The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley

by Donald S. Olson

'A lively account of the life of a brilliant misfit' - The Sunday Times
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.

Aubrey Beardsley challenged the hypocrisies of Victorian England — and was made to suffer for it.

Praise for The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley:
'The triumph of this book is that is that Beardsley himself, with his jaunty courage, his acerbic wit, and his amazingly precocious genius, retains one’s sympathy from beginning to end' - The Spectator

'…with The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley… the imagined voice Olson creates for Beardsley’s rarified aestheticism is spot on, particularly in his battles with the censorious “If my persecutors regarded me as some kind of erotomaniac, then I wanted to give them something to be frightened about”' - The Bookseller

'Bitter, humorous and sly, the confessions beguile and shock the reader by turns' - Marie-Claire

Donald S. Olson is a novelist, playwright and travel writer. His seven published novels include The Secrets of Mabel Eastlake, the first trans-thriller; Queer Corners, about the violent anti-gay rights battles in Oregon during the 1990s; and the internationally published rom-coms My Three Husbands and Memoirs Are Made of This, written as Swan Adamson. Donald’s new collection of ghost stories, The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Other Otherworldly Tales, will materialize with Lume Books in 2020.

Genres: Fiction

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 21, 1993

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to smile when I read an Amazon 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 we’re talking about – an unashamedly decadent artist with an overt interest in the erotic, his reputation destroyed by Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace, his later work published by the pornographer Leonard Smithers. To take the ‘smut’ out of Beardsley’s 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 Olson’s 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 doesn’t travel much beyond ‘The Peacock Skirt’, then this book is probably not for you.

[Tocotin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title actually says it all, the narrator of this novel is the dying Aubrey Beardsley, who is relating his life to his confessor (Beardsley became a Catholic towards the end of his life and tried to get all his "morally questionable" drawings destroyed), so you can imagine it's quite interesting: fin de siecle, Japanoiserie, Paris, Oscar Wilde and general debauchery (on a side note, why is my stupid dictionary underlining Beardsley and Wilde? Wtf?). Well, I did have some fun. I especially liked Wilde in this book, much more than Beardsley (alas).

My one and only serious complaint is that the style of these confessions is too straightforward, too callous, too crude, even. The hero certainly lacks refinement. He is always 100% sure he is a genius; he has no doubts about that. He is a zealous neophyte, but what he really craves is the acceptance of the reader, not his God or his confessor; the language, the presented events, the attitude towards them, and the dismissal of any religious ideals would be deeply offensive to a priest. As a result, I was left scratching my head as to the necessity of this mode of narration, because it's clear (from this book) that the hero doesn't care about Catholicism at all. His decision to convert remains unexplained.

Also, whatever happened to Penny Plain? Why introduce her at all?

[Dayna]

Probably not going to finish this one. Certainly not any time soon.

[Vic Marriott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Fascinating and Sad Story

Well told life of a man of gargantuan talent forced to distill as much art as his being could produce into a doomed brief life.

[dead letter office · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great novel about the gifted artist who died young after producing some of the strangest drawings ever to come out of england. he seems to have been talented and eccentric enough to make oscar wilde a bit jealous, and they had a stormy friendship after beardsley illustrated the wilde play Salome. well written and worth reading, even if you have no idea who aubrey beardsley is.