Lily's Story (119 page)

They read
aloud their polemics – Emersonian Platonism, domesticated
Darwin,
ars gratia
artis
– and their poems.
Isabella listened carefully, as a starved sparrow leans towards the
dawn-light, but never made a comment of any kind. Nor did she offer
to read her own verse, though Sarah showed them a stack of
completed work almost a foot high. In the meantime Sarah was
persuaded to return on occasion to Bradley’s place where they made
love. Sarah’s eyes shone with gratitude and unappeased desire; he
felt the glow of the halo everywhere on her skin. Holding his
breath, he measured the dithy-rambics of her heart as she cadenced
towards climax. They decided that she, not her cousin, ought to
have been the poetess. She had the gift of gratuitous pleasure, she
worshipped the beauty in the world as she did in
herself.

One day in
early April when Isabella and her mother were out for the
afternoon, Sarah and Bradley made love on the cold floor, and
afterwards, over coffee, Sarah suggested that Bradley take a look
at Isabella’s poems. “She’s a great poet, I’m sure of it; she’s
sold many of her stories, but only a few of her poems. Maybe you
could help.” At first Bradley refused to violate Isabella’s
privacy, but at last he was persuaded to do so with a view to being
of some assistance. Inside, he was trembling with anticipation.
What kind of poetry would he find uttered by such an ungainly,
plain-spoken, suffering creature? What he found – as he read page
after page
for more than two
hours – amazed and appalled him. The effort was prodigious,
thousands of striding epic lines; the great themes challenged –
good and evil, love and hate, the primitive and the urbane; a
compulsive energy of conviction and quest. But all this potential
glory was disfigured by clumsy rhythms and preposterous images.
Here the sweep of myth and idea was contaminated by the characters
devised to speak for them – primordial savages, unschooled
lumberjacks, backwoods damsels. And the scenery! Wild waterfalls,
ugly pine-forests, rock-battered torrents, gaudy sunsets. The
result was not beauty – of theme or cadence or delicacy of image.
Bradley felt a cold pocket where his heart should have been. The
poetasters of Canada First had written of the native maple with
mock-eloquence and unimpaired metre in a pathetic attempt to graft
beauty onto a colonial landscape, but this was infinitely more
dangerous; here the ugly potence of raw landscape and its
aboriginal scatology were released outright to mix, as they might,
with the quintessentials of civility.

So, when Paul
suggested a week later that their journey towards cosmic
consciousness was in
danger of
being derailed by the impedimentum of phenomena – that is, getting
bogged down in everyday obligations – Bradley agreed. A day later
they were in Montreal, unencumbered by goodbyes of any kind.
However, they did not find in the first city of the country that
large, free air they wished to breathe. Here there was even more
politics, in two languages, and even more obsession with the local
and the transitory. They survived only till the summer of 1883 when
Paul persuaded Bradley that only in England itself could they be
free to worship the beautiful, in London where the great Wilde held
court and where the accents of Swinburne and Rosetti echoed at
matins and vespers. They decided to ‘rough it’ in true vagabond
style, booking passage on a freighter. But when Bradley became ill,
they both moved up to the officer’s deck, at great expense.
However, money was not a problem, then or ever. Paul was devoted to
him. He sat by his cot and read aloud to Bradley some of his own
verse, and though it failed to cure the flu, it gave both of them a
bit of the courage they were afraid to admit the absence of. “You
are a genius,” Paul announced as the train pulled into Victoria
Station. “I am content to be the genie.” He was true to his word.
The loyalty he had longed to give to his family or even to his own
bright hopes – and found he could not – was transferred to his
friend without regret. They took up lodgings on the south bank, in
Shakespeare’s territory, but soon moved up to Chelsea to a flat
they labelled a garret but might have served a duke’s younger son.
And while Bradley began once again to write poem after poem, Paul
set about penetrating the literary chambers of the world’s most
cultured city.

Within months,
using his connections with the few influential Canadians he met in
London, Paul had insinuated Madame Wilde’s salon, and though they
were successful in meeting such rising luminaries as Whistler,
Frank Miles and Byrne-Jones, they were never lucky enough to catch
the Great Aesthete himself at home. But Wilde was everywhere – in
the witticisms and putdowns that circulated secondhand but
undiluted through salon and soiree. That winter was a harsh one and
Bradley was sick most of the time.
He wrote nothing. Paul remained at his side, reading
constantly to him. By April the roses were in bud and Bradley began
writing again. He had the outlines of an epic poem in his head.
Paul foraged daily in the British Museum for books on ancient
mythologies. By October he had the first of twelve sections
completed. Paul decided that Oscar Wilde himself should see this
paean to the Beautiful. The epic would bear the weight of this
title:
The Ruin of
Arcady
.

