Supporting Players of the Fin de siecle.

STONE, MARTHA E.

The Man Who Was Dorian Gray

by Jerusha Hull McCormack

St. Martin's Press. 353 pages, $24.95

Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson

by James G. Nelson

Pennsylvania State University Press 430 pages, $35.

WAS there a real-life model for Dorian Gray? Opinion among Wilde scholars is divided, but Jerusha Hull McCormack is quite sure there was. His name was John Gray, a minor British poet about whom she has written a number of works. And she backs up her theory with some convincing quotations from Wilde and his contemporaries, as well as from newspaper reports.

John Gray was born in 1866 as a poor lad, the oldest of eight. Ambitious and intelligent, he worked hard, fell in with the right crowd, worked his way up the Civil Service ladder to become a librarian in the Foreign Office, published some poetry, and made it into Wilde's inner circle before being overthrown by Lord Alfred Douglas. His first published work, a translation of a Verlaine poem, appeared in 1890 in a "uranian" periodical called The Artist and Journal of Home Culture. He was a friend of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who published his fiction in their literary magazine, The Dial. His writing--and his handsome looks--impressed Wilde, who underwrote the cost of publishing his first collection of poems, Silverpoints. In a 1994 reprint by Woodstock Books, Ian Small and R. K. R. Thornton describe the book as an icon of the 1890's." Thirteen of its 29 poems were translated from the French, and several are dedicated to movers and shakers of the fin de siecle. Its epigraph is a line from Verlaine.

In a dramatic second act, John Gray reinvented himself as a priest. For a number of years he'd maintained an apparently Platonic relationship with Andre Raffalovich, once a friend of Wilde, a poet and neglected son of a wealthy, Russian-Jewish family, who was often mistreated in anti-Semitic England. Raffalovich quietly subsidized Gray, some of Gray's siblings, and a number of other impecunious writers and artists, notably Aubrey Beardsley. In 1896, Raffalovich suddenly decided to convert (perhaps emulating the example of the beloved Scottish governess who'd taken care of him since childhood), became a lay member of the Dominican Order, and took the name Brother Sebastian. Gray followed suit, but went further and became a Roman Catholic priest, assigned to an Irish slum in Edinburgh. (McCormack asks, perhaps rhetorically: "Was there some infection at Oxford, a diseased longing for ritual and candles and beautiful young priests?") Raffalovich decided to build a church for Gray in a smart neighborhood. They li ved together in a nearby house, their friendship supervised by Raffalovich's now-elderly governess, who treated both men as her own children. Gray had long since repudiated Silverpoints and reportedly tried to buy up and destroy any remaining copies that he could find. Gray and Raffalovich died within a few months of each other in 1934.

The Man Who Was Dorian Gray makes for a somewhat exasperating read, its tone a combination of breathless and earnest. For anyone interested in Wilde and the literature of the English Decadents of the 1890's, it will be entertaining, if only for the name-dropping and gossip. McCormack has chosen to write it in the present tense and to interpolate imaginary conversations with paragraphs of fiction and poetry written by some of the principles. Because Gray himself was an elusive figure whose personality does not make much of an impression, much of the book centers on other figures of the time.

Many of these same figures also appear in John G. Nelson's history of Leonard Smithers' publishing company in Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson. Leonard Smithers, who died in poverty on his forty-sixth birthday in 1907, was eulogized at his funeral by Oscar Wilde's friend Robbie Ross as 'the most delightful and irresponsible publisher I ever knew." Filled with information about the costs, styles of paper and printing, and the day-to-day business of publishing during this period, Publisher to the Decadents contains a few beautiful reproductions of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, the artist who helped Smithers achieve his great success. As it happened, Smithers was also deeply enamored of erotic literature. Trained as a lawyer, he knew his way around the laws of late Victorian England. Nelson calls Smithers "the most daring, courageous, and in some respects, the most clever and talented" of the publishers of his time. Wilde, however, found him unbusinesslike, "a priest who serves at the altar whose God is Literature." Wilde was also irate that Smithers had not printed sufficient copies of his Ballad of Reading Gaol and had not given it much publicity.

At the beginning of his career, Smithers struck up a correspondence with the explorer and connoisseur of the erotic, Sir Richard Burton, who had translated The Thousand Nights and a Night in 1885. Several years later, Smithers fell into a partnership with a printer and rare book dealer in Soho, at that time the center of the porn trade. Mter their company took off with a new edition of Burton's Nights, Smithers struck off on his own. Nelson explores the friendships he forged with Beardsley and with poets such as Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson as he built his publishing list, giving them employment when he established his short-lived but controversial, avant-garde, and influential literary magazine, Savoy. In 1895, he published Symons' poetry collection, the "blatantly decadent" London Nights, which had been turned down by other publishers, stating that "he would not be intimidated by what Burton had referred to as 'the purity people."'

Nelson relishes detailing the everyday problems Smithers underwent as a purveyor of erotica in the 1890's. He kept his "most vulnerable books of pornography" in suitcases under the counter so that "if a police raid of his premises appeared imminent, the bags could be quickly taken to the nearest railway station and deposited until it was safe to redeem them."

Publisher to the Decadents furnishes helpful annotated checklists of Smithers' publications and chapter notes that consume over a hundred pages. Full of literary anecdotes that seem, a century later, surprisingly fresh, this is an unusual study and a valuable contribution to the literature about Wilde and his world.