Beardsley's Venus and Tannhäuser: Two Versions

16 BEARDSLEY'S VENUS AND TANNHAUSERι TWO VERSIONS By George Y. Trail (University of Houston) Present liberal court and publishing policies have created a problem that is perhaps unique to the modern scholar - one has more difficulty obtaining expurgated texts than unexpurgated. Copies, for instance, of the expurgated Lady Chatterly's Lover ironically command a higher price than the unexpurgated text. Indeed, books are being published with the apparent aim of excluding that portion of the text which is not "salacious," "questionable," "dirty," or whatever. Grove Press's Olympia Reader and Ralph Ginzburg's An Unhurried View of Erotica are two of a number of such cases Tn point. It is even difficult to obtain expurgated copies of such "recent breakthroughs" as Donleavy's Ginger Man and Harris's My Life and Loves. But who would want them? We usually assume that the expurgated text will not represent the intentions of the author, and certainly it could not be more "interesting" than the unexpurgated text. However, in at least two cases such material is valuable: if the expurgations are the author's (and thus give us an index of not only his standards but the standards he assumes in his audience ); or if the researcher is interested in an overview of the period itself, and will thus be concerned with what that period suppresses by means legal, practical, personal, or other. Stephen Marcus's The Other Victorians, if it has done nothing else, has at least clearly indicated the potential value of the study of this other side of the coin. The published versions of Aubrey Beardsley's Venus and Tannhauser. variously and apparently randomly titled by whatever publisher or critic into whose hands it fell as The Cup Bearers, Tannhäuser, Venus and Tannhäuser, and Under the Hill, offers a complex but interesting view of the two sides of this coin. Although the publishing history of Venus and Tannhäuser does not make it clear that Beardsley thought of the first public appearance of his work as expurgated, later publishers have, perhaps in their own best interests, assumed that it was and returned to the privately printed edition as their source. Beardsley's own feelings about the matter are not clear. Stanley Weintraub's biography of Beardsley , where we would expect to find a comment on this, only refers to Venus and Tannhäuser's "milder Savoy form." There is, further, no indication in Beardsley's letters of any unhappiness between him and the editors of the Savoy in which the work, then titled Under the Hill, first appeared. If Beardsley was disturbed by the supposed emasculation of his text, he wrote nothing of it, and no one reports any such feelings of him. John Lane advertised the appearance of Venus and Tannhäuser as a book as early as October of I894, but it was not until January of I896 that the first three chapters of what Karl Beckson calls "a drastically bowdlerized version" appeared in the Savoy.1 The 17 April issue of that magazine published the fourth chapter and then, with an apology, declared that due to Beardsley's health it would be unable to continue the serialization. It announced, however , that Under the Hill "will be issued by the present publisher in book form, with numberous illustrations by the author, as soon as Mr. Beardsley is well enough to carry on the work to its conclusion."2 There is little other evidence concerning the texts. In April of I896 Beardsley wrote to Leonard Smithers, the ultimate publisher of the "unexpurgated" text in 1907. that he had "a good idea for a story to be told by Mrs. Marsuple, in which Hop on my thumb is the hero." On June 7 of that year he wrote to Smithers further that "the Juanesque continuation of Under the Hill begins to take form bootifully."3 The correspondence on the matter closes with a letter of 2 November I897, five months before his death, in which he writes "I have a very fine line drawing in hand & half way through for the legend of Tannhauser. May I finish it & send it [to] you to look at [?] If you liked it...