The Decadent Traveller E-Book

Medlar Lucan

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 306

Beschreibung

It contains enough excitement and excess to last most armchair travellers their reading lifetime.

Das E-Book wird angeboten von und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

THE AUTHORS

Since the publication of The Decadent Cookbook and The Decadent Gardener, Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray have been garlanded by critics and hounded by debt-collectors across the globe. Masters of disguise and deception, they have vanished from some of the world’s greatest cities, including those described in the present volume. From time to time they appear in cabaret and at priapic festivals, offering a taste of their extreme cooking and eclectic lifestyle, based on their legendary Decadent Restaurant in Edinburgh. The Decadent Traveller fills in the ‘missing years’ between the Cookbook and the Gardener, and adds important new elements to their bizarre and alarming tale.

Lucan and Gray are currently living at El Periquito, a cabaret-brothel in Havana.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank Mike Abrahams for the portrait of Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray here, and John Hoole and Mervyn Heard for their help with other pictures.

They would also like to thank the following for permission to quote from Copyright material: Stephen Mulrine (translator) and Faber & Faber Ltd, for the extract from Moscow Stations by Venedikt Yerofeev, quoted in ‘St Petersburg’.

Neil Rollinson, for his poem ‘Sutras in Free Fall’, from his collection A Spillage of Mercury (Jonathan Cape, 1996), and the North American Space Agency for the ‘CUVMS’ procedure, quoted in ‘Cairo’.

Editions Gallimard for the passage from L’Anglais Décrit Dans le Château Fermé by André Pieyre de Mandiargues, quoted in ‘New Orleans’.

Dedalus made every effort to contact the other rights holders, without success, and would like to hear from them.

CONTENTS

TITLE

THE AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1PURPLE TOURISM

2ST PETERSBURG

3NAPLES

4CAIRO

5TOKYO

6NEW ORLEANS

7BUENOS AIRES

8APPENDIX: THE GOLD STANDARD

THE DECADENT COOKBOOK MEDLAR LUCAN & DURIAN GRAY

THE DECADENT GARDENER MEDLAR LUCAN & DURIAN GRAY

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

Given the notoriety of the first two books produced by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, (The Decadent Cookbook and The Decadent Gardener) it was inevitable that the clamour for more of their peculiar brand of salaciousness would grow to the point where even they, reclusive and elusive as they are, would be compelled to produce the material for another volume. Public interest focused in particular on the period between the closure of the Decadent Restaurant, which brought about their expulsion from Edinburgh, and the moment when they arrived in Southern Ireland to start work on the gardens of Mrs Conchita Gordon’s house at Mountcullen.

So, in response to the demands of a public desperate for the smallest scrap of information concerning the two debauchees, Lucan and Gray have once again provided us with a sackful of undigested material, a stinking pot-pourri of travel anecdotes, contentious opinions, lies, reminiscences, literary references, graphic – and often pornographic – diary entries, foreign phrases, left-luggage tickets and unpaid hotel bills. It has been our task to impose some sort of pattern on this material.

Whether we have succeeded in this, we must leave to others to judge. Now at least the events unfold according to the known laws of the physical universe: the travellers are in only one place at a time, they stay for a period before moving on, and time itself moves in a linear fashion (albeit with a few jumps and curves). But there the coherence ends: the narrative itself is shot through with uncertainty. We do not know for instance, whether Lucan and Gray actually travelled up the Nile, or visited the cave of the Ghost Children in Japan, or roamed the cemeteries of Buenos Aires in search of a dissolute uncle. These may be elaborate fictions. Yet such are the doubts that beset the reader of any travel narrative. It is a medium built for lying and exaggeration.

The story of Lucan and Gray’s travels begins at the point where they were forced to leave the city of Edinburgh. Here they had spent many years carefully cultivating a scandalous reputation. However …

‘We were expelled from that city like two turds shat out through the sphincter of bourgeois morality. We were victims of persecution, no more no less, evicted from our home and forced to live, like all great visionaries, a life of exile.’

This rather overwrought metaphor from the pen of Medlar Lucan gives a good idea of the bitterness he and Durian Gray felt about the unceremonious way in which they were hounded out of Edinburgh. It is an episode that is still shrouded in mystery, contradiction and myth-making, and it must be said that despite numerous attempts to set the record straight – in interviews, cabaret appearances and the like – Lucan and Gray have done little to elucidate the events of that fateful Sunday night. If anything they have added further layers of confusion to the existing chaos of disinformation.

Our own efforts to shed light on the matter – through the Edinburgh City Fathers, the police, Henderson’s Debt Collection Agency and the official receivers, the firm of Goldberg, Tench and Van Rikkenbakker – have proved fruitless. Indeed, several of those approached clearly knew less than we did and were keen to find out more. Others knew more than was good for them and wished they could forget.

We decided finally that a touch of ‘negative capability’ – Keats’s capacity for ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ – was the most appropriate, indeed the only possible, response. A number of references in the present volume add detail and emotional colour to the record, but it essentially remains far from complete. Only four facts can be stated with any certainty.

1.The police raided the Decadent Restaurant on Jan. 30th 1994.

2.Lucan and Gray refused all bookings for the next three days.

3.They disappeared without trace.

4.A reluctant and ill-tempered alliance of creditors and city authorities was left to clear up the mess.

Lucan and Gray before their journey. At this point The Decadent Restaurant was a still a going concern.

According to the official police report, Lucan and Gray flew to London, then transferred to the first available cheap flight out of the UK, which happened to be for St Petersburg. It is at this point that the narrative of The Decadent Traveller proper begins.

Despite the tone of self-pity to be found in much of Lucan and Gray’s writing at this period, their expulsion from the Scottish capital was surely in some sense willed and positively sought by them. Although they were running a commercial enterprise with the usual commercial aims, they had another, hidden agenda, perhaps only half-conscious, which both contradicted and subverted their business goals: namely to outrage as many people in the city as possible. Their favourite and persistent targets were precisely the functionaries and legal officials (judges, senior policemen, government ministers, corporate executives) who, in their restaurant’s heyday, were responsible for its success. Lucan and Gray were at first amused that such people found the restaurant congenial. Later they became worried and frustrated. They tried hard to drive them away, but only succeeded in attracting them in greater numbers. Even such innovations as the Circe room – a bare box with cement walls, concrete floor, a small trough in one corner and a ring in the middle to which clients were tethered naked, on all-fours, and fed massively overpriced pig swill – proved distressingly popular.

Their last desperate resort was to photograph these clients in moments of heedless abandon and then offer the pictures to various friends for their ‘political edification’. Inevitably some photos found their way to the press. This finally did the trick, but it was widely seen as an act of betrayal and it spelt the end of the Decadent.

Lucan and Gray never ceased to complain that they were themselves victims of betrayal, but the reader would be entitled to treat such claims with scepticism. There always has been a streak of self-destructiveness in Lucan and Gray, and their efforts to provoke outrage are well documented.

As with their previous work, there are clearly two ‘voices’ audible in the writing. Indeed their personalities are here more individual than ever. They frequently have disagreements in the course of their travels, and part of the fascination of this assemblage of documents is the ebb and flow of tension, occasionally exploding into outright rage, between the two protagonists. There are moments when Medlar and Durian seem on the point of parting for ever, others where they are fused into a single personality. There is something oddly reassuring about this tidal movement in their relationship, which seems to prove that no matter how determined a person may be (and they are extremely determined) to escape the common lot of humanity, the familiar strains and pressures assert themselves. To change the metaphor slightly, Lucan and Gray are divers without oxygen: it is not surprising that from time to time they come to the surface gasping for breath.

Lucan and Gray in the Library at Mountcullen, posing as James Joyce and Augustus John. The picture was taken after the journeys described in this book.

One of the difficulties of editing a ‘manuscript’ of this kind is in deciding what to omit, and on what grounds. We could not exclude material on grounds of obscenity, as this would have left the publishers with an unacceptably short book. The same applies to other criteria: irrelevance, inconsequentiality, inaccuracy, poor taste, crassness, and bad or overblown writing in general. All of these are endemic. We have therefore excluded only material that was illegible, defamatory or so fragmentary as to be nonsensical. Discarded chapter headings scrawled on cigarette packets, envelopes, pornographic post cards, etc. include ‘Genghis Khan – The Father of Modern Tourism’, ‘The Sewers of Swindon’, ‘A Boy Scout’s Guide to Bangkok’, ‘Around the World on Datura’, and ‘Sir Randolph Lederhosen – Gentleman, Traveller and Psychopath’. More complete, though no less bizarre, is the first chapter in this book: ‘Purple Tourism – Our Philosophy of Travel’. Like everything else that Lucan and Gray turn their hand to, this chapter has a certain insane glamour. Deranged yet oddly stylish, it places one in a lotus-eating world of eccentric wealth and disinhibition – precisely the world of Mrs Conchita Gordon, whose offer of hospitality and employment as garden designers brought this strange and restless period of exile to a close.

