John Ashbery – { feuilleton }

What A Life! An Autobiography by EVL and GM

In last week’s post about Norman Rubington/Akbar Del Piombo I said that Rubington’s collages “were probably the first to use the form developed by Max Ernst for explicitly humorous purposes.” That “probably” was well-placed since it turns out that Rubington wasn’t quite the first to reuse engraved illustrations to comic effect, something I was unaware of until a few days ago. What A Life! An Autobiography (1911) is a short book credited to “EVL & GM”, or Edward Verrall Lucas and George Morrow, in which Lucas wrote captions for illustrations selected by Morrow from a catalogue for Whiteley’s, one of the first London department stores. The “autobiography” recounts the upbringing and adulthood of an English aristocrat, Baron Dropmore, with much of the humour being derived not from the text itself but from the mislabelling of various household items. Lucas and Morrow both worked for Punch magazine, and the humour is very much in the older Punch mode but given a fresh twist by the use of pre-existing illustrations.

In addition to the mislabelling there’s also some rudimentary collage work from Morrow which is easy to overlook after a century of similar examples. Whiteley’s catalogue seems to have been a more fertile source for this than the publications produced by the store’s rivals. I have a facsimile reprint of the 1895 catalogue for Harrod’s, a literal doorstop of 1000 pages. It’s a useful reference if you want to know how much the upper classes were paying for their goods in the Victorian era but it’s never been very good for collage purposes. This smaller Whiteley’s catalogue has many more illustrations plus a number of those florid title designs festooned with combination ornaments that you often find in 19th-century books.

The pages here are taken from a scan at the Internet Archive but What A Life! has been reprinted several times, including an edition published by Dover in 1975 for which John Ashbery provided an introduction. Ashbery enjoyed this kind of pictorial eccentricity; one of his art essays is The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour, an appraisal of A Glove (1881) by Max Klinger, a series of etchings that prefigure the Surrealists in their dreamlike strangeness. Ashbery also made collages of his own, one of which, Summer Dream (2008), contains a detail borrowed from What A Life!

(Thanks to Allan and Andrew for the tip!)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fuzz Against Junk & The Hero Maker
• Nathaniel Krill at the Time Node
• Initiations in the Abyss: A Surrealist Apocalypse
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
• Metamorphosis Victorianus
• Max (The Birdman) Ernst
• The art of Stephen Aldrich

Weekend links 609

Cover of Tom Veitch Magazine #1 (1970).

• RIP Tom Veitch, a writer with whom I almost created a comic-book series in the 1990s. Things didn’t work out for a variety of reasons but we had some good conversations. All the news notices focus on his writing for comics, a career which ranged from angry, political strips with Greg Irons to typical franchise fare. But he had short stories published in New Worlds magazine when it was at its peak under Michael Moorcock’s editorship, and in Quark, a short-lived paperback magazine edited by Samuel Delany & Marilyn Hacker. Veitch was also among the first 35 contributors to John Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem service when it launched in 1968, part of a select group that included John Ashbery, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Related: An interview with Tom Veitch on William Burroughs at Reality Studio.

• “I won’t deny that I thought very much about a post punk influence on it. Everybody knows that I love post punk, but I didn’t want to copy anybody.” Robert Hampson talking to Jonathan Selzer about the return of Loop.

• “What Joyce and Eliot, Ulysses and The Waste Land, had in common was a showiness, an overt ambition as well as a magpie approach to literature as assemblage.” John Self on the year 1922, “literature’s year zero”.

• At Spoon & Tamago: All of Japan’s 47 prefectures captured in expressive typography.

• At Public Domain Review: Composition (1905) by Arthur Wesley Dow, a book for art students influenced by the example of Japanese prints.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on the unending attempts to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

• Mixes of the week: Fact Mix 846 by Ehua, and Soylent Green – No Escape by The Ephemeral Man.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Matthew Suss presents…Joseph Cornell Day.

• At Bandcamp: A guide to Alvin Lucier.

• Loop The Loop (1980) by Young Marble Giants | Q-Loop (1995) by Basic Channel | Loop-Loop (1996) by Michael Rother

Gloves

A Glove: Anxieties (1881) by Max Klinger.

Although the Glove‘s scenario was given its due Germanic explication by contemporary critics, it defies rational analysis. The last picture, which was seen as a kind of happy ending to the glove’s peregrinations, is particularly ambiguous and leaves the whole meaning of the series in doubt. The story is a parable of loss based on a trivial lost article, like the lost keys in Bluebeard and in Alice, like Desdemona’s missing handkerchief, or like the philosopher’s spectacles in Klinger’s own Fantasy on Brahms, which have slid out of their proprietor’s reach just as he was nearing the summit of a kind of Matterhorn. There are overtones of erotic symbolism and fetishism in the glove and the phalloid monster who abducts it, heightened for a modern viewer by the Krafft-Ebing period costumes and décors (the engravings appeared in 1881, and the drawings were apparently finished in 1878).

John Ashbery describing Max Klinger’s extraordinary series of etchings A Glove (aka Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove) which in their inexplicable narrative of fetishist obsession anticipate Surrealism. See the entire sequence here or here. For A Glove in print there’s The Graphic Works of Max Klinger from Dover Publications.

The Song of Love (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico.

Ashbery begins by discussing Giorgio de Chirico’s enthusiasm for Klinger’s work, a passion and influence that provides one of the many connections between the Symbolists and the Surrealists. This “metaphysical” painting looks back to Klinger and forward to Magritte.

The Pleasures of the Glove, 3 (1974) by Duane Michals.

The enigmatic encounter of ‘The pleasures of the glove’ follows the lead character as he fantasises about a pair of gloves on the hands of a mannequin in a shopfront window. The perverse pleasure of desiring the gloves but not acquiring them leads him on a surreal adventure of first imagining his own glove as a queer furry tunnel that swallows his hand to the fantasy of stroking the naked body of a woman he sees on the bus with her own glove. (more)

A more contemporary take on the same idea, albeit without the intercession of a pterodactyl-like thief. If Klinger is pre-Surrealism then this is the post- version; Michals photographed René Magritte, and many of his other works run in a distinctly Surreal direction. (Thanks to Anne Billson for the tip!)

The Vanished World of Gloves (1982) by Czech animator Jiri Barta features sex, Surrealism and a lot more besides, all in the space of 16 minutes. A can of film is unearthed which contains a series of short episodes pastiching different cinematic styles: Chaplinesque slapstick, swashbuckling romance, Buñuel Surrealism, a war film, a Fellini orgy and a science fiction apocalypse. All the parts are played by gloves, of course, and if you didn’t see the credits you might take this at first for a Svankmajer short.

The Vanished World of Gloves: part one | part two

Update: I knew I’d forgotten something… Added de Chirico’s The Song of Love.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• More Golems
• Max Klinger’s New Salomé
• Barta’s Golem