by Philip Hoare
It always had. Wilde was an avid swimmer, and had been since his youth. As a muscular student he’d spent his summers swimming in Dublin Bay (in between reading Aurora Leigh), where the rocks of the Forty Foot were famous as a naked bathing place for men and boys – both Joyce and Beckett would swim here too. Oscar felt immortal in the sea, and ‘sometimes heretical when good Roman Catholic boys enter the water with little amulets and crosses round their necks and arms that the good S. Christopher may hold them up’.
Six years later in 1882, on a tour of America which would make him an international star, an Apostle of his own Newness – not least because he arrived in Manhattan in an oversized green overcoat lined with otter fur and collared in seal, almost as if he were a marine mammal himself – Oscar had spent days on Fire Island, newly fashionable as a resort for New Yorkers, where the press portrayed him in a daring costume, complete with sand shoes. He was a modern man, looking out over the ocean.
Now, after ten years of fame, he was taking refuge from his own celebrity in Torquay. With Constance called away, leaving him to look after their two young sons, he invited Lord Alfred Douglas to stay. Oscar played at being a decadent headmaster, ordering champagne and sherry and biscuits for himself and Bosie for morning break, with compulsory reading in bed for his boys at night. Tradition has it that he swam here too, in the same cove from which Elizabeth’s brother had set sail.
Despite his happiness at Babbacombe Cliff, Wilde detected a disturbance in the atmosphere. ‘But today the sea is rough, and there are no dryads in the glen, and the wind cries like a thing whose heart is broken.’ His lover’s true nature was emerging, tempestuous and petulant. There were angry shouts, and Douglas packed his bags, pursued to London by Oscar’s letter: ‘Bosie – you must not make scenes with me – they kill me – they wreck the loveliness of life.’ Wilde’s life would be wrecked by Douglas, as surely as if he’d been cast up on those rocks below Wonderland.
All of this happened with a speed that belied his own dramas. Two years later, in the summer of 1894, Oscar returned to the coast at Worthing. He was working on The Importance of Being Earnest, and spent weeks ‘doing nothing but bathing and playwriting’. He was a powerful swimmer, as his son Vyvyan recalled, ploughing through high seas like a shark. Evoking Byron’s feats, he swam from a yacht as he sailed from Worthing to Littlehampton, only for a sudden storm to stir ‘a fearful sea’ out of the pitch dark on the return trip; Oscar boasted to Bosie of being ‘Viking-like and daring’. The end of the land allowed the unallowable. In Worthing, Wilde wooed Alphonse Conway, a sixteen-year-old boy who wanted to become a sailor. He asked Oscar to take him to Portsmouth. Instead he was kitted out in a blue serge suit and taken to Brighton, a straw hat on his head. A year later, Alphonse’s name would be used against Wilde at the Old Bailey.
In London, facing the inevitable, Oscar was encouraged by his friends to flee before it was too late. Frank Harris had a boat waiting on the river, crewed and ready with a head of steam. Harris said extravagantly, ‘In one hour she would be free of the Thames and on the high seas, delightful phrase, eh? – high seas indeed where there is freedom uncontrolled.’
He tried to entice Wilde with the vision. ‘You’ve never seen the mouth of the Thames at night, have you? It’s a scene from wonderland; houses like blobs of indigo fencing you in; ships drifting past like black ghosts in the misty air, and the purple sky above never so dark as the river, the river like an oily, opaque serpent gliding with a weird life of its own.’
But the water would not save him. In court, the words which he had written from the privacy of Babbacombe Cliff extolling Bosie’s rose-leaf lips were read aloud to the audience in the public gallery. Sentenced to two years’ hard labour, Wilde was taken from Pentonville to Clapham Junction where he was spat at as he stood on the platform, his station of the cross. From there he was conducted to Reading Gaol. As prisoner C.3.3 he was subjected to a new transformation. He sobbed as they cut his hair. He was kept in his cell for twenty-three hours a day, and when he did leave it he was forced, like other prisoners, to wear a cap with a thick veil so that no one could recognise each other. Time had stopped for a man who had defined a new age. Like Woolf, he conducted a transaction with his time, only to be punished for his facility. In his pitiful letter, De Profundis, he told Bosie, ‘With us, time does not progress. It revolves.’ He had not realised that there was so much suffering in the world, or that he would experience it: ‘What lies before me is my past.’ In his cell, alone and kept in silence, he had ‘a strange longing … for the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.’ While the world thought his nature unnatural, he thought of the Greeks: ‘they saw that the sea was for the swimmer’.
When he was released after two years’ imprisonment, Wilde left immediately for France, as if he could not bear to spend a single night of freedom in the country which had disowned him. At Berneval, near Dieppe, he shook off his imprisonment by swimming every day – ‘breasting the waves, a strong and skilful swimmer’, according to his friend Robert Sherard, who wished he could take a photograph of the aesthete, ‘to show people in England that there’s a man in him’.
Oscar had a beach hut set up in which to undress, and told Robbie Ross that he wanted to build ‘a little chalet of plaster and wood walls’, in which he might live out his life by the sea. He soon found another chalet, with a wooden balcony overlooking the water. Far from Wonderland, it was as bare as Thoreau’s hut, its only decoration a carved Madonna salvaged from a fishing boat. He was happier than he had ever been, writing letters precisely timed and dated – ‘Thursday 3 June, 2.45 pm, AD 1897’ – but addressed from a ‘Latitude and Longitude not marked on the sea’, a nowhereness which would have appealed to Melville. Oscar had written in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.’ He looked out from that atlas and saw his future in the sea.
With his now substantial bulk, far from the immortal student who’d swum in Dublin Bay with Catholic boys and their amulets and crosses, Oscar looked like an elegant elephant seal, his head held above the waves. He adopted a new identity, as Sebastian Melmoth. Surely he had half his life left to live? He was just forty-three. The opal sea washed his sins away while the gulls were blown about like white flowers. He had found his own utopia. Nearby, he’d discovered a chapel, of Our Lady of Joy – ‘It has probably been waiting for me all these purple years of pleasure’ – and he thought of the Virgin Mary as the Star of the Sea as he lay in the sea-grass outside, recalling the ‘strange beauty’ of William Michael Rossetti’s poem.
The sea is in its listless chime,
Like Time’s lapse rendered audible;
The murmur of the earth’s large shell.
In a sad blueness beyond rhyme
It ends.
‘Yesterday I attended Mass at 10 o’clock and afterwards bathed,’ he told Robbie. ‘So I went into water without being a pagan. The consequence was that I was not tempted by either sirens or mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus. I really think that this is a remarkable thing. In my Pagan days the sea was always full of Tritons blowing conchs, and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite different.’
But a month later he invited Bosie back, telling him that he had a bathing suit ready for him.
UNDERAGREENSEA
In July 1910, seven decades after Elizabeth Barrett Browning had arrived there and eighteen years after Oscar Wilde had left, a teenaged boy from Shrewsbury spent a summer holiday with his uncle and aunt in Torquay. He knew this place and loved it, particularly for the bathing. That year, however, there was a new excitement to his stay. Two hundred vessels of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet had gathered in Torbay to mark the accession of the new king, George V. Yet the spectacle that day was not confined to the sea. For the first time, boy and king would see an aeroplane soaring into the skies. It seemed like a g
ood omen for a new reign; an intimation of glamour and technology. But it also promised another kind of future, one to which the young man – Wilfred Owen – would bear witness.
Like Elizabeth, Wilfred had come to join his relatives in the town. But unlike her uncle and aunt, living in a grand house on the hill, John and Ann Taylor lived at 264 Union Street in the commercial centre, between a bank and a pub. The wealthy winter visitors to Torquay were now giving way to more ordinary holidaymakers, and the ground floor of the Taylors’ house was a shop where they sold books, magazines and stationery. The building is still there: its wide, double-fronted bay windows, which once showed its wares, now display bridal gowns. Wilfred loved the shop; it felt special, the way things do on holiday. Passing the local newspaper office, he imagined a career as a journalist. He thought about the life of a poet, too, although that seemed even more fantastical. He had discovered that Christabel Coleridge, granddaughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lived close by, and one morning he arrived unannounced on her doorstep. Miss Coleridge and her brother Ernest obliged by signing his edition of their ancestor’s poems. Other poets he revered had visited the area too. In ‘the azure time of June’ of 1816, Percy and Mary had spent a second, secret honeymoon in Torquay in ‘one soul of interwoven flame’. And two years later, a year after his visit to Southampton and the Isle of Wight, John Keats had stayed for two rather rainier months at neighbouring Teignmouth.
Wilfred felt connected to these poets; they spoke to him over time. Later, he would take the train to Teignmouth, where high tides and winter storms often threatened to cut off Brunel’s coastal railway; enveloped in cloud, Keats said Devon was so wet that it was amphibious. He had come here to look after his brother Tom, who was mortally sick with consumption, the same disease that would kill himself. But it was also here, by the sea, that he completed Endymion, just as he had begun it by the sea, on the Isle of Wight (and described the whole process as leaping into the ocean to become more aware of his surroundings). Staring into the windows of the house where his hero had stayed, Owen alarmed the inhabitants, so he walked down to the shore, where Keats had seen ‘the wide sea did weave | An untumultuous fringe of silver foam | Along the flat, brown sand | I was at home, | And should have been most happy – but I saw | Too far into the sea …’
Back in Torquay Wilfred wrote a sonnet to his patron saint: ‘Eternally may sad waves wail his death.’ He told his mother, Susan, that he was ‘in love with a youth and a dead ’un’; and when he read William Michael Rossetti’s biography of the poet, he felt that his hand had been guided ‘right into the wound … I touched, for one moment the incandescent Heart of Keats.’ (In a world in which words could pass on as relics, Rossetti himself had befriended the elderly Trelawny, who gave him a blackened fragment of Shelley’s skull taken from the funeral pyre.) But for Wilfred, the worship of dead poets was caught up with the sea and the life it offered; the water was the overwhelming reason to love Torquay on this, his third visit there, now with his brother Harold, four years his junior. ‘The whole day … centres around the bathing, the most enjoyable we have ever had, I think,’ Wilfred told his mother, adding, in his sweetly self-important way, ‘It is one of those rare cases where the actuality exceeds, does not fall short of, the expectation.’
He may have been born in landlocked Shropshire, but Wilfred had a strange connection to the sea. His father, Tom, would pretend to be a sailor – although his maritime experience amounted to little more than having once sailed to Bombay as a young man. He now worked as a railway clerk, but in his spare time Tom Owen assumed the stance of a captain, dressing up in a nautical, Gilbert-and-Sullivan manner on his visits to Liverpool docks, where he acted as a volunteer for the Missionary Society. One day he invited four Lascars home to tea; Harold remembered eight bare Indian feet appearing under the family table.
Mourning his imaginary career, Tom Owen invested his hopes in his eldest son; he planned a life at sea for Wilfred from the first.
An early family photograph depicts Tom in a sort of seaman’s outfit, with a straw hat and wide white trousers. Balancing the infant Wilfred on his shoulder like a kitbag, he poses like an Edwardian idea of a sailor. Harold – who really would go to sea – thought their father looked like Robert Louis Stevenson, with his long, handsome moustache. In another photograph, young Wilfred, dressed in his own white sailor’s suit, holds a toy yacht made for him by his father. And later, a little older, posed on a swing in navy blue, he seems already set for the sea, looking off to his own horizon.
At the age of six, Wilfred was taught to swim by his father on evening visits to the local public baths, where he displayed ‘a lithe aptitude for the water’. On holiday, Tom Owen insisted that his children should swim in the sea every day, whether the sun shone or not. It was a ritual for him, and became so for his eldest son.
At Tramore, near Waterford in Ireland, where many ships had been wrecked, Tom took the boys into a rough sea. Told by local fishermen to return to the shore, he defied them, recklessly diving into the waves and spouting through his moustache looking like a walrus. Later, the Owens caught a large dogfish which they stored overnight in a shed, only for Wilfred and Harold to find it rearing up in a corner on its tail, its mouth gasping and white; they thought it was walking like a man. The resurrected fish was duly released back to the sea, where it continued to be seen, swimming in the shallows. In another eerie incident, the family went for a walk down a dark, tree-shaded lane. A large animal seemed to be moving in the branches above them. At the end of the path a lake appeared like a mirage, and out of the darkness stepped a threatening figure that confronted their father while the children looked on, shaking with fear. None of this was explained, although the fisherman and his wife in whose cottage they were staying looked at each other strangely and asked the Owens not to tell anyone about what had happened.
In Harold’s remembering it seemed that the family were collectively haunted, as families can be. Wilfred embodied that mystery; they all felt he was in some way different, with his solemn gravity but sometimes wildly high spirits. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, he was proud of his Celtic blood, and had an animal love of loneliness. They called him the old wolf, although he might as easily have been a selkie.
Everywhere he could, he swam in the sea. ‘We bathe here every day,’ Wilfred had written from Cornwall in the summer of 1906. Now a teenager, the water released a new energy in him. Staying in Bournemouth, he told his mother, ‘I have been so often at the Sea Side in Day Dreams of late.’ Those dreams took shape in a long and enthusiastic poem based on Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, in which the heroine gives up the sea for the land so that she can meet a young prince; Andersen’s story was a cipher, as Elspeth Probyn would write, ‘for an impossible love’. Wilfred was influenced by Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and by Turner, whose paintings he had recently discovered. In lines neatly written out in his exercise book in his open, fair hand, he imagines the ‘exceeding deep’ beyond the ‘sea-bird’s view’, and ‘the tireless glee | Of waggish dolphins turning somersault | And whales a-snorting fountains angrily’. Such scenes make me wonder if Wilfred had seen cetaceans as a child, but his animals seem to have surfaced from Endymion, whose ‘gulphing’ whales and ‘Ionian shoals of dolphins’ would be familiar to Orlando and Oscar Wilde, too.
That summer in Torquay, Wilfred and Harold found a secluded cove, away from the other beaches with their deckchairs and families staking claim on their bit of England in the sand. To get there the boys walked up the hill, past the house from which Elizabeth had looked out to sea, and over the headland to Meadfoot. Here Charles Darwin had convalesced; his neighbour was Angela Burdett-Coutts, the richest woman in England; another villa was owned by the Romanoffs. The area’s well-to-do air appealed to the snob in Wilfred. But beneath the cliffs was the winding darkness of Kents Cavern, where three species of humans had lived; its prehistory appealed to the archaeologist in him. The beach was clean and wide, with flat p
ebbles veined with quartz; it looked out to a jagged shard named Shag Rock after its sentinel birds and driven at an angle into the sea, like something that had fallen from the sky.
One morning after swimming, Wilfred proposed an impromptu investigation of the geology of the cliff. As the brothers busied themselves with their excavations, as if looking for a psammead, they noticed two boys and a girl also digging about the rocks. Wilfred found the newcomers interesting – especially one of the boys, Russell Story Tarr. His father was Ralph Stockman Tarr, from Gloucester, Massachusetts; his ancestors included mariners and fish-oil merchants and women accused of witchcraft. A renowned geologist, student of marine zoology, collector of meteorites and Arctic explorer, Ralph Tarr was about to leave for Spitzbergen to investigate the physical properties of ice. The Tarrs were rich, evidently: Russell and his sister Catherine were staying with their parents at the grand Osborne Hotel, overlooking the beach.
Russell, bespectacled and about to go up to Harvard, was the personification of a new world. He and Owen were the same age, seventeen, and shared a love of geology; more importantly, Wilfred admired Russell’s prowess in the water. ‘This American boy is a splendid swimmer,’ he told his father. Russell would dive from a moored raft in the bay, disappearing for a dangerously long time, to emerge exhausted but clutching two handfuls of pebbles to prove how deep he had been. Wilfred and Harold tried to emulate him, but came nowhere near to doing so. Besotted by their new friend, the brothers would make the daily trek to Meadfoot to join Russell on the beach. In turn, the young American invited them to spend the following summer in New England. He couldn’t understand why the Owens were unable to accept.