Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  As an Oxford graduate, Wilde arrived in London with an established group of friends—those from Magdalen and those from other colleges. Constance brought confidantes into the marriage, in particular Lady Mount-Temple, a distant cousin and surrogate mother, whose house in Torquay was a favorite writing place for Wilde. But there were no couples or families with children whom they saw regularly. On Fleet Street, Wilde came and went too quickly to form any ties, except with editors such as Harris and Henley.

  There was Yeats, of course, and had not the young poet’s nationalistic interests taken him elsewhere, the two writers might have become better friends, although Wilde tended to avoid friendships with those whose intellectual talents were equal to or greater than his. Between the two was an unspoken love of Ireland. Yeats spent his youth in Sligo, a market town on Ireland’s western coast, set between ocean and mountains and as rich in heroic and supernatural lore as Connemara. The two men shared what Yeats called “half-civilized blood,” and when Wilde spoke of hearing mystical, invisible voices at Illaunroe, Yeats understood. To please his father, who was a fashionable Dublin portrait painter, Yeats studied art, but he had abandoned it for poetry and was now on the verge of appreciation with the publication of The Wanderings of Oisin—his search for meaning through mythological figures. Wilde noted it in the Pall Mall Gazette, perhaps with the nostalgia that eight years earlier he would have welcomed similar words about Poems. “Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are never met,” he wrote. “Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author.” Sincere or insincere (one never knew with Wilde), he was proven right.

  Yeats attended Lady Wilde’s salons when he arrived in London but met her son in 1888 at the home of the Cassell’s editor W. E. Henley, where Wilde famously remarked that “the basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl.” Five years before, an eighteen-year-old Yeats heard Wilde lecture in Dublin on “The House Beautiful” and marveled at his perfect sentences, which seemed to have been written “overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous.” Sensing Yeats’s hero worship, Wilde invited him to Christmas dinner. Yeats had grown up surrounded by Dublin intellectuals and was hardly an ingenuous youth, even though he recalled himself as such that day at Tite Street, writing in his autobiography that he was “perplexed by my own shapelessness, my lack of self-possession and of easy courtesy … astonished by this scholar who as a man of the world was so perfect.”

  Youthful impressions can be misleading, but Yeats said he knew Wilde “at the happiest moment of his life. No scandal had touched his name, his fame as a talker was growing among his equals, and he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his own spontaneity.” That changed when Wilde became the toast of the West End, a successful playwright and an absentee husband and father. Yeats said Wilde was a man who “could not endure the sedentary toil of creative art and so remained a man of action.”

  After dinner, when Constance excused herself to see to the children, Wilde read parts of “The Decay of Lying” from the January 1889 issue of Nineteenth Century. In its unequivocal support of lying, Wilde’s most modern essay became an enduring blueprint for the artistic imagination; it also explained his paradoxical nature: he advocated lying by being honest. The telling of beautiful lies was essential to Wilde’s image of himself as a work of art; thus his tales of bisexual bravado or strenuous physical activity should be suspect, for they contradict his nature. Wilde was so convincing as his own mythologizer that the dubious stories endure: they are too good not to be true. The aim of the liar, he said, “is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society.”

  Better than most of his contemporaries, Wilde understood that writing is only the beginning of a process, which involves design, printing, distribution, reviewing, and promotion—all the building blocks of twentieth-century book publishing. Wilde possessed a natural artistic eye refined through collaboration with Charles Ricketts, who designed and illustrated all of his books except Salome, which made Aubrey Beardsley, an artist of frightening originality, an icon of the 1890s. Ricketts excelled in many fields: illustrator, book designer, wood engraver, painter, sculptor, and set designer.*

  Wilde’s first editions were all printed on cotton-rag paper, which does not oxidize, rather than on paper made from tree fibers, which turns brown, then brittle, and crumbles like a dead leaf. He was a fortunate man of letters to be publishing when the heated press made it possible to stamp bindings in gold leaf before they were bound to the text. A book like The Sphinx, with its dramatic tableaux imprinted on continuous vellum covers, represented the quintessence of fin de siècle design, before a new century replaced opulence with the dust jacket. In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry admires a Gautier edition printed on Japanese paper and bound in “citron green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates.” (Dorian itself was bound in gray pastel paper and stamped with tiny gold marigolds.)

