by Neil McKenna
Bosie Douglas, Lucas D'Oyly Carte and Lionel Johnson were different from the majority of public school boys who indulged in sex with other boys, but when they left school, or university, made the transition to sex with women. Bosie, Lionel and Lucas did not. `I left Winchester,' Bosie wrote forty years later, `neither better nor worse than my contemporaries - that is to say a finished young blackguard, ripe for any kind of wickedness.' Bosie arrived at Oxford a decided and determined lover of his own sex. He went to Magdalen College which was, according to Bosie's nephew, the epicentre, `the Temple of Eros', for the then extremely fashionable `cult of boy-love'. Bosie was soon `the unquestioned leader' of a rich and influential set of young undergraduates who flouted convention and had love affairs with good-looking freshmen.
Bosie's sexuality was not fluid, but fixed, fixated in fact, on boys and young men. He saw himself as `a frank and natural pagan'; a child of Hellas, a preChristian for whom the sins of the flesh were not sins at all. Bosie convinced himself that, in the firmament of `pagan ethics', sex was virtuous and lifeaffirming, and sexual abstinence pernicious and life-denying. Bosie was convinced that Uranian love was not just an alternative to sex with women but was actually superior, a higher form of love, `the higher philosophy' as he and Oscar and others termed it. Later, Bosie told his mother that when he arrived at Oxford in 1889 his sexual orientation was decided, that he was already `quite certain of the truth'. Bosie was determined not merely to pursue his sexual truth. More dangerously, he wanted to be its prophet.
`I have never sowed wild oats: I have planted a few orchids.'
Bosie was twenty when Oscar first met him. He was devastatingly, radiantly attractive. `His was a peculiarly English type of youthful beauty,' Bosie's nephew wrote, `an exquisite pink and white complexion, golden hair, cornflower blue eyes and a slim elegant figure.' Bernard Shaw said Bosie was `gifted, or cursed' with a beauty that inspired `passionate admiration in men and women indiscriminately. Poets wrote sonnets praising his beauty, as Shakespeare has-praised-Mr W.H.'s.'
Apart from his arresting physical beauty, Bosie had other qualities which were bound to attract Oscar. He was a lord, and Oscar, a mild snob, had always been attracted by the aristocracy. Bosie was also a poet of some talent, and Oscar had always loved poets, especially if they were handsome young poets. And Bosie was one of those so very delightful young Oxford undergraduates Oscar found so irresistible. But, unlike the majority of young Oxonians whom Oscar considered to have `profiles, but no philosophy', Bosie had both; he was highly intelligent, well-educated and his view of the world exactly chimed with Oscar's. Both thought of themselves as pagans, and both were passionate about what they called `the higher philosophy', about Uranian love and Uranian sex.
Bosie's first, momentous meeting with Oscar took place on a summer's day in June 1891. Bosie had invited Lionel Johnson to lunch at his mother's London house at 18, Cadogan Place. Afterwards, Johnson took Bosie the short cab ride to Tite Street to take tea with Oscar. Bosie had wanted to meet Oscar ever since he had first read Dorian Gray, and he must have persuaded, perhaps even cajoled, Johnson into arranging the introduction.
As with most people meeting Oscar for the first time, Bosie's first impressions were unfavourable. He must have been struck by Oscar's size and commanding physical presence. The lesbian poets `Michael Field' compared Oscar to an overfed herbivore, describing him as `grass-gorged':
There is no charm in his elephantine body, tightly stuffed into his clothes - no charm in his great face and head of unselect Bohemian cast - save the urbanity he can adopt or the intelligence with which he can vitalise his ponderousness.
The actress Elizabeth Robins thought Oscar had been stuffed with spices and caviar: `Poke him and he would bleed absinthe and clotted truffles,' she noted. And the French writer Marcel Schwob confided his first impressions of Oscar to his journal, describing him as:
A big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more. While he ate - and he ate little - he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes.
Max Beerbohm sketched Oscar wonderfully in a few words: `Luxury - goldtipped matches - hair curled - Assyrian - . . . not soigne ... cat-like tread - heavy shoulders - enormous dowager - . . . jollity overdone - But real ability.' It was this real ability of Oscar's, his supreme intelligence and the sublimity of his conversation, which turned those put off by his unprepossessing physical presence into ardent disciples. Bosie once tried to capture the `remarkable and arresting' essence of Oscar's conversation:
Without any apparent effort he exercised a sort of enchantment which transmuted the ordinary things of life and invested them with strangeness and glamour. The popular idea of him as a man who fired off epigrams at intervals and was continually being amusing is quite inadequate to explain his charm and fascination. He had a way of looking at life, and a point of view which were magical in their effect.
The first meeting between Oscar and Bosie went well. `We had tea in his little writing-room facing the street on the ground floor,' Bosie later recalled, `and before I left, Oscar took me upstairs to the drawing-room and introduced me to his wife.' Tea in Oscar's study was rather formal, little more than `just the ordinary interchange of courtesies', Bosie said. `Wilde was very agreeable and talked a great deal, I was very much impressed.' But it seems scarcely credible that Oscar, Lionel Johnson and Bosie, all of them avowed Uranians, all of them poets, did not talk about the higher philosophy, as well as the baser passions.
Oscar was most certainly attracted to Bosie at that first meeting. `Oscar took a violent fancy - it is no exaggeration to describe it as an infatuation - to me at sight,' Bosie wrote in a more revealing version of his love affair with Oscar. Bosie did not, could not, reciprocate. But he felt `flattered that a man as distinguished as he was should pay me so much attention and attach so much importance as he apparently did, to all my views and preferences and whims'. They parted, but only after Oscar had made him promise to lunch with him or dine with him soon, which he did a few days later at the Lyric Club. Oscar brought along a copy of the newly published large-paper edition of Dorian Gray and presented it to Bosie, inscribing it `Alfred Douglas from his friend who wrote this book. July 91.'
Oscar wasted no time in propositioning Bosie. `From the second time he saw me (when he gave me a copy of Dorian Gray which I took back with me to Oxford), he made "overtures" to me.' But Oscar was not remotely Bosie's type. With the exception of Lionel Johnson, Bosie had never been to bed with anyone older than himself. All his sexual instincts were, he said later, `for youth and beauty and softness'; in other words, for boys. Nevertheless, Oscar was unfazed by Bosie's refusal to go to bed with him. The more often Bosie refused, the more persistent Oscar's `overtures' became. Oscar was infatuated:
He `made up to me' in every possible way. He was continually asking me to dine or lunch with him, and sending me letters, notes and telegrams. He flattered me, gave me presents, and made much of me in every way. He gave me copies of all his books, with inscriptions in them. He wrote a sonnet to me, and gave it to me at dinner one night in a restaurant.
At one of those early lunches or dinners Oscar inscribed a copy of his collection of essays, Intentions, with the words 'Bosie, from his friend the author ... In memory of the Higher Philosophy'. They talked endlessly about love and about sex, mostly about sex, as Bosie was fascinated by and fascinating on the subject. He talked obsessively about boys and about buggery. It was `the one topic round which your talk invariably centred', Oscar later told him. Oscar found Bosie's conversation `fascinating, terribly fascinating'. Despite his air of boyish purity, his almost angelic beauty and his poetic sensitivity, Bosie was very sexually experienced. He had a voracious sexual appetite and had already begun to explore the darker side of the Uranian moon. In addition to his sexual encounters at Winchester, Bosie had already started having sex with working-class boys and male prostitutes,
boys he picked up on the streets or met while out slumming in pubs and music halls. He was wildly promiscuous, seemingly addicted to sex, to dangerous sex, with dangerous young men. As Oscar later told him, `The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you.'
What Constance thought of Lord Alfred Douglas when she first met him that summer afternoon in June is not recorded. She would have been charming and gracious, as she always was when she met Oscar's friends, if a little shy at first. `I was always on the best of terms with Mrs Wilde,' Bosie wrote. `I liked her and she liked me. She told me, about a year after I first met her, that she liked me better than any of Oscar's other friends.' There was no reason for Constance not to like Bosie. He was delightful, charming, handsome, aristocratic and poetic. Constance had, by this time, met a good many of Oscar's young men, some of them his lovers, some not, who formed his circle of `disciples'. She had made friends with several of them: with Robbie Ross and Arthur Clifton, with Richard Le Gallienne and Clyde Fitch. She was used to the strange sight of her husband standing at the centre of an adoring circle of young men who all shared, to a greater or a lesser extent, a certain quality.
As the young men in Oscar's life flitted in and out of favour, flitted in and out of Tite Street, lunching or dining or smoking cigarettes with Oscar in his Moroccan smoking room, Constance (rather like Daisy Broome, the wife of the poet Cyprian Broome, in Andre Raffalovich's thinly disguised fictional portrait of the Wildes' marriage, The Willing Exile) may have felt slightly bewildered by the parade of young men:
Cyprian was, or seemed to be, intimate with countless young or youngish men; they were all curiously alike. Their voices, the cut of their clothes, the curl of their hair, the brims of their hats, the parties they went to: Daisy could not see much difference between them. Her house was full of them - at lunch time, at tea time, at dinner time, they sometimes came to suppers, and they sometimes called on Cyprian at twelve o'clock in the morning. Affectation characterised all these men, and the same sort of affectation. They were all gushers, professional gushers ... Married (some were married) or unmarried, they gushed alike, only some were ruder than others, and some were duller than others. Some were gentlemen, and some were not; but they might all have been more robust. Some were permanent friends; they did not come frequently one season, and not the next, but they remained devoted. Others brought friends, very similar to themselves, inseparable duplicates, with whom they quarrelled in due course.
Raffalovich was well-placed to observe the comings and goings at Tite Street, having been at the centre of Oscar's circle for five years. His description is cruel but accurate, especially his depiction of Daisy/Constance's response to the small army of young men who traipsed in and out of Tite Street monopolising most of Oscar's time.
Although to all outward appearances Oscar and Constance were a happily married couple with two beautiful children, there were barely concealed strains and tensions in the marriage. Constance, in particular, was unfulfilled and unhappy. `Honesty compels me to say,' Bosie wrote later:
that Oscar during the time I knew him was not very kind to his wife . . . At the time when I first met him he was still fond of her, but he was often impatient with her, and sometimes snubbed her, and he resented, and showed that he resented, the attitude of slight disapproval she often adopted towards him.
And if Constance was suffering from one of her periodic bouts of depression resulting from the unhappiness of her childhood and tried to talk to Oscar about it, he could be brutally uninterested. She told her brother and his wife how Oscar was `quite unsympathetic if she referred to the past', saying he was `bored with people who go back to their childhood for their tragedies'.
Oscar was often out, and Constance was left alone with just the children and the servants for company. She was lonely and she felt neglected. However much she tried to hide it, her unhappiness was obvious, at least to Speranza, who wrote several letters to Oscar, while he was in Paris in the autumn of 1891, urging him to pay her more attention. `Constance was here last evening,' she wrote. `She is so nice always to me. I am very fond of her. Do come home. She is very lonely, and mourns for you.' And a few days later, Speranza was again emphasising how lonely Constance was:
I would like you home. I want to see my poet son and Constance would like you back. She is very lonely. Finish your dramas now and come back to us, though London is very dull and dark and wet and cold and foggy.
The state of affairs between Oscar and Constance is reflected in Dorian Gray, where the misogyny of Lord Henry Wotton is the misogyny of Oscar Wilde. The novel oozes a dislike, a contempt, for women and their feelings, and, significantly, it is Lord Henry Wotton, the only married man in the trinity of the novel's leading characters, who is far and away the most misogynistic. Oscar's misogyny, like Lord Henry Wotton's, was selective, targeted not so much at women, but at wives, and specifically at Constance. It was a brittle, witty misogyny almost certainly born out of Oscar's feelings of frustration and irritation at being incarcerated in a marriage he no longer wished to be in. According to Charles Ricketts, `Oscar always said that women would be wonderful if they had not been taught to speak.'
In Dorian Gray, women, more particularly wives, are presented as bovine, stupid and dull. `No woman is a genius,' Lord Henry tells Dorian. `Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.' For both Oscar and Lord Henry, marriage is both a farce and a form of bondage. Though slaves themselves, women somehow fetter men, clinging on to them like leeches long after love has died. `Always!' says Lord Henry. `That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.' If Dorian had married Sibyl Vane, he would have been `wretched', Lord Henry tells him:
Of course you would have treated her kindly. One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her.
There are echoes of Oscar and Constance in Lord Henry's words. When Oscar proposed to Constance, Grandpapa Lloyd approved the match, telling Oscar that he had every `confidence in you that you will treat her kindly'. Oscar had always treated Constance kindly. But it was a passionless kindness, born out of emotional and sexual indifference.
Lord Henry's married life is based on a series of deceptions and lies. `The one charm of marriage,' he says, `is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary.' Likewise, a life of deception was absolutely necessary to Oscar. Without a cascade of lies, untruths and half-truths, it would have been impossible for Oscar to lead the life he wanted to lead; impossible for him to fall in and out of love with a series of young men; impossible to have sex with all the young men he wanted to have sex with. Friendships, infatuations and love affairs with young men constitute the true reality and the true satisfaction of Lord Henry Wotton and Oscar. But there was no question of any change to the status quo between Lord Henry and Lady Wotton, or between Oscar and Constance. `The only way a woman can ever reform a man,' Lord Henry remarks, `is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.'
Constance had not succeeded in reforming Oscar, but she had succeeded in boring him. He was `bored to death with the married life', bored with domesticity, bored with Constance, and bored, revolted and repulsed by sex with Constance, by the very idea of sex with Constance. Five years earlier, when they had ceased to have sex, Constance had, perhaps, harboured hopes of a resumption of sexual relations. If so, she had been disappointed. As far as Oscar was concerned, the sexual side of their marriage was well and truly over. Any physical contact was disgusting to him. In Tite Street they slept apart, and Oscar was not prepared to share a bedroom with Constance under any circumstances. When the Wildes were invited to stay in the country house in Berkshire of their wealthy friends the Walter Palmers, Mrs Walter Palmer was surprised at what she considered Oscar's impertinence when he telegraphed his conditional acceptance of the invitation `if yo
u will give us two rooms, one for Mrs Wilde and one for me'. It was not mere impertinence, but the act of a man who was completely and utterly incapable of any physical or emotional intimacy with his wife. The long, slow death of Oscar's love, his neglect, his absences, had a devastating effect. Photographs of Constance taken in the garden of the Walter Palmers' house show her looking frumpy, older, worn out and unhappy. When Louise Jopling showed Constance a photograph of her playfully making up to Oscar, all she could reply was a weary, wondering and compassionate `Poor Oscar!'
Did Constance know about Oscar? Did she suspect that he was having a series of love affairs with young men, some of whom she had met, had welcomed into her home? It seems inconceivable that she had no suspicions about Oscar's `friendships' with young men; no suspicions about his not coming home until the early hours, if at all; no suspicions about the flurry of telegrams and hand-delivered notes sent to and received from young men; no suspicions about the whispers and the rumours of sexual unorthodoxy that swirled around him, or about the barely concealed homoeroticism which seemed to saturate Mr W.H. and Dorian Gray. Paradoxically, the answer is yes and no. Constance almost certainly had some inklings, some doubts, a general uneasiness about the life that Oscar led. But what she knew and what she chose to allow herself to know were two very different things. There is a strange penumbral landscape where truths can exist and not exist, where they can be at once buried in the shadowlands of the mind, and yet illuminated by the light of rationality. Constance must have known or at the very least suspected that something was wrong with her marriage. But she chose not to confront this knowledge, preferring instead to gloss over any problems, explain away the inexplicable, and swallow, uncomplainingly, the unpalatable.