Monday 25 May 2009

Robbie Ross

Here's a birthday well worth marking. Robbie Ross, the bravest, most loyal and most admirable of the Oscar Wilde circle, was born on this day in 1869. Here was a man who had the almost unimaginable courage to 'come out' to his family in the 1880s, and who made no attempt to disguise his sexuality among the hearties of Cambridge - who duly dunked him in a fountain and gave him pneumonia. Nothing unusual in that, sadly, but what came next was extraordinary - Ross not only forced a public apology from the offenders, but mounted a vigorous (failed) campaign against the don who had supported them. Later, when virtually all the 'friends' of Oscar Wilde (including, deplorably, Walter Sickert) were shunning and disowning him after his public disgrace, Ross remained steadfast to the end - indeed to the deathbed. This loyalty provoked a long campaign of vilification from the odious Lord Alfred Douglas (and Ross was also publicly persecuted by the deranged Noel Pemberton Billing). But Ross's greatest and most lasting achievement was as Wilde's literary executor, rescuing his scattered writings, buying up copyrights, sorting out the genuine from the fake, and establishing a definitive edition of the Wilde canon. Then, with typical selflessness, he gave away all earnings and future rights in the works to Oscar's sons. I don't think the category 'gay hero' does any favours to anyone, but if ever there was a man who deserved the title, it was surely Robbie Ross.

8 comments:

  1. As ever, Nigeness provides a peerles public information service - the name meant nothing to me. Selfless heroes get forgotten too easily I suppose.

    Intriguing opening claim in his Wiki entry though: he "brought together Siegfried Sassoon", apparently.

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  2. I had thought that you were about to refer to the wayward understrapper in the Taggart 'tec stories on the telly.

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  3. Ah yes - the ironically named wayward understrapper!

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  4. I didn't know this about Sickert but my uninformed guess is that it was part of a malign make-up. I recently went to the show of his Venice paintings at Dulwich, not having seen very much of his work. I found the experience rather creepy - he seemed to want to repeatedly paint the colours of a bruise, regardless of the subject matter.

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  5. Yes poor old Sickert - there does seem to be a whiff of brimstone about him - he's even been in the frame for the Ripper murders. I found the Venice show fascinating (posted on it in fact), but yes he's certainly more convincing when he's painting the dark side of the city rather than the light. He was a more or less permanent fixture in Dieppe when Wilde landed there straight from prison, and took care to shun him - most likely to stay in with Dieppe 'society' (which didn't seem to mind his long-standing relationship with a fishwife in the old town). A strange man - but I think our best painter of the period.

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  6. Thanks Nige. I'll look up your review - must have gone up before I started on this blogging thing.

    I happened to have given my impression of the show whilst on a Pooterish day trip here.

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  7. Don't you think people tend to live up (or down) to their names? "Sick" is in Sickert's name. And Wilde IS Oscar's name, though I agree that his imagination made him wildest of all. There's a new book out by a fellow who read everything Wilde read and even got his rooms at Cambridge...this is his contention. Wilde's wild life overshadowed his intellectual and artistic brilliance.

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  8. Thanks for highlighting this important tidbit from Oscar Wilde's era. I have given much thought to Wilde's fall from grace (if that might be an appropriate characterization), and it seems to me his appalling failure to understand the court system was the catalyst for his problems. When Wilde chose to litigate against his detractor(s), he ought to have had better legal advice from someone who could have told him that the truth is not always the prevailing factor in the courts where political correctness and corruption often would trump facts and common sense.

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