Someone's got to do it: On Saint Sebastian and Aubrey Beardsley, with just a bit (of course) of Anthony Powell

We open today's post with the entry on Saint Sebastian from Foxe's Book of Martyrs:

Sebastian being born in that part of France called Gallia Narbonensis, was a Christian, and was lieutenant general of the vaward of Dioclesian the emperor; who also encouraged many martyrs of Christ by his exhortations unto constancy, and kept them in the faith. He being therefore accused to the emperor, was commanded to be apprehended, and that he should be brought into the open field, where by his own soldiers he was thrust thro' the body with innumerable arrows.

Martyrological legend has it that Sebastian survived the arrows and was given a chance to harangue Diocletian in person, only to then be clubbed to death. In the world of art, however, that death has almost no place, while Sebastian, looking calm, pious, even beautiful under a hail of arrows has been a common subject for centuries now, familiar from any number of works and artists.

I was not, however, familiar with this engraving of the scene by printmaker Jacques Callot.



What I like about this is the spaciousness of it: Callot chose to depict not merely the moment of death but the organized process of bringing it. This is an execution more than a martyrdom, Sebastian a small figure at its center

I doubt I'd ever have seen this engraving--being not a believer, I don't spend a lot of time on saints--had I not been flipping through a volume of Aubrey Beardsley's letters and found this reference to it in a letter to his friend Andre Raffalovich, a Catholic, of May 5, 1897:

I suppose Gray knows of Callot's singularly interesting eau-forte of the Martyrdom of St Sebastian. There is a charming soldier in the background picking up the arrows that have missed the Saint.

Had you noticed the soldier? I can't say I would have without Beardsley as my guide. I'm not sure I would describe him as charming. That feels like Aubrey being deliberately casual, decadently arch. There is, nonetheless an unusual quality to him. Does his awkward step signal caution? (Are there more arrows coming?) Delicacy? Even goofiness? Looking at his almost mincing manner, you can imagine him as a character from a Monty Python sketch, trying simply to do his job and finding himself utterly beset.

My first thought on encountering Beardsley's letter, and being led to the image itself, was that Anthony Powell would have loved this detail. I quickly turned to a pair of Powell's reviews of volumes of Beardsley's letters from the 1970s in hopes of finding a comment, but alas: it goes unremarked. Nonetheless, the whole of it seems to his taste: the discovery and highlighting of an inessential background figure; the realization that the artist put him there deliberately, and seems to have even perhaps taken some pleasure in doing so; and the acknowledgment he signifies that even the most dramatic moments of life retain their humdrum characteristics--there is always someone around just doing their job. I realize that an alternative response to this scene would be one of horror: a man is cooly going about his job as another is being murdered. But the bloodless quality of centuries-old tales of martyrdom, and my sense of Powell's own sensibility, suggests he'd take it lightly. As he once wrote of Beardsley, without obvious judgment, "He was without sentimentality.

A line from Powell's notebooks came to mind: "They are casting lots for my raiment at this moment." The gallows humor is kin to that arrow-gathering soldier, no? I also thought of a more sentimental way of reading a not-dissimilar scene, this one from Roger Ebert's 1983 review of Return of the Jedi, praising George Lucas's inclusion of small details:

Here is just one small moment in "Return of Jedi," a moment you could miss if you looked away from the screen, but a moment that helps explain the special magic of the Star Wars movies. Luke Skywalker is engaged in a ferocious battle in the dungeons beneath the throne room of the loathsome, Jabba the Hutt. His adversary is a slimy, gruesome, reptilian monster made of warts and teeth. Things are looking bad when suddenly the monster is crushed beneath a falling door. And then (here is the small moment) there's a shot of the monster's keeper, a muscle-bound jailer, who rushes forward in tears. He is brokenhearted at the destruction of his pet. Everybody loves somebody.

All drama has a center, which means it has a periphery, and on that periphery are a lot of people simply trying to get through their day. That Callot paused to think, "Not all those arrows are going to hit," then followed that thought out and had fun with it, makes me happy.

 Beardsley, meanwhile, can be forgiven a bit of gallows humor, even a shade of deliberate affectless decadence: read more than a handful of his letters and you'll begin to realize how awful tuberculosis must have been. Letter after letter is little more than a patient, mostly uncomplaining recital of symptoms and hoped-for routes to respite. His death didn't have the drama of a martyrdom, but he was able to see it coming for a long time.

Let's wallow in the overripe and baroque for a bit, shall we?

At the library the other day in search of a volume of Aubrey Beardsley's letters, I stumbled across a book on Aubrey from 1928 by a friend and near-contemporary, Haldane McFall. The title page, below, will give you a sense of the lush production of this volume, redolent of an earlier, more bountiful age of publishing.



I'm sure I won't do anything more than dip into the book--for what genre holds up less well than instant biography? But I thought you might appreciate the breathless, dramatic tone of McFall's foreword nonetheless. Here's how he opens the book:

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.

Not a bad way to begin a biography, no?

The decadent atmosphere of the '90s emerges more clearly in the prose of the end of the foreword:

We ought to realise that even as Beardsley, by light of his candles, wrought his art, the skeleton leered like an evil ghoul out of the shadows of his room. . . . Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of manhood; and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into each twelve-month. He knew that for him there would be few to-morrows--he knew that he had little to which to look forward, and had best live his life to-day. And he lived it like one possessed.

The letters, meanwhile, seem, on quick perusal, to be mostly depressing: Beardsley refers constantly to his coughs and hemorrhages, to the extent that you find yourself giving thanks for the tuberculosis vaccine. But once in a while there's a detail that calls the era to life, like this one, from a letter to Andre Raffalovich of March 18, 1897:

You have never told me, dear Andre, of the progress of your hand, and how long black silk bandages were necessary.

What was the injury? Did it heal? Who knows? But what better image of the darker, night-time life of the 1890s could we have than that of an injured hand bandaged not with cotton or wool, but with pure black silk?

Baudelaire, Borges, and the devilish--as Edmund Wilson Week continues!

{Charle's Baudelaire's monument in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse.}

In a piece on the decadent writers for the New Yorker from October 1923, collected in the first of the new Library of America volumes, Edmund Wilson writes,

The school which began with Baudelaire and is now dissolving with Arthur Symons derived its principal force from its constant conviction of sin. The decadents talked much about "paganism," but their point of view was not pagan: it was a reaction against Victorian Christianity by people who were still Christians and Victorians. . . . How can you believe that sin is "the good" and at the same time believe it to be sin? From the point of view of the person who is really convinced of the sinfulness both of the pleasures of the flesh and of the play of the intelligence, they are things to be sedulously shunned; from a point of view really pagan, they do not become an issue at all. Baudelaire had to pretend to take the Devil seriously while he was spending his artistic life endeavoring to make him attractive; and his successors followed his example.

Wilson has hit upon the primary problem with rebellion as a position in general: a significant part of the attraction of rebellion is--and, it seems clear, always has been--simply doing what one is not supposed to do. Yet that very pleasure can only occur if one allows that the rules one is breaking have some essential power. What's fun is to realize that Wilson wrote this from the heart of the rebellion that was 1920s Greenwich Village--and that he and his milieu were not even that distant in time from the decadents about whom he was writing. Baudelaire had been long dead, but Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and Paul Verlaine, to take a few, had only died--and thus left off outraging society--twenty-five years or so earlier. When Wilson goes on to write that Baudelaire, like other fin-de-siecle writers, seems diminished now--that we can't read them

with the enthusiasm of their contemporaries. The effectiveness of the subjects dealt with depends on one's being shocked by them, and when the prejudices to be baited have been removed, the works of art are no longer exciting.

--an unspoken question lingers: If those artists' creations had, in a sense, been assimilated in such a short time, what clues did that give about the fate of the more outre works--and lives--of Wilson's own contemporaries?

For all his careful contextualization, however, Wilson never goes so far as to outright dismiss Baudelaire. For that, we have to turn to Borges, who, in a letter to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, positively erupts on the topic:

It is ridiculous to fill literature with cushions and furniture and show evil in a positive light. Baudelaire helps one gauge whether a person understands anything at all about poetry, whether he is an imbecile or not: anyone who admires Baudelaire is an imbecile.

If Borges is limiting the category of imbecile to people who admire Baudelaire, then I escape easily. But if--as seems likely from the context--by "admire" Borges actually means "enjoy," then an imbecile I am, at least once in a while. I suppose there are worse things to be--like maybe a devil?

Two deaths and an angel

From John Aubrey's Brief Lives, on the death of Francis Bacon:

Mr. Hobbs told me that the cause of his Lordship's death was trying an Experiment; viz. as he was taking the aire in a Coach with Dr. Witherborne (a Scotchman, Physitian to the King) towards High-gate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my Lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in Salt. They were resolved that they would try the Experiment presently. They alighted out of the Coach and went into a poore woman's house at the bottom of Highgate hill, and bought a Hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the body with Snow, and my Lord did help to doe it himselfe. The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his Lodging (I suppose then at Graye's Inn) but went to the Earle of Arundel's house at High-gate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a Panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a colde that in 2 or 3 dayes as I remember Mr. Hobbes told me, he dyed of suffociation.

From Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens:

The angel Arizaphel collected books. If he were totally honest with himself, he would have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand bookseller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours—he was incredibly good at it.

And, returning to Barbara Pym, from Crampton Hodnet:

Miss Doggett cleared her throat and said impressively, "I always think it such a pity when I see young people up here wasting their time in doing something which can only bring disgrace upon their families. All this Socialism and Bolshevism, for instance. If you take my advice, Mr. Cherry, you'll have nothing to do with it."
"I don't see how it can bring disgrace on my family, said Mr. Cherry, with sudden boldness.
"Do you think your mother would like to see you speaking in Hyde Park?" demanded Miss Doggett.
"My mother is dead," said Mr. Cherry, feeling that he had scored a point.