Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Some of the money he received from Tree was spent on renting Babbacombe Cliff, Lady Mount Temple’s beautiful house outside Torquay, for three months (from mid-November to mid-February). Constance had been wanting to buy a country house; this was a more manageable option. Babbacombe would be a place of retreat for the family. Wilde told Lady Mount Temple that he was looking forward to the ‘peace and beauty’ of her home, where he would be able to do imaginative work – ‘to hear things the ear cannot hear, and see invisible things’. Babbacombe would also be good for Wilde’s health. The constant regime of drinking, smoking and dining out, of late nights and little exercise, of professional stresses and private worries, took its toll. He was becoming increasingly prone to attacks of nervous and physical exhaustion. But he did also use his ‘health’ as an excuse, and means of escape.9

  Even as he was making arrangements over Babbacombe, Wilde ran off, for a few days, to the Royal Bath Hotel in Bournemouth – ostensibly because he was ‘not very well’. In fact he was accompanying Douglas, who had been sent there by his own doctor, but ‘hated being alone’. Already the pattern of Bosie’s demands and Wilde’s acquiescence was being established. But there was encouragement and patronage too. Douglas had just taken on the editorship of an Oxford undergraduate magazine, The Spirit Lamp, and Wilde agreed to contribute a poem to the next number. The trip also, it seems, gave Wilde a first taste of Bosie’s terrible temper. Wilde was unsettled by it, and unsettled too by other cares. It seems possible that already his dealings with male prostitutes had opened him up to threats of blackmail and extortion. Constance’s brother, Otho, recalled meeting Wilde just after he had returned from Bournemouth. ‘An important note or letter… he said, had been either mislaid or mis-delivered by the porter of the hotel in which he was staying, and he seemed to me to be worried, as if some trouble were haunting him.’† And to Douglas (now back at Oxford) he referred obliquely to ‘strange and troubling personalities walking in painted pageants’ through his London life.10

  Such anxieties, however, did nothing to deflect him from his course. His fascination with the sexual underworld increased. It became his consuming passion. As he later recalled (and explained) it: ‘Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.’11 If there were perils, Wilde accepted them as part of the game: ‘It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.’12 Schwabe introduced him to a teenage bookmaker’s clerk, a would-be music hall comedian (and accomplished blackmailer) called Freddie Atkins. There was another bacchanalian dinner in a private room of a Soho restaurant, during which – according to Atkins – Wilde kissed the waiter. If he did not sleep with Atkins that night, he seems to have done so later. Shortly afterwards Wilde had to go over to Paris for a few days to oversee details of the publication of Salomé (Mathews and Lane wanted to have their names added to the title page to create a simultaneous edition for the British market). Atkins and Schwabe accompanied Wilde on the jaunt. They shared three adjoining rooms at Wilde’s old hotel on the Boulevard des Capucines, which was convenient for bed-hopping: Atkins claimed that he returned from a night at the Moulin Rouge to find Wilde in bed with Schwabe. At the end of the trip Atkins received his silver cigarette case.13

  Constance and the boys had been installed at Babbacombe since the middle of November, living in daily expectation of Oscar’s arrival. He finally came down on 3 December, bringing tin soldiers for the children.‡ They were thrilled to see him. Within days, however, his health collapsed, and he took to his bed for over a week. The doctor declared that ‘he must not live in London’. It was not a piece of advice he was likely to follow.14

  Babbacombe Cliff was a Pre-Raphaelite dream house, described by one visitor as ‘full of surprises and curious rooms, with suggestions of Rossetti at every turn’. There was a Burne-Jones window. All the bedrooms had been given names: Wilde was installed in ‘Wonderland’ – Lady Mount Temple’s boudoir, and ‘the most artistic’ of all the chambers. Constance reported that he was busy feeding the ‘cheeky’ pigeons that came to his window, or sat prettily ‘in rows along the branches of the fir trees’ outside. He was absorbed, too, in reading a book of ‘supernatural stories’ full of intimations from beyond the grave. It was an interest that drew him closer to Constance. Her own attention was increasingly absorbed with spiritual and religious questions. Some of these she shared also with Robbie Ross, who came down to stay. A Dante enthusiast with Catholic leanings, he was ready to engage with her about religion and the Divine Comedy. He even presented her with a rosary, and a guide to how to use it.15

  For Wilde, though, the pull of London, of Bosie, and of promiscuous commercial sex, remained dangerously strong. He was drawn up to town before the end of the year. He had learnt from Bosie of Taylor’s latest discovery: a handsome, thick-set, fair-haired working-class youth of seventeen called Alfred Wood. Douglas had already had sex with him, but was eager for Wilde to share the experience. There was the inevitable champagne supper in a private room, Wilde with his hand inside Wood’s trousers by the end of the meal. And then, the house being empty, they were able to return to Tite Street for sex.

