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• W2054216592 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeDavid Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926 Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926. David Weir. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Pp. xxii+233.Tom LutzTom LutzUniversity of California, Riverside Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI love books like this: a lot of facts, a lot of research in a quirky archive, a cast of compellingly offbeat characters. David Weir chases down myriad long-ignored traces of a largely forgotten American artistic subculture: the often gay, countercultural, urbane, and sometimes snooty group that flew the banner of “decadence.” Some years ago, in Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), Weir wrote about French and British decadence and began his last chapter with a look at the decay, I suppose, of decadence in the 1890s, which is when his Decadent Culture in the United States picks up the tradition in its belated American expression.All these mutinous Victorian Bostonians lounging about pretending to be Oscar Wilde and smoking hashish, opium, and cigarettes. What fun! They don’t just smoke their cigarettes but do so with the “truly artistic, cigarette temperament” (56). They take pictures of each other in various “Oriental” costumes, and the photos in the book— of F. Holland Day, for example, supposedly in a kimono, but looking like a cartoon medieval wizard—provide a window onto a serious yet self-consciously goofy world of artistic, social, and cultural commitments deeply at variance with Main Street, Gilded Age, and even Howellsian highbrow literary practice. Angus Beaton, for instance, the Wilde-shaped, long-haired character in Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), represents a barely fringy Bohemianism more like that of stolid Howells himself than that of the characters Weir discusses.Weir gives well-contextualized readings of journals like the Mahogany Tree, which ran for six months in 1892 and is now best known as the place that published Willa Cather’s first story, and Knight Errant, also started in 1892, with many of the same contributors. This Boston group is the most interesting one that he discusses, with architect Ralph Adams Cram at the center, as well as Day, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and the poet Louise Imogene Guiney, one of the few American women associated with the movement. Weir also shows the relations of this Boston group to coteries in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, as represented by Herbert Stone and Ingalls Kimball (the ex-Harvard publishers of the Chap-Book [1894 –98]) in Chicago and by Boston transplant Gelett Burgess’s The Lark (1895–97) in San Francisco.Of course, to call it a movement is perhaps not quite right. As Weir discusses various manifestations of the decadent spirit in cities across the country in 1890s and 1900s, and then again in the 1920s and the 1950s, it is never quite clear whether he is following the history of the term and its related cluster of words or whether he is talking about a consciously invoked and maintained (however evolving) tradition, or a kind of cultural complex that exists in different ways in different historical and cultural contexts, or, finally, simply a series of somewhat related subcultural manifestations of what he takes to be the major themes of some general ethos. When he talks about the “cultural transfer that occurred in the 1920s,” for instance, “the passage of decadence from literature to film” (192), it is a little difficult for me to pin down what kind of entity is being passed. Decadence, Weir writes, was in competition with modernism and realism for cultural prestige and thus exists almost like a genre. When he says that Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) “emerged from the same decadent-aesthetic Boston milieu” (84), decadence becomes a context. But in other parts of the book it is less a genre or a context than a set of attitudes, themselves often changeable, self-contradictory, and not always held by even the closest of self-declared decadents.This is a quibble, however, because along the way Weir makes very many canny observations connections among writers—say Edgar Saltus, Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, Henry Blake Fuller, James Branch Cabell, and Djuna Barnes—who are not the likeliest of bedfellows. Weir expands on the argument of his earlier book on the relation of decadence to modernism and in another leap takes us, by way of conclusion, to Kenneth Anger, Aleister Crowley, and Quentin Crisp. In making each of these connections, Weir adds something of value to our understanding of these figures, providing a new through-line for American cultural historians. His discussion of some of these figures’ antimodernism, for instance, provides a more nuanced picture than the arguments we have had before, and attention to their relations helps correct some other notions. Rather than continuing to think of Saltus as the American Wilde, Weir notes, we should recognize that Saltus was writing Wildean repartee before Wilde was. There is more to be said about the relationship of decadent aesthetics, queer sexualities, and cultural conservatism, but Weir has added significantly to that field as well.Throughout, Weir is interested in distinguishing American decadents from their European forebears, and he claims that American decadence, unlike European, was not simply aimed away from popular culture for ideological reasons but toward it for economic ones: the adoption of decadent themes by sensationalist film is one instance, and the use Stone and Kimball earlier made of decadence in their publishing business another. “In America, yesterday’s decadence is often today’s popular culture,” Weir writes pithily (177). And the enormous importance of what one writer called “the implements of Decadence” suggests yet another consumerist dimension to the discourse, or fad, or subculture, or however we might have it: those implements, he suggests include “cushions, cigarettes, incense, wine, Turkey carpets, jade bowls, ivory couches, Burne-Jones’s pictures, French novels, Oscar Wilde’s complete works” (59)—a significant shopping list just to set up house. The tension between this kind of purchasable identity and the philosophical and historical pessimism that need also be acquired animates this subcultural formation and its relation to the mainstream. And Weir smartly locates Thorstein Veblen and his economic critique in the context of these countercultural currents.Although Weir sometimes seems a little overly fond of decadent attitudes, he is an otherwise unassuming and admirably prepared guide. The book will be standard reading for the period and be productive of more work as well—although there was something bracing about the lack of theoretical discussion of sexuality here, a refreshing matter-of-factness, I can’t imagine that Weir’s work won’t help generate some such work, for instance. And one wonders what we might make, now, of Cather’s appearance in these circles, or, for that matter, how it might encourage a rereading of Henry James and other central figures. Weir’s claims are not very grandiose—he sticks close to his material—but the ripples spread far. What, for instance, did the editors who founded Modern Philology in 1903 think of their decadent neighbors Stone and Kimball? The combination of modern and classical, looking forward and back at the same time, preservationist and devoted to discovery—the decadent’s progressive reactionism—may not be far from MP ’s founding professors’ own attitudes. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 3February 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/663602 Views: 356Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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