Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Ross’s reprimands were endured in silence.22 But when the report reached Naples of Sherard’s ill-considered outburst, Wilde wrote a sharp note of reprimand, charging his old friend with playing the moralizing hypocrite ‘Tartuffe’– always one of the strongest terms of contempt in his personal lexicon.23 It marked a sad end to their intimacy, if not quite their friendship. Douglas’s family were no more pleased with the arrangement than were Wilde’s friends. Lady Queensberry had hoped that her son’s attachment to Wilde had dwindled away over the years of enforced separation. But for the moment she forbore from challenging him – perhaps aware of how intransigent he became when crossed.24

  Constance, of course, very soon discovered from Blacker that Wilde and Douglas were together. She at once fired off what Wilde described as a ‘terrible’ letter, full of prohibitions: ‘I forbid you to see Lord Alfred Douglas. I forbid you to return to your filthy, insane life. I forbid you to live in Naples. I will not allow you to come to Genoa.’25 Wilde chose to regard such demands as ‘foolish’.26 He refused to apologize, to explain, or to yield to her demands. ‘I wrote to her,’ he told More Adey, ‘to say that I would never dream of coming to see her against her will, that the only reason that would induce me to come to see her was the prospect of a greeting of sympathy with me in my misfortunes, and affection and pity. That for the rest, I only desired peace, and to live my own life as best I could. That I could not live in London, or, as yet, in Paris, and that I certainly hoped to winter at Naples.’27 Wrapped up in his own drama, he refused to acknowledge the feelings of others.28

  To Constance his reply came as a final blow. ‘Had I received this letter a year ago,’ she told Blacker, ‘I should have minded, but now I look upon it as the letter of a madman who has not even enough imagination to see how trifles affect children, or unselfishness enough to care for the welfare of his wife. It rouses all my bitterest feeling, and I am stubbornly bitter when my feelings are roused. I think the letter had better remain unanswered and each of us make our own lives independently. I have latterly (God forgive me) an absolute repulsion of him.’29 Her bitterness would soon find a practical expression.

  Wilde realised that her silence was ominous, and that he might expect ‘a thunderbolt’ from her solicitor. ‘I suppose she will now try to deprive me of my wretched £3 a week,’ he wrote bitterly to Ross. ‘Women are so petty, and Constance has no imagination.’30 Money was certainly on his mind. It was needed to fulfil the dream of self-realization, and, more pressingly, so that he and Douglas could escape from the expensive hotel and into a rented villa. Douglas received ‘about £8 a week’ from his mother but was, Wilde claimed, ‘of course… penniless as usual’.31 It was left to Wilde to take up the burden. There was the promised £100 from Dalhousie Young for the Daphnis and Chloe libretto, a work that Wilde now conceived as a collaboration with Douglas. And, after various irritating minor delays, the money arrived.32 There were several loans that Wilde had made to friends – notably the £18 or £20 to Ernest Dowson – which might be recalled.33 Wilde also retained his conviction that Leonard Smithers should pay him an advance of £20 for The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he diligently set about convincing Smithers of the fact too.34 And, beyond that, Wilde had dreams of a large US serial rights sale for his poem: ‘I really think £500 should be asked, and £300 taken.’35

  On the strength of these sums, actual and wished for, he and Douglas took a ‘gracious apartment’ in a charming villa in Posillipo on the northern edge of the town, paying four months’ rent in advance at the beginning of October.36 Framed by shaded tree-lined alleys and well-kept flower-beds, it had a view over the bay, a terrace, and marble steps leading down to the sea.37 There was even a piano (which Douglas could play).38 It seemed a haven from the chorus of disapproval from across the Alps. Some of the rooms might be adorned with ill-omened peacock feathers, but such things could be (and were) removed.39 There were four servants, who cost little more than their keep: a cook, Carmine; a maid; and two boys, Peppino and Michele. Douglas estimated that the immediate daily outgoings should be less than 10s a day.40

