I Proclaim the Mad Queen

…in which Lydwine considers the spiritual fruits of literary decadence, holiness as spectacle, and the many graces of our patroness, Saint Lydwine of Schiedam.

“Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”
- Oscar Wilde

She was, in J.-K. Huysmans’s memorable phrase, “a missionary of pain,” her body from age fifteen so ravaged that “when they wished to move her to change the sheets of her bed, they had to bind her members firmly with napkins and cloths, for otherwise her body would have fallen to pieces and come away in the hands of those who tended her.”

That this monumental suffering was understood by Saint Lydwine and her contemporaries as a Providential blessing, an invitation to participate in and perpetuate the macabre and mystical sublimities of the Passion, to “reflect His suffering face in a mirror of blood,” might strike us, some 400 years hence, as excessive, misguided, dangerous, or quite simply bewildering. Ideas of reparation and expiation notwithstanding, of “a victim ground in the mortar of God,” what real sense can we make of a woman shriven and houseled by angels, who beheld the Infant Jesus crucified, who suckled at the Virgin’s own breast, and whose parents collected bits of her bone and flesh, leavened with the scent of spring flowers, as relics?

When Huysmans published his account of her life in 1901, the same year he professed as a Benedictine oblate, many readers politely preferred to look the other way.

“It is to be regretted,” wrote one reviewer, “that M. Huysmans has not availed himself of the uncontested scientific explanations of the trances and flagellations that abound in the lives of Saints, and notably in that life of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam to which he has devoted a characteristic but incomplete work.”

In 1884 Huysmans had made an infamous reputation as a novelist with the publication of À Rebours, the tale of the Duc Jean des Esseintes, a young and wealthy aristocrat so bored by his own decadence - dinner parties, for instance, where “the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears” - and so contemptuous of others he resolves to isolate himself in a villa outside Paris, where “he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity,” and therein consecrate himself to an absolute poetics of artifice and self-absorption.

“The main thing,” Huysmans wrote of Des Esseintes’s efforts, “is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and so substitute the vision of a reality for the reality itself.”

A live tortoise jeweled in Japanese floral patterns; a servant forced to dress as a Flemish Beguine; a dining room remade into a semblance of a ship’s cabin, perfumed with tar; even a specially constructed ‘mouth-organ’ dispensing small sips of liqueur as its stops are pulled, each spirit carefully matched in Des Esseintes’s imagination to a particular instrument - marc-brandy tubas and gin cornets - so that as he sips and savors he might “listen to the taste of music,” and “hear inside his mouth crème-de-menthe solos and rum-and-vespetro duets,” - an echo of Rimbaud’s le dérèglement de tous les sens.

But the tortoise dies from the strain of its adornment, and Des Esseintes nearly follows suit, suffering in the wreckage of his sensual fixations complete physical and mental collapse.

A doctor prescribes a round of peptone enemas, which Des Esseintes accepts with enthusiasm, seeing in them “the crowning achievement of the life he had planned for himself; his taste for the artificial had now, without even the slightest effort on his part, attained its supreme fulfillment. No one, he thought, would ever go any further; taking nourishment in this way was undoubtedly the ultimate deviation from the norm.”

Alas, the doctor also delivers a most unwelcome prognosis - for any hope of recovery, Des Esseintes “would have to abandon this solitary existence, to go back to Paris, to lead a normal life again, above all to try and enjoy the same pleasures as other people.”

Faced with the real possibility of insanity and death, Des Esseintes complies. The world beckons the anchorite from his cell - the possibilities of community and communion await.

As he bids farewell to his palace of obscure delight, Des Esseintes’s deepest longing - impossible to realize, he thinks, in an age of the banal and the bourgeois - reveals itself, finally, in the anguish of prayer:

“Ah! but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me. — Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe…”

“It is necessary to guzzle like animals or to contemplate the face of God,” offered Léon Bloy, in response to À Rebours, “I do not see a contemporary book which pronounces more definitively than this one, and in a more distressing form, this alternative.”

Huysmans would certainly make his own choice, entering the Church via the Trappists in 1892. Others took from À Rebours a more literal dispensation, forgoing the impact of its satire entirely for the sake of more delirious pursuits. Where Des Esseintes failed, they would not.

“The worship of the senses,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves… the true nature of the senses had never been understood… they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them the elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.”

At the Queensberry trial of 1895, Wilde conceded he had À Rebours in mind in writing his own novel, Huysmans’s work suggesting the “poisonous book” that so captivated Dorian Gray. Both Wilde and Huysmans would offer inspiration for later generations of libertines, including the life, work and death of Harry Crosby, the founder of Black Sun Press and an aspiring poet-cum-prophet of 1920s Paris.

“What Huysmans imagined,” Crosby’s biographer noted, “Harry performed.” The champagne orgies and other sins of Crosby and his circle were notorious, a messianic urge toward appetite promising the ‘new spirituality’ brought at last to its moment of genesis:

“I am a harbinger of a
New Sun World
I bring the Seed of a
New Copulation
I proclaim the Mad Queen”

“They’re wraiths, all of them,” a friend of Crosby’s once remarked, “They aren’t people. God knows what they’ve done with their realities.”

Des Esseintes broke his health, and fled back to Paris. Dorian Gray ended up with a knife in his heart. For his own part, Harry Crosby outdid them both, dying by his own hand in a bizarre murder-suicide pact in December 1929, at the Hotel de Artistes in Manhattan, illuminating “the terminal consequences of the religion of art.”

The poet Archibald MacLeish, an intimate of Crosby’s, stood vigil over his friend’s body: “As I sat there looking at his corpse, seating myself where I wouldn’t have to see the horrible hole in the back of his ear, I kept saying to him: you poor, damned, dumb bastard. He was the most literary man I ever met... I never met anyone who was so imbued with literature, he was drowned in it. I think I’m close to deciding literature is the one thing never to be taken seriously… Harry took it literally. That’s what made me so mad at him.”

By the time of her own death in the spring of 1433, as a result of her countless infirmities Saint Lydwine of Schiedam had become “grotesque to look at, a thing without form, from which dropped blood and tears.” It was as she wished. In the suffering Christ she had found a spouse with whom to share a marriage bed of pain and humiliation. “I am not to be pitied,” she told those attending her, “I am happy as I am; and if the recitation of one Hail Mary would avail to cure me, I would not recite it.”

By the standards of modernity, having overthrown both God and suffering as incompatible with human flourishing, her attitude is simply unfathomable. After his conversion, Huysmans chose to write of Saint Lydwine in hopes her story might reinvigorate this love grown cold, “to throw a little light, however uncertain, upon the dark and terrifying mystery of suffering… for one is never nearer to God, and never more accessible to his influence, than when one is in pain.”

Within this love, this mystery, are endless human possibilities, of which our age is painfully ignorant.

We are told, time and again, even by its detractors, of the great era of individuality and individual expression in which we live, but this is clearly a swindle. Never, in celebrating selfishness, in championing artifice, have we been so overwhelmed by sameness, huddled over our phones, content with craft beer, neck tattoos, and the enervating consolations of pornography. We buy our individuality off the rack, and marvel at the quality and cost.

This is to be expected, isn’t it? When a certain masturbatory self-regard is exalted, we end not as harbingers of a new world, but as a clutch of bored and fearful onanists, pathetic - and as delighted with ourselves as Des Esseintes was of his peptone enemas.

No, if this were truly an age of expression we would allow for more outcomes. Instead sin is the great leveler of human experience - a democracy of the flesh, and deadly.

The communion of saints, in contrast, promises visions of the unrepeatable, the incomparable, gathered in kaleidoscopic majesty - wheels within wheels, endless, and full of eyes all around.

Consider but one example: it was the habit of Saint Lydwine, Huysmans relates, to discourse in the uncreated light with other righteous souls of her age. One of these confidants was Gérard, an anchorite of the Egyptian desert, who had presented himself to the saint in person as a young man, to ask her blessing and confirm his vocation for the ascetic life.

Years later, a traveler reported seeing Gérard in the desert - living in a nest of palms in the branches of a great tree, grown marvelously obese, but with the radiant face of an angel.

When asked how he managed to sustain himself in such fashion in a desolate region, Gérard explained he was “provided for by the Creator, who sent him flakes of manna as formerly to the Hebrews.”

“His stoutness,” offered Huysmans, “which was due to the nutritive qualities of the manna, was such that rolls of flesh dropped from his neck and ran in cascades down his back, so that he could neither sit nor lie down, but was forced to remain constantly kneeling or standing in his tree.”

A fable, perhaps. Hagiography. A stumbling block to Jews, and folly for Greeks.

But still - another vision of what’s possible. Unhappy as we are, what do we have to lose?

MacLeish was mistaken, it seems. Harry Crosby’s failure was not in taking literature too literally - he simply chose the wrong book.

---

Quotes from J.-K. Huysmans’s Saint Lydwine of Schiedam are from Agnes Hastings’s translation (TAN Books, 1979). Quotes from À Rebours are from Robert Baldick’s translation (Penguin Classics, 1968). See also Baldick’s The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Dedalus, 2006) for a full account of Huysmans’s life, work, and conversion. Thanks to Brendan King, whose site huysmans.org provides a wealth of resources on the author and his times, including the reviews of W.M. Fullerton and Léon Bloy quoted here. For a full transcript of the Queensberry libel trial, including the back and forth between Oscar Wilde and Edward Carson regarding À Rebours, see Irish Peacock & Scarlett Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (Fourth Estate, 2003). For all things Harry Crosby see Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolfe (New York Review Books, 2003).

Special thanks to K.P. Dyer, who always sees what should be seen before anyone else.

Guthrie, Oklahoma, 2021 - Photograph by Lydwine