The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Bosie decided to break his journey to Constantinople at Athens to spend a fortnight with Fred Benson, who was working for the British Archaeological Society. It was probably during his stay there that Bosie heard the news that Lord Currie had withdrawn his offer of the post of honorary attache. Rumours of Bosie's `carryings on' in Cairo may have reached him. Or James Rennell Rodd, Oscar's `true poet and false friend', now a diplomat in Constantinople, may have dripped some poison into Currie's ears about Bosie's sexual preferences.

  But the post in Constantinople was the last thing on Bosie's mind. He was becoming increasingly agitated about Oscar. He had not received any letters from him for several weeks now, not since the end of December, and he was bewildered, hurt and upset by the stony silence. Bosie had written a poem in Cairo - `The Sphinx' - the last lines of which seem to express his fears and anxieties over his relationship with Oscar:

  Bosie began to brood, to worry - rightly as it turned out - that Oscar was falling out of love with him, that he had, perhaps, already fallen out of love. He had written several letters to Oscar and despatched a swathe of telegrams, none of which had elicited a reply. After writing to tell Bosie that their love was `rosecrowned as of old', Oscar appears to have changed his mind about the relationship yet again, unilaterally deciding to end the affair without telling Bosie.

  From Athens, Bosie wrote in great distress to Sybil, begging her to get in touch with Oscar and persuade him to write to him. Oscar was surprised to hear from her. `I confess I was absolutely astounded at her letter,' Oscar recalled in De Profundis:

  I could not understand how, after what she had written to me in December, and what I in answer had written to her, she could in any way try to repair or renew my unfortunate friendship with you.

  Oscar wrote a frigid reply to Sybil to the effect that Bosie's best interests would be served by his remaining abroad. Thereafter, Bosie's telegraphic entreaties accelerated, and, when no letter came from Oscar, he turned to Constance for help. `Finally you actually telegraphed to my wife begging her to use her influence with me to get me to write to you,' Oscar recalled:

  Our friendship had always been a source of distress to her: not merely because she had never liked you personally, but because she saw how your continual companionship altered me, and not for the better: still, just as she had always been most gracious and hospitable to you, so she could not bear the idea of my being in any way unkind - for so it seemed to her - to any of my friends.

  Oscar's account in De Profundis is revealing. Behind her hospitable and gracious facade, Constance quite clearly loathed and hated Bosie; she was jealous of him and of his relationship with Oscar - a relationship which had long been `a source of distress' to her. At Constance's request, Oscar did get in touch with Bosie. He sent a telegram to him in Athens, and every word he wrote was seared into his memory: `I said that time healed every wound but that for many months to come I would neither write to you nor see you.'

  Bosie was devastated by Oscar's telegram. He started back for Paris immediately, sending `passionate telegrams' to Oscar pleading with him to meet him there, adding credence to the hypothesis that Bosie was under some sort of injunction to remain abroad. On the face of it, there was no reason to prevent Bosie from returning to London and laying amorous siege to Oscar at St James's Place, at Tite Street or at any one of their favourite haunts. Oscar declined to meet Bosie in Paris. Bosie begged and beseeched. Finally he despatched an eleven-page telegram to Oscar in Tite Street which contained `a threat of suicide, and one not thinly-veiled'. Oscar agreed to meet. `When I arrived in Paris,' he wrote:

  your tears, breaking out again and again all through the evening, and falling over your cheeks like rain as we sat, at dinner first at Voisin's, at supper at Paillard's afterwards: the unfeigned joy you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though you were a gentle and penitent child: your contrition, so simple and sincere, at the moment: made me consent to renew our friendship.

  It was an epic reconciliation for an epic love affair. The passion and intensity of Bosie's love for him, a love he was ready to sanctify by the sacrifice of his life, must have left Oscar shaken and humbled. Oscar had written about suicide as the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate expression of love. In The Portrait of Mr W.H., Cyril Graham commits suicide to demonstrate his faith and belief in the love between Shakespeare and Willie Hughes, and in Uranian love generally. And in Oscar's story `The Nightingale and the Rose', the nightingale ritually sacrifices herself to the ideal of a decidedly masculine, `flame-coloured' Uranian love by slowly impaling herself on the thorn of a rose bush. `Love is wiser than Philosophy, though he is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty,' the Nightingale declares.

  That the love affair of Shakespeare and Willie Hughes might be spurious, and the beneficiary of the Nightingale's sacrifice unworthy, is not the point. To believe in love so powerfully, so passionately was an act of almost religious faith. George Ives wrote of Oscar that `love to him was always a sacrifice, a sacrament, a religious rite'. The flames of Bosie's love may have consumed both himself and Oscar, but they also purified and sanctified their love. If Bosie was prepared to offer the ultimate sacrifice, then Oscar could hardly fail to reciprocate. He had passed a lifetime seeking for, and never quite finding, true love. Bosie's readiness and willingness to sacrifice his young and beautiful life at the altar of love was a revelation to Oscar. Never before had he encountered such intense flames of passion and knew that he might never do so again. Oscar and Bosie's reconciliation in Paris was arguably one of the great turning points in their relationship, the moment when they shed the skin of their previous passion to reveal a greater, deeper, more potent love for each other. In the course of their love affair they had feasted with panthers, fought with blackmailers and gambled with the danger of exposure, arrest, and imprisonment. Now they were both playing for the highest stakes.

  With their love truly `rose-crowned', Oscar and Bosie decided to return to London, arriving in early March. Bosie's relationship with his father had continued to be difficult and problematic. Queensberry disapproved of almost every aspect of his life: of his leaving Oxford without a degree, of his fecklessness and extravagance, and most of all of his friendship with Oscar. Indeed, he had urged Bosie, on more than one occasion, to end his intimacy. Only days after their return to London, Oscar and Bosie were lunching together at the Cafe Royal when Queensberry entered and they invited him to join them.

  It was eerily reminiscent of the occasion eighteen months earlier when they had met Queensberry by chance, also in the Cafe Royal, and invited him to lunch. Then, as now, the luncheon went off very well, and Bosie left Oscar and his father chatting amiably. Oscar even boasted that he `completely got round' Queensberry and that they were great friends. With this happy state of affairs continuing, Bosie decided to pay a visit to Oxford, where he saw Max Beerbohm. `Dear Bosie is with us,' Beerbohm told Reggie Turner. `Is it you who have made him so amusing? Never in the summer did he make me laugh much, but now he is nearly brilliant.'

  But disaster struck just days later when Oscar and Bosie had the bad luck to be spotted in each other's company by Queensberry. In a statement to his solicitors, Queensberry told how he happened to be standing near a window in Carter's Hotel when he noticed a hansom cab draw up outside the Albemarle Club which was just next to Carter's. Oscar and Bosie were in the cab, and Queensberry watched with horrified fascination as Oscar `caressed' his son in what he considered to be `an effeminate and indecent fashion'.

  Queensberry was `exceedingly distressed' and decided to write immediately to both of them and demand that they terminate their friendship. Signing himself `Your disgusted so-called father', Queensberry wrote on 1 April to take Bosie to task about his intimacy with `this man Wilde':

  It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eye
s I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I ever seen such a sight as that in your horrible features.

  Queensberry told Bosie that everyone was gossiping and speculating about his relationship with Oscar. `No wonder people are talking as they are,' he wrote. `Also I now hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true, or do you not know of it?' Queensberry closed his letter by stating that, if it was true that Oscar and Bosie were lovers, he would be quite justified in shooting Oscar on sight.

  The letter Queensberry sent to Oscar two days later was slightly more temperate. `Sir,' he wrote:

  I would request of you that you will close this acquaintance with my son Alfred. I make no accusations neither do I wish to characterise what your relationships are in this friendship. You must be aware that you are doing my son a great deal of harm and that any amount of people are talking about it. I myself saw you a short time ago with him in a hansom cab on terms of familiarity that actually made my blood curdle.

  Bosie's response to his father's letter was calculated to enrage him. He sent a telegram to Queensberry which read simply: `What a funny little man you are.' Bosie proudly described his telegram as `My celebrated telegram'. But it was, as Oscar later and more accurately remarked, `a telegram of which the commonest street-boy would have been ashamed'. Queensberry was duly enraged. `You impertinent young jackanapes,' he wrote to Bosie. `I request that you will not send such messages to me by telegraph. If you send me any more such telegrams, or come with any impertinence, I will give you the thrashing you deserve.' Queensberry closed his letter with a clear threat:

  If I catch you again with that man I will make a public scandal in a way you little dream of; it is already a suppressed one. I prefer an open one, and at any rate I shall not be blamed for allowing such a state of things to go on.

  Bosie followed up his telegram with a solicitor's letter in which he announced that he was relinquishing any claim to financial support from his father and that he declined to hold any more communication with him. He also demanded `some withdrawal of your grave and unwarrantable insinuations'.

  It had taken less than five days for a state of war to be declared between Bosie and his father. Queensberry could hardly be blamed for rising to the bait. It was barely six months since the debacle at Bad Homburg, where his plan of `thrashing' Lord Rosebery over his rumoured sexual relationship with his eldest son, Drumlanrig, had been thwarted after the personal intervention of the Prince of Wales. Queensberry had been sent away, his tail between his legs. To add insult to injury, Rosebery -'that bloody bugger' and `Jew nancy boy' - had, three weeks earlier, on 3 March, become Prime Minister after Gladstone's resignation. `God help the country say I if ever such as yourself come to guide her destinies,' Queensberry had told Rosebery the previous summer. Now Queensberry's worst fears had come to pass. Rosebery was indeed guiding the country's destinies.

  Queensberry was motivated by a complex blend of paternal instincts and gross personal insecurities. In attempting to `save' his sons from sodomy, a fate regarded by most Victorians as worse than death, Queensberry was doing what any dutiful father would have done. His threats to thrash Rosebery and to shoot Oscar would have been seen as entirely laudable. At the same time, Queensberry must have felt a deep sense of shame that two of his sons were apparently being sodomised by older, powerful men. To have one sodomitical son might be regarded as a misfortune, to have two looked like heredity. Queensberry must have asked himself whether the blood of his sons was somehow tainted. He repeatedly referred to Bosie's birth as a 'crime', a crime against nature. `I cried over you the bitterest tears a man ever shed,' he told Bosie, `that I had brought such a creature into the world, and unwittingly had committed such a crime.' Queensberry could and did point an accusing finger at his wife's family, the Montgomerys, especially `Alfredo Montgomerino', the `Jew pimp' and general ne'er do well. `There is madness on your mother's side,' he told Bosie. But there must have been times when Queensberry asked himself whether or not it was the tainted blood of the Douglases, his blood, which had produced so unnatural a brood.

  Even worse, Queensberry's confidence in his own sexual normalcy and prowess had recently taken a severe battering. Six months earlier, on 7 November 1893, he had suddenly married Miss Ethel Weedon, a young woman he appears to have met while he was on holiday in Eastbourne. No one from either the bride's or the groom's family was invited to the wedding, and it was left to Tom Gill, Queensberry's valet, to act as one of the two witnesses. Whatever Queensberry's motives for this precipitate marriage, the wedding night was a disaster. Within days, Ethel Weedon had left Queensberry and petitioned for an annulment, on the grounds of `malformation of the parts of generation' and `frigidity and impotency'. Queensberry was furious and humiliated. His young wife's allegations, coupled with the rumours about his two sodomitical sons, goaded him into a fury. He was determined to make a public scandal.

  Having enraged his father to the point of apoplexy, Bosie left London in the second week of April to spend two months in Florence. He may have thought that discretion was the better part of valour, and that some time away from his father might allow things to cool off. He may also still have been worried that his premature return to London might arouse the wrath of the outraged fathers, Colonel Dansey and the Reverend Biscoe Wortham. Bosie also hoped that Florence might yield up some of its youthful sexual treasures. `I wish you would write and tell me anything you know about Florence, as I have never been there before and am going by myself,' he wrote insouciantly to Charles Kains Jackson. `I mean of course anything you know with regard to the eternal quest for beauty to which I am bound.' `Beauty' was of course a euphemism for sex with young men, and was a term very much in vogue in Oscar's circle. Oscar had described Shakespeare's passion for Willie Hughes by saying that he was `the slave of beauty'. George Ives had spoken of the `Beauty-Spirit', confiding longingly to his diary how he wanted `to get a glimpse of the beauty side of life - so long as it does not harm the Cause'. Florence had always had a reputation for tolerance when it came to sex between men, and was popular with English Uranians. Bosie also got in touch with his friend Lord Henry Somerset, who had contributed a Uranian poem in Italian to Bosie's magazine, the Spirit Lamp, and who was at the centre of a small expatriate Uranian community there.

  Once Bosie had left for Italy, Oscar began to miss him. `The gay, gilt and gracious lad has gone away,' Oscar wrote to him, complaining that he was short of money. `I am in the purple valleys of despair, and no gold coins dropping down from heaven to gladden me.' There were titbits of news about trade:

  I had a frantic telegram from Edward Shelley, of all people! asking me to see him. When he came he was of course in trouble for money. As he betrayed me grossly, I, of course, gave him money and was kind to him. I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it.

  Oscar might also have told Bosie about an argument he had had with his former lover, Clyde Fitch. One gloomy, wet afternoon Oscar spotted Fitch walking along the street and offered him a lift in his cab. Taking his courage in both hands, Fitch started to remonstrate with Oscar regarding the `ugly rumours', presumably about his relationship with Bosie and Lord Queensberry's ire, which were swirling round London. Despite Oscar's airy dismissals and evident wish to change the subject, Fitch persisted. `Stop to let this man out!' an exasperated Oscar called to the driver. `I invited him for a drive, but he is not a gentleman!'

  Oscar joined Bosie in Florence in early May, and the lovers spent a month together, both of them bound on `the eternal quest for beauty'. Oscar certainly met Lord Henry Somerset, who was clearly not one to hold a grudge. Five years earlier, in a review in the Pall Mall Gazette, Oscar had scathingly dismissed his volume of poetry, Songs of Adieu, with the words: `He has nothing to say and says it.' Andre Gide was also in Florence. `Who did I meet he
re?' Gide wrote to his mother. `Oscar Wilde!! He looks older and ugly, but he is still an extraordinary storyteller.'

  If either Oscar or Bosie had thought that their absence from London might calm Queensberry down, they were sadly mistaken. The scandalous, sodomitical activities of his two sons continued to prey on Queensberry's mind. He was obsessed with `saving' his sons, at any cost. When Oscar returned from Florence, he received several vile letters from Queensberry, none of which survive. Judging by his usual epistolary style, they would have been long and incoherent rants, threatening exposure, thrashings or even death. In at least one of these letters, Queensberry brought in Lord Rosebery's name, as well as the names of other `exalted personages', almost certainly accusing them of being sodomites. Oscar was unsure what to do. Should he dignify Queensberry's disgusting invective with a reply? Or should he do nothing and hope that the screaming `Scarlet Marquis' would quickly tire of the game and slink away? More importantly, Queensberry's allegations posed a serious risk. If Queensberry was intent on `a public scandal', how long would it be before he was bruiting his allegations abroad? How long before they reached the ears of Constance or came to the attention of Scotland Yard? Oscar and Bosie were still debating what on earth to do when matters came abruptly to a head.

  On the afternoon of 30 June, at approximately four o'clock, Queensberry turned up at Tite Street unannounced. He was accompanied by a friend, `a burly friend'. Queensberry and his burly friend were shown into the library on the ground floor. Oscar was upstairs, changing. He was in the highest of high spirits, about to depart to spend an idyllic weekend with a young man in the country, and a carriage laden with bags was waiting outside. `I am off to the country till Monday,' he had told George Ives that morning. `I have said I am going to Cambridge to see you, but I am really going to see the young Domitian, who has taken to poetry.' It is not hard to guess the type of young man Oscar was planning to visit. The Roman Emperor Domitian was famous for his sexual vigour and for having sold himself as a male prostitute when he was young and poor.