IRIS, Sharmel. Gordon ERTZ, illustrator and illuminator. ~ The Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid. [?Chicago, 1917].
Illuminated manuscript on paper, large square 4to (288 × 250 mm), 24 leaves (the first blank), illuminated manuscript with elaborate gouache borders to all leaves, comprising 7 titles/verse titles, 10 text leaves, 5 full-page miniatures and a final colophon leaf signed by author and illustrator, all on thick paper with tissue guards. Contemporary dark green crushed morocco, gilt, by the Monastery Hill Bindery, covers with elaborate borders and cornerpieces including red morocco onlays, watered silk endpapers, gilt edges. Rebacked
A singular illuminated manuscript, an echo of the Celtic Twilight, interpreted in Chicago by an Italian-born American poet of considerable notoriety. ‘The Heart-Cry of the Celtic Maid’ had been first printed in Iris’s poetical collection, Lyrics of a Lad, a slim volume published by Chicago’s Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co. in 1914. But it is here given full calligraphic treatment by the illustrator Gordon Ertz, in a unique volume with five full-page miniatures and the other pages with illuminations, the colophon signed by both poet and illustrator, stating it was ‘especially done for “A Delicate Wine Glass” sometimes known as “Covelli” and at others as “Zada”’.
Though the manuscript is both genuine and attractive it soon exposes Iris’s career of deception, plagiarism, forgery and obfuscation, which stretched over the first six decades of the twentieth century. His poem ‘The Heart-Cry’ was approved of in at least one review of Lyrics of a Lad — one Milo Winter (otherwise apparently unknown) called it ‘graceful’ in the Little Review of December 1914 — but others accused Iris of plagiarism, noting the poem’s similarity to the English poet Laurence Hope’s ‘Love Lightly’ (1902). Plagiarism seems to have been the mildest literary crime practised by Iris, whose trademark strategy was to place fictional reviews of his work by famous authors in his publications. Across his career he published a series of collections often containing endorsements or approvals by association by: Ruskin, Swinburne, Gosse, Francis Thompson, Yeats, Eliot, Sarah Bernhardt, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Robert Frost, G. B Shaw and Edith Sitwell. It is probable that none of these figures had ever heard of Sharmel Iris, who remained a persistent if marginal figure in Chicago literary society until his death in 1967. The whole saga has been recounted by Craig Abbot in ‘The Case of Scharmel Iris’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 77, no. 1, 1983, pp. 15–34 and more recently in his monograph Forging Fame: The Strange Career of Scharmel Iris (2007).
‘If poets are “liars by profession,” Sharmel Iris was truly professional. Poet, plagiarist, imposter, and forger, Iris engaged in a lifelong campaign of self-promotion that linked him to a constellation of leading writers and public figures, among them T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, Ezra Pound, Dame Edith Sitwell, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, William Wrigley, and Woodrow Wilson. “Of poets writing today, there is no greater,” states a preface, signed by W. B. Yeats, to one of Iris’s volumes of poetry―although at the time of publication Yeats had been dead for several years’ (Abbot).
The illuminator Gordon Ertz (b. 1891), while not widely known, was sought after as a magazine illustrator and designer of book covers and jackets.