Coquelin: Et ce que les bourgeois appellent le beau?
Ego: Cela n’existe pas.¶32
These were notions that Sherard struggled to grasp. After their first dinner together, he had ostentatiously stubbed his cigar-end into his coffee-stained saucer, demanding where is the ‘beauty’ in that? There had been – he recalled – a rare ‘glint of ill humour’ behind Wilde’s listless reply, ‘Oh, yes. It makes quite an effective brown.’ The beauty of ugliness was a paradox that Wilde wanted to explore, not explain.33
He was not alone. Bourget, with whom Wilde discoursed over the Left Bank café tables, had just published his Essais de Psychologie Contemporain, in which he identified Baudelaire as the dominant influence on the rising generation of Parisian poets and writers. He could lay out for Wilde the details of this new artistic tendency. A movement was becoming apparent, inspired by the dark tones and corrupted forms of Les Fleurs du mal, as well as by Gautier’s celebrated introduction to the 1868 edition of the book (the only edition then in print). In his notice Gautier had described Baudelaire’s poetic idiom as ‘the style of decadence’ – ‘a style that is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language’ – a style perfectly adapted for expressing the shifting moods, over-subtle sensations and ‘singular hallucinations’ of the modern spirit. Gautier likened it to ‘the language of the later Roman Empire, already mottled with the greenness of decomposition… the inevitable and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where factitious life has replaced the natural life, and developed in man unknown wants’.34
For the febrile Baudelaire-obsessed young poets who gathered at Le Chat Noir to drink absinthe and discuss their work, these were compelling ideas. ‘Decadence’ became their rallying call and their ideal. They adopted its distinctive taints of pessimism and nervous hypersensitivity, its stylistic complexity, and its fascination with depravity. They celebrated it in the novels of the Goncourts, and found it too in the poetry and person of Paul Verlaine. The thirty-nine-year-old Verlaine – balding, satyr-faced, alcoholic and homosexual – had recently returned to Paris after over a decade of self-imposed exile, to find that his three early volumes of Baudelarian verse, published in the 1860s, were rather less well remembered than his violent and doomed affair with the young Arthur Rimbaud. He was eagerly taken up by the young ‘Decadents’. They encouraged his writing and published his poems.
Wilde and Sherard met Verlaine one evening, over his absinthe, at the café Françoise Première. Although Wilde held – and maintained – a huge reverence for the French poet, their first encounter was not a great success. Wilde’s was distressed by the shabbiness of Verlaine’s broken-down appearance, while the brilliant flow of his own talk was wasted on the childlike French poet. Verlaine, for his part, was irritated that Wilde failed to offer round his expensive-looking cigarettes.35
Less depressing, but even more alarming, was the poet Maurice Rollinat, author of the recently published Les Névroses. A fixture at the Chat Noir cabaret, he would sit – gaunt, pale, wreathed in his mop of black hair – and accompany himself on the piano while declaiming poems of murder, rape, theft, parricide, sex, sacrilege, disease and live burial. Some considered him superior even to Baudelaire. He was both a drug addict and a diabolist. Wilde read his verses with interest and admiration, and became fascinated by the poet’s ‘ravaged personality’.36
After they met, Wilde copied down several of his aperçus: ‘Je ne crois pas au progress: mais je crois à la stagnation de la perversité humaine’ (‘I do not believe in progress: but I do believe in the stagnation of human perversity’); ‘Il n’y a q’une forme pour le beau mais pour chaque chose chaque individu a un formule: ainsi on ne comprend pas les poètes’ (‘There is only one form for the beautiful, but for each thing every person has a formula: hence poets are not understood’); ‘Il me faut les rêves, le fantastique; j’admire les chaises Japonais parce-que ils n’ont pas était faits pour s’asseoir’ (‘I need dreams, and the fantastic; I admire Japanese chairs because they were not made for sitting on’). He liked, too, Rollinat’s notion of ‘music continuing the beauty of the poetry without its idea’.37
Wilde invited Rollinat to dinner, together with Sherard, in his rooms at the Hôtel Voltaire; after the meal he persuaded him to recite his macabre ‘Soliloque de Troppmann’ – an imaginative recreation of the serial killer’s thoughts as he carries out his crimes. The performance was lent additional horror by Rollinat’s wild gestures and mounting nervous excitement. Wilde much enjoyed the occasion. Sherard was disturbed by what he considered to be Rollinat’s wilful course of self-destruction. He could not understand why Wilde did not intervene. The next morning, as they were crossing the Pont des Arts, he asked, ‘If you saw a man throw himself into the river here, would you go after him?’ ‘I should consider it an act of gross impertinence to do so,’ Wilde replied.38**
Under the pervading influence of Baudelaire and Les Décadents, Wilde took up again his idea of writing a poem about the Sphinx (or ‘Sphynx’, as he spelled it). He had made a beginning during his previous visit to Paris and the Hôtel Voltaire, and went back to it now, refashioning it in a self-consciously decadent mode, rich in jewelled polysyllables, monstrous images, erotic suggestion and recondite reference.
Bourget, in his Théorie de la décadence, had suggested that ‘a style of decadence’ effected the disintegration of the whole into its parts ‘the unity of… the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word’. Wilde embraced this idea. He had always loved words for their own sake, lingering over their sounds with sensual relish. Like Poe, he believed that their ‘musical value’ was greater than their ‘intellectual value’. And ‘The Sphinx’ – like Poe’s ‘The Raven’ – is a poem dominated by strange and sonorous words.
Wilde compiled lists of them – ‘amenalk’ ‘chameleon’ ‘hippogryph’ – and then sought to fix them into place. He laboured over the task, a craftsman of letters. Then, as he walked the boulevards, he would rehearse and refashion the ringing phrases. To Sherard’s surprise, he announced that a rhyming dictionary was ‘a very useful accessory to the lyre’ – though he also expected his friend to contribute to the game. ‘Why’, he would demand, when they met, ‘have you brought me no rhyme from Passy?’ Sherard was made proud and happy when, for a wanting tri-syllable ending in ‘ar,’ he produced the word ‘nenuphar.’ It was duly installed at the end of the couplet:
Or did huge Apis from his car leap down and lay before your feet
Big blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured nenuphar?39
Still in decadent mode, but turning from the phantasmal realm to the sordid realities of the modern metropolis, Wilde also composed ‘The Harlot’s House’ – in which the traffic of lust was reduced to a danse macabre performed by marionettes:
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.
Paris was a city of sex and sin. But Wilde seems to have directed almost all of his erotic energies into his verse. Sherard was amazed that, during their six weeks together, Wilde appeared to have only a single sexual encounter – picking up a cocotte at the Eden Music Hall one evening. The next day, when Sherard called at the Voltaire, Wilde’s first words to him were, ‘Robert, what animals we are.’ For Wilde, sex – the secret of the Sphinx – seemed to be a destructive force: ‘You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be.’40††
Wilde had entertained Rollinat at the Hôtel Voltaire, rather than at a restaurant, because he was running short of ready money. By the end of April his American earnings were spent. There was nothing to be expected from his Keely’s Perpetual Motion Co. shares.41 And he had still not heard back from Mary Anderson about ‘the Duchess of Bally-Padua’ (as Willie referred to it). Seeking to force the issue, he sent the actress a telegram ask
ing for her decision.42
Sherard was with him at the Hôtel Voltaire when he received the answer later that same day. A petit bleu cablegram was delivered as they sat smoking after lunch. Wilde read it without any show of emotion – only tearing a little piece off the form, rolling it into a pellet and putting it in his mouth, a little unconscious act that often accompanied his reading. He then passed the telegram over to Sherard, remarking, ‘This, Robert, is rather tedious.’ Anderson had rejected the manuscript. It was an awful reverse. He had founded so many hopes and expectations – both artistic and financial – upon the play, hopes that had been encouraged by Anderson and Griffin; he had worked so hard on the manuscript. But, if the blow to his pride was a heavy one, he absorbed it. He turned the conversation at once to other matters and did not mention the telegram again.43
They would not, though, be ‘dining with the duchess’ that evening. Wilde proposed instead a modest ‘choucroute garnie at Zimmer’s’. But Sherard, feeling for his friend, insisted that Wilde must – for once – come as his guest to ‘a little place on the other side of the water, where they don’t do you too badly’. He then led Wilde through circuitous byways to the unpretentious side door of the Café de Paris. Only when they pushed through into the gilt-and-plush glory of the great salle did Wilde realize where they were. ‘Quite a nice little place,’ he observed. And they maintained the joke throughout the evening, considering the grand restaurant as a humble marchand des vins. They went on to the Folies-Bergère, where Sherard had been given a box. But after not many minutes, Wilde suggested they leave. He had felt too many eyes upon him. ‘There are occasions,’ he remarked, ‘on which a loge is a pillory.’ It was the only indication that he was upset.44
A few days later a letter arrived from Anderson to confirm her verdict. She had returned the play to Wilde’s London address. ‘I could’, she told him, ‘under no circumstances produce your play at the time mentioned in the contract… The play in its present form, I fear, would no more please the public of today, than would Venice Preserved [by Thomas Otway] or [Victor Hugo’s 1833 play] Lucretia Borgia. Neither of us can afford a failure now, and your Duchess in my hands would not succeed, as the part does not fit me. My admiration of your ability is as great as ever. I hope you will appreciate my feelings in the matter.’45
Having deliberately set out to achieve a ‘modern idea’ in ‘an antique form’, it was galling to be told the effect was akin only to the fusty unplayable works of Restoration tragedy and early Victor Hugo. The criticism was harsh. Wilde refused to acknowledge it. He had too much faith in his own play, and his own talent. He really did believe the Duchess was the chef d’œuvre of his youth.46 Anderson’s rejection might be a blow to his amour propre, but he would recover. A way forward was suggested by her claim that it was in her hands that the play would not succeed – as the part did not fit her. Wilde would have to find other, fitter, hands to take up the challenge. That, however, could not be achieved at once, and in the meantime there was the sudden, irretrievable ‘loss’ of an expected $4,000 (£800) to be faced. Wilde’s literary life in Paris would have to come to an end.
Although he still had the prospect of Vera before him in August, he began to think of other practical schemes for earning money. Schemes for spending money remained always before him: with typical generosity he provided Sherard with the cash to return to England to face a family crisis. Wilde took up again the idea of lecturing. It was the field in which he had achieved his greatest success thus far. There was already the possibility of an Australian tour for later in the year, after Vera had opened in New York. But England, too, he recognized, might have potential.
As to subject matter, the notion of giving a talk based on his American experiences had been mooted even while Wilde was in the States, and it had followed him back across the Atlantic. During his time in Paris he began to work up his American anecdotes. He amused Goncourt, when they met again – chez de Nittis – with his ‘tall stories’ of life out west.47 And at a dinner hosted by the expatriate journalists and artists of the ‘Pen and Pencil Club’, Wilde set the company ‘roaring’ with an after-dinner speech about transatlantic life. The tale of the Leadville saloon, with its sign admonishing ‘Please do not shoot the pianist; he is doing his best’, was the hit of the evening.48 Newspapers were soon reporting that Wilde was ‘preparing a lecture for an English audience’.49
* ‘My drama? It is of style only. Hugo and Shakespeare have used up all the subjects between them: it is impossible to be original – even in sin; thus there are no emotions, only extraordinary adjectives. The end of the play is quite tragic – my hero at the moment of his triumph makes an epigram that falls flat, so he is condemned to be an Academician with forced speeches.’
† ‘Poetry is idealized grammar’; ‘The artist in poetry, and the poet; two very different things: c.f. Gautier [the former] et Hugo [the latter].’ A further, more mysterious, epigram ran, ‘Il me faut des lions dans des cages dorées: c’est affreux, après la chair humaine les lions aiment l’or, et on ne le leur donne jamais. (O.W.)’ [‘I need lions in gilded cages: it’s awful, after human flesh, lions love gold, and no one ever gives it to them.’]
‡ Wilde was delighted by the remark of one of the guards at the Louvre: when asked for directions to the Old Masters, they had replied, ‘Les maîtres anciens? C’est les momies, n’est-ce pas?’ – directing the inquirer towards the Egyptian Mummies.
§ Strange pets were a feature of Parisian literary life. Wilde was curious to learn of a gentleman, Count Robert de Montesquiou, who had a gilded tortoise, studded with emeralds, declaring that he, too, wanted ‘des bibelots vivants’. And it was perhaps these examples that inspired Wilde later to acquire a pet snake; Mrs Jopling recalled opening her studio door one day to find him outside with it ‘twisted around his neck’.
¶ ‘What is civilization, Mr. Wilde?’ / ‘The love of beauty.’ / ‘What is beautiful?’ / ‘What bourgeois call the ugly.’ / ‘And what do the bourgeois call the beautiful?’ / ‘That does not exist.’
** Rollinat’s recitation was not the evening’s only bizarre entertainment. Wilde, always interested in human dramas, had given some money to a male dancer from the Bal Bullier, who wanted to escape the ‘depths of Parisian vice’ and return to his native Brittany to join the navy; the young man appeared at the end of the dinner, anxious to show off the new suit that Wilde’s funds had enabled him to buy for his journey home. And as an expression of thanks, he insisted on dancing, for the three dinner companions, a pas seul ‘of amazing grace and agility’.
†† The example of his brother would not have encouraged Wilde to visit prostitutes. Willie wrote to Wilde in Paris, asking him to ‘Go and burn a candle for me at some saint’s shrine who… knew remorse and hated harlots. Can’t you find out some battered old Carmelite – some saintly swash-buckler that would teach me anodynes and sleeping-draughts and potions that would kill the past?’
2
First Drama
‘Never mind, Oscar, other great men have had their dramatic failures.’
willie wilde
Back in London by the middle of May, Wilde defied the imperatives of his unhappy financial situation and resumed his old rooms in Charles Street. In an effort to bring in some immediate funds, he did write to Steele Mackaye giving a glowing account of The Duchess of Padua – omitting to mention Mary Anderson’s rejection of the piece – and asking for repayment of $200 he had loaned. It is uncertain, though, and perhaps unlikely, that the money was returned. As a more effective expedient he pawned, probably not for the first time, his Berkeley gold medal.1
Wilde was ready to invest in his own play. He paid to have twenty copies of The Duchess printed; the title page described him as ‘Author of “Vera” etc.’ – and the play as ‘A Tragedy of the XVI Century, Written in Paris in the XIX Century’. In the left-hand top corner was the legend ‘Op.II’. The scripts were sent out in the hope of securing interest in a production, but there were no i
mmediate offers. If Lawrence Barrett really had expressed an interest in the play the previous year, he did not follow it up now. The one extant reply is from the painter Millais, who wrote, ‘I read your play with great interest and I am sure it would be a success if put on the stage. The plot is admirable as are the delineations, but the dialogue might be improved in many parts.’2
Wilde refused to allow such setbacks to dent his pose of buoyant self-assurance. He plunged back into ‘the splendid swirl and whirl’ of London life. He had been away from the capital for almost a year and half, and was determined to catch up. There were ‘at homes’ and tea parties, receptions and dances. He attended breakfasts with Whistler, dinners chez George Lewis, and a banquet for Henry Irving.3 ‘I am hard at work being idle,’ he informed Sherard, ‘late midnights and famishing morrows follow one another.’ Society, he declared, ‘must be amazed and my Neronian coiffure has amazed it’.4 Laura Troubridge kept her amazement in check: ‘[Wilde] is grown enormously fat,’ she confided to her diary, ‘with a huge face and tight curls all over his head – not at all the aesthetic he used to look.’ She was no more impressed by his new manner: ‘He was very amusing and talked cleverly, but it was all monologue and not conversation… He is vulgar, I think, and lolls about in, I suppose, poetic attitudes with crumpled shirt cuffs turned back over coat sleeves!5 A few people were prepared to interrupt the monologue. The writer Augustus Hare was amused to note, at one reception, when Wilde launched into a torrent of talk ‘intended to be very startling’, he was brought up short by the elderly Mrs Duncan Stewart saying quietly, ‘You poor dear foolish boy! How can you talk such nonsense.’6
Amid the social swirl, Wilde sought out Constance Lloyd. During his absence in America, and then Paris, Lady Wilde had taken care to maintain the connection. Constance and her brother Otho had attended several of her ‘at homes’. Otho found the occasions rather dizzyingly unconventional but he did note that his hostess had taken a fancy to his sister, and – ‘despite all her oddities’ – was ‘a kind friend to girls… especially if [like Constance] they have brains’7. And it was at one of Lady Wilde’s salons, in mid-May, that Oscar and Constance met again. The old rapport was immediately re-established. ‘Oscar Wilde had a long talk with Constance,’ Otho reported; ‘it was of art, as usual, and of scenery.’ Wilde greatly amused Otho by talking of ‘that dreadful place, Switzerland, so vulgar with its ugly big mountains, all black and white, like an enormous photograph’.8
Oscar Page 38
