It seems that many people have lied about Wilde in their time, and one can only put this down to the many contradictions in the information that we have about him. However, maybe the following anecdote told by Ford Madox Ford does not necessarily contradict his reputation for boldness: after leaving prison, and during his final years in Paris, Wilde was frequently the butt of student jibes when he walked through Montmartre. An apache called Bibi La Touche, accompanied by some other thugs, used to come over to him and tell him that he had taken a fancy to Wilde’s ebony walking-stick, with its ivory inlays and its handle in the shape of an elephant, and that, if Wilde did not surrender it immediately, he would be murdered on his way home. According to Ford, Wilde would then weep, the tears pouring down his great cheeks, and invariably surrender his stick. The following morning, the apaches would return it to his hotel, only to demand it again a few days later. Maybe all the legends are true, bearing in mind how much Wilde, the ex-convict, had changed. Perhaps he had learned to be afraid in prison, and he was, at any rate, a man prematurely aged, with only what money his most faithful friends could find for him, too lazy to work (that is, to write), exasperatingly querulous and faintly comic. During this period, he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, published only his famous Ballad of Reading Gaol, grew ever deafer, had coarse, reddened skin and walked as if his feet hurt him, leaning always on that much-stolen stick. His clothes were not as resplendent as they had been in the past, and he had succumbed at last to the obesity that had stalked him for so long; in a photo taken of him standing in front of St Peter’s in Rome, three years before his death, his whole figure is dominated and made ludicrous by a minuscule hat that cruelly emphasises his very large head, the head which, in his youth, had been crowned by long, artistic locks and capacious plumed hats.
The only thing he did not lose was his gift for conversation, and they say that he presided over gatherings and suppers with the same firm hand and rich variety of anecdote as he had during his years of greatest glory in London, the years when he was a playwright. It was not just that he came out with endless witticisms, invented improbable puns, and improvised maxims each more brilliant than the last, it seems that he was also an extraordinary teller of tales, far better than he ever was as a writer. At any social event, he was the one who talked, the only one, and yet, whenever he was alone with someone, that person always had the feeling that he had never been listened to with more attention, interest and pity, if pity was what was required. It is true that, as regards his wordplay, he was often accused of plagiarism: Pater, it was claimed, or Whistler or Shaw, had said the same thing before him. This was doubtless true in many instances (he certainly imitated Whistler, whom he at first revered and with whom he later fell out), but the fact is that his ingenious comments, whoever they may originally have belonged to, only became famous when spoken by him.
Wilde’s bisexuality is a proven fact, although the scandal of his trials tends to make one think of him as the pure apostle and modern proto-martyr of homosexuality. However, not only did he marry Constance Lloyd, with whom he had two children, there has been much talk of the syphilis he caught from a female prostitute in his youth and of an early disappointment with a young Irishwoman whom he courted doggedly for two years, at the end of which time she married Bram Stoker. (One can only conclude, incidentally, that the young woman in question had a taste for strong emotions, and, having hesitated between the future authors of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula, she opted, in the end, for immortal vampirism rather than a pictorial and not very enduring pact with the Devil.) And several of his friends and acquaintances were amazed when the scandal broke and they learned what the charges were: they would never have suspected him of such proclivities, they said, despite Wilde’s repeated professions of Hellenism from his student days on and ever since his trip to Greece, which resulted in a photograph of the traveller in full-skirted local dress and in his formal embrace of paganism, to the detriment of the Catholicism he had been considering taking up shortly before. He had even adorned his rooms at Oxford with pictures of the Pope and of Cardinal Manning, but when he actually visited the former, at an audience in Rome arranged by his extremely Catholic and extremely wealthy friend Hunter Blair, he maintained a sullen silence throughout and thought the whole encounter dreadful; afterwards, he closeted himself in his hotel room and emerged bearing an apposite sonnet. The worst came later: as they were passing the Protestant cemetery, Wilde insisted on stopping and prostrating himself before the grave of Keats, a far humbler obeisance than he had offered to the very pious Pius IX.
Little is known of Constance Lloyd Wilde, except that she viewed her husband with a mixture of disapproval and sweetness. On the other hand, a great deal is known about Lord Alfred Douglas, or “Bosie”, thanks largely to the various books he himself wrote during his long life (he died in 1945 at the age of seventy-five), divided equally between poetry and volumes of more or less autobiographical and justificatory prose. As a young man he was long on ringlets and short on intelligence, and, in later years, he lost the ringlets, but gained not a jot in intelligence: he became a Catholic and a puritan, and his judgement about what happened seems confused to say the least. It was his fate to live for far too long marked by a scandal in which he was only the reluctant co-protagonist, but he never did anything to justify his taking centre stage for any other reason. Two years after Wilde’s death, he married a poetess, and so one might say that he made an odd marriage—of versifiers. His bête noire was Robert Ross, who not only manipulated and kept the long letter that Wilde had written to “Bosie” from prison and which is now known as De Profundis, but was the remote instigator of that whole tragedy, having initiated the youthful Wilde into sex in its most Hellenistic vein.
Wilde’s witticisms are legion, and most have found too warm a reception in quotation heaven to repeat them here. Indeed, even now, he is attributed with ingenious comments that never even occurred to him. This description of a hard day in a writer’s life is, however, definitely his: “This morning,” he said, “I took out a comma, and this afternoon, I put it back again.”
Later, he seemed to take these words literally, after leaving the prison in which he had spent two years doing hard labour. Although it was clear that if he wrote a new comedy or a novel, money would rain down on him and his poverty would be at an end, he had neither the strength nor the will to write. As he put it, he had known suffering and could not sing its praises; he hated it, but he had known it, and that is why he could not now sing the praises of what had always hitherto inspired him: pleasure and joy. “Everything that happens to me,” he said, “is symbolic and irrevocable.” During those years, André Gide described him as “a poisoned creature”. He drank too much, which further irritated the reddened skin of his face and body: he often had to scratch himself, for which he apologised. He wrote to a friend: “I am more like a great ape than ever, I hope you will give me a lunch and not a nut.”
Six years before his fall from grace, he had written this: “Life sells everything too dear, and we buy the most wretched of its secrets at a monstrous, infinite price.” He stopped paying that price on November 30, 1900, when he died in Paris at the age of forty-six, after a death agony that lasted more than two months. The cause of his death was an ear infection which later spread and was vaguely syphilitic in origin. Legend has it that shortly before he died, he called for champagne and, when it was brought it to him, said cheerfully: “I am dying beyond my means.” He lies in the Paris cemetery of Père Lachaise, and on his grave, presided over by a sphinx, there is never any shortage of the flowers due to all martyrs.
Yukio Mishima i
n Death
THE DEATH OF Yukio Mishima was so spectacular that it has almost succeeded in obliterating the many other stupid things he did in his life, as if his previous non-stop exhibitionism had been merely a way of getting people’s attention for the culminating moment, doubtless the only one that really interested him. That, at least, is how we must see it, as coming from his deep-rooted fascination with violent death, which—if the victim was young and had a good body—he considered to be the height of beauty. It is true that this idea was not entirely original to him, still less in his country, Japan, where, as we know, there has always been a highly respected tradition of ceremonial self-disembowelment followed immediately by decapitation with a single blow delivered by a friend or subordinate. Not so very long ago, at the end of the Second World War, no fewer than five hundred officers (as well as a fair number of civilians) committed suicide as a way of “taking responsibility” for the defeat and “presenting their apologies to the Emperor”. Among them was a friend of Mishima’s, Zenmei Hasuda, who, before honouring “the culture of my country, which, I am sure, approves of those who die young” and blowing his brains out, still had time to murder his immediate superior for having criticised the divine Emperor. Perhaps it is understandable that twenty-five years later, the Japanese army was, as Mishima put it, still depressed, vulnerable, and incapable of hitting back.
His desire for death, born at an early age, was not, however, indiscriminate, and while one can understand his terror of being poisoned, since death by such means could hardly be called “beautiful”, it is not so easy to explain why, in 1945, when he was called up at the age of twenty, he took advantage of a temporary fever brought on by a bout of flu to lie to the army doctor examining him and to present him with a list of fictitious symptoms that prompted the doctor to make an erroneous diagnosis of incipient tuberculosis and to exempt him from military service. Not that Mishima was unaware of the implications this had for the veracity of his ideals: on the contrary, in his famous autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask, he pondered this matter very pompously and at great length. As one would expect from a man of considerable cunning, he finally came up with an aesthetic justification for having avoided what he, in principle, desired so much (namely: “What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky …”) and he concluded that “I much preferred to think of myself instead as a person who had been forsaken even by Death … I delighted in picturing the curious agonies of a person who wanted to die but had been refused by Death. The degree of mental pleasure I thus obtained seemed almost immoral.” Whatever the truth, the fact is that Mishima did not undergo any great or strange sufferings until the day of his real death, and that, when the time came, he had, thanks to pure ignorance, all his strength and determination intact. Prior to this, though, his fear of being poisoned was so obsessive that, whenever he went to a restaurant, he would only order dishes that did not lend themselves to poisoning and, after eating, would frantically brush his teeth with soda water.
None of this prevented him from fantasising as much as he wanted, not only about his own erotic (i.e., violent) extinction, but about that of many other fictional beings, all of them extremely good-looking: “The weapon of my imagination slaughtered many a Grecian soldier, many white slaves of Arabia, princes of savage tribes, hotel elevator boys, waiters, young toughs, army officers, circus roustabouts … I would kiss the lips of those who had fallen to the ground and were still twitching.” Needless to say, he also enjoyed his share of cannibalistic daydreams, whose favourite object was a rather athletic school friend: “I thrust the fork upright into the heart. A fountain of blood struck me full in the face. Holding the knife in my right hand, I began carving the flesh of his breast, gently, thinly at first …” One assumes that in these alimentary imaginings he must, fortunately, have lost his fear of being poisoned.
This erotic fascination with manly bodies tortured, dismembered, flayed, butchered or impaled had marked Mishima since adolescence. He was immodest enough as a writer to ensure that posterity was kept au fait with his ejaculations, from which one must deduce that he lay great store by them; and so we are obliged to know that he had his first ejaculation whilst contemplating a reproduction of the torso of St Sebastian whom Guido Reni had painted pierced with arrows. It is therefore not surprising that, as an adult, he was given to having artistic-cum-muscleman photographs taken of himself, and that he appeared in one of them in the same garb, that is, with a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins and with a couple of arrows stuck in his sides, his arms aloft and his wrists bound with rope. This last detail is not without importance, given that his favourite masturbatory image (which he was also kind enough to record) were armpits, very hairy and, one fears, very smelly. This famous photograph must, therefore, have served his narcissism well.
Other photographs which he bequeathed to the more infantile enthusiasts of calendar sex were no less comic: Mishima standing before a large mirror, gazing at his own rather puny chest; Mishima with a pyromaniac glint in his eye and a white rose in his mouth; Mishima doing weight-training in order to develop some decent biceps; Mishima half-naked and pulling in his stomach, with a bandanna around his head, a samurai sword in his hands, and an expression on his face that verges on the apoplectic; Mishima wearing a paramilitary uniform, which is surprisingly restrained given that he himself dreamed up the design for his own private army, the Tatenokai. He also acted in his own films or in B-movies about yakuza or Japanese gangsters; he recorded songs and made a record on which he played all forty characters in one of his own plays. He was so concerned about his image that he always made sure that in any photo in which he appeared alongside much taller men, he was the one who looked like a giant.
One should not infer, however, that Yukio Mishima spent his life worrying only about such folkloric nonsense. He must also have written non-stop, for at his death he left over one hundred volumes, and it is known that he wrote one of them, eighty pages long, while holed up in a hotel in Tokyo for just three days. To all this activity must be added his campaign of self-promotion, which took him on numerous trips to Europe and America and caused him to attempt a carefully planned, but ill-fated bit of stage-management when, in 1967, it was rumoured that the Nobel Prize was about to be given to a Japanese author for the first time. He organised his return from a tour to coincide with the date on which the decision would be announced, and reserved a VIP suite in a downtown hotel. However, when the plane landed and he was the first to emerge, laughing and smiling, he found the airport plunged in gloom because the prize had gone to some wretched Guatemalan. A year later, his depression only deepened: the Nobel Prize did, at last, go to Japan, but to his friend and teacher Yasunari Kawabata. Mishima opted for a bit of reflected glory: he rushed to Kawabata’s house so as to be the first to be seen congratulating him and at least appear in the photos. Needless to say, Mishima considered himself to be not only worthy of the Nobel Prize but—quite simply—a genius. “I want to identify my literary work with God,” he said once to an extreme right-wing fanatic, who was, perhaps, accustomed to such delusions of grandeur.
According to those who knew him, Mishima was an extremely likeable man with a lively sense of humour, although his laugh was wild and strident and he was rather too prodigal with it. He had few relationships with women, apart from his grandmother (who, to the despair of her daughter-in-law, practically kidnapped him at birth), his mother, his sister, his wife, and his daughter, the essential female elements not even a misogynist can dispense with. He married because of a false alarm: his mother was believed to be dying of cancer, and Mishima thought he would make
a last gift to her by marrying: she would die more peacefully knowing that the family line would be continued. Her cancer turned out to be a mere phantom and she went on to survive her son, but by the time Mishima learned about the first of these facts, he was already married to Yoko Sugiyama, a young woman from a good family, who, one assumes, fulfilled the six prerequisites that the bridegroom had stipulated to the matchmakers: the bride should be neither a blue-stocking nor a celebrity hunter; she must wish to be married to Kimitake Hiraoka (his real name), the private citizen, not to Yukio Mishima, the writer; she should be no taller than her husband, even in high heels; she must be pretty and have a round face; she must be prepared to look after her parents-in-law and be capable of running the home efficiently; lastly, she must not disturb Mishima while he was working. The truth is that little more is known of her after the wedding, although the writer’s hagiographers (among them the gushing and later gushed over Marguerite Yourcenar) described excitedly how Mishima often took Yoko with him on his trips abroad, which was not the custom among Japanese men of his day. With that, in the view of Yourcenar and others, he had apparently done his duty: after all, he could easily have left her at home.
It was in the latter period of his life that Mishima created the paramilitary organisation Tatenokai, to which he liked to refer by its English initials, the SS (Shield Society). It was a small army of a hundred men, tolerated and encouraged by the Japanese Armed Forces. The one hundred men were mostly students and staunch admirers, devoted to the Emperor and to Japan’s most ancient traditions. For a time, they restricted themselves to camping expeditions, tactical exercises, pseudomilitary manoeuvres, and to cutting themselves in order to mingle and drink each other’s blood. Their first and last real action took place on November 25, 1970, when Mishima and four of his acolytes presented themselves in their mustard-brown uniforms at the Ichigaya base in Toyko. They had an appointment there with General Mashita, to whom they were going to pay their respects and show a valuable antique Samurai sword, doubtless well worth seeing. Once in the general’s office, the five fake soldiers tied his hands, barricaded themselves in, brandishing knives and swords, and demanded that the troops should gather underneath the balcony to listen to a speech by Mishima. Some unarmed officers (the Japanese army is not allowed to use arms against civilians) tried to overpower them and were badly cut (Mishima almost sliced off the hand of a sergeant). When he managed, at last, to address the troops, his words were not exactly well received: the soldiers kept interrupting him by hurling insults like “Kiss my ass!” or “Bakayaro! ”, which is difficult to translate, although it seems the closest equivalent would be “Go screw your own mother!” (Some people, however, say that it means nothing more than “dimwit”.)
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