by Neil McKenna
There was little or no money to be had from writing. After the publication of `The Ballad of Reading Gaol' and of a long and passionate letter on prison reform to the Daily Chronicle, Oscar ceased to write. He did undertake the editing and revision of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest for publication by Smithers, but wrote nothing else except many wonderful letters to his friends chronicling his life. Despite the encouragement and entreaties of the devoted Robbie, who sent him beautiful blank notebooks to write in, Oscar knew that he would never write again. When he was asked by the Comtesse de Bremont why he no longer wrote, Oscar replied:
Because I have written all there was to write. I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written; life can only be lived. I have lived.
At Oxford, a quarter of a century earlier, Oscar had written in his commonplace book that `the end of life is not action but contemplation, not doing but being.' Oscar sensed that he was reaching the end of his life, both physically and metaphysically. He no longer needed or wanted to write, but merely to contemplate the world he found himself in. He no longer wanted to do. He simply wanted to be.
At the very core of his being was his sexuality. To be at one with himself was to be at one with his Uranian self. In Paris he embraced his sexual urges and was in turn embraced and enveloped by them, achieving an erotic state of grace where desire was balanced by satisfaction, and where the contradictory imperatives of love and sex were resolved, merging into a perfect whole. Many years earlier, in his poem `Helas!', Oscar had asked whether the price of Uranian love was too high, whether `the honey of romance' was worth losing his `soul's inheritance'. Disgraced, disavowed and harrowed by prison and its thousand humiliations, he now found such debates meaningless. No longer encumbered by a wife or by his position in society, Oscar had no need to conceal his sexual self. He was liberated, emancipated from all internal and external constraints, and he could realise that delicious state of being:
Among Oscar's many lovers in the last three years of his life, there was one for whom he felt a particular tendresse. Oscar met Maurice Gilbert `by chance' during his first fortnight in Paris. His mother was French and his father English -'all French lily and English rose' Oscar called him - and he was, or had been, a soldier in the marine infantry. Oscar hymned Maurice's flower-like beauty in letters to his friends. `His upper lip is more like a rose-leaf than any rose-leaf I ever saw,' Oscar told Reggie Turner, adding that Maurice's `eyelashes are too long'. He was `jonquil-like in aspect, a sweet narcissus from an English meadow', and his mouth, he told Robbie, is `the most beautiful mouth I know. It has the curves of Greek art and English flowers.' When Oscar embraced and kissed Maurice in public, he was rebuked by the journalist Jacques Daurelle, who told him he had `retourne a son vomissement'. Oscar was impervious. `He is beautiful,' he told Daurelle. `Look at him. He has the profile of Bonaparte."He grows dearer to me daily,' Oscar told Smithers on 5 March.
Maurice was not only beautiful, he was also sweet, gentle, yielding and devoted. He was as happy to have sex with Oscar's friends as he was with Oscar. He was, Oscar said, `a born Catholic in romance', and Reggie, Robbie and Bosie all had love affairs with Maurice, seemingly concurrently. In May, Maurice went to London where he spent time with Reggie Turner and with Robbie. `No cheque this morning,' Oscar wrote to Robbie on 24 May, `but instead my sweet Maurice, our sweet Maurice, looking quite charming and as delightful as ever. He seems a little tired, but that of course was the journey.' Robbie was particularly taken by Maurice and wrote to Oscar asking him to give Maurice his `undying love'.
Bosie met Maurice at some point in early April and straight away laid amorous siege to him. Maurice appears to have rejected Bosie's advances, at least at first. 'Bosie is being very angelic and quiet,' Oscar told Robbie. `It did him a great deal of good being trampled on by Maurice.' But by June, they were having a full-blown affair. 'Bosie is now inseparable from Maurice; they have gone again to Nogent,' Oscar told Robbie on 1 June.
