Review by Glenn Russell
Nightmares of an Ether-Drinkeris a collection of 27 very readable,
highly provocative and enjoyable short-stories by Jean Lorrain, member
of the French Decadent movement of the late 19th century. And Jean Lorrain
was a decadent with attitude: as a leading journalist of the day, many
of his literary reviews were brutal. How brutal? Marcel Proust challenged
him to a duel. Guy de Maupassant likewise requested pistols at ten paces.
You can read all about Lorrain’s fascinating life and the stages
of his literary output in translator Brian Stableford’s excellent
30 page introduction. And this introduction also includes how Lorrain’s
ether drinking was part of the French literary scene’s experimentation
with substances like opium and hashish, conducted by, most notably, Charles
Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier. Sidebar: Brian Stableford notes
how addiction to ether killed Jean Lorrain, since Lorrain found out too
late that drinking ether is like imbibing rat poison. So, please don’t
try this at home, gang.
Ether doesn’t play a part in all these stories but nightmares of
one stripe or another most certainly do. For me, I couldn’t put the
book down. I started reading in the evening and couldn’t stop; rather
than sleeping, I spent the entire night riveted to every page, mesmerized
by Lorrain’s breathtaking storytelling. Over the course of the next
week I reread, slowly and carefully, recording a number of his stories
on my digital recorder so I could listen whilst taking my walks. This
being said, I’d love to share my take on all these stories but since
I am writing a book review and not a book, I’ll exercise restrain
and comment on three of my very favorites:
The Possessed
The narrator’s friend Serge insists he’s perfectly healthy since
he hasn’t taken ether in a year: he eats like a horse, sleeps like
a log and can run up hills like a teenager. However, he must leave Paris
before the cold weather sets in and the city becomes fantastically haunted
and he starts hallucinating. Serge goes on, “You see, the strangeness
of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified
by reality.”
Well my goodness, a man terrified by reality. How did this happen? Serge
explains how his mind-creations, those invisible ghosts and ghouls that
haunted him during his ether-drinking days have disappeared but have been
replaced by much more sinister phantoms: everyday people! We are given
lurid detail of what happens nowadays when Serge encounters people in
the street and when boarding the tram. For example: “ I was possessed
. . . by the conviction that all the people facing and sitting to ether
side of me were beings of some alien race, half-beast and half-man: the
disgusting products of I don’t know what monstrous copulations, anthropoid
creatures far closer to the animal than to the human, with every foul
instinct and all the viciousness of wolves, snakes, and rats incarnate
in their filthy flesh.”
Such visions of reality reveal the inglorious underbelly of hallucination-inducing
drugs. And such horrific visions also speak to the decadent world-view.
Recall how des Esseintes, the effete, hyper-sensitive aristocrat and main
character in J-K Huysmans’s novel ‘Against Nature’(À
rebours), cult favorite of the decadents, becomes nauseated when spotting
a few potbellied, mutton-chopped bourgeois at a train station. This negative
experience of everyday people is intensified 100-fold in Lorrain’s
tale. And If this short-story is in any way autobiographical, it’s
no wonder the author’s decadent lifestyle mirrored his decadent writing.
The Locked Room
Contrary to his usual decision to remain in Paris and partake of the
opera and theater, the narrator accepts his friend’s offer to participate
in a hunt out in the country. Since there are no rooms available in the
chateau, he is given room in the guest house. Bad luck! Turns out, the
host’s long deceased mother was adjudged mad and locked away in that
very room.
The first night the narrator has an experience he will never forget.
He is suddenly awakened from his sleep; he sits bolt upright in a sweat
as he hears the playing of a harpsichord in the adjoining room. Then,
even more mysterious and creepy, enveloped in the darkness of the night,
he feels the pressure of breath on his face, then a thin, faint imploring
voice: “Take me away. Take me away” followed by the noise of
fleeing footsteps, a door closing and a key turning a lock. Horrified,
he attempts to flee but escape is impossible, for the doors are locked.
He pulls a chair over and sits up reading and keeping vigilant watch all
night. The next morning he wakes up in bed. Were all the events of the
previous night a nightmare? Or, did he really receive a visit from the
mother’s ghost? The narrator receives a sign that keeps him wondering.
With this short-story we hear echoes from another J-K Huysmans novel,
‘Becalmed’ (En Rade), where a similar Parisian ventures to a
similar French chateau with a similar guest house. The fin de siècle
decadents were miles away from romantic notions of nature and country;
rather, for them, rustic, rural life was primitive, uncouth, ominous and
noxious. Here is the way our Parisian narrator in ‘The Locked Room’
puts it: “The guest-house of the Marquis de Hauthere stood beside
that stagnant pool, in the midst of wild grasses, rotting in the rain.
Its atmosphere was strange, unsettling and mysterious. The thick silence
was undisturbed save for the weathervanes on the roof creaking in the
October wind; all around was the conspiratorial silence of the voiceless
and echoless woods, dormant beneath a blanket of fog.”
A Posthumous Protest
A visiting friend is aghast when he sees the decapitated head of Donatello’s
‘Unknown Woman’ sitting on the narrator’s shelf. The narrator,
in turn, confesses he performed the decapitation on a whim. The friend
accuses him of a monstrous act against art and humanity, a Satanic impulse
that will certainly have dire consequences.
Sitting in his armchair several evenings later, the narrator relates
his shocking encounter: “I saw – oh horror! – that the
cut-off head shone strangely in the gloom. The fixed eyes were illuminated
by a halo of light which bathed her, surrounding her golden hair with
a radiant aureole. From those staring eyes – her terrible eyes, whose
dead pupils I had myself outlined in ultramarine – darted two rays
of light, directed at the sealed door, now laid bare by the curtain which
I had removed.” He then goes on to describe how a naked decapitated
young woman appears at the doorway with blood trickling between her shoulders.
To see just how far the French decadent literary movement separated itself
from 19th century romanticism, let’s compare this Lorrain tale with
‘The Mummy’s Foot’ by Théophile Gautier. In Gautier’s
romantic tale, the narrator purchases a mummy’s foot from a Parisian
antique dealer and that night has a dream of enchantment where he travels
back to ancient Egypt with a beautiful princess to have a series of thrilling,
exotic, heart-throbbing experiences. Nothing of this sort for Lorrain’s
narrator; rather, his meeting with a young, beautiful woman is horrific
(after all, he decapitated her) -- he is pulled down into a ghastly, hair-raising
nightmare. Ah, the decadents!
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