Oscar behaved like a perfect gentleman, Bosie assured his mother. “He has been sweet and gentle and will always remain to me as a type of what a gentleman and a friend should be.” Bosie could not stand the reflected infamy: “I am tired of the struggle and tired of being ill-treated by the World.” Pleased that her son had fled, Lady Queensberry opened her purse; she paid the rent on the villa, the unpaid Naples hotel bill, and two hundred pounds toward trial costs. Wilde considered payment of the five-hundred-pound court costs for which he had been bankrupted a debt of honor. Intellectually Bosie agreed, but he believed that gentlemen commonly do not pay debts of honor and no one thinks anything the worse of them. The two hundred should have gone to what Wilde spent on Bosie in Naples.
In December, Eleonora Duse, known as La Duse, came to the magisterial Teatro Mercadante. Wilde saw her in Magda and an Italian adaptation of Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. He hoped she might play Salomé, although she was no Bernhardt. The two actresses could not have been more different. Duse created characters with simplicity—no gesticulating or declaiming. Small and unprepossessing, she had a soft voice but played tortured and betrayed women. It was said that she could blush on demand. A nO or a pouah—just one word—was done with such interpretation that it inspired unanimous applause. Duse read Salomé, but she did not see herself as the lurid princess. It was a narcissistic part better suited to Bernhardt.
Fitful after Bosie’s departure, Wilde accepted the invitation of a newly met friend described as a “Russian Elder” to visit Taormina in Sicily. There he spent Christmas and New Year’s, and met Baron von Gloeden, whose photographs of Sicilian youths in the costumes of Theocritan goatherds or shepherds he obliquely refers to in Dorian Gray: Lord Henry collects photographs of Dorian posing as such homoerotic icons as Antinoüs, Adonis, and Narcissus. The baron had settled in Taormina in the nineties and became a photographer to support himself when he exhausted the family fortune. His nude Sicilian boys posed like Greek statues delighted Wilde, who reciprocated with a copy of the Ballad.
Wilde returned to Posillipo to discover that the servants had stolen everything. He mourned the loss of a pastel portrait of him in a red vest done in Paris in 1891 by Will Rothenstein, then nineteen and destined to become principal of the Royal College of Art. The burglary provided an excuse to leave the Villa Giudice, with its memories of happy, sunny days. He moved to the Palazzo Bambino, at 31 Santa Lucia in Naples, and planned his entry into Paris.
Since finishing the Ballad, Wilde had methodically corrected proofs, enjoying as he always did the process of editing. Before he left for Sicily, he told Leonard Smithers that he was overcome by “the maladie de perfection” and wanted no more proofs. He approved the type (thick font) and design (a cinnamon-colored spine) and fought with Smithers about the publisher’s name on the page being larger than the author’s, identified as C.3.3. A major disappointment was the lack of interest in America, which Wilde interpreted as a rejection of himself and his work. He had wanted three hundred pounds for newspaper publication, but the only offer was one hundred dollars from the New York Journal. Elisabeth Marbury apologized: “Nobody here seems to feel any interest in the poem. The World refuses to give us anything and no syndicate will handle it.” The coolness probably had more to do with the subject matter than with Wilde’s infamy.
On February 13, 1898, when the Ballad was published, Wilde was in Paris, settled into the Hôtel de Nice, 4 rue des Beaux-Arts. The same day Americans read about Reading Gaol in the daily newspaper. In England everyone knew the author’s identity, paying to read about his suffering. One shop sold out its fifty copies on the morning of publication. Few review copies were sent out, so there was little press recognition. The Daily Telegraph described it as “a moving piece of work, without doubt, despite its tone,” and as having “already had a certain vogue, not merely for the reason that it is a strikingly vivid and realistic description of prison life, but also because everyone is ready with a suggestion as to who the anonymous really is.” Constance received an uninscribed copy and wrote her brother, “It is frightfully tragic and makes one cry.”
Within a month, the tragedy was Constance’s sudden death. Wilde learned that his wife had died in Genoa on April 7, 1898, at the age of forty. Her chronic back problems had forced a second operation on her spine, and she did not recover. Bosie was sympathetic. Constance had always treated him kindly when he visited Tite Street. Wilde cabled to Ross, AM IN GREAT GRIEF, and asked him to come to Paris. Ross rushed over and found his friend in laudable spirits. He wrote Smithers that Oscar “did not feel it at all.” Such a remark was typical of Ross, who saw Wilde as only a lover of men. “My way back to a new life ends in her grave,” he told Frank Harris. “Everything that happens to me is symbolic and irrevocable.” Wilde’s feelings were complex but no less poignant. He called his wife’s death a tragedy, and that was true for her as well as for him. As long as Constance lived, there was a hope that he could see his sons. Now her family closed ranks against him. “If we had only met once, and kissed each other,” he wrote Carlos Blacker. “It is too late. How awful life is.”
The following month, Wilde celebrated the French translation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Now the French had something of his to read beyond Salomé. As the Ballad was going into its fifth English edition, Smithers took out an advertisement in The Athenaeum with the headline “3000 Copies Sold in Three Weeks.” “When I read it,” Wilde told George Ives, “I feel like Lipton’s tea!” It seemed that the positive response might open a new literary chapter. Instead, it ended Wilde’s artistic period and began a new existence as an overt homosexual.
*Sebastian was condemned to death for converting soldiers in his ranks, but he did not die as depicted; the archers left him for dead and a widow nursed him back to health. He presented himself before Emperor Diocletian, who condemned him to death again—by beating. His body was thrown into a sewer and found by another pious woman, who dreamed that Sebastian told her to bury his remains near the catacombs. Reni’s iconography made his St. Sebastian series popular with homosexuals; twentieth-century writers such as Evelyn Waugh, in Brideshead Revisited, and Tennessee Williams, in Suddenly Last Summer, named characters of ambiguous sexuality Sebastian.
*Wilde was referring to Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels (1860), wrongly considered a celebration of decadence, when Baudelaire meant it as a condemnation of drugs and alcohol by someone who had discovered the perils too late. “I have come to loathe all stimulants because of the way they expand Time, and of the exaggerations with which they endow everything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Stealing Happiness
O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
Wearied of pleasure’s paramour despair,
Wearied of every temple we have built,
Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer.
For man is weak; God sleeps, and heaven is high;
One fiery-coloured moment: one great love;
and lo! we die.
—“PANTHEA”
Even for the author of Salomé, Paris was not a homecoming. Wilde’s last extended stay in the city had been in 1891, when he was welcomed by artist-aristocrats who no longer dominated the salons. Verlaine had died while Wilde was imprisoned, and Mallarmé would be dead in six months. Louÿs had married and forgotten old recriminations. To absolve himself of guilt, Gide made his courtesy call in Berneval, but he saw Wilde only once afterward, when Wilde hailed him from an outdoor café. Wilde insisted that Gide sit beside him. “I’m so alone these days,” he said, adding that he had not even a sou. Gide gave him some money and lied about another meeting. “I have lost the mainspring of life and art, la joie de vivre; it is dreadful,” Wilde wrote Frank Harris. “I have pleasures, and passions, but the joy of life is gone. I am going under: the morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc-bed there. After all, I had a wonderful life, which is, I fear, over.” He had learned “a curious and bitter lesson,” he said, almost su
rprised by the insight. “I used to rely on my personality: now I know that my personality really rested on the fiction of position. Having lost position, I find my personality of no avail.”
By necessity, Wilde’s exile on the Left Bank was spent with the lower rung of artists, who had not yet made a reputation that could be tarnished by association with him now that he had decided to live openly—and without fear—as a homosexual. When he threw away the mask and stopped the lies, he was strangely happy. In this new sensual life, there was no room for intellectual Greek love. He could not be arrested for soliciting in Paris, but he would be talked about. That was fine: Wilde needed to be talked about. “A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country,” he said, “and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys.” Every day in Paris, he wanted to be in love with a beautiful boy.
This was no new artistic manifesto comparable to Aestheticism, Decadence, or platonic love. It probably went unnoticed that Wilde was making a statement about himself, his nature, and his life as a work of art. He had no guidelines, no thoughts about his identity as a homosexual or his place in a nonexistent homosexual culture. He knew he would never see his children again. There was no one left to outrage except himself and a few old friends.
Will Rothenstein took him to dinner at an outdoor restaurant that featured an orchestra. Wilde insisted on being seated near the musicians and flaunted his interest in one of the players. Uncomfortable, Rothenstein decided not to keep in touch. On his next visit to Paris, he saw Wilde walking along the boulevards. He later wrote, “I saw at once that he knew we had meant to avoid him. The look he gave us was tragic, and he seemed ill, and was shabby and down at heel.”
Wilde enjoyed being in his old neighborhood. The Hôtel Voltaire, where he had written The Duchess of Padua and The Sphinx, was a short walk from where he stayed on the rue des Beaux-Arts, which paralleled the rue Visconti, where Balzac had his printing shop. Poverty did not ennoble Wilde, nor did it inspire him. Being hungry was romantic only when one was young. Twenty years earlier, he had never scribbled at the tables of the Brasserie Lipp or Les Deux Magots, popular cafés on the boulevard St.-Germain where the rue Bonaparte starts down toward the Seine. The ubiquitous circular table was for drinking and meeting friends, for reading the Chronicle with much rustling of the pages, and for writing letters, particularly if the café provided stationery and ink. At the Café Procope he made friends with Marcel Legay, a songwriter, and J.-B. de Bucé, editor of a small literary journal. One evening, Jean Lorrain, a Decadent novelist, and Wilde had a good-natured squabble about who was the better poseur. Wilde’s passion for blague, or humbug, never abated.
No longer able to be a generous host, he learned to sit and wait until someone else paid. “I live a very ordinary life,” he somberly wrote Ross. “I go to cafés like Pousset’s where I meet artists and writers. I don’t frequent places like the Café de la Paix [on the boulevard des Capucines]. I dine in modest restaurants for two or three francs. My life is rather dull. I cannot flaunt or dash about: I have not got the money, nor the clothes. When I can I go to the Quartier Latin under the wing of a poet, and talk about art.”
Since he was constantly borrowing and begging, Wilde made it impossible for anyone to calculate how much money he had to spend, but he was never as poor as he said he was when asking for a handout. His quarterly allowance, doled out by Ross, was £37.10, the equivalent of 925 francs. He tried to live on 250 francs a month, and his hotel cost 70. In addition, he earned royalties on the Ballad because, he said, “the public liked to hear of my pain.” He sold publication rights for An Ideal Husband and Earnest to Smithers for £30, paid out in increments of £5. Wilde’s cycles of frugality, as reported to Ross, were not without humor. He found a restaurant where for 80 francs a month “one can get nothing fit to eat—two chances a day.” He discovered that “one can’t get railway-tickets on credit. It is such a bore!”
Getting money from London was a constant irritation. As an expatriate, Wilde could have opened a bank account, but he was living under the assumed name Sebastian Melmoth, with only a gentleman’s calling card for identification. Funds were wired to Thomas Cook’s at the place de l’Opéra, long the Englishman’s connection to home. “I have been seven times to Cook’s,” he wrote Smithers, “and also went at seven o’clock, two hours after their bank closes, and woke them up. Of course nothing at all had arrived, so I have had no dinner.” While in the area, he browsed around Brentano’s, the English and American bookstore at 37 avenue de l’Opéra. He had to pay cash, and his last purchases were four volumes of Tennyson and seven popular novels, curiously entitled Colonel Harbottle’s Client, March Hares, and A Protegée of Jack Hamlin.
Bosie’s income was even more mysterious. He went from having no money in Naples to leasing an apartment on avenue Kléber, one of Baron Haussmann’s fashionable thoroughfares radiating from the Arc de Triomphe. Wilde helped him select furniture, including a green bed in honor of Baudelaire. Bosie continued to gamble heavily on horse races, and once had to pawn his cuff links for train fare to Paris. No one changed, as Wilde had astutely observed: people just kept rattling about in their old personalities. When Ross sent some new clothes, Wilde complained that the trousers were too tight in the waist. He was gaining weight because of cheap food. “Nothing fattens so much as a dinner at 1 fr. 50,” he said.
The former lovers enjoyed each other’s company as much as ever, but Wilde’s heart no longer quickened when they met. At twenty-seven, Bosie looked years younger, but his Apollonian aura was tarnished through use. Money remained an issue between them. A hopeless handicapper, Bosie usually lost heavily at the races, but when he won twelve hundred pounds, Wilde asked him to settle his debt of honor. Bosie was outraged. “I can’t afford to spend anything except on myself” was a typical reply. As they were sitting at a table outside the Café de la Paix, Wilde let the matter drop.
Wilde was known to many boys along the boulevards. “Of course I cannot bear being alone,” he wrote Ross, “and while the literary people are charming when they meet me, we meet rarely. My companions are such as I can get, and I of course have to pay for such friendships.” His letters to Ross and Turner listed many a boy. There was Ashton, Edmond, Léon, a Russian named Maltchek Perovinsky, and Giorgio, a Corsican who worked at the Restaurant Jouffroy, Eugene, who was “the harvest-moon,” and Alphonse, who was “quite an imp.” At the Café d’Égypte, there was a slim brown Egyptian waiter “rather like a handsome bamboo walking-stick.” The beauty of the French fauns gave Wilde something to write home about, but he was really bored “by the lack of intellect,” for which he admonished himself. “I attribute it to Oxford. None of us survive culture.”
One companion brightened his exile: Maurice Gilbert. Described by Wilde in adjectives redolent of Bosie, Gilbert had an upper lip that was more “like a rose-leaf than any rose-leaf I ever saw.” Half English and half French, he had been a soldier in the marine infantry and did odd jobs around Paris, particularly for Rowland Strong, a friend of Wilde who was Paris correspondent for the Observer. Gilbert was generous and patient; he played bezique, a pinochle-like game, hour after hour because it amused Wilde. “Maurice has won twenty-five games of bezique and I twenty-four,” Wilde reported, “however, as he has youth, and I have only genius, it is only natural that he should beat me.” When the seventh edition of the Ballad was issued with Wilde’s name—enclosed in brackets—below his cell number, C.3.3., Gilbert copied Wilde’s extravagant signature onto presentation copies because the author was too tired to sign his final work.
Also Bosie’s boy, Gilbert returned to Bosie during the racing season. He traveled to London to share the affections of Ross and Turner, expenses presumably paid by Turner, the only one who could afford such gestures. When he is away, Wilde teases Ross: “So you love Maurice?” And asks Turner, “How is my golden Maurice? I suppose he is wildly loved?” As a lover to the whole group, Gilbert linked them together and symbolized how homosexual love cou
ld germinate without jealousy.
Inevitably, Wilde established friends in the theatre. Georgette Leblanc, mistress of the dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck and the leading actress at the Opéra Comique, gave him seats for her performances. He visited the actress’s house near the Bois de Boulogne, decorated to Wilde’s taste with white walls and Burne-Jones photographs. He met Maeterlinck, dubbed “the Belgian Shakespeare” in 1889 after the production of his first play, La Princesse Maleine. Maeterlinck had given up playwriting, prompting Wilde’s remark that he “rests his hope of humanity on the Bicycle.” André Antoine, a French actor, gave Wilde a box seat to see Les Tisserands, a translation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s socialistic drama Die Weber, based on the incidents of the weavers’ revolt in 1844. Wilde said it “was rather like a public meeting, and should be called The Triumph of the Supers.”
The annual May Fête des Fous distracted him. “A delightful evening,” he wrote Turner, “the whole Quartier Latin was bright with beauty and wine, and the students in their mediaeval costumes picturesque and improbable and gay.” Beyond frequenting poetry readings at Montmartre cafés, Wilde found friends at places catering to homosexuals. His favorite was the Calisaya, on the boulevard des Italiens, where he knew the bartender and met Ernest La Jeunesse, a journalist. Sometimes his old friends Jean Lorrain and Maurice Du Plessys joined them. It was a comfortable spot to end the evening with petits verres. Vincent O’Sullivan warned him that the bar was filled with “sodomist outcasts, who were sometimes dangerous in other ways.” But Wilde liked the atmosphere.
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