Such a theory might entertain a dinner table but it was poor company during the long days and weeks of an often solitary existence. As winter drew on and visitors became less frequent, Wilde’s spirits sank. He was diagnosed as suffering from ‘neuresthenia’, the catch-all medical term of the period, designating nervous exhaustion and depression. He found himself ‘quite unable to get out of bed till the afternoon, quite unable to write letters of any kind – beyond the occasional flirtatious missive to Louis Wilkinson’. Even his begging letters to Smithers were ‘reduced to postcards’.84 Drink, which seemed to offer a release, merely exacerbated the condition.85
Working on the ‘Love is Law’ script was entirely beyond him. He was alarmed, though, to discover that the American-based producer Louis Nethersole – brother of the actress Olga Nethersole – considered that he, too, had bought the ‘scenario of the play’ and was anxious to see the script.86 Nethersole had acquired his ‘stolen’ copy of the plot outline from Sedger’s former partner, ‘a scoundrel’ called Arthur Eliot.87 It was a fresh and unwelcome difficulty. The stress did nothing to improve Wilde’s health. At the beginning of 1900 his neuresthenia was compounded by an uncomfortable and mysterious skin rash that itched terribly and made him look ‘like a leopard’. Wilde considered that it was due to mussel poisoning.88 In February, as a further blow, he developed a serious infection that attacked ‘the throat and the soul’. And it seems to have been accompanied by ‘a sort of blood-poisoning’ (current medical scholarship suggests that Wilde was suffering with ‘septicaemia from a streptococcal sore throat’).89 To recover from this low ebb he was obliged to spend ten expensive days in a private hospital.90
His own condition, though, was put into perspective by the news from London of Ernest Dowson’s death (on 23 February), aged just 32. The poet had been in Paris only that summer. Wilde asked Smithers to put some flowers on the grave of the ‘poor wounded wonderful fellow’.91 Dowson had been nursed during his final days in Catford by Sherard. And when Sherard was next in Paris, he made a point of calling on Wilde to let him know some of the details of the poet’s end. Wilde, though still in his dressing gown, received his old friend. He was saddened by Dowson’s death but confident that ‘much of what he has written will remain’. To Sherard’s inquiry about the progress of his own ‘work’ – which lay in a litter upon the table – he replied, ‘One has to do something. I have no taste for it now. It is a penance to me, but, as was said of torture, it always helps one to pass an hour or two.’ He was cheered by Sherard’s quick assertion (echoing his own verdict on Dowson) that, even if he never wrote another line, he had done enough to ensure ‘immortality’.92
The new year had also carried off the Marquess of Queensberry, who died in London on 31 January, aged 55. On his deathbed he effected an improbable return to the Christian faith of his childhood, receiving ‘conditional absolution’ from his brother Archibald, a Catholic priest. There had been, though, no such rapprochement with either Bosie or Percy. Indeed the marquess had roused himself from his pillow to spit in Percy’s face, when the heir to the title had appeared at his bedside. Nevertheless, neither son was cut out of the will. Even as a younger son Bosie inherited some £15,000 (£8,000 came to him immediately, the rest was to follow); Percy received considerably more.93
For Wilde this was excellent news. There was now a real chance that he would get the remaining money owing to him from the Douglas family, for the legal expenses he had incurred at the time of his ill-fated court case. Bosie and Percy came over to Paris briefly at the end of February. ‘They are in deep mourning and the highest spirits,’ Wilde reported. ‘The English are like that.’94 Bosie promptly paid Wilde £125, as his share of the ‘debt of honour’(together with an additional £20). Percy, however, dragged his heels.95
Wilde, meanwhile, was increasing his resources in other ways. At the beginning of February he had agreed terms with Ada Rehan for ‘a new and original comedy, in three or four acts’ – a different play, it seems, from ‘Love is Law’. He was to receive an advance of £100, with a further £200 due on delivery of the manuscript, on or before 1 July.96 He had hopes that the playwright Maurice Donnay might adapt one of his plays for the French stage.97 He was also in contact with Herbert Beerbohm Tree, hopeful of receiving some royalty payments for a touring production of A Woman of No Importance that had recently been mounted. Tree regretted that the play had only been given once, and that any monies would have to be sent to ‘the Trustees in Bankruptcy’. He did, though, mention that George Alexander held some ‘fees’ that he would be ‘glad to settle’.98
Having bought the performing rights to both Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest from the official receiver, Alexander offered to make some discretionary payments to Wilde. Both plays, though rarely performed in London, had become fixtures of the touring repertoire.99 It was a generous gesture, and one that Wilde readily appreciated. The unfortunate bicycling encounter outside Napoule was forgotten. Alexander also pushed forward plans to produce cheap acting editions of the both plays, to encourage amateur productions.100 Nor were these Wilde’s only ties to the London theatrical world. Charles Wyndham continued to solicit work. Wilde was flattered by his persistence, and though he turned aside a suggestion that he adapt Dumas’s La Dame de Monsoreau, he did promise to try and think of an alternative.101 Thought, however, seems to have been almost as difficult as serious application for the ailing Wilde.
Perhaps to spur his recuperation, Wilde accepted an invitation from Harold Mellor to make an Italian tour of Sicily, Naples and Rome. Although Mellor’s company was less than stimulating, Wilde had lost none of his power of enjoyment, and was able to draw great pleasure from the spring sunshine, the dark eyes of young men and the wonders of art. ‘Sicily was beautiful’, he told More Adey; the mosaic-covered Cappella Palatina at Palermo was a ‘marvel of marvels: when one was in it one felt as if one was in a precious shrine, consecrated almost in a tabernacle’. Naples was ‘evil and luxurious’.102 Among other diversions Wilde ‘fell in love with a Sea-God, who for some extraordinary reason [was] at the Regia Marina School instead of being with Triton’.103
Rome, though, was ‘the one city of the soul’.104 They arrived there just before Easter, recalling the visit of Wilde’s student days. While Mellor returned to Switzerland, Wilde immersed himself in the ceremonies and pageantry of the Catholic Church. He was blessed by the pope, not once but seven times.105 One happy effect of the papal benediction was that he was ‘completely cured’ of his ‘mussel-poisoning’. The miracle he thought deserved a ‘votive’ picture: ‘The only difficulty,’ he mused, ‘is the treatment of the mussels. They are not decorative, except the shells, and I didn’t eat the shells.’106 Wilde was also amused at the sight of John Gray, who was now studying for the priesthood in Rome: ‘mockery dangled’ in the air, as the new seminarian passed by without speaking.107
The pleasures of the Roman holiday were increased by the fact that Ross was also in the Eternal City, wintering with his mother. He and Wilde spent much time together, picking up young men and looking at classical statues. Despite the miraculous rash cure, Ross was struck by the ‘great change’ for the worse that had come over his friend’s general health in the previous six months. Nevertheless he found Wilde ‘in very good spirits’. Amid the round of fun Wilde asked Ross to introduce him to a priest with a view to being ‘received into the Church’. Ross demurred. He was still not convinced that Wilde was serious – though, as he admitted, Wilde himself was never quite sure when he was serious either. His refusal allowed Wilde to joke that ‘whenever he wanted to become a Catholic [Ross] stood at the door with a flaming sword’ barring the way.108**
After Ross’s departure Wilde idled on in Rome for a couple of weeks, diverting himself with his latest hobby. Having acquired a camera he took innumerable photographs ‘with a most childlike enthusiasm’. He was particularly thrilled with a picture of some cows in the Borghese Gardens, telling Ross that ‘cows are ve
ry fond of being photographed, and, unlike architecture, don’t move’.109
* Poverty had, too, its paradoxical side. Wilde liked to tell of the occasion when he had been forced to get out of an omnibus because he did not have the few sous for the fare, and – instead – hail a cab, because this could be paid for by the doorman at the apartment building to which he was heading.
† Wilde liked to recount how, when La Jeunesse discovered that a noted publisher had suggested that his high-pitched voice was an indication that he was ‘completely impotent’, he had plotted revenge. After a long campaign, La Jeunesse had succeeded in seducing the publisher’s wife. In due course she had a child by him. And the publisher was perturbed to find himself bringing up a child with a very distinctive and very high-pitched wail. Wilde called it ‘the greatest repartee in history’.
‡ Harris was working on a series of articles about Shakespeare, and had embraced the notion of the playwright’s homosexuality. While holding forth on the subject one afternoon in the Café Royal dining room, he had boomed to the Duc de Richelieu, ‘No my dear duke, I know nothing of the joys of homosexuality. You must speak to my friend Oscar about that.’ A profound silence descended upon the room. ‘And yet’, Harris mused, in a more subdued but still reverberating tone, ‘if Shakespeare had asked me, I would have had to submit.’
§ Wilde still registered at his hotels as ‘M. Sebastian Melmoth’. When, in Italy, a local newspaper announced his presence as ‘Oscar Wilde’, stirring up a great deal of interest and excitement, Wilde refused to drop his incognito with the students who flocked to his café ‘to talk – or rather to listen’. As he explained to Ross: ‘To their great delight I always denied my identity. On being asked my name, I said every man has only one name. They asked me what name that was. “Io” [the Italian for “I”] was my answer. This was regarded as a wonderful reply, containing in it all philosophy.’
¶ Wilde liked a boiled egg for breakfast: ‘An egg is always an adventure,’ he declared; ‘it may be different… there are a few things – like the Nocturnes of Chopin – which can repeat themselves with-out repetition.’
** Adela Schuster thought that Wilde’s ‘one chance of redemption’ – if he were unable to resume writing – would be to convert. ‘He would make a splendid preacher,’ she told More Adey. ‘This is not meant flippantly,’ she added, ‘though I fear it may sound so.’
3
All Over
Jack Worthing: ‘He seems to have expressed a desire to be buried in Paris.’
Miss Prism: ‘I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.’
oscar wilde
Wilde returned to Paris towards the end of May, breaking his journey north with a ten-day visit to Mellor at Gland. His stay was made memorable by the fact that Mellor had just acquired an ‘automobile’. Wilde thought the new contraption ‘delightful’ – although, as he explained to Ross, ‘of course, it broke down: they, like all machines, are more wilful than animals – nervous, irritable, strange things: I am going to write an article on “nerves in the inorganic world”’.1
He would have found good material for such a piece back in Paris. Nervous new machines were everywhere: diesel engines, moving-film projectors, escalators, a giant Ferris wheel, the ‘telegraphone’ sound recorder. The city was en fête for a vast Exposition Universelle to celebrate the achievements of the past century and look forward to the possibilities of next one. There was excitement in all this – the national pavilions, the bustling crowds, the curving art nouveau outlines of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais – but it provided, too, a reminder of how little Wilde himself had achieved over the past year. June had now arrived and he had written nothing.
The habitual optimism that allowed him to think that, perhaps, ‘tomorrow’ he might be able to begin, seems to have faltered. On 1 July he wrote to Ada Rehan’s business manager regretting that he had been unable to write her comedy, and admitting there was no possibility of his doing so in the near future. He promised to repay the £100 advance, asking only a ‘little time’ to gather the money.2
Ross hoped that the newly wealthy Bosie might help with Wilde’s financial position – perhaps by supplying him a regular income, or else by paying off his creditors and giving him the chance of earning money again from his existing copyrights; Douglas, however, declined.3 He was ready to be generous to Wilde, but on his own terms, and at his own rate. Having come into money for the first time in his life, he was anxious to set about spending it – for the most part on racehorses, ‘boys, brandy and betting’.4 Wilde could look forward to occasional cheques and more frequent banknotes. But when, after one dinner, he suggested that he might warrant some more formal consideration, Bosie went into ‘paroxysms of rage, followed by satirical laughter, and then said it was the most monstrous suggestion he had ever heard’.5 When Wilde pressed his point, Douglas told him he was behaving like ‘an old fat prostitute’.6
The meanness of Douglas’s vision was thrown into relief by the generosity of George Alexander. The actor-manager came over to Paris with his wife that summer. Their meeting with Wilde was a happy one. Discussing the discretionary payments that Alexander wished to make, Wilde suggested that it would be a ‘great boon’ if – via Ross – he sent ‘£20 on the first of every month’. With the assurance of such regular money Wilde even held out the hope that, perhaps, some day, he might ‘do something [Alexander] would like’.7 The vain struggle to write continued. In an effort finally to get to grips with ‘Love is Law’ for Mrs Brown-Potter (who was growing understandably impatient), Wilde agreed to collaborate with Frank Harris on writing the piece. This arrangement at least offered a possibility of progress. Wilde was supposed to undertake only the first act. But even so he failed to make a start on the work.8
He had, since his return to Paris, abandoned himself to the distractions of the Exposition. It was as if, recalling the memories of his 1867 visit, he felt himself a boy again. He ignored his ailments. Nature had ‘gathered all her glories together for him’ and he was determined to enjoy the show. Ernest La Jeunesse reported how he loved it, drinking it ‘in large measures, greedily, as one drinks blood on the battlefield. In every palace of it he built again his own palace of fame, riches and immortality’.9 He watched the wanton flamenco dancers in the Spanish pavilion, and drank at the Café d’Egypte, served by a ‘slim brown Egyptian, rather like a handsome bamboo walking stick’.10 Everything interested him.11 Among the exotic imports, new inventions and old artworks he ‘amused himself’ – as Stuart Merrill noted – ‘like a big child’.12
Wilde was greatly impressed by the dedicated Rodin pavilion, out beyond the Porte de L’Alma. Because of its location it was a rather under-visited exhibit, but as Rodin boasted to Jean Lorrain, ‘I don’t attract quantity but I do get quality’ – and he cited the recent visits of Countess Potocka ‘and the poet Oscar Wilde’.13 Rodin showed Wilde ‘anew all his great dreams in marble’ and plaster – including ‘The Gates of Hell’. And Wilde pronounced the sculptor ‘by far the greatest poet in France’.14
It was a sociable time. Wilde went round the exhibits with the still adored and still promiscuous Maurice Gilbert (who was just then involved in a ménage à trois with a rose-like girl and her lightly moustachioed lover). He also saw much of Paul Fort: they attended wrestling matches together, following the fortunes of the impressively named ‘Raoul le Boucher’.15 The Exposition brought English visitors to Paris in their thousands. For Wilde there were a few uncomfortable encounters, and many disapproving glances. It may have been at this time that he and Edward Carson met, exchanging only a look.16 There was an awkward moment, too, when he ran into the Rothensteins. They had not mentioned that they were in Paris, and they registered the pained look in Wilde’s eyes as he deduced that they were perhaps planning to avoid him. The suspicion was correct: Will was still irritated that, on their previous visit, Wilde had led them to a restaurant, claiming that he liked the music there, only for it to become c
lear, during the dinner, that ‘he was less interested in the music than in one of the players’. Will thought that Wilde looked ill and slightly ‘down at heel’, and – over the course of a dinner together – suspected that he was now depending on drink ‘to sustain his wit’.17 Other meetings were happier. Smithers and Vincent O’Sullivan came over. Harold Mellor paid a visit.18 Wilde was spotted by Aimée Lowther and Ellen Terry staring into the window of a pastry shop; they invited him to dine with them and he ‘sparkled just as of old’.19 He also greeted his old friend Anna, comtesse de Brémont, and talked with her of past times, when they met on a bateau-mouche heading towards St Cloud.20
Wilde enjoyed such excursions as a relief from the summer heat of the city. He would go sometimes to Fontainebleau. It was there, sitting outside a café, that he was spotted by Peters Chalmers Mitchell, the young zoologist who – years before – had advised him about the best way for Dorian Gray ‘to get rid of a body’. They passed a stimulating couple of hours, talking of crimes and punishments, poetry and science. Mitchell was impressed by the breadth of Wilde’s knowledge, and also his tact. Wilde turned down an invitation to dine that evening, suspecting that Mitchell’s two rather conventional travelling companions would not approve.21
In August Douglas took a shoot, together with Percy, at Strathpeffer in the Scottish Highlands. Before departing, though, he gave Wilde a splendid dinner at the Grand Café. All resentments were set aside. Wilde was in the ‘highest spirits’, amused by Bosie’s anxiety to reach Scotland in time for the ‘Glorious Twelfth’. But at the end of the meal he became suddenly depressed. He told Douglas that he did not think he would live out the year. He had had ‘a presentiment’. ‘If another century began,’ he remarked gravely, ‘and I was still alive, it would really be more than the English could stand.’ Douglas brushed this aside as characteristic exaggeration. He promised to send a cheque from Scotland and did so – for £15.22
Oscar Page 91
