Fathers and sons
Richard Shone
The Mad Bad Line: The Family of Lord Alfred Douglas Brian Roberts (Hamish Hamilton pp. 319, £15) This astonishing book has the makings of a truly outrageous comedy. There are nuns and pederasts, old wives with young husbands, corrupt Homes for Boys and corrupt boys with no homes, rented country houses (which sleep 25 guests 'at a squeeze'), hidden mistresses, drunken lords, an unspeakable scene of horror at Euston — all of them cornerstones of the English theatrical tradition. But, in the end, the effect is hardly amusing and it is to the author's credit that, with his instinctive gift for comedy, the tragic elements of his story have been neither diminished nor completely submerged. Farce is evenly placed but isn't allowed to triumph, although there is one character who obviously posed a severe threat to Brian Roberts's more serious intentions.
The ostensible subject of the book is the history in the last century of the Douglas family, revolving round the figures of the 7th Marquess of Queensberry, his son the 8th Marquess and his grandson Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's `Bosie'. The real subject, however, is the genetics of heredity as seen in a family with amazingly consistent characteristics spreading, like Dutch Elm disease, through its every root and branch. And the moral which the story appears to support is the debilitating effect of sport among the upper classes. The Douglases boxed, swam, hunted, shot and mountaineered. The 7th Marquess was a handsome, gambling pugilist in the Georgette Heyer/Barbara Cartland mould who was found at the age of 40 shot through the heart, decently, on his own estate. It was almost certainly suicide, the first of three spectacular ones in the book. His son John Sholto, the 8th Marquess whose fighting career spans the whole narrative — propels it in fact — was even more athletically endowed. He boxed and brawled, shot and rode and nothing seems to have prevented this display of demonic energy save lovemaking (even at dinner between soup and entrée, so to speak), his frequent appearances in court and his encroaching old age when, not to be defeated, he took up the new craze of bicycling. While his wife Sybil (nee Montgomery) became increasingly estranged, bored and pregnant, Queensberry would go riding about the Scottish countryside as though he were Mad Jack Mytton 'with all the restlessness of the hyena'. Sometimes he rode so long and so energetically that his boots and breeches had to be cut from his legs.
If that were all, there would be little to tell. But the Queensberry family would think and, although this activity rarely strayed (except in moments of weakness) beyond the political and practical (and religion came under both these headings), they wished the world to know, at any cost, what they had been thinking. Queensberry wrote a very long (and very bad) poem on the death of his brother Francis whose rope snapped on the first descent from the Matterhorn. This led him into the tumults of Free Thought and a virulent stand against established Christianity. It gives to the popular espousal of Queensberry, as the defender of Christian family morals at the time of Wilde's trial, a farcical element quite in keeping with much else in the book. Such hypocrisy (Queensberry's marital record was shocking) always endears itself to the public. In this sense Queensberry was as much part of his age as was Wilde of the fin de siècle.
The Marquess's active agnosticism (which caused him to lose his seat in the Lords) was shared by his sister Florence, Lady Florrie Dixie; the rest of his family were of various persuasions, but chiefly Roman Catholic. As usual religious bickerings were behind several family ruptures. Conversion crops up with blinding regularity. Fanny Montgomery, Sybil's sister, preferred Catholicism to conversation and ended her days, pious but silent, in Naples.
And Queensberry himself, in one last characteristic yoke face, appears to have embraced some almighty referee, touching wood under the influence of his ordained brother Archie.
The latter part of this entertaining chronicle widens the social scene — to the luxuries of the Savoy Hotel and perfumed male brothels off the Tottenham Court Road. It is concerned with Wilde and Bosie, Queensberry and the courts. It is a distressingly familiar story, succinctly told.
Although Brian Roberts adds little that is new, he has placed the events in a slightly different perspective. Particularly interest ing is his amplification of the earlier relationship between Bosie's brother Vis count Drumlanrig and the Foreign Secret ary Lord Rosebery who, at the time of the trials (he was then Prime Minister) was advised to take a cruise for his health. In England, Drumlanrig went behind a hedge and shot himself through the mouth.
Bosie's older brother, Percy, was the only member of the family to support Wilde — for which action he was punched by his father in Piccadilly and his wife was subjected to atrabilious letters from her father-in-law. After the deaths of Wilde and Queensberry in 1900, Lord Alfred proved himself as wayward and litigious as his father and died a penniless literary pussy-cat on the Sussex coast.
But if Lord Alfred is the odious heroine of the book, then Lady Florrie Dixie is its magnificent hero. Brian Roberts has portrayed her with a relish for detail that makes one long for more. She was Amazo nian, opinionated and fearless. She was the first to advise her 'sisters' (the women of England) 'to adopt the masculine position and saddle' when riding. She supported Dress Reform, anti-blood sports, Free Thinking and belligerent women's rights.
She was a war correspondent in South Africa and an indomitable traveller — a Lady Hester Stanhope of more circums cribed days. She did for Patagonia in the last century what Mr Chatwin has done for it in this. She kept a leopard called Affums in her Thames-side garden and wrote book after book, her last three-decker being serialised in the Agnostic Journal and only curtailed by her death. The insanity of most of her family touched her only intermittently and with entirely hilarious results.
The author writes with gusto and considerable narrative skill. The family chroni cle seems to suit him but I doubt whether he will find another, even among the English aristocracy, that was quite so preposterous as this.
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