to really feel something is to commit a great crime and feel himself flooded with remorse, a genuine emotion which he can hold onto and feed off for the rest of his quiet life as a lighthouse keeper.

So he sets fire to an industrial estate on the outskirts of Paris full of warehouses of oil etc which goes up in a huge blaze, spreading to the nearby houses of the urban poor, some of whom are burned to death, many made homeless. He loiters long enough to enjoy the fruit of his labours – ‘At last I’m going to find out what it means to be “tortured with remorse”…I’m born again. I exist!‘ – then takes a cab with trunks of his belongings to the station whence he will travel to his lighthouse.

A small digression on outsider literary criminals

His grand arson puts Chaudval in the lineage linking Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s alienated student, Raskolnikov, in the novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ (1867); with Albert Camus’s blank-minded murderer, Mersault, in ‘The Outsider’ (1942); via André Gide who invented the concept of the ‘acte gratuite’ (an utterly unmotivated behaviour that defies routine, custom, and normal explanations) in his novel ‘Les Caves du Vatican’ in 1914.

17. Flowers of darkness (2 pages)

A baleful little 2-page meditation on the trade in Paris whereby flowers and wreaths left at funerals, come nightfall, are scavenged, thrown into carts and taken to ateliers where they are reworked as attractive bouquets and handed to the sweet little flower girls who come out at night and loiter in front of theatres, restaurants etc so that men can impress their dates by buying them bouquets.

De L’Isle-Adam gives it a characteristically morbid and moralising turn by saying that these flowers of the dead are an apt emblem for the pale-faced ladies of the night who all-too-often hand out love which is death, by which I take it he means sexually transmitted diseases.

18. The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath (8 pages)

Like ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’, this is a heavy-handed satire on the unrelenting pace of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ which de L’Isle-Adam associates with unbridled technical innovation, commercialism and advertising. It isn’t a ‘story’ at all but more a satirical article about a fictional invention.

The narrator hails the invention of a device which can capture and analyse the last breaths of the dying. He goes on to say that children are now practicing on their parents when they fall asleep in front of the fire, getting used to the experience and feelings of death so it’ll seem boring when it actually happens. An extended satire on how the young will learn to be heartless, respect for the dead will vanish and good thing too, art and literature will lose their mystery which is just as well in an age when time is money, and other sarcastic sallies.

19. The brigands (7 pages)

A broad farcical satire on the provincial bourgeoisie. A beggar, an old fiddler from the Gascon town of Nayrac, stops the churchwarden of the neighbouring town of Pibrac on the highway and asks for some alms. Within hours rumour passes round both towns that a huge gang of ferocious brigands is at large. So the bourgeois landowners of both places nerve each other to assemble a posse and, armed with ancient muskets (and cough drops from anxious wives) set off on a tour of their lands during which they’ll collect all the rents owed them.

They see no sight of any brigands because there aren’t any but as night falls they become distinctly nervous. Then in the darkness the two wagons, one of nervous burgers from Pibrac, one of the same from Nayrac, surprise each other on the dark road. The moon disappears behind a cloud and a nervous landowner fires his gun by mistake. What follows is a general massacre in which everyone, even the horse, is slaughtered.

Some distance away the blind fiddler and his loose group of beggar friends hear all the shooting and decide to investigate. They arrive just at the moment that the last burger accidentally blows his brains out and to find a scene of mayhem and massacre.

And, as you might have predicted, seeing all these dead bodies and bags of coins scattered everywhere, the fiddler suggests to his mates that they steal all the swag and hot tail it out of the province, which is what they do.

20. Queen Ysabeau (8 pages)

De L’Isle-Adam wrote a biography of Ysabeau de Bavaria (who was a real historical personage) which was itself meant to be only part of a vast history of his aristocratic family which he insisted stretched back at least as far as the 1400s. In the event this grand history was never completed and even the biography of Ysabeau de Baviere was never published during his lifetime. This ‘story’ is an episode from the larger biography.

It is a deliciously cruel story, a kind of historical Roald Dahl story. It is 1404. Queen Ysabeau de Bavaria is the wife of King Charles VI of France. He has gone mad and she has taken a lover, Vidame de Maulle. One day, carousing with his aristocratic friends who are discussing the nubile women at court and in particular the daughter of the Court silversmith, Bérénice Escabala, de Maulle is foolish enough to bet that he can take her virtue before anyone else.

Now, among the mob of jesting courtiers is Louis d’Orléans, the Queen’s brother-in-law, who has an unhealthily incestuous passion for her. He doesn’t hesitate to report de Maulle’s boast to the Queen, who is not amused. Thus, the next time they are in bed together, having had the usual passionate sex (‘the abandoned delights of the most wonderful pleasures’), the following scene transpires. De Maulle wakes the drowsy Queen to say he can hear bells ringing and the sky is red, there must be a big fire somewhere. Yes, Ysabeau, drowsily says, yes she had her people set fire to the home of the court silversmith. The next day he (de Maulle) will be arrested on the charge of starting the fire in order to abduct the silversmith’s daughter and win his bet. He has only one alibi, that he was here with the Queen on the night in question, which his honour as an aristocrat will forbid him from using – and also the fact that admitting to having sex with the Queen is Treason, also punishable by death. So it’s death either way. In any case he will be tortured until he confesses whatever he’s told to.

Now, they are in bed together, naked, having just had sex, as the Queen lazily and sleepily tells de Maulle all this and he laughs nervously and embraces her again. Ha ha, you’re joking, right? But next morning he is arrested, taken off to the Grand Chatelet prison, and thoroughly tortured, as the Queen predicted.

There’s a final twist. De Maulle’s lawyer believes the young nobleman and makes the noble gesture of swapping places with him in prison, lending de Maulle his cloak so the latter can leave pretending to be the lawyer after a prison cell conference. But when the Queen hears of this, she doesn’t display the nobility you might expect in a more bourgeois story and free the noble lawyer. Instead she has the lawyer ‘broken on the wheel’ in de Maulle’s name so that the latter’s title can be struck from the register.

And the moral of the story is: If you’re having an affair with a medieval queen do not make a public bet to take another woman to bed. A lesson we can all take to heart.

21. Sombre tale, sombre teller (10 pages)

It might be me adapting to de L’Isle-Adam’s style and worldview but, with this run of 5 or 6 good stories, the collection seemed to significantly improve. A bunch of writers go for dinner to celebrate a playwright’s success. Food and drink make them talkative and the subject turns to duels. One of them is asked to explain more about the duel he’s recently taken part in. This writer certainly does describe, in detail, the duel he assisted at which involved an old schoolfriend seeking satisfaction for a bounder who insulted his mother. But the point of the story is that he is so imbrued with writing and playwriting that he assesses every situation, every step of the unfolding story, as if it was a fiction, awarding marks to his friend as he retells the story of the original insult, then comparing him to famous actors of the day for his restraint, nobility and then, after he’s been mortally wounded in the actual duel, the dignity of his death speech. So much can he only see it as a drama that as his old friend expires in his arms he bursts out applauding.

This story had a little of the delirious effect, the effect of dizzying paradox, of one of Borges’s short stories (a little).

22. The sign (19 pages)

The narrator and some writer friends are drinking tea round a friend’s house when this friend, as always a titled gent, Baron Xavier de la V— offers to tell a story about an uncanny coincidence. To start off he makes all the fashionable claims about being doomed by hereditary spleen, a morose and taciturn creature prey to crippling depression. And that’s why he decided to take a rest cure in the country.

He decides to go and visit the Abbé Maucombe in the town of Saint-Maur in Brittany. His journey there, the farm and the good Abbé are all described in adequate detail. What stands out is the Baron’s hallucinations. Everything looks calm and bucolic around the old house where the priest lives but then a cloud passes over the sun and he sees it all in a different way, rundown and crumbling and sinister. (It reminded me a bit of the TV series ‘Stranger Things’ where you see an innocent small town by day and then are shown the grim, overgrown derelict place it will become if They take control.)

They have philosophical talks about God and stuff but that night the Baron has a sinister dream in which he a creepy figure whose face is masked hands him a cloak. Long story short, several days letter the Baron has to return to Paris on business and the Abbé insists on walking him to the village where the stagecoach stops and it starts to rain, and the kind-hearted Abbé lends him his cloak, handing it over in a gesture which exactly matches what the Baron saw in his dream. With a certain inevitability, a couple of days later, in Paris, the Baron gets a letter saying the Abbé has died of a cold picked up in the rainstorm.

But these ‘facts’ barely matter. What matters is the tremendous atmosphere of ominous premonition which de L’Isle-Adam whips up, and especially the couple of genuinely creepy moments when he suddenly sees an alternative reality, the rundown haunted landscape behind the bright sunny one we see most of the time.

23. The unknown woman (14 pages)

The scene is a grand night at the opera, the farewell performance of noted soprano Maria Felicia Malibran, singing in Bellini’s Norma. The narrative singles out a handsome young man in the stalls, displaying a notable excitement and enthusiasm, explaining that he is the Comte Félician de la Vierge, a provincial aristocrat who only comes to Paris occasionally. This young man catches sight of a beautiful woman in a box and is bowled over by her beauty. Her image speaks to something inside him and he realises that he is in love.

He follows her outside, ignoring the flashy opera crowd, and when she dismisses her cab, he does the same to his and follows her on foot. Seized by a sudden premonition that he might lose her and never see her again, he overtake he, turns and bows and declares his undying love for her. So far, so melodramatic and overwrought and improbable. But all this is to set up what follows, for the pale beautiful young woman waits till the man has finished his speech then declares that she is…deaf!

This staggers the young man for a moment but then his love is reinforced by compassion, and he renews his assault, declaring her disability will make him love her even more. Whereupon the ‘story’ takes a turn, for the unnamed deaf woman delivers a series of long speeches. The gist is that their love can never work because he will, sooner or later, no matter what he promises now, get used to her deafness. Married life requires a lot of practical discussion and agreement and she won’t be able to hear him and eventually he will just mouth ‘I love you’ and write her practical notes and she couldn’t bear that.

Having reduced him to stricken silence, she turns, steps into the cab which has been following her all that time, and is whisked away. Next day the tragical young man packs his bags, returns to his estates in Brittany and is never heard from again, living in heart-broken solitude.

That’s what happens, but in reality the last 6 or so pages are a peg or pretext for de L’Isle-Adam to get his unnamed woman to deliver a series of lectures or addresses on a variety of topical themes. In fact I detected (or think I detected) in the 14 pages of the story a variety of tropes and styles from the period, including Realism, Naturalism, Parnassianism, Romanticism, Decadence and Symbolism. If I have time, I’m thinking I might have a crack at analysing out all the different tones, registers and styles which thong this packed little text.

24. Maryelle (10 pages)

A well-known lady of easy virtue suddenly disappears from society and the narrator, from lordly aristocratic boredom, sets out to find out why. This isn’t very difficult since he bumps into her on the street, on the Avenue of the Opera, to be precise.

She is 25 and pale. He invites her to lunch at a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne ‘so that we might get bored together’, striking the note of exquisitely aristocratic world weariness. He tells her a story ‘to break the ice’ which captures the cynicism of de l’Isle-Adam and his circle perfectly. It concerns a vengeful squire who arrives home to find his wife ‘in a questionable position’ and swiftly inflicts a mortal wound on the lover. As he lays dying in the unfaithful wife’s arms, the husband has the bright idea of tickling her feet with a feather so that she bursts out laughing in the face of her beloved!

It now appears that they had some days of passion a year or so ago but Maryelle makes it quite clear that that is not going to happen again, at which, like so many de L’Isle-Adam characters, the narrator acts the part.

I considered it incumbent on me to assume a somewhat melancholy expression, as the tribute any well-bred man must always pay to a pretty woman. (p.217)

Then she tells him a story. Last winter at the theatre she became the object of a naive young man up from the provinces. Maryelle has the gift of becoming whatever other people want her to be. Here, as in so many of the other stories, it’s about a person who plays at living or acts a role, for at least two reasons: 1) they are such experts at life, they have lived so thoroughly, that most scenes are just repeats of things they’ve experiences, so they’re just going through the motions; 2) from another perspective, their acting turns their lives into art, gives them an artful completeness and aesthetic finish which ‘real life’, alas, usually lacks.

Anyway, when Maryelle becomes aware of the youth’s interest she adopts the role of a respectable widow of a respected army officer, deceased, on a rare trip up to Paris. (She is a courtesan. This is all an act.)

She receives one then several letters (which she shows the narrator who is cynically amused at their naive innocence) but then something strange happened. As she agreed to meet the poor innocent lad she found herself…falling in love with him!

She plays the part of the chaste widow so well that she comes to believe it herself conveniently forgetting her entire previous existence as a lady of the night. And the narrator, with typically droll irony, praises this sweet and innocent love based, as it is, on all-round lies and deceit. The only slight snag is that, while being faithful in her heart to the young innocent she is, apparently, continuing to see and sleep with an impressive roster of other gentleman to which her response is the admirably practical: ‘Is it my fault if a girl has to live?’

She then delivers a page-long speech about the artificiality of modern life, whose gist is:

Haven’t the appearances of love become, for nearly everybody, preferable to love itself? (p.223)

The implication that he (the narrator) has never had a meaningful relationship with Maryelle infuriates the narrator who shouts at her to go back to her penniless lover, Raoul. She, by contrast, keeps her cool, rises, adjusts her veil, and disappears into the evening.

There’s a funny payoff. From the balcony of the restaurant the narrator looks out over the grass bright with the evening dew. Vexed and irritated, to try and calm his mood, in a petty gesture, he insouciantly tosses his dead cigar onto it. Which explains why, one billion cigars later, the world is dying.

25. Doctor Tristan’s treatment (5 pages)

Hurrah!…Hosannah! Progress sweeps us along on its torrential course. (p.225)

Another right-wing satire on ‘progress’ and ‘liberalism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ like ‘The apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last breath’, ‘Celestial publicity’ and ‘The Glory Machine’. In many ways it’s the best because the satirical premise is kept simple and punchy.

A Dr T. Chavassus has invented a treatment for anyone suffering from those troublesome voices in their head, such as: the voice of God a la Joan of Arc, the voice of conscience, the voice of patriotism, the voice of outraged honour etc etc a sarcastic list of all the right-wing shibboleths.

The doctor’s technique is to clamp the patient to a chair, then yell in their ear for 20 minutes the magic word HUMANITY, after which he slips an electric wire in each ear and sends such a voltage through it that it bursts the eardrums, and makes the patient permanently deaf. But no more irritating inner voices which detract from the citizen’s efficiency in the modern economy.

This is carried along by de L’Isle-Adam’s anger but, as with all the other science satires, you only have to reflect for a few seconds to realise that deafening someone won’t interfere in the slightest with the voice of conscience or God or outrage patriotism or whatever which continua assailing those who hear them. It’s a bravura comic performance for the 7 or 8 minutes it takes to read, then instantly revealed to be impossible and not even internally consistent and so, like so many of his stories, discarded.

26. Occult memories (5 pages)

Originally a prose poem and only just about converted into something approaching a ‘story’, a 5-page monologue by a proudly Celtic son of Brittany who describes the career of his ancestor, some kind of soldier-adventurer in France’s Indian colonies, which opens with a deliberately Gothic description of the Dead Cities, overgrown with foliage, into whose tombs his ancestor crept, having massacred all the guards, to steal ancestral treasure, until he was eventually betrayed by a fellow adventurer, an Irishman with the splendid name of Captain Sombre.

It is another variation on one of de L’Isle-Adam’s idées fixes – the descent from grand, wealthy ancestors, the lament for present poverty, the refusal to truckle to the degraded ‘values’ of the present age.

27. Epilogue: The messenger (23 pages)

This is the longest story in the collection and de L’Isle-Adam was particularly proud of it. It’s based on a story told in the Old Testament which the book’s editor, A. W. Raitt, quotes in the notes in its entirety before going on to comment that de L’Isle-Adam’s main achievement was to ‘overlay it with a veneer of pretentious erudition’ (Notes, p.285). A bit later Raitt comments that de L’Isle-Adam ‘optimistically claimed to know Hebrew’ when he very obviously didn’t. Raitt’s notes are a joy to read in their own right, especially for the more absurd moments of de L’Isle-Adam’s biography which he pulls out.

It’s set in Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon and mostly consists of a long prose poem describing the layout and buildings and trees and canals and gilded decorations of the city as the narration, like a camera, pans over it and up to the great palace of Solomon himself. Here the text becomes clotted with descriptions of the exotic peoples who attend the court, in all their oriental variety, stuffed with Biblical placenames. It is striving for the same kind of gorgeous Biblical ornateness as Flaubert’s story, Hérodias‘, published just a few years before, in 1877, and anticipating Oscar Wilde’s play on the same subject, Salomé, published in 1891.

Almost the entire story is a gorgeous description of the celebrations of the Passover in the great palace of King Solomon at the height of which the sky goes ominously dark, heavy raindrops fall, a bolt of lighting demolishes a column and suddenly appears an angel of the Lord, Azrael. Initially Solomon thinks the angel of the Lord has come to take him away from this world of sorrow but he is disappointed because the Angel has, in fact, come to whisk away the King’s chief priest, Helcias.

This piece forms the deliberate climax of the collection, a spectacular cornucopia of Biblical names and descriptions rendered in a deliberately clotted, gorgeous poetic prose which you can imagine de L’Isle-Adam labouring over long and hard. It probably ought to be read aloud, recited or declaimed from a stage rather than silently read.

It prompted one simple thought, which is that, in a way I doubt de L’Isle-Adam intended, it shows how the entire edifice of Symbolism depends, ultimately, on the voodoo resonances of Judeo-Christianity. Symbolism piggybacks on Catholicism. It relies for its atmospheric effects on the most lurid and melodramatic aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition while ignoring the positive day-to-day practice of Judaism or the cheerful, ‘good news’ aspects of Christianity.

Conclusions

It took a while for me to adapt to de L’Isle-Adam’s tone and vibe and subject matter, but eventually, after an initial aversion due to their snobbery and melodrama, the sheer number of stories drew me in and I found myself enjoying them more and more, and rereading a number of them purely for pleasure of their arch, contrived, improbable, sometimes comic, but sometimes genuinely effective melodramatic appeal.

Purple prose

Here’s what de L’Isle-Adam regularly sounds like:

‘You, I thought to myself, who lack the refuge of your dreams, and for whom the land of Canaan, with its palm-trees and its living waters does not appear in the dawn after you have walked so far beneath the hard stars; traveller so joyful when you set off and now so gloomy; heart made for other exiles than those whose bitterness you now share with evil brethren – behold! Here you can sit on the stone of melancholy! Here dead dreams revive, anticipating the moment of the grave! If you wish to feel a real longing for death, approach: here the sight of the sky thrills to the point of forgetfulness.’ (Baron Xavier de la V— sounding off in ‘The Sign’)

Characteristic ingredients include:

  • exotic location from the Bible (land of Canaan) or some Romantic source text
  • melodramatic vocabulary (gloomy, dead dreams, grave and death death DEATH)
  • long histrionic sentences, as if written not to be read but declaimed from the stage in some Gothic melodrama

A.W. Raitt’s notes

The notes in this 1985 Oxford University Press edition by de L’Isle-Adam scholar A.W. Raitt are a droll delight. Apart from annotating particular aspects of the text, his throwaway references to aspects of de L’Isle-Adam’s life create a kind of collage biography. Thus:

  • Villiers (as Raitt calls him; much shorter and easier) was very proud of his skill as a boxer and at one time earned money as a sparring partner in a gymnasium (p.261)
  • Villiers was a devoted monarchist and stood unsuccessfully as a royalist candidate in the 1881 elections to the Paris Municipal Council (p.262)
  • the poet Stéphane Mallarmé was for many years Villiers’s best friend and wrote a mighty funeral oration for him (p.264)
  • Villiers was an ardent Wagnerian and visited the great man in Switzerland in 1969 and 1870 (p.265)
  • as a Breton, Villiers had a great love of the sea (p.266) [in which case it’s striking how few of his stories feature it; most are firmly wedged in Paris]
  • Villiers had a morbid interest in the guillotine and was a regular attender at executions (p.270)
  • Villiers was a member of the Parnassian group of poets who were routinely accused of being too cold and clinical in their approach (p.272)
  • Villiers believed he had the makings of a great actor (p.273)
  • Villiers was well-known for stopping in the street to gaze at his own reflection in mirrors and shop fronts (p.273)
  • his uncle (his father’s younger brother) was a parish priest in Brittany for his entire life (p.278)
  • Villiers was extremely suspicious and regularly took elaborate precautions to defend himself (p.279)
  • towards the end of his life Villiers, obviously unwell, returned to his Catholic faith (p.281)

The funniest biographical snippet concerns Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury who succeeded Disraeli as the leader of the Tory Party in 1881. Villiers named a character in his novel ‘The New World’ Lord Cecil and sent a copy of the book to the Marquess along with a flattering letter. Having read Andrew Roberts’s vast and hugely enjoyable biography of Cecil, I’m not surprised that the Marquess a) was polite enough to write a reply which was b) studiedly distant. But it was enough to delude the ever-hopeful Villiers into believing he had at last found the wealthy patron who would make his name and fortune, and Villiers proceeded to bombard the Marquess with copies of each of his new works as they were published. Villiers did, in fact, finally meet the Marquess in Dieppe when the latter was on holiday there in 1888, but was intensely disappointed that nothing came of the encounter (p.286).

