#intextligentsia

[entries-in-marginalia]

On Huysmans, Part 3

From Unicorns, by James Huneker (1917)

A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition, Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not. Nor for that matter did Flaubert. [...] He loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive, forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable Æsthetic of the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility with a repelling misanthropy. In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K. Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries; indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour, yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible among decorated philistines!

[entries-in-marginalia]

On Huysmans, Part 2

From Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons (1916)

"To Huysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly and unpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessity of contemplating, every flaw and every discomfort that a somewhat imperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition of the ideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the disagreeable only that is heightened; and the world, in this strange disorder of vision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with that of a drop of impure water under the microscope. 'Nature seen through a temperament' is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing, certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans. To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealed himself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. 'He gave me the impression of a cat,' some interviewer once wrote of him; 'courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot out his claws at the least word.' And, indeed, there is something of his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert, with a look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace, the features are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or the Stock Exchange. But gradually that strange, unvarying expression, that look of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the man makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office—he is an employé in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employé; I have seen him in a café, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of bric-à-brac. The spoils of all the world are there, in that incredibly tiny salon; they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to screens, brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese toy, the other a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the rainbow clash in a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this fantastic room, Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the air of one perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is said by my learned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or perhaps it is the young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or (if that were not impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies me; and Huysmans, without looking up, and without taking the trouble to speak very distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpierces it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration. Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility."

[entries-in-marginalia]

On Huysmans, Part 1

From Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons (1916)

Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation—and sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each of us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world appears to be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a certain solace in various forms of art, and certain possibilities of at least temporary escape. Part of his work presents to us a picture of ordinary life as he conceives it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness; in another part he has made experiment in directions which have seemed to promise escape, relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself the delight of his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself would be the first to acknowledge—indeed, practically, he has acknowledged—that the particular way in which he sees life is a matter of personal temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves."

[thenextheraldmage]

As of today, Jane Yolen has died.

May her memory be a blessing.

[thenextheraldmage]

Previous & Current Blogs

This is not my first Tumblr blog.

My first active blog was @jonathantylan (now deactivated) and was a combination of RP and reblogging basically anything interesting that crossed my path.

I decided to reinvent myself for the first time in 2018, beginning the blog @aestivetic as my main blog, with a variety of sideblogs. The most active were:

@goatgodschild; an online shrine to Pan

@psychic-war-in-the-usa; my SPN blog

@scarred-up-angel; my RP blog

@the-belows-128375; my Flight Rising blog

As I did not use a functional tagging system with any of these, they became quite messy, particularly goatgodschild, which I was in the process of revamping when I got permanently locked out of all of those blogs.

Don't sign up for Tumblr with a burner email you don't check, signing in to Tumblr doesn't count as using it. It will get deleted for inactivity, and you will be without recourse.

So those four blogs are permanently in limbo, unable to be used or to be deactivated. @staff

The positive side of this is that I was already moving towards focusing entirely on the goatgodschild blog, so being able to make my pagan blog my main one instead of a sideblog was a bonus.

My current sideblogs are:

@entries-in-marginalia; for "non themed conversations"

@psychicwarintheusa; a redux of my previous SPN blog, which I plan on mostly absorbing into this main one at some point

[thenextheraldmage]

April 7

Henry Hay, English-born American founder of the Mattachine Society, 1912.

[thenextheraldmage]

April 6

Charles Jackson, American writer, 1903

Raphael (ne Raffaelo Santi), b. Urbino, Italy, 1483

The "divine painter" in his handsome youth. Almost every Renaissance painter has been thought to be gay by one writer or another over the years, and Raphael, the "divine painter," is no exception. The clues, however, may be purely circumstantial in Raphael's case. (1) As a young man he was exceedingly beautiful. (2) As an adult he lived together with his two favorite students, Giulio Romano, reputed to be bisexual, and Gianfrancesco Penni. (3) When he died at thirty-seven, he left the larger part of his fortune to the two young men. (4) As The New York Times would have put it, "he never married." Reach your own conclusions.

William Rufus de Vane King, b. Sampson County, North Carolina, 1786

President Buchanan's First Lady. King, a U.S. Senator from Alabama, was the best friend of America's only bachelor president, James Buchanan. And he paid a political price for the closeness of that friendship. Andrew Jackson called him "Miss Nancy," and others referred to him as "her" and "Aunt Fancy." When an attempt was made to check the gossip by shipping King off as U.S. minister to France, jokes circulated about the presidential "divorce." Washington has always been such a vicious city, hasn't it?

[thenextheraldmage]

April 5

Algernon Charles Swinburne, b. London, 1837

He may also have been D. C. Swinburne. One of the great lyric poets of the English language, Swinburne spent much of his life countering charges that his poetry was overly sensuous. Although his defensive critiques were undoubtedly necessary in the Victorian era, he needn't have bothered. His critics were right and he was wrong. His poetry is sensuous, and all the better for it. "Fleshly" his poems may have been, but whether he himself was fish or fowl is more difficult to say. He was most certainly a masochist who loved to be flogged, and he was probably homosexual as well. All we know is that he and gay painter Simeon Solomon used to chase each other through the poet Rossetti's house, but that's hardly conclusive. Or is it?