Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne

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Aholibah (1928).

You won’t find Harry Clarke’s illustration for Swinburne’s Aholibah in Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne even though it was intended for the book, and was the illustration that Clarke deemed his favourite of the series. The erotic nature of the drawing was too much for the publisher so Clarke had to content himself by pasting a reproduction in his own copy. The copy above has been scanned from Nicola Gordon Bowe’s Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art; everything below is from the published Swinburne collection which turned up recently at the Internet Archive.

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Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne was Clarke’s last illustrated book, published in 1928, three years before his untimely death. Of all the major Clarke books that appeared during the artist’s lifetime it’s always been the most difficult to find. Some of the drawings have been reprinted in recent collections but never the book itself. As with Clarke’s Faust, the erotic and morbid qualities of the illustrations generated disquiet outside the publisher’s office, with Humbert Wolfe in the book’s introduction stating that Clarke’s interpretations were completely opposed to his own. Given the erotic and morbid preoccupations of the poet and his work this surprises me; Swinburne’s poetry was admired by Aleister Crowley and HP Lovecraft, among others. They weren’t reading him because he was writing paeans to daffodills.

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My earlier mention of this volume included a link to a defunct blog with a collection of the illustrations separated from the text. This was unavoidable at the time, there wasn’t anywhere else that you could see all of them in one place. But seeing the illustrations with the poems benefits the drawings as well as the verse, especially when the poems themselves aren’t so familiar. For my part it’s also good to see all of the illustrations, being the owner of a first edition which I bought many years ago only to discover that a couple of the best pictures had been carefully removed with a razor. This is a common problem with old illustrated books. Caveat emptor as always.

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Clarke didn’t do many double-page illustrations. This is one of his best.

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Continue reading “Harry Clarke’s illustrated Swinburne”

Weekend links 777

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The Seven Wonders of the World (1886). 1: Lighthouse on the Island of Pharos, Alexandria; 2: Statue of the Olympian Jupiter; 3: The Colossus at Rhodes; 4: The Temple of Diana at Ephesus; 5: The Mausoleum of Artemisia; 6: The Pyramids of Egypt; 7: The Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

• “The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined.” Nikhil Mahant on the many possible forms of alien language.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (translated by Basil Creighton).

• At Alan Moore World: A new interview with Mr Moore about Long London, magic and the future of humanity.

• New music: The Reverent Sky by Steve Roach; and Contrary Motion by Scanner & Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Tangled Dürer: The Six Knots (ca. before 1521).

• At The Daily Heller: A Typographer’s Mother Goose by Louise Fili.

• At Colossal: Woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jud Yalkut’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Steve Aylett.

Seven And Seven Is (1966) by Love | Seven By Seven (1973) by Hawkwind | Seven, Seven, Seven (1995) by Money Mark

Omnibus: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler

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The full title of this BBC documentary is Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler. The film was broadcast in 1969, ten years after Chandler’s death, and has been on iPlayer recently to judge by the logo in the corner, but it’s not one I’d seen before. It would have been ideal viewing a couple of years ago during my attempt to watch all the films listed in The Big Noir Book. While working my way through the film list I was also reading some of Dashiell Hammett’s novels (The Maltese Falcon is excellent; The Dain Curse is terrible) and all of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Or almost all…I didn’t read Poodle Springs, his final book, left unfinished then completed by other hands. I enjoyed the Philip Marlowe novels so much I was tempted to start them all over again after I’d reached the end of Playback. Added to the enjoyment was the opportunity to see how much the books were mauled when they passed through the Hollywood mill. The BBC documentary opens with a clip from The Big Sleep which has always been the best of the adaptations (it can be difficult getting Humphrey Bogart out of your head when you’re reading Philip Marlowe’s narration) but even this one alters the story while downplaying the sexual content (homosexuality and pornography in the novel), something that all the films of the 40s do their best to avoid.

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A Portrait of Raymond Chandler was written by John Foster and Fred Burnley who present the writer via his own words in a sequence of dramatised interviews and enactments of scenes from the novels. There’s also a brief interview with JB Priestley, an intriguing thing in itself as I’d no idea that Priestley knew Chandler. The enactments don’t work very well—all the very small and very English rooms look nothing like Los Angeles architecture—but Edward Judd makes a decent attempt to apply his hard-boiled manner to the detective role without any Bogart impersonations. Judd appeared throughout the 60s in a succession of science-fiction films, and the film works best when he’s reading from the novels. Omnibus used him for the voiceovers a few years later in another portrait of a writer, Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, a film about Hunter S. Thompson. The Chandler documentary appeared just ahead of the wave of renewed Hollywood interest in the Marlowe books that broke in the 1970s. Among the film clips there’s a short scene from the soon-to-be-released Marlowe, an updated adaptation of The Little Sister which isn’t one of the best Marlowe films but it has some nice interior shots of the Bradbury Building, and you get to see Bruce Lee demolish James Garner’s office with his feet and fists.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Big Noir Book, or 300 films and counting…

Weekend links 776

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Illustration by Adolf Hoffmeister for a Czech edition of The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• It’s good to hear that Czech animator Jiri Barta is back at work on his long-gestating feature film based on the Golem legend. The new iteration looks like a reimagining of the entire project.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells.

• This week in the Bumper Book of Magic: Ben Wickey breaks down more of his Great Enchanters pages.

• At Colossal: Charles Brooks photographs the interiors of musical and scientific instruments.

• At Igloomag: Philippe Blache on neo-noir, doom jazz and related atmospheric music.

• At The Daily Heller: The book-brick that is the 1,264-page Emigre Specimen Encyclopedia.

• New music: Changing States by Matmos, and Of Shadow Landscapes by Skotógen.

• At the BFI: Josh Slater-Williams selects 10 great Japanese time-travel films.

• Lawrence English remembers the sound-art pioneer Alan Lamb.

Tunde Adebimpe’s favourite albums.

Time Machine (1967) by Satori | Time Machine (1968) by Lemon Tree | Turn Back Time (1971) by Time Machine

Weekend links 775

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The Bride of the Wind (1914) by Oskar Kokoschka.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Fantômas, by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain (translated by Cranstoun Metcalfe).

• This week’s Bumper Book of Magic news: the Brazilian edition of the book, titled A Lua e a Serpente: Almanaque de Magia, will be published in June. It’s available for pre-order here.

• “The basis of compilations as far as I’m concerned is, ‘I like this stuff, you may like it too.’” Jon Savage on the art of the compilation album.

• At Public Domain Review: The strange story of Oskar Kokoschka, Hermine Moos, and the Alma Mahler Doll.

• At the Daily Heller: Psychedelics, Day-Glo, Hallmark and The Peculiar Manicule.

Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a new version for sale from Important Records.

• The Strange World of…Michael Chapman.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Boris Karloff Day.

• RIP David Thomas of Pere Ubu.

Dream Machine (1968) by Les Sauterelles | Dream Machine (1980) by The Androids | Dream Machine (1981) by Phantom Band