A surfeit of camperies

Bevis Hillier

DIVINELY DECADENT by Stephen Calloway and Susan Owens Mitchell Beazley, £30, pp. 208, ISBN 184003286 Matthew Arnold wrote about the Scholar-Gipsy. Stephen Calloway is a Scholar-Dandy, a sort of trainee Roy Strong. He worked for Strong at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and is still to be found there, not yet behind glass. Where Strong has an Edmund Gosse moustache, Calloway sports a Vandyke beard, presumably on the principle enshrined in B. I. Isherville's couplet about relative hirsuteness:

The rule inflexible, if harsh, is: One beard shall equal two moustaches.

Calloway also has a nice line in brocade waistcoats, cravats and Inverness capes. I know him slightly: a bright, pleasant man; I'd say, a genuine aesthete, not a poseur.

Susan Owens, who gets smaller billing than Calloway on the title page — as it were, Loretta Young to his Clark Gable — is described as 'a beautiful, young Oxford blue-stocking' on the back jacket flap, which also records of the two authors:

They share an exquisite existence devoted to art, epicureanism and bibliophily in one of the most elegant of the seaside terraces of Regency Brighton.

There you catch the note of the Callowavian archness, which can become wearing.

Reviewing Calloway's last book, Baroque, Baroque, I gave it only two cheers. I wish I could muster more for this new offering. It is well written and spattered with scholarship; but it is a weird hybrid of a book. In fact, it is two distinct books, either of which Calloway is qualified to write, but they are `yoked by violence together', as Dr Johnson wrote about the images of metaphysical poetry, and this welding together is of a discombobulating incongruity.

One of the books squashed between the covers is a history and analysis of 'deca dence' Huysmans, Wilde, all that. One would expect it to be illustrated by pictures of celebrated decadents in their habitats — from my own collection, for example, I show here the poet-warrioraesthete Gabriele d'Annunzio (somebody Calloway and Owens do not so much as mention) in his languorous setting, and a 1915 caricature of him by Olaf Gu'bransson. Instead, the illustrations are all of modern rooms, furnished in styles which could be politely described as 'flamboyant', and less charitably as 'roaring kitsch'. The two works simply do not gel. It is as if a history of pop music were illustrated only by pictures of singers at present appearing on Top of the Pops — intermittently decorative, but inadequate. It must be said that the photography, by Deidi von Schaewen, is superb, with imaginative use of detail and cleverly angled viewpoints. This is the World of Interiors school of art history.

The second book, joined, Siamese-twin fashion, to the first, is not only a survey of extravagant contemporary decor, it is a consumer guide for those with aspirations to be chicly decadent. At the end of the book, the authors list no fewer than 71 retailers — Christopher Sheppard for antique glass, V. V. Rouleaux for fabrics, All Our Yesterdays for vintage clothes, Axford's for corsetry, Clone Zone for 'fetish wear', and so on. I suspect that Calloway suffers from the same flaw as the equally market-conscious 'style guru' Peter York, who wrote a book about the lifestyle of the 1980s — the flaw of yearning to be part of the phenomenon he is meant to be anatomising. Nice little yearner, nice little earner. Calloway is as interested in swanning about in fancy waistcoats and spats, or lolling on an overstuffed chaise longue under a giant fern, as in writing about those things. A subject like decadence, seething with over-the-topness, needs to be treated with an almost clinical objectivity, while wearing metaphorical rubber gloves. Otherwise, you soon find yourself in the position of the slipshod scientist who, while investigating a virus, becomes infected by it.

Over-the-topness: that is the ingredient which makes a tenuous link — a rococissimo Bridge of Sighs — between the two books in this volume. 'Over the top' is a phrase whose meaning changed radically in the last century. If an officer in the first world war told his troops, 'Men, we're going over the top', the poor sods were about to leave their mudlogged trenches to charge over the terrain ahead in no man's land. In recent years the phrase has come to mean 'excessive', 'overweening', `going too far'. The abbreviation OTT became so current in Britain that it was used as the title of a television series, which only too enthusiastically lived up to its bills; but, as a savourer of kitsch, I was rather disappointed when a Canadian film entitled Over the Top turned out to be about armwrestling. The phrase has not caught on in the USA, though Britain has little to teach Americans about going over the top. When Russell Lyrics attacked the excesses of American materialism in A Surfeit of Honey (1957), he took his title from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1:

They surfeited with honey ... began To loathe the taste of sweetness whereof a little More than a little is by much too much.

The British allow for some over-the-top citizens, whom we license with the label 'eccentrics'. Artists and writers have a special exemption: Harry Levin called his book on Christopher Marlowe The Oven-eacher. But those are human safety-valves of society. In general, the British regard restraint as a virtue, and other nations satirise us for that quality. Restraint is closely allied to our love of privacy: it means not letting your personality impinge tiresomely on others as Kenneth Williams's 'Snide' character did on a train journey when he told another passenger, `I haven't got an asp in this box, if that's what you think.' It is perhaps significant that a large proportion of Calloway and Owens's illustrations are of foreign rooms — American, French, Italian, Austrian, Bavarian, Russian, Moroccan. But there are some luscious English interiors too.

From the 1930s the Pevsnerian virtues of the Modern Movement and the International Style, stripped of ornament and vaunting functionalism and fitness for purpose, held tyrannical sway in interior decoration. Calloway's and Owens's book is at least an encouraging sign that luxury and self-indulgence are no longer seen as unforgivable heresies. The worry is that over-the-topness may be becoming the new tyrannical norm. Look at the popularity of the ineffable Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's television programme, Home Front. On 7 November Terry Ramsey, television editor of the London Evening Standard, gave this preview of one of the programmes:

Interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and garden guru Diarmuid Gavin give a mock-Tudor house in Kent a Mexican-style makeover. Yes, from mock-Tudor to Mexican. If that sounds bad enough, wait until you see the pink-and-white colour scheme and pink water feature. Is the result a master

If I might suggest a precept for LlewelynBowen, and perhaps Calloway and Owens too, to bear in mind, it would be this, from Jean Cocteau's Le Coq et l'Arlequin (1918): `Le tact dans l'audace, c'est de savoir jusqu'ou on peut aller trop loin.' (Tact in audacity, that's knowing just how far you can go too far.) There are only a few instances where absolutely unbridled overthe-topness has seemed in place — among them, the triumphal arches which Rubens designed for the entry into Antwerp of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, brother of the King of Spain, when the young prince became governor of the Netherlands in 1634; or the triumphal chariot, bristling with allegories, designed by the same artist to celebrate Ferdinand's victory over the Dutch at Calloo in 1638. (0 frabious day! Calloon! Callay!) These martial splendours were more virile than decadent. Cinema interiors of the Twenties and Thirties were another instance where excess was not merely acceptable, but obligatory.

The incongruity which characterises the authors' yoking of their two books is found in each of the sub-books. too. In Book I — the one which chronicles and analyses 'decadence' — Calloway and Owens go to some trouble to point out that male ostentation is part of nature — witness the glorious peacock ('his vast array of iridescent tail-feathers held in a shivering, almost menacing fan') and the dowdy little peahen. This would justify all Calloway's sartorial flauntings: just dear old nature taking its course. But, only a few pages away, we find the authors lauding Joris Karl Huysmans' book A Rebours (translated under the title Against Nature) and idealising perversities:

These seekers after strange sins and rarefied pleasures have rediscovered the ancient secret that it is in the mystic conjunction of lust and luxury that the most exquisite

So going along with nature and going against it both get a fair crack of the whip (see Sade, Marquis de). Even voyeurism gets a look-in (with binoculars):

Too world-weary for the continual pursuit of sexual conquest, the voyeuristic pleasures of the sequestered decadent are provided by visual Literary delights.

Purist grammarians will find a wonky construction in that; and, if I may add my own jab of pedantry, it is to advise the authors that 'doyen' means 'most senior', not 'best' — the sense in which they seem to deploy it in 'the bowerbird is the doyen of the decorating world'. Oh, I don't know; I suppose bowerbirds were on the scene before interior decorators, chicks before Hicks, so to speak.

Another self-contradiction in Book I relates to the unending battle between grandiose display and reticence or restraint. On the one hand, the authors pontificate that

for the Last thousand years, overweening selfregard, arrogance and the love of vaunting ostentation have always been demonised by those who are dull and uninspired

— which seems to be giving an oblique blessing to the over-the-top, as does their very debatable view that 'All the world's greatest builders have been vainglorious megalomaniacs.' But then they deal equally approvingly with the Regency dandies who displayed 'a subtle form of vanity based upon style in place of pride of possession'; and here Calloway and Owens have to concede that the prince of dandies, Beau Brurnmell, far from going for vulgar show, made his mark by being ultra-restrained, with dove-grey coats and snowy cravats. (Being different from the pack: surely that is the essence of dandyism?) Brummell was once described as 'a nobody who became a somebody and who ended up by giving the law to everybody'; but he did not have an overwhelming influence with the Prince Regent (always, in the mind's eye, played by the young Peter Ustinov, in the movie Beau Brummell); the future George IV built one of Britain's most exuberant follies, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. But even Trinny' has quite modest ranking among the most over-thetop personages of all time, who include Nero, Heliogabalus, d'Annunzio, William Randolph Hearst (San Simeon), Edward James (the Mexican jungle towers). Carmen Miranda (costumes, hats, singing and overacting), the Emperor Bokassa (towering throne and cannibalism) and, above all, mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (the castles). Of these, only Nero and Ludwig get any space in Divinely Decadent. I'd also have liked to see more enquiry into the causes of decadence. Vanity, yes; but isn't ennui a factor, too? (A character in a Disraeli novel demands some bad wine because he is so tired of the good.) The section-headings of Book I are mostly the names of the Deadly Sins. Though this smacks a little of an old colour-supplement wheeze, it works quite well, even if finding examples of decor to fit into 'Wrath' was more problematic than illustrating 'Sloth'. Along the way, there are many thought-provoking ideas. The old notion was that decadence represents the embers of slaked lust and has been earned by passion. Theophile Gautier described decadence as 'art at the extreme point of maturity produced by those civilisations which are growing old, their suns low in the sky'. Calloway and Owens note how this 'doom of exhausted races' theory was superseded by one which saw decadence as 'a mark of exquisite refinement, the name carried like the subtly secret badge of an exclusive cult'. This type of decadence goes in for a 'pessimistic nostalgia', looking back to golden ages. Luxury is part of it, too. Much to the point, the authors mention that when, in 1847, the American artist Thomas Couture exhibited 'The Romans of the Decadence' at the Paris salon, the painting was accompanied by a quotation from Juvenal:

Luxury has fallen upon us, more terrible than the sword, and the conquered East has revenged herself upon us with the gift of her vices.

That little nugget is typical of the Calloway-Owens erudition, which reaches into many recherché enclaves of the past. But again, the reference to Couture's picture cries out for a reproduction of it. There is none — just the sequence of overripe interiors of Book II.

Like Book I, Book II visits many incongruities upon us. The most glaring (wilfully so) are bizarre creations for the Trois Garcons' restaurant-cum-antiqueshop: shown here, a bed with a sunburst headboard in the same room as a gilt Gothic pinnacle balanced on top of an Art Deco cabinet; and a grotesque stuffed bulldog tricked out with a jewelled head

dress and fairy wings. Apart from the illustrations, Book II consists solely of extended captions — and what captions! I shall give just two samples. Sample one:

In a characteristically surreal touch, jewelled necklaces adorn several of the African game trophy heads [including a giraffe's] that form part of the decorations of ...Trois Garcons...

Sample two:

In New York, the house of artist Izhar Patkin groups sumptuous embroidered cushions, low seats and a heavily tooled Moroccan pouffe around a low Damascus brass coffee table lit by a lamp designed by the owner.

Here, as so often, one is unsure whether the authors are having us on. Are we meant to giggle with them or at them? That 'heavily tooled Moroccan pouffe' sounds suspiciously like a Frankie Howerd joke in a Carry On film. I remember that Alan Coren, in one of his humorous pieces in the Times, got some mileage out of trying to buy an ottoman. (He eventually lost the nerve to go into furniture shops saying that he was looking for 'a small Turkish pouffe'.) I wouldn't want Calloway and Owens to lose entirely their frivolity, campness and light touch; but they should apply the 'damper' pedal a little. The German-born BBC film-maker Peter Adam, in his 1995 autobiography Not Drowning but Waving, quotes from a reproving letter which his friend Hans Werner Henze, the composer, wrote him in 1969:

Watch out that they don't destroy you. Cynicism is more than just a wall to protect your vulnerability. It can turn against you and destroy you. All our sadness and desperation can he turned around, changed into a revolutionary potential. One day, in the middle of prosperity, when God is coming to Mahagonny, in the middle of the whisky, your eyes will open up and 'decadence' will no longer be enough for our tiredness.

That is almost as gnomic as Cantona's pronouncement about the sardines; but I think Calloway and Owens will get its drift and understand how it might apply to them. I also believe that if they follow its precepts, they will one day write a really memorable book. (0 frabjous day! Callooh! Calloway!) In the meantime, interior decorators everywhere will find this book a scream.