The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Oscar's aesthetic costume and long hair were hardly designed to emphasise his vigorous masculinity. But the hostile press reports were not simply a case of smoke and no fire. Oscar was, it seems, indiscreet and incautious about his sexual tastes almost from the day he set foot in New York. On 8 January, he wrote an unguarded note to the politician and bon vivant Robert Barnwell Roosevelt to thank him for a hand-delivered message of welcome. `What a little Ganymede you have sent me as your herald!' Oscar wrote. `The prettiest thing I have yet seen in America.' In Greek mythology, Ganymede was the beautiful shepherd boy abducted and anally raped by Zeus in the form an eagle. Oscar's comments proclaimed an interest in Greek love that went far beyond the theoretical.

  Oscar desperately wanted to meet Walt Whitman, whom he and many others considered to be America's greatest living poet. Oscar claimed that he had been weaned on Whitman. He had, he told a reporter from the Philadelphia Press, `absorbed the Whitmanesque poetry from boyhood', when Lady Wilde used to read his poems aloud. Oscar also said that he and other `Oxford boys' would bring Whitman's poems with them on their `rambles' and read them to each other.

  There was another, more compelling, reason behind Oscar's eagerness to meet Walt Whitman. Whitman's poetry spoke of the potency of friendship and love between men, particularly between working-class men, and positively oozed homoeroticism. Indeed, the `Calamus' section of Whitman's great poetic cycle Leaves of Grass was so intensely homoerotic that it gave rise to the shortlived term `calamite' to denote a man who loved men. Swinburne was to denounce `the cult of the calamus' and `calamites'. Whitman had a vision of what he called `adhesiveness' between men, of a `high towering love of comrades', which was somehow separate from and more noble than the love between men and women.

  Men like John Addington Symonds and the socialist poet and writer Edward Carpenter, who were ardent campaigners for the social and legal emancipation of men who loved men, saw Whitman as a great prophet of a new erotic world order. `The chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance,' Oscar was later to write of Whitman. `He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald of a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type.' One or two `Whitmanite fellowships' had already sprung up in the North of England, the first, cautious coming together of men - and a few women - to discuss male love. Symonds in particular had become obsessed with Whitman's poetry. He instituted a long correspondence with Whitman, probing him as to the exact nature of the `manly love of comrades' he spoke about, but Whitman's replies were invariably and maddeningly evasive. Oscar and Symonds can hardly have failed to discuss Whitman in their correspondence before Oscar departed for America. Oscar was as intrigued as Symonds about Whitman's sexual tastes. `There is something so Greek and sane about his poetry,' Oscar told the Philadelphia Press.

  Oscar was indebted to the Philadelphia publisher Joseph Marshall Stoddart, who owned the US publishing rights to the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, for his meeting with Whitman. Stoddart befriended Oscar and may have been sympathetic to - and perhaps even shared - his sexual tastes. `Oscar Wilde has expressed his great desire to meet you socially,' Stoddart wrote to Whitman:

  He will dine with me Saturday afternoon when I shall be most happy to have you join us. The bearer, Mr. Wavier, will explain at greater length any details which you may wish to know, and will be happy to bring me your acquiescence.

  Whitman at first declined to meet Oscar, sending him instead his `hearty salutations and American welcome'. But he changed his mind after reading Oscar's admiring comments in the Philadelphia Press on 17 January, sending a note to Stoddart the next day. `Walt Whitman will be in from two till threethirty this afternoon, and will be most happy to see Mr Wilde and Mr Stoddart.'

  The meeting at Whitman's untidy house in Camden, New Jersey was a roaring success. Oscar was suitably humble in the presence of Whitman, greeting him with the words, `I have come to you as to one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle.' The contrast between the two poets could not have been more marked. Oscar was young, tall, slender and clean shaven. Whitman was in his early sixties, but looked much older. He was shorter than Oscar and wore a long, bushy white beard. Oscar was highly educated, cultivated and still in his languid Aesthetic phase. Whitman was selftaught, and robustly masculine in manner.

