Trois Excentriques Anglais

This biographical triptych was conceived as a whole, like an altarpiece. Each of the three allegorical portraits illustrates one aesthetic and moral aspect of England by means of an eccentric figure who lived before, during and after Victorianism. These three forms of deviances, like so many contact prints, reveal in a “negative” form the society from which they wish to free themselves.The first of these eccentrics, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849), was the eeriest poet of the English Romantic period, on the cusp of Victorianism. Obsessed by death, he even referred to himself as a “phantom-wooer,” yet paradoxically his poetry is full of life, inasmuch as death was his reason for living. One principle of Romanticism presided over his moods: deadly nostalgia that led him to attempt to revive Elizabethan theatre and to indulge in morbid and subversive reverie – the major component of the English alternative culture.The second eccentric is the poet John Gray (1866-1934), a close friend of Oscar Wilde, who retrospectively made him a model for The Picture of Dorian Gray. Throughout his life, he tried to elude the Romanesque phantom who was draining his lifeblood. A wayward angel of modest background, he suffered a profound identity crisis when he broke off relations with Wilde – a crisis which led him to convert to Catholicism and become a priest.Last of all, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) embodied the 20th century’s most trouble fears and desires. This poet, mountaineer, spy, magician, champion chess player and charismatic and erotomaniac mentor inclined to seek all sorts of extreme sexual experiences, had nicknamed himself “The Great Beast 666” in reference to Saint John’s Apocalypse. He also founded a sect, Thelema, whose mission was to help its members find what Crowley called their “True Will” through sexual magic. This immoralist’s demonic seductive power influenced the greatest minds of his generation. After having epitomised the Antichrist in his English novel of the Inter-War period, he was rediscovered in the 1960s by rock counterculture fans, who turned him into an anti-Establishment idol.