Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  No less precocious, and no less prone to ironic appraisal, was the twenty-one-year-old artist Aubrey Beardsley, a recent ‘discovery’ of Robbie Ross’s. Beardsley, then at the outset of his career, had produced an extraordinary drawing in pen and ink depicting the climax of Salomé. Wilde was impressed by the highly stylized ‘japonesque’ image of the princess preparing to kiss the severed head of John the Baptist. He was impressed too by the angular, consumptive, yet poised figure of the artist. In acknowledgement of both he presented Beardsley with a copy of the French edition of the play, inscribed, ‘March 93. For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance. Oscar.’10

  Wilde at once began to consider Beardsley’s potential as an illustrator of his own work. When Gray’s Silverpoints was published that month, with its elegant Ricketts cover, its modishly sparse text and its modishly wide margins, Ada Leverson suggested that Wilde should go a step further and produce ‘a book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts’. Wilde approved, telling her, ‘It shall be dedicated to you, and the unwritten text illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. There must be five hundred signed copies for particular friends, six for the general public, and one for America.’ Soon afterwards, when Wilde convinced Mathews and Lane to bring out an English-language edition of Salome, it was arranged that Beardsley would provide ten pen-and-ink illustrations and a cover design.11

  The commission did not mark a desertion of Ricketts and Shannon by Wilde. They remained involved in his other publishing projects of the moment. Despite certain irritations over late payments and advertising budgets, Wilde had been impressed by Lane and Mathews’ handling of his books, and negotiations were entered into for the Bodley Head to produce his entire oeuvre. Besides the English version of Salome, there was to be a uniform edition of Wilde’s plays – Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance and The Duchess of Padua (Vera seems to have been consigned to obscurity) – with bindings designed by Shannon. The Duchess of Padua, having not yet been performed in Britain, would have an introduction by Wilde’s friend, the American poet Edgar Fawcett. It was also envisaged that Ricketts, once he had finished work on ‘The Sphinx’, would design a cover and initial letters for an edition of ‘The Incomparable History of Mr. W. H.’. The scheme – if it could be achieved – seemed to offer Wilde an impressive literary permanence.12

  Douglas, however, took precedence. Wilde spent a succession of weekends at Oxford, staying at the rooms on the High Street that Douglas shared with his friend Lord Encombe. There were almost nightly dinners in his honour, given by members of The Spirit Lamp coterie. Wilde was delighted to be back at his alma mater, surrounded by eager young listeners. He regaled them with ironic tales of self-sacrifice: of Lydia and Metellus, patrician lovers and converts to the early church, who were condemned to death as Christians, but, despite each having lost their faith in prison, felt they could not save themselves by renouncing their religion, as they believed it would break the other’s heart. ‘And so when the appointed day came, in their turn Lydia and Metellus were thrown to the wild beasts in the Circus – and thus they both died for a Faith in which they did not believe.’ He told of Pope John XXII, who, on his way to meet his mistress, stops at a little church where, sitting in the confessional, he hears the confession of a man who has undertaken to assassinate him. Having assured the would-be killer that God will forgive him even for this great crime, the pope then proceeds to his tryst. As he embraces his mistress, the assassin steps from the shadows and stabs him. ‘With a groan he fell to the ground – a dying man. Then with a supreme effort he raised his hand, and, looking at his assailant, said in the last words of the Absolution: “Quod ego possum et tu eges, absolve te.”’

  Wilde’s presence in Oxford provoked a satirical attack in an undergraduate periodical, the Ephemeral, produced on successive days during Eights Week. One of the two editors (Arthur Cunliffe) contributed a parodic account of ‘Ossian Savage’s New Play’ (‘[it] was progressing fast and well as usual, though it had not yet got a plot. The plot came afterwards in Ossian’s plays with the “finishing touches”,’ etc.). The skit, though gentle enough, described the playwright as ‘a man of coarse habit of body and of coarser habits of mind’, a ‘spiteful’ jibe that provoked Douglas into a ‘full blooded correspondence’ over the paper’s subsequent issues. And although both editors offered qualified apologies, Cunliffe defended his use of the adjective ‘coarse’ in relation to Wilde’s ‘mental tendencies’ as revealed in his published works.

  Nevertheless Hamilton Grant (Cunliffe’s co-editor) agreed to meet Wilde at dinner in Douglas’s rooms; like so many others, he was soon won over. Wilde greeted him winningly with, ‘I hear that you are called “Gragger.” But this is dreadful. It must not go on. We must find a new name for you, something beautiful and worthy and Scottish.’ And when, at the end of the meal, Grant produced a cigar (to distinguish himself from the ‘perfectly dressed effeminate types’ who had been smoking gold-tipped cigarettes throughout the proceedings), Wilde stilled the cries of protest, saying, ‘How too terrible of you! But we shall call it a nut-brown cigarette – and you shall smoke it.’ After another dinner, held in rooms on St Giles’, when Wilde’s presence on the first-floor balcony had attracted a small but rowdy crowd of townspeople, shouting ‘Hoscar – let’s ’ave a speech, Hauthor, Hauthor, Hoscar, Hoscar!’, Grant and a friend had sallied forth to disperse them. Wilde hailed their triumphant return with, ‘You are magnificent – you are giants – giants with souls.’13

  Soulful Scottish giants were not the only attractions of Oxford. At Douglas’s lodgings there was a seventeen-year-old servant boy called Walter Grainger. It is hard to suppose that Douglas had not already had sex with him; Wilde certainly did so during his regular weekend visits. Grainger later recounted how, over successive days, when he took a morning cup of tea to Wilde’s bedroom, Wilde first kissed him, then played with his ‘private parts’, and finally induced him to lie on the bed where ‘he placed his penis between my legs and satisfied himself’. On giving Grainger ten shillings after one of these encounters, Wilde stressed the need for discretion. His own behaviour, though, was anything but discreet.14

  Pierre Louÿs had been upset by what he had seen in London. He had not cared at all for Douglas, and disapproved of his relationship with Wilde. The shared (or adjoining) bedrooms at the Albemarle left no room for doubt about its nature, even before Wilde’s boast that he had been ‘married three times in [his] life, once to a woman and twice to men’. Worse, though, than this reckless flaunting of convention, was the thoughtless cruelty to Constance that Louÿs witnessed. He confided these misgivings to Henri de Régnier, who wasted little time in sharing them with others. Goncourt delightedly recorded in his journal on 30 April: ‘Ah you don’t know?’ (said de Régnier, when Oscar Wilde’s name was mentioned), ‘Well, he’s not hiding it himself. Yes, he admits that he is a pederast… following the success of his play in London, he left his wife and three [sic] children and set himself up in a hotel, where he is living conjugally with a young English lord.’

  In a city dedicated to gossip, Wilde’s sexual proclivities became, henceforth, an abiding theme. Goncourt suspected that his pederasty was an hommage to – if not a plagiarism of – Verlaine (of whom Wilde often spoke eulogistically); or perhaps a tribute to the perverted English nobleman ‘Lord Annandale’ in Goncourt’s own novel La Faustin. There was much debate as to whether Wilde was ‘actif’ or ‘passif’ in his sexual relations with men – the majority supposing the former; though one commentator declared that he must be ‘passif’ as only then does a man ‘encounter a pleasure that he does not enjoy with a woman’.15

  For Louÿs, though, Wilde’s behaviour was the cause of real anguish. When Wilde was over in France at the end of May, Louÿs called on him at his hotel and urged him to break the connection with Douglas. It was a futile interview. Forced to choose between Louÿs and Bosie, Wilde – as he la
ter put it – ‘chose at once the meaner nature and the baser mind’. ‘Adieu, Pierre Louÿs,’ Wilde said sorrowfully at the close of the encounter, ‘Je voulais avoir un ami; je n’aurai plus que des amants’ (‘I had hoped for a friend; from now on I will have only lovers’).16

  3

  Brief Summer Months

  ‘Live for the present and the future.’

  oscar wilde

  Wilde soon returned to England and to the demands of his ever-exacting lover. Douglas, claiming illness, failed to take his degree that June. His parents and the college authorities were disappointed, though Wilde congratulated him on choosing – like Swinburne – to remain an undergraduate all his life. Distractions nevertheless were called for. At Douglas’s prompting Wilde took a lease on The Cottage, a picturesque house on the Thames at Goring. There was a suggestion that Wilde would be able to work there: his play for Hare was not progressing as well as the Ephemeral had suggested. But the overriding concerns were, it seemed, to ensure comfort and luxury. Wilde allowed Douglas to oversee the ordering of the supplies and the hiring of the (eight) servants; the former involved copious amounts of champagne, the latter included the Queensberrys’ old family butler, and young Walter Grainger from Oxford.1

  That summer was extremely hot, and it was pleasant to be out on the river. Wilde ensured that punts, skiffs and a canoe were available; although tennis was deemed too exhausting, croquet offered a diversion. Constance brought Cyril down, together with a governess. There was a constant stream of visitors from London and Oxford. Arthur Clifton and his wife came. The young would-be poet Theodore Wratislaw enjoyed a memorable weekend visit. Bosie’s college fellows arrived in relay, while Willie – and his friend, ‘the fascinating Dan’ – had to be put off, so full was the house. Oscar, with typical generosity, compensated by affecting horror at the news that Willie had taken to smoking American cigarettes: ‘I am greatly distressed… You really must not do anything so horrid. Charming people should smoke gold-tipped cigarettes or die, so I enclose you a small piece of paper, for which reckless bankers may give you gold, as I don’t want you to die.’ George Grossmith and his wife had a house nearby, and regularly joined the croquet parties and evening ‘theatricals’. The Henley Regatta at the beginning of July provided ‘fireworks of surpassing beauty’.2

  But, for all this, the atmosphere was oppressive – sometimes literally so. Apocalyptic thunderstorms provided regular interruptions to the brooding heat. The servants, besides making inroads into the champagne (much to Wilde’s amusement), could not get on together. Scenes were frequent. After the cosy domesticity of Cromer the previous year, Constance felt excluded in an atmosphere dominated by Douglas, his wants, his friends, his demands. Oscar, she complained, ‘so nice to others’ was ‘so cold’ to her. She eventually fled, leaving Cyril and his governess behind.3*

  A bacchanalian spirit prevailed in her absence. The vicar called one day to find Wilde sitting wrapped in a bath towel, and Bosie lying naked on the lawn; they had been dousing each other with the hosepipe to cool off. At the sight of this ‘perfectly Greek scene’, the poor clergyman turned very red and left. Wilde was sleeping regularly with Walter Grainger, a fact that was soon known by the other servants, and became the gossip below stairs. The governess, Gertrude Simmonds, was very much surprised to notice Wilde, on the night of the regatta, with his arm on the shoulder the house boat-boy. The locals, too, were disapproving of the goings on at The Cottage. There was hostility in the village: the local publican recalled that there were those who wanted to punch Wilde. Back in London ‘weird stories’ of the life at Goring began to circulate.4

  Wilde tried to work, but not very hard. Nothing got done. To Ricketts he confessed ‘the river-gods have lured me to devote myself to a Canadian canoe, in which I paddle about. It is curved like a flower.’ He claimed to Lady Randolph Churchill that his progress was hampered because he had ‘no pen!’. Bosie offered a constant distraction. There were the now familiar outbursts of temper. Wilde later reminded Douglas how – after one ‘dreadful’ scene – ‘we stood on the level croquet-ground with the pretty lawn all round us, [me] pointing out to you that we were spoiling each other’s lives, that you were absolutely ruining mine and that I evidently was not making you really happy, and that an irrevocable parting, a complete separation was the one wise philosophic thing to do. You went sullenly after luncheon, leaving one of your most offensive letters behind with the butler to be handed to me after your departure.’ But then, of course, before ‘three days had elapsed’, Bosie was telegraphing from London begging to be forgiven. And, of course, Wilde forgave him.5 To encourage Douglas into some sort of productivity, and to link their names in a single artistic endeavour, Wilde suggested that Bosie should provide the translation for the planned English-language edition of Salome. It gave him a task, even if he was slow to take it up.

  The high life at Goring – which Wilde estimated was costing some £445 a month – appeared to be sustained by the continuing success of A Woman of No Importance. Wilde travelled to Birmingham on 14 August for the opening night of the play’s provincial summer tour, with Lewis Waller taking the role of Lord Illingworth. And two nights later Wilde went up to London with Bosie for the closing night of the Haymarket run. They supped afterwards with Ross, Beerbohm and Beardsley. Beerbohm reported to Turner that Wilde was both inebriated and ‘fatuous’: ‘He called Mrs Beere “Juno-like” and Kemble “Olympian quite” and waved a cigarette round and round his head. Of course I would rather see Oscar free than sober, but still… I felt quite repelled.’6

  But if Beerbohm considered that Wilde was in a bad state, so too did Wilde. His health was causing him concern. It may have been at this moment that he consulted Sir William Dalby, an eminent London ear specialist. Although Wilde seems to have been suffering from an infection of the middle ear and a degree of hearing impairment, Danby reassured him that ‘with proper care there was no reason at all why he should lose his hearing’.7

  At the end of August, encouraged by his doctor, Wilde went to Dinard, on the Brittany coast, for a fortnight. He travelled alone, needing – as he later put it – a relief from the ‘terrible strain’ of Douglas’s company. His hopes of ‘seclusion and rest’, however, were not entirely fulfilled. He found himself swept up into a ‘round of gaiety’ and was soon complaining of the late hours. Among the diversions he attended was a drawing-room performance given by his adored Aimée Lowther. Nevertheless change and sea-air created a sense of new hopes and possibilities. He told a journalist who accosted him on the beach, ‘I am thinking of publishing a book of maxims called Oscariana, which may or may not be acceptable to the thinking world. My idea is that every day should begin [with] a new thought, a fresh idea, and that “yesterday” should be a thing of the past. Forget everything unpleasant in the past and live for the present and future.’8

  Wilde strove to embody his own philosophy. A young barrister, Chartres Biron, recorded his encounter with Wilde at Dinard that summer at a modest and conventional family dinner. ‘There were then unpleasant rumours about Wilde,’ Biron recalled, ‘and I was strongly prejudiced against him. His appearance was not in his favour, heavy and sensual; but directly he spoke his whole face lit up, the aspect of the man changed and he seemed a different personality.’ The past was obliterated by the present. Though Wilde held the company ‘spellbound,’ he did not monopolize: his wit, and also his ‘wisdom’, arose from the ‘general conversation’. He impressed with his comments on Browning’s supposed ‘obscurity’, explaining, ‘You must remember, every great truth is unintelligible. Then the master wants an audience and waters it down to the level of a disciple; then it becomes popular and is lost.’ He amused with his advice that, in life, instead of beginning at the bottom of the ladder and working one’s way up, it was better to ‘begin at the top and sit upon it’.9

  Wilde returned to England via Jersey, where the touring production of A Woman of No Importance was being played. During his absence Douglas had complete
d the translation of Salomé: unfortunately, though, Wilde was unimpressed. The work was full of ‘schoolboy faults’ (‘On ne doit regarder que dans les miroirs’ had, for instance, been rendered, ‘One must not look at mirrors’ rather than ‘One should look only in mirrors’). Douglas – who had been ‘rather proud’ of his effort – did not take criticism well. The usual violent letters of resentment and abuse followed. In one of them Douglas asserted that he was under ‘no intellectual obligation of any kind’ to Wilde. He refused to accept Wilde’s corrections. To John Lane he wrote, washing his hands of the project, declaring, ‘I cannot consent to have my work altered and edited, and thus to become a mere machine for doing the rough work of translation… My private opinion is that unless Oscar translates it himself, he will not be satisfied.’ It seems, though, that Beardsley then put himself forward as a possible translator, and Wilde consented to let him try.10

  Wilde had his own literary project to focus on. He had still not written his comedy for Hare, although the initial deadline was now passed, and news of the play had been leaked in the press. In an effort to precipitate himself into action he took rooms at a private hotel in St James’s Place, as a space where he could work each day away from home. It proved a productive setting; within a week he had completed the first act of what would be An Ideal Husband. But the sanctum was soon invaded. His initial ire over the Salomé translation having abated, Bosie would turn up daily at noon, and stay ‘smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1.30’. Then – as Wilde later reminded him – ‘I had to take you out to luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley. Luncheon with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3.30. For an hour you retired to White’s. At tea-time you appeared again, and stayed till it was time to dress for dinner. You dined with me either at the Savoy or at Tite Street. We did not separate as a rule till after midnight, as supper at Willis’s had to wind up the entrancing day.’11