Oscar Wilde Read online

  On December 27, 1882, Wilde sailed for England on the SS Bothnia, taking with him $5,605.31, his profit from the tour, and the $800 remaining from his first advance. Revisiting the Atlantic, he brooded on the betrayal of Frank Miles, who had not championed artistic freedom and had not stood up to his father’s criticism of Wilde’s Poems. In addition there was the defection of his protégé James Rennell Rodd, considered heir to the title of Oxford Aesthete and a Newdigate winner in 1880 for a poem on Sir Walter Raleigh. When Rodd came down from Balliol, Wilde had encouraged him as a poet, introducing him to Burne-Jones and Whistler.

  They had traveled together to Belgium in the summer of 1879, accompanied by Rodd’s parents and sister. The following year they went along the Loire and stopped in Paris. Wilde playfully took the nom de plume Lord Robinson, and Rodd answered to Sir Smith, a portent of Wilde as Sebastian Melmoth in the same city. But Rodd was wary of Wilde’s need for control and companionship. When he published his first book of poems, Songs in the South, in 1881, Rodd refused to change passages that Wilde considered artificial.

  If there was one thing Wilde could not tolerate, it was rebellion from disciples; hence, he moved to regain control. Leaving for his lecture tour, he had promised Rodd that he would find an American publisher for Songs, now called Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf. During his absence, Rodd transferred his allegiance to Whistler, who had returned from Venice with a brilliant series of etchings. Rodd had good reason to distance himself from Wilde as his mentor’s flamboyant image drew more attention. Prudence was demanded at the beginning of his diplomatic career, which culminated as ambassador to Italy from 1908 to 1919.

  In Philadelphia, Wilde convinced J. M. Stoddart to publish Rose Leaf. Wilde wrote the preface and decreed the design: parchment covers, verses printed in brown ink on only one side of the paper, and interleaved blank apple green pages. The cover and title page bore the seal of Wilde’s favorite signet ring: the profile of a young boy in ringlets. The choice was obviously a courting gesture. The volume was “a chef d’oeuvre of typography,” the beginning of “an era in American printing,” he told Stoddart by way of congratulating himself.

  A thirty-five-hundred-word “L’Envoi” to launch the young poet was primarily devoted to Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy, which was not always Rodd’s. More disturbing was Wilde’s discussion of their travels together in terms that could be misconstrued by the Foreign Office. There was also an inappropriate dedication. The British edition was dedicated to Rodd’s father and inscribed “To Oscar Wilde—‘Heart’s Brother’—These few songs and many songs to come.” Without consulting Rodd, Wilde used the same words to dedicate the American edition to himself. Rodd tried to have the page removed, but the 175 copies were already off to bookstores.*

  Wilde’s generosity toward young poets earned him many protégés and disciples; most were strictly platonic relationships exemplifying the ideal of the older man teaching the younger, but some were intimate, in varying degrees. Wilde needed the illusion of friendship and demanded unconditional love and loyalty. Ingratitude made him want to found only schools without disciples. Deemed a “false friend,” Rodd complained of Wilde’s “Olympian attitude” but later called him a “daring and gifted personality” who had brought him “nearer to emancipation from convention.”

  Wilde shed some of his bitterness over betrayal when he wrote “The Devoted Friend,” published in The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888. Selfish and mean-spirited, Hugh, the so-called devoted friend, exploits Hans, an agreeable young man who does chores for him in exchange for a broken wheelbarrow. When Hans drowns as a result of Hugh’s demands, Hugh declares, “I will certainly take care not to give away anything again. One always suffers for being generous.” At the same time Wilde introduces his contrary notions about pain and sympathy. Hugh maintains that unhappy people “should be left alone and not bothered,” but “a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain.” With few exceptions, Wilde’s affection and loyalty existed without malice, without giving pain, a rare trait in so brilliant a conversationalist.

  Wilde returned to a London without Rossetti, who had died on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1882, while Wilde was on a train from Sacramento, California, to Salt Lake City, Utah. He had spoken so often of Rossetti that he came to believe in their phantom friendship and never knew that the Pre-Raphaelite had disliked his Poems. “I saw the wretched Oscar Wilde book,” Rossetti wrote Jane Morris, “and glanced at it enough to see clearly what trash it is. Did Georgie [Burne-Jones] say that Ned [her husband] really admired it? If so, he must be gone drivelling.” Rossetti never aligned himself with the Aesthetes, but he was their mythmaker, “a subconscious influence,” Yeats said, “and perhaps the most powerful of all.” For some years he had fought an addiction to chloral hydrate as well as suffering mood swings from depression to paranoia.

  Violet Hunt told Wilde she had visited Tudor House, where Rossetti lived on the Chelsea Embankment, and saw all his possessions, including The Ladies’ Lament, painted by his wife, Lizzie Siddal, tagged for auction in the “dreary studio.” Years later, when Hunt wrote The Wife of Rossetti, she claimed that Lizzie poisoned herself because of her husband’s infidelities with his models. In Wilde’s absence, Hunt had matured into a liberated New Woman; she had visited Paris, learned German, read George Sand’s biography, and decided that romantic adventures were better than marriage.

  Visiting Tor Villa, Wilde placed himself in the big armchair so he could slouch and lounge with his feet resting on the red-velvet stool encircling the fireplace fender. Hunt showed him the scrapbook with clippings from his tour, and they laughed at the headline “Mr. Wilde Disappointed with the Atlantic.” Hunt found him “not nearly so nice.” One evening, as they talked about maps of the ancients, he teased her: “Oh, Miss Violet, think of a map drawn of a whole continent, and beside the names of an insignificant city or two a blank and Hic sunt leones! Miss Violet, let you and me go there.”

  “And get eaten by lions?” she replied.

  In Hunt’s autobiographical novel, Their Lives, Philip Wynyard (Wilde) has “full pouting pale lips” that remind Christina (Hunt) of the “debased Roman Emperors whose busts stand in one of the corridors of the British Museum” and whose “habit of drawing in his breath in a susurrant, self-satisfied manner at the end of a would-be poignant sentence” disgusts the heroine. Christina “could not imagine his kissing her—or herself wanting him to do it.”

  Wilde took back his old rooms at Charles Street and visited his mother and brother, who still lived nearby on Park Street. Lady Wilde had given up on Willie’s marriage, but when Oscar’s arrival revived her matchmaking mood, he quickly bolted to Paris to write his play. His first trip to Paris had been with his mother and brother in 1867, after Isola’s death. Paris would become his second city now that Dublin was in the past. Wilde revered Balzac, Flaubert, and Baudelaire; his spoken French was excellent, his written prose less so, and opinions varied about the purity of his accent. When he wrote Salomé, he said that he wanted to command another language and make something beautiful out of it.

  Anticipating a welcome as leader of the British Aesthetic movement, he settled into a first-floor suite overlooking the Seine at the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, on the booksellers’ quay. Baudelaire had taken a room in this establishment in the artists’ quarter in 1856 and stayed for two years while writing Les Fleurs du mal; Wagner’s stay in 1867 had produced Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wilde worshiped Baudelaire but thought Wagner too belligerent. In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry’s wife remarks, “I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.” At least Die Meistersinger—if its aura lingered—did not have boisterous gods and goddesses. All muses were welcome if they kept Wilde at his writing desk.

  With less than two months to complete The Duchess of Padua, he set about arranging his apartment. A copy of Baudelaire’s poems went on the nightstand; on the wr
iting desk were his calling cards—volumes of Poems in gold-embossed vellum covers—scenario notes, and a packet of handmade paper from De La Rue in London. Putting black words on white, silky-textured, hallmarked sheets was an artistic act on which Wilde splurged as he would on champagne. He envisioned himself an ancient calligrapher bent over snowy scrolls of Japanese washi, a paper as smooth as skin.

  In imitation of Balzac—who marked the transition from reality to fiction by putting on a white cashmere monk’s cowl tied with a belt of Venetian gold from which hung a paper knife, a pair of scissors, and a penknife—Wilde wore a white wool dressing gown when at his writing table. To be more Balzacian, he ordered a copy of the novelist’s famous ivory walking stick with a lapis lazuli pommel. The author of La Comédie humaine daily stoked the muse with two dozen cups of coffee, his slow path to caffeine poisoning, but Wilde preferred nicotine, buying cigarettes by the thousands to keep up with his chain smoking. He kept a large blue porcelain bowl on the writing table as an ashtray, and next to that a vase of flowers to neutralize the smell. Wilde cherished everything about the smoking ritual: the light, the first puffs, the stamping out, and the starting over. He agreed with Pierre Loÿus, the French poet and novelist to whom he would dedicate Salomé, that cigarettes were the only new pleasure invented by man in eighteen hundred years; a cigarette was Wilde’s closest friend, without which he could not write.

  While visiting a school in America, Wilde was shocked by a No Smoking sign. “Great Heaven!” he exclaimed. “They speak of smoking as if it were a crime. I wonder they don’t caution the students not to murder each other on the landings.” During Lady Bracknell’s interrogation in Earnest, Jack admits that he smokes. “I am glad to hear it,” she says. “A man should always have an occupation of some kind.” In A Woman of No Importance, Lord Alfred observes that gold-tipped cigarettes “are awfully expensive, I can only afford them when I am in debt.” In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry speaks for Wilde when he says: “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied.”

  At his writing desk, his gaze fixed on the Louvre’s blue-gray roof studded with eye windows, Wilde went to work with uncharacteristic discipline. Since invitations were not a distraction, he worked without too many interruptions, putting “black upon white” as he liked to say, in his fluid, musical handwriting, in which an of suggested two clasped circles. The Duchess of Padua, a Renaissance revenge tragedy written in blank verse, was the least favorite of his dramas; in 1898 he said it was “unfit for publication—the only one of my works that comes under that category. But there are some good lines in it.” He returned to The Sphinx, a poem begun at Oxford that would bewitch him until 1894. In the morning, when he lit his first aromatic cigarette, convoluted words formed couplets in his head: words like Lupanar to rhyme with nénuphar, and catafalque to go with Amenalk.

  The ambiguous, silent sphinx, with its whorish eroticism and ancient secret (Wilde called women sphinxes without secrets), had long fascinated him. There were endless echoes he wanted to reinvent, from Flaubert’s La Chimère to Alfred Hunt’s Newdigate poem “Nineveh.” In a feverish outpouring, he completed the first draft, eighty-seven couplets in the meter of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. It was a poem that became a game, and by the time it was published a decade later, it was an eclectic extravaganza, owing as much to Paterian Aestheticism as to French Symbolism, and even to nursery rhymes with lines such as

  But you can read the hieroglyphs

  on the great sandstone obelisks,

  And you have talked with Basilisks,

  and you have looked on Hippogriffs.

  When Paris did not court him, Wilde went into the cafés and restaurants to make his presence known. He was in the mood for spending money. When a Left Bank habitué wanted to return to Brittany and join the Navy, Wilde provided a new suit and the train fare. Not one to let a bank invest his money, Wilde kept it with him, ready for any spontaneous wasteful moment. His attitude toward money never varied: “The only thing that can console one for having no money is extravagance,” he said, and this was a lifetime philosophy, even in the dark days. “I don’t want money,” Lord Henry says in Dorian Gray. “It is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine.”

  Wilde found companionship not with a French poet but with the impressionable Robert Harborough Sherard, a twenty-one-year-old aspiring writer, eight years Wilde’s junior and a great-grandson of Wordsworth. Sherard looked the part of a disciple: honey-colored hair, handsome, and plausibly heterosexual. Sent down from New College, Oxford, he told Wilde of his studies and adventures, including a year at the University of Bonn studying law and, curiously, Sanskrit; he boasted of surviving a duel in Naples over a beautiful girl. During Wilde’s three months in Paris, they were constantly together. Sherard’s growing devotion through the balance of Wilde’s lifetime bordered on idolatry. Although Sherard wrote five books about Wilde, he failed to accept his homosexuality and never understood the man who found him so attractive.

  Entertained at Foyot’s, an expensive restaurant on the rue de Tournon, Sherard won Wilde’s admiration by pointing out that wine was not white but yellow; thereafter Wilde ordered wine by that color. Sherard’s family had shared a house with Victor Hugo in Guernsey; he arranged for Wilde to meet Hugo at a reception, but the old man was asleep in his chair and could not be roused for an introduction. They visited Sarah Bernhardt, appearing then in Sardou’s Fédora, at her home on the avenue de Villiers. Wilde brought her wallflowers. They had lunch at the fashionable Café de Paris (Bignon’s) on the avenue de l’Opéra, where Wilde overspent, maintaining that it was his duty to show the bourgeois that there were artists who did not starve in garrets.

  Sherard was there to record Wilde’s childishness when he put on his favorite overcoat, hugged himself in its ample folds, and said, “So nice and warm.” He was there to see a new butterfly emerge: “All that belonged to the Oscar of the first period,” Wilde said. “We are now concerned with the Oscar Wilde of the second period, who has nothing whatever in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower [or a lily] down Piccadilly.” The Oscar of the second period dressed like a Frenchman, had his hair bobbed and curled after a bust of the young Nero in the Louvre. He was reclaiming his youth. Visits to the barbershop to have his locks done with a curling iron pleased him so much that he convinced Sherard to do the same. Together they slummed around Paris. But the story that one night Wilde went with a well-known prostitute from the Eden Music Hall remains hearsay.*

  As he was being introduced around Paris, Wilde thought he was garnering friends, but it takes more than speaking the language to impress the French. A meeting with Edgar Degas was disappointing. The artist told Walter Sickert that Wilde had “the look of someone playing Lor’ Byron in a suburban theatre.” Wilde wanted to meet the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (“the one Christian poet since Dante”), who was now a poet of sexual inversion and decadence. He saw Verlaine in an absinthe stupor at the Café Vachette, looking seedy and depressed over the death of his lover Lucien Létinois. Once Verlaine had impressed Wilde with the religious fervor of his poems, but seeing him destitute and ugly, with the face of a satyr, Wilde turned away in disgust. “Verlaine is in the gutter, but he writes poetry on the pavement,” he later remarked.

  The novelist and memoirist Edmond de Goncourt, who was more welcoming, met Wilde several times. Goncourt’s novel La Faustin examines the conflicts between life and art through the title character, an actress who needs love to perform. Excited by this theme, Wilde made up a sketch about an actress with the opposite problem: love divests her talent. This became the story of Sibyl Vane in Dorian Gray. A decade later, when Wilde was on the threshold of theatrical success, Goncourt published entries from his journal in L’Écho de Paris, referring to Wilde as “au sexe douteux” (of doubtful sex) and quoting his description of Swinburne as “a flaunter of vice.”

  Wilde saw Swinburne only once, at
a reception in the 1880s. He sent him an account of his visit with Whitman, hoping to establish a friendship when he returned from America, but that failed, partly because Wilde’s preface to Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf upset Swinburne, who described Rodd as “Oscar Wilde’s young man—the Hephaestion of that all-conquering Alexander.” Ignoring the reference to himself, Wilde told Goncourt that he had misunderstood their conversation. The “English public, as usual hypocritical, prudish, and philistine, has not known how to find the art in the work of art: it has searched for the man in it,” he wrote. “Since it always confuses the man and his creations, it thinks that to create Hamlet you must be a little melancholy, to imagine Lear completely mad. So it has built around M. Swinburne a legend of an ogre and a devourer of children. M. Swinburne, an aristocrat by birth and an artist by temperament, has merely laughed at these absurdities.” Wilde was to use the same defense four months later with Dorian Gray. (When Goncourt published his journal as a book, he omitted both references.)

  Wilde completed The Duchess, calling it the “chef d’oeuvre of my youth.” He sent Mary Anderson the script and anxiously awaited her approval; he had spent most of the initial thousand-dollar advance and anticipated the remaining four thousand on his contract—if she accepted. When the telegram arrived six weeks later, Sherard was with him and watched while he read it—without expression. “Robert,” he finally said, “this is very tedious. We shan’t be able to dine with the Duchess tonight.” But celebrate they did. Sherard took Wilde to the Café de Paris, where they drank yellow wine to forget. Thereafter they dined at the Hôtel Voltaire, where Wilde could sign and accumulate debt. Anderson explained that a play in blank verse would not be commercial. (Did Wilde not say he was using blank verse when they met in New York?) “The play in its present form, I fear would no more please the public of today than would ‘Venice Preserved,’ or ‘Lucretia Borgia,’ ” she wrote. But the play had its good points. Wilde told the French actor Coquelin that the ending “is quite tragic; my hero, at his moment of triumph, makes an epigram which falls flat.”