Dandy in the Underworld

Sebastian said at US Customs, "I have nothing to declare but Oscar Wilde's genius." They wouldn't let him into the country. Read this book, and you'll find plenty of genius--Oscar Wilde's that is. Horsley, or more appropriately, Whoresley, is irreverent, illogical, and funny as all get out. Put down that yellow lilly, and pick up this book.

"I am not a writer. I am a performer. Writing is merely a way of bringing myself to the notice of the world." Thus says Englishman Sebastian Horsley, and he certainly got my notice in _Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorized Autobiography_ (Harper Perennial), although reading it is often like the horrific roadside crash you cannot take your eyes off. A reader cannot help thinking that this is yet another fake memoir; it is just too weird, too incredible, even if it were written by an actual dandy, bisexual, drug-addicted, self-obsessed, obsessive-compulsive, libertine artist. As far as I can tell, Horsley really exists, and really has had the adventures recalled here, although if he has exaggerated some for comic effect that is the least of his sins. If you want to read a memoir by an addict who has grueling tales of the overpowering effects of drugs and the profound misery that they can cause, but you don't want to be made miserable, check this out. Horsley is hilarious. He jokes on every page, witty puns and turns of phrases that simultaneously counter and highlight any grimness in his story. He may borrow (nay, steal) a phrase from Oscar Wilde or Quentin Crisp, but this is a compellingly original memoir, strange, revolting, funny, and self-serving by turns. "If you can't brag about doing something well," he advises, "then brag about doing it badly. At any rate, brag." He has taken to heart his own advice. In a chapter which is the apology for the dandy's life ("Mein Camp"), Horsley lists gloves, shirts ("I devoted myself to their design"), hats, and suits of all colors, and let's just give you the ones that were pink: "Soft pink, hard pink, petal pink, shell pink, shocking pink, even more shocking pink, flaming pink, salmon pink, prawn-cocktail pink, spam pink. In the pink pink." He enjoyed something like a thousand prostitutes. His drug-soaked days and nights are described specifically, and with his superb choice of descriptive detail, Horsley gives an idea of the attractions of drug use as well as the rot it causes. There were various descents into hopelessness and degradation, including disastrous stints in drug rehab, which he describes with the zingy humor that infuses even the book's darkest pages. In this strange book are two extraordinary sections that would seem to have no place in it. One is Horsley's adventures in diving to find the great white shark. The other is that he got himself crucified. He went to the Philippines in 2000 for the annual Good Friday crucifixions, "a seething, chaotic, blood-spattered circus in which the profoundest devotion and the most avid entrepreneurship meet." It was part of his artistic suffering and (though he has profound disdain for religion) part of his admiration for Christ, who "... after all, had profound style. He was the ultimate dandy... All great stylists borrow a lot from the wardrobe of Christ - everything in fact except those dreadful clothes." Horsley was invited t

I LOVE this book. Every line is a beautifully chosen combination of humor, pain and gut-shredding honesty and the author throws in numerous wonderful games with the language. I couldn't wait to find out what mischief Sebastian would get into next and how he would ride through the repercussions. For anyone who has aspired to much and accomplished little, this is a Bible of hope.

Seeing mention of Horsley's being denied entry to the US by our insane regime led me to recall some amusing piece of his in the British press and I picked up this book on a whim. Dry British accounts of depravity are common enough, but I was not prepared for this very well written and touchingly sincere account of such fundamental perversity. Mr. Horsley may declare himself a useless Dandy, but this book made me blow coffee through my nose and that is useful indeed....

Horsley, Sebastian, "Dandy in the Underworld", Harper Perennial, 2008. " A Masterpiece of Filth" Amos Lassen Brian Ferry has called Sebastian Horsely's "Dandy in the Underworld" a masterpiece of filth and that it is, Yet the filth is well written and very, very interesting. It is funny, strange and somewhat upsetting in its perversity, The underlying idea of Horsley is to take one's lifestyle and raise it to uselessness. Horsely seems doomed from the start, His parents were both ridiculous and terrible. They abused each other, they drank, and they divorced and married other people. Because his mother fell in love with the concept of suicide, Sebastian was sent off to boarding school and there he founded a punk band and discovered drugs and sex. After he finished boarding school, he enrolled in art school, had a bad marriage and became friends with a convicted murderer. He had sex with everyone as he yearned for attention. Then there were the prostitutes on whom he says he spent one hundred pounds sterling and another one hundred thousand on crack. And heroin also enters the picture and he ended up in rehab but learns that his self-creation was little more than an act of revenge against his father. Sebastian discovers how to become self-aware and begins to hate the body he has destroyed through drugs but always loves money because of the power that it brings. He also falls in love with himself and goes as far as to state that having a girlfriend would cause him to be unfaithful to himself. In a strange turn of events, Horsely went to the Philippines where he was crucified and thereby became infamous in London, His crucifixion, he claims, was an artistic statement and an attempt to break the limits of life. There are few words to describe Sebastian Horsely. He was an artist and a junkie, a misogynist, a narcissist, a bon vivant and a sexual deviant. He is now nearly bankrupt having wasted his family's fortune on "pleasure" and he had a very strange life. In the style of Quentin Crisp, George Gordon, Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde, he was a "dandy".