In any case, Douglas played his last card, an unexpected trump, by writing to ask Constance Wilde to intercede for him. (It was the same procedure he had used in soliciting the help of Robert Ross to make peace between him and Wilde over the translation of Salome.) Though Mrs Wilde was, like Ross, a rival for Wilde’s affections, she also could not resist Bosie’s appeal. She did not want her husband to be unkind. Subjected to this incongruous pressure from his wife to make up with his lover, Wilde continued to dig in his heels. He sent Douglas a telegram in March 1894: ‘Time heals every wound but for many months to come I will neither write to you nor see you.’ This challenge fired Douglas’s blood. He was off to Paris at once, a journey of six days and nights, his only stops en route being to send Wilde telegrams. When he reached his Paris hotel, he found a letter saying Wilde would not come. Douglas sent off a telegram of ten or eleven pages (he denied it later), saying he had traveled arduously across Europe only in the hope of a meeting, and would not be responsible for his actions if Wilde continued to refuse him. Wilde was well aware that in the annals of the Queensberrys there had been an uncle of Douglas who committed suicide in 1891, and a grandfather who had probably done the same some years earlier. Against such blackmail he could not stand out. It brought him to Paris, and over dinner at Voisin’s and supper at Paillard’s Wilde allowed himself to be vanquished by beauty, tears, contrition, and caresses.11 Although he did not know it, this was a last chance to break free. Losing it, he saw his life move—almost independently of him—towards climax.
Douglas Returned
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
On their second day back in London, 1 April 1894, Wilde and Douglas were lunching at the Café Royal when the Marquess of Queensberry caught sight of them. He regarded their lunching together as an open defiance of him, a sign that his son had lapsed back into the old vile habits. They invited him to their table, however, and he was momentarily overborne by Wilde’s charm. ‘I don’t wonder you are so fond of him,’ he said to Douglas; ‘he is a wonderful man.’ Then, returning home, he had second thoughts. Taking his paternal duties seriously, he wrote a long letter to his son the same afternoon:
1 April 1894
Alfred,—It is extremely painful for me to have to write to you in the strain I must, but please understand that I decline to receive any answers from you in writing in return. After your recent hysterical impertinent ones I refuse to be annoyed with such, and I decline to read any more letters. If you have anything to say do come here and say it in person. Firstly, am I to understand that, having left Oxford as you did, with discredit to yourself, the reasons of which were fully explained to me by your tutor, you now intend to loaf and loll about and do nothing? All the time you were wasting at Oxford I was put off with an assurance that you were eventually to go into the Civil Service or to the Foreign Office, and then I was put off with an assurance that you were going to the Bar. It appears to me that you intend to do nothing. I utterly decline, however, to just supply you with sufficient funds to enable you to loaf about. You are preparing a wretched future for yourself, and it would be most cruel and wrong for me to encourage you in this. Secondly, I come to the more painful part of this letter—your intimacy with this man Wilde. It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I ever seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I now hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true, or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight. These christian English cowards and men, as they call themselves, want waking up.
Your disgusted so-called father,
QUEENSBERRY
Douglas’s reaction to even mild criticism was ferocious. He had mentioned in a letter to his mother how once, when he had replied to some of her recriminations by a savage letter, he had shown it to Wilde, who had torn it up with the words ‘After all, nobody has a right to be unkind to his mother.’ But he did not give Wilde a chance to see the telegram which he sent off to his father on 2 April: ‘WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE MAN YOU ARE.’12 Queensberry was in fact an inch shorter than Douglas, being five feet eight inches. He matched his son in amour-propre and ferocity. When Wilde heard about the telegram, he was dismayed. As he said later, but probably forbore to say at the time, ‘it was a telegram of which the commonest street-boy would have been ashamed.’13 Bosie could not stop doing things Wilde thought unworthy of him. Queensberry’s reply on 3 April was vehement, but even in his rage he somewhat mollified his threat to cut Bosie off entirely. Still, it was hardly a letter to bring about better relations:
You impertinent young jackanapes. I request that you will not send such messages to me by telegraph. If you send me any more such telegrams, or come with any impertinence, I will give you the thrashing you deserve. Your only excuse is that you must be crazy. I hear from a man at Oxford that you were thought crazy there, and that accounts for a good deal that has happened. If I catch you again with that man I will make a public scandal in a way you little dream of; it is already a suppressed one. I prefer an open one, and at any rate I shall not be blamed for allowing such a state of things to go on. Unless this acquaintance ceases I shall carry out my threat and stop all supplies, and if you are not going to make any attempt to do something I shall certainly cut you down to a mere pittance, so you know what to expect.14
It was perhaps now that Wilde protested that he could not be a catspaw between father and son.15 Douglas insisted that he had nothing to do with the quarrel, but seems to have thought it advisable nonetheless to take a month’s trip to Florence, arranging for Wilde to follow him there, but surreptitiously. Wilde left for Paris on 27 April and stayed till 6 May before going on to Florence. His attempt to keep his presence in Florence a secret was perhaps doomed to fail, since his height and dress and theatrical nature made him conspicuous wherever he went.‖ One person known to have recognized them was André Gide, who met them in a café and felt at first unwelcome. He was queasy about being seen with them. The relationship of Wilde and Douglas was notorious; in letters to Paul Valéry, Gide at first did not mention the encounter at all, and only after some weeks allowed that he had run into Wilde, accompanied by ‘un autre poète d’une génération plus nouvelle,’ as if Douglas’s name would give too much away. If Wilde was disconcerted, he recovered quickly; he offered Gide two drinks, four stories, and their flat, which they had hired for a month but used only for two weeks. Gide agreed, then decided to leave it for a pensione.17
Wilde had probably run out of money, and had to return to London early in June, probably to borrow. He had also decided to consult a solicitor, and did so in late May. Unfortunately, as he probably heard, Sir George Lewis’s services had been pre-empted by Queensberry, so he accepted a suggestion that came from Robert Ross and went to see another solicitor, named C. O. Humphreys, a choice that turned out to be a bad one, since homosexuality was quite outside Humphreys’s field of knowledge. What advice Wilde got from Humphreys on this occasion is unrecorded, but for the moment he did not try to bind the Marquess over to keep the peace. As for the Marquess, he had seen and heard enough, and made an unannounced visit to Wilde in Tite Street on 30 June. The confrontation was described twice by Wilde, and once by Queensberry, who said in a letter that Wilde had shown him the white feather. The version Wilde gave was quite different. He said he denied all charges and made Queensberry leave the house. This was not quite the whole story. In De Profundis Wilde described the scene with more anguish: ‘in my library at Tite Street, waving his small
hands in the air in epileptic fury, your father, with his bully, or his friend, between us, had stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of, and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried out.’
Wilde evidently more or less outfaced the Marquess on this occasion, though it does not seem possible that he, as he later said, ‘drove him out’; he quailed at the thought of such a scene’s being played in public. Chance appears to have protected him, for, as he said in De Profundis, ‘He [went] from restaurant to restaurant looking for me, in order to insult me before the whole world, and in such a manner that if I retaliated I would be ruined, and if I did not retaliate I would be ruined also.’ Douglas continued to taunt his father, claiming to be altogether unmoved by the threats which had obviously shaken Wilde. He wrote in early June 1894:
As you return my letters unopened I am obliged to write on a postcard. I write to inform you that I treat your absurd threats with absolute indifference. Ever since your exhibition at O.W.’s house, I have made a point of appearing with him at many public restaurants such as The Berkeley, Willis’s Rooms, the Café Royal, etc., and I shall continue to go to any of these places whenever I choose and with whom I choose. I am of age and my own master. You have disowned me at least a dozen times, and have meanly deprived me of money. You have therefore no right over me, either legal or moral. If O.W. was to prosecute you in the Central Criminal Court for libel, you would get seven years’ penal servitude for your outrageous libels. Much as I detest you, I am anxious to avoid this for the sake of the family; but if you try to assault me, I shall defend myself with a loaded revolver, which I always carry; and if I shoot you or he shoots you, we shall be completely justified, as we shall be acting in self-defence against a violent and dangerous rough, and I think if you were dead not many people would miss you. A.D.18
The ‘ridiculous pistol’ that Douglas carried went off in The Berkeley later, according to Wilde, and created further scandal. There was no doubt that Frank Harris was right in warning Wilde about this time that he was putting himself between the bark and the tree. He had become the instrument of Douglas’s ancient battle with his father. The dangerous quarrel somehow exhilarated Douglas. In cruel summary Wilde said later, ‘The prospect of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you. I never remember you in higher spirits than you were for the rest of that season. Your only disappointment seemed to be that nothing actually happened, and that no further meeting or fracas had taken place between us.’19 Although it has often been said that Wilde aspired to misfortune, he had no such conscious aim. As for Douglas, he demanded misfortune as the final token of Wilde’s love.
Wilde’s increasing anxiety is plain. At the beginning of July he approached George Lewis (now Sir George), perhaps within a few days of Queensberry’s visit to Tite Street. Lewis’s answer was polite but distant, considering how long and intimately Wilde had known him and his family.
7 July 1894
Dear Mr Wilde,
I am in receipt of your note. The information that you have received that I am acting for Lord Queensberry is perfectly correct, and under these circumstances you will see at once that it is impossible for me to offer any opinion about any proceedings you intend to take against him.
Although I cannot act against him, I should not act against you.
Believe me
Yours faithfully
GEORGE M. LEWIS
Wilde now went again to Humphreys, who wrote to Queensberry asking him to retract his libels or risk litigation. The Marquess replied that he had nothing to retract, having made no direct accusation against Wilde, but that he wanted the association with his son to end. There the matter was allowed to rest for the moment.
Fortunately, it was almost midsummer, and time for all concerned to leave London. Wilde had not deserted literature completely. During the summer he published The Sphinx with Lane and Mathews, with Ricketts’s elaborate cover. The edition was limited to 250 copies. ‘My first idea,’ said Wilde, ‘was to print only three copies: one for myself, one for the British Museum, and one for Heaven. I had some doubts about the British Museum.’ He took care that the press got some, and the reviews were mostly favorable. From August to October Wilde was with his family in Worthing, determined to write The Importance of Being Earnest, on which he had already been paid an advance. There were many interruptions. The house at Worthing was small; the Wilde children were there with Constance and a Swiss governess. Douglas’s brother Percy visited for a time, as did Douglas himself. He wrote to Robert Ross afterwards, ‘I had great fun, though the last few days the strain of being a bone of contention between Oscar and Mrs Oscar began to make itself felt.’20 As Wilde wrote to Douglas in De Profundis, ‘Our friendship had always been a source of distress to her, not merely because she had never liked you personally, but because she saw how your continued friendship altered me, and not for the better.’
Anguishing Capers
One should never take sides in anything. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.
None of Wilde’s plays cost him less effort than the best of them. The Importance of Being Earnest flowed from his pen. According to Ricketts, the plot was originally more complicated, involving double identity and placed in the time of Sheridan. He changed his mind, and said later, ‘There is no use adding “place” and “time” to the scenario, as the unities are not in the scheme. In art I am Platonic, not Aristotelian, tho’ I wear my Plato with a difference.’21 It gathered together various themes that Wilde had been developing since 1889. The title went back to the subtitle of his dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist,’ which was ‘With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Absolutely Nothing.’ The assumed languor of Algernon and Jack was the well-established posture of aestheticism since Schlegel’s Lucinde, where it is said, with a touch of Wilde’s self-mockery, ‘Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from Paradise.’
In ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ Wilde had repudiated marriage, the family, and private property; in his play, he repudiated them by pretending they are ineradicable, urging their enforcement with a mad insistence which shows how preposterous they are. In certain essays Wilde made art into a kind of new ethics, replacing worn-out conventions with new generosity, freedom, and individuality. This view of art as social instrument coexisted with its own cancellation. Salome dwelt upon incest and necrophilia, and displayed them as self-defeated, punished by execution and remorse. But with the critical intellect he could dissolve notions of sin and guilt. He does so in The Importance of Being Earnest, all insouciance where Salome is all incrimination. The philosophy of the last play, he told Robert Ross, is ‘That we should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’22 In The Importance, sins accursed in Salome and unnamable in Dorian Gray are transposed into a different key and appear as Algernon’s inordinate and selfish craving for—cucumber sandwiches. The substitution of mild gluttony for fearsome lechery renders all vice innocuous. There is a wicked brother, but he is just our old friend Algernon. The double life which is so serious a matter for Dorian or for the Ideal Husband becomes Bunburying—playing Jack in the country and Ernest in town, and only to avoid boring engagements. In the earlier, four-act version of the play, Wilde even parodied punishment, by having a solicitor come to take Algernon to Holloway Prison (as Wilde himself was soon to be taken), not for homosexuality, but for running up food bills at the Savoy. ‘I am not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs for dining in the West End. It is ridiculous,’ Algernon replies. Elsewhere, the notion of expiation is mocked; as Cecily observes, ‘They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.’ The theme of regeneration, not to mention religious zeal, is parodied in the efforts of Ernest and Jack to be rebaptized. (In the earlier version, when Prism too is about to be baptized, someone comments, ‘To be born again would be of co
nsiderable advantage to her.’) The ceremonial unmasking at the play’s end, which had meant death for Dorian Gray, leaves everyone barefaced for a new puppet show, matrimony. Yet, amusing as the surface is, the comic energy springs from the realities that are mocked.a
The Importance of Being Earnest constructs its wonderful parapet over the abyss of the author’s disquietude and apprehension. By a desperate stratagem Wilde keeps the melancholy of the world at a distance. Deception is everywhere, canceled by spontaneity and humor. Erotic passions compete with family ambition; innocence longs for experience and experience for innocence. Tears are taboo. Wilde masked his cares with the play’s insouciance, by a miracle of control. A friend said it should be like a piece of mosaic. ‘No,’ said Wilde, ‘it must go like a pistol shot.’24
Kind Friends
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.
Beerbohm’s life often converged with Wilde’s at this time. He rejoiced in Dorian Gray as a mock-sacred book, to be set for examinations; during ‘Hedony [from hedonist] Term 1894’ he drew up a model for these, with such questions as: ‘Is there any internal evidence to show that the custom of cigarette-smoking obtained in the period with which the story deals?’ Another of his procedures was less innocent. He had become friendly with Robert Hichens, and early in the summer of 1894 Hichens showed him the manuscript of The Green Carnation. Neither he nor Hichens understood how dangerous the book would be for Wilde, but Beerbohm could not have been totally unaware of the risks, for in a letter to Turner of 12 August 1894 he pretends there has been a brush with the law: ‘Oscar has at length been arrested for certain kinds of crime. He was taken in the Café Royal (lower room). Bosie escaped, being an excellent runner, but Oscar was less nimble.’ These fancies were uncomfortably close to life: Beerbohm may have awaited with unconscious excitement the removal of the master from the London scene, leaving the field open for his disciple. At any rate, he wrote still more cruelly in April–May 1895 to Mrs Leverson, ‘I look forward eagerly to the first act of Oscar’s new Tragedy. But surely the title Douglas must have been used before.’
Oscar Wilde Page 59