The forgotten literary figure, Count Eric Stenbock
Eric Stenbock, a poet and gay society playboy, was one of the most flamboyant and intriguing characters of late 19th Century literary circles.
Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock (1858-1895) was an Estonian and Swedish poet and writer of fantastic fiction. He was the count of Bogesund and the heir to an estate near Kolk in Estonia. He attended Balliol College, Oxford but never completed his studies. He was a great friend of Oscar Wilde.
The most self-conscious of all 1890s decadents, Stenbock impressed his contemporaries by his personality and wealth rather than by his morbidly sensitive and self-financed poetry and prose. He lived in England most of his life, and wrote his works in the English language. He published a number of books of verse during his lifetime, including Love, Sleep, and Dreams, 1881, and Rue, Myrtle, and Cypress, 1883. In 1894, Stenbock published The Shadow of Death, his last volume of verse, and Studies of Death, a collection of short stories that were good enough to be the subject of favourable comment by H. P. Lovecraft.
W.B. Yeats called Stenbock: “Scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men.” Arthur Symons saw him as “bizarre, fantastic, feverish, eccentric, extravagant, morbid and perverse”. And a contemporary critic sarcastically supposed his work must be “an elaborate and screaming parody of… the youthful decadent, … the affected preciousness, the sham mysticism and sham aestheticism, the ridiculous medley of Neo-Paganism and Neo-Catholicism…” Everyone seems to need a string of epithets to convey the extraordinary character of Count Eric Stenbock.
In a short life--he died at 36 in 1895--he so impressed himself upon his contemporaries that the legends they tell of him in memoirs and anecdotes far outstrip the attention given to his writings, the three slim volumes of verse and one book of sombre short stories. Though born near Cheltenham, he was the heir to vast estates in Estonia, owned by his family since the 18th century. He was educated abroad, but went to Oxford for four terms from 1879. His first two poetry collections, Love, Sleep and Dreams (1881?) and Myrtle, Rue and Cypress, (1883), are now impossibly rare. Many of the verses concern his doomed adoration for a Berkshire youth, Charles Bertram Fowler, who died of consumption at the age of 16. Stenbock could realize essence of his feelings to boys only through opium smoke and fanciful ligature of romantic images. About feelings to the heavenly beardless creatures he wrote tales, in which a sin seemed to be a goodness thanks to his talent of a writer. Could society bear this broad hint of the “forbidden love”? It could, perhaps only thanks to Stenbock’s capability of creating pictures that breathe with mystery and enigma like those the young Lionel painted in the short story Hylas (the lovely young artist, who fell in love with his sophisticated teacher, took his revenge for his betrayed feelings with his own death).
Stenbock's father died when his son and heir was still young, and his mother and new step-father had three sons and three daughters. Shy and good-humoured, Frank Mowatt should have been a good stepfather. But Eric hated him. In 1874 the family moved to Withdeane Hall, near Brighton. It is said that Eric spent part of his childhood in Russia. This foreign education--the wish of his father's family--probably made it difficult for him to feel at home at Withdeane Hall.
In 1885 Stenbock inherited his ancestral domain and seems to have spent most of the next two years there, a period splendidly evoked by Mary Smith, wife of an old college friend when the couple visited him one Christmas: "Count Stenbock has his own rooms furnished in the most aesthetic style, with a lamp burning before a Buddha and Eros and his other gods disposed in various places. When he was at Oxford, he said, he and one of his friends (who is now insane) used to try a fresh religion every week… He has also a number of pet snakes and lizards and toads and salamanders in his room, and--worse still--a collection of Simeon Solomon's morbid and pessimistic pictures of the Rossetti school. In the garden… he has a “zoo” containing three reindeer, a bear and a fox…”
The Count's decadent tastes were also clear from his love of exotic and vivid costume, the burning of incense and the taking of opium. But he also took delight in playing games and masquerades with the children of the house--his cousins whom he formed into an exuberant Idiots Club.
He returned to England in, 1887 and soon became acquainted with many of the key figures of the day--Beardsley, Yeats, Symons and Lionel Johnson, who thought his poetry bad, but remembered him with affection.
From 1890 Stenbock's health, always delicate, deteriorated badly, aggravated by his alcoholism--Johnson complained of the “devilish” mixture of drinks the Count urged on him. Stenbock became both physically enfeebled, and fatalistically obsessed with death.
His last collection of poems, ominously entitled The Shadow of Death (1893), contains many hauntingly bittersweet evocations of the poet's past life and his anticipation of its end. Studies of Death: Romantic Tales appeared in 1894, ornamented with a striking frontispiece by its author. The seven stories reveal an original imagination and a spry, urbane style quite removed from the melancholy murmurings of the Count's verse.
Towards the last the Count was mentally as well as physically ill. At Withdeane Hall he terrified the domestic staff with his persecution complex and his delirium tremens so scared the young Mowatts that they had to be moved to more distant rooms. On his travels he had been escorted, and with him went a dog, a monkey and a life-size doll. He was convinced that the doll was his son and referred to it as “le Petit Comte”. Every day it had to be brought to him, and when it was not there he would ask for news of its health. The Stenbocks believed that a dishonest monk--or perhaps a Jesuit--had extorted large sums of money from him under the pretence of paying for the education of “le Petit Comte”.
In the spring of 1895 London was acting out the tragedy of Wilde. On April 26th, Wilde faced the first day of his first trial, Eric died in mother's home, Withdeane Hall. Against such a background (for the Wilde trial had reverberations at all levels of English society) his death was likely to go unremarked. Ross and Adey were of course busy supporting Oscar. From a printed programme that has survived it was very much as if the young Mowatts and their friends were rehearsing a rip-roaring farce in the drawing-room while Eric was agonising on his death-bed. Since their mother was already fatally ill (nursed by her daughter Margaret, she refused to see the rest of the family) they were perhaps only trying to keep up their spirits. He was buried at the Brighton Catholic Cemetery on May 1st (the day Wilde's jury disagreed and was discharged) “in the presence” (said the Brighton Examiner) “of a large number of relatives and friends”. Before burial the heart was extracted and sent to Estonia, where it was placed among the Stenbock monuments in the church at Kusal. It was preserved in some fluid in a glass urn in a cupboard built into the wall of the church. At the time of his death, his uncle and heir, far away in Esbia, saw an apparition of his tear-stained face at his study window.
Lucy Mowatt did not long survive her son. She died at Withdeane Hall on the 14th October, 1896.
His Grave
Eric, Count Stenbock was an extraordinary queen and one of Brighton's great characters. A charming man in many ways, he has been described as “the first Goth” and “the Quentin Crisp of the 1890s”. He was buried in Brighton Extra-Mural Cemetery. More than a century later his neglected tomb is in very bad condition. A rampant growth of ivy has toppled a crucifix and the whole grave is in danger of sliding down the hill. Members of Brighton Ourstory are campaigning with The Lost Club (a society devoted to reclaiming the reputations of unjustly forgotten writers to have the grave restored).
His Bibliography
Love Sleep and Dreams
Myrtle Rue and Cyprus
The Shadow of Death
Studies of Death
On the Freezing of the Baltic Sea
The True Story of a Vampire
The Child of the Soul
The Myth of Punch
The Collected Poems of Count Stenbock
La Mazurka Des Revenants
A Secret Kept
Excerpts from Studies of Death: Romantic Tales (1893):
...But on a sudden a black cloud covered the moon entirely, and all was black, utter darkness, and through the darkness he heard wolves howling and shrieking in the hideous ardour of the chase, and there passed before him a horrible procession of wolves (black wolves with red fiery eyes), and with them men that had the heads of wolves and wolves that had the heads of men, and above them flew owls (black owls with red fiery eyes), and bats and long serpentine black things, and last of all seated on an enormous black ram with hideous human face the wolf-keeper on whose face was eternal shadow; but they continued their horrid chase and passed him by, and when they had passed the moon shone out more beautiful than ever, and the strange nightingale sang again, and the strange intense blue flowers were in long reaches in front to the right and to the left.
Narcissus
My father died before I was born, and my mother in giving birth to me, so I was born at once to a title and a fortune. I Merely mention this to show that Fortune, in a way, seemed from the first to smile upon me. The one passion of my life was beauty, and I thought myself specially fortunate that I realised my own ideal in myself. Even now that I am writing I look round the room, and see portraits of myself at varoius stages of my life: as a child, boy and a young man. Never have I seen a face as lovely as my own was. That glorious classical outline, those large lustrous, dark blue eyes, that curledgold hair, like woven sunshine, that divinely curved mouth and exquisite grace of lips, that splended poise of neck and throat! I was not vain in the proper sense of the word, for vanity means desire for the approbation of others, and getting up oneself to please others. But I, on the contrary, did not care what others thought; I would remain for hours before the mirror in a kind of ecstasy. No! no single picture I had ever seen could come up to me.
The Story of a Scapular
The world says charitably that Bernard and I (Francis) were once two very dissipated young men. Dissapated indeed! -- Debauched and deprqaved rather. We were not always so. When we first met we conversed together chiefly on religious subjects. How was it? Did we read latent depravity in one another's eyes?
At first we spoke hesitatingly, then plainly: afterwards we whispered.
