OSCAR
Matthew Sturgis
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AN APOLLO BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
About Oscar
Oscar Wilde’s life – like his wit – was alive with paradox. He was both an early exponent and a victim of ‘celebrity culture’: famous for being famous, he was lauded and ridiculed in equal measure. His achievements were frequently downplayed, his successes resented. He had a genius for comedy but strove to write tragedies. He was an unabashed snob who nevertheless delighted in exposing the faults of society. He affected a dandified disdain but was given to great acts of kindness. Although happily married, he became a passionate lover of men and – at the very peak of his success – brought disaster upon himself. He disparaged authority, yet went to the law to defend his love for Lord Alfred Douglas. Having delighted in fashionable throngs, Wilde died almost alone: barely a dozen people were at his graveside.
Yet despite this ruinous end, Wilde’s star continues to shine brightly. His was a life of quite extraordinary drama. Above all, his flamboyant refusal to conform to the social and sexual orthodoxies of his day make him a hero and an inspiration to all who seek to challenge convention.
In the first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years, Matthew Sturgis draws on a wealth of new material and fresh research to place the man firmly in the context of his times. He brings alive the distinctive mood and characters of the fin de siècle in the richest and most compelling portrait of Wilde to date.
Contents
Welcome Page
About Oscar
Dedication
Preface and Acknowledgements
Proem
Part I: The Star Child
Chapter 1: A Small Unruly Boy
Chapter 2: A Fair Scholar
Chapter 3: Foundation Scholarship
Part II: The Nightingale and the Rose
Chapter 1: Young Oxford
Chapter 2: Heart’s Yearnings
Chapter 3: Hellas!
Chapter 4: Specially Commended
Part III: The Happy Prince
Chapter 1: A Dream of Fair Women
Chapter 2: The Jester and the Joke
Chapter 3: Up to Snuff
Chapter 4: An English Poet
Part IV: The Remarkable Rocket
Chapter 1: The Best Place
Chapter 2: Go Ahead
Chapter 3: This Wide Great World
Chapter 4: Bully Boy
Chapter 5: Different Aspects
Chapter 6: The Dream of the Poet
Part V: The Devoted Friend
Chapter 1: Over the Seine
Chapter 2: First Drama
Chapter 3: Man of the Day
Chapter 4: New Relations
Chapter 5: In Black and White
Chapter 6: L’Amour de l’Impossible
Chapter 7: Woman’s World
Chapter 8: A Study in Green
Part VI: The Young King
Chapter 1: A Man in Hew
Chapter 2: A Bad Case
Chapter 3: Suggestive Things
Chapter 4: The Best Society
Chapter 5: The Dance of the Seven Veils
Chapter 6: Charming Ball
Chapter 7: White and Gold
Part VII: The Selfish Giant
Chapter 1: The Eternal Quest for Beauty
Chapter 2: Feasting with Panthers
Chapter 3: Brief Summer Months
Chapter 4: Enemies of Romance
Chapter 5: Scarlet Marquess
Chapter 6: A Capacity for Being Amused
Part VIII: The House of Judgement
Chapter 1: The Last First Nights
Chapter 2: Hideous Words
Chapter 3: The Prosecutor
Chapter 4: Regina Versus Wilde
Chapter 5: The Torrent of Prejudice
Part IX: In Carcere e Vinculis
Chapter 1: The Head of Medusa
Chapter 2: The System
Chapter 3: From the Depths
Part X: The Fisherman and his Soul
Chapter 1: Asylum
Chapter 2: Artistic work
Chapter 3: Outcast Men
Chapter 4: Bitter Experience
Part XI: The Teacher of Wisdom
Chapter 1: The Parisian Temple of Pleasure
Chapter 2: Going South
Chapter 3: All Over
L’Envoi
Plate Section
Endpapers
Abbreviations used in the Notes
Endnotes
Image credits
Index
About Matthew Sturgis
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
For Tim and Jean
Preface and Acknowledgements
Oscar Wilde is part of our world. Leaving my Airbnb in New York on my way to inspect a previously overlooked Wilde letter in the library at Columbia, I passed a chalkboard outside an Irish bar scrawled with the legend, ‘Work is the curse of the Drinking Classes’. Opposite me on the Uptown subway sat a girl whose mobile-phone case carried the slogan, ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world’. And then, to make my morning complete, walking through the university portals was a student sporting a T-shirt that declared, ‘Genius is born, not paid’. All three quotations were duly – and (as is not always the case) correctly – credited to ‘Oscar Wilde’.
