Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Although the first time has been portrayed as a year earlier, no evidence documenting the date of the intimacy exists. A seduction in Wilde’s vermilion-trimmed study surrounded by Hellenic mementos was convenient. Secondhand gossip about the encounter drifted down after Wilde’s death, naming “little Robbie Ross” as the seducer. Wilde had long waited for such an embrace and did not resist. Only later would he understand that “a kiss may ruin a human life,” a line he gives to Mrs. Arbuthnot in A Woman of No Importance. Ross probably introduced Wilde to fellatio and the classical intercrural modes of copulation.*

  Now that he had accepted the same-sex desire that had followed him since youth, Wilde felt liberated, happy to be alive. He embarked on his most prolific period as a writer. From 1887 to 1891, he wrote reviews (sometimes weekly), worked two years as editor of a women’s magazine, published fairy tales, essays and dialogues, a novel, and a third play, Salomé. Acceptance of his sexuality was a more compelling incentive to work than creditors’ letters. He was also a criminal under British law, a status he had long fantasized about and would use in his fiction; hereafter, choosing among espousal, parental, and forbidden love would be complicated.

  Perfection, for Wilde, was love, passion, and friendship contained in one beautiful personality. Between men and women, he wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.” But what of the emotional bond of affection and trust that can support a woman indefinitely and would have sustained Constance? Wilde never understood that a platonic ideal is possible between opposite sexes. By the time he wrote An Ideal Husband, he realized that the only thing worse than an absolutely loveless marriage was a marriage in which there is love on one side only.

  “The one charm of marriage,” Lord Henry tells Dorian, “is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” For the three months that Ross lived with the Wildes, there was no need for such subterfuge; only discretion while at Tite Street was necessary. Ross went up to King’s College in 1888, involved himself with radical journalism, and saw little of Wilde until 1891. “I hope you are enjoying yourself at Cambridge—whatever people may say against Cambridge it is certainly the best preparatory school for Oxford that I know,” Wilde wrote. Ross sent Cyril and Vyvyan a white Persian kitten. “The children are enchanted with it,” Wilde wrote Ross, “and sit, one on each side of its basket, worshipping—It seems pensive—perhaps it is thinking of some prim rose garden in Persia, and wondering why it is kept in this chill England.” A white-on-white objet, the little kitten disappeared into the white carpet and the white Chippendale chairs.

  Willie Wilde excelled at granting favors and in the social aspects of journalism. It was big brother who had Wilde’s sonnets to Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry published in his paper, The World. Moving around Fleet Street from newspapers to magazines, Willie was lackadaisically employed by The Daily Telegraph, Punch, the Gentlewoman, and Vanity Fair. In 1880, he launched a satirical journal, Pan, which did not publish a second issue. Shaw, who never appreciated the power of popular journalism, said Willie “must be ruthlessly set aside by literary history as a vulgar journalist of no account.” He was wrong. Willie and his kind are a vanished breed, but once they were the stuff of legends in newsrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.

  No matter what the excesses of the night before, Willie performed well under deadline pressure, writing word after word, clearly and accurately, as quickly as he spoke. He was able, an admiring colleague said, “to sum up a situation, political or social, in a single moment” and then write a “clear, witty statement every time,” with a “pulsing sense of intellect” and “lambent though cynical Irish wit” that “seemed to stand out from the printed page.” His stories lacked epigrams, to avoid comparison with Oscar’s.

  Despite his talents, Willie played the self-deprecating stage Irishman. He once described his workday as beginning at noon, when he walks into the office and greets the editor: “ ‘Good morning, my dear Le Sage,’ who replies: ‘Good morning, my dear Wilde, have you an idea to-day?’ ‘Oh yes, Sir indeed I have. It is the anniversary of the penny postage stamp.’ ‘That is a delightful subject for a leader.’ ”

  Assignment approved, Willie eats a few oysters and drinks half a bottle of Chablis at Sweeting’s, strolls toward the park, considers going to the British Museum to grub up a lot of musty facts, but decides doing so “would be unworthy of a great leader writer.” By late afternoon he retires to his club, where he writes “three great meaty, solid paragraphs” that a messenger delivers into the hands of his editor. Willie loved the gratification of reading his words in print only hours after he wrote them. He could leave an event before midnight, file his story in an hour, return to finish the evening, and on the drive home buy the paper and read the account of the party he had just left.

  Being popular was an important quality on Fleet Street. A contemporary recalled how Willie entered the Café Royal to “peer round shortsightedly till he found a genial coterie.” Arthur M. Binstead, a journalist from the Pink ’Un, the racing paper, found him the “personification of good nature and irresponsibility,” observing that the “bother of earning a living proved highly repugnant to his really frank and sunny disposition.” Max Beerbohm, however, was repulsed by Willie’s appearance: “Quel monstre! Dark, oily, suspecte [sic] yet awfully like Oscar: he has Oscar’s coy, carnal smile & fatuous giggle & not a little of Oscar’s esprit. But he is awful—a veritable tragedy of family-likeness.”

  Sitting with his rowdy group of journalists, Willie was often embarrassed when his brother cut him on the way to his group in the Domino Room. The brothers were friendly when they met at Lady Wilde’s, where Willie lived, enjoying maternal approval, but Willie expected his brother to acknowledge him by inviting him into his social circle. “My Darling Boz. Forgive me,” he wrote after an argument. “We have hot tempers all of us, but we love each other.… I am much more lonely in the world than you are Oscar, & I feel things—that’s all.” Willie mobilized his mother to make Oscar respect him. In a letter she pointedly asked: “Did you read Willie on soda water—it is so brilliant?” With the best intentions, Lady Wilde tried but failed to stimulate in Oscar appreciation for Willie as a writer; thus the dream of her sons conquering the literary world hand in hand—like so many of her dreams—died.

  Shaw thought journalism vulgar, and Wilde agreed. In “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert observes: “As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.” After all, “journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.” In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde again attacks: “In the old days men had the rack, now they have the Press.” And in “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” perhaps apropos of Willie: “To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers.”

  Mostly Wilde attacked journalism as the adversary of the artist. In “The Soul of Man,” he compliments France as a country where “they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.” Still, as an artist, Wilde had benefited from the press’s scrutiny; in fact, publicity (satirical or not) was largely responsible for his success. From the time he put on his cello coat and cultivated his aesthetic pose, he was caricatured in art and words. By creating his aesthetic persona, Punch made him visible and secured his American tour. Wilde did not like to admit it, but publicity motivated him to live up to his reputation—or change it.

  At Tite Street, Wilde balanced his contrary needs with a family life that he truly enjoyed. He was a delighted—and devoted—father who liked nothing better than to become a child again and play in the nursery with his sons. Lecturing, however, was repetitive. How much longer could he inspire beauty in the provinces? As long as
there was no other work, he continued to travel and return home to greet Constance and the children, meet his friends at the Café Royal, write some reviews, then go off to King’s Cross and the north. His fee was five pounds a lecture, decent money (if not spent at restaurants), but it was Constance’s income that ran the household.

  Eventually, Wilde, like every other man before and after him, discovered that there is an inevitable—and unenviable—sameness to marriage. Every morning he awoke to a day pretty much like the day before. His favorite ritual was bathing. In “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” the title character prepares for his bath: “The light stole softly from above, through thick slabs of transparent onyx, and the water in the marble tank glimmered like a moonstone. He plunged hastily in, till the cool ripples touched throat and hair, and then dipped his head right under, as though he would have wiped away the stain of some shameful memory. When he stepped out he felt almost at peace.”

  Wilde’s rites were less aristocratic but nonetheless satisfying. A small table next to the tub was set with a box of cigarettes and a large bowl for an ashtray. Lighting a cigarette, he inhaled once or twice, extinguished it, and lit another. Smoke and steam enveloped him in a fog of tranquillity; he spent hours soaking, smoking, and silently writing in his head. Sometimes he so delighted himself that he laughed aloud when he mounted a bejeweled epigram in its setting. Thinking preceded speech, or, as he said, “talk itself is a sort of spiritualized action.” Christ spoke in proverbs and parables; Wilde called them paradoxes or prose poems. Christ had his cult, and Wilde had his.

  • • •

  IRONICALLY, VULGAR JOURNALISM was drawing Wilde deeper into its disreputable bowels; with lecture bookings declining, he depended on freelance income. From 1887 to 1891, he wrote nearly a hundred anonymous reviews for W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette and was read less frequently in Court and Society Review. Stead, a sex-obsessed zealot who hounded adulterous politicians and believed that marital fidelity was the pinnacle of British life, became famous for a sensational series of articles on child prostitution. Entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” the series influenced passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent to sixteen and proscribed all public and private homosexual acts—it was the law that sent Wilde to prison.

  For the Gazette, Wilde reviewed books by unknown authors or literary figures, a former tutor or a false friend—everything from manuals and cookbooks to poetry and first novels. After anointing the author of a marriage guide “the Murray of matrimony and the Baedeker of bliss,” Wilde said he should have received a royalty since the quotation was used so frequently in advertising. His former disciple James Rennell Rodd had his second volume of poetry dismissed as “healthy and harmless.” Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought: From the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest was roundly criticized. Wilde complained that his Trinity mentor “might have made his book a work of solid and enduring interest, but he has chosen to give it a merely ephemeral value, and to substitute for the scientific temper of the true historian the prejudice, the flippancy, and the violence of the platform partisan.” Writing of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, he reproached the author for being at the mercy of words and for lacking “any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject.”

  Although unsigned, Wilde’s reviews have signature hallmarks of humor and erudition. He describes “The Chronicle of Mites” as “a mock-heroic poem about the inhabitants of a decaying cheese, who speculate about the origin of their species and hold learned discussions upon the meaning of Evolution and the Gospel according to Darwin. This cheese epic is a rather unsavoury production, and the style is, at times, so monstrous and so realistic that the author should be called the Gorgon-Zola of literature.”

  A cookery book gets an appetizing send-off: “A man can live for three days without bread, but no man can live for one day without poetry, was an aphorism of Baudelaire’s: you can live without pictures and music, but you can’t live without eating, says the author of ‘Dinners and Dishes’: and this latter view is no doubt the more popular. Who indeed, in these degenerate days, would hesitate between an ode and an omelette, a sonnet and a salmis?”

  Central to Wilde’s growth as a thinker, this freelance period helped to formulate his theories of literary criticism. He was moving away from Matthew Arnold’s dictum that criticism should see the work as it is toward a personal approach that sees the work as it really is not. Wilde ranked the critic with the artist: it takes an artist to praise, he said, but anyone can pick something apart. Wilde was amused “by the silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work.” The critic’s duty is to educate the public and awaken the age to new ideas and desires. These themes would coalesce in a book of criticism, Intentions, published in 1891.

  Through his work for the Gazette, Wilde entered another house of journalism. In November 1887, the first issue of The Woman’s World appeared with “Edited by Oscar Wilde” printed in large black letters on a pink cover. Wilde’s lively articles had impressed Thomas Wemyss Reid, new general manager of Cassell & Company publishers, who asked him to look over back issues and send him ideas on how to revitalize Cassell’s new publication The Lady’s World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society.

  Ahead of his time, Wilde rejected the stale formula of fashion, food, and decoration. The magazine was “too feminine, and not sufficiently womanly,” he wrote Reid, too similar to Queen and Lady’s Pictorial; it had a “taint of vulgarity”; it was not a magazine that “aims at being the organ of women of intellect, culture, and position.” Reid knew the magazine had problems, and Wilde found as many as possible, suggesting articles dealing with what women think and feel written by notable personalities. Wilde instinctively knew that celebrities sell magazines. He presented Reid with a modern manifesto and earned his first—and only—full-time job, which he held from May 1887 to October 1889. His salary was six pounds a week, but Wilde saw benefits beyond a steady income.

  An astute Shaw impudently observed that Wilde was a “snob to the marrow of his being.” Everything Wilde did was calculated to enhance his comfort or prestige. As editor of a woman’s magazine, he could meet the aristocracy, flattering the countesses and ladies with promises of bylines and full-page illustrations. An editor molds a publication in his own image and that of his friends; since Wilde was partial to the peerage, he wrote down a list of potential contributors, including Lady Archibald Campbell, Lady Dorothy Nevill, the queen of Rumania (Carmen Sylva), Violet Fane, Mrs. Comyns Carr, Olive Schreiner, Mrs. William Bell Scott, Marie Corelli, Lucy Garnett, Mrs. Alfred Hunt and her daughter Violet, his mother, and his wife.*

  “Tomorrow I start for Oxford to arrange about Lady Margaret’s article, and to meet some women of ability. We must have the Universities on our side,” Wilde wrote Reid. “On Monday I have a meeting at Mrs. Jeune’s.… I hope that Lady Salisbury will be there.… I have already engaged Lady Greville … and will go to Cambridge before the end of the Month.… I also wish to go to Paris to see Madame Adam about a letter every two months. I find personal interviews necessary.” To potential contributors, he stressed that his magazine would be quite different from The Lady’s Worlds-which, he said, seemed “to have been a very vulgar, trivial, and stupid production, with its silly gossip about silly people, and its social inanities.”

  The Woman’s World was different in appearance and content; it reflected Wilde’s aesthetic interests, but its intellectual thrust could be ponderous. Some articles ran to four thousand words. The old gossip column was replaced with Wilde’s compendium of literary notes on recent books. He designed a new cover, discarding the green wrapper and statuary art for pink paper, red ink, and a sensuous William Morris-style design of undulating vine leaves supported by serpentine caryatids.

  Finding writers gave him the pleasant opportunity of getting back in touch with old friends such
as Nellie Sickert, sister of the painter, whom Wilde met when she was only a girl and susceptible to his malarkey. She recalled how he talked nonsense until he saw a skeptical frown on her face and with mock sadness said, “Well, it’s as good as true.” He knew her well enough to admit his insecurity. “I hope I will be able to make it a success,” he wrote, “but I am not allowed as free a hand as I would like.” Still at university, Sickert wrote an education article and Wilde paid her a guinea—a shilling more than the standard pound—a page because the piece was her first paid journalism. Wilde believed that artists should be paid and paid well. In “The Happy Prince,” the Swallow delivers one of the statue’s sapphire-jeweled eyes to a poor playwright, who delightedly cries: “I am beginning to be appreciated.”

  Wilde’s letters to contributors were patient, cajoling, and encouraging—sometimes all three. “I do not propose at present to have any notices of current theatrical events. We have to go to press six weeks before issue, on account of the illustrations,” he replied to a query. Instead he asked the author to write three thousand words on any subject and let him know what she was doing, “as I should not like it to clash with any other article.” He wrote asking that Queen Victoria send her early verses. An amused queen replied, “Really what will people not say and invent. Never cd [could] the Queen in her whole life write one line of poetry serious or comic or make a Rhyme even. This is therefore all invention & a myth.”

  Wilde was an excellent editor. He knew that even the most confident author needed praise and encouragement—and frequently. He advised Violet Fane: “I think the sonnet is quite clear as it stands. No lover could possibly miss the allusion to the old proverb about the gorse and kissing time, and it is only for lovers that poets write. Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art. If the public cannot understand the line, well—they cannot understand it.”* He praised Harriet Hamilton King: “I have just been reading again your poem about Nicotera—what a wonderful picture of the sea it holds! Keats even would have envied you your ‘purple barge, in purple shadow on the seas.’ Such colour and music together are rare.”