Inspiring Older Readers
Black & White: A portrait of Aubrey Beardsley by Brigid Brophy
I last read this rather beautifully produced little essay back when I was just 19 and involved in a brief tryst with a fellow student who was besotted by the literature of Oscar Wilde, the art of the Pre-Raphaelites and literally obsessed by Aubrey Beardsley. She lent me the book and pretty much ordered me to read it and I was in no position to refuse – I was pretty sure there was also going to be a test at the end of it. There was and the relationship, as you might have guessed, was pretty much done for before it got going.
I’ve always had good book etiquette however so I returned the book and hadn’t seen it again until I recently came across a copy on one of my regular bookshop trawls. To be honest I’d forgotten just how delightfully produced the 1968 first edition is. The black and white aesthetic has been sustained throughout and the size (quarto, I think) works splendidly because it’s big enough to contain excellent full page reproductions of Beardsley’s drawings but not so big it becomes a coffee-table production.
The size of the book makes it readable but what about the content? The short essay it contains is, by any measure, idiosyncratic and I suspect rather like Marmite – there will be those who love it and those who will find it akin to a breathy whirlwind of excitable prose that is more a fan letter than a considered critical appraisal. Not that I think this is necessarily a bad thing but I would suggest that if you want a thorough-going portrait of Beardsley and his work, this is not the place to go for it. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a poetical, emotional and creative response – something visceral – Brophy’s monograph will exhilarate.
From the opening sentences, Brophy sets out her central theme:
“Live (love) now: die sooner or later.
That, classically, is the purport of lyrical art. Aubrey Beardsley was above all a lyrical artist – but one who was pounded and buckled into an ironist by the pressure of knowing, which he did virtually from the outset, that for him death would not be later but sooner.”
She doesn’t dodge the centrality of the erotic or Beardsley’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ and the figure of the mother and the incestuous suggestions of the relationship with his sister are all part of Brophy’s downhill slay ride of a book. It’s an essay, as my 19 year old girlfriend must have known (consciously or not), to give to a young person if you’re trying to excite their interest. Maybe it’s a window on what a dullard I was that I obviously didn’t respond to it back then with the sort of enthusiasm I was expected to demonstrate.
What has interested me more than the Beardsley essay itself is doing some more investigation into the author – who turns out to be a really fascinating character in her own right. Born in 1929, Brophy died in 1995 but lived for the last third of her life with increasingly invasive multiple sclerosis that required her to have a dedicated carer and which did nothing to temper her legendary grumpy and combative personality. She is perhaps most famous for her campaigning work on promoting legislation to enable the introduction of Public Lending Rights that would see payment to authors whenever their books were borrowed from libraries.
But this was just the tip of a substantially bigger iceberg and her astonishingly diverse career and interests are superbly captured by Giles Gordon in his Independent obituary:
“Atheist, vegetarian, socialist; novelist and short-story writer; humanist; biographer; playwright (The Burglar had a brief West End run in 1967); Freudian promoter of animal rights; children's author (the adventures of Pussy Owl, only progeny of Edward Lear's pair); tennis fanatic (not least Navratilova) and, on television, football fancier; most loyal of friends; reverer of Jane Austen; lover of Italy; Mozart adorer (her radical Mozart the Dramatist: a new view of Mozart, his opera and his age, 1964, was reissued in a new edition in 1989); aficionado of the English National Opera (but not of the Royal Opera House); disliker of "Shakespeare in performance"; smoker of cigarettes in a chic holder and painter of her fingernails purple; mother, grandmother, wife; feminist; lover of men and women; Brigid Brophy was above all an intellectual, which British (although she was Irish) authors aren't supposed to be. We mistrust logical, rational thought in our writers, finding it easier to live with instinct, intuition. Brophy was ever the Aristotelian logician.”
So it’s worth thinking of Black & White as not just an introduction to the life and work of Aubrey Beardsley but also to the life and times of Brigid Brophy. The book is available in paperback in the Faber Finds series but you’ll get the original hardback for not a lot more on the second hand market. I would strongly recommend you do the latter.
Terry Potter
September 2019