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A My friend’s mother once told me that for several years in the 1980s – when the Conservatives were fighting with the miners and spent late at night on Marxist-feminist groups reading – she wore almost every day a uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. On her wedding day she broke her habit and wore a dress that she had bought, at great cost to her, which was fun, sensual and, although she never used these words, proud. The following week at the school where he was teaching, he saw his co-worker wearing it. “Nice clothes,” he said. The friend replied: “It’s good for work, but I wouldn’t wear it.” outside.”
I found myself recalling this legend while reading Jack Parlett’s ethnographic history of our canoe push attempt. Any effort is to be shamed, to be seen as foolish or hopeless. One way to avoid these charges is to use lighthearted or sarcastic humor. Parlett finds examples of this in Oscar Wilde and what the cultural critic Susan Sontag once described as camp, a worldview concerned with art and performance. Although Flamboyance is not a problem, it is clear that its author sees something missing in this practice of grooming. This book is presented as an alternative; Parlett offers flamboyance as an example of how to live a life that not only ignites “the power of opposition” but “puts politics back into the picture”. In practice, this means that he has little patience for the idea of art for art’s sake; he insists, for example, that there is no understanding of flamenco without understanding the history of fascism in Spain.
Although mainly concerned with the culture of homosexual men in English-speaking countries, Flamboyance makes many philosophical points about the importance of honesty, love and political commitment. The term, Parlett tells us, comes from an architectural metaphor. Flamboyance, from the French verb fieryto burn, in the 1800s it was used in a very interesting way to describe how the gothic churches of the 15th century lived in their churches decorated like flames rising to the sky. He suggests that there is something embedded in the image, though it takes a bit of work to see the connection. He said: “Maybe I wouldn’t have shouted ‘kill’ on the stones around the windows of the village church.
Moving between the low and high pages, Parlett observes that William Morris, whose vivid flower pictures have helped define the English style, “was more like a candidate for change on a show like Queer Eye” than one of his admirers. The point, which has been made with a little favor, is that pride has nothing to do with external appearances but rather, as he writes in the last chapter, “what precedes the show… the hard work we do behind the scenes”.
This makes his book a radical vision of flamboyance, an ideology whose intentions are best understood in the memoir sections. There he describes his struggle with alcoholism and his gradual realization that it is possible to “find fulfillment without the help of addiction”. Read in light of these revelations, it’s hard not to see Flamboyance as a larger metaphor for alcoholism and the author’s hope to find a way to deal with it, rather than withdrawing from his life.
Unfortunately, the connection with cultural history is weakly established, and this makes the discussion of art, literature and film uninspiring. On top of this, the spread of the spread can sometimes be too wide: Wilde, flamenco, the murdered rapper of the 1990s Big L, Frank O’HaraLil Nas X and Donald Trump both enter. Often times, these passages are held more in context than in argument. In another dense region we are leaving the “brightest tree” of Madagascar. Delonix is directing to Proust’s protagonists’ love of flowers, to the word pansy as a slur, before arriving at Derek Jarman’s garden. Despite these weaknesses, Parlett succeeds in introducing a group of writers, artists, dancers and musicians who know a lot. This means that, while there is a lot to go through in Flamboyance, there is also a lot to learn.
Flamboyance: The Art of Burning Brightly by Jack Parlett published by Granta (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your book from guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.
