The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  But Oscar's attempts at conciliation were doomed to failure. The brooding, embittered Robbie did not want Oscar's worthy protestations of platonic love, gratitude and friendship. He wanted the joyous, passionate, irrational and unconditional love that Oscar lavished on an unworthy Bosie. If he could not have Oscar's love for himself, he was determined that Bosie should not have it. And if hurting Bosie meant hurting Oscar, so be it.

  Robert Sherard also entered the fray. When he heard the news in the Authors' Club in London that Oscar was living with Bosie, he could not resist making some highly critical comments about Oscar's morality. Oscar was told about Sherard's remarks and penned a stinging rebuke to `that bravest and most chivalrous of all beings':

  When you wish to talk morality - always an amusement - and to attack me behind my back, don't, like a good fellow, talk so loud, as the reverberation reaches from the Club to Naples; also, it is easy - far too easy - for you to find an audience that does not contain friends of mine; before them, play Tartuffe in the style of Termagant to your heart's content; but when you do it in the presence of friends of mine, you expose yourself to rebuke and contempt, and of course I hear all about it.

  Constance dropped her bombshell on 16 November. Her solicitor wrote to Oscar to inform him that she was stopping his `wretched £3 a week' because he had created `a public scandal' by living with Bosie, a notoriously `disreputable person'. Oscar was outraged. `Women are so petty,' he told Robbie, `and Constance has no imagination.' Besides which, Oscar objected to the description of Bosie as a disreputable person. `After all,' he told Robbie, `no charge was made against him at any of my trials, nor anything proved, or attempted to be proved.' What did Constance expect him to do? His very existence was a scandal. He could not live alone, and Bosie was the only one of his friends able or willing to share his life. `If I were living with a Naples renter I would I suppose be all right,' he added bitterly. `As I live with a young man who is well-bred and well-born, and who has been charged with no offence, I am deprived of all possibility of existence.'

  There was another bombshell five days later. The guileless More Adey wrote to Oscar telling him that he and Robbie not only agreed with Constance's decision but that they were a party to making it. `I said at once,' he wrote:

  that your wife was acting strictly within her legal rights according to the agreement, when I was asked whether your friends wished to oppose your wife's action in withdrawing your allowance.

  Oscar was incredulous and furious. He felt utterly betrayed and was for once, as he told Reggie Turner, lost for words:

  For More and Robbie to have done this - More and Robbie of all people in the world! - is so astounding that I cannot comment on the fact. I simply state it.

  Oscar could just about comprehend More's role in the affair. More was fussy and over-precise in business matters and might easily have allowed himself to be persuaded that Oscar had contravened the terms of the Deed of Separation. But Robbie's actions were altogether different. It was barely three months since they had resurrected their sexual relationship. Robbie was a hypocrite and a false friend. A Uranian himself, he objected to Oscar's Uranian love for Bosie. And he professed friendship for Oscar at the same time as he sought to destroy his life with Bosie.

  Though he was provoked beyond measure, Oscar tried to be conciliatory. He wrote to Robbie to see if there was any possibility of a compromise. `Do you think that if I engaged not to live with Bosie - in the same house - that that would be regarded as a concession of any kind?' he asked:

  To say that I would never see him or speak to him again would of course be childish - out of the question - but I am quite ready, and so will Bosie be, to say that we would not live in the same house again, if that would be regarded as an equitable concession. Or do you think that everything is over, and that my wife will hear of nothing that would enable me to live?

  He appealed to More Adey in a similar vein. `Do, if possible, try to arrange something,' he pleaded:

  I know you all think I am wilful, but it is the result of the nemesis of character, and the bitterness of life. I was a problem for which there was no solution.

  Bosie was not so diplomatic. He realised that Robbie was jealous of Oscar's love for him and came out and said so in an indignant letter to More, adding for good measure that he thought Robbie `perfectly capable' of trying to sabotage the publication of `Reading Gaol' so as to further starve Oscar of money. It was natural that More should show Bosie's letter to Robbie, who immediately went into a huff and wrote stiffly to Smithers to inform him that he could no longer be involved in any plans for the publication of `Reading Gaol' as he had ceased to enjoy Oscar's confidence in business matters.

  Oscar and Bosie were worried about the withdrawal of Oscar's £3 a week, but not unduly so. Bosie received an allowance of £8 a week from his mother, and this, together with what Oscar could beg, borrow or earn from the ballad was enough - more than enough - to keep them in wine and boys for the foreseeable future. Then the third bombshell exploded. In late November, Lady Queensberry, prompted by Robbie and More, wrote to Bosie to tell him that she was stopping his allowance until he parted from Oscar. It was the last straw. Oscar and Bosie knew they were beaten. They had been, as Robbie jubilantly phrased it, `starved out'. Oscar was bitter. `It is proposed to leave me to die of starvation, or blow my brains out in a Naples urinal,' Oscar told Smithers in late November. He was outraged by what he saw as the warped morality of his family and friends, who would rather see him dead than in bed with Bosie. `Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts,' he declared:

  I would rather have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.

  Shortly afterwards, on 3 December, Bosie and Oscar parted. Bosie went to Rome, and Oscar, after a week on his own in the Villa Giudice, went to Taormina in Sicily as the guest of a `very cultivated' Russian of `advanced years'. Here he met the German photographer, Baron von Gloeden, who made a living selling photographs to visiting Uranians of naked Sicilian youths disporting themselves in an erotic evocation of ancient Greece and Tiberian Capri. Von Gloeden gave Oscar some of his photographs, two of which still survive.

  Neither Oscar nor Bosie appeared to be inconsolable with grief at their enforced parting. Oscar soon acquired a new companion. `I hear you have a beautiful love in Naples,' Smithers wrote to Oscar in January 1898. Bosie meanwhile had arrived in Paris and was soon writing to Oscar, typically complaining about the cost and difficulties of finding boys in Paris:

  The annoyance of living in this town and not having any money to live the way one would like is perpetual. The facilities of Naples are so enormously superior. Here I have simply not the energy of going to the trouble of doing that sort of thing. Since I left Rome, there have only been three occasions, and unbridled chastity is telling on my health and spirits.

  Publicly, Oscar and Bosie pretended that they had parted in acrimony. Both wrote letters regretting their decision ever to live together in Naples. `It is, of course, the most bitter experience of a bitter life,' Oscar told Robbie:

  It is a blow quite awful and paralysing, but it had to come, and I know it is better that I should never see him again. I don't want to. He fills me with horror.

  `I am so glad, 0 so glad! to have got away,' Bosie told his mother:

  I am so afraid you will not believe me, and I am so afraid of appearing to pose as anything but what I am, but I am not a hypocrite and you must believe me. I wanted to go back to him, I longed for it and for him, because I love him and admire him and think him great and almost good, but when I had done it and when I got back, I hated it, I was miserable.

  The sentiments of both letters were untrue. Both were deliberately written with the clear purpose of regaining their allowances. Oscar was most certainly not filled with horror at Bosie, and Bosie was far from `glad, 0 so glad!' to get away from Oscar. Once their allowances had been restored, they fully intended t
o see each other again. But with one crucial difference: they would meet as friends, not lovers. As their Neapolitan autumn imperceptibly turned to gentle winter, Oscar and Bosie both came to realise that their epic love for each other had faded into a loving friendship.

  ~1 joy-song

  JACK: He seems to have expressed a desire to be buried in Paris. CANON CHASUBLE: In Paris! I ./ear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.

  Oscar arrived in the City of Light on 13 February 1898, the very day that `The Ballad of Reading Gaol' was published to great acclaim in England. Oscar hoped that the publication would ensure his entree to literary Paris. `A poem gives one droit de cite, and shows that one is still an artist,' he wrote. `Reading Gaol' was a phenomenal success, quickly selling out of the first edition of four hundred copies. Oscar was exasperated by the meagre printrun and by the failure of the `absurd' Smithers to advertise the book. `I fear he has missed a popular "rush",' he told Robbie. `He is so fond of "suppressed" books that he suppresses his own.' After a coolness lasting three months, during which time neither Oscar nor Robbie had written to the other, Oscar broke the ice the day after he arrived in Paris and sent a short, cordial note to Robbie asking him to come and see him. Within days they were back on the best of terms and, with one or two wobbles, would remain so until Oscar's death.

  Relations with Constance were also beginning to thaw. There had been an angry silence between them ever since she had stopped his allowance in midNovember. But Oscar had Smithers send a copy of `Reading Gaol' to her in Genoa, where she had finally settled. She was moved and `frightfully upset by this wonderful poem of Oscar's', she told her brother, Otho. `It is frightfully tragic and makes one cry.' On 4 March she wrote to Carlos Blacker asking him to go and see Oscar. `He has, as you know, behaved exceedingly badly both to myself and my children,' she said, `and all possibility of our living together has come to an end, but I am interested in him, as is my way with anyone that I have once known.'

  Constance asked Blacker to tell Oscar that she thought the ballad `exquisite' and that she hoped its huge success would encourage him to write more. To her surprise and consternation, Constance received a less-than-tactful letter from Oscar five days later, requesting the restoration of his allowance. The tone of the letter was far from the abject contrition that Constance had hoped for. He had written, she reported to Blacker, `more or less demanding money as of right', curtly informing her that she owed him £78 and hoped she would send it. `I know that he is in great poverty, but I don't care to be written to as though it were my fault,' she told Blacker. Nor was the unapologetic, defiant tone of Oscar's observations on his love affair with Bosie designed to propitiate her. Constance told Blacker:

  He says that he loved too much and that that is better than hate! This is true abstractly, but his was an unnatural love, a madness that I think is worse than hate. I have no hatred for him, but I confess that I am afraid of him.

  She refused to reinstate Oscar's allowance. But fortunately for Oscar she had, just before she received his letter, generously sent £40 to Robbie for Oscar, asking him not to tell Oscar where the money had come from.

  Oscar was bitter when he heard that his allowance was not to be reinstated. `I have a sort of idea that she really wants me dead,' Oscar told Blacker:

  It is a horrible and persistent thought, and I daresay she would be relieved to hear you had recognised me at the Morgue.

  But it was Constance, not Oscar, who was in the morgue. Three weeks later, on the night of 7 April, Oscar had a vivid dream that Constance had come to Paris to visit him. `I kept on saying, "Go away, go away, leave me in peace".' The following day he received a telegram from Otho telling him that Constance was dead. She had indeed left him in peace. Constance had died in Genoa following an operation on her spine. In early 1895, she had tripped over a loose carpet at Tite Street and fallen downstairs, damaging her back. An operation in March 1895 -'not a serious one', she told Robbie at the time - had been unsuccessful, and she had suffered a creeping paralysis ever since. Many years later, Otho said that Constance had died of an internal tumour, `brought about in the first place by what she went through under her mother', an unassuageable childhood grief compounded by the many later griefs in her marriage. Constance's younger son, Vyvyan Holland, said his mother had died of `a broken heart'.

  Oscar sent a flurry of `telegraphic tears of Hibernian sorrow' to his friends, bemoaning `this fresh misery an unkind fate had brought upon him'. `It really is awful,' Oscar lamented to Carlos Blacker a few days after he heard the news. `I don't know what to do. If we had only met once, and kissed each other. It is too late. How awful life is.' Robbie was not convinced by Oscar's acute outpouring of grief. He had been great friends with Constance and almost certainly felt her death keenly himself. `You will have heard of Mrs Wilde's death,' Robbie told Leonard Smithers:

  Oscar of course did not feel it at all. It is rather appalling for him as his allowance ceases and I do not expect his wife's trustees will continue it.

  `He is in very good spirits and does not consume too many,' Robbie added, in a reference to Oscar's drinking which was reaching epic proportions.

  `Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities,' Oscar declared, `produces all the effect of intoxication, but the only proper intoxication is conversation.' He would generally drink the best part of a bottle of brandy a day, in addition to wine, champagne, whisky and absinthe, which then contained thujone, a toxic substance which damaged the brain but produced vivid hallucinations. `Absinthe stands alone,' Oscar once remarked:

  It is like nothing else; it shimmers like southern twilight in opalescent colouring; it has about it the seduction of strange sins. It is stronger than any other spirit and brings out the subconscious self in man.