It is richly comic to imagine the response of the immensely wealthy, profoundly conservative, philistine and reactionary Cecil to the tactless importuning of a poverty-stricken, scandalously immoral Bohemian depicter of Paris’s high-class prostitutes and dissolute wastrels. Hard to imagine two more opposite types.

At one point he sums up Villiers’ profile in a snappy sentence:

Breton origins, illustrious forebears, present poverty, nostalgia for past glories. (p.284)

Credit

Contes Crueles by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam was published in France in 1883. Oxford University Press published an English translation, ‘Cruel Tales’, translated by Robert Baldick, in 1965. Extensive notes and a new introduction by Oxford academic A.W. Raitt were added in a revised edition published in 1985.

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Posted by Simon on June 28, 2024

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Les Diaboliques by Barbey d’Aurevilly (1874)

‘A considerable number of years ago…’
(First words of the first story which set the tone of backward-looking nostalgia which characterises the whole book)

‘By Jove I was young then, and the disturbance of the molecules in the organisation, which is called the violence of emotion, seemed to me the only thing worth living for…’
(Dr Torty in ‘Happiness in Crime’, page 107)

‘Stop him, mother!… Don’t let him tell us these horrid, creepy tales!’
(Little girl Sybil in ‘Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist’, page 130)

From his Wikipedia article:

Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808 to 1889) was a French novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary critic. He specialised in mystery tales that explored hidden motivation and hinted at evil without being explicitly concerned with anything supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Henry James, Leon Bloy, and Marcel Proust.

His greatest successes as a literary writer date from 1852 onwards, when he became an influential literary critic at the Bonapartist paper Le Pays, helping to rehabilitate Balzac and effectually promoting Stendhal, Flaubert, and Baudelaire. Paul Bourget describes Barbey as an idealist, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the uncongenial ordinary world. Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, thought the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary opinions, his dandyism and snobbery were a caricature of Byronism.

Beloved of fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d’Aurevilly remains an example of the extremes of late romanticism.

Les Diaboliques (‘The She-Devils’) published in 1874, is a collection of short stories, each about a woman who commits an act of violence or revenge, or other crime. On publication it caused an uproar with the French public, was declared a danger to public morality and the Public Prosecutor issued orders for its seizure on the grounds of blasphemy and obscenity, thus guaranteeing it would become a succès de scandale, a particularly French phenomenon. It was defended by the prominent politician, Leon Gambetta. It is generally considered d’Aurevilly’s masterpiece.

My view

The blurb on the back of the Dedalus paperback edition and the introduction by Robert Irwin both claim the book is drenched with the late Romantic taste for the melodramatic – all satanism, vampires and lurid crime – which revived in the 1870s and 80s as the Decadent movement, intensifying into the dark symbolism of the 1890s. To quote the blurb:

Les Diaboliques are six tales of female temptresses – she-devils – in which horror and the wild Normandy countryside combine to send a shiver down the spine of the reader.

This, quite frankly, is rubbish. The stories are nowhere near as intense and spooky as, say, Dickens’s most intense moments. They completely failed to create any sense of suspense or drama for me. There is nothing supernatural, ghostly, spooky or scary about any of them. On the contrary, they are above all garrulous. They consist of middle-aged men of the world telling long yarns – long, long yarns full of leisurely circumstantial detail, about some incident from their long-lost youth or things they once witnessed 25 or 30 years ago. The effect, for me, was reassuringly old fashioned and comforting, like listening to an old uncle telling a long-winded story from his youth.

The lack of dramatic impact is heightened by the way all the stories are examples of récit which, Wikipedia tells us, ‘is a subgenre of the French novel, in which the narrative calls attention to itself’. It certainly does, with the narrator sedately setting the scene, introducing the secondary figure who is going to tell the actual story, and that person, in telling their story, often handing over to yet another narrator or, frequently, retailing conversations and dialogue from 30 years ago as if he was there and so, by extension, as if we, the readers, were there.

For it all happened a long time ago. ‘The Crimson Curtain’ was written in 1866 and concerns a seasoned, middle-aged roué recalling his first love affair when he was a young soldier in the generation immediately following Napoleon i.e. the 1820s. ‘Happiness in Crime’ talks about the impact on his character of the 1830 revolution in France. They were written while Dickens was still alive, before Thomas Hardy had published anything, and generally set a generation before that.

And whereas the Decadence is associated with the City, with dark sins in sordid slums or perversions in locked garrets, the overall vibe of these stories is rural. ‘The Crimson Curtain’ is set in a small town in Normandy and so is ‘Happiness in Crime’, in small Normandy towns which, compared to the inner City London I inhabit with its stabbings, shootings and street crime, instead of ‘sinister’ and ‘wild’ has the bucolic innocence of Thomas Hardy’s lighter Wessex stories.

This récit is a very artificial technique which calls attention to itself but not in a modern, disorientating kind of way. On the contrary, it feels, like so many aspects of the stories (the long ago settings, the atmosphere of nostalgia, the courtly manners of all concerned) very calming and reassuring. Cosy. Fireside stories.

This is why I realised they’re best experienced read aloud. Their slow stately pace is a bit frustrating to read to yourself but makes much more sense if you snuggle up with someone and read them aloud.

The stories

  1. The Crimson Curtain
  2. The Greatest Love of Don Juan
  3. Happiness in Crime
  4. Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist
  5. At a Dinner of Atheists
  6. A Woman’s Revenge

1. The Crimson Curtain (40 pages)

The narrator takes a stage coach for Normandy. There is one other passenger who he names as the Vicomte de Brassand, though that is an alias. The narrator goes out of his way to describe the Vicomte as a famous dandy, an ‘old beau’, although the story concerns his early life as a soldier. For night falls and after rattling through a succession of small towns they arrive in one where they have to stop to get one of the wheels of the coach fixed. As it happens they park in such a way as to see the a light in the third floor window of a house and the Vicomte says there’s a story behind that window.

And then he sets off telling, in long rambling style, the story of his first love. For it was in this town that he was first posted as a young soldier (very young, aged 17) and in this house that he was billeted. It was owned by a middle-aged bourgeois couple and they had a beautiful daughter, aged 18. But she was cold as ice, rigid and aloof. At mealtimes and around the house she completely ignored our hero. She is named Albertine but the parents call her Alberte.

Imagine his astonishment, then, one mealtime when, for once she is not placed between her parents but next to him and he fells her suddenly touch his hand under the table. It takes all his self-possession not to flinch or hive himself away etc etc. Over succeeding weeks she takes his hand secretly while they’re all eating together. Then she is placed back between her parents and she gives no sign of ever having been friendly. Until one night his bedroom door opens and she is standing there in her nightwear i.e. scandalously undressed for the era: ‘she was half naked’ (p.45).

And here commences one of the most characteristic aspects of these stories which are supposed to be so full of sex and melodrama which is their extraordinary reticence about things of the flesh. The daughter tiptoes to his room every other night at the same hour but all they appear to do is lie on the sofa together, her head on his chest. That’s it, that’s as crazy, lurid and debauched as it gets. Maybe I’m being slow and that’s as crazy and debauched as D’Aurevilly was allowed to write in his day and age (the late 1860s). Maybe the intelligent reader was meant to imagine the rest.

One night she comes barefoot along the cold brick corridor from her room to his and he notices her feet are icy cold and tries to warm them up by, I think, kissing them, then taking her in another of his sexless embraces. Then she falls into one of the swoons she is apt to give way to and he initially thinks it’s another one, as usual (which is itself odd). But no, she’s dead! The cold ascends from her feet through her body then he realises her heart has stopped!

a) He is upset but he is then b) thrown into a terror because he has a dead girl in his bedroom. As and when it comes to light he will be accused of a) taking advantage of her b) murder. Initially he considers trying to sneak her back to her room and picks up her corpse for the purpose but, in a peculiar detail, the only way to her bedroom is through the bedroom of her parents. If either of them wake up to discover him carrying the corpse of their daughter through their bedroom…

He goes on at length about how he is seized by ‘a terrible dread’ and ‘deadly fear’ and his hair stands up like quills, and the dread of the black doorway to the parents’ room etc etc, but, to be honest, the situation has none of the genuine terror of an Edgar Allen Poe story. It just seemed odd, inexplicable and contrived that this woman had died of nothing at all, and embarrassing that he had to do something with the body. More farce than horror.

In the end it is resolved in a very practical way. Chickening out of trying to sneak through the parents’ bedroom, he places the corpse back on the sofa, sneaks out of the house and goes to the house where the Colonel of his regiment is boarding, bangs on the door and wakes him up. And the Colonel gives him the gruff practical advice to clear out of town. Loans him some money and tells him to catch the diligence to a nearby town where he will write to him. And that’s it. Ten minutes later the coach pulls into the town inn, the young Vicomte is waiting and climbs aboard, and off he rides.

A month later he receives a letter to report to his regiment as they are heading off on campaign. Years pass and his curiosity about what happened slowly fades. There are more military adventures, many more women (of course) and he had virtually forgotten that bizarre episode of his first love.

Then, in one final touch, as they are both looking up at the window of the room in question, they see a woman’s outline appear at it just for a moment, and the captain exclaims that it is the ghost of Alberte mocking him. Then the coach wheel is fixed, the horses paw the ground, and the stage drives off, and that is the end of the tale.

Comment

Early on the narrator tells us the Vicomte is ‘the most magnificent dandy I have ever known’ (p.18), ‘the most stolid and majestic of the dandies I have known’ (p.26) but, as you can tell from my summary, this much vaunted dandyism has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual story which concerns a boy soldier and the bizarre story of his quiet, retiring first love simply dying in his arms. You could stretch it and claim the story somehow accounts for his later alleged dandyism but I don’t think so. In my opinion the word ‘dandyism’ is slapped onto a story which has precious little to do with it. It is fake. It is factitious. You could delete all the spurious references to dandyism from the start of the story and it wouldn’t affect it in the slightest. It’s almost like dandyism was a buzzword and fashion of the 1860s and so D’Aurevilly tacked it onto this otherwise odd but straightforward story of a young soldier.

In the same way, the Vicomte prepares the narrator for the story with big words about its huge significance – ‘the story of an event which bit into my life as acid bites into steel and which has left a dark stain on the page of my libertine pleasures’ (p.28) but once you’ve read the thing, it feels much less than that – as does the fact he states, at the end, that years passed and he almost forgot about Alberte.

At one point the narrator says he thought the whole thing was going to turn into ‘a mere history of a garrison love affair’ (p.39) and, although the girl dying suddenly in his arms is, apparently intended to give it a weird voodoo power, in fact, despite all the persiflage about dandies and souls, that is pretty much what it seemed to me to be: young soldier has an affair with the pretty daughter of the family he was billeted on.

If this is the first story in order to set the tone, the tone looks like it’s going to be one of disappointment at stories which are odd but not quite the earth-shattering scandals I was led to believe.

2. The Greatest Love of Don Juan (20 pages)

‘For a good Catholic you are a trifle profane and I must beg you to spare me the details of your naughty suppers.’ (p.59)

The unnamed narrator is chatting to the Comtesse de Chiffrevas. He is describing the Comte de Ravila de Ravilés who is widely held (i.e. among their aristocratic circle) as the greatest Don Juan i.e. lover of woman or philanderer, of the age. OK, if you say so.

The narrator proceeds to tell the Comtesse that just a few days earlier, to celebrate the Comte’s mature years, twelve of his greatest conquests from the finest aristocratic ladies in Paris decided to hold a grand feast to celebrate his career. Obviously this is described in sumptuous detail but the heart of the matter is that one of the ladies suggests that the Great Man recounts the story of his greatest love, his greatest conquest, which, with very little encouragement, he proceeds to do.

Now remember that the narrator wasn’t present at this great supper, only 12 posh ladies and their Don Juan. So he must have been told the story by one of the twelve. So what we’re reading is the narrator’s version of this woman’s version of the Comte de Ravila de Ravilés’ version of events. From reading around the book (Wikipedia, the introduction, the introductions to related books) it seems that it was this technical expertise (a narrator relating a narration of a narration) which had most impact on other writers, not the silly superficial posing of the subject matter.

Long story short: all 12 fine ladies are disappointed because the Comte reveals that his greatest conquest wasn’t any of them, it was some other aristocratic lady, or at least it initially seems like it. Until the Comte starts talking about her daughter, a fussy, cold, over-religious little girl of 13 who is studiedly indifferent to him and who, after making initial efforts to befriend, he gives up and ignores.

The climax of the story comes when the family priest comes to visit the Comte’s lover in a passion of bewilderment and quickly tells the woman that her 13-year-old daughter has just been to confession at his church and confessed that she is pregnant! The posh lady runs upstairs and finds her (morbidly religious) daughter prostrate in front of a crucifix crying her eyes out. When the mother calms her down and gets her to speak the girl says that the other day she and the Comte were in the same room, he reading quietly and completely ignoring her until he eventually got up and left the room without a word. At which point the daughter went and sat in the chair because it was nice and warm by the fire and felt ‘as if I had fallen into a flame of fire’, couldn’t move, felt as if her heart had stopped and the only explanation she could think of was that…she was pregnant and she bursts into tears on her mother’s shoulder.

Cut back to the dinner party and the 12 fine ladies listening agog as the Comte concludes his tale:

‘And this, ladies, believe me or not, as you please, I consider the greatest triumph of my life, the passion I am proudest of having inspired.’ (p.78)

Comment

When I summarised this story to my wife she thought it was ‘sweet’ because she focused on the poor 13-year-old girl’s innocent panic. Now ‘sweet’ is pretty much the opposite of the lurid, melodramatic, decadent qualities which the book’s reputation, back cover blurb and introduction all talk about, but I agree. It is a sweet and almost whimsical tale and its sweetness far eclipses the stagey setting of the feast of the twelve ladies with its (if you care about such things) risqué parody of the Last Supper. Far from shivering with some kind of Grand Guignol, it made me smile.

3. Happiness in Crime (41 pages)

‘One morning last autumn I was walking in the zoological gardens with Doctor Torty…’ (p.83)

It is these relaxed, sunny openings with their amiable civilised tone of voice which completely belie the book’s reputation for ‘satanism, vampires and lurid crime’. A crime is eventually committed but a very banal and ordinary one and the image which stayed with me was of these two mature chaps enjoying a Sunday afternoon stroll.

Anyway, whilst in the park they behold a little scene. An impressively tall and stately couple saunter up to the little zoo in the park. They stand in front of the cage holding a panther. The woman slowly unbuttons her elegant glove, puts her hand through the bars and slaps the panther. The panther snaps at her and for a second it looks as if it has her hand in its toothy grip but then onlookers realise it’s just the glove and the woman has withdrawn her hand. Her tall elegant companion chides her for being so foolish and they saunter off with aristocratic nonchalance.

Turns out that Doctor Torty knows the couple very well, indeed he delivered the elegant woman 20-something years ago. (The tales are always set a generation earlier). So, with a little prompting from the narrator, he proceeds to tell the tale.

An ex-army fencing instructor named Stassin came to the sleepy Normandy village which the narrator, very annoyingly, only names as V. Here he builds up a practice among the aristocrats of the neighbourhood who want to acquire this noble art. In his fifties he marries, gets his wife pregnant and the local doctor, Dr Torty, delivers a bouncing baby girl. On a suggestion from a posh client Stassin names her Hauteclair.

Dr Torty watches her grow up, tended by a besotted father who teaches her his craft so that by the time she’s a teenager, she is a supreme and expert fencer. (The narrator tells us that the 1830 revolution demoralised Stassin and also undermined his trade. The girl was about 17 then so the origins of the story – Stassin coming to V – must have been just at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815. Long, long time ago.)

One day at V arrives the Comte Serlon de Savigny who has been absent being educated but, his father just having died, has returned to take up residence in the family chateau. He has heard about the local fencing master and his legendary daughter, the beautiful, haughty and extremely skilled Hauteclaire and so he immediately signs up for lessons and comes every day.

With vast inevitability he falls in love with his strict, stern teacher. But there’s a catch. Years ago he had been engaged by his family to the daughter of another local noble family, Mademoiselle Delphine de Cantor. Duty calls so he marries her, she moves into the ancestral chateau, married life is established, but the Comte continues to come to his fencing lessons.

Then one day Hauteclaire disappears, vanishes off the face of the earth with no explanation. The townspeople gossip about a mystery elopement or any other story they can cook up but nobody knows for sure. Only the doctor discovers the secret, by accident. He goes to treat the new wife, now titled the Comtesse de Savigny, and realises that Hauteclair is living at the chateau, masquerading as a servant under the name of Eulalie.

Rather than elope with her, the Comte has installed her in his own house, given her a disguise and a false name, where she now has to wait on and serve the very woman whose husband she is having an adulterous affair with!

Again, as in ‘The Crimson Curtain’, this doesn’t send a shiver up my spine, it just feels like an eccentric variation on a very tired theme (adulterous husband takes a lover). During his periodic visits Dr Torty drops in a few questions about the new maid but the Comtesse’s replies make it quite clear she hasn’t a clue that her new maid is her husband’s lover.

Then the Comtesse falls ill, with what doctors of the time called anemia and so the doctor starts to visit more regularly until he is a regular visitor at the chateau. One day he’s passing by the estate past midnight when he hears the sound of fabric being beaten. He sneaks closer and realises he’s hearing the sound of the Comte and Hauteclair dressed in full fencing outfits, fencing in one of the chateau’s more remote rooms. So this fencing is a crucial aspect of the affair.

Long story short, next thing we know is that the countess is dying of poisoning. The story is given out that her faithful servant Eulalie mixed up a medicine the doctor had prescribed with ‘some copying ink’. The doctor goes to attend her on her deathbed and hears her deathbed confession or last thoughts. These are that she knows that Eulalie is her husband’s lover and knows that she’s been poisoned and is consumed by hatred for both of them, but … noblesse oblige, meaning that although justice demands they be punished, she doesn’t want the Savigny name which she now bears to be dragged through the courts and the public scandal. And so she will take her secret to the grave and demands that the doctor does the same. And he promises.

The Comtesse dies and the Comte observes the customary two years of mourning. Then he marries Hauteclaire. The entire neighbourhood is scandalised by an aristocrat marrying a servant but still nobody even knew that she was the former Hauteclair and there was no whisper of scandal about the Comtesse’s death. Anyway, they keep entirely to themselves, locked away in their rural chateau, never mixing with the outside world.

