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London Letter by Beverley Baxter

Has Oscar Wilde's Crime been Redeemed?

(Drawing from VRIENDSCHAP, Amsterdam)

OSCAR WILDE

T IS Saturday morning in late autumn. My garden is covered with dead leaves although in some mysterious way a gallant remnant of flowers is holding out like the Guards at Waterloo. Yellow chrysanthemums, blush-red dahlias and Michaelmas daisies . . . There is a lovely melancholy about these lingerers, as though they were missing their companions but loath to follow them.

But now we shall leave this old-world garden in St. John's Wood for I must make my way to Tite Street in Chelsea where hundred or so of us are going to watch the unveiling of a plaque placed by the door of one of the houses there. Let us take the bus to de Park Corner, then dismount and make our way on foot to Chelsea via Constitution Hill, Buckingham Palace and the Embankment.

London has never looked more lovely. It ages so beautifully with the dying year that even the dead leaves seem a carpet to soften the path for our feet.

Hello! Here's a troop of Household Cavalry trotting up Constitution Hill. So perfectly are they drilled that the horses seem in step, and heaven help the miscreant who showed daylight between the saddle and his posterior.

It might have been Brussels in 1815 instead of London in 1954, with a troop jingling its way to Waterloo on the eve of the battle. I suppose these fellows are Bill Smith of Peckham, Tom Jones of Cardiff and Harry Brown of Margate who live in fear of the sergeantmajor and their wives, but they look terrific to me.

mattachine REVIEW

Writing in Maclean's Magazine, the Canadian 1 national weekly, London Columnist Bever ley Baxter not long ago told another chapter in the present-day reappraisal of Oscar Wilde. His crime has been redeemed, Baxter says. This story of the honor bestowed upon a man' regarded as infamous a half century ago is retold here because accusations of homosexuality, made against Wilde probably marked a height in British courts in the late, Victorian age. This makes the honor bestowed loom as a significant change in attitude.

Now we are at the gates of Buckingham Palace. A youthful Grenadier Guardsman with a rosy complexion marches up and down, stamping terrifically as he makes an about-turn. Nor does he show the slightest interest in the Americans snapping him with cameras at a range of a few inches.

At the palace gate a London bobby politely answers questions from the tourists. I asked him what kind of things they wanted to know. "Mostly what bus they should take to get some place or other." There is nothing like a London bobby to reduce romance to its proper level.

In a few minutes we shall be in Chelsea, that sanctuary of pensioners and poets. Old soldiers in their scarlet coats and cocked hats live out their days in good companionship and in gratitude to Nell Gwynne who persuaded Charles II to do something for the pensioners when their days of fighting were over.

Here we are in Tite Street, and there is quite a crowd. I can see Sir Compton Mackenzie who wields his pen like a sword, and near him is Dame Edith Evans who has no claims to beauty of any sort but is our greatest actress. Just beside her with an untidy beard and watery eye is Augustus John, the sculptor. The little man beside him, looking rather like a timid librarian, is the American-born T. S. Eliot, who has become the most successful dramatist in our theatre.

Near them I see the handsome face of Lord Cecil Douglas, He has an artificial leg to replace the one he