Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  There is some evidence that the decision of Wilde and Douglas at the end of August to reunite was less wholehearted than either allowed the other to know. Douglas, moderating his earlier eagerness, specified a six-week delay before the reunion would take place. He had planned to spend three weeks in September with his mother at Aix-les-Bains, taking the waters for his rheumatism, and then to go on to Venice. So leisurely a convergence with Wilde implies some qualification of desire. He seems to have enjoyed himself at Aix, and in his Autobiography notes that it was there that he wrote his best ballad, ‘The Ballad of St. Vitus.’ That poem is not about reconciliation with Wilde, but about reconciliation with Queensberry: it describes how Vitus regains his father’s love by a miracle. Douglas was to seek consciously to be once more his father’s son the next year. That he was irresolute is confirmed by his checking out of his hotel in Aix, and leaving the forwarding address of a hotel in Venice. He had evidently written to tell Wilde of this plan, for a letter from Wilde answers:

  My dearest boy: I hope to go to Naples in three days, but must try and get some more money. I see it costs £10 to go to Naples. This is awful. Of course, wait until your cure is finished. I hope you will have no more rheumatic horrors. I know how dreadful they are.

  As regards Venice, of course do just as you will, but the sooner you come to Naples the happier I shall be. At present I am wretched, and in low spirits. Come as soon as you can. The accumulated hotel bills were awful, and the proprietress, of course, turned out to be a Shylock. Ever yours, with love,

  OSCAR4

  This letter may have decided Douglas; he wrote agreeing to an earlier meeting.

  Wilde, for his part, was aware that returning to Bosie would outrage everyone. They all wanted him to see his wife first. He felt he had little choice. On going back to Berneval from Rouen, he had experienced that village in all its villagism, the company vying with the weather in being insufferable. And he was tired of the insufferable. He now went again to Rouen and, according to Gertrude Atherton, whose account, though hostile, cannot be sheer invention, urged Reggie Turner, who was staying at her hotel, to come and live with him. Turner, after all, had a fixed income and could live wherever he liked; as a novelist, moreover, he shared Wilde’s literary interests. But Turner rebelled at the prospect of committing himself, and confided his difficulty to Mrs Atherton; she urged him to escape to London, where Wilde could not follow him.5 After three days Turner appears to have done just that. He would say much later that her report was full of lies, but visiting Wilde was one thing, living with him another; he wished to be a friend and not a copain.

  When Turner failed him Wilde knew he had exhausted all the alternatives: he returned to Berneval, packed up his belongings, paid off M. Bonnet, arranged to have his books and other possessions sent on later (they arrived on 5 November), and on 15 September departed for Paris. All thought of writing a play in Berneval had been dissipated. It may have been at this time that he ran into the journalist Chris Healy and said to him, ‘I cannot say what I am going to do with my life; I am wondering what my life is going to do with me. I would like to retire to some monastery—to some grey-stoned cell where I could have my books, write verses, and reverently smoke my cigarettes.’ Healy mentioned that Nordau’s Degeneration, in which Wilde was a principal exhibit, treated all men of genius as mad. ‘I quite agree with Dr Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots,’ was Wilde’s reply.6 From Paris he wrote to Douglas, and was encouraged to come on to Aix as soon as he had some money. Vincent O’Sullivan, whom Wilde saw again, was obliging. After listening to Wilde’s plight over lunch, he went to his bank, withdrew the sum needed, and gave it to him.7

  The two friends then met at Aix-les-Bains, neither of them quite so certain of enjoying the other’s company as they pretended. Both looked forward to Naples; Douglas knew it well, and was acquainted with all the British community. He had no money, but regarded this as of no consequence. He and Wilde checked into the Hôtel Royal at Naples and ran up a bill of £60 on the strength of Douglas’s being a lord. Then some lean days came. Douglas tried to raise money, as usual, from his mother, and probably also from his brother; but whatever handouts he received were grudging. Wilde was more resourceful: he had talked over with Dalhousie Young the possibility of writing a libretto for an opera about Daphnis and Chloe, for which Young would compose the music. Now Wilde declared he was ready to proceed at once if Young would advance £100. It was the first time since his release from prison that Wilde had asked for an advance on a work which he probably never planned to deliver, and was a step down in his rehabilitation. Still, he could scarcely afford old scruples now. Fortunately, Dalhousie Young agreed. With his £100 and perhaps odd sums from Queensberry relations, Wilde and Douglas took the Villa Giudice, now 37 via Posilipo, in fashionable Posilipo, north of the city of Naples, and moved into it before the end of September.

  If Wilde meant at all seriously his letter saying that only with Douglas would he be able to write, he cannot have been pleased with the results. Douglas turned out a series of sonnets, which Wilde overpraised to Smithers and Ross as being ‘ivory and gold’ and ‘quite wonderful.’ (As Gordon Craig commented, ‘To be kind was why he flattered—but woe to any fool who accepted the flattery.’) Three of the sonnets, entitled by Wilde ‘A Triad of the Moon,’ were sent to Henley, of all people, who rejected them, as he had earlier rejected ‘The Ballad of Perkin Warbeck.’ One sonnet, on Mozart, was sent to the editor of a music magazine, who commented impertinently on its poor quality and was soundly rebuked for his pains by Wilde, on the grounds that the poem was a gift and not a submission.8 These were feeble efforts to secure a few pounds and a little recognition, and did not work. Together, Wilde and Douglas produced a few lyrics for ‘Daphnis and Chloe,’ but, not surprisingly, Dalhousie Young gave up the project. More to the point, Wilde wrote a number of new stanzas for The Ballad of Reading Gaol; while they added to its cumulative effect, they did not otherwise improve it. Some additions were abysmal; he altered ‘in God’s sweet world again’ to ‘for weal or woe again.’ Smithers made him restore the original phrase, which was a little better and not so archaic.9 As for the projected plays, they remained unwritten, even unattempted.

  Most of their time went in dawdling about the cafés or the beaches, good-humoredly competing for Neapolitan boys. When La Duse was performing in Naples, they went every night. Wilde wrote sending her Salome and begging her to produce it some day. She admired it.10 The Villa Giudice proved to have rats, and Douglas had to move across the street until they called in a local witch who got rid of them. This was the same witch Wilde pointed out later to Vincent O’Sullivan with the words ‘Unless that old woman asks you for money, do not offer it to her. But if she asks you, be sure not to refuse.’11 He was still in fear of the evil powers, though they had already indulged themselves at his expense. Once when Wilde received a £10 check from Smithers, he and Douglas went off to Capri for three days. The Swedish doctor Axel Munthe invited Bosie to dinner; Bosie said he could not come without Wilde, and Munthe urged him to bring Wilde, saying he had always thought his imprisonment unjust. They invited More Adey to stay with them in Posilipo, but he refused. They were not popular with the English set in Naples ‘for some reason’ (as Wilde said); one day Douglas met a man named Knapp whom he had known at Oxford and said to him, ‘Oscar is here, do join us, or do you mind?’ Knapp didn’t mind, but the question showed that invitations could not be given without hesitation. One day the attaché from the British Embassy in Rome—where Bosie had spent the previous winter with his mother—came to Naples to warn him, in an apparently casual chat, that sharing a house with Wilde was creating scandal. ‘My existence is a scandal,’ Wilde commented.12 Still, if the English looked the other way, the Italians were friendly. As long as a little money trickled in, life at the villa was pleasant and sunny. There were four servants to reconcile them to their lot.

  Elsewhere
were only frowns and recriminations. Constance learned where her husband was, and with whom. On 29 September 1897 she wrote to him with unaccustomed forcefulness, ‘I forbid you to see Lord Alfred Douglas. I forbid you to return to your filthy, insane life. I forbid you to live at Naples. I will not allow you to come to Genoa.’ Wilde answered that he would never dream of going to see her against her will, or without assurance of her sympathy and pity. Her many refusals to meet had left him no alternative, he said, blaming her for his decision. For the rest, he only desired peace and to live his life as best he could. He did hope to winter in Naples. She wrote to her brother, ‘Oscar has gone to Naples and consequently back to Lord A and has written me a horrid letter. If he prefers that life to living here with me—well, I am sorry for him but what can I do?’13 To Carlos Blacker, Wilde stated baldly that he had nowhere else to go, no one to live with, since Constance had spent three months fending him off. He said to Claire de Pratz, correspondent of Le Petit Parisien and Daily News, whose article on Loti he had published in Woman’s World, ‘Is there on earth a crime so terrible that in punishment of it a father can be prevented from seeing his children?’14

  Constance did not reply to his letter directly, but through her solicitor she invoked the clause in their agreement which provided that his allowance would cease if he lived with a disreputable person. There followed a correspondence with Ross and Adey which is not without its comic side. Wilde and Douglas were quick to deny that Douglas was a disreputable person, and charged their friends in London with having meekly accepted this designation instead of challenging it. If Douglas was disreputable, then so were Adey and Ross; Ross had spent two months with Bosie on Capri the year before. (In fact, Constance had objected in 1895 to Wilde’s seeing Adey in prison on exactly those grounds.) In another mood, Wilde allowed that Douglas was indeed ‘a gilded pillar of infamy,’ but not therefore disreputable.15 Adey had to explain patiently that neither he nor Ross had ever said Douglas was disreputable; all they had acknowledged—and they had no alternative—was that Wilde and Douglas were living together. The designation of Douglas as disreputable had been made by Constance, and was the whole purpose of her having that clause inserted in the agreement. There was nothing they could do to save Wilde his £3 a week, which was stopped in November.

  Lady Queensberry was not to be outdone. She too saw that

  Love in a hut, with water and a crust,

  Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust,

  and was equally determined to separate Wilde and Douglas by financial means. She loathed Wilde as her son’s corrupter as much as Constance loathed Douglas as Wilde’s. The two women made common cause. Lady Queensberry knew that Bosie had no real source of money but herself, his allowance being £25 a week and whatever else he could wheedle from her. By thwarting his tastes for ‘brandy, betting, and boys’ she could bring him to heel. She wrote emphatically that until she had a pledge from both Douglas and Wilde that they would not live again under the same roof, her son would receive no more money. But if they would pledge themselves in writing, she was willing to pay whatever debts Douglas had contracted in Naples, and also pay Wilde £200 as a sort of compensation for his signature.16

  Big spenders with little money, the friends discussed the matter, £200 being the golden bait. They agreed that they would never surrender their right to see each other, but with their present lack of means they were forced to envisage the possibility of living apart. By 23 November, Wilde was writing to Ross to see if he thought Constance would be appeased if he and Bosie took separate quarters. Six days later, Douglas wrote Edward Strangman a letter which indicated that they were still in doubt, but drifting towards decision:

  I am here with Oscar, we have been here two months. The whole thing has been a hand to mouth struggle, kept up by desperate telegrams to reluctant relations, and pawning of pins and studs. Now the struggle is quite over for Oscar’s trustees have cut off his allowance on the ground that he has violated his agreement by living with me, and now my mother has cut off my allowance for the same reason. So that we are actually in view of positive starvation. Fortunately the rent of our villa is paid till the end of January. What we are going to do I don’t know and don’t much care being about as nearly desperate as is consistent with gentlemanly bearing.… I suppose we (O and I) shall be forced to compromise the matter ultimately and separate at least for the present.17

  The pace quickened. This same day or the next, Douglas wrote to his mother that he and Wilde were prepared to give her the written assurances she required. On 2 December 1897 he telegraphed that he was going to Rome next day and would send the assurance from there. But in Rome, on 3 December, he wrote that he felt miserable and wanted to go back to Wilde, and even more to defend his conduct. Had his mother expected him to write and say to Wilde:

  ‘I cannot come and live with you now. I lived with you before and stayed with you and lived on you, but that was when you were rich, famous, honoured and at the summit of your position as an artist, now I am very sorry of course, but you are ruined, you have no money, you have hardly any friends, you have been in prison (chiefly, I admit, on my account and through my fault), you are an ex-convict, it will do me a great deal of harm to be seen about with you, and besides that my mother naturally objects to it very strongly, and so I’m afraid I must leave you to get on as best you can by yourself.’

  To do so would have been loathsome. He mentioned Munthe on Capri, and also a fashionable woman named Mrs Snow, who had entertained them both. Only his mother was inflexible.

  Four days later his mood had changed violently, and he wrote to her from the Hôtel d’Italie in Rome on 7 December:

  I am glad, O so glad! to have got away. I am so afraid you will not believe me, and I am so afraid of appearing to pose as anything but what I am, but I am not a hypocrite and you must believe me. I wanted to go back to him, I longed for it and for him, because I love him and admire him and think him great and almost good, but when I had done it and when I got back, I hated it, I was miserable. I wanted to go away. But I couldn’t. I was tied by honour.18

  His promise to remain with Wilde for the rest of their lives had held him only until Wilde himself agreed that Douglas might as well go.

  Their last weeks together can be pieced out. Douglas in his Autobiography attributes their drifting apart to the fact that at twenty-seven he was no longer the ever-young Dorian Gray. He was beginning to lose his looks. But Wilde’s affections did not flag so quickly, and there is no evidence that he had become oblivious to that other bond between him and Bosie, that of the old sheep and the young butcher. In his letter to his mother Douglas probably comes closer to truth when he says that he had ‘lost that supreme desire for his [Wilde’s] society’ which he had formerly had, and that he was also ‘tired of the struggle and tired of being ill-treated by the world.’ For, after all, unlike Wilde, he had never committed what Ross called ‘the supreme vulgarity of having been found out.’ Wilde’s place in the world was now fixed for good—no longer at its center, but always on its outskirts. Douglas had no vocation for dancing attendance upon an outcast. He wanted ‘social recognition,’19 and he felt he had done enough.

  When their money ran out, as it did by early November, Wilde must have recalled his analysis of Douglas and money in De Profundis. Now the situation was repeating itself; Douglas was overspending Wilde’s money as if he were Wilde and not Wilde’s eternal dependent. Wilde did not recriminate. As Douglas acknowledged to Lady Queensberry, ‘he has been sweet and gentle and will always remain to me as the type of what a gentleman and a friend should be.’ But he admits in his Autobiography that they had several quarrels, and Bosie in quarrel has been described by Gide, white face contorted with rage as he vented the insults guaranteed to wound.20 He no doubt brought up again the risks he had taken to be by Wilde’s side during the suit against Queensberry, when all his other friends had made off for the Continent; and he would not have been able to resist flaunting his self-sacrifice i
n consorting now with the pariah he had created. Wilde, on his side, clung tenaciously to his contention that the Queensberry family still owed him £500 for a debt of honor. Douglas replied that lots of gentlemen did not pay their debts of honor and were no less gentlemen therefore in the eyes of the world. But he devised or encouraged his mother’s plan to send Wilde, if not £500, at least £200, and to promise to send the rest later. Wilde can hardly have urged Douglas to stay when his inclinations were to go, but, though acquiescing in the separation, he did not take it easily. Douglas had offered him a sanctuary and then withdrawn the offer; his failure to find money was part of it. A letter to Ross of 2 March 1898 described Wilde’s version of their stay:

  The facts of Naples are very bald and brief.

  Bosie, for four months, by endless letters, offered me a ‘home.’ He offered me love, affection, and care, and promised that I should never want for anything. After four months I accepted his offer, but when we met at Aix on our way to Naples I found that he had no money, no plans, and had forgotten all his prómises. His one idea was that I should raise money for us both. I did so, to the extent of £120. On this Bosie lived, quite happy. When it came to his having, of course, to repay his own share, he became terrible, unkind, mean, and penurious, except where his own pleasures were concerned, and when my allowance ceased, he left.…

  It is, of course, the most bitter experience of a bitter life; … it is better that I should never see him again. I don’t want to. He fills me with horror.

  Wilde never regarded the £200 paid by Lady Queensberry, of which Ross was fully informed, as anything but partial repayment of the debt of honor, and in no sense reimbursement for supporting Bosie for three months or for being abandoned by him at the end of that time. (The money was paid through Adey, £100 to Wilde in December 1897 and £100 near the end of January 1898).21 Still, the horror he claimed to feel was perhaps intended to encourage Ross, who was writing to Constance urging her to renew the subsidy. That there was in fact no final rift is confirmed by a letter from Douglas to Wilde, still in Naples, on 8 January complaining of Paris prices and the ‘unbridled chastity’—except on three occasions—he had practiced since he arrived.22