Decadent Constantinople: Symons, Flecker, and Nicolson

Abstract

This article examines the work of three British writers – Arthur Symons, James Elroy Flecker, and Harold Nicolson – who all spent time in Constantinople in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on the Decadent literary aesthetic, they registered their distaste for a city then synonymous with decline. In their poetry, impressionistic prose, and fiction they struggle to write about a city that seemed so amenable to a literature of exhaustion and decay. I argue that the work of Symons and Flecker reveals something like a limit point to the development of literary Decadence. Rather than be a vehicle for affective, cosmopolitan community, Decadence encouraged solipsism and melancholy, a legacy that lives on in literary modernism. Their exhausted Decadence is then satirised by Nicolson who sees late-Victorian aestheticism as ill-equipped to deal with the geopolitical complexities of the city by the Bosphorus.