  The idyll was slightly undercut when, on moving in, they discovered that the villa was infested with rats. And Douglas, having sat up in bed for two nights ‘frozen with terror’,41 insisted that they must move to a nearby hotel to sleep.42 The villa’s proprietor undertook to poison the pests, but – as Douglas reported – ‘apparently they live on poison. The more they eat the more active they become. They seem to treat it as a sort of aphrodisiac.’43 Wilde felt that a surer measure would be to call on the services of a local witch – who ‘with two flutes’ would be able to charm the rats off the premises.44 Michele produced a gratifyingly hideous old sorceress, bent double and with a distinct beard, who, he claimed, was ‘infallible’. And certainly Wilde chose to believe that it was her ‘burned odours’ and muttered incantations, rather than the conventional arsenic, that were chiefly responsible for seeing off the vermin.45 The witch also told their fortunes, but it is not recorded what she foresaw.46

  Life at the Villa Giudice began in an aura of productive harmony. ‘Oscar and I are getting on capitally,’ Douglas reported to Adey.47 Wilde strove to believe that ‘his old power’ was coming back to him now that he was ‘happy’ and in the south. He felt ‘the bruised leaves’ of his spirit begin to unfold in the light and warmth of the Neapolitan sun and Douglas’s affection. ‘I can write as well, I think, as I used to write,’ he told Smithers. ‘Half as well would satisfy me.’48 His various play plans were all jostling for attention. He was preparing himself for Daphnis and Chloe by reading the libretto of ‘Tristan’.49 Douglas, meanwhile, was setting a good example, producing a ‘lovely’ lyric for the opera,50 as well as three sonnets which Wilde chose to consider ‘quite wonderful’: he dubbed them the ‘Triad of the Moon’. They were sent to Henley at the New Review – though whether as a provocation, a joke or a serious proposition, it is hard to know. They were not published. Another Douglas sonnet, on Mozart, was sent to Robin Grey, the editor of the Musician, but with the same lack of success.51

  For Wilde the most pressing task was completing The Ballad of Reading Gaol and arranging the details of its publication. Having been working on the typed-up draft that he had received back from Smithers, he was able to produce, and send off, a much-amended version at the beginning of October. Within days, however, he was dispatching a sheaf of further additional verses (‘four more… of great power and romantic-realistic suggestion’).52 And others followed at regular intervals throughout the month. There was a need to bulk up the poem to book length, and also to balance its various artistic aims.53 He worked hard.54 The task was not an easy one: ‘I find it difficult,’ he confessed, ‘to recapture the mood and manner of [the poem’s] inception. It seems alien to me now – real passions so soon become unreal – and the actual facts of one’s life take different shape and remould themselves strangely.’55 He later pretended that the additional material added during these weeks reflected his life in Naples rather more than his time at Reading.56

  He sought – as so often before – Ross’s literary and critical advice on the text, receiving from him ‘a lot of suggestions’, and accepting ‘half of them’. He retained, though, his use of such charged adjectives as ‘dreadful’ and ‘fearful’ for the commonplace incidents and objects of prison life, defending it as being ‘psychologically’ apt: they described not the thing itself, but ‘its effect on the soul’.57 And Douglas – whose poetry Wilde so much admired, and who had himself been working in the ballad form – was also on hand, to act both as a sounding board and as a slightly rivalrous counterbalance to Ross’s editorial ideas. Wilde even paid him the poetic tribute of borrowing one of his couplets to fashion the phrase, ‘That night the empty corridors / Were full of forms of Fear, / And up and down the iron town / Stole feet we could not hear’.58

  On the whole Wilde was pleased with his efforts:59 in places he had – as he put it – been able to ‘out-Kipling Henley’.60 Of course
there were reservations: ‘Much,’ he told Turner, ‘is, I feel, for a harsher instrument than the languorous flute I love.’61 But this, he acknowledged, was probably inevitable: ‘The poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic: some poetry, some propaganda. I feel it keenly but as a whole I think the production interesting: that it is interesting from more points of view than one is artistically to be regretted.’62

