The two years prior to Wilde’s trial proved to be the most optimistic for the open debate on homosexuality. Contributing to this dialogue was Douglas’s work in two periodicals: the Spirit Lamp, which he edited, an undergraduate Oxford publication that came out during 1892 and 1893, and The Chameleon, a one-issue venture in December 1894. Wilde contributed epigrams from his notebooks and called them “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” with such wisdom as “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”
In the same issue was an anonymous story, “The Priest and the Acolyte,” written by the editor John Francis Bloxam, which explicitly describes pederastic interest in altar boys, a theme that the Crown made much of at Wilde’s trial. Another sympathetic publication was the Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1888–94), edited by Bosie’s friend Charles Kains Jackson. Teleny: or the Reverse of the Medal, an explicit homosexual novel published in 1893 by Leonard Smithers, was rumored to have many authors, of which Wilde was a likely suspect, but there is nothing in its style or content to suggest that he wrote any passages.
Bosie was an advocate for sexual freedom when few voices remained. John Addington Symonds, the grand old historian of the Renaissance who lost his chair in poetry at Oxford because of a fondness for young boys, was the closest to a crusading homosexual. He died in 1893, and that left George Ives. The illegitimate son of aristocratic parents and a Cambridge-educated poet, Ives struggled daily with thoughts about “the Cause.” Most of his suffering went into a diary that grew to more than three million words. “If Bosie has really made Oxford homosexual, he has done something good and glorious,” he wrote. Ives suggested the title Chameleon, a choice as interesting for its double meaning as Bunbury in Earnest.
Ives envisioned homosexuals from all spheres of life, working and living openly without prejudice. Somber and self-absorbed at twenty-seven, he lived at E4, the Albany, the bachelor residence immortalized in Earnest.* He was not a member of Wilde’s circle because he found it too exhilarating. “After going among that set it is hard to mix in ordinary society,” he wrote, “for they have a charm which is rare and wonderful. I wish they were less extravagant and more real.” In 1893 Ives founded a secret society, the Order of Chaeronea, modeling its rituals after the Masons’. Wilde was never a member. He lacked purpose, Ives said, noting in his diary, “Well, I shall find out in time, no one can conceal their real nature for ever.” When Ives championed Greek love in print, Wilde warned, “When the prurient and impotent attack you, be sure you are right.”
How important was Bosie’s role as muse? Writing bitterly from prison, Wilde would have it that Bosie destroyed him as a writer. But the evidence shows that Wilde wrote five plays during their relationship, his most productive period. Bosie promoted Wilde’s poetry of concealment, but he was not content to observe genius at work. A greedy, selfish muse, he encouraged Wilde’s popular style by driving him to write for money—money to be spent on pleasures far from the writing table. But Wilde’s claim in De Profundis that he never wrote a single line when they were together, that his life was “sterile and uncreative,” is untrue. When John Gielgud met Douglas in later years, the actor was disappointed that of the genesis of The Importance of Being Earnest Bosie could tell him only that he had stood at Wilde’s shoulder all the time (an exaggeration) he was writing the play at Worthing. A decorative muse furnishes a room and serves a purpose.
When Wilde took rooms to work at St. James’s Place, he claimed that Bosie arrived at noon and “stayed smoking cigarettes and chattering till 1:30,” when he took him to luncheon at the Café Royal or the Berkeley, which “with its liqueurs lasted usually till 3:30.” Wilde had an hour to himself while Bosie went to his club, only to reappear at teatime and stay till it was time to dress for dinner at the Savoy or at Tite Street. “We did not separate as a rule till after midnight,” Wilde recalled, “as supper at Willis’s had to wind up the entrancing day.”
If Bosie was not hovering in plain sight, Wilde missed him, as he did at Babbacombe Cliff, when he tried to polish A Woman of No Importance in Wonderland. “Things are the wrong colour without gold to light them up,” he wrote in March. “Are you working? I hope so. Do get a good crammer. I am rather unhappy as I can’t write—I don’t know why. Things are all wrong.” That Bosie was the supreme, the perfect love of Wilde’s life, meddlers such as Ross never understood. Wilde loved the image of the man—not the man. After prison, he admitted that “the mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him.”
