The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  There were times when Oscar simply failed to turn up and keep his assignations with Clyde, who was immediately cast down into the depths of despair, writing anguished letters of reproachful love to Oscar in the small hours:

  It is 3. And you are not coming. I've looked out of the window many, many times. The brown is blurred, quite colourless, and the silver heart is leaden ... I have not slept. I have only dreamt, and thought. I don't know where I stand, nor why ... I will only wonder & love. Passionately yrs am I, Clyde.

  Clyde's last letter to Oscar was written the night before he was due to set sail for New York. It is a strange, valedictory letter, full of foreboding that his love affair with Oscar would not survive his return to America. It contains a strange parable:

  I am so glad to come to you tonight - my last night in London. You have dyed all that I have done and am this summer in Angleterre. You have been the sun that has glorified my horizon, and if night came on, and the sun set in a sad splendour, the morning came with its own golden halo and shone sweetly into the thicket where the brown eyed Fawn lay in his grass green bed, with a strangely shaped wound - like this - r - in his side. A hunter in snaring his shadow had wounded his heart. But the Brown eyed Fawn was happy. `He has my heart,' he sang. `But the wound, the wound is mine - and no one can take it from me!'

  Clyde is the brown-eyed faun, lying wounded in his green grass bed. Oscar is the hunter, a sexual predator, who, in attempting to snare the faun's shadow, or sexual self, has wounded his heart. But even though he lies bleeding, bereft and left for dead, the faun rejoices in his wound, in his stigmata of love. The sexual imagery of the parable is striking and insistent. The faun has been pierced and penetrated, and bears a heart-shaped wound of love. Oscar has penetrated Clyde, emotionally and physically; and he bears the `strangely shaped wound' inflicted by Oscar's anal penetration. And though Clyde's heart is broken, he nevertheless possesses the erotic pleasure of having been penetrated, a pleasure that no one can take away.

  Oscar's response to this parable was to write an answering poem, which took up the story of the brown-eyed faun, the hunter and the faun's shadow. The single-sheet manuscript of the untitled poem signed simply `Oscar' was found, after Clyde's death, carefully folded into a presentation copy of Oscar's Intentions, but certainly dates from 1889, as Oscar, always one to recycle, published a slightly amended version of the poem, which he called `In the Forest', in that year's Christmas number of the Lady's Pictorial Magazine. Oscar's poem precisely expresses his confused feelings - not just about Clyde, but about the tensions and contradictions between love and lust:

  Clyde is the brown-eyed, ivory-limbed faun who skips and dances through the forest meadows. Oscar is on the horns of a dilemma. He does not know what to follow, the faun's song or his shadow, pure love or impure lust. He can ask the nightingale - the symbol of love - to catch the strain of the faun's song, or the hunter - the symbol of lust - to snare his shadow. In Oscar's fairy story The Nightingale and the Rose, the nightingale is the symbol of pure, self-sacrificing love, who deliberately impales herself on a thorn for the sake of love. The shadow is a thing of the night: penumbral, mysterious and elusive. It is the dark side of love, representing sex, lust and desire. The shadow must be hunted, snared, captured by craft and guile.

  There is no solution to the dilemma in the poem, just as there was no solution in Oscar's life. Song or shadow? Shadow or song? Love or lust? Lust or love? By the end of the poem, a resolution is as far off as ever, and Oscar, `moonstruck by madness and music', is doomed to seek in vain. This last line suggests that men who love men or boys are subject to a form of erotic lunacy; literally, a madness of the moon. The moon as arbiter of erotic destiny was to feature in Oscar's play Salome, where a cruel, cold moon presides over and controls the erotic desires and destinies of poor mortals. `These men are mad,' declares Herodias, mother of Salome. `They have looked too long on the moon.' Oscar perhaps knew that in Russia men who had sex with men were known as `men of the lunar light', a name which suggested that the origins of sexual desire between men lay in the cycles of the moon and that those under the spell of the moon's cold light were incapable of free will. Oscar had most certainly imbibed the idea of lunacy, of moon-induced and moon-controlled madness whilst he was growing up in Ireland. According to Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends:

  In some parts of Ireland the people, it is said, on first seeing the new moon, fall on their knees and address her in a loud voice with the prayer: `O moon; leave us well as thou hast found us.'

  Oscar frequently referred to the `magic mirror of the moon' and, after his release from prison, often associated sex with the moon. `Romance is a profession plied beneath the moon,' he wrote later about sex between men and male prostitutes in Nice. He even began to refer to the penises of boys as `harvest moons' or `full moons'.

  Clyde Fitch's instincts were right. When he left London for New York in early September 1889, his love affair with Oscar was over. Absence did not make Oscar's heart grow fonder. Out of sight meant out of mind. Besides, Oscar had already met yet another young man, a new ideal boy, in the form of John Gray, a handsome young poet who was to become the inspiration for one of Oscar's most famous and beguiling creations, Dorian Gray. But Oscar and Clyde were to remain on affectionate terms until just before the scandal broke. Clyde visited London every summer and they continued to meet socially. Constance carried on an intermittent correspondence with Clyde's mother, and Oscar invariably presented Clyde with inscribed copies of his books; in a copy of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Oscar wrote: `Clyde Fitch from his friend Oscar Wilde. Faery-Stories for one who lives in Faery-Land'. It was, in every sense, a just assessment; a reference not just to Clyde's hopelessly romantic, enchanted world view, but also a sly and knowing reference to the slang name for New York's men who had sex with men, the Fairies - among whom Clyde Fitch could now number himself.

  In late August 1889, Oscar made the acquaintance of Charles de Sousy Ricketts and Charles Shannon, near neighbours who lived a few minutes' walk away at number 1, The Vale, a cul-de-sac off the Kings Road. Max Beerbohm was later to dub them `the ladies of the Vale'. Both were talented artists and designers with a keen interest in all aspects of modern literature and art, so keen that they were on the point of launching the first issue of their own journal of contemporary culture, the Dial. Ricketts and Shannon sent a copy to Oscar who promptly called at the Vale to thank them. `It is quite delightful,' he told them. `But do not bring out a second number, all perfect things should be unique.' Oscar was very taken with his new acquaintances: `I saw Mr Ricketts on Saturday,' he told his friend, the young artist W. Graham Robertson. `He seems very cultivated and interesting.' Ricketts and Shannon were cultivated and interesting in every sense. They had met at the City and Guilds Technical Art School in Lambeth when Ricketts was just sixteen and Shannon nineteen. They fell in love, and their relationship was to last the best part of half a century. Ricketts was half-French and had been brought up in France and Switzerland. He was cultured and sophisticated; a fascinating and lively conversationalist with a questioning, probing mind. He was not afraid to disagree with Oscar. `Oh, nonsense, Oscar,' he would often exclaim during their `long verbal combats'. Shannon, by contrast, was a clergyman's son from Lincolnshire, handsome in a quintessentially English way, tall, fair and very shy.

  Before very long Oscar had christened Shannon `Marigold' and Ricketts `Orchid'. They were well-named. Like an orchid, Ricketts was rare, exotic and spectacularly colourful, while Shannon was possessed of all the simple, obvious and straightforward delights of an English country garden flower. Oscar commissioned Ricketts to paint the forged Elizabethan portrait of Willie Hughes for a frontispiece to the expanded version of Mr W.H. Ricketts duly obliged and painted a wonderful portrait on `a decaying piece of oak' and `framed it in a fragment of worm-eaten moulding, which my friend Shannon pieced together'. Oscar was delighted. `My dear Ricketts,' he wrote. `It is not a forgery at all; it is an authentic Clouet of the highest
artistic value. It is absurd of you and Shannon to try and take me in!'

  The flower-like existence of Orchid and Marigold in the Vale was attractive to Oscar. He described it to the artist Will Rothenstein as `the one house in London where you will never be bored'. Whenever he was at a loose end, or bored by the domesticity of Tite Street, he could walk round to the Vale and be assured of a warm welcome, excellent conversation and interesting company. As men who loved men who had discreetly set up house together, Marigold and Orchid entertained a large circle of writers and artists, many of whom, like Oscar, shared their sexual tastes. It was there, almost certainly, that Oscar met John Gray.

  Gray was a young poet and writer who had contributed an article to the Dial on the brothers Goncourt and a fairy story, `The Great Worm'. He was devastatingly handsome. Photographs from the time show an exquisitely dressed young man with a perfect profile, dark blonde hair, full lips and large expressive eyes. He was wonderfully graceful and elegant, charming and intelligent with perfect manners. He looked much younger than his years. He was twenty-three when Oscar first met him, but could easily have passed for seventeen. When the poet Lionel Johnson met him two years later, he thought he had the face of a fifteen-year-old. John Gray retained this quality of youthfulness throughout his twenties, and beyond.

  But there was more to John Gray than just being handsome, charming, poetical and exceptionally young-looking. Each and all of these qualities made him desirable, but there was something more. He was quite beautiful; startlingly and arrestingly beautiful. Two years later, when Gray was twentyfive, Andre Raffalovich's devoted governess, Miss Gribbell, was sitting in her box at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden:

  Somebody pointed out to her, across the long row of stalls, a seated figure in an opposite box, saying: `That is the young poet John Gray.' Miss Gribbell looked through her opera glasses and exclaimed: `What a fascinating man. I never knew that anybody could be so beautiful.'

  John Gray was beautiful, coldly and perfectly and poetically beautiful, like porcelain or alabaster. Of all the young men Oscar had met, none was so supremely beautiful as John Gray, none at once so desirable and so seemingly unattainable.

  Not long after he met John Gray, Oscar wrote about the suzerainty of beauty:

  And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

  John Gray's Beauty was higher than Oscar's Genius. Beauty was made not just to be loved by Genius, but to be worshipped, to be hymned, by Genius. Oscar's meeting with the divine John Gray, Prince of Beauty, was like Shakespeare's meeting with Willie Hughes. Here was the young man, the ideal boy incarnate, who could inspire Oscar's `passionate adoration', and his `strange worship'. Oscar fell in love with John Gray at once.

  John and Dorian

  `There is something tragic about the enormous number ofyoung men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.'

  When Oscar met and fell in love with the perfectly beautiful, wonderfully poetic and absurdly boyish-looking John Gray, he thought he had met his ideal boy incarnate. The only problem was that John Gray did not immediately reciprocate. Although he could recognise and respect Oscar's Brobdingnagian intellect, marvel at his conversation, his wit and his humanity, he was not attracted to him. This was a new experience for Oscar, who had spent the years since his marriage having a series of affairs with young men, all of which had ended almost as soon as they had begun - usually when Oscar's beloved started to show dangerous signs of falling in love with him. But John Gray showed no inclination to fall instantly and deeply in love with Oscar. And the more he hesitated, the more he doubted, the more he fired Oscar's passion.

  Oscar set about laying amorous siege to John Gray. Oscar was a hard man to resist, even for someone as controlled and controlling as John Gray. And, under the full effulgence of Oscar's professions of immortal, undying love, his flatteries, his generous gifts and his constant attentions, John Gray did eventually consent to become Oscar's officially beloved, several months after they first met. Sex between them did take place but it was sex more as a rite of passage, a rite of possession. For Oscar, sex with John Gray was an act of worship. For John Gray, it was a confirmation of his social and literary status. Oscar became his protector, his patron, his benefactor, poetically and materially.

  In fact, the John Gray that Oscar met and fell in love with was a construction, an exquisite fiction, a carefully crafted sonnet of a young man, hewn and marvellously fashioned from very rough clay. John Gray had had no advantages in his life. Everything he was, he had created. He was born in lodgings in Bethnal Green, then as now a poor working-class area of London, the first son of John and Hannah Gray. John Gray senior had moved to London from Scotland and had met and married Hannah Williamson, two years his junior. He was a skilled artisan, a wheelwright and carpenter in the Woolwich Dockyard. The Grays' marriage was not particularly happy. John Gray senior was dour, probably a drinker; Hannah was strong-minded, intelligent, hard-working and devoted to her children. She was ambitious for them and determined that they would make their way in the world. Money was always short, and in the first years of John's life the family moved around London, from one working-class lodging to another. Eventually, John Gray's father landed the post of Inspector of Stores at the Woolwich Arsenal, a salaried position which brought with it a measure of security. The family now settled in Plumstead, near Greenwich, a couple of rungs up the social ladder.

  From a very early age, it was clear that John was an exceptionally gifted boy. As a child, he attended a Wesleyan school, the family being nominally Methodists. Then, at the age of twelve, he won a scholarship to the Roan School in Greenwich, a well-established grammar school. Hannah Gray was delighted by John's success. It was what she had hoped for, planned for. John's time at the Roan School began well and he wrote a prize-winning essay on the subject of cruelty to animals for the Royal Humane Society. But after just a year, John's studies were abruptly terminated. Aged just thirteen, John was set to work in the great workshops of the Woolwich Arsenal as an apprentice metal-turner.

  Exactly why John's schooling ended so suddenly remains a mystery. It can hardly have been a simple matter of money. John's school fees of £ 1 a term were affordable for a respectable working-class family. And an apprentice's wage was so small as to be insignificant to the household budget. Hannah Gray must have been appalled. It was the very opposite of everything she had worked for. That it was John's father's decision to remove him from school is suggested by the deleted lines of an unpublished autobiographical poem: `My father then commands/That I must learn to use my hands'. It was not a request, not a decision, but a command. Was it possible that John's dour Scottish father had detected dangerous signs of effeteness, of effeminacy in his oldest son's manner, in his behaviour? And had he, in violent reaction, pulled him out of the environment where he was thriving and placed him firmly in a working-class, working-male, overtly masculine environment, to toughen the boy up; to knock any signs of effeminacy out of him; beating, literally and metaphorically, some sense into him? By the age of thirteen, it must have been evident that John was an exceptionally handsome boy, and likely to grow into an extraordinarily handsome young man. Had there been some kind of sexual scandal at the school? And had John been involved? Whatever the reason for his departure from school, John clearly blamed his father and began to hate him with a vengeance. When his father died in 1892, leaving a widow and eleven children, John could not mourn his passing. All he could say was, `I have lost my father. I am well pleased with the loss.'

  John Gray found himself at the age of thirteen in a dirty, noisy metal workshop, part of the vast Woolwich Arsenal, which supplied the British Empire with ordna
nce and guns. As an apprentice, he was indentured to work long hours for a wage so small that he still had to rely on his parents for his food and lodgings. It was a devastating translation for a sensitive, intelligent boy whose future had seemed assured. Despite the noise, the dirt and the long hours, he somehow managed to educate himself, teaching himself mathematics, Latin, French and German, as well as becoming proficient in drawing and painting. It was a remarkable achievement for a young boy from the working class, and his talent did not go unnoticed. After taking a test, he was promoted to the drawing office, where he started to train as a technical draughtsman. Here, it was warm, dry and quiet. More importantly, the experience had taught John the lesson that hard work and study could produce dividends. At the age of sixteen he sat and passed the competitive entrance examination for a Civil Service Lower Division Clerkship and began work in the Savings Bank Department at the London General Post Office. A year later he was promoted to the Post Office's Confidential Enquiry Branch, a department which dealt with theft or fraud. In his spare time he continued his studies, passing the London University matriculation examination in June 1887 as an independent scholar. In 1888, at the age of twenty-two, he was appointed to a job in the Foreign Office.

  In nine long years he had risen from working-class apprentice metal-turner to a position in the Civil Service in one of the great government departments. If his rise through the ranks continued at the same velocity, he could expect great things. Not only had John Gray escaped from his fate as a horny-handed son of toil, but he had also escaped from the strictures of his class. Somehow or other, in addition to working long hours, studying hard, and passing examinations, he had managed to transform himself into a simulacrum of a young man about town: exquisitely dressed, with an accent and manners so perfect as to make him indistinguishable from his contemporaries at the Foreign Office who had been to public school and university. John was a young man of letters, a poet of some ability and a writer of prose with strong literary aspirations. He was also a lover of men.