by Neil McKenna
Oscar always considered himself first and foremost a poet. Although he went on to be a dramatist, the author of at least one novel and the writer of many stories, he invariably described himself as a poet. Poetry was, according to Oscar, the `highest form of literature', but one which `brings no wealth to the singer'. Poetry was the medium through which Oscar expressed his most powerful and profound thoughts and emotions, and most of his poems are intensely personal and intensely autobiographical.
In the autumn of 1887, Oscar wrote a poem, `Un Amant de Nos Jours', which seemed to encapsulate and express his complex feelings about his marriage and the future direction of his sexuality. Writing a poem, let alone publishing it in the Court and Society Review, was in itself unusual. Oscar wrote poems only infrequently now. He was frantically busy, `too busy to lecture', he said. By 1887 he had found the literary success that had eluded him for so long, in that year alone publishing two stories, The Canterville Ghost and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, writing numerous reviews and taking on the editorship of a women's magazine, the Lady's World, a title which Oscar thought possessed `a certain taint of vulgarity about it' and which he quickly changed to the Woman's World.
The first half of `Un Amant de Nos Jours', or `A Lover of Our Time', is a lament and opens with a stark confession of sin:
The sin of which Oscar speaks is almost certainly a reference to his marriage. The first line of the poem is a confession of guilt over his decision to marry Constance and its disastrous consequences which he could not have foreseen at the time of his engagement. `I did not understand,' he writes plaintively of his decision to marry. How could Oscar possibly have understood that the love he felt for Constance at the time he proposed to her was not in fact love, but something akin to love? Fondness, affection, attraction, tenderness. But not love. So Summer has turned to Winter, and now both their lives and their love are diminished, `withered' and `meagre', lying `prisoned' in a cave, buried `in so deep a grave'.
At one level the poem is a poignant expression of regret and sadness at the unhappiness Oscar has unwittingly brought down on Constance. At another level, it is a powerful lament for the diminishment, the repudiation, the burying, the making invisible of his sexual feelings for men `save where some ebbing desultory wave', or the occasional love affair, comes to pass. When he wrote the poem, Oscar and Constance had stopped having sex completely. Long after they were both dead, Constance's brother, Otho, told Arthur Ransome, who was writing a biography of Oscar, that there had been `a virtual divorce' between Oscar and Constance in 1886, by which he meant that sexual relations between them had ceased. The Wildes' second son, Vyvyan, was born early in November 1886 - the exact date remains a mystery as neither parent seems to have been able to remember it when the time came to register Vyvyan's birth.
It has been suggested that the reason for this abrupt cessation of sex between Oscar and Constance was the recrudescence of the syphilis which Oscar is supposed to have contracted at Oxford. But there is no evidence that Oscar ever contracted syphilis, at Oxford or elsewhere; no evidence that he was ever treated for the disease; and no evidence that there was any recrudescence of the disease. In the majority of cases of syphilis, the tertiary stage of the disease is reached within ten years when it begins to affect the internal organs, especially the brain. Oscar's friend, Frank Miles, had to be taken to a lunatic asylum in 1887 when his brain became disordered, and he died there from the effects of advanced syphilis five years later. If Oscar had contracted syphilis at Oxford, there must surely, nearly a decade later, have been some signs of the disease. There were none. Oscar seemed to be enjoying robust good health, apart from a tendency to corpulence, the consequence of over-indulgence in food and wine.
As they had done before the birth of Cyril, Oscar and Constance would naturally have refrained from sex at some point during her pregnancy. But after Vyvyan's birth in November 1886 they never resumed sexual relations. There are a number of possible explanations. Constance had two babies to look after: she would have been exhausted and she may herself not have wished to resume sex, especially if there was any risk of a third pregnancy so soon after Cyril and Vyvyan. Two pregnancies in just over two years was draining, physically, emotionally and financially - and both Constance and Oscar would have been aware that complications during childbirth were one of the most common causes of death for women of childbearing age. The most common form of birth control during the nineteenth century was abstinence. It would have been quite unexceptional for a young married couple to practise abstinence - for a while at least - in order to avoid an unwelcome pregnancy. By common consent, two to three years was regarded as the ideal interval between pregnancies. What may for Constance have begun as a period of abstinence became for Oscar a welcome relief from the burden of conjugalities. And even though Constance may have found it strange that they did not resume their sex life, there was little she could do. Oscar would not necessarily have had to explain why he no longer wished to have sex if he did not care to; it was not a subject for discussion between husbands and wives. Sex happened, or it did not. Women of the middle classes were not supposed to have sexual desire, let alone talk about sex. Constance may have shared her anxieties with her closest women friends, or she may have broached the subject with her doctor. It is more likely that she remained silent, wondering why her husband no longer wished to make love to her.
It is unlikely that Oscar followed the example of his friend John Addington Symonds, who one fine spring day in 1869 went for a long walk in `heavenly hills' outside Bristol with his wife, Catherine. Symonds's purpose was to negotiate an end to the sexual side of their marriage. He told his wife how he had fallen in love with a boy called Norman; how his pent-up sexual frustration was making him ill; and how he would be a better husband and better companion to her once the problem of sex had been resolved. Remarkably, Catherine acceded gracefully. She disliked sex and did not want to have any more children. She was a pragmatist. She agreed to a celibate marriage, having extracted a promise from Symonds that he would indulge in `nothing base' with Norman, by which she meant anal sex. But Constance was not Catherine. She was a passionate idealist. It is unlikely that she would have agreed to a celibate marriage with Oscar on the grounds that he was in love with a boy.
If the first half of `Un Amant de Nos Jours' is a lament about the death of the sexual side of his marriage to Constance and the harrowing of his sexual desire for other men, the second half is a triumphant affirmation of homoerotic desire, a brash trumpet blast signalling the coming of the dawn after the long darkness of night:
The `new-found Lord' dressed in `dyed garments from the South' is a Christlike figure, a new Lord of love whose corporeal and spiritual kiss at once sanctions and sanctifies sex between men. There must be no more downcast gazes among men who love men, they must look up and wonder, `weep and worship', at the coming of this new Lord. More daringly, the love object of this new Lord is clearly a youth, a virginal youth. Oscar employs some highly sexualised imagery to convey the virginity of the youth: the `roses' of his mouth are as `yet unravished'. Just as the locus of Oscar's sexual interest in Constance lay in her virginity, and in robbing her of that virginity, so his sexual interest in men turned increasingly towards younger men, youths, boys, especially those without any sexual experience of men, male virgins whom he could deflower. `Un Amant de Nos Jours' charts the dramatic change that came over Oscar's perception of his sexuality in less than two years - from the young husband and father tentatively exploring his repressed sexuality after the disappointment of marriage, struggling against fear and remorse at his sexual desires and experiences, to the champion not just of the legitimacy - but more importantly, the superiority - of sex between men and boys.
It is perhaps hard to comprehend the importance of poetry to men who loved men at the end of the nineteenth century. Poetry was much, much more than a form of emotional and erotic self-expression. It was the medium in which the erotic, the spiritual and political collided and coalesced.
Homoerotic poetry was the lingua franca of many men who loved men. They read it, they wrote it, they talked about it and wrote about it; and they used poetry as a badge of, sometimes as a camouflage for, their sexual desires. And those who constituted themselves, or were constituted, the `leaders of Hellas', as George Ives termed them, those who dedicated their lives to gaining social and political acceptance for men who loved men - Walt Whitman, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde - were all poets who sought to express their sexuality through the medium of their poetry.
Poetry was not just an invocation of homoerotic desire, but also an attempt to define and classify, to order that desire. Like the painter Simeon Solomon's mystic treatise on Uranian love, poetry became a vision of love, a vision of a world where love between men and youths was somehow raised up from its furtive, criminal, despicable status as the crimen tantum horrihile non inter Christianos nominandum, to a finer, higher plain, to a Higher Philosophy, as Plato had termed love between men and youths in the Symposium. When Oscar inscribed a copy of his collection of essays, Intentions, for Lord Alfred Douglas, he wrote 'Bosie, from his friend the author ... In memory of the Higher Philosophy'.
