The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Others were well aware that the sudden efflorescence of the green carnation, far from meaning `nothing whatever' as Oscar had maintained, actually had a very clear meaning. Just twelve days later, at the first performance of John Gray's translation of Theodore de Banville's play Le Baiser, The Kiss, the green carnation made another equally dramatic appearance. The Star reported the presence of `Mr Oscar Wilde and a suite of young gentlemen, all wearing the vivid dyed carnation, which has superseded the lily and the sunflower'. The Lady's Pictorial denounced the wearing of the green carnation as `unmanly'. Even Oscar's former lover, Richard Le Gallienne - `Shelley with a chin' - attacked the appearance of `these strange green flowers that spring from daisy roots and seem to bear a sting'. When Oscar heard of Le Gallienne's attack, he shrugged it off, declaring that Le Gallienne's betrayal was the natural consequence of his debt of gratitude. Le Gallienne was now happily married and anxious to distance himself from Oscar's increasing notoriety.

  There was one place where the appearance of the green carnation was welcomed: in the monthly magazine the Artist and journal of Home Culture, edited for the past four years by Charles Kains Jackson, a London solicitor, poet and lover of boys. Under the editorship of Kains Jackson, the Artist developed a subtle Uranian flavour with `a thin scarlet thread' of homoerotic material woven into `the homespun' of its usual contributions. The Artist gave instructions to its Uranian readership on how to make their own:

  The green carnation to which we have referred is a white carnation, dyed by plunging the stem in an aqueous solution of the aniline dye called malachite green. The dye ascends the petals by capillary attraction, and at the end of twelve hours they are well tinged. A longer immersion deepens the tint.

  The audience on that memorable first night of Lady Windermere's Fan constituted an emotional and sexual autobiography for Oscar. There were lovers past, present and even future seated in the auditorium. Constance was there, of course, though the ever-mindful Speranza had written to Oscar expressly to remind him of the attentions due to his wife: `Do try to be present yourself at the first performance - it would be right and proper and Constance would like it. Do not leave her all alone.' Arthur Clifton, an old friend of Oscar's and one of the disciples, was duly drafted in to escort Constance to the theatre and to sit with her and her aunt, Mrs William Napier, in a private box.

  Almost two years earlier, in July 1890, Oscar had been commissioned to write a play by the actor-manager George Alexander but did not start writing Lady Windermere's Fan until the summer of 1891, the summer he met Bosie. It was his first comedy, and his first play to find popular and commercial success. Like so much of Oscar's work, the four society comedies are strongly autobiographical and teasingly revealing of the truths of Oscar's sexual life and sexual identity. Lady Windermere's Fan explores the tensions between sex and morality, between love and lust, between appearance and reality, and between truth and lies.

  The play tells the story of Lady Windermere's imagined discovery of her husband's secret sexual life - of his affair with an older, quite shameless woman, Mrs Erlynne, who appears to have some kind of hold over him. There is more than a hint of blackmail in the relationship between Lord Windermere and his mistress, as his wife discovers when she finds he has been paying Mrs Erlynne very large sums of money. A secret life, illicit love affairs and the stench of blackmail were all part and parcel of Oscar's life. There are recognisable elements of Constance in the character of Lady Windermere, who is young, beautiful and rather stern. Like Constance, she is governed by a set of moral precepts, `hard and fast rules', which she will not and cannot bend: `You think I am a Puritan, I suppose?' Lady Windermere asks Lord Darlington, who is hopelessly in love with her. `Well, I have something of the Puritan in me. I was brought up like that. I am glad of it.' Constance, too, had something of the puritan in her, a puritanism based on a strong and enduring sense of a moral universe that increasingly irked Oscar and rankled with what he called his antinomianism. The Antinomians were a sixteenth-century sect of dissenters who believed they were God's chosen people, the elect, predestined for salvation, and consequently they were not bound by conventional moral laws. `Morality does not help me,' he wrote in De Profundis. `I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.'

  The dramatic crisis in Lady Windermere's Fan is precipitated by Lord Windermere's insistence that his wife should receive his mistress at their home. This determination reflects Oscar's habit of introducing his youthful lovers to Constance, of entertaining them at Tite Street, and, on occasions, having sex with them there. This had happened with Robbie Ross when he was a paying guest. Oscar had probably wanted it to happen with Andre Raffalovich in the early days of their acquaintance, when he had sent a note to Andre inviting him to call at Tite Street, saying, rather pointedly, `Constance will be away.' And there had almost certainly been other occasions when Oscar had had sex in Tite Street, and in the course of the next three years there would be more.

  Oscar was well aware of the effect his secret life was having on Constance and writes about it with an almost uncanny autobiographical frankness in Lady Windermere's Fan, when Lord Darlington tells Lady Windermere about what her life will be if she remains with her husband:

  You would feel that he was lying to you every moment of the day. You would feel that the look in his eyes was false, his voice false, his touch false, his passion false. He would come to you when he was weary of others; you would have to comfort him. He would come to you when he was devoted to others; you would have to charm him. You would have to be to him the mask of his real life, the cloak to hide his secret.

  It was all true. It was all just. Oscar's life with Constance was predicated on a falsehood, a lie. Behind the facade of his marriage, behind the facade of the House Beautiful, Constance was `the mask of his real life', `the cloak to hide his secret'. When the poet W.B. Yeats spent Christmas with Oscar at Tite Street, he remembered thinking `that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and two young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition'.

  And yet, as Lord Darlington's speech suggests, Oscar's relationship with Constance was not entirely deliberately exploitative, not completely calculatedly cynical. There was an emotional dynamic between them, a hidden, unbreakable bond, which would endure even beyond the catastrophe which would engulf them. `He would come to you when he was weary of all others,' Lord Darlington tells Lady Windermere, `you would have to comfort him.' It was true of Oscar and Constance. Oscar did have days of bleakness and depression; days when his work was going badly; when his love affairs were becoming difficult or tiresome, or unravelling into a complex, often dangerous, nightmare. Then, he would seek Constance out, taking refuge in her comfort and her love. Some time before he wrote Lady Windermere's Fan, Oscar began but never finished a play entitled - significantly - A Wife's Tragedy in which the main protagonist, Gerald Lovel, a poet rather like Oscar, tries to explain to an uncomprehending friend the secret of why his marriage endures. `Life is a wide stormy sea,' says Gerald. `My wife is my harbour of refuge.'

  There were other speeches in Lady Windermere's Fan which may have held particular resonances for some of the audience there that first night. `I am told there is hardly a husband in London who does not waste his life over some shameful passion,' says Lady Windermere. As she heard these words, it may have occurred to Constance to wonder whether Oscar was one of those London husbands wasting his life over some shameful passion. A `shameful passion' invokes the Uranian code-word, shame, meaning the love that dare not speak its name. It would have been understood by many of those wearing the green carnation in their buttonhole that night, especially by Bosie Douglas who may have attended the performance and shared Oscar's box.

  Six months later, Bosie would write his famous poem `Two Loves', which encapsulated the Uranian resonances of `shame'. The poem interrogates a `Sweet youth' wreathed in moon-flowers:

  Oscar and Bosie had kept in touch in the six mo
nths since their first meeting. They had written to each other, though none of these letters now survive the bonfire that Bosie later made of them. And Oscar had been to Oxford at least once to press his sexual suit. At that stage, Bosie was still not sexually attracted to Oscar. He was much more interested in handsome young men, the younger the better and the rougher the better. As he was writing Lady Windermere's Fan, Oscar was almost certainly thinking of Bosie and his obsession with boys and buggery when he has the Duchess of Berwick exclaim:

  Boys are so wicked. My boy is excessively immoral. You wouldn't believe at what hours he comes home. And he's only left Oxford a few months - I really don't know what they teach them there.

  Loyal, loving Robbie Ross was there that night, no doubt dutifully wearing his green carnation. He had brought along his friend More Adey, who was destined to play a part in Oscar's unfolding drama. John Gray was there, though where he sat, and with whom, is not known. If Bosie, as some accounts claim, was sharing Oscar's box, Gray would have been decidedly put out at being usurped by a younger, stunningly handsome poet. It may have been this event which sowed some of the seeds of the bitter falling out which took place later that year between Gray and Oscar, and which took Gray to the brink of suicide. There were newer friends at the premiere too: Reggie Turner, a young friend from Oxford, and Sydney Barraclough, a twenty-year-old actor that Oscar had taken rather a violent fancy to. He was seated in the dress circle next to a tall and attractive young man, carefully dressed - perhaps a little too carefully dressed - in evening clothes, and also wearing a green carnation.

  His name was Edward Shelley, and he, too, had his part to play in the evening's proceedings. After Constance had been sent home on her own, Oscar entertained his friends to supper. Later, he and Edward Shelley went up to Oscar's suite in the Albemarle Hotel, where they drank whisky and sodas before Oscar led Edward Shelley into the bedroom, undressed him and took him into his bed.

  Oscar had met Shelley in the autumn of 1891, when Shelley was seventeen and working as a clerk in the Vigo Street shop of the publishing partnership of Elkin Mathews and John Lane. Edward Shelley has been described as `distinguished-looking', tall and attractive in a classical, rather masculine way, with a square jaw, clear blue eyes and brown hair. He had `an intellectual face', Oscar said later. `I wouldn't call him good-looking.' Like John Gray, Shelley came from a large working-class family. His father was a blacksmith in resolutely working-class Fulham. And, like John Gray, he had left school at the age of thirteen and was making his way in life on his wits alone. Shelley had advantages: he was intelligent, he was personable, and he had taught himself to speak and to dress properly. Neighbours remembered how he used to leave home for work each day dressed in a frock coat.

  At the age of sixteen, Edward Shelley had landed on his feet with a junior clerkship earning fifteen shillings a week at Elkin Mathews and John Lane, who published for the most part poetry and belles lettres. It was a publishing partnership fraught with mistrust and misunderstandings, a partnership that would shortly dissolve acrimoniously. Elkin Mathews and John Lane published some of Oscar's work and at the time Oscar met Edward Shelley were preparing to reprint his Poems. Lane's relationship with his teenage clerk was a little out of the ordinary, to say the least. He seems to have entered into some sort of compact with Shelley with the aim of keeping tabs on his business partner, Elkin Mathews. Lane worked in the Railway Clearing House at Euston, and his main contribution to the partnership was searching out promising new writers. He did not trust Mathews and needed to know what he was getting up to while his back was turned. Lane and Shelley held regular meetings, their `Once-a Weeks', Shelley called them, and Shelley wrote almost daily reports to Lane on the doings and the sayings of `M', as he called Elkin Mathews. Some of these letters have survived and are interesting not so much for what they reveal about the partnership of Mathews and Lane - most of the letters consisted of trivial gossip: `M was in such an ill-temper' and `M was irritable for the remainder of the day' are typical comments - but for their insights into Edward Shelley's troubled personality.

  Shelley had taken to his surveillance of Mathews with disturbing gusto, secretly copying letters that `M' received and sending them to Lane, silently sneaking up on `M' to find him `with his coat off, & in his shirt sleeves, examining your parcels!' Shelley's letters to Lane became positively conspiratorial. `I should like to have a few minutes conversation with you,' he wrote to Lane in December 1890:

  nothing very important but I have some information, that can be used to advantage. If I see you, before I can receive a reply, make some sign to me, by which I shall know where to meet you. If you cannot do that with safety, please shut the door if I am to meet you at the coffee-house but leave the door open (as you come in) if you cannot meet me.

  Spying, surveillance and secret signals in the unlikely surroundings of a small publishing house had clearly fired the imagination of Shelley, to an obsessive, almost worrying degree.

  There is a suggestion, no more than a suggestion, that John Lane was sexually interested in, and perhaps even sexually involved with Shelley, which might help to explain why John Lane destroyed the vast majority of his letters from Shelley, and why he was at such pains at the time of Oscar's trial to vigorously refute the suggestion that it was he who had introduced Shelley to Oscar. Trelawny Backhouse claims that Aubrey Beardsley gave him a caricature entitled `A Physical Impossibility' which showed:

  a fat, squatty little Lane of the large paunch endeavouring vainly to insert a flaccid, inert organ into the `proctodaeum' of his office boy, named Shelley.

  It was inevitable that Oscar and Edward Shelley would meet sooner or later. Oscar was visiting Vigo Street fairly often in connection with the publication of his Poems and would exchange a word or two with the pleasant, attractive young man who was tying up parcels of books. `He seemed to take notice of me,' Shelley said. `He generally stopped and spoke to me for a few moments.' One day, as he was leaving, Oscar invited Edward Shelley to dinner at the Albemarle Hotel, where he had a suite of rooms. Something had gone wrong with the drains at Tite Street, and with a true Victorian dread of anything remotely connected with raw sewage, the family had fled: Constance and Vyvyan to Lady Mount-Temple's, Cyril to Mrs William Napier's, and Oscar, conveniently alone, to the Albemarle Hotel.

  Oscar's dinner with Edward Shelley took place a few days before the premiere of Lady Windermere's Fan. The evening went well. `We dined together in a public room,' Shelley testified later. `Mr Wilde was very kind and attentive, and pressed me to drink. I had champagne with dinner.' Edward Shelley was literary-minded, and cherished ambitions of a literary career. He had, he said, read a good deal of `the lighter forms of literature, dramatic and poetic', and he had `written a few things', some poems and some stories, none of which were ever published and none of which have survived. Oscar charmed and enchanted Shelley and drew out of him his literary ambitions. Will Rothenstein, who had met Oscar in Paris only a few weeks earlier, recalled how Oscar encouraged and inspired people younger than himself. `I had met no one who made me so aware of the possibilities latent in myself,' says Rothenstein:

  He had a quality of sympathy and understanding which was more than mere flattery, and he seemed to see better than anyone else just what was one's aim; or rather he made one believe that what was latent perhaps in one's nature had actually been achieved.

  According to the statement he made three years later to the Marquis of Queensberry's solicitors, Shelley said that Oscar had flattered him outrageously, told him he was clever and talented and offered to help him on his way. After dinner, Oscar invited Shelley up to his suite to drink whisky and sodas and to smoke cigarettes. Then, when Oscar said, `Will you come into my bedroom?' Shelley agreed. Once in the bedroom, `Mr. Wilde kissed me. He also put his arms round me,' he said. `I felt insulted, degraded, and objected vigorously.' Shelley said Oscar started to touch his private parts, and it was at this point that he fell into a state resembling `stupor' and woke to
find himself unwittingly and unwillingly in Oscar's bed. Andre Raffalovich confirmed Shelley's version, writing with righteous indignation that the `flattered, inebriated, terrified' Shelley `fainted under the ignominious kiss of the poet whom he admired above all'. When he testified in court, Shelley would give a slightly different version. Deeming the actual words Shelley used unfit for publication at the time, the newspapers reported that Oscar had `placed his hand on the private parts of the witness and sought to put his, the witness's, hand in the same indelicate position as regards Wilde's own person'.

  Edward Shelley claimed he was traumatised by his sexual experience with Oscar, that he had been `entrapped', as he later put it, into having sex against his will. Oscar, he claimed, had taken advantage of him, of his admiration, to seduce him. If this was the case, why did he return the very next night to have dinner and to again go to bed with Oscar? When he was asked why, he could only reply `I was weak of course.'