The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  In her published memoirs, Violet says that she `as nearly as possible escaped the honour of being Mrs Wilde'. Oscar broached the question of marriage obliquely by sending the sweetest Violet `a single white Eucharist lily without a stalk, reposing on cotton wool in a box, ridiculed by my younger sisters'. Oscar's hesitancy may have been due to financial considerations. The Hunts were not wealthy and there would be no marriage settlement of any substance for her. Oscar's hesitation sealed the matter and his proposal was declined by Alfred Hunt, initially to Violet's chagrin, although she would later begin to see Oscar in a clearer, harder light.

  There may have been another element in Alfred Hunt's rejection of Oscar's matrimonial overtures. What he made of Oscar living with Frank Miles, or of Oscar's puzzlingly intense, seemingly romantic friendship with the young poet Rennell Rodd can only be surmised. Speculation and gossip about Oscar were rife. Punch had repeatedly caricatured him as effeminate. There was a cloud of suspicion hanging over him, a cloud which Alfred Hunt as an affectionate and protective father surely could not ignore.

  It was shortly after his failed bid for Violet Hunt, in the early summer of 1881, that Oscar met the woman who was to become his wife. Constance Mary Lloyd was twenty-three years old. She was tall by the standards of the day, slim and elegant with abundant wavy, auburn hair, piercing violet eyes and fine features. Oscar had met Constance's older brother Otho four years earlier. Although they were contemporaries at Oxford, they met first in Dublin, at the Wilde family home in Merrion Square. Otho Lloyd was staying with his Irish grandmother, `Mama Mary' Atkinson, who knew the Wildes and encouraged Otho to call. Lady Wilde was probably not yet up. She never received anyone till5pm, as she hated what she called `the brutality of strong lights'. So the two young men were alone. According to Otho, `Oscar ... gave me a most amusing description of a journey he had recently returned from to Athens and by boat a voyage among the Aegean islands where they encountered a terrific storm with two or three men friends.' Although the two undergraduates subsequently bumped into each other at Oxford, and Oscar invited Otho to call on him at Magdalen College, it was an acquaintance which did not quite ripen into friendship.

  Now, four years later, in June 1881, Oscar met Otho's younger sister Constance for the first time. Lady Wilde and her son had been invited to tea at Lancaster Gate, the home of Constance's grandfather, to meet Otho's and Constance's aunt who was visiting from Dublin. Constance almost certainly knew more about Oscar than Oscar knew about her. Her great-uncle, Charles Hemphill, who knew Speranza well, had kept the Lloyds up to date on the Wilde family vicissitudes following the death of Sir William and Speranza's move to London two years earlier:

  Lady Wilde has sold the Merrion Square house - everything was mortgaged to the hilt, including the country residence of Moytura and the row of houses at Bray - and is gone to launch herself on the great unheeding metropolis across the water. She wants Oscar to enter the Parliament when he settles - he would get in on his mother's name alone, I should think. Willie is living with her in London, but Oscar has taken rooms off the Strand.

  Constance had heard stories of Oscar at Oxford from Otho and could not help but be aware also of his burgeoning fame as a `Professor of Aesthetics', and now as a poet. Oscar's Poems were published sometime in June and Constance was evidently nervous at the prospect of meeting such a celebrity. The tea party went well. Oscar was dazzling and Constance was duly dazzled. She wrote to Otho the very next morning:

  O.W. came yesterday at about 5.30 (by which time I was shaking with fright!) and stayed for half-an-hour, begged me to come and see his mother again soon, which little request I need hardly say I have kept to myself. I can't help liking him, because when he's talking to me alone he's never a bit affected, and speaks naturally, except that he uses better language than most people.

  Constance also divined hidden depths in Oscar at this very first meeting which others could not always see: `Grandpa, I think, likes Oscar, but of course the others laugh at him, because they don't choose to see anything but that he wears long hair and looks aesthetic.' For his part, Oscar was captivated by the beautiful, intelligent and receptive young woman he met. Her nervous blushes and shyness added to her quiet, modest charm. Ever one to make snap decisions in matters of the heart, Oscar remarked to his mother as they left Lancaster Gate, 'By the by, Mama, I think of marrying that girl.'

  That Oscar exercised a fascination for women is beyond dispute. Many young women seemed to fall in love with him on the spot. Violet Hunt fell `a little in love' with Oscar at their first meeting, as did Laura Troubridge, who confided to her diary how she `fell awfully in love with him', and `thought him quite delightful'. Unlike many young men of the period who suffered from stultifying shyness or a paralysing excess of etiquette in the presence of young women, Oscar had the gift of being able to instantly establish a rapport, a conversational intimacy, which allowed him to talk with women rather than to them. As a true son of the revolutionary Speranza, he was an unabashed champion of women's rights and believed women to be every bit as intelligent as men and equally worthy of what she called `that higher culture and education which has been so tardily and, in some instances, so grudgingly granted to them'. He was charming, sympathetic and funny. He could flatter outrageously, but at the same time intelligently. He could talk knowledgeably about the loveliness of their clothes and wittily about the shortcomings of other people's. He was intimate with famous beauties, infamous mistresses, actresses and all manner of fascinating and deadly women. He could gossip about the Bernhardt and the Jersey Lily. He was a poet who could talk poetically - mesmerisingly even - about art and beauty and life, love and death. He was a literary lion, and the world was beginning to sit up and take notice. It would have been surprising if Constance had not fallen in love with him.

  Constance no longer lived with her mother. Her father, Horace Lloyd, had died comparatively young of pulmonary disease when she had just turned sixteen. It was a difficult age for a girl to lose her father, particularly a father whose kindness and love for his daughter counteracted her mother's indifference and sometimes downright hostility. Horace Lloyd had been a successful barrister. His marriage to his Irish cousin, Adele, had been unhappy and, after the birth of Otho and Constance, the couple lived increasingly separate lives. Horace's career in law and his expansive - and expensive - social life in the Prince of Wales's set had kept him away from home, while Adele missed Ireland and made long visits with the children to Mama Mary Atkinson's house in Dublin.

  Anyone meeting the quietly assured, beautiful and charming young woman that Constance appeared to be in 1881 might well have been surprised to learn that she had led a deeply unhappy life which would leave her permanently scarred. After Constance's premature death in 1898, Otho wrote:

  There are some lives that are evidently doomed to mistreatment, and hers was one; I doubt if she ever strictly knew what happiness was, at least for any long time together.

  Constance's childhood seems to have been desperately, agonisingly unhappy as a result of her mother's mental instability. Adele abused Constance emotionally, and perhaps even physically. Writing privately towards the end of his life, Otho described Constance's childhood and adolescence as `a tragedy, in consequence of her ill-treatment by her mother who was unfortunately of a very jealous and cruel temper'. His mother, he said, had been `scarcely responsible' for her outbursts, implying obliquely that Adele was a victim of mental illness. There seems to have been a history of violent, uncontrollable outbursts of temper in the family, and Otho considered that his mother had inherited this terrible defect. He quotes a family tradition that those who suffered from this defect of temper `were like devils when once roused'.

  The presence of Constance's father had, it appears, in some way acted as a brake on the worst excesses of Adele's outbursts. But Horace's death in 1874 left the sixteen-year-old Constance exposed and totally unprotected. Otho was away at boarding school in Bristol and then at university in Oxford, leaving Constan
ce alone and having to shift as best she could with an unstable and unpredictable mother: `Two women cousins living,' Otho wrote, `could testify to what she underwent at her mother's hands, especially from the time of her father's death.' And indeed, when Otho's daughter met one of these cousins in 1935, `she could not say bad enough of my mother'.

  Indeed, so appalling was the treatment meted out to Constance that Otho considered it a significant factor in her early death - even more of a factor than the trauma she would experience as the wife of Oscar: `I shall always think,' he wrote in 1937, `that her internal tumour was brought about in the first place by what she went through under her mother.' It was Otho who finally took matters into his own hands and decided to rescue Constance from her mother. He went to see his grandfather, John Horatio Lloyd, and demanded - `at my instance and on my insistence' are the words he used - that he give Constance the protection of his home where Adele could not reach her.

  Life with Grandpapa Lloyd was calm and well-regulated. His unmarried daughter, Constance's Aunt Emily, ran his opulent household in Lancaster Gate with extreme efficiency. She was strict with Constance but always scrupulously fair. If she could not love her niece, then she at least tried to protect her and look after her interests. And if there was any resentment at a pretty granddaughter becoming the centre of Grandpapa Lloyd's attention, while she, the spinster daughter, shouldered the generally thankless burden of nursing him, she tried not to show it. Grandpapa Lloyd was an indulgent grandfather and Constance wanted for nothing materially. Otho was a tower of strength, her protector, her champion. And like many children of unhappy and abusive parents, Constance had assuaged her unhappiness by creating close friendships with other adults, notably Georgiana, Lady Mount-Temple whom Constance significantly christened `Mia Madre'.

  Now Constance had found Oscar and the future seemed full of promise. We know very little about the early days of the courtship of Oscar and Constance. After Oscar's precipitate declaration of his intention to `marry that girl', little seems to have happened. Oscar was busy promoting his Poems. No doubt Constance, chaperoned by Otho, attended at least one or two of Speranza's weekly salons in her cramped, darkened drawing room in Park Street, Chelsea. And Oscar almost certainly called again at Lancaster Gate and slowly improved his acquaintance with the family.

  The discreet pace of the courtship was dramatically interrupted in September by an unexpected invitation. Five months earlier, Gilbert and Sullivan's operatic satire on Aestheticism, Patience; or Bunthorne's Bride, had opened. The `hero' was the `fleshly' and effeminate poet Bunthorne, inspired primarily by Swinburne, but with touches of Oscar thrown in for good measure. Bunthorne wears the regulation aesthetic garb of kneebreeches, silk stockings and long hair. He is:

  The success of Patience in London encouraged its producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, to put on a production in New York which opened in September to rave reviews. New York audiences were fascinated by Bunthorne and wanted to find out more about the movement which Patience so brilliantly satirised. D'Oyly Carte and his business partner Colonel Morse decided that if New York could not go to Bunthorne, then Bunthorne must go to New York. On 30 September Oscar received a cable from New York. Would he consider undertaking a lecture tour in the United States with a minimum of fifty lectures? Oscar did not hesitate for a second. `Yes, if offer good,' he replied.

  `Strange that a pair ofsilk stockings should so upset a nation.'

  Oscar set sail for New York on Christmas Eve 1881 and arrived there on 2 January. It was late afternoon when the S.S. Arizona dropped anchor and a horde of reporters, unable to wait for him to disembark, travelled by tug to the ship and eagerly clambered aboard to catch their first glimpse of the rare and wonderful English Aesthete. Oscar did not disappoint. He had dressed carefully for the part and appeared in a striking new overcoat. `His outer garment was a long Ulster, trimmed with two kinds of fur, which reached almost to his feet,' the New York World breathlessly reported:

  He wore patent-leather shoes, a smoking-cap or turban, and his shirt might be termed ultra-Byronic, or perhaps decollete. A sky-blue cravat of the sailor style hung well down upon his chest. His hair flowed over his shoulders in dark-brown waves, curling slightly upwards at the end.

  Oscar's rather pompous comments on art and Aestheticism were not what the reporters had hoped for, and they were forced to scurry around asking his fellow passengers for suitably utterly-utterly utterances. `I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic,' he is supposed to have remarked mid-voyage. `It is not so majestic, or even as large, as I expected.' Apocryphal or not, the newspapers lapped it up: `Mr Wilde disappointed with the Atlantic', the headlines blared. Thankfully, the newspapers did not print the comments of the captain of the Arizona who, like so many other men, had taken an immediate and visceral dislike to Oscar. `I wish I had that man lashed to the bowsprit on the windward side,' he had said during the voyage.

  When he was asked by US Customs officials if he had anything to declare, Oscar is supposed to have proclaimed in ringing tones, `Nothing. I have nothing to declare but my genius,' but even Oscar was surprised at the extraordinary and intense level of interest he generated. He was feted wherever he went, and his every utterance on art and life was dutifully scribbled down by the reporters who dogged his footsteps. By sustained and determined feats of self-publicity, Oscar had achieved a degree of mild notoriety in London which had helped him to scratch a precarious living from writing. But in New York he found that he was not only famous, he was also - for the first time in his life - rich. It was a delightful sensation. Two weeks after his arrival, he wrote in great good humour to his friend Mrs George Lewis to announce that he was being treated like royalty wherever he went:

  I stand at the top of reception rooms when I go out, and for two hours they defile past for introduction. I bow gracefully and sometimes honour them with a royal observation, which appears next day in all the newspapers. When I go to the theatre the manager bows me in with lighted candles and the audience rise. Yesterday I had to leave by a private door, the mob was so great. Loving virtuous obscurity as much as I do, you can judge how much I dislike this lionising, which is worse than that given to Sarah Bernhardt I hear.

  Oscar gave his first lecture at New York's Chickering Hall exactly a week after his arrival. The night before, he attended a performance of Patience at the Standard Theatre, arrayed in a black velvet suit with kneebreeches, set off by a scarlet silk handkerchief. His costume was almost identical to that worn by Bunthorne the poet prancing on stage below, but Oscar seemed not to mind, merely remarking to his companions, `Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.' Chickering Hall was a sell-out. At eight o'clock a placard announcing `Standing Room Only' was placed outside, but the queues still grew. Inside there was a buzz of anticipation. New York was waiting to be dazzled. But New York was disappointed. Oscar's first attempt at a public lecture was received in stony silence. His subject was `The English Renaissance of Art', but there was nothing artistic about Oscar's delivery. It was stiff and formal, and his voice struck many of those present as `sepulchral'. Despite his external bravado, Oscar was extremely nervous. None of his warmth and wit shone through. It was a mistake he very quickly rectified, ruthlessly pruning the lecture by a quarter, making the content less theoretical and the language less grandiloquent. And as his confidence grew, Oscar's delivery became more relaxed and more assured.

  Despite the general lionisation of Oscar, there were plenty of dissenting voices, and there were many sly, and not so sly, digs at him. He was variously described as `maidenly', `girlish' and `womanish'. The New York Times called him a 'mamma's boy', and spoke of his `affected effeminacy', while the Newark Daily Advertiser described his eyebrows as `neat, delicate and arched, and of the sort coveted by women'. The Boston Evening Transcript was moved to verse:

  Matters were not helped when Oscar's friend from Oxford, John Bodley, mounted an unexpected and vicious attack in the New York Times on 21 January, in which he described Os
car as `epicene'. Henry James spoke of Oscar as a `fatuous fool', `a tenth-rate card' and `an unclean beast', while James's friend and correspondent, Mrs Henry Adams, said that Oscar's sex was `undecided'. When Oscar paid a visit to New York's Century Club, some members refused point blank to meet him. `Where is she?' another member demanded to know. `Well, why not say "she"? I understand she's a "Charlotte Ann".' A `Charlotte Ann' was the American slang term for an effeminate sodomite, the equivalent of a `Mary Ann' in England.

  There were those who saw, or claimed they saw, New York's sexual underground - the city's `Charlotte Anns' and `Miss Nancys' - rallying to Oscar's banner. On the day after his arrival in New York, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle predicted that Oscar -'the pallid and lank young man' - will find `in the great metropolis (any fair day on Fifth Avenue) a school of gilded youths eager to embrace his peculiar tenets'. The use of the word `embrace' was calculated to suggest sexual contact.

  On the night of Oscar's lecture in Chickering Hall, the reporter for the New York Tribune observed `many pallid and aesthetic young men in dress suits and banged hair' leaning `in medieval attitudes against the wall'. His meaning was clear. `Banged hair' was a way of dressing the hair and usually consisted of a deep fringe, with longer ringlets, waves or plaits on either side. Only women wore their hair in bangs. Towards the end of the month, the Washington Post spoke of Oscar in the same breath as the `young men painting their faces ... with unmistakable rouge on their cheeks'. New York had a thriving subculture of men who loved men. Greenwich Village was renowned as a resort of male prostitutes. And eighteen years after Oscar visited New York, a committee investigating the goings on at Paresis Hall on the Bowery recorded that the men there:

  act effeminately; most of them are painted and powdered, they are called Princess this and Lady So and So and the Duchess of Marlboro, and get up and sing as women, and dance; ape the female character; call each other sisters and take people out for immoral purposes.