The doctor still visits, has become a family retainer, discovers Hauteclaire has thrown off the disguise of Eulalie and now lords it as the haughty lady of the house. Discovers they are still absolutely besotted with each other, with no falling off due to familiarity. Indeed their happiness puts other married couples he knows to shame.

Being a cynical atheist, the doctor can’t help commenting that the adulterous and murderous couple’s ongoing happiness, which shows no sign of flagging with familiarity, conclusively disproves moralists with their fairy tale notions of vice punished and virtue rewarded (p.121). (You can’t help suspecting that it’s cynical comments like this which caused the outcry against the book, rather than the fairly tame stories themselves.)

Comment

At the end D’Aurevilly tries to jazz the story up by describing the chateau as ‘the theatre of a crime of which they have perhaps forgotten the memory in the bottomless abyss of their hearts‘ but here, as in all the other stories, you feel he is trying to dress up what is a fairly mundane tale (husband and lover poison wife) in the trappings of fashionable amorality and cynicism and decadence which it doesn’t really merit. All the way through he deploys this hyperbole.

4. Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist (44 pages)

The opening page and a half are an extended statement of the world-going-to-the-dogs trope (see separate section, below):

[She was] one of the most faithful admirers of the now almost lost art of witty conversation, a lady always ready to keep her doors open to the few exponents of it still spared us … [since] in these later days wit has been entirely superseded by a pretentious nondescript called Intelligence…(p.127)

If you say it in the right upper-class twit voice, this is more P.G. Wodehouse than Marquis de Sade and almost all of D’Aurevilly’s attitudinising comes over as pompous and silly rather than in any way menacing or sinister.

The narrator pops into the salon of Madame de Mascranny which, he ludicrously claims, is the last redoubt of the Art of Conversation which is being crushed by the vulgar world of newspapers, by ‘the busy, utilitarian habits of the age’ (p.127). In statements like this you hear the embattled tones of the bourgeois intellectual who rebels against the triumph of his own class on the back of the industrial revolution, and allies himself, in wistful nostalgia, for what he describes as the last, expiring examples of the once-great aristocracy with all its fine manners and conversational style.

Anyway he arrives just as some aristocrat who the narrator claims is ‘the most brilliantly successful talker in this kingdom of brilliant talk’ is talking about ‘Romance’ and suggesting that it is in fact, all around us, but that we only ever glimpse fragments of it. At which he settles down to tell a yarn to prove this proposition.

He takes a long time to paint a picture of the ‘most profoundly, ferociously aristocratic town in all France’ (p.131), the same title given to the town in the previous story and, like it, in Normandy. It is some time in the 1820s and the aristocrats have been restored after the fall of Napoleon but have found themselves increasingly rendered redundant by the new class of rising bourgeoisie.

Ruined. Futile. In vain. Melancholy. Stagnation. Monotony. Smothered. World-weariness. Exhaustion. These are the keywords of the superseded aristocracy, clinging on to its values and self importance despite the growing realisation of its redundancy. In this society it is considered ‘a sublime axiom’ to say that ‘the best happiness of life is to win at cards, and the next best, to lose’, which is pretty pathetic, neither witty nor profound (p.137).

The story, such as it is, concerns a handful of superior aristocratic personages in this town on the Normandy coast. There is a profound paradox at work here, which runs through the other stories, too. This is that D’Aurevilly’s entire schtick is based on the notion that his characters are the grandest acmes and perfections of aristocratic superiority, nonchalance, wit and good manners in all of France – and yet, at the same time, they are all depicted as living in a stiflingly dull, melancholy provincial little town on the Normandy coast. It is as if D’Aurevilly has mashed together two completely different genres – tales of the highest aristocratic circles (which really ought to be located in Paris) and life in dull provincialdom, in the manner of Flaubert, another Norman addicted to describing in fiction how dull and tedious life in his province was.

Anyway it concerns a Marquis de Saint-Albans. He hosts regular whist evenings. A regular guest is an Englishman, Monsieur Hartford. One evening he is late but arrives with a friend from Scotland, born in the Hebrides (which triggers many references to characters in the novels of Walter Scott) and named Marmor de Karkoel (a very unscottish name). On that first evening the fourth player is the Comtesse du Tremblay de Stasseville. The text then turns into an extremely drawn-out description of the characters of these two people and here, again, I thought D’Aurevilly’s influence on other writers must surely not be for the voodoo, spooky supernatural aspect of his writings of which there is, in fact, nothing; surely much more for the insane detail which he goes into in describing all these posh people. I imagine this is what Proust is like, page after page after page of carefully limning every facet of the characters of his exquisites. Something D’Aurevilly himself seems perfectly aware of, for he comments of the old boy telling this particular yarn:

It may be the whole merit of the story lay in his manner of telling it… (p.163)

In fact the plot is a bit convoluted: one night in his uncle’s house (the narrator still being only a teenager) he witnessed yet another game of whist during which the Comtesse’s green ring happened to let loose a flash of light. The man partnering her, the Chevalier de Tharsis, asked to take a look at it. At that moment Madame Herminie de Stasseville, standing by the open window, coughed piteously. And this recalled to the narrator a pretty important event which he had up till this moment concealed, which is that a few days previously he (the narrator) had entered the room of M. de Karkoel without properly knocking and discovered the latter bending over a desk concentrating. When quizzed, he explained that he was handling an extremely toxic poison which a brother officer serving in India had sent him at his request. He was decanting some from the vial it arrived in into a ring with a removeable diamond. Surely a moment and a far-fetched explanation anyone wouldn’t easily forget.

Anyway, weeks later, on this evening of whist playing at his uncle’s, the coincidence of the Comtesse handing her partner her exquisite green ring to inspect with her daughter’s sudden hacking cough at the window, brought the scene back to the narrator’s mind and made him wonder whether the Comtesse was poisoning her daughter.

Then his narrative takes a huge leap, he has been sent off to college and two years later he hears news that Herminie has died of a wasting disease (tuberculosis?). In the meantime the revolution of 1830 had taken place and hit the little Norman town hard. All the English tourists who used to come across for the season have abandoned it.

The narrator returns to the town to find it much changed and almost immediately bumps into the Chevalier de Tharsis who is only too keen to tell him the scandalous gossip: for not only Herminie is dead but so is her mother, the Comtesse du Tremblay de Stasseville, who outlived her by barely a month. As for Marmor de Karkoel, he was soon after summoned to rejoin his regiment in India.

But the point is, everyone now realises that Marmor and the Comtesse were lovers, but not just this, this would be pretty banal (witty lady has affair with dashing soldier); no, the scandal is that her daughter was in love with him too. And their rivalry led the Comtesse to hate her daughter and persecute her.

But even that isn’t all, because the story has the first really atrocious ending of the collection: for the Comtesse had taken, on her social visits, to wearing a spray of mignonette in her waistband and, when she played whist or became nervous, breaking petals off the flowers and chewing them. So far, so eccentric. But after the died they cleared out her rooms, including the big mignonette in a pot and when they went to replant it discovered the corpse of a newborn baby buried in it. What?

The Chevalier de Tharsis delights in the visceral impact this has on the narrator who is stunned. What? Was the baby stillborn? Was it murdered? Whose baby? The Comtesse’s? Her daughter’s? By Marmor?

Nobody knows and nobody will ever know because Marmor is now far away in India and the priest who received the Comtesse’s last rites is bound by the rules of the blah blah.

Comment

This is the first story which featured something uncanny or weird i.e. the baby in the flower pot. But what strikes me as more ‘literary’ about it is the way it ends with mystery, mystery upon mystery. So I can imagine D’Aurevilly’s influence being twofold: 1) the long wordy pen portraits of these aristocrats who all regard each other as blessed, special, the old warrior, the great Don Juan, the best whist player in France, the sharpest wit in Paris, and so on, each one a legend in their little social circle, and 2) the deliberate irresolution of many of the stories, which have endings of sorts but leave you with a strong sense of the deeper mysteriousness of life or, less pompously, of other people. Despite all our tale-telling about them, other people remain, in the end, a mystery.

5. At a Dinner of Atheists (48 pages)

Contains the only witty line in the book. Mesnil says to a fellow soldier who doesn’t understand what he’s doing:

‘My good fellow, ever since the creation of the world there have been men like me specially intended to astonish men like you.’ (p.176)

Like the other chapters this is less a story than an extended profile of a handful of characters, in this case the Chevalier de Mesnilgrand. This fellow served in the Army of the Emperor (Napoleon) and returned to him on his return from Elba, and fought at Waterloo, but the defeat ruined him. His loyalty meant he was kicked out of the Restoration army. And then a profile of his father, of the previous generation, who the Revolution and then war made into a hardened atheist. So hardened that he holds regular Friday night dinners for all the old soldiers, atheists and blasphemers of the neighbourhood, including some ex-monks and ex-priests.

The long deep profiles the narrator gives of Mesnilgrand father and son make it all the more surprising that one Sunday his military junior but more impetuous ex-officer friend, Captain Rançonnet of the 8th Dragoons, spies him coming out of a church of all places and accosts him. Mesnilgrand refuses to say what he was doing there. Now, in the middle of the dinner of atheists, Rançonnet brings up the incident again and demands that Mesnilgrand explains to the whole room of 25 or so dinner guests, what he was doing there.

Mesnilgrand good-humouredly agrees but this, of course, as in all the other tales, requires him to start a new narrative, a story within a story. So he reminds the old soldiers there of the days of the Spanish campaign of 1808, in particular the arrival of a Major Ydow who brings with him his mistress, who calls herself Rosalba or La Pudica. She is, of course, a phenomenon of debauchery who, at the same time, maintains an absurd modesty. In a short time all the other officers in the regiment are besotted with her. Mesnilgrand describes how he himself made love to her once when she received him wearing only a transparent muslin gown revealing her full voluptuousness.

Eventually Mesnilgrand breaks off his liaison with Rosabla, realising that she doesn’t love him, she doesn’t love anyone. Shortly afterwards Major Ydow announces to everyone that his wife is pregnant, leading half a dozen officers to wonder whether they might be the father. Soon after follows the Battle of Talavera (28 July 1809) and then Rosabla had her baby in the carriage train of the army on the move. A few months later it died and Ydow was distraught and widely sympathised with. Because they’re on the move he quickly buries the body but has the heart embalmed and placed in a glass container to carry about with him (unusual and ghoulish).

The end of the story is first farcical, then atrocious. Mesnilgrand goes round to see Rosalba, knowing Major Ydow is playing billiards in the officers’ mess. He finds her half-dressed as usual, but just putting the finishing touches to a letter to yet another lover. He starts kissing her back but then she stiffens, she can hear the Major coming up the stairs. So she hurriedly bundles Mesnilgrand into the cupboard where he has to hide and stay still, a scene from a thousand bedroom farces.

What happens next is not so funny. Ydow is in a filthy mood and when he discovers the letter he tears it open and reads it and proceeds to yell all kinds of abuse at Rosalba. She gives as good as she gets, yelling that she has a hundred lovers and then twisting the knife by claiming that the baby, which Ydow genuinely loved and grieved over, wasn’t his. When Ydow demands to know whose it is, Rosalba, either truthfully or just to taunt him, and to taunt Mesnilgrand who she knows is listening, claims it is Mesnilgrand’s.

At that Mesnilgrand hears the sound of breaking glass and realises Ydow has thrown to the floor the glass container which held the embalmed heart of his dead baby. Now the wild couple proceed to throw the baby’s heart at each other. Not so much horrific as macabre. Then Mesnilgrand hears shrieks and can put up with no more, bursting out of the cupboard like the lover in a Whitehall farce.

He sees that in all the fighting Rosalba has been stripped naked (of course) and that Ydow is holding her pinned to the table and…that Ydow is melting the wax Rosalba had been using to seal her letter over the candle she was using and is going to seal her up. To be precise:

He was sealing his wife as she had sealed the letter…’Be punished where you have sinned, miserable woman,’ he cried. (p.218)

Does this mean what I think it means, that Ydow is dripping molten wax onto Rosalba’s vulva? That he is sealing up her genitals?? If so, then this is easily the most outrageous and scandalous idea in the book and you can see that it would probably trigger an outcry today, let alone in nineteenth century France.

Mesnilgrand springs forward and, without a second thought, plunges his sabre right through Ydow’s body, who falls to the ground dead. All the racket had brought a maid to the door who Mesnilgrand now orders to run and fetch the regimental surgeon, who will have, presumably, to treat the burns on her pudenda.

But D’Aurevilly neatly gets round having to deal with the aftermath of this appalling scene by having Mesnilgrand declare that at this exact moment the enemy (the British or Spanish) launch a surprise attack on the garrison. Mesnilgrand picks up the trampled heart of the baby Rosalba claimed was his, tucked it in a pocket of his tunic, sprang onto his horse and went off to fight. In the chaos following the surprise battle, he not only never saw Rosalba again, he couldn’t even find the regimental surgeon who, like so many others, disappeared. In other words, D’Aurevilly simply dispenses with the problem of any aftermath or repercussions.

Having given the full background, Mesnilgrand ends his story with a simple explanation that, after Waterloo he carried the baby’s heart around with him but slowly came to feel that he didn’t want to profane the poor mite’s soul any more than it had already suffered. And so he had finally nerved himself to take the heart to a priest and ask that it be given a decent burial. It was coming out of the side aisle where he handed it over that Captain Rançonnet collared him and accused him of giving in to Christian belief.

You can see why conventional opinion would have been outraged by this atrocious story. And yet D’Aurevilly goes out of his way to tack on a pious moral. Addressing the entire gathering of atheists and renegades, the narrator says:

Did these atheists at last understand that even if the Church had been established for nothing else but to receive those hearts – dead or alive – with which we no longer know what to do, it would be accomplishing a good work? (p.220)

When he was threatened with prosecution it was comments like this which allowed his defender, Gambetta, to claim that underlying the cynicism and shocking content of the book, lay a profoundly moral and Christian sensibility…

6. A Woman’s Revenge (32 pages)

The final story starts with an interesting prologue arguing that contemporary (1860s and 70s) French critics, journalists etc lambast contemporary literature for being ‘immoral’ when it isn’t at all, when it is nowhere near as ‘immoral’ as behaviour reported in newspapers every day, let alone the scandalous behaviour described in the ancient historians (and he cites Tacitus and Suteonius). Far from being ‘immoral’, contemporary literature is nowhere near immoral enough! Interestingly he cites the widespread practice of incest, which he claims is commonplace among the French lower and upper classes as he writes, but which no novelist dare go anywhere near.

Anyway this little essay morphs into the thought that modern ‘immorality’ or crime is more sophisticated than the kind described in older literatures because, as society has developed, it has become more psychological: the worst modern crimes often entail no physical harm at all but forms of psychological torture. And he sets about proving it with the following story:

As this thoughtful prologue indicates, this is one of the best stories. Maybe it was written last. Certainly the description of the young protagonist, Robert de Fressignies, feels more modern, that’s to say, less backward looking and nostalgic and socialised than the protagonists in the previous stories, who tend to function amid salons and soirées which just feel like assemblies of snobbery.

De Fressignies is much more the Baudelaire-Des Esseintes flavour of ‘dandy’, solitary, intellectual, in control of his appetites but always open to the lure of a new sensation.

He had outlived that first youth of folly which makes man the buffoon of his own senses, and during which any woman exerts a magnetic influence over him. He was long past that. He was a libertine of the cold and calculating sort of that positive age – an intellectual libertine who had thought about those feelings of which he was no longer the dupe, and was neither afraid nor ashamed of any of them. (p.226)

Almost a scientist of sensations, then. Anyway, he’s loitering on the balcony of Tortoni’s (presumably a smart restaurant) when he sees a brightly-dressed woman walk past, then back the other way, then past again, clearly flagging that she is a prostitute. He is intrigued because she reminds him of a former love and so steps down into the street and follows her. So he follows her through the streets back to her dingy lodgings, typical of her type, up the winding stairs and into her sordid room, clothes scattered everywhere, unstoppered vials of perfume, the big rumpled bed taking centre stage with a mirror behind the headboard and on the ceiling (this kind of thing was considered risqué when it appeared in movies of the 1960s yet here it is calmly described in a novel of the 1860s).

Anyway, the appeal of the story is in the slow pace and the lingering descriptions. De Fressignies sits on the sofa and takes her between his knees to assess her shape, which is outstanding. D’Aurevilly throws in that de Fressignies has been in Turkey and so is experienced at sizing up and buying women for sex. Then she slips behind a screen, strips off and re-emerges wearing only a see-through slip, walks right over and presses her breast against his mouth and then the text dissolves into generalisations about the sex that followed, in which she justified the nickname of ‘panther’ which Parisian prostitutes of the time were assigning themselves, what with her biting and scratching. She is the best lay he’s ever had.

So far the story has been all of a piece, a lengthy, wordy description of a fairly commonplace event (posh man on a whim follows prostitute to her lodgings, she strips they have mad sex). Now it takes a sudden turn to the melodramatic and stagey. During all this sex he notices her looking at a bracelet on her arm (?) and suddenly realises the is maybe having sex with him as a substitute for an old love etc. So he demands to see the bracelet which, sure enough, contains the portrait of an ugly Spanish man.

The story now takes a turn for the ridiculous as the woman reveals that 1) the portrait is of her husband 2) he is one of the greatest nobles in Spain 3) she hates him 4) she herself is none other than the Duchess of Arcos de Sierra Leone. And now she mentions it, de Fressignies realises that he met her once, years ago, when he was holidaying in Spain just on the French border and she was holding a magnificent court. He had tried to get an introduction to her but had failed and only glimpsed her from a distance. This explains what attracted him to her when she sauntered past Tortoni’s.

De Fressignies is appalled at how low this grand personage has fallen. Predictably enough, the Duchess explains that she is taking revenge and asks if he would like to hear his story? And so, once again, we get a story-within-a-story as the Duchess tells her tale.

She comes from an ancient Italian family, the Turre-Crematas. It was an arranged marriage to the head of one of the oldest Spanish families, Don Christoval d’Arcos, Due of Sierra Leone. He takes her off to his remote estates where she is locked up with her maids and servants, living a life of stifled boredom. Until the Duke’s cousin, handsome Don Estaban, Marquis of Vaconcellos, comes to stay. Guess what? They fall in love. Suddenly it has stopped being modern but collapsed back into a late-Romantic melodrama, like hundreds of forgotten Victorian plays and a handful of operas about soaring aristocratic love.

For their love is utterly chaste, far superior to physical love, the adoration of Saint Theresa for Jesus etc. Except one day, as Don Estaban sits at her feet adoring her, her husband enters with some Negroes from the colonies who proceed to strangle Esteban to death, then cut out his heart! Not just that, but the Duke whistles for two savage dogs and prepares to throw Estaban’s heart to them but the Duchess begs to be allowed to eat her lover’s heart. Precisely because she wants to, the Duke throws it to the dogs, but the Duchess then fights with the dogs to get scraps of the still warm heart!

She realised there was nothing physical she could do to the Duke she hated, he was not afraid of death. So she would hurt him in his wretched pride: she would become a common prostitute and drag his name through the mud. And so here she is, and here is de Fressignies, suitably harrowed and chastened by her story, and here is the reader, disappointed that a tale that began with reasonable subtlety and interest has exploded into the wildest overblown Gothic melodrama.

She describes her secret escape, after some months of silent seething hatred. She explains coming to Paris, as anywhere in Spain she would be captured and returned to the Duke. She explains taking up the career of streetwalker and why she wears the bracelet with the image of her hated husband, for every time she has sex she looks at the picture and delights in his debasement.

She explains that she wants not to drag his name through the mud but bury it under a pyramid of mud. She explains that she wants to catch syphilis and die horribly in a Paris hospital and to spread the word of her fate in order to drag the Duke’s name into the gutter. She is an artiste of vengeance.

