Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  On the Monday evening, in a public show of defiance, Wilde attended The Importance of Being Earnest together with Constance and Bosie. Though he affected to enjoy the evening, Constance was – understandably – ‘very much agitated’ throughout. Douglas noted that she had ‘tears in her eyes’ when they parted at the end of the evening. Alexander was agitated too. When Wilde went round between the acts, the actor-manager joined the chorus of those urging him to leave the country. ‘Everyone wants me to go abroad,’ Wilde replied. ‘I have just been abroad. And now I have come home again. One can’t keep on going abroad, unless one is a missionary, or, what comes to the same thing, a commercial traveller.’31

  Wilde’s one slender hope was that Queensberry’s lawyers did not actually have the witnesses or the hard evidence to back up the bold claims of their plea of justification (there was no obligation for the defence to disclose such matters). In an effort to discover how things stood, Wilde sent word to Alfred Taylor. He also tried to contact Sidney Mavor, the most ‘respectable’ of the young men listed in the plea. Taylor came to see him at Tite Street on the day before the trial began. He seems to have been as mystified as Wilde by the apparent flood of revelations, and undertook to investigate. His findings were chilling. He wrote to Wilde shortly afterwards to say that he was being watched by a private investigator (an ex-inspector named Littlechild), and that he, or another, had gained access to his old rooms in Chapel Street – rooms that might have yielded much incriminating evidence.32 It was ominous news.

  * Wilde consulted Ricketts about set designs for Salomé – probably apropos Bernhardt’s planned Parisian production. Ricketts recalled: ‘I proposed a black floor, upon which Salomé’s feet could move like white doves; this was said to capture the author. The sky was to be a rich turquoise green, cut by the perpendicular fall of gilded strips of Japanese matting forming an aerial tint above the terraces.’ It was Wilde, perhaps, who suggested the division of the actors into separate masses of colour: ‘The Jews were to be in yellow, John in white, Herod and Herodias in blood-red. Over Salome the discussions were endless; should she be clothed in black – like the night, in silver like the moon – or, the suggestion was Wilde’s – green like a curious poisonous lizard?’

  3

  The Prosecutor

  ‘We have been to the Sibyl Robinson. She prophesied complete triumph, and was most wonderful.’

  oscar wilde

  The case of ‘Regina (Wilde) versus the Marquess of Queensberry’ began in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey at half past ten on Wednesday 3 April 1895. It was eagerly anticipated. The details of Queensberry’s plea of justification, though not published, had become partly known. Wilde arrived to find the small panelled courtroom thronged with bewigged barristers, anxious to witness the drama. They filled the seats and benches, and stood, ‘a serried mass of voluble, grey wigged, black-gowned humanity, in the gangways and approaches of the court’. The few places they had not secured were taken by the press; while, up above, the narrow public gallery was crammed with lookers-on, all of them male. Wilde, pushing through the crowd to reach his legal team, had to pass close to where the Marquess of Queensberry stood – thin and drawn, but still pugnacious – sporting a Cambridge-blue hunting stock instead of a collar and tie. His red-tinged side whiskers bristled. Wilde himself was dressed with studied sobriety, even gravity, in a black morning coat, his black tie fastened with a diamond and sapphire pin. He wore – it was noted – no buttonhole.1 The judge, Justice Henn Collins, took his place on the bench. Queensberry entered the dock, where, refusing a chair, he stood with his arms folded. The jury (of a dozen north London shopkeepers) was sworn. And the case began.2

  Sir Edward Clarke referred briefly to the allegations of ‘indecency’ made in Queensberry’s plea of justification, but sought to make light of them: it would be up to the defence to provide ‘credible witnesses’, he suggested pointedly, and actual evidence to support such serious charges. There followed an outline of Wilde’s career, his family life and his literary achievements; his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and his dealings with an increasingly intemperate Queensberry. Sir Edward touched on Dorian Gray and The Chameleon. And, in an attempt to forestall one possible line of the defence, he laid out the story of Wilde’s ‘extravagant’ madness-of-kisses letter to Douglas, telling of how it had fallen into the hands of Alfred Wood, of how Wilde had refused to be blackmailed over it by Allen and Cliburn, and of how it had been transformed from a ‘prose poem’ into a French sonnet. He then proceeded to take Wilde over the same ground.

  Posed easily in the witness box, with his arms resting on the rail, Wilde gave an assured performance. Clear and succinct for the most part, his well-honed accounts of the confrontations at Tite Street, first with Allen and Cliburn, and then with Queensberry, provoked frequent laughter. The line ‘I don’t know what the Queensberry Rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot at sight’ was especially enjoyed. From the dock, only a few feet away, Queensberry looked on with undisguised contempt, his lower lip working ceaselessly.3

  The examination-in-chief lasted just over an hour. Then Carson rose to commence his cross-examination. In anticipation of the confrontation, Wilde had remarked to his junior counsel, ‘No doubt he will perform his task with all the added bitterness of an old friend.’4 And he was right. Wilde faced his adversary with a smile. ‘A man’, remarked the Daily Chronicle, ‘might as well have smiled at the rack’. Carson may have been suffering from a bad cold, but he pursued his task with his wonted remorseless zeal. His first move was to establish that Wilde was not thirty-nine, as he had claimed to Sir Edward Clarke, but ‘something over forty’. The point was small enough (a matter of six months) but it revealed Wilde’s casual attitude to the truth, and also emphasized the disparity in age between him and the twenty-four-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas. Carson, however, did not press home the point at once. Instead Wilde found himself led on to the surer ground of literature: here he defended Douglas’s two poems in the The Chameleon as ‘exceedingly beautiful’ and refused to be drawn upon the tale of ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’. Asked whether he did not consider the story ‘immoral’, he provoked laughter by replying, ‘Worse, it is badly written.’ About his own contributions to the magazine he was playful:

  Carson: Listen sir. Here is one of your ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’: ‘Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.’ (Laughter) … Do you think that is true?

  Wilde: I rarely think that anything I write is true. (Laughter) … Not true in the sense of correspondence to fact; to represent wilful moods of paradox, of fun, nonsense, of anything at all – but not true in the actual sense of correspondence to actual facts of life, certainly not; I should be very sorry to think it.

  As to whether such axioms as ‘Religions die when they are proved to be true’ or ‘If one tells the truth one is sure sooner or later to be found out’ were suitable ‘for the Use of the Young’, Wilde suggested to his former college mate, ‘Anything that stimulates thought in people of any age is good for them.’

  He continued to assert his belief in the absolute division between art and morality as Carson drew him into discussions of Dorian Gray and Huysmans’ À Rebours. He was obliged to admit that, in revising his own original magazine story for publication in book form, he had altered one passage to avoid conveying the unintended ‘impression that the sin of Dorian Gray was sodomy’. But this, he claimed, had been done, not to assuage any moral clamour in the popular press, but on the advice of the great literary critic Walter Pater. It had been an artistic judgement.

  Wilde turned aside Carson’s repeated attempts to draw connections between the story of Dorian Gray and Wilde’s own friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas. When Carson quoted – from what he called the ‘purged’ passage – Basil Hallward’s description of how he had ‘adored [Dorian] madly, extravagantly, absurdly’, and demanded, ‘Have you ever felt that feel
ing of adoring madly a beautiful male person many years younger than yourself?’ Wilde replied, ‘I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.’ It called forth another burst of laughter, as did his assertion that he had ‘borrowed’ the idea of such an infatuation from Shakespeare. Wilde proudly declared his ‘love’ for Douglas, but described him as his great ‘friend’. He defended his extravagantly phrased letters as ‘beautiful’ works of art.5*

  Carson remained implacable. It seemed to many of those present in the courtroom that they were witnessing ‘a contest of giants’. Wilde maintained his poise, and won his laughs, but Carson refused to be deflected. His ‘white, thin, clever’ face stood out in sharp relief beneath his wig. He deployed his arsenal of mannerisms – of pregnant pauses, quizzical looks and grim smiles. His ‘self-possession is absolute’, reported the Daily Chronicle. ‘Against him a witness, however good his case, is, while the cross-examination lasts, as lath against iron.’6

  On and on the questions went, throughout the long afternoon session, as they moved from literature to life – and to Wilde’s friendships with a succession of young men. Who was Alfred Wood? What was his occupation? What was his age? How had they met? Had Wilde taken him to supper and given him money? How had he come to know Edward Shelley? When and where had he met Alphonse Conway? Had Wilde bought him a new suit of clothes, or given him a cigarette case? Did Conway call him Oscar?’ At every juncture Carson pointed up the disparities in age, in class, in intellectual attainment between ‘Oscar’ and these ‘boys’: Wood, the ‘twenty-four-year-old’ unemployed ‘clerk’, Shelley, the Bodley Head ‘office boy’ aged ‘eighteen’; Conway, the similarly aged ‘loafer’ on the Worthing seafront.7

  But Carson’s questions also swooped into darker places: ‘Did you ask [Wood] to your house at Tite Street?’ ‘Was your wife away at that time at Torquay?’ ‘Did you ever have immoral practices with Wood?’ ‘Did you ever open his trousers?’ ‘Put your hand upon his person?’ ‘Did you ever put your own person between his legs?’ ‘Did [Shelley] stay all night [at the Albemarle Hotel] and leave the next morning at eight o’clock?’ ‘Each of you having taken off all your clothes, did you take his person in your hand in bed?’; ‘Did you kiss [Conway] on the [Lancing] road?’ ‘Did you put your hands in his trousers?’ To this barrage of questions, Wilde could only put up a succession of stout denials, but the questions were damaging enough. And they revealed to Wilde for the first time the extent of the information that the defence had managed to secure. It was clear that they had detailed first-hand statements from the various witnesses.8 When the court rose at quarter to five, Wilde must have been exhausted. It had been a punishing day, the successes of the morning undermined by the revelations of the afternoon.

  There was much for a prurient press to cover and a prurient public to discuss. The case was hailed as ‘about the most “tasty” thing that the masculine barbarians of the West End have enjoyed for many a day’. Its combination of illicit sex and Wildean wit proved irresistible to a newspaper-buying public.9 Even as Wilde left the court the newsboys were hawking evening papers with accounts of the morning’s proceedings. ‘Scandal’, ‘Sensation’, ‘Extraordinary Revelations’, ran the headlines. Many of the papers carried verbatim reports, transcribing large portions of the cross-examination – only obscuring references to ‘sodomitical’ habits with allusions to ‘nameless’ crimes, or with rows of ellipses. In the frenzy of press coverage, the St James’s Gazette distinguished itself by refusing to mention the case at all – a move that won it rather more publicity than sales.

  The grim circus began again the following morning. Wilde, considerably subdued, was obliged by Carson to describe his ‘intimacy’ with Alfred Taylor, and tell of the all-male tea parties held at his ‘strongly perfumed’ candlelit rooms in Little College Street.10 Carson then embarked on a roll call of working-class, and usually unemployed, young men whom Wilde – he suggested – had met and entertained, through Taylor: Fred Atkins, Charles Parker and his brother William, Sidney Mavor, Ernest Scarfe (a one-time valet ‘about twenty years of age’). Had Wilde engaged in ‘intimacies’ with them? He denied it. Had he given them cigarette cases? He confessed that he was fond of giving people cigarette cases. Asked what he could possibly have in common with such people, he replied, ‘Well, I will tell you Mr Carson. I delight in the society of people much younger than myself. I like those who may be called idle and careless. I recognize no social distinctions at all of any kind and to me youth – the mere fact of youth – is so wonderful that I would sooner talk to a young man for half an hour than even be, well, cross-examined in court.’

  It was one of several sallies. Taxed as to whether ‘iced champagne’ was a favourite drink of his, Wilde replied, ‘Yes, strongly against my doctor’s orders.’ ‘Never mind the doctor’s orders,’ cut in Carson, allowing Wilde the riposte: ‘I don’t. It has all the more flavour if you discard the doctor’s orders.’ Such facetiousness might win a laugh, but Carson knew that it would not sway a jury. He moved implacably on to Walter Grainger, the teenage servant from Douglas’s lodgings at Oxford: ‘Did you have him to dine with you?’ ‘Never in my life’; ‘Did you ever kiss him?’ ‘Oh no, never in my life; he was a peculiarly plain boy.’ The qualification was lightly given, but Carson pounced upon it, rapping out question after question:

  Carson: He was what?

  Wilde: I said I thought him unfortunately – his appearance was so very unfortunately – very ugly – I mean – I pitied him for it.

  Carson: Very ugly?

  Wilde: Yes.

  Carson: Do you say that in support of your statement that you never kissed him?

  Wilde: No, I don’t; it is like asking me if I kissed a doorpost; it is childish.

  Carson: Didn’t you give me as the reason that you never kissed him that he was too ugly?

  Wilde (warmly): No, I did not say that.

  Carson: Why did you mention his ugliness?

  Wilde: No, I said the question seemed to me like – your asking me whether I ever had him to dinner, and then whether I had kissed him – seemed to me merely an intentional insult on your part, which I have been going through the whole of this morning.

  Carson: Because he was ugly?

  Wilde: No.

  Carson: Why did you mention his ugliness? I have to ask these questions.

  Wilde: I say it is ridiculous to imagine that any such thing could have occurred under any circumstances.

  Carson: Why did you mention his ugliness?

  Wilde: For that reason. If you asked me if I had ever kissed a doorpost, I should say, ‘No! Ridiculous! I shouldn’t like to kiss a doorpost?’ The questions are grotesque.

  Carson: Why did you mention the boy’s ugliness?

  Wilde: I mentioned it perhaps because you stung me by an insolent question.

  Carson: Because I stung you by an insolent question?

  Wilde: Yes, you stung with by an insolent question; you make me irritable.

  Carson: Did you say the boy was ugly, because I stung you with an insolent question?

  (Here the witness began several answers almost inarticulately, and none of them finished. His efforts to collect his ideas were not aided by Mr Carson’s sharp staccato repletion, ‘Why? Why? Why did you add that?’ At last the witness answered…)

  Wilde: Pardon me, you sting me, insult me and try to unnerve me in every way. At times one says things flippantly when one should speak more seriously, I admit it, I admit it – I cannot help it. That is what you are doing to me.

  Carson: You said it flippantly? You mention this ugliness flippantly; that is what you wish to convey now?

  Wilde: Oh don’t say what I wish to convey. I have given you my answer.

  Carson: Is that it, that that was a flippant answer?

  Wilde: Oh, it was a flippant answer, yes; I will say it was certainly a flippant answer.

  Carson: Did ever any indecencies take place between you and Grainger?

  Wilde: No, sir, n
one, none at all.11

  For many in the court it seemed a climactic moment, with Wilde rattled and retreating, having inadvertently and indirectly admitted that he would have considered kissing a less ‘unfortunate-looking’ boy.12

  When Carson concluded his cross-examination soon afterwards, Sir Edward Clarke tried to wrest the initiative back by re-examining Wilde, getting him to cast his various associations in a better light: to emphasize the respectability of Alfred Taylor (a cultured piano-playing Old Marlburian) and of the deliberately unnamed Maurice Schwabe (‘a gentleman of high position, good birth and good repute’); to show the real engagement and generosity in his dealings with Shelley and Conway. To capture attention he introduced as evidence Queensberry’s intemperate letters to Lord Alfred Douglas and Alfred Montgomery. Certainly the reference to Wilde as a ‘damned cur and coward of the Rosebery type’ created a momentary stir when it was read out, but the rest of the letter made clear that Queensberry’s ire against Rosebery was over the political slight that he and Gladstone and the queen had delivered in raising Viscount Drumlanrig to the peerage. There was sympathy, too, for the marquess, as he stood in the dock throughout the interminable reading, ‘gazing alternately’ at Wilde in the witness box, and at his son, who was sitting at the opposite end of the court. ‘Every now and then’, the Sun reported, ‘he turned to the man in the witness-box and ground his teeth together and shook his head at the witness in the most violent manner. Then when the more pathetic parts of the letter came [relating to Drumlanrig’s death], the poor old nobleman had the greatest difficulty in restraining the tears which welled into his eyes, and forced him to bite his lips to keep them back.’13 As evidence it did nothing to advance Wilde’s case. It did, though, allow Rosebery’s enemies, both political and personal, to claim that he had been ‘mentioned’ in the case – or to suggest rather more.†