by Neil McKenna
Constance was by nature kind, yielding and generous. `There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman,' says Cecil Graham in Lady Windermere's Fan. `It's a thing no married man knows anything about.' Constance would grant plenary forgiveness for sins she knew nothing about and wished to know nothing about. Love for Constance meant something altogether different from Oscar's conception of love. Her love was quieter and more tranquil than Oscar's. She believed in love enduring, in love forgiving and, at the last blast of the trumpet, in love triumphant. Having promised at the time of their engagement to hold Oscar `fast with chains of love and devotion', Constance was herself now bound by those same chains. She would never, could never, leave Oscar, nor ever love anyone else. She was bound by love and blinded by love. But it would not be long before the scales would fall from her eyes.
Oscar's relentless pursuit of Bosie was interrupted by Bosie's return to Oxford in the autumn of 1891, and by his own visit to Paris. It was Oscar's third extended visit to the City of Light. On his first visit he had been a literary young Turk, the poet and Professor of Aesthetics who had taken America by storm and was now determined to storm the literary Bastilles of Paris. His second visit had been very different. Then he was an enraptured bridegroom on honeymoon in the City of Love with his beautiful young wife. Now, on his third visit, Oscar returned as a conquering hero, a writer at the height of his powers whose output was prodigious: he was an acclaimed essayist, a penetrating critic, a writer of exquisite fairy stories and arresting short stories, as well the author of a daring homoerotic novel which had so shocked and outraged Britain's bourgeoisie. Not only that, Oscar had written a play, provisionally entitled A Good Woman, which was shortly to go into production, and he had signalled his intention, while in Paris, of writing a play in French.
That play was Salome, a short and intensely symbolic version of the biblical story of Salome, who danced the dance of the seven veils for her stepfather Herod in return for the severed head of John the Baptist. In the late nineteenth century, the story of Salome had captured the imagination of French poets, writers and painters, and Salome had become the incarnation of decadence: mysterious, alluring, erotic, a symbol of the spectacular collision of love and death. Mallarme had written a poem about Salome, and Gustave Moreau had painted two famous pictures depicting her dance of the seven veils and the moment when she is presented with John the Baptist's severed head. Both of these paintings were bought and obsessed over by Des Esseintes, the hero of J.K. Huysmans's novel A Rebours, the novel which had so fascinated Oscar when he read it on his honeymoon in Paris seven years earlier. In A Rebours, Salome is `the symbolic incarnation of undying lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty ... the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning'.
Oscar had been minded to write about Salome for some time, initially in the form of a story, then in a narrative poem. According to the young Guatemalan diplomat and writer, Enrique Gomez Carillo, whom Oscar befriended on this trip to Paris, Oscar was `obsessed by the spirit of Salome'. Never a day went by, said Gomez Carillo, `when he didn't speak to me of Salome':
Sometimes women passing in the street made him dream of the princess of Israel. He used to stand for hours in main streets, looking at jewellers' windows and imagining the perfect jewellery of his idol's body.
At lunch one day with a group of young French writers, he extemporised so brilliantly on the story of Salome that his audience was spellbound. Returning home to his rooms in the Boulevard des Capucines late that afternoon, Oscar saw a blank notebook lying on the table, and the simple fact that it was there inspired him to begin to write down - in French - what he had just been relating. `If the blank book had not been there on the table I should never have dreamed of doing it,' he told Vincent O'Sullivan several years later. `I should not have sent out to buy one.'
Oscar wrote and wrote in a kind of reverie, induced, perhaps, by the `opiumtainted cigarettes' which Marcel Schwob claimed Oscar smoked in Paris. When he looked at the clock, it was gone ten. He had been writing for hours and needed to eat. So he walked to the nearby Grand Cafe where a gypsy orchestra was playing. Oscar called over Rigo, the orchestra leader, and said:
`I am writing a play about a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain. I want you to play something in harmony with my thoughts.' And Rigo played such wild and terrible music that those who were there ceased their talk and looked at each other with blanched faces. Then I went back and finished Salome.
In Oscar's Salome, the cold and chaste moon is the cruel and heartless arbiter of fate presiding over the action of the play, inspiring madness, lust, suicide and murder. Oscar's Salome is every bit as cruel as the Salome of Huysmans. Lust, the lust of a man for a woman, and, more markedly, the lust of a woman for a man, pervades, poisons and destroys every relationship in the play save one. To gratify his lust for Salome's mother, Herodias, Herod has imprisoned and executed her husband - his own brother, Philip. Now he lusts after Salome, while Salome lusts after Herod's prisoner, Jokanaan - John the Baptist. Only the Uranian love of the young Page of Herodias for the Captain of the Guard, the Young Syrian, is perfect and pure and remains unsullied by the cyclic carnival of lust played out in Herod's palace.
Oscar's Salome portrays female sexuality as predatory, degrading and often fatal. Herodias is manipulative, incestuous and extremely promiscuous. She lies, Jokanaan declares, in a `bed of abominations'. When Salome attempts to seduce Jokanaan, the pure and beautiful ivory-white prophet, he curses her in the name of her mother's iniquities. `Daughter of adultery ... Daughter of an incestuous mother,' Jokanaan brands her, `Daughter of Babylon', `Daughter of Sodom', `wanton', `harlot'. The more Jokanaan repudiates her sexual advances, the more Salome is determined to possess him. `I am amorous of thy body,' says Salome to Jokanaan. `Let me touch thy body.' Like a mantra she repeats hypnotically, `I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. I will kiss thy mouth.' Salome's obsessive desire for Jokanaan is matched and ratcheted up by his absolute revulsion for her. Underpinning this axis of lust and revulsion is the fact that Jokanaan is, like Oscar, only attracted to his own sex. Salome desires him because she knows he can never desire a woman.
Cross-examined during the celebrated trial for criminal libel in 1918 of the eccentric MP Noel Pemberton-Billing, Bosie testified that before he wrote Salome, Oscar had been reading Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard Krafft-Ebing's monumental study of the whole gamut of sexual deviation. The characters of Salome and her mother, Herodias, are clearly informed by Krafft-Ebing's chapter on sexual hyperaesthesia, or the `abnormal predominance of sexual sensations with mighty and frequent demands for sexual gratification', and in particular by his `Case VII': an account of a woman plagued by lust and the desire for coitus from the age of thirteen. Salome's unslakable lust for Jokanaan mirrors Case VII's unslakable lust for a man who refuses to respond to it because he is a lover of men. `The latest turn which her sex life has taken is rather peculiar,' Krafft-Ebing wrote of `Case VII':
She is devoting all her affection, her means and her devotion to a man who, being a homosexual, has never had the taste for sexual intercourse with woman. The circumstance that it is men he loves provokes, she reports, an indescribable excitement in her, because she knows that she will have to forego any sexual intercourse with him.
After Jokanaan is executed and his head delivered on a silver charger, Salome taunts the dead prophet. `Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,' she says. `Well, I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit.' Salome does kiss Jokanaan's mouth. `There is a bitter taste on thy lips,' she says. `Was it the taste of blood ... ? But perchance it is the taste of love ... They say that love hath a bitter taste.' And then a moonbeam lights up Salome on stage as Herod gives orders for her to be killed, crushed beneath the shields of the soldiers.
Written in a reverie, Salome expresses and reveals the extent of Oscar's subconscious fear and loath
ing of the articulate flesh of female sexuality. Salome is the vampiric, emasculating incarnation of the ancient Hebrew beth shenayim, or `toothed place', the vagina dentata, the dangerous, castrating, consuming vagina. Throughout the play there are images of beheading, biting, piercing, severing and tearing. Oscar told Gomez Carillo that he wanted his Salome to be cruel and to be shameless. `Her lust must be an abyss,' he said, `her corruptness, an ocean.' Krafft-Ebing's Case VII not only helps to explain the nature of Salome's obsessive love for a man she knows she can never arouse, but it also sheds some light on Jokanaan's sense of utter disgust at the sexual desires of Salome and Herodias. Jokanaan, like Oscar, is a lover of men and a prophet of divine love who is, prophetically, incarcerated and martyred because he dared to preach a new form of love.
Apart from Oscar's obsession with Salome, there was plenty to occupy his mind, and his eye. Oscar met old friends and made new ones, with young poets and writers like Marcel Schwob, Pierre Lout's and Andre Gide. Pierre Lout's was in his very early twenties, a poet and writer who was attracted by Wilde's wit, intelligence and status as the most interesting and exciting writer in Britain. And part of the attraction was Oscar's sexuality, which he positively flaunted in Paris. Lout's was ostensibly a vigorous heterosexual, but he nonetheless harboured a degree of sexual interest in men. He was not remotely sexually attracted to Oscar, but he was drawn to the aura of sexual unorthodoxy that swirled about him like a mist.
`Paris is a city that pleases me greatly,' Oscar told a reporter from the Echo de Paris as he lay stretched out on a divan smoking Egyptian cigarettes. `While in London one hides everything, in Paris one reveals everything ... the lowest dive interests me as much as the most elegant cafe.' It was a telling comment. In London, Oscar had to hide his sexual liaisons from Constance and from society. In Paris, where sex between men was legal under the Code Napoleon, Oscar could afford to be much more relaxed, to reveal - if not quite everything - then a good deal more about his sexual desires than he ever dared to in London.
For his part, Oscar liked Pierre Lout's, he found him interesting and attractive, and inscribed a copy of his collection of fairy stories A House of Pomegranates to Lout's in terms that were extravagantly erotic:
It was through his friendship with Oscar that Pierre Lout's was finally able to explore his sexual feelings for men when he visited London the following year.
Andre Gide was a friend of Pierre. He persuaded Lout's to arrange a dinner where he could meet the fascinating Oscar Wilde, and at their first encounter on 29 November Gide was mesmerised. `There were four of us,' Gide recalled, `but Wilde was the only one who talked':
Wilde did not converse: he narrated. Throughout almost the whole of the meal he did not stop narrating. He narrated gently, slowly; his very voice was wonderful.
Andre Gide was twenty-two, a tubercular, neurotic, sexually repressed young man who was finding it difficult to acknowledge, let alone come to terms with, his sexual preferences for boys. He had been expelled from school at the age of eight after having been caught masturbating, and had experimented sexually with the young son of a servant. Meeting Oscar was revelatory and unsettling. For three weeks Oscar became the Lord Henry Wotton to Andre's Dorian Gray, a harbinger of sexual truth and sexual liberation. In his engagement book for 11 and 12 December, Gide scrawled the words `Wilde, Wilde' across the pages, and, in an ecstatic letter to his friend Paul Valery, he wrote: `Oh how extraordinary, extraordinary he is.' Gide said he felt like `someone who is stunned, who no longer reads, no longer writes, neither sleeps, eats nor thinks'.
Oscar's feelings for Gide are not recorded, although he later said, `I love Andre personally very deeply.' There is no evidence that the two of them had a love affair or even had sex, and, indeed, it is hard to imagine Oscar and Gide - `the egoist without an ego', as Oscar dubbed him - in bed together, though the beardless Gide had a certain boyish charm, and Oscar was already becoming less particular about his sexual partners. But Gide was obsessed. Meeting Oscar had affected him profoundly, and his friends were convinced he had fallen in love. `Gide est amoureux d'Oscar Wilde', `Gide is in love with Oscar Wilde,' Jules Renard confided to his journal, and Marcel Schwob thought the same. Less than a week after meeting Oscar, Gide wrote:
Wilde is piously setting about killing what remained of my soul, because he says that in order to know the essence of something, one has to suppress it. He wants me to deplore my soul. The effort to destroy it is to be the measure of it. Everything is made up only of its emptiness.
By his soul, Gide really meant his conscience. Oscar's vivid gospel of scarlet sins and sexual liberation shook and shocked Andre, who was tortured by homoerotic desires which he sought to quell by means of his Protestant faith and by a rigorous, puritanical asceticism consisting of sleeping on bare boards, rising at dawn, ice-cold baths, scripture study and prolonged prayer. Just eleven months earlier, he had proposed marriage to his cousin and childhood soulmate, Madeleine Rondeaux, with whom he would eventually have a marriage blanc, a sexless marriage. But spiritual exercise and bodily scourging were no match for Oscar's seductive evangel. Oscar made Andre confront his sexual self, spiritually and perhaps even physically.
But after Oscar had returned to London, Andre ripped out the pages of his journal which covered the three weeks or so he had spent almost continuously in Oscar's company. Whatever had happened was not to be bequeathed to posterity. On New Year's Day 1892, Gide opened his new diary with the declaration that:
Wilde, I believe, did me nothing but harm. In his company I lost the habit of thinking. I had more varied emotions, but had forgotten how to bring order into them.
If Oscar could have read Andre's words, he might have smiled and wondered exactly which of Andre's `varied emotions' he had brought into play during their brief and intense friendship: love or lust, or perhaps even both? They would meet again, but in the meantime Oscar barely gave Andre a backward thought. He had other things, and another young man, on his mind.
Strange green flowers
`One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. '
Just minutes before the curtain went up at the St James's Theatre on a chilly evening in late February 1892, a dozen or so young men filed into the stalls, each wearing a vivid green carnation in his buttonhole. It was the premiere of Lady Windermere's Fan, Oscar's first society comedy, and expectations were high. As the young men took their seats, the audience craned their necks to see what was going on. Who were they? And why did they all sport a green carnation? There was, after all, no such flower known to nature.
Oscar had planned to cause a stir at the premiere of his play and succeeded in causing a sensation. He had stage-managed the dramatic appearance of the green carnation down to the last detail. The day before, Oscar had told Graham Robertson to go to Goodyear's the florist in the Royal Arcade and order a green carnation to wear for the performance. Robertson was puzzled. `A green carnation?' he repeated. `I know there's no such thing,' said Oscar, `but they arrange them somehow at that shop; dye them I suppose. I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow - it will annoy the public.' Robertson was still bewildered: `But why annoy the public?' he asked. `It likes to be annoyed,' replied Oscar:
A young man on the stage will wear a green carnation; people will stare at it and wonder. Then they will look round the house and see here and there more and more specks of mystic green. `This must be some secret symbol,' they will say: `What on earth can it mean?'
`And what does it mean?' Robertson asked. `Nothing whatever,' said Oscar. `But that is just what nobody will guess.'
Oscar later claimed that the mystic green carnation was his own idea. `I invented that magnificent flower,' he said. In fact, he had merely borrowed the idea from the Parisian Uranians who had in the summer of 1891 begun a craze for wearing carnations, artificially dyed green, as a badge, a secret symbol, of their sexual preferences. Just a few years earlier, in Paris, green cravats had been the rage among men who loved men. Now i
t was green carnations. As Oscar had predicted, the audience was suitably annoyed, especially as all the young men wearing the curious green carnations shared, or seemed to share, a certain quality that today might be described as camp. Many of them `were wearing make-up, or seemed to be', according to Andre Raffalovich, who added that, `There is a way of styling one's hair and of swaying one's hips which goes with the artificial bistre, lipstick etc.'
The coup de grace of the evening was Oscar's appearance on stage after the performance. The `unspeakable animal', as Henry James called him, had responded to curtain calls by appearing with a `metallic blue carnation' in his buttonhole and a lighted cigarette in his fingers. `Ladies and Gentlemen,' Oscar said, as the applause for the author died away:
I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.
Oscar's short speech infuriated Henry James, who thought it predictably `impudent'. A large proportion of the audience, including several theatre critics, thought the same. They considered it to be in bad taste, and downright cocky. The cigarette, in particular, struck them as the very height of bad manners. Etiquette dictated that gentlemen should never smoke in the presence of ladies. `People of birth and breeding don't do such things,' the critic Clement Scott expostulated. The Daily Telegraph reported in shocked tones how Oscar had `addressed from the stage a public audience, mostly composed of ladies, pressing between his daintily-gloved fingers a still burning and half-smoked cigarette'. Punch produced a cartoon of Oscar delivering his speech captioned, `Quite too-too puffickly precious!! Being Lady Windy- mere's Fan-cy Portrait of the new dramatic author, Shakespeare Sheridan Oscar Puff, Esq.' In the cartoon Oscar adopts a languid pose leaning on a column and holding an open fan while a cigarette dangles from his mouth. Three entwined smoke rings hover above his head, each containing a single word: `Puffl!! Puffl! Puffl'. 'Puff' ad multiple meanings: it could mean a vainglorious and self-serving speech, as well as an insolent braggart. It was also a relatively new slang term for an effeminate man. Punch's cartoon was a twoedged sword. On the surface, it was a reprobation of Oscar's arrogance, his cockiness, his tireless and, to some, tiresome self-promotion. At the same time it was a not-so-coded reference to his sexuality.