Were I to tell you that there exists interview footage of someone, somewhere, discussing Alice B. Toklas in the present tense while also recalling a midnight tête-à-tête with Marcel Proust and a childhood encounter with Oscar Wilde, I imagine this would be of more than passing interest.

Were I to add that the someone is in fact Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), then in her nineties, and that the somewhere from which she summons these spectral luminaries is her legendary Left Bank lodgings in the rue Jacob where for the better part of six decades she hosted a salon through whose doors passed a selection of 20th century literary figures that, for want of time but with no undue exaggeration we can summarise as “everyone”…well, it’s just a little bit exciting, no?

The year is 1962. The interviewer is Miron Grindea, editor of the Adam International Review, an arts journal which that year devoted a whole issue to Barney’s life and work. But if you detect a note of impatience in Barney’s answers, it might help to know that she thought little of her interlocutor. The process of putting together the edition was one for which Grindea expected Barney to open not just her archives, but her purse as well; she complained to friends of the effort and expense of it all.

The all too brief interview finds Barney in her magic garden, the site of a temple to friendship (curious Francophones will find an exhaustive study of this structure here); the chatelaine refers to herself as its “vestal”. Referencing her “genius for friendship”, Grindea concentrates largely on Barney’s role as a cultural catalyst which, while crucial, is not the whole story. Her own work, which was addressed at length in Adam and is still being rediscovered (as we saw just recently), is passed over with barely a word here. Work, in general, is viewed with suspicion: “One must be idle in order to become oneself”, Barney announces in one of her characteristic aphorisms, addressing the camera directly as she warns us not to confuse personhood with profession.

Elsewhere, La Barney bitches – enchantingly, of course – about Lord Alfred Douglas and frenemy Gertrude Stein, her terse rocking the outward sign of a mind undimmed by age. It’s difficult not to be blinded by the sheer improbability of the footage; I also found the dreamlike atmosphere, overgrown gardens and palpable presence of spirits put me in mind of Rebecca, or Suddenly, Last Summer. Perhaps we will all wake tomorrow and discover that those patrician tones, august features, dappled drops of sunlight, haunting piano figures and talk of Belgian bells were but a dream. But for now – sleep on, enjoy.

My thanks to Cassandra Langer for alerting me to this treasure.

Giovanni Boldini: La marchesa Luisa Casati con penne di pavone (1914)

The Marchesa Casati died in London on this day in 1957. It seemed a tease to mention an anecdote about her, as I did the other day, without passing on the anecdote itself. It comes from an entry in Harry Graf Kessler’s diary dated 23 January 1930, recording a story told at breakfast that day by his friend Karl Gustav Vollmoeller. Like many Casati tales, this one dwells somewhere between plausibly outrageous and suspiciously fanciful. Perhaps a passing Casatian scholar might care to comment on its veracity. Certainly the Marchesa’s residence got lost in transcription – Palais Rose was actually to the west of Paris in Le Vésinet, not the Faubourg St Germain, and Louis XV only in style rather than vintage – so it may be prudent to view the rest of the account through a filter of doubt. But even as legend, what rare odours of filthy enchantment this tableau exudes!

Vollmoeller told sparkling, colourful tales about the Marchesa Casati. One of them might well have been invented by Barbey d’Aurevilly. One night at 3 in the morning she rings the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris from her beautiful old Louis XV hotel with its large garden in the Faubourg St Germain, and asks him to come straight away, she has a very important message to relay to him at once; the life and death of her soul is at stake. The cardinal, awoken, refuses to attend to the matter in the middle of the night and finally, after long negotiation, dispatches a priest who holds some position or other with him. The priest sets off, rings the doorbell, is admitted and led along a dark garden avenue toward the house. Halfway along the avenue he suddenly encounters Casati, completely naked, holding a candelabra with numerous candles in each hand, determined to recite a long litany. The priest, utterly horrified, turns tail and flees as though he had witnessed the embodiment of evil and the next day the cardinal lodges a complaint of attentat à la pudeur and blasphemy with the police. The affair ends with Casati disappearing into a mental asylum for six months.

A compelling coda to Vollmoeller’s tattle appears in a 1987 essay by David Wistow. There is a high possibility that it is merely a corruption or conflation of the previous tale, and there may be nothing more than idle between-the-wars café society fabrication to either. At the very least we must replace the name of the prelate. The annotated edition of Kessler’s diaries informs us that the Archbishop mentioned by Vollmoeller was a certain (Louis-Ernest) Dubois, who died in 1929, and his successor, according to my copy of Le petit livre de grands fromages catholiques (a.k.a. Wikipedia) was a certain Jean Verdier:

One source estimates her debts in 1932 to be the modern equivalent of twenty million dollars. Her impending bankruptcy, at least in the mind of the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Louis Ernest Dubois, was just retribution for her profligate lifestyle. When she requested a visit by him to plead forgiveness, the priest was confronted by La Casati dressed all in white, carried in on a settee by four valets, holding a white gladiolus on her lap while a white parrot, representing the Holy Ghost, perched near her feet. With a transfixed stare she kept repeating: “Je suis la Vierge immaculée!“

The bust above, by sculptor Auguste Clésinger, stands guard over the French Senate, in the Palais de Luxembourg in Paris. It is one of numerous variations on the figure of Marianne, the personification of the French Republic, that adorn public buildings throughout the country. But the lawmakers who pass her day after day would probably be surprised, to say the least, to learn anything of the woman behind the likeness.

The model was Clésinger’s lover, poet and occultist Berthe de Courrière, who died in Paris 100 years ago today. But it was not just her beauty but also her passion for hermetic knowledge that inspired another lover, writer Remy de Gourmont. He described her as a “soul to which mystery has spoken – and has not spoken in vain”. Far more than a mere muse, she was his guide to a subterranean world of ritual, mysticism and the dark arts. It, and she, were woven into Gourmont’s novels Sixtine (1890) and Le Fantôme (1893). Between these two works Courrière served as a conduit for J.K. Huysmans’ own survey of this shadow realm, Là-Bas (1891). Everything suggests that her exploration of Satanism and the occult were more than merely academic; our old friend Rachilde relates that Courrière kept communion wafers about her person for the purpose of feeding stray dogs.

For more about this thrillingly wayward figure, Madeleine LeDespencer’s recent piece “Flowers of Evil: Satanic Feminists of Bohemian Paris Part 1 – Berthe de Courrière” for Dirge Magazine is a must-read. The writer performs a particularly valuable service in presenting Courrière as a personality in her own right, not just an adjunct to the male creative professional. Previous commentators focused on Courrière’s alleged insanity, but LeDespencer rightly notes that “they ignore how easy it might be for a woman to find herself committed for displaying the same peculiarities that the average bohemian man could flaunt without concern”.

And if nothing else, Courrière’s decorating tips – “Altar cloths, religious objects adapted to most unexpected locations, monstrance, corporals, dalmatics, candelabra with multicolored candles lit in mysterious corners of shade” – could clearly rival Gustav Meyrink‘s.

British poet David Gascoyne was born 100 years ago today. The occasion is marked tonight by an event in his birth town Harrow, and another on Thursday on the Isle of Wight, where Gascoyne died in 2001.

As we saw, Gascoyne was a key catalyst for the epochal Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936, engineering one of the movement’s most enduring images – and he had not yet turned 20. I have to admit Gascoyne was largely unfamiliar to me before the 2012 publication of Robert Fraser’s biography Night Thoughts. But the outline of his life (experimental poet electrified by Surrealism, bisexual, precocious cultural networker who headed to Paris in the early 1930s and endured until the early 21st century as a revered innovator of Modernist verse) made me think immediately of Charles Henri Ford; that entire parenthetical description applies equally to the American writer. Curious to know if the two ever met, I opened Fraser’s book and discovered…yes. Yes, they most certainly did.

In October 1933, Gascoyne was in Paris, meeting the Surrealists and courting a woman by the name of Kay Hime. His encounter with his transatlantic double came just a few days shy of his 17th birthday, during a date with Ms. Hime, as Fraser explains:

They were sitting over dinner in the Dôme when a 20-year-old* American called Charles Henry Ford briefly entered. Ford was an openly bisexual poet and collagist from Brookhaven, Mississippi who had taken to spelling his middle name ‘Henri’ to avoid been [sic] mistaken for an automobile manufacturer. He was currently engaged in co-writing a daring study of contemporary manners entitled The Young and the Evil**, somewhat indebted to the ongoing drafts by his friend and later mistress Djuna Barnes for her novel in progress, Nightwood. In the longer term he was cohabiting in a studio near Vaugigard with the Russian Surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchev***, and modelling for openly homoerotic works by his boyfriend such as The Swimmers**** of that year. If his sexual orientation was not obvious from his appearance, the reproduction of that work with its narcissistically exposed torsos in Read’s Art Now, which David had by his hotel bedside, would have given a fair clue.

Ford exchanged a few remarks with this handsome, compatible-looking heterosexual couple, and then left. A few seconds later, Gascoyne rose to his feet and followed him out into the night, abandoning his consort for the evening in nonplussed isolation at their table. A couple of hours later he returned, sat down again, and attempted to resume their conversation where he had left off. She was not impressed.*****

* Ford was actually 25 at the time; his insistence that he was born in 1913 rather than 1908 was usually taken at face value and only definitively refuted after his death.

** The Young and Evil (no second article), the pioneering novel of gay life that Ford had co-written with Parker Tyler before embarking for Paris in 1931, had actually been published by Obelisk Press in August 1933, although this first edition sold in negligible quantities.

*** Usually transliterated as Pavel Tchelitchew

**** Possibly The Bathers, painted in 1933, although this may just be a variance in translating the presumably French original title

***** No shit. While Emily Post’s notes on dining etiquette are mute on the matter, I feel certain she would have frowned on inter-course intercourse.

Happy new year!

Our annual look at forthcoming books is…forthcoming. Naturally the quixotic nature of publishing schedules is such that you can miss a lot from a January vantage point, and it strikes me that I should really do this twice a year. Meanwhile, here is a handful of late 2016 titles that may be of interest.

A sense of place is the common denominator in the majority of these titles, a number of them dwelling on the city and its secrets. Franz Hessel’s recently translated Walking in Berlin presented one key to these secrets in the person of le flâneur. But what of la flâneuese? Is the unmediated, unplanned exploration of the urban environment a solely masculine prerogative? In 2008, Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough’s The Invisible Flâneuse? offered a tentative, academic reply. An emphatic non is the answer supplied by Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, subtitled Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, out since mid-year in the UK and due in late February in the US. In a spirited text, Elkin uses examples as diverse as Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Martha Gellhorn and Sophie Calle to illustrate the worlds encountered by women on foot.

A more digressive city stroll comes in Nancy Cunard‘s “Parallax”, included in the collection Selected Poems from Carcanet Press. The writer and publisher’s indelible image is far more present in our day than her work. This volume is therefore a timely reminder that Cunard is not just handy for padding out your “bracelet ideas” Pinterest board. That those prodigiously ivoried arms were also known to move across paper, work the presses and raise themselves in righteous activism is too readily forgotten. I include this also as a note-to-self to share with you some images of Cunard’s childhood home which I visited last summer.

The perils and pleasures awaiting the unwary at large in the metropolis are sketched in Scott Spector’s Violent Sensations. This is a scholarly text built around an irresistible set of keywords, its subtitle of Sex, Crime & Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 depositing it squarely in Strange Flowers’ sphere of interest. It contrasts the self-image of a rational, industrialising society with the chaos that re-emerges in the form of unruly desires and criminal savagery. There is much to recommend Spector’s book, particularly its fearless collapsing of academic compartments. One quibble from this reader is that it too readily conflates the abstractions of Decadent literary themes – which were only ever of interest to a small, rarefied subset of the educated public – with the often brutal, real-life convulsions of societies in flux.

These “Decadent literary themes” were very much the focus of Nicole Albert’s 2005 book Saphisme et décadence dans Paris fin-de-siècle. Recently translated by Nancy Erber and William A. Peniston and published by Harrington Park Press, it comes to as as Lesbian Decadence. Here the English-language reader discovers that love between women was an idée fixe of French literary Decadence, but generally broached by those who were themselves alien to the experience (men, in the main). Consequently, the approach of these works ranges from censorious to fetishistic, appalled to inspired. Speaking of Belle Époque preoccupations…

One thing that surprised me on my first trip to Paris many lunes ago was the huge amount of esoteric literature available from the Seine-side bouqinistes and Left Bank bookshops. Hermetic enquiry was never entirely erased from the crucible of Enlightenment rationalism. In Occult Paris, Tobias Churton shows “how a wide variety of Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Martinists, Freemasons, Gnostics, and neo-Cathars called fin-de-siècle Paris home”. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the conjunction of time, place and subject matter that the singular figure of Joséphin Péladan features prominently. You may remember Tobias Churton as our guide to Aleister Crowley’s Berlin and may thus be interested to know that he has a similar study of the Great Beast in America under way.

It’s been more than half a decade since the name Theodore Wratislaw appeared in these pages. He was, as I wrote then, “at once one of the most emblematic of the English 1890s poets and one of the most obscure”. Now, more than 80 years after his death, the veil of obscurity lifts with the publication of D.J. Sheppard’s Theodore Wratislaw: Fragments of a Life, through Rivendale Press. Sheppard up-ends the suspicion that Wratislaw was a timid parvenu toying with modish themes. In fact the writer’s mental turmoil meant that “Wratislaw’s struggle was to maintain some semblance of bourgeois respectability rather than to escape it”. Benefiting from access to previously unpublished documents – including Wratislaw’s unfinished memoirs – it also carries a seal of approval from no less a Yellow Decade aficionado than the brilliant Barry Humphries.

More late Victorian literary curios in Simon Goldhill’s collective biography of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his offspring. Like the Manns, the Benson children came in a six-pack of personal eccentricity and were, as the book’s title avers, A Very Queer Family Indeed. “The Archbishop and his wife had six children,” we learn, “none of whom ever had heterosexual intercourse, as far as we can tell; certainly none of them ever married.” They included E.F. Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia books, and R.H. Benson, Frederick Rolfe‘s ally-turned-adversary, best known as the author of Lord of the World, a highly idiosyncratic piece of speculative fiction.

Even further off-road: Peter Owen Publishers, whose namesake sadly died in 2016, recently issued two prose works by artist Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988). Colquhoun was better known as a painter but in The Crying of the Wind and The Living Stones she records her discoveries in Ireland and Cornwall, respectively. Each volume comes with a foreword by Stewart Lee (and yes, for the British readers – it is the Clarkson-baiting comic). Cenotaph South, from Penned in the Margins, is perhaps an even more left-field choice, which I include partly because I once lived near Nunhead Cemetery which is the book’s focal point. In a highly personal journey through this south-east London resting place and its surrounds, author Chris McCabe discovers fellow poets and hidden histories amid the headstones and the ivy.

Finally, our sole fictional selection comes in the form of Linda Stift’s The Empress and the Cake in Jamie Bulloch’s translation, available through Pereine Press. The female protagonist of this dark, perverse tale “lives with her servant in an apartment full of bizarre souvenirs” and may in fact be (or may not be, or may merely resemble) our old favourite Elisabeth (Sissi) of Austria. Guten Appetit.

In keeping with a theme, this – a look ahead at books of a Strange Flowers flavour coming out this year – was going to be “17 books for 2017”. But so many interesting titles have gathered on the horizon that I had to abandon the conceit altogether. Here, then, is a metric shitload of books for 2017.

It is a year in which the news already resembles dystopian fiction, so might books like Giorgio De Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin tell us how it all ends? Originally published in Italian in 1977, this grim parallel parable draws on the occult allure of Turin, and features mysterious outbreaks of savagery and intimate thoughts being communicated “across the ether” (cf. right now). Thanks to translator Ramon Glazov it is now finally available in English. Joining it in a violent speculative realm is China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris (already out in the US, due in the UK next month). With Nazis, André Breton and our old friend Jack Parsons, this is a “what if?” scenario far more feverish and bizarre than The Man in the High Castle.

I’m not entirely clear why there is a run on Anaïs Nin right now; tomorrow marks 40 years since the famed eroticist’s death, but that’s hardly a red-letter anniversary. There was a rumpus last year about a volume of her previously undiscovered porn-for-hire entitled Auletris [aside: the uncredited cover image of the book was apparently taken from a drawing in Nin’s possession; might it possibly be an Alastair?]. Anyway, as they say – a dirty book gathers no dust. Two new titles show Nin in close-up and wide shot (Tristine Rainer’s Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin and Anita Jarczok’s Writing an Icon: Celebrity Culture and the Invention of Anaïs Nin, respectively), while a forthcoming new volume of unexpurgated diaries from the woman herself, Trapeze, covers the years 1947-1955.

The coming months bring a clutch of centenaries. Carson McCullers would have been 100 on February 19, the centenary of Jane Bowles comes just three days later. Both women are honoured with comprehensive collected works by the Library of America (here and here respectively). Artist and writer Leonora Carrington died in 2011, just a few years short of what would have been her centenary. That milestone, 6 April, is marked by the publication of Joanna Moorhead’s biography, The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, one of a small flood of Carringtonian works. Lively, surreal tableaux abound in The Milk of Dreams, stories which the artist wrote (in Spanish, originally) and illustrated for her own children, while the decidedly adult Down Below, also issued by NYRB, fearlessly documents Carrington’s time in a mental institution. Meanwhile, the Dorothy Project has a Complete Stories, while finally Manchester University Press provides scholarly context around Carrington’s words and images in Leonora Carrington and the international avant-garde.

The first issue of The Blind Man, a zine-like publication edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, appeared in New York on 10 April 1917. Its significance in avant-garde lore lies in fantastical disproportion to its extent and duration (little more than two dozen pages across just two issues). Contributors included Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Gabrielle Buffet and Carl Van Vechten. You can discover all this for yourself later in the year when Ugly Duckling Presse reprints facsimiles of The Blind Man in a centennial edition along with extensive commentary. The second edition of the journal included a photograph of Fountain, Duchamp’s provocative sanitaryware totem banned from display at the Independents’ Exhibition, which also launched in New York on 10 April 1917. Bonus doomed poet fact: it was at the show’s opening party that Mina Loy first caught sight of Arthur Cravan.

There’s much more poetic doom to come in Deaths of the Poets, by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, which I await avidly. “In this book, two contemporary poets undertake a series of journeys – across Britain, America and Europe – to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, honouring inspirational writers, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.”

One book I could recommend year after year is Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians (2003). In one episode Nicholson describes “a scene straight out of Puccini” as the consort of Britain’s foremost bohemian faced her fate in the late winter of 1907. “Augustus John’s young wife, Ida, lay dying of puerperal fever in the boulevard Arago after the birth of her fifth child, Henry. Augustus’s mistress Dorelia was looking after the other children not far away. There was a tremendous thunderstorm as Augustus sat by Ida’s bedside. As day broke over the rain-washed city of Paris, Ida was sufficiently conscious to drink a toast with her husband – ‘to Love!’ The end was close now…” Ida John was just 30 when she died, and Augustus comes off poorly in any account of her pitifully short life. Now, in The Good Bohemian, we hear from the woman herself in letters which describe her marriage to the magnetic Augustus which so shocked her family, and the pair’s further break with convention as they accepted Dorelia McNeill into their ménage. The selection is edited by Ida (and Augustus’s) granddaughter Rebecca John and Augustus John biographer Michael Holroyd.

The Last Bell offers tales “both literally and metaphorically Bohemian”; the same description could apply to its author, Johannes Urzidil (1896-1970). Urzidil was part of an early 20th century circle of mostly Jewish German-speaking writers in Prague whose more prominent members included Franz Kafka, Max Brod and Franz Werfel. This edition, translated by David Burnett and issued by Pushkin Press, is (I believe) the first English-language appearance of Urzidil’s fiction. That he got to write these absurd tales at all is due in no small part to the writer Bryher; it was thanks to her principled largesse that Urzidil managed to escape Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Twisted Spoon Press is not only based in Prague, it is also a tireless champion of undervalued works by Czech and other Central European authors – beautifully presented, masterfully translated and appended with thoughtful commentary. Although it’s been out for a while I can recommend A Gothic Soul (first issued in 1900) by Jiří Karásek, an intensely atmospheric, authentically nihilistic work whose protagonist could be Monsieur de Bougrelon‘s maudlin cousin. And now, following last year’s widely praised poetry volume The Absolute Gravedigger, by Vítězslav Nezval, comes A Prague Flaneur by the same author, originally published in 1938. And from around the same period comes Dreamverse, a forthcoming collection of hypnagogic text (translated by Jed Slast) and images by Jindřich Štyrský.

Speaking of dreams, and Monsieur de Bougrelon, we eagerly return to Spurl, who last year introduced Jean Lorrain’s aged dandy to English-language readers. Now comes a translation (by Richard Sieburth) of Nights as Day, Days as Night in which author Michel Leiris, “disrupts the line between being asleep and awake, between being and non-being”. Like Anaïs Nin, Michel Leiris seems to be having a capital ‘m’ Moment. Other forthcoming works by the French Surrealist – who was a subject of Francis Bacon paintings and an object of André Breton’s ire – include Fibrils, the third instalment of his vast autobiographical project, and Phantom Africa issued by Kolkata-based Seagull Books.

Oscar A. H. Schmitz

The name of German writer Oscar A. H. Schmitz (1873-1931) arouses little recognition among present-day readers in his homeland and almost none beyond. His eclectic bibliography extends from travel writing to lifestyle advice, polemics to macabre fiction. In 1897 he spent several months in Paris, where he became a regular at the salon of writer Rachilde, greedily inhaling the Decadent literature for which it was a hub. For Hashish, his first book of prose, Schmitz huffed deeply on Huysmans and like-minded writers while squinting ahead to the macabre literature to come in the early 20th century. First published in 1902, Hashish is now available in English thanks to translator W. C. Bamberger and publisher Wakefield. It comes as a series of electrifyingly morbid tales spun by habitués of a hashish den, moderated by mysterious dandy Count Alta-Carrara. The tales roam from a crumbling Venetian palazzo – where sex is sister to death – to pre-revolutionary Paris, where jaded aristocrats goad the peasantry to barbarous orgies. Something for everyone! Also among Wakefield’s bounty of forthcoming titles is Francis Ponge’s The Table, which joins the publisher’s previous translation of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris in the canon of obsessional focus.

Following their rediscovery of Theodore Wratislaw, Rivendale Press turn their attention to an equally fascinating, equally obscure figure of the 1890s in Michael Seeney’s More Adey: Oscar Wilde’s Forgotten Friend. I’ve long been eager to find out more about More, a mysterious link to the lone novels issued by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, respectively. Lesser-known sides of a better-known literary figure comes in The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell, edited by Allan Pero – a welcome visitor to these pages – and Gyllian Phillips.

