Free The Marble Quilt by David Leavitt Page B

which he embodies that very work ethic against which Wilde, in his witty defenses of idleness, strove to rebel. For Wilde was bad: he fouled the sheets of decent hotels, went into debt, drank. Robbie, on the other hand, conducted all his affairs—even his amorous ones—with tact. Had Wilde chosen him instead of Bosie, he might have grown into an honored old man of letters, with his sons at his knee, his wife at his side, his “companion” quiet in the background. Instead of which Wilde chose Bosie—pouting, spendthrift, malicious Bosie—and died a bankrupt.
    On December 1, 1908, the eighth anniversary of Wilde’s death, a dinner was held in Robert Ross’s honor at the Ritz Hotel in London. The purpose of this dinner was twofold:first, to announce the publication of the final two volumes of Wilde’s collected works (which Robbie had midwifed); second, to celebrate the emergence of the Wilde estate into solvency (which Robbie had negotiated). One hundred sixty people—among them Somerset Maugham, the Duchess of Sutherland, and Wilde’s two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan—attended. Not Bosie, however. He declined his invitation, writing that in his view the dinner was “absurd.”
    After Frank Harris and H. G. Wells, among others, had toasted Robbie, he himself stepped up to the dais, where he described all that he had had to undergo while resurrecting Wilde’s reputation. Then—in ironic reference to himself—he quoted a fragment from an eighteenth-century poem:
    I hate the man who builds his name
    On the ruins of another’s fame
.
    He could just as easily have been talking about Bosie. Though probably he would have sued anyone who dared link this couplet with his career, nonetheless Bosie must have recognized the degree to which his fate was becoming yoked to that of his dead lover. For Wilde’s resurgence threatened not merely his campaign against vice, but his very identity, his new idea of himself as a reformed libertine. More and more it must have been evident to him that his success would actually require Robbie’s failure, and with it the preservation of Wilde’s image as an unregenerate sodomite.
    They are now more intimate, Bosie and Oscar, even than in the days when they scandalized London society by taking rent boys out to dinner at the Savoy. The object of the game is Robbie’s ruin, which Bosie begins to seek aggressively. In letters, he threatens to horsewhip Robbie: “You have corrupted hundreds of boys and young men inyour life, and have gone on doing it right up to the present time.” His intention seems to be to goad Robbie into initiating an action against him, as once his own father, goaded by Bosie, goaded Wilde. Yet Robbie refuses to answer, even when Bosie writes to the prime minister demanding that Robbie be fired from his post as assessor of picture valuations to the Board of Trade (and promising to let off a stink if Mr. Asquith continues to receive “this horrible man” in his house). Later he sends another letter, “nailing” Robbie, to two judges, the recorder of London, the prime minister, the public prosecutor, Mr. Basil Thompson of Scotland Yard, the publisher John Lane, Sir George Lewis, and the master of St. Paul’s School (as once he promised to mail his defense of homosexuality to every judge, lawyer, and legislator in England), and makes sure that Robbie is informed of the fact. Already T.W.H. Crosland, his coeditor at
The Academy
, has labeled Robbie’s efforts to resuscitate “the maligned and greatly suffering Wilde” merely “one dirty Sodomite bestowing whitewash upon another.” Now he makes his point plain: “If these letters do not contain the truth about you, there can be little question that you would have taken a certain and obvious legal remedy.”
    Matters come to a head for Bosie in the spring of 1913, with a spate of lawsuits. On April 18 he