by Neil McKenna
More importantly, Egypt had other attractions which were perhaps more to Bosie's taste. `I understand that the population of Alexandria is an interesting one,' George Ives confided to his diary. Like Ives, Bosie could not have been unaware that sex with boys was widely available in Egypt, as it was elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, and he would no doubt have heard Uranian travellers' tales about the sexual delights to be had there. Bosie had certainly read Richard Burton's translation of Eastern poetry, and may well have been familiar with Burton's famous `Terminal Essay' appended to his 1885 translation of The Thousand and One Nights, which defined `the Sotadic Zone', a geographical band taking in the broadly equatorial regions of the world where, Burton claimed, pederasty and sodomy are `popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo'. Egypt was at the heart of the Sotadic Zone and was, according to Burton, the `classical region of all abominations'. Burton quoted from various authorities as to the prevalence and popularity of sodomy in Egypt and gleefully retailed how, in the 1860s, `the highdried and highly respectable' Dutch Consul-General for the Netherlands had been rebuked by the Khedive of Egypt after criticising the prevalence of sodomy in Egypt. The Consul-General `was solemnly advised' by Khedive Said Pasha `to make the experiment, active and passive, before offering his opinion upon the subject'.
Just before he left, Bosie wrote to Charles Kains Jackson, a solicitor as well as the editor of the Artist and Journal ofHome Culture. Bosie was seeking Kains Jackson's help for a man called Burnand who shared a house with the novelist Roy Horniman, the brother of a former boyfriend of Oscar's. `I want to ask if you cannot do anything for this poor man Burnand who is now waiting his trial for an assault on a boy,' Bosie wrote:
I saw a most piteous letter from him today which almost made me cry. Surely for the sake of the cause something can be done for this poor man who seems quite friendless and penniless. As far as I can make out, there is not a bad case against him, and if the thing was properly managed I feel sure he could get off. Do try and do something, my heart bleeds for the poor chap.
Although Bosie's commitment to `the Cause' was evidently as strong and as passionate as ever, his empathy with Burnand may have been intensified by the irony of their relative situations. Both had had sex with boys. But while Burnand faced trial, imprisonment and public shame, Bosie was escaping to Cairo, scot-free.
Bosie was not in the best of spirits on the eve of his departure. `I am very unhappy about other things,' he confessed to Kains Jackson. One of the chief causes of Bosie's unhappiness was his deteriorating relationship with Oscar. Things had not been going well. Towards the end of November, just days before Bosie's planned departure to Cairo, there had been yet another series of scenes `culminating,' according to Oscar, `in one more than usually revolting when you came one Monday evening to my rooms accompanied by two of your friends'. The rooms in question were at 10, St James's Place. Quite what happened is impossible to know, but Oscar's pointed reference to Bosie's two friends may suggest that Bosie had turned up with two extremely unsuitable boys, expecting a menage d quatre with Oscar. For Oscar, still nervous, still recovering from the anxiety of the Bruges affair, the boys may have been too young, too rough, or too obviously criminal - or indeed, a combination of all three - for him to want to risk a sexual encounter.
The next day Oscar fled abroad to Paris, having given his servant a false address for fear of Bosie's following him or finding him. `I remember that afternoon,' he recalled in De Profundis, `as I was in the railway-carriage whirling up to Paris, thinking what an impossible, terrible, utterly wrong state my life had got in to from the intellectual or ethical point of view.'
Oscar was probably right. From any conventional ethical or moral standpoint, his life was in a `wrong state'. His relationship with Bosie was legally wrong, utterly impossible. But from a sexual and from an emotional standpoint, their relationship made perfect sense. At some level, Oscar could still experience a sense of guilt and disgust at the lived experience of his sexuality, a guilt and disgust paradoxically intensified by his compulsive, everstrengthening desire for more sex, with more boys. There were times when Oscar was cast down by the weariness of the treadmill of desire and satiation, by the ever-present, raging thirst of lust: slaked, but never quenched, by sex. But these storms of self-loathing were just that: storms. They were over almost as soon as they began. Afterwards, the sun would shine, and Oscar would feel the warm rays of his love for Bosie, and Bosie's love for him, beating down.
`The usual telegrams of entreaty and remorse followed,' Oscar recalled. `I disregarded them.' Bosie finally played his trump card. Unless Oscar agreed to meet him, he would refuse to go to Egypt. Oscar capitulated. By refusing to go to Egypt, Bosie might be placing himself in danger. Besides which, an angry, remorseful, importuning Bosie in London would have been infinitely more difficult to manage than a Bosie in Cairo, distracted by venerable antiquities and readily available boys. Oscar and Bosie met, probably in France, on the first leg of Bosie's journey to Cairo. `Under the influence of great emotion, which even you cannot have forgotten,' Oscar wrote, `I forgave the past, though I said nothing about the future.'
Bosie continued on to Cairo and Oscar returned to London. Gertrude Simmonds later claimed that she had seen and read a letter from Bosie, written from on board ship en route to Cairo, in which he several times addressed Oscar as `darling' and said that he had `found a very nice boy on the way' that would have `suited' Oscar very well.
Oscar did not share Bosie's high spirits. In De Profundis he recalled that, on the day after their reconciliation, he sat in his rooms in St James's Place:
sadly and seriously trying to make up my mind you really were what you seemed to be, so full of terrible defects, so utterly ruinous both to yourself and to others, so fatal a one to know even or to be with.
Oscar's negative thoughts about Bosie never lasted for very long. In fact he loved Bosie as much for his `terrible defects' as for his finer points. He was fascinated by Bosie's wilful, mercurial moods, by his sexual paganism and by his determination to get what he wanted at almost any cost. But Oscar also knew that his love affair with Bosie was `ruinous' and `fatal'. He loved Bosie, he once said, `with a sense of tragedy and ruin' and made a deliberate choice to embrace the inevitable tragedy and ruin that knowing Bosie would bring. In his poem `Panthea', Oscar had written, `One fiery-coloured moment: one great love; and lo! we die'. Bosie was Oscar's fiery-coloured moment, his one great love.
Less than three weeks later he was writing joyously to Bosie in Cairo:
I am happy in the knowledge that . . . our love has passed the shadow and night of estrangement and sorrow and come out rose-crowned as of old. Let us be infinitely dear to each other, as indeed we always have been.
Bosie felt the same. His love for Oscar never wavered, never faltered, never flickered for an instant, even though Oscar often doubted and often repudiated his love for Bosie. Bosie knew that his love for Oscar was ennobling and unselfish, that it represented the very best of him.
On the night before his departure for Cairo, Sybil had had a searing and painful conversation with Bosie on the subject of his relationship with Oscar. She poured out her long-suppressed feelings that Oscar had acted the part of the corrupt and corrupting Lord Henry Wotton to Bosie's Dorian Gray and was `ruining his soul'. Sybil even confessed that she `would almost like to murder' Oscar. Bosie answered her charges in a series of impassioned letters written from Cairo. He told Sybil that he didn't believe he had a soul before he met Oscar, that it was Oscar, and only Oscar, who had opened up and illuminated the moral universe:
He has taught me everything I know that is worth knowing, he has taught me to judge of things by their essential points, to know what is fine from what is low and vulgar.
Underpinning Sybil's charges of corruption lay her conviction that Oscar had seduced Bosie and initiated him into the mysteries of Uranian love. Bosie vigorously refuted this:
I should also like to tell you
, that I did not imbibe those ideas from Oscar Wilde and that he did not put them into my head and encourage them. I had formed them in my own mind and was quite certain of their truth two years before I had ever seen him or even heard of him.
`I am passionately fond of him,' Bosie told Sybil:
There is nothing I would not do for him, and if he dies before I do I shall not care to live any longer. The thought of such a thing makes everything black before my eyes. Surely there is nothing but what is fine and beautiful in such a love as that of two people for one another.
Their love was on an epic, heroic scale. When Oscar's life comes to be written, Bosie told Sybil, their love for each other would be `remembered and written about as one of the most beautiful things in the world, as beautiful as the love of Shakespeare and the unknown Mr W.H. or that of Plato and Socrates'.
