Wilde explores the nature of love through the story of Sibyl Vane, whose love for Dorian inhibits her superb talent to suspend disbelief in her real self and perform Shakespeare in the squalid surroundings of an East End theatre. “You have killed my love,” Dorian berates her. “You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.” That love kills a woman’s mystery was Wilde’s recognition of his own failed marriage, expressed in Dorian’s chilling observation “There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”
Those in the Uranian community were more fearful than pleased when Wilde drew attention to their covert behavior. “If the British public will stand this they can stand anything,” said J. A. Symonds, commenting on the magazine version of 1890. “I resent the unhealthy, scented, mystic congested touch which a man of this sort has on moral problems,” added Symonds, himself a homosexual. He conceded that the story was “an odd and very audacious production, unwholesome in tone, but artistically and psychologically interesting.” Still, he bristled at the homosexual nuances at the very time he was assisting Havelock Ellis with a study of homosexuality, which later became volume two of Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
About his sexual preferences, Wilde provided sufficient innuendo in “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” but Dorian Gray was more daring and made him vulnerable to attack. Following its publication, Constance was aware that people treated her differently, but she gave no indication that she knew about the nature of her husband’s relationships with young men. She trusted and loved him, perhaps realizing—as her mother-in-law had with Sir William—that allowances must be made for genius.
Reviewers in The Daily Chronicle and the St. James’s Gazette attacked in force. The Chronicle criticized the story’s “effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophisings and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity.” Wilde defended his modern morality tale with letters to both publications. The St. James’s Gazette had implied that the story should be suppressed by the government—and worse, called Dorian Gray “tedious and dull.” Wilde abhorred any suggestion of censorship over imaginative literature as much as he did attribution of boring prose to himself. “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment,” he told the Gazette, adding that there were two defects in the book: “it is far too crowded with sensational incident, and far too paradoxical in style.” By expanding Dorian Gray and adding subplots, Wilde corrected the first error; by emphasizing the contradictions, he enhanced his style.
Ricketts designed the book with a vellum spine and half-parchment boards but positioned the author’s name and title at the bottom of the spine instead of the traditional placement at the top. He later called it “a dreadful book … a poor, early, money-making effort.” In a Bookman review, Pater praised Wilde’s “skill” and “subtlety,” noting that the tragic ending illustrated how “vice and crime make people coarse and ugly.” Yeats designated it “a wonderful book.” But overall the reviews were negative. The Athenaeum found the novel “unmanly sickening, vicious (though not exactly what is called ‘improper’), and tedious.” The author’s mother offered the most encouragement: “It is the most wonderful piece of writing in all the fiction of the day.… I nearly fainted at the last scene.”
Photographs show John Gray’s profile as more perfect than Robbie Ross’s, but Gray was darkly handsome whereas Dorian is a golden deity—Wilde’s physical ideal. While Gray impressed Wilde with his incipient poetic talent, he was noticed by another poet, positioning Wilde at the apex of a homosexual triangle. The third man was Marc-André Raffalovich, son of wealthy Russian-Jewish émigrés, born in Paris and a student at Oxford before he left after a year to spend his way into smart society. Despite hosting lavish dinner parties, he was never accepted; it was a xenophobic time in England, and his Semitic appearance—a crown of black, tight curly hair and almond-shaped eyes—was more noticeable on a singularly unattractive person.
Violet Hunt wrote of him, “extremely ugly, knows it,” but she appreciated his “confiding, ingenuous, apologetic manner.” The story that his mother sent him to London to avoid embarrassment at her Parisian literary salon on the fashionable avenue Hoche owes its survival to Hunt’s gossipy nature. To the list of those Hunt claimed wanted to marry her, his name should be added: he offered a marriage of convenience and suggested she use the epitaph “a woman made for irregular situations.”
Wilde had favorably reviewed Raffalovich’s second volume of poetry, Tuberose and Meadowsweet, in 1885, approving of its “heavy odours of the hothouse,” but he provoked a pedantic squabble over the poet’s three-syllable pronunciation of the first word of the title. Wilde perversely referred to him as Raffalovich when everyone else called him “Raff,” and—in an unguarded malicious moment—reportedly said that he “came to London with the intention of opening a salon and succeeded in opening a saloon.” This rare example of Wildean wit at someone else’s expense resulted in enmity between the two.
Raffalovich could have been the role model for Isaacs in Dorian Gray, the “horrid old Jew” with “an oily, tremulous smile” and “jewelled hands,” who manages the Holborn theatre where Sibyl Vane performs. Wilde turns up in Raffalovich’s first novel, A Willing Exile, published the same year as Dorian Gray, as the dandy Cyprian Brome, who has a circle of friends interested only in beauty and fashion. One evening Constance surprised everyone by casually remarking to Raffalovich: “Oscar says he likes you so much—that you have such nice improper talks together.” She was referring to a discussion they had had about Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus.* Raffalovich used the innocent listener defense: there had been no discussion, only Wilde’s views. He vowed, “Never again did I speak with him without witnesses.”
AS RAFFALOVICH SAW it, there was no better revenge than splitting up Wilde and Gray. Gray was enjoying the reflected fame of sharing his name with the scandalous Dorian Gray; he even signed his fictional alter ego’s name to a letter sent to Wilde in January. But when the amusement went beyond Wilde’s circle, Gray was annoyed. He forced the Star to publish an apology for referring to him as the original for Dorian; Wilde also complained to The Daily Telegraph for similar comments. In a moment of untruth, he referred to Gray as “an extremely recent” acquaintance.
Perhaps the most tormented personality yet to be taken up by Wilde, Gray was also the most talented, earning a place—along with Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman—in anthologies of Victorian verse as a significant poet of the 1890s. He was twenty-five, but Lionel Johnson said he had the face of a fifteen-year-old. Wilde recognized his startling talent but found Gray difficult to manipulate. Gray wanted to be a poet on his terms; at the same time, he was undergoing a spiritual revolt that would lead him to renounce his Decadent poetry. In 1889 he had gone over to Catholicism but quickly became a lapsed convert. Promoted to junior clerk at the Foreign Office Library, he had more time to write and lived frugally in shabby rooms in the Temple, several rambling old buildings (described by Dickens in Great Expectations) sloping from the south side of Fleet Street to the Thames Embankment. Symons, Yeats, and George Moore also lived in the artists’ refuge.
During 1892, while preoccupied with rehearsals for Lady Windermere’s Fan and the beginnings of a romance with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde continued to encourage Gray as a poet. He offered to underwrite the production costs of a first volume of poetry and signed a contract with the Bodley Head in June; the money would have to come from future play royalties. By the end of the year, Gray was in an extreme nervous state—ambivalent about Catholicism and worried about the sinful implications of being Dorian’s namesake. What he resented most was Wilde’s growing interest in Douglas: it w
as obvious that he was being pushed aside. Following his father’s death, Gray suffered a breakdown and was found wandering about Piccadilly murmuring to himself: “I must change my life. I must change my life.”
It was the perfect opportunity for Raffalovich to insinuate himself. He offered Gray financial protection and unconditional affection. But he demanded a public break with Wilde: “You cannot be Oscar’s friend and mine.” As a result, Wilde withdrew from the book contract; with a wealthy patron to back him, Gray easily negotiated his own agreement that gave him 20 percent. Then he systematically expunged any questionable passages to erase links between himself and Wilde.
Beautifully bound by Ricketts, Silverpoints appeared in 1893, a showcase for Decadent poetry, including Gray’s best-known poems, “The Barber” and “Mishka,” and “imitations” of Verlaine and Baudelaire. But the design overshadowed the poetry. The tall, narrow format (four inches by eight and a quarter) was based on the Persian saddle book, sized to be carried in the pocket of a jacket—for ease of reading. The deluxe edition had a vellum cover, embossed with flamelike leaves against a wavy, shimmering latticework. The work was precocious and anticipated the new French Symbolist poetry as exemplified by Verlaine. Gray later called the volume “the odious Silverpoints.”
Spoken of as a young man with a promising career behind him, Gray became a translator, wrote poetry, collaborated with Raffalovich on plays, and lived out the platonic ideal. Together for forty-two years, they celebrated “sublime inversion, a sublimated form of homosexuality,” which Raffalovich described as a chaste, ennobling relationship dedicated to spiritual ends. Believing that homosexuality was inherent rather than chosen and not a matter of moral responsibility, Raffalovich championed intellectual and spiritual friendships—which it seemed were harder to achieve without the strength of Catholicism.*
By the end of 1891, Wilde could look back at a year of successes and surprises. He had found Hyacinth in Lord Alfred Douglas, published his first novel, written a political treatise, and reincarnated The Duchess. Lawrence Barrett, the American actor-manager who had offered to produce the play in 1882, when it was optioned to Mary Anderson, was again interested in the blank verse drama. When Barrett wanted some revisions, Wilde visited him in Kreuznach in July 1889. (“The Rhine is of course tedious,” Wilde wrote Ross, “the vineyards are formal and dull, and as far as I can judge the inhabitants of Germany are American.”)
To clear the air after the Vera debacle, they changed the title to Guido Ferranti and withheld the name of the playwright. It opened at New York’s Broadway Theatre on January 26, 1891, and closed on February 14. Even so, Wilde was thrilled. He wrote George Alexander that Barrett thought the run “a huge success” and that he was going to include the play in his season. It was not unusual to introduce a play for a short run and then put it into repertoire, but that did not happen; it closed. It was never much of a secret that Wilde was the author. The Tribune’s William Winter called him “a practiced writer and a good one.”
In a swaggering mood, Wilde moved on to securing a London run. Henry Irving turned down the opportunity. But George Alexander, who had taken over the St. James’s Theatre to showcase English dramatists, considered the possibilities, though he decided he preferred to risk time and money on something fresh. Offering Wilde fifty pounds, he asked him to try a modern subject, to write about what he knew. In this way Alexander became midwife to the social comedies. When he faced difficulties writing, Wilde offered to return the advance, but Alexander encouraged him to keep trying. “I am not satisfied with myself or my work,” Wilde explained. “I can’t get a grip of the play yet: I can’t get my people real. The fact is I worked at it when I was not in the mood for work, and must first forget it, and then go back quite fresh to it. I am very sorry, but artistic work can’t be done unless one is in the mood; certainly my work can’t. Sometimes I spend months over a thing, and don’t do any good; at other times I write a thing in a fortnight.”
A summer visit to the Lake District near Lake Windermere helped Wilde break through. In October, Alexander’s patience was rewarded when he listened to Wilde read A Good Woman, later titled Lady Windermere’s Fan. Realizing that the play would be a hit, Alexander offered to buy it outright for a thousand pounds. In one of Wilde’s more astute business negotiations, he refused and asked for a percentage, which brought him several thousand more.
The witticisms in Lady Windermere’s Fan surpassed any comedy since Sheridan; Wilde’s use of sparkling dialogue to uncover character and conflict set him apart from the probing conversations of Ibsen. It upstaged any previous well-made play in its use of dramatic convention, particularly in the scene where Mrs. Erlynne, the woman with a past, destroys her reputation anew by coming out from hiding in the lord’s rooms, thus saving the honor of her long-lost daughter, who is hiding in another corner. Dialogue was everything, action incidental. After struggling with old forms in Vera and The Duchess—and breaking out with Dorian Gray—Wilde knew he had harnessed his genius. Nothing pleased him more than discovering a new self; at thirty-seven, his youth was past, but he had found his voice. And Paris would have the pleasure of his company.
He reminded Constance how productive he had been on his last visit, when he completed The Duchess and forged new stanzas for The Sphinx. A few months in Paris and he would produce something wonderful, he told his wife. What occupied his imagination was a work to impress the Symbolists: a version of the biblical tale of Salome, who danced for the head of John the Baptist, a subject previously immortalized by Flaubert in “Hérodias.” By coincidence, Stéphane Mallarmé was struggling with a poem entitled “Hérodiade.” Wilde considered poetic treatments but decided on a play written in French. His version would be named Salomé.
