He had been hoping that Constance and the children could be persuaded to come to Dieppe. His position in the town would certainly have been improved by their presence. At the end of July, however, he was ‘terribly distressed’ to receive a letter from Carlos Blacker informing him that Constance’s health worries had returned. Her creeping spinal paralysis had left her all but unable to walk. It was heartbreaking news.§ ‘Nemesis,’ Wilde declared, ‘seems endless.’ He proposed going to his wife in Switzerland.36 Blacker, however, put him off, suggesting he should wait until Constance was settled back at Nervi, outside Genoa.37 It was another frustrating delay. And as August advanced, Wilde’s resolve ebbed and his anxieties grew.
He had come out of prison determined to escape the sexual ‘madness’ of his past. And according to Dowson, after one of their evenings together, they repaired to a Dieppe brothel in order that Wilde might acquire ‘a more wholesome taste’ in sexual matters. After the visit Wilde was said to have remarked, ‘The first these ten years, and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton!’, before adding, ‘But tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character.’38 The escapade, however (if it really did take place) appears to have been something of a diversion. Wilde had come to the conclusion that it was not ‘Uranian love’ itself that he needed to renounce so much as the wilful excesses of promiscuous sex with London rent boys. The love of men, rather than of women, was, he declared, simply ‘a matter of temperament’. And in this regard his temperament was unchanged.39
Although he had felt obliged to assure Turner that his prison ‘pal’ Arthur Cruttenden was not ‘a beautiful boy’ but a quite unfanciable fellow of twenty-nine with prematurely greying hair and a ‘slight, but still real moustache’, the protest revealed the direction of his thoughts.40 And when – in the middle of August – Robbie Ross finally came over to stay at Berneval, he and Wilde slept together. Sherard, who was also staying, reported that, to his ‘absolute knowledge’, Ross ‘dragged Oscar back into the delights of homosexuality’ at this time.41 The incident marked another alteration in the possibilities and expectations of Wilde’s post-prison life. Certainly the commitment to Franciscan abstinence was faltering.
Wilde’s hopes of being able to produce artistic work again were receiving some encouragement. The ballad continued to develop. It took on a polemical tone, to match the personal one, as Wilde sought to point up not only the cruelties of prison life, but also the guilt of society in imposing them.
[For] every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
And as the poem grew, so did Wilde’s hopes for it. He began to think that it might be substantial enough to publish in book form. Smithers was the obvious choice of publisher. After their first meeting Wilde had written to him expressing the hope that ‘some day I shall have something that you will like well enough to publish’.42 The day had arrived sooner than expected. They discussed the matter over dinner at the Café des Tribunaux. Smithers quixotically suggested that Wilde should have the ‘entire profits of the book’. Wilde, however, demurred, proposing that a more businesslike arrangement would be to share the profits 50/50.43 As an initial practical step he sent the publisher his first draft to be typed up. ‘It is not finished,’ he explained, ‘but I want to see it type-written. I am sick of my manuscript.’ Smithers showed the poem to Beardsley who ‘seemed to be much struck by it’. Although Beardsley ‘promised at once to do a frontispiece’ for the book, Smithers had seen too many of the artist’s recent plans and promises change, or evaporate, to believe that it would ever be done.44 Nevertheless preparations for the publication advanced.
But, aside from the ballad, Wilde’s literary plans showed few signs of progress. His various plays remained stubbornly unstarted. ‘The shock of alien freedom’, as he put it, was still upon him.45 He hoped that in due course, he would ‘get back the concentration of will-power that conditions and governs art’.46 He had acquired a red tie in the belief that it might give him inspiration – but to no effect.47 He came to accept that he would not be able adapt Le Verre d’eau for Wyndham. Even with the assistance of Ross, and the example of Congreve, it was beyond him. As he lamented to Carlos Blacker, ‘I simply have no heart to write a clever comedy.’48 He continued to hope that he might be able to do something with The Florentine Tragedy or his other theatrical projects. But even so he hesitated to begin.
