by Neil McKenna
Early the next morning, Andre quietly left the hotel and caught the train to Algiers, with an overwhelming sense of relief at having avoided being drawn into the erotic entanglements with local boys which Oscar and Bosie so clearly sought. Andre's relief may have been tinged by disappointment. He had tasted the guilty joys of Uranian passion only twice: once with Ali, a young Arab boy who had joyously seduced him a year earlier in the sand dunes outside Sousse in Tunisia, and once with a handsome young Italian oarsman whom he had hired to take him out for a moonlit row on Lake Como. Both encounters had left him confused about his sexuality, a confusion compounded by an affair he had in the Algerian oasis of Biskra with a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl prostitute, Meriem, who was destined to become the muse of Pierre Lout's.
Andre's encounter with Oscar and Bosie did not end with his flight from Blidah. A few days later, Oscar was back in Algiers and, late one afternoon, Andre came across him sitting in a bar at a table strewn with papers. Bosie was not there. `I have a friend in London who looks after my correspondence for me,' Oscar told Andre. `He keeps back all the boring letters - business letters, tradesmen's bills and so on - and only forwards the serious letters - the love letters.' Oscar was especially delighted by a letter from a poorly educated young acrobat. `It's the first time he has written to me,' he laughed, `so he doesn't like to spell properly.'
At this point a clearly furious Bosie walked in and, brushing past Andre as if he did not recognise him, stood over Oscar and:
in a hissing, withering, savage voice, rapped out a few sentences of which I understood not a single word, then turning on his heels, went out.
Oscar turned very pale. `He does nothing but make scenes like that,' Oscar told Andre after a long pause. `He's terrible. Isn't he terrible?' But behind Oscar's words, Andre astutely discerned Oscar's profound `admiration' for Bosie. Oscar had, Andre recalled, `a kind of lover's infatuated pleasure in being mastered'. Bosie's personality, thought Andre, seemed much stronger and more marked than Oscar's. It was `overweening':
a sort of fatality swept him along; at times he seemed almost irresponsible; and he never attempted to resist himself, he would not put up with anyone or anything resisting him either.
After the scene with Oscar, Bosie returned to Blidah where he had unfinished business with a young boy called Ali who worked as a caouadji, a boy making and serving coffee in a cafe. Bosie was obsessed with Ali who was, according to Andre, only `twelve or thirteen', though Bosie said he was in fact fourteen. Bosie was determined to `elope' with him to the desert oasis of Biskra, after hearing Andre's glowing descriptions of the place. `But,' Andre wrote, `to run away with an Arab is not such an easy thing as he had thought at first; he had to get the parents' consent, sign papers at the Arab office, at the police station, etc.' There was enough bureaucracy to keep Bosie busy in Blidah for several days.
While Bosie had his hands full in Blidah, Oscar suggested to Andre that they go to a Moorish cafe where they could listen to wonderful music. They took a carriage, which dropped them off at the edge of a labyrinth of small streets and alleyways. Oscar had procured the services of a guide, who led them to a dark steep alley where the cafe was located. Oscar was already an habitue of the cafe, but, at first, Andre was puzzled as to why Oscar had dragged him there. There seemed to be nothing special about the place; a few elderly Arab men sitting cross-legged and smoking kief, and a young caouadji half-hidden in the darkness brewing ginger tea. `Lulled by the strange torpor of the place, I was just sinking into a state of semi-somnolence,' Andre recalled, `when in the half-open doorway, there suddenly appeared a marvellous youth.' The boy hesitated at the door, seemingly unsure whether to enter, until Oscar beckoned him over to join them. The boy's name was Mohammed, Oscar said, and he was one of Bosie's lovers. Andre was dazzled by Mohammed's beauty, by his large, languorous black eyes, by his flawless olive skin and by his wonderfully slender and graceful body. Andre was also attracted by Mohammed's youth. In the original French of his memoir of this night, Andre dwelt lovingly on Mohammed's `corps enfantin', on his `childlike body'.
Mohammed took out a reed flute from his waistcoat and began to play exquisitely. Within a few minutes the young caouadji came to sit beside him, accompanying him on a darbouka, a kind of drum:
The song of the flute flowed on through an extraordinary stillness, a limpid steady stream of water, and you forgot the time and the place, and who you were and all the troubles of this world. We sat on, without stirring, for what seemed to me to be infinite ages.
