4
The Best Society
‘A man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world.’
oscar wilde
One afternoon, towards the end of June, Lionel Johnson called at Tite Street, bringing with him a friend: the twenty-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of the celebrated Marquess of Queensberry (renowned for codifying the rules of boxing). Douglas – a contemporary, and a bedfellow, of Johnson’s at both Winchester and Oxford, had sought the meeting, having been completely enraptured by The Picture of Dorian Gray. He had read the novel straight through a dozen times, and was anxious to meet the author. Wilde greeted his two undergraduate admirers in the ground-floor ‘library’ and dazzled them with his talk. He, for his part, though, was somewhat dazzled too – by the fair-haired, fair-complexioned, youthful beauty of Lord Alfred. Beside his looks, Douglas was also conspicuously charming: he had poetic ambitions; he admired Wilde’s work; he said amusing things; he made a good impression on Constance when they went up to the drawing room to see her; and he had a title. And, maybe, even at that first meeting, he hinted at his ‘frank paganism’ and enthusiasm for sex with other young men. Wilde was certainly intrigued and excited.1
A friendship was immediately initiated, no different from the many other friendships that Wilde began with young, intelligent literary admirers. Douglas was invited to lunch at the Lyric Club a few days later, and presented with a copy of the deluxe edition of Dorian Gray, inscribed ‘Alfred Douglas, from his friend who wrote this book, Oscar. July 91’. And there were perhaps a couple of other meetings over the summer. According to Douglas’s later account, from the time of their second meeting, Wilde ‘made “overtures” to me’, but was rebuffed (Douglas’s own sexual tastes were, as he put it, all towards youth and softness). Such refusals, however, did nothing to mar the burgeoning friendship.2
Lunching with a lord was not the height of Wilde’s social success that summer. Indeed the season of 1891 had the aspect of a triumphal progress. Wilde’s literary successes had opened new doors. He and Constance were invited to a succession of grand country house parties at Taplow Court, Wilton and Wrest. There were dinners in Carlton House Terrace and select group excursions to the London theatre.
Wilde owed all this to the interest of Ettie Grenfell, the wife of his Oxford contemporary Willie Grenfell, and the mistress of Taplow Court. Around the vivacious twenty-four-year-old society hostess there gravitated an extraordinary group of inter-connected friends and cousins, known – to themselves and others – as the ‘Souls’ (because, it was claimed, they spent all their time talking, not about politics, but about their ‘souls’). In the conventional world of British society they were exceptional in being not only rich and aristocratic, but also intelligent and interesting. Among the leading lights were George Wyndham; his sister, Lady Elcho; her sometime lover, Arthur Balfour; the irrepressible young Margot Tennant; Harry Cust (renowned for his ‘random flashes of wit’);3 the poet Wilfrid Blunt; St John Brodrick (whom Wilde had so amused when crossing the Atlantic in 1883); and George Curzon.
Wilde was thrilled to find himself drawn into this charmed and elevated circle. He had, it seemed, reached a new social empyrean, beyond even that inhabited by the sickly Duke of Newcastle and the reprobate Lord Francis Hope. And it was, as ever, the women who welcomed him. The men, jealous of their caste, were not entirely to be trusted. At the same moment that Ettie Grenfell was proposing outings and sending invites, Curzon – Wilde’s supposed friend – was complaining of her ‘pursuit of notoriety in any shape (if associated with cleverness)’: it had, he regretted, already led to ‘the decadence of our circle by the introduction of the “Osquiths”’ – a term he had coined by combining the Oscar Wildes and the Herbert Asquiths. He was furious that ‘Ettie’ had invited these ‘new guns’ – together with the (even less socially elevated) Beerbohm Trees – to a great Sunday party at Taplow. As Curzon lamented to the American diplomat Harry White, ‘It means the dissolution of the fairest and strongest band of friends ever yet allied by ties of affection.’ He urged White to capsize the interlopers during the days’ punting, in the hope of drowning them.4
Wilde escaped undrowned from the Taplow party (on 31 May), although Ettie would later recall his ‘stepping in mid-river’ from one punt to another ‘with heavy oscillations’ and Mrs Beerbohm Tree hailing his arrival in her boat with the ‘delicious greeting’ ‘Welcome, little stranger.’5 He passed a delightful day, telling stories and showing off. Another guest remembered him, together with Balfour, Harry Cust and others, sitting on the Taplow lawn, talking over ‘the most striking and impressive event’ that each of them had witnessed; Wilde claimed that ‘what had impressed him most in life was seeing a French widow in the heaviest crepe weeds fishing by the side of a canal!’.6
The undercurrent of animus was perhaps more detectable when Wilde spent a bachelor weekend at Crabbet Park – his introduction to Wilfrid Blunt’s select but informal ‘Crabbet Club’. The days of tennis and talk culminated in evenings of post-prandial oratory and competitive verse making.* As part of the process of Wilde’s ‘election’ to the club, Curzon acted as devil’s advocate, putting forward reasons why Wilde might be ineligible for membership. Drawing on their shared Oxford history, he argued that Wilde had been guilty of doing ‘serious work’ by reading the lessons in a surplice as a demy at Magdalen. Wilde countered this with the claim, ‘I always read the lesson with an air of scepticism, and was invariably reproved by the Warden after Divine Service for “levity at the lectern”’.7
Curzon then began an assault ‘bristling with innuendoes and sneering side-hits at strange sins’. Although the press coverage of Dorian Gray the previous year had created a tenuous link between the ‘unhealthy’ details of the story and the possible sympathies of the author, Curzon, and his circle, had – it seems – actual knowledge of Wilde’s clandestine sexual interests and activities. Harry White, sympathizing with Curzon over the dilution of the Souls’ circle, had remarked, ‘I must say, I’m inclined to draw the line at Oscar Wilde about whom everyone has known for years.’ Blunt felt Curzon’s attack went too far, and was inclined to intervene. But Wilde rose from his chair, and delivered ‘an amusing and excellent speech’. Drawing on the arguments he had mapped out for his extended version of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, he made an impassioned defence of the ideal friendship – both creative and romantic – that can exist between a man and a youth. The debate continued long, and though the ‘Curzon–Wilde duel’ was remembered as being brilliant, its ‘ferocity’ was noted too. The other club members looked on with a mixture of ‘hilarity and disquiet’ as Wilde indicted Curzon’s intellectual mediocrity and his toiling hard for a second-class degree as a prelude to a second-class career. Blunt was relieved that both antagonists kept their temper. But he recognized that the occasion had been an uncomfortable one for Wilde (despite urgings from Blunt, Wilde never returned to Crabbet).8
The house party at Wilton, with Blunt’s great friend the Earl of Pembroke, was less charged with hostile undercurrents, but Wilde was expected to play up to the role of court jester. The composer Hubert Parry, a fellow guest, recalled him as ‘the centre of attraction’ throughout the stay. During a week full of ‘the clatter of society’ – he ‘talked incessantly’, devoting himself to ‘tête-à-têtes’ with the various ladies during the day, or entertaining groups of ‘entranced listeners’ with his stories and paradoxes. In the evening, after dinner, when ‘a sort of symposium’ would form in the smoking room, George Wyndham (a fellow Crabbet Club member) would direct the discussion to make Wilde talk more generally. Parry thought Wilde sometimes ‘amusing, once or twice, brilliant, often fatuous… at his best about art and literature, and thoroughly idiotic about politics and social questions’.
He considered that Wilde’s ‘great gift is perfect assurance – truly brazen when he is talking nonsense. For when he is quite tired out he trusts to his deliberate manner of slow enunciation to carry off
perfectly commonplace remarks. One evening when he was quite exhausted with successive tête-à-têtes, the smoking-room symposium formed itself as usual with George Wyndham as leader. G.W. really did all the talking, and all O.W. could do was to reiterate very slowly, when reference was made to somebody, or another, “How old is he?” at which the assembly looked uncommonly interested.’9
Wilde does not seem to have made any effort to charm Parry – who, by the end of week, ‘thoroughly detested him’. The composer did, however, make friends with Constance, who, seemingly unsettled by the gathering momentum of her husband’s successes – both literary and social – as much as by his divergent sexual interests, was increasingly left trailing in his wake. Parry found her ‘a very strange person, who ha[d] abnegated all balance of mind and all self-control, but [was] at the same time kind, natural and willing to serve her friends at any moment’.10
A week later at Wrest Park, the Bedfordshire home of Lord and Lady Cowper, in another Souls-dominated throng, the pattern was repeated, with Wilde once again the centre of attention. One fellow visitor recalled him sitting on the lawn ‘surrounded by a large audience of ladies’ telling them stories. Among his improbable conceits was that there should be ‘a Form of Prayer used for a Baronet’.11 And perhaps it was at Wrest, over tea, that he astounded the company by suddenly tearing off the petals from a magnificent rose that his hostess was passing round for everyone to admire. As a ‘tremor of indignation’ rose against this sacrilege, he quelled it with the explanation that, ‘it would have been too sad to see such a rose wither’.12 Wilde’s confidence in his powers, and sense of his own success, was made manifest when he came to sign the visitors’ book. Rather than inscribing his name on the same page as the rest of the party, he took a fresh leaf, writing his name towards the top and then executing an immense flourish so that no other name could be written below.13
He celebrated his new social prestige in other ways too. Preparing his second collection of fairy tales, The House of Pomegranates, for the press, he elected to dedicate each of the four stories to a different and distinguished woman – to ‘Mrs William H. Grenfell’, ‘Miss Margot Tennant’, ‘H. S. H. Alice, Princess of Monaco’ (whom he had met in Paris), and ‘Margaret, Lady Brooke’, the ranee of Sarawak and a London literary hostess. The volume itself – a choice creation designed by Ricketts and illustrated by Shannon – was dedicated to ‘Constance Mary Wilde’.
More significantly, the social excitements of the summer seem to have inspired him, finally, to write his play for George Alexander. Telling Frank Harris that he had come up with an idea he ‘rather’ liked, he announced, ‘Tomorrow I am going to shut myself up in my room, and stay there until it is written… I wonder can I do it in a week, or will it take three? It ought not to take long to beat the Pineros and the Joneses.’† The idea was for a comic drama set in the convention-bound world of contemporary society, and it appears to have been written within a month.14
A Good Woman, as Wilde provisionally titled his play, told the story of young Lady Windermere, who suspects her husband of having an affair with the worldly and mysterious Mrs Erlynne, to whom he has made several large, and secret, payments. When confronted on the topic, Lord Windermere refuses to explain the true nature of their relationship, only insisting on its innocence. Lady Windermere is not convinced and, in a moment of rash despair, decides to leave her own birthday ball and run away with the witty and irresponsible Lord Darlington, who has declared his love for her. Mrs Erlynne, however, discovers her plan, follows her to Lord Darlington’s house and persuades her to change her mind before it is too late. At that moment the two women hear the voices of Lord Darlington, Lord Windermere and other friends about to enter the room where they are conversing. They hide, to avoid discovery, but Lady Windermere leaves her distinctive fan – a birthday gift from her husband – on the table. The men enter. The fan is spotted. Lord Windermere suspects his wife of being on the premises. But before he can initiate a search, Mrs Erlynne steps forward from her hiding place, thus compromising her own reputation; she claims that she must have picked up Lady Windermere’s fan by mistake when she left the ball. Disaster for Lady Windermere is averted, as she makes her escape. It is revealed to the audience – though not to Lady Windermere – that Mrs Erlynne is in fact Lady Windermere’s mother, who had herself run off, deserting the marital home and her infant daughter, some twenty years previously, and was now seeking to regain a place in society under an assumed name (and by blackmailing Lord Windermere for funds). Nevertheless her self-sacrifice, to save her daughter from a similar fate, ensures that she herself earns the right to be called ‘a good woman’.
The outward details of the plot were conventional enough. There were distinct echoes of Dumas. And Wilde’s friend, the Australian-born dramatist Haddon Chambers, had enjoyed a success in the previous year with a play in which the married heroine – in trying to save her husband from blackmail – had nearly compromised herself by leaving her fan behind in the blackmailer’s room.15 What gave Wilde’s play distinction was not just its scintillating dialogue but also its blithe dissection (and acceptance) of society’s convenient hypocrisies and double standards.
The paradoxical wit that Wilde had honed in his own conversation, in his dialogues and essays, and in the pages of Dorian Gray, now found dramatic expression. Lord Darlington was the most assured and accomplished of Wilde’s epigrammatic dandies so far; the duchess of Berwick his finest comic creation. Wilde cheerfully plundered his own earlier works for choice lines and epigrams.‡ The action conformed to Vivian’s dictum – in ‘The Decay of Lying’ – that what is interesting about people in good society is the mask that each one wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. No conventional moral was pointed. Lord Windermere remained in ignorance of his wife’s near-elopement, Lady Windermere is kept unaware of her true relationship to Mrs Erlynne. And Mrs Erlynne, having briefly experienced the terrible passions of motherhood, escapes back into the world of pleasure. Earlier in the year Wilde had been a serial attendee when Elizabeth Robins premiered Ibsen’s controversial Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville Theatre; and his own play’s challenge to the established values of middle-class morality proclaimed an allegiance to the new spirit of dramatic Realism ushered in by the great Norwegian dramatist.16
Alexander – according to his own later recollection – never forgot the delight he experienced in hearing Wilde read the play script to him. When Wilde asked whether he liked it, he replied, ‘Like is not the word. It is simply wonderful.’ He supported his wonderment with an offer of £1,000 to buy the piece outright. Wilde, however, countered, ‘I have so much confidence in your excellent judgment, my dear Alec, that I cannot but refuse your generous offer – I will take a percentage.’17 Contemporary evidence, however, suggests that Alexander may have been marginally less bowled over by the play’s merits. Although glad to have the piece, and to pay Wilde the second part of his advance, he did not want to be bound to any specific time for its production, recognizing that it would take ‘a world of labour’ to get ‘right’.18 Wilde himself was full of mingled hope, excitement and anxiety about the play’s prospects. He immediately sent a copy of the script to the American impresario Augustin Daly (who was over in London) in the hope that he might buy the American rights. But no immediate deal was reached.19
The only transatlantic production on the horizon was the splendidly improbable marriage of Willie Wilde to the American magazine owner and editor Mrs Frank Leslie who, at fifty-five, was twelve years his senior. The formidable and dynamic Mrs Leslie had been coming over to England regularly during the previous seven years, and had become friendly with the Wilde family, developing a particularly ‘strong affection’ and admiration for Lady Wilde. Willie seems to have recognized that her wealth might offer him a haven. She, for her part, was amused by his wit, and half-persuaded by his apparent ardour. She also considered that his fluent writing style might be an asset to her various American publications. Ignoring the fact th
at he spent little of his time working and most of his money on drink, she carried him away to New York, married him (on 4 October 1891) and – after the inevitable honeymoon at Niagara – installed him in her luxurious apartment in the Gerlach building on West 27th Street. Constance (perhaps echoing Oscar) reported to her friend Lady Mount Temple, ‘The news has much the same effect upon me socially that poor Mr Parnell’s [recent] death has upon me politically – that is, that it is the best solution to a difficulty, and that things in both cases will now right themselves.’20 Her optimism on both fronts would prove misplaced.
Wilde himself was exhausted by his efforts in writing A Good Woman. His nerves, moreover, had been additionally frayed when the Tite Street house was burgled one night while he and the children slept. Much of Constance’s jewellery had been stolen, along with the children’s christening cups and other silver. If no money was taken, it was – as malicious gossip pointed out – because ‘there was no money to steal’.21
And there were other strains too. On 16 October the young publisher William Heinemann (together with the French writer Gérard Harry) called at Tite Street to try and interest Wilde in writing an introduction for an English-language edition of Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama Princess Maleine. They found their host dressed in deep mourning. Wilde explained, ‘This day happens to be my birthday [his thirty-seventh], and I am mourning the flight of one year of my youth into nothingness, the growing blight upon my summer.’22 For all these accumulating cares, Wilde’s doctor recommended a six-week rest cure. Wilde decided to take it in Paris, that least restful of cities.
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