The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  One of their early visitors at Salisbury Street was a young woman, Laura Troubridge, sister to Violet, who wrote a vivid sketch of her visit. `Went to tea at Oscar Wilde's,' she wrote in her diary:

  Great fun, lots of vague `intense' men, such duffers, who amused us awfully. The room was a mass of white lilies, photos of Mrs Langtry, peacock-feather screens and coloured pots, pictures of various merit.

  Lillie Langtry was a professional beauty who had modelled for the greatest painters of the day and who was shortly to become the mistress of the Prince of Wales. She also agreed to model for Frank Miles, who drew numerous pastel portraits of her. It was through Frank that Oscar met the `Jersey Lily' at a tea party one afternoon. Lillie later recorded her first, not entirely favourable, impressions of Oscar. `How astonished I was at his strange appearance,' she wrote later:

  Then he must have been not more than twenty-two. He had a profusion of brown hair, brushed back from his forehead, and worn rather longer than was conventional, though not with the exaggeration which he afterwards affected. His face was large, and so colourless that a few pale freckles of good size were oddly conspicuous. He had a well-shaped mouth, with somewhat coarse lips and greenish-hued teeth. The plainness of his face, however, was redeemed by the splendour of his great, eager eyes.

  Lillie and Oscar became friends. There were rumours that he was deeply in love with her, and that he presented her with a single pale lily every day. `I would have rather discovered Mrs Langtry than have discovered America,' he remarked. He wrote a poem -'The New Helen' - praising her beauty and sent her a copy inscribed `To Helen, formerly of Troy, now of London.'

  Oscar was prepared to do almost anything to further his career as a poet and a writer. He knew the value of publicity, and he knew too that nothing generated publicity like controversy. `There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,' Lord Henry Wotton says in Dorian Gray, `and that is not being talked about.' Oscar's hair grew longer and longer, and his clothes more and more outre. It was rumoured - falsely - that Oscar had walked down Piccadilly in Aesthetic costume of kneebreeches and a flowing velvet jacket reverently holding a lily in his hand. `Anyone could have done that,' he said proudly. `The great and difficult thing was what I achieved - to make the whole world believe that I had done it.'

  Oscar's extravagant and very public devotion to Lillie Langtry, and to the actresses Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt, was designed to get his name in the newspapers and in the minds of the public at large. He reputedly greeted the arrival of Sarah Bernhardt in England by throwing an armful of lilies at her feet. His efforts did not go unrewarded. When his Oxford friend William Ward called at Salisbury Street one morning, he found Oscar still in bed, his sittingroom a mess:

  He explained that he had given a supper party the night before, at which Sarah Bernhardt had been present and that she had tried to see how high she could jump and write her name with a charcoal on the wall. From the scrawl on the side of the room and not much below the ceiling it seemed that she had attained considerable success in her attempt.

  Oscar's name was everywhere and it was not long before he achieved the dubious distinction of being satirised by Punch, `a comic weekly' with a large circulation, which saw its role as puncturing pretension and pomposity wherever it occurred. Oscar and the Aesthetic craze were a prime target. Oscar personified the `very aesthetic', `supremely intense', `long-haired and hyperpoetic' Apostle of Beauty:

  From 1880 onwards, Oscar was lampooned mercilessly in Punch as Jellaby Postlethwaite', the namby-pamby, limp-wristed poet, striking poetic attitudes for all he was worth and worshipping beauty in the most unlikely ways; and as `Maudle', the painter with an unhealthy interest in youth. In one famous Punch cartoon, Maudle, looking exactly like an over-fed Oscar, admires Mrs Brown's teenage son:

  Maudle: How consummately lovely your son is, Mrs Brown!

  Mrs Brown (a Philistine from the country): What! He's a nice, manly Boy, if you mean that, Mr Maudle. He has just left school, you know, and wishes to be an Artist.

  Maudle: Why should he be an Artist?

  Mrs Brown: Well, he must be something!

  Maudle: Why should he Be anything? Why not let him remain for ever content to Exist Beautifully!

  The caption to the cartoon closes with the words: Mrs Brown determines that at all events her Son shall not study Art under Maudle. Punch was clearly not fooled by Oscar's extravagant declarations of love for beautiful young women.

  Oscar acknowledged that he was the inspiration behind Maudle. `I suppose that I am the original of Maudle,' he reluctantly admitted in a newspaper interview. But he looked down with Olympian disdain on Punch's caricatures:

  My attitude toward all this is that a true artist who believes in his art and his mission must necessarily be altogether insensible to praise or blame. If he is not a mere sham, he cannot be disturbed by any caricature or exaggeration. He has the truth on his side, and the opinion of the whole world should be of no consequence to him.

  In 1881, Frank Burnand, the editor of Punch, decided to exploit the public fascination with all things Aesthetic and wrote a play, The Colonel, which featured the shamming poet and Aesthete, Lambert Streyke, who was clearly modelled on Oscar. Queen Victoria saw the play and wrote that it was:

  a very clever play, written to quiz and ridicule the foolish aesthetic people who dress in such absurd manner, with loose garments, puffed sleeves, great hats, and carrying peacock's feathers, sunflowers and lilies.

  Oscar's own volume of poetry, simply entitled Poems, was published in the summer of 1881, further confusing him in the public mind with his alter egos Jellaby Postlethwaite and Lambert Streyke. It was poorly received. `I see that Oscar Wilde, the utterly utter is bringing out 10s. 6d worth of poems,' the Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins told a friend, while the translator and literary critic Edmund Gosse called the volume `a curious toadstool' and `a malodorous Parasitic growth'. Punch also produced a `Fancy Portrait' of Oscar as a sunflower:

  `The cover is consummate, the paper is distinctly precious, the binding is beautiful, and the type is utterly too,' said Punch scathingly, describing Poems as `a volume of echoes', `Swinburne and water'. For the past decade, Algernon Charles Swinburne had been England's most controversial young poet, writing lushly sensual verse and leading a drunken, scandalous existence.

  Ina debate at the Oxford Union on whether to accept Oscar's present of a signed copy of Poems, the poems were savaged as both derivative and immoral. `It is not that these poems are thin - and they are thin,' declared Oliver Elton:

  It is not that they are immoral - and they are immoral: it is not that they are this or that - and they are all this and all that: it is that they are for the most part not by their putative father at all, but by a number of better-known and more deservedly reputed authors.

  The Union voted by a narrow margin to decline Oscar's gift. But despite the almost universal criticism of Poems, Oscar was not unduly cast down. The book went through five editions in as many months. It was true, there was no such thing as bad publicity.

  The publication of Poems had one unexpected consequence. It brought to an abrupt - and perhaps not unwelcome - end Oscar's relationship with Frank Miles. The sexual side of it had probably already died a death, though they remained friends and continued living together. But Frank's sexual behaviour was growing increasingly erratic. Perhaps the syphilis that he had already contracted and that was to kill him ten years later was already beginning to manifest itself. Frank had started to live dangerously, too dangerously for Oscar. There was a succession of unpleasant and unsettling incidents. Frank was blackmailed, almost certainly over an indiscretion with a young man. An anonymous memoir of Oscar describes Frank's `terror and misery' at the blackmail. `He revealed his trouble to his fellow tenant,' the memoir recorded, `and Wilde immediately volunteered to do his best to rescue him from his persecutor.' It was Oscar's first brush with the world of blackmailers and it would not be his last. On another
occasion the police tried to force an entry to Keats House to arrest Miles on a charge of immorality, probably with a young boy. Oscar is supposed to have held the police at bay until Frank could escape over the rooftops and then to have let the police in, glibly explaining that he thought the police raid was a practical joke and claiming that `Mr Miles was travelling on the continent'.

  When Frank's father, Canon Miles, read a copy of Poems shortly after publication, he wrote immediately to Oscar expressing his deep concern about Oscar's continuing friendship with his son:

  If we seem to advise a separation for a time it is not because we do not believe you in character to be very different to what you suggest in your poetry, but it is because you do not see the risk we see in a published poem which makes all who read it say to themselves `this is outside the pale of poetry', `it is licentious and may do great harm to any soul that reads it'.

