Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Not that any single interpretation of a story was ever allowed to hold sway. Wilde explained to one would-be expounder that he liked ‘to fancy that there may be many meanings’ in each tale: ‘I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets, and many answers.’83 Wilde called the stories ‘studies in prose, put for Romance’s sake into a fanciful form’. And if they were meant ‘partly for children’ they were intended more ‘for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness’84 (he would sometimes describe the stories as being ‘for Children from Eight to Eighty’).85 He read some of them to Theodore Watts, who was ‘charmed’ but suggested that they might be even better done in verse. Wilde, though, remained true to his conception of them as ‘prose-cameos’.86 They only wanted a publisher.

  For all his activity, Wilde was still earning very little with his pen. Short stories, even when published, were scarcely more remunerative than book reviews. Financial worries continued to beset him. Interest payments on the money borrowed from Constance’s marriage settlement and from Otho were not met.87 When, in the rooms of Lord Francis Hope, the talk turned to finance, and it was reported that ‘Money [was] very tight’ in the City just then, Wilde cut in, ‘Ah yes; and of a tightness that has been felt even in Tite Street.’ Wilde claimed he had passed the morning ‘at the British Museum looking at a gold-piece in a case’. To the young American author Edgar Saltus he cheerfully confided that the only thing he could now afford to pay was compliments.88 In an effort at retrenchment there was even a plan to let Tite Street, the ‘House Beautiful’ upon which Constance and he had expended so much time, taste and money. But no tenant could be found, so they were obliged to live on there ‘rather too extravagantly’, as Constance put it, in the hope that ‘after next year we shall be able to get on’.89 And on this score there were some unexpected grounds for optimism.

  * Wilde and Marillier lunched with Oscar Browning on one afternoon. Coming away, Wilde remarked, ‘OB is a genial soul, but it is a revolting sight to watch him eat.’ The next time Marillier saw ‘OB’, Browning commented, ‘Your friend Oscar is very witty, but it is a pity he is such an ugly feeder.’

  † Exactly what was involved in that first homosexual encounter remains, not surprisingly, unknown. An account of another of Ross’s seductions (of a younger boy rather than an older man) describes him inviting the boy into his bedroom, putting him on the bed, and placing his penis between the boy’s thighs. Such ‘intercurial sex’ was the preferred mode of gratification in Greek paederastia and Victorian public schools. Sherard, however, who later took an enthusiastic – but highly speculative – interest in Ross’s sex life, claimed that the most popular sexual activity among those in ‘the Rossian orbit’ was fellatio – or, as he neologistically termed it ‘buccal onanism’.

  ‡ ‘The detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery’ – or sodomy, as it was also called – was not specifically defined in the ‘Buggery Act’ of 1533, although through the courts it came to mean not only penetrative anal sex between men, but also anal sex between a man and a woman, or any sort of penetrative sex between a person and an animal. It was a capital offence – and remained one even after the old act was replaced by the Offences Against the Person Act of 1828. The death penalty was not always enacted, but occasional executions in England for ‘buggery’ (almost invariably anal sex between men) continued up until 1835. In 1861 the revised Offences Against the Person Act abolished the death penalty for buggery, replacing it with penal servitude for anything between ten years and life. It remained a felony in England and Wales until 1967.

  § Constance attracted rather more attention when, on 17 May 1886, she appeared as a non-speaking handmaiden wearing a sea-green gown edged with gold in a determinedly Aesthetic – or ‘Neo-Hellenic’ – matinee production of Helena in Troas, written by John Todhunter and mounted by Godwin. Herbert Beerbohm Tree played Paris, and Hermann Vezin Priam.

  ¶ Wilde’s decision to write a ghost story may have been, in part, an hommage to Godwin, who had died on 6 October 1886. According to the artist George Percy Jacomb-Hood, Godwin, during his last years, was cheerfully obsessed with ‘ghost-lore’, and would visit houses that had the reputation of being haunted, in the hope of seeing ‘or even, by exceptional good luck, catching one’.

  7

  Woman’s World

  ‘It was a case of grammar versus mysticism, and the contest is still raging. I fear I shall have to yield.’

  oscar wilde

  Oscar had been offered a job. In April 1887 he was approached by Wemyss Reid, the general manager of Cassell’s Publishing Company, with a view to editing ‘and to some extent reconstructing’ their recently established up-market monthly, the Lady’s World. Wilde’s lingering reputation as a dress reformer probably encouraged the approach, as well as his profile as one half of a noted Aesthetic couple. The opportunity, with its promise of an official title and a regular income, was both flattering and well timed. Wilde agreed to take on the task.

  He was full of ideas. Finding the magazine, in its existing state, ‘too feminine and not sufficiently womanly’, he suggested a ‘wider range’ and a ‘high[er] standpoint’, less ‘millinery and trimmings’, fewer expensive fashion plates, and more about what women ‘think, and what they feel’. He wanted women’s thoughts on art and modern life, entertaining literary criticism (‘if a book is dull let us say nothing about it’) along with a serial story (‘exciting but not tragic’). He imagined contributions from royalty (Princess Louise, perhaps, or Princess Christian), from America (Julia Ward Howe), from Paris (Madame Adam), from the universities (Mrs Humphrey Ward) and from the occasional man.

  Wilde was keen to disturb as well as exploit the conventional divisions between the sexes. In the realm of art, at least, he was ready to declare gender an irrelevance: ‘artists have sex but art has none’. And he hoped that under his editorship the magazine would become one ‘that men could read with pleasure, and consider it a privilege to contribute to’.1 He advised a change of cover, and demanded a change of name.2 The Lady’s World seemed to him – and to all his women friends – to carry ‘a certain taint of vulgarity’. A magazine that aimed to become ‘the organ of women of intellect, culture and position’ should be called Woman’s World. The title, he claimed, had been suggested to him by Mrs Craik, the celebrated author of John Halifax, Gentleman.3

  Terms were agreed, and Wilde began to draw a salary from 1 May. The exact amount is unknown, though one contemporary estimated it at £6 a week (over £300 a year); not huge, but very much more than he had been earning hitherto.4 Although the first number for which Wilde was to be responsible was not due for over six months, he threw himself into preparations without a moment’s delay: drawing up lists of potential contributors, aided by the indefatigable Mrs Jeune; arranging interviews ‘with people of position and importance’; and writing ‘innumerable letters’ to solicit and suggest articles.

  Women had been Wilde’s great allies and supporters since the moment of his arrival in London. It was they who had welcomed him into their homes, delighted in his company and listened to his views on art. Now was a chance to repay them, through his enthusiasm, his engagement and his offer of ‘a guinea a page’ for all published articles (the same rate as the Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century). He wrote to established ‘authoresses’, literary ladies, social reformers, pioneering professionals, society hostesses and Oscar Browning. He sought contributions from Walter Pater’s sister and the daughter of Matthew Arnold, from young Helena Sickert (freshly graduated from Girton) and from the scarcely older Violet Hunt. He swept up his friends Lady Archibald Campbell and Lady Dorothy Neville, and approached – more deferentially – the Countess of Jersey and the Marchioness of Salisbury. He commissioned his old companion Constance Fletcher (‘George Fleming’) to write the serial, and persuaded ‘Violet Fane’ (Mrs Singleton) to submit
her poems.5

  Perhaps his greatest coup was to secure the support of the popular novelist Ouida (or Maria Louisa Ramé). She was in London that season, over from Italy, and, having installed herself in a suite at the Langham Hotel, was entertaining with a lavish hand. Wilde went to pay court. There was much to draw them together. The forty-eight-year-old Ouida was a literary phenomenon: her highly coloured novels of society life, with their independent-minded heroines and aristocratic heroes, may have been ‘just beyond the high-water mark of books which could be safely admitted to the family library’ but they were the bestsellers of the day. Born in modest circumstances in Bury St Edmunds, the young Miss Ramé had recast herself as a woman of mystery and allure. She possessed – as Mrs Jeune remarked – ‘an insatiable love of notoriety’ and a desire to know ‘everyone worth knowing’. And despite her short, square figure, her eccentric dress sense and a voice like ‘a carving knife’, she had achieved the status of a ‘Lionne’ in London society, carried along by a mixture of romantic affectation and brazen self-assertion. ‘Now that George Elliot [sic] is gone,’ she is supposed to have declared, ‘there is no one else [but me] who can write English.’

  While most people of literary pretension looked down on her and her work, Wilde had been a champion of Ouida’s books since his Oxford days. Although they might be overwritten, trivial and littered with solecisms, they had style. He claimed to find in them something of the same ‘picturesqueness and loveliness of words’ that he admired in Ruskin, Pater and Symonds (Ruskin, too, was an unlikely fan).6

  Backed by his genuine enthusiasm Wilde soon became a privileged visitor at Ouida’s Langham suite, attending not only the fashionable receptions but also her intimate dinners. He was an adept at flattering her and drawing her out. At one dinner party he told her, ‘What I admire so much about your books is the wonderful vividness with which you portray scenery and environment. One but closes the eyes and finds oneself in the particular setting.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ Ouida replied, ‘all that is perfectly true, but that is not what is most wonderful about my books. What is most wonderful about my books is that I write as Duchesses talk.’7 By the end of her stay (June 1887) Ouida was declaring that ‘there was only one man in England… worth looking at or talking to, and he was Oscar Wilde’.8 Wilde secured her commitment to write for his magazine – even though she, with characteristic contrariness, did not care for its new title.9

  As news spread of his appointment, Wilde had also to field a deluge of unsolicited material. Among the old acquaintances who sought him out was the Irish artist and writer Edith Somerville. She gave an account of the editorial Wilde in action to her cousin and collaborator, Violet Martin: ‘I went down to Oscar yesterday… He is a great fat oily beast… He pretended enormous interest… but it was all to no avail. He languidly took the sonnets and is to return them by post. He talked great rot that “French subjects should be drawn by French artists” – I was near telling him, as Dr. Johnson said: “who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.”’10

  The inaugural number of Woman’s World appeared at the beginning of November 1887, its handsome new decorative cover proclaiming the editorship of ‘Oscar Wilde’. There were signed articles on E. W. Godwin’s open-air theatricals at Coombe (illustrated with pictures of the author, ‘Lady Archie’ Campbell, cross-dressed as ‘Orlando’ in As You Like It), on ‘Oxford Ladies’ Colleges’ and ‘Alpine Scenery’, on urban child poverty (by Mrs Jeune) and on Madame de Sevigny’s grandmother (by Thackeray’s daughter). One of Wilde’s discoveries, Amy Levy (‘a mere girl, but a girl of genius’), contributed a very short story. The Countess of Portsmouth provided a rather longer essay on ‘The Position of Women’ – ingeniously suggesting that the greater independence and growing power of women might be used ‘to make men stronger’. Fashion was not neglected, but the eight well-illustrated pages on the latest modes from London and Paris were placed at the back of the magazine, rather than at the front, where such matter usually appeared.11 Wilde contributed ‘Literary and Other Notes’, a round-up of books by female authors from Princess Christian to his old Oxford friend Margaret Bradley (now ‘Margaret L. Woods’) – whom he generously compared to Dostoyevsky. There was also a eulogistic paragraph on Mrs Craik, who had died shortly after sending her last story in to the new venture.

  The debut of Wilde’s magazine, eagerly anticipated, created a decided stir – at least in London. It was reported that on the evening after publication ‘there was not one [copy] in the West End to be had for love or money’.12 The reaction was favourable. The re-launch was pronounced a ‘success’ – a ‘decided improvement’ on Lady’s World. Its ‘excellent illustrations’ received general notice, as did the ‘distinguished’ line-up of ‘lady’ contributors. There was praise for the ‘wider scope’ of the articles, the ‘greater variety of subjects’ and the ‘higher’ tone of discussion.13 Wilde’s literary notes were described variously as ‘crisp’, ‘interesting’ and ‘well-written’. The Spectator remarked approvingly that he did not ‘obtrude either his personality or his well-known views too much on his readers’.14

  The future success of the magazine was prophesied, and set down to Wilde’s role as editor – ‘a circumstance which, no doubt, will carry its full weight with the gentle sex’.15 Women had ‘wooed his cause’ before, and it was expected that they would do so again.16 There was one dissenting voice: Lady Wilde was most put out that Oscar had failed to mention her in his note about a recent anthology of women writers. And she hastened to let him know it.

  Dear Mr Editor,

  Why didn’t you name me in the review of Mrs Sharp’s book? Me, who holds such an historic place in Irish literature? and you name Miss Tynan and Miss Mulholland!

  The Hampshire Review gives me splendid notice – you – well, ’tis strange. I have lent the Woman’s World by O.W. to Mrs Fisher. Lady Archie is the best of the women essayists. George Fleming begins interesting – and is good – but women in general are a wretched lot.

  Did you read Willie on soda water – it is so brilliant – [Lewis] Arnold, [editor of the Daily Telegraph] was delighted.

  Come for a talk on Sunday evening. I have so little time left now – for I must certainly drown myself in a week or two. Life is quite too much trouble.

  La tua

  La Madre dolorosa17

  Wilde was able to assuage the maternal ire by placing Lady Wilde’s ‘Historic Women’ as the opening piece for the January 1888 number. The 259-line poem included some stirring words on Queen Victoria (‘Supreme above all women… blending with her royal majesty / The soft sweet music of a woman’s life’).18 And a copy was dispatched to Windsor, eliciting a prompt response from a lady-in-waiting that the queen ‘likes the poem very much.’19 Emboldened, Wilde inquired whether her majesty might care to contribute to the magazine herself – perhaps ‘some of the poetry written by the Queen when young’. But the offer was not taken up.*

  Wilde’s star was ‘ascending once more’.20 He relished his role as editor. On three mornings a week he would set off from Tite Street, take the underground from Sloane Square to Charing Cross (now Embankment Station), stroll up the Strand and along Fleet Street, before turning through an archway into ‘La Belle Sauvage’, the former coaching inn yard where Cassell’s had their premises. In this bustling establishment (which also contained the firm’s printing presses) Wilde stood out as an exotic bird. Beautifully groomed and elegantly attired, he was, as one fellow employee noted, ‘easily the best-dressed man in the place’. His office was shared with an editorial assistant. Wilde found the twenty-seven-year-old Arthur Fish not only ‘reliable and intelligent’ but sympathetic also; he came to count him as a ‘real friend’.21

  Fish later recalled those early days of editorial engagement: ‘A smiling entrance, letters would be answered with epigrammatic brightness, there would be a cheery interval of talk when the work was accomplished, and the dull room would brighten under the influence of [Wilde’s] great personality.’22 The magazine
began to evolve a distinctive character: cultured, high-minded, socially engaged, yet stylish too.

  There seems to have been a deliberate editorial policy to give a balanced coverage of the great feminine topics of the day: ‘The Fallacy of the Superiority of Man’ was matched by ‘The Fallacy of the Equality of Women’, ‘Woman’s Suffrage’ with ‘Reasons for Opposing Woman’s Suffrage’. But Fish had no doubt that the ‘keynote’ of the periodical, under Wilde’s guidance, was ‘the right of woman to equality of treatment with man’. Many of the articles on political and social subjects were ‘far in advance of the thought of the day’. And Wilde encouraged this. Whenever Wemyss Reid called by to talk over controversial articles, Wilde ‘would always express his entire sympathy with the views of the writers and reveal a liberality of thought in regard to the political aspirations of women that was undoubtedly sincere’.23

  Wilde had to endure some frustrations with the management. Reid protested against the ‘too literary tendencies’ of the first few numbers; and also maintained a tight control on finances.24 But such checks did little to detract from the pleasures of the job. It was a novelty to hold an official position. At least one friend considered that ‘society’ began to take Wilde ‘seriously’ for the first time when he became editor of Woman’s World.25

  Wilde’s position at the helm of a respected monthly gave him a new standing in the literary sphere. He was now an acknowledged professional who could meet with fellow professionals on more or less equal terms. He became friendly with Frank Harris, the recently appointed editor of the Fortnightly Review (the introduction was effected by Mrs Jeune). They lunched together regularly. The brash, unscrupulous Harris, who had left school at thirteen, was fascinated by Wilde’s university-trained erudition and wit. Wilde found Harris’s energy and curiosity by turns bracing and exhausting.26