by Neil McKenna
More immediately, Drumlanrig's suicide brought about a reconciliation between Oscar and Bosie. After Bosie had flounced out of their lodgings in Brighton and sent an especially foul letter, Oscar said he felt as if he had been `polluted' by his love affair with Bosie. It was a friendship which `had soiled and shamed my life irretrievably'. He was, he recalled in De Profundis, determined to bring about a formal end to the friendship:
I settled with myself to go back to London on the Friday, and see Sir George Lewis personally and request him to write to your father to state that I had determined never under any circumstances to allow you to enter my house, to sit at my board, to talk to me, walk with me, or anywhere and at any time to be my companion at all.
Whether Oscar would have abided by his decision to end his love affair with Bosie is a moot point. However badly they had quarrelled in the past, abject contrition on Bosie's part and plenary forgiveness on Oscar's had invariably brought about a reconciliation. On the morning of Friday 19 October, the very day he had arranged to go to London to see Sir George Lewis, Oscar opened the newspaper and read of Drumlanrig's death. All thoughts of separation were forgotten. Oscar could only think of Bosie's sorrow and his grief. `I telegraphed at once to you my deepest sympathy,' Oscar recalled, `and in the letter that followed invited you to come to my house as soon as you were able':
You came at once to me very sweetly and very simply, in your suit of woe, and with your eyes dim with tears. You sought consolation and help as a child might seek it ... Your grief, which was real, seemed to me to bring you nearer to me than you had ever been. The flowers you took from me to put on your brother's grave were to be a symbol not merely of the beauty of life, but of the beauty that in all lives lies dormant and may be brought to light.
Oscar and Bosie must have been aware of Drumlanrig's relationship with Rosebery. For Bosie, Drumlanrig would always be his `dear saint' and `true knight', a martyr, slain before his time to appease his father and the forces of reaction. Oscar's flowers, symbolic of `the beauty that in all lives lies dormant', were perhaps a reference to `beauty' in the Uranian sense, the eternal sexual grailquest. Drumlanrig's sexuality had lain hidden and secret and had never been `brought to light', never freely expressed. If his suicide proved anything, it proved the nobility and supremacy of love in the face of mindless prejudice. Yet again, Uranian love and Uranian persecution had conspired together to produce tragic consequences in the lives of Oscar and Bosie. And yet again, adversity had brought them closer together.
Now they worked together on a new literary project. In the course of the summer, Bosie had introduced Oscar to his handsome friend, John Bloxam. Bloxam was a Uranian, and equally as dedicated to the Cause as Bosie and Oscar. He was determined to follow in Bosie's footsteps with the Spirit Lamp and start up a new magazine of Uranian culture - the Chameleon - to which he wanted Oscar and Bosie to contribute. Oscar produced a set of witty but subversive sayings, collectively entitled `Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young', which contained some overtly sexual aphorisms like `Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others' and - in a clear reference to prostitution -'If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.'
Bosie contributed two daringly political Uranian poems, both set in Arcadian nocturnal dreamscapes where beautiful but sad phantasmagorical youths walk abroad and proclaim the bittersweet joys of Uranian love. The first, `In Praise of Shame', is a paean to the joys of Uranian sex. `I am Shame,' cries one wanton phantom:
Whereupon the dreamer awakes and duly decides that `Of all sweet passions, Shame is loveliest.'
Although many years later Bosie unconvincingly tried to argue that `Two Loves', the second of his two poems in the Chameleon, had `nothing on earth to do with the vice which was the subject of Wilde's trials', the poem is emphatically Uranian, a dialogue where two beautiful youths symbolise the contrast between the joyous, fair and blooming love of boy and girl, and the pallid, moonlit, ineffably sad love between boy and boy. `I am the Love that dare not speak its name,' says the `sad and sighing' personification of Uranian love. The message is clear. Uranian love languishes in a dimly-lit prison because the world cannot countenance it. Less than six months after the publication of `Two Loves', Oscar would stand in the witness box of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, bravely and brilliantly extemporising on the nature and nobility of `the Love that dare not speak its name'.
Oscar's and Bosie's involvement in the Chameleon was rather more extensive than either would later admit. From a letter Bloxam wrote to Charles Kains Jackson on 19 November, it seems clear that Oscar was more a partner in the enterprise than merely a contributor. A few days earlier Bloxam had called on George Ives at the Albany, where, he said, he had `the good luck to meet Oscar':
We discussed the paper fully, and the name. After a good deal of discussion we decided to change the first title yet again (from the Parrot Tulip). I think we have fixed on a very good one for which Ives must have the credit -'The Chameleon'. I think it is excellent.
The subtitle of the Chameleon was `A Bazaar of Dangerous and Smiling Chances', a line from Robert Louis Stevenson, but highly suggestive of the eye contact used by men in dangerous street pick-ups - what Xavier Mayne and others called the `gaze' - `the mysterious Anblick of the Uranian fraternity, that psychic-sexual interrogation, that signal and challenge, everywhere current and understood among Uranians'.
Apart from Oscar's subversive but essentially cheerful aphorisms, and one or two other neutral contributions, the mood of the Chameleon was unrelievedly bleak and sombre. The rapture of easeful death and the savage joy of martyrdom pervaded the atmosphere of the magazine. There was an intensely poetic prose meditation by John Gambril Nicholson called `The Shadow of the End', about the death of a beloved boy, and an anonymous story, `The Priest and The Acolyte', about the love affair between a twentyeight-year-old priest and his fourteen-year-old acolyte who, when their relationship is discovered, form a suicide pact.
Ada Leverson thought she detected the hand of John Gray in the story. "`The Priest and the Acolyte" is not by Dorian,' Oscar told her in early December, after the Chameleon was published, `though you were right in discerning by internal evidence that the author has a profile. He is an undergraduate of strange beauty.' The story was in fact written by Bloxam, who was subsequently to follow his fictional hero's footsteps into the priesthood. `The Priest and the Acolyte' made for grim but explicit reading. There was not a shadow of a doubt that the story concerned the sexual relationship between a man and a boy. Shockingly, the story portrayed the boy not as the seduced and traumatised victim of an older man, but as a full and willing partner. Perhaps more shockingly still, the story was unblinkingly partisan in its insistence that the love between the man and the boy was divinely ordained: `There is no sin for which I should feel shame,' says the Priest:
God gave me my love for him, and He gave him also his love for me. Who is there that shall withstand God and the love that is His gift?
Oscar thought the story `too direct'. `There is no nuance,' he told Ada, `it profanes a little by revelation: God and other artists are always a little obscure. Still, it has interesting qualities, and is at moments poisonous: which is something.'
There were others who found the Chameleon poisonous, and not in the pleasing sense that Oscar meant. Jerome K. Jerome, the celebrated author of Three Men in a Boat, thought the Chameleon was `certainly a case for the police'. `The publication appears to be nothing more nor less than an advocacy for indulgence in the cravings of an unnatural disease,' he thundered in an editorial in his newspaper To-day on 29 December. The Chameleon was bound to absolutely corrupt and ruin any boys and young men attracted to members of their own sex:
That young men are here and there cursed with these unnatural cravings, no one acquainted with our public school life can deny. It is for such to wrestle with the devil within them; and many a long and a
gonised struggle is fought, unseen and unknown, within the heart of a young man. A publication of this kind, falling into his hands before the victory is complete, would, unless the poor fellow were of an exceptionally strong nature, utterly ruin him for all eternity.
The Chameleon, Jerome declared, `is an insult to the animal creation', `an outrage on literature', `unbridled licence' and `garbage and offal'.
It was not long before a copy of the magazine found its way into Queensberry's hands. `I have now in my possession, a copy of a most odious work, suppressed on account of its utter filth,' Queensberry told his daughterin-law, Minnie. It contained, he said:
two so-called poems, if filthy gibberish strung together can be called poetry, by Alfred, and signed with his name, and headed `In Praise of Shame' and `Two Loves', the last ending up with the words -'I am the love that dare not breathe its name', meaning sodomy.
Queensberry also mistakenly thought that `The Priest and the Acolyte' was by Oscar. The Chameleon was further proof, if proof were needed, of what Queensberry thought of as `the unnatural and hideous love' practised and promulgated by Oscar and Bosie.
Queensberry had brought about an end to Drumlanrig's relationship with Lord Rosebery, though at the impossibly high cost of his son and heir's life. Mad with grief and remorse, and filled with a seething hatred of `Snob queers' and `Jew nancy boys', Queensberry was now determined to bring to an end his younger son's infatuation with Oscar. He had declared war on sodomy and sodomites, and he would not rest until he had destroyed Oscar -'this hideous monster' - Sodom's chief architect and apologist.
Passionate fauns
`You do not feel the beauty ofa nation till you have slept with one q f them.' -5ohn Addington Symonds
Eighteen ninety-five was `the year of the Faith 2233', according to George Ives's calendrical reckoning, which started with the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, when the male lovers of the Theban Band were slaughtered. Oscar celebrated the new year in style with a brilliant dinner party at the Continental for his closest young Uranian friends, including George Ives, Jack Bloxam and quite possibly Bosie. Ives was, as usual, dazzled by the glittering company he found himself in. `After going among that set it is hard to mix in ordinary society,' he confided to his diary that night, `for they have a charm which is rare and wonderful.' But Ives was also worried about his friends, who seemed hellbent on pleasure and laughter. `I wish they were less extravagant and more real,' he wrote, `so gifted and so nice, and yet here is this terrible world waiting for the word of truth to set it free.' Ives had the uncomfortable sense that something was wrong, that something was going to happen. `I see the storm of battle ahead,' he wrote presciently.
The year looked set to be an annus mirabilis for Oscar. His play An Ideal Husband opened to generally laudatory notices on 3 January, and The Importance of Being Earnest was already in rehearsal and due to open in February. Oscar would then have the remarkable distinction of two plays running simultaneously in the West End. Quite apart from the prestige, the revenue from these two `roaring successes', as Henry James called them, would bring to an end the money worries that had plagued Oscar for months.
Oscar installed himself at the Albemarle Hotel at the beginning of January. It was convenient for the theatre and, even more importantly, convenient for entertaining boys. The neurotic Edward Shelley was among those who -'in a moment of weakness', he said - visited Oscar there. There were other, more dangerous and altogether more exciting visitors, as Ada Leverson found on a visit she made to Oscar at the Albemarle shortly after the premiere of An Ideal Husband. `I saw a knife lying on a table in Oscar's rooms,' she recalled years later. `I asked him who left it there. "Oh, some careless young murderer," he said.'
With the prospect of unlimited showers of gold falling from the theatrical skies, Oscar was in confident and expansive mood. He and Bosie had not forgotten the consoling prophecy made the previous summer by Mrs Robinson, `the Sibyl of Mortimer Street', that early in January they would go away together for `a long voyage'. They decided to fulfil the Sibyl's prophecy, settling on the French colony of Algiers. `Yes. I fly to Algiers with Bosie tomorrow,' Oscar told Ada Leverson on 14 January. `I begged him to let me stay to rehearse, but so beautiful is his nature that he declined at once.' Bosie's appetite for North Africa had been whetted by his short exile in Cairo the previous winter. The climate in winter was delightful, and the brilliant light and warm zephyrs were a tempting alternative to the unrelieved greyness, damp and chill of London. But the real attraction of Algiers for Oscar and Bosie was the fabled beauty of its boys and their ready availability. Algiers was also in Richard Burton's `Sotadic Zone', where pederasty and sodomy were `popular and endemic'. Oscar had long been aware of the Uranian attractions on offer in Algiers, already a favourite destination for French Uranians. Dorian Gray once owned a `little white walled-in house at Algiers' where he and Lord Henry Wotton `had more than once spent the winter'. And there were references in Teleny to the `new pleasures Algiers could afford'.
Oscar and Bosie arrived in the city of Algiers on 17 January and spent ten days there at the Hotel de 1'Europe. Oscar was enchanted by what he found. `There is a great deal of beauty here,' he wrote to Robbie, saying he found the boys from the Kabyle tribe `quite lovely':
At first we had some difficulty in procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right, and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love. Bosie wakes up at night and cries like a baby for the best haschish.
The city of Algiers and its surrounding countryside were for Oscar a new Uranian Arcadia, `full of villages peopled by fauns' where, he told Robbie, `we were followed by lovely brown things from forest to forest'. There were beautiful boys wherever they turned, seemingly all of them smiling sexual invitation. `Several shepherds fluted on reeds for us,' Oscar wrote, in what was probably an oblique reference to oral sex. `The beggars here have profiles,' he added glibly, `so the problem of poverty is easily solved.' Neither Oscar nor Bosie had any sense that their pursuit of boys was wrong, or that paying them for sex might be exploitative. They were used to paying renters for sex in London. As far as they were concerned, Algiers was no different to London, other than that the supply of boys seemed unending and that, for Bosie in particular, younger boys - some as young as thirteen or fourteen - were readily available. After a week or so in Algiers, they decided to make an excursion to the small and attractive walled city of Blidah, about thirty miles away, which the French had turned into a winter resort. They were to stay at the Grand Hotel de l'Orient where, by coincidence, Andre Gide was also staying.
Gide was severely depressed. `I have the feeling that I am going through a very important crisis, and I don't understand anything about it at all,' he had written to his mother four days before Oscar and Bosie's arrival. It was `a decisive crisis', Gide wrote, `and one from which I shall emerge fully grown'. Gide's crisis was a crisis of sexual denial. He desired sex with boys but was disgusted by what he considered to be his unnatural lusts, writing how he felt `ashamed' of himself, how he wanted to `disown' and `repudiate' himself.
Gide was on the point of leaving the Grand Hotel de l'Orient to return to Algiers when he saw the names of Oscar and Bosie chalked up on the board listing the guests in the hotel. His first instinct was akin to panic. He wanted to flee Blidah, to leave without seeing or talking to them. Oscar was, he told his mother, `that terrible man, the most dangerous product of modern civilisation'. After his initial panic subsided however, Gide went into an agony of indecision. Oscar might have already seen dear Andre's name on the visitor's board and would feel insulted that he had left without bothering to say hello. To flee seemed feeble, but to stay might be dangerous. He could not make up his mind what to do. As the minutes ticked by, Andre realised that the decision had been made for him: he had missed his train. He would stay and face whatever it was that he so feared and yet was so fascinated by. Andre may well have sensed that the resolution of the `decisive
crisis' was in some way bound up with Oscar. He was right. This chance encounter with Oscar and Bosie in Blidah would profoundly affect the rest of his life.
Oscar was alone when he turned up in the hotel and seemed almost put out at finding Andre there. It was barely six months since they had met each other in Florence, but Andre thought Oscar had changed since that last encounter. There was `less softness in his look, something raucous in his laughter and something frenzied in his joy', Andre observed. `He seemed both more sure of pleasing and less ambitious to succeed in doing so; he was bolder, stronger, bigger.' Bolder, stronger, bigger. In the warm Sotadic Algerian sun, Oscar was all three. He had, he told Andre, followed the sun to Algiers and found a kind of pagan Paradise. He wanted to worship and `adore' this exotic, erotic sun, under whose bold, unblinking gaze so many Uranian pleasures seemed to pulsate.
Oscar and Andre were joined by Bosie after dinner. A tour of Blidah's nightlife was proposed, to which Andre reluctantly agreed. A guide was hired - a `vile procurer', Andre recalls - and Oscar announced that he wanted to see some young Arabs `as beautiful as bronze statues'. No sooner were they in the street than Bosie took Andre affectionately by the arm. `All these guides are idiotic,' he said:
It's no good explaining - they will always take you to cafes which are full of women. I hope you are like me. I have a horror of women. I only like boys. As you are coming with us this evening, I think it's better to say so at once.
Andre could not speak. He was shocked and stupefied - not so much by Bosie's bold and unashamed declaration of his sexual preferences, but by the clarity with which he had pierced the murky overlay of guilt and self-loathing which concealed Andre's own Uranian desires. Andre was alternately repulsed and fascinated by Bosie, just as he was repulsed and fascinated by Oscar, and repulsed and fascinated by the idea of sex with a boy. The evening went badly. Their guide took them to a low dive where a brawl immediately broke out between some Spaniards and some Arabs. When knives were pulled, and the first blood was spilt, Oscar, Bosie and Andre thought it prudent to return to their hotel. `On the whole,' Andre recorded, the evening had been `a rather dismal affair'.