* Wilde’s prowess at lawn tennis had declined rather since his Oxford days. Blunt’s daughter, Judith, recalled him on court, ‘a great wobbly blancmange trying to serve underhand’.
† Arthur Wing Pinero (1855–1934) and Arthur Henry Jones (1851–1929) were two of the most popular dramatists of the period. While Wilde described one of Pinero’s plays as ‘the best play I ever slept through’, it became his theatrical axiom that ‘There are three rules for writing plays. The first rule is not to write like Arthur Henry Jones; the second and third rules are the same.’
‡ For example, Lord Henry Wotton’s observation – in Dorian Gray – that ‘nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing’ – was refined to Lord Darlington’s definition of a ‘cynic’ as, ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
5
The Dance of the Seven Veils
‘A Paris on montre tout, ici on cache tout: – même l’esprit! C’est là la différence entre l’Angleterre et la France.’
oscar wilde
The French capital, nevertheless, had a tonic effect. Wilde was delighted to be back on the boulevards. As he explained to one friend, ‘I am not really myself except in the midst of elegant crowds, in the intoxication of capitals, at the heart of rich districts or amidst the sumptuous ornamentations of palace hotels, surrounded by desirable objects and with an army of servants, and the warm caress of plush carpets beneath my feet.’ There was the usual spice of exaggeration in all this; after a brief stint at the passably grand Hôtel Normandie, he removed to a low-ceilinged room on the Boulevard des Capucines.1
The friendships and associations with French writers that he had initiated at the beginning of the year were taken up again, and reinforced. Indeed Wilde had come to feel such a kinship with France and its literature that he conceived the notion of hiring a translator to have The Good Woman turned into French and premiered not in London but at the Comédie-Française. To make his debut as a modern dramatist in Paris, and in French, would certainly leave the English critics wrong-footed. The piece – like many other French productions of the period – might then be transferred to London as an established success. He announced this bold plan at breakfast one morning to Wilfrid Blunt, George Curzon and Willy Peel, who were all over in Paris. Indulging the fantasy, they agreed to attend the opening night, ‘George Curzon as Prime Minister.’2
Wilde, as ever, had travelled with a stock of presents. He sent an inscribed copy of Intentions to Lord Lytton, the British ambassador and a cousin of Blunt’s (Wilde had come to know Lytton, who was a poet as well as the former viceroy of India, at Ouida’s Langham Hotel receptions, and a literary friendship had developed). Lytton, already a great admirer of the book, was delighted to receive the gift from his ‘brilliant Confrere’, but apologized that he was too ill to see guests. He hoped, nevertheless, that Wilde would lunch at the embassy with the rest of the Lytton family. Lytton’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Emily, reported of the occasion that ‘we all thought him [Wilde] very amusing and not so odious as we expected, though he is evidently fearfully conceited. He talked chiefly about his own health and his books [and his plans for his French play], but he was certainly amusing.’3*
To Mallarmé Wilde sent an inscribed copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as a prelude to attending the poet’s mardi on 3 November. The mood of that evening was slightly coloured by the presence – on the sideboard – of a telegram from Whistler, announcing in shrill capitals: ‘PREFACE PROPOSITIONS PREVENIR DISCIPLES PRECAUTION FAMILIARITE FATALE SERRER LES PERLES BONNES SOIREE’ (‘Preface Propositions – Forewarn Disciples – Precaution – Familiarity Fatal – Hide the Pearls – Have a Good Evening). The painter, who was now living in Paris and was an old friend of Mallarmé’s, had worked himself up into an almost hysterical state about the fact that Wilde was being admitted into the poet’s circle. He kept up a steady stream of letters denouncing Wilde as a ‘farceur’ – who had purloined Whistler’s ideas (for, among other things, the preface to Dorian Gray), and would steal ‘the pearls’ from Mallarmé and his disciples given half a chance. Mallarmé, with a fine appreciation of artistic rivalries, soothed Whistler’s anxieties while welcoming Wilde to his table. And Wilde, too, rose above the pettiness of Whistler’s jibes. When Whistler’s name was introduced by Mallarmé into the general discussion, he readily echoed the admiration expressed by the rest of the company.4
Mallarmé wrote a densely phrased letter of thanks for The Picture of Dorian Gray, praising the inner reverie and strange ‘perfumes of the soul’ that it stirred up, and saluting it as a true work of art. ‘It was the portrait that had done everything,’ he concluded. ‘Ce portrait en pied, inquiétant, d’un Dorian Gray, hantera, mais écrit, étant devenu livre lui-même’ (‘This disquieting full-length portrait of a Dorian Gray will haunt, but being written, has itself become a book’). It was a flattering recognition. Yet Wilde, it seems, attended only few more of the Maître’s gatherings.5
He was swept up by other commitments, drawn excitedly into the literary stream. He sought an entrée to Madam Adam’s celebrated salon, sending her a copy of Dorian Gray and a flattering letter. He called on the princess of Monaco and received from her a photograph graciously inscribed ‘Au vrai Art – à Oscar Wilde’. He secured an introduction to Count Robert de Montesquiou, the supposed model for Huysmans’ des Esseintes.6
Both Sherard and Stuart Merrill were on hand to pilot him among the cafés of the Latin Quarter. His old Oxford friend Bodley was also in Paris, having settled there the previous year to pursue a journalistic career. Already well connected, he hosted a small ‘banquet’ to introduce Wilde to ‘some of the writers of France’. Perhaps it was there that Wilde came to know Marcel Schwob, who assisted Catulle Mendès in editing the literary pages of the Parisian daily L’Echo de Paris. The twenty-four-year-old Schwob, already the author of a volume of Symbolist fairy tales, shared Wilde’s enthusiasms for the medieval criminal-poet François Villon, and for the slang of the urban underclass. It proved a happy basis for a friendship, and Schwob became another of Wilde’s guides over the coming weeks – his ‘cornac’, or elephant-driver, as Jean Lorrain called him.7†
The days and nights were filled with an almost ceaseless round of talk – in cafés, in restaurants, strolling along the boulevards, driving in the Bois, at fashionable salons and intimate dinners, around Mallarmé’s exalted board in the rue de Rome, or with the reprobate vagabond Bibi la Purée, among the crowded tables of the Café Harcourt on the Boulevard St Michel. Wilde became the ‘great event’ of the season. Stuart Merrill recalled Wilde’s presiding presence during those weeks, ‘smooth and rosy, like the High Priest of the Moon in the time of Heliogabulus’ talking, listening, smiling.8 De Régnier remembered the enchantment that Wilde cast over all who heard him: everyone was seduced by the ‘sumptuous inventions created by the storyteller in his slow, even, melodious voice’. He enjoyed a legendary status.9 Tales were told that he was ‘a millionaire’ that ‘publishers snatched up his slightest literary efforts, their hand filled with banknotes’, that he was the darling of the English aristocracy.10 He gathered new friends and disciples. First among them was the handsome dandified figure of Pierre Louÿs. A devoted Hellenist and poet, he had replaced the conventional ‘i’ in his surname with a ‘y’ – or ‘i-grec’ – in homage to his literary heroes.
In Louÿs’s wake came André Gide. The twenty-two-year-old writer, who had recently published a treatise on Narcissus, found himself almost swept away by Wilde’s commanding personality, his amazing flow of talk, his fables and stories, his praise of hedonism, his contempt for accepted moralities. Among Wilde’s topics of the moment was the life of Christ. Having suggested in ‘The Soul of Man’ that Christ’s message was really about the development of personality, he was anxious to take the idea further. To Coulson Kernahan he claimed that, more than anything else, he wanted to write ‘the Illiad of Christianity’. His vision of ‘Christianity as
taught by Christ’ would, however, be a novel and idiosyncratic one, stripped of both metaphysics and morality. As he explained to Gide, there was nothing that Christ had said ‘that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art, and there find its complete fulfilment’.11
