Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Wilde handled rejection by involving himself in other work. The New York premiere of Vera was scheduled for late August, four months away. Wilde wrote Marie Prescott detailed letters. “Never be afraid that by raising a laugh you destroy tragedy,” he said. “On the contrary, you intensify it.” This was his theory of opposites as applied to the theatre. “One of the facts of physiology,” he explained, “is the desire of any very intensified emotion to be relieved by some emotion that is its opposite.”

  On August 2, 1883, Wilde boarded the SS Britannia for the nine-day voyage to New York. On his arrival, The New York Times noted his new look: long trousers, cutaway velvet coat, patent-leather boots, and a Byronic collar with a scarf and diamond pin. Opening night, August 20, was, as feared, hot and humid. The program called Vera Oscar Wilde’s “new play,” making him sound like a prolific dramatist. By the fourth act, critics were squirming in their seats. “It was not an intellectual audience,” Comtesse Anna de Brémont recalled, “and what capacity it possessed for enjoyment melted under the stress of the heat.”

  James Kelly, the artist who had first sketched Wilde, recalled there were cries to bring down the curtain. “It comes as near failure as an ingenious and able writer can bring it,” the Timer’s critic wrote, hurtfully adding that “Wilde was very much of a charlatan and wholly an amateur.” Even Prescott’s acting was compared to scolding, even her vermilion dress as designed by Wilde was berated. The play closed after seven performances, and Prescott took it on tour to recoup her losses.

  The next morning, Kelly called at the Brunswick Hotel and found a chastened Wilde at breakfast. “Kelly, Kelly, my first play!” Wilde cried out when he saw him. Kelly suggested he forget the other night and take a walk with him to meet the young Thomas Edison, who worked at 65 Fifth Avenue. Defensive about the play’s failure, Wilde said to Edison: “Dion Boucicault told me, ‘Oscar, from the way you have written your play, it would take Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry and Ada Rehan to render it; you depend too much on the actors. Now when I write a play, if the leading man gets sick, or in any way fails me, I call up one of the ushers—and if he repeats my lines, the play will be a success.’ ” Edison laughed heartily at this, glanced at Kelly, and jerked his head toward Wilde: “He’s laarning—he’s laarnin’—he’s learnin’!”

  Mary Anderson, who was making her London debut at the Lyceum as Parthenia in Ingomar, wrote to William Winter, critic for the New York Tribune, “They say here [Vera] is the worst failure ever in America.… Willie Wilde said last night he was so sorry I had opened in such a bad play as Ingomar.… I should like Oscar to write as good a one.” For The Entr’acte, Alfred Bryan drew a cartoon of Willie and Oscar tearfully embracing after Vera closed.

  Wilde did not rush back to London; he accepted invitations to be entertained in Newport and Saratoga. He had Sarony photograph him with curly hair; he posed for a life-size oil portrait by Harper Pennington that must have pleased him, for he looked successful and Balzacian, right down to the ivory walking stick. A month later he was back at Charles Street with a roommate. Sherard had abandoned plans to take a job in the East in order to stay with Wilde. They had a fine address, but the beds were hard and the bathroom outside. They entertained with Oxford-style breakfasts, smoked Parascho cigarettes, and drank liqueurs into the afternoon.

  Reluctantly, Wilde returned to lecturing. A regional tour was planned to present “The House Beautiful” and the newly written “Impressions of America.” For a temperament that thrived on change, to be a lecturer was traveling backward, particularly when his commitment to Aestheticism was wavering. Wilde took a greater interest in his mother’s desire that he marry.

  *There was a drawback: the two stages went in only one direction. MacKaye then designed another stage to move in any direction; also to his credit were an adjustable proscenium to control the size of the stage opening, a system for projecting moving clouds, and, his most bizarre project, a “spectatorium” with twenty-five stages, on which he planned to perform Columbus’s voyage to America.

  *The phrase “heart’s brother” comes from Rodd’s poem “By the South Sea,” included in Rose Leaf: “Shall we get hence? O fair heart’s brother! / You are weary at heart with me, / We two alone in the world, no other: / Shall we go to our wide kind sea?”

  *In the 1930s, when A.J.A. Symons considered doing a biography of Wilde, Sherard wrote him: “The only reflection I made to myself on the morning when I heard of the Eden episode was to wonder how a well-fed, well-wined, full-blooded man as Oscar was at 29 could so control himself as to restrict his sexual contacts to once in 42 days.” It is clear that Sherard was not with Wilde that evening, but it is unclear whether he heard the story from Wilde or from someone else.

  PART THREE

  (1884–1891)

  Rebelling

  Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long some day to feel.… I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so.

  —Oscar Wilde to Henry Marillier

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mrs. Oscar Wilde

  The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life.

  —THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  An exceptional woman by all accounts, Constance Mary Lloyd met her future husband in the spring of 1881, when Wilde and his mother paid a social call on Dublin friends living in London. He saw a tall, slender woman with chestnut-colored hair coiled at the back of her neck. She was Irish on her mother’s side and made known to him her love for Keats. “By the by, Mama,” Wilde said suddenly on the way home, “I think of marrying that girl.” He had found an ideal wife. Lady Wilde immediately put the courtship protocols in motion, inviting Constance to her Saturday salon. The following week Wilde was asked to tea at Constance’s house; afterward she wrote her brother, “I can’t help liking him, because when he’s talking to me alone he’s never a bit affected, and speaks naturally, excepting that he uses better language than most people.”

  Otho Lloyd observed the couple closely; he recalled how Wilde’s eyes followed his sister around the room whenever they were separated. There was much to admire. Refined and highly intelligent, Constance Lloyd was twenty-three, had studied painting and music, had read Dante in the original. She was not a worldly woman, like Violet Hunt or Lillie Langtry; her sympathies were not with fashionable society but with social reform. An empathy with the less fortunate connected her to her own forlorn childhood, a time she wanted to share with Wilde. But he was indifferent to misfortune. Otho Lloyd said Wilde could not be bothered with people “who relived their tragedies.” In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry remarks after learning of Dorian’s traumatic childhood, “I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.… The less said about life’s sores the better.”

  Sympathy with pain was not the highest form of sympathy or intrinsic to Wilde’s philosophy of individualism as expressed in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend,” he wrote, “but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathize with a friend’s success.” Although he hints that one should sympathize with both, Wilde clearly sees pleasure as better because it “intensifies the sum of joy in the world.” He uses extreme examples—citing saints and martyr
s—for this argument, when all his future wife wanted was to share her joylessness as a child; they even had family secrets in common: their fathers had publicly disgraced themselves.

  To be sure, Ada and Horace Lloyd lacked certain nurturing instincts, but they were not Dickensian monsters. Constance’s grandfather John Horatio Lloyd, a queen’s counsel, was a successful barrister who handled legal matters for many of the British railway companies. Two sons followed him into the law, but the third, Constance’s father, bypassed the family firm to set up a practice specializing in arbitration.

  At twenty-seven he married Ada Atkinson, who came from a respectable Dublin family. The couple lived at Harewood Square in London, where Constance and Otho were born within two years of each other, Constance on January 2, 1858. Horace Lloyd was an absentee father, most often at his club or following the Prince of Wales to European playgrounds and spas, particularly Baden-Baden. There were signs of philandering, and Horace had been arrested for exposing himself to nursemaids in the garden in an inn of court. An embittered Ada turned away from her children. They turned to each other for emotional support.

  Constance was four when her maternal grandfather died and her grandmother became the family matriarch in Dublin. Constance grew up with an Irish sensibility and a love for the country, which she shared with Wilde. When she was sixteen, her father died of an undisclosed ailment at the age of forty-six. Ada found herself well-off and remarried four years later, but she made her life separate from that of her children. Otho was at Oxford, and Constance, then twenty, went to live with Grandfather Lloyd at 100 Lancaster Gate, a household sternly managed by his unmarried niece, Constance’s Aunt Emily.

  Just as Constance and Wilde were feeling comfortable together, Wilde left for America. He returned only to leave for Paris, then New York for the ill-fated opening of Vera. After a brief time back in London, he went to lecture in the provinces. Their courtship lasted three years. When Lillie Langtry was touring with her theatre company in America, Wilde wrote her that he was in love with “a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a blossom, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her.” (Whenever Wilde described beauty, he used images devoid of warmth; ivory was a favorite word.) “I am so anxious for you to know and to like her,” he continued, “it is horrid being so much away from her, but we telegraph to each other twice a day, and I rush back suddenly from the uttermost parts of the earth to see her for an hour, and do all the foolish things that wise lovers do.”*

  While Wilde converted provincial audiences to art and beauty, Constance was lovesick and lonely. She told her brother, “I am with Oscar when he is in town, and I am too miserable to do anything while he is away.” She thought him the greatest poet, the greatest conversationalist, and believed he would become the greatest playwright. As Wilde observed, “No man has any real success in this world unless he has women to back him.” Marriage would give him that. More than anything, Constance needed love, and Wilde—when so inclined—could be loving and attentive.

  Constance was flattered when Wilde asked her opinion of Vera. She knew the play had failed and wondered whether he was testing her critical abilities. She postponed a judgment until she reached Dublin, a visit coinciding with two of Wilde’s lectures. What she wrote balanced diplomacy with integrity, revealing a woman of insight and independence. She called Vera “a very good acting play” with “good dramatic situations” and praised “the passages on liberty and the impassioned parts,” but she found some of the minor dialogue “slightly halting or strained.”

  Violating Wilde’s edict about discussing pain, she continued: “The world surely is unjust and bitter to most of us. I am afraid you and I disagree in our opinions on art, for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality, whilst you say that they are distinct and separable things, and of course you have your knowledge to combat my ignorance with. Truly I am no judge that you should appeal to me for opinions, and even if I were, I know that I should judge you rather by your aims than by your work, and you would say I was wrong.” Constance was spirited. At the outset Wilde felt she could challenge him.

