Oscar Wilde Page 8

  Playing one of his preferred roles, that of ingenuous boy, Wilde informed his Oxford tutor that he would be ten days late for term. “Seeing Greece is really a great education for anyone,” he wrote, “and will I think benefit me greatly, and Mr. Mahaffy is such a clever man that it is quite as good as going to lectures to be in his society.” The dons were unimpressed. Oxford had produced classical scholars for generations without their seeing the Parthenon or the ancient site of the Olympic games. When ten days stretched to twenty-two and Wilde had not returned, he was rusticated, or sent down for the rest of term, and fined half his scholarship for the year.

  “I was sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia,” he complained. Secretly delighted, he met Blair and Ward in Rome. Before he could unpack, Blair had him kneeling before Pius IX for a private audience. The Pope encouraged Wilde to follow Blair into the church; afterward the two friends left St. Peter’s in silence. When Wilde locked himself in his hotel room to write the sonnet “Urbs Sacra Aeterna,” Blair thought it was a sign that his friend was ready to convert but soon realized that Greece had changed him—he “had become Hellenized, somewhat Paganized.”

  In London, Wilde spent whatever money he had, saving only enough to reach Dublin, and prepared for his first public appearance. He had the right invitation: the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery on May 1, 1877. The Dublin University Magazine asked him to write a review of this landmark event, which broke the hegemony held by the Royal Academy for more than a century by providing a space for contemporary French paintings and the avant-garde as exemplified by James Whistler. The review was Wilde’s first published prose and his debut as an art critic. He wrote an ambitious essay that attempted to link painting with the writings of Pater, Ruskin, Morris, Swinburne, and Symonds.

  Socially, it was a glamorous evening with men in top hats and ladies in ostrich feathers. Inspired by a dream—or so he told his tailor—Wilde wore a bronze-colored coat with the back shaped like a cello. In an exhibition where the familiar children and scenes from The Vicar of Wakefield were absent, Wilde created as much comment as Whistler’s expressionistic paintings. “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art” was one of his “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.” But after one becomes a work of art, lies and masks are necessary.

  Lacking funds to stay in London, when he wanted to enjoy his instantaneous fame, Wilde reluctantly returned home for the remainder of his rustication. Willie greeted him and made a scene, insisting he reveal the real reason he was sent down. Lady Wilde dismissed the Oxford incident as “wretched stupidity.” Florrie was waiting for him, as he told Kitten, “more lovely than ever.” He read Aurora Leigh, gave lectures on Greece to college girls, and when the shooting season opened in September went to Clonfin House in County Longford.

  One of the American visitors at the country house had brought over a blank album published in New York in 1870 called Mental Photographs, an Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits and Convictions. Wilde filled in thirty-nine of the forty questions with uncanny foresight as to his character and interests. Already in place is the Wildean mockery of his own qualities and faults. The sweetest words in the world: “Well Done!”; the saddest: “Failure!” His favorite occupation: “Reading my own sonnets.” Character traits he detested: “Vanity, self-esteem, conceit,” and admired: “Power of attracting friends.” His most distinguishing characteristic: “Inordinate self-esteem.” If he could not be himself, he wanted to be a “cardinal of the Catholic Church.” His idea of happiness: “Absolute power over men’s minds, even if accompanied by toothache.” His aim in life: to achieve “Success, fame or even notoriety.” Florence (for Florrie) was his favorite girl’s name, and when married he said that “devotion to her husband” should be the distinguishing characteristic of his wife. Curiously, “What is your motto?” was left blank.

  • • •

  Wilde’s talent for self-advertisement was instinctive. It began in a modulated tone with letters and grew into a verbal brilliance epitomized by his successful plays of the 1890s. During rustication he spent more time than usual with the newspapers. An article in The Times about the massacres of Christians in Bulgaria caught his imagination: he composed a sonnet on the subject and sent it to William Ewart Gladstone, then between terms as prime minister.

  “I am little more than a boy,” he explained as a way of seeking help to publish his poetry. Wilde correctly assumed that an Oxford man would not be ignored, and Gladstone’s reply arrived suggesting he submit his work to The Spectator. He did and was rejected. Next he took issue with a proposed Keats memorial and sent a monograph to the Keats scholar William Michael Rossetti, Dante’s brother. It was, he abjectly noted, “little more than a stray sheet from a boy’s diary.” Luckily his correspondents were unaware that the boy was twenty-three.

  Obsequiousness came easily with the eminent, but arrogance ruled with editors. Wilde’s inexperience as a writer called for a bit more humility than he demonstrated when he returned the proofs of his Grosvenor Gallery review. He stipulated: “I always say I and not ‘we.’ We belongs to the days of anonymous articles, not to signed articles like mine.” Furthermore, he added: “To say ‘perhaps’ spoils the remark,” and “my sonnet must be printed in full large type: it looks and reads bad as it stands.” Wilde was known as a bully before he was acknowledged as a writer.

  Passing himself off again as a mere boy, Wilde sent a copy of his DUM review to the unmet Walter Pater, who replied: “You possess some beautiful, and for your age, quite exceptionally cultivated tastes: and a considerable knowledge too of many beautiful things.” Pater invited him to visit when he returned to Oxford. Later he would ask, “Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.” Wilde took the challenge and set out to surpass Pater’s prose, eventually dismissing him and his style. (When told that Pater had died, Wilde reportedly inquired, “Was he ever alive?” But ridicule of the living was atypical for Wilde.)

  That summer, Henry Wilson, Wilde’s illegitimate half brother, died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-nine. Wilde told Harding he was a cousin “to whom we were all very much attached.” Wilson had never married, so Oscar and Willie expected to be his sole heirs. But Sir William had used his son to keep Oscar in the Church of Ireland. The bulk of the estate went to St. Mark’s Hospital; Willie received two thousand pounds, Wilde only one hundred, on condition that he remain a Protestant. Even Oscar’s beloved Illaunroe was not free and clear; if he converted within five years, he forfeited the property. “It is a terrible disappointment to me,” he complained to Ward. “I suffer a good deal from my Romish leanings, in pocket and mind.”

  In his academic pursuits, Wilde loved to predict failure and be jubilant when proved wrong. He wrote Kitten and Bouncer that a First in Greats was impossible and he had steeled himself to settle for a Fourth. He stayed at Magdalen to study during Easter break, regretting, as he wrote Florrie, that he could not make it to Ireland. Taking a few days in Bournemouth, he wrote again, reminding her that the previous Easter she had sent him a card in Athens “over so many miles of land and sea—to show you had not forgotten me.” At the end of term, he had a First in Greats.

  With a First in Mods, he had earned a double First, astonishing the dons, his classmates, and—for once—even himself. His scholarship was extended for a fifth year because he still had to pass the divinity exam failed two years earlier. No classics fellowships were available at Magdalen; he took the examination at Trinity, but not even Mahaffy’s support got him an appointment. Although teaching was an obvious choice for Wilde, he was too independent and brilliant for doctrinaire dons to want at their table.

  When he thought there was nothing more to swagger about, he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna. His mother trilled like an archangel: “Oh Gloria, Gloria! … It is the first pleasant throb of joy I have had this year.… Well, after all, we have Genius.” Lady Wilde understood th
e importance of the award: “This gives you a certainty of success in the future—You can now trust your own intellect, and know what it can do.”

  To be a winner of the Newdigate Prize, first given in 1806, was to be a member of a select club, which included Arnold, Ruskin, Symonds, and others who smoothed Wilde’s entrance into London society. When the perennial curmudgeon W. S. Gilbert, soon to satirize Wilde in Patience, heard about the honor, he snapped, “I understand that some young man wins this prize every year.” Wilde enjoyed the irony of it all. Had he not visited Ravenna on the way to Greece and been rusticated, he might not have won the Newdigate. Ravenna was the assigned topic that year, and being there had given him an atmospheric advantage. At the June Encaenia of 1878, in accordance with tradition, he walked in the academic procession with the vice-chancellor, heads of college, and other dignitaries to the Sheldonian Theatre, where he nervously began his poem:

  A year ago I breathed the Italian air—

  And yet, methinks this northern Spring is fair,—

  These fields made golden with the flower of March,

  The throstle singing on the feathered larch,

  The cawing rooks, the wood-doves fluttering by,

  The little clouds that race across the sky;

  And fair the violet’s gentle drooping head,

  The primrose, pale for love uncomforted,

  The rose that burgeons on the climbing briar,…

  A beaming Mahaffy and a somber, if not sober, Willie Wilde sat in front; apparently absent was Lady Wilde. Afterward Wilde and some friends were photographed with a marble bust of the young Augustus, Wilde’s trophy for being the first Magdalen undergraduate to receive the Newdigate since 1825.

  He was not pleased, however, with his annual two hundred pounds from his father’s estate, a decent income for anyone except Wilde. Then he learned that Florrie was to wed Bram Stoker, his Trinity classmate, whom Henry Irving had offered the position of acting manager at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Irritated that Florrie had not told him herself but far from heartbroken, he gravely asked for the return of a Christmas gift, a gold cross inscribed with his name.

  “Worthless though the trinket be,” he wrote, “to me it serves as a memory of two sweet years—the sweetest of all the years of my youth—and I should like to have it always with me.… whatever happens I at least cannot be indifferent to your welfare; the currents of our lives flowed too long beside one another for that.” That Florence Balcombe attracted both men reveals more about their attitudes toward women than it does about her character. Both were obsessed with the notion of chaste womanhood (as Stoker demonstrates in Dracula), and Florrie posed no threat to the idealized mother figure they sought.

  The Oxford University Gazette announced that Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde—with all his names in place—received his bachelor of arts degree on November 28, 1878. Halfhearted attempts to obtain an archaeological studentship or to follow in Matthew Arnold’s footsteps as an inspector of schools failed. Wilde loved Oxford but wanted, he said, “to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world.” Strolling along Magdalen’s “bird-haunted walks” on one of his last days there, he pledged to throw “the pearl” of his “soul into a cup of wine,” to go “down the primrose path to the sound of flutes,” to live “on honeycomb.”

  Richard Ellmann contends that around 1878, while at Oxford, Wilde contracted syphilis from a female prostitute. Such women were available in and around the High Street or at the more elegant houses that catered to randy young lords. There is no evidence, however, that Wilde was ever tempted to join other students in lustful merrymaking even after a night of drinking whiskeys and soda. Bragging about visiting a brothel is the kind of outrageous fabrication that Wilde would use to interrupt a conversation during his period of self-mythologizing.

  By the time Ellmann wrote his biography, talk of Wilde’s syphilis had been around for many years. In Arthur Ransome’s biography of 1912, the author clearly states that Wilde’s death was “directly due to meningitis, the legacy of an attack of tertiary syphilis.” The book was dedicated to Robbie Ross, who, along with Reggie Turner, was present at Wilde’s death. Subsequent biographers such as Frank Harris, Hesketh Pearson, and H. Montgomery Hyde perpetuated the story, perhaps assuming that Ross would have objected to Ransome’s statement about syphilis if he had believed it untrue. Perhaps Ross did, for the second edition in 1913 omits any mention of syphilis. At first Turner supported the syphilis theory, but he later retracted his statements. As for Ransome, he never gave a source for his diagnosis.

  Lacking medical records or a cause of death on the death certificate (the doctors who attended Wilde during his final illness treated him for cerebral meningitis, a complication arising from an inflammation of the middle ear), or any reference by Wilde in his letters to having Baudelaire’s disease, where is the evidence beyond hearsay? Where were the classic symptoms? The primary stage of the disease exhibits painless sores or ulcers that feel like a button buried beneath the skin. In the secondary stage, which starts six to eight weeks later, a rash appears, the glands swell, and there is a loss of appetite and weight. While at Oxford, Wilde was healthy and fit, although he was prone to colds and suffered, along with everyone else, during influenza season. Later he complained of gout, a condition physicians often predicted for their gourmand patients.

  Wilde’s teeth, already protruding and irregular and sometimes described as stained, signified the disease for Ellmann. Since Wilde had a habit of talking with his hand covering his mouth, Ellmann assumed he did so to conceal his blackened teeth, a symptom that he was undergoing mercury treatment.* Wilde “adopted mercury rather than religion as the specific for his dreadful disease,” Ellmann writes. “Perhaps now the parable of Dorian Gray’s secret decay began to form in his mind, as the spirochete began its journey up his spine towards the meninges.” Ellmann never cites a source for Wilde’s mercury treatments, only his blackened teeth. (Actually, mercury leaves a dark line on the gums but does not darken the teeth.) Any discoloration of his teeth came from Wilde’s heavy smoking and from nicotine eating into the enamel. When he arrived in America in 1882, the New York Tribune reported on “a shining row of upper teeth which are superlatively white.” Lillie Langtry once referred to them as green. The color of Wilde’s teeth was in the eye of the beholder.

  Evidence does not exist—and probably never will—to justify Ellmann’s conviction that Wilde died of neurosyphilis, that the disease influenced his early poetry, and that it ultimately led to his conversion to Catholicism. But believe it Ellmann did. This belief, Ellmann said, was central to his “conception of Wilde’s character” and his “interpretation of many things in his later life.” In fact, his biography is interwoven with the idea.

  *The blue-and-white china imported into England in the nineteenth century was known as “Old Nanking” and was usually from the Chinese Kang Hsi period (1662–1722), which refined cobalt blue to a brilliant and pure sapphire with no trace of purple or gray. Whistler started the blue-china mania in 1859 and soon he and Rossetti became rival collectors. Wilde came late to the craze, favoring French porcelain or Japanese imitations.

  *Rubdowns of mercury were the only treatment available in the 1870s. Dr. Paul Ehrlich did not discover his “magic bullet,” the arsenic-based drug Salvarsan, until 1910. When Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, he found a remedy that killed the germ but not the patient.

  PART TWO

  (1879–1883)

  Reinventing

  HÉLAS!

  To drift with every passion till my soul

  Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,

  Is it for this that I have given away

  Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?

  Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll

  Scrawled over on some boyish holiday

  With idle songs for pipe and virelay,

  Which do but mar the secret of the whole.

&nb
sp; Surely there was a time I might have trod

  The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance

  Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:

  Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod

  I did but touch the honey of romance—

  And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?

  —Oscar Wilde

  CHAPTER SIX

  Artists and Beauties

  To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people—that is all!

  —A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE

  At the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, Wilde had become a work of art when he wore a shimmering bronze cutaway coat shaped like a cello, a brocade waistcoat, and a blue satin ascot tie. As he entered the crush, his voice fluttered and purred. “Ah! Yes. Indeed! Good evening,” he said, extending a white-gloved hand like a fat alabaster star. That the pleasure produced by his cello coat needed no justification was a rebellious theory. “Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force,” Wilde wrote. “Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.” The defense of pleasure was added to Wilde’s principles that made art an end in itself and put the needs of the individual above society.

  In his review of the Grosvenor opening, Wilde praised Whistler’s traditional portrait of Carlyle but snubbed his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, which depicted fireworks over Cremorne, a popular amusement park on the north bank of the Thames. Wilde wrote that it was “worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute.” John Ruskin gave it less than a second, writing in Fors Clavigera that he had “seen and heard much of Cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”*