Lily's Story

by Don Gutteridge

  They met again, and one day Sarah led Bradley and Paul back to her lodgings not far from their own. She wanted them to meet her cousin, a ‘real poet’. Whatever they had prepared themselves for, the bard they were introduced to when they entered the drafty second-storey walkup over a wholesaler’s depot was not one of the imagined possibilities. First of all, it was a woman, who also bore an odd name: Isabella Valancy Crawford. She did not resemble any picture of a poetess they were ready to accept. She was a plain woman in her early thirties, though her age was hard to determine because she was consumptively pale with luminous dark eyes that were simultaneously childlike and agedly wise, releasing only half the pain they were feeding upon. The rest lay hidden below a brave smile, waiting, as they were soon to learn, to be ambushed by words. Her speech was courteous but up-country Irish, unadorned by wit or felicity of phrase. Though she appeared to listen politely to the young men and her cousin while they postured and pamphleteered through the long evening hours in a room with the fire dead, the coal run out, the lamps sweating – she had little stamina for argument, lapsing into a trance interrupted only by a requisite smile now and again. She found no passion to respond to the great debates the young lions arranged on their tri-weekly visits throughout the winter.

  Sarah lived with Isabella and the latter’s mother in three rooms above the hubbub of a warehouse quiet only on Sundays. They were bitterly poor, lighting a fire in the morning and again in the evening though the winter was severe. The two young women wrote occasionally for the newspapers, but Isabella spent most of her time composing stories and poems. “I would come in with Sarah late on a wintry day; the room would be filled with the lurid light of sunless snow, the fire perished in its grate. Isabella would not immediately turn to greet us; she was always seated in a hard-backed rocker, facing at a quarter-angle the window which overlooked the frozen gardens to the south. She appeared to be gazing through the landscape, catching it with an odd perspective, you could still see the surprise in her whole face as she swung slowly round to acknowledge our presence. Sometimes I would ask Sarah to stay downstairs while I slipped unnoticed into the room to watch her there by the window, her hands gripping one another across her lap as if it was their task to hold back the petty anguish of daily existence while her eyes were freed to interrogate the bleak details of the universe out there. Once Paul said to me, ‘She has a haunted look about her,’ but I said, ‘Yes, though it appears to me that when she stares outward at the world she’s attempting to haunt it.’”

  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 writ
ten 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 bottom 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’.”

  “Oscar was seated on a throne-shaped, white wicker chair, delicately latticed and coifed with ostrich feathers not too distant from the moulting season. Around him everything was white – the eggshell walls, the ivory casements, the bleached wool of the sofa and settee – or its opposite among
the decorated paraphernalia – black walnut, blue crystal, imperial crimson, chinese jade, polished onyx. The effect was of a brilliant chill, an exquisite tastefulness purged of feeling and the lesser niceties. The sun had not quite gone down yet, so the natural light still streamed in through the capacious windows unencumbered by curtains. The room, like the man himself, seemed an awesome combination of the austere Grecian and the sumptuality of Rome.”

  “Wilde was ornately polite to the guests, waving us with a plump sigh of his hands towards two cushions set out near the throne. He began immediately to regale his audience with drolleries from his visit to America, making certain to include us in the amusement by tilting his brow in our direction in the most confidential manner he could muster. Whistler and Bosie, a blonde leonine figure with a touch of Adonis in the face, mounted a mock counter-attack to accelerate the repartee, and as the banished shadows poured out of their burrows and worm-casts to engulf the ersatz aesthetic of the room, I never took my eyes off Wilde’s face. Shorn of ambient light and the corona of the beautified room itself, his features – mercurial, wit-quick, tightened by tenderness, ransomed by inexhaustible humour – lapsed into shadow. Though the elegance of phrase and the swift épée-cut of his wit continued unabated, under lamplight I began to notice that the mobile lips, hedged by shadow, now seemed bloated; the cheeks more rounded, their translucent skin pulled by the jaw’s swerve across rancid flesh; the impudent tumble of his Byronic curls now coiled and sensitive and raven. I turned my gaze at last to the manilla folder beside his chair, where my poem lay, my last bid on the future.”

  “Without preface, Wilde reached down and took up into his flaccid grasp The Ruins of Arcady. At that precise moment I became aware of the odour of incense; only one lamp burned in a far corner. Wilde did not acknowledge the ripple of chatelaine laughter as he flipped the folder open to the title page. I watched his face; the smile was gangrenous.”