But there’s more. De Fressignies goes back to his rooms and spends days locked away by himself mulling over this extraordinary tale. When he eventually returns to the salons he comes over as depressed and anti-social. Then he packs his bags and disappears for a year, gone nobody knows where. At a reception of the Spanish ambassador’s another Frenchman asks after the Duke d’Arcos de Sierra Leone, and after receiving a summary of the mysterious disappearance of his wife a few years ago, stuns the company by telling them that he just today was passing the church of Salpetriere where he noticed that she had just been buried, after dying of a wasting illness in the adjacent hospital. And on her tombstone it mentions that she was a ‘harlot’ i.e. she has her public revenge on the Duke.

Next day Fressignies goes to see the priest who tells him it is true, that the Duchess contracted a terrible venereal disease and quickly wasted away and died. She gave her considerable fortune to the other inmates of the hospital.

The French attitude to sex

The attitude of nineteenth-century French literature to sex is a universe away from the British. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Collins, none of them would dream of even hinting at sex, not a breath or whisper, whereas the French routinely described mistresses and infidelity and, as here, in a military context, happily accepted that army officers took mistresses or grisettes for sex in every town where they were billeted. When characters in nineteenth century British novels are referred to as reading French novels it always means stories which are far more open about sex, sexual motivation, sexual infidelity and sex crimes than the British dared to be until well into the twentieth century.

Having acknowledge the existence of sex in a way British writers simply couldn’t, French writers were able to investigate its impact and effects, its themes and variations, its role in obvious events like falling in love, marriage, infidelity, adultery and so on, in a wide range of colours and tones. All of this was undeveloped and unexplored in British fiction, which in its place has snobbery and all the aspects of a repressive class system as its central theme (see, for example, the novels of E.M. Forster).

What this meant is that the French, to put it crudely, had a head start in dealing with grown-up themes in a grown-up way in literature, a frankness and honesty about sex which British writers have still, arguably, not caught up with.

Dandyism and its fans

The book is disappointing for a number of reasons. No chills went up my spine, just a handful of occasions when I was nauseated (dead babies). One of the disillusioning things is how it, inadvertently reveals the origins of the quite appealing notion of ‘the dandy’ in the banal nostalgia and embattled elitism of an outworn aristocracy. The stories are so old, set against the Napoleonic Wars or the restoration of the French monarchy in 1815, harking back back back to fops and beaux of the Regency period (1811 to 1820), repeatedly citing Beau Brummell (1778 to 1840) as the archetypal dandy.

Leaving aside what a dandy is or thinks he is, what the use of récit – i.e. a framing device of a first-level or initial narrator who then hands over the telling of the story to a second narrator, to someone within his framing story – really brings home is how the essence of dandyism is having fans, having devotees who acknowledge your superiority. A ‘dandy’ is only really a dandy because his fans say he is.

Thus in the first two stories there is no real evidence that either the Vicomte de Brassand or Comte de Ravila de Ravilés are particularly well dressed and they certainly don’t say anything at all witty or memorable (nothing at all) but what they both have is fans. The narrator of ‘The Crimson Curtain’ in particular is unable to contain his gushing adulation of the Vicomte who, in fact, just comes over to the reader as a tired old man with an odd story from his youth. All this is treated as if it is some spectral spooky story of Edgar Allen Poe intensity but it really isn’t. Dandyism is in the eye of the beholder.

To experience the full effect you have to buy into the mystique, you have to accept the premise that there are only a few hundred people ‘who matter’ in Paris and that this or that hard-drinking old geezer is the Greatest Dandy of the Age. If you don’t buy into this fantastically narrow, blinkered and elitist view of the world then the narrator and his small clique instead come over as shabby self-deceiving relics of a bygone age, left behind by the dynamism and transformations of nineteenth century industry and technology, complaining about ‘Liberalism’ and ‘industry’ and the new ‘bourgeoisie’, harking back to a vanished golden age… The Daily Mail mindset with cravats.

Old soldiers

I wrote the above after reading the first three stories but as I read on I realised a simple truth: although D’Aurevilly uses the word ‘dandy’ about his protagonists it’s just a word applied to what are, in reality, old soldiers. These are soldiers’ stories.

  • The Crimson Curtain’ is a story about a young soldier billeted on a local family
  • ‘Happiness in Crime’ centres on the figure of Hauteclaire Stassin but before the love story gets going there’s a lot about the military experiences of her father, the army fencing instructor
  • ‘At a Dinner of Atheists’ sounds as if it’s going to be bracingly modern but turns out to be a a very long story (the longest in the book) about officers in the French Army during the Peninsular War

The repeated descriptions of or references to the French Army of the Napoleonic Wars reminded me much more of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories than of anything which came after D’Aurevilly (Aestheticism, the Decadence, Symbolism).

‘World going to the dogs’ trope

Believing that the world is going to the dogs and everything is going down the drain may be the most tiresome and suburban of prejudices, a Daily Mail-level cliché, the belief of long-suffering old codgers that young people these days don’t know they’re born, in the old days you could leave your front door unlocked, people had respect for the law blah blah blah.

D’Aurevilly’s stories are full of this slack slagging-off of the contemporary world, lamentations about how its protagonists are the last true this or the end of that noble tradition etc. He and his characters marinade in this utterly negative, blocked and futile worldview. It’s enervating and pointless.

These days when strength is continually diminishing and is no longer much thought of… (p.21)

… a man who belonged to our time and yet differed so much from the men of our time… (p.22)

‘…that is a feeling of which your generation, with its peace conferences and philosophical and humanitarian clowning will soon have no idea…’ (p.31)

…’physiologically, if I may employ that pedantic word which belongs to your days and not to mine…’ (p.34)

…he flourished aloft his champagne glass, not the silly, shallow cup fashionable in these pagan days but the true champagne glass, the glass our fathers drank from…(p.66)

‘The Comte de Savigny was certainly one of the most distinguished of the swell youth of the locality. There are none of them left now.’ (p.94)

‘She showed more and more all the symptoms of that debility which is so common now, and which the medical men of this enervated age call anaemia…’ (p.108)

‘If we were still what we ought to be, I should have thrown Eulalie into one of the dungeons of the Chateau de Savigny, and there would have been no more said about her. But we are no longer masters in our own houses. We have no longer our expeditious and silent justice…’ (p.115)

She would die as befitted V., the last aristocratic town in France… (p.116)

Nowadays, unfortunately, the sovereigns of Europe have quite other matters of greater urgency to attend to… [than] the expiring art of conversation, that doomed child of aristocratic leisure and monarchical absolutism…’ (p.127)

‘…that stern spirit, better worthy of sixteenth century Italy than of our puny days…’ (p.169)

‘What a piece of good fortune for me in these empty, hollow-hearted days…’ (p.231)

‘He prides himself on having nothing but ‘blue blood’ in his veins whilst even the oldest families, degraded by misalliances, have now only a few drops.’ (p.238)

After I’d picked out so many of these lachrymose laments for the good old days, it occurred to me that this whole attitude is a form of self pity. The world changes, as it must, and some people are sad or devastated that it has changed and this feeling is self-pity dressed up as opinion. It’s an extremely commonplace sentiment.

The only way to avoid falling into this suburban prejudice is to embrace change, to acknowledge that your times and values and everything you hold dear will diminish, disappear, be swept away – and embrace it.

As I tried to explain in my review of Edward Burtynsky‘s dazzling photos of a world gone to hell, you can either 1) ignore it, turn away, reject it, or 2) acknowledge it and collapse into endless tears and lamentation over what is lost or 3) you can embrace the change, the loss of the old, the continual arrival of the new. Human beings will certainly endure but on a planet, in ecosystems, in social structures, with languages and norms, beyond our imagining. Good!

A few years after ‘Les Diaboliques’ was published, in 1873, the boy wonder poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote in his prose poem ‘A Season in Hell’ that ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’. Rimbaud’s virile embrace of the future shows up D’Aurevilly’s nostalgic ‘dandies’ and lachrymose ex-soldiers for the backward-looking, drink-sodden, self-pitying conservatives that they are.

Credit

Les Diaboliques by Barbey D’Aurevilly was first published in 1874. It was first published in English in 1926. Page references are to the 1996 New Dedalus paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on June 26, 2024

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Fantasy: Realms of Imagination @ the British Library

This is a huge, beautifully designed exhibition. It’s encyclopedic in scope, endlessly fascinating, full of visual and imaginative pleasures. It makes you realise how widespread the impulse to Fantasy has been throughout the history of literature, and is in today’s culture, having undergone explosive growth in the last 50 years. In that period Fantasy has broken beyond books into graphic novels, TV and movies, into board and card games, in what we used to call video games and innumerable online games, plus a host of live action events where fans can dress up as their favourite Fantasy characters.

The exhibition pulls together examples of Fantasy in all these media, namechecks scores and scores of authors, and builds up a dizzying sense of the multiple, limitless worlds of Fantasy. It features over 100 exhibits, including historical manuscripts, rare printed books and original manuscripts, drafts of iconic novels, scripts and maps, illustrations, clips from Fantasy TV shows and movies, film props and costumes, and much, much, much more.

‘The Battle of Helm’s Deep’, watercolour illustration by Alan Lee for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by J.R.R. Tolkien, published by Harper Collins (1992) © Alan Lee

Structure

The curators must have had a lot of fun figuring out how to structure the exhibition. It’s divided into four main sections, but the sub-themes or genre within each topic, the themes and ideas the exhibition addresses, keep overflowing these containers, so there are sub-sections within each theme, so that it looks something like this:

  1. Fairy and Folk Tales
    • Faerie worlds
    • The dark enchanted forest
    • Endings
  2. Epics and Quests
    • Into battle
    • Journeying and seeking
  3. Weird and Uncanny
    • Architects of the strange
    • Gods and monsters
    • Peculiar affinities
  4. Portals and Worlds
    • Gateways and thresholds
    • Forging realms
    • Worlds of fandom

I’ll be candid and say I struggled to contain the overflow of ideas raised by the show within this structure, so I loosely use the big four themes/rooms to structure this review but also go off at tangents sparked by individual exhibits or wall labels.

Here’s one of Piranesi’s Carceri pictures from the mid-18th century. As well as an artist, Piranesi was an architect and archaeologist who studied the layered history of Rome. The Carceri etchings depict vast, imaginary prisons filled with stairs, shadows and machines. In the second edition the images seem to have been edited to make some of their geometries physically impossible, further shifting them into the realm of the fantastical.

‘Carceri Etchings’ by Giovanni Battista Piranesi,(1750 to 1761) © British Library Board

1. Fairy and Folk Tales

‘An ancient mappe of Fairyland newly discovered and set forth’ by Bernard Sleigh (1918) © British Library Board

Fairie

Fairie is the archaic word denoting the place where fairies live, a world of fairy folk such as witches and warlocks, goblins, elves, sprites and trolls. Stories features themes of transformation, magic spells, bewitchment. he exhibition includes the 12 ‘Coloured fairy books’ by Andrew Lang, published between 1899 and 1910 which bring together myths, legends, romances, histories, epics and fables from around the world, an encyclopedia of Fantasy as it was defined in the Edwardian era.

Origins

Fantastical elements are present in the earliest literature, gods and monsters appearing in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and in the even earlier Epic of Gilgamesh, written nearly 4,000 years ago.

These are all represented by venerable old editions of these classics, the Iliad by a 14th century handwritten manuscript which is covered in notes and glosses. The great epic of our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons, Beowulf, describes a hero battling superhuman monsters. Although the possessor of superhuman strength, the poignancy of the poem comes from the fact that in his final battle he is mortally wounded and dies.

‘Beowulf’ in the Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, f.193 r © British Library Board. Photo by the author

Stories about heroes battling gods and monsters obviously helped humanity categorise, makes sense of and manage what were, until living memory, the terrors of being alive.

Multicultural

The exhibition makes a bold effort to cast its net beyond the Anglophone tradition and so has displays about Europeans Franz Kafka and Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as about the Arabian Nights and the adventures of Sinbad, a version of the Chinese Monkey legend and the African Ananci stories – both in their original forms and as reimagined by modern writers and comic book authors.

‘Sinbadnama, the Story of Sinbad’ in an anonymous Persian version © British Library Board

Pilgrimage

The idea of pilgrimage was invented as early as the 3rd century AD, but the idea of a hero going a journey in which he faces death and learns wisdom is not only much older but appears in all human cultures. The moral seems to be universal: to learn wisdom you must leave home.

King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table

The huge, complex and rich series of legends surrounding the court of King Arthur and his knights circles around the idea of the holy quest. In England its most famous spin-off is the medieval poem ‘Gawayne and the Green Knight’ where the hero has to undergo trials of strength and fidelity which he, in the event, fails.

Original illustrated manuscript of ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Photo by the author

There’s a typically handsome illustration of Sir Thomas Malory’s Birth, Life and Acts of King Arthur by the fabulous Aubrey Beardsley. It’s worth pointing out that, although from another era, dealing with a completely different subject, the huge series of tales about king Arthur, like Beowulf end in failure as Lancelot’s infidelity breaks up the Round Table and Arthur is fatally wounded in the Last Battle. These are flawed heroes.

And then, subverting the earnest seriousness of Gawayne or the Welsh version of the stories in The Mabinogion, is a nearby of a display about Monty Python’s movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), complete with killer rabbit and the Knights Who Say Ni. To be precise, it’s a notebook showing Michael Palin’s very early drafts for the movie screenplay.

Epic then folk then fairy

Epic came first, stories about gods and heroes, in Europe epitomised by the primal monumentality of Homer. The primary epic of Homer was copied and civilised in the great Aeneid of Virgil but it’s instructive to see how Virgil softens the hardness of the all-male Iliad, introducing the love story of Dido and Aeneas, and lending his story a strong sense of magic, specifically in Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in search of wisdom.

Folk stories are the popular versions of the literature of the elite. They are found in the ancient world and appear throughout the Middle Ages, when they were often Christianised as legends about saints and martyrs. The exhibition includes an edition of the most famous collection of European folk stories, by the Brothers Grimm.

‘Children’s and Household Tales’ by the Grimm Brothers (1819) © British Library Board

Fairy tales come a lot later and are the sanitised cousins of the folk tale, cleaned up and given a happy ending suitable for children, with an improving moral thrown in. The exhibition includes classic collections of fairy stories, including ones by Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen (rare early editions of both on display here).

Gothic In the late 18th century there was a fashion for Gothic works such as ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (1794) and Mary Shelley’s great masterpiece, ‘Frankenstein’, both represented here by old editions and informative labels. Critics always say that narratives like this combine elements of fantasy, horror, crime and even science fiction. What they’re really proving is that those sub-genres had not yet been divided up and crystallised.

Specialist genres The explosion of genres came at the end of 19th century when cheaper printing and publishing technology encouraged a proliferation of specialist magazines and journals which could afford to cater to niche tastes and so encouraged the creation of literary genres and sub-genres. Science fiction, detective stories, horror and fantasy were just some of the sub-genres which began to find shape and definition at the turn of the twentieth century.

Two books provide evidence for my thesis: The Story of the Glittering Plain is a fantasy novel by William Morris published in 1891 and, according to Wikipedia, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature. The second is George MacDonald’s novel Lilith, published in 1895 and widely seen as one of the first modern Fantasy novels. My point being that both were published in the decade which, I’m suggesting, saw the emergence of so many specialist genres and movements.

The emergence of Fantasy

Yoking together examples of Fantasy which stretch all the way back to the Iliad, via Beowulf, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein into the 20th century prompts a thought: in those older works, classics of European and English literature, the Fantasy element is embedded in a larger worldview, often in a religious theology. The Iliad depicts the gods of Olympus as most ancient Greeks actually believed them to be, beliefs which continued to be held across the ancient world well into the Christina era.

Similarly, Paradise Lost is explicitly a work of Christian propaganda, its stated aim being to justify the ways of God to men i.e. defend orthodox Christian belief. In their ways two other classic works, Thomas More’s Utopia and Gulliver’s Travels, are heavily embedded in serious Christian debates about the ideal state and human morality, about the value of learning and education. The element of Fantasy is subordinate to what you could call the serious or adult aim of the work.

‘Utopia’ by Thomas More © The British Library Board

Now we can begin to see that the modern concept of Fantasy emerges and becomes clearer when it steps free of these ideological frameworks. Fantasy emerges as the fantastical elements in those previous works but shorn of their serious ideological context. It is set free. It becomes more playful because unrestricted by ‘serious’ aims, by those ‘adult’ agendas. As the 20th century progressed Fantasy was set free and has gone on to have stranger and more complex adventures.

My impression is that countless fantastical elements and works existed previously, but it was in the mid-twentieth century that Fantasy fiction was crystallised by J.R.R. Tolkien’s magisterial Lord of the Rings (published in 1954 and 1955) and has continued to grow in popularity ever since.

My impression is that the genre has undergone explosive growth since the 1990s; it was turbocharged by the advent of the internet which has allowed all kinds of fan fiction to proliferate. Alongside this has gone the huge growth in fantasy video games, many of which have led the technical, graphic and operation development of online games, to become a vast market spanning the world. And spreading from Japan, the spread of manga comics and, alongside the growing respectability of graphic novels.

The purposes of Fantasy

Arguably, Fantasy helps its consumers navigate profound difficulties we face in life.

Small

When we’re small this is panic-fear of the unpredictable giants known as grown-ups, who tell us strange fantastical stories and about whom we ourselves make up all kinds of stories. In childhood we live among networks of stories, our imaginations are formed by countless stories, many or most unfettered by the constraints of ‘reality’.

Teenagers

When we are troubled, alienated teenagers, it is simultaneously reassuring, thrilling and/or terrifying to think that there are other worlds than this one, ones where life is more exciting and dramatic and where, maybe, we or our representatives in the story can perform heroic actions. I’m thinking of the four ordinary schoolchildren who go through the back of a wardrobe and into Narnia where they play a pivotal role in the future of an entire world.

(The exhibition includes notes C.S. Lewis made for his Narnia books, plus the original map of Narnia he drew before handing it over to the series’ illustrator Pauline Baynes to bring to life.)

Grown-up

When we ourselves are grown up, the simplest function of Fantasy is to take us away from our boring mundane lives but it also has the power to take us back into the intense emotional worlds of childhood and youth. It can be an escape into pure fantasy, or an escape back to our earlier, simpler selves.

Video games

This wish to be elsewhere doing elsewise is maybe most obvious in the final sections of the exhibition about videogames like Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls, plus a playable mini-game by Failbetter Games designed especially for the exhibition, based on the Fallen London universe.

LARP

And in the very last section which describes the real-life world of conventions and events where fans can dress up as their favourite Fantasy characters. Apparently, this is referred to as Live Action Role Play or LARP. Right at the end there’s a stand of life-size costumes and a video of fans at a convention explaining their motivation for dressing up as elves and fairies and orcs.

Just some of the scores of thousands of costumes Fantasy fans make for themselves or hire and wear at numerous Fantasy fan events and conventions. Photo by the author

I was very struck by these vox pops of young people dressed up for a LARP event somewhere because they all said basically the same thing: which is that dressing up like this gave them a sense of identity, attending these events gave them a great sense of belonging, putting on Fantasy costumes helped them accept who they are and how they feel. And to be able to do it in a safe space among thousands of like-minded fans gave them a tremendous feeling of being accepted.

As a satirically-minded young man I would have laughed at all this, until I had children of my own and had to support them through their troubled teenage years, had to help my daughter in particular to ‘find her tribe’ – so now I am much more accepting of this kind of thing. In fact I found these artless happy vox pops rather moving and ended my visit to the exhibition feeling unaccountably emotional.

The importance of play

Psychologists know that ‘play’ is absolutely vital for the development and ongoing health of human beings. From this point of view Fantasy can be seen not as an escape from the ‘real world’ but an escape into a much more intense version of the world we inhabit. It represents all the slight irritations and small emotions of everyday life (the bus is late, my boss is nagging me) transformed back into the enormous primal emotions we experienced as children.