Such encounters are by no means exceptional. Indeed, seeing the world as I have done over recent years through a Wildean prism, it seems to me that rare is the newspaper or magazine that does not contain a stray reference to Wilde or his work. And it is not simply his epigrams that have survived in the age of Twitter and shortening attention spans. His plays are still performed. His books are still read. His image is widely reproduced, and instantly recognized. He regularly appears, as a character, on both stage and screen. He has even been turned into a detective by Gyles Brandreth.
The position he holds is an extraordinary one; it spans high and popular culture, it bridges the past and the present. Among British writers he stands with Shakespeare and Jane Austen. In America perhaps Mark Twain shares something of this glamour. The French might look to Baudelaire and Proust. Wilde, however, seems likely to outstrip them all. His prominence increases with each year. His defiant individualism, his refusal to accept the limiting constraints of society, his sexual heresies, his political radicalism, his commitment to style and his canny engagement with what is now called ‘celebrity culture’, all conspire to make him more approachable, more exciting and more ‘relevant’.
All this is impressive, and extraordinary, but does it mean that we need another biography of Wilde?
Soon after I began work on this book, I went to dinner at the house of some friends. My host had piled on my chair a selection of books about Wilde drawn from his own shelves. There was Hesketh Pearson’s 1946 Life of Oscar Wilde, Montgomery Hyde’s ‘definitive biography’ from 1976, and, of course, the book that supplanted it: Richard Ellmann’s monumental green volume – Oscar Wilde, published in 1987.
And it was not, moreover, as if my host’s collection was anything like complete. It was just a gathering from the shelves of a general reader. There were dozens of other books that might have been added to the already tottering pile – lesser biographical accounts, the memoirs of contemporaries, literary studies. Surely the story had been told (and retold), the details fixed (and refixed). The tale had become familiar.
But appearances, as Oscar knew, can be deceptive. To anyone with a more than general interest in Wilde it had been clear for some time that there was a pressing need for a new and full biography. The reasons for this are threefold. In the thirty yea
rs since Ellmann’s book appeared, much new material has come to light, much interesting research has been carried out, and the deficiencies in Ellmann’s biography have become ever more apparent.
As to the new material: there have been some amazing discoveries. The full transcript of the libel trial that Wilde launched against the Marquess of Queensberry was unearthed; so too were the detailed ‘witness statements’ of many of those involved in the case. At the Free Library of Philadelphia, Mark Samuels Lasner and Margaret Stetz discovered (hiding in plain sight) one of Wilde’s early notebooks, his annotated typescript of Salomé and a long letter concerning his Ballad of Reading Gaol. Numerous other previously unknown letters were gathered up in the magnificent, and much expanded, new edition of Wilde’s letters, produced by Rupert Hart-Davis and Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland in 2000.
Scholarship, too, has been busy. Oxford University Press has started to produce The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde in its scholarly Oxford English Texts series; there are seven volumes so far, including two tomes of Wilde’s journalism, all with critical introductions and exhaustive notes. There have been many excellent specialist studies – articles, pamphlets, books and websites – on specific aspects of Wilde’s life: his working practices, his medical history, his sex life, his family background, his Irishness, his schooldays, his classical education, his reading, his American tour, his Liberal politics, his British lectures, his role as an editor, his fairy tales, his women friends, his love of Paris, his Neapolitan sojourn; his final days. There have been dedicated biographies of important figures in Wilde’s life: his mother; his wife; the Marquess of Queensberry; Lord Alfred Douglas; such collaborators as Charles Ricketts, Pierre Louÿs and Aubrey Beardsley; such friends as Carlos Blacker, More Adey, Frank Miles and Lillie Langtry. The Oscar Wilde Society has grown and thrived over the last twenty-five years, producing an impressive and regular stream of publications. The Oscholars website has provided another useful forum for research. The need to bring together all this scattered and disparate new information – to assess it and integrate it into the record of Wilde’s life – has grown more pressing with each year.
And, of course, knowledge prompts knowledge. The many additions to the record of Wilde’s life provided by such scholarship have encouraged new avenues of research. Certainly they have encouraged me to re-investigate the great Wildean archives, to search out new material, to track down forgotten references and to avail myself of the possibilities allowed by the groundbreaking digitalization of historical newspaper archives. (To anyone who can recall the long journey out to the British Library Newspaper Archive at Colindale, and the eye-wearying trawl through flickering reels of microfilm in search of an elusive review, or paragraph, the ease and efficiency of the new process seems quite miraculous – if not almost indecent.)
In tandem with this growth in knowledge about the incidents of Wilde’s life, it has become more and more apparent that Ellmann’s book – for all its virtues – is not quite satisfactory. As scholars have engaged with his text, its deficiencies as a record of Wilde’s life have become only too apparent. The German academic Dr Horst Schroeder began to compile a hand-list of ‘Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde’, soon after the book’s appearance. It was published in 1989. And, having continued his investigations, Dr Schroeder issued an expanded edition in 2002, running to over 300 pages. It is, though, by no means exhaustive. Almost everyone who has written on Wilde during the last three decades has had to correct or amend the picture framed for them by Ellmann. Certainly that was my experience in working on my biographies of Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert, both of whom knew Wilde well.
There are reasons for this. Ellmann was overtaken in his work on the biography by a debilitating illness. He was racing to finish the book before he died. It was published posthumously. But beyond this his approach was that of a literary critic rather than an historian. The Life is seen largely through the prism of the Work. Of course, in examining the life of a writer, there are virtues in such an approach – but it has its limits too. And it does seem to have inclined Ellmann not to pay as much attention as he might have done to the facts and the chronology of Wilde’s life, or to the testing and assessing his sources. The errors, for the most part, might be small enough, but they are many, and they inevitably distort the unfolding narrative.
Ellmann’s determinedly literary approach also has its subtly warping effect. He frames his story – as others have done – in the terms of Greek tragedy, foreshadowing the narrative arc from the outset, and suggesting an awful inevitability to its course. And by deploying quotations from Wilde’s works as a running commentary on all the incidents of his life, fact and fiction, early hopes and later achievement, actual experience and reflection upon experience, truth and legend, often become blurred and confused. Because, it seems, Mrs Cheveley (in Wilde’s 1894 play An Ideal Husband) remarked that she had forgotten her schooldays, Ellmann seems content to race past Oscar’s six years at the Portora Royal School in scarcely more than a couple of pages. Wilde, of course, created myths about himself, and adopted poses, and there is always a fruitful tension to be explored between these masks and the truths that stand behind them. But there are moments – in the pages of Ellmann – when our hero seems almost to be parading through his life as the ‘Oscar Wilde’ of later legend.
This is a feature of many books about Wilde. Indeed it is a constant challenge to avoid it. The established persona of ‘Oscar Wilde’ – the unflappable epigrammatic Aesthete – is so compelling, that it is hard not to be seduced by it. At its most extreme this can lead to such cheerful distortions as Hesketh Pearson’s claim that Wilde ‘sinned against his nature’, during his youth, by shooting, fishing and playing tennis ‘with some approach to gusto’. But it can distort in lesser ways too. The picture tends to be complicated further by the fact that in the years after Wilde’s death so many myths grew up around him – spurious anecdotes, invented epigrams, inaccurate newspaper reports, misremembered incidents. Biographers have sometimes been more ready to perpetuate these tales than to question them.
In writing this book I have sought to return Wilde to his times, and to the facts. To view him with an historian’s eye, to give a sense of contingency, to chart his own experience of his life as he experienced it.
