Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Trying to mix feminist theories with melodrama can be difficult, but Wilde’s views are clear: the double standard is unfair. By saying that men are intellectual and heartless and women live by their emotions, Wilde explains—perhaps excuses—his own behavior. In this play he makes melodrama modern. There is a triumphant curtain line, delivered by Mrs. Arbuthnot after she has struck her former lover in the face with his own glove. Her son enters and picks up the glove, asking who had called. “Oh! no one. No one in particular. A man of no importance.”

  • • •

  Tree said he produced the play not with the assistance of the playwright but with his interference. Wilde claimed that Tree had called him “foolish,” “slippery,” and “deceptive.” Not only did Wilde want his way with his own words—not an unheard-of prerogative—but when thwarted he attacked the little things, such as the flimsy paper used for tickets: “If I go to Charing Cross station and pay a penny to go to Westminster, I get a nicer ticket than if I bought one of your ten-and-sixpenny Stalls.” When they returned to more serious matters, Tree complained that some of the dialogue was “redundant,” and the heroine’s name “too fluctuating—for theatrical purposes.” Wilde wanted the part of Gerald to go to a newly discovered profile, an actor named Sydney Barraclough, but Tree refused. He wanted parts given to members of his company, in this case Ellen Terry’s brother, Fred.

  A Woman of No Importance opened at the Haymarket on April 19, 1893. Arrivals were dropped off at a Corinthian portico, not as imposing as the Lyceum’s, but still regal. Dressed in a white waistcoat with a buttonhole of little lilies, Wilde watched from his box at stage left. When the applause and calls for the author began, he disappointed all those who expected a reprise of his speech after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan. He stood in his box, surveyed the audience from the gallery to the stalls, and made sure he was recognized before laconically announcing: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that Mr. Oscar Wilde is not in the house.” Afterward he was less generous with praise for the audience. “People love a wicked aristocrat who seduces a virtuous maiden,” he said, “and they love a virtuous maiden for being seduced by a wicked aristocrat. I have given them what they like, so that they may learn to appreciate what I like to give them.” Success was making Wilde increasingly arrogant, not that he had ever been humble.

  The play had defects but was welcome entertainment. A disappointed Yeats said, “Despite its qualities, it is not a work of art, it has no central fire, it is not dramatic in any ancient sense of the word.” Clement Scott, who criticized Fan as “a clever, immature work,” praised its successor for being “pungent, observant, sarcastic, and amusing.” He said that when Wilde “removes the jester’s masks then he rises with his subject and elevates it at every soar.” Scott called the characters “strong, poetical, sympathetic, virile,” adding that if the author continued in this manner Scott would persuade himself that the stage could be made a serious platform.

  It has some of Wilde’s best lines about relationships: “My husband is a kind of promissory note; I am tired of meeting him,” says Mrs. Allonby. Whereupon Lady Caroline Pontefract replies, “But you renew him from time to time don’t you?”

  The idée fixe of Wilde’s work was a pattern of secret and revelation, guilt and forgiveness: “The Book of Life begins with a man and woman in a garden. It ends with Revelation”; “Women have a much better time than men. There are far more things forbidden to them”; and “All the married men nowadays live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.” Everyone wanted to sound like a Wildean character, to sparkle with epigrams. “As far as I can ascertain,” said Shaw, “I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will. The fact that his plays, though apparently lucrative, remain unique under these circumstances says much for the self-denial of our scribes.”

  His reputation secure in London, Wilde perversely repudiated America, where he had begun his career as a playwright, albeit unsuccessfully, with Vera. Elisabeth Marbury,* now the preeminent theatrical agent for European authors, with offices worldwide, begged him to attend the first night of Lady Windermere’s Fan, which opened in Boston in January 1893 and the following month in New York, with Maurice Barrymore—patriarch of the acting dynasty of Ethel, John, and Lionel—in the role of Lord Darlington. Wilde criticized Albert Marshman Palmer’s production. Barrymore “dresses the part badly,” he wrote Marbury, on the basis of secondhand reports, “and does not see that Darlington is not a villain, but a man who really believes that Windermere is treating his wife badly, and wishes to save her.”

  Wilde wanted Charles Frohman—destined to be, with David Belasco, the leading producer of the English-speaking stage—to produce Woman after its run at the Haymarket so that the American version would be the same as the one done under his supervision. “I need not tell you,” he instructed Marbury, “with your experience and artistic instinct, how a play grows at rehearsal, and what new points one can introduce.” Frohman did not take the play, but Rose Coghlan, an English-born American actress, did. Again Marbury begged Wilde to attend opening night: “Your presence here would do more to advance the success of the production than anything else.”

  Nothing would have pleased Wilde more than a triumphant return to New York, where he had so many friends, among them Clyde Fitch. But to leave Bosie, who was busy doing badly at Oxford and needed his encouragement, might have threatened their newfound intimacy.

  *The first performance in French was at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris in 1896, when Wilde was in prison; the first London performance was privately produced in 1905; the first public performance was in 1931 at the Lyceum. The premiere of Richard Strauss’s opera was in 1905 in Dresden; when he sought a license in 1909 to perform the German libretto based on Wilde’s play in London, he was refused. A license was granted only after all biblical allusions were eliminated. Instead of the head appearing onstage, Salomé had to sing to a bloodstained tray. When Madame Ackle refused to sing to an empty tray, more permissions were needed for the tray to be covered with a cloth. “Only care must be taken not to build up a great heap in it, which would look suggestive,” the report read.

  *Beardsley was the first innovative artist whose success was based on photogravure—a technique that enabled him to work directly from ink drawings, which were photographically reproduced, then printed straight from the block, thus destroying the distinction between an original and a copy. Beardsley earned his reputation through the publication of reproductions; few ever saw his original work.

  *When Marbury started as an agent in 1890, playwrights had some legal rights, but piracy, particularly of foreign plays, was rampant. Pirates sent stenographers to the theatre to transcribe the scripts; working in the dark, they stretched string across their notes to keep the lines straight. Marbury is credited with establishing the royalty system in America.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mostly Famous

  Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops.

  —DE PROFUNDIS

  He usually wore a frock coat and top hat and carried a silver-crested walking stick; his buttonhole was made daily by a florist in the Burlington Arcade. Now a successful dramatist, Wilde hired a hansom by the day to drop him at the theatre and wait outside until he made his nightly rounds, which usually ended at the Café Royal, where the only crime in 1890s society was not to sparkle. Seated at his favorite marble-chipped table in the Domino Room, he summoned one of the garçons de café, whose aprons by managerial decree covered their shoes. Ordering absinthe, he held the glass up to the light, savored its green color, and announced to all within earshot that it was Baudelaire’s favorite. Whenever Wilde paused in conversation, he lit
another cigarette from one of the several silver cases on the table. The first time Max Beerbohm saw the Domino Room, he looked at the gold and crimson, the mirrors and the caryatids, listened to the hum of cynical conversation broken by the clatter of dominoes on the marble tables, and said: “This indeed is life!”

  When the chef appeared to make his recommendations, Wilde conferred with his guests, inquiring in French on the merits of the sole Beau-manoir or the suprême de volaille à la Patti. A celebratory life expanded his waistline, but he never saw himself as fat: fate had trapped him inside a monumental edifice. He was handsome in the way of an enormous doll. “When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me,” he said. “Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink.”

  Sometimes Wilde and his exquisite Aeolian harps, as Max called the group that included Bosie, Ross, and Turner, made a tour of the popular music halls. In Earnest, Jack and Algernon discuss how they will spend the evening after dining at Willis’s. “What shall we do after dinner?” asks Algernon. “Go to a theatre?” Jack replies: “Oh no! I loathe listening.” “Well, let us go to the Club?” “Oh, no! I hate talking.” “Well, we might trot round to the Empire at ten?” “Oh, no! I can’t bear looking at things. It is so silly.” “Well”—Algernon sighs—“what shall we do?” “Nothing!”

  Wilde had perfected the art of talking, but listening and looking were recent enjoyments. Most evenings he was seen applauding loudly at the theatre. Michael Field observed him at a performance of The Duchess of Malfi and said that he “sits as if blowing bubbles of enjoyment.” At The Master Builder, she noted his position in a box “allowing the people to see him and the silver knob of his cane.” After the theatre, a late supper followed, often at the cozy Artists Room at Pagani’s in Great Portland Street, a rendezvous of the Prince of Wales and Lillie Langtry, where the specialties were calf’s brains and lark-and-steak pie. Along with Sarah Bernhardt, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Peter Tchaikovsky (who added several bars from his Fourth Symphony), Wilde signed his name on the linoleum wall. Bosie’s perfect evening, Wilde said, was “a champagne dinner at the Savoy, a box at a music hall to follow, and a champagne supper at Willis’s as a bonne bouche for the end.”

  For looking, Wilde enjoyed the vernissages, or private views, at the Royal Academy. He is immortalized, the tallest top-hatted figure consulting his catalog, in the painting The Private View of the Academy, 1881 by William Powell Frith. His clubs were not comparable to those of his characters or of Douglas, who belonged to White’s, which along with Boodle’s was an aristocratic St. James’s gentlemen’s club. While at Oxford, Wilde joined St. Stephen’s, a Conservative club near the Houses of Parliament; after his marriage he and Constance patronized the Albemarle, a mixed club founded in 1879. Despite support by prominent members, including an unlikely Henry James, who loathed Wilde, the prestigious Savile blackballed him in 1888. That invitations—“To meet Mr. Oscar Wilde”—inserted him between the soup and the pudding never bothered him.

  Being involved in all aspects of theatre production introduced Wilde to a homosocial world that had existed since Elizabethan times. Uranian culture was flamboyant, theatrical, anticipating the admiration for male ballet and musical comedy dancers. Except for those who appeared in amateur drag-queen theatricals, West End actors who were homosexual were circumspect about their private lives. There was always the chance that letters (purloined or misplaced) might fall into the wrong hands, as Wilde soon discovered—even as he used such letters as plot devices for his plays. Everyone in London’s homosexual underground knew the story of Stella (Ernest Boulton) and Fanny (Frederick Park), who were arrested in 1871 coming from a theatre dressed as women. Suggestive letters found in their lodgings became evidence and threatened a jail sentence. It is noteworthy that twenty-four years before Wilde’s trial, when provocative letters were used as evidence, the chief justice regarded them as “no more than the romantic expression of personal admiration and affection. No doubt such feelings and attachments had existed and might exist without any evil.” At that time the court preferred to pretend that homosexual feelings did not exist.

  It was no exaggeration that the 1885 law under which Wilde was prosecuted was called “the Blackmailer’s Charter.” Dorian “had heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter or overheard a conversation.” An indiscreet letter had brought Wilde and Bosie together. After a few casual meetings, Bosie invited Wilde to visit him at Oxford. Bosie was being blackmailed and needed advice. Wilde spent the weekend in his rooms, returned to London, and handed the matter over to his solicitor, George Lewis, who retrieved the document for a hundred pounds. Bosie claims in his autobiography that Wilde was a persistent suitor, but Wilde was still seeing John Gray and was far too involved with the production of Lady Windermere’s Fan for any intense courtship.

  By May 1892, when Wilde describes Bosie to Ross as “a narcissus—so white and gold,” stretched out “like a hyacinth on the sofa,” the symbolism of nakedness gave Ross every reason to be jealous and to question his preeminent place in Wilde’s circle. The following month, Wilde inscribes a new edition of Poems: “To the Gilt-mailed Boy.” Intimacies paralleled Wilde’s aesthetic appreciation of his lover’s body.

  Bosie recalled that they became lovers nine months after they met. “These familiarities were rare,” he said, “but they did occur spasmodically.” They stopped six months “before the final catastrophe, and were never resumed after he came out of prison.” Inevitably the two developed an incompatible physical relationship. They both worshiped youth and beauty. Briefly at Trinity, Wilde’s body had been muscular, but no longer. Bosie liked to romp and pose naked, completely at ease as the gilt-mailed boy. Wilde felt awkward beside him.

  Wilde believed that Greek spiritual love is the highest form of love; what he wanted was not bliss or even satisfaction but contentment. “I blame myself for allowing an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, entirely to dominate my life.” Sexual needs led to quarrels. Bosie could be “revolting,” “loathsome,” “offensive,” and “violent,” Wilde said. At some point they agreed on a platonic relationship and found sex elsewhere. “So far from his leading me astray, it was I that (unwittingly) pushed him over the precipice,” Douglas later said about introducing Wilde to the homosexual underworld of rent boys.

  These prostitutes, often younger than the legal age of sixteen, solicited on street corners, in public lavatories, at pubs, and in and around the promenades of the Empire, Tivoli, and Pavilion, the popular music halls. Male prostitutes sometimes called themselves “gay” to go with their female counterparts, who were known as “gay ladies.” Wilde and Bosie were gentlemen who were homosexual in a country where sex was one of the few means by which someone could cut across class boundaries. Following a long tradition of gentlemen who liked to trash their own breeding in the pursuit of street boys, the two embarked on experiences Wilde later described as “feasting with panthers.” Wilde accepted promiscuity with mixed feelings: it was nonexistent in Plato’s time because it was unnecessary, but evolved in modern times when free expression of desire was forbidden. Jealousy applied to marriage and was, Wilde said, an emotion “closely bound up with our conceptions of property” and “an extraordinary source of crime in modern life.” As he watched Bosie leave a party with a beautiful young man, however, he must have felt some twinge of ownership.

  Wilde did not meet lovers in sordid East End rooms. Usually Bosie’s friend Alfred Taylor arranged introductions at Wilde’s restaurants or the Café Royal; following a leisurely dinner and a mutual understanding, they left for Wilde’s rooms at 10–11 St. James’s Place, the Savoy, or the Albemarle, even Tite Street if the family was away. Wilde and Bosie took connecting rooms at the Savoy. The evening began with champagne dinners, then intimacies with th
e boys selected, followed by more champagne or hock and seltzer and talk and more talk—about sex. “Your defect was not that you knew so little about life, but that you knew too much,” Wilde said of Bosie in De Profundis. “The gutter and the things that live in it had begun to fascinate you.… terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me.” There followed months of prodigal nights succeeded by vicious arguments redeemed only by laughter.

  Alfred Taylor was the son of a cocoa merchant and once a public school boy at Marlborough, a fact that Wilde proudly stated at his trial. Taylor lived at 13 Little College Street, behind Westminster Abbey, in a fourth-floor flat with a view of the Houses of Parliament. There he staged drag theatricals and his own mock wedding to his companion, Charles Mason. Among the young men whom Taylor introduced to Wilde was Sidney Mavor, later a Church of England priest, whom Wilde saw over a period of a year and a half; Freddy Atkins, seventeen, already a blackmailer; the brothers Charles and William Parker, unemployed gentlemen’s servants, and others such as Alfred Wood, a seventeen-year-old whom Bosie tired of and passed on to Wilde.

  Since these boys were already prostitutes, there was no need to seduce them, but Wilde courted them the same way he would have courted a young woman. There were champagne dinners during which he took a personal interest in their lives—one criminal talking to another; he gave them gifts, often silver cigarette cases from Thornhill’s in Bond Street. Not every meeting resulted in sexual favors, but it mattered not whether there were improprieties if there appeared to be, and Wilde’s behavior generated unwholesome talk. “I am one made for the exception and not for the rule,” he said, claiming the right to defy established norms. “I have never posed as being ordinary, great heavens!”