Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Wearing Bosie’s cast-off suit, Wood met Wilde at the Café Royal in the spring of 1893; they had a drink and afterward dined in a private room at the Florence, a restaurant popular for its two-shilling five-course dinners. That evening, Wilde ordered the champagne supper and eventually presented his guest with a five-pound note. Within days, Wilde learned that Beerbohm Tree had received a copy of the Hyacinth letter. Concerned about bad publicity, Tree advised him to buy the letter back. Wilde would not consent to outright blackmail, so he gave Wood thirty-five pounds, ostensibly to help him emigrate to America. Wood handed over the packet to Wilde, who trustingly put it his pocket, only later discovering that the Hyacinth letter was missing.

  An accomplice of Wood’s, William Allen, called on Wilde at Tite Street. “I suppose you have come about my beautiful letter to Lord Alfred Douglas,” Wilde said. “If you had not been so foolish as to send a copy of it to Mr. Beerbohm Tree, I would gladly have paid you a very large sum of money for the letter, as I consider it to be a work of art.” “A very curious construction can be put on that letter,” Allen said. “Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes,” replied Wilde. “A man has offered me sixty pounds for it.” “If you will take my advice, you will go to that man and sell my letter to him for sixty pounds. I myself have never received so large a sum for any prose work of that length: but I am glad to find that there is someone in England who considers a letter of mine worth sixty pounds.” “The man is out of town.” “He is sure to come back,” added Wilde.

  Finally Allen admitted that he needed money. Wilde gave him half a sovereign with the comment “The letter is a prose poem, will shortly be published in sonnet form in a delightful magazine, and I will send you a copy of it.”* Allen left, and in a few minutes his cohort, Robert Clibborn, appeared at the door and handed Wilde the original of the letter. Wilde examined it and noted that it was soiled. “I think it quite unpardonable that better care was not taken of this original manuscript of mine.” Wilde gave him another coin. “I am afraid you are leading a wonderfully wicked life,” said Wilde. “There is good and bad in every one of us,” said Clibborn. Wilde kept the letter in some safe place, but a copy later surfaced and was read aloud at the Old Bailey.

  While Hichens worked on his satire, to be called The Green Carnation, a literary publication that would become celebrated was being planned. During the 1890s, the Victorians needed to construct a new world to replace what had existed when Queen Victoria, now approaching her diamond jubilee, ascended the throne. The decade has been variously labeled “the Naughty Nineties,” “the Yellow Nineties,” “the Mauve Decade,” and “the Age of Decadence.” Wilde and the Yellow Nineties were the most synonymous: yellow was the color of his walls and his wine, the color of sunlight and sunflowers. Lord Henry remarks wistfully in Dorian Gray that “yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life.” The color had been favored by Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones. Whistler used yellow in his Japanese paintings. Beardsley painted the walls of his studio yellow with black moldings. But the label “the Yellow Nineties” owes more to the publication and demise of The Yellow Book than to any one artist’s color sense.

  Aubrey Beardsley started the quarterly with Henry Harland and John Lane; all decided to exclude Wilde from participation. They had not forgotten the three-way disagreements over Salome and feared more of the same. The new publication appeared in April 1894, bound like a book, with a sense of mission and permanence that impressed the public. The contents page listed such figures as Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Arthur Symons, Richard Garnett, and Edmund Gosse. “A mixture of English rowdyism and French lubricity,” The Times said. “Have you seen The Yellow Book?” Wilde asked Ada Leverson. “It is horrid and not yellow at all.” He told Bosie: “It is dull and loathsome: A great failure—I am so glad.” When Charles Ricketts tried to praise it, Wilde stopped him and told how he had been trying to “lose” his copy—only to have it continually returned to him by overzealous cabbies and railway guards. It was Beardsley’s Decadent style, a reminder of the Salome illustrations, that nonetheless linked the book with Wilde. More subdued artists—John Singer Sargent, Wilson Steer, and Sir Frederick Leighton—went unnoticed.

  Two months after The Yellow Book appeared, the rarest of Wilde’s books, The Sphinx, a poem in progress since Oxford, was published. Ricketts outdid himself with a beautiful vellum book that allowed the interplay between illustration and text to work like that in a medieval manuscript. He considered the ten full-page drawings, delicate with wavy lines, his best. Wilde complained that the drawings were conceived through his intellect, not his temperament. Ricketts was angry. Not knowing where to lash out, he attacked Wilde’s inscription: an aggressive example of his eccentric signature, which ended in a sprawling straight-lined Z. Ricketts tore out the page on which it was written and returned it to Wilde. But the succès de scandale of Beardsley’s illustrations for Salome overshadowed The Sphinx, and, like A House of Pomegranates, it was remaindered. Most of the two hundred first-edition copies, whose entire text was printed in capital letters, went unsold, and those were destroyed in a fire at the Ballantyne Press in 1899.

  *In Act One of the original four-act version of Earnest, Wilde gave John Worthing the same address as Ives’s, making it an insider code; before opening night he changed it to B4. He also deleted a remark by Miss Prism from an early version of Act Two when she says that Ernest must be “as bad as any young man who has chambers in the Albany, or indeed even in the vicinity of Piccadilly, can possibly be.”

  *Louÿs wrote in the voice of a young woman, claiming that he had translated newly discovered Sapphic writing. The second part of The Songs of Bilitis, entitled “Elegies at Mytilene,” contains the lesbian love poems, including “The Desperate Embrace”: “Love me, not with smiles, flutes, or braided flowers, but with your heart and your tears, as I love you with my breast and my lamentations.… Moan! Moan! Moan! Oh, woman! Eros draws us into pain. You would suffer less on the bed when bringing a child into the world than when giving birth to your love.”

  *Wilde sensed there might be more trouble and probably asked Pierre Louÿs to turn the letter into a French sonnet. It was published in the Spirit Lamp, and Wilde used the defense at his trial that the letter was a work of art.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Broken Line

  We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

  —THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  Wilde believed that the imagination shapes reality to its will, and he lived uneasily with the uncanny ability to write his life and then live it, authenticating his philosophy that life imitates art more frequently than art imitates life. He trusted in fortune-tellers to confirm his sense of destiny; rather than the tarot, he preferred chiromancy, the ancient art of palmistry, taught by Anaxagoras and practiced by Aristotle. London’s foremost chiromancist was Count Louis Hamon, known as Cheiro, who wrote one of the first textbooks on palmistry and predicted Wilde’s fate at a party after the opening of A Woman of No Importance where guests anonymously put their hands through a curtain. “I little thought when his rather fat hands were passed through the holes in the curtain that such hands could belong to the most talked of man in London at that moment,” he wrote when Wilde’s future was long past. Wilde’s left hand—the hand that records what one is born with—reflected the nobility and intelligence inherited from his parents; his right hand—the hand that reveals what one does with that legacy—showed “brilliance and uninterrupted success.” It was the hand of a king, Cheiro said, but the hand of a king who would send himself into exile.

  “At what date?” Wilde asked.

  “A few years from now … between your forty-first and forty-second year.”

  Wilde noted the prophecy and left but returned for a private reading. Asked to sign Cheiro’s visitors’ book, he wrote, “The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible,” a point mad
e in Dorian Gray when Lord Henry remarks to Dorian, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” At the next appointment with Cheiro in Half Moon Street, Wilde asked, “Is the break still there?” It was. “But surely,” responded Cheiro, “[your] Destiny could not be broken.” Wilde replied: “My good friend, you know well Fate does not keep road-menders on her highways.”

  In July 1894, he consulted Mrs. Robinson, whom he called “the Sibyl of Mortimer Street.” She told him that he would take a journey at the beginning of the year but warned, “I see a very brilliant life for you up to a certain point. Then I see a wall. Beyond the wall I see nothing.” Wilde thought she might have foreseen Lady Wilde’s death. In failing health and bedridden, his mother received daily visits from Constance, who ran errands for her. “Death and Love seem to walk on either hand as I go through life,” Wilde told Bosie after visiting his invalid mother. “They are the only things I think of, their wings shadow me.”

  Willie married for the second time on January 11, 1894, and moved into Oakley Street with his bride, Sophia Lily Lees, a Dublin girl of thirty-six who surrendered a two-thousand-pound dowry by marrying the forty-three-year-old Willie. Wilde’s absence from the wedding provoked one of his mother’s motivational letters: “I am truly sorry to find that you and Willie meet as enemies. Is this to go on to my death? Not a cheering prospect for me, to have my two sons at enmity, and unable to meet at my deathbed. I think, to please me, you might write the 8 words I asked—‘I forget the enmity. Let us be friends. Signed Oscar.’ 8 words! Can you do it to oblige me? There need be no intimacy between you but at least social civility.” Wilde replied in Earnest with Gwendolen’s remark to Cecily: “Now that I come to think of it, I have never heard any man mention his brother. The subject seems distasteful to most men.” Wilde never mentioned Willie, but Willie made an avocation of mentioning him.

  • • •

  Wilde wrote plays to elicit laughter and surprise. No tears. The need to disguise the sexual aspects of his life while revealing emotional truths deepened his plays and opened them up to a wider audience. By expressing emotions subtextually, he rendered them all the stronger. In some way, all of Wilde’s characters are dandies. Onstage the dandy is a heterosexual philanderer encoded as a third sex, with the manners and morals to move in or outside society. Wilde was most comfortable in the liminal zone between masculinity and femininity. In the three social comedies leading up to Earnest, women are bought and sold, but it is the woman who suffers while the man goes free. His women characters—Mrs. Cheveley, Mrs. Erlynne, Lady Bracknell—chattering away on fashion and behavior, are women acting like men being dandies. By using foundlings, orphans, or mysterious births (Jack Worthing’s only proof of birth is a handbag found at Victoria Station), Wilde responded not only to his family background, which included three illegitimate half siblings, but to plotlines from the literature of the time.

  During 1894 he worked on a variety of scenarios that he variously completed, left in fragments, or let evaporate in talk. Salomé led to scribblings about a biblical drama La Sainte Courtisane, subtitled The Woman Covered with Jewels. He began work on a more mature blank-verse drama, A Florentine Tragedy, imagined A Woman’s Tragedy, yet another “good woman” play, and jotted down sketches for Constance.* He returned to a medieval drama in The Cardinal of Avignon, conceived during the American tour, and sent it off to George Alexander. The questions—Can a man ever be good? Can a woman be anything else?—preoccupied him as he worked on An Ideal Husband, with the fateful line “As a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.”

  Wilde did not stay at the St. James’s Theatre with Alexander, whom he thought not up to his dandy roles. Despite criticism that Alexander only played himself, he saw each role as an individual challenge and was a far better actor of Wildean parts than Beerbohm Tree. But Wilde balked at Alexander’s sincerity and went after the highest bidder. He gave first refusal to John Hare of the Garrick Theatre, who rejected the script because he did not like the last act. He went to Tree, who was touring America and had leased the Haymarket to Lewis Waller and H. H. Morell. They took the play, originally called Mrs. Cheveley, and rehearsals began in December.

  An Ideal Husband is an adult fairy tale that has a magic charm—a stolen diamond brooch that leads a double life as a bracelet—and a happy ending, where everyone gets dressed up and walks arm in arm into dinner. Deliciously absurd, morally serious, profoundly sentimental, and wickedly melodramatic, it is primarily a comedy of manners about politics, corruption, and love. It pounds away at a basic hypocrisy of English life: the secret of public success is not to be found out. Wilde finally had the opportunity to show that ideal husbands, like Renaissance silversmiths, can be criminals. This time the man has a past, the woman is an adventuress, and the puritan wife more dangerous than the scheming blackmailer, Mrs. Cheveley, who observes Lady Chiltern’s handwriting and says, “The ten commandments in every stroke of the pen!”

  Written when Wilde was being blackmailed over the Hyacinth letter and six months before he went to prison, it is a well-made play that satisfies for being so contrived that the audience scarcely notices how subversive it really is. It captures the contradictory essence of its author even more than Dorian Gray by introducing the most fully realized of Wilde’s pantheon of dandies in the character of Lord Goring. “There is something entertaining in the picture of the rather elderly young fop,” one critic noted of the role, “who makes one doubt whether he is a fool with some cleverness and good sense, or a clever fellow who affects folly.” The same could be said of Wilde.

  Lady Chiltern’s husband has made his fortune through a youthful indiscretion that now threatens his marriage. When she learns that he has sold state secrets, she cruelly declares: “One’s past is what one is.” Wilde did not give her Constance’s generosity to love her husband more in adversity. That this error has enabled Sir Robert to have a useful career in public life underscores Wilde’s defense of sin on philosophical grounds. But Sir Robert resists being stereotyped. He sees his acceptance of a bribe as a mark of “strength and courage,” not weakness. Wilde will not allow him the traditional punishments: poison or pistol or cultivating his garden. Instead he accepts a cabinet position: his treason leads to good, but only through concealment and the threat of retribution. H. G. Wells, a new critic at the Pall Mall Gazette, wrote knowingly that Wilde was “working his way to innocence.”*

  On opening night, January 3, the audience wondered whether Wilde would top his cigarette speech at the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Instead he formalized it, with no risks taken. At the curtain call, he bowed and said, “I thank you for the kind attention you have given to my play, and I thank the clever company for its interpretation of this airy familiarity with an audience usually lenient and good natured.” Not so good-natured two nights later was Henry James, who sat gloomily in the stalls when he should have been at the St. James’s for the opening of his play Guy Domville. To appease his nervousness, he decided to condemn An Ideal Husband as “so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, feeble and vulgar.”

  When James called Wilde “Hosscar,” contempt dripped with each hissing sibilant. His dislike for Wilde had not mellowed since their only meeting at a Washington reception during Wilde’s American tour in 1882. Exuberant over the publishing success of The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square, he mentioned his nostalgia for London. “Really? You care for places? The world is my home,” Wilde replied. James took it as a rebuff, perhaps a threat to his suspect sexuality. At the mention of Wilde’s name, James broke into declamations of him as “a fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad,” “an unclean beast,” and an “unspeakable animal.”

  The only form in which James had not excelled was the drama. He saw plays as the novel intensified. Lacking the distinction of “successful playwright,” he felt incomplete. As much as he despised Wilde, it was masochistic of him to sit through Wilde’s play on his ow
n first night, leaving with the echo of enthusiastic applause, which he said gave the appearance “of complete success” and gave him the “most fearful apprehension.” A solitary James walked across St. James’s Square, stopping in the middle to ask himself: “How can my piece do anything with a public with whom that is a success?” He arrived at the St. James’s for the final curtain of Guy Domville. There were cries of “Author! Author!” Hoping for the best, Alexander escorted James onstage, but to the sounds of hoots, jeers, and catcalls. For years afterward James dreamed of hostile faces, white against the dark background of the gallery, screaming at him. He returned to novels and never again wrote for the stage. “I have come,” he said, “to hate the whole theatrical subject.”

  Outrage over Wilde’s success at his expense never left James. He reveled in the Crown’s prosecution during the trials, which he followed with ill-disguised fascination, calling the turn of events “hideously, atrociously dramatic, and really interesting.” Wilde’s fall, James told Edmund Gosse, “from nearly twenty years of a really unique kind of ‘brilliant’ conspicuity (wit, ‘art,’ conversation—‘one of our two or three dramatists, etc.’) to that sordid prison-cell and this gulf of obscenity over which the ghoulish public hangs and gloats—it is beyond any utterance or irony or any pang of compassion! He was never in the smallest degree interesting to me—but this hideous human history has made him so—in a manner.”

  In July 1894, Alexander gave Wilde £150 for the right of first refusal on his new farcical comedy. Wilde started work at Worthing, a seaside resort in Sussex, and in only twenty-one days produced the first draft of the wittiest comedy in the English language. Worthing was middle-class and affordable, a lazy place where families sat on wooden benches and strolled along the promenade. Brighton’s Georgian diversions were a twenty-minute hansom ride away along the uncobbled Brighton road. The months of August and September passed pleasantly at 5 The Haven, Esplanade, an undistinguished Victorian row house overlooking the beach.