The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Oscar rose to the occasion. He went to Oxford to see Bosie and to try and find a way out of the mess. On his return, he consulted his friend George Lewis, the wily London society solicitor who was well-versed in extricating his clients - including the Prince of Wales - from difficult situations. `Oh, he knows everything about us, and forgives us all,' Oscar once airily said of Lewis. An arrangement was made with the blackmailers to pay them £100 in full and final settlement. Oscar was to stump up the cash, and Edwin Levy, a strange character from Oscar's past, part money-lender, part private detective, was engaged to make the actual payment. Whatever it was that Bosie was being blackmailed over, both Lewis and Levy were shocked. Oscar said later that it was because of the sordid details of the blackmail that he began to lose George Lewis's esteem and friendship. `When I was deprived of his advice and help and regard,' Oscar wrote, `I was deprived of the one great safeguard of my life.' Levy was so shocked, Oscar recalled, that he went to great pains to urge Oscar to have nothing more to do with Bosie:

  Edwin Levy at the very beginning of our friendship, seeing your manner of putting me forward to bear the brunt, and annoyance, and expense even of that unfortunate Oxford mishap of yours, if we must so term it, in reference to which his advice and help had been sought, warned me for the space of a whole hour against knowing you.

  But there was another, quite different, more potent and more enduring consequence of the `unfortunate Oxford mishap'. Oscar and Bosie, quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly, fell deeply and passionately in love.

  Bosie was grateful, eternally grateful, to Oscar for saving him from the clutches of the blackmailers. And Oscar, though he grumbled later about the expense and annoyance, was thrilled to have saved Bosie from such a predicament. It was as if Oscar had saved Bosie's life, and now, rescued and rescuer, they were bound together, their destinies entwined, as if `the Fates,' Oscar wrote later, `were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided lives.' As he got to know Oscar, Bosie's initial physical repugnance was replaced by a fascination for his genius, for the subtleties of his mind, for the enchantment of his conversation and for the generosity of his spirit. Bosie once said that Oscar `quickened' him, that he brought him to spiritual life, and nurtured that life. Oscar, he said, fed his `soul with honey of sweet bitter thoughts', and transported him `out of this tedious world into a fairy land of fancy, conceit, paradox and beauty by the power of a golden speech'. `I was fascinated by Wilde,' Bosie said later. `I really ... adored him and was "crazy" about him.'

  For most of his life, Oscar had been searching for his one great lifeaffirming, life-changing, immortal love affair with a beautiful boy, his ideal boy, with whom he could scale the impregnable heights of great love and great passion. He found it in Bosie. Bosie was not only beautiful and boyish, he was brilliant, charming, aristocratic and poetic. Oscar was beguiled by both his vices and his virtues. Bosie was, he said later, a `wilful, fascinating, irritating, destructive, delightful personality'. He was a force of nature, a glorious, guiltfree sexual pagan, with a capacity to live life as intensely and as vividly as Oscar.

  Oscar felt that he had come face to face with his erotic and emotional destiny. Bosie was the prophesied and prefigured `new-found Lord' dressed in `dyed garments from the South' from Oscar's poem `Un Amant de Nos Jours'. He was Willie Hughes, who had so inspired and inflamed Shakespeare. And he was the extraordinarily beautiful Dorian Gray, the `young Adonis', the `veritable Narcissus', who looked as if he `were made out of ivory and roseleaves'. Bosie was to Oscar what Dorian Gray had been to Basil Hallward, `the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal, whose memory haunts us artists, like an exquisite dream'.

  Bosie was the ideal boy, the realised incarnation of sexual and spiritual desire. He was the puer eternus, the boy who would never grow old, the boy who could never grow up. If he was frustratingly childish in many ways, he was also appealingly childlike. His petulance, his selfishness, his wild and reckless enthusiasms, as much as his sense of honour and his passion for life, were those of an adolescent boy. Bosie himself regarded himself as little more than a boy when he met Oscar and said his love affair with him belonged to his `boyhood'.

  When he fell in love with Bosie, Oscar's grailquest was over. Long after the tragedy broke, when Oscar had been released from prison, he was asked by Reggie Turner how he could justify his return to the man who had destroyed him. Oscar's answer was a proclamation of love. `Say that I love him,' Oscar told Turner:

  that he is a poet, and that, after all, whatever my life may have been ethically, it has always been romantic - and Bosie is my romance. My romance is a tragedy of course, but it is none the less a romance - and he loves me very dearly, more than he loves or can love anyone else, and without him my life was dreary.

  The love of Oscar and Bosie was consummated in the early hours of a June morning at Tite Street. Constance was away, and Oscar and Bosie had been out on the town: dinner at the Savoy, a play, and then supper at the Lyric Club. They had both been drinking. `I was filled up with drinks by the time I got back to his house at almost two o'clock in the morning,' Bosie remembered. There were more drinks and more conversation. `After about two hours discussion he induced me to stay the night in a spare bedroom,' Bosie told Frank Harris, in a remarkably candid letter written in 1925. `In the end he succeeded in doing what he had wanted to do ever since the first moment he saw me.' The sex was predictable, according to Bosie, but with one important difference:

  Wilde treated me as an older boy treats a younger one at school, and he added what was new to me and was not (as far as I know) known or practised among my contemporaries: he `sucked' me.

  Shortly after his first night with Bosie, Oscar wrote ecstatically to Robbie Ross from the Royal Palace Hotel in Kensington. `My dearest Bobbie,' he wrote:

  Bosie has insisted on stopping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus - so white and gold. I will come either Wednesday or Thursday night to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired: he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.

  The letter is a coded reference to oral sex: Bosie `so white and gold' lies naked on the sofa, his penis erect, `like a hyacinth' and Oscar `worships' him - `worship' being a euphemism for fellatio. To worship a boy is not only to adore him emotionally, but also to adore him sexually, to gratify him, by sucking his penis. Oscar was fond - very fond - of oral sex, and there are many testimonies to this fondness for `performing certain operations with his mouth', as one of the witnesses against him tactfully termed it. Laurence Housman, the brother of the poet, spoke of Oscar's predilection for what he called `pollution labiale', while Bosie's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, was rather more to the point, when he said of Oscar, `That man is a cock sucker.' Andre Raffalovich was also direct, asserting that Oscar `practised penis-sucking and paid delivery boys to let themselves be worshipped in this fashion'. Sucking cocks gave him `inspiration', Oscar said. He told George Ives on several occasions, no doubt with his tongue in his cheek, that `Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.'

  Oral sex was, then as now, perhaps the most common sexual activity between men. Robert Sherard, who in later life regarded himself as something of an authority on sex between men, said that from his `most distasteful observance of the practices of homosexuals', oral sex - or what he rather quaintly called `buccal onanism' - was the most frequent method of sexual satisfaction. Raffalovich observed that among some sexual inverts, including Oscar, `penis-sucking' had `become a habit and a mania, a sexual and cerebral need which he requires to become aroused'. Indeed, some men offered cock-sucking as an inducement to `soldiers and common men' to have sex with them. `After they have made sure of his sanitary condition,' says Raffalovich:

  they may well practise oral coitus on him - out of a desire to seduce, out of vanity, or to give him a new pleasure, a pleasure which cheap or very cheap women have not given, or would not give him. Oral coitus is one of the inducements of the unisexual in the presence of a heterosexu
al; and more than one heterosexual has let himself be convinced.

  According to Raffalovich, men who loved men could be divided into two camps. There were sexual inverts like Oscar, he said, who were addicted to cock-sucking and other unsavoury sexual practices, and then there were sexual inverts like himself, who were `sensual, without being debauched'. These latter, he said:

  may very well forego oral coitus: many inverts do not find it worthy of their love; many also find it lacks natural and spontaneous sensuality.

