Firbank: Art for Artist's Sake by davistrell@aol.com
Now nineteen, the delicate, erstwhile retiring, shy schoolboy was blossoming into a fashionable, over-sophisticated, yet eager young swan. The chrysalis of puberty over, the butterfly of manhood emergent. Under his arm he carried the portfolio portmanteau of erotic drawings, and in his hand, he clutched the envelope with letter of introduction to Sir Ronald Firbank, the famous artist, the aesthete non-pareil, one; if not the one, most influential member of London's Royal Art Academy.
Grahame Pirpond, the young man in question, unhesitatingly rang the bell, with politely pointing index finger, and thumb, connecting, pulling on the chain, that performed the bellish tinkle, he could hear therein, and when the door was opened, placed his invitation on the silver platter held by the tall gray-templed, widow-peaked butler, who stood inquiringly, as Grahame pushed back the cascading bang of hair.
"I'll see if the master will see you, young man."
The manservant brought the youth into the vestibule, showed the seat where the visitor would wait. With a military bearing of one born to subservience, the butler floated away, leaving Grahame alone, in marbled hall, soaking in the spectacle of the interior of the Georgian town-houseof Eaton Square, SW1. A mere stone's throw from the palace, but of course, it would be so gauche to attempt such a thing.
At the foot of the gleaming staircase, spiraling away upward, stood an immaculate copy in ivory-white marble, of a goat-boy, quaffing from a wine cup, leaning slightly backward, eyes glazed as if intoxicated, supported by an over-zealous satyr, nibbling grapes. Michaelangesque, crossbred with Biagnini, a copy, but well done, if not exactly circumspect.
Grahame's eyes skimmed the surface of the wainscotting, the interleafed rosebuds and clinging thorn vines, with a less familiar flora, a long stemmed mushroom with elongated shaft, emerging from twin unshelled walnuts. Then he smiled, as he realized what the unsubtle motif really represented. He crossed his legs while he waited. By the flagon-size amphora, with its glazed terracotta, the greek sinopia still detectable, of athletes, scraping off sweat, and doing what athletes did after the Games were over, and the games began.
Grahame's Aunt, the second cousin of a second cousin of the Duchess of Compagne had wheedled the introduction, knowing that her nephew needed guidance, in a world where influence was negotiable.
It was unquestioned that Grahame had talent; it was in what direction, that talent lay.
He had not been good at sports at school, had not excelled at mathematics. Biology had made him faint; but put a pencil in his hand, and he would be happy for hours, stroking the thin black lead over pearlescent white paper, conjuring up images heretofore only glimpsed by an old, older generation. So he'd been sent out, into the world, and if his 'art' passed muster, he would, well, that would be for art-history to say.
So, now, young Pirpond, now to be ensconced inside the very halls of a leading artist of the Royal Acadamey; such an honor. If Grahame's art met with the requisite approval, he would perchance be given patronage, commissions and would mayhap realise the ambition, as had been his boyhood dream, of being a painter. Naturally in the Decadent style, currently prevalent. Peacocks and hermaphroditic ignudi, as in the example, on the wall, a beautiful Byrne-Jones, King Ethelred giving Unction to the young Scion of Wales, Aldebran.
The butler, one Yeats, reappeared at the top of the stairs, and with a white gloved finger, with a come-hither gesture, indicated that Grahame should come up.
A bead of nervous perspiration broke on Grahame's forehead, and thrusting the precious portfolio under his arm, the youth took strides, scampered up, with the elegance of a quick-limbed gazelle, mounting the stairs, two at a time.
Yeats, covering his mouth, gave a little fractious cough. And patting the boy's buttocks, ushered him into the Master's bedroom; mayhap moreso a studio/cum atelier. Sir Ronald was at an easel with a three foot-long, filbert paintbrush in his hand, touching paint-dabs gingerly on a life-size canvas. He took, or seemed not to, pay the least attention to the quiet, shy youth, who tip-toed in. The painting as Grahame neared, was a David, holding a long dagger and a bleeding head of he who was once Goliath. The David's face showed a sneer of contempt as he gazed down at the dead-eyed decapitated head.
Not knowing quite what to do, not knowing if he should speak, not knowing quite what to say, Grahame surreptitiously, surveyed the room. Chairs verdantly draped with red silk, bespeckled with gold cartouches, velveteen drapes and a humidity of incense hung heavy on the air. Two decadent modern pictures, tres outre, masses of flowers mostly out of season, coloured dissonantly; headily perfumed. A broken statuette of homoerotic subject matter lay in disarray, a broken man, no longer clutching a broken boy. The small row of paint tubes, their caps firmly screwed on, the small palette with its ordered array of flesh-tints, cadmium rose, and raw sienna, celanese green, yellow ochre, and the obligatory dollop of titanium white.
A small decanter, of linseed oil, the chosen medium, which would thin the delicate colors, glazing on a transparent velatura glaze, stood precariously on the corner of the small taboret. The inebriating, slightly acrid perfume of a cobra-lilies wilting in a vase, in desparate need of resuscitation.
"You like, m'boy?" Sir Ronald ventured.
Grahame looked around, not sure it was indeed he who was being spoken to, but managed to mumble, an stuttering unintelligible reply to the older man.
Grahame's eyes, big, wide full of childlike wonder, set off by arched brunette brows that in the crepuscular light looked almost phosphorescent. His eyes, two almonds. His apple-hard, but pear-ripe body, the almost indiscernible roundness at the midriff, the stocky legs, and the slouching shoulders, that would make any adult benefactor want to correct the boy's stance.
"You would never believe this desirable creature was a dockside ragamuffin, would you? But look what he gives. The broad arms, muscled by work, the chest still undeveloped, the hands gnarled, the hips, slender like a princess'. And a penis as large as a belaying pin. Of course the Goliath head is mine own, a self-portrait, that needs no explanation or codification."
"The Goliath has a most handsome head sir, though your beard is not so unkempt, nor your eyes...your eyes, sir, ...are so searching.....," his voice trailed off, as Sir Ronald looked Grahame up and down. Mostly down.
"Harumph," he coughed, "let me see your doodles."
Grahame undid the slip-cover and his precious leaves were out, on display for the old man's perusal. Forty if a day, and fortified by wine, fortutiously present, and the Master, fortunately important.
Grahame took the cardboarded, leather-covered folio, with marbellised endpapers, undid the silken string that kept his precious drawings safe within.
"Sit down, yes, next to me. My, my, what do we have here?"
"Student excersises, acadamies, copies from antique statuary and a few fantasies of my own invention..."
"In the nouveau school style, I see, the influence of Mantegna, grabbings of an immature Raphael, Corregio's limpid softness, and even a plagiarism of one of most popular decadent symbolists...Oh my, this is rather interesting...."
"Copied from a greek vase. The old man proffers the rooster, to the young man, a gift, so to speak...for the return of...favors..."
"Pernicious in its abbreviated calligraphy..., but its intent, that of one speaking to another, in impressionistic arousal...you have hidden depths beneath your obvious charms, young man...."
Grahame crossed his ankles, as he turned over the parchment leaves, as Sir Ronald sat closer. He had a viridian green cummerbund, a Slovakian peasant billowy shirt, wore a whimsical goatee, his mustaches curling upward in delight at his mouth corners. His hair, mops, bunches of sienna-umber; elfin, bushy eyebrows and his bagged pants, the folds moving with an growing tenebristic mystery.
They sat together on an immense bed, more like a seraglio tent of purple and rose silk. An immense parasol above, a large divan of cushions and well-tempered animal skins, below. A luxuriant eiderdown, feather-filled, resilient to the touch, soft and giving to his weight; Grahame seem to sink into, like a pearl, ready to be plucked from a giant clam.
"The act of fellatio, steel-engraved in the hard-style of Durer...observed from life, for versimilitude...what, what?"
"Just an excersise in plastic values, sir....."
He let Sir Ronald take the pictures, and watched as the knight d'art adjusted the monocle through which he could stare more closely.
"M'boy they are devastating, the ennui, the aplomb...the je ne sais quoi...the fleeting glimpses of muscle, burgeoning under svelte flesh, the distorted proportion betwixt head-size and limb...the flatterning curvaceous sinuosity of trenchant extensions..."
Grahame's skin curdled. To be flattered thus, by He so High. He crossed his legs. He watched as the older man overleafed more pages.
"Ah, a Sickert touch. Most becoming. The haze of chiaoscuro as they perform the unmentionable act. Effortlessy executed. The sheen of skin, the humidity of the noctural erogeoia...mi congratuliziones!"
Grahame trembled as the visigoth of the Arts shuntered near. But as he uncrossed his legs, to extricate the uncomfortable one, wanting to be free. Grahame felt a primordial urge. But resisted.
"Tracings of the one Greek touching another, I detect your influences, I see a debilitating sense of draughtsmanship, a Sargeant-Singer-Watteau, what ho, full come to flower. These are, undoubtedly poesies, dark thoughts in the post-pubescent mind... or are you, mayhap... experienced?"
Yeats enters. With the jerky gait of the butler's crane-like legs, bows; and delivers once more, a fractious cough.
"The boy, will he do..?"
"Oh I must paint him " said the artist.
"With candied confection or Oils...?"
"You want to paint me..?" said Grahame increduously.
"With paint; wattle, spit and daub."
It was circumspect under the circumstances. Grahame unhooked the clasp of his suspender, unloosening his trousers, a weskit was thrown to the wind and like Susannah was naked before his elders. A careÐworn toss of the hair and he lay back on the milk-white albino bear-skin rug. He parted his legs, and his phallic adumbration lay silently over his peach-cream thigh.
Painted first was the giaconda-vermillion out-line, in marzipan, tracing the Leda's swan, goose-necked in erection on the boy's chest, then the dove-white wings applied to his haunches, with a baking accessory, a bag with nozzle, squeezing out the pale icing. Held taut was the flesh of the inner thighs as butterflies, in Peppermint and Butterscotch were thereon adorned. A racoon mask, over the eyes with falcon's wings were next. Black-licorice zebra stripes encircling his legs; but the penis left unpainted. Cranberry-Chocolate was the rib-cage.Sprinklings of Black-Forest gateau, sprinled on, tossed carelessly. In the valley of the barely nascent pectorals, a rasberry ripple.
"Will that be all, sir....?"
"Get out, get out, leave me with my...creation..."
Yeats left. Mantis-like, closing the door behind.
The Artist bent over. A libidinous tongue, hungry for sugar.
A lick, dessicated coconut, at the armpits. The chest macamadamia-nut cream. Two cherry sworled bon-bons on macaroon chest, angel hair fronds of cob-web thin ginger cotton-filaments, with glazed mint leaves surmounted the pubis and at the belly, a hollow of montelimar. The boy was wet from spittle, dissolving the sugary coating.
Grahame's head flopped sidewise as the Master covered him with genuflecting worship, the boy's body a felicitous altar on which the elder statesman of peinture wallowed in idolatrous devotion.
Grahame's pointed sword, stood forth, and the old Artist kissed it before engulfing the, oh, too sweet confection. Grahame writhed. He was licked, in the way he'd only before felt in imagination, moaning like a bride on a walpurgis-nacht wedding night.
The blood redness of the sky, the white of hoar-frost, the yellow of daffodil, the blue of vein, the pinkness of a tempest-tossed youth.
The heavy draping curtain, plush-velvet, lush, but pierced by a large moth-hole that leaked in a a thin stream, a rivulet of shafted light, cone-like, enlarging, letting every visible twittering dust-mote to be revealed, shining down like a lecherous spotlight splashing onto the sheets, silky, curving with little wavelet folds, embracing the golden pink skin of the youth being lied to, in return for the aquiescence of mutual congress.
"Your eyes are like sea-anenomes," said Sir Ronald, his mouth full of sugar.
The Master's tongue danced with the rhythm of firelight, dancing tonges of flame that awakened every nerve ending in the young man's anatomy, exhorting the penis lying mere inches above his sphincter, which sighed, in expectation. Sir Ronald's mouth rode jauntily on the boy's equine phallus. From behind, in a mirrored reflection of the ensuing activity, in a gilt ormulu framed glass, Grahame could see all, and raised his legs high in a religious ovation. With a clear view, his flesh imploring, watched the Sensei, his head rocking, nay bobbing, fro and back, steadfastly, unrelentingly.
Grahame, writhing vehemently, as his boyhood swallowed, kept him hooked, like a fighting sea-creature. Such a pretty butt, such ripe white cheeks, such a wanton star. The tongue scooped in, delights reserved usually only to the Turkish.
"M'boy.." the older man sighed in understatement.
With Yeats no longer present, Grahame had to play the part of servant and took down the Artist's trousers. A red, maybe too purple, pinnacle of flesh. Engorged with blood, every vein and knotty fiber showed the utmost strain.
Grahame gave the tip a carefree lick to moisten it. Vinegary with a overtone of Pineapple. He took the bait, and swallowed hard. Now caught, hooked, escape impossible. Ready to be filleted by Sir Ronald's whale-hook harpoon. A veritable Moby Dick.
"Sir Ronald," a moist voice, behind a fractious cough, "'Tis time for your three o' clock appointment.."
"Damn you sirrah, I am in no position to be interrupted. Send whomever away, say I have a cold, a dripping nose, my eyes are full of phlegm..."
Yeates demurred. "But it's Thomas Abalone, the beach-drift with whom you told, had permission to be allowed entrance, at any time..."
"Tom, you say! Ha! The young wallop! Let him in, by all means.And leave his clothes in the doorway, you can scoop them up..."
A blond, with a nudity that would have made Praxiteles, take out his tape measure, ambled in. A touch of horse in the face, a bullfrog chest, and more horse than boy between his legs, approached. Yeates left silently, the door closing in a whispering squeak.
Grahame perplexed, folded his body into itself, and sank into cushiony softness, ostrich-like, looking for concealment.
"Hey, Firbank, you old bumbershoot, you getting a bit of the naughty, without me? Got 'im to gobble you down yet? Looks a tad inexperienced..."
His ribbed torso rippled as he guffawed, and Grahame peeked out.
This Thomas, a lioncub fully on the way to lionheart, hair long, down behind his shoulders, where skin should be pink, his was brown-gold, and as he walked forward, each Greacian God, would have blushed in envy, as the youth, came forward, and passed, The trembling Firbank, pulled back the sheet where quivering, tremulous Grahame lay, a tulip bulb, wanting so much to be an opened rose.
Sailor Tom, pushed out his hand. Fingernails bitten, and black.
The dock-side brat of a youth, standing like a dirty Apollo, grimaced a laugh, while Sir Ronald blustered.
"He was to be Isaac, on which, I, Abraham, would put the knife to his throat, and God would interfere...eventually..."
"Divine interference? Always fancied being an angel, you was goin' to use me, as model, sent from heaven, weren't you? I do good angel, don't I? The kid, it got a name?"
Tom stood, by the two, in a mocking Donatello stance, with more than a touch of dockyard braggadacio.
Sir Ronald Firbank, pushing Grahame, aside, as if embarrassed, said. "His name? I've forgotten."
He tried to hide Grahame behind his stocky frame, but the candy coated youth reached out to touch Tom's extended hand.
Grahame took the proffered hand of the blond sailor, who could not have been been more than three years older. But a distance would have to be crossed. Touching, a first necessary step.
"Grahame, huh? First time around the block? Don't worry about the old man. Basically he's a watcher, not a doer."
And as the two stood up, face to face, Sir Ronald stuck up a thumb, as if measuring. But the thumb down as he compared the displayed gentitalia. The thumb moved clockwise, upward, as the youths became aroused.
"Without all this paint, you're probably cute. Like the small cock: I'll make it long and hard," said Tom with a Cheshire-cat smile.
Tom laughed as Grahame got even shyer; Grahame coyed away. But he stared at the magnificence hanging between the thighs of his new found friend. He reached out to hold it, and felt it groan in his hand. He slipped down, his back on the divan, and took it in his mouth, feeling it grow.
"Hey, Ronnie,you got a classical reference for this?"
Sir Ronald sketched rapidly, with silverpoint, trying to catch the gesture as the youths before him, congressed.
"Ouch, Grahame; no teeth..."
Tom's hips slinked back and forth as his cock glided in Grahame's open, lotus-flowered mouth. The young sailor devil-no-care's arm reached down, to the buttocks of the youth below, investigating, with a nest of fingers.
"Alexander and Hephastion, Antoninus and Hadrian..." said Sir Ronald as the figures mimicked poses only seen on Ancient Greek sarcophogai, as Tom rolled on, over the smeared Grahame, limb, locked by limb, as in the iconography of Satsayanu's Indian carved temples far off in the Hindustan.
"Don't lump us with those old guys," said Tom with a leer, as two fingers, entered Grahame's painted butt.
"I'm a blackhearted pirate, a'doin of the cabin boy."
Grahame raised his legs so more finger could go in.
"Shiver me timbers! Aharr, this is a virgin territory! Who knows what wonders too which it will succumb!"
Grahame had to grab Tom's cock, point it to his ass, and exhaled, and hoped thet Tom would follow as dicktip, slipped in to the end of eternity.
"Feel that, boy, feel the breadth , the length..."
"I can feel the breadth, but not the length, it does not impress me as yet..." and immediately regretted his words.
If Yeates were not a gentleman, he would have covered his eyes, and not observed, with gonad-wrenching intensity, the butt whumping on the other side of the tapestry curtain.
He would of seen exertion, as legs braced back, as hip, drove into pelvis, the thick moving rope of flesh that conjoined the two youths, wrestling with exhilaration, as flesh stuck flesh, and inter-conjoined again.
Mirth was met with merriment and exertive noises of exalation, ejaculation and exuberance. Pleasure of laughter, the pain of sweat, met with strenous noises, the carnality of the Paeolithic, rude paintings in bison-blood daubed on the walls.
Sir Ronald was exhausted as the two youths wrested, fought, loved, sexed each other, giving neither quarter. And none taken.
"Yeates! I need... I need.."
And the splooch spurted out, trickling on his varicosed thigh.
"A napkin, m'lord?"
And like the good butler, Yeates cleaned up his master, saw the boys through to the coup de grace, saw all resume to a calming normality. Turned off the light, went upstairs to his room, got under the covers, made himself comfortable and settled down with his latest dirty novellette, a parody of Dickens and Trollope.
Till Billy Bottom, the bootboy, came up from the servant quarters, up from downstairs.
He closed his book, lifted up the covers and let the boy in.
He turned out the light, as Billy got all comfortable.
Sir Ronald coasted the stairways all night, lonely as a ghost, felt as Job had felt. Listened in at keyholes, listened to toilet bowls flush, listened as beds squeaked, listened as voices, first tremulous, became emphatic, listened for listless sighs. All came, each vocal utterance, and decided that his next picture ought be, a visitation, an annunciation, or just a plain good old Sodom and Gommarah. But with him, this time, as participant.