Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Travers was awarded a farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages. Wilde had to pay more than two thousand pounds in costs. An expensive escapade, to be sure, but Lady Wilde was energized by the attention and publicity. She kept the occasion freshly minted by sending off letters reiterating that no one in Dublin took the charges seriously, explaining that Travers was “mad” and the “sneering” English newspapers inaccurate.

  Of course this was untrue. Among the detractors was Sir William’s medical rival, Dr. Arthur Jacob, who was envious of his colleague’s self-advertising ways and seized the opportunity to denounce him in the Medical Press for not testifying and clearing his name—a reasonable criticism. The Medical Times and Gazette was supportive, even printing an aphorism—“Genius has its penalties as well as its privileges”—with which Oscar would concur. The trial did not significantly jeopardize Wilde’s professional reputation, but the stress damaged his health. He had a chronic cough and appeared much older than his fifty years.

  As Oscar would say, “All trials are trials for one’s life.” His father spent more time away from Dublin, indulging his mania for acquiring property and building houses. He already had four rental houses facing the sea at Bray, a resort south of Dublin. In 1853, he leased a fishing lodge on a wooded peninsula called Illaunroe (Irish for “little red island”) on Lough Fee in Connemara and in 1865 acquired fifteen acres from the estate of his maternal ancestors, the Fynnes of Ballymagibbon. The land, located near Cong in County Mayo, was on an elevation overlooking Lough Corrib, with a distant silhouette of the Moycullen Hills. There were magnificent views of the lake and its numerous islands, some 365, one for each day of the year; on leap year an additional one was said to appear. It was an area rich with antiquities, particularly Cong Abbey, which Wilde helped to restore.

  Within the property’s boundaries was the location of the mythological battle of Magh-Tura, where Babor of the Evil Eye was slain. As near as possible, Wilde located the cairn-studded site of the battle and built a two-story peaked-roof house, which he called Moytura. When it was completed in 1866, he affixed a stucco medallion over the doorway with entwined W’s and the date. Traveling to Moytura was not difficult, even in the 1860s. A train left Dublin at 8:30 A.M. and pulled into Galway station at 1:45 P.M. There was time for lunch at the Great Southern Hotel before boarding the three o’clock steamer to Cong. Thirty-one miles separated Moytura from Illaunroe, an arduous journey along a winding dirt road if made by cart or on horseback.

  Thereafter the family spent their holidays in the west rather than Bray. Oscar preferred the seclusion and sport of Illaunroe, then—as now—a place of mists and purple shadows, of clouds and sudden rains. There, as at other water-fringed sites, he could “hear things that the ear cannot hear and see invisible things.” Like a Wildean paradox, Connemara is a dreamscape where light and shade and color and shape are never the same. Oscar found it magical, a place of renewal, which made him “years younger than actual history records.” Yeats, whose mother’s family was from nearby Sligo, recognized in Wilde the same “half-civilized blood,” which comes from areas rich in heroic and supernatural lore.

  Oscar would Ridicule upper-class country life in England, where there were no Connemaras. The bons mots in A Woman of No Importance were easily struck: “I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me” or “The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.” It was true: Oscar did not sit a horse well, but he thoroughly enjoyed fishing and shooting. At Illaunroe he rose at 5:00 A.M., anticipating dawn over the Atlantic, the air filled with millions of minute prisms and shattered into rainbow colors over Lough Fee. His enthusiasm for the outdoors spills over in the letters he wrote to Oxford classmates during the long vacations. It was the duty of the individual, especially the artist, to develop his personality to the fullest, and Oscar made baiting a hook a sublime act. He passed fishing lore on to his children, telling them stories about the “great melancholy carp” that had to be called from the bottom of the lake with Irish songs.

  Willie and Oscar accompanied their father during his explorations of ancient sites when he gathered material for a historical guide. Written with an explorer’s enthusiasm, Lough Corrib: Its Shore and Islands urges readers: “Westward, ho! Let us rise with the sun and be off to the land of the West—to the lakes and streams, the grassy glens and fern-clad gorges—the bluff hills and rugged mountains—now cloud-capped, then revealed in azure, or bronzed by evening’s tints.”

  Oscar enjoyed excavating enough to apply for an archaeological studentship—which he did not receive—after Oxford. In the application, he explained that from his boyhood he had “been accustomed, through my Father, to visiting and reporting on ancient sites, taking rubbings and measurements and all the technique of open air archaeologica—it is of course a subject of intense interest to me.” The family’s outdoor classroom stretched from Lough Corrib to the Atlantic. Willie and Oscar sketched caves, cairns, monoliths, stone circles, and holy wells. Willie recorded Oscar and his father exploring Hag’s Castle on the island of Inishmaan in Lough Mask.

  One day they came upon an unmortared building containing two arched crypts; it measured five feet by three feet wide and resembled a lime kiln but was of the wrong construction. Sir William, who had never seen anything like it, was fascinated; he made several visits to Inishmaan and spent considerable time studying the structure. When he determined that conversations could be heard between the two crypts, he speculated that the ruin was an ancient prison or sweathouse once used by the nearby abbey. At the age of thirteen, Oscar had his first look at how a person was confined in a small space. That the experience could ever become personal would have surprised him.