With his Greats examination scheduled for June, Bosie engaged Campbell Dodgson to tutor him at his mother’s home in Salisbury. Then Wilde’s yearning letter changed the schedule, and they headed for Torquay, announcing their arrival by telegram when they were halfway there. Constance left to visit her aunt in Italy, while Cyril and Vyvyan remained with their father. Wilde wrote Lady Mount-Temple that Cyril was studying French in the nursery but neglected—as he often did—to mention Vyvyan’s whereabouts. Designating himself as schoolmaster, Wilde wrote the rules: compulsory hide-and-seek for headmaster, dinner with compulsory champagne, and compulsory reading in bed. (“Any boy found disobeying this rule will be immediately woken up.”)
Not much tutoring occurred. Life was “lazy and luxurious,” Dodgson recalled, and moral principles “lax.” “We argue for hours in favor of different interpretations of Platonism,” he said. “We do no logic, no history, but play with pigeons and children and drive by the sea.” Of Wilde, he said, “I think him perfectly delightful with the firmest conviction that his morals are detestable.” He found Bosie “beautiful and fascinating, but quite wicked.” Following Baudelaire’s axiom that genius is the ability to be a child at will, Wilde created an atmosphere in which the whole household became children. Bosie said Wilde “exercised a sort of enchantment which transmuted the ordinary things in life and invested them with strangeness and glamour.” He told his mother that Wilde was “as simple and innocent as a child.”
The carefree laughter of innocence resounded throughout the Cliff. One day there was a bad storm; the wind howled and the sea pounded against the rocks. The mood inside turned black. Something was said or done that set Bosie off on one of his tantrums, followed by his throwing clothes into valises and storming out. At such moments Wilde vowed to end the relationship. These scenes, he told Bosie, “kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life. I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me.” By the time Bosie calmed down, the train had pulled into Bristol, where he wired his apologies, begging Wilde for forgiveness. These cycles continued, with Bosie trying to prove to himself that he was lovable.
During their marriage, Wilde avoided commiserating with Constance about her unhappy childhood, but Bosie’s moods demanded he listen to stories about the horrors of being the youngest son of the Marquess of Queensberry. In 1887 Bosie’s mother divorced her husband on grounds of adultery and devoted herself to her three sons, particularly Bosie. Lady Queensberry knew about Wilde and, hoping that the older writer might help her son through Oxford, invited him and Constance to visit her at Bracknell in Surrey.
Bosie’s mother was less intimidating than Earnest’s Lady Bracknell, but she was her namesake’s equal in breeding. Wilde listened as she discussed her son’s vanity and extravagance. What Constance thought of being included in a discussion of how to deal with a rebellious undergraduate who monopolized her husband’s time can only be imagined. Instilling a positive note, Wilde praised Bosie’s poetry. During a time when attention to meter, rhyme, and classical forms was appreciated, Bosie excelled at the sonnet, his greatest skill the songs of youth. The best remembered is “Two Loves,” which includes the famous lines
“Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.”
Then sighing, said the other, “Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.”
One afternoon at the Café Royal, Wilde chanced to meet John Sholto Douglas, whose legendary Scottish title stretched back to the Black Douglas. The marquess was a vocal atheist and amateur light boxer who gave his name to the Queensberry Rules, which conferred on boxing a new era of fairness and respectability. Stocky at five feet eight inches, a beefy boxer at his side as bodyguard, he looked like a lion on the prowl, more at home in the brawling world of the Regency than among well-behaved Victorian lords. Any conduct that he considered unvirile outraged him. Wilde and Bosie had ordered lunch when they sensed him glowering from a nearby table. Invited to join them, he fell under Wilde’s charm as they found mutual interests in the sport of fishing and left understanding why Wilde had a reputation as a wit. But it was the last time he allowed positive thoughts to interfere with his plans to rescue his son.
Wilde hated the endless rows with Bosie, but he loved making up. Like many couples who fight and then embrace, they thrived on crises. Wilde told Bosie that his trust that he would always be forgiven was “perhaps the thing in you that I always really liked best, perhaps the best thing in you to like.” After vowing mutual affection, Bosie expected a reward, preferably a stay at the Savoy Hotel. “I want everyone to say there goes Oscar Wilde and his boy!” Bosie said when Wilde suggested they use the side door rather than attract attention in the lobby. Built in 1889, the Savoy was London’s first luxury hotel, with a view of the Thames and its bridges. It had central heating, twenty-four elevators, seventy bathrooms, and round-the-clock room service. This amenity delighted Bosie, who ordered iced champagne at any hour. The formidable Swiss hotelier César Ritz was general manager. The chef was Auguste Escoffier, who cooked for Napoléon III, created cuisses de nymphes à l’Aurore (cold frogs’ legs in a Moselle cream jelly flavored with paprika) for the Prince of Wales and pêches Melba (poached peaches over vanilla ice cream covered in raspberry purée) for the diva Nellie Melba, and imported American delicacies such as canvasback duck, sweet corn, and Little Neck clams, which Wilde had enjoyed at Delmonico’s tables in New York.
In April 1893, Wilde was staying at the Albemarle Hotel when Pierre Louÿs, soon to publish Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894), the strongest endorsement of lesbian life since Sappho, visited from Paris.* He was twenty-two and a great success with Wilde’s friends, but their indiscreet behavior disturbed him. One evening Constance knocked at the door. Having brought the mail, she begged her husband to come home and see their children. Louÿs was shocked that Wilde could inflict such a humiliation on his wife. With youthful bravado, he made his friendship contingent on Wilde giving up Douglas. Wilde found this absurd. He wrote Ross that he “chose at once the meaner nature and the baser mind.” Wilde could love Bosie and Constance at the same time, but he could not divide passion.
When Bosie did not appear for his examinations, he was required to remove his name from the Magdalen roster and leave Oxford. He had no regrets; in England a title counted for more than a degree. As Lord Illingworth tells Gerald in A Woman of No Importance, “Examinations are of no value whatsoever. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.” A summer of delicious enjoyment lay ahead. Bosie had seen a quaint thatched cottage on the river at Goring-on-Thames, an idyllic village near London, and Wilde rented it. He arrived at the station in a new white suit with his butler Arthur and the underbutler Walter Grainger, who had been a servant at Bosie’s Oxford lodgings. The surroundings were serene; the Thames flowed behind the house; even the weather was good. “I have done no work here,” Wilde wrote Charles Ricketts. “The river-gods have lured me to devote myself to a Canadian canoe, in which I paddle about. It is curved like a flower.” He remained “divided in interest between paddling a canoe and planning a comedy.” In an expansive mood, he invited his brother down for the Henley Regatta weekend in July, even sending along a pound note for cigarettes, explaining that “charming people should smoke gold-tipped cigarettes or die.” Willie did not join the festivities.
Bosie used Goring as a base to go back and forth to London; he returned with school friends who expected to be entertained. Not surprisingly the tranquillity was shattered with a scene, this time on the croquet lawn. Wilde said they “were spoiling each other’s lives” and Bosie was “absolutely ruining” his. Since they could not make each other happy, they should part, a promise Wilde made but never kept. Bosie would hold his hand like “a gentle and penitent child,” and their love, Wilde said, “passed through the shadow and the night of estrangement and sorrow and came out rose-crowned as of old.”
On his return to Tite Street in November, Wilde secretly wrote to Lady Queensberry to advise her that her youngest son was not in good health and would benefit from a change of climate. There had been another separation. He suggested four or five months in Egypt. Wilde described Bosie’s life as “aimless, unhappy and absurd,” because of his lack of interest in intellectual pursuits. “I think that if he stays in London he will not come to any good, and may spoil his young life irretrievably, quite irretrievably.” Wilde neglected to say that Bosie, who was recklessly consorting with young boys, had been involved in an unpleasant incident that included himself, Ross, and the sixteen-year-old son of an army colonel. Acting on the advice, Lady Queensberry arranged a stay with Lord Cromer, the consul general in Cairo, then a fashionable place for the English to spend the winter. Bosie threatened not to go unless he saw Wilde again and they reconciled, which they did, but Wilde sent no letters to Egypt.
Cairo was a paradise for street boys. Bosie had not been separated from his way of life; he had been delivered to a more exotic version. Before he met any dignitaries, he encountered Reggie Turner, whose half brother, Frank Lawson, had rented a kind of houseboat called a dehabiyeh—the word means “thing of gold”—which was moored in the Nile for the winter. Bosie joined them for a trip to Luxor, where they stayed at the Hôtel de Luxor; at dinner, served on long tables, they sat opposite E. F. Benson,
author of the satirical novel Dodo and a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert Hichens, a music journalist with literary aspirations not yet fulfilled at the age of thirty.
They toured Luxor’s temples, walked into the Valley of the Kings, and lounged around the barge on richly upholstered cushions, sipping iced drinks and indolently watching the ancient, silent feluccas drift along the Nile. More than once Bosie invoked Wilde’s name. They were in the midst of an exotic world not far removed from the symbolism of the banned Salomé. Oscarisms dominated the competitive exchanges. Turner did hilarious imitations of Wilde when he was not inventing provocative closing lines for letters, such as “May Allah ease your urine” and “May heaven bless the sheep that bore the lamb that grew the wool which was woven into the robe of the priest who baptised you.” Hichens congratulated himself for falling in with such a stimulating group. When he returned to London, he told Max Beerbohm he was writing a satire on Wilde based on the Nile stories. Max offered to help.
Wilde’s silences enraged Bosie so much that he convinced his mother to act as intermediary; she sent Wilde Bosie’s address in Athens, where he had gone with Benson en route to Turkey. At Lady Queensberry’s urging, Cromer had offered her son a post as honorary attaché to the British ambassador in Constantinople. Bosie wanted Wilde to meet him in Paris, but during the back-and-forth with these arrangements, the ambassador had second thoughts about Douglas joining his staff, and the offer was withdrawn. Bosie appealed to Constance to advance his cause. Wilde telegraphed him: TIME HEALS EVERY WOUND BUT FOR MANY MONTHS TO COME I WILL NEITHER WRITE TO YOU NOR SEE YOU. A week later, after a barrage of telegrams, Wilde and Bosie sat down to order an expensive meal at Voison’s in Paris.
No sooner were they back in London at their favorite haunts than Queensberry, now christened “the Scarlet Marquis” by Wilde, caught them lunching at the Café Royal. The Wildean charm was not as effective this time. If Bosie continued to see Wilde, he would be disowned. “I am not going to try and analyse this int
imacy, and I make no charge,” Queensberry wrote to his son, “but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression.” Bosie telegraphed back: WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE MAN YOU ARE. An angry reply arrived, followed by a waiver on the allowance, making threats meaningless. The lovers left for a trip to Florence.
The next attack came when Wilde returned to Tite Street. Queensberry arrived unannounced, waving “his small hand in the air in epileptic fury and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried out,” Wilde told Bosie, who escalated the tension by threatening to shoot his father. “I think if you were dead not many people would miss you,” Bosie wrote to him. Wilde watched as the child tormented the lion, waiting for the growl and the bite. “The prospect of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you,” Wilde recalled. “I never remember you in higher spirits than you were for the rest of that season.”
Before departing for Cairo, Douglas gave one of his old suits to an unemployed clerk named Alfred Wood, whom he had befriended at Oxford. When Wood discovered some letters in the pockets, he realized he had found easy money. Of particular interest was a letter Wilde wrote to Bosie from Babbacombe Cliff: “My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.” Dorian had received a similar letter, containing such idolatrous words as “the world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” As the letter passed from hand to hand, it became known as “the Hyacinth letter.”
Oscar Wilde Page 26