The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Raffalovich, like many others, would have his revenge on Oscar.

  -,Eolian harps

  `This passion for beauty is merely the intensified desire for life.'

  From now on Oscar's lovers appeared and disappeared with dizzying and everaccelerating speed. There were any number of young men who, if not exactly poets, were decidedly poetic, flitting in and out of Oscar's life. Robbie Ross was still very much a favourite of Oscar's. He had gone up to King's College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1888 with a letter of avuncular advice from Oscar telling him to get in touch with Oscar Browning, a fellow of King's: `You will find him everything that is kind and helpful,' he wrote. Oscar had just been to Stratford for the unveiling of his old friend Lord Ronald Gower's statue of Shakespeare. `My reception,' he told Robbie, in a decidedly camp aside, `was semi-royal, and the volunteers played God Save the Queen in my honour.'

  Robbie's career at Cambridge came to an abrupt end one evening early in March 1889, when he was violently seized by a gang of half-a-dozen King's undergraduates and unceremoniously ducked in the college fountain. His assailants included one of the sons of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Fred Benson, who was destined to play a minor role in the saga of Oscar and Bosie. Robbie had not been popular with his fellow undergraduates. Unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries, he was not a product of one of the great public schools, particularly Eton, which enjoyed very close links with King's, and his contemporaries found his cosmopolitan sophistication and his literary aspirations bewildering. Robbie had already been proposed for membership of the Savile Club in London and boasted several literary friendships, most notably with Oscar.

  Robbie was an outsider, socially - and more importantly - sexually. Although every other undergraduate at King's who had been to a public school must have known about Greek love, if not from direct personal experience, at least from close observation, Robbie was different. He flaunted his sexual difference and sophistication. He bragged about his friendship with Oscar and affected an aggravating air of superiority. The reasons for Robbie's ducking are complex and have never been fully explained. But he had put people's backs up by attacking old Etonians and pitching himself headlong into the uncharted and treacherous waters of college politics. There was strong speculation that Oscar Browning had tacitly sanctioned Robbie's ducking, an accusation Browning vigorously denied. And Arthur Tilley, a junior lecturer at King's and older brother of John Tilley, one of the six conspirators, was also supposed to have known about and approved of the ducking in advance. But there may have been another, more sinister, reason for the attack. An anonymous margin note in the British Library's copy of the Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas says that the reason Robbie was ducked `was for fractions inclining to pederasty'. In other words, Robbie had had a sexual liaison at Cambridge and had been-found-out and punished.

  The effect of the ducking was catastrophic. Robbie was suddenly taken ill with what Oscar Browning called `a violent brain attack, the result of the outrage preying on his mind'. Robbie had a nervous breakdown, and the college authorities feared that he might even commit suicide. His brother Alec was summoned to take him back to his mother's house in Onslow Square, where he made a slow and painful recovery. Browning, determined to live up to Oscar's encomium of being `everything that is kind and helpful', was one of Robbie's first visitors after he had recovered and promptly took him to Windsor to stay in his mother's house, where he was introduced to Browning's sister, Mina, her husband, the Reverend Biscoe Wortham, and their two sons, Philip and Oswald. Robbie quickly became firm friends with the Wortham family. It was a fateful friendship, and one that would have terrible repercussions just four years later.

  Immediately after spending this fateful weekend at Windsor, Robbie and Browning proceeded to the Isle of Wight where they were to rendezvous with one of Browning's working-class waifs and strays, Matthew Oates, who Robbie dubbed the `fair sailor'. Oates and Robbie had sex together, and Robbie was smitten, describing him as `very beautiful and very charming'.

  Robbie's illness and recuperation meant that he could spend more time in London with Oscar. He did return briefly to Cambridge in the summer term but contracted measles and was again seriously ill for a time. His first year at Cambridge had been an unmitigated disaster, a disaster which became a catastrophe when Robbie, in a fit of extraordinary courage or extraordinary stupidity, decided to tell his family about his sexual orientation. His mother was deeply distressed, his sister Lizzie deeply hostile. Only his brother Alec took Robbie's part. The upshot of it all was that Robbie would not be returning to Cambridge, and Alec cast around to find him work. In the meantime Robbie became an integral part of the circle of young men who buzzed around Oscar.

