Free The Marble Quilt by David Leavitt Page A

volatility, and passion (Bosie) instead of prudence, circumspection, and restraint (Robbie). For Robbie, unlike Bosie, was reliable. When he met Wilde, he was a young man of slight build and no great beauty, with a delicate mouth set rather low on his face, a weak chin, wide, wet eyes. Scholars generally concur that he was “the first boy Oscar ever had.” But then Bosie came along, and Robbie was demoted to the capacity of advisor and confidant, the friend into whose ears Oscar poured his passion when the affair was going well and his misery when it was going badly; none of which stopped him from supporting Oscar steadfastly throughout the years, even when it was both unpopular and unprofitable to do so. It was Robbie who took care of him after he got out of prison; Robbie who tried to dissuade him from reconciling with Bosie; Robbie who, in thedecade following Wilde’s death, managed more or less single-handedly to bring his estate out of bankruptcy and get his work back into print.
    How Bosie despised him! Years before, they had quarreled over a boy called Alfred, whom Robbie had seduced, and whom Bosie had then seduced away from him. Now the prey over which they fought was Wilde’s corpse and, more specifically, the manuscript of Wilde’s prison letter
De Profundis
, which Robbie had given to the British Museum and which Bosie would have liked to see burned. Increasingly he was becoming aware that Wilde’s resurrection (of which Robbie was the chief architect) was going to necessitate his own depiction as the instigator of the great writer’s downfall. This he could not bear, and so sometime around December 1, 1909, he begins to rail in print against the cult of Wilde, whom he calls a “filthy swine … the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years.” Robbie, along the same lines, is “a filthy bugger and blackmailer … an unspeakable skunk.” As for Bosie himself, he is merely a “normal” husband and father who only wants the world to know that despite youthful wickedness, he has reformed: toward this end, he transforms
The Academy
into an organ of right-wing propaganda.
    There is a touch of the Victorian spinster in Robbie, a disquieting mixture of quaintness, cowardice, and spite. On the surface he is the classic nineties aesthete, quietly flouting even the creed of nationalism that ushered in the Great War by painting the walls of his rooms on Half Moon Street a tone of weary gold: an evocation of France, of “abroad.” Nor does he lack for pugnacity: indeed, in his role as Wilde’s literary executor he sued so many bookstores and publishers that in
Who’s Who
he lists litigation as one of his hobbies. Like Bosie, he enjoys winning battles. By the teens he has grown into asmall, tidy, mustached man of middle age who wears a turquoise blue scarab ring and carries a jade cigarette holder. When he entertains friends at his flat—its decor “half Italian and half Oriental,” according to Siegfried Sassoon, and featuring a devotional panel of Saint Sebastian and Saint Fabian over the mantelpiece—he dons a black silk skullcap, serves Turkish delight, hands out boxes of Egyptian cigarettes. Yet
quietly
. This is the key to Robbie, the factor that distinguishes him from Bosie: the open warfare Wilde invited he makes certain always to avoid. When he takes the poet Wilfred Owen to dinner (and then home after dinner) he introduces him into a world of well-bred, refined homosexuals for whom Wilde’s flamboyance is a quality at once to be admired and regretted, for though Wilde is their hero, his breaking of the rules—it cannot be denied—has made life more difficult for them. Much better to have one’s say slyly, even anonymously, and without pointing any fingers.
    Robbie’s diligence, the earnestness with which he undertakes his labors on Wilde’s behalf, suggests the degree to