The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  And sex with men was supposedly a passing phase. Sex between boys and between young men was common, and to a certain extent tolerated, in public schools and universities. The rule was never to get caught, and there was an expectation that young men would eventually grow out of these habits and marry. Men who continued to have sex with other men well into adult life could tell themselves that their behaviour was merely the continuation of a habit they had formed at school and university, a habit that met a need, a habit that could and would be broken when the right woman came along.

  Such comforting doublethink could assuage but not entirely obviate the burden of guilt and self-doubt. There were also times when Oscar struggled against the `burning channel' of his inclinations, when, like Symonds, he was severely distressed by what he saw as his `wicked' desires. The wonder of sex with a young man would be followed by bitter remorse. Such storms of selfloathing and self-doubt would batter him over the next few years, and return, with hurricane force, during his imprisonment.

  In the summer of 1875, Oscar flirted with at least two young women. The mother of one wrote to him to express her disapproval of Oscar's behaviour with her daughter:

  Dear Oscar, I was very much pained the last time I was at your house when I went into the drawing room and saw Fidelia sitting upon your knee. Young as she is, she ought to have had (and I told her) the instinctive delicacy that would have shrunk from it - but oh! Oscar, the thing was neither right, nor manly, nor gentlemanlike in you.

  She went on to reproach Oscar for kissing Fidelia when her back was turned. `As to kissing Fidelia ... out of sight as it were,' she wrote:

  For instance the last day I saw you - you left me, a lady, to open the hall door for myself, you staying behind at the same time in the hall to kiss Fidelia. Did you think for a moment that I was so supremely stupid as not to know that you always kissed F. when you met her, if you had an opportunity?

  There was also Eva, whose affection for Oscar prompted her aunt to write to him in October 1875, dropping a heavy hint that `dear Eva' was minded to accept a proposal of marriage, if Oscar was `truly in earnest'.

  In the summer of 1876, Oscar was at home in Dublin and wrote to his Oxford friend Reginald `Kitten' Harding with some exciting news:

  I am just going out to bring an exquisitely pretty girl to afternoon service in the Cathedral. She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saran and not a sixpence of money. I will show you her photograph when I see you next.

  The name of this exquisitely pretty girl was Florence Balcombe. Oscar was quite smitten. He sketched her in pencil, a sketch which still survives and shows a slender young woman with long dark hair and large dark eyes with a thoughtful, faraway look. Two months after he met Florrie, Oscar presented her with a watercolour painting he had done of the `View from Moytura House', the house built by his father as country retreat in County Mayo. And at Christmas that year, he gave her a small gold cross. There was no doubt that Oscar and Florrie were courting. They wrote to each other frequently, though only a handful of Oscar's letters have survived.

  Oscar's courtship of Florrie continued into 1878 and then, inexplicably, seemed to fade into friendship. Not long afterwards, Florrie met and fell in love with Bram Stoker, a young Irish civil servant who would go on to write Dracula. When he heard of her forthcoming marriage to Stoker, Oscar wrote to Florrie and asked her to return the `little gold cross':

  It serves as a memory of two sweet years - the sweetest of all the years of my youuth - and I should like to have it always with me.

  Three years later, as Florrie was about to make her debut on the London stage, Oscar asked the actress Ellen Terry to give her a crown of flowers as if they were from herself-

  I should like to think that she was wearing something of mine the first night she comes on the stage, that anything of mine should touch her. Of course if you think - but you won't think she will suspect. How could she? She thinks I never loved her, thinks I forget. My God how could I!

  On the face of it, Oscar's love for Florrie appeared to be real, passionate and heartfelt. And yet, at the time he met Florrie, and during the entire `two sweet years' of their courtship, Oscar was involved in a relationship - a sexual relationship - with another man, Frank Miles. It was the start of a pattern of behaviour that was to last for nearly twenty years. Flirting with pretty girls, making love to beautiful young women, and eventually marrying were for Oscar always more than merely `a cloak to hide his secret', as he would later memorably phrase it. Women were half of the equation of love: they represented purity and freshness, safety and security, and sometimes even sanctuary: boys and young men, on the other hand, were on the dangerous and dark side of the erotic moon, where forbidden pleasures tasted so much sweeter.

  Tea and beauties

  `It is a dreadful thing to have one's name in the papers. And still more dreadful not to.'

  Oscar met Frank Miles in the spring of 1876. Frank was two years older and was living in London, where he was trying to establish himself as a portrait painter of society ladies. Photographs of Frank show a dashingly good-looking, blond-haired young man. He was, according to Frank Harris, `a very pleasant, handsome young fellow who made a sympathetic impression on everyone'. By early summer, Oscar and Frank were good friends and were almost certainly already lovers. On a visit to Bosie at Oxford in 1892, Oscar would confess - in a fit of nostalgia de la bone - that he and Frank first had sex there.

  In June 1876, Frank took his friend, the sculptor Lord Ronald Gower, to meet Oscar. 'By early train to Oxford with F. Miles,' Gower wrote in his diary for 4 June:

  There I made the acquaintance of young Oscar Wilde, a friend of Miles's. A pleasant cheerful fellow but with his long-haired head full of nonsense regarding the Church of Rome.

  Gower was Frank's friend and patron. He was also a notorious sodomite, with a penchant for `rough trade' in the form of soldiers, sailors and labourers. Not only did he introduce Frank to fashionable society ladies in need of one of the flattering pastel portraits that Frank specialised in, but Gower was also his guide to London's sexual underworld. Later, Oscar would base the character of Lord Henry Wotton, the corrupt and corrupting prophet of strange sins in Dorian Gray, on Gower.

  Frank's father was rector of Bingham in Nottinghamshire, and it was not long before Frank, Oscar and Gower visited Bingham and spent a delightful week there. `I came down here on Monday and had no idea it was so lovely,' Oscar wrote to his best friend in Oxford, Reginald `Kitten' Harding, from Bingham Rectory. `A wonderful garden with such white lilies in rose walks; only that there are no serpents or apples it would be quite paradise.' Eden was clearly never going to be enough. Oscar was already signalling his need to be tempted by forbidden fruit. `Life's aim, if it has one,' he wrote later, `is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them. I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.'

  After `dallying in the enchanted isle of Bingham Rectory, and eating the lotus flowers of Love', Oscar went to Ireland where he had arranged to spend a week or so in Moytura House with Frank, before they went into the mountains of Connemara to `a charming little fishing lodge' where Oscar was determined to make Frank `land a -salmon and kill a brace of grouse'.

  It was not love that Oscar felt for Frank, at least not the conventional love that he felt for Florrie Balcombe. Rather it was `a richly impassioned friendship' which gave him and Frank both emotional stability and sexual expression. Like all his subsequent relationships with young men, Oscar's relationship with Frank is unlikely to have been monogamous. They had sex with each other, and with other people. But the sexual bond between them weakened as time passed. Frank wore a moustache, which was something that became anathema to Oscar: he preferred his young men to be beardless. From the outset, Oscar availed himself of his sexual freedom. In December 1876 he visited Lord Ronald Gower in Windsor, taking another young artist, Ar
thur May, as his companion. `We had a delightful day,' he wrote to `Kitten' Harding. `I have taken a great fancy to May. He is quite charming in every way and a beautiful artist.' Oscar also wrote praising May to his other Oxford friend, William Ward, a few days later. `I saw a great deal of Arthur May: he is quite charming in every way and we have rushed into friendship.' Over the next four years there would be several other young men with whom Oscar would rush into friendship equally precipitately.

  Oscar was beginning to get his work published, poems mostly, and the occasional review. In July 1877, he reviewed an exhibition of paintings at the fashionable Grosvenor Gallery, dwelling lovingly, almost lasciviously, on the images of boys in the exhibition. There were references to the beautiful boys of the Greek islands, to St Sebastian, to a `Greek Ganymede' and to other notable artistic examples of `the bloom and vitality and the radiance of this adolescent beauty'.

  When his review was published in the Dublin University Magazine, he sent a copy to Walter Pater at Oxford who, four years earlier, had published his notorious Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The book's controversial `Conclusion' preached a dangerous gospel. Pater made a passionate appeal to his readers to drink fully from the heady cup of life, to consume every experience that was on offer. `A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life,' he wrote. Ecstasy consisted of squeezing and consuming as many of these pulses as possible into a lifetime, of burning always with a `hard, gemlike flame'. There were moments when Pater no longer seemed to be talking about art, but about sex:

  While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.

  Pater's invocation of strange and curious passions inspired by the beautiful face of a friend was profoundly homoerotic and gave rise to much speculation about his sexual tastes. Pater himself realised that he may have gone too far and removed the `Conclusion' from later editions of the book, saying `I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.' Oscar was one of those young men willingly misled by Pater's passionate advocacy. Not only were many of his ideas about the supremacy and sensuality of art imbibed from Pater, but his attitudes towards sex and promiscuity can also be traced back to Pater's `Conclusion'. Pater's hard, gemlike flame became for Oscar the flame of sexual passion. `All flames are pure,' he told his friend George Ives in a discussion on sex.

  When Pater received Oscar's letter and a copy of his review, he recognised a fellow spirit and wrote a carefully coded reply. `I hope you will give me an early call on your return to Oxford,' Pater wrote:

  The article shows that you possess some beautiful, and, for your age, quite exceptionally cultivated tastes; and a considerable knowledge too of many beautiful things.

  Oscar and Pater began a cautious friendship. For Oscar, Pater was always too hesitant, too secretive about his sexual tastes, while for Pater, Oscar was the opposite. According to Vincent O'Sullivan, who was a friend of both of them, Pater was `timid and afraid that W. would compromise him'. John Bodley called at Oscar's rooms late one morning and found him delicately laying the table for luncheon. When Bodley asked if he could stay, Oscar refused point blank. `No, no!' he said. `Impossible to have a Philistine like you. Walter Pater is coming to lunch with me for the first time.' Bodley looked on with extreme concern at Oscar's developing friendship with Pater. He knew that, as recently as 1874, Pater had been implicated in a scandal with an undergraduate, William Money Hardinge, known as `the Balliol Bugger'. Hardinge was extremely indiscreet about his interest in men and it was discovered that he had received letters from Pater signed `Yours Lovingly'.

  Bodley claimed later that it was Oscar's `intimacy' with Pater which turned Oscar into an `extreme aesthete'. Bodley's phrase was carefully chosen. He meant to convey that it was Pater who had corrupted Oscar into becoming a lover of men. He was mistaken: Oscar was already a lover of men. But it was true that Oscar was now an ardent convert to the Aesthetic movement which had emerged in opposition and reaction to the ugly certainties of Victorian Britain. Aestheticism seemed to spring into life, fully formed, towards the end of the 1870s and was a heady mix of art, idealism and politics which sought to propagate a new gospel of Beauty. Aestheticism was a hybrid which drew on diverse strands of radical thinking - the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and John Ruskin, Pater's theories on art for art's sake, William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement, Socialism and the Trades Union movement. Aestheticism embodied many of the ideas and ideals of these movements and yet had a unique and distinct identity. The apostles of Aestheticism believed that the very idea of beauty - the simple, natural beauty of the arts and the crafts, of poetry and prose, of thoughts and ideas - was powerful enough to change the world.

  `I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,' Oscar is reputed to have said. Whether he had indeed made the remark was, he quickly discovered, immaterial. The saying passed into the currency of Oxford myth, and Oscar was amused and delighted some weeks later when he heard that John Burgon, Vicar of St Mary's Church in Oxford, took it so seriously that he preached a sermon against it:

  When a young man says not in polished banter, but in sober earnestness, that he finds it difficult to live up to the level of his blue china, there has crept into these cloistered shades a form of heathenism which it is our bounden duty to fight against and crush out, if possible.

  This was, Oscar said afterwards, the `first time that the absolute stupidity of the English people was ever revealed to me'. It was also the first time that he had been so publicly talked about and talked against. It was a strangely pleasurable experience, and he felt that it conferred on him a species of celebrity.

  Oscar continued to plough the furrow of his Paterian `cultivated tastes' in boys and young men. In December 1877, his poem `Wasted Days' was published in Kottabos, the magazine of Trinity College, Dublin. Oscar wrote the poem after seeing a tile, painted in the medieval manner by Violet Troubridge, of a beautiful slender boy. The poem is unashamedly homoerotic:

  Longing eyes, foolish tears, unkissed cheeks and lips drawn in for fear of love, `Wasted Days' spoke `scarlet volumes' about Oscar's artistic and sexual tastes. Boyish youths and youthful men, `rose-red youth' and `rose-white boyhood', were to become a sexual leitmotiv. `Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' Lord Henry Wotton tells Dorian Gray. And at his trial Oscar would declare, `To me youth, the mere fact of youth, is so wonderful.'

  But Oscar's continuing wonder at the beauty of youth was interrupted by a storm of remorse and self-loathing. On 15 April 1878, he had a long interview with the Catholic priest Father Sebastian Bowden at the Brompton Oratory. Bowden wrote a letter to Oscar the following day from which much of what Oscar said can be guessed at. Bowden described Oscar's visit with him as a `confession'. Oscar had, he wrote, freely and entirely laid open his `life's history' and his `soul's state'. He had spoken at length of his `present unhappy self' nd about `the aimlessness and misery' of his life. One sentence in Bowden's letter is especially revealing:

  You have like everyone else an evil nature and this in your case has become more corrupt by bad influences mental and moral, and by positive sin.

  Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Oscar had confessed some or all of his sexual experiences, possibly with the anonymous choirboy, probably with Frank Miles and Arthur May, and perhaps with others, to Father Bowden. This was the `positive sin' Bowden was referring to. And at least one of the `bad influences, mental and moral' that Bowden mentioned was Lord Ronald Gower, who was increasingly playing Lord Henry Wotton to Oscar's Dorian Gray. Another bad influence was John Addington Symonds - `Mr Soddington Symonds', as the poet Swinburne dubbed him - with whom Oscar was now in regular correspondence, and who was an in
defatigable champion of Greek love.

  Bowden fervently urged Oscar to take the plunge and convert to Catholicism. `As a Catholic,' he told him:

  you would find yourself a new man in the order of nature as of grace. I mean that you would put from you all that is affected and unreal and a thing unworthy of your better self.

  Father Bowden chose his words carefully. His phrase `a new man in the order of nature' strongly suggests that, by becoming a Catholic, Oscar would not only enter a state of spiritual grace, but that he would also throw off the burden of his unnatural sexual desires - that `thing unworthy of himself' and take his assigned place in the natural order as a normal man, a man who loved women. He urged Oscar to visit him again for another talk. `In the meantime pray hard and talk little' - the latter injunction difficult, if not impossible, for Oscar to obey. After his confession, Oscar appeared to recover his equilibrium as quickly as he had lost it. He cancelled his second appointment with Father Bowden, sending him a bunch of lilies in his stead.

  The lily was the unofficial symbol of the Aesthetic movement. Oscar's bunch of lilies to Father Bowden clearly signalled his intentions. His spiritual and sexual crisis was over. He had chosen to worship Beauty, rather than God, and to put his faith in art, rather than religion. Six months later Oscar left Oxford for life in London, grandly styling himself `Professor of Aesthetics and Art Critic'.

  Oscar set up home with Frank Miles. They had two floors of an old and rambling house in Salisbury Street, leading off the Strand - `this untidy but romantic house', Oscar called it. Oscar had a large sitting room, panelled and painted white, where he and Frank Miles would entertain, sending out invitations broadcast for `Tea and Beauties' where Frank's pastel portraits of beautiful women would be prominently displayed in the hopes of picking up a commission or two. Their aim was not so much to break into the rigid and stuffy confines of high society, but to establish themselves as arbiters of taste among the more relaxed, more exciting and fashionable society of writers, artists and poets. Oscar once remarked that there were only three ways to get into society: feed it, amuse it or shock it. He used all three tactics simultaneously.