Books: Satan’s Fra Angelica

BEARDSLEY by Stanley Weinfraub. 285 pages. Braziller. $6.

Aubrey Beardsley was so extravagantly foppish, so precious in his speech and so languid in his posturings that Oscar Wilde claimed him as his own invention. In fact, Beardsley had invented himself. He deliberately set out to create his reputation for decadent eccentricity, and his extraordinary style was a clear forerunner of art nouveau.

The big Beardsley revival, in exhibitions, reprints of his works, and books, is explained partly by the fact that he is admired by the practitioners of “psychedelic art,” most of whom imitate him without drawing nearly so well.

He was a frail, tuberculous stalk of a fellow with a hatchet face crowned on a high dome with an inverted bowl of reddish hair cut in bangs. He liked to invite friends early to a party to help him “scent the flowers.” He was happiest “when the lamps of the town are lit,” and held forth at Soho cafes, bantering with other wits of the day. “Nero,” he said once, “set Christians on fire like large tallow candles”; then he added wickedly that this was “the only light Christians were ever known to give.”

Body into Dress. Biographer Weintraub (T. E. Lawrence, William Golding) evokes the life and times of Beardsley in splendid fashion, but presumably feels that he lacks the competence to weigh the man’s art. Beardsley’s exquisitely wrought line drawings embraced a vision of some unearthly world—part pagan myth, part Oriental mystery. It was a world inhabited by satyrs and hermaphrodites, dwarfs and dandies, by women either ornamentally angular and boyish or monstrously fat and corrupt. Often they were nude or seminude, but their bodies seemed merely part of their fantastically elaborate dress. His illustrations for such works as Wilde’s Salome, Malory’s Morte d’ Arthur and Aristophanes’ Lyslstrata were likely to include elegant versions of whippings and other aberrations; they shocked the Victorian age while also appealing strongly to the lively pornographic and demonic subculture that flourished in London and Paris. One critic called Beardsley the “Fra Angelico of Satanism.” A handsome compliment, but slightly exaggerated. He suggested an elegant imp as much as a Satanic friar.

Rumored Guilt. Beardsley was born in Brighton. His father was a blade who soon squandered a small inheritance; his mother, Ellen Pitt, a Brighton belle, was so slender that she was known locally as “the bottomless Pitt.” For a while, young Beardsley was employed as an inept clerk in an insurance firm run by a relative, who was nearly as happy as Aubrey when the boy deserted business for art. But that career was nearly wrecked by Oscar Wilde as a consequence of Wilde’s own notorious homosexual liaison with Lord Alfred Douglas. Though Beardsley’s name was not even mentioned in the court proceedings, the fact that he had been a known friend of Wilde’s was enough to get him fired as the Yellow Book’s art director and virtually blacklisted. He was rumored to be guilty of just about every sexual deviation, including incest (with his actress sister Mabel) and homosexuality.

Whether he was or not can never be shown conclusively. Author Weintraub thinks that Beardsley’s tuberculous condition and his consuming passion for work left him little time and less stamina for dalliance. Bernard Shaw shrewdly noted that Beardsley was “boyish enough to pose as a diabolical reveler in vices of which he was innocent.”

Beardsley himself told a friend: “Yes, yes, I look like a sodomite, but no, I am not that.”

After the Wilde-Douglas episode, Beardsley gradually made a comeback, but his career and life were tottering toward an end. He still drew by candlelight in a darkened room, working furiously because he knew that he was doomed by his lungs. He moved from London to the softer climate of Dieppe and finally to the French Riviera. His sister had become a Roman Catholic, and Beardsley, in terror of death, soon followed. In a last letter, written in “my death agony,” he begged his publisher to destroy all his “obscene drawings,” particularly his series on Lysistrata, but the letter was never mailed. In 1898 he died, aged 25.

Audacious Whispers. Beardsley’s figures often seem to be whispering audacious obscenities to each other. What they might be saying is suggested by his only novel, Under the Hill, which employs a curious mixture of four-letter words and effete and esoteric Gallicisms. Recently published by Grove Press ($3.95), the novel is Beardsley’s pornographic retelling of the Tannhauser legend. Beardsley never completed the book, but the final quarter has been written according to his plan by Canadian Poet John Glassco. His work ably mimics Beardsley’s writing, giving credence to Glassco’s boast that “the prose may be imitated but never the drawings.” He is right. The text is less remarkable than the illustrations-among them a portrait of Venus in a startling likeness of Jacqueline Kennedy.

What is most startling about the drawings is that they were the work of an eager young man in his twenties and not a mature artist surfeited with life and pleasure. But perhaps Beardsley was born ancient; one friend recalled that, even as a child, Beardsley had “the oldest eyes I have ever seen.”