The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  There was a gap of just a year between The Portrait of Mr W.H. and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the two stories represent a radical and dramatic change of attitude on Oscar's part towards love and sex between men. In Mr W.H., Oscar had celebrated love, rather than sex, between men. But in Dorian Gray, the reverse is true. The book celebrates the triumph of sex over love, of sensation over spirit, of the body over the soul. The moral battle between love and sex, the body and the soul, between the moral and the morally reprehensible, is fought on a number of fronts.

  The neo-Platonic ideal of love so perfectly expounded in Mr W.H. is personified by Basil Hallward's pure, spiritual love for Dorian. But it is a love that is effortlessly vanquished when Dorian is seduced - spiritually and sexually - away from Basil by Lord Henry Wotton. The body and the soul of Dorian battle it out for mastery. The body symbolises sex, the soul love. But the struggle between them is unequal. For much of the novel, the soul of Dorian is imprisoned in Basil's portrait, safely locked away in the attic, out of sight and almost out of mind, leaving Dorian's body free to do as he will, safe in the knowledge that his sins have no consequences, other than becoming graven on the face of his portrait.

  Like all Oscar's work, The Picture of Dorian Gray is immensely and complexly autobiographical, something he acknowledged in a letter to a young admirer:

  I am so glad you like that strange coloured book of mine: it contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be - in other ages, perhaps.

  Much of The Picture of Dorian Gray both mirrors and anticipates Oscar's own exploration of his sexuality, a journey which began in doubt, denial and despair, and ended with a confident, triumphal assertion of his sexual self.

  Dorian Gray explores and indulges his sexuality to the full and the novel is loaded - almost overloaded - with potent images and invocations of sex between men. Just as Oscar was beginning to become aware of London's hidden Uranian riches, so Dorian experiences an awakening realisation of the vast erotic potential of the city:

  I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its splendid sinners, and its sordid sins, as you once said, must have something in store for me.

  Dorian is sexually driven, as Oscar was sexually driven. The more sex Dorian has, the more he wants: `The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.' Dorian starts cruising the streets of London, looking for sex:

  As I lounged in the Park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at every one who passed me, and wonder with a mad curiosity what sort of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations.

  Dorian is driven by desires over which he has no control, compelled to commit nameless `psychological' or Uranian sexual sins, a reflection of Oscar's own sexual compulsions which, no matter how hard he had tried to suppress them, forced their way out to the surface:

  There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

  Oscar invokes an elaborate battery of gods and saints, emperors and lovers, soldiers and scholars, philosophers and poets from history, from the ancient Greek pantheon of myth to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. All are there to give corporeal reality to the sexual caresses and excesses of men who love men. Adonis the beautiful and Narcissus the self-loving represent the ideal of the beautiful youth. Saint Sebastian and Antinous, the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, are invoked both as symbols of youthful male beauty and as personifications of self-sacrifice, of martyrdom. Ganymede, another beautiful youth from Greek myth, who was abducted and raped by the god Zeus in the form of an eagle, symbolises anal sex. And the Roman emperors Caligula, Nero and Heliogabalus all represent exploration, experimentation and sexual excess among men who love men. The boy Emperor Heliogabalus stands for the passive pleasures of sodomy. He was obsessed with being anally penetrated by men with enormous phalluses and is supposed to have combed the Roman Empire for such men to pleasure him. Michelangelo, Montaigne, Winckelmann and Shakespeare are all there to emphasise the intellectual traditions of men who love men, while a series of royal favourites, Piers Gaveston, the lover of Edward II, and Robert Carr and Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, both lovers of James I, invoke the royal traditions of sodomy.

  Despite his voracious sexual appetite, Dorian's body is unblemished and unblemishable. He has the gift of eternal youth. His love affairs with young men are graphically told when Basil confronts him with a grisly catalogue of unhappy endings. `Why is your friendship so fateful to young men?' Basil demands:

  There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent's only son, and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James's Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life had he got now? What gentleman would associate with him? Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous.

  The original manuscript was even more explicit. `Why is it that every young man that you take up seems to come to grief, to go to the bad at once?' It was a highly suggestive passage, and one that would come back to haunt Oscar five years later when he stood in the witness box of the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey being cross-examined by one of the most deadly exponents of that art, Edward Carson, his friend from Trinity College, Dublin. Did this passage suggest `a charge of sodomy?' Carson demanded. `It describes Dorian Gray as a man of very corrupt influence,' Oscar parried, `though there is no statement as to the nature of that influence.' It was hardly a convincing denial.

  Social ostracism, shame, sorrow, suicide, exile abroad and the other unspecified, dreadful ends of young men were all too sadly familiar to men who had sex with men, and highly suggestive to others. Suicide was a widespread problem. Cyril Graham in The Portrait ofMr W.H. committed suicide, and in Teleny, the hero Des Grieux contemplates suicide as a way out of the painful dilemma of his sexual attraction to men:

  The passion I had tried to stifle, and which was merely smouldering, had burst out with renewed strength, entirely mastering me. That crime could therefore only be overcome by another. In my case suicide was not only allowable, but laudable - nay, heroic.

  Robbie Ross had contemplated, perhaps even attempted, suicide, after his ducking in the fountain at King's College, Cambridge, a ducking somehow connected with his sexuality. John Gray would contemplate suicide at a moment of crisis in his life. And John Addington Symonds wrote of the extent of the problem of suicide among men who had sex with men:

  I do not think I am far wrong when I maintain that at least half of the suicides of young men are due to this one circumstance. Even in cases where no merciless blackmailer persecutes the Urning, but a connection has existed which lasted satisfactorily on both sides, still in these cases even discovery, or the dread of discovery, leads only too often to suicide.

  In Dorian Gray, apart from the suicide of `that wretched boy in the Guards', was the `dreadful end' of Adrian Singleton, the only son of Lord Kent, also a case of suicide? Was it the same dreadful end as that of Lord Arthur Clinton MP, son of the Duke of Newcastle, who almost certainly committed suicide before he was due to appear in court over the `Stella' Boulton and `Fanny' Park affair? And was Sir Henry Ashton who left England with `a tarnished name' a thinly disguised reference to Lord Henry Somerset who had fled abroad to exile in
Florence a decade earlier in the shadow of a scandal concerning his relationship with a young man, Harry Smith?

  Dorian has acquired a reputation for unnatural sex, just as Oscar had acquired a similar reputation. Basil Hallward, the voice of conscience, confronts Dorian over his sexual relationships with young men. As a Uranian in thought - if not in sexual deed - Basil is hardly in a position to object, but he is concerned about rumours of Dorian's nameless depravity, of his sexual vice and violence. `Then there are other stories,' Basil tells Dorian:

  stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in London. Are they true? Can they be true? When I first heard them, I laughed. I hear them now, and they make me shudder.

  Dorian had been seen brawling with sailors. Had he been down to the docks, looking for sailors to have sex with? And was the `foulest dens' a coded reference to public lavatories or `cottages', or to the male brothels where, for a few shillings, a man could have sex with an off-duty soldier? This is what John Addington Symonds did with an `old acquaintance of old standing', possibly the poet Roden Noel. This friend, Symonds wrote:

  asked me one day to go with him to a male brothel near the Regent's Park Barracks. I consented out of curiosity. Moved by something stronger than curiosity, I made an assignation with a brawny young soldier for an afternoon to be passed in a private room at the same house.

  Dorian's love affair with the young actress, Sibyl Vane, is a thinly fictionalised portrait, a parable, of Oscar's love affair with Constance. Dorian is sexual journey, just like Oscar's, begins in doubt, denial and despair. After Lord Henry Wotton reveals to him the truth of his sexual preference for men, Dorian seeks to deny the truth of the revelation, to master his sexual feelings, to channel them into a more normal, heterosexual course. He falls precipitately in love with Sibyl Vane, an actress who plays the heroines in Shakespearean plays, parts that would have originally been taken by boy actors like Willie Hughes.

  Sibyl bears a remarkable physical resemblance to Constance. `Imagine a girl,' Dorian tells Lord Henry, `hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion.' In a letter to Lillie Langtry written just after their engagement, Oscar described Constance in almost identical terms as `a beautiful young girl ... a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop'. With the same coiled dark brown hair, the same violet eyes, the same flower-like head and the same `Greek' quality, Sibyl and Constance are one. And just as Sibyl has her brother James, Constance has a staunchly true defender of her interests in her brother Otho - as well as a mother who has abrogated her duty and responsibility to her daughter.

  But Dorian has fallen in love with an illusion, with the Sibyl he sees on the stage bringing Shakespeare's heroines to life. Sibyl is a boy manque; an actress who in times gone by would have been a boy; and, if only Dorian had the courage to admit it to himself, should, by rights, still be a boy. He declares his love for Sibyl and wants to marry her, but Lord Henry Wotton is not fooled for an instant by this `sudden mad love'. It is, he realises, `a psychological phenomenon of no small interest', `not a simple but rather a complex passion'. `Psychological' was of course one of Oscar's code-words for love and sex between men. In other words, Dorian's sudden, mad love for Sibyl is a form of denial, a refutation of his true sexual nature. But the illusion is about to be shattered. Sibyl, in love with Dorian, no longer needs to pour her heart and soul into her acting and gives a tawdry, artificial performance as Juliet. Dorian's wonderful illusion of a boy actor manque is shattered, and Sibyl appears precisely as she is: a young, sweet girl of seventeen in love with her Prince Charming. The revelation of Sibyl's true being - of her girlhood, her femininity - is what Dorian cannot accept, and his love for her is killed stone dead.

  When Dorian tells Sibyl that she is `shallow and stupid', that she has `spoiled the romance' of his life, that he does not love her and cannot marry her, Sibyl obligingly kills herself, leaving Dorian free to mourn her - for a day or two - before embarking on a journey of discovery of his true erotic nature. For Oscar, such a melodramatic but undeniably convenient end to his marriage was unthinkable. Oscar was married and must stay married.

  Oscar proclaimed that the moral of Dorian Gray was that `All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.' At the end of the novel, Dorian, in a fit of half-remorseful rage, slashes at the ghastly, raddled and corrupt image of himself in Basil's portrait, which magically reverts to its original, pristine and unblemished state. Dorian is found dead, his body slashed as he had slashed the canvas of the portrait. In trying to kill his conscience, Dorian has killed himself, and his corpse now shows all the signs of sin and self-indulgence that his portrait used to bear. It is a moral, but an extremely unconvincing moral. Dorian has led `a life of mere sensation and pleasure'. His death, following his perfect life, is instantaneous and painless. In this mortal coil, at least, Dorian seemingly pays no price for his self-indulgence and his sins.

  The struggle between Dorian Gray's body and his soul has an almost exact counterpart in the real-life struggle John Gray was experiencing between his body and his soul, between the sins of the flesh and the call of the spirit. When Dorian considers becoming a Catholic, it is almost certainly a reference to John Gray's half-hearted conversion to Catholicism, a process which began not long after he met Oscar. In the summer of 1889, John Gray embarked on a course of religious instruction and, on St Valentine's Day 1890, was baptised and conditionally received into the Catholic Church. Like many Catholic converts, John Gray failed to have the transforming experience he had hoped for. `I went through instruction as blindly and indifferently as ever anyone did,' he wrote later, `and immediately I began a course of sin compared with which my previous life was innocence.'

  John Gray clearly implies that this course of sin was a continuation, an intensification of his previous life of sin. He never revealed exactly what his course of sin consisted of, just as Dorian Gray's sins are only ever adumbrated and never spelt out. But clearly, both Dorian's and John's sins are sexual. Was John Gray's `course of sin' the inspiration - if inspiration is the right word - for Dorian's course of sin? Oscar began writing The Picture of Dorian Gray in the late autumn of 1889, finishing it some time in the late spring of 1890, two and half months or so after John Gray's formal reception into the Catholic Church. Or was it a case of life imitating art? Had Oscar somehow inspired or encouraged John Gray towards a deeper, darker exploration of his sexuality, just as Lord Henry Wotton impels Dorian down the same course?

  Lord Henry presents Dorian with a book which Oscar later identified as Huysmans's A Rebours. This was of course the book that Oscar had read on his honeymoon and which had, cataclysmically, revealed the truth of his own sexuality to him. The book has the same revelatory effect on Dorian as it had on Oscar:

  The hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.

  Had Oscar, in fact, presented John Gray with a copy of A Rebours, and did the book affect him in the same way it had affected Oscar, and had affected Dorian?

  Dorian Gray's life of pleasure and sensation was an autobiographical projection of Oscar's own defiant life of pleasure. `I want to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world,' Oscar had told a friend at Oxford. Later, in prison, even though he had regrets, doubts even, Oscar still clung to his creed of pleasure. `I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure,' he wrote in De Profundis. `I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does to the full. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine.'

  Certainly, by the time he came to write Do
rian Gray, Oscar had developed a profound interest, verging on obsession, in all things sexual, most especially in things sexual between men. At the same time, he also developed an intense preoccupation with the idea of sin. He wanted to probe, explore and celebrate the nature and the mystery of sins and sinners. He wanted to immerse himself in sin, especially in sins of the flesh. If he was to be cast as a sinner, then he would sin, and sin spectacularly. There were, he wrote, `pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins'. Sin was to be positively sought out because it added an extra dimension to human experience.

  Lord Henry Wotton articulates a new, daring and dangerous sexual philosophy for men who love men, `a New Hedonism', a reaction and an antidote to `the harsh, uncomely Puritanism' of the age. At its heart this new philosophy of sexual pleasure does not accept, will not accept `the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience'. In other words, sex, as much sex, and with as many people as possible, was to be the order of the day. By having as much sex as possible all inhibitions, all doubts, all self-loathing would be overcome. `The future would be the same as our past,' says Lord Henry, and `the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.' The great, abiding and undiscovered secret of life, its salvation, its sacrament, is sex:

  Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

  Was Lord Henry's new Hedonism, his philosophy of sex as the great sacrament, the great secret of life, the same dangerous philosophy that Oscar had inculcated into John Gray, causing him to embark on his epic course of sin? Did Oscar lead by erotic example, and John Gray follow? Or was it the other way round, with John Gray leading a fascinated Oscar?