A decade later, Gide recalled that Wilde had at this time “what Thackeray calls the ‘chief gift of a great man’: success. His gestures and his look triumphed. His success was so sure that it seemed as if it preceded Wilde and that he merely had to come forward after it.… Some compared him to an Asiatic Bacchus; others to some Roman emperor; others to Apollo himself—and the fact is that he was radiant.”
Even so, Wilde was also perceived as cold and distant, particularly when he feared that he was not making a grandiose impression. “I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects,” he said. “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.” On this latter advice, Wilde was a miserable failure. Friends admired him, but he was never feared. The statement “I trust him” was not easily used about Wilde.
A CHAIN-SMOKER WHO lit up sixty cigarettes a day, Pierre Louÿs was sixteen years younger than Wilde; he was darkly fascinating and heterosexual, an inveterate practical joker who abandoned himself to life, convinced that he would succumb to tuberculosis like his mother and older brother. His habit of writing in purple ink on handmade paper in what was described as medieval script fascinated Wilde. Gide and Louÿs had been friends since 1888, when they attended the same gymnasium. Joining them at the cafés was Marcel Schwob, an authority on the fifteenth-century poet François Villon and coeditor with Louÿs of the Symbolist review Mercure de France.
Well-connected through his venerable Jewish family, which traced its lineage back to the Crusades, Schwob generously entertained Wilde at his home on the rue de l’Université, leaving a most unattractive description of his new friend, who, he said, had “a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more.”
Putting on record Wilde’s growing love of the “green fairy,” Schwob called him a “terrible absinthe drinker, through which he got his visions and his desires.” Like smoking, absinthe had its rituals, making it more a drug than a drink. When absinthe arrived at the table, Wilde poured water over the sugar cubes balanced on a trapezoid-shaped slotted spoon; water cut the bitterness, and more water diluted the 70 percent alcohol content. In time the hallucinogenic effects activated the imagination.* Wilde once remarked that “after the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”
They were a quirky group. Gide was awkward as he pretended to be a Left Bank intellectual complete with cape and beard. Louÿs abhorred homosexuality but celebrated love between women in his writings, while Schwob reveled in unearthing macabre stories peopled with such characters as a leprous king, an Indian raja, and a Roman noblewoman. Even though Schwob wanted to evoke the uniqueness of men, divinities, mediocrities, and criminals, he is remembered today as Daniel Defoe’s translator. He did a French translation of “The Selfish Giant,” which he published in L’Écho de Paris, where he worked, and dedicated his 1892 short story “Le Pays bleu” to Wilde, who reciprocated when The Sphinx appeared in 1894.
By the time Wilde crossed the channel, he had every right to be pleased with himself. He had completed his first work written in another language; he had talked with Proust about Ruskin; he had met Stuart Merrill, an American expatriate poet who saw Wilde as “gigantic, smooth-shaven and rosy, like a great priest of the moon in the time of Heliogabalus”; and he had befriended the minor poet Jean Moréas, known for his 1886 Symbolism manifesto published in Le Figaro. Wilde’s personality had pierced the forbidding literary elite. He celebrated Christmas with his family and toasted the new year of 1892 with Perrier-Jouët ’89. It would be a good year. Success in the theatre brought him fame and wealth, and he fell passionately in love.
*John Sholto Douglas, in biographical accounts, is often referred to as either the eighth or the ninth Marquess of Queensberry. This confusion stems from a renumbering of the title following World War II. At this time, James, son of the second Duke of Queensberry, reputedly an idiot from birth who had in his lifetime been passed over for the title, was recognized. As a result, the then current Marquess, the tenth, became the eleventh Marquess, and Bosie’s father, in his lifetime the eighth, the ninth.
*Wilde recycled the sentiments in Lady Windermere’s Fan, when Lord Darlington tells the astonished Lady Windermere: “I love you—love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly, madly!”
*Rachilde was the pseudonym of Marguérite Eymery, wife of Alfred Vallette, the founder of the review Mercure de France and the eponymous publishing company. Her novel on male homosexuality, published in 1889, caused her to be dubbed Mademoiselle Baudelaire and Queen of the Decadents.
*Raffalovich converted to Catholicism in 1896; two years later Gray went to Rome and entered a seminary; he was ordained a priest in 1901 and sent to Edinburgh as a curate. Raff followed him and lived nearby. He used his wealth to build St. Peter’s Church in South Edinburgh and wrote scientific treatises on homosexuality, including Uranisme et unisexualité, published in France in 1896, which contained the first full account of Wilde’s trials to appear in any language.
*The hallucinogen was oil of wormwood, which contains thujone, a relative of the active ingredient in cannabis. Absinthe was banned in Switzerland in 1908, in the United States in 1912, in France in 1915, but never in Britain. Because of this loophole, absinthe imported from the Czech Republic became available in London to celebrate the New Year in 1999.
PART FOUR
(1892–1895)
Flaunting
Luxury—gold-tipped matches—hair curled—Assyrian—wax statue—huge rings—fat white hands—not soigné—feather bed—pointed fingers—ample scarf—Louis Quinze cane—vast malmaison—cat-like tread—heavy shoulders—enormous dowager—or schoolboy—way of laughing with hand over mouth—stroking chin—looking up sideways—jollity overdone—But real vitality—Effeminate, but vitality of twenty men—magnetism—authority—Deeper than repute or wit—Hypnotic.
—Oscar Wilde as described by Max Beerbohm
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
More Than Laughter
In the drama, there may occur in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is this silly fellow to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists? No.… He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament.… No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play.
—“THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER SOCIALISM”
Wearing a coat with a black velvet collar, a white waistcoat with a black moiré ribbon emblazoned with seals, and a green carnation buttonhole, Wilde entered from stage left and leaned insolently against the proscenium arch. A gold-tipped cigarette smoldered in his white-gloved hand. That moment towered above all Wilde’s other public appearances—from childhood recitations at Merrion Square and the reading of Ravenna at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre to the podiums of a hundred American cities. He inhaled and exhaled with satisfaction. “Ladies and Gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely,” he told the opening-night audience at the St. James’s Theatre. “The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.” Caps waved down in the pit. There was applause followed by bewilderment from the stalls and rousing cheers from the steep gallery with its wooden seats.
Later the audience and critics thought the words rang of ridicule. Wilde saw his audience as characters whose world was reflected—not imitated—in his play. He knew just how far to go with social criticism; the audience should savor scandal without being offended. But he was not praising them as much
as patting himself on the back for Lady Windermere’s Fan. His curtain-call speech on February 20, 1892, went beyond the usual homilies of even an egoist like Henry Irving. Friends applauded sincerely. An Oxford colleague, Arthur Clifton, escorted Constance and her aunt, Mrs. William Napier. Wilde cautioned him that “she will be very nervous.” Seated with Wilde’s first lover, Robbie Ross, was Wilde’s current infatuation, Edward Shelley, an office boy at the Bodley Head. Willie Wilde, estranged from his brother, was there as a critic with a negative disposition. A recluse who seldom left Oakley Street, Lady Wilde was at home for this and all her son’s first nights. “You have had a brilliant success! and I am so happy,” she wrote.
Many critics thought Wilde’s insouciant appearance with a dangling cigarette arrogant and conceited. Conflicting versions of what was said made the rounds. Did Wilde say, “It’s perhaps not very proper to smoke in front of you, but … it’s not very proper to disturb me when I am smoking”? Did he purposely affront Victorian propriety? Or was he too nervous to discard his constant companion? Punch published a cartoon of him leaning against a pillar, three puffs of smoke circling his head, a toppled statue of Shakespeare and an open box of cigarettes at his feet. The caption: “Quite Too-Too Puffickly Precious!! Being Lady Windy-mere’s Fan-cy Portrait of the new dramatic author, Shakespeare Sheridan Oscar Puff, Esq.” Wilde labeled his impromptu talk “delightful and immortal.” All the fuss was really about how he held his cigarette.
Henry James reported that the “unspeakable animal” had responded to curtain calls by appearing with a metallic blue carnation in his buttonhole and a cigarette in his fingers. Despite efforts to be aloof, James was resentful. “There is of course absolutely no characterization and all the people talk equally strained Oscar,” he told a friend. The “impudent” speech was “simply inevitable mechanical Oscar—I mean the usual trick of saying the unusual—complimenting himself and his play. It was what he was there for and I can’t conceive the density of those who seriously reprobate it.”
The green carnation followed the lily and the sunflower of the aesthetic period as Wilde’s signature flower. It was natural but looked artificial. Green, the color of absinthe, of gold-embossed bindings, symbolized Decadence, a new beautiful and interesting disease, as Arthur Symons put it. But perhaps the green carnation was only a green carnation. “What does it mean?” Graham Robertson had asked Wilde. “Nothing whatever,” Wilde replied, “but that is just what nobody will guess.”*
Wilde’s success marked not only the debut of a new dramatic talent but also the beginning of change throughout the West End. Henry Irving’s reign as actor-manager and the Lyceum’s as leading venue for serious theatre were no longer unchallenged. In 1888 Irving staged a brilliant Othello with controversial interpretations. Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth was scheming and fragile, unaware of the evil in her husband. Irving played the Thane of Cawdor as a black-hearted rogue, a traitor who displays courage only when at bay. But editing Shakespeare to fit his talents was as far as Irving wanted to go.
George Alexander, a former Lyceum apprentice, was more adventurous; he wanted choices beyond the classics, melodramas, and boulevard comedies. After leaving Irving in 1889, he spent a year as actor-manager at the Avenue Theatre before leasing the St. James’s in 1891. His idea was to create a theatre for English dramatists, and he asked not only Wilde but also Arthur Conan Doyle and John Galsworthy to write plays. Alexander looked for comedies, but comedies with a social message. Another ambitious actor-manager, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, worked his own brand of magic at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
When it came to challenging Victorian domestic morality, Wilde could be as revolutionary and iconoclastic as Ibsen and later Shaw. Ibsen’s influence in England was fresh and inspiring: A Doll’s House opened in 1889, and two years later, Elizabeth Robins, an actress much admired by Wilde, appeared in Hedda Gabler. Although modern in outlook, Wilde’s comedies still depended on the old forms of the “well-made” play, as well as melodrama and farce.
