Chapter 7: White and Gold
1 Henri de Régnier, Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, in Mikhail, 465; P. Louÿs to A. Gide, June 1892, quoted in McCormack, John Gray, 91.
2 Blunt, My Diaries – Part One, 81; Anne Anderson, ‘There is Divinity in Odd Numbers’, Wildean, 43 (2013), 77–86; ‘Michael Field’, Diary, 25 May 1892. Teodoro Serrao to OW, 21 July 1892, Rome: ‘Please send me the manuscript of the “Fan” [LWF] as soon as you can, so that I might be able to have it ready for the winter’ (Clark); J. T. Grein to OW, 5 September 1892, re. a contract with Dr O. Blumenthal for the rights to produce LWF in Austria and Germany (Dulau cat. no. 161; item 122); ‘Theatrical Gossip’, Era, 18 June 1892; Evening World (NY), 23 June 1892.
3 Tynan, Twenty-five Years, 130; ‘Dropped from the Lotos’, NYT, 18 September 1893; Weindling and Colloms, The Marquis de Leuville; S. N. Behrman, Conversations with Max (1960), 239–40.
4 CL, 527–8. OW first approached McIlvaine about publishing LWF, but without success; see ‘Unknown Publisher’ [C. McIlvaine] to Jonathan Sturges, 18 March 1892 (GUL); Guy & Small, 70–1; CL, 533–4.
5 CL, 701–2; 725, 795. McKenna, 241ff, suggests that it was LAD’s brother, Lord Drumlanrig, who approached OW, but this seems to be a misreading of CL, 795.
6 LAD to F. Harris, 1925 (Austin); R. Croft-Cooke, Bosie (1964), 91.
7 The Oscar Wilde collection of John B. Stetson, cat. item 11; LAD to F. Harris, 1925 (Austin).
8 Gertrude Simmons, ‘Witness statement’, quoted in Guardian, 6 May 2001.
9 R. Ross, ‘A Note on Salome’, in Salomé (1912); ‘The Censure and Salomé’, PMB, 29 June 1892. The notion that Bernhardt should play the role had been mooted earlier. On 2 February 1892 L’Echo de Paris had even announced that she and her company would be putting on the play in London, with Bernhardt in the title role. But this seems to have been a piece of wishful – if prophetic – journalistic invention (OET V, 341).
10 ‘The Censorship and Salomé’, PMG, 6 July 1892; ‘The Censure and Salomé’, PMG, 29 June 1892; Ricketts, 53.
11 In Paris OW had told Gómez Carrillo that he wanted to see ‘Sarah Bernhardt, by some miracle a young woman again, dancing naked before Herod’ (in Mikhail, 194); CL, 1196.
12 Ricketts, 52; CL, 874.
13 Robertson, Time Was, 126–7.
14 PMG, 29 June 1892; OW’s annotated typescript of Salomé is at the Free Library of Philadelphia (and can be viewed online); Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (2009), 34.
15 PMG, 6 July 1892; Bernhardt wrote in CMW’s autograph album: ‘Je vous promets, Madame, d’avoir un immense success dans Salomé et je vous affirme que le public français sera très fier d’avoir la première de cette admirable pièce’ (BL).
16 PMG, 29 June 1892; ‘Mr Oscar Wilde’, Standard, 30 June, 1892, quoting Le Gaulois (Paris), 29 June 1892; Punch, 9 July 1892.
17 OW, after a brief sojourn at the Royal Victoria Hotel, moved to 51 Kaiser-Friedrichs-Promenade; see the ‘Zugangs-Liste’ in Amtliche Homburger Fremden-listen; CMW to Otho Lloyd, 7 July 1892, CL, 530n; Maguire, 27; CL, 530; Ross, ed., Robbie Ross – Friend of Friends, 358. It is often stated (Hyde, Oscar, 189; Ellmann, 356; McKenna, 253; Moyle, 204) that LAD accompanied, or met with, OW at Bad Homburg but Schroeder, 130–2, makes clear that he did not.
18 It is perhaps suggestive that amongst OW’s fellow guests listed at 51 Kaiser-Friedrichs-Promenade, in Bad Homburg, was ‘Alex. Arbuttnot’ – very probably Sir Alexander Arbuthnot, the former Indian administrator.
19 Chris Healy, Confessions of a Journalist (1904), 255.
20 OW in Sketch, 9 January 1895, in Mikhail, 241.
21 H. Pearson, Beerbohm Tree (1956), 65.
22 H. Beerbohm Tree to OW, 12 December 1891 (Austin), returning, and criticizing, OW’s play (The Duchess of Padua), and praising his ‘brilliantly written’ essays ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’. Liverpool Mercury, 26 October 1892, mentions that John Hare had also wanted OW’s new play for the Garrick, but Beebohm Tree had ‘first refusal’; CL, 535–6.
23 H. Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, 65.
24 Moyle, 205.
25 Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx (1930), 47.
26 Moyle, 206–7; LAD to A. J. A. Symons, 16 March 1939 (Clark). LAD’s interest in golf seems to have been heightened by the presence at the links of a young lad called ‘Jack’; Laura Lee, Oscar’s Ghost (2017), 39–40.
Part VII: The Selfish Giant
Chapter 1: The Eternal Quest for Beauty
1 Hyde, Trials, 211–12; Sidney Mavor witness statement, quoted in McKenna, 281. In court Mavor stated that Schwabe was the nominal host of the dinner. He also suggested that Wilde and Alfred Taylor were meeting for the first time on the occasion. This corroborates OW’s statement that Schwabe introduced him to Taylor in October 1892. LAD later claimed that it was Ross – rather than himself – who had introduced Wilde to ‘the male prostitution of the streets’ (LAD to Frank Harris, 22 March 1925 (Austin)). But, as Harris remarked, LAD told so many lies it was hard to know and difficult to believe (F. Harris to Henry Davray, 1 March 1926 (Clark)). There is no evidence to suggest that Ross was responsible.
2 Holland, 225; W. B. Yeats to Olivia Shakespear, 30 June 1932, in Allan Wade, ed., The Letters of W. B. Yeats (1954), 798.
3 Hyde, LAD, 25–6.
4 LAD, Autobiography, 99. The incident occurred in November 1892; see Schroeder, 149.
5 James Sully, My Life & Friends (1918), 326; J. Dobson and C. Wakeley, Sir George Buckstone Browne (1957), 79; Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 81.
Horst Schroeder, ‘The OET Edition of the “The Critic As Artist. Part I”’, Wildean, 38 (2011), 69–70. Wilde met Meredith again soon afterwards, at a dinner hosted by W. S. Blunt at Brown’s Hotel (W. S. Blunt to Sir H. B. Loch, 25 October 1892, at National Records of Scotland).
6 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 81.
7 Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, 67; critics, and the time and since, have also noted the plot’s similarities to Dumas’s Le Fils naturel (1858); during his visit to Scotland, OW also spent a night with Margot Tennant’s family at The Glen, their house in the Scottish Borders. Horace G. Hutchinson, ed., Private Diaries of Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West (1922), 63 (entry 5 October 1892).
8 CL, 536; Guy & Small, 110f, refute the figure of £7,000 given in Ward, Recollections of a Savage, 51 and used by Ellmann (315) and others; Maguire, Ceremonies of Bravery, 27.
9 Moyle, 212–14; CL, 538.
10 CL, 538, 763, 156.
11 CL, 730.
12 CL, 758.
13 Hyde, Trials, 206–7; Holland, 182–91; CL, 546–7.
14 Moyle, 214.
15 Campbell Dodgson to Lionel Johnson, 8 February 1893 (BL); CMW to Lady Mount Temple, 12 December 1892, in Moyle, 215; CMW to RR, 4 December 1892 (Austin); CMW to RR, 16 April 1893 (Clark).
16 McKenna, 284–5; OET V, 347–51. CMW to Lady Mount Temple, 2 February 1893, in Moyle, 217.
17 CL, 538; CMW to Lady Mount Temple, 2 February, 1893, in Moyle, 218; CL, 582. Hare had wanted WNI but had been pipped by Beerbohm Tree. Liverpool Mercury, 26 October 1892.
18 CL, 544.
19 CL, 547; CL, 555–6.
20 Campbell Dodgson to Lionel Johnson, 8 February 1893.
21 McKenna, 266.
22 The Spirit Lamp, 3, no. 2 (17 February 1893); CL, 544; the sonnet was ‘In Sarum Close’.
23 CL, 552–6; The Times, ‘Books of the Week’ Column, 23 February 1893; PMG, 27 February 1893; CL, 552; Black and White, 11 May 1893; Spirit Lamp, 4, 21–7; CL, 557; Mason, 375.
24 CL, 689, 691.
25 Moyle, 219, 221.
26 CL, 691; André Gide, If It Die (1915), 300.
27 CL, 691.
28 CL, 549–50.
29 CL, 688; see Bills at BL (Hyde); CL, 774–5. LAD to Maurice Schwabe, 5 March 1893, from Salisbury: ‘I went to the Savoy with Oscar for two nights; and I was sentimental enough to go down to the old room 123 next to th
e restaurant where we used to sleep together, the valet enquired after you as “votre cousin”’. OW said that Douglas stayed at the Savoy with him ‘three times’ that spring (Yorkshire Herald, 25 May 1895); C. Parker witness statement, in McKenna, 293; CL, 714; Harris, 166; Herbert Tankard witness statement, in McKenna, 298.
30 McKenna, 305–6; LAD to M. Schwabe, 9 March 1893; LAD to M. Schwabe, 17 March 1893; CL, 701–2.
31 McCormack, John Gray, 39–40; R. H. Sherard to Pierre Louÿs [November 1892] (Austin); Ellmann, 369; John Gray to Pierre Louÿs, 16 March 1893, in McCormack, John Gray, 105.
32 Hyde, Trials, 215, McKenna, 297; Holland, 233.
33 Mary J. Schwabe to Maurice Schwabe, 25 October 1894 (Library of NSW); LAD to Maurice Schwabe, 5 March 1893 (Library of NSW); McKenna, 354–64.
34 Memoirs of Charles Hirsch, quoted in Caspar Wintermans, Alfred Douglas (2007) 32; Harris, 90; LAD, Autobiography, 99.
35 Anon., Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried (1915), 143.
36 McKenna, 301; Moyle, 222; Era, 23 March 1893; ‘Theatrical Mems.’, Bristol Mercury, 28 March 1893.
37 Goncourt Journal, 30 April 1893.
38 Jacomb-Hood, With Brush and Pencil, 115.
Chapter 2: Feasting with Panthers
1 Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, 69–71; Pearson, 233–4; OW further acknowledged Tree’s rare distinctiveness in his remark that ‘imitations of Tree are all alike – except Tree’s’.
2 Ellmann, 360; Schroeder, 134; Julia Neilson, This For Remembrance (1940), 139–40 thought the hissing may have been occasioned by the scandalous rumours already circulating about OW, but this seems unlikely at this date; ‘Theatrical Gossip’, Era, 21 April 1893; Freeman’s Journal, 20 April 1893; ‘Mr Oscar Wilde’s New Play’, Birmingham Daily Post, 20 April 1893; Morning Post, 20 April 1893. The anecdote (in Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, 71) that OW himself announced from his box, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that Mr Oscar Wilde is not in the house’ – is not supported by any of the contemporary accounts.
3 Pearson, 237; Max Beerbohm to Reggie Turner, [30 April 1893], in Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., Max Beerbohm’s Letters to Reggie Turner (1964), 38; quoted in Ellmann, 360.
4 Guy & Small, 116; Schroeder, 135; even towards the end of the run, when audiences had begun to dwindle, OW was still earning c. £70 a week.
5 Oscar Wilde: Three Times Tried (1906), 57; Pearson, 274.
6 Harris, 94–6; Holland, 32, 52–4.
7 George Ives Diary, 23 December 1893; Harris, 94; ‘London Correspondence’, Freeman’s Journal, 27 May 1895.
8 Raffalovich, L’Affaire Oscar Wilde, 5.
9 Hart-Davis, ed., Max Beerbohm’s Letters to Reggie Turner, 36, 35, 34.
10 Beardsley’s copy of Salomé is at the Sterling Library, University of London. It is often stated – e.g. Ellmann, 290 – that Beardsley had met OW at Burne-Jones’s studio in July 1891, but, although Beardsley did refer to meeting ‘the Oscar Wildes’ on that occasion, it was only Constance and the children that he encountered. See Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley (1998), 73–4.
11 Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx, 19–20; John Lane to OW, 8 June 1893 (Austin): ‘I have this day seen Beardsley and arranged for 10 plates and a cover for 50 guineas!’
12 J. G. Nelson, The Early Nineties, 244–245; Guy & Small, 160–4. The agreement, drafted in May, was finalized – and signed by Wilde – on 3 August 1893.
13 A[lfred] Hamilton Grant, ‘The Ephemeral: Some Memories of Oxford in the ’Nineties’, Cornhill Magazine (December 1931), 641–53, in Mikhail, 220–7.
14 McKenna, 320–1; Although McKenna states that Grainger was sixteen, he was born in late 1875 (and christened on 9 January 1876) so would have been seventeen and a half in May 1893.
15 Goncourt Journal, 30 April 1893, 7 April 1895, 14 April 1894.
16 H. P. Clive, Pierre Louÿs (1978), 92–3, quoting OW’s account given to A. Gide. Louÿs memory of Wilde’s parting lines had been ‘Vous pensiez que j’avais des amis. Je n’ai que des amants’ (‘You thought I had friends. I have only lovers’). When OW gave an account of the conversation to Léon Daudet, word of it got back to Louÿs, who wrote a final indignant note of farewell, ending the friendship on 25 May 1893. Both Marcel Schwob and Paul Valéry attempted to heal the breach, but it was not to be done.
Chapter 3: Brief Summer Months
1 Hyde, LAD, 1984; McKenna, 321; Moyle, 208–9, 224–5.
2 Gertrude Pearce (née Simmonds) letter (1906), in Ellmann 389–90; Moyle, 210; Theodore Wratislaw, ‘Memoir of Wilde’ (Clark); CL, 569.
3 Moyle 210, 224–5; Gertrude Pearce, in Ellmann, 390.
4 Harris, 104–5; witness statements of Gertrude Simmonds and Ernest Mitchelmore (landlord of Miller of Mansfield inn at Goring), in McKenna, 323–4.
5 CL, 566, 567; 692.
6 CL, 688; The Sunday Times, 20 August 1893; Birmingham Daily Post, 15 August 1893; Max Beerbohm to R. Turner, 19 August 1893, in Hart-Davis, ed., Max Beerbohm’s Letters to Reggie Turner, 53.
7 CL, 659; Robins, 101–2; the date of OW’s consultation with Danby remains conjectural.
8 ‘Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy’, Weekly Standard and Express (Blackburn), 16 September 1893; Le Gaulois, 9 September 1893, says that Aimée Lowther put on the one-act play 5 O’Clock.
9 Sir Chartres Biron, Without Prejudice; Impressions of Life and Law (1936), 211–12, in Mikhail, 339.
10 CL, 692; Ellmann, 379; LAD to John Lane, 30 September 1893; LAD ms copy (at BL, RP 1802), later included as a note in Autobiography (1931 edition), 160n. The exact sequence of events is hard to fathom. LAD wrote to Lane on 30 August, saying he had completed the translation and sent it to Wilde at Dinard. OW wrote to LAD on 9 September, following his return from France, saying that LAD should expect proofs soon. There is no hint of a dispute – suggesting that either OW had not yet read the translation, or (perhaps) that he had read it, corrected it, passed on to Lane, and was hoping that Douglas would simply accept any corrections that he had made. See OET V, 662ff. Donohue (OET V, 672–3) feels that LAD’s claim that Beardsley attempted a translation is ‘questionable’ given some of the other – patently untrue – statements he made in the same note (i.e. that OW had originally written the play in English, and then translated it into French with the assistance of Louÿs and Gide). But the idea of a Beardsley translation seems to me very plausible, given Beardsley’s literary ambitions and linguistic ability. And there is no obvious motive for LAD to have invented it.
11 CL, 686; The Sunday Times, 6 August 1893, carried news of the play. OW’s letter to George Alexander at CL, 582 (dated January 1894) should be re-dated accordingly.
12 McKenna, 269–70; George Ives Diary (Austin) 14 October 1893; OW had made the acquaintance of Ives the previous year (30 June 1892) at the meeting of the Authors’ Club when he denounced the Censor’s treatment of Salomé.
13 George Ives, Diary, 15 October 1893, 26 October 1893 (Austin); LAD to Charles Kains Jackson, 10 September 1893 (Clark).
14 McKenna, 354ff; twenty-five years after the event, Oscar Browning claimed that ‘on Sunday [the boy] slept with Oscar’. And while this scenario is possible, it seems more likely that Wilde was not involved. Certainly he later reproached Douglas over the whole business in a manner that suggested he had no share in it. And Max Beerbohm’s contemporaneous account of the affair does not implicate OW in the incident, only in its aftermath. Oscar Browning to Frank Harris, 3 November 1919; CL, 694; Hart-Davis, ed., Max Beerbohm’s Letters to Reggie Turner, 84.
15 CL, 575; McKenna, 362.
16 Lady Queensberry to LAD, in Ellmann 390–1; CL, 694; LAD to A. J. A. Symons, 24 August 1937 (Clark).
17 NYT, 18 September 1893; JFW to OW, 29 March 1894, in Tipper, Oscar; WCKW wrote two plays after his return from America. Nicoll’s History of English Drama 1660–1900 lists The Dumb Princess, a two-act piece performed on 17 January 1894 at Baskcome House, West Kensington, and French Polish (1895). Neither received any critical attention.
18
CL, 574, 576; Adela Schuster to OW, 26 November 1893 (Clark); Moyle 233–6.
19 Elisabeth Marbury to OW, 10 November [1893] (Clark); Elisabeth Marbury, My Crystal Ball (1923), 97–103, in Mikhail, 437–8.
20 CL, 574, 576, 578–9; LAD, Autobiography (1931 edition), 160n; LAD to John Lane, 16 November 1893 (Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia). Joseph Donohue (OET V, 674–5) points out that in the absence of the manuscript sent to the printers (T. and A. Constable) it is impossible to know how much of the published work was OW’s and how much LAD’s. Although LAD’s pronouncements are often unreliable, on 6 July 1906 he did write to John Lane, who was planning to re-issue the play, saying, ‘I should think [my name] had better be omitted. I only translated it, as you will remember, to oblige Oscar Wilde, & he himself revised the translation to the extent of taking out from it most of the elements of original work on my part’ (John Lane archive).
21 Frances Winwar, Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties (1940), 214; H. Maas, J. L. Duncan & W. G. Good, The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, 52, 58; Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley, 158–61.
22 Carlos Blacker to Carrie Frost, 1 December 1893, quoted in Maguire, 33.
23 CL, 693–4. If OW’s account is correct, it seems likely that the meeting between LAD and OW took place in Paris, with LAD en route to Egypt. Blacker’s letters – at Maguire, 34 – make clear that OW remained in Paris until 4 December, while LAD’s letter to Charles Kains Jackson, 29 November 1893 (Clark), ends ‘I am very unhappy… I start Friday [1 December] at 11 in the morning. My address will be c/o Lord Cromer, British Agency, Cairo.’
24 CL, 578; Gertrude Pearce letter [906], in Ellmann, 389–90; George Ives Diary records meals and meetings on 8, 13, 17, 22 December; Emma Calvé, My Life (1922), 96–7.
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