Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Thrice weekly he rode the underground from Chelsea’s Sloane Square to Charing Cross; from there he walked up the Strand and Fleet Street to Ludgate Circus, passing on the left the street of the Old Bailey, where he would be tried in 1895, and up to Ludgate Hill. The process of getting to his office—arising early and moving among jostling crowds—was initially appealing. “Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality,” he said. Arriving at the civilized hour of eleven, he greeted Arthur Fish, his assistant editor and a career journalist at Cassell’s.

  That Wilde was not allowed to smoke in the office made each hour torture; he was not one to take a quick puff at the pub downstairs; in fact, he abhorred pubs and bars and all places where people drank standing up instead of sitting comfortably at a café table. Forbidden cigarettes in prison, he philosophically said in a moment of untruth: “You make up your mind that you cannot smoke, and you resign yourself to the inevitable with ease.” But anyone who knew Wilde knew the difficulties he had with self-discipline.

  He left the office earlier and earlier to spend the remainder of the day pretending to be an editor at the Café Royal. Younger by six years and in awe of Wilde, Fish made excuses for his boss’s absences. By the sound of Wilde’s step, Fish determined whether he would get to work or postpone everything. On a bad day, Wilde sighed heavily and asked, “Is it necessary to settle anything today?” If not, he put on his hat and left. In the spring, Fish found him more cheerful, entering the office “with epigrammatic brightness” to illuminate a dull room.

  Eventually he just dropped in. His column “Literary and Other Notes” was neglected (he wrote only eleven during his editorship). Exaggerating, of course, Wilde told W. E. Henley, another Cassell editor, that he had stopped answering letters. “I have known men come to London full of bright prospects,” he explained, “and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters.” Wilde kept the contributors happy, but after a year his letters lost their personal touch. One Cassell editor called him “so indolent but such a genius.” Wilde’s major regret in life was always his indolence.

  Inevitably, there were complaints about missed columns and lower circulation. Wilde worked harder for a while but soon slacked off; the consistency necessary for office work mystified—and eluded—him. As sales continued to slide, the publishers reverted to the old emphasis on fashion. In March 1889, Wilde received a six-month termination notice. One of his last contributions was a book review on the history of embroidery and lace. The Woman’s World folded the following year.

  Typifying Wilde’s generosity to underlings, he wrote to Fish on his marriage that there are “only two things in the world of any importance, Love and Art; you have both; they must never leave you.” On his departure, Wilde wrote to Reid, thanking him and his staff for their courtesy and expertise; he singled out Fish as “a most reliable and intelligent subeditor.” Reid was sorry to see Wilde leave: he was amusing to have around the office, when he was there.

  Beyond being a wife and mother, Constance published two children’s books—Grandma’s Stories and A Long Time Ago—and wrote unsigned theatre reviews and dramatic notes for such publications as Lady’s Pictorial, where she reported on the Lyceum’s end-of-season banquet onstage, which the Wildes attended. Determined to make her husband proud, Constance overcame her shyness and fear of public speaking. W. T. Stead predicted that she would soon be one of the popular “platform ladies.” She advocated teaching children the evils of war at a conference sponsored by the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association in April 1888.

  She joined the Rational Dress Society and edited its Gazette, a publication dedicated to eliminating tight-laced corsets, bustles, and high heels. In an article on the correct attire for women writers, she suggested “no false coils or frizzy fringe on the brow to heat the temples and mar the cool logic of thought.” Opponents blamed breath-constricting corsets for everything from liver malfunctions and stomach ulcers to chronic constipation. An example of healthy dress was a loose-fitting cashmere tunic that Constance wore over matching trousers.

  • • •

  The Wildes were fascinated with chiromancy (palm reading), spiritualism, mesmerism, and phrenology. Wilde believed in the evil eye and all the wondrous Irish superstitions that his parents had collected and published. He read books of magic and collected spells and potions, explaining to Yeats that the best way to eliminate an enemy is to “carve a Cerberus upon an emerald and put it in the oil of a lamp and carry it into a room where your enemy is, two new heads will come upon his shoulders and all three devour one another.”

  All over London groups met to explore the occult. Wilde preferred palmistry, which drives the plot of “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” Listening to pontificators was not for him, but he encouraged Constance’s interests. She attended meetings of the Theosophical Society, begun by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the great Victorian eccentrics, who is credited with bringing the word occultism into common use. The society encouraged unconventional living, including homosexual acts, and Madame Blavatsky set the tone with demonstrative affection for her chief disciple, Annie Besant, the socialist and free thinker. Perhaps in reaction to this atmosphere, Constance moved on to a more mystical group, called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which practiced ritual magic.

  Founded by a London coroner and prominent Rosicrucian Freemason named William Wynn Westcott, the Golden Dawn attracted magicians, charlatans, and eccentrics of all kinds, as well as W. B. Yeats and Annie Horniman, founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Its enduring legacy was occult fiction, examinations of the dark side of life. At the initiation ceremony in 1888, Constance wore a black tunic with a cord wound three times around the waist and red shoes; she chose as a motto Qui patitur vincit: “He who suffers, conquers.” A year later she reached the rank of Philosophus, the highest grade in the outer order, and was required to move up to the secretive second level, which ran the organization. By that time it was 1890; with the publication of Dorian Gray, she sadly told a friend, “No one will speak to us.” She was learning the meaning of her intuitive motto.

  • • •

  Never imprisoned by maturity, Wilde was a true senachi, the name given to legendary Irish storytellers. He loved the enchanted nonsense of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. Now he had two wide-awake sons to entertain with his tales, which he called “studies in prose,” written “partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” Wilde was little more than an overgrown child himself. His younger son, Vyvyan, in his book Son of Oscar Wilde, recalled how his father would burst into the nursery and go down on all fours, “being in turn a lion, a wolf, a horse.” Wilde mended the toys broken in such rambunctious play and, when he grew tired of playing, told fairy stories or tales of adventure, of which he had a never-ending supply. Cyril once asked why “The Selfish Giant” brought tears to his father’s eyes; Wilde replied that “really beautiful things always made him cry.”

  Not all the sleepy-time stories were recorded, but Wilde did publish The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888. The volume excited the critics, and for the first time he was taken seriously as a writer. One reviewer favorably compared him with Hans Christian Andersen; another called the bitter satire different from Andersen; yet another said the stories revealed Wilde’s genius “at its best.” Ellen Terry told Wilde that she wanted to read one of his tales “some day to NICE people—or even NOT nice people, and MAKE ’em nice.”

  In 1887 Court and Society Review published “The Canterville Ghost” and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” both tales of redemption with happy endings. Virginia, the young American heroine of “The Canterville Ghost,” learns from her experience with the ghost “what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both.” In the second story, Wilde explores the notion of the artistic impulse seeking expression through the cr
iminal, a theme he returned to in “Pen, Pencil and Poison.”

  “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” combines Wilde’s interest in aristocratic character, criminality, and chiromancy. Count Louis Hamon, known as Cheiro, was London’s foremost palm reader; in addition to seeing clients privately, he entertained at fashionable parties like the one described in the story. The tale, like much of Wilde’s fiction, started out with the dull working title “George Ellison and the Palmist”; as usual, Wilde told this story of destiny fulfilled to the artist W. Graham Robertson during a walk in the country. Robertson later complained that Wilde’s tales “lost much of their charm” when written out. Yeats reviewed the story and called it “amusing enough.”

  Lord Arthur commits murder as an act of duty so that he can wed his fiancée without fear of scandal. At first he does not know what his fortune portends: “Could it be that written on his hand, in characters that he could not read himself, but that another could decipher, was some fearful secret of sin, some blood-red sign of crime?” According to Cheiro’s palmistry textbook, the hand of such a murderer would have a short, thick thumb and a short, thick, and red headline on the palm. Realizing his destiny, Lord Arthur fears that he will “wake the slumbering city from its dreams.” Wilde continues this ambiguous coding in a scene where Lord Arthur observes two men reading a billboard: “An odd feeling of curiosity stirred him, and he crossed over.” Wilde too had “crossed over” into a new world, one quite different from the Hellenic ideal of his university days. Now he made each lingering gaze at a youth a dangerous adventure by which he awoke London and the world.

  *Intercrural unions appear frequently on ancient painted Greek vases. Scenes often depict a bearded older man facing a shorter, clean-shaven youth. The older man has his hands around his partner’s waist, his head below his shoulder, his knees bent, and is thrusting his penis between the youth’s thighs. Sometimes the couple is wrapped in a single cloak, recalling Alcibiades’ attempt to seduce Socrates by creeping under his blanket.

  *Constance appropriately contributed articles titled “Children’s Dress in This Century” and “Muffs”; his mother contributed the poem “Historic Women”; neither of the Hunts published in the magazine.

  *Wilde refers to this line in “Hazely Heath”: “The yellow gorse, like kissing-time—or death,” which refers to the proverb “When gorse is out of bloom, kissing is out of favour.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Enemies and Friends

  There are terrible temptations that it required strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage.

  —AN IDEAL HUSBAND

  In a time of hirsute chins, a perpetually clean-shaven Wilde inspected his reflected profile every morning and asked whether it was the portrait of a “criminal.” The mirror assured him it was the face of an artist-criminal with the mask of a genius. A satisfying answer. Masks tell more than faces. During the closing years of the eighties, driven by furtiveness, Wilde worked at literature with a vengeance, producing four notable essays published in The Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century, and later collected as Intentions.

