by Neil McKenna
The summer wore on, with Bosie and Robbie at each other's throats. Bosie wrote to Robbie to inform him that their friendship was at an end. `He has really left me no choice at all,' Bosie indignantly told More Adey:
He has said things to me which are quite unforgivable and which would make it positively dishonourable for me to continue my friendship for him ... It seems to me that he is possessed by an extraordinary spirit of animosity and vindictive hatred towards me.
Bosie was right. Robbie had behaved badly and would continue to do so. He was prepared to go to almost any lengths to keep Oscar and Bosie apart. Robbie genuinely believed that Bosie had wreaked havoc in Oscar's life and would continue to do so. He wanted to protect Oscar from Bosie's destructive whirlwind. But there was also no doubt that, after the recrudescence of sexual relations between them, Robbie had cast himself in the role of Oscar's officially beloved, giving balm and succour to a disgraced genius.
Oscar felt increasingly lonely and isolated without Bosie, and Bosie was equally wretched at not being able to see Oscar. On 21 August, Bosie wrote to his brother Percy, threatening suicide:
I don't even know whether you will get this letter, and if you do I suppose you can't do anything. Unless however something turns up in a few days I shall shoot myself, as I am sick and tired of this miserable life I lead, always alone, always begging people to come and see me who never come.
Neither Oscar nor Bosie could restrain their love for each other, or live with the misery of being forced to stay apart. A week later, they met in Rouen, some fifty miles from Dieppe, and spent the night together. `The meeting was a great success,' Bosie recalled:
I have often thought since that if he or I had died directly after that, our friendship would have ended in a beautiful and romantic way. Poor Oscar cried when I met him at the station. We walked about all day arm in arm, or hand in hand, and were perfectly happy.
`Yes I saw Bosie,' Oscar told Robbie after his return from Rouen, `and of course I love him as I always did, with a sense of tragedy and ruin.' A few days later, Oscar wrote to his `own Darling Boy' with a passionate declaration of love and longing and need. `I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all,' he told Bosie:
I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don't understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.
The `chasms of moonless night' had been bridged. A week later, Oscar and Bosie eloped secretly to Naples.
Two outcast men
`Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.'
Oscar was careful not to tell anyone of his planned elopement with Bosie. But before he left Berneval, Oscar did announce his intention to spend the winter in southern Italy. `I cannot stay in the North of Europe: the climate kills me,' he told his old friend Carlos Blacker, who now lived in Switzerland:
I don't mind being alone when there is sunlight and joie de vivre all about me, but my last fortnight at Berneval has been black and dreadful, and quite suicidal. I have never been so unhappy.
Blacker was sceptical. He suspected that Oscar's motives in going to Italy were primarily sexual and wrote to him, accusing him of `returning to his vomit', as he put it later. `You are really wrong in your views on the question of my going there,' Oscar replied indignantly. `It is not perversity but unhappiness that makes me turn my steps to the South.'
Oscar and Bosie arrived in Naples on Monday 19 September. Neither of them had much money, and Oscar had been obliged to borrow the money for the train fare from Vincent O'Sullivan, a rather serious-minded young IrishAmerican poet and novelist in Paris whom he had first met in London a year or so before his trials. Oscar and Bosie installed themselves in the Hotel Royal des Strangers -'a hotel of absurd prices', Oscar called it - and celebrated their elopement by running up an enormous bill of £68 in just over a week. Naples was Bosie's choice. The climate was delightful, and the cost of living was low - at least in theory. But, most importantly, Naples was a city simpatico to the many European Uranians who flocked there - and to nearby Capri - to enjoy what Oscar called the area's `freedom from morals'.
