Rough Music Story on Amazon

“Rough Music” is my last fictional story, set in 1970s America.  I wrote it a year or so ago, and I hope someday to write more “band stories” but for the present I’m working on editing my partner’s poems and stories.  “Rough Music” is set some time ago (think when I was a kid) . Bands worked on the road for much of the time.  Tours were long and hard and  many marriages broke down under the strain of the men (usually) being away for such long periods, and their finding other women on the road while their wives were at home with the house and children.  My two chief characters Jeff and Brandon are good friends and they are a bit guilty about the way that their work means they don’t spend enough times at home and that they have other women and use drugs to ease the stress of travelling. but they are men of their time and don’t feel overly guilty… However Jeff finds that when he divorces one wife and marries another, he’s in a similar situation.  He’s still not that close to his wife.  She is annoyed that he is away so much and that there are other women.

I try to make my characters realistically male, which means they would usually prefer to hang out with their buddies and play games and drink, than to be home all the time.

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452977780&sr=8-1&keywords=nadine+sutton

Words Poem by Benedict Brooke

Aye the times - the words are lost –

Don’t you remember how many you stole?

Dear Sweet wind?

Or whence they blew

On dusty carcasses of mind

All left unstrewn

You pruned the thorns,

Cut back the brambles

Where once they snagged

They spoke without understanding

And the meaning was laid bare

Though it was oft’ askew

Fallow ground now

Those desolate moors once left undesolate

As the tors tore the snags from the brambles…

I wrote poetry then

Found in these soft and fallow places

Shall that wind blow thence again?

The words are there, Time will bide…

Hank Williams Jnr (Bocephus)

Randall Hank Williams was the only child of Hank Williams by his wife Audrey. He was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1949. 
He was only a young child, when his father died, tragically and at the age of 29, on a trip to a New Year’s Gig. His mother was traumatized by her stormy marriage and the divorce from Hank Senior but after his death, she saw herself as the keeper of his legacy. She pressured her son to sing his father’s hits and she managed him, trying to make money out of the songs that were his father’s legacy. Hank Junior (sometimes known by his father’s nickname for him, Bocephus) had a very good country voice and great instrumental talent and he went along with his mother’s “pushing” as a boy. However it was increasingly difficult for him to live up to people’s expectations of him, particularly his mother’s. He loved country music but he also loved rock -and as he grew older, he wanted to step out from his father’s shadow and to work at the music he himself liked. He knew all the country and early rock and roll “Greats” from Jerry Lee Lewis to Johnny and June Carter Cash (June Carter was his godmother), but he was increasingly unhappy with being forced to sing the old Hank Williams classics when he wanted to strike out in a new direction for himself. His mother was possessive and difficult and in spite of the money from Hank’s hits, there were financial problems. 

As he grew older, the pressures on Hank, made him more depressed. He turned, like his father, to drink and drugs. His first marriage, when he was very young, was short lived. His second marriage, to Gwen Yeargain produced his first child Shelton Hank Williams (now known as Hank III) but again, he was unhappy and finding it hard to cope with marriage or fatherhood. He made a suicide attempt but survived. He and his wife had separated and he was desperately unhappy. Then in 1975 he went mountain climbing in Montana and fell 500 feet down a mountain. The accident almost killed him. He survived but with serious scarring of his face. He was traumatized seriously by this and it took some time before he fully recovered. He had plastic surgery which repaired his face. The psychological wounds remained. From then on, he started to wear a hat and sunshades, on stage, and grew a beard to hide the scars. 
Some of his best songs are about his relationship with Country music and his father, such as "Family Tradition".  Other well-known and loved classics are "If Heaven aint a lot like Dixie", " Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound (about honky tonks), "A Country boy can survive" and others.  He often performs with the rock singer Kid Rock who has become a country fan and whom Hank calls his "rebel son"...

He married again and had more children, but the damage done to his relationship with his eldest child was still there. He tried to spend time with his son, but Hank III felt neglected. However, in the 70s’ after the accident he began to branch into the sort of music that he really wanted to do, while still doing some of his father’s country hits. He still had addictions to drink and drugs, and while he was immensely popular and successful, his addictions sometimes interfered with his performances. 

Hank’s voice is as strong as ever, though he’s now in his 60s and he is great at playing to an audience. He is a big man with a powerful musical voice...

His musical ability has not diminished as he’s grown older. His life is more settled now and he is as successful as ever with his music. Like his father, he is a Republican supporter and he has caused some controversy with some of his slightly unorthodox political statements. But in spite of the dramas and tragedies of his early life, he has fulfilled his early musical promise.

Gone with the Wind Novel The Story of Scarlett O’Hara

This novel has been a massively popular hit in America and all over the world ever since it was written in 1936.  It is the one and only full work by Margaret Mitchell, a young woman from a southern family, who had heard stories of the Civils war from her relatives all her life.  It is, most famously, also a film with Vivien Leigh as the anti-Heroine, Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as the blockade running Southern rascal Rhett Butler.
The story is too well known to need repetition here.  It is a romance but it has an uneasy ending.   It does not end with the heroine and hero falling in love or marrying... Scarlett marries three times and has three children during the story, as well as surviving the horrors of war, taking up running a business, in an unladylike fashion, and even killing a man.

After years of pursuing Ashley Wilkes, the gentlemanly but weak young man from a neighbouring plantation, Scarlett realises that she loves Rhett, her third husband. Rhett is also a Southerner, but unlike Ashley he has lived life exactly as it pleased him, been cheerfully selfish instead of high minded.  Rhett has made money from the war and only joined the Confederate Army after the fall of Atlanta.  Rhett only starts to fit in with the prim and proper mores of the Old South when he wants to get his daughter into local society…and realises that having a mother and father who traded and socialised with Yankees and who were more concerned with money making than with reciting the history of the Lost Cause and the South’s defeat, will damage Bonnie’s chances of finding a suitable husband when she is grown.

The story’s attitude to the South is ambivalent.  Mitchell did not seem to find anything particularly reprehensible about slavery and the South’s defence of its “peculiar institution”.   Most of the characters that are against slavery are bad in some way or at best weak and overly idealistic.  It is possible that she did not want to inflict modern views on slavery and racism to her 1860s based characters but she does not seem ever to provide any other viewpoint.  
However she is critical of the South for its foolish belief that they can “Lick any number of Yankees” with few factories and industrial resources, and nothing but “cotton, slaves and arrogance”.  She is also tart in the first part of the book, about the South’s attitude towards women, that they had to pretend to be pretty little  idiots who need their menfolk to guide them, when in fact they were often the ones who ran plantations or bred horses while their menfolk idled and talked about politics or hunting.   She allows Scarlett, (albeit we are always told that Scarlett is not very clever about people and apart from a shrewd head in regard to figures and money, isn’t very intelligent or cultured) to get irritated by the men’s behaviour and their desire to keep her in the drawing room and nursery.   Rhett is one of the few men who admires her for her brains and grit and willingness to work hard, but even so, he tends towards the end of the book to revert to a more conservative point of view about the South in general and its attitude to women.
He tries to curb Scarlett’s independence at times, to stop her from using her business interests to spend time with Ashley whom he knows she still loves.  He intrigues with Melanie, to get her to sell the mill, to Ashley.  He forces her into his bed, to stop her from thinking about Ashley.  He leaves her in the end because he now has stopped loving her and does not want her to be adoring him when he is not willing to reciprocate.  And because he is no longer rebelling against the southern codes in the way he used to be.  He wants to look for the old ways, and to remember the happier times when he was more in tune with the ways of his people…   He rejects Scarlett because she has identified with the Yankees and “not looking back at the past” and rejected the code of “Southern womanhood”, and he sees this as signs of her being shallow and vulgar and that she “will always be attracted to glister more than to gold”.
He doesn’t seem to accept her defence that if she had been “soft and sweet like a southern lady”, she would have lost Tara, left her family to starve and that her selfishness and hard work have saved them.
Scarlett is not a heroine. She is selfish and ruthless. She lacks understanding and education and has little to recommend her, except for toughness and willingness to work hard and to shoulder her own burdens and those of her family, even when she doesn’t like them.

In spite of criticisms of the undoubted racism, Gone with the Wind has always been loved and read mostly by women.  I believe that this is more to do with the portrayal of Scarlett as a woman who has to grow up too fast… and who in spite of the war, is able to use her abilities in a way that she would not have done otherwise.   Scarlett uses her femininity and sexuality to lure men into doing business with her, but she has plenty of “street smarts” and is willing to work hard, even picking cotton. Women readers may disagree with many of her methods but her courage and willingness to do what’s necessary, as she sees it. 

Nancy Mitford and gay characters

Nancy was the daughter of a “backwoods peer”, and one of family of aristocrats who were very well known, almost notorious, in British society in the 1920s and 1930s.  The family consisted of 6 daughters and one son.  Some of them sympathised with the fascist cause in the 30s and were friendly with Hitler and wished for the UK to join with Hitler and fight communism.  One daughter Jessica however became a Communist and married another young aristocrat who fought on the Red side during the Spanish Civil war.   Her sisters Diana and Unity were on the fascist side.  Diana married Oswald Mosley and Unity tried to kill herself when Germany and Britain were at war.

Nancy was somewhere in the middle on the political front.  She was mildly liberal as a young woman and tried her hardest to break away from the strict rule of her conservative father, Lord Redesdale, by going to Art School and trying to make a living writing novels and light journalism.  As she grew older she became more conservative, and she settled in France with a French Gaullist as her lover.

In her 20s she took part in social activities, but grew rather bored with the social round.  She fell in love with Hamish Erskine, a young gay aristocrat and seems to have blinded herself to his sexual nature and believed that they would marry.   They were engaged, but in the end, he grew fed up of trying to pretend he cared for Nancy as a woman and he broke off the engagement.  Nancy was nearing 30 and wanted to marry. So with a certain amount of desperation, she ended up marrying Peter Rodd, another rather lazy young man who was not likely to be a good provider.  Peter was said to be good natured but a terrible bore and incapable of holding down a job.  He didn’t have much family money behind him and Nancy ended up writing novels to support them.

Within a few years, the marriage was failing and Peter was unfaithful.   Nancy was struggling to keep up her optimistic viewpoint.
Word War II began and the divisions in the Mitford family were painfully exacerbated by it.  Nancy with Peter had done some refugee work in the South of France helping people who had escaped from Francoist Spain.  So she was ardently on the British side in the war and was shocked that Diana and Mosley were sympathetic to Nazism -even though both of them were willing to fight for England, when war was declared.  Nancy was truly sympathetic to the victims of fascism and was proud that Peter had joined up. 
Lady Redesdale, like Unity was not happy that Britain was at war with Germany, and she and Nancy disputed over this.   However Lord Redesdale did not agree with his wife.  He was an old fashioned Tory and regretted his brief sympathy with Germany and Hitler.  His wife continued to feel that Hitler wasn't so bad. 
 The elder Redesdales began to live apart although they remained married.  Lord Redesdale was unhappy about his 2 daughters who had involved themselves with the fascist cause.  

Nancy’s marriage improved for a time, while she and Peter were finding common cause over the war, but in due course, they began to spend time apart again.   Nancy began to do war work with the Free French in London, and through this work she met a young man who became her lover for a short time.  Peter turned up occasionally but spent most of his time with other women.   Then Nancy met Gaston Palewski, a Polish French officer, who was sympathetic with De Gaulle.  He was attracted to her, and she became his mistress.  She fell desperately in love with him, but for him, it was a light hearted wartime affair.

After the war, Nancy now aged 40, fell in love with France and decided to move there.  It was a big move for a woman approaching middle age but she convinced herself that France was a much nicer place than England.  She settled in Paris and continued her relationship with Paleswski,  though he made it clear that he did not want a permanent romance or marriage.  He was involved in politics on the Gaullist side and told her that they had to keep their affair very discreet and that he could never marry an English Protestant divorced woman.  He was however very openly involved with many other women. Nancy however continued to love him and excuse him for the constant infidelities.  She remained in France for the rest of her life, until the 1970s when she died of a painful cancer after many years of ill health and suffering.  She and Gaston never married.  But her love for him inspired her work. Eventually he married a woman who had given him a son, but who was divorced.  Nancy forgave him for this and they remained good friends to the end of her life. 

