Mallarmé did not accept Whistler’s animus. He was impressed by The Picture of Dorian Gray when Wilde gave it to him. He could scarcely have failed to notice it as a central document in symbolism. It shared the preoccupation of Mallarmé’s verse with the way that the borders of life and art, the real and the unreal, shift under the pressure of the imagination. The transformation from a flower to the ‘Flower absent from all bouquets,’ from the man to the simulacrum, was consonant with the master’s ideas. Mallarmé conveyed as much in elliptical but admiring phrases:
J’achève le livre, un des seuls qui puissent émouvoir, vu que d’une rêverie essentielle et des parfums d’âme les plus étranges s’est fait son orage.
Redevenir poignant à travers l’inoui raffinement d’intellect, et humain, en une pareille perverse atmosphère de beauté, est un miracle que vous accomplissez et selon quel emploi de tous les arts de l’écrivain!
‘It was the portrait that had done everything.’ Ce portrait en pied, inquiétant, d’un Dorian Gray, hantera, mais écrit, étant devenu livre lui-même.
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ‖5
Both Mallarmé and Wilde saw literature as the supreme art, and one that could transform a painting into words, a life into an artifice.
Wilde had in mind a challenge to the master more profound than Dorian Gray. One of Mallarmé’s central works, ‘Hérodiade,’ was still unfinished after many years, the best-known unfinished poem since ‘Kubla Khan.’ Wilde determined to use the same subject, the beheading of John the Baptist at the instigation of Herodias. Whether or not he intended to compete directly, he did so, and Mallarmé, in his futile effort to complete ‘Hérodiade,’ had to take note of Wilde’s efforts; he said he would retain the name of ‘Herodias’ to differentiate it from that other (Salome), ‘which I shall call modern.’ Years later (after his release from prison) Wilde was asked by a journalist in Dieppe for his opinion of Mallarmé. He replied, ‘Mallarmé is a poet, a true poet. But I prefer him when he writes in French, because in that language he is incomprehensible, while in English, unfortunately, he is not. Incomprehensibility is a gift, not everyone has it.’6 He obviously felt on equal terms with the great master.
Wilde is not known to have attended any more mardis, and perhaps he experienced some embarrassment, as if his treatment of Salome was in some way a trespass. Whistler’s reaction is unrecorded, but can be imagined. Robert Ross says that once, when Wilde complained that a well-known novel had been borrowed from an idea of his, Ross replied that Wilde was himself ‘a fearless literary thief.’ ‘My dear Robbie,’ Wilde drawled in answer, ‘when I see a monstrous tulip with four petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.’7
His interest in the legend of Salome antedated his meetings with Mallarmé, even if Mallarmé quickened it. Salome, having danced before the imaginations of European painters and sculptors for a thousand years, in the nineteenth century turned her beguilements to literature. Among those who made artistic overtures to her were Heine, Flaubert, Huysmans, and Laforgue. Jaded by exaltations of nature and humanism, they inspected with relief a Biblical image of the unnatural. They daringly reconstituted the Salome of the Bible. As there are many Iseults, many Marys, so there were many Salomes, without monotony.
W. S. Blunt’s diary confirms that Wilde had the idea for Salome before he went to France. Some time after his arrival in Paris, he had breakfast with Curzon and Blunt, and told them he was writing a play in French, for which he would be made an Academician. They promised to attend the first night, Curzon as Prime Minister.8 Certainly Salome was consonant with Wilde’s theory of tragedy, which he expressed to a correspondent in 1894:
Dear Sir,
Whether a comedy should deal with modern life, whether its subject should be society or middle class existence, these are questions purely to the artist’s own choice. Personally I like comedy to be intensely modern, and like my tragedy to walk in purple and to be remote: but these are whims merely.
As for ‘success’ on the stage, the public is a monster of strange appetites: it swallows, so it seems to me, honeycake and hellebore, with avidity: but there are many publics—and the artist belongs to none of them: if he is admired it is, a little, by chance.
Yours sincerely,
OSCAR WILDE
The principal engenderer of the story was an account in the fifth chapter of Huysmans’s A Rebours of two paintings of Salome by Gustave Moreau, and in the fourteenth chapter of the same book a quotation from Mallarmé’s poem ‘Hérodiade.’ In one painting the aged Herod is being stirred by Salome’s lascivious but indifferent dance; in the other Salome is being presented with the Baptist’s head giving forth rays on a charger. Huysmans attributes to Salome the mythopoeic force that Pater attributes to the Mona Lisa, and mentions that writers have never succeeded in rendering her adequately. Only Moreau has conveyed that she is not just a dancing girl, but ‘the symbolic incarnation of undying lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed beauty exalted above all other beauties by the catalepsy that hardens her flesh and steels her muscles, the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like the Helen of ancient myth, everything that she touches.’ Yet this is not the whole story, for in the second painting, a water color, Moreau showed her horror at the sight of the bodiless head.
Wilde did not perhaps need much more impulsion, but he received some from an American named J. C. Heywood, whose Salome he reviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette on 15 February 1888. Heywood had written his dramatic poem in the 1860s, and in 1888 it was reprinted by the London publisher Kegan Paul. He had profited from Heine’s retelling of the story in Atta Troll, Heine having portrayed a procession in which a phantom Herodias, mounted on a horse, kisses the prophet’s head. Heywood’s contribution was to make her do this before she was turned into a ghost, while still alive. This detail is not in the other sources. Wilde saw, as Heywood did not, that kissing the head might constitute the climax. In 1890 he announced he would write about Salome. He had dinner at a Piccadilly restaurant with Edgar Saltus, and afterwards they visited Lord Francis Hope in his rooms across the street. The decor of the rooms was generally sober, an exception being an engraving of Herodias dancing on her hands, as she is pictured doing in Flaubert’s ‘Hérodias.’ Wilde went up to the picture, and said, ‘La bella donna della mia mente.’ According to Mrs Saltus, Wilde said he would write about her, and Saltus, who planned to write about Mary Magdalene, replied, ‘Do so. We will pursue the wantons together.’ Saltus’s book came out first, and Wilde praised it as ‘so pessimistic, so poisonous, and so perfect.’ (But he commented on another work of Saltus on Tristram, ‘All that is related in the style of A Painful Accident in New Jersey.’) Saltus returned the compliment when he read Salome, saying that the last line had made him shudder. ‘It is only the shudder that counts,’ Wilde answered.9 He began to conceive of the play as posing a perverse passion, the desire of vice for virtue, pagan for Christian, living for dead (as in ‘The Canterville Ghost’), and the abhorrence of vice by virtue, the extremity of renunciation.
Virgin Cruelty
IOKANAAN: Back! Daughter of Babylon!
Come not near the chosen of the Lord.
This plethora of suggestion encouraged Wilde in his search for his own Salome, though he did not as yet know how to engender her. In Paris he began to formulate a work, talking with everyone except, presumably, Mallarmé about it. The Mallarmé entourage was drawn into the gestation of the subject; Marcel Schwob, Adolphe Retté, and Pierre Louÿs were asked to correct various drafts. It suited Wilde to have a subject of such general interest.
A writer, Yvanhoe Rambosson, has described Wilde’s state of mind at this time, November 1891. Rambosson and Wilde had lunched at the apartment of the translator Henry Davray. Afterwards they went to the Café d’Harcourt, where they were joined by Enrique Gomez Carrillo, a young Guatemalan
diplomat and writer, who was with Paul Verlaine. Wilde did the talking while Verlaine drank his Pernod and seemed absorbed in it. Once in a while, however, he would mumble some street-arab comment in answer to one of Wilde’s careful phrases. As in 1883, Wilde disliked Verlaine’s appearance, and therefore devoted himself to Gomez Carrillo, an exuberant youth with a lively intelligence and a picturesque speech. Wilde spoke of his life, his travels, his love of existence and sensation, and he remarked, as he would also to Gide, ‘I have put only my talent into my works. I have put all my genius into my life.’ At this Verlaine became suddenly serious, and leaned over to say to Rambosson aside, ‘This man is a true pagan. He possesses the insouciance which is half of happiness, for he does not know penitence.’10
This may have been Wilde’s first meeting with Gomez Carrillo, who became a confidant. When they were alone, Wilde objected to Verlaine’s unkempt appearance. ‘The first duty of a man is to be beautiful, don’t you think?’ he asked. Gomez replied, ‘The only beauties I know are women.’ Wilde would not have this: ‘How can you say that? Women aren’t beautiful at all. They are something else, I allow: magnificent, when dressed with taste and covered with jewels, but beautiful, no. Beauty reflects the soul.’ He objected to Gomez’s being so often in the company of a certain woman, and did not withdraw his objection when Gomez explained that he was in love with her. She, for her part, said that Wilde was a pederast, but Gomez liked him and was happy to spend time with him.
Wilde’s knowledge of the iconography of Salome was immense. He complained that Rubens’s Salome appeared to him to be ‘an apoplectic Maritomes.’ On the other hand, Leonardo’s Salome was excessively incorporeal. Others, by Dürer, Ghirlandaio, van Thulden, were unsatisfactory because incomplete. The celebrated Salome of Regnault he considered to be a mere ‘gypsy.’ Only Moreau satisfied him, and he liked to quote Huysmans’s description of the Moreau paintings. He was eager to visit the Prado to see how Stanzioni had painted her, and Titian, about whom he quoted Tintoretto’s comment ‘This man paints with quivering flesh [carne molida].’
Wilde seemed to want to obsess himself with his idea, and every day he talked of Salome. The women in the streets seemed possible princesses of Israel to him. If he passed the rue de la Paix, he would examine the jewelry shops for proper adornment for her. One afternoon he asked, ‘Don’t you think she would be better naked? Yes, totally naked, but draped with heavy and ringing necklaces made of jewels of every colour, warm with the fervor of her amber flesh. I don’t conceive of her as unconscious, serving as a mute instrument. No, her lips in Leonardo’s painting disclose the cruelty of her soul. Her lust must needs be infinite, and her perversity without limits. Her pearls must expire on her flesh.’ He began to imagine Sarah Bernhardt dancing naked before the Tetrarch, who in his mind had become a compound of three Herods—Herod Antipas (Matthew IV:14), Herod the Great (Matthew II:1), and Herod Agrippa I (Acts XII:19).11
Yet at times he veered round to make Salome chaste. She would dance before Herod out of divine inspiration, to accomplish the death of the impostor John, that enemy of Jehovah. ‘Her body, tall and pale, undulates like a lily,’ as this narrative went. ‘There is nothing sensual in her beauty. The richest laces cover her svelte flesh.… In her pupils gleam the flames of faith.’ The image was suggested to him by a painting of Bernardo Luini. He had to endure another interpretation one night at dinner at the home of Stuart Merrill, the American poet who wrote in French, when the unprepossessing but self-assured Rémy de Gourmont broke into Wilde’s fantasies about Salome by telling him, ‘You have confused two Salomes. One was the daughter of Herod, but as Josephus attests, she had nothing to do with the dancer in the Bible.’ Wilde listened to Gourmont’s rebuke, but commented later to Gomez, who was also present, ‘That poor Gourmont thinks he knows more than anybody else. What he told us was the truth of a professor at the Institute. I prefer the other truth, my own, which is that of the dream. Between two truths, the falser is the truer.’12
One evening, Wilde went to the house of Jean Lorrain, with Marcel Schwob, Anatole France, Henry Bauer, and Gomez Carrillo as fellow guests. He asked to see a bust of a decapitated woman he had heard about. As he examined the bloodstains painted on the neck above the place where the sword had cut, he cried, ‘It is Salome’s head, Salome who has had herself beheaded out of despair. It is John the Baptist’s revenge.’ The image stirred him to add, ‘A Nubian gospel discovered by Boissiere tells of a young philosopher to whom a Semitic dancer sends, as homage, the head of an apostle. The young man bows and says, smiling, “What I really want, beloved, is your head.” She quails and goes off. The afternoon of the same day a slave presents the philosopher with his darling’s head on a gold platter. And the philosopher asks, “Why are they bringing this bloody thing to me?” and goes on reading Plato. Doesn’t it seem to you that this princess is Salome? Yes, and—pointing to the bust—‘this marble is her head. With this execution John the Baptist had his revenge.’ Lorrain was dubious: ‘You are writing a singular poem,’ he said. Since Lorrain wrote singularly himself, this was deferential.13
Another contributory image came to Wilde one day when he and Stuart Merrill went into the Moulin Rouge and saw a Rumanian acrobat dancing on her hands. Wilde hastily wrote something on his calling card and sent it to her, but to his disappointment she did not respond. He had wanted, he said, to make her an offer to dance the part of Salome in a play he was writing. ‘I want her to dance on her hands, as in Flaubert’s story.’14
But, according to Gomez Carrillo, Wilde did not start with the idea of writing a play. He first wrote some pages in prose, then broke off and decided to write a poem. Only gradually did he realize that a play was in order. One night he told the Salome story to a group of young French writers, and returned to his lodgings in the boulevard des Capucines. A blank notebook lay on the table, and it occurred to him that he might as well write down what he had been telling them. ‘If the book had not been there I should never have dreamed of doing it,’ he told O’Sullivan. After writing a long time, he looked at his watch and thought, ‘I can’t go on like this.’ He went out to the Grand Café, then at the corner of the boulevard des Capucines and the rue Scribe. ‘That fellow Rigo who ran away with the Princesse de Chimay, Clara Ward, was then the leader of the orchestra of Tziganes. I called him over to my table and said, “I am writing a play about a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain. I want you to play something in harmony with my thoughts.” And Rigo played such wild and terrible music that those who were there stopped talking and looked at each other with blanched faces. Then I went back and finished Salome.’15
According to Robert Ross, he did not at first imagine its being put on the stage. Gradually, however, he began to cast it in his mind. The idea of Bernhardt acting in it perhaps encouraged him to write it in French, but he must also have dreamed of outrivaling Mallarmé in a drama which should be a ‘Mystère,’ a revelation of a ‘Passion de l’Homme.’ He complained of the docility of the Biblical Salome, who simply obeys Herodias and, once she receives the head, conveys it to her mother. The inadequacy of this account, Wilde said, ‘has made it necessary for the centuries to heap up dreams and visions at her feet so as to convert her into the cardinal flower of the perverse garden.’ In all his talk about the play, he was loyal to one incident and never changed it: Salome, after dancing, demands John’s head not to obey her mother, but out of unrequited love. The Tetrarch, after battling with his conscience, grants her wish, and the head, with its black eyes and red lips, is handed to her on a silver charger. She receives it, takes hold of it with her hands, and exclaims, ‘Ah, you did not want to let me kiss your lips? You can hardly hinder me now.’ And she kisses it as she would bite a tasty fruit. As Gomez Carrillo says, Wilde’s heroine is a woman who loves, suffers, hates. Faith does not concern her. That John is involved in a prohibited religion, or that he is faithful to official rites, does not touch her. What disturbs, tortures, agitates
her is the black eyes and red lips of the man. ‘Your flesh,’ she says when she visits him in prison, ‘your flesh is white like snow on the mountain.’ That, and all the rest she speaks with such ardor, is replete with the immorality of the Song of Songs. (But the Song of Songs describes a woman’s beauty, not a man’s.) ‘I flee from what is moral as from what is impoverished,’ said Wilde to Gomez; ‘I have the same sickness as Des Esseintes.’16
In its earlier dramatic form, Wilde thought he would call the play The Decapitation of Salome. The title seems to have gone with a story he told Maeterlinck and Georgette Leblanc. It was of how Salome eventually became a saint. Herod, incensed at her kissing the decollated head, wanted to have her crushed, but at the pleas of Herodias contented himself with banishing her. She went off to the desert, where for years she lived on, maligned, solitary, clothed in animal skins, and subsisting on locusts and wild honey like the prophet himself. When Jesus passed by, she recognized him whom the dead voice had heralded and she believed in him. But, feeling unworthy of living in his shadow, she went off again, with the intention of carrying the Word. Having passed over rivers and seas, she encountered, after the fiery deserts, the deserts of snow. One day she was crossing a frozen lake near the Rhône when the ice broke under her feet. She fell into the water and the jagged ice cut into her flesh and decapitated her, though not before she managed to utter the names of Jesus and John. And those who later went by saw, on the silver plate of the re-formed ice, showing like the stamen of a flower with rubies, a severed head on which gleamed the crown of a golden nimbus.17 Wilde’s brain overflowed with such images.
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