e.... The oblique stare of the hostile Trojans.
Helen coifed with flame. Menelaus. Love ... Greater men than Grimshaw
had written of Priam's tragedy. His audacity called attention to his
imperfect, colourful verse, his love of beauty, his sense of the
exotic, the strange, the unhealthy. People read his book on the sly
and talked about it in whispers. It was indecent, but it was
beautiful. At that time you spoke of Cecil Grimshaw with disapproval,
if you spoke of him at all, or, if you happened to be a prophet, you
saw in him the ultimate bomb beneath the Victorian literary edifice.
And so he was.

I saw him once at the Alhambra--poetry in a top hat! He wore evening
clothes that were a little too elaborate, a white camellia in his
buttonhole, and a thick-lensed monocle on a black ribbon. During the
entr'acte he stood up and surveyed the house from pit to gallery, as
if he wanted to be seen. He was very tall and the ugliest man in
England. Imagine the body of a Lincoln, the hands of a woman, the jaw
and mouth of Disraeli, an aristocratic nose, unpleasant eyes, and then
that shock of yellow hair--hyacinthine--the curly locks of an insane
virtuoso or a baby prodigy.

"Who is that?" I demanded.

"Grimshaw. The chap who wrote the book about naughty Helen. _La belle
Helene_ and the shepherd boy."

I stared. Everyone else stared. The pit stopped shuffling and giggling
to gaze at that prodigious monstrosity, and people in the boxes turned
their glasses on him. Grimshaw seemed to be enjoying it. He spoke to
someone across the aisle and smiled, showing a set of huge white
teeth, veritable tombstones.

"Abominable," I said.

But I got his book and read it. He was the first Englishman to dare
break away from literary conventions. Of course he shocked England. He
was a savage aesthete. I read the slim volume through at one sitting;
I was horrified and fascinated.

I met Grimshaw a year later. He was having a play produced at the
Lyceum--"The Labyrinth"--with Esther Levenson as Simonetta. She
entertained for him at her house in Chelsea and I got myself invited
because I wanted to see the atrocious genius at close range. He wore a
lemon-coloured vest and lemon-yellow spats.

"How d'you do?" he said, gazing at me out of those queer eyes of his.
"I hear that you admire my work."

"You have been misinformed," I replied. "Your work interests me,
because I am a student of nervous and mental diseases."

"Ah. Psychotherapy."