  *This book describes surgical experiments for a mastoid or middle-ear abscess. Ironically, it was this condition, which may have originated from a fall in prison, that led to meningitis, the cause of Wilde’s death in Paris at the age of forty-six.

  *One Merrion Square has been restored by the American College, Dublin, following nearly a quarter century of neglect. William Wilde’s built-in mahogany bookcases survive in the ground-floor study and plaques honor Oscar and his father. At darkness a stained-glass window illuminates the Happy Prince, with Wilde’s face. The garden, now open to the public, remains as overgrown and lush as Wilde portrayed it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Away From Home

  The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else.

  —“THE REMARKABLE ROCKET”

  Oscar and Willie were enrolled at the Portora Royal School near Enniskillen in February 1864. Oscar was young for boarding school, not yet ten, and Willie was twelve. They were a hundred miles from Dublin in the county of Fermanagh, now part of Northern Ireland. Situated above the juncture of upper and lower Lough Erne, the school provided a peaceful country atmosphere with nearby monastic ruins to explore. Portora saw itself as the Irish Eton; the school song was “Floreat Portora,” sung to the same tune as “Floreat Etona.” Like their English cousins, the Irish Protestant boarding schools educated the sons of the middle class, valued athletic rather than academic achievement, and believed that cold baths built character.

  Portora was less stuffy and class-conscious than Eton, and unlike other Irish public schools admitted Catholics. For Oscar’s seven years, it was a nurturing rather than a threatening institution. He discovered the classics, greedily read poetry, sharpened his wit, and, for the first time, socialized with boys his own age. Portora not Trinity grounded him in Greek scholarship. His contemporaries suggest he was popular (an important label at boarding school), recalling that he entertained rather than annoyed, avoided music and mathematics, and loathed games.

  Portora classmates included Louis Claude Purser, a constant rival in classics, and Edward Sullivan, who noted Oscar’s “romantic imagination.”
Both went on to Trinity, where Purser remained as Latin professor and Sullivan’s scholarship concentrated on the Book of Kells. Recorded decades later, their memories are vague, indicating only that Wilde was just another student, wittier than some and brighter than most. He enjoyed his solitude and was often seen rowing on the river Erne but was not a good enough oar to compete, setting him apart from his classmates, who excelled in rugby, cricket, and rowing. He did not shirk controversy and was one of six students to sign a protest about the severity of punishment for a missed scripture lesson.

  Although contemptuous of the playing fields, Oscar gained respect by his wit and skill in manipulating teachers. In class he asked questions like “What is a Realist?” to turn the discussion toward what interested him. “I have forgotten my schooldays,” says Mrs. Cheveley in An Ideal Husband. “I have a vague impression that they were detestable.” By all accounts, Wilde enjoyed Portora, for the simple reason that it permitted him to mature on his own terms.

  He had a handsome, boyish face with hooded eyes turned down at the corners and the large, sensual lips of his father. This was Wilde before vanity, before masks camouflaged his original self. “To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely,” he later wrote. “It is not wise to show one’s heart to the world.… In so vulgar an age as this we all need masks.”

  Being at the same school was irksome for Willie and Oscar; they walked the same corridors, ate in the same dining hall, and competed for best marks. At first, the headmaster thought Willie the better all-round student. Known as “Blue Blood,” Willie was seen as “clever, erratic and full of vitality.” He was a good enough pianist to attract a crowd in the common room, which must have annoyed Oscar, who lacked musical talent and never appreciated music, even during his Aesthetic period. If it served his purpose, he echoed Walter Pater’s dictum that music is the artistic ideal to which all the other arts should aspire, but like Tolstoy he thought music a dangerous force that irritates rather than elevates the soul. In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde observed that music can create in the listener the illusion of “terrible experiences,” of “fearful joys, or wild romantic loves,” even if the person has led “a perfectly commonplace life.” To Dorian, “music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos.” But words were different. Lord Henry’s musical words awaken erotic feelings in him because they evade explicit meaning.

  Portora gave its students a heavy dose of the cheerless Protestantism of the Church of Ireland, which Oscar could have done without. There were morning and evening prayer assemblies, and daily scripture classes until the fifth form. On Sunday mornings the students paraded to St. McCartan’s Cathedral in Enniskillen, where Oscar meditated on the stained-glass windows; in the evening they attended services at the parish church. During frosty winter days, students huddled around a stove in the school’s flagstone entrance, known as Stone Hall, where Oscar imitated the medieval poses seen in the cathedral windows.

  Ignorant of this schoolboy lark, W. S. Gilbert wrote the following lines for the posing aesthete Bunthorne, when he satirized Wilde and the Aesthetic movement in Patience in 1881:

  I am not fond of uttering platitudes

  In stained-glass attitudes.

  In short, my mediaevalism’s affectation,

  Born of a morbid love of admiration!

  Oscar excelled in discussions about God, politics, and literature, late-night rites at any school, which separated the dolts from the knowing. “In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer” was one of Wilde’s phrases for the young. He had one feat that never failed to astonish. With his back to the stove in Stone Hall, he faced his classmates with a sizable book in his left hand and skimmed two facing pages at a time, flipping through in a blink. Afterward he recited an accurate synopsis of the material, for, like his father, he had an encyclopedic mind and a photographic memory.

  The boys were at Portora when the Mary Travers libel trial against Lady Wilde began on December 12 and continued for five days. Newspaper headlines chronicled Sir William’s relationship with the young woman who had taken them for walks around Dublin, and they returned for their Christmas holidays to a chaotic Merrion Square, then came back to snickering classmates when classes began in the new term. One day a group was discussing a recent heresy trial in England, involving a vicar who insisted that Christ was physically present in Holy Communion, another instance of the Anglicans wanting to adopt Roman Catholic beliefs. Oscar found the lawsuit fascinating and said he would like nothing better than “to go down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as ‘Regina versus Wilde.’ ” He should have wished for something else—getting what one wants is life’s greatest tragedy.

  Homosexuality was an accepted part of life at English public schools, as would be seen when explicit coming-of-age novels were published in the twentieth century. From the beginning, these schools were pivotal in the development of a homosexual identity. But Portora’s reputation differed from that of Eton and Harrow, Rugby or Winchester. Samuel Beckett’s recent biographer portrays the Portora of the 1920s, when Beckett was a student, as a place where homosexuality did not seem to have been a part of life, although “sentimental friendships between older and younger boys, in which there was a greater or lesser element of chivalrous romanticism, were not uncommon and seem not to have been discouraged, either by officialdom or by public opinion.”

  The platonic relationship that Wilde believed to be the spiritual ideal between men was a comfortable part of student life. About intimate attachments at Portora, Wilde later told Lord Alfred Douglas, the significant love of his life, “There was nothing more than sentimental friendships.” Wilde’s adult behavior, Douglas said, could be described as “the usual public schoolboy business.” Sentimental or spoony friendships started with looks, furtive glances at choristers and cricketers, or a walk along cloistered paths with an arm over another boy’s shoulder.

  The gaze as the shock of silent recognition dominates Dorian Gray. “When our eyes met,” Basil Hallward says of Dorian, “I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.” Dorian becomes aware of his beauty only when he stares at his portrait, making him an eroticized subject to be worshiped at a distance.

  A young boy might easily become seduced into being a connoisseur of male bodies if he read classics. Intense scrutiny of textbook pictures brought statues to life, for Greece glorified the nude male form over the female and idealized the intimate relationship between males as more spiritual than marriage. The bible of classicism at Portora was the History of Ancient Art, published in 1764 by the first of the modern Hellenists, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), who never visited Greece and never saw the statues he so sensitively described. Oscar saw his first classical art at the age of ten, when the National Gallery of Ireland opened to the public. Located diagonally across from his home, it made a perfect Sunday outing for the family. In the sculpture gallery, casts of Greek and Roman originals were displayed between marble Corinthian columns.

  Portora was veritably monastic compared with Harrow, where John Addington Symonds was a student in the mid-1850s. Author of Studies of the Greek Poets and a leading theorist in the development of English homosexuality, Symonds recalled in his memoirs how “the talk in the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences. They filled me with disgust and loathing.”

  In the Phaedrus and Symposium,* Symonds discovered that “the voice of my own soul spoke to me through Plato, as though in some antenatal experience I had lived the life of philosophical Greek lover.” Lytton Strachey said he read t
he Symposium at sixteen “with a rush of mingled pleasure and pain,” as well as “surprise, relief, and fear to know that what I feel now was felt 2,000 years ago in glorious Greece.” Convinced that the study of Plato was injurious to some young men, Symonds wrote to Benjamin Jowett, whose English translations had sanitized Greek love. “Greek love for modern students of Plato is no ‘figure of speech’ and no anachronism,” he said, “but a present poignant reality.… It is indeed impossible to exaggerate the anomaly of making Plato a textbook for students, and a household book for readers, in a nation which repudiates Greek love.” But the master of Balliol had no intention of joining any anti-Plato campaign.*

  Reading Plato stirred Oscar to esteem same-sex passion, but he was far more interested in ancient Greek as a spoken language and was infatuated with its musical cadences. Portora’s headmaster changed his opinion of the brothers when Oscar in his third year finished fourth and Willie only thirteenth in classics. There were few with Oscar’s brilliance for euphonious oral translations from Thucydides, Plato, and Euripides. His spontaneous empathy with Greek consistently demonstrated the inferiority of literal translation. One memorable example was using “the unvintageable sea” to translate Homer’s phrase “the sea from which one gathers no grapes.”

  Students Arrived at Portora with wicker laundry hampers that were sent home and returned full of clean clothes folded over biscuits, cakes, candy, or anything sweet or sausagelike to enliven the monotony of tasteless food. One’s popularity at school could hinge on how generous parents were in sending food and how willingly it was shared. Oscar’s earliest surviving letter, written in 1868, when he was thirteen, acknowledges the hamper: