Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  He had recently been sent an interesting – and thoroughly Aesthetic – publication called The Dial. A collection of essay, stories, art notes and pictures, it had been privately produced by two young artists, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. They lived very close to Tite Street, in a dilapidated Regency house (until recently inhabited by Whistler) set in a little rustic cul-de-sac off the King’s Road. Wilde went to call on them.

  He found an intriguing ménage: the lively twenty-three-year-old Ricketts, small, red-headed, bright-eyed, sharp-bearded, full of eager energy and inquiry; and the quieter, fairer, less hirsute, twenty-six-year-old Shannon. The house was bare, but touched with discriminating artistic details. There were Japanese prints pinned on the yellow walls. And the great mutual affection and dedication of the two artists was readily apparent too, although whether the relationship had a sexual dimension was less clear, and remains so. Many supposed that it did; others suspected that the two friends deliberately sublimated their sexual energies into art. They were dubbed by one contemporary ‘the Sisters of the Vale’.37

  Ricketts later recalled the excitement of Wilde’s visit: his over-generous praise of The Dial, and his admonition ‘it is quite delightful but, do not bring out a second number, all perfect things should be unique’; his inspection of their own work; and then his unexpected request that Ricketts might paint for him ‘a small Elizabethan picture – something in the manner of, shall we say, Clouet’ – to adorn his proposed book about ‘Mr W. H.’. A few days later Wilde read the new, enlarged, story to Ricketts, in his Tite Street study. And ‘within a fortnight’ Ricketts had produced the little portrait, framed in some ‘worm-eaten moulding’ pieced together by Shannon.38

  Wilde was thrilled:

  ‘My dear Ricketts,’ he wrote, ‘It is not a forgery at all – it an authentic Clouet of the highest artistic value. It is absurd of you and Shannon to try and take me in! As if I did not know the master’s touch, or was no judge of frames!

  Seriously, my dear fellow, it is quite wonderful, and your giving it to me is an act so charming that, in despair of showing you any return, I at once call upon the gods to shower gold and roses on the Vale, or on that part of the Vale where the De Morgans do not live. I am really most grateful (no! that is a horrid word: I am never grateful) I am flattered and fascinated, and I hope we shall always be friends and see each other often.39

  Despite now possessing a perfect frontispiece for his story, Wilde still struggled to find a publisher for the book. The plan, carried forward so eagerly that autumn, was languishing by the end of the year. Whether publishers were reluctant to take up the project on moral or commercial grounds is not known. But there was, just then, a heightened public anxiety – almost an hysteria – about sexual relations between men. From the end of September London had been filled with ‘prurient gossip’ concerning the police discovery of a male brothel in Cleveland Street, near Tottenham Court Road. Most of the prostitutes working there were teenage telegraph boys from the Central Post Office, while their clientele was said to include several members of the nobility – and perhaps even royalty. Although the authorities initially strove to hush up the matter, the scandal erupted in the press at the end of the year, when the Earl of Euston felt himself obliged to sue the editor of a north London newspaper for suggesting that he was an habitué of the place. Although there is no suggestion that Wilde ever visited 19 Cleveland Street, he would certainly have taken a keen interest in the case – and not just because George Lewis was acting as Lord Euston’s solicitor.

  The scandal, when it broke, provided generous scope for British hypocrisy. The press, while claiming to be shocked at the notion of ‘noble lords’ paying for sex with working-class telegraph boys, relayed the full details with gusto, sure of a ready readership. It was clear, too, that the authorities had been reluctant to act. The only two people actually prosecuted (both workers at the brothel) had been given light sentences; and their case had been barely reported. Meanwhile Lord Arthur Somerset, the most conspicuous of the society figures implicated in the scandal, had been allowed to escape abroad without a warrant being issued for his arrest.40

  If Wilde followed the drama with interest, he had his own troubles – or minor irritations – to contend with. A young writer called Herbert Vivian, whom he had met and, in facetious mood, had encouraged to write his ‘memoirs’, began to publish extracts from these hastily penned Reminiscences of a Short Life in the Sun newspaper. He claimed Wilde as ‘the fairy-godfather’ of the work, and among the anecdotes he relayed were several relating to family life at Tite Street. Vivian reported Wilde’s fanciful claim that he had adorned the walls of his children’s nursery with ‘texts about early rising and sluggishness and so forth, and I tell them that when they grow up, they must take their father as a warning, and occasionally have breakfast earlier than two in the afternoon’. He also gave an account of how the infant Cyril, when urged to say his prayers ‘to make him good’ had, ‘after a prolonged altercation’, announced as a ‘compromise’ that he ‘wouldn’t mind praying to God to make baby [Vyvyan] good’ instead.41 Wilde was dismayed at both the vulgarity and the intrusiveness of such details. ‘Meeting you socially,’ he reprimanded the bumptious young author, ‘I, in a moment which I greatly regret, happened to tell you a story about a little boy. Without asking my permission you publish this in a vulgar newspaper and in a vulgar, inaccurate and offensive form, to the great pain of my wife, who naturally does not want to see her children paraded for the amusement of the uncouth.’ In a heated correspondence, he insisted that his name should not be used to endorse the book.42

  Herbert Vivian’s ill-judged ramblings caused grief in other ways too. His comments about Wilde’s supposed intellectual debt to Whistler opened up that old wound, and prompted the painter to fire off a stinging letter to Truth, which was just then conducting a debate about the ethics of plagiarism. Whistler denounced Wilde as being the ‘fattest of offenders’, rehearsed all his old grievances, and pointed out (as Vivian had done) that a phrase about ‘having the courage of other people’s opinions’ – which appeared in ‘The Decay of Lying’ – had been borrowed ‘without a word of comment’ from an earlier ‘well-remembered letter’ that Whistler had sent to Wilde.43 The tenor of the attack was so deliberately offensive that even the good-natured Wilde felt obliged to respond. He wrote to Truth, regretting that it was necessary to take note of ‘the lucubrations of so ill-bred and ignorant person as Mr. Whistler’ – nevertheless, he went on: ‘The definition of a disciple as one who has the courage of the opinions of his master is really too old even for [Whistler] to be allowed to claim it, and as for borrowing Mr Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority over painters greater than himself.’44 The break was now open and irrecoverable.

  It was a sad ending. There were, however, enough new beginnings to draw Wilde’s attention onwards. The friendship with Ricketts and Shannon was thriving. After that first visit to the Vale Wilde returned often. Soon he was coming to ‘jaw’ three times a week. Happy evenings were spent talking what Ricketts called ‘inspired “rot”’.45 Of the two ‘Dialists’ it was the lively, erudite, abrasive Ricketts who engaged Wilde most. Half-French, he had a Gallic delight in playing with ideas, trying out theories and revisiting old opinions – often to the exasperation of his more literal partner. ‘What’s the use of saying that?’ Shannon would sometimes demand, ‘You know you don’t think it.’ Wilde, however, enjoyed such flights, and was ready to match them. One regular visitor to the Vale – Charles Holmes, the future director of the National Gallery – sketched the typical scene: ‘Ricketts, perched on the edge of the table, engaged Wilde in a long verbal combat. So swiftly came parry and riposte, that my slow brain could only follow the tongue-play several sentences behind, and cannot remember a word of what passed, except “Oh! Nonsense, Oscar,” from Ricketts, although it lives in the memory as the most dazzling dialogue
which I was ever privileged to hear.’46

  They vied with each other in showing off and sharing their literary interests and artistic enthusiasms. ‘I viewed [Wilde],’ Ricketts later recalled, ‘as a man who had known Swinburne, Burne-Jones, and who might have met Rossetti. I think he made me read Pater and I made him read Villiers [de Lisle Adam] and Verlaine; we had a common meeting ground in Baudelaire and Flaubert.’ Ricketts had a knowledge of French literature and art that in many ways exceeded Wilde’s own; he lent his new friend a copy of Verlaine’s 1870 volume Fêtes Galantes, as well as introducing him to the works of some of Verlaine’s followers.47

  Wilde met another interesting young Francophile that February when he was in Oxford, visiting Pater and offering advice to a student production of Robert Browning’s play Strafford. Prompted perhaps by Pater, he sought out an undergraduate poet called Lionel Johnson. ‘On Saturday at mid-day,’ Johnson reported to a friend, ‘lying half asleep in bed, reading Green, I was roused by a pathetic and unexpected note from Oscar: he plaintively besought me to get up and see him. Which I did: and I found him as delightful as Green is not. He discoursed, with infinite flippancy, of everyone: lauded the Dial: laughed at Pater: and consumed all my cigarettes. I am in love with him.’ Wilde, too, enjoyed the encounter, and hoped to see more of Johnson in London.48‡

  * In another act of sly subversion, Wilde published a slightly amended version of his love lyric for Clyde Fitch, in the Christmas number of the Lady’s Pictorial. It was retitled ‘In the Forest’.

  † Conan Doyle, five years younger than Wilde, was offered only £100 for a story of not less than 40,000 words. He produced ‘The Sign of the Four’ [sic], the second appearance of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. It was published in the February 1890 number of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and attracted only modest attention.

  ‡ Wilde, for all his admiration for Pater as a prose stylist, was often amused and exasperated by his mentor’s cautious and reticent manner. Something of Wilde’s facetious attitude to his ‘master’ is suggested by his remark to Pater, after the latter’s lecture at the London Institution on Prosper Mérimée on 24 November 1890. When Pater expressed a concern over whether audience had been able to hear him, Wilde remarked deftly, ‘We overheard you.’

  2

  A Bad Case

  ‘The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.’

  oscar wilde

  Meanwhile Wilde’s plans for his Lippincott’s story had begun to shift. After toiling at ‘The Fisherman and his Soul’ for several months, he abandoned the idea of sending it to the magazine. At 15,000 words it was far too short. Besides, a new and ‘better’ idea had occurred to him, for a tale about a mysterious portrait.1 The initial seed for the story had been sown a couple of years earlier when – in December 1887 – he had had his portrait painted by his friend, the Canadian artist Frances Richards, who was over in London and staying with the Ross family in Kensington. ‘When the sitting was over,’ Wilde recalled, ‘and I had looked at the portrait, I said in jest, “What a tragic thing it is. This portrait will never grow older and I shall. If only it was the other way!” The moment I had said this it occurred to me what a capital plot the idea would make for a story.’2

  He had subsequently gone on to evolve a Poe-like tale of a handsome young man committed to a life of hedonistic dissipation who remains quite unmarked by either age or debauchery, while his portrait gradually accumulates all the terrible signs of both. It joined his repertoire of extemporized fables to be spun out among friends and dining companions. Now, though, he determined to write it down – or write it up.* To achieve the 35,000-plus words required, the story needed some amplification. Wilde told Stoddart he could have the work done by the end of March. He also asked if he could have ‘half the honorarium [£100] in advance’, as he needed money after his months of illness-enforced idleness.3

  Fired now with enthusiasm for the project, Wilde set about expanding the plot, and infusing it with his current concerns – the literature of the French Decadents, the relations between art and life, the creative force of pederasty and the challenges of leading a ‘double life’. He created the figures of Dorian Gray, the vain young man who wishes that his portrait might age so that he will not; Basil Hallward, the artist who – infatuated with Dorian – creates the magical picture; and Lord Henry Wotton, the worldly advocate of a ‘New Hedonism’, who leads Dorian along a fatal path of self-fulfilment through self-indulgence: ‘The only way to get rid of a temptation,’ he tells Dorian, ‘is to yield to it.’

  Dorian Gray’s name carried not only an echo of Disraeli’s first novel, Vivian Grey, but also a coded reference to the ‘Dorians’ of ancient Sparta, who were credited with introducing pederasty into Greek culture; while Dorian’s relationship with Hallward – framed as an intense romantic friendship – is also that of the ‘beloved’, who through his beauty inspires his pederastic ‘lover’ to create an artistic masterpiece. Drawing on the genealogy mapped out in Pater’s Renaissance and his own ‘Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, he characterized Basil’s feelings for Dorian as a ‘noble and intellectual’ love – ‘not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.’4

  To provide a blueprint and a guide for his career of pleasure, Lord Henry lends Dorian a fatal book – a French novel written in a ‘curious jewelled style... without a plot, and with only one character, being indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own… loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.’ Although clearly inspired – as he privately admitted – by Huysmans’ À Rebours, Wilde dubbed it ‘Le Secret de Raoul’ by Catulle Sarrazin (in a rather congested allusion to the protagonist of Rachilde’s novel, Monsieur Vénus; to the Decadent author Catulle Mendès; and to Wilde’s friend Gabriel Sarrazin).5 And although Wilde’s vaguely sketched account of Dorian’s pleasures and crimes was a model of reticence by contemporary French standards, he was well aware that its hints of drug abuse, sexual predation and ‘unnatural’ vice went far beyond the accepted limits of the contemporary English novel. He was to sound a new note in the fiction of the day.

  He devised a low-life subplot in which Dorian falls in love with a young East End actress called Sybil Vane, enraptured by her performances as Shakespeare’s romantic heroines, only to reject her when her all-too-real love for him undermines her artistic ability to simulate love convincingly in her acting. And he fashioned a climax in which Dorian, overcome with remorse after murdering Basil Hallward and marring the lives of countless others, finally attempts to obliterate the past by destroying the now-disfigured portrait, only to destroy himself.

  The sometimes melodramatic aspects of the plot were countered by the sparkling play of epigrammatic wit among the three main characters, directed always by Lord Henry Wotton. Wilde’s enjoyment in writing these parts sometimes threatened to unbalance the whole. Indeed, the story, he confessed to one friend, ‘is rather like my own life – all conversation and no action. I can’t describe action: my people sit in chairs and chatter.’6 The chatter, though, enabled him to fix instances of his own spontaneous wit, and also to continue that successful blend of paradox and ideas that he had initiated with ‘The Decay of Lying’. Frank Harris considered the ‘first hundred pages’ of the story to be ‘the result of months and months of Oscar’s talk’, with Lord Henry being ‘peculiarly Oscar’s mouthpiece’.7

  At almost 55,000 words, the story was his most sustained piece of writing to date. He had worked hard, even turning down luncheon engagements in his anxiety to meet his deadline.8 He did take some short cuts: the descriptions of precious stones
and church vestments were copied almost verbatim from the ‘art handbooks’ of the South Kensington Museum.9 But then other avenues were explored with more thoroughness. He took the trouble to quiz a young scientist acquaintance about the best way for Dorian to dispose of Basil Hallward’s body. And, overall, his manuscript shows signs of meticulous care.10

  Wilde had a finished typescript ready before the end of March. And although he might pretend to Bernard Berenson that he had knocked it off as a piece of magazine hack work, there is no doubt that he was proud and pleased at his creation. To another friend he described it, excitedly, as ‘my best piece of work’.11 As Basil Hallward had put much of himself into his portrait of Dorian, so Wilde had put much of himself into his story. As he later phrased it, ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.’12

  Wilde dispatched the typescript to Philadelphia, and, after a wait of almost a month, received a letter from Stoddart expressing his ‘entire satisfaction with the story’ – which he judged ‘one of the most powerful works of the time’. It would appear in the July number of the magazine.13 The letter, though, concealed quite as much as it revealed. Stoddart, on first reading the manuscript, while impressed by the strength of the story, had been alarmed to note ‘a number of things which an innocent woman would take an exception to’. These ‘objectionable passages’ would, he told his employer, Craige Lippincott, ‘undoubtedly have to be fixed’ before the story could be published. And it was only after he had consulted with several of his literary associates (male and female) on how best to carry out this editorial task, that he wrote to Wilde accepting his story. In his letter, though, he made no mention of any of this; there would, after all, not be time to consult Wilde about changes to the text. Stoddart and one of his editors were already busy, excising over 500 words from the typescript. Some of the changes addressed – and toned down – the homoerotic nature of Basil Hallward’s feelings for Dorian; others removed the decadent details of the fatal French novel presented to Dorian by Lord Henry Wotton (its fanciful title and author were among the things obliterated); the largest number, though, related to Dorian’s promiscuous relations with women. All references to mistresses and prostitution were carefully removed.14