Such was George Orwell's vision of suburban life in his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air – a vision of mindless, middle-class consumerism teetering always on the edge of financial ruin – a domestic life-in-death. Over the course of the twentieth century, suburbia has become the topos of bourgeois complacency, the locus of psychic decline. Strange, then, to think that at the end of the nineteenth century, two of Europe's Decadent writers – Max Beerbohm and Joris-Karl Huysmans – could find in the suburbs of London and Paris an aesthetic retreat from the snares of bourgeois urban life. In 1884, Huysmans published Against Nature, the paragon of fin-de-siècle Decadent fiction which recounts the movement of the syphilitic aristocrat, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, from the centre of Paris to the suburban village of Fontenay-aux-Roses where he constructs his anti-bourgeois aesthetic hermitage. Over ten years later, in 1896, Beerbohm published his satirical essay “Diminuendo,” in which the twenty-four-year-old writer announces his retirement from the literary world and his subsequent retreat to a quiet life of aesthetic contemplation in a London suburb. Needless to say, these suburban havens are a far cry from Orwell's sordid account of pre-war suburbia's obsession with false teeth and life insurance. Though only a little over fifty years separate Against Nature and Coming Up for Air, the suburbs of Huysmans and Orwell seem worlds apart. No one could imagine Des Esseintes's leather-bound study in the “Hesperides Estates,” and it seems unthinkable to picture Beerbohm locking himself away in a library amidst the cacophony of squealing infants and nagging housewives. The suburbs seem the least likely place in which the Decadent or dandy might thrive, and yet in Against Nature and “Diminuendo,” Huysmans and Beerbohm depict the suburbs as the last refuge of the man of taste. How could this be? What are these fin-de-siècle suburbs of London and Paris, and what do they signify in Huysmans's and Beerbohm's writing? These are the central questions I pose in this study of the Decadents’ retreat from urban life.

Pax Suburbana

Although Des Esseintes's reclusive withdrawal to the Parisian suburbs occurs later in his life, the desire to escape the dreariness of city-living came early to this erstwhile aristocrat, for once he left his Jesuit college and entered the secular world, “already he was dreaming of a peaceful, civilized retreat, a comfortable desert, a snug, immovable ark where he could take refuge, far from the incessant deluge of human folly” (Against Nature 7; Prologue). Though we might think of the countryside as the archetypal literary refuge, for Des Esseintes, Nature is simply a cheerless mirror of the city's bleak commercialism: “what triteness Nature displays, like a specialist who confines himself to his own single sphere; what small-mindedness, like a shopkeeper who stocks only this one article to the exclusion of any other; what monotony she exhibits with her stores of meadows and trees, what banality with her arrangements of mountains and seas!” (20; ch. 2). Thus Des Esseintes's more obvious space of retreat, his rural Château de Lourps, becomes an unworkable solution in his escape from Paris, for “Nature has had her day; she has finally exhausted, through the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and her skies, the sedulous patience of men of refined taste” (20; ch. 2). This denial of natural beauty proves to be a consistent thread throughout Huysmans's writing; in his essay, “La Bièvre,” Huysmans declares, “Nature is interesting only when sickly and distressed” (93). Such an inversion of our aesthetic expectations is surely a touchstone of Decadent literature, but, as Natalie Doyle notes, such a pose is not simply aesthetic, but political as well, since, for Huysmans, “Nature . . . is an accomplice of the social order established by the bourgeoisie” (20). Thus in denying Nature's status as a viable aesthetic category, Huysmans denies an entire set of bourgeois social, political, and artistic values. Only by championing Nature's anomalies can Huysmans circumvent the bourgeois social order.

Given Des Esseintes's aesthetic and political motivations, the suburb, neither city nor country but a created space between, becomes the only place in which Des Esseintes can land his “immovable ark”:

At Fontenay-aux-Roses, Des Esseintes can safeguard himself from the Parisian throngs while remaining free from the disappointments of unadulterated Nature. Des Esseintes's choice to move “near the fort” recalls Huysmans's earlier writings on the suburbs. In “Around the Fortifications,” Huysmans asserts, “nowadays the suburbs are the last reguge of the intimists” (89). As in “La Bièvre,” Huysmans here locates beauty in the decrepitude of the suburbs, remarking, “it is as if the suburbs are forever recovering from some disease that preys on the city and saps its strength” (89). The area just outside Paris's fortifications offers intimists like Huysmans a curious blend of both urban and natural decay. In “View from the Ramparts of North Paris,” Huysmans describes the “doleful charm of the suburbs” in which “the all-powerful beauty of nature is replendent, because the landscape is in perfect accord with the profound distress of the families who people it” (106). This distressed landscape offers Des Esseintes solace because it calls to mind neither the rampant affluence of Paris's middle-class bourgeoisie nor the banal attractiveness of Nature.

Beerbohm's “Diminuendo” follows the pattern of Against Nature closely. Beerbohm, the young artist, becomes disenchanted with his experience at Oxford, and “disheartened” (69) with the cult of Walter Pater. The aspiring aesthete finds little comfort in the hubbub of modern Oxford life, and he “wonders what counsel Pater, insistent always upon contact with comely things, would offer to one who could nowhere find them” (69). Not only has Oxford “lost its charm and its tradition” (68), it has also, like Huysmans's social-climbing, bourgeois Paris, lost its social organization: “the townspeople now looked just like undergraduates and the dons just like townspeople” (68). Like Des Esseintes, Beerbohm realizes that he “surely . . . could have no part in modern life” (69). The urbanization of Oxford has cheapened the ancient city's beauty, and so Beerbohm deems retreat to be his only option. He writes, “to unswitch myself from my surroundings, to guard my soul from contact with the unlovely things that compassed it about, therein lay my hope” (69). Beerbohm resolves to “make [himself] master of some small area of physical life, a life of quiet, monotonous simplicity, exempt from all outer disturbance” (71), and, in a passage uncannily similar to Huysmans's description of Des Esseintes's “house-hunting,” Beerbohm writes,

