THE FIRST MEETING of Wilde and Douglas in July 1891 was prompted, informed and framed by Wilde’s art. It was, in every sense of the word, written. This is no doubt partly why it made such a profound impact on Wilde, who could only see life through art’s crystal. It is entirely appropriate that, at their second encounter, which took place a couple of weeks later at the Savile Club, Wilde presented Douglas with a copy of the large paper edition Dorian Gray, inscribing it with the words ‘Alfred Douglas from his friend who wrote this book. July 91. Oscar’.1 The gift set the tone of what would be an extremely bookish love affair; it also ensured that its progress would be strongly influenced by Wilde’s novel.
Douglas carried the book back to Magdalen where he read it through fourteen times running. Its effect on him was overwhelming; he later described it as an extraordinarily powerful weapon of seduction. Bosie also explicitly compared Dorian Gray to the novel Lord Henry gives to Dorian, when he claimed that he had been ‘poisoned’ by it.2* It is not difficult to see why he drew the parallel. As Dorian reads the ‘poisonous’ novel, ‘the sins of the world’ pass ‘in a dumb show before him’. ‘Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.’4 It is hard to imagine Dorian Gray revealing any sins of which the extremely experienced Douglas had never dreamed. Yet the book, containing as it did Lord Henry’s eloquent exhortations to Dorian to burn always with a hard, gem-like flame, may well have confirmed and encouraged Douglas’s choice of the primrose path of pleasure in life. It is also possible that he saw, in its hedonistic hero, a prefiguring type of himself.
It would be six months before Wilde’s relentless campaign bore fruit, at least so far as sex was concerned. Not that sex, at least between Douglas and Wilde themselves, would play a vital part in a relationship that they both characterised as spiritual and Platonic (their mutual sexual attraction was rather limited, and found expression chiefly in their hunting in tandem for other lovers). As part of his bid to impress the young man, Wilde presented to Bosie, in those early months of their affair, all of the books he had written up to 1891, from Poems (1881) to Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891). He adorned them with effusive and poetical inscriptions, one of which read ‘Pomegranates for a pomegranate flower’.5
The inscriptions Wilde penned to Douglas thereafter chart the progress of their relationship. In June 1892 he gave Bosie the exquisitely designed limited edition of his Poems (1892) designed by Charles Ricketts. Opposite the title-page he wrote ‘From Oscar to the Gilt-mailed Boy. At Oxford, in the heart of June’.6 That volume was followed two months later by a copy of Intentions in which Wilde inscribed the words ‘Bosie from his friend the author. August 92. In memory of the higher philosophy’.7 Wilde was referring to Plato’s Symposium where homosexual love is described by Socrates as more spiritual and intellectual, and therefore ‘higher’, than the ‘sensual’ love of men and women. It is fitting that he should have written the phrase in a volume which contains ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Critic as Artist’, Platonic dialogues in which a young man is initiated into a new understanding of art and the world by an older, wiser head.
About a year after Wilde presented Douglas with Intentions the pair became inseparable. From June 1893, when Douglas came down to London from Magdalen without taking his degree, they saw each other practically every day. So frequently did Bosie appear in public with Wilde that he was referred to, in a newspaper, as Wilde’s ‘shadow’. Wilde continued to shower books on his young lover, but the words he wrote in them became less passionate and poetic: ‘For Alfred Bruce Douglas,’ Wilde wrote in Bosie’s copy of Lady Windermere’s Fan, ‘from the author, London, Nov ’93’.8 They were now an established couple who could express their affection in other ways.*
The latter-day Socrates also heaped upon his young Alcibiades countless volumes written by other authors. Douglas received a copy of the works of Andrew Marvell from his lover; Wilde also presented him with John Fletcher’s Jacobean play The Faithful Shepherdess. Bosie’s copy of the poems of the eighteenth-century author James Thomson contains markings that appear to be in Wilde’s hand; perhaps, as was his custom, Wilde wished to indicate his favourite lines for his friend’s delectation.10
Wilde passed on to Douglas his copy of Ghazels from the Divan of Hafiz in the hope that ‘the honey of [the] verse’ might ‘charm’ him.11 Ghazels is an English prose anthology of the fourteenth-century Persian verse of Hafiz, in which the beauty of ‘youths’ and the pleasures of wine and love are celebrated. It is the ideal present for an absent lover: ‘Without your love, I am alive without life,’ reads one poem. ‘Better than eternal life is union with the beloved,’ Hafiz declares in another.12
While the pair were staying together at Brighton in 1894, Douglas caught influenza. Wilde lavished food and books on the invalid, and tended him throughout his sickness. As a result of nursing Douglas, Wilde himself came down with influenza and was confined to his bed. Bosie, however, proved to be far less solicitous than Wilde had been. When Wilde begged him to procure a volume from the local bookseller, Douglas did not even take the trouble to go there, covering up his negligence with the lie that the shop’s assistant had promised to bring the book round to their hotel. After a day or so, when Wilde complained about Bosie’s behaviour, the young man exploded into an Aeschylean rage that petrified Wilde.13
This episode throws light on the less agreeable side of their relation ship, which was punctuated by countless lovers’ tiffs. Some of these were extremely trivial; others were the sort of spectacular melodramatic performances one would expect from two intensely theatrical participants. Looking back on their affair Wilde would complain bitterly of his lover’s petulance and ferocity. The masochist in Wilde, however, probably enjoyed Bosie’s tantrums at the time.
Their friendship was, as the poet W.H. Auden remarked, a classic union of the under-loved and the over-loved. The under-loved, starved of affection in childhood (in Bosie’s case, from his father), cannot believe that his partner really cares for him and so feels constantly compelled to put his lover to the test. The over-loved, on the other hand, welcomes this inherently problematic and unstable state of affairs, because he is bored and unconvinced by the love that has always been showered upon him.14 This was the psychological dynamic of Douglas and Wilde’s dramatic affair, which Wilde would later characterise as a tragic romance, forgetting that they also acted out countless comic scenes.15*
A large part of their fun was derived from book talk. To the end of his days the younger man would fondly recall their long and stimulating discussions about authors such as Dickens, Meredith, Stevenson, Tennyson, Kipling and Swinburne.16 In the run up to Douglas’s Oxford exams, Wilde helped his lover revise, by discussing Plato’s dialogues with him. Bosie’s friend and tutor, Campbell Dodgson, participated in these debates. During them Wilde would implore Dodgson ‘with arms outspread and tears in his eyes to let [his] soul alone and cultivate [his] body’.17 It was an utterly Athenian scene.
In the halcyon days of their relationship, Douglas bought Wilde a silver cigarette case which might stand as a memorial of their love. He had a quotation from the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne inscribed on it:
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.18
Four hundred years of scholarship have failed to unpack these lines, which are from the poem ‘The Canonisation’. That may be because they were not meant to be understood at the purely rational level of ‘meaning’. They intimate, through jangling rhymes and subtle symbols, an idea of harmony between a pair of lovers, a mystical union of opposites which is at once sexual and spiritual, sacred and profane, male and female. Donne’s lines provide the ideal epigraph to a complex and ambiguous alliance, which was a potent blend of sensual and spiritual elements, and in which love was sometimes mixed with hate.
* Douglas said that he knew of the cases of over a hundred young men whom Wilde had conquered through the agency of his novel’s black magic.3
* Douglas’s copies of the other books Wilde published between 1893 and 1895 bear equally laconic inscriptions. One of these is particularly interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with its wording. In a copy of the original French-language edition of Salomé the words ‘Bosie from Oscar’ have been scrawled near the printed dedication, which read ‘ A mon Ami PIÉRRÉ LOUŸS’. Curiously, the inscription is not in Wilde’s hand, but in an unconvincing imitation of it. It seems to be the work of Douglas himself – it is certainly very similar to the handwriting displayed opposite the title-page, where Bosie has written his own name. The words ‘Bosie from Oscar’ may express Douglas’s envy at being overlooked for the dedication in favour of Louÿs, a French poet of Wilde’s acquaintance. This was, after all, the first new work Wilde had published since he and Bosie had become an item.9
* The tensions of the Wilde–Douglas relationship must, however, also be seen in a broader social context. As homosexuals, they were outlaws, and, as such, denied the possibility of enjoying a stable and peaceful relationship by society.