Ever since his arrival in Paris, Oscar had seen Bosie frequently and even helped him choose furniture for his new flat. They were friendly and affectionate, but Oscar sometimes carped at the less attractive sides of Bosie's personality. Bosie had started to gamble heavily. `He apparently goes to races every day, and loses of course,' Oscar told Robbie. `He has a faculty of spotting the loser, which, considering that he knows nothing at all about horses, is perfectly astounding.' Oscar also criticised his sense of humour. 'Bosie has no real enjoyment of a joke unless he thinks there is a good chance of the other person being pained or annoyed,' he told Robbie:
It is an entirely English trait, the English type and symbol of a joke being the jug on the half-opened door, or the distribution of orange-peel on the pavement of a crowded thoroughfare.
When he was not betting on the horses or spending time with Maurice, Bosie was, as ever, chasing boys. `He is devoted to a dreadful little ruffian aged fourteen,' Oscar informed Reggie:
whom he loves because at night, in the scanty intervals he can steal from an arduous criminal profession, he sells bunches of purple violets in front of the Cafe de la Paix. Also every time he goes home with Bosie he tries to rent him. This, of course, adds to his terrible fascination. We call him the `Florifer,' a lovely name. He also keeps another boy, aged twelve! whom Bosie wishes to know, but the wise `Florifer' declines.
A week or so later, Bosie had `grown tired of the Florifer but intends using the word in a sonnet', Oscar told Reggie, adding philosophically, `All romances should end in a sonnet. I suppose all romances do.'
Oscar reported to Robbie his irritation at Bosie's crassness in bringing a young renter to a literary dinner given by the French author and journalist Henry Davray:
Bosie turned up ten minutes after my arrival with Gaston! of all people, and placed him at Davray's table, where he gabbled about bicycles, and was generally offensive. Davray was much annoyed, and so was I. Bosie cannot understand the smallest iota of social tact, and does not see that to thrust `Giton, the boy-paederast' into a literary reunion, without being invited, is vulgar. So life goes on.
Bosie's life in Paris could be summed up in a phrase. `Boys, brandy, and betting monopolise his soul,' Oscar wrote. `He is really a miser: but his method of hoarding is spending: a new type.'
Oscar was not a gambler, but he devoted as much, if not more, time as Bosie to boys and brandy. The boys of the boulevards became Oscar's lovers and friends. Oscar said that they were the only companions he could get. This was not strictly the case. He was far from friendless and rarely lonely or alone. He saw Bosie frequently, usually once or twice a week - sometimes more, sometimes less. He was often with Frank Harris, and Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner regularly came over to Paris to see him. And George Ives, Charles Conder and Will Rothenstein all spent time with him, as did many other friends.
It was true that he was sometimes snubbed by some of his former friends, and shunned by some of literary Paris, but only because of the way he flaunted his friendships and love affairs with the boulevard boys. `I cannot bear being alone,' he told Robbie:
While the literary people are charming when they meet me, we meet rarely. My companions are such as I can get, and I of course have to pay for such friendships.
Andre Gide squirmed with embarrassment when he met Oscar one evening while out strolling along the boulevards. Oscar was sitting at a table on the terrace of a cafe and begged Andre and his companion to join him for a drink. Andre priggishly did not want to be seen talking to Oscar. He tried to take the chair facing Oscar, with only his back visible to the street, but Oscar obliged him to sit next to him, revealing their acquaintance to the world. Both Pierre Lout's and Henri de Regnier gave Oscar the `cold shoulder', according to Vincent O'Sullivan, who later recalled that many former friends of Oscar in Paris had begged Robbie to try and make Oscar `realise that he was ruining what sympathy was left for him among the Parisians by showing himself drunk on
the boulevards with Sodomist outcasts'.
Oscar relished the company of the boulevard boys and in the course of his three years in Paris he got to know many of them. He wandered, he said, in `the Circle of the Boulevards', invoking the Inferno of Dante. But his life on the boulevards was far from a journey through Hell, more a kind of louche Heaven. There was Edmond, whom Oscar christened `Edmond de Goncourt' after the diarist. Oscar introduced the boy to Robbie, and they enjoyed a brief affair. `Edmond de Goncourt begs to be remembered with love to you,' Oscar wrote to Robbie. `He adores his sash and your memory.' A month later, Oscar reported that:
Edmond is very smart, and directs his little band of brigands on the Boulevard with great success. His book, Les Chevaliers du Boulevard, is begun, but he says he finds poetry very difficult. That promises well for his future as an artist.
Robbie was not impressed when Oscar announced that he wanted to rent a suite of unfurnished rooms, convinced that he only wanted the rooms to make it easier to have sex with boys. `I don't wish to be horrid,' Oscar rebuked Robbie wittily:
but I think you are a little unkind in saying that you cannot explain to people that the object of my taking unfurnished rooms is to enable me to have boys. Boys can be had everywhere. The difficulty I am under is my name, my personality.
There was Casquette of the blue suit; a boy known only as `Le Premier Consul', to whom Oscar was `devoted'; and an eighteen-year-old Russian youth called Maltchek Perovinski, `quite charming and very educated'. And there was Leon, whom Oscar used to meet `to smoke a cigarette or to weave words about life' and sometimes to sleep with: `A meeting with Leon, whom I found wandering in the moonlit chasm of my little street, ended an admirable Continental Sunday,' he told Reggie. Giorgio was `a most passionate faun', a young Corsican who worked at the Restaurant Jouffroy. `His position was menial,' Oscar wrote, `but eyes like the night and the scarlet flower of a mouth made one forget that.' Eugene was named `the harvest-moon', a reference to the fact that he was uncircumcised. Georges was a `beautiful boy of bad character'; Walter was a `snub-nosed little horror'; and Henri, who plied his trade up and down the boulevard all day, had, Oscar wrote, `the sweetest and most compromising smiles for me, especially when I am with friends'.
Many of the boys were accomplished and dangerous criminals, a fact which endeared them to Oscar, who saw them as fellow outlaws. `Edmond de Goncourt' was arrested and sent to prison. But, on his release, he was unabashed and paraded up and down the boulevard in a new straw hat. Joseph, `a little Dionysiac', was extremely violent and was sent to prison for attempted murder. Alphonse, a lover of both Oscar and Reggie Turner, went in for chantage, or blackmail. `Your little friend Alphonse was arrested last night for chantage,' Oscar told Reggie in December 1898:
He demanded fifteen francs, and was only given ten and a cab-fare, so on being expelled from the house he made a scene and was taken up. There is much joy amongst his friends, as his general conduct did not meet with approval. It is a pity he always wanted to behave badly; it gave him a demoniac pleasure. He was quite an imp, though attractive in love scenes.
Despite his own frequent relations with boulevard boys, Robbie was often assailed by attacks of conscience and morality and would often urge Oscar to change his ways and stop associating with `these gutter perverts', as he called them. Oscar gave as good as he got. He was not about to take lessons in moral probity from his `dear little absurd Robbie'. `The only thing that consoles me,' Oscar told him:
is that your moral attitude towards yourself is even more severe than your moral attitudes towards others. Yours is the pathological tragedy of the hybrid, the Pagan-Catholic. You exemplify the beauty and the uselessness of Conscience.
Rather more kindly, he sometimes made light of Robbie's confused notions of morality, telling him:
It is quite true that when you talk morals to me, which you do quite beautifully, I always pipe on a reed and a faun comes running out of the thicket. You at once say `What a lovely faun!' The rest is silence.
Robbie even went so far as to suggest to Oscar that he might consider getting married. Oscar treated Robbie's absurd suggestion with the wit it deserved. `As regards to my marrying again,' he wrote:
I am quite sure that you will want me to marry this time some sensible, practical, plain, middle-aged boy, and I don't like the idea at all. Besides I am practically engaged to a fisherman of extraordinary beauty, aged eighteen. So you see there are difficulties.
In December 1898, Oscar accepted Frank Harris's invitation to spend three months on the French Riviera as his guest. Oscar was installed at the Hotel des Bains in Napoule, near Cannes. He took daily walks in the pine woods, and discovered that `the fishing population of the Riviera have the same freedom from morals as the Neapolitans have'. He had, he said, `two special friends, one called Raphael, the other Fortune - both quite perfect, except they can read and write'. `Yes,' he told Leonard Smithers, `even at Napoule there is romance: it comes in boats and takes the form of fisher-lads, who draw great nets, and are bare-limbed: they are strangely perfect.' Oscar told Harris that he was thinking of writing a poem to be entitled `The Ballad of the Fisher-Boy'. It was, he explained, to be a companion piece to `The Ballad of Reading Gaol', but `a joy-song' rather than `a song of sorrow and despair'. It would, he said, `sing of liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution'. Oscar reeled off three wonderful stanzas to Harris but never got round to writing them down.
