Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  At the beginning of June, Carlos Blacker came down from Paris to see Wilde. The meeting, though it ended with ‘protestations of devotion’, was not quite satisfactory. The friendship had been faltering for some months. Blacker was under pressure from his wife to break off all connection with Wilde. He was also aware that Wilde was seeing Bosie again, and he disapproved. But, worse than this, he suspected that Wilde was the source of embarrassing information about his dispute with the Duke of Newcastle that was appearing in the French press, and causing him much distress. When Blacker followed up the Nogent visit with ‘a Nonconformist conscience letter’ reiterating these points, Wilde chose to take offence. He sent ‘a very strong’ reply, asserting his innocence, accusing Blacker of hypocrisy, and putting an end to their long and rewarding friendship. ‘So,’ Wilde commented to Ross, ‘Tartuffe goes out of my life.’73

  Although Wilde might affect (and even feel) a callous indifference, the rupture with Blacker had implications for his standing in Paris. It was seen by Blacker’s many Dreyfusard friends as a rank betrayal. Henry Bauër, the critic to whom Wilde had sent a copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, wrote of the ‘contempt’ that he now felt for Wilde, a man whom he had ‘defended so ardently’ up until then. ‘He betrays his friends who have stood by and supported him. I turn away from this foul odour. He no longer exists for me.’74 The view was shared by others. But if Wilde broke with Blacker, he continued to meet, and dine, with the embattled Esterharzy. The net was closing in upon the traitor following the exposure of Colonel Henry’s forgeries; and on 2 September, encouraged by Strong, he slipped away from Paris and fled to England. In the British press at least it was supposed that Wilde was in some way involved in this sensational development.75

  Wilde wanted to flee from Paris himself. The city was in the grip of a terrible heatwave. ‘I walk in streets of brass’, he complained to Frank Harris. There was no one around except ‘perspiring English families’. And though at night it could be charming, by day it was ‘a tiger’s mouth’.76 From this discomfort he was rescued by an invitation to stay with Charles Conder at Chantemesle, a little village near La Roche-Guyon, on the Seine, west of Paris. Wilde joined a happy party including Will Rothenstein and his soon-to-be-wife, Alice. Conder reported to Mrs Dalhousie Young: ‘I think some people were rather annoyed at my bringing [Oscar] – but he turned Chantemesle into a charming little state, made himself king and possessed himself of [Arthur] Blunt’s boat – for his barge – and got little boys to row him from Chantemesle to La Roche every day; there he took his aperitif and returned laden with duck-ham and wine usually which served as extras to the frugal dinners we get here.’77

  Despite such jollities, Conder reported that Wilde was ‘much more serious’ than he had been at Dieppe the previous summer – even ‘very depressed at times, poor fellow’.78 The limitations of his Parisian life seemed already to be grating on him. Conder asked why he did not take a flat: ‘Everybody would be happy to come and see you. You would have all the littérateurs and artists.’ To this Wilde had replied mournfully, ‘My dear fellow, that is just it: I do not care about littérateurs. The only people I like are the Great. I want duchesses.’79 Duchesses, however, he had come to realize – with ‘much sorrow’ – were now out of reach. He would ‘never get into society again’. Instead he must strive to embrace ‘a Bohemian existence’ – a mode of living (Ross claimed) that was ‘entirely out of note with his genius and temperament’. To Conder he admitted that he was beginning to feel ‘rather old for the volatile poets of the “quartier”’.80

  2

  Going South

  ‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.’

  oscar wilde

  Wilde’s own poetic inspiration remained in abeyance. His belief that the ‘stimulating’ intellectual atmosphere of Paris might restore his creative energy was proving as vain as his previous hope that sunshine and Naples would effect the change. The early assurances that he would soon be starting on ‘a new play’ were not followed through.1 Instead he began referring to The Ballad as his ‘chant de cygne’ – the dying swan’s final lament.2 Nevertheless he refused to abandon all hope. As he reminded Ross, he had ‘done a good year’s work’ since coming out of prison: ‘Now I want to do work again, for the next year,’ even if it was ‘not easy to recapture the artistic mood of detachment from the accidents of life.’3

  In the meantime a semblance of literary endeavour could be kept up. To follow on the success of The Ballad, Smithers was advancing plans to bring out editions of both An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, done in the same elegant format that had been used by John Lane for Wilde’s two earlier society comedies. It was decided to publish The Importance of Being Earnest first, since – as Ross pointed out – it was not only ‘far the best’, and most critically acclaimed, of Wilde’s plays, but also the least known: ‘It ran for so short a time that many people would buy it who could not have seen the play.’4

  Wilde devoted much of the year to revising the typescript. His ear for comedy remained as sure as ever. He made dozens of small textual changes, improving adjectives and refining speeches. To Lady Bracknell’s pronouncement – ‘Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence’ – he added the resonant closing words, ‘in Grosvenor Square’. The book was to be dedicated to Ross. Wilde had chaffed him over his great enthusiasm for the play with the (patently untrue) remark, ‘There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest best.’5 Wilde’s own name would not be appearing on the title page. It was still, he thought, too soon. He suggested, instead, the formula ‘By the author of Lady Windermere’s Fan’.6

  Musing on his past successes brought mingled pain and pleasure. On the future, though, he refused to dwell. He might tell the young English novelist Wilfrid Chesson, who visited him at Nogent, ‘I do not doubt that there are as wonderful things in my future as my past’; but such a claim can only have been made for his own encouragement.7 When Healy asked him about his plans, he replied, ‘I cannot say what I am going to do with my life; I am wondering what my life is going to do with me. I would like to retire to some monastery, some grey stoned cell where I could have my books, write verses, and reverently smoke my cigarettes.’8 He was content, for the most part, to live in the present. The discovery of a stray franc for another cannette of beer was all he asked of the passing moment. ‘You worry too much,’ he admonished Chesson; ‘never worry.’9

  He strove to follow his own advice, and for the most part succeeded. Drink helped. The level of consumption begun in Naples was continued, and increased. Beer, wine, champagne, brandy, whisky and soda, advocaat, were all imbibed in quantity. But absinthe now became his drink of choice.10 At Berneval he had discoursed to John Fothergill upon the three stages of absinthe intoxication. ‘The first stage’ he described as being ‘like ordinary drinking’; during the ‘second’ you began to see ‘monstrous and cruel things’; but if you were able to persevere and enter upon the third stage you would ‘see things that you want to see, wonderful and curious things’. He described how, after one long evening of solitary absinthe drinking, he achieved this third stage, just as the waiter came in with his green apron and began to close up the café, piling the chairs on the tables. When he brought in a watering can and began to water the sawdust on the floor, ‘the most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up’ all around. They remained invisible to the waiter, Wilde recalled, but ‘as I got up and passed out into the street I felt the heavy tulip-heads brushing against my shins’.11

  Reality, however, could not always be kept in check. Vincent O’Sullivan noted that sometimes, during the course of a conversation, Wilde’s ‘face would be swept with poignant anguish and regret’ or with ‘the apprehension of the future’. At such moments he would ‘
pass his large hand with a trembling gesture over his face and stretch out his arm’ as though to ward off the thought.12

  He refused, though, to make any provision for the morrow. His monthly allowance was dedicated more to rent boys than to rent. He consoled himself with small extravagances. To the amazement of a group of poets, with whom he was drinking, he sent out a page boy with a 20-franc piece to fetch a packet of gold-tipped cigarettes. The brand proved disappointing when he lit the first one. But, as the boy handed him the change – about 15 francs – Wilde announced, ‘No, keep it. That will give me the illusion that these cigarettes are good.’13 He could run up an impressive bill of over 27 francs for ‘Eau de Cologne’ and other toiletries in just a couple of visits to Jules & Roger in the rue Scribe.14

  Always generous when he was in funds, he expected his friends to provide for him when he was without them. An inability to budget meant that he ended almost every month in want. Ross received regular pleas for early payment of the allowance. After one particularly urgent appeal – in which Wilde described himself as both penniless and ‘dinnerless’ – Ross sold a Beardsley drawing that he owned for £5, and had Smithers send the money anonymously to Wilde.15 Ross did, though, soon become wise to Wilde’s habits of exaggeration and, indeed, deception. Wilde was obliged to apologize, having been caught out in a lie about desperately needing funds to retrieve his impounded luggage from the innkeeper at Nogent: ‘I am so sorry about my excuse,’ he wrote. ‘I had forgotten I had used Nogent before. It shows the utter collapse of my imagination, and rather distresses me.’ And Frank Harris recalled a tragi-comic dinner at Durand’s when – at the beginning of the evening – he had given Wilde a generous cheque with which to pay off his current debts. As they parted (at three in the morning), Wilde – having forgotten the earlier gift – asked Harris whether he might have ‘a few pounds’ as he was very ‘hard up’.16 Wilde, though, in matters of money, had moved beyond either embarrassment or shame. Poverty might be ‘dreadful’, but it was principally a periodic inconvenience.*

  He retained hopes for a brighter financial future, if not from the book edition of The Importance of Being Earnest, then from his modern play scenario ‘Love is Law’. Properly developed, it had the potential to earn him thousands. Although nothing had come of Smithers’ approach to Augustin Daly, in October Wilde arranged to sell the British performing rights for the unwritten play to a London theatre producer called Horace Sedger, who was then enjoying a successful run with an adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.17 But if Wilde hoped that signing a contract might stimulate his ability to work, he was disappointed. The advance simply allowed him to indulge himself more.

  Paris, though, seemed empty that autumn. He did see a few old friends, even if Ross and Turner – who were making a three-month tour of Italy – bypassed Paris on their way south. Ada Leverson came over for a visit. She had lost none of her bracing wit: when Wilde regaled her with the tale of a devoted young apache who accompanied him everywhere with a knife in his hand, she remarked, ‘I’m sure he had a fork in the other.’18 But Wilde’s regular companions were away. Strong was over in London trying to sell Esterhazy’s story to the British press. Bosie, too, after almost three and a half years in exile, had returned to England, his mother having received assurances from the public prosecutor that he would not face arrest. He remained in London for several months, arranging publication of two slim volumes, one a collection of his poems (not including ‘In Praise of Shame’ or ‘Two Loves’) and the other a gathering of nonsense verse for children; both books were to appear without his name upon the title page. While in England he also attempted a reconciliation with his father. The meeting, in the smoking room of Bailey’s Hotel, went well, with Queensberry embracing him, calling him his ‘darling boy’ and promising to restore his allowance. But when the marquess followed this up with a letter demanding to know what exactly were his son’s relations with ‘that beast Wilde’, Bosie sent back a bitter and intemperate reply, ending all possibility of a rapprochement.19

  In the absence of his English cronies, Wilde devoted time to flirtatious correspondence with some of the young men of artistic and/or Uranian inclination, who wrote enthusiastically to him from England: there was Louis Wilkinson, a seventeen-year-old Radley schoolboy who claimed that he was planning to dramatize The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Jerome Pollitt, a wealthy cross-dressing Aesthete who sent photographs with every post.20 Wilde, though, hated being alone in his unlovely and ‘too yellow’ hotel room. He might read for a while in the little back yard of the Hôtel d’Alsace, but he soon sought the sociability of the streets. He would wander through the Latin Quarter. He knew the wares of all the local antique dealers. He was often to be seen in the Luxembourg Gardens. If he walked slowly, with short paces, it was thought – by those who knew him – that he did so in order to allow himself better to enjoy his memories of ‘what he had once been’.21

  Although Wilde remained cut off from the currents of ordinary social life, it was sometimes by his own choice. When invited home by his old Oxford contemporary J. E. C. Bodley, he fled at the door on learning that Bodley’s family was there.22 He gravitated instead to French literary circles. The Calisaya American Bar on the Boulevard des Italiens (close to the Opera) became – as he told Turner – his chief ‘literary resort’; at five o’clock he would gather there with is ‘friends’ Moréas, Ernest La Jeunesse, ‘and all the young poets.’23 The ritual of the five o’clock aperitif gave a structure to the day, and a starting point to the evening. And if the excellent champagne cocktails, for which the bar was renowned, were stimulating, so too was the discourse.24 Literary disputes were not infrequent, but there was much fun as well. The science fiction writer Gustave Le Rouge, who first encountered Wilde at the Calisaya, recalled being impressed by his ‘sincere good spirits and by his laughter which rang true, revealing his teeth which were nearly all capped with gold and which gave him a vague semblance of an idol’.25

  The crowd at the Calisaya provided Wilde with an audience, and he poured forth an endless succession of parables and stories.26 Though he delighted in entertaining, La Jeunesse suspected that he was also improvising ‘for himself’, to assure himself that ‘he still could, still would, still knew’.27 The heroes of Wilde’s tales were almost ‘invariably’ kings and gods – although one story concerned a king and a beggar. At the close of it Wilde remarked, ‘I have been king; now I will be a beggar.’ The self-dramatization was typical, as was the exaggeration. Whatever Wilde’s periodic financial embarrassments, he remained (as La Jeunesse noted) always the perfect, well-groomed Englishman – ‘and [he] did not beg’.28

  In another exercise of self-mythologizing Wilde elaborated a tale of how, in his former life, he had reached such a level of success and happiness that he was suddenly seized by ‘a secret feeling of terror, that in reality [he] was too happy, that such improbable bliss could only be a trap set by [his] evil genius’. Recalling the example of the tyrant Polycrates, he determined to make a sacrifice to the gods to assuage their jealousy, and like that Greek king he ‘flung a valuable ring into the sea.’ But, as happened with Polycrates, the ring was brought back to him by a fisherman who had discovered it in the belly of a fish: ‘The unfortunate thing about it,’ Wilde added with a ‘strange smile’, was that the ‘little fisherman’ who returned the ring was ‘far too handsome a fellow…’29

  The suggestive allusion to the fisher-boy’s good looks marked a new autobiographical note in Wilde’s storytelling, a hint of his now defiant sexual boldness. He made no attempt to hide his proclivities. Indeed he seems to have introduced some of his pick-ups at the Calisaya. He mentioned to Turner a ‘beautiful boy of bad character’ who was sometimes present, explaining that ‘he is so like Antinous, and so smart, that he is allowed to talk to poets’.30 Such doubtful company, however, unsettled the more priggish of the young Parisian writers. Vincent O’Sullivan recalled how Stuart Merrill and others ‘were constantly begging me to get Wilde’s E
nglish friends to make him realize that he was ruining what sympathy was left for him’ among former friends, by appearing at the Calisaya ‘with sodomist outcasts, who were sometimes dangerous in other ways [too]’.31

  As a result of such attitudes Wilde found it impossible to build upon, or even sustain, some of the connections and much of the goodwill occasioned by the publication of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He did continue to dine with Merrill, but not often.32 Gide he saw again only twice: both rather awkward chance encounters upon the boulevards, at which Wilde strained to recapture the gaiety of former years, and Gide felt a great sadness lurking behind the attempt.33 Nevertheless there were many who did enjoy his company. He took up with a young American writer called Charles Sibleigh, who was engaged in translating The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from English into French.34 He saw something of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; the diminutive artist found him a ‘most sympathetic companion since he didn’t always stare at him as if he were a monster or a miracle’.35 But it was the twenty-four-year-old critic and novelist Ernest La Jeunesse who became Wilde’s ‘great friend’. A fantastical figure, bushy-haired and eccentrically attired, his face patched with eczema, and in his hand ‘an empire cane’, he and Wilde made a striking pair when patrolling the boulevards.36 Wilde was amused by La Jeunesse’s piercing falsetto voice and his malicious wit.† He was impressed too by his energy. La Jeunesse was forever starting short-lived literary reviews. Wilde promised to contribute ‘a poem in prose’ to one of them. But the ‘great effort’ involved in setting even a very short story down on paper seems to have been beyond him.37