Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  To decapitate both would suit Wilde’s apothegm about Dorian Gray, that ‘all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.’ Christian Iokanaan and pagan Salome, one animated by piety and the other by sensuality, would both be brought low. Dorian Gray’s dilemma, of abandon and horror, would find another example, this time without preternatural aid. But Wilde eventually gave up the decapitation of Salome as too pat and repetitive.

  The character of Salome evolved along with that of Herod. Herod’s lust for Salome’s body pales in comparison with Salome’s lust for Iokanaan’s bodiless head. Hers is a passion which drowns in its own excess. Sensation at this utmost bound is almost mystical. With all her savagery, Salome has a virgin innocence. Like Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, she is a jusqu’auboutiste, willing her passion beyond human limits, beyond the grave even. Those who do this become exemplary; their value as illustrations mitigates their monstrousness. When death comes to Salome, it takes the measure of her boundless desire. She dies into a parable of self-consuming passion.

  Wilde made the central character neither Salome nor Iokanaan, but Herod. Swayed by rival dispensations, Herod eventually detaches himself from both. One cancels out the other. Herod is strong in his tremblings, a leaf but a sinuous one, swept but not destroyed by successive waves of physical attraction and spiritual revulsion. By yielding to each in turn, Herod remains Herod, beyond both.

  In the tenebrous happenings of Salome there are vestiges of the house of Atreus. A sense of doom pervades the play. Iokanaan is like Cassandra, and Salome has some traits of Clytemnestra. Wilde had Aeschylus in mind as much as the Bible.

  The Seduction of Paris

  ‘I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.’

  On 19 December 1891, L’Echo de Paris said that Wilde was ‘le “great event” des salons littéraires parisiennes’ of the season. The two months that he spent there were a continual feast. Marcel Schwob, a young lion of the day, writer and journalist, was his principal guide, though Pierre Louÿs, another young lion, was also much in evidence. Schwob asked Wilde’s permission to translate his story ‘The Selfish Giant’ into French in December, and on the 27th of the month the story was published in L’Echo de Paris. He dedicated his own story ‘Le Pays bleu’ to Wilde, in 1892, and Wilde dedicated ‘The Sphinx’ to him in the same year. Schwob was at that time secretary to Catulle Mendès, on L’Echo de Paris, and consoler of Mendès’s wife, Marguérite Moreno, who was working for Sarah Bernhardt. Schwob’s mother had been the teacher of Miss Lipmann, who became Mme Arman de Caillavet and was the official Egeria of Anatole France. Through these associations Schwob could be and was extremely helpful. Jean Lorrain, to whom Schwob introduced Wilde, says Schwob was Wilde’s pilot and cornac (elephant-keeper). Jules Renard said that at Léon Daudet’s Schwob seemed to confuse Wilde with Shakespeare.18

  After Wilde’s visit, Schwob wrote of him in his journal without rapture. He described him as ‘A big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more. While he ate—and he ate little—he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes. A terrible absinthe-drinker, through which he got his visions and desires.’ Wilde wore a long brown frockcoat and a peculiar waistcoat, and carried a walking stick with a gold pommel. Once Schwob called for him, and Wilde, not finding his stick, said, ‘My gold-headed cane has disappeared. Last night I was with the most terrible creatures, bandits, murderers, thieves—such company as Villon kept. [He knew Schwob had just written about Villon.] They stole my gold-headed cane. There was a youth with beautiful sad eyes who had slain his mistress that morning because she was unfaithful. I feel sure it was he who stole my gold-headed cane.’ He concluded with relish, ‘My gold-headed cane is now between the hands that slew the frail girl who had the grace of a spent rose-bush in the rain.’ ‘But, Mr Wilde,’ said Schwob, ‘there is your gold-headed cane in the corner.’ ‘Ah yes,’ said Wilde, much put out, ‘so it is. There is my gold-headed cane. How clever of you to find it.’19

  Schwob entertained Wilde in his apartment at 2, rue de l’Université. Léon Daudet sometimes met him there, and was attracted and repelled. He thought Wilde’s stories delicious, and his conversation fatiguing. Words came tumbling out of his slack mouth, and he would roar with laughter like a fat, gossipy woman. At their third meeting Wilde said to him, sensing reservations, ‘And what do you think of me, Monsieur Léon Daudet?’ Daudet referred to his complexity and possible guile. The next day he received a letter from Wilde in which he declared himself to be ‘the simplest and most candid’ of mortals, ‘just like a tiny, tiny child.’20

  The artist Jacques-Emile Blanche, long an admirer, introduced Wilde to Proust at the house of Mme Arthur Baignères. Wilde was impressed by Proust’s enthusiasm for English literature, especially for Ruskin (whom he translated) and George Eliot, and accepted Proust’s invitation to dinner at the boulevard Haussmann. What happened, according to two grandsons of Mme Baignères, was that ‘On the evening of the dinner Proust, who had been held up at Mme Lemaire’s, arrived very out of breath two minutes late. He asked the servant, “Is the English gentleman here?” “Yes, sir, he arrived five minutes ago; he had hardly entered the drawing room when he asked for the bathroom, and he has not come out of it.” Proust ran to the end of the passage. “M. Wilde, are you ill?” “Ah, there you are, M. Proust.” Wilde appeared majestically. “No, I am not in the least ill. I thought I was to have the pleasure of dining with you alone, but they showed me into the drawing room. I looked at the drawing room and at the end of it were your parents, my courage failed me. Goodbye, dear M. Proust, goodbye …” ’ Afterwards his parents told Proust that Wilde had looked about the drawing room and commented, ‘How ugly your house is.’21

  Stuart Merrill was helpful. It was he who gratified Wilde’s desire to meet Jean Moréas, as Iannis Papadiamantopoulos called himself. Moréas, born in Athens but resident in Paris since 1870, arranged for Wilde to dine at the Côte d’Or with him and his followers. For once Wilde had to yield the floor, as Moréas expounded the theories of the Ecole Romane, to which he, Charles Maurras, Ernest Raynaud, Maurice Du Plessys, Raymond de la Tailhède, and others had rallied. They proposed to return to the classical traditions of earlier French poetry, in opposition to the symbolistes. Moréas denounced the nineteenth-century poets: Hugo was vulgar, Baudelaire paradoxical, and so on. At dessert, according to Merrill, Wilde asked Moréas to recite some verses. ‘I never recite,’ replied Moréas, ‘but if you would like it, our friend Raynaud will recite us something.’ Raynaud stood up and, resting his redoubtable fists on the table, announced, ‘Sonnet to Jean Moréas.’ His reading was applauded and once more Wilde pressed Moréas to recite. ‘No, but our friend La Tailhède—’ In his turn La Tailhède rose and, his eyeglass fixed, launched in a clear voice: ‘Ode to Jean Moréas.’ Wilde grew visibly uneasy at the worship of Moréas, but out of courtesy tried again. ‘Du Plessys, let us hear your latest verses,’ commanded the master. Leaping up, Du Plessys trumpeted in vibrant tones: ‘The Tomb of Jean Moréas.’ At this, says Merrill, ‘Oscar Wilde choked, conquered, routed, he who had silence about him in the salons of London, asked for his hat and coat and fled into the night.’ He recovered later, and asked Moréas, Merrill, La Tailhède, Gomez Carrillo, and others to dinner. This time he ruled the table with his stories. Moréas commented as he left, ‘Cet anglais est emmerdant [This Englishman is a shit].’ When Moréas was mentioned afterwards, Wilde would say, ‘Moréas, existe-il vraiment [Moréas, does he really exist]?’ Answered in the affirmative, he went on, ‘Comme c’est curieux! J’ai toujours cru que Moréas est un mythe [How strange! I’ve always thought Moréas was a myth].’22

  Ernest Raynaud claims that Merrill exaggerated what happened at that first meeting, as no doubt he did, b
ut acknowledges that Wilde suddenly pleaded another engagement and left. Some time later, as he was coming out of his hotel, he met Raynaud on the boulevard des Capucines and said to him solemnly: ‘I approve of Moréas and his school for wanting to reestablish Greek harmony and to bring back to us the Dionysian state of mind. The world has such a thirst for joy. We are not yet released from the Syrian embrace and its cadaverous divinities. We are always plunged into the kingdom of shadows. While we wait for a new religion of light, let Olympus serve as shelter and refuge. We must let our instincts laugh and frolic in the sun like a troop of laughing children. I love life. It is so beautiful—’ And here Wilde pointed to the scene around them, lit up by sunlight. ‘Ah,’ he went on, ‘how all this outdoes the languishing beauty of the countryside. The solitude of the country stifles and crushes me.… I am not really myself except in the midst of elegant crowds, in the exploits of capitals, at the heart of rich districts, or amid the sumptuous ornamentation of palace-hotels, seated by all the desirable objects and with an army of servants, the warm caress of a plush carpet under my feet.… I detest nature where man has not intervened with his artifice.’ He went on in Nietzschean fashion to compare a diamond and a piece of charcoal to the poet and the ordinary man. A miracle of crystallization produced the diamond; just as the diamond retained its properties at different temperatures, so the poet retains his rights in the face of ordinary laws and communal necessities. ‘When Benvenuto Cellini crucified a living man to study the play of muscles in his death agony, a pope was right to grant him absolution. What is the death of a vague individual if it enables an immortal word to blossom and to create, in Keats’s words, an eternal source of ecstasy?’23

  Before this torrent Raynaud ventured to speak of Wilde’s writings, but was stopped with a gesture: ‘Oh, let’s drop that! I consider those things to be so unimportant. I do them to relax and to prove to myself, as your Baudelaire used to do with more genius, that I am not inferior to my contemporaries whom I hold in low esteem. My ambitions do not stop with composing poems. I want to make of my life itself a work of art. I know the price of a fine verse but also of a rose, of a vintage wine, of a colorful tie, of a delicate dish.’

  They walked on past Le Napolitain, where Ernest La Jeunesse hailed them. Catulle Mendès was there, and invited them to join him. The subject of Wilde’s paradoxes arose, and Wilde said to Mendès that paradoxes, though half-truths, were the best to be had, there being no absolute truths. He pointed out that the New Testament is full of paradoxes, though familiarity makes them less startling. ‘What greater enormity could there be than “Blessed are the poor”?’24 When Wilde asked his views of recent French verse, Mendès obliged with a harangue. He praised the Parnassiens and spoke of Armand Silvestre as the best poet. Silvestre’s sixty thousand verses were a long struggle towards the purest ideal; his prose was good too, and neither coarse nor trivial. Wilde listened without a word, smiling almost imperceptibly, as Mendès spoke with oracular certainty, head thrown back, shaking his locks or adjusting his tie. Mendès made a full-scale attack on the symbolists, and La Jeunesse’s defense fueled his fire: ‘the symbolists make us laugh. They’ve invented nothing. The symbol is as old as the world.… Mallarmé is … a broken Baudelaire whose fragments have never come together.’ He came down to the young poets whom Wilde had met: Henri de Régnier was all contained in Banville and Hugo. Paul Fort had a false simplicity and suffered from ‘the Belgian aesthetic.’ As for Vielé-Griffin, Mendès hoped he was missing something in this poet because, if there was no more in him than what he could see, there wasn’t much. On the way out Raynaud warned Wilde that Mendès was probably responding to criticism by Vielé-Griffin of his work. Wilde said only, ‘Nonetheless, this devil of a man is terribly amusing.’25

  Most of the time Wilde did not have to listen. A book given to him by Aristide Bruant on 8 December 1891 bears the inscription ‘Pour Oscar Wilde le joyeux fantaisiste anglais.’26 Friends turned up from London, such as J. E. C. Bodley, who gave a party for Wilde and some French writers, then drove him out to the Bois de Boulogne with the intention of warning him not to repeat the scandal of Dorian Gray. Wilde insisted that the book struck a moral note and had been misread; he said he had received commendatory letters from the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Bodley was unconvinced but silenced. Another excursion was to the Château Rouge, a sort of doss house, to which Wilde went in company with Will Rothenstein, Sherard, and Stuart Merrill. Sherard added to their discomfort by threatening loudly that anyone who meddled with his friend Oscar Wilde would soon regret it. ‘Robert,’ said Wilde, ‘you are defending us at the risk of our lives.’27

  Wilde’s brother-in-law, Otho Lloyd, and his wife had a house in the rue Vivienne. At a luncheon party where Wilde was to be guest of honor, he arrived an hour late. He asked for the shutters to be closed and candles lit, having his mother’s dislike of sunlight for social occasions. The tablecloth had also to be changed, because the flowers on it, before he banished them too, were mauve, a color he superstitiously feared. He brusquely disregarded the names of the people to whom he was introduced. With the hors d’oeuvres he took over the conversation. His listeners were disappointed. He put on airs; he questioned people and did not listen to their answers, or indelicately forced them to speak: ‘You have never seen an apparition? No. Oh really now, you, madame, yes, you, madame. Your eyes seem to have contemplated phantoms.’ He attested that one night, in a bar, the tables were put in order and the floors swept not by the waiters but by the angels of the day’s end. He told paradoxical stories in a low voice, like secrets, and then gave a discourse about morgues in different capitals. The French had heard Villiers and Baudelaire try to shock in this way, and fashions had changed. Wilde realized that he had misjudged the occasion, and during the latter part of the meal was silent.

  Over coffee, when people began to talk about a French vaudeville company touring Germany and England, he proposed almost diffidently that the prodigious theatrical sense in France explained most of its history. French foreign policy, he said, was scenic: it searched for the fine attitude, the decorative words, the marked gesture, rather than practical success. And he unwound the history of France, from Charles X to the present day, in paradoxes. Renaud was amazed as Wilde deployed men, deeds, treaties, wars. He made them sparkle like jewels with the light of his words. A question led him to talk to Disraeli, and the salon of Lady Blessington, where Disraeli, though Jewish and obscure, stood up to the Count D’Orsay. He described and joked, with the generalizing power of a great historian and with the command of emotions of a great playwright and poet. In recounting Lady Blessington’s love affairs he became lyrical, his voice resonating like a viol. If he had seemed pretentious, he went on to succeed by simplicity. Several of the guests wept, says Renaud, to think that words should achieve such splendor. And yet it was done so naturally, like ordinary conversation.28

  So Wilde pervaded Paris. Stuart Merrill described him as ‘gigantic, smooth-shaven and rosy, like a great priest of the moon in the time of Heliogabalus. At the Moulin Rouge the habitués took him for the prince of some fabulous realm of the North.’ A blowsy woman, meeting him for the first time, said, ‘Ne suis-je pas la femme la plus laide de Paris, M. Wilde?’ ‘Du monde, Madame,’ he replied.a As Merrill said, ‘He could awaken the enthusiasm of Henri de Régnier on the one hand, and of Bibi la Purée on the other.’ Not everyone took this view, but Wilde disregarded detractors. The only one he recognized was Edmond de Goncourt, who happened to publish in L’Echo de Paris on 17 December 1891 his journal entries of meetings with Wilde on 21 April and 5 May 1883. In the latter he referred to Wilde as ‘this individual of doubtful sex, with a ham actor’s language, and tall stories’ In the former he said Wilde had talked of Swinburne as a flaunter of vice. Wilde ignored the attack on himself, and wrote to clarify what he had said of Swinburne. It was one of his most adroit letters:

  [17 December 1891]

  9 Boulevard des Capucines

&
nbsp; Cher Monsieur de Goncourt,

  Quoique la base intellectuelle de mon esthétique soit la Philosophie de l’Irrealité, ou peut-être à cause de cela, je vous prie de me permettre une petite modification à vos notes sur la conversation où je vous ai parlé de notre cher et noble poète anglais M. Algernon Swinburne.… Sans doute c’était de ma faute. On peut adorer une langue sans bien la parler, comme on peut aimer une femme sans la connaître. Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare.

  Vous avez dit que je représentais M. Swinburne comme un fanfaron du vice. Cela étonnerait beaucoup le poète, qui dans sa maison de campagne mène une vie bien austère, entièrement consacrée à l’art et à la littérature.

  Voici ce que j’ai voulu dire.… Dans Shakespeare, et dans ses contemporains Webster et Ford, il y a des cris de nature. Dans l’oeuvre de Swinburne, on rencontre pour la première fois le cri de la chair tourmentée par le désir et le souvenir, la jouissance et le remords, la fécondité et la stérilité. Le public anglais, comme d’ordinaire hypocrite, prude et philistin, n’a pas su trouver l’art dans l’oeuvre d’art: il y a cherché l’homme. Comme il confond toujours l’homme avec ses créations, il pense que pour créer Hamlet il faut être un peu mélancolique, pour imaginer Lear absolument fou. Ainsi on a fait autour de M. Swinburne une légende d’ogre et de mangeur d’enfants. M. Swinburne, aristocrate de race et artiste de temperament, n’ai fait que rire de ces absurdités.…

  J’espère que lorsque j’aurai l’honneur de vous rencontrer de nouveau, vous trouverez ma manière de m’exprimer en français moins obscure que le 21 avril 1883.b

  Goncourt was shown the letter by Catulle Mendès, and it was then printed. In publishing the same passages from his journal in book form, Goncourt omitted both the lines about Swinburne as flaunter of vice and of Wilde as doubtful-sexed. It was his compliment to a man whose letter proved him to be, whatever else, a genuine writer, and entitled to the courtesies of a fellow craftsman. When, on Goncourt’s death in 1896, the Académie Goncourt was founded, a French Academician, actuated by like feelings, proposed Wilde along with Tolstoy for membership.30