The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Later, both Oscar and Bosie would describe themselves as `Nature's stepchildren'. Oscar's copy of Bertha is lost, so whether Sayle had inscribed it with an equally effusive dedication is impossible to know. But the mere fact that he sent an overtly homoerotic volume of poems to Oscar suggests that he knew Oscar would be an appreciative reader.

  Two days later, Oscar was writing again to Harry. He was in a playful mood:

  What is Harry doing? Is he reading Shelley in a land of moonbeams and mystery? Or rowing in Babylonish garments on the river? Is the world a dung-heap or a flower-garden to him? Poisonous, or perfect, or both?

  `Poisonous, or perfect, or both.' This antithesis, and its synthesis, became a mantra for Oscar and was to recur throughout his writing and his letters. He wanted to explore and experience both aspects of the world, the dung-heap and the flower garden. Earth and sky. Heaven and hell. High society and low society. Success and scandal. Fame and infamy. Virtue and vice - especially vice. `What is your real ambition in life?' Bouncer Ward asked Oscar one evening in Oxford. `God knows,' said Oscar, serious for a moment. `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.' Oscar succeeded in realising all these ambitions in the short span of his life.

  Just three weeks after their first exchange of letters, Oscar went to Cambridge to spend two or three days with Harry. He almost certainly also saw Oscar Browning, a fellow of King's College and a lover of working-class boys, and may have introduced Harry to him. Oscar was treated royally by Harry and his friends. There was a breakfast where Oscar told one of Harry's friends that `Nothing is good in moderation. You cannot know the good in anything till you have torn the heart out of it by excess.' This was a very different Oscar from the Oscar who had wanted Constance to practise self-restraint and economy. But Constance's housekeeping and Oscar's appetite - for food and for sex - were two very different things. `Enough is as bad as a meal,' he said. `More than enough is as good as a feast.' `Moderation is a fatal thing,' says Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance. `Nothing succeeds like excess.' Lord Illingworth and Oscar were right. Nothing did succeed like excess, for the time being at least.

  It was on this trip to Cambridge that Oscar and Harry almost certainly slept together for the first time. It was probably Oscar's first sexual contact with a man for nearly two years, and it was a memorable experience. On his return to Tite Street, Oscar wrote a blissful letter to Harry:

  Does it all seem a dream, Harry? Ali! What is not a dream? To me it is, in a fashion, a memory of music. 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!

  There was, according to Oscar, `only one evil omen - your fire! You are careless about playing with fire, Harry.' Exactly what Oscar meant by this tantalising comment is not certain, but it was clearly intended to resonate with Harry. Maybe the fire in question was love: Harry's love for Oscar and his desire for commitment. Harry had perhaps hinted or even gone so far as to declare his feelings for Oscar. But falling in love was dangerous, not just because sex between men was illegal, but also because long-term relationships no longer formed part of Oscar's plans. `How much more poetic it is to marry one and love many!' he used to say. By `love' Oscar meant several things: certainly desire and certainly sex, probably the feelings of excitement and danger of a brief, passionate and illicit affair with a young man, and perhaps feelings of friendship and warmth. There were to be no more marriages, to men or to women.

  Oscar wrote a further letter to Harry which would become one of his most memorable and important letters. In it he articulates a new sexual, intellectual and artistic credo, a daring manifesto of amorality, which he would stick to, through thick and thin, for the rest of his life. Oscar's letter was a pagan rejection of traditional concepts of love, monogamy and fidelity, and a powerful affirmation of his intention to explore and experience his sexuality. That he was speaking explicitly of sex between men is evident by his use of the phrase l'amour de l'impossible, the love of the impossible, another euphemism for love and sex between men. John Addington Symonds used this identical phrase to describe his emotional and sexual feelings for young men. `You too,' Oscar told Harry, `have the love of things impossible - l'amour de l'impossible (how do men name it?)':

  Someday you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as a romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance - that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long some day to feel. So at least it seems to me.

  Walter Pater had written in the famous `Conclusion' to his Studies in the History of the Renaissance that the secret of life was `not the fruit of experience, but experience itself'. Oscar went one step further. It was not the fruit of experience, nor even the experience itself, but the desire for experience - in particular, the endless, unquenchable desire for sexual experience - that was the secret of life. `I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world,' he wrote later. It was the scorpion sting of sexual desire that drove him endlessly forwards. There was, of course, the sexual pleasure of the encounter, the orgasmic `most fiery moment of ecstasy', but this was a subsidiary order of pleasure, a mechanistic pleasure, a pleasure of consumption. True pleasure lay in the simultaneous assuaging and stimulation of desire.

  Desire was the beginning and the end of life. Romance and love were transitory emotions, to be anticipated with excitement or recollected in tranquillity. It was an endless, eternal cycle of desire, satiation and desire, a divine and decadent music of the spheres, at once both perfect and poisonous. Oscar recognised and rejoiced in the perverse and paradoxical dualities which his doctrine of desire contained. He told Harry:

  Strangely enough, what comes of all this is a curious mixture of ardour and of indifference. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the last!

  The secret of this doctrine of desire lay in the abandonment of all self-control, a surrender to a mood of endless, eternal and shifting desire. The mystery of moods, he told Harry, was infinitely fascinating. `To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still.' A decade earlier Oscar had articulated this vision of absolute surrender to endless desire in his poem `Helas' when he wrote: `To drift with every passion till my soul/ is a stringed lute on which all winds can play.' Back then, he had rejected such a doctrine, unwilling to sacrifice his `soul's inheritance' and `mine ancient wisdom, and austere control' for the pleasure of sex with men. Now he was preparing to abandon all restraint, to surrender and submerge his self and his soul into the great sea of desire and to be washed up on the shore of `an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous'.

  Oscar's intense affair with Harry Marillier continued until January 1886. Only a handful of letters have survived, but Oscar reputedly wrote him `a suitcase full' of love letters. Harry invited Oscar to spend a night or two at a curiously named house, Ferishtah, near Hampton Court, where Oscar would meet Osman Edwards, a schoolfriend of Harry's, who was now at Oxford. `Let us live like Spartans,' Oscar replied, `but let us talk like Athenians.' Two weeks later Oscar invited Harry to Tite Street: `Come at 12 o'c on Sunday and stay for lunch. So glad to see you dear Harry.' This luncheon was Harry's first introduction to Constance. Quite what she made of the handsome twentyyear-old undergraduate whom Oscar seemed so interested in is not recorded. It may have crossed her mind to wonder whether or not the youthful Harry was an entirely appropriate friend for her thirty-two-year-old husband.
She might have thought their sudden intimacy after a five-year gap was a little strange. And, less than a week later, when Oscar insisted on inviting Harry, together with a handsome young Oxonian, Douglas Ainslie, it might well have struck Constance that her husband's fondness for the society of very young men was unusual.

  Oscar no doubt managed to set Constance's mind at rest. He would have had an answer - or, much the same thing, a glittering paradox - for everything. In any case, when Oscar invited Harry to lunch, their affair was already waning. Oscar was beginning to get bored. The novelty and the excitement had begun to pall. The sex, once so desired, so anticipated, and so lusted after, was now predictable. Harry's body had yielded up its secrets, and it was time to move on. Harry may have become tedious, or intemperate in his demands for Oscar's attention, so Oscar did what he was to do again and again with his lovers when he wanted to move on: he tried to convert the affair into a friendship. Lovers would be invited to Tite Street, lunched or dined or both, introduced to the shy and charming chatelaine of the House Beautiful, and very soon friendship would fill the place of passion. Oscar would be free to begin his search for a new lover. In this case, he did not have to look too far.

  As his affair with Harry was waning, a new erotic interest was waxing in the form of Douglas Ainslie. Ainslie was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Oxford who shared rooms with his Eton schoolfellow, Lord Albert Edward Godolphin Osborne. There is no record of how Oscar and Douglas Ainslie met. Perhaps Ainslie had written a letter of avowal to Oscar. Both he and Osborne were founder members of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and Ainslie may have written to Oscar to invite him to review their first production, Twelfth Night, which opened at the New Theatre on St Valentine's Day. Oscar duly obliged, and when Ainslie invited him to review a second production, he accepted with alacrity. `Dear Douglas,' he wrote, `I have lost your note. What is your address, and what day have you asked me for? I really am "impossible" about letters: they vanish from my room.' (Vanishing letters, lost, mislaid - or, more usually, stolen by young blackmailers and male prostitutes - were to be a constant refrain in the years to come.) Oscar's invitation to Ainslie re-used the gist of his earlier invitation to Harry: `We must have many evenings together,' he told Ainslie, `and drink yellow wine from green glasses in Keats's honour.' Oscar was also very taken with Ainslie's friend, Lord Osborne: `I hope you and Osborne are reading hard,' he told Ainslie. `He is quite charming, with his low musical voice, and his graceful incapacity for a career. He is a little like the moon.' Oscar declared, not for the last time, that `young Oxonians are very delightful, so Greek and graceful and uneducated. They have profiles but no philosophy.'

  With Harry Marillier and then Douglas Ainslie, Oscar's pursuit of desire was only just beginning.

  Mad and coloured loves

  `Love is all very well in its way, but friendship is much higher. Indeed, I know of nothing in the world that is either nobler or rarer than a devoted friendship.'

  The two years following his wedding were professionally barren for Oscar. He continued to tour the country on his self-appointed mission to civilise the provinces with a new repertoire of lectures on `Dress', `The Value of Art in Modern Life' and `Beauty, Taste and Ugliness in Dress'. It was work and it paid, but it hardly seemed like the realisation of the brilliant promise he had shown at Oxford. He had been on the professional lecturing stump for nearly four years now and it was becoming increasingly obvious to him - and others - that his star was in the descendant. The Pall Mall Gazette reported unkindly that `Oscar's star has been low in the horizon since he cut his hair and became "Benedick the married man"'. The lodestar of lasting literary fame had proved elusive. As a self-styled and self-publicising Professor of Aesthetics, Oscar had mesmerised and scandalised the middle classes in Britain and America, for a while at least. His first volume of poetry had been a modest financial success, running through five editions in as many months, but had been savaged by the critics. And his play Vera, or the Nihilists had opened with fanfares in New York and promptly closed after a week, while The Duchess of Padua was languishing unproduced after the American actress Mary Anderson refused to proceed with her planned production.

  Despite Constance's income, which should have been perfectly adequate for any normal family to live on quietly but comfortably, money seemed to be in perpetual short supply. Oscar's income was sparse and erratic, and his extravagance meant that finances were a constant problem. He was profligate with money and had absolutely no sense of how to budget. He was contemptuous of those who sought to balance their books and eke out their income. He was determined to deny himself nothing. `Give me the luxuries,' he used to say, `and anyone can have the necessaries.' Oscar needed a diversion from the wearisome treadmill of the provincial lecture circuit, and, from early 1886 onwards, he increasingly turned to journalism as a source of income. His work for the Pall Mall Gazette consisted of reviews mostly, of books and plays - anything that would bring in a few pounds.

  Early in 1886 Oscar even considered taking employment. He applied - unsuccessfully - for the Secretaryship of the newly established Beaumont Trust, an educational charity for the poor. He also considered becoming an Inspector of Schools and wrote to his old tutor and friend, Mahaffy, asking him to use his influence with Lord Spencer, a senior figure in the Liberal government. `A word from you as to my capabilities would go far towards getting me what I want,' he wrote. It was not just the uncertainties and insecurities of the literary life that pushed him into this uncharacteristic step. There was another, more pressing reason. Constance was pregnant for the second time.

  As his affair with Harry Marillier cooled into friendship, Oscar returned to Constance's bed. There would have been a lapse in sexual relations while Constance was pregnant with Cyril: most Victorian doctors did not recommend sexual intercourse for pregnant women, though some thought that sex up to three months before the birth was acceptable. And Oscar and Constance would perhaps have refrained from having sex for some months afterwards to avoid another pregnancy. There are several possible explanations as to why he resumed having sex with her. He may have done it out of a sense of duty, or loyalty. He may have done it to keep Constance's suspicions at bay. He may have done it to get her pregnant again and so avoid having to have sex with her on a regular basis. He may even have done it out of a strange kind of love and affection for her. Despite his strong disgust for the female body and for female sexuality - especially anything to do with pregnancy - Oscar may well have resumed sexual relations with Constance with almost a sense of relief after his entanglement with Harry. However exciting, however compelling the prospect of sex with young men, there were risks and dangers. `In mad and coloured loves there is much danger,' he wrote. `There is the danger of losing them no less than the danger of keeping them.' There was a feeling of safety, of predictability, of consistency in sex with Constance. Oscar once said that `consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative', and, after the turbulence and excitement of sex with a man, he may have sunk back into the unimaginative repose of married life - for a while at least.

  And `mad and coloured loves' were becoming dangerous for another reason. It was unfortunate to say the least that Oscar's exploration of his sexual desires for men coincided with one of Britain's periodic spasms of public morality. In the early summer of 1885, W.T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, published an expose of the ease with which depraved men could purchase the sexual services of very young girls. Stead went out and procured a young girl to demonstrate how easily girls could be bought. His series of articles, `The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', provoked a national moral outrage and forced the caretaker Tory government of Lord Salisbury to hastily enact the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, the long title of which was `an Act to make further provisions for the Protection of Women and Girls; the suppression of brothels, and other purposes'. The Bill was designed to more effectively suppress brothels, to prevent the procuring of girls for common prostitution, and to suppress what wa
s known as the white slave trade in which young British women and girls were sold into sexual slavery in brothels abroad. The Bill also raised the age of consent for girls to sixteen. It had been thirteen.

  Stead was arrested, tried and sent to prison for two months for technically breaking the law by procuring a young girl without the consent of her father. Henry Labouchere, the maverick Liberal MP for Northampton, claimed - several years later - that Stead at this time wrote to him privately, sending him a report about the prevalence of male prostitution in London and other big cities. Labouchere, or Labby as he was known to friends and foes alike, was a former diplomat and now founder and editor of the campaigning weekly magazine Truth, which sought to expose corruption, hypocrisy, lax morality and malpractice.

  Oscar had been a great admirer of Labouchere. During his tour of the United States in 1882, he had praised Labby as `the best writer in Europe, a most remarkable gentleman'. Labby was less eager to return the compliment. A review of Oscar's lecture `Impressions of America' in Truth was critical of his profligate and voluptuous use of adjectives. Oscar had, Truth reported, used the word `lovely' forty-three times; `beautiful' twenty-six times; and `charming' no less than seventeen times. In an editorial the following day, Truth went for Oscar's jugular. The editorial was written by Labby and provocatively described Oscar as an `epicene youth' and `an effeminate phrasemaker. . . lecturing to empty benches'.

  Labby was so concerned by Stead's report on the prevalence of male prostitution that, during the last stages of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill's passage into law, he tabled an amendment which outlawed sexual acts between men not amounting to sodomy. Sodomy had been illegal in England since the seventh century. But, until the reign of Henry VIII, cases had always been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, the usual punishment being death by being buried alive, burning, hanging, or drowning. In 1533, `the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery' was codified into secular law and became a felony punishable by death.