GLR March-April 2023

ESSAY

Jean Lorrain, Ambassador from Sodom L AURENCE S ENELICK

O F ALL THE DECADENTS, dandies, and de viants who enlivened the fin de siècle in France, none was more outrageous than Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). He serves as an early example of the homosexual celebrity as social and artistic arbiter, a role later played to the hilt by Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. His aphorism “What is a vice? A taste one does not share” belongs in every diction ary of quotations. That it doesn’t may be testimony to the sul furous reputation that lingered long after his disappearance from the scene (Figure 1). Paul Alexandre Martin Duval, son of a wealthy Normandy ship owner, arrived in Paris in 1881 and set out to make that reputation. When he first began publishing his work, his father insisted that he use a pseudonym, and his doting mother found “Jean Lorrain” in a local directory. His earliest collection of poems, Le sang des dieux ( Blood of the Gods, 1882), daringly featured the ephebes of classical mythology: Ganymede, Anti nous, “Hylas, his arms polished by Hercules’ kisses,” and the Roman mime Bathyllus scorching sailors in low dives with his come-hither glances and provocative dances. The book met with modest sales but major publicity. With their emphasis on succulent adolescents, the poems fail to reflect Lorrain’s own weakness for what he called Fleurs de boue ( Flowers of Mud, an allusion to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil ), “those gentlemen of the ring, a tiger pelt/ About their loins, bare chests, their own hides fine and clear” ( Modernités, 1885). “I am very fond of hooligans, fairground wrestlers, butcher boys and assorted pimps, both plain and fancy,” he boasted. In a fashionable restaurant he declaimed to the aston ished diners: “Last night I lay between two stevedores/ Who emptied me of all my passion.” Sex with thugs and ruffians is a recurring theme in his stories. In Sonyeuse (1891), a woman prefers to couple with the basest criminals in the hope of some day attending their executions (Figure 2). Of strapping physique himself, with the blond moustache of a Viking and a deep bass voice, Lorrain painted his face, dyed his hair garish colors, rimmed his heavy-lidded, bulging eyes with kohl, and adorned his fluttering hands with ornate rings. He attended artists’ balls in outrageous costumes, often escorted by a prize-fighter in tights. “As unctuous as a frosted pastry,” Lor rain became known, in the words of Philippe Jullian, as “the Petronius of the decadence ... the best observer of a milieu of which he was also the worst ornament” (Figure 3). Lorrain haunted galleries and theaters for material to write about, puffing a painter or scorning a star in sensational articles Laurence Senelick is author of Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (2017) and the editor-translator of Lovesick: Mod ernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, 1894–1925 (1999).

signed with pseudonyms from “Mimosa” to “Stendhaletta.” He soon won infamy as a journalist whose columns were savored for their colorful reportage, innuendo-saturated gossip, and character assassination. They would flay his best friends and apologize profusely afterwards. Nor had he any compunction about mocking others’ sexual penchants, calling Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen “a petty suburban Nero” whose taste for Black Masses and altar boys “is better suited to the pink mass (Vaseline and essence of Guerlain).” In Le Figaro , in 1896, Lorrain venomously characterized the budding Marcel Proust as one of those “pretty little young men in society down with a bad case of literature.” Proust’s Pleasures and Days is described as a blend of “elegiac flabbi ness, elegant and subtle little nothings, pointless tenderness, inane flirtations in a precious and pretentious style.” This was the chamber pot calling the slop bucket smelly. It led to a harm less duel, after which the two ignored one another thoroughly (Figure 4). There is, however, more than a hint of Lorrain in

The G & LR Fig. 1. Front cover of Lorrain’s first biography by his disciple Georges Normandy and his admirer Mme Aurel. It shows him in his South-of-France outfit and an em blem combining two of his favorite tropes, a poisonous snake and precious stones.

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