Rustum...

IX

“But come with old Khayyám and leave the Lot

Of Kaikobád and Kaikhosrú forgot:

Let Rustum lay about him as he will,

Or Hátim Tai cry Supper – heed them not.”*

 

Thanks to the enthusiasm of the Americans, the Rubaiyat would probably not have been picked up by British publishers quite so enthusiastically after it had wandered out of copyright. Without America’s wholesale pirating of FitzGerald’s translation, its prominence in the public eye – already waning from its status as a nine-day’s wonder, provoked by the Pre-Raphaelites – would most likely have dwindled away to almost nothing. However, late-Victorian and Edwardian England was intrigued by the brashness of American ways and they kept their collective ears to the ground concerning whatever was causing a stir across the Pond.

Literature in Europe was becoming an embittered territory: Tennyson, so beloved by Victoria, stood as a symbol of the outmoded and unfashionable; Realist literature, serialised adventure and romance in weekly periodicals, the Victorian triple-decker, were hide-bound formats that no longer provoked the literati. In France, the Symbolists and the Decadents were coming to the fore and, in the form of Oscar Wilde, were making scandalous in-roads into England. The violent, anti-establishment hedonism of Rimbaud and Baudelaire were beyond the pale of many British readers; however, the dreamy exoticism of FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam – with its upbeat sentiment – allowed many readers to walk on the wild side without the risk of public censure, or the possibility of having to wallow in the dubious mires of the French enfants terribles.

So the Rubaiyat was not only ‘edgy’, in that its exotic settings evoked the dangerous excesses of the Symbolist and Decadent literature of the time, it was also fashionable with the American ‘cool kids’. But there was something else that the Americans did which would send the Rubaiyat into the upper stratosphere of popularity.

We’ve seen an example, in Edmund Dulac’s work, of how well text and image come together in the context of the Rubaiyat; it seems like a perfect marriage of style and substance and there’s no doubt, it is. However, amazing as it might sound to us, it wasn’t an obvious leap. It took an American publisher taking a gamble on a little-known American artist, to come up with the concept of illustrating the poem.

 

Elihu Vedder Jr. (1836-1923) was born in New York City, the son of a well-to-do dentist. He decided early on that life as an artist was what he wanted and his mother supported him in this regard; his father obviously had other ideas, and Elihu Jr. was cut off financially after swanning about Italy in his youth with various bohemian colleagues. It didn’t help that his brother became a respectable navy doctor and dealt diplomatically with Japan during that country’s emergence from Imperial solitude: the comparison was always going to work against him.

 

Vedder had close associations with the French Symbolists and with the British Pre-Raphaelites; his style of art pre-figured the Art Nouveau and clicked with the mysterious iconic images of the Decadents. In the 1880s the Houghton-Mifflin publishing house commissioned him to illustrate their (pirated) copy of the Rubaiyat, probably at his own insistence. Vedder produced 56 images to accompany FitzGerald’s translation and the book was released in a limited edition of only 100 copies in 1884. It was first offered for sale in Boston on November the 8^th of that year and sold out completely in just six days, prompting successive, less sumptuous, editions to follow. The collection of images has been hailed as “a masterwork of American art”, and two travelling exhibitions have recently been held – in 1998 and 2008 – by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to showcase them.

 

Vedder’s impoverished life changed forever after the publication and he moved to Italy, his spiritual home, and remained there, with only sporadic visits to the US, until his death in 1923. By then his impact had been felt: the concept of the illustrated poem, of the Gift Book and other similar publications, had really taken off and the Golden Age of Illustration had peaked and was on the wane. Without Vedder, we probably would not have the gorgeously illustrated versions of the Rubaiyat that proliferated in his wake; and certainly not the bejewelled and gilded versions that were to come next...

 

*“Rustum the ‘Hercules’ of Persia, and Zál his father...” (EFG)

Hátim Tai was a philanthropist, famous for his generosity. FitzGerald’s inclusion of figures from Persian history was part of his aim of preserving oriental forms for poetic effect. In some respects he thought it ‘better to be orientally obscure than Europeanly [sic.] clear.’