“At outdoor rituals, Arizona says she wore a red robe and stood in the centre of a pentagram which was surrounded by a hexagram or Star of David. She was triggered into her ‘Isis’ program and conducted the Drawing Down of the Moon ceremony which, she says, made four snarling, hideous creatures materialise in the Satanists’ circle. The sacrificial victims, who have been bred from birth for the role, are ritually killed by slashing the throat from left to right. This is the origin of the Freemasonic sign of pulling the flat hand across the throat from left to right, a movement which means ‘You’re dead.’ The blood from the victims is collected and mixed with arsenic, which appears to be a necessary element for those of the human-reptilian bloodlines. This is poured into goblets and consumed by the Satanists, together with the liver and eyes. This is supposed to provide strength and greater psychic vision. Fat is scraped from the intestines and smeared over the bodies of the participants – like the fat of the ‘messeh’ in ancient Egypt. The corpse is then suspended from a tree and the Satanists stand naked to allow the dripping blood to fall on them. The Mother Goddess says that by this time the participants are in such a high state of excitement that they often shape-shift into reptilians and mostly manifest, she says, in a sort of off-white color.”
-David Icke, The Biggest Secret
Là-Bas: the Aftermath
On March 6th, 1891 (a month before the publication of Là-Bas in book form), Husmans received a letter from a Mr. Eugene Cross: in this letter, Cross wrote that if the letters of Mme. Chantelouve were in fact copies of letters that had been sent to Huysmans by Henriette Maillat, then Huysmans should contact Cross promptly. It was, in essence, a blackmail letter. Huysmans reminded Cross that he was himself a government official, then hired a detective to investigate both Cross and Maillat (this was around March 10th or so): when the two became aware of this, they quickly dropped the blackmail ploy. Around this same time he also sent a letter to Andre Gide, praising the novel Le Cahier d’Andre Walter, Gide’s first novel (that the author had previously sent to Huysmans).
The publication of Là-Bas also was condemned by the Rosicrucian secret societies of the time. In one of Boullan’s earliest letters to Huysmans (February 10th, 1890), he had asked Huysmans if he were prepared to defend himself should occult warfare erupt between himself and the Rosicrucians: Boullan had warned that, “if you write the book you have outlined to me, you will certainly incur the full fury of their hatred.” When Huysmans replied in the negative, Boullan supplied him with instructions on how to combat evil spells (during Huysmans first meeting with him during his Lyons trip towards the end of 1890). Later on he would also send him some “weapons,” such as an exorcistic paste, which was a mixture of myrrh, incense, camphor and cloves (the plant of St. John the Baptist), the purpose of this paste being to ward off evil spirits.
Around this same time (beginning in March of 1891 and ongoing for several years), Huysmans became troubled by the feeling of something cold moving across his face, and became alarmed at the idea that he was surrounded by an “invisible force.” These ‘attacks’ would often occur at night, before he went to bed, and he referred to them as ‘fluidic fisticuffs’ (apparently his pet cat suffered similar ‘attacks’ during this same time period). Naturally, Huysmans blamed the Rosicrucians (and Stanislas de Guaita in particular) for these “attacks.”
Other strange events began to occur. One day Boullan warned him not to go into work that day, so Huysmans called in sick. Upon returning to work the next day, he found out that on the previous day a heavy gilt-frame mirror behind his desk had fallen off the wall and landed at the exact spot where he should have been sitting (had he gone into work). He also made use of the exorcistic paste and the blood-stained hosts which Boullan had provided him with. At the first sign of a spiritual attack, Huysmans would promptly make use of these occult weapons. First he would burn a tablet of the paste in his fireplace. Then he would draw a defensive circle on the floor. Wielding the “miraculous host” in his right hand, he would then press the blessed scapular of Elijan Carmel to his body and begin reciting special conjurations, the purpose of which would dissolve the “astral fluids” and paralyze the “power of the sorcerers.” Perhaps needless to say, it was around this period that some of Huysmans friends had begun to suspect that he was suffering from some kind of mental degradation.
In a letter to Jean Lorrain (written April 15th, 1891), Huysmans wrote, “Personally, I renounce all Satanism. I am going to write a mystical book, and after my St-Severin, which is a relaxation, simply an interlude, I shall take a bath in a sheep dip, I shall purge myself, and with a clean body I shall go to confession – after which I shall, I think, be in a state of candour which will permit me to vent my hysteria in a reversal, an ‘A Rebours’ of Là-Bas!” A few months later, in a letter written to Emile Edwards on May 17th, 1891, Huysmans again confirmed that his next book would be the total opposite of Là-Bas: “I shall try to produce the opposite of Là-Bas– a book full of the whiteness of pure and divine mysticism.” But this was still all very vague, and he himself had no clear idea what the book would be like, though in April of 1891 he did mention (in an interview with Jules Huret) the possibility of doing a novel about a priest.
Generally speaking, Huysmans tended to avoid telling most of the people he knew about these religious stirrings, and if asked about the subject, usually would just evasively suggest it was research for his next novel. Not that all of his activities of this time period were pious, as he continued to frequent brothels as well. Finally, determined to lead a chaste life, he decided that he would need to seek out a spiritual advisor. When Berthe de Courrière (of all people!) found out about this, she began seeking out a priest for her friend to confide in. There was one priest she knew of, a worldly and literate man she had met towards the end of 1890 named Arthur Mugnier (b. 1853 in the village of Lubersac), who was the curate of the church of Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, a post he had held since his appointment there in 1888. Around the time that Là-Bas was being serialized, Berthe mentioned to Mugnier, “I know the author of this novel, M. Huysmans, very well. He is a very talented writer. For some time now, he has been prowling round the churches and looking for a priest in whom to confide. I mentioned your name to him, and he would be glad to see you if you have no objections.” Even though Mugnier had yet to read a single word written by Huysmans (though he was familiar with his name), the priest agreed to meet him. On the evening of Thursday, May 28, 1891, Berthe took Huysmans to meet Mugnier. Once the two men were alone, Huysmans mentioned how he had just written a satanic book full of Black Masses, but that now he wanted to write a white book, but that before he could do that, he would first need to whiten himself. It was then that Huysmans asked the priest, “Have you any chlorine for my soul?”
Impressed by Huysmans’ humility, Mugnier agreed to become Huysmans’ spiritual advisor. Mugnier advised Huysmans to pray as often as he could, both at home and in church, and to avoid sinful occasions. At the same time that Huysmans was seeking advice from Mugnier, he was also (paradoxically) seeking out spiritual advice from Boullan. That July, Huysmans and Boullan made a pilgrimage to La Salette (the details of this trip would later be worked into his novel The Cathedral), before returning to Lyons and spending a few weeks with Boullan and his posse. While there, they received a letter from Paris, in which some occultists supposedly sent them death threats. In a letter to Boucher (written on August 19th), Huysmans wrote, “…and the battles lasted three days. It was like Wagram in the void! In his priestly vestments, with hosts in his hand, Boullan brought down his enemies, assisted by a somnambulist in a state of lucidity, and by Mother Thibault. And by me! I was responsible for seeing that the enemy did not cast little Laura (the somnambulist) into a state of catalepsy.”
Upon returning to Paris, Huysmans resumed both his pious and carnal activities, confessing to his friend Arij Prins (in a letter written on September 30th, 1891): “As far as filth is concerned, I have problems! I had discovered a girl whose depravity was first-rate; she had managed to get into my blood and we had some fine times between us. Her delicious and terrifying anus haunted me. I devoured it without respite, and now some American swine has deprived me of her. He is carrying her off to run a bar in Cincinnati! Damn! Since then other women seem insipid, even when using one’s tongue. That particular flower is decidedly the only remaining pleasure; but, damn it, a little mauve and pink hole is necessary, and that is not to be found every day.” In that same letter, he also gave some details about his next book: “I should like to write the battle between piety and the flesh. A book where there will be both prostitution and convents, scenes of taking the veil, and of deflowering, music and the liturgy of La Salette and strange corners of Paris. I am meditating on all this, and it is simmering away. I hope something will emerge from this cookery.”
In a long letter written to Louis de Robert and Emile Lapoix in November 1891, Huysmans claimed that “…I believe naturalism to be dead and buried, if it continues in the way in which it is being enforced. The novel of the mediocre man, of the majority, of the average voter, an analysis of the man in the street seems to me to be finished.” He also goes on to claim in this letter that the first chapter of Là-Bas is essentially a summary of how he feels about art, and that Là-Bas“…is in fact naturalistic, if by this word you understand only its documentary veracity, the reality of its characters, and for me this is so, but in quite a different way from in Les Soeurs Vatard, for example. In that area, the soul follows a special path that is unknown and immense, more interesting – for me at least – than all the psychology of worldly ladies or fishwives…To sum up, like you, I believe in exact documentation and in life, and I have no intention of straying from this path, but I am moving towards a beyond that is different from Zola, or even the Goncourts, towards states of the soul that are less well known, but I think interesting and disturbing.”
In the summer of 1892 (July to be exact), Huysmans spent a week at a Trappist monastery named Notre-Dame d’Igny, where he made Confession and took Communion: essentially, it was a religious retreat. Although this was a huge moment in Huysmans’ life, the topic is too lengthy to get into here: those curious about it should seek out his novel En Route, which (among other things) “dramatizes” his time at the monastery in fictional form.
Shortly after his stay with the Trappists, in August of 1892, Huysmans returned to Lyons to hang out with Boullan and his sect again. Around this same period of time, Boullan was trying to influence the subject matter of Husymans’ ‘white’ book (which for a time he was calling La Bataille charnelle, “The Carnal Battle”), saying that it should revolve around demonic possession in the convents of France and also present “…the spectacle of people abandoned to every sort of satanic obscenity, yet at the same time enjoying the illumination of divine life” (Boullan might have been describing himself here). During his stay there, Huysmans watched as Boullan engaged in long-distance occult warfare with his Rosicrucian foes, while Madame Thibault reported her visions of militant archangels. Huysmans seems to have begun harboring some doubts about Boullan around this period, for in a letter to a friend, he confessed, “This Boullan is disconcerting. As a theologian, as a mystic, and as an experienced confessor, he was incomparable. Why the devil had this man, who would otherwise have become an ecclesiastical high-up a long time ago, to get mixed up with the crazy notions of a Vintras!”
In the winter of 1892, Joseph Boullan visited Paris on a “mysterious errand,” staying at a hotel under an assumed name. During his stay in Paris, Boullan hung out with Huysmans and some of his friends. This would be the last time that Huysmans and Boullan would ever see each other again. By the start of 1893 Boullan was back at his home in Lyons, and on the 2nd of January he wrote a letter to Huysmans, extracts of which follow:
“My very dear friend J.-K, Huysmans, We received with much pleasure the letter which brought us your good wishes for this New Year. It opens with ominous presentiments, this fateful year, and its figures 8-9-3 together form a terrible warning… 3 January. I ended my letter there last night to wait for dear Mme Thibault to finish hers; but during the night a terrible incident occurred. At three in the morning I awoke with a feeling of suffocation and called out twice: ‘Madame Thibault, I’m choking!’ She heard, and came to my room, where she found me lying unconscious. From three till three-thirty I was between life and death. At Saint-Maximin, Mme Thibault had dreamt of Guaita, and the next morning a bird of death had called to her – prophesying this attack. M. Misme, too, had dreamt of it. At four I was able to go to sleep again: the danger had passed…”
Boullan passed away the following day, on January 4th, in the evening. He had been in a jovial mood that evening, but during his nightly prayers with Julie Thibault he suddenly began to feel ill and cried out, “What’s that?” He then crumpled to the ground and “died after an agony lasting two minutes” (to quote from a letter that Thibault sent to Huysmans regarding the death of Boullan shortly afterwards).
Huysmans instantly suspected the black magic of the Rosicrucians as the prime culprit behind Boullan’s death. He expressed these suspicions to his friend Jules Bois (who was also a disciple of Boullan). Bois then wrote an article attacking Guaita, which appeared in the January 9th issue of Gil Blas:
“I consider it my duty to relate these facts: the strange presentiments of Joseph Boullan, the prophetic visions of Mme Thibault and M. Misme, and these seemingly indisputable attacks by the Rosicrucians Wirth, Péladan, and Guaita on this man who has died. I am informed that M. le Marquis de Guaita lives a lonely and secluded life; that he handles poisons with great skill and marvelous sureness; that he can volatize them and direct them into space; that he even has a familiar spirit – M. Paul Adam, M. Dubus, and M. Gary de Lacroze have seen it – locked up in a cupboard at his home, which comes out in visible form at his command… What I now ask, without accusing anyone at all, is that some explanation be given of the causes of Boullan’s death. For the liver and the heart – the organs through which death struck at Boullan – are the very points where the astral forces normally penetrate.”
In an interview with Le Figaro a few days later (January 10th, 1893), Bois went on to claim that (though the response was wrongly attributed to Huysmans), “It is indisputable that Guaita and Péladan practise Black Magic every day. Poor Boullan was engaged in perpetual conflict with the evil spirits which for two years they continually sent him from Paris. Nothing is more vague and indefinite than these questions of magic, but it is quite possible that my poor friend Boullan has succumbed to a supremely powerful spell.” Guaita was so outraged by these comments that he ended up challenging Huysmans to a duel, but in the end Huysmans decided to placate Guaita and, in an article published on January 15th, he disassociated himself from Bloy’s accusations (Guaita himself would die a few years later, in 1897, at the age of 36, from a drug overdose).
Unable to attend Boullan’s funeral, Huysmans instead purchased a 15-year grant of a grave in a cemetery in Lyons, and on the tombstone he had this inscription placed: ‘J.-A. Boullan (Docteur Johannes), noble victime’. The grant, however, was never renewed, for by 1908 Huysmans, Julie Thibault, and most of the other members of Boullan’s sect had all passed away.
