THE MONSTROUS AND THE FANTASTIC IN THE SHORT STORIES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE PAINTINGS OF ANTOINE WIERTZ BY JAN VANDER LAENEN

6/8/2021

Irreverently, it could be said that Antoine Wiertz was the Ed Wood among the Romantic painters because of his clumsy tech- nique, though digging a bit deeper reveals a fascinating person whose canvases now, almost two hundred years later, increasingly manage to excite the interest of enthusiasts all over the world on account of their incredibly original and almost avant-garde approach.

The fantastic Belgian painter and sculptor Antoine Wiertz is unfortunately not very well known yet outside the circles of aficionados, although he is, with all his Romanticism, fantasy, and megalomania, almost the ideal person to spin an extremely creepy biographical and historical novel, play, or film around.

Antoine Wiertz was born in Dinant, the present French-speak- ing area of Belgium, in 1806 --barely three years earlier than the famous American author Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he has something in common--and died in Brussels in 1865, not at the age of forty and from alcohol poisoning like Poe, but in his fifty- ninth year from paint poisoning: the new method devised by Wiertz to combine the Flemish oil painting and Italian al fresco techniques with each other, and which he called peinture mate, gradually burned and destroyed his lungs.

The American writer Poe and the Belgian painter Wiertz, both products of the first, “Romantic,” half of the nineteenth century, do have something in common, although they may never have known of each other’s existence. The first bit of evidence of this could well be a book published in 2001 and which takes the wide- spread phobia from their epoch with a pinch of salt: Buried Alive! by Jan Bondeson. The back cover states the following: “Read- ers of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1800s could not have been at risk of being buried alive?” The front page is illustrated with a detail of a painting by Antoine Wiertz: The

Antoine Joseph Wiertz, The Premature Burial, 1854. Oil on canvas, 160 x 235 cm. Musée Wiertz, Brussels.

Premature Burial, exactly the same title as Poe’s short story deal- ing with this obsession. So it appears that both had a tendency toward the macabre.

And yet, beside the fact that they both worshiped the arts, were blindly ambitious, and had an extremely high opinion of their own literary and artistic talents and almost gave their lives for this--alcohol and paint poisoning--they might well have not appreciated each other’s company. They were both too egocentric for that; or, to quote Poe’s very own words: “I cannot conceive of any being superior to myself.” The course of their lives was also very different, as were their characters, something that can perhaps best be demonstrated by their portraits.

An early daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe dates from 1849, the year in which he died, and perhaps nothing can describe his facial expression better that the phrase from Poe’s French translator, Charles Baudelaire: “Il a beaucoup souffert pour nous” (He suffered a lot for us). His life story reads almost like a night- mare--an even worse nightmare than he actually committed to paper, according to biographer Van Doren Stern: his father, an alcoholic actor, simply disappeared in Poe’s early years; his young mother, a talented actress, pining for two-year-old Edgar, suc- cumbed to tuberculosis in a musty boarding house in Richmond; he was to see his older brother, William, die of alcoholism in his early twenties; and his sister Rosalie was bordering on oligo- phrenic. The three children were placed in foster homes, Edgar in Richmond with a surly trader in tobacco, among other things, by the name of John Allan and his childless wife, who was to die of consumption before Edgar reached the age of twenty. Edgar’s relationship with this foster father was, however, very cool, unlov- ing, and problematic on account of their diverse characters, and the latter therefore never legally adopted Edgar or helped him financially with his university studies, for example, and did not even mention him in his will.

The tragic tone was set for Edgar’s future life and he was spared little misery, from the death of his niece-bride, Virginia, whom he worshiped--in his own asexual way--to severe financial prob- lems and scandals, as well as periods of chronic dipsomania and a

“death in the gutter.” And yet, despite all this adversity, he never laid down his pen, witnessed by some fifty poems, one novel, two novellas, seventy short stories, and a roughly equal volume of essays and articles.

