Besides being a good boxer and an excellent hunter, Queensberry was a poet of sorts. In the Spirit Lamp Douglas printed one of his father’s poems, ‘Lines Suggested by Fred Leslie’s Death 3 Feb. 1893,’ lines perhaps suggested also by a poem of Christina Rossetti. ‘When I am dead, cremate me,’ was its resonant opening. In 1880, Queensberry published in pamphlet form his most ambitious poem, The Spirit of the Matterhorn (his brother, Lord Francis Douglas, had died climbing that mountain). In it he expressed certain views which he thought might placate the Scottish nobility. The Scottish lords had just then voted not to re-elect him as one of their representatives to the British House of Lords (something he and his ancestors considered their due because of their ancient title), on the grounds that he had publicly denied the existence of God. This rebuff wounded Queensberry deeply. He explained in a preface to his poem that he did not deny the existence of God, but preferred to call him the Inscrutable. His poem was mostly a versification of a theory that the soul is not distinct from the body, but is a result of the body itself. Consequently, one must choose one’s mate carefully so that the descent will be as eugenic as possible, since we reproduce not only our children’s bodies but their souls. ‘Go, tell mankind, see that thy blood be pure.’ The God-fearing Scottish lords were not mollified.
A glimpse of his character is afforded by his attempt to break up a performance of Tennyson’s The May Queen in December 1885 on the grounds that an atheist was badly treated in it. A weekly, The Bat, editorialized, ‘The more the Marquess of Queensberry orates to his own class the less effect he seems to create. His celebrated speech on his brother peer’s play only succeeded in obtaining for him ejection from the theatre.’ The next issue contained Queensberry’s reply:
Sir,—I thank you for your advertisement in your scurrilous journal—Conservative, I presume. You say I was ejected from a certain theatre. So I was. Also another advertisement. I believe the play was taken off three weeks afterwards.… Thanking you for further advertisement, yours faithfully,
QUEENSBERRY5
It was clear that this man would prove a formidable antagonist, eager for public gestures, as arrogantly indifferent as Wilde to what the world thought of him, and much less vulnerable. On 22 January 1887 his wife won a divorce from him on the grounds of his adultery with Mabel Gilroy of 217 Hampstead Road, Camden Town. Though he had made a poor husband to his first wife, to whom he was not at all suited, he had paid for his children’s needs and pleasures and taken a considerable, if tactless, interest in their welfare. He was delighted when Alfred, his third son, went up to Oxford, and distressed when his career there showed signs of coming to nothing. His rage was, however, still to come.
Rough Trade
I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do anything that one does.… I lived on honeycomb.
The relationship of Wilde and Douglas was intense and romantic, but they pursued more transient attachments. Douglas was fascinated by young men who for a few pounds and a good dinner would prostitute themselves. He introduced Wilde to this world, and there was a kind of competition between them. With this encouragement, Wilde stepped up the pace of his casual affairs in the autumn of 1892. Through Maurice Schwabe, a nephew of the Solicitor General, whom Douglas brought into his circle, he met Alfred Taylor, the errant son of a cocoa manufacturer, and once a public-school boy at Marlborough. Taylor in turn introduced him to a series of boys, the first important one being Sidney Mavor, later a Church of England priest. In October 1892 Wilde invited Taylor, Mavor, Douglas, and Schwabe to dinner at Kettner’s. He continued to see Mavor for the next year and a half. Schwabe also introduced Wilde to Freddy Atkins in October 1892; Atkins, not yet eighteen, was already an accomplished blackmailer. Wilde lavished money and cigarette cases and other gifts upon these boys, and cultivated a reputation for generosity and good will of which they took shameless advantage. This was the ‘feasting with panthers’ of which he spoke later.
During 1893 he established a practice of staying at hotels, ostensibly so he could work, actually so he could play as well. From 1 to 17 January he was at the Albemarle Hotel, but his behavior was sufficiently dubious for the proprietor to welcome his departure. Several young men paid him visits. He was pursuing his affair with Edward Shelley. It had begun early in 1892 when, having seen Shelley in the publisher John Lane’s office, Wilde invited him to dinner. Shelley was extremely nervous about the relationship, and in March 1893 wrote to Wilde that he wanted to break it off. Wilde made no objection, and offered him £100 if he wished to return to his studies. Shelley refused, but continued to count on Wilde for help in emergencies over the next two years.6 Meanwhile, in February 1893, Douglas passed on to Wilde a boy he had met, a seventeen-year-old named Alfred Wood. Wilde received him by prearrangement at the Café Royal, gave him, a drink, dined him in a private room at the Florence in Rupert Street, and took him off to Tite Street to make love. (The house was empty at the time.) They continued to meet. Douglas went on seeing Wood, and gave him some castoff clothes, carelessly failing to notice that there were letters from Wilde in the pockets. Wood decided to exploit this find to get money for a trip to America, and in April he sent a copy of one letter† to Beerbohm Tree, then rehearsing A Woman of No Importance, and waited for Wilde outside the stage door. Wilde, alerted by Tree, refused to give Wood anything, saying that if Wood could—as he pretended—get £60 for one of the letters, he should take advantage of this price, unusual for a prose piece of this length. Wood and two confederates eventually decided to give the letters to Wilde, except for the Hyacinth letter, and Wilde obligingly gave him £25 then and £5 a day later. After this transaction Wood went to America for a year.
At this period Wilde and Douglas had met through Taylor a boy named Charles Parker, and various other hangers-on. Although the meetings were not numerous, the detailed accounts of them later to emerge tend to ignore that they occurred over a period of years. With Sidney Mavor, Wilde went off to Paris in February 1893, wishing to be there for the publication of Salome, and put him up in a suite at one of the best hotels. What seems to characterize all Wilde’s affairs is that he got to know the boys as individuals, treated them handsomely, allowed them to refuse his attentions without becoming rancorous, and did not corrupt them. They were already prostitutes. The excitement of doing something considered wrong, and the professional avarice of the blackmailing, extortionate, faithless boys, may have been as important for Wilde as sexual gratification.
From late 1892, Wilde saw his life divide more emphatically between a clandestine, illegal aspect and an overt, declarable side. The more he consorted with rough but ready boys, in deliberate self-abandonment, the more he cultivated a public image of disinterestedness and self-possession. (Douglas had his place in both lives.) If he had sought ways to imperil himself, Wilde could hardly have found better ones. English society tolerated homosexuality only so long as one was not caught at it. His chances of being caught were enormously increased as he combined casual associations with his more idealized ones with Ross, then Gray, and then Douglas. Wilde believed in his star: he even had a star painted on the ceiling of his bedroom in Tite Street. But he was always bringing himself to the brink.
John Gray and Raffalovich
How agitated little André was last night!
The constant presence of Douglas in Wilde’s activities was irritating to other friends of Wilde. Robbie Ross was indulgent, feeling assured of his own place in the troop. The case of John Gray was harder. Wilde liked Gray’s verse, and thought he had achieved ‘a perfected mode of expression.’ Accordingly, he had agreed with John Lane on 17 June 1892 to defray all the publishing expenses of Gray’s first book, Silverpoints.7 During the early months of 1892, Gray was Wilde’s constant companion, Alfred Douglas’s turn being still to come. Wilde helped Gray to become a member of the Playgoers’ Club, and suggested him as a speaker. On 8 February 1892, with Wilde in the chair, Gray took the position that art was
manipulative and dandyistic, and the artist a pariah. Afterwards Wilde praised him ‘for being misunderstood, a distinction that I myself share,’ and denied that Gray’s surname had suggested Dorian’s. About 13 June, Pierre Louÿs arrived in London with a woman friend; Wilde at once invited the two to dinner, and had John Gray, already known to Louÿs, there to meet them. The three men saw one another regularly until, on 3 July 1892, Wilde went with Douglas for his rest cure to Bad Homburg, where Louÿs would visit him later. From Bad Homburg, Wilde sent the Silverpoints contract to Lane.
Although Louÿs was heterosexual, he naively enjoyed the entrée to this homosexual clique. He would tell André Gide of their exquisite manners: instead of offering a cigarette directly, Wilde and his friends would light one first, take a puff, and then offer it. He heard with approval how two of them (Alfred Taylor and Charles Mason) had celebrated ‘a real marriage’ with an exchange of rings and a ceremony. ‘They know how to envelop everything in poetry,’ he told Gide approvingly.8 The poetry must indeed have helped, but he was soon to be alerted by Gray to less felicitous aspects. Late in 1892, Gray informed Louÿs that he was thinking of committing suicide: Douglas’s ascendancy over Wilde was pre-emptive and Gray felt jilted.
It was at this time that André Raffalovich, who had admired Gray without knowing him, intervened. Out of jealousy he had published an article attacking both Gray and Wilde for their literary styles. But when Arthur Symons introduced him to Gray in November 1892, he repented and fell in love. Pressing his suit, he denounced Wilde’s intimacy with Douglas as vain and debauched. His sumptuous dinner parties, with which he had made a mark in London, now had Gray as a constant guest. Wilde was amused and contemptuous: Raffalovich was ‘the man who sent the New Helen [Lillie Langtry] in to dinner with Cardinal Vaughan,’ he said. ‘André came to London to start a salon, and has only succeeded in opening a saloon.’ Pursuing the joke, on his own last appearance at Raffalovich’s he said to the butler on arrival, ‘A table for six.’ Wilde was irked enough to deride his rival’s features: ‘as ugly as Raffalovich,’ he said. He would not sit next to him in the hairdressing establishment in Bond Street which they both patronized.9
Gradually Gray was won over. His last tribute to Wilde was an inscription in his translation of Paul Bourget’s A Saint and Others in October 1892, ‘To My Beloved Master, My Dear Friend, Homage.’ Soon after, Raffalovich brought him out of modest lodgings in the Temple and installed him at 43 Park Lane, minutes away from his own house in South Audley Street. On 4 January 1893, Gray, no doubt at his friend’s urging, had John Lane draw up a new contract for Silverpoints which left Wilde out except as a recipient of free copies. Ostensibly Lane agreed to pay all the costs of publication—a highly disadvantageous concession—so Raffalovich was presumably behind the scenes, guaranteeing him against loss. Silverpoints was published during the week of 4 March 1893. The response was disappointing, for the most part. Le Gallienne reproved Gray in March for modish decadence; Theodore Wratislaw was more severe in November, writing in the Artist and Journal of Home Culture (a homosexual journal) that Gray was ‘an artist with a promising future behind him.’
The most amusing response was from Wilde’s lately acquired friend Ada Leverson, whom he called ‘the Sphinx.’ Mrs Leverson, a witty woman and later a successful novelist, surveyed ‘the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin,’ and suggested to Wilde that the next step was for him to publish a book all margins, full of beautiful unwritten thoughts. The volume should be bound in some Nile-green skin powdered with gilt nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory, decorated with gold by Ricketts (if not Shannon), and printed on Japanese paper. Wilde approved. ‘It shall be dedicated to you and the unwritten text illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. There must be five hundred signed copies for particular friends, six for the general public, and one for America.’10
By March 1893, Gray had broken with Wilde and told Louÿs he had done so. Louÿs, conscious of many favors and much hospitality, was slow to follow. Through Wilde he had met not only Marion Terry, who was playing Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan, but Bernhardt herself—an encounter which inspired him to write the first version of his Aphrodite. Then, on 22 February 1893, he received a copy of Salome and found that the book was officially dedicated A mon ami Pierre Louÿs. He sent Wilde a facetious telegram, which Wilde returned to him: ‘Is the enclosed really all that you have to say to me in return for my choosing you out of all my friends to whom to dedicate Salome? I cannot tell you how hurt I am.… It is new to me to think that friendship is more brittle than love is.’ Louÿs made peace by sending him a sonnet entitled ‘Salomé,’ which began:
A travers le brouillard lumineux des sept voiles
La courbe de son corps se cambre vers la lune,
Elle se touche avec sa chevelure brune
Et ses doigts caressants où luisent des étoiles.‡
Wilde then invited him to the first performance of A Woman of No Importance, on 19 April. On this trip Louÿs began to see what Gray had found so hard to bear. He wrote to his brother Georges that the crowd he was with had begun to embarrass him, and on 22 April he added, ‘Oscar Wilde has been charming on my behalf, I have lunched with him almost every day. But I should have been glad if he had provided different company.’11 The ubiquity of Douglas was oppressive.
Wilde and Douglas told Louÿs that they were worried about the possibility of blackmail over the Hyacinth letter which Wilde had written to Douglas, still in the hands of Alfred Wood. So that it might be given the status of a work of art, Louÿs obligingly prepared a version of it in French, and the result was published in the Spirit Lamp, Douglas’s Oxford magazine, on 4 May 1893, with an allusion to Wilde’s play, as ‘Sonnet. A letter written in prose poetry by M. Oscar Wilde to a friend, and translated into rhymed poetry by a poet of no importance.’§
By now Louÿs observed Wilde and his clique at close quarters. He was present one morning in the Savoy Hotel room which Wilde and Douglas were sharing, where there was one double bed and two pillows.‖ While they were talking, Constance Wilde arrived, because she saw so little of her husband, to bring him his post. When she besought him to come home, he pretended he had been away so long he had forgotten the number of his house, and Constance smiled through her tears.13 This was the occasion when Wilde said aside in explanation to Louÿs, ‘I’ve made three marriages in my life, one with a woman and two with men!’14 Presumably the two men were Douglas, for certain, and either Ross or Gray. Louÿs was upset: he had not considered the wife. For his part, Wilde was frank about it. He related to Mme Melba how he had been telling his sons stories the night before about little boys who were naughty and made their mothers cry, and what dreadful things would happen to them unless they behaved better. ‘Do you know what one of them answered? He asked me what punishment would be reserved for naughty papas, who did not come home till the early morning, and made mother cry far more.’ The punishment for that would be severe indeed.
Louÿs returned to Paris, disgusted at what he had seen. He told Henri de Régnier that Wilde was now confessedly a pederast, and had abandoned his wife and children for Douglas. Régnier passed on the details to Edmond de Goncourt, who entered them gloatingly in his journal for 30 April. Louÿs, however, had spoken not out of an urge to impart scandal, but out of a real dismay. He decided to urge Wilde to change his ways. An opportunity came in late May 1893, when Wilde stayed for a few days at the Hôtel des Deux-Mondes in the avenue de l’Opéra. Louÿs visited him, probably on the 23rd, and remonstrated with him about his relationship with Douglas and his mistreatment of wife and children. Wilde declined to offer any excuse or modify his conduct. Louÿs, he said, had no right to sit in judgment over him. In that case, Louÿs responded, he had no alternative but to break off relations. Wilde now gazed at him sadly and said, ‘Goodbye, Pierre Louÿs. I had hoped for a friend; from now on I will have only lovers.’
But he gave an indignant account of the interview to Léon Dau
det, and Louÿs, being duly informed by the unsympathetic Daudet, wrote to Wilde on 25 May 1893 a stinging letter: ‘With regard to yourself, I have nothing to add to what I said to you the other day, except that I am astonished at your insistence and at the way you noise about an incident which I did not expect you to abuse.’15 At Wilde’s request, Marcel Schwob tried to make peace, saying that Daudet had misrepresented what Wilde had said. It was to no avail. A few days later Louÿs notified John Gray: ‘You know that I have broken with Wilde and that I cannot meet him anywhere.’ Wilde’s rift with Gray and Louÿs, lover and friend, Englishman and Frenchman, was a foretaste of worse to come. In his last years he would think back with regret of how he had lost their friendship because of Douglas. But for the moment he embraced danger as if it were a Ganymede.
Like a figure in Greek tragedy, Wilde had allowed his success to make him overweening. The behavior of his companions ostentatiously reinforced the childlike self-flattery in which he indulged. A letter from Beerbohm to Turner, written three days after the last performance of A Woman of No Importance on 16 August 1893, marks a distinct stage. Wilde came to the theatre with Douglas, Ross, and Beardsley. ‘The last of these had forgotten to put vine-leaves in his hair, but the other three wore rich clusters—especially poor Robbie [who was getting bald]. Nor have I ever seen Oscar so fatuous: he called Mrs Beere “Juno-like” and [Henry] Kemble “Olympian quite” and waved his cigarette round and round his head. Of course I would rather see Oscar free than sober, but still, suddenly meeting him … I felt quite repelled.’ That Wilde was not so arrogant as he pretended did not mitigate the unpleasantness of his effect on people.
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