Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Act III. Mabel and the false brother.

  He proposes and is accepted. When Mabel is alone, Lady Maud, who only knows the guardian under the name of George, arrives alone. She tells Mabel she is engaged to ‘George’ – scene naturally. Mabel retires: enter George, he kisses his sister naturally. Enter Mabel and sees them. Explanations, of course. Mabel breaks off the match on the grounds that there is nothing to reform in George: she only consented to marry him because she thought he was bad and wanted guidance. He promises to be a bad husband – so as to give her an opportunity of making him a better man; she is a little mollified.

  Enter the guardian: he is reproached also by Lady Maud for his respectable way of life in the country: a JP: a county-councillor: a churchwarden: a philanthropist: a good example. He appeals to his life in London: she is mollified, on condition that he never lives in the country: the country is demoralizing: it makes you respectable. ‘The simple fare at the Savoy: the quiet life in Piccadilly: the solitude of Mayfair is what you need etc.’

  Enter Duchess in pursuit of her daughter – objects to both matches. Miss Prism, who had in early days been governess to the Duchess, sets it all right, without intending to do so – everything ends happily.

  Result

  Curtain

  Author called

  Cigarette called

  Manager called

  Royalties for a year for author

  Manager credited with writing play. He consoles himself for the slander with bags of red gold.

  Fireworks.

  The ‘scenario’ was, of course, just a first sketch; the ‘real charm of the play’, Wilde suggested, would be in the dialogue. He hoped, though, that the idea would appeal enough for Alexander to advance him £150 to secure the first refusal – the money to be returned should he not care for the finished script. He suggested that – if he were able ‘to go away and write’ – it could be done by October.2

  Wilde was able to get away and write. After the excesses of Goring the year before, Constance – working to a budget of 10 guineas a week – had taken a more modest place for the last month of the summer. The Haven was a terraced house belonging to a friend of hers, on the Esplanade at Worthing, on the south coast. She and the boys (now aged nine and seven) – with their governess, and two of the Tite Street servants – went down at the beginning of the second week in August. Wilde arrived three days later and claimed the top-floor room with a balcony as his ‘writing room’.3 It was to be a season of seaside fun and literary endeavour, and not just for Wilde. He had passed on his ‘Oscariana’ idea to Constance. She was to compile an anthology of his epigrams, taken from his plays and other works; and the little book was to be privately printed by Arthur Humphreys, the young manager of Hatchard’s bookshop.

  A special rapport had grown up between Constance and the twenty-nine-year-old (married) Humphreys during their collaboration. The recent months of neglect by Oscar had made Constance susceptible to kindness and attention. In one letter to Humphreys she confessed that she considered him ‘an ideal husband, indeed… you are not far short of being an ideal man!’ When he came down to Worthing for the day, to work on the project, she took a moment to write ‘darling Arthur’ (as she now called him) a note, while he was out smoking his cigarette, a note – ‘to tell you how much I love you, and how dear and delightful you have been today’. Whether this romantic friendship evolved into an affair is uncertain, and perhaps unlikely, but it did, perhaps, show Wilde that his wife was desirable to others, and desiring of them too.4

  Wilde threw himself into his play, and was only partially deflected by the arrival of Lord Alfred Douglas on 14 August. Although, before coming down to Worthing, Wilde had suggested Douglas might visit, he had then tried to put him off with tales of the boringness of family life (the children’s governess was ‘horrid, ugly… quite impossible,’ and Swiss; ‘also, children at meals are tedious’). Bosie, however, was not to be gainsaid. Despite Wilde’s warnings, he curtailed his travels with Wilfrid Blunt to join the fun at the seaside. Although he seems to have put up at a hotel, he was a regular presence at The Haven, much to Constance’s dismay. He soon became aware that he was a ‘bone of contention between Oscar and Mrs Oscar’, but – with characteristic selfishness – ignored their discomfort and set about enjoying himself. In his own recollection, he greatly contributed to the composition of Wilde’s play, sitting alongside the playwright, approving the jokes as they were read out to him, and suggesting many of his own.5

  Douglas’s presence could not entirely dispel the air of the family seaside holiday. Indeed Wilde’s son Vyvyan later remembered that summer as a charmed one, with Oscar ‘at his best’, taking his boys swimming, fishing and sailing – ‘when it was not too breezy’. They established an aquarium in which the day’s rock-pool discoveries could be deposited. Wilde threw himself into sandcastle building, ‘an art in which he excelled’, devising ‘long, rambling castles… with moats and tunnels and towers and battlements’. There were other treats: the Worthing Annual Regatta provided a fine spectacle (marred only for Wilde by the presence of sailing boat, bearing ‘a huge advertisement for a patent pill’). At the lifeboat demonstration the Wilde party was conspicuous in the flotilla, ‘flitting about’ in a small rowing boat. Wilde also took Cyril to at least one concert, in the very full programme laid on at the Assembly Rooms.6 The special bond between Wilde and his older son was reinforced that summer. Indeed Wilde would refer to the ‘beautiful, loving, loveable’ Cyril as ‘my friend of all friends, my companion of all companions’.7

  Nevertheless, for at least some of the time Wilde allowed himself to be monopolized by Douglas. They would go off sailing together, often accompanied by a trio of local lads who they had picked up on the beach: the sixteen-year-old Alphonse Conway and his friends Stephen and Percy. The boys would swim naked off the boat, diving for prawns and lobsters. Wilde characterized Alphonse – or ‘Alphonso’, as he dubbed him – as a ‘bright, happy, boy’ without any obvious occupation, and his brightness added to the attractions of the holiday. He and his friends became part of the summer scene. After one outing Wilde and Douglas took Alphonse and Stephen to lunch at the Marine Hotel. The boys would also join in the family activities, taking Wilde’s sons out ‘prawning’ in the boat. Alphonse even attended a children’s tea party for Cyril at the Esplanade.8

  Wilde developed a particular fondness for ‘Alphonso’, who lived with his widowed mother close to the seafront. He encouraged his ambition to go to sea, and stimulated his imagination with gifts of Treasure Island and a book called The Wreck of the Grosvenor. He also bought him a blue serge suit and a straw hat with a red and blue ribbon, so that he need not be ashamed of his ‘shabby’ clothes during the summer festivities. But, although there seems to have been a certain affection in all this, there was also a definite sexual element.9 According to Conway, shortly after they became acquainted, Wilde suggested that they meet on the parade at about nine in the evening. They walked out of the town together on the little coastal road towards Lancing. In a quiet place Wilde suddenly ‘took hold’ of ‘Alphonso’, and, putting his hand inside his trousers, masturbated him until he ‘spent’. He did not ask Alphonse to ‘do anything’. The incident did not seem to perturb the boy, and was repeated a few nights later. Whether Douglas also had sex with Alphonso, or with either of his friends, is unknown, but it is certainly possible.10

  There was a heightened sense of sexual danger that summer. News arrived from London of a police raid on a house in Fitzroy Street (just round the corner from Cleveland Street), during which eighteen men had been arrested, two of them in ‘fantastic female garb’. Among those taken into custody were Wilde’s friends Charlie Parker and Alfred Taylor. Although, in the end, no charges were brought due to lack of evidence, the court reports indicated that the premises had been under surveillance for some time, and that many of those arrested were ‘known’ to the police. Although there is no suggestion that Wilde had ever visited the house, it was
worrying to learn that the police were taking an active interest in such places. Certainly Wilde was distressed at the news: ‘a dreadful piece of bad luck’, he called it, that spelt ‘real trouble’ for ‘poor Alfred Taylor’. But, as the incident resolved itself, he adopted a lighter tone. ‘Do tell me all about Alfred,’ he asked a mutual friend, ‘Was he angry or amused? What is he going to do?’ (Taylor went back to doing what he always did: not very much. Charlie Parker, though, reacted to the scare by enlisting in the Royal Artillery).11

  Bosie left Worthing at the beginning of September, allowing Wilde to re-devote himself to his play, with regular breaks for bathing. He had not heard back from George Alexander about the project, and suspected that the scenario had been ‘too farcical’ for his tastes and his theatre. It turned out, though, that Alexander’s letter expressing interest had simply got lost in the post. This was revealed when Alexander wrote again, anxious for news of the piece, and concerned to know whether he would be able to have American – as well as British – rights, as he was planning to tour the States for the first time the following year.12

