Thanks to Gerhard for originally posting this on the Cerebus Yahoo!Group. Since the formating on that was wonky, here is the formated one. And here is the original MS Word document which has the pictures embedded in it (and is decent sized at 530 kb).
The Long Strange
History of Phase II
(starting bid: $5 US)
Good Things for the
CBLDF
First Quarto: The Savoy
Part I
As Neil Gaiman wrote in his essay “300
Good Reasons to Resent Dave Sim”: “Endings are more memorable than
beginnings…we remember where we were when we heard good friends were dead,
while our first memories of them are hazy, muzzy things.” And so I am rather fortunate in being able
to remember that I met Neil Gaiman on or about the afternoon of October 4, 1986
(although it would stretch a point to describe Neil and me as good friends and,
at least at this point, we are both still alive). I can remember because I just have to walk a few steps over to
the second floor landing and look at the Cerebus
1986 UK Tour poster (Fig.1)
which is framed on the wall there and look down to the last appearance at
Forbidden Planet in London. Had the Tour
worked out the way that I had intended—as the breakthrough point to world fame
and fortune for Dave Sim, the World’s Most Ambitious Graphic Novelist and His
Brilliant Collaborator, Gerhard—I might not have remembered meeting Neil. I had been to the UK the previous fall for
the UK Comic Art Convention and it had stuck with me what a dinky little island
England was and that it would be possible for Gerhard and me to Tour the entire
country (and Scotland) by car
for roughly what it had cost for my then-wife Deni and I to fly between any two
stops on the First American Tour in 1982 and roughly half of what it cost for
most of the flights on the First Canadian Tour in 1983. Of course, the fact that we flew over on
Concorde and came back in First Class on British Airways tended to eat up the
savings.
As
the cliché goes, I was “flush with my first major success”—the decision to
print the entirety of the 500-page High
Society (Cerebus 26-50) storyline
under one cover and to sell it directly to the Cerebus readers (the distributor orders had been woefully small and
insufficient to pay the whopping printing bill)—and had determined to try some
more ambitious promotions with my brand-spanking-new six-figure bank
account. One of the hidden motives, of
course, was that I wanted to experience “High Society living” analogous to that
experienced by Cerebus in the titular graphic novel: I had developed a weakness for world-class hotels, an appetite
which had only been whetted by stays at Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier, Toronto’s
Royal York and Hilton Harbour Castle Hotels, New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and The
Plaza. The Savoy was definitely on my
list.
So
it was partly an indulgence of my taste for the high life and partly a sincere
effort at promotion that led me to contact the Publicist at Forbidden Planet
and to see if he would be able to drum up some journalistic interest in the
world’s only 300-issue graphic novel and its two would-be perpetrators by
inviting all interested journalists to a Press Reception in our suite at the
Savoy. I forwarded the usual pile of
promotional items that are of use in such instances and attempted to do the
same through the various stores along the way.
That was when I learned a first, hard media lesson about England. It is, indeed, a dinky little island but
dinky little islands (with no domestic newsprint sources) also produce dinky
little newspapers; dinky little newspapers which need every available square
inch of newsprint to shrill and shriek about this, that and the other
tempest-in-a-teapot du jour and are,
therefore, not overly amenable to finding merit in colonials who are attempting
to draw and write a 6,000 page graphic novel, who are only a quarter of the way
through same and whose graphic novel has not been optioned for the cinema or a
television program and which has nothing to do with bloodshed, perversion, the
Royal Family or admixtures of the three subjects about which the newspaper
might shrill and shriek in a few self-aggrandizing paragraphs. I’m not sure what English television and
radio news is like now, but then it was very much like Canada’s (which was
modeled upon it): the BBC and CBC being Pravda writ small, government
mouthpieces and, besides that, a couple of freelance corporations at the
periphery (the news, if it could be called that, so much resembled a Monty
Python skit that I kept waiting for the punch-line at the end of every item). And, of course, we had the colossal
misfortune to be over there at the same time as Frank Miller, who was there on
DC’s nickel as they tried, as well, to beat the bushes for media coverage with
Time-Warner money behind them in an effort to capitalize on (what I believe was)
the release of the final issue of The
Dark Knight Returns in that Year Before what would prove to be the most
lucrative and influential year in the company’s history (thanks largely to Alan
Moore and the same Frank Miller). As the resulting Dark Knight coverage was less of the Rolling Stone feature profile variety Frank was then getting used
to and was, instead, mostly of the “Holy Splat! Bam! Pow! Cartoonist wows UK
Bat-fans” variety I counted myself rather luckier than not, in the long run,
that it was Frank and not me who was the object of (second hard media lesson)
the universally patronizing London media.
Of
course that still left us with our Press Reception and on the afternoon in
question, having thrown open the mini-bar and ordered hors d’oeuvres and bowls of caviar from room service, I prepared to
seduce the three members of the fourth estate who had turned up at the behest
of the Forbidden Planet publicist and (thereby) to make them do my journalistic
bidding: Roz Kaveny, Dave Dickson and Neil Gaiman.
Of
the three, Dave Dickson (I was informed by the Forbidden Planet publicist) was
our big “coup,” since he wrote regularly for the music press in England: the
big guns, New Music Express and
what-not. He had (reportedly and
confirmed by him in our pre-interview chat) been out for a night of drinking on
one occasion with Keith Richards. He
was a Cerebus enthusiast and it was,
as I recall, the appearance of Mick and Keef in the book a few months before
which had won him over to the idea of doing a piece on the Tour. He was an
elfin fellow who looked for all the world like a small replica of David Bowie
and who wore his rock ‘n’ roll credentials with distinction. I remember he took over Neil’s flat when
Neil came to America the first time, so it was interesting to me that—since
Neil had given me the number of his London flat—I could get a hold of Dave
Dickson anytime I chose to fly across the pond and join in whatever rock ‘n’
roll festivities might be going on that weekend. I never did, but at the time, divorced and single, that was
always nice to have in the back of my mind as an option. I remember that Mr.
Dickson came up to say hello at one of the stops on the ’93 UK Tour and was
more-than-somewhat the worse for wear for his rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle-in-proximity
(not unusual among music journalists: word to the wise), but still charming and
friendly as ever.
Roz Kaveney. Well, let me quote
Neil again from “300 Reasons…”:
She was, and is several sizes bigger than I
am, huge as Thomas Aquinas and just as large as life: all dressed in black
leather (Roz, that is, not Thomas Aquinas, who was a Saint), carrying a black
leather bag full of manuscripts heavy as bricks, and to top it all she
occasionally wears hats…Sometimes Roz would explain stuff, but usually she’d
assume I knew what she was talking about.
I had a mental map of Roz’s world that was more or less like listening
to an ongoing soap opera of truly operatic proportions (with real valkyries). To be honest it would occasionally be a
shock to meet members of the cast, who were without fail a disappointment:
life-sized people of no particular distinction in whom it was hard to discern
the sacred monsters of Roz’s sagas.
It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out that
Roz Kaveney WAS a valkyrie. She
certainly knew how to dominate a room, with her knitted scarf the size of a
large boa constrictor and the above-mentioned satchel clearing a path before
her. The whole time I was being
interviewed by Dave Dickson I had trouble keeping my mind on his questions and
my answers as Roz held court with Neil, Gerhard and the Forbidden Planet
publicist in the hallway directly in my line of sight munching on crackers and
caviar (and gesturing emphatically with them) and holding forth on, well, as
Neil says: could have been just about anything. Nor was the situation much
different when it came her turn to interview me. I did far more listening than answering, as I recall. There is a
species of interviewer that is just “that way”—many of them seem to see the
journalistic profession as balancing out the economic karma of their therapy:
in the one instance getting paid to tell someone their story and in the other
paying someone else to listen.
(That was a small, formulaic joke, by the way. I have no idea if Roz
Kaveney has ever been in therapy and I mean no offense: I would certainly rank
her as among the most interesting of the “I’ll talk, you listen” species of
journalist that I ever met and—given that there wasn’t the remotest danger of
having London throwing itself at my feet as a result of this particular Press
Reception—I was as amenable to listening to Roz Kaveney’s “World According to
Roz Kaveney” and enjoying my suite at the Savoy as I was to interjecting any
observation just to hear myself speak.)
It
did give me a more-than-usual amount of time to “size her up” though. She reminded me of someone, but for the life
of me I couldn’t picture who it was. It
was only when she was in front of me, waxing eloquent on her various areas of
expertise that it came to me.
Roz
Kaveney looked like Oscar Wilde.
Now
what is perhaps interesting (or perhaps not—as you’ve probably noticed, I’m a
bit of a Roz Kaveney myself when I get going) is that the interview that Neil
conducted with me at the Savoy became linked in my mind with the photo Gerhard
had taken of it which ran on the back cover of issue 146 (Fig.2), three issues before the conclusion of the serialization of
Melmoth.
So, I would occasionally think to myself: why wasn’t I more aware of the number of the suite?
Because the stay at the Savoy had become linked in my mind with the
mid-point of the series, I had half-convinced myself that part of the reason
that I had stayed there was because of its notoriety in the debacle of Oscar
Wilde.
For those unfamiliar with that part of the
story, it was in March of 1893 that Wilde engaged rooms at the (then)
newly-constructed Savoy Hotel with Lord Alfred Douglas of whom he had become
enamoured and (to the temper of those Victorian times, anyway) with whom he was
becoming indiscreet to a point, as the Victorians would have said, “that
faileth human understanding”. From
Richard Ellman’s Oscar Wilde:
From
late 1892 Wilde saw his life divide more emphatically between a clandestine,
illegal aspect, and an overt, declarable side.
The more he consorted with rough but ready boys, in deliberate
self-abandonment, the more he cultivated a public image of disinterestedness
and self-possession. (Douglas had his place in both lives.) If he had sought
ways to imperil himself, Wilde could hardly have found better ones. English society tolerated homosexuality only
so long as one was not caught at it.
His chances of being caught were enormously increased as he combined
casual associations with his more idealized ones with Ross, then Gray, and then
Douglas. Wilde believed in his star: he
even had a star painted on the ceiling of his bedroom in Tite Street. But he was always bringing himself to the
brink.
I’ll leave aside the inadvertent double entendre of that last sentence.
What is of far greater interest to me is Pierre Lou˙s’ observations—as a heterosexual member of Wilde’s circle to
that point—as Alfred Douglas came to dominate Wilde’s circle and Wilde’s
decision-making:
By now
Lou˙s observed Wilde and his clique at close quarters. He was present one morning in the Savoy
Hotel room which Wilde and Douglas were sharing, where there was one double bed
and two pillows. While they were
talking, Constance Wilde arrived, because
she saw so little of her husband, to bring him his post. When she besought him to come home, he
pretended that he had been away so long he had forgotten the number of his
house, and Constance smiled through her tears.
This was the occasion when Wilde said aside in explanation to Lou˙s,
‘I’ve made three marriages in my life, one with a woman and two with
men!’...Lou˙s was upset: he had not considered the wife. For his part, Wilde was frank about it. He related to Mme Melba how he had been telling
his sons stories the night before about little boys who were naughty and made
their mothers cry, and what dreadful things would happen to them unless they
became better. ‘Do you know what one of
them answered? He asked me what punishment would be reserved for naughty papas,
who did not come home till the early morning, and made mother cry far more.’
As it turns out, the
punishment for that—at least indirectly—would be a good deal more severe than
Wilde might have anticipated as he was found guilty of committing acts of gross
indecency with unknown male persons in his room— room 362 (Eighteenth count)
and in room 346 (Nineteenth count)—at the Savoy in the indictment against him
at his third trial in May of 1895 at which he was sentenced to three years of
hard labour.
Someone sent me a copy of the fourth printing of The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1952) which contains the full record of
all three trials. When I got to the
part about the rooms at the Savoy, I wondered, were either of those the rooms
that I had stayed in? It was
possible. One of the things I had
splurged on was “river view” which was a good deal more expensive than the
“city view” rooms. I was vaguely
bemused on arrival to find that the view was completely obscured by the trees
that grow on that side of the Thames embankment (Fig.3)It seemed a distinctly typical “world class hotel”
trick: the first time you stay here,
you get the trees. If you come back,
you’ll know enough to ask and we’ll put you up where you can actually see the river.
As you can see by the photo, the trees were just high enough to make
viewing the Thames a complete impossibility.
It is interesting to me, in this age of sexual
latitude, that Oscar Wilde’s conduct is not only excused but revered as
that of one brave homosexual’s courageous stand against a society of
philistines—and that it is so seldom taken into account that whatever one might
think of his sexual inclinations and
to whatever extent one subscribes to the “love conquers all” theorem (or Woody
Allen’s “the heart knows what it wants” variation on the theme which led him to
his lover’s high-school-aged stepdaughter), Wilde was, at the time, a husband
and a father to two small boys and consequently an adulterer (and a shameless
one if the testimony of Lou˙s is to be believed):
Lou˙s returned to Paris, disgusted at what
he had seen. He told Henri de Régnier
that Wilde was now confessedly a pederast, and had abandoned his wife and
children for Douglas. Régnier passed on
the details to Edmond de Goncourt, who entered them gloatingly in his journal
for 30 April. But Lou˙s had spoken not
out of an urge to impart scandal, but out of a real dismay. He decided to urge Wilde to change his
ways. An opportunity came in late May
1893, when Wilde stayed for a few days at the Hôtel des Deux-Mondes in the
avenue de l’Opéra. Lou˙s visited him,
probably on the 23rd and remonstrated
with him about his relationship with Douglas and his mistreatment of his wife
and children. Wilde declined to offer
any excuse or modify his conduct.
Lou˙s, he said, had no right to sit in judgment over him. In that case, Lou˙s responded, he had no
alternative but to break off relations.
Wilde now gazed at him sadly and said, ‘Goodbye, Pierre Lou˙s. I had hoped for a friend; from now on I will
have only lovers.’
But,
of course, Neil interviewing me was well before the publication of Richard
Ellman’s Wilde biography in 1987—the reading of which had first inspired the
idea of casting Oscar Wilde as the third party in one of the two love triangles
involving Jaka and her husband Rick in Jaka’s
Story. At the time of the
interview, I was just past the halfway point of the serialization of Church & State (if a 500-page
graphic novel doesn’t impress them, maybe a 1200-page graphic novel will
attract their attention being the sum of my internal thinking: as it turned out
not only did a 1200-page graphic novel not interest the media and the general
public but a 6,000-page one has slipped past them, well below their radar screens
as well) and virtually all that I knew about Oscar Wilde was that he, er,
looked like Roz Kaveney.
The decision was made largely on the
basis that there is something comedic about someone of that size and that
effeminacy thinking himself to be about eight dress sizes smaller than he is
(Oscar Wilde, I mean. Roz Kaveney seemed to know exactly where she physically
began and ended and was more than comfortable with that and—being as she’s a
woman—a certain effeminacy is to be expected, at least on occasion). There’s a famous photograph (printed in the
Ellman biography) of Wilde dressed as Salome (Fig.4)—she of the step-father-seducing dance of the seven
veils—that, to me, is inherently funny.
It isn’t just that this hulking brute of a fellow is dressed in a
costume that would only flatter the form of a lithe and newly-budded teen-age
girl, it’s the fact that you can tell by looking at him that he really thinks
he’s able to “bring it off,” rather like the dancing hippopotami in Fantasia. Likewise, Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Wilde slumped, drunkenly,
in the Café Royal (Fig.5)…
(It is perhaps interesting to note that
the library book that I found which documented the history of the Savoy Hotel
makes no mention of Oscar Wilde or Lord Alfred Douglas. The Café Royal, by contrast—serving a
high-class theatre crowd just off Piccadilly Circus and virtually unchanged in
its Elysée-Palace-like splendour (Fig.6)from Wilde’s day to our own—has no such qualms and displays large portraits
of Wilde and Douglas in the public bar area)
…I’m as sure that Beerbohm’s caricature
was accurate as I am equally sure that Wilde’s mental self-image was that of a
slim and graceful English poet striking the attitude of a recumbent Apollo
instead of what it undoubtedly was: that of a middle-aged paunchy debauchee
sliding drunkenly under the table.
I
never strayed far from that concept in developing the character of Oscar as the
comedy relief in Jaka’s Story. Of course, my extensive research into
Wilde’s life made me realize that there was a more tragic story afoot and that,
ultimately, led to the decision to do the follow-up graphic novel, Melmoth, documenting Wilde’s last days
in France (despite the awkward fit of then having two Oscars in the one
storyline).
Anyway, that—in my long-winded way (and I
never know how many pages it’s going to take for me to explain something very
simple) was all that I initially intended to mention here in “The Savoy”
section of the History of Phase II—I wanted to make the point that, in a karmic
sense, I think it safe to say that Wilde’s undoing owed as much to his brutal
and cavalier dismissal of his wife and children (as documented by Pierre Lou˙s)
as it did to his being a poor misunderstood homosexual oppressed by an uncaring
society: even though in our own day and age we tend to see the former as
“business as usual” and the latter as a “minor crime against humanity” (or a
“major crime against humanity” depending on the extremes of your political
inclinations).
That was, I thought, all that I had to say about The Savoy. It turns out that I was wrong.
Next: “The Savoy” Part II
