by Jim Bernhard
OSCAR WILDE
“I put all of my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” So said Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, who was born in Dublin, October 16, 1854, with a name as flamboyant as his later lifestyle. Second of three children, Wilde was tutored at home in the classics by his parents, an eye surgeon and his poet wife. After three years at the University of Dublin, he matriculated at Oxford, where he was tutored by such big academic guns as Walter Pater and John Ruskin, winning a degree in classics with “double first-class honours.” His stellar achievement elicited this comment in a letter to a friend, “The dons are ‘astonied’ beyond words—the Bad Boy doing so well at the end.” At Oxford, he espoused the theory of aestheticism, which idealized beauty over social or political content in art. He wore his hair unfashionably long, decorated his room with peacock feathers and flowers, and dressed like a dandy in knee breeches; a flowing tie; velvet coat; wide, turned-down collar; and a drooping lily.
Settling in London, Wilde published a book of poems, worked as a journalist, became editor of The Woman’s World magazine, and in 1881 married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Queen’s Counsel, with whom he had two sons. In 1882, he embarked upon a year-long lecture tour of more than a hundred cities in the United States, sponsored by Richard D’Oyly Carte to promote his American production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, a parody of the aesthetic movement with which Wilde was closely identified. Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a young man whose aging is transferred to a portrait, was inspired by aestheticism.
By 1886, Wilde’s marriage had begun to fray, and at the same time he was fatefully seduced into a homosexual affair by Robert Ross, a seventeen-year-old admirer. Through Ross, Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensberry—the same British peer who invented the rules of modern boxing. Wilde and Douglas, who was known as “Bosie,” began an affair that lasted for years, involving Wilde in the sordid world of homosexual prostitution, and resulting ultimately in his imprisonment.
Wilde was also becoming widely known as the West End’s leading boulevard dramatist. Between 1891 and 1895, there were productions of Salome, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and Wilde’s comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest.
The feisty Marquess of Queensberry vehemently opposed the relationship between his son and Wilde. On one occasion, the Marquess—full of vitriol, but low on spelling skills—left his calling card at Wilde’s club addressed to “Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].” Homosexual acts, officially referred to as sodomy, were illegal in Britain, and Wilde filed a libel suit against Queensberry. This proved to be an unfortunate tactic, and at the trial, evidence was produced to show the truth of Queensberry’s assertions, resulting in Wilde’s prosecution for “gross indecency” and imprisonment for two years.
When he was released in May of 1897, Wilde went to France, began calling himself Sebastian Melmoth, and though impoverished, managed to indulge in promiscuous sex and heavy consumption of absinthe. When told by doctors that the absinthe would kill him, he replied, “I am dying as I lived, beyond my means.” At this low point of his life, Wilde might well have recalled what he said of death in The Canterville Ghost, his first published story:
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.
Scraping a living from the small stipend sent to him by his estranged wife, the aptly named Constance, Wilde was reduced to making his home in a single room in Paris’s modest Hôtel d’Alsace in the rue des Beaux-Arts. When Constance died in 1898, following a fall, Wilde relied upon friends. A typical day started at eleven o’clock with breakfast, followed by lunch at two o’clock, drinks at the Café de la Régence at five o’clock, and supper after midnight at the Café de Paris. The owner of the Alsace, Jean Dupoirier, supplied Wilde with five bottles of Courvoisier cognac each week. Dupoirier said that a liter would hardly last him through the night.
Despite his dissipation, Wilde did manage to write a poetic account of prison life, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and to prepare An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest for publication, before falling ill in October of 1900 with an ear infection, caused by a perforated eardrum he had suffered in prison. To relieve the condition, Dr. Maurice A’Court Tucker, the British Embassy’s physician, advised a mastoidectomy, which was done in his hotel room on October 10.
Wilde telegraphed his old lover, Robert Ross, “Terribly weak. Please come.” While recuperating, Wilde said of his surroundings, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to go.” By November, the infection had spread to his brain and developed into cerebral meningitis. Morphine would no longer stop his pain, so Wilde tried opium, chloral hydrate, and generous slugs of champagne. Ross finally arrived on November 29. He found Wilde “thin, his flesh livid, his breathing heavy,” and with a two-week growth of beard.
Wilde, who had been baptized in the Protestant Church of Ireland, but had flirted with Roman Catholicism all his life—he said it “is the only religion to die in”—wanted to see a Catholic priest. Ross, who was a Catholic, found Father Cuthbert Dunne, an Irish priest of the Passionist order, who came to Wilde’s room and presided over his deathbed conversion. Dunne administered conditional baptism and extreme unction to Wilde, but because he was semi-comatose, he did not attempt to give him communion. Even so, Dunne was satisfied that the dying man was lucid enough to assent to the basics of the Catholic faith.