Is Fantasy childish?

I think the answer is a straight Yes, as long as we use at least two positive definitions of childhood: 1) as a time in our lives when we were subject to simpler, more intense emotions derived from simpler, more primal situations, and 2) when we were free to play – to dress up and be whoever we wanted to.

Board games

I’ve mentioned video games but there were also lots of examples of board games. The most famous might be Dungeons and Dragons, ‘a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and first published in 1974’. There’s a display of original boxes and cards.

There’s also a display of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s ‘Fighting Fantasy’ interactive gamebooks. And Martin Wallace’s board game A Study in Emerald based on Neil Gaiman’s story of the same name.

There’s one devoted to Magic: The Gathering a tabletop and digital collectible card game in which players use cards to take on the role of Planeswalkers, powerful wizards who can cast spells and summon spirits.

And there’s a nifty display case of Warhammer models, ‘a tabletop miniature wargame with a medieval fantasy theme created by Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell and Rick Priestley, and first published by the Games Workshop company in 1983’. My son went through an intense Warhammer phase and we not only bought the models but really got into painting them properly, attending a painting course at one of the many Warhammer shops.

Display of Warhammer models. Photo by the author

2. Epics and Quests

The ‘Epics and Quests’ section introduces us to iconic heroes and villains ranging from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Xena Warrior Princess, and explores how ancient tales have helped to shape modern Fantasy epics. On display is a version of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic story.

It’s also a rare opportunity to see items related to The Lord of the Rings, including J.R.R Tolkien’s notes for the 1955 to 1956 BBC Radio adaption of the book. There’s a funny story about Tove Jansson the beloved author of the Moomin books. In 1960 she was thrilled to be commissioned to make illustrations for a Finnish version of The Hobbit. However, a note tells us, Tolkien didn’t like her illustrations that much and took particular exception to her depiction of Gollum as a giant troll, significantly taller than the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Her misinterpretation of the character led Tolkien to insert the word ‘small’ into descriptions of Gollum in subsequent editions.

‘Bilbo: En Hobbit’s Aventyr’, front cover designed by Tove Jansson (1962) © Tove Jansson Estate

This section also includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s drafts and drawings for her Earthsea novels, on display in the UK for the first time, a site of pilgrimage for Le Guin’s many fans.

Some of Ursula K. Le Guin’s notebooks showing her working out the world of her classic trilogy ‘Earthsea’. Photo by the author

Sword and sorcery

There are, these days, a bewildering variety of sub-genres and categories of Fantasy. ‘Sword and Sorcery’ is the phrase used to describe the kind of Fantasy which features sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures. The genre is said to originate in the early-1930s in the works of Robert E. Howard but the actual term ‘sword and sorcery’ was only coined in 1961, by Fritz Leiber in a Fantasy fanzine.

I was intrigued to read the carefulness of the definition which is that S&S takes place in a world before any technology, dominated by muscle-bound heroes fighting evil powers, witches and dragons etc but that, crucially, these are purely personal adventures and battles which don’t affect the world they take place in – a contrast with a lot of other Fantasy stories in which the fate of the alternative world is often at stake.

I associate them with the Conan the Barbarian, the character invented by Howard and embodied in the terrible 1982 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (which was remade in 2011). The genre is characterised by a very distinctive iconography of an absurdly muscle-bound hunk wearing armour and wielding an immense sword, generally being adored by a scantily clad busty beauty sitting or kneeling in a posture of adoration. Different strokes for different folks.

3. Weird and Uncanny

This section focuses on iconic monsters, sinister landscapes filled with eerie edifices and the darkness at the heart of Fantasy.

Visitors are presented with the roots Fantasy in works like the Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein or the macabre short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. We learn how Piranesi’s atmospheric Carceri etchings, a kind of hallucinatory vision of a decaying 18th century city, inspired the design of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi. There’s a displayaboutf G.K. Chesterton’s nightmarish thriller The Man Who Was Thursday and much more.

There’s also section on classic anti-heroes, starting with the (initially) charismatic figure of Satan from Paradise Lost through to the lead characters in Mervyn Peake’s classic series, Gormenghast.

4. Portals and Worlds

Having encountered monsters and weird creatures, visitors move on to explore the imagined worlds these creatures inhabit in the ‘Portals and Worlds’ section. It’s a distinctive characteristic of Fantasy that its texts involve imagining and describing entire worlds i.e. world-building. The ability to create ‘strange new worlds’ gives Fantasy writes almost unlimited scope to create wonder and amazement, at one end of the spectrum, or worlds of darkness and horror. Or to create cities, in particular, which satirise the cities we live in now, strange mashups of recognisable features.

Fantasy maps

And if you’re creating new worlds, then chances are you need a map. The curators could have gone to town on the theme of Fantasy maps along, given that so many Fantasy stories involve journeys. In the event there’s Branwell Brontë’s map of the Glass Town Federation, C.S. Lewis’s own draft map of Narnia, and a bigger, more finished map of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Installation view of the fold-out ‘Discworld Mapp’ devised by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs (1995) Photo by the author

Talking of Pratchett, it is, of course, possible to satirise this genre, to pastiche and caricature and play it for laughs. If Monty Python mock the Grail quest theme, Diana Wynne Jones did something similar in her Derkholm series.

Portal Fantasy

The concept of the portal or doorway to another world plays a very large part in Fantasy, as in Science Fiction. Think of all those mysterious doorways into another time and space: maybe the wardrobe in the Narnia stories is the most classic portal, although platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross is possibly the most famous secret doorway of our times. On a moment’s reflection you realise that both the Alice in Wonderland books contain portals which the heroine passes through, falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland or passing through the Looking Glass in its sequel.

Authors

Huge range of authors, ancient and modern. I’ve mentioned Homer, but classics of English literature include:

  • Gulliver’s Travels (1726) demonstrates a completely different aspect of Fantasy, namely the Journey to Fantastic Lands
  • Paradise Lost (1667) because Milton’s version of Satan is an archetype of the charismatic baddie, archetype of the Dark Lord who appears in so many Fantasy and Horror stories

‘Paradise Lost’ illustrated by Gustav Doré (1888) photograph © British Library Board

Other classic authors include:

  • The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliff (1794)
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley for his early poem, Queen Mab (1813), which uses fairy tale elements as allegory to convey Shelley’s radical political views
  • The Bronte sisters for the Fantasy world Gondal they invented and wrote stories about in the 1830s
  • Edgar Allen Poe for his stories of mystery and the imagination (1839)
  • Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
  • Christina Rossetti for Goblin Market (1862) which combines elements of fairy tale, children’s story and Fantasy
  • William Morris for his Fantasy novel The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891)
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman for her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892)

1900s

  • Frank Baum for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
  • J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan (1904) and his adventures among pirates and faeries in Neverland
  • G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
  • E. Nesbit for The Magic City (1910)
  • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett aka Lord Dunsany, for his 1905 book, The Gods of Pegāna and his 1924 fantasy novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter
  • H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928)

‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ by Edgar Allen Poe illustrated by Harry Clarke © British Library Board

Modern i.e. post-war authors include:

  • Jorge Luis Borges for the fantastical stories in Labyrinths (1940s)
  • Mervyn Peake for his Gormenghast books (1946 to 1959)
  • C.S. Lewis for the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ (1950 to 1956)
  • J.R.R. Tolkien for The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954 to 1955)
  • Philippa Pearce for Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958)
  • T.H. White for the Once and Future King series (1958)
  • Mikhail Bulgakov for The Master and Margarita (1967)

Notebooks of text and sketches by Mervyn Peake for his ‘Gormenghast’ novels

Contemporary authors include:

1960s

  • Alan Garner, for children’s books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), Elidor (1965) and The Owl Service (1967)
  • Susan Cooper for The Dark is Rising series (1965 to 1977)
  • Ursula K. Le Guin for her Earthsea novels (1968 to 2001)

1970s

  • Angela Carter for rewriting traditional fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979)
  • M. John Harrison for his Viriconium stories (1971 to 1984)

1980s

  • Terry Pratchett for his series of comic Fantasy Discworld series (1983 to 2015)
  • Robert Holdstock for Mythago Wood (1984)
  • John Crowley, Little, Big (1981) and his Ægypt series (1987 onwards)
  • Neil Gaiman, especially for The Sandman comic book (1989 to 1996)

1990s

  • Robin Hobb for her ‘Realm of the Elderling’ novels (1995 onwards)
  • George R.R. Martin’s epic sequence A Song of Fire and Ice (1996 to the present)
  • J.K. Rowling for the cultural phenomenon which is the seven Harry Potter books (1997 to 2007) and movies and stage plays
  • Diana Wynne Jones for her Derkholm series (1998 to 2000)

2000s

  • China Miéville particularly for Perdido Street Station (2000)
  • Patricia A. McKillip for Ombria in Shadow (2002)
  • Susanna Clarke for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

2010s

  • Nnedi Okorafor for her Nsibidi Scripts series (2011 to 2022)
  • Monstress, an ongoing epic fantasy comics series written by Marjorie Liu and drawn by Sana Takeda, since November 2015
  • Naomi Novik for Uprooted (2015)
  • Aliette de Bodard for her Dominion of the Fallen series (2015 onwards)
  • Seanan McGuire for his Wayward Children series (2015 to the present)
  • Jeannette Ng for her 2017 novel Under the Pendulum Sun
  • The Deep (2019) by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes

2020s

  • N.K. Jemisin for her novel The City We Became (2020)

The exhibition is being staged by a library so most of these authors are represented by editions of their books – often old and precious early editions – but also by quite a few displays of notebooks and manuscripts. These include manuscripts and notebooks by J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S, Lewis, the Bronte sisters, Michael Palin, Ursula K. Le Guin, original sketches and outlines for Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, notes for his Fantasy epic Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, and more.

Costumes

There are the costumes worn by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in the Royal Opera House’s 1968 ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty which is, of course, based on Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale. And costumes from the 2003 musical ‘Wicked’ and the 1982 movie The Dark Crystal.

Costume for Kira in ‘The Dark Crystal’ (1982) © Brian and Wendy Froud

But the best prop is probably the very staff used by actor Ian McKellen playing Gandalf in the three-movie epic version of Lord of the Rings. I know it’s valuable and all, but I think the Library missed a trick by displaying it in a glass case: it should have been free-standing and they should have encouraged children to touch it and pose with it. It might have got a bit knocked about but imagine the magic it would have brought into thousands of children’s lives!

Installation view of Gandalf’s staff, pipe and concept art from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by Alan Lee. Photo © Justine Trickett

Transformation and metamorphosis

Generally heroes of Fantasy remain themselves but are transported to otherworlds like Narnia or the worlds visited by protagonists of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. They rarely themselves change shape or person. Slightly odd is the inclusion by the curators of Franz Kafka’s famous short story The Metamorphosis, represented here in a version illustrated by Rohan Daniel Eason.

Movies and TV

The exhibition includes excerpts from Fantasy TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 to 2001), Xena the Warrior Princess (1995 to 2001), Twin Peaks (1990 to 1991), the Netflix series The Witcher (started 2019 and still ongoing).

And from Fantasy movies such as The Dark Crystal (1982), the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke (1997), Lord of The Rings (2001 to 2003), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and more.

I was surprised at the space the curators gave to The Wizard of Oz and to learn quite what a cultural phenomenon it was in its time. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum was published in 1900. It was, apparently, ‘the first Fantasy series with continuity provided by the imagined world rather than by the characters’. Baum wrote no fewer than 14 books set in Oz, but at the same time cashed in on the books’ popularity by writing a stage musical and a comic strip. He concocted an elaborate touring spectacle involving dozens of actors, a full orchestra, a slideshow and moving picture clips.

A movie version was made in 1910, silent and in black and white and running for just 13 minutes. Most of us are more familiar with the 1939 version starring a young Judy Garland, directed by Victor Fleming.

In the past 124 years there have been scores of spin-offs, but the most successful of recent times is probably Gregory Maguire’s 1995 reworking of the story in ‘Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West’, which was adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 2003.

Exhibition design

The design of the exhibition allows visitors to journey through different Fantasy landscapes, from a dark enchanted forest, through epic mountains and a sinister fallen city to sunrise on a new world.

Installation view of the ‘Fairy and Folk Tales’ section of ‘Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination’ at the British Library. Photo © Justine Trickett

Anniversaries

Interestingly, a little fleet of Fantasy anniversaries are coming up. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Colour of Magic, the first novel in Terry Pratchett’s immensely successful comedy fantasy Discworld series. It also marked the 50th anniversary of Susan Cooper’s best-selling novel, The Dark is Rising. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons.

Events

These anniversaries, the achievements of numerous Fantasy authors, as well as themes and topics (Queer Fantasy, Black Fantasy) are explored in a comprehensive series of events:

Reading list

On one level the entire exhibition is like an animated reading list. When you emerge from the exhibition into the British Library shop the temptation is to buy every book in sight – Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin, Melville, Garner, and scores of others – take them home in a suitcase, lock yourself in your bedroom and not come out for a year. Why not? It’s not as if the so-called ‘real world’ is anything to celebrate right now.

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by Simon on January 13, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, fairy tale, Fantasy
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Posted by Simon on January 13, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/13/fantasy-realms-of-imagination-the-british-library/

French Impressions: Prints from Manet to Cézanne @ the British Museum

The British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings

The Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum contains the national collection of Western prints and drawings, in the same way as the National Gallery and Tate hold the national collection of paintings. It is one of the top three collections of its kind in the world and home to around 50,000 drawings and over two million prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to the present day.

French Impressions

This is a lovely FREE selection of prints from the age of the French Impressionists, a wide ranging selection of nearly 80 key works by artists including Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s a golden opportunity to view rarely seen artworks by some of France’s most famous artists.

Divan Japonais by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1893) showing the dancer Jane Avril seated next to the critic Édouard Dujardin watching the singer Yvette Guilbert perform on stage, wearing her trademark long black gloves © The Trustees of the British Museum

But the exhibition is more than just a selection of images: it presents a fascinating and authoritative history of print making and distribution in 19th century France.

Print production

The exhibition explains how prints – and in particular etchings – became markedly more popular in the 1860s among France’s growing middle classes, people with money but without the means to afford large oil paintings. At the same time artists became more interested in the expressive possibilities of print-making, a quicker, a more affordable, and a reproducible medium.

Prints reached a wider audience than ever before through the proliferation of illustrated journals and specialist magazines, as well as in portfolios commissioned and financed by enterprising print publishers such as Ambroise Vollard.

Manet

After some explanation about the difference between lithography, etching, woodcut and engraving, the exhibition settles into a tour of characteristic prints by the forty or so artists featured, starting with Manet. He is represented not only by several prints but also by a copy of the enormous illustrated volume devoted to the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s talismanic poem, The Raven, which was produced in a limited edition illustrated with Manet’s striking black and white images, and signed by the artists.

Berthe Morisot

Next to Manet are works by two woman artists, Berthe Morisot (who Manet knew and often painted – there are two portraits of her by him) and Mary Cassatt. Cassatt was American and moved to Paris in 1874. In 1891 she went to see an exhibition of Japanese prints at the Musêe des Beaux-Arts which had a profound effect on her. She immediately started making a set of ten colour aquatints which combine thin but distinct lines and delicate washes of pale colour and flattened areas of decoration.

The coiffur, fourth and final state by Mary Cassatt (1891) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Japonisme

Which brings us to the influence of Japanese prints on French. As Japan opened up to the West as part of the Meiji Restoration, brightly coloured woodcut prints began appearing on the western market from the end of the 1850s. In 1872 the critic Philipe Burty coined the term ‘Japonisme’, meaning

understanding Japanese art, culture and life solely through contact with the art of Japan

The Japonisme section of the exhibition features a print of a crayfish, fishes and prawns by Utagawa Hiroshige from 1832, next to an earthenware platter decorated with a lobster by Félix Bracquemonde who made a series of 25 prints for the crockery service all based on Japanese designs.

Henri Rivière

Nearby is one of the treats of the show. Artist and designer Henri Rivière was best known for his shadow theatre performances at Le Chat Noir nightclub (as recently covered in the Barbican’s big exhibition about arty nightclubs).

Hokusai

He’s here because in the 1880s he conceived the idea of taking Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as the starting point for his own series of views of the Eiffel Tower, as it was being constructed. Here’s the Hokusai print the curators have selected:

Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall by Katsushika Hokusai (circa 1830)

And here’s the Rivière: spot the influence! The Eiffel Tower prints chart the slow construction of the tower in thirty-six scenes, in all weathers including, as here, in heavy snow.

The Eiffel Tower under Construction, seen from the Trocadéro (1902) by Henri Rivière

You can see all thirty-six prints on this website:

Toulouse-Lautrec

If they’d been popular earlier in the century, prints underwent an explosion of popularity in the 1890s. Advances in colour printing paved the way for the brilliant designs of Henri Tolouse-Lautrec among many others. Lautrec made a living by producing illustrations for the proliferation of publications in the 1890s which sought to capture the glamour and glitz of the capital, as well as for the explosion of nightclubs which Paris witnessed.

La Revue Blanche

One of the most influential magazines of the period was La Revue Blanche founded and edited by Alfred Natanson, remembered mostly for its connection with literature, but it also included prints and illustrations, including the ones on display here by József Rippl-Rónai, Paul Ranson, Felix Vallotton and Maurice Denis.

Pierre Bonnard

There’s a selection of prints from Pierre Bonnard’s first series of twelve prints commissioned by Vollard in 1899 and some really evocative colour prints by Édouard Vuillard. They’re simple Paris street scenes but half abstracted into pleasing designs and patterns. It’s not Impressionism and not Abstraction, but a pleasingly decorative half way house between the two.

La Pâtisserie by Édouard Vuillard (1899) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a whole wall of French artistic heavy hitters: in quick succession you can see prints by Degas, van Gogh, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir and Cézanne.

Cézanne

The Cézanne is interesting: it is of Les Baigneurs (the Bathers), one of only eight prints ever made by the artist and a variation on one of his most popular themes (see my review of Tate Modern’s Cezanne exhibition). In fact, the wall label tells us that Cézanne made at least 200 images of bathers, an obsessive reworking of a specific theme which is very characteristic.

Les Baigneurs (grande planche) by Paul Cézanne (c.1898) © The Trustees of the British Museum

I feel ambivalent Paul Cézanne. I loved him as a boy but the recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition of his portraits put me off him, and I’m not sure I really like this image, no matter how famous it is. Maybe it’s because it feels like an image designed for another medium (oil paint) which the impresario Vollard had to persuade Cézanne to make, unlike the Vuillard print which feels like an image which has been conceived and produced with the medium of print in mind.

Richard Ranft

In a different way, the image below is obviously designed to take advantage of the defined lines and vivid colours enabled by 1890s print technology. What’s not to like about this scene from the circus by the less well-known artist Richard Ranft?

L’Ecuyere by Richard Ranft (1898) © The Trustees of the British Museum

A Swiss artist and former student of Gustave Courbet, Ranft produced many images depicting the daily lives and diversions of fin-de-siecle Parisian society. He was also a painter and illustrator, contributing popular images to many of the new journals and magazines. The acrobatic circus horseback rider was a popular subject, and Ranft’s version of it appeared in L’Estampe Moderne, a series of print portfolios, in 1898.

Gauguin

There’s a brilliant double portrait by Gauguin – in the contrary experience to Cézanne, the recent big Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery made me love him more and want to explore much more of his work.

Whistler

But I’ll end on a figure who is a little apart from all the other artists on display insofar that he was not only not French, he wasn’t even European. It’s easy to walk by the three black and white prints by the American James McNeill Whistler on your way to the more brightly colours Toulouse-Lautrec or Ranft posters, but these relatively small prints from Whistlers series of pictures of late Victorian Venice, are wonderful.

Whistler was, according to the curator, ‘the supreme master of etching and a key figure in nineteenth-century printmaking. Declared bankrupt in 1879, Whistler accepted the offer from the Fine Art Society to produce twelve prints of Venice over a three month period. A year later Whistler returned and made a further 50 etchings, hence the existence of a Venice Set from 1880 and The Second Venice Set of 1886.

This is from the second set and the delicate streaking of the ink in the upper and lower parts convey the shimmering reflection of the buildings by a typically Venetian canal, making it seem as if the sky is as liquid and luminous as the water.

Nocturne: Palaces 1880 by James McNeill Whistler (1886)

Reflecting on the Whistler’s subtlety and sophistication leads you to compare it with the highly stylised works of Toulouse-Lautrec, the fine art works of people like Gauguin or Cézanne, with the deliberately bright and popular art of Richard Ranft , with the dreamy and mysterious works of Nabis like Félix Vallotton, or the intimate scenes of half-naked women bathing and drying themselves by Cassatt or Degas. Wow. What a brilliant, exciting and enjoyable array of the best prints of some of the greatest artists who’ve ever lived, as well as a fascinating selection of works by less well-known figures which are equally and sometimes more beautiful.

Had you heard of Paul Helleu or Jacques Villon or Armand Séguin or Suzanne Valadon or Charles Maurin or Ker-Xavier Roussel or Angelo Jank before? Me neither, but all of them are good, and some of them are surprisingly vivid and modern.

Angelo Jank

This print is a startling image by Angelo Jank (1868-1940), a German animal painter, illustrator and member of the Munich Secession. He specialized in scenes with horses and riders.

It’s an illustration for Léo Desmarais’ work Les Miroirs, which is so obscure I can’t find anything about it on the internet. It’s a plate from the magazine L’Estampe Moderne which appeared from 1897 to 1899 as a series of 24 monthly instalments, each containing four original lithographs, like this striking one of a woman with a brilliant green parrot.

What is going on? Who is the blonde woman? Why is she holding an apple? And why is a brilliantly green parrot looming down at her?

La Femme au Perroquet by Angelo Jank (1898) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Strangely unlike anything else in the show and deceptively modern, it might be from the 1960s. The exhibition is like this, full of unexpected treats and treasures. And it’s FREE!

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by Simon on February 21, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 21, 2020

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The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard (1970)

WARNING: This review contains quotations which are extremely brutal and/or sexually explicit.

Fingers fretting at the key in her pocket, she watched Travers search through the montage photographs which the volunteers had assembled during anaesthesia. Disquieting diorama of pain and mutilation: strange sexual wounds, imaginary Vietnam atrocities, the deformed mouth of Jacqueline Kennedy. (p.68)

The fact that American edition of the book was titled Love and Napalm gives you fair warning of what to expect.

The Atrocity Exhibition is only a short book, 110 pages in the Granada paperback edition I’ve got, and yet it opens up wide, jagged horizons and makes a tremendous impact because of its format.

The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator. (p.13)

Experiments and collage

Ballard was keenly interested in experimental fiction and art, an interest which reached its peak in the late-1960s. As early as the late 1950s he’d created a series of collages assembled from texts cut out of scientific magazines. In 1967 he began a series of what came to be called ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’, being surreal or collagist parodies of traditional adverts. And we know that Ballard originally wanted The Atrocity Exhibition to be a book of collage illustrations.

I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.

In the event this proved impractical and Ballard ended up creating a kind of verbal equivalent of collage from a sequence of stand-alone prose pieces. These were originally published as stand-alone ‘stories’ in various art and sci fi magazines.

The final text of The Atrocity Exhibition is divided into 15 of these pieces or stories or texts, and then each of these is sub-divided into very short sections, often only a paragraph long. Each paragraph has a title of its own, in bold. The result is to make the book a highly fragmented read and certainly not a ‘novel’ with a consistent linear narrative in any traditional sense. Here’s a typical paragraph, or fragment, or angle.

Auto-erotic. As he rested in Catherine Austin’s bedroom, Talbot listened to the helicopters flying along the motorway from the airport. Symbols in a machine apocalypse, they seeded the cores of unknown memories in the furniture of the apartment, the gestures of unspoken affections. He lowered his eyes from the window. Catherine Austin sat on the bed beside him. Her naked body was held forward like a bizarre exhibit, its anatomy a junction of sterile cleft and flaccid mons. He placed his palm against the mud-coloured areola of her left nipple. The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.

1. You immediately see the intense but detached pornography of the female body, which never uses swearwords but refers to intercourse and all aspects of sexuality by their strict scientific names, ‘sterile cleft and flaccid mons’.

2. And you immediately see how the sex is intimately and intricately interwoven with equally precise descriptions of architecture and modern transport machines – helicopters flying over the motorway from the airport, a concrete landscape of overpasses and underpasses.

3. And beneath it all, initially obscured by the novelty of the clinical sexuality and the obsessed concrete-mania, lies the characteristic Ballard exorbitance, the Edgar Allen Poe hysteria ‘mediated’, as he would put it, through the detachment of the science journalist, summarising his perceptions as ‘symbols in a machine apocalypse’.

And yet there is no apocalypse. A few cars crash, one helicopter crashes and burns (I think), but there’s nothing like an ‘apocalypse’. The apocalypse – the extremity of all the situations – is all in the mind – of the cipher-characters and, ultimately, of Ballard himself.

The chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition

Here’s a list of the fifteen ‘chapters’/stories and the magazines they were first published in, and dates of first publication. You can see how the composition of the pieces stretched over three years from spring 1966 to late 1969 i.e. was a relatively slow and scattered process.

  1. The Atrocity Exhibition (New Worlds, Vol. 50, # 166, September 1966, excerpt)
  2. The University of Death (Transatlantic Review, No. 29, London, Summer 1968)
  3. The Assassination Weapon (New Worlds, Vol. 50, # 161, April 1966)
  4. You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe (Ambit # 27, Spring 1966)
  5. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (New Worlds July 1967, excerpt)
  6. The Great American Nude (Ambit # 36 Summer 1968)
  7. The Summer Cannibals (New Worlds # 186 January 1969)
  8. Tolerances of the Human Face (Encounter Vol. 33, No. 3, September 1969)
  9. You and Me and the Continuum (Impulse, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1966) FIRST
  10. Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy (Ambit # 31, Spring 1967 [the 26 paragraph titles are in alphabetical order])
  11. Love and Napalm (Export USA Circuit #6, June 1968)
  12. Crash! (ICA-Eventsheet February 1969, excerpt) LAST
  13. The Generations of America (New Worlds # 183, October 1968)
  14. Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (Brighton: Unicorn Bookshop, 1968)
  15. The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race (Ambit # 29, Autumn 1966)

Condensed novels

In one interview Ballard described the chapters or stories as each forming an individual, ‘condensed’ novel.

They’re certainly condensed in the sense that, as you read them, it feels as if lots of the action and description and linking passages which would create an ordinary ‘story’ have been surgically removed. Instead the paragraphs jump between isolated moments or scenes, between characters, between settings, so that it’s often difficult to see how they’re at all related, apart from featuring the same names. I’m not sure I really followed the ‘narrative’ of any of them.

And the prose style is just as ‘condensed’. Although it’s only 110 pages long, The Atrocity Exhibition is a chewy read because every single sentence feels packed with meaning and significance. There’s no filler or run-of-the-mill description or dialogue. It makes you realise how slack the texture of most normal novels is.

The Geometry of Her Face. In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. The diagram of her bones formed a key to his own postures and musculature, and to the scenario that had preoccupied him at the Institute. He began to prepare for departure. The pilot and the young woman now deferred to him. The fans of the helicopter turned in the dark air, casting elongated ciphers on the dying concrete.

Threads and themes

So the book consists of fifteen short (7, 8 or 9 page) sections, themselves sharply cut up into 20 or 30 fragments or perspectives which superficially justifies the term ‘condensed novels’.

But actually, the term is quite misleading because the sections are not as free-standing as it implies. In fact there are clear, indeed dominating, threads, themes, images and ideas which link almost all the chapters and make the assembly of the texts together much bigger than just the sum of a bunch of disparate parts.

For a start the same ‘characters’ recur in almost all of them – Dr Nathan the psychiatrist, Catherine Austen a mature love object and Karen Novotnik, a younger woman.

The first three or four sections all feature a central male protagonist who leads the action and the other characters comment on although, in an approach which I enjoyed, this character’s name changes from chapter to chapter – from Travis to Talbot to Tallis and so on – and in each incarnation he’s not quite the same person, as if reality shifts subtly in each story, or as if each avatar each one represents an alternative possible reality. This would explain why the young woman Karen Novotnik appears to die not once but several times, each time in a different scenario.

Celebration. For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries, the unique creation of the pudenda of Ralph Nader. The dismembered bodies of Karen Novotny and himself moved across the morning landscape, re-created in a hundred crashing cars, in the perspectives of a thousand concrete embankments, in the sexual postures of a million lovers.

As well as these recurring names, the texts are held together by their obsessive circling round the same handful of images, ideas and names. In fact, the way that the central male figure keeps reappearing under different names made me realise that without much difficulty you could say that the characters aren’t carrying the plot, the obsessions are.

So that the book can really be seen as about the circulation, meeting, mingling, parting and interaction of certain obsessive ideas, images and phrases. It’s as if the obsessions are the real, rounded, multi-dimensional entities, the ones we get to know in detail, who feature in various adventures and permutations, while the so-called human ‘characters’ are just vectors or mediums through which the idées fixes are channelled.

Over and over, the same images, situations, ideas and phrases recur with a claustrophobic, obsessive repetition. Dominant are images of death, war, car crashes, apocalypse. They include:

  • World War III
  • the atom bomb and atomic test sites
  • cars and car crashes and the wounds car crashes create in soft human bodies
  • helicopters flying ominously overhead, Vietnam-style
  • utterly impersonal sexual congress conceived as a form of geometric investigation
  • images over-familiar film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor or Brigitte Bardot
  • newsreel footage of war atrocities, from Auschwitz to Vietnam via Biafra and the Congo
  • the Kennedy assassination (one character is described as obsessively trying to recreate the Kennedy assassination ‘in a way that makes sense’)
  • concrete motorways and multi-storey car parks

Each chapter contains a specific mix of these ingredients, but the same overall list of ingredients recurs across all 15, rotating in ever-changing combinations like a kaleidoscope.

Chapter one: The Atrocity Exhibition

Thus chapter one features characters named Travis, his wife Margaret Travis, Catherine Austen who he’s having an affair with, his psychiatrist Dr Nathan who is analysing Travis’s obsession with creating a kind of one-man, psychological World War III, and Captain Webster who is having an affair with Margaret.

Travis is collecting ‘terminal documents’ (just like Kaldren in the short story The Voices of Time). Travis dreams of starting World War III, if only in his head (‘For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display…’). These terminal documents appear pleasingly random and in a note Ballard tells us they were the result of free association:

  1. A spectrohelion of the sun
  2. front elevation of balcony units, Hilton Hotel, London
  3. transverse section through a pre-Cambrian trilobite
  4. ‘chronograms’ by E.J. Marey
  5. photograph taken at noon 7 August 1945 in the Qattara Depression Egypt
  6. a reproduction of Max Ernst’s Garden Airplane Traps
  7. fusing sequences for ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Boy’, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs

They’re actually quite a good cross-section of JG’s obsessions: the atom bomb, the alienating effect of modernist architecture, deep geological time (which Ballard had painted as returning to dominate the modern world with its dinosaurs and tropical swamps in The Drowned World or the short story Now Awakes The Sea), a Surrealist painting, the obsession with time indicated by the fictional ‘chronographs’.

And hotels, hotels are classic locations for alienation and ennui for Ballard, if they’re abandoned in one of his dystopian futures, surrounded by drained swimming pools, all the better.

So far, so sort-of reasonable, after all characters and themes occur in all novels. But it’s difficult to convey the chaotic and deliberately dissociative texture of the book.

Brachycephalic. They stopped beneath the half-painted bowl of the radio-telescope. As the blunt metal ear turned on its tracks, fumbling at the sky, he put his hands to his skull, feeling the still-open sutures. Beside him Quinton, the dapper pomaded Judas, was waving at the distant hedges where the three limousines were waiting. ‘If you like we can have a hundred cars – a complete motorcade.’ Ignoring Quinton, he took a piece of quartz from his flying jacket and laid it on the surf. From it poured the code-music of the quasars.

There is no joined-up, consecutive narrative. Each paragraph is genuinely a fragment in the sense that they don’t cohere into any kind of ‘story’. Instead they are snapshots of the characters’ obsessions. Certainly the ‘people’ in the stories meet, encounter each other, have sex, drive cars because we see this in individual paragraphs. But each consecutive paragraph charts a new scene. They are like fragments from a lot of different jigsaws all jumbled together.

At the end of ‘chapter’ one the bodies of Dr Nathan, Captain Webster and Catherine Austen form a small tableau by the bunker. Maybe they were killed in bombing of the target zone in the disused military zone which Travis seems to have organised.

But the second ‘chapter’ begins with these same ‘dead’ characters – Dr Nathan, Catherine Austen – brought back to life, in new scenes as if nothing had happened. Now they are taking part in a screenshow in a university organised by one ‘Talbot'( a sort of structural variation on Travis) and whose students are ostensibly studying World War III, inspired by the jealous student Koester. Talbot is having an affair with Catherine but sees her body chiefly as a ‘geometry’ of vents and clefts and is more interested in the sculpture he’s building on the roof, metal aerials constructed to hold glass faces to the sun. He is clearly cracking up.

And so it continues, tangling and rethreading a narrow and obsessive networks of themes and images…

Key words

If certain key ideas recur and repeat in endless permutations, so do key words. As so often, I find the words more interesting than the ‘ideas’:

geometry

  • her own body, with its endless familiar geometry…
  • in the postures they assumed, the contours of thigh and thorax, Travis explored the geometry and volumetric time of the bedroom
  • only an anatomist could have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern
  • his wife’s body with its familiar geometry
  • His room was filled with grotesque magazine photographs: the obsessive geometry of overpasses, like fragments of her own body; X-rays of unborn children; a series of genital deformations; a hundred close-ups of hands.
  • the concrete landscape of underpass and flyover mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval…
  • the obsessive geometry of flyovers, like fragments of her own body
  • the geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind
  • a crushed fender; in its broken geometry Talbot saw the dismembered body of Karen Novotny
  • the danger of an assassination attempt seems evident, one hypotenuse in this geometry of a murder
  • For Talbot the explosive collision of the two cars was a celebration of the unity of their soft geometries…

mimetised

  • he assumed the postures of the fragmented body of the film actress, mimetising his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her body
  • the mimetised disasters of Vietnam and the Congo
  • segments of his postures mimetised in the processes of time and space
  • our anxieties mimetised in the junction between wall and ceiling

terminal

  • A Terminal Posture. Lying on the worn concrete of the gunnery aisles, he assumed the postures of the film actress, assuaging his past dreams and anxieties in the dune-like fragments of her
    body.
  • Dr Nathan gazed at the display photographs of terminal syphilitics in the cinema foyer
  • He remembered the aloof, cerebral Kline, and their long discussions on this terminal concrete beach…
  • The Terminal Zone. He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralizing the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune, the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

neural

  • Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.
  • The concrete landscape of underpass and overpass mediated a more real presence, the geometry of a neural interval, the identity latent within his own musculature.
  • Impressions of Africa. A low shoreline; air glazed like amber; derricks and jetties above brown water; the silver geometry of a petrochemical complex, a Vorticist assemblage of cylinders and cubes superimposed upon the distant plateau of mountains; a single Horton sphere – enigmatic balloon tethered to the fused sand by its steel cradles; the unique clarity of the African light: fluted tablelands and jigsaw bastions; the limitless neural geometry of the landscape.

planes

  • For some reason the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature.
  • The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies.
  • Her blanched skin revealed the hollow planes of her face.
  • His rigid face was held six inches from her own, his mouth like the pecking orifice of some unpleasant machine. The planes of his cheekbones and temples intersected with the slabs of rainwashed cement, together forming a strange sexual modulus.
  • The planes of her face seemed to lead towards some invisible focus, projecting an image that lingered on the walls, as if they were inhabiting her skull
  • The apartment was a box clock, a cubicular extrapolation of the facial planes of the yantra, the cheekbones of Marilyn Monroe.

This sketchy review of his key vocabulary establishes that what Ballard’s key words have in common is the way they are hard and technical, continually shifting the imagination away from soft human bodies to hard geometries, from sentimental ‘feelings’ towards impersonal, scientific and mathematical notions of ‘neural’ events, planes and geometries.

Art

Ballard made no secret of the immense influence on him of Surrealist painting. He mentions it in pretty much every interview he ever gave, lards his stories with the adjective ‘surrealist’, and frequently refers to specific Surrealist paintings. The Atrocity Exhibition contains references to the following works of art:

  • Max Ernst – Garden Airplane Traps
  • Max Ernst – Europe after the Rain (p.15)
  • Salvador Dali – Hypercubic Christ
  • Max Ernst – Silence (p.21)
  • Salvador Dali – The Persistence of Memory (p.22)
  • Magritte – The Annunciation (p.31)
  • Duchamp – The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even
  • Max Ernst, The Stolen Mirror (p.47)
  • Bellmer sculptures (p.54)
  • Duchamp – Nude descending a Staircase (p.55)
  • Tanguy – Jours de Lenteur (p.85)
  • Max Ernst – the Robing of the Bride (p.85)
  • de Chirico – The Dream of the Poet (p.85)

The art references tend to occur in contexts where they add, expand and complicate existing descriptions.

The ‘Soft’ Death of Marilyn Monroe. Standing in front of him as she dressed, Karen Novotny’s body seemed as smooth and annealed as those frozen planes. Yet a displacement of time would drain away the soft interstices, leaving walls like scraped clinkers. He remembered Ernst’s ‘Robing’: Marilyn’s pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic thighs, a face of ash. The widowed bride of Vesuvius.

On reflection, I realise that you could see each of the individual paragraphs as the equivalent of free-standing paintings. That makes a lot of sense. Treating each paragraph as a painting treating a different mood, or angle, or perspective on similar events, covering similar subjects, but each from a different angle and approach – and yourself sauntering past them as they’re hung up on a gallery wall.

Sex and pornography

The text is soaked in sex and sexual perversions and pornography regarded as a clinically detached exercise.

This is justified, if needs be, by Ballard’s view that we are in a hyper-advanced technological society where all experience is mediated by a bombardment of media and advertising imagery to such an extent that naive notions of simple sentimental sex have been scorched out of existence.

The need for more polymorphic roles has been demonstrated by television and news media. Sexual intercourse can no longer be regarded as a personal and isolated activity, but is seen to be a vector in a public complex involving automobile styling, politics and mass communications

The satirical surveys

With a satire which is so straight-faced it’s hard to tell whether he’s laughing or not, the later chapters of The Atrocity Exhibition are notably different from the earlier ones.

They are still laid out as fragmented paragraphs but they more or less cease being (fragmented) narratives and consist of collections of pseudo-scientific surveys and reports.

And these focus relentlessly, obsessively on the conjunction of atrocity and sex, specifically the impact of viewing a) President Kennedy’s assassination b) Vietnam war footage c) general atrocity footage (Auschwitz, the Congo) on the sex lives of an amusingly random and surreal cross-section of audience types, including children, the mentally ill and housewives.

Satirically, the ‘research’ presents evidence that atrocity footage improves workplace efficiency and stimulates a healthy sex drive. Conclusion? Wars of the Vietnam type are good for society.

Using assembly kits of atrocity photographs, groups of housewives, students and psychotic patients selected the optimum child-torture victim. Rape and napalm burns remained constant preoccupations, and a wound profile of maximum arousal was constructed. Despite the revulsion expressed by the panels, follow-up surveys of work-proficiency and health patterns indicate substantial benefits. The effects of atrocity films on disturbed children were found to have positive results that indicate similar benefits for the TV public at large. These studies confirm that it is only in terms of a psychosexual module such as provided by the Vietnam war that the United States can enter into a relationship with the world generally characterized by the term ‘love.’

This fairly blunt satire – although presented in the same-chopped-up paragraphs each headed by a title in bold type as the earlier ‘stories’ – feels drastically different in intention from the earlier stories.

Maybe they reflect the quick escalation in protest against the war which took place in the last few years of the 1960s, and which prompted the equally savage satirical short story The Killing Ground of 1969.

Nuclear satire

Also: In one of his notes to the book, Ballard points out that from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the fact that the world was living under the shadow of impending nuclear holocaust meant that, to anybody who thought about it, everything was permissible. How could you believe in the fuddy-duddy old values of Church and State, all those crowns and gowns, if the world could be incinerated tomorrow?

Not only that, but how can you think about the end of the world and the destruction of the planet except via extremity and satire? As demonstrated by the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove which was a) released in 1964 only 2 years before the first Atrocity story was published, and b) filmed at Shepperton studios just round the corner from Ballard’s house. Serendipities. Zeitgeist. Spirit of the Age.

Conclusion for philistines

If Ballard’s obsession with car crashes and clinical pornography seems sick, ask yourself who’s the sickest – novelists who write blistering porno-satire or generals who order napalm by the lakeful to be dropped on peasant villages?

That was the reality of the times Ballard was writing in, and for. Remember the American version of the book was titled Love and Napalm

  • The billboards multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscapes of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.
  • Homage to Abraham Zapruder Each night, as Travers moved through the deserted auditorium, the films of simulated atrocities played above the rows of empty seats, images of napalm victims, crashing cars and motorcade attacks.
  • On the basis of viewers’ preferences an optimum torture and execution sequence was devised involving Governor Reagan, Madame Ky and an unidentifiable eight-year-old Vietnamese girl napalm victim.

Remember the photo of that little naked Vietnamese girl running down the road her skin flapping off her where the napalm had burned her? Those photos were all around in 1966, 67, 68. Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard’s response to the TV-mediated hyper-violence and psychic disturbance of the times.

Conclusion for Ballardians

I think it’s his best book. It’s an über-intense encyclopedia of Ballard’s distinctive obsessions and visions. Some people read it as an experimental depiction of the psyche of a man undergoing a nervous breakdown.

I think it’s bigger than that, it presents an (in)coherent way of verbalising a number of the visual, psychological and imaginative pressures anyone living in the modern era is subjected to. The constant, hammering pressure of the motorways, the thundering traffic, the massive planes grinding overhead, the aggressive billboard hoardings, the saturated mediascape, the faces of the same handful of celebrities dinned into our brains, and the deadening and at the same time hysterical impact that has on our imaginative lives, and emotional lives, and sex lives (if we have them).

Joy Division

Wrote a song based on the book, released on their 1980 album Closer, which is a fair attempt to capture the book’s weirdness in another medium.

Credit

‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1970. Page references are to the 1979 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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Posted by Simon on January 31, 2020

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Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard (1971)

All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the rising air above the sand-reefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus. Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve sea-horses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film-stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun.

Those who come looking for classic Ballard – all car crashes and multi-story car parks – will be disappointed. The nine stories Ballard wrote about Vermilion Sands are, for the most, part, among his earliest – in fact Prima Belladonna, the first story in the series, is also the first short story he ever had published – and they all reek of early period, fin-de-siecle-cum-surrealist dreams rather than the hard psychoses of the modern world which he became famous for later on.

The idea is that Vermilion Sands is a holiday resort of the very near future, but a desert resort on the model of Palm Springs in southern California. So no sea, no beaches, no sunbathing and all that vulgar paraphernalia. Instead the town is surrounded by a vista of endless rolling dunes, sand-lakes and quartz reefs, among which grow the mysterious ‘sound sculptures’ and out of whose dark grottos fly the ominous sand-rays.

Perfectly at home with this nearly other-planet-like landscape, the denizens of this alternative reality are all well educated and middle class, all seem to work in the arts (we meet an increasingly predictable series of artists, singers, film makers, architects, painters and fashion designers), and indulge strange dreamy fantasies which involve making singing sculptures, tending plants which emit music, selling houses which shape themselves to their owners’ moods and, in the most characteristic story, The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D, use gliders to carve faces and shapes out of clouds for the entertainment of the jaded inhabitants below.

The stories appear to take place in the present or near future:

  • in Venus Smiles the narrator references the Expo 75 and the Venice Biennale as contemporary events; later he tells us that the artist Lorraine Drexel hobnobbed with Giacommetti and John Cage (making her a very 1950s character)
  • in The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista the architect who is shot dead is described as having hung out in the 1950s with Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright, and then moved on to Vermilion Sands, ‘1970 shots of him, fitting into the movie colony like a shark into a goldfish bowl’, and since we know he was shot soon after arriving at the resort that sets his murder in the Seventies, and the story is being told some ten years after the trial (p.194)
  • in Say Goodbye To the Wind the lead female character Raine Channing, was a world famous model in the 1970s and the ‘now’ of the story is barely ten years later (p.132)

But the stories take place in a location which is not the same earth or the same present as the rest of us inhabit. Everyone is comfortably off and lazy. All the houses have balconies and verandas where the characters do a good deal of daydreaming and musing. Everyone takes the endless dunes, the singing sculptures, and the flying manta rays for granted.

Ballard is often heralded as the prophet of late-twentieth century urban psychoses but these stories really reveal the late Victorian in him, the man in thrall to a Tennysonian love of euphony, given to long lazy paragraphs describing pre-Raphaelite women who sleepwalk through the dunes under the shimmering moonlight, combined with an 1890s, decadent, Oscar Wilde intoxication with jewels (jeweled eyes, jeweled insects) and the uncanny attraction of the macabre. In these stories Ballard is more of a Symbolist than a modernist.

Standing with one hand on the cabin rail, the brass portholes forming halos at her feet, was a tall, narrow-hipped woman with blonde hair so pale she immediately reminded me of the Ancient Mariner’s Life-in-Death. Her eyes gazed at me like dark magnolias. Lifted by the wind, her opal hair, like antique silver, made a chasuble of the air.

In a short preface Ballard says the stories are his best guess at what ‘the future will actually be like’, a snapshot of ‘the day after tomorrow’ – but I think we can take that with a pinch of salt: the future will obviously look very much like the world of today, only more crowded and polluted; that’s certainly how the future has turned out for the last 40 years that I’ve been experiencing it.

In the 1970s they told us that by the year 2000 there’d be colonies on the moon or even Mars, and we’d all be living in the Leisure Society where the only challenge would be deciding whether to fill your spare time by being an artist or a poet. Forty years later the Space Age is over, everyone works harder than ever, and the world is just more crowded and polluted.

What the Vermilion Sands stories really are is a mental realm where Ballard could go to indulge the most rococo and whimsical of his decadent fantasies, untroubled by any constraints of realism or logic. He is closer to the mark when, later in the Preface, he says that the stories consciously celebrate ‘the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.’ They are exercises in the strange and the fantastical, the weird and surreal, all told in the calm, bejewelled prose of a latter-day Oscar Wilde.

Memories, caravels without sails, crossed the shadowy deserts of her burnt-out eyes. (p.21)

References in the text to Vermilion Sands

And what they tell us:

Vermilion Sands is my guess at what the future will actually be like.

Vermilion Sands is a place where I would be happy to live. I once described this overlit desert resort as an exotic suburb of my mind…

Vermilion Sands has more than its full share of dreams and illusions, fears and fantasies, but the frame for them is less confining. I like to think, too, that it celebrates the neglected virtues of the glossy, lurid and bizarre.

Where is Vermilion Sands? I suppose its spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach, but in recent years I have been delighted to see it popping up elsewhere — above all, in sections of the 3,000-mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and where each summer Europe lies on its back in the sun. That posture, of course, is the hallmark of Vermilion Sands and, I hope, of the future — not merely that no-one has to work, but that work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work. (Preface)

‘tourist haunts like Vermilion Sands’ (The Singing Statues)

Ten years ago the colony ‘was still remembered as the one-time playground of movie stars, delinquent heiresses and eccentric cosmopolites…

All the houses in Vermilion Sands, it goes without saying, were psychotropic…

‘Darling, Vermilion Sands is Vermilion Sands. Don’t expect to find the suburban norms. People here were individualists.’ (Stellavista)

… to Vermilion Sands, to this bizarre, sand-bound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting perspectives

The Recess

the Recess is referred to in several places as a worldwide economic slump which reduced most people to working a few hours a day (Referred to in The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista and the Cloud Sculptors), but this is as airily vague and meaningless as everything else in the stories.

Vermilion

This is the colour vermilion.

1. Prima Belladonna (1956)

Steve Parker keeps a shop of singing flowers, Parker’s Choro-Fauna. A lot of effort is put into explaining the complexity of singing plants and, in particular, the way they need tuning and Steve does this using the monstrous Khan-Arachnid orchid, a difficult bloom with a range of 24 octaves. When he’s not fussing about these rare and expensive musical plants, Steve hangs out with his pals Tony and Harry, drinking cool beers on his balcony.

What is maybe most characteristic about the story is the notion that it is set during ‘The Recess’, a decade of economic stasis. There’s no socio-economic explanation of this, it just reinforces the sense of slow, lazy, easy-going torpor which hangs over the story.

Into their relaxed, passive lives arrives the stunningly beautiful Jane Cyracylides, long and lean with golden skin and disconcerting eyes which seem like insects. The boys ogle her from their balcony and then one day she comes to the shop.

Tony gets to know here and discovers Jane’s astonishing singing ability, an ability which, if not restrained, badly upsets the flowers in his shop. She starts to make a living singing in nightclubs and becomes famous so Tony is thrilled when they become an item, cruising round together and hanging at the beach.

One day he is awoken by music from the shop, strange, it’s locked up and should be quiet. He goes in to discover the Khan-Arachnid orchid in mad tumescence, rearing up to over nine feet tall and sucking into its core the willing body of Jane Cyracylides. When he tries to pull her free she pushes him away. Later, when he re-enters the shop, the Khan-Arachnid has returned to its normal size and Jane is nowhere to be seen. Has it eaten her?!

2. Venus Smiles (1957)

A broadly comic story. The narrator – Mr Hamilton – is on a small committee which commissioned a sonic sculpture for the central square of Vermilion Sands and awarded the gig to Lorraine Drexel. Unfortunately the finished product looks like a radar aerial with a car radiator grill broken in two so the bars stick up like a big metal comb. And the sound it emits instead of being calm and reassuring is a high pitched whine, a sitar-like caterwauling. The crowd gathered to see the unveiling starts booing.

Quite quickly the statue is withdrawn and ends up in the narrator’s own front garden, and Lorraine Drexel leaves town, laughing. This is because she knows what’s coming next. Which is the statue starts growing, and sprouting more and more sound cores which start broadcasting various classical lollipops like Mendelsohn’s Italian Symphony or Grieg’s Piano Concerto.

Hamilton chops it up with a hacksaw but the parts only grow back. They call in an expert, a Dr Blackett, who spouts some typical half-plausible pseudo-scientific explanation about the sculpture extracting its new content from oxygen in the air and its metal core, creating a dynamic form of rust.

Hamilton wakes up to find the thing smashing through his bedroom window and stretching all over his garden, caterwauling umpteen different pieces of classical music. His colleague on the Art committee, Raymond, comes round with an oxy-acetylene kit and they spend a day chopping the monster singing sculpture up into thousands of tiny pieces. They pay a local contractor to take it away to a steel mill and get it all recycled.

But the sculptress Lorraine Drexel reads about it in the press and sues. The case spends months dragging through the courts and the final verdict is delivered in Vermilion Sands’s new courthouse. They lose the case because the judge doesn’t believe – despite the eye witness testimony – in a growing singing sculpture.

But as they leave the courthouse, Hamilton feels a vibration in his feet. He leans to the floor and hears music. He walks to a window and looks out at some of the unfinished parts of the courthouse. Yes, there are new struts and stanchions growing out from the building even as he watches and new ‘sonic cores’ forming, from which emits louder and louder music.

The sculpture! Its melted-down parts have been mixed with other metal and sent off to construction jobs all over the city. Not only buildings but cars and planes, all the artifacts of modern technology will start budding soundboxes and singing!

3. Studio 5, The Stars (1960)

Studio 5, the Stars is an address – studio 5 is a house half way along a road in Vermilion Sands called The Stars.

It’s a good-humoured joke that the narrator is Paul Ransom, editor of Wave IX, a poetry magazine all of whose works are produced by modern VT technology – punch in your requirements of stanza form, genre, style, metre and so on into an IBM machine and it coughs out as many lines as you like.

Into his life wafts a late-Victorian beauty, the mysterious figure of Aurora Day (much like the slender and mysterious beauties Leonora Chanel and Jane Ciracylades in the other stories), given to mysterious sleepwalking in her billowing white gown or feeding the white fish in her pond or stretching on her divan, her ‘beautiful body uncoiling like a python.’

She is a real poet in that she writes the old fashioned way, with a pen. Once she learns Ransom is editor of a poetry mag she sends her pink Cadillac round every morning so that the hunchback chauffeur can deliver her latest compositions, and in the evening the tapes on which she has written her texts comes roiling and blowing across the sand from her house across the dunes, Studio 5.

But this is just the start. When Ransom rejects her poems, she magically co-opts the entire issue he’s sent to the printers, deleting all the computer-generated poems and replacing them with hers. Far more dramatic, when Ransom gets over burning the tampered copies, he lifts his glass to find a quote of poetry engraved on it, and poetry engraved on the steps of his, and on the doors, and on the walls, and on the floors. Then he looks at his arms and realises they are live with hand-written verse and when he looks in the mirrors he sees that his face it is covered in poetry.

He vaults the balcony, lands on the sand and runs over to Aurora’s house. There she is lazily feeding her fish and asks him if he knows the Greek myth about Melander, goddess of poetry, and Melander, the only true poet of the day who kills himself to prove his devotion to the art of poetry. As she tells it him, Ransom realises there are paintings of the two characters all round the walls. Is she… is she the goddess Melander?

Quickly the plot develops. Ransom utterly gives in to Aurora’s demand that the next edition of his magazine be filled with original, hand-made poetry. But when he gets home he discovers his lovely IBM poetry-making computer has been trashed. He phones the other 23 poets in Vermilion Sands and same has happened to them. How the devil is he going to fill his magazine?

One alone among the other poets isn’t fazed, the good-looking youth Tristram Caldwell. He not only offers to submit some of his verse but comes over and introduces himself to Aurora. Over the next few days they become inseparable. He suggests they go on a sand-ray hunt, sand-rays being things like bats which fly about above the ‘reefs’ but have a sharp and fatal sting.

To cut a long passage short, Tristram fools Aurora into going into a mazy grotto of the reefs and there whipping the sand-rays into such a frenzy that they appear to attack and kill Tristram. Aurora runs off screaming and is driven away the goatish chauffeur who Ransom has, by now, realised must be a reincarnation of the Greek god Pan.

Ransom a) tries to follow them but their big Cadillac loses him b) drives to Aurora’s house only to find it empty, deserted and feeling as if it has never been inhabited (as in a thousand clichéd ghost stories) and c) gets home to find Tristram lazing on his divan. What!

It was a scam by Tristram. He learned how seriously Aurora took the Melander story and how she had cast him as the tragic devotee. So he staged the entire sand-ray hunt in order to fulfil her psychological need. Only he among the little hunting party knew that they are in the ‘off’ season for the rays, and so their blades aren’t poisonous.

And the punchline of the story? Ransom is still stressing about how to fill his next issue when he gets a call from one of the poets who, strange to say, has had a moment of inspiration and has knocked out quite a decent sonnet. And then another phone call. And another. Somehow, Aurora’s presence, or her (probably) commissioning the hunchback to smash up all the poetry computers, has had the desired effect. The poets have learned how to write again.

4. The Singing Statues (1961)

Another story about a beautiful willowy woman who enters the life of the male narrator and entrances him.

In this case he is Milton, an artist, a maker of sonic sculptures and she is Lunora Goalen (what, not the Lunora Goalen, yes!! the Lunora Goalen!!), rich patron of the arts with apartments in Venice, Paris, New York (funny how some things haven’t changed in 60 years), doyenne of the news magazines and celebrity columns and society pages.

Lunora has rented a luxury house in the resort. She has dropped into the art gallery where Milton was just adjusting his latest sound sculpture which looks like an enormous totem pole with wings at the top. Out of the wings come sounds. Milton happens to be inside when the rich client strolls his way and – knowing the musical range of his sculpture is actually pitifully thin – he grabs the microphone and as Ms Rich arrives in range, singes the Creole Love Call which is transmogrified by the computers into a haunting melody which enchants Lunora and she buys it on the spot, turning and walking out to climb back into her white Rolls Royce, leaving it for her sharp-eyed assistant Mme Charcot to make out the cheque to the flustered gallery owner.

Next day they get an angry call complaining that the sculpture only seems to emit a dull booming noise. Milton drives out to the luxury house (like ‘a Frank Lloyd Wright design for an experimental department store’) and pretends to be doing maintenance when he is in fact installing a tape of classical music. This should fix the problem for a day or two.

On successive nights he sneaks back across the dry lake climbs over the wall into the garden, sneaks up onto the unrailed terrace and instals a new tape. Then spends increasing amounts of time looking down to the ground floor where Lunora is sleeping on an open-air divan, topless.

On the climactic day he is rung up by Mma Charcot who insists he comes straight away. Lunora is distraught, her hair undone, dishevelled, crouching beside the sculpture. Milton crouches down beside her and takes her hands in his but Mme Charcot sniggers, it is not him she cares for – it isn’t even the sculpture – it is herself she is in love with.

Appalled, Milton turns and walks away. Next day Lunora, her secretary and chauffeur have gone, When he revisits the house it is cold and empty, the muted statuary standing around like corpses. Months later, in preparation to make a new statue, Milton goes out among the actual living sound sculptures, among the sand dunes and reefs of the desert, and there discovers the sculpture he had sold her, chopped up into pieces and scattered around the sand, some of the fragments still making a sad, whining lament.

5. The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista (1961)

Talbot and his wife Fay are looking for a house to rent in Vermilion Sands. The resort is now past its prime and these new buyers are aware of the history of movie stars and celebrities who populated it in its prime.

The story is based on the idea of Psychotropic Homes – these are homes built in a kind of bioplastic which respond to their owners’ moods and personalities. This immediately leads Ballard into a comic tour of totally unsuitable homes, such as the mock-Assyrian ziggurat whose previous owner had St Vitus dance and so which was still nervously jitterbugging even years after he’d left. Or the converted submarine pen which was the home of an alcoholic and whose vast concrete walls still reek of gloom and helplessness. You get the idea.

Anyway they finally take a nice house with a pool and it’s only when the estate agent ‘turns it on’ (you turn on psychotropic houses) that he reveals it was the home of 70s movie star Gloria Tremayne, who was the defendant at the Trial of the Century, accused of shooting dead her architect husband, Miles Vanden Starr. Now we learn that Talbot, who’d already told us he was a lawyer, was actually a junior defence lawyer on Gloria’s team. Lots of guff about how mysterious and aloof and Greta Garbo she was.

To cut to the chase, Talbot and Fay find themselves beginning to act out the characters of its previous inhabitants. In particular, we learn from Fay’s comments to him, that Talbot has become obsessive, vengeful, permanently angry. One day the house tries to kill her by melting and bending down the ceiling in the living room where she’s sleeping to crush her onto the sofa. Her screams waken Talbot who comes running in to save her.

Next day she’s gone, a note on the memogram saying she’s gone to stay with her sister. Two months later she demands a divorce. Talbot goes on a bender, drinks too much, raves the car back across the lawn, smashing into the automatic garage, throws his coat in the swimming pool, necks a bottle of whiskey and wakes up sprawled across his bed to witness a strange sight.

A pressure zone enters the doorway, but no person, The pressure zone crosses the bedroom towards the bed, there’s a pause, then a convulsion in the air and the house goes into spasm, has a fit. The room he’s in starts to contract, within moments the door and control panel are covered in melting blob, huge veins stand out on the walls. Luckily his lighter is in his pocket and Talbot holds it up to the ceiling which starts to fizz and melt apart and he’s able to pull himself up into the from above, though that is melting and bending, the swimming pool has been upturned and draining.

He realises the house is reliving the moment Gloria Tremayne went into his bedroom to shoot Starr. The spasm was the house re-enacting Starr’s death spasm, the contraction was his lungs and heart ceasing to work, his life force contracting as the room contracted around Talbot.

Talbot makes it to the control panel and turns the house off. Hours later the police leave deciding there’s nothing they can do to prosecute a house for murder. The estate agent looks in horror at the wrecked, erupted shell of the desirable property he sold Talbot only a few months previously, then leaves.

For the time being Starr will remain. He can’t afford to move and the house is turned off. But one day… one day, he will turn it back on… the threat being that he will subsume himself in the damaged psyche of the murderess.

6. The Screen Game (1962)

Paul Golding is an artist, well, an artist in the Vermilion Sands sense, meaning he rarely actually paints anything. He’s co-opted by his friend Tony Sapphire into painting the sets for an avant-garde movie being produced by the millionaire playboy Charles van Stratten (two ex-wives and a controlling mother who mysteriously died in an ‘accident’) who owns a massive house out across the sand lakes.

There’s a cast of distractions including the outrageous director, but the point of the story is to introduce us to the beautiful, slender and (inevitably) troubled young woman at the heart of it. Emerelda Garland used to be a famous actress, darlings, but had a breakdown after her mother died. Now van Stratten (who is, of course, devoted to her) has organised the filming solely to recreate the milieu of her glory years and try and effect a cure.

As an typically eerie and oblique aspect of this cure the narrator is tasked with building a series of twelve enormous screens, which are painted with the signs of the zodiac and are to be moved around what seems to be an enormous chessboard on a terrace below the producer’s summer house.

As the story progresses, Golding produces many more screens than are required and he and his friends develop a strange complicated ‘game’ of moving them around, creating strange patterns and mazes.

Emerelda does indeed find walking among their ever-changing patterns and mazes somehow consoling, although Golding finds it disconcerting that she is followed everywhere or surrounded by an eerie troop of scorpions and spiders with jewels embedded in their heads, jewelled insects which foreshadow the jewelled world created in The Crystal World. (Leonora Chanel is referred to on almost page of her story as having ‘jewelled eyes’, which, we eventually realise, means small decorative jewels stuck around her eyes.)

The climax comes one morning when Charles himself deigns to come down from the summer house and play ‘the screen game’, by now a complex process using the 40 huge screens Paul has painted. But suddenly an abandoned sonic sculpture down on the empty beach sets up a wailing and they realise something is wrong.

Charles starts tearing apart the screens which form the protective carapace the mad Emerelda has made for himself. But when he penetrates to the core and strips away the screens shielding her, exposing her to the harsh sunlight, her entourage of jewelled insects, scorpions and spiders, protects her by leaping onto Charles’s body and covering his face, and stinging him to death as he runs away down the sand embankment screaming in time to the sonic sculpture’s mournful wail.

7. Cry Hope, Cry Fury! (1966)

The first-person narrator, Robert Melville, goes sailing on his sand-yacht across the bone-dry dunes of the sand-sea, in hunt of the eerie sand-rays which fly just out of reach. When one of the tyres of his sand yacht gets a puncture he sets off on foot but the razor sharp sand cuts his feet. Back at the yacht an enormous ray flies overhead till he shoots it dead and it falls out of the sky wrecking his sails and knocking him unconscious.

When he comes to he is being rescued by a much larger sand-yacht under the command of the windswept beauty, Hope Cunard, who tends him in her cabin as they cruise over the smooth dry sand lakes towards her luxury home on the bone dry Lizard Key. Here Melville meets Hope’s small and characteristically troubled entourage, namely her pockmarked half-brother, Foyle, and her secretary Barbara Quimby.

Hope is, of course, a painter, she paints portraits. In a nod to his sci-fi audience Ballard invents a kind of paint which, once you’ve set the basic parameters, you leave out on the canvas in front of the subject and it automatically takes the shape of whatever you intend to paint – similar to the computer programs for making poems in Studio 5, The Stars.

The subject of painting does two things. One, it brings out a profusion of references to artists, including Monet, Renoir, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Balthus, Gustave Moreau, the surrealists as a group and ‘the last demented landscapes of Van Gogh’, as well as literary references to Coleridge’s poem The Ancient Mariner and one of the Surrealists’ holy books, Maldoror. Two, it triggers a glut of sensuous, decadent description, of the desert, the gleaming sand, the sand-rays wheeling above the rock spires and so on. And, of course, the human body as a junction or meeting point of the organic and the crystalline.

Sometimes at night, as she lay beside me in the cabin, the reflected light of the quartz veins moving over her breasts like necklaces, she would talk to me as if completely unaware p.103

It emerges that Hope had a tempestuous affair (underneath the psychological flim-flam there’s quite a lot of Mills and Boon about a Ballard story) with a tall dark stranger who is identified in the story with the Flying Dutchman. He even left a jacket behind with a tell-tale bullet hole in the chest.

Hope lets a portrait of herself and Melville be painted but over the following days it twists and distorts into the macabre figure of a skull-faced woman in a blonde wig and a pig-faced mannequin. The narrator thinks this is a reflection on the weird psychic processes at work in the isolated house, but at the climax of the story we learn that the two other occupants – Foyle and Barbara – have been dressing up in costumes and standing in front of the self-painting paintings, nothing weird and psychic about it at all, it’s a twisted attempt at humour and control.

The climax come when the Flying Dutchman or some such young man does indeed arrive, but Hope has been driven into a state of hysteria and fires a pistol at him, wounding him in the wrist and he and Melville both make their escape, running across the piazza and onto the man’s sand-schooner.

8. The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D (1966)

This might be the best, the most representative of the stories. Major Raymond Parker has been invalided out of the air force after an accident, hence the crutches. He is building gliders in a disused garage. two freaks pass by, the hunchback Petit Manuel and tall artist Nolan. They’re joined by playboy Charles van Eyck and form the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. a) Coral D is the fourth and largest of the four large coral towers outside vermilion Sands b) cloud sculptors glide among the clouds and release scythes of silver iodide to carve and sculpt them into the shapes of celebrities, presidents and actresses.

Till the day when beautiful reclusive heiress Leonora Chanel (daughter of one of the world’s leading financiers) is driven up in her white Rolls Royce, accompanied by her secretary Beatrice Lafferty (it does feel as if Ballard is writing the same story again and again and again).

As we get to know her we realise Leonora is a monster of egotism. She puts on a massive party at her huge villa and invites the cloud sculptors to perform. Van Eyck and Nolan are vying for her attention and outdo each other. Parker quickly starts an affair with Miss Lafferty and they jointly observe what happens next which is

1. That night there is some kind of argument or fight up on the terrace and Nolan goes running off into the night. We learn that he has in fact already had an affair with Leonora and painted a very unflattering portrait of her. Out of the shadows emerges smooth playboy Van Eyck who now tries his chances with Leonora.

2. Next day there is another party (easy to get the fact there are two, a bit confused) and this time the clouds darken into a storm. First Manuel begs to go up, in order to impress Leonora who had not tried to hide her revulsion at the hunchback. He goes up and his glider is smashed to bits in a storm cloud. Parker and Lafferty go and recover his body which means they are out in the desert when the storm turns into a real tornado and – apparently driven by the vengeful Nolan in his glider -heads straight for Leonora’s villa, where it wreaks tremendous damage.

Emerging from their hidey-hole, Parker and Lafferty tour the ruined, devastated villa, with its wreckage of party chairs, marquee and smashed champagne glasses. They find Leonora dead among her peacock feathers, her face covered by shreds of the many portraits of herself she’d commissioned over the years. And Van Eyck hanging strangled in the wires of the party lights.

9. Say Goodbye to the Wind (1966)

The narrator, Mr Samson, keeps a fashion boutique jokily called ‘Topless in Gaza’, the snazzy sci-fi angle being that the clothes are all bio-clothes, animated clothes, which shape and mould themselves around the owner and are also prone to hysterical fits (much like the sensitive plants and the sensitive houses and the sensitive musical sculptures).

One day a glamorous former supermodel, Raine Channing, turns up at the shop (just as Lunora Goalen turns up at Milton’s art gallery and Jane Cyracylides turns up at Tony Parker’s flower shop) and buys a carful of clothes. This is paid for by her secretary Mme Fournier (same figure as the Mme Charcot who handles everything for Lunora) and has an aggressive chauffeur (as did Lunora and Aurora Day).

Basically, Raine was used and moulded by her svengali, fashion designer Gavin Kaiser. Now she imagines he is coming back to get her and her behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged, particularly her habit of wafting from her hotel room through the empty streets to the abandoned nightclub and dancing by herself to the one record left on the old-fashioned gramophone.

At the climax of the novel the narrator is watching her, when someone creeps up behind him and biffs him on the head. When he regains consciousness he is in a hand-tailored biomorphic golden suit which almost immediately starts contracting and strangling him to death. there’s a couple of sentences of over-the-top description of this Poe-esque fate before strong hands grip him and a macho man cuts open the constricting fabric. It is none other than Jason Kaiser, brother of the dead Gavin Kaiser who has rescued him for obscure reasons.

Five miles away they watch the headlights of Miss Channing’s chauffeur-driven car as it disappears into the night, just like all the other psycho-goddesses in every other one of these stories, disappears back into the shadows of Ballard’s obsessive psyche.

Ballard’s goddesses

Hope Cunard stepped through the open window, her white gown shivering around her naked body like a tremulous wraith. (p.102)

Into all this Emerelda Garland had now emerged, like a beautiful but nervous wraith. (p.65)

Almost all the stories rotate around women of a particular type. Each of Ballard’s narrators meets and falls under the intoxicating influence of glamorous female figures with golden skin and mysterious pasts, former movie stars, reborn goddesses, alluring divas from myth, beguiling heiresses, elusive millionairesses:

  • Jane Ciracylades – mysterious and sexy woman who has a superhuman singing ability
  • Aurora Day – a witch with magic powers who can project poetry quotations into solid objects and onto human skin and murders (she thinks) her lover
  • Leonora Chanel – ‘this beautiful but insane woman’, millionairess who inspires the cloud sculptors, spurring them on to death and destruction
  • Gloria Tremayne – former actress who shot her husband and went mad
  • Emerelda Garland – former actress who had a collapse after her mother died and ends up trying to shoot her lover
  • Hope Cunard – millionaire heiress owner of mansion on Lizard Key who tries to shoot the narrator and her former lover
  • Lunora Goalen – neurotically self-obsessed millionaire art collector who has a breakdown by a sculpture
  • Raine Channing – former teenage supermodel who tries to kill the narrator by dressing him in constricting bio-fabric

These femmes fatales involve the narrator in their strange and dreamlike psychodramas which spiral up towards some kind of often violent climax before they abruptly disappear. He uses the stock phrase – ‘I never saw XX again’ – in so many of these stories it becomes a trademark, a cliché. ‘Of course I never saw her again’ (Gloria); ‘That was the last I saw of Aurora Day’ (p.180) and so on. They come; they entrance and beguile; they disappear – like women in a (very male) dream.

In fact the basic structure – glamorous woman enters life of man with an interesting speciality (animated clothes, musical plants, cloud-carving gliders, computer-generated poetry), after some fencing they ‘fall in love’ i.e. go to bed, before the plot moves to some kind of climax to which she is central and then the woman disappears as abruptly as she arrived – reminds me of the basic template of the James Bond stories (Bond’s interesting speciality being that he is the sexiest spy in the world). The Bond books began appearing only a few years before Ballard’s (first Bond novel 1953, first Ballard short story 1956).

There’s another point worth making: almost all the women are topless or scantily clad at some point; there are quite a few bare bosoms about. Lunora Goalen sleeps topless every night out on the desert terrace where Milton the sound sculptor spends hours watching her. When you see the contemporary illustrations for Ballard’s stories in contemporary sci-fi magazines, you see why coming up with a steady supply of nubile, slender and topless or diaphanously dressed women was required to keep the fans happy.

Cover of the October 1963 issue of Fantastic Stories showing an illustration of The Screen Game – jewelled insects, moveable screens painted with signs of the zodiac and – of course – a slender, half-naked young woman

Some of this – the recurrence of film stars and the entire story about making an avant-garde movie (The Screen Game) – sheds light on Ballard’s later obsession with real-life movie stars like Greta Garbo, Jayne Mansfield and especially Elizabeth Taylor in Atrocity and Crash.

These later texts are usually read as deconstructions of the mediascape in a consumer capitalist society, of the way Hollywood iconography and huge advertising hoardings mediate, focus and exploit primal human longings (for sex, for a better, perfect life) for profit. But a simpler interpretation is that Ballard himself had a deep devotion to the figure of the goddess, the muse, the Perfect Woman, which has more to do with Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites than the hectic commercial world of the 1960s.

It’s characteristic that even though some of his male narrators sleep with these other-worldly muse figures – as Steve Parker does with Jane Cyracylides and Robert Melville with Hope Cunard – little if anything is made of the sex, as such. It is more important as a symbol of the often oblique psychological bond between the narrator and the goddess-figure.

But even that is not quite accurate, because there is actually little if any psychology in a Ballard novel. Or, to put it another way, Ballard’s novels are full of psychology but it is Ballard’s psychology – the characters are little more than ciphers in the strange trance-worlds Ballard creates, as their generally anonymous names clearly signal – Ransom, Golding, Milton, Talbot, Melville, they’re all dream figures acting out Ballard’s compulsive scenarios, again and again and in Vermilion Sands it’s striking how many of these obsessions are more or less the same one – being entranced by a beautiful, sexy, but mad and dangerous young woman.

As a footnote, they all arrive in very nice cars, and they all have chauffeurs:

  • Leonora Chanel – white Rolls Royce, chauffeur and secretary (p.11)
  • Lunor Goalen – white Rolls Royce, chauffeur and secretary (p.75)
  • Aurora Day – pink Cadillac and chauffeur (p.154)

Once I’d noticed this, I couldn’t help thinking about Lady Penelope, driven about in her pink six-wheeled Rolls Royce by the faithful Parker in Thunderbirds (which was broadcast 1965-66).

Ballard’s buzzwords

There’s a lot of detail and imagination in all of the stories – a lot of sci-fi gags, like the houses which change shape or the mutant plants which can make music or the eerie sand sculptures and so on – but, in the end, I found it a struggle to read the book right to the end. The atmosphere, which starts off as dreamy symbolism, ends up becoming too one-dimensional, the effects too shrill and tinny.

I began to notice the way he throws around the adjective ‘insane’ a lot – insane wishes, insane people, insane ideas, insane landscape, insane logic,

  • fighting the insane air, Manuel piloted the glider downward…
  • For a moment the ambiguous nature of my role, and the questionable morality of abducting a beautiful but insane woman, made me hesitate. (p.67)
  • Convinced at the time of this insane logic, I drove my fists through the canvas… (p.105)
  • I raised my hands to my face, in horror saw that the surface of my skin was interlaced by a thousand tattoos, writhing and coiling across my hands and arms like insane serpents. (p.163)
  • The fragments of Aurora Day’s insane poems caught the dying desert light as they dissolved about my feet… (p.181)
  • I stood up, wondering what insane crisis this psychotropic grand mal duplicated. (p.205)
  • ‘The place must have been insane.’ (p.207)
  • There’s a subtle charm about the house even in its distorted form, like the ambiguous smile of a beautiful but insane woman. (p.208)

And bizarre:

  • the portraits recapitulated in reverse, like some bizarre embryo, a complete phylogeny of modern art… (p.98)
  • a character’s shirt makes him look like ‘some bizarre harlequin’ (104)
  • She seemed to be concealed in this living play-nest like a bizarre infant Venus (p.134)

And demented:

  • We barely noticed the strange landscape we were crossing, the great gargoyles of red basalt that uncoiled themselves into the air like the spires of demented cathedrals. (p.52)
  • In the wardrobe the racks of gowns hung in restive files, colours pulsing like demented suns. (p.136)
  • I woke on Raine’s bed in the deserted villa, the white moonlight like a waiting shroud across the terrace. Around me the shadows of the demented shapes seethed along the walls, the deformed inmates of some nightmare aviary. (p.141)

Yes, nightmare:

  • What had begun as a pleasant divertimento… had degenerated into a macabre charade, transforming the terrace into the exercise area of a nightmare. (p.69)
  • Kicking back the door I had a full glimpse of these nightmare figures. (p.106)
  • The macabre spectacle of the strange grave-flora springing from cracked tombs, like the nightmare collection of some Quant or Dior of the netherworld… (p.130)
  • The cloud if insects returned to the summer house, where Dr Gruber’s black-suited figure was silhouetted against the sky, poised on the white ledge like some minatory bird of nightmare. (p.71)

And macabre. And grotesque. And hell.

  • The livid colours of Hope’s pus-filled face ran like putrefying flesh. Beside her the pig-faced priest in my own image presided over her body like a procurator in hell. (p.107)
  • I remembered the clothes I had seen on a woman killed in a car crash at Vermilion Sands, blooming out of the wreckage like a monstrous flower of hell, and the demented wardrobe offered to me by the family of an heiress who had committed suicide. (p.137)
  • Three nights later, tired of conducting my courtship of Emerelda Garland within a painted maze, I drove out to Lagoon West, climbing through the darkened hills whose contorted forms reared in the swinging headlights like the smoke clouds of some sunken hell. (p.67)

And nightmares. And Bosch.

  • My pig-snouted face resembled a nightmare visage from the black landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. (p.105)
  • With his beaked face and insane eyes, his hunched figure hung about with the nets of writhing rays, he looked like a figure from Hieronymus Bosch. (p.177)

There’s a tired business mantra that if everything’s a priority then nothing’s a priority. Same here. If everything is ‘insane’, if eveythingis a ‘landscape from hell’ then, eventually, nothing is.

My point is that it’s too easy and glib to chuck around extreme adjectives like that. It devalues them and they quickly lose their evocative affect.

The obsessive repetition of the same basic structure – mysterious glamorous woman entrances naive male protagonists against the backdrop of the endless dunes, sand reefs and sonic sculptures – gets pretty boring after the fourth or fifth iteration. The details of things like the psychotropic houses and the moments when the house tries to kill Fay, then the narrator, are weird and hallucinatory, the details of the gliders flying among the clouds and sculpting them into shapes and faces is wonderful, but:

  1. the human plots which he concocts amid the sand-seas and reefs of quartz are often shallow and disappointing
  2. Ballard’s language is too often cranked up to maximum all the way through; there’s little light or shade, the whole thing does indeed become ‘glossy, lurid and bizarre’ to such an extent that, in the end, it runs the risk of ceasing to register or matter

Maybe literature is something to do with restraint, and the reason Ballard is hard to take seriously as a literary figure is because, although his novels are brilliant (the three disaster novels are breath-taking and ‘Atrocity’ and ‘Crash’ are all outstanding visions), nonetheless Ballard’s writing – considered solely as written prose – is so ridiculously over the top.

In the silence of the villa I listened to [the shadows of the demented shapes] tearing themselves to pieces like condemned creatures tormenting themselves on their gibbets. (p. 141)

Edgar Allen Poe on acid.

Credit

‘Vermilion Sands’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1973. Page references are to the 1985 J.M. Dent paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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by Simon on January 29, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 29, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/vermilion-sands-j-g-ballard/

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