  Ricketts had ended a five-year apprenticeship to the wood engravers’ guild and was at the beginning of his career when he dropped off some sketches at The Woman’s World. Wilde liked his work and assigned him articles to illustrate. During his guild studies, Ricketts met Charles Shannon, a boyish-looking aspiring painter with whom he lived for fifty years; they were self-sufficient bachelors and men of arts and letters who spent a lifetime becoming aristocrats of good taste. “Bending over their blocks they looked like figures from a missal,” said the artist Will Rothenstein.

  In the summer of 1889, Wilde knocked on the door of The Vale, a Regency House off the King’s Road in Chelsea where the couple lived—quietly and discreetly. They had recently published The Dial, a collection of writings and illustrations from unknown contributors. Wilde had received a copy and, impressed with its aesthetic sensibilities, dropped by to offer congratulations. “What a charming old house you have, and what delightful Japanese prints,” he said on entering the drawing room. “Yes the Japanese understand conciseness and compact design. And you have yellow walls, so have I. Yellow is the colour of joy.” Wilde noticed what the couple called pretty things: Greek lecythi, Tanagra statuettes, Venetian glass, drawings by Hokusai, Persian miniatures.

  Ricketts greeted a man of thirty-five who looked older. “His face had grown full about the mouth and chin,” he later recalled, “the eyes were intelligent, below their heavy lids, and lit the face which, at times, during moments of suspicion or introspection, became mask-like.” Ricketts said that Whistler, whom he described as “a Hungarian bandmaster, aping Mephistopheles,” was more a dandy in dress than Wilde.

  Small, wiry, intense, with a Vandyke beard and dark eyes, Ricketts was born in Geneva and reared in a cultured, musical home, the son of an English father and a French mother. Wilde noticed that he was the extrovert and Shannon the quiet one, or, as one visitor put it, “the reasonable wife.” A contemporary observed that between the two existed “the most marvelous human relationship,” a union “more bracing than comfortable.” Wilde decided that “Marigold” was the perfect name for Shannon; Ricketts he called “Orchid.” That evening marked the beginning of a seven-year partnership—Wilde writing and Ricketts building (his word) beautiful books.

  Wilde found The Vale “the one house in London where you will never be bored, and where you are not asked to explain things.” Any working relationship between writer and artist can be competitive, even uneasy. This one began cordially enough, with Ricketts wanting Wilde to drop by whenever he wished, but frequent visits made Wilde take his hosts for granted. Once he angered Ricketts with the abrupt comment that he made “beauty out of a little coloured paper smeared with gold,” reducing his intricate art to nursery finger painting. Never revering artists as he did poets, Wilde also overstepped courtesy when he annou
nced one evening: “Both you and Shannon are ascetics of art, you turn away from life and, like most painters, you lack curiosity.” By the time they produced The Sphinx in 1894, there were serious artistic differences. Wilde saw the collaboration as a source of “advantage and resentment,” Ricketts said.

  But during 1891, Wilde was gracious to the Marigold and his Orchid—and their interesting friends. There were Friday evening dinners with artists such as Rothenstein, Sturge Moore, and Walter Sickert; Wilde looked forward to talking with the lesbian couple Katharine Bradley and her niece, Edith Cooper, who wrote verse and drama under the nom de plume Michael Field and lived nearby. He came, also, to appreciate Ricketts as a sophisticated raconteur, a worthy opponent. The fare was frugal but eaten off a tabletop of lapis lazuli. Everyone sat in white-scrubbed kitchen chairs. Shannon cooked up eggs with leftovers or served rolled tongue with bread and butter and quince jam. There was always inexpensive wine. Years later, when Wilde heard that Ricketts and Shannon were making a little money, he remarked: “Ah, I suppose when you go there to supper they give you fresh eggs now.” The main attraction was always the swift parries and ripostes. All noticed how Ricketts and Shannon were obsessed with Wilde, how they copied his voice and speech. He became “everything to them,” recalled Michael Field.