A change in the weather depressed him. But what he really missed was the stimulation of daily companionship, and the support of domestic structure. Dowson and Smithers had returned to England, and Wilde by now realized that he could not rely on Ross or Turner for more than the brief and occasional stay. Dieppe’s summer crowds were beginning to depart. A planned visit by Ricketts and Shannon failed to materialize.49 Fothergill wrote a priggish letter to say that he found it was not ‘politic’ for him to continue his friendship.50 Constance and the children seemed as distant as ever. Long vistas of rain-swept autumnal loneliness began to open up, beyond the fading days of summer.
In this mood of gathering ennui Wilde turned to Bosie, who remained near at hand at Nogent-sur-Marne, enduring his own sad and continuing exile. Plans for a clandestine meeting had stuttered on during the summer, but with limited commitment on either side. At the end of July Douglas had written suggesting that Wilde come and stay with him in Paris. Wilde, however, felt he ‘could not face Paris yet’. To his own proposal that they should meet, instead, at Rouen, Douglas had replied that he did not have the ‘forty francs’ necessary to make the journey. After that matters had languished. Until now. With the prospect of autumn and winter before them, they resolved to act.51
Their meeting took place at Rouen (almost certainly on 28 August) and was, in Douglas’s words, ‘a great success’. They spent a day, and a night, together. Wilde cried when they met at the station. It had been two years and four months, since their last sight of each through the prison grating at Newgate. The wastes of pain and acrimony were obliterated in the glow of remembered love, of shared experience and mutual need. There were no recriminations.¶ If they were two outcast men, strapped for cash, shunned by society and a burden upon their friends, they had each other. Bosie, as Wilde recorded, ‘was on his best behaviour, and very sweet’.52 They walked about all day, ‘arm in arm, or hand in hand, and were perfectly happy’.53 It seemed that the past could be recaptured and revived, that from the ashes of their old love something might yet arise. Bosie presented Wilde with a silver cigarette case inscribed with Donne’s lines:
The Phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us, we two being one are it.
So to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
We die and rise the same and prove
Mysterious by this love.54
During their charmed day together they began to form a plan of escaping to Naples for the winter. There – amid ‘the sunlight and joie de vivre’ of the south – they could be together and work. Douglas was hopeful that he might raise money from his family to support the venture.55 He wanted, as he said, to give Wilde a ‘home’ – a refuge from his cares, a place where he should ‘never want for anything’, and would be able to write again.56 It was a vision that Wilde dared to believe possible. ‘If I cannot write in Italy,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘where can I write?’57 To Bosie he declared, shortly after they parted: ‘My own Darling Boy… I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends.’58
The meeting at Rouen was supposed to have been secret, although Wilde had been greatly disappointed that, since Douglas was well known at the hotel where they stayed, there was no opportunity for him to use his romantic pseudonym.59 Ross, however, came to know of the encounter from Turner who, being in Rouen, had bumped into ‘Sebastian and the �
�Infant Samuel”’ by chance.60 Neither he nor Turner was delighted at the rapprochement, recognizing the practical troubles that might follow in its wake. Wilde, however, assumed an air of defiance, telling Ross, ‘Yes: I saw Bosie, and of course I love him as I always did, with a sense of tragedy and ruin.’61 He avoided, though, mentioning their planned flight to Naples.
Back at Berneval, Wilde devoted himself to raising the money necessary for the trip. ‘It costs £10 to go to Naples,’ he lamented. ‘This is awful.’62 After three months of heedless expenditure and serial generosity he was ‘penniless’ and beset with bills. Conder and Dowson had departed owing him money. He reported to Smithers that he had ‘just lent a French poet forty francs to take him back to Paris’, adding, ‘He is very grateful, and says he will send me a sonnet in three days!’.63 Wilde’s hope that the publisher could advance him £20 ‘at once’ for the ballad was not realized, but he found relief in other quarters: the second instalment of his allowance from Constance arrived (several days late) at the beginning of September; he also received a cheque for £15 from Rothenstein who had managed to sell the Monticelli painting that he had bought at the Tite Street sale; and Dalhousie Young generously proposed commissioning a libretto for an opera of Daphnis and Chloe (‘£100 down, and £50 on production’).64 Despite this, Wilde still ‘borrowed’ 100 francs from one of his Berneval neighbours to help get himself to Paris, and once there touched Vincent O’Sullivan for the price of his ticket to Naples.65 As a prelude to his departure Wilde visited a Parisian fortune teller. ‘I am puzzled,’ she told him. ‘By your line of life you died two years ago. I cannot explain the fact except by supposing that since then you have been living on your line of imagination.’66
Wilde also wrote disingenuously to Carlos Blacker describing the decision to head south as necessary for his work and his sanity, only adding that he was ‘greatly disappointed’ that Constance had still not asked him ‘to come and see the children’.67 He of course omitted to mention that he would be travelling with Douglas. And in fact there was some last-minute doubt about Bosie’s plans. After the eager scheme-making at Rouen he had gone off on holiday with his mother and sister to the spa town of Aix-les-Bains, and seemed in no hurry to leave. He was even considering going on from there to Venice. Wilde knew better than to chide: ‘Do just as you will,’ he wrote, ‘but the sooner you come to Naples the happier I shall be.’68 The assumed nonchalance had its effect. Douglas met him as the train passed through Aix, and they journeyed on together to Naples. There, Wilde hoped, with Bosie’s help, he might ‘remake’ his ‘ruined life’.69
* In the poetry of Wilde’s childhood it reached back not only to his mother’s ballad The Brothers, but also to Denis Florence MacCarthy’s New Year Song with its ringing lines:
There’s not a man of all our land
Our country now can spare,
The strong man with his sinewy hand,
The weak man with his prayer!
No whining tone of mere regret,
Young Irish bards, for you;
But let you songs teach Ireland yet
What Irish man should do.
† As a variation on this line, he told the French poet Jean Joseph-Renaud that ‘the Nineteenth Century has had three great men: Napoleon the First, Victor Hugo, and Queen Victoria’.
‡ ‘One must accept a personality as it is. One must never regret that a poet is drunk, one must regret that drunkards are not always poets.’
§ The nature of Constance’s illness was debated at the time by her doctors, and since by scholars. In 2015 her grandson Merlin Holland, drawing on family letters, plausibly suggested that she was suffering from multiple sclerosis.
¶ Wilde was under the impression that Douglas had by now received a copy of the long letter that he had written from prison. And he was glad that he seemed able to move beyond it. Douglas’s equanimity, however, was due to the fact that he had not read the long indictment. He had, it seems, destroyed the copy he received after merely glancing at the first few disobliging paragraphs.
3
Outcast Men
‘My existence is a scandal.’
oscar wilde
Naples in mid-September was still quiet. The fashionable winter season had not yet started, and the big hotels were only just stirring back into life. Wilde and Douglas installed themselves in one of the biggest: the Hôtel Royal des Étrangers, on the waterfront, close to the Castello dell’Ovo, its glorious view across the bay framed by Vesuvius to the left and Capri on the right.1 For Wilde it was thrilling to have escaped loneliness and the drear north, to be together with Bosie, and to be in Naples – a place ‘full of Ionian and Dorian airs’.2 ‘Pleasure,’ as he remarked, ‘walks all around’.3 Wilde felt that in this new environment he would be able to write again. They might take a little villa or an apartment together for the winter, perhaps even for longer.4
In holiday mood, during those first days, they embarked on a campaign of carefree extravagance. Douglas’s plans for raising money from his family had not been fulfilled, or even pursued. His title, however, was good for credit. To an Italian hotel proprietor of the late nineteenth century any English ‘milord’ needs must be also a millionaire. Within a little over a week Douglas and Wilde ran up a bill for £68.5 Even in a hotel of ‘absurd prices’ this was an impressive performance, carrying with it, perhaps, an echo of those lavish days at the Savoy.6
But the elation of the moment could not shut out the concerns of the world beyond. Among the letters forwarded to Wilde from Paris was one from Constance, offering the longed-for meeting, urging him to come to her at the Villa Elvira. She confessed that the children would be away at school, but she enclosed photographs of – and remembrances from – them. It was too late. Wilde had, as he later told Smithers, ‘waited four months in vain’ for just such a letter. But now it arrived after he had committed his hopes and himself to Douglas and to Naples: ‘In questions of the emotions and their romantic qualities, unpunctuality is fatal.’7
He sought some additional justification for his change of attitude from the fact that Constance seemed to have deliberately waited until the children were back at school before sending for him. It was their love that he wanted, or so he claimed. And now he feared it was ‘irretrievable’.8 He told Blacker (a letter from whom had also been forwarded to Naples) that ‘had Constance allowed me to see my boys’ things would have been ‘quite different’ – adding, disingenuously, ‘I don’t in any way venture to blame her for her action, but every action has its consequence.’9
He wrote back to Constance, nevertheless, suggesting that he would come and see her, though not until the following month. The note of urgency and yearning that had dominated his communications over the summer had quite evaporated. Constance, full of happy preparations for what she supposed would be Wilde’s imminent arrival, was completely ‘ballottée’ by this brief and noncommittal reply.10 Vyvyan, on the eve of his departure for school, always recalled how her expectant joy turned to misery when she found that Oscar ‘had other claims upon his time’.11 She wrote at once to Blacker to vent her unhappiness. And although Wilde had carefully avoided mentioning that he was in Naples with anyone, least of all with Lord Alfred Douglas, her suspicions were piqued. ‘Question: has he seen the dreadful person [Douglas] at Capri? No-one goes to Naples at this time of year, so I see no other reason for his going, and I am unhappy.’12
To Wilde she wrote back at once (as she subsequently explained) ‘saying that I required an immediate answer to my question whether he had been to Capri or whether he had met anywhere that appalling individual. I also said that he evidently did not care much for his boys since he neither acknowledged their photos which I sent him nor the remembrances that they sent him.’13 To these blows others were added: Ross and Turner did know that Wilde was with Douglas, and both of them wrote to express their concern at a reunion which they knew must damage Wilde’s chances of rehabilitation – and which might well affect his right to an income.
Wilde countered with a mixture of grand statement and self-pity: ‘My going back to Bosie,’ he told Ross, ‘was psychologically inevitable: and setting aside the interior life of the soul with its passion for self-realization at all costs, the world forced it on me. I cannot live without the atmosphere of Love: I must love and be loved, whatever price I pay for it… Of course I shall often be unhappy, but still I love him: the mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him.’14 While to Turner he claimed that going back to Bosie – who ‘is himself a poet’ – would be good for his work, ‘and that, after all, whatever my life may have been ethically, it has always been romantic, and Bosie is my romance. My romance is a tragedy of course, but it is none the less a romance, and he loves me very dearly, more than he loves or can love anyone else, and without him my life was dreary.’15
Turner was urged to ‘stick up’ for them.16 He would have been kept busy. News of the elopement, as it spread round Wilde’s circle of friends, was greeted with dismay: W. R. Paton (an Oxford contemporary) was ‘physically & actually sick’ when he learnt of it;17 Blacker felt that Wilde was now ‘beyond redemption’.18 Sherard, probably ‘in his cups’ at the Authors’ Club one afternoon, declared blunderingly that it was ‘an unfortunate mistake’ and that Wilde’s ‘actions would everywhere be misconstrued; that his traducers and enemies would be justified in the eyes of the world, and many sympathies would be alienated’.19 Others wrote ‘long tedious letters’ informing Wilde that he had ‘wrecked [his] life for the second time’.20 Even Ross continued to ‘bombard’ him with admonitory epistles – ‘an unfair thing,’ Wilde complained, ‘as unfortified places are usually respected in civilized war.21
Oscar Page 84
