New York News - New York Press: New York's Premier News Source and Alternative Newspaper. (original) (raw)

NEWS & COLUMNS

A Gallows Sermon
Life & Death Among the Decadents

Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent by Jad Adams
I.B. Tauris, 211 pages, $29.95

Ernest Dowson–an intimate of Wilde, enemy of Beardsley, translator of the French antichrist Zola–wrote, under the influence of the usual Frenchmen (Baudelaire, Baudelaire and Baudelaire), some of the most memorable and trifling lyrics of the 1890s ("days of wine and roses"? his), was horribly poor, did nothing sensible for himself whatsoever in between hanging around with sailors and cabmen and being nearly run over by omnibuses and so forth, and when he died young, possibly more of drink and heartbreak than tuberculosis ("You are like an Angel from Heaven," he not Keats-unconsciously told the friend’s wife who was dosing him with ipecacuanha wine, "God bless you"), he owned nothing but his clothing and a bundle of verse manuscripts. He died at a friend’s house at the age of 32 (I wonder how many people these days would let you do something so unsanitary as to die at their house...it seems so John Savage. And why? The Victorians were better than we are. Everybody was better than we are.) An absinthe-drinker, an art-for-art’s-sake boy and all-round degenerate, Peter Panning toothlessly around the place in a perpetual l’heure verte, a glass of the green fairy in one hand and a closet-case love song to a dead prepubescent in the other, Dowson, you might say–as someone once said to me, Christlike, in another context–did it for us all. He did what "poets" do, supposedly: The deathwhirl, the slow-motion suicide, that "poetical" life that has so little to do with poetry, and such an awful lot to do with alcoholism.

Dowson drank for the rest of us, at least: he drank like Jesus was scourged. After a West End absinthe rampage with a few select representatives of Victorian Sodom, he confined himself to lemonade and strychnine for a few days, by way of a restorative. That’s drinking. And he hung out with the boys as they were at the time: Aubrey Beardsley, his more interesting actress sister Mabel, Wilde, Smithers (the louche, tubby solicitor-publisher–"the most learned erotomaniac in Europe," according to Wilde–who ran a house Beardsley proposed calling "The Sodley Bed"), Yeats, all. Blacktoothed, smelly, irredeemable, with a Continental upbringing and a Limehouse dock-inheritance tied up in the courts for the extent of his unhappy life, Dowson had the sort of fakir-like gift for self-punishment (would sleep on floor, rather than spare bed, refused loans, coats, dinners) that seems to be wedded to a certain kind of Roman Catholic sensibility–the ascetic Jansenist kind, rather than the Cardinal Newman or Oxford Movement esthetic kind. And he was a drunk. Boy was he a drunk. "The first today," he mumbled guiltily, hitting Yeats’ whiskey.

Aubrey Beardsley, a legitimate genius who was as poor and doomed as anyone else, leaving meetings on the layout of The Savoy, in Dieppe, the Douai of the Decadent Jesuitry, to spit pulmonary blood, came to hate Dowson for his lack of style–his inability to drink properly. Beardsley was not the nicest man alive at the time, actively campaigning against the ruined Wilde (who, be fair, was a bit snide about Beardsley), but he was, I think, right about Dowson. Vincent O’Sullivan wrote: "The spectacle of a man slowly killing himself, not with radiance, still less with decorum, but in a mumped and sordid way, with no decoration in the process, but mean drink shops, poisonous liquor, filth and malady...that, when he saw it in Dowson, irritated Beardsley beyond control." Quite right, too.

Beardsley was dying, but he loved life and radiance and decorum, as one should–and he could hold his liquor, which Dowson could not do, and was skeptical about bohemia, which Dowson could not be. The novelist Conal O’Riordan wrote (with that admirable 19th-century delicacy of opinion which had so much to do with the close memory of dueling) of Dowson: "I’m afraid that Ernest (within my knowledge of him) was completely ‘captivated’ by La Vie de Bohème. He saw only the picturesqueness, though I never heard him give it that name, and was blind to the squalor." Dowson noted chuckleheadedly in Paris that O’Riordan smoked and drank nothing so he could afford two meals a day and apparently rather liked himself for scrimping to be able to afford cigarettes and absinthe. It didn’t seem to occur to Dowson that O’Riordan was scrimping because he was in business, engaged in the composition of manuscripts that were to be sold for not very much money, upon which he had to live. Dowson had even less money, upon which he was obligated to die.

•

The scene is laid in the Decadence. Artists bonding together in "movements" give me a sensation of profound nausea. The Decadents are particularly interesting, though–yet not the way in which they were interested in themselves. The most important thing about these very distinct men is their indistinguishability. The artists of one generation, with their drinking, loves, money problems, triumphs, banality, might as well be the artists of any other generation. It turns out, strangely enough, that you can hardly tell a Decadent or a Romantic from a Modern, except in minor points of style among lesser figures who don’t matter anyway because they wrote contemporaneously–which is what members of what we call "movements" do–rather than timelessly, which is what those we call "writers" do. You don’t have much time for "movements" after you get a clue about individual talent, and notice how few people in any given "movement" had that article. There’s writing, and there isn’t.

