"Count" Wratislaw: 1890s Poet Who Lived Too Long

THEODORE WRATISLAW (1871–1933) may not even have made the second eleven of 1890s writers, yet he contributed to the iconic Yellow Book and Savoy. His fLagging reputation afterwards cost him, until now, a biography, a gap effectively and readably redeemed by D. J. Sheppard, Senior Academic Mentor at Oakham School, Rutland.

Son of a solicitor in Rugby with aristocratic antecedents in Bohemia, Theodore Count Wratislaw—as he sometimes adopted his rather flimsy claim to a title—had no desire to follow his father in a suffocating small-town law practice. While reluctantly studying law in London he aspired to become a man of letters. A garret in Bloomsbury led him to literary coteries, to the gaudy allure of music halls and to Swinburnean bathos. However attracted to dancing girls, and shocking his father by ecstatically admiring, in verse, their "contours," he lapsed even further in judgment. Closing "To a Sicilian Boy" (although he never knew one), Wratislaw pretended to the "Uranian" predilections of some of his Decadent contemporaries in deploring "the dull ennui of a woman's kiss." Despite several marriages and intermittent affairs, he would never outlive the Wildean pose, as his early reveries of "imagined love" found a market in print.

In his fading years, Wratislaw would begin a memoir, "Salad Days," still in typescript and unfinished, yet vivid with images of friends and foes of the Decadence years. Replete with reflective charm and sharp recall, the extracts quoted by Sheppard display Wratislaw at his best. Responding to a waspish review of an Oscar Wilde effusion by Richard Le Gallienne, who was despised by both Oscar and Theodore, Wilde gibed: "Well! It has always seemed to me that the finest feature of a fine nature is treachery." Wratislaw found "the modern neurosis, the delight in anything strange and depraved," felt by those "above the level of Rugbeian schoolmasters or Boetian swineherds," as most strikingly evoked in the "grotesque fantasy, the diseased imagination," of Aubrey Beardsley, whose outré style he admired above other Nineties Decadents. At one of Beardsley's "at homes" on Cambridge Street, he encountered another memorable figure, Max Beerbohm, who seemed stiff and faintly ridiculous in a high starched collar above a "stony white" face. "No corpse ever suffered from rigor mortis as Max while alive and young."

Sheppard guesses that one of the prototypes of Max's dim, elusive fictional poet Enoch Soames is Wratislaw, If so, Soames becomes curious revenge for acerbic lines Beerbohm would never know.

Despite his literary and artistic contemporaries, Theodore Wratislaw faced diminishing opportunities in print as changing fashions bypassed him, and he had to resort to the "ineffable boredom" of partnering in his father's law practice in Rugby. Returning desperately to London, he used his law credentials for employment as Third Class Clerk in the Estate Duty Office at Somerset House. Safely ensconced with a small salary, he attempted literature again with a play, The Pity of Love. A Tragedy, the title borrowed from Yeats but as doomed as the love affair it dramatized. Orchids, a failed verse collection, followed. To Sheppard "the mediocre poems are too numerous" but a few, such as "Hothouse Flowers" and the music hall-based "At the Empire," would grace "any nineties anthology." After the monograph, Swinburne, in December 1900, "Theodore vanished as a published writer."

His later years at Somerset House, confessedly "my dungeon," and his three marriages, the first clouded by bereavement, the second by adultery, divorce and bankruptcy, close with an amiable third and domestic and financial respectability at forty-four with a wife, Ada, stout and thirty-six. That there was no best man at the wedding "corroborates the suspicion," Sheppard writes, that Wratislaw "lacked a gift for friendship." That trait had eluded him among literary colleagues much of his life, and lacking supportive connections had abbreviated his publishing future as much as had his flickering fLair for writing, which needed such stimuli.

A brief foreword by Barry Humphries, more familiar to theater audiences...