Five years ago, I finally bailed from the Decadence Party. After rejecting a “rock and roll” lifestyle in my youth — I had seen how the strings were pulled as a teenage NME hack — I eventually made up for it by doubling down on the sex and drugs. But after caning it for three decades, I decided that I’d had enough. Predictably for a mid-50s matron, Christianity and volunteer work had a lot to do with it. I cleaned up overnight — and I can honestly say I don’t miss it a bit.
What do you think of when you read the word “decadent”? Liza Minnelli showing her stocking tops while fascism looms in the shadows? Gatsby laying out his shirts to reclaim Daisy’s love? Julia Flyte’s gift from her rich lover, a tortoise whose shell bore her initials in diamonds? Or was it best embodied by notorious porn purveyor Larry Flynt, who died this week?
Merriam-Webster defines it both as “appealing to self-indulgence — a rich and decadent dessert” and “marked by decay or decline — an increasingly decadent society.” In other words, it is considered either good or bad depending on your point of view. Not many words take in both the fall of the Roman Empire and a chocolate ganache.
Its meaning has, of course, changed over the years. Certainly things seem to have moved on since the late 19th century, when writers and artists favouring outré subjects became known as the Decadent Movement. As always there was a sizeable gulf between the French and the English; they had the deadly serious Joris-Karl Huysmans, we had the savage amusements of Oscar Wilde.
A magazine, Le Decadent, was founded in 1886 to bring order to their principles, but even then your average self-obsessed, opium-eating onanist wasn’t exactly a team player. A lot of it was little more than a Perve’s Charter. But the Decadents shrewdly saw that hedonism could be dignified with a backbeat of tragedy, and portrayed their excesses as a sane reaction to a mad world. As Baudelaire put it: “Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters… Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.” With virtue? Yeah, right.
With the twentieth century, the alibis for acting out ramped up as we entered the Age Of Excuses. The barbarism of the First World War was widely accepted as the trigger for the Roaring Twenties, and by the 1950s psychology had found a deep-seated reason for every last bit of bad behaviour.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe