Dandyism

What is a dandy? Carlyle said he was a man whose "existence consists in the wearing of clothes." Isak Dinesen worshipped the freedom of the aesthete as a special Satan. But even these definitions are not enough to contain the dazzling originalities of Lord Chesterfield, Oscar Wilde, George Sand, Max Beerbohm, Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau--all of them dandies. Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly's jewel-like writing on the sensibility of dandyism has never been equaled as the study of life lived as style. His Dandyism, with a new preface by Quentin Crisp, is now back in print in America after an absence of nearly a century. The implication for today's obsession with fashion and personality make this 1845 study of the cult of the self as timely and thoughtful as ever. In the spectacles of contemporary society, the body easily becomes a cultural text. Barbey d'Aurevilly looks behind the mask of English society in the Regency period to show how life can be lived as ironic performance. In his own magnificent performance as a writer one can feel the aroma of manners exuded by the eponymous Beau Brummell who is the star of this miniature portrait of elegant hedonism and spectacular decline. "Brummell was descended from the people of the north, lymphatic and pale, like their mother the sea ...." are the words he uses to describe the Englishman. No wonder his contemporary Lord Byron said he would rather be Brummell than Napoleon. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly himself lived the life of a dandy in an age that was beginning to define our idea of modernist sensibility. He wrote over fifty volumes of novels, short stories, criticism, and letters, one of the most provocative his study of women, The Diaboliques. He was also the model for Des Esseintes in Huysmans' decadent novel Against Nature. Barbey d'Aurevilly died in 1889, at the age of eighty, in utter poverty but surrounded by his Angora cats.--Adapted from dust jacket.