HAFEZ; Justin Huntly McCARTHY (translator). Ghazels from the Divan of Hafiz.

Beardsley’s Bookplate for Aleister Crowley’s Lover

HAFEZ; Justin Huntly McCARTHY (translator). Ghazels from the Divan of Hafiz. London: [Chiswick Press for] David Nutt. 1893.

8vo. Publisher’s green boards, title lettered to upper board in Persian in teal, spine lettered in English in teal, yapp fore-edges; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 151, [1]; spine ends bumped, spine lightly soiled; offsetting to free endpapers, but internally clean and bright; a very good copy; contemporary inscription ‘Aux cœurs blessés, l’ombre et le silence’ (Balzac) to front pastedown and free endpaper, bookplate of Herbert Charles Pollitt, designed by Aubrey Beardsley and lettered ‘Mr Pollitt’s Bookplate’, to front pastedown (see below).

First edition of this prose translation of Hafez’s fourteenth-century Persian poems by the Irish politician Justin Huntly McCarthy (1859–1936), this copy with Beardsley’s rare bookplate made for his patron, Herbert Charles Pollitt (1871–1942), at one point the owner of most of Beardsley’s Lysistrata drawings; it is one of only three bookplates Beardsley designed and was initially intended for the artist’s own use.

‘Beardsley had been promising Pollitt a bookplate for some time. When this drawing was published in A Book of Fifty Drawings in 1897 conscience may have got the better of the artist and in Pollitt’s copy of the edition de luxe Beardsley added the lettering in india ink on the reproduction. From this Pollitt had a new block made (by Carl Hentschel) for his own use) (Warrack and Perkins 82, quoted in Samuels Lasner). On 26 September 1897, Beardsley wrote to Pollitt from Paris announcing the completion of the bookplate: ‘And how is my dear best Friend? There is one more wonderful book plate in the world. That makes two. Yours and another I have just made for a Miss Custance. You must ask Leonardo [i.e. Leonard Smithers] for a proof’ (Beardsley, Letters, p. 372).

Beardsley’s other two bookplates were for the scholar and physician John Lumsden Propert, and for the poet Olive Custance, who in 1902 married Lord Alfred Douglas. Herbert Charles Pollitt, later known as Jerome Pollitt, was known for his cross-dressing performances as Diane de Rougy and for his friendships with Beardsley and Smithers; at Cambridge he had been president of Footlights. From late 1897 through 1898 he was romantically involved with Aleister Crowley, who ‘lived with Pollitt as his wife for some six months and he made a poet out of me’ (Crowley, quoted in Kaczynski). During this time, Pollitt introduced Crowley to Smithers. ‘It is probably through Pollitt that Crowley met the ailing Beardsley and commissioned a bookplate from him; he also asked Beardsley to provide a cover illustration for one of his books […] Alas, Beardsley died in January 1898, before he could finish either commission’ (ibid, p. 38). Pollitt is thought to have kept three copies of each of his books, the first two with Beardsley bookplates: a reading copy, one to be kept in his library in pristine condition, and one to be inscribed and given away.

This copy is very likely connected to his relationship to Crowley, who in 1910 privately printed the collection of homoerotic verse Bagh-i-Muattar: The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, in which ‘the relations between God and the soul are set forth’ under ‘the figure of the amorous adventures of a Sufi Poet and his cupbearer’, the style much inspired by the work of Hafez. Within this collection, the opening of the poem ‘The Comparisons’ directly parodies a ghazal by Hafiz. Famously, the first letter of each line of ‘The Riddle’ (‘Habib hath heard; let all Iran who spell aright from A to Z | Exalt thy fame and understand with whom I made a marriage-bed [...]’) spells out ‘Herbert Charles Jerome Pollitt’, and the first letter of the following poem, ‘Bagh-i-Muattar’, spells out Aleister Crowley’s name in reverse.

Beardsley’s bookplate was finished only a month before Crowley and Pollitt met in 1897, and three months before the two became lovers on New Year’s Eve. The manuscript quotation to the front pastedown and free endpaper, is from Balzac: ‘Aux cœurs blessés l’ombre et le silence’ (‘For wounded hearts, shadow and silence’). Crowley, in his autobiography, mourned the end of his relationship with Pollitt as a ‘lifetime regret’, and Pollitt perhaps felt the same.

Justin Huntly McCarthy was MP for Athlone and Newry from 1884 to 1892, as well as the author of biographies on Gladstone, Peel, and Pope Leo XIII. He is noted for his important prose translation of four hundred and sixty-six quatrains of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, published by David Nutt in 1889 (reprinted 1898). His translation of Hafez is dedicated to the poet William Ernest Henley (best known for his poem ‘Invictus’) as a ‘tribute of gratitude for many things, especially a tribute of gratitude for the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments”’, Henley’s 1893 poem on the transportive magic of reading. ‘One whose memories of the Orient glow with such heat and colour may, for the sake of those memories, be willing to welcome these pages from that Book of Verses which the poet of Shiraz wrote in the gardens of Mosella by the gardens of Rocknabad’ (p. v).

For the bookplate, see Reade 471; Samuels Lasner 113; Samuels Lasner, Bookplates A2; Gallatin 1065 (but not in Gallatin, Aubrey Beardsley as a Designer of Book-Plates. On Pollitt, see Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (2012).

SKU: 2125990