Besides the fact that he is also dressed in black and is wearing the black cravat fashionable at that time, the contrast of Wiertz’s look and general posture in his self-portrait at the age of forty- nine could not be greater compared with that of his contem- porary Poe, who had passed away in the meantime. There he stands, his arms crossed and looking arrogantly at the viewer, the brilliant painter and sculptor who wanted to surpass Raphael and Michelangelo as well as his compatriot Rubens, who obtained the necessary funding to enable him to become proficient in his art in Paris and Italy, and Rome in particular, and could always

Antoine Joseph Wiertz, Two Young Girls, or The Beautiful Rosine, 1847. Oil on canvas, 140 x 100 cm. Musée Wiertz, Brussels.

count on the necessary political and financial support during his further career. Later in his life he got the Belgian state to go as far as building a studio and adjoining house for him in Brussels, which had to be transformed into a museum after his death in his honor. The museum is one of the least visited in the European capital.

And yet, he has something endearing, this Antoine Wiertz. He adored women and was certainly not averse to the carnal, whether paying for love with them or not, in contrast to Poe, who did not even consummate his marriage and possibly had homosexual ten- dencies. Wiertz, however, regarded his artistic vocation as being so important that he never wanted to marry so as not to be dis- tracted. Furthermore, his view of women is, in a way, denigrating. Two quick examples of this: a beautiful young girl is initiated as a witch (the phallic aspect of the broom handle is striking); and a voluptuous lady is handed forbidden books by the devil which prompt her to indulge in indecent acts.

Antoine Wiertz was also socially committed. When he was around forty, he must have realized his own mediocrity all too painfully, especially compared with his heroes, Raphael, Rubens, and Michelangelo, and then proceeded to lead his life as a bene- factor of mankind, denouncing various social injustices with his canvases. Two quick examples of this are Hunger, Madness, Crime, featuring a widow who cannot pay her taxes, whose breasts do not contain any more milk for her infant child, and who is so hungry that she cuts off her baby’s leg to make soup from it. The Suicide concerns a young man who has read rather too many writings by the communist and atheist Karl Marx--notice the book entitled Materialism --and writes in his farewell letter, “Il n’y a point d’âme, il n’y a point de Dieu” (there is no soul, there is no God), and then puts a bullet through his head in the presence of his guardian angel and a devil.

The most endearing aspect of Antoine Wiertz’s personality is, however, that he is now remembered for a very different reason from what he might have imagined: no, compared with the Renais- sance and Baroque masters, he became a wretched dauber, though his extravagant and macabre choices of subject, from Napoleon in Hell to the Visions of a Guillotined Head among others, have turned him into a well-known figure in those circles preoccupied with horror and the fantastic.

The Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire translated many of Poe’s short stories into French during his stays in Brussels, and it was also during one of his stays there that he visited the studio of Antoine Wiertz. It is generally known that he regarded Poe as a genius, a poète maudit, while he dismissed Wiertz as a charla- tan and profiteer. And yet, Wiertz and Poe might have had more in common than Baudelaire may have realized. What follows is a comparison between three of Poe’s short stories and three of Wiertz’s paintings.

Being buried alive: this has been a death penalty and one of the most controversial and intense phobias through the centuries.

Sigmund Freud may well have argued that this fear was nothing more or less than the unconscious desire to return to the safety of the womb; but, in the era of Poe and Wiertz, the terror of being buried alive--i.e., prematurely--took on obsessive proportions. In his standard work L’Homme devant la mort (Man before death), historian Philippe Ariès provides a scientific basis for this age-old fear and explains why this anxiety had taken on psychotic forms precisely at the time of Poe and Wiertz. His finding is that, in an increasingly secular society, there was a tendency to pay increas- ingly less heed to the rituals surrounding death, as these were sometimes ignored completely during the Industrial Revolution with its depersonalization, population growth, and epidemics. According to the author, these rituals served precisely to avert the risk of premature burial.

Poe’s shortstory entitled“The Premature Burial”has an umber of surprising aspects. The narrator cites, by way of introduction, a number of historical examples, then describes how he, as a well- to-do hypochondriac, has more than sufficient financial resources at his disposal to renovate his family crypt and have a cozy coffin tailor-made for himself so as to be able to reappear effortlessly among the living in the case of a possible premature burial, but then ends with a decidedly humorous “twist” that shows his per- sonality in a quite different light. After first describing with an accumulation of frightening expressions how he arrived at the most dreadful conclusion during the slow awakening that he had been lowered into the ground in a coffin while still very much alive--the smell of earth, a cloth around his head, a really eerie place--he manages to let out a loud cry, a primal scream that is answered immediately in a rather facetious manner by a trio of male voices asking what in the devil’s name is wrong with him. The narrator is, in fact, quite simply lying in an extremely narrow bunk in the cabin of a cutter transporting earth. The experience appears to have the effect of a catharsis on the narrator: he is henceforth forever cured of his catalepsy attacks, stops wallowing in macabre fantasies about death, and decides to lead a healthier and more active life.

Antoine Joseph Wiertz, One Second After the Death. Oil on canvas. Musée Wiertz, Brussels.

Wiertz was, in contrast to Poe, a bothersome do-gooder who believed in “progress,” as evidenced by the way he treated the topic: there is no question of humor or perspective or of depicting the expensive funeral “touches” that Poe describes so charmingly. No, the coffin the possibly indigent, apparently dead person is trying to crawl out of is hammered together hurriedly, with a cross painted on the lid in a rudimentary manner, the floor covered with some straw, and lowered into an anonymous catacomb in an equally hasty manner, without any pomp. The direct provocation for Wiertz’s creation was the cholera outbreak that occurred in Antwerp in 1853, with the epidemic then spreading across the other towns and cities of Belgium and claiming thousands of vic- tims who had to be hurriedly buried (still alive?) in order to stem further disease. Wiertz leaves no doubt with regard to his reason for painting this canvas as the following can be clearly read on the coffin: “Mort du choléra, certifié par nous Docteurs Sans Doute” (dead by cholera as pronounced by doctor Without Any Doubt), including stamp--thus an open indictment of the physicians.

In Poe’s very short story entitled “The Oval Portrait,” a traveler retreating at night to a deserted castle in the Italian Apennines is fascinated to read the comments on a virtually lifelike painting of a young girl. According to this observation, the poor painter was, with each stroke of his brush, actually drawing, like a vampire, the life from his young bride and model, who grew increasingly weak until he found her dead on her chair when applying the final touch and uttering the words “This is indeed Life itself!”

The definitive version of “The Oval Portrait” --which initially bore the title “Death in Life” and had a longer introduction con- cerning the effects of opium on the mind--dates from 1842, the year of Virginia’s first hemorrhage due to tuberculosis. Besides the underlying theme that art can therefore, so to speak, overcome or
“avert” physical death and can make a person “eternal,” Poe also inadvertently reveals two other intimate, and asexual, aspects of his marriage to his cousin: firstly, he portrays the painter as some- one who gives priority to his artistic vocation over his love, which he therefore cannot or does not want to experience physically; and secondly, he admits with the necessary feelings of guilt how this vocation does not even enable the painter to feed and clothe his loved one and will eventually rob her of her life. All that is pre- served of their relationship for posterity is a literally lifelike oval portrait...an oval portrait in the “vignette” style, so typical of the time, and which, in Poe’s imagination, must have had much more of the features of his very own and perhaps virginally deceased child bride than those of his late mother, Eliza, or his late foster- mother, Frances Allan. Ironically enough, however, Poe was never able to gather together the financial resources to hire an artist with a view to producing a genuine likeness of his young wife, with the result that only one portrait of his cousin-bride remains preserved, painted a few hours after her death. Truly macabre...

Wiertz’s best-known painting is La belle Rosine, a model that is much more bare, as well as less virginal and asexual, than the model from “The Oval Portrait” by Poe. And yet, it deals with the same theme in an almost identical way, namely that art can overcome or “avert” physical death and can make a person “eter- nal.” Rosine, in contrast to many of Poe’s female personages, is indeed a girl of flesh and blood, as Wiertz had painted her a few years previously while she was doing her makeup, proof that they were lovers and had carnal contact with each other on more than one occasion.

