*Wilde wrote the scenario at Worthing while he was working on Earnest. Constance starts out as another “good woman” play, but by the end the title character loves another man and has hastened her husband’s suicide. Wilde told George Alexander that he wanted “the sheer passion of love to dominate everything.” Frank Harris later dramatized Wilde’s scenario as Mr. and Mrs. Daventry.
*When Wilde wrote the play, in 1894, Sir Robert’s crime referred to Benjamin Disraeli’s purchase of shares in the Suez Canal. The Argentine canal project (a speculators’ swindle) in which Mrs. Cheveley invests had no counterpart in reality then, but it does now with the Hidrovia waterway scheduled to open up South America’s heartland to commerce in 2000. A similar plot was seen in Pinero’s 1890 The Cabinet Minister, where an unscrupulous financier blackmails the wife of a cabinet minister into giving him inside information about the Rajputana canal project.
*In an early draft of Earnest, Wilde has Lady Brancaster (later Bracknell) look at a book called The Green Carnation and pronounce it “a morbid and middle-class affair.”
*By Gide’s own account, he actually lost his virginity to a boy at the end of 1893 in Sousse in Tunisia and the next year had his first heterosexual experience with a prostitute in Biskra.
PART FIVE
(1895–1900)
Reconciling
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old:
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
—The Ballad of Reading Gaol
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Last First Night
Algernon: A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.
JACK: That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won’t want to know Bunbury.
ALGERNON: Then your wife will. You don’t seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.
—THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
On February 14, the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest, London had one of its infrequent snowstorms. The weather provoked as much comment as Wilde’s play. Early morning flurries dusted the city, then turned to windswept snow by early evening, when skittish horses drawing broughams, hansoms, and bespoke carriages crowded into narrow King Street and the entrance of the St. James’s Theatre. Young men wore buttonholes of lilies of the valley. An enthusiastic crowd hailed Wilde’s arrival with Constance on his arm. Asked if he thought the play would be a success, the author replied, “The play is a success. The only question is whether the first night’s audience will be one.”
At nine o’clock, having shed damp wraps and capes, the audience impatiently waited for the curtain, which rose fifteen minutes late. Observing Aubrey Beardsley seated in a box with his sister, Wilde said: “Mabel a daisy, Aubrey the most monstrous of orchids.” A dutiful, hardworking, puritanical—in short, earnest—audience saw a play in which earnestness is trivialized and the name Ernest taken seriously (Cecily and Gwendolen will only marry a man named Ernest). A farce should be a mosaic, a friend told Wilde. “No,” he contradicted, “it must be like a pistol shot.” Sir John Gielgud, who played Jack Worthing many times, said the play is like chamber music. The punning last line withheld from Strand typists brought down the house. Lady Bracknell accuses Jack of “displaying signs of triviality,” to which Jack responds, “On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the Importance of Being Earnest.” (Wilde added vital before Importance in 1899, when the play was first published.)
Wilde took a curtain call with Alexander but made no speech. He had stunned the audience after Lady Windermere’s Fan, been silent after A Woman of No Importance, and humble after An Ideal Husband. There was nothing more to say. He found Alexander in his dressing room. “Well, wasn’t I right? What did you think of it?” the actor asked. Wilde’s ironic gaze commanded silence until he replied: “My dear Aleck, it was charming, quite charming. And, do you know, from time to time I was reminded of a play I once wrote myself, called The Importance of Being Earnest.” H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were amused, but Shaw thought the play insignificant. William Archer worried that it raised no moral principles except the author’s witty personality.*
Few knew of the backstage drama. Responding to rumors that Queensberry planned to address the audience about his son’s relationship with Wilde, Alexander called the police and canceled Queensberry’s ticket. It was said that he arrived with a bundle of turnips and carrots, which he hurled at the backstage door when security officers barred him from entering the lobby. Wilde wrote Bosie that his father had “left a grotesque bouquet of vegetables for me! I had all Scotland Yard—twenty police—to guard the theatre. He prowled about for three hours, then left chattering like a monstrous ape.” Wilde was touched that Bosie rushed home, even though his eagerness had more to do with wanting filial revenge than with concern over Wilde’s reputation.
Wilde consulted his solicitor in May and again in July 1894 to discuss what steps could be taken to stop Queensberry’s harassment. Wilde considered Queensberry’s invasion of his private home, when he “stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of,” and his public display at Earnest’s premiere sufficient grounds for legal action. But there had to be witnesses. Prosecution was impossible without the testimony of George Alexander and his staff. At the same time, Queensberry brought Wilde’s suggestive letters to his solicitor, asking what he could do, and was told nothing.
Planning his next move, Queensberry prowled about Wilde’s favorite restaurants looking for him. His emotional state was precarious. Not only had he been agitated by thoughts of homosexual conspiracies since his elder son’s suicide but he was also mortified by the recent annulment of his brief second marriage for reasons of impotence. He hated his father-in-law, the effeminate Alfred Montgomery, and was convinced that his first wife’s family had passed homosexual traits on to their sons.
At the Avondale Hotel, Wilde’s grip on reality was no better. He refused Bosie’s whim to invite a young boy to stay at the hotel. Bosie stormed out, stranding him with a £140 bill. Wilde considered fleeing to Paris, but the hotel had impounded his luggage. On February 28, he went to the Albemarle Club on Dover Street to collect his mail. The hall porter handed him an envelope with a calling card left ten days earlier by Queensberry on which the porter had noted the exact date and time. Wilde turned the card over and over, inspecting each side, calculating the date, then glancing at the porter, who obviously had read the message. The handwriting was difficult to decipher. Did it say: “To Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite [sic]”? Or “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite”? Was the marquess’s misspelling deliberate, hasty, or in ignorance? Wilde now had evidence of probable libel.
Before communicating with Bosie, he wrote Ross. “I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution,” he said. “My whole life seems ruined by this man. The tower of ivory is assailed by the foul thing. On the sand is my life split.” Ross and others advised him to ignore the card, tear it up, and leave for Paris. Wilde would not be swayed; he wanted his life back. Going to court seemed the only way. Once he put “into motion the forces of Society,” he said, “Society turned on me and said, ‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to these laws for protection? You shall have these laws exercised to the full. You shall abide by which you have appealed to.’ ”
Events moved quickly. Wilde telegraphed the headmaster of Cyril’s school, canceling plan
s for his son to come home. He met with Constance and told her that he was not a “posing sodomite” and there was no justification for Queensberry’s libel. There was no reason in Wilde’s mind because he was not pretending to be a homosexual—he was one. His wife never doubted him and wanted to help despite her ill health. During the summer, when Wilde had been in Brighton with Bosie, Constance had injured her back in a fall down the stairs at Tite Street. Lady Mount-Temple invited her to Babbacombe Cliff to recuperate, but she was overdrawn at the bank and had no funds to travel. She had to plead with Ross to locate her husband and ask him for money. Now, with Wilde’s decision to sue, the couple were reunited but under crisis circumstances.
At the Marlborough Police Court on March 1, Wilde swore out a warrant for the arrest of the Marquess of Queensberry on the charge of publishing a libel against him. Confident that his father soon would be punished for an innocent libel, Bosie pledged that his mother and brother would pay Wilde’s court costs. Wilde sat in his solicitor’s office and told, as he later recalled, “serious lies to a bald man,” C. O. Humphreys, his legal adviser by default. His own solicitor, George Lewis, who had made Bosie’s blackmail problems at Oxford disappear, had been preempted by Queensberry. Asked by Humphreys if there was any basis to the charges, Wilde denied everything.
Humphreys persuaded the eloquent Sir Edward Clarke to be Wilde’s barrister; the eventuality of rent boys testifying against his client never occurred to him. Lewis withdrew from the case out of friendship for Wilde and was replaced by Charles Russell and the barrister Edward Carson. A fellow student of Wilde’s from Trinity, Carson was convinced to take the case only when he saw the damaging dossier collected on Wilde’s relationships. “No doubt he will perform his task with the added bitterness of an old friend,” Wilde remarked.
At this difficult time, Bosie goaded Wilde into taking him to Monte Carlo, where he neglected him in favor of losing his money at the casino. Wilde had time to reflect on his situation but did not waver in his decision when he returned to London, the holiday cut short because the two were recognized and asked to leave the hotel. The impending libel trial had attracted the attention of the European press.
On March 23, Wilde consulted Frank Harris and arranged to meet him the following day at the Café Royal, where Harris was lunching with George Bernard Shaw. By the time Wilde arrived, Harris and Shaw had concluded their business. Shaw, who barely knew Wilde and had never met Bosie, ended up witnessing a crucial scene in Wilde’s downfall.
Wilde asked Harris to be a literary expert and testify as to the artistic merit of Dorian Gray. Harris ignored the request and launched into the reasons why Wilde should drop the libel action and flee to France until all was forgotten. Into the fray strode Bosie, uninvited and worried that antagonistic forces were working against him. Wilde tried to convince Harris that if Bosie swore to the brutishness of his father, all would be well. Harris correctly argued that a son’s views on his father were irrelevant to the libel against Wilde. A bemused Shaw nodded in agreement. Infuriated, Wilde attacked Harris for not supporting him. “It is not friendly of you, Frank. It really is not friendly,” he said and turned his back on the Café Royal forever.
All his life he had wanted to do something unequivocal. He was the bravest of men in his refusal to pretend to be other than what he was and in his insistence that he would not run away. Unwilling “to be dogged by a maniac” and secretly wanting a platform to justify the right of the artist to live as he wanted, Wilde saw that the central conflict—as in his plays—was between the individual and society. In the tradition of Baudelaire and Zola, he wanted his day in court, wrongly assuming that his personality, not his private sex life, would be the center of attention. The marquess entered a plea of justification, which ran to thirteen counts of “acts of gross indecency.” Two additional counts addressed the alleged immorality of Dorian Gray and the maxims published in The Chameleon.
• • •
THE LIBEL TRIAL opened at the Central Criminal Court, known as the Old Bailey, on April 3, 1895, and lasted three days. The small public gallery was filled with men. No women queued for admittance. Though Wilde was the prosecutor, it was evident that he was the one on trial. Clarke, who grew in confidence through three trials, made the opening speech, defending Wilde’s reputation. He described the Hyacinth letter, which he rightly assumed would be brought up by the defense, as a prose sonnet and stressed that its interpretation had nothing to do with the plea in question. Bosie was not called as a witness; the only witness beyond the Albemarle Club’s porter, to whom the libel was published, was Wilde, who, in an unconscious slip into vanity, identified himself as thirty-nine years old. Carson, who made his reputation in this so-called trial of the century, looked sharply at his old classmate and made a notation. Carson knew Wilde to be forty and used the fact that he had lied to undermine his credibility as a witness.
Brilliantly setting the tone of the cross-examination with his first question, Carson said: “You stated that your age was thirty-nine. I think you are over forty. You were born on the sixteenth of October 1854?” Then Carson held up a copy of Wilde’s birth certificate. “I have no wish to pose as being young,” Wilde replied, smiling at the double meaning. “You have my certificate and that settles the matter.” “But being born in 1854 makes you more than forty?” Carson persisted. “Ah! Very well.” Wilde sighed and allowed Carson the satisfaction of doing simple mathematics.
Now Carson could emphasize how much older Wilde was than Bosie—his lover had been twenty and Wilde thirty-six when they met—and the young men whose names were introduced. Ultimately, it was as a malicious seducer of youth and a man who shamelessly corrupted the boundaries between the classes by giving street boys champagne dinners and cigarette cases that Wilde was made to seem the most dangerous to the public, although none of the boys mentioned was under the statutory age of sixteen.
Carson went on to analyze Dorian Gray, probing for its homosexual content, hoping to prove Wilde an immoral author, putting him in the awkward situation of defending dialogue he had written for fictional characters. Wilde answered too wittily when he should have kept the examination to a discussion of literary and aesthetic issues. Carson read aloud a piece of verse from one of Wilde’s articles and asked whether Wilde was the author. Wilde considered the question. There was a prolonged pause. “Ah no, Mr. Carson, Shakespeare wrote that.” Having bested his former school friend, Wilde forgot that he was in the witness box. Carson read another piece of verse and asked, “And I suppose Shakespeare wrote that also, Mr. Wilde?” “Not as you read it, Mr. Carson,” Wilde replied and turned his back on the noise, arms folded over his chest, staring at the ceiling. The judge ordered silence and threatened to clear the courtroom.
The game was afoot. Carson would not be humiliated again. He poked and probed at Wilde’s contradictory elitism, questioning his friendships with what Carson termed shiftless and homeless boys. The Hyacinth letter, stolen and retrieved for thirty-five pounds, returned to haunt Wilde. Denying any improper behavior, he invoked artistic freedom in his choice of enjoying the company of unsavory young men and writing poetic letters. On the second day, Carson resumed his cross-examination by asking questions about Alfred Taylor, alleged to have introduced Wilde to young men at his Little College Street rooms. Wilde said he was unaware of any such connections, describing Taylor as “a man of great taste and intelligence” who “was brought up at a good English school.” Carson interrogated Wilde on all the boys who had given pretrial depositions: the Parker brothers, Fred Atkins, Ernest Scarfe, Sidney Mavor. Then he introduced the name of Walter Grainger, a former servant of Douglas, who was hired as underbutler at Worthing. Wilde admitted knowing him but said he had never dined with him as he had the others.
“Did you ever kiss him?” Carson asked. Wilde was caught off-guard. “Oh, dear, no,” he replied. “He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was unfortunately extremely ugly. I pitied him for it.”
Carson: Was that the reason y
ou did not kiss him?
Wilde: Oh, Mr. Carson: you are pertinently insolent.
Carson: Did you say that in support of your statement that you never kissed him?
Wilde: No. It is a childish question.
Carson: Did you ever put forward a reason why you never kissed the boy?
Wilde: Not at all.
Carson: Why, sir, did you mention that this boy is extremely ugly?
Wilde: For this reason. If I were asked why I did not kiss a door-mat I would say because I do not like to kiss door-mats.
Carson hammered away at the question: “Why did you mention his ugliness?” His harangue had Wilde confused. He started but never completed sentences; finally, he addressed his former classmate with the tone of an injured child: “You sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me—and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously I admit it.”
“Then you said it flippantly?” Carson asked.
“Oh, yes,” Wilde said, “it was a flippant answer.”
The implication that he would have kissed the boy if he had been attractive destroyed Wilde’s case against Queensberry. The outburst authenticated the relationship between Aestheticism and sexual appetite, even as Wilde had pretended that the two had nothing in common.
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