JK Huysmans – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

It’s taken a while but here at last are some of the pages from my series of illustrations based on The Picture of Dorian Gray, as featured in volume 2 of The Graphic Canon (“The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals”) edited by Russ Kick. I agreed with Russ not to run everything so there’s some incentive to buy the book (or books…there are three volumes altogether). Now I’ve seen the printed edition the whole project seems even more remarkable: 500 large illustrated pages in a variety of media and art styles. Volume 2 runs through the 19th century and ends with my contribution; I opted to do this story in black-and-white but there’s colour used throughout the books. I especially like the Moby-Dick sequence by Matt Kish, a very different take on a very familiar tale.

As with many of the things I’ve been doing recently I opted for adapting materials of the period. Since I have a lot of Oscar Wilde-related reference material I was able to go further and incorporate details that relate directly to the book and Wilde’s life. All the text is taken from a scan of the first printing of the novel at the Internet Archive, the title lettering being drawn originally by Wilde’s friend, publisher and illustrator Charles Ricketts. A heavy black square on each page provides some continuity as well as resembling the frames of comic pages. (Or a picture frame.) The silhouette on the opening page is another of Wilde’s friends, the writer Max Beerbohm, taken from a drawing by William Rothenstein. The pair were dandyish Café Royal regulars throughout the 1890s.

This is my favourite page. I liked the way the composition came together and also enjoyed being able to use John Singer Sargent’s portrait of W. Graham Robertson as the picture of Dorian. I’ve noted in an earlier post the similarity between this painting and the portrait seen in the BBC’s adaptation of the novel by John Osborne. Robertson was a theatre designer and illustrator who Wilde consulted when planning stage designs for what would have been the London debut of Salomé. Robertson was also (so far as we know) homosexual which adds an extra resonance.

The Sibyl Vane page: a combination of details from The Studio, The Strand and The Magazine of Art. The motif at the foot of the page is by Walter Crane. Nothing of Wilde’s appeared in The Strand but that magazine’s most popular writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, had his second Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four, commissioned at the same dinner that saw the commissioning of Dorian Gray, both novels being published by Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890.

A page depicting Dorian’s distracting obsession with jewels and luxurious goods. This chapter can seem somewhat superfluous unless seen in the light of Wilde’s intention to write something like Huysmans’ À rebours (1884).

The “Love that dare not speak its name” page. This makes explicit the subtext of the book although if you read the two paragraphs I selected it’s evident enough why Dorian is causing a problem for so many young men. The blindfolded Eros was a drawing by Walter Crane which I doubled then re-drew slightly so the pair were holding hands. The boy below is a picture from The Strand of the young Edward VII, a robust heterosexual in later years but with a son, Prince Albert Victoria, who became linked to the notorious Cleveland Street Scandal which involved a male brothel catering to aristocrats. The two young men in the picture frame are described as a pair of “panthers” in Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003), by which he means that they were fin de siècle rent boys (as in Oscar’s remark about “feasting with panthers”); McKenna doesn’t give any further details about the photo but it suited the picture.

In addition to this series of illustrations, volume 2 of The Graphic Canon includes two of my Lewis Carroll illustrations in a section by different artists based on the Alice books. I’d be recommending The Graphic Canon even if I wasn’t a contributor, as I said above it’s a remarkable achievement. Watch out for it.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive

“It had not been able to support the dazzling splendour imposed on it…”

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.

The corrupting French novel which Lord Henry Wotton gives to Dorian Gray is never named by Oscar Wilde but its identity is no secret. À Rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans was published in 1884 and Wilde, Whistler and others were immediately impressed by what amounts to a manual for the lifestyle of a Decadent Aesthete. Wilde fell sufficiently under its spell to have Dorian Gray in the later chapters of his own novel indulge his senses much like Huysmans’ protagonist, Des Esseintes; where Des Esseintes grows poisonous blooms and fills his room with exotic perfumes, Dorian Gray luxuriates over a hoard of precious stones.

À Rebours features lengthy descriptions of Symbolist art, with particular attention given to Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. Yet despite the visual description Arthur Zaidenberg’s illustrations are the only ones I’ve come across to date. The book may be influential but it seems too obscure to have attracted illustrators. Zaidenberg’s drawings from a 1931 edition are executed in a woodcut style not far removed from Frans Masereel’s earlier work in books such as Die Stadt (1925), and as such the style is fashionably spare, not necessarily the right choice for a work concerned with sensory delirium. (This Zaidenberg street scene from 1937 shows a definite Masereel influence.) I’d much rather have seen Harry Clarke illustrate Huysmans. Zaidenberg’s drawings are also curious for their foregrounding of the sexual content which makes me think this edition may have been sold on the basis of a salacious reputation. The scene below, for example, doesn’t occur in the novel but can be implied from the description of Des Esseintes meeting a schoolboy in the Avenue de Latour-Maubourg.

“Never had he experienced a more alluring relationship.”

The complete (?) set of Zaidenberg’s illustrations can be seen here. Pages from a later artists’ manual, Anyone Can Draw, are at VTS.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Osborne’s Dorian Gray
• Because Wilde’s worth it
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Dorian Gray revisited
• Frans Masereel’s city
• The Poet and the Pope
• The Picture of Dorian Gray I & II

Tag: JK Huysmans

Picturing Dorian Gray

Arthur Zaidenberg’s À Rebours