The Angels of Perversity Read online

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  Publishing History

  First published by Dedalus in 1992

  First ebook edition in 2011

  Translations (unless otherwise stated) c copyright Francis Amery 1992

  The Faun/Don Juan’s Secret/Danaette c copyright Brian Stableford 1900

  Printed in Finland by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  STUDIES IN FASCINATION

  Péhor

  The White Dress

  Don Juan’s Secret

  The Fugitives

  Limpid Eyes

  The Shroud

  On the Threshold

  The Red Marguerite

  Sylvie’s Sister

  The Other

  The Death One Cannot Mourn

  The Magnolia

  The Adulterous Candle

  The Dress

  The Faun

  Danaette

  Evening Conversation

  Stratagems

  THE PHANTOM

  The Portal

  The Palace of Symbols

  Duplicity

  Incense

  The Organ

  Images

  Tears

  The Unicorns

  The Figures

  Laughter

  Flagellation

  The Rings

  INTRODUCTION

  by Francis Amery

  Remy de Gourmont was born in 1858, of an aristocratic line which had suffered a decline in its fortunes, mainly due to the depredations of the English during the Napoleonic wars. At the age of ten his family left the Château de la Motte at Bazoches-en-Houlmes, where he had been born, and took up residence in the somewhat less grandiose Manoir de Mesnil-Villeman not far from Coutances, where he went to school. He was, as a matter of course, received into the Roman Catholic Church. In 1876 he went to Caen to study law, but did not stay long; the following year his parents gave him leave to continue his studies in Paris.

  Gourmont knew before leaving for the capital that he did not intend to make a career in the legal profession. He confided to his personal diary his intention to devote himself to “l’amour et les livres”, scrupulously noting that love would enable him to develop the sensual aspect of his personality, and books the intellectual aspect. He was to remain permanently preoccupied with notions of personal evolution and self-development, and with the supposed divisions, balances, tensions and contradictions inherent in the idea of the self. He was perpetually fascinated by dichotomies of all kinds: male and female; thought and emotion; materialism and idealism; God and man. His intellectual exploration of the dynamics of such complementarities and oppositions drew him into all manner of heresies, but no matter what challenges he posed to the religious and aristocratic ideals which he had inherited he never entirely cast them aside. If he ever became an atheist, he nevertheless remained a thoroughly Catholic atheist, and however radical his moral philosophy became he was never in the least attracted by socialist politics; he remained a diehard elitist utterly contemptuous of “the rabble”.

  In 1881 Gourmont applied for a post in the Bibliothèque Nationale, although the stipend was scarcely sufficient to meet his living expenses. His early work included the preparation of a series of educational books for young readers. He also began publishing articles in periodicals, including Le Monde and La Vie Parisienne. His first novel, Merlette (1886), is generally considered to be awkward and naive; the manuscript of a second, Patrice, was lost by the journal to which it was submitted – a loss which he does not seem to have regretted for very long. Whether his early adventures in love were as dubiously satisfactory as these early literary endeavours it is hard to tell, although people who knew him in those days confirmed that he was a handsome young man before he fell prey to disfiguring disease. His romantic aspirations took a decisive new turn, however, in 1887, when he met Berthe Courrière.

  Berthe was six years his senior, and her aristocratic pretensions – she preferred to style herself Berthe de Courrière – were sufficiently specious that even Rachilde, who. was no stranger to the business of fantastic self-aggrandisement, felt free to describe her as a “horribly bourgeois fantasist”; nevertheless, she captivated Gourmont. His early letters to her were posthumously published as Lettres a Sixtine, clearly associating her with the heroine of his first successful novel Sixtine (1890; tr. as Very Woman, 1922), and there is no doubt that Le fantôme (1891; tr. herein as The Phantom) is an account of their affair, albeit highly transfigured by jaundiced hindsight.

  Berthe fancied herself a serious student of the occult arts, having thrown herself wholeheartedly into the kind of lifestyle fantasy which had become popular in Paris in the wake of the self-styled “Eliphas Levi” (Alphonse Louis Constant). She knew Josephin Peladan, the would-be Rosicrucian magus whose turgid novels railing against the cultural and spiritual decadence of contemporary France helped to popularise the idea of “Decadence” as a style and a literary movement. She also knew Joris-Karl Huysmans, having become closely acquainted with him while he was conducting the explorations of the Parisian occult demimonde that were to be incorporated into his classic novel of contemporary Satanism Là Bas (1891); the character of Mme de Chantelouve is said to be partly based on her.

  Berthe -widened Gourmont’s horizons considerably, in both erotic and social terms. She introduced him to Huysmans, and for a while the two became fast friends, although the alliance broke up, partly because Huysmans threw himself back into the arms of the Church while Gourmont drifted further away into the realms of exotic heresy. Like Huysmans, Gourmont became a great admirer and early supporter of the poetry and prose-poetry of Mallarmé, and Huysmans undoubtedly encouraged his decision to develop Symbolist techniques of his own with a fervour which would exceed Mallarme’s.

