Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Rocco seems to have joined Wilde and Douglas in these sexual adventures, along with a new English friend, I. D. W. (‘Sir John’) Ashton – described by Wilde as ‘a most charming and delightful fellow’, astounding ‘in his capacity for pleasure, grand in his cups, and with a heart of gold’.98 Having sex with Neapolitan youths was stimulating for Wilde’s language skills: he talked to them about the aesthetics of attraction, and they taught him the idiom of the streets. ‘I am getting rather astonishing in my Italian conversation,’ he boasted to Adey. ‘I believe I talk a mixture of Dante and the worst modern slang.’99

  The press began to take note of Wilde’s assignations. There were knowing references to his ‘nocturnal walks… in search of adventure’.100 One scandal sheet carried a fanciful account of Wilde passing the night at a hotel with five young soldiers, each from a different regiment (the hotel porter was concerned that, with Wilde seducing so many of the military, there might be a danger to national security).101

  In the wake of such stories and ‘all sorts of unpleasant gossip’, Douglas’s ‘people’ – his mother and brother – increased their efforts to break up the ménage. At their prompting Denis Browne, an attaché from the embassy and an Oxford friend of Douglas’s, came down from Rome. After an apparently jolly luncheon at the villa, he took Douglas aside and urged him to abandon Wilde and leave Naples. Douglas, characteristically, bridled at this interference. Browne called him ‘a quixotic fool’, and they ‘parted in anger’.102

  In truth, though, life at Posillipo was beginning to show signs of strain. The bright start could not be maintained. The lack of money was a constant source of stress and division. They lived in a wearying state of ‘daily financial crisis’.103 Douglas’s modest allowance was – as Wilde announced more than once – ‘not enough for his own wants’, let alone for both of them.104 The ‘hand to mouth struggle’ was only ‘kept up by desperate telegrams to [Douglas’s] reluctant relations, and pawning of pins and studs’.105 When they were totally without cash they had to dine back at the Hôtel Royal des Étrangers, where they could at least eat on credit.106

  Dowson did send Wilde £10 of what he owed;107 an unexpected £9 arrived as a gift from Ross (‘a miracle of a very wonderful kind’);108 and Turner, if he did not send money, paid for a £2 10s postal order to be left, in Wilde’s name, for the handsome Harry Elvin on his release from Reading.109 But the £20 advance due from the always cash-strapped Smithers only arrived in piecemeal fashion, and only after numerous (expensive) telegrams and many fruitless visits to Cook’s. ‘I calculate the expenses incurred by waiting for [your] £20 at £34 up to the present,’ Wilde told his publisher at the beginning of November, when half of it was still owing. ‘The mental anxiety cannot be calculated. I suppose you think that mental anxiety is good for poets. It is not the case, when pecuniary worries are concerned.’ In desperation Wilde even wrote to Ernest Leverson, reviving his claim to the money he felt was due to him. He received no reply.110

  Adding to the sense of anxiety and frustration was the lack of progress in selling the rights to The Ballad of Reading Gaol in America. ‘I keep on building castles of fairy gold in the air,’ Wilde told Dowson. ‘We Celts always do.’111 But the golden castles, as is so often the case, were slow to materialize. No offers arrived, and all the feedback was discouraging. It was both a shock and surprise. ‘I had no idea that there were such barriers between me and publication in America,’ Wilde lamented to Ross. ‘I thought I would romp in, and secure a good lump sum. It is curious how vanity helps the successful man, and wrecks the failure. In the old days half of my strength was my vanity.’112 As a final ploy he suggested contacting his wonderfully efficient American play agent, Elisabeth Marbury, in the hope that she would be able to do something.113

  The silence from across the Atlantic – and the ever-pressing need for money – persuaded Wilde to revisit his decision about British serial rights. Having assured Smithers that he would let the publisher have ‘the perfect virginity of my poem for the satyrs of the British public to ravish’,114 he now suggested a simultaneous publication in a newspaper. He claimed to have been offered £50 by Robin Grey at the Musician, and he told Ross that he would, indeed, be prepared to ‘accept any English paper’ – the Sunday Sun, the Saturday Review or even Reynolds’s Newspaper – ‘it circulates widely amongst the criminal classes, to which I now belong, so I shall be read by my peers – a new experience for me’.115

  Smithers was horrified by the notion and, supported by Ross, issued an ultimatum, threatening to abandon plans for the book’s publication if any such arrangement were made.116 Wilde backed down: ‘I dare say you will think me very unpractical and all that,’ he told Smithers, ‘but I candidly confess that if I have to choose between Reynolds and Smithers, I choose Smithers.’117 And, although he sought to excuse himself to Ross by claiming that Smithers had written to him ‘several times’ saying ‘he did not mind the thing appearing elsewhere’ he was obliged to abandon the plan: ‘I quite see that it would spoil the book.’118

  And Wilde did want a book. He kept up a close correspondence with Smithers about the physical form of the volume. The challenge was to make something distinct and distinguished: ‘The public is largely influenced by the look of a book,’ Wilde declared. ‘It is the only artistic thing about the public.’119 His initial idea was for a ‘very artistic’ production – with a wonderful cover (paper of course), frontispiece, initial letters, culs-de-lampe etc. But his hopes of a frontispiece – something ‘sombre, troubled and macabre’ by Paul Herrmann, an ‘interesting genius’ he had met in Paris – gradually dwindled as no drawing arrived. He accepted that the first edition at least would have to be without illustration.120

  The sense of distinction would be created by the choice of materials and the use of typography. In order to give the book ‘thickness and solidity’ and prevent it looking too like ‘a sixpenny pamphlet’, it was decided to print the text on alternate pages.121 This, together with the thick Dutch hand-made paper chosen by Smithers, gave sufficient bulk to warrant a cloth binding. And – on Wilde’s recommendation – a ‘cinnamon’ colour was chosen, with white cloth (and gold lettering) for the spine. The proposed format, rather taller and thinner than the standard, also ‘delighted’ the author.122

  On receiving the first set of proofs, Wilde approved of Smithers’ choice of typeface, though he considered the question marks ‘lacking in style, and the stops, especially the full-stops, characterless’.123 Much additional care, though, had to be expended upon the wording and layout of the title page. It was agreed that Wilde’s name was not to appear, but rather the author should be designated solely by his prison number, C.3.3. The public, Wilde remarked, ‘like an open secret’.124

  Although there was to be an epigraph commemorating Trooper Wooldridge as the subject of the poem, Wilde wanted to add also a personal dedication to Ross: ‘When I came out of prison / some met me with garments and spices, / and others with wise counsel. / You met me with love.’125 Ross, however, demurred, partly because he thought the wording both ‘unsuitable’ and untrue – he had met Wilde with garments and spices, to say nothing of wise counsel – but also because, as he pointed out to Smithers, since his name was not mentioned (nor even indicated by initials), ‘everyone will believe rightly or wrongly that Bosie Douglas is intended. This will damage the reputation of the poem everywhere and immediately prejudice everyone against it directly they open the book.’ Indeed Ross half suspected that Wilde had worded the dedication so he could ‘tell me and Douglas and two or three other people that each was intended’.126

  What sort of market the book might have remained unclear. The size and pricing of the first edition was much debated between author and publisher, with the former tending towards optimism, and the latter counselling caution. Wilde dismissed Smithers’ early suggestion of ‘an edition of 600 copies at 2/6!’: ‘If the thing goes at all it should certainly sell 1500 copies, at that price. If on the other hand 500 is the proba
ble sale, it should be 5 shillings.’127 Money dominated Wilde’s thoughts.

  As the autumn drew on, the daily anxiety about ‘ways and means’ was taking its slow toll on the mood at Villa Giudice. Douglas felt sure that Wilde could earn good money from writing plays, as he had in the past, and could not understand why progress was so slow. He became sullen and resentful at Wilde’s failure to produce a commercial drama. He was not accustomed to want. And when the local tradesmen began to turn up demanding payment for small debts, Douglas’s temper ‘went to pieces’.128 The hoped-for idyll of domestic happiness and creative productivity receded with every day. Both Wilde and Douglas grew increasingly unhappy with their predicament, yet neither was prepared to confess it to the other. Having fought so hard, and sacrificed so much, to achieve their reunion, any admission that it was not ideal was too painful to contemplate. Nevertheless the great emotional fact was unignorable, even if it remained unspoken: their old love could not be rekindled.

  Douglas did at least admit to himself: ‘I had lost that supreme desire for [Wilde’s] society which I had before, and which made a sort of aching void when he was not with me.’129 But this knowledge merely made him feel even less able to abandon Wilde. It could not be done without a loss of honour: an excuse was needed. He sought to provoke a crisis. There were – as he put it – ‘several quarrels’.130 Crockery was thrown.131 Wilde recalled the horror of one row, when Douglas, smarting from having been ‘dunned’ for an unpaid laundry bill, raged and ‘whipped’ Wilde with his acerbic tongue: ‘It was appalling.’132 But Wilde – without other options, worn down in spirit, and naturally non-confrontational – had neither the energy nor the inclination to rise to the bait. ‘I could only stand and see love turned to hate,’ he later told Frank Harris; ‘the strength of love’s wine making the bitter more venomous.’ Only once, it seems, did he snap. When Bosie asked him what he had meant by the line, ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’ he answered, without emotion, ‘You should know.’133

  Wilde’s room to manoeuvre was further reduced when, on 16 November, the long-dreaded ‘thunderbolt’ finally struck: a letter arrived from Hansell informing him that he was to be deprived of his allowance from Constance because he was living with Douglas. He railed against the decision: ‘I do not think it fair to say that I have created a “public scandal” by being with him… my existence is a public scandal. But I do not think I should be charged with creating a scandal by continuing to live: though I am conscious that I do so.’ He railed against Hansell – who was, after all, his own solicitor, rather than Constance’s – for accepting the definition of Douglas as a ‘disreputable person’; he had, after all, never been convicted of any crime. He railed against Ross and Adey for not opposing Hansell’s view: ‘I do not deny that Alfred Douglas is a gilded pillar of infamy, but do deny that he can be properly described in a legal document as a disreputable person.’134 He railed against the world: ‘I wish you would start a Society for the Defence of Oppressed Personalities’, he told Smithers. ‘At present there is a gross European concert headed by brutes and solicitors against us.’135

  There was, though, little that could be done. Forces were massing against them. Douglas received a letter from his brother urging him to separate from Wilde (‘You have gained your point and proved you are not to be interfered with’).136 And this was followed up by letter from Lady Queensberry announcing that she would be stopping Douglas’s own allowance if he continued to live with Wilde.137 Wilde wondered whether, if Douglas moved out of the Villa Giudice, and they no longer shared a roof, that might satisfy the powers, and restore their respective allowances: ‘To say that I would never see [Bosie] or speak to him again would of course be childish – out of the question.’138 But there was no support for this idea. It was clear that they would ‘be forced to compromise the matter… and separate at least for the present’.139 There was perhaps a sense of relief in this for both Wilde and Douglas: a termination for which neither of them would have to take responsibility.

  Certainly Douglas claimed that he finally ‘felt and saw’ that Wilde did not really wish him to stay ‘and that it would really be a relief to him if I went away’. Even so he felt unable to abandon the now allowance-less Wilde without some provision. He persuaded his mother that he would leave Naples only if she arranged payment of at least some of the £500 ‘debt of honour’ that the Douglas family owed Wilde for the costs of his case against Queensberry. She promised £200 on receipt of written declarations from both Wilde and Bosie that they would never live together under the same roof – declarations that were duly made.140 She sent also an immediate £68 to pay the bill at the Hôtel Royal. This account having been settled, Bosie departed for Rome in the first week of December with – as he put it – ‘a clear conscience’.

  He insisted to his mother that he still loved and admired Wilde: ‘I look on him as a martyr to progress. I associate myself with him in everything. I long to hear of his success and artistic rehabilitation… at the very summit of English literature.’ He declared his intention of writing to him occasionally and seeing him ‘from time to time in Paris and elsewhere’. But he confirmed that the experience of Naples had been both chastening and ‘lucky’: ‘If I hadn’t rejoined him and lived with him for two months, I should never have got over the longing for him. It was spoiling my life and spoiling my art and spoiling everything. Now I am free.’141

  Wilde too was free, left alone at Posillipo to ‘try to get to literary work’.142 There was, at least, a small flurry of last-minute editorial problems to occupy his attention, as The Ballad of Reading Gaol advanced towards the press. The printers (the ‘idiotic’ Chiswick Press) became anxious that the descriptions of the prison doctor, chaplain and governor – variously designated in the poem as coarse-mouthed, shivering and yellow-faced – might be libellous. They needed to be reassured that the figures were generic, not specific.143 And Wilde himself had a sudden doubt about the resonant opening description of Trooper Wooldridge: ‘He did not wear his scarlet coat, / For blood and wine are red.’ Wooldridge’s regiment was the Royal Horse Guards – famously known as the ‘Blues’. Did they, Wilde wondered, actually wear blue uniforms? ‘I cannot alter my poem if they do,’ he told Smithers; ‘to me his uniform was red.’144 He conceded also that it would be best to wait until the new year before bringing out the book: as he remarked, ‘I am hardly a Christmas present.’145

  In these deliberations and decisions Wilde no longer had the informed support of Robbie Ross. There had been an unfortunate falling-out (provoked by Douglas) over what was deemed to be Ross’s unsupportive attitude to the sale of serial rights in the poem.146 Ross had written to Smithers declaring that he felt he no longer had Wilde’s ‘confidence in business matters’ and so did not wish to be connected with his affairs any more. Wilde was at once contrite, begging Ross for forgiveness – and telling Smithers that if Ross ‘will kindly send me a pair of his oldest boots I will blacken them with pleasure, and send them back to him with a sonnet’.147 Ross, however, was not to be wooed back at once.

  4

  Bitter Experience

  ‘I have made an important discovery… that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication.’

  oscar wilde

  The sonnet of contrition was never written, and in this it was sadly like Wilde’s other literary projects. Alone in the villa at Posillipo, he struggled to bring his energies into focus. The hopeful vision of ‘turning to the Drama’ once work on the ballad was completed proved vain. The proposed collaboration with Douglas on the Daphnis and Chloe libretto had been foundering even before Douglas’s departure; with him gone the project faded completely from view. There were several attempts to begin his ‘modern social comedy’. And perhaps hoping to prompt himself into action, he even asked Smithers to re-approach Augustin Daly with a view to securing the American rights.1

  But Wilde recognized that there was something wilfully paradoxical in the undertaking. Two y
ears of prison and six months of exile had crushed his comic sense. ‘I suppose it is all in me somewhere,’ he told Turner, ‘but I don’t seem to feel it. My sense of humour is now concentrated on the grotesqueness of tragedy.’2 He did not put himself to the test. It is uncertain whether Daly ever received his proposal; certainly he never replied to it. And Wilde, sticking to the tragic, instead tried to take up Pharaoh and The Florentine Tragedy. But these more modest projects proved equally beyond him. ‘I find the architecture of art difficult now,’ he admitted.3 Even his newly invented recipe for stimulating literary composition – ‘reading a dozen pages’ of Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony and taking ‘two or three haschich pills’ – failed to work its magic.4

  Under less formal constraints he did retain many of his old gifts of imaginative invention. His letters and conversation were full of fantastical conceits. He conjured up visions of writing a life of Heliogabalus for Smithers, having inspected a bust of the dissolute emperor in the Museo Nazionale – ‘rather like a young Oxonian of a very charming kind, the expression a mixture of pride and ennui.’ The incident of the emperor’s ‘marriage to the moon’ touched on in The Picture of Dorian Gray would – he thought – make an excellent chapter of jewelled words. But the sustained effort necessary to bring such ideas to the page was, for the moment at least, more than he could manage.5