Those Wild Wyndhams by Claudia Renton

TWELVE
The Mad and their Keepers

     
    In 1891, after two years of travelling, George Curzon returned to England. The Souls celebrated with another Bachelors’ Club dinner. Yet snobbish Curzon was appalled by developments in his absence. As the Souls gained in prominence, they had invited into their midst the talented and amusing, regardless of social background. For Curzon, the ‘degradation’ wrought upon ‘our circle’ was epitomized by ‘the Cosquiths’, a shorthand he used to describe Herbert Henry Asquith, the middle-class barrister shortly to leapfrog directly from Liberal backbencher to Home Secretary under Gladstone; and Oscar Wilde, lecture-giving aesthete, whose notoriety had taken a darker turn with the publication of his first novel,
The Picture of Dorian Grey
, in instalments in
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
(it was deemed so scandalous that the newsagent W. H. Smith refused to sell those editions of
Lippincott’s
at its stalls). 1
    ‘Gone forever is the old Gang and a few magnificent souls [sic] like you and Harry [Cust], [Doll] Liddell, Mary Elcho and myself remain. The rest are whirling after new Gods and baring their heads in the temple of twopenny Rimmons,’ 2 Curzon told Harry White, sadly and grandly, upon hearing that Ettie Grenfell had invited Oscar and Constance Wilde, Henry Asquith and his wife Helen, 3 and the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his wife (also called Helen) to Taplow Court, the Grenfells’ house in Berkshire. Curzon urged White to capsize the interlopers’ punt while on the river. 4 In fact, Mary had turned traitor too. In the previous six months alone, she had gone to the theatre ‘
à quatre
’ with Wilde, Arthur and Ettie, and had had Wilde to dine at Cadogan Square where he kept his end of the table ‘alive with paradox’, and her guests, including Arthur, George and Sibell, and Edward Burne-Jones, stayed until well after midnight: ‘so I suppose they weren’t bored’, she said with relief. 5 With her consuming interest in people, and her expansive warmth, Mary was to become renowned for introducing new people into the Souls.
    That same summer, Curzon forced an uncomfortable confrontation between himself and Wilde at the meeting of the Crabbet Club, an all-male club that met annually at Wilfrid Blunt’s Sussex estate. The Crabbet’s stated purpose was ‘to discourage serious views of life’. Its annual meeting consisted of a poetry competition and a night of Bacchanalian excess. Its membership, recruited by Wilfrid and George Wyndham in collaboration, was primarily male Souls. By convention each new member was subjected to ‘jibes’ – a grilling on his life and work. 6 The two new members that summer were Curzon and Wilde. Curzon demanded that he be the one to grill Wilde.
    As recorded by Blunt in his diary, Curzon was ruthless: attacking Wilde for his treatment of sodomy in
Dorian Gray
and suggesting that Wilde engaged in such practices himself. The fleshy Wilde at first smiled helplessly, but eventually gave ‘an amusing and excellent speech’. The debate continued until dawn when some of the Club, including Curzon and George Wyndham, went to swim in the river, followed by a game of lawn tennis – ‘just as they were, stark naked, the future rulers of England’, said Wilde. 7 Shortly afterwards, Wilde met the Wyndhams’ cousin Bosie Douglas, and their destructive mutual infatuation began. Bosie later joined the Crabbet, but Wilde never attended another meeting – an indication, probably, of his distaste for it.
    The following year, the poetry competition’s theme was ‘Marriage’. Harry Cust’s offering brimmed with ironic self-knowledge:
    Various vigorous virgins may have panted
    Wailing widows wilted in the dust
    To no female has the great God granted
    Grace sufficient to be Mrs. Cust

    Harry Cust, by his lover, Violet Manners.
    Contemporary paeans to Harry’s heavenly blond appearance must be measured against the adolescent Judith