The ending of Act Two was a problem. Lady Windermere is led to believe that her husband has betrayed her with Mrs. Erlynne. Despite his wife’s protests, Mrs. Erlynne appears at her birthday party, makes a brilliant entrance, dances with Lord Windermere, and provokes his wife to seek solace with Lord Darlington. She writes a confessional letter to her husband conveniently left for Mrs. Erlynne’s eyes. Realizing that she wrote the same words when leaving Lady Windermere’s father, she promises to salvage her daughter’s happiness. She goes to Lord Darlington’s rooms, where Lady Windermere has been waiting, and pleads for her to return to her husband and save her marriage. As Mrs. Erlynne burns the incriminating letter, the two women are interrupted by the men’s arrival; Lady Windermere drops her fan when she hides behind a curtain. Mrs. Erlynne pretends the fan belongs to her and Lady Windermere slips away, never knowing that she was aided by her mother.
For the curtain speech, Mrs. Erlynne asks her love interest, Lord Augustus, to keep Lord Windermere away from home. When he questions her motives, she replies: “Your reward? Your reward? Oh! ask me that tomorrow. But don’t let Windermere out of your sight to-night. If you do I will never forgive you. I will never speak to you again. I’ll have nothing to do with you. Remember you are to keep Windermere at your club, and don’t let him come back to-night.” Alexander wanted a more modern exit line, but Wilde thought Mrs. Erlynne should leave Lord Augustus in a state of bewilderment. “With regard to the new speech written yesterday personally I think it adequate,” he wrote Alexander. “I want Mrs. Erlynne’s whole scene with Lord Augustus to be a ‘tornado’ scene, and the thing to go as quickly as possible.” Grudgingly Wilde wrote one line—“Well, really I might be her husband already. Positively I might”—which gives Lord Augustus the last word.
They bickered over background noise. “Every word of a comedy dialogue should reach the ears of the audience,” Wilde complained, objecting to the duchess dropping words in her first speech to Hopper. “It should run,” he explained at length, “ ‘Kangaroos flying about. Agatha has found Australia on the map. What a curious shape it is! However, it’s a very young country, isn’t it?’ The words she left out are those I have underlined. They are the point to the remark about the young country. To omit them is to leave out the point of the climax, and in point of time nothing is saved by their omission. The words take less than ten seconds to speak.” To describe the curious shape, Wilde added, “Just like a large packing case.”
At the end of each day’s rehearsal, Wilde insisted on a discussion. “It saves a great deal of trouble,” he declared. “It would in the present instance have saved me writing this long letter, the points of which could have been more easily put forward in conversation, when I would also have had the advantage of hearing your own views on many points.” Wilde feigned illness to demonstrate his determination, forcing Alexander to summon him to the theatre. They resolved the mother-daughter revelation scene. It is hinted at in the first act and disclosed in the second. Only the audience knows that the mother’s identity is kept from her daughter and that the husband never knows how he nearly lost his wife. Wilde was resolving emotional conflicts about his marriage and his sexuality, but he was more interested in expressing the universality of the truth that everyone has secrets.
The reviews were mixed, even as they predicted a long run. Clement Scott, after William Archer London’s most influential critic, made fun of Wilde’s speech by putting words in the playwright’s mouth: “The society that allows boys to puff cigarette-smoke into the faces of ladies in theatre-corridors will condone the originality of a smoking author on the stage.” Wilde’s bad manners outraged Scott, who thought the play cynical and unintelligible.
James called it “infantine … both in subject and form.” The anonymous critic of The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News complained that he could not “reconcile the things the characters say with the things they do.” Some thought Lady Windermere such a moral person that for her to desert her husband on the basis of gossip was illogical. The darkly serious theme—that men are only honest with other men and women with other women—went unnoticed. Wilde had wanted to show that heterosexual relationships were incongruous. But critics responded to the play as yet another version of the French well-made play, pointing to the familiar devices of the letter and fan to drive the plot.
Shaw was amused, as were audiences enchanted by Wilde’s sparkling dialogue. Fan contains some of his most quoted and ambiguous lines. In conversation about how women prefer men to be bad so they can reform them, Dumby remarks: “I don’t think we are bad. I think we are all good except Tuppy.” Lord Darlington remarks: “No, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Dumby: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars? Upon my word, you are very romantic tonight, Darlington.” Cecil Graham: “Too romantic! You must be in love.” (Darlington is in love—with Lady Windermere.) Lord Darlington’s observation about looking at the stars has the Irish optimism of landing face up after too much drink.
Wilde’s characters break into epigrams at emotional moments just as modern-day musical stars burst into song. Shaw called Wilde the “only thorough playwright because he plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre.” Both dramatists needed actors who knew how to handle long, elaborate sentences while enacting high-society manners—such as Lord Darlington’s exchange with Lady Windermere when he remarks what a fascinating puritan she is. “The adjective was unnecessary, Lord Darlington,” she says. “I couldn’t help it,” he replies. “I can resist everything except temptation.” The temptation in the play is to flirt, but the line became synonymous with Wilde’s own excesses—and later a flippant excuse for anyone.
• • •
Initially marriage had limited Wilde’s social life. He was no longer the extra man and invitations arrived for two, but when Constance was confined to bed while pregnant and then a mother caring for young children, Wilde accepted for himself. As his reputation grew, hostesses depended on him to animate their table. A married man, he lived a bachelor’s life. In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry observes that “there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life.” Constance accepted her husband’s need to be out in society and dutifully returned to Tite Street after the premiere of Fan. Wilde met his friends at The Crown, a public house. A more appropriate home celebration had not been planned. Over in Fleet Street, his brother, Willie, was at The Daily Telegraph writing an anonymous review of Fan: “Mr. Oscar Wilde has spoken. He has publicly announced his complete satisfaction with his new and original play.… The author peoples his play with male and female editions of himself.… The play is a bad one, but it will succeed.” Wilde had arrived as a playwright but at the expense of a fragmented family.
Willie’s life had taken an unexpected turn. He declared bankruptcy in 1888 and moved in with his mother. Three years later he renewed an acquaintance with Mrs. Frank Leslie, the American widow indirectly responsible for promoting Oscar’s American lecture tour. She was fifty-five, with a vague past that stretched from her illegitimate birth as Miriam Folline in New Orleans in 1836 to “the Empress of Journalism,” the name given her by New York’s tabloids. Mrs. Leslie exemplified a type of American woman who erased humble origins through advantageous marriages: first to a jeweler, then to an archaeologist, E. G. Squier, whom she accompanied to South America, where she met her third husband, Frank Leslie, a wealthy publisher. They married in 1874 and, following his death six years later, Mrs. Leslie took over the business.
Lady Wilde thought she had worked some Irish spell when this wealthy widow took an interest in her Willie. He was fifteen years younger, but his main attraction was his journalistic skills. In a fourth husband, she wanted a lover but mostly a business partner. Willie proposed after a week’s courtship. Mrs. Leslie, acting coy, asked for time to think and le
ft for New York. Willie was on the SS Havre, the next ship crossing. Wearing a charming mask, he walked down the gangplank and into Mrs. Leslie’s heart, winning over her Park Avenue friends with his wit and piano improvisations. On October 4, 1891, Willie married for the first time in the Church of the Strangers on Mercer Street, ignoring advice to draw up a prenuptial agreement. The bride wore a Worth gown of pearl gray satin with a bonnet of gray velvet and pearl ostrich tips. The reception was at Delmonico’s and the honeymoon at Niagara Falls. Willie spent their wedding night drunk and was seldom sober thereafter.
Instead of sitting behind an office desk, he leaned on the Lotos Club bar, entertaining members with parodies of Oscar and signing for round after round of drinks for which his wife paid. He never thought about American journalism and let the tabloids write about his antics. News of his drunken performances reached his brother, who was not amused. Lady Wilde, thoroughly misinformed about how far the marriage had deteriorated, extolled its virtues for Oscar: “I hope you wrote to Willie. He seems in radiant health, hope and happiness.… Her influence must work great good in him and give him the strength he wants.”
Willie never had a chance. Mrs. Leslie was very demanding and, when disappointed, very angry. “A more scholarly and accomplished man never came to America,” she told journalists. “I had hoped he would be of great assistance to me in my business.… He couldn’t lead a London club life here in New York, and his attempt to do so was his chief fault.” Later she admitted that “he was of no use to me either by day or by night.” One newspaper headline announced: “Tired of Willie!” After six months, the estranged couple returned to England. “I’m taking Willie over, but I’ll not bring Willie back,” she announced. The marriage ended on June 10, 1893. Willie returned to Oakley Street, and Lady Wilde’s allowance of one hundred pounds a year from her daughter-in-law ended.
Lady Wilde took a perverse delight in the divorce publicity. She saw Willie as a celebrity and supported his right not to work—that was why he had married a wealthy woman. But this first divorce in the family made her more aware of the problems between Oscar and Constance, who complained to her on every visit about her husband’s long absences. Lady Wilde postponed reuniting the brothers to berate Oscar for neglecting his family. But it was too late. The son she had predicted would do “something wonderful” was in love with a bewitching young aristocrat.
The love affair of Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde was the most scandalous homosexual relationship in Victorian letters. Not for its short-lived grand passions but for the statement it made about friendship and platonic love—and for the artistic limbo to which it relegated Wilde for nearly a century. Wilde’s obsessiveness was played out in public view: it was a reckless affair. Douglas’s feelings should not be underestimated. He cared deeply for Wilde, even as Wilde cared for him more. Emotionally damaged by an erratic father and a possessive mother, he was too young to make the right choices.
Called “Bosie” by his friends from a pet name his mother gave him, Douglas was vain, shallow, and, when enraged, vindictive—an entelechial family trait. By his own account, he was “rather exceptionally good-looking as a boy,” with the cupid moue of a fin-de-siècle Aesthete. “That flowerlike sort of beauty must have been a horrible handicap to you,” Shaw once remarked, but “it was probably Nature’s reaction against the ultra-hickory type of your father.”
Photographed next to Wilde, Bosie appears short and slight, but he was above average height at five feet nine inches, a muscular 126 pounds. He liked to pose for pictures like a mischievous boy, fists shoved into his trouser pockets. The myth of his incredible beauty cannot be judged by modern standards or by surviving photographs, which froze a passive, careless face when the shutter clicked. For Wilde, Douglas’s blond hair and alabaster complexion, his sleepy eyes and heart-shaped mouth, personified Hellenic beauty: a marble torso come to life.
Bosie was a sociable young man whom Constance welcomed into the family as she had Ross. If having young men around to talk of poetry and art made her husband happy, she made every effort to include them in family holidays. At Babbacombe Cliff in Torquay on the Devon coast, Lady Mount-Temple, a distant cousin of Constance’s, owned a classic Victorian residence designed by Ruskin and decorated by Burne-Jones and Morris.
Lady Mount-Temple was more than a relative; Constance addressed her as “Mia Madre” in letters, for she was the kindly mother denied her as a child. The Wildes leased the house for months at a time for a nominal fee. The Cliff was a large, rambling structure with part of the drawing room built over an archway in the carriage drive, which had a view across Lyme Bay to Exmouth. Wilde’s young sons, Vyvyan and Cyril, called the outcropping “Wonderland” because it had originally been decorated with scenes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This was Wilde’s writing room. Going off to write, he announced that he was going to visit Wonderland.
From his days at Oxford, when he nonchalantly earned Firsts without appearing to study, Wilde had promoted a slothful image. “I have no sympathy myself with industry of any kind,” he wrote in the short story “The Remarkable Rocket,” which satirizes the narcissistic personality. “Indeed, I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.” In Earnest, Algernon complains, “It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.” Wilde wanted everyone to think that he was a man of fashion who wrote only when there was no better entertainment. Actually, he wrote all the time.
He wrote in his head; he wrote when he talked and later in notebooks, where he doodled and drew young faces in profile. Instead of the copy editor’s upside-down caret sign to indicate insertions, he wrote inside big balloons. If words pleased him, he underlined twice, and satisfactory epigrams received a star. He wrote in ink and edited in pencil; he reworked by taking a string of words and eliminating clutter to allow the idea to breathe life, to take shape. The changes—instinctive rather than agonizing choices—were no less touches of genius. The famous line in An Ideal Husband, “To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance,” began as “To love one’s self is the highest note of romance.” “A really well-made buttonhole is the true link between Art and Nature” started out as “A really exquisite buttonhole is the only true link between Art and Nature.”
Wilde loved writing plays. He worked hard at something he liked and earned more money than he had as a critic or journalist. Being a dramatist came naturally, whereas juggling subplots in his only novel had confounded him. He was never more in control of his authorial life as at this time; he demanded the right to uninterrupted writing times in comfortable places with servants to indulge and cater to him. The history of his plays is irrevocably connected to his writing houses. A successful writer’s prerogative was to complain or to blame others if unable to write. Bosie bore the brunt of the blame—perhaps unfairly—although he did complicate the progress of translating Salomé.
*Wilde wore the Malmaison, or the breakfast-tray white carnation, which changed color when plunged into a water-based aniline dye called malachite green. An earlier method used the fumes of burning sulfur. The assumption that the green carnation was worn in France as a sign of homosexuality has never been documented.
*The St. James’s was built by the actor-singer John Braham for his wife, a large woman who disliked climbing stairs. His Covent Garden contract stipulated that she always have a ground-tier box on nights when he performed, but one night a duchess usurped her place and Mrs. Braham broke an ankle climbing to an upper box. Despite a campaign led by Vivien Leigh, the much-loved St. James’s was razed in 1957 to make way for an office building.
†Battenberg was a nephew of the Prince of Wales, also one of Langtry’s lovers. He was the great-grandfather of Charles Windsor, the present Prince of Wales.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Translating Ecstasy
Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan, I have kissed thy mo
uth.
There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood?…
Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love.…
They say that love hath a bitter taste.
—SALOME
The Jews were to be dressed in yellow, Herod and Herodias in purple, and John the Baptist in white. There would be a black floor to show off Salomé’s white feet. Her special color was black, then silver, until Wilde decided on “green like a curious and poisonous lizard” standing against a violet sky. “Yes, I never thought of that,” said Wilde. “Certainly a violet sky and then, in place of an orchestra, braziers of perfume. Think—the scented clouds rising and partly veiling the stage from time to time—a new perfume for each emotion” and the theatre aired out between emotions. Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and Graham Robertson talked long into the night, draping luxurious fabrics over the cast of Salomé.
In the spring of 1892, Wilde attended a dinner at the Lyceum’s Beefsteak Room. Seated opposite him was “the serpent of old Nile,” as he called the Divine Sarah, that evening resplendent in sequins and feathers, waving a long cigarette holder. “Why don’t you write me a play?” she asked. “I have already done so,” Wilde answered. Unhappy with her season in London, Bernhardt read the one-act script re-creating a historical moment when a king becomes the pawn of his lascivious wife and stepdaughter and immediately accepted the title role.
Wilde cautioned that the central figure was the moon—admired because of its inconstancy—not the dancing princess; actually it was Herod, but Wilde chose not to confuse the temperamental actress with authorial truths. Rehearsals started in mid-June, but Bernhardt rejected the color-coordinated production and went to Henry Irving for a set and costumes. Listening to “my own words spoken by the most beautiful voice in the world has been the greatest artistic joy that it is possible to experience,” Wilde said during rehearsal. How Bernhardt phrased things in French was irrelevant. “The dress, the title of the play, the order of the words may vary,” Shaw said, “but the woman is always the same. She does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it.”
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