by Neil McKenna
`There is not enough fire in William Watson's poetry to boil a tea-kettle,' was Oscar's sharp retort. Max Beerbohm was never in much doubt about whether Oscar would leave England. He wrote to Reggie Turner in July 1892:
I do not exactly know which course Oscar will take: but inasmuch as French naturalisation entails a period of service in the French army, I fancy that his house in Tite Street will not be in the hands of an agent.
In Bad Homburg, Bosie introduced Oscar to his grandfather, with disastrous results. Montgomery immediately took a `violent and invincible' dislike to Wilde and `declined to meet him again'. The urbane and worldlywise Montgomery had good reasons for his antipathy towards Oscar. He must have known about Oscar's reputation for unorthodox sexual tastes and realised that his interest in Bosie was more than literary. Montgomery's dislike of Oscar may well have been because of his own sexual tastes. There were rumours that he, too, preferred the company of young men. Perhaps the discreet Montgomery feared that Oscar might compromise him.
Oscar wrote to Constance with a highly coloured account of the rigorously healthy life he was leading. `Oscar is at Homburg under a regime,' Constance told her brother Otho, `getting up at 7.30, going to bed at 10.30, smoking hardly any cigarettes, and being massaged, and of course drinking waters. I only wish I was there to see it.'
After his return to England, Oscar took Constance and the boys on holiday to what the theatre critic Clement Scott had dubbed `Poppyland', the stretch of the Norfolk coast from Sheringham to Mundesley which was renowned for its beauty and the purity of its air. The Wildes rented Grove Farm, in the village of Felbrigg, near Cromer, for August and September. It was to be both a family holiday and an opportunity for Oscar to work on his new play, A Woman of No Importance. But the pleasures of domesticity soon palled. Oscar invited Edward Shelley to come and spend a week at Grove Farm. On impulse, he sent Shelley a telegram at the end of August asking him to visit, and posted £3 for his fare. Oscar's motive in inviting Shelley was entirely selfish. Shelley would provide a welcome sexual outlet. But Shelley declined. He had his hands full with John Gray, who he had met at the premiere of Lady Windermere's Fan. Gray and Shelley were having some sort of relationship. John Gray's sudden interest in Edward Shelley might have been a response to Oscar's obsessive affair with Bosie. To be displaced, effortlessly, by Bosie after nearly three years as Oscar's officially beloved was humiliating. More humiliating still was the ease with which Oscar had simply forgotten about him, letting him slither out of his life with barely a backward glance.
In early September Bosie arrived for a three-week stay. It was a happy, carefree time. Oscar and Bosie played golf almost every day. `Oscar had a pony cart,' Bosie remembered, `which he used to drive himself, to the great danger of traffic as he had not much idea of driving!' Oscar, Constance and Bosie spent a week together before Constance and the children left to go and visit Lady Mount-Temple at Babbacombe Cliff, near Torquay. After she left, Bosie was unwell for a couple of days, and Constance was concerned enough to write a solicitous note to Oscar. `I am so sorry about Lord Alfred Douglas, and I wish I were at Cromer to look after him. If you think I could do any good, do telegraph for me.'
Oscar's second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance, was conceived and largely written at Grove Farm, and then polished and revised towards the end of the year. Oscar again weaves autobiographical strands into the play. The story revolves around a rather bland and colourless young man called Gerald Arbuthnot, based perhaps on Edward Shelley, who is `an underpaid clerk in a small provincial bank in a third-rate English town', living with his widowed mother. Gerald has been asked by the brilliant epigrammatist and provocatively amoral dandy, Lord Illingworth, to become his secretary, an offer which seemingly has more to do with Gerald's personal charms than with his secretarial skills. Again and again, Lord Illingworth says he has taken `a great fancy' to Gerald, telling him, `It is because I like you so much that I want to have you with me.'
Oscar told the actor-manager who played Lord Illingworth, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, `He is certainly not natural. He is a figure of art. Indeed, if you can bear the truth, he is MYSELF.' Indeed, Tree played Lord Illingworth as if he were Oscar, affecting Oscar's voice, his intonations and his mannerisms. `Ah, every day dear Herbert becomes de plus en plus Oscarise,' Oscar remarked during rehearsals. `It is -a wonderful case of Nature imitating Art.'
In a deleted passage from an earlier draft of the play, the amoral Mrs Allonby teases Lord Illingworth about his interest in Gerald. `How you delight in your disciples!' she says. `What is their charm?' To which Lord Illingworth replies, `It is always pleasant to have a slave to whisper in one's ear that, after all, one is immortal. But young Arbuthnot is not a disciple ... as yet. He is simply one of the most delightful young men I have ever met."Disciples' was a word often used by Oscar, and by others, to describe the young men who hovered around him, and it seems clear here that the transition from `delightful young man' to `disciple' was a sexual rite of passage.
The erotic sub-plot of A Woman of No Importance was wittily and pithily summed up by Lytton Strachey when he went to a revival in 1907. Writing to Duncan Grant, Strachey described the play as `the queerest mixture'. It was rather amusing, he said, `as it was a complete mass of epigrams, with occasional whiffs of grotesque melodrama and drivelling sentiment':
A wicked Lord, staying in a country house, has made up his mind to bugger one of the other guests - a handsome young man of twenty. The handsome young man is delighted; when his mother enters, sees his Lordship and recognises him as having copulated with her twenty years before, the result of which was - the handsome young man. She appeals to Lord Tree not to bugger his own son. He replies that that is an additional reason for doing it (oh! he's a very wicked Lord!).
Lord Illingworth articulates many of Oscar's own beliefs and attitudes. `It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true,' declares Lord Illingworth, a reference to the increasing gossip about Oscar's unorthodox sexual tastes. Sex and sexual desire are for Lord Illingworth, as they were for Oscar, paramount. `Nothing is serious except passion,' he says. `There is no secret of life':
Life's aim, if it has one, is simply to be always looking for temptations. There are not nearly enough of them. I sometimes pass a whole day without coming across a single one. It is quite dreadful. It makes one so nervous about the future.
For the time being, at least, Oscar was assured of plenty of temptations.
The worldly, witty and amoral Mrs Allonby, who seems to have divined the true nature of Lord Illingworth's interest in Gerald, was probably based on the writer and wit Ada Leverson, whom Oscar had met a few months earlier and with whom he had instantly formed a close bond. Ada Leverson was fascinated by men who loved men, and Oscar was completely candid with her about his love life. She met and befriended several of Oscar's lovers, including Bosie, and was happy to allow Oscar to bring his lovers to dinner at her house.
There are other autobiographical inferences to be drawn from A Woman of No Importance. The triangular relationship between a young man, his mother and a dandy closely resembles the triangular situation of Bosie, Lady Queensberry and Oscar. Both Mrs Arbuthnot and Sybil Queensberry are women with a handsome twenty-something son. Both are alone in the world: Mrs Arbuthnot because Lord Illingworth would not marry her when she was pregnant, Sybil because of Queensberry's drunken, brutish behaviour and womanising. Both are extremely protective of their sons, and both have deep anxieties about their son's relationship with an older, dazzling, dandiacal man of the world who wishes to take him away for purposes they suspect are improper.
It is unclear exactly when Sybil Queensberry was first introduced to Oscar. Certainly, by the early autumn of 1892, social relations between the Wildes and Sybil were firmly established. Oscar and Constance visited Sybil at Cadogan Place and stayed with her at her house, `The Hut', near Ascot. Sybil and Constance seem to have beco
me quite close. Constance `frequently came to my mother's house', recalled Bosie, `and was present at a dance which my mother gave during the first year of my acquaintance with her husband'.
But behind the veneer of superficial friendliness with the Wildes, Sybil was deeply uneasy about her son's friendship with Oscar. It was not just the disparity in age, nor the evident gulf between Oscar's worldly experience and Bosie's apparent innocence. There was something else. Sybil sensed that their relationship transgressed the normal boundaries of male friendship, that there was a concealed sexual dynamic between them. Her father, Alfred Montgomery, must have communicated his absolute dislike of Oscar, and had, perhaps, hinted at his suspicions about the-sexual-nature of the friendship.
Sybil wrote to Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen, Bosie's Oxford college, asking his opinion. What kind of man was Oscar Wilde, she wanted to know. And was she right to be worried? Warren's reply was soothing. Oscar Wilde, he said, was a man of enormous talents and great integrity. Bosie was fortunate to have him as a friend. Warren's letter failed to assuage Sybil's anxieties, but there was little that she could do. Bosie would brook no interference in his affairs. So, for the time being, Sybil was content to play a cautious, waiting game, appearing to accept the friendship, while anxiously watching and hoping that it would burn itself out.
Privately, she sought to enlist Oscar to her cause, to make him collude with her in helping to resolve what she called Bosie's problems. Her purpose was twofold: by alerting Oscar to Bosie's defects of personality, she hoped to persuade him that his relationship with Bosie would be fraught with difficulties. At the same time, she wanted Oscar to subtly change his role from that of a lover to a sort of surrogate parent. Knowing, as she did, Bosie's absolute dislike of parental interference, Sybil maybe hoped that the relationship would then end in bitterness and recrimination. Before long, Sybil started writing to Oscar, sending him:
endless little notes, marked `Private' on the envelope, begging me not to ask you so often to dinner, and not to give you any money, each note ending with an earnest postscript `On no account let Alfred know I have written to you'.
Oscar recalled in De Profundis how he had `two long interviews' with Sybil, one in the summer, and another in the autumn, of 1892. `She told me of your chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as she termed it, "all wrong about money ".' `I asked her why she did not speak directly to you herself,' Oscar wrote. `On both occasions she gave the same answer: "I am afraid to: he gets so angry when he is spoken to".'
Oscar was puzzled by this reference to Bosie's anger. `The first time, I knew you so slightly that I did not understand what she meant,' Oscar told Bosie. `The second time, I knew you so well that I understood perfectly.' Oscar is referring to a trip he took with Bosie early in November 1892. Bosie had been ill, felled by an attack of jaundice, and they had decided to go to recuperate at the Royal Hotel in Bournemouth. It was there they had the first of their many rows, and Oscar experienced, for the first time, one of Bosie's sudden and terrible bursts of uncontrollable rage. Sybil told Oscar how Bosie was `the one of my children who has inherited the fatal Douglas temperament'. It was something Bosie, too, recognised in himself when he told his mother, `I have in my blood the love of a scene and a tragedy.' In De Profundis, Oscar reflected on:
those incessant scenes that seemed to be almost physically necessary to you, and which in your mind and body grew distorted and you became a thing as terrible to look at as to listen to: that dreadful mania you inherit from your father, the mania for writing revolting and loathsome letters: your entire lack of any control over your emotions as displayed in your long resentful moods of sullen silence, no less than in the sudden fits of almost epileptic rage.
But to the lovestruck Oscar in these early days, Bosie's rages, his tantrums were an expression of the depth of his passion, a potent measure of his love. And, after the terrible storms of rage, would come Bosie's childlike tears of repentance, which would always melt what Bosie described as Oscar's `loyal, kind and forgiving' heart.
Despite Bosie's manifold imperfections, despite his petulant tantrums and his frightening rages, despite his recklessness, his vanity and his spendthrift habits, Sybil loved Bosie with more passion and more devotion than she did any of her other children. This meant that Sybil and Oscar, like Mrs Arbuthnot and Lord Illingworth, were rivals for Bosie's love. Sybil became increasingly concerned about what she euphemistically referred to as Oscar's `eccentricities and peculiar views of morality'. She was convinced that Oscar, as she said later, was acting `the part of a Lord Henry Wotton', corrupting Bosie morally, and seducing him sexually. Oscar was, Sybil told Bosie, `the murderer of your soul'. For his part, Oscar always regretted his collusion with Sybil. His love for Bosie had become compromised and tainted by his strangely mistrustful friendship with Sybil. When Lord Illingworth says, `People's mothers bore me to death', Oscar may have been thinking about Sybil and her influence over Bosie.
Sybil's concerns were almost certainly shared by Bosie's father, Lord Queensberry. Queensberry had met Oscar ten years earlier and had had a desultory conversation with him. He knew Oscar by sight and was alarmed when, one day during the summer of 1892, he saw his son and Oscar together in a hansom cab. Bosie, he said later, `looked unhappy'. In the deposition he made justifying his public accusation of Oscar as a sodomite, Queensberry said that he had `part-read' Dorian Gray - read enough to realise that it was `a sodomitically-inclined novel'. He did not consider, he said, that Oscar was in any way `a desirable companion' for his son.
Bosie had always had an equivocal relationship with his father, loving him and at the same time loathing him. `All through my childhood and youth,' Bosie wrote later:
the shadow of my father lay over me, for though I loved him, and had indeed a quite absurd admiration for his supposed heroic qualities, I could not be blind to his infamous treatment of my mother.
During much of Bosie's childhood Queensberry and Sybil had lived apart. In 1886, Sybil and the children had the Hut near Ascot, which `at a pinch would hold quite twenty-five people'. That year, during Ascot Week, Queensberry had arrived without notice in the company of some of his sporting friends and his mistress, demanding to stay for the duration of the race meeting. Sybil was obliged to put off her own guests at the last minute and leave the Hut with her children. She was humiliated, and the following year succeeded in divorcing Queensberry on the grounds of adultery and cruelty. Queensberry did not bother to contest the case and the decree was granted in less than a quarter of an hour.
Whatever depths of resentment Bosie may have felt towards his father over the treatment of his mother, at least on the surface father and son managed to maintain a friendly and respectful relationship. Queensberry stumped up a more than generous allowance for Bosie when he went to Oxford and they maintained regular contact.
When Queensberry spotted Bosie and Oscar in the hansom cab in that summer of 1892, he decided to tackle Bosie on the subject. `My father suddenly one day spoke to me about it,' Bosie remembered, `and told me that Wilde was not a fit man to associate with.' Queensberry broached the subject with surprising tact. He was not `unkind or offensive', Bosie said. `He lightheartedly told me that I must give up knowing Wilde, and seemed to think that this would be enough.' It was not enough. Not nearly enough. Bosie wrote what he described as a `perfectly respectful and affectionate letter' telling his father that he had no intention of giving up his friend, `begging' him not to interfere. Queensberry tried again, this time by a letter, and Bosie parried. And there matters appeared to rest. The exchange left `some strained feelings' between Bosie and Queensberry, as Sir Edward Clarke, Oscar's barrister, later termed it, but it was a coolness rather than an outright rift.
When Oscar and Bosie returned from Bournemouth in November, they were lunching in the Cafe Royal one day when Lord Queensberry walked into the principal dining room. Oscar suggested to Bosie that this was a good opportunity to speak to his father and repair matters between them. S
o Bosie got up, shook hands with Queensberry and, after a few minutes' conversation, brought him over to Oscar's table. The three of them had lunch together. It went splendidly. Oscar turned the full force of his charm on Queensberry, and Bosie was equally charming, conciliatory and filial. Bosie was obliged to leave at about 2.30, leaving Oscar and his father chatting. In the course of conversation it emerged that they were both going to be in Torquay later that month. Oscar was going to be at Babbacombe Cliff with Constance and the boys, and Queensberry was to give a lecture, probably on the subject of Atheism. Would Oscar like to come to one of his lectures, Queensberry asked. Oscar said he would be delighted, and that he hoped to see Lord Queensberry at Babbacombe Cliff. In the event, Queensberry never went to Torquay. But he wrote a friendly note to Oscar there, saying he was sorry that they would not be meeting after all.
Whatever his faults of personality, and despite his reputation as a brute and a boor, Queensberry appears to have behaved in an exemplary fashion during these early months of the relationship between Oscar and Bosie. He was concerned, as indeed any Victorian father would be concerned, about his son's friendship with a man who had a reputation for sexual unorthodoxy and who had recently published a novel which had drawn fierce criticism for its aura of sodomy. He was concerned that Bosie might be corrupted, morally and sexually, by such a man, and he was sensitive enough to try and `lightheartedly' suggest that Bosie should draw away from Oscar's friendship. But after lunching with Oscar, Queensberry's fears were allayed. He had been seduced by Oscar's qualities and charms and was ready to admit that he may have misjudged him and that the world was in error about him.
A family crisis had, it seemed, been averted. Oscar could travel down to Torquay and Bosie could return to Oxford secure in the knowledge that Queensberry's disapprobation of their friendship had been surmounted, charmed away. It was too good to last.