JF

AM

South Mimms

May 2000

PURPLE TOURISM

An Essay on the Philosophyof Decadent Travel

The day Medlar and I were driven out of our beloved Edinburgh was one of the bleakest of our lives. Despair hung upon us like bitter black smoke and the darkness closed in over our heads. And yet, de profundis, we still managed to cling on to a scrap of consolation: the thought that our expulsion was at least in accord with our ideals of Decadence. At the restaurant we had often argued that to follow the path of true Decadence means to condemn oneself to a lifetime of rootlessness. The Decadent finds himself ejected from the society of Man and forced to wander aimlessly from one place to another in search of a home he knows he will never find. Our true vocation, we averred, was exile, a notion which has always appealed enormously to the Decadent imagination, and we too were drawn towards it as to a lodestone, compelled by the electro-magnetism of our souls.

Now we had been given the chance to live out our conviction. In this we saw ourselves following in the footsteps of a number of heroic literary, historical and mythical figures, among whom has to be counted Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.

Ahasuerus was a shoemaker by profession, outside whose shop the exhausted Christ paused to rest while dragging his cross along the Via Dolorosa. The cobbler’s reaction was to give the Son of God a good kicking and tell him to clear off. (Not unreasonably, in our opinion. The sight of a blood-stained criminal collapsed under the weight of his own crucifix, thereby blocking the entrance to an establishment, can have a highly detrimental effect on one’s livelihood. It was something we constantly had to guard against at the Decadent restaurant, where crucified individuals staggered past our door several times a week.) In reply, however, Christ cursed Ahasuerus, saying: ‘I go quickly, but you will wait until I return.’ Yet more evidence of a God as mean-spirited and vindictive as an Edinburgh city councillor! Although we have no pretensions to eternal life of course we cannot help but have enormous sympathy for the man who was condemned in that moment to wander the face of the earth until Judgement Day. In this respect Ahasuerus came to resemble the figure who stands out as the very personification of the Exiled and the Rejected – Satan.

It would not be overstating the case to say that we revere Satan, just as he has been revered by Decadents of every age. This is not simply because he was the first and the most glorious of rebels, who paid for his rebellion by being exiled from the kingdom of God, but because in being exiled he was given no choice but to follow the path of evil. According to our theology (one which is imbued with a profound rationality) God made Satan evil by exiling him. Thus it is God who is responsible for unleashing evil upon the world. Charles Baudelaire, greatest of the French poets of the 19th century and a man who has long held an esteemed position in our Pantheon of Decadence, understood this perfectly. In Les Litanies de Satan, he addresses Satan thus:

O Prince de l’exil, à qui l’on a fait tort,

Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort

O Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!

…

Père adoptif de ceux qu’en sa noire colére

Du paradis terrestre a chassés Dieu le Père

O Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!

O Prince of Exile, who has been so wronged

And who, vanquished, returns all the stronger.

O Satan, have pity on my unending misery.

…

Adopted father of those whom God the Father

in his black anger has hounded out of the earthly paradise,

O Satan, have pity on my unending misery.

The divine Charles was something of an inspiration to us, exiles malgré nous, on our travels. In many ways he encapsulated the spirit in which, so we believed, the true Decadent should travel. Although the poet did little travelling himself, the image of the journey plays a seminal role in many of his poems. One of our favourites is Le Voyage. It is dedicated to Maxime du Camp, the photographer who accompanied Flaubert on his travels to Cairo (see chapter 4). Whenever we read this poem we felt as if he had looked into the very depths of our souls and seen there our own sad plight – a century and a half before! The poet writes:

Un matin nous partons, le cerveau plein de flamme

Le coeur gros de rancune et de désirs amers,

Et nous allons, suivant le rythme de la lame,

Berçant notre infini sur le fini des mers:

One morning we leave, our minds aflame

Our hearts swollen with rancour and bitter desires.

We set off, following the rhythm of the oar

Cradling our infinity on the finite sea.

There is little doubt that he foresaw precisely what we hoped our own travels might bring forth:

Etonnants voyageurs! quelles nobles histoires

Nous lisons dans vos yeux profonds come les mers!

Montre-nous les écrins de vos riches mémoires,

Ces bijoux merveilleux, faits d’astres et d’éthers.

Astonishing travellers! What noble histories

Do we read in your sea-deep eyes!

Show us your casket filled with rich memories,

Those marvellous jewels, made of stardust and ether.

In many ways Baudelaire was to play the role of Virgil to our Dante as we journeyed through the underworld of numerous cities. With this difference. Our travels could be described as an inversion of Dante’s. Whereas the latter set out in search of spiritual love and enlightenment, we of course were only ever seeking out degradation and debauchery.

There is little doubt in our minds that the Divine Comedy is one of the most extraordinary travel books ever written, although one cannot help thinking that if Dante Alighieri were alive today and in the process of writing ‘il suo poema’, he would be leading us through an altogether different Inferno.

I suggest that those condemned to the first circle of this contemporary Hell would find themselves in the departure lounge at Gatwick airport, where shrieking infants are strapped into harnesses, boorish drunken louts lurch menacingly, husbands and wives are at each others throats with murderous intent, all are condemned to an eternity of delayed flights.

In the second circle they would be trapped in a renovated Tuscan farmhouse where the overweight host, a North London lawyer dressed in a ludicrous straw hat and brown ribbed socks, endlessly extols the virtues of a local wine which is only fit for clearing drains and forces it down the poor sinners’ throats.

In the third circle, wretched souls are lashed to deck chairs beside the pool of a hotel in Barbados where they are surrounded by witless blonde harridans from Wilmslow with leathery skin who consider deep-fried camembert the height of sophistication and whose golf-playing husbands lie bloated and scarlet in the noon day sun.

The fourth circle is not a circle at all, but an endless narrow side street in a small Spanish coastal town. It is always four o’clock in the morning and lost souls, in search of a hotel that does not exist, are compelled to step over numberless bodies of pasty English youths who lie groaning in pools of their own vomit, watched over by their moronic bedraggled girlfriends.

The fifth circle resembles the Valley of the Malabolge, or ‘evil wind’. Here sinners are buried up to their necks in the sand of a beach in Thailand, listening to a macrobiotic adolescent with a backpack reciting his vapid, self-obsessed verse while the tide of a shit-rich sea laps around their chins, threatening to engulf them.

In the sixth circle one tries in vain to escape from a bar crowded with enthusiastic yachtsmen. The seventh circle is my own personal hell. I sometimes wake with a start at night, bathed in sweat as I recall the horror. I am walking through the garrigue in Southern France. The heat is intense and I am surrounded by a chatty and lively group each carrying an easel under their arm. Yes, I am on a water-colouring holiday.

In the eighth circle the damned are forced for all eternity to take holiday snaps of coach parties of grotesquely obese Americans as they stand with their backs to the glorious west front of Chartres Cathedral and whine about the price of some vile trinket they have just bought.

The final most excruciating punishment is reserved for only the basest of humankind – the bigot, the sanctimonious and the pious. They will navigate the seas ceaselessly aboard that most grotesque Ship of Fools – a cross-channel ferry.

But let us return to Satan. The consequence of his first rebellion and what preceded his exile was a ‘fall’, and, as we never tire of pointing out, the word ‘decadence’ refers precisely to the act of falling, which puts me in mind of another of Baudelaire’s great verses, Icarus: the Fall.

En vain j’ai voulu de l’espace

Trouver la fin et le milieu;

Sous je ne sais quel oeil de feu

Je sens mon aile qui se casse.

In vain I sought out

The end and the middle of space.

Under the gaze of some fiery eye

I felt my wing break apart.

My loudly professed admiration for Icarus – a man who was prepared to defy nature and the gods by attempting to fly – might go part of the way to explaining why I take such inordinate delight in air travel. In fact I have always maintained that, given the choice, the way I would prefer to die is in a plane crash. It is my fervent wish that the last few seconds of my life will be spent falling. I yearn to experience the sheer exhilaration and terror of those moments spent looking out over a vast expanse of earth, seeing the ground screaming up to greet me, then shattering my body to pieces. That would make my life complete. O Icarus, happiest of men! who in his moment of supreme failure must have experienced a moment of triumph like no other. Or, in Richard Le Gallienne’s words:

First drink the stars, then grunt amid the mire.

Here is a death worthy of a Decadent. If one is to live decadently, one must surely be prepared to die decadently.

In order to pursue this interest of mine, I spent some time researching the locations of some of the most famous and spectacular air crashes in aviation history: Munich, New York, Mt. Fuji, Tenerife. I even produced a map of these sites and was intent on travelling, by way of pilgrimage, from one site to another. While in Japan, I commissioned a series of photographs to be taken of myself dressed as a Kamikaze pilot, and spent a week writing farewell poems in the traditional Kamikaze style.

When the spring wind blows

Which are the blossoms that first touch the earth?

The pink cherry? The white cherry?

I am a petal of pink cherry blossom.

When I kiss the earth, do not lament.

Later, when Medlar and I were travelling through Peru, I desperately wanted to visit the site in the Andes where several members of an Argentinian rugby team had crashed in a light aircraft and the survivors were reduced to slicing bits off their dead companions in order to avoid starvation. The allure of crash site and cannibalism was almost more than I could bear. Uncharacteristically, Medlar thought this was a little de trop. Try as I might to persuade him, he was deaf to my entreaties.

In general Medlar seems not to share my enthusiasm. Indeed he avoids flying whenever possible. He even turned down a lavish invitation to spend some time at the home of a Tampa millionairess on the grounds that:

‘… if God had meant us to fly, my dear, he would have given us all air miles. This has nothing to do with a fear of flying. Indeed, fear is an emotion which I relish and cultivate at every available opportunity. Rather, my aversion to air travel is due largely to my hatred of airports. For here one is confronted with the horror of contemporary travel in its most naked and strident form: the hordes of peasantry drifting like grazing bovines, the sense of utter futility in all human endeavour. All that ingenuity to master the air – the Brothers Wright, Sir Frank Whittle, Reginald ‘Spitfire’ Mitchell – and for what? The package tour! It is no coincidence that, apart from airports, the word ‘terminal’ is primarily associated with fatal diseases.’

Medlar’s preferred form of travel is the train, largely because he enjoys the florid architecture of railway stations and the opportunities they present for sexual misconduct. In this he hopes one day to emulate his great Uncle Walter who, at Avignon in 1855 among the temporary wooden buildings of the newly erected station, laid down a world standard for voyeurism which seems unlikely ever to be surpassed. (For the full sordid details, see the Appendix.) More importantly, there is something about the rhythm of trains which brings about a steep rise in the level of Medlar’s libido. There was a period in his life when he was incapable of any sexual response anywhere except on a moving train. His favourite line was the light railway from Welshpool to Llanfair Caereinion. The following is an extract taken from a letter he wrote to me from a cheap Bed & Breakfast somewhere in the Welsh marches.

‘The train is pulled by a small steam engine – all busy little pistons and vertical thrusting smoke stack. It consists of four carriages which were made in Austria in the early 1920s at the death of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were originally third class coaches with wooden slatted seats and the last coach was perfect for my purposes as it had an open-air observation platform at the back. From here I could look out over the undulating Welsh countryside and indulge at least three of my passions – copulating on a train, in the open air, with the additional stimulus of the fear of being detected. My orgasms have never been so protracted, nor have I produced such copious quantities of semen as I did during the course of those delightful journeys through the hills of mid Wales in the company of a local whore with the voices of happy and excited schoolchildren ringing out from inside the little carriage.’

Other forms of transport which we long considered worthy of the Decadent traveller include Cleopatra’s barge (‘the poop whereof,’ according to Plutarch, ‘was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, oboes, citherns, viols and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge … out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf’s side’), a sea tractor with buoyant wheels, Napoleon’s bath wagon (for a little touring holiday through central Europe), and Soraya Kashoggi’s chocolate-filled private jet.

It was somewhat ironic that when we were forced to quit Edinburgh, Medlar and I were actually drawing up plans for our own ideal form of transport. This was a caravan. Or to be more precise, Raymond Roussel’s motorised gypsy caravan.

Roussel was an immensely wealthy aesthete – you cannot help but admire a man who never wore the same shirt twice – and the writer of bizarre and wonderfully surrealistic novels such as Impressions d’Afrique and Locus Solus. He was also a rather reclusive man. Hence the caravan. We were intrigued by the following description of it which appeared in an edition of the Revue du Touring Club de France.

So it is with the Sybarite in mind that we describe the very luxurious and practical house on wheels devised by M. Raymond Roussel. The author of Impressions d’Afrique, which is acclaimed by distinguished minds as a work of genius, has had built from his plans an automobile 30 feet long by 8 feet wide.

The car is really a small house. In fact it comprises, by means of an ingenious system: a sitting-room, a bedroom, a study, a bathroom, and even a small dormitory for the staff of three man-servants (two chauffeurs and a valet).

The bodywork by Lacoste is very elegant, and the interior both original and ingenious. To take two examples: the bedroom can in the daytime be turned either into a study or a sitting room, while the forward part (behind the driver’s seat) at night turns into a little bedroom where the three man-servants can rest and wash (there is a basin in the panelling – to be seen to the left of the driver’s seat).

The interior of M. Raymond Roussel’s house comes from Maples.

There is electric heating and a paraffin stove. The hot water for the bath also runs on paraffin. The furniture is designed to cater for every need. There is even a Fichet safe. An excellent wireless set can pick up any European station.

This brief description gives some idea of how this remarkable villa on wheels – to which can be added a towable kitchen – affords its owner all the comforts of his own home on a scarcely reduced scale.

This luxurious installation is constructed on a Saurer chassis. On the flat its cruising speed is 25 mph. It can negotiate steep hills without fear thanks to an engine-braking system. It has a very tight turning circle which is very useful for twisting mountainous roads.

M. Raymond Roussel did not design and build his caravan – as he modestly calls it – as a mere whim, without intending to use it. As soon as it was built the caravan set off last year for a round trip of 2000 miles through Switzerland and Alsace. Every evening M. Roussel had a different view. He returned from his trip with incomparable impressions. This year at the start of the summer, he took to the road to follow his wandering fancy in search of constantly changing sensations.

It is to be hoped that the example of M. Raymond Roussel will be understood and followed by numerous sybarites and that the day will come when many houses on wheels will run on the world’s roads, to the subtle satisfaction of their occupants.

The most expensive form of travel we explored was space flight. As far as Medlar is concerned this is the ultimate fantasy for the Decadent traveller, although with the cost of a space suit running to about half a million dollars, I can only think that those astronauts must have frightfully good tailors.

Everyday details like the prohibitive cost of space-suits did not stop Medlar giving full vent to his astronautical fantasies in Cairo, where the sight of the pyramids unleashed a burst of prose so purple that one can almost smell the paper rotting beneath it. It is here that the unreality of Medlar’s thinking reaches its apogee. The notion that we two professional lounge lizards (or ‘salon iguanas’ as we prefer to be known) might present ourselves for astronaut training is about as ludicrous a thought as the human brain is capable of formulating. It caused me no little distress when Medlar informed me that he had volunteered our services as Belgium’s first men in space.

His fantasy is so all-consuming that he has elevated a genuine astronaut to the venerable company of Decadents. The victim of this improbable strategy is Michael Collins, a member of the Apollo XI crew that landed on the moon in July 1969. By some labyrinthine twist of logic, Medlar has designated this clean-cut American hero as a fellow-spirit of Wilde, Huysmans and Baudelaire.

Of course if one wants to be considered a truly Decadent traveller, the main impulse to resist is the desire to go somewhere in particular. This is absurd. The ideal state of mind for travelling is that of accidie, or apathetic torpor. This was the condition that the gods inflicted upon Ulysses after the Trojan War – which was why he spent so many years wandering aimlessly around the Mediterranean. Or perhaps a more poignant example closer to home is that of lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, whose voyage began with single-minded fortitude and direction before degenerating into pointless wandering, insane fantasy and death. Not so much a lesson in how to travel, but rather in how to live one’s life.

Here we are approaching the dark heart of what it is to travel decadently. In truth, those voyagers who have achieved immortality, whose names ring down the centuries – Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo – probably never left home. The great Decadent journeys are those of the mind, and it is to Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes – who else? – that we turn for the most refined and poignant account of one such journey. The account relates how the supreme dandy arrives in Paris, en route for London, and takes a cab for the Rue de Rivoli.

Lulled by the monotonous beat of the rain drumming on his luggage and on the roof of the cab, like sacks of peas being tipped on his head, Des Esseintes began dreaming of his coming journey. The appalling weather seemed to him like a down payment of English life paid to him up front in Paris; and his mind conjured up an image of London as an immense sprawling rain-sodden metropolis stinking of soot and hot iron, constantly enveloped in a cloak of smog. In his mind he could see a line of dockyards stretching into the distance – cranes, capstans, and bales of merchandise, swarms of men – some perched on the masts and sitting astride the yardarms, while hundreds of others, their heads down and bottoms in the air, trundled cases along the quays and into the cellars.

All this activity was taking place in warehouses and on wharves washed by the dark, greasy waters of an imaginary river Thames, in the midst of a forest of masts, a tangle of beams and girders, piercing the pale, lowering clouds. Up above, trains sped past; and in the underground sewers, others rumbled along, occasionally letting out ghastly screams or spewing floods of smoke through the gaping mouths of air shafts. Meanwhile along every street, large or small, in an eternal twilight relieved only by the tawdry infamies of modern advertising, there flowed an endless stream of traffic between two columns of earnest, silent Londoners, trudging along with gaze fixed ahead and elbows glued to their sides.

Des Esseintes shuddered with delight at sensing himself lost in this fearful world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, engaged in this incessant activity, and trapped in this merciless machine which ground millions of poor wretches to dust …

But then the vision vanished as the cab suddenly jolted him up and down on the seat. …

In the rue de Rivoli, Des Esseintes enters the Bodega and orders a glass of port.

He was surrounded by swarms of English people. There were gangling clergymen, pale and clean-shaven, with round spectacles and greasy hair, dressed in black from head to foot – at one extremity soft hats, at the other laced shoes, and in between, incredibly long coats with little buttons running down the front. There were laymen with the bloated face of the pork butcher or the bulldog, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, wine-coloured cheeks, stupid bloodshot eyes, and whiskery collars as worn by some of the great apes. At the far end of the wine-shop, a tow-haired man, as thin as a stick with white hairs sprouting from his chin like an artichoke, was using a magnifying glass to decipher the minute print of an English newspaper. …

Des Esseintes drifted into a reverie, conjuring up some of Dickens’ characters, who were so partial to the rich red port he saw in glasses all about him, and used his imagination to people the cellar with a new set of customers – here was Mr Wickfield’s white hair and ruddy complexion, there the sharp, blank features and emotionless eyes of Mr Tulkinghorn, the grim lawyer from Bleak House. These characters stepped right out of his memory to take their places in the Bodega, complete with all their mannerisms and gestures, for his recollection, revived by a recent reading of the novels, was extraordinarily precise and detailed. … He settled down comfortably in this London of the mind, happy to be indoors, and believing for a moment the dismal hooting of the tugs by the bridge behind the Tuileries was coming from boats on the Thames.

Des Esseintes decides that he has enough time to dine before catching the train to Dieppe. He stops at a tavern where he eats the heartiest of meals: thick, greasy oxtail soup, smoked haddock, roast beef, blue stilton, rhubarb tart and a pint of porter. He observes the other inmates:

As most of them turned their gaze upwards as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded that almost all these Englishmen must be discussing the weather. Nobody laughed or smiled, and their suits matched their expressions: all of them were sombrely dressed in grey cheviot with nankin-yellow or blotting-paper-pink stripes. He cast an eye over his own clothes and was pleased to note that in colour and cut they did not differ appreciably from those worn by the people around him. He was delighted to realise that superficially at least he could claim to be a naturalized citizen of London.

…

Des Esseintes felt incapable of moving a muscle; a soothing feeling of warmth and fatigue was invading every limb, so that he could not even lift his hand to light a cigar.

‘Get up and go, man,’ he kept telling himself, but these orders were no sooner issued than countermanded. After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn’t he already in London – whose smells, weather, citizens, food and even cutlery were all about him?

…

‘When you come to think of it, I’ve seen and felt all that I wanted to see and feel. I’ve immersed myself in English life from the moment I left home. It would be insane to jeopardise such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality. As things are, I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have thought of repudiating my old convictions, to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination, and to have believed like any halfwit that it was necessary, interesting, and useful to travel abroad.’

Alas! Not for us the unsullied delights of the imaginary voyage. For us it was all too real, and there is no disguising the fact that our period of exile was not a happy time for us, to such an extent that we were forced in the end to agree with Pascal of all people (hardly a prime candidate for the Decadent pantheon) when he said that ‘