A Surfeit of Mirrors

Henri Régnier (1864-1936) was the most commercially successful of all the French Symbolist writers of the 1890s. A Surfeit of Mirrors, published by Black Coat Press, is a collection of most of his important short fiction.

Régnier’s life was as unusual as his fiction. He and his friend (and fellow writer) Pierre Louÿs were rivals for the affections of the same woman. Régnier married her and Louÿs promptly began an affair with her. Marie Régnier would have many offer affairs while Régnier would have a series of intense platonic relationships with married women.

Régnier was an aristocrat whose family had been ruined by the Revolution. Régnier maintained an aristocratic pose throughout his life.

This collection includes Régnier’s two most popular volumes of short fiction, La Canne de jaspe (1897) and Histoires Incertaines (1919). Translator Brian Stableford’s title for this volume, A Surfeit of Mirrors, is well chosen. Mirrors figure in just about all of Régnier’s tales. These are stories of obsessive self-analysis, of introspection taken to an extreme. Régnier’s characters are profoundly alienated from real life. They have a horror of real life and their lives are lived almost entirely internally. They are alienated from their own times as well, living in a world of the past of their own imagination.

Although not one of the characters of his stories is an artist as such art, or at least the aesthetic imagination, plays a crucial role in their lives.

These are stories that make no concessions to realism and many could be justly described as stories of the fantastic. There are women whose homes are taken over by centaurs, satyrs and fauns. Women and men whose lives seem to take place within mirrors, either literally or figuratively. Extraordinary things happen but we can never be sure to what extent these events take place within the imaginations of the characters.

There are hints of the supernatural but again we are dealing with people so alienated from reality that the world of the imagination is more real to them than real life.

Régnier spent a great deal of time in Venice and this city plays a key role in many of his stories. Marcelline; Or, The Fantastic Punishment is a particularly fine story about a marionette theatre with some interesting properties. It’s one of several stories that involve elements of the fantastic. The Sealed Pavilion is another excellent story with a tone of gentle melancholy and regret for the past. Many of the characters in these stories live in the past; in the case of The Glimpse the past really is alive.

The Tale of the Lady of the Seven Mirrors and The Knight Who Fell Asleep in the Snow are stories that also evoke the past and create a mood that celebrates ruin and decay.

The tone of these stories is melancholy but resigned. His characters do not love life enough to fear death.

Régnier’s tales are masterpieces of Symbolist literature and also have some affinities with decadent literature, and even the gothic.

These are exquisite little stories, strange jewels that transport the reader into a strange internal world that is more real than reality.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rococo

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rococo

Take hands and part with laughter;
    Touch lips and part with tears;
Once more and no more after,
    Whatever comes with years.
We twain shall not remeasure
    The ways that left us twain;
Nor crush the lees of pleasure
    From sanguine grapes of pain.

We twain once well in sunder,
    What will the mad gods do
For hate with me, I wonder,
    Or what for love with you?
Forget them till November,
    And dream there's April yet;
Forget that I remember,
    And dream that I forget.

Time found our tired love sleeping,
    And kissed away his breath;
But what should we do weeping,
    Though light love sleep to death?
We have drained his lips at leisure,
    Till there's not left to drain
A single sob of pleasure,
    A single pulse of pain.

Dream that the lips once breathless
    Might quicken if they would;
Say that the soul is deathless;
    Dream that the gods are good;
Say March may wed September,
    And time divorce regret;
But not that you remember,
    And not that I forget.

We have heard from hidden places
    What love scarce lives and hears:
We have seen on fervent faces
    The pallor of strange tears:
We have trod the wine-vat's treasure,
    Whence, ripe to steam and stain,
Foams round the feet of pleasure
    The blood-red must of pain.

Remembrance may recover
    And time bring back to time
The name of your first lover,
    The ring of my first rhyme;
But rose-leaves of December
    The frosts of June shall fret,
The day that you remember,
    The day that I forget.

The snake that hides and hisses
    In heaven we twain have known;
The grief of cruel kisses,
    The joy whose mouth makes moan;
The pulse's pause and measure,
    Where in one furtive vein
Throbs through the heart of pleasure
    The purpler blood of pain.

We have done with tears and treasons
    And love for treason's sake;
Room for the swift new seasons,
    The years that burn and break,
Dismantle and dismember
    Men's days and dreams, Juliette;
For love may not remember,
    But time will not forget.

Life treads down love in flying,
    Time withers him at root;
Bring all dead things and dying,
    Reaped sheaf and ruined fruit,
Where, crushed by three days' pressure,
    Our three days' love lies slain;
And earlier leaf of pleasure,
    And latter flower of pain.

Breathe close upon the ashes,
    It may be flame will leap;
Unclose the soft close lashes,
    Lift up the lids, and weep.
Light love's extinguished ember,
    Let one tear leave it wet
For one that you remember
    And ten that you forget.

Arthur Symons, Palm Sunday: Naples

Arthur Symons, Palm Sunday: Naples

Because it is the day of Palms,
Carry a palm for me,
Carry a palm in Santa Chiara,
And I will watch the sea;
There are no palms in Santa Chiara
To-day or any day for me,

I sit and watch the little sail
Lean sideways on the sea,
The sea is blue from here to Sorrento,
And the sea-wincl comes to me,
And I see the white clouds lift from Sorrento
And the dark sail lean upon the sea.

I have grown tired of all these things,
And what is left for me?
I have no place in Santa Chiara,
There is no peace upon the sea;
But carry a palm in Santa Chiara,
Carry a palm for me.

Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas

Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas superficially resembles Joris-Karl Huysman’s Á Rebours in that it’s also a portrait of an aristocratic aesthete who is alienated from society and from his age. And both Huysman’s hero des Esseintes and Lorrain’s hero are ultra-sensitive to sensory stimuli.

There are major differences, though. While des Esseintes deliberately constructs for himself a life in which he can enjoy sensory pleasures, Lorrain’s Duc de Fréneuse is completely passive and is overwhelmed by nightmarish sights, sounds and smells. His sensitivity to aesthetic stimuli makes his life a living hell. Art affects him deeply, but it merely serves to emphasise the horror of his existence. He was probably never entirely sane, but is now spiralling ever deeper into madness. He is haunted by visions of eyes, by a particular gaze that obsesses him and which he is unable to find outside of dreams.

The paintings of Gustave Moreau also obsess him, especially the painting of Odysseus’s massacre of the suitors. He forms a strange and somewhat destructive friendship with a visionary English painter, and a mysterious Irishman. These friendships have definite homoerotic overtones – Lorrain was a homosexual, with a preference for rough trade.

Monsieur de Phocas also superficially resembles Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but it is in no sense merely a second-rate imitation of either Wilde’s book or of Huysman’s. Monsieur de Phocas can stand very well on its own merits. A must-read for all devotees of decadence.

The Fiery Angel by Valery Bruisov

Rupprecht has lived an adventurous life in early sixteenth century Germany, having been a university student, a landsknecht in the wars in Italy, and a trader in Spain’s colonies on the New World. His life is changed forever when, quite by chance, he meets a strange woman named Renata in an inn in Germany. She appears to be possessed by devils, but it transpires that she is haunted by the presence of an angel named Madiël, a presence that has been with her since childhood.

She desired nothing more than physical union with this angel, but because of her sexual lust for Madiël he abandoned her. She has been seeking him ever since, and believing him to be incarnated in the person of a handsome nobleman, Count Heinrich, she seduced him. Now he has abandoned her as well. She enlists the help of Rupprecht to find her beloved, and this begins a strange and obsessive relationship between Renata and Rupprecht. At times she seems to love Rupprecht, at other times she is repelled by him. At times she is overcome by lust and their relationship becomes passionately sexual, and then she is overcome by horror and disgust and will not let him touch her or even speak to her. Rupprecht’s suffering is intense, but he is unable to break free of her spell, and becomes involved in her plans to summon the aid of demons to find the true object of her love, the angel Madiël.

In the course of their occult experiments Rupprecht makes the acquaintance of other celebrated questers for occult knowledge, including Henry Cornelius Agrippa and Doctor Faustus. Rupprecht is prepared to sacrifice his immortal soul if only he can make Renata happy.

The Russian decadent poet and novelist Valery Bruisov published The Fiery Angel in 1909. It’s a novel of the occult, and an exceptionally good one. It’s also a story of obsessive and very unhealthy love, and a tale of religious, spiritual and sexual obsession. The extreme unhealthiness of the relationship between Renata and Rupprecht is its main claim to being a work of decadent fiction, and certainly it’s a relationship whose destructive qualities are on a truly epic scale. Whether Renata’s angel actually exists remains obscure. While it is possible that he is nothing more than the product of her own frenzied erotic longings, Bruisov is not entirely sceptical of the reality of the occult, so the true nature of Renata’s obsessions remains shrouded in mystery, which is of course as it should be.

Bruisov lovingly recreates the world of late medieval Europe, and in Renata and Rupprecht he has given us two of the most ill-starred lovers in all of fiction. Renata is both heroine and villainess, while Rupprecht’s own motives are also somewhat ambiguous. It’s a fascinating and memorable book, the product of a specifically Russian brand of decadence, and I recommend it very highly indeed.

Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams

Arthur Machen is known (insofar as he is known at all) as a writer of supernatural fiction, and is sometimes considered to be a representative of Late Victorian Gothic. Whether his novel The Hill of Dreams is really a novel of the supernatural is hard to say.

The hero is Lucian Taylor, the son of an impoverished English country clergyman. In adolescence Lucian has a mystical, visionary experience in the remains of an old Roman fort. Whether he has really come into contact with occult forces that linger there, or whether the visionary experience comes entirely from within, is never specified and in the end it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that Lucian, who is already obsessed with “useless reading and unlikely knowledge”, feels himself from this point on to be set apart from the rest of humanity. He dreams of becoming a writer.

The Hill of Dreams is a book about books, and the writing of books. It’s a book about visionary experiences. It’s also a book about a young man whose entire life is taken over by such experiences. He becomes more and more cut off from the general run of humanity, and from what ordinary people consider to be reality.

This is also very much a decadent book, and can be considered to be one of the finest flowerings of the English Decadence, even though that movement is generally considered to have run its course by the time it was published in 1907. The writing is gorgeous, highly charged and subtly erotic. The whole book has an intensely visionary quality. There’s a sense of another reality intersecting our everyday reality. This other reality cannot be perceived by everyone, but for those attuned to such things it may be more real than everyday reality.

This is an absolutely superb book. One of the most exciting books I’ve read in a long time. Very highly recommended.

Senso and other stories by Camillo Boito

Senso and other stories by Camillo Boito (1836-1914) is yet another in the fabulous Decadence from Dedalus series. Boito wrote these tales over a fairly lengthy period, from the 1860s to the 1890s.

They’re not decadent in the gloriously overheated Huysmans style, but there are some neat little stories of sexual and aesthetic obsession. A Body, Buddha’s Collar and The Grey Blotch all in their various ways fall into this category.

There’s a definite hint of the gothic as well, and he had a gift for elegantly twisted and cynical endings. The title story was the subject of a celebrated movie adaptation by Visconti. It’s a tale of a woman exploited by her lover, and of her revenge.

A Body involves a beautiful woman, and two men who lust after her perfect body in very different ways. It’s both a supremely decadent tale of sensual and aesthetic desire and an effective little horror story.

Vade Retro, Satana sees a priest tormented by his hunger for a fallen woman, or at least a woman he regards as fallen, since he seems to consider any woman who isn’t a pious virgin to be a fallen woman.

Christmas Eve is another tale of obsession, while Buddha’s Collar exploits Boito’s considerable talent for rather black humour. The Grey Blotch is a fine story of lust, self-disgust and guilt.

Boito was an engineer, architect and art historian as well as being a writer of fiction. He is another superb writer rescued from obscurity by Dedalus. Highly recommended.

Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach

Bruges-la-Morte, published in 1892, is possibly the best known work by the Belgian Symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach. The novella concerns a man, Hugues Viane, who has settled in the city of Bruges after the death of his wife. He intends to devote the remainder of his life to a kind of cult of death centred around his deceased wife, and he finds Bruges, which to him seems like a city of the dead, a congenial place in which to do this.

He identifies himself with the city, and comes to feel that he shares its moods and even its soul. He keeps his dead wife’s possessions, and also a lock of her hair preserved under glass. This existence continues until he encounters a woman in the streets, a woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to his wife. This over-sensitive man is prone to obsession at the best of times, and soon becomes obsessed with this woman. She is an actress. They begin an affair. The more he tries to make her fit his image of his departed wife the more he sees that it isn’t quite working, and to add to his problems his obsession is slowly becoming a scandal. Bruges is a very Catholic city, and he starts to fear that perhaps he really is committing a sin and that as a result he may never be re-united with his bride after death. But he has also fallen in love with the actress, although he is perhaps never quite sure which woman it is he is in love with. Of course this situation is not going to end happily.

Hugues’ difficulty in distinguishing between the real woman he once loved, the woman with whom he is now having a affair and the woman of his imagination who is composed of parts of both women is traced with exquisite sensitivity as is his identification with Bruges which becomes both himself and the thing he loves. In his mind death is possibly more real than life.

A wonderful little book. Highly recommended. There are several English translations available; the edition I read was translated by Philip Mosley and published by the University of Scranton Press. It’s also available from Dedalus Books.