A Book of Bargains by Vincent O'Sullivan

Taking up a theme dear to both Symons and Wratislaw (fellow members of the Smithers stable), 'A Dancer At the Opera,' O'Sullivan crafts a mini-drama in which a heartless femme fatale is brought up short by a vision of her own demise. The result is that Houses of Sin, as the follow-up collection was titled, contains pieces like 'Malaria' and 'Drug' ('despair-Sweet Drug!') in which the poet indulges himself in lip-smacking flights of diabolerie. If Mathews was O'Sullivan's good angel, attempting to steer him down the road to correct aesthetic verse, Smithers cheerfully played the part of the bad angel encouraging his derided wreck to be as decadent as he wants to be.

The following year he issued a new volume of verse from a new publisher, Leonard Smithers, and the change seems to have done his writing a world of good. He puts one in mind of Brecht's poem about the Mask of Evil-yes, you find yourself thinking, how hard it is to be evil! Because he sees himself as 'a derided wreck' and 'a weary broken man,' ('Brain Fever,' 19, 20) it hard to come away from the poem itself with any real sense of pleasure. Wratislaw will write about sins and convince you that he's enjoyed committing them, but O'Sullivan, never. There is a definite heaviness to O'Sullivan's verse. What separates him from a poet like Symons or even Theodore Wratislaw is the fact that a certain lightness of touch is absent from his verses. A poem like 'Brain Fever' or 'Papillons du Pave' will work up a 'wages of sin' motif, yet the poet seems fully cognizant of the fact that without the sins there would be no verses. He makes use of occasional religious imagery without ever producing a religious poem, but he also finds room to write about knights and pirates' wives. The poems collected in the volume of verse published by Elkin Matthews in 1896 and titled Poems, are fairly conventional. O'Sullivan starts out as standard-issue Baudelaire epigone. Of course he probably would put the incident into one of his stories. So, what sort of a person was Vincent O'Sullivan? On the evidence of his writings alone, he would appear to share the sentiment of Waldo Lydecker that he would be extremely sorry to see his neighbor's children eaten by wolves. He likes his characters to be right on top of each other, and close enough to smell the sweat. He hardly ever resorts to poison, which is a sort of remote-controlled killing.

I suspect that O'Sullivan treasured the personal touch involved in such killings. Occasionally there will be a strangling or a shooting, but mostly his characters are disposed of via daggers being plunged into their hearts, their backs, their necks. There is a recurring motif of stabbing in the works of Vincent O'Sullivan. To appear at all times as you are, since faces relate more than words.

Your life must be masked and covered by appearances.

A Book of Bargains by Vincent O'Sullivan