The Mrs Arbuthnot of the title, having been seduced as a young woman by the ‘wicked’ Lord Illingworth, has been left alone to raise their illegitimate son, Gerald. Keeping him in ignorance of his shameful parenthood, and her shameful past, she has launched him into the world, only to learn that he has – by chance – been taken up by Lord Illingworth, who wishes to appoint him as his private secretary. The inevitable revelations, recriminations and reconciliations ensue, as Gerald discovers the secret of his parentage, forgives his mother, secures the hand of Hester Worsley, a wealthy but high-minded American heiress, and joins in the general condemnation of the thoroughly unrepentant Lord Illingworth.
It was Wilde’s conceit – and one readily enough believed by the public – that ‘the art of play-writing… consisted of writing a series of epigrams, and then finding characters to fit them, with a tag of incident thrown in’.19 Certainly his new piece, set during twenty-four hours at a country house party, allowed for a welter of wit and paradox: ‘A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life’; ‘The Peerage… is the best thing in Fiction the English have done’; ‘One must have some occupation nowadays. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about’; ‘I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex’; ‘The English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.’ Indeed Wilde described the opening scene as his rebuke to the critics who had complained at the lack of action in Lady Windermere’s Fan. Amid a great deal of amusing talk about love, marriage and society, there was ‘absolutely no action at all’; it was, Wilde claimed, ‘a perfect act’.20
There were many fine female characters in the play (the worldly Mrs Allonby, the formidable but foolish Lady Hunstanton, the passionate Hester Worsley, Mrs Arbuthnot herself) but most of the witticisms fall to the cynical Lord Illingworth. He was the next in line of Wilde’s brilliant epigrammatic dandies, following on from Prince Paul, Lord Henry Wotton and Lord Darlington, though Wilde – with his usual relish for exaggeration – claimed, that he was ‘like no one who has existed before’. Indeed, immediately contradicting this assertion, he went on: ‘He is certainly not natural. He is a figure of art. Indeed, if you can bear the truth, he is MYSELF.’21 And doubtless much of the character’s wit did borrow from Wilde’s own conversation. Certainly it borrowed from his writings: numerous lines were taken from The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde also used the play to comment slyly upon his own position as a man leading a precarious and illicit double life in the midst of society. To those who knew – or suspected – his secret, there would be a keen double edge to such comments as, ‘It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.’ This was self-concealment through self-revelation.
The theatrical world was eager for news of the play. Wilde was now in demand. And, after the stressful production process of Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde was ready to look beyond George Alexander. Beerbohm Tree had for some time been jockeying for the right to produce his next piece. Wilde – who thought Tree best suited to historical roles – had initially tried to interest him in The Duchess of Padua; but the suggestion had been deflected. Tree wanted something modern and comic. And Wilde, having been brought together with the actor-manager by the illustrious Ettie Grenfell, was perhaps inclined to look upon his wishes with particular favour. Certainly he consented to give Tree ‘first refusal’ of his new script.22
He retained, though, some doubts about the actor’s ability to play the aristocratic and dandified Lord Illingworth (he would be far better suited, Wilde thought, as Herod in Salomé). To Tree’s assertion that his recent performance as the Duke of Guisbury in A. H. Jones’s The Dancing Girl had been highly praised, Wilde remarked, ‘Ah! That just it. Before you can successfully impersonate the character I have in mind, you must forget that you ever played Hamlet; you must forget that you ever played Falstaff; above all you must forget that you ever played a duke in a melodrama by Henry Arthur Jones.’23
Progress on the script was good during those first weeks in Norfolk, although there were distractions. ‘I’m afraid Oscar is going to become bitten by golf mania,’ Constance reported to her friend Lady Mount Temple. ‘He played his first game on the links here yesterday and has joined for a fortnight.’24 Cyril was collected from friends in Cambridgeshire, though his younger brother remained behind, suffering from whooping cough. Wilde invited Edward Shelley down, but he did not come. Arthur Clifton and his new wife did arrive, in the midst of their honeymoon (Wilde had given them £160 to enable them to get married).25 And then, on the last day of August, a telegram came from Lord Alfred Douglas ‘asking to be put up for a night’. Constance was happy to accommodate him. The single ‘night’, however, seems to have been no more than a formula; Douglas installed himself for the duration. He joined Wilde for his daily round on the links (Constance lamented, laughingly, that she was becoming ‘a golf widow’). He appeared in some of the photographs that Constance arranged to be taken before the party broke up on 10 September.
It had been planned that Wilde would stay on for another week, on his own, to finish the play. Douglas, however, also contrived to remain behind. There seems to have been a fiction that he had fallen ill (Constance wrote from Babbacombe, where she had gone, to ask whether she should return ‘to look after him’). Douglas’s own memory, though, was of days playing golf, and of trips in a ‘pony cart’ that ‘Oscar used to drive himself – to the great danger of the traffic’. There were also regular visits to the Flowers at Overstrand. At one lunch Wilde declared that ‘if he had to work for his living he would like to be a shepherd’. When Mrs Flower suggested that he might ‘find looking after a lot of sheep rather trying’ he replied, ‘Oh, I should not like to have more than one sheep.’ Amid the general laughter, Mrs Flower countered with the remark, ‘Well you’ve got one lamb already with a golden-fleece.’ Wilde was delighted with this allusion to the fair-haired Douglas; and Douglas was delighted too. The comment was ingenuous: Mrs Flower regarded ‘Bosie’ as little more than a child, and indeed, later, even asked him to a children’s party at her house in London.26 ‡
But she was deceived by his boyish looks. The week together at Felbrigg was certainly an opportunity for Douglas and Wilde to have sex, but it was also a chance for Wilde to learn something of Douglas’s voracious promiscuity. How much Bosie disclosed about the sexual bond he shared with his friend and exact contemporary, Maurice ‘Pretty Boy’ Schwabe, is not known. Douglas’s surviving letters to Schwabe, in which he declares undying love, and proclaims himself ‘your loving boy-wife, or your “little bitch” if you prefer it’, make clear the intensity, and the dynamic, of the relationship; as does a photograph – taken at Oxford – of Bosie sitting on Schwabe’s knee. What Douglas did talk about was the London subculture of male prostitution that he and Schwabe were busy exploring together. Wilde remembered it as Douglas’s sole topic of conversation. The Cleveland Street brothel may have been closed down, but there were plenty of other places where gentlemen could meet working-class youths and pay them for sex. The Knightsbridge roller-skating rink was a rich cruising ground, as was the bar at the St James’s restaurant. Douglas and Schwabe’s guide to this clandestine sex-fuelled world was Alfred Taylor. A feckless but well-educated young man, just turned thirty, who was reputed to have squandered an inheritance of £45,000, Taylor acted as an informal procurer, picking up interested youths and introducing them to clients with money. Douglas and Schwabe were eager for such charged encounters, with their mix of power, abasement, depravity and danger. Blackmail, as Bosie had already discovered, was a constant risk.
This was an erotic world beyond Wilde’s ken, and – always seeking new experiences – he was both intrigued and excited to learn of it, and even more intrigued and excited to experience it. ‘Danger’, as Mrs Allonby in his new play was made to remark, ‘is so rare in modern life.’ And something of Wilde’s attitude
towards it was conveyed by her further observation: ‘The one advantage of playing with fire, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don’t know how to play with it who get burned.’
* Douglas, in later life, after he converted to Roman Catholicism and renounced his homosexual past, became almost frantic in his insistence that he had never been sodomized by Wilde. And perhaps this was true, even if Douglas’s letters to Maurice Schwabe (see below) seem to indicate that he was happy to take the passive role during penetrative sex.
† Pigott seems to have regarded the work – and the idea of producing it – as little more than a joke in very poor taste. He wrote confidentially to his colleague Spencer Ponsonby on 27 June 1892, sending him the MS for his ‘private edification and amusement’: ‘It is a miracle of impudence; and I am bound to say that when Mr Abbey, [OW’s] Acting Manager, called on me, in answer to my summons, he lifted up his eyes with a holy shudder of surprise, when I described the piece to him, & recommended him (as Uncle Toby advised the father of the juvenile Poet [in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy]) to “wipe it up & say no more about it”… The piece is written in French – half Biblical, half pornographic – by Oscar Wilde himself. Imagine the average British public’s reception of it.’
‡ Cyril Flower was unlikely to have regarded the relationship between Wilde and Douglas in such an innocent light. He too was a lover of men – and (as Douglas later reported) in 1902 ‘got into serious trouble for activities on the O.W. lines & had to leave the country hurriedly’.
-PART VII-
The Selfish
Giant
1892–1894
age 37–40
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Oxford, 1893.
1
The Eternal Quest for Beauty
‘Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.’
oscar wilde
Wilde’s initiation into the fire seems to have occurred shortly after he returned to London, at a small dinner laid on by Schwabe and Douglas in a private room at Kettner’s. Alfred Taylor arrived bringing with him a ‘modest and nice’ young man called Sydney Mavor, a twenty-year-old clerk at a lamp-wick manufactory in the City, who lived with his widowed mother. He had been specially chosen to appeal to Wilde. ‘I am glad you’ve made yourself pretty,’ Taylor had told Mavor before they arrived at the restaurant. ‘Mr Wilde likes nice clean boys.’ Wilde certainly did like Mavor. ‘Our little lad has pleasing manners,’ he declared complacently towards the end of the evening. ‘We must see more of him.’ According to Mavor they had sex that night in Wilde’s room at the Hotel Albemarle. Whatever the commercial elements of the transaction, Wilde insisted on giving the encounter a human aspect – even a romantic one: a few days afterwards Mavor received an expensive silver cigarette case inscribed inside, ‘Sidney from O.W. October 1892.’ The gift was, he said, ‘quite a surprise’.1
It was the first of many such assignations – and many such cigarette cases (‘I have a great fancy for giving cigarette cases,’ Wilde later admitted). It marked, too, a shift in Wilde’s relationship with Bosie. Their mutual infatuation continued, coloured by poems and passionate letters and occasional sex, but it was now fired by a shared and predatory enthusiasm for sex with others; ‘the eternal quest for beauty’, as Douglas termed it. Wilde became a regular visitor at the all-male tea parties that Alfred Taylor hosted at his flat above an empty baker’s shop in Little College Street, Westminster. Taylor’s rooms, shuttered and curtained against the daylight, were a bower of cut-price Aestheticism, decked with fans and artificial flowers, draped with oriental textiles and theatrical costumes. A ‘really noble crucifix’ added a distinctive touch. Scented pastilles clouded the air. And there was piano which, Wilde claimed, Taylor could play ‘very charmingly’.2
In the same month as his meeting with Sidney Mavor, Wilde and Constance were invited down to Bracknell to call on Douglas’s mother, Lady Queensberry – a needy yet supercilious woman who, having obtained a divorce from the marquess in 1887, had devoted herself to fretting over and spoiling her children. She had been concerned about her third son’s growing friendship with Wilde, even writing to Dr Warren, the President of Magdalen (and an old friend of Wilde’s), to ask whether it was a suitable association. Warren had informed her that Bosie was indeed fortunate to have obtained the notice of so able and eminent a man.3 Reassured, Lady Queensberry now sought Wilde’s advice over her errant child, and his various travails at Oxford. As Wilde ‘sat in the Bracknell woods’ listening to Lady Queensberry list her concerns, he must have felt the absurdity and awkwardness of his position, as well as enjoying the experience of having a marchioness confide in him. ‘Bosie’ was, she said, vain and ‘all wrong about money’. When Wilde queried why she did not tackle him on these points, she mentioned her son’s terrible temper. It was not something that Wilde had encountered. Yet.
The visit to Bracknell drew Wilde for the first time into the web of Douglas family relations. He would find it hard to escape. The encounter with Lady Queensberry was soon followed by a meeting with her former husband. The ‘Mad Marquess’ was a man of fierce opinions and combative temper. Beside his contributions to the world of pugilism and racing, he was a committed secularist and a frustrated politician, with the rare ability (as one paper described it) ‘to attract public attention to himself’. Even in a family of noted eccentrics, he was conspicuous. In 1882 he had famously interrupted a performance of Tennyson’s The Promise of May to protest against the treatment of atheism in the piece.*
As Bosie’s relationship with Wilde developed, and the two friends began to be seen often about town together, he grew uneasy. Aware of rumours circulating about Wilde’s sexual interests, he disapproved of the connection. With an uncharacteristic attempt at paternal tact, he ‘light-heartedly’ suggested to his son that he should give up the friendship. Douglas, however, was not to be dictated to or advised – and certainly not by a parent who, he felt, had always neglected him. Although he wrote back respectfully, his letter provoked the marquess’s easily roused ire: Bosie was called a ‘fool’ and a ‘baby’; there were threats to cut off his allowance.
But, before matters could worsen, the marquess chanced upon Wilde and Douglas lunching together at the Café Royal. Douglas insisted his father join them. Wilde exerted himself to please, and soon had the marquess not only engaged but actually laughing. When he steered the talk on to the iniquities of Christianity (Queensberry’s favourite topic) Bosie ‘got bored’ and left them to it. Wilde later reported that they had continued the lunch till after four. Following the encounter Queensberry wrote to Bosie praising Wilde as a ‘charming fellow’ and ‘very clever’. Having experienced his conversation, he could well understand why his son should be so fond of him. He was heartened too to hear that Lord and Lady de Grey considered him ‘perfectly all right’ in every way. It seemed as though a danger had been averted.4
These new emotional currents coursing through Wilde’s life had to accommodate themselves alongside the plans for his new play. Shortly after his return from Norfolk, Wilde paid a visit to his friends the Palmers at Reading, where Walter Palmer was head of the biscuit-making firm Huntley and Palmer. The sixty-four-year-old novelist George Meredith was also of the party. This was a source of considerable excitement. Meredith had a reputation as ‘the most brilliant talker of his day’, his conversation overflowing – as one contemporary recalled – with ‘expressions of the comic spirit, ranging from the playful antics of boyish “larkishness” up to the mature and artfully adjusted attack of wit and irony’. Theodore Watts considered him the one conversationalist who could be put in the same bracket as Wilde. Meredith, he thought, was the better when he could ‘choose his topic’; Wilde excelled him when it came to turning ‘any chance remark to happy and apt use’. To have both men under one roof was a great coup. Mrs Jopling, a fellow guest, noted ‘how the two writers thoroughly enjoyed their first meeting’. Unfortuna
tely she noted little more. ‘The talk at the dinner table was most interesting. I wish I could remember it, if only a sentence or two.’ After the encounter Meredith, who had previously expressed reservations about Dorian Gray, declared that Wilde was ‘good company’.5
Eager to test his new play, Wilde read the last act aloud to the assembled guests one afternoon. He would have been pleased to note that some of them were moved to tears at the scene when the wronged Mrs Arbuthnot strikes her seducer, Lord Illingworth, in the face with her glove, though – typically – Wilde defused the moment, declaring that ‘I took that situation from the Family Herald.’6 Wilde re-used this line (with variations), when shortly afterwards he met up with Beerbohm Tree and his company in Glasgow – where they were on tour – and read the script to them. To the actor-manager’s fulsome praise of the plot, he replied:
Plots are tedious. Anyone can invent them. Life is full of them. Indeed one has to elbow one’s way through them as they crowd across one’s path. I took the plot of this play from the Family Herald, which took it – wisely, I feel – from my novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. People love a wicked aristocrat who seduces a virtuous maiden, and they love a virtuous maiden for being seduced by a wicked aristocrat. I have given them what they like, so that they may learn to appreciate what I like to give them.7
Tree certainly thought the public would like it. A contract was drawn up, and it was arranged that the play would open at the Haymarket the following spring. Meanwhile Lady Windermere’s Fan continued to draw the crowds. It returned to the St James’s Theatre from its provincial tour on the last day of October, and finally closed at the end of November. The ten-month run had earned Wilde perhaps as much as £3,000. Blacker, who saw Wilde soon afterwards, reported him as ‘beaming with the inebriation of success’, and delighted at having produced so apparently ‘excellent’ a new play with such ‘remarkable rapidity’.8
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