  Stoddart tactfully left the two poets alone. `If you are willing - will excuse me - I will go off for an hour or so - come back again - leaving you together,' he said. `We would be glad to have you stay,' Whitman replied. `But do not feel to come back in an hour. Don't come for two or three.' Whitman opened a bottle of elderberry wine and he and Oscar drank it all before Whitman suggested they go upstairs to his `den' on the third floor where, he told Oscar, `We could be on "thee and thou" terms.' Whitman gave a detailed account of the meeting to a reporter from the Philadelphia Press the next day. `We had a jolly good time,' he said. `I think he was glad to get away from lecturing and fashionable society, and spend some time with an old rough':

  One of the first things I said was that I should call him `Oscar.' `I like that so much,' he answered, laying his hand on my knee. He seemed to me like a great big, splendid boy. He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly. I don't see why such mocking things are written of him.

  They talked for two or three hours. Oscar had brought `cordial messages' for Whitman from several English poets, almost certainly including John Addington Symonds. The mention of Symonds's name would have turned the conversation to love and sex with young men. Years later Stoddart was quoted as saying that:

  Everyone who knew Whitman even slightly was certain that he had these tastes and that, in free conversation with intimate friends, the poet did not trouble to conceal his liking for handsome youths.

  Stoddart went on to say that `after embracing, greeting each other as "Oscar" and "Walt", the two talked of nothing but pretty boys, of how insipid was the love of women, and of what other poets, Swinburne in particular, had to say about these tastes'. Stoddart's reminiscences accord with Oscar's later account of the meeting to his friend, George Ives. According to the voluminous diaries of Ives, Whitman told Oscar that he refused to answer Symonds's questions about his sexual inclinations because `he just resented Symonds's curiosity and the way he put his questions'. Oscar told Ives that there was `no doubt' about Whitman's sexual tastes. `I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,' he boasted.

  Oscar's friendship with Stoddart took root and blossomed, and seven years later the publisher would commission Oscar to write his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. But in Philadelphia, Oscar had a more immediate concern. Before leaving London, he had offered to look for a publisher in America for Rennell Rodd's first volume of poetry, Songs in the South. The book had been first published in England in a small edition in 1881 when Rodd had inscribed Oscar's copy with a prophetic verse in Italian:

  Oscar persuaded Stoddart to publish Rodd's poems under a new title of his own devising, Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf. Without consulting Rodd and much to his embarrassment, Oscar added an explicitly homoerotic dedication to himself: `To Oscar Wilde - "Heart's Brother" - These few songs and many songs to come'. He added insult to injury by writing a lengthy introduction - an Envoi - to the poems which sailed dangerously close to the wind. It was a very public declaration of love: `There is none whose love of art is more flawless,' he wrote of Rodd, `none indeed who is dearer to myself.'

  Back in London, Rodd was appalled. His career in the Diplomatic Service was in jeopardy. He wrote immediately to Stoddart saying the inscription was `too effusive' and asking him to halt the distribution of the poems. But he was too late. The book was already in circulation. The Saturday Review in London mercilessly mocked Rodd and paraphrased the Envoi to suggest that Rodd was Oscar's lover:

  Among the `many young men' who follow Mr Wilde, `none is dearer to myself' than the beloved of Mr Wilde and of the Muses, Mr Rodd.

  Swinburne immediately wrote maliciously to Theodore Watts-Dunton. `Have you read
the Saturday on Oscar Wilde's young man,' he asked, `the Hephaestion of that all-conquering Alexander?' The reference to Hephaestion and Alexander was carefully and precisely meditated. Hephaestion was reputedly Alexander the Great's lover and catamite. - - -- - - --- - --

  The relationship between the two poets, which had begun so well, now soured. Rodd chose social acceptability and his career as a diplomat. Later, when Oscar returned from America, Rodd would write to him to finish their friendship. `My friends criticised the ascendancy which he began to exercise,' he recalled long afterwards, in a coded repudiation of the dominant love affair of his youth. But to Oscar, Rodd would always be `the true poet and the false friend'.

