E.A. Poe created the first detective story, with the declasse
aristocrat
M. Dupin, who loved ratiocination and the night. In the Rue
Morgue,
rationatality battled animal horror, which set the stage for
all future
mysteries. Poe also wrote The Fall of the House of Usher.
When the
narrator sees it for the first time, he compares it to what a
opium smoker
sees when he wakes up!
Charlie Baudelaire in France fell in love with Poe's writing.
In his
prose poem (?) The Double Room an opium smoker wakes up from
a
drug-induced dream of paradise and sees he lives in a hovel
on a mean
street straight from hell. CB also created a literary
character that he
called The Dandy, a sort of declasse aristrocrat (or fallen
angel of the
avant garde), who believed in art for art's sake, did dope,
wore a long
floawing gentleman's cape, and prowled the night.
This tradition goes to England and splits in two. We have the
declasse
gentleman who believes in ratiocination and a 7% solution of
cocaine who
prowls the foggy streets in pursuit of horror. (Sheer-luck
something or
other.) In that same period we see Stevenson's Jeckyl &
Hyde (about
monstrous gentlemen who drink too much and one in particular
who snorts a
vile powder), we have Bram Stoker's Dracula (a very declasse
gentleman who
also slobbers over women like Mister Hyde,) and we have Jack
D'Ripper of
Whitechapel, who may have been a fallen away
gentleman-surgeon, or maybe a
member of the royal family itself.
The Dandy finds its most fitting candidate in Oscar Wilde,
with his cape,
his declasse airs, his night-foragings, his advocacy of art
for art's
sake, and his flower in his lapel. (The flower became a
calling-card
or maybe a secret code to the hidden homosexual community of
England
at the time. The Importance of Being Earnest makes more sense
if you
figure the two male leads are gays who have to stay in the
closet and
marry women in order to avoid official censure.) This
tradition of
the Dandy will flow uneasily through T.S. Elliot (from
Missouri) and Ezra
Pound, who dressed like a Baudilairian nightmare.
Read the description of Joel Cairo and his belongings in The
Maltese
Falcon. He could be a Americanized recincarnation of Oscar
Wilde,
complete to the flower. And the theatre tickets to the Geary
Theatre.
If you're a detective who goes out to fight the Horror in the
Night
(whether it's a monstrous ape or a killer all methed-up), you
drink
because the Great Battle between Good or Evil demands a price
from you.
If the Battle can demand you give up your life--then why
bother eating
tofu?
Frederick Zackel
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