Illustrating at a Social Distance: On Beardsley, Wilde, and ‘Salome’

In a time before social distancing, in a crowded church on Good Friday, I played the role of Veronica in a mimed passion play. Like all the other sixth graders, I wore a single tear of blood painted on my face. Unlike everybody else, I botched the role. I had only one job, to reveal the image of Jesus’ head that had miraculously appeared on my cloth, but I did it upside down. With hundreds of gasps and chuckles, it was hard to know if what I’d done was horrid or hilarious.

In a time before social distancing, in a packed college seminar, I remember giggling uncontrollably along with all my neighbors at the professor’s suggestion that a head “brought in upon a platter,” as Elliot writes in Prufrock, stood for castration. Wasn’t being dead the ultimate castration? But then, I didn’t really understand much yet about how this Biblical severing had a particular history as a sexy story.

In a time before social distancing, elbow to elbow around a conference table packed full of bodies anxiously waiting to graduate, my AP literature students requested that we read Salome. The play is Oscar Wilde’s version of the Biblical story in which Herod’s step-daughter dances in exchange for John the Baptist’s head. It was a simple request on the students’ part—The Importance of Being Earnest was on the curriculum and a few kids asked if we might swap it out for a different Wilde play, one they’d seen with pictures.

The illustrations, decorative and titillating, were done by Aubrey Beardsley. And since I liked taking suggestions, I perused the less-read, less-liked play and considered.

Horrid, hilarious, sexy, violent—I could see why the students, though they hadn’t read a word of the play yet, had been drawn in by Beardsley’s transgressive prints. They are stylized and naughty. Breasts and claws peek out of opulent clothing. Small paiges are hermaphrodites, satyrs, masked angels, fetuses. Genitals are out, but no one’s touching. As I read, it was hard to tell how most of this relates to the text at hand. Beardsley himself called his drawings “simply beautiful and quite irrelevant.”

Both eccentric dandies, Wilde and Beardsley traveled for a while in the same London artistic circles, though they had little interaction over the specifics of the illustration. Beardsley developed his bizarre idiom from his wild imagination, but the technique of his unusual line drawings came out of a desire to flatter and maximize the potential of the line press machine, the technology by which Salome would be editioned. The flat lines that result are crisp and beautiful, cold and distant, often funny when the text is not.

Maybe Beardsley’s illustrations are divergent because he, like everybody else, couldn’t quite understand what Wilde was going for in the play. The main alteration Wilde made to the Gospel version of the story is that he changes the motives. In the original biblical plot, Salome’s mother is vengeful because John the Baptist, or Jokanaan, speaks out against her marriage to her husband’s brother and Salome acts at the behest of her mother.

However, in Wilde’s play, Salome lusts wildly for Jokanaan of her own accord, then demands his reticent, rebellious head. She is a powerful, malevolent force, like the “moon . . . looking for dead things” to which she is compared throughout the play. When she sees Jokannan, she speaks psalms about his body, calling it “like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed.” When he asks her to step away, she says his body “is like a plastered wall, where vipers have crawled . . . like a white sepulcre full of loathsome things.”

Legend has it that Beardsley was angry at Wilde when he made these pictures. The narrative that has proliferated is that Beardsley had wanted not just to illustrate, but to translate the play. (Wilde had written it in French to skirt British laws against performing Biblical stories on the stage.) So then, when the job of English translation was given to Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, instead, Beardsely took revenge by mistranslating word into image.

But there is no evidence for this story. All it shows is the public will to believe that the images, by virtue of their dissociative nature, were spiteful readings of the play, willful sabotage. Shortly after the book came out, when Wilde was arrested for sodomy, Beardsley’s association with the writer lost him a beloved job at The Yellow Book, famed magazine of the aesthetic movement.

There were also unfounded whispers that the two were lovers, as though the chasm between the words and pictures suggested an illicit proximity between the writer and illustrator. So, in the public imagination around the book, Beardsley drafted a hatefuck of Wilde’s play just as Wilde’s play was a hatefuck of the Bible.

In the public imagination around the book, Beardsley drafted a hatefuck of Wilde’s play just as Wilde’s play was a hatefuck of the Bible.

For the Catholic school class I taught, I did not know what to do with Salome. Wilde’s hysterical protagonist felt fickle, nihilist, flat in ways I couldn’t account for. And Beardsley’s dissonant renderings only added a layer of difficulty. More still, I struggled with how I could, as a literature teacher, put forth for study a text overshadowed by its illustrations, a book overshadowed by its interpersonal dramas.

So I dismissed the request and left the curriculum as it was, not worrying much about their disappointment because I loved Earnest and had confidence that we could unite around that play’s seemingly universal humor.

*

When, just a few weeks ago, we were all introduced to the term social distancing, I immediately imagined a future Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, glorying in the practice. I was not alone—the New York Times and the Atlantic both profiled Larry David and the governor of California deployed him for a social distancing PSA.

Bunbury, the invented, ailing friend of Wilde’s titular Earnest/Ernest, is a character prescient of the Larry David playbook. The anthropomorphized excuse with his absurd name has always cracked me up; Ernest worms out of family gatherings and other unwelcome social obligations, triumphs in an elaborate fib. Bunbury was the rudest gesture towards manners and a caricature of our need for space.

But my students didn’t all find it as funny as I did. Most cringed a little, some were downright angry at the character’s dishonesty, some were sad that he should hate his family. By the time we read through to the end, an enthusiastic marriage plot, only a few of my students had warmed to the absurd humor. We should have read the one with the beautiful, disturbing pictures.

Apparently, the socially stilted people are a stranger, less sympathetic breed than I had realized when first weighing them against a bloodthirsty belly dancer.

Bunbury is a blunt object, a rudimentary, gleeful social distancing tool. Call on “Bunbury” and wheedle yourself some time alone. But in Salome, characters don’t squirm from one another—they flinch. They seek distance as a response to danger, not distaste. Whether it is the gaunt prophet evading Salome’s kiss, or Salome evading the Freudian interest her stepfather takes in her, or Herodias dodging the curses of Jokanaan.

“Who is this woman looking at me? I will not have her look at me,” says Jokanaan of Salome. His disgust is not funny. He offers no excuses.

It is hard to get the feel for whether the text is modernist or melodramatic. The tone feels off—it is sexy; it is orientalist; it is atmospheric; it is magical; but every once in a while Wilde’s typical snark pops up. A young Roman, sounding just as Victorian as Lady Bracknell, says, “the stoics are people of no cultivation. They are ridiculous people. I myself regard them as being perfectly ridiculous.”

Beardsley’s drawings of Salome are as much of a puzzle. She is different in every image—in one her hair is a black cloud, then a mass of tentacles, then fish scales, then woven into a headdress of something between antler and flame. But Beardsley’s style binds these disparate images and looking at the pictures again, I find the humor. A few curled lips, tapers burning spiked atop devil’s heads and phalli, stacks of contemporary French books in the—not one, but two—illustrations set in Salome’s boudoir. (No boudoir is referenced in the text.)

The details are all pushed apart by black lines across negative space, as though tent poles prop up different points of meaning. Beardsley claimed, in creating these drawings, to have made a new set of meaning for his lines. While typical drawing technique uses thick lines to represent foreground and thin lines background, Beardsley reimagined all lines of equal thickness and assigned them all the same value.

Maybe the thing that binds picture and word is that here, comedy and tragedy are assigned the same value. In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère reflects on the Biblical stories left unpainted, a “gallery of phantom paintings.” His words remind me of what an incredibly often painted story Salome is. Always sexy. Always a cunning revenge plot. Here, in Wilde’s version, it is sexy for sex’s sake. The revenge is for sex denied.

That is not cunning, like the original. It seems silly to watch her lust hysterically after an ascetic imprisoned in a cistern. She will do anything for a kiss, and when Jokanaan physically withdraws, she seizes his power to withdraw. In this self-defeating act, does she castrate him or behead him?

Apparently, the socially stilted people are a stranger, less sympathetic breed than I had realized.

*

My son has absorbed social distancing, and made up some of his own rules. Instead of kissing goodnight, he gives four and a half blown kisses; the half he does by turning his palm horizontal, as though he is silencing himself. When I sneak a kiss on his cheek he squeals “not that type” and shoos me. It is funny and terrifying and sad. I don’t want revenge, but I want out of the cistern.

In Beardsley’s final plate, he writes a line from the actual play, “J’ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan, J’ai baisé ta bouche.”

Salome floats in the air, maybe like a terrifying witch, maybe like an elated lover. Iokanaan’s head is connected to the ground by a plume that either rises from the lily beneath him or pours from the severed head. The black and white is no help with these distinctions between the gorey and beautiful, death and life.

About Salome as source text for Beardsley’s mischievous and aloof drawings, a contemporary Richard Ross writes, “Never was there a more suitable material for that odd tangent art in which there are no tactile values.” All illustrations for text are tangents so some degree, I think. Yet here, image wanders particularly far from plot. For Salome, though, Ross is right—illustrator and writer both dispense with value distinction: tactile, tonal, moral.

One of the uncomfortable truths about social distancing is the amount some of us relish it, even in the midst of so much suffering. It is an opportunity for so many small indulgences. For every social interaction I miss, there is one uncomfortable task I don’t, and there is something ambivalent that I won’t miss angsting about.

For a moment, I think about the sumptuous book design for Salome—is this lovely edition worked up for the people who Bunburyied their way out of a night at the theatre, avoided the blood and the passion as staged by Wilde? If so, Beardsley’s specimens replace people nicely.

In the frontispiece of the edition, Beardsley draws a caricature of Oscar Wilde’s face as the moon, staring with a disaffected look through some clouds and looking at the two ambiguous Adam and Eve type figures. This is no hatefuck, exactly. In this, as in all of his illustrations, Beardsley holds up Wilde’s head, a light impression of it, far from his chest, proudly and upside down.

So is castration funnier, or beheading? The appendages Beardsley scatters around the pages call it a draw. Maybe my students and I should have struggled through Wilde’s alienating words and Beardsley’s aloof images as a united front. Maybe we would have figured it out, or at very least we would have been disappointed, had a laugh, in the same room together.

For me, the days of distance are fearsome and funny—but I wish they’d be short as a suite of thirteen line-drawings or a one-act play.

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