Sybil was unconvinced by Bosie's protestations and decided to write to Oscar, begging him to leave her son alone and to promise not to meet him abroad. She may have hinted at her belief that Oscar had sexually corrupted Bosie and specifically reproached him for having introduced Bosie to Robbie Ross, and so entangling Bosie in the Bruges incident. Oscar was affronted and wrote a frank reply which left Sybil in little doubt of Bosie's Uranian proclivities and the endless trouble they had got him into:
I went as far as I could possibly go, I told her that the origin of our friendship was you in your undergraduate days at Oxford coming to beg me to help you in very serious trouble of a very particular character. I told her that your life had been continually in the same manner troubled. The reason of your going to Belgium you had placed to the fault of your companion in that journey ... I replaced the fault on the right shoulders, on yours.
Oscar told Sybil that he had no intention of meeting Bosie abroad, or anywhere else, and that he hoped she would try and keep Bosie in Egypt for at least two or three years. Oscar had decided that he needed a rest from Bosie. He needed to work, to finish An Ideal Husband, and to write other plays.
Despite the success of his plays, money was in desperately short supply. The costs of the three-month stay at Goring had been enormous. And afterwards, in London, Oscar and Bosie had continued in the same extravagant lifestyle. In De Profundis, Oscar described their daily routine:
At twelve o'clock you drove up, and stayed smoking cigarettes and chatting till 1.30, when I had to take you out to luncheon at the Cafe Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White's. At tea-time you appeared again, and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight as supper at Willis's had to wind up the entrancing day.
After his trials and conviction, Oscar would also have the further humiliation of being declared bankrupt. He was obliged to attend bankruptcy hearings where he had to account, in minute detail, for his previous expenditure. It was then that Oscar worked out that his expenses for an ordinary day in London with Bosie, `for luncheon, dinner, supper, amusements, hansoms and the rest of it ranged from k12 to £20, and the week's expenses were naturally in proportion and ranged from £80 to £ 130.' In 1893, a pound was worth £60 in today's money, which means that Oscar was spending a staggering £5,000 to £8,000 a week. Creditors were pressing. Gertrude Simmonds, the governess to Cyril and Vyvyan, recalled how `things were not so prosperous' in October 1893, `the butcher even refusing to send a joint until the account was settled, Oscar himself driving round in a hansom and settling up'.
But with Bosie in Egypt, there were distractions in Oscar's life. Though Oscar claimed he had taken his rooms at 10, St James's Place so that he could `work undisturbed', they were equally convenient for entertaining a stream of young male visitors. According to Thomas Price, head waiter at St James's Place, Oscar `had a great number of callers', some of them `young boys'. They included some old friends, like Charlie Parker and Fred Atkins, and some new friends, among them Ernest Scarfe, whom Alfred Taylor had picked up at the roller skating rink in Knightsbridge, notorious as a place where older gentlemen could pick up younger men.
Scarfe was twenty-one and unemployed, and spent almost every afternoon at the rink. One evening, Taylor took Scarfe round to meet Oscar at St James's Place. The three of them chatted for a couple of hours and drank whisky and soda. As Scarfe was leaving, Oscar invited him to call again soon. In his statement to Queensberry's solicitors, Scarfe recounted how he returned for tea a day or so later. Oscar, he said, made flattering remarks, stroked his hair and tried to caress him. Scarfe claimed that he would have none of it and gave Oscar no encouragement. On the next occasion Scarfe came to tea, Oscar tried to fondle Scarfe's penis through his trouser fly-buttons. `I would not allow him,' Scarfe deposed, `although he tried to undo the buttons.' Thomas Price remembered Scarfe's visits to Oscar very clearly. `I remember him because he was rather impudent,' said Price. Scarfe was not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in his statement. In the weeks between making his statement and the date of Oscar's trial, he changed his story, alleging that Oscar had committed both sodomy and acts of gross indecency with him.
There were other young men in Oscar's life, including an unidentified `Frank' who had recently returned from a trip to Spain. `You must tell me about your trip to Spain,' Oscar wrote. `Your letter from there charmed me. No: you must tell me all about yourself. You are much more interesting to me than even Spain is.' And Oscar was still responding positively to letters of avowal from young men. Ralph Payne wrote to Oscar in February 1894 praising Dorian Gray. `I am so glad you like that strange coloured book of mine,' Oscar wrote in reply. `Will you come and see me?' he asked:
I am writing a play, and go to St James's Place, number 10, where I have rooms, every day at 11.30. Come on Tuesday about 12.30, will you? But perhaps you are busy? Still, we can meet, surely, some day. Your handwriting fascinates me, your praise charms me.