  Many years later, Bosie recalled that he had `seen Oscar over and over again so drunk that he couldn't walk, in the last two years of his life'. According to Stuart Merrill, an American poet who lived in Paris, Oscar had `never been exactly sober', but now he was drinking huge amounts. `He used to be so overcome that he could scarcely stagger from the Madeleine to the Opera,' Merrill recalled. And Trelawny Backhouse claims that Oscar not only drank huge quantities of absinthe, but that he also used cocaine regularly.

  Oscar would spend every night drinking and talking, talking and drinking, as if he could not stop. He would talk brilliantly and prodigiously to anyone who cared to listen, to `waiters, coachmen, sellers of late papers, beggars, poor street girls'. His conversation was `like a superhuman burst of fireworks', the writer Ernest La Jeunesse remembered, `interwoven strands of gold and precious stones, of subtle ideas'. George Ives recorded a meeting with Oscar one evening at the Cafe de la Paix where they stayed until closing time. Predictably, Ives drank glass after glass of hot milk, while Oscar demolished endless whisky and sodas. Afterwards they went on to another bar, to another cafe, to anywhere that was open, where Oscar could get another drink. In the small hours, a drunken Oscar staggered back to his hotel, leaving Ives on the boulevard agonising over whether to speak to a beautiful boy who was loitering with erotic intent.

  Money, or rather the lack of it, was a constant problem for Oscar, and for those of his friends who tried to ensure that he had enough money to pay for food and lodgings. Fortunately, Robbie was wrong about Oscar's allowance. Constance had added a codicil to her will specifying that he should continue to receive his £3 a week during his lifetime. But £3 a week was meaningless to a man who could spend £30 a day and have nothing to show for it. `Like dear St Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty,' Oscar wrote to a friend:

  But in my case the marriage is not a success: I hate the Bride that has been given to me: I see no beauty in her hunger and her rags: I have not the soul of St Francis: my thirst is for the beauty of life: my desire for its joy.

  Oscar was incapable of managing his money. If he had any cash, he would spend it on fine food, drink and boys. Robbie's solution was to steadily dole out small amounts to Oscar. `I tel
l everybody not to give Oscar money,' he said to Vincent O'Sullivan. `If you give him anything give him clothes.' Oscar regarded Robbie's caution as just plain parsimony. `Robbie is a dear but he does not understand,' he complained.

  Oscar devoted his very considerable talents to begging, borrowing and virtually stealing money from whoever and wherever he could. He sold the scenario of a play, which he called Love is Law, to Frank Harris for £ 175, and then sold the same scenario to several other people. The play was virtually identical to the play he had sketched out to George Alexander in the summer of 1894, which had been provisionally entitled Constance. After many misunderstandings and much negotiation, Harris wrote and eventually produced the play - Mr and Mrs Daventry - in October 1900, just a month before Oscar died.

  Harris was shocked when Bosie described Oscar as `a fat old prostitute' over his insistent demands for money. Bosie explained later that he had used the words `when I was hot from an interview with him in which he had alternately whined and wheedled and wept to extract more than the £40 I had just given him'. Bernard Shaw understood perfectly. `I know that there is no beggar on earth as shameless as an Irish beggar,' he told Bosie forty years later. `I have seen them when they are perfectly well-off beg from poor people.'

  Oscar occasionally lost track of his stratagems for extracting money. He wrote to Robbie beseeching him to send his allowance early. A sudden crisis had arisen:

  A wretched inn-keeper at Nogent to whom I owe 100 francs, out of a bill of 300, threatens to sell Reggie's dressing-case, my overcoat, and two suits, if I don't pay him by Saturday. He has been detaining these things and now threatens a sale.

  Two days later Oscar was forced to eat humble pie. `I am so sorry about my excuse,' he told Robbie. `I had forgotten I had used Nogent before. It shows the utter collapse of my imagination, and rather distresses me.' But there were times when Oscar was in real need. `I had a fearful letter from poor Oscar who seems in a dreadful state of poverty even allowing for slight exaggeration,' Robbie wrote to Smithers a month after Constance's death. `He says he had no dinner on Friday or Saturday.' Robbie was strapped for cash himself and was forced to ask Smithers to sell a picture on his behalf and send Oscar £5. `Tell Oscar that a friend is sending him the money. There is no need to mention my name.'