  Oscar was becoming increasingly confident and increasingly blase about his sexuality. He had gathered an entourage of attractive and fashionable young men around him, `his admiring cohort' as they were described at the time. They were sometimes referred to by Oscar, and by others less sympathetic, as his `disciples'. Andre Raffalovich called them Oscar's `sons', while Oscar himself described them as `the exquisite IEolian harps that play in the breeze of my matchless talk'. Oscar's choice of the word IEolian is significant; the IEolians along with the Dorians and the Ionians constituted the three main tribes of Greece. Oscar's IEolian young men were Greek in the sexual sense of the word. Many of them probably became lovers of Oscar, or, to put it more brutally, had sex with him once, twice or even three or four times, before they were discarded and became captive worshippers at his shrine.

  There was, for instance, Robbie's friend, Arthur Clifton, a handsome young solicitor and amateur poet. `I wish you would send me two or three of your poems,' Oscar wrote. `You have certainly a delicate ear for music.' Oscar's infatuation with Clifton was short-lived, but their friendship survived. He became a valued friend of the family. Constance was particularly fond of him, and he was of great service to both Oscar and Constance after the tragedy.

  In the course of their marriage, Oscar introduced many of his lovers to Constance. It was a strange thing to do, almost as if he sought her approval, as if he wanted to somehow synthesise his lovers into his life at Tite Street with Constance and the children. Several of them, notably Robbie Ross, Arthur Clifton and Graham Robertson, were accepted as family friends. Robbie also became Constance's especial and devoted friend. She had need of friends. She saw less and less of Oscar now. His editorship of the Woman's World took up some of his time, though he had very quickly grown bored with his role and hardly bothered to turn up at the office, preferring to work from Tite Street and leave all the administrative details to his able assistant, Arthur Fish.

  Oscar was fond of young actors. He wrote an adulatory letter to Henry Dixey, a twenty-six-year-old American dancer and actor, who had taken the title role in a musical play called Adonis, which Oscar went to see. `My dear Adonis,' Oscar wrote. `I wish you were a wave of the sea, that you might be always dancing. Every movement and gesture that you make is instinct with natural beauty, and expressive of the loveliness of mere life. Some afternoon I will come and sit with you, if you let me, while you are dining.' To Roland Atwood, another young actor of whom he was enamoured, Oscar sent a gift of a necktie: `I send you your necktie, in which I know you will look Greek and gracious. I don't think it is too dark for you.' Oscar signed himself `Affectionately yours' and added a romantic postscript: `Has Gerald Gurney forgiven me yet for talking to no one but you that afternoon? I suppose not. But who else was there for me to talk to?'

  Oscar met many of his `exquisite IEolian harps' after they had written letters of avowal to him. Judging from the handful that have survived, Oscar's replies were invariably graceful: teasingly playful, whimsical, ever so slightly provocative and, above all, encouraging. `What a pretty name you have! it is worthy of fiction,' Oscar replied to a letter of avowal from a young man called Aubrey Richardson. `Would you mind if I wrote a book called The Story of Aubrey Richardson? I won't but I should like to. There is music in its lo
ng syllables, and a memory of romance, and a suggestion of wonder. Names fascinate me terribly. Come and see me some Wednesday.' Such a letter, such an invitation, so beautifully written and so charmingly extended must have been hard to resist, if indeed Aubrey Richardson and the countless other writers of letters of avowal wanted to resist.

  There was the twenty-three-year-old Graham Hill, an aspiring poet who wrote to Oscar asking if he might send him some of his poems. Oscar responded immediately. `Dear Mr Hill,' he wrote. `Come and have tea on Friday at 5 o'clock if you have nothing to do. So you are a rhymer! We all are when we are young.' Hill sent Oscar his volume of poems, Under Her Window, which was dedicated to `M.L.'. Oscar was `charmed' with Hill's `little volume'. `You certainly have a light touch and a pleasant fancy,' he told him, adding, `M.L. whoever she is, should feel quite proud at such an artistic offering. Are you very much in love with M.L.? and does M.L. love you? Come and see me some day. Wednesday afternoon usually finds me in.'

  Oscar used the same combination of whimsy and charm on W. Graham Robertson, a young writer, artist and stage designer. Tall, willowy and elegant, Robertson was one of the most handsome young men in London. In a prefiguration of Lord Henry Wotton's encounter with Dorian Gray, Oscar met the twenty-year-old Robertson at the studio of a painter, a mutual friend. Their acquaintance took several months to grow into friendship and intimacy. `What do you allow your friends to call you?' asked Oscar archly, `W or Graham? I like my friends to call me Oscar.' Robertson sent Oscar some drawings, perhaps to illustrate one of his fairy stories. `I wish I could draw like you,' Oscar replied, `for I like lines better than words, and colours more than sentences.' `However,' Oscar continued:

  I console myself by trying now and then to put `The Universe' into a sonnet. Some day you must do a design for the sonnet: a young man looking into a strange crystal that mirrors all the world. Poetry should be like a crystal; it should make life more beautiful and less real. I am sorry you are going away, but your narcissus keeps you in my memory.

  As usual, Oscar's friendship with Robertson lasted longer than the sexual relationship, but Robertson was proud of having been a favoured lover of Oscar, even boasting of it in later life.

  This was not the case with Harry Melvill, a young actor with whom Oscar had a brief fling. They met in the summer of 1888, and there was a pretty exchange of letters. `What a charming time we had at Abbott's Hill,' Oscar told him. `I have not enjoyed myself so much for a long time, and I hope that we will see much more of each other, and be often together.' That this friendship, like so many of Oscar's other friendships with young men about town, culminated in sex is borne out by a letter written by Oscar after his release from prison when he was living in Paris. One evening there he encountered Harry Melvill walking along the street in a small party. Oscar greeted him, but Melvill cut him dead and pretended not to see him. It was a bitter humiliation for Oscar, but he retailed the story with characteristic gaiety. He felt, he said, as if he had been cut by a `Piccadilly renter', slang for male prostitute. `For people whom one has had to give themselves moral or social airs is childish,' he added on a dignified note. `I was very much hurt. But have quite recovered.'

  By the late 1880s, Oscar seems to have thrown caution to the winds and was readily propositioning good-looking young men for sex, among them Bernard Berenson, an exceptionally handsome young American art historian, recently arrived in London. Berenson turned up at Tite Street with a letter of introduction and was immediately invited to stay. Berenson recalled how Oscar would arrive home late in the afternoon, complaining of exhaustion from yet another luncheon party of rich and fashionable society. Oscar told Berenson that such affairs were `terrible'. But the rich and fashionable were fascinating to Oscar. `There is something about them that is irresistibly attractive. They are more alive. They breathe a finer air. They are more free than we are.' Berenson was, in common parlance, something of a prickteaser. He knew of his consummate attractiveness to men, and he enjoyed, exploited and perhaps encouraged their amorous attentions, only to reject any overt sexual advances. Berenson claimed that he had `a delight in the beauty of the male that can seldom have been surpassed', coupled with `an unfortunate attractiveness for other men'. On another occasion he was less reticent, boasting that he had made `homosexuals' mouths water'. Certainly he can hardly have been surprised when he made Oscar's mouth water. Oscar propositioned Berenson in Tite Street only to be met with a polite but firm rebuff. `You are completely without feeling,' Oscar complained. `You are made of stone.' But their friendship endured.

  Oscar had by now discovered the Crown public house in Charing Cross, a decidedly Bohemian establishment and the nearest thing that London possessed to a bar where men could meet other men for sex. He may have been introduced to the delights of the Crown by Robbie Ross. According to the writer and wit, Max Beerbohm, the Crown was `a literary tavern full of young nameless poets and cocottes and old men who have been ministers of the Church of England and are no longer. Such a dull, suspect place it is.' The writer Rupert Croft-Cooke described it as a public house full of:

  vociferous young writers and a good many literary charlatans, painters and would-be painters together with male prostitutes and Service men looking for an addition to their miserable wages from one or another of the richer and older men who came there. It was not by any means exclusively a `queer' pub, but having once gained a reputation for being lively it was used by those who wanted to find a young sailor or an out-of-work stable boy, as well as by artists who may have been scarcely conscious of these activities.