Gide filled his diary with notes of their meetings – the ‘three hour’ dinners, with Louÿs, Merrill, Schwob, Henri de Régnier and others. On these occasions, when Wilde was in full flow, elaborating an almost endless succession of stories, Gide – as Merrill noted – would stare distractedly at his plate. It seemed to some that he must be in love with the older writer. He had Wilde’s photograph prominently displayed on his mantelpiece. In the immediate aftermath of these intense few weeks of association, Gide declared that Wilde’s effect on him had been almost entirely ‘evil’ – ‘with him I had unlearned how to think. My emotions were more and more diverse, but I didn’t know how to organize them; above all I could no longer follow other people’s deductions.’ He excised many pages from his diary, perhaps relating to Wilde. But the fascination and attraction remained.12
Wilde always sought out the young. He took up the engaging eighteen-year-old Enrique Gómez Carrillo, recently arrived in Paris on a literary scholarship from his native Guatemala. He called on the English students studying at the Académie Julian, befriending the gifted Will Rothenstein and the amiable Charles Conder. Rothenstein was amazed and enchanted by Wilde’s conversation, and his extraordinary knowledge of people and books, but even more taken by his generosity of spirit. ‘I had met no one’, he later recalled, ‘who made me so aware of the possibilities latent in myself.’ Wilde insisted on regarding his nineteen-year-old friend as ‘a sort of youthful prodigy’: he enthused about Rothenstein’s pastels, and introduced him to the literary life of Paris. Together with Sherard and Merrill they made a memorable pilgrimage one evening to the Château Rouge, a notorious inn-cum-doss-house, frequented by thieves and prostitutes. ‘The criminal classes have always had a wonderful attraction for me,’ Wilde declared delightedly. He had, though, to dissuade Sherard from vociferously warning off the various low characters who approached them. ‘Robert,’ he declared, ‘you are defending us at the risk of our lives.’13‡
Perhaps it was the following day that Schwob called for Wilde at his rooms; as they were about to head out, Wilde declared that he could not find his walking stick: ‘My gold-headed cane has disappeared. Last night I was with the most terrible creatures, bandits, murderers, thieves – such company as Villon kept. They stole my gold-headed cane. There was a youth with beautiful sad eyes who had slain his mistress that morning because she was unfaithful. I feel sure it was he who stole my gold-headed cane.’ Enjoying the romance of it all, he concluded, ‘My gold-headed cane is now between the hands that slew the frail girl who had the grace of a spent rose-bush in the rain.’ ‘But, Mr Wilde,’ interjected Schwob, ‘there is your gold-headed cane in the corner.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ said Wilde, rather put out. ‘So it is. There is my gold-headed cane. How clever of you to find it.’14
The dramas and conflicts of Parisian low-life were certainly matched in the literary sphere. It was a world, Wilde soon discovered, rent with divisions. In poetry Mallarmé and the Symbolists stood opposed to José-Maria de Heredia’s technically exacting Parnassian school (Wilde visited Heredia, whose younger daughter would later marry Pierre Louÿs). Merrill took Wilde to dine with Jean Moréas and his disciples, who had broken away from the Symbolists to found the École Romane as a re-assertion of classical purity against allusive vagueness. According to Merill’s account Wilde was half-diverted, half-appalled, when, after dinner (and a general dismissal of all French literature from Hugo onwards), the white-faced, black-moustachioed Moréas commanded his disciples to recite their verses. ‘Sonnet to Jean Moréas’ was followed by ‘Ode to Jean Moréas’; at the announcement of the ‘Tomb of Jean Moréas’, Wilde made his excuses and left. 15
He found more amusement in listening to the caustic Catulle Mendès who, having denigrated Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, launched into Mallarmé and his disciples: ‘the symbolists make us laugh’, he declared. ‘They’ve invented nothing. The symbol is as old as the world.’ Mallarmé was dismissed as ‘a broken Baudelaire whose fragments have never come together.’ Henri de Régnier was all contained in Banville and Hugo. Paul Fort had adopted ‘the Belgian aesthetic’ and there appeared to be nothing at all in Vielé-Griffin.16 Adolphe Retté, meanwhile, could offer a similar denunciation of Jean Moréas and his school. Only Verlaine, amiably innocent and usually drunk, seemed to stand above – or below – the strife.
