The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  While he was in prison, Oscar dropped dark hints that at least some of the charges against him were in fact committed by Bosie. In De Profundis, Oscar wrote that `the sins of another were being placed to my account. Had I so chosen, I could on either trial have saved myself at his expense, not from shame indeed, but from imprisonment.' Oscar alleged that the Marquis of Queensberry and his solicitors `carefully coached' the witnesses who were produced to testify against Oscar `not in reticences merely, but in assertions, in the absolute transference deliberate, plotted and rehearsed, of the actions and doings of someone else on to me'.

  While he was out on bail between his second and third trial, Oscar told Frank Harris that Jane Cotta's evidence was wrong. `It was not me they spoke about at the Savoy Hotel,' he told Harris. `It was . I was never bold enough. I went to see in the morning in his room.' Harris asked Oscar why on earth Sir Edward Clarke had not brought this out at the trial. `He wanted to,' replied Oscar. `But I would not let him. I told him he must not. I must be true to-my-friend. I could not let him.'

  Harris's version is backed up by Bosie's account of the affair. After giving in to Oscar's entreaties for him to go abroad just before the first trial, Bosie went to Calais, from where he telegraphed Sir Edward Clarke, `giving him certain information which I implored him to use, although it was compromising to myself, and again offering to give evidence'. Bosie's offer was peremptorily refused:

  In reply I got a `stern rebuke' from Wilde's solicitors, who informed me that my telegram was `most improper,' and that Sir Edward Clarke had been greatly upset by receiving it. I was solemnly adjured not to attempt any further interference, `which can only have the effect of rendering Sir Edward's task still harder than it is already'.

  Sir Edward Clarke was quite right to turn down Bosie's offer to take the blame for one of the alleged incidents at the Savoy. He was trying to defend Oscar by pretending that nothing improper had ever taken place there. If Bosie was prepared to admit that it was he, and not Oscar, who had sodomised at least one of the boys at the Savoy, it would undermine the entire foundation of Oscar's defence.

  Oscar's belief that he could have saved himself, had he so chosen, by naming Bosie as the culprit is only partly true. It may well have been the case that it was Bosie, and not Oscar, who had sodomised Charlie Parker, or that it was in Bosie's bed, and not Oscar's, that Jane Cotta saw the sleeping, sallow-skinned boy. But to prove that Oscar was innocent of one charge did not and could not exculpate him from the morass of other allegations. Oscar himself admitted that he `was not in prison as an innocent man'. After he came out of prison `nothing irritated him more than to meet - as he occasionally did - admirers who refused to believe that he was addicted to the vices for which he was condemned,' said Bosie. `This used to infuriate him.'

  Oscar and Bosie left the Savoy at the end of March. Bosie's father claimed that they had been asked to leave the hotel because of a sexual scandal - `a stinking scandal', Queensberry termed it. In his deposition to his solicitors, Queensberry said that he had been told by `a Lady' that Oscar and Bosie had been refused rooms at the Savoy because of their scandalous behaviour there during their stay in March 1893. Queensberry said that he was so concerned about the allegations that he went to see the manager of the Savoy, who denied the story, as well he might. The Savoy could not afford to have the faintest whiff of scandal clinging to its name. Better to deny the story altogether, than risk its promulgation.

  The Savoy came up again a year later, when Queensberry confronted Oscar in Tite Street. `You were both kicked out of the Savoy Hotel at a moment's notice for your disgusting conduct,' he said. `That is a lie,' retorted Oscar. But was it? Certainly, Oscar and Bosie never stayed at the Savoy again, although they continued to dine there. But their presence, it seemed, was unwelcome. Once when Frank Harris was dining at the Savoy, he thought he saw Oscar and Bosie leaving the dining room. `Isn't that Mr. Oscar Wilde?' he asked the head waiter, Cesari. `Yes,' said Cesari, `and Lord Alfred Douglas. We wish they would not come here; it does us a lot of harm.' `How do you mean?' asked Harris sharply. `Some people don't like them,' answered Cesari.

  As Oscar and Bosie started to work their way through the best and the worst of London's rent boys, as well as having sex with a variety of other young men who crossed their path, they were living Oscar's gospel of sexual self realisation to the full. According to Bosie, Oscar preached that it was the duty of every man to `live his own life to the utmost', to `be always seeking for new sensations', and to have what he called `the courage' to commit `what are called sins'. They certainly did not lack courage or daring. Thoughts of prosecution, of punishment and disgrace were far away. They were invulnerable and invincible, fearless warriors fighting for a Cause they believed sacred. Sex, they convinced themselves, was not so much a pleasure, as a duty, almost a sacrament. But even as they took their pleasures, gastronomic and sexual, the storm clouds were ominously gathering.

  The madness of kisses

  `The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policeman can see them. They are so far away from its that only the poet can understand them.'

  Oscar's prolonged absence from Tite Street was causing Constance acute unhappiness. She could perhaps understand his taking rooms at St James's Place so that he could work undisturbed by the endless interruptions of family life, and from where he could conveniently attend rehearsals for A Woman of No Importance. But she could hardly overlook the fact that her husband was living with a young man in an expensive suite of rooms at the Savoy and rarely - if ever - spent time with her and the children.

  Pierre Lout's visited Oscar at the Savoy several times during March 1893 and was an embarrassed witness when Constance turned up in Oscar's suite one morning, ostensibly to bring him his post from Tite Street. Neither she nor Lout's could have failed to notice that the bed looked as if it had been slept in by two people. Constance tried to persuade, to plead with Oscar to come home. There were, Lout's noted, tears in her eyes and tears trickling down her cheek when Oscar loftily explained that he could not return home: it was so long since he had been at Tite Street, he said, that he had quite forgotten the number of the house. Constance tried bravely to smile despite her distress, but it was a bad joke, and a cruel one. Pierre Lout's was shocked and disgusted by Oscar's insensitivity, by his downright cruelty. He told Henri de Regnier what he had seen and de Regnier quickly spread the word throughout literary Paris. Edmond de Goncourt confided to his diary for 30 April what de Regnier said when Oscar's name came up in conversation.

  'Ali! You don't know? After all, he doesn't attempt to conceal it. Yes, he admits to being a pederast. He told me once that he has been married three times in his life: once to a woman and twice to men! After the success of his play in London, he left his wife and three children and moved into a hotel where he lived conjugally with a young British lord'.

  It is hardly credible that Constance was unaware that her husband was cohabiting with Bosie at the Savoy. Whatever comforting half-truths about Oscar's fondness for young men she had forced herself to swallow in the past, she could hardly obliterate the evidence of her own eyes: the bed in which clearly two people had slept. Constance was powerless to do anything. She must have considered separation from Oscar, and perhaps even thought about divorce. In the months that followed, London was awash with gossip that Constance was going to divorce Oscar. The gossip reached the ears of Queensberry. `I now hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes,' he wrote to Bosie. `Is this true or do you not know of it?'

  But it is unlikely that Constance seriously considered divorcing Oscar. She knew if she cited Oscar's love affair with Bosie, or his sexual relations with other men, Oscar would be ruined and probably imprisoned. And Constance knew only too well that divorced women, however innocent, however wronged, still faced shame and social ostracism, as did the children of divorced parents. Besides which, Constance still loved Oscar, and the thought of takin
g any steps which might harm him was anathema to her. Constance decided that she would wait, wait for this particular infatuation with Bosie to burn itself out. After all, Oscar had had passionate friendships with young men before, and in every case the passion had cooled, the infatuation had faded into friendship. Oscar would, she felt sure, come back to her.

  Oscar had more pressing worries than the unhappiness of his wife. Both he and Bosie were being blackmailed, this time by Alfred Wood. Wood had stolen a bundle of letters after he had sex with Bosie in Oxford at the Mitre Hotel. One of Oscar's letters, the `madness of kisses' letter, was found by Wood in the suit which Bosie had given him to make him look respectable enough to dine at the Mitre. The others were filched from the splendid scarlet morocco writing case which ironically Oscar had given to Bosie to keep his compromising letters-in.-

  Seventeen-year-old Alfred Wood had been a clerk, but he was unemployed when he first met Oscar and Bosie through Alfred Taylor. By the time he stole Bosie's bundle of letters, he was well on the way to becoming a professional renter, a boy who sold his body for money and who was not averse to a little blackmail to supplement his income. Through Taylor, who knew and liked most of the boys on the game, Wood had met two of the most notorious and accomplished professional renters then working in London: Robert Cliburn and William Allen. Cliburn boasted that he had rented the Earl of Euston, who had figured so prominently in the Cleveland Street Scandal, and he had already served a prison sentence for blackmail. Cliburn and Allen recognised that the young, fair-haired and attractive Wood might be very useful to them. They cultivated him and told him how easy it was to make a little extra money from the gentlemen he slept with. All he had to do was to keep his eyes sharp open and pocket any letters he saw lying around. It was easy money, they said, and they would do all the dirty work.

  Wood was persuaded, and his first theft of letters was from Bosie in Oxford. Shortly after the theft, Wood showed his cache of compromising letters to Cliburn and Allen. There were four letters from Oscar in all, and Cliburn and Allen read them all before pocketing Oscar's `madness of kisses' letter. `This one's quite hot enough,' said Allen. Wood later claimed in court that Allen had `stolen' the letter from him. It was half true. Cliburn and Allen were wily and experienced renters in their mid-twenties. Alfred Wood was young, inexperienced and not particularly cunning. He stood no chance against Cliburn and Allen. But he kept the other three letters from Oscar, as well as those from Lucas D'Oyly Carte to Bosie, and decided to try and use them to make a little money on his own account.

  At some point in March, Wood told Alfred Taylor that he had some letters and wanted money for their return. He was in trouble, serious trouble, and wanted to go to America. He needed the money, he explained, `to get away from a certain class of person' - by which he meant Cliburn and Allen. Wood was naive but not stupid. He realised that Cliburn and Allen were dangerous and that he was being drawn ever deeper into their net, that he was being used by them as bait to entrap vulnerable men with a taste for teenage boys, or `chickens'.

  Taylor was distraught. It was he who had introduced Wood to Oscar and Bosie, and now they were being blackmailed by him. He went to see them and it was agreed that Oscar should approach his friend and solicitor Sir George Lewis, who had so ably dealt with matters when Bosie was being blackmailed a year earlier. It was the second time Oscar had asked Lewis to help him resolve a case of blackmail, and this time he himself was involved. It was a humiliating experience, and Oscar sensed Lewis's air of disapproval. Nevertheless, the business-like Lewis immediately despatched a stern solicitor's letter to Wood at his lodgings in Langham Street which produced little effect. Anguished entreaties from Alfred Taylor and a sheaf of telegrams finally induced Wood to go to Taylor's rooms at Little College Street one afternoon towards the end of March where he found Oscar. According to Wood, Oscar was kind and friendly and shook hands with him. Wood appeared to be suitably chastened. `I suppose you think very badly of me,' he said to Oscar, handing him the three letters which Oscar read straight away. The `madness of kisses' letter was not among them. `I don't consider these letters of any importance,' said Oscar. Wood repeated the story he had told Taylor about needing to get away from Cliburn and Allen. `I'm very much afraid of staying in London,' he said, `as Allen and other men are threatening me.' Oscar gave Wood £30, two £ 10 notes and two £5 notes, and apologised that it was not very much. He promised to send Wood a further £5 the following day and arranged to take him for a farewell lunch at the Florence, where they had oysters and champagne and said their goodbyes. When Wood sailed for New York on the S.S. Servia in midApril, Oscar must have heaved a huge sigh of relief.

  With Wood safely somewhere in mid-Atlantic, Oscar could give his full attention to the rehearsals for A Woman of No Importance, which was due to open in a week's time at the Haymarket Theatre. Oscar had attended rehearsals assiduously, much to the disgruntlement of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who resented what he saw as Oscar's patronising manner and endless interference in the production. Tree later told Oscar's younger son, Vyvyan, that Oscar was an `infernal nuisance' during rehearsals, continually interrupting the proceedings with minor objections and impractical suggestions. As the first night drew near, Tree came across Oscar looking through the playscript and asked him what he was doing. `I am making some slight changes in the text,' replied Oscar. `But after all, who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?'

  Despite Oscar's interference and his tamperings - perhaps even because of them - A Woman of No Importance was a great success. Oscar boasted that he had had to turn away `royalties and bigwigs', such was the pressure for tickets for the premiere. `The first night was very brilliant in its audience,' Max Beerbohm told Reggie Turner:

  Balfour and Chamberlain and all the politicians were there. When little Oscar came on to make his bow there was a slight mingling of hoots and hisses, though he looked very sweet in a new white waistcoat and a large bunch of little lilies in his coat. The notices are better than I had expected: the piece is sure of a long, of a very long run, despite all that the critics may say in its favour.

  That evening Oscar attended a supper given by Blanche Roosevelt, who had invited the celebrated palmist Cheiro to read the hands of her guests. Cheiro sat behind a curtain so that he was unable to identify whose palms he was reading. Oscar, always hugely superstitious, was one of those who was eager to find out what fate held in store. Cheiro later recalled that Oscar's hands struck him as rather fat, and he had no idea that they belonged to one of the most talked-about men in London. His reading was starkly accurate:

  I pointed this case out as an example where the left had promised the most unusual destiny of brilliancy and uninterrupted success, which was completely broken and ruined at a certain date in the right. Almost forgetting myself for a moment, I summed up all by saying, `the left hand is the hand of a king, but the right that of a king who will send himself into exile.'

  Oscar was deeply struck by Cheiro's reading. `At what date?' he asked rather quietly. `A few years from now,' Cheiro answered, `between your forty-first and forty-second-year.'-Oscar left the party abruptly.

  There was fresh trouble the very next morning. Beerbohm Tree was handed a letter written in large, rather ungainly clerkly handwriting on the cheapest writing paper. At the top of the letter was written `Kindly give this letter to Mr Oscar Wilde and oblige yours', followed by a set of initials. Written out beneath this message was a copy of Oscar's `madness of kisses' letter to Bosie. Tree, who must have been aware of Oscar's predilections for young men, handed this strange epistle to him. When he read this copy of his love letter to Bosie, Oscar was bewildered, shocked and sick with anxiety. After paying Alfred Wood to disappear to New York, Oscar had hoped that he had extricated himself from a squalid but not too serious blackmailing incident. Now he realised that the blackmail was not resolved. Far from it. But who was blackmailing him? Had Alfred Wood changed his mind about New York and returned to London to haunt him? Or had someone else got hold of his l
etter to Bosie? Tree wanted to know what it all meant. He thought - rightly - that the letter spelt trouble.

  Oscar was not kept in suspense about the identity of the blackmailer for long. A day or so later, as he left the theatre by the stage door, Robert Cliburn approached him and introduced himself. He told Oscar that he wanted to speak to him about a letter in the possession of a friend of his. Oscar had to think on his feet. He decided to bluff it out. `I told him that I was rehearsing and could not be bothered, and that really I did not care tuppence about it,' Oscar remembered. Cliburn departed but Oscar knew that he would be back before too long. There were anxious and anguished discussions between Oscar and Bosie. What to do? Pay up and hope for the best? Or pay up and pay again and again and again? They decided on a bold strategy. The letter was decidedly homoerotic in sentiment but not explicitly obscene. Oscar had couched his feelings of love in purple, poetic prose, sprinkled with fine classical allusions to Apollo and Hyacinthus. Why not pretend it was a kind of prose poem, written as a draft and sent to Bosie in his capacity as editor of the Spirit Lamp? Better still, get Pierre Lout's to translate it into French verse and publish it as soon as possible. As an expression of his feelings for Bosie the letter was lethal; but as a published prose poem, it was, well, poetic. Nobody had ever been blackmailed over a poem, especially a published poem.

  The plan was speedily put into operation. Pierre Lout's was happy to translate the letter into French, though he was probably not privy to the real reason why he was doing it. Louys's translation appeared in the May issue of the Spirit Lamp under the heading `A letter written in prose poetry by Mr Oscar Wilde to a friend and translated into rhymed poetry by a poet of no importance'. The whole operation had been accomplished in less than a fortnight. Now Oscar was ready for the next encounter with the blackmailers. This time it was Allen who called at Tite Street. Calling on Oscar at home was designed to put the frighteners on him.