Never before did Wilde write so quickly and easily. As he completed each act in longhand, it was recopied into an exercise book and sent to Mrs. Marshall’s Typewriting Office in the Strand. Wilde saw these new establishments as omnivorous beasts eating up pages pushed through the mail slot. To avoid any revelations about the plot’s twists and turns (different typists worked on the script), Wilde submitted it under the name of Lady Lancing: A Serious Comedy for Trivial People and withheld the crucial last line. Back came a clean draft to be trimmed, tightened, and polished. No one eliminated meaningless words better than Wilde. His dialogue soars onstage because he understood the importance of timing.
That summer was the last the family spent together. Wilde was astonished to meet the “ugly Swiss governess” who had been caring for Cyril and Vyvyan for a year, an indication of his prolonged absences from Tite Street. Frequent reports reached Bosie. “I have been doing nothing here but bathing and playwriting,” Wilde wrote. “My play is really very funny: I am quite delighted with it. But it is not shaped yet. It lies in Sibylline leaves about the room, and Arthur has twice made a chaos of it by ‘tidying up.’ The result, however, was dramatic.” Wilde said the “first act is ingenious, the second beautiful, the third abominably clever.” There comes a point when one must stop being someone else and discover who one is—that was Earnest’s message.
One day on the beach, a young man named Alphonso Conway helped Wilde launch a boat from the shore. “He led a happy, idle life,” Wilde said later when Conway’s name came up during his trial. The eighteen-year-old was his companion for six weeks, often seen on the beach with Wilde’s sons. Wilde promised to take him on a trip as a token of his appreciation; he bought Conway a blue-serge suit and straw boater and they went to Brighton. Wilde socialized below his class because of the pleasure that came from “being with those who are young, bright, happy, careless, and free. I do not like the sensible and I do not like the old.”
Vyvyan, eleven at the time, recalled this Worthing holiday as a happy one. He admired the power of his father’s swimming as he “ploughed through the waves in a rough sea like a shark.” The boys preferred their father in fanciful moods and liked it when he built sand castles with them. Dressed in a Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and a large-brimmed gray hat like the one favored by Walt Whitman, Wilde made a striking barefoot figure as he crawled around his ephemeral property. Vyvyan said his father built “long rambling castles” with “moats and tunnels and towers and battlements, and when they were finished he would usually pull a few lead soldiers out of his pocket to man the castle walls.”
Wilde was amazed to have a book called The Green Carnation land on his desk at Worthing. The anonymous author was Robert Hichens, who had listened well to tales told about Wilde during the Nile cruise with Bosie and Reggie. Wilde appreciated its humor as a satire, since he was one of the presumed authors, along with his friend Ada Leverson, the novelist Marie Corelli, and Alfred Austin, soon to follow Tennyson as poet laureate. Turning rumors to his advantage, he denied authorship. “I invented that magnificent flower,” he wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette. “But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not.” Queensberry read the novel with distaste.
Hichens put on record Wilde’s homosexual life in the obvious relationship between Esmé Amarinth (Wilde) and Lord Reggie Hastings (Turner with a patina of Douglas). Amarinth talks brilliantly in Wilde’s epigrammatic style, and Lord Reggie mesmerizes a choirboy with his green carnation buttonhole. Imitating the style of Dorian Gray, the novel came perilously close to depicting living people in a libelous manner. In one of its lighter moods, The Athenaeum suggested that with lines such as “I love drinking Bovril in secret. It seems like a vice,” the novel was “apparently an elaborate advertisement” for the beef-soup base. Two weeks later it reported that the “Bovril Company informs us that it had nothing to do with the writing of The Green Carnation, so that the object of the writer in producing so silly a book seems unexplained.”*
The Green Carnation had been a welcome interruption, an excuse to write a letter to the editor, one of Wilde’s favorite amusements. Returning to Earnest, he edited and added coded references to homosexuality. Most of the audience did not know that “earnest” was Victorian slang for homosexuality (“Is he earnest?” was a familiar question). Introduced into the subculture in 1892, three years before Wilde’s play, the pun appears in a volume of sonnets entitled Love in Earnest by the young schoolmaster John Gambril Nicholson. Cecily was a word used for rent boys. Bunburyism, which concealed a lewd pun, meant an alibi indicating the double life necessary for seeking forbidden pleasure. The word shame was open to interpretation. Bosie’s poem “In Praise of Shame” includes the line “Of all sweet passions Shame is loveliest.”
Much attention is paid to food, particularly food eaten by men. In one of Wilde’s better gender paradoxes, Gwendolen praises her father for conceding that a man’s place is in the home and that public affairs may be safely entrusted to women: “The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don’t like that. It makes men so very attractive.” Wilde’s art of inversion reaches a comic high when Algy becomes Bunbury; Jack becomes Ernest; women read philosophy; and men eat dainty cucumber sandwiches.
Bosie arrived in Worthing, sneered at the surroundings, and made clear that it was not up to his standards. Constance and the children returned to London, and Wilde took him to the Grand Hotel overlooking the Brighton pier. The chill October weather led to a bad case of influenza, and Bosie took to his bed, sulking. Wilde nursed him until he felt better and they moved to less expensive lodgings. When Wilde fell ill, Bosie turned away, disgusted with his snuffling and sneezing. Bosie complained when Wilde did not feel well enough to go out on the town, escalating a tantrum delivered in full force the next morning. “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting,” he screamed and left for the Grand. “The next time you are ill I will go away at once.” It was Wilde’s fortieth birthday.
Wilde returned to London three days later, determined to end the relationship. He picked up the newspaper and read that Bosie’s brother Drumlanrig had been killed in a gun explosion. Suicide was suspected because of threatened revelations of a homosexual relationship with Lord Rosebery, the foreign minister (soon to be prime minister), for whom Drumlanrig was a private secretary. This tragedy, Wilde wrote to Ives, was “the first noble sorrow” of Bosie’s life, and he had to be “the sharer of his pain.” He rushed to Bosie’s side, all bad behavior forgiven. The incident convinced Queensberry not to let scandalous gossip touch another son.
Meanwhile, Wilde lived with palpable tension and mounting debts. He had outstanding bills at several hotels and owed hundreds of pounds for cigarettes and the silver cases he handed out as gifts. “I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance,” he told Alexander. “But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.” In October, Wilde sent Alexander the polished first draft of Earnest, asking for an advance; when the actor noticed that there was no leading role for him, he rejected the four-act version. The parts “are equally good,” Wilde told him, the “plot is slight, but I think, adequate” with “lots of fun and wit.” Elisabeth Marbury, who had sold a first option in America for three hundred pounds to Charles Frohman, had the right idea about the play. “I think it would be a mistake for you to sell outright,” she said, “because it really seems to me that this piece will make some money for you.”
When Guy Domville folded after thirty-one performances, Alexander felt differently about Earnest and set out to create his play by collapsing four acts into three. Minor characters disappeared; one scene was eliminated and others shortened. Jack Worthing became a romantic role, more likable and less cynical, more suitable for Alexander.
With the hilarious Gribsby scene from Act Two (when the solicitor Gribsby arrives to arrest Algy for nonpayment of debts) chopped off, the play’s trivial center was strengthened. “This scene that you feel is superfluous,” Wilde tersely told Alexander, “cost me terrible exhausting labour and heart-rending nerve-racking strain. You may not believe me, but I assure you on my honour that it must have taken fully five minutes to write.” Rehearsals did not go smoothly; there were too many revisions to be smoothed out. An exasperated Alexander begged Wilde to get out of town: “I’ll send you a box for the first night and see you again after the performance.”
Cairo was Wilde’s choice, but Bosie demanded Algeria, where Lord Henry and Dorian had gone for the beautiful Arab boys. “I fly to Algiers with Bosie tomorrow,” Wilde nonchalantly told Ada Leverson. “I begged him to let me stay to rehearse, but so beautiful is his nature that he declined at once.” By 1895 Algeria had become a fashionable winter destination in tandem with Egypt. Although it offered none of the great monuments of antiquity, it had oasis resorts like Biskra, where André Gide and a friend had spent the previous winter, and Blida, the walled city known as “the desert rose,” aromatic with the fragrance of orange and lemon groves. In the Arab quarter, with its teeming souks and suggestive smells of spices, sweat, and dung, an exotic world awaited male visitors. The Kabyle boys showed their availability by scrambling up the men’s trousers.
Wilde and Bosie registered at the Grand Hôtel d’Orient in Blida. Gide had been there for some days but found the January grayness too depressing and planned to move to Biskra. He was paying his bill when he glanced at the slate on which the names of guests were written in chalk and noted the new arrivals. Impulsively, he erased his name from the top of the list but reconsidered his decision halfway to the rail station. What good could come from such a snub, Gide reasoned, and admonished himself for being so intimidated. He returned to the hotel and read Barnaby Rudge in the lobby until Wilde and Bosie returned from their walk.
It had been two years since Gide and Wilde had talked at length in Paris. Gide found him changed. “One felt less softness in his look,” he recalled, “something raucous in his laughter and something frenzied in his joy. He seemed both more sure of pleasing and less ambitious to succeed in doing so; he was bolder, stronger, bigger.” Since Paris, when Wilde’s taunting of his monastic attitudes had panicked him, Gide had recognized his own bisexuality but practiced homosexuality more surreptitiously than Wilde.
On one walk outside the walls, Wilde confided to Gide the sorry state he was in with Queensberry. Gide advised prudence. “Prudence!” Wilde exclaimed. “But can I have any? That would be going backwards. I must go as far as possible.… I cannot go further.… Something must happen … something else.” Wilde changed the subject and memorably asked: “Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It’s that I’ve put my genius into my life; I’ve put only my talent into my works.” They entered the native quarter, and Wilde strode purposefully around until he found a suitable guide and asked to see some Arab boys “as beautiful as bronze statues.” “I hope to have quite demoralized this city,” he told Gide.
Ross received a letter extolling hashish—“quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love”—and the boys—“the beggars here have profiles so the problem of poverty is easily solved.” Bosie shocked Gide by announcing, “I hope you’re like me.… I only like boys.” The evening provided only a café fight, and Gide set off to Algiers the next morning. “It’s impossible to gauge what is the young Lord’s intrinsic worth,” he wrote his mother. “Wilde seems to have corrupted him to the very marrow of his bones.” Bosie’s dreamy demeanor made it difficult for others to see him as a debaucher.
Alone with Gide in Algiers—Bosie stayed in Blida to be with a young boy—Wilde arranged an evening in a Moorish café known for its music and its enticing waiters, one of whom joined them and began to play the flute. Transfixed by the sounds and the boy’s gentle movements, Gide watched silently until Wilde motioned for them to leave. Outside there was a conference with the guide. Wilde asked Gide if he would like the flutist. Gide could barely utter “Yes.” Wilde assumed that he had arranged for Gide’s initiation.* In his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, Gide noted that the “great pleasure of the debauched is to lead others to debauchery.” Offering no explanations, Wilde led Gide to the European bar of the Oasis Hotel, where they drank until an appointed hour and left to meet the guide at a small hotel. Wilde produced a key, Gide entered the room, and the guide appeared with the flute player, with whom Gide boasted he took his pleasure five times and was disappointed when the boy was not impressed.
The next morning Wilde began an arduous and lonely journey back to London. There had been many rows on this trip. Because he was preoccupied with the opening of Earnest, Wilde’s enthusiasm for sexual conquest had not matched that of Bosie, who decided to stay on with a beguiling coffee server named Ali. It was snowing when Wilde departed; no one was there to say good-bye or wish him success for Earnest’s opening night. His ferry across the Mediterranean was delayed for twenty hours. He had time to ponder the truth of his remark that “there is no such thing as changing one’s life, one merely wanders round and round within the circle of one’s own personality.”
For the past two years, when Wilde lived in rooms or hotels, he returned infrequently to Tite Street. He missed Cyril and Vyvyan but was weary of lying to his wife. The positive attitude Constance maintained toward her marriage cannot be explained by traditional concepts of wifely love. Her devotion transcended the usual marital loyalties. During their engagement, she had pledged to love her husband with such devotion that he would never leave or love anyone else as long as she could love and comfort him. That she had done and in all likelihood would have continued; in her mind, loving the sinner was more important than the sinner’s transgressions.
Cyril and Vyvyan were both in school, beyond intensive mothering. Constance regularly visited her mother-in-law, who suffered from all the aches and pains that beleaguer a woman of seventy-three. She helped the working poor, particularly women with small children, through the Chelsea Women’s Liberal Association. She had given up the editorship of The Gazette for the Rational Dress Society but maintained a relationship with the manager of Hatchard’s, a popular Piccadilly bookstore that published the magazine. His name was Arthur Lee Humphreys; he was six years her junior and married.
They were brought together again in the summer of 1894 through a proposal made by Wilde. After reading The Green Carnation, he decided to curb fictional characters speaking like him. It was time to copyright his words. Wilde asked Constance to collate a selection of epigrams and sayings and gave Humphreys permission to quote from the copyrighted material for fifty pounds. (Later in the year, “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated” appeared in The Saturday Review and “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” in The Chameleon.)
Wilde was at Worthing preoccupied with Earnest and Bosie and did not see Constance’s choices until they were set in type. He wrote Humphreys that the book is “so bad, so disappointing, that I am writing a set of new aphorisms, and will have to alter much of the printed matter. The plays are particularly badly done.… After the Green Carnation publication, this book of ‘real Oscar Wilde’ should be refined and distinguished: else, it will look like a bit of journalism.” Fifty copies of Oscariana, the first of many volumes of Wilde’s sayings, appeared in January 1895, and another edition was released in May. Wilde must have been pleased, for he sent Humphreys a ticket for the first night of Earnest. And Constance fell in love with Humphreys.
His affection can only be surmised from Constance’s few letters to him in which she unburdened herself. She had adored her father, who abandoned her, as much as she adored Wilde. In his position as a prominent bookseller, Humphreys would have heard gossip about Wilde and his young boys; he was wise enough to understand that when Constance spoke of her parents, she spoke also of herself. S
he wrote Humphreys that she had “stepped past the limits perhaps of good taste in the wish to be your friend and to have you for my friend. I spoke to you very openly about myself, & I confess that I should not like you to repeat what I said about my childhood.” Talking about his marriage was a way to show dissatisfaction with her own. Constance told him she thought him an “ideal husband” and emphasized the point by writing that he was not only an ideal husband but “not far short of being an ideal man!” She continued, “I liked you & was interested in you, & I saw that you were good, and it is rarely that I come across a man that has that written in his face.”
Constance wanted to worship her husband, but he eluded her. Humphreys did not. “I am the most truthful person in the world,” she wrote, “also I am intuitive, and it is perfectly true that after I parted from you yesterday I knew as clearly as I do to-day that you stand on a pinnacle high above me, and that your marriage was made for the sake of good, was the result of your character, and so was ideal.” Another letter beginning “My Darling Arthur” and ending “Your always devotedly loving Constance” declares “how much I love you, and how dear and delightful you have been to me today. I have been happy, and I do love you dear Arthur. Nothing in my life has ever made me so happy as this love of yours to me has done.… I love you just because you ARE, and because you have come into my life to fill it with love and make it rich.” Constance thanks him for being “dear to the children, and nice to Oscar too.”
They often met at the London Library. Following one conversation about the low minimum wage of sixpence an hour, she wrote that they “must not talk of subjects that we do not agree upon. You have a very strong nature, and it is perhaps natural that you should have no sympathy with the unfortunate of the world.” She asks that they do not “speak of it again; it is a subject—that I feel most deeply on, and that is not serious to you.” Brief though this affair would have been, since Constance soon injured her back and Wilde’s trials became the center of her emotional life, it is pleasant to think of these two arguing about labor issues on a park bench, embracing, then going their separate ways. Now Mrs. Oscar Wilde had her own intimate secret.
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