The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  It was an appropriate comment, given the circumstances. After the trauma of being blackmailed, first by Alfred Wood and then by Cliburn and Allen, Oscar was spending a wild few days in Paris with Bosie, Trelawny Backhouse, then a young Oxford undergraduate, and an actor, probably Harry Barford. Everyone seemed to be sleeping with everyone else. Oscar and Trelawny Backhouse were enjoying a lively sexual relationship. `Sexual relations were frequently commemorated between us,' Trelawny recalled, although Oscar admitted to him that he preferred sleeping with rough trade `because their passion was all body and no soul'. Their sexual relationship was destined not to last; Oscar began by eulogising Trelawny's `pomegranate lips' and his `alluring pedicandial presentment' but ended by telling the bewildered undergraduate, `My poor Trelawny, you are simply banal. I am sorry for you, because you are so ugly!'

  And - as if to symbolise Oscar's `better, saner, finer philosophy of life' - it was on this trip to Paris that he underwent, according to Trelawny Backhouse, `a mock marriage in the Hotel Bristol with a catamite in female attire from the gutter and the results of their union were concrete and visible (as formerly at the Savoy Hotel) on the drapery of the nuptial couch'.

  Brazen candour

  `Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what is the use of them?'

  Bosie and Oscar returned from their brief trip to Paris in May 1893, Bosie to Oxford and Oscar to London. Bosie did almost no work during this summer term, instead preferring to continue to concentrate his efforts on the Spirit Lamp. But the lovers saw a great deal of each other. Bosie was often in town, and Oscar visited Oxford almost every weekend, going up on Saturday morning and returning on Monday.

  Oscar's presence in his alma mater did not escape the satirical attentions of the editors of the Ephemeral who published a scathing article on a playwright they called `Ossian Savage', `a man of coarse habit of body and of coarse habits of mind'. The Ephemeral also ran a `missing word competition' for their readers:

  To-He often writes of things with brazen candour Non inter Christianos nominanda.

  This doggerel was a clear reference to sodomy and its conventional Latin appellation, the crimen tantum horribile, the crime so horrible that it was `not named among Christians'. And the unnamed addressee of the doggerel was clearly Oscar. But when Bosie invited the editors of the Ephemeral to meet Oscar, they were quickly charmed out of their antipathy towards him.

  Oxford had other attractions for Oscar, in the person of sixteen-year-old Walter Grainger. Grainger was employed as a servant in the house where Bosie shared rooms with his friend Lord Encombe, known as `Jane', at 34, High Street. Grainger was, according to Oscar, `a peculiarly plain boy', `unfortunately very ugly' - so ugly that Oscar said he pitied him for it. Ugly or not, Oscar had sex with Grainger on many occasions. Bosie had probably already had sex with him and passed him on to Oscar. When Grainger gave his statement two years later to Queensberry's solicitors, he said that, on the Sunday morning of Oscar's first visit to 34, High Street, he had gone into Oscar's room to wake him, and Oscar had kissed him. The next morning, Grainger again went in to wake Oscar. On this occasion, he claimed, Oscar started to caress him, unbuttoning his trousers and playing with his `private parts'. Afterwards Oscar gave the boy ten shillings. Oscar returned to Oxford the next weekend, and Grainger again came into his room to wake him up on the Sunday morning. This time, Oscar pulled Grainger's trousers and undergarments down and persuaded the boy to lie down on his back on the bed. According to Grainger, Oscar `placed his penis between my legs and satisfied himself.

  Sex with Grainger was now a fixture almost every weekend. But, disturbingly, in an effort to ensure Grainger's silence, Oscar threatened him, telling him that if he told anyone about what had happened, he would be in `very serious trouble'. Oscar was being cautious. He did not want the boy blabbing to his friends or family about what had gone on. By now both he and Bosie had had enough experience of being blackmailed to last them a lifetime. It was not that Oscar coerced Grainger into having sex. Although he was not a renter, or a male prostitute, Grainger was clearly willing to gratify the whims of gentlemen, especially if it meant a large tip. But it was probably not the first time - or the last time - that Oscar warned boys he had sex with that they would get into serious trouble if they breathed a word about it.

  In June, Bosie suddenly left Oxford. He had not taken his degree. There were rumours that he had been asked to leave on account of an unsavoury scandal involving a local boy and blackmail. But no evidence has yet come to light to suggest that this was indeed the case. Like his father before him, Bosie may have decided that a degree would be of limited use to him in the literary life that seemed to be beckoning. `I really don't care twopence about having a degree,' he said, eerily using the self-same words his father had uttered when he left Oxford without a degree thirty years earlier. Bosie's first impulse was to telegraph to Oscar in London, begging him to come to Oxford. Oscar did so at once. Bosie announced that he did not like `under the circumstances' to return home to his mother's house. Instead, he wanted to go to Goring-on-Thames to spend a few quiet days with Oscar.

  They arrived in Goring on 12 June and took two bedrooms and a sitting room at the Miller of Mansfield Hotel. Bosie liked Goring and, during the week of their stay, they saw a large and attractive house, rather misleadingly called the Cottage, which was available to rent. Bosie persuaded Oscar to take it, not that Oscar needed much persuasion, whatever he said later. Within a week, they were in possession of the Cottage. It was their first home together. They would live the literary life in this idyllic corner of England. Oscar would write his next play, and Bosie, in between writing poetry, would translate Oscar's Salome into English. For recreation, there were the gardens, and there was the river. They would spend the perfect English summer there, perfectly happy. There was even room for Constance and the boys.

  Ina fit of optimism, Oscar took the Cottage for twelve months. At two hundred guineas a year it was expensive. Apart from the rent, the house needed staffing: a butler, a pair of parlourmaids, a cook and a scullerymaid were the minimum complement needed. With food and drink and other expenses, the costs for the three months that Oscar and Bosie actually spent at the Cottage amounted to a staggering £1,340. The rent and the servants' wages were the least of it. By far the largest proportion was spent on costly food and drink, especially drink.

  On about 20 June, just a week after their arrival in Goring, the `peculiarly plain' Walter Grainger received a telegram from Oscar telling him to come to the Cottage at one o'clock the next day. Grainger was given the rather grand title of `under-butler'. His official duties were to assist the butler, one Harold Kimberley, who had formerly been in the service of the Marquis of Queensberry. Unofficially, Grainger was there for Oscar to have sex with. Two or three nights after his arrival at the Cottage, Oscar went into the boy's bedroom, woke him up and told him to come into his bedroom quickly and quietly. This was easily accomplished, as Grainger had been given the room next to Oscar's, no doubt to facilitate such night-time manoeuvres. Oscar `acted as before to me', Grainger deposed, `except that he worked me up with his hand and then made me spend with his mouth'. The same thing happened almost every other night: Oscar would have inter-crural sex with Grainger and suck him off.

  According to Grainger, Oscar continued to threaten him. He said in his deposition to Queensberry's solicitors that Oscar told him that he would be in serious trouble, that he would go to gaol, if anyone found out what was going on. He was, he said, `frightened' by Oscar's threats of dire consequences. If Grainger was telling the truth, Oscar's threats reflect little credit upon him, and today would be condemned as a classic stratagem of sexual abuse. But was Grainger telling the truth? The statement he made sounds plausible. Yet it is possible that his account of the threats made by Oscar was fabricated. Grainger's statement was taken down by Queensberry's solicitors, who were gathering evidence to use against Oscar. Did they `prompt' Grainger to record these threats of dire cons
equences? If it was a prompt, why was Grainger the only one of the witnesses persuaded to speak of threats? And, if it was true, why was nothing made of such threats during the trials?

  It was not long before the secret of Oscar's night-time trysts with Walter Grainger was out. One night, when Grainger was lying naked in Oscar's bed, and Oscar was out of the room, Harold Kimberley, the butler, looked into the room. Kimberley said nothing, but saw everything. Soon, the other servants would get to know what was going on between Oscar and the young underbutler.

  Oscar was trying to write his next play, but life was so pleasant he found it hard to concentrate. Oscar and Bosie's life together was idyllic. Towards the end of his life, Bosie lamented that `the fun of being with Oscar', the sheer, shimmering joy of being in his company, had been overshadowed by the catastrophe which engulfed them. It was not, Bosie said, `his epigrams or more studied humour' which created this aura of joy, `but his continuous lightheartedness and love of laughter. Everyone felt gay and carefree in his company ... he bubbled all the time with frivolous, happy humour.'

  `I have done no work here,' Oscar wrote to Charles Ricketts from Goring. `The river gods have lured me to devote myself to a Canadian canoe, in which I paddle about. It is curved like a flower.' And Oscar told a young man called Stuart that his interest was divided between paddling a canoe and planning a comedy, and he was `finding that life in meadow and stream is far more complex than life is in streets and salons'. The summer was warm, and Oscar and Bosie were in the habit of stripping off in the garden and turning the garden hose on each other to cool down. On one occasion, the vicar called and, finding his way to the garden, discovered Oscar, enveloped in a bath towel. The vicar was not amused. `You've no idea the sort of face he pulled,' Oscar told Frank Harris. `I am delighted to see you,' Oscar told the vicar, pointing to Bosie lying naked on the grass. `You have come just in time to enjoy a perfectly Greek scene.' The vicar gasped, went very red and fled to the accompaniment of gales of laughter. The vicar was not slow to disseminate the `perfectly Greek scene' he had stumbled across at the Cottage.

  Constance paid four extremely short visits to Goring in the course of the summer. Her husband had taken a large house for a year where he and a young man had effectively set up home together. She must have felt affronted. It was galling for her to visit a house where she felt like a guest. But the boys needed to see their father, and Constance still hoped that she would, in the long run, prevail in Oscar's affections.

  Gertrude Simmonds - a young woman who had been very recently employed by Constance as governess to Cyril and Vyvyan - accompanied Constance and the boys to Goring. It was not long before she was let into the secret of Walter Grainger's night-time peregrinations into Oscar's bed. One of the parlourmaids, Alice Saunders, told her about it first. Alice Saunders had heard it from Harold Kimberley, and it was not very long before the three of them were discussing the matter in hushed tones. Gertrude Simmonds recalled that she thought it very `peculiar'. She started to notice other small things. Early in July, the family went to see the fireworks display at the Henley Regatta. It was during the fireworks, Gertrude Simmonds said, that she heard Mr Wilde's voice behind her and turned round. Oscar was speaking to George Hughes, the boy he employed to look after the boats. `Much to my surprise,' she recalled, `Mr Wilde had hold of his arm and was patting his shoulder familiarly. I was very much surprised.'

  The unusual goings on at the Cottage were common knowledge below stairs and the subject of village gossip. According to the proprietor of the Miller of Mansfield, there was gossip in the village about Oscar. Some villagers had said that they would like to `punch him'. Constance must have sensed an atmosphere: strange looks of commingled pity and contempt from her servants, and simmering, if inexplicable, hostility from the villagers. It was no wonder that she disliked spending time at Goring, and left the boys there under the care of Gertrude Simmonds.

  Like any couple living together for the first time, Oscar and Bosie had their share of rows and reconciliations. But one row in particular stood out. A group of Bosie's friends from Oxford had come to spend a weekend at the Cottage. `The morning of the day they went away,' Oscar recalled in De Profundis, `you made a scene so dreadful, so distressing that I told you we must part':

  I remember quite well, as we stood on the level croquet-ground with the pretty lawn all round us, pointing out to you that we were spoiling each other's lives, that you were absolutely ruining mine and that I evidently was not making you really happy, and that an irrevocable parting, a complete separation was the one wise philosophic thing to do.

  Oscar gave no clue as to the cause of the row. It may have had something to do with Bosie's Oxford friends. Oscar may have flirted with one or more of them a little too decidedly, arousing Bosie's ire. Nether Oscar nor Bosie were in the least bit jealous of each other's sexual adventures. That was merely `trade'. But a handsome and articulate undergraduate from Oxford posed a significant emotional threat. Whatever the cause of the row, Bosie left `sullenly' after lunch, leaving behind one of his `most offensive letters' with the butler, to be handed to Oscar after his departure. But before three days had elapsed, Bosie was telegraphing Oscar begging to be forgiven and to be allowed to return. Oscar relented and it was perhaps to mark this reconciliation that, as a present for Bosie, he extravagantly ordered - but never paid for - `four wire baskets filled with flowers' from the Royal Berkshire Floral Establishment in Reading. Everything was as it had been before, or almost so.

  While Oscar was busy with Walter Grainger, Bosie was having his own sexual adventures. Earlier in the year he had met Robbie Ross, and some sort of relationship ensued, sexual as well as emotional. `Ross was by way of being devoted to me in those days,' Bosie recalled in his Autobiography:

  If I had followed his example and kept the letters he wrote to me, I could have showed that he professed devotion and admiration for me in as extravagant terms as those used by Oscar.

  Devotion and admiration. Bosie was easy to admire, easy to fall in love with, and easy to become devoted to. Many of those in Oscar's circle, like George Ives and Reggie Turner, fell head over heels in love with the young and impossibly beautiful aristocrat and poet, who combined a boyish sense of freshness and purity with a compelling lust for life and sex. Many years later, Robbie wrote to his friend and amanuensis, Christopher Millard, about his relationship with a young man called Freddie Smith. `Freddie is the one friend besides Oscar and Douglas for whom I have made sacrifices.' By bracketing Bosie's name with those of Oscar and Freddie Smith, his avowed lovers for whom he had also made sacrifices, Robbie implies that his relationship with Bosie was one of the most important in his life.

  Robbie was a `slender, attractive, impulsive boy' when they first met, Bosie recalled. As he did with Oscar, Bosie was happy to share his sexual conquests with Robbie, and vice versa. They were the best of friends, sometimes lovers and, until force of circumstance caused them to part in the autumn of 1893, spent a great deal of time together. Robbie was a frequent and welcome guest at Sybil Queensberry's house in Cadogan Place. In a letter to his older brother, Percy, written in October 1893, Bosie described Robbie as `one of my greatest friends and one of the best fellows that ever lived'.

  Despite the erotic complexities of country living and the lure of the river gods, Oscar did manage to sketch out the scenario and some of the dialogue for what was to be his third society comedy, An Ideal Husband. Like all his work, the play is heavily autobiographical. Oscar told his friends Marigold and Orchid - Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts - that the play `contains a great deal of the real Oscar'.

  The plot revolves around forty-year-old Sir Robert Chiltern, UnderSecretary for Foreign Affairs and rising star in the Liberal government, tipped for Cabinet rank. Sir Robert's wife Gertrude - quite probably named after the Wildes' governess, Gertrude Simmonds - is `a woman of grave, Greek beauty', possessed of a faultless, if unbending, sense of moral rectitude. Significantly, `grave' was also the epithet Oscar applied
to Constance during their engagement, and Constance's grave beauty was also allied to a strong sense of what is right, a belief in what Constance herself described as `perfect morality'.

  The play opens with a brilliant evening reception for the cream of London society at Sir Robert's mansion in Grosvenor Square, which is marked by the unexpected arrival of the fascinating Mrs Cheveley, elegant, orchid-like, with red hair, pale skin and grey-green eyes. She has come to blackmail Sir Robert. Many years ago, as a young, ambitious but penniless politician, Sir Robert leaked the government's secret plans to invest in the Suez Canal to a mysterious Austrian financier, Baron Arnheim, enabling the Baron to make a large fortune from buying and selling the shares. Sir Robert was rewarded handsomely with a large sum of money and advice on how to invest it. In time Sir Robert became a wealthy man and married a wealthy woman.

  The Baron has since died, but the fascinating Mrs Cheveley is in possession of the letter Sir Robert Chiltern wrote to him about the Suez Canal shares, a letter Sir Robert thought had been destroyed. Mrs Cheveley's mission is clear. Unless Sir Robert publicly commits the British government to back the fraudulent Argentine Canal Company scheme, Mrs Cheveley will make sure that his incriminating letter reaches the newspapers. `Suppose when I leave this house,' she tells him, `I drive down to some newspaper office, and give them this scandal and the proof of it!':