The spell was broken by Oscar. `Venez,' he said, rising from the table and propelling Andre towards the door. Outside, Oscar stopped abruptly. `Dear,' he whispered into Andre's ear, `would you like the little musician?' Andre's heart was beating uncontrollably. He felt as if he was going to choke. With `a dreadful effort of courage', he croaked out `Yes'. It was an epiphany, the moment when Andre's `important crisis' was decisively resolved. By accepting and acknowledging his sexual desires, Andre emerged from his crisis of sexual denial `fully grown'. In the space of a moment in a dark and foul-smelling alleyway in Algiers, Andre had been reborn a Uranian. And he had Oscar to thank for it.
Oscar muttered a few words to their guide and then took Andre off to drink cocktails at the Hotel de l'Oasis. After an hour or so Oscar escorted a nervous Andre to a dingy hotel in a run-down part of the city. As soon as they crossed the threshold, `two enormous policemen' appeared. Andre was terrified, thinking they were going to be arrested. `Oh no, dear, on the contrary,' Oscar told him:
It proves the hotel is a safe place. They come here to protect foreigners. I know them quite well. They're excellent fellows and very fond of my cigarettes. They quite understand.
Oscar was right to be cautious. He had already had one potentially fatal encounter with an Arab boy. The young Arab, Oscar told Laurence Housman later, had `planned to trap him for robbery and possible murder'. But after Oscar had had sex with him, he was, apparently, `ready to lay down his life for him'.
They went up to the second floor where Oscar had a key to a suite of two adjoining rooms. The guide appeared, followed by the two boys. Oscar sent Andre and Mohammed into the further room, while he went in the other room with the darbouka player for a night of passion. The sex with Mohammed was electrifying. Andre was in `transports of delight at holding in my bare arms that perfect, wild little body, so dark, so ardent, so lascivious'. Andre had five orgasms with Mohammed that night, and several more after the boy left. It was the most profound and potent sexual experience of his life. `Since then, whenever I have sought pleasure, it is the memory of that night that I have pursued,' Gide wrote a quarter of a century later.
Early the next morning, on 31 January, Oscar left Algiers to return to London. Bosie was still in Blidah, waiting to start his journey to Biskra with Ali. As Ali only spoke Arabic, Bosie suggested to Andre that he should travel to Biskra with them to relieve the tedium of the two-day journey. Andre was eager to see Bosie again. Although he considered that Bosie was `blackened', `ruined' and `devoured by an unhealthy thirst for infamy', Andre admitted to his mother that Bosie nevertheless maintained an air of `ambiguous distinction'. Andre was fascinated by the flagrancy and intensity with which Bosie flaunted his sexuality, even if he was embarrassed by the way his conversation continually returned `with disgusting obstinacy' to boys and sex. He was, Andre wrote, almost wistfully, a man `who seeks shame and finds it'. Bosie was a joyfully unapologetic sexual predator who knew what he wanted and who was ready to go to almost any lengths to get it. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Andre secretly admired Bosie's single-minded devotion to sex. Besides which, there was an erotic bond of sorts between them. After all, Andre had slept with Bosie's boy, Mohammed, and he may have thought there might be a chance of sex with Ali. In any case, the boy who could cause Bosie to take such infinite pains must be worth seeing.
Andre arranged to meet Bosie and Ali at Setif, half-way to Biskra. He was unprepared for the magnificent sight of Ali st
epping out of the railway carriage. Before him stood `a young prince' dressed in dazzling silks:
How stately his bearing, how proud his glance! What masterful smiles he bestowed on the hotel servants as they bowed before him! How quickly he had understood that, however humble he had been the day before, it was now for him to enter a room first, to sit down first ... Douglas had found his master and however elegantly dressed he was himself, he looked like an attendant, awaiting the orders of his sumptuously apparelled servant.
Andre has often been accused - most vociferously by Bosie himself - of inventing the sexual escapades of Oscar and Bosie in Algiers. `I have been trying to read your book,' Bosie wrote to Andre in 1929 after he had read his account of their time in Algiers, `but frankly I find it ugly, squalid and boring.' Bosie claimed that Andre's version of events was `a mass of lies and misrepresentations' about Algiers, `a clumsy fabrication of lies founded on a small substratum of truth'. `Gide is a shit!' Bosie told Harford Montgomery Hyde in 1931. `Like a person who has an abscess on his bottom and continuously displays it to the world.' But the truth of Andre's account of Bosie and the boy Ali in Biskra is borne out by a letter marked `PRIVATE' which Bosie wrote to Robbie Ross on 11 February. `My dear Bobbie,' he began:
Oscar will have told you that I am held fast by the lassoo of desire to a sugarlipped lad. He is of extraordinary personal beauty, and is aged fourteen.
`In fact, between me and you,' Bosie somewhat ambiguously added, `his sugar has not yet been wiped by the nurse from milk' - presumably suggesting that Ali had not yet sucked Bosie. `I constantly compare my boy to a gazelle,' a delighted Bosie went on, describing how he and Ali had had `a fearful scene' the other day, carried on through an interpreter:
My boy, All, insisted upon wearing an old pair of trousers, I having just, at vast expense, bought him two new pairs. Words followed (through the interpreter, who speaks moderate French), and finally I told him that I had seen another boy named Achmet who was far more like a gazelle than he was; I said he was so like a gazelle that on dirait une vraie gazelle, and that he was in constant danger of being shot in mistake for one. This completely overcame my boy who lay on his bed and wept for two hours, the interpreter saying: Il dit quepuisque vous avez fait venir ici an autre garfon qui ressemble une gazelle, c'est mieux qu'il retourne d Blidah d ses parents, parce que ici it est comme orphelin, n'ayant ni pere ni mere, mais vous settlement, et cet. et cet. All this quite seriously.
`Finally,' wrote Bosie, `we made it up and had each other, as we have done every single day since I brought him from Blidah ten days ago (sometimes twice).' The interpreter was Athman, the fifteen-year-old boy Andre had met the previous year in Biskra.
Bosie was delighted with Biskra. He was especially fascinated by `the street of the courtesans' which he found quite extraordinary:
They sit at their doors and call to the passers-by. There are among them two male courtesans (of course there are heaps of other amateurs, but these are real professionals). One of them is astounding, he is exactly like a Greek slave of the late Roman Empire. Yesterday as I passed he was sitting in his doorway crowned with a wreath of narcissus, and he called to me to come in the house ... He is about nineteen, just Oscar's style.
Tempted as he was by the beautiful courtesan, Bosie passed up the opportunity to sleep with him. `I am far too occupied with Ali to look at anyone else,' he told Robbie, `and Ali has sworn to stab me if I have any other boy.' Ali was not so insistent about fidelity when it came to his own pleasures. He wanted to have as much sex, with as many people, as he could and started an affair with a local boy. Bosie could just about tolerate this, but when Ali went to bed with Meriem, the beautiful young prostitute from the Oulad Nail tribe whom Andre had slept with the previous year, Bosie lost his temper. `Boys, yes boys, as much as he likes,' he told Andre. `But I will not stand for his going with women!'
Despite the alarums and excursions in his relationship with Ali, Bosie was enjoying his stay in Biskra enormously. `I am really having a splendid time,' he told Robbie. But Bosie's idyll was brought to an abrupt end on 15 February when he received a telegram from his older brother, Percy. Queensberry was back on the rampage. Bosie was needed in London. The charms of the gazellelike Ali were forgotten and the boy, once so feted, was summarily cast aside. Bosie rushed back to London. George Ives had been right. The storm of battle did indeed lie ahead.
Hideous words
`Ifyour sins find you out, why worry! It is when they find you in that trouble begins.'
Oscar's departure from Algiers on 31 January was rather abrupt. He had been there for just a fortnight, hardly the `long voyage' that the Sibyl of Mortimer Street had prophesied. The row with Bosie had not helped matters. With Bosie in Blidah trying to organise taking Ali to Biskra, Oscar was left alone in Algiers with only the less-than-scintillating Andre for company, and London may have seemed a tempting alternative. The premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest was another consideration. Oscar had of course planned to return in time for the first performance on St Valentine's Day. But with nothing to keep him in Algiers now, apart from the readily available sex, he may well have decided to return and give full rein to his predilection for meddling in the productions of his plays.
There was, perhaps, another, more compelling reason for his early return. Oscar may well have contracted a sexually transmitted disease in Algiers, probably gonorrhoea, and he would have wanted to get treatment for the infection as quickly as possible. If he had indeed contracted gonorrhoea, the symptoms would have quickly begun to manifest themselves. Urethral discomfort and discharge usually occur within five days of infection, and often within two. Early treatment was essential. On his return to London, Oscar consulted Dr Lanphier Vernon Jones, rather than his usual physician, Dr Charles de Lacy Lacy of Grosvenor Street. Dr Vernon Jones was an acknowledged expert in the treatment of gonorrhoea, who was to publish, in 1902, Gonorrhoeal Arthritis, a well-regarded treatise on one of the complications arising from untreated or partially treated gonorrhoea. As his unpaid bill attests, Oscar remained under the care of Vernon Jones for three months, until his trial began.
Before the introduction of antibiotics, gonorrhoea was a notoriously difficult infection to deal with, and treatment involved poisoning the patient with noxious substances like mercury, zinc, aluminium and turpentine, purging and starving them, or making them heartily sick on `monstrous doses' of derivatives of Cubebs and Copaiba pepper. The treatment had to be endured for weeks if not months and was considered even by doctors to be disgusting and sickening, nauseating and repulsive. Stephen Yeldham, Surgeon to the London Homeopathic Hospital, described in sickening detail the `disgusting hodgepodge' of Cubebs and Copaiba that men were obliged to swallow several times a day:
Let a man take a turn at this for a week, and, if he has not the stomach of a dog, and the constitution of a horse, tell you at the end of it how he feels, and if you have not a heart of stone, you will pity him.
The treatment for gonorrhoea was almost worse than the disease itself, and it was not uncommon for those infected with it to be prescribed strong opiates for the pain and discomfort of the treatment.
Rather than go home to Tite Street, Oscar installed himself at the Avondale Hotel in Piccadilly, a'loathsome' place he said. He would have much preferred to stay at the Albemarle Hotel but could not, as he had failed to settle an outstanding bill. On the surface, at least, he appeared to be in good spirits and had acquired a new young friend. `You were kind enough to say I might bring someone to dinner tonight,' Oscar wrote to Ada Leverson in early February. `I have selected a young man, tall as a young palm tree (I mean tall as two young palm trees).' The young man's name was Tom, `a very rare name in an age of Algies and Berties', wrote Oscar. `I met him on Tuesday, so he is quite an old friend.' Tom Kennion was nineteen and a student at Oxford University when he met Oscar, and, unlike so many of Oscar's other boys, was from a good family, his father being an army Colonel.
A few days before the openin
g night of The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar was told about a plot by Lord Queensberry to wreck the performance. Algy Bourke, Bosie's cousin and the owner of White's Club and Willis's restaurant, had got wind of Queensberry's intentions and wrote urgently (and with scant regard to his spelling) to warn Sybil Queensberry:
What I wanted however to tell you was that Qhas obtained a seat at St. James Theatre tonight for the 1st night of OW's play. It is his present intention to go there and make a public scandle. Cant you get Bosie to go and see his Father and dissuade him from this. It would be most detrimental to the boy.
With Bosie still in Biskra with Ali and Andre Gide, Sybil turned to Bosie's elder brother Percy, Lord Douglas of Hawick, who lost no time in communicating the plot to Oscar.
Ever since the death of his eldest son, Drumlanrig, in October 1894, Queensberry had been in Scotland, grieving for him, and cursing and raging against the sodomitical conspiracy that had already robbed him of one son and looked as if it would almost certainly rob him of another. When he returned to London towards the end of January, he discovered that Bosie and Oscar were together in Algiers. Queensberry had been threatening a public scandal for months: now he was going to have one. He wanted to goad Oscar into action, into an act of violence or into some sort of legal action, or both. But he needed a platform from which he could make the scandal public. If he were arrested and charged with assault or breach of the peace, then he could justify his actions from the dock.
