Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“AUBREY BEARDSLEY – A Biography” by Matthew Sturgis (First published 1998)
I have never been fixated on the late-19th-century phenomenon known as “the decadence” in the arts, but in the 12-or-so years that this blog has been a going concern, I have given accounts of works from the “the decadence” a number of times. On this blog you will find analyses of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ dandy novel A Rebours (Against the Grain) and his lurch into Satanism La-Bas ( Down There), French works which inspired “decadent” British writers. You will also find Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurian, a call to pure aestheticism. Then there is Chad Adams’ Madder Music, Stronger Wine – The Life of Ernest Dowson, a wrenching biography of the dissolute, self-destructive “decadent” poet. And there is an account of the very camp writer Frederick Rolfe, who styled himself Baron Corvo, A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo . There is also George Moore's self-conscious and dandy-ish memoir Confessions of a Young Man, where Moore seems to be dabbling in "decadence" before opting for Zola-esque grim realism. Stretching a point I could also include Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, even if it is written more in a spirit of fun, although Beerbohm himself was a son of the “decadence”. Oddly, though, I have never reviewed a biography of Oscar Wilde, the best-known author of British “decadence”, even if I have read the three biographies of him that sit on my shelves. But I have reviewed here Thomas Wright’s interesting tale of the books Wilde read, called Oscar’s Books and I have corralled together what I think are the best short poems of Oscar Wilde’s Poetry . In short, while in no way an expert on fin-de-siecle art and literature, I am reasonably well-versed in it.
But, for some reason, I never got around to reading a biography of the artist who for many was the essence of English “decadence”. I refer to Matthew Sturgis’s Aubrey Beardsley – A Biography, which had sat, unread, on my shelves since I acquired in it the year it was first published, 1998. Only last month did I find the time to sit down and read it, and I’m glad I did. Not only is Matthew Sturgis very even-handed in his judgements, but he presents Aubrey Beardsley “in the round”, delving into all sides of his connections and personality, all the changing phases of his art, all his passing enthusiasms and all the judgements, fair or unfair, that were made upon him. In short, this account of Aubrey Beardsley seems to me to be definitive.
The arc of his life is very simple. Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) died in his 26th year – that is, like John Keats and Wilfrid Owen, he died when he was 25. His whole professional career as an artist was crammed into six years. It is interesting to note that he came from a shaky middle-class family – his father, Vincent Beardsley, was a ne’re-do-well who lost money more than he made it and who often deserted the family, sometimes leaving them to survive on the charity of wealthier relatives. Aubrey’s mother Ellen was the backbone of the family and Aubrey always got on very well with his sister Mabel who also had artistic leanings but who made her career as an actress. For various reasons Aubrey and Mabel were sent to Brighton to live with a wealthy grand-aunt. When the boy was about seven he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, the disease that would life-long plague him and that eventually killed him. Because Aubrey was lean, horsey-faced and with long bony fingers, it has often been assumed that he was very tall. In fact this was an illusion. Matthew Sturgis reports that he was average height – about 5 foot 8 inches.
For somebody who was physically weak and clearly a bit of an introvert, it is interesting to note that he got on very well at the Brighton Grammar School to which he was sent. Even the athletic types liked him and enjoyed the school plays he wrote and produced as well as the school-boyish poems he wrote for the school magazine and the caricatures that he often drew. One of his school-time pals was Charles Cochran who, many years later, became a well-known theatrical impresario. But when Aubrey left school aged 16, he had to go back to London and support his mother and sister as a clerk in an insurance company. Often his tuberculosis worsened and he took to his bed, avidly reading French literature (especially Balzac). For a short while he abandoned his drawing and took to writing but, while still toiling as a clerk, he discovered the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and switched back to drawing.
In this biography, Matthew Sturgis give a very comprehensive account of the art movements that were vying with each other in England in the 1880s and 1890s. On the one hand, there was the persistence of the Pre-Raphaelites, now championed by Burne-Jones and [in a way] William Morris. On the other, there was the influence of French Impressionism which, in England, was championed by the (very quarrelsome) American-born James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley was at first attracted to the Pre-Raphaelites and, at the age of 18, approached Burne-Jones, who was very encouraging about his sketches.