Alexander presided over the St. James’s for twenty-seven years. He was shrewd and known for his furious energy. Unlike Irving, he was secure enough to have a company with actors more competent than he. He played the dandy, and that meant playing himself. Wilde said Alexander did not so much act as behave. To devotees the twelve-hundred-seat theatre was a cross between the Comédie-Française and a monastery. Located on King Street, Piccadilly (farther west than most theatres), it was built in 1835 on the site of Nevot’s, a hostelry that dated from the days of Charles II.*
In the early years, it presented a mishmash of genres, from music hall to foreign language. In the mid-eighties, Irving made his first important London appearance as Doricourt in The Belle’s Stratagem. Pinero’s first successful play, The Money Spinner, opened in 1881. Despite Alexander’s success with Wilde’s first and last plays, the sensation of his tenure was in 1893 with Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. In the title role, Mrs. Patrick Campbell triumphed when she entered Aubrey’s rooms at the ubiquitous Albany, the bachelor residence of Jack Worthing in Earnest, and spoke the line “I love fruit when it is expensive.”
Wilde wanted Lillie Langtry to play Mrs. Erlynne, the woman with a past and an adult illegitimate daughter. He assumed she would be flattered; instead, she was insulted to be considered old enough (she was thirty-nine) for such a part. Vanity was involved but also a secret: she had an eleven-year-old illegitimate daughter, who thought Langtry was her aunt, and whose father was Prince Louis of Battenberg.† Of this Wilde was unaware—Langtry was too shrewd to trust him with such a revelation. The old friends exchanged bitter words and did not speak for several years. But Wilde turned the incident into pertinent dialogue. He had Mrs. Erlynne—who was played by Ellen Terry’s sister Marion—ask Lord Windermere: “How on earth could I pose as a mother with a grown-up daughter? I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.” Wilde went around describing his work as “one of those modern drawing room plays with pink lampshades.”
During rehearsals Wilde lived and worked at the Albemarle Hotel in Mayfair, beginning a long association with the hostelry. This time he did not need to manufacture an excuse, since Tite Street had been evacuated because of dangerous drainage fumes, and Constance had taken the boys to stay with friends. This was Wilde’s first experience with staging a play. Vera and The Duchess had involved only long letters from London to New York. Now he saw opportunities to revise during rehearsals. That Alexander and his company worked differently never occurred to him. Arriving on time and by hansom—despite not yet earning royalties—Wilde was impeccably dressed to meet the impeccably dressed Alexander. Since Alexander played Lord Windermere, he was onstage most of the time, leaving Wilde to brood on the inadequacies of actors.
The actor’s aim, Wilde believed, “is, or should be, to convert his own accidental personality into the real and essential personality of the character” and not let that personality distort a play. Anybody can act. “There are many advantages in puppets. They never argue. They have no crude views about art,” he said. “They recognize the presiding intellect of the dramatist.” Just as easily, he demolished the dramatist. “I do not think it makes the smallest difference what a play is if an actor has genius and power. Nor do I consider the British public to be of the slightest importance.” His was a contradictory memory.
The plot centers on a woman’s sudden discovery—and quick renunciation—of maternal passion. Wilde explained the psychology to Alexander: “ ‘This passion is too terrible,’ she says. ‘It wrecks my life.… I don’t want to be a mother any more.’ ” Because Mrs. Erlynne manipulates the dramatic action of the play, histrionic speeches make it easier for her to reject maternal feelings. The audience ends up not taking her seriously, and Wilde escapes from melodrama into comedy. The secret that Mrs. Erlynne abandoned her daughter, now Lady Windermere, when she ran off with her lover twenty years ago is known
only to the audience. Mrs. Erlynne has returned to use this confidence to force Lord Windermere to sponsor her in society.
By revealing sooner or later who did what to whom, a dramatist shifts the balance of a play. Wilde wanted to wait until the fourth act; any earlier, he told Alexander, would reduce the dramatic effectiveness of Act Three. “The chief merit of my last act,” he said, “is that it does not contain, as most plays do, the explanation of what the audience knows already, but that it is the sudden explanation of what the audience desires to know.” The audience’s knowledge that the self-sacrifice was made by a mother would destroy the element of surprise since sacrifice is expected of a mother. Alexander disagreed. A revelation at the end would offend the audience, making the plot a long riddle rather than a play of emotion and suspense. The issue was unresolved by opening night, when the only major change was dropping the title: A Good Woman. Lady Wilde bluntly told her son: “I do not like it. It is mawkish. No one cares for a good woman. A Noble Woman would be better.”
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