Goldsmiths, University of London

21 February 2025, RHB 137

Organised by the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths

Thank you to all who attended the second symposium on the fin-de-siècle writer Ernest Dowson - Ernest Dowson: Revived.

In what will be 125 years since he died of tuberculosis in a friend’s house in Catford, owning nothing but his tattered poetry notebook, Dowson has becoming something of a decadent legend. Bohemian, itinerant, and plagued by longing and loss (not least of his own teeth), he had an affinity with the capital city’s impoverished and intellectual spaces, as well as international literary and artistic circles. His exquisite, refined verses and prose are among some of the most technically adept and captivating works in the decadent canon.

The symposium ended with a celebration of the revised edition of Jad Adams’s biography of Dowson. Madder Music, Stronger Wine, which is being republished to mark the 125th anniversary of Dowson’s death. Please visit Jad’s website for more information.

Schedule

11.00 Dowson Graveside Vigil (Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries)
Please meet us by the Ladywell entrance at 11.00.

12.00 Lunch break (and make our way to Goldsmiths)

14.00 Symposium - RHB 137, Goldsmiths

14.15 Panel 1: Critical Responses

Michele Brugnetti (Sapienza University of Rome), ‘A portrait of the ‘decadent’ as a young novelist: the case of Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore’s Adrian Rome’ 

Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne), ‘Dowson in France: The Statute of Limitations in Poetic Translation’

Simon Wilson (Independent Scholar), ‘Viewing Verses: Dowson and the Decadent Decorated Book’

Robert Stilling (Florida State University), ‘The End of Every Song: Ernest Dowson, Apocalypticism, and The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World’ (via zoom)

 15.15 Break

15.30 Panel 2: Creative Responses - A selection of poetic responses to Dowson’s work

Margaret Stetz, Eytan Kerbel, Leo Wynne-Williams, Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling

16.00 Round Table Discussion - ‘Madame de Viole: Dowson’s unpublished manuscript sees the light of day’

17.00 Book (Re)Launch - Jad Adams’s Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent

Critical Responses - Abstracts and Bios 

Michele Brugnetti (Sapienza University of Rome), ‘A portrait of the ‘decadent’ as a young novelist: the case of Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore’s Adrian Rome’

This contribution aims to shed a light on Adrian Rome by Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore. Meant to be ‘vindictive, savage, spleenful[,] libellous almost, to the last degree’ (quot. Stark, 2023: 23), the novel appears to pillory ‘the Decadent mania to aestheticize life at all costs’ (Stark, 2023: 13). Drawing from Matthew Potolsky’s analysis in ‘Decadence and Realism’ (2021), I interpret the novel as a tragicomic treatment of the anti-modern decadent novelist, and argue that the protagonist’s undoing is meant to signify the ‘rejection of the counterfeit health of the Victorian novel’ (Kristin Mahoney 2021). Within this framework, I contend that the novel transcends mere parody of the writer-aesthete, but that rather it reveals a deep mistrust in the myth of progress and in the possibility of harmonious reconciliation; as a consequence, the ‘decadent’ novelist emerges as a figure in painful and acute opposition to their historical times. 

Biography 
Michele Brugnetti is a doctoral student enrolled in the PhD program in English Literature, Language, and Translation Studies at Sapienza University of Rome (specialising in Literary and Cultural Studies), in joint collaboration with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His doctoral project focuses on the intersection between the British novel and British Aestheticism in the long fin de siècle. He is a member of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society and the International Walter Pater Society.

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Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne), ‘Dowson in France: The Statute of Limitations in Poetic Translation’

Translation is the first means of literary dissemination. Periodicals, maybe more than books, are instrumental in disseminating translations across borders and fueling readers’ appetite for further work. However, that process may be interrupted or derailed for various reasons, some pertaining to the author, some to the translator(s), and others to editorial policies.

Decadent poet and prose-writer Ernest Dowson is a case in point for discussing the role of translation in literary recognition and dissemination. A Francophile, Dowson was partly educated in France, lived in Britany for a while, and translated prose and poetry from the French alike. In a time when periodical translations were almost simultaneous to the original publication, only a few of his poems were belatedly translated into French in short-lived reviews. My talk addresses those translations published in Le Prisme (1905-1906) and Vers et Prose (1905-1914), two periodicals strongly indebted to the fin de siècle literary ebullience. I also comment on the fate of translations into French of Dowson as a decadent poet.

Biography
Bénédicte Coste is Professor of Victorian Studies at the Université de Bourgogne. Her research focuses on ENG-FRE and FRE-ENG translations in French and British periodicals of the fin de siècle. With Dr Caroline Crépiat, she has developed the ‘Décabase’, a database of ENG-FRE translations into 10 generalist and literary French periodicals between 1880 and 1914.

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Simon Wilson (Independent Scholar), ‘Viewing Verses: Dowson and the Decadent Decorated Book’

Dowson’s Verses can be seen as one of a quartet of decorated books of the 1890s in which a key decadent text is presented in such a way as also to become an iconic decadent aesthetic object. Published in 1896, with a cover by Beardsley, it marks the climax of a development that begins with Wilde’s Dorian Gray designed by Charles Ricketts in 1891, followed by his Salome illustrated by Beardsley in 1894, and his Sphinx also designed by Ricketts, later in the same year. 

Verses has an added dimension of decadence in its publisher Leonard Smithers. It is in fact the product of an unholy trinity of Smithers, Dowson, and Beardsley. Although Dowson’s diminutive volume appears on the face of it slight in comparison with those predecessors, it might, in the exquisite ephemerality of its pale, frail parchment boards, stamped in gold with Beardsley’s almost non-existent yet magisterial design, be considered the most truly decadent of them all.

Biography
Simon Casimir Wilson OBE MA is an independent writer and critic with a special interest in Aubrey Beardsley and the fin de siècle. His most recent publications include From Greek Youth to Flying Demon Angel, a study of the tomb of Oscar Wilde (2020), and Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley co-edited with Sasha Dovzhyk and published by MHRA Jewelled Tortoise (2022). This includes a definitive scholarly edition, based on the original manuscript, of Beardsley’s notorious novella Under the Hill.  ‘A notable event in the history of publishing [and] of nineteenth-century erotica’ (John Stokes in SWPA 8 2023).

*****
Robert Stilling (Florida State University), ‘The End of Every Song: Ernest Dowson, Apocalypticism, and The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World’ (via zoom) 

In September of 2024, with the release of The Cure’s album Songs of a Lost World, Ernest Dowson was suddenly in the news. As the music press reported, it was in Dowson’s poem “Dregs” that The Cure found the inspiration for the album’s lead single “Alone.” As singer Robert Smith commented: “that was the moment when I knew the song – and the album – were real.” In the video and album art conceived by Smith and designed by Andy Vella, The Cure feature the work of Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat (1932-2021), whose sculpture “Bagatelle,” part unhewn rock, part archaic visage, hurtles like an asteroid toward earth. This presentation will argue that beyond the shared imagery of endings, regrets, and burnt-out inspiration, Smith updates Dowson’s “Dregs” with a 21st-century Anthropocene apocalypticism that takes the form of an antique, but revived aestheticism, which, like an ancient relic, threatens present destruction. Indeed, The Cure’s “lost world” isn’t the fading past of Dowson’s memory, but the present-day earth whose end times seem ever imminent, and whose past is catching up to it. 

Biography
Robert Stilling is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University and author of Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (Harvard UP, 2018).

Creative Responses

‘Apple Blossoms: For Ernest Dowson’ - Margaret D. Stetz

his face still smooth as snakeskin
at the climax
he thought of Hetty Merton
(or Hattie Morton? so unimportant
was her name)
that pretty village girl
with rosy apple cheeks
an uncut blossom
the one he would not ravish
yet
in hopes she might restore
his purity his goodness
Dorian stood before
Himself on canvas
holding high
his blade
then fell dead
shrunken wrinkled and reptilian
proof there was no way back to
The Garden . . .
thus warned
Oscar

nonetheless
not long after
at a café table
bloodshot eyes disheveled clothes
Ernest gripped and squeezed
his pen
to find relief
release beyond the power of
absinthe or stronger wine
in fantasies
of apple blossoms
the story of a young and pretty maiden
fresh untouched unpicked 
about-to-open flower 
(like Adelaide who served 
his dinner in a Soho restaurant)
but nestled in the country
in Brittany perhaps
(what name to give her?
did it matter?)
she would hardly speak 
the point-of-view would be 
the older man’s 
(much older with an urban taint
with sweepings from the London streets 
encrusted in the fabric
of his being)
the plot—
renunciation
how noble not to break that 
stem and make the petals shrivel
in this tale he (both Man and Author)
would send her to a convent
a nursery for virgin buds that never
fully bloom
preserved protected from desires
and from choice
(especially her own)
the outline scrawled across
an envelope
tomorrow he would 
write it all
an ending
that would cleanse him 
but tonight 
sink to the floor exhausted
roll into a ball
the way a serpent does
and dream of biting into
Adelaide
whose rosy body
smelled like apples

Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, as well as a widely published poet. ‘Apple Blossoms: For Ernest Dowson’ was inspired by Dowson’s short story, ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’, which was published in the October 1894 number of The Yellow Book, and also by the ending of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Conference Organisers

Jad Adams, Alice Condé, and Jessica Gossling