LITERARY PETS

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Variorum of Classic Tracts and Pamphlets

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Nicotine Chic: Writers as Smokers

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Of Goose Quills, Gloves, and Writing Booths

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Up the Green!

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***

Brendan Behan (with snake), Phoenix Park Zoo, Dublin, 1959 via John McNabb

A Tipsy Tribute to the Leading Literary Lush of the Emerald Isle: Brendan Behan
by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

At least as well known for his boozing as for his books, iconic Irish author Brendan Behan (1923 - 1964) was a rollicking, larger-than-life Gaelic knockabout—a foul-mouthed, furry-chested stereotype of the drunken Paddy. In fact, the polemical playwright and legendary dipsomaniac once sardonically summarized himself as "a drinker with writing problems."

Behan was, at one time or another, a Borstal boy ( = reform school inmate), an I. R. A. "messenger" (he was an explosives expert with a special preference for gelignite), an inveterate jailbird, a busker, a pornographer, and a house painter. He was, at all times, a rebel and all-around hellbender. In the end, it was a bottle and not a British bullet which did him in. His death certificate cited a terminal condition of "hepatic coma, fatty degeneration of liver."

Bawdy, brawling, send-em-sprawling, pub-after-pub-crawling Behan referred to the stout which was his beverage of preference as "a pint of gargle," and thought nothing of putting away several thimbles of whiskey washed down with a gallon of ale chasers. The champion toper, when three sheets to the wind, and flush with a fresh royalty payment for one of his books, would routinely pass out money to anyone who approached him with a hard luck story, then trundle out of the tap room, a besotted grizzly bear of a man, singing in the streets, stumbling in the gutters, bumping into lampposts, and carrying on loud conversations, at all hours, with nonexistent respondents.

He was raised first by nuns, the French Sisters of Charity, whom he loved, and of whom he said. "I was their little pet"; then by priests, the Christian Brothers, of whom he said, "I hated them and they hated me." His real education came in a succession of lock-ups, where he had time to improve his mind and to plunder the libraries while molding himself into a surprisingly fine French and Irish scholar.

He was born with revolution in his blood. As Sean McCann tells it, "He came from a long line of rebels who were nurtured over a tenement fire. A grandmother of his was jailed for illegal possession of explosives at the age of seventy. A grandfather was one of the Invincibles (they murdered Lord Cavendish on a Sunday morning in Phoenix Park in 1882); both his parents fought in the War of Independence and in The Troubles; his father was interned with Sean T. O'Kelly, later president of Ireland; his uncle Peadar Kearney wrote the Irish National Anthem, 'The Soldier's Song.' Brendan was nine when he joined the junior movement of the I. R. A." Also by the age of nine, Behan was imbibing to the point of flagrant inebriation.



When he wasn't holding forth in a grog shop, he could be heard uttering unintelligibilities on radio or television. Edward R. Murrow cut out Behan from a broadcast citing "difficulties beyond our control"; on a television program where he appeared bombed with Jackie Gleason, the comedian said of him "Behan came across 100 proof—this wasn't an act of God, it was an act of Guinness." The Daily News quipped, "If the celebrated playwright wasn't pickled, he gave the best imitation of rambling alcoholism you ever saw." With tousled hair and rumpled clothes, Behan would attend performances of his own plays roaring drunk, taunting the actors, shouting epithets at them, and insulting the audience by screaming "Eejits!" ( = Idiots!")

Behan's Herculean binges got him into plenty of hot water. He was jailed in London, fined in Toronto, banned in New York. Rude, crude, and socially unacceptable, the rowdy provocateur was a brash, loutish cross between Victor McLaglin and Lenny Bruce. He swore like the proverbial stable boy, soused or sober. He was constantly censored. When he achieved fame as a writer, the liquor dispensaries and moist social establishments which once summarily gave him the boot now threw open their doors in boundless charity and warmest welcome. And all Ireland loved him.

Concerning the business of drinking, Behan opined:

--For me, one drink is too many and a thousand not enough.

--I only drink on two occasions: when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.

