by Neil McKenna
`Bored to death.' How long had it taken Oscar to become bored with married life, let alone bored to death? The answer is almost certainly not very long. Oscar was easily bored. `Ennui is the enemy!' he said. Though he was fond of Constance, he was bored by her; bored by her frequently expressed sense of conventional morality -'Women are always on the side of morality, public and private' - so at odds with his own anarchic views; bored and made impatient by her accounts of her unhappy and abusive upbringing. And was Oscar speaking of Constance when he had Lord Henry Wotton tell Dorian Gray that `the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life'?
There was also a darker side to the breakdown of relations with Constance. Before his marriage Oscar had hoped that regular sex with a woman would curb - indeed cure - his desires for sex with young men. What he had not bargained for was that marriage and the birth of his two sons, Cyril in 1885 and Vyvyan in 1886, would foment a strong physical loathing, a visceral distaste for the bodily trappings of womanhood. It was more complex than simply preferring male bodies to female. It was a sense of disgust, of revulsion, of absolute repugnance for any physical manifestations of female sexuality.
Oscar had married the Madonna Mia of his poetic imagination. With her slender, boyish figure and tremulous, flower-like beauty, Constance was the embodiment of sexual innocence: unsullied, untouched, untainted by any overt manifestation of sexuality. Oscar worshipped her purity, her freshness. But once married, once deflowered, Constance could no longer be the virga intacta of his imagination. Her innocence became experience, her purity, a sexual complicity. She became a woman, a creature of flesh and blood, with womanly attributes like breasts and a vagina. She had pubic hair, and every month she menstruated. From the idealised freshness of the flower meadow, she became sentient and sensual, a lover, a mother with breasts that enlarged and a belly that swelled. In his poem `The Harlot's House', written just after his honeymoon, Oscar put this transition from innocence to experience, from love to lust, into words:
This repugnance for female bodies first manifested itself when Constance was pregnant with Cyril. Frank Harris records a conversation with Oscar about the burgeoning sense of disgust he felt for Constance. `When I married,' he told Harris:
my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. Within a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed. She dragged herself about the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her, forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always and - oh! I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome. I used to wash my mouth and open the window to cleanse my lips in the pure air.
The seeds of Oscar's physical repugnance for women's bodies and women's sexuality were perhaps always there. He had a profound aversion to any physical deformity or pain. `Ugliness,' he once told Robert Sherard, `I consider a kind of malady, and illness and suffering always inspire me with repulsion.' And Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray says:
I can sympathise with everything, except suffering. I cannot sympathise with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
Pregnancy to Oscar was a deformity, a form of ugliness. When Frank Harris asked Oscar if he felt no pity for Constance when she was pregnant, he replied impatiently, `Pity! Pity has nothing to do with love. How can one desire what is shapeless, deformed, ugly? Desire is killed by maternity. Passion buried in conception.'
Oscar was not alone in his distaste for female bodies and female sexuality. Many men who had sexual desires for other men had strong feelings of repugnance for the female body, especially the vagina. They were repelled by the sight and the smell of menstruation. According to Andre Raffalovich, who knew Oscar well, `Many men find the smell of women unpleasant whilst the sweat of a healthy clean man is exciting and pleasant.' In Teleny the hero describes how a husband `must love indeed, not to feel an inward sinking feeling when a few days after the wedding he finds his bride's middle parts tightly tied up in foul and bloody rags'.
Oscar's misogyny was selective. At an individual level, he liked women enormously. He liked them socially; he found it easy to be intimate with them, to be inspired by their beauty or by their intelligence. He could be kind, incredibly kind, towards women. He wanted their friendship. He wanted - sometimes - to adore them, at other times to be adored by them. And Oscar could love women in an idealised, abstract way. But on a collective level, especially when it came to sex, he was irrationally, almost phobically misogynistic. Frank Harris tried to talk to Oscar about the sexual desirability of the opposite sex. `Don't talk to me of the other sex,' Oscar retorted with distaste. `First of all in beauty there is no comparison between a boy and a girl. Think of the enormous, fat hips which every sculptor has to tone down, and make lighter, and the great udder breasts which the artist has to make small and round and firm.' He exhibited this streak of his misogyny to Robert Sherard. `Oscar had no illusions whatever about female virtue,' Sherard recalled later. `He considered women as prompted only by sexual urge and devoid of what the bourgeois call morality.' Oscar once met Sherard in the Adelphi Hotel in London, where Sherard was staying with a young woman with whom he had eloped from Paris and hoped to marry. `Act dishonourably, Robert,' Oscar told him. `Act dishonourably. It's what sooner or later she'll certainly do to you.'
When it came to sex between a man and a woman, Oscar held a curiously Old Testament view that women set out to ruin men. Women were Eves: temptresses and sirens; they had eaten of the fruit of the tree of sexual knowledge, and after they had `glutted their lust', as Oscar once termed it, they would bring about the expulsion from Eden. When the weasly Fred Atkins, a blackmailer and male prostitute whom Oscar took to Paris, testified against him in court, he told how Oscar tried to dissuade him from visiting the Moulin Rouge, the haunt, so Oscar said, of women of easy virtue. `Mr Wilde told me not to go to see those women, as women were the ruin of young fellows,' Atkins told the court. The subject was clearly close to Oscar's heart, and Atkins testified that `Mr Wilde spoke several times about the same subject, and always to the same effect.'
`A woman's passion is degrading,' Oscar told Frank Harris. `She is continually tempting you. She wants your desire as a satisfaction for her vanity more than anything else, and her vanity is insatiable if her desire is weak, and so she continually tempts you to excess, and then blames you for the physical satiety and disgust which she herself has created.' This paradox between female sexual desire and male sexual disgust, between lust and satiety, was a theme Oscar developed in his epic poem `The Sphinx', begun in Paris in 1883 and progressively revised throughout his marriage. Oscar portrays the sphinx as the incarnation of female lust, a monstrous supernatural femme fatale, possessed of an amorphous, all-consuming sexuality which tempts, debases and disgusts:
Get hence, you loathsome Mystery! Hideous animal, get hence! You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be. You make my creed a barren sham, you wake foul dreams of sensual life.
Oscar explores this paradox even more explicitly in Teleny. Women tempt men into sex. They gratify men's sexual needs and, in so doing, degrade themselves and their sexual partners, creating a kind of righteous disgust, a virtuous contempt in men. After having sex with Des Grieux's mother in order to clear his debts, the pianist Rene Teleny is overcome with disgust and remorse as he gazes down at what was immediately previously the object of his passion:
Her thighs were bare, and the thick curly hair that covered her middle parts, as black as jet, was sprinkled over with pearly drops of milky dew.
Such a sight would have awakened an eager, irrepressible desire in Joseph himself, the only chaste Israelite of whom we have ever
heard; and yet Teleny, leaning on his elbow, was gazing at her with all the loathsomeness we feel when we look at a kitchen table covered with the offal of the meat, the hashed scraps, the dregs of the wines which have supplied the banquet that has just glutted us.
He looked at her with the scorn which a man has for the woman who has just ministered to his pleasure, and who has degraded herself and him. Moreover, as he felt unjust towards her, he hated her, and not himself.
There is an element of cruelty in Oscar's misogyny, something he perhaps recognised himself when he had Lord Henry Wotton say in Dorian Gray: `I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same.'
For Oscar, marriage to the Madonna Mia of his poetic imagination had clearly been a mistake. But in a perverse, paradoxical way, Oscar's marriage had the effect of refocussing his erotic desires towards young men and gave him the impetus and the will to seek them out. In `Wasted Days', the original version of `Madonna Mia', the object of Oscar's poetic ardour had been a `fair slim boy'. It was high time to turn his attention back to boys, to seek again `the love of the impossible'. It was the first act in an unfolding tragedy.
Playing with fire
'Marriage is a sort o fforcing-house. It brings strange sins to fruit, and sometimes strange renunciations.' - Esme Amarinth in The Green Carnation
When Oscar was touring the provinces six months after his marriage, he wrote a love letter to Constance which combined the poetic and the prosaic:
Dear and Beloved, Here am I, and you at the Antipodes. 0 execrable facts, that keep our lips from kissing, though our souls are one.
What can I tell you by letter? Alas! Nothing that I would tell you. The messages of the gods to each other travel not by pen and ink and indeed your bodily presence here would not make you more real: for I feel your fingers in my hair, and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some exquisite ecstasy with yours. I feel incomplete without you. Ever and ever yours.
OSCAR
Here I stay till Sunday.
There is something profoundly unconvincing in this love letter. It seems curiously detached. Written in what Richard Ellmann called Oscar's `best Olympian', his letter is too studied, too artificial. It is a deliberate artistic composition, rather than a spontaneous outpouring of love and passion.
At about the same time that he was writing this letter of dubious love to Constance, Oscar wrote a much more spontaneous and flirtatious letter to Philip Griffiths, a twenty-year-old young man he had recently met after giving a lecture in Birmingham:
My dear Philip, I have sent a photo of myself for you to the care of Mr MacKay which I hope you will like and in return for it you are to send me one of yourself which I shall keep as a memory of a charming meeting and golden hours passed together. You have a nature made to love all beautiful things and I hope we shall see each other soon. Your friend OSCAR WILDE
The photograph in question was a standard pre-signed publicity shot. Oscar had added in a different ink `To Philip Griffiths'. The swapping of photographs was to become a feature of Oscar's affairs with young men. We have no way of knowing the exact circumstances of their meeting, nor exactly how intimate they became. But it was clear that some sort of friendship, some sort of intimacy was established between Oscar and Philip - and established very quickly, as the meeting Oscar refers to almost certainly began and ended in the course of his very brief visit to Birmingham. Presumably Philip had been introduced to Oscar after his lecture, or had introduced himself, perhaps claiming a mutual friend. Oscar, alone in Birmingham and facing the depressing prospect of a solitary evening in his hotel, may well have invited Philip to dinner. They were quickly on Christian name terms, always a badge of Oscar's favour. When Oscar was cross-examined by Edward Carson during his trial on his penchant for calling young men by their Christian names, he replied, `Yes. I always call by their Christian names people whom I like. People I dislike I call something else.' Exactly what Oscar and Philip did or did not get up to during the `golden hours' they spent together will never be known.
Oscar's sudden and intimate friendship with Philip Griffiths just six months after his marriage to Constance was the first of many such friendships with handsome and intense young men. Usually he told them, as he had told Philip, that they were possessed of `a nature made to love all beautiful things', or a variation on the same theme. A stray introduction after a lecture, or a gushing fan letter, would usually elicit an invitation to tea and an encouragement to share confidences. Walt Whitman called these fan letters written by young men, passionately identifying themselves with the homoerotic intensity of his poetry, `letters of avowal'. Oscar would receive many such letters of avowal and a good number of his responses survive.
Despite his distaste and repugnance for Constance during her pregnancy with Cyril, Oscar probably managed to stay faithful. He might flirt with handsome young men like Philip Griffiths; he might receive and write gushing letters to them; he might even fantasise about having sex with them, but he somehow managed to stay on the right side of marital fidelity. But all this was about to change.
On the morning of 5 November 1885, five months to the day after the birth of Cyril, Oscar received a letter from a young man called Harry Marillier, who was a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Oscar had known Harry slightly five years earlier as a fifteen-year-old Bluecoat Boy at Christ's Hospital school in the City of London who had lodged in the same house as Oscar and Frank Miles. Harry Marillier's letter to Oscar was a cautious letter of avowal. He asked if Oscar remembered him from Salisbury Street, told him that he had not forgotten him, that he was a student at Peterhouse, and extended an invitation to Oscar to come to Cambridge and watch a performance of Aeschylus's Eumenides. Oscar's reply was equally cautious. He was, he said, `charmed' to discover that Harry had not forgotten him. `I have a very vivid remembrance,' he wrote, `of the bright enthusiastic boy who used to bring me my coffee in Salisbury Street, and am delighted to find he is devoted to the muses, but I suppose you don't flirt with all nine ladies at once? Which of them do you really love?' Oscar extended his own invitation to Harry: `Whether or not I can come and see you, you must certainly come and see me when you are in town, and we will talk of the poets and drink Keats's health.' There was a cautious and subtle interrogation of Harry's sexual preferences when Oscar asked him to `write and tell me what things in art you and your friends love best. I do not mean what pictures, but what moods and modulations of art affect you most.'
Harry replied by return of post and, though his letter does not survive, it is clear that his `moods and modulations' chimed with Oscar's, for two days later they met in London. Oscar only had an hour before he had to catch his train to Newcastle to deliver a lecture at North Shields that evening. But an hour was enough. Both of them realised that there was an intense attraction between them. `Harry, why did you let me catch my train?' Oscar lamented in a letter written that evening from the Station Hotel in Newcastle. There had been, he went on, `keen curiosity, wonder, delight' in their meeting. It had been, he said tellingly, `an hour intensely dramatic and intensely psychological'.
Oscar's use of the word `psychological' betrays the real nature of the encounter with Harry Marillier. `Psychological' was a contemporary term, almost a euphemism, used by men who had sex with men and by Victorian sexologists alike, to describe the nature of sex and love between men. John Addington Symonds invariably used the word to describe anything pertaining to sex between men. Oscar had started to use `psychological' at Oxford when discussing love affairs between undergraduates, and would continue using it throughout his life as a word to describe the complex emotional feelings and sexual instincts that impelled men to have sex with other men.
`I find the earth as beautiful as the sky, and the body as beautiful as the soul,' Oscar tol
d Harry and said that, if he were to live again, `I would like it to be as a flower - no soul but perfectly beautiful.' He added, as an afterthought, `Perhaps for my sins I shall be made a red geranium!!' Oscar was impatient to see Harry. `When am Ito see you again?' he demanded. `Write me a long letter to Tite Street and I will get it when I come back. I wish you were here, Harry. But in the vacation you must often come and see me, and we will talk of the poets and forget Piccadilly!! I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself, and you are infinitely young.'
Less than a week later, Oscar was writing to Harry again telling him `you have the power of making others love you' and asking him to send a photograph of himself. Oscar also mentioned Charles Sayle of New College, Oxford, who had just anonymously published a book of homoerotic poems called Bertha: A Story of Love. Sayle had been sent down from Oxford because of a sexual liaison with a young man, probably a fellow undergraduate, and had returned home to Cambridge. `Do you know him?' Oscar enquired of Harry. `There is one very lovely sonnet.' Sayle had sent copies of Bertha to both Oscar and John Addington Symonds and had inscribed the latter's copy with an effusive dedicatory poem praising Symonds as the leader of the emerging Uranian movement, addressing him reverentially as `Master'. Sayle's dedicatory poem neatly summed up the philosophy of the Uranians, that, as children of Nature, their sexual instincts were natural:
