Edmund J. Sullivan...

In my last post, I made a glancing reference to Edmund J. Sullivan (he of the pirated Grateful Dead poster), so I thought I’d take the opportunity to introduce this particular illustrator properly, although he may well be the most instantly-recognisable illustrator of the Rubaiyat out there.

FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: First and Fifth Editions with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, Three Sirens Press, New York, NY, USA, nd. (c.1938)

Octavo; hardcover, fully bound in pigskin, with spine-titling on a green cloth label, upper board titles and decorations, and laid-paper endpapers; 194pp., on laid paper, top edges dyed green and all opened, with a monochrome frontispiece and many illustrations likewise. Sunning to the spine; mild discolouration to the boards; previous owner’s ink inscription to the front pastedown; rear free endpaper torn; some pages inexpertly opened; mild offset to the preliminaries. Slipcase rubbed with a tipped-on printed label, in good condition. Very good.

English, born in 1869 and dying in 1933, Sullivan was a prolific illustrator and teacher of illustration, known mainly for his drawings of skeletons. He was obsessed with skeletal anatomy and took every opportunity to include a set of bones in his commissions. The Grateful Dead poster image is not so surprising therefore!

Sullivan undertook a commission to illustrate an edition of the Rubaiyat released in 1913, and it has been in and out of print pretty much constantly since then. Unusually, he took the arduous approach of illustrating every single verse, something rarely attempted (Gordon Ross – 1873 to 1941 – being the only other instance which springs to mind). Sullivan eschewed the improved colour processes of the day and chose to illustrate in monochromatic line drawings. His images are mainly pen and ink, although within this portfolio there is evidence of a variety of technique and possibly the creeping-in of other media. The resulting images are occasionally criticised for being somewhat “cartoon-y”, but the overall effect is quite powerful and aptly serves to highlight the imagery of the poem.

FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, Avenel Books/Crown Publishers Inc., New York, NY, USA, nd. (c.1940s)

Octavo; hardcover, in papered boards, with gilt spine- and upper board titles and decorations; unpaginated [156pp.], many monochrome illustrations. Light sunning to the spine; previous owner’s ink inscription to the front free endpaper; mild toning to the text block and page edges. Good.

Some commentators of the Rubaiyat illustrators attempt to place the various contributors within three “camps” – the Art Nouveau illustrators; those of the Art Deco period; and the Moderns. While a case may be made for such divisions, I feel that they’re somewhat arbitrary. Both Elihu Vedder and Sullivan are unceremoniously dumped into the “Nouveau” camp, but neither is an entirely happy fit within that style. Personally, I prefer to let each artist stand on their own merits and try not to over-classify them.

Sullivan approached his Rubaiyat images in a clever way, identifying references within the verse and creating an iconography to suit. Thus “Destiny”, or “Fate”, is depicted as a naked, medusa-like hag, complete with snake-y hair, while “Time” is shown as the standard Chronos-figure, with wings, hourglass and scythe. The main narrator of the poem – the “I” of the sequence – is an aged Persian man, while the unnamed “Saki”, or cupbearer, is a traditionally-garbed Persian woman. A strange addition is the presence of the “Creator” figure, or God equivalent, shown often as merely an arm with wings and starry knuckles. The rest is a stunning cavalcade of mitred popes, knights, animals, pottery and landscapes. The identification and depiction of these “roles” within the poem serve greatly to keep the sense of the poem – in both words and pictures – on track.

There are some odd moments. In the final image accompanying verse LXXV, the scene shows a gathering of friends and the Saki about to turn down the empty glass in memory of the Narrator. Beside her where she stands however, there are a series of concentric lines emerging from a rose bush at the centre of which is an outstretched pair of ghostly arms. Too, in the background, a tree occupying the top right corner of the frame seems half-inclined to turn into a skeleton. Neither element sits well within the overall picture: it seems like Sullivan had some notion which he wanted to inject into the scene but, possibly due to difficulty or time constraints, left it unfinished and nebulous.

Some of the illustrations are barely pictorial at all, specifically the images for verses VI, XLII and LIV. These are almost diagrammatical in nature, schematics and doodles tricked out with some scrollwork in order to fit the bill of “illustration”. Along with this random sketchiness, many of the images have a rushed feel to them, as though they were done without much enthusiasm, or with the imminence of an imposing deadline curtailing their creativity.

Some other illustrations seem to have been manually altered after completion. The “saints and sages” of verse XXV seem to have had their background edited out with a pair of scissors; and the image of Eve and the Serpent in verse LVIII looks to have been executed in charcoal, or some frottage method, instead of pen and ink. These changes, of course, may have been altered by editorial authority without Sullivan’s knowledge or intervention, rather than having been done by him personally.

Having illustrated all of the quatrains of the First Edition, the final effect can be termed almost literal in its presentation. This could be seen as a defect, but I think that Sullivan manages to skate past such criticism. Other illustrators prefer not to depict the actual imagery of a particular verse, but rather try to convey the mood or sensibility of the text as a whole; this works for the most part, but I think Sullivan, by selecting his cast for his portfolio at the outset, manages to capture sense and mood at once. If you flick through his pictures from the early sketches, his Narrator and the Saki follow a line of intoxication from joy, to maudlin regret, to hope, that perfectly captures the tone of FitzGerald’s take on the verse.

In the final analysis, Sullivan’s portfolio of imagery, at its best, is a fantastic accompaniment to the text; at worst, didactic. Nevertheless, it manages to powerfully convey the meaning of the translator, if not the author. His illustrated version was published in 1913 by Methuen; he had wanted to produce the first illustrated English version and had completed some images a few years earlier but the Publisher (whoever they were is unrecorded) to which he was attached would not commit to the timetable; he produced several more images over the next couple of years, some of which were published in local newspapers, before amassing a portfolio sufficient to encourage Methuen to undertake publication. It is likely this series of false starts which account for the patchy quality of some of the pictures. That first release was a quarto format with a coloured frontispiece, but many fans would have seen the later releases in octavo format through Avenel in the US. I have several of these later issues – including one misbound, with the binding on upside-down – and a paperback version which uses the coloured frontispiece of the original edition as the front cover. I have yet to clap eyes on a 1913 original.

FITZGERALD, Edward (trans.), Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with drawings by Edmund J. Sullivan, Airmont Publishing Company Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1970.

Octavo; paperback, with illustrated wrappers; 160pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Text block and page edges toned; verso of the wrappers quite browned; mild wear. Very good.

If I was to compile a “Top Ten” of Rubaiyat illustrators, I would definitely include Sullivan in the list. It’s not just that he provides “pretty pictures to go with the poetry”, he also attempts to interpret and to decode the meanings within the verse, which makes these editions the perfect vehicles for those who come new to Omar, and to FitzGerald’s re-workings.

Postscript:

I apologise to anyone who may have thought that this was a new post - when I uploaded the initial version, there was something screwy with the final result, so I deleted it and started again. This iteration is more acceptable I think.