Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  After the days of ‘awful struggle’, Ross and Turner felt a surge of relief at seeing their friend ‘quiet’ at last.82 But beyond the immediate concerns of physical suffering, there was also sense that an intractable problem had been solved. During the course of the previous three years it had become harder and harder to see how Wilde’s life might develop in happy and productive ways. And although there was, of course, much to regret in the loss of so great and rare a spirit, it did seem as though in this case ‘the terrible commonplace’ really were true: ‘It was for the best.’83

  Wilde’s passing drew no great outpouring of interest and attention from either the public or the press. The funeral, on the morning of 3 November, was a modest affair. Some fifty people gathered in the chapel behind the high altar at St-Germain-des-Prés for the simple service: a handful of minor French writers, the staff from the Hôtel d’Alsace, a few journalists, and fewer old friends. Ross and Turner followed the coffin, together with Maurice Gilbert. Douglas was there, as ‘chief mourner’, having arrived from England the previous day, but Frank Harris – ill in bed – had been unable to travel.

  There were perfunctory notices in the French and English papers. Ross thought that, on the whole, silence was preferable to cheap moralizing.84 And there was some of that. Prevailing notions of ‘poetic justice’ demanded that Wilde’s last years should have been unhappy.85 The obituary in The Times closed its brief outline of Wilde’s career with the observation that death had brought an end to ‘what must have been a life of wretchedness and unavailing regret’.86 The Sunday Times claimed that ‘the dregs of sympathy’ left for Wilde at the time of his release ‘were flung away by his conduct and pernicious surroundings in his latter days’. The notice ended: ‘No sadder record of a life wilfully blighted can be found… The only epitaph for the unfortunate man is, “Oh, the pity of it!”.’87

  Ross was confident that ‘later on’ people would come to recognize Wilde’s real achievements, and that his works would last, but the few immediate verdicts on his literary output (rather than his person) suggested that the wait might be a long one. The Pall Mall Gazette claimed that, for all his ‘wonderful cleverness’ he had ‘no substantiality’: his plays, though filled with ‘bright moments’ of wit, lacked ‘constructive capacity’ as drama. Even The Ballad of Reading Gaol could be dismissed as no more than ‘an adroit pastiche’. And while he might perhaps have been a useful ‘corrective to British stolidity’ during the days of his Aesthetic ‘absurdities’, ‘nothing he ever wrote had strength to endure’. According to their considered estimate, Wilde’s most abiding contribution to the cultural record would remain his ‘disappointment’ with the Atlantic Ocean.88

  * Unknown to Ross (and Wilde), Douglas had, only two weeks before, made a brief, clandestine visit to Paris, in pursuit of a young rent boy with whom he was infatuated. The visit ended badly, with Douglas being attacked and robbed by the youth’s two protectors.

  † It is not recorded whether Wilde was encouraged or irritated by news that the play had opened at the Royalty Theatre on 25 October to an enthusiastic reception. The play’s cleverness was widely acknowledged, along with its daring. Although some in the audience were aware that the piece derived from an idea by Wilde, no mention of this connection was made in the press.

  L’Envoi

  ‘I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face

  All radiant and unshadowed of distress,

  And as of old, in music measureless,

  I heard his golden voice, and marked him trace

  Under the common thing the hidden grace,

  And conjure wonder out of emptiness.’

  lord alfred douglas, ‘the dead poet’

  Robert Ross’s hope that, in time, Wilde’s literary reputation would revive might have seemed fanciful in the winter of 1900. But some measure of redemption was actually achieved with surprising speed.

  The popular notion that Wilde’s plays remained unperformed in Britain for a generation is not borne out by the facts. As Michael Seeney has shown in his theatrical history, From Bow Street to the Ritz, Wilde’s comedies continued to be played successfully – albeit on the provincial touring circuit – throughout the decade following his fall. The pleasure that they gave could not be denied.

  Ross, as Wilde’s recognized literary executor, diligently nurtured the few copyrights that still belonged to the estate. Of these the most immediately profitable was Salomé. Although the play remained banned in Britain, it found an audience in Europe, and particularly in Germany. A celebrated production by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1902 was witnessed by Richard Strauss, and inspired him to treat the story operatically. Foreign recognition brought enhanced status at home. Strauss’s opera Salome was premiered – triumphantly – in Dresden in 1905, and was one of the elements that encouraged the British censor to reconsider his ban on the play (it was lifted in 1907).

  As part of a project to establish a definitive edition of Wilde’s various works, Ross brought out in 1905 a much-edited version of Wilde’s great prison letter. It was entitled De Profundis. Shorn of all the bitter personal recrimination (and indeed of all reference to Douglas) it offered a philosophical meditation on punishment and repentance. The book proved hugely, and perhaps unexpectedly, popular. By presenting a vision of chastened suffering it served to redeem Wilde in the eyes of the public. He had paid for his sins.

  By the beginning of 1906 Ross could celebrate releasing Wilde’s estate from bankruptcy. In 1909 Wilde’s body was moved from the suburban obscurity of Bagneux to Père Lachaise – where, in due course, a splendid funerary monument, designed by Jacob Epstein, was erected over it.

  The growing appreciation of Wilde’s work was matched by a growing interest in his life. In ‘The Critic as Artist’ Wilde had written, ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ It would perhaps be harsh to cast the well-meaning Sherard as the Judas among Wilde’s many disciples; he was, though, the first to hasten into print, producing Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship (1902) and then The Life of Oscar Wilde (1906); the following year saw the publication of Oscar Wilde, an opportunist scissors-and-paste job by ‘Leonard Creswell Ingleby’, one of the pseudonyms of Leonard Smithers’ former crony Ranger Gull. Although none of the books was worthy of its subject, they began to fix the compelling story of Wilde’s heady rise and tragic fall. They began, too, to fix the vision of Wilde as the archetypal homosexual man – flamboyant, witty, defiant and tinged with effeminacy. It was an arresting combination.

  When Christopher Millard (under the name ‘Stuart Mason’) produced his magisterial Bibliography of Wilde’s work in 1912, Ross could write in the introduction that its appearance confirmed the truth of his prophesy that Wilde’s writings would come to ‘excite wider interest than those of almost any of his contemporaries. Indeed, with the possible exception of Dickens and Byron,’ he added, ‘I doubt if any British author of the nineteenth century is better known over a more extensive geographical area.’

  The gathering momentum was complicated, though, that same year, when, under Ross’s guidance, the young Arthur Ransome produced Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study. Although largely concerned with Wilde’s work, the biographical portion of the book (composed with information gleaned from Ross and the unpublished part of De Profundis) contained veiled references to Wilde’s animus against Douglas for the role he had played in his downfall and its aftermath. Douglas – who by then had married, converted to Roman Catholicism and developed an abhorrence of his homosexual past – launched a libel action against Ransome and the publishers. Having destroyed, unread, the copy of the De Profundis letter that had been sent to him in 1897, he was unaware of the source of Ransome’s comments. He had to endure the ignominy of listening to the whole text of Wilde’s letter (preserved and produced by Ross) being read aloud in court, with all its denunciations of his meanness and want of talent. The experience was shattering.

  Springing to his own
defence he dashed off (with the assistance of his combative associate, T. W. H. Crosland) Oscar Wilde and Myself, a withering and unbalanced account of Wilde as a talentless and corrupt charlatan. It was the beginning of long campaign against the memory of Wilde. In another court appearance Douglas would describe him as the ‘greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe in the last three hundred and fifty years’. And although Douglas did eventually relent, and come to a more balanced view of his relationship with Wilde, it was his threats of further legal action that prevented the publication in Britain of Frank Harris’s 1916 biography of Oscar Wilde. That book, for all its moments of invention, presented a vivid portrait. It became a bestseller in America, where interest in Wilde had grown at an almost faster rate than in Europe. Although Harris’s book remained unpublished in Britain until 1938, its suppression did little to dent Wilde’s ever-growing prestige.

  In 1927 the art critic Roger Fry could write to his friend Helen Anrep that he was ‘rather staggered and ashamed’ – on re-reading Wilde’s essays – ‘to see how little I did him justice’. Although Fry recognized that Wilde was ‘an exhibitionist’, he still managed to come ‘infinitely nearer to some kind of truth than all the noble rhetoricians, the Carlyles, Ruskins, etc, of the day. He has a way of being right, which is astonishing at that time, or any for that matter.’

  The verdict has been echoed in different forms and cadences down the years since then. It has adapted to different circumstances and adopted different emphases. Wilde’s shimmering wit creates an open-ended discourse that encourages all heresies. And, in his posthumous existence, he has assumed quite as many masks as he did during his own life, and with the same élan. He has appeared as the counter-cultural rebel, the gay martyr, the victim of British colonial oppression, the proto-modernist, the proto-postmodernist, the precursor of ‘Cool’. And the list will continue. Wilde retains all his fabled ability to communicate. And he still has ‘a way of being right’ which is both ‘astonishing’ and delightful.

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  Plate Section

  Endpapers

  Abbreviations used in the notes

  Endnotes

  Image Credits

  Index

  About Matthew Sturgis

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Plate Section

  1. Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, aged forty-three in 1864, by the Dublin artist Bernard Mulrenin.

  2. Oscar in a blue velvet dress, aged about two.

  3. Sir William Wilde towards the end of his life, in the regalia of the Swedish Order of the North Star.

  4. A small sketch from Oscar’s picture al-bum, possibly a drawing by him of his beloved sister Isola.

  5. Reverend Dr William Steele, the inspira-tional headmaster at Portora.

  6. J. P. Mahaffy, Professor of Ancient Histo-ry at Trinity College Dublin; the scholar who showed Oscar ‘how to love Greek things’.

  7. John Ruskin, Slade Professor of Art at Ox-ford in the 1870s; Oscar thought him ‘the Plato of Eng-land’.

  8. Walter Pater, controversial Oxford don and author of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, one of Oscar’s ‘Golden Books’.

  9. Drawing of a picnic at Blenheim from Florence Ward’s diary, Oxford ‘Commem’, June 1876; Oscar is perhaps depicted as the third figure on the upper row, flirting with Florence’s sister, Gertrude.

  10. Oscar photographed having won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Ravenna’ as well as a bust of Au-gustus Caesar left by a Magdalen fellow to the next undergradu-ate from the college to gain the prize. Oscar’s brother, Willie, is seated on the right; Marian Willets is standing behind him.

  11. ‘Hosky’ with his Oxford friends, Reggie ‘Puss’ Harding and Willie ‘Bouncer’ Ward, 1876.

  12. Frank Miles, the well-connected young artist and amateur gardener who introduced Oscar to London life.

  13. Lord Ronald Gower by John Everett Mil-lais; the portrait was exhibited at the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in April 1877.

  14. Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian, admired by Oscar at Genoa in 1877.

  15. The ‘exquisitely pretty’ Florence Bal-combe, drawn by Oscar, c.1876.

  16. Lillie Langtry, first and greatest of the Professional Beauties; the ‘New Helen’ of Oscar’s verses.

  17. Ellen Terry, Irving’s leading-lady at the Lyceum and the subject of several of Oscar’s sonnets.

  18. Sarah Bernhardt, photographed by Napo-leon Sarony in New York, c.1880; Oscar said of the actress, ‘There is absolutely no one like her’.

  19. Helena Modjeska, the Polish-born ac-tress; Oscar became her English champion.

  20. George Lewis, the Society solicitor, fea-tured, along with Oscar, as one of the ‘Lights of London’, in the Christmas Number of the World 1881.

  21. H. Beerbohm Tree playing the Aesthetic poet Scott Ramsay in the manner of Oscar Wilde in the popular 1880 farce, Where’s the Cat?.

  22. George Du Maurier’s cartoon introduces the Aesthetic poet ‘Jellaby Postlethwaite’ to the readers of Punch, 14 February 1880.

  23. Constance Lloyd around 1883, shortly before she became engaged to Oscar.

  24. James McNeil Whistler, variously Os-car’s ‘hero’, friend, teacher and enemy.

  25. Henry Labouchère, the magazine pub-lisher and MP, another sometime friend and enemy to Os-car.

  26. E.W. Godwin, the innovative architect and designer, who helped Oscar and Constance create their ‘House Beautiful’ on Tite Street.

  27. Mary Anderson for whom Oscar wrote The Duchess of Padua.

  28. Marie Prescott who played the title role in the ill-fated New York premier Vera.

  29. Walt Whitman in 1880, old before his time; Oscar thought him ‘the closest approach to the Greek we have yet in modern times’.

  30. Clara Morris as Camille by Sarony: alt-hough the American actress was known to be ‘difficile’, she was Oscar’s first choice to play the part of Vera.

  31. Robert H. Sherard, the friend Oscar made in Paris in 1883; he was considered ‘astonishingly hand-some’, well-informed and ‘lovable’.

  32. Carlos Blacker (left) and Norman Forbes Robertson: two of Oscar’s oldest friends. Blacker was the dedicatee of The Happy Prince, although they fell out later, during Oscar’s exile in Paris.

  33. Raffalovich (right), Oscar’s bête noire, together with John Gray and unknown woman friend.

  34. Frank Harris, a tireless but sometimes exhausting supporter.

  35. Cyril, aged seven, in the garden at Fel-brigg, near Cromer, 1892.

  36. Vyvyan in his sailor-suit; although Con-stance wondered about a naval career for him, Lady Wilde in-sisted that he was ‘a born writer’.

  37. Robbie Ross, Oscar’s first male lover and most enduring friend.

  38. John Gray, the poet admired by Oscar for his verse as much as his profile.

  39. Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon drawn by William Rothenstein; their home in Chelsea was, Os-car claimed, ‘the one house in London where you will never be bored’.

  40. John Barlas, the poet and anarchist for whom Oscar stood bail.

  41. Ada Leverson, Oscar’s beloved ‘Sphinx’, the ‘wittiest woman in London’.

  42. Max Beerbohm’s ‘Some Persons of “the Nineties”’ (1925); from left to right: Arthur Symons, Henry Harland, Charles Conder, William Rothenstein, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley. Back: Richard Le Gallienne, Walter Sick-ert, George Moore, John Davidson, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and (barely visible) ‘Enoch Soames’.

  43. Pierre Louÿs, the dedicatee of the French edition of Salomé ; Oscar was disappointed by his response to this honour.

  44. André Gide, who was awed by Oscar’s talk, his storytelling and his sexual freedom.

  45. A scene from the original production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar’s first theatrical triumph; George Alexander is at the far right.

  46. Lord Alfred Douglas at Oxford in 1891, around the time
he first met Oscar.

  47. Lord Alfred Douglas sitting on the lap of Maurice Schwabe. In 1930 Douglas recalled that the picture was ‘taken in my second year at Oxford’ [1890–1] ... rather by way of being a joke, though really I forget what the idea was now.’