In this enterprise I owe a huge debt to all the scholars who have been working on Wilde over the last three decades. Some I have encountered only in their work: Karl Beckson, Ian Small, Josephine M. Guy, John Stokes, Bobby Fong, Joseph Donohue, Mark Turner, J. Robert Maguire, Stefano Evangelista, Kerry Powell, Joel Kaplan, amongst them.
Others I have been fortunate to know. In the generous sharing of scholarship, I owe personal debts to Merlin Holland, Joseph Bristow, Thomas Wright, John Cooper, Michael Seeney, Geoff Dibb, Don Mead, Iain Ross, Franny Moyle, Horst Schroeder, Margaret Stetz, Mark Samuels Lasner, Julia Rosenthal, Neil McKenna, and Ashley Robins.
I am grateful to the staffs of the: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA); Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; British Library; London Library; Bodleian Library; the National Archives, Kew; Trinity College Dublin Library; Glasgow University Library; National Library of Congress, Washington; New York Public Library; Columbia University Library; Fales Library (NYU), Morgan Library & Museum (New York); Houghton Library (Harvard); Beinecke Library (Yale); Archive of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington); Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at University of Delaware; Massachusetts Historical Society Library (Boston); National Library of Australia; Toronto University Library; Brotherton Library (Leeds); University College Library (Oxford); Magdalen College Archive (Oxford); Biblioteca della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria; Biblioteca Universitaria di Napoli; library of the Institut de France (Paris), public library at Bad Homburg; public library at Leadville, Colorado.
To many others who have shared information or assisted in other ways: Amelia Gosztony, Michael Claydon, Clive Fisher, Steven Halliwel
l, John Nicoll, Robert Whelan, Roy Foster, Rupert Smith, David Macmillan, Edward Farrelly, Greg Gatenby, Kitty and Ted Drier, Tony and Jane Worcester, David White (Somerset Herald), Oliver Forge, Reg Gadney, Patrick Gibbs, Gyles Brandreth, Rebecca Jewell, Phil Shaw, Michael Tuffley, Peter Hyland, Gordon Cooke, Hugo Chapman, Audrey Curtis, Sophie Hopkins, Penny Fussell, John Nightingale, Robin Darwall-Smith, David Waller, Sile O’Shea, Megan Dunmall, Ellen O’Flaherty, Louise Turner, Scott Morrison, John Mexborough, Oliver Parker, Paul Vincent, Donna Clarke, Desmond Hillary, Alan Black, Devon Cox, Jill Hamilton, A. N. Wilson, Tim and Jean Sturgis, Alexander Fygis-Walker, Charles Martin, Linda Kelly.
I owe a huge debt to my agent, Georgina Capel, for her vision and dedication in bringing this project to fruition; also to Georgina Blackwell and her colleagues at Head of Zeus for welcoming the book with such insight and enthusiasm.
And most of all to my wife, Rebecca Hossack, for so cheerfully putting up with the presence of Oscar Wilde in our shared life these last six years.
Proem
There was a great pressure for admission. The body of the court was filled with barristers in their wigs and gowns. The galleries and passages were densely crowded with the public and the press. No libel case had so excited the town in a generation. Fashionable society was abuzz. The newspapers headlined the story in their largest type. The name of Wilde had been enough to assure huge interest; the lurid revelations of the opening days’ evidence had increased that interest to a new pitch. And more was expected to follow. The potent mix of celebrity, sex and scandal would be brought to the boil. Counsel might complain at the prejudicial reporting of the morning papers, but the chief justice brushed all objections aside.1
The scene was the Court of Common Pleas in Dublin, on 17 December 1864. The ‘great libel case’ occasioning such intense interest had been brought by an attractive young woman of literary pretensions, Mary Travers, against Lady Wilde, the celebrated wife of Dublin’s leading eye-and-ear doctor, Sir William Wilde. It marked the culmination of a fourteen-month campaign of vilification, annoyance and aggravation against the parents of the ten-year-old Oscar Wilde.
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