Oscar Wilde Read online

  †The term uranism, or Uranismus in German, originated in the 1860s with a Hanoverian lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. He believed that uranism was a congenital abnormality in which a female soul was encased in a male body, which he called an Urning. In England, poets who wrote about same-sex passion called themselves Uranians. Names such as invert, bugger, or sodomite referred to the act, but no name existed for the person, except Uranian. The word homosexual made its first significant appearance in the English language in the 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.

  *This medal became Wilde’s collateral, and he would pawn it on numerous occasions. A pawn ticket was found among his possessions after his death, but the medal was never retrieved and its whereabouts are unknown.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Magdalen Manners

  I remember bright young faces, and grey misty quadrangles, Greek forms passing through Gothic cloisters, life playing among ruins, and, what I love best in the world, Poetry and Paradox dancing together!

  —OSCAR WILDE TO HENRY MARILLIER

  In Wilde’s Oxford rooms, Catholicism eclipsed Hellenism: there were pictures of Pope Pius IX, Manning and Newman, a bust of the Madonna, and a photograph of Burne-Jones’s Christ and Magdalene. Two Sèvres vases, the inspiration for his comment “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,” overflowed with lilies. From the pulpit of St. Mary’s, the vicar warned his congregation: “These are the days, dear friends, when a young man says not in polished banter, but in sober earnest, that he finds it difficult to live up to his blue china, then there has crept into these cloistered shades a form of heathenism which it is our bounden duty to fight against.” The blue-china mot was launched and immortality assured when George Du Maurier used the sentiment underneath a Punch cartoon of October 30, 1880.*

  One of Wilde’s first friends, J. E. Courtenay Bodley, was a wealthy Balliol student who remembered Wilde’s lisp and Irish lilt. The accent went first, replaced by what Max Beerbohm called “a mezzo voice, uttering itself in leisurely fashion,” and what Lillie Langtry found “one of the most alluring voices that I have ever listened to.” Bodley introduced Wilde to Queen Victoria’s youngest son, Prince Leopold, a student at Christ Church, and facilitated his initiation into the university’s Masonic lodge, the Apollo. A scholarship of ninety-five pounds a year did not cover membership fees and the formal dress required to join the Masons, but living beyond his means bothered Wilde less and less, and being in debt became a lifelong addiction.

  Lean and lanky, he wore his brown hair shorter than at Trinity; when he looked in the mirror, his wide-open, ardent eyes delighted him; a large mouth and heavy jaw did not. He knew his face was not that of a genius, but a colorful tie or a curly-brimmed hat drew the eye away from irregular features. In the ubiquitous checked suits then in style he looked like any other intense undergraduate. No longer openly scorning athletics, he was seen rowing on the river and loudly cheering at cricket and boxing matches. Over his four years at Oxford, Wilde occupied three different rooms: the most splendid, called Kitchen Stairs, overlooked the river Cherwell; there he scratched his initials (O.F.O’F.W.W.) into the glass window. His close friends all lived near him at Magdalen and were known by their nicknames: Dunskie, Kitten, and Bouncer. He was called “Hosky.” Destined for clerical and professional careers, they were likable fellows who posed no threat to Wilde’s intellect or sexuality.

  David Hunter Blair (Dunskie), the son of a Scottish baronet, praised Wilde’s “extra-ordinary conversational abilities.” Blair was on the brink of going over to Catholicism and wanted to take Wilde along. Wilde called Richard Reginald Harding (Kitten, after the song “Beg your parding, Mrs. Harding, Is my kitting in your garding?”) “my greatest chum.” William Welsford Ward (Bouncer), a bellicose anti-Catholic, said Wilde’s sociability counted for more than athleticism at Magdalen: “His qualities were not ordinary, and we, his intimate friends, did not judge him by the ordinary standards.”

  Ward and Wilde were both reading Greats, the student term for Honour School of Literae Humaniores, the most elite school at Oxford; it demanded intensive study of the classics—ancient history, philosophy, and philology—and rigorous skepticism. Wilde described Greats as the only curriculum where one could be simultaneously “brilliant and unreasonable, speculative and well-informed, creative as well as critical, and write with all the passion of youth about the truths which belong to the august serenity of old age.”

  On Sunday evenings Wilde entertained lavishly, emulating his mother’s Irish hospitality. There were no tiny glasses of sherry accompanied by one plate of biscuits, the typical frugal English fare. In Earnest, Wilde satirizes the British obsession with tea to the extent that Act One seems to be all about cucumber sandwiches. Blair recalled “brimming bowls of gin-and-whisky punch and long churchwarden pipes, with a brand of choice tobacco.” There was always someone at the piano pounding out music. When the crowd drifted off, the foursome lounged around the fire and talked as “boys will,” he said, about “everything and other things as well.” Wilde dispensed epigrams and poetry—his own and others’.

  Flushed with punch and warmed by the coals, they hypothesized about the future. Ward knew he was expected to join the family law firm in Bristol; Harding would have a career with the London Stock Exchange, and Blair startled everyone by becoming a monk. Ward asked Wilde what he wanted to do. “God knows?” he replied. “I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.” He said he might lead a life of pleasure and then “rest and do nothing.” And it all came true just as Wilde predicted. Because he believed in fate and accepted that man cannot control his destiny, Wilde saw existence in brighter colors than most of his friends, and every day had possibilities.

  When Wilde Returned to Ireland, his letters to Ward and Harding began: “My dear Bouncer,” “My dear Kitten,” or “My dear boy.” Using “boy” or “dear boy” was Wilde’s way of maintaining juvenescence. Sometimes he teases Ward with images of same-sex attraction, reporting that a classmate had “been out every night to see a Brasenose man, but I have just found out that all the men there have gone down, so I suppose he mistook the Lane for the College.” Another time, he admits to reading Catullus while lying in bed “with Swinburne (a copy of),” later gossiping about a student and a choirboy seen together in a private box at the theatre. Wilde reports that the student “is extremely moral and only mentally spoons the boy.”

  A Romantic, Wilde saw himself as being given great gifts; he disarmed friends and earned enemies by appearing brilliant without effort, for he was seldom seen studying or reading at the library, although he consistently had his name posted in the column for highest honors. Wilde’s secret was the power of sustained intellectual concentration; like Samuel Johnson he was an eye reader and had a genius for total recall. Blair compared him with the scholar in Tom Brown at Oxford, “who after an evening of dissipation would bind a wet cloth round his throbbing brow, drink buckets of strong black coffee, and read Pindar until the chapel bells began to ring for morning prayer.”

  Oxford’s luminaries included John Ruskin, then fifty-five, who held the coveted post of Slade Professor of Fine Art. Despite his learning and influence, the forever melancholy Ruskin failed to reconcile life’s realities with his artistic philosophy. An irrational desire for very young girls clouded his thinking. Euphemia (Effie) Gray was twelve when he saw her, nineteen when they wed, and twenty-five when she left him for the painter John Millais, the marriage annulled for reasons of “incurable impotency.”

  After Wilde attended Ruskin’s lectures on Florentine art, he longed to visit Italy. To meet the grand old man, he joined his Hinksey Road project of 1875, initiated with volunteer undergraduates to celebrate the dignity of labor. Wilde arose at dawn—a major sacrifice for a night person—and traveled to the village of Ferry Hinksey, where he pushed wheelbarrows filled
with paving material. He succeeded in attracting Ruskin’s attention, and a friendship ensued. The road, though, was abandoned and disappeared.

  Ruskin was greedy for attention, and Wilde could be a consummate flatterer. The relationship continued once Wilde moved to London, abetted by obsequious letters: “There is in you something of prophet, of priest, and of poet, and to you the gods gave eloquence,” Wilde wrote, “so that your message might come to us with the fire of passion, and the marvel of music, making the deaf to hear, and the blind to see.” But Ruskin saw aesthetics differently from the way Wilde did. He found the term a degrading word that made art an amusement, when it should be form and texture, perspective and angles, medieval and Gothic, and he had muted enthusiasm for the Renaissance, which Pater declared the inspiration and the spiritual mother of Decadence.

  Wilde had to wait until his third year to meet Pater. The thirty-eight-year-old reclusive agnostic scholar was the sort of cerebral oddity only a university like Oxford could accommodate. He had studied at Queen’s, taken a fellowship at Brasenose, and remained there—his ecstatic moments limited to gazing at frozen marble youths—until his death in 1894 at the age of fifty-four. Pater may not have lived with as much abandon as he wrote, but his Studies in the History of the Renaissance was already the bible of a whole generation of English intellectuals. More than Arnold, Tennyson, or Ruskin, Pater became the voice of nascent modernism. Wilde told Yeats that Studies was “my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.”

  When the Magdalen group finished discussing themselves, their classmates, aesthetics, and Greats, the topic often came around to Catholicism. Wilde told Blair about his father’s attitude toward the church when he was at Trinity. “I am sure,” he said, “that if I had become a Catholic at that time he would have cast me off altogether, and that he would do the same to-day.” Fathers did this sort of thing, as Wilde observes in an early draft of Earnest: “Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap’s bills and don’t bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.” In 1875 Blair traveled to Rome and returned a Catholic, which startled Wilde, but he was not ready to give up his two gods: money and ambition. Blair persevered by arranging for a priest to give him instruction, but Wilde was not receptive. He did, though, enjoy the company of priests, seeing them as a third sex: homosexual but chaste in a sublimated way like Cardinal Newman, who was celibate but androgynous and perceived as a dandy.

  That summer Wilde planned his first visit to Rome with Mahaffy and a Dublin friend, William Goulding. There was no talk of conversion in this staunchly Protestant group. During the trip, Wilde expressed his religious longings through poetry. These first poems, spiritual but tempered by pagan images, were published in the Dublin University Magazine; the Irish Monthly; the Illustrated Monitor, another Dublin Catholic magazine; and Trinity’s Kottabos. He toured Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Verona, posting enthusiastic letters to Merrion Square, some with sketches of the antiquities, which he knew would please his father. When he ran out of money, he wrote the aptly titled “Rome Unvisited,” lamenting that he did not see “the only God-anointed King, / And hear the silver trumpets ring.”

  His mother’s letters inevitably reported on his brother’s lack of ambition. Willie had returned to Merrion Square and had been called to the Irish bar in 1875, but instead of securing briefs, he preferred drinking in the pubs or ice skating at the new rink. He had failed in that most crucial area of life, the intellect, or, as Lady Wilde wrote in Social Studies: “The intellect is a delicate-stringed instrument that rusts if not played on, and it is by the collision of mind with mind that we learn our own value.” Since her dreams of Willie leading Ireland to independence were not to be, she decided to find him a wealthy wife.

  Oscar had minimal interest in Willie’s courtships but found his mother’s breathless descriptions of his sallies into society useful when he became a playwright: “Willie got introduced to Lady Westmeath, young, Greek head, ivy wreath—he devoted himself entirely to her and ignored all his nearest and dearest friends of the Corporation lot [meaning lawyers]. ‘Who are all these people?’ asked Lady W. ‘Really I don’t know,’ said Willie. ‘Never saw them before.… ’ ‘Oh, of course,’ said Lady W. ‘They’re not in my lot, but one must come to these places sometimes.’ ‘Quite so,’ said Willie, ‘let us sit down in a corner and look on.’ ”

  On a more somber note, his mother told Oscar that his father’s health was deteriorating. Sir William suffered from a variety of complaints, including asthma, gout, bronchitis, and a weak heart. His condition became critical during the spring of 1876. Oscar was at Oxford studying Greek and Latin for Honour Moderations (Mods) and arrived home just in time to be at his father’s bedside before he died on April 19. During the deathwatch Wilde observed a veiled woman, probably the mother of Sir William’s recently deceased daughters, sitting silently by his bed. Her presence demonstrated how much Lady Wilde loved her husband, Wilde told his first biographer, Robert Sherard.

  • • •

  NOW TWENTY-ONE, Wilde felt alone, with only fond recollections of the hours spent with his father exploring for antiquities in Cong and Connemara. Returning to Oxford, he apathetically sat for his Mods exam and feigned curiosity about the results. Waiting until The Times was out, he casually picked it up at the Mitre and read about his First. His father’s death had robbed him, he wrote Kitten, of “any real pleasure” in the honor; he told Bouncer he dreaded returning to Merrion Square, “with everything filled with memories.”

  When Sir William’s estate was settled, it was near bankruptcy. Merrion Square and Moytura House were heavily mortgaged, and there was insufficient income from the other properties to maintain Number One. “I am sorry to say the family affairs grow more dilapidated every day,” Lady Wilde wrote Oscar. “Were I young like you I would take a pupil to read with. Youth can earn, age cannot. But I suppose the consolations of religion and philosophy will be sufficient—at least they cost nothing.” His mother looked for guidance, but Oscar shifted the responsibility to Willie, who, after all, was the favorite and living at home.

  It was the right psychological moment for a romantic distraction. Wilde was vulnerable and needy of admiration. Other attractive girls had caught his eye, but none so stunning as Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe. The third of five daughters in a family of seven, she lived in Clontarf outside Dublin; her father, Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe, had served in the Crimea and named her after Florence Nightingale. Harding was the first to share Wilde’s happiness: “I am just going out to bring an exquisitely pretty girl to afternoon service in the Cathedral. She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money.” Wilde noticed women’s faces but seldom described their bodies. Not that he was ill at ease or passive with women, quite the opposite; he was stimulated by their company and like most young people thought that falling in love would transform his life.

  Florence had challenging gray-blue eyes and a crown of brown hair that wound around her head like the finest silk. At five feet eight, she was tall for a woman of her time but just the right height for walking down Grafton Street with the six-foot-three Oxonian. That summer of 1876, Wilde did a charming pencil sketch of her wearing a wistful, ethereal look, and they “walked out” together until he left for his annual fishing holiday in Connemara.

  Failing to entice Ward and Harding to join him for poteen, trout, and partridge, he invited another Oxford friend, Frank Miles, son of the rector of Bingham in Nottinghamshire, who wanted to be an artist. Miles was also a keen gardener who introduced Wilde to the Lilium auratum, or golden-rayed lily, long before Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience linked the flower with the Aesthetes. (The lily was also the Magdalen College emblem.) At Illaunroe they awakened at dawn, pulled on their Wellingtons, and did not return until they had caught or bagged the evening meal. Wilde wrote Bouncer that he was
“too much occupied with rod and gun for the handling of the quill. I have only got one salmon as yet but had heaps of sea-trout which give great play. I have not had a blank day yet. Grouse are few but I have got a lot of hares so have had a capital time of it.”

  He dabbed a purplish blue watercolor of the view from Moytura and inscribed it “for Florrie.” Miles painted a fresco (still visible) over the arch in the front hall at Illaunroe of two cherubs (resembling artist and host) fishing; it is called Tight Lines, an angler’s good-luck wish. After a week, Willie joined them. Writing to his latest girlfriend, Margaret Campbell, he referred to Illaunroe as his “real Irish home.” He would paint a sunset for her, he said, and went on to describe how the mail was delivered ten miles by “a pretty little bare-footed girl—brown & picturesque,” whom he also meant to paint. Tactless Willie had a way of making women feel inconsequential.

  Returning To Oxford, Wilde was understandably depressed over his father’s death and the financial muddle at home. He had difficulty studying for the annual Ireland Scholarship, a test of classical knowledge, which demanded concentrated preparation. When he failed to apply himself, he was even more despondent. “I look back on weeks and months of extravagance, trivial talk, and utter vacancy of employment,” he wrote Ward, “with feelings so bitter that I have lost faith in myself.” He did not win the scholarship.

  To console himself, he arranged to travel with Mahaffy during the spring vacation of 1877, but only as far as Genoa. Then he would go to Rome. Wilde saw this delayed visit as a turning point in his feelings about the church. “This is an era in my life, a crisis,” he wrote Kitten. “I wish I could look into the seeds of time and see what is coming.” At Genoa, the wily Mahaffy lured him to Greece by way of Ravenna and Brindisi. Again Rome went unvisited. They saw Olympia and Mycenae, crossed the Peloponnese on horseback, visited Argos and Nauplia, sailed to the island of Aegina, and on to the port of Athens. Mahaffy’s gusto over everything Greek—including food and wine—was infectious. Rome, as well as Oxford, was forgotten.