A Leak In The Safe

Certainty about Graves’s "disintegration" – by which he meant "disintegration of my post-war personality" – began to crystallize rapidly in his mind as soon as he had got to know Laura Riding, whose personality – however anyone may wish to assess it – was, although unhymned except by him, both explosively freakish and characterized by acute though not learned intelligence.

– Martin Seymour-Smith

But there was the Devil himself. Having accepted her invitation to sit down and warm himself, he was obviously waiting for her to say something. So she said "Now what do you want?" "My dear," he answered with a confidential slant of his head, "I want nothing but your happiness." "Humph!" she snapped at him, "you can’t have it."

– Laura Riding

Alas for obstinate doubt: the dread

Of error in supposing my heart freed,

All care for her stone dead!

Ineffably will shine the hills and radiant coast

Of early mornings when she is gone indeed,

Her divine elements disbanded, disembodied

And through the misty orchards in love spread –

When she is gone indeed –

But still among them moves her restless ghost.

– Robert Graves

The vast worldwide audience of RADIOFREEUBU is not doubt weary of my constant touting of these great Dedalus books, but I can’t help it – they just keep blowing me away! My latest fantastic find is Valery Bruisov’s 1908 work The Fiery Angel. It’s a historical novel set in the sixteenth century, the putative confessions of Rupprecht, a drifter who has just returned to Germany, flush from his adventures in the New World. One night while staying at an inn he hears a commotion in the room next door and rushes in to find the fascinating Renata, who at that moment is writing on the floor, the victim of demonic possession. Rupprecht is in turn possessed by Renata, who draws him into her compulsive, occult search for her lost love Count Heinrich, who may or may not be the embodiment of Madiel, the angel who has been appearing to her since childhood.

Although I was enthralled with Fiery Angel from the start, it’s so unusual that it took me a while to see it for what it is – a Decadent novel that is both representative and atypical. The seeds of the flower of evil that was the historical aesthetic movement known as Decadence blew all over the world and developed different growths depending on prevailing conditions and the native soil. Russian literature has, from the beginning, been spiritual and very serious (even in its humor), cynical and satiric, but never ironic, and Bruisov, as the leader of Russian Decadence, brought a decidedly Russian flavor to his version of it. Fiery Angel displays many of the core elements of Decadence such as an enigmatic, doomed femme fatale who sadistically manipulates her willing victim and an preoccupation with Satanism and the occult, but it also has an energy and earnestness that’s the farthest thing from typical fin de siecle ennui. Flaubert’s Salammbo and Louys’s Aphrodite, the paradigmatic Decadent historicals, are set in a glittering pagan world and told in a fragmentary, impressionist manner, while Bruisov’s work takes place in the earthy Reformation, and his strange story unfolds with deliberate conventionality and concreteness.

And what a story – while the French strived for brief perfection and unity, Fiery Angel is impressive in it’s variety and completeness – it’s got (among other things) a witches’s Sabbath, a magical ceremony of invocation, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus and Mephistophilis, and ends in a convent full of possessed nuns who are soon to be put to the rack. It’s a bravura performance, and the author’s sure hand and encyclopedic knowledge result in an extraordinary, one of a kind work.

Here’s a few passages that I particularly dug, mostly in the femme fatale line:

I felt already that I lacked the strength to leave Renata, that I either had been charmed to her by some magic power, or borne naturally into gentle bondage by the Mother of Love – the Cyprian.