On a trip to Nice, Oscar bumped into a friend from Paris, eighteen-year-old le petit Georges, `one of the noble army of the Boulevard':
He is like a very handsome Roman boy, dark, and bronze-like, with splendidly chiselled nose and mouth, and the tents of midnight are folded in his eyes; moons hide in their curtains. He is visiting Nice on speculative business. It is beautiful, and encouraging, to find people who can combine romance with business - blend them indeed, and make them one.
Oscar celebrated Christmas with a new friend, Harold Mellor, who was staying at Cannes and came constantly to Napoule to see Oscar, bringing with him `a very pretty Italian boy' called Eolo. Mellor was a `charming fellow', a Uranian, who had been `sent away from Harrow at the age of fourteen for being loved by the captain of the cricket eleven'. He was extremely wealthy and lived with Eolo in a house in Gland, Switzerland, which he begged Oscar to visit. Oscar accepted Mellor's invitation and left for Gland in late February 1899, travelling there via Genoa, where he stopped off to visit Constance's grave. `It is very pretty - a marble cross with dark ivy-leaves inlaid in a good pattern,' he told Robbie:
It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb ... I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected - with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.
Oscar took his own comments on the futility of regret to heart. On the same day that he visited Constance's grave, he also picked up `a beautiful young actor' from Florence:
whom I wildly loved. He has the strange name of Didaco. He has the look of Romeo, without Romeo's sadness: a face chiselled for high romance. We spent three days together.
The visit to Gland was not a success. Though the villa was pretty and comfortable, Oscar decided that he did not much like Harold Mellor after all:
He is a silent, dull person, cautious and economical: revolting Swiss wines appear at meals: he is complex without being interesting: has Greek loves, and is rather ashamed of them: has heaps of money, and lives in terror of poverty: so I regard it as a sort of Swiss pension, where there is no weekly bill.
A month with Mellor was enough, and Oscar announced to Smithers that he was returning to Genoa `to try and find a place ... where I can live for ten francs a day (boy coinpris)'. But by May, Oscar was back in Paris and had resumed the usual pattern of his life there.
In March 1900 Oscar had sufficiently mended his breach with Harold Mellor to accept his invitation to spend two months in Italy. They went to Sicily first, where Osc
ar befriended Manuele, Francesco and Salvatore. `I love them all,' he told Robbie, `but only remember Manuele.' Oscar also became great friends with a fifteen-year-old seminarist, Giuseppe Loverde. Giuseppe was `most sweet', and every day Oscar `kissed him behind the high altar' in the cathedral of Palermo. From Sicily they went to Naples and spent three days there. Oscar was disappointed to discover that most of his `friends' in the city were in prison. `But I met some of nice memory,' he told Robbie, `and fell in love with a Sea-God, who for some extraordinary reason is at the Regia Marina School instead of being a Triton.'
Oscar and Mellor arrived in Rome on 12 April. Mellor returned to Switzerland after two days, while Oscar remained in the Eternal City for a month and was joined there for a short visit by Robbie. There was, Oscar reported to Bosie enthusiastically, a plentiful supply of exceptionally beautiful boys. `I am glad you are enjoying Rome so much,' Bosie replied. `I quite agree with you that the boys are far more beautiful there. In fact I think they come next to English boys.'
Oscar mentioned several Roman boys in his letters. There was Homer, who talked too much, and Pietro, who was `dark, and gloomy, and I love him very much'. There was Omero, whom Robbie had picked up and passed on to Oscar. Omero was a guide `who knows nothing about Rome'. And there were the two friends, Armando and Arnaldo. `I have given up Armando, a very smart elegant young Roman Sporus,' Oscar told Robbie. `He was beautiful, but his requests for raiment and neckties were incessant: he really bayed for boots, as a dog moonwards.' Oscar promptly took up with Arnaldo. There was Philippo, a student, and another boy, Dario, to whom Oscar presented a ticket to see the Pope: