First Decadent

The First Decadent: Being the Strange Life of JK Huysmans by James Laver, 267 pages

Nabokov insisted quite rightly that Proust was a novelist rather than a memoirist, and warned that the reader should therefore guard against conflating Marcel the character with Marcel the author.  The same could be said of other authors as well - Dante being the obvious example.  Despite this, when dealing with a novelist as assertively autobiographical as Huysmans a solid biography can be an invaluable aid.  Thankfully, that is exactly what James Laver delivers.

There are two great temptations when dealing with the life of a man like JK Huysmans.  The purely aesthetic literary admirer is unlikely to be sympathetic to Huysmans' spiritual journey, and is likely to imagine that it impoverishes rather than enriches his work.  The pious biographer, on the other hand, is likely to want to sanitize Huysmans' life and work for fear of alienating his intended audience, thus ironically minimizing the importance of the same journey.  Laver somehow manages to avoid both traps, capturing the erotic charge the young Huysmans derived from the scent of a cluster of streetwalkers whose services he was unable to afford as well as the transcendent shock he found in the sound of perfect plainchant.  The result is, however, likely to be disturbing to the sensitive (there are passages here that are as black as any in La Bas), a quality it fittingly shares with its subject.