Decadence, Desire and the Divided Self: The Curious Case of Trumbull Stickney

In 1897, during a return visit to Florence, the young American Joseph Trumbull Stickney wrote the following to his friend Robert Morss Lovett:

If you wish to know where my home is, it is more here than elsewhere, where old servants come and tell me how I've grown and kiss me, where a chap I used to go and see 15 years ago, to pick camellias in his palace garden, comes and calls me by my first name, where a dozen people wish to see me since I've grown up, where at least my own memory goes back to childhood.... Suppose you had been thrown upon the world like a piece of freight: wouldn't you love the place, where, as a box, you first stood open, before being packed, dispatched, shipped at customs-houses of France, Germany, and England...? ¹

At this moment in time Stickney was just twenty-three years old; he had been resident in Paris since 1895 as a doctoral student at the Sorbonne. Prior to that, he had been a student in his native country at Harvard University. Originally, however, as his wistful letter suggests, his formative life had been a rootless, nomadic one, as the child of an American émigré family in Europe. Just seven years after writing this letter, by the time of his tragic early death in 1904, he had become the first American to achieve the doctorat ès lettres degree at the Sorbonne and returned to Harvard as a lecturer. He had also published a collection of poetry in 1902, and though his reputation was never widespread during his lifetime, a hastily assembled posthumous collection in 1905 did garner general critical praise. Apart from occasional publications and appraisals in the twentieth century, he and his work have fallen almost totally from sight. ² Stickney's sense of being cast adrift—personally and culturally—deeply infuses his poetry and colours his lustrous, fin-de-siècle aesthetic. This feeling of not belonging, of never quite "fitting in," was also prophetic, as he has never found a proper home in the literary canon: he is still waiting, "as a box," to be unpacked, placed, and properly appreciated.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Stickney's life and work is the light which they both throw upon the existence of the American Decadent poet. The poète maudit has come to be seen as an exclusively European affair, ³ with little or no attention paid to the presence of this figure in America. There has, equally, been little discussion of American poetry in the 1890s and the extent to which European Decadent trends were having an impact. ⁴ In this sense, as an American poet writing in Europe, and a somewhat exotic, unsettlingly alien presence in his own country, Trumbull Stickney can be seen as a literal point of Transatlantic Decadent cultural interchange. ⁵ His excellent, varied and entertaining poetry shows a fragile, conflicted realisation of European Decadent trends in American letters. There is also detectable within the beautifully cadenced dying falls of the verse a shadowy, melancholy homoeroticism. This article seeks to go further than the existing and all too slight commentary on Stickney to give a comprehensive contextualisation of his life and poetry, addressing his major themes—Decadence and desire—and his connections with his European contemporaries, offering detailed readings of a range of different poems and styles. This enigmatic, haunting figure—lingering spectrelike in the wings of fin-de-siècle culture—is one of the most accomplished and idiosyncratic voices in European Decadent poetry, while also being the preeminent American lyricist of his time and a valuable precursor of poetic modernism.

The Life: "My goddess is unrest"

The life of Trumbull Stickney, albeit brief and lacking in external incident, is nevertheless emblematic of the American Decadent poet's plight and necessarily colours the way in which we receive and interpret the poems. The fullest biographical accounts we currently have can be found in the introduction to Reeves and Haldane's Homage to Trumbull Stickney and Haldane's The Fright of Time...