  On his return to Dublin in November, the first since his father’s death in 1876, Wilde stayed at the elegant Shelbourne Hotel, which was more costly than the usual touring stopovers: he obviously wanted to make an impression on the Atkinson relatives. During the visit, Constance found him “decidedly extra affected” but realized he was nervous. Wilde was being scrutinized as a serious suitor and was lecturing for the first time in his hometown—enough to make anyone insecure.

  He proposed on November 25 while in Ireland, in what was apparently a spontaneous desire to wed. But did he prepare a speech? Was it like the scene in Earnest when Jack asks Gwendolen, “Well … may I propose to you now?” And she replies, “I think it would be an admirable opportunity. And to spare you any possible disappointment, Mr. Worthing, I think it only fair to tell you quite frankly beforehand that I am fully determined to accept you.”

  All Constance told her brother was “Prepare yourself for an astounding piece of news! I am engaged to Oscar Wilde and am perfectly and insanely happy!” Otho welcomed Wilde as a new brother, telling him that “if Constance makes as good a wife as she has been a good sister to me your happiness is certain; she is staunch and true.” A curiously worded, though prescient, congratulation. But Constance warned her fiancé: “I am so cold and undemonstrative outwardly: you must read my heart and not my outward semblance if you wish to know how passionately I worship and love you.” In The Duchess of Padua, Wilde has the duchess tell her lover: “Do you not remember your own words: woman’s love makes angels of us men? / Well, men’s love makes women sufferers, who for their sakes bear all things.”

  Between Constance and Wilde there followed the wonder of passionate beginnings. “We are, of course, desperate in love,” Wilde wrote a friend. “I have been obliged to be away nearly all the time since our engagement, civilising the provinces by my remarkable lectures, but we telegraph to each other twice a day, and the telegraph clerks have become quite romantic in consequence. I hand in my messages, however, very sternly, and try to look as if ‘love’ was a cryptogram for ‘buy Grand Trunks’ and ‘darling’ a cypher for ‘sell at par.’ ”

  Constance’s replies were overly needy, expressing a vulnerability Wilde could not understand until he found himself reacting in a similar manner with Lord Alfred Douglas. “Do you believe that I do love you most passionately with all the strength of my heart and mind?” she wrote. “When I have you for my husband, I will hold you fast with chains of love and devotion so that you shall never leave me, or love anyone as long as I can love and comfort you.” Innocent, loyal, and romantic, Constance believed that if she loved Wilde to the depth of her being, she could save him from temptation. It was an attractive loyalty that made Wilde even more guilty when he betrayed her.

  At some point, judging from Constance’s few surviving letters, the engaged couple exchanged confidences about past relationships. She had surely heard about his friendship with Lillie Langtry. Since women with pasts fascinated Wilde, he made them central to his comedies, but their pasts were a bit more wicked than Constance’s admission that a previous engagement had been broken off by her fiancé. “I don’t think I shall ever be jealous,” she decided. “Certainly I am not jealous now of anyone: I trust in you for the present: I am content to let the past be buried, it does not belong to me.” Constance was a mystery and a mood. “She scarcely ever speaks,” Wilde remarked. “I am always wondering what her thoughts are like.”

  “It’s a ridiculous attachment,” twittered the Swallows about the Reed in “The Happy Prince”; “she has no money, and far too many relations.” Disapproving of the betrothal, Aunt Emily lapsed into dour silences whenever Wilde visited. They had a “cold and practical” family, Constance complained to Otho, adding, “I w
on’t stand opposition, so I hope they won’t try it.” When Violet Hunt heard the news, she told her diary, “I hear that Oscar’s fiancée only has £400 a year instead of £800. I expect to hear of that engagement being broken off.” Actually, Constance had £250 a year, which would increase to £900 at her grandfather’s death. But Grandfather Lloyd was not ready to give his blessing to a young man without solid prospects. Like Lady Bracknell, he asked about Wilde’s income and debts. Wilde admitted to owing £1,000. Lloyd wanted him to pay off £300 before setting a wedding date; then he would give them £5,000 against Constance’s inheritance to lease and furnish a home.

  Wilde’s family had no reservations. Willie began a letter to Constance “My Dear Little Sister,” referring to the fact that she was only nine months older than Isola would have been, if she were alive. “My dear old Boy,” he wrote his brother. “This is indeed good news, brave news, wise news, and altogether charming and amazing in the highest and most artistic sense.” Lady Wilde was practical: “What will you do in life? Where live?” she asked. “Meantime you must go on with your work. I enclose another offer for lectures. I would like you to have a small house in London and live the literary life and teach Constance to correct proofs and eventually go into Parliament.” Such a domestic scene was not what she had settled for with Sir William. She demanded a separate identity. Her feminist values, however, were abandoned when it came to her son, who needed a full-time wife to rise in politics.