Beardsley tried to work out an aesthetic of his own. He was very influenced by the critical writings of Whistler, of Oscar Wilde, and of George Moore, but he was even more interested in the work of French writers – Huysmans, Baudelaire, Verlaine. He took on as one of his icons – appearing in much of his artwork - the image of the sad Pierrot. As Sturgis writes, the revival of the Pierrot figure “became in the hands of the late nineteenth-century poets and dramatists a symbol of the alienated artist consigned to life’s margins and consoling himself with doomed love and art.” (Chapter 3) But Sturgis also notes that Beardsley struggled to find his own style “The varied elements of Beardsley’s interest – Burne-Jones and Whistler, Mantegna and Pierrot, medieval romances and French novels, church furnishings and opera boxes – struggled to adjust themselves. As yet they remained disparate. He sampled them in turn , but lacked the artistic personality and the technical ability to synthesise them into something new and personal.” (Chapter 3)
It was only when he took evening classes at the Westminster School of Art that he began to find his own style and he was greatly encouraged by Fred Brown and Walter Crane to use the pen rather than the pencil and to concentrate on lines – thus the beginning of Beardsley’s very linear, black-and-white art. He was rebuffed by William Morris but, interested by Japanese motifs, he at last found his own style: what he called the art of “large black blots”. He understood that the people he depicted were, like him, thin, angular and morbid. In the 1890s, new methods of reproducing black-and-white images in newspapers and magazines chimed perfectly with Beardsley’s aesthetic. Aged about 20 he began to get commissions to illustrate books. His first commission was for an edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. His illustrations were widely admired (but panned by William Morris), yet Beardsley never completed the commission.
Now able to earn a reasonable income, he gave up clerking and got paid-and-regular work at a cheap newspaper called the Pall Mall Budget but, says Matthew Sturgis, what he was required to contribute were simply school-boyish caricatures, unlike his more serious work. But then came the commission that made him famous – or infamous. The publisher John Lane asked him to illustrate an edition of Oscar Wilde’s banned play (banned in England – not in France) Salome, which included his notorious image of Salome kissing the decapitated head of John the Baptist on a platter. Just as they had condemned the works of Degas, the “philistines” condemned such blasphemous images. Other critics saw Beardsley’s work as leaning too much on Burne-Jones and Japanese style. Sturgis remarks that, when Beardsley thought himself into the Salome project, he “placed his figures on stark white backgrounds and dispensing almost entirely with the fringed border effect, used only a few lines to describe forms and evoke the fall of drapery.” (Chapter 5) You could say that Aubrey Beardsley was one of the first to understand that less could mean more.
It was only at this time that Beardsley first met Oscar Wilde who, with typical self-aggrandisement, described Beardsley as “the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.” (quoted Chapter 5) What is interesting here is that, despite the way Beardsley has been paired with Wilde, Beardsley genuinely disliked Wilde and tried to avoid him. This had little to do with his sexual orientation. As Sturgis has remarked earlier, Beardsley had been introduced to the homosexual group headed by Robbie Ross, and he was interested in “the camp argot with which [this] circle expressed their views. He was attracted to the homosexual milieu, with its extravagant phraseology, it self-deprecating wit, and its obsession with surface. Without committing himself sexually, he learnt the language and studied the pose.” (Chapter 4) But Sturgis says Beardsley could just as well be regarded as asexual. His tuberculosis meant he had recurrent bouts of weakness, no sexual intercourse and it is clear that he died a virgin. [Sturgis emphasises this in Chapter 6]. When it came to Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley found him to be a patronising, self-obsessed show-off. Of course, once his fame was established, Beardsley mingled with Wilde’s group and got to know the likes of Max Beerbohm, Sickert, Steinbock et al. But he always steered clear of Wilde and (the sometime pornographer) Frank Harris. Very slyly, Beardsley included mocking images of Wilde in the illustrations of Salome. Says Sturgis “Wilde was au fond a sentimental romantic. Beardsley looked through the purple haze of sentimentality, and adopted the cynic’s view. Illness had made him old beyond his years, and his mind was attracted to the sharp lines of wit and reason. As a mutual friend noted ‘Oscar loved purple and gold, Aubrey put everything down in black and white’.” (Chapter 5) Quite apart from his “serious” artwork, Beardsley also circulated a crude caricature of Wilde, mocking him as a charlatan who stole his ideas from other people’s books.
In 1894, Beardsley and his friend Henry Harland proposed to John Lane a new serial publication of art and literature to be called The Yellow Book, with Beardsley as art editor and Harland as literary editor. It was specifically agreed, at Beardsley’s insistence, that Oscar Wilde would always be excluded from it. However John Lane refused to run an essay by Max Beerbohm mocking Wilde. By this stage, Beardsley was as much feted for his designs of street posters as for his illustrations. Once again, the “philistines” denounced The Yellow Book as decadent, ugly or obscene, but the first run sold out so that additional runs had to be printed. It made Lane, Harland and Beardsley comfortably off and Beardsley now became a celebrity (Sturgis calls it “the Beardsley boom”). The artist was lionised, but kept faith with his old insurance company friends by inviting them to his soirees. Now he sometimes affected dandyish style. (Oscar Wilde kept out of all this and made scathing comments about Beardsley in his private correspondence.) Meanwhile comic journals like Punch and newspapers had a field day, referring to him with such witty names as “Awfully Weirdsley” etc.
Beardsley and his sister Mabel were captivated by a season of Wagner operas in London, and he declared that he was going to write a novel about Venus and Tannhauser – but the novel (eventually called Under the Hill), half dandy-and-baroque erotic posturing with a touch of pornography, was never finished. Though (or because) he was a virgin, Beardsley’s brain became fevered with sex and many of the sexual or erotic images he now produced were, says Sturgis, deliberately provocative, making a direct attack on Victorian attitudes to sex. “Beardsley’s campaign was insidious: sex pullutated from every stroke of his pen. It was sex not allied to conventional beauty but to unconventional ugliness.” (Chapter 6) Beardsley refuted the suggestion that his work was satirical and insisted that he was depicting reality. His notoriety boosted his fame.
Many British literary figures had earned money by undertaking lecture tours in the USA (Dickens, Thackeray, Wilde). A lecture tour was mooted for Beardsley as his work had become known in America. But he was too ill to undertake such a tour. He and his sister Mabel consoled themselves by attending the premieres of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. (Beardsley might have loathed the man, but he admired the work.) Unfortunately, this was shortly before Wilde’s reputation collapsed as his private life was exposed. In 1895 Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel for sodomy. Unfortunately for Beardsley, Wilde was arrested with a copy of “a yellow book” (it was a French novel) but this was mis-reported in the press as The Yellow Book, so Beardsley was again paired with Wilde in the popular imagination as “he inherited a deleterious and enduring association with a type of criminalised vice which, though it may have amused his imagination, had never dictated his actions.” (Chapter 7) Fearing for his own reputation, John Lane cancelled Beardsley’s art work for the 5th issue of The Yellow Book and sacked him as art editor (The Yellow Book continued for another nine issues before it ceased to be published.). Despite this, Beardsley still got many commissions and he did work for another periodical, The Savoy, published by Leonard Smithers (a very dodgy publisher and bookseller who thrived on under-the-counter pornography).
Taking a long break in France, Beardsley indulged in much drunkenness and some flirting with women, including one serious – but chaste – liaison. Sometimes he smoked opium and he ran into other English “decadents” including Ernest Dowson who disgusted him with his “shambolic manner, lack of dress sense, and apparent ignorance of personal hygiene”. Beardsley complained “that it was unfair to inflict such a shabby and malodorous figure on a smart restaurant.” (Chapter 8) He stayed for a while in Paris, working hard at illustrations for a de luxe edition of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, but by mid-1896 he was rapidly becoming an invalid and had to be escorted back to London. Even though he was very ill, he completed with dispatch his illustrations for an edition of Lysistrata and for Juvenal’s Satire Against Women. These were the most priapic, most sadistic, most overtly erotic images he every produced, the most notorious being the illustration for Lysistrata showing three sex-starved men brandishing their gargantuan swollen penises.