  Bosie may have admitted that Oscar `sucked' him, but he was adamant on one point: there was never any question of anal sex. `It is hateful to me now to speak or write of such things,' he told Harris, `but I must be explicit: sodomy never took place between us, nor was it thought or dreamt of.' Indeed, Bosie always denied that he had indulged in anal sex at any time in his life, either at Winchester, at Oxford, or at any time afterwards. He even told Harris that he was prepared to submit himself to a medical examination to prove that he had never indulged in sodomy:

  If I had ever allowed anyone (either Wilde or any other single person) to treat me in that way, surely a medical examination would reveal the fact.

  But by sodomy, Bosie more properly meant being sodomised, being anally penetrated. Presumably the kind of medical examination Bosie had in mind was the same kind performed on `Stella' Boulton and `Fanny' Park by the police surgeon who found that their anuses were so dilated, so slack, that he had `never seen anything like it'. In Bosie's case such a test, taken a quarter of a century later, might or might not prove whether he had ever been anally penetrated. What it could not prove, as Bosie must have known, was whether or not he had sodomised another man, whether or not, as Trelawny Backhouse alleges, he had been the `ascendant' to Backhouse's `pathic'.

  For Bosie, as for many men, there was a huge distinction between the act of anally penetrating another man and the act of being anally penetrated. It was far more acceptable to sodomise another man, or even better, a beardless, androgynous boy, than to allow oneself to be sodomised. To penetrate is essentially, integrally male. But to be penetrated is essentially female. One affirms masculinity, the other undermines it. Few men were willing to own up to a taste for being the passive partner in anal sex. John `Soddington' Symonds bravely said that he `did not shrink from passive pedicatio', or sodomy, but added that, thankfully, it had never been demanded of him. Of the thirty-eight men whose life stories and sexual histories are included in Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, sixteen men said they enjoyed active sodomy, while only five admitted enjoying being sodomised. The books did not balance.

  Bosie's reticence on the subject of sodomy is not surprising. When, in the 1920s, he was writing about his sexual experiences, he had renounced his sexual past and become a devout Catholic, and any suggestion of sodomy was anathema to him. He had fallen out with Robbie Ross many years earlier, and had publicly and persistently denounced him as a sodomite and a bugger. To now admit to having engaged in what he regarded as the vice and the cardinal sin of buggery was impossible.

  Anal sex was almost as taboo among the men who practised it as it was among those who condemned it. Campaigners for reform of the laws on sex between men persistently underplayed the incidence of anal sex because it was such a taboo subject, likely to disgust and alienate legislators and the general public alike. The penalty for gross indecency was a maximum of two years, with hard labour. But the maximum penalty for sodomy was life imprisonment. Anal sex was a stumbling block standing in the way of reform. According to Symonds, it was `a vulgar error' to assume that sodomy was the desire and pursuit of all men who had sex with men, or, indeed, that anal sex had a deleterious effect on the health of those who practised it:

  It is the common belief that one, and only one, unmentionable act is what the lovers seek as the source of their unnatural gratification, and that this produces spinal disease, epilepsy, consumption, dropsy, and the like. Nothing can be more mistaken, as the scientifically reported cases of avowed and adult sinners amply demonstrate. Neither do they invariably or even usually prefer the aversa Venus; nor, when this happens, do they exhibit peculiar signs of suffering in health.

  Andre Raffalovich was also at pains to emphasise the rareness of sodomy. `Anal intercourse (active or passive) is not the end of their sexuality and the satisfaction of their sexual instinct; rather this is a deviation, just as anal intercourse is a deviation for heterosexuals.' Raffalovich went further, and argued that men who loved men would cheerfully support changes in the law which permitted activities like mutual masturbation and fellatio between consenting adults, while continuing to treat sodomy as a crime.

  For Oscar and Bosie, sex was never the most important component of their relationship. Once, after Oscar's release from prison, when they were discussing the sexual side of their relationship, Oscar said, `Oh, it was so little that, and then only by accident, essentially it was always a reaching up toward the ideal, and in the end it became utterly ideal.' Bosie told his mother that nobody could ever love him as `faithfully, loyally, devotedly, unselfishly and purely as Oscar loves me'. Their love, he said, was `perfect love, more spiritual than sensual, a truly Platonic love, the love of an artist for a beautiful mind and a beautiful body'.

  Bosie was right. It was an ideal and idealised love: poetic, pure and perfect. But the perfect love of Oscar and Bosie had foundations of perfect, and more generalised, lust. As they played out the drama of their great love, both Oscar and Bosie were having as much sex as they could with boys and young men. They were addicted to sex. Sex, frequent sex, with as many people as possible, drove them. After all, Oscar declared, sex was `all a question for physiology', a biological function, a bodily need. `Sins of the flesh are nothing,' he said. `They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured.' To find the sex they craved, Oscar and Bosie hunted singly and as a pair. They would find lovers for each other, and they were happy to share lovers. Sexual fidelity was unimportant. What mattered was spiritual fidelity. `Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love,' declared Lord Henry- Wotton. `It is the faithless who know love's tragedies.'

  Love or lust? Lust or love? And how on earth to synthesise the two? It was a tension, a contradiction, a conundrum which had vexed Oscar for most of his adult life. Now, in a single, brilliant and inspired stroke, Oscar and Bosie had cut through the Gordian Knot of Victorian morality's thorniest problem. Love and lust were not, they realised, contradictory. They were complementary. Why choose one or the other, when you could have both? Indeed, it was impossible to choose one or the other, when they were indissolubly linked. Love and lust were like the sun and the moon, light and shadow. One could not exist without the other. They were part of the great wheel of life, part of the perfect harmony of the spheres.

  `Be careful to choose your enemies well. Friends don't much matter. But the choice of enemies is very important.'

  The summer of 1892 seemed to go on for ever and ever. For Oscar and Bosie, it was a gilded, golden time, a honeymoon. They had fallen deeply and passionately in love and wanted to spend every moment together. Oscar presented Bosie with a copy of his Poems, recently reprinted by Elkin Mathews and John Lane. Inside he wrote `From Oscar to the Gilt-mailed Boy at Oxford, in the heart of June.' It was a bad pun. From being the blackmailed boy, Bosie had become the golden, gilt-mailed lover of Oscar. Oscar would always think of Bosie as shrouded in an alliterative golden haze. He was `the gilt and graceful boy', `the gay, gilt and gracious lad', possessed of a `slim gilt soul' and `gilt silk hair'.

  Early in July, Oscar announced to Constance that he was going to the fashionable spa town of Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt, to take the cure. This was only partly true. His real reason for going was that Bosie was already there, holidaying with his grandfather, Alfred Montgomery. Oscar also wanted to live down the fiasco surrounding the production of Salome, which had been due to open later that month. Oscar had persuaded the divine Sarah Bernhardt to take the title role in Salome, but, after thre
e weeks of rehearsals, Edward Pigott, Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain's Office, announced that he would not be granting Salome a licence for performance. Officially, the reason given was that the play depicted Biblical characters, but a letter Pigott wrote privately to a friend makes it clear that it was the play's seething sexual content which lost it its licence. Pigott called Salome `a miracle of impudence':

  Salome's love turns to fury because John will not let her kiss him in the mouth - and in the last scene, where she brings in his head - if you please - on a `charger' - she does kiss his mouth, in a paroxysm of sexual despair. The piece is written in French - half Biblical, half pornographic - by Oscar Wilde himself. Imagine the average British public's reception of it.

  Oscar was incensed by the refusal of the licence. `I shall leave England and settle in France, where I will take out letters of naturalisation,' he announced, rather hot-headedly. `I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness of artistic judgement.' Oscar's threat roused the poet William Watson to write a mock lament in the Spectator: