But, behind the scenes, Queensberry was moving against him. Frank Harris recalled hearing the marquess coming out of one of his clubs, bragging that he would stop Wilde going about with his son. As a first step Bosie’s money supplies were cut off, provoking a flurry of furious telegrams. Queensberry also began to make inquiries about Wilde’s friends and connections. A private detective named Cook, who had been used to track down Bosie’s younger brother, Sholto, when he had disappeared on a drinking-spree the previous year, was able to furnish some interesting information.26
* Among the convolutions of the plot the Cardinal, secretly in love with his beautiful young ward, seeks to break her engagement to a handsome youth in his own retinue by falsely informing the boy that the girl is in fact his own long-lost sister. This same plot device occurs in – if it was not borrowed from – Melmoth the Wanderer, the novel by Wilde’s illustrious relative Charles Maturin.
† Queensberry’s general rage against the world had been increased by his own personal travails. The previous November he had married a young woman called Ethel Weeden. The marriage had proved a disaster, apparently due to the marquess’s inability to consummate the union. Having been served with divorce papers by his wife (on 9 March) he had filed a counter suit, claiming that the marriage had indeed been consummated, and that he was neither impotent nor frigid. On 10 April, the week after his exchange with Bosie, he had to endure a humiliating medical examination to determine the truth of his statement. His wife had to go through a no less harrowing examination, to establish whether she was a virgin, on 20 April.
‡ Willie had remarried, at the beginning of the year, a sweet-natured but penniless Irish girl called Lily Lees. She had joined the ménage at Oakley Street. Lady Wilde continued to plead for a reconciliation between her estranged sons: ‘otherwise I shall die of utter despair.’ But Oscar, in this one instance, was prepared to overlook ‘the curious morbid pleasure’ of forgiving his enemies.
5
Scarlet Marquess
‘It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one that are absolutely and perfectly true.’
oscar wilde
On 30 June 1894, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Wilde returned home, en route as he thought for a weekend away with some ‘young Domitian’ of poetic aspirations, only to be told that Lord Queensberry and another gentleman were waiting for him in the downstairs library. Queensberry was standing by the window; the other ‘gentleman’ was his friend Edward Pape. Wilde was not to be cowed, and a heated confrontation ensued. Wilde – at least in his telling of the incident – seized the initiative, demanding to know whether Queensberry had come to apologize for the libellous allegations he had made in his letter to Bosie – about Constance planning to divorce him for sodomy. Queensberry back-tracked, claiming that the letter was privileged as it was written to his son. At Wilde’s direct challenge – ‘Do you seriously accuse your son and me of sodomy?’ – he countered, ‘I don’t say you are it, but you look it, and you pose as it, which is just as bad.’ Nevertheless the marquess’s wild scattering of accusations displayed a worrying knowledge of Wilde’s recent movements; he suggested that Wilde and Douglas had been ‘kicked out of the Savoy for [their] disgusting conduct’, and crowed that Wilde had been ‘thoroughly well blackmailed’ over ‘a disgusting sodomitic letter’ he had written. His rage throughout the interview was alarming, Wilde later recalled, his small hands waving in the air ‘in an epileptic fury’ as he uttered ‘every foul word his mind could think of’ before screaming ‘If I catch you and my son together in any public restaurant, I will thrash you!’ It was a loathsome spectacle and a frightening one. Wilde claimed to have replied, ‘I don’t know what the Queensberry Rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at sight’, before demanding that Queensberry leave his house, and instructing the servant (his startled young ‘butler’) that the marquess was never to be admitted again. In Queensberry’s estimation, though, Wilde had ‘plainly shown the white feather’.1
Douglas, when he learnt of the encounter, was incensed, and more determined than ever to continue the feud with his father. His family, though, were less keen on provoking a scandal which would bring down upon them yet more embarrassment. Lady Queensberry’s father, Alfred Montgomery, sought to calm the marquess’s ire, but was rudely dismissed: ‘Your daughter is the person who is supporting my son to defy me… I have made out a case against Oscar Wilde and have to his face accused him of it. If I was quite certain of the thing I would shoot the fellow on sight, but I can only accuse him of posing.’2 Lady Queensberry was, in fact, doing her best to defuse the situation, but it was little enough. She sent her cousin, ‘plausible George Wyndham’ (as Wilde called him), to see Wilde and convince him to ‘gradually drop’ Bosie. Breaking the connection, however, was not really in Wilde’s power. Bosie was enjoying the mounting tension. Lady Queensberry – knowing her former husband’s litigious nature – wrote, pleading with Wilde not to involve solicitors in the dispute.3
But Wilde could see no other recourse. He wrote to George Lewis seeking his advice. Lewis, however – the great expert on evading confrontations and keeping matters out of the courts, the friend who had guided Wilde’s career almost from its outset – could not help him. He had been retained by Queensberry in relation to the marquess’s ongoing divorce proceedings. He was able to write only a formal note of reply: ‘Under these circumstances you will at once see that it is impossible for me to offer any opinion about any proceedings you intend to take against him. Although I cannot act against him, I should not act against you. Believe me, Yours faithfully, George Lewis.’4
Instead Wilde turned, on Robbie Ross’s advice, to the firm of C. O. Humphreys, Son and Kershaw. Mr Charles Humphreys (senior) dispatched a stern letter to Queensberry giving him an opportunity, as he put it, of retracting – in writing – the ‘assertions and insinuations’ contained in ‘certain letters’ that the marquess had written to his son, which ‘most foully and infamously libelled’ both Wilde and Lord Alfred. He demanded a written apology to both Wilde and Douglas and hinted that, should it not be forthcoming, it might be necessary to publish the offending letters, which, besides their libellous claims, mentioned certain ‘exalted personages’ (almost certainly Queensberry’s usual bugbears from the Liberal establishment, Gladstone and Rosebery) who might be wounded by such a disclosure.5
The response was not encouraging: ‘I have received your letter with considerable astonishment,’ Queensberry wrote back, ‘I shall certainly not tender to Mr. Oscar Wilde any apology for letters I have written to my son.’ The marquess disavowed all knowledge of having referred to ‘exalted personages’ and claimed that, such was ‘Mr Wilde’s horrible reputation, I can afford to publish any private letters I have written’. His resolve to provoke a ‘public row’ with Wilde hardened. He took to patrolling his favoured haunts – the Berkeley, Willis’s Rooms and the Café Royal – in the hope of catching him and Bosie dining together.6
Douglas, meanwhile, stoked the fire. When Queensberry returned his letters unopened, Bosie sent a postcard, informing his father that he treated his ‘absurd threats with absolute indifference’, flaunting the fact that he and Wilde often dined together in restaurants, and would continue to do so. ‘I am of age and my own master.’ Placing others in the firing line, he claimed that Wilde could certainly prosecute Queensberry for his ‘outrageous libels’ and have him sent to prison. As to threats of violence, he boasted that he now carried a loaded revolver – ‘and if I shoot you, or if [Wilde] shoots you, we should be completely justified as we should be acting in self-defence against a violent and dangerous rough, and I think if you were dead not many people would miss you.’7
The revolver proved a mistake. It went off by accident in the Berkeley. Fortunately no one was hurt, but the scandal had to be hushed up. And Queensberry recognized it as an opportunity. He made a personal call on Wilde’s solicitors, informing them that unless Bosie ceased carrying the gun
, he would report him to the police. This was followed up by a letter in the afternoon stating that – although he had now ‘heard that the revolver has been given up’– the police would still be informed of the shooting incident, should Wilde and Bosie continue to defy him by any ‘further scandals in public places’.8
And for Queensberry the very idea of Wilde and his son being together was a scandal. It became his obsession. He went from restaurant to restaurant ‘spreading vile scandals’ and announcing that the next time he saw Wilde together with his son, he ‘was going to hit [him] across the face with a cane’.9 In the sporting club circles to which he belonged, he found many to support his resolution, and to repeat his ‘vile scandals’. Wilde’s flamboyant otherness had always provoked conventional male antipathy. But, as his reputation and demeanour became tinged with something more sinister, such hostility grew. The journalist Frank M. Boyd, when approached at the Café Royal by one of Wilde’s ‘young men admirers’ with a suggestion that Wilde would like to meet him, replied, ‘You can tell your friend to go to the devil as far as I am concerned… and you can add that I am a friend of “Q[ueensberry]”.’ John Boon, another journalist and Queensberry acquaintance, took it upon himself to warn the sons of two friends against associating with Wilde. And Frank Harris recalled hosting a lunch ‘to meet Oscar Wilde and hear a new story’ (the event perhaps coincided with the publication of six of Wilde’s ‘prose poems’ in the July issue of Harris’s Fortnightly Review). Out of the dozen invitations sent to men, seven or eight were declined, three or four of the men specifically telling Harris that ‘they would rather not meet Oscar Wilde’. Wilde could not wholly ignore such slights. There were incidents, too, in clubs with members pointedly walking out when he entered the room.10
