Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  Edmond La Grange held his empty glass out towards Eddie Garstrang. Garstrang took it and held it in front of him, like a cupped chalice. La Grange banged his fists on the arms of his chair and rose to his feet. As he got up, the lords and ladies all got up too. ‘It’s a wonderful story, is it not, Oscar?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Oscar, ‘in its way. I wonder that you did not tell it to me before now.’

  ‘Oh,’ said La Grange, stepping towards Oscar and putting his hand on Oscar’s sleeve, ‘I could not. A gambling debt is a debt of honour: it cannot be enforced by law. Monsieur Garstrang and I came to our arrangement in Leadville two months ago. We shook hands on it. We agreed that he would settle his affairs in Colorado and then join us here, today, in New York. To be honest, I was not entirely sure that he would turn up. But he has. And for that I salute him. He is a gentleman; though, sadly, I cannot afford to let him travel as one.

  La Grange laughed and widened his eyes and looked about him: at Garstrang, who was still cradling the empty champagne glass, and the attendant lords and ladies who were moving gradually towards the saloon door. ‘We have done well in America, but we need to husband our resources nonetheless. The Théâtre La Grange is being refurbished in our absence. The sets for Hamlet will not come cheap. I like to think that I keep a first-class company, but most of them must travel steerage, alas.’

  He clapped his hands. It was the sign for dismissal. ‘The ship is moving. Shall we go and wave New York farewell? And then change for dinner. You will join me for dinner, won’t you, Oscar? Eight o’clock, in my stateroom? Come looking wonderful — and with something amusing to say.

  Two hours later, Oscar arrived for dinner in Edmond La Grange’s stateroom dressed in a dark purple evening coat lined with lavender satin. He wore velvet knee-breeches, black silk stockings, and low shoes with shiny, silver buckles. At his neck and wrists were frills of ivory lace and in his buttonhole a spray of winter-flowering cyclamen. (The florist at 61 Irving Place, at the corner of Seventeenth Street, had equipped him with a different buttonhole for each night of the crossing, each one wrapped in damp cloth to keep it fresh.) He was wearing a version of the costume that he had worn when giving his lectures.

  La Grange was delighted with his young friend’s appearance. ‘You do look wonderful,’ he said, beckoning him into the stateroom with one hand and handing him a crystal saucer of Perrier-Jouët ‘78 with the other. ‘And have you come in an amusing frame of mind?’ he asked.

  ‘I have come in a receptive frame of mind,’ answered Oscar, smiling. ‘The spectator is to be receptive. He is the violin on which the master is to play.’

  La Grange laughed. ‘You’re a very clever fellow, Oscar. I can see that I must watch you carefully. I fear that our little circle is going to be a bit dull for you, but we’ll wine you well and feed you properly, that I promise.’

  Dinner on board the SS Bothnia was a substantial affair — at least it was for the half-dozen first-class passengers dining in the La Grange stateroom. In the journal that he kept intermittently (and which he used as much to try out new lines as to record the happenings of the day), Oscar made a note of it. I reproduce it here in its entirety:

  27.xii.82. Dined with ELG en famille. Service à la française. Menu à la Weybridge until we got our just desserts. ELG talked of Rabelais and ate like Gargantua: mulligatawny soup, fried whiting, brill with shrimps, pork cutlets, tomates farcies, boiled turkey in celery sauce, curried hare, roast pheasant with all the trimmings. I played Pantagruel (as required) and ate quite daintily until the jellies and meringues and boudin à la reine appeared, when I succumbed. I can resist everything except temptation. The wines were exceptional, notably a Chambertin 1870, a Château d’Yquem 1880, and a curious Russian liqueur that arrived with the ices. Give me the luxuries: anyone can have the necessaries.

  Oscar made a note, too, of his dinner companions:

  A motley crew. I had met them all before and was consequently doubly grateful to my host for seating me as he did, between himself and Mademoiselle de la Tourbillon. This was the seating plan:

  ELG placed his mother on his right hand. Liselotte La Grange (universally known as ‘Maman’) is an insufferable old booby: spoilt, selfish, self-referential, childish, obstinate, opinionated. Her excuse is that she is as old as the century, born, it seems, on 5 January 1800. She is one of those shrill women who preach the importance of virtues she is never called upon to exercise. Wanting for nothing, she harps on the value of thrift. Being idle, she grows eloquent over the dignity of labour. Her son defers to her in everything. He even indulges her repellent bitch poodle, a cumbersome creature known, absurdly, as Marie Antoinette because she is said to be descended from one of the original poodles bred by Louis XVI. (Maman is obsessed with lineage, her own and everybody else’s.) In truth, the dog lacks all breeding and spent the whole of dinner breaking wind, scratching herself and scrabbling beneath the table, tripping up the waiters and begging scraps from the plates of Maman and her neighbour, Richard Marais.

  Marais, I cannot fathom. He is the La Grange company’s homme d’affaires and has been with La Grange for more than twenty years. He is bald and plain and appears to lack all personality. The poor man is deaf, as well, a disability La Grange regards as essential in a business manager. ‘When the tax man comes to call, Monsieur Marais can honestly say he never heard him knocking.’ Marais is deaf, but not mute. He can speak, but does so rarely. And when he speaks, what he says is not interesting. We shall not be friends, I think. I cannot listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style or by beauty of theme.

  Carlos Branco does both. He is witty, too. Tonight he said, ‘I love acting. It is so much more real than life.’ Branco is La Grange’s oldest and closest friend, the scion of a distinguished Portuguese theatrical family. (‘Heritage’ is everything with these people!) He is sixty, handsome, intelligent, as sophisticated as Maman is vulgar. He has been playing leading character roles in the La Grange company productions all his life. ‘Polonius is my destiny,’ he said this evening. He has humour and humanity, and warm, walnut-coloured eyes. I like him very much.

  Gabrielle de la Tourbillon I adore. She is tall as a poplar, slender as a reed, and her beauty, though real, is not obvious. She has the figure and face of a boy, but the energy and guile of an ambitious woman. When first I met her, a few weeks ago, she said at once: ‘I am Edmond La Grange’s leading lady and his mistress. He has had several of both. He is sixty now and I am thirty. I am the one who is here to stay. ‘Tonight, at dinner, while La Grange fussed over Maman and the wretched Marie Antoinette, Gabrielle talked to me of his other mistresses — and of his wife, the mother of his twins, Alys Lenoir, who took her own life, twenty years ago, after the children were born. Gabrielle told me, too, of her own lovers — all but one of them older than her — and, as she spoke of them, saying, ‘An actress needs friends,’ beneath the table she took my hand in hers and squeezed it tight. ‘I like a young man who has a future,’ she whispered. ‘I like a young woman who has a past,’ I replied.

  That evening, towards the end of the dinner, over the ices and the Russian liqueurs, the talk of the table turned to the La Grange company’s return to Paris and the plans for the forthcoming production of Hamlet. Forty years earlier, when they were both twenty, Edmond La Grange and Alys Lenoir had played Hamlet and Ophelia together. It was how they had met. Now, their twin children were twenty years of age and their son, Bernard, was to play Hamlet, and their daughter, Agnès, Ophelia. ‘It is in the great La Grange tradition,’ declared Maman, tapping the side of her dessert dish with her spoon. ‘Bernard will be a fine Prince Hamlet. He has the voice and the profile. And Agnès, poor fragile thing, was born to play the doomed Ophelia. All Paris will come.’ When she spoke, Liselotte La Grange addressed no one in particular. Her every utterance was a general declamation. ‘When Edmond played Hamlet,’ she continued, ‘his father played Claudius and I played Queen Gertrude. All Paris came. Edmond will play Cla
udius now. Carlos will play the old fool, Polonius, of course. Who will play Gertrude?’

  ‘Gabrielle is to play Gertrude, Maman,’ said La Grange amiably, resting his hand on his mother’s tightly clenched fist, ‘as well you know.’

  ‘She is too young,’ hissed Madame La Grange, pulling her fist away from her son’s grasp and banging it fiercely on the table.

  ‘She is too young,’ echoed La Grange soothingly, ‘but she is an actress. She can appear older than her years.’

  ‘She is too thin,’ insisted Madame La Grange. ‘Far too thin. It’s disgusting.’

  In the corner of the stateroom, Marie Antoinette began to yap and chase her own tail. Gabrielle de la Tourbillon said nothing. Nor did she look dismayed. She appeared accustomed to Maman’s tirades.

  Edmond La Grange looked at his mistress and smiled. He turned back to his mother. ‘Gabrielle is slender, certainly.’

  ‘She has no breasts,’ snarled the old woman.

  Oscar stirred. ‘Are breasts essential to the playing of the role of Queen Gertrude?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ barked Madame La Grange. ‘They are, monsieur. Gertrude is a mother. A mother has breasts.’

  ‘Breasts will be provided,’ said Edmond La Grange. ‘I shall speak to the wardrobe mistress.’

  After that first night at sea, when the ocean was placid and the night sky quite clear, the weather changed. The remainder of the Atlantic crossing was of a piece with Maman’s manner: at best unsettling, at worst tempestuous. Storms came and went quite suddenly, but the bitter wind was constant and the heavy rain relentless. Even at noon the sky was dark. Only the foolhardy — and Richard Marais taking the wretched Marie Antoinette for her twice-daily constitutional — braved the decks of the SS Bothnia. Oscar, finding, to his relief, that he was a better sailor than he had expected, spent most of the journey closeted with La Grange in the actor’s stateroom, listening to the great man’s stories of the glory days of French theatre and working with him, line by line, on the translation of Hamlet. It was absorbing work. All his life, Oscar would be fascinated by Hamlet’s melancholy.

  Now and again Oscar exchanged a word or two with his erstwhile valet, Traquair, when the young man struggled up from his third-class berth in the bowels of the ship to attend to Monsieur La Grange’s laundry and to lay out his new master’s evening clothes. Traquair seemed happy enough, though he said little. Eddie Garstrang said still less.

  Oscar saw Garstrang each evening, briefly, after dinner. Each evening, in La Grange’s stateroom, Oscar ate a similar meal with the same five people: La Grange, his mother, his mistress, his business manager and his oldest friend. Each evening, when dinner was done, La Grange escorted Maman to her cabin and helped her fuss over her night-time pills and potions. Each evening, he then returned to his stateroom and invited Oscar to join him and Richard Marais and Carlos Branco for cards. ‘We play euchre, Oscar. It is an easy game. It is your kind of game. It is the game for which the joker was invented.’

  Each evening, Oscar hesitated (he was not averse to cards) and then declined (recognising that this was what was expected of him), at which point a steward was despatched to summon Garstrang from the second-class lounge to make up the foursome. Garstrang arrived, smiled, bowed and took his place at the card table. Each evening, on his arrival, when Oscar tried to engage him in conversation, he demurred, explaining quietly, ‘My obligation is to Monsieur La Grange now — I cannot talk — I must play cards.’

  The transatlantic crossing took ten days, during which the La Grange evening ritual was varied only twice. On the night of 31 December the captain of the SS Bothnia hosted a series of New Year’s Eve parties for passengers of every class. Edmond La Grange remained all evening in the first-class saloon with his mother and Marie Antoinette, while Oscar, with La Grange’s encouragement, escorted Gabrielle de la Tourbillon to the principal festivities that had been arranged inside a huge marquee lashed to the ship’s main deck. There the young couple —Oscar was twenty-eight; La Grange’s mistress was thirty — defied the elements and danced the night away to music provided, alternately, by a palm court orchestra and a Negro band.

  To Mademoiselle de la Tourbillon’s delight, Oscar was eager to dance. To her surprise, he was quite nimble on his feet. To her amazement, when the Negro band started to play ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers’, he declared:

  ‘This is my favourite tune in all the world!’

  ‘And why is that, Oscar?’ she asked, laughing.

  ‘Because it is written by a friend of mine, a man named Jimmy Bland,’ Oscar answered, sweeping the actress around him as they glided across the crowded dance floor. ‘I met him in New York and I liked him at once. We were born in the same week in the same year. I felt we were brothers beneath the skin. He is black, of course, and I am white.’

  ‘And you are Wilde,’ she said, still laughing, ‘and he is Bland.’

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Oscar. ‘Names fascinate me terribly.’ As the music propelled them around the windswept tent, he held her closely in his arms and said, ‘I am filled with delight at the beauty of your Christian name, Gabrielle. It has an exquisite forest simplicity about it, and sounds most sweetly out of tune with this rough and ready world of ours — rather like a daisy on a railway bank!’

  ‘You are absurd, Oscar!’

  ‘I hope so,’ he answered, kissing her forehead as the band played on.

  Oscar enjoyed New Year’s Eve on board the SS Bothnia. He noted in his journal:

  I flirted with ELG’s mistress all night, amused her (I believe) and pleased myself (I know). A chase after a beautiful woman is always exciting. I do not love her, of course. Does she love La Grange? She says that she does, but I wonder. Does he love her? He pays her scant attention.

  His recollection of his final night on board the SS Bothnia was less happy:

  It was Maman’s birthday — her eighty-third — and in the first-class grand saloon La Grange hosted a reception in her honour. The party was not a success. The sea was calm (the Irish coast was within sight), the buffet was generous, wine flowed freely, and ELG made a gracious tribute to his mother. But it was a cold affair: Liselotte La Grange is not loved by those who know her well. I watched as the middle-aged members of the company went up to her to pay their respects. They did their duty and retreated as quickly as they could. When they leant forward to kiss her hand or cheek they made sure their lips did not touch her withered skin. The younger actors kept their distance altogether. The old woman is to be pitied. She is arrogant, irritating, tediously obsessed with her wretched dog and the glory of the La Grange lineage, but it is her age that makes her peculiarly unlovely. Old age has no consolations to offer us. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty has become sluggish. Limbs fail, senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memories of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Liselotte La Grange is angry with the world and she has cause. Once upon a time she was young.

  On the morning after the party in Maman’s honour, at the break of day, the SS Bothnia, bound ultimately for Le Havre, docked at Liverpool to allow the British passengers to disembark. Wrapped in heavy greatcoats and wreathed in scarves, Edmond La Grange, Gabrielle de la Tourbillon and Carlos Branco gathered on the grey and misty deck to bid Oscar farewell. La Grange embraced him in a bear hug, as a father might a son. Gabrielle kissed him tenderly, as a sister might a brother. Carlos Branco shook him heartily with both hands and then, playfully, boxed his ears. ‘Au revoir, mon brave,’ he said, ‘come and see us in Paris very soon.

  ‘He is coming in three weeks’ time,’ declared La Grange. ‘We’re only releasing him now so that he can see his mother again and sort out his affairs in London. We shall have him on the boulevard du Temple at the end of the month, in time for our first rehearsal. He is to meet my children. He is to assist us with our production.’ The great actor looked up at Oscar and smiled. ‘Now that we have found you
, we’re not going to lose you, are we, Oscar?’

  ‘No,’ said Oscar simply. ‘You’re not going to lose me.’

  Carlos Branco put a hand on Oscar’s shoulder; Gabrielle slipped off her glove and ran her fingers down his cheek; Oscar and La Grange hugged one another once more. There were tears in all their eyes.

  The sentimental moment was interrupted by the arrival of an English customs officer.

  ‘Is this your trunk, sir?’ asked the man, indicating a large brown leather case, bound with heavy black straps. It was being held by a pair of boy porters who appeared to be struggling with the burden of it.

  Oscar gave it a cursory glance. ‘It is,’ he said.

  ‘Are you Mr Wilde? Mr Oscar Wilde?’ asked the customs officer, seemingly winking as he spoke.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Have you anything to declare this morning, sir?’ asked the customs man, with a smirk. ‘Anything in the way of genius, I mean?’

  Oscar smiled.

  The customs officer chuckled. ‘You see, we know who you are, sir.’

  ‘I’m gratified.’

  ‘The trunk appears to be unusually heavy, sir.’

  ‘It is full of books,’ replied Oscar.

  ‘You’re not one for light reading, then?’ said the customs officer, grinning. He seemed especially pleased with this sally. He clapped his hands together and the cold morning air was filled with a burst of his warm breath. ‘Do you mind if we take a look inside, sir?’