Aubrey Beardsley – { feuilleton }

The Greenwood Faun

Arthur Machen isn’t usually considered to be a Decadent author even though it was in the Mauve Decade of the 1890s that he first established himself as a writer. Machen knew Oscar Wilde well enough to recount an anecdote in later life, and two of Machen’s earliest books were published with covers designed by Aubrey Beardsley. But Machen outlived Wilde and Beardsley and all the other writers and artists who expired prematurely around the turn of the century, while Machen’s 20th-century stories are now so enmeshed with the evolution of weird fiction that the world of the weird has claimed him as one of its own.

The Greenwood Faun is a novel by Nina Antonia which plays with both these phases of Arthur Machen’s career. This is a ghost story to some degree, in which the shade of Decadent poet Lionel Johnson wanders the streets of London in various stages of corporeality, as well as a tale of the dysfunctional Hartington Leacock-Jones family whose entanglements with a mysterious book—The Greenwood Faun by Lucian Taylor—comprise the main substance of the novel. Machen aficionados will recognise Lucian Taylor as being the central character of Machen’s semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams, a detail which makes Antonia’s story a novel about a novel from a novel.

It’s never entirely clear how the world of The Greenwood Faun manages to have Arthur Machen in it as the author of a novel called The Hill of Dreams while also containing the central character from that novel whose death has occurred before the story begins. The important element is Lucian Taylor’s unpublished book, discovered in manuscript form then printed in a limited edition (books like these are always limited editions) with faun-embossed boards and pages that exude a sylvan fragrance. Jorge Luis Borges would have enjoyed the intertextuality—he enjoyed inventing books, and also enjoyed Arthur Machen’s writing—which is paralleled to a small degree by Alan Moore’s The Great When in which we find another book from a Machen story—A London Walk by the Reverend Thomas Hampole—manifesting in the real world. (This isn’t to suggest any influence; Antonia’s book was first published in 2017.) The Greenwood Faun extends a fateful influence over the Hartington Leacock-Jones family, either chiming sympathetically with those receptive to its magical charm or repulsing those whose characters are blind to its visionary qualities. Roger, the oldest of the trio of siblings, is a worldly materialist who remains immune to the spell of the book, whereas Conrad, his dreamy younger brother, is a poète maudit in embryo, equally responsive to the lure of the novel and to the romantic seductions of the ghostly Lionel Johnson. The thorn in this world is Giles Gorse, a literary critic soon to be married to Violet, the brothers’ sister. Gorse has his own designs on The Greenwood Faun, seeing the novel as something he can republish as his own, if only the book would behave more like a book and less like an object endowed with magical life.

Nina Antonia’s novel is a treat for Decadent enthusiasts, littered with references and borrowings from the Mauve Decade, and to writers like Saki and Ronald Firbank who carried its spirit into the 20th century. Saki is a good match for Machen even though one of Saki’s most memorable characters, the waspish Clovis Sangrail, would be appalled to find himself repurposed here as one of the lower orders. The mysticism that surfaces now and then in Saki’s stories reaches a Machenesque peak in The Music on the Hill, another of those Edwardian tales in which Pan is encountered in the English countryside. The story is quoted in epigraph at the opening of The Greenwood Faun, and it’s to this vision of a pagan deity that the novel pays homage, not the annihilating terror of Machen’s Great God Pan.

The Greenwood Faun is published by Snuggly Books which also has a paperback edition of N by Arthur Machen, the story that concerns that other fateful volume, The London Walk.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A Czech Machen
• Ibrahim Ineke’s The White People
• The White People
• The Bowmen by Arthur Machen
• Rex Ingram’s The Magician
• The Great God Pan

Weekend links 803

Ad for The United States Of America from Helix magazine, 1968.

• American composer Joseph Byrd died this week but I’ve yet to see a proper obituary anywhere. He may not have been a popular artist but he was significant for the one-off album produced in 1968 by his short-lived psychedelic group, The United States Of America. Their self-titled album has been a favourite of mine since it was reissued in the 1980s, one of the few American albums of the period that tried to learn from, and even go beyond, the studio experimentation of Sgt Pepper. The United States Of America didn’t have the resources of the Beatles and Abbey Road but they did have Byrd’s arrangements, together with an energetic rhythm section, an electric violin, a ring modulator, some crude synthesizer components, the voice of Dorothy Moskowitz, and a collection of songs with lyrics that ranged from druggy poetry to barbed portrayals of the nation’s sexual neuroses. The album became an important one for British groups in the 1990s who were looking for inspiration in the wilder margins of psychedelia, especially Stereolab, Portishead (Half Day Closing is a deliberate pastiche), and Broadcast. Byrd did much more than this, of course, and his follow-up release, The American Metaphysical Circus by Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies, has its moments even though it doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessor. Byrd spoke about this period of his career with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine in 2013.

• At BBC Future: “The most desolate place in the world”: The sea of ice that inspired Frankenstein. Richard Fisher examines the history of the Mer de Glace in fact and fiction with a piece that includes one of my Frankenstein illustrations. The latter are still in print via the deluxe edition from Union Square.

• A Year In The Country looks at a rare book in which Alan Garner’s children describe the making of The Owl Service TV serial.

• The final installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi).

• At Public Domain Review: Perverse, Grotesque, Sensuous, Inimitable: A Selection of Works by Aubrey Beardsley.

• At Colossal: Ceramics mimic cardboard in Jacques Monneraud’s trompe-l’œil ode to Giorgio Morandi.

• At the Daily Heller: The “narrative abstraction” of Roy Kuhlman‘s cover designs for Grove Press.

• New music: Elemental Studies by Various Artists; and Gleann Ciùin by Claire M. Singer.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Archive Matrix.

• Sensual Hallucinations (1970) by Les Baxter | The Garden Of Earthly Delights (United States Of America cover) (1982) by Snakefinger | Perversion (1992) by Stereolab

Elliott Dold’s Night

Looking for artwork by Elliott Dold turned up this remarkable set of illustrations for an unremarkable collection of poetry, Night, by a friend of the artist, Harold Hersey. Elliott Dold (1889–1957) was an American illustrator during the early days of the pulp magazines, best known today for drawings of huge machines which are a match for those by his more prolific contemporary, Frank R. Paul. The pulp magazines are so often filled with mediocre illustration that it’s a pleasure to find another talent lurking in their pages. But Dold was more than an illustrator of big science, as these illustrations for Hersey’s dubious poetry demonstrate.

Night is a collection of vaguely erotic poems, all of which Hersey labels “Nocturnes”. The collection was published in 1923 in a privately-printed subscriber-only edition, and every description I’ve read of it agrees that the illustrations are the best thing about it. The drawings are also radically different to Dold’s science-fiction art, to a degree that they could easily be taken for the work of a different illustrator. “What a pity the artist has to waste his time grinding out art for the pulps,” said HP Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith. A pity, indeed. Dold’s illustrations are on a par with those that Wallace Smith was producing in the same year, and are close enough to Smith’s style that’s it’s tempting to accuse him of imitation. Smith’s style wasn’t unique, however; Ray Frederick Coyle was another American artist at work in the 1920s who favoured the same combination of strict black-and-white, careful linework and stylised figures. It’s curious that three books with somewhat controversial contents should have been published in the USA in 1922/23, all of them illustrated in a very similar manner: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Malare (illustrated by Wallace Smith), James Branch Cabell’s new edition of Jurgen (illustrated by Ray Frederick Coyle), and Hersey’s Night. Rather than look for spurious influence I’d guess that this was a combination of coincidence and American literature acquiring a belated taste for Decadence which required suitably Beardsleyesque illustration. Similar trends were evident in cinema, especially in Alla Nazimova’s 1923 film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, where the costumes and settings were all based on Beardsley’s illustrations.

The images here are from a copy of the book at HathiTrust that’s another poor Google scan. The Hathi website isn’t as convenient for reading as the Internet Archive so I’ve downloaded all of the illustrations and, when necessary, cleaned the grey tone left by the scanner’s camera.

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British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day

The “to-day” in the title is a sign that this volume dates from the years before the Second World War when the hyphenated “today” was still a common sight. British Book Illustration – Yesterday and To-day was published in 1923, one of many such books produced by The Studio magazine. Studio editor Geoffrey Holme is also credited as editor of the book which follows the history of British illustration from Thomas Bewick, in 1795, to Randolph Schwabe in 1923, with each artist being represented by one or two pieces considered to exemplify their work. (Harry Clarke, who appears near the end, was Irish but the newly-minted Irish Free State was only a year old at this time so Clarke had technically been a Briton for most of his life.) Being a Studio publication, each illustration includes a note of the medium used (pen, wood engraving, etc), something you don’t always see in books of this kind. A lengthy introductory essay by Malcolm C. Salaman examines the work of each artist in turn. Two hundred pages isn’t anything like enough to do justice to the subject, and I could quibble over many of the selections, as well as the omissions. But the book is worthwhile for some of its unusual choices as well as showing drawings by artists who weren’t as well known as Beardsley and company. Among the unusual selections is the original drawing for The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar that Harry Clarke produced for his Poe collection. This was rejected by Harrap for being too horrible even though it accurately depicts the moments from the end of the story. The drawing is much more detailed than the one that replaced it but you don’t see the first version reproduced very often. Looking at it again it occurs to me that it really ought to be included in future editions of Clarke’s Poe illustrations.

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Art on film: Crimes of Passion

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks working my way through the Ken Russell filmography, rewatching familiar documentaries and feature films while acquainting myself with the portions of the Russell oeuvre that I’d missed in the past. Crimes of Passion (1984) was a film that I did see when it turned up on video in the late 1980s but I didn’t remember much about it apart from its overheated erotic atmosphere and a red/blue lighting scheme. It’s not one of Russell’s best—the script lurches uncomfortably between mundane domestic drama and lurid, sex-crazed delirium; Rick Wakeman’s synthesizer score is persistently annoying—but it does feature spirited performances by the lead actors, Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins.

Turner is Joanna Crane, a swimwear designer who deals with the vacuity of her life by moonlighting as an in-demand prostitute named China Blue. (The polite term “sex worker” didn’t exist in the 1980s.) Russell delivers the art references early on, with unexpected cuts to erotic figures from Aubrey Beardsley’s Lysistrata (above), various Japanese shunga prints, and a flash of The Rape by René Magritte. Since the real woman behind the China Blue persona isn’t revealed until later in the film we don’t know at first that Joanna Crane’s apartment contains reproductions of some of the same pictures. She eventually admits to thinking of them during stressful moments.

Despite this admission, there’s nothing in the script of Crimes of Passion that warrants the references, Crane’s apartment could easily have been furnished in a blandly expensive manner suited to a successful designer. The only other character who seems remotely interested in art is Anthony Perkins’ Reverend Shayne, a splenetic, sex-obsessed preacher who has a hotel room next door to China Blue. In one of several references to Psycho, Shayne watches his neighbour’s erotic encounters through a spyhole. The walls of his own room are covered in a collage of religious and pornographic imagery but little is made of this.

The Lovers by René Magritte.

Joanna Crane and Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) in Joanna’s apartment. Among the pictures on the walls are Romeo and Juliet by Marc Chagall, The Embrace by Gustav Klimt, and The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.

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