Moving on, by May 1893, Huysmans decided to take his ‘white’ book (which for a time he had intended to call Là-Haut, or Up There, thus further casting it as a sequel to Là-Bas) in a new direction. This would now become his novel En Route. Shortly before the book’s publication in 1885, Huysmans would provide this description of the book to a friend:
“The plot of the novel is as simple as it could be. I’ve taken the principal character of Là-Bas, Durtal, had him converted, and sent him to a Trappist monastery. In studying his conversion, I’ve tried to trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all the admirable art which the Church has created.” He then goes on to explain how the book is split into two parts, with the first part taking place in Paris and detailing the steps of Durtal’s turn towards Catholicism, while part two takes place at a Trappist monastery. As Huysmans notes, “In a word, I have made nothing up, neither the daily timetable, which I copied out at Igny, nor the kinds of monk that I present.” In short, En Route, even more so than Là-Bas, is less novel and more thinly-veiled autobiography, though it does make some reference to some of the events of Là-Bas: we find out that Durtal both finished and published his book on Gilles de Rais (somewhat unoriginally calling it The Life of Gilles de Rais), during his Confession at the Trappist monastery he mentions his relationship with Madame Chantelouve and how she took him to a Black Mass, and we also find out that in-between Là-Bas and En Route Durtal lost his two closest friends within two months of each other, with des Hermies dying from typhoid fever and Carhaix expiring from a chill.
In the summer of 1884, Huysmans paid a brief visit to Lyons to consult the private papers of Boullan. It was then that he also first discovered and read (to his horror) Boullan’s infamous cahier rose, and thus realized that Boullan and his followers had duped him all along (sadly for our purposes, around this point in time he destroyed the majority of his correspondence with Boullan: only a few of their letters remain in existence today, four of which may be found at the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal in Paris). Later on in his life, in a letter to Adolphe Berthet written on May 1st, 1900, Huysmans wrote, “Boullan was a Satanist, that is for sure, and Guaita was another. Only they both pretended to be men of God. And they both lied…”
In the year 1904, Les Cent Bibliophiles published a deluxe edition of A rebours, and to this edition Huysmans wrote a special preface, entitled “Preface, written twenty years after the novel” (though in fact he wrote this preface the previous year, in 1903). Although the subject matter of this preface naturally concerned itself with A rebours, Huysmans did address some of his other novels as well, including Là-Bas, and seeing as how this preface was written towards the end of Huysmans’ life (and in essence seems to summarize his life’s work as a novelist), it seems only appropriate to conclude this segment with his thoughts on Là-Bas: “As for this novel Là-Bas, which alarmed so many people, I wouldn’t write it in the same way either, now that I have become a Catholic again. No doubt it is true that the wicked, sensual part expounded in it is reprehensible; but I have to say that I toned it down, I revealed almost nothing; the documents the book contains are very insipid confections, very tasteless morsels compared with those I omitted and which I have in my archives. Nevertheless, I believe that despite its cerebral aberrations and its alvine follies, the novel has, by mere virtue of the subject matter it treated, rendered a useful service. It has drawn attention to the machinations of the Evil One, who had succeeded in getting men to deny his existence; it has been the point of departure for all the subsequent studies on the eternal trial of Satanism; it has helped to put an end to the odious practices of sorcery by exposing them; in short, it has taken sides and resolutely fought for the Church against the Devil.”
I do find it interesting that, following his reversion to Catholicism, certain members of the priesthood at the time were convinced that Huysmans should repudiate his secular books and have them destroyed. But as Huysmans observed in that same above quoted preface, “… how is it possible to appreciate the work of a writer in its entirety if one doesn’t see it from the beginning, if one doesn’t follow it step by step; and how, above all, is it possible to understand the progress of Grace in a soul if you suppress the traces of its passage, if you efface the first impressions it left behind?”
1903 saw the publication of The Oblate of St. Benedict, the fourth and final book of the Durtal tetralogy: having brought Durtal to the end of his spiritual voyage, it would fittingly be the final novel penned by Huysmans, who died on May 12th, 1907, from cancer of the mouth. He was 59 years old.
the grave of J.K. Huysmans
“Guibourg also confirmed that it was at la Voisin’s that he had ministered to the depraved requirements of Mlle des Oeillets and the titled Englishman, and he recalled an instance when he had performed a particularly distasteful spell for them. After Mlle des Oeillets had provided Guibourg with a sample of her menstrual blood, the Englishman masturbated into a chalice, then bats’ blood and flour were added to the semen collected there. Once Guibourg had uttered an incantation on this mixture, Mlle des Oeillets and her male companion took it away.”
-Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons
Là-Bas: Excerpts
What follows are two excerpts from the novel Là-Bas. For these, I have chosen to use the Keene Wallace translation, which, while not as accurate as some of the later English translations, is still the first version of the text that I ever read, and hence still has some sentimental value (though I still stress that the Dedalus Press edition is the ideal translation to read for those new to the book: indeed, prior to its appearance there had never been publically available a complete and unexpurgated English translation of the book).
(The Grünewald Passage, from Chapter I)
Grünewald's Karlsruhe Crucifixion, 1523-1525
“Durtal's introduction to this naturalism had come as a revelation the year before, although he had not then been so weary as now of fin de siècle silliness. In Germany, before a Crucifixion by Matthæus Grünewald, he had found what he was seeking.
He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. With extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body.
This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated.
Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulæ touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.
Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously.
The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight.
Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.
Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.
It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom—then powerless to aid Him—He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.
In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last ignominy of putrefaction.
Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception and execution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinity nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores and bleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Grünewald had passed all measure. He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.
These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard. Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place to supraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God.
Grünewald was the most uncompromising of idealists. Never had artist known such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely bounded from the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven. He had gone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he had extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears. In this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime the infinite distress of the soul.
It was without its equivalent in literature. A few pages of Anne Emmerich upon the Passion, though comparatively attenuated, approached this ideal of supernatural realism and of veridic and exsurrected life. Perhaps, too, certain effusions of Ruysbroeck, seeming to spurt forth in twin jets of black and white flame, were worthy of comparison with the divine befoulment of Grünewald. Hardly, either. Grünewald's masterpiece remained unique. It was at the same time infinite and of earth earthy.”
(The Crimes of Gilles de Rais Passage, from Chapter XI)
"Gilles refuses to alienate his existence and sell his soul, but he contemplates murder without any horror. This man, so brave on the battlefield, so courageous when he accompanied Jeanne d'Arc, trembles before the Devil and is afraid when he thinks of eternity and of Christ. The same is true of his accomplices. He has made them swear on the Testament to keep the secret of the confounding turpitudes which the château conceals, and he can be sure that not one will violate the oath, for, in the Middle Ages, the most reckless of freebooters would not commit the inexpiable sin of deceiving God.
"At the same time that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces, Gilles begins a course of systematic gluttony, and his flesh, set on fire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethes in tumultuous eruption.
"Now, there are no women in the château. Gilles appears to have despised the sex ever since leaving the court. After experience of the ribalds of the camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of the prostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminine form came over him. Like others whose ideal of concupiscence is deteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by the delicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour of femininity which all sodomists abhor.
"He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority. He chose them in the first place, these little psaltry ministrants, for their beauty, and 'beautiful as angels' they are. They are the only ones he loves, the only ones he spares in his murderous transports.
"But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy. The law of Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must go the whole way, is once more fulfilled. Gilles's soul must become thoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwell at ease.
"The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind over a slaughter house. The first victim is a very small boy whose name we do not know. Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearing out the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati's chamber. The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, who holds his peace. Gilles, confounded, flees. Prelati rolls up the poor remains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them in consecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.
"Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocation and conjurements. It manures a horrible crop. Not long afterward the Marshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever been sown.
"From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between the Marshal's retreat and his death, the inhabitants of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany walk the highways wringing their hands. All the children disappear. Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields. Little girls coming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in the lanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.
"In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, the scribes of Jean Touscheronde, duke's commissioner in these matters, compile interminable lists of lost children.
"Lost, at la Rochebernart, the child of the woman Péronne, 'a child who did go to school and who did apply himself to his book with exceeding diligence.'
"Lost, at Saint Etienne de Montluc, the son of Guillaume Brice, 'and this was a poor man and sought alms.'
"Lost, at Mâchecoul, the son of Georget le Barbier, 'who was seen, a certain day, knocking apples from a tree behind the hôtel Rondeau, and who since hath not been seen.'
"Lost, at Thonaye, the child of Mathelin Thouars, 'and he had been heard to cry and lament and the said child was about twelve years of age.'
"At Mâchecoul, again, the day of Pentecost, mother and father Sergent leave their eight-year-old boy at home, and when they return from the fields 'they did not find the said child of eight years of age, wherefore they marvelled and were exceeding grieved.'
"At Chantelou, it is Pierre Badieu, mercer of the parish, who says that a year or thereabouts ago, he saw, in the domain de Rais, 'two little children of the age of nine who were brothers and the children of Robin Pavot of the aforesaid place, and since that time neither have they been seen neither doth any know what hath become of them.'
"At Nantes, it is Jeanne Darel who deposes that 'on the day of the feast of the Holy Father, her true child named Olivier did stray from her, being of the age of seven and eight years, and since the day of the feast of the Holy Father neither did she see him nor hear tidings.'
"And the account of the investigation goes on, revealing hundreds of names, describing the grief of the mothers who interrogate passersby on the highway, and telling of the keening of the families from whose very homes children have been spirited away when the elders went to the fields to hoe or to sow the hemp. These phrases, like a desolate refrain, recur again and again, at the end of every deposition: 'They were seen complaining dolorously,''Exceedingly they did lament.' Wherever the bloodthirsty Gilles dwells the women weep.
"At first the frantic people tell themselves that evil fairies and malicious genii are dispersing the generation, but little by little terrible suspicions are aroused. As soon as the Marshal quits a place, as he goes from the château de Tiffauges to the château de Champtocé, and from there to the castle of La Suze or to Nantes, he leaves behind him a wake of tears. He traverses a countryside and in the morning children are missing. Trembling, the peasant realizes also that wherever Prelati, Roger de Bricqueville, Gilles de Sillé, any of the Marshal's intimates, have shown themselves, little boys have disappeared. Finally, the peasant learns to look with horror upon an old woman, Perrine Martin, who wanders around, clad in grey, her face covered—as is that of Gilles de Sillé—with a black stamin. She accosts children, and her speech is so seductive, her face, when she raises her veil, so benign, that all follow her to the edge of a wood, where men carry them off, gagged, in sacks. And the frightened people call this purveyor of flesh, this ogress, 'La Mefrraye,' from the name of a bird of prey.
"These emissaries spread out, covering all the villages and hamlets, tracking the children down at the orders of the Chief Huntsman, the sire de Bricqueville. Not content with these beaters, Gilles takes to standing at a window of the château, and when young mendicants, attracted by the renown of his bounty, ask an alms, he runs an appraising eye over them, has any who excite his lust brought in and thrown into an underground prison and kept there until, being in appetite, he is pleased to order a carnal supper.
"How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them? He himself did not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murders he had committed. The texts of the times enumerate between, seven and eight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seems overconservative. Entire regions were devastated. The hamlet of Tiffauges had no more young men. La Suze was without male posterity. At Champtocé the whole foundation room of a tower was filled with corpses. A witness cited in the inquest, Guillaume Hylairet, declared also, "that one hight Du Jardin hath heard say that there was found in the said castle a wine pipe full of dead little children.'
"Even today traces of these assassinations linger. Two years ago at Tiffauges a physician discovered an oubliette and brought forth piles of skulls and bones.
"Gilles confessed to frightful holocausts, and his friends confirmed the atrocious details.
"At dusk, when their senses are phosphorescent, enkindled by inflammatory spiced beverages and by 'high' venison, Gilles and his friends retire to a distant chamber of the château. The little boys are brought from their cellar prisons to this room. They are disrobed and gagged. The Marshal fondles them and forces them. Then he hacks them to pieces with a dagger, taking great pleasure in slowly dismembering them. At other times he slashes the boy's chest and drinks the breath from the lungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges the incision with his hands, and seats himself in it. Then while he macerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks over his shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms. He himself says afterwards, 'I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures, tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.'
"Then he becomes weary of these fecal joys. An unpublished passage in his trial proceedings informs us that 'The said sire heated himself with little boys, sometimes also with little girls, with whom he had congress in the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than acting in nature.' After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them to pieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in the fireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and the ashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from the top of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.
"Soon his furies become aggravated. Until now he has appeased the rage of his senses with living or moribund beings. He wearies of stuprating palpitant flesh and becomes a lover of the dead. A passionate artist, he kisses, with cries of enthusiasm, the well-made limbs of his victims. He establishes sepulchral beauty contests, and whichever of the truncated heads receives the prize he raises by the hair and passionately kisses the cold lips.
"Vampirism satisfies him for months. He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the tomb. He even goes so far—one day when his supply of children is exhausted—as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the fœtus. After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his violations of the grave. But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.
"As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a victim. His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; it becomes spiritual. He wishes to make the child suffer both in body and soul. By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupes affection, and desecrates love. At a leap he passes the bounds of human infamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil.
"He contrives this: One of the unfortunate children is brought into his chamber, and hanged, by Bricqueville, Prelati, and de Sillé, to a hook fixed into the wall. Just at the moment when the child is suffocating, Gilles orders him to be taken down and the rope untied. With some precaution, he takes the child on his knees, revives him, caresses him, rocks him, dries his tears, and pointing to the accomplices, says, 'These men are bad, but you see they obey me. Do not be afraid. I will save your life and take you back to your mother,' and while the little one, wild with joy, kisses him and at that moment loves him, Gilles gently makes an incision in the back of the neck, rendering the child 'languishing,' to follow Gilles's own expression, and when the head, not quite detached, bows, Gilles kneads the body, turns it about, and violates it, bellowing.
"After these abominable pastimes he may well believe that the art of the charnalist has beneath his fingers expressed its last drop of pus, and in a vaunting cry he says to his troop of parasites, "There is no man on earth who dare do as I have done.'
"But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certain souls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited. In his excesses of stupration and murder the Marshal cannot go beyond a fixed point. In vain he may dream of unique violations, of more ingenious slow tortures, but human imagination has a limit and he has already reached it—even passed it, with diabolic aid. Insatiable he seethes—there is nothing material in which to express his ideal. He can verify that axiom of demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who give themselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him.
"As he can descend no further, he tries returning on the way by which he has come, but now remorse overtakes him, overwhelms him, and wrenches him without respite. His nights are nights of expiation. Besieged by phantoms, he howls like a wounded beast. He is found rushing along the solitary corridors of the château. He weeps, throws himself on his knees, swears to God that he will do penance. He promises to found pious institutions. He does establish, at Mâchecoul, a boys' academy in honour of the Holy Innocents. He speaks of shutting himself up in a cloister, of going to Jerusalem, begging his bread on the way.
"But in this fickle and aberrated mind ideas superpose themselves on each other, then pass away, and those which disappear leave their shadow on those which follow. Abruptly, even while weeping with distress, he precipitates himself into new debauches and, raving with delirium, hurls himself upon the child brought to him, gouges out the eyes, runs his finger around the bloody, milky socket, then he seizes a spiked club and crushes the skull. And while the gurgling blood runs over him, he stands, smeared with spattered brains, and grinds his teeth and laughs. Like a hunted beast he flees into the wood, while his henchmen remove the crimson stains from the ground and dispose prudently of the corpse and the reeking garments.
"He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges, dark, impenetrable forests like those which Brittany still can show at Carnoet. He sobs as he walks along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms which accost him. Then he looks about him and beholds obscenity in the shapes of the aged trees. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his very presence depraves it. For the first time he understands the motionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches.
"Here a tree appears to him as a living being, standing on its root-tressed head, its limbs waving in the air and spread wide apart, subdivided and re-subdivided into haunches, which again are divided and re-subdivided. Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in a stationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished scale from bough to twig to the top of the tree. There it seems the trunk is a phallus which mounts and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, on the contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges into the glossy belly of the earth.
"Frightful images rise before him. He sees the skin of little boys, the lucid white skin, vellum-like, in the pale, smooth bark of the slender beeches. He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar boys in the dark and wrinkled envelope of the old oaks. Beside the bifurcations of the branches there are yawning holes, puckered orifices in the bark, simulating emunctoria, or the protruding anus of a beast. In the joints of the branches there are other visions, elbows, armpits furred with grey lichens. Even in the trunks there are incisions which spread out into great lips beneath tufts of brown, velvety moss.
"Everywhere obscene forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered, into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunks frightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers, membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is an arboreal lazaret, a venereal clinic.
"And there, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech.
"Amid the sanguinary falling leaves he feels that he has been spattered by a shower of blood. He goes into a rage. He conceives the delusion that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.
"He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk, weeping, until he arrives at the château and sinks to his bed exhausted, an inert mass.
"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps. The lubric enlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, the coupling of the diverse beings of the wood, disappear; the tears of the leaves whipped by the wind are dried; the white abscesses of the clouds are resorbed into the grey of the sky; and—in an awful silence—the incubi and succubi pass.
"The corpses of his victims, reduced to ashes and scattered, return to the larva state and attack his lower parts. He writhes, with the blood bursting his veins. He rebounds in a somersault, then he crawls to the crucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips to the feet of the Christ.
"A sudden reaction overwhelms him. He trembles before the image whose convulsed face looks down on him. He adjures Christ to have pity, supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, and when, incapable of further effort, he whimpers, he hears, terrified, in his own voice, the lamentations of the children crying for their mothers and pleading for mercy."
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I would like to add here that, despite the grimness of some of the book’s subject matter (as can be seen from the above passages), at the same time there are also some very funny moments. Part of the humor comes from Huysmans’ constant vexation with nearly every single aspect of modern society: at the start of chapter V, he even takes a moment to go on a long diatribe about modern stoves (or, as he calls them, “hideous sausages of sheet-metal”). In one scene, Durtal tells Hyacinthe that he can’t sleep with her anymore, and as an excuse for why this is the case he comes up with some cock & bull story on the spot about a non-existent child of his and the child’s ailing mother, and by the end of his lie has gotten so carried away with it that he finds himself believing in the child himself and almost starts crying. When des Hermies finds out that Huysmans will be attending a Black Mass, he grumbles, “Some people have all the luck!” And in the chapter following the Black Mass chapter, des Hermies is unimpressed with Canon Docre’s version of the Black Mass, proclaiming it (in comparsion with the crimes of Gilles de Rais) “…incomplete, pale imitations, tame, as one might say.” To which Durtal peevishly replies, “You’re a fine fellow, you are. It’s not that easy these days to procure children one can disembowel with impunity, without the parents whinging and the police coming after you!”
“In Paris, and even in London, there are misguided people who are abusing their priceless spiritual gifts to obtain petty and temporary advantages through these practices. The “Black Mass” is a totally different matter. I could not celebrate it if I wanted to, for I am not a consecrated priest of the Christian Church. The celebrant must be a priest, for the whole idea of the practice is to profane the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Therefore you must believe in the truth of the cult and the efficacy of its ritual. A renegade priest gathers about him a congregation of sensation-hunters and religious fanatics; then only can the ceremonies of profanation be of extended black magical effect. There are many ways of abusing the Sacrament. One of the best known of which is the “Mass of Saint Secaire,” the purpose of which is to cause an enemy to wither away. At this “mass,” always held in some secret place, preferably in a disused chapel, at midnight, the priest appears in canonical robes. But even in his robes there is some sinister change, a perversion of their symbolic sanctity. There is an altar, but the candles are of black wax. The crucifix is fixed the head downwards. The clerk to the priest is a woman, and her dress, although it seems to be a church garment, is more like a costume in a prurient revue. It has been altered to make it indecent. The ceremony is a parody of the orthodox Mass, with blasphemous interpolations. The priest must be careful, however, to consecrate the Host in the orthodox manner. The wine has been adulterated with magical drugs like deadly nightshade and vervain, but the priest must convert it into the blood of Christ. The dreadful basis of the Mass is that the bread and wine have imprisoned the Deity. Then they are subjected to terrible profanations.”
-extract from an essay entitled “Black Magic is Not a Myth” written by Aleister Crowley in 1933
Some Examples of Là-Bas in Pop Culture
It would seem that the fictional serial killer Norman Bates is a fan of Là-Bas. Consider this passage from Robert Bloch’s classic 1959 horror novel Psycho, in which the character Lila peruses the bookcases of Norman Bates: “Here Lila found herself pausing, puzzling, then peering in perplexity at the incongruous contents of Norman Bates’s library. A New Model of the Universe, The Extension of Consciousness. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Dimension and Being. These were not the book of a small boy, and they were equally out of place in the home of a rural motel proprietor. She scanned the shelves rapidly. Abnormal psychology, occultism, theosophy. Translations of Là Bas, Justine.”
The December 1976 issue of Playboy magazine saw the publication of Norman Mailer’s 18 page screenplay/film treatment “Trial of the Warlock,” itself an adaptation of Huysmans’ Là-Bas. Although some of its scenes are shuffled in a different order (the screenplay opens with the scene where Durtal visits the home of Mr. Chantelouve, which is chapter 12 of the novel, for example), and the ending is much different from the novel, on the whole it is a fairly faithful adaptation and captures the spirit of the book quite well. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friend Scott Bradley for bringing this screenplay to my attention, and also for photocopying and mailing the pages in question to me, a few of which I reproduce below:
title page of “Trial of the Warlock”
page 2 of Mailer’s screenplay
page 3 of Mailer’s screenplay
Mailer’s depiction of the Black Mass
the Black Mass continues
the final page of Mailer’s screenplay
When studying the lyrics to Current 93’s Imperium album (released in 1987), I came across the following lyric in the song “Locust” (which is, I’ll confess, one of my top ten favorite Current 93 songs): “Leaden tower of hysteria, bloody vase of rape.” This is, of course, taken from one of Canon Docre’s diatribes during the Black Mass chapter of Là-Bas. Evidently David Tibet was using the Keene Wallace translation of the text, as a more accurate translation of the line in question would be: “The Founder of Hysterias, the blood-stained Vessel of Rape!”
Umberto Eco’s excellent 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum makes a reference to Là-Bas. Consider this passage, which, even though it does not mention the book by name, is clearly alluding to it (especially the reference to Lyon):
In the year 2000, the Susan Lawly record label (best known for being the home label for the power electronics band Whitehouse) released an extremely interesting compilation album entitled Extreme Music From Women (the third in their “Extreme Music” series, following the extreme music from Japan/Africa releases). One of the tracks on this album, Debra Petrovitch’s “Dislocated,” contains a text reading, this reading being “a ‘recall’ of the Grunewald painting of ‘The Crucifixion From Wound to Wound’ written by Huysmans in 1891” (to quote the album’s liner notes): obviously a reference to Là-Bas. You can hear the track here:
During his run on the Batman comic in 2008, comic book writer Grant Morrison wrote a 6 issue arc known as “Batman R.I.P.” that ran from May to November of that year, through Batman issues #676-681. In this storyline, Batman was pitted against the Black Glove, a mysterious organization obsessed with destroying both him and all the values he stood for. The leader of the Black Glove is a sinister individual known only as Dr. Simon Hurt, a man whose identity is very obscure (though Morrison drops a lot of clues and hints that Dr. Hurt is the Devil in human form). In the second issue of this arc (#677: “Batman in the Underworld”), the Batcave is attacked by gargoyle-masked henchmen of the Black Glove, who proceed to administer a savage beat down to Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler. Before this beat down takes place, one of the henchmen says the following to Alfred: “Ah, La Bas. Deep where no one can find you.” At the time this issue was released, this line confused a large portion of the Batman fan base, as many of them had never even heard of the novel Là-Bas. Needless to say, I got the reference! “Batman R.I.P.” actually has very little to do with Là-Bas, and most likely Morrison just put that reference in there to further add to the Satanic ambiance of his storyline (though I would like to point out that Morrison has obviously been influenced by the Decadents: for further proof of this, see his 3 issue mini-series Sebastian O, published in 1993, which concerns itself with a dandy bisexual mercenary living in a sort of alternate steampunk Victorian England: one of the issues of this mini-series is called “Against Nature” and there’s even a reference to a character who’s last name is “Carhaix”).
My own debut short story collection Grimoire: A Compendium of Neo-Goth Narratives (Rebel Satori Press, 2012) is heavily indebted to the writing style and subject matter of J.K. Huysmans, and there are many aspects of that book that represent his work. The penultimate story, “Reaping Time Has Come,” features a scene (in a chapter suggestively entitled “Down There”) in which the main character hallucinates herself watching a Black Mass, a scene that totally rips off Là-Bas, even down to a cameo to Gilles de Rais himself (though the part where Rais does a mincing striptease using a boy’s intestines as a boa was my own invention, though even that was ripped-off from something else, most likely a WSB homage).
J.K. Huysmans in April 1903
Some miscellaneous Huysmans quotations
Huysmans on Maldoror:
“But oh yes, my dear Destrée, the Comte de Lautréamont is talented with a fine madness. That singular book with its comic lyricism, a bloody rage reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade, and amidst a load of sentences put together like four pennyworth, a few that burst with magnificent sonority! I await an article on this book with impatience, I hope you will have found some information concerning the life of this strange fellow, who has created his hymn of homosexuality with such fine phrases. It is also true that it contains some nightmares a la Redon. The screwing of the female shark by the man is stupefying, and there is a disemboweling, liver and heart, through a vagina that is quite appetizing. Thank you for having sent me these songs. They are in fact worth reading – what the devil could a man who has written such terrible dreams do for a living?” (from a letter to Jules Destrée, dated September 27th, 1885)
Huysmans on the Sun:
“Apart from all that, nothing new here- sun – and you know my hatred for that celestial lout, who roasts my lodgings and renders me stupid, covering me with sweat and depriving me of what little appetite I have.” (from a letter to Odilon Redon, dated June 28th, 1886)
Huysmans on the human body:
“Ah, such fine news: on the one hand I have a stomach upset and on the other, neuralgia. How inferior this human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.” (from a letter to Arij Prins, dated August 11th, 1886)
and:
“The hostelry of flesh in which we lodge our wretched selves is badly run.”
(from a letter to Edmond De Goncourt, dated March 17th, 1889)
Huysmans on the only rewarding aspect of writing:
“I have just written those felicitous words: the end! You know what that means! It is the only really good literary moment in one's life, I believe, given that, the very next day, disgust with what one has written sets in. But still, there has been at least one minute of happiness.” (from a March 1887 letter to Camille Lemonnier, on the completion of En Rade)
J.K. Huysmans on city life:
“And savour the fresh air. Here it is pestilential and filthy- the streets are full of provincials, dragging confused-looking wives and weeping children. All this with their noses in the air, looking up to the skyline to read the street names. One feels the need for a massacre. But what are they all after, these people? There was a crowd of them at the Louvre yesterday; they smelt of damp dog, polluting the paintings with their breath. One of them, bald and obese, was explaining the subjects of the pictures to his abominable wife, done up Gods know how, and she, rolling her liquid rubber eyeballs, her hands on her belly, mumbles: ‘Them’s old, them pictures, old, old.’ Massacres!” (from a letter written to Odilon Redon on September 15th, 1889)
And:
“There is at least one respect in which you are to be envied in being shut up: that of not seeing the city overrun with foreigners displaying their vulgar wealth, and the English. It is enough to make one vomit at the moment; what frightful tides of humanity foreign spermatozoa produce: comic and podgy. It is unbelievable. The tortures of the Holy Office certainly had their uses!”
(from a letter to Paul Verlaine, dated September 27th, 1889)
Huysmans on dealing with STDs:
“You give me sad news of your love life: your gonorrhea. A propos, do you know how we successfully treat it in Paris, without injections, and without relapse? I have myself followed this treatment, which is excellent. Drink as much as you can of a herbal tea made from pine buds. You simply pour boiling water on the buds and let it cool. This increases the flow, and then when you have had a really good flow, buckets of it, you take sandalwood capsules for a few days, and that’s an end to it. The essential is to pee for all you are worth beforehand, let it run like a river. That’s the secret. Then the pus is no longer green, like gamboge. It’s all over very quickly and is a real cure.” (from a letter to Arij Prins, dated July 24th, 1890)
Huysmans on the state of literature:
“Literature is mediocre; twenty-five novels come out every day, and, in this mass, nothing worthwhile. This overproduction is frightening, and drowns everything. Ah, how right they are, those who bring out their books for their friends, privately, not polluting themselves with the heady prostitution of paying customers.”
(from a letter to Jules Destrée, dated December 12th, 1890)
Huysmans on the Homosexual scene in Paris:
“I found your studies of disturbance in sexual gender no less interesting. Two years ago, with a view to a book which is unfortunately unwriteable, for it would look as if one were digging up scandal, I was able to get an introduction into the frightful world of sodomy. Frightful! That is the word, and if demonic action were to exist, that is where it would be found. I believe that they are just about all candidates for the madhouse, but stab wounds ensure that they die in hospitals rather than in mental asylums. This is what is disconcerting; one could almost establish a law: that is, the true sodomites (I don’t mean young lads who do it for money, but those who live only for this fixation) are physical giants. It seems that muscular strength develops this taste in men. Thus this army finds its recruits amongst the porters of the central market, butchers’ boys, fairground strongmen. Those are the ones who are really enamored of this vice and are, above all, the passive partners. All the bars around Les Halles are full of them. And what is frightful is that a man who has this vice cuts himself off voluntarily from the rest of the world. He lives apart. He eats, has his hair done, drinks in special establishments run by sodomites; his brain becomes even more given up to imbecility as his voice changes; imagine a Hercules with enormous arms, a bestial mouth, cackling like an old maid, putting on airs in a loud voice that is shrill and husky! Is there any relation between the vocal chords and genital organs? One might think so, if one observes that nearly all female singers are lesbians, especially contraltos.”
(from a letter to Dr. Paul Serieux, written May 15th, 1893)
Huysmans addressed these issues again in a letter he wrote to an acquaintance in 1896. Because I’ve grown sick of transcribing things by this point, I’ve decided to just scan two images of the letter in question here, which I provide because I think it gives an interesting (though bilious) view of what the homosexual scene in Paris was like at the tail-end of the 1890’s (for those curious, the “talented boy” who served as Huysmans’ guide into the Parisian homosexual scene was none other than Jean Lorrain):
In my own personal opinion, Huysmans strikes me as a bit of a closet case, a man equally fascinated by and repulsed by homosexuality. As we saw in his letters to Prins earlier (and some of his other letters written in the 1880’s), he was clearly comfortable discussing the subject, and only got squeamish about it following his reversion to Catholicism in 1891-1892. Yet even though Huysmans became fanatically religious late in his life (and, it must be said, somewhat anti-Semitic), at the same time he still associated with open homosexuals such as Jean Lorrain, though their friendship became a bit strained when Lorrain was charged with “corrupting public morals by literary means” in the early 1900s, as Huysmans remained silent rather than come to his friend’s defense (he did, however, heap praise on Lorrain’s novel Monsieur de Phocas upon its publication in 1901). Huysmans also remained good friends with Verlaine, a man he would later classify as the only Catholic poet worth reading: in the preface that Huysmans wrote for the 20th anniversary edition of Against Nature, Huysmans not only stood by his praise for the poetry of Verlaine that he had first expressed in that novel all those years ago, but also said that if anything his appreciation of Verlaine’s work had only gone higher since then. In 1904, Huysmans wrote a preface for the publication of a volume of Verlaine’s religious poetry, and the fact that Huysmans would associate his name with such a project exasperated many Parisian Catholics. Huysmans mentioned this in a letter written on April 29th, 1904:
“At the moment I’ve got the Press nagging at me. The preface to A Rebours, coming on top of the preface to the Verlaine book, has had the good fortune to exasperate the Catholics and they have begun harping again on that same old string – the destruction of my earlier books. I told them to go to hell in one or two interviews, and to my astonishment this doesn’t appear to have pleased them. Oh, the imbecility, the bigotry of these people! … The idea, too, that Verlaine was a great poet, the only Catholic poet, drives them to distraction. Again and again they come back to the point that he was a drunkard and a sodomite. They must be very pure themselves, these people, to be so fond of condemning others…”
In Baldick’s biography of Huysmans, he mentions Huysmans “…proposition that the only noteworthy Catholic writers and artists were converts who, like Verlaine, had tasted life’s pleasures and griefs to the full.” This was one reason why he found Gilles de Rais to be a more interesting Christian than, say, George Sand or Augustin Craven. In his book Decadence and Catholicism, Ellis Hanson points out that T.S. Eliot’s famous quote about Baudelaire (“Satanism itself, so far as not merely an affectation, was an attempt to get into Christianity by the back door”) is even more appropriate when applied to Huysmans’ case. As Huysmans would observe later on in life, “…it was through a glimpse of the supernatural of evil that I first obtained insight into the supernatural of good. The one derived from the other. With his hooked paw, the Devil drew me towards God.” Yes, you’re reading that right: Huysmans credits the Devil with his religious conversion!
Recommended Reading
The three Huysmans novels that I would recommend to anybody are A Rebours, Là Bas, and En Route. The Dedalus Press editions of these books are especially worth seeking out as they usually include helpful endnotes and introductions. Plus, they’re considered to be the most accurate translations.
Other books on Huysmans that I would recommend:
The Life of J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Baldick, first published in 1955, republished in 2006 by Dedalus Press. A little outdated, yet it still remains the definitive biography of Huysmans’ life. Essential reading.
The Road From Decadence: from Brothel to Cloister: Selected Letters of J.K. Huysmans edited and translated by Barbara Beaumont and published by the Athlone Press in 1989. A nice selection of Huysmans’ letters, well worth seeking out.
The Image of Huysmans by Brian Banks, published in 1990 by AMS Press. Not as good as the two previous mentioned books, but still very informative, and a must read for fans of En Route (in that it includes many rare photographs of Notre-Dame d’Igny, the Trappist monastery that Huysmans stayed at in the year 1892).
Those interested in other writers of the 19th-century French Decadence would do well to investigate the work of Jean Lorrain (who perhaps in his life embodied the spirit of the Decadence to a greater degree than any other writer of that era), though sadly much of his writings still remain to be translated into English. The interested reader should be sure to check out Monsieur de Phocas, one of his final novels and a sort of spiritual sequel to Huysmans’ Against Nature: it has been published by both Dedalus Press and, more recently, Tartarus Press, this latter edition coming in the form of a deluxe hardcover, and which makes a nice collector’s item. Last year Snuggly Books released a collection of Lorrain’s short stories entitled Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker which I also highly recommend (I understand that they’re also planning to release a second volume of his short stories at some point in the future, which will be entitled The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies). In this same vein, I would also recommend Remy de Gourmont’s The Angels of Perversity (Dedalus Press, 1992) and Leon Bloy’s Disagreeable Tales (Wakefield Press, 2015: sadly much of Bloy’s writing remains untranslated into English as well). Also recommended is The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France (Zone Books, 1998, edited by Asti Hustvedt). Over 1,000 pages long, it collects a number of French Decadent novels (including Rachilde’s Monsieur Venus, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, and Huysmans’ En Rade), along with a selection of short stories by writers such as Guy de Maupassant, Jean Lorrain, Remy de Gourmont and Octave Mirbeau, among others. In regards to the relevant realm of Decadent art, the books Lust For The Devil: The Erotic-Satanic Art Of Felicien Rops (Wet Angel, 2013) and The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon (Dover Publications, 1969) are also highly recommended. In terms of poetry, perhaps needless to say, Baudelaire and Rimbaud are the two patron saints.
Links
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14323/14323-h/14323-h.htm
On-line e-version of the Keene Wallace translation of Là-Bas
http://www.huysmans.org/
Brendan King’s Huysmans website
http://www.yucknyum.com/zine/winter-2011/5/
"The Mordant Liquor of Tears: Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece" by Ben Robinson, from the Winter 2011 issue of Yuck ‘N Yum
http://museumofthemind.org.uk/gallery/artist/henry-chapront
a collection of the illustrations created by Henry Chapront that appear in a 1912 publication of Là-Bas
http://abrax.stormloader.com/huysman.htm
“The Word-Painter of Paris: an Introduction to the work of J.K. Huysmans” (by Colin Wilson). This article was originally to have appeared as an introduction to Brian Banks’ The Image of Huysmans, but was cut for some unknown reason
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One final note I’d like to add. Last fall I read Ray Russell’s short novel The Case Against Satan, which was first published in 1962 and which paved the way for later popular depictions of demonic possession such as The Exorcist. In a footnote at the end of the book, Russell relates a story about how, while working on the book’s 13th chapter, which depicts an exorcism ritual that culminates with the words “Begone, Satan!” While working on this chapter, Russell found himself being annoyed by the abrupt manifestation in his study of a large horsefly, one that was “almost the size of a bee.” This horsefly began buzzing around Russell’s head, preventing him from working on the chapter. Eventually he was forced to stop writing and kill the horsefly with a rolled-up newspaper. Upon sitting down to resume work, no sooner had he typed a few words then did a second fly of the same size as the first “attacked” him. So he was forced to stop work again and kill this fly as well. All in all, he was ‘attacked” by four flies, each one appearing after he had killed the previous one. According to Russell, the flies stopped appearing after he had typed the words of exorcism, “Begone Satan!” Leaving his study afterwards, Russell felt an instant of “superstitious fear” upon recalling a tidbit of information that he had learned many years before but had forgotten until that moment: how Beelzebub was the name of Lucifer’s lieutenant, and how the name Beelzebub, in Hebrew, means Lord of the Flies.
I mention this little anecdote for the following reason: on the evening of February 21st, 2015 (a Sunday), a day in which I had spent a great number of hours working on this very Là-Bas Day, a most curious coincidence occurred (or maybe Jung would have classified it as a synchronicity). Like many people who suffer from a mild form of OCD, I have a number of little rituals I carry out every morning and night that I can’t really explain. In my bedroom I keep a shoebox containing (among other things) a number of objects from my high school days that, every morning, I set up at spots around my bedroom, only to return them to the shoebox at night. One of these objects is a small handheld pocket calculator that hasn’t functioned correctly in years: whenever I put it away at night I always observe how some new random number is on display. Well, on the evening of which I speak (and I swear in the name of everything I hold sacred that I’m not making this up, including on the souls of my deceased cats), when I went to put the calculator away, I noticed that the number on display that evening was 666. Make of that what you will!
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p.s. Hey. And now you have the entirely of Sypha's amazing monument. Thank you ever so much, James! ** David Ehrenstein, Howdy! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi. Yeah, even though 'better to be safe than sorry' is a boring way to go in many situations, in LSD's case, it can be wisdom from on high. I don't know that Jeffrey Lewis song but the title, not to mention your mentioning it, will make me find it. I think super fame must be very hard. I'm friends with someone who's extremely famous, and it's nothing but a constant toll and burden on his life. He used to be only semi-famous, and we could hang out, see movies, go to Disneyland, go bowling, whatever, and there'd be maybe one or two people who'd interrupt things asking for autographs, etc., but now he literally can't do anything casually and socially anymore, and there's no reward at all for that level of fame. All it does is narrow his life way, way down. I kind of famously really hate Lars von Trier's movies. That always surprises people, and a lot of my trusted, smart friends are into them, but I just can't stand them. They and I just do not get along at all for some reason, ha ha, but true! What have you got going on for the weekend? I think I'm going to just try to get work done, although it has turned into a slightly chilly version of spring here as of yesterday, and the outdoors has become very tempting. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Yeah, I can't stand U2 or him. The sanctimony drives me crazy, and they're huge generalizers in their lyrics and POV, etc., and I hate generalizations almost more than anything. I did kind of love their very first single 'I Will Follow' at the time, but nothing since. Oh, the image your dad talking casually to James Brown is pretty trippy in a great way. When I was a little kid, I was with my mom when she bumped into Lucille Ball somewhere, and they had a really friendly, unremarkable conversation, and I remember being incredibly confused. It was kind of like the child version of taking acid. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Really happy that James' post was so warmly welcomed by you. ** Sypha, Hi, master. It's so cool to have the whole thing united now. Thank you infinitely. So great. And the traffic here was through the roof yesterday, so it's a smash hit as well. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Thanks a lot for your message this morning! I seem to have fallen out of my period of inordinate interest in following Zorn's stuff, I don't know why. Maybe because he's so prolific and flexible, and I'm already on a non-stop mission trying to keep up with Robert Pollard, and that's all my attention span can manage or something. I heard and liked the first Simulacrum album, but I guess not enough to continue. Anyway, theoretically, based on what you said, that new one sounds curious but maybe not so hot. ** MANCY, Hi, S. I finally wrote to you. Such an exciting idea! Anyway, read the email, and, yeah, a super interesting idea! My favorite Malicks are 'The Thin Red Line' and 'Tree of Life'. If you want to try them, I think I would suggest watching'TTRL' first. I'm very happy that you're into exploring Malick, obviously. Bon weekend, pal. ** Okay. You all have amazing weekends ahead, locally-wise, thanks to Sypha, so take full advantage, please. See you on Monday.