  It was almost certainly at the Crown in the winter of 1888 that Oscar met Frederick Althaus. Frederick, or Fred as he liked to be called, was different from the usual run of young men that Oscar mixed with at this time, who were literary, artistic or connected in some way with the theatre. Fred was none of these. He worked as a relatively lowly clerk for a firm of solicitors in the City. Little is known about him except that his father was a German immigrant who taught languages. Fred was not the sort of young man that Oscar could introduce to Constance. He lived with his family in Swiss Cottage and was just twenty when he met Oscar. No letters from Oscar to Fred survive, but there are half-a-dozen letters from Fred to Oscar which document the course of their relationship over six months, a relationship which, like so many of Oscar's other brief but intense love affairs, began well and ended badly. Oscar took a fancy to Fred when they met each other at the Crown. Fred, along with his brother, was a regular there; he called it `The C-' in his letters to Oscar. On the night they met, Oscar took Fred out, probably for supper, following this up by sending him a ticket for a concert. Fred could not go, as he explained to Oscar:

  I hasten to write and tell you how extremely kind it is of you to send me the concert ticket, pray accept my best thanks for your thoughtfulness. I need hardly say that I should be delighted to use it, but I much regret that I shall not be able to get away from the City. Were it any other day but a Tuesday I might perhaps get free, only Tuesdays and Thursdays are our late days - and I dare not ask - the ticket I return to you with my best thanks!

  Fred was at pains to thank Oscar for his generosity at their first meeting. `I never told you the other evening how much I enjoyed myself and how sincerely I appreciate your kindness to me.' He was poor and blushed at his inability to repay Oscar's hospitality. `I feel positively ashamed,' he told Oscar:

  of in no way being capable of reciprocating but I can assure you that I hardly know a greater pleasure than being in your society and I am very grateful to you for the kindly interest you seem to take in me. Hoping soon to see you. Believe me yours, F.P. Althaus.

  Oscar asked Fred for a photograph of himself, just as he had asked Harry Marillier for one three years earlier, a request which Fred was eager to fulfil. `I shall as soon as I get them send you a photo of mine an enlarged copy of the one taken in flannels with my German friend - but he of course is not on it,' he told Oscar. The mention of his `German friend' suggests that Fred had
already had at least one relationship with a man, possibly on a visit to see his family in Germany. From his letters, Fred comes across as a rather shy, slightly awkward young man, no more than adequately educated, but determined to better himself. He was idealistic, affectionate and romantic and wanted to meet an older man with whom he could have a conventional courtship and settle down. And he was also slightly neurotic and inclined towards hysteria.

  Shortly after their first meeting, Fred replied to a letter from Oscar suggesting a meeting. `I have heard from Barnes that I can have a room there for two nights,' Fred told Oscar, `and I feel quite pleased at the idea of going and hope very much that you will join me there after.' Fred signed himself `Affectionately yours' and added a postscript: `I do so want you to see my photo.' Whether Barnes was a person, a friend of Fred's, or a reference to Barnes Village, located in a loop of the Thames just south-west of Chelsea, is impossible to know. But the two nights Fred spent there with Oscar were probably when they first had sex.

  The next surviving letter from Fred is much more confident. It probably dates from the early spring of 1889, when Fred and Oscar had been seeing each other for two or three months. Oscar would almost certainly have been pursuing a number of other young men, while Fred seems to have set his sights just on Oscar. He refers to a telegram he had sent impulsively. `Dear Oscar,' he wrote:

  I could not help sending you that telegram, the weather is so heavenly and I thought we must have a couple of days by the sea - of course each goes on his own back fa va sans dire. I shall expect an affirmative reply. My photo has come and is simply splendid. I wonder what you will hang with it.

  This time Fred signed himself off with his `Best love' to Oscar. But Oscar was clearly losing interest. Fred was beginning to be difficult. Apart from the slight gaucheness of his letter and the rather stiff way he uses hearty phrases like `simply splendid' and `each goes on his own back', the fact that Fred was sending impulsive telegrams to Tite Street, demanding that Oscar spend time away with him, and his expectation of `an affirmative reply' were calculated to make Oscar want to cool things down between them. Fred almost certainly never got his affirmative reply. In his next, rather Pooteresque letter, Fred has taken to telling Oscar where he will be in the hope that he will turn up: