Subject: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Wanker
From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 17:02:40 -0500

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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG
WANKER

The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley by Donald S. Olson, 
published by Black Swan 
($NZ24.95) ISBN 0 552 99577 0

Reviewed by Hugh Young
3 Haunui Way
Pukerua Bay 6450
Aotearoa / NEW ZEALAND

Père (e-grave) Coubé's (e-acute) Tannha"user (a-umlaut)

- 400 words

By chance I was reading Peter Ackroyd's Last Testament of Oscar
Wilde when this arrived. That is the better, briefer and cleverer
"autobiographical novel," since Wilde's style is so much better known
and harder to sustain than Beardsley's.

This purports to be a literal confession to a French priest when
Beardsley joined the Catholic Church, shortly before his death at 25 
(of
tuberculosis - socially the AIDS of the 19th century). One can only
imagine Père Coubé's dismay, faced with this 400-page book when all
he wanted was a list of sins.
 
Beardsley lived and died unhappily in Wilde's shadow. Widely and
wrongly assumed to be homosexual, his career ended when Wilde was
arrested carrying a yellow book - but not The Yellow Book, a magazine
Beardsley illustrated. Beardsley's own sexual practice was mainly
manual or with prostitutes, with an intense, ambiguous relationship 
with
his sister Mabel.

The style veers wildly between Victorian prudery ("my /membrum
virile/") and Victorian porn ("thrusts his flaming engine up her 
yielding
cunt") - which is perhaps as it should be, richly evoking the heights 
and
depths of late Victorian society.

Poor Beardsley! His life only becomes interesting when it intersects 
with
the man who ruined him. The overblown decadent style suits the man,
his pictures and his few published writings (such as the deliciously 
obscene Story of Venus and Tannha"user or Under the Hill), but it is 
heavy going until the Wilde debacle begins. Then it rises in (sic) a 
crescendo to a meeting of the dying consumptive and the ruined 
aesthete.  

Missing is any description of Beardsley at work. Did he meditate on 
the
page for an hour then plunge at it like a Chinese calligrapher, 
executing
his perfect curves in one concentrated flourish - or outline 
everything in
pencil with frequent erasures? We are given no hint.

There are several minor infelicities: French phrases followed by
translations the priest would hardly have needed, an estimate that he
masturbated 30,000 times in 11 years (an average of more than seven
times a day, when he admits to a maximum of three), Americanisms,
anachronisms and an astonishing, careful docking of 10 years from
Queen Victoria's reign.    

The paperback is illustrated with photographs of Beardsley and his
circle and actual Beardsley pictures - reproduced in dark grey 
half-tone
instead of his luscious black and white. The second of them is so 
ugly
and poorly drawn it must be one of the many forgeries. 
						
						#   #   #

Hugh Young lives alone on a cliff near Wellington, New Zealand, 
overlooking beautiful Kapiti Island. He has been active in gay issues 
since 1973 and out since 1986.  His radio documentaries about Oscar Wilde and
Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas have been broadcast on the This Way Out network
(along with 
ones about Benjamin Britten, Walt Whitman, Sir Roger Casement, Alan 
Turing, Sir Robert Baden Powell, Tchaikovsky, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn 
and Cardinal Spellman).