Two days after his arrival in Naples, Oscar tried to explain in an emotional letter to Robbie why he had eloped with Bosie. `My going back to Bosie was psychologically inevitable,' he wrote. `I cannot live without the atmosphere of Love: I must love and be loved, whatever price I pay for it.' He had been lonely -'so lonely that I was on the brink of killing myself' and in the midst of his `loneliness and disgrace' Bosie offered him love which, after three months struggling against a `hideous Philistine world', he gratefully accepted. Oscar told Carlos Blacker that he knew his decision to return to Bosie would pain his few remaining friends. `But I cannot help it,' he wrote. `I must remake my maimed life on my own lines.' He admitted to Reggie Turner that his great love for Bosie was a paradox. `I love him, and have always loved him. He ruined my life, and for that very reason I seem forced to love him more,' he wrote:
So when people say how dreadful of me to return to Bosie, do say no - say that I love him, that he is a poet, and that, after all, whatever my life may have been ethically, it has always been romantic, and Bosie is my romance. My romance is a tragedy of course, but it is none the less a romance, and he loves me very dearly, more than he loves, or can love anyone else, and without him my life was dreary.
Oscar and Bosie quickly set up home together and rented the small and secluded Villa Giudice in Posilippo, a quiet village just to the north of Naples. `We have a lovely villa over the sea, and a nice piano,' Oscar told Robbie. The Villa Giudice was `very beautiful', according to one Italian journalist who visited Oscar and Bosie there:
All around, flower beds kept with the utmost care; farther on, shadowy alleys, and beyond the trees, the vastity of the calm sea, of a livid hue that stretched to the horizon. A deep silence.
They had a cook called Carmine, a maid and two boys to serve them - Peppino and Michele - as well as an infestation of rats. The rats were driven out by the successful ministrations of a `potent witch' who came to the villa and `burned odours and muttered incantations'.
`I intend to winter here, if all goes well,' Oscar told the young writer and music critic Stanley Makower, soon after his arrival in Naples. `I love the place: it is, to me, full of Dorian and Ionian airs.' Oscar was not just referring to the city's rich cultural heritage. There were plenty of erotic temptations to which he and Bosie were only too happy to yield. `The museum is full, as you know, of lovely Greek bronzes,' Oscar told Ernest Dowson:
The only bother is that they all walk about the town at night. However, one gets delicately accustomed to that - and there are compensations.
Life in Naples was perfect. All was harmony. Oscar and Bosie were both working, separately and together. Oscar was revising `The Ballad of Reading Gaol', and Bosie was writing sonnets. They were also collaborating on a libretto for an opera - Daphnis and Chloe - that Dalhousie Young was composing. `We are together,' Oscar told Leonard Smithers simply:
He understands me and my art, and loves both. I hope never to be separated from him. He is a most delicate and exquisite poet, besides - far the finest of all the young poets in England ... He is witty, graceful, lovely to look at, loveable to be with.
Smithers had agreed to publish `The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. He was an extraordinary man. Formerly a solicitor in Sheffield, he had turned to publishing, making his money out of pornography and using it to subsidise the publication of works of a more literary bent. It was Smithers who, in 1893, had published Teleny, the highly sexually explicit novel of Uranian love which Oscar had had a hand in writing. He looked like a rather grubby clerk or a commercial traveller. Oscar drew a vivi
d thumbnail sketch of him for Reggie Turner:
He is usually in a large straw hat, has a blue tie delicately fastened with a diamond brooch of the impurest water, or perhaps wine, as he never touches water - it goes to his head at once. His face, clean shaven as befits a priest who serves at the altar whose God is literature, is wasted and pale, not with poetry, but with poets, who, he says, have wrecked his life by insisting on publishing with him. He loves first editions, especially of women - little girls are his passion - he is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe. He is also a delightful companion, and a dear fellow, very kind to me.
`My definition of a straightforward publisher is Leonard Smithers,' Robbie Ross told Ada Leverson. `He always said he would cheat you and always did. He was the only honest publisher I ever met.'
`The Ballad of Reading Gaol' was to be Oscar's literary swan song. He spent almost six months working on the epic poem of one hundred and nine stanzas, which tells the story of the execution of Trooper Charles Wooldridge, hanged at Reading Gaol - while Oscar was an inmate there - on 7 July 1896, for having slashed his wife's throat in a fit of jealousy. The ballad is a powerful and moving indictment of the futility of capital punishment and of the senseless cruelty of prison life. Oscar fully intended `Reading Gaol' to be a polemic, even though he considered that this in some way devalued it artistically. `The poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style,' he told Robbie. `Some is realistic, some is romantic, some poetry, some propaganda.'
