By Stewart Gibson

“Nothing dates so quickly as the apt comment.” So wrote Osbert Lancaster, ruefully reflecting on the inevitable eclipse of his reputation as one of the leading cartoonists, wits and dandies of his day.

Over a period of almost 40 years, Osbert Lancaster became a household name in Britain thanks to his introduction (with some inspiration from the French) of the newspaper “pocket cartoon.” For four decades readers would avidly seek out Lancaster’s contribution to the front page of the Daily Express prior to giving any consideration to the headlines.

The year 2008 marked the centenary of Lancaster’s birth, and in celebration a new book and exhibition are shining a fresh light on that once glittering reputation, providing illuminating insights into the world view of a man who brought the beady eye of an Edwardian dandy to bear on the follies and foibles of the mid-20th century.

In a superb earlier article for Dandyism.net, Michael Mattis covered much of the life and personal style of this “modern major minor dandy.” So here we must focus upon the work and its relation to the nature of its creator, as surveyed in the recently published book by James Knox, “Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster.”

Born to a wealthy family, Lancaster enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. He showed a natural talent for drawing from an early age and his sojourn at Charterhouse School fortuitously placed him at a institution which had an unusually strong tradition of producing outstanding caricaturists and illustrators, among them William Makepeace Thackeray, John Leech and Lancaster’s direct precursor and hero, the “incomparable” Max Beerbohm.

As a cartoonist, boulevardier and “connoisseur of social distinctions,” Lancaster’s use of longer captions revised the tradition of 19th-century Punch cartoons, in addition to following the example of Beerbohm. Lancaster’s obvious nostalgia for an earlier epoch was reflected in his wry observations on the shifting social mores of the 1950s-70s, most usually as seen through the eyes of his greatest comic creation: Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton. Maudie, and her fatalistic and fogeyish husband Willie, were as well known in their day as any society couple could possibly be. (more…)

The big-screen adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” opens July 25 in the US. “The Passionate Spectator” columnist Robert Sacheli recently attended a press screening. The following are his thoughts on the film, as well as the charges of sacrilege leveled by fans of the 1981 Granada Television version.

Outrage against cultural debasement becomes a dandy as much as a good pair of white summer flannels, but the new film adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited” has stirred up a level of feverish emotion ill suiting the man of bemused detachment.

Why has the film hit so many exquisitely sensitive nerves? Perhaps because revisiting “Brideshead” in 2008 is less a threat to the cultural legacies of Evelyn Waugh or Granada Television than it is to our own memories of the 1981 series and the role it holds in our lives.

My own sacred and sometimes profanely silly “Brideshead” connections reach back to high school. Despite the questionable erotic themes — and possibly more problematic, the Jesuit bias — the Brothers of Holy Cross judged “Brideshead Revisited” to merit a place on our summer reading list as we headed into junior year. I’m now deeply ashamed that a hasty late-August skim through the novel left no lasting impression except for its cover illustration, a floridly rendered version of the Brideshead fountain with a pair of male and female figures ominously dwarfed by its sculptural glories.

The now-legendary television series, though, was quite another story. I was as guilty of being a “Brideshead”-head as the next impressionable fellow in the early ’80s. I had an English friend record my answering machine greeting with the series theme swelling in the background. Spellings such as “emphasised” spilled from my fountain pen. I admit to have spoken the phrases “unused to wine” and “would your friend care to rumba?” in actual conversations.

In short, I joined a brotherhood of millions who happily fell for a seductive vision of inter-war England as filtered through the lens of Thatcherism. With that memorable baroque trumpet theme echoing in our imaginations, we daydreamed about cricket sweaters, plover’s eggs, and perpetually indulgent nannies.

Yes, we thought, this is when and how we deserved to have lived.

Burnished in our affection by repeated DVD marathons, “Brideshead” was a comforting return to our youth — or at least the imaginary version we’d assembled from Waugh’s seductive characters and the glow of high-level art direction.

So it’s understandable that there might be reluctance towards Brideshead II. Better to boycott the local cineplex with a wearily dismissive attitude.

Sorry to spoil your fun, but this version of “Brideshead” is neither a desecration nor a disaster. Rather it’s a refocused approach to the novel’s story and characters — a necessary step when adapting any work of literature for the screen.

(more…)

If filmmaker Catherine Breillat could be anyone in the world, she’d be the man pictured at left. Yes, the guy who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead dressed for the Dickens Fair.