“
We waited
outside the Cafe Royal where we knew Whistler and Wilde spent most
of their afternoons. It was pouring rain. We tried waiting in the
main room but it was choked with smoke and a burly postilion stood
guard at the door to the side-chamber where Wilde’s silken accents
mingled with the American’s broadcloth twang.” They had been
waiting in the cold drizzle for two hours before the two men
emerged, Wilde easily recognizable in his Eskimo coat, bare head
cocked to one side as if just delivering or recovering from a
verbal sally, brown shoulder-length curls as impudent
as the womanly lips set for a snarl.
‘I’m Chambers,’ Paul said, ‘I’ve written often to you.’ He glanced
at Whistler who chose not to remember their having met. Wilde
scoured Paul’s face, annoyed then faintly bemused at what he was
seeing. “He waved us in under an awning farther up the street.
‘We’re the Canadians,’ Paul persisted. ‘We heard you speak in
Toronto.’ Wilde and Whistler exchanged glances and signals. Wilde
then peered at me, who had said nothing to this point, and I saw a
click of recognition as quick as a camera’s shutter before it was
extinguished by his perpetual ironic glint. I stared at him, trying
to connect the beaver coat and the elegant epigrams of his
published remarks. ‘I see you’re appraising my Canadian fur,’ he
said. ‘It was given me by one of your Esquimaux during an
uncharacteristic heat-wave, an act of foolish magnanimity I am
certain he has had reason to regret many times since.’ Whistler
chuckled asthmatically. Encouraged, Wilde continued, this time
looking at Paul. ‘Odd country, though. I’m told, and have firsthand
experience to prove so, that whereas other dominions have
prevailing winds, Canada has a prevailing season: winter.’ Paul
managed a laugh of sorts, despite his chattering teeth, and said
bluntly, ‘Did you receive the outline of Mr. Marshall’s epic I sent
you in August?’ ‘So this is the tongueless Philomel, then?’ he said
to me. ‘I’m no nightingale, but I am a poet, sir,’ I said. He
smiled, and for a moment seemed undecided how to extricate himself
from the situation, the cold rain, the pestilence of minor bards.
‘Ah yes, the young colonial with the epic grasp. I do remember,’ he
lied without a faltering blink. ‘Well, my advice to you gentlemen
is exactly the same as I gave to Mr. Whistler here when he arrived
fresh from Atlantica: stay here long enough to learn how to speak
English, then go back home and bedazzle your poor relations.’
Whistler was still chortling when they turned the corner and headed
for Tite Street.”

Paul viewed
the disaster as a minor setback. He said he had a good chance of
meeting Swinburne who
was,
after all, the greatest practising poet in all of England. What had
Wilde ever
written
? He took
Bradley out for a night on the town. They brought a couple of
sweet-faced whores home with them, but Bradley was too drunk to
perform so Paul had to do double-duty. When Paul woke up late the
next morning, the women were gone and the flat was in such a mess
he almost did not see the suicide note on the table. It simply
informed him that Bradley had decided to take the only path now
open to him. He thanked his friend for his devotion and begged him
– as a dying man’s wish – not to inform anyone of his death, not
Sarah and especially not his mother. But Paul knew Bradley better
than he had suspected. He went immediately, instinctively, to the
spot along the river below the Tower Bridge where he was certain
the suicide attempt would take place. He found Bradley’s clothing
in a neat pile on the ancient wharf, the blurred shadow of the
fabled bridge falling across it. He peered out into the water where
a cold mist was rapidly descending and saw Bradley’s head slowly
disappear under the brown surface. He screamed, too late. For five
minutes he watched the widening circle where Bradley had gone under
until the mist sank over it. He picked up the clothing and returned
to the flat. For three days he scanned the papers for accounts of
the drowning. There were many each day. He visited the morgue and
stared wretchedly at the puffed cadavers under dripping tap-water.
Finally, he sat down and wrote Sarah. He had to tell someone. The
burden was too great, too unfair.

“
I heard
Paul’s cry but it made no impression on me. Wilde’s remarks had
served an inadvertently merciful purpose. They cut away with their
cruel clarity the festering scab I had allowed to grow over the
remorse and self-loathing I had felt unceasingly since the moment
that crockery jar smashed on the bedroom floor and I fled like a
thief into the night with the money you had laboured for and shored
up against a future you expected we would share. My life was a
sham. With Paul’s cry ringing in my ears, I opened my mouth and
swallowed death. I felt the fierce current pull my feet from the
bot
tom and draw me into its
horizontal rush to the estuary. I fancied I saw through the murk
and haze the shadow of those twin towers and their
eight-hundred-year-old stones. I waited for my breath to collapse
so the Thames could enter my lungs. But it didn’t. Though my arms
remained motionless, my feet and legs were pumping steadily enough
to force my face through the surface. I could not stop them. The
will to live remained in them, out of reach of my despair, and
gradually that determination eased upward until at last my arms
began rocking as smooth as oars and I found myself not only afloat
but aimed for a blunt headland on my left. I flopped down on the
grass there like a beached whale – exhausted. I was miles from my
entry point, out in the countryside somewhere. I could smell the
mist sweet on the autumn grasses. I drifted into unconsciousness.
When I woke I was in a fisherman’s cottage with my head bandaged.
The old woman said I’d struck a rock coming ashore. They’d seen me
and arrived just as I collapsed. Three days had passed. I was too
weak to hold a soupspoon. I was, alas, alive.”

It was almost ten days later
when Bradley walked into the Chelsea flat and surprised Paul as he
was packing books into a large crate. After reunion and
explanations, Paul remembered with horror that he had written
Sarah. Bradley said it was better she think him dead. Paul then
swore he would not tell her under any circumstances of the
resurrection.

The next seven
years were spent in the same flat and only the outlines of what
happened need be told, shameful as they were, in Bradley’s opinion.
Paul’s father continued to send his son money, mainly to keep him
from coming home and disgracing everyone (his spies had given him
too accurate a report of his son’s activities, though they did not
bother to mention the name of his ‘live-in male lover’). Paul took
a mistress and spent much of his time at her apartments in
Paddington. Bradley went back to
The Ruins of Arcady
more convinced than ever by his brush with death that he
was destined to suffer and create something of value. Paul remained
his staunchest supporter. He got involved in politics, gathered
some influence around him and promoted his friend’s ‘genius’
unflaggingly. Bradley wrote and suffered, fell ill, wrote and
drank. By 1890, the year that Wilde published
The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s
Magazine
, Bradley was
alternating bouts of alcoholism with bouts of illness and
debauchery. Paul’s mistress abandoned him for a Lord of the Realm,
and he began bringing home a miscellany of tarts and cast-offs.
Somehow in the brief interludes
The Ruins of Arcady
was completed. Wilde was now famous again, and what-is-more
his latest companion was none other than Robert Baldwin Ross,
teenage son of Canada’s former attorney-general and patron of the
Chamber’s law firm. Robbie Ross was wined and dined, and at last
agreed to present Bradley’s magnum opus to Wilde. Bradley did not
touch a drink for more than a month. He slept beside the fireplace,
shivering, all during the month of February, 1891 while they waited
anxiously for a response. Robbie Ross came around to their flat to
inform them that they both were invited to a soirée at the Tite
Street house on the fifteenth of March. Wilde had read the poem,
all ten thousand lines of it.

“
Young Robbie
met us at the door, flushed with excitement. ‘Oscar’ was in the
drawing room with ‘Jimmy’ Whistler and his new friend ‘Bosie’
Douglas and several other regulars, but first we had to be given
the grand tour of Number 16 Tite Street. I was far too anxious to
pay close attention to details – but I remember
thinking how odd Robbie Ross’s flat cadences
sounded among the sophistication of Moorish casements, ceilings
bedewed with pressed peacock plumage, the works of Whistler and
Manet hanging everywhere, and walls decorated with a Pointillist’s
palette. As if to underline my thought, Robbie paused before a
Constable-like painting of the Scottish countryside in the hallway
just outside the drawing room and said, ‘This is one of Oscar’s
favourite pieces, by Homer Watson – from Ontario. Oscar met him in
Toronto’. He paused again and looking at me said, ‘Oscar has a way
of attracting people’.”