“LIKE BOTTLED WASPS”: BEERBOHM, HUYSMANS, AND THE DECADENTS’ SUBURBAN RETREAT

Abstract

Such was George Orwell'svision of suburban life in his 1939 novelComing Up for Air– a vision of mindless, middle-class consumerism teetering always on the edge of financial ruin – a domestic life-in-death. Over the course of the twentieth century, suburbia has become the topos of bourgeois complacency, the locus of psychic decline. Strange, then, to think that at the end of the nineteenth century, two of Europe's Decadent writers – Max Beerbohm and Joris-Karl Huysmans – could find in the suburbs of London and Paris an aesthetic retreat from the snares of bourgeois urban life. In 1884, Huysmans publishedAgainst Nature, the paragon offin-de-siècleDecadent fiction which recounts the movement of the syphilitic aristocrat, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, from the centre of Paris to the suburban village of Fontenay-aux-Roses where he constructs his anti-bourgeois aesthetic hermitage. Over ten years later, in 1896, Beerbohm published his satirical essay “Diminuendo,” in which the twenty-four-year-old writer announces his retirement from the literary world and his subsequent retreat to a quiet life of aesthetic contemplation in a London suburb. Needless to say, these suburban havens are a far cry from Orwell's sordid account of pre-war suburbia's obsession with false teeth and life insurance. Though only a little over fifty years separateAgainst Nature and Coming Up for Air, the suburbs of Huysmans and Orwell seem worlds apart. No one could imagine Des Esseintes's leather-bound study in the “Hesperides Estates,” and it seems unthinkable to picture Beerbohm locking himself away in a library amidst the cacophony of squealing infants and nagging housewives. The suburbs seem the least likely place in which the Decadent or dandy might thrive, and yet inAgainst Natureand “Diminuendo,” Huysmans and Beerbohm depict the suburbs as the last refuge of the man of taste. How could this be? What are thesefin-de-sièclesuburbs of London and Paris, and what do they signify in Huysmans's and Beerbohm's writing? These are the central questions I pose in this study of the Decadents’ retreat from urban life.