The Master

by Colm Toibin

  ONCE THE TRIAL was over, it was clear to Gosse that Wilde, if he did not flee, would be arrested. As each hour went by, since the police knew where he was, his being charged with indecency and worse was more and more likely, with witnesses appearing from the sewers of London, Gosse said.

  ‘There is a list, as I told you, and there is great fear in the city and a great determination on the government’s side, I am told with some authority, that rampant indecency will be stamped out. I fear there will be other arrests. I have heard names. It is rather shocking.’

  Henry studied Gosse and paid attention to his tone. Suddenly, his old friend had become a rabid supporter of the stamping out of indecency. He wished there were someone French in the room to calm Gosse down, his friend having joined forces, apparently, with the English public in one of their moments of self-righteousness. He wanted to warn him that this would not help his prose style.

  ‘Perhaps a period of solitary confinement will help Wilde,’ Henry said. ‘But not the martyrdom. One would wish that on no one.’

  ‘Apparently, the Cabinet has discussed the list,’ Gosse went on. ‘The police, it seems, have already questioned people and many have been advised to cross the channel. And I believe that many are crossing as we speak.’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘and besides the moral climate I think they will find the diet rather better over there too.’

  ‘It is unclear who is under suspicion, but there are many rumours and suggestions,’ Gosse continued.

  Henry noticed Gosse watching him.

  ‘It is advised, I think, that anyone who has been, as it were, compromised should arrange to travel as soon as possible. London is a large city and much can go on here quietly and secretly, but now the secrecy has been shattered.’

  Henry stood up and went to the bookcase between the windows and studied the books.

  ‘I wondered if you, if perhaps …’ Gosse began.

  ‘No.’ Henry turned sharply. ‘You do not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about.’

  ‘Well that is a relief, if I may say so,’ Gosse said quietly, standing up.

  ‘Is that what you came here to ask?’ Henry kept his eyes fixed on Gosse, his gaze direct and hostile enough to prevent any reply.

  STURGES CONTINUED to visit in the period leading up to Wilde’s trial, when Wilde was in custody and all possibility of going to France had faded.

  ‘His mother, I am told, is jubilant,’ Sturges said. ‘She believes he has delivered a great blow against the Empire.’

  ‘It is difficult to imagine him having a mother,’ Henry said.

  Henry asked his two visitors and anybody else whom he saw in these weeks if they knew anything about Wilde’s two golden children whose very name was disgraced for ever. It was Gosse who came with the news.

  ‘Although he is bankrupt, his wife is not. She has her own money and has moved to Switzerland, as far as I know. And she has changed her name and that of her sons. They no longer bear their father’s name.’

  ‘Did she know about her husband before the trial?’ Henry asked.

  ‘No, I understand that she did not. It has been an enormous shock to her.’

  ‘And what do the boys know?’

  ‘I cannot tell you that. I have not heard,’ Gosse said.

  For days he thought about them, watchful, beautiful creatures in a country where they could not understand a word of the language, their very names obliterated, their father responsible for some dark, nameless crime. He thought of them in some turreted Swiss apartment house in high rooms with a view of the lake, their nurse refusing to explain why they had come all this way, why there was so much silence, why their mother kept apart from them and then suddenly came close to them as though they were in danger. He thought of how little they would need to say to each other about the demons that were around them, their new name, their great isolation, the upheaval which had resulted in their spending days alone together in those cold rooms, as though waiting for a catastrophe to unfold, their father a ghostly memory, standing smiling at them on the bare half-lit landing as they climbed the staircase, beckoning in the shadows.

  WHEN WILDE had been sentenced and the scandal surrounding London’s dark underworld had died down, Henry’s relationship with Edmund Gosse returned to what it had been, as Gosse himself underwent a restoration of his old self. Immediately after Wilde was imprisoned, Gosse ceased to sound like a member of the House of Lords.

  One afternoon, as they sat in Henry’s study drinking tea, an old subject of theirs, which had been much on Henry’s mind, arose. The subject was John Addington Symonds, a friend and correspondent of Gosse, who had died two years earlier. Of all the people, Henry said, who would have been fascinated by every moment of the Wilde case, surely JAS, as he called him, would have been the most intrigued. It would almost have made him come back to England.

  ‘He would have loathed Wilde, of course,’ Gosse said, ‘the vulgarity and the filth.’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry said patiently, ‘but he would have been captured by what came into the open.’

  Symonds had lived mainly in Italy and had written with great, perhaps too great sensuousness about the landscape and the art and the architecture. He became a connoisseur of Italian light and colour, but he also became an expert on another more dangerous matter, what he called a problem in Greek ethics, the love between two men.

  Ten years earlier, Henry and Gosse had discussed Symonds as avidly as they discussed Wilde during the trial. This was when Gosse moved less freely among the powerful, and there had been a tacit understanding between them that these preoccupations of Symonds mattered to both of them personally, an understanding which had lessened as the years passed.

  Throughout the 1880s Symonds, writing from Italy, made no secret of his own leanings. He wrote explicit letters to all his friends and many who were not his friends. He sent his book on the matter to those in England whom he thought might initiate a debate. Many who received the book were infuriated and embarrassed. Symonds wanted it brought into the light, discussed openly, and this, Henry remarked to Gosse at the time, was a sign of how long he had been out of England, how many years he had been basking in Italian sunshine. Gosse was interested in public life and wished to discuss the implications of what Symonds was saying for legislation or public attitudes. Henry, on the other hand, became fascinated by Symonds. By this time Henry had received several letters from Symonds about Italy, and had by chance, several years before, sat beside Symonds’s wife at dinner. He remembered her as mostly silent, quite dull, and he failed to recollect, when he became interested in her case, a single word she had said.

  Yet he brought away a sense of her, as someone with fixed opinions, hardened attitudes, and as Gosse continued to tell him more about Symonds, Henry began to work his imagination on Mrs Symonds, as though he were a portrait painter. She was, Gosse said, in no sort of sympathy with what her husband wrote, she disapproved of his tone when he wrote about Italy, the hyper-aesthetic manner he had developed appalled her, and then she loathed his entire concern with love between men. She was, to start with, Gosse said, of a narrow, cold, Calvinistic disposition, as morbid in her search for moral purpose as her husband was in search of ultimate beauty. One of them, Gosse said, seemed to aggravate the other so that as time went by Mrs Symonds increasingly craved the sackcloth while her husband longed for Greek love.

  Gosse spoke idly of the Symondses and did not realize how Henry was taking this in. The story came to Henry, in any case, so quickly and easily that he did not have time to tell Gosse. He set to work.

  What if such a couple had a child, a boy, impressionable, intelligent, alert to the world around him and deeply loved by both his parents? How would the child be educated? How would the child be taught to look at life? He listened to Gosse and asked questions and from the answers began to construct his story. His first ideas emerged later as too stark and so he abandoned the ambitions of the parents for their son – one wanting the child to serve the Ch
urch, the other, the father, wanting the child to become an artist. Instead he dramatized the idea that the mother merely wanted to save her son’s soul, and in order to do so she needed to protect him from his father’s writings.

  He wondered at first if he should allow the child to grow up a lout and an ignoramus, as far away as possible from his mother’s hopes and his father’s ambitions. But as he worked, alone, away from Gosse’s conversation, he decided to deal only with the boy, and to make the time frame of the story short and dramatic. And he would bring in an outsider, an American, an admirer of the father’s work, one of the few who understood the father’s true genius. The father, he thought, could be a poet or a novelist or both. The American is very kindly received, he remains near the family for some weeks, weeks which coincide with the child’s illness and death. The American understands something which the father does not know – that during the night, as the child lay ill, his mother made up her mind secretly that it were better he should die, and she watched him sink, holding his hand, but doing nothing, allowing him for very tenderness to fade away. The American never imparts this information to the author he so much admires.

  Henry wrote down the bones of the story one night after Gosse had departed and then worked steadily, daily. He knew that it would take prodigious delicacy of touch, and even then would probably be too gruesome and unnatural. Nonetheless, the story intrigued him, and he thought he would try it, for the general idea, corruption and Puritanism and innocence, was also full of interest and typical of certain modern situations.

  Gosse, he remembered, had been frightened by the appearance of the story in the pages of the English Illustrated magazine. Most people would recognize the Symondses, he said, and those who did not would imagine that the subject was Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry told him that the story was now written and published; it did not cost him a thought who recognized themselves or others. Gosse remained nervous, knowing how much he had contributed. He insisted that writing a story using factual material and real people was dishonest and strange and somehow underhand. Henry refused to listen to him. In retaliation, Gosse began to refrain from providing him with his usual store of gossip. Soon, however, his friend forgot his objections to the art of fiction as a cheap raid on the real and the true, and began once more to tell Henry all the news he had picked up since their last meeting.

  As Sturges told Henry that Wilde’s wife had travelled from Switzerland to tell her prisoner husband personally of his mother’s death, he mused once more on the fate of the children of a union between two opposing forces. He pictured himself and William at the window of the Hôtel de l’Ecu in Geneva when he was twelve and William thirteen and their time in Switzerland seemed to him an eternity of woe: infinite hours of dullness, the dingy streets, the courtyards and alleys black with age. He imagined Oscar Wilde’s two sons, their names changed and their fate uncertain, watching from a window as their mother departed. He wondered what they feared most now when night came down, two frightened children in the unforgiving city, its shadows steep and sombre, half knowing why their mother had left them in the care of servants and haunted by unnamed fears and barely grasped knowledge and the memory of their evil father who had been shut away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  May 1896

  HIS HAND HURT HIM. If he wrote with it, moving the pen calmly with no flourishes, then he did not feel even a mild discomfort, but when he stopped writing, when he moved his hand about, he could, on turning a door handle, for example, or shaving, feel an excruciating pain in his wrist and the bones which ran towards his little finger. Lifting a sheet of paper was a form of mild torture now. He wondered if this were a message from the gods to keep writing, to wield his pen at all times.

  Every year as the summer approached he felt the same persistent dull worry which led eventually to panic. As transatlantic travel became easier, and more comfortable, it also became more popular. As time went by, his many cousins in America seemed to develop many more cousins of their own, and his friends many more friends. In London all of them wished to visit the Tower and Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery, and over the years his name had been added to the list of the great local monuments, essential to see. As soon as the evenings lengthened and the swallows returned from the south, the letters began to arrive, letters of introduction and what he called letters of determination from the very tourists themselves, certain that their visit to the capital would lack all due shine were they to miss the famous writer and not receive the benefit of his company and counsel. Should his gates be locked to them, their letters implied – indeed, they often insisted and implored – then they would not get full value for their money, and this he discovered meant more and more to his compatriots as the century came to an end.

  He remembered what he had written in his notebook the previous year; it was a scene which had been on his mind since then. Jonathan Sturges had told him of a meeting in Paris with William Dean Howells, now almost sixty. Howells had told Sturges that he did not know the city, all of it was new to him, and every sensation came to him freshly. Howells seemed sad and brooding, as if to suggest that it was too late for him in the evening of his life when he could do nothing except take in the sensations and regret that they had not come to him when he was young. Then, in response to something Sturges had said, Howells laid his hand on his shoulders and exclaimed: ‘Oh you are young, be glad of it and live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do – but live.’ Sturges had acted out the lines, making them into a strange and plaintive appeal, a sudden burst of drama, as though Howells were speaking the truth for the first time.

  Henry had known Howells for thirty years and corresponded with him regularly. Whenever Howells came to London, he behaved as though he were at home there, as though he were a well-travelled cosmopolitan gentleman. Henry was amazed then by his response to Paris, the sense Sturges got from him that he had not lived at all and that it was too late for him now to begin to do so.

  Henry wished that London made his American guests express themselves as Howells did. He wished that the visits instilled awe or regret, or caused them to understand the world and their place in it as never before. Instead, he listened as they told him and each other that there were towers in the United States too, and that some of their own correctional institutions compared rather favourably in size, if nothing else, with the Tower of London. And, in addition, their own Charles River seemed to serve its purpose more efficiently than the Thames.

  Nonetheless, as each summer came around, watching London through his visitors’ eyes interested him; he imagined himself as them, seeing London for the first time, just as he imagined the lives he could have lived when he went to Italy or on his return visits to the United States. A new streetscape, even a single building, could fill him with thoughts about who he might have become, who he might be now had he stayed in Boston or spent his days in Rome or Florence.

  For him as a boy and for William, and perhaps even for Wilky and Bob and maybe even Alice, the reasons given for moving from Paris to Boulogne or from Boulogne back to London, or from Europe in general back to the United States, never seemed as solid as their father’s own restlessness, his great agitation, which they knew but never managed to understand. The finding of a haven only to be uprooted after a time, or the arriving, as his family did throughout his boyhood, at an unfortunate lodging, not knowing how long it would take his father to announce that they would soon have to depart, made him long for security and settlement. He could not think why his family had translated themselves from Paris to Boulogne. He must have been twelve or thirteen then, and there may have been a crisis on the stock exchange or a failure of some leaseholder to pay rent or an alarming letter about dividends.

  In the time they lived in Boulogne, Henry walked with his father on the beach. On one of those occasions, it was a windless and calm day, the beginning of summer, with a long sandy expanse and a wide sweep of sea. They had been to a cafe with
large clear windows and a floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that for Henry gave it something of the charm of a circus. It was empty save for an old gentleman who picked his teeth with great facial contortions and another gentleman who soaked his buttered rolls in his coffee, to Henry’s fascinated pleasure, and then disposed of them in the little interval between his nose and chin. Henry did not wish to leave, but his father wanted his daily walk on the beach and thus he had to abandon his delight in observing the eating habits of the French.

  His father must have talked as they went along. The image in his mind now, in any case, was of him gesticulating, discussing a lecture or a book or a new set of ideas. He liked his father talking, especially when William was elsewhere.

  They did not paddle or walk too near the waves. His memory was that they walked briskly. His father may even have carried a stick. It was a picture of happiness. And for a stranger watching, it might have remained like that, an idyllic scene of a father and son at ease together in the late morning on the beach in Boulogne. There was a woman bathing, a young woman being watched by an older woman on the beach. The bather was large, perhaps even overweight, and well protected from the elements by an elaborate bathing costume. She swam out expertly, allowing herself to float back with the waves. Then she stood facing out to sea letting her hands play with the water. Henry barely noticed her at first as his father stopped and made as though to examine something on the far horizon. Then his father walked forward for a while, silently, distracted, and turned back to study the horizon once more. This time Henry realized that he was watching the bather, examining her fiercely and hungrily and then turning away, observing the low dunes behind him, pretending that they also interested him to the same intense degree.