As a younger woman, she wrote light novels that were moderately successful about the “Bright young Things”.   After meeting Gaston, she began to write novels that were light and comedic but had a greater emotional depth.  They were more closely  based on her own family relationships.  Her father became “Fa” -the grumpy but lovable conservative backwoods, Lord Alconleigh.  And her siblings were portrayed as the crazy and charming Radlett family.   Linda, the heroine of “The Pursuit of Love” was partly based on her sister Diana’s earlier marital adventures and partly on Nancy’s own marriage and her affair with Gaston Palewski.   The novel and its successor “Love in a Cold Climate”, were extremely popular best sellers.
Some people don’t think highly of Mitford’s novels, that they are at best,  just light hearted froth about silly upper class characters with a conservative bias. But she was a sharp and witty writer, who, like Jane Austen, chose to write about the sort  of people she knew best, socialites rather than try writing about other classes.  And she was remarkably liberal for a woman born in Edwardian times, on the issue of homosexuality.  She had had a long standing engagement to a young man who was gay, and possibly, at that age did not fully understand his sexual orientation and that it meant that he was unlikely to truly wish to be married to her.  Later on, she portrayed characters such as Cedric Hampton, the gay aesthete who becomes heir to the Montdore title, with wit and sympathy. In her other novels, too, she is sympathetic to homosexuals, and tolerant and defends them against the idea that they are “sexually perverse”, saying that they “just prefer boys to girls”.

Words By Benedict Brooke

The words are there- let them bide

Came unanswered, days long lost,

Aye the times - the words are lost –

Don’t you remember how many you stole?

Dear Sweet wind?

Or whence they blew

On dusty carcasses of mind

All left unstrewn

You pruned the thorns,

Cut back the brambles

Where once they snagged

They spoke without understanding

And the meaning was laid bare

Though it was oft’ askew

Fallow ground now

Those desolate moors once left undesolate

As the tors tore the snags from the brambles…

I wrote poetry then

Found in these soft and fallow places

Shall that wind blow thence again?

The words are there, Time will bide…

Litany of Lawyers Comic Poem, Benedict Brooke

A litany of lawyers

Looking like Tom Sawyers

Twelve years old if they’re a day

Mischievous and creatin’

A rumpus and all statin’

“We guarantee, no fee, no win no pay!”!

They’re circling at my bedside

And someone at my headside,

Is guiding my hand to sign a contract

Saying “You need testimony

Then leave the rest to me...”

We’ll see you rich – and that’s a fact!”

“So you had a little accident,

This’ll be money well spent”

“Hold On, I thought you said no fee?”

“You’re gonna have your day in court,

Then just as an afterthought

“Now kindly sign your rights over to me…”

I guess that I’d been in a crash

Had a broken leg and some whiplash

Hold on, these guys said they came for free!

Now they’ve taken all I’ve got, and that wasn’t such a lot

They took my money, took my house and all my clothes in lieu

And all they said to me was “Thought you knew.”

A question Unanswered Benedict Brooke

Twas ‘twixt the jester and the joke

The wise man spoke but no one knew

The history of his sanity

Was virtually untrue

And then he sat with vacant eyes

The shadow of his own surprise

Whilst wisdom newly crowned

Downed another drink and said

“The beauty of being dead is only seen

By those who have once been

Somewhere on the other side-“

Yet isn’t it unfair to hide

The knowledge of one’s own passing?

And in the same breath he denied

Or was he the first man who lied?

That God had ever spoken to him

On some fine and wistful day

Of the majesty of sin...

Oscar Wilde Part III the impending doom

In 1895 Wilde had 4 plays running in the West End including his master work, the Importance of Being Earnest.  He was noted for his witty dialogue, his love of paradoxical statements which amused the audience, his charming upper class characters and the wit and humanity of his work.  He was a success, financially and socially.

 His marriage was still intact and he was a loving father, but he and Constance were no longer close.

 Within a few years of the marriage, Oscar had embarked on an affair with Robert Ross, a boy some years his junior.  Robbie had been born in France and his father was Canadian but he was educated in England and had ambitions to write.  (Ross later became his literary executor)

 Robbie was open about his sexuality even at college and is said to have seduced the older Oscar and to have been his first male lover. 

When Wilde had been at college himself, he had been aware of homosexuality and some of his friends had been involved in homoerotic relationships, but he himself had been more cautious or perhaps not fully aware of his own sexual nature.  But within a few years of his marriage, he had become disillusioned with heterosexual marriage, finding his wife unattractive and “falling out of love” with her.  He turned to Robbie Ross, who was unashamed of his sexual desires and perhaps he finally realised that he did not sexually love women.