Later that month Oscar wrote to Philip Houghton, an artist, whose letter of avowal had `deeply moved' him. `Write to me about yourself,' Oscar wrote, `tell me about your life and loves and all that keeps you wondering.'
In Cairo, Bosie was blissfully unaware of the state of dudgeon that Oscar had worked himself up into. `I am enjoying this place very much,' he told Sybil. There was much to enjoy. Shortly after his arrival, he went to have tea with Wilfrid Blunt, who described him as `a pretty, interesting boy, very shy and youthful'. Bosie was also spotted one day at a race meeting by a young journalist called Robert Hichens. As the Consul-General's party arrived, the cry went up `Here comes Cromer!' and Hichens pushed his way to the front where he saw an open carriage in which Lord Cromer, resplendent in a white top hat, was seated. 'By his side,' Hichens recalled, `sat a young man, indeed almost a boy, fair, aristocratic, even poetic-looking I thought.'
Reggie Turner, whom Bosie had met eighteen months earlier at the premiere of Lady Windermere's Fan, was also in Egypt. Turner was a fellow Uranian with an especial attraction to boys, whom Oscar later christened `the boy-snatcher of Clement's Inn'. Turner was a great friend of Max Beerbohm's and of Bosie's, and it may well have been Turner's presence there which swayed Bosie to choose Egypt. Turner was staying on his half-brother's dahabeeyah, the arabic word for gilded barge, which was `the last word in comfort and luxury', Bosie recalled. Reggie was attracted to the youthfullooking Bosie, and was moved to write his one and only sonnet to him which began, rather leadenly: `More fair than any flower is thy face,/Thy limbs from all comparison are free.'
It was through Turner that Bosie made the acquaintance of Robert Hichens and the young novelist E.F. Benson - or Fred, as Bosie called him. Bosie and Reggie were openly and avowedly Uranian; Hichens and Benson were also Uranians, but rather less reconciled to their sexual urges. Throughout his life, Fred Benson struggled between his Uranian inclinations and what he saw as the `filthy' and `bestial' activities of sex, though perhaps in his youth he was rather more relaxed about the idea of love an
d sex between men. The four young men decided to take a trip up the Nile on a post boat.
Despite the poverty of his poetical imagination, Reggie Turner was a hugely gifted and witty conversationalist, as indeed was Bosie. Bosie, Reggie, Fred and Bob - as the four Uranian young men now called each other - sailed leisurely up the Nile and talked endlessly and well about the subject closest to their hearts: boys and sex. Bosie took the lead. He was, after all, a widely experienced authority on the subject. As a proud and proselytising Uranian, as well as someone incapable of reticence or discretion, Bosie talked at length and with passion of his love for Oscar, of their sexual explorations and adventures together, and of the primacy of the Cause. Robert Hichens listened greedily, and may have even taken notes in the privacy of his cabin, notes he would use for a novel, a roman d clef, in which the real lives of Oscar and Bosie would be masqueraded as the fictitious lives of Esme Amarinth and Lord Reggie Hastings. Nine months later, the child of Robert Hichens's imagination, The Green Carnation, sprang into life fully formed, amazing and dazzling London. It was, Bosie reflected later, `a piece of perfidy' which was to do Oscar and Bosie incalculable harm.
The Scarlet Marquis
'A typical Englishman, aln'ays dull and usually violent.'
The exact circumstances of Bosie's departure from Cairo are unclear. He left abruptly in early February 1894, to take up a post in Constantinople as honorary attache to Lord Currie, the British Ambassador to Turkey. Strings had been pulled by Bosie's mother and grandfather to procure the post for him. But he may have left Cairo under a cloud. According to Robbie Ross, Bosie was `hurled out of the official residence in consequence of the way in which he carried on in Cairo'. Bosie had almost certainly had sex with some willing Egyptian boys, just as he would almost exactly a year later with the willing boys of Algiers. Oscar later made a disparaging reference in De Profundis to Bosie and `the fleshpots of Egypt', which suggests that he either knew or suspected a good deal of what had gone on. And Bosie had another sexual encounter while he was in Cairo: many years later, he told his nephew that he had had `a romantic meeting' with Lord Kitchener, who was then forty-four years old.