  Though Wilde pleaded that he was too poor to come to London to discuss the project, Alexander lured him up for lunch at the Garrick. It was a satisfactory meeting: Wilde was able to get some money out of Alexander in exchange for allowing him the ‘first refusal’ of the finished script. But he dissuaded him from his idea of taking the play to America, where, rather than being given a proper premiere and run in the major cities, it would serve simply as an occasional repertory item on Alexander’s tour. Wilde envisaged selling the American rights separately to an American producer for perhaps as much as £3,000.13

  On returning to Worthing Wilde dashed off a scenario for another play that he thought might be more suitable for Alexander to take on tour to the States: a ‘comedy-drama’ with more drama than comedy. The scenario neatly reversed the dynamics of Lady Windermere’s Fan: an unfaithful husband is rescued from a compromising situation by the smart action of his ‘simple sweet’ wife. But she then deserts him to run off with the husband’s friend, to whom she has become passionately attached. ‘You have made me love you,’ she tells him. ‘All this self-sacrifice is wrong, we are meant to live. This is the meaning of life.’ Compared to the cheerfully convoluted absurdities of his farce, this was to be a drama of real power and passion, and – as such – much better attuned to Alexander’s ‘romantic’ acting style. ‘I see great things in it,’ Wilde told the actor-manager, ‘and, if you like it when done, you can have it for America.’14

  In the meantime, though, he returned to his farcical comedy. He was ‘quite delighted’ with the piece. It was imbued with his own deliciously subversive philosophy: ‘That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’15 The original scenario had been enriched over the summer: now both the male characters were engaged in living ‘double lives’. Just as the ‘guardian’ (renamed Jack Worthing in honour of the seaside resort) had invented his imaginary reprobate brother (now renamed Ernest) to provide an excuse for coming up to town, so his friend (transformed from Lord Alfred Rufford to plain Algernon Moncrieff, perhaps to lessen his resemblance to Lord Alfred Douglas) had invented an imaginary invalid friend called Bunbury to give him a pretext for avoiding tedious social obligations. In a further elaboration, parodying the involved coincidences of popular romantic fiction, Jack became Algernon’s long-lost brother (actually called Ernest), having been abandoned as an infant by his nurse (the young Miss Prism) and raised by a kindly old gentleman in ignorance of his true identity.

  Wilde doubtless enjoyed the echoes that the plot provided with his own increasingly involved ‘double life’ as respectable husband and clandestine lover of young men. Indeed the whole piece was shot through with subversive intimations of Wilde’s sexual interests and connections. The renaming of Jack’s imaginary brother as ‘Ernest’ did, of course, provide a satirical comment upon conventional Victorian notions about the virtues of ‘earnestness’, and allowed for the play to be called The Importance of Being Earnest, but it also offered a coded reference to a recently published volume of ‘Uranian’ verse, entitled Love in Earnest, in which the author, John Gambril Nicholson, had proclaimed his love for a schoolboy named Ernest. ‘Ernest Worthing’, moreover, is described as living at E4, the Albany – the very rooms inhabited by George Ives.16

  But not all of Wilde’s sly allusions were to his secret sex life. He renamed Jack’s pretty young ward ‘Cecily Cardew’ as a tribute to the infant niece of an old Oxford friend.17 To honour Max Beerbohm he inserted into a list of British generals beginning with ‘M’, the improbable ‘General Maxbohm’. He named the play’s two butlers ‘Lane’ and ‘Mathews’ to vent his annoyance at his publishers (though he later relented and changed ‘Mathews’ to ‘Merriman’). The imaginary invalid ‘Bunbury’ was perhaps a disparaging allusion to Charles Brookfield, who had played a character of that name in his recent comedy, Godpapa.18

  Throughout everything, though, there was a sense of Wilde’s pleasure in the work. The dialogue – absurd, light and paradoxical – was, he thought, the best he had ever written. Nevertheless the play itself still needed shaping. ‘It lies in Sibylline leaves about the room,’ he told Douglas. Arthur, the young ‘butler’ who they had brought with them from Tite Street, had ‘twice made a chaos of “tidying up”’ – though Wilde claimed to detect dramatic possibilities in this random re-ordering: ‘I am inclined to think that Chaos is a stronger evidence for an Intelligent Creator than Kosmos is.’ 19

  Constance left Worthing on 12 September to prepare the boys for school. Cyril was being sent away to Bedales, the progressive boarding school recently established by Harry Marillier’s Cambridge friend J. H. Badley, while Vyvyan was going to a prep school in Broadstairs (the money from Alexander arrived just in time to allow Wilde to pay the fees).20 Wilde remained at The Haven to work. There were, of course, some distractions. Wilde had, during his weeks of residence, achieved the position of a local celebrity, and was asked to give out the prizes at the ‘Venetian Fete’ that ended the town’s season of waterborne festivities.

  His speech, dilating upon the charms of Worthing, was enthusiastically received. He praised the town’s amenities – its beautiful surroundings and many ‘lovely long walks, which he recommended to other people, but did not take himself’. It is unclear whether the be-suited Alphonse Conway was present in the Pier Pavilion to hear this partial untruth. Wilde concluded his remarks by saying that ‘he was delighted to observe in Worthing one of the most important things… the faculty of offering pleasure’.21

  Constance’s departure seems to have been a signal for Bosie to re-appear. He and Wilde even made a fleeting visit across the Channel to Dieppe (‘very amusing and bright’ during the summer season).22 They returned, however, to find themselves illuminated in the glare of an unwanted new notoriety. During their absence there had appeared, anonymously, a book entitled The Green Carnation. Published by Heinemann, it was creating a sensation with its thinly veiled, and very funny, depiction of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas – as the epigrammatic ‘Esmé Amarinth’ and his gilt-haired disciple ‘Lord Reggie Hastings’ – a young man who ‘worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth’.

  The book was less a caricature than a photograph. It showed a quite startling familiarity with the details of Wilde and Bosie’s life. On receiving a fulminating letter from his irate and bewhiskered father, the insouciant Lord Reggie replies by telegram, ‘What a funny little man you are’. Although the plot – such as it was – centred on Lord Reggie’s unsuccessful courtship of ‘Lady Locke’, there were broad hints about the heroes’ real sexual interests. Both men follow ‘the higher philosophy’ elaborated by Amarinth: ‘To be afraid of nothing, to dare to live as one wishes to live, not as the middle classes wish one to live; to have the courage of one’s desires, instead of only the cowardice of other people’s.’
And, as Amarinth made clear, while the middle classes celebrated what was ‘natural’, he favoured the ‘unnatural’ in all aspects of life. Wilde was more amused than alarmed at it all. He considered the book ‘very clever’, even ‘brilliant’ in many places.23

  There was much discussion – both in the press and down at Worthing – as to who could have written it. Wilde suspected Ada Leverson, who had parodied him so nimbly in Punch, but she assured him of her innocence.24 They had discovered by then that the culprit was Robert Hichens. He had absorbed all that Douglas had told him during their trip down the Nile, and embellished it with what he had learnt since returning to England, both from meeting Wilde and from listening to Beerbohm. Wilde called him ‘the doubting disciple who has written the false gospel’; Douglas complained that ‘all the best jokes in the book were really [his]’ and had been stolen ‘without acknowledgment’. They both sent off comic telegrams, Wilde to tell Hichens that the secret was discovered, Bosie advising him to flee from their righteous wrath.25

  Wilde also sent a humorous letter to the Pall Mall Gazette dispelling a suggestion, made by the paper, that he himself was the author of The Green Carnation. ‘I invented that magnificent flower,’ he declared, with a slight amplification of the truth. ‘But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not.’ And to the manuscript of his play he added a line in which Lady Brancaster mentions having received a copy of the book, before dismissing it as ‘a morbid and middle-class affair’ seemingly about ‘the culture of exotics’.26

  Wilde’s levity was misplaced. The book, which romped through three editions before the end of the year, greatly increased the awareness of, and prejudice against, his friendship with Douglas. ‘The Green Carnation ruined Oscar Wilde’s character with the general public,’ Frank Harris recalled. ‘On all sides [it] was referred to as confirming the worst suspicions.’ Certainly it ‘inflamed’ the Marquess of Queensberry.27