Books: Notable: Apr. 6, 1981

AUBREY BEARDSLEY

by Miriam J. Benkovitz

Putnam; 226 pages; $11.95

From his black-trimmed London studio, Aubrey Beardsley transformed book illustration into high art. His use of curves and filigrees had the delicacy and tensile strength of Victorian wrought iron, but his subjects—fauns, satyrs, naked slaves—earned him a reputation of fearful decadence. Even in the prurient "yellow nineties," when young men dragged live lobsters down Pall Mall on silken leashes, Beardsley was singled out. "A monstrous orchid," Oscar Wilde proclaimed him, a judgment unchallenged until now.

In this overdue study, Miriam J. Benkovitz, a biographer who specializes in English mannerists (Ronald Firbank, Baron Corvo), traces Beardsley's profound influence on modern art and restores a tarnished career.

In his brief 25 years, Beardsley was disabled by poverty and tuberculosis and defamed because of his association with Wilde and the supercilious periodical The Yellow Book. But the artist intensely disliked the writer and was, in fact, obsessively heterosexual. Yeats was to recall him in the company of a notorious London tart, "Penny Plain." His health failing, the God-haunted Beardsley finally converted to Roman Catholicism and implored from his deathbed to have "all obscene drawings" destroyed. Fortunately, Benkovitz notes, he was ignored. Without that pivotal oeuvre, the world of graphic art would be impoverished.

PEACE BREAKS OUT

by John Knowles

Holt, Rinehart & Winston

193 pages; $10.95

All authors dream of writing a perennial: a book that not only sells well for a season but continues to sprout on bedside tables and school reading lists for years afterward. John Knowles, 54, did just that with his first novel, A Separate Peace (1960). Its story of prep school rivalry and love, set in the early 1940s against a distant but beckoning war, seemed to many a near perfect distillation of adolescence, a nostalgic memoir about an end to innocence and an athlete dying young.

Peace Breaks Out is not so much a sequel as a spinoff: different characters, same place. The scene is once again New Hampshire and the fictional Devon School; World War II has just ended. A returning student reflects on the meaning of all this: "Isn't it funny to be starting our senior year and at the end of it, unlike every senior class here in I don't know how many years, no war to be thrown into? Isn't that weird?"

Knowles proceeds to rig this promising situation unmercifully. His plan calls for the Devon boys to find a scapegoat on whom they can vent their frustration. They are goaded by the editor of the school paper, whose murky motive seems to be a belief that the U.S. needs a good purging. Someone breaks a new window in the chapel; four athletes corner a suspect and, while trying to force a confession out of him, bring on his death. A teacher then meditates on "that monster war—sending last thin death waves still reverberating around the world, even here to this little rural corner."