James Elroy Flecker

• Illustration — His birthplace, 9 Gilmore Road, Lee, London, is marked with a blue plaque • Illustration — Flecker (sitting) and J. D. Beazley in 1908 Herman Elroy Flecker was born on 5 November 1884 in Lewisham, London, to William Herman Flecker, headmaster of Dean Close School in Cheltenham, and his wife Sarah. His much younger brother was the educationalist Henry Lael Oswald Flecker, who became headmaster of Christ's Hospital. Flecker later chose to use the first name "James", either because he disliked the name "Herman" or to avoid confusion with his father. "Roy", as his family called him, was educated at Dean Close School, and then at Uppingham. He subsequently studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford, he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there under John Addington Symonds, and became a close friend of the classicist and art historian John Beazley. From 1908, Flecker worked in the consular service in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a ship to Athens, he met Hellé Skiadaressi, and they were married in 1911. Flecker died on 3 January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland, and was buried in Bouncer's Lane Cemetery, Cheltenham. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats". Hellé Flecker settled in England. She edited Flecker's Letters: Some Letters from Abroad of James Elroy Flecker, published by Heinemann in 1930 "with a few reminiscences by Hellé Flecker". In 1935, she was awarded a Civil List pension of £90 a year "in recognition of the services rendered by her husband to poetry". Hellé Flecker survived her husband for more than 45 years, dying in Sunbury-on-Thames in October 1961.

Flecker's poem The Golden Journey to Samarkand was published in 1913, but only found its larger context when his play, Hassan, was published. Hassan (The Story of Hassan of Bagdad and How He Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand) is a five-act drama in prose with verse passages. It tells the story of Hassan, a love-sick middle-aged confectioner of Baghdad who saves the Caliph Haroun ar Raschid from the King of the Beggars and is showered with riches in gratitude. However, horrified by witnessing the Caliph's capricious cruelty to a pair of lovers, he rejects the life of luxury and joins the caravan to Samarkand dressed as a pilgrim. Hassan was not staged in Flecker’s lifetime, and was published posthumously in 1922. The play premiered in a sumptuous production directed by Basil Dean at His Majesty's Theatre, London on 20 September 1923. Henry Ainley played Hassan, with Leon Quartermaine, Malcolm Keen, Esme Percy, Cathleen Nesbitt, Basil Gill and Laura Cowie in the cast. The incidental music was by Frederick Delius and conducted by Eugène Goossens. The ballets were devised by Michel Fokine, and George W. Harris designed the sets and costumes. Delius was in the audience. Percy Fletcher conducted the music after the second performance, and recorded a selection of numbers from the production with the orchestra and chorus of His Majesty's Theatre in November 1923. The production included incidental music, songs, dances, and choral episodes. It caught the fancy of English audiences at the time, perhaps because of the escape implied in its exotic setting and a post-war vogue for oriental imagery, and its wistful ending of death, by execution, and a hoped-for reunion and love in the afterlife, a theme that would have resonated for the survivors of the Great War, remembering those who died in the war. Delius's atmospheric music also contributed to the success of the production. • Illustration — A scene from the 1923 production of Hassan

• The Bridge of Fire (Elkin Matthews, 1907) • Thirty-Six Poems (Adelphi Press, 1910) • Forty-Two Poems (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911) - a reissue of Thirty-Six Poems, with six new poems added. (Also as e-book and audio book) - 1924 edition bound with The Grecians (1910) • The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) • The Old Ships (The Poetry Bookshop, 1915) (as audio book) • Collected Poems (Martin Secker; Doubleday, Page & Co., 1916)

• The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (New Age Press, 1908) • The King of Alsander (George Allen & Unwin, 1914)

• Hassan (William Heinemann, 1922) Full title: Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How he Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand. (Incidental music to the play was written by Frederick Delius in 1920, before the play's publication, and first performed in September 1923.) • Don Juan (William Heinemann, 1925)

• The Grecians: A Dialogue on Education (J. M. Dent & Sons; E. P. Dutton, 1910) • The Scholars' Italian Book (1911) • Collected Prose (G. Bell and Sons, 1920) - contains 'Tales and Sketches'; The Grecians; 'Critical Studies'. • The Letters of J.E. Flecker to Frank Savery (The Beaumont Press, 1926) • Some Letters from Abroad of James Elroy Flecker (William Heinemann, 1930)