Problems of family life
Montgomery Hyde
Aubrey and the Dying Lady: A Beardsley Riddle Malcolm Easton (Secker and Warburg, £4.50) Few artists who died as young as Aubrey Beardsley—not yet twenty-six at the time —can have had so much written about them. The justification for adding another work to the Beardsley canon is that this year marks the centenary of his birth in Brighton. He died of tuberculosis on March 16, 1898, at Menton, where he had been " wintering " with his mother, and was buried in the cemetery above the town. Just half a century later he was to be joined there by Richard Le Gallienne, his collaborator on The Yellow Book.
Malcolm Easton, who is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at Hull University and presumably should know his business, regards Beardsley as the greatest of English pen-draughtsmen, a claim which some Will find exaggerated; though I agree with him that the zinc-block reproductions of Beardsley's black-and-white drawings, such as those he did for Lysistrata, do not do justice to the originals. I also agree With Easton that his wash drawings have been considerably undervalued, such for example as ' Holywell Street ', scene of the pornographic book trade in London, before the street was pulled down to make room for Aldwych and the lucrative business was transferred to Soho.
• here is no doubt that Aubrey Beardsley was a kinky person and like many tubercular sufferers displayed a morbid interest in sex in all its manifestations, normal and abnormal. As. he grew older he became kinkier. His early upbringing may account for this to some extent. We are told that as a child he was frequently whipped by his mother for sundry transgressions, and When he became too old to be chastised in this way Ellen Beardsley told his future biographer Robert Ross that she regretted that she could no longer do so. The strongly built woman in the sylvan scene depicted on the cover of the first number of The Savoy (January 1896) was clearly inspired, by Mrs Beardsley. In her gloved right hand she grasps a hunting whip, as if about to strike the small figure of her son Who is in the act of urinating on a copy of The Yellow Book, from which he had been Peremptorily dismissed as art editor Shortly before. Mrs Beardsley strongly disapproved of the tone of much of Aubrey's work and in the end she won out. His last letter, written as he was dying, in which he implored his publisher Leonard Smithers to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and all " bad " drawings — "by all that is holy all obscene drawings " — seems to have been written at her dictation; certain ly the accompanying envelope was addressed to Smithers in her handwriting.
As Easton shows, Dr Audrey experimented with the whole range of sexual behaviour from homosexuality to transvestism, besides trying cannabis and a variety of LSD. "Chastity has almost become a habit with me now," he wrote to his homosexual friend, Julian Sampson not long before the end, "but, my dear Julie, it will never become a taste." Women's clothing and accessories such as silk stockings became a positive fetish with him, and in his fantasies he saw himself in the role of hermaphrodite. This is particularly apparent in The Story of Venus and Tannhauser, which he wrote as well as illustrated, and which Smithers published in an expurgated version in The Savoy entitled ' Under the Hill,' and in full after Beardsley's death.
There is also the question of Aubrey's relationship with his actress sister Mabel, who died of cancer in 1916, aged 44, having inspired W. B. Yeats to write his poem "Upon a Dying Lady." Were their relations incestuous? Frank Harris thinks they were. But he was a congenital liar. In spite of the title of his book, Dr Easton devotes considerably less than half of it to this "riddle." Although Aubrey and Mabel were certainly close to each other, the author's researches have failed to find anything substantial to support Frank Harris's unreliable gossip. Likewise with Aubrey's theme of a baby's foetus which characterises some of his work, which, it is suggested, was the result of a miscarriage on Mabel's part. Aubrey is much more likely to have got the idea from some medical book he came across.
Aubrey and the Dying Lady is nicely produced and in the circumstances moderately priced, seeing that it contains over a hundred illustrations mostly of Beardsley's work. Some inaccuracies I would have been reluctant to mention but for the fact that one of them concerns myself. In August 1894, the police raided a house in Fitzroy Street in Bloomsbury and among those arrested was a "female inpersonator," whose correct name, according to Dr Easton, was Marley, but which I am accused of wrongly stating in my book on the Wilde trials to be Marling. The point would be of little importance were it not for the fact that the theatrical impersonator's name cropped up in the Wilde trials, particularly in connection with Wilde's confederate Alfred Taylor. Whether he used the name Marley or Marling in his profession as a music hall artist, I do not know. The fact remains that he , was charged under the name of Arthur Marling in court, and it was by this name that he was referred to by Crown counsel during the Wilde-Taylor trial.
A few other corrections should be noted. It is not true to state, as Dr Easton does, that Robert Ross was "better known to the police than anyone for his Piccadilly importunings." Ross had no need to pick up men in the streets, and in fact never did so, although he was admittedly homosexual. Nor was the Cafe des Tribunaux, frequented by Beardsley and his friends, "on the Dieppe waterfront." It was in the town's main street, some distance from the harbour, and when I recently saw the Cafe it was still flourishing. Likewise, it is wrong to describe Teleny, which Smithers published anonymously in 1893, as "a sodomitical tale." Dr Easton states in a footnote that the extracts quoted by Brian Reade in his Sexual Heretics are taken from the first American edition published in 1971. In fact they are from the original edition. I happen to know, as I was responsible for the publication of the only other English edition, which appeared here in 1966, with an introduction by me recounting the whole story of this curious work.
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