By this stage he was being eaten away by tuberculosis and was bed-ridden for months. He made a will, leaving everything to his sister Mabel. Yet he still worked feverishly, although most of his projects were unfulfilled. He now suffered much haemorrhaging and was repeatedly sent to coastal residences where the air was meant to do him good. To an interviewer he said “How can a man die better than by doing just what he wants to do most? It has been bad enough to be an invalid, but to be a slave to one’s lungs and to be… sniffing sea breezes and pine breezes with the mistaken idea that it will prolong one’s existence, seems to me to be utter foolishness.” (Quoted Chapter 8)
He returned to France seeking warmth and sea air. In Paris his work was greatly admired, with not one whiff of “scandal”, and he met with such bohemian-decadents as the crazy Alfred Jarry. At Dieppe he bumped into Oscar Wilde, released from prison and now living under a nomme de guerre. They seem to have spoken cordially. He moved south to Menton and still worked on some projects, including an illustrated version of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, but the ending was near.
Beardsley had always been interested in churches and their decoration, but his interest in churches was not only aesthetic. He was always religious and worshipped in High-Church - or “Anglo-Catholic” - Anglican churches. For years he was mentored by the High-Church Anglican priest Alfred Gurney. But as his end approached, he did what so many British “decadents” did (Oscar Wilde, his nasty boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, who became a Catholic priest, and others). He converted to Catholicism and was received into the Catholic Church by the Jesuit priest David Bearne. For some time he resided in the village of St. Germaine-en-Laye, frequently ministered to by another Jesuit priest Fr. Henri. Given the nature of some of his artwork, some were sceptical of Beardsley’s conversion, but Sturgis declares “The sincerity of Beardsley’s conversion is beyond doubt. It was attested to by those who knew him well; even Lionel Johnson, a fellow convert who might have been disposed to doubt, was convinced.” (Chapter 9) It is probable that his sister Mabel was a great influence on Aubrey. She had become a Catholic a year or so before he did. In his new state of grace, Aubrey Beardsley regretted some of his work and sent letters to his publishers begging that all his “obscene” images be destroyed. His pleas were ignored.
Beardsley died on 16 March 1898. He was lamented most in France and in Germany, where his work had been acclaimed and applauded. Back in England, many obituaries of him were still chastising. It is pleasant to learn that the pornographer Smithers went bankrupt and lost all his copyrights. Mabel died in 1912. W. B. Yeats – who was on the fringes of the “decadence” that Beardsley knew - wrote a sequence of poems on her called “Upon a Dying Lady”. Ellen Beardsley outlived both her children and died in 1932.
That is the story of Beardsley in a rather cramped nutshell. But what of the really important thing – the art? There is always something precious in fin-de-siecle “decadent” art (as opposed to the more robust Impressionism). In Beardsley’s art there are always those over-dressed women of the court or the ball, often those enticing bare breasts, those sad Pierrots, those men in buttons-and-bows costumes that would be impossible to wear in reality, those dwarves and cherubs and (let alone the ropier erotic stuff) those grotesques. A little of such images goes a long way. And yet the penmanship is superb. The clear lineation is dazzling. The starkly contrasted black and white is genius. Let’s be magnanimous. In his chosen style, Beardsley was unique and a great artist. And the fact that he achieved all he did in a mere six years, under the debilitating curse of tuberculosis, says much for his fortitude and dedication to his craft.
Obnoxious Footnote: I have on my shelves a copy of Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished novel Under the Hill, as presented by Paris-based Olympia Press, long-time purveyors of soft porn for intellectuals. A hack writer “completes” the novel in this edition. I read it some years ago, expecting some titillation. But my tits weren’t -illated. It was overwritten and fearfully boring. Yesterday’s scandal often ends up as today’s yawn.
Pedantic Footnote: In the 1950s, John Betjeman wrote a witty poem called "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel". It depicts Wilde talking languidly with Robbie Ross before the police burst in and arrest him. However, it makes the mistake of having Wilde reading The Yellow Book at the crucial moment, and this is exactly NOT what he was reading, as Sturgis's biography of Aubrey Beardsley attests.
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