Archetypes of love and lovers were invoked in poetry, usually but not exclusively from classical Greece. Individually and collectively, the body of homoerotic poetry created a taxonomy of homoerotic desire which centred on the classical model of Greek paiderastia and celebrated the spiritual and sexual love of an older man for a youth. One of the most distinctive qualities of homoerotic poetry was its embodiment of the yearning quality of homoerotic desire, the eternal striving after love with a youth. Not for nothing was love between men called l'amour de l'impossible, the love of the impossible - impossible not only because it was dangerous and illegal, concealed and furtive, but more importantly because of its fleeting, ephemeral nature. Youth was finite. Its very transitoriness made it more rare, more precious, more difficult to capture. And once captured, what then? Uranian love gloried in the thrill of the chase. Once captured, once `had', to use Oscar's phrase, the glorious chase, the moment of capture, of sexual surrender, could never be replicated. The Uranian lover's erotic doom was an endless cycle, an unrelenting grailquest of desire and satiation which could never result in lasting peace and fulfilment.
Oscar's most important love affairs - and many less important ones - were with young poets. There was Rennell Rodd, with whom he had fallen in love before he married Constance. And there was Richard Gallienne, the first poet Oscar `loved' after his marriage. Oscar described Gallienne as the incarnation of the Angel Gabriel in Rossetti's painting `The Annunciation'. Swinburne, rather more clear-sightedly, described him as `Shelley with a chin', a reference to Gallienne's jutting chin, his most prominent feature. Gallienne's father had taken his seventeen-year-old son to hear Oscar lecture on `Personal Impressions of America' in Birkenhead in 1883. Young Richard was enraptured by Wilde and determined to follow in his poetic and literary footsteps. In the spring of 1887, Richard Le Gallienne (by now he had added `Le' to his name, presumably to make it more euphonic, more individual and more poetic) sent Oscar his first, privately printed volume of poems, My Ladies' Sonnets, with a pretty letter of avowal.
In his reply, Oscar called Le Gallienne's book `charming ... full of much that is dainty and delicate in verse'. `The whole book,' wrote Oscar, `is evidently the work of one who is an artist in poetry.' Oscar's eye was caught by Le Gallienne's `Sonnet to a Young Actor'; sonnets to men, especially to young men, resonated particularly with him: `I can recognise a whole life in the choice of an adjective,' he told Le Gallienne, extending an invitation to meet. `When you come to London pray let me have the pleasure of knowing you personally.'
Six months later, Le Gallienne was in London, and he met Oscar for the first time on 6 June. He was an intense young man who had assumed all the visible trappings of the poet and, in imitation of the Oscar of the first period, wore his hair long, `fanning out', Oscar said, `into a wonderful halo'. Le Gallienne found Oscar delightful, `a most charming fellow'. He turned down an invitation for the following afternoon from the publisher John Lane, saying he had `an opportunity to spend it with Oscar Wilde ... an opportunity not to be missed'. This afternoon was perhaps the summer day referred to in Le Gallienne's poem `With Oscar Wilde: A Summer Day In June '88' which opened with the suggestive lines: `With Oscar Wilde, a summer day/ Passed like a yearning kiss away'. The yearning kiss in question was literal as well as literary. Something more corporeal than poetry had happened that summer afternoon between Oscar and the twenty-two-year-old Le Gallienne. That evening, Oscar inscribed a copy of his Poems: `To Richard Le Gallienne, poet and lover, from Oscar Wilde. A summer day in June '88.' Le Gallienne responded by sending Oscar a copy of his poem, adding `This copy of verse I have made for my friend Oscar Wilde, as a love-token, and in secret memory of a summer day in June '88.' Poet, lover, love-token, summer afternoons and secret memories were the stuff of illicit love affairs. There can be no doubt that Oscar seduced Richard Le Gallienne that summer afternoon; and no doubt that Richard Le Gallienne was ready and willing to be seduced. Le Gallienne was an ambitious and not especially talented poet and seems to have made a point of forming romantic and sexual friendships with older, more established poets and men of letters. The same month he met and had sex with Oscar, Le Gallienne was also to be found staying with the journalist and poet Gleeson White and his wife in Christchurch, Hampshire, a town which was later to house a small but important colony of Uranian poets and writers.
Oscar's effect on Richard Le Gallienne - and on young men generally - was mesmerising. Le Gallienne wrote to John Lane immediately after their short love affair, in execrable rhyming prose. He was ecstatic:
Oscar Wilde, sweet `Fancy's child', how can I write of him tonight? of all his dear delightful ways thro' three summer nights and days; suffice it I have never yet more fascinating fellow met, and 0! how sweet he was to me is only known to Richard Le G.
Oscar was fascinating, dazzling, powerful. By his sheer brilliance, force of personality, charm and wit, he could dazzle all who met him. Even though Le Gallienne returned to the less than poetic environs of Birkenhead, he and Oscar continued to correspond, conducting a poetic and postal love affair. `Bother space and time!' Oscar wrote to him. `They spoil life by allowing such a thing as distance.' `Yea! Dear Poet,' Le Gallienne wrote in a breathlessly ardent reply. `The thought that you sometimes recall me is sweet as a kiss and it is blessed to know that but a little while and I shall be with you once more ... I shall have news to tell you in which I think you will rejoice with your truelover.' Le Gallienne eventually married and repudiated his short and passionate love affair with Oscar, going so far as to strongly warn Edward Shelley, one of Oscar's lovers, against getting involved with him.
Andre Raffalovich was another poet-friend of Oscar's. He was the youngest son of a wealthy Russian Jewish family and had been brought up in Paris by a remarkable and formidable Scottish governess, Miss Gribbell, who remained with Raffalovich for nearly seventy years, until her death in 1930 at the age of eighty-nine. Raffalovich's first volume of poetry, Tuberose and Meadon'szveet, had been published in 1885 and reviewed by Oscar in the Pall Mall Gazette. Oscar had scented the unmistakable homoerotic undertones of the poems: `To say of these poems that they are unhealthy and bring with them the heavy odours of the hothouse is to point out neither their defect nor their merit, but their quality merely.' Raffalovich's volume has the distinction of including an early, if not the first, instance of the use of the word `shame' to denote spiritual and sexual love between men. The word occurs in the poem `Piers Gaveston', about the murdered lover of Edward II:
Later, Bosie was to take the concept of shame and turn it on its head. He wrote a provocative homoerotic sonnet - `In Praise of Shame' - which proclaimed `Of all sweet passions Shame is loveliest.' Bosie's sonnet was to became famous and notorious when Oscar was cross-examined in court on the precise meaning of the word shame. Oscar also used shame
as a synonym, a codeword to denote sexual passion between men.
Oscar had become friendly with Raffalovich during 1886. By the end of the year he was referring affectionately in letters to `Little Andre'. At the beginning, Oscar was attracted to the twenty-two-year-old Raffalovich. `You could give me a new thrill,' Oscar told him. `You have the right measure of romance and cynicism.' Whether anything came of his flirtation with Raffalovich is not known for certain. They were certainly intimate for three or four years, often talking about sex or what Raffalovich termed `the more dangerous affections'.
Then there was a rupture in their friendship which has never been satisfactorily explained and which may have been the consequence of a lovers' falling out. According to Raffalovich, this happened after an innocent remark by Constance. `Oscar says he likes you so much,' she told Raffalovich in 1889. `He says you have such nice improper talks together.' Raffalovich was affronted and appalled. `Never again did I speak with him without witnesses.' Constance's comment hardly seems a valid reason for so sudden and violent a split. Another version has it that Oscar and a group of friends turned up at Raffalovich's Mayfair house for lunch. When the butler answered the door, Oscar is supposed to have said `We'd like a table for six, please.' Raffalovich, who was standing in the hallway and heard everything, was deeply insulted.
Whatever the cause of their falling out, the animosity between Oscar and Raffalovich was intense. Oscar used to say of Raffalovich that `he came to London with the intention of opening a salon, and he has succeeded in opening a saloon' - a quip which he redeployed to good effect in The Picture of Dorian Gray. After the rupture, Oscar decided that Raffalovich was ugly - like `a foetus in a bottle', he said. He used to invoke Raffalovich's name as a symbol of extreme ugliness, and `As ugly as Raffalovich' became one of his oftrepeated comments. Towards the end of his life, when Raffalovich recorded his memories of Oscar, he confided to a friend that it was an account of `a dislike, not of a friendship'.