  Several other assignations followed, before Wilde had to go over to Paris to consult on the final details of his Salomé book, which Marcel Schwob had been seeing towards completion. While in the French capital, Wilde had a fleeting glimpse of Constance; a ‘delightful peep’ she called it. She was on her way to Italy, together with her aunt, Mary Napier, and two cousins. She would be away for almost two months.16

  Wilde returned to Babbacombe, to the children, and to work. He had high hopes. With A Woman of No Importance – as it was now called – completed, he had already committed himself to a new project. Ignoring, it seems, a verbal agreement to write something for Alexander, he contracted to produce a society comedy for John Hare, the ambitious actor-proprietor of the newly built Garrick Theatre. And, for himself, he planned also to compose a piece ‘in blank verse’ – though whether it was to build upon the achievement of Salomé or of The Duchess of Padua is unclear.17 But the prospect of productive calm was shattered, almost at once, by the arrival of Lord Alfred Douglas. He came with his fox terrier and his tutor, a recently graduated Oxford scholar (and friend of Lionel Johnson’s), called Campbell Dodgson. Douglas had been rusticated from Magdalen for the spring term, after neglecting his studies, and was supposed to be making good his deficiencies with a course of reading ahead of the final examinations in June. Wilde had suggested that he might come to Babbacombe whenever he liked, and he had wasted little time in arriving.18§

  To Lady Mount Temple Wilde described a scene of studious endeavour: ‘Babbacombe Cliff has become a kind of college or school, for Cyril studies French in the nursery, and I write my new play in Wonderland, and in the drawing room Lord Alfred Douglas – one of Lady Queensberry’s sons – studies Plato with his tutor for his degree at Oxford in June. He and his tutor are staying with me for a few days, so I am not lonely in the evenings.’ But a letter written to Dodgson – after he had departed – gives perhaps a truer flavour of a regime that Wilde claimed succeeded ‘in combining the advantages of a public school with those of a private lunatic asylum’. He provided a full prospectus:

  Babbacombe School

  Headmaster – Mr Oscar Wilde

  Second Master – Mr Campbell Dodgson

  Boys – Lord Alfred Douglas

  Rules.

  Tea for masters and boys at 9.30 a.m.

  Breakfast at 10.30.

  Work 11.30–12.30.

  At 12.30. Sherry and biscuits for headmaster and boys (the second master objects to this).

  12.40–1.30. Work.

  1.30. Lunch.

  2.30–4.30. Compulsory hide-and-seek for headmaster.

  5. Tea for headmaster and second master, brandy and sodas (not to exceed seven) for boys.

  6–7. Work.<
br />
  7.30. Dinner, with compulsory champagne.

  8.30–12. Ecarté, limited to five-guinea points.

  12–1.30. Compulsory reading in bed. Any boy found disobeying this rule will be immediately woken up.

  At the conclusion of the term the headmaster will be presented with a silver inkstand, the second master with a pencil-case, as a token of esteem, by the boys.19

  Dodgson’s own memory of the visit was of ‘lazy and luxurious’ days more given over to playing ‘with pigeons and children’, driving by the sea and talking than to serious study. He found Wilde’s command of language ‘extraordinary’. ‘We argue for hours in favour of different interpretations of Platonism,’ he reported to Lionel Johnson. ‘Oscar implores me, with outspread arms and tears in his eyes, to let my soul alone and cultivate my body for six weeks… Bosie is beautiful and fascinating, but quite wicked. He is enchanted by Plato’s sketch of democratic man, and no arguments of mine will induce him to believe in any absolute standards of ethics or of anything else.’20

  Douglas was also distracted with his editorial duties for The Spirit Lamp, conducting a copious correspondence by telegram. The periodical, abandoning all absolute ethical standards, had been developing an increasingly homosexual – or ‘Uranian’ – tone over its recent issues. Douglas had solicited contributions from both John Addington Symonds and Lord Arthur Somerset. It declared itself as a magazine dedicated to ‘the new culture’ – a coded phrase referring to the promotion of same-sex relations between men.21 Wilde certainly approved of the venture, and Bosie’s part in it. He provided one of his quasi-biblical prose poems – ‘The House of Judgment’ – for the forthcoming issue, and he also encouraged Douglas’s own poetic ambitions. Of one love sonnet that Douglas had sent prior to his arrival, Wilde had written with customary exuberance, ‘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 Hyacynthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.’22

  Wilde, for his own part, had the pleasure of receiving, from Paris, the first copies of Salomé. He considered that its binding of ‘Tyrian purple’ looked particularly well against the ‘gilt-haired’ Douglas. Swinburne, Pater, Bernard Shaw, William Archer, Edmund Gosse, Florence Stoker and Frankie Forbes-Robertson were among those to whom he sent copies. Although Douglas ensured that The Spirit Lamp hailed the play as both ‘a daring experiment and a complete success’, the public prints were less generous. Having been denied a sight of the play on stage, they stirred themselves to ‘stern and indignant condemnation’ of the book. The Times called it ‘an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred’. Wilde was becoming inured to the ‘philistine’ hostility of the critics; more distressing was that Pierre Louÿs, to whom he had dedicated the book, sent only a facetious telegram of acknowledgement. ‘A drop of froth without wine. How you disappoint me,’ Wilde declared. ‘It is new to me to think that friendship is more brittle than love is.’ Louÿs hastened to repair the fault by composing an elegant sonnet of appreciation. 23

  The regime at Babbacombe broke up towards the end of February in the face of one of Douglas’s sudden and hysterical rages – even more ferocious than the one at Bournemouth. What provoked it remains unknown, and was probably insignificant. But it left Wilde shaken and upset. It was a shocking sight to see the boy he loved – and liked to regard as a ‘sunbeam’ – suddenly transformed, distorted in ‘mind and body’, ‘a thing terrible to look at’. Dodgson, who seems to have returned in time to witness the scene, explained that he – and ‘most of the men at Magdalen’ – considered Douglas was ‘at times… quite irresponsible for what he said and did’. Douglas left the next morning, and Wilde determined that it must mark the end of the relationship. He never (so he claimed later) wished to see or speak to Douglas again.24

  The sudden calm that descended upon the house must have been striking. Wilde’s mind could turn to thoughts of Constance. They had been in daily communication during her travels through Italy. He had been enjoying – at one remove – her discovery (a volume of Ruskin in hand) of the beauties of Tuscan art and Roman splendour. In his own daily letters he encouraged her notion that they might spend the coming autumn together in Florence. But the vision struggled to take form.25 Douglas only got as far as Bristol before he ‘wrote and telegraphed’ pleading for a reconciliation. It would become a familiar trope. Once his rages had passed, Bosie seemed to forget them completely. For Wilde, whose world was made of words, the furious insults lived on in the memory. But even so his resolve weakened. As André Gide noted, in the wake of another of Bosie’s outbursts, for all Wilde’s distress at such ‘terrible’ scenes, there was ‘a kind of lover’s infatuated pleasure in being mastered’.26 In this instance he relented at once. They met and, on their way up to town, Douglas begged to be taken to the Savoy.27

  The hotel, the most luxurious in London, stood just off the Strand, close to where Wilde had first lodged when he came down from Oxford. The acme of comfort and modernity, it had opened in 1889, built by Richard D’Oyly Carte from the profits of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas – and of Wilde’s American lecture tour too. Carte had installed electric lighting and electric lifts. The bathrooms were numerous and well appointed. César Ritz was the manager, Escoffier the chef. Douglas, it seems, was already an habitué; he and Maurice Schwabe had slept together there on several occasions. And he had a connection with place through D’Oyly Carte’s son, Lucas, a contemporary at both Winchester and Oxford, and another of his regular bedfellows. It was expensive. But Wilde now had money coming in from the US production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and hopes that A Woman of No Importance would soon be going into rehearsal.28

  They took adjoining rooms, and embarked on a spree of sybaritic abandon. Though Wilde needed little encouragement when it came to extravagance, Douglas encouraged him. They ran up huge bills in the restaurant. Wilde recalled the ‘clear turtle soup – the luscious ortolans wrapped in their crinkled Sicilian vine leaves’ and ‘the heavy amber-coloured, indeed almost amber-scented champagne’. With Bosie in tow, he found it quite possible to spend as much as £20 simply on ‘the ordinary expenses’ of an ‘ordinary’ London day – ‘luncheon, dinner, supper, amusements, hansoms and the rest of it’. Originally intending to stay for a couple of nights, Wilde installed himself for a month, in a suite with a sitting room overlooking the river. Douglas came and went, and so did a succession of rent boys. Taylor introduced Wilde to two more young lads, brothers Charlie and William Parker. Charlie, Wilde supposedly declared, ‘is the boy for me’. And there were others. Douglas, on his regular visits, would recklessly allow these youths to spend the night in his room, at the risk of the hotel servants seeing them still abed in the morning. Wilde, though, did nothing to diminish the air of licentious abandon. He insisted on kissing the hotel page boys when they delivered him messages, much to their alarm; though, as one remarked, ‘he always tips me 2/6’.29

  The pageant of pleasure was interrupted, but not halted, when Wilde found himself being blackmailed – or ‘rented’ – by Alfred Wood. It was Douglas’s fault, though he refused to acknowledge any responsibility. He had taken Wood up to Oxford for a few days, and while there Wood had stolen several letters – some written by Wilde, others from Lucas D’Oyly Carte. Wood later claimed that he had found them in the pocket of a suit that had been given to him by Douglas. It was a serious alarm. Wilde was uncertain what letters Wood held. The one describing Bosie’s ‘rose-leaf lips’ as made for the ‘madness of kisses’ would certainly be compromising. He felt he had no other recourse than to call in George Lewis. It was the second time he had had to consult him on such a matter – and although he may have tried to dress it up as another commission for a ‘friend’ in trouble, Lewis would have suspected the
truth. Nevertheless he undertook to ‘settle’ Wood ‘at once’ – and dispatched a solicitor’s letter to Wood’s lodgings. In fact, though, it was Alfred Taylor, distraught at having been the person to have introduced Wood to Wilde, who negotiated the settlement. He brought the two men together at Little College Street. Wood explained that he only asked for money as he wanted to go to America in order to escape from ‘a certain class of person’ – a pair of notorious blackmailers – who were seeking to draw him into their schemes. Wilde accepted the story and gave Wood some £30 in return for the three stolen letters. The ‘madness of kisses’ letter, he noted, was not among them. He was not sure whether to be relieved or perturbed. The experience of being ‘rented’ was a new and unsettling one. Although he appeared to have ‘got through all right’ (as Douglas put it), the incident marked another significant downward step. He was, he recognized, beginning to lose Lewis’s ‘esteem and friendship’ – a friendship that stretched back almost fifteen years, and had sustained and directed much of his London life.30

  There were other ruptures. Gray broke with him, after a period of mounting emotional turmoil and distress. The young poet had – shortly before he met Wilde – converted to Roman Catholicism, but then, in the wake of that step, had immediately embarked on what he described as a deliberate ‘course of sin’, immersing himself in the world and its pleasures. His time as Wilde’s devoted disciple had marked that course. ‘Michael Field’, to whom, many years later, Gray confided something of his past life, understood that his indulgence in ‘exotic habits’ had been limited enough – ‘not so much sinning’ as ‘conversing with sin’. But, even so, it had provoked its reaction. The death of his father perhaps heightened Gray’s sense of remorse. And Wilde’s growing absorption by Lord Alfred Douglas almost certainly played its part too. Gray seems to have suffered some sort of breakdown at the end of 1892. To Sherard he confessed fears of ‘death, madness, epilepsy and other horrors’. Wilde was not on hand to offer support or assistance. His place was readily taken by André Raffalovich; he became Gray’s devoted friend and protector. Although there was real generosity in his actions, Raffalovich perhaps enjoyed too the idea of drawing away one of Wilde’s most conspicuous protégés. The old ties were soon broken. The Silverpoints contract was redrafted, with Wilde’s contribution no longer required. Although one of the poems in the volume remained dedicated ‘to Oscar Wilde’, it was valedictory gesture. On 16 March Gray wrote to Pierre Louÿs confirming that his ‘falling out with Oscar’ was ‘absolute’.31