HUYSMANS, Jorris Karl. Against the Grain [À Rebours]. Translated from the French by John Howard. Introduction by Havelock Ellis.

HUYSMANS, Jorris Karl. Against the Grain [À Rebours]. Translated from the French by John Howard. Introduction by Havelock Ellis. New York: Lieber & Lewis. 1922.

8vo. Original black cloth, spine and front board lettered in gilt, publisher’s device blind-stamped to rear board, top edge stained orange, with the original dust jacket; pp. xiii, [2], 16-331, [1], with frontispiece “Des Esseintes” after an original by Odilon Redon; spine and extremities of dust jacket darkened, spine sunned, else a near-fine copy.

First edition in English, a remarkably well-preserved copy in the rare dust jacket.

First published in French in 1884, À Rebours quickly became a literary landmark of the Decadent and Aesthetic movement. The novel follows Jean des Esseintes, a neurotic, reclusive aristocrat who abandons society in favour of an obsessive pursuit of artifice and sensory experience. With its radical rejection of realism and its exaltation of individual taste, À Rebours became the manifesto of the Decadent movement.

Huysmans’ novel, originally issued in yellow wrappers, gained lasting notoriety across the Channel thanks to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The “poisonous French novel”, bound in yellow wrappers and given to Dorian by Lord Henry, is widely understood to be À Rebours, a connection confirmed in Richard Ellmann’s biography. In this edition, Wilde’s passage in Dorian Gray is excerpted on the front panel of the dust jacket. À Rebours also gave its name to The Yellow Book, the British literary quarterly that became synonymous with decadence and aestheticism in the 1890s.

This 1922 edition, introduced by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), presents a somewhat abridged text. The first complete English translation appeared in 1926 from the press of the Parisian publishers Groves & Michaux.

See Oscar Wilde’s Love Affair with À Rebours, Columbia College Chicago – Oscar Wilde and British Aestheticism, online.

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