Behind the story of Trooper Wooldridge's execution, `Reading Gaol' also reveals Oscar's experiences and feelings about his imprisonment. He drew explicit parallels between his own crime and punishment and that of Trooper Wooldridge. Both were in prison for crimes of passion. Both were being punished for love. And both had become social and sexual outcasts:
There are deliberate echoes and invocations of Oscar's own experience of love and sex in the lines, `Some love too little, some too long/ Some sell, and others buy'. Oscar had loved Bosie too much and, by his own admission, loved many others too little. His compulsive masturbation in Wandsworth was invoked in the ballad, as were the storms of sexual doubt and self-loathing that had assailed him in prison. Oscar wrote of the `crooked shapes of Terror', the reproachful `sprites' and `phantoms' of the night, who assume the `smirking' gait and `mincing' manners of a nightmarish Uranian underworld. These `slim shadows' with `subtle sneer and fawning leer' mock Oscar's sexual past with the significantly worded refrain:
There was a clear reference in the ballad to the unjust laws under which Oscar had been convicted and sent to prison:
But the over-arching theme of `Reading Gaol' is the death of love: all kinds of love, and all manner of deaths. After life, love is the greatest of all God's blessings because it is made in His own image. And, just as man is born to die, so love must inevitably die, invariably at the hands of the beloved:
Though bleak and stark, `Reading Gaol' is nonetheless a fundamentally optimistic poem. For death is not only the end, but also the beginning. The death of one love also means the birth of another. Oscar had experienced the death of his love for Bosie in prison. Now he was experiencing its rebirth. The warm sun-filled days of the Neapolitan autumn soothed and lulled him. Feeling loved and loving, he slowly began to enjoy life once again. There were long lunches eaten alfresco within sight of the sea, and excursions to Capri where, according to the historian Suetonius, the Emperor Tiberius created an erotic Arcadia where he indulged in abandoned orgies with boys and young men, famously training boys to act as `minnows' in his swimming pool, nipping and biting his genitals as he swam. `We go to Capri for three days,' Oscar playfully announced to Reggie Turner. `I want to lay a few simple flowers on the tomb of Tiberius. As the tomb is of someone else really, I shall do so with the deeper emotion.' And in the spirit of Tiberius, Oscar and Bosie could spend their evenings in Naples drinking to excess and sampling a seemingly unending and exciting range of erotic distractions with beautiful and willing young men. It was in Naples, Robbie said many years later, that Oscar contracted the `alcoholic habits from which he never recovered and reverted to homosexual excesses, both of which continued until he died'.
They were amused when the obsessively secretive George Ives wrote a carefully coded and consequently almost incomprehensible letter to Oscar in Naples, which prompted Bosie to draft a witty reply, written, he told Ives, `in your own mysterious style':
My dear G
O showed me your letter. We are here at N or rather at P which is close to N. We met a charming fellow here yesterday. I wonder if you know him; his name is X and he lives at Z. He was obliged to leave Ron account of a painful scandal connected with H and T. The weather here is D today but we hope it may soon be L again.
Yours in the strictest privacy
A.B.D.
PS: Have you written to A.C. lately and seen R.S.?
There were, of course, squabbles and arguments. According to Vincent O'Sullivan, plates were thrown by Bosie on at least one occasion. But these arguments were minor eruptions, soon quieted and quickly forgotten. Before the fall, their every attempt at domesticity had invariably ended in disaster. Bosie would descend into one of his epileptic fits of rage and, white with anger, would flounce out, sending Oscar a series of vile letters. But life at the Villa Giudice was different, altogether happier. Oscar and Bosie were content just to be together and to work together. Their love had passed through the valley of the shadow of death and had emerged `rose-crowned' as of old.
