The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century by Philip Mann (review)

“Do you believe,” the performance artist Penny Arcade once asked the great English dandy-memoirist Quentin Crisp, “in postmodernism?” “No,” Crisp said. “I believe that once there was modernism, then it ended, now there is only decline and decay” (quoted in Mann, 205). In fact, the dandy is the anachronistic secret soul of modern and postmodern twentieth-century Anglo-American culture—both of literary culture, whose dandyish public representatives include T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the first half of the century and William Burroughs and Truman Capote in the second, and of popular (and especially musical) culture, which offers a veritable gallery of dandies from Elvis to Little Richard to Mick Jagger to David Bowie to, in our own time, Outkast’s André Benjamin (aka Andre3000). Nor should twentieth-century dandyism be understood as an exclusively male phenomenon. Djuna Barnes’s gothic modernism can be elucidated under the rubric of decadent dandyism; Joan Didion’s ironic, flattened affect is nothing other than a kind of Wildean epigrammatism tuned for the postwar American West; Susan Sontag’s antihermeneutic aestheticism is Pater—master-theorist of Victorian dandyism—rewritten for the nuclear era. Although in some sense primordially male, the dandy has been, at least since Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s inaugural theoretical exploration Of Dandyism and Beau Brummell (1845), a figure of constitutive androgyny, and essential in that capacity to what Rita Felski called, in 1995, “the gender of modernity.”

Why does the twentieth century remain persistently invested in a style so centrally associated with the fin de siècle of Oscar Wilde and, more distantly, the Regency period of Brummell, the first dandy? Although not purporting to offer a comprehensive history of dandyism, Philip Mann’s beautifully written The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century, provides an answer in its marvelous title: in modernity, the aesthetic as such has become the site of a sweetly painful backwards look. As Mann writes, for post-Brummellian dandies, “a slightly melancholic nostalgia . . . formed part of the way they defined themselves: d’Aurevilly remained faithful into old age to the redingote that had been fashionable in his childhood; Max Beerbohm was an Edwardian until his death in the 1950s; and Bunny Roger even reinvented the Edwardian style in the late 1940s” (34). Such nostalgia applies to a wider field than clothing; and the dandy’s melancholy aligns him with that most iconic of all modernist figures, the flaneur, whose urban spectation rests on permanently arrested desire. At its most extreme, dandiacal melancholy is self-annihilating: “Given the dandy’s nature as work of art, the passing of time poses particular problems for him. . . . The most radical solution to this problem is suicide” (35–36).

Sorrow, the backwards glance, auto-aestheticism, and the radical nihilism at dandyism’s heart are the themes Mann tracks across his portraits, analytic and biographical, of six exemplary European dandies: Adolf Loos, the Duke of Windsor, Bunny Roger, Quentin Crisp, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Rainer Fassbinder. Scholars of modernism will be especially interested in the Introduction (“Modernity out of Decadence”), whose major figure is Brummell, and in the chapter on Loos, architect, interior decorator, and theorist of abstraction. Often credited with inventing the modern men’s suit, Brummell’s sartorial dandyism offered not showiness or ostentation but, rather, the abandonment of “superficial ornamentation and colour” famously dubbed by J. C. Flügel “the great masculine renunciation” (12). (More flamboyant styles of sartorial dandyism, from Wilde’s to Bowie’s, all react against the strictures of Brummell’s style.) Mann links Brummell’s “need for abstraction” to much more than “the modern suit”—Brummellian abstraction “paved the way . . . for modernity itself. Indeed, the principles of dress as laid down by Brummell read like axioms of modernist architecture and design” (12).

Dandiacal control is a tactic for “hid[ing] the pathological side of his character,” but the dandy’s “pathology,” from Brummell onwards...