Published by Bantam Press, 1993, hardcover, illustrated, 422 pages, slight tear to lower edge dust jacket, otherwise condition: as new.
In a stunning fictional tour de force, based on five years of research, Donald S. Olson portrays Aubrey Beardsley's life from infancy to his death at the early age of twenty-five, a victim of tuberculosis. Written in the first person, in the form of confessional letters to a French priest, Père Coubé, The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley weaves fictional incidents into the biographical facts of Beardsley's life to present a powerful portrait of a modern artist who challenged the hypocrisies of Victorian England and was made to suffer for it.
I had to smile when I read a review of this novel, from a reader clearly red-faced with indignation: This book is so crammed with smut. Well, yes, there is a fair amount of what-one-might-describe-as smut in the book, but this is Aubrey Beardsley were talking about an unashamedly decadent artist with an overt interest in the erotic, his reputation destroyed by Oscar Wildes fall from grace, his later work published by the p**********r Leonard Smithers. To take the smut out of Beardsleys life and work is to deny a major theme not only in his art, but in fin de siècle art and literature as a whole.
Moving on This novel takes the form of a confession (i.e. autobiography) written by Beardsley to a French priest. Beardsley is holed up in France, dying from consumption, contemplating a deathbed conversion to Catholicism (though at no point during the Confessions does he evince any religious feelings at all, and one can only conclude that his eventual conversion is more a case of hedging his bets for the afterlife than the result of a spiritual epiphany).
Anyone wanting to read an actual biography about Beardsley might be better directed to the one written by Matthew Sturgis (workmanlike, but a trifle dull). To be honest I find Olsons novel more readable, giving more of a sense of Beardsley as a person, his conflicting desires, his battle with the disease that would eventually kill him, and above all his approach to his art, and his thorny relationship with Oscar Wilde.
This is a novel, and should be read in that spirit, and taken as such it is a sharply-written and sometimes moving account of an extraordinary artist, who might have been only 25 when he died, but whose work still graces many walls today mine included. But if your interest in Beardsley doesnt travel much beyond The Peacock Skirt, then this book is probably not for you.
