Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  † He unitalicizes some italicized words, he changes ‘woulds’ to ‘shoulds.’ Speeches were improved. Instead of Jack’s saying, ‘I was very nearly offering a reward,’ he is made to say, ‘I was very nearly offering a large reward,’ and when Algernon attempts to claim it, he replies, ‘There is no good offering a large reward when the thing is found.’ Algernon, instead of saying, ‘poor Bunbury is a horrible invalid,’ says, ‘poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid.’ Gwendolyn originally said, ‘Yes, but men often propose for practice. I know my brother Gerald does. He tells me so.’ Wilde revised it to, ‘All my good friends tell me so.’ Lady Bracknell’s impressive speech had read, ‘Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.’ Wilde retouched it by adding to the last sentence, ‘in Grosvenor Square.’

  ‡ His attitude towards absinthe varied. ‘It has no message for me,’ he told Bernard Berenson. But to Arthur Machen he said, ‘I never could quite accustom myself to absinthe, but it suits my style so well.’ Gradually he warmed to it, and said in Dieppe, ‘Absinthe has a wonderful color, green. A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?’ And, ‘I have discovered,’ he said, ‘that alcohol taken in sufficient quantity produces all the effects of drunkenness.’34

  § ‘Hey, my poor man, are you desperate?’ ‘No, sir, I’m a hairdresser.’

  ‖ Another story of miracles explained the persecution of the early Christians in Rome. ‘You know, Nero was obliged to do something. They were making him ridiculous. What he thought was: “Here everything was going on very well, when one day two incredible creatures arrived from somewhere in the provinces. They are called Peter and Paul, or some unheard-of names like that. Since they are here, life in Rome has become impossible. They collect crowds and block the traffic with their miracles. It is really intolerable. I, the Emperor, have no peace. When I get up in the morning and look out of the window, the first thing I see is a miracle going on in the back garden.” ’

  a ‘Wife of Oscar Wilde’ has since been added to the stone.

  b Queensberry’s will was faithful to his principles. It concluded, ‘At my death I wish to be cremated and my ashes put into the Earth enclosed in nothing earth to earth, ashes to ashes, in any spot most convenient I have loved. Will mention places to my son. Harleyford for choice. I particularly request no Christian mummeries or tomfooleries be performed over my grave but that I be buried as a Secularist and an Agnostic. If it will comfort anyone there are plenty of those of my own faith who would come and say a few words of common sense over the spot where my ashes lay. Signed, Queensberry, January 23rd/95. Places to lay ashes. The Summit of Craffed, or Queensberry, Dumfriesshire, the end of the Terrace overlooking the New Lock, Harleyford, Bucks. No monument or stone necessary or required, or procession, as ashes can be carried in one person’s hand. Failing these places any place where stars shall ever shed their light, and sun still gild each rising morn.’

  c The Paris Exhibition of 1900, which ran from 14 April to 5 November.

  d The doctors’ report of that day has survived:

  Les médecins soussignés, ayant examiné M. Oscar Wilde, dit Melmott, le dimanche 25 Novembre, ont constaté des troubles cérébraux importants résultant d’une ancienne suppuration de l’oreille droite d’ailleurs en traitement depuis plusieurs années.

  Le 27 les symptômes se sont beaucoup aggravés. Le diagnostic de méninge encéphalite est admis sans conteste. En l’absence de tout indice de localisation on ne peut songer à une trépanation.

  Le traitement conseillé est purement médical. L’intervention chirurgicale semble impossible.

  Paris le 27 Novembre 1900

  DR PAUL CLEISS A’COURT TUCKER, M.D.

  En l’absence de la famille, qui sera prévenue sur notre demande, assistaient à la consultation MM. Turner et Dupoirier.

  REGINALD TURNER

  DUPOIRIER hôtelier

  [The undersigned doctors, having examined Mr Oscar Wilde, called Melmott, on Sunday, 25 November, established that there were significant cerebral disturbances stemming from, an old suppuration of the right ear, under treatment for several years.

  On the 27th, the symptoms became much graver. The diagnosis of encephalitic meningitis must be made without doubt. In the absence of any indication of localization, trepanning cannot be contemplated.

  The advised treatment is purely medical. Surgical intervention seems impossible.

  Paris etc.…

  In the absence of the family, who are to be notified at our request, Messrs Turner and Dupoirier were present at the consultation.…]

  e Ross’s visiting card has survived, and bears the words ‘Can I see one of the fathers about a very urgent case or can I hear of a priest elsewhere who can talk English to administer last sacraments to a dying man?’

  f Turner—perhaps out of self-censorship—was later to deny that this had happened, but Augustus John says he heard about it from Ross and Turner.

  g In The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack says of his supposedly dead brother, ‘He seems to have expressed a desire to be buried in Paris,’ and Mr Chasuble comments, ‘In Paris!,’ shaking his head. ‘I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.’

  Epilogue

  The men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.

  Wilde had to live his life twice over, first in slow motion, then at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat. For the three and a half years he lived after his release from prison, he saw pass before him, mostly in dumb show, a multitude of people he had known earlier, who evaded him. His wife kept him away and then died. He did not know where his sons were. There were terrible confrontations with old adversaries like Whistler and Carson in which, after having stared at each other, neither spoke. The people whose lives he had helped to make forgot him: though Lillie Langtry pretended in later life that she had sent him money in his last years, she did not. Aubrey Beardsley, after some hesitation, spurned Wilde. Max Beerbohm was sympathetic, but kept his distance. Sherard and Wilde did not speak to each other anymore. It was ostracism—more or less—by two groups, those who could not bear his homosexuality and those who could not bear his requests for money. Douglas gave him dribs and drabs, then snubbed him when he asked for more. Ross and Turner were not capable of passing him but did pass Paris to avoid him. Frank Harris wrote Wilde’s play for him—and only distressed him. Wilde was as conspicuous in defeat as in triumph, and as well known in Paris—he said—as the Tour Eiffel. There were moments of grace. But these were rare, and brief.

  No wonder he drooped. And had a constant sense of ill-being, checked but not eliminated by absinthe and brandy. No wonder he stayed in bed longer and longer, until he discovered he was bedridden. His body had its reasons, his mind also. Ross was cheering himself up when he contradicted his earlier statement by saying that Wilde’s last years had not been so bad: though he had continued to find young men, to talk, eat, and drink, all these familiar activities took place in a desolate environment, the memory of what he had been and the sense of what he had become, the trivial debts at which he had once laughed and now could only cry, the snubs and insults which every day brought. English law had misdone him by punishment, and English society finished him off by ostracism.

  When Wilde died, the relations between him and Douglas came to a kind of ending. But there was a posthumous connection as tumultuous as any in life. This came about through De Profundis. Ross felt bound to publish it in an abridged form, and the 1905 edition omitted all reference to Douglas. But it was clear that Douglas had been an amour fatale. A vague reference to this effect in Arthur Ransome’s book on Wilde in 1912 made Douglas sue for libel. (He had already begun to have some success in forcing apologies and out-of-court settlements.) Ross
now felt he must disclose the missing portions of De Profundis, and at the request of Ransome’s counsel, the whole letter was read out in court. Douglas was in the witness box at the time, but left during the reading. He could not bear to listen to Wilde’s reference to his verse as undergraduate, to his stature as low, to his disposition as sponging, to his nature as shallow. Within months he had got his reply ready in Oscar Wilde and Myself.

  Douglas disclaimed the book later, but in 1919 he republished it with a new preface, declaring that he had been ‘born into this world chiefly to be the instrument, whether I would or not, of exposing and smashing Wilde’s cult and the Wilde myth,’ and that he was a poet and an honest man. Much the same account appears in his Autobiography (1928). The books insist that he had never participated in homosexual acts. Homer shows how Helen, back from Troy, blamed Venus for the elopement with Paris, and insisted that she had always longed to be back with her husband.

  Douglas now began, in his father’s manner, to write letters attacking Ross to Ross’s friends, until the pressure became so great that Ross, as Wilde before him, had to sue for libel. On the witness stand Douglas proved too much for him, and though Ross escaped prosecution he felt harried until his death in 1918. It seemed to many people that Douglas had hounded him into his grave. Douglas found other targets: for a criminal libel of Winston Churchill he was sent to Wormwood Scrubs for six months, and during that time composed his sonnet sequence, In Excelsis, as a riposte to De Profundis. He said in it that England was being led by Wilde, as the lord of abominations, to black night. His father would have been proud of him.

  In the late 1920s he began to change his views about Wilde. By the time he wrote his Autobiography, he had become ardently Catholic, and although his marriage ended in a predictable divorce, he had not, or said he had not, resumed homosexual practices. He tried to achieve detachment and forgiveness, though the name of ‘Ross’ could still drive him to distraction. In his later years he managed a daily bet on the races. On his deathday he placed two bets instead of one, and lost both.

  Douglas’s love had a fierceness that prevented Wilde from throwing him off, but also from living in content. Yet Wilde’s most brilliant work, The Importance of Being Earnest, pretends that the course of love can run quite smooth. It is a record of his emotions in that it excludes them, and defiantly demonstrates they are excludable. Douglas left a record too, in his Autobiography. It is a grimly intent work, but unconsciously funny too. Though the book is overtly opposed to homosexuality, Douglas feels that God led him to ‘a most beautiful little boy with an angelic face and smile,’ who told him where he could find a witness to testify against Ross. And he himself looks forward to being a boy again in paradise, where he says one can be any age one likes.

  Even more than the hopeless loves of Yeats or Dowson or A. E. Housman, Wilde’s love affair provides an example of berserk passion, of Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée. It could have occurred only in a clandestine world of partial disclosures, blackmail, and libel suits. He was obliged by the trial to broadcast his love to the world, but could not contemplate pleading guilty, denied everything, and refused to let Douglas disclose their relations, or to disclose them himself. His behavior destroyed Constance. After first meditating and offering a confession (in French), Douglas adopted the same mode of reticence, holding back for years before finally telling, if not all, all but all, and then only in the character of a reformed profligate. But of course he never really changed. For twenty-seven years he was also Bosie the irresistible, the beloved object of a great writer. The history preserves in amber his beauty and his greed, rage, and cruelty.

  After the death of Constance Holland in 1898 and of Oscar Wilde in 1900, their sons, Cyril and Vyvyan Holland, were befriended by Robert Ross, who as literary executor paid off Wilde’s debts and recovered his copyrights for them. Cyril volunteered for combat duty in the First World War, and was killed. Vyvyan wrote books, married, and had one child, Merlin, who lives in London, is married, and has a son, Lucian. Willie Wilde and his wife, Lily, had one child, a daughter, Dolly, well known in Paris in the circle of Natalie Clifford Barney, the famous ‘Amazon.’

  Wilde’s remains were moved from Bagneux to Père Lachaise when the famous funerary monument by Epstein was placed there, in 1909. Mrs Carew, mother of Sir Coleridge Kennard, paid for the monument. When Ross died in 1918, his will directed that his own ashes be put into the tomb. This was done. The monument bears an inscription from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

  And alien tears will fill for him

  Pity’s long-broken urn,

  For his mourners will be outcast men,

  And outcasts always mourn.

  ‘There is something vulgar in all success,’ Wilde told O’Sullivan.1 ‘The greatest men fail, or seem to have failed.’ He was speaking of Parnell, but what was true of Parnell is in another way true of Wilde. His work survived as he claimed it would. We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria’s. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.2

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Appendixes

  Notes

  Works frequently cited are referred to by author only, or by author and abbreviated title, after the first full citation. Where no author is given, the work cited is by Oscar Wilde. The place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated. See the Select Bibliography, this page, for a list of published sources, and the Acknowledgments, this page, for a full list of sources of unpublished material, referred to below in abbreviated form.

  Beginnings

  CHAPTER I

  1 Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England, 3rd edn. (1882), 97.

  2 The Biograph iv (1880): 130–5.

  3 Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (1979), 1. The letter is quoted in a Stetson sale catalogue (1920).

  4 Robert Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (N.Y., 1906), 104.

  5 Michael Field, Works and Days, ed. T. Sturge Moore (1933), 139.

  6 Henriette Corkran, Celebrities and I (1902), 137; Lord Rathcreedan, Memories (1932), 51.

  7 Robert Sherard, Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship (1902), 73.

  8 R. Ross, letter to Leonard Smithers from Hôtel Voltaire, Paris, 17 Apr 1898 (Texas).

  9 Lady W, letters to H. W. Longfellow, 30 Nov 1875 and 11 May 1878 (Houghton).

  10 Lady W, letter to W. Carleton, in D. J. O’Donoghue, The Life of William Carleton, 2 vols. (1896), II: 138–9; Carleton to Lady W, 1849 (NLI, MS. 13993).

  11 Brian de Breffny, ‘Speranza’s Ancestry,’ Irish Ancestor iv, no. 2 (1972): 94–103. Frances was the name of Jane Elgee’s elder sister, born 1816, who died at the age of three months.

  12 Horace Wyndham, Speranza: A Biography of Lady Wilde (N.Y., 1951), 23.

  13 W. B. Yeats, Thomas Davis Centenary Address (Oxford, 1947), and Catherine Hamilton, Notable Irishwomen [1904], 176.

  14 Terence De Vere White, The Parents of Oscar Wilde (1967), 82.

  15 Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845–1849 (1883), 94.

  16 Sir William Hamilton, letter to Aubrey de Vere, quoted in Wyndham, 56; Gavan Duffy to Jane Elgee (Wilde), n.d. [1849], letter in my possession.

  17 Jane Elgee (Wilde), letters to unnamed Scottish correspondent, June [? July] 1848 and 7 Apr 1858 (Reading).

  18 See C. Hamilton, Notable Irishwomen, 181.

  19 Lady W, letter to unnamed correspondent, 1850 (Reading); Lady W, Notes on Men, Women, and Books (1891), 42.

  20 Lady W, letter to Lotten von Kraemer, 19 Mar 1859 (copy, NLI).

  21 ‘Mr. P
ater’s Last Volume,’ in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago, 1982), 230.

  22 Lady W, Social Studies (1893), 13.

  23 Lily Yeats’s Scrapbook, 1889 (courtesy of W. M. Murphy).

  24 Wyndham, 70.

  25 Coulson Kernahan, ‘Wilde and Heine,’ Dublin Magazine, n.d., 22; Anna de Brémont, Oscar Wilde and His Mother (1911), 77.

  26 Lady W, MS. notes in NYPL: Berg.

  27 H. Corkran, Celebrities and I, 138; W. B. Yeats, Autobiography (N.Y., 1965), 92.

  28 Lady W, letter to Wilde, n.d. [1876] (Clark 2299).

  29 Lady W, ‘To Ireland’ and ‘Who Will Show Us Any Good?,’ in Poems (1864). Not all her friends agreed. The feminist Mona Caird, protesting against Lady W’s strictures on her novel The Wing of Azrael (1871), in which the heroine kills her husband when he tries to rape her, wrote: ‘I do not share your admiration for the woman who is “sacrificial.” … I do not agree with you in thinking that women have to prove themselves heroines and devotees of duty before they have a right to claim the fullest opportunity for development and life. They claim this right as human beings.… Again you say “take woman as she is meant to be”: I deny that she is “meant to be” anything in particular. She is as she makes herself, as the forces and conditions of life make her. The “inspiration of humanity” she may still be, and in my opinion is much more likely to be, when she ceases to be afraid, ceases to worship morals, ceases to see the “divine” only where she has been hitherto taught to see it in submission, sacrifice, “duty” (so-called) and general self-destruction.’ (Letter of 27 June 1889, in my possession.)