  Oscar flew into a rage and demanded to know what Frank himself thought. When Frank weakly agreed with his father, Oscar left the house they shared, there and then, and moved into rooms in Charles Street in Mayfair. It was the end of the friendship.

  Oscar was far from inconsolable. There had been other young men in his life, like the young actor Norman Forbes-Robertson, to whom he had made overtures early in 1880. `I don't know if I bored you the other night with my life and its troubles,' Oscar wrote to him:

  There seems something so sympathetic and gentle about your nature, and you have been so charming whenever I have seen you, that I felt somehow that although I knew you only a short time, _yet that still I could talk to you about things, which I only talk of to people whom I like - to those whom I count my friends. If you will let me count you as one of my friends, it would give a new pleasure to my life.

  Norman was attractive, with `gold hair' and `rose cheeks'. His was the classic, peaches-and-cream type of English boyish beauty to which Oscar would always be drawn.

  There was also the poet James Rennell Rodd, who was four years younger than Oscar. Rodd had been awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1880, two years after Oscar had won it. Rodd was extremely handsome in a poetic sort of way. `Nature has given him a poet's face, that thrills to the pathos and passion of his thought,' declared the Daily Telegraph after he declaimed his prize-winning poem in the Sheldonian Theatre. Although Oscar had known Rodd slightly at Oxford, their friendship really blossomed in London when Rodd was invited to Salisbury Street for tea and beauties. In the late summer of 1880 they decided to go on a walking tour of France, an idyllic trip which Oscar described to the son of George Lewis, the society solicitor who in due course was to get Oscar and Bosie out of several serious situations with blackmailing servants and outraged fathers:

  I had a very charming time in France and travelled among beautiful vineyards all down the Loire, one of the most wonderful rivers in the world, mirroring from sea to source a hundred cities and five hundred towers. I was with a delightful Oxford friend and, as we did not wish to be known, he travelled under the name of Sir Smith, and I was Lord Robinson.

  Oscar and Rodd had a `richly impassioned friendship' and - for the space of a summer - may have fancied themselves to be in love. Sex may well have entered the romantic equation, almost certainly at Oscar's instigation. But it probably consisted of little more than fervid hand-holding, snatched kisses and bed-sharing in French lodgings with some attendant, fumbling mutual masturbation.

  But this was not the whole of Oscar's romantic life. As always, there were two sides to his erotic moon. During these first years in London - at the same time that he was involved in relationships with Frank Miles, Norman ForbesRobertson and Rennell Rodd - Oscar was also seriously contemplating marriage.

  'Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.'

  Marriage had been on Oscar's mind - if only intermittently - ever since Oxford. Speranza was constantly encouraging both her sons to make what she called `a good marriage', a marriage with a young woman of fortune and family connections who could help her husband in his chosen career.

  Oscar had proposed to at least two young women in the two years since he had left university. The first was Charlotte Montefiore, the sister of his Oxford friend Leonard Montefiore. Leonard died very suddenly in America in September 1879, at the age of twenty-six. Oscar was, he said, `distressed beyond words' and wrote to Charlotte a few days later:

  I am so glad you are coming to town. I want to see you though the memories you will bring with you will be most bitter. Yet often I think when a friend dies those who are left become very close to one another, just as when an oak falls in the forest the other trees reach out and join branches over the vacant place.

  Quite what the nature of Oscar's relationship with Charlotte was at the time of her brother's death is impossible to say. He signed his letter to her `Your affectionate friend'. They had clearly met, probably on several occasions. Oscar's comments on Charlotte's courage in the face of her bereavement - `Alfred Milner ... tells me you are so brave - I knew you would be' - suggest that they knew each other really quite well. Charlotte may have visited Leonard at Oxford - just like the sister of Oscar's friend John Bodley who had spent a happy fortnight sampling the University's social delights and going for picnics and excursions with her brother and Oscar and assorted other undergraduates. Equally, Oscar may well have met Charlotte during a visit to the Montefiore family home.