In the 1890s, after meeting Alfred Douglas, he became more involved in a gay lifestyle. But he was heading toward disaster, and didn’t seem to realise that his new lover was unstable and involved in a bizarre family quarrel.  
John Sholto Douglas, Lord Queensbury was extremely eccentric and aggressive and unusually for an upper class man, had been divorced from his wife.  He was concerned about her spoiling Alfred and his sons’ getting into bad company.  He became increasingly upset when in 1894, his oldest son, Francis Viscount Drumlanrig died in a shooting accident.  It might have been accidental but there were rumours that Francis was involved in a sexual relationship with another man.  
He worked as private secretary to Lord Rosebery – and there were persistent rumours that Rosebery was bisexual.  So Francis may have killed himself because of this. 
Queensbury grew increasingly bad tempered and irrational and believed that “snob queers” like Rosebery had ruined his son.  He then began to obsess about Alfred’s friendship with Oscar Wilde, to believe that it was more than a friendship.  He started to storm about London, threatening his son and Wilde and Alfred fanned the flames of his father’s temper…

Queensbury was, in his own view, trying to save his younger son, already spoiled and selfish and extravagant, from the shame and decadence of an illegal relationship with Wilde. He began to follow the two men around, and planned to throw rotten vegetables at one of Oscar’s plays.   Wilde heard of the plan and managed to avert it, but then Queensbury left a card at his club, stating “To Oscar Wilde posing “somdomite”. (A spelling or handwriting mistake!).  Wilde, pressed by Alfred, decided to sue Queensbury for libel. 

Some of his friends tried to persuade him not to do this, but Bosie was eager to make his father look foolish and to upset and enrage the easily excited peer. He hated him.  Wilde too was finding Queensbury’s campaign problematic and embarrassing, and he was so enamoured of Bosie that he wanted to do whatever made his friend happy.

However the problem was that in essence, Queensbury’s attack was founded on truth.  It would have been wiser for Wilde to ignore the man’s behaviour, to tone down his own flamboyance and (as friends suggested) move abroad.

Wilde went into court, and was soon floundering under cross examination.  He lost the libel case, since it was proven that he had in fact been involved with a number of rent boys and that he had written love letters to Alfred Douglas... so having lost the case, he was forced to pay Queensbury’s legal costs, (which was the law at the time) and faced with the prospect that he might be charged with illicit sex with boys.

Kafka (VERY dark short story) Benedict Brooke

Kafka stood by the door, and smiled listlessly at the small and slightly crumpled cigarette that hung recalcitrantly on the lip of the ashtray. He shifted almost uneasily -as a telephone rang somewhere in the distance. Harsh and loud in the sombre night. He ran his tongue over his slightly cracked lips, not a cheering thought on a night like this. Coming to you like this, in the soft uneasy beat of footfalls and the odd creak of a warning door.

Loth as he was, there were worse crimes. He heard the vile coughing, as it staggered a little on the staircase.  The dull step of worn leather stumbling into a shuffle, and as he pushed himself deeper into the corner he saw the first snatch of patched overcoat. The moon glanced between the clouds and ran grimy fingers over the wall opposite the shattered casement window. The old guy slipped past him and he eased the blade out and upwards, feeling the warm hard impact of flesh and smelling him.  Tobacco, stale urine, and staler gin.  And all of a sudden fresh blood. Then stepping  back he heard the sound of his firmer steps, sliding on the corner of the stop landing, and then felt the fresh air as he broke free onto the shadowed roof... skipping now like a kid in play.  He could hear the metallic chatter of the fire escape, as he hastened onto the slick street where the ugly haze of neon slunk through the puddles, reflected from the brash pink sign of the club opposite.

He headed in a different direction, not where it was dark and might seem easier, but to the main street where taxis danced in the streetlights. He could almost smell their leather as they passed.

They had asked for Harry Martyr, but hadn’t been able to get him.  Not because he was expensive but because he was a Glasgow man and he had his children to think of.  So it was hard to get him to leave the sour redbrick streets of his hometown, where he lived, and knew the memories of his own childhood. He wanted to treat his kids to the same illicit stolen moments of grit and hard words. And he didn’t like to leave them... 

So -not being able to get Harry Martyr, they had got him instead.

Kafka (although his friends called him Michael) was different.  He had been Michael back in the old days, in their earlier lives, before they had found their alter egos.

He knew the man from the shop as Danny.  Danny with the old shabby suits and the hair that shuddered greyly over his brow. The rain had stopped as he met him by the old books that stank as badly as the man’s dirty old overcoat. It was not knowing the reason that did it, he supposed. Anyway, Danny didn’t know but it was now his turn. 

He had said “Kafka, it’s a dirty business and a world that’s full of traps and snares.  So don’t eat with them, even the best of them, or you might find yourself eating shit.”

He got the buff envelope off Danny first.  There was enough blood on the money, without adding his.  And now someone in Whitehall could rest easy.

The thunder irritated him, made his head heavy. The lightning seemed uneasily close to the neon – and he could see the old man’s blood as vividly as he had done before –

When he had opened the mail on that grey depressing morning... he had had an inkling that something was wrong.  The golden daybreaks of his youth had left him, and he would have been easier if he could have seen clearer. The hearse that rolled beneath his window, as he glanced into the street while pouring milk for his breakfast.

But no one saw him, not really.  The true reason why he had no wife.  Not his trade, but the emptiness of his vision.

He didn’t really register, as he walked the imaginary dog in the park, that Lucas was following him.  He knew Lucas as the spare lean guy in the pub, who watched women like a mongrel and wore an old tweed, and soup stains on what passed for a club tie.

Lucas greeted him shyly in the pub that lunchtime.  He laid a hand on his thigh, not looking... As he was prone to do with women and men alike.  Christ but the drink did taste good.  It was only when Lucas smiled like he knew something- that Kafka could see his mistake.

“Never let the bastards buy you a drink, or you might just find yourself drinking shit as well.”

Why hadn’t Danny told him that? As his eyes reached the floor, his body slumped off the barstool.  That was the final thing he thought, as Lucas gave that smile again, the last gasp of faded neon died from his eyes.  He saw the old man’s face, vivid as his blood, in the wild eyed tumbling of the previous night.

He should have known.  After all, he spent long enough looking for his father. 

Knowledge (By Benedict Brooke)

They asked the fool, amusedly,

As he fumbled for the door

“What do you want from tomorrow?

A drink, a fag, a whore?””

“The only thing that I require,”

He replied in some grief

“Is not to be called a liar,

And to know true belief.”

Oscar Wilde Part II

Within a few years of Oscar’s marriage, however he had begun to find his wife unattractive.  They had 2 sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, and Oscar felt that Constance’s pregnancies made her ill and unbeautiful.  The two of them had had interests in common, liberal social views, an interest in decorating and clothes... but it wasn’t long before Oscar’s essential sexual nature began to assert itself.  He drew away from his wife and embarked on an affair with Robbie Ross.   

His plays were increasingly successful and he was making good money, but his private life was on a slide.  He wrote his only novel Portrait of Dorian Grey, which attracted critical attention.  
Reviewers immediately criticised the novel's decadence and homosexual allusions.  Oscar revised it and cut some of the more controversial bits.  But the theme was intriguing, a beautiful young man wishes to keep his youthful good looks and he finds that he does so, but that his portrait of himself as young and beautiful man, becomes uglier and uglier, the more decadent and outrageous his behaviour becomes.  Eventually he commits murder and it becomes truly hideous.   When he is killed, however his face and body become vilely ugly and his portrait reverts to the youthful image.

The book shows some of Oscar’s preoccupations - with youthful beauty in men, with sin, with art… and while his “decadent behaviour” is never spelled out, it is probable that it’s intended to include homosexuality.   It was in 1891 he met Lord Alfred Douglas, who was the son of the Marquis of Queensbury.  Queensbury was a maverick peer, an agnostic, who was interested in boxing, and enjoyed mixing with prize fighters. He was not a conventional conservative minded aristocrat... He was a supporter of unusual causes, such as divorce and was separated and eventually divorced from his first wife, Alfred’s mother.          

Alfred, his second son, called Bosie, was singularly good-looking and a spoilt selfish young man.  Oscar was now aware of that his sexual orientation was not heterosexual, and there had been other relationships.  But he fell violently in love with Douglas.  By 1893, they were sexually involved and it was a passionate affair.  Wilde spent money on the younger man and adored him.  But Bosie was spoiled and hot tempered and demanding.  He introduced Wilde to the world of gay prostitution, which Oscar later described as “feasting with panthers.” 
It was dangerous high-risk behaviour, consorting with young working class men, who sold their bodies, and who often blackmailed their middle and upper class clients. Since homosexual activity was illegal -men with “something to lose” their jobs, their social position etc -were vulnerable, if they engaged in paid sex with these young men.  
The law had changed in 1885, and now all homosexual activity, not just sodomy was criminalised. 
The young men (who would now be called “rent boys”) were called “renters”, and Oscar behaved very indiscreetly with them.  He not only engaged in sex... He took them to dinner, gave them expensive gifts and attracted attention by his behaviour, In a very class conscious world, he was acting as if these boys were his social equals.  
Bosie too had his affairs and the two men seemed to enjoy the descent into the world of “underground  Homosexuality”.  As Oscar called it -“feasting with panthers” for him at least -some of the attraction was in the danger.  He knew that the behaviour was illegal and carried a prison sentence... He knew that these boys were always on the lookout for more money and were capable of blackmail, and yet he wrote letters which could be used as proof of an illegal relationship.

Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 Part I

In my student days I was a big fan of Oscar Wilde and enjoyed his plays, his poems and was very interested in his life.  The big drama of his downfall attracted my sympathy.  However I’m a middle aged lady now and I can see rather less to admire… there was a kind of wilful folly about him.

My partner who has just passed away, and whose poetry I have been posting... was also a fan.  but in latter years when we discussed Oscar, he would say that perhaps Oscar would have been a bit tiresome to live with, like Chandler in Friends or Hawkeye in MASH, constantly making jokes and expecting laughter.  I agreed, and felt that at times he seemed determined to be as stupid and wilful as possible....
Oscar was born in 1854, in Victorian Dublin, to a rather eccentric and literary minded lady called Jane Francesca Elgee, (her pen name was Speranza) and William Wilde, a doctor.  Wilde was an increasingly successful surgeon who specialised in eye complaints.  He was an intellectual who wrote about Irish history and mythology.  He operated on the King of Sweden and so gave the name Oscar to his second son.  Their first son was named Willie, and they also had a daughter Isola who died in childhood.  William Wilde was a womaniser who had several illegitimate children, and who often got involved in scandalous love affairs, including one with an eccentric patient Mary Travers.  Travers claimed that Wilde had raped her under anaesthetic and wrote a pamphlet publicising her “rape”.

Lady Wilde complained, and Mary brought an action for libel.  She won her case, but was only awarded a farthing in damages. She was seen as a slightly mad “woman scorned”. 

However the scandal affected the Wilde family and Sir William moved to the west of Ireland. After his death, the family were left badly off and Jane moved to London with her sons where she held a salon.

Initially the family were Anglo Irish, Protestants, comfortably middle class at a time when the native Irish were poor, and increasingly discontented with British rule.

Oscar was a highly intelligent young man, who went to Trinity College Dublin and then to Oxford. He believed that he could make his fortune, writing. His older brother became a journalist and Jane also wrote.  She was sympathetic to the Irish nationalist cause. Perhaps because of this, Oscar was always interested in Catholicism…

He had studied under Ruskin and Pater, and was devoted to the Aesthetic Movement and believed that books were not written to point a moral, and that they were to be judged on how well they were written, not on whether they were a bad or good influence on readers.  He made a living from his pen, with poetry and journalism.  He then undertook a lecture tour of America where he received mixed reviews.  He began to write plays and in 1884 he was doing well enough to consider marriage. He met Constance Lloyd -a very lovely young woman who had a modest fortune of her own and they married in late 1884.

The Oscar Wildes were expensive in their tastes and decorated their new house in Tite Street, Chelsea, beautifully but extravagantly.  Wilde had a post as editor of a woman’s journal “Woman’s World.”  He had liberal views, being a supporter of Irish Home Rule (Unlike many Anglo Irish) and an interest in socialism. 

Beaches in Winter short poem Benedict Brooke

I’m walking along the sea shore

And I hear waves, and gulls crying

And the voices of children

That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

Except that I don’t mind the gulls and the seashore,

But I’ve never been keen on children

There’s a pub up the road,

And a little brief escape.

I like beaches in the winter

White, swollen surf and the sound of gulls crying

And hearts being broken and pretending to mend

And a pub up the road…