“I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing."
On a recent binge-read Decadents, Neo-Decadents, and Graveyard-Goth poets, I found an old book on my shelves — Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Work by Haldane MacFall, published in London in 1928 — and fell in slight love with the awkward necro-romanticism of the introduction:
About the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in Hampstead Church--the gift of the American admirers of the dead poet, who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and Hoop on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by--and there had foregathered within the church on the hill for the occasion the literary and artistic world of the 'nineties. As the congregation came pouring pitof the church doors, a slender, gaunt young man broke away from the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, stumbled and lurched awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleeping dead. This stooping, dandified being was evidently intent on taking a short-cut out of God's acre. There was something strangely fantastic in the ungainly efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the mound-encumbered ground by the loose-limbed, lank figure so immaculately dressed in black cut-away coat and silk hat, who carried his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long white hands, his lean wrist showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid, cadaverous face grimly set on avoiding falling over the embarrassing mounds that tripped his feet. He took off his hat to some lady who called to him, showing his "tortoiseshell" coloured hair, smoothed down and plastered over his forehead in a "quiff" almost to his eyes--then he stumbled on again. He stooped and stumbled so much and so awkwardly amongst the sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted; but was mistaken--he was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley.
British illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley is known for his black ink drawings that foregrounded the grotesque, the gruesome, the excessive, the decadent, the queer and the erotic. He lived a short and difficult life, committed to irreverence and a refusal to blur the line between artists and persona. Beardsley was eccentric in public and private; he was weird and fine with it. He selected his clothing intentionally, including dove-grey suits, hats, ties, yellow gloves. Arthur Symons qualifies his creative process:
….he hated the outward and visible signs of an inward yeastiness and incoherency. It amused him to denounce everything, certainly, which Baudelaire would have denounced; and, along with some mere gaminerie, there was a very serious and adequate theory of art at the back of all his destructive criticisms. It was a profound thing which he said to a friend of mine who asked him whether he ever saw visions: "No," he replied, "I do not allow myself to see them except on paper." All his art is in that phrase.
After a massive lung hemorrhage at 23, Beardsley converted to Catholicism. His health continued to decline and he died of tuberculosis two years later, in the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Menton (one of my favorite cities on the French Riviera). Following a requiem mass in the Menton Cathedral, his immortal remains were interred in the Cimetière du Trabuquet.
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Because Haldane MacFall’s introduction to the book is a fireworks of crackly syntax and necro-romanticism, I’ve included it in full below, for those who need a new temporality, a “twelvemonth” in which to exist….
On a side note, Donald Olson has chronicled Beardsley’s decline for The Gay and Lesbian Review, and he attributes the fall his association with Oscar Wilde and the aesthete crew.
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I appreciated how MacFall captioned some of Beardsley’s drawings with the word “suppressed,” which is not quite the same as “censored.” To me, censor lies close on the tongue to censure, which indicates a punishment, a price to pay for touching the forbidden, whereas suppressed is closer to muffling, gagging, preventing from speaking at all.
Suppression is preventive rather than reactive. Someone drowns when I read it.
MacFall also says Beardsley was “expelled from The Yellow Book” in its first year of publication. Expulsion evokes Edenic imagery, a sense of moral trespass which involves one’s relation to the forbidden.
The forbidden is that which may consume us if we consume it. The forbidden is what gives rise to the need for expiation. Someone must devise a ritual which undoes the anxiety of influence, the peculiar power to taint that characterizes the condition of forbiddenness.
