The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  But before the party broke up, Oscar invited Fred to lunch the next day at the Cafe Royal, where he asked Fred if he would like to accompany him to Paris for a few days as his `secretary'. Fred was thrilled. He had never been abroad before. Maurice Schwabe was to follow on, a day or two later. On 21 November, Oscar and Fred took the 2.45pm Club train for Paris and arrived that evening. They stayed at 29, Boulevard de Capucines, the small private hotel run with absolute discretion by Madame Goly where Oscar had stayed two or three times before. They had a small suite on the third floor, with two inter-connecting bedrooms. They lunched the next day at the Cafe Julien, after which Oscar asked Fred to copy half a page of manuscript for him. Fred was happy to oblige, and the task took him all of ten minutes. Then the pair of them went to Pascal's, the hairdressing shop under the Grand Hotel, where Fred decided on a whim to have his hair curled. Oscar tried, not very hard, to dissuade him. A sumptuous dinner followed. Oscar was tired out, so he went back to the hotel while Fred went out to the Moulin Rouge with the money Oscar had given him, and a lecture about the dangers of consorting with loose women he would find there ringing in his ears. Oscar told him, Fred said, `not to go to see those women, as women were the ruin of young fellows'. Fred returned to the hotel in the early hours. Oscar heard him come in and came into Fred's room. `Shall I come into bed with you?' said Oscar and offered to suck him off, or as Fred phrased it, `perform certain operations with his mouth'.

  Maurice Schwabe arrived the next day and Fred was surprised to walk into Oscar's room on the morning of 23 November and find the pair of them in bed together. Schwabe was as far from being Oscar's type as Oscar was from being Schwabe's type, but neither of them seems to have minded about this. Oscar had learned to take his pleasures where and when he could. If it was Fred Atkins one night and Maurice Schwabe the next, so be it. There was no harm done. It was all very light-hearted, pleasant and pleasurable, a happy Parisian jaunt. Oscar enjoyed being with boys like Fred Atkins. He liked to treat them, to show them something of the world, to buy them presents and to experience their excitement and their gratification. It was Fred's birthday on 24 November and a special lunch was called for, at which Oscar presented him with a silver cigarette case. There had been no time between meeting Fred and taking him to Paris to have it inscribed.

  Surprisingly, Fred never tried to blackmail Oscar. He seemed to be genuinely fond of him. Unlike many recipients of Oscar's silver cigarette cases who sold them immediately, Fred kept the one Oscar had given him, and they continued to meet and have sex regularly. Two days after their return to London, Oscar wrote to Fred at his lodgings in Pimlico and asked him to come and see him at Tite Street, where he was, he said, ill in bed. Oscar had been alerted, almost certainly by Alfred Taylor, to Fred's blackmailing activities and, for once, was on his guard. He asked Fred to give him back the letter he had just written to him, making him promise never to reveal anything about their trip to Paris. That small matter resolved, they proceeded to have sex.

  When Oscar rushed back to London from Babbacombe at the end of January 1893, it was almost certainly in response to a telegram from Bosie in Salisbury, who had arranged a pleasant surprise for him in the person of Alfred Wood. Wood was an unemployed clerk, or so he claimed. It is more likely that he was well on the way to becoming a professional `renter'. In January 1893, Wood was homeless and was sharing Alf Taylor's bed at Little College Street. Bosie had met Wood at one of Taylor's tea parties in early January, and they had had sex several times. According to Wood, Bosie telegraphed him and told him to meet Oscar at the Cafe Royal. Bosie wanted Oscar to share `Love's burden', to sleep with Wood. What neither Bosie nor Oscar knew was that in Wood's case the cost of `Love's burden' would prove to be extremely high.

  Oscar arrived at the Cafe Royal first. Wood turned up, as arranged, at nine o'clock in the evening, and was directed to where Oscar was sitting. `Are you Alfred Wood?' asked Oscar. `Yes,' Wood replied. Oscar ordered drinks. He liked what he saw. Wood was attractive, very attractive. He was seventeen - not twenty-three as Oscar later tried to claim - a thickset blonde, with a nice face, working-class, fairly presentable and very sexually willing. Oscar whisked Wood off to supper at the Florence. Oscar ordered champagne, and the meal was, according to Wood, `one of the best to be got'. The private room was convenient, enabling Oscar, so Wood claimed, to `put his hand inside my trousers beneath the table at dinner and compel me to do the same to him'.

  After supper, in the early hours of the morning, Oscar and Wood went back to Tite Street for sex. Oscar let himself in with a latchkey and they tiptoed upstairs to Oscar's bedroom where they had some hock and seltzer. The sex was very successful. After the usual `kissing &c', Oscar, according to Wood's account, placed his `person' between Wood's legs, pushing it back and forth until he ejaculated. Oscar gave him £2 in cash that first night, having cashed a cheque at the restaurant so that he could pay Wood for his services. Wood went to Tite Street the next day where the same thing happened. The liaisons continued every day for a week or more. Oscar would write or telegraph to Wood at Little College Street and arrange to meet him, usually between 10pm and midnight at the corner of Tite Street. In court, Wood testified that Oscar had eventually sodomised him. `It was a long time, however, before I would allow him to actually do the act of sodomy,' Wood said. After the first night, Wood's rates went up. Now Oscar was giving him `£3 or £4 at a time'. Oscar also gave Wood a gunmetal watch on a silver chain. But Wood was contemptuous of this cheap present and sold it for a few shillings. Oscar had also promised to take him away somewhere and to buy him more jewellery. But, as Wood deposed aggrievedly, he `did not fulfil his promises'. The now daily sexual contact between Oscar and Wood only ceased because Oscar had to return to Babbacombe Cliff. Constance was about to go to Florence, leaving Cyril at Babbacombe.

  Oscar's place with Wood was taken by Bosie, who had returned to London for a few days. Wood said that he stayed `several times' with Bosie at chambers in Jermyn Street, possibly those of Maurice Schwabe. `Familiarities', as Wood termed them, similar to those which he had engaged in with Oscar, took place on these occasions. But he did not say whether these familiarities included sodomy. Early in February, Bosie was in Oxford and summoned Wood - probably by telegram - to come and see him. Bosie was staying at the Mitre Hotel, and the two of them dined together that evening in the hotel. Wood may not have been presentable enough to sit in the hotel's dining room with a lord, so Bosie lent him one of his suits. Afterwards, they spent the night together in the Mitre and had sex.

  The next morning Bosie departed for Salisbury, to his mother's house, and Wood was to return to London. Bosie had paid him for his pleasures and given him a suit, possibly the suit he had lent Wood the previous evening. Oscar's `madness of kisses' letter was still in the pocket. To make matters worse, before he left, Wood helped himself to a handful of other letters from the new scarlet morocco box Oscar had presented to Bosie - the perfect receptacle, Oscar had assured him, for compromising letters. The letters were from Oscar, Lucas D'Oyly Carte and others, and were indeed compromising. Wood knew that they were worth their weight in-gold.-

  Bosie had been sent down from Oxford for the Hilary, or spring, term, having failed an examination. The Spirit Lamp had been taking up all his time and energy, and he needed a private tutor to help him catch up. Lionel Johnson suggested a friend of his, a fellow Uranian, Campbell Dodgson. The plan was for Dodgson to join Bosie at his mother's house in Salisbury, where, Dodgson assumed, they would be able to work undisturbed. He was wrong. 'Bosie's whims have led me dancing on devious ways, many and strange, since Saturday last, and more improbable things have befallen me in these few days than usually brighten my sombre and cowlike existence in as many months,' a slightly dazed Dodgson reported to Johnson. Bosie arrived at his mother's house in Salisbury, `a flutter of telegrams about him and dishevelled locks', and promptly plunged himself into correspondence about the Spirit Lamp.

  At lunch the next day, Bosie informed Dodgson `t
hat we were going to Torquay that afternoon to stay with Oscar Wilde!' Dodgson's account perfectly captures the disorganised, hectic, almost hysterical style in which Bosie conducted his life:

  Our departure was dramatic; Bosie was as usual in a whirl: he had no boots, no money, no cigarettes, and had omitted to send many telegrams of the first importance. Then, with a minimum of minutes in which to catch our train, we were required to overload a small pony chaise with a vast amount of trunks, while I was charged with a fox terrier and a scarlet morocco dispatch box, a gorgeous and beautiful gift from Oscar. After hurried farewells to the ladies, we started on a wild career, Bosie driving. I expected only to drag my shattered limbs to the Salisbury Infirmary, but we arrived whole at the station. When we had been gone an hour or so it occurred to Bosie that he never told Oscar we were coming, so a vast telegram was dispatched from Exeter.

  Bosie's stay at Babbacombe was a happy and carefree interlude. There were the children to play with, drives to be taken along the coast, conversation and laughter. Bosie recalls going with Oscar into a hotel in Torquay one morning for breakfast and being told by the waiter that there was some nice fish. `If you knew the breeding habits of fish you would scarcely call them nice,' said Oscar. They spent the rest of the day in a happy cloud of endless absurdities and cheerful nonsense. 'Babbacombe Cliff has become a kind of college or school,' Oscar told Lady Mount-Temple:

  for Cyril studies French in the nursery, and I write my new play in Wonderland and in the drawing-room Lord Alfred Douglas - one of Lady Queensberry's sons - studies Plato with his tutor for his degree at Oxford in June. He and his tutor are staying with me for a few days, so I am not lonely in the evenings.

  As the self-styled Headmaster of Babbacombe School, Oscar told Dodgson that he really thought he had `succeeded in combining the advantages of a public school with those of a private lunatic asylum'. Oscar also composed a set of school rules:

  Babbacombe School

  Headmaster - Mr Oscar Wilde

  Second Master - Mr Campbell Dodgson

  Boys - Lord Alfred Douglas

  Rules.

  Tea for masters and boys at 9.30 a.m.

  Breakfast at 10.30.

  Work. 11.30-12.30.

  At 12.30 Sherry and biscuits for headmaster and boys (the second master objects to this).

  12.40-1.30. Work.

  1.30. Lunch.

  2.30-4.30. Compulsory hide-and-seek for headmaster.

  5. Tea for headmaster and second master, brandy and sodas (not to exceed seven) for boys.

  6-7. Work.

  7.30. Dinner, with compulsory champagne.

  8.30-12. Ecarte, limited to five-guinea points.

  12-1.30. Compulsory reading in bed. Any boy found disobeying this rule will be immediately woken up.

  Campbell Dodgson's account of the visit to Babbacombe was rather more revealing:

  Our life is lazy and luxurious: our moral principles lax. We argue for hours in favour of different interpretations of Platonism. Oscar implores me, with outspread arms and tears in his eyes, to let my soul alone and cultivate my body for six weeks. Bosie is beautiful and fascinating but quite wicked ... Oscar sits in the most artistic of all the rooms, called `Wonderland', and meditates on his next play. I think him perfectly delightful, with the fullest conviction that his morals are detestable. He professes to have discovered that mine are as bad. His command of language is extraordinary, so at least it seems to me who am inarticulate, and worship Irishmen who are not. I am going back on Saturday. I shall probably leave what remains of my religion and my morals behind me.

  Such insouciance could not last. One evening Bosie lost his temper and there was a hideous scene. There was no reason for the scene; if there ever was, it was forgotten, dwarfed by the emotional explosion it had precipitated. Bosie became contorted by rage, his face livid, snarling obscenities and invective at Oscar. The next morning, Bosie flounced out, leaving Oscar feeling aggrieved and angry. The scene had been so terrible that Oscar was fully determined to end their love affair:

  When you left my house at Torquay I had determined never to speak to you again, or to allow you under any circumstances to be with me, so revolting had been the scene you had made the night before your departure. You wrote and telegraphed from Bristol to beg me to forgive you and meet you.

  Bosie's extreme penitence, his pathetic entreaties softened Oscar. They met, most probably in Salisbury, and Oscar forgave him. It was the start of a pattern of behaviour of idyllically happy times followed by ugly and terrifying scenes. This in turn resulted in Bosie's tearful pleas for forgiveness and Oscar's granting of plenary absolution.

  After this reconciliation they parted. Bosie was to spend a few days more in Salisbury and then join Oscar in London, at the Savoy Hotel, where Oscar had taken rooms at Bosie's special request. But the events at Babbacombe were still preying on Oscar's mind. From the Savoy, Oscar wrote to Bosie `with a heart of lead' begging him not to make any more scenes:

  Dearest of all Boys - Your letter was delightful - red and yellow wine to me - but I am sad and out of sorts - Bosie - you must not make scenes with me - they kill me - they wreck the loveliness of life - I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted by passion; I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me - don't do it - you break my heart - I'd sooner be rented all day, than have you bitter, unjust and horrid - horrid.

  `I'd sooner be rented all day.' It was a strangely prophetic comment. Less than a month later, both Bosie and Oscar found themselves being blackmailed. The renter was none other than Alfred Wood.

  Feasting with panthers

  'Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a .feast.'

  Oscar arrived at the Savoy at the beginning of March 1893, with Bosie following a few days later. There was, of course, absolutely no necessity for Oscar to stay there. He could easily have returned to Tite Street, or to the suite of rooms he had been renting since the autumn in St James's Place, where he could work undisturbed, or so he said. The Savoy Hotel was the most modern and the most opulent hotel in London, fully lit by electricity and with more bathrooms than any other establishment. The legendary Auguste Escoffier was the maitre de cuisine. It was Bosie who had been so determined to stay at the Savoy, a determination which may have been the root cause of the hideous scene he made just before flouncing out of Babbacombe. Whatever the cause, the price of reconciliation was, it seemed, a lengthy stay at the hotel. Oscar wrote later how Bosie had `begged' him to take him there. `That was indeed a visit fatal to me,' Oscar later reflected.

  They stayed until the end of the month, running up an enormous bill. When he was made bankrupt, Oscar owed the Savoy the enormous sum of £63 7s 10d for `food and drink' consumed there. In a deleted scene in his last play, The Importance of Being Earnest, bailiffs call on Algernon to arrest him and incarcerate him in Holloway Prison for an unpaid bill for food and drink run up at the Savoy. `I really am not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs for having dined in the West End,' says Algernon. `It is perfectly ridiculous.' The unpaid bill in question is £762 14s 2d. `How grossly materialistic!' says Miss Prism disapprovingly. `There can be little good in any young man who eats so much, and so often.'

  Oscar and Bosie's stay at the Savoy was certainly grossly materialistic. In De Profundis, Oscar recalled the expensive and exquisite luxury of their dinners there: `the clear turtle soup - the luscious ortolans wrapped in their crinkled Sicilian vine leaves' and `the heavy amber-coloured, indeed almost amberscented champagne'. Food and sex became inextricably intertwined. Oscar and Bosie had an insatiable appetite for both, an unquenchable desire to consume, to gorge, to gourmandise. Oscar likened his sexual tastes to food and drink, to the difference between white wine and red wine. `Suppose I like a food that is poison to other people, and yet quickens me,' he demanded of Frank Harris. `How dare they punish me for eating of it?' And Bosie wrote a poem about this time, `A Port in the Aegean', addressed to a boy.
Bosie yearned, he wrote, to know `the honey of thy sugar lips' which was `food to my starved eyes'. Oscar and Bosie entertained rough trade at a succession of lunches, dinners and suppers, where the best wine and the best champagne flowed, nearly always a prelude to sex. They called boys who were willing to suck their cocks `gourmets', and they saw themselves as connoisseurs of this rare and delectable cuisine.

  Oscar and Bosie's arrival at the Savoy marked the beginning of a two-year binge of intense and unremitting sexual activity with dozens of boys and young men; an endless cycle of pursuit and capture, of desire and satiation. `I am sorry to say that Oscar drinks more than he ought,' Max Beerbohm told Reggie Turner. `He has deteriorated very much in appearance, his cheeks being quite a dark purple and fat to a fault. I think he will die of apoplexy.' Oscar and Bosie became intoxicated not only by the copious amounts of alcohol they were consuming every day, but also by the thrill of the chase and the excitement of transgression. The more risks they took, the more they wanted to take. `It was like feasting with panthers,' Oscar said. `The danger was half the excitement.'