The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  The audience, what little there is of it, is becoming restless. The old man’s voice is monotonous and harsh. He is a bore. A fat, weary-looking youth gets up to leave. The bag lady who comes to all these readings, to sit alone in a corner chair amid her shreds of blanket, ceaselessly opening and closing the top of a plastic water bottle, starts humming to herself. Again the counselor turns, levels a glance at Christopher that makes him smile.

  Gravy train, Christopher thinks.

  “What Henry James called ‘the air-blown grain’ … Byron in Thessalonica … The muse of history.” History! Well, Christopher has really had it now. For he hates history, which for him means his high school teacher, Mrs. Helfgott, chattering nasally about the War Between the States. Earlier, when the lesbians were being so rude, he felt sorry for the old man. But now, by invoking history’s muse, he has proven himself merely to be another dumbass fart. Part of the status quo. What good will history do us in nuclear winter? Christopher thinks as the lecture ends, and a thin runnel of applause rises from the folding chairs, out of which most of the few listeners immediately bolt. As for the bag lady, she opens her water bottle and closes it, opens her water bottle and closes it. Hums.

  “Does anyone have any questions?”

  Silence. The counselor raises his hand.

  “Yes, John?”

  “Professor McMaster, forgive me if this sounds gossipy—”

  “The best kind of question. Go on.”

  “Thank you. Well, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley I remember a rumor went around that Roger Hinton—”

  “Many rumors have circulated about Roger, most of them true.”

  “Very likely. Anyway, according to this rumor, when he was on leave from the Marine Corps near the end of the Second World War, he went to Brighton to seduce Lord Alfred Douglas, so that he could say he’d slept with someone who’d slept with Oscar Wilde.”

  A low murmur of surprise now rises from the hinterlands of the bookstore. Indeed, such is the magnetism of Wilde’s name that even the lesbians cease talking and turn toward the lectern.

  “Ah yes,” the old man says. “Unfortunately, that one I’ve never been able to corroborate. There is evidence that Roger was in England in 1944, the year before Douglas died. There’s even evidence that he went to Brighton. Beyond that, though, I haven’t been able to prove anything except—you see, Roger learned early on that the best way to keep people interested in him was to keep them guessing. So whenever anyone asked him about that particular rumor—or any rumor—he’d make a point of sort of dancing around the question without actually answering it, just the sort of maneuver our political leaders have become so adept at lately. Still, if one is, as I am, a literary critic—which amounts, in essence, to being a snoop—then it’s hard to resist the impulse to dig around in the poetry for clues, even though, as we all know, the purpose of poetry is never merely to render up autobiographical ore. Perhaps, John, you will recall an odd little ballad of Roger’s called ‘The Dark Grey Man.’”

  The counselor (John) smiles at the name, recites: “‘I remember him treading dark water, / The dark-souled, dark grey man.’”

  “Very good, very good. Yes, it’s a puzzle, that one. For years I couldn’t work it out, which surprised me, because as we all know, Roger’s poetry is usually fairly unopaque—at least by design. He used to say that he was a novelist manqué. And yet that poem always struck me as being, in certain ways—well, very unlike the rest of his work. Intentionally obscurist. I always thought of it as a puzzle or riddle for which you had to find the key … and then one day, while I was researching my biography, I happened upon an extraordinary fact.” From the lectern he picks up his book. “According to Rupert Hart-Davis in his biography of Bosie, the name Douglas derives from the Gaelic dubh glas, and means ‘dark water’ … which Walter Scott rendered in The Abbot as ‘dark grey.’ In that novel an eighteenth-century Douglas, a warrior, is ‘the Dark-Grey man.’”

  The old man clears his throat; quotes: “‘As if fishing for Neptune’s daughter / In the dark grey, roiling water, / Or perhaps he’d already caught her, / That dark-souled, dark grey man.’

  “Well, and what, after all, is the most obvious synonym for ‘roiling’?”

  John raises his hand. “You,” the old man says—suddenly a professor again, as John is suddenly a student.

  “Wild,” John says.

  “Wild. Exactly. Exactly.”

  He smiles. The bag lady hums.

  Campden Hill, or the Abyss

  Now we enter into what is perhaps the most difficult period in Bosie’s life to make out. The problem is not lack of information. On the contrary, documents abound, too many of them: police reports, trial transcripts, lurid coverage in the tabloid press. (Excessive paper is a side effect of the litigious life.) These documents ensnare and obfuscate, they are a jungle of innuendo and error. Under their canopy details meld: one forgets at which trial Freddie Smith, Robbie Ross’s erstwhile thespian lover, admitted to wearing powder and paint not only on stage, but in church. (And is Freddie Smith in any way related to F. E. Smith? No, he was Robbie’s counsel … though only in the first of the trials.)

  The sheer quantity of actions in which Bosie was involved means that even he has difficulty keeping them in order, with the result that when he is arrested upon his arrival at Folkestone in 1914 (for the last few months he had been hiding out in France) he has no idea on which warrant he is being charged: is it Colonel Custance’s bench warrant, revived after Bosie wrote a letter to King George V complaining of the “foul way” he was being treated by his father-in-law? No, that one appears to have escaped the officer’s attention. Is it a warrant left over from Robbie’s earlier action against Crosland, then, the one in which he asserted that Crosland, “being concerned with Lord Alfred Douglas, did, on September 17, 1913, and on diverse other dates between September 17 and February 14 last, unlawfully and wickedly conspire, combine, confederate, and agree together, and with diverse other persons unknown, unlawfully, falsely, and corruptly to charge Robert Baldwin Ross with having committed certain acts with one Charles Garratt?” No, that case Robbie has already lost.

  Instead the warrant turns out to be new, issued by Robbie, and accusing Bosie of “falsely and maliciously publishing a defamatory libel” about him. Bosie only finds this out when he gets to London, though; already his cousin Sholto Douglas, along with an Anglican parson called Mills, is standing in the courtroom, waiting to bail him out. But hold on! At the last minute, Sir George Lewis stalks in dramatically from the wings, declaring that as long as a warrant still exists for Bosie’s arrest regarding “certain other charges of which he has been convicted”—charges involving a gentleman who just happens to be another client of his, Colonel Frederic Hambledon Custance—bail cannot be granted! So Bosie is shipped off to jail for five days, an experience no doubt intended to provoke second thoughts in him but from which he emerges more rather than less determined to ruin Robbie.

  Provocation is seduction. In the atmosphere of panic that took hold just before the Great War, even Bosie’s most ludicrous delusions take on the heft of reality. Reviewing the coverage, one begins to believe that there actually was a sodomitical conspiracy afoot, the intention of which was to depose the king of England and put Robert Ross—as heir to dear dead Oscar—onto the throne. Nor do Bosie’s ravings about Robbie—whom he calls “the High Priest of all the sodomites of London”—lack their equivalent in public life. More and more, the language of infection (and disinfection) seeps into the national discourse. Thus it is reported that German agents provocateurs have begun circulating among the healthy ranks of the military, handing out venereal diseases like candy. (According to the article, these Germans are sexual kamikazes, motivated by duty instead of lust—which elides the trickier question of why Albion’s sons are so susceptible to their charms.) Foreigners are “parasites who live on the blood of fighting men.” War is “the sovereign disinfectant,” Robbie’s friend Edmund Gosse write
s, “its red stream of blood … the Condy’s fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect.” A few years later, in Wormwood Scrubs prison for libeling Churchill, Bosie himself declares in verse:

  The leprous spawn of scattered Israel

  Spreads its contagion in your English blood …

  Of course, he was playing to the gallery here, to that philistine majority from whose ranks jurymen were selected, and for whom homosexuality, artistic talent, and pacifism necessarily went hand in hand with pro-Hun and pro-Jewish sentiment (and possibly espionage). For the downside of Bosie’s anti-Oscar stance is that it puts him in the awkward position of having to rely for support upon a “public” toward which, as a snob and an aristocrat, he feels only contempt. This was where Crosland became invaluable. Crosland—it cannot be denied—had a certain prescient genius; he could smell the xenophobic terror of the middle classes, to which war had not yet given a voice. He also understood that above all else, a prophet must be a good public speaker, someone who can transform inchoate rage into eloquent diatribe. And who better to play the part of prophet than Bosie? Because he is not of them, then maybe he can win them, convince them that far from Oscar Wilde’s boy, he is their savior, sent from heaven to crusade against sin, sodomy, socialism, Judaism, and all foreigners who have chosen to make their home in England.

  By now Bosie is forty-three years old. He is no longer beautiful. The fate of men who resemble Renaissance seraphim in their twenties is that as they age their handsomeness does not mature. Thus Bosie, in a photograph taken of him in 1919, looks exactly the same as Bosie in a photograph taken in the 1890s—same glossy dark blond hair, same high cheekbones and wide eyes, same slim torso—except that (how else to put it?) he is no longer young. Instead of weathering his features, time has let Bosie rot, leaving us with this circus spectacle, the prematurely elderly child.

  Whenever he writes, odors rise from the page. His hatred—his “lack of imagination”—is boundless. For example, one day in 1913 he reads in the Reynolds newspaper that a male prostitute called Charles Garratt has been arrested upon leaving the flat of one Christopher Millard. Millard, as Bosie well knows, is Robbie Ross’s secretary, and Wilde’s bibliographer; might the boy, then, count Robbie among his clients too? (Very likely; from experience Bosie knows the sodomite’s habit of trading boys like recipes.) There is no time to lose, and promptly he sends a solicitor to speak to Garratt, who admits that he knows of Robbie but refuses to say more until he is let free. Next Crosland visits Garratt’s mother, a charwoman in Lincolnshire, stands her a drink at a pub, and says that if she speaks up, the men who corrupted her son will be punished. She is alarmed, and takes him to meet her daughter, a Mrs. Flude, to whom he explains that recently two men named Millard and Ross got her brother so drunk that he passed out, only to awaken the next morning dressed as a woman and smelling of perfume. All of this is invention—as Garratt will later testify, he’s never even met Ross—which does nothing to stop the fantasy from taking a fierce hold on the national imagination. For such a scenario—the boy seduced, drugged, and quite literally emasculated—speaks to the very fear that Crosland wants to exploit: the fear of foreignness, contamination, contagion. No doubt the Germans are behind it all … and haven’t we heard plenty already about the sorts of things that go on in Berlin?

  Provocation is seduction. When Robbie Ross, in 1914, finally sued Bosie for criminal libel, he seemed at last to be taking some action; in fact he was merely submitting to a prostitute’s wiles. “Come on,” Bosie had beckoned—for years—“climb into this warm, close bed.” So at last Robbie climbed into that warm, close bed, as Oscar had; as Gerald and Wellington had. And Bosie pounced.

  As soon as he’s released from jail, he sets about seeking evidence with which to condemn Robbie. The stakes in the game are high. Given his record, if Bosie loses, he will probably go to prison. On the other hand, if he wins, then Robbie will probably be tried on charges of “gross indecency,” found guilty, and sentenced, as Wilde was, to hard labor. A lurid spectacle, this: one spiteful queen attempting to use an unjust law to “out” (and thereby destroy) another. Nor are Robbie’s own belligerent tendencies to be overlooked in the matter. For if he had simply ignored Bosie’s threats, then very probably by his silence he would have done his enemy far greater damage than he did by providing him with the soapbox of a trial. After all, Bosie’s diatribes in the gutter press posed no danger so far as Robbie’s high-ranking friends were concerned. On the contrary, so greatly did his treatment by the police incense Margot Asquith, the prime minister’s (lesbian) wife, that she went to Scotland Yard to have it out herself with the director of public prosecutions. Later, Edmund Gosse persuaded more than three hundred people, including Sir James Barrie, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw, to sign a testimonial to Robbie, which was presented to him along with a “purse” that he used to endow a scholarship “for male students only” at the Slade School of Art. None of this, needless to say, went down particularly well with Bosie, but then again it wasn’t intended to.

  Bosie’s campaign to ruin Robbie begins deep in the past. He brings out the old scandal of the schoolboy called Alfred whom Robbie was supposed to have seduced in 1893; the problem here is that later Bosie had lured Alfred away from Robbie (and written him love letters). Then he tries to persuade Garratt (again) to testify that Robbie was one of his clients. Garratt refuses. Then he tries to dig up evidence to substantiate a rumor that three years earlier Robbie attended a New Year’s Eve party at which men danced with other men. He fails. Finally he goes after Freddie Smith, Robbie’s former boyfriend and putative secretary. Here he has more success. A fellow member of Freddie’s dramatic society, Emma Rooker, agrees to state in court that she once saw Robbie embrace Freddie and call him “my darling,” while the Reverend Andrew Bowring—the same pastor who had dismissed Freddie in his capacity as an acolyte after he was found to be wearing make-up and powder to church—expresses his grave doubts as to Freddie’s qualifications for the position of secretary to “a man of literature.” And that would have been it, the entirety of Bosie’s plea of justification, had not, in his own words, a “miracle” occurred.

  Having just returned from a fruitless trip to Guernsey and several other places where Robbie was supposed to have got up to no good, Bosie received a tip that during the years just after Wilde’s death, while he was living in Campden Hill, Robbie had “victimized” sixteen-year-old William Edwards, who subsequently went off to South Africa and died. Go to Campden Hill, a tipster told him, go to a certain address and ask for Mr. Edwards. He will tell you what you need to know. So Bosie went. His hope was to persuade the boy’s father to testify against Robbie at his trial. But when he knocked at the door of the address given, he was told not only that no Mr. Edwards lived there, but that no Mr. Edwards had ever lived there.

  At an utter loss, looking up and down a street lined by “at least 150 houses”—this was probably Campden Hill Road, near Holland Park, now one of London’s most notorious cruising grounds—Bosie sent up a prayer to Saint Anthony of Padua (the patron saint of lost objects) and waited. It was then that a little boy strode up to him and asked him if he needed help. Bosie stated his dilemma; the little boy smiled and explained that all the numbers in the street had recently been changed. Then he took Bosie by the hand and led him to the right house.

  “I firmly believe,” Bosie wrote later, “that the child was an angel … He was a most beautiful little boy, and he had an angelic face and smile.” Just as Bosie did.

  When you go to heaven you can be what you like, and I intend to be a child.

  At the trial Mr. Edwards testified that in 1908 his son William had come home wearing a shirt with the name “Ross” printed on its collar. His older son, a soldier, testified that after William’s disappearance he had gone to a bar on Copthall Avenue in search of Robbie, who had tried to buy his silence and then, when he refused the bribe, threatened to accuse him of blackmail. (I am so
rry to say that such a tactic sounds just like Robbie.) Emma Rooker testified, as did the Reverend Andrew Bowring, and Vyvyan Holland (his mother had changed their name), and Bosie. Robbie himself testified—not very well, apparently, for in his summing up the judge complained that his performance had been inadequate. “I waited and waited, but I waited in vain for any moral expression of horror at the practice of sodomitical vices … It was certainly not so emphatic a denial as you would expect from a man with no leprosy on him.”

  After three hours the foreman of the jury announced that it had failed to reach a verdict. The judge sent them back. The foreman returned with the same news. Later it was revealed that they were split eleven to one in favor of acquittal—yet the holdout refused to budge. In future ravings, Bosie would insist that this gentleman—who robbed him of complete victory—was a plant, a vassal of the nefarious Sir George Lewis.

  Not long after, Robbie died. He did not live to be old. Bosie lived to be old.

  A Link in a Chain

  “You’ve got more books than the bookstore,” Christopher says, slinging his backpack off his shoulder and sitting down on John’s (the counselor’s) sofa.

  From across the room, where he’s opening a bottle of wine, John looks at him cautiously. Is there reproach in Christopher’s voice? he wonders, the reproach of youth, of a generation that disdains history? Or is he too much of a skeptic? Perhaps, he thinks, Christopher is expressing simple wonder. This is closer to the truth. The fact of the matter is that John’s apartment—in which there are only books, buckling shelves full of books, books piled on either side of the sofa—somewhat intimidates Christopher. From near where he’s sitting he picks one up, turns to the title page. Real Presences, he reads, Is There Anything in What We Say? He puts the book down as if it’s bitten him, picks up another. Roger Hinton: A Life, by Jack McMaster. “Oh, the old guy who was lecturing,” he says, glancing neutrally at the photograph on the back of the jacket. (It is the same photograph that was on the lectern.)