A Grammar of Monsters: Beardsley's Obsessive Images and Their Sources

140 A GRAMMAR OF MONSTERS: BEARDSLEY'S OBSESSIVE IMAGES AND THEIR SOURCES By Ian Fletcher Arizona State University This essay aims at synthesising Beardsley's obsessive images and more pronouncedly his sources. The act of synthesis itself will furnish, it is hoped, its own justification. Others have isolated the "leaps" in his art— changing his style every summer. His exploitation of and by the line block process of the public prints has been commented on and the episode of the artist's dismissal from The Yellow Book recurs with the regularity of Halley's comet in most studies of Beardsley though with a reduced periodicity that one can only regret. He has been made respectable in the "demon of progress" mode of art history by relation to Kandinsky and Klee on the evidence of one or two abstract lines in his middle period drawings. The artist's imagery, though, with the exception of the foetus—given a biographical tinge by Brian Reade— has not perhaps been sufficiently addressed though Brigid Brophy has wrung acute insights from the soiled Freudian linen that flutters so freely over New York. The absent or contemptuous father, and the mother whom he dominated and was dominated by; his desir ardent and inability to stanch that; his foreknowledge of an early and messy death, all shape him as a perfect actor in the Freudian theatre. But his art remains more than purely consolatory; virtually never self-pitying, in spite of his identification with the extreme or stylized images he projects, it is rather indeed the privileged voyeurism of illness that he celebrates. Still, Brophy justly accents the importance of Mummy and the voyeurism of the child's eye view of Mummy's toilette, the manufacturing of the mask of society, itself a gesture highly theatrical. Beardsley's world is far removed from the world of men, extraverted, energetic, unenclosed. Fascinated by women, he salutes their power and autonomy though fascination is sometimes counterpointed by fear not so much of the dominating momma as the sexually predatory female. But this period castratrix is subverted by humour and satire. The ritual of subversion is accomplished in L'Education Sentimental where we connive with the knowing smirk of the late teen who clearly has nothing to learn from her mondaine governess; The Fat Woman drawing, probably of Mrs. Beatrix Whistler, leans on the tradition of those picture postcard jokes, popular at seaside resorts; jokes about ladies with surging embonpoint gallantly clinging to an optimistic notion of their own maturely pneumatic charms: Mrs. Whistler's coquettish bow crowning the Rift Valley of her cleavage. These ladies are of the half world; the solid postprandial item that tops many a business luncheon in a strange city. With the Messalina images, fear and fascination evoke a 141 Fletcher: A Grammar of Monsters genuine Swiftian shudder: the Empress, femme de quarante ans, with her rigorously irritated nipples and incessant vaginal drip that no savage manual dexterity may ever hope to stem. Beardsley remains, though, tender enough to the auto-erotic autonomy or sapphic consolations of women and his last phase neutrally celebrates the uterine factuality of the female. As to the famous Venus and putto image, implicated in marble or stucco of the Volpone, that can be read of course as a hungering for return to the simplicities of touching and suckling, looking for milk and comfort and being given (willy nilly) stone. But one may equally read it as a baroque mammary exuberance as well as inconographic parody. Different readings, whatever the iconic history, are not confusing; Beardsley allows such different readings to embarrass the reader's moral as much as his aesthetic sense. But what of images that are obsessively present in his work, where, as in W. B. Yeats's "Among Schoolchildren," the human appears to exist only as a vehicle or even victim of such images? The effect of the poem talking back to its creator is analogous to the "picture" talking back to the viewer whose eye had elided its unusual asperities. Beardsley did not live in the stable allegorical world of macro- and microcosm. Goddess or monkey, tree and twy-sexed creatures cannot be tied to very...