The House of Pomegranates was published in mid-November, while Wilde was still in Paris. He ensured that Constance, the volume’s main dedicatee, received the first copy off the press. He also wrote to excuse the appearance of those other names attached to the separate stories. ‘To you the Cathedral is dedicated,’ he told her. ‘The individual side chapels are to other saints. This is in accordance with the highest ecclesiastical custom! So accept the book as your own, made for you. The candles that burn at the side altars are not so bright or beautiful as the great lamp of the shrine which is of gold and has a wonderful heart of restless flame.’ Constance was thrilled by this apparent affirmation of her continuing place at the centre of Wilde’s life and affections. Although it might be tempting to doubt Wilde’s sincerity, the statement did probably reflect some aspect of his feeling, and, as with so many of his statements, the mere fact of uttering it made him believe it… almost.17
The book looked sumptuous with its richly decorated cover, and was heftily priced – like Wilde’s other collectors’ items – at one guinea. But the rich effect was rather undercut by the fact that Shannon’s four full-page illustrations were almost invisible; the new ‘improved’ process used to reproduce them had gone badly awry. It was a sad blow. And most of the few reviews dwelt ungenerously on the invisibility of the pictures. The rest fussed tediously over whether the tales were really intended for children. Wilde was moved to write to both the Speaker and the Pall Mall Gazette to explain that ‘in building the House of Pomegranates’ he had had ‘about as much intention of pleasing the British child as [he] had of pleasing the British public’. The stories had been written to please himself. If Wilde had hoped that the book would establish him as a conteur to rival Flaubert, he was disappointed; of the three volumes that Wilde brought out with Osgood & McIlvaine during the course of 1891 it was the least successful.18 Its main use was as a literary calling card. A copy was presented to Louÿs, inscribed ‘au jeune homme qui adore la beauté, au jeune homme que la beauté adore, au jeune homme que j’adore, Oscar Wilde’.19
Through such gifts Wilde strove to make his work better known in France. The Picture of Dorian Gray existed as a name, but few (beyond those like Mallarmé who had been given copies) had actually read the book. There was no sign of the mooted French edition of the novel, nor of Wilde’s dialogues. Extracts from his ‘Soul of Man Under Socialism’ had, however, been published that summer in the anarchist journal La Révolté. They had enhanced Wilde’s reputation among the younger Symbolists, even if the Parisian correspondent for the Pall Mall Gazette exaggerated in claiming that these writers now regarded Wilde as ‘a kind of Messiah’.20 As a small but gratifying next step Schwob had undertaken to make a translation of ‘The Selfish Giant’ for publication in L’Echo de Paris.21
As part of his pose, though, Wilde deflected inquiries about his work – at least during the early part of his stay. When Ernest Raynaud, one of Moréas’s disciples, tried to draw him about his writings, he remarked, ‘I do them to relax and to prove myself, as your Baudelaire used to with more genius, that I am not inferior to my contemporaries whom I hold in low esteem. My ambitions do not stop with composing poems. I want to make my life itself a work of art.’ And one afternoon at the Café Harcourt – together with Gómez Carrillo, Verlaine and the impressively named Yvanhoe Rambosson – Wilde confessed, ‘I have put only my talent into my works. I have pu
t all my genius into my life’ (it would be a line he would use again). Verlaine, suddenly attentive, remarked to Rambosson, in an approving aside, ‘This man is a true pagan. He possesses the insouciance which is half of happiness, for he does not know penitence.’22
The young French writers were dazzled by Wilde’s performance, almost literally. Gide recalled that at a dinner hosted by the Princess Ouroussof, the princess suddenly gave a loud shriek and declared she had seen a halo around Wilde’s head.23 And Wilde, though he might conceal it, was equally impressed by the young French writers. For all his affected indifference to literary production, he found great stimulation in their energy and commitment, their concerted desire to achieve ‘a richer Romanticism, with subtleties of new colour and strange music and extended subject matter’. The ‘transformation of the French language, in the hands of the leaders of the new schools’ was, Wilde considered, ‘one of the most interesting and attractive things to watch and wonder at’.24 Despite the rather irritating character of Moréas, Wilde saw attractions in the École Romane, but it was the Symbolism of Mallarmé and de Régnier that continued to attracted him most. And although, initially, he seems not to have been confident enough of his own French to do more than ‘watch and wonder’, the weeks spent immersed in the language, in telling and retelling his fables in French, encouraged him to reconsider.
Certainly many of his new friends were impressed by his command of their language, by his ability not only to express his ideas but also to dress them in what Adolphe Retté called ‘an irresistible softness’. ‘He knew French admirably,’ Gide recalled, ‘but he pretended to hunt about a bit for the words which he wanted to keep waiting.’ He had, moreover, almost no accent, or ‘only such as it pleased him to retain and which might give the words a sometimes new and strange aspect’.25
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