In both China and the West, very little has been written on Shao Xunmei. Googling his name leads to a few articles chronicling his affair with the American writer Emily Hahn, while a search on Amazon results in several studies with chapters about him, plus half a dozen other volumes that give him passing references. The first Chinese source we read on him, an entry in a reference book in the mid-90s, dismissed him as ‘a minor poet with decadent tendencies’— clearly he was not to be regarded as anyone important in his country’s literary history! While there has recently been a slight increase of interest in early twentieth-century Chinese writers and artists who were influenced by the West, scholarly attention is mostly
directed the other way, to topics like the Chinese influence on Ezra Pound, etc. This neglect of Shao is regrettable, since he epitomized a movement in entre-guerres Shanghai that sought to rejuvenate China with cultural energies derived from the West, while at the same time remaining Chinese. As a poet, publisher, essayist, translator and man, Shao was a fascinating cultural hybrid in both his life and art. Ultimately, he fell into obscurity as first the Japanese and then the Communists exerted greater cultural force, but he is worth remembering, and is valuable to both East and West today.
Legally named Shao Yunlong, he was born in 1906 to a wealthy family with a colourful past whose residence was on Shanghai’s Bubbling Well Rd. According to the memoir of his daughter, Shao Xiaohong, he was precocious from an early age and seen by his family as destined for a career in letters. He learned English at a missionary school, and it was planned that he would attend Cambridge University as preparation for a job in business or government. When Shao reached his teens, however, it became apparent that he was suited for a less conventional career path: Jonathan Hutt, the only Western scholar to document his life, reports that he dashed around town in his family’s cars wearing a purple tweed suit and engaging in torrid romantic affairs—he was even implicated in a murder scandal at age seventeen. Nonetheless, he obediently set sail for England in 1923 after becoming betrothed to Shen Peiyu, a society beauty he had known since childhood. His first European port of call was Naples, and he later claimed that in a museum there he saw a portrait of Sappho that seemed to call out to him; the poetess of Lesbos was to be a major influence on his life’s course.
Reaching the storied colleges of Cambridge via Paris, where he consorted with the Chinese artistic community, Shao moved in with the Rev. A.C. Moule, a former missionary in China, and began his studies in economics. That this discipline was not his métier soon became apparent, however: his enquiries about Sappho led Moule to introduce him to an expert on her at Jesus College named J.M. Edmonds, and through him the young Shao found his two main European avatars: George Moore, reading whom introduced him to Gautier, Baudelaire and Verlaine, but above all A.C. Swinburne. Around this time, Shao began to compose verse of his own inspired by these models, so it was apparently then that he determined on a career as a poet. He also composed poetry during his vacation visits to Paris, where he continued his relationships with Chinese artists who would later be his friends back in Shanghai. Astonishingly, Shao was able to pass his examinations in economics despite all his artistic activity; it is even more surprising, therefore, that he failed so dismally economically in his later life.
Shao continued composing verse during his 1926 voyage home to marry Peiyu, to whom he dedicated the volume in which he collected all his youthful lines: Heaven and May, published that same year. Anyone reading anything in it can detect the influence of his European Symbolist-Decadent models, especially Swinburne. Here is the opening stanza of the first poem, appropriately entitled “Heaven”:
Alas, this barren heaven—
Why is it no different from a beautiful tomb?
Lord on high!
You have lured everyone here to keep in captivity,
Shutting out all human desires:
Lord on high! [Our translation]
The rest of this 185-line work goes on to question whether God’s paradise is really as happy as promised, and suggests that He is a selfish and despotic owner of it. The last third relates Shao’s own version of the fall of man, in which Satan tempts Adam and Eve to love themselves and so find true happiness by breaking free from God. While the poem as a whole is distinctly Shao’s, it certainly echoes Swinburne’s famed quarrel with the Victorian God, most particularly in ‘Hymn of Man’, with its key line, ‘But God, if a God there be, is the substance of men, which is man’. Swinburne concludes: ‘Glory to Man in the highest! For Man is the master of things’. At any rate, the divinization of human love and desire is the central theme of Swinburne’s work, as well as Shao’s.
Another frequent theme of Shao’s that seems to have come from Swinburne is the metaphor of a flower as a woman, although this owes a debt as well to Baudelaire, who of course influenced Swinburne. The main example in Heaven and May is ‘Narcissus’:
Ah, Narcissus!
Since you grow inside this filthy mire,
Why do you possess such a special perfume that
Attracts passersby like me to love you?
The middle two stanzas relate how the speaker desires to enter the mire to kiss the narcissus, but cannot pull her out of it without killing her. She is instead kissed by wind and rain, and remains ‘standing smilingly erect in the filthy mire!’ The final stanza reads:
If you have lost your senses,
Then how can you have any affection for me?
Alas! Isn’t it just better to speak with you about love?
Better to let you stay alone in the filthy mire! [Our translation]
Shao’s imagery recalls Swinburne’s line from ‘Dolores’ about ‘the mystical rose in the mire’, combining as it does the theme of sublime beauty being at one with filth. This poem contains all the ambivalence about nature and the exaltation of divinized sensuality that characterized the Aesthetic movement, and provides insight into Shao’s state of mind while in Europe.
By a stroke of great good fortune, Heaven and May appeared at a moment in Shanghai’s history when many Chinese there were open to inspiration from the West. Shao’s friend and fellow poet Xu Zhimo hailed him as ‘China’s very own Verlaine’, and Shao republished his poems with some new ones in a volume with the Baudelairean title Flower-Like Evil. The scholar Erich Fruehauf has documented how Western images of the ‘exotic orient’ were reciprocated by ‘Western exoticism’ among the Chinese, especially in Shanghai, the natural locus of such interest because it was home to the foreign concessions as well as most Chinese returning from sojourns abroad. For example, there were the artists Fu Yanchang and Zhu Yingping, who launched Shanghai’s Paris-style literary café in the early 1920s, as well as the Francophile Zeng Pu, who with his son founded the True, Beautiful and Good Bookshop. These and similar figures became Shao’s artistic companions, since with his foreign experience, wealth and eccentric personal style he was a fixture in both Shanghai’s literary and high society.
Shao was an entrepreneur himself, founding the Golden House Bookshop and publishing company, the latter equipped with a state-of-the-art press that was the most advanced piece of printing technology in China for decades. Thus established, he started his own literary magazine, Golden House Monthly, whose yellow cover recalled The Yellow Book of the 1890s. In it, he published his and others’ translations of Western writers as diverse as Pater and Tennyson. Shao also produced many beautiful art books with fancy bindings and wide margins, including his own Fire and Flesh, whose title was apparently derived from Swinburne’s line in ‘Laus Veneris’ about ‘Venus clothed in flesh like fire’. Not surprisingly, its contents consisted of two essays on his idol, as well as ones on Sappho, Moore, Verlaine, Gautier and Catullus’s love poetry. His giving Swinburne double the space of anyone else confirms him as his main influence, but his essay on Moore is also revealing. After all, Shao and the Irishman had much in common: both came from gentry families, wrote a youthful book of Baudelairean verse, studied art in Paris and associated with painters, were deeply attached to France and idolised Theophile Gautier. Indeed, the modern Chinese literature scholar Leo Ou-fan Lee has opined that in this essay, Shao seems to personally identify with his subject, ‘as if he were writing his own memoir’. For his part, Hutt rightly declares Fire and Flesh as the ‘closest thing ever to a Chinese manifesto of the decadence’. All its influences were to crystallize in Shao’s final volume of verse in the next decade.
In the 1930s, Shao engaged in a five-year affair with the American New Yorker correspondent Emily Hahn, who wrote a novel and a non-fiction book about their relationship and her uncomfortable dealings with Peiyu, by whom Shao sired six children. The affair scandalized both Chinese and Western society in Shanghai, making him more of an outcast. Since his bookstore and publishing company did not make money, he had to sell his family’s property and heirlooms at increasingly low prices. He started some popular magazines, but these, too, were unsuccessful. More seriously, he had long been hated by Lu Xun, leader of Shanghai’s League of Left-Wing Writers, who wrote bombastic articles condemning him. Throughout the decade, Lu Xun and his movement came to dominate the city’s artistic and political scene, alienating Shao’s Western-influenced circle. Throughout it all, at least according to Hahn, he continued to wear a traditional scholar’s gown with English shoes, which at Cambridge he had found the most comfortable.
It was in this grim situation that Shao published 25 Poems, which was to be his final volume of verse, in 1936. Such critics who have evaluated it see the 50-line ‘Xunmei’s Dream’ as its crux, mainly because it closes with the determination, ‘Ah! I do not want to sleep, but to wake, to wake!’ [Our translation]. This resolution comes after a dream vision of an encounter with an immortal goddess, a frequent image in Shao’s poetry. While there is a point to the interpretation that Shao was leaving the fanciful life of his youth behind and starting to face reality, we believe that the sonnet ‘Heaven and Earth’ contains the real spiritual thrust of this volume. Its first line is an address by the speaker, presumably Shao himself, to an immortal goddess, whom he wishes can come down from heaven to astonish ordinary folk on earth. The final line, however, looks forward to heaven and earth becoming one in the end. While Shao wrote an introduction for 25 Poems in which he distanced it from Heaven and May, the fact that many of its poems are dated as early as 1928 indicates some continuity between the two volumes, as do similarities in themes and imagery, such as the flower-woman temptress, although there is more acceptance of nature.
25 Poems might have been the beginning of a mature phase in Shao’s poetry, assuming he could have afforded to continue it, had it not been for the Japanese invasion the following year, which brought Shanghai’s artistic life to a halt. Shao survived WWII in penury, and after the Communists took over he was jailed repeatedly and never able to publish poetry again. He made a living as a translator, and his 1955 rendering of Tom Sawyer is still in print in China. He finally died in 1968, the height of the Cultural Revolution, which stood for everything that he had opposed. How then can we finally assess him? Was he just a quixotic dreamer? Alternately, the fact that he poured all his fortune into his artistic work shows that he believed in what he was doing. Hutt, however, points out that the general culture of pre-1949 Shanghai was vulgar consumerism, and Fruehauf has documented that none of Shao’s books ever sold more than 2,000 copies. Therefore, did he really stand a chance of transforming his country? The answer is almost certainly not. Nevertheless, despite his practical failure, Shao’s East-West synthesis in both his art and his life is worth analysis at a time of interest in cross-cultural studies—he might even inspire some of today’s Chinese writers to again look westward.
By Hal Swindall and Jicheng Sun