It was Wilde, however, who created Gray’s public image, by introducing him to the right people and giving him the right patina. In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry describes the satisfaction of such a relationship: “To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age limited and vulgar.”
Gray was overpowered by personality, for Wilde made his young men feel they were the center of his attention (and they were for that moment); he was interested in them, their views, their poetry—but not their problems. That Gray was a poet of startling originality made Wilde’s excursion that much more exciting. The exact nature of the relationship is a matter for conjecture, but there is no reason to doubt that they were lovers. Wilde said in De Profundis, “My real life, my higher life” was with Gray and others like him, but then he said so much in anger in that letter to Douglas that this could mean only what he explained at his trial: love was a higher state than adoring someone madly.
During the day Gray supported himself with civil service jobs, working his way up to clerk in the Foreign Office Library. His evenings were spent at the Independent Theatre, which staged private club performances of Ibsen’s Ghosts and other censored plays, and occasionally at the Rhymers’ Club. Begun as a gathering of Irishmen living in London, the Rhymers gathered at The Crown and the Cheshire Cheese, a pub off Fleet Street associated with Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century’s foremost conversationalist. Through the club Gray met Yeats, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. Wilde made infrequent appearances because he scorned pubs and was not enthusiastic about poetry readings, but he was present when Gray read some of his verses in the style of the French Symbolists.
Gray excelled in mystical verses written in a Decadent style, including musings on Saint Sebastian and other homoerotic Christian icons. By giving Gray’s surname to Dorian, Wilde demonstrated affection for his latest disciple but unwittingly invoked disturbing affinities between Gray’s life and that of a fictional character.
*Ricketts designed the binding and/or the decoration for The Picture of Dorian Gray, Intentions (1891), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891), Poems (1892), and The Sphinx (1894); with Charles Shannon he designed A House of Pomegranates (1891). Shannon was responsible for the binding design of the plays. The Happy Prince and Other Tales was illustrated by Jacomb Hood and Walter Crane, who became a well-known illustrator of children’s books.
*Ricketts made Wilde a gift of the portrait, which disappeared from recorded history after it was knocked down for a guinea at the bankruptcy sale of his possessions in April 1895. It was purchased by a bookseller on the Brompton Road, who resold it for five pounds to an unidentified customer. Publication of the expanded version of The Portrait of Mr. W.H. was complicated by reorganization at the Bodley Head and by Wilde’s trial, and the book did not appear until 1921 in America and 1958 in England.
*Fitch’s name is evoked and memorialized in the classic Hollywood theatre film All About Eve (1950). When the actress Margo Channing, played by Bette Davis, throws a tantrum, her director calls the melodramatic lines worthy of a Clyde Fitch play.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Darian Prophecy
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.… The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it had forbidden to itself.
—THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
More frequently now, Wilde traveled up to Oxford from Paddington to attend an opening of the Dramatic Society or to match wits with Pater. His double life drew him back: he surrounded himself with undergraduate profiles, recalled how he forged his aesthetic persona along Magdalen’s tree-lined walks, and renewed his pledge to feast on honeycomb. During a visit in February 1890, he sought out Lionel Johnson, an aspiring poet. Wilde made himself at home in Johnson’s New College rooms, smoked his cigarettes, dissected Pater, and noticed familiar signs of ambivalence: on a table was a bottle of Glengarry Scotch and open volumes of Les Fleurs du mal and Leaves of Grass; on the wall portraits of Cardinals Newman and Wiseman—reminders that Johnson had pledged to convert to Catholicism when he graduated. A troubled young man (whose alcoholism contributed to an early death at age thirty-five), Johnson said his “sorrows never come from consciousness of wrong, but from the vague shadow of unrest thrown over life by passing things.” In his best-known poem, “The Dark Angel,” he wrestles with moments when “all the things of beauty burn with the flames of evil ecstasy.”
Wilde mesmerized Johnson with flippant comments about everything and everyone, and the visit resonated beyond the immediate moment. Johnson told his friend Lord Alfred Douglas: “I am in love with him.” The twenty-year-old youngest son of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry was intrigued.* Douglas had been a practicing homosexual since a schoolboy at Winchester, where he met Johnson; he was at Wilde’s old college and recognized the name but, not being a reader or a scholar, knew little of Wilde’s literary reputation. When Dorian Gray was published in 1890 in Lippincott’s, Johnson gave Douglas his copy, insisting that he read it, which he did, “fourteen times running,” fully recognizing himself in the story of a young man falling in love with his own beauty.
The following summer Johnson brought Douglas around to Tite Street, where—in the words of W. H. Auden—“the Overloved met the Underloved.” Balzac’s fictional meeting between Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempré at the coach house was one of Wilde’s favorite erotic moments in literature—a coup de foudre. Basil Hallward’s stroke of lightning on first seeing Dorian was the realization that “I had seen perfection face to face.” Wilde observed Douglas’s pallid beauty and thought of Hyacinth when Apollo loved him. The meeting was brief, with only time for tea and for Douglas to charm Constance and be amused (as Johnson had predicted) by Wilde’s lively banter. “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship,” Lord Henry remarks, “and it is far the best for ending one.” They talked of Magdalen and Greats, which Douglas was close to failing. Since Wilde had earned a First in this difficult course, he offered to coach the younger man and rewarded his enthusiasm for Dorian Gray with a signed deluxe copy.
Wilde was too sensitive to the temper of his life, one of foreshadowings and forebodings, not to marvel at another extraordinary example of life imitating art. If he had not invented Dorian, with “his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair,” before he beheld Douglas with his blond hair and blanched skin blending into Tite Street’s all-white drawing room, he could have done so at that very moment. And had not Wilde’s attentions been elsewhere—writing a new play for George Alexander—the relationship might have started immediately. Instead Wilde went to the country near Lake Windermere, where Robbie Ross later joined him, and he completed the first of his social comedies, Lady Windermere’s Fan.
Like all of Wilde’s prose pieces, Dorian Gray began as a story told to friends. The derivative plot of a man and his portrait that does not grow old had been in his subconscious since youthful readings of Sidonia and Melmoth, embellished by borrowings from other authors. During a gathering at The Vale, Wilde told a separate narrative about an actress who loses her power to persuade when she falls in love. Combining Dorian and Sibyl might never have happened had not J. M. Stoddart—who introduced Wilde to Whitman and published Rodd’s Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf—journeyed to London in August 1889. As editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, he was commissioning short fiction and invited Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle to dinner to discuss their work in progress. Doyle contributed his second Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four, and Wilde parried with his own mystery, describing Dorian Gra
y as an unsolved murder story.
Wilde agreed to deliver a manuscript in two months but, true to form, asked for more time: the October deadline stretched into the spring of 1890. Stoddart asked for a hundred thousand words; Wilde replied that the English language did not have that many beautiful words. Then Stoddart demanded the manuscript, which forced Wilde to finish it in three weeks. As a fledgling novelist, he struggled with the same problems that Dion Boucicault had criticized in his first play, Vera: too much dialogue and too little action. Typically, the characters in Wilde’s social comedies sparkle only in drawing rooms, seldom moving outside to risk worldly interaction. Despite a beginning, middle, and end, Dorian Gray is more a meditation than a narrative. Like Huysmans’s À rebours, it appears randomly improvised, which Wilde knew or half-knew. Plot lacunae were intensified by murder, suicide, or accidental death; Dorian, in essence, executes himself when he attacks his portrait with a knife. At the end, only Lord Henry remains alive, and his wife has divorced him. It made sense to have Dorian remove obstacle after obstacle to keep his ghastly secret, but then Wilde decided—in response to hostile reviewers—to make Aestheticism rather than Decadence the moral focus for the novel; he added six new chapters and a preface, and made other revisions.
“EVERY PORTRAIT THAT is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion,” says Basil Hallward about Dorian’s picture. Despite Wilde’s remark that “an artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them,” Dorian Gray is very much the author’s autobiography. Dorian’s beautiful face, a mask concealing an evil soul, is no different from its author’s use of multiple masks to conceal his true sexuality. The plot reveals Wilde’s talent as a writer of concealment—a power that came from not speaking directly about the subject most important to him. Whatever was private was coded in a style so witty and delightful that it made Wilde’s return to playwriting imperative. The novel form helped Wilde to reveal himself, while the dramatic form allowed him to celebrate. “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim,” he said, a noble sentiment for everyone else, when for him it was the opposite.
With its multilayered symbolism and compulsive hedonism, Dorian Gray has never been out of fashion or absent from university reading lists. Successive generations have not heeded Wilde’s warning that “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” The novel’s excitement for the reader comes from interpreting a haunting, narcotic story of self-deceiving vanity and from experiencing the erotic transformation of a person into an objet d’art. On another level, Dorian Gray is a study of male homosexual panic within a love triangle of three men. Dorian laments that “each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.” Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan sees retribution as endless: “One pays for one’s sins, and then one pays again, and all one’s life one pays.”
An active participant in his own self-destruction, Dorian commits acts of inhumanity that are stamped on his portrait; by the end of the novel, confronting his hideously disfigured image, he realizes that he is beyond redemption and by attacking his conscience kills himself. “Yes; there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray,” Wilde said, “a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.” Wilde wanted to tell a story of multiple personalities and succeeded in crafting a cautionary tale of his own many selves, making it easy for his enemies to remark behind his back: “Just like that Dorian Gray character.”
Dorian was, Wilde said, “what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps”; he was wistfully admitting his lack of beauty in the pursuit of decadence. Clearly Wilde saw a mirage of himself in Dorian’s death scene, when the character is withered and wrinkled like the mummy his father discovered in Egypt (the rescuers even have to break through the windows of the attic as if it were a tomb). Dorian is identified only by his rings, a reminder of the scarab ring that Wilde never removed. Lord Henry is what the world thought Wilde to be: an acrobat of words who mesmerized with epigrams, who “played with the idea, grew wilful, tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox,” a taunter who convinces Dorian that “nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” Basil Hallward is “what I think I am,” Wilde also said, and he might have added that these feelings were more accurate whenever he took off his mask and the mirror reflected the face of an unattractive and unloved genius.
By using Dorian as his hero’s Christian name, Wilde advertised the book’s homoerotic ambitions. He knew the history of the Dorian tribes from his classical education, but any educated person could identify the allusion—if they risked accepting the symbol. Of the three major tribes—Dorians, Ionians, and Aeolians—it is generally thought that Greek homosexuality originated in the military of the Dorian states (the “Sacred Band” of Thebes was composed only of pairs of homosexual lovers) and spread through Dorian influence. Combined with the last name of his disciple, the name Dorian Gray was a boldly coded declaration.
• • •
When Wilde was tried on charges of gross indecency at the Old Bailey, the prosecution read passages from the Lippincott’s version to support the claim that Dorian Gray was an immoral book. The fact that there were two versions seemed irrelevant to the court. The Scots Observer had condemned the magazine story in an unsigned review as dealing “with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigations Department or a hearing in camera.” It was declared “false art—for its interest is medico-legal,” underscoring the prevalent belief that inversion was a medical disease.
Edward Carson, the defense attorney, referred to the book version of 1891 as “purged.” He then made personal Hallward’s remark to Dorian that he adored him “madly, extravagantly, absurdly.” Asked if he had ever “adored a young man madly,” Wilde, in the dock, replied, “No, not madly. I prefer love—that is a higher form.… I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.” In the book version, Hallward’s words are changed from amorous to aesthetic: “You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you.”*
Other revisions wrapped Dorian’s sins in ambiguity, diluted the all-male world with additions of Dorian talking to aristocratic ladies, and included background on Sibyl Vane and her family. Wilde made relations between the three characters—all representing his various sides—less erotic and deleted innocent physical contact between Basil and Dorian. In 1890, Basil is stirred by Dorian’s “beauty,” but in the second version the attraction is his “personality.” Wilde added length by appending witticisms—pulled from lists he made of sayings that passed his aural test for sound and balance—to the ends of trivial conversations. In Lippincott’s, Lord Henry apologizes to Dorian for being late: “I went to look after a piece of old brocade in Wardour Street, and had to bargain for hours for it.” In 1891 he adds: “Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” Originally Lord Henry tells Basil, “If you want to make him [Dorian] marry this girl, tell him that, Basil. He is sure to do it, then.” Later he also quips: “Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
Fear of disclosure through implications of homosexual behavior drives the novel, often occurring when subterfuge involves some other guilt or crime. Dorian is at once “a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know” and one whose friendship “is so fatal to young men.” One is never sure of the extent of Dorian’s sins, but it is his disregard for humanity and lack of generosity rather than any sexual act that determine his destruction. “There is no such thing
as a moral or an-immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all,” Wilde announces in the preface, which was useful to have said five years before he had to defend Dorian Gray’s morality in court, but it confounds the fascinating chain reaction of literary influences. Lord Henry quotes—and misquotes—Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance without ever mentioning the author, Wilde’s first aesthetic authority. When Lord Henry wants to seduce Dorian into the hedonistic life, he supplies him with a “poisonous” book, assumed to be À rebours, Wilde’s bible of Decadence. Ultimately Wilde creates in Dorian an authoritative guide for the next generation of pleasure seekers.
Drawing on his own experience during shooting seasons at Irish country houses, Wilde wrote authentically of the scene where Sibyl’s brother is accidentally shot: “Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass, some twenty yards in front of them, with black-tipped ears erect, and long hinder limbs throwing it forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of alders.… and as the hare bounded into the thicket he fired. There were two cries heard, the cry of a hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which is worse.”
As for atmosphere, Wilde doubtless had secondhand knowledge of the sordid neighborhoods that Dorian explores, since Wilde’s firsthand slumming was in the future. Everything he needed was within the covers of The Sins of the Cities of the Plain or the Recollections of a Mary-Anne, available in 1881, a vivid picture of the Victorian homosexual underworld. Richard Rowe’s Found in the Streets, published in 1880, describes an opium den much like the one Dorian patronizes, with the Malays “crouching by a little charcoal stove playing with bone counters” and an old man trying to brush imaginary red ants off his sleeve. Wilde would not have been averse to using opium; he and Douglas would enjoy hashish during a trip to Algeria in 1895, when Wilde told André Gide, “I have a duty to myself to amuse myself frightfully.” But Wilde preferred stimulants that allowed him to be genius, gourmand, and talker: opium’s characteristic somnolence posed no threat of addiction.
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