Earlier in 1891, when Wilde had been in Paris, he had presented a copy of Dorian Gray to Mallarmé, the acknowledged leader of Symbolism. They met at a mardi, one of the Tuesday evening salons held in Mallarmé’s modest fourth-floor flat in the rue de Rome, near the St. Lazare railway station. Known for his innovative syntax and referents, often unintelligible or misunderstood, Mallarmé dominated a cénacle that included the last and most prestigious generation of Mardistes, led by Pierre Louÿs, who introduced Mallarmé to his young friends Gidé, Paul Valéry, and Camille Mauclair. Twelve years Wilde’s senior, the bearded Mallarmé looked older than forty-nine, a fact that his followers attributed to creative suffering. In his presence, Wilde endured unaccustomed silences, behaving like a disciple when the master spoke.
Mallarmé claimed his poetry attempted to paint not the thing but the effect it produced; to this end, he invented a singular vocabulary linking art and beauty to pleasure by texture, color, shape, touch, and smell. A similar language had stirred Wilde’s imagination when he read À rebours on his honeymoon, a perfect opulent language for Salomé. And like Des Esseintes, the hero of that novel, Wilde found Salomé a haunting goddess, a Helen of Troy who poisons all who see her.
Arriving in late October, Wilde stayed at the Hôtel de l’Athénée in the rue Scribe on the Right Bank. One of his first visits was to the Louvre to view The Apparition, Gustave Moreau’s 1876 visionary watercolor of Salomé, which Huysmans called “the symbolic incarnation of undying lust.” Wilde sought to disprove Des Esseintes’s claim that no writer had ever “succeeded in rendering the delirious frenzy of the wanton, the subtle grandeur of the murderess.” Given Wilde’s natural obsession with portraits, cast as characters in two of his works, he traced Salomé’s iconographic history and its relationship to prose. The biblical princess had inspired Rubens, Leonardo, Dürer, Ghirlandaio, and Titian, but Moreau’s two versions came closest to Wilde’s concept of sexual abandon. In one, the seductress dances for Herod, her body shimmering in a silver aura; in the other, the severed head of the Baptist, surrounded by a halo, appears to her in a vision. Moreau’s luminous images pursued Wilde through the boulevards and followed him into his own absinthe-induced hallucinations.
In the cafés, at dinner
s, wherever Wilde found receptive audiences, he told the story of Salomé. One evening, according to the biographer Vincent O’Sullivan, he returned to his hotel, saw a blank notebook on the table, and started to write. “If the book had not been there,” Wilde said, “I should never have dreamed of doing it.” If this confidence represents a creative truth, then Wilde produced a first draft while in Paris, polished it when he returned to London, and sent the script back to Paris for editing.
On Wilde’s 1883 visit, when he wrote The Duchess, he had wanted to be noticed but lacked important literary credentials beyond his volume of poems. Now Dorian Gray had elevated his reputation. L’Écho de Paris labeled him “le ‘great event’ des salons littéraires” that season. Wilde went to Rachilde’s salon planning to compliment the author on Monsieur Vénus and was shocked to be introduced to a young girl. Most important were his new friends: the disparate trio of Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Schwob, and André Gide. Wilde assessed the twenty-two-year-old sexually repressed Gide and concluded that he needed a Lord Henry in his life. At one literary function, Wilde stared at his mouth and announced: “I don’t like your lips. They are straight like those of someone who has never lied. I want to teach you how to lie, so your lips become beautiful and twisted like those of an antique mask.”
During the next three weeks, the pair were inseparable. Gide’s friends assumed that he had fallen in love with Wilde, but whatever his feelings, they were never revealed because Gide ripped out the relevant pages from his journal. As a taunter rather than a seducer, Wilde challenged Gide’s addiction to the truth, his religious values, his conventional living. Eminent and powerful, Wilde had a profound effect on this immature and vulnerable only child of the Protestant bourgeois whose father died when he was ten. Gide complained to Paul Valéry that Wilde had done him “nothing but harm.” He said Wilde “[is] piously setting about killing what remained of my soul,” Gide wrote, “because he says that in order to know the essence of something, one has to suppress it.”
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