A central figure of the Decadent Nineties, “a modern of the moderns” as Holbrook Jackson described him (222), Vincent James O’Sullivan was an American poet, short-story writer, novelist, and memoirist, with a penchant for the grim and the macabre. He was born in New York on 28 November 1868 (some sources give 1872 as his year of birth) to Eugene O’Sullivan, a coffee trader who amassed a substantial fortune during the Civil War, and his wife Christine. O’Sullivan’s parents were immigrants from County Kerry, Ireland, and had three other sons (“Lost Treasures”). O’Sullivan attended Columbia Grammar School in New York, and in the early 1890s he moved to England, pursuing further studies at the Catholic seminary of the St. Mary’s College, Oscott, where he might have crossed paths with Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo (1860–1913), who was a Junior Master. In 1892, the year his father died, O’Sullivan was enrolled at Exeter College, Oxford University, but left after a short period to pursue a literary career.

Establishing himself in London with long breaks spent in Paris, O’Sullivan was quickly absorbed by various Nineties circles, boasting among his cherished friends Ernest Dowson, Leonard Smithers (1861–1907), Arthur Symons, George Moore, Paul Verlaine, and especially Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. O’Sullivan was a Roman Catholic, a fact that cemented his comradeship with Beardsley. In his letters to his brother, Beardsley speaks of O’Sullivan admiringly, noting a conversation they had on St. Teresa and commending him on his theological learning (376). Similarly, Dowson in a letter to Henry Davray (1873–1944), French critic and translator, hints at the indispensability of O’Sullivan’s company (Longaker 279). Wilde originally did not like O’Sullivan, but that changed after the former’s release from prison. O’Sullivan funded Wilde’s trip to Naples in 1897, something he was proud of for the rest of his life. At Naples, Wilde encouraged O’Sullivan to visit him, expressing his admiration for his new friend, praising him for his “jewelled verse” and “strangely and subtly-coloured prose” (Wilde 660). The two dined at least twice, in Paris and near Dieppe. After a dinner meeting in Paris, Wilde confided to Robert Ross (1869–1918) that O’Sullivan “was really very pleasant, for one who treats life from the standpoint of the tomb” (Wilde 660, 830).

O’Sullivan was productive in the 1890s and his writings indeed have a predilection for morbidity, the supernatural, and ghoulish themes and imagery. His volume of Poems came out in 1896 with Elkin Mathews and was adorned by a Pre-Raphaelite illustration of Madonna and child by Selwyn Image. In this early volume, O’Sullivan’s voice is already formed and distinctive. Experimenting with a variety of stanzaic schemes, the poems blend Catholicism with death and meditations on mortality. “Papillons du Pavés” and “Brain Fever” stand out in their combination of impressionism with self-introspection. A second volume of poetry, The Houses of Sin (1897), came out with Leonard Smithers and featured a gilded cover design on cream by Beardsley. This was an exquisitely produced decadent volume that reeked of the delights of the grave, to put it oxymoronically. In a letter to Smithers, Wilde praises both the format and content of O’Sullivan’s volume, deeming the poems “more concentrated in motive” than those in the first volume, commenting: “what maladies he draws from the moon!” (692). The title poem, “The Houses of Sin,” with its yellow-lit street and the “perfumed wind’ beckoning the narrator to step into the house of sin, half-anticipates T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock (Houses 11). “Malaria” and “Drug” evoke Edgar Allan Poe’s deliria and Baudelaire’s spleen. In 1896 O’Sullivan survived consumption (see Beardsley 165–6) and perhaps this accounts for the imagery of sickness in his work. O’Sullivan’s poetry is psychologically cavernous and unique in evoking the visionary tone and sense of foreboding of James “B. V.” Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874), shot through with Catholic sinfulness and often lacquered with Pre-Raphaelite techniques.

As with The Houses of Sin a year later, in 1896 Smithers published O’Sullivan’s collection of seven short stories under the title A Book of Bargains with an elegant frontispiece by Beardsley. These are cutting-edge and spine-chilling horror tales delving into manias, perversities, and the unfathomableness of the human psyche. Within the Faustian theme of the volume, O’Sullivan’s stories obsess with nerves, criminal behaviour, murder and psychopathy, as if they were anecdotes illustrating the theories of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Cesare Lombroso. They showcase O’Sullivan’s superb narrative economy and are peppered with graphic details; in “My Enemy and Myself,” for example, we come across this sentence: “the middle finger of my left hand struck his eye, and now, as I pressed, the eye bulged out” (68). Unsurprisingly, the Yorkshire Post called the book “offal” (qtd. in “Lost Treasures”). An unfavourable but short-sighted review of A Book of Bargains in The Academy posits that O’Sullivan “aims at vividness rather than subtlety” (593). In one sense, O’Sullivan’s transgressive character-narrators stand opposite to the understated, self-deprecating ones in Dowson’s Dilemmas (1895), as both O’Sullivan’s and Dowson’s characters are psychologically rendered. Yet the inscrutability and lack of motive of the former ones for their deeds make the bargains highly impactful. One example is “Original Sin,” a shocking tale of child murder. Alphonse D’Aubert, a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure, is plagued with an obsession to kill the little daughter of Madame Dantonel, his benefactress, which he does in the end by strangulation.

In the same year O’Sullivan contributed an essay in the second issue of Symons’s The Savoy (1896) entitled “On the Kind of Fiction Called Morbid.” This is as much a barbed defence of the fiction of the Aesthetes and Decadents against attacks from the philistine press as an apology for the provocative short fiction that can be found in his own A Book of Bargains. O’Sullivan exposes the hypocrisy of the critics by cleverly arguing that even Shakespeare’s venerated works, which contain an abundance of gruesome details, would have been panned in his time and likewise described as “‘exotic,’ ‘morbid,’ ‘unhealthy’” (168). Besides this trenchant article in The Savoy, O’Sullivan contributed numerous stories and articles to The Senate (1894–1897), a monthly magazine that, as Alex Murray argues, fused Decadence with Tory conservatism (see Murray 195–9).

In 1898 O’Sullivan continued the pattern of successful collaboration with the leading publisher and the leading illustrator of the English Decadence; Smithers produced a deluxe edition of Ben Jonson’s Volpone; or, the Foxe with a sumptuous cover design and artwork by Beardsley, a eulogy of the artist by Ross, and a critical essay by O’Sullivan. In 1899 another book came out with Smithers, entitled The Green Window, a collection of philosophical and impressionistic sketches or peculiar prose poems. The pieces, or “monologues” as O’Sullivan calls them, are governed by a cynical mood and dwell on individualism, servility, Catholicism, cruelty, and social hypocrisy. The vices and plights of the working class are also a major theme. This volume’s hauntingly Poe-esque “Will” was translated into French by Davray and appeared in the Mercure de France under the title “Le Scarabée Funèbre” (1898). Treading in the footsteps of Wilde and capturing the spirit of modernity, The Green Window brims with aphorisms such as “Life is largely a matter not of renunciations, as some hold, but of repudiations” and “the sting of servility is contempt” (18, 25), proving O’Sullivan a virtuoso of compressed expression.

In the twentieth century O’Sullivan continued to contribute to periodicals, for example Dublin Magazine, The Century, Scribner’s, and J. W. Milne’s The Smart Set, as well as prefaces and introductions to various editions, such as Rip, l’homme qui dormit 20 ans et autres contes d’Amérique (1924). In the early years of the twentieth century he was as prolific as in the 1890s. A Dissertation Upon Second Fiddles (1902), Human Affairs (1907), and Sentiment and Other Stories (1913) are accomplished, wide-ranging short story collections. The Good Girl (1912) is an unconventional, peculiar realist novel that polarized critics. In 1916 John Cowper Powys included it in his list of 100 best literary works of all time, while, as O’Sullivan himself muses in an essay on H. L. Mencken, it was banned in the Public Libraries of Boston, New York, and possibly others (“The American Critic,” 19). O’Sullivan also penned plays, two of them performed; Alan Anderson offers a valuable short account of O’Sullivan’s dabbling in theatre (10).

During the First World War O’Sullivan stayed in America, mostly in New York. In 1918 he returned to Europe and was involved in the inspection of Catholic hospitals, followed by a lecturing post in 1919 on American literature at the University of Rennes, in Brittany. He continued to mingle in literary circles. The American expatriate writer Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) was one of his close acquaintances; he often visited her with Symons. In the 1930s he settled in Bayonne, in southwest France. That was a period of financial struggle and declining health. By 1909 his fortune had fizzled out due to his generosity and unwise financial manoeuvres (“Lost Treasures”). In the last years of his life O’Sullivan resided in the Nouvel Hotel in Paris. Having broken his leg and living in destitution, he appealed to various charitable organizations for support, such as the Salvation Army. In mid-June 1940 the Nouvel Hotel was requisitioned by the Germans and O’Sullivan was moved to another hotel in the vicinity, on the Boulevard de Picpus. The American Aid Society had been trying unsuccessfully to move O’Sullivan in fear of a bombardment. He died on 18 July 1940 in dismal conditions, about a month after the German occupation of Paris.

O’Sullivan’s final book before his death was Aspects of Wilde (1936). This volume, which came out with Constable, is considered one of the best and most reliable memoirs of Wilde. O’Sullivan produced it from meticulous and well-kept notes. It includes fascinating anecdotes and exceptional biographical material. Another book, Opinions, appeared posthumously, in 1959. This is a treasure trove of various first-hand accounts of 1890s figures collected from Dublin Magazine. It comes with an extensive biographical introduction by Alan Anderson, who went on to found Tragara Press in Scotland that further promoted O’Sullivan’s work. These volumes reveal how important O’Sullivan is as a chronicler and reporter of the artistic and literary enterprise of the 1890s. He was a farsighted, perspicacious individual who prized his friends’ and contemporaries’ accomplishments even more than Symons did, and without the required critical distance. In “Olivia Mist” (1916), a short story in The Century Magazine, the narrator, a thin disguise of O’Sullivan himself, quibbles over literary tastes with a puritanical, superficial young lady who prefers the popular Evangelical novelist E. P. Roe (1838–1888). The narrator counterposes Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), Symons, Beardsley, Dowson, and Hubert Crackanthorpe. According to Ms Mist, The Savoy magazine “should be suppressed by the police” (102). In his exasperation the narrator turns into disguised mockery and sarcasm. Aside from providing insight into the chasm between O’Sullivan and popular literature, “Olivia Mist” is enlightening in showing us that, even before the War, he regarded the 1890s as a concrete movement whose legacy and shadow of modernity were decisively cast in the new century. But apart from his role as a perceptive commentator and unofficial yet authentic curator of 1890s lore, O’Sullivan is a first-rate poet and prose writer, obsessed with malaise, neurosis and death. Marked by sin-ridden Catholicism, social cynicism, and a psychological realism mingled with aberrance and cadaverousness, his output strikes a wholly original chord.

©2022, Kostas Boyiopoulos, Honorary Fellow, Department of English Studies, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.

Selected Publications by Vincent O’Sullivan

• “On the Kind of Fiction Called Morbid.” The Savoy, no. 2, April 1896, 167–170. Savoy Digital Edition, edited by Christopher Keep and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019.
  https://1890s.ca/savoyv2-osullivan-fiction/

• Poems. Elkin Mathews, 1896.

• A Book of Bargains. Leonard Smithers, 1896. [Short stories.]

• The Houses of Sin. Leonard Smithers, 1897. [Poems.]

• [Introductory Essay]. Volpone, Or the Fox, by Ben Jonson. A New Edition. Illustr. Aubrey Beardsley. Leonard Smithers, 1898.

• The Green Window. Leonard Smithers, 1899. [Prose poems.]

• A Dissertation Upon Second Fiddles. Grant Richards, 1902. [Short stories.]

• Human Affairs. David Nutt, 1907. [Short stories.]

• The Good Girl. Constable, 1912. [Novel.]

• Sentiment, and Other Stories. Duckworth, 1913.

• Saint Augustin by Louis Marie Emile Bertrand. Constable, 1914. [Translation.]

• “Olivia Mist.” The Century Magazine, Vol. 41, No. 65, November 1916, pp. 95–102.

• “The American Critic.” In Burton Rascoe and Vincent O’Sullivan, H. L. Mencken. Alfred A. Knopf, 1920, pp. 16–20.

• Aspects of Wilde. Constable, 1936.

• Opinions. Unicorn Press, 1959.

• Some Letters of Vincent O’Sullivan to A. J. A. Symons. Tragara Press, 1975.

• Fifteen Letters to Seumas O’Sullivan.‎ Tragara Press, 1979.

• >Master of Fallen Years: Complete Supernatural Tales of Vincent O’Sullivan. Ed. and intro. Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Ghost Story Press, 1995.

• The Houses of Sin, 1897; Poems, 1896. Ed. and intro. R. K. R. Thornton and Ian Small. Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents. Woodstock, 1995.

Selected Publications about Vincent O’Sullivan

• Anderson, Alan. “Introduction.” In Vincent O’Sullivan, Opinions. The Unicorn Press, 1959, pp. 7–16.

• Anon. Review of A Book of Bargains by Vincent O’Sullivan. The Academy, Vol. 50, No. 1286, 1896.

• Beardsley, Aubrey. The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley. Cassell, 1970.

• Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen Nineties. Grant Richards, 1913.

• Longaker, Mark. Ernest Dowson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945. Rev. ed. 1968.

• “Lost Treasures.” Irish Identity. 2003. http://www.irishidentity.com/extras/famousgaels/stories/treasures.htm

• McWilliams, Carey. “Vincent O’Sullivan.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4, October 1931, pp. 394–404.

• Murray, Alex. “Decadent Conservatism: Politics and Aesthetics in The Senate.” Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2015, pp. 186–211.

• Powys, John Cowper. One Hundred Best Books. G. Arnold Shaw, 1916, pp. 64–65. [about The Good Girl].

• Sullivan, Robert. “O’Sullivan, Vincent (1872–1940).” The Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing.
  https://modjourn.org/biography/osullivan-vincent-1872-1940/

• Thornton, R. K. R. and Ian Small. “Introduction.” In Vincent O’Sullivan, The Houses of Sin, 1897; Poems, 1896, Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents. Woodstock, 1995.

• Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. Harcourt, 1962.