The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  There were other unpleasant consequences resulting from the novel's publication. The Green Carnation had, according to Bosie, further inflamed the anger of Queensberry, who was now furious on all fronts: furious at the description of himself as `an elderly gentleman with a red face and small sidewhiskers'; furious at the washing of the family's dirty linen in public; and furious that his son's relationship with Oscar was now so publicly known to be sodomitical. Queensberry felt that he had been publicly humiliated and that the question on everybody's lips was `What is his father about, and why does he not interfere?'

  At the beginning of October, Bosie paid a surprise visit to Oscar in Worthing, turning up at the Haven late one Sunday. `You suddenly appeared,' Oscar recalled in De Profundis:

  bringing with you a companion whom you actually proposed should stay in my house. I (you must admit now quite properly) absolutely declined. I entertained you, of course; I had no option in the matter: but elsewhere and not in my own home.

  Bosie's `companion' was quite clearly a renter. He must have been very rough, very dangerous or very young for Oscar to refuse to allow Bosie to spend the night with him at the Haven. After all, Constance and the boys were no longer in residence, and Oscar had twice or three times entertained Alfonso Conway to dinner and sex. `The next day, a Monday,' Oscar recalled, `your companion returned to the duties of his profession and you stayed with me.'

  A Monday morning in October in Worthing. Bosie was `bored'. The long days of summer were over, and now Worthing seemed dull and deserted. Any semblance of domesticity between Oscar and Bosie invariably spelled disaster. Much as they genuinely loved each other, any time they spent together undiverted by friends and amusements, or undiluted by `the eternal quest for beauty', by their compulsive pursuit of boys, created friction. Bosie insisted on being taken to Brighton. They arrived there on 4 October and booked into the Hotel Metropole, where Bosie was immediately struck down with `that dreadful low fever that is foolishly called the influenza'. As he recalled in De Profundis, Oscar nursed Bosie devotedly, waiting on him and tending him `with every luxury of fruit, flowers, presents, books and the like', as well as with `affection, tenderness and love'.

  After four days, Bosie recovered, and, since their hotel bill was already £9, Oscar decided to take cheaper rooms in Brighton where he would have sufficient peace and quiet to finish off the play he was working on. No sooner were they installed in the lodgings than Oscar too went down with influenza. After the devotion he had shown in nursing Bosie, he quite reasonably expected Bosie to reciprocate. He was to be bitterly disappointed. Bosie announced that he had to go to London - on business, he said - but that he would return the same day. `In London you meet a friend,' Oscar recalled in De Profundis, `and do not come back to Brighton till late the next day.' For those two days, Bosie left Oscar `entirely alone without care, without attendance, without anything'.

  On the Saturday evening, Oscar begged Bosie to come back a little earlier than usual and sit with him. Bosie agreed with an `irritable voice and ungracious manner'. Oscar waited till eleven o'clock. Still Bosie did not appear. `I then left a note for you in your room just reminding you of the promise you had made me, and how you had kept it,' wrote Oscar. It was hardly tactful. Oscar must have known by now that Bosie could brook no criticism. It brought out the very worst in him. `At three in the morning, unable to sleep,' Oscar continued, `and tortured with thirst, I made my way, in the dark and cold, down to the sitting room in the hopes of finding some water there. I found you':

  You fell on me with every hideous word an intemperate mood, an undisciplined and untutored nature could suggest. By the terrible alchemy of egotism you converted your remorse into rage. You accused me of selfishness in expecting you to be with me when I was ill; of standing between you and your amusements; of trying to deprive you of your pleasures.

  It transpired that Bosie had come back to the lodgings at midnight and, finding Oscar's note waiting for him, had fallen into an angry brooding rage. He told Oscar he had come back simply to change out of his dress clothes before going out again in the hope that `new pleasures were waiting'. Those new pleasures were sexual. Bosie had hoped to go out and find a boy, but Oscar's note of recrimination had effectively doused his mood of sexual expectation.

  The row continued the next morning when there was another nasty scene - `with renewed emphasis and more violent assertion' - in Oscar's bedroom. `I told you at length to leave,' Oscar recalled:

  You pretended to do so, but when I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you moved suddenly towards me. A sense of horror came over me, for what exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two flights of stairs to the sitting room.

  Bosie left the lodgings that morning, having silently helped himself to some of Oscar's money. Three days later, on the morning of his birthday, Oscar received a particularly foul letter in which Bosie congratulated him on his prudence in leaping out of his sickbed when he did. `It was an ugly moment for you,' Bosie wrote, `uglier than you imagine.' He savagely and sneeringly concluded his letter. `When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.'

  Oscar's melodramatic account of this event in De Profundis strongly suggests that Bosie was on the point of attacking him, either with the revolver he had bought to try and frighten Queensberry, or with `a common dinner knife that by chance was lying on the table between us'. It was an ugly row, but it was not the first they had had, nor would it be the last. Max Beerbohm gleefully told Ada Leverson that Oscar and Bosie had had `a very serious quarrel' and `Oscar does not answer Bosie's telegrams'.

  Despite the row, Oscar managed to complete the play he had been working on for George Alexander. The Importance of Being Earnest was Oscar's fourth society comedy, and it was to be his last and greatest play. Oscar wrote Earnest extremely quickly out of a desperate need for money. `I am so pressed for money,' he told Alexander, `that I don't know what to do.' He managed to extract £150 from Alexander for an option on the play and seems to have started work the moment he arrived in Worthing, hindered - or perhaps even helped - by the well-meaning efforts of Arthur, his butler. `My play is really very funny: I am quite delighted with it,' Oscar told Bosie. `But it is not shaped yet. It lies in Sibylline leaves about the room, and Arthur has twice made a chaos of it by "tidying up". The result, however, was rather dramatic.'

  Both Bosie and Robbie Ross claimed to have had a hand in helping Oscar create what has become his most enduring and characteristic work of art. Bosie told his friend Marie Stopes that he was `in and out of his study' all the time Oscar was writing Earnest, that `they talked and laughed about it' and a number of the jokes were his. Robbie Ross said that, when he spent two months lodging with the Wildes in Tite Street in 1887, he had written down many of Oscar's bon-mots and epigrams. `To tell you a great secret which I ought not to do,' Ross told their mutual friend Adela Schuster shortly after Oscar's death, `I gave him my notes and he used a great deal of them for one of his later plays which was written in a great hurry against time as he wanted money.'

  Unlike Oscar's three previous society comedies, The Importance of Being Earnest does not explore moral themes like adultery, illegitimacy and corruption. Nevertheless, Oscar was adamant that the play did indeed have a philosophy, which he expounded in an interview he gave to Robbie Ross for the StJames's Gazette. It was `that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality'. Earnest is both a comedy of manners and a comedy of errors, where accident and design conspire to simultaneously mislead and yet safely guide its quartet of young men and women to a prosperous - if not a happy - ending. The action of the play spins on the merry-go-round of courtship and marriage where birth, breeding, rank and wealth count for more than honesty, affection, love
and honour.

  The women of the play - Gwendolen, Cecily, Lady Bracknell and Miss Prism - emerge particularly badly and reflect Oscar's dislike of women and his fundamental distrust of their motives, especially in matters of love and marriage. `Women are the ruin of young fellows,' Oscar told the weasly Fred Atkins more than once, and he counselled his friend, Robert Sherard, to `act dishonourably' over an affair of the heart. `Act dishonourably. It is what sooner or later she'll certainly do to you!' Oscar portrays the women in Earnest as selfish, scheming, manipulative, jealous and grasping. All are seeking husbands, either for themselves or, in the case of the Gorgon-like Lady Bracknell, for her daughter. And all of them, to a greater or a lesser degree, pretend to be something or somebody they are not: Gwendolen Fairfax pretends to be a girl with `a simple, unspoiled nature' though she is, like her mother, Lady Bracknell, extremely knowing and very calculating. Cecily Cardew pretends - to herself at least - that she is engaged to be married, even though the engagement is entirely the product of her imagination. Lady Bracknell pretends to be the epitome of the blue-blooded, thoroughbred grande dame, even though she was a penniless nobody when she married into the aristocracy. And the prim, prudish Miss Prism poses as Egeria, the wise teacher, though she is far from wise and has distinctly unvirginal ambitions towards Canon Chasuble.

  The two young `heroes' of the play emerge with not much more honour. Jack Worthing is a wealthy foundling, and his `best friend', Algernon Moncrieff, is an idle young man about town. Both are seeking a wife. Without a family of his own, without any pedigree, Jack wants to marry the aristocratic Gwendolen, while the feckless Algy, without a penny of his own, wants to marry Jack's ward, the extremely rich Cecily. Algy is particularly cynical about marriage. `If I ever get married,' he declares, `I'll certainly try to forget the fact.' When Jack tells him that he has come up to town expressly to propose to Gwendolen, Algy's response is cynical in the extreme. `I thought you had come up for pleasure?' he says. `I call that business.'

  Both Jack and Algy lead double lives. In his country house where he lives with his ward, Cecily, Jack is forced to adopt `a very high moral tone on all subjects'. But since a high moral tone `can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one's health or one's happiness', he pays frequent visits to his flat in London, in the Albany, where, Dr Jekyll-like, he assumes the mantle of wicked Ernest Worthing. Algy also has a double life, escaping to the country to visit an imaginary and invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury. Bunburying is Algy's means of escape, his way of evading his social duties and family responsibilities. Algernon has Bunburyed all over the country and recommends the device to Jack. `Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury,' he says:

  If you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

  That Bunbury is in some way a codeword for the love that dare not speak its name is signalled when Algy informs Lady Bracknell that his friend has `exploded'. `Exploded!' Lady Bracknell exclaims:

  Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity.

  `Social legislation' was a euphemism for the movement to change the laws governing sex between men, and `morbidity' was a word frequently used perjoratively to characterise sex between men in terms of disease, decay and death. The extraordinary Uranian writer and poet John Moray Stuart-Young, who claimed to have had an affair with Oscar, and who even went so far as to forge letters from him, published a volume of poetry entitled An Urning's Love. (Being a Poetic Study of Morbidity). And when, nine months later, Oscar wrote from prison to petition for a reduction in his sentence, he described himself as `the sure prey of morbid passions, and obscene fancies'.

  Oscar was almost certainly drawing on his own considerable experience of Bunburying. He had spent the best part of ten years leading a double life, inventing excuses to get away from Constance and the children and spend time with young men of his own kind. `I am off to the country till Monday,' he had told George Ives in June, in a clear act of Bunburying. `I have said I am going to Cambridge to see you, but I am really going to see the young Domitian.' According to Aleister Crowley, there was an even more specific circumstance behind the concept of Bunburying. In 1913, Crowley wrote to a friend, Bruce Lockhart, who was an official at the British Embassy in Moscow. `I was going to tell you a story which very few people know,' he wrote, taking great care not to mention Oscar by name. `That is the inner history of the catastrophe that overtook the gentleman in whom Russia is so interested':

  The story is called `Danger of Bunburying'. Bunbury is a portmanteau word [of] Banbury and Sunbury. The author in question hastily getting into the train at Banbury found the carriage already occupied by a schoolboy who was returning from a public school not far away. They got into conversation and subsequently met by appointment at Sunbury. Hence the word Bunbury and its meaning. For our author began a series of frequent and unexplained absences.

  Jack and Algy, Gwendolen and Cecily inhabit an inverted, topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass world where nothing is what it seems, where right becomes wrong, where truth becomes lies and where the serious becomes trivial, and the trivial serious. The immoral universe of Earnest was the same immoral universe which Oscar had inhabited for so long, the same immoral universe in which he had successfully lived a double life, and where, adopting Algy's advice, he had tried very hard to forget the fact that he was married. Much of the fabric of the play is stitched together from Oscar's experience as a Uranian. Indeed, it is only truly explicable when understood in these terms.

  Just like Oscar and Bosie, Algy and Jack, the play itself has a secret Uranian life, comprehensible only to those with eyes to see, to the initiated, to the elect. `I hope some of the faithful, and all the elect, will buy copies,' Oscar told Robbie five years later, when Earnest was about to be published for the first time. The very title of the play is a Uranian pun, inspired in part by a volume of Uranian poetry, Love In Earnest, published in 1892 by a schoolmaster called John Gambril Nicholson, which recounted his obsessional love for a boy, probably one of his pupils. `One name can make my pulses bound/No peer it owns, nor parallel,' ran his poem, `Of Boys' Names', each verse concluding triumphantly: "Tis Ernest sets my heart a-flame.' Nicholson's poems were noticed by the great and the good of the Uranian community. `Have you read a volume of sonnets called "Love in Earnest"?' John Addington Symonds asked a friend. `It is written by a School-master in love with a boy called Ernest.' Among less literary Uranians, `earnest' - a corruption of the French Uraniste - enjoyed a short vogue as a coded signifier of Uranian inclinations. `Is he earnest?' had the same meaning, at about the same time, as the question `Is he musical?' No wonder then, that the name `Ernest', as Gwendolen remarks, `produces vibrations'. It was meant to.

  The play is littered with references to Oscar's Uranian life and Uranian friends. Jack Worthing takes his name from the town where Oscar spent the summer and met Alfonso Conway. In the earliest version of the play, the cynical Algy was originally called Lord Alfred Rufford, a name too similar to Bosie's name to be coincidence. And, like the reckless Bosie, who took innumerable risks in his eternal quest for beauty, Algy was always getting into `scrapes'. `I love scrapes,' says Algy. `They are the only things that are never serious.' Oscar also makes a not-so-veiled reference to Bosie's continuing feud with Queensberry when Jack says `I don't know a single chap at the club who speaks to his father,' and Algy replies feelingly, `Yes! Fathers are certainly not popular just at present.'

  Jack Worthing's double life is revealed by an affectionate inscription in a cigarette case, just as Oscar's double life would be revealed in court six months later by not one but several affectionate and highly indiscreet inscriptions in several cigarette cases. There is a nod to George Ives, or rather to his rooms in the Albany: Ives lived in E.4 the Albany, which Oscar used as the exact address
of Jack Worthing's chambers in an early draft of the play. In the course of the summer Bosie had introduced Oscar to his handsome schoolfriend from Winchester, John Bloxam, who was now an Oxford undergraduate and fervent fellow Uranian. Bloxam makes an appearance in Earnest in drag as Lady Bloxham, the lessee of Jack's house in Belgrave Square and `a lady considerably advanced in years'. `Ah,' remarks Lady Bracknell. `Nowadays that is no guarantee of respectability.' And Oscar could not resist slipping in a sly denunciation of the recently published The Green Carnation. `This treatise, "The Green Carnation", as I see it is called, seems to be a book about the culture of exotics,' says Lady Bracknell. `It seems a morbid and middle-class affair.'

  John Bloxam may also have been the inspiration for the character of Jack Worthing. In his diary, George Ives refers to Bloxam as `Jack Bloxam', describing him as `a most sweet and interesting dual character'. Ives does not explain the nature of Jack Bloxam's interesting dual character, but it was clearly worthy of note. Was Jack Bloxam's `dual character' the inspiration behind Jack Worthing's double life as Uncle Jack of the `high moral tone' in the country, and as the wicked, irresponsible Ernest in town, running up impossibly high debts at the Savoy, and constantly getting into `the most dreadful scrapes'?

  Among Oscar and Bosie's less salubrious friends, Charlie Parker turns up in the original four-act version of the play as one half of the firm of writ-serving solicitors, Parker and Gribsby. Gribsby arrives at Jack's country house to arrest the fictitious Ernest Worthing and take him to Holloway Prison for debts run up for food and drink at the Savoy. At the time he was writing Earnest, Oscar still had a large unpaid bill from the Savoy for food and drink he and Bosie had consumed during their lengthy stay there in March 1893, which combined gluttonous luxury with an orgy of sex. The scene is one of the funniest and one of the most resonant - in Uranian terms - of the play. `I really am not going to be imprisoned in the suburbs for having dined in the West End,' says an indignant Algy. `There can be little good in any young man who eats so much, and so often,' tut-tuts Miss Prism. Throughout the play, eating and drinking become sexualised metaphors for the Uranian consumption of `trade'. Phallic cucumbers are swallowed with `reckless extravagance' and dripping muffins consumed with decorous care to avoid spillage on the cuffs.