The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  `How can you have the flower of romance without a brotherhood of soul?'

  In November 1892, Bosie acquired a new toy in the form of the Oxford magazine the Spirit Lamp, one of Oxford's many ephemeral magazines produced by undergraduates for undergraduates. Its original subtitle, under the editorship of Sandys Wason, was An Oxford Magazine Without News. Bosie contributed an essay under Wason's editorship and was surprised and gratified when Wason approached him and offered to sell him the title. As the owner of the Spirit Lamp Bosie automatically became its editor, a task he took to with enthusiasm. He had had plenty of experience. At Winchester he had co-founded and edited the Pentagram, the first of five magazines he was destined to edit, and, as he later admitted ruefully, `the only one that ever showed a profit'.

  Bosie was determined to transform the Spirit Lamp from a slightly gauche undergraduate magazine into what its new subtitle ambitiously proclaimed as `An Aesthetic, Literary and Critical Magazine'. Bosie worked extremely hard to produce his first edition, which appeared in early December and included a sonnet by Oscar entitled `The New Remorse'. Oscar had presented Bosie with the sonnet a year earlier during their courtship. Bosie was flattered and believed that Oscar had written it specially for him as a love token. In fact, Oscar had published the poem four years earlier as `Un Amant de Nos Jours'. But its distinctly Uranian tone clearly signposted the Spirit Lamp's future direction.

  For the next four issues, the contents of the Spirit Lamp became still more Uranian. There were contributions from notable lovers of men and lovers of boys. John Addington Symonds contributed, as did Charles Kains Jackson, editor of the Uranian-inclined Artist and Journal of Home Culture. Kains Jackson contributed three `Impressions' to the March 1893 number of the Spirit Lamp, one of which rather daringly seemed to invoke the joys of oral sex:

  rapt I gaze upon Those glowing limbs, those lips which take Love's rose-pink and vermilion.

  Robbie Ross contributed. Max Beerbohm, the much younger half-brother of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree who was appearing as Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, contributed an essay, `The Incomparable Beauty of Modern Dress'. Bosie also managed to persuade Lord Henry Somerset, who was living in exile in Florence after fleeing England in the wake of his scandalous love affair with a young man, to contribute a poem in Italian, 'T'Amo', `I Love You'. The work of the editor himself was much in evidence, especially in the March 1893 number which even carried a short apology from Bosie about the number of his own poems he had published. In the May 1893 number, Bosie published his `Sicilian Love Song' which could hardly have proclaimed his sexual preferences more explicitly:

  Material had been submitted for publication that was too explicit even for Bosie to publish. In the Spirit Lamp's `Answers to Correspondents' column in May, Bosie responded to A.R. Bayley, `A.R.B. - I like your story very much, but I dare not publish it.'

  The Spirit Lamp attracted plaudits from its Uranian-inclined readers, and brickbats from others. The first issue of the rival Oxford magazine, the Ephemeral, called the Spirit Lamp an `unholy, decadent academy'. But Oscar was vastly excited by the very idea of the Spirit Lamp. He immediately commissioned Will Rothenstein, the young artist he had met in Paris the previous year, to do a portrait in pencil of Bosie in flannels lying back in an armchair, to be entitled `The Editor of The Spirit Lamp at Work'. And in a spirit of high good humour, Oscar wrote to Bosie at Salisbury after his poem had appeared in the magazine, complaining that he had never received a copy and teasingly demanding a fee. `I never got the Spirit Lamp, nor even a cheque!' he wrote. `My charge for the sonnet is £300. Who on earth is the editor? He must be rented. I hear he is hiding at Salisbury.'

  The Spirit Lamp advertised itself as a magazine for `all who are interested in modern life and the new culture'. The `new culture' was code for the new Uranian culture which Bosie, Oscar and many others wanted to see established. Kains Jackson called it `the New Chivalry', while Oscar and Grant Allen named it `the New Hedonism'. It was a literary, a poetic and a political moment, a movement where Culture, Chivalry and Hedonism were fermented together in the heady, revolutionary brew of a new sexual order. It aspired to make l'amour de l'impossible, the love of the impossible, possible; to translate the higher philosophy into articulate social and political flesh. It was a strange and powerful combination of passion and politics which used any and all tools at its disposal, invoking the glory that was Greece, deploying Malthusian arguments about over-population and sexological arguments that men who loved men were born and not made, and presenting medical arguments that sexual inversion was a biological fact, not a criminal choice. The primary aim was reform of the laws against gross indecency and sodomy, followed by a wish to win a wider social acceptance for men who loved men.

  Oscar had incautiously argued in favour of the `new culture' in his work. Both Mr W.H and Dorian Gray had contained powerful passages hymning the glories of Greece and their revival in the Renaissance. In Dorian Gray, he had explicitly argued against the Labouchere Amendment when he wrote how `monstrous laws' made the love of men for men `monstrous and unlawful'. And his essay `The Soul of Man Under Socialism', published in 1891, can be read as a clarion call for the sexual freedom of the individual. The essay is not so much about socialism as a hymn to `the new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills or not, is working'. And, as Oscar unambiguously declares, `the new Individualism is the new Hellenism'. Not only does Oscar invoke ancient Greece, he also proclaims the innate right of all to live without moral restraint, and the sovereignty of nature in deciding what is sexually right and sexually wrong. `Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval,' he wrote. `When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.'

  When Oscar and Bosie first met, they were both already convinced of the rightness of the `new culture', and both were intellectual activists for it. But the alchemy of love brought about a surprising political reaction. Merged emotionally and sexually, Oscar and Bosie were to merge politically. Their attitudes to their sexuality and to the `new culture' became radicalised and intensified. They jointly underwent a process of `coming out', of con- textualising their situation politically and socially, and both started to see themselves as advocates working for what they and many others referred to simply as `the Cause'. Both of them knew and accepted that there were risks and dangers inherent in becoming political activists, just as both of them knew that there were risks and dangers of exposure, violence, blackmail and imprisonment inherent in having sex with boys and young men.

  Bosie wrote to Charles Kains Jackson about the `new culture', extolling Oscar's leading role in it. `Perhaps nobody knows as I do what he has done for the "new culture",' wrote Bosie:

  the people he has pulled out of the fire and `seen through' things not only with money, but by sticking to them when other people wouldn't speak to them. He is the most chivalrous friend in the world, he is the only man I know who would have the courage to put his arm on the shoulder of an exconvict and walk down Piccadilly with him, and combine with that the wit and personality to carry it off so well that nobody would mind.

  In June 1892, the month that Oscar and Bosie first had sex together, Oscar met George Ives, who was to play an important role in further developing Oscar and Bosie's political awareness. Ives was the illegitimate son of an army colonel who had been brought up by his paternal grandmother, whom he always referred to as Mother in his - literally - voluminous diaries. Ives's diaries number one hundred and twenty-two thick volumes containing about eight million words. Much of the text of the diaries is indecipherable. Oscar once `dived' into Ives's diaries and `struggled with the bad handwriting'. The diaries are unreadable in another sense too. Ives wrote page after page in an exalted, half-ecstatic, ranting Old Testament style of thees and thous, prophesying bright visions of a Uranian future, alternating with terrible and Mosaic diatribes on the hypocrisy of society - the whole liberally soused with maudlin passages of misery and self-pity.


  Oscar picked Ives up at an Authors' Club dinner on the evening of 30 June. His interest in Ives was initially sexual. Ives recorded the event in his diary. `Our meeting was quite droll and romantic,' he wrote, `and would be pronounced far-fetched in a play but such meetings are not new to me or to him.' According to Ives, Oscar:

  looked at me with his sleepy eyes and said What are you doing here? I replied I was attending the literary dinner. But, he answered - tho' I forget the words used it is so long ago - What are you doing here among the bald and the bearded?

  Oscar invited Ives to come on with him to the Lyric Club. If he found Ives attractive when he picked him up, it seems that by the end of the evening he had thought better of it. Perhaps it was Ives's moustache that put him off. Oscar had never got over his abhorrence of facial hair. A year later, though, he did kiss Ives `passionately' on the lips, but by that time Ives, `having obtained permission from Mother', had shaved off his `anti-Hellenistic' moustache. After Oscar's trial and imprisonment, Ives spent several pages of his diary fantasising about how different Oscar's life might have been had he fallen in love with him, Ives, instead of with Bosie. Ives was amiable, attractive and likeable. He was moneyed and leisured, a poet and a penal reformer. But he was also depressive, highly secretive and obsessed with the `new culture', with `the Cause', as he called it. What physical attractions he possessed were outweighed, at least for Oscar, by his obsessive secrecy and, at times, dreary and repetitive conversation. Oscar was frequently exasperated by George Ives. Once, after Ives had particularly irritated him, Oscar suggested - not entirely in jest - that he should `establish a Pagan Monastery, possibly on some small rocky island in the Mediterranean'.

  In the autumn of 1893, a year or so after meeting Oscar, George Ives set up a secret society to promote `the Cause'. His diary for October recorded that he was `moving very rapidly now at last but I am prepared, it is well', and that his `time has been so full of plotting and planning'. Ives was still busy with his secret society in December, writing that he was `all creativity, laying plans and plots for the great movement of the future'. Ives named his secret society the Order of Chaeronea, after the battle of the same name where the male lovers of the Theban Band were slaughtered in 338 BC. Ives started to date his correspondence from 338 BC, this being year one of `the Faith'. The `Rules of Purpose' stated that the Order of Chaeronea was `A Religion, A Theory of Life, and Ideal of Duty', although its purpose was primarily political. `We demand justice for all manner of people who are wronged and oppressed by individuals or multitudes or the laws,' the Order's Rules of Purpose stated. Members of the Order were `Brothers of the Faith', although it seems there were some lesbian members who were `Sisters of the Faith'. The `Service of Initiation' for the Order still survives. It was `revised in the Year of the Faith, 2237' - or more prosaically 1899 - and it contains `The vow that shall make you one of our number':

  That you will never vex or persecute lovers. That all real love shall be to you as sanctuary. That all heart-love, legal and illegal, wise and unwise, happy and disastrous, shall yet be consecrate for that love's Holy Presence dwelt there.

  Dost thou so promise?

  It is impossible to know exactly how many men and women did so promise and were recruited to Ives's Order of Chaeronea, but at its peak `the Elect' numbered perhaps two or three hundred. No membership lists survive, and the members referred to each other by initials, if at all. And as in the bestorganised radical political groups, new members were recruited by just two existing members in a cell structure. Ives impressed on new members the vital need for secrecy in his best Old Testament prose. `Thou knowest the two who received thee in the Order. Thou dolt not need to know any others. Thou art forbidden to mention who belongs to anybody outside it.'

  The Order of Chaeronea was, according to Ives, emphatically not to be used as a forum for men to meet other men for sex. Sex `is forbidden On Duty, and the Order is most ascetic', Ives wrote. `Yet we condemn not any sensuality, so long as it is passionate. All flames are pure.'

  It is almost certain that Oscar was an early recruit to the Order of Chaeronea. `Oscar Wilde's influence will be considerable I think,' Ives confided to his diary on 26 October, when he was in the process of establishing the Order. Two of Oscar's sayings are quoted, reverentially, in the `Thoughts' which preceded the solemn vow members were expected to swear to, suggesting that Oscar was a potent and profound source of inspiration to the Order. The first was Oscar's ambiguous `Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling', the second, a line from his play Salome, `The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.'

  Bosie almost certainly became a member of the Order of Chaeronea as well. As one of the most passionate and outspoken advocates of the Cause it is inconceivable that he would not have joined. Bosie met Ives for the first time at a luncheon party at which Oscar and the young poet Theodore Wratislaw were also present. Ives was on the point of launching the Order and this luncheon may well have been to recruit Bosie and Wratislaw. Ives was suitably bewitched by Bosie. `He was very beautiful, I was indeed fascinated by him,' Ives confided to his diary. `I have an idea that we shall influence one another greatly.'

  In his diaries, Ives frequently makes reference to Oscar's belief that love, specifically sex, was the only true form of democracy. `Love is the only democratic thing,' Ives quotes Oscar as saying, and later adds `Oscar, you were right there; Love is the only democratic thing. The only bond which really binds the brotherhood of man.' The `democracy of Uranianism' was both idealistic and pragmatic. John Addington Symonds, `our dear brother of the Faith' as Ives called him, firmly believed that love and sex between men could and would undermine the rigid class system that prevailed. A lord sleeping with a labourer meant that both could break free from the `cataract-blinded' destiny of their class. Symonds put his principles into practice by having long and intense affairs with a Swiss peasant and a Venetian gondolier, as well as hundreds of sexual encounters with working men. `The blending of Social Strata in masculine love seems to me one of its most pronounced, and socially hopeful features,' Symonds wrote to Edward Carpenter. `Where it appears, it abolishes class distinctions.'

  Edward Carpenter agreed. Carpenter, who was from a wealthy middle-class background, had studied at Cambridge to become a minister in the Church of England but had renounced this for a new calling as a poet, socialist and sexual prophet. Carpenter established himself in a cottage at Millthorpe, just outside Sheffield, where he grew his own vegetables, made his own sandals and lived perfectly happily with a young man he had encountered one day pushing a cart through a blizzard. George Merrill's nickname was `Georgette' and he became Carpenter's devoted companion. Both Symonds and Carpenter were influenced by Walt Whitman's vision of `adhesiveness' between men, of `the high towering love of comrades' which was somehow separate from and more noble than the love between men and women. Whitman envisioned a bright world of democracy and equality, a spiritual commonwealth of conceptual cities and states built and cemented together `by the love of comrades, by the manly love of comrades'.

  In the early 1890s, Carpenter began work on an epic prose poem Towards Democracy, an ecstatic meditation on the journey that men and women must undertake to reach the millennium of true democracy. This goal, like Oscar's socialism, seems to hinge on the freedom and the flowering of sexual expression:

  I conceive of a millennium of earth - a millennium not of riches, nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual facilities, not absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies - shall attain freedom and joy.

  Carpenter's own sexual and democratic inclinations emerge from Towards Democracy when he writes of `entering the chamber' of a young male prostitute, dwelling on the image of the `thick-thighed hot coarse-fleshed young bricklayer with the strap around his waist'. Carpenter imagines himself as erotic putty in the hands of working men:

 
I will be the ground underfoot and the common clay. The ploughman shall turn me up with his plough-share among the roots of the twitch in the sweetsmelling furrow. The potter shall mould me, running his finger along my whirling edge (we will be faithful to one another, he and I). The bricklayer shall lay me: he shall tap me into place with the handle of his trowel.

  There was a widespread belief among Uranians that sex and love between men of the working class were innate, natural and spontaneous, free from guilt and free from notions of vice and sin. In E.M. Forster's novel Maurice, the handsome young gamekeeper Alec Scudder is the incarnation of a joyous, spontaneous and natural homoeroticism, in sharp contrast to Clive Durham and Maurice Hall, both of them angst-ridden middle-class lovers of men who seek to escape their sexual destiny through marriage and medical hypnosis respectively. According to `Q, an anonymous correspondent of Havelock Ellis:

  Among the working masses of England and Scotland `comradeship' is well marked, though not very conscious of itself. Friends often kiss each other, though this habit seems to vary a great deal in different sections and coteries. Men commonly sleep together, whether comrades or not, and so easily get familiar. Occasionally, but not so very often, this relation delays for a time, or even indefinitely, actual marriage, and in some cases is highly passionate and romantic.

  Another anonymous correspondent told Ellis how it was a fact, `patent to all observers, that simple folk not infrequently display no greater disgust for the abnormalities of sexual appetite than they do for its normal manifestations'. He went on to tell Ellis `of many cases in which men of the lower class were flattered and pleased by the attentions of men of the higher class' and gave, as proof positive, the testimony of a friend who had successfully propositioned many working-class men:

  He had made advances to upward of one hundred men in the course of the last fourteen _years, and that he has only once met with a refusal (in which case the man later on offered himself spontaneously) and only once with an attempt to extort money.