There were still those who violently disapproved of them. `It is very curious that none of the English colony here have left cards on us,' Oscar wrote. `Fortunately we have a few simple friends among the poorer classes.' Their presence in Naples quickly became known to the newspapers and a spate of articles and supposed interviews appeared, setting off alarm bells in the British Embassy in Rome. One of the attaches, the `very witty and talkative' Beauchamp Denis Brown, whom Bosie had known at Oxford, was despatched to the Villa Giudice, where he privately informed Bosie that their menage in Posilippo was `mal vu' by the Embassy.
Brown's visit and coded warning to Bosie to leave almost certainly had something to do with the fact that Lord Rosebery had that year paid £ 16,000 for the beautiful Villa Delahante, also in Posilippo, where he would indulge his passion for sodomising young men for many years to come. There was every reason to fear that the unpredictable and passionate Bosie might confront Rosebery with his allegations of a conspiracy in the Liberal Party, of the plot to sacrifice Oscar in order to save Rosebery and other senior Liberals from exposure as sodomites. It is not clear whether Rosebery was in the Villa Delahante in the autumn of 1897, or whether Oscar and Bosie even knew that Rosebery had bought a villa in Posilippo. But sooner or later the poets and the politician were bound to meet, a prospect which caused Rosebery some trepidation.
When Bosie and Oscar showed no signs of taking any notice of the heavy diplomatic hint to leave Posilippo, Eustace Neville-Rolfe, Rosebery's close friend and the British Consul in Naples, made some circumspect investigations and, in a letter to Rosebery marked `Very secret', concluded that there was little danger of a confrontation. The Villa Giudice is `fully two miles from you', he told Rosebery:
Oscar Wilde calling himself Mr Sebastian Mothwell ... lives a completely secluded life ... he looks thoroughly abashed, much like a whipped hound ... I really cannot think he will be any trouble to you.
But the approval or otherwise of the British Embassy, the British Consul and the British community in Naples was of small moment to Oscar and Bosie. What did matter was the concerted opprobrium of family and friends.
Oscar had written to Constance a few days after his arrival in Naples to let her know that he intended to winter there. Though he made no mention of Bosie, Constance's suspicions were instantly aroused. Angry and upset, she wrote to Carlos Blacker, who had become her trusted advisor: `Question - has he seen that dreadful person at Capri?' `That dreadful person' was Bosie. Constance could not bear ev
en to write his name:
No-one goes to Naples at this time of year. So I see no other reason for his going, and I am unhappy. Write to me and tell me what to do.
Constance was haunted by the very idea of any contact between Oscar and Bosie. Without waiting for Blacker's advice, she sat down and wrote to Oscar that very day. She wrote to Blacker to tell him what she had done:
I have today written a note to Oscar saying that I required an immediate answer to my question whether he had been to Capri or whether he had met anywhere that appalling individual. I also said that he evidently did not care much for his boys since he neither acknowledged their photos which I sent him nor the remembrances that they sent him. I hope it was not too hard of me to write this, but it was quite necessary.
Within a day or so of writing to Oscar, Constance was told - by either Blacker or Robbie, or by both - that Oscar and Bosie were living together in Naples. She was in a paroxysm of rage and bitterness and wrote a long and `terrible' letter to Oscar. `I forbid you to see Lord Alfred Douglas,' she wrote. `I forbid you to return to your filthy, insane life. I forbid you to live at Naples.'
At first, Oscar's response was scathing and defiant. `How can she really imagine that she can influence or control my life?' he demanded of Robbie. `She might just as well try to influence and control my art. I could not live such an absurd life - it makes one laugh.' But when Constance's angry letters were followed by no fewer than three furious letters in as many days from Robbie attacking him for setting up home with Bosie, Oscar tried a conciliatory approach. `Robbie has written me three unkind and detestable letters,' he told Reggie Turner. `But he is such a dear, and I love him so much, that I accepted them meekly.' To Robbie himself, Oscar was almost grovelling:
As you remade my life for me you have a perfect right to say what you choose to me, but I have no right to say anything to you except to tell you how grateful I am to you, and what a pleasure it is to feel gratitude and love at the same time for the same person.