From: NewLGVoice@aol.com Date: Mon, 8 Jan 1996 17:02:40 -0500 Subject: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Wanker A Submission From THE NEW LESBIAN AND GAY VOICE 1747 "S" Street, Northwest Washington, DC 20009 Telephone: (202) 483-1311 Facsimile: (202) 265-9737 Internet: NEWLGVOICE@AOL.COM This submission by the New Lesbian and Gay Voice is directed primarily to the lesbian and gay print media, as a means of distributing articles of possible interest to their readers. We are using a new list of lesbian and gay print media that we have just obtained. It is possible that this list includes individuals who do not wish to receive further submissions from the New Lesbian and Gay Voice, or individuals who have previously requested that they be removed from our list. If this is so, we apologize, and request that you advise us so that we will not disturb you in the future. New Lesbian and Gay Voice prefers to distribute and communicate by Internet: It's cheaper and easier. 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New Lesbian and Gay Voice is always seeking additional authors to assist, and we will appreciate your forwarding this message to any potential authors. Our goal is to improve the already high quality and scope of the lesbian and gay press by providing unconventional articles and points of view that might otherwise not be available. 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).