Queensberry’s campaign was producing a sense of mounting disquiet. It seemed to Wilde that nowhere in London was safe from possible invasion. And to be ‘dogged by a maniac’ was ‘intolerable’. Moreover, he was becoming increasingly aware that his position in the unfolding drama, though central, was secondary. He was merely providing a focus for old-established family antipathies and resentments.11 Yet he would be the main victim of any confrontation. Although Queensberry might fulminate against his ingrate son – doubting his legitimacy and cursing his name – some family sense remained. His motive in wanting to break up the friendship between Bosie and Wilde – never easy to estimate, and perhaps never completely fixed – resolved itself into a determination to ‘smash’ Wilde, and Wilde alone.12*
Wilde could see no obvious way of escape. He regretted that he had not instructed Humphreys to have Queensberry bound over to keep the peace. When Harris joined the chorus in suggesting that, in order to avoid any confrontation, he should ‘drop’ Bosie, Wilde had demanded, ‘Why should I cringe to this madman?’ ‘Because,’ replied Harris, ‘he is a madman.’13 Such a break, though, was unthinkable. Douglas would not countenance it. And nor would Wilde. ‘I can’t live without you,’ he declared, when Douglas was out of town for a few days. ‘You are so dear, so wonderful. I think of you all day long, and miss your grace, your boyish beauty, the bright sword-play of your wit, the delicate fancy of your genius, so surprising always in its sudden swallow flights towards north or south, towards sun or moon, and above all, you yourself.’14
Despite his misgivings Wilde found himself carried along by Bosie’s delight at the gathering storm. Douglas had never been in ‘higher spirits’, and his only disappointment was that no confrontation came. He tried to enlist his family’s support, but – as he complained to his brother Percy (away in Australia) – ‘with the exception of course of darling Mamma’ they all ‘simply backed out of it: & Francy [Drumlanrig] absolutely refused to even stick up for me to the small extent of dining in public with me & OW to show that he did not believe what my father said, though I implored him to do it’.15
Indeed the family worked to keep Bosie out of London. They were assisted by the coming summer, which was drawing everyone away from the capital. Douglas, it seems, was in Sussex for the Goodwood Festival at the beginning of August; and Wilfrid Blunt (another ‘cousin’) took him on a riding holiday to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they read Shakespeare’s sonnets besides the playwright’s tomb ‘as an appropriate form of prayer’. Queensberry himself was away in Scotland.16
Although Wilde felt bereft during the weeks of separation from Bosie, he was consoled by a visit to the palmist Mrs Robinson. The ‘Sibyl of Mortimer Street’ made him ‘very happy’ by her vision of his future. ‘I see a very brilliant life for you up to a certain point,’ she declared. ‘Then I see a wall. Beyond the wall I see nothing.’ Wilde, with his optimistic outlook, was inclined to focus on the brilliant life before the ‘wall’. He was delighted too at her prediction that early in the coming January he would ‘go away’ together with Bosie ‘for a long voyage’, and that their lives would walk ‘always hand in hand’ together.17
It was a bright prospect at a moment when darker thoughts were crowding in. At the end of July Walter Pater died, aged just fifty-four. Wilde reported to Bosie that, on one evening, he went and sat with his now-ageing mother: ‘Death and Love seem to walk on either hand as I go through life: they are the only things I think of, their wings shadow me.’18 Lady Wilde now rarely left the house. She found walking difficult, and bright sunlight painful. Besides the occasional visitor, and the yet more occasional ‘salon’, what she really liked was a good fire and a good book. ‘Who is there,’ she asked, ‘that can speak as Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks to you?’ Apart from her younger son there was no one. Her financial situation remained precarious. The collapse of Willie’s first marriage had brought to an end a yearly allowance from Mrs Leslie of £100 – a ‘very dreadful’ loss. She regularly called on Oscar for ‘advances’ of £10 or £20. He was always ready to oblige, even if he sometimes had to rely upon his wife’s money to provide the necessary sums.19 His own resources remained frustratingly low. The substantial sums received for An Ideal Husband seem to have been consumed already. He was £41 overdrawn at the bank and, as ever, ‘pressed for money’. Plans for both The Cardinal of Avignon and the ‘triple bill’ had apparently stalled. He would need to look elsewhere.
* It seems that George Lewis attempted, in some measure, to correct Queensberry’s estimate of the relationship between Wilde and his son. Certainly he told Queensberry of the ‘Oxford incident’, when Bosie had been blackmailed, and Wilde (though not involved in the matter in any way) had come to his assistance. But Queensberry, while accepting the truth of Lewis’s account, failed to make any adjustment in his attitude towards Wilde. [Lord Queensberry to Minnie Douglas, 26 February 1895; and Lord Queensberry to Percy Douglas, 27 March 1895]
6
A Capacity for Being Amused
‘Remember my epigrams then, dear boy, and repeat them to me tomorrow.’
esmé amarinth to lord reggie, the green carnation
As the summer advanced Wilde’s thoughts turned to writing a new play. George Alexander, he knew, was interested in taking his next work. He conceived the idea of producing something different: not a comic ‘drama’, like his previous pieces, but an outright comedy, even a farce. After his recent exposure to A School for Scandal, he considered attempting something ‘eighteenth-century’. But he soon settled, instead, upon transposing Sheridan’s comic spirit into a modern setting.1
He mapped out a rough idea of the plot for Alexander:
Act I. Evening party. 10 pm.
Lord Alfred Rufford’s rooms in Mayfair. Arrives from the country Bertram Ashton his friend: a man of 25 or 30 years of age: his great friend. Rufford asks him about his life. He tells him that he has a ward, etc. very young and pretty. That in the country he has to be serious, etc. that he comes to town to enjoy himself, and has invented a fictitious younger brother of the name of George – to whom all his misdeeds are put down. Rufford is deeply interested about the ward.
Guests arrive: the Duchess of Selby and her daughter, Lady Maud Rufford, with whom
the guardian [Bertram] is in love – Fin-de-Siècle talk, a lot of guests – the guardian proposes to Maud on his knees – enter Duchess – Lady Maud: ‘Mamma, this is no place for you.’
Scene: Duchess enquires for her son Lord Alfred Rufford: servant comes in with note to say that Lord Alfred has been suddenly called away to the country. Lady Maud vows eternal fidelity to the guardian whom she only knows under the name of George Ashton. (P.S. The disclosure of the guardian of his double life is occasioned by Lord Alfred saying to him ‘You left your handkerchief here the last time you were up’ (or cigarette case). The guardian takes it – the Lord A. says ‘but why, dear George, is it marked Bertram – who is Bertram Ashton?’ Guardian discloses plot.)
Act II. The guardian’s home – pretty cottage.
Mabel Harford, his ward, and her governess, Miss Prism. Governess of course dragon of propriety. Talk about the profligate George; maid comes in to say ‘Mr George Ashton’. Governess protests against his admission. Mabel insists. Enter Lord Alfred. Falls in love with ward at once. He is reproached with his bad life, etc. Expresses great repentance. They go to garden.
Enter guardian. Mabel comes in: ‘I have a great surprise for you – your brother is here.’ Guardian, of course, denies having a brother. Mabel says ‘You cannot disown you own brother, whatever he has done.’ – and brings in Lord Alfred. Scene: also scene between [the] two men alone. Finally Lord Alfred arrested for debts contracted by guardian: guardian delighted: Mabel, however, make him forgive his brother and pay up. Guardian looks over bills and scold Lord Alfred for profligacy.
Miss Prism backs the guardian up. Guardian then orders his brother out of the house. Mabel intercedes, and brother remains. Miss Prism has designs on the guardian – matrimonial – she is 40 at least – she believes he is proposing to her and accepts him – his consternation.
Oscar Page 67