The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  I married without passion or the feeling that this particular woman was the only woman in the world for me. Thus I deceived her practically, if not intentionally or deliberately. And I deceived myself, in so far as her temperament was incapable of sharpening the sexual appetites which in me had hardly any edge where woman was concerned.

  Not only was Catherine North incapable of sharpening Symonds's heterosexuality, he discovered that the long-hoped for `cure' for his sexual attraction to young men failed to materialise. Instead, he `found, to his disappointment, that the tyranny of the male genital organs on his fancy increased'.

  We will probably never know whether or not Symonds passed on to Oscar his experience of marriage as a possible `cure' for his attraction to young men. Although the two corresponded, most of their letters have been lost. And, even if Symonds had obliquely hinted that marriage offered no cure and little respite from the relentless, compulsive obsession for sex with men, it is doubtful that Oscar would have listened. He was determined to marry Constance. A rumour persists that Oscar visited a doctor before he married. Some have speculated that he wanted to make sure that he was completely cured of the syphilis he was supposed to have contracted from a prostitute at Oxford. There is no evidence that Oscar ever contracted syphilis - at Oxford or elsewhere. But it is possible that this visit to a doctor may have had more to do with Oscar's concerns over his sexual attraction to men and how he might overcome them within marriage to Constance.

  Although Oscar was well aware of his attraction to handsome young men, equally he had convinced himself that he could, should and must marry. He had always intended to marry, to do what his mother and what society expected of him, but there were also other obvious - and less obvious - advantages to marriage. Not least, marriage would put an end to the unceasing speculation and sniping about his sexual orientation. `Bachelors are not fashionable any more,' observes Lord Caversham in An Ideal Husband. `They are a damaged lot. Too much is known about them.'

  By marrying, Oscar would be able to draw a line under the uncertainties of the past. He would no longer be the butt of Punch's heavy-handed caricatures of him as poetic, effeminate and languid, with an unhealthy interest in blue china and young men. Marriage provided status and stability - emotional as much as financial - in a jealous, carping and uncertain world. And he was confident that the nuptial couch would provide an appropriate, acceptable and safe outlet for his vigorous sexual energies. Oscar disliked using prostitutes, and there was the constant and recurring dread of contracting a venereal disease - gonorrhoea or, even worse, syphilis. Oscar may have been aware that Frank Miles was suffering from advanced syphilis. The prospect of contracting so fell a disease filled him with terror and may have been an additional impetus to send him rushing towards the bacteriological sanctity and safety of marriage. Not only had Oscar convinced himself that he loved Constance, but he had also told himself that he desired her. She was the one woman who had awoken a strong sexual sense in him.

  On 29 May 1884, six months and four days after he had proposed in the drawing room at Ely Place, the impatient lovers, Oscar and Constance, were married by special licence at St James's Church in Paddington. Oscar had taken control of the ceremony, designing his bride's wedding dress and choreographing every last detail. Although it was supposedly a private family wedding, Oscar must have been pleased by the throng of curious onlookers who came to see the wedding of the year. `There is only this much to be recorded about it,' reported Edmund Yates in the World:

  The bride, accompanied by her six pretty bridesmaids, looked charming; that Oscar bore himself with calm dignity; and that all most intimately concerned in the affair seemed thoroughly pleased. A happy little group of intimes saw them off at Charing Cross.

  Not everybody was so `thoroughly pleased' by the wedding. Robert Sherard thought it too staged, too showy - more of a publicity stunt than the joining together of two lives. `No woman,' he observed astutely:

  who was not blindly convinced of the superiority of her bridegroom's taste would have consented to such a masquerade. It may have occurred to some of the onlookers that a union so initiated could not contain the elements of happiness. Where the woman is entirely hypnotised and subjugated her marriage is not often a happy one for her.

  It was all too true. Constance was a woman entirely hypnotised, entirely subjugated by her love for Oscar. She entered the marriage grateful for love and blinded by love. Her marriage, like her life, was doomed to unhappiness.

  Against nature

  `The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, ifshe is pretty, and to someone else, ifshe is plain.'

  On honeymoon in Paris, Oscar wrote a letter to a friend in New York which somehow found its way into the pages of the New York Times. In what the newspaper called `a silly and thoroughly characteristic letter', Oscar declared that `he has not been disappointed in married life'. Oscar almost certainly wrote the letter within a day or two of his wedding night with Constance, which makes the real meaning of his letter plain. What Oscar really meant by `married life' was what Marie Stopes was later to call `married love', or sex in marriage. In the interval between his marriage ceremony and writing to his friend in New York, the only aspect of married life that Oscar had had time to experience was its sexual delights. His letter was evidently an epistolary sigh of relief and betrayed the very real fears he had had that the sexual side of marriage might prove to be in every sense an anti-climax. - - - - -- - - - - - - -- - -- - -

  Fortunately, the wedding night sex had worked out well, as a delighted Oscar told Robert Sherard the morning after the night before. Sherard had called to congratulate the newly-weds at the Hotel Wagram on the Rue de Rivoli, where Mr and Mrs Wilde had a suite of rooms on the third floor overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. Sherard had been sceptical about the marriage from the outset, believing Oscar incapable of making any woman happy. Oscar suggested a walk and, leaving Constance behind in the hotel, they strolled towards the Marche St Honore where, Sherard recalled, Oscar `stopped and rifled a flower stall of its loveliest blossoms and sent them, with a word of love on his card, to the bride whom he had quitted but a moment before'. What Sherard left out of his published account of this walk was how, as they stood in front of the flower stall, Oscar could not wait to expatiate on the joys of his wedding night sex with Constance and began: `It's so wonderful when a young virgin ...' An embarrassed Sherard hurriedly interrupted. `No, Oscar,' he said. `You mustn't talk about that to me. (a, c'est sacre.'

  Robert Sherard had not always been so easily embarrassed by Oscar's sexual talk. After all, Oscar had told him of his visit to a prostitute in Paris the year before and on another occasion they had had a heated discussion about the language of sex, specifically about the use of the word `have' in relation to sexual congress between a man and a woman. `I pointed out to the lord of language,' Sherard recalled:

  that I didn't understand the word `have' as a description of the sexual act. I said that neither the man nor the woman, though temporarily united, remained other than separate and distinct - each desperately alone, mentally and physically, and that before as well as after the contact it was solus cum Bola. He didn't agree with me at all. He said that the word `have' was a perfect description of the possession that the man took of the woman in the sexual act and discoursed about it.

  That Oscar felt he had to tell, if not the world, then at least Robert Sherard and his friend in America that the sexual side of his marriage had been an unqualified success betrays a fundamental uncertainty about his sexuality. His public parade of his sexual prowess seems to be a case of protesting too much, of staking a claim to vigorous and normal heterosexuality, rather than an expression of his joy in his spiritual and physical union with Constance. The reality of Oscar's wedding night may have been closer to the experience of John Addington Symonds who wrote to his sister the morning after his wedding night with his bride, Catherine:

  Such a great event as yesterday, however long anticipated, well prepar
ed for, and leading to however thoroughly foreknown a termination, always at last falls suddenly upon one. I felt all through the day that I was acting a part, and this helped me. When men have to do things, there rises up between their self and the deed a screen of unreality. So action is always less essential than contemplation. But after it is done, a sense of inadequacy and incompleteness, proceeding from the contrast between the deed meditated and the deed accomplished, springs up.

  Symonds was honest enough to admit to himself and to those close to him that his wedding night sex - the `foreknown termination' - had been a disappointment, that he felt he had been acting a part, going through the nuptial motions.

  Then there was the way Oscar had dwelt on Constance's virginity. Oscar had certainly `had' - to use his preferred word - Constance on their wedding night, but his particular emphasis on her virginity suggests that the locus of his sexual achievement lay not so much in `the possession that the man took of the woman' but rather in her deflowering. At a breakfast party where the novelist Vernon Lee was present, Oscar obliquely referred to his deflowering of Constance when he said he loved her because she was `annulee et tendre', `tender and surrendered'. This posed a new problem. If Constance had been the incarnation of his Madonna Mia, his Virgin Mary, his Artemis, goddess of chastity, before their marriage, what did she become after her ritualistic deflowering? Once deflowered, no longer chaste, no longer `a young virgin': exactly where did her attraction for Oscar lie? It was a paradox, and perhaps one that the greatest master of paradox failed to fully grasp.

  If Oscar was protesting too much about the delights of the nuptial couch, Constance was predictably reticent. She wrote to Otho five days after the wedding. `Of course,' she told Otho, `I need not tell you that I am very happy, enjoying my liberty enormously.' `Liberty'. It was a curious word to use. Clearly Constance saw her marriage as a liberation from the correctitude of Aunt Emily and Lancaster Gate, a correctitude that could only become more stifling after the death of Grandpapa Lloyd.

  It was very much a social and cultural honeymoon. It may have been business as usual for Oscar, but for Constance it presaged the delights of married life with a fashionable young poet and man of letters. There were trips to the Salon, a trip to the theatre to see Sarah Bernhardt in Macbeth -'the most splendid acting I ever saw', Constance told Otho, `Sarah of course superb, she simply stormed the part' - and dinners to meet Oscar's Parisian friends and acquaintances like `young Mr Sherard' who has `a romantic story and a romantic face' and `the young sculptor Donoghue whom I have seen several times, very handsome Roman face but with Irish blue eyes'. Like Oscar, Constance could appreciate a handsome face. She was flushed with the success of it all. Oscar's friends liked her. Robert Sherard gallantly told her how jealous he was of Oscar, and how he wanted to run him through with his swordstick. Constance's dress caused `a sensation', and Henrietta Reubell, an American spinster who held a salon -'frightful, fair, white-faced and forty', as Constance described her - wanted her dressmaker to copy it. Constance closed her long, happy letter to Otho: `Oscar is out,' she wrote, `so I can give you no message from him.' It was the first of many such absences to come in her married life.

  It could never be said that Oscar did not start married life as he meant to go on. Within days of their arrival in Paris, Oscar was out slumming in the bars and brothels of Paris with Robert Sherard and one or two others, leaving Constance to her own devices. They visited what Sherard described as the haunts of the lowest criminals and poorest outcasts of the city, `the show-places of the Paris Inferno - Pere Lunette's, and the Chateau Rouge, - which everybody who wishes to know the depths of darkness which exist in the City of Light goes to see'. At the Chateau Rouge, they spent time fraternising with the thieves, with `the saddest daughters of joy' and the professional beggars who delightedly showed their visitors the tricks by which they feigned their infirmities. Oscar was delighted: `The criminal classes have always had a wonderful attraction for me,' he exclaimed. Sherard recalled how, `as a bonnebouche', the landlord of the Chateau Rouge offered to show them the celebrated `Salle des Morts' upstairs where the flotsam and jetsam of Paris slept:

  Stretched out in every posture of pain and discomfort, many in the stupor of drink, many displaying foul sores, maimed limbs, or the stigmata of disease, all in filthy and malodorous rags, the sleepers of the Room of the Dead, with their white faces, immobile and sightless, showed indeed like corpses.

  Sherard reported that Oscar was horror-struck, his face like one who had looked upon Medusa. But he was later to utilise this sense of horror in his works, in the poem `The Harlot's House', in passages in The Picture of Dorian Gray and, most memorably, in Teleny.

  The `Salle des Morts' was, according to Sherard, `the favourite spectacle of those seeking unhealthy emotions'. And Oscar was certainly in the market for unhealthy emotions. Barely a week after the arrival of the newly-weds in Paris, something happened which heralded the end of the marriage, not that either Oscar or Constance realised its cataclysmic significance at the time. It was a comparatively small thing: Oscar's discovery of a slim volume written in French and published just a fortnight before. The book was A Rebours, translatable as Against Nature or Against the Grain. Its author was an unassuming civil servant called Joris-Karl Huysmans.

  The novel tells the story of Duc jean des Esseintes, a frail, unhappy, nervy young man of thirty, the last in the line of an ancient and distinguished family. Des Esseintes is a neurasthenic, a now-forgotten Victorian word for a person suffering from nervous exhaustion, often believed to be brought about by sexual or masturbatory excess. Des Esseintes is prematurely tired of life and tired of the world and decides to retreat into dreamlike seclusion in a country house where, surrounded by every luxury and an eclectic collection of rare and beautiful jewels, decadent Latin literature and hothouse flowers, he sets out on a voyage of discovery. His quest is to probe, to burrow into the darkest recesses of his soul to try to find the meaning of life. He seeks to cure the malady of the soul through the medium of his senses with hallucinogenic results. As his exploration of the darker recesses of his soul progresses, Des Esseintes becomes increasingly hysterical and increasingly physically weak. Finally, he can take no more and his doctor orders a return to reality and normality. As the book draws to its close, Des Esseintes realises, almost too late, that the only cure, the only salvation for his soul's malady is the pity and the love of God. The novel ends abruptly as this beam of redemptive light shines upon him.

  Late in May in Paris, A Rebours became a literary sensation, taken up, talked about and argued about over and over again. Whistler praised it, the poet and playwright Arthur Symons called it `the breviary of decadence', and Paul Valery called it his `Bible and bedside book'. Oscar acquired a copy of the book shortly after he arrived in Paris with Constance. Perhaps he started to read it when the weather took a turn for the worse six days after their arrival, when, as Constance told Otho, `a sudden storm of wind and rain broke over us in the afternoon'. The effect of the book upon Oscar was equally sudden and even more dramatic. He later admitted in the witness box to an inquisitive jury at the Old Bailey that the unnamed `yellow book' lent to Dorian by Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray was based on A Rebours. In reply to a letter written by Mr E.W. Pratt of Lower Clapton, North London, enquiring where he could buy a copy of Dorian's yellow book, Oscar wrote:

  `Dear Sir, The book in Dorian Gray is one of the many books I have never written, but it is partly suggested by Huysmans's A Rebours, which you will get at any French bookseller's. It is a fantastic variation on Huysmans's overrealistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age.

  Oscar's description of the effect of reading A Rebours on Dorian Gray is almost certainly autobiographical. Dorian, `taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves':

  After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the del
icate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

  What compelled Oscar's attention about A Rebours was its account of `the sins of the world'. Beneath the jewelled style of Huysmans's writing and the fantastical, grotesque set pieces and flights of imaginative fancy lay a strong homoerotic subtext. The novel tells the story of Des Esseintes's erotic journey towards sexual realisation. Des Esseintes comes from degenerate aristocratic stock whose men, as the decades and centuries have passed, have become `progressively less manly'. He attends ajesuit school and then, like most young men of his class and wealth, gives himself up to dissipation:

  In the days when he had belonged to a set of young men-about-town, he had gone to those unconventional supper parties where drunken women loosen their dresses and beat the table with their heads; he had hung around stage doors, had bedded with singers and actresses, had endured, over and above the innate stupidity of the sex, the hysterical vanity common to women of the theatre. Then he had kept mistresses already famed for their depravity .. . and finally, weary to the point of satiety of these hackneyed luxuries, these commonplace caresses, he had sought satisfaction in the gutter, hoping that the contrast would revive his exhausted desires and imagining that the fascinating filthiness of the poor would stimulate his flagging senses.

  Bored, disgusted, unsatisfied and increasingly impotent, Des Esseintes shuts himself away, making occasional erotic forays. One day while walking in the Rue de Rivoli - where Oscar and Constance's honeymoon hotel was located, and where he almost certainly read Huysmans's novel - Des Esseintes encounters `a young scamp of sixteen or so, a peaky-faced, sharp-eyed child, as attractive in his way as any girl'. Des Esseintes takes him to a brothel and offers to pay for the boy to have sex with a prostitute of his choice and is appalled and angry when the Madame of the brothel casually assumes that he is sexually interested in the boy.