  What is clear from Oscar's letter is that his intentions towards Charlotte involved rather more than being just her affectionate friend. He hoped, he wanted, he aspired to `become very close' to her, to share her grief for Leonard. `I want to see you,' he wrote. `If I called in on Wednesday evening would you see me?' These phrases have the ring of an impatient lover, of a suitor in waiting. A few days later he did call on Charlotte and initiated a discreet courtship of the grieving sister. And early in 1880, he proposed marriage.

  Charlotte turned him down. She liked him, she was much attached to him. He was the close friend of her dear, departed brother. They had shared their grief. But she did not love him and therefore could not, would not marry him. It was also clear that he did not love her. During the courtship, Oscar wrote many letters to Charlotte, nearly all of which she later destroyed. In a brief note penned immediately after she had refused his offer, Oscar wrote: `Charlotte, I am so sorry about your decision. With your money and my brain we could have gone far.' Charlotte Montefiore was almost certainly right to refuse Oscar. The flippancy of his note betrayed the ambition, the cynicism and the flagrantly mercenary motives that lay beneath his proposal.

  There was no question of mercenary motives underpinning Oscar's next proposal. Violet Hunt was the captivatingly beautiful daughter of the PreRaphaelite landscape painter Alfred Hunt and his wife Margaret Raine Hunt, the popular novelist. In May 1879, Margaret Hunt received an invitation to `Bellevue', the London home of W.B. Scott and his wife Letitia, to a party given to meet `a wonderful young Irishman just up from Oxford'. Margaret's response was muted. `Another of Letitia's young men!' she remarked, but nevertheless she accepted the invitation, taking seventeen-year-old Violet with her. Violet was a perfect Pre-Raphaelite beauty with her abundant auburn hair, large eyes and expressive mouth. `Out of Botticelli by Burne-Jones' was Ellen Terry's response to Violet's beauty. `You were a pretty child,' she told Violet. `You will be a beautiful woman.' Violet had grown up in the company of artists and writers and was precociously confident and articulate. She was already writing fiction and poetry and was studying art at South Kensington Art School.

  Oscar and Violet hit it off instantly. `In ten minutes I was the fashion, wrapt into sudden glory by the fact that Mr Oscar Wilde allowed me to monopolise him for a couple of hours.' They sat together in a window seat which looked out over the Thames where there was hardly room for Violet - just a `slip of a girl' as she described herself - and the `big lusty fellow with the wide, white face, the shapely red mouth and the long lock of straight peasant-like black hair that fell ac
ross his fine forehead, and which he pushed away now and then with a full poetic gesture.'

  Oscar told Violet how he had been to tea the day before with `The Bernhardt', who had just made her first appearance on a London stage and how she had lain `on a red couch like a pallid flame'. He recited from memory a sonnet he had written to Ellen Terry in his `fine, true voice with its exquisite timbre and cadence'. Oscar laid flattery on with a trowel: `Beautiful women like you,' he rather pointedly told Violet, `hold the fortunes of the world in your hands to make or mar.' Then, bending forwards conspiratorially, he said, `We will rule the world - you and I - you with your looks and I with my wits.' It was a dazzling performance and Violet was smitten. She went home, dazed and adoring - `and a little in love to boot'. Oscar, it was clear, was seeking to make the most of his one great capital asset: his intelligence. He wanted to combine forces with Charlotte's money or with Violet's looks. His stated aim was to go far, to rule the world, and he saw a wife as an essential component in his manifest destiny.

  For the next two years Oscar saw a great deal of Violet Hunt. On Sunday evenings, more often than not, he would visit the Hunts at their London home, Tor Villa. And Margaret and Violet were earnestly invited to tea with Oscar and Frank Miles at Salisbury Street. Oscar confessed to Margaret that he thought Violet `the sweetest Violet in England ... though you must not tell her so'. Violet was in love with Oscar, and Oscar was, according to Violet, `really in love with me-- for the moment and perhaps more than a moment'.