Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Of course Wilde consented to such distractions, and enjoyed them too. He always found it easy not to work. The good resolutions of Dinard were soon forgotten in the pursuit of pleasure. Charles Parker came to St James’s Place for regular assignations. New friendships were nurtured, too. Wilde – together with Douglas – saw much of the wealthy would-be novelist George Ives. A cricket-loving Hellenist and a convinced lover of men, Ives was set on establishing a secret society to promote his idealized vision of the Uranian ‘new culture’ – or ‘the Cause’ – as he dubbed it. The society was to be named ‘The Order of Chaeronea’ after a celebrated battle of 338 bc in which a military company of Theban male lovers had been annihilated by the Macedonians. As a first step – ‘having obtained leave from M[other]’ – Ives had shaved off his moustache, on the grounds that it was so ‘anti-Hellenic’. Ives hoped to enlist Wilde and Douglas for his new order, though he found both of them hard to fathom.12

  Wilde’s determined un-seriousness bemused him. After a small dinner party at the Savoy he fretted in his diary: ‘[O.W.] is such a puzzle to me, born it would seem, a teacher, he either cannot or will not give the key to his philosophy, and till I get it I can’t understand him. He seems to have no purpose and I am all purpose. Apparently of an elegant refined nature, and talented as few men are, brilliant as a shining jewel, yet he teaches many things which cannot be held, and which are so false as not even to be dangerous.’ Nevertheless he considered that Wilde’s ‘influence will be considerable’.

  Douglas would have been able to support the notion. He told Ives’s friend Charles Kains Jackson that ‘nobody knows as I do’ what Wilde has done for ‘the “new culture”, the people he has pulled out of the fire, and “seen through” things, not only with money, but by sticking to them when other people wouldn’t speak to them. He is the most chivalrous friend in the world, he is the only man I know who would have the courage to put his arm on the shoulder of an ex-convict and walk down Piccadilly with him, and combine with that the wit and the personality to carry it off so well that nobody would mind.’ Douglas himself Ives found fascinating. But he thought him set on a course of wilful self-destruction – and even warned him that he ‘was indulging in homosexuality to a reckless and highly dangerous degree’. There seemed every chance that he would get himself ‘arrested one day’.13

  Certainly Douglas’s latest piece of ‘foolishness’ had brought him close to disaster. It involved a seventeen-year-old schoolboy ‘with wonderful eyes’, whom Ross had recently taken up. The boy, Claude Dansey, was on his way back to the ‘English College’ in Bruges, a school run by a friend of the Ross family, when Douglas ‘stole’ him from Ross, and installed him at the Hotel Albemarle, sleeping with him over the weekend, and paying for him to sleep with a woman on the Monday night. Dansey returned to Bruges three days late. His tardy arrival provoked an inquiry by the headmaster, which uncovered Dansey’s ‘indecent’ relations with both Douglas and Ross – as well as Ross’s earlier seduction of the headmaster’s eldest son. Scandal threatened. Ross and Douglas travelled to Bruges in an attempt to negotiate a settlement. Dansey’s father, a colonel in the Guards, wanted to prosecute, and was only dissuaded when George Lewis (acting, it seems, for Ross) pointed out that although the perpetrators would ‘doubtless get two years’ his son would ‘get six months’ as a willing accomplice. In the end, after various incriminating letters were returned and destroyed, the affair was hushed up. But it had been a very near thing.14†

  The drama, played out during that October, placed a further strain on Wilde’s relations with Douglas. Wilde had been obliged to miss a Lloyd family wedding to go over to Calais to ‘fetch’ Bosie back from the continent. There were fierce rows, and fresh recriminations. Wilde, though, seems to have recognized in the debacle a possible means of breaking the emotionally exhausting and self-destructive cycle: he convinced Douglas that he must go abroad for a while. Ross had been banished, by his despairing family, to Davos in Switzerland, supposedly for two years, in order to avoid what Beerbohm called ‘a social relapse’. Wilde wrote to Douglas’s mother, suggesting that Bosie had rather lost his way since coming down from Oxford, and urging her to send him out of England – to stay with Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General in Egypt, for several months ‘if that could be managed’.15

  Lady Queensberry leapt at the idea. Her attitude to Wilde had altered. She no longer saw him as a benign mentor, and was only too keen to break up the friendship between him and her son. Conscious that her always-difficult child was becoming yet more difficult, she put it down to Wilde’s influence. She had perhaps heard rumours of their life together in London – and, ignorant of Bosie’s already established commitment to a course of ‘pagan’ amorality, suspected that Wilde had played ‘the part of Lord Henry Wotton’ to her son’s ‘Dorian’. He was, in her opinion, the ‘murderer’ of Bosie’s ‘soul’. Indeed she told Bosie that she would almost like to murder Wilde for what he had done. To Wilde, though, she wrote more temperately, merely seeking an assurance that, if Douglas went abroad, Wilde would not try to visit him there. Piqued at this implied rebuke, Wilde hastened to give her some details of the recent scandal that Douglas had precipitated, and that was the real reason why he needed to be sent away. He asserted that he had no desire ever to see her son again.16

  It was to be a season of separations. Willie’s divorce was finalized that autumn, but in its wake came reports from the American press about his behaviour in New York: his ‘simply killing’ impersonations of Oscar at the Lotos Club, and his stated plan ‘to buy a second-hand copy of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims’ and ‘set up a play foundry’ of his own, in opposition to his brother. These were new betrayals, and Oscar felt unable to forgive them. The brothers, much to Lady Wilde’s distress, were estranged.17

  Wilde seems to have felt only relief in the face of these breaks. Certainly the imminent prospect of being parted from Bosie acted as tonic. He re-engaged with family life, taking Constance to the theatre three times in one November week (they particularly enjoyed Sheridan’s School for Scandal), dining with her at the Albemarle Club, attending a lecture by William Morris on printing, and hosting a small dinner party at Tite Street, a now rare event. Wilde was delighted with the appearance of Lady Windermere’s Fan in book form that month. Among the letters he received was one from Adela Schuster – a particular favourite among his young women friends – thanking him for ‘some hours of the keenest enjoyment I have ever experienced’. Although still ignoring the pressing claims of his new comedy, Wilde did begin work on a ‘mystery play’ (almost certainly La Sainte Courtisane, a Symbolist drama about a beautiful courtesan converted to the religious life by an ascetic hermit – who, himself, is then drawn to the world of sensual pleasure on account of her beauty). Constance and other friends were delighted – and bemused – at this sudden turn of events. Wilde confided to his wife that supernatural forces were involved: he had received a communication from his father’s spirit – through ‘raps’ – at a séance.18

  With an American production of A Woman of No Importance about to begin in New York, Wilde’s US agent, Elisabeth Marbury, was urging him to come over for the opening night. It would, she suggested, greatly ‘advance the success’ of the production. And Wilde might combine his visit with a short lecture tour and gain ‘a very large amount of money’. Indeed she put forward so many ‘convincing and compelling’ reasons that Wilde felt he could not possibly do anything so ‘reasonable’. He declined to sail.19

  Besides he needed to be in London to oversee the troubled gestation of the English edition of Salome. The publisher was proposing a ‘coarse’, ‘common’ and ‘quite impossible’ cloth binding for the ‘ordinary’ edition of the book, and had to be dissuaded. There were other problems too. Wilde found Beardsley’s attempted translation of the play even less satisfactory than Bosie’s. According to Douglas, he declared it ‘utterly hopeless’ – and decided that ‘he would on second thoughts rather have mine’. It was a decision en
couraged by Ross, who had been urging Wilde not to demoralize Douglas at the outset of his literary career. The reversal drew Wilde back into close contact with Bosie. All textual changes still had to be negotiated, Douglas insisting that, if his work were altered, his name should not appear on the title page. In the end Wilde devised an elegant solution, omitting Douglas from the title page, but dedicating the book to ‘To My Friend Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, The Translator Of My Play’. Douglas, in a rare moment of acquiescence, allowed himself to be persuaded that this arrangement was of ‘infinitely greater artistic and literary value’ – being ‘the difference between the tribute of admiration from an artist and a receipt from a tradesman’.20