Things take a queer turn with our next trio of books. “Queer” is a word I regard more as a convenient umbrella term for all manner of sexual variance than a label I might, say, apply to myself. But all three of these titles have the effect of returning us to times, places, or cultural products familiar to us in various degrees and uncovering what has been too readily obscured – a valuable and important endeavour.

In Jews Queers Germans, Martin Duberman takes us to Wilhelmine Germany, offering real-life characters such as Harry Graf Kessler, Magnus Hirschfeld and Kaiser Wilhelm II himself in a fictional treatment of the gay scandals that so damaged the standing of the imperial order. Meanwhile, Peter Ackroyd noses around the molly houses and fingersmiths of London’s millennia of gay and lesbian history in Queer City. Few writers have written about anywhere with the passion and erudition with which Peter Ackroyd has chronicled the British capital, so this is likely to become a standard text of the city’s sexual dissenters. Also forthcoming is a catalogue to accompany Tate Britain’s exhibition Queer British Art 1861-1967, with artists ranging from Simeon Solomon to David Hockney.

As we now find ourselves in the coffee table section, I reluctantly draw your attention to the catalogue for another forthcoming London exhibition, Behind this Mask Another Mask. Reluctantly, because yet again Claude Cahun, an artist of breathtaking originality and searing self-sufficiency, is being presented to audiences through the intercession of another artist. And it’s not her frequently uncredited partner and step-sister Marcel Moore in this case, but contemporary artist Gillian Wearing. The show at the National Portrait Gallery (just around the corner from the site of what may be Cahun’s best-known yet least-credited work) follows the 2015 Whitechapel exhibition where Cahun was chaperoned by Sarah Pucill in a lineage that stretches all the way back to 1994, when the ICA introduced London to Cahun alongside Tacita Dean and other artists. For a one-volume introduction to Cahun and Moore I can recommend Don’t Kiss Me (2006), the extensively annotated catalogue of the Jersey Heritage Trust’s collection.

At the halfway point of the year, New York’s Guggenheim will be presenting Mystical Symbolism, plus accompanying catalogue, which surveys the Salon de la Rose+Croix exhibitions held in Paris between 1892 and 1897 which reintroduced Roscicrucian thinking and other metaphysical strains to Belle Époque Paris. Artists included Jean Delville, Fernand Khnopff and Jan Toorop, and the prime mover was the “sandwich man of the beyond”, Joséphin Péladan.

And finally a few interesting-sounding cultural history titles in brief: Lela F. Kerley’s Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque, overlapping in period and subject matter with Kathryn Hughes’s Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, a “groundbreaking account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body”. Also: Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex, a “mythical life of Haiti” by John Cussans, out through Strange Attractor.

Anyway, those are some of the titles that will be liberating the doubloons from my doublets this year. I hope you find something to your liking too.

Count (later Marquis) Boni de Castellane was born 150 years ago today. Our sesquicentenarian valentine was a fixture of Belle Époque society, noted for his free spending, his meticulous toilette, his ambitious building plans. The Parisian Palais Rose which he shared with his American heiress wife Anna Gould – before the maddening expense of it tore them apart – was testament to the count’s Bourbon tastes, inside and out. Pastiche it may have been, but it deserved a better fate than its 1969 demolition (see this Palais Rose on the outskirts of Paris for comparison).

Thankfully they remembered to empty the place before the wrecking balls turned up. At the end of the month, selected items that once filled the Castellane-Gould residence will go on view in Paris ahead of an auction on 7 March. If, like Boni, you like your régimes on the ancien side, and money is no object, have a troll round – you’re sure to find something you’ll like. Perhaps you have a wall that’s looking positively naked without an original Fragonard, or maybe you’d like to get your hands on a nice pair of jugs (Sèvres, obvs). Or you may well be thinking, “it’s only nine months until James’s birthday, yes I will get him those enamel cufflinks framed in 18 carat gold depicting what appear to be Victorian ghost children”. The reserve is only in the low four figures, but I will appreciate the gesture nonetheless.

Further reading
Dress-down Friday: Boni de Castellane
Boni and the Palais Rose

French writer Joséphin Péladan died one hundred years ago today. By that time he had become “an absurd relic of a receding age” as Alex Ross says in his highly recommended New Yorker article, “The Occult Roots of Modernism“. But as that piece demonstrates, Péladan the self-styled “magus” was both of, and very much ahead of his time, not least in his interdisciplinary activities. Ross’s article was published to coincide with an exhibition at the (New York) Guggenheim entitled Mystical Symbolism, which in turn referenced Péladan’s own highly influential Salon de la Rose+Croix, staged annually in Paris between 1892 and 1897. Not just a selection of canvases, these shows raised art to the status of religion and were crucial in the modern revival of occult thinking.

Péladan’s strange cosmology and even stranger appearance inspired, it has to be said, as much mockery as admiration. He turns up as a deeply eccentric apparition in memoirs of the time, or thinly disguised in fiction, such as Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen‘s Lord Lyllian. German writer Oscar A. H. Schmitz recorded a visit to the Salon de la Rose+Croix in a diary covering his Paris years, and appears to have enrolled the magus in his 1902 hommage to French Decadence, Hashish. As I mention in the afterword to the recent English version (tr. W. C. Bamberger), the book’s description of an unnamed hashish club habitué with “a blue-black square-cut beard, like an Assyrian magus … wrapped around with purple velvet” closely matches the best-known portrait of Péladan, by Alexandre Seon.

Sasha Chaitow has written extensively on Péladan, and you can find a wealth of material at her dedicated website, while in the video below she provides a highly informative introduction to this singular figure. While Belle Époque Paris produced thrillingly wayward characters on an almost industrial scale, Joséphin Péladan may just be the most intriguing of them all.

Further reading
A sâr is born
Pearls: Joséphin Péladan
Dress-down Friday: Joséphin Péladan
Royally buzzed

Somehow it is already the first day of Advent, which means we are drawing ever closer to that most wonderful time of the year, the day that brought the birth of our saviour Quentin Crisp. You are doubtless wondering how you can mark the season with gifts to passive-aggressive co-workers, Brexit-voting cousins and flag-flying neighbours in a way that will leave your reputation as an inscrutable recondite snoot intact. Allow me to present a round-up of giftable cultural history with which you can unmistakably signal your degenerate cosmopolitan values:

… because if you were to wind the clock back 100 years (the kind of thing we’re given to doing around here; witness a proto art intervention, an early milestone in marriage equality and the respective deaths of the ‘heathen madonna’, the ‘sandwich man of the beyond’ and a yellowface magician) and you were to find yourself in Munich, you really would need a copy of Dreamers to know what the hell was going on. Volker Weidermann’s book (translated by Ruth Martin, who talks about it here) describes a moment when poets, anarchists and chancers impetuously seized the reins of power in Bavaria in the immediate wake of World War One. It couldn’t last, of course, but as you read this magnificently rendered account you will find something extraordinary on just about every page.

… because while that was going on in Munich, Berlin’s artists were preparing a revolt of their own amid the post-war ferment, although the Scheisse wouldn’t well and truly hit the Ventilator until January. Because it’s where Dada met Bauhaus (and in fact predates the formal establishment of Bauhaus) and not nearly enough people are familiar with the Novembergruppe, a radical, revolutionary, multi-genre, interdisciplinary movement that encompassed everyone from Kurt Weill to Hannah Höch, Walter Spies to Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Otto Dix. Because Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the group’s first meeting (although their name celebrated the inspiration of the previous month), and an exhibition reflecting its insanely varied output is currently on in Berlin, accompanied by a catalogue.

… because women have been written out of the canonical narrative of early Modernism long enough and because five years after I saw and was astonished by a show of her work in Berlin it is great to see that Swedish abstract pioneer Hilma af Klint is having an actual MOMENT, oh yes she is, a proper uptown-exhibition, multiple-monographs, articles-in-foldy-out-newspapers moment, and it’s wonderful and so richly deserved. Paintings for the Future accompanies the Guggenheim show while Notes and Methods draws the reader further into her profound, idiosyncratic mysticism.

… because women have been written out of Surrealism long enough, here’s The Milk Bowl of Feathers, an anthology of Surrealist fiction which complements over-familiar names like Louis Aragon, André Breton and Salvador Dalí with the likes of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and Leonora Carrington.

… because Leonora Carrington brings us to her compadre, Spanish artist Remedios Varo whose written work can now be enjoyed in a new Wakefield anthology, Letters, Dreams & Other Writings (translated by Margaret Carson).

… because for some unfathomable reason there is STILL no Annemarie Schwarzenbach bio in English, and while this is in German, Jenseits von New York (Beyond New York) at least features her outstanding photos of segregation- and Depression-ravaged rural America.

… because having done devastating between-the-wars verité you may be interested in its aesthetic antithesis which you will duly find in Jane Stevenson’s Baroque between the Wars, which brings to mind Stephen Calloway’s masterly compendium Baroque Baroque.

… because I recently had a MAJOR BIRTHDAY and not to boast or anything, but I got a signed Alfred Kubin lithograph from my partner. How good is that? It’s an image of the prophet Jeremiah playing the harp and bitching, because ‘I thought you might relate to a complaining old man’. This catalogue is from an exhibition currently showing in Munich which explores the Austrian artist’s relations with that city’s avant-garde Blaue Reiter group, and while it, too, is in German it is at least a quality trove of Kubin images, something that is surprisingly hard to find.

… because we love Pierre Loti around here and are pleased to see him take his place in the Reaktion ‘Critical Lives‘ series, right there between Lenin and Jean-François Lyotard. Because author Richard M. Berrong is well-versed in Lotiana, having published In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Novels of Pierre Loti and the Emergence of Gay Male Identity. Because – speaking of handsome sailors – on page 120 there is a photo you really must see of Loti’s special friend Léo Thémèze. Woof! as I believe no one says any more. And because there is also an extraordinary photo of La Loti herself in circus attire on page 44. Run, don’t walk. Run.

… because in rooting around at Reaktion I stumbled across this, Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais, a study of one of the great Decadent motifs.

… because hothouse flowers made me think of the wonderful vignette of Aubrey Beardsley scenting his carefully cultivated blooms in the utterly essential account of the English Decadence, Passionate Attitudes, and that book’s author Matthew Sturgis has a new life of Oscar Wilde, and if there is anything more to say about said life I would certainly trust him to say it.

… because that in turn reminded me that last year there was a great article in the London Review of Books by Colm Tóibín in which ‘De Profundis’ framed a fascinating double portrait of Ma and Pa Wilde, and that he followed it up with studies of the respective fathers of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and it made me want to read more, and now in Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know I can.

… because you might be curious to know how Joyce shaped up as a father himself, which you can in a fictional account of the life of his troubled daughter Lucia, by Alex Pheby.

… because that brought to mind the curious intersections in the lives of Lucia Joyce and Antonin Artaud who were both treated by the same doctor in the same Parisian psychiatric clinic and had both been discovered roaming Dublin, manic and dishevelled. Artaud’s disjointed thoughts from his erratic pilgrimage through Ireland are recorded in letters now issued by Infinity Land Press as Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, translated by Stephen Barber.

… because even though a lot of my conscious hours are monopolised by translation and I am never less than fascinated by the process I sometimes feel like I understand it less the more I do it and reading Mark Polizzotti’s Sympathy for the Traitor makes me grateful that smarter people than I are giving more thought to it than I ever could.

… because if you ever wondered what went down in the sessions between Sigmund Freud and his analysand, the great Modernist poet H.D. (and who among us has not?), Kath MacLean can offer you an idea in Translating Air.

… because this is unexpectedly turning out to be a great year for uncovering unjustly neglected stories and although Gentleman Jack, Angele Steidele’ study of lesbian Regency diarist Anne Lister, orginally appeared in German it has been translated by Katy Derbyshire so you know it must be good.

… because, like I said, the unsung are having their moment, as Ria Brodell’s illustrated Butch Heroes um… illustrates, and it also reminds me that next year will bring Diana Souhami’s No Modernism without Lesbians, a title that is brilliant, bold and true.

… because untold stories always contain more untold stories, as evidenced by Joan E. Howard’s We Met in Paris, in which Grace Frick steps forth from the shadow of her partner Marguerite Yourcenar.

… because Spurl Editions are congenitally incapable of a dull book. I have reviewed three of them and I never write book reviews (this? darlings, this is a shopping list). Because their unerring sensibilities have turned up another treasure in Luigi Pirandello’s 1926 novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (translated by William Weaver), which boldly busies itself with ‘The definition of madness, the problem of identity, the impossibility of communicating with others and with being (or knowing) one’s self’.

… because when I was flying into Thessaloniki earlier in the year I was reading Owen Hatherley’s Trans-Europe Express, specifically the chapter describing 20th century development in said city (which is entitled ‘No, No, No, No’… spoiler alert: he’s not a fan) and as fond as I am of Greece’s second city the book was so fascinating and well-argued I couldn’t hold it against him. Because from Lviv to Madrid, it ably defines and analyses the nature of the European city in a book abounding in erudition, observation and discernment.

… because of the numerous people to live out their penniless decline in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, couturier Charles James, ‘the Ovid of fashion’, was possibly the most unlikely and most interesting, as reflected in Michèle Gerber Klein’s Charles James: Portrait of an Unreasonable Man.

… because the Decadence and Translation Network recently got under way and it’s always good to see more Decadent works appearing in translation, such as Jean Lorrain’s withering satire Errant Vice and Lilith’s Legacy, an anthology of works by Renée Vivien. Because both are translated by Brian Stableford who judging from his translation output alone is actually a sleepless compulsive – and what could be more Decadent?

… because it’s always fascinating to see how the recherché literary modes of Belle Époque Paris mutated throughout space and time, as reflected in And My Head Exploded: Tales of desire, delirium and decadence from fin-de-siecle Prague (translated by Geoffrey Chew) and Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology.

… because if you only know occultist Pamela Colman Smith from her tarot cards, or not at all, Stuart R. Kaplan’s authoritative, exhaustive and superbly realised monograph The Untold Story will open your eyes to an extraordinarily gifted and characterful artist whose work ranged from fairy tale illustrations to graphic representations of Beethoven sonatas.

… because if you had a choice of taking life lessons from a) a guy who hung out with Gertrude Stein and André Gide, tattooed bikers, slept with hundreds of men (including Rock Hudson and Lord Alfred Douglas) and kept meticulous notes thereof, penned gay erotica while introducing a hitherto absent transgressive note to the Illinois Dental Journal or b) oh, I don’t know, Alain de Botton or some insufferable ballache like that – who would you choose? The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward is lost no more. Hallelujah.

… and because if there is anything I have absorbed from the teachings of Christ, it is to love others as I love myself, to remember those less fortunate and (I’m paraphrasing here) to celebrate His birth by flogging my latest product. Ilse Frapan’s visionary feminist novel We Women Have no Fatherland, originally published in 1899, is reflective, despairing, exorbitant, inspiring, sentimental and angry.

Just like Christmas.

Such are the peculiarities of this most seasonal of seasons that our rundown of forthcoming titles comes at an indecently brief interval after our last bookish blow-out; this Janus-faced time of year(s) looks back and looks forward and evidently needs something to browse wherever it casts its eyes. Our planned reading for the coming year sees us returning to familiar themes with hopefully enough new stimuli to repel middle-aged stasis.

We begin in Berlin where left-wing activist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by a reactionary militia during the Spartakus rebellion 100 years ago today, her body dumped in the Landwehr Canal from which it was retrieved only months later. Early on, Luxemburg championed freedom of opinion and warned of the dangers of Russia’s emerging Soviet dictatorship, and the fact that her name continues to adorn public spaces in Berlin while no-one would think of reviving, say, Stalinallee tells us much about her enduring significance. Klaus Gietinger’s Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal was published a few years ago and now appears in English as The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (translated by Loren Balhorn) to mark the anniversary of her death.

If that occasion marked the violent baptism of the Weimar era, in 1931 German court reporter Gabriele Tergit provided a vital account of its sickly demise. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm, her first work of fiction, addressed the machinations of the media itself, its core narrative offering us a largely talent-free singer who is suddenly elevated to ubiquitous renown. That alone makes it highly relatable in the present day, but it is also a brilliantly observed and bitterly funny account of Berlin as the lights started going out. It is great to see NYRB Classics bringing this scandalously forgotten piece of Weimar literature to English-speaking readers as Käsebier Takes Berlin (translated by Sophie Duvernoy).

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven didn’t quite conquer the Kurfürstendamm when she returned to Weimar Berlin toward the end of her life, in fact all she did there was sell newspapers. Now the artist and writer known as the ‘Dada Baroness‘ appears as an elusive presence in Siri Hustvedt’s forthcoming novel Memories of the Future. Another extraordinary, highly eccentric image-maker accedes to the fictional realm in French author Nathalie Léger’s Exposition, published by the wonderful, new-ish press Les Fugitives, which revisits the life of Second Empire self-portraitist Countess de Castiglione and is translated by Amanda DeMarco (who also translated Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin).

The task of fictionalising Arthur Cravan, the proto-Dadaist boxer-poet nephew of Oscar Wilde, was something Cravan himself managed quite well, even leaving us with a cliffhanger in the form of his mysterious (presumed) death. But his multiple identities and the irresistibly incongruous set of associations triggered by his existence mean there is still a lot to unpack in his life. Unsurprisingly he has been a subject of recurring academic interest, the latest example being The Fictions of Arthur Cravan by Dafydd Jones. Its cover is a naive image Cravan painted under another pseudonym, Robert Miradique, as explained in the extensive catalogue for last year’s exhibition Arthur Cravan: Maintenant?

Cravan’s uncle is never far from these pages. Despite the forbidding taboo around Wilde in the years following his death, a number of writers who came of age in that era – including Brian Howard, Ronald Firbank and the Sitwells – were drawn to the Yellow Decade they were too young to participate in, even as the 20th century brought new forms that cast the 1890s further into shadow. It was a paradox captured in Martin Green’s Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence in England after 1918 (1976). Now comes Decadence in the Age of Modernism (edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray) which “argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance.”

Returning to the source, it is highly surprising to discover that How to Become a Mage is the first English translation of French Decadent mystic Joséphin Péladan (courtesy of K. K. Albert with Jean-Louis de Biasi) in over a hundred years. Interest in Péladan was buoyed by the 2017 Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism, which explored Péladan’s own late 19th century exhibition series Salon de Rose+Croix, a landmark event of hermetic image-making in the modern era.

In a related vein, Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Magic and Visual Culture from Fulgur looks at “the fascinating intersections between esotericism and visual culture through a decidedly cross-cultural lens, with topics ranging from talismanic magic and the Renaissance exploration of alchemy, through to the role of magic in modern art and 20th century experimental film.” Meanwhile Hilma af Klint’s moment continues in World Receivers, the catalogue to an exhibition currently to be seen in Munich in which the Swedish artist’s pioneering abstraction appears alongside images by English medium Georgiana Houghton and geometric patterns of compulsive intricacy by Swiss Outsider artist Emma Kunz.

Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald is a name even less likely to excite recognition than the above trio. An exhibition starting in Berlin next month, with accompanying catalogue raisonné from Zagava, aims to bring the early 20th century German illustrator to a wider public. Ewers-Wunderwald touched on occult themes in her work, with some of her best-known images adorning works penned by her husband, the notorious Hanns Heinz Ewers.

In 1898, the dandified bisexual Ewers encountered one of his heroes – Oscar Wilde (see? I told you. He’s everywhere). The setting was the island of Capri, “a wildly permissive haven for people – queer, criminal, sick, marginalized, and simply crazy – who had nowhere else to go” according to the forthcoming A Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri. They include Flowers favourites Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Jean Lorrain, Romaine Brooks and the Marchesa Casati. James’s 2016 book, The Glamour of Strangeness, was a thrilling account of a diverse sextet – including Walter Spies, Isabelle Eberhardt and Maya Deren – and their respective pursuits of fulfilment in distant locations. His trip to Capri promises to be another genius combination of locus and persona and frankly I can’t wait. And an even more localised cultural history of an Italian island location awaits us at the distant horizon of the year in Grand Hotel, Palermo: Ghosts of the Belle Epoque, Suzanne Edwards and Andrew Edwards’ study of the Sicilian hotel where Wagner completed Parsifal and Raymond Roussel finally encountered oblivion in an act that may or may not have been suicide.

Similar uncertainty surrounds the early death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who published a prodigious amount of Romantic poetry under the name L.E.L. which was highly popular in its time, fell into disfavour, attracted the posthumous scorn of Virginia Woolf and much later praise from Germaine Greer. Lucasta Miller’s new biography of the writer, L.E.L., highlights a life “lived in a blaze of scandal and worship, one of the most famous women of her time, the Romantic Age in London’s 1820s, her life and writing on the ascendency as Byron’s came to an end.” Her rapid fame came with rumours of sexual impropriety, as difficult to verify as the cause of her death in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana).

Reaching even further back we find two highly contrasting responses to antiquity. In Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned (translated by Victor Corti), Antonin Artaud considers the legendary depravity of the emperor, ancient Rome’s ultimate teen tearaway, in a book originally published in French in 1934. Artemis Leontis, meanwhile, offers Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, the first biography of a woman who grew up in an eccentric and artistic milieu in New York City and later dedicated her life to the revival of ancient Greek culture, including a recreation of the festival of Delphi. She shared her passion with the similarly rigorous Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora), who would become Eva’s brother-in-law when she married Greek writer Angelos Sikelianos (brother of Duncan’s wife). In the course of her research Leontis discovered a trove of correspondence that illuminated an even earlier liaison of the young Eva Palmer, with Natalie Clifford Barney.

You know me so you know I will have something to say about Wilhelmine Germany and its neglected treasures. This year’s bounty includes a new English translation (by Gary Miller) of Eduard von Keyserling’s pre-WWI masterpiece Waves, from Dedalus. Keyserling is Karl Lagerfeld’s favourite writer, well-respected in Germany, yet he remains criminally ignored in the wider world. He was one of the few German exponents of literary Impressionism, but is almost as well known for his alarming appearance as his exquisite prose. Lovis Corinth’s unsettling 1900 portrait of the author (above) was the subject of Klaus Modick’s recent book Keyserlings Geheimnis. Like Alvin Albright’s attic-bound portrait of Dorian Gray in the 1945 film adaptation of Wilde’s novel (see?!), it suggested not just physical but moral corruption as well; Keyserling was in the advanced stages of syphilis.

When translating Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin’s Third Sex, one of the many things that struck me was how utterly familiar the sexual and romantic practices of early 20th century Germany seemed. For instance – Hirschfeld describes a telegraph hook-up service by which subscribers could summon temporary companions corresponding to their fetishes and other preferences. So, basically Grindr over 100 years ahead of time. In Love at Last Sight, Tyler Carrington explores the technologically advanced means by which the lonesome and horny found like-minded strangers in Wilhelmine Berlin. This year will also highlight the visual sophistication of the era in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Artists of the New Weimar, based on an exhibition in Ottawa this year that examines the philosopher’s impact on art, and Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis by Miriam Paeslack, which captures the German capital at its most self-confident.

Finally, 15 January also marks the day on which this nonchalant chap – Austrian writer Hermann Bahr – died, in 1934. Bahr is interesting for more reasons than I can list, not least his crucial role in the cultural hothouse of fin-de-siècle Vienna, his championing of new forms in German-speaking Europe and his status as a catalyst of Modernism. Best known for drama (both as a critic and a creator), secondarily as a writer of transgressive prose, it was one of his non-fiction works that attracted my attention. It is my next translation for Rixdorf Editions and will appear later in the year.

Antisemitism, originally published in Germany in 1894, finds Bahr setting out to examine modern manifestations of an ancient hatred by interviewing the great and good. It was an extremely innovative approach; the word (and concept) “interview” had only just been adopted in German, and Bahr’s broad focus – talking to writers, politicians and others in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium and beyond – suggested that antisemitism was a pan-European problem that required a pan-European solution (Bahr later referred hopefully to the idea of a “United States of Europe”). His respondents included Social Democrat patriarch August Bebel, spiritual leader Annie Besant, French writer Alphonse Daudet and German scientific polymath Ernst Haeckel. Bahr’s survey is by no means an echo chamber, with his interviewees widely distributed across a spectrum of opinion from philosemitism to extreme prejudice.

Once again, so much here seems modern, not least the susceptibility of sections of the public to clueless, bigoted loudmouths. Antisemitism was nearing its pre-Nazi zenith, a rising political force in Germany and a major disruptive power in France which was about to descend into the rancour of the Dreyfus Affair. What is particularly striking is the number of well-meaning respondents who predicted that if everyone just ignored it, antisemitism would simply burn out and disappear. And how well did that turn out? It would be unfair to confront figures of the past with their lack of clairvoyance, but nor can we ignore this most glaring lesson from history: Don’t. Fuck. With. Fascists.

***

So that is our self-imposed lot, but there are still more titles that I should like to mention briefly; for example, In the Stillness of Marble, a “tragic and personal, visionary and transgressive” text by troubled Chilean writer Teresa Wilms Montt (translated by Jessica Sequeira). The mysteries of the Czech capital reveal themselves to Surrealist Vítězslav Nezval in A Prague Flâneur (Twisted Spoon, translated by Jed Slast), while if you have five hundred free-falling British pounds burning a hole in your backstop you can treat yourself to the mammoth three-volume International Encyclopedia of Surrealism. And if you want to go full coffee table there’s John Richardson: At Home, highlighting the big-ticket boho interiors of the collector and Picasso biographer I will always remember as author of the hilariously snarky Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters.

OK, now I feel like I’m talking over the orchestra at the Oscars. But there’s more! The Kindness of Strangers by blacklisted emigré Salka Viertel, buddy of Greta Garbo! Edythe Haber’s Teffi: A Life of Letters and Laughter about a bizarrely forgotten Russian writer who rejected Rasputin and lived to tell the tale! My agent whose name I just forgot! A catalogue of an exhibition covering the gloriously queer life of Archduke Ludwig Viktor! The Caledonian cultural miscellany of Kirsten Norrie’s Scottish Lost Boys!

*crescendo, indistinct shouting, something about Oscar Wilde*

The Feast Day of Saint Quentin of Crisp is already behind us, so it’s high time we got naughty, nice and nasty with our annual seasonal book list. I’m not going to lie – this year Satan’s little helpers have found a shizzload of interesting books that stray into our purview of wayward cultural history. And remember – these are just the titles originally published in English. We still have another post of translated books to come.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

This year marks a century since Walter Gropius established a certain school of architecture and design in Weimar, and trying to buy all the Bauhaus-related books out this year will probably land you in the poorhaus. You don’t need me to tell you why Bauhaus remains a big deal; much that is currently in your line of sight, including the device on which you are reading these words, probably owes at least something to the functional design of Gropius and associates (a forthcoming book explicitly joins those dots). But the official account of Bauhaus and its streamlined aesthetic has itself been streamlined, planing away the ludic, the mystical and the illogical for which the faculty and student body had a much greater susceptibility than the school’s reputation for machine-tooled rationalism would suggest. An even graver omission from the story is the contribution of women; in fact women made up the majority of applicants when the Bauhaus first opened, but they were largely fobbed off to the weaving department. One of their large-scale works was a rug for Walter Gropius’s office, and it’s hard to ignore the symbolism of their work being trod underfoot by men. So among the deluge of editions this year it is especially gratifying to see these lacunae addressed in a quartet of books by experts Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler. Otto’s Haunted Bauhaus offers us an “investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures” while the women of Bauhaus get the Taschen treatment in Rössler’s Bauhausmädels, a theme that the pair also tackle in Bauhaus Women and (as editors) in Bauhaus Bodies which draws these strands together and adds body culture, fashion, performance, utopianism and mysticism, including the Mazdaznan cult of the extraordinary Swiss artist Johannes Itten (for whom there is a new catalogue raisonné, of which the first volume appears this year).

Itten turned up as a character in a recent German drama series about Bauhaus, along with Gropius’s wife Alma Mahler in a big hat and even bigger Viennese accent; she is the subject of a new biography by Cate Haste, Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler. Back in Vienna, Alma Mahler was not best pleased when she received a bill from Dr Sigmund Freud in 1911, particularly as it was not even for her own therapy, but sessions taken by her first husband, Gustav. Who had just died. Now with our minds still very much on Vienna – the first part of our wanderings in the city can be found here, the second is coming up next week – we visit Dr Freud (who naturally features in Norman Lebrecht’s Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947). In Vienna a century ago he published one of his most influential papers, one that dealt with das Unheimliche, the uncanny – the unsettling amalgam of compulsion and repulsion, familiarity and alienation, a quality that had long been evident in visual arts and literature and was particularly at home in German letters. In London, in the very home he inhabited in exile, the Freud Museum is hosting an exhibition to commemorate, accompanied by a catalogue, plus there’s also a new collection of essays entitled On Freud’s “The Uncanny” (edited by Catalina Bronstein and Christian Seulin). Oh, and you can also get an “uncanny candle”, which apparently smells like the roses from the Freud Museum garden rather than, say, haunted calculators.

Another of Freud’s famous analysands was the modernist poet H.D., or Hilda Doolittle, who took to the fabled couch in part to pick apart this mess; a clutch of her essays are now collected in Visions and Ecstasies (through David Zwirner Books, in a series that also includes a history of the codpiece by Michael Glover). Joining Doolittle in the Pennsylvania-born Modernist Lesbian category is Gertrude Stein, and in Gertrude Stein Has Arrived by Roy Morris Jr. we get to revisit the delightful anomaly of an out butch modernist who left the US to produce resolutely radical works ending up a fêted literary celebrity in her homeland. Stein inspired the title of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance by Hannah Roche, and features alongside Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes, the latter also celebrated in Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism edited by Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz, and in a little volume of three stories she wrote under the name Lydia Steptoe. Sadly Djuna Barnes’s biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven never saw the light of day, but we do have an experimental study of the poetry of the “Dada Baroness” by Astrid Seme, more specifically the punctuation therein — Baroness Elsa’s Em Dashes. Can I share something embarrassing? For years I have struggled with the difference between em dashes and en dashes. Which is the wide one and which is the shorter one? And then THIS YEAR it was explained to me that – duh — the letter “m” is wider than “n”. Anyway Elsa’s hand-drawn punctuation marks might more properly be termed emmm dashes, such is their length.

Now if you would like to adopt a suitably beatific expression and follow me to the spirituality section (watch yer riah on them dreamcatchers…), allow me to present American Messiahs by Adam Morris, which speaks deeply to my fascination for apocalyptic cults. A fictional, English version comes in Claire McGlasson’s The Rapture in which a vicar’s widow declares herself a Daughter of God, forms the “Panacea Society” and pronounces the English commuter town of Bedford to be the site of the original Garden of Eden. Except that outline isn’t actually fiction at all, it really happened (just in case you were wondering why Bedford seemed too idyllic to be a mere Thameslink terminus).

In The Professor & the Parson by Adam Sisman, we encounter Robert Parkin Peters, “plagiarist, bigamist, fraudulent priest and imposter extraordinaire”. He was first exposed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also uncovered the perfidy and peccadillos of Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse (and whose nose for deceit famously and calamitously deserted him when he was presented with the “Hitler diaries”). “Motivated not by money but by a desire for prestige, Peters lied, stole and cheated his way to academic positions and religious posts from Cambridge to New York, Singapore and South Africa. Frequently deported, and even more frequently discovered, his trail of destruction included seven marriages (three of which were bigamous), an investigation by the FBI and a disastrous appearance on Mastermind.”

I am grateful to Wormwoodiana for their pointer to a reissue of The Devil’s Saint by Dulcie Deamer, originally published in 1924. Like Rosaleen Norton, with whom she shared thematic interests, Deamer was born in New Zealand but found infamy in the bohemian underworld of Sydney. Once, on being evicted from her accommodation, Deamer avenged herself by leaving behind a horse she had coaxed to an upstairs bathroom (she left it with a bale of hay and a bath full of water). Crowned “Empress of the Holy Bohemian Empire”, she was the presiding spirit of the city’s Artists’ Balls, which she appears to have parodied in The Devil’s Saint (extract here). You will search this book’s colophon in vain for the words “nihil obstat”, but it looks like fun.

American photographer Shannon Taggart has investigated spiritualist practices for years, and Fulgur have published the results in a typically exquisite production, Séance, with a foreword by Dan Aykroyd (wait, what?). Oh, and if you happen to find yourself at a séance wondering who you’re gonna call, Adrian Dannatt has some prime suggestions in Doomed and Famous: Selected Obituaries. It includes an extremely Strange Flowers-y selection, “an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world’s rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum and much much more.” Meanwhile Heather King, self-described “ex-barfly Catholic convert” offers Fools for Christ: Fifty Divine Eccentric, Artists, Martyrs, Stigmatists and Unsung Saints, which may well appeal to ex-Catholic barfly converts as well.

Three gay Catholic converts of the late 19th/early 20th century who are close to our hearts yet sadly not included in that collection are represented in reissues this year through Snuggly (along with a mysterious stranger from Düsseldorf). Snuggly are on a hot streak right now. There are more selections to come in our translation post so it is probably easier to just point you and your PayPal account in the direction of their website, but for now I commend to your awareness The Shadow of Death by “scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert” Count Eric Stenbock, Six Ghost Stories by the faux-priest Montague Summers, who combined “a manifest benignity with a whiff of the Widow Twankey”, and Amico di Sandro, an unfinished portrait of Botticelli by failed priest and would-be pope Baron Corvo.

A French trio of the same era enliven the latest work from Julian Barnes. The titular hero of The Man in the Red Coat is Samuel Pozzi, a handsome individual immortalised by Sargent in the portrait that is included sans head on the cover (was the hand inspired by Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man, as featured on the Corvo edition?). Pozzi was a surgeon and gynaecologist who operated on a prestigious Parisian clientele in his Place Vendôme practice. But Barnes’s book is also about Prince Edmond de Polignac, half of one of the most notorious lavender marriages of the day, and our old favourite, arch aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, who inspired some of the greatest examples of Decadent literature. And if you need context we have the authoritative new Decadence and Literature edited by Jane Desmarais (whose cultural history of hothouse flowers, a classic Decadent motif, I can highly recommend) and David Weir.

Nihilist poet Harry Crosby was inspired by the great flowering of Decadence although he arrived in Paris too late to have experienced it directly. He cycled rapidly through influences and in 1927 he was proclaiming his “swan-song to the decadent” and embracing the prevailing avant-garde movement of Surrealism. This trajectory is captured in Seeing with Eyes Closed which collects the prose poems originally published in limited quantities by the Black Sun Press he operated with wife Caresse. Although arriving much later, Penelope Rosemont was another American captured by the hypnagogic mutiny of Surrealism. In Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields we find her “rubbing shoulders with some of the movement’s most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie.” Artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun, at least nominally a Surrealist, is enjoying a posthumous renaissance that continues with a collection of her shorter written works entitled Medea’s Charms, and a biography by Amy Hale coming in the new year, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully. The Viktor Wynd Museum in London is currently hosting the first exhibition of Colquhoun’s work in the city for over 40 years, although with the Tate having acquired her extensive archives this year, it is unlikely to be 40 years until the next one.

Feral House have just reissued the memoirs of “Dirty” Helen Cromwell, who sounds like she was all kindsa fun. Good Time Party Girl (written with Robert Dougherty) is the “long-lost autobiography of a woman who lived life with no regrets from the 1880s to the 1960s” which takes us “into the colorful criminal underworld from New York to San Francisco and every whorehouse, tavern, and mining camp in between.” Elsewhere, Into the Night, edited by Florence Ostende with Lotte Johnson to accompany an exhibition currently showing at the Barbican in London, examines the night-spot as a laboratory for creation and progress. Venues like the Chat Noir in Paris provided a space for artists and writers to mix, hone their personae and bring new forms to life. The Chat Noir even issued its own magazine, which influenced a Gilded Age vogue for similar titles across the Atlantic as Brad Evans relates in Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism.

The parameters of modern life were expanding, but this change wasn’t all issuing from candle-lit taverns and small-run journals. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman explores the lives of American women of colour, “the first generations born after emancipation.” “These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood – all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.” At the same time, W.E.B. Du Bois zoomed out to encompass the black American experience as a whole; you may well have already seen the extraordinarily modern graphics he created for this purpose at the beginning of the 20th century. These are now paired with contemporary photographs in Black Lives 1900.

City Lights Books are publishing the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, 60 years after they issued one of his very first works, the absurd “Abomunist Manifesto”, in which Kaufman burlesqued the apocalyptic tone of political and cultural statements of intent. Death to the Fascist Insect, a collection of writings by the Symbionese Liberation Army, is considerably more earnest, and genuinely apocalyptic. The SLA became notorious for the kidnap and brainwashing of Patty Hearst, who parlayed the traumatic experience into an unlikely cult movie career, appearing in the last five movies by John Waters. His latest book, Mr. Know-It-All, is a wise and hilarious primer on pretty much everything and although some anecdotes may be familiar if you’re a long-time fan, I would rather listen to John Waters repeat himself than almost anyone else extemporising. Here he riffs on Hearst’s experience and fantasises about William Donohue, the viciously homophobic President of the Catholic League, being kidnapped and forced to watch Pasolini’s Salò on repeat (“A ransom would be pointless because who would want him back? I bet even the Pope thinks he’s an asshole”). Alongisde Salò in the canon of extreme cinema that John Waters has championed is Derek Jarman’s Blue, which brings us to Dungeness Blues, a stunning edition by Zagava which includes poetry by Jarman himself and responses from Jeremy Reed, also included on a cassette.

In Germany it is always the anniversary of something. The Twenties are around the corner again and the flood of Bauhaus books suggests we will be recalling the innovations of Weimar Germany in real time + 100 years. Brendan Nash, who can tell you more about Isherwood’s Berlin than anyone, summons this period in his first novel, The Landlady. And we recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that dominates Ben Fergusson’s An Honest Man, a deeply affecting love story disguised as a thriller. This is the perfect book to end on because it has my favourite ending of any book this year. And the fact of my knowing both these writers as fine, upstanding members of their community in no way influences my enthusiasm.

I’ll be back imminently with some translated selections. And please – support the people who truly care about books and who are making this wealth of reading possible by ordering directly from small presses and/or supporting your local independent bookshops. It really makes a difference.

We now turn to a highly subjective selection from the phenomenal wealth of books translated into English that appeared throughout 2019, encompassing a narrower thematic range than our original English language list. This is worth emphasising, as I would hate you to think that this is in any way representative of anything but my own odd areas of interest. For one it’s an almost entirely European selection, and heavy on the French, whereas a lot of the most interesting work in literary translation of late has been in works from non-European languages. Look around and you will find far more wide-ranging year-end lists of books in translation.

Uniting many of the selections here is the idea of the alternative canon, or anti-tradition – concepts particularly applicable to many lesser-known works of French literature from the late 19th and much of the 20th century. Often they were too perverse, too singular to feature, say, in any official account of literary Modernism, or make their way onto curricula. Disruptive in form and language, transgressive in theme and intent, they could be caustic, macabre, ecstatic, obscene, oblique, unfathomable. To an overwhelming degree it is passionate small presses that have sustained interest in this disparate body of work, rediscovering, re-contextualising and often bringing them into English for the first time. It was certainly their example that inspired me to start Rixdorf Editions.

This anti-tradition is nothing if not fertile, with secret inheritances from one writer to another, as well as considerable overlap with sympathetic creative professionals in visual arts, performance and cinema. Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich and That Obscure Object of Desire, the last of Luis Buñuel’s films, took their narrative from The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs, originally published at the end of the 19th century and now available in a new translation by Jeremy Moore through Dedalus. “The novel opens during the boisterous Seville Carnival of 1896, which Andre Stevenol, an amorously-inclined young Frenchman, succeeds in attracting the attention of the alluring young Concha Perez. A rendezvous is arranged, but before it can take place Andre meets Don Mateo, who, in a long monologue recounts his affair with Concha and seeks to dissuade the younger man from becoming embroiled with the ‘worst of women’…”

These fin-de-siècle tropes of erotic obsession, duplicitous womanhood and hapless masculinity are paraphrased by the cover image, by Félicien Rops. One of the Belgian artist’s most famous works – Pornokrates – adorns the cover of the first English translation of Mephistophela by Catulle Mendès, a key Decadent work originally published in 1889. Now, there are few combinations of words more likely to excite my interest than “thinly veiled fiction of the Belle Époque”, and this is just one of three examples of the form that Snuggly have presented this year, all translated by Brian Stableford.

Mendès poured into Mephistophela his entire era’s anxiety about women pursuing romantic and sexual fulfilment sans blokes, and the train of disgrace this would – inevitably! – trigger. Here this results in what a British tabloid might paraphrase as My Kinky Satan Lesbo Sex Drug Hell. But it is not the moralising of the novel, but the sheer bonkers intensity of the dissipation depicted therein that seems so modern. Or consider the point where our heroine Sophie thinks back to her First Communion, refashioning it in her mind as a same-sex wedding well over a century before this was actually an option. But Sophie is lost to heterosexuality by the trauma of her actual wedding night and once she embraces same-sex love she cannot! get! enough! She soon adopts the more masculine name Sophor and embarks on a chem-sex odyssey. “If a woman does not keep within the bounds of normality, she is condemned to the extremes,” claimed Mendès, “for her, there is no relief, not even for a moment, if she rejects everyday life and heads for the outer limits.” This kind of pathologising was typical of the author whose stand-in here is – what else? – a doctor.

But who is Sophie? Ah, that would be Sophie-Mathilde-Adèle-Denise de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf, better known as Mathilde de Morny, or “Missy” – butch fatale of the Belle Époque. Mendès was obsessed with the mannish marquise, and submitted her “case” to a psychologist for phoney-baloney “analysis”. Never mind that the real Morny was a clean-living individual with a healthy teint; apparently this was just “her system’s last instinctive defence before physical and moral collapse”. Well, of course. The key takeaway, the last slide in the “So, you want to be a female character in a fin-de-siècle novel?” PowerPoint presentation is: YOU CAN’T FUCKING WIN.

Mendès was not alone in his Morny mania; Rachilde and the marquise’s most famous lover Colette also drew literary inspiration from Missy, so too Jean Lorrain. His articles of the early 1890s were studded with “blind items” about Missy (although calling her “Mizy” and referring to the Mendès book kinda cut out the guesswork). Morny wanted to take him on in a duel – she had priors on that count – but was dissuaded by a friend who shared what appears to be the first recorded variation on the advice that “it doesn’t matter what people say, as long as they’re talking about you.” And that friend? Only Sarah goddam Bernhardt. But Missy decided to sue Lorrain instead. And won.

Lorrain and his poison plume were rarely out of trouble; in 1903 a story entitled “Victim” landed him in court again; the painter Jeanne Jacquemin – a patient of Dr Pozzi whom you may remember from our other book list – surmised that it was about her and drew Lorrain into a protracted legal battle; he lost and had to knock out the book La Maison Philibert to pay the legal fees. Here “Victim” joins “gossipy character sketches, of actresses and mystics, gigolos and dowagers, of an entire rogues gallery of fin-de-siècle types” in Fards and Poisons, originally published in 1903; three years later Lorrain was dead – on Dr Pozzi’s operating table.

The third romp à clef is a new translation of A Woman Appeared to Me by Renée Vivien, in which the author turns the tables on Mendès and his ilk by claiming in fact that heterosexual sex is a “crime against nature” and “abominable”. Vivien (born Pauline Tarn) appears as San Giovanni, her lover “Vally” is none other than Natalie Clifford Barney, who rivalled Missy as the most clef’d figure of the Belle Époque (srsly). Both women cultivated a cultish allure, and A Woman Appeared to Me is filled with religious allusions; when Vivien died at just 32 Barney claimed she was a “priestess of death, and death was her last masterpiece”.

Before we move on, I am also grateful to Snuggly for the introduction to Jane de La Vaudère (actually Jeanne Scrive), one of the few French female Decadent writers of note, of whom Rachilde is the most prominent example. While some of La Vaudère’s works are squarely located within familiar Decadent territory of drugs, androgyny and the occult, in this selection she branches out into the exotic, erotic East in a dual edition of Three Flowers and the King of Siam’s Amazon, also translated by Brian Stableford.

We find more Francophone exotica with the extraordinary polymath Victor Segalen, who died 100 years ago. This Chinese-speaking naval doctor idolised Huysmans and wrote a paper on “neurosis in contemporary literature” while studying medicine, and would later pen a libretto for Debussy. Joining the navy as a doctor allowed him to pursue traces of the Frenchmen who had ventured out into the wider world before him; in the South Pacific he arrived on Tahiti three months too late to see his idol Paul Gauguin alive; in Djibouti he found living witnesses to the later life of Arthur Rimbaud, who died over a decade earlier. The imminent publication In a Sound World by Victor Segalen combines the novel of that name, “a work of fantasy concerning an inventor lost in his own immersive harmonic space”, along with the libretto for Debussy’s Orpheus Rex and an essay on synesthetics and Symbolism (the collection is edited by Marie Roux and Rod Hunt; it is unclear if either or both also translated).

Arguably the most emblematic figure in this anti-tradition is Alfred Jarry, partly because he transcended the modish, perfumed perversities of the Belle Époque to create work that was crude, provocative, incendiary in a way that found recurrent favour with the radical creators of the 20th century. The Pope’s Mustard-Maker (translated by Doug Skinner) is the last work Alfred Jarry finished before his death in 1907, a “bawdy three-act farce loosely based on the medieval legend of Pope Joan, with a huge cast and lively songs bubbling with rhymes and wordplay”. The cast includes “cardinals, tourists, salvationists, muleteers, bull carriers, porters, gondoliers, pontifical Zouaves, Scots Guards, Swiss Guards, little mustard-makers of the Sistine Chapel, the faithful, ballets of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, shameful apothecaries …”

Meanwhile, the purest exponent of the anti-tradition was Raymond Roussel, who exerted an enormous influence on avant-garde practice long after his death in 1933. So the rediscovery of a lost Roussel novel is a big ol’ deal. L’allée aux Lucioles, which would have been the author’s third novel, was part of a trove of Roussel papers found in a furniture warehouse in 1989. I’m not sure why it has taken 30 years for this to make it to English, but here we are: The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories, translated by Mark Ford. Abandoned shortly before the start of World War One, the novel finds the author reflecting on European civilisation reaching back to the Enlightenment, but in a typically elliptical Rousselian way. In his biography Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, Ford describes the book thus:

Lavoisier … has developed a kind of non-melting ice that proves perfect for keeping wine cool in hot weather without the risk of diluting it. Since Voltaire is among the guests staying with Frederick, by way of compliment Lavoisier models this ice into little figurines that allude to a new chapter of Candide in which the adolescent Pangloss, then a chorister, is seduced by a ravishing Marquise. She prosecutes the affair under the watchful eyes of her jealous husband by dressing the fresh-faced philosopher in women’s clothes and claiming he is Amanda, the daughter of a poor relation…

And then things get weird.

There have been recent welcome stirrings from two presses who have done more than just about anyone to honour this alternative canon/anti-tradition, particularly of late 19th/early 20th century French works – Exact Change and Atlas. Both have, for example, published editions of Jarry and Roussel in the past.

Exact Change emerge after a long absence with Mount Analogue by René Daumal, translated by Roger Shattuck. “A touchstone of Surrealism, Pataphysics, and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Mount Analogue tells the story of an expedition to a mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed. Left unfinished (mid-sentence) at the author’s early death from tuberculosis in 1944 and first published posthumously in French in 1952, the book has inspired seekers of art and wisdom ever since – Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation”.

Meanwhile Atlas Press return with To Those Gods Beyond (translated by John Walker) by Giorgio Manganelli, part of the post-war Italian avant-garde along with Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. “In Manganelli’s innumerable universes, beyond the gods we know or suspect we know is an endless array of other gods. Everything that is seemingly finite or known in our world becomes infinite and unknown. We die, we find ourselves among the other dead, and we die again, only to find ourselves somewhere even more unknown and with death still awaiting. We are both monarch and victim in a gothic simulation illuminated by sombre flashes of sardonic rhetoric that reveal only an astounding desolate wreck.” Yikes.

Anti-tradition in its drier, more cerebral mode is represented by The Penguin Book of Oulipo, edited by Philip Terry (who perhaps also partly translated it? Apologies, I’m not getting a very strong signal on that). Even among adherents of experimental literature, the post-war works issued under the banner of Oulipo aren’t for everyone. The movement’s stylistic work-outs and self-imposed restraints (e.g. Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style, or Georges Perec’s La disparition, famously written without the letter “e”) can seem like smug, bloodless parlour games. This edition combines the (largely French) works of Oulipo itself with earlier texts that work with similar restrictions.

This selection has already been far more Francophone than I had anticipated, so before we expand our linguistic horizons I will just mention Exposition by Nathalie Léger, which has just been issued by Les Fugitives in Amanda DeMarco’s translation. My interest was particularly piqued by its depiction of 19th century Italian-born courtesan Countess de Castiglione, who inspired the fantasies of aesthetes like Robert de Montesquiou, the Marchesa Casati and Ganna Walska, and has strayed into performance, film and contemporary art but has rarely been captured in fiction. Unless I am missing something there is nothing between a disguised appearance in Émile Zola’s His Excellency Eugène Rougon in 1876 and Léger’s novel, originally published in 2008 (Alexander Chee later enrolled the countess into a huge cast of Second Empire figures in The Queen of the Night, 2016). Castiglione’s notoriety begins with machinations at the Savoy court before moving on to France, where she became mistress to Napoleon III and intrigued for the cause of Italian unification; interesting enough in itself but of course it is the extraordinary photographs that the countess confected with Pierre-Louis Pierson up to and during her morbid, reclusive, half-mad decline that ensure her immortality. “Mysterious yet over-exposed, adored and despised in equal measure, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, the mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Examining the myths around icons past and present, Léger meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography, reframing her own family history in the process.”

Death Mort Tod – A European Book of the Dead by Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak is an odd and profoundly unsettling scrapbook of mortal reflections from throughout the continent, a kind of Eurovision replacing power ballads with free-form ruminations on death (read more about it here). With bureaucratic doggedness it covers every country in Europe, so here’s Liechtenstein with an enigmatic collage of decline and demise, there’s San Marino with cut-up reports of the deaths of race car drivers. The United Kingdom is represented by selections from the Moors Murders tapes, a transcript of evil so extreme as to be utterly unendurable.

The book’s entry for Poland is a dense Mitteleuropa network of references that begins with Ludwig Wittgenstein setting out, and failing, to save the moody, maudit poet Georg Trakl when he was stationed in Poland during the First World War. Issued in Poland before the war, A Death: Notes of a Suicide by Zalman Shneour (translated by Daniel Kennedy) operates in a similar atmosphere. Originally written in Yiddish, this “dark, expressionist love affair develops in a large, unnamed Eastern European city between the young, impoverished, and violently self-loathing teacher, Shloyme—and a hungry, spiteful, and unsettlingly sensual revolver…” It appears to express a particularly Eastern European Jewish mode of Nietzschean nihilism I recognise in another writer I have only recently come into contact with, Jacob Elias Poritzky.

From the same period and also from Wakefield – themselves great champions of the alternative canon – comes Samalio Pardulus by Otto Julius Bierbaum (translated by W. C. Bamberger). “Buried in an isolated castle on the outskirts of a city in the Albanian mountains, the wildly ugly painter of blasphemies, Samalio Pardulus, executes works too monstrous to bear viewing, and espouses a philosophy that posits a grotesque world that reflects the ravings of a dead, grotesque god. […] Samalio Pardulus describes the simultaneous descent and ascent of the titular anti-hero into a passionate perversion of Catholicism in which love and madness become one, as a dark, incestuous incubus settles into a doomed family.” So that sounds fun. And who do you get to illustrate such a “grotesque world”? Duh, it could only be Alfred Kubin.

Continuing our Austrian theme, we discover a missing link in Robert Musil’s early output, a publication that followed his first novel The Confusions of Young Törless in which he processed his traumatic boarding school experience. Originally published in 1911, Vereinigungen is a double edition of stories that deals extensively with Musil’s own double, his future wife Martha Marcovaldi. Perhaps appropriately this is available in double translations (this, as I have found, is the hazard with public domain works – if they are free for you to translate, they are free for anyone else to translate; it’s a double-edged sword). Genese Grill has translated the two stories as “The Completion of Love” and “The Temptation of Quiet Veronica” and the collection as Unions; Peter Wortsman offers us Intimate Ties comprising “The Culmination of Love” and “The Temptation of Silent Veronica”.

From the same incredibly fertile pre-World War One period, I make no apology for including my translation of Else Lasker-Schüler’s The Nights of Tino of Baghdad in this company. And I’m not even charging for it. Available free as a PDF with the Rixdorf Editions newsletter, according to some fragrant genius this is “an episodic fantasia, a heady journey through landscapes that author Else Lasker-Schüler had only explored in her mind.” I translated this short, intoxicating work of fiction in part as response to the long, sobering work of non-fiction which was my other Rixdorf contribution for this year, Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr. Originally published in 1894, it is a collection of interviews with Bahr’s contemporaries – everyone from Annie Besant to August Bebel – on the scourge of anti-Jewish hatred then taking on specifically racial and political form to replace the older, almost folk religious prejudice. Sadly, much of it reads like it could have been written last week.

In 1909 both Bierbaum and Bahr were included in Der Roman der XII, an “exquisite corpse” exercise in which a dozen authors successively contributed chapters to a novel, the gimmick being that the names weren’t attached to the chapters, and readers were encouraged to enter a competition to guess who wrote what. One of the other authors was Hanns Heinz Ewers, whose early life is an irresistible combination of drugs, polysexual escapades, travel to exotic locales and themes of horror and compulsion (and he is also credited as the first auteur film director). But he was almost 40 before he produced his first novel, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which also appeared in 1909. This and Vampire were the book ends of a trilogy that included the phenomenally successful Alraune. Here Side Real Press complete the trio with Ludwig Lewisohn’s translation which was issued in censored form in 1927, with the excised parts restored by Joe E. Bandel. This is a handsome edition compiled with evident passion, and includes source material as well as a stage play drawn from the same material. Like many of Ewers’s works, the first edition of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice came with a cover illustration by his brilliant artist wife, Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald. Her intensely intricate Jugendstil works were the subject of an exhibition in Berlin earlier this year; the original catalogue with text by Sven Brömsel is published in my translation by Zagava in a beautiful edition, The Art of Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald. Yes I am mentioning another project I worked on. I’m drunk on power! Somebody stop me!

Hanns Heinz Ewers’s later accommodation with the Nazis is a morality tale too complex to fully explore here, but the next three authors are also instructive of the ways in which Weimar vitality was abruptly stilled. Kurt Tucholsky was an implacable enemy of fascism and had already moved to Sweden in 1929, which inspired his best-loved work, Castle Gripsholm, here in a reissued translation. While it is great to see Tucholsky’s works available in English, and even better to have them translated by Michael Hofmann, what particularly commends this to our hearts is its satirical portrayal of Elisàr von Kupffer, the gay mystic who founded a two-man homoerotic order with partner Eduard von Mayer, building a temple thereto in Minusio, Switzerland – “Elisarion” – adorned with Kupffer’s paintings of naked, androgynous figures in idyllic settings. Here Kupffer becomes Polysander von Kuckers zu Tiesenhausen and Elisarion “Polysadrion”, transported to Copenhagen.

Tucholsky was a frenemy of Irmgard Keun, initially a champion, later a critic, accusing her of plagiarism for her most popular work, The Artificial Silk Girl, now reissued in Kathie von Ankum’s translation (although not credited; Jesus, c’mon Penguin). Like Gilgi, One of Us, also reissued this year (translated by Geoff Wilkes), it explores the elusive highs and habitual lows of liberated Weimar womanhood. Both were popular on first publication, but were unsurprisingly banned by the Nazis; Keun eventually went into exile, although she returned to Germany in mysterious circumstances after faking her suicide in 1940, and lived in generally perilous circumstances until 1982.

Friedo Lampe never left. Born in 1899, he was a little older than Keun but tragically his literary star was ascending just as the lights went out. Rediscovered and translated by Simon Beattie, his 1933 debut At the Edge of the Night is a stunningly evocative nocturne, an ambitiously digressive, vividly cinematic journey through a summer’s night in Bremen whose frank depictions of sexual difference are just part of its expansive embrace of life as it is actually lived. While it didn’t have the mass appeal of Keun, Lampe’s book didn’t have a chance to find the acclaim it deserved; conceived at the end of the Weimar Republic, the fact that it was published after the Nazis took power is remarkable enough in itself, its prohibition shortly thereafter hardly surprising. Lampe was gay, and like Ewers he stayed in Germany despite the evident danger. And like Ewers he didn’t make it out of the Third Reich alive; tragically Lampe was shot at the very end of the war in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

As always I am grateful to Twisted Spoon whose fine editions open up a whole half-continent of literature. Their translations of Eastern European works encompass both newly discovered titles reaching back to around the beginning of the 20th century, and contemporary works; they were one of the first English-language presses to issue the work of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, for example. Their output this year includes a new edition of the inter-war The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch (“Having become the ‘lowliest worm’ at the hands of his estranged wife, Helga, the Queen of Hells, Sternenhoch eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation through the most grotesque perversions”) by Ladislav Klíma, translated by Carleton Bulking and A User’s Manual by Jiří Kolář (translated by Ryan Scott) which combines collages with text that parodies the imperatives of communist rule.

Our last selection is not strictly speaking a work of translation but it is a vital linguistic study all the same. Paul Baker’s Fabulosa! concerns the rich heritage of the gay dialect Polari, which was subversively beamed into homes across Britain on the late 1960s radio show Around the Horne. I bow to no man in my love for Kenneth Williams and I can think of few more thrilling introductions than the words “Hello I’m Julian and this is my friend Sandy” with which Hugh Paddick would preface whatever enterprise he and Williams were embarked upon that week, from Bona Publishers to the Bona Gift Boutique (“Jule’ll follow you around and make suggestions, won’t you Jule?”). Much of their dialogue was encoded in Polari, allowing them to get away with things you are still unlikely to hear at prime time in unencrypted form. Baker also published the lexicon Fantabulosa! for anyone who doesn’t know their aris from their elbow.

So December was all about gorging, and January is all about going dry or whatever variety of performative asceticism is congesting your social feeds right now. But it seems strangely appropriate. After our intemperate two-part pre-Christmas Grande Bouffe bookish blow-out of works both translated and originally published in English, this selection feels a little lean. Is this just not a banner year for the corner of crazy in which we dwell? It certainly appears to me that there have been better years in this annual selection of forthcoming titles, and that’s OK. And it’s OK not to pretend otherwise. Anyway I’m not fishing and if this is your perfect book shopping list, that’s swell. So before too much more of the year in question elapses, here we go …

A fair number of these selections fall under the banner of queer history. In Before Trans, for example, Rachel Mesch examines three writers who came to prominence in late 19th century France, born female but identifying to various degrees as male – Jane Dieulafoy, Rachilde and Marc de Montifaud. All three were married and their careers were entwined with those of their husbands; all three adopted male clothing and two of them male names. The provocative title highlights the difficulty of imposing present-day understanding of gender and sexuality on historical figures. And I recognise the complexities and contradictions that can arise in so doing, even within myself; for ease of understanding I would describe Ludwig II as gay although he would never have applied the label to himself, but simultaneously I wouldn’t refer to an historical figure with pronouns that the individual didn’t use while alive. It’s complicated.

In 1933, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler issued the novel The Young and Evil, which was fearless both in its bracingly modernist style and its depiction of (what I would call) gay, urban life. The forthcoming The Young and Evil (edited by Jarrett Earnest) recycles this title for a survey of Ford, Tyler and other queer modernists of the period, including George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Margaret Hoening French and Ford’s lover Pavel Tchelitchew (who was the unlikely crush of Edith Sitwell, who cast the original Young and Evil to the flames egged on by crotchety closet Edward James; it’s … complicated).

In April – finally! – comes Diana Souhami’s No Modernism without Lesbians, inspired by Truman Capote’s oft-quoted summation of Romaine Brooks’s portraits as “the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes” and restoring their subjects and other associates – Natalie Barney, Bryher, Una Troubridge, Gluck, Ida Rubenstein – to their rightful position at the heart of modernist endeavour in Paris and other cultural hubs in the first half of the 20th century.

In the life of Maurice Sachs, a gay Jewish writer who converted to Catholicism, we encounter competing and often contradictory currents of between-the-wars France. From the unfailingly inspiring Spurl Editions comes Sachs’s Witches’ Sabbath (translated by Richard Howard), an autobiographical work originally published after the Second World War, at the close of which Sachs was shot on a forced march from a German concentration camp. “He recounts how, as a young man, he befriended Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel, both of whom he stole from, as he stole from many others in his life … Every period of Sachs’ life is marked by his dialogue with living and dead authors; Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Stendhal, all are featured. Thanks to his lifelong obsession with literature, Sachs developed a style all his own: peppered with keen, acerbic portraits of his contemporaries, sometimes picaresque, introspective and often full of irony.”

A similarly hybrid identity is captured in the title of Marc David Baer’s book German, Jew, Muslim, Gay. The subject is philosopher Hugo Marcus, born in Posen (now Poznań) in 1880. Marcus moved to Berlin in the early 20th century and joined the gay rights group of Magnus Hirschfeld, wrote in favour of pacifism during World War One, and found himself in the expansive circle of acolytes around German poet Stefan George, before converting to Islam in 1921 and adopting the name “Hamid”. He represented a strain of Muslim intellectualism and gave lectures in Berlin’s only mosque of the time, drawing the attention of writers Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. Interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, he was freed just before the war and fled into Swiss exile. He remained in Switzerland after the war and wrote for the influential gay magazine Der Kreis which also attracted writers such as Kurt Hiller and Sam Steward. So, yep, on balance you can see why someone might think there’s a book in the life of Hugo Marcus.

Der Kreis had the distinction of being the only gay magazine operating in Europe during World War Two, but it was started by exiles who had been associated with a clutch of popular titles in Weimar Germany that were targeted at newly confident sexual minorities. Much of this activity was overseen by Friedrich Radszuweit, who not only published newsstand periodicals for gay men, but also the world’s first magazines for lesbians and transvestites, respectively, and established the Federation for Human Rights in 1923 – eventually a huge gay advocacy group. Radszuweit’s successful business model was built on a growing sense of community and polite activism, magazines offering both informative articles and thirst traps, and the consoling message to wider society that why, us inverts are just like you regular folk. All of this is covered in Javier Samper Vendrell’s The Seduction of Youth, a canny title that could refer to the images of decorative young people found in Radszuweit’s magazines or – for their conservative opponents – the young readers who might be lured off the righteous path of monogamous, matrimonial heterosexuality. But while his blend of progressive identity politics and sexy commercialism makes Friedrich Radszuweit seem like a 2020 kind of guy, there was a considerable dark side; in the early 1930s he sought accommodation with the rapidly rising Nazis and was quite happy to throw the Jewish Magnus Hirschfeld under the bus, although Radszuweit died in 1932, before Hitler came to power. For more, take your ears over here to the highly recommended Bad Gays podcast.

From the same fractious period comes Lance Olsen’s novel My Red Heaven. “Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters—some historic, some invented—crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg—as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts.” Presumably Rosa Luxemburg, murdered in 1919, is among the ghosts.

The forthcoming exhibition Fantastic Women at the Schirn in Frankfurt – and accompanying catalogue (ed. Ingrid Pfeiffer) – feature an outstanding selection of female artists associated at least partly with Surrealism who looked at the roles that Breton’s movement offered women (which included the silent, eroticised muse and … well that’s about it) and said “nuh-uh”. Muses to no one but themselves, they include (deep breath) Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Maya Deren, Frida Kahlo, Sheila Legge, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim, Valentine Penrose, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen, Remedios Varo, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun and Leonor Fini. That’s really some kinduva line-up.

The last two of those names are also represented elsewhere this year; Amy Hale’s Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gully is hotly anticipated (by me, anyway, and other persons of taste no doubt), being the first major biographical study of the artist. “After decades of neglect, Colquhoun’s unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic. Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun’s rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.”

We just saw some footage of the magnificent Leonor Fini, but we are not fini with Fini! Like Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini incorporated mysticism and eroticism into work that encompassed both text and images. This year brings major examples of both from the Argentine-born Franco-Italian artist. From Wakefield comes a translation (by William Kulik and Serena Shanken Skwersky) of Rogomelec, one of three works of fiction Leonor Fini originally issued in French in the 1970s. “This novella’s ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec—where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers—and moves through a waking dream involving strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles.” As far as I can make out this is the first English translation of Fini’s fiction. Also out this year is a catalogue raisonné (edited by Richard Overstreet and Neil Zukerman) of Leonor Fini’s oil paintings – two volumes and over a thousand colour plates.

One of my favourite facts about La Fini is that her erotic illustrations for the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette were printed in secret on a Vatican printing press in 1944. She is included in Alyce Mahon’s forthcoming The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde, “The writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) present a libertine philosophy of sexual excess and human suffering that refuses to make any concession to law, religion, or public decency. In this groundbreaking cultural history, Alyce Mahon traces how artists of the twentieth century turned to Sade to explore political, sexual, and psychological terror, adapting his imagery of the excessively sexual and terrorized body as a means of liberation from systems of power.” As we discover, the impact of the transgressive pre-revolutionary writer on the intellectual and cultural life of the 20th century ranged from Susan Sontag to Pier Paolo Pasolini, from Man Ray to Angela Carter.

Like the Bastille’s most famous inhabitant, Richard Wagner exerted an enormous influence well beyond the confines of his chosen discipline. While some of us believe the pinnacle of Wagnerian scholarship to be the micro-genre of “Amazon customer reviews for Penetrating Wagner’s ‘Ring’” – I am puerile and I own it – this year Alex Ross (author of the utterly essential The Rest Is Noise) offers us Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music. “For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.”

It was in Sicily that Wagner brought his operatic oeuvre to a close, finishing the last notes of Parsifal in Palermo’s Grand Hôtel et des Palmes. The hotel is still going (although currently closed for renovations) and in Ghosts of the Belle Époque by Andrew Edwards and Suzanne Edwards we have one of my favourite kinds of cultural history, one that can find strata of drama, secrets and significance in a highly confined setting. Later guests included Aleister Crowley, the cast of Visconti’s The Leopard, a bunch of Mafiosi and Raymond Roussel, who never checked out.

Francesca Wade offers a slightly broader canvas in Square Haunting, detailing lives that coincided on London’s Mecklenburgh Square, on the edge of Bloomsbury. “In the pivotal era between the two world wars, the lives of five remarkable women intertwined at this one address: modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf. In an era when women’s freedoms were fast expanding, they each sought a space where they could live, love, and—above all—work independently.”

Our minds are ­­– still – on Austria (if you’re just joining us, last year we visited Alfred Kubin in Zwickledt before advancing to Empress Sissi on the edge of Vienna, then the capital itself in two parts). The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body by Alys X. George skews scholarly as it “explores the modernist focus on the flesh by turning our attention to the second Vienna medical school, which revolutionized the field of anatomy in the 1800s. As she traces the results of this materialist influence across a broad range of cultural forms—exhibitions, literature, portraiture, dance, film, and more—George brings into dialogue a diverse group of historical protagonists, from canonical figures such as Egon Schiele, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal to long-overlooked ones, including author and doctor Marie Pappenheim, journalist Else Feldmann, and dancers Grete Wiesenthal, Gertrud Bodenwieser, and Hilde Holger.”

Joseph Roth, the great elegist of Austria-Hungary, is also represented in a collection of shorter fictional works, The Coral Merchant (translated by Ruth Martin). The “pre-cataclysmic” style remarked upon by admirer Barry Humphries is much in evidence; perhaps nowhere does Roth’s nostalgia find greater expression than the character of Count Franz Xaver Morstin with his pan-European recollections and mournful regret for the great unity of diversity in Franz Joseph’s unwieldy empire.

Vienna-born Hermynia Zur Mühlen offered between-the-wars parables which, in contrast with so many German-language fairy tales whose messages are “avoid forests” and “don’t be a child”, are updated to reflect the concerns of the politicised proletariat. Imagine the seven dwarves in collective bargaining talks and you’re halfway there. “For example, in ‘The Glasses,’ readers are encouraged to rip off the glasses that deceive them, while in ‘The Carriage Horse,’ horses organize a union to resist their working and living conditions. In ‘The Broom,’ a young worker learns how to sweep away injustice.” A selection is collected in The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales, translated by Jack Zipes.

Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist (ed. Richard Canning, Gerri Kimber) is a scholarly work on the great prose stylist, principled campaigner and Ronald Firbank‘s greatest champion. “This book explores all aspects of Brophy’s literary career, alongside contributions on animal rights, vegetarianism, anti-vivisectionism, humanism, feminism and sexual politics, not only celebrating Brophy’s eclectic achievements but fully reflecting them. Contributors include literary critics, animal rights activists, Brophy’s daughter, Kate Levey, and Brophy herself.”

Our final selection speaks to my interest in anomalies of place, the outcome of a childhood spent poring over atlases and memorising national capitals. Exclaves, eccentric borderlines, tiny countries – I loved them all, but as an adult I came to appreciate the intriguing geopolitical grey market in self-declared sovereign states. Dylan Taylor-Lehman’s Sealand celebrates one of the most famous, a tiny platform in international waters claimed in the 1960s by the Bates family, who still issue titles – lord, baron, count, duke, sir and their female equivalents. And even though the international community don’t recognise Sealand, you’ll at least have something interesting to pick from the “title” drop-down on online forms.

Growing up in Australia, Halloween was something I only knew about from American movies rather than a matter of lived experience. As an adult I happened to be in New York at the end of October one year and, rube that I was, entirely underestimated just how big a goddam deal the Halloween parade is, and emerging out of a subway station and trying to make my way to a restaurant I found myself kettled by revellers, which triggered something close to a panic attack. My adopted home of Germany has a half-hearted, ersatz Halloween culture (saving most of its dressing up for Karneval/Fasching), but with the very real horror of soaring infection rates, even that will be on mute this year.

In short – and not to rain on anyone else’s parade – I’ve never really taken to Halloween. For me, the last day of October means one thing: the birthday of Natalie Clifford Barney, the great writer, aphorist and saloniste who recreated Lesbos on the Left Bank, the woman whose horseback prowess inspired admirer Remy de Gourmont to dub her “l’Amazone”, the lover immortalised in the fiction of Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. If you’re just joining us, here is a quick primer of at least some of her manifold romantic interests and other connections.

Many years ago on a trip to Paris I sought out Barney’s former home on the rue Jacob. There wasn’t much to see, just the usual slightly forbidding heavy Parisian apartment building door, and it is probably just as well that Natalie’s secret garden wasn’t visible. Its spell could never be as potent as it was in my imagination, or for that matter in Un soir chez l’Amazone. Francesco Rapazzini’s 2001 book imagines Barney at home on the evening of her 50th birthday, as she gathers friends and frenemies who just happen to number among the most fascinating people between-the-wars Paris had to offer: Colette, Rachilde, Paul Morand, Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, André Germain, René Crevel, Natalie’s two lovers of the time, Romaine Brooks and Elisabeth de Gramont, and a new arrival who has her wondering whether she can turn this triangle into a quadrilateral arrangement – Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly Wilde.

I mention this now because an outstanding English-language, spoken-word version of Rapazzini’s book is now available, in time for Barney’s birthday this year. A Night at the Amazon’s is voiced by Suzanne Stroh to stunning effect (she also translated from the French with Sally Hamilton). She switches between characters with miraculous dexterity, fully inhabiting the personae of long-dead party guests. I had never previously pondered what a drunken Djuna Barnes doing an imitation of Gertrude Stein might sound like, but I am confident that I now know. Literary giants both present and gossiped about emerge as vividly human, as if enjoying a Rumspringa before settling into the canon.

The utterly captivating voice work is accompanied by an evocative soundscape, and together they manage something even cinema can’t sustain for this long – the sense of actually being there, an enveloping intimacy that draws you through space and time, your awareness catching on snatches of conversation, gaining illicit ingress into the minds of passing guests and stealing away with their thoughts. The mix of characters is electric, at times combustive, dividing along lines of class, generation, gender, sexuality, nationality, sensibility. Even the help is fractious. With prudent fictional licence the author has telescoped events, filling out the guest list and bringing forward Natalie’s encounter with Dolly Wilde, for instance (which happened the following year). And maybe ageing Decadent provocateuse Rachilde didn’t actually sniff around the hostess’s bedroom, but I can certainly imagine her doing so. Her disdain for Colette also squares with the record. Here fiction reveals the greater truth of its subjects.

Woody Allen’s facile Midnight in Paris, which shares a time, location and even a couple of characters with Un soir chez l’Amazone, did at least offer one solid observation that is borne out here: no matter how far back you go, the golden age is even further back. In the mid-1920s we find that many of the characters still seem to inhabit, or long for, the opulence, hedonism and spectacle of the Belle Époque. When Marcel Proust is invoked, it is not as a monolithic edifice of Modernism, but a recently departed associate hovering neurasthenically in the minds of guests, one who passed through these very rooms, in fact, as Natalie relates. Her mind also casts back to lover Renée Vivien, who died in 1909. It is, after all, the night when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest and A Night at the Amazon’s is, in a sense, a ghost story.

So if your Halloween plans are on dry ice this year, or any time you want to be transported from your doomscrolling day, take off your mask and huddle up. You don’t even need to wash your hands if you don’t care to (but why is René Crevel taking so long in the bathroom?). Take a look here – yes it is that Large Shopping Platform, but the name at least is appropriate.

And I’ll be back soon-ish with a Bavarian interlude.

If you’ve been reading for a while now, you’ll know what to expect – each year around this time I select a bunch of books with a Strange Flowers flavour which you might like to share with intimates who share your skewed sensibilities, to enlighten/scare off those who don’t, or of course to treat yourself. And you’ve survived your ride on this sorry-go-round of a year, so knock yourself out.

I am full of admiration for anyone who published a book in 2020; it’s more than I managed. But this year, the question of how to buy seems as pressing as what to buy and now more than ever I would implore you to support local bookstores and independent publishers; the link for each title will take you to the publisher’s page. And because convenience and principle needn’t be mutually exclusive, you’ll also find links (where available) to buy the book at the UK and/or US versions of Bookshop.org, “an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores”. Bookshop is still in beta and comes with an unfussy layout  – perhaps a little too unfussy; an option to sort or filter by date, name and other criteria would be welcome. But why don’t we, collectively, aid them in improving the site and help keep passionate booksellers in business rather than showering venture capitalists and tax avoiders with our cash so they can further over-engineer our lives?

OK, enough with the PSA and on with the books. Christmas is fast approaching so I’m going to try and keep this brief – let’s see how that works out, eh?

The intersection of the occult and graphic arts is a recurring theme this year, with a particular focus on divination – perhaps it’s just an understandable collective desire to see what will emerge from this busted crank hole of a year? Zoom out with The Art of the Occult or the major survey of Not without My Ghosts – although it looks like the catalogue for that exhibition may have been held over until next year – and lay your cards on the coffee table with a large-format graphic survey of the Tarot from Taschen (who are also issuing a new edition of Salvador Dalí’s tarot set). The Leonora Carrington revival continues with The Tarot of Leonora Carrington by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq in a range of typically handsome editions by Fulgur. Last year the same publisher issued a survey of Ithell Colquhoun’s abstract tarot designs; the artist’s entire career of images and text is covered in the highly recommended Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully by Amy Hale (and I’m honoured that it includes one of my images of Lamorna, where the artist and writer spent much of her life). In the catalogue Pamela Colman Smith: Life and Work we discover more about the most celebrated tarot artist of all, a Jamaican-born bisexual bohemian who died penniless even though her works have been reproduced in the millions.

Colman Smith appeared in Arthur Ransome’s 1907 Bohemia in London as “Gypsy”, inhabitant of a milieu that James Gatheral examines in The Bohemian Republic: Transnational Literary Networks in the Nineteenth Century (UK) as he moves from the Parisian origins of bohemianism under the July Monarchy to highlight comparable communities that emerged in the Anglophone world, a theme that Sherry L. Smith takes up in Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth Century America (US). Their spiritual descendants offer seasonal day drinking inspiration in Darren Coffield’s Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia (UK), celebrating the London bar notorious for hostess Muriel Belcher’s salty welcome and the Homeric quantities of alcohol consumed by its artist and writer patrons; Barry Humphries recalls his pre-teetotal days in the foreword. As an archetype the bohemian combined the vagabond’s disdain for the bourgeoisie with the hauteur of the dandy, figures captured – respectively – in The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from The Golden Age of Vagabondage by Ian Cutler (UK/US) and Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (UK/US), in which Len Gutkin pursues some immaculate coat-tails through literary history.

The dandyish Gabriele d’Annunzio represents a particularly dark glamour. In The Fiume Crisis (UK/US). Dominique Kirchner Reill details the episode that began when d’Annunzio, writer and war hero, led a group of loyalists to capture a city with a majority Italian-ethnic population in the newly created Yugoslavia after the end of the First World War. The short-lived state which resulted was a paradoxical endeavour; the glorification of power, violence and ethno-nationalism – not to mention d’Annunzio’s title of “Duce” – clearly inspired Mussolini. But there was a carnival-esque atmosphere to Fiume, where fur-lined caves hosted coke-fuelled orgies; note, too, the Fiume constitution, which was surprisingly progressive. This and other former sovereign states and geopolitical anomalies are included in Gideon Defoe’s An Atlas of Extinct Countries (UK/US), the kind of larky, middle-brow survey of historical and geographical quirks to which I am all too susceptible. In Saffron Jack (UK), meanwhile, Rishi Dastidar offers a narrative poem which brilliantly burlesques the conventions of treaties and foundational documents to explore nationhood, identity and belonging. Nicholas Daly’s Ruritania (UK/US) offers nations of no map in a notional Baedeker of fictional realms from the original Ruritanian adventure, The Prisoner of Zenda, to The Princess Diaries. The “Princess” of The Princess and the Prophet (US) was Eva Brister, Noble Drew Ali the Prophet and in them and other Black variety performers of the 1920s Jacob S. Dorman locates the origins of the Nation of Islam, a search for a conception of belief and society that transcended the segregation of Jim Crow America. It was a story continued in Claude McKay’s Harlem: Negro Metropolis, but in the major recent rediscovery Romance in Marseille (UK/US) the Jamaican author reaches even further with a Transatlantic tale of race, class, sexuality and disability.

A booted and suited Flowers favourite returns in Annemarie Schwarzenbach: Aufbruch ohne Ziel, a major survey of Schwarzenbach’s outstanding photographic work; the text is in German but if you can wait until next year, Seagull are reissuing her All the Roads are Open and Death in Persia in translation (and here let me add my annual note of bafflement and regret that no one has published an English-language bio of Schwarzenbach). I don’t know for sure if the Swiss writer and photographer encountered the striking figure of sculptor Renée Sintenis in the lengthening shadows of late Weimar Berlin, but it’s highly likely. Renée Sintenis: Between Freedom and Modernism (US), includes what I believe to be the first English text on the artist. Another particularly welcome English survey is Karla Huebner’s Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (UK/US). As I mentioned a few years back on encountering her work in Prague, Toyen’s erotica is among the most vivid and fearless that Surrealism had to offer. And completing our quintet of androgynous between-the-war image-makers are Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, although Jeffrey H. Jackson’s Paper Bullets (UK/US) takes us through the (second) war itself, with a non-fiction account of the step-sisters/lovers and their extraordinarily brave campaign of subversion against the Nazis, as movingly fictionalised by Rupert Thomson in Never Anyone But You.

Who are you Alexander Smith Cochran, and why are you here? Walter Goffart’s The Industrialist and the Diva (UK/US) introduces the “millionaire carpet manufacturer, noted philanthropist, and avid yachtsman” who started an Elizabethan club at Yale. It sounds … well, thou do thou Alex, but not gonna lie you don’t really sound us. But who is the “diva” of the title? Ah, that would be your wife, the sublime Ganna Walska, who (partly) inspired the figure of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane by pursuing an opera career in which she offered little by way of musical accomplishment but big-ticket glamour without end, with her turn as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni costumed by none other than Erté. The stone cold roué returns in Brigid Brophy’s reissued novel The Snow Ball (UK). Detailing the author’s core obsessions of “Mozart, sex and death”, it’s the perfect New Year’s Eve reading if you’re not going out (chances are you aren’t, and shouldn’t). And it includes a “two-page orgasm”, so there’s that. Staying in costume, we recall one of Cecil Beaton’s most celebrated and mocked images which showed Stephen Tennant, the photographer himself and other Bright Young Things dressed for a fête galante, included in the catalogue for Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things (UK/US), an exhibition of the photographer’s face work from London’s National Portrait Gallery; the accompanying Cecil Beaton’s Cocktail Book (UK/US) offers further day-drinking inspiration. Meanwhile Catherine Hewitt’s Art is a Tyrant (UK/US) tells the story of Rosa Bonheur, an eccentric French artist who enjoyed considerable fame in the 19th century, while dressed as a bonhomme of the previous century and living openly with her female partner and a menagerie of animals. British-born French writer Renée Vivien greeted the Belle Epoque dressed as though she had just emerged from a Versailles wormhole. Her short fiction is included in The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories (UK) (translated by Karla Jay & Yvonne M. Klein), her life threaded into the fabric of The Passion according to Renée Vivien by Catalan writer Maria-Mercè Marçal (translated by Kathleen McNerney and Helena Buffery).

If A Night at the Amazon’s sparked your fascination for Vivien and the rest of the circle around Natalie Clifford Barney, we have another short fiction set by another of La Barney’s lovers in The Last Siren and Other Stories by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (translated by Brian Stableford). Publisher Snuggly also offer a new version of Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon (translated by Brian Stableford) with extra short stories, also available in a splendid deluxe edition by Side Real Press with illustrations by Drian (longer term readers will know of my love for a previous translation of Lorrain’s novel, by Eva Richter). Translated by Lawrence Venuti, Fantastic Tales (UK/US) collects works by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, who lived a restless existence, plagiarised wildly, and died young, remembered as a key figure of 19th century Italy’s Scapigliatura movement, whose bohemian provocations cast a bridge between Romanticism and Decadence. Also found in translation this year is Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel (UK/US) in which the eccentric bohemian polymath of Wilhelmine Berlin, Paul Scheerbart, visits my home country of Australia (in his mind, at least); translation by Christina Svendsen. Freshly arrived from there in another millennium I saw a London stage adaptation of Street of Crocodiles by Polish writer Bruno Schulz and remember – more vividly than just about anything else of the period – the play’s traumatised protagonist desperately trying to recreate tableaux of the past, moving figures around on the stage to concord with his memory of a lost world. Now a slim volume translated by Frank Garrett offers Schulz’s first published piece, the recently rediscovered Undula (US). Try this for a 2020 opening: “It must’ve been weeks now, months, since I’ve been locked up in isolation. Over and over I sink into slumber and rouse myself anew, and real-life phantoms get jumbled up, blurring into drowsy fragments.” And a reissue of The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts by the deeply troubled Unica Zürn (translated by Malcolm Green) joins a recent rediscovery of the radical author, The House of Illnesses (UK).

Exhibitions throughout the year – inevitably rescheduled – introduced New York to two of the most singular apparitions of the Belle Epoque and we can – at least – enjoy the catalogues. Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde (UK/US) at MoMA was a survey of a caustic art critic and radical catalyst barely known to English readers, while the Morgan Library & Museum presented a no less anarchic and avant-garde existence in Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being (some of the exhibits are online); the catalogue is by Sheelagh Bevan. Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (UK/US) by Martin Lockerd shows how fin-de-siècle posturing amid the smells and bells of the Mother Church became a crucial touchpoint for a certain strain of prose stylist in the 20th century. Decadent, Catholic and wholly absurd, Montague Summers is still referenced for his research into witchcraft, the Gothic novel and adjacent fields, which also informed his works of fiction as here in The Bride of Christ and Other Fictions (UK/US). And we get to see what the Russian avant-garde was up to around the same time in Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age by John E. Bowlt (UK/US); the Munich edition of this series is one of my essential references.

We cast adrift with two women whose privilege and genius for reinvention propelled them far from the safe harbour of dull upper class society. Nancy Cunard, Perfect Stranger by Jane Marcus (US) rejects reductive readings of the poet, publisher and activist and reconsiders her place in literary Modernism. Peggy Guggenheim: The Last Dogaressa (UK/US) revisits the later life of the great patron and highlights the works she collected during her time in Venice (edited by Karole P.B. Vail, Vivien Greene). Like many moneyed gay men of the time, Oscar Wilde was drawn to the sympathetic legal environment and sun-dazed sensuality of Italy as captured in Renato Miracco’s Oscar Wilde’s Italian Dream 1875-1900 (UK/US). It was to the island of Capri that he decamped on his release from prison, a haven for sexual minorities as authoritatively detailed in Pagan Light by Jamie James, who sadly died earlier this year. It was home for many years to Norman Douglas, subject of Unspeakable (UK/US), a work of moral genealogy by Rachel Hope Cleves which reveals the uncomfortable truth that many in Douglas’s circle were aware that he sexually exploited minors, and not especially disapproving of the fact it would seem. And while it wasn’t solely high-brow sex tourism that drove Christopher Isherwood and W. H.  Auden to 1920s Berlin, it wasn’t exactly a deterrent as Colin Storer details in Britain and the Weimar Republic (UK/US).

I hope there’s something for you in that lot. And here’s to 2021, when with any luck we shall return to our routine of masked orgies, full-body poetry slams and foam lute recitals.

As our dire global circumstances keep us away from each other and from communal physical experience, books are among the few cultural artefacts we get to explore in a similar timeframe to our fellow humans that don’t require the intercession of a prism of expensive glass (unless you use an e-reader, of course). Mindful that I just recently dumped reading suggestions on you, I nonetheless offer you this selection of books coming up this year. It paces familiar territory but as ever I hope you discover some welcome surprises.

And once again – please support independent bookstores and small presses, and/or consider Bookshop.org, which combines the convenience of online shopping with support for local businesses. Where available, links to Bookshop.org in its UK and US versions are included for each title.

We begin by dialling the clock back exactly seventy-five years; on this day in 1946 Jack Parsons met artist Marjorie Cameron. The occult-fixated rocket scientist had summoned his mate, he believed, in a series of rituals he undertook in the desert with L. Ron Hubbard. He planned to create a “moonchild” with Cameron, a kind of hermetic messiah. Michael William West reveals this and other stories at the intersection of the erotic and the esoteric in Sex Magicians (UK/US). I’m looking forward, for instance, to reading more about the thrilling Maria de Naglowska, a Russian aristocrat who set herself up as a “priestess of Satan” in between-the-wars Paris and conducted sex rites in her own temple; and Paschal Beverly Randolph, a Black occultist and Rosicrucian who introduced North America to the concept of ritualistic sex magic. Then there are subjects more familiar to these pages, such as Austin Osman Spare, Anton LaVey and, inevitably, Aleister Crowley.

One of the reasons I cannot wholly subscribe to the cult of Crowley, despite his compelling message of radical selfhood, is the callousness if not abject cruelty with which he treated many of those around him. A particularly pitiable example is Victor Neuburg, who became a disciple and participant in some of Crowley’s “sex magick” rituals no doubt outlined in West’s book. Crowley tormented the hapless Neuburg, subjected him to antisemitic abuse and contributed to his mental collapse. Obsolete Spells (US), edited by Justin Hopper, offers a welcome opportunity to discover a curious, troubled figure on his own terms, collecting Neuburg’s own works and those he published under his Vine Press.

This, too, sounds fascinating: The Eater of Darkness by long-time New Yorker writer Robert M. Coates, an art critic who coined the term “Abstract Expressionism” (and thus not to be confused with famously terrible Regency actor Robert Coates). Originally published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions in 1926, and long out of print, it’s the “first Dada novel published by an American” and comes with an introduction and notes by biographer Mathilde Roza. Prepare yourself for “both an acclaimed crime novel and a study in surrealist fiction; an experimentation of style, structure, and syntax; and an innovative, avant-garde concoction from an author who wrote years ahead of his time.”

So you remember December when I mentioned a Leonora Carrington revival? The first half of this year brings no less than three manifestations of this renewed interest in the British Surrealist artist and writer, with a reissue of her most celebrated novel, a memoir and a work in which she appears in fictionalised form. NYRB Classics are issuing a new edition of her 1976 tale The Hearing Trumpet, (US), which Merve Emre recently described as “one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century” in The New Yorker; this comes with an afterword by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. You may recall Carrington’s cousin Joanna Moorhead and her biography, The Surreal Century of Leonora Carrington; now Gabriel Weisz Carrington offers an intimate portrait of his mother in The Invisible Painting: My Memoir of Leonora Carrington (UK/US). And in Leonora in the Morning Light (UK/US), Michaela Carter takes a life that often seemed as if it were straining at the bounds of reality and gently prods it into the fictional realm (Elena Poniatowska essayed something similar in 2011, in the book simply entitled Leonora).

In Eight Girls Taking Pictures (2012), Whitney Otto developed the lives of fictional women photographers into a large-format panorama. Another eight girls take pictures in Art for the Ladylike: An Autobiography through Other Lives (US), a memoir that considers the influence of the not-at-all fictional Sally Mann, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Ruth Orkin, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Madame Yvonne and Grete Stern. Meanwhile Portuguese writer Afonso Cruz’s 2018 novel Kokoschka’s Doll (UK) is appearing in English this year, translated by Rahul Bery. Starting in Dresden during the catastrophic firebombing in the late stages of World War Two, its characters are linked to each other as well as one of the most disturbing products of the 20th century artistic imagination – the life-sized doll Oskar Kokoschka made of his lover Alma Mahler (sorry Amelia – she’s baaaack).

While I was dimly aware that film director Billy Wilder had been a journalist in his pre-Hollywood years – a German edition of his articles came out in 2000 – I have never actually read his newspaper pieces and now I’m thinking I really should. Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (UK/US), edited by Noah Isenberg, offers a selection in English for the first time (translated by Shelley Frisch); one story details his experience as a paid dancing companion to older women (compare David Bowie’s character in Just a Gigolo). A number of these articles first appeared in Berlin’s B.Z. newspaper, which is still around and still one of the city’s more lurid media outlets. 

A new edition of Joseph Roth’s satirical novel Flight without End (US) in David Le Vay’s translation is imminent, and it got me to wondering if Roth and Wilder ever crossed paths. Their trajectories were surprisingly similar; they both came from Jewish communities in Galicia, both spent time in Berlin and Vienna between the wars and detailed their experiences for newspapers (although Roth wrote for more prestigious titles), and both left Berlin for Paris after Hitler came to power. So on balance: probably, but I can find no record to confirm.

Earlier than either, Swiss writer Robert Walser came to Berlin in 1905, but he too wrote up his observations in the kind of hyper-aware miniature that prompted W.G. Sebald’s description of him as Clairvoyant of the Small, now the title of the first English-language biography of Walser. The author is the foremost translator of Walser’s works into English, Susan Bernofsky.

An even earlier example of the Wahlberliner (elective Berliner) is Lou Andreas-Salomé, who shacked up near the city’s Anhalter Bahnhof with Paul Rée in 1882, just 21, just starting to write, and just in time to witness the start of the German capital’s ascent to world city status. Das Haus, on the other hand, is one of her mature works, originally published in 1921, and now appearing in English as Anneliese’s House (UK/US), translated by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger. While Andreas-Salomé is known for her associations with Freud, Nietzsche and Rilke (who appears here in fictional form), English editions of her work are rare, so this is very heartening to see. A caveat: it comes from an academic publisher, with pricing to match; eighty pounds is a steep ask for a work of fiction shy of 300 pages, even an annotated edition.

Completing our tour of German-speaking Europe is comedy Austrian malcontent Thomas Bernhard. A number of his works have been published in English, through Seagull, Penguin and a major series by Faber. One title that eluded translation was The Cheap-Eaters (US), in which the protagonist observes a group of down-and-out diners at the Vienna Public Kitchen, told in Bernhard’s characteristically relentless prose (pro tip: get out of tiresome chores by carrying a Bernhard novel around with you; when called upon to, say, do the dishes, say “I’ll just read to the end of this paragraph” – this will buy you a lot of time). It is now available in English, translated by Douglas Robertson and available through Spurl (who have an elegant new format for their fiction titles).

A new work examines the life of Jamaican-born Claude McKay, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance whose fiction is currently undergoing rediscovery. In particular it details his political journey, which included an actual journey to the Soviet Union, where he was warmly received. “Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik,” as Winston James details in Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (UK/US). I don’t mean to harp on about pricing, but the hardcover for this lists at £112, or $135. I mean, what?! Thankfully the paperback is a quarter of that, but do a couple of pieces of stiff card really justify that kind of differential?

I will never exhaust my fascination for the Belle Époque. A clutch of new books vividly map out the personal eccentricity, daring innovation and outrageous spectacle of France and in particular its capital accelerating up to and over the starting line for the 20th century. Take dancer and courtesan Liane de Pougy. A figure of enormous public fascination well in control of her destiny, la grande horizontale gave an avid public numerous opportunites to purchase pieces of her life and likeness, drawing a gauzy veil over her prodigious liaisons with male and female partners in books like A Woman’s Affair and Chasing the Dream, now available in English courtesy of Graham Anderson. Pougy merch also included the first-ever celebrity scent, coloured postcards and posters of her appearances at the Folies Bergère.

Also treading the boards at the Folies Bergère was Chicago-born Loie Fuller, who revolutionised the use of coloured electric light in performance (and launched the career of Isadora Duncan). “Credited today as the pioneer of modern dance, she was perennially broke, never took no for an answer, spent most of her life with a female partner, and never questioned her drive,” as Liz Heinecke discoveres in Radiant: The Dancer, the Scientist and a Friendship Forged in Light (US), which examines Fuller’s unlikely friendship with scientist Marie Curie.

In Cabarets of Death (UK/US), the late Mel Gordon (known for introducing Anita Berber to English-language readers) explores a ridiculous high-concept Belle Epoque endeavour targeted at a cashed-up bourgeoisie hungry for novelty. The three Montmartre cabarets in question were based respectively on the themes of “Heaven”, “Hell” and (my favourite) “Nothingness”. “Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays with flashes of nudity and shocking optical illusions” (which reminds me of a restaurant I went to on one of my first visits to Berlin where all the desserts shared a theme of death; the restaurant is long gone but happily the afterlife afters are visually preserved). André Breton lived for a time in the same building as “Hell” and would sometimes meet other Paris-based Surrealists there amid its infernal decor.

While these temples of the beyond have themselves passed over, you can still (in less infectious times, at least) visit the city’s Musée Nissim de Camondo, a repository of high French style. The titular Camondo was the son of the owner, Moïse de Camondo. Nissim was killed in the First World War and his father bequeathed his exquisite collection of furniture and decorative items to the French state in his name, along with the building in which he had gathered them. In Letters to Camondo (UK/US) Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes, tells the story of the remarkable family which rose to prominence after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and ended with the Holocaust. Finally, Dominique Kalifa sums up the whole era with the cultural history of The Belle Époque, translated by Susan Emanuel.

I think that brings us to 20 already, but as always there’s more. Such as: No Dandy, No Fun by Hans-Christian Dany and Valérie Knoll (UK/US), an essay coinciding with an exhibition in Bern. “Like an elegant harbinger, a Dandy arrives in times of crisis when societies are undergoing transformation. Like the hands of a clock, their silhouettes become messengers of change.” Then there’s a new monograph dedicated to design polymath Carlo Mollino, whose pharaonic love shack I visited in Turin a few years ago. Napoleone Ferrari, co-curator of Mollino’s legacy, and Michelangelo Sabatini explore Mollino’s extraordinary contributions to Modernism and the built environment, including the Teatro Regio, in Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller (UK/US). Or perhaps I can interest you in Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870-1945 (UK/US), a scholarly work by Salvatore Pappalardo which explores writers in the Italian city whose allure was so movingly evoked by the sadly departed Jan Morris. This is another academic title, so along with the usual caveat on pricing I would point out that it includes headings like “James Joyce and the Ethnolinguistics of Hiberno-Punic Mythography”. And something else I’m looking forward to, the first biography of cross-dressing English poet Valentine Ackland, particularly her turbulent relationship with Sylvia Townsend Warner. Valentine Ackland. A Transgressive Life (UK/US) comes to us from Handheld Press, whose fascinating list of original works and rediscoveries also includes The Akeing Heart by Peter Haring Judd, which covers part of this story from a different angle.

Both Ackland and Warner appear alongside Anne Lister, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Rimbaud, Renée Vivien, Allen Ginsberg, Patricia Highsmith and many others in the forthcoming pink and purple pantheon that is Queer (UK), edited by Frank Wynne, which I am very pleased to say also contains an extract from my translation of Berlin’s Third Sex by Magnus Hirschfeld. Oh and there will be a new title to join Hirschfeld in the Rixdorf Editions line-up this year, and meanwhile over on Twitter I am tweeting out #AYearofStrangeFlowers again, so stop by to marvel at a different exhibit in the cabinet of human curiosities each day.

In Berlin, the first snow has fallen and the first Advent candle is lit. I better get a move on.

We finished part 1 of our book round-up with Decadence, we begin part 2 with the Father of Decadence (and modernism and just about everything else) who had the big two-oh-oh this year and gets his own Bicentennial Birthday Baudelaire bundle. That includes a catalogue of the exhibition Baudelaire, la modernité mélancolique currently on at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (only in French it seems, but appears to be image-heavy), a digital graphic novel treatment of his Haitian-born mistress Jeanne Duval in Mademoiselle Baudelaire by Yslaire, a new translation (by Aaron Poochigian) of his magnum opus The Flowers of Evil, plus a new rendering (by Rainer J. Hanshe) of the flânerie ur-text Paris Spleen.

As we stroll on into the Walk the Talk and Talk the Walk bundle we ask, where did the flâneurs go? Did all the psychogeographers become nature writers? Perhaps New Directions in Flânerie (edited by Kelly Comfort and Marylaura Papalas) might tell us, or a new edition of Walking and the Aesthetics of Modernity (edited by Klaus Benesch and François Specq) for those of you who can’t put one goddam foot in front of the other without a critical apparatus. Antonio Muñoz Molina accompanies us on a less academic, more personable urban amble in To Walk Alone in the Crowd (translated by Guillermo Bleichmar), and as ever our thoughts in these matters turn to Fernando Pessoa who is still, it appears, having a moment. Maybe we should accept that Pessoa is always having a moment. This year brings Richard Zenith’s toe-crusher of a biography and a new edition of The Mad Fiddler, a suite of verse which, like many of Pessoa’s works, is almost impossible to corral into a definitive version.

I’m calling this bundle French Letters and your objections on the matter are powerless. From Seagull (who are having a 50% sale until Christmas Eve!) comes The Three Rimbauds, in which Dominique Noguez plays alternative history with everyone’s favourite teen tearaway, the most famous disappearing act in French literature (translated by Seth Whidden, also author of a Rimbaud study in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series). Some achieve disappearance, some have disappearance thrust upon them; Surrealist Robert Desnos turned away from the movement’s self-anointed pontiff André Breton (always a good sign), joined the Resistance and died at just 44 shortly after liberation from Theresienstadt. From his surprisingly prolific late period Wakefield offers The Die is Cast (translated by Jesse L. Anderson), which portrays “a band of opium, cocaine, and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris, a motley group who share nothing but their addiction and their slow and steady descent into ruination and despair”. Hervé Guibert died of AIDS-related illness in 1991 at just 36, but not before leaving Arthur’s Whims (here translated by Daniel Lupo), an outré, transgressive, hallucinatory text which can hold its own with Lautréamont in the canon of illustrious perversion; another fascinating find from Spurl. In The Mysterious Correspondent it is the text itself which disappeared – nine recently rediscovered stories by Marcel Proust (translated by Charlotte Mandell). Proust may have challenged Jean Lorrain to a duel for effectively outing him but here he brings relative candour to the theme of same-sex desire. Contains the immortal phrase “I am the fairy of misunderstood sensitivities” (snap girl!).

If you’re anything like me, you begin each day propped up in bed with an organza shrug wrapped snugly about your shoulders and a finger pressed to your cheek as a thought bubble rises languidly above your head toward the eau-de-nil baldachin, in it the words “what news of Djuna Barnes?”. As well as two imminent academic studies which pair La Barnes with H.D. and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven respectively, our Emphatically Queer bundle offers a slim, recently rediscovered text from early on in her career: Vagaries Malicieux, in Sublunary’s eclectic and highly recommended Empyrean Series. Barnes biographer Phillip Herring calls it an “unmalicious, if rambling, article describing her first trip to Paris” in which Barnes encounters Joyce around the time he published Ulysses (expect centennial noise re same in February). While the author herself was dismissive of the piece, it holds literary historical value and offers winning descriptions, such as that of the “accidental aloofness” of Joyce. Here I will offer my customary lament that another year has passed without an English-language study of Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Except – gasp! – in The Buoyancy of the Craft, Morelle Smith offers just that, in a book which brings the sweep of the writer and adventurer’s life into novel form. And we offer thanks to Feral House and Sarah Burns for The Emphatically Queer Career of Artist Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends. Read this, watch the video below, ask yourself – why am I only now finding out about this magnificent fairy of misunderstood senstivities?

Our Dames and Showgirls bundle draws inspiration from an audiobook, Simon Berry’s The Dame and the Showgirl which fictionalises the meeting between Edith Sitwell and Marilyn Monroe (which as fictional as it sounds did actually happen). The pair are voiced by Emma Thompson and Sinead Matthews respectively. The Institut du monde arabe in Paris this year hosted an exhibition entitled Divas d’Oum Kalthoum à Dalida, a celebration of the greatest female singers of the Arab world. The catalogue is in French but even for the non-Francophone it offers an introduction to the iconography of artists like the enigmatic Asmahan and the immortal Oum Kulthumm, subject (sort of, but also not) of a 2017 film which provides the cover image. That year also brought the biopic Nico, 1988, with the German-born singer and model also the subject of Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone. Like Annemarie Schwarzenbach (and Franziska zu Reventlow), Nico met her sad end after a bicycle accident. I have also recently discovered that Nico was discovered at Berlin’s premier department store KaDeWe, and I don’t really know what to do with that information but pass it on to you.

Our Dreaming Rebels bundle begins with me feeling bummed that I will probably not get to the major exhibition of works by Czech Surrealist Toyen currently showing in Hamburg (*shakes fist at global pandemic*). But – as I have said before – at least we have the catalogue! This recurring phrase is starting to feel less like a book recommendation and more like a diagnosis of our current condition; we can’t experience reality but we can admire the pretty pictures thereof. Anyway, Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel (edited by Anna Pravdová, Annie Le Brun and Annabelle Görgen-Lammers) is probably the best introduction to one of the most fascinating figures of 20th century art available in English. The subject of Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel (edited by Nancy Ireson) left school at 11 to become an acrobat, modelled for Puvis de Chavanne’s enormous Allegory of the Sorbonne (including the men) for over three years, by which time she knew enough to become a highly accomplished artist in her own right. Suzanne Valadon gave birth to son Maurice Utrillo out of wedlock when she was 18, and later made an artist of him in an effort to get him off booze and then married a man even younger than him and painted him sans togs – apparently (and amazingly) the first female painter to ever depict a male nude. So – yeah, I’d say there’s a story there. in Jugendstil Women and the Making of Modern Design, Sabine Wieber goes in search of the rebel women of Wilhelmine Germany including Anita Augspurg and Sophia Goudstikker, who lived in relative openness as a couple and whose Elvira studio was not only the first solely female-owned business in Germany, housed in the most emblematic Jugendstil structure (designed by August Endell), it was also an important focal point for the progressive thinkers of Munich around the beginning of the 20th century, a time when the Bavarian capital was producing new ideas in industrial quantities. In Catherine Prendergast’s The Gilded Edge we explore the fate of women living in bohemian Californian configurations around the beginning of the 20th century. Meanwhile the remarkable Gertrude Abercrombie, the “queen of the bohemian artists” who was praised as “the first bop artist” by none other than Dizzy Gillespie, appears in Chicago Avant-Garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time, along with choreographers Katherine Dunham and Ruth Page, art historian Katharine Kuh and poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Finally (and I realise that chronologically I’m all over the place) we have a welcome, serious study of clairvoyant women in Emily Midorikawa’s Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, spiriting us away to a “lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic, in which women who craved a public voice could hold their own.” Subjects include the Fox sisters, Georgina Weldon and Victoria Woodhull, first female candidate for the US presidency.

In Communicating Vessels we join hands and summon the Purchase button with a bundle of occult and occult-adjacent dainties. The book of the same name (not to be confused with the book of the same name by Friederike Mayröcker, which is not to be confused with, yet was inspired by, the book of the same name by André Breton) offers artistic responses to the life and work of Ithell Colquhoun. Communicating Vessels includes an introduction by Amy Hale, who in her biography Genius of the Fern Loved Gully mentions an unpublished novel about a witch cult by Colquhoun written in the mid-1960s. Unpublished no more: Destination Limbo is appearing in print for the first time, with an introduction by Richard Shillitoe. Colquhoun was intimately connected to the Cornish landscape where she lived and worked, and to the pagan and occult lore of the region. Her beloved stone circles are part of the terrain covered in the imminent Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain, which also takes us to “the Cotswolds town that worshipped Pan”, “the ancient forest where Gerald Gardner’s coven performed a ritual to prevent the German invasion” and “the Scottish mansion where Aleister Crowley summoned the Lords of Hell” among many other sites. Meanwhile in Aleister Crowley in England (actually coming out early in the new year), Tobias Churton continues his protracted global stalking of the Great Beast, while a little later we can narrow him down to the capital in City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley by Phil Baker, who has also provided a guide to Austin Osman Spare’s time in the city.

Our Modernism & Exile bundle offers Gallery of Miracles and Madness in which Charlie English shows all too clearly how a culture war (here, the Nazis’ loathing for Modernist art of artists by then scattered throughout the world) can presage actual war. Their “degenerate art” found a more sympathetic audience in exile as Lucy Wasensteiner’s The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition, now in paperback, reveals. In Caroline Maclean’s Circles and Squares: The Lives & Art of the Hampstead Modernists, exiles like Walter Gropius meet locals like Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, with such outcomes as the “Unit One” group of Modernist artists. Swedish-born Nell Walden left both her adoptive home of Germany and her husband, key modernist catalyst Herwarth Walden, in 1933. While my sympathies will forever be with the first Mrs Walden, Else Lasker-Schüler (and I’ll be issuing a collection of her prose next year), Nell Walden was a creative force in her own right – an artist, poet and art collector, as we discover in Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art by Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe.

Lastly we come to our Happy Place, or the idea of a happy place at least. The utopian project, humanity’s ceaseless quest to start again and refigure society in idealised microcosm is a saga of repeated failure which nonetheless offers extraordinary stories driven by compellingly wayward individuals. In Gary Kornblith and Carol Lasser’s Elusive Utopia (which I missed when it first came out, but appearing here in paperback) we travel to Oberlin, Ohio to discover an inspiring experiment in racial harmony established prior to the Civil War, but eventually overrun by the realities of the society around it. Anna Neima’s The Utopians takes us to intentional communities in India, Britain, Japan, France, Germany and the US, with figures like Gerald Heard, Rabindranath Tagore and G. I. Gurdjieff. While hardly germane and certainly nothing to do with the community he founded in France, my favourite story about the Armenian mystic relates how once, when he was broke, Gurdjieff upcycled sparrows by dyeing them yellow and selling them as canaries. We also visit the ambitious, progressive Dartington School, further fleshed out in The Elmhirsts of Dartington, one of Routledge’s new series of six 20th-century texts dealing with utopia, both as an abstraction and attempted reality. Mirra Alfassa’s planned town of Auroville, in India (built in the late 60s and still going) is the setting for Akash Kapur’s investigation of his own complex family history in Better to Have Gone. And finally, Utopia’s Discontents by Faith Hillis follows the trails of Russian émigrés and examines how their “communities evolved into revolutionary social experiments in the heart of bourgeois cities. Feminists, nationalist activists, and Jewish intellectuals seeking to liberate and uplift populations oppressed by the tsarist regime treated the colonies as utopian communities”. These outposts sprang up in places like London, Paris, Geneva and – bringing us ouroboros-like back to where we set out from in the beginning of part 1 – my own happy place, Berlin.

An anecdote dating from the Belle Époque tells us that one night at the theatre, Count Robert de Montesquiou was greatly struck by a young man he saw in the audience. The stranger bore a startling resemblance to the writer Alfred de Musset, who had died when Montesquiou was an infant and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, along with a number of the count’s illustrious ancestors. After the performance Montesquiou invited the doppelganger to dinner and swept him up into his night’s ensuing revelries. Finally at dawn the count apologised to “Alfred” for detaining him in this realm for so long and deposited the perplexed young man – not at his home, but at the gates of Père Lachaise.

Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac died in Menton 100 years ago today. He was buried in Versailles at the side of his lover, Gabriel Yturri, who had died in 1905. An angel with a finger to its lips guarding their shared tomb counsels discretion – a don’t ask/don’t tell, do-not-disturb sign on their eternal lodgings. Montesquiou chose not to mingle with the bones of his storied forebears, who included an aide-de-camp to Napoleon, a Maréchal on tu terms with Henri IV and one of the Three Musketeers.

Born in 1855, Montesquiou wore baby clothes that once clad Napoleon’s son, the ill-fated King of Rome, whose governess was the count’s great-grandmother. At boarding school, young Robert subsumed his adolescent longings into poetry whose recondite imagery contrasted with the strict formality of their settings. He became an assiduous curator of his own elegance. He gained the favour of his schoolmates with bitchy aperçus and impersonations; all of these habits persisted into adulthood.

Our visual impression of Montesquiou is largely informed by the great 1890s portraits by Whistler and Boldini. But before them came a fascinating 1879 study by Henri-Lucien Doucet. Here, Montesquiou is not yet Montesquiou. His hands, much admired by his contemporaries, and later habitually clamped to a cane, are clenched in a gesture which suggests something other than the self-possession that the sitter would later whet to warlike acuity. Pale, handsome, with the suggestion of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth, he is still in his overcoat as though he has just arrived or is making to leave. There is a touching hesitation, an uncertainty, a sense that acclamation is desired and not merely assumed as it would be later. Even the background seems unfixed.

Within a few years – certainly by 1884 when his persona suffused J. K. Huysmans’s characterisation of Jean des Esseintes in À rebours – Montesquiou had become Montesquiou. But what does that mean? He was described as a “crank”, “literary lunatic”, “commander of delicate odours”,  “sculptor of clouds”, “stringer of pearls”, “great genius of talk”, “grand duke of Sodom”, “professor of beauty”, “born poet”, “legendary friend”, “Apollo of mystery”, “poet of the bats”, “sovereign of transitory things”. Nominally commended to posterity as a poet, so completely does the count elude conventional compartments of fame that he functions more as a talisman of sensibility than an actual figure of history, literary or otherwise. Rare is the francophone masochist who would choose to read, say, his 1892 volume of verse about bats, jewels, fireworks and who knows what across 500 pages. At a time when far more obscure fin-de-siècle writers are available in English, there is a reason that Montesquiou’s works – “vague, shrouded poems … perversely exquisite in spirit and in form” in the estimation of Arthur Symons – remain almost entirely untranslated.

The description of “aesthete”, while nebulous, comes closer. Montesquiou approached aesthetics with cultish intensity, cultivating a freemasonry of ephemera of which he became the ultimate adept. He opposed the tide of industrialisation with Counter-Reformational zeal, a mania for rarity and raffinesse. As Baudelaire once said, “beauty always has an element of strangeness,” and as well as tending the curious blooms in the hothouse of his rarefied tastes, Montesquiou nurtured his eccentricities like spoiled children. He invited society friends to the christening of his cat, wore a ring mounted with a crystal enclosing a single tear, embarked for New York with his Great Dane in a white leather collar studded with turquoise. He had a pet bat which he announced to be the reincarnation of King Ludwig II. His costumed ancien régime play-acting with friends at Versailles was so authentic that two English lesbian academics on a day trip were convinced they had entered a wormhole. His hyper-refinement inspired an entire literary movement.

For it is easy to forget that Montesquiou – regardless of his own work – was not merely emblematic of Decadence, he was essentially patient zero in its viral spread. If Stéphane Mallarmé had not visited Montesquiou’s profoundly eccentric chambers on the Quai d’Orsay – Linderhof and Fonthill Abbey compressed beneath a mansard roof – and if he had not related his impressions to J. K. Huysmans, then À rebours and the entire Decadent movement might never have happened, thus no Picture of Dorian Gray – and so forth.

Of course, to some this would have been quite the more preferable outcome. As artist Richard Hawkins observed in the catalogue for a 2005 exhibition of latter-day Decadence, Montesquiou is “almost always characterised in biographies and histories of the period as the worst of the clichés and bad humour of the fin de siècle, as if everything unseemly of the period could be packed into one little 5-foot-7 faggy snit.” That we have a more rounded figure available to us than this unjust caricature is largely the work of writer Philippe Jullian. Just as the cult of Baron Corvo owes much to the work of biographer A. J. A. Symons, it was greatly to Montesquiou’s favour that a champion as insightful and sympathetic as Jullian came along while there were still (just) living witnesses to his subject’s life, including Princess Bibesco, Natalie Barney and the count’s only niece. His 1965 biography Un prince 1900 is as much evocation as description, reconstructing the recherché pleasures of the Belle Époque around the reader.

Jullian shows us that Montesquiou’s true lineage was not to be found in the names engraved in Père Lachaise but in a network of similarly narcissistic aesthetes, living and dead. Proust would imitate the mannerisms of Montesquiou, some of which he had cribbed from Whistler. Montesquiou communed with Ludwig II, Empress Sissi, Sarah Bernhardt (who, while not dead, chose to sleep in a coffin). As the 19th century came to a close, the count partook in the ultimate sacrament of these secret inheritances. He had long been obsessed with the Countess de Castiglione, the Second Empire courtesan who became the mistress of Napoleon III in 1856, at which point she began her astonishing artistic project of staging events in her life in photographs. They continued for four decades, as she lived out her half-mad dotage on the Place Vendôme, conducting a long funeral rite for her own beauty just as Des Esseintes had publicly mourned his virility.

The count had never encountered the countess in life, but as the news of her death circulated throughout Paris in late 1899, he seized the opportunity, hurried to the Place Vendôme and there caught sight of her corpse just as the lid was being lowered on her coffin. So profound was the impact of this moment that it took him over a decade to formulate it in words. By the time he published his tribute La Divine comtesse in 1913, he had collected many of the objects with which she furnished her solitude as well as a trove of those extraordinary photographs. He shared his obsession with his friend the Marchesa Casati, the “living work of art”, while the photographs would end up in the possession of much-married diva Ganna Walska. Each of them sought the mirror that only another narcissist can supply.

Like that opening anecdote, Montesquiou’s communion with Castiglione speaks to both the count’s parlour mysticism – his insistence that he was in touch with other planes – but also a life shaded with sorrow. Montesquiou was a high-functioning melancholic; his mother, he said, had given him the “sad gift of life”. He referred to himself as a “future corpse”, adding fin-de-siècle morbidity to the dandy’s habitual melancholy. Naturally Montesquiou aestheticised mortality, because Montesquiou aestheticised everything – posing as John the bodiless Baptist, carrying a photo of Sarah Bernhardt in her coffin, wearing an onyx death’s head as a scarf pin. “Robert de Montesquiou was to see the world as a place of vanities, in which, under a heap of roses, ivories and carved goblets, one discovered a skull of exquisite proportions.” These words are from Philippe Jullian, who goes on to evoke the lines from Platen which became the count’s motto: “He who looks Beauty full in the face/Is already dedicated to death”. It was not a slave whispering “memento mori” to Montesquiou, but a mirror; it isn’t difficult to trace the crepuscular traits of Des Esseintes.

But in contrast to Des Esseintes, Montesquiou maintained an active social life. Contemporaries invariably noted the hysterical high-pitched laughter which would follow his put-downs; he would hold his hand in front of his mouth to hide his rotten teeth – something he shared with his idol Ludwig II, although he never ran to fat like the Bavarian king. In fact Montesquiou was rejected for military service for being “excessively thin”, although he did win bronze in an equestrian event at the 1900 Olympics. For elegance and hauteur he had no podium rivals; in some caricatures his head is thrust so far back he looks like a gymnast about to embark on a floor routine. It was said he could dress in cabbage leaves and still possess un chic suprême. He could discern gradations of grey invisible to the lay eye. And in fairness it should be noted that he supported the work of younger writers and artists – Colette, Romaine Brooks, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Claude Debussy, Anna de Noailles and – to his lasting regret – Marcel Proust.

But there was a venomous edge to Montesquiou’s tastemaking which recalls the axiom attributed to Gore Vidal (among others): “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” When Montesquiou hosted a party, for instance, he would draw up two lists – one of the invitees, the other of those knowingly excluded. “The truth of the matter is I prefer the parties themselves to the people I invite to them … I have always regarded them as an inseparable – shall I say unavoidable? – detail of any reception, but a detail that is, alas! all too often recalcitrant.” He further complained that guests didn’t “stand in the position suggested to them in a well-ordered gathering,” unlike his beloved bibelots.

At formal occasions, Montesquiou settled those awkward questions of precedence and placement with which his milieu busied itself by announcing “the place of honour is where I find myself.” He was largely repelled by the men of his class and their preoccupation with hunting (pheasants, soubrettes – it made little difference) but he would sometimes lend the more adventurous of their wives his queer eye. While Montesquiou excelled in malice, in part this was the tenor of his set. One night he was dining with fellow dandy Boni de Castellane and the painters Giovanni Boldini and Jean-Louis Forain, all of whom rivalled the count for waspish obloquy. So greatly did each of them fear leaving first, knowing that he would be the object of the remaining trio’s merciless aspersions, that they agreed to rise together and leave as one.

But Montesquiou’s mockery was never turned inward; his vanity and elitism were entire, self-enclosed and unabashed. When imitators tried to recreate the interiors so rapturously imagined by Huysmans, Montesquiou moved on. Mere refinement was insufficient; he had to be utterly original. When burglars broke into his Le Vésinet property but later attested in court that “there was nothing for us there”, Montesquiou accepted this as high praise. The count neither sought nor attained the attentions of the boulevard.

He didn’t need wider acclaim, of course, because he had the means and the social standing to fuss with his gewgaws as much as he liked. Unlike Jean Lorrain, who had risen to become the highest paid journalist in Paris. Philippe Jullian, who penned biographies of both men, claimed that Lorrain was driven “by the assurance of having more talent and the fear of having less taste” than Montesquiou. Lorrain spread a story that Montesquiou had been at the tragic fire at the Bazar de la Charité in 1897, and had used his cane to beat women out of the way as he saved his own skin. It was a terrible calumny; Montesquiou was nowhere near the blaze but the story gained purchase because people could imagine him doing such a thing.

Poet or not, Montesquiou was more comfortable with images and objects than words, and as well as sitting for an extensive body of photographs inspired by Castiglione, he was a sought-after subject for painters. In addition to Doucet they included Giovanni Boldini, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Antonio de la Gándara, Philippe de Laszlo and most famously James McNeill Whistler. The excursion to London to attain immortality under Whistler’s brush brought out the full spectrum of Montesquiou’s eccentricity. He travelled under elaborate aliases although, as W. Graham Robertson (another cane-wielding Whistler subject) commented, “he might have walked down Piccadilly accompanied by a brass band without anyone being much the wiser.” In the exacting sessions Montesquiou felt that Whistler was “emptying him of life”, and he availed himself of “Vin Mariani”,a cocaine-laced “restorative”; like everyone from Decadent provocateuse Rachilde to Pope Leo XIII, he also shilled for the makers. As the long sittings drew to a close, Whistler countered Montesquiou’s antsy impatience by appealing to his vanity; “Look at me for an instant longer, and you will look forever!” (“perhaps the most beautiful phrase ever spoken by a painter” reflected Montesquiou).

As the 20th century advanced, Montesquiou retreated further into the past, indulging his Bourbon nostalgia by buying a palace modelled on the Grand Trianon, the “Palais Rose” to match his rival Boni de Castellane’s similar residence in central Paris. Montesquiou was already overshadowed by Des Esseintes when in 1913 Marcel Proust issued Du côté de chez Swann, the first in what would eventually be a series of seven novels which included the character of the prodigiously homosexual Baron de Charlus. Proust had first met Montesquiou twenty years earlier at the home of Madeleine Lemaire, painter of floral studies (“only God created more roses” as Dumas fils maintained). Despite the author’s initial protestations, Charlus was largely inspired by the count. At this point the Montesquiou persona began to slip the surly bonds of mere existence and drift into undying artifice.

“Is it admissible,” Montesquiou once asked, “is it desirable, to see a fictional character overtake its model, to the point of relegating him to the background and almost replacing him in people’s memories?” He was speaking about the treatment of his ancestor d’Artagnan (at the hands of Dumas père), but could very well have been referring to himself. But surely it was better to front up to eternity in the more flattering guises tailored by Proust and Huysmans than, say, as the “Priest-Petronius and Mecaenas-Messiah, volatile volatiliser of words” in Edmond Rostand’s Chantecler, the “Duc de Fréneuse” in Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas, “Jacques de Serpigny” in Le Mariage de minuit by Henri de Regnier (with whom Montesquiou fought a duel over the Bazar de la Charité slander) or “Montautrou” (“arse-climber”) in Lord Lyllian, Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s roman à clef of Satanism and sodomy in high society.

The count continued to maintain an interest in the avant-garde of his day, and cultivated a friendship with the writer Raymond Roussel, something of a next-generation Montesquiou – handsome, gay, wealthy, dandyish and deeply eccentric. But a deceptively minor incident in the friendship between the two men is of unimprovable symbolic value in illustrating the difference in their artistic sensibilities and the simple passing of time and fashion. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Montesquiou gave Roussel a bloom meant only for the hothouse; Roussel earned the count’s ire by instead planting it in a windswept garden. The count’s carefully tended art, interior without true interiority, could not be transplanted to the great febrile landscapes that issued from the younger man’s mind.

They say “count no man happy till he dies” – may we count the count happy? He would probably have regarded conventional notions of happiness as appallingly petty bourgeois. But as he grew older and his health worsened the endless shades of grey tended to gun-metal. The return of Charlus in the second volume of Proust’s magnum opus in 1919 seemed to drain Montesquiou of much of his remaining vitality. His world of rare perfumes, neurasthenic décor and titled dowagers was gone, and he knew that he was at a remove from, as he put it, “Picasso’s artistic conceptions, from Czechoslovakian aestheticism or Negro art”. His luxury limited editions of corseted alexandrines could scarcely have been more apt to repel the attentions of the between-the-wars sophisticate if their pages had been pasted together.

Even the manner of Montesquiou’s demise was démodé, Beardsley-esque. Suffering from uremia, the sixty-six year old count decamped to Menton, where he died on 11 December 1921. Ten days later he was laid at Yturri’s side in Versailles in the company of Natalie Barney, Ida Rubinstein, Maurice Barrès and Lucie Delaure-Mardrus. Eulogist Paul-Louis Couchoud admirably evoked the count’s essential nature without planing away his sharp corners. “We shall no more see his tall figure thrust back, his princely brow, his deep and pensive eyes, his mocking and sincere mouth … At once the haughtiest and most candid of men, proud but sensitive, refining all properties and breaking all conventions, master of the art of pleasing and attracted by the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing, irritated to excess by the slightest baseness, infinitely exalted by the most obscure sign of spiritual grandeur, stating that the only bearable things are things in the extreme …”.

Montesquiou’s persona is captive in arts and letters of more talented contemporaries, and more recently evoked in Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat. This just leaves Montesquiou the man who was – as Arthur Symons pronounced in the ne plus ultra of fin-de-siècle shade – “merely real”.

Further reading
Dress-down Friday: Robert de Montesquiou
The countess in the afterlife
The hands of Robert de Montesquiou
Places: Palais Rose, Le Vésinet
The poet of the bats
Pearls: Robert de Montesquiou
The ghosts of Versailles
Royally buzzed

I can’t believe it’s already whatever day it is of whatever year this is. It’s high time we took a look at new titles of a Strange Flowers flavour coming up this year. As much as I look forward to sharing new book recommendations, time is short so forgive me if I keep my commentary brief this go round.

We start by making a small dent in the “list of writers James can’t believe haven’t been translated into English” with the welcome news that the fascinating Emmy Hennings, a writer, performer and – along with later husband Hugo Ball – key figure in the development of Dada in Zurich, is finally available in translation. Hennings overcame poverty, drug abuse, prostitution, prison, attempted suicide and the Spanish Flu to leave a unique body of work. Das Brandmal (here translated, by Katharina Rout, as Branded) was originally issued in 1920. Described as “the Joan of Arc of the Expressionist generation”, Hennings here offers the most Catholic of Modernist novels, a confessional and thinly fictionalised account of her own troubled progress prior to the First World War.

Also issuing from the pre-World War One period is Three Prose Works by the great German-Jewish writer Else Lasker-Schüler coming out through Rixdorf Editions in my translation. I honestly don’t just come up with these lists to trumpet my own work (and anyway, the egregious self-promotion is happening over here) but even if I hadn’t translated it I would be tripping over myself to alert you to this trio of fictional works now appearing here in English for the first time. Wild and intoxicating, fragmentary and gem-like, they trace the author’s development as she moves from bourgeois comfort to bohemian experimentation, as the scope of the constituent pieces in each work expands from vignette to parable.

Lasker-Schüler’s friend Magnus Hirschfeld (whose book Berlin’s Third Sex I translated OK I’LL STOP NOW) is the subject of Laurie Marhoefer’s Racism and the Making of Gay Rights which “shows how Hirschfeld laid the groundwork for modern gay rights, and how he did so by borrowing from a disturbing set of racist, imperial, and eugenic ideas. Yet on his journey with [Chinese lover Li Shiu Tong], Hirschfeld also had inspiring moments – including when he formulated gay rights as a broad, anti-colonial struggle and as a movement that could be linked to Jewish emancipation.”

So while Hirschfeld remained broadly on the side of social progress, forthcoming book Bad Gays by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller (based on their highly recommended podcast) evaluates the legacies of gay subjects who are, to say the least, problematic. “From the Emperor Hadrian to notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors excavate the buried history of queer lives. This includes fascist thugs, famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, imperialists, G-men and architects.”

In the Netflix series Pose, MJ Rodriguez‘s Blanca stages a sit-in at a gay bar frequented by the kind of bad gays who, arriving at a certain level of societal acceptance, pull the ladder up behind them to reject other minorities – trans women like Blanca, for instance. The title of Ricky Tucker’s And the Category is … may still be ringing in your ears in the voice of Billy Porter after the third and sadly last series of Pose, set in the late ‘80s/early 90s New York ballroom scene. This book – a “love letter to the legendary Black and Latinx LGBTQ underground subculture, uncovering its abundant legacy and influence in popular culture” – reveals not just the struggle and the activism, but celebrates a scene “where trans lives are respected and applauded, and queer youth are able to find family and acceptance.”

Earlier that century: “On a Saturday in New York City in 1912, around the wooden tables of a popular Greenwich Village restaurant, a group of women gathered, all of them convinced that they were going to change the world. It was the first meeting of ‘Heterodoxy’, a secret social club.” They issued from bohemian circles, in which women may have had more freedom of expression, but even in more unconventional households they were often expected to wait on their menfolk. But the members of Heterodoxy were “passionate advocates of free love, equal marriage, and easier divorce. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers, and scientists. Their club, at the heart of America’s bohemia, was a springboard for parties, performances, and radical politics.” All this in Hotbed by Joanna Scutts.

Here we swivel to a combination of time and place to which my thoughts ever turn – Belle Epoque Paris – to visit one of the most emblematic figures of the period, can-can dancer La Goulue. Born in 1870 as Louise Weber, La Goulue would “borrow” clothes from the laundry where her mother worked, and as she paraded them in the music halls she first got a taste for nightlife, eventually becoming the star of the can-can. In a new biography by Will Visconti, Beyond the Moulin Rouge: The Life and Legacy of La Goulue, we learn how “La Goulue overcame loss, abusive relationships, and poverty to become the very embodiment of nineteenth-century Paris, fêted by royalty and followed as closely as any politician or monarch.”

La Goulue is featured on the “Pataphysical calendar”, a time-keeping system which begins with the birth of arch-provocateur Alfred Jarry in 1873 (today, for instance, is 24 Décervelage 149, and is dedicated to “Saint Weidman”, whoever that is). Parodying the Catholic liturgical calendar, it combined invented personas with figures identified with or admired by practitioners of Pataphysics (also rendered as ’Pataphysics). This movement employed slightly aggressive forms of pseudo-scientific nonsense, using humour to unsettle rather than cajole or comfort. It draws devotees to this day, with a dedicated “Collège de ’Pataphysique”. The essays in ’Pataphysics Unrolled (edited by Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor) “create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. […] Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.”

One latter-day champion of this anarchic spirit was Boris Vian, a member of the Collège de ’Pataphysique and a highly prolific author and songwriter. Vian only lived to be 39, his very death a critical gesture; he died of a heart attack after decrying the screen adaptation of one of his novels. Written during World War Two, his novel Vercoquin and the Plankton (translated by Terry Bradford) “describes the collision of two worlds under the Vichy regime: that of the youthful dandyism of the ever-partying Zazous, and the murderously maniacal bureaucracy of a governmental office for standardization.”

Following Diana Souhami’s No Modernism without Lesbians, which included the fascinating Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman) among its quartet of subjects, Susan McCabe looks at the writer’s long relationship with H. D. (who is also the subject of a forthcoming study, Winged Words). In H. D. & Bryher we revisit one of the great partnerships of the 20th century with all its tangled interconnections (I had a go at mapping them here). “When they met in 1918, H.D. was a modernist poet, married to a shell-shocked adulterous poet, and pregnant by another man. She fell in love with Bryher, who was entrapped by her wealthy secretive family. Their bond grew over Greek poetry, geography, ancient history and literature, the telegraph, and telepathy.”

In Theatres of Melancholy: The Neo-Romantics in Paris and Beyond, Patrick Mauriès explores artists working between the wars who embraced the figurative while much of the avant-garde was turning to abstraction, who were excluded from the grand narrative of Modernism, or included only with a wealth of asterisks and clarifying footnotes. “They were influenced by Picasso, in particular his Blue and Rose periods, but went beyond him to forge new ways of painting. These artists liked to play with forgotten references and obsolete visual devices such as trompe l’oeil.” This young, international cohort included Christian Bérard, Thérese Debains, Pavel Tchelitchew, Eugene and Leonid Berman, and Kristians Tonny.

Mina Loy seems to be forever hovering at the edge of greater recognition. Now in Mina Loy: Apology of Genius we have the first major study of Loy this millennium, following Carolyn Burke’s substantial Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (1996). Perhaps it was the very variety of her activities and connections which makes it difficult to place her – a “poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto-writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer” as author Mary Ann Caws describes her. “Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance, and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist.”

The imperialist episode in which Napoleon III of France decided ruling Mexico would make fun busywork for a spare Habsburg (Archduke Maximilian) is not exactly a knockabout, but it does have stretches of dark humour. Setting off from Trieste with his wife Charlotte (Carlota), “Emperador Maximilano” found himself out of his depth as soon as he arrived, as we discover in The Last Emperor of Mexico (Edward Shawcross): “The ensuing saga would feature the great world leaders of the day, popes, bandits and queens; intrigue, conspiracy and cut-throat statecraft, as Mexico became the pivotal battleground in the global balance of power, between Old Europe and the burgeoning force of the New World: American imperialism.” As it all started unravelling, Carlota returned to Europe to solicit aid; in the 1939 film Juarez, Bette Davis chews the scenery, playing a paranoid Carlota close to mental collapse as she berates Napoleon III. As excessive as it seems (and Bette, bless her, was drawing on her on instability of the time), the portrayal was largely faithful to the facts. So unhinged was Carlota that when she went to Rome to petition the Pope she would only eat chickens kept for the purpose in her hotel room; after Maximilian was executed in 1867 she never fully recovered.

A name previously unknown to me, Amélie Rives combines factors which seem distinctly Flowers-friendly if Jane Turner Censer’s The Princess of Albemarle is any indication: “Rives’s most famous novel, The Quick or the Dead?, published when she was just twenty-four, was a sensation in its time, but soon she began to grapple with marital woes, an addiction to morphine and cocaine, and reams of unfavorable press coverage. Dramatically she took control of her celebrity: she divorced her husband and married a Russian prince, broke free of addiction, and changed her image to that of a European princess. Rives then regained her writing career, including plays produced on Broadway.”

In Carl Abrahamsson’s Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan we have a study of probably the most influential Satanist of the modern era. While the “Black Pope” LaVey and his Satanic Bible may seem mere fodder for adolescent provocation, the belief system they espouse is relatively benign. It doesn’t see Satan as a literal entity, a bogeyman, a paragon of evil or lord of darkness, rather an entirely symbolic figure representing the limits of individual will. Now, whether that’s a good thing or not is of course debatable; the radical self-seeking of modern Satanism has plenty of overlap with libertarianism, for instance. But it’s impossible to witness the sideshow stylings of LaVey and believe yourself in the company of evil.

Born in 1913 in (what is now) Berlin, artist Meret Oppenheim was largely active in Switzerland and France. In Paris she fell in with André Breton’s Surrealists, exploring and ultimately rejecting the roles which the movement customarily reserved for women (model, mistress, muse) to become a vital creative force. Here art historian Simon Baur brings his years of engagement with Oppenheim’s career to a new study, Meret Oppenheim Enigmas (translated by Bronwen Saunders).

In Letters to Gwen John, artist Celia Paul draws on her life and career and finds numerous parallels with the titular fellow artist (who died around the start of World War Two). While Paul is often mentioned in the context of her relationship with Lucian Freud, the Welsh artist had not one but two older male artists of her own to assert herself against (brother Augustus John, lover Auguste Rodin). There are also shared motifs in the work of the two women, such as the recurring image of women with their hands folded in contemplation. “Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists’ work), and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic.”

The recent departure of André Leon Talley reminded me that I once saw him – he was difficult to miss – at a major show of Jean Cocteau’s work at the Pompidou Centre in 2004 (which had an adults-only section; the French just make dirty pictures more fun). A curio of the Cocteau oeuvre, published in 1950 but only now available to us in translation (by Alex Wermer-Colan) is Letter to the Americans. In this slim volume – slight, even – the author “sees the incredibly buoyant hopes in America’s promise, while at the same time warning of the many ills that the nation will have to confront—its hypocrisy, sexism, racism, and hegemonic aspirations—in order to realize this potential.”

I’m also happy to see the (expanded) reissue of a book I’ve been meaning to get my hands on: American Magus Harry Smith (edited by Paola Igliori), which explores the vast oeuvre of polymath Harry Everett Smith. Smith’s best-known project, the hugely influential Anthology of American Folk Music, grew out of his near-manic collecting of old 78s (he also collected paper airplanes, string figures, Ukrainian Easter eggs and tarot cards). It should come as no surprise that amphetamines were central to Smith’s working practice, reflected in the obsessive mandalas and shamanic patterns of his paintings, and the experimental films which set this imagery in motion. All of this captured in this collection of essays, many of them by friends and associates.

We close with a trio of Berlin-related works in reissue. I had a bit of a Joseph Roth moment over the holidays, inspired by Dennis Marks’s 2011 book Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth. This short, pacy book is an incisive overview, and helpful in sorting out the characters who recur in Roth’s books. It also explores the author’s hometown, Brody (now Ukraine), the surrounding territory of Galicia and its contested status as a buffer between east and west (plus ça frickin’ change, huh?). This inspired me to read a handful of books by the man himself that have eluded me to date, including Die Rebellion (a book which, as previously noted, is itself the subject of a study by Hugo Hamilton, The Pages). Now reissued in Michael Hofmann’s translation, Rebellion shares with Roth’s classic Job the motif of a simple man so ground down by circumstances that he rebels against the highest authority of them all (*points skyward*). The disintegrating psyche of the one-legged protagonist, just one of the war-wounded adrift in early Weimar Berlin, inspires some of Roth’s most unconventional yet moving prose.

Rahel Varnhagen was the first book by Hannah Arendt, completed as she went into exile in 1933 but only published in 1957, and then only in an English translation (by Clara and Richard Winston). Some of the notes that Arendt took are the only record of primary sources lost when archives were destroyed in the Second World War. Her subject is the great early 19th-century writer and salonnière who built on the traditions of Moses Mendelssohn and Goethe in equal measure. Rahel Varnhagen was one of the first in a grand legacy of Jewish women who ran salons in Berlin – oases of culture, enquiry and sophistication at a time when the city was little more than a barracks town.

Another welcome re-run is a collection of works on paper by Berlin-based Dadaist Hannah Höch (edited by Dawn Ades, Butler Emily, Daniel F. Herrmann). The stand-outs here are the collages where Höch’s superlative eye produced memorable compositions out of images torn from newspapers and magazines. Like Georges Bataille’s journal Documents around the same time, these assemblages transgressed the barriers between high and low culture, according equal respect to politicians and botany, Hollywood glamour and ethnography, engineering miracles and dancing girls.

Enjoy!

We open with the eagerly awaited biography of Joseph Roth, Keiron Pim’s Endless Flight, which I picked up last month in Winchester (where I also managed to walk straight past Jane Austen’s grave in the magnificent cathedral; too busy looking up). Thanks to extensive coverage it seems the great Austrian author is finally gaining the status in the English-speaking book world he deserves. Roth is among my very favourite authors and one I usually reserve for the colder months, so I am looking forward to finally reading this over the holidays. And if you’re new to Joseph Roth yet curious we have a brace of newly reissued translations, including the devastating Job (translated by Dorothy Thompson, all others here translated by Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker, the reportage of What I Saw and The Hotel Years, The Radetzky March – often cited as his masterpiece – and its follow-up The Emperor’s Tomb. If pressed this might well be my pick of the Roths; I actually forgot to breathe the first time I read the piano scene, while the conclusion is an electrifying collaboration between Roth the novelist and Roth the reporter, incorporating the annexation of Austria in real time.

Roth’s first book was the extraordinarily prescient The Spider’s Web (1923), most likely the first novel to mention Hitler. That same year brought a tale that drew on the same anxieties, but which is now best remembered as a children’s film. Two new English editions of Austrian author Felix Salten’s Bambi (translated by Jack Zipes and Damion Searls respectively) show us the even darker themes behind a tale that has already traumatised millions of children. It can be read as both an allegory of antisemitism, “or a critique of humankind’s assault on nature,” as Maddie Crum writes, adding: “But why not both?”. Salten was both Jewish and a hunter, by the way. A fellow member of the early 20th-century Viennese avant-garde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is the subject of Walter Kappacher’s novel Palace of Flies (translated by Georg Bauer). No longer the precocious twink of Austrian letters, the middle-aged Hofmannsthal is holed up in a provincial hotel “plagued by feelings of loneliness and failure that echo in a buzz of inner monologues, imaginary conversations and nostalgic memories of relationships with glittering cultural figures”. This tension also haunts the stories of Johannes Urzidil collected in House of the Nine Devils (translated by David Burnett) in which “… the writing often blurs the border between reportage, memoir, and fiction, such as an encounter with Gavrilo Princip, wasting away in the Terezín prison after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or a WWI soldier trying to evade military police and thus disrupting a night at Café Arco, a favorite haunt of the Prague Circle that included Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil, the group’s youngest member and one of the last links to that symbiotic milieu of Prague German-Jewish artists.”

In the provocatively subtitled The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain finds in Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke a writer who “sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty” (Chamberlain’s vital Nietzsche in Turin has also been reissued). Still on an Austro-Hungarian vibe, we have Opium and Other Stories (translated by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers) by Géza Csáth, “a Hungarian psychiatrist, one of Freud’s first followers, as well as a music critic and opium addict. In 1919, at the age of 31, he killed his wife and then committed suicide, just one year after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.” We can’t move on without dropping in on the most fascinating figure of that construct’s demise – Sis(s)i, Empress Elisabeth – recent subject of two feature films plus a Netflix series. The latter also comes as a historical novel, The Empress by Gigi Griffis, which concentrates on Sissi’s first few months at the Viennese court. Fictional licence adds a pivotal lady-in-waiting, an attempted palace coup by the Emperor’s ill-fated brother Maximilian, and a degree of romance that the real imperial couple seem not to have shared. But it also captures the real Sissi’s rebellious spirit and her conflict with courtiers, particularly her mother-in-law. Later Sissi kept her distance from the court; Stefan Haderer falls Under the Spell of a Myth as he traces the steps of the Empress in Greece, including her Corfiot hidey hole named for Achilles.

Like Sissi, the Austrian women in Sophia Haydock’s debut The Flames – models in Egon Schiele’s canvases – are fixed as images. “None of these women is quite what they seem. Fierce, passionate and determined, they want to defy convention and forge their own path. But their lives are set on a collision course when they become entangled with the controversial young artist Egon Schiele whose work – and private life – are sending shockwaves through Vienna’s elite.” There are more muses unmuted in Ruth Millington’s Muse: Uncovering the Hidden Figures Behind Art History’s Masterpieces, tackling the myth of the “passive, powerless model (usually young, attractive, and female) at the mercy of an influential and older male artist”. The role of muse was one proffered to, and roundly rejected by German-born Surrealist Meret Oppenheim. Drawing from her extensive career, My Album “assembles photos, objects, notes, and brief texts, as well as ideas and concepts for artworks, and offers very personal insights into Oppenheim’s private life and thought.” Her most famous object – Object, a fur-lined cup, saucer and spoon – was displayed at the famous 1936 Surrealist exhibition in London, which brings us to The British Surrealists. Desmond Morris’s study takes us from “the unpredictability of Francis Bacon to the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington, from the beguiling Eileen Agar to the ‘brilliant’ Ceri Richard” (meanwhile Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics offers sylvan Surrealism from uncommon gardeners whose creations were anything but common or garden). The evidently inexhaustible well of Surrealism has inspired two recent shows. At Potsdam’s Museum Barberini – which hit headlines recently after a climate activist thoughtfully shared their lunch with one of the gallery’s Monets – Surrealism and Magic revisits the movement’s representatives “who cultivated the traditional image of the artist’s persona as a magician, seer, and alchemist”. Meanwhile Surrealism Beyond Borders “traces Surrealism’s influence and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as geographically diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey”; this comes from the exhibition shown at the Tate in London and the Met in New York.

Who – might you guess – was the first woman to enjoy a solo retrospective at the Met? The somewhat surprising answer is the subject of Florine Stettheimer: A Biography by Barbara Bloemink. “During her first 40 years in Europe, Florine Stettheimer studied academic painting and was aware of all the earliest modernist styles ahead of most American artists. Returning to New York, she and her sisters led an acclaimed Salon for major avant-garde cultural figures including Marcel Duchamp, the Stieglitz circle, poets, dancers, writers, etc. She showed her innovative paintings in over 46 of the most important museum exhibitions and Salons, wrote poetry, designed unique furniture and gained international fame for her sets and costumes for avant-garde opera.” It was Duchamp, by the way, who organised that (posthumous) retrospective, and two new books explore the outset of Duchamp’s New York activities during World War One. Ruth Brandon’s Spellbound by Marcel explores the love triangle of Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, while Corinne Taunay’s Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York (translated by Doug Skinner) describes the revolutionary art that emerged at the same time.

Two recent books cover the life and career of Jewish-Austrian artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who studied under cultish mystic Johannes Itten in Vienna before moving with him in 1919 to a new school in Germany called the Bauhaus, where among many other things she created a poster to celebrate Else Lasker-Schüler’s reading at the school. More of her images come to us in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, while in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Bauhaus Student, Avant-Garde Painter, Art Teacher we discover a “painter, art teacher, and politically active poster artist. Initially, she specialized in textile and graphic design, and later she worked as an interior designer. Her paintings reflect her profound study of the classical avant-garde.” Deported to Theresienstadt, she taught art to hundreds of children; like most of her pupils, Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in the Holocaust. Not just a neglected artist overdue for rediscovery, but an example of the best of humanity in the very midst of Hell.

At a certain point a neglected artist becomes … an artist. In the case of Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint that point appears to have arrived. Following blockbuster exhibitions, numerous books (including a multi-volume catalogue raisonné), plus a feature film of her life, the narrative of non-figurative art has been corrected to incorporate her pioneering role. “Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation.” That’s from Hilma af Klint: A Biography by Julia Voss, who also wrote the afterword for Philipp Deines’s graphic novel, The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint. And the Pamela Colman Smith revival rolls on in another graphic treatment, Cat Willett’s The Queen of Wands. “From a childhood spent between the United Kingdom and Jamaica, to early artistic success in New York, to involvement in the secret occult society Order of the Golden Dawn … Though she received little money and almost no credit for her contributions to the magical realm in her lifetime, Pixie’s impact on tarot, divination, and the worlds of mysticism and the arts have reverberated for nearly 150 years, and her story serves as an enchanted spark.” Meanwhile, if you’re assembling your dinner-party-guests-from-history list, I can recommend Lisa Kröger & Melanie R. Anderson’s Toil & Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult whose subjects range from “Dion Fortune, who tried to marshal a magical army against Hitler” to “Elvira, queer goth sex symbol who defied the Satanic Panic”.

Every time you mention the word “occult” a book about Aleister Crowley falls out of the sky. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules. Tumbling into our selection is the luridly titled Astounding Secrets of the Devil Worshippers’ Mystic Love Cult by William Seabrook, whom you may recall as the subject of wife Marjorie Worthington’s vexed biography. Here, in a series of early 1920s dispatches, Seabrook introduced American newspaper readers to the Great Beast’s orgiastic capers (that’s from Snuggly, of whom more later). Occult artist Austin Osman Spare had comparably earthly conjunctions in mind in his pan-sexual illustrations for Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published for the first time in a lavish Fulgur production. NSFW, naturally, if that’s even a thing any more (isn’t it NSFH? Oh and while I have you here between parentheses, Phil Baker’s bio, the standard work on Spare, is due for an expanded reissue next year). A dirty book gathers no dust, and we recover some primo Weimar smut in the form of a Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights (translated by Michael Gillespie), whose “charming, witty, and erotic tales capture the trials and triumphs of early twentieth-century gay life without apology or shame”. It was originally issued in the early 1920s by author “Granand” (Erwin Ritter von Busse), and its fate offers a useful corrective to the myth that Weimar Germany was an anything-goes free-for-all; it was banned upon publication and only reissued decades later. True-life transgressions are the subject of Peter Jordaan’s impressively thorough A Secret between Gentlemen, “a unique historical biographical trilogy revealing the gay scandal, hidden for 120 years, that embroiled the noted British M.P., connoisseur, and philanthropist Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea in 1902.”

In After Sappho we have a personalised queer history, a “joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.” Subjects include Natalie Barney (who needs no introduction to the readers of these pages), Virginia Woolf (who needs no introduction to anyone), along with many other lesbian or bisexual women of the 19th and 20th centuries. Author Selby Wynn Schwartz describes it as “a book about the desire to write your life for yourself, preferably in good company”. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) writes her own (early) life in HERmione, now reissued. “She was in her early twenties—a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place.” Donna Krolik Hollenberg, an authority on the subject, offers us Winged Words: The Life and Works of the Poet H.D., which “explores her love affairs with both men and women; her long friendship with Bryher; the birth of her daughter, Perdita, and her imaginative bond with her; and her marriage to (and later divorce from) fellow poet Richard Aldington. Additionally, the book includes scenes from her relationships with Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence; H.D.’s fascination with spiritualism and the occult; and H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud.” It’s unclear why there has been such a run on H.D. of late, but if anyone’s keeping track we’re at the lengthy-New-Yorker-article stage of the revival. The women’s suffrage movement is the subject of Wendy L. Rouse’s Public Faces, Secret Lives, specifically the “variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities,” yet “publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.” Another highly welcome historical study to counter the grievous fiction that trans identity is a Western invention of recent origin: Before We Were Trans, in which Kit Heyam seeks “to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.”

A more localised piece of queer history in Places of Tenderness and Heat, which spirits us to fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg, “a city full of risk and opportunity”. Author Olga Petri “takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized.” One of the most influential products of Silver Age St. Petersburg was Sergei Diaghilev, the revolutionary cultural catalyst and creator of the Ballets Russes, and the subject of Rupert Christiansen’s Diaghilev’s Empire. “Off stage and in its wake came scandal and sensation, as the great artists and mercurial performers involved variously collaborated, clashed, competed while falling in and out of love with each other on a wild carousel of sexual intrigue and temperamental mayhem.” Diaghilev also features in Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: “Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers eked out a living at menial jobs, while others found great success. Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky joined Picasso, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein in the creative crucible of the Années folles …” In a similar vein comes Homeward from Heaven by Boris Poplavsky who shares the not exactly congested category of “Paris-based boxer-poets who died in their early 30s” with our old sparring partner Arthur Cravan. Translated by Bryan Karetnyk, Poplavsky’s novel was “… written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, this final novel by the literary enfant terrible of the interwar Russian diaspora in France recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.”

We remain in between-the-wars France for Anna de Courcy’s Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age. “Dazzlingly beautiful, highly intelligent and an extraordinary force of energy, Nancy Cunard was an icon of the Jazz Age, said to have inspired half the poets and novelists of the twenties.” A year ago the great Josephine Baker was interred in the Panthéon, in a ceremony which sadly did not feature the current head of the FBI on his knees begging forgiveness of Baker’s spirit for the Bureau’s vicious campaign of harassment during her lifetime. The Flame of Resistance by Damien Lewis (NB not the actor) is an anomaly in the writer’s oeuvre in that it is not about the SAS. But it is a tale of wartime heroism which finds Baker – “one of London’s most closely-guarded special agents” – undertaking enormously risky clandestine operations. “Baker’s secret war embodies a tale of unbounded courage, passion, devotion and sacrifice, and of deep and bitter tragedy, fueled by her own desire to combat the rise of Nazism, and to fight for all that is good and right in the world.” Josephine Baker often appears in those “awesome women in history” books you grab when you’re panic-buying for a 10-year-old girl’s birthday; how grotesquely unjust that she should have to appear alongside that vile collaborator, Coco Chanel. More Americans in Paris: in Strange Impressions we have extracts from the previously unpublished memoirs of painter Romaine Brooks. The author’s own title, which may give you an insight into her childhood and how it shaped her later life, was No Pleasant Memories.

Natalie Barney (her again!) is the one degree of separation between Brooks (her lover) and our next subject (her sister), who helped popularise the Baháʼí faith in the West, as we discover in The Life of Laura Barney. Author Mona Khademi “traces the journey of Laura Barney from her pampered childhood to her life as a feminist, global-thinker and peace-builder who was twice decorated by the French Legion of Honoré.” (Natalie) Barney biographer Suzanne Rodriguez is the author of Found Meals of the Lost Generation: People, Stories & Recipes from 1920s Paris, now reissued and with which, among other things, “…you can transform your living room into Gertrude Stein’s famous salon”. Stein features in Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, in which Scott Herring offers “portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism.”

Herring’s account includes a chapter on “The Harlem Renaissance as Told by ‘Lesbian Elder’ Mabel Hampton”, while a clutch of recent reissues introduces a new readership to the outstanding between-the-wars profusion of Black arts that was the Harlem Renaissance. They include The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes’s Not without Laughter, collections of short fiction and essays by Alice Dunbar Nelson and Zora Neale Hurston, respectively, Home to Harlem by Claude McKay (whose collected articles are now available in a single edition) and a convolute of Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen (the latter in a film adaptation last year). Passing is a dominant theme of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, now reissued by Everyman’s Library, and Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene (translated by Tina Kover), a novelisation of the fascinating real life of Belle da Costa Greene, director of the private library of banker JP Morgan. “Flamboyant, brilliant, beautiful […] Belle is among New York society’s most sought after intellectuals. Although she looks white, she is African American, the daughter of a famous black activist who sees her desire to hide her origins as the consummate betrayal.”

The magnificent Morgan Library that Greene built up was recently the venue for a major exhibition on the life and work of provocateur Alfred Jarry, whose works are still being rediscovered in English. Speculations, translated by R J Dent, is a “darkly comic collection of surrealist and satirical prose pieces … everything is worthy material for his surreal satire; the Passion is presented as a sporting event; buses are the prey of big game hunters, and even the Queen is licked from behind”. Something for everyone, then. By this stage of our Satanic selection, when talk turns to the umbral delights of the Belle Epoque, regular readers will know to expect a slew of Snuggly titles – and this year is no exception. New anthologies address the classic fin-de-siècle trope of the femme fatale and collate occult-related fiction while a new collection of works by Hersh Dovid Nomberg bears the delightful title of Happiness and Other Fictions (translated by Daniel Kennedy, who has more translations from the Yiddish at Farlag Press). From the late-breaking (1923) Decadence of Hélène Picard’s Sabbat (translated by Brian Stableford): “Seeing Satan emerging from a poppy and accepting him as her poetic savior …” OK, stop right there and just take my money. Snuggly have an impressive list of works by the similarly outré Jane de la Vaudère, to which they now add The Priestesses of Mylitta (again translated by Brian Stableford). Set in Babylon, it introduces us to “the cult of the eponymous goddess, whose worship consists, in part, of newly married women delivering themselves to haphazard lovers, the story, which was very probably the author’s last completed work, is one of both tenderness and torture, brutal bloodshed and the adoration held in delicious kisses.” Each of these rediscoveries points to an uncommonly interesting creative force, so how fortunate that this year also brings the first English biography of the author, Resurrecting Jane de la Vaudère by Sharon Larson. “A controversial figure who was known as a plagiarist, La Vaudère attracted the attention of the public and of her peers, who caricatured her in literary periodicals and romans à clef. Most notably, La Vaudère claimed to have written the Rêve d’Egypte pantomime, whose 1907 production at the Moulin Rouge featured a kiss between Missy and Colette that led to riots and the suspension of future performances.” From the same era the fascinating polymath Victor Segalen looks back at one of his idols in the 1907 Le double Rimbaud, here in a bilingual edition (English translation by Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs). “While disclosing the two Rimbauds that most interested him, the writer and the adventurer, the seer and the outlaw, Segalen aims at overlapping his own shadow with Rimbaud’s and walking beyond the signposts of his own mind so as to confront the two roads taken by the other poet, the imaginative one and the real one.”

I don’t at all hold with Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the mouthpiece of the party that has screwed the country from top to bottom, but they do a good obituary, with some of the more diverting recent examples to be found in Eccentric Lives: The Daily Telegraph Book of 21st Century Obituaries. It was a Telegraph obituary that sparked the classic account of butch fatale island despot Joe Carstairs; author Kate Summerscale returns with The Book of Phobias and Manias: A History of Obsession (whose cover bears the classic image of the divinely manic Countess de Castiglione – who died on this day in 1899). You name it, someone somewhere is turned on or terrified by it, as we discover in this “history of human strangeness, from the middle ages to the present day, and a wealth of explanations for some of our most powerful aversions and desires.” Obsession drives Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, “a carefully woven tapestry of death and melancholy that has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo” (and also worked its way into Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon). The translator is Will Stone, who also brings us the first English edition of Nietzsche in Italy, an account of the philosopher’s travels by Guy de Pourtalès first published in 1929 (which neatly complements Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin, mentioned above). Friedrich Nietzsche’s own Thus Spake Zarathustra is available in a new translation by Michael Hulse in which “Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendor as a man who prizes self-worth above all else as a moral code to live by.” Salomo Friedländer (who published as Mynona) was the author of an influential study of Nietzsche; like many writers born around the beginning of the German Empire, he was in thrall not just to Nietzsche’s thinking, but his magisterial prose as well. But in the slim volume Black – White – Red (translated by W. C. Bamberger), Mynona works in the “grotesque” form, a mode that was enjoying renewed attention from Germany’s avant-garde in the early 20th century, including writers like Hermann Harry Schmitz, Oskar Panizza and Else Lasker-Schüler (a fellow devotee of Nietzsche).

Reaching further back in German cultural history, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self explores ideas to which Strange Flowers is irresistibly drawn – the modern conception of personality that arose in the wake of the French Revolution. Alongside familiar figures like Goethe, Schiller and Hegel, author Andrea Wulf introduces us to writer and translator Caroline Schlegel, whose salon brought these and other minds together. “When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s …” Simultaneously, the dandies were modelling another conception of self-will; British Dandies by Dominic Janes “explores that social and cultural history through a focus on three figures: the macaroni, the dandy, and the aesthete. The first was noted for his flamboyance, the second for his austere perfectionism, and the third for his perversity.” Their spiritual descendants haunt Nino Strachey’s Young Bloomsbury, which describes the moment in the movement’s history when a “group of queer young creatives joined their ranks, pushing at gender boundaries, flouting conventions, spurring their seniors to new heights of artistic activity.” Subjects include Vita Sackville-West’s dazzlingly camp cousin Eddy, who furthered the early 20th-century tradition of the cultured country house in “England’s last literary salon” as related in Simon Fenwick’s The Crichel Boys. “Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys – later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer – became members of one another’s surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel’s visitors’ book reveals a Who’s Who of the arts in post-war Britain – Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson – who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation”. Country house social experimentation of a different kind in Anna Neima’s Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall, a progressive community inspired by Rabindranath Tagore. The invented tongue of the original Utopia, Thomas More’s, joins “the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language” in Marina Yaguello’s Imaginary Languages (translated by Erik Butler). The island of Redonda comes closer to the original meaning of the word “utopia”, or “non-place”. Redonda is a place, just – an uninhabited outcrop in the Caribbean which makes Joe Carstairs’s Big Whale Cay look positively continental. But in Try Not to Be Strange, we discover the bizarre and remarkably persistent mythology which arose around the island “kingdom” and its succession of underworld overlords, largely fabricated in the distant bohemian enclave of Fitzrovia. Author Michael Hingston presents “the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves …”

And with this very Strange Flowers selection of misfits we draw our Satanic selection to a close. My own publishing venture is winding up, so rest assured this will be the last time I shill for Rixdorf Editions (though I can’t promise I won’t put out anything under my own name and tell you all about it!). Most titles are still available but they’re selling fast at the five-year anniversary price of five yo-yos; have a look here. It will all be over at the end of this year; they’ll be gone forever and this will have been nothing but a strange and beautiful dream.