Alan Odle

This week I ordered a copy of The Life and Work of Alan Odle by Martin Steenson which tells you most of what you need to know about this interesting if fairly obscure artist.  I'm glad I found it, as I was thinking of doing a similar book myself - abandoned project No.57.  I do agree with the review that can be found here, however: after a pretty thorough bibliography of his work in books and periodicals there's very little information about the final illustrations - are they all in the collections of Terry Gilliam, Jeremy Hulme and Victor Arwas?  We're not told.  I see that Victor Arwas died in 2010.

Some years ago, searching around for a cover image for my Decadent London book I found the above picture in a history of the Cafe Royal and the search was over.  Many people think that it's a portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (or even the result of an incestuous relationship between Beardsley and his sister Mabel!) but it is in fact Odle, painted by his friend Adrian Allinson (if I recall correctly, the original is now missing, but the V&A has a photograph, hence the sepia tones).  I'm not sure that I care for a lot of his art, I prefer the earlier illustrations but he seems to have suffered many disappointments and setbacks in his life.  He was married to the Modernist writer Dorothy Richardson, whose reputation, unlike her husband's, grew after her death.  She writes that she was glad that he predeceased her, as he appears to have been almost hopeless at coping with everyday life; in earlier years he led a life of ceaseless dissipation, mostly within the comfortable environs of the Cafe Royal.  In a letter to his brother he wrote 'You know the old man's allowance won't run to Cafe Royal evenings and fires.  Necessities come first so, I do without fires.'  He also collaborated with Clifford Bax (friend of Aleister Crowley - see his memoirs Some I Knew Well) and Austin Osman Spare on the periodical The Golden Hind.

The Times Deceas'd

Last week at a book launch in London I had the pleasure of chatting to Timothy d'Arch Smith, author, bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller.  Amongst his works are the erudite and entertaining occultist Books of the Beast (Mandrake) and an autobiographical volume The Times Deceas'd (Weiser Antiquarian) about his time at Foyle's and the Times Bookshop, formerly located in Wigmore Street (it disappeared in the late 1960s). As well as praising my most recent book he also mentioned another interesting character who lived not so far from Hastings, Cyril Scott, whom I'd not encountered before.

I thought I would reproduce a short extract from his account of working in the book trade to give you a taste of the joys within; it deals with a couple of 'Uranians' who are included in my own Decadent London.

'Anthony d'Offay, an enterprising undergraduate at Edinburgh University, had acquired the library of the nineties poet, John Gray and of his friend, Marc-Andre Raffalovich.  This he had done in very simple fashion by knocking on the door of the monastery where the books were housed and offering money for them.  In common with many decadent writers, Gray had converted or, to put it in a less charitable light, subverted - part and parcel of a general wilfullness exhibited by this literary movement - to the Church of Rome.  In contrast to many of his fellow writers, he did not die young.  He and his rich friend 'settled down'.  Gray became a priest.  Their pooled libraries, moved about from cure to cure, ended up in Edinburgh where they had been bequeathed to the Dominican order.  Raffalovich's books all had his bookplate, or rather one of two bookplates, a pictorial label of fin-de-siecle design executed by the psychic artist Austin Osman Spare; and for books of a homosexual nature - plenty of those - an Eric Gill woodcut of a serpent wound in a knot: perhaps a lover's knot to add to symbolism already heavily-handedly ratified.  We had acquired at Sotheby's a copy of John Gray's Silverpoints (1893), the special vellum-bound issue, which set off the association copies bought from D'Offay for our second catalogue.  D'Offay produced his own catalogue of the more important books from the Gray/Raffalovitch menage adorned with a cover photograph of the young Andre Raffalovich which bore striking resemblances to the young Anthony D'Offay.  Already hankering after a career in pictures instead of in books, D'Offay jobbed off to us his entire stock over the next few years, among which remained a sprinkling of the Gray/Raffalovich treasure-trove.' [p.44]

For more on John Gray see In the Dorian Mode: a Life of John Gray by Brocard Sewell.

D'Offay, of course, went on to become a major art dealer - I was a regular visitor to his gallery, just south of Oxford Street, in the 1980s and 1990s - it closed in 2002.  The Times Deceas'd is written in a delightfully orotund style that had me occasionally reaching for the dictionary, one obscure adjective also reminded me of my favourite name for the publishing house of my last work - Callipygous Press - that had to be abandoned in favour of Accumulator.

Austin Osman Spare

After a very well attended launch at Maggs last week Phil Baker's biography of Austin Osman Spare is finally available in a beautiful edition published by Strange Attractor Press. I'm reading it at the moment and I can thoroughly recommend it. Lots of stuff I didn't know about such as the Cult of Ku and his friendship with Sylvia Pankhurst, Andre Raffalovich and John Gray.

At the launch I met the publisher of Atlas Press, which specialises in avant garde, Surrealist, Oulipo and Dadaist texts - I've already ordered a book from them.

Incidentally, my Decadent London walk on 19th May (see earlier post) is already 50% subscribed - maximum 40 places.