Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Douglas returned to town on 22 September, allowing Wilde a week of uninterrupted work at The Haven. Or almost uninterrupted: he had Alphonse Conway to dinner at the house on two, perhaps three, occasions. Afterwards, as Alphonse recalled, Wilde ‘took me to his bedroom and we both undressed and got into bed’.28 Wilde also fulfilled a promise of taking Alphonse on an overnight trip, ‘as a reward for being a pleasant companion’ to Wilde and his children over the summer. They went to Brighton, and put up at the Albion Hotel. Wilde ensured they had connecting rooms, and that night – after dinner in the hotel restaurant – he took Alphonse to bed. ‘He acted as before’, Alphonse said, although on this occasion he also ‘used his mouth’. It was perhaps on the following day that Wilde presented Alphonse with a signed photograph, a fancy walking stick and a cigarette case inscribed ‘Alfonso from his friend Oscar Wilde’.29

  Before September was quite over, Douglas was back once again at Worthing, on another fleeting visit. He arrived with a ‘companion’ so unsuitable that Wilde refused to allow them to stay, preferring to put them up at a hotel. Only the following day, after the companion (presumably a London ‘renter’) had ‘returned to the duties of his trade’ did Douglas move into The Haven. The holiday season, however, was over, and the little town was emptying. Douglas soon became bored with the limited domestic routine. He insisted that they relocate to the brighter lights of Brighton.30

  It was not a happy interlude. Soon after they arrived at the Hotel Metropole, Douglas fell ill with influenza. Wilde nursed him diligently, filling the room with flowers and sending for exotic fruits from London, since Bosie did not care for the grapes at the hotel. ‘I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life,’ Wilde reported to Ada Leverson. ‘They fill him with surprise.’ After four days of expensive hotel life, and with Bosie recovered, they moved into lodgings. Wilde hoped the setting might allow him to finish his play. But, instead, he himself succumbed to the flu. Douglas was not inclined to nurse him; he went off to London for a couple of days, leaving Wilde ‘entirely alone without care, without attendance, without anything’ (as Wilde bitterly recalled it). When he did return, he amused himself in the town until the early hours. At Wilde’s mild remonstration he flew into a fury, accusing Wilde of incredible ‘selfishness’ in expecting him to give up his pleasures to sit in a sick room. And the following morning he appeared in Wilde’s bedroom, not to apologize, but to renew this attack. Wilde, alarmed at the almost hysterical fury, felt in actual physical danger and, scrambling out of bed, fled downstairs to the common sitting room. Bosie then departed, although not before ‘silently’ gathering up what money he could find in Wilde’s rooms.

  Even in a relationship regularly vexed by Douglas’s temper, this was an exceptional row. Wilde was left badly shaken. Perhaps ‘the ultimate moment’ really had arrived. Wilde recalled that the thought came as ‘a great relief… I knew that for the future my Art and Life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way… Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was irrevocable gave me peace.’ He had, of course, made such resolutions before. But this time his determination was strengthened a few days later, when, on his fortieth birthday, amid the various messages of goodwill, he received a letter from Douglas, rehearsing once more all his bitter ire: taunting Wilde with ‘common jests’, bragging at how he had run up Wilde’s tab at the Metropole, ‘congratulating him on his panicked “flight” from his sick bed, and concluding, ‘When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.’ In the face of such ‘revolting… coarseness and crudity’ Wilde settled ‘with himself’ to see George Lewis immediately on his return to London that Friday (19 October); he would get him to write to the Marquess of Queensberry, stating that he was breaking off all relations and communications with Douglas.31*

  On the Friday morning, though, he opened his morning paper to discover the shocking news that Bosie’s eldest brother, Lord Drumlanrig (‘the real head of the family, the heir to the title, the pillar of the house’) had been killed in an ‘accident’ during a day’s shoot down at Quantock in Somerset. He had been found, by other members of the party, in a ditch, with his gun beside him, half his face blown away. Wilde’s resolve evaporated in the instant. He cabled to Bosie, full of sympathy for his terrible loss. They met a few days later at Tite Street. No allusion was made to Bosie’s terrible behaviour at Brighton, nor to his yet more terrible letter. Everything was washed away by the tragedy of Drumlanrig’s death. ‘Your grief,’ Wilde later reminded Bosie, ‘seemed to me to bring you nearer to me than you had ever been. The flowers you took from me to put on your brother’s grave were to be a symbol not merely of the beauty of [Drumlanrig’s] life, but of the beauty that in all lives lies dormant and may be brought to light.’ All thoughts of terminating the friendship were swept aside in the face of this new intimacy.32

  Although at the inquest, held in Somerset on 20 October, a verdict of accidental death had been returned, many of those connected with events suspected suicide. Only the motive remained mysterious. Drumlanrig had been on the verge of announcing his engagement to the young niece of his host. Had something perhaps gone wrong? Queensberry wrote with typical intemperance to Alfred Montgomery on the subject, blaming him and his daughter, along with the ‘The Snob Queers like Rosebery & canting Christian hypocrite Gladstone’, for making ‘bad blood’ between him and his eldest son over his peerage. Otherwise things might have turned out differently:

  I smell a Tragedy behind [Drumlanrig’s death] and have already got wind of a more ghastly one if it is what I am led to believe, I of all people could & would have helped him, had he come to me with a confidence, but that was all stopped by you people – we had not met or spoken hardly for more than a year & a half. I am on the right track to find out what happened. Cherchez la femme, when these things happen. I have already heard something that quite accounts for it all.33

  Sadly there is no further record of Queensberry’s suspicions and discoveries. Was the ‘femme’ behind the tragedy Drumlanrig’s fiancée Alix Ellis? Or another? And what role did she play? Queensberry’s assertion that he ‘of all people’ would have been able to help his son is intriguing, but hard to fathom. Did it perhaps relate to his own recent and ill-fated marriage, which was ended on the 24 October at a hearing held in camera – annulled ‘by reason of the frigidity impotency and malformation of the parts of generation of the said Respondent’?34 It is impossible to know. Then (as now) the mystery of Drumlanrig’s death encouraged speculation. There were persistent rumours that the forty-six-year-old Rosebery (a widower since the death of his wife in 1890) was sexually interested in young men. His tendency to take on good-looking private secretaries was noted, and inclined some to ‘believe the worst’. His habits of opening his own letters, and of going on holiday to Naples, also counted against him. Queensberry certainly relished such gossip: ‘Bloody Bugger’ to ‘Snob Queer’ were among his rich arsenal of Rosebery insults. Although there is little in Queensberry’s initial reaction to suggest that he connected Rosebery’s supposed proclivities with the ‘catastrophe’ of Drumlanrig’s death, others certainly did make such a link. And it may be that, in time, he came to share their suspicions.35†

  Certainly the tragedy did nothing to deflect the marquess from his pursuit of Wilde. He talked of the matter – and the distress it was causing him – to his son Percy, now returned from Australia. Percy counselled bringing the ‘miserable business… to a head’. Time seemed pressing. For anyone, like Queensberry, who suspected that the upper reaches of British society were being corrupted by a secret network of sodomites there had recently been a number of disturbing signs. The ‘new culture’ seemed to be asserting itself with increasing boldness. In response to debate in the press about Victorian social conventions regarding marriage, several articles had appeared suggesting that complete personal liberty should extend to same-sex relations. In April Charles Kains Jackson was sac
ked as editor of The Artist after making this point in an outspoken essay on what he termed the ‘New Chivalry’. In October, George Ives penned a similar piece in the Humanitarian (after his article was savaged in the Review of Reviews, Wilde congratulated him: ‘When the prurient and the impotent attack you, be sure you are right’).36

  At Oxford, although The Spirit Lamp had not survived Douglas’s departure, plans were being laid for a new periodical that would continue to promote the ‘new culture’ at the university. At Ives’s rooms in the Albany Wilde met the young editor, ‘an undergraduate of strange beauty’ called John Bloxam. They discussed possible names for the magazine, eventually fixing upon The Chameleon. Pressed to provide something for the inaugural number, Wilde offered a page of ‘aphorisms’. Douglas offered a pair of sexually charged sonnets, one of them, ‘The Two Loves’, with the memorable last line, ‘I am the Love that dare not speak its name.’ Wilde’s contribution – ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ – was less obviously contentious. Many of the maxims were borrowed from An Ideal Husband, and framed a vision of intellectual, rather than sexual, inversion, but a few did carry more dangerous suggestions. ‘Wickedness’, Wilde asserted, ‘is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.’37

  Wilde may have been inclined to include these aphorisms in Oscariana, along with those from another gathering published in the Saturday Review under the title ‘A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated’. He had been disappointed with the initial selection put together by Constance: ‘The plays are particularly badly done,’ he complained to Humphreys. ‘Long passages are quoted, where a single aphorism should have been extracted.’ He was now busy amending and augmenting the text himself. As he tried to impress upon Humphreys, the book needed to be ‘a really brilliant thing’.38

  For Wilde, though, the most pressing concern was The Importance of Being Earnest. At the end of October he sent the finished typescript – under the disguised title of Lady Lancing – to George Alexander. He did so with reservations. ‘Of course, the play is not suitable to you at all,’ he told him: ‘you are a romantic actor’; here was a farcical comedy, well outside ‘the definite artistic line’ usually followed at the St James’s Theatre. Wilde suggested that the piece really wanted comic actors like Charles Wyndham or Charles Hawtrey. And it is possible that Wilde had already sounded out both these men about the play. Certainly when Alexander failed to commit at once to the piece Wilde took the play to Wyndham, securing his commitment to put it on at the Criterion Theatre in the new year. With this agreement he seems also to have received an advance of £300 – although, from this, he probably had repay whatever he had already received from Alexander.39

  It was good news at last. After more than twelve months without a new production, Wilde now had two plays in prospect for the coming year. Rehearsals for An Ideal Husband began in the second week of December; the play was to open on 3 January at the Haymarket. Wilde was a constant presence at the theatre. Julia Nielson, the actress playing Lady Chiltern, recalled him there, always accompanied by three young men, who stood beside him in descending height ‘like the Three Bears’ (where the 5ft 9in Bosie ranked in this line-up is not recorded). Wilde remained doubtful of the play’s prospects. Constance reported him as very ‘depressed about it’.40 After the conviviality of Beerbohm Tree’s company the previous year, he found the cast less sympathetic. There was an unfortunate dispute with Waller’s wife, Florence, who insisted on playing the part of Mrs Cheveley, in the face of Wilde’s reservations. Charles Hawtrey (who had lampooned him in The Poet and the Puppets) was playing Lord Goring; and although Wilde admired Hawtrey’s comic talent, the actor had retained an unspoken resentment against him. When an interviewer – seeking a general answer – asked Wilde, ‘What are the exact relations between the actor and the dramatist?’ Wilde replied, with a smile, ‘Usually a little strained.’ And to the follow-up question, ‘But surely you regard the actor as a creative artist?’ Wilde answered, with a touch of pathos, ‘Yes, terribly creative – terribly creative!’41

  The tension between actors and playwright was heightened by the presence in the cast of Charles Brookfield. The author of The Poet and the Puppets had taken the minor role of Goring’s valet – because, as he ungraciously explained, he did not want to learn too many of Wilde’s lines. By not rising to such provocations, Wilde of course antagonized the actor further. He was adept at such ploys. When Brookfield, furious at having to rehearse over the Christmas holiday, asked, ‘Don’t you keep Christmas, Oscar?’, Wilde replied, ‘No, Brookfield, the only festival of the Church I keep is Septuagesima. Do you keep Septuagesima, Brookfield?’ ‘Not since I was a boy,’ Brookfield replied. ‘Ah,’ said Wilde, ‘be a boy again.’42

  * Douglas had taken himself off to Oxford, putting up at the Clarendon together with Beerbohm and Reggie Turner. ‘Bosie is still in the hotel, and is very amusing,’ Beerbohm reported to Ada Leverson. ‘It appears that he has had a very serious quarrel with Oscar. Oscar fell ill at Brighton. Bosie went to a music-hall in the evening and, returning at 2 in the morning, sang loudly. Oscar was furious and called him inconsiderate. Bosie left the next morning – and Oscar does not answer Bosie’s telegrams.’

  † Although definite information about Rosebery’s supposed homosexual relations remains elusive, it is clear that the rumour of them was well established in the period. André Gide reported a conversation he had with Reggie Turner on the beach at Dieppe in August 1902: moving on from a discussion of Wilde, they touched on others (some unexpected) who had shared his sexual tastes:

  Lui [Turner]: ‘Balfour… Kitchener… Rosebery.’

  Moi [Gide]: ‘Kipling.’

  Lui: ‘Non.’

  Moi: ‘Je vous assure.’

  Lui: ‘C’est la première fois que je l’entends dire.’

  Silence

  -PART VIII-

  The House Of

  Judgement

  1895

  age 40

  Oscar Wilde in the dock, by ‘Yorick’ (Ralph Hodgson), 1895.

  1

  The Last First Nights

  ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple.’

  oscar wilde

  ‘Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you,’ declares the dangerous Mrs Cheveley in Act 1 of An Ideal Husband:

  In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one’s neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues – and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins – one after the other. Not a year passes in England without somebody disappearing. Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest, to a man – now they crush him.

  The speech was just one of the jewels of sparkling perspicacity that glittered on the play’s opening night. Wilde’s anxieties about the piece proved unfounded. It was welcomed enthusiastically, bar a few growls from ‘the pittites’. To most in the crowded theatre it seemed to display ‘a distinct advance in dramatic power’. There was much laughter, real enjoyment and real engagement. Wilde, ‘faultlessly groomed’ and dressed in the ‘last note of fashion’ was conspicuous in a stage box, surrounded by a flattering crowed of ‘most distinguished persons’ whose praise he received with a ‘semi-royal graciousness’. Called before the curtain, he gave his now expected turn of insouciant self-assertion (or ‘studied insolence’), declaring – ‘I have enjoyed myself very much.’1*

  The reviewers might still carp at Wilde’s supposedly formulaic witticisms and second-hand plot devices but their ungenerous comments were neatly skewered by Bernard Shaw in the Saturday Review: ‘As far as I can ascertain,’ he wrote, ‘I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will. The fact that his plays, though apparently lucrative, remain unique under these
circumstances, says much for the self-denial of our scribes. In a certain sense Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actor and audience, with the whole theatre.’2

  Wilde had achieved an almost unprecedented feat: his first three plays ‘all successes’.3 If this was a rare attainment, it was also a great relief. He would be earning money again, and in large amounts. Success, however, did not make him humble; it made him insufferable. Taxed as to whether he considered An Ideal Husband his best play, he replied that ‘only mediocrities improve’; his three comedies, he suggested, ‘form a perfect cycle, and in their delicate sphere complete both life and art’. ‘Humility,’ he explained to the same interviewer, ‘is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent. Assertion is at once the duty and the privilege of the artist.’4 Not everyone was impressed by the pose. Arthur Conan Doyle thought Wilde must have become ‘mad’ when the playwright solemnly urged him to see his new play with the line, ‘Ah, you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius!’5

  In a series of statements to the press Wilde re-affirmed his current views on the relative positions of the playwright, the public and the critic. ‘I write to please myself,’ he explained. The critics ‘have always propounded the degrading dogma that the duty of the dramatist is to please the public’, but the ‘aim of the artist is no more to give pleasure than to give pain. The aim of art is to be art.’ Such ‘art’ should be an expression of the artist’s personality. ‘We shall never have a real drama in England until it is recognized that a play is as personal and individual a form of self-expression as a poem or a picture.’ ‘The public makes a success when it realizes that a play is a work of art.’ As a result it was the artist who was ‘the munificent patron of the public’, rather than the other way round. ‘I am very fond of the public,’ Wilde declared; ‘and, personally, I always patronize them very much.’6