Hans Henning Voigt – { feuilleton }

Alastair’s Manon Lescaut

The illustrated works of Alastair aren’t always easy to find, not when Hans Henning Voigt (as the artist was known to his German parents) chose a nom de l’art shared by a large portion of Scottish manhood, past and present. This 1928 edition of Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost is a recent arrival at the Internet Archive. The publisher, John Lane, specialised in illustrated editions, and their Manon Lescaut gives an idea of what we might have seen from Aubrey Beardsley had he survived into the 20th century. John Lane had published collections of Beardsley’s drawings together with related works like Robert Ross’s memories of the artist. It was in their interest to continue the posthumous association, hence the pairing of Alastair with a novel that Beardsley himself might have illustrated. Alastair not only positioned himself as an inheritor of Beardsley’s filigreed drawing style but in photographs appears to be adopting the persona of one of Beardsley’s etiolated characters.

This edition of the novel is an English translation by DC Moylan, with an introduction by Arthur Symons, Beardsley’s friend and collaborator when the pair were teamed as editor and art editor of the short-lived Savoy magazine. Symons was an astute critic, his essays are always worth reading; he remembers his friend here while stepping lightly around Alastair’s imitation of Beardsley’s decorations. As for Alastair himself, he did a good job with the illustrations. The figure-drawing isn’t as uncertain as in some of his earlier works, and each piece is printed in two colours (“the colour of fire and night” as Symons describes it), a process he favoured elsewhere. The leading study of Alastair’s art, Alastair: Illustrator of Decadence (1979) by Victor Arwas, reproduces five of the fourteen drawings, only one of which is shown in colour.

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Sculptured Melodies by Mera Sett

Another week, another link to the Internet Archive. It’s hard to resist reporting these discoveries when so many are either surprising, much-needed, or—as in this case—fantastically rare and obscure. Sculptured Melodies (1922) was a book of short stories published privately in Britain in an edition of 500 copies. The possibly pseudonymous author and illustrator, Mera Sett, is so off the map that almost all the available information seems to derive from a series of posts about the book by John Hirschhorn Smith of Side Real Press. (The Internet Archive scan is also from Smith’s own copy of the book.) Each story is inspired by a piece of music, and written “in a decadent style reminiscent of Pierre Louÿs”; Orientalist or Ancient World exotica is the predominant tone.

Whoever the author was, he (it does at least seem to be a he) illustrated his stories in the post-Beardsley idiom that continued to a feature of publishing in the 1920s. The drawings are very much the work of an enthusiastic amateur, although the same might be said of Sett’s better-known contemporary, Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt), another follower in Beardsley’s wake who compensated for his uneven figure drawing with copious decoration and outrageous costumes. Sett also uses decoration to disguise his shortcomings, borrowing some of Aubrey’s Japonisme peacocks along with other motifs from Persian and Indian art. The latter details suggest an unexplored artistic avenue that blends Beardsley’s black-and-white style with the tableaux of Persian miniatures.

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Weekend links 130

Sarah and Writhing Octopus (New Wave Series, 1992) by Masami Teraoka.

Strange Flowers continues to push all my buttons. For a while now I’d been intent on writing something about the strange (unbuilt) temples designed by German artist/obsessive naturist Fidus (Hugo Höppener) but I reckon James has done a better job than I would have managed. Also last week he wrote about Schloss Schleißheim, a palatial estate outside Munich with connections to Last Year in Marienbad and another eccentric, pseudonymous German artist: Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• The circus poster that inspired John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper song Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! has been reproduced as a limited edition letterpress print. Related: Wikipedia’s page about Pablo Fanque (1796–1871), “the first black circus proprietor in Britain”.

• The first two volumes of The Graphic Canon, both edited by Russ Kick, are reviewed at Literary Kicks. I’ve not seen either of these yet but volume 2 contains my interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Related: the second book previewed at Brain Pickings.

You only have to read [Alan Bennett’s] diaries to see that, underneath the wit and humour and sandwich-filled pottering around old churches, there is a deep resentment at what has happened to England in his lifetime and an instinctive distrust, sometimes amounting to deep loathing, of most politicians. Listening, for instance, to Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke talking on the radio about the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998, he writes: “Both have that built-in shrug characteristic of 80s Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery’s at stake.”

Michael Billington on Alan Bennett: a quiet radical

• Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future: Mark Pilkington draws a Venn diagram encompassing Coil, Broadcast, the Ghost Box label, Arthur Machen, MR James, Nigel Kneale, Iain Sinclair and others.

• Hell Is a City: the making of a cult classic – in pictures. The mean streets of Manchester given the thriller treatment by Hammer Films in 1959. The film is released on DVD this month.

• The Function Room: The Kollection, Matt Leyshon’s debut volume of horror stories, has just been published. The cover painting is one of my pieces from the 1990s.

• New Worlds magazine (now apparently known as “Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds“) has been relaunched online.

A drawing from Anatomy (part 1), a series by Alex Konahin.

• The forthcoming Scott Walker album, Bish Bosch, will be released on December 3rd. 4AD has a trailer.

• Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone: Noah Gallagher Shannon on the early drafts of Blood Meridian.

• The Velvet Underground of English Letters: Simon Sellars Discusses JG Ballard.

• Michelle Dean on The Comfort of Bad Books.

• The typewriter repairers of Los Angeles

• Cats With Famous People

• Marienbad (1987) by Sonoko | Komm Nach Marienbad (2011) by Marienbad | Marienbad (2012) by Julia Holter.

(Thanks to Ian and Pedro for this week’s picture links!)

Weekend links 119

The BFI’s recent DVD release of Peter de Rome’s gay porn films has been mentioned here a couple of times already but I only bought a copy this week. It’s a remarkable release for a number of reasons, not least for showing how much attitudes towards pornography in Britain have changed in recent years. De Rome’s films are explicit enough to ensure that in the 1970s and 1980s anyone caught selling them in the UK might have been imprisoned. That you can now buy them uncut from a high street shop on a disc packaged with the usual care by the British Film Institute means another small part of our iniquitous past has gone for good. Among the extras there’s a documentary with the 88-year-old director discussing his work. This week he talked to BUTT magazine who also have one of his shorter films from the DVD, Hot Pants, on their site.

• “Reading this book, it is hard not to feel that the largest mental health problem – the really crazy thing – is society’s attitude to drugs in general and LSD in particular…” Phil Baker reviews Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain by Andy Roberts.

• “Loved by aristocrats and immortalized in literature, Denham Fouts remains virtually unknown in his own hometown.” Richard Wall on The World’s Most Expensive Male Prostitute.

The very etiology of rabies is mythic: once the bite heals and the virus has traveled to the brain, “the wound will usually return, as if by magic, with some odd sensation occurring at the site.” Then there’s the fact that no definitive diagnosis can be made without taking a biopsy of the sick animal’s brain, leaving only one gory solution: decapitation.

Rabies is horror’s muse. In almost all iterations of the genre, those we most trust suddenly turn strange: a boyfriend morphs into a wolf at midnight, a fiancé turns out to be harboring a mad first wife in the attic, a friend is bit by a zombie and goes berserk.

Alice Gregory reviews Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.

• The Horror of Philosophy: Erik Davis talks to Eugene Thacker about Lovecraft, medieval mysticism, and thinking the world-without-us.

• Eagle Scouts Returning Our Badges: A Tumblr for those protesting the current anti-gay stance of the Boy Scouts of America.

• His Father’s Best Translator: Lila Azam Zanganeh on the late Dmitri Nabokov.

• Les Liaisons dangereuses: illustrations by Alastair (Hans Henning Voigt).

• Andrea Scrima looks at Robert Walser’s Der Spaziergang (The Walk).

• 10 Great Places to Meet Lesbians If You Have a Time Machine.

• Jesse Bering in Scientific American asks “Is Your Child Gay?”

• As Above, So Below (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Genius Of Love (1981) by Tom Tom Club | Mea Culpa (1981) by Brian Eno & David Byrne.

Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures

This is a strange book. Green Pipes: Poems and Pictures (1929) was written and illustrated by Joseph Rous Paget-Fredericks (1903–1963), a man better known these days for a substantial collection of memorabilia and archive material related to 20th-century dance. Paget-Fredericks studied with Léon Bakst then went on to create his own costume designs as well as producing some books for children of which this is an example. In style the poems aim at AA Milne’s When We Were Very Young but succumb to tweeness with a superfluity of fairies and pixies. At first glance the illustrations seem just as twee until you notice remarkable details such as costumes and foliage created from a wealth of disconnected lines and squiggles. The drawing of a Smoke Sprite is closer to something by Alastair than EH Shepard, while the Snow Fairy is the vaguest outline in a dress composed of circles, lines and dots. The Green Pipes of the title are the pipes of Pan, and so we get a late eruption of that peculiar flourishing of Pan Mania that extends from the 1890s to the 1930s. A book of children’s poetry isn’t the place you’d expect to encounter flower children kneeling before a piping faun but after the openly Pantheist chapter of The Wind in the Willows anything is possible. Far more out of place among all the fairies is a painting of a pirate brandishing a bloody cutlass. And what are we to make of the lines at the end of Elfin Children?

Then from the windowed heights we stream
By silent starlit mire…

The Starlit Mire (1911) was a book of epigrams by James Bertram & F. Russell illustrated by Austin Osman Spare (with a head of Pan blocked onto the cover). It’s not at all a book for children so the occurrence of that phrase in Paget-Fredericks’ poem is very surprising. Is “starlit mire” a quote that precedes the Bertram & Russell book? Please leave a comment if you know.

Read Green Pipes online here or download it here.

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