VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

   Full name: Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, (Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de)

(1840-1889)

   French writer - mostly of poetry, plays and short stories - and an extremely impoverished member of the Breton aristocracy. His best-known prose work remains Contes Cruels (coll 1883; trans RobertBaldick as Cruel Tales 1963 UK), a title which itself came to designate a category of the French conte or moral fable which emphasizes the punitive twists of fate, the arbitrary chill of the world. The book contains a number of bizarre fantasy stories, several of them sf, including "Celestial Publicity", in which advertising slogans are projected onto thenight sky by electric light. An early translation of VDL-A's work, which also took stories from Nouveaux Contes cruels ("New Contes Cruels") (coll 1888), was Sardonic Tales (coll trans Hamish Miles 1927 US). Of moredirect sf interest is L'Eve future (1886; trans Marilyn Gaddis Rose as The Eve of the Future 1981 US; new trans Robert M. Adams as Tomorrow's Eve1982 US), in which a handsome young lord despairs when his fiancee turns out to be extremely crass - but a fictional character called Thomas Alva Edison comes to the rescue with an impeccable robot duplicate (EDISONADE). Seen as an important contribution to the Symbolist movement, the novel is philosophical, ironic and mockingly contorted. Claire Lenoir, which appeared originally as part of Tribulat Bonhomet (coll 1887) and was trans Arthur Symons (1925 US), applies similar ornate twists to a horror tale involving possession and hideous paroxysms of female guilt. VDL-A remains best known for his final work, the ecstatic play and prose-poem Axel (1885-6 Jeune France; rev 1890; trans H.P.R. Finberg 1925 UK; newtrans June Guicharnaud 1970 US), whose dramatization of the Symbolist inturning of the imagination inspired Edmund Wilson's famous Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931). Theeponymous count - an unimaginably wealthy Rosicrucian savant whose supernaturally impregnable fortress can stave off the armies of the world, and who remains adamant in his refusal to taste the desolations reality imposes on dreams - is a figure who has influenced generations of writers, including almost certainly the 1980s sf and fantasy creators of Dying Earths heavily populated by aesthetic aristocrats weary unto death ofvulgar sensation. Axel's near-final declaration - "Live? Our servants will do that for us" - is a brilliant epigraph to the gesture he represents.

   JC/PN

   See also: ABSURDIST SF; ADAM AND EVE; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; SATIRE; SCIENTISTS.