Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Ingenuously, Wilde thought the negative reviews were a reaction to his immaturity as a poet. But the critics had a secret agenda. Wilde had trumpeted his greatness all over London, and his slim volume—no matter how beautiful the white parchment binding and the handmade Dutch paper—was an inadequate debut. Wilde’s posturing was beginning to rankle the littérateurs he most wanted to impress.

  Close friends were supportive: Violet Hunt loved the poems. Wilde’s effusive response to her praise shows that the naysayers were getting to him. “In an age like this when Slander, and Ridicule and Envy walk quite unashamed among us,” he wrote, “and when any attempt to produce serious beautiful work is greeted with a very tornado of lies and evil-speaking, it is a wonderful joy, a wonderful spur for ambition and work, to receive any such encouragement and appreciation as your letter brought me.” Later, when prose rather than poetry compelled him, he told Yeats: “We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.”

  The Oxford Union solicited a copy, which Wilde inscribed: “To the Library of the Oxford Union, my first volume of poems, Oscar Wilde Oct 27 ’81.” The request was pro forma for alumni; libraries filled shelves with such requests. When the acquisition was announced, a minority cried plagiarism, citing borrowings from Shakespeare, Byron, and Swinburne, and convinced the majority to return the book. It was a “coarse impertinence,” Wilde said, but he did not toss his blue china vase into the fireplace: he was an artist, on occasion a work of art, but never a temperamental artist. “It is only the unimaginative who never invents,” he maintained. “The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.”

  In acknowledging that artists plagiarize from others as well as themselves, Wilde told a well-known truth. In “The Critic as Artist,” he observes that all “artistic creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind.” In “The Decay of Lying,” Vivian explains, “Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, refashions it in fresh forms,” and, as Wilde did in his poetry and prose, “is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams.” Of course, Wilde was equally at home with the opposite view, although fatuous in an interview after the success of An Ideal Husband: “Nobody else’s work gives me any suggestion. It is only by entire isolation from everything that one can do any work. Idleness gives one the mood in which to write, isolation the conditions.”

  Lord Henry speaks for Wilde when he tells Dorian: “Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.… The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write.” That irresistible man, of course, was Oscar Wilde.

  As for indecency, Wilde was in his infancy, growing toward Dorian Gray. Still, “Charmides,” about a lover caressing a marble statue, is carnal, with lines such as

  The grand cool flanks, the crescent thighs, the bossy hills of snow.…

  And then his lips in hungering delight

  Fed on her lips, and round the towered neck

  He flung his arms, nor cared at all his passion’s will to check.

  Frank Miles’s religious father was shocked. He warned that his roommate’s poetry was “licentious and may do a great harm to any soul that reads it.” In the summer of 1880, Miles and Wilde had left Thames House for One Tite Street in Chelsea, a three-story, red-and-yellow-brick house with a green-slate roof and balconies. Wilde called it Keats House because the previous owners were the Skeates. Now Canon Miles, who had paid for the renovations done by Edward William Godwin, Ellen Terry’s former lover, decided that Wilde was a bad influence and should live elsewhere. His son did not protest.*

  A rite of passage in every life, betrayal invariably pained Wilde and became a brooding point in his work. Frank Harris’s biography claims he was furious when Miles told him he had to leave, and there was a scene with much yelling and throwing about of clothes. Wilde vowed never to speak to Miles again. He moved to furnished rooms at 9 Charles Street (now Carlos Place), off Grosvenor Square and across from the Coburg (Connaught) Hotel.

