by Gary Lachman
It was this sort of thing that appealed to the fin de siecle taste for what we might call satanic decadence. But by the late 19th century, the fascination with evil as a means of stimulating a flagging consciousness was widespread. Essential to the Black Mass is a meticulous "revaluation of values," in which the sacramental elements are reversed: the most obvious emblem of this is the cross turned upside down.' Sex, urine, and ordure were included in the rituals as well. Silly, but in their heyday they were the height, or depth, of depravity.
Yet along with the idea of Satan as the archetypal rebel or fount of forbidden pleasure, among some writers in the late 19th century, a different picture of the Devil arose. In The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky presented the Devil as a rather shabby, down at heel customer, a seedy petit bourgeois who wears checked trousers and has just had himself vaccinated for smallpox. Dostoyevsky knew that the image of the Devil as a kind of superman, beyond good and evil, gave a dangerous carte blanche to a generation of anarchists and atheists convinced that "nothing is true" and "everything permitted." His influence, however, has been minimal, and a new generation of satanic rebels - comprised today mainly of heavy metal headbangers - finds it all too easy to have some sympathy for the Devil.
Charles Baudelaire II
Baudelaire's Satanism was touched on earlier. Like all young Romantics, early in his career Baudelaire espoused what we could call a satanic, or certainly a decadent philosophy of life. Along with Gerard de Nerval and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Baudelaire indulged in several eccentricities. Among other things he died his hair green more than a century before any punk thought of it. As Enid Starkie recounts in her biography, as a young aspiring dandy, Baudelaire threw himself into the flamboyant lifestyle expected of fledgling poets. His father's inheritance allowed him a considerable latitude. As mentioned, he furnished his rooms lavishly and frequently changed the decor, selling furniture and pictures he had tired of at a discount well before paying for them, then purchasing new ones, and thus acquiring some of the life-long debts that would crush him. He papered his rooms in red and black and hung curtains of heavy damask. His library consisted of rare volumes of French, Renaissance and Latin poets. Hidden cupboards contained an impressive collection of liqueurs. Delacroix adorned the walls, thick carpets muffled the urban cacophony, and voluptuous perfumes filled the air. This atmosphere of sensuous and aesthetic refinement would be codified years later in Huysmans' influential novel A Rebours.
While he could afford it, Baudelaire's own appearance rivalled that of his rooms. He was often seen in a black velvet tunic, gold belt, skin-tight trousers, patent-leather shoes, white silk socks, a white linen blouse opened at the neck to reveal a scarlet tie, the whole ensemble accentuated by his pale pink gloves. On nights when the Club des Haschichins met, Baudelaire and his friends sat noisily around his elegant walnut table, waving daggers and swords, stoned out of their minds. His neighbours would sometimes complain, and Baudelaire would excuse himself for the noise and explain that he had only been dragging his mistress around the floor by her hair. In the cafes he would epater le boheme by remarking that he was the son of an unfrocked priest, or regale them with stories of how he murdered his father. On one occasion he complained of an evening meal that the cheese had a faint odour of child's brains. That Baudelaire relished these antics is clear, and he made a point of ratcheting up his demonic reputation by speaking of his erotic need for freaks, or by demanding of one respectable madame that she allow him to hang her from his ceiling, bite her succulent white flesh and make love to her. To Baudelaire's regret, the lady declined.'
Baudelaire's behaviour wasn't anything new, the Bouzingos of an earlier generation - Nerval, Petrus Borel, Theophile Dondey - had already dotted most of these i's and crossed nearly all the t's. But unlike many of the Romantic wild boys, Baudelaire's sensibilities matured, and through "implacable life" he learned to appreciate more man's satanic weakness and less his adolescent rebellion. Although he is considered a high priest of modernity, throughout his later years Baudelaire maintained a belief that we consider positively medieval: the actual existence of the Devil. Baudelaire's choice of themes - corpses, prostitutes, drunkenness, disease: in general, evil - lead a superficial reader to believe he revelled in these things. The truth is that Baudelaire is an old fashioned moralist, and he was reviled by his contemporaries less for his embrace of the dark side than for his unflagging insistence that we face these elements in ourselves. Although the reports of his deathbed conversion, like those of Rimbaud, are unconvincing at best, Baudelaire clearly did believe in Original Sin. Man is a fallen creature, and it is the task of the poet to remind him of his lost heritage. Yet it is clear that the Symbolist aesthetic, the idea that the external world is a mere cipher, leads almost naturally to an embrace of the rejected and repressed, to that which the healthy, plodding, insensitive mind casts aside as worthless. Hence Baudelaire's discovery of beauty in the sick, decrepit and ugly which, clearly, is another form of reversal.
Arthur Rimbaud
When Baudelaire died, it was as a critic and translator that he was known, if at all. Even his closest friends, like Theodore de Banville, remarked at his funeral on his importance as a man of letters: an appreciation of his significance as a poet was left to the future. That significance was uncovered by a new generation of Symbolists, by Paul Verlaine and by a poet who is perhaps the most well known and imitated embodiment of satanic revolt, Arthur Rimbaud. Baudelaire, it is true, showed the way, but where he picked a few flowers of evil, Rimbaud spent an entire season in hell.
The legends surrounding Rimbaud are, as is often the case, better known than his work, and the most well known of these is the fact that he abandoned poetry and France at the age of nineteen and embarked on his own journey to the East. Or, more accurately, Africa, where he spent a decade trading in coffee and guns (it is also rumoured hashish), and amassing a considerable fortune. In 1891, at the age of thirty-six, he developed a tumour on his knee, and on his return to France, in Marseilles his right leg had to be amputated. The next months were spent in agony, cancer was diagnosed (but it may have been syphilis) and on 10 November 1891, Rimbaud, who had just turned thirty-seven, died. Not, however, before returning to the Church after a dramatic deathbed confession, or so his sister Isabelle claimed.
Other legends involve his tumultuous relationship with Paul Verlaine. The two sodomized, took drugs, drank heavily, wrote poetry, scandalized their peers, and, like any couple, had some vicious, nasty fights. During one of these Verlaine famously shot Rimbaud in the wrist, and spent some time in prison for it. These were the years of Rimbaud as the uncontrollable roaring boy, foul-mouthed, drunk on absinthe, dirty and dressed in rags, with his trademark pipe perched upside-down in his sneering lips. If this hooliganism was all Rimbaud accomplished, there would be little reason to remember him today. But he is responsible for taking the idea of the poet as a visionary, a seer, to previously unscaled heights and, perhaps even more so, hitherto unplumbed depths.
It is true that Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name Comte de Lautreamont, anticipated some of Rimbaud's discoveries and that his writing also displays a decided satanic character. Lautreamont's main work, Chants de Maldoror, is full of demonic energy, and reeks of sadism, perversity and dark, diabolical urges. Infanticide and cruel humiliating sex feature heavily, and although Ducasse died unknown at 24, when his work was re-discovered it understandably became a central inspiration for the Surrealists. But little is known of Lautreamont's life and it is unclear how much, if at all, he dabbled in the occult. This is not true of Rimbaud. Like Baudelaire and Nerval, with whom he has much in common, Rimbaud was a reader of works on mysticism, magic and alchemy. Hailed as a founding father of modernism, Rimbaud's poetic theories, which were to have a profound influence on 20th century literature, are rooted in his deep immersion in the popular occult writing of his time.
Rimbaud was born in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, in 1854. His f
ather, an army captain, abandoned his family when Rimbaud was still a boy, and Arthur was raised by his stern, bigoted mother, a woman seemingly bereft of any conception of poetry. For a brilliant, sensitive and strong willed child, it was a classic formula for rebellion, but young Arthur, a child prodigy, was well behaved, a model pupil who astonished his teachers. Rimbaud read voraciously, and had a clear talent for Latin, winning first prize in a competition. Yet poetry became an early obsession, and at sixteen Rimbaud was writing brilliant pastiches of the Parnassians. His facility quickly led to criticism, and Rimbaud's poetry began to speak increasingly of a blasphemous revolt against the suffocating world of Charleville and the repressive embrace of his mother. Rimbaud ran away from home on more than one occasion, once to Paris to throw in his lot with the Commune of 1871. During this episode it's believed he had some shattering homosexual experience - possibly raped by soldiers - and it's after this that his rebellion became total. Along with drunkenness, unruliness, filth, violence and a taste for scatological expression, part of Rimbaud's revolt included a study of the occult.
Rimbaud was introduced to the occult by Charles Bretagne, a drinking companion from the cafes and bars of Charleville, where Rimbaud spent most of his time caging drinks and being more or less blasphemous. Bretagne was a customs official, amateur fiddler and draughtsman, who was also an habitual student of the Kabbalah.s Like Rimbaud, Bretagne was known for his outrageous opinions and behaviour. As Enid Starkie remarks, in the Middle Ages, Bretagne would probably have been burnt at the stake as a sorcerer.6 He encouraged Rimbaud's rebellion, arguing that vice was a means to enlarge the spirit, a belief shared by the ancient Gnostics. He also lent Rimbaud books on magic, alchemy and the Kabbalah. Given what was available in Charleville at the time, it's more than likely that what Rimbaud read were many of the works discussed here. Rimbaud himself did not record what he read, but it is reasonable to assume that his list consisted of writers like Balzac, Baudelaire, Nerval, Saint-Martin, Cazotte, Hoene Wronski and Eliphas Levi. From Baudelaire alone Rimbaud would have absorbed the basic Swedenborgian idea of a higher spiritual world with which the physical world shares correspondences. That in itself would have been sufficient material for his own magical theory of poetry as `vision'.
Rimbaud's The'orie du Voyant was first set forth in two letters, written in May 1871, not long after his return from his catastrophic visit to Paris. Writing to his teacher George Izambard and a fellow poet, Paul Demeney, Rimbaud voiced his much repeated dictum that, "One must, I say, be a visionary, make oneself a visionary." The path to this, Rimbaud argued, led "through a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses." The poet must face "ineffable torture;" he must possess "superhuman strength," be "the great criminal, the great sickman, the accursed and the supreme Savant!" And the goal of all his suffering is: "the unknown." Rimbaud's `disordering of the senses' would become standard for practically all aspiring poets to come, from the Symbolists to the Punks.
Rimbaud may have picked up the idea of the poet as visionary from Eliphas Levi. In Les Clefs des Grands Mysteres - a work later translated as The Keys of the Mysteries by Aleister Crowley - Levi wrote that the poets of the future are called on to "rewrite the divine comedy" according to the mathematics of God. This is a reference to the Pythagorean ideas of Levi's mentor Wronksi. The poet who accomplishes this, Levi claimed, would become co-creator with the deity. That poetry, language, was a means of achieving this is a fundamental belief of magic: according to the Kabbalah, if the secret name of God, the Tetragammaton, were spoken, the universe would be destroyed. Rimbaud believed such destruction was necessary before the new creation could begin. Hence his "rational disordering of all the senses."
Rimbaud's link between poetry and occultism is clear from the title of the collection of prose poems that embodies his Theorie du Voyant: Illuminations. Although there's a slight possibility the title is not Rimbaud's, his study of various occult illuminati, as well as the clear occult source for his Theorie du Voyant suggest otherwise. In any event, it is clear that in these works, Rimbaud is taking language into new, unexplored regions, into what he called "the unknown." Hence the difficulty many readers find on first encountering the work. Perhaps a less ambiguous expression of Rimbaud's occult poetics is in the poem Voyelles, "Vowels." Here Rimbaud expanded on Baudelaire's synesthesia, linking the vowels to particular colours: A black, E white, I red, U green, 0 blue, thus codifying the unity of sensation central to Symbolism. But as Enid Starkie argues, there is good reason to believe that Rimbaud based his alphabet on the sequence of colours associated with the alchemical process.'
Although Rimbaud was never a Satanist in the proper sense, he did recognize in the Devil the rebel par excellence. In the historian Jules Michel's writing on witchcraft, he would have found good arguments for seeing in Satan a figure of intelligence, creativity and will, whose worship the Church repressed in the Middle Ages. In Michelet's view, Satan is more a Prometheus figure, with echoes of Hermes Trismegistus, than a prince of darkness. Rimbaud, eager to cast off all inhibitions, would have found much encouragement in Michelet's argument.
Yet, after only two years of his "rational disordering of the senses," Rimbaud found himself at a dead end. The result was a merciless account taking, culminating in his harrowing A Season in Hell and the abandonment of poetry.
In his letter to George Izambard, Rimbaud wrote: "I is another." He repeated the phrase in his letter to Paul Demeny, adding that "The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire." "He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it." In order to do this, however, a certain distortion of the usual self must be accomplished. ". . . the soul has to be made monstrous," he told Demeny. "Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face."
This warts and all plunge into self-analysis left Rimbaud revolted by his own revolt, and full of revulsion for his rebellion. A Season in Hell is Rimbaud's unflinching account of his alchemical descent into his own underworld, a fragmentation of his psyche into its disparate elements, the dissolutio in the first stage of the Great Work. After this, Rimbaud abandoned poetry, his homeland, and himself. "I" had become "another".8
J.K. Huysmans
If one book can claim to be a bible of decadence it has to be Huysmans' A Rebours. Translated as "Against Nature" or "Against the Grain," neither rendering really captures the essence of Huysmans title: as one literary critic suggests, "Up the Arsehole" is a more accurate and graphic attempt.9 In the character of des Esseintes, Huysmans took Baudelaire's brief fling as a dandy and combined it with the aesthetic predilections of other eccentrics - Ludwig II of Bavaria, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Edmond de Goncourt and, most famously, Robert, Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac"' - and created an archetype of aristocratic world-rejection. In the "refined Thebaid" at Fontenay-aux-Roses, des Esseintes, a neurasthenic, oversensitive, weak and world-weary aesthete, shuts out the boring realities of everyday life and reconstructs his universe according to his over refined tastes. A jewelencrusted tortoise, voluptuous perfumes, exotic plants, an `organ of liqueurs' on which he performs oral concertos, a library of Latin decadent writers bound in rare Moroccan leather - Huysmans' DIY book on extravagant selfexpression became the blueprint of the fin de siecle. Arthur Symons famously called it "the breviary of the Decadence," and most readers know that it is the notorious "yellow backed book" that sent Dorian Gray on his exquisite road to perdition.
Yet, if not entirely accurate, "Against Nature" certainly expresses the basic philosophy of Huysmans and his Symbolist peers. From Swedenborg's belief that the external world is a symbol of a higher, spiritual one, we arrive at a complete rejection of Nature and the natural, and an enervating search for something else. In A Rebours that possible something else takes many forms: a glass case displaying silk stockings, a dining room fitted out like a ship's cabin, even the taste of moldy food found in the gutter. As may be expected, des Esseintes' attempts prove unsuccessful, and his need to escape
a crushing, paralysing ennui is unabated. Barbey d'Aurevilly, reviewing A Rebours, remarked that its author would have to choose "between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross." Huysmans did end his life as an oblate in the Catholic Church. His road to salvation, however, led through some curious detours.
Doris-Karl Huysmans was born in Paris in 1848, the only child of a French mother and Dutch father and his early years were saddened by the early death of his father and his mother's subsequent remarriage. After finishing his education, at the age of eighteen, Huysmans entered government employment as a fonctionnaire, or civil servant, working with the Surete Generale. He remained there for thirty-two years. In 1874 Huysmans published his first book, a collection of prose poems, Le Drageoir a epices, which showed the influence of Baudelaire. Coming under the influence of Zola and the Medan Group, Huysmans turned to novel writing, and produced a series of competent, if unremarkable, works in the naturalist style of his mentor. But by 1882, Huysmans had become bored with Zola's sociological approach, and in a letter to his master complained that he felt the need "for a complete change."" The result was A Rebours which marked Huysmans' rejection of Zola and the start of his fascination with the strange, bizarre and artificial.
A Rebours, however, for all its rejection of Zola's methods, retains many of the naturalist school's practices. There is, for example, the prodigious research into a variety of subjects: botany, Latin literature, the Middle Ages, as well as the meticulous detail given to des Esseintes' diet, reading habits, style of dress, the decor of his rooms. Not much happens, and one often feels Huysmans enjoys communicating to his readers the extent of his scholarship. A similar experience greets the reader of La Bas. Like Zanoni, La Bas is full of fascinating information on Satanism, alchemy, the Middle Ages, Christian mysticism, herbology, astrology, black magic, Illuminism, and a host of other subjects. It's not unfair to see it as a kind of encyclopedia of fin de siecle occultism masquerading as a novel.