  Beardsley’s illustrations were proving scarcely less contentious. Ever subversive, he had smuggled lewd details into many of the pictures. There were phallic candlesticks and garments distorted by obvious erections. Wilde complained that ‘dear Aubrey’s designs are like the naughty scribbles that a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copy books’. In a couple of instances the too-conspicuous genitalia of the male characters had to be edited out, to ensure that the book could be displayed openly in bookshops. Lane rejected three other drawings outright, leading Beardsley to replace them with three others, which he described to Ross as ‘simply beautiful and quite irrelevant’. The illustrator’s satiric campaign extended beyond indecencies to caricaturing Wilde: the playwright appeared as King Herod, as a mage heralding the entrance of Herodias, and – more contentiously – as the ‘Woman in the Moon’ (described in the text as ‘mad’, ‘drunken’ and ‘seeking everywhere for lovers’). Tensions over both the pictures and the translation led to much feverish debate as the book was readied for the press. ‘I can tell you I had a warm time of it between Lane and Oscar and Co.,’ Beardsley reported archly to Ross. ‘For one week the numbers of telegraph and messenger boys who came to the door was simply scandalous.’21

  As so often a stressful situation was rendered more stressful by Bosie’s vanity and temper. After one ‘more than usually revolting’ scene – at the end of November – Wilde fled to Paris, giving Constance an ‘absurd’ excuse and leaving a false address, simply to relieve the torture. In the French capital he was able ‘to pour out his soul’ to Carlos Blacker, who reported to his fiancée, ‘poor fellow… [Oscar] has much to make him unhappy but his grand spirit of optimism will ultimately I am sure carry everything before it’.22 Wilde’s ‘grand spirit’ had, though, to contend with Douglas’s implacable will. Although Wilde felt able to ignore the ‘usual telegrams of entreaty and remorse’, Bosie’s threat not to proceed to Egypt prompted a rapprochement. Wilde agreed to a meeting, and ‘under the influence of great emotion’ consented to forgive the past (while saying ‘nothing at all about the future’). It was enough to secure Bosie’s departure for Cairo.23

  For Wilde the thumbscrew had been removed. For neither the first nor the last time he resolved never to see Douglas again. Queensberry, it seems, was mollified by the separation.‡ The pace of life could right itself. He resumed work on his comedy for John Hare; although he had ‘grave doubts’ that he would be able to convince the actor-manager that it was ‘a masterpiece’, he was desperate to get it finished. After the extravagances of Goring over the summer he was in sore need of money: ‘vulture creditors’ were circling. On one humiliating occasion the butcher refused to send round a joint to Tite Street until the bill was settled.

  Even after Douglas’s departure he continued to see something of George Ives – and, apparently, kissed him on at least one occasion. He had shown, in his own way, a commitment to Ives’s ‘cause’ that November, proudly taking Verlaine around with him, when the poet (pederast and ex-convict) came over to England to give a series of readings. Wilde introduced him at a reception hosted by Lady de Grey and encouraged him to recite his poem ‘D’un Prison’: the performance, poignant and tragic in its simplicity, had reduced the sophisticated society audience to tears.24 Old connections were also maintained. Robbie Ross sneaked back to town briefly in December ‘lame and bearded!’ and ready for dinner at Kettner’s. It was perhaps at this juncture that – in order to assist Wilde in his efforts to complete An Ideal Husband – he gave him a sheaf of epigrams that he had copied down from Wilde’s conversation during his stay at Tite Street back in 1887.25 Wilde also exerted himself to assist Carlos Blacker, who had fallen out badly with the Duke of Newcastle. The duke had accused him of cheating at cards, and Blacker felt obliged to sue. Wilde consulted with Blacker’s solicitor (unfortunately Newcastle had engaged George Lewis), and also sought an interview with Newcastle in an effort to resolve the matter.26

  Such was Wilde’s sense of returning equilibrium that by the end of December he even felt able to write to Bosie, who had been bombarding him from Egypt with the inevitable letters of contrition and pleas for attention: ‘My dearest Boy,’ he declared with a lightly measured affection, ‘I am happy in the knowledge that we are friends again, and that our love has passed through the shadow and the night of estrangement and sorrow and come out rose-crowned as of old. Let us always be infinitely dear to each other, as indeed we have been always.’ It seemed safe to make such declarations with Douglas over 2,000 miles away.§ Back in London Wilde threw himself into the pleasures of the family Christmas. Gertrude Simmonds recalled him in the Tite Street dining room that year, ‘happy as a boy’, doling out the Christmas pudding and pulling crackers.27

  * Constance’s growing irritation with Wilde led to him humorously dubbing her ‘Mrs Cantankeray’, in hommage to the title character of A. W. Pinero’s sensational drama The Second Mrs Tanqueray, which opened at the St James’s Theatre on 27 May 1893.

  † Claude Dansey (10 September 1876 – 11 June 1947), after a varied military career, went on to become a senior figure in British intelligence, and – as ‘Agent Z’ – was assistant chief of MI6 during the Second World War. He was knighted in 1943. His later enthusiasm for secretiveness perhaps dated from the experience of having his letters intercepted and read.

  ‡ The marquess had been enduring other troubles. That summer he had fallen out with his oldest son, Lord Drumlanrig, an assistant private secretary to Lord Rosebery, the secretary of state for foreign affairs in Gladstone’s government. As part of a scheme to increase the Liberal representation in the House of Lords, the twenty-six-year-old Drumlanrig had been raised to the peerage, taking the title Baron Kelhead. Queensberry, still smarting at his own exclusion from the Upper House by his fellow Scottish peers., had come to resent this. His increasingly angry letters on the point, to Gladstone, the Queen and Lord Rosebery, were ignored, convincing him that the whole thing was a plot against him. His rage grew. In August he had travelled to Bad Homburg in the hope of picking a fight in public with the ‘Jew pimp’ ‘liar’ and ‘Bloody Bugger’ Lord Rosebery. It was only due to the intervention of George Lewis and the Prince of Wales that a confrontation was averted.

  § Douglas was enjoying himself in Cairo. Among various sexual adventures, he had (so he later claimed) a ‘romantic meeting’ with the forty-four-year-old Herbert Kitchener – then a brigadier with the Egyptian army. And to Robbie Ross he wrote describing the attractions, and ready accessibility, of the ‘beautiful and bright-eyed’ local boys. He also started work on a ‘burlesque (unpublishable of course)’ but containing a variation on the music hall hit ‘Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow’ – apropos ‘Labby’s clause in the Criminal Law Amendment Act’ – which he thought would be a good song and dance number ‘for Oscar (in Coster Costume)’:

  Labby wouldn’t let me have a boy-woy

  Labby wouldn’t etc, etc.

  I’ve got a dear old Dutch

  And I like her very much

  But I’d rather have a boy-woy-woy.

  4

  Enemies of Romance

  ‘It is not wise to show one’s heart to the world.’

  oscar wilde

  At the start of 1894 Wilde received an invitation from the superstition-defying Thir
teen Club, inviting him to attend a dinner of thirteen courses, to be held on 13 January in Room Number 13 of the Holborn restaurant. He wrote back promptly, regretting that he would be unable to attend: ‘I love superstitions,’ he explained. ‘They are the colour element of thought and imagination. They are the opponents of common sense. Common sense is the enemy of romance. The aim of your society seems to be dreadful. Leave us some unreality. Don’t make us too offensively sane.’1

  For Wilde work was the current ‘unreality’ of choice. As he wrote to Henley, in a letter of condolence following the tragic death of Henley’s six-year-old-daughter: ‘To work, to work… that is what remains for natures like ours. Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality.’2 For the first time in many months he was without distractions: he was able to concentrate, and engage his imagination. An Ideal Husband continued to advance; he hoped to have it finished by the end of January.3

  He regarded the play as something of a departure. Certainly it had more plot than his previous pieces – unfolding a complex and many-sided intrigue in which a British cabinet minister, Sir Robert Chiltern – the supposedly ‘Ideal Husband’ of the title – stands in danger of having the shady financial dealings of his youth exposed by the scheming adventuress Mrs Cheveley, unless he falls in with her own nefarious money-making plans. Although the character of Lord Goring – Sir Robert’s great friend (and Mrs Cheveley’s former fiancé) – might be another epigrammatic dandy, Wilde regretted that, unlike his previous plays, ‘there is no one like myself’ in the piece. In some of his moods he condemned all the characters as ‘horrid objective creations of serious folk’ and feared that the critics would rush to declare, ‘Ah, here is Oscar unlike himself!’ But, at other moments, he was ready to admit that he had become ‘engrossed’ in writing the piece, and that – beneath all the conventions of the well-made melodrama – ‘it contain[ed] a great deal of the real Oscar’.4