  In mid-February, Oscar delivered two lectures at the Central Music Hall in Chicago. Among his audience was John Donoghue, a penniless young sculptor. Donoghue later wrote to Oscar. His letter is lost, but whatever he said was sufficient to persuade Oscar to call on him at his studio. Oscar found an extraordinarily handsome young Irish-American sculptor with piercing blue eyes. Donoghue specialised in carving bas-reliefs in the style of ancient Greek sculpture. It is likely that Donoghue was Greek in another sense. Oscar was thrilled with his discovery and took up John Donoghue's cause, sending a photograph of one of Donoghue's sculptures to Charles Eliot Norton in an effort to win a commission. `I send you the young Greek: a photograph of him,' he wrote. `The young sculptor's name is John Donoghue: Pure Celt is he':

  I feel sure he could do any of your young athletes, and what an era in art that would be to have the sculptor back in the palestra, and of much service too to those who separate athletics from culture, and forget the right ideal of the beautiful and healthy mind in a beautiful and healthy body.

  In his lectures, Oscar praised Donoghue's work to such an extent that his fortunes took a spectacular turn for the better. The friendship with Donoghue endured, and Oscar met him two years later in Paris where he bought from him what Constance described as `a lovely bas-relief... a nude figure full profile of a boy playing a harp, perfectly simple and quite exquisite in line and expression'.

  Oscar crossed and re-crossed the United States for ten months, even venturing into Canada. He delivered nearly 150 lectures and was seen and heard by tens of thousands of Americans. By the time his tour ended in October he had become an accomplished and compelling lecturer. He spent the last weeks of his year in America in New York, trying to get Vera, or the Nihilists produced, a drama - almost a melodrama - about love and death among Russian anarchists, which he had written the previous year in London. And he also signed a contract with the actress Mary Anderson for a New York production of a new play he had begun during his travels, The Duchess of Padua. Oscar was back in New York in time to greet Lillie Langtry's arrival with an armful of lilies. She had come to make her debut on the American stage, and Oscar was her guide and escort in the city.

  Oscar was the victim of a curious and unsettling incident at this time. He was walking up Fifth Avenue late one morning when he was accosted `by a thinfaced youth' who introduced himself as the son of a financier, Anthony J. Drexel, whom Oscar had met. Accounts of the incident are sketchy, but it appears that Oscar immediately invited the young man to lunch, over which he announced that he had won a lottery prize and asked Oscar to go with him to collect it. The youth took Oscar to a house where illegal dice games were going on. Oscar apparently started gambling and had soon written cheques for the enormous sum of $1,200. Realising afterwards that he had been fleeced, Oscar went to the bank to put a stop on the cheques and then went to the police.

  It is quite possible that there was more to this incident than meets the eye. Fifth Avenue was the acknowledged haunt of male prostitutes, and the description of the youth as `thin-faced' immediately conjures up images of the pallid and lank young men who frequented Oscar's lectures. The `thin-faced youth' could easily have been one of the scores of `gilded youths' earning a living from prostitution and blackmail. It was certainly odd that Oscar should not be able to differentiate between the scion of a fabulously wealthy banking family and a cheap confidence trickster. And it was odder still that Oscar should invite the young man to lunch, let alone go off with him afterwards to an unknown destination. Was it in reality a pick-up in Fifth Avenue, and had Oscar gone to the young man's rooms expecting, perhaps even getting, sex, only to be threatened with exposure unless he paid up there and then? It was a common enough trap for men to fall into. If there was a sexual dimension to the incident, then it marked the first of many occasions when Oscar would fall victim to crimes associated with his sexual tastes.

  A few days later, Oscar boarded the S.S. Bothnia bound for England. He was ready to go home. He had been away from London for a year and was beginning to miss his family and his friends. The first giddying days of fame and fortune were over. Audiences for his lectures had dwindled dramatically in the last few months of his tour, and he was no longer the young lion of New York. `America is a land of unmatched vitality and vulgarity,' he said later, and Americans `a people who care not at all about values other than their own and, who, when they make up their minds, love you and hate you with a passionate zeal.' It was time to make a graceful exit from the New World and return to pick up the scattered threads of his life in the Old.

  Freedom from sordid

  care

  `The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.'

  Constance was certainly one of the scattered threads that Oscar was anxious to weave back into his life. Though no letters between them survive, it is possible, perhaps probable, that they wrote to each other and that the courtship, if such a slow and ceremonial procedure could be called a courtship, continued across the Atlantic.

  Throughout 1882, Constance could only wait patiently in London for Oscar to return. She must have been in a flurry of anxiety in July 1882 when reports filtered back to the London newspapers of his supposed engagement to a Miss Howe, the daughter of his friend and champion in the United States, Julia Ward Howe. Speranza wrote to Oscar immediately. `Are you in love?' she demanded. `Why don't you take a bride? Miss Howe was given to you by all the papers here.' Violet Hunt confided to her diary, a little ruefully, the rumour of an engagement to `Miss Ward Howe, with a million of money'. Oscar promptly denied the rumour.

  In December, anticipating Oscar's imminent return, Constance prompted her uncle, Charles Hemphill, to call on Lady Wilde. Constance may perhaps have felt unsettled by the rumours of Oscar's romantic attachments and engagements and wanted Uncle Charles to enquire discreetly how the land lay - and perhaps convey that she was still interested in Oscar. Uncle Charles despatched his errand with great tact and `praised Constance immensely' to Lady Wilde who reciprocated by dropping heavy hints that she would be in favour of the match. She dutifully reported back to Oscar:

  I had nearly in mind to say I would like her for a daughter-in-law, but I did not. It was Constance told him where we lived. I thought the visit looked encouraging. He said you were quite a celebrity now.

  Oscar was in London for just three weeks after his return from New York in January 1883, before he went to Paris for three months. He called at Lancaster Gate at least once to re-establish his relationship with Constance. A month later, on 28 February, Constance and Otho were at Speranza's, whose eccentricities Otho described to his fiancee, Nellie Hutchinson:

  I think she would kill you with laughing. I came away not quite certain whether I liked her or not. In appearance she is an enormous woman with a face like the face of an eagle and she talks like a book . . . what a talk we all had afterwards about the Irish though Lady Wilde would speak of little else than her son Oscar, whom she calls As-car.

  After civilising America, Oscar had set his sights on conquering Paris. He arrived there towards the end of January, determined to use the money he had earned in America to keep him while he finished The Duchess of Padua. Oscar lived the writer's life in Paris, taking rooms in the Hotel Voltaire, in the city's literary quarter. He turned down an invitation to visit his mothe
r's friend Clarisse Moore in Rome. `At present I am deep in literary work and cannot stir from my little rooms over the Seine till I have finished two plays,' he wrote:

  This sounds ambitious, but we live in an age of inordinate personal ambition and I am determined that the world shall understand me, so I will now, along with my art work, devote to the drama a great deal of my time.

  Oscar succeeded in finishing the play and had enough time to spare to look about him and crash the Parisian literary scene. He sent copies of his Poems to several well-known writers and arbiters of literary taste, accompanied by charming notes begging them to accept `mes premieres fleurs de poesies'. The diarist Edmond de Goncourt was among those to receive a copy. The two men met a few days later and de Goncourt recorded in his journal how Oscar had mounted an astonishing attack on Swinburne for deliberately posing as a sodomite and a pederast, when he was, in fact, no such thing. When de Goncourt met Oscar at a dinner a few days later, he described him scathingly as `cet individu an sexe douteux, an langage de cabotin, aux recits blagueurs' - `this individual of doubtful sex, with the language of a third-rate actor, full of tall stories'.

  It was during this stay in Paris that Oscar first met Robert Sherard, who was to become one of his great friends and champions and would eventually write several partisan accounts of Oscar's life and times. Sherard was a greatgrandson of William Wordsworth and, like Oscar, had gone to Paris to find literary fame and fortune. He wrote poetry and dabbled, not very successfully, in journalism. But he was young, with longish blond hair -'honey-coloured', Oscar called it - and he was passionate about life and literature. Oscar was instantly attracted to him, though nothing seems to have ever come of the attraction. Sherard was a red-blooded heterosexual with a penchant for prostitutes, the younger the better. Some years later, the French writer Pierre Lout's described a night on the tiles with Sherard which culminated in a dawn breakfast of oysters and bacon with two sixteen-year-old prostitutes who had `suppurating syphilitic sores the size of walnuts'.