Free The Marble Quilt by David Leavitt

with her mother, she had flirted with the famous lesbian Natalie Barney, going so far as to write Natalie a poem about how “Love walks with delicate feet afraid / ’Twixt maid and maid.” Besotted, Natalie proposed that she (Natalie) ought to marry Bosie, after which the three of them could live together in a ménage à trois. Olive demurred. Later, in a letter, Natalie made the same proposal to Bosie, who also demurred.
    Like his love affair with Laura, Bosie’s romance with Olive seems to have involved a certain amount of transvestitism, albeit in this case on Olive’s part rather than his own. For instance, in a note to Olive written shortly before he embarked on a trip for America—where, he joked, he hoped to find a rich heiress to marry—Bosie suggests that she dress as a boy and accompany him. In letters, Olive refers to herself as Bosie’s “little Page”: “Write to me soon and tell me that you love your little Page, and that one day youwill come back to ‘him,’ my Prince, my Prince.” His princess Olive is not: “
She
will be very beautiful. But meanwhile love me a little please …”
    On March 4, 1902, they marry; their son, Raymond, is born on November 17. The marriage does not go well, however, according to Bosie, because Olive loves only “the feminine part” of him: the “more manly” he became, the less attractive he was to his wife. To make matters worse, Bosie and his father-in-law, Colonel Custance, took an instant dislike to each other. An upright Christian gentleman, the Colonel—eager for an heir, and unhappy with the way that his daughter and son-in-law (flighty and irresponsible poets both) were raising his grandson—decided that it was his duty to wrest custody of Raymond from them, toward which end he duped Olive into signing away her inheritance so that she would fall into a position of financial dependence upon her parents. Enraged, Bosie barraged the Colonel with vituperative letters, and when the Colonel stopped opening them, with postcards and telegrams—the e-mail of his age. He called the Colonel “a despicable scoundrel and a thoroughly dishonest and dishonorable man,” and promised to send accusatory letters to his clubs, his bank, and the tenants of his estate. Later, after the Colonel threatened to cut her off without a penny if she did not hand Raymond over, Olive left Bosie for a time, and he added his wife’s name to his list of enemies. “My father is angry all the time because I love Bosie still,” she wrote to Lady Queensberry. “But would it do Bosie any good if I am turned out to starve? I am helpless since I made those settlements … I only wish I had the courage to kill myself!”
    Custance was not the only person Bosie hated at this stage of his life. He also hated Mr. Asquith, the prime minister. He hated Asquith’s wife, Margot, and Winston Churchill. He hated Robert Ross, Wilde’s younger friend and literary executor, and hehated Ross’s solicitor, Sir George Lewis, son of the same Sir George Lewis who had been Wilde’s great advocate, and who in 1892, at Wilde’s behest, had extricated Bosie (then an Oxford undergraduate) from the intimidations of a blackmailer. The second Sir George (no coincidence, in Bosie’s view) numbered
both
Colonel Custance and Robbie Ross among his clients.
    Where did all this hate come from? Wilde seemed to think it was linked to Bosie’s “terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character.” Hate, in Wilde’s words to Bosie, “gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant.”
    Hate, then, as disease; infection.
    Wilde’s gravest error—some might say his fatal error—was that he chose Bosie instead of Robbie Ross to be his lover. In making such a decision, he allied himself decisively with risk,