Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Among Wilde’s repertoire of spoken tales, one story recurred with greater frequency than the others: the story of Salome, daughter of Queen Herodias, who danced for her stepfather, Herod, and demanded in return the severed head of his prisoner, John the Baptist. The biblical accounts were so terse as to invite invention, and three of Wilde’s favourite French writers had embroidered the narrative. Flaubert had recounted the story as one of his Trois Contes; in À Rebours des Esseintes spends much of Chapter V in ecstatic contemplation of Gustave Moreau’s jewelled dreamlike image of Salome dancing before Herod, and the same artist’s yet more disturbing ‘Apparition’, in which the severed head of the saint hovers in an auriole of light before the now-horrified dancer. Wilde had the passages of lush description by heart, and loved to recite them.26 And Mallarmé was known to be engaged with the subject too, in an ongoing poetic work that took the figure of Herodias as the starting point for an investigation into the nature of language and beauty (the work was begun when Mallarmé was twenty-two, but remained incomplete at his death). Wilde was stimulated rather than daunted by these illustrious precursors.

  His interest in the story, after all, predated his trip to Paris. Edgar Saltus recalled an afternoon, some years before, when he and Wilde had seen, in the rooms of Lord Francis Hope, an engraving of Salome dancing ‘on her hands, her heels in the air’, just as Flaubert describes her in his story. Confronted with the image, Wilde exclaimed ‘La bella donna della mia mente’ (‘the fair lady of my dreams’).27 The dream stayed with him, and in Paris came gradually into sharper focus.

  As was his usual practice, he remoulded the story over many tellings, trying variations and testing effects upon his listeners. He imagined Salome shameless and cruel (‘her lust must be an abyss, her corruptness, like an ocean’). He imagined her almost chaste, a ‘sad princess’ dancing ‘as though under divine command so that the impostor and enemy of Jehovah might be punished’.28 In one version he had Salome, banished to the desert by a remorse-stricken Herod, living like a hermit, until one day she sees Jesus pass by and recognizes him as the Messiah. She then sets out to spread the word. Years later, crossing a frozen lake, she falls through the ice, her head being cut from her body as she drops, her mouth uttering the names of Jesus and John with its final breath. Travellers coming after see her head, resting on the ice, a golden halo shining around it. She had become a saint.29 In another variant (told one evening chez Jean Lorrain) Salome only wants the head of John the Baptist because she is in love with a ‘young philosopher’, and he has expressed a desire to possess it. But when she presents the trophy to him, he remarks, ‘What I really want, beloved, is your head.’ In despair she goes off and has herself decapitated. When they bring her head to the philosopher, he asks, ‘Why are you bringing this bloody thing to me?’ before turning back to his Plato.30 Wilde was not at all impressed when Rémy de Gourmont, citing the ancient historian Josephus, pointed out that Wilde, in all his tales, was confusing two separate people both called ‘Salome’ – one the daughter of Herod, the other the fatal dancer. ‘Poor Gourmont,’ Wilde remarked to Gómez Carrillo. ‘What he told us was the truth of a professor of the Institute. I prefer the other truth, my own which is that of the dream. Between two truths, the falser is truer.’31 In the end, from among the shifting dreamlike truths, Wilde settled upon a succinct yet macabre narrative line in which Salome, overcome with unrequited lust for the imprisoned John the Baptist, seeks to gain his severed head so that – at last – she is able to kiss his lips.

  Wilde had wondered at first whether to fix his tale as a short story, or perhaps a poem.32 But then he had the inspiration to make it a drama, and a drama in French. He had been ‘thinking much’ about Maeterlinck, in preparation for the introduction (that he never quite got around to writing) to Princess Maleine. The preparation, however, proved fruitful. Maeterlinck’s play was the evangel of a new Symbolist drama – spare, anti-naturalistic, written in incantatory, repetitive, deliberately stilted, prose. Indeed Wilde thought that ‘a great deal of the curious effect that Maeterlinck produces’ was due to the fact French was not his first language. And he began to perceive that he might be able to achieve something similar. Freed from the demands of realistic dialogue, there was no reason why his own French should not be sufficient for the task. Oddities of expression would ‘give a certain relief or colour’ to the piece.33

  According to his own account the work was begun one afternoon after he had lunched with a group of young writers. He had told them – as he had told others – the story of Salome, but, on returning to his room, he had noticed a blank notebook on the table and had decided to write the story down. ‘If the blank book had not been there on the table,’ Wilde claimed, ‘I should never have dreamed of doing it.’ He wrote without break deep into the evening. At ten o’clock he went out to sup at a nearby café. He told the leader of the gypsy orchestra that he was ‘writing a play about a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain. I want you to play something in harmony with my thoughts.’ The band struck up ‘such wild and terrible music’ that soon the whole café fell into an awed and shocked silence. ‘Then,’ Wilde claimed, ‘I went back and finished Salomé.’ Although the details are certainly embellished, there does exist a notebook, purchased from a stationer’s in the Boulevard des Capucines, and containing an early draft of the play, to confirm the outline of the story.34

  That first session of furious activity was, though, only the prelude to a more concerted campaign. Wilde worked hard at the manuscript, revising and improving. Salome dominated his conversation and his thoughts. His new Parisian friends were excited by the project. They were keenly aware of the possibilities of Symbolist drama: Maeterlinck’s play L’Intruse (The Intruder) had been successfully premiered at Paul Fort’s experimental Théâtre d’Art that May.35

  Wilde was encouraged by such tales, and his thoughts were soon running ahead to details of staging and design. He wondered whether Salome should dance clothed or naked, or simply covered in jewels. He lingered outside the boutiques in the rue de la Paix, pondering which ornaments or fabrics might best suit his heroine. He steeped himself in images of the fatal dancer. He wished he could accompany Gómez Carrillo to Madrid to see the painting of her by Titian in the Prado with its ‘quivering flesh’. In his obsession to find the perfect representation of the dancer-princess he declared himself, ‘mad, like Des Esseintes’. And, like the hero of À Rebours, he returned always to the erotically charged jewel-encrusted image created by Gustave Moreau. It was, he announced, ‘one of the wonders of the world’. Fired by the picture, he looked for Salome’s ideal representative in the women he passed on the boulevards; he imagined Sarah Bernhardt in the role; although when he saw a Romanian acrobat at the Moulin Rouge dancing on her hands, he sent round his card, in the hope that he could interest her in the part. He paid a visit to the morgue, to see the body of a recently executed criminal, so that he might feel the weight of a severed head. He was ‘astonished’ by how heavy it was.36

  Pierre Louÿs affected an introduction to Paul Fort, and it was arranged that Wilde should give a reading of the play script under the auspices of the Théâtre d’Art.37 The occasion (in mid-December) was, according to Wilde, a great success: the ‘young poets’ who made up the audience admired the work-in-progress ‘immensely’. One friend recalled Wilde’s great satisfaction in ‘chanting’ the sonorous yet simple phrases of the play. Plans began to be laid for a production the following year.38 Wilde could account himself a figure on the Parisian literary scene: it became his semi-humorous boast that he was now ‘a famous French author!’39

  His position was confirmed in the press. There were lengthy articles on him in Le Figaro and Le Gaulois, and an interview in L’Echo de Paris (Lady Wilde noted approvingly that the interviewer seemed to approach her son with ‘a kind of awe’). The Echo de Paris also printed Wilde’s adroit open letter to Edmond de Goncourt, correcting a passage from Goncourt’s recently seri
alized diary entry for 21 April 1883, which suggested that Wilde had described Swinburne as ‘a braggart of vice’ (‘un fanfaron du vice’). Wilde began with the neat paradox that, since the intellectual basis of his aesthetic was the philosophy of unreality, he should be allowed to make a small rectification of a mis-statement doubtless caused by his limitations as a French speaker. ‘French by sympathy,’ he declared (in French), ‘I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.’ Goncourt showed his regard for Wilde by removing the offending passage when his diary was published in book form; he also – though Wilde had not complained of the phrase – excised the reference to the Irish writer being of ‘sexe douteux’.40

  * Lord Lytton did not recover from his sudden illness; he died on 24 November. Wilde attended his funeral service at the English church in rue d’Aguesseau, opposite the embassy – impressed by ‘the purple-covered bier with its one laurel wreath’, a lone ‘solemn note of colour and sadness in the midst of the gorgeous uniforms of the Ambassadors’.

  † The Decadent novelist Jean Lorrain, though both a fellow homosexual and a fellow dandy, was one of the few Parisian writers with whom Wilde failed to achieve a rapport. Having been introduced to each other, Wilde was asked what he made of Lorrain. He replied, ‘Lorrain is a poseur’. Lorrain, asked what he thought of Wilde, declared, ‘He is a faker.’

  ‡ Although Wilde met the twenty-year-old Marcel Proust through Jacques-Emile Blanche and was impressed by his knowledge of Ruskin and George Eliot, no friendship developed between them. Nevertheless the account, first recorded in Philippe Jullian’s Oscar Wilde (1976), of an aborted dinner chez Proust, when Wilde, not finding his host there to greet him, retreated to the lavatory (after looking in on Proust’s parents in the drawing room and declaring ‘How ugly your house is’) before eventually fleeing into the night, is not perhaps to be trusted.

  6

  Charming Ball

  ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’

  oscar wilde

  Wilde returned to England in time for Christmas. Constance and the children were delighted to have him back. He revised and completed Salomé at Torquay over the festive season, before going to stay for a few days at Glyn-y-Garth, a ‘princely mansion’ by the Menai Bridge belonging to Mrs Salis Schwabe, the widow of a wealthy cotton magnate. It was a brief interlude of rest and pleasure.1

  Back in London there were projects demanding his attention. He had been approached by a new publishing company, recently established by Elkin Mathews and John Lane at ‘the sign of the Bodley Head’. The firm was developing a reputation for producing handsomely designed, and handsomely priced, volumes of contemporary verse and belles lettres in small editions. It was a ploy calculated to appeal to the growing market of Aesthetically inclined bibliophiles, and it was proving surprisingly successful. Wanting to add Wilde, the arch-Aesthete, to their list, they had proposed buying up the remaining 220 copies of Bogue’s edition of his Poems, and repackaging them as an exclusive collector’s item. Wilde was delighted at the idea (the unbound sheets had been languishing in a warehouse ever since Bogue’s bankruptcy in August 1882). Ricketts was commissioned to design a new decorative title page and cover for the book. Wilde proposed signing each copy, to further enhance ‘the special character’ of the edition.2

  He also found himself drawn into an unexpected drama, when John Barlas was arrested on 31 January for firing a revolver at the Palace of Westminster in an anarchist protest; to show, as he put it, his ‘contempt for the House of Commons’. Together with Gray and John Davidson, and several family members, Wilde attended Barlas’s arraignment at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 7 January. There was some anxiety that the authorities would declare Barlas insane, but this was averted. And Wilde returned the following week, together with the socialist publisher H. H. Champion, when Barlas was released by the magistrate, ‘bound over’ to keep the peace for the next two months, on a surety of £200. Wilde and Champion agreed to stand bail. Wilde seems to have enjoyed his brief appearance in the role of responsible member of society; in the crowded courtroom, he was invited to sit beside the magistrate. And, at the end of the hearing, the ‘beak’ remarked to him, in an attempt at legal humour, ‘I think, Mr Wilde, that this is clearly a case for [a calming dose of] bromide of potassium.’3*

  When Champion had called at Tite Street with news of Barlas’s impending court appearance, he had found Wilde on the point of heading out of the house to see George Alexander, to discuss plans for his forthcoming play. In the confusion of the moment, Wilde dropped the furled typescript he was carrying. It did not – he was pleased to note – ‘fall flat’. The omen seemed propitious.4

  Alexander’s plans were in flux. His first production of the new year (Joe Comyns Carr’s Forgiveness) was failing. He had hoped that he might be able to replace it with R. C. Carton’s Liberty Hall, but Carton had fallen ill with the piece still unfinished. It was in the face of these difficulties that he summoned Wilde and proposed putting A Good Woman into production for the following month. For Wilde it was an opportunity to be seized. He was invited to read the script to the assembled company at the St James’s Theatre. One of those present recalled how he arrived, his silk hat ‘ruffled’, and stumbled as he stepped on to the stage. But then his self-assurance asserted itself. ‘He put a large box of cigarettes on the table in front of him, and saying, “May I smoke?” lit one and began to read.’ The company was prepared to be unimpressed, but ‘after the first sentence all listened in breathless silence to the close’.5 Ricketts was told ‘that no one surpassed’ Wilde as a reader of his plays and, ‘where dialogue was concerned, diction and expression were alike varied and vivid’.6

  It was agreed that the play’s name should be changed to Lady Windermere’s Fan. Lady Wilde, among others, had disliked the original title: ‘It is mawkish,’ she declared. ‘No one cares for a good woman.’ Rehearsals began in early February, on the now empty stage of the St James’s. Wilde attended regularly, fussing over details of set design, stage business, dialogue and even make-up. Alexander was subjected to reams of notes after almost every session: ‘I want you to arrange Mrs Erlynne on a sofa more in the centre of the stage and towards the left side.’ ‘Hopper had better have either his own hair or a quiet wig. His face last night was far too white, and his appearance far too ridiculous.’ ‘The Duchess left out some essential words in her first speech. It should run, “[Australia. It must be so pretty with all the dear little] kangaroos flying about. Agatha has found Australia on the map. What a curious shape it is! However, it’s a very young country, isn’t it?” The words left out are those I have underlined. They give the point to the remark about the young country.’ ‘I think that [Cecil] Graham should not take his aunt into the ballroom – young dandies dislike their aged relatives – at least rarely pay them attention.’ ‘Pray give your serious attention to all these points.’7

  To add to Wilde’s cares, a problem with the drains at 16 Tite Street necessitated the family moving out. While Constance and the children decamped to the country, he took up residence at the Hotel Albemarle, just off Piccadilly. It was only a few hundred yards from the theatre, and allowed him to keep an even closer eye on proceedings. He was proving a nervous and difficult author. There was a prolonged struggle over the closing line of Act 2. Alexander finally prevailed (having cursed the playwright’s ‘damned Irish obstinacy’) and Wilde, ‘rather to his [own] annoyance’, was obliged to recognize that the revised and lighter ending was a great improvement on his more obviously ‘dramatic’ original.

  He refused, however, to accept Alexander’s main point: that it was dramatically essential for Mrs Erlynne’s identity as Lady Windermere’s mother to be revealed early in the play, rather than held back until the final act. The change could be very easily made, requiring only a couple of lines in Act 2. But Wilde was ‘inexorable’, ignoring all arguments and pleas. Alexander, in his exasperation, started refe
rring to Wilde as ‘this conceited, arrogant and ungrateful man’. The dispute increased the stress of rehearsals.8 Wilde also had to ‘submit to a good deal of well-deserved banter’ from the cast, on account of some impromptu remarks he had made at a meeting of the Playgoers’ Club. The newspapers had reported him as dismissing actors as no more than ‘a set of puppets’ – and the stage as merely ‘the frame to the picture’. It was not a view likely to be well received by the acting profession.9

  Wilde wrote a long letter to the Daily Telegraph explaining that he had been misquoted: ‘What I really said was that the frame we call the stage was “peopled with either living actors or moving puppets.”’ Nevertheless an extended paragraph about how the intrusive ‘personality of an actor is often a source of danger in the perfect presentation of a work of art’ can only have increased the irritation of Alexander and the other cast members.10 Wilde’s letter had also corrected another point. The paper had described John Gray, whose lecture had been main feature of the evening, as Wilde’s ‘protégé’. Gray, it appears, had been upset by the designation. And Wilde wrote to disavow it. ‘Allow me to state,’ he declared with less than complete accuracy, ‘that my acquaintance with Mr John Gray is, I regret to say, extremely recent, and that I sought it because he had already a perfected mode of expression in both prose and verse.’ Armed with his ‘high indifference of temper’ and his love of art, ‘he needs no other protection, nor indeed, would he accept it’. Another article, in the Star (perhaps written by Le Gallienne), had described Gray as ‘the original Dorian of the same name’. The poet, supported by Wilde, threatened to sue, and secured a retraction. Whether Gray’s anxieties were artistic or social is uncertain. But he was certainly aware of Wilde’s dangerous sexual relationships with other young men, and may well have been concerned to distance himself from them.11