“I have always said that if I had been born in a different century, I would have been Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly,” says the director of “The Last Mistress,” which opened in the US last week.

The film, which is loosely based on a novel by d’Aurevilly, centers around Ryno de Marigny, a proud libertine and gambler who strolls through life with his “hands in his pockets and nose in the air.”

The film stars prettyboy newcomer and Angelina Jolie lookalike (emphasis on jolie) Fu’ad Ait Aattou, who had never acted before and who therefore gives off the requisite air of dandy detachment.

Asia Argento, daughter of Italian horror film legend Dario Argento, is the film’s leading lady and a classic belle-laide.

Fans of Barbey’s fiction will enjoy a long sequence in the heart of the film that makes use of his favorite literary device, the recit parlé, or spoken narrative. Breillat’s adaptation also preserves the themes of mystery, revenge, passion and death that permeate all the work of Barbey, who was born in the sign of Scorpio and shares the sign’s preoccupations to the highest degree.

The press kit for the film includes the following remarks from Breillat:

On discovering the book Une Vieille Maitresse: I enjoyed the dandyism, a last shout from the aristocracy. Just like the Marquise de Flers, I am “absolutely 18th century.” The 18th century was more elegant and open-minded than the 19th, when the middle classes came into power, bringing narrow-mindedness and rigorously strict moral principles.

I also loved all these highly androgynous characters. Ryno is a terrible womanizer, a sort of Valmont (DANGEROUS LIAISONS), but he is also, like many dandies, deeply feminine. I’ve often dreamt about Michelangelo and the “Portrait of a Young Man” by Lorenzo Lotto (which is also in the film), about these men of dazzling beauty, a certain feminine beauty, yet without being effeminate.

The story could only take place in an aristocratic environment. When struggling to survive, feeding a family and finding a room for shelter, there is no time for the leisure of romance. Not enough time to experience the pureness. Sentiment can only be expressed in a certain level of comfort where it is not tainted by the harsh realities of life. The way many great authors of that era expressed strong feeling in such idealistic settings has always fascinated me. Aristocracy simply lends itself to the refinery of sentiments.

Dandyism.net shines its diabolical monocle on the 1988 BBC miniseries “Piece of Cake” and discovers a gem of a film. Set among a squadron of RAF fighter pilots in the early days of World War II, “Piece of Cake” is a feast of rakish style and quiet courage, with dotted silk scarves worn during combat missions serving as symbols of civility in the face of war’s cruel brutality.

“Piece of Cake” is also a banquet of patrician male bonding. Hornet Squadron sets up temporary headquarters in a grand French chateau, where war plans are made over champagne and cigars, and where a loyal canine serves as the squadron’s mascot, even while urinating on everyone’s legs. With snifters overflowing and songs at the piano, Hornet Squadron’s regimen of ritualized masculinity is so seductive one almost forgets there’s a war on — a frequent line in the film — and that most of them won’t come out alive.

“Piece of Cake” inspired us to view a spate of WW II films. Share your own recommendations in this forum thread.

“War used to be cruel and magnificent,” Winston Churchill once said. “Now it’s cruel and squalid.” Words that ring more true today than ever.

By Nathaniel Adams

“Beau Brummell”
Written by Ron Hutchinson
Directed by Simon Green
Starring Ian Kelly and Ryan Early

Lounging nude in a bathtub, George Brummell holds a razor to his throat. Will he remove his stubble, or end his life?

This stark suicidal pose we opens Ron Hutchinson’s semi-biographical play about the life of Brummell, starring Ian Kelly. I quickly feared a sensationalized portrait of a madman, but this was immediately assuaged by the wit and rapport between Brummell and his fictional valet Austin, the only two characters in the play. Kelly is of course the author of the recent highly acclaimed biography of Brummell. The valet, played by Ryan Early, is a well developed character in his own right, and is used as a rational foil for Brummell’s idealistic eccentricities. Throughout the production Brummell dresses and undresses, allowing the viewer to experience a metaphorical “revelation” of sorts, candidly privileged to see the famed dresser undressed.

The action takes place on one day close to the end of Brummell’s life when he is living in poverty in Calais. The occasion is special because King George IV, who as Prince Regent had been Brummell’s close friend and benefactor, is passing through Calais. Much of the play focuses on Brummell’s famous “Who’s your fat friend?” insult, blaming much of Brummell’s downfall on that fateful line. This reduction of the myriad complex reasons for Brummell’s exile to one bon mot might be factually inaccurate, but in the context of the play beautifully illustrates the man’s priorities and core beliefs. (more…)

By Nick Willard

Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style
By Ian Kelly
Free Press

I was prepared to thoroughly dislike Ian Kelly’s biography of Beau Brummell. The attendant ballyhoo, here in the US and last year in the UK, has been lascivious and sensational — Brummell as “a Casanova and a playboy;” variously the “Boy Toy” and “Toy Boy” of the Duchess of Devonshire; taking lovers of both sexes; his grandfather a brothel keeper, and his mother a courtesan. It has also affected a vulgar contemporaneity. He was the “first celebrity;” “the first metrosexual,” and “the inventor of the suit” — odd, since he never wore one. In the unkindest cut, the subtitle, in crossing the Atlantic from Britain to America, was switched from “The Ultimate Dandy” (something of an oxymoron, as Brummell originated dandyism) to “The Ultimate Man of Style.”

My worst fears have been disappointed. Mr. Kelly’s account of Brummell’s life is well written, lively, informative, factual, balanced and innovative. It is, simply put, the best biography of Brummell. (more…)

By Nick Willard

The Boutonniere: Style in One’s Lapel
By Richard Martin, et al.

“Reginald slid a carnation of the newest shade into the buttonhole of his latest lounge coat and surveyed the results with approval. ‘I am just in the mood,’ he observed, ‘to have my portrait painted by someone with an unmistakable future. So comforting to go down to posterity as ‘Youth with a Pink Carnation’ in catalogue-company with ‘Child with a Bunch of Primroses’ and all that crowd.” — Saki, The Innocence of Reginald

Last week I attended a cocktail party at Saks 5th Avenue to open “Dressing the Part,” NYU’s Eighth Fashion Conference. As I was to deliver a lecture at the conference on “Dandyism Then and Now,” as well as uphold the honor of Dandyism.net, I felt an obligation to look my dandy best. (more…)

By Nick Willard

“Casanova”
Directed by Lasse Hallstrom

Despite doing his best work while wearing no clothes, Giacomo Casanova has been anointed a sort of patron saint of dandies. Stephen Robins, in his book “How To Be a Complete Dandy”, considers the 18th-century Venetian a dandy and invokes him as proof of the dandy’s virility. “Dandies and Don Juans,” an early 20th-century study of sportsman and adventurers by Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm, prominently includes the adventurer and womanizer. Most importantly, our own definitive dandy genealogy chart identifies him as a precursor, albeit tangential, of the original dandy, Beau Brummell.

The chart lists Casanova as an example of the related dandy archetype of the “seductive rogue.” This archetype was linked with the dandy through the Cavaliers. Upon their return from France to the court of Charles II during the Restoration, they introduced French notions of men’s elegance into an England recovering from the Puritanism of the Puritans (who else?) and Cromwell. They also brought back a serious reputation as libertines; hence, the link between elegant attire and sexual escapades. The first serious work on dandyism, Barbey’s “Du Dandysme,” identified the Cavaliers as part of Brummell’s pedigree. The Cavaliers will soon be in the spotlight again. Next month, the long-delayed theatrical release of Johnny Depp’s “The Libertine,” based on the life of one such Cavalier, the bisexual and scatological 17th-century English poet John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, arrives. (more…)

By Nick Willard

Fred Astaire Style
G. Bruce Boyer
Assouline Publishing

The dandy reveals himself by what he wears. His essence is external display. Photographs, therefore, inherently constitute a better medium to communicate the significance of the dandy than do words. Words, however artfully crafted, can only mediate, not exhibit, the effect of the dandy. Photographs, on the other hand, permit us to directly experience the dandy. This jewel box of a book is the very model of what a volume about the dandy should be.

Mr. Boyer has been, for well over two decades, the preeminent writer about men’s clothing. His erudition and taste show. His pithy and perceptive introductory essay deftly assesses Astaire’s sartorial significance in the annals of dandyism. Astaire is the American Dandy, a “classless aristocrat,” the populist exponent of natural elegance. The author then sagaciously steps aside and gives Mr. Astaire center stage: 60 pages of photographs, wisely chosen and many never-before-published, primarily showing Astaire in elegant mufti rather than in his movie costumes. Mr. Boyer unobtrusively annotates the photographs at the end of the book. (more…)

By Michael Mattis
The Aesthetic Adventure
By William Gaunt
The New Aestheticism
By John J. Joughin and Simon Malpa

There is no excitement quite like that of unwrapping books you have just gotten in the mail. Pretensions to maturity and sophistication fly out the window as you manically tear the packaging apart like an eight-year-old opening a long sought-after birthday present, pausing only to wonder, “Must they always wrap these things in reinforced steel and concrete?”

So it was when two books recently arrived from online bookseller Alibris. One of these, “The Aesthetic Adventure” by William Gaunt, was not new to me. I had owned a paperback copy of it before. It was one of those seminal books in my development as a student of aesthetics and as a dandy, holding an honored place alongside Holbrook Jackson’s “The Eighteen Nineties,” Ellen Moer’s “The Dandy,” and Richard Ellmann’s “Oscar Wilde.” But that copy fell apart some years back and I discarded it. Reminded of “The Aesthetic Adventure” a few weeks ago by a conversational thread in another online community, I determined to find another copy.

While perusing the Alibris website for “The Aesthetic Adventure,” I also came across a second book, the title of which fired my interest. “The New Aestheticism” is edited by a pair of English profs, John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, and the books’s jacket-flap pap seemed promising:

“The rise of literary theory spawned the rise of anti-aestheticism, so that even for cultural theorists, discussions concerning aesthetics were often carried out in a critical shorthand that failed to engage with the particularity of the work of art… This book introduces the notion of a new aestheticism… focusing on the specifically aesthetic impact of a work of art or literature has the potential to open radically different ways of thinking about identity, politics and culture.”

What this seemed to say to me at the time was that a few radically level-headed, if not “radically different,” scholars had found the courage the toss the theoretical baby out with the Lacanian bath water, take a stand and dare to say what’s good and what’s bad in a work of art on its own merits. I imagined a book full of eloquent essays by latter-day Walter Paters writing in hard, gemlike and readable prose. In addition, the book’s price led me to think that it might also offer a number of illustrations, perhaps even color plates, providing examples of new-found, contemporary expressions of skillfully crafted beauty. Silly me.

But I get ahead of the story. It happened that I opened Gaunt’s “The Aesthetic Adventure” first. This cloth-bound hardback edition, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1945, wore its original jacket, featuring Max Beerbohm’s caricatures of James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Carlyle, along with the legend, “A witty and highly entertaining history of the Bohemian movement in art and writing.” I don’t remember if my paperback version included the same words, but they describe “The Aesthetic Adventure” perfectly.

“The Aesthetic Adventure” is a cultural history of aestheticism, that movement so tightly summed up in the Theophile Gautier’s now timeless phrase, l’art pour l’art. Gaunt takes us through the aesthetic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as if we were there, looking over Whistler’s shoulder. Its 262 pages deftly weave art, literary, philosophical and cultural history together with the lives of the artists, writers, thinkers, patrons and characters who made the aesthetic movement so wonderfully engaging and so deeply flawed: Matthew Arnold, Roger Fry, Max Beerbohm and his bother, Herbert, Audrey Beardsley, Edward Burne-Jones, Earnest Dowson (now remembered mostly for his quip, “Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder”), Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, James McNiell Whislter, George Moore and a host of others. The book takes us up to the time when Europe’s aesthetic illusions were shattered by the shells of the First World War.

In Gaunt’s able hands the era comes alive. Reading “The Aesthetic Adventure,” it’s easy to get caught up in the bohemian players’ enthusiasm, to picture their late nights drinking at the Café Royal or trading barbs at the Rhymer’s Club, where, Gaunt writes, “wit sparkled, enmity smiled, the poor were entranced by splendor and the rich by talent.”

Gaunt continues: “Sometimes Dowson came here [to the Rhymer's Club] surfeited from the streets, finding it neutral ground between the society he disliked and the netherworld to which he was so irresistibly drawn, discovering there the typical balance of the time between pleasure and ruin.”

“Surfeited from the streets… The typical balance of time between pleasure and ruin.” I don’t know if I have ever read a more eloquent passage about the destructive fascination that low life holds. The book is full of such clear-eyed, thoughtful passages. Gaunt’s really is the quintessential history of the “art for art’s sake” movement, the way Ellen Moer’s “The Dandy” is the quintessential history of dandyism.

When I finally got around to cracking “The New Aestheticism,” I was excited to read what this new movement might hail. Though the book turned about to be a plain paperback with fine print and no illustrations, I dove in. I was soon left wondering however, exactly what planet these new aesthetes lived on.

Given the current state of academia, it’s not surprising that no one has come up with a phrase to describe Joughin and Malpas’s new aestheticism as neatly as Gaunt’s old aestheticism was summed up with Gautier’s “art for art’s sake.” And, unfortunately, Joughin and Malpas themselves can’t really be bothered to try, but instead fall back on the obfuscatory, pomo lit-babble common in today’s humanities to explain away any claim this new aestheticism of theirs might have on uncovering the beautiful.

Their opening gambit is ladled with weak sauce: “The very notion of the ‘aesthetic’ could be said to have fallen victim to the success of recent developments within literary theory.” Really? Could it indeed be said to have? Or has it? And what’s with the scare-quotes around “aesthetic?” You would think these two august professors might have been slinking around the academy long enough to know what that word means.

When our two intrepid profs do get around to defining their terms we get: “Maybe the best response” – left-wing professors always respond, everyone else reacts – “is to say that aesthetics is the theoretical discourse which attempts to comprehend the literary.” Forget about beauty, in other words, aesthetics is a technical shorthand, like Newtonian notation is to calculus, for describing a text – and everything, to these people, is a text – one that needs to be employed if we are to understand it. Funny, I always thought the best way to understand a text was by “reading” it. And hadn’t they promised to avoid “critical shorthand?”

I read on and found this little gem: “Perhaps the most basic tenet we are trying to argue for is the equiprimordiality of the aesthetic – that, although it is without doubt tied up with the political, historical, ideological, etc., thinking it as other than determined by them, and therefore reducible to them, opens space for an artistic and literary specificity that can radically transform its critical potential and position with regard to contemporary culture.”

I’m not sure who this “them” is, but the poor bastards certainly have my sympathy, trapped as they are in a pool of equiprimordial quicksand. Blech.

Still, I was only in the introduction and had some hope for the essays tucked within. I flipped through to Jonathon Dollimore’s “Art in a time of war: towards a contemporary aesthetic.” It began promisingly enough, with a brief exploration of the universality in Hermann Hesse’s writings. I’m not a fan of Hesse – too damned serious for me – but his sentiments are noble and clearly put. The essay quickly dips, however, into stereotypical attacks on globalization and popular culture, exemplified by “Hollywood and McDonald’s rather than Shakespeare and Harrods.” Dollimore goes on to attempt to show that there are no universals in literature and that Enlightenment humanism’s pretty much shuffled off this mortal coil, because, you know, it’s all relative.

That pretty much wraps it up for the new aestheticism. There’s no truth and no beauty in the world, just a bunch of dissembling dialectics trying to describe the indescribable. So what’s the point, you ask? Who knows? You would think these people would get bored with writing the same paper with the same conclusion over and over again, but the stream of drivel seems endless. If the flaw in the old aestheticism was in its practitioners’ attempt to create a beauty far removed form the world around them, the flaw in the new aestheticism is in it adherents’ refusal to see any beauty in the world at all not tainted by politics or economics.

Some may find the clarity, conciseness and elegance of phrase that marks good writing like that of William Gaunt reactionary. I think, in academia at least, these qualities have been buried so long – 40 years or more – that to bring them back would be nothing short of revolutionary. And should such a revolution find a clean-shaven Che Guevara to lead it, the excitement of getting books in the mail may end in disillusionment less often.

By Nick Willard

The 85 Ways To Tie a Tie
Thomas Fink and Yong Mao
Broadway Books

The decadent dandy has as his guidebook “Against Nature,” the “poisonous” yellow book redolent of incense that Lord Henry gives to Dorian, the catalyst for Wilde’s young hero’s descent into Avernus.

So do fundamentalist dandies, those devotees of Brummell – possessors of a languid wit, connoisseurs of a fine cut (both sartorial and social), practitioners of “country washing,” and aficionados of elegant neckwear – have a similarly inspirational guide?

Surprisingly, the answer may lie not among the informative books listed on this site’s Texts page, but in a little book dedicated to the Brummellian task of tying one’s tie properly. And it comes from the unlikeliest of authors: two condensed-matter physicists at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, Thomas Fink and Yong Mao. The physicists applied topology (a branch of geometry), Knot Theory and physics to certain assumed practical constraints (e.g. length of tie, size of knot), and determined that there are exactly 85 ways to tie a tie.

Fink and Mao expanded their initial research into a jeu d’esprit entitled “The 85 Ways To Tie a Tie.” The book includes a history of neckcloths; sprinkles throughout photographs of the famous sporting various knots (the last photo, in context, is particularly clever and witty); briefly summarizes the relationship among topology, Knot Theory, physics and tying tie knots; and relegates to the appendix the mathematical proof.

The glory of the book is in its instructions. Attractive diagrams and the authors’ own simple and especially devised notation detail the sequence of moves for tying each of the 85 knots move-by-move. These directions are the clearest and most precise ever written. Twenty-five knots are accorded short essays, a few only a sentence long.

A dandy must perfect nineteen of the knots. Applying topological principles, the authors deem thirteen of the knots “aesthetic,” a designation without practical significance. The others are either indistinguishable iterations or simply too awful to sport. The knots run the gamut from casual to relaxed, formal to intricate. They range in size from three moves to nine. The shapes vary from a tapered, tunneled look to the triangular and bulbous. A number of knots begin with the tie inside-out around the neck – these are certainly the knots your father did not teach you. A delightful singularity is a variation of what the authors have dubbed “The Christensen,” which results in a cruciform design. It is very formal, intricate and elegant, and I chose this knot to go with my morning attire for my daughter’s wedding.

Dandies can be passionate about their knot preferences, but what is the best knot is intensely personal. There are four general considerations: It must harmonize with one’s face, the tie itself, the shirt collar, and the rest of one’s attire. In other words, the shape of the knot must accent good facial features and/or offset weak ones; the tie’s thickness, width, length and in some cases shape must be consistent with the knot; the knot must be proportionate to the length and spread of the shirt collar points (which in turn must flatter one’s face); and the formality or informality of the knot must match the rest of one’s attire. Learn the knots, experiment, and use one’s eye and educated sense of elegance to select, on any given occasion, one’s choice.

Brummell spent upwards of two hours each day arranging his cravat. He never left his digs until his cravat was perfect. A contemporary dandy should be content with no less. To paraphrase the creator of Dorian Gray – and Lord Henry – a well-tied tie is the first serious step in dandyism.

By Michael Mattis

The Bohemian Manifesto: A guide to living on the edge
By Laren Stover

Laren Stover’s “Bohemian Manifesto” is not a manifesto at all. It does not hail the wave-like crash of a mighty new movement ‘gainst the rocky shore of bourgeois indifference. It does not strive to steer the course of cultural production. It posits no statement of unified aesthetic theory, nor does it declare any sweeping political principle. Artaud’s “The Theatre of Cruelty” it is not.

Rather, the “Bohemian Manifesto,” as its subtitle title suggests, is “A guidebook to living on the edge,” and belongs to that class of publications ostensibly designed to instruct the reader in the fine art of becoming a social stereotype. Beginning with “Real Man Don’t Eat Quiche” and descending down to “The Metrosexual Guide to Style,” these primers usually adorn a bookstore’s checkout counter until they find their way onto your coffee table, then to your end table, then the tank of your WC and, at last, into the pile of unshelved volumes next to your desk in the den.

Stover’s “Manifesto” is a sort of Emily Post for the aspiring demimondaine, a kind of Dale Carnegie for the would-be beat poet. The author leaves out almost nothing. In fact, you would practically have to be a CEO in order to afford all the hipster gimcracks you’ll need to succeed in Stover’s non-Starbucks café society.

Stover opens her “Manifesto” by defining the qualities she thinks make the Bohemian what he is: courage, audacity, and revolt. How she could have left “dirty” out of this list is a mystery. She then goes on to define the “Bohemian Breakdown:” the Nouveau Bohemian, the Gypsy Bohemian, the Beat Bohemian, the Zen Bohemian and, at last, the Dandy Bohemian. In layman’s terms, the first four break down respectively to: patronizing wannabes, hippies, beatniks and ravers. Not surprisingly, Stover has the most difficult time with the dandy.

Dandyism.net readers may cringe at Stover’s opening line, “A little seedy, a little haughty, slightly shredded or threadbare, Dandies are the most polished of all bohemians even when their clothes are tattered.”

Haughty, threadbare and tattered are hard words. But “seedy?” That’s practically a declaration of war. But she also says, “The Dandy laments that the values of honor, elegance, and dignity have fallen by the wayside along with starched collars and/or ruffled cuffs,” which is true enough for the most part, with the possible exception of the lazily phrased last bit.

In some parts, Stover reminds me of myself back in my salad days in San Francisco. When she speaks of her boho dandy’s preference for engraved calling cards, vintage clothing, unpopular liqueurs, and abhorrence of frugality – “part Oscar Wilde, part ‘Addams Family,’ a little ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’” – she holds up a mirror to my youthful self.

Yet there’s something not quite right with Stover’s dandy. Like many writers who have taken on the subject, she tends to conflate the dandy, the aesthete and the neo-Victorian. While a dandy can certainly be an aesthete and an aesthete a dandy, Stover assumes that that the dandy is always this eccentric retro character, the sort of terminally overdressed, blossom-waving, gender-bending Dracula impersonator in a pirate shirt that people chuckle about at the supermarket. That’s not dandyism, that’s schtick.

What I remember most about my own days in bohemia is my almost desperate desire to leave it behind. And this is another point where I feel Stover lets the dandy down. She sees the dandy as permanent resident of that 5th-floor Greenish Village walkup, a permanent rebel without applause. What she leaves out is that bohemians, whether dandies or not, are people on a mission. Whether they’re writing that great American novel, the play for the common man, or the screenplay that explores aesthetic experience more elegantly than any before it, bohemians are always passing through bohemia, breathing its seductive air while mining it for stories. Otherwise, they’re nothing more than slackers.

No, the dandy always moves on, always grows, becoming ever more refined, ever more streamlined. He’s like the fencing student who starts out by swinging his epee about in great flourishing arcs, but who over time finds his economy and trades his roundhouse slashes for a simple step forward, a step back, and a lighting flick of the blade.

Books like Stover’s allow readers to explore a cultural type without having to slog through all those dreary first sources. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. They whet the appetite for more. But in the case of the dandy, readers would be better off with Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “Du Dandysme” or Ellen Moers’ definitive history, “The Dandy,” as their primer.

By Michael Mattis

The Affected Provincial’s Almanack
By Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy
Plankton Art Co. (self-published version)

There is something endearingly dandyish about self-published books. They recall a time when gentlemen-scholar-adventurers braved the noonday sun on the parched Serengeti to collect stamen samples in support of quasi-scientific theories resulting in weighty tomes full of Latinate terminology, which they knew from the outset no right-thinking human being would ever crack. There’s a hopeless romance to self-publishing, something very Enoch Soames about it.

There’s also something about the relationship between author and printer that is akin to that between beau and tailor. One can imagine the youthful aesthete-antiquarian T.E. Lawrence, years before his ascent to “of Arabia” fame, pouring over his illuminated galleys, demanding a comma here, taking one away there, adjusting the tint on this illustration, suggesting a touch of gold leaf to another, all with the same meticulous care that D’Orsay might have taken with the drape of jacket or the pull of a buttonhole. (more…)

By Nick Willard

Dark Lover: The Life & Death of Rudolph Valentino
Emily W. Leider
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

This is an eminently readable, very sympathetic account of the life and work of Rudolph Valentino. The subject comes across quite likeable as he careens from one personal, financial or career crisis to another. Valentino’s status as the ultimate Lain Lover shows the power of Hollywood mythmaking.

His first marriage, to lesbian bit-player Jean Acker, ended on their wedding night when she wouldn’t let Valentino into the bedroom. Leider stoutly defends Rudy’s heterosexuality, depicting him as sexually passive, more interested in cooking and eating spaghetti than chasing women. But the author comes across a tad naïve about Rudy’s relationship with his protégé, French actor and Rudy-look-alike André Daven. (more…)

By: Michael Mattis

The Aviator
Martin Scorsese, Director
Warner Home Video
 

It should come as no surprise that a gentleman with a talent for making a cravat seem to float in the air would hold a fascination with flight. Indeed, dandies have been flying almost from the start. When brothers Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier first witnessed their newly invented hot-air balloon ascend above the streets of pre-Revolution Paris – their feet safely on the ground, we might add – you can bet they were in their Sunday best. By the beginning of the 20th century, aviation became one of those dangerous pastimes practiced by the rich, the fashionable and the adventurous.

(more…)