Bohemia–the Floating World, with liquor, done properly–is the same thing in every generation, too. There were a lot of guys in the valley of the Tigris, I bet, who thought they were something else with the cuneiform. And then there were one or two guys who actually were, who didn’t go out much. Bohemia is the same nation, really, endlessly replenished. The Lower East Side, or Northampton, where I live, is no different from any other franchise or cantonment of Bohemia: the proportion of actual talent is one person in a thousand, maybe–if the odds aren’t even worse, which I suspect they might be. For every artist having something to drink, on his way to realizing that his homeland is hard work, there’s another one who thinks that Bohemia–which unless you are pretty foolish is just another word for youth–is real.

Conal O’Riordan, who befriended the derelict Dowson, had an interesting view of Bohemia, and if perchance you are reading this in a particular kind of LES bar, I want you, after reading this, to raise the eyes to the room: "There lies a land in the stormy ocean of life," wrote O’Riordan, "which fools think is a free country. Its inhabitants are wrinkled youths, callow satyrs, and sad women; its pleasures are joyless…its sorrows desperate; its mirthful feasts are debauches of depravity; its loves are shameful; its marriages are unions of harpies and embryos...its shores are studded with magnetic rocks, and on them sit wailing...sirens; and woe! woe! to the Ulysses who stops not his ears, for this is the land of Bohemia, where bleach the bones of lost souls."

Obviously what you have writing there is an Irishman, conscious of desperation, littleness, grotesquery and sin (you need to see those to hit your way through to grace–and I mean this humanistically), but O’Riordan was, as Irishman often are, both hilariously medieval and completely on the money. Dowson believed in Bohemia–granted, as a suicide believes in the bullet, but also in other more pathetic, generous and optimistic ways. And he believed in the Decadence, too, which is why someone else was W.B. Yeats. My God, when you think about it, there were people who couldn’t even be Dowson, who, in between being shitfaced and insane, was a literary man of the first water, an excellent-ish versifier, a good translator of French, and here and there he did the right thing, rightly. The finest thing that Dowson ever did, in fact, lack of gallantry aside, was a splendid attack on Lady Burton for having burned Sir Richard’s "pornography"–one of the most philistine acts in the history of letters.

Dowson was characterized by a considerable hideousness of appearance, and speech of unusual beauty and refinement. He wrote a style of great classical simplicity, but that was not uncommon in his age. (It was also not uncommon to be recognized for doing it, which, these days...) He adored Horace. He had, tellingly, a few French ideational problems, always swooning for concept over plain English execution. He spent too much time in France. His epitaph is this:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream

That "within a dream" causes a cringe; Jesus, man, take five more minutes–take a walk–and get down something better. But Dowson didn’t get something better a lot of the time. Maybe he didn’t have any better. Maybe he was just too drunk and ill.

Yeats generously said of Dowson (he was always generous to Dowson; and since Yeats wasn’t a gentleman in other ways, he must have thought it would get him to heaven or something) that he "had what I lacked, conscious deliberate craft, and what I must lack always, scholarship." This is a nice way of saying that Dowson was second-rate. Yeats had genius, which eats scholarship. Yeats’ tribute to the scholarly-craftsy Dowson ("The Grey Rock") is suspiciously better than anything Dowson wrote, and Yeats knew that as well as I do. Beware of the "tribute" that smokes your ass. (All tributes should be of the Jonson-to-Shakespeare variety, and in that proportion: generous yet also bewildered, jealous, enraged.)

We are indebted to Dowson for the best available pictures of Wilde in French exile. Wilde "has changed a good deal–he seems of much broader sympathies, much more human and simple. And his delight in the country, in walking, in the simplicities of life is enchanting." Yet Wilde was still Wilde, "perversely extravagant. He does not realise in the least that nobody except himself could manage to spend the money he does in a petit trou de campagne [a little spot in the country]." They drank absinthe under apple trees, as one does. Dowson (whose heterosexuality was a bit more vaporous and hysterical, I think, than his biographer is prepared to assert) attempted to "reform" Wilde by sending him to a brothel in Dieppe.

This sad and horrid picture resulted, if Yeats can be trusted in any story flavored with sentiment, which, as an Irishman, I grimly suspect he can’t: the toothless Dowson pooling funds on a cafe table with the broke jailbird Wilde. Wilde went into the brothel and "had" a woman, as they used to say. "The first these ten years," he said on emerging, "and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton." Wilde turned to the delighted French crowd and remarked, "But tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character." The man who had once been Oscar Wilde was dead at that moment. One can assume he knew it.

Dowson made the rounds of the literary universe of the 1890s, and he is perhaps most interesting as a kind of literary journalist. He goes to Paris with Conal O’Riordan, and naturally visits Verlaine, the louche Pope of the Decadence. In the so-encouraging-to-young-artists way that he always had, Verlaine–alcoholic, syphilitic, gonorrheal, diabetic, living with a retired prostitute, which has to be a barrel of laughs (yes, I’m turning Yankee in my old age), and who was tended in his elephantine decline by the minatory sort of Warhol Factory guy "Bibi-la-Purée," the umbrella-thieving loon son of an Angoulême businessman turned Bohemia-land "fixer"–sort of an Antonioni mime wearing top hat and dreadful finery, mopping Verlaine’s seat before the great man could sit down in a cafe for another nice glass of syph... (I’m sorry. I just took a two-year-old out for ice cream–and you know what? I’m not really in the goddamned mood to read about drunk poets rotting with syph.)

I should mention that Madder Music, Stronger Wine contains a great account of Verlaine’s funeral.

•

It was a great age in many ways to be sure, the Decadence: you could get anything over the counter, for example, which one would do, and a lot of people on any given gaslit Victorian evening were undergoing relaxment after whacking down some Mrs. DeCausibus’ Lung Tonic, and good for them and bad for us, because, despite military types beating the shit out of flop-haired Decadents on the Embankment, they lived in a freer world than we do. And sexually no less free, too–except for contraception problems. No matter what tv tells you about Victorian times, you could hardly have a Yellow Book meeting without it being disrupted by a girl from Sheffield OD’ing on abortifacients.

We get a bit of Dowson’s unsettling sex life. The Decadents, sexually, like everyone else, sexually, are ultimately as boring as your "sex-positive" pal Ed dressing up as Dark Lord Scary, Dread Emperor-Elf of the Sales Department. Oh how interesting. You’re certainly on the edge, aren’t you. Here are some nipple clamps. Fucking idiot. Get a job. But we’re less bothered with this than we used to be. When’s the last time you saw an article about that shit? Long time, isn’t it? Doris hath guiltily retired her journeywoman’s nipple rings. Along with her Hula-Hoop, once so self-defining!

Dowson’s sexuality: He had what I have to call the closet-case’s usual interest in underage girls. He was not only interested in children, but in dead ones who, alabaster, infest his verses, and we don’t, thank you, need to make a trip to Vienna to figure that one out. Dead little girls aren’t really going to have a problem with the poet being a penniless closet-case too drunk to fuck even if he wasn’t gay anyway. No: there’s nothing safer for someone not actually heterosexual than a dead 12-year-old girl. I hate to sound like Dr. Laura, but look–we’ve all lived in the world. You tell me.

Jad Adams writes: "When he was in a position to have sex with 15-year-old Bertha, in the company of his friend Lefroy with his girl of presumably the same age, Dowson specifically referred to the Criminal Law Amendment Act as the reason they did not proceed. [Dowson] recounted, ‘we agreed that in view of the new Act le jeu ne valait." Right, pal. Stone boulevardier. Dowson was always very busy letting people know that he visited whores–and perhaps he did–but I think he used them like he used drink: as a pistol, as poison. Which, in those days, they were. Dowson nearly lost his mind when a grown Englishwoman expressed interest in him. The woman could have saved him, too. But Dowson didn’t go for it: he wasn’t built that way. He was built for death.

The main thing you pick up reading Dowson’s biography, and looking at his poems, is that Dowson did not, in some hysterical way, know what he actually was, what he was actually saying, what, at any point, he was actually doing. There are a lot of people like that in the world. None of them are poets. You need an eye to be a poet, an eye that sees through the seeming of the world. Dowson didn’t have the eye for the true job–he held a mirror neither to nature nor to himself.

It’s impossible not to read the life of Dowson without feeling anxiety and pain. For Christ’s sake don’t drink so much, one thinks, but he does, of course, the way these people do. It is as painful to read the biography of someone like Dowson as it is to keep half an eye on them at a party, worrying if they’re going to be an asshole again, which they almost always are, and always will be. One comes to the account of Dowson’s death with almost no compassion whatsoever: well, one thinks, you did it to yourself, didn’t you? The man couldn’t drink and was stupid enough to keep trying. Bury him. And may flights of dodos....etc.

The book? It’s totally okay, which is sometimes the best you can hope for, and for its picture of the Decadence I will be glad to have it on my shelf rather than wheelbarrowing it down to the used book store. Biography is so formalized at this point (I mean proper literary biography, not some deformed chimp 100 years from now telling you what Jonathan Ames was really thinking when he wrote The Count of Monte Cristo) that there’s very little that you can do wrong with it. Of the things that can go wrong (second-guessing a person 50 times smarter and more complex than you are is the usual sin of a literary biographer), Jad Adams commits no sins of this or any other variety. One should buy his life of Dowson and see how it’s possible to "do" Bohemia both right and wrong. In fairness, Dowson was poor, and ashamed of it, and brutalized by it, could do nothing about it. And that’s the real villain, in many a villainous life. (The main thing that money does, of course, is to glaze worthless bastards with an aspect of accidental virtue.) Telepathically to Dowson: you did good. There was no harm in you, yet not enough poetry to rule out a day job, either.