Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Away from the relative chic of the Calisaya, Wilde – embracing his new bohemianism – also explored the low dives of the Latin Quarter: the student cafés, the ‘wine cellars’, ‘the dens of ill-repute’. There was, of course, a sexual element in these expeditions. But there were artistic rewards too. Wilde’s generosity in buying drinks for – and bestowing praise on – the unknown songwriters, would-be artists and ‘unpublished poets’ that he met along the way gave him an enjoyable status and popularity. He found friends and listeners among the shifting population of American expatriate art students, young Scandinavian painters and popular versifiers. When he attended a poetry recital in a Montmartre café, he was ‘received with great honour’ – and even the waiter, ‘a lad of singular beauty’ asked for his autograph.38

  In London, also, Wilde was not completely forgotten. The wider literary establishment, dismayed at the news that he had ‘returned to Paris and to his dog’s vomit’, continued to shun him.39 But some old friends remained true. Among them it was Frank Harris who took the most active interest in his well-being. Flush with funds, having sold the Saturday Review and pursuing ambitious plans to buy a hotel in Monaco, he offered to take Wilde with him to spend winter in the South of France – hoping that the change of scene, and the absence of material care, might enable him to write. It was a very generous offer, and Wilde accepted, despite a certain trepidation about the exhaustion of being in Harris’s company for three whole months.

  In the event his worries proved unfounded. Having installed Wilde at the Hôtel des Bains in the picturesque fishing village of Napoule, just outside Cannes, Harris disappeared along the coast to Monaco to pursue his business plans. They met up only occasionally, for bracing evenings of literary talk, philosophical discourse and debate about sexual attraction.‡ After these encounters, Wilde told Turner, ‘I stagger to my room, bathed in perspiration; I believe [Harris] talks the Rugby game.’ Wilde was perspiring again when Harris dragged him on a not-very-long walk to visit a nearby monastery. The old abbé, impressed by Wilde’s manner and bearing, asked Harris if he were a not a ‘great man’. ‘Yes,’ Harris replied, ‘a great man – incognito.’40

  For much of the time, though, Wilde was left to his own devices. But still he wrote nothing except the occasional letter. The days were passed in happy idleness, enjoying the aromatic air of the pine trees, ‘the high sapphire wall of the sea’ and ‘the gold dust of the sun’. He read much. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw impressed him particularly: he thought it ‘a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale, like an Elizabethan tragedy’.41 His evenings were spent picking up young men. He would go into Cannes or Nice, where ‘romance’ was ‘a profession plied beneath the moon’.42 But even at Napoule he found that the fisher-lads had ‘the same freedom from morals as the Neapolitans have’.43 By the beginning of the new year he was boasting to Ross that he was ‘practically engaged to a fisherman of extraordinary beauty, age eighteen’.44 And when Harris chivvied him about his writing, he suggested that he might undertake The Ballad of a Fisher Boy as a sort of joyful companion to The Ballad of Reading Gaol; it would ‘sing of liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution’. The poem, however, never got beyond a few verses, and even these were not consigned to paper.45

  There were many British visitors to the Riviera, and Wilde’s days were marked by the occasional unexpected encounter. George Alexander passed by on a bicycle but did not stop, giving only ‘a crooked sickly smile’. Wilde thought it ‘absurd and mean of him’.46 The Prince of Wales did better: having driven past Wilde in his carriage, he turned and raised his hat.47 Wilde befriended a wealthy young Swiss-domiciled Englishman called Harold Mellor, who was staying at Cannes together with his handsome young Italian servant. Mellor, though depressive and often depressing, provided welcome companionship and the occasional champagne supper. It was Mellor who took Wilde to Nice to see Bernhardt in Tosca. ‘I went round afterwards to see Sarah,’ Wilde told Ross, ‘and she embraced me and wept, and I wept, and the whole evening was wonderful.’48

  As the new year advanced, however, Wilde grew restless. He presumed increasingly upon Harris’s generosity, moving from Napoule to Nice to Monte Carlo and back again, each relocation occasioning importunate demands that his hotel bill be paid at once. Harris might not have minded but for Wilde’s failure to work. When Harris finally pointed out that ‘everyone grows tired of holding up an empty sack’, Wilde took umbrage. As an escape he accepted an invitation to spend March with Mellor at his villa in Gland on the shores of Lake Geneva. Mellor, at least, did not expect him to work.49

  Before departing for Switzerland, however, Wilde crossed the Italian border and travelled to Genoa. There, in the gleaming cemetery outside the town, he visited Constance’s grave. ‘It is very pretty,’ he told Ross, ‘a marble cross with dark ivy-leaves inlaid in a good pattern… It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb – her surname, my name, not mentioned of course – just “Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd, QC” and a verse from Revelations. I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected – with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.’50

  At Gland, soon afterwards, Wilde received news of another loss: the death of his brother Willie, aged forty-six. He left a widow and an infant daughter. The ‘wide chasms’ that had existed between the brothers could now be closed. By Willie’s death Wilde inherited the ‘absurd’ and much impoverished family property at Moytura; but the meagre asset was almost immediately claimed by that ‘octopus of the law’, the official receiver.51

  If this was a disappointment, there were more telling ones to hand. The publication of The Importance of Being Earnest in February had been greeted by a resounding silence in the press and meagre interest from the public. Its failure did not come as a surprise to the author. Wilde had suggested to Harris that the play was ‘so trivial, so irresponsible a comedy: and while the public like to hear of my pain – curiosity and the autobiographical form being the elements of interest – I am not sure that they will welcome me again in airy mood and spirit, mocking at morals, and defiant of social rules’. In confirmation of his view, The Ballad of Reading Gaol continued to sell so well that Smithers was arranging for a large (2,000-copy) printing of a new edition, bearing Wilde’s name, in brackets, on the title page.52 But, while it now seemed commercially astute to acknowledge authorship of his prison poem, Wilde thought it best to maintain his anonymity on all other fronts.§ He was furious at Horace Sedger for announcing in the press that he would be producing ‘a new comedy by Oscar Wilde’ on the London stage. As he explained to Ross: ‘My only chance is a play produced anonymously. Otherwise the First Night would be a horror, and people would find meanings in every phrase.’53

  Despite the minimal sales of The Importance of Being Earnest Smithers courageously continued with plans for an edition of An Ideal Husband; Wilde spent some of his time at Gland amending and correcting the typescript of the play, and fussing over the details of publication. He planned to dedicate the volume to Frank Harris – as ‘A Slight Tribute to his Power and Distinction as an Artist, his Chivalry and Nobility as a Friend’. The editorial work proved a diversion from the tedium of Swiss life. A month chez Mellor was altogether too long. By the beginning of the third week Wilde was ungraciously complaining that ‘Mellor is tedious, and lacks conversation: also he gives me Swiss wine to drink: it is horrid: he occupies himself with small economies, and mean domestic interests. So I suffer very much.’ The vaunted beauty of the Swiss landscape was ‘obvious’ and ‘old fashioned’, the Swiss themselves ‘so ugly to look at’ as to ‘convey melancholy’ into the soul, and a terrible ‘chastity’ into the body.54

  At the beginning of April Wilde fled back to the Italian Riviera, in search of sunshine, beauty, cheap lodgings and convenient sex. ‘I am going to try and find a place near Genoa,’ he informed Smithers, ‘where I can live for ten francs a
day (boy compris).’55 This modest ideal was achieved in the ‘quite delightful’ little port village of Santa Margherita, just a mile out of Genoa, where Wilde took rooms above the Ristorante Christofero Colombo. But, whatever the charms of the place, it was not stimulating. Boredom and loneliness soon set in. Even ‘the lad’ Wilde was in love with proved a disappointment.56 Only a lack of money for the rail fare back to Paris kept him tethered there.

  A diversion, and the chance of escape, was provided by the arrival of Leonard Smithers. There had been developments concerning Wilde’s proposed play. Sedger, impatient at Wilde’s failure to deliver a script, and in financial difficulties himself, had transferred his rights in the project to a fellow producer called Roberts. New terms were discussed. Roberts agreed to pay Wilde £100 on the delivery of each act, besides defraying his expenses.57 It was an excellent deal, and it seems that Roberts, together with Smithers, came out to Italy to finalize the plan. There was a dinner at the Café Concordia in Genoa, but it appears not to have been entirely satisfactory. Roberts returned ‘home in utter disgust and offered to transfer his contract’ to Smithers at a price that ‘tempted’ the publisher.

  Smithers duly succumbed to the temptation. He wrote to Wilde proposing to take over the project. He would ‘square’ Wilde’s hotel bill at Santa Margheritia, pay his return fare to Paris and provide a weekly stipend, allowing Wilde to work free from daily financial care – at least until ‘I find that you are not serious in promising to write’.58 Wilde readily accepted, but then almost immediately fell ill. Ross – summoned by a series of plaintive telegrams – came, once again, to the rescue. Taking charge of the situation he managed to convince Wilde that many of his health problems related to his ever-increasing intake of alcohol. With dire warnings he was able to scare Wilde off drinking – at least for the present.59 He then piloted the patient back to Paris.60

  Having overcome a short-lived misunderstanding with Smithers about the business arrangements, Wilde was soon at work on the play. By the beginning of June he claimed to have written ‘more than half of the Fourth Act’.61 He had started with the play’s ‘serious’ and ‘tragic’ denouement since he found it difficult ‘to laugh at life’ as he used to, and ‘the comedy of Acts I and II’ frightened him ‘a little’.62 Nevertheless he was in optimistic mood when he ran across the American producer Augustin Daly, together with his wife and also his star actress, Ada Rehan, in a Paris restaurant. The encounter was a happy one. Wilde joined their table, and ‘talked so charmingly’ – Rehan later recalled – ‘it was just like old times’.63 Theatrical plans were discussed. Daly was ready to make a ‘large offer for the American rights’ to ‘Love is Law’, the play on which Wilde was working, but he and Rehan also wanted him ‘do something’ new for them too.64 Unfortunately Daly died almost the next day before any arrangements could be made. Wilde with typical generosity put himself at the service of Mrs Daly and Ada Rehan, helping them to deal with the French authorities. He ‘was more good and helpful than I can tell you’, Rehan related, ‘just like a very kind brother’.65

  If Wilde was shocked and disappointed by Daly’s death, he did have other projects to contemplate. On his return to Paris he had found a letter from an old London friend, the actor Kyrle Bellew, who wanted him to collaborate on a play about Beau Brummell, possibly to be put on by the wealthy society actress Mrs Brown-Potter.66 Wilde, who had always been stimulated by working concurrently on multiple projects, encouraged the idea. And, having received a draft typescript at the beginning of July, he accepted Bellew’s proposal that they meet at Boulogne, or one of the other Normandy summer resorts, to discuss the undertaking.67

  The meeting led to a slight amendment of plans over the course of the summer. Wilde – who passed most of the season just outside Paris at Chennevières-sur-Marne – became gradually disillusioned with Smithers’ ability to produce any play by him. The publisher, after all, had no experience of the London theatre. As an alternative Wilde persuaded Bellew that, rather than proceeding with the Beau Brummell project, he should buy out Smithers’ interest in ‘Love is Law’, and that he – and Mrs Brown-Potter – should produce the piece. Smithers apparently agreed to this plan on one of his visits to Paris. Wilde offered to repay him the £160 he had thus far received, but not immediately; the money would come ‘out of the proceeds of the play’. In the meantime Wilde was already getting £5 a week from Bellew to continue work on the piece, an arrangement that was superseded after five weeks when Mrs Brown-Potter paid an initial advance of £100 for the play, with more due on completion.68

  Although all this could be construed as progress of a sort, there was no doubt that Wilde’s second year of freedom had not been as productive as his first. His literary output from Chennevières-sur-Marne consisted largely of begging letters to friends and acquaintances about his Parisian living arrangements. He was anxious to move back to the Left Bank, but his bill at the Hôtel Marsollier – where he was installed – remained unpaid, and his luggage was impounded.69 Nevertheless he did have one new publication to celebrate. An Ideal Husband (‘By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan’) was issued that July. If it received no reviews, Wilde could bestow complimentary copies on his friends in England and in Paris. Major Nelson and Toulouse-Lautrec were among those to be sent copies.70

  At the end of the summer Wilde returned to Paris, effecting his escape from the Hôtel Marsollier, and moving back across the river to rooms at the congenial Hôtel d’Alsace, where the proprietor, M. Dupoirier, was sympathetic, provided breakfast and extended credit.71¶ He re-established his Parisian daily round of late rising and light reading, of the five o’clock aperitif and the long evening of talk and drink. Often he was lonely, sometimes he was sad. Although never drunk, he was not always sober.72 He could present a sorry figure. One French writer recalled the sight of him sitting alone outside a café late one evening as the waiters cleared up around him, and the rain poured down.73

  Certainly he had his moments of depression, and even despair. But it was ‘part of his pose to luxuriate a little in his tragic circumstances’. The cries of woe that dotted his letters and his conversation had a rhetorical flourish: ‘I am going under,’ he told Frank Harris: ‘the morgue yawns for me.’74 Douglas, who saw him often, considered that throughout his time in Paris Wilde was ‘on the whole, fairly happy’. His buoyant temperament remained largely unimpaired; his sense of humour and ‘unrivalled faculty for enjoyment of the present’ continued to sustain him.75 The young Augustus John recalled two weeks he spent in Paris that autumn (together with Conder and the Rothensteins) when he saw Wilde regularly. He was impressed that, for all he had endured, Wilde was so untouched by ‘bitterness, resentment or remorse’.76 Surrounded by attentive listeners, there was ‘nothing lugubrious or sinister about him. He fancied himself a kind of Happy Prince, or, admitting a touch of vulgarity, the genial although permanently overdrawn millionaire’. Although he kept up an easy – and impressive – ‘flow of practical wit and wisdom’ there was nothing middle-aged about him. He had, instead, ‘the frank, open, friendly, humorous face’ of a young man; for – as John noted – ‘he had too much sense to grow old’.77

  Laurence Housman – also in Paris that autumn – left a vivid record of Wilde’s talk, as he entertained the young disciples who gathered around his café table. He amused them with his conceits (that he had chosen a particular boîte because the decor complimented his complexion) and he fascinated them with his tales: of the ‘Man who sold his Soul’ only to find – to his great disappointment – that he could no longer sin; or of a hell in which a poet, by the power of his verse, was able to convince his former muse that she was, in fact, in heaven.78

  The wit and invention remained; only the ability to write any of it down was missing. It was almost two years since he had completed The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he had composed nothing – neither a Symbolist drama nor a social comedy; neither a poem nor a parable. He had also turned down, or failed to honour, several lucrative
journalistic commissions as either too vulgar or too tedious.79 There had been practical setbacks. The notebook containing his draft of La Sainte Courtisane – which had been in the safekeeping of Ada Leverson, and which might have provided a ready-made template for a short Symbolist play – was brought over to Paris, and promptly mislaid in a cab (Wilde laughingly told Ross that he thought ‘a cab was a very proper place for it’).80 But the real failure was one of will. The mainspring seemed broken. When Housman quizzed Wilde about his literary plans, he replied, ‘I told you that I was going to write something: I tell everybody that. It is a thing one can repeat each day, meaning to do it the next. But in my heart – that chamber of leaden echoes – I know that I never shall. It is enough that the stories have been invented, that they actually exist: that I have been able, in my own mind, to give them the form which they demand.’81

  He ascribed his continuing incapacity to the fact that, when he took up his pen, his past life sprang up too vividly before him, and ‘made him miserable and upset his spirits’. Douglas, though, suspected that the real reason for his ‘literary sterility’ was that his great gift was as ‘an interpreter of life’, and that his bohemian existence in Paris was simply ‘too narrow and too limited to stir him to creation’. It was not worth reflecting in the ‘magic mirror’ of his genius. He needed the stimulus of ‘a gay season in London’. Indeed Wilde often told Douglas that what he missed most in his Parisian exile was ‘the smart and pretty women’ who in the old days had sat at his feet and listened to his words.82

  Faced with his inability to produce new work, Wilde began to elaborate a philosophy of failure. He claimed that artists might be successful ‘incidentally’ but ‘never intentionally’:

  If they are, they remain incomplete. The artist’s mission is to live the complete life: success, as an episode (which is all it can be); failure, as the real, the final end. Death, analysed to its resultant atoms — what is it but the vindication of failure: the getting rid for ever of powers, desires, appetites, which have been a lifelong embarrassment? The poet’s noblest verse, the dramatist’s greatest scene deal always with death; because the higher function of the artist is to make perceived the beauty of failure.83