Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  But when the danger of losing Wilde became real, Douglas wilted. He asked someone, almost certainly Robbie Ross, to intercede, and Ross pointed out to Wilde that to return the manuscript like a schoolboy’s exercises would scar Douglas’s life. Douglas did not know much French, and Wilde should not have expected so much from him. He also assured Wilde that, whatever Douglas said or did, he was utterly devoted to his lover. Wilde had no desire to be the first to check or discourage Douglas’s beginnings in literature, as he said long afterwards, and had the less right to do so since he had encouraged them. ‘So I took the translation and you back.’20

  He evidently came to this decision at Dinard, where he had gone at the end of August to recover from twelve weeks of Douglas. ‘I required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of your companionship,’ he wrote in De Profundis. On 9 September he sent a conciliatory letter to Douglas in which he mentioned with deliberate casualness that Douglas would soon be receiving proofs. He did not give up his criticisms, however, and insisted on many changes. Douglas reasserted himself, and refused to make them. On 30 September he wrote to the publisher John Lane,

  Dear Lane,

  Oscar and I have found it impossible to agree about the translation of certain passages, phrases and words in Salome, and consequently as I cannot consent to have my work altered and edited, and thus to become a mere machine for doing the rough work of translation, I have decided to relinquish the affair altogether.

  You and Oscar can therefore arrange between you as to who the translator is to be. My private opinion is that unless Oscar translates it himself, he will not be satisfied.

  Yours very truly

  ALFRED DOUGLAS

  The matter did not end there. In October or November, Beardsley read the translation and said it would not do; he offered to make one of his own. Wilde, fortunately for Douglas, did not like this either. There ensued an acrimonious four-way controversy among Lane, Wilde, Douglas, and Beardsley. Lane said that Douglas had shown disrespect for Wilde, but backed down when Douglas accused him of stirring up trouble between them. Beardsley declared that it would be dishonest to put Douglas’s name on the title page when the translation had been so much altered by Wilde. Wilde then offered the wisdom of Solomon: he proposed to Douglas that the title page should bear only his own name, but that a dedication should be made to Douglas as translator. Beardsley stayed out of this controversy, and wrote to Ross in November,

  I suppose you’ve heard all about the Salome row. I can tell you I had a warm time of it between Lane and Oscar and Co. For one week the numbers of telegraph and messenger boys who came to the door was simply scandalous. I really don’t quite know how matters really stand now. Anyhow Bosie’s name is not to turn up on the Title. The book will be out soon after Xmas. I have withdrawn three of the illustrations and supplied their places with three new ones (simply beautiful and quite irrelevant).21

  Douglas sent Lane a letter explaining that the new arrangement was more honorific than the old:

  In the meanwhile let me assure you that nothing would have induced me to sanction the publication of Salome without my name on the title-page (and the matter was left entirely in my hands by Mr Wilde), if I had not been persuaded that the dedication which is to be made to me is of infinitely greater artistic & literary value, than the appearance of my name on the title-page. It was only a few days ago that I fully realised that the difference between the dedication of Salome to me by the author and the appearance of my name on the title-page is the difference between a tribute of admiration from an artist and a receipt from a tradesman.22

  He thrived on quarrels, but the others did not. He had an inexhaustible stock of combative energy, but when this had run its course, he was as shiftless as he had been before mistranslating Salome. His father was furious over his failure to take his degree and, having no one else to blame, blamed Wilde. Queensberry had other problems as well. His oldest son, Drumlanrig, was private secretary to Lord Rosebery, then Foreign Minister under Gladstone but to be Prime Minister the next year (1894). Queensberry had begun to see homosexuals everywhere, and suspected that Rosebery was influencing Drumlanrig in this direction. Quick to go on the rampage, and hearing that Rosebery was at Bad Homburg, Queensberry followed him there in August 1893 with a dogwhip. The Prince of Wales intervened, and the police asked the Marquess to leave. The next month, on 11 September, Queensberry’s second son, Percy, married the daughter of a Cornish clergyman, an alliance opposed by the atheist Queensberry because he considered the family both too paltry and too pious. To the author of The Spirit of the Matterhorn, the prospective descendants of such a match could hardly have been less promising. His personal life was also agitating. On 1 November 1893, Queensberry married for the second time. His wife was Ethel Weedon, a young woman of a respectable Eastbourne family, none of whom came to the wedding. She left him immediately, and started proceedings for annulment, alleging ‘malformation of the parts of generation’ as well as ‘frigidity and impotency.’ To be called impotent seven years after having been judicially declared adulterous, and after having begotten four children, was a heavy load for this active man of fifty. He contested the suit, claimed the marriage had been consummated, and hired George Lewis to defend him.

  Queensberry repeatedly demanded that Douglas stop seeing Wilde. On 8 November 1893, Wilde wrote a long letter to Lady Queensberry about Douglas’s disturbed state, which suggests some trepidation in the writer too:

  16 Tite Street

  Dear Lady Queensberry, You have on more than one occasion consulted me about Bosie. Let me write to you now about him.

  Bosie seems to me to be in a very bad state of health. He is sleepless, nervous, and rather hysterical. He seems to me quite altered.

  He is doing nothing in town. He translated my French play last August. Since then he has really done nothing intellectual. He seems to me to have lost, for the moment only I trust, his interest even in literature. He does absolutely nothing, and is quite astray in life, and may, unless you or Drumlanrig do something, come to grief of some kind. His life seems to me aimless, unhappy and absurd.

  All this is a great grief and disappointment to me, but he is very young, and terribly young in temperament. Why not try and make arrangements of some kind for him to go abroad for four or five months, to the Cromers in Egypt if that could be managed, where he would have new surroundings, proper friends, and a different atmosphere? I think that if he stays in London he will not come to any good, and may spoil his young life irretrievably, quite irretrievably. Of course it will cost money no doubt, but here is the life of one of your sons—a life that should be brilliant and distinguished and charming—going quite astray, being quite ruined.

  I like to think myself his greatest friend—he, at any rate, makes me think so—so I write to you quite frankly to ask you to send him abroad to better surroundings. It would save him, I feel sure. At present his life seems to be tragic and pathetic in its foolish aimlessness.

  You will not, I know, let him know anything about my letter. I can rely on you, I feel sure. Sincerely yours

  OSCAR WILDE

  In spite of the request for secrecy, Wilde’s De Profundis makes clear that the idea of Douglas’s going to Lord Cromer in Cairo was a stratagem they had hit upon together. Douglas had reason enough to leave the country. There had been a scandal in which he was involved. A letter from Beerbohm to Turner offers a mystifying account:

  Robbie Ross has returned to this country for a few days and of him there have been very great and intimate scandals and almost, if not quite, warrants: slowly he is recovering but has to remain at Davos during his convalescence for fear of a social relapse. I must not disclose anything (nor must you) but I may tell you that a schoolboy with wonderful eyes, Bosie, Bobbie, a furious father, George Lewis, a headmaster (who is now blackmailing Bobbie), St John Wontner [a police solicitor], Calais, Dover, Oscar Browning, Oscar, Dover, Calais, and returned cigarette-cases were some of the ingredients of the dreadful e
pisode.… The garçon entretenu, the schoolboy Helen ‘for whom those horned ships were launched, those beautiful mailed men laid low,’ was the same as him of whom I told you that he had been stolen from Bobbie by Bosie and kept at the Albemarle Hotel: how well I remember passing this place one night with Bobbie and his looking up sadly at the lighted windows and wondering to me behind which of the red curtains lay the desire of his soul.23

  This high-spirited jumble has to be supplemented by a letter from Oscar Browning to Frank Harris. Browning’s brother-in-law, the Reverend Biscale Hale Wortham, kept a boys’ school, St Laurence, in Bruges. Robert Ross went to visit the Worthams during the holidays. A sixteen-year-old boy named Philip Danney, son of an army colonel, was staying there, and Ross, who had known the boy since he was fourteen, invited him to visit him in London.

  While Danney was staying with him, Ross mentioned the fact casually in a letter to Douglas, then at Goring with Wilde. Douglas responded by rushing to London and bringing the boy back to Goring. ‘On Saturday,’ says Browning, ‘the boy slept with Douglas, on Sunday he slept with Oscar. On Monday he returned to London and slept with a woman at Douglas’s expense. On Tuesday he returned to Bruges three days late. His master inquired into the facts and told them to me as I have related them.’ Colonel Danney, an officer in the Guards, got wind of the matter, and the police solicitors were consulted. Ross and Douglas had to hotfoot it to Bruges on 15 October 1893 and meet with Wortham. Ross gave back Danney’s letters. Wilde’s name was kept out of it. ‘It is an absolute fabrication,’ said Ross. Colonel Danney, according to Browning, ‘wished to prosecute the offenders, but the lawyer said, “They will doubtless get two years but your son will get six months.” ’ So the father, unlike Queensberry after him, decided to let the matter drop. Ross’s relations heard of the affair, and called him—as he later admitted in open court—‘the disgrace of the family, a social outcast, a son and brother unfit for society of any kind.’ It was decided that he should leave the country, and he went to Davos partly for reasons of health but mostly, as Beerbohm said, to avoid ‘a social relapse.’24a He ventured back to London in the first days of the next year, but life could never be so free and easy again. The tiger had flexed its paws; Wilde would not be warned.

  Lady Queensberry was kept in the dark. She decided to follow Wilde’s advice to send her son to Cairo, and arranged matters with the Cromers. Douglas prepared for departure. He had his own tremors, even if Ross was bearing the brunt. Wilde had begun to look forward to his absence, and Douglas may have detected this, for he fell into another fit of fury and Wilde escaped to Paris, leaving a false address. Telegrams and letters trailed after him, but this time he disregarded them. Douglas had a trump card to play: he threatened that he would not go to Egypt at all unless Wilde agreed to a reconciliation. Wilde knew how much Lady Queensberry had banked on the change of scene, and felt that since he had proposed it he must not allow Douglas to give it up. He made peace. Douglas went off to Cairo, once more confident of Wilde’s love, though this was by no means unreservedly renewed.26

  Not all Wilde’s time went into these anxieties. The opera singer Emma Calvé tells how, late in 1893, Wilde came up to the hostess at a large party and said he had with him a French poet who had been in prison, and asked her permission to bring him in. She agreed. It proved to be Paul Verlaine, unkempt as ever, but this time in favor with Wilde. At Wilde’s urging, Verlaine read a poem about his prison experience; his words cut through hypocrisy and evasion to touch the hearts of the respectable company. Wilde, on his way to becoming another of society’s victims, joined proudly in the applause.27

  * At the Authors’ Club on 30 June 1892 Wilde met Ives, whose Order of Chaeronaea was supposed to provide a secret power base for homosexuals. Wilde’s first remark to Ives was ‘Why are you here among the bald and the bearded?’ He was sympathetic to Ives’s Order, though there is no evidence that he ever joined it. He suggested to Ives that a pagan monastery might be established on some small island in the Mediterranean, where, as Ives wished, all loves might be free. Wilde was put in mind of the friendship of Byron and Shelley, which he said ended when Byron attempted to make love to Shelley and Shelley broke off the relationship.

  † Presumably this was the one sent by Wilde from Babbacombe Cliff in January 1893:

  My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.

  Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place—it only lacks you; but go to Salisbury first. Always, with undying love, yours

  OSCAR

  ‡ ‘Through the luminous mist of the seven veils / The curve of her body arches towards the moon, / She brushes herself with her dark hair / And her caressing and starlit fingers.’

  § Hyacinthe! Ô mon coeur! jeune dieu doux et blond!

  Tes yeux sont la lumière de la mer! ta bouche,

  Le sang rouge du soir où mon soleil se couche.…

  Je t’aime, enfant câlin, cher aux bras d’Apollon.

  Tu chantais, et ma lyre est moins douce, le long

  Des rameaux suspendus que la brise effarouche,

  A frémir, que ta voix à chanter, quand je touche

  Tes cheveux couronnés d’acanthe et de houblon.

  Mais tu pars! tu me fuis pour les Portes d’Hercule;

  Va! rafraîchis tes mains dans le clair crépuscule

  Des choses où descend l’âme antique. Et reviens,

  Hyacinthe adoré! hyacinthe! hyacinthe!

  Car je veux voir toujours dans les bois syriens

  Ton beau corps étendu sur la rose et l’absinthe.

  Louÿs was evidently schooling himself to write his own Chansons de Bilitis.

  ‖ Max Beerbohm wrote to Ross in 1893: ‘Poor Oscar! I saw him the other day, from a cab walking with Bosie and some other members of the Extreme Left. He looked like one whose soul has swooned in sin and revived vulgar. How fearful it is for a poet to go to bed and find himself infamous.’12

  a At Davos he gave a talk before the English Literary Society on ‘The Didactic in Art and Literature,’ in which he said, ‘I do not think that Plato’s morals or those of any Greek writer would withstand the British crucible.’25

  CHAPTER XVI

  Sailing into the Wind

  HEROD: And I hear in the air something that is like the beating of wings, like the beating of vast wings. Do you not hear it?

  ‘Falling Towers …’

  A letter from Wilde to Douglas, written in the summer of 1894, tells of having been to sit with the aging Lady Wilde. ‘Death and Love seem to walk on either hand as I go through life: they are the only things I think of, their wings shadow me.’ Lady Wilde, now seventy-four, was in great distress at the rupture of relations between her two sons. In January of this year Willie had married for the second time, his bride a pleasant woman named Lily Lees. Oscar was conspicuously absent. On 29 March Lady Wilde wrote to him, ‘I am truly sorry to find that you and Willie meet as enemies. Is this to go on to my death? Not a cheering prospect for me, to have my two sons at enmity, and unable to meet at my deathbed. I think, to please me, you might write the 8 words I asked—“I forget the enmity. Let us be friends. Signed Oscar.” 8 words! Can you do it to oblige me? There need be no intimacy between you but at least social civility.’1 Her pleas were unavailing, except to make Wilde take stock of himself and recognize, not for the first time, how solemn a vision underlay the insouciance he affected.

  These dark thoughts perhaps prompted him in April to get out his old scenario for The Cardinal of Avignon, in the hope that the American tragic actor Richard Mansfield might play in it. In this sketch, which he had written in the flush of his first American fame in 1
882, Wilde had planned to include a ‘Masque of Death.’ The plot reads like something from Jacobean drama. The cardinal—about to be elected pope—has a passion for his ward, whom he alone knows to be his daughter. But she is in love with a young man, who, as only the cardinal is aware, is her brother. Out of jealousy, not morality, the cardinal informs the brother of his true relationship with the girl (though not with himself), and makes him tell her that he no longer loves her. When the cardinal is elected pope, he has a change of heart, and tells the young man he will permit the marriage. But the girl is brought in on a bier: she has killed herself. The young man is about to commit the sin of killing the Pope, and is not swayed by the Pope’s telling him, ‘I am your father.’ But when the Pope says, ‘I too loved her,’ his son flings open the doors of the palace and tells the soldiers, ‘His Holiness the Pope rides to Rome tonight.’ He throws himself on the bier and kills himself as his sister has done. The plot was Wilde’s emulation of another neo-Jacobean drama, Shelley’s The Cenci,* but differs in its lack of interest in the subject of incest. The tragedy is one of thwarted love, and the family relationships of lovers and rival do not seem to matter. Mansfield was interested, but the play got no further.