Decadence on the Silent Screen: Stannard, Coward, Hitchcock, and Wilde

Abstract

In the final pages of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library (1988), the figure of Ronald Firbank appears flickeringly in an early home movie: this master of decadent-camp style presents himself, by turns, as a flamboyant entertainer and a Chaplinesque mime, playing up to the camera. It is a fitting tribute because, though Firbank was never really captured on film, cinema defined his own writing, just as his writing would later help to define the aesthetics of filmmakers in Great Britain, Europe, and the US. He was after all a connoisseur of all degenerate and transgressive art forms. This, combined with his love of cinema and a desire to profit from his self-funded novels made him ‘very elated at a letter sent to him by some transatlantic cinema magnate, asking for the film rights of Caprice’. Sadly, the film was never made. But of course it couldn’t have been; as Christopher Fowler reflects, ‘you can’t build a national cinema industry on people hermetically sealed in heavily draped drawing rooms, having peculiar conversations’. Those we recognize as aesthetes and decadents in the mould of the 1890s would not be the ones to bring the principles of their tradition to the big screen. Although a few of these, including Arthur Symons, would recognize the potential of cinema, more would reject any claim it might have to cultural significance – let alone any claim to be a form of art. The decadent tradition reached the screen through figures of the next generation who could make decadence new, restyling it into forms to befit the mass-market appeal of motion pictures.