by Neil McKenna
Bosie was furious. Although he admired Oscar's work enormously, he also had an extremely high opinion of his own talents, and always considered himself to be a great poet. `I suspected that I was a great poet when I was twenty-three,' Bosie wrote later, `and as the years went by my suspicion became a conviction.' Bosie flounced out of the Cottage, sending a series of violent and vituperative letters to Oscar, in which he announced that he was under `no intellectual obligation of any kind' to him. In Bosie's statement, Oscar recognised a fundamental truth. It was, he thought, `the one really true thing' Bosie had written `in the whole course of our friendship'. Oscar realised that there was an unbridgeable gulf of understanding, of culture, of intellect between them. They had tried a form of Uranian marriage and it had failed dismally. `Ultimately,' Oscar wrote:
the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
Bosie was, Oscar convinced himself, `trivial in thought and action', charmingly so. Bosie's endless talk of boys and buggery, no less than the fascination of their exploration of their shared and forbidden sexuality, had begun to pall:
The froth and folly of our life grew often very wearisome to me: it was only in the mire that we met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic around which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me. I was often bored to death by it.
Oscar's version of this crisis in his relationship with Bosie was written while he was in Reading Gaol and is tinted and tainted by the bitter and painful experiences of incarceration. Oscar was right: Bosie was indeed obsessed by what he called `the eternal quest for beauty', by which he meant boys and sex. Yet Oscar had been equally obsessed. It was their life, their passion, their addiction. They were predators in the murky undergrowth of Victorian sexuality. They could not have stopped, even if they had wanted to. The endless cycle of sexual desire and sexual satiation had by now become `a malady, or a madness, or both'. There was no escape, no cure.
Oscar decided that he would join Constance and the boys in Dinard, in Brittany, for a fortnight. Bosie wanted to come too. `You were extremely angry at me for not taking you with me,' Oscar recalled. There were more arguments, more scenes culminating in a series of unpleasant telegrams sent to the country house where Oscar was staying. This time Oscar was more tactful, telling Bosie that he ought to spend at least a week or two with his family. `But in reality,' Oscar wrote, `I could not under any circumstances have let you be with me.' Oscar realised that after twelve weeks in each other's company:
I required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of your companionship. It was necessary for me to be a little by myself. It was intellectually necessary.
Oscar travelled to France determined to end a relationship which seemed to be going so catastrophically awry. The trip to Dinard was `a good opportunity for ending the fatal friendship that had sprung up between us, and ending it without bitterness'.
Bosie meanwhile was staying at the house of his uncle, George Finch, in Burley-on-the-Hill in Rutland. `I have just finished translating Oscar Wilde's Salome,' he told Charles Kains Jackson. `It is to be published in October.' In his reply, Kains Jackson made some slighting allusion to Oscar. Bosie sprang vigorously to Oscar's defence. `The general philistine attacks him quite enough without any assistance from the elect,' he reprimanded Kains Jackson, reminding him that Oscar `is the most chivalrous friend in the world'.
Bosie was lonely. He was missing Oscar, blithely unaware of the most unchivalrous thoughts that were running through the mind of his most chivalrous friend. `I am bored to death and very unhappy and unloved!' he told Kains Jackson. `I am surrounded here by what is popularly known as "a bevy of fair girls" which fills me with misery. I am also very seedy.' To console himself, Bosie wrote two Uranian sonnets.
The first of these sonnets concerned a boy in a straw hat. As he explained to Kains Jackson:
What I said about the `Straw Hat' . . . was quite deliberate. I was trying to get the modern sentiment into it. It was a bit of realism. Really I think a straw hat has all the feeling of a modern Oxford boy in it, it's my idea of a boy of that sort that he should always have a straw hat on.
Bosie's sonnet - which is now lost - may well have been a piece of poetic realism and was perhaps inspired by an encounter with an unknown and unnamed boy in London a fortnight earlier. On 18 August, two days after his drunken evening with Oscar, Robbie, Beerbohm and Beardsley, Bosie had ordered a straw hat from his hatters, James Lock and Company in St James's Street. The company's ledgers record simply that Bosie purchased a `Straw Hat, No Band (for Friend)'. Giving straw hats to boys was a potentially dangerous pastime. The following summer, Oscar would buy a straw hat, this time with a band of red and blue, for Alfonso Conway, a boy Oscar and Bosie picked up on the seafront at Worthing. Conway and his straw hat would come back to haunt Oscar during his trials.
Bosie's second Uranian sonnet concerned the exquisitely desirable lips of a boy:
and I saw thee In thy white tunic gowned from neck to knee, And knew the honey of thy sugar lips.
`I was so fascinated by the expression "sugar lips" used of a boy in one of Burton's translations,' Bosie told Kains Jackson, `that I wrote a sonnet on purpose to bring it in. I haven't named it yet, I can't think of a good name. Something Eastern I think it ought to be.' Bosie was referring to Sir Richard Burton, the extraordinary explorer, traveller and scholar who had translated much Eastern poetry and who had made an extensive study of sex between men in India, North Africa and the Near East. Sugar lips were for kissing - and also for cock-sucking. Later, Bosie would use the same expression to describe the allure of a fourteen-year-old Algerian boy. `I am held fast,' he told Robbie Ross, `by the lassoo of desire to a sugar-lipped lad,' with whom he had had sex `once, sometimes twice for the past ten days.'
Two weeks in Brittany with Constance and the boys rapidly brought Oscar to his senses. Much as he was fond, `really very fond' of Constance, and deeply as he loved his sons, he realised that he could never again attempt a simulacrum of normal family life. Besides which, he started to miss Bosie desperately. Even though he sometimes fancied himself weary and exhausted by the `froth and folly' of Bosie's sexual obsessions, the sudden and complete absence of Bosie's `fascinating, terribly fascinating' talk about boys and sex was unnerving and unsettling. And Oscar knew that for all his faults - his greed, his selfishness, his self-indulgence - Bosie really loved him. `No matter what you wrote or did, you were absolutely and entirely devoted to me.'
On his return to London, Oscar allowed himself to be persuaded by Robbie Ross, Bosie's new best friend, that he had, perhaps, behaved unjustly towards Bosie in the matter of the Salome translation. He decided to repent and relent. `It was represented to me,' Oscar wrote in De Profundis:
that you would be much hurt, perhaps almost humiliated at having your work sent back to you like a schoolboy's exercise; that I was expecting far too much intellectually from you. . . I knew quite well that no translation, unless one done by a poet, could render the colour and cadence of my work in any adequate measure: devotion seemed to me, seems to me still, a wonderful thing, not to be lightly thrown away: so I took the translation and you back.
A pattern of behaviour was beginning to emerge. A period of simmering tension would erupt in a terrible scene, or series of scenes. Bosie would flounce out, sending Oscar vituperative telegrams and letters. Oscar would decide that the friendship must end. As they both cooled off, each realised that they could not live without the other. Bosie was penitent, Oscar magnanimous. Reconciliation and joy unconfined - at least until the next flashpoint.
There were still problems about the Salome translation, exacerbated when Oscar unwisely told Bosie that he was considering asking Aubrey Beardsley to translate the play, as well as illustrate it, though, in the event, Oscar stuck with Bo
sie's rendering. Robbie Ross had introduced Beardsley to Oscar that spring, after Beardsley had been commissioned to do an illustration inspired by the recently published French edition of Salome to accompany an article on Beardsley's work for the new art magazine, the Studio. Beardsley's illustration was suggestively entitled `The Climax' and depicts an orgasmic Salome in transports of erotic delight as she kisses the decapitated head of Jokanaan, symbolically levitating herself into the air under the impetus of her expressed lust. Oscar was delighted with Beardsley's acute and sexually knowing interpretation of his play and presented the artist with a copy of Salome inscribed:
March '93, for Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.
Oscar's enthusiasm for the work of his new friend resulted in Beardsley being commissioned by John Lane to illustrate the English version of Salome.
Aubrey Beardsley was just twenty-two when he first met Oscar and was on the threshold of a spectacular and extremely short-lived career. He was a striking young man. Oscar called him `the most monstrous of orchids'. He was very tall and very thin, with very elongated, graceful hands and a long, equine face. Like his art, the consumptive Beardsley was a study in black and white, the extreme pallor of his skin contrasting sharply with his shock of black hair. He was artistically and intellectually precocious, with a sharp wit and a profound interest in all matters sexual, an interest which was reflected in his frequently priapic drawings. `Absinthe,' Oscar remarked when lunching one day with Beardsley and Frank Harris:
is to all other drinks what Aubrey's drawings are to other pictures; it stands alone; it is like nothing else; it shimmers like southern twilight in opalescent colouring; it has about it the seduction of strange sins. It is stronger than any other spirit and brings out the subconscious self in man. It is just like your drawings, Aubrey; it gets on one's nerves and is cruel. Baudelaire called his poems Fleurs du Mal, I shall call your drawings Fleurs du Peche - flowers of sin.
Like Max Beerbohm and Will Rothenstein, Aubrey Beardsley was drawn to Oscar by the magnetic force of his personality. Although not lovers of men or boys themselves, Beerbohm, Rothenstein and Beardsley were fascinated by what Beerbohm once described as `certain forms of crime', and they enjoyed their status as privileged observers of Oscar's circle. They were noncombatants who made a breathless, excited audience to the vivid Uranian comings and goings, complications, scandals, squalls and scenes, a vocal Greek chorus watching Oscar's tragedy unfold.
Oscar's friendship with Aubrey Beardsley began well but quickly degenerated in the course of the first six months. This was almost certainly Oscar's fault. He was curiously attracted to Beardsley who, though hardly conventionally good-looking, was young and interesting and seemingly sexually ambiguous. Beardsley may have sent out conflicting signals about his sexual preferences. `Yes, yes, I look like a sodomite,' he once told Arthur Symons. `But, no, I am not one.' It seems almost certain that, at some point in 1893, Oscar propositioned Beardsley for sex. Oscar was in the habit of propositioning young men. He had suggested sex to Bernard Berenson in Tite Street, pulled an alarmed Will Rothenstein on to his knee during a drunken carriage ride in Paris, and tried it on with many others. Like Havelock Ellis's anonymous correspondent in Sexual Inversion who had `made advances to upward of one hundred men in the course of the last fourteen years, and only once met with a refusal', Oscar had discovered that even the most determinedly heterosexual young men were willing to experiment more often than might reasonably be supposed. Robert Sherard was convinced that Oscar had made `advances on Beardsley, who took offence thereat and afterwards restricted his relations with Oscar to purely business transactions'.
The mutual admiration Oscar and Aubrey felt for each other quickly turned to animosity. In consequence of Oscar's sexual overtures, Beardsley manifested an increasing hostility towards Oscar and towards any discussion of sex between men. At an after-theatre supper in the Savoy with Beardsley and others, Oscar started to discourse about his favourite topic: boys and sex. On this occasion, he was going into unusual detail, seemingly about the practice of anilingus, or rimming. Beardsley told Trelawny Backhouse how Oscar had:
boasted of having had five love affairs and resultant copulations with telegraph and district messenger boys in one night. `I kissed them each one of them in every part of their bodies,' asserted Oscar: `they were all dirty and appealed to me for just that reason.'
Beardsley was shocked and rather disgusted. To know that Oscar was a sodomite was one thing, to be forced to listen to the goriest of gory details was quite another. Oscar's braggadocios about five sexual connections in one night, and his taste for anilingus, were perhaps more than Beardsley could stomach. `I don't mind his morals,' Beardsley said, `but his lamentable repetitions bore me to death and give me nausea like an emetic.' Trelawny Backhouse's rather unhelpful response to Beardsley's sense of disgust was to quote a line from a sonnet by Paul Verlaine: `Sales sont tes parties secretes, maisje les crime.' `Unclean your private parts but dear to me!'
Beardsley cruelly satirised Oscar in four of his drawings for Salome, most obviously in `The Woman in the Moon', originally entitled `The Man in the Moon'. The face of the woman in the moon is clearly that of Oscar, sporting a green carnation and presiding over the action of his play as the pagan moon coldly presides over the fates of Salome and Jokanaan. Oscar would not have thanked Beardsley for the comparison with the woman in the moon, whom Herod describes as `like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers', who `reels through the clouds like a drunken woman'. Drunken, reeling and sexually insatiable might be an accurate portrait of Oscar when he had, more often than not now, `vine leaves in his hair', but it was not kind.
Oscar bridled when he saw Beardsley's drawings, describing them as `like the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes in the margins of his copybooks'. The publisher, John Lane, was also very anxious lest Beardsley manage to slip any obscene imagery into his drawings. According to Trelawny Backhouse, Lane:
used to inspect with absurd minuteness (magnifying glass in hand) each and every sketch, searching for hidden suggestiveness, finding it sometimes where none whatsoever was dreamed of by the artist.
Like absinthe, Beardsley's drawings were cruel and had begun to get on Oscar's nerves. Relations between Salome's author, translator, illustrator and publisher became increasingly strained. `I can tell you I had a warm time of it between Lane and Oscar and Co,' Beardsley told Robbie Ross:
For one week the number of telegraph and messenger boys who came to the door was simply scandalous . . . I have withdrawn three of the illustrations and supplied their places with three new ones, simply beautiful and quite irrelevant.
Beardsley went on to describe Oscar and Bosie as `really very dreadful people'.
Oscar's account in De Profundis of the events of the autumn of 1893 is very sketchy, deliberately so. There was another scandal from which Oscar, Bosie and Robbie Ross only escaped by the skin of their teeth. `There have been very great and intimate scandals,' Max Beerbohm breathlessly told Reggie Turner:
A schoolboy with wonderful eyes, Bosie, Bobbie, a furious father, George Lewis, a Headmaster (who is now blackmailing Bobbie), St John Wontner, Calais, Dover, Oscar Browning, Oscar, Dover, Calais, intercepted letters, private detectives, Calais, Dover and returned cigarette cases were some of the ingredients of this dreadful episode.
The origins of the scandal went back five years, to 1888, when Robbie was recovering from the nervous breakdown he suffered after being ducked in the fountain at King's College, Cambridge. Oscar Browning, a friend of Oscar's and fellow of King's, had taken Robbie to spend a recuperative weekend at the Beehive, the house of his elderly mother in Windsor.
The Windsor weekend was certainly recuperative, if not in any conventional sense. At the Beehive, Robbie met Browning's sister, Mina, and her husband, the Reverend Biscoe Hale Wortham, and their two sons, Philip, then fourteen, and Oswald,
always called Toddy, who was a year or so younger. The friendship blossomed, and Robbie kept in close touch with the Worthams, staying with them `frequently' in England and in Bruges, where Biscoe Wortham had taken over a boarding school for English boys called `Laurence's', re-christening it rather more grandly `The English College'. Philip and Toddy also used to visit Robbie in London, sometimes staying a night or two in Mrs Ross's house in Onslow Square, or in Robbie's rooms in Kensington Church Street. Robbie's most recent visit to Bruges had been over Easter 1893, when he stayed about a week with the Worthams. Naturally, he spent time with Philip and Toddy, but on this visit he also met and befriended another boy -'a nice-looking, well-mannered, rather attractive boy a little over sixteen, of no particular strength of character' was how Biscoe Wortham described him.
The boy in question was probably Claude Dansey, the son of a retired Lieutenant-Colonel in the Life Guards. Wortham later confessed to his brother-in-law Oscar Browning that, at the time, he had thought `there was something suspicious' in the sudden friendship between Robbie and Claude but decided to say and do nothing, as Robbie was a trusted family friend. Robbie and Claude started to correspond, writing to each other regularly. None of their letters survive, but it seems that Robbie was in love with Claude. He told Max Beerbohm that the boy was `the desire of his soul'. Nor is it known quite how often they met between Easter and October, when the scandal broke. The Danseys may have had a house in London, so it is entirely possible that Claude and Robbie had ample opportunities to meet during the summer holidays.