Oscar Wilde Read online

  Darling Mama, The hamper came today, and I never got such a jolly surprise, many thanks for it, it was more than kind of you to think of it. Don’t forget to send me the National Review.… The flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie’s, mine are one quite scarlet and the other lilac but it is too hot to wear them yet. You never told me anything about the publisher in Glasgow, what does he say? And have you written to Aunt Warren on the green note paper?

  Said to accompany the letter was a sketch of Willie and Oscar with the caption “ye delight of ye boys at ye hamper and ye sorrow of ye hamperless boy.” Oscar does not identify the “jolly surprise,” although it was certainly food. The National Review contained his mother’s new poem of rebellion, “To Ireland.” Aunt Warren, Lady Wilde’s sister, did not share her politics; writing her on green notepaper was a family joke. Was Lady Wilde responsible for color-coding her sons? Or did Oscar select the scarlet and lilac material that was sewn into nightshirts? And what were Willie’s colors? Gray and beige?

  Back at Merrion Square, Lady Wilde watched nine-year-old Isola grow up, read her sons’ letters, and wrote as much as possible. She had recently published a second volume of poetry translations and had a new confidante, the Swedish writer Lotten von Kraemer, whom she met shortly after Isola’s birth when von Kraemer visited Ireland during a state trip with her father, the governor of Uppsala.

  There are no surviving photographs of Isola; as a presence she is more shadow than substance. She was alone in the nursery now that her brothers were away at school, perhaps sitting on the window seat overlooking the park. At a younger age, she may have worn the same velvet and lace dress in which Oscar was photographed. She is mentioned once in her mother’s letters. When her daughter was a year old, Lady Wilde wrote von Kraemer “that little Isola is rapidly taking her place as pet of the house.”

  In the winter of 1867, Isola developed one of the swift nineteenth-century fevers. She was recuperating in the country with Sir William’s sister, wife of the rector at Edgeworthstown, when she had a relapse and died on February 23. Sir William said the tragedy made him “a mourner for life.” Lady Wilde’s loss of her “radiant angel” was no less tragic. She wrote her Swedish friend that they “never dreamed that the word death was meant for her. Yet I had an unaccountable sadness over me all last winter, a foreboding of evil.”

  Although grief stricken, Sir William finished his book on Lough Corrib, one of his favorite projects. “Daily work must be done,” his wife wrote to Sweden, “and the world will not stop in its career even tho’ a fair child’s grave lies in its path.” More resilient than realistic, Lady Wilde hoped that by writing the same platitudes frequently enough she might come to believe her own words.

  Willie’s reaction to his sister’s death was not recorded, but Oscar was devastated. The physician who cared for Isola recalled the twelve-year-old as “an affectionate, gentle, retiring, dreamy boy” whose “lonely and inconsolable grief” sought vent “in long and frequent visits to his sister’s grave in the village cemetery.” Wilde always kept a lock of her hair with him and later wrote of his loss in “Requiescat”:

  Tread lightly, she is near

  Under the snow,

  Speak gently, she can hear

  The daisies grow.

  All her bright golden hair

  Tarnished with rust,

  She that was young and fair

  Fallen to dust.

  Lily-like, white as snow,

  She hardly knew

  She was a woman, so

  Sweetly she grew.…

  Experiencing death for the first time changed him; he felt more grown-up, more poetic because he had endured loss. In other poems, such as “Panthea” and “Charmides,” he continued to explore this theme of unfulfilled womanhood and the sadness of death before maturity. In “Charmides,” a dryad makes love to a dead man, while in the parable “The Fisherman and His Soul,” it is the reverse: a young man makes love to a dead mermaid. After writing a letter to Sibyl, Dorian learns of her suicide and wonders: “Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call dead?” Morbidity often obsesses sensitive children on the threshold of adolescence, and it is hard to evaluate Oscar’s feelings, but, like most siblings in this situation, he probably felt guilty that he was alive, even responsible for his sister’s death, and confused about whether he could have saved her.

  His reflection in The Ballad of Reading Gaol that “each man kills the thing he loves” casts a shadow over many facets of his life. If his sister could die suddenly, so could his mother or father. Throughout his life, Wilde feared abandonment. In his plays, he repeatedly returns to the theme of a mother not loving a child or of losing a child with disastrous consequences and in Dorian Gray darkly exploits death as the punishment for sexuality.

  Isola’s death made Lady Wilde a recluse, and she mourned her daughter for three years. She wrote to her Swedish friend that she would never again appear in public, not even at Dublin Castle. She told her Scottish friend that writing was her only pleasure because at her desk “the world does not meet one with cold unfeeling eyes.” Nothing seemed real to her except “a dull resignation to the prospect of coming death.” She was forty-six.

  When eighteen-year-old Willie entered Trinity College in 1870, he took up residence in his old room, clearing away the cobwebs and his mother’s moroseness. Dining with Willie—always entertaining after a few drinks—made her realize how isolation had drained her of wit and spontaneity. She decided to return to society as hostess of a weekly salon, going in one leap from depression to excess—a durable family trait. Her invitations read: “At Home, Saturday, 4 P.M. to 7 P.M.” The wording was the accepted form, except she had added the word Conversazione.

  An atmosphere of personal anarchy mixing with unorthodox guests made her salon different from that of any other Dublin matron. Within weeks, she was hailed as the Madame Récamier of Merrion Square.* Guests wandered through rooms lit by lamps and candles in homage to the salons of Maturin; windows were shuttered and closely curtained even on sunny afternoons. No one came to eat or drink; it was too crowded for that. Coffee, wine, and biscuits were served in the foyer. The attraction was watching Lady Wilde stir up irreverent conversation.

  One guest recalled that Merrion Square “was a rallying place for all who were eminent in science, art, or literature. Dr. Shaw, the versatile sarcastic Fellow of Trinity and a brilliant writer, was frequently seen. H. J. Fitzpatrick, the well-known biographer, seldom failed to show his melancholy aristocratic face. Dr. Tisdall gave some of his delightful and mirth-inspiring recitations.” Lady Wilde introduced each guest many times over, gushing about their recent accomplishments. It was what she called a talent for affinities, for putting people together, although with Lady Wilde it was often a collision.

  In the original version of Dorian Gray, which appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Wilde portrays his mother as Lady Brandon, who “treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods.” In one scene she introduces a man, in a loud tragic whisper, with the words: “Sir Humpty Dumpty—you know—Afghan frontier—Russian intrigue: very successful man—wife killed by an elephant—quite inconsolable—wants to marry a beautiful American widow—everybody does nowadays—hates Mr. Gladstone—but very much interested in beetles: ask him what he thinks of Schouvaloff.” Oscar toned down this satire when the novel came out in book form in 1891.

  Sir William played his role as brilliant husband and engaging host, but when it became too crowded and noisy, he retreated downstairs to his study to hold court surrounded by medical colleagues. At such times husband and wife communicated by note. Listening to his stories of Egypt was a Trinity student named Bram Stoker, who would write the classic vampire tale, Dracula. The plot of Stoker’s 1903 novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars, was suggested by Sir William’s discovery of the mummified dwarf outside a tomb.

  Lady Wilde�
��s outrageous comments circulated from hostess to hostess, growing more ridiculous with each retelling. When Stoker introduced her to a young woman whom he described as “half English and half Irish,” she replied: “Glad to meet you, my dear. Your English half is as welcome as your Irish bottom.” Someone asked how she managed to gather such interesting people and she snapped: “By interesting them. It’s quite simple. All one has to do is to get all sorts of people—but no dull specimens—and take care to mix them. Don’t trouble about their morals. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t any.”

  Once a visitor asked permission to invite a famous London newspaper correspondent. Lady Wilde replied: “By all means. But a corespondent would be a bigger draw. See if you can’t get one.” She greeted the daughter of a third-rate novelist with: “Welcome, my dear. You resemble your intellectual father, but you do not have his noble brow. Still, I see from the form of your eyelids that you have marked artistic qualities.… I hear you have a lover. This is a pity, since love puts an end to ambition. But don’t on any account bind yourself until you have seen more of men.”

  Lady Wilde’s costumes were endlessly amusing. “Round what had once been her waist, an Oriental scarf, embroidered with gold, was twisted,” one guest noted. “Her long, massive handsome face was plastered with white powder; and over her blue-black glossy hair was a crown of laurels. On her broad chest were fastened a series of large brooches, evidently family portraits, which came down almost as low as the gastronomical region, and gave her the appearance of a perambulating family mausoleum.” The towering, overweight hostess created a spectacle, but that was the intention. Comtesse Anna de Brémont, an American who knew Wilde and his mother for many years, saw “faded splendour,” which “was more striking than the most fashionable attire, for she wore that ancient finery with a grace and dignity that robbed it of its grotesqueness.”

  “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.” Wilde grew up to contradict this paradox from Earnest: he not only became like his mother but surpassed her in his talent—and genius—for soliciting public attention.

  *Plato’s most extended discussion of love between men is found in the Symposium, particularly the speech by Pausanias on the varieties of eros, and by Aristophanes on the origin of love. It is an anthology of views on love, offering no answers, existing to stimulate dialogue.

  *Symonds lamented the “inadequacy of language to represent states of thought.” In A Problem in Greek Ethics, he wrote that all the languages of Europe “supply no term for this persistent feature of human psychology, without importing some implication of disgust, disgrace, vituperation.” Plato as well found no exact word to fit his distinctions between “friendship, desire and mixed species.”

  *In 1876 such was the Wildes’ reputation that they were mentioned in a Dublin guidebook: “The corner house, No. 1 Merrion Square, north, is the residence of the eminent antiquarian, Sir William Wilde, and his gifted wife, the well known Irish poetess ‘Speranza.’ ”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Budding Aesthete

  There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

  —LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN

  Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde entered Trinity College on October 10, 1871, six days shy of being seventeen, emotionally and sexually immature but intellectually precocious. He signed the rule book as simply Oscar Wilde. At Portora he had won the Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament and received one of three Royal School scholarships to Trinity. When he walked through the arched gateway of the university of Swift, Congreve, Goldsmith, and Farquhar, and entered the cobbled square with its great oak, under which Walt Whitman’s “Calamus” poems had recently been shared by Bram Stoker and the Whitmanites, he felt trapped. It was all too familiar.

  Most public school boys leave the best years of their lives behind when they enter university; not so with Wilde. He had only come home and like many other Dubliners lived under the parental roof for his first year, then took rooms in a building called Botany Bay in the second quadrangle, for a time sharing them with his brother. As to a future career, he gave it little consideration; he did what he found pleasurable if he awakened in the morning or the afternoon. To excel in classics and win Trinity’s awards was not an obstacle, although some late-night studying would be required. At this time, Wilde needed inspiration outside of academic achievement; he was searching for a spiritual awakening: a passionate idea, belief, or someone to stir his soul.

  He looked around Trinity’s baronial Long Room Library and saw familiar faces—Louis Purser and Edward Sullivan from Portora, and Edward Carson, with whom he had built sand castles as a child, destined to be the chief prosecutor at his trial. Disappointed if a don failed to challenge him, Wilde cut lectures, including those of Edward Dowden, the first professor of English literature. An outspoken advocate of Whitman’s poetry, Dowden was competing with the entrenched classicists to secure prominence for English and American literature in Trinity’s curriculum. Wilde, whose cavalier attitude won him no friends at the college, perhaps alienated Dowden, who refused to sign a petition for his release from prison.

  Willie had been at Trinity for two years before Oscar arrived and, in his own way, had distinguished himself. He won a gold medal in ethics and was an officer of the Philosophical Society, where he gave papers with titles such as “Painting and National Morality.” When his father was guest chairman, he delivered a defense of prostitution. He was also prominent in the Historical Society, the parliamentary debating society, founded by the statesman Edmund Burke in 1770. Oscar joined these two prestigious student organizations; in fact, Bram Stoker seconded him for the Phil, but he was known only by his absence.

  Physically Willie also had changed. He grew a full beard to distinguish himself from the perpetually clean-shaven Oscar. It was said that Willie’s talk was as memorable as that of his younger brother, but it “did not astonish as much as it charmed.” Their rivalry was more distant now, except when they took up dueling pens in Kottabos, the college magazine.* This publication solicited a miscellany of Greek and Latin verse, translations, and original poetry of a playful or humorous nature. Both Wildes were poets in training, so their verse was derivative, or, as Oscar might have put it: Willie borrowed but he stole. Willie is remembered for a slight poem entitled “Salome,” published in 1878. Oscar used the biblical story in 1892 for a controversial play of the same name, which Richard Strauss turned into an acclaimed opera.

  A month after classes began, their illegitimate half sisters, Emily and Mary, died. They were twenty-four and twenty-two, accepted as the children of the Reverend Ralph Wilde, Sir William’s eldest brother. They had attended the local balls in County Monaghan, where they lived, and at one Emily danced too close to the fire. Her dress burst into flames, and Mary was severely burned trying to save her. Both died within moments. In only four years, Sir William had lost three daughters, and he withdrew more and more by himself to Moytura.*

  Wilde’s preoccupation with death and destiny deepened. Late-night reading followed by late-afternoon sleeping was his remedy. He took solace in Swinburne and Keats, returned to the poetry of Whitman, which his father had recited, and enjoyed Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, the required text for his aesthetics course. But the literature and style he preferred came from Baudelaire, Pater, and Mallarmé, sometimes Ruskin, but not Newman or Arnold. In Keats, who valued the imagination over the intellect, Wilde found an ally for his aesthetics of intensity and artifice. Visiting Keats’s grave in 1877, he wrote a poem comparing the poet—dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five—with the martyred Saint Sebastian.

  He felt a kinship with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the most avant-garde artistic and literary movement of its time, founded in 1848 by seven artists and writers, including
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Wilde admired Rossetti’s Decadent portraits of statuesque models clad in flowing gowns with somnambulistic expressions bordering on sexual ecstasy, as seen in Beata Beatrix and Astarte Syriaca. Aesthetics and its significance occupied his thoughts. The word was coined in 1750 by the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, but the concept goes back to Plato. Wilde was unsure about his personal aestheticism. Did it mean risk taking? Triviality? Exquisiteness? Solipsism? He adopted the idea of art for art’s sake, meaning that art should be concerned only with itself. Although he made the axiom a rallying call, he did not originate the phrase, which was first used in 1804. On occasion he gave credit to the French writer Théophile Gautier, who popularized the doctrine.

  In advocating that art exists for its beauty alone, Wilde rejected Ruskin’s view that art should be informed by a moral purpose. When he came to America to lecture on the English Renaissance, he urged audiences to “love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be added to you.” He observed: “We spend our days, each of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art.” If only a few attempted to experience art differently—and only for selfish reasons: who would not want to find the secret of life?—then Wilde had made his point. An important authority on his aesthetic theories was Walter Pater, whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance—“that book which has had such strange influence over my life”—was published in 1873. In the famously notorious conclusion, Pater advocates a life of passionate moments, of success through ecstasy:

  Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy is success in life.