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Victorian Studies 45.2 (2003) 373-375



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Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent, by Jad Adams; pp. ix + 211. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002, £12.95, $17.95.

Referring to his friend and fellow poet Ernest Dowson, W. B. Yeats once observed, "I cannot imagine the world in which he would have succeeded" (qtd. x). Had there been an autopsy after Dowson's death, another acquaintance quipped, they would have found "Art for Art's sake" engraved on his heart (12). Such comments helped spawn the so- called "Dowson Legend," which held that this writer was the archetypal fin-de-siècle decadent, a man whose heightened aesthetic sensibility led him to starve in a garret rather than compromise his artistic vision, to embrace drink, drugs, Catholicism, and perverse sexuality, and to succumb to illness and early death. Though many today do not recognize Dowson's name, phrases he coined such as "gone with the wind" and "days of wine and roses" have entered into the popular lexicon. Even the refrain of his most famous poem— "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion"—is less famous in its original form than as the chorus of a Cole Porter song from Kiss Me, Kate (1948).

Jad Adams's well-researched and compulsively readable new biography of Dowson provides a welcome chance to learn more about this minor but magnetic figure. Madder Music, Stronger Wine fleshes out the Dowson legend, revealing that despite tragic circumstances like the probable suicides of both his parents and the early onset of his own tuberculosis, Dowson rarely succumbed to self-pity and often exhibited a wry sense of humor. Indeed, he resisted his own mythologization at the hands of acquaintances determined to describe him as a sorrowful lost soul. During one of his many sojourns in France, for example, Dowson received a letter in which a friend characterized him as a pitiable phantom. In response, he insisted that although he was not a particularly happy man, "I do not go about Paris with a halo of ghosts and tears, having been gifted by God with a sense [...] of humour! [I] occasionally smile, and even in Paris, at a late hour of the night [...] have been known to laugh" (qtd. 124). Though Dowson suffered from paralyzing bouts of depression and shyness, Adams reveals that he nevertheless had a genius for friendship. An entertaining if wild companion, he was known for conversing and carousing into the wee hours, and for issuing such bon mots as "absinthe makes the tart grow fonder" (qtd. 23).

Adams conjures up a remarkably vivid picture of the daily lives of the writers that Yeats dubbed "the tragic generation" (qtd. 175). Deftly weaving together a wealth of material from many sources, he provides detailed descriptions of how the members of the Rhymer's Club—including Dowson, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Lionel Johnson—worked and played. Besides supplying illuminating information about their [End Page 373] writing habits and relationships with publishers, he also recounts how these men spent their nights; after indulging in lengthy chat sessions at the Café Royal, the Crown, and the Cheshire Cheese, they would move on to the theatre, brothels, card parties, and cabmen's shelters. Adams reveals that these friends not only partied together, but took care of each other as well. Dowson tenderly nursed a female friend who fell ill after an abortion and courageously stood by Wilde during and after his trial, hiding his own depression in order to cheer his friend up. Meanwhile, men like Wilde, Robert Sherard, and Leonard Smithers found Dowson work, lent him money, and took him in when he was broke and dying.

Adams mines so many sources so skillfully that it is surprising that he never sets himself up in relation to previous writers on Dowson, especially Mark Longacre, author of the 1945 biography Ernest Dowson. Adams does not mention Longacre by name until page 151, and then only in passing. Perhaps he chooses not...

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