The next day, November 30, Ross and another friend reported they heard grinding sounds from Wilde’s throat, and a nurse dabbed blood coming from his mouth. His pulse weakened, and Oscar Wilde died at 1:50 p.m., at the age of forty-six. His corpse was dressed in a white nightshirt and covered in a white sheet and palm branches. The accumulated bill for his four-month stay at the hotel was £200, which was never paid.
The cause of Wilde’s meningitis has been much debated. Some thought it was a result of syphilis, but others blamed a botched mastoidectomy. Wilde’s own physician simply attributed it to complications of the old eardrum injury.
Bosie arrived on December 2 for the funeral the next day. A requiem mass was celebrated by Dunne in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with fifty-six people in attendance, and Wilde was given a pauper’s burial in the remote Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris. In 1909, his old friend Ross came up with funds to move his remains to Père Lachaise Cemetery.
In 1913, Ross commissioned the noted sculptor Jacob Epstein to design a monument. The modernist work was in the form of a nine-foot nude “demon-angel” whose genitalia were so prominent that the cemetery manager insisted they be covered in plaster. A year later, Ross substituted a bronze butterfly for the plaster. The butterfly was stolen, and for decades thereafter the exposed pendulous testicles were regarded as tokens of good luck for visitors to Wilde’s tomb, and became shiny from frequent rubbing. In 1961, two Englishwomen walking in the cemetery were so offended by the statuary that they hacked off the testicles and took them to the cemetery office, where they were used as paperweights. Today, the desexed monument is protected from further vandalism by a glass barrier. It bears an inscription from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
The Modern Era
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Author of sixty-three plays, critic of music and literature, Socialist reformer, co-founder of the London School of Economics, and the only person ever to win both the Nobel Prize for literature and an Oscar, George Bernard Shaw began his long, productive life on July 26, 1856, in Dublin, the youngest of three children of a corn merchant and a concert singer.
He attended a Methodist grammar sc
hool, Central Model School, and, finally, the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. He said of his schooling that he “had learned little and was largely self-educated.” He worked in Dublin as a clerk for a real estate company, and when he was twenty, he went to London to join his mother, who had abandoned the Shaw household three years earlier to live with a conductor and music teacher named Vandeleur Lee. Young Shaw wrote several novels, which were rejected by publishers, then began to earn a modest living working for the Edison Telephone Company while also writing music reviews.
He lost his virginity on his twenty-ninth birthday to a lusty Irish widow who was a family friend, evidently a very close one. Thereafter, Shaw was infatuated with numerous women, including the actresses Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick (Stella) Campbell, but by most accounts his only other sexual experience was with an actress named Florence Farr. Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a well-to-do fellow Socialist in the Fabian Society, but, owing to her fear of pregnancy at age forty-one, their marriage was never consummated during its forty-five years.
Beginning with a production of Widowers’ Houses, Shaw began to write popular comedies with social and political messages. Among the most notable are Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra (all in the 1890s), Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Misalliance, Androcles and the Lion, Pygmalion, Back to Methuselah, Saint Joan, and The Apple Cart (all between 1900 and 1929). Recognized as the leading English-speaking playwright, he won the Nobel Prize in 1925 and the Oscar in 1938 (for the screenplay of Pygmalion). Shaw declined all other honors, including the offer of a knighthood.
A teetotaler, a nonsmoker, and, in his later years, a vegetarian, he led an ascetic life. He continued to write plays, essays, and political pamphlets, and voluminous correspondence with his platonic lovers and others—an astonishing 250,000 letters are attributed to him, or an average of about ten a day for his adult life.
Shaw’s interests were centered on the present life, and very little serious attention is given in his works to notions of personal immortality. In his youth, he called himself an atheist—“I am an atheist, and I thank God for it,” he allegedly said. But in later life, he espoused a kind of mystical evolutionary theology, sparked by a “Life Force,” and based partly on the Creative Evolution promulgated by Henri Bergson and partly on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of a “Superman.” Shaw argued in a speech called “The New Theology”:
I do not want to be uncomplimentary, but can you conceive God deliberately creating you if he could have created anything better? What you have got to understand is that somehow or other there is at the back of the universe a will, a life-force. You cannot think of him as a person, you have to think of him as a great purpose, a great will, and, furthermore, you have to think of him as engaged in a continual struggle to produce something higher and higher, to create organs to carry out his purpose; as wanting hands, and saying, ‘I must create something with hands’; arriving at that very slowly, after innumerable experiments and innumerable mistakes, because this power must be proceeding as we proceed, because if there were any other way it would put us in that way: we know that in all the progress we make we proceed by way of trial and error and experiment.
The possibilities of Heaven and Hell did emerge in his work—but it was tongue-in-cheek, as in the exchange between Don Juan and Dona Ana in the Don Juan in Hell section of Man and Superman:
ANA: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough reality on earth.
DON JUAN: Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. . . . But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. . . .
ANA: But if Hell be so beautiful as this, how glorious must heaven be! . . .
DON JUAN: In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are your glory. . . . Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation. . . .
ANA: Is there nothing in Heaven but contemplation, Juan?
DON JUAN: In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. . . .
Shaw’s long life came to an end in 1950 at the age of ninety-four at his home, known as Shaw’s Corner, in Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire. On September 10, he had fallen from a ladder while pruning a tree. He was taken to a nearby hospital and underwent surgery for a fractured thigh. The trauma reinflamed a chronic infection in his bladder and kidneys, and more surgery was done to alleviate that condition. He returned home, but the infection worsened, and by late October, he was in a much-weakened condition.
In his final days, Shaw was visited by the Reverend R. G. Davies, the local Anglican vicar, who said prayers over the non-believer. “It is wrong to say that he was an atheist,” Davies later said. “I would call him rather an Irishman. He believed in God.”
At three o’clock in the morning on November 1, Shaw fell into a coma and never regained consciousness. With only his two nurses at his bedside, he expired at 4:59 a.m. on November 2. Later that morning, his housekeeper, Alice Laden, dressed in black, appeared at the gate and told waiting reporters, “Mr. Shaw is dead.”
Shaw had left instructions that there be no religious service and that his tombstone not “take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.” Nonetheless, the vicar conducted a five-minute service at Shaw’s Corner, attended by several local parishioners.
For his cremation at the local Welwyn chapel, Shaw had instructed that no clergymen be present and that two of his favorite musical compositions should be played: “We Are the Music-Makers,” a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy set to music by Elgar, and “Libera Mea” from Verdi’s “Requiem.” It was his wish that his ashes be mixed with those of his wife, Charlotte, who had died seven years earlier, and then scattered in their garden.
Shaw’s will left a sizeable sum to promote a phonetic alphabet he had invented. In a ruling that probably would have infuriated him, a court ruled this project was “impossible” and ordered the money distributed instead to the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the National Gallery of Ireland.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Sherlock Holmes may have been a highly rational detective whose methods depended on close empirical observation and rigid logic, but his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a spiritualist who believed in fairies. Doyle, who added his middle name to his surname so that he would be known more elegantly as Conan Doyle, entered the world on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh. His father was a down-at-heels alcoholic, and the family was supported by wealthy Roman Catholic uncles, who saw to it that Arthur received a rigorous Jesuit education before studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
As a dashing medical student, Arthur fancied himself a ladies’ man and bragged about keeping five women on the string at the same time. Whimsically, he made a sketch of himself receiving his medical diploma with the caption “Licenced to Kill.” After graduation, he sailed to West Africa as a ship’s surgeon and then returned to England to set up an unsuccessful medical practice, first in Plymouth, then in Portsmouth. In the long gaps between patients, he wrote
stories, and he sold A Study in Scarlet, the first story to feature sleuth Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson, to Beeton’s Christmas Annual for £25. Conan Doyle married Louise Hawkins, the sister of a patient, and they had two children.
In 1890, Conan Doyle set up practice in London as an ophthalmologist. He claimed, seemingly without regret, that not a single patient came to see him, and he was able to devote himself full-time to writing. It was just as well, for detective stories were more lucrative than medicine, and he needed money to support his stable of horses, his Swiss skiing trips, and his new-fangled motor car. By this time, the Sherlock Holmes stories had attracted millions of fans on both sides of the Atlantic, including King Edward VII, who knighted Conan Doyle for his service as a physician in the Boer War.
Conan Doyle decided to kill off Holmes, in order to have more time for serious historical novels, and Holmes, along with his archenemy Professor Moriarty, met a watery doom in “The Final Problem.” Readers, including Conan Doyle’s mother, were outraged. “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!” she wrote to him. The chorus of protest was so loud and vehement that Holmes was resurrected in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Conan Doyle’s first wife died of tuberculosis, and the widower married Jean Leckie, with whom he had been in love for ten years and had even carried on an affair during his wife’s illness. They had three children.
Besides the loss of his first wife, Conan Doyle experienced the death of one of his sons, a brother, and two brothers-in-law—and he began to try to communicate with their departed souls. Becoming an ardent spiritualist, he claimed to have spoken to Joseph Conrad, Cecil Rhodes, and other talkative, though deceased, Britons. On a trip to America, he struck up a friendship with the illusionist Harry Houdini, whom he credited with supernatural powers, despite Houdini’s dogged insistence that his feats were mere (albeit brilliant) trickery.