  But Ricketts had an aggressive side beneath his charming manners. One evening he attacked Wilde for bringing an inferior guest to the artistic discussion. When the uninvited departed, Ricketts demanded: “Why did you bring this man here?” “An obscure worshipper who bowed in the outer court,” Wilde loftily replied, wanting to dismiss the matter. “So I, the god, beckoned him in.” There was another unpleasant evening when John Addington Symonds became obnoxious with his self-appointed mission to have Whitman and other prominent figures admit to same-sex passions. Asked to leave, Symonds looked up at Ricketts from the bottom of the stairs and persisted: “But you are, aren’t you? You do, don’t you?”

  “There were two personalities in him,” Ricketts said of Wilde: “the exhibitor of well-rehearsed impromptus, of which he had a stock, and the spontaneous and witty critic of Life.” The process of invention varied: a plot or a situation would flash upon him, but more often he invented a story and told it, and, if he liked the sound of it, wrote it down. The sound of the words was as important in prose as in plays as he tried to recapture the musical cadences of the ancient Greek. Literature, Wilde said, was an elaborate design appealing more to the eye than to the ear; he missed the nuances of classical times, when the voice was the medium, and the ear the critic.

  He swaggered a lot, acting like his character the Remarkable Rocket, who proclaims, “I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” It amused Ricketts how often Wilde merged ego and hero worship, giving the impression that he had known Rossetti, Baudelaire, and Gautier. “Flaubert had just told me,” remarked Wilde one evening, that “he was lost in admiration when I recited to him these lines: ‘The land was dry and burnt up with heat. The people went to and fro over the plain, like flies crawling upon a disk of polished copper!’ ” Of course, everyone knew he was joking.

  One evening Wilde read to Ricketts and Shannon an expanded version of his short story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” published in Blackwood’s in July 1889. In it he argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets were inspired by same-sex love for an actor in his company named Willie Hughes or Hewes, who played the leading female roles, since women were barred from performing on the Elizabethan stage. Wilde read the sonnets—making puns and faces at sexually suggestive lines—and outlined the story, which uses as proof a period portrait of Hughes later revealed to be a forgery. Wilde wanted readers to understand what Ricketts and Shannon already knew—that friendship can transcend sensuality.

  The central paradox of “Mr. W.H.” presumes that if you convince someone else of a belief, you lose the belief yourself; a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. William Blackwood, publisher of the prestigious Edinburgh magazine, found the story powerful and was unconcerned by the homosexual allusions. “I propose publishing this work in a delicate slim volume powdered with gold,” Wilde told Ricketts about the expanded version. “Already I have been warned that the subject is most dangerous,” he boasted. “Our English homes will totter to their base when my book appears,” he said, referring to the story’s initial rejection by The Fortnightly Review.

  Asked to create something mock-Clouet (Jean Clouet was a sixteenth-century Flemish painter of miniatures) for the frontispiece, Ricketts painted an imaginary portrait on a decayed piece of oak, which Shannon framed in a fragment of worm-eaten molding. “It is not a forgery at all, it is an authentic Clouet of the highest authentic order,” Wilde wrote, to show he believed it an Elizabethan original rather than a forgery of a fictional forgery.* Wilde credited Robbie Ross for inspiring “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” “The story is,” he told Ross, “half yours, and but for you it would not have been written.”

  After being tutored by Wilde during his stay at Tite Street, Ross went up to Cambridge, but he spent only a year there, leaving in 1889 after a ragging incident when he was dunked in the college fountain and caught pneumonia. He quarreled with his family about his homosexuality, left London for Edinburgh to work at the Scots Observer, but returned to edit the Society of Authors magazine. Ross made few demands on Wilde. He was content to dine with him outside the glare of the Café Royal at small cafés in Soho, where they ordered a three-shilling meal and Wilde tried out themes for “The Decay of Lying.” An agreeable listener, Ross was never an intellectual force behind Wilde’s creativity. Giving him credit for “Mr. W.H.” and “Decay” was Wilde’s way of making his disciple feel important. Ross took his muse status more seriously.

  Visits to The vale were interrupted when Wilde met, through a letter of introduction from American friends, the fascinating personality Clyde Fitch. Fitch was eleven years younger (Wilde preferred an age difference of eleven to sixteen years), a playwright at the onset of a successful and prosperous career, and a dandy in the Whistler tradition. He wore a sky blue suit and painted a frieze of cherry blossoms around the walls of his room on his first day at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Later he adopted a black-and-white checked suit with purple cravat, white hat, and silver-mounted walking stick.

  Fitch’s frothy plays reflecting the passions of the smart set were of the moment (at one time he had four plays running simultaneously on Broadway) and are seldom revived.* He worked hard to maintain an ostentatious standard of living (his Park Avenue home was a museum where guests drank Château d’Yquem from antique spiral Venetian glasses); he wrote or adapted fifty-five plays in twenty years. “Writing plays was like copying something you know by heart,” he said. Fitch had collaborated on a play based on Beau Brummell, the English fop and friend of George IV when he was Prince of Wales; it opened in May 1890 at Madison Square Garden, and its success brought him into New York’s artistic circle, including the salon of Elisabeth Marbury and her companion, Elsie de Wolfe, an actress who became a celebrated interior decorator.

  Without a script to borrow from, Fitch put a Wildean gloss to his Brummell dialogue with lines such as: “Men shake hands much too often. A glance of the eye, Reginald—a glance of the eye,” and “Observe me, Mortimer, am I quite correct? Are there creases in my cravat! I would not wish to make creases the fashion.” Wilde gave Fitch the copy of Blackwood’s with “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” His response was everything that Wilde could have wished. “You precious maddening man,” Fitch wrote.

  Your letters are more than you—because they come and you don’t. Last night when I came home I flung myself in the best evening clothes and all with my Blackwood. “I will just look at it,” I thought. But I could not leave it. I read, unconscious of the un-comfortability of my position and of the fact that one arm and two legs were asleep, fast.

&n
bsp; Oh! Oscar! The story is great—and fine!

  I believe in Willie Hughes: I don’t care for the laughter, I only know I am convinced and I will. I will believe in Willie H. Sometime, if the Gods are kind I shall send you a picture of Mr. W. H., it may be another forgery—But that won’t make any difference, will it?

  They met at Fitch’s hotel but not frequently enough. Fitch wrote: “It is 3 and you are not coming. I looked out of the window many, many Times.… I have not slept. I have only dreamt, and thought. I don’t know where I stand nor why. Passionately yours.” Another letter addresses Wilde as “Oh! you adorable creature! You are a great genius. And oh! such a sweet one. Never was a genius so sweet so adorable.… You are my poetry—my painting—my music—you are my sight, and sound, and touch.” Fitch returned to London the next year and sought to rekindle the relationship. “Nobody loves you as I do. When you are here I dream. When you are away I awake … we have our secrets,” he wrote. In 1892 Fitch was again in town, staying at the Albany, Jack Worthing’s address in Earnest, but by then Wilde had met John Gray and then Lord Alfred Douglas.

  Tentatively Wilde explored London’s underground homosexual world, aware of the dangers. Like everyone else, he read about Lord Arthur Somerset’s plight in September 1889, when he had to leave England because of alleged offenses with telegraph boys at a homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street. Until Douglas insisted on more hazardous sexual venues, Wilde met young men through friends. He probably met John Gray at The Vale. Gray had written two pieces for the first edition of The Dial. Twelve years younger than Wilde, a working-class carpenter’s son from Bethnal Green, Gray was being turned into an aristocratic dandy by his mentors Ricketts and Shannon.