--In a caricature of Behan, Rowan Atkinson includes a wall poster with the slogan "Too young to die, too drunk to live."

***

Visit the Dublin Writers Museum

***

Previously by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert:
--Why Don Pedro Drinks
--Soap Opera Digest: A Candybox of History's Sappiest Literary Lovers
--Poets Ranked by Beard Weight
--Interview 1
--Taedium Vitae
--Snake-O-Rama: one, two

Lions of Literature:
Leon Bloy
Swinburne
Adelheid Duvanel
Christopher Spranger

Why Don Pedro Drinks

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I'm importing the archives to the new site and posting new material daily.

Please visit and update your links. Thanks.

***

Why Don Pedro Drinks
by José Marín Cañas
Translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Nobody had any idea, until that night, what made Don Pedro drink. Don Pedro was a very picturesque gentleman who affected extravagant airs. He sported oversized collars and cravats in the absurdest of colors. But the truth about this grandiose fop was that he drank and, at times, in a manner immoderate and obstreperous.

Don Pedro’s flaw was an infantile and harmless conceit. The poor old sot had an atrociously fecund musical bent, and he composed waltzes, minuets, rigadoons, fox trots, marches, one steps, and other various popular pieces and, what is more, penned poetry in a calligraphic style reminiscent of Crispulo Elizondo: he delighted in exorbitantly cursive script, and he dashed off lyrical petitionary missives as accompaniments to his waltzes, polkas and other trifles – all dedicated to Senora de Fernandez, de Benitez, or de Oconitrillo, and delivered right under the noses of their husbands who stood there alongside them in their yellow shoes and ugly cashmere sweaters like big, dumb schoolboys dressed by their mothers.

That was how Don Pedro lived.

"I enrich the art of music," was all he would say in a fierce tone, when he overheard the wisecracks of some loudmouthed know-it-all, in an attempt to deflect further gibes and snipes. "There will come a day," said Don Pedro, "when my name will resound throughout the four corners of the globe along with those of Verdi, Wagner, Donizetti, and Cavallini." (Don Pedro had a queer mania for believing that Cavallini was the name of a composer, and no one pointed out to the poor man that this name belonged to a watchmaker.)

Then someone asked, "Why do you drink?"

"I am not a weakling like you," he retorted. "I drink because I want to. Yes, gentlemen. Are you listening? Because I want to. I hope my answer doesn’t disappoint you, but there are no sad stories to tell. I’m not shameless like you, you sorry riffraff! Any of you who thinks otherwise is scum! You hear me? That's why I drink. Yes, Perez! Because it cleans my kidneys. Have you got that, you assholes? Would you like me to tell why your girlfriend left you, or why your wife went with somebody else, or what kind of books they pollute themselves with? Assholes! I drink because I want to!"

In the face of such flaming oratory, no one dared interrupt.

"Alright, alright, Don Pedro, don’t get worked up."

The poor old man sat down and cooled off, thanks to the ministrations of one of the more compassionate regulars. Then, after awhile, he thrust his hand into his satchel and removed some sheets of music. Amongst all the other muck he dredged up from the unfathomable depths of his pockets, was a little photograph smudged and blotted by filth and age.

"Eh, Don Pedro, who is that?"

"My little boy, my son," he said quickly and guardedly.

"Eh, Don Pedro," Perez spouted, "This son of yours, where is he, anyway? How come we never heard about him before? Do we look like we just rode in on camels? This is a gag, right?"

"Where is he? Where is he, you imbecile? He's over there." And he pointed, ferociously, forbiddingly, his arm stiff, his eyes fixed.

* * *

Don Pedro's inexorable finger was outstretched towards the gloomy silhouette of the distant graveyard.

* * *

About José Marín Cañas (1904 - 1980)

Costa Rican novelist, newspaperman, educator and essayist who, during his youth, held a variety of jobs including those of breadseller, stockboy at a market, and pitchman. As an adolescent, he learned to play the violin and gave serenades, performed at dances and theaters and provided musical accompaniment to silent films. He remained interested in the cinema throughout his life. A sensationalistic journalist and something of a literary experimentalist, Cañas was considered an avant-gardist in his day. His punctilious approach to composition has been likened to that of a watchmaker. He abandoned writing for thirty years, then resumed his profession during the late 1960s by contributing a regular column to a daily paper in the capitol. He served as director of the Institute of Hispanic Culture but was forced to step down from his chair in the School of Journalism at the University of Costa Rica because he lacked a diploma. He swore never again to set foot on its campus. He died at daybreak December 14, 1980, of emphysema. He never quit smoking. Among his noted books are Steel Tears and Green Hell. "Why Don Pedro Drinks" is from his 1929 collection of crepuscular tales about alcoholics, The Rum Bums (Los bigardos del ron). [Ed. note: J. M. Cañas has not previously appeared in English.]

***

Happy St. Patrick's Day from all of us here at A Journey Round My Skull

The top image is by John Collier, c. 1772, found at the LOC

***

Previously by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert:

--Soap Opera Digest: A Candybox of History's Sappiest Literary Lovers
--Poets Ranked by Beard Weight
--Interview 1
--Taedium Vitae
--Snake-O-Rama: one, two

Lions of Literature:
Leon Bloy
Swinburne
Adelheid Duvanel
Christopher Spranger

Soap Opera Digest

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Voluptuous Corruption

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Scarbo Suite by Aloysius Bertrand

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The Maze of No Emergence by Marco Denevi, translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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The Bloody Nun by Charles Nodier, translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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Luisa Frascati by Leopoldo Lugones, translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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The Taint of Lucre by Leon Bloy, translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

THE TAINT OF LUCRE
by Leon Bloy
Translated from the French by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert


"Have pity on a poor psychic, please!"

It's a story of the most banal sort. He had had the misfortune of being stricken with clairvoyance after surviving a shocking catastrophe in which a great number of good people met a miserable end.

It was, I believe, a railway accident; at least, so far as I can tell, it wasn't a shipwreck, a fire, or an earthquake. Who can say for sure? He didn't like to talk about it and, despite whatever ingenious and well-intended precautions or stratagems anyone adopted, he was always unstrung and insulted by the curiosity of do-gooders.

I will always remember his decorous supplicant's bearing at the foot of the basilica steps where he solicited alms. Because his ruin had been absolute.

It was impossible to resist a feeling of respectful sympathy for so unusual and so nobly persevering an unfortunate.

One felt that this queer individual had formerly known, better than most, the sweet delights of blindness.

A brilliant education, no doubt, had served to refine in him that exquisite faculty for seeing nothing which is the prerogative of all men, almost without exception, and the decisive criterion of their superiority over simple brutes.

It wasn't much of a trick to puzzle out, with an involuntary shudder of emotion, that, before his accident, he had been one of those exceptionally blind men called upon to become society's glitterati, and he retained from that epoch the melancholy of a prince of shadows exiled to the light.

The contributions, meanwhile, didn't exactly cascade into the old hat which he drooped in front of passersby. A beggar afflicted with an acute infirmity stymied the generosity of the devout but disconcerted parishioners who hated themselves, catching sight of him, while filing into the sanctuary.

Instinctively, one mistrusts a necessitous person who stares unflinchingly at the noonday sun, who all too clearly sees things as they truly are. There was no telling what heinous crime, what nameless sacrilege he had to expiate in some way and, from a safe distance, parents pointed him out to their offspring as a living testimonial to the redoubtable verdicts of God.

Those who encountered him even felt, for an instant, the fear of contagion, and the curate of the parish had been on the point of expelling him. Happily, a group of honorable church officials whose competence couldn't be questioned, had declared, not without a bitter twinge of distaste but, in the most authoritative and incontrovertible manner: "it isn't catching."

***

He subsisted thus, stingily, from occasional alms and from the meager fruit of the tenuous occupations at which he excelled.

He was a glutton for threading needles. He could also string pearls with breathtaking rapidity. For my own part, I was forced to seek him out not long ago and, several times, to take recourse to him to decipher the works of a renowned mystic who had adopted the habit of writing with a camel's hair cleft into four strands.

It was thus that we got to know one another and that we formed the regrettable bond that came, one day, to cost me so dearly.

God preserve me from being hard on a poor freak who, moreover, has been sadly buried in his grave for some time now! But consider how nefarious must have been the effect on my young imagination of the influence of an individual who taught me the secret science -- forgotten for centuries -- of telling a lion from a pig and a Himalaya from a heap of bran.

This dangerous knowledge almost led to my perdition. I teetered but a hair's breadth from sharing the fate of my preceptor. As it turned out, I was no closer than groping. That word says it all.

My lucky star, thank heaven, saved me from the abyss! I was able to extricate myself little by little from this baleful influence until I definitively broke the spell and resumed my role as an adequate figure among all the other moles and millipedes who blunder through the blindman's-buff of life.

But it took time, lots of time, and I was reduced to handing over a considerable part of my worldly goods to retain the rarefied services of a famed occultist from Chicago who, after an interminable series of intense sessions steered me definitively from the light.

Meanwhile, I yearned to know what had become of the wretched beggar; I will now relate how he ended up:

For a few more years, he kept up his clairvoyant's scam outside the door of the cathedral. His affliction, it is said, worsened with age. The older he got, the clearer he could see. The alms diminished proportionately.

The vicars gave him a few farthings to ease their consciences. Otherwise it was only gullible, unsuspecting strangers or persons of the lowest circumstances who, in all probability, had in themselves the seeds of clairvoyance, who came to his aid.

The blind man at the other door, a just and pitiful man who really raked it in, blessed the clairvoyant with a humble offering on the days of the grand carillon.

But all that put together amounted to next to nothing, and the revulsion he inspired mounted daily, and it didn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to guess that it wouldn’t be long before he starved to death.

Believing this himself, he swore an oath. Cynically, he flaunted his infirmity, the way the legless cripples, the goitered, the ulcerated, the demented, the arthritic displayed theirs during votive feasts in the countryside. He held himself under your nose, so to speak, forcing you, as it were, to inhale.

The disgust and indignation of the public were at their peak, and the fate of the reprobate hung by a thread, when there supervened an event as prodigious as it was unexpected. The derelict clairvoyant lucked into an inheritance from an American grandnephew who had become preposterously wealthy from artificial fertilizer and who'd been devoured by the cannibals of Auricania.

The ex-mendicant no longer needed to plead for scraps, but claimed in full the estate of his grandnephew, and straightaway set out to hurl himself headlong into a titanic binge of riotous living. One easily imagines that the fantastic and almost monstrous lucidity which had rendered him a celebrity would immediately bloat and mutate as he, like a consumptive suddenly gripped by uncontrollable seizures, precipitated himself into a rage of profligacy and dissolution.

It was precisely the opposite which happened.

A few months later he fell gravely ill -- and his condition was inoperable. He lost all clairvoyance and even became completely deaf.

No longer living on rancid tripe and rinsed-off garbage, he was finally delivered from the external world -- by the taint of lucre.

TRANSLATOR: Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

(Image created using a 1922 bill from the collection of Iliazd. I wanted to use this stunning collage by Mark Wagner but didn't hear from him in time.)

Bloyspawn: An Interview with Andrew Bloy by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

BLOYSPAWN
An Interview with Andrew Bloy
[Scion of Leon Thrice Removed]

Interview and intro by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Through the miracle of modern communications, A Journey Round My Skull is pleased to bring its readers the serendipitous fruit of the sort of felicitous happenstance only possible through the magic of the internet -- the discovery, in Los Angeles, of the great-grandson of that inimitable literary monument of Belle Epoch France -- the one and only Leon Bloy! [Bloy on JRMS: 1, 2, 3, 4.] Yes, the bloodline of the maitre is perpetuated in the unlikeliest of locales -- that modern Babylon perched on the perimeter of the Pacific rim -- Tinseltown! Great-grandson Andrew, himself a writer, as are his mother and his uncles, uses the pen name Drew Scott. Andrew reports that the boughs and branches of the family tree spread out as follows: pater familias Leon was his paternal great-grandfather who had two sons and a daughter (who died in infancy) in the early 1890s -- Andrew's grandfather Andre (Andrew's namesake), who changed his name to Arthur upon emigrating to America and Pierre, for whom his brother Peter is named; other grandchildren, besides Andrew's father, include an uncle and aunt in New Jersey whom he has never met. Andrew remembers from childhood hearing "tidbits and minor references to a long lost relative of some note" but confesses he had little literary interest at the time. It is with pride and pleasure that A Journey Round My Skull has asked Andy to share his observations and meditations about his illustrious ancestor.

JRMS: First off: how do you prefer to be called -- Andrew, Andy, or Drew?

A. B.: I usually just go by Drew. If anyone calls me Andy or Andrew 9 times out of 10 it's a telemarketer! [or an interviewer! -- ed.] My family calls me "The Heathen" (just kidding)!

JRMS: What is your first recollection of a family connection to Leon Bloy? Did the family regard him as a black sheep, a skeleton in the closet?

A. B.: I vaguely remember someone referring to his work but, honestly, I don't know in what context.

JRMS: What is your personal take on the "old man"? Are you familiar with much of his writing? Do you like what you've come across? Do you think there was justification for those of Leon's contemporaries who, though conceding his obvious talents, regarded him as everything from an obnoxious irritant and a slightly unbalanced windbag, to a subversive of the status quo and a dangerous crackpot?

A. B.: I know this sounds kind of sad but I've only read the translation of The Infusion on JRMS. I really like his way of twisting things -- it’s almost Poe-esque. Nobody knows at first who she poisoned… Could be Him! The crazy bitch is up to no good, that's for sure! I think unbalanced or dangerous are adjectives best used when describing wealthy and powerful men. Leon was just a poor schmuck with an empty stomach. You try to be civil with out a good breakfast! Absolutely, yes, Leon speaks from a soapbox – but that’s what a good writer does -- command you to read EVERYTHING he has to say…

Portrait of Leon Bloy by Felix Vallotton

JRMS: There's an abiding mystery about Leon Bloy. He was a driven man, a man possessed, a one-man crusade to correct the errors of the human race. In some respects, he was anachronistically old-fashioned even for the year 1900. He had the scolding, disdainful temperament of a Calvinist minister, the high moral tone of Juvenal or Swift, the raw cynicism and contempt for humanity of Bierce or Celine. Yet he was a proto-modernist par excellence -- he was "Kierkegaardian" as well as "hard-boiled" before either term assumed currency. He was Kafkaesque before Kafka, Borgesian before Borges; both of whom held him in the highest esteem and praised his insights and his stylistic innovations in the most laudatory terms. Further complicating the mass of contradictions the world knows as Leon Bloy is the fact that he wore a public face which was full of scorn and which was met, in turn, with the most scathing denigration, revilement and near total ostracism, while he had a reputation, in private, as the gentlest, kindest, most gracious and hospitable of men. What do you make of all this?

A. B.: Well, it might seem overly romantic of me to suggest that Bloy men are all cut from that same cloth, but it really is true. When I was growing up my dad's hero was Archie Bunker and, at age 83, he still flips off bad drivers. Definitely, I will never be accused of being a "warm and fuzzy" guy. My favorite person is a 65 lb. mutt named 'Luckyboy.' Everyone else is really getting on my nerves.

JRMS: Leon Bloy was as notorious for his personality as for his writings. To call him cantankerous would be an understatement. To call him opinionated would be like calling Tyrannosaurus Rex a carnivore. A blood and thunder preacher belching hellfire and damnation sermons, Bloy projected a fulminating tone which carried over boldly and undisguisedly into his fiction. As unsparing as he was of the shortcomings of his late nineteenth and early twentieth century contemporaries, how do you think the old warhorse would react to our world's twenty-first century ways?

A. B.: If he were alive today he would be locked up for shoving someone's I-phone up their bracket and likely have a reality show called 'Who Wants to Have A Squirrel Jammed In Your Eye?' It's funny how this convergence has led me to his work because I'm toying with the idea of bringing him into my universe for a week and seeing what happens. We'll do peyote to loosen him up for a little cross-country literary crime spree. I think he'll really dig Utah...

JRMS: Leon Bloy had one of the most distinctive, forceful faces of all time; the fearful countenance of a heavy judger of men, with eyes – seething liquid orbs teeming with indicible secrets -- borrowed from Svengali or the Buddha. His eerie, penetrating gaze, characteristic of the mystic or the mad genius, seems infused with the discharges of some sort of psychic energy gland cranked up full blast and capable, like the gorgon's gaze, of turning beholders to stone. Seeing as the serum of the same blood courses through your veins, one question begs to be asked: do you ever get itchy during a full moon and feel an insurmountable urge to howl at the top of your lungs?

A. B.: Psychic Energy Gland! That was the name of my band in high school! We did Def Leppard covers and dressed like Wavy Gravy. No, not a lot of itching or howling but I have blasted the guy in front of me at Starbucks with the 'Super Stinkeye' when he orders the latest non-coffee abomination these sheep pay nine dollars for... don't get me started…!

JRMS: What similarities with or differences from Leon do you feel you may have? What do you think Leon's life and career teaches about the nature of celebrity? It seems to have rankled Leon that people didn’t pay him more heed, and he chafed to see his colleagues garner worldly honors and recompense while he was left by the wayside. Perhaps our celebrity-obsessed, celebrity-saturated society can learn from Leon Bloy the lesson that celebrity is fickle and fleeting -- he was prominent during his lifetime but widely spurned and berated for his preachy attitude -- people then, as now, didn’t want their faults pointed out, let alone having their noses rubbed in them. And, despite his literary importance, Leon has continued to languish in obscurity for many decades. Do you think there’s a chance he may begin to be rediscovered in our post-punk, innately cynical era?

A. B.: We're not so different. I think we both feel a sense of betrayal by our respective societies: we both have a message and it's not what the general public wants to hear. I wish I could write pap for all the people who care less what goes in their eye hole, ear hole, and mouth hole. I'd be a bloody gazillionaire. I think Leon figured out that the writing thing wasn't going to basically change anybody or make any money, so he said to himself, "screw it -- I'll just do whatever I want." As far as celebrity is concerned, I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and he is here enjoying his celebrity right now.

JRMS: If you could meet your great-grandfather today, and say one thing to him, what would that be?

A. B.: First, we'd have a ribeye and a bottle of Petrus. I think I'd rather let him talk...

***

Coming soon: Leon Bloy's "The Taint of Lucre," translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert.

Leon Bloy, Mr. Intensity

Lions of Literature: Flavia Company by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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Lions of Literature: Christopher Spranger by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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Poets Ranked by Beard Weight

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10/6/11 update: Now (back) in book form thanks to Skyhorse Publishing!


Buy it on Amazon if you have one of the following beard types: Box, Claus-esque, Dutch Elongated, Full Velutinous, Garibaldi Elongated, Hibernator, Italian False Goatee, Maltese, Mock Forked Elongated, Queen's Brigade, Spade, Spatulate Imperial, Van Dyke, Van Winkle, Wandering Jim...

Swinburne Centenary

Harry Clarke, spine illustration for The Selected Poems of Swinburne (1928)

April 9, 2009 is the hundredth anniversary of the death of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 - 1909). In February, I featured Gilbert Alter-Gilbert's massive, 4-part "Lions of Literature" column on Swinburne.

We illustrated the column with Harry Clarke's fantastic but little-seen illustrations, courtesy of Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Visit the Swinburne Project to sample the poet's work.

Use these links to read the four-part column in order:

Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

Lions of Literature: Adelheid Duvanel

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Lions of Literature: Swinburne, by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (Part 4)

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, binding decoration

Swinburne On Books

"The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain."

Use these links to read the four-part column in order:

Part 1 * Part 2 * Part 3 * Part 4

SWINBURNE'S LEGACY
by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

With its driving, headlong rhythms and repetitive, trancelike drone, the imperative surge of incantatory utterances given voice by Swinburne's verse had all the strangeness of glossolalia. It rattled the guardians of tradition and shook the benumbed British mind from its tedious slumber. The startling new poetry sent shock waves shuddering through the repressed realm of Victoria Regina, not just because of its erotic content, but because of the jarring unfamiliarity of the very sound of its speech. In addition to his sexual, political, and theological provocations, Swinburne had waged what amounted to nothing less than an aural assault upon an unsuspecting England. A definitive lyric poet, Swinburne performs feats which seem to defy the physics of prosody. Tour de force is too weak a term to describe the effects he achieves routinely, almost offhandedly. With the urgency of its anapestic beat, its intricate symphonies and antiphonies alternately aggressive and lulling, its gushing rushes of adjectives strung together in alliterative syndicates and its scintillating trains of monosyllabic nouns, Swinburne's technique had, on the ear of England, the impact of a verbal avalanche.

At its most opulent, the sensorial sumptuousness of Swinburne's verse cannot be overstated; stanza after stanza of perfumed notes and chords, overlush and decadent, cascade in dizzying, indefatigable torrents of eloquence. A spasticated frenzy of compounds and concatenations all but impossibly coordinated in splurging cataracts of rhetorical excess and complex scansion; all of it building, wave after wave, into a massive onslaught of music – this was Swinburne's artistry.

To the unprepared ears of the average Victorian, Swinburne's mesmeric monotone of manic diction and emotional intensity must have seemed staggering, unimaginable – an auditory circus, a congress of wonders. To the discerning, it was literary caviar.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, Weary Wedding

Like Austin Dobson, Swinburne was well at ease with the conventions of French versification. He was adept with the virelay, the sestina, and the villanelle, and is credited with having adapted the rondeau into his own invention, the English roundel. Moreover, he was an adroit practitioner of rarefied meters such as hendecasyllabics and trochaic tetrameter. Swinburne, nevertheless, was sometimes rebuked by critics for emphasizing sound over sense – a foible with which critics were to fault Dylan Thomas nearly a century later.

Swinburne was a lifelong Hellenist and Latinist of the highest order and a medievalist by temperament and taste, partly as a result of the principles and preferences that rubbed off on him during his affiliation with his Pre-Raphaelite brethren. He wrote verse dramas in the classical and medieval molds, featuring femmes fatales and sadomasochistic situations.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, St. Dorothy

Three series of Poems and Ballads and volume on important volume of other verse; scores of scholarly treatises about fellow writers; histories; essays; historical plays and plays based on myth poured from his pen. He was a mighty workhorse who trotted out novels, hoaxes, burlesques and parodies, erotica and juvenilia, much of it still unpublished, in a continual, undifferentiated splurge.

Swinburne is noted for his metaphorical depictions of desolate, inhuman landscape. Pre-Raphaelite pictorial productions tended to render nature as an enchanted fairyland of dream settings a la Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Spenser's Faerie Queene, or Tennyson's Lady of Shallot. Though this sensibility tinged some of Swinburne's work, and he was intimately familiar with the Pre-Raphaelite painters and with the related creations of his contemporary Richard Dadd and of William Bell Scott and John William Inchbold, who were his friends, his own technique was generally Turnerian, impressionistic, and his aesthetic was that of the Sublime.

Scholar J. D. Rosenberg notes that Swinburne was "obsessed by the moment when one thing shades off into its opposite, or when contraries fuse." He was especially fixated on transitional states in nature – dawn and dusk, sea and sky; what Rosenberg terms "hermaphrodisms." Striving to express this singular sense of the inseparability of contraries, Swinburne emulated in words what his great countryman Turner had done with paint. Swinburne's various technical signatures – assonance and alliteration, synesthesia, monotony – comprised a palette prepared with incomparable virtuosity and they set him apart from all others. The "covert pathology" of his algolagnia, coupled with an exuberant morbidity and a preoccupation with exotic themes like necrophilia, sapphism, and states of sexual humiliation, combine with a truculent "theological defiance" deliberately blasphemous to the point of pastiche, to force a heretical and systematic upheaval by substituting a perverse facsimile of conventional expectations. This impulse, which permeates the preponderance of Swinburne's loftiest verse, manifests colorfully in his poisonous pantheon of cruel goddesses such as malignant Faustine and toxic Dolores. Their dolorous and baleful beauty demanding absolute adoration repaid with abasement, abjection, shame, and disgrace, emblematizes a veritable ethos of the bittersweet.

Harry Clarke, Selected Poems of Swinburne, Hymn to Proserpine

For Swinburne, love is a cruel god, "doomed, bleak, sick and sterile." He is the "poet of love's impossibility" and, according to scholar J. D. Rosenberg, "the laureate of barrenness in all its forms." Love, for Swinburne, is traumatic, and its victims always bruised and scarred. Swinburne's linkage of the frigid with the torrid, of love with death has been attributed to the loss of an often-hinted mystery sweetheart – almost certainly his cousin Mary Gordon – when she married another during his youth. Swinburne's compulsive conflation of affliction and infliction, agony with ecstasy, latent and patent, make him seem a mass of ambiguity and contradiction. Living paradox that he was, he nonetheless not only successfully sublimated the exuberant perversity of his algedonic world view into a balance of opposites but harnessed it as fuel for exquisite literature.

Swinburne studied painters and learned coloration from the Pre-Raphaelites and mirrored "indistinctness" and other innovations he observed in the works of Turner and Whistler. He aped Turner's diffuseness to create total impressionistic wholes displaying an "exaltation of energy over form, and infinite nuance over discrete detail." Within these parameters, Swinburne was able to give scope to his larger view of the cosmos, and of "man's fate on a cooling star." For Swinburne, that fate, according to Anthony Harrison, is "the tragedy of mankind whose pitiable part it is to strive for fulfillment through filial, erotic, and fraternal love, but, in doing so, to generate only strife and be freed from frustration and suffering only in death."

Swinburne uniquely used monotony to convey desolation. To this day, he remains unique in the application of this technique and the achievement of the resultant effect. He was equally unique in his ability to sustain a spree of highly ornate phrasings and fluid inflections perfect to the last scintilla and iota. It has been seriously speculated that the unaccustomed vigor and vivacity of Swinburne's verse and the source of its vital spark is attributable to a brain disorder. Swinburne's was a "music of enervation" in which "a sense of disorientation combined with insistent, mesmeric meters," a blurring, slurring mutedness, as if the drowsy cadences of the poem were enunciated in a dream.

Swinburne the humanist who celebrated in Hertha a Whitmanesque ideal of homo sapiens and who, as a ten-year-old Anglican ("quasi-Catholic," as he put it) had a working knowledge of biblical hermeneutics came, as an adult, to posit the presence of a God-but-not-God governing principle of the universe in which an infinitude of stars views man with cold indifference and even the supernal overlord Time Himself is susceptible to erasure. Just as his countrymen Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, and James Thomson and their American cousins Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson were grappling with similar proto-existentialist notions of tragedy and pessimism, Swinburne subscribed to a "relentlessly fatalistic world view" of a sumptuous desolation void of all but Implacable Nature, tyrannical and irreducible, subject only to the supremacy of all-vanquishing Time.

The final paradox of Swinburne is his insistence on the absence of eschatological purpose or teleological scheme in the cosmos other than the rhythm of primordial forces – of oceans and tides and seasons, of the phases of nature and the predations of time. For the most part, Swinburne dispenses with cataloging the contents of Pandora's Box, unlike Baudelaire; he cleaves to a higher perspective from which he views the evils that beset mankind as mere incidentals of mortality all of which will be expunged in the ultimate onslaught – the eventual extinction of mortality and of the process of extinction itself – when, in Swinburne's own oracular words, "as a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead."

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