Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  • • •

  The couple leased a four-story house at 16 (now 34) Tite Street, at the opposite end from where Wilde and Frank Miles had lived. Chelsea had become a popular area with the building of the Embankment in 1771—sewage no longer washed up to the doorways. Carlyle, Rossetti, and Whistler made Chelsea their home. Bram and Florence Stoker lived close by, at 17 St. Leonard’s Terrace. John Singer Sargent was a future neighbor. Edward William Godwin, who renovated Chelsea houses for Miles and Whistler, was hired to refurbish the interior; the Victorian row-house exterior remained as monotonous as its neighbors’.

  The wedding was a private ceremony, held on May 29, 1884, in St. James’s Church, Sussex Gardens. Constance’s wedding dress, designed by Wilde in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, was cowslip yellow satin with a high neck and puff sleeves; around her waist was a silver girdle, a gift from the groom, who also fashioned the interlocking wedding rings. A veil of saffron-colored gauze, embroidered with pearls, was held by a crown of myrtle leaves, the sacred plant of Venus. She carried a bouquet of white lilies and ferns. The six bridesmaids, all Constance’s cousins, wore tunic dresses in shades of blue, yellow, and green.

  The Irish Times reported that the bridegroom with his curled hair “looked more like George IV than usual.” Lady Wilde wore gray satin, with matching chenille-fringed trim, and a broad-brimmed hat accented by a long ostrich plume, tilted in the style of the Duchess of Devonshire. At the reception, the eighty-five-year-old Lloyd patriarch scrutinized the newest family member in his blue morning dress and gray trousers. Wilde looked prosperous and dignified, but he still wore his ornate rings.

  Following a wedding breakfast the next day, the couple departed on the boat train for Paris. Wilde crossed to the Right Bank and the Hôtel Wagram on the rue de Rivoli for his honeymoon. The suite overlooking the Tuileries was filled with flowers for their arrival. One of the first to offer congratulations was Robert Sherard, who joined the bridegroom for a walk. An ebullient Wilde excitedly started to describe the wedding night. “It’s so wonderful when a young virgin”—an embarrassed Sherard stopped him.

  A few days later the Morning News interviewed Wilde as he lay stretched out on a sofa surrounded by books. He was reading Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, a book he often revisited. “For my part, I think the most exquisite thing in reading is the pleasure of forgetfulness,” he said. “It is so nice to think there are some books you cared for so much at a certain epoch in your life and do not care for now. There is a positive delight in ‘cutting’ an author and feeling I have got beyond him.” He went on to praise Sarah Bernhardt’s Macbeth, which the Wildes had seen several times. “There is nothing like it on our stage, and it is her finest creation. I say her creation deliberately, because to my mind it is utterly impertinent to talk of Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Shakespeare’s Othello. Shakespeare is only one of the parties. The second is the artiste through whose mind it passes.”

  While Constance read Hugo’s Les Misérables, Wilde picked up the recently published À rebours, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which became his bible of Decadence. It arrived in stores two weeks before Wilde’s honeymoon and was the talk of Paris. In its hero, Des Esseintes, whose passions exceed Paterian ecstasy, Wilde found a nascent Dorian Gray. Dorian reads a book assumed to be À rebours, amazed that the hero was “a kind of pre-figuring type of himself. And indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.” Dorian Gray did the same for Wilde.

  The hotel catered the couple’s first dinner party, much to Constance’s relief. As she told Otho, “Everything is sure to go right in a hotel. I am rather looking forward to it.” Guests included the artists John Singer Sargent and John Donoghue, the French critic Paul Bourget, and Henrietta Reubell, a wealthy American with a Parisian salon. After a quiet week in Dieppe, enjoying the sea air and walking along the promenade, the couple returned to London in late June to find Tite Street far from habitable. The five thousand pounds was gone, and Wilde increased his debt to seventeen hundred pounds. The newlyweds shuttled in and out of hotels and lodgings, a stressful beginning to married life. Not only was Godwin behind schedule but the contractors were overcharging, and litigation followed. On July 18, 1884, Grandfather Lloyd died, and Constance received her inheritance.

  Wilde substituted as Vanity Fair’s drama critic when his brother went on holiday, and he began another lecture tour of the provinces. From Edinburgh, he lovingly wrote his wife: “Here am I, and you at the Antipodes. O execrable facts, that keep our lips from kissing, though our souls are One.… I feel your fingers in my hair, and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some sweet ecstasy with yours. I feel incomplete without you.” What more wonderful thought could a husband have than “I feel incomplete without you.” Although some saw the marriage as artificial (“some deliberate artistic composition,” said Yeats), they never looked closely enough to see the depth of Wilde’s passion during those first years.

  In January 1885, what Wilde called “the House Beautiful” was finally ready, remarkable not for its exterior—largely unchanged today—but for its interior decoration, which Wilde said matched the pure color of his speech. No pictures survive, but the rooms are described in various memoirs. The dining room was painted in different shades of white, with white curtains embroidered in yellow silk. Wilde pronounced it “absolutely delightful.” There were no Morris designs to be seen. A room with wallpaper makes the eye restless, Wilde said. In general all wallpaper offended him. “Modern wallpaper is so bad,” he said in a lecture, “that a boy brought up under its influence could allege it as a justification for turning to a life of crime.” One of his last comments was that he and his hotel wallpaper were “fighting a duel to the death. Decidedly one of us will have to go.”

  In the all-white drawing room, rare engravings and etchings, including a Venetian scene by Whistler, formed a deep frieze along the walls. The only touches of color were two Japanese feathers inserted into the plaster ceiling. Hanging over the carved mantelpiece, also painted white, was a gilt-copper bas-relief of a young girl by John Donoghue, which illustrated “Requiescat,” Wilde’s poem to his sister, Isola. The study was buttercup yellow with lacquered vermilion woodwork. A favorite piece was a satiny ivory table, so soft and beautiful that Wilde wanted to engrave his sonnets on it. “Quill pens and notepaper are only good enough for bills of lading. A sonnet should always look well,” he said.

  Wilde loved objects: classical statues, blue-and-white china, paintings, gilt-embossed books, but he lacked the obsession—not to mention the funds and discipline—for acquiring them, so he never became a true collector. Most often his mementos were also memories: a statue he bought in Greece during the trip with Mahaffy; a painting from Rome to remind him of David Hunter Blair, a Monticelli, a Japanese painting of children at play, a drawing of Eros by Simeon Solomon, and a reproduction of Praxiteles’ bust of Hermes. His most prestigious item was Thomas Carlyle’s writing table, which the historian’s mother gave Carlyle for his rooms at Edinburgh University.

  Yeats noticed a red lampshade positioned over a terra-cotta classical figure on the center of a red cloth covering a white table. Such minimalist accents blended into rooms that were comfortable and lacked clutter, that were light and airy rather than dark with Victorian velvet and fringe. Yeats said Wilde led an imaginary life and “perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all that he had known in childhood and youth. He never put off completely his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house and to remember that he had dined yesterday with a Duchess.” Merrion Square, with its curtained windows and dirty teacups, was the past.

  Observers thought Constance a remarkably quiet and demure wife for an extrovert like Wilde, not understanding that he preferred a listener. She was a pleasant hostess when she felt confident that the evening was going well, but afterward worried that h
er guests did not enjoy themselves, displaying all the familiar entertaining anxieties. Wilde sparkled at dinner parties, went to the theatre several times a week, and thought his social life would remain the same after marriage. Evenings at home without guests began to bore him; a gregarious Irishman, he needed to be around more than one other person to enjoy himself. Constance, however, was happy to nest and enjoy their beautiful home.

  When Mary Anderson came to town, Wilde wanted to see her Romeo and Juliet. He had not enjoyed it the first time in New York, even though William Winter, dean of American drama critics, called her Juliet “the most essentially womanlike and splendidly tragical.” Wilde should have resented Anderson’s rejection of The Duchess, but he seldom held grudges and never for long. Following the performance, he sent his congratulations—“What was a bud has grown to a blossom, and those who admired you as a woman must reverence you now as an artist”—but he did exaggerate when he compared her with Bernhardt. He had taken only a brief hiatus from playwriting and wanted all the actresses indebted to him when he returned.

  Dressed in green, the Wildes were a striking couple at a Grosvenor Gallery private view. One of his favorite colors, along with yellow and vermilion (he hated mauve and magenta), green signaled an opportunity to wear the beloved fur-trimmed overcoat. Constance wore a velvet ensemble in the same Lincoln green under a shawl embroidered with iridescent beads. In “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” Wilde’s dandy poisoner has “that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.” Whether consciously or unconsciously, Wilde made Constance an extension of himself, as he had with Lillie Langtry. As usual, his ideal woman was an illusion, an artifice, a costumed statue. “For his sake she posed in Grecian, early Venetian, Medieval, Caroline, Dutch, and Directoire and she did not like it a bit,” wrote one biographer.

  Their first child was born within a year of the wedding. “ ‘My wife has a cold’ but in about a month will be over it,” Wilde wrote Godwin. “I hope it is a boy cold, but will love whatever the gods send.” On June 5, 1885, Constance gave birth to a son, who was christened Cyril Wilde. There were no middle names, a change from his father’s grandeur. The parents asked the polymath Edward Heron-Allen to cast Cyril’s horoscope. What was read in the stars under his sign of Gemini is not known, but Wilde put great stock in omens. “I love superstitions, they are the colour element of thought and imagination,” he said. “They are the opponents of common sense.”

  Wilde observed Cyril as every new father observes his child—with disbelief. He told Norman Forbes-Robertson, “The baby is wonderful: it has a bridge to its nose! which the nurse says is a proof of genius! It also has a superb voice, which it freely exercises: its style is essentially Wagnerian.” Cyril was presented with a brother on November 5, 1886. He was baptized Vyvyan Oscar Beresford. His parents spelled it Vivian; the provenance of Beresford remains a mystery. Wilde once said, “Every one has some secret reason for christening a child.”

  Because both pregnancies were difficult, Constance was often confined to bed. Unprepared for the change in his wife’s physical appearance, Wilde found her unattractive: the goddess had become too real. Along with Baudelaire, Wilde believed that a woman should appear magical, a golden idol ready to dazzle men, and to be worshiped. But ugliness was a malady. “Desire is killed by maternity,” he said, “passion buried in conception.” If this was the consequence of love, he reasoned that women were not made for passion, only for motherhood. He told Sherard that illness and suffering inspired him with repulsion. “A man with the toothache ought, I know, to have my sympathy, for it is a terrible pain. Well, he fills me with nothing but aversion.”

  For Constance, however, the discomfort and pain of pregnancy and childbirth were quickly forgotten. Cyril was the family favorite, who, she wrote a friend, “chatters all day long and amuses me so much.” But he later developed what may have been rheumatic fever or an undiagnosed kind of nonparalytic polio. Constance said he was “growing crooked” and needed massage and exercise. As to temperament, Cyril was “very affectionate and tremendously self-willed, an exceedingly clever boy, but he does not give his mind to anything much yet.” Vyvyan was “sharper and quicker.” Constance accepted that her younger son was the clever one and that Cyril had inherited the “Irish gift of speaking well altho’ he has not got the Irish facility of turning his hand to anything.”