And the skeleton here? For the sake of convenience, the canvas could be completed as an illustration for “vanitas” in the form of “Death and the Maiden” if it were not for Rosine assisting in anything but a chaste manner and a small detail lending a “twist” to the picture, i.e., with a label bearing the words “La belle Rosine” stuck to the skull. In this way, Wiertz makes the model stare into the hollow eyes of her own cranium, i.e., a chronologically impos- sible situation, though this did receive much acclaim among the later Symbolists and Surrealists such as André Breton and Salva- dor Dalí.

However, what does Wiertz actually mean by this brutal “state- ment”? La belle Rosine is perhaps both a hymn to her earthly beauty and a firm refusal to make her his wife: Rosine will shortly lose this earthly beauty she has and turn into a skeleton, with the result that Wiertz will prefer to devote the time allocated to him on this earth to painting “eternal” canvases rather than loving a transient woman. And yes, Poe’s Virginia and Wiertz’s Rosine do continue to live in their short story and canvas--Virginia as the heavenly beautiful girl and wife of a destitute artist, Rosine as the volup- tuous model of a painter who treats this evidently well-to-do lady almost like a prostitute.

One of the lesser-known short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Power of Words,” is a philosophical jewel. A self-assured “Oinos” (Greek for wine, although the Norton Critical Edition suggests that it refers to the Hebrew word for “man”) flies toward the immeasurable universe for a moment after his death and, in all his confusion, is immediately welcomed by a spirit named “Agathos” (Greek for “good”), who explains the theories of the universe to him. Very briefly, it could be argued that, according to these theories, God created the world and humans, who then continue to create with their thoughts and words, prompting actions that will, however, remain ad infinitum. Because the universe is thus so dynamic and endless and “restless,” it is not omniscience that brings supreme happiness but, rather, the gathering of further knowledge. The only thing that the Creator does not know, according to Agathos, is that he is omniscient. In order to illustrate this power of words at the end, Agathos points to a planet with the most beautiful flowers and volcanoes belching the most lava and, half crying, tells Oinos that this planet was created by a passionate love poem he jotted down three centuries earlier for a beloved.

“Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts.”

This is a splendid vision of the universe, a vision in which not one single thought, word, or action is lost but can, on the con- trary, bring about a “butterfly effect,” as it were, and also a vision in which Poe praises the immortality of the soul. In this story, he depicts himself after his death as “a spirit new-fledged with immortality!” which, with his poems--Poe regarded himself pri- marily as a poet --created the most exotic planets. Was he aware that his work would become such a source of adoration and study after his death?

Wiertz’s painting Une seconde après la mort or Les grandes choses de la terre vues à 500,000 kilomètres de ce globe (One second after death or the great things on the earth seen from a distance of 500,000 kilometres) depicts the same scene as Poe’s narrative in a virtually identical manner: a man in a shroud flies into the immea- surable universe and will be met by another soul. As optimistic and profound as Poe’s version is, however, the picture painted by Wiertz during the latter years of his life is equally pessimistic and embittered. The man --a self-portrait perhaps --looks back nostalgically at his planet earth, which now has the importance of a shriveled pea, and lets a thick book slip from his hands --“Gran- deurs humaines” (Human greatness). This is the “statement” of an artist who feels he has failed (he could never be the equal of a Rubens or Raphael or Michelangelo), who realizes that he could never achieve his grandiose ambitions (he has doubts about the “eternal value” of his work and has not even been responsible for bringing any children into this world), and who then bids a bitter farewell to his life of failure. Indeed, one of his last utterances on his deathbed reads: “A quoi me sert mon imagination à présent. On se détache facilement des misères humaines” (To what good is my imagination now, one grows so quickly indifferent to human misery)...Grandeurs humaines, actually, or Sic transit gloria mundi...

Antoine Wiertz. Edgar Allan Poe. Contemporary artists of their time on either side of the big pond. Poe always saw himself as an aesthete and a poet, though he is nowadays mainly revered for his macabre and frenetic short stories published in inferior magazines of the time. Wiertz wanted to be the equal of the great painters, though he only arouses interest now on account of his rather bizarre and macabre pictures and, as already explained, these do have something in common with Poe’s stories in terms of the associated themes and shock effects.

Irreverently, it could be said that Antoine Wiertz was the Ed Wood among the Romantic painters because of his clumsy tech- nique, though digging a bit deeper reveals a fascinating person whose canvases now, almost two hundred years later, increasingly manage to excite the interest of enthusiasts all over the world on account of their incredibly original and almost avant-garde approach.

JAN VANDER LAENEN

Jan Vander Laenen (° 1960) lives in Brussels, Belgium, where he works as an art historian and translator (Dutch, French, Italian, English). He is also the author of numerous collections of short stories, plays, and screenplays which have attracted keen interest abroad.

A romantic comedy, "Oscar Divo", and a thriller, “The Card Game”, have been optioned in Hollywood, while his short fiction collections, "The Butler" and "Poète maudit", and his horror play "A Mother's Revenge" are eliciting the requisite accolades in Italy.

His most recent publication are the tales “A Glass of Cognac” in “Bears: Gay Erotic Stories” (Cleis Press), “Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty” in the Bram Stoker Award winning “Unspeakable Horror” (Dark Scribe Press), “Fire at the Chelsea Hotel” in “Best Gay Love Stories 2009” (Alyson Press), “The Stuffed Turkey” in “Best Gay Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press),“The Corpse Washer” in Best S/M III (Logical Lust), “Lise” in “Strange Tales of Horror” (NorGus Press), the E-Books “Skilfully and Lovingly” (Sizzler Edition) and “The Centrefold and other Stories of working Men” (Silver Press), and the Dutch and French version of his novel “The housekeeper and other scabrous tales” (‘t Verschil, Antwerp (Belgium) - Textes gais, Paris (France)), the weird tale “The bat” in the anthology “A Darke Phantastique” (Cycatrix Press), “Petit papa Noël” in the anthology “Un cadeau de noël pour le refuge” (Textes gais, Paris), and the essay “The monstrous and the fantastic in the short stories of Poe and the paintings of Wiertz” (Weird Fiction Review).

Jan is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Poe Studies Association. He presented his paper "Hypotheses on Poe's homosexuality" at the Bicentennial Congress in Philadelphia in October 2009 and “Poe as a latent homosexual, as suggested by Marie Bonaparte” at the New York Conference in February 2015. He has also given lectures on Baudelaire, Wiertz, Andersen, Guy de Maupassant, Grand Guignol and the guillotine at the universities of Porto (Portugal), Ghent (Belgium), Louisville (Kentucky), Madrid (Spain), and the Paris Sorbonne and Diderot universities.

Jan performed in the successful “Gala” by French choreographer Jérôme Bel in theatres in Brussels in May 2015 and December 2017, and he is taking acting classes to study as an author “the other side” of the written page.

Jan is currently working on a play/screenplay around the life of the Romantic Belgian "horror" painter Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865), a novel called "The Psychomanteum" around the practice of mirror gazing, and a screenplay around the life of Lucida Mansi. In July 2020 he finished his scandalous trilogy "Paulo or the obscene life of a gay escort" (240.000 words). He has also written recently three 30 minutes episodes for a series "Horror without frontiers", ten others are in the make.

Readers on "Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty

The stand out story for me was clearly "Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty" by Vander Laenen, quite possibly the most brilliant horror short story I have ever read. If for no other reason, reading this story is worth picking up a copy of the anthology. Yes, it's that good.

“Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty” by Jan Vander Laenen is a truly delightful tale reporting an unusual erotic adventure on the gay side taking place in the famous pineta (pinewood) of Viareggio, Italy.

Belgian writer Jan Vander Laenen's “Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty” was translated into English for the anthology, and is among the most unsettling of the stories: a man on holiday, hiding his homosexual cravings from his wife and children, seeks risky public sex and discovers a naked, dying, young man in the woods. This like many of the tales in the collection divulges the horrifying lengths some will go to fulfill lust, and is more cutting and critical than celebratory of many gay lifestyles.

"Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty" by Vander Laenen was ...disturbing but isn't that what horror is supposed to do?