Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Wilde’s vision was to connect Shakespeare to the Greek tradition of pederastic love as it had been rediscovered in the Renaissance. In the ‘curious dedication’ that Shakespeare had inscribed to ‘Mr. W. H.’ as the ‘onlie Begetter’ of his sonnets, Wilde detected the note of ‘pure Platonism’. Shakespeare, he suggested, must have ‘felt that his art had been created in him by the beauty’ of this mysterious friend.11 Conventional scholarship supposed that ‘Mr W. H.’ was simply an aristocratic patron: William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, or perhaps – through a transposition – the no less noble Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. Wilde, however, proposed that the initials denoted the otherwise unknown ‘Willie Hughes’. The idea had first been put forward by the eighteenth-century critic (and Chatterton scholar) Thomas Tyrwitt, who had detected recurrent puns on the words ‘Will’ and ‘Hues’ in several sonnets. But Wilde took the notion forward with typical elan. While Tyrwitt had suggested that Hughes – as the ‘Fair Youth’ addressed in many of the sonnets – might be a court musician, Wilde proposed that he was a boy actor who played the female roles in Shakespeare’s company, a youth ‘whose physical beauty was such that it became the very corner stone of Shakespeare’s art’. Hughes, he suggested, was not merely the addressee of some poems, but the inspiration for all Shakespeare’s plays, ‘the very incarnation of Shakespeare’s dreams’.

  Rather than setting out his ideas as a mere essay, Wilde wrapped them up in a story. He did not want to be shackled to tedious facts or fixed positions. As he explained to a female writer friend, ‘Fiction – not truth,’ was his preferred mode; ‘I could never have any dealings with truth. If truth were to come in to me, to my room he would say to me, “You are too wilful.” And I should say to him, “You are too obvious.” And I should throw him out the window.’ When his friend queried, ‘Is not Truth a woman?’ Wilde allowed, ‘Then I could not throw her out of the window; I should bow her to the door.’12

  The fiction he devised was a tale of male friendship, artistic forgery and obsession, as the narrator learns from his friend ‘Erskine’ how another friend, the ‘wonderfully handsome’ and ‘effeminate’ ‘Cyril Graham’, had become fascinated by the ‘Will Hughes’ theory but, unable to find definitive proof, had forged an Elizabethan-style portrait of the young actor, his hand resting upon an edition of the sonnets. Although the forgery was uncovered, and Cyril Graham committed suicide, first ‘Erskine’ and then the narrator finds himself beguiled by his theory, unable quite to dismiss it.

  The story was a daringly sketched account of artistic creativity inspired by pederastic love, although the fictional form allowed Wilde to keep a certain distance from the topic. It absolved him, too, from having to declare any personal endorsement of the theory – although in private, he would playfully claim, ‘Even I, who have tried not to believe – for the artist always questions his latest work in happy anticipation of the next – even I have been unable to doubt.’13 It is very doubtful that Wilde had submitted the manuscript for the approval of Carlos Blacker, as he had, jokingly, promised he would.14 Other influences were more apparent. As with ‘The Decay of Lying’, the idea for the piece had been evolved in discussion with Robbie Ross. Indeed Ross could almost lay claim to being the Willie Hughes to Wilde’s Shakespeare. Wilde told him, ‘indeed the story is half yours, and but for you would not have been written.’15

  Wilde initially tried to place the story with the Fortnightly Review, but Frank Harris happened to be away from the office, and the piece was turned down by his deputy. It found a berth instead with the highly respectable Blackwood’s Magazine; Wilde was able to persuade them to take it on the grounds that they had already published several interesting articles on the question of ‘The Sonnets’.16

  If ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ concerned itself with the ethics of forgery, the topic was engaging Wilde in other ways too at that moment. As part of the Tory efforts to discredit Parnell (and, with him, the Home Rule agenda), The Times had published the facsimile of a letter, purportedly from the Irish leader, condoning – if not inciting – violence in Ireland. Parnell had denounced the document as a forgery, and demanded an inquiry to clear his name. A special commission – directed by three unapologetic and hostile Unionists – was set up to investigate not just that charge but also numerous other accusations against the Home Rule leadership. It was a lengthy and contentious process. Parnell himself appeared before the commission in February, and Wilde was frequently in attendance during his testimony. He must have felt close to proceedings. George Lewis was acting for Parnell, and was largely responsible for uncovering the fact that the disputed letter had indeed been forged, by an Irish journalist called Richard Pigott. Willie was also a regular at the commission, showing an unwonted energy in his meticulous and partisan reports for the Daily Chronicle.17

  The political tenor of life at Tite Street was further heightened by the fact that Constance was involved in her own cause célèbre during the early part of 1889, helping Lady Sandhurst’s pioneering attempt to gain election to the inaugural London County Council (Lady Sandhurst won a majority, but a legal challenge prevented her from taking her seat). In the wake of these exertions, however, Constance’s health collapsed. A trip to Brighton in March was only the first of series of rest-cures and holidays aimed at bracing her increasingly fragile constitution.18

  Constance’s absence allowed Wilde more time to pursue his friendships – both sexual and intellectual – with the various young men he gathered about himself. Fred Althaus was hoping that Wilde would be able to ‘go away’ with him over Easter. And perhaps Wilde went.19 Richard Le Gallienne had established himself in London, and became a regular guest at Tite Street. Also in town over the spring and summer was the twenty-four-year-old American writer Clyde Fitch. He had met Wilde the previous year, when travelling in Europe with his mother. Now, though, he was on his own: ‘slight, dark… very aesthetic and romantic looking… whimsical as a child, loving, loveable, gay, witty and gracious’; with lustrous black hair and a passion for fine tailoring, he had a huge admiration for Wilde.20 And his surviving letters preserve the outline of a passionate, if brief, affair: ‘You are my poetry – my painting – my music – you are my sight, and sound, and touch. Your love is the fragrance of a rose – the sky of a summer – the wing of an angel – the cymbal of a cherubim… Time – it stopped when you left – will, always, in every weather’ – and so on.21 Although Wilde seems to have found such levels of emotional intensity rather exhausting, he did reciprocate with a short, sexually suggestive lyric, beginning, ‘Out of the mid-wood’s twilight, / Into the meadow’s dawn, / Ivory-limbed and brown-eyed / Flashes my faun.’22

  While Wilde was embracing the body, Constance was becoming ever more interested in the spirit. The possibility of contact with the ‘spirit world’ was one of the great fashionable concerns of the late nineteenth century. And Constance, like her husband, was always up to date. Having been introduced to spiritualism soon after her marriage – probably by Lady Wilde’s friend Anna Kingsford – she eagerly explored its more occult manifestations, becoming first an enthusiastic disciple of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophists, and subsequently (in November 1888) a founder member of the even more mystic and magical Order of the Golden Dawn. Wilde, it seems, encouraged her interest, content to learn something of the movement and its mysteries at second hand, without having to commit himself to its discipline.23

  He was, though, rather impressed by Madame Blavatsky herself. They spent a memorable afternoon of talk and tobacco smoke as the twin centres of attention at the opening of a philanthropical restaurant for working women on Oxford Street. Oblivious to the circle of listening guests, and the inquisitive crowd gathered at the window beyond, they sat deep in their wicker chairs, exchanging ‘brilliant epigrams’. Even so, Wilde did not take up Blavatsky’s invitation to join the Theosophical Society.24

  A few days after the Oxford Street lunch ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ appeared in the July number of ‘Maga’ (as
Blackwood’s Magazine was generally known), having been trailed in selected papers. It was, on the whole, very favourably noticed in the press. And some of the private responses were effusive. ‘Oh! Oscar!’ wrote Clyde Fitch, having finished the piece in one late-night sitting, ‘The story is great – and fine! I believe in Willie Hughes: I don’t care if the whole thing is out of your amazing beautiful brain. I don’t care for the laughter, I only know I am convinced and I will, I will believe in Willie H.’25

  The article, however, was treated by the reviewers largely as an ingenious – if not wholly convincing – contribution to Shakespearean scholarship. Wilde’s fictional framing narrative was almost completely ignored. And there was scarcely more comment upon the homoerotic and pederastic elements of his theory. The World (for so long Wilde’s great supporter) proved a conspicuous exception; its paragraphist remarked that the ‘subject’ of Shakespeare’s supposed passion for ‘a boy actor’ was ‘a very unpleasant one’, and that it was ‘dilated upon in the article in a peculiarly offensive manner’. Its note of prudish disapproval was echoed, more faintly, by W. E. Henley, (now in Edinburgh, editing the Scots Observer); he referred to the article as ‘out of place in Maga – or, indeed, any popular magazine’. Wilde felt able to ignore such barbs. ‘To be exiled to Scotland to edit a Tory paper in the wilderness is bad enough,’ he told Henley, ‘but not to see the wonder and beauty of my discovery of the real Mr. W. H. is absolutely dreadful. I sympathize deeply with you… The Philistines in their vilest forms have seized on you. I am so disappointed.’26

  Frank Harris’s memory of the article was that it ‘set everyone talking and arguing’. The mystery of ‘Mr W. H.’ became one of the topics in literary circles that season. Wilde enjoyed the success, and also the sense of subversion. He had managed to present, in a respected journal, a strikingly frank exposition of pederastic love, and its artistic benefits, by framing them as a mystery story and connecting them to England’s greatest poet. His self-confidence – both in relation to his writing and to his clandestine sexuality – advanced another step.27*

  On the score of sex, however, rumours were beginning to circulate. The extreme discretion that he had advocated – and practised – during the first years of his new sexual life was beginning to fray.28 Wilde’s relations with young men were becoming a shared secret in some sections of London’s artistic and theatrical world. Ellen Terry had provoked amused consternation amongst the few when, at the private view of the New Gallery’s summer exhibition, she had innocently asked Wilde whether he had really meant it when he had told her friend, the now-grown-up Aimée Lowther, ‘if only you were a boy I could adore you’. Henry Irving, who was present, tried to explain her inadvertent faux pas to her on the way home; but she was too innocent to understand.29

  If Wilde was happy to flirt with indiscretion, others were not. The fastidious Raffalovich was not amused when Constance remarked (with an ingenuity to match Ellen Terry’s), ‘Oscar says he likes you so much – that you have such nice improper talks together.’ After that Raffalovich claimed he never spoke with Wilde, except before ‘witnesses’. He did not want to be tainted with Wilde’s impropriety. Wilde responded to such priggishness with a series of increasingly ungenerous comments on Raffalovich’s social position and physical appearance. ‘As ugly as Raffalovich’ became one of his habitual similes. And he repaid Raffalovich’s lavish hospitality with the quip that ‘Dear Andre’ had come to London ‘with the intention of opening a salon, and succeeded in opening a saloon.’ Unsurprisingly the rift soon widened into barely concealed hostility. If they met it was only ‘unwillingly and by accident’.30

  Although Blackwood had suggested reprinting ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ in their annual anthology, Tales from Blackwood, Wilde was anxious to expand the story and bring it out, on its own, in book form. After the success of The Happy Prince the previous year, he was keen to have another book to his name.31 Wilde’s sense that his professional stock was rising received further confirmation that summer, when, after a hiatus of almost five years, not one but two US producers approached him about the possibility of staging The Duchess of Padua. Anna Calhoun, an actress with whom he had come into contact through Elizabeth Robins, expressed a tentative interest in putting it on. And, at almost the same moment, he heard from the celebrated American tragedian Lawrence Barrett.

  Barrett (so Wilde had told Mary Anderson in 1882) had been keen on the piece even before it was written. And it is likely that Wilde had sent him one of the privately printed copies of the play the following year. Perhaps the debacle of Vera had put Barrett off at the time; now, however, he took up the idea again with enthusiasm. Wilde was delighted – ‘proud and pleased’ that his work had not been ‘forgotten’ by such an eminent and ‘artistic’ producer. He hastened to assure Barrett that he would ‘be very glad to make any alterations in it you can suggest’, having ‘no doubt that the play could be vastly improved’. In order to discuss these ‘alterations’ Wilde – despite being, as ever, short of funds – travelled to see the actor-manager at the German spa town of Kreuznach (‘I thought it would be a superb opportunity for forgetting the language,’ Wilde told Robbie Ross). He found Barrett in poor health, but on ‘a delightful drive’ through the hills above the Rhine, they discussed how best to ‘condense’ the play. It was also decided that to avoid any anti-Wilde sentiment that might still linger from the New York production of Vera it would be best to bring the play out anonymously, and under a different title. Even with these provisos it was thrilling for Wilde that the ‘chef d’œuvre’ of his youth might yet achieve a professional staging. And although the production would take over a year to come to fruition, his confidence in the project remained strong.32

  Not long after his return from Germany Wilde received an invitation from another old American contact. J. M. Stoddart (the Philadelphian publisher, with whom he had paid his memorable visit to Walt Whitman) was over in London on a visit, in his new role as editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and he invited Wilde to dinner at the Langham Hotel on 30 August. It was a select party: Stoddart, Wilde, the jovial Irish MP Henry Gill, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The thirty-year-old Conan Doyle always recalled it as ‘a golden evening’:

  Wilde to my surprise had read Micah Clarke [Conan Doyle’s recent historical novel about the Monmouth Rebellion] and was enthusiastic about it, so that I did not feel a complete outsider… He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had the delicacy of feeling and tact, for the monologue man, however clever, can never be a gentleman at heart. He took as well as gave, but what he gave was unique. He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour, and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning, which were peculiar to himself. The effect cannot be reproduced, but I remember how in discussing the wars of the future he said: ‘A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle’ – his upraised hand and precise face conjuring up a vivid and grotesque picture.

  The dinner, however, was more than a social occasion. Lippincott’s Magazine was already published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic but Stoddart wanted to enhance this Anglo-American flavour. Up until now the magazine had, as an editorial put it, ‘confined itself to native American authors’ when commissioning its most distinctive feature, the complete short novel printed entire in each monthly number. Stoddart had come to London to sign up some English writers. He asked both Wilde and Conan Doyle to contribute stories. With a suggested length of not less than 35,000 words, and a proposed ‘honorarium’ of £200, Wilde readily agreed.33 †

  The offer was not only flattering to Wilde but also welcome. For, despite the recent advances in his own literary reputation, his career as a magazine editor was drawing to a close. Woman’s World may have garnered some excellent notices, but it had not prospered commercially. Cassell’s announced that Wilde’s tenure (and, indeed, the magazine itself) would come to an end in October. Wilde would miss the
income, if not the work.34

  The bright prospects of the Lippincott’s commission, the proposed Laurence Barrett production of the Duchess, and the possible book version of ‘Mr. W. H.’ created a counter-current of optimism. And Wilde, enjoying the moment, set off on a late-summer holiday to Provence – with whom is unknown. He returned ready to work. His story for Stoddart would, he decided, be an elaborate fairy tale concerning a fisherman and a mermaid. He made a start, but progress was frustratingly slow. Wilde’s energy was sapped by a debilitating illness (he called it ‘malaria’) contracted while in France. It dragged on for months. He toyed with his projects, but seemed unable to bring them into focus. Eventually he wrote to Stoddart’s agent in London suggesting that they would have put back the deadline for the fisherman story. ‘I am unable to finish it,’ he explained, ‘and am not satisfied with it as far as it goes.’35

  Progress was rather better on the expanded version of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’. The subject, with its edge of sexual transgression, was perhaps more immediately exciting than the mystical tale of ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’. Wilde, among his additions, made entirely explicit the connection between Shakespeare’s love for ‘Will Hughes’ and the pederastic tradition that ran from of Plato’s Symposium through to Marsilio Ficino and the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance, with ‘its subtle suggestions of sex in soul, in the curious analogies it draws between intellectual enthusiasm and the physical passion of love, in its dream of the incarnation of the Idea in a beautiful and living [male] form’.

  Over that autumn he read, or at least recounted, his revised story to friends and acquaintances, stirring up interest (as he hoped) for the book. Andrew Lang, he claimed, was ‘not entirely hostile’ and ‘Balfour thinks he is convinced’. Wilde also submitted the expanded manuscript to a publisher, most probably Blackwood’s. But the firm’s reader took fright. ‘This gardien du sérail,’ Wilde reported, ‘advises me not to print it, lest it should corrupt our English homes.’36 The rebuff, it seems, only heightened his desire to bring out the book. The publication would, he thought, need a frontispiece – an image of the young ‘Willie Hughes’; and Wilde began to consider who might be able to provide such a work.