  Gourmont formed other equally-important friendships at the same time, one of the most significant being with Villiers de l’Isle Adam, with whom he had much in common – like Gourmont, Villiers was an aristocrat fallen on hard times. The failure of Villiers’ attempts to marry for money had embittered him against the world and against the female sex in particular, and Gourmont was soon to drink as deeply from his own cup of bitterness. The sub-genre of Contes cruels to which Villiers had given a name in his collection of 1883 paraded a kind of haughty cynicism which Gourmont found attractive, and which infected his own work to a degree clearly manifest in the erotic fantasies which he collected under the title Histoires magiques (1894; tr. herein as Studies in Fascination). Alas, this friendship did not even last as long as Gourmont’s association with Huysmans; it was cut short in 1889 when Villiers died.

 
; Gourmont also became friendly with Alfred Vallette, the husband of the amazing Rachilde, whose exotically erotic novels – including The Marquise de Sade (1887) and Monsieur Vénus (1889) – were among the central works of the short-lived Decadent Movement. This association proved far more durable; Gourmont assisted Vallette in the founding of the Mercure de France in 1890, and became one of its most prolific contributors. It was for this journal that Gourmont was to do much of the work which made his name in 1890–91, although the respect which he eventually earned was initially preceded by notoriety, occasioned by a contemptuous article for the Mercure on “Le Joujou-Patriotisme”. This piece so offended the establishment that he was dismissed from his post at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The ensuing scandal provoked contributions from Catulle Mendès and Octave Mirbeau, among others, although the anarchist Mirbeau – whose support Gourmont presumably regarded as a mixed blessing – had difficulty finding a publisher for his own even more outspoken comments.

  Later, Gourmont made a friend of the young Alfred Jarry, whom he met in the offices of the Mercure de France in 1894. He collaborated with Jarry on L’Ymagier (1896), and exerted a significant influence on the development of the younger writer, but as with Huysmans the association was eventually split by an irreconcilable difference of opinion.

  Although his first publication – the text for an illustrated educational book on the eruption of a volcano – had been issued in 1882 and he had been a reasonably prolific writer ever since, the work which Gourmont did in the period 1889–91 marked a new beginning. It was in this period that he wholeheartedly embraced Symbolist techniques and cultivated a thoroughly Decadent sensibility (although he later objected to the perversion of meaning inherent in the use of the label “Decadent”). His fiction of the period consisted mainly of brief contes, and there is a considerable grey area where these overlap with his experiments in prose-poetry. His one and only subject matter was sex; he was deeply fascinated by the essential capriciousness of the sexual impulse, by the ill-effects of social and religious repression of sexuality, and by the intellectual strategies which might maximise the quasi-transcendental experience of sexual rapture.

  The present volume assembles a good deal of the fiction which Gourmont published in the years in question. Although the short novel Le fantôme was first issued in book form in 1893 it had earlier appeared in the Mercure de France in 1891, and the majority of the Histoires magiques (which were collected in book form in 1894) had appeared in journals in 1890–91. There is in this fiction a good deal of creative exuberance and sheer literary virtuosity; it features extravagant play with the new-found world of symbolism: the symbolism of colours, of flowers, and of religious imagery is elaborately explored and developed. The proliferation of sexual symbolism in these works is extraordinary, echoing in advance much of the mapping that Freud was soon to do in The Interpretation of Dreams. In Gourmont’s histoires magiques, as in Freudian dreams, everything is symbolic – but in Gourmont’s tales, wish-fulfilment is at best only half the story, almost always followed by disillusionment.

  From the very beginning, Gourmont was well aware of the mercuriality of sexual fulfilment, and the extreme difficulty of making the most of it. But the magnitude of his eventual disappointment was unusual, the commonplace effects of his growing disenchantment with Berthe Courrière being compounded and quickly overtaken by the appalling effects of the disease which ruined his life. In the two substantial works which concluded this phase, “Stratagems” and Le fantôme, one can easily see the after-effects of a decayed infatuation, but one can also see premonitions of a deeper and more sinister awareness of permanent loss.

  The disease which began in 1891 to cast its blight upon Gourmont’s features was known at the time as “tubercular lupus”. As that name implies, it was widely assumed to be a species of tuberculosis. It is nowadays known as “discoid lupus erythematosus”, and is generally thought to be caused by a virus, but even the modern pharmacopoeia has little to offer by way of effective treatment. It is not fatal, nor even particularly debilitating in cases in which it does not develop into systemic lupus erythematosus, which affects the other organs of the body. The progress of Gourmont’s case was limited but rapid. Initially, at least, it only affected his face – but to such an extent that it rapidly became the dominating fact of his life. It turned him into a recluse. His friends continued to visit him, but as time went by he became extremely reluctant to go out into a world where he was likely to be refused service in restaurants which he had previously patronised, and he became a virtual refugee in the world of his own imagination. Arthur Ransome appended to his translation of A Night in the Luxembourg a brief memoir of the author, in which he records that he found Gourmont, towards the end of his life, living on the fourth floor of a house in the Rue de Saints-Pères, dressed in a monk’s robe and a grey felt cap. He placed his vistors on the far side of his huge desk, with the light carefully directed at their faces, away from his own. Ransome observes that Gourmont kept his hand in front of his face, but coyly does not say why – and most biographical sketches of Gourmont in English reference books make no mention of his disease, although no French reference book considers it unmentionable. One can only wonder what readers unaware of the truth of the matter made of Ransome’s circumlocutory observation that the face which was once “beautiful in the youth of the flesh” had now become “beautiful in the age of the mind … vitalised by intellectual activity.”

  Having lost his position at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Gourmont had no alternative but to make his living entirely with his pen, and he set out to do so very methodically. In the course of the following quarter-century he produced enough work to fill fifty volumes, most of it taking the initial form of essays written for periodicals. His non-fiction covered a wide range, from his early study of mysticism and symbolism in Medieval poetry, Le Latin mystique (1892) to his remarkable study of the natural history of sexuality, Physique de l’amour: Essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1903; tr. as The Natural Philosophy of Love, 1922). He became one of the most respected literary critics of his day. He also helped to interpret and popularise the philosophical ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and made his own distinctive contributions to the development of aesthetic philosophy.

  He was to write four more novels: Les Chevaux de Diomède (1897; tr. as The Horses of Diomedes, 1923); Le Songe d’une femme (1899; tr. as Dream of a Woman, 1927); Une Nuit au Luxembourg (1906; tr. as A Night in the Luxembourg, 1912); and Une Coeur virginale (1907; tr. as A Virgin Heart, 1921). These works are, however, very different from the work of his early Symbolist period, whose climactic phase came to an end with the fervent heretical drama Lilith (1892) and the various short stories and prose-poems which were collected in Proses moroses (1894), Le Pèlerin du silence (1896) and D’Un pays lointain (1898). Much of the work in these collections dates from the 1889–91 period, notably “Le Pèlerin du silence”, a nouvelle dedicated to Mallarmé which appeared in the Mercure de France in 1890. In the later part of his career Gourmont produced only one more volume of short pieces, Couleurs (1908), and even that had to be padded out with material reprinted from Proses moroses. But not all his non-fiction was scholarly; his reclusiveness did not prevent him from being a prolific letter-writer, and some of his less formal later works take the form of quirky epistles, including the ironic and imaginary Lettres d’un satyre (1913; tr. as Mr Antiphilos, Satyr, 1922) and the philosophical and authentic Lettres à l’Amazone (1914; the addressee was Natalie Barnay). The latter book was published the year before he died, serving as a suitably eccentric swan song.

  As noted above, the subject of all Gourmont’s fiction is sex, but his attitude to that subject changed considerably over time, although it never remotely approached fashionability. Gourmont was, in a way, a direct literary descendant of Théophile Gautier, much of whose fiction consists of erotic fantasies which lament the failure of actual sexual relationships to live up to the ideals of the imagination. But Gautier achieved a comp
romise in life which is reflected in the self-indulgence of much of his fiction; while elevating the ballerina Carlotta Grisi to the status of a Platonic ideal he served his sexual appetite by sleeping with her sister Ernesta. Gourmont is less sentimental and more relentlessly analytical than Gautier; he can never be content to dwell in fantasy-worlds because his intelligence rips them to shreds almost as soon as they are formulated, and he is perpetually entranced by the apparent absurdity of sexual attraction. The impossibility of actually achieving a satisfactory sexual relationship undoubtedly disappointed Gautier, but Gautier was prepared to make the best of what he had, both materially and imaginatively. For Gourmont that impossibility – once he had convinced himself of it – was a more profound tragedy, an expression of the essential perversity of existence; and yet the perversity itself became a topic of intense interest to him, to be investigated and described and explained as fully as possible.

  The works assembled in this volume represent early endeavours in this regard. The histoires magiques are really neither “tales” nor “magical”; they are a series of case-studies in sexual attraction, mapping the capricious forms which erotic attraction takes, and the sometimes-bizarre behaviours which result from its channelling. Where they become explicitly supernatural they do so purely by symbolic extension, although the sexual impulse itself is here represented as a quasi-supernatural force. It was the Catholic Church’s attitude to sexuality, more than any purely doctrinal objection, which drove Gourmont to embrace attitudes so heretical that some people would indeed consider their literary expressions blasphemous. He was completely at odds with the Church’s repression of sexuality, considering the social and psychological consequences of that repression to be appalling. “Péhor”, the story which Gourmont selected to open the sequence of his histoires magiques, is a straightforward account of a young girl brought to destruction by her own sexuality, perverted by enforced ignorance and social pressure into a species of pious idolatry which cannot begin to satisfy her inner need. Here sexuality is symbolised by the eponymous demon, who was a tribal god before he was condemned as fallacious by the followers of Jehovah, when his status was automatically redefined as evil. The demon’s attentions are fatal, but the venereal disease which kills poor Douceline so horribly is something which shelters beneath the cloak of secrecy which the church has spread over the entire spectrum of sexual impulse and expression.