Oscar Wilde Read online

  Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Beiford

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Fourth Estate Ltd.: Excerpts from The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Sir Rupert Hart-Davis. Letters copyright © 1962, 1985, 2000 by The Estate of Oscar Wilde. Editorial matter copyright © 1962, 1985, 2000 by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland. Reprinted by permission of Fourth Estate Ltd.

  Henry Holt and Company LLC: Excerpts from The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Sir Rupert Hart-Davis. Letters copyright © 1962 by Vyvyan Holland. Copyright © 1990, 1997 by Merlin Holland. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Belford, Barbara.

  Oscar Wilde : a certain genius / Barbara Belford.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79537-3

  1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900. 2. Authors, Irish—19th century—

  Biography. I. Title.

  PR5823.B546 2000

  828′.809—dc21

  [B] 00-026827

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE (1854–1878): BECOMING

  1. Lord of Life

  2. Merrion Square

  3. Away from Home

  4. Budding Aesthete

  5. Magdalen Manners

  PART TWO (1879–1883): REINVENTING

  6. Artists and Beauties

  7. Aesthetes and Dandies

  8. A Second Self

  9. New Scenarios

  PART THREE (1884–1891): REBELLING

  10. Mrs. Oscar Wilde

  11. Crossing Over

  12. Enemies and Friends

  13. The Dorian Prophecy

  PART FOUR (1892–1895): FLAUNTING

  14. More Than Laughter

  15. Translating Ecstasy

  16. Mostly Famous

  17. A Broken Line

  PART FIVE (1895–1900): RECONCILING

  18. The Last First Night

  19. Touching Sorrow

  20. Misbegotten Yesterdays

  21. Stealing Happiness

  EPILOGUE

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PHOTOGRAPHIC AND ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Other Books by this Author

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  OScar Wilde was a dazzling conversationalist: once heard never forgotten. His life was the triumph of flippancy over genius, and sometimes the triumph of genius over flippancy. He needed a paradoxical nature to create his brilliant antithetical views on the English and the Irish, male and female, truth and artifice, good and evil—and himself. By writing about serious issues that are still relevant—the corrosive effects of power, the quest for status, and class pretensions—he sums up what is past, embodies what is passing, and intimates what is to come. By flaunting the right to his own sexuality, Wilde catapulted Uranian passion out of adolescence and into maturity and gave birth to a homosexual consciousness. Anticipating modernism, he saw the value of interpreting and criticizing culture through one’s personal visions. His life impinges on us still.

  Wilde experimented with all literary forms: journalism, criticism, poetry, fiction, and biography; along the way he illuminated Aestheticism, Decadence, and Symbolism. He taught us that style not sincerity is what matters. As the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, the wittiest comedy of all time, rivaling even the works of Molière and Shakespeare, he changed the sound of laughter. His dramas taunted the English with the folly of their ideals and their hypocrisy. Once attacked as derivative, his words now make the unoriginal enlightened; present-day writers plunder his work searching for an epigram to say what they cannot about contemporary life. Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, Ronald Firbank, P. G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh owe as much to Wilde as do the dramatists Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard, Paul Rudnick, Tony Kushner, Terrence McNally, and Larry Kramer, who like Wilde attack the certainties and presumptions of the so-called normal life.

  Any new biography brings Wilde, and his age, before another jury to be retried and judged. In his lifetime the end of “Victorianism” and all that it had come to represent was approaching, but nothing had evolved to take its place. It was Wilde who defined the conscience and the consciousness of the artist at a time when all other values were thrown into doubt. My aim has been to reclaim Wilde in all the brilliant details of his contradictions as he appeared to his contemporaries and to argue that his writing as well as his life has a certain genius.

  Hundreds of books have been written about Wilde. Most have stumbled when it came to humanizing the arrogant poseur. The first to succeed in capturing his extraordinary charisma and conversational abilities was Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit (1946), written by Hesketh Pearson, a former actor who was ten years old when Wilde was released from prison. Early Wilde scholarship was dominated by H. Montgomery Hyde and Rupert Hart-Davis. A lawyer, Hyde edited The Trials of Oscar Wilde in 1948 from newspaper sources since there were no official transcripts and wrote a biography in 1975. Hart-Davis published a collection of Wilde’s letters in 1962 and a supplement in 1985.

  Modern Wilde scholarship begins with Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1987), the comprehensive biography against which all subsequent works will be judged. Recent books have tended to take specialist views. We have the Irish Wilde, the gay Wilde, and the Freudian Wilde. Ellmann’s approach, in many ways critically astute, suffers from a reticence about discussing his subject’s homosexuality as more than a private matter: it is divorced from contemporary politics and culture. Strong on the facts but weak on cultural context, particularly the conditions and personalities of the contemporary theatre that had so much of an impact on Wilde, it is not a dramatic biography or one that provides a sense of time and place. Ellmann wrote the tragedy of Wilde, not the life.

  As much as I am indebted to Ellmann’s scholarship, I must disagree with his thesis that Wilde contracted syphilis from a female prostitute at Oxford, that it influenced his work and hastened his early death. Those aspects of Wilde’s life and personality that did not fit this argument were glossed over. One wonders whether Ellmann’s insistence on syphilis was an effort to give Wilde some heterosexual patina to make him more sympathetic. Indeed, Wilde himself said that each biography is its own fiction because at best it takes a stance oblique to the truth. When one looks at the facts anew, Wilde’s medical history makes syphilis difficult to substantiate.

  The problem in writing any new biography of Wilde is that he comes to us with his life already written, so much of his anecdotal history precedes specific knowledge of any actual details of it. The first mythologizing and fictionalizing was by Wilde himself. So why another book about him? And why now? Because his life is a continual allegory and his social, political, and artistic views, which went right to the heart of Victorian society, are no less threatening today. Because his obsessive love for Lord Alfred Douglas is one of the nineteenth century’s extraordinary love stories. He is a major figure in world culture and needs a fresh look. What better time to publish a new life than the centenary of his death, November 30, 2000?

  I came to kn
ow Wilde through the women he loved. My first biography was of Violet Hunt, who claimed that she nearly became his wife in the 1880s. Her life introduced me to the Pre-Raphaelites, who inspired Wilde’s own brand of Aestheticism. My next biography was of Bram Stoker, who brought me to Dublin and Trinity College, where he and Wilde were born and studied. Stoker ended up marrying Wilde’s college sweetheart, Florence Balcombe. Best known as the author of Dracula, Stoker was business manager for Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre for three decades. His life initiated me into the West End, its theatres, clubs, and restaurants. Finally, “The Happy Prince,” a childhood story that awed me with its themes of love, hope, and death, pulled me into five years of getting to know the inner Wilde. I discovered that his childlike nature extended to all his works—from The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Importance of Being Earnest.

  What I want to show is how different stories can be embedded in the same factual material, depending on the perspective of the biographer’s approach. I cannot boast of being the first to consult unsealed caches of letters or of discovering a lost diary. But everything is freshly culled, because everything that Wilde wrote bears the closest psychological inspection. If I manage to recapture his ebbs and flows, his duplicity, loyalty, and mendacity, to penetrate the magic of his conversation—for his authentic voice was never recorded—then the reader will have entered into the 1890s and I will have written a good book.

  My research took me to Ireland, England, France, and Italy to see Wilde’s homes and experience his favorite restaurants and cafés. I felt closest to him when I entered the atmosphere of the places where he wrote. Wilde was a reluctant writer and a great procrastinator when it came to carving out the solitary hours needed to compose. He suffered from writer’s block and bouts of depression. But when he put pen to paper, he wrote quickly because the story was already in his head. Wilde started with an idea, an epigram or a paradox, which he told as a story or a parable, polishing it in the retelling and committing it to memory. His intellectual work done, he needed only an interlude in the pursuit of pleasure to put words on paper. But was he a genius? This question was persistently asked. How could he be considered a genius when he wrote the first draft of his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, in three weeks? To be a genius, the reasoning goes, a writer must suffer, each word written in torment; a writer must take years, not a matter of days, to produce innovative ideas. But Wilde’s work habits defined a different kind of genius.

  His last years are too often told as a dark tragedy, piled on top of the infamy of two years in prison. I found a brighter story to tell. Wilde lived as he wanted, old age was never for him; he had had a wonderful life and he was content to leave it on his own terms. In following his dictum that the “one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,” I hope this biography revokes the myth of Wilde as a tragic figure.

  PART ONE

  (1854–1878)

  Becoming

  I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.… I awoke the imagination of my century so that I created myth and legend around me. I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.… I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy.

  —De Profundis

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lord of Life

  There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life’s lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it.

  —A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE

  Oscar Wilde’s first public performance was in the drawing room of his Dublin home on Merrion Square, where the two-year-old entertained guests by reciting his name—Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde—over and over. Savoring the vowels, trilling the fricatives, he gulped for air, chanting away, faster and faster like an intelligent windup toy, precocious, brazen, and insecure, until applause quieted him. Wilde was later to assert: “Everyone is good until they learn to talk.” His mother called him a genius, and he agreed but others misunderstood. “The public is wonderfully tolerant,” Wilde said. “It forgives everything except genius.”

  He mocked himself and society and made the world laugh at destiny. “My name has two O’s, two F’s and two W’s,” he later observed. “A name which is destined to be in everybody’s mouth must not be too long; besides it becomes so expensive in the advertisement.” Following his birth, Wilde’s mother wrote a friend: “He is to be called Oscar Fingal Wilde. Is not that grand, misty and Ossianic?” “Names are everything,” says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Oscar, who believed that his cradle was rocked by fate, had more than his share.

  “I envy those men who become mythological while still living,” W. B. Yeats once remarked to Wilde, who replied, “I think a man should invent his own myth.” That he did. The name Oscar was an auspicious beginning, for it honored the son of Osín of the Gaelic epics, who was born in the Land of Eternal Youth.* Like his namesake, Wilde loved youth, even more than art. “The soul is born old but grows young,” he wrote. “That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.” Fingal, Gaelic for “fair-haired stranger,” goes back to Viking times and identifies a coastal region between the Liffey and Boyne Rivers.

  With the addition of O’Flahertie, recalling the Galway heritage of his father, whose ancestors had married into the clan of the pre-Norman kings of West Connacht, Oscar was linked to an ancient Celtic family. His father had been given the name Wills as a tribute to a leading Roscommon family that included the playwright William Gorman Wills. In fact, Wilde’s father dedicated his first book, Madeira, to Wills, a notable eccentric who filled his room with abandoned animals he rescued. The name was passed on to Oscar, who used it when it suited his fancy.

  His mother called him “Oscar,” with an imperious accented a; his relatives preferred “Ossie.” At public school he was “Grey-Crow,” and at Oxford “Hosky” or occasionally “O’Flighty.” In London, the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler dubbed him “Oscarino.” Henry James referred to him as “Hoscar.” Identity begins—and sometimes ends—with nicknames.

  “How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me ‘plain Oscar,’ ” Wilde later said. “When one is unknown, a number of Christian names are useful, perhaps needful. As one becomes famous, one sheds some of them.… I started as Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or ‘The Oscar.’ ”

  Brilliance and daring created “The Oscar,” which led to C.3.3., his prison cell number, and finally to Sebastian Melmoth, his nom de plume in exile, when, without an identity, Wilde was deprived of his currency in everyday life. Before his death, he decided that he wanted to be known as “the infamous St. Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr.” How far had he traveled from those jovial evenings when grown-ups applauded his recitations!

  His Parents were brilliant and eccentric—bohemian characters often manipulated by biographers into the cause of Wilde’s errant sexuality. Far more than the sum of their excesses, they lived in the next century while other mid-Victorians still grappled with industrialism. William Wilde became a notable eye-and-ear surgeon with a still-resonating legacy of scientific and folkloric research. He fathered at least three illegitimate children before marriage and was accused of rape after marriage. His wife, an inflammatory poet of nationalism and an innovative translator, became Dublin’s most gossiped about hostess—known for her bizarre dresses and bawdy talk.

  “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,” Wilde wrote in “The Critic as Artist.” “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” In the art of masks, Wilde’s mother was a skillful teacher. Jane Francesca Elgee was born on December 21, 1821. Births were not re
gistered then, but she gave this date in 1888, when she applied for financial aid from the Royal Literary Fund and it was in her interest to be older. At other times she was five years younger. In A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingworth speaks for her when he says, “One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.” Oscar started to grow backward before he reached twenty-four, and by the time of his trials, when he was forty-one, he admitted to thirty-nine.

  As a young woman, Oscar’s mother was slender and stately, with glistening black hair, a perfect model for a statue of civic virtue. Although she ballooned into an ungainly, large-boned woman in her later years, she never lost the ability to enter a room with a savoir faire that silenced conversation.

  Outfitted in multilayered skirts over numerous petticoats, her face masked by a black-lace mantilla, she looked every inch a donna of the aristocracy, which she claimed as a putative descendant of Dante. To enhance this subterfuge, she may have Italianized her middle name from Frances to Francesca. Oscar learned that reality can be improved and that life should be a series of beautiful lies—maternal verities that he turned into a philosophy of life.

  Her Irish background was Protestant and, on her mother’s side, prosperous; all in all respectable, but Jane would have preferred Dante. Her father, Charles, an attorney, descended from a bricklayer with roots in the Northumberland area of Durham; her mother, Sarah Kingsbury, was the daughter of the vicar of Kildare and the granddaughter of the archdeacon of Wexford. Her maternal great-grandfather, Dr. Thomas Kingsbury, a friend of Jonathan Swift, was president of the Royal College of Physicians.

  By far the most impressive relative was a maternal uncle by marriage, an eccentric, melancholy character who died before Oscar was born. His name was Charles Maturin, and he was a clergyman and the author of Melmoth the Wanderer, a classic gothic tale of sin and redemption that was published in 1820, two years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Maturin was a dandy whom Oscar would have adored. A contemporary recalled how he “was the first in the quadrille—the last to depart. The ballroom was his temple of inspiration and worship.” When he entertained, the shutters were closed and candles lighted even on sunny days, an atmospheric touch Oscar’s mother imitated. Maturin liked to write surrounded by people and placed a red wafer on his forehead to indicate he was working; if a conversation intrigued him, he sealed his mouth shut with a homemade paste. It impressed Wilde that his great-uncle was respected by Baudelaire and that Balzac included Maturin with Goethe, Molière, and Byron as a genius of European letters, even writing a sequel to his novel called Melmoth Réconcilié.