Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  In Wilde’s perfumed Decadent dream, more representative of his imagination than any other work, he plays with the tensions between symbol, style, and substance, between art, life, and image. Language bursts into outsized symbols: “Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory,” Salome says to Jokanaan. “It is like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory.” Wilde celebrates women as described by his mother in Social Studies. “Woman lies at the base of all life, whether for good or evil,” Lady Wilde wrote. “From Eden to Olympus, woman is the first word written on the page of every history and of every religion, and is the illuminated initial of every man’s life.… Her power over man, whether through beauty or love, through purity or sin, is the crown and the torture, the glory or the perdition.”

  More recklessly than in Dorian Gray, Wilde here exploits voice, gaze, touch, and hunger as metaphors for desire. Merely looking at someone is enough to evoke an atmosphere of doom. Lustful gazes ravish the characters. Salome accuses Jokanaan of taking her virginity from her with his gaze, revealing the secret chambers of Wilde’s imagination. Herod gazes at Salome, who desires Jokanaan, hidden in a cistern she cannot see. “It is his eyes above all that are terrible,” she says. “They are like black holes burned by torches in a tapestry of Tyre.” Salomé was a turning point in Wilde’s life, a play that celebrates love as the most powerful force in human nature, written at the moment when the author embraced a perilous love. “The mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death,” says Salome.

  All new plays needed the imprimatur of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, where the blue pencils were wielded by civil servants. Wilde’s fate was settled by Edward F. Smyth Pigott, who held the title of examiner for nearly a half century and, in Shaw’s words, was “a walking compendium of vulgar insular prejudice.” Aware that there was a ban on plays depicting biblical characters, Wilde should not have been so outraged that artists and sculptors could portray biblical figures while a playwright could not. He threatened to leave the country and settle in France. “I shall take out letters of naturalisation. I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in artistic judgement. I am not English,” he said. “I am Irish which is quite another thing.” Punch published a cartoon of Wilde wearing military uniform laden with infantry gear, illustrating that, if he became a French citizen, he was subject to national service.

  Salomé in the original French text was published by the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant in February 1893, but plans for a Paris production were unsuccessful. Dedicated “A mon ami Pierre Louÿs,” it was bound in “Tyrian purple” (Max Beerbohm said “Parma violets”) with letters Wilde described as “fading” or “tired” silver. Wilde bragged to Ricketts that he had become a famous French author.* The French edition provoked passionate reactions. Edgar Saltus said it made him shudder. “It is only the shudder that counts,” Wilde replied. William Archer called Salomé “an oriental Hedda Gabler,” one who speaks to “that life within your life, which alone … is really worth living—the life of the imagination.” Recently staged in London, Ibsen’s play had impressed Wilde, who said afterward, “I felt pity and terror, as though the play had been Greek.” The Times thought Salomé “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.” To those who pointed out resemblances to Flaubert’s “Hérodias,” Wilde replied, “Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine without signing my name at the end of it. Que voulez-vous? All the best Hundred Books bear my signature in this manner.”

  Wilde wanted an English version but was too involved with his next play to do it himself, and he needed an illustrator, who by right of seniority was Charles Ricketts. He focused elsewhere when he saw the work of Aubrey Beardsley in the new art magazine The Studio. Only twenty-one, the idiosyncratic artist was experimenting with a style based on the simplicity of Japanese woodcuts. Arousing Wilde’s regard was Beardsley’s drawing of the climactic scene of his play, when Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist. Wilde acknowledged the tribute with an inscribed copy: “For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.”

  Wilde met Beardsley in the summer of 1891 at Burne-Jones’s studio, where the artist appeared uninvited with his portfolio. The older artist encouraged him to continue his work and brought him out to the garden to meet the Wildes and their sons. Wilde noted that Beardsley had a face “like a silver hatchet.” Diagnosed as a consumptive while still a child, Beardsley would be dead in seven years: he saw himself encumbered with “a vile constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long red hair, a shuffling gait and a stoop.” Through Wilde’s patronage, he joined the inner circle that dined at the Café Royal, Willis’s, and Kettner’s. He told Wilde that he read French as easily as English, considered Balzac’s characters in La Comédie humaine his family members, and wanted to translate Salomé. The publisher John Lane discouraged the idea and steered the young man back to art, promising him not only the cover but also ten full-page drawings. Working with large blocks of black ink and blank white areas to graphically define space, Beardsley set out to upset the traditional relationship between text and illustration.* Wilde wanted to involve Bosie in some intellectual project and asked him to make the translation. Flattered by the prospect of sharing the title page with Wilde, Bosie put his inadequate French to work.

  Like Wilde in the mid-seventies, Beardsley was intent on being a personality and applying a decorative style to modern life. The competition between the two dandies with their lemon-colored kid gloves could overoxygenate a room. Besides taking himself too seriously, Beardsley lived with an anger at life’s limits, not uncommon in people with terminal illnesses. He forged a friendship with Max Beerbohm to share the sport of challenging Wilde’s authority. As he finished the drawings, Beardsley sent them by messenger to the Bodley Head office in Vigo Street. At first Lane ignored or missed some of the lewd details, but he soon returned those drawings that needed a fig leaf here or an obscurity there. While concealing some obscenities, Beardsley introduced satires of Wilde, whose bloated face appears as “the Woman in the Moon,” described as a “mad,” “drunken” woman “seeking everywhere for lovers.”

  Hostility combined with ambiguous sexuality fascinated Wilde. Beardsley, like Gide, was a young man in need of taunting. Wilde challenged his sophistication, remarking, “Dear Aubrey is too Parisian; he cannot forget that he has been to Dieppe—once!” He also attacked Beardsley’s art: “When I have before me one of your drawings, I want to drink absinthe, which changes colour like jade in sunlight and makes the senses thrall, and then I can live myself back in ancient Rome, in the Rome of the later Caesars.” He questioned his preferences. “Don’t sit on the same chair as Aubrey, it’s not compromising,” Wilde once said at the Café Royal. Beardsley had a habit of folding up his long legs and perching on the arms of chairs. Then, as now, he was a puzzle, an eternal adolescent whose masturbation fantasies were sublimated in priapic art. As to homosexuality, he told Arthur Symons, “Yes, Yes, I look like a sodomite. But no, I am not one.”

  Bosie worked on the translation throughout the summer, more to demonstrate his dedication than to impress Wilde with his painstaking word choices. Whatever he produced would be accepted, or so he thought; but when Wilde read it and found it full of “schoolboy faults,” Bosie was insulted. Wilde should not have been surprised, he had expected too much—using the dictionary, as his mother had done as a translator, for one thing. The text was “unworthy” of the original work, he told Bosie. Tantrums followed rows, then a separation so acrimonious that Ross had to intercede on Bosie’s behalf, then the reuniting—and the terms. Wilde wanted Bosie to make major revisions, and, when he refused, Beardsley wanted to step in. A four-sided squabble ensued among Wilde, Beardsley, Douglas, and Lane before Wilde w
rested Bosie’s version to edit himself. Retaliating, Beardsley substituted irrelevant drawings in his submissions to Lane; when he became art editor of The Yellow Book, he accepted on condition that Wilde was excluded as a contributor. Their paths would cross again, however, when Wilde was in exile in Dieppe.

  As Wilde envisioned it, his play was the language of purple and gold, a verbal interpretation of Gustave Moreau’s gilded style. Prepared for a Byzantine setting, he was shocked by the black-and-white Japanesque figures that resembled little monsters with big heads and bulging eyes; some had faunlike bodies hidden in the foliage of scaly rosebushes and exhibited genitalia. Beardsley had neither illuminated nor elevated the text; he had given his drawings a life of their own, including personal attacks on the author. They were the kinds of “naughty scribbles a precocious boy makes in the margins of his copybook,” Wilde said. The drawings had surface appeal but not the unrestrained emotional depth that Wilde craved. They overshadowed the play and made Beardsley’s reputation. Reviewing the edition, the London Times remarked on the graphics that the “whole thing must be a joke, and it seems to us a very poor joke!” Joyce called it “a polyphonic variation on the rapport of art and nature.”

  Wilde launched Symbolist drama in a vehicle in which atmosphere is everything, in which exotic language and opulent imagery create overlays of sensual evil. Enlarging artistic horizons, he flaunted his achievement in making “Drama, the most objective form known to art, … as personal a mode of expression as the Lyric or the Sonnet.” His ambition, fluctuating since Oxford, was to be remembered not as a poet, thinker, or playwright, “but as the man who reclothed the sublimest conception which the world has ever known—the Salvation of Humanity, the Sacrifice of Himself upon the Cross by Christ—with new and burning words.” These words had to wait for prison and De Profundis.

  A new personality joined Wilde’s circle when Herbert Beerbohm—who added Tree to his name when he entered the theatre—introduced his elfin half brother Max around town. Called “the Incomparable Max,” Beerbohm had been known to Wilde at Oxford in the mid-eighties, when he was a Merton undergraduate chumming around with Reginald “Reggie” Turner, his closest friend. Short and owlish, Max became a fixture at homosexual gatherings, his fastidious, reticent nature appreciated by the other egotists. Only Max could get away with announcing his state of mind as “Oh, I’m radiant.” His was an incessant zest, and he liked to watch fires.

  Turner never knew his mother and assumed he was the illegitimate son of Edward Levy-Lawson, proprietor of The Daily Telegraph, but his father was probably his guardian, Levy-Lawson’s uncle, Lionel Lawson, who left Turner money at his death in 1879. A witty companion and a great mimic, Turner was known for his ugliness. He had a nut-shaped head, blubbery lips, a huge snoutlike nose, and a nervous habit of continually winking and blinking. Eager to be accepted, he was generous with his ample allowance. Reggie and Max were inseparable at college and remained lifelong friends, despite the complication that Turner, a homosexual, was in love with Max. Unmoved by the senses and fearful of life’s coarser aspects, Max never felt passion for his men friends or for women. His late marriage by mutual agreement was probably never consummated; he told his wife, Florence, that physical love was beyond him.

  Still, there was also the exception, and Turner feared that Beerbohm might be seduced by Bosie’s beauty when the two became friendly at Oxford. In his offhand way, Max assured Turner that he had no reason to worry. Bosie was “obviously mad (like all his family I believe),” Max said, “and though he is pretty and clever and nice, I never judge my friends from an aesthetic, an intellectual, or an ethical standpoint: I simply like them or dislike—that is all. You are fortunate enough to have fallen into the former category.”

  Like a Cheshire cat, Max watched from the warmth of a distant sunlit window, noting the worst in everybody, a talent that served him well when he became a scathing caricaturist. Will Rothenstein said that “nothing escaped the clear pitiless grey eye of Max.” He later regretted drawing Wilde bloated and openmouthed, looking very decadent, particularly when the picture was posted in the office of the police inspector who arrested Wilde for gross indecency.

  In words and art, Beerbohm was an annoying moralist. What business was it of anyone eighteen years Wilde’s junior to keep track of his drinking? “I am sorry to say that Oscar drinks far more than he ought,” he wrote Turner; “indeed the first time I saw him, after all that long period of distant adoration and reverence, he was in a hopeless state of intoxication. He has deteriorated very much in appearance: his cheeks being quite a dark purple and fat to a fault.” He also attacked Wilde’s need for disciples in an article published in the Anglo-American Times. Max decided that Wilde had done “incalculable” harm by not realizing that a love of beauty for its own sake was “inborn and cannot ever be communicated.” In his view the young men trying to be Aesthetes had, for the most part, failed absurdly.

  Wilde read the article, told Max that his style was like a “silver dagger,” and liked him all the more for his courage—few chose to take such a risk. Over dinner at Willis’s, they discussed Oxford professors. Max complained that he could never hear Pater when he lectured. Wilde observed that one only overheard him. “Giving lectures for him,” Max continued, hoping to trump the master, “was a form of self-communion. He whispered them.” No wonder Wilde said that the gods had bestowed on Max “the gift of perpetual old age.” Like Wilde himself, Max was a conundrum. “Tell me,” Wilde asked a mutual friend, “when you are alone with him, … does he take off his face and reveal his mask?” The two dandies spoke the same language.

  • • •

  Before Wilde began his second play, A Woman of No Importance (originally entitled Mrs. Arbuthnot), he and Bosie went to Bad Homburg. Much to Constance’s amusement, her husband took the rest cure, demanding a strict diet and no cigarettes. That summer of 1892 he wrote at a farmhouse at Felbrigg, a village near Cromer on the coast of Norfolk. His family was at Babbacombe Cliff, and exchange visits were planned. After a few weeks of solitary writing, Wilde invited Bosie to join him. Shortly after arrival, Bosie caught a cold and took to bed, sniffling and sniveling. Wilde wrote Constance that he could not leave Bosie to visit Torquay, and she graciously offered to come and nurse: “I am so sorry about Lord Alfred Douglas, and wish I was at Cromer to look after him. If you think I could do any good, do telegraph for me, because I can easily get over to you.”

  In mid-September, Constance wrote to a friend that the play would be finished in a week. She said of Oscar, “He has become mad about golf and spends two or three hours on the links every day and this is good for him.” One of the few games in which talking enhances a sport, golf was made for Wilde, a perfect recreation for a conversationalist. One imagines him ambling down the green in his elephantine gait, wearing tweed plus fours, distracting the other players’ concentration with endless stories—most lost forever. Wilde kept his clubs leaning in the hallway corner at Tite Street, but he had more enthusiasm than skill for the game.

  Wilde handed Tree the script of A Woman of No Importance on October 14 and began the nuisance of breaking in a new actor-manager. Had he collaborated again with Alexander, the process might have been easier, but the St. James’s was booked and Tree had an open schedule at the Haymarket. By affecting a flippant attitude, Wilde tried to take control. “As Herod in my Salome you would be admirable,” he told the beefy Tree. “As a peer of the realm in my latest dramatic device, pray forgive me if I do not see you.” Tree reminded him that he had played the Duke of Guise-bury in The Dancing Girl. “Ah! that’s just it,” said Wilde. “Before you can successfully impersonate the character I have in mind, you must forget that you ever played Falstaff: above all you must forget that you ever played a Duke in a melodrama by Henry Arthur Jones.” Better still, Wilde continued, “forget you have ever acted because the part is unlike any that existed.” Humoring him, Tree exclaimed: “My God! he must be supernatural.” “He is certainly not natural
,” said Wilde. “He is a figure of art. Indeed, if you can bear the truth, he is MYSELF.”

  Wilde kept written notes after each rehearsal and made marginal notes on the script indicating how Tree should speak certain lines. He asked him to underplay the scene at the beginning of Act Two when Lord Illingworth is lecturing his son (although the relationship is not known) about the evils of puritanism. Lord Illingworth advises Gerald that the “wildest profligate who spills his life in folly, has a better, saner, finer philosophy of life than the Puritan has. He, at any rate, knows that the aim of life is the pleasure of living, and does in some way realise himself, be himself.” A diatribe against puritanism was out of place, said Tree, particularly when the principal character is delivering a series of worldly-wise epigrams. Tree wanted the speech cut. Wilde agreed to substitute an epigram: “Puritanism is not a theory of life. It is an explanation of the English middle classes.” Tree insisted on deleting the whole speech and eventually got his way.

  A Woman of No Importance is “a woman’s play,” Wilde said. There is the woman with a past, Mrs. Arbuthnot, her illegitimate son, and the unrepentant aristocratic dandy as seducer. There is wit and melodrama, but mostly there is talk. Wilde proudly pointed out that there was absolutely no action—only conversation—in the first act. Deliberately and succinctly, he turned the most common criticism of his dramas—all talk and no action—into a virtue. Anticipating all the playwrights to come, he makes talk dramatic, and gradually, in Ibsen-like fashion, characters reveal their inner selves; he introduces flirtations in code and shows the impact of silent communication.