The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  A few days after they met, Oscar suggested to Alfonso that they should go on an evening walk. They met at nine o'clock at night at the East Parade and walked along the coast road towards Lancing. According to Alfonso's statement, Oscar suddenly `took hold' of him, unbuttoned his trousers, and masturbated him until he `spent'. `He did not ask me to do anything,' Alfonso said. The same thing happened a night or two later. Alfonso also had dinner at the Haven on two or three occasions. Each time after dinner, he recalled, Oscar `took me to his bedroom and we both undressed and got into bed'. These dinners must have taken place in September, after Constance and the boys had returned to London, as it is scarcely credible that Oscar would risk taking Alfonso to bed while Constance was in the house.

  Towards the end of September, Oscar took Alfonso to stay in a hotel. It was to be a great treat. `I promised him that before I left Worthing I would take him somewhere, to some place to which he wished to go, as a reward for his being a pleasant companion to myself and my children,' Oscar said. `He chose Portsmouth, as he was anxious to go to sea, but I told him that was too far. So we went to Brighton.' Oscar bought Alfonso a suit of blue serge, a pair of flannels and a new straw hat, trimmed with a red and blue ribbon. He bought the clothes for Alfonso, he said, `in order that he shouldn't be ashamed, as he told me he was, of his shabby and ordinary clothes'. Oscar's generosity was also tinged with self-interest. It would have been almost impossible for Oscar to take Alfonso in his ordinary clothes to a hotel without raising eyebrows and suspicions.

  They booked into the Albion Hotel. Oscar took a pair of rooms with a folding green baize door between them. They had tea in the hotel and then went out to a restaurant to dine. That night, Oscar was careful to lock the outer doors of both rooms before he and Alfonso got into bed. `He acted as before,' Alfonso said, only this time, `he used his mouth'. In all they spent two hours together in Oscar's bed. The next day, Oscar presented Alfonso with a cigarette case inscribed `Alfonso from his friend Oscar Wilde', a signed photograph, a walking stick and a book, William Clark Russell's The Wreck of the Grosvenor.

  Oscar's expedition to Brighton with Alfonso Conway marked the end of the summer of 1894, his last summer of freedom. As the nights began inexorably to draw in, new problems and new challenges were to assail him.

  The arsenic flower

  `It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.'

  On his journey up the Nile early in 1894, in the company of Reggie Turner and Fred Benson, Bosie had struck up a warm friendship with Robert Hichens. Hichens was a good listener, perhaps too good a listener. As Bosie extolled the genius of Oscar and the joys of his `eternal quest for beauty' to his three companions and fellow Uranians, Hichens listened greedily. Previously, he had been able to admire Oscar only from afar. He had heard him lecture in the Victoria Rooms in Clifton in October 1884 and seen him several times since at a distance, most memorably at a premiere at the Independent Theatre in May 1892, when Oscar had appeared `immaculately dressed, and wearing in his buttonhole a large carnation dyed a violent green' followed by `five ultra-smart youths, all decorated with similar green carnations'.

  In the spring of 1894, Bosie fulfilled his promise to introduce Hichens to Oscar. They met over lunch at the Cafe Royal and, like Bosie, Oscar took an immediate liking to him. `I thought him rather pleasant,' he told Frank Harris. There was no question of sexual attraction. Hichens was 30 when they met and was, as Oscar later wittily commented, `unrelieved by any flashes of physical beauty'. Though Hichens later sought to distance himself from Oscar and his circle, claiming in 1948 that he had only ever met him on three occasions, he was clearly on intimate terms with Oscar and Bosie. Oscar said that he `saw a good deal' of Hichens in the spring and summer of 1894. Hichens was a Uranian, albeit a reluctant one. He had been dazzled by Bosie's beauty, and now he was dazzled by Oscar's genius and the unorthodox sexual gospel he preached. He became Oscar's newest disciple. But Hichens was also a journalist who aspired to be a novelist. When he met Bosie in Egypt, and then Oscar in London, he realised that he had found the theme for his first book, The Green Carnation.

  The Green Carnation was published anonymously on 15 September 1894. It was the publishing sensation of the year and went through four editions in as many months. The short, sharp novel was a brilliantly witty portrait of Oscar and Bosie. Although it purported to be a work of fiction, everyone knew that it was based on fact. The book was not so much a skit or a satire on Oscar and Bosie as a documentary - and a rather dangerous documentary at that. Frank Harris said `it was a sort of photograph of Oscar', and Trelawny Backhouse called it `an undisguised portrait'.

  The novel opens with its `hero', Lord Reggie Hastings, carefully pinning a green carnation on to his evening coat. Lord Reggie is an extremely unflattering, if not downright unpleasant, portrait of Bosie as a consummately vain, selfish and egotistical young man who is supremely conscious of his startling beauty. `It is so interesting to be wonderful,' Lord Reggie tells himself:

  to be young, with pale gilt hair and blue eyes, and a face in which the shadows of fleeting expressions come and go, and a mouth like the mouth of Narcissus.

  Setting out for the evening in a cab, he spies an elderly gentleman with a red face and small side-whiskers who stares at him and sniffs ostentatiously:

  `What a pity my poor father is so plain,' Reggie said to himself with a quiet smile. Only that morning he had received a long and vehement diatribe from his parent, showering abuse upon him, and exhorting him to lead a more reputable life. He had replied by wire -'What a funny little man you are - Reggie.' The funny little man had evidently received his message.

  Lord Reggie's wire to his father uses the exact wording that Bosie had used in his telegram to Queensberry, the first devastating salvo in the terrible feud with his father. That Robert Hichens not only knew about the telegram, but could reproduce its exact wording and the exact context in which it was sent, was proof enough that he was privy to Bosie and Oscar's most private affairs.

  It soon becomes clear that, behind his beauty and his intelligence, Lord Reggie is a sodomite. He looks like `a young Greek god' and is `one of the most utterly vicious young men of the day', a young man who `worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth'. Lord Reggie has a penchant for slumming it with rough trade. `There are moments,' he says, `when I desire squalor, sinister, mean surroundings, dreariness and misery':

  The great unwashed mood is upon me. Then I go out from luxury. The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel. The thoughts sit in the Park sometimes, but sometimes they go slumming. They enter narrow courts and rookeries. They rest in unimaginable dens seeking contrast, and they like the ruffians whom they meet there, and they hate the notion of policemen keeping order.

  The plot of The Green Carnation - in so far as it has one - concerns the courtship of Lord Reggie Hastings and Lady Locke. Lady Locke is `a fresh looking woman of about twenty-eight, with the sort of face that is generally called sensible, calm observant eyes, and a steady and simple manner'. She is the widow of a colonial administrator and has a delightful young son, Tommy. Emily Locke epitomises all the qualities of prime English womanhood: purity, universal rightmindedness and a fortune in excess of twenty thousand pounds a year.

  Lady Locke and Lord Reggie are brought together by Mrs Windsor, `a very pretty woman of the preserved type, with young cheeks and a middle-aged mouth' - almost certainly a portrait of Ada Leverson, Oscar and Bosie's devoted friend and devout Uranian sympathiser. Lady Locke is fascinated by Lord Reggie's androgynous beauty and Lord Reggie is fascinated by Lady Locke's money. It is impossible to know whether or not Lord Reggie's determination to marry for money mirrored a similar determination on the part of Bosie to marry an heiress. With no funds from his father, it is entirely conceivable that Bosie had declared his intention of finding a rich woman to support him. Indeed, seven years later, Bosie carried
the scheme into practice when he set sail for the United States in search of an heiress, writing that he had had three firm offers, one of whom had `quite £20,000 a year'.

  Lord Reggie's greatest friend and influence is Esme Amarinth, an undisguised portrait of Oscar. He is a'tall and largely built man, with a closely shaved, clever face, and rather rippling brown hair' with `a gently elaborate voice', whose conversation is a cascade of witty epigrams and beguiling paradoxes. `I was born epigrammatic and my dying remark will be a paradox,' says Esme - prophetically. `How splendid to die with a paradox upon one's lips!' Like his counterpart in real life, Esme Amarinth articulates a dazzling gospel of sin and sinning, where all virtues are vices, and all vices virtuous. His gospel, like Oscar's, proclaims that to sin is to be healthy and natural. Virtue, or the conscious repression of the urge to sin, is unnatural and shameful. `Prolonged purity wrinkles the mind as much as prolonged impurity wrinkles the face,' he says. `Nature forces us to choose whether we will spoil our faces with our sins, or our minds with our virtues.'

  Esme's concept of sin - like Oscar's - is entirely sexual. What society calls sin, Uranians call love. He makes an impassioned speech about the persecution of Uranians. `There are only a few people in this world,' Esme declares:

  who dare to defy the grotesque code of rules that has been drawn up by that fashionable mother, Nature, and they defy in secret, with the door locked and the key in their pockets. And what is life to them? They can always hear the footsteps of the detective in the street outside.

  It could so easily have been - and perhaps it even was - a speech by Oscar. And the phrase `the footsteps of the detective' evokes the increasingly hostile social and legal environment for Uranians in England, a hostility which was already palpable. When, in November 1894, Oscar attended the premiere ofJohn-a- Dreams, a play by Haddon Chambers, at the Haymarket Theatre, he experienced this growing hostility first-hand. `The bows and salutations of the lower orders who thronged the stalls were so cold that I felt it my duty to sit in the Royal Box,' he told Bosie. `How strange to live in a land where the worship of beauty and the passion of love are considered infamous.'

  Esme - like Oscar - is the `inventor' of the green carnation. He describes it as `the arsenic flower of an exquisite life' and first wore it `because it blended so well with absinthe'. Lady Locke is bewildered and confused by the appearance of so many green carnations adorning the lapels of young men at the opera. `All the men who wore them looked the same,' she tells Mrs Windsor:

  They had the same walk, or rather waggle, the same coyly conscious expression, the same wavy motion of the head. When they spoke to each other, they called each other by Christian names. Is it a badge of some club or some society, and is Mr. Amarinth their high priest? They all spoke to him, and seemed to revolve round him like satellites around the sun.

  Intrigued, Lady Locke decides to quiz Lord Reggie about the significance of the green carnation. He tells her that those who wear the green carnation are `followers of the higher philosophy'. `The higher philosophy! What is that?' asks Lady Locke. Lord Reggie replies with a rousing declaration about needing courage to love as a Uranian:

  The philosophy to be afraid of nothing, to dare to live as one wishes to live, not as the middle-classes wish one to live; to have the courage of one's desires, instead of only the cowardice of other people's.

  Believing that he can either ignore or overcome the marital sexual expectations of Lady Locke -'the one awkwardness that walked in the train of matrimony' - Lord Reggie has almost made up his mind to ask Lady Locke to marry him, and Lady Locke has almost made up her mind to accept his proposal, when she overhears Lord Reggie promising her nine-year-old son a green carnation. `Do you love this carnation, Tommy, as I love it?' Lord Reggie asks the boy:

  Do you worship its wonderful green? It is like some exquisite painted creature with dyed hair and brilliant eyes. It has the supreme merit of being perfectly unnatural. To be unnatural is often to be great. To be natural is generally to be stupid. To-morrow I will give you a carnation, Tommy, and you shall wear it at church.

  It is a symbolic act of seduction and corruption and Lady Locke is horrified. It is possible that the planned seduction of Tommy Locke was based on Bosie's hoped-for seduction of Cyril Wilde, Oscar's oldest son, who was also nine years old. A few months later, in Algiers, Bosie was waxing lyrical about Cyril's beauty to Andre Gide. `He will be for me,' he told a shocked Gide.

  In the light of Lord Reggie's designs on Tommy, Esme Amarinth's lengthy panegyrics on youth and its joys take on a much more sinister face. `How exquisite rose-coloured youth is,' says Esme Amarinth as a troop of choirboys is ranged in front of him:

  There is nothing in the world worth having except youth, youth with its perfect sins, sins with the dew upon them like red roses - youth with its purple passions and its wild and wonderful tears. The world worships youth ... Let us sin while we may, for the time will come when we shall be able to sin no more. Why, why do the young neglect their passionate pulsating opportunities?

  Esme's comments go much further than merely celebrating the joys of youthfulness: they appear to stray dangerously towards suggesting that youth in general - and choirboys in particular - are ripe for the sexual plucking. Horrified, Lady Locke turns down Lord Reggie's proposal of marriage, much to his chagrin and to Esme's relief, who fears that marriage to Lady Locke might alter his protege. `The refining influence of a really good woman is as corrosive as an acid,' he remarks.

  The Green Carnation was a succes de scandale. There was intense speculation about the identity of the author. The names of the novelist Marie Corelli and the poet Alfred Austin were put forward as candidates. So many people believed that Oscar himself had written it, as yet another exercise in selfadvertisement, that he was obliged to deny these rumours. `Kindly allow me to contradict, in the most emphatic manner, the suggestion, made in your issue of Thursday last, and since then copied into many other newspapers, that I am the author of The Green Carnation,' he wrote from Worthing to the Pall Mall Gazette:

  I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not.

  Oscar's tone of frigid hauteur was the best response he could muster under the circumstances. To rail against the caricatures of himself and Bosie would be to dignify them with his attention and make it appear as if he and Bosie could not take a joke. But Oscar and Bosie spent many anguished hours wondering who in their circle had - Judas-like - so grossly betrayed them. The chief suspect was Ada Leverson, `the Sphinx of Modern Life', as Oscar had christened her, who had written skits and satires for Punch. They must have voiced their suspicions abroad. `I am not surprised that our Worthing friends think anything so witty as the "Green Carnation" must have been written by you,' Max Beerbohm wrote to Ada. `What agitated discussions Bosie and Osie must have had over the authorship of that book. I wonder if they have thought of Hichens at all?'

  When it finally emerged that Robert Hichens had indeed written the novel, Oscar and Bosie were obliged to send a witty telegram of retraction to the Sphinx: `Esme and Reggie are delighted to find that their Sphinx is not a minx after all ... Reggie goes up to town tonight - Cadogan Place. He proposes to call on the dear and rarely treacherous Sphinx tomorrow.' But behind the wit, both Oscar and Bosie were flustered and made uncomfortable by the appearance of The Green Carnation. Hichens had behaved ignobly, Oscar said. His description of Hichens as not so much a Judas as `a doubting disciple' was a penetrating insight. The ugly and unflattering portrait of Uranian love contained in the novel speaks volumes about Hichens's own sexual equivocations and self-loathing.

  The damage to Oscar and Bosie's reputations was real and significant. `The Green Carnation ruined Oscar Wilde's character with the general public,' said Frank Harris. `On all sides the book was referred to as confirming the worst suspicions.' The novel's barely disguised po
rtrait of them as proselytising, politicised sodomites was damaging and dangerous enough, but the portrayal of Bosie as a predatory pederast, intent on marrying Lady Locke not just for her fortune but also for her nine-year-old son, was an appalling indictment. It was no wonder the publisher, William Heinemann, had taken the precaution of having the manuscript read for libel by Sir George Lewis, fearing that he might be sued for libel by Oscar or Bosie, or both.

  But the real damage of The Green Carnation was its promulgation of the existence of a Uranian subculture infecting and corrupting the body social. It was, as Andre Raffalovich termed it, the `invisible city of Sodom', the enemy within, not just secret, unknown and unknowable, but highly contagious, a virus that spread by stealth, undermining and destroying all that was healthy, all that was sacred. Although the Victorians were utterly repelled by any sexual acts between men, they were more repelled, more fearful of any manifestation of social organisation between men who loved men. It was these fears of a spreading social and sexual contagion in the wake of scandals like the Dublin Castle and the Boulton and Park affairs which had prompted Henry Labouchere to introduce his new legislation in 1885 criminalising not just sex between men but anything that even vaguely hinted at `conspiracy' between men who loved men. The phrasing of Labby's law was so loose that even social contact between Uranians was potentially criminal.

  The Green Carnation stirred up a hornet's nest of fear and loathing. Privately, Oscar told Robert Sherard that the book had `really raised the hue and cry', and Bosie admitted later that `the book did me a lot of harm'. Nevertheless, when Trelawny Backhouse and Robbie Ross tried to warn Oscar of the dangers he faced in the hostile climate generated by The Green Carnation, he dismissed them, saying, `The Treasury will always give me twenty-four hours notice to leave the country, just as they did in Lord Henry Somerset's case.'