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7.
INFLUENCES:
DECADENCE IN OTHER NATIONS
No other nation except for France and England had a recognisable and self-declared Decadent Movement; there were, nevertheless, many individual writers in various other countries who came under the influence of the French Decadents and echoed the themes and methods of Decadent writing in their own work. However one cares to construct a definition of Decadence one will inevitably discover that some of the most interesting examples can be found in languages other than French or English.
The nation which came closest to producing a Movement akin to those of France and England was Russia, which had more than its fair share of neurotic writers. Indeed, some of the main themes of French Decadent fiction had already been anticipated in Russia in the work of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. While the novelists of Decadence were first becoming busy in France the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin, while going mad himself, was producing, “The Red Flower” (1883), in which a patient in a lunatic asylum “discovers” that all the world’s evil is contained in three poppies growing in a garden and must lay an elaborate plan for their destruction. A similar interest in morbid states of mind can be found in the work of writers heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky, including M. N. Albov and Prince Golitzyn Muravlin, the latter of whom took as his project the identification of the principal pathological types of the decaying aristocracy.
Many of the younger Russian writers of the fin de siècle period found themselves gathered together by the anchorage of Maxim Gorky’s publishing house, Znanie. Most of these writers were politically radical champions of realism, but there nevertheless grew up in their midst a Symbolist Movement which took its inspiration from France and – like the English Movement – took aboard a selective measure of Decadence as well. They came to prominence somewhat later than the equivalent English writers but enjoyed a similarly brief vogue after the demoralizing Russo-Japanese War and the consequent Revolution of 1905.
The most successful writer of this period in Russia was Leonid Andreyev, who did not belong to the Symbolist group but who influenced and shared certain concerns with them. Like Baudelaire, Andreyev was a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, and was inordinately impressed by the power of Poe’s studies of abnormal states of mind; he also followed Poe in becoming intensely interested in metaphysical matters. In many of his later stories Andreyev is concerned to draw links between the encroachments of madness and discovery of the meaninglessness and hopelessness of the human condition; such stories as “Thought” (1902), The Red Laugh (1904), “Eleazer” (1907) and “Darkness” (1908) all present harsh statements of the emptiness of existence which begin the stretching of Decadent sensibility in the direction of the bleaker extremes of existentialist angst. Very similar themes are extensively developed in the work of Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky, whose most notable story in terms of its relationship to Decadence is “Babayev”, which deals with a neurasthenic officer’s obsessive desire to commit a crime. Alexander Kuprin, though primarily a realist, also produced some short stories in this morbid vein.
The Russian Symbolists were far more interested in matters metaphysical than their French and English counterparts, becoming very preoccupied with the idea of the world as a vast network of symbols. The Movement’s most notable prose writers – although all three wrote poetry as well – were Valery Bryusov, Andrey Bely and Fedor Sologub. Bryusov, who had collaborated on a book on Russian Symbolists as early as 1894 took charge of a publishing house in 1900 which then became the focal point of the Movement, issuing a journal called Vesy (“The Scales”) from 1904-09. His most famous short story is a remarkable futuristic fantasy about an epidemic of madness in a Utopian state, “The Republic of the Southern Cross”.
Although the word “decadent” was not bandied about as freely in Russia as it had been in Britain by those intending denigration, Bryusov was so charged and so was Bely. The latter was condemned partly for his ironic sensibility – though he could not really be accused of not taking the metaphysical matters which fascinated him seriously. The prolific Sologub did not suffer from any lack of seriousness, despite casting many of his short tales in a fairy-tale mode, and took great pains to extrapolate his sense of disappointment with the universe. Some of his phantasmagoric allegories are very striking, and such tales as “The Lady in Fetters” are very close indeed to the spirit of French Decadent prose. Sologub’s most successful novel was Mekli Bes (1907; tr. as The Little Demon). The other important members of the Symbolist school were the poets Vyacheslav Ivanov and Alexander Blok; the latter took his place alongside Bryusov as an important promoter of the movement and eventually became its most prestigious member – such poems as “Danse Macabre” encapsulate Decadent consciousness neatly and wholeheartedly.
The history of Russian Symbolism – and of its Decadent inclusions – might have extended over a longer period had it not been for the intervention of the Revolutions of 1917, which ushered in a new era of heavily politicized art. It was not enough for Symbolists and others to convert to Communism; they had also to adjust their philosophies of art. It was not merely Decadence which had become decadent in the eyes of the State, but everything which was not Socialist Realism.
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Because it had the city of Rome within its bound Italy might, in principle, have been reasonably fertile ground for the philosophy of decadence and a consequent literary movement, but the historical moment was not ideal. The Kingdom of Italy had been proclaimed as recently as 1861, following Garibaldi’s unification, and the newness of the city’s role as the capital of a modern nation state was an inhibition to the notion that it was decadent, despite the antiquity and continuing decline of the Roman Church. Nevertheless, Italy did produce one writer of considerable note – indeed, the foremost Italian writer of his day – who was entirely happy to dabble in the Decadent style as soon as it became fashionable in France; this was Gabriele D’Annunzio.
D’Annunzio was by no means possessed of a Decadent personality, though the prolific turnover of his mistresses called his morality into question and eventually landed him with syphilis. He was a man of great energy, ambition and patriotism who looked constantly towards the future; he fought duels over his women, distinguished himself in the Great War, and took a Vernian delight in the technology of transportation. His work was equally wide-ranging, but it is the early poetry and novels, which most clearly show the influence of contemporary French writing, which are today best remembered.
D’Annunzio’s first venture in the Decadent style-was the poetry collection Intermezzo di rime (1883), which declared its intentions with a motto taken from the passage in the Apocalypse which refers to the Harlot of Babylon and was printed on pink paper. It includes, among other items, twelve sonnets celebrating the exploits of famous adulterers, four “nude studies” and various poems of a vaguely sacrilegious character. Two more collections in the same vein followed but D’Annunzio then seemed to tire of being an enfant terrible (as he tired of most things) and moved back in the direction of realism. Decadent elements were combined with this new thrust, however, in his two most important novels: Il piacere (1889; tr. as The Child of Pleasure) and Il trionfo della morte (1894; tr. as The Triumph of Death). Both drew heavily on his own experiences and his own obsessions with beautiful women, and his vivid depiction of the city of Rome reflects the wide-eyed view of an upwardly mobile country-boy with a hunger for luxury, in much the same way that Rachilde’s novels express her similar attitude to Paris. Il trionfo della morte is particularly extravagant in deploying Decadent imagery, possessed by a fascination with depravity which converts the central love story into a danse macabre haunted by spectres of the past.
Like some of the English Decadents, D’Annunzio became fascinated with the works of Nietzsche, whose influence combined with that of the Symbolists in Le vergini delle rocce (1895; tr. as The Virgins of the Rocks), which he wrote for Il Convito, a periodical of his own in which he inte
nded to emulate such foreign productions as the Yellow Book. Concentrating as it does on the grotesque life of an aristocratic family which has withdrawn from the world, it comes as close as any other novel of the period to producing an image of social decadence in the Decadent style. D’Annunzio’s subsequent involvement with the famous actress Eleanor Duse, who built a great reputation for herself as a Decadent performer, inspired further works in celebration of erotic freedom, but after the turn of the century Decadence gradually drained out of his work just as it dwindled away in France.
Almost all of D’Annunzio’s Italian contemporariesleaned more towards the realism of Giovanni Vergarather than his own heated example. Federico de Roberto’snovel of an aristocratic Sicilian family in decline, I vicerè(1894; tr. as The Viceroys), scrupulously avoids theDecadent style, having none of the baroque decoration of Le vergini delle rocce. Luigi Pirandello, on the otherhand, was taken beyond his early realism by therepercussions of a personal tragedy – the insanity of hiswife. He developed a fiercely ironic view of life and apreoccupation with the fallibility of understanding andcommunication which sometimes encourages critics tofind Decadent elements in his work, but his more obviousaffinities are with the French Theatre of the Absurd.Critics have also found Decadent tendencies in theintrospective and impuissant work of Italo Svevo, whopublished his early novels at the same time as D’Annunziobut had to wait thirty years to be “discovered”. TheDecadent Movement itself probably had more influence,albeit of a negative kind, on Filippo Marinetti’s shortlived Futurist Movement, which sought to integrate theDecadent’ suspicion of tradition into a far morerevolutionary and forward-looking manifesto. If D’Annunzio was not the only Italian Decadent, therefore,he certainly deserves to be considered as the onlyimportant one.
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Despite being the home of Nietzsche, who was an important influence on several notable Decadent writers, Germany produced no Decadent Movement of its own in the nineteenth century, and such traces of Decadent attitude and style which can be found in German writers before the Great War are few and fugitive. As in Italy, the German nation-state was of recent provenance – it was not finally clarified until 1866 – and no German city could begin to compare with Paris and Rome. German censorship was more rigid even than English censorship where matters of moral indecency were concerned, and this too was a strong deterrent to authors tempted by the charm of the Decadent style; Otto Bierbaum’ avant garde literary journal Pan (founded 1894) was, in consequence, rather less ambitious than the Yellow Book. In addition, the temper of German Romanticism and the subsequent reaction against it had been markedly different from that of French Romanticism. The influence which Nietzsche had on writers who were already familiar with Rousseau was not the same as the influence which he had on those reared on Hegel or Schopenhauer.
Although Nietzsche had certain ideas which appealed strongly to the Decadent consciousness – including the idea that the modern world had been made rotten by the dominance of a cowardly “ethic of the herd” – he was by no means a Decadent himself. His notion of when and where the rot of historical decadence had first set in was radically different from Montesquieu’s, pointing the accusing finger not at the mad emperors of Rome but at Euripides and Socrates, who had previously been thought of as the great heroes of Greek cultural magnificence and Enlightenment. There was nothing at all in Nietzsche to give an atom of encouragement to a cult of artificiality (which accounts for his greater influence on the English Decadents, who could not take such a cult.seriously) and he had not time at all for impuissance, dedicating his later work to a lyrical celebration of the “will to power” which must convert man into übermensch. Even those German writers who could not contrive a similar hopefulness – Thomas Mann remained a doubter whose work is haunted by the idea of society possessed by an incurable sickness – were nevertheless deflected away from French Decadent consciousness.
It is not surprising, in view of this, to find German studies of decadent aristocracy presented in a style more reminiscent of de Roberto than D’Annunzio. Ricarda Huth’s Erinnerungen von Ludolf Ursleu dem Jungeren (1893; tr. as Unconquered Love) is one example. The period produced some exotic and impressionistic poetry, notably that of Max Dauthenday, but Symbolism made less impact than a belated renewal of native sturm und drang. The nearest thing to spleen and impuissance which German writing produced was Jakob Wassermann’s trägheit (sloth), which was extensively discussed in Caspar Hauser (1908).
The most significant work of the fin de siècle period in Germany which invites discussion on account of its Decadent elements is Frank Wedekind’s play Lulu. Evidence of the strength of German taboos is provided by the fact that the work was not published in its proper from until 1962, but it was known in bowdlerized and divided form as Der Erdgeist (1895; tr. as Earth Spirit) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1902; tr. as Pandora’s Box). The play is an elaborate account of the destructiveness which can overcome the sexual impulse in a society where it is rigidly repressed, dressed up with various baroque elements in order to mask and excuse its underlying ferocity.
Mention must also be made, however, of the slightly later writings of Hans Heinz Ewers, who wrote poetry, short stories and novels in a determinedly Decadent vein. Two of his novels featuring the Decadent anti-hero Frank Braun enjoyed considerable commercial success; the better of them is Die Zauberlehrling (1907; tr. as The Sorceror’s Apprentice), in which Braun seeks relief from boredom in persuading a peasant girl that she is a saint, and then must watch as she pursues her career to the bitter end of martyrdom; this was followed by the stylistically-exotic Alraune (1911), which inverts the theme by producing a female incarnation of evil. Ewers later added a third novel to the series, Vampir (1922; tr. as Vampire and Vampire’s Prey) in which Braun is infected with vampiric compulsions.
Wedekind became an important precursor of German Expressionism and his work came to seem much more important andprophetic when, in the years following Germany’s humiliation in the Great War, Berlin suffered a dramatic inversion of former intolerance and experienced a virtual epidemic of calculated Decadence. Ewers, having been an ardent German patriot campaigning for his country in America during World War I, was converted to Nazism but could not adapt to the pressures of that creed as well as D’Annunzio adapted to Mussolini’s Fascism, and seems to have ended his life as an official non-person.
Ewers was not the only German writer to go to America; most of the others, for obvious reasons, never came back. It is probably worth noting as an afterword to the story of absent German Decadence that one of the most interesting works of American Decadent fiction was written (in English) by an emigre who, like Ewers, subsequently became a Nazi. George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907) is a homoerotic fantasy of enervation by psychic theft which has strong echoes of Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Viereck’s poetry is also in a distinctly Decadent vein, and he went on to write with Paul Eldridge a series of popular novels featuring the erotically-inclined adventures of the Wandering Jew and other immortals.
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It is hardly surprising that the search for American Decadents shouldfirst stumble across a European emigré; America is the last place on Earth which one would expect to provide fertile soil for literary Decadence. It was the nation most thoroughly infected with the mythology of progress and the home of the frontier spirit; in the eyes of every right-thinking American, decadence was a purely European problem – even though America had in Edgar Allan Poe the writer who had inspired Baudelaire more than any other.
Poe had no followers in his own country as enthusiastic as Baudelaire and Andreyev. Such accounts of hereditary decadence leading to exotic perversion as “Berenice” and “Morella” had far greater influence in France than in Poe’s native land. The Poesque elements in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work are strictly subdued by moralism, although the curious fantasy “Rappaccini’s Daughter” may have given Baudelaire the cue which led him to call his seminal work Les Fleurs du M
al. Later generations tended to regard Poe as an un-American wimp, and this, combined with a rigid puritanism which considered almost all French fiction indecent and all pretensions to literary style effete, was even more powerful as a disincentive to would-be Decadents than the intellectual climate in turn-of-the-century Germany. It was an attitude which infuriated some of the more cultured immigrants, for its absurd self-righteousness as well as its idiocy, and it may be credited with having eventually produced, by way of angry reaction, one of the most determinedly and extravagantly Decadent of all literary productions: the novella Fantazius Mallare (1922) by the Russian-born Ben Hecht. Like most suspect literary productions of its day this was issued in a limited edition for “private circulation” to “subscribers” because it could not be openly sold – a fate which overcame almost all French fiction, Decadent or not.
Despite its lack of promise as host to a Decadent Movement, however, some American writing was marginally infected by the spirit of Decadence. Gautier was first translated in the U.S.A. in 1882 by Lafcadio Hearn, a writer of similar stylistic ambition and morbid interest. He was, however, too much of an outsider to survive happily in America and in 1890 he went to Japan, where he spent the remainder of his life writing essays and stories based in Japanese mythology, in languidly lapidary prose. Another writer briefly infected with Francophilic enthusiasms was Robert W. Chambers, who was an art student in Paris in the late 1880s. The influence of his Parisian experiences is elaborately displayed in his first two books, In the Quarter (1894) and The King in Yellow (1895). It is revealing that the stories are feeble except for a group in which the corollary influence of Poe is displayed in no uncertain terms – the first four items in the second book are a group of powerful baroque horror stories, among the best of their kind; while the fifth, “The Demoiselle D’Ys” is a heavily sentimentalized Gautieresque timeslip romance. The same impetus, slightly weakened, can be seen in one subsequent collection, the Mystery of Choice (1897), but Chambers was then thoroughly reinfected with the attitude of his native culture and his work became carefully commercial and utterly trivial.
The Dedalus Book of Decadence, Volume 1: Moral Ruins Page 7