  The energy released by combining the artist with the criminal fascinated him. In “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” ostensibly a biographical essay on the writer-painter Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (also a forger and serial killer), Wilde was less interested in retelling a well-known story than in promoting his views on crime and creativity. Of Wainewright he said that “his crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked,” a description that sounds autobiographical. “The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose.”

  As Wilde variously demonstrated in his plays, interesting personalities are created out of sin, and wickedness exists so that good people can find others attractive. In “Shakespeare and Stage Costume” (retitled “The Truth of Masks”), Wilde starts out discussing the need for authentic costume design, but at issue is his theory that allows for contradictory principles. “A Truth in art,” he writes, “is that whose contradictory is also true,” and “The Truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.” Sin returns in “The Critic as Artist,” a two-part dialogue between Gilbert and Ernest. “What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress,” explains Gilbert. “Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race.”

  Discussing why the creative ranks over the critical, Ernest suggests abolishing critics and the magazines that publish “the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.” Gilbert points out that the critical spirit is Greek and that “if the Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world.” Ernest sympathizes because “the creative faculty is higher than the critical.” But without the critical, Gilbert rejoins, there is no artistic creation.

  The highest criticism, Gilbert argues in Wilde’s voice, is “the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself.… It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life.” To build a literary theory on personality was Wilde’s aim: “It is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others.… As art springs from personality, so it is only to personality that it can be revealed.” In Pater’s version, the preferred word was temperament—vague and nonjudgmental. Wilde’s use of personality found its power in narcissism.

  Through publishing “Critic” and “Lying” in The Fortnightly Review, Wilde became friendly with Frank Harris, one of the era’s more controversial journalists and literary figures; in addition to being an influential London editor for two decades, he wrote short stories, plays, and biographies, including Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (1916). Shaw, who was not a close friend of Wilde’s, contributed his reminiscences of Wilde to the second edition of Harris’s biography in 1918. Wilde and Shaw first met at Lady Wilde’s salon in 1879 when Shaw recalled a palpable tension. “We put each other out frightfully; and this odd difficulty persisted between us to the very last, even when we were no longer mere boyish novices and had become men of the world with plenty of skill in social intercourse.”

  Two years younger than Wilde, Shaw grew up on Hatch Street in Dublin, where his mother supported the family by giving music lessons. Wilde’s family secrets were insignificant compared with Shaw’s: his father was a drunk, and his mother may have been involved with her resident singing teacher (rumored to be Shaw’s biological father). While Wilde was at university, Shaw was a real-estate clerk collecting rents in the Dublin slums. Self-righteous and physically obsessive, Shaw was a perfect zealot for all the causes of the day, from vegetarianism to the healthy claims made for unbleached woolen clothing.

  Skilled in musical appreciation and determined to be a writer, Shaw arrived in London in 1876, two years before Wilde; he wrote music reviews for the Star and unsuccessful novels with forgettable titles like Immaturity, and became a socialist. After attending a lecture at the Fabian Society, Wilde decided to write his own views in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” Asked what he thought of the essay, Shaw replied that “it was very witty and entertaining, but had nothing whatever to do with socialism.”

  Not with socialism perhaps but certainly with individualism. Wilde’s hymn to freedom demonstrated that he was more an anarchist than a socialist; his dogmas benefited the artist: “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion,” he states and then cautions that “the note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace,” and “the form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.” Wilde wanted to con
vert the unconverted to his way of thinking: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.” A world of unselfish people? No wonder Shaw had a few laughs.

  Shaw recalled something between six and twelve meetings with Wilde, listing the fifth as an incongruous encounter at a naval exhibition in Chelsea. “It was my sole experience of Oscar’s wonderful gift as a raconteur,” said Shaw, who worked to retain his Irish accent and was unimpressed with Wilde’s brand of Hibernian charm used to impress the English. Whenever Shaw wanted to reproach Wilde publicly, he criticized his “Merrion Square Protestant pretentiousness” but allowed him to be “a citizen of all civilised capitals,” and “at root a very Irish Irishman, and as such a foreigner everywhere but in Ireland.” More and more, Wilde suppressed his Irishness in favor of a persona that astonished.

  With some truth, Shaw claimed that Wilde lacked close friends in society and failed to build a solid social foundation, which contributed to his downfall. He “was incapable of friendship, though not of the most touching kindness on occasion,” Shaw wrote Harris in 1916. “The vulgar hated him for snubbing them; and the valiant men damned his impudence and cut him. Thus he was left with a band of devoted satellites … and a dining out connection … with here and there a man of talent and personality enough to command his respect.” Years earlier, on the same subject, Wilde told Yeats that Shaw had “no enemies, and none of his friends like him.” What Shaw ignored was Wilde’s inclination to shun those who challenged his intellect. His Oxford connections allowed him to visit Pater and Ruskin or to ask Swinburne to write in favor of his mother’s Civil List pension, but when it came to dining out, he wanted youthful profiles by his side.