Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent

by Jad Adams

Ernest Dowson, a major poet of the Victorian Decadent period, alcoholic, and severe depressive, died in 1900 at 32. He created much of his best work while suffering from tuberculosis. The most tragic of his generation, his life is a story of doomed love and adversity. Adams explores how the poet's strange delights and sexual excesses were worked into his lyrical verse.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, History, Literature

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Jad Adams is a historian working as an author and an independent television producer. He has specialized in work on radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and 'the decadence' of the 1890s.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The short, miserable career of the poet Ernest Dowson--fastidious in verse but untidy in life--is pathetic but also moving, a revealing lens through which one may view literary London of the fin-de-siecle.

Like the age, Dowson was full of contradictions: an idolater of child-women and a frequenter of whores, a passionate convert to Catholicism and a degenerate consumer of absinthe, a dedicated craftsman of gem-like lyrics and a hack translator of soft-core pornography.

Most important of all is the final contradiction: this man whose brief life seemed one long waste will be cherished for a few lyrics and a handful of phrases ("faithful in my fashion," "the days of wine and roses," "gone with the wind") as long as the English language is spoken or its literature remembered.

[RedSaab · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding, clear-eyed and sympathetic biography of an exquisite yet lesser known fin-de-siecle poet. It would be easy to dismiss Ernest Dowson as a self-indulgent miserabilist who simply squandered his narrow genius and died prematurely. However Jad Adams convincingly paints Dowson as a man of such cruelly acute sensibilities that he was hardly meant for this world; indeed was pre-ordained not to survive it for very long. As the novelist Edgar Jepson perfectly put it:

"[Ernest] had the air of being submerged in a dream, and plainly enough he rose out of that dream only when you called him into the world in which he was actually moving. But he was not really connected with it, and I think that a great deal of his uncommon charm came from that attitude to life: he never cared enough for this world to pose before it. It was the charm of an uncommon simplicity, and the charm of an extraordinary gentleness. He was always just Ernest Dowson. It was a delightful person to be." (p.69)

Along the way Adams paints an fascinating picture of 1890's life in London (and Paris), and of the small select 'decadent' movement to which Dowson belonged. We also get to meet many famous contemporaries with whom he rubbed shoulders - notably Oscar Wilde, W.B.Yeats, Aubrey Beardsley and Frank Harris.

Adams charts Dowson's all-too-brief artistic flowering and untimely decline in unflinching detail. Tortured by courtly yearnings for unnattainable young love, condemned by tubercular consumption, and self-propelled by dissolute drinking which made him uncharacteristically fractious and boorish, Dowson's doomed trajectory never really deviated. Rather, he appeared to accept and even embrace his fate without a trace of self-pity. Dowson's many kindly-disposed friends and associates did make efforts to intervene, but rewriting his life script proved as futile as Shakespeare trying to engineer a happy ending for Romeo or Juliet. Dowson's final days were indeed pitiful and the reader is not spared some truly heartrending reading.

There runs through all Dowson's poetry a profound understanding of love, loss and the frailty of life. Its melancholic essence is no better conveyed than in the poignant poems which Frederick Delius set to music -'Cynara' and 'Songs of Sunset'. Bittersweet works which I reliably lose myself in whenever I listen to them; much as I lost myself in this wonderful book.

[Isidore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A succinct and vivid biography of poor, doomed, brilliant Dowson, whose life turns out to have been even more wretched than one would have guessed from his exquisitely unhappy poems.

Adams has diligently tracked down every surviving reminiscence by Dowson's peers (which included Yeats and Wilde) on which to base his account, and mostly he spares the reader his notions of what the poems might "mean".

Parenthetically, from time to time Dowson resembles a haunted protagonist in a Lovecraft story:

"Dowson told him that he was afraid to enter the room in the hotel near the Gare Montparnasse where he lived for nameless horrors obsessed him. Sherard recounted that there was 'a statue on his mantelpiece which filled him with terror, "I lie awake at night and watch it," he said, "I know that one night it means to come down off its shelf and strangle me."''"

—and—

"Hopkins said he became an occasional companion of Dawson's, sometimes walking round with him and playing a game they called Blind Chivvy which consisted of finding short cuts from one part of London to another by way of the alleys and byways which abounded in the city before it was remodelled in the mid-twentieth century by the Blitz and the planners. Hopkins tells the story of their encounter with a sinister character whom they met in a bar and later observed entering the house where Dowson lodged, 152 Euston Road, opposite St. Pancras church. Dowson would not stay under the same roof as the man and so went home with Hopkins to Crouch End. . . . Hopkins recounts that the man died in the lodging house leaving no possessions but a bag of soft earth or mould. Dawson, he said, told him that the stranger's name was Lazarus and 'that mould in the bag was graveyard mould.'"

[Philip Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ernest Dowson, a friend of Oscar Wilde and an important, although often overlooked poet from the Victorian Decadent era.

My interest in Dowson began after seeing fresh flowers on his grave, a 110 year old grave where all around his had been forgotten. So I looked him up on Wikipedia and now, well I'm hooked. His poetry is arguably some of the most important lyrics of his time, and was considered by some a 'genius' including Oscar Wilde.

He died penniless, sleeping on a friends sofa in pain physically, and emotionally tortured (both his parents committed suicide, and the only girl he ever loved, did not feel the same about him). He died of 'consumption' at the age of 32, when he should have been in his prime.

This book has only fed my fire to find out more about Dowson, and to read his works.

The Author, Jad Adams manages to bring to life the Decedent Era, and also, and which I found very useful, was to be very honest, and realistic. He obviously researched the subject in great detail.

An amazing poet, a tragic life (perhaps that is why his poetry is so powerful?) and through this book Adams gives an authentic insight into the era, and into the life of Ernest Dowson

[Philip Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ernest Dowson, a friend of Oscar Wilde and an important, although often overlooked poet from the Victorian Decadent era.

My interest in Dowson began after seeing fresh flowers on his grave, a 110 year old grave where all around his had been forgotten. So I looked him up on Wikipedia and now, well I'm hooked. His poetry is arguably some of the most important lyrics of his time, and was considered by some a 'genius' including Oscar Wilde.

He died penniless, sleeping on a friends sofa in pain physically, and emotionally tortured (both his parents committed suicide, and the only girl he ever loved, did not feel the same about him). He died of 'consumption' at the age of 32, when he should have been in his prime.

This book has only fed my fire to find out more about Dowson, and to read his works.

The Author, Jad Adams manages to bring to life the Decedent Era, and also, and which I found very useful, is very honest, and realistic. He obviously researched the subject in great detail.

An amazing poet, a tragic life (perhaps that is why his poetry is so powerful?) and through this book Adams gives an authentic insight into the era, and into the life of Ernest Dowson.

[Paul Helliwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

madder music, stronger wine continues to go well.

well not so for victorian decadent poet ernest dowson who continues to drink himself to death. the fortunate (or unfortunate) thing is that he finds writing poetry easy - you know his lines (or the lines influenced by him); days of wine and roses, gone with the wind.

here he is. an influence on t.s.eliot (and that's probably how people now know him).

now dowson, and his poetry, feature in michael moorcock's 'the dancers at the end of time' trilogy (I am a low-brow pleb really, this is where I heard of him).

however, there are surprisingly few english decadents so anything on them is probably worth reading.

[Bill Chamberlain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ernest Dowson was, at his best, a superb lyric poet. Ironically enough, he cared more for his prose than poetry.

Dowson also makes for a haunting study of poetry and self-destruction.

Adams’ book is very insightful - puts Dowson’s troubled mind and soul under a microscope.

This book would likely be very interesting for anyone who enjoys reading about the “decadent period.”

[The Literary Chick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully written biography,but it did seem to drag in the end.