  At the end of November 1885, when Cyril was five months old, Wilde received a letter from Henry (Harry) Currie Marillier. It was a pleasant surprise and an opportunity to recall the days at Salisbury Street, when Marillier, a student at Christ’s Hospital, lived in the basement and brought Wilde his morning coffee to earn a few pence. Now a classics student at Cambridge, he invited Wilde to a production of Eumenides. Appreciating the diversion from domesticity, Wilde encouraged a friendship. Marillier visited Tite Street, and the two talked of Keats, Poe, and Baudelaire. “I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself,” Wilde wrote him, “and you are infinitely young.”

  A few months later, when Wilde was in Glasgow for a lecture, he unburdened himself. The artistic life, he told Marillier, was “a long and lovely suicide.” He observed that “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.” A return to Oxford in February 1886, for the opening of the New Theatre, brought back memories. “Young Oxonians are very delightful, so Greek and graceful and uneducated,” he solemnized, “they have profiles but no philosophy.” The word profile was used by Wilde to identify any desirable youth.

  Wilde was restless. “I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience,” he told Marillier, “and I know there is no such thing as a new experience.” In Dorian Gray, he writes about having one great encounter to repeat over and over. Loving a woman was not that involvement. Constance no longer made him feel complete.

  *Langtry was not in England for the wedding, and it is unclear when Wilde introduced his Artemis (protector of the young and virgin goddess of the hunt) to the actress. She sent them tickets to Peril in April 1885, but Constance was pregnant and Wilde returned them, suggesting she come to tea; they both attended a matinee of The Lady of Lyons on March 23, 1886.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Crossing Over

  “Know thyself!” was written over the portal of the antique world.

  Over the portal of the new world “Be thyself” shall be written.

  And the message of Christ to man was simply “Be thyself.”

  That is the secret of Christ.

  —“THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM”

  Wilde loved Constance and had married her with the intention of spending a long and happy life with her; he never anticipated how her motherhood would disturb his aesthetic sensibilities or how domesticity could alter his formerly entertaining bachelor life. Lady Bracknell understood: “I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing,” she tells Jack. “Which do you know?” Jack hesitates before replying: “I know nothing, Lady Bracknell.” “I am pleased to hear it,” she responds. “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.” Lady Bracknell was not speaking of sexual confusion or curiosity, but Wilde’s ignorance was confounded and complicated by the presence of Robert “Robbie” Baldwin Ross.

  Seventeen years old, fifteen years younger than Wilde, a Canadian by heritage, Ross was born in Tours, France, during a stay there for his father’s health. John Ross was an attorney, active in Canadian politics as speaker of the Senate, and the son-in-law of Robert Baldwin, first prime minister of Upper Canada. He died when Robbie was two, and the boy’s mother moved the family to England to be educated. Within two years, she remarried a fellow Canadian and settled at 85 Onslow Square, London. Ross was spoiled by his two older s
isters. It was a close and loving family until Ross admitted his same-sex preferences.

  Through a combination of tutors, schools, travel, and nurture, Ross had come to look and act mature beyond his years, as if he had grown old in the womb. He was not one of Wilde’s graceful profiles. Wilde said he had the face of Puck—but photographs show him looking more like a kindly ferret. Ultimately Ross became known as Wilde’s “devoted friend” and was named his literary executor and editor of the fourteen-volume edition of Wilde’s works published in 1908. He secured the copyrights for the estate and had immense power in molding Wilde’s literary reputation. But he lacked emotional insight into Wilde and never understood his obsession for Douglas. Some of the more dubious stories about Wilde trace back to Ross: the prostitute visit at Oxford that resulted in syphilis and the ghastly description of Wilde’s body exploding on his deathbed.

  When Wilde and Ross first met is not known, but by 1887 Ross was friendly enough with the Wildes to stay at Tite Street as a paying guest while his mother went abroad. Constance liked him, and he was fond of Cyril and Vyvyan. With Wilde’s help, Ross prepared for his Cambridge entrance examination; when Wilde was away lecturing, Ross dined with Constance. A practicing homosexual, Ross recognized Wilde’s need to fulfill his nature. They became lovers.