On February 18, 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle, a members-only bohemian writers’ club. The inscription read: “For Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomite” [sic], the marquess had inscribed on the card. Since sodomy was a felony crime in England, the allegation could have carried severe legal consequences. Wilde sued for libel. When the case finally went to court in April, the defense stacked the deck with witnesses describing all manner of depravity on Wilde’s part, and Wilde realized, too late, that he—and not Douglas’s father—was the one effectively on trial.
The public was looking for a scapegoat for the ills that were suddenly befalling society in the latter half of the nineteenth century. There was widespread concern that Western civilization was in decline and the peace of the Victorian era was in peril. Absinthe use by the lower classes was increasing, and the liquor had become known as “Charenton Omnibus” for its association with madness (Charenton was the same French asylum that had once housed the Marquis de Sade). Worse, middle- and upper-class women were becoming addicted in droves to morphine, which had surpassed laudanum as the opiate of choice. Jewelry stores had even begun carrying silver and gold-plated syringes for the discriminating drug addict. As the face of the Decadents, Wilde became the fall guy for the apparently widespread breakdown of societal values.
His private life of “blackmailers and male prostitutes” was dragged from out of the Victorian underground and into the open. When the Marquess of Queensberry’s lawyer, Edward Carson, asked Wilde if he had kissed a particular servant boy, Wilde exclaimed, “Oh, dear, no. He was a particularly plain boy—unfortunately ugly.” Carson replied that it shouldn’t have mattered if the boy was ugly ... unless, of course, Wilde was a homosexual.
When he was asked about his books’ subject matter, Wilde used the old Realist defense as articulated in his introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” Only “brutes and illiterates,” whose views on art “are incalculably stupid,” would dare to judge books on moral grounds, Wilde testified.
The marquess was declared not guilty of libel and Wilde was ordered to pay restitution for the defendant’s legal expenses. Unfortunately for Wilde, the judgment would be the least of his worries: as he left the courtroom, authorities applied for an arrest warrant on charges of sodomy and gross indecency.
Wilde had faced controversy before. When his play Salome was banned for its portrayal of biblical characters, the controversy had proven beneficial for his career and reputation. The latest accusations would not do the same for him, at least not in his own lifetime. Wilde’s friends advised him to leave for France before he could be arrested. “The train has gone,” Wilde said of his window to flee the country. “It’s too late.” After authorities arrested him, Wilde pled not guilty.
“What is ‘the love that dare not speak its name’?” prosecutor Charles Gill asked Wilde on the witness stand.
Wilde was defiant as ever in his answer: “‘The love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.” He also referenced Plato, perhaps hoping that the prosecution would gloss over the fact that Plato and his students regularly engaged in homosexual activities as part of their “studies.”
The jury was unable to reach a verdict; Wilde was released on bail. The reprieve would only be temporary, however, as a judge handed down a guilty verdict on May 25. Wilde and Alfred Taylor, a “procurer of young men” (a pimp), were convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labor in prison. The judge described their sentences as inadequate, but, luckily for Wilde and Taylor, two years was the maximum punishment allowed for their convictions. Ernest Dowson was the only major player associated with the Decadents in attendance at the hearing.
“There is not a man or woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensberry for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents,” Wilde’s former friend W. E. Henley wrote in the National Observer. Theater owners papered over Wilde’s name on playbills, and the plays themselves soon shut down. An angry mob shattered the windows of a bookstore where The Yellow Book, a quarterly Decadent publication, was prominently displayed.
Wilde lost legal custody of his children while he was in prison. His mother died during his time in jail, and when his wife visited him to bring him the news of his mother, it was the second to last time he would see his wife before she too passed away in 1898.
Meanwhile, The Yellow Book closed up shop. In its place, Arthur Symons started a new journal called The Savoy, slyly named after the Savoy Hotel, where many of Wilde’s homosexual trysts were said to have taken place. “We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents,” Symons wrote in the first issue, attempting to distance the new periodical from the tarnished decadent image. Perhaps he should have embraced it: The Savoy, failing to stir any public interest, shuttered its doors after just eight issues.
After serving his prison term, Wilde attempted to prove his decency to the public by visiting a brothel in France. Dowson encouraged him to have sex at the brothel as a way to repudiate his homosexual image. Wilde entered the establishment, cash in hand. A crowd gathered outside, awaiting the infamous sodomite’s vaginal rechristening. When he emerged, he told Dowson that it was his first woman in ten years, “and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton.” He addressed the crowd using a more upbeat tone, asking them to tell about his adventure in England, “for it will entirely restore my character!”
Unsurprisingly, the brothel visit did not restore his character. Wilde continued his relationship with Douglas. Though he was just entering middle age, Wilde felt the grave tugging on the sleeves of his fur coat. “The Morgue yawns for me,” he wrote to a friend. He even visited the morgue in Paris to inspect his next place of lodging.
When he was forty-six, Wilde fell ill with cerebral meningitis following ear surgery. As his body fought against the infection, Wilde tired of lying on his deathbed and went to a nearby café for a glass of absinthe. “You’ll kill yourself, Oscar. You know the doctor said absinthe was poison for you,” his friend Robbie Ross told him.
“And what have I to live for?” Wilde said, returning to his bed. He slipped into a coma and passed away shortly thereafter.
Wilde’s friend Dowson was found the same year in Paris drunk and incoherent, slumped over a table sticky with absinthe. Dowson’s drinking had escalated in recent years because of his grief over the deaths of his parents. While they had been sick with tuberculosis, neither had died of it. Their deaths were grim: his father had overdosed on chloral hydrate, and his mother hanged herself. Dowson was now sick with tuberculosis himself.
At one of the final Rhymers’ Club meetings, he had been asked if he had anything new to read for the group. Dowson pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. He stared at the words. They had become meaningless to him. He shook his head solemnly and pocketed the poem. “Literature has failed for me,” he told Robert Sherard, the friend who found him at the Parisian café. “I shall look somewhere else in the future.”
After a second encounter between the two men some months later revealed Dowson to be in a state of rapid physical and mental decline, Sherard took him back to his place at Catford, where Dowson would spend his final weeks. “I have no lungs left to speak of, an apology for a liver, and a broken heart,” he told Sherard, apologizing for his dilapidated state. His coughing grew worse, and Sherard left to fetch a doctor.
When Sherard returned and propped Dowson up into a sitting position, the poet expired at the a
ge of thirty-two. The end had been a long time coming. “I cannot conceive Ernest Dowson otherwise than supremely unhappy. He was not of this world or for it,” Sherard wrote.
Dowson’s favorite saying defined the 1890s: après nous, le deluge, meaning when this is over, all hell is going to break loose. And that’s exactly what happened in the next century, as the world erupted in the first of two world wars.
11
The Lost Generation
“Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.”
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The First World War, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, radically altered the landscape of the Western world. The changes far exceeded geographic boundaries. Young men went to war, and, if they didn’t lose their lives on the battlefield, returned home “lost”—irreparably spiritually, physically, and mentally damaged. What was there to live for? “All gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” American author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.
In the United States—the heart of puritanism—Congress passed the first national antidrug bill in 1909 that made the importation and sale of opium for nonmedicinal purposes illegal. The bill was predated by antidrug laws at the state level and was surpassed in scope by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914, which banned all use of opium, cocaine, and other opiates. Illicit drug use was destructive “to human happiness and human life,” according to one of the bill’s supporters in the House of Representatives.
The antidrug fervor spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. At the victorious powers’ insistence, the International Opium Convention of 1912 was made a condition of peace. The United Kingdom passed the Defence of the Realm Act and the first of several Dangerous Drugs Acts between 1914 and 1920. Even France hopped on the anti-drug bandwagon, banning the Decadents’ drink of choice, absinthe, in 1915.
There were many factors that drove the antidrug legislation, including xenophobia and the very real fear that many men were returning from World War I addicts. Whatever the reason, the message was clear: recreational drug use would no longer be tolerated in proper society.
The result of the temporary stop to the worldwide drug trade was that alcohol firmly took hold as the most popular drug in the United States and Europe. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol, did little to hinder the popularity of booze, except for a nominal decrease during the first two years following its enactment in January 1920.
During the next thirteen years of Prohibition, thousands of Americans died from drinking bootleg alcohol. Relatively few citizens were jailed: the law made it illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, but it was legal to possess and consume them. “We all seemed to feel that Prohibition was a personal affront, and that we had a moral duty to undermine it,” Elizabeth Anderson, wife of Sherwood Anderson, wrote.
The forced exuberance of the so-called Jazz Age masked a mood of futility. Out of the despair arose a hedonistic zest for life that permeated American culture. Many of the best American writers and artists fled into self-imposed exile in Europe. “You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), on the eve of his first book’s publication, wrote to a childhood friend that he saw himself as becoming famous within a year and “I hope, dead within two.” Though he would exceed even his wildest literary ambitions, he would never shake the specter of despair that hung over his head.
Fitzgerald’s unhappiness started when he was a child. “He wasn’t popular with his schoolmates,” his headmaster observed. “He saw through them too much and wrote about it.” Fitzgerald dressed up in a suit for his sixth birthday party and waited all afternoon for his friends. No one showed. The suave host did the only honorable thing, the six-year-old version of seppuku: he “sorrowfully and thoughtfully consumed one complete birthday cake, including several candles.” Fitzgerald later wrote, “Parties are a kind of suicide.”
As a young man, he would later miss the biggest party of his generation. While he was waiting to be shipped overseas to join World War I, the fighting abruptly ceased and he never left American soil. In later life, he confessed that he had only two regrets about his younger days: not being big enough (or good enough) to play college football, and not fighting overseas in the war.
Instead of making his way in the world with his physicality, which was compromised by a bout with tuberculosis, Fitzgerald made his way with words. He exploded onto the literary scene with his first novel at the age of twenty-one. The book, This Side of Paradise, was little more than thinly veiled autobiography—a struggling Princeton graduate makes a living writing advertising copy—but it was nonetheless an eye-opening look at the young men and women of his generation.
This Side of Paradise sold fifty thousand copies in hardcover its first year, making its author an overnight celebrity. Perhaps most important, Fitzgerald was credited with popularizing (some might say capitalizing on) the English “flapper” phenomenon in America.
“There was an outbreak of new heroines in English life and letters,” he said. “They wanted independence. They loved danger and were excitement-mad and faintly neurotic. They discussed subjects that had hitherto been considered taboo for women; they lived independently of their families. When their actions began to arouse comment, they increased their daring. I had no idea of originating an American flapper when I first began to write. I simply took girls whom I knew very well and, because they interested me as unique human beings, I used them for my heroines.”
With the age of the flapper, Victorian modesty was consigned to the dustbin. Fitzgerald found himself the de facto spokesperson for the Lost Generation. “The uncertainties of 1919 were over—there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen—America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history,” he said. “The whole golden boom was in the air.” The prohibition of alcohol did little to affect the boisterous feeling in the air. They were living in a new age, Fitzgerald proclaimed: “The Jazz Age.”
While he rode the zeitgeist to literary bestsellerdom, Fitzgerald did little to endear himself to the public. His comments about women are especially grating to the modern ear. “I know that after a few moments of inane conversation with most girls I get so bored that unless I have a few drinks I have to leave the room,” he said. “All women over thirty-five should be murdered.” (He was, one hopes, kidding.) He once told a reporter that the average Midwestern girl “is unattractive, selfish, snobbish, egotistical, utterly graceless, talks with an ugly accent and in her heart knows that she would feel more at home in a kitchen than in a ballroom.” Still, he wasn’t entirely dismissive of the fairer sex. “The southern girl is easily the most attractive type in America,” he said.
His wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900–1948), was a southern girl, born and raised in Alabama. Scott proposed to her with his mother’s ring in 1919. Zelda, however, wasn’t yet sure if Scott was marriage material. She locked the ring away and cut off sexual relations with Scott until he showed signs of material success.
At one point, Zelda even returned the ring to her fiancé and called things off. Fitzgerald went on a three-week bender. He wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson, “Since I last saw you, I’ve tried to get married and then tried to drink myself to death.” Fitzgerald’s prospects changed for the better after he sold his first novel for publication; Zelda readily agreed to get married as soon as possible.
Journalist B. F. Wilson, writing in 1923, spoke rosily about the couple as newlyweds. “As I left the house I carried with me a rather pleasant picture. As handsome a young author as I ever hope to see, this F. Scott Fitzgerald of twenty-five or six. As pretty a young wife as rarely falls to the lot of any man.” Early on in his career, Fitzgerald said, “We were married and we’ve lived—happily—ever afterwards. That is, we expect to.”
But then came the parties, and then came Zelda’s madness.
Ah, the parties ... Zelda and Sco
tt Fitzgerald perfected the art of professional party crashing. They were prone to show up at the door uninvited, on all fours and barking like dogs. If they tricked the host into letting them into the house, they might strip naked and take a bath in the master bathroom tub. Zelda frequently shed her clothing in public, and stories abound of her panties or bra coming off at parties. Dorothy Parker found them “too ostentatious for words. Their behavior was calculated to shock.”
Occasionally, the Fitzgeralds’ antics turned dangerous. One night after they had been drinking heavily, their car stalled on a trolley line. They leaned back in their seats and promptly fell asleep for the evening. Someone came across them in the morning and pulled them out of the car twenty minutes before a trolley came bustling down the tracks, smashing their car to pieces. On another occasion Zelda lay down in front of their car, daring her husband to run her over. He didn’t, but not for lack of trying: the car just wouldn’t start.
Suicide, it turns out, was something of a running gag with the couple. When Fitzgerald met his literary idol, James Joyce, at a dinner party in Paris, Fitzgerald offered to toss himself out of a window to prove his devotion to the famous writer. “That young man must be mad,” Joyce said. “I’m afraid he’ll do himself some injury.” If that was how Fitzgerald reacted when he met someone he idolized, how would he react when meeting someone he had no respect for? “There’s no great literary tradition,” said Fitzgerald. “The wise literary son kills his own father.”
Fitzgerald spent no small amount of time taking his contemporaries down a peg. “If I knew anything I’d be the best writer in America—which isn’t saying a lot. English novelist Hugh Walpole was the man who really started me writing,” Fitzgerald told a St. Paul Daily News reporter. “One day I picked up one of his books when I was riding on a train. I thought, ‘If this fellow can get away with it as an author, I can too.’ His book seemed to me to be as bad as possible, but I knew they sold like hot cakes. I dug in after that and wrote my first novel.” Fitzgerald, on a roll, trashed his contemporaries Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, and Floyd Dell. “Floyd Dell has reached the depth of banality in his book Moon-Calf,” he said. The reporter, Thomas Alexander Boyd, wrote, “Scott Fitzgerald is a youth that American literature will have to reckon with. To how great an extent depends upon himself.”
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