The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Dear Oscar, I shall be at the Lyric about 6.30 to 6.45. I can stay there till 7.15. Try and come. What a glorious day. I greatly enjoyed a ride on the top of the 'bus this morning. Ever yours, F.

  Fred grew ever more demanding. He wanted more and more of Oscar's time and was continually coming up with plans for them to go away together. `My dear Oscar,' he wrote in March 1889:

  I have an invitation to go away at Easter but before deciding what I shall do I write to ask you what your plans are? Are you remaining in town or could we perhaps go away together ... of course I should much prefer going with youu and of course have as yet given no answer to my friend before consulting you as to your plans for Easter.

  The letter makes it clear that they were still seeing each other. `The other evening was "quite charming",' he tells Oscar, deliberately invoking one of Oscar's favourite and most over-worked phrases:

  When can we meet? I am engaged all of this week but perhaps you will drop in at the office on Sat evening, my brother and I ... will be at the C- I daresay at 11.30. With much love, Yours as ever. F.

  Three months later, in June, Fred is still trying to persuade Oscar to go away with him, this time to Eastbourne. He has already asked Oscar about the trip and is anxiously awaiting Oscar's response, a response which has failed to materialise:

  The afternoon post has come and brought me no letter from you. I wonder what you will decide about Eastbourne, just imagine this gorgeous weather at the seaside lying on the cliffs in flannels - it would be charming. Unless I go with you I shall go away alone as all other people bore me. My parents are going to Croydon and I shall certainly not remain in C. Tomorrow is your At Home - how furious you will be that you ever told me, perhaps I may look in and see you on my way home. At all events let me know by tomorrow afternoon what you decide as I like to know one way or another. `The Albion' at E is very good; apartments are nice but one gets no food in them. I long to see the lovely blue sea in heavenly sunlight in which I adore basking thinking that it was perhaps generous enough to lend some of its beauty to its admirers. I am gradually getting well again and the cold is showing signs of decreasing.

  Fred signed himself with `Much love', adding a hasty postscript in the light of Oscar's long-awaited reply. Oscar had said he was ill, `out of sorts', and quite unable to contemplate Eastbourne:

  Your letter just received I am so grieved to hear that you are out of sorts. I should like to take a cab and rush off and see you to try and cheer you up - I am much disappointed that you can't manage Eastbourne ... Much love

  In reality, perhaps, Oscar was perfectly well but desperate to shake off the tenacious Fred. There was more than a hint of menace, of emotional blackmail, in Fred's remarks about Oscar's At Home. `Perhaps I may look in and see you on my way home' may have sounded innocuous enough, but how would Constance and Oscar's other guests react to the lowly young clerk turning up unannounced and uninvited in their midst and claiming an intimate friendship with Oscar? Fred was entirely correct when he predicted `How furious you will be that you ever told me.'

  Poor Fred Althaus. It was a sad and sordid affair which dragged on for six months. All Fred wanted was for Oscar to fall in love with him and to go off for romantic weekends by `the beautiful blue sea in heavenly sunlight', locked in a loving embrace. But Oscar was the wrong man for such a quaint and cloying vision of love. Oscar did not love Fred; he had never loved Fred, even if, in the heat of pursuit and in the heat of passion, he had said or suggested that he did. Oscar was attracted by Fred, wanted to have sex with him and, when he had accomplished that, began to lose interest. Certainly he liked Fred, he was touched by Fred's devotion, finding perhaps his old-fashioned romantic views of life and love charming, at least initially. And certainly he treated Fred well enough when they were together, paying for suppers and dinners, buying him expensive gifts and perhaps occasionally making him presents of money. Oscar was generous to a fault with his money but utterly selfish when it came to matters of the heart.

  Oscar often confused lust with love. He would often talk about `loving' a boy, when in truth he meant having sex with him. He had had love affairs with Harry Marillier and Robbie Ross, and with others, but these short, intense relationships were founded upon lust. When Oscar's sexual thirst was slaked, such love affairs quickly faded into affectionate friendship. He had not, as yet, even come close to falling truly in love with anybody, let alone with poor sweet, sad, romantic Fred.

  Spiritualised sodomy

  `Literature has always anticipated life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.'

  In the summer of 1889, Oscar startled the literary world with the publication of The Portrait ofMr W.H., an audacious and tantalising work of fiction, which reads like a work of fact. The story takes its title from the mysterious dedication which prefaces Shakespeare's sequence of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets: `To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W.H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet.' The identity of Mr W.H. has puzzled scholars for centuries, and dozens of candidates have been put forward, including the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Pembroke, and two relations of Shakespeare's: his brother-in-law, William Hart, and his nephew, also called William Hart. One theory even had it that there was no mystery at all about the identity of Mr W.H., claiming that the dedication was a simple printer's error and should have read `Mr W. Hall happinesse'. In 1766 a scholar called Thomas Tyrwhitt put forward a theory that Mr W.H. was in fact an Elizabethan boy actor, Willie Hughes, a theory based on several clearly signalled puns in the Sonnets, most evident in Sonnet XX, when Shakespeare puns on the surname Hughes in the seventh line: `A man in Hew, all Hews in his controwling'.

  The Portrait ofMr W.H. is a fleshing out by Oscar of Tyrwhitt's theory and is presented in the form of a complex story of love unravelled and revealed, a roman d clef where the real hero of the story is the spiritual and sexual love that men have for younger men, the love that dare not speak its name. It is the love that Shakespeare has for the boy actor, Willie Hughes; the love that Erskine, one of the protagonists, has for Cyril Graham, the discoverer of Willie Hughes; and the love that the anonymous narrator discovers within himself when he learns about Willie Hughes. The story is a powerful homage to this love which, despite centuries of denial, deceit, death, separation and suicide, triumphantly survives.

  Oscar had conceived the story in the autumn of the previous year, after Robbie had decided to leave Cambridge, and the two of them used to spend long hours in Oscar's Moorish study in Tite Street, smoking endless cigarettes and weaving wonderful fantasies about life, love and sex. After the publication of Mr W.H., Oscar wrote to Robbie to thank him for his part in bringing Willie Hughes to life. `Indeed the story is half yours, and but for you would not have been written.' It was a generous acknowledgement of Robbie's role not just in helping to create Willie Hughes, but also more broadly in stimulating Oscar's creativity. Meeting Robbie, loving Robbie, having sex with Robbie - and with other young men - and absorbing some of Robbie's joyous acceptance of his sexuality had fired Oscar's creativity.

  The inherent tensions and contradictions, the paradoxes and the perversities of leading a complicated double life, a life drenched with sexual longings and sexual satiations, being a husband, a father and a dedicated hunter of rare, wonderful and dangerous sex liaisons with young men were the perfect stimulus for Oscar's art. He worked in frenzied bursts of creativity. His output was prolific. Between 1887 and 1889, at the same time as editing the Woman's World, he was also turning out a prodigious number of freelance reviews. And in addition to his two long stories, The Canterville Ghost and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, Oscar had also published a volume of exquisite fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and two major essays: Pen, Pencil and Poison and The Decay of Lying. And now, seemingly effortlessly, he had produced The Portrait ofMr W.H.

  For those with eyes to see, for those who could read between the lines, much of Oscar's work seemed to have a strong,
all-pervasive homoerotic undertow, flirting with revelation and concealment, affirmation and denial, guise and disguise. As Oscar grew bolder in exploring and embracing his sexuality, this homoerotic strand emerged more strongly. In Pen, Pencil and Poison, his admiring biographical essay on Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the dandy, artist, forger and `subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age', Oscar glorifies Wainewright as an artist and a criminal par excellence. The combination of artist and criminal, writer and outlaw fascinated Oscar. It was a mantle he was eager to assume, especially now that the state had decreed with the passing of the Labouchere Amendment that he too was to be a criminal.

  In Pen, Pencil and Poison, Wainewright was graven in Oscar's own image. Oscar might have been describing himself when he wrote of Wainewright: `He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations ... and book-bindings, and early editions, and wide-margined proofs.' Just like Oscar, Wainewright was:

  determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves were well-known ... while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delighted distinction of being different from others.

  The description might have fitted Oscar perfectly, except that he wore pale lavender-coloured gloves and an antique scarab ring. Like Wainewright, Oscar had rich curly hair - even if the curls were artificially induced - and had fine, luminous eyes and large but wonderfully expressive white hands. Oscar shared Wainewright's delight in being very distinctly different from the common weal. Rather more worryingly, he also shared Wainewright's delight and fascination with danger. Oscar was already living dangerously; he flirted daily with the thrill of dangerous sex and the fear of discovery. Danger fired him up, gave form and shape to his life, added piquancy and colour, antidoting his great fear of the taedium vitae, the boredom, banality and ordinariness of life, its sheer tedium.

  And like Wainewright, Oscar was a man who `sought to be somebody, rather than do something. He recognised that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.' Most importantly, Oscar, again like Wainewright, `had that curious love of green which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals'. This was a coded and deliberate reference to sex between men. There was a widespread belief in late nineteenth-century Europe that one of the distinguishing characteristics of men who loved men was a preference for the colour green. Indeed, men who loved men themselves seemed equally convinced that their preference for green was in some way bound up with their sexuality.

  Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion details several case histories where men who love men claim that they have what Oscar called `that curious love of green': `Case VII' `remarks that he cannot whistle and that his favourite colour is green', and `Case XII' `has a special predilection for green: it is the predominant colour in the decorations of his room, and everything green appeals to him. He finds that the love of green ... is very widespread among his inverted friends.' Ellis himself was convinced that a preference for green was very marked among men who loved men and offered an historical precedent: `It has also been remarked,' he wrote, `that inverts exhibit a preference for green garments. In Rome cinaedi were for this reason called galbanati.' Cinaedus meant `catamite' and galbanatus meant `effeminate wearer of green clothes'. As a classical scholar Oscar would have been well aware of the symbolism of the colour green in ancient Rome. And rather closer in time and space, Oscar knew too that white carnations, artificially dyed green, were worn as badges of sexual preference by men who loved men in Paris. `The colour green and Hell,' he said `are both made for thieves and artists.'

  And yet The Portrait ofMr W.H. was even more audacious in its celebration of the love that dare not speak its name. Oscar was deliberately setting out to shock and undermine the literary and cultural amour propre of Victorian England by attempting to prove that Shakespeare, the nation's most venerated poet and playwright, had not just fallen in love but had actually had a sexual relationship with -a seventeen-year-old boy actor.

  Mr W.H. is a dazzling conjuring trick, telling three intertwined love stories simultaneously: the story of Shakespeare's love for Willie Hughes, the story of Erskine's love for Cyril Graham, and the story of the anonymous narrator's discovery of his love for young men. Cyril Graham is the young man who has decoded the secret of the Sonnets and tells his friend from Eton, Erskine, who is immediately enraptured by the theory that Shakespeare was in emotional and sexual thralldom to a beautiful boy actor `whose personality for some reason seems to have filled the soul of Shakespeare with terrible joy and no less terrible despair':

  Who was that young man of Shakespeare's day who, without being of noble birth or even of noble nature, was addressed by him in terms of such passionate adoration that we can but wonder at the strange worship, and are almost afraid to turn the key that unlocks the mystery of the poet's heart? Who was he whose physical beauty was such that it became the very cornerstone of Shakespeare's art; the very source of Shakespeare's inspiration; the very incarnation of Shakespeare's dreams?

  But, before he can be finally convinced, Erskine tells Cyril that they must find documentary evidence that Willie Hughes did, in fact, exist. Some weeks later, Cyril produces what he claims to be incontrovertible evidence of the existence of Willie Hughes in the form of-

  a full-length portrait of a young man in late sixteenth-century costume, standing by a table with his right hand resting on an open book. He seemed about seventeen years of age, and was of quite extraordinary personal beauty, though evidently somewhat effeminate. Indeed, had it not been for the dress and the closely cropped hair, one would have said that the face, with its dreamy, wistful eyes and its delicate scarlet lips, was the face of a girl.

  Was this the face of the boy actor so beloved of Shakespeare, the boy who inspired him with terrible joy and terrible despair? Erskine is convinced that Cyril has discovered the secret of the Sonnets and the secret of Shakespeare's greatest love. There are strong parallels, Erskine realises, with his own feelings for Cyril, who shares many of the elusive and attractive qualities of Willie Hughes. Cyril was `effeminate', `very languid in his manner', and `not a little vain of his good looks'. He was, Erskine says, `wonderfully handsome':

  People who did not like him, philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used to say that he was merely pretty; but there was a great deal more in his face than mere prettiness. I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner. He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere. It was due, I think, chiefly to his inordinate desire to please.

  Erskine has by now completely embraced the theory that Willie Hughes was the object of Shakespeare's passion - that is, until he discovers, quite by chance, that Cyril had the portrait of Willie Hughes forged. Erskine confronts Cyril, who admits the forgery but then commits suicide, offering his life, as he tells Erskine in his suicide note, `as a sacrifice to the secret of the Sonnets'. `It was a foolish, mad letter,' Erskine recalls:

  I remember he ended by saying that he intrusted to me the Willie Hughes theory, and that it was for me to present it to the world, and to unlock the secret of Shakespeare's heart.

  Erskine, who has as a result of the forgery lost his belief in Willie Hughes, recounts the strange tale of Cyril Graham and his theory about the identity of Mr W.H. to a young man, little more than a `boy', who is the anonymous narrator of the story. The narrator is enraptured by the theory. `I believe in Willie Hughes,' he declares rousingly, and sets out to find the proof that Cyril Graham could not find, becoming obsessed by a vision of the beautiful boy actor, Shakespeare's lover and his inspiration:

  His very name
fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How musically it sounded! Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare's passion, the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage, the delicate minion of pleasure, the rose of the whole world, the herald of the spring decked in the proud livery of youth, the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear, and whose beauty was the very raiment of Shakespeare's heart, as it was the keystone of his dramatic power?

  The young narrator tries to conjure up a vision of Willie Hughes in his mind, imagining him `as some fair-haired English lad whom in one of London's hurrying streets, or on Windsor's green silent meadows, Shakespeare had seen and followed'. As the narrator muses on Willie Hughes, a mysterious osmosis occurs. The more he dwells upon the sexual relationship between Willie Hughes and Shakespeare, upon `the mystery of his sin or of the sin, if such it was, of the great poet who had so dearly loved him', the more he realises that his own sexual longings are exactly those of Shakespeare. As he reads and re-reads the Sonnets, it seems to him that he is:

  deciphering the story of a life that had once been mine, unrolling the record of a romance that, without my knowing it, had coloured the very texture of my nature, had dyed it with strange and subtle dyes. Art, as so often happens, had taken the place of personal experience.