Here again we see the Decadent yearning for a space which excludes activities which are both conventionally urban (“no traffic”) and conventionally rural (“no harvest”). Beerbohm's entirely lifeless suburb, where “no vital forces unite,” is the extension of Huysmans's faubourgs which “are wasting away and growing thin, languishing and putting on a pitiful appearance” (“Fortifications” 89). Once again, the suburb presents itself as the only viable place in which to enact the Decadent lifestyle – the only reasonable cloister for a man of taste. Beerbohm, like Des Esseintes, locks himself away “among books that charm, and give wings to the mind” (“Diminuendo” 72) in a suburban retreat.

Nothing Happens Here

We might justly wonder, however, why Beerbohm, the quintessentially urban and urbane dandy, takes such pains to point out that his place of refuge can only be found in a London suburb. After all, Beerbohm's “real life” retreat to Rapallo, Italy in 1909 could hardly be considered suburban. Furthermore, such a similar invocation of the suburb-as-retreat by two fin-de-siècle European writers – one French, one English – does seem to be a remarkable coincidence. G. A. Cevasco argues that Beerbohm would have been familiar with Against Nature, and at the very latest would have read the novel in his first years at Merton College at the beginning of the 1890s (29). We can certainly read Against Nature as an important model for “Diminuendo,” and so Beerbohm's suburban reference may simply be an homage to Huysmans's text. Yet, while Beerbohm may have sympathized with Huysmans later in life,Footnote ¹ we must keep in mind that “Diminuendo” is a parody of Decadence, complete with mock-Pateresque Latinate prose. If we read “Diminuendo” satirically, then, we must consider the villa in “—ham” and its attendant Huysmanian associations as the ironic centre of Beerbohm's essay.

In order to understand how the suburb functions ironically in “Diminuendo,” however, we need to understand the nature of London's late-nineteenth-century suburbs. In England, the suburb was without doubt a bourgeois terrain, for, as Christine Bolus-Reichert observes, “frequently characterized as middle-class utopias, suburban ‘estates’ embodied the nineteenth-century ideal of ‘middlingness.’ Neither urban nor agrarian, neither proletarian nor aristocratic, the suburb charted a middle course in aesthetics and politics” (162). England's suburbs were very much built communities, and they first appeared near the end of the eighteenth century as circles of homes surrounding city-centres (Hinchcliffe 1). Prior to the eighteenth century, the area outside London's walls was associated with industry and indigence. As the socio-economic composition of Britain began to waver with the rise of the middle class throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so too did the previously rigid divisions between city and country. A new kind of space was required to accommodate the growing middle classes who longed to escape urban overcrowding while remaining close to the centre of business, and so, as Tanis Hinchcliffe argues, “the suburb provided a buffer between town and country and allowed all those activities which were neither urban nor properly speaking rural” (15). Indeed, the suburb represented, in Sharon Marcus's terms, “a paradoxical symbiosis of the rural and the urban” (4). With time, however, “middlingness” came to represent not simply a new economic reality, but rather the ideal reality, for while “the suburb altered the landscape around the town,” Hinchcliffe argues, “it gained its own definition from the town and not the country. It was sub-urban, not sub-rural” (17). The placidity of country life no longer soothed the increasingly city-based bourgeoisie, so, as Bolus-Reichert notes, suburban living came to represent “a psychological ‘retreat’ from the stresses of commercial and professional life” (163). Hinchcliffe explains further: “the suburb was constructed not so much as the antithesis of the city, but as its complement, supplying in its comfort and informality what the city lacked, while rejecting at the same time the louche diversity and essential inefficiency of the old productive suburb” (17). The suburb was thus an enhanced version of the city – the circumscribed asylum of the bourgeoisie.

In “Diminuendo” Beerbohm speculates about the viability of an aesthetic project which lacks a suitably aesthetic space: “could it be that there was at length no beautiful environment wherein a man might sound the harmonies of his soul?” (69). Such a “beautiful environment” does, of course, exist: the suburb. What Beerbohm laments about modern Oxford is the encroachment of the Big City upon the little, contemplative town:

The chaos of city life, with its hotels and newsboys and trams, compels Beerbohm to flee to the suburbs; yet, ironically, the bourgeoisie fled the city for the very same reason – to escape the turmoil of urban dwelling. In escaping to the suburbs, Beerbohm the “Decadent” artist thus satirically aligns himself with the bourgeoisie – the very class against which the fin-de-siècle artistic movements reacted.

In order to understand Beerbohm's satiric move here, we need to contextualize “Diminuendo” within the discourse of suburban criticism in the 1890s. As London continued to expand throughout the second-half of the nineteenth century, so too did the list of suburbia's critics. By the close of the 1880s, the idyllic dream world of suburban living became in many cases a nightmarish mirror vision of “darkest London.” As Margaret Jones Bolsterli notes, the typically urban issues of “overcrowding, jerry-built houses, and poor sanitation” (4) plagued the new residential suburbs built by unscrupulous, cash-hungry developers. The suburban crisis was not merely a crisis of housing, however, for the deterioration of suburbia also roused “anxieties about national decline” (Hammerton 295). The ever-growing and ever-more insufficient suburban landscape came to represent a kind of shorthand for wider social criticisms of class, taste, and economics. It is not surprising, then, that attacks on middle-class suburbia should figure so prominently in the literature of the period.

Two of the most memorable, if divergent, critiques of suburbia from the period include George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody (1892) and George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee (1984). The former text is notable for inspiring the term that captures that peculiarly suburban breed of middle-class pretension: Pooterism. Charles Pooter, a hapless City clerk, strives to attain a singular vision of a gentlemanly lifestyle in the otherwise insipid suburban development of Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. The Grossmith brothers catalogue, with a gentle satiric hand, Pooter's increasingly disastrous attempts at maintaining appearances in the suburbs, from negotiating with insolent servants and predatory tradesmen to navigating decorating fads and class politics. Throughout, it is Pooter's pretensions to a status he does not merit that forms the crux of the Grossmiths's satire, and, as such, Pooter stands in for an entire class of aspiring bourgeoisie. Hardfur Huttle, “a very clever writer for the American papers” (153; ch. 20), is the Grossmiths's mouthpiece for anti-bourgeois sentiment. At a dinner party, Huttle seizes upon Pooter's faith in “the happy medium,” and suggests that Pooter's quest for “respectability” through a course of steady middlingness can only lead to “insipidness” (153; ch. 20). Pooter becomes increasingly uncomfortable as Huttle continues his onslaught against “the happy medium,” for Huttle's diatribe reads as a mirror held up to Pooter's existence:

Though this sudden expression of anti-suburban philosophy at the end of the novel might appear a little too heavy-handed, nonetheless, the Grossmiths manage to neatly capture the crippling complacency that Pooterism engenders. And, given the wild success of The Diary of a Nobody, both in its initial serialization in Punch and its later compilation, it seems that many Britons agreed.

If the Grossmith brothers made suburbia ludicrous, then Gissing made it sinister. His 1895 portrait of Camberwell in In the Year of Jubilee is a nightmare vision of the Grossmiths's Brickfield Terrace. Pooterism in Gissing's view leads not to a series of comical gaffes, but rather to social tragedy. Nancy Lord, the young, “educated” heroine of Gissing's novel, falls victim to her skewed understanding of social status. Buoyed up in her fervent belief that the possession of “culture” is an efficacious means to ascend from her lowly, lower-middle-class place, Nancy fails to realize that her education has, in her father's words, “made her neither one thing nor another” (80; bk. 2, ch. 1). She has become, in fact, the embodiment of the “unhappy medium” – too educated for labour, yet too poor for leisure. In her quest for gentility, Nancy suffers the ignominy of carrying an illegitimate child and is alienated from both her middle-class roots and her upper-class aspirations. Gissing painstakingly documents the dire results of a suburban class “in rabid pursuit of gentility” (27; bk. 1, ch. 4) who can no longer discern between real and sham. The suburban space in which this levelling of values runs amok is no longer simply, Gissing argues, a comic backdrop for the gentle mockery of pretense; it is a breeding ground for social calamity.

If, then, we place “Diminuendo” in the context of fin-de-siècle criticisms of the London suburb, we can understand the role Beerbohm's suburban retreat plays in his satire. If the suburb had come to signify a bourgeois dreamworld of pretense, consumerism, and social climbing, then Beerbohm's decision to seek solace in such an overdetermined landscape becomes palpably absurd. Beerbohm undercuts the serious implications of his retirement by locating said retirement in an entirely untenable space. As Gissing and the Grossmiths make clear, the suburbs are no proof against “contact with unlovely things.” The extreme sterility of Beerbohm's suburb, in which “the pulse of life” (72) is only accessible through a borrowed copy of the Times, will only serve to imprison him outside “the distant pageant of the world” (72). Thus, Beerbohm's choice of a suburban retirement acts as the pivot-point of his satire; surely the “Incomparable Max,” the ur-dandy, could never thrive in such a world; surely he could never live a life of “monotonous simplicity,” for in seeking to rebel against the horrors of bourgeois commercialism he experiences in the city, Beerbohm's path leads him into the snares of middle-class complacency. Transposing the trademark detachment of the dandy into spatial terms, Beerbohm the ironist effectively casts himself as one of William Cowper's men of business who, upon retiring to the “Suburban villas, highway-side retreats,” become “prison'd in a parlour snug and small/Like bottled wasps upon a southern wall” (ll. 481–93). And so to read “Diminuendo” as a social commentary, the attuned reader must begin to unravel Beerbohm's ironic web; knowing that the suburbs, being just as tasteless and stultifying as the city, are no place for an aesthete, we assume Beerbohm's jest to be an admonition against all he seems to promote. The suburbs are no cure for taste.

Une ceinture de ruines

If the suburbs are a quintessentially bourgeois space, how can Huysmans's suburban-retreat narrative not be wholly satiric? Quite simply, the suburbs of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century signified an entirely different way of life than did their English counterparts. Unlike the constructed communities of Britain's suburban estates, the suburbs of Paris came about rather haphazardly. Most of Paris's suburbs were previously autonomous villages that had been annexed throughout the 1850s and 1860s as part of Baron Haussmann's scheme to reconfigure Paris (Merriman 26). This massive rearrangement of Paris's borders, coupled with the expansion of the transit system, resulted in the creation of the city's twenty arrondissements. The changes, however, were far from welcome; John Merriman observes, “villagers of the suburbs became Parisians, like it or not, and most apparently did not” (27). Though the “new Parisians” resented their loss of civic autonomy, the city centre was equally wary of its fringe communities, as is clear, Leonard Koos argues, in “the increasingly lexical imprecision of the words used to designate these spaces – ‘les environs’, ‘les faubourgs’, ‘la banlieue’, and ultimately ‘la zone’, all acquired pejorative resonances in the developing discourse of urbanism” (“Terrains” 202). As Haussmann attempted to perfect the centre of Paris, the more unsavoury aspects of urban life were pushed to the edges of the city, and so the faubourg played a key role in the process of “mass marginalization” concomitant with the rise of industry in France (Merriman 13). Whereas the English bourgeoisie fled to the suburbs so that they could escape the hazards of urban life – crime, disease, poverty – the Parisians simply exported such dangers to the faubourg, thus rendering the suburbs a decidedly unbourgeois place. As Robert Fishman observes, the suburban villa so popular in Britain was

The socio-spatial configuration of Paris was precisely the inverse of LondonFootnote ³ – had Beerbohm been a Parisian raffiné, he might have installed himself in the top floor of an imposing Mansard-roofed apartment building; being English, his Queen Anne villa sufficed for satiric effect. If the fin-de-siècle suburbs of London signified a bourgeois dream, then those of Paris were a bourgeois nightmare.

Although the suburbs were a space of geographic marginalization, they were psychologically central to the minds of most Parisians. Koos argues the faubourg was “the locus of repellent yet strangely fascinating and seductive dangers in the French cultural imagination,” which “possessed a representational potential” of “radical semiotic malleability” (“Terrains” 203). Not surprisingly, the vileness of the suburbs became a touchstone of French literature during this period, especially amongst the Naturalist writers. For instance, in his essay “Aux champs,” Emile Zola describes the suburban “red belt” in vivid detail, writing,

Zola connects the foulness of this “belt” with the process of industrialization and expansion, noting that “the forest has been razed to allow Paris to pass, which advances always; one does not find more than a vast empty plain, where the ugly buildings have laid their roots along roads” (201–02; my translation). Though the English would characterize London as the topos of vice and decay, for the French, “one finds in the suburbs all the filth and crime of the big city” (Zola 194; my translation).Footnote ⁴

Yet, the suburbs of Paris offered artists and writers representational possibilities beyond mere vilification, for the faubourg was in many ways the antidote to the bourgeois homogeneity of the commercialized city centre. Koos argues that in contrast to both the overdetermined French countryside and the “monotonous predictability” of Paris's bourgeois neighbourhoods, the faubourg allowed for “the possibility for a brutal yet exhilarating re-awakening of the artist's consciousness, numbed by urban consistency and order” (“Terrains” 207). The suburbs were, in Koos's terms, “a zone of cultural commentary” (“River” 95) which gave rise to literary and artistic creativity in the midst of industrial and urban destruction. In other words, while the English suburbs were domestic outlets, Parisian suburbs were artistic outlets; they “represent something of a free and open space, a subculture with its own argot, delinquent in resisting not only laws but cultural traditions, defiantly contre-pouvoir” (Merriman 8).

Huysmans's use of a suburban locale in Against Nature is both thematically and formally motivated. In many ways, the suburb becomes a spatial mirror of the artistic and psychological temperament of the contre-pouvoir Decadent artist. Koos contends, “the Huysmanian suburb comprises, in the mobility of its significations, a subversively liberating space on which dominant discourses are disabled and dismantled” (“Terrains” 208). This suburban landscape, “unpredictable and uncodified” (Koos, “River” 100), provided Huysmans with a geographically and socially eccentric space in which to cultivate his programme of artistic and cultural eccentricity. Because the suburbs of Paris were at once authentically sordid and yet somehow unimaginable, they were the only place in which eccentricity could thrive; they were the “imaginary space of décadence” (Doyle 15) made real.

The semantic and geographic indeterminacy of the Parisian suburbs imbued the outskirts of the metropolis with a vague – yet menacing – sublimity. As Merriman argues, “faubourg and suburb seemed beyond the law, beyond policing, even beyond understanding. Workers referred to the new exterior boulevards of Paris as ‘the shores of the New World’” (64). Huysmans echoes such rhetoric when he describes Des Esseintes, who “saw himself as cast away on the shore at a sufficient distance for the tide of Paris to no longer reach him, yet still close enough to the capital to ensure his solitude” (9; Prologue). This profoundly liminal space to which Des Esseintes chooses to retreat becomes, in true Decadent fashion, a place in which reality and illusion may be intertwined.Footnote ⁵ Suburban “nature” is deceptive, discordant, and in many ways sordid, yet, for Huysmans at least, it is somehow preferable to unadulterated organicism. Just as Huysmans's beloved Bièvre, which “is nothing but a moving rubbish dump, but nevertheless it waters the last remaining poplars in the city” (“La Bièvre” 95), the faubourg, though vice-riddled and depraved, becomes a positive zone – something more than either city or country – just as Des Esseintes's imagination surpasses “vulgar reality.” In the squalid suburbs of Paris, art can renew itself by confronting and elevating reality through artifice.

In this reading of Against Nature, then, Huysmans's use of the Decadent suburban retreat is not, as it is for Beerbohm, an ironic move because, unlike Beerbohm's London suburb, the Parisian faubourg represents an assault on bourgeois sensibility in keeping with the Decadent mandate to épater le bourgeois. In retiring to Fontenay-aux-Roses, Des Esseintes does not capitulate to middle-class ideals – he in fact embraces the suburban subculture of heterogeneity and individuality.

“Anywhere Out of the World”

Judging from these more conventional readings of “Diminuendo” and Against Nature, then, it would seem that a somewhat uninspiring combination of genre and urban planning accounts for the difference between these Decadent retreats to the suburbs. Yet we cannot be too quick to adopt such cozy readings of the texts at hand, for both of these readings rely on the valorization of the Decadent artist in their attempts to make sense of the suburban space. In Beerbohm's case, the satire would seem to succeed only once we grant the dandy aesthetic superiority over the suburban classes; in Huysmans's case, Des Esseintes's aesthetic program can only take place in the profoundly subversive space of the Parisian faubourg. Yet the clues we must necessarily overlook in order for these readings to work might actually point us in another direction altogether; behind Beerbohm's satire and Huysmans's subversiveness lies a shared concern: the manifest unsustainability of Decadence. Beerbohm and Huysmans retire to the suburbs neither to mock middle-class pretension nor to awaken the artist's consciousness, but rather to retire, in its most finite sense, aestheticism itself. The suburbs are, in effect, the only space in which these disillusioned artists can stage the death of Decadence.

In order to understand this rereading of the suburban retreat, we need first to reconsider the notion of exile that figures so prominently in these texts. For the Decadents, the figure of the artist exiled from the commercial maw of fin-de-siècle Philistinism had come to signify a brand of aesthetic heroism.Footnote ⁶ Baudelaire's splenetic withdrawal from bourgeois Parisian society and his program of flânerie on the margins of urban life became a call-to-arms of the aesthetic elite. And if self-imposed exile is the calling card of Decadence, then Huysmans's Against Nature is by definition the perfection of the Decadent movement, for, as Jennifer Forrest asserts, the suburban Des Esseintes “go[es] beyond Baudelaire, who situated himself only figuratively on the social margins” (13). Thus, the suburban backdrop of Against Nature is the marker of true aesthetic exile. In fact, it is no accident that the suburbs can be so clearly linked with exile; in parsing the etymological root of banlieue, “ban,” Forrest makes clear the necessary, if arcane, connection between exile and suburbia: “in medieval times, the ‘ban’ referred explicitly to a range of official proclamations, usually of a prohibitive nature concerning persons either choosing to live beyond city walls (subject to taxes upon entering the city) or submitting to legal banishment (permanent expulsion from the city)” (24). In other words, when Des Esseintes remarks that he had “outlawed himself from society”Footnote ⁷ (175; ch. 16), we understand implicitly that he has, in moving to Fontenay-aux-Roses, placed himself “beyond the law.” By combining the Baudelairean flaneur's psychological exile with Des Esseintes's geographical exile, Huysmans creates the ultimate Decadent hero. Against Nature represents, in Matei Calinescu's words, “the summa of decadence” (172).

Naturally, the idea of the outlawed exile carries with it romantic notions of rebellion and free-spiritedness, the very portrait of the contre-pouvoir artist that Koos paints. Yet the banishment Huysmans actually depicts in Against Nature is characterized by melancholy and monotony. If one really wants to split etymological hairs, one might point out that not only does the root “ban” provide “banlieue,” it also gives French and English “banal.” The “banality of exile” certainly lacks a romantic ring, but nonetheless is a more apt description of Des Esseintes's central predicament. If we train ourselves away from the conventional exile-as-hero mythology of Decadence, we begin to realize that the banlieue might be performing a very different function than critics contend.

To be perfectly accurate, one must point out that, at least if we consider the exiled or banished to be a socially and/or politically compromised individual, then Des Esseintes's true exile occurs not in Fontenay-aux-Roses – by all accounts his personal Canaan – but rather in his ultimate return to Paris. When his doctor orders his removal to the city to “cure” Des Esseintes's neurotic symptoms,Footnote ⁸ Des Esseintes realizes that he has been left to choose between “death or deportation” (173; ch. 15). He must choose between death and what amounts to a penal sentence. Des Esseintes's self-deportation to the faubourg does not carry with it any social or political compromise for the budding recluse; yet his quasi-institutional extradition to Paris is cause for genuine lament. At least from Des Esseintes's intrinsically eccentric point of view, life among Parisians is the true marginality; he cries in anguish, “to think that all this is not a dream! To think that I shall be rejoining the depraved and servile rabble of this age!” (180; ch. 16). To be banished amongst the “servile rabble” is to suffer deprivation and discomfiture in exile; it is an assault on Des Esseintes's individuality. In contrast, his self-banishment to the suburbs seems a comic interlude, a pleasant parody of exile to mirror the appalling deportation order that concludes the novel. Compared to this final exile, Des Esseintes's retreat to the fringes of Paris carries with it no danger of oppression – it becomes truly “banal.” So, we might reconsider Forrest's claim that Des Esseintes goes “beyond Baudelaire,” for the self-banishment which sits at the heart of the Decadent fascination with Against Nature reveals itself to be not heroic but evasive.

If we think of the villa at Fontenay-aux-Roses in terms of evasion rather than subversion, then the reading of Against Nature as the “breviary of decadence” becomes more complicated. Although Huysmans constructs Des Esseintes's suburban villa as an aesthetic “ark,” a hermetically sealed dreamspace untouched by the rapacious grasp of Paris, Huysmans goes out of his way to dismantle this decadent dream; Des Esseintes exclaims, in resignation, “it really is all over; the waters of human mediocrity, like a tidal wave, are rising up to the sky and will engulf this haven whose sea-walls I have with my own hands most unwillingly breached” (180–81; ch. 16). Those fervent aesthetes who focused only on the ark and ignored the flood ultimately misread Huysmans's argument. Against Nature may well be the “summa of decadence,” but the summit always signals the moment of inevitable decline.Footnote ⁹Against Nature is simply the decadence of Decadence.

In light of the collapse of the house of art, we can begin to reconstruct the nature of Des Esseintes's banlieue. This reconsideration does not deny Huysmans's faubourg its status as a phenomenally creative space, but rather it suggests that the source of this creative force was not so much subversive as regressive. As I have suggested, the truly significant movement in Against Nature is not, in fact, Des Esseintes's movement to the suburbs, but rather his removal from the suburbs. This inward movement aligns Des Esseintes with that feature that so captured Huysmans's imagination throughout his career: the Bièvre, Paris's buried river.Footnote ¹⁰ In La Bièvre (1890), Huysmans compares the Bièvre to “the country girls” who are “exploited by the big city” (9; my translation). The Bièvre, whose course was first diverted towards Paris in 1148, moves from the (relatively) idyllic outskirts of the city to the (quite literal) bowels of the urban scene before ignominiously flinging itself into the Seine. In this essay on the river, Huysmans traces “the agony of its waters” (22) in the river's path through Paris's most sordid and polluted industrial areas. At the end of La Bièvre, just as the pestilential river reaches its place of burial, Huysmans directs himself to a meditation on the river's more illustrious past. He fantasizes about the Bièvre's monastic course, trickling past the convent, playfully skirting the abbey, washing “the feet of the ancient cloister” (22). Lamenting the loss of this ecclesiastical environment, Huysmans bemoans,

This doleful vision of “contemplation and prayer” ceding to a space enveloped “in an hourless shadow,” a dank “underground,” bears a striking resemblance to Des Esseintes's estimations of his fate at the end of Against Nature. Diverted from his happy suburban asylum and effectively buried under the weight of Paris, Des Esseintes must “sail right out again into that tempest of stupidity” (175) – he must wade into the heart of “the idolatrous city which grovelled as it chanted vile canticles of praise before the ungodly tabernacle of the Bank!” (180). The Bièvre is thus Des Esseintes's natural correlative; it is not only the symbol of fallen country girls in the city, it is “also the emblematic image of the races of abbeys, of the ancient families, of the castes of dignitaries who have gradually collapsed and who have ended up, downfall after downfall, committing themselves to the unspeakable mud of fruitful commerce” (La Bièvre 23; my translation). As Robert Ziegler argues, “this place . . . can be experienced only as a consequence of one's expulsion, described in the transgressive words for whose use one is punished and sent into exile” (39). The Bièvre is, in effect, Des Esseintes himself, the fallen aristocrat forced into the “shameful sludge” of Paris. La Bièvre crystallizes Huysmans's ideas of Parisian space, history, decay, and materialism, and as such it throws into relief Des Esseintes's plight at the end of Against Nature. In this later essay, Huysmans makes clear that Des Esseintes's morbid retreat from the banlieue to Paris is not simply an ironic fluke; it is, like the flow of the river itself, an inevitability – a compulsion towards decay.

Des Esseintes's tentative step towards “the impossible belief in a future life” (180; ch. 16) and Huysmans's own conversion to Catholicism in 1892 certainly seems to affirm Abbé Mugnier's assertion that “after such a book, the only thing left for the author is to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross” (197; Appendix). Huysmans's desire to turn back time in La Bièvre, to “reverse the course of the river inhumed in a sewer” by “repudiating business, forsaking the city to reascend to the source” (Ziegler 38), mirrors perfectly Des Esseintes's seemingly hopeless desire for “the terrible God of Genesis and the pale Crucified Christ” to “reignite the rain of fire that once consumed those cities of the damned,” to resurrect “the majestic ruins of the Church which had become a place of assignation (180). It is in Paris, not Fontenay-aux-Roses, where one must choose between the cross and a gun – to choose between turning back time or flinging oneself into the Seine. This is not to deny the faubourg its rightful place as a zone of cultural activity; it may very well be a space of artistic liberation, but that is not the banlieue's primary function in Against Nature. Huysmans places Des Esseintes in the suburbs to recreate the tragic course charted by the Bièvre, to dramatize the ineffable power of time – symbolized by Paris's insatiable industrial and commercial growth – to subsume anything that attempts to move à rebours. In moving his “hero” to the suburbs, Huysmans stages the death of Decadence and the impossibility of art for art's sake in a modern world devoid of taste. At best, Fontenay-aux-Roses is a palliative care ward, a temporary refuge before the artist's ultimate deathmarch back to Paris where he will either be expressed to a bourgeois hell or, as seems to have been the case for Huysmans, redirected to the sea of faith. Both paths diverge, finally, from aestheticism. Only by staging the initial step in this diminuendo in the suburbs can Huysmans fully spatialize the submergence of Decadence in the final deluge of tastelessness.

* * *

While we cannot lose sight of the fact that “Diminuendo” is a satiric piece, we can shift the focus of the satire to understand that Beerbohm's retreat to the suburbs, much like Huysmans's, initiates a critical response to Decadence. As is the case for Against Nature, “Diminuendo” benefits from a reconsideration of exile, which requires first a reconsideration of context. “Diminuendo” was originally published in 1896 in The Pageant – a short-lived art and literature annual – under the title “Be It Cosiness.” Later that year it was retitled and included as the final essay in Beerbohm's first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm. Both of these publication contexts are crucial to understanding Beerbohm's artistic position as the century drew to a close. “Be It Cosiness” stands out in sharp contrast to the other essays in The Pageant. The annual reads like a yearbook of aestheticism: Swinburne, Verlaine, and Maeterlinck populate the table of contents; learned discussions of “art” stand side-by-side with fantastical, “symbolic” fables; Pre-Raphaelite images haunt the issue throughout. Beerbohm's satiric piece seems at once in harmony with the interests of this “aesthetic” publication, while at the same time highly critical of its Decadent ethos. Beerbohm's subsequent repackaging of the essay as “Diminuendo” helps to explain this critical stance. Diminuendo – winding down – does not only describe Beerbohm's cheeky decision to retire from writing, it also describes the state of aestheticism in 1896. To end his Works – his first book – with this decadence of the artist is not, perhaps, entirely satiric. “Be It Cosiness” stands out among its Pageant associates not for its criticism of the middling-classes, but rather for its awareness of the flaws inherent in the attitude The Pageant as a whole espouses. By 1896, “art for art's sake” was on its way out, and the anaemic offerings in The Pageant testify to this decline.

On the surface, it would seem that the object of Beerbohm's criticism in “Diminuendo” is the unbridled development of middle-class interests in the heart of England's most historic spaces. The aspiring aesthete can find no solace in the cult of Pater because he can perceive no beauty in the philistine commercial environment of ancient Oxford: “how sad was my coming to the university! Where were those sweet conditions I had pictured in my boyhood?” (68).Footnote ¹¹ As always, however, one must remain alert to shades of irony in Beerbohm's work. We cannot forget the timing of the essay – in 1896, Oscar Wilde had begun to serve his prison sentence; the ringleader of the English dandies had fallen. England's aesthetic dreamworld had suffered a blow; growing popular resentment towards Wilde and all he signified caused the tide to turn against the Decadents. Like Des Esseintes's snug ark, the refuge of art had been breached.

Wilde's imprisonment and subsequent exile in France shares its unheroic ignominy with Des Esseintes's deportation to Paris. Robert Viscusi argues that Wilde's humiliating defeat and his “assumption of the mask of Christ” (70) had a profound effect on Beerbohm's sense of his own “dandiness.” C. A. J. Grillou reads Beerbohm's retirement as a defensive measure to guard himself from a similar “undandified fate,” in that “he preventively turns psychological estrangement into actual physical distance, preserving himself by cutting himself off from a changing world” (79). Indeed, it is not hard to read Beerbohm's supposedly ironic disillusionment with the cult of beauty as a very serious meditation on his own place in the world in the wake of Wilde's own “diminuendo.” Viscusi claims, “at this crucial point in his career,” – 1896 – “Beerbohm's vision of the dandy was transformed: no longer simply a sovereign, the dandy became a kind of Christ who must die to be king. This was the moment that Beerbohm ‘retired,’ and while some great ambition in him died then, another took shape” (9–10). Beerbohm's dandy, like Huysmans's raffiné, became a figure of exile, but of exile in defeat, not triumph, of exclusion, not mere aloofness. Beerbohm traces the dandy's inescapable fate in “Dandies and Dandies,” another essay in The Works, with reference to his other Decadent hero, the archetypal man of taste, Beau Brummel, who “was a dandy, nothing but a dandy, from his cradle to that fearful day when he lost his figure and had to flee the country, even to that distant day when he died, a broken exile, in the arms of two religieuses” (5). “Diminuendo,” then, speaks not to the superior artistic figures wishing to lord their taste over the insipidity of the masses, but to the artists on the brink of humiliation and the pain of inevitable exile. Beerbohm's suburban retreat signifies his unwillingness to suffer the discomfiture of an exiled dandy, his desire to break the pattern of Byron, Brummel, and Wilde before him. While one might rightly question Viscusi's construction of “the dandy Jesus” (70), he is nonetheless astute in pointing out that “Diminuendo” is only on the surface a mock retirement; it is, in fact, a psychic retirement, a retreat away from the unstable world of Decadence to contemplate and chronicle its past. Indeed, The Works of Max Beerbohm espouses as a whole a historical attitude towards Beerbohm's present; Beerbohm “feels himself a trifle outmoded” (73) because he has outmoded himself – he has forced himself into a sepulchral suburban space so as to avoid suffering from the changing tide of contemporaneity. To write of the present in the past is to reconfigure one's relation to the world; it is a move that privileges reflection over fashionability, observation over participation. Indeed, as Hall points out, in the final years of the 1800s Beerbohm's writing began to reflect a reoriented sense of style, marked by “a quieter tone, a less brassy irony, a little less youthful cleverness; and no obsolete, rare, or even big words, no foreign-language phrases, no tricky syntax – just simple, straightforward prose” (92). “Art for Beerbohm,” Osbert Lancaster observes, “finally resolved itself into once-disturbing figures recollected in tranquillity” (10). For Viscusi, “Diminuendo” represents Beerbohm's decision to “write of the dandy's world with a more nuanced sense of its complete moral relationship to the rest of the human world” (70).Footnote ¹² This contemplation of a “moral relation” becomes, much like Huysmans's eventual acceptance of faith, the dandy's last stand – the only means by which to avoid complete submergence in exile. Yet this “moral relation” also negates aestheticism's “art for art's sake” mentality; it is an admission that aestheticism is, fundamentally, lacking.

Once we rethink Beerbohm's critical position in “Diminuendo,” we necessarily have to rethink the nature of the suburbs, and, more importantly, the nature of Beerbohm's relationship with them. For, of course, Beerbohm himself never inhabited a suburb: before moving to Italy in 1910 and excluding his time spent at Oxford, Beerbohm lived in London.Footnote ¹³ Yet, as the critical and popular fascination with these new housing estates indicates, it was impossible to ignore the fact that these developments were daily changing the urban, as well as suburban, environment. And, while in the 1890s suburbia was largely synonymous with Pooterism, aestheticism was not wholly free from this seemingly middle-class development. In fact, in its conception, suburban development seemed a natural mate for aestheticism, since, as Bolus-Reichert argues, the picturesque style which dominated nineteenth-century suburban décor is often interpreted as “decadent, because it aims to organize and to produce a superior version of the real” (162). The “built” lifestyle of the suburb was thus the logical extension of the aesthetic programme, for it produced the superior version of the real city.

While Beerbohm's description of the suburb in “Diminuendo” is consciously generalized and unnamed, one cannot ignore the fact that the suburban development which, more than anything, crystallised the aesthetic desire for a “superior” space was none other than Bedford Park, which “became famous during the 1880s for its own utopian aspirations, and for its association with the Aesthetic Movement, whose values it had done much to popularize” (Bolus-Reichert 164). As such, Bedford Park provides helpful clues in understanding precisely how Beerbohm employs the suburbs as a critique of aestheticism. As Ian Fletcher points out, Bedford Park and the Aesthetic Movement both emerged in the 1870s and the two were linked inextricably in the popular press (180). Richard Norman Shaw and E. W. Godwin's Queen Anne villas, coupled with the propensity among residents for decorating their new homes in William Morris designs, set Bedford Park apart from the sterile, tawdry developments elsewhere. Moreover, unlike Gissing's Camberwell, which was populated with upwardly mobile merchants, Bedford Park was the residence of choice for artists – an association that was cemented by Walter Hamilton's description of it as “A Home for the Aesthetes” in the final chapter of The Aesthetic Movement in England (1882). Bedford Park was, according to the satirical Ballad of Bedford Park, a place “where men may lead a chaste correct / aesthetical existence” (qtd. in Bolsterli 123). Of course, this association was not always sympathetic; as Bolsterli remarks, “when a Punch cartoonist needed a locale in which to place an Aesthete he could use Bedford Park to accomplish the desired effect” (19). Given Beerbohm's close association with aestheticism – an association bolstered in “Diminuendo” by Paterian references – it is not unreasonable to assume that “Diminuendo” would have conjured in readers’ minds an image of Bedford Park.

One of the more notable artistic families to inhabit Bedford Park in its heyday was the Yeats family. In his Autobiographies, W. B. Yeats reminisces about his early days in the community as a child:

Here Yeats articulates the dream of Bedford Park – a place in which “good taste” inhered, where the travesties of Victorian commercial design – imitation grain and encaustic tiles – were banished from sight. Yet this aesthetic haven (for once again we must invoke Des Esseintes's tasteful haven) fell victim to its own mythology. The spirit of art stagnated in Bedford Park; Yeats who, after living in Dublin for a time, returned with his family to the suburb, laments that with the passage of time Bedford Park “had lost the romance he saw there” (113) and he “could not understand where the charm had gone” (114). He hints, however, at the cause of Bedford Park's diminishment. The enthusiasm with which artists flocked to Bedford Park turned into complacency. Seeking out his father's friends of the Pre-Raphaelite epoch, Yeats is saddened to find Todhunter, who “of all the survivors . . . was the most dejected and the least estranged” (117). Yeats remembers “encouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to buy a very expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it without strong liking and would have agreed had there been any fault to find” (117). Todhunter's unthinking resignation to an artistic “fashion,” coupled with a directionless, erratic artistic vision, speaks to the aesthetic climate in Bedford Park at the beginning of the 1890s. G. K. Chesterton, while describing the setting of The Man Who Was Thursday in “Saffron Park” – a thinly veiled Bedford Park – aptly summarizes the paradox of this space: “it was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art” (9; ch. 1). Not only did Bedford Park wane aesthetically, it fell victim to the commercialism it had formerly abhorred; as Bolus-Reichert explains, the residents’ “adoption of artistic principles too often meant the purchase of something artsy” (186). The aesthetic suburb, like Huysmans's hero, sunk into “the unspeakable mud of fruitful commerce,” and by the 1890s the suburb – and aestheticism – were already “a trifle outmoded.”

In other words, when Beerbohm the artist “retires” in the suburbs, Beerbohm the satirist is not being entirely facetious: the aesthetic movement really did retire in the suburbs. “Diminuendo” and its suburban location dramatizes, like Huysmans's faubourien setting, the fundamentally untenable position that “art for art's sake” represents. To stage his retirement in the suburbs is not to align himself ironically with the pretensions of the bourgeoisie, but rather to align himself quite seriously with the defeat of Decadence. The suburb for Beerbohm is not a space of exile, but a space of resignation to a defeated dream – an alternate, though humbled, route for the dandy. In fact, “Diminuendo” proves to be especially prescient in its contemplation of aesthetic exile. “No. 2. The Pines,” though written in 1914, recollects Beerbohm's first visit to the suburb of Putney in 1899 to meet another exiled aesthete, the ailing Swinburne, then under the care of Theodore Watts-Dunton. “It was held anomalous,” Beerbohm writes, “and a matter for merriment, that Swinburne lived in a suburb” (239). For Beerbohm, however, this trip to suburbia represents a voyage into an idealized past: “No. 2 – that prosaic inscription! But as that front-door closed behind me I had the instant sense of having slipped away from the harsh light of the ordinary and contemporary into the dimness of an odd, august past. Here, in this dark hall, the past was the present” (242). As “Diminuendo” suggests, and “No. 2. The Pines” confirms, the suburb was the perfect space for Beerbohm to locate his symbolic retirement; its sterility, the sense that “nothing happens” there, allows Beerbohm to stop time and assume a historical, reflective pose; its association with the defeated dream of aestheticism allows Beerbohm to exile symbolically the dandy in him.

Although the social and historical context for their respective suburbs may differ radically, Beerbohm's and Huysmans's suburban retreats perform the same psychic, sepulchral role. However else London and Paris's suburbs may diverge, they both represent, for men of taste, a space of defeat. For both Beerbohm and Huysmans, suburbia is the only space in which to enact the death of Decadence and symbolically to begin anew. Huysmans's new path led to faith; Beerbohm's to “moral contemplation”; both paths led, ultimately, to a renewed historical valuation of the artist's space in the world.