From Decadence to Dissonance: A leaf through the art, music, literature and sexual politics that shaped the late Victorian Era.
The 19th Century’s penchant for aesthetics helped define one of the most vibrant and vital periods in modern history. But the highly eroticised works of Klimt, Wilde and Beardsley would come crashing down through the courts, the irons, the fire and the brimstone of the impending 20th Century.
The ideal meeting of the decadent movement might have been Oscar Wilde’s short play Salomé. Originally written in French in 1891, Wilde’s tragedy tells in one act the biblical story of the beautiful Salomé, the stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, and the final few days of the life of John the Baptist. Told in elegant and powerfully symbolic prose, the play is often called Wilde’s piece of “strange music”. Oscar incited this idea himself by declaring in a letter that “the recurring phrases of Salome,… bind it together like a piece of music” Its flamboyance, its hypnotic rhythms, recurring lexical riffs and hauntingly melodic passages stitch the action together in such a way as to mimic some sort of dramatic aria.
When Salomé was translated into English three years later the text was accompanied by highly stylised and erotic illustrations by the young Aubrey Beardsley. Perfectly capturing the attitude of Wilde’s lyrical decadence and visual intensity, the etchings seem now almost inseparable from the original script.
Naturally, this movement wasn’t limited to Britain, the roots had been stretching out on the continent for the past 20 years. The development of the decadent movement there lead to painters like the Viennese Gustav Klimt creating artwork that was inspired by the priceless mosaics of Byzantium. Influenced by their inherent ‘flatness’, Klimt creates patchwork canvasses of glittering gold and vigourous colours.
In fact, the lack of ‘realist’ perspective in famous works like The Kiss and the Portrait of Adele seem to be the beating at the heart of the genre; to disband with depth and background and to push everything to the shimmering fore. When, in these images and in Wilde’s poetry, the visual intensity is forced to be so immediate and so beautiful, the allure of decadence suddenly becomes so directly apparent: these works are not concerned with representing anything, accurately or otherwise, they are concerned with creating art and nothing else.
This highly aesthetic approach is elegantly outlined in Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, he claims there quite simply that:
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
Of course this preoccupation with creating beauty was one that was not allowed to last. Salomé was banned from the London stage before it even had the chance to premiere and Beardsley was hounded as a pedlar of filth and obscenity and was forced to live out the rest of his tragically short life, a sickly Catholic convert, in Menton in France.
Wilde himself of course was tried and imprisoned for Gross Indecency on accounts of his homosexuality. Never truly recovering from the hard labour meted out at Reading Prison, Oscar Wilde died in Paris in 1900. So disgusted with Wilde’s crimes were the wider public that, from the point of his conviction, not a single child was christened Oscar in Britain for twenty years.
The imposed repression of the Victorian era at far reaching consequences. Forced by the prevailing society to conform with certain values and tastes, decadent art was forced out of polite conversation and largely ignored. As Wilde’s popularity receded, more ‘wholesome’ writers like Kipling and Hardy began to blossom.
In short, the century that followed seems totally at odds with the simple premise that Wilde laid down in his Preface in 1890. The world of Reading Gaol, of quantum mechanics, of Flanders, Ypres and the Holocaust often seems to have very little to do with artifice and beauty at all. Though Wilde’s imprisonment was to protect the sensibilities of public, the impending modernism, with its catastrophic treatment of banality, would ironically lead to dangers far greater than supposed moral delinquency.
Britpop Boppers: is ANYONE listening anymore?
I’m pretty sure that it’s seasonal. In fact, I’m utterly convinced that Britpop heavyweights like Oasis, Primal Scream and The Charlatans all have some sort of cosmic affinity; a sonic menstrual cycle if you will (and I wish you wouldn’t, because that sounds disgusting) so that they release new material all at the same time.
It might be one, two or even three years between releases but, when the moon is on the cusp of entering Bore-us and the stars are so aligned, they each decide to return to Earth, feast on human flesh and release repetitive gumpf.
Normally, they prop up their latest album release with a string of festival appearances. Primal Scream are dab hands at second billing a rock festival, running through “Rocks” and a couple of numbers off Screamadelica and then shoehorning in some new track about Calamity Jane or something. ‘Hang on’ the crowd mew and bleat, ‘this is new; baah, whass this? Bah, Baaah.”
(sigh) I suppose my beef is this: JESUS CHRIST, who ACTUALLY cares?!?
Did anyone see Primal Scream on The Culture Show the other day? It was possibly the most pointless three and a half minutes of my rather tedious little life. That’s not to say that the music was that bad (I mean it was terrible, but that’s beside the point) it was just the archetype of the ‘same old same old’.
Bobby Gillespie was doing his weasily best at the microphone, slurring the old Madchester trivialities, whilst Mani was bobbing about in the background with the custom trinity: loafers, cream coloured jeans and a Ben Sherman. Back stage it must be like an episode of Pinky and the Brain:
Mani: What are we going to do tonight Bobby?
Bobby: The same thing we do every night Mani: mediocre pub rock bollocks.
Then there’s The Charlatans- hang on, they were on this series of The Culture Show as well (I hope this is cock up rather than conspiracy). Anyway, whasshisname Burgess is now sporting some sort of Warhol cut and committing the same sort of fragile beige guff over the same sort of ‘trippy’ Rickenbacker guitar lines. Yawn, yawn yawnnnnnnnzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Then of course there’s Oasis who I think the world stopped listening to precisely when that clock chimed nine on the inside of the Be Here Now album cover; so what’s that… about 11 years ago? Still, they’ve got a little further to go before they start encroaching on the length of Bob Geldof’s undead career.
Jesus wept.
What really gets my goat on this whole thing has nothing to do with age or genre or anything like that, it’s the complete artlessness of the their exploits.
And what’s worse is that they even seem to have some sort of nauseating pride in their dopey steadfastness. Otherwise how else would one account for the unfathomable insistence of Liam Gallagher to sporadically come out with seriously uninteresting tosh like “We’re a rock’n'roll band” and “we’re gonna make a good old old fashioned rock’n'roll album” I mean whasssthatabout Liam?? Because it seems to me like you’re promising to churn out a load of tired, uninspired balls… well, actually, I take that back because that’s exactly what Don’t Believe the Truth felt like. Oh, and just out of interest – can anyone think of a worse or more boring name for an album than Don’t Believe the Truth? It’s just utter stool water isn’t it.
So there you have it. Primal Scream’s heroically titled Beautiful Future was released just 10 days ago, on the 21st July. The Charlatans foray into the world of digitalism came when You Cross My Path was released just before the summer and Oasis’s outstandingly spiritual Dig Out Your Soul is due on general release from the 6th October.
I for one will be counting down the sleeps.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: Heady Murder, Spoil and Villainy
Born in the same year as Shakespeare and every bit as popular with audiences at the time, meet Christopher Marlowe, the drunken, homosexual hell-raiser that is too often England’s forgotten literary genius.
Born in Canterbury in 1564, Christopher Marlowe would go on to capture the Elizabethan stage with his vibrant and often erotic plays. Drenched in sex, sin and sensational language, before Shakespeare had managed to get a foothold on the playhouses of the South Bank, Marlowe had arrived, achieved amazing success and then been stabbed through the eye in a barroom brawl… the man who killed him, it must be added, got off for self defence.
Unlike Shakespeare, Marlowe went to university and, thanks to wealthy patronage, was enrolled at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Here is where Marlowe’s colourful life and work first begins to take shape. An anarchic student, when he wasn’t drinking with other poets and playwrights like Robert Greene and Thomas Nash, Marlowe was embroiled in claims of spying and counter spying in Reims, an area of Northern France where many Catholic conspiracies were concocted. Initially being denied his degree by the university, the highest tier of government, the Privy Council, got involved and insisted that Cambridge issue him with the MA. What service, we may ask ourselves, had Marlowe done in order to win favours from the English authority?
Marlowe’s first literary works began to emerge whilst still an undergraduate. He translated the Roman poet Ovid and began work on his first play Dido, Queen of Carthage. This drama focusses heavily on events described in Virgil’s Aeneid and opens with Jupiter, the king of the gods, “dandling the infant Ganymede upon his knee” and whispering “Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me.” Can you imagine anyone getting away with that today?
When Marlowe’s plays are put on at the theatres of the South Bank, his penchant for the debauched shows no sign of slowing down. Edward II ends with the vicious murder of the king by the assassin Lightborn. As Edward is despised for his weakness at the hands of his supposed homosexual relationship with his “favourite” Piers Gaveston, Lightborn (a play on the name ‘Lucifer’ – the bringer of the light) enters Edward’s cell and murders him by ramming a red hot poker into his backside.
Of course, it’s not just fruity story lines that Marlowe is famous for. His poetic language and structure has influenced some of England’s most celebrated drama. “The Mighty Line” is how his admirers often refer to his verse because of its robust and rhythmical nature. It is true that Marlowe did not invent what we call today ‘blank verse’ (a line that is unrhymed and contains five stresses – “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships”) but he certainly mastered it. And his poetic imagination certainly influenced writers like Shakespeare. In the Jew of Malta Marlowe has the beautiful, young Abegail step out onto a balcony above her father Barabas who then asks: “But stay, what star shines yonder in the east? | The loadstar of my life, if Abigail.” Shakespeare borrows this for his famous scene in Romeo and Juliet when, in the second scene of act two, Romeo sees Juliet walk out onto her balcony and speaks the immortal: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? | It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
Marlowe’s most famous play is arguably Dr Faustus, a tragedy about the Wittenberg scholar who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for 24 years of magical powers. Inspiring works of drama, literature, opera and even an episode of the Simpsons, Marlowe’s version of the story, though not the original, is probably the most famous. Controversial throughout its 400 year history, Dr Faustus is troubling and thought-provoking but undeniably a work of vivid genius. The popularity of the play and its continuing appeal is what seems to be at the heart of all of Marlowe’s oeuvre. That is to say, his work and reputation have an intensity that defies the problems that they harbour. His style may be dark and dangerous to look at but, like Faustus, we cannot fail to still be intrigued by the power that he harnesses.
Dying at just 30, it seems impossible to imagine what he would have produced if he had lived as long as Shakespeare; and, indeed, it may be impossible to know what position this unruly and truly wild dramatist would command in the history of English literature today. He may not be the most level-headed or morally sound role model but he is an intriguing artist that can no more be ignored today as he could when he was alive.
BALLADS AND BINGE DRINKING
As the new film The Edge of Love is put on general release, we take a look at the current surge in the poet Dylan Thomas’s popularity
Dylan Thomas is undoubtedly one of the great literary heroes of Wales. His lilting, lyrical poetry seems to drift effortlessly over the south of the country, nipping up now and again in quotations above old wooden bars polished with beeswax or cast into the brass placards that are pinned beneath statues in public squares. He seems, in only the 55 years since his death, to have become a bit of a mythic character; his words are often old and warm and familiar. Yet, he also manages to retain an almost rockstar like aura. He is less the literary father of the nation than the roguish, prodigal son. Byron was hailed as being mad, bad and dangerous to know, but up against Thomas he was a pussy cat.
Danger, debauchery, drinking and Dylan Thomas seem like natural bedfellows, and what a rather adroit menáge they would make. He is, if not a particularly amiable role model, at least an intriguing one. With Matthew Rhys, Keira Knightly and Sienna Miller all starring in The Edge of Love, a new film that explores the poet’s colourful love life, a shot of glamour and cool is bound to be injected into the growing Thomas phenomenon. He is now, if he wasn’t before, untouchably cool.
In fact, of late, people are practically tripping over each another to make public their reverence for the Welsh poet. Mick Jagger, for instance, owns the rights to his 1939 collection, The Map of Love. Pierce Brosnan had his son christened “Dylan Thomas” and Neil Morrissey owns a handful of properties in Thomas’s spiritual hometown of Laugharne. Musician Ben Taylor named his recent album Famous Among the Barns as a tribute to the man and, if one decides to look for him, his work can be found in a smattering films, albums and television programmes from the likes of Chumbawumba to George Clooney.
So why Dylan Thomas and why now? Is his work just the new flavour of the month? Are people attracted to his rebellious persona or has this modern age discovered something truly remarkable and artistic in his body of work?
Well, not according to Nicholas Lezard from the Guardian. His rather snivelly attitude to the “rockstar poet” pivots on the fact that he takes Dylan Thomas to be the “poet for people who don’t really like poetry”
Quite an indictment I think you’ll agree. But then, he might have a point.
Thomas is certainly famous enough to be a touchstone for those with only a passing interest in poetry. It would be difficult to find a chap of a certain age alive that couldn’t recite one or two phrases from Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night or have an idea about what Under Milk Wood was all about. But is that enough? Is he, dare I say it, easy?
The answer, naturally, is: no, of course that’s not enough.
Thomas’s poetry is often striking and immediate, but it is never easy. The skill that Thomas constructs his verse is seemingly in its aural quality, which it has to be said, it holds above all other qualities. For example, digging out an old copy of Richard Burton’s reading of the play Under Milk Wood, we come across this description of the trees that lead to the sea in the opening monologue:
“limping invisible down to the slowblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea”
Sounds fantastic doesn’t it? The lilting, lolling tones roll beautifully. But does it make sense? Well, you could ague that: no it doesn’t, not in a strict or methodical way. But, if we look closer at what Thomas is doing we may be able to piece something together. The ‘limping’ of the trees for example mirrors their uneven line down to the sea whilst the ‘slowblack, slow, black, crowblack” echoes the limping. Hear it? Then this part about ‘fishing boat bobbing sea’, well, Thomas here creates a striking image at the expense of standard grammatical laws; the word order is all of a pickle so to speak. But then therein lies the power. Thomas’s intensity comes from dislocating the image from that which surrounds it. It is an example of what, in Russia, they might call Ostrananie or “making strange”. A formalist idea that says that once we make something seem strange or new, it takes on a new freshness and vibrancy that we were not expecting. Its result is to make that which is normal seem bright and immediate.
It seems to me that that is why Thomas is going through somewhat of a boom of late, because his work is so lyrical and intensely visual. People are making films about him now because, largely, his work has such scope for cinema and theatre. One could argue that The Edge of Love is not so much about the poetry but the man, but then can we really separate the two? Dylan Thomas is clearly someone that lived his profession; he would have been a poet if no one else had ever read a single couplet of his writing. What is attractive about Thomas though is that he lived his profession so intensely. He created a persona that, like his poetry, was clear and bright and a perfect (dislocated) image of his work.
