ON AN AUTUMN day in 1890 Wilde took down a copy of The Happy Prince from his library bookshelves and wrote inside it: ‘Clyde Fitch from his friend Oscar Wilde. Faëry-Stories for one who lives in Faëry-Land’.1 Fitch, a starry-eyed twenty-five-year-old, with whom Wilde enjoyed making ‘merry over a flagon of purple wine’ and inventing ‘tales with which to charm the world’, had just embarked on what would be a triumphant career as a dramatist in his native America.2 He was also one of the many amorous conquests Wilde made after his affair with Robbie Ross in 1886.
Book gifts played a crucial part in Wilde’s seduction campaigns. He besieged the men he courted with inscribed copies of his first editions; he also bestowed books on his lovers to sustain or memorialise their relationships. The Happy Prince was one of several volumes Wilde presented to Clyde Fitch. Soon after their first meeting in the summer of 1889, Wilde had given him a copy of ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ In 1891, Fitch would receive Dorian Gray adorned with the inscription: ‘To Clyde, to whom the world has given both laurels & love, from his friend who wrote this book’.3
Wilde was convinced of the magical power of the word: ‘Do you wish to love?’ Gilbert asks in ‘The Critic as Artist’. ‘Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies that they spring.’4 He must have hoped that his presents would act like love potions or charms on the young men he courted, perhaps revealing a latent passion to them, or exciting a fresh desire. At the very least, they would further Wilde’s Socratic ravishment of his acolytes. In Fitch’s case, Wilde’s love potions proved to be very potent indeed. After reading ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, which describes Shakespeare’s passionate attachment to the young actor Willie Hughes, Fitch declared his undying ‘adoration’ for the ‘great genius’ who had penned it. ‘Oh! Oscar!’ Fitch enthused. ‘The story is great – and – fine! I believe in Willie Hughes . . . Invent me a language of love. You could do it. Bewilderedly, All yours, Clyde.’5
Fitch was particularly susceptible to Wilde’s gifts because he was a fledgling author. With the succès de scandale of the original magazine publication of the decadent ‘Dorian Gray’ in 1890, and the 1892 performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), Wilde’s first, and enormously successful, social comedy, he achieved his lifelong ambition of becoming both famous and a little infamous. Disciples such as Fitch applauded Wilde’s triumphs and were flattered by the attention he lavished upon them. Perhaps they also hoped Wilde would further their careers – which, in many cases, he did. In the company of his devotees, who would address him as ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘the divinity’, Wilde played the role of the ‘great genius’.6 Inscribing and presenting books was an essential part of his act.
Edward Shelley, another young man with literary ambitions, worked in the offices of Wilde’s publisher John Lane. Wilde struck up a conversation with him on a visit there, and was delighted to discover that the rather highly strung seventeen-year-old adored his works. Over the ensuing months Wilde bombarded Shelley with inscribed copies of his first editions, along with tickets to see his plays, until, finally, the boy succumbed. Wilde seems to have been genuinely concerned about the education of the working-class Shelley. He offered the young man £100 to enable him to return to his studies and bought many books for him. Wilde mischievously inscribed one of these – John Oliver Hobbes’s novel The Sinner’s Comedy – with the words ‘From the author, August 1892, to dear Edward Shelley’.7 This was probably a joke at the expense of Hobbes, who had tried, with qualified success, to imitate Wilde’s witty epigrammatic manner in the novel.8
Book gifts were significant in Wilde’s pursuit of Lord Alfred Douglas. His Lordship, who had been born in 1870, was the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry, an irascible and unstable man who had a frosty, and sometimes violent, relationship with his family. Lady Queensberry loathed her husband and divorced him in 1887; she bestowed all of her love on her boys, whom she utterly spoilt. Alfred addressed her as ‘my own darling’; like Wilde, she often called him ‘Bosie’, a nickname derived from his childhood sobriquet ‘Boysie’. The name was apt because Douglas remained, to the end of his days, a spectacularly egotistical boy. When he was in the mood, however, he could turn on his considerable charm and display the charisma characteristic of narcissists. Wilde accurately described him as a ‘wilful, fascinating, irritating, destructive, delightful personality’.9
At Winchester school, Douglas had given free rein to his sexual attraction to other boys, having no doubts or qualms about his instincts. As a schoolboy he also demonstrated his gift for writing technically virtuoso verse. By the time Wilde met him, Douglas had left Winchester for Magdalen College, Oxford where, like Wilde, he studied Greats. There, however, the comparisons between them end. While Wilde had walked away with the highest first in his entire year, the indolent Douglas did not even turn up for his Finals exam. As a lord, he may have considered such tests irrelevant to his future; or perhaps, being woefully under-prepared, he simply lost his nerve. When Magdalen reprimanded him for his absence, he sent himself down (i.e. expelled himself) in a rage; soon afterwards he told the president that posterity would regard the college’s harsh attitude towards him as the greatest blot on its history. It was a typical gesture in its belligerence, haughtiness and theatricality.
Douglas’s ignominious exit from Oxford lay some time in the future, however, when he first met Wilde at Tite Street in July 1891. The appointment had been arranged by Lionel Johnson, who was also there in attendance. Johnson, an Oxford friend of Douglas’s, was no more than five feet tall, and had dark slicked-back hair, which accentuated the pale oval face that seemed at once infantile and prematurely aged. Wilde always thought Johnson looked like a baby dressed up in adult clothes, quipping, on one occasion, as Johnson left a bar, that he was about to hail a passing perambulator. Douglas, in contrast, was a svelte, yet athletic five foot nine blond, with striking looks that can be described as a combination of classical Greek and English aristocracy graceful. Douglas liked to characterise himself as a ‘boyish’ beauty, and would continue to do so well into middle age. Temperamentally too, Douglas and his friend were quite a contrast: Johnson was a complex and brooding introvert, Douglas an out and out extrovert given to hysterical public ebullitions of feeling.
When the Pierrot-like homunculus and the upper-class Adonis walked up the four steps to the white front door of No. 16 and rang the bell, it was opened by Wilde’s manservant, who showed them into the library. Surrounded by beautiful volumes, Douglas and Johnson’s conversation might have turned to books, and to one book in particular, which was represented on the shelves in multiple copies: Dorian Gray, an inscribed copy of which Wilde had sent to Johnson on its publication two months earlier.
Johnson admired the novel so much that he composed an extravagant poem in Latin ‘In Honour of Dorian and His Creator’. Evidently Johnson read between the lines that describe Dorian’s passionate relationships with other men, as he writes, in his eulogy, about the ‘strange loves’ the hero so ‘avidly’ explores: ‘Here are the apples of Sodom the very hearts of vices, and tender sins’.10 Johnson doubtless mentioned such ‘purple’ matters (to use a phrase for ‘homosexual’ current in Wilde’s circle) when he lent Douglas his copy of Dorian Gray. Bosie, in turn, was captivated by the book and became eager to meet its author.11 The young aristocrat’s afternoon audience with Wilde was thus directly inspired by the novel; his expectations of the meeting would, too, have been powerfully shaped by it. Perhaps Douglas dreamed of stirring in Wilde the desire to play Lord Henry to his Dorian. He seems to have always yearned for a loving and Socratic father figure who might substitute his natural father, whom he abhorred. He would certainly have fancied himself as a double for the beautiful and aristocratic Dorian.*
As Wilde put the final touches to the costume he had selected for the occasion, he too may have wondered whether life was about to imitate his art. In arranging the meeting, Johnson would surely have expatiated on Douglas’s beauty and told Wilde of his ardent devotion to Dorian Gray. His profile of the young Magdalen man may have even dared Wilde to hope that he would finally encounter what Basil Hallward, Dorian’s artist friend, calls ‘the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream’.13 Wilde certainly identified with the intense, and rather melan choly, painter. ‘Lord Henry,’ he said, is ‘what the world thinks me . . . Basil Hallward is what I think I am’.14 Basil discovers his artistic ideal in Dorian, who becomes his muse and the mainspring of his art.
If Douglas and Wilde’s expectations of the meeting did indeed derive from the novel, then neither would be disappointed. When he entered the library, Wilde was instantaneously infatuated at the sight of a young man every bit as beautiful, and as ostentatiously aristocratic, as his fictional hero. Basil is momentarily petrified when he first sets eyes on Dorian; a ravished Lord Henry compares the boy to Adonis and Narcissus after seeing his painted image. Wilde would, in time, liken Douglas to both of these Greek deities, so it is possible that they came into his mind as the young poet rose from the divan to greet him. He certainly saw Douglas as the embodiment of the godlike figure which represented love, the poetic muse, and all that was desirable to him.
Incarnations of that archetypal deity had tripped through the pages of Wilde’s golden books. He was Charmides, the youth who had made the venerable Socrates burn with desire; he was Willie Hughes, the boy actor whose graceful form had risen up to embrace Wilde when he had turned the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets.* And he was Pico della Mirandola, the marvellous boy of the Italian Renaissance, whose first meeting with the ageing philosopher Marsilio Ficino had, according to a passage in Pater’s Renaissance that Wilde loved, opened an entirely new phase of Ficino’s writing career. ‘When Pico,’ as Wilde paraphrased Pater’s words, ‘stood before Ficino in all the grace and comeliness of his wonderful youth, the aged scholar seemed to see in him the realisation of the Greek ideal.’16
And now, a young poet from Oxford stood before him as the manifestation of his ‘unseen ideal’ and the fulfilment of all these literary prophecies. The magical first impression Douglas made on Wilde endured to the end of their encounter. Inspired to verbal brilliance by the young man’s beauty, Wilde enchanted Douglas with his talk; eagerly, the young man agreed to another meeting. Before leaving Tite Street the guests were taken up to the drawing-room to meet Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan.
* If Douglas did harbour such hopes as he sat in the Tite Street library on that July afternoon, the portents would have struck him as auspicious. He was, as he doubtless realised, acting out a scene from Chapter 4 of the novel in which Dorian waits for Lord Henry in the beautiful little library of his Mayfair house. Dorian passes the time by examining the room’s Persian rugs and ornate furniture, and by casting his eye over Lord Henry’s éditions de luxe. Life, yet again imitated art, as Douglas would have whiled away the time in exactly the same fashion.12
* Willie Hughes would enter Douglas’s life in an uncanny, and thoroughly Wildean, way. In his book The True History of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London, 1933) Bosie defended and elaborated Wilde’s theory that the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets was the boy-actor, Willie Hughes. Soon after the book’s publication, Douglas actually unearthed the first factual evidence confirming the historical existence of a sixteenth-century boy from Canterbury called William Hughes, who may have been an associate of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rival playwright. Wilde himself had been unable to discover any empirical confirmation of his theory, which he had based, as he puts it in his essay-story, ‘not so much on demonstrable proof of formal evidence, but on a kind of spiritual and artistic’ intuition. How extraordinary that Douglas, Wilde’s own Willie Hughes, should happen upon that evidence. It all sounds too good to be true, but true it all is: life again imitated Wilde’s art.15