  At twenty-six, Wilde was an Oxford gentleman who lived on his own and on credit, unlike his brother, who lived with, and off, their mother. He had an unproduced play and a batch of bad reviews for a book of poems he’d had to publish on his own. But he still had his reputation as a dandy and a brilliant conversationalist. He continued to burnish the image of the apostle of aesthetics, a poet with a lily in his hand. His mannered attitudes and epicene posturing were never viewed as signs of an invert nature. From the time of the Regency, a same-sex subculture of which others were unaware had gathered around aristocrats. Dressed in satin and lace, colored stockings and powdered wigs, the court fops were effeminate but manly. Sexuality was never an issue; ambiguity made the dandy interesting. Beau Brummell, who symbolized for Regency London overrefinement, leisure, and a preoccupation with fashion, became a despot of wit and taste, a position he invented rather than inherited. That wit could be valued over being well-born was not lost on Wilde.

  In the eighties, the satirical magazine Punch reflected the opinions and prejudices of the British upper-middle classes. Its leading cartoonist, George Du Maurier, had lived with Whistler in the bohemian Paris of the 1850s; when he lost the use of his left eye at age twenty-three, he abandoned painting for a less demanding medium. He had satirized the Aesthetes since 1873, at first by theme, such as the mania for blue-and-white china. In one drawing, an aesthetic bridegroom presents a teapot to his wife, remarking, “It is quite consummate, is it not?” “It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, Let us live up to it!” The worship of blue china was not confined to Wilde; in fact, Whistler and Rossetti collected blue china long before Wilde worried about living up to it at Oxford.

  Du Maurier’s captions invented the language of aesthetics, with words like “utterly utter,” “quite,” “exquisite,” “beautiful,” and “divine.” The Aesthetes’ floral preferences were noted, particularly the lily, an image revered by Rossetti. In 1880 Du Maurier introduced the painter Maudle and the poet Jellaby Postlethwaite, whose aesthetic murmurings impress society. Postlethwaite, who speaks like Wilde but looks unlike him as an emaciated poet with prominent cheekbones, sees his success in floral terms: “The Lily had carried me through my first season, the Primrose through my second. The question arose: what Flower of Flowers is to carry me through my next?” On February 12, 1881, Wilde’s face appears on Maudle, who lounges on a settee talking to Mrs. Cimabue Brown, identified as a Philistine from the country. Her son wants to be an artist, and Maudle (sounding like Wilde) advises: “Why should he Be anything? Why not let him remain for ever content to Exist Beautifully?”

  Punch featured Wilde as its thirty-seventh “Fancy Portrait,” following the publication of Poems. His face is in the center of a sunflower accompanied by this critical ditty:

  Aesthete of Aesthetes!

  What’s in a name?

  The poet is WILDE,

  But his poetry’s tame.

  Other Punch cartoonists had fun with his name, too, and Wilde appears variously as Oscuro Wildegoose, Drawit, the Wilde-eyed poet, and Ossian Wilderness. When Du Maurier’s caricatures were discussed at Burne-Jones’s studio, Violet Hunt recalled, “Burne Jones suddenly hissed out, as he could hiss when roused: ‘Say what you like, there is more wit in that man’s little finger than in du Maurier’s whole body.’ ”

  By satirizing aesthetic affectations on stage, W. S. Gilbert provided the turning point Wilde’s life needed. In his Savoy opera Patience, Gilbert introduces two poets: Reginald Bunthorne, the fleshly, and Archibald Grosvenor, the spiritual. As role models, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Whistler were uppermost in Gilbert’s mind, but the public saw only
Wilde on the program cover: an Aesthete in knee breeches and black stockings, floppy tie and wideawake hat, a modification of the French artist costume of 1830. Wilde did not invent the so-called aesthetic dress. Inspired by a similar costume worn at his Oxford Masonic lodge, he borrowed the look for his American tour and made it his own work of art. As early as September 1876, when Wilde was an Oxford undergraduate, Du Maurier dressed Boniface Brasenose in knee breeches and a smoking jacket with quilted lapels.

  In addition to the librettos written with Arthur Sullivan, Gilbert excelled at those dramatic forms—burlesque, fairy play, pantomime—that characterized the nineteenth century. For Gilbert, laughs were always at the expense of some person or institution. His verbal dexterity (rhyming aesthetical, heretical, and emetical) was gimmicky, but he created hum-mable tunes. Before Wilde or Shaw, Gilbert satirized human vanity, hypocrisy, and stupidity but directed the sting at the bourgeois, not at Wilde’s preferred target—the upper classes.

  Patience opened at the Opera Comique on April 23, 1881, and transferred in October to inaugurate the new Savoy Theatre, the first theatre in the world to use electric lights, generated by an engine chugging away in a nearby shed. The plot revolves around some lovesick maidens who are more attracted to the poets who pose and gaze at lilies (modeled on Du Maurier’s cartoons) than to the blue-and-gold-uniformed dragoons. Bunthorne assumes an aesthetic attitude to attract Patience, the village milkmaid, who sings of her longing to discover the meaning of love, then meets a stranger, Grosvenor, who immediately proposes. The affections of Patience for the two poets and those of the maidens for the dragoons combine to complicate the plot.

  Generations of actors playing Bunthorne have attempted to translate Wilde’s quasi niente of tone and gesture into a studied emphasis on what today would be called camping or queening. Wilde called it “swaggering,” a word suggesting arrogance of movement, a nineteenth-century strut done with supreme self-confidence. Wilde swaggered when his vanity bubbled over, but the language was mostly verbal. He denied that he bought a lily daily and walked it through town to Lillie Langtry’s home. “To have done it was nothing, but to make people think one had done it was a triumph,” he said. The anecdote inspired Gilbert to write:

  Though the Philistines may jostle,

  You will rank as an apostle

  In the high aesthetic band,

  If you walk down Piccadilly

  With a poppy or a lily

  In your mediaeval hand.

  Gilbert did not have the Aesthetes all to himself. Dramatists found Wilde an irresistible subject. There were even parodies of parodies. Sometimes Wilde refused to see himself onstage.* Being lampooned was only another kind of self-promotion, but to be taken seriously, Wilde needed to discourage any more buffoonery.

  Then, at the perfect time, a dignified offer arrived to tour America as the apostle of Aestheticism or, as Wilde put it, “to show the rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might create.” Patience had opened in New York, and the plan called for Wilde—a real Bunthorne—to promote the operetta. The coast-to-coast tour was suggested to Richard D’Oyly Carte’s business manager by Mrs. Frank Leslie, director of the publishing company founded by her late English-born husband and editor of Frank Leslie’s Lady’s Magazine—destined to become Wilde’s sister-in-law.

  Extravagantly described as a visiting artist whose recent volume of poems had made “a profound sensation” in England, Wilde was to celebrate poetry and art and be entertained by America’s cultural elite. And, if he proved popular with audiences, there was money to be made. All traveling expenses and a half share of the profits tempted him to accept. There was no reason to remain in London in two furnished rooms with his social life dislocated by the break with Frank Miles. He began thinking about what he should wear and what he would say.

  *An example of how adapting foreign dramas led to theatrical careers: Augustin Daly (1838–99) was a New York newspaper drama critic for ten years before he adapted Leah in 1862 from Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Deborah, a German melodrama written in 1850.

  *There is no evidence that the two families were related. The first Wilde (Ralph), Oscar’s great-grandfather, came to Castlerea as an agent for the Wills family, owners of Wills-grove near Castlerea in County Roscommon.

  *Miles spent a great deal of time with Lord Ronald Sutherland-Gower, seven years his senior and a known homosexual, and feared that his father might discover his ambiguous sexuality. His father died shortly after Wilde departed, and six years later Miles was taken to an insane asylum near Bristol. He died there in 1891, when Wilde was on the threshold of fame.

  *Before Patience there was The Grasshopper (1877), a burlesque of the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery; Where’s the Cat? (1880), with Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the Wilde part, and The Colonel (1881), by F. C. Burnand, editor of Punch.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Second Self

  Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself.

  Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

  —“THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM”

  Wilde imagined America with chilly scenes of snowcapped mountains and frozen streets with arctic winds snapping at his legs, a climate worse than England’s. Obviously he needed new clothes and warm ones. Along with several velvet aesthetic costumes to wear while lecturing, he asked his tailor to make an ankle-length, Lincoln green, otter-lined, seal-trimmed overcoat with frogged closures. Oversized, with extrawide cuffs and a deep-notched collar, this coat became Wilde’s favorite item of clothing; it had an aura that possessed him, and when it was sold while he was in prison, he mourned it as one does a lost friend. It “knows me perfectly,” he said.

  After settling on the contents of his steamer trunks, Wilde solicited letters of introduction. The American ambassador, James Russell Lowell, who had favorably reviewed his Poems in the Atlantic Monthly, wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes that “a clever and accomplished man should no more need an introduction than a fine day.” (In Boston, Wilde dined with “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” and afterward sent Holmes an edition of his poems.) Burne-Jones wrote appreciatively to the scholar Charles Eliot Norton. “The gentleman who brings this little note to you is my friend Mr. Oscar Wilde, who has much brightened this last of my declining years.… he really loves the men and things you and I love.” To feed his fantasy that he would visit Japan—and in case he did—Wilde asked the Japanese vice president of foreign affairs in London for introductions to cultural organizations.

  Any British traveler found it difficult to learn about America in 1882, ten years before a Baedeker on the country was published. Current facts were available only in select newspapers. But Wilde never craved facts and statistics: they intruded on expectations. In “The Decay of Lying,” Vivian complains about the invasion of facts: “Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarizing mankind.”

  Wilde planned to complete his first lecture on the English Renaissance during the eight-day voyage from Liverpool; he boarded on Christmas Eve and celebrated until the SS Arizona steamed into New York harbor on January 2, 1882. Wilde was at the railing in his new coat and a broad-brimmed black hat. His lecture was incomplete, but he had good quotes for the press. If Wilde said something clever, he never thought, “That’s brilliant. I’ll write it down.” His epigrams went through a lapidary stage: presented, polished, then committed to paper. Performances took place during the drawn-out seven-course meals that helped to pass time on transatlantic crossings.

  Before Wilde cleared customs, he was famous for his alleged quote “I have nothing to declare except my genius.” Another bon mot, delivered secondhand, noted that “the Atlantic is a disappointment. It did not roar.” His comment had delighted passengers, and one repeated it when a journalist asked how Mr. Wilde had enjoyed the voyage. After sailing through a Mediterranean cyclone between A
thens and Naples, Wilde expected more from an ocean.

  As promised, the Grand Hotel at Thirty-first Street and Broadway was first-class; his two-room suite had a view of the new Wallack’s Theatre in the heart of a developing theatre district. Previously theatres had clustered downtown at Union Square, an area no longer fashionable. When the upper classes began to move uptown, the theatres followed, to Madison Square and Long Acre Square, which became Times Square in 1904. Ten blocks from Wallack’s was the Metropolitan Concert Hall, later the city’s first opera house. As soon as Wilde left the hotel, reporters were after him seeking quotes, demanding to hear his impressions of America.

  Somewhat sarcastically, he observed that American men “seem to get a hold on life much earlier than we do.” And the women were superior. “On the whole, the great success of marriage is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and … no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband’s dinners … the horrors of domesticity are almost entirely unknown.” The United States is the only country where Don Juan is not appreciated, he said, “and the men—docile and unromantic—have made it such a paradise that this is perhaps why, like Eve, the women are always so anxious to get out of it.” Divorce was a positive family value. “When people are tied together for life they too often regard manners as a mere superfluity, and courtesy as a thing of no moment,” he said, rehearsing an insight repeated in his social comedies, “but where the bond can easily be broken, its very fragility makes its strength, and reminds the husband that he should always try to please, and the wife that she should never cease to be charming.”