The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Mrs Robinson's prophecy was correct. Oscar and Bosie did go away together in early January the following year, to Algiers.

  Not long after his first reading, Oscar felt that he needed to pay another visit to the Sibyl. `I have been deeply impressed by what you told me. It has made me very happy,' he wrote to Mrs Robinson in the first week of August, `but the thing is so serious that I must see you again.' The so serious `thing' that Oscar was referring to must have been the troubles he and Bosie were having with Queensberry. `Your father is on the rampage again,' Oscar told Bosie, `been to the Cafe Royal to enquire for us, with threats etc.':

  I think now it would have been better for me to have had him bound over to keep the peace, but what a scandal! Still, it is intolerable to be dogged by a maniac.

  Still they trusted to Fate. Bosie had consulted another, unnamed sibyl who had prophesied a bright future. He had written to tell Oscar the glad tidings. `Your new Sibyl is really wonderful,' Oscar replied. `It is most extraordinary. I must meet her.'

  Oscar and Bosie's sudden interest in divining the future reflected their passionate commitment to the Cause. Some Uranians - like Edward Carpenter and George Ives - believed that many of their kind were gifted with special, mystical powers and that sodomy was, quite literally, a magical act. Edward Carpenter had studied the `curious and interesting' worldwide phenomenon of `the connection of the Uranian temperament with prophetic gifts and divination' and had come to the firm conclusion that Uranians in many cultures and civilisations, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, were `prophets or priests', `wizards or witches'. George Ives wrote about the Uranian `spiritual sight' and mused upon why it is `full and strong in some, and in many so absent or undemanding - but I love those best to whom it is given, they are of the higher life'. Ives believed he was possessed of the spiritual sight. `Only in the darkness, amidst solitude, do I feel to, somehow, come to my real Life. I seem to be in touch, then, with wonderful things and with mystic Powers.'

  As the Uranian Cause was finding its first, faint and tremulous voice in the early 1890s, it also sought to divine its spirit, to articulate its mystical philosophy. The commonwealth of shared sexual experience was not enough, not nearly enough, to launch an ideological battle against a virulently hostile world. Uranianism needed something more, something which could bind together the diverse strands of the movement, and the even more diverse individuals within it. And so the idea of a sexual and psychic solidarity, of a shared Uranian spirituality, was born.

  Just before midnight on the night of 27 July, Oscar and Bosie attended a Uranian `thought-reading' at the flat of George Ives in the Albany. The invited `thought-reader' was 'C.D.', or Campbell Dodgson, a friend of Lionel Johnson's, and the same Campbell Dodgson who had gone to stay with Oscar at Babbacombe Cliff as Bosie's tutor two years earlier. Dodgson was, according to Ives:

  positively prophetic in his power of thought-reading. He has an occult or magnetic power which surpasses anything I have yet seen, and would have been burnt as a sorcerer in the bad old times.

  But for Oscar and Bosie, there was little occult comfort to be garnered that evening. When they walked into the flat, Ives records, `difficulties arose':

  `C' was very nervous and for mystic reasons, would not come farther than the outer door. I think he must have known by instinct and his gift that `O' who came in and 'B' were very cross - I have never seen `O' so ruffled and knew there must be something wrong. (C says yes, but it is nothing very serious, I have no doubt he is right).

  Dodgson was wrong about the nature of what was ruffling the feathers of Oscar and Bosie and making them so cross. It was not trivial. It was deadly serious.

  Oscar was so deeply impressed with Mrs Robinson that he not only recommended her to two of his friends, but also persuaded Constance to go to her for a reading. Like her husband, Constance was deeply superstitious and had, in 1888, become a member of the fashionable Order of the Golden Dawn, a heady blend of Kabbalism, Buddhism, Theosophy and Freemasonry, whose members sought enlightenment and wisdom through occult ceremonies. Constance was seeking comfort and reassurance about the future. She was probably unaware of the threat Queensberry posed to her husband and her family in the summer of 1894. But she was only too well aware that Bosie was back in Oscar's life, and their attachment seemed stronger than ever.

  Oscar was desperately strapped for cash that summer. `I am overdrawn £41 at the bank,' he told Bosie. `It really is intolerable the want of money. I have not a penny. I can't stand it any longer, but don't know what to do.' It was shortage of money which forced Oscar and Constance to economise on their summer plans by taking a house, the Haven, on the Esplanade in Worthing for the long summer vacation. Property was plentiful and very cheap in Worthing that year. The previous summer there had been a serious outbreak of typhoid fever in the town, after the fresh water supply had become contaminated with sewage.

  In sharp contrast to the luxurious house at Goring that Oscar and Bosie had taken the previous year, the Haven was rather modest. `The house, I hear, is small,' Oscar told Bosie before he left London, `and I have no writing room.' Bosie was invited to come and stay at the Haven. `When you come to Worthing, of course all things will be done for your honour and joy,' he wrote. But a day or so later, Oscar was earnestly trying to dissuade Bosie from coming to stay. `Dearest Bosie,' Oscar wrote from the Haven. `I have just come in from luncheon':

  A horrid ugly Swiss governess has, I find, been looking after Cyril and Vyvyan for a year. She is quite impossible. Also, children at meals are tedious. Also, you, the gilt and graceful boy, would be bored. Don't come here. I will come to you.

  Oscar was trying to be tactful. Constance must have made it clear that she had no wish to receive Bosie in Worthing. But Bosie was not to be put off. He came and stayed on three occasions during August and September. In a letter to Robbie Ross, he admitted that his presence there had been a source of friction. `I had great fun,' he told Robbie, `though the last few days the strain of being a bone of contention between Oscar and Mrs Oscar began to make itself felt.' Though he later repudiated this statement, pretending it was a joke, Bosie admitted that relations between Oscar and Constance were at this time `distinctly strained'. Oscar's joke about just discovering that a governess had been looking after Cyril and Vyvyan for a year, though clearly an exaggeration, does suggest that he had little interest and took little part in domestic arrangements. Certainly the couple seemed bent on spending as little time as possible with each other and appeared to be living almost separate lives, coming together for the sake of the children.

  Constance spent August in Worthing, making at least one and possibly more trips to London on her own in the course of the month. She returned to London with the boys in early September, leaving Oscar in sole possession. She had found consolation for the neglect of her husband in a passionate friendship with a younger man. Arthur Humphreys was twenty-eight, a bookseller and publisher who worked for Hatchard's in Piccadilly. He was bringing out a small edition of Oscar's aphorisms, Oscariana, chosen by Constance, and this is presumably how they came to meet. Arthur was married, seemingly happily. He and his wife Eleanor had one child, a daughter. Quite when Constance and Arthur realised that they had feelings for each other is not known, but a letter she wrote to him in early June seems to mark a significant turning point in her feelings. `I feel as tho' I must write you one line to emphatically repeat my remark that you are an ideal husband, indeed I think you are not far short of being an ideal man!'

  Constance's note of `one line' extended to eight pages and includes an account, a justification, of how and why her feelings for Arthur came into existence. It seems that she was attracted to him at first sight. `I liked you and was interested in you, and I saw that you were good, and it is rarely that I come across a man that has that written in his face.' Constance made it clear to Arthur that she was attracted to him. `I stepped past the limits perhaps of good taste in the wish to be your friend and to have you for my friend
,' she wrote. Arthur was easy to talk to, a good and sympathetic listener. Constance opened up to him, revealing, as she had done to Oscar, the sadness and bitterness she still felt about her unhappy childhood at the hands of her mother. `I spoke to you very openly about myself,' she told Arthur, `and I confess that I should not like you to repeat what I said about my childhood: I am afraid it was wrong to speak as bitterly as I did.'

  Constance knew that there could never be a physical dimension to her love affair with Arthur, a fact she was ready to acknowledge. `Your marriage,' she told him, `was made for the sake of good, was the result your character, and so was ideal.' Constance concluded her letter by saying `I speak of you in terms of high praise to every-one,' and adding `but it is unnecessary to give reasons for so doing.' This is one of only two surviving letters which Constance wrote to Arthur. There is a gap of almost three months between the two. That dozens of letters were written and received during those three months, and that their relationship grew in intensity over the summer, is clear from Constance's second letter of 11 August when she wrote to `My Darling Arthur' to `tell you how much I love you, and how dear and delightful you have been to me to-day':

  I have been happy, and I do love you dear Arthur. Nothing in my life has ever made me so happy as this love of yours to me has done ... I love you just because you ARE, and because you have come into my life to fill it with love and make it rich.

  She signed herself `Your always devotedly loving Constance' and added:

  I shall try and give you this; and if I can't I shall post it. I shall come up on Thursday, so let me have a letter when I arrive PLEASE.

  Oscar was not blind to his wife's infatuation with Arthur Humphreys, and he could see the parallels and ironies of their situations as a husband and wife each in love with somebody else. In August 1894, while he was in Worthing and while Constance was going up to London to exchange furtive billets doux with Arthur, Oscar sketched out to George Alexander a scenario for a play, reputedly to be called Constance. As he explained to Alexander, the play concerned a husband and a wife: a man - like Oscar - `of rank and fashion' married to a woman very like Constance, `a simple sweet country girl - a lady - but simple and ignorant of fashionable life'. Eventually, `he gets bored with her', just as Oscar had been `bored to death' by Constance.

  The husband `invites down a lot of fashionable fin-de-siecle women and men' who are `horrid to the wife, they think her dowdy and dull', just as Oscar's friends had thought Constance dowdy and dull. The husband lectures the wife on how to behave. She must not, he enjoins, be `prudish', nor must she mind if anyone, especially the dashing Gerald Lovel, flirts with her. Constance, as Oscar knew only too well, was inclined to be prudish, with her views on `perfect morality'.

  The husband makes love to `Lady X', one of the fashionable fin-de-siecle guests, in the darkened drawing room, unaware that his wife is in the room and hears and sees everything. Oscar, of course, had made love to - and had sex with - dozens of young men in Tite Street, including Bosie. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that Constance either knew or had very strong suspicions about what Oscar got up to. When Lady X's husband beats violently on the door of the drawing room, demanding admittance and threatening to plunge the family into scandal (just as Lord Queensberry had violently beaten on the doors of Tite Street, threatening to plunge the Wildes into scandal), it is the wife who saves the day by telling Lord X that they had all been engaged in `an absurd experiment in thought-reading'. The wife then falls in love with Gerald Lovel, and too late the chastened husband begs forgiveness. The wife tells her husband she cannot forgive him, and, besides which, Gerald Lovel is the father of her unborn child. The husband promptly kills himself.

  Oscar thought the scenario `extremely strong'. `I want the sheer passion of love to dominate everything,' he told Alexander. Love was to dominate the play, and the suicide of the husband was the proper due paid to true love, `leaving love its tragedy, and so making it a still greater passion'. Although Oscar most certainly did not envisage committing suicide so that the sheer flame of love could burn even more brightly between Constance and Arthur Humphreys, it is significant that he believed suicide and tragedy were part of the power and passion of love. Oscar had by now begun to recognise that his love for Bosie was tragic, doomed and therefore all the more passionate. `I love him as I always did,' he said later, `with a sense of tragedy and ruin.'

  During August, there was some more disturbing news from London. Oscar read in the newspapers of a police raid on the basement of a house in the West End of London in which Alfred Taylor and Charlie Parker were caught up:

  Eighteen men were taken into custody by the police in a midnight raid in Fitzroy Street on Sunday, August 12, 1894, two of them being men in feminine clothing. Amongst them were Charles Parker, 19, of no occupation, 72, Regent Street, Chelsea; Alfred Taylor, 32, of no occupation, of 7, Camera Square, Chelsea; John Watson Preston, 34, general dealer, 46, Fitzroy Street, W., the proprietor of the raided premises; and Arthur Marling, 26, of 8, Crawford Street. The last named was described as a female impersonator, and was charged with being an idle and disorderly person. He appeared in court dressed in a fantastic female garb of black and gold.

  The house was being used as an unofficial club for drag queens, renters and their punters. The police testified how they had seen two of the arrested men, Preston and Marling, in a hansom cab, dressed as women, with men in ordinary clothes sitting on their laps. The police had apparently been watching the premises in Fitzroy Street for some time and claimed that most of the men they had arrested were `known' to them. This was alarming. Were the police beginning to systematically keep tabs on the Uranian demimonde? Only the previous year, in August 1893, Alfred Taylor's landlady had allowed a police sergeant to secretly search his rooms.

  The Fitzroy Street raid prompted Max Beerbohm to joke to Reggie Turner, `Oscar has at length been arrested for certain kinds of crime. He was taken in the Cafe Royal (lower room). Bosie escaped, being an excellent runner, but Oscar was less nimble.' Alfred Taylor's `husband', Charles Spurrier Mason, appealed to Oscar for help. `I was very sorry to read in the paper about poor Alfred Taylor. It is a dreadful piece of luck,' Oscar replied. He appeared not to be unduly concerned about Alfred Taylor. `Do tell me all about Alfred?' he wrote again a day or so later. `Was he angry or amused? When I come back to town do come and dine. What fun our dinners were in the old days!' Alfred Taylor and Charlie Parker were given unconditional discharges for lack of evidence, though the magistrate did comment that he had received a number of letters indicating that most of the arrested men were of `the vilest possible character'. Alfred Taylor immediately went back to his previous happy, chattering, rather vacuous life as everybody's friend and resumed his profession of part-time procurer. Charlie Parker reacted rather differently. Six weeks after his discharge, on 3 October, he enlisted for the Royal Artillery. His military records curiously note that his eyebrows met and that he had scars on the palms of both hands.

  Meanwhile, in Worthing, the weather during the first half of August was terrible. The wind blew and the rain poured down. But there were at least some pleasant diversions. On 13 August a Councillor Smith drew the problem of men's nude or `indecent' bathing to the attention of a Borough Council committee and asked if some kind of awning could be erected to screen off the beach at the east end of the Parade - practically in front of the Haven - where the men were joyously disporting themselves, weather permitting. Oscar and Bosie would have enjoyed such a perfectly Greek scene and may even have taken part in it.

  On 20 August, Oscar and Bosie picked up two boys on the beach at Worthing: Stephen and Alfonso. Oscar and Bosie were in the habit of going out sailing most afternoons, and that day Oscar and Bosie had spotted Alfonso Conway and a younger boy dressed in flannels `helping the two boatmen to drag down our boat which was high-beached' to the shoreline. `Shall we ask them whether they would like to have a sail?' Oscar apparently said to Bosie, who said `Yes.' The two boys `seemed
very delighted' and went sailing and swimming with Oscar and Bosie nearly every day afterwards. A third boy, Percy, also seems to have become part of Oscar and Bosie's circle in Worthing. Percy may have been a holidaymaker, as Oscar refers to his departure from Worthing, but Alfonso and Stephen were residents.

  There can be no doubt from Oscar's letter to Bosie that their relationship with the boys was sexual:

  Percy left the day after you did. He spoke much of you. Alfonso is still in favour. He is my only companion, along with Stephen. Alfonso always alludes to you as `the Lord', which however gives you, I think, a Biblical Hebraic dignity that gracious Greek boys should not have. He also says, from time to time, `Percy was the Lord's favourite', which makes me think of Percy as the infant Samuel - an inaccurate reminiscence, as Percy was Hellenic.

  Though Oscar later claimed that Alfonso was `a youth of about eighteen', he was in fact only fifteen. He lived with his widowed mother who kept a lodging house in Worthing. That summer she had just one lodger, and the family had very little money. Alfonso told Oscar that he wanted to go to sea as an apprentice in a merchant ship, but that his mother was reluctant to let him go. To help make ends meet, Alfonso had sold newspapers and stationery from a kiosk on the pier, but at the time he met Oscar and Bosie he was unemployed - a `loafer', as Edward Carson later sarcastically described him; Oscar, rather more charitably, said he was leading `a happy, idle life'.

  Oscar was certainly very taken with Alfonso. The morning after they met, the four of them, Oscar, Bosie, Alfonso and Stephen, went fishing off Lancing in the boat. On their return to Worthing, they all had lunch at the Marine Hotel. In the ensuing days, Alfonso later said, he was `nearly always with' Oscar and Bosie. He was introduced to Oscar's sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, and seems to have become especially friendly with Cyril, even attending a children's tea party at the Haven.