  Although Wilde was travelling incognito as Sebastian Melmoth, rumours of his, and Douglas’s, presence in Naples soon began to circulate. The first Italian paper to announce the fact managed, however, to confuse Lord Alfred Douglas with the young writer Norman Douglas who, retiring from a brief diplomatic career at the age of thirty, had recently moved to a villa also in Posillipo. Norman Douglas had staying with him an aged and infirm Spanish count (who was duly confused with Wilde) and as a result it was reported that Wilde was in Naples very much broken down in health. The British consul in Naples, Eustace Neville-Rolfe (who was a aware of Wilde’s presence) wrote to the Corriere di Napoli to point out the error of their account, and a brief correction duly appeared.63 The false report of Wilde’s decrepit state had, however, already been taken up by numerous British and foreign newspapers, and was much recycled – though without any mention of an accompanying Douglas, whether ‘Norman’ or ‘Lord Alfred’.64

  Other articles in the Neapolitan press soon followed.65 Some papers dismissed Wilde with a few slighting references to ‘the English décadent’ and his trial.66 Others, though, sensed a story. Journalists began to ‘dog his heels’.67 A reporter from one of the city’s evening papers tricked his way into the villa in the hope of an interview. Wilde dismissed him, irritated by the intrusion. A report of the brief non-encounter duly appeared.68 Wilde, who had once delighted in playing on the press, no longer desired to play. He was annoyed by the unwanted attention, and by the ungenerous assessments of some of the articles; Il Mattino referred to him as ‘the most insufferable kind of bore that contemporary chronicles have inflicted upon the patient public’.69 ‘I don’t want to be written about,’ he complained ‘I want peace – that is all.’70 When he learnt that there were no newspapers on Capri, he half-jokingly suggested moving to the island.71

  The fashionable expatriate community, increasing as the autumn advanced, chose to ignore him. ‘It is very curious,’ he told Ross with mock innocence, ‘that none of the English colony here have left cards on us.’72 There was, however, always the danger that indifference might shade into hostility. Wilde was made uncomfortably aware of this when he and Douglas (using the £10 received from Smithers) took the short trip across the bay to Capri in mid-October. They planned to stay three days: ‘I want,’ Oscar explained, ‘to lay a few simple flowers on the tomb of Tiberius. As the tomb is of someone else really, I shall do so with the deeper emotion.’73 The exact details of the expedition are unclear, but it seems they intended to stop at the Hotel Quisisana, and were just settling down to dinner there, when the proprietor appeared and ‘with perfect ceremony’ asked if they might leave. Some British guests, recognizing Wilde, had complained of his presence. They moved on to a second establishment only for the same awful charade to be repeated. Rather than risk a third rebuff they contemplated the tedium of sitting up all night, without dinner, waiting for the dawn steamer to take them back to Naples.74

  From this sorry vigil they were, it seems, rescued by the island’s Swedish-born doctor, Axel Munthe. Chancing upon the two ‘lost souls’ wandering in the piazza, Munthe hailed Douglas, whom he had come to know the previous year. He had no objection to being introduced to Wilde, indeed was shocked that Douglas could suppose him ‘so ignorant and so brutal as to be unkind to anyone who has suffered so much or been so shamefully treated’. The conviction of Wilde had always seemed to him ‘utterly absurd’.75 He insisted that both men accompany him home to dinner and rest.76 Wilde was delighted with the art-filled villa at Anacapri, and with Munthe himself, finding him ‘a wonderful personality’ and ‘a great connoisseur of Greek things’.77 Douglas stayed on at Capri the next day, to dine with the American socialite Mrs Snow, but Wilde, chastened perhaps by the experience at the Quisisana, returned at once to the greater anonymity of Naples. He chose not to mention the distressing incident to Ross.78

  There were, though, a few English friends and acquaintances who, on passing through Naples, did not shun them. John Knapp, an Oxford contemporary of Douglas’s, spent some happy hours in their company,79 while the campaigning journalist Harry de Windt (who wrote – approvingly – about Russian prison camps) hailed Wilde when he came across him ‘seated in solitary state, with a Bock before him, outside the Café Gambrinus’; and there was a subsequent dinner together with Douglas one evening.80 Both these visitors, however, noted the slightly claustrophobic devotion of the two exiles, isolated as they were from the wider social scene. Knapp remembered Douglas as being ‘quite infatuated with Oscar’, while to de Windt Wilde delivered a ‘long eulogy’ on Douglas, saying how he had ‘stuck to him through thick and thin and was his best and most faithful friend’.81

  But if English companionship was often limited, other diversions were to hand. Wilde, to his great gratification, was taken up by a coterie of young Neapolitan writers. Of these the most enthusiastic was a twenty-five-year-old poet and sometime magazine editor G. G. Rocco (the initials stood for ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi’), who had sought Wilde out within days of his arrival. An excellent English speaker, he undertook to teach Wilde Italian, coming three times a week for sessions of ‘Italian conversation’.82

  Although Wilde’s trials had been widely reported in Italy, knowledge of his actual work remained very limited. There had – extraordinarily – been a production of Vera at the Teatro Diana in Milan in 1890, which closed after three performances; and a few passages from ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ had appeared, in translation, in 1892, as a supplement to a Sicilian anarchist magazine.83 Rocco suggested that he might translate Salomé into Italian. Wilde was delighted. He wanted to be recognized in Naples not merely as a notorious celebrity but also ‘as an artist’.84 He did not, however, have a copy of the play with him, and had to write to London in the hope of borrowing one. Ada Leverson, with typical generosity, lent hers.85

  Rocco was also convinced that, once the play was translated, it would be possible to mount a production in Naples.86 This was an exciting idea. ‘It would help me greatly to have it done,’ Wilde informed Turner.87 His only concerns were practical; it would be necessary to find ‘an actress of troubling beauty and flute-like voice’ for the title role, and (as he explained to Stanley Markower) ‘unfortunately most of the tragic actresses of Italy – with the exception of Duse – are stout ladies, and I don’t think I could bear a stout Salome.’88 The religious objections that had stymied the London production did not hold in Italy. Indeed Rocco was friendly with Giovanni Bovio, a Neapolitan writer and MP, whose own biblical drama, Cristo alla festa di Purim, had already enjoyed a nationwide success.89 And when Rocco completed his first draft of the translation, under supervision from Wilde, he organized a reading of it at Bovio’s home. The play was enthusiastically received by the assembled crowd of writers, poets, students and journalists – and most especially by Signora Bovio, who, according to Rocco, was unstinting in her praises.90 It was an auspicious start. And another of the guests, Luigi Conforti, impressed by the vigour of Wilde’s writing, suggested a rather more public second reading at the Circolo Filologico di Napoli; sadly, though, nothing came of the plan.91

  Conforti, a poet and historian, was also the secretary of the Museo Nazionale at Naples, and had just published a guide to its collections. Wilde was a frequent visitor to the museum, delighting in its incomparable gathering of antiquities from Pompeii and Herculaneum, Stabiae, Cumae and Rome. He was drawn particularly to the gallery of ‘lovely Greek bronzes’.92 There, among the emperors, dancers and philosophers, he could ponder the lithe and naked Wrestlers, the so-called Narcissus, and Me
rcury Reposing (described by Baedeker as ‘a beautiful picture of elastic youth’).93 These were wonderful things. ‘The only bother,’ as Wilde reported archly to Dowson, ‘is that they all walk about the town at night.’ But, as he added, ‘one gets delicately accustomed to that – and there are compensations.’94

  If that solitary night with Ross at Berneval had re-introduced Wilde to ‘the delights of homosexuality’, Naples offered something more. Although celebrated as a place of fashionable resort, it had also a darker reputation as a land of sexual opportunity. The old pagan morality of the Greeks seemed to persist in its shaded alleys and sunlit streets. Young men were readily available for sex. As one foreign visitor recorded, it was only necessary ‘to show an interest in a half-grown youth, to remark on his curly hair or his almond-shaped eyes, and the young man begins to flirt… and with unmistakable intentions’.95 And as long as public decency was not offended, the law did not concern itself with such encounters. Douglas had confirmed the truth of all this during his visit the previous year, and was now eager to introduce Wilde to the city’s sexual underworld. Wilde’s assertions, made in the weeks after his release, about how his former promiscuous life among the London renters had been ‘unworthy of an artist’, were soon modified, and then forgotten. Over the coming months he – in Ross’s phrase – ‘reverted to homosexual excesses’.96 The pleasure of bought casual sex was as piquant as ever. If Wilde noted that, with age, ‘one is more difficult to please’ in sensual matters, he also found that ‘the sting of pleasure [was] even keener than in youth and far more egotistic’.97