9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
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Messing about on the river
In 1893, floating slowly to Luxor on what -- according to accounts given in letters sent home -- was "a gilded barge" an odd group of Englishmen had assembled, including E F Benson, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Hitchens, Reggie Turner and Lord Alfred Douglas. The first two would later come to the attention of the public as novelists while Reggie Turner, who also tried his hand at writing, would achieve a rather more precarious celebrity as the model on which Max Beerbohm based Comus, the ugly, talented character who charmed the English set in Florence. Douglas, of course, would become notorious as the addressee of De Profundis, the extended letter composed by Oscar Wilde while in prison. He enjoyed, at the time, a vague reputation as a minor poet, due largely to the assiduous promotion of Wilde, and though six years later he was kept out of the witness box during Wilde's two sensational trials (the first Wilde's own libel action brought against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry) it is difficult to view Douglas as anything other than the cause of the disaster that ultimately befell the plaintiff.
The scandal and the court rooms of a few years hence could hardly have impinged on the spirit of the group as the barge set sail in late December. Douglas was in Egypt as a guest of the Cromers, the visit devised by Lady Queensberry, and by Wilde, to get him away from a life of petty debauchery in London. ("Why not," Wilde had written to Douglas's mother earlier in the year, "try and make arrangements for him to go abroad for four or five months, to the Cromers in Egypt if that could be managed, where he would have new surroundings, proper friends and a different atmosphere? I think if he stays in London he will not come to any good... ") That so many friends of his should have been in Cairo at the same time is unlikely to have been a coincidence, and they undoubtedly provided a perfect excuse to escape the stuffy social round at the Residency.
Lord Cromer, egged on by Lady Queensberry, tried hard to find a post for Douglas though he was practical enough not to want a young man with an already questionable reputation too close to home. He eventually contrived, instead, an appointment as honorary attaché to Lord Currie, British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, though only after Douglas had been in Egypt for slightly more than three months. Douglas prevaricated, Currie got wind that all was not, perhaps, as he would have wished, and the offer of the appointment was withdrawn.
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas
Uncovering the minutiae of colonial administration, though, is far less interesting an exercise than speculating on the journeying together of quite so many literary footnotes. Wilde, as Richard Ellmann, far and away his best biographer, rightly points out, would have been by far the most powerful presence on the journey even though he was not there. The Picture of Dorian Gray had recently been published; its impact had been enormous and the passengers on the gilded barge would all have been able to quote it line by line. Douglas was himself temporarily estranged from Wilde, (who had recognised the importance of distancing himself from his young lover's distractingly hysterical behaviour in order to finish plays already commissioned), a fact that would have furnished endless opportunities for gossip among the friends. Cruising down the Nile, too, would have developed a less prosaic connotation as the voyage progressed: indeed, the journey of wealthy, young, dedicated fin-de-siècle aesthetes -- Benson was, in the 1890s, a world away from the bourgeois niceties that he would chronicle so successfully in his Mapp and Lucia novels -- provides the perfect framework for the kind of fictional reconstruction that is currently in vogue. It's almost worth copywriting the idea.
Not that the story is a secret: it is just one of those events mentioned in passing by a writer whose main focus is on something else, but which, depending on the interests of different readers, may or may not strike a resonant chord. I was intrigued simply because I live in Egypt, and in books in which Egypt is not expected to appear any asides tend to provoke a pricking up of the ears. They are like the interesting bits of other people's conversations that we strain to hear.
It is surprising how often it happens. Lying flat on the floor of my apartment for a month because of that most laughable, and painful, of ailments, the slipped-disc, I was reduced to begging friends for reading material and a remarkably eclectic selection of books began to form teetering columns around me. From the top of one such pile I salvaged a biography of Diana Mosley, née Mitford, the great beauty who married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. The couple were interned during the Second World War and only released from prison in late 1945. Social pariahs from then on, they set up a publishing house immediately after their release, and continued to dabble in lunatic fringe politics. And who was the first author they published? It was here that I pricked up my ears, for the first books the newly-formed company produced were two novels by Desmond Stewart.
Stewart, of course, is the author of Cairo: Mother of the World, one of the most engaging introductions to the city written in English, and currently kept in print courtesy of AUC Press. He is also the translator of Abdel-Rahman El-Shaqawi's 1953 novel El-Ard -- it appeared in English in 1962 under the title Egyptian Earth -- which immediately established a model for socially committed, realist fiction. He was, in his time, lionised by many members of the Egyptian left who were no doubt unaware of his earlier fascist sympathies which, even now, tend to be glossed over as no more than an amiable eccentricity by people who were close to Stewart.
Another framework, perhaps, for what might be an interesting fictional exercise. And again, no copyright.
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