Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray Richard A. Kaye Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $54.95 (cloth); $54.95 (eBook). This collection brings new attention to modernism's self-repression—and the repression by critics—of its origins in fin-de-siècle decadent poetics. Examining a tantalizing range of Anglo-American writers, the contributors variously make a case for decadent writing as entwined with modernist achievements. Running through the volume, too, is an emphasis on the ways in which decadent literature determined a queer poetics that stood astride modernism in the writing of familiar writers such as Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, H.D., Hart Crane, and Carl Van Vechten as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Sackville, Ada Leverson, Bruce Nugent, and Donald Evans. The trio of decadent/queer/modernist concerns informs the essay by Vincent Sherry, whose 2018 book Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence is itself a pioneering work tracing the neglected sinews linking modernist artistry and decadent aesthetics. Here Sherry considers the legacy of decadence in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Beckett, in which queer, minor characters (St. John Alaric Hurst of Woolf's The Voyage Out, Baron Felix in Barnes's Nightwood) wander like ghosts from the Wildean past. Drawing on the argument of Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Sherry suggests that these writers found considerable value in forgoing a viable, erotically normative future. The modernist reliance on a decadent midVictorian legacy informs Howard Booth's essay on Lawrence's adoption of Swinburnean tropes in his fiction, particularly Swinburne's use of the Pan figure and the theme of nympholepsy, the belief originating with the Ancient Greeks that human beings could be inhabited by nymphs. For Lawrence, such tropes "imagine a resolution of the split and division between humankind and the world" (186). In later fiction such as St. Mawr (1924), however, Lawrence will come to see such breaches as unbridgeable as he sought to conceive of a futurity beyond or without modernity. [End Page 797] Wilde's imprisonment for "gross indecency" casts a shadow over much of this volume. Nick Freeman explores post-1895 writers such as John Edmund, Max Beerbohm, and Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), all of whom borrowed the stylistic strategies of decadent writing while dispensing with, through playful satire and elegant evasiveness, its immoral or scandalous scenarios. Kristin Mahoney revisits the career of Wilde's friend Ada Leverson, whose parodic fictions provided a light critique of dandyism even as they sought to find a place in decadence for feminist aspirations. Joseph Bristow brings fresh insight to the legacy of late-Victorian aestheticism in the work of another feminist, the poet and pacifist Margaret Sackville. Sarah Parker explores the Baudelairean elements in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who sought to invigorate the spirit of Les Fleurs du Mal (she was one of the volume's first female translators) with irony, humor, and a markedly American idiom. This volume resurrects a number of forgotten modernists indebted to the decadent movement. Douglas Mao discusses the literary career of the Greenwich Village poet Donald Evans, whose press Claire Marie published Stein's writing. Mao considers the place of "cuteness" and "naughtiness" in Evans and Stein's work, two features of 1890s sensibility that become denigrated in an age of high modernist seriousness and austerity. Kirsten MacLeod offers a fine reading of Van Vechten's 1923 Jazz-age novel The Blind Bow-Boy, where decadent and camp aesthetics commingle (the novel's title is a campily lascivious reference to a line in Romeo and Juliet: "… the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft"). Michèle Mendelssohn draws on original archival research to explore the life and work of the African-American writer Bruce Nugent, whom Mendelssohn describes as "one of the few African American writers" of the Harlem Renaissance "with the audacity to challenge homophobic prejudice and explicitly portray interracial sensuality" (a characterization that perhaps overly...