The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Oscar also believed that sex between men was natural and endemic among the working class. `What is called the vice of the upper classes is really the pastime of the working classes,' he proclaimed.

  Behind all the talk of comradeship, of democracy, of adhesiveness lay some uncomfortable truths. Whatever the sexual relations between the classes, they were rarely accompanied by any lasting emotional interactions. Working-class men and boys were fair game. They were there, Oscar declared, to serve genius. They made good bed partners, but rarely became long-term lovers, unless they had, like John Gray and Edward Shelley, achieved for themselves a simulacrum of middle-class identity which gave them an entree to the realm of the emotions as well as the realm of the erotic. Edward Carpenter's affair with George Merrill, and the fictional affair between the middle-class Maurice Hall and the working-class Alec Scudder in Maurice, were the exception rather than the rule.

  Many middle- and upper-class men were sexually attracted to working-class men and boys. They saw them as `rough trade', whose fascination lay in their dangerous masculinity, in their feral maleness, a maleness untrammelled and unfettered by any civilising or effeminising influences. `Manliness has become quite effeminate,' Oscar remarked in a deleted aphorism from `Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young', which he contributed to the Uranian magazine the Chameleon in 1894. Whatever philosophical or social virtues effeminacy might hold for Uranians, it was clear that when it came to sex, many Uranians craved what they saw as the unpredictable, unknowable, untameable, often violent and sometimes criminal masculinity of rough trade. Rough trade was, Oscar said, `all body and no soul'. That many bits of rough trade were predominantly heterosexual merely underlined their true masculinity and added spice to the frisson of danger. The attractions Alec Scudder held for Maurice were magnified by the fact that he was bisexual, equally at home, equally sexually competent with both women and men.

  Unlike John Addington Symonds, who demanded sex from his workingclass contacts as `a pledge of comradeship', Oscar never deluded himself that his relations with rough trade consisted of anything more than sensual and sexual excitement. He had a pure and perfect idealised love with Bosie, and he wanted an equally impure and erotic love with rough street boys, the rougher, the dirtier, the more dangerous the better. `I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations,' Oscar said. It was different, exciting, exotic and, most of all, addictive. Hunting rough trade and having sex with rough trade was `like feasting with panthers', Oscar said. `The danger was half the excitement.' He was straying into a parallel sexual universe, an `imperfect world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed'; a world populated by male prostitutes, blackmailers and criminals who were `the brightest of gilded snakes'. `Their poison,' he said, `was part of their perfection.'

  Oscar had a name for this coarse, formless world of unbridled lust. He called it `the mire': a dark, dirty morass, an erotic swamp peopled by the rough denizens of the demimonde. The mire both repelled and fascinated him. Oscar had sought to tread and chart its dark untrodden paths and had often fallen, `sprawling in the mire'. Bespattered and besmirched, he had tried to extricate himself, to escape, only to find himself sucked back into its gelatinous embrace. Oscar believed that the mire was his fate, his destiny. `His Doom' he called it, always with a capital D. In prison, he recalled this sense of impending, inexorable Doom that seemed to drive him and draw him ever closer to destruction. In all his relations with Bosie he discerned `not Destiny, merely, but Doom: Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood'. Oscar sought to enter the mire and consume it, knowing that he was, in turn, to be consumed by it. He was impelled by what Freud was later to christen the death drive: the ultimate paradox where life is experienced at its greatest intensity in the pursuit of danger, destruction and death. Oscar said he had been snared by the Greek goddess of retribution:

  Nemesis has caught me in her net: to struggle is foolish. Why is it that one runs to one's ruin? Vhy has destruction such a fascination? Why, when one stands on a pinnacle, must one throw oneself down? No one knows, but things are so.

  And yet, paradoxically, Oscar also recognised that for him a curious salvation lay in the mire. Just as Dorian Gray had visited the lowest dens of the East End to `cure the soul by means of the senses', so Oscar, in the rabid sexual abandonment of the mire, in the abnegation of self, of status, of reason and of morality, found a sense of ease and freedom, of escape. `Only in the mire can I know peace,' he admitted later. In the many petits morts, or little deaths, of the mire, Oscar searched for and found the poetic azure of oblivion, knowing full well that sooner or later, le grand mort, the great death would call him.

  By November 1892, Oscar had both embraced the Cause and embarked upon his exploration of the mire. Dangerous politics and dangerous sex were an explosive combination. The outcome would prove fatal.

  For love or money

  `What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a quest ion for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not: old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.'

  At the end of November 1892, Oscar and Constance rented Babbacombe Cliff, Lady Mount-Temple's pre-Raphaelite fantasy of a house near Torquay. They planned to spend the winter there, to get away from the London fogs which, according to Oscar, were getting worse every year. Oscar also needed, he said, peace and quiet in which to work. More importantly, for a while at least, he needed to get away from the erotic distractions and temptations of London. But, pleasant as Torquay was in the late autumn, Oscar quickly became bored. `Are there beautiful people in London?' he asked Robbie Ross plaintively:

  Here there are none; everyone is so unfinished. When are you coming down? I am lazy and languid and doing no work. I need stirring up.

  The ever-faithful Robbie did go down and spend a few days at Babbacombe. Oscar also invited the young actor Sydney Barraclough, who, against the wishes of the actor manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Oscar wanted to play the part of Gerald in the forthcoming production of A Woman of No Importance. Oscar's interest in Sydney clearly extended beyond the merely dramatic. `You are my ideal Gerald, as you are my ideal friend,' he wrote to Sydney from Babbacombe. `I want you down here: it is a lovely place, and you need rest and quiet and I need you too.'

  Despite his dalliance with Sydney, Oscar was missing Bosie desperately. They wrote to each other constantly, Oscar sending passionate love letters, of which only a handful survive. In early January, Bosie sent Oscar an exquisite sonnet he had written, `In Sarum Close', which neatly expresses and explains the strange amalgam of pure love and unbridled lust in their relationship. In the sonnet, Bosie writes how he is exhausted and disenchanted with sex merely for sex's sake, how he is `Tired of passion and the love that brings Satiety's unrest'. The sonnet asks Oscar to share the joys and sorrows of love:

  Oscar and Bosie were those `two neighbour jewels' in Love's coronet, who could love each other deeply and passionately and yet share `Love's burden'. In practice, sharing the burden of love meant not just sharing the compulsion to have sex with as many young men and boys as possible, it also meant, at its most prosaic and literal, sharing the young men and boys themselves - sometimes at the same time.

  Although Oscar would later slightingly refer to this sonnet of Bosie's as a poem `of the undergraduate school of verse', at the time he was rhapsodic and wrote in reply what was destined to become one of his most famous and controversial letters, signing it with his `undying love':

  My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.

  When Bosie received this letter from Oscar, he stuffed it in the pocket of the suit he was we
aring and promptly forgot all about it.

  Oscar was finding his time at Babbacombe Cliff irksome. He was spending more time than he was accustomed to with Constance and the children, and such unrelieved domesticity bored him to death. In January 1893, he decided to return to foggy London alone for a couple of weeks. Rehearsals for A Woman of No Importance were about to get under way, and his play Salome was about to be published. Or that was what he told Constance. In reality he was desperate for some mental and sexual stimulation. He could see Robbie. He could see Bosie, and he could call on his new friend, Alfred Taylor, for tea and beauties of an entirely novel and beguiling kind.

  Alfred Waterhouse Somerset Taylor was thirty years old when he met Oscar in the autumn of 1892. He was a good-looking man: tall, dark and clean-shaven, running a little to fat, but with a good-natured face and a beaming smile. He had been born a gentleman, the son of a wealthy cocoa manufacturer, and had been sent to Marlborough, from where he had been expelled after a few terms, after being caught, quite literally, with his pants down in the school lavatories with a much younger boy. When he came of age in 1883, he inherited a fortune of £45,000 and ran through it in eight years. At the time he met Oscar, he had rooms above a disused bakehouse in Little College Street, Westminster, which he rented for £3 a month, and he was living on the last remnants of his fortune, spending £40 or £50 a week, a huge amount of money, on boys. Within a year, he would be bankrupt.

  Taylor had never struggled with his sexual identity. He was a happy, rather camp, well-adjusted, feather-pated lover of young men. Later, when he was asked in court by Sir Frank Lockwood, `Was it not repugnant to your Public School idea, this habit of sleeping with men?' Taylor bravely stood his ground. `Not to me,' he replied. `Where there is no harm done I can see nothing repugnant in it.' He loved gossiping, parties, dressing up in drag - `for a lark' - and singing sentimental songs at the piano. Taylor had a particular friend, a `husband', in the person of Charles Spurrier Mason, a twenty-five-year-old male prostitute, with whom he went through a mock marriage service in 1893. Taylor wore drag and the couple exchanged rings and entertained friends to a wedding breakfast afterwards. Pierre Lout's excitedly reported the event to Andre Gide - `a marriage - a real marriage - between two of them, with an exchange of rings and so on'. But Oscar was cynical. `I hope marriage has not made you too serious?' he quipped to Charlie Mason. `It has never had that effect on me!'

  There were always boys and young men at Little College Street. Taylor's landlady, Mrs Grant, deposed that there was a steady stream of male visitors. She used to overhear conversations. Taylor would call his guests by their Christian names -'Charlie, dear' and `Dear boy'. To them he was Alf or Alfie. Alfred Taylor liked his boys rough, but he was not at all fussy. His great talent in life was his ability to pick boys up. His easy manners, his charm and his genuinely sympathetic nature were invaluable assets. He had some favoured hunting grounds: the Alhambra and the Empire, the notorious bar at the St James's Restaurant and the skating rink in Knightsbridge, where he would fall into conversation with likely-looking lads, especially those who were unemployed or who seemed to be at a loose end. He was a mother hen, always ready to listen to the problems of the boys he met, always ready to give them a bed for the night, the week or the month, and always ready with the gift of a few shillings, or a loan of a pound or two, and some sound advice. Since he had moved to Little College Street, Taylor had effectively been procuring boys for his friends. It was partly social, partly business. More often than not, a satisfied `friend' might bung him a fiver, or take him out for dinner, as a thank you for introducing him to a boy. But the money was always secondary for Taylor. He liked bringing people together, it gave him pleasure. If there was a little money as a result, to help stretch his tight budget, well, that was a bonus.

  Oscar was introduced to Alfred Taylor by Maurice Schwabe. There are conflicting accounts of how Oscar met Schwabe. Some say it was Bosie who introduced them, others that it was Robbie Ross. Schwabe had been at the first night of Lady Windermere's Fan and had struck up a friendship with Oscar. Like Taylor, Schwabe inclined towards plumpness and, according to one of the bits of rough trade he had slept with, was `a very girlish boy'. He was a `fat talkative queen with glasses and a pronounced giggle', recalled a bar keeper in Tangier who knew him in 1910. Schwabe took Oscar to one of Taylor's celebrated afternoon tea parties in Little College Street, a first-floor front with permanently shuttered and heavily draped windows, artificially lit with lanterns and heavily scented with pastilles. Taylor's landlady particularly noticed his fancy bed-linen. His pillowcases, she said, were expensively and elaborately decorated with lace. Oscar liked Alfred Taylor. Most people did. He was entirely without malice or guile. Above all, he was trusted by everyone he knew; by the boys he procured and by the gentleman he supplied with boys. He was discreet and he was on everybody's side.

  Taylor and Schwabe shared a penchant for butch young trade. Within a few days of meeting Oscar, Alfred Taylor picked up a man called Edward Harrington in the house of a friend, a schoolmaster called Court. Taylor invited Harrington back to Little College Street, where he stayed for two nights, sharing Taylor's bed, the only bed in his suite of rooms. `What was the attraction about Harrington?' Sir Frank Lockwood demanded during Oscar's second trial. `I don't know what his attraction was,' Taylor answered evasively. Harrington's attraction was, in fact, primarily sexual. He was in his midtwenties, tall, well-built and extremely attractive in a butch way. Taylor and Schwabe took him out to dinner and then introduced him to Oscar. The meeting was not a success. Harrington was far too masculine, far too manly for Oscar, who only wanted boyish young men.

  A few days later, towards the end of September 1892, in the bar at the Gaiety Theatre, Taylor picked up another young man who he thought might appeal to Oscar. Sidney Mavor was twenty and was hardly rough trade. He was slim and rather feminine with a slight cast in his eye. His friends called him `Jenny', and he had ambitions of going on the stage. He was the son of a veterinary surgeon and lived with his widowed mother in genteel penury in South Kensington. He worked in the City, in a small firm manufacturing and supplying lamp-wicks. According to jenny Mavor, Taylor was `very civil and friendly'. He asked jenny to come home with him, and they had sex together, even though the rather feminine jenny was not really Taylor's type. `Bread and bread' - as opposed to bread and butter, or even, in the case of working-class boys, bread and dripping - was a slang phrase used to describe sexual incompatibility between two men like Alf Taylor and Jenny Mavor who both preferred rough, butch men and boys. But Taylor certainly was not too fussy, and jenny clearly did not mind if he did.

  Jenny was invited back for tea parties. On 2 October, Taylor said to him, `I know a man in an influential position who could be of great use to you. He likes young men when they're modest and nice in appearance. I'll introduce you.' The man in the influential position was of course Oscar. `It was arranged that we should dine at Kettner's Restaurant the next evening,' Jenny testified later. `I called for Taylor, who said, "I'm glad you've made yourself pretty. Mr Wilde likes nice clean boys."'

  Dinner in a private room at Kettner's was a great success. Oscar liked jenny and, turning to Taylor at the evening's end, proclaimed regally, `Our little lad has pleasing manners. We must see more of him.' It's likely that Oscar saw everything that jenny had to offer that very night. They had sex together `in Oscar's room at the Albemarle Hotel', jenny said later. And a few days later he was surprised to receive a parcel at his home in South Kensington containing a silver cigarette case. It was inscribed inside: `Sidney from O. W. October 1892'. `It was quitea surprise to me!' Jenny said.

  Jenny Mayor's silver cigarette case had cost £4 l is 6d. It was an expensive gift and the first of many silver cigarette cases which Oscar presented to his lovers. `I have a great fancy for giving cigarette cases,' Oscar testified during his trial. He had given, he said, seven or eight of them to young men in 1892 and 1893. But Oscar was being economical with the truth. M
any more than that were presented to his sexual partners, though some of the recipients were not as lucky as jenny Mayor and received cigarette cases costing only k I. Bosie's, of course, as was his due, was made of solid gold. When Oscar was arrested and taken to Bow Street Police Station, a search of his pockets revealed writs for the non-payment of bills for silver cigarette cases.

  During Oscar's trial, the Evening News commented with particular disgust on how the trial had left the realms of literature and `penetrated the dim-lit perfumed rooms where the poet of the beautiful joined with valets and grooms in the bond of silver cigarette cases'. Cigarette cases were the sterling symbol of an erotic compact. There were strong links between smoking cigarettes and sucking cocks. `A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure,' Lord Henry Wotton had pronounced in Dorian Gray. `It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied.' And what was true for smoking cigarettes was also true for cock-sucking. It was exquisite and left one unsatisfied, hungry for more. When Pierre Lout's wrote to Andre Gide about the elegant customs and manners of Oscar and his disciples, he was charmed by the way `X', a young man to whom he had just been introduced, offered him a cigarette. `Instead of simply offering it as we do,' Lout's wrote, `he began by lighting it himself and not handing it over until after he had taken the first drag. Isn't that exquisite?' Lout's overlooked, or pretended to overlook, the homoerotic symbolism of the gesture. `They know how to envelop everything in poetry,' he said.

  A few weeks after he met jenny Mayor, on 18 November, Oscar and Bosie called by invitation at Little College Street for tea and to be introduced to Taylor and Schwabe's newest find: sixteen-year-old Fred Atkins. He was `pale-eyed and pimply-faced', a precocious and knowing cockney lad with lively and engaging manners. Maurice Schwabe had picked up Fred Atkins at the roller skating rink in Knightsbridge, blithely unaware that he was already a hardened young criminal, an experienced rent boy and an accomplished blackmailer. Schwabe found him delightful, as did Taylor. Both of them were sure Oscar and Bosie would like him too. They did. The five of them - Oscar, Bosie, Taylor, Schwabe and Atkins - went out to dinner that evening to the Florence restaurant in Rupert Street, where they had dinner in a private room. Oscar's behaviour at dinner was, according to Atkins, most unusual. `Mr Wilde kissed the waiter,' he testified in court. And Oscar, he said, kept making indecent gestures towards him with his tongue, and continually stroked his thighs. Fred and Oscar did not however sleep together that night. Fred went off to have sex with someone else, either Bosie or Schwabe. Oscar would have to wait his turn.