Oscar Wilde Page 3

  *Osín, a favorite of the Irish seanchaí or storyteller, rode off with Niamh Cinn óOir, daughter of the king of Tír na nóg, to an enchanted land of emerald fields and silver streams, where no one worked and no one grew old and time was endless. The mythical Oscar was born into this paradise. One night Osín dreamed of his father, Fionn MacCumhaill, leader of the Fianna, and decided to return to Ireland. Niamh warned him not to step on Irish soil. Three centuries had passed, and while he rode along comprehending this truth, he saw men trying to move a boulder with crowbars. He leaned down and shoved it on its way. His saddle strap broke and he fell to the ground. Like Dorian Gray, Osín turned into a wrinkled old man.

  *Unlike his father, Oscar never saw Egypt but was fascinated by its art (particularly the Sphinx) and symbolism. He wore an emerald scarab ring on the little fìnger of each hand; he said the ring on his left hand was the cause of all his happiness and the one on the right all his unhappiness. When a friend suggested he remove the right-hand ring, he replied, “To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.”

  *Wilde had seen the two red granite Cleopatra’s Needles lying as they had for centuries at Heliopolis. His campaign was successful two years after his death: in 1878 the obelisk was transported—not without great difficulty—and erected on its present site, the Thames Embankment. And two years later the other needle was raised in New York’s Central Park.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Merrion Square

  Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

  —A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE

  Two sons were born at 21 Westland Row: William Charles Kingsbury, called Willie, on September 26, 1852, and Oscar, with his carefully selected mantra of names, on October 16, 1854. Isola Francesca Emily Wilde had her beginnings on April 2, 1857, at Merrion Square, an address Wilde later appropriated for himself as a more elegant birthplace.

  Few books about Wilde omit the photo of him at the age of two posing in a dress of cobalt blue velvet trimmed with lace; he wears white stockings with bowed shoes on his small feet; his hair is rolled into sausage curls, swept off a high forehead with a ribbon, revealing the heavy-lidded eyes.

  Early biographers seeking to explain Wilde’s homosexuality decided that his mother, disappointed that her second child was not a daughter, dressed Oscar in frills, which aroused his interest in men. Present-day wisdom discards such notions, but in the Ireland of the mid-eighties there was a reason: dresses protected little boys from the dreg due, or blood fairy, who, according to myth, ignored little girls but abducted little boys.

  Speranza delighted in Oscar, but like so many mothers favored her firstborn, as Oscar would favor Cyril over Vyvyan. Physically, Oscar and Willie resembled the large-boned Elgees: tall and lanky when young, towering and overweight when older. They had their father’s sentimentality and mystical blue eyes, their mother’s narcissism and alabaster skin. A letter to Scotland described Oscar as “a great stout creature who minds nothing but growing fat,” while Willie “was slight, tall and spirituelle [sic] looking, with large beautiful eyes full of expression. He is twined round all the fibres of my heart.” There would always be money and sympathy for Willie, the lovable but undisciplined prodigal. Both sons competed for their mother’s love; neither won, and childhood conflicts followed. “At every single moment of one’s life,” Wilde wrote in De Profundis, “one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.”

  William Wilde’s voluntary hospital, St. Mark’s, flourished, as well it should have: it was the only hospital in Ireland or England offering instruction on diseases of the ear. Wilde published Practical Observations in Aural Surgery and the Nature and Treatment of Diseases of the Ear, the first textbook on the subject in English, in 1855* and completed a six-hundred-page history of Irish medicine collected during the census of 1851.

  Speranza realized that her husband was special but found the reality of living with a genius on a day-to-day basis uninspiring. Physically and intellectually, he was not the dominating man of her fantasies. Marriage and motherhood distracted her from writing and translating. Often she seemed to be competing with her husband to publish frequently and first. An impatient woman at best, Speranza found life at Westland Row inadequate to her ambitions.

  The Family moved in 1855 to One Merrion Square, a large Georgian house on the sunny north-side corner (or, as Lady Bracknell might say, the fashionable side). There were few better addresses. Not the oldest but the largest and the most elegant, Merrion Square was built in 1762, twenty-two years after Mountjoy and Rutland Squares. The peers and members of Parliament who had lived there when the British ruled at Dublin Castle were now replaced by doctors and lawyers in frock coats and peg-top trousers and their wives in poke bonnets and crinolines.

  Number One was the only house on the square with three steps—rather than one—leading up to the entrance, a glassed-in conservatory, and a wrought-iron balcony overlooking Merrion Street, where the family viewed parades and processions. Wilde saw most of his patients at St. Mark’s but also had a small surgery at the back of the house with a separate entrance for private consultations. Speranza held her salons in the first-floor drawing room overlooking the square’s private garden.

  Used during the famine as a soup kitchen, the garden was locked during Wilde’s childhood to exclude outsiders, much like the garden in his fairy tale “The Selfish Giant.” Speranza’s fondness for Neoclassical sculpture survives in stucco bas-reliefs in the foyer, where a bust of Maturin once had the place of honor. (It was in front of Number One in 1904 that James Joyce vainly waited for his first date with Nora Barnacle.)*

  Employing her various languages, Oscar’s mother ran an efficient international household that included a staff of six servants and a series of German, Swiss, and French governesses. In the fourth-floor nursery Willie and Oscar took the measure of each other—and declared war. Dark furies bred in the hothouse atmosphere of the nursery were later recalled in The Importance of Being Earnest. One day Oscar tried to appease Willie and gave him his stuffed bear. Unimpressed, Willie continued to tease him until Oscar shouted, “You don’t deserve my bear. You must give me back my bear.” But when poetic letters and engraved silver cigarette cases replaced toy bears to fetter love, he never asked for their return. Another time, the brothers were bathing in front of the fire when a nightshirt burst into flames. Oscar clapped his hands with delight while Willie shouted for the governess to extinguish the blaze. Afterward Oscar cried with rage that tragedy was averted. “I don’t care for brothers,” Basil Hallward says in Dorian Gray. “My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.”

  • • •

  RISING AT DAWN, William Wilde walked to St. Mark’s, made his rounds, and consulted or operated at other hospitals. In the evening, he was often invited to present antiquarian papers at the Royal Irish Academy or the Royal Dublin Society. If he dined out, it was usually with colleagues from the Medico-Philosophical Society or the Mystics, an eating club where food, drink, and laughter were more valued than lofty philosophical talk.

  Despite a work-centered life, he spent more time with his sons than many Victorian fathers. Important events—birthdays, high marks, awards—were recognized by the Wildes’ friends with evening celebrations for which Willie and Oscar were awakened and brought downstairs for a brief appearance. Children’s parties seemed absent from Merrion Square. Both parents used their sons as extensions of themselves.

  Oscar fondly remembered his father’s deep voice doing justice to the cadences of Walt Whitman and his mother’s whispers and squeals when she told the old stories of witches and blood fairies. His father retold the folktales collected from patients during the medical census and sang the Irish lullaby “Athá mé in mu codladh, agus ná dúishe mé” (I am asleep, and do not wake me), which he taught his sons.

  Oscar’s fairy tales have rather friendly antagonists, considering the m
any macabre ones that marched over his bedcovers. Before they went to sleep, the boys were taught to revere their mother’s poems and the poetry of the Young Irelanders “as a Catholic child [does] the saints of the calendar.” If Wilde had not been Irish and raised in such a fertile storytelling atmosphere, he might have become a writer who used pen and paper more and conversation less.

  Speranza was overly ambitious for her boys. “Willie is my kingdom,” she wrote to Scotland a month after Oscar’s birth. “I will rear him a Hero perhaps and President of the future Irish Republic. Chi sa? I have not fulfilled my destiny yet.” She envisaged Willie “ready to spring forth like another Perseus to combat evil.” She had the leisure for such daydreams: eating breakfast in bed, reading or napping until noon; by two she was at her desk to sort through the morning mail, accept invitations, and receive visitors.

  From the nursery window on the fourth floor, Oscar and Willie watched the horse-drawn carriages circling the square. It was at this time that Oscar embraced superstitions, which he later called “opponents of common sense.” Like his mother, he believed in the evil eye, and he never hailed a hansom with a white horse, which he believed unlucky. (His mythical father, Osín, left the Land of Eternal Youth on a white stallion.)

  Seldom did the Wildes dine at home alone. Fathers of future famous sons, John Butler Yeats and George Henry Moore, known for their wit and erudition, were frequent guests. Willie and Oscar ate with their governess in the nursery and then joined the adults. Since bedtimes were not rigorously enforced, it was routine for the boys to fall asleep at their father’s feet. On the drawing-room carpet, Oscar learned important lessons about the art of charming society, breeding in him a disdain for ordinary talk; he would suffer fools sooner than bores.

  When Oscar was almost three, his sister, Isola (Gaelic for Iseult) Francesca Emily, was born, and her brothers were led into the nursery to greet her. Like siblings everywhere, Willie and Oscar were astonished that Isola was so small and were skeptical when told they were once the same size and in the same cradle.

  Speranza had borne three children in five years and was impatient to return to a life of the mind. She began translating the German romantic novel The First Temptation by Wilhelmine Canz, whose plot involves the tragic death of an aesthete. At the same time, her husband published the first of three volumes cataloging antiquities in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. Even with a grand home and rewarding work, Oscar’s mother was nostalgic for the bygone days of turmoil, when she had lived on the edge, when she was Speranza, the voice of freedom.

  She wondered to her Scottish confidant: “I look back at my own self that then was. Now I have gone forth into another life with nothing but memory to make me aware of the identity, for all true identity has vanished.” She complained as much as any latter-day feminist: “Alas! the Fates are cruel / Behold Speranza making gruel!” Being married to a genius meant keeping out of the way. “The best chance, perhaps, of domestic felicity,” she wrote in the essay “Genius and Marriage,” “is when all the family are Bohemians, and all clever, and all enjoy thoroughly the erratic, impulsive, reckless life of work and glory, indifferent to everything save the intense moments of popular applause.”

  Eventually, Speranza took up the mantle of martyrdom. “A Joan of Arc was never meant for marriage,” she complained. “Life has such infinite possibilities of woe” was another favorite expression. Oscar would also agree that life is “a very terrible thing” and “the tragedy in one’s soul.” In “The Remarkable Rocket,” a tale of how vanity distorts reality, he observes: “As for domesticity, it ages one rapidly, and distracts one’s mind from higher things.” Speranza consistently passed discontent on to her sons. She manipulated Oscar by signing letters as La Madre Devotissima, La Madre Dolorosa, or La Madre Povera. Never was she devoted, sad, and poor at the same time. Her favorite salutation was Caro Oscuro, Figlio Mio Caressimo, or Mio Caro Figlio (my dear son).

  Despite anti-British sentiments, she attended balls and levees at the Viceregal Court; her entrance curbed all trivial gossip. What was she wearing this time? She often designed her costumes by assembling this and that from her closet. There was always a political message for Dublin Castle pinned on her skirt or bodice: bits of Limerick lace and Irish poplin or brooches copied from the ornaments of Ireland’s early queens. La Madre makes a brief appearance in Dorian Gray as Lord Henry’s wife, “a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.”

  On St. Patrick’s Day, 1859, the British ladies inhaled when she curtsied to the lord lieutenant wearing three skirts of white silk ruched with white satin ribbons looped with bouquets of gold flowers—and one large green shamrock. A plumed-feather wreath with a white tulle veil bordered in gold encircled her black hair. In the gentle blush of gaslight, Speranza looked like a bride; more unkindly she was seen as a wedding cake. “Am I not fallen to a mere woman?” she teased her Scotsman. “How marriage changes one.… We no longer live in glorious ideas and majestic abstractions.”

  William Wilde may have suffered manic-depressive episodes. Speranza described cycles of agitated work followed by “strange” and “hypochondriacal” periods when he wrapped himself “in a black pall” and was “stern, mournful and silent as the grave itself.” Neither partner was easy to live with. Both needed mutual understanding beyond sexual intimacy but were not modern enough to discuss their marriage; in this respect they were conventional Victorians. Speranza had her unburdening letters to Scotland; her husband had his illegitimate son, Henry Wilson, now working for him, as trusted confidant.

  In 1862, Wilde received the Swedish order of the Polar Star, and the following year Queen Victoria appointed him surgeon oculist to the queen in Ireland, not a demanding responsibility considering her dislike of visiting Ireland. In 1864, Wilde was knighted, not in recognition of his professional reputation, which was European, but for his work on the Irish Census, which annoyed Speranza, who saw the census as the least of his accomplishments. But she willingly retired Speranza for the title of Lady Wilde. The rank did not indicate that the Wildes had reached the upper classes; a peerage might have been different but an unlikely honor for a doctor.

  At the investiture, The Irish Times reported, Lady Wilde’s dress and train were of the “richest white satin, trimmed handsomely in scarlet velvet and gold cord, with bouillonnes of tulle, satin ruches and a magnificent tunic of real Brussels lace lappets.” Regarding fashion, Lady Wilde wrote that a woman should match her personality and decide to be “either a superb Juno, or a seductive Aphrodite, or a Hebe, blooming and coquette, or a Pallas Athena, grand, majestic and awe inspiring.” Lady Wilde preferred the last: goddess of wisdom, peace, and war.

  “In this world there are only two tragedies,” Oscar wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan. “One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is a real tragedy!” Perhaps he was remembering what happened to his father shortly after the announcement of the knighthood, when he was accused of alleged sexual advances—rape was hinted—with a young patient, Mary Travers. This convoluted story proves the wisdom of the line from Earnest that “the truth is never pure and seldom simple.”

  The daughter of a law professor at Trinity, Travers was impressionable, highly strung, and, as she demonstrated, obsessive. She was eighteen when she became Wilde’s patient in 1854. Welcomed at Merrion Square, she took Willie and Oscar on outings. Sir William escorted her to lectures, bought her books and clothes, and, as a gifted cicerone, introduced her to a more cultured world. Eight years after they met, he tried to sever the association, offering to send her to Australia, where she had relatives.

  First hysterical and then vindictive, Travers was not about to be dismissed and went public with her version of the relationship. One evening as Wilde lectured at the Metropolitan Hall, a pamphlet entitled Florence Boyle Price: or a Warning by Speranza was sold outside for a penny. Newsboys hawked it, shouting it cont
ained letters written by Sir William. Travers told a parable about a woman called Florence (her alter ego), who is chloroformed and seduced by a Dr. Quilp (Sir William), who had “a decidedly animal and sinister expression about his mouth, which was coarse and vulgar in the extreme.”

  Drawing on the fanaticism that made Speranza’s notoriety at the Duffy sedition trial, Lady Wilde reacted quickly and defensively. She attempted to buy up all the pamphlets and when that failed wrote to Mary Travers’s father. His daughter was using unfounded threats to extort money from the Wildes and furthermore, she informed him, “consorts with low newspaper boys,” which implied prostitution. The letter provided sufficient reason for Travers to sue for libel. Sir William was also charged because a husband was considered responsible for his wife’s civil offenses.

  Forgotten stories of past liaisons were repeated in pubs and drawing rooms so that all Dublin soon knew of the other children; with each retelling the number grew until Wilde had populated whole villages. Isaac Butt, his former editor at DUM and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, was on the prosecution team. The court heard testimony that Sir William had sexually violated the plaintiff in 1862, but after a two-year interval such an accusation could not be taken seriously.

  Lady Wilde took the stand and played to the gallery. When the prosecution inquired: “When Miss Travers complained to you of your husband’s attempt upon her virtue, why did you not answer her letter?”

  “Because I was not interested,” she replied.

  Butt emphasized Lady Wilde’s apparent indifference to the allegations. As the loyal wife, she made a dignified witness, answering questions without a trace of malice toward either party. After all, she was a lady and no longer the Speranza who had disturbed the court in the Duffy trial. Since Sir William was not the defendant, he refused to take the stand and confront embarrassing questions. The court upheld the libel charge on the basis of incriminating letters (one inquired whether Travers needed underclothing or pajamas) but ignored the plaintiff’s pleas of outraged innocence.