WHEN ALFRED DOUGLAS entered Wilde’s library in the summer of 1891, he brought with him the perfume and the promise of sex. He would also bring sex into the room in a literary sense. Between 1892 and 1893 Bosie presented Wilde with various issues of The Spirit Lamp, an undergraduate magazine which he edited during his time at Magdalen.1 The poems and articles published in its pages celebrated homosexual passion, with a frank ness that was exceptional for the period. The editor solicited works by homosexual authors such as Lionel Johnson, John Addington Symonds, and the notorious aristocrat Lord Henry Somerset, who had been forced to flee England when his amorous relationship with a young man became public knowledge. Bosie also persuaded Wilde to furnish the magazine with a sonnet and two prose poems.
The poets in the group contributed to a genre of verse which had been known since the 1880s as ‘Uranian poetry’.* Uranian poets forged an allusive poetic language with which they could freely discuss their passion. They also tried to give a positive definition to a love that remained ‘nameless’, and undefined outside the pejorative designation conferred on it by the law and medical science.
Wilde’s relationship with the editor of The Spirit Lamp brought him into the heart of the Uranian fold. His interest in Uranian verse, however, predates his meeting with Bosie by several years. His library contained several representative works of the genre from the 1880s and early 1890s by poets such as Marc-André Raffalovich, a wealthy Russian based in London, whose verse, Wilde said, exuded ‘the heavy odours of the hothouse’. Wilde also owned inscribed copies of Erotidia and Bertha: A Story of Love, poetry collections by the young Oxonian Charles Sayle.2 These volumes are fervent declarations of Uranian faith. The former contains the lines
write again in a bold, round hand:–
‘He loved boys and thieves and sailors . . .’
In Bertha Sayle writes:
There is no sin, nor any need of cure
For we are Nature’s children – and she, sure
It is, is wholly pure and sanctified.
Wilde was impressed by this volume, recommending it to a young man he was courting.3 His reference to Bertha was probably a way of testing the young man’s attitude to homosexual love: once again, a book played a crucial role in his seduction strategy.
Wilde’s interest in Uranian poetry goes all the way back to his Oxford days. He owned A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, a book by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Simeon Solomon. He must have purchased the volume some time before 1877, when he mentioned it in an article.4 Solomon’s homosexuality was notorious by that date. In 1873, he had been arrested in a public convenience on London’s Oxford Street for ‘indecent exposure’ and ‘intent to commit sodomy’. Although he eventually escaped imprisonment and fled to France he was ruined by the scandal. Ostracised by elite artistic and social circles, his life would end in poverty, insanity and a premature death.
Wilde must have been familiar with at least some of Solomon’s tragic biography when he purchased his allegorical prose poem. In A Vision, love is described as a beautiful boy ‘half-seated, half-lying’ on a throne. Like some Caravaggio cherub his lips are ‘parted with desire’ as he is ‘borne gently upward’ into the air, ‘naked, and glowing exceedingly’.5
Wilde was intimately acquainted with the authors to whom the Uranian poets turned for inspiration. One of the poems in Sayle’s Bertha has an epigraph from Whitman, beginning with the line:
As I lay with my head in your lap, Camerado6
It was taken from the ‘Calamus’ section of the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a collection which, with its colloquial language and sprawling free verse form, had revolutionised American poetry. In the ‘Calamus’ poems Whitman enthusiastically celebrated ‘comradeship’ between men. Edward Carpenter, the socialist and campaigner for homosexual rights, described the poems as powerful agents of revelation which opened a ‘new era’ in the lives of many young homosexuals in the late Victorian period.7
Wilde visited Whitman on two occasions during his 1882 lecture tour of America. ‘I have come to you,’ he declared, by way of introducing himself, ‘as to one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle’ – a reference to the fact that his mother had read Leaves to him as a child.8 Wilde brought with him, as an offering, a copy of his play Vera which he inscribed ‘to a beautiful poet, a sincere republican and a charming friend’.9 The two men drank Whitman’s home-made elderberry wine and chatted away about poetry and homosexuality. Wilde boasted to a friend of having left one of their meetings with the great man’s kiss on his lips.10
Wilde was familiar, too, with the ancient precursors of the Uranian poets and delighted in a number of Renaissance productions that were animated by homosexual passion, such as the philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘On Friendship’ and the poems of Richard Barnfield. He owned a copy of Symonds’s edition of the Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti,11 which contained translations of some of the sculptor’s famous love sonnets to Tommaso Cavalieri. On its publication in 1878, Wilde was one of only twelve recipients of inscribed copies of the book, which suggests that Symonds knew of the young Oxonian’s interest in homosexual love.12
Wilde was probably versed in all of the classical literature that touched on homosexual passion.13 He was well read in the erotic literature of the ancients, much of which has a specifically homosexual flavour. Some of his undergraduate notes display a detailed knowledge of the finer linguistic points of homoerotic comic verse. He translates into English the Greek terms for ‘small pole or penis’, ‘priapism’ and ‘paiderastia’.14* The homoerotic literature of the Romans also fascinated Wilde. His letters contain numerous references to Petronius Arbiter’s racy first-century ‘novel’ Satyricon. Petronius’s unfinished narrative charts the desultory odyssey of two youths, Ascyltus and Encolpius, who travel around Italy and further afield in the company of their boy lover Giton. Giton is an extremely feisty flirt who, at one point in the rambling tale, threatens to cut off his genitals if his lovers persist in arguing. As Wilde would compare one of Douglas’s amorous conquests to Giton, it is just possible that he witnessed a similar scene.16
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, scientific and sociological discussions of homosexuality began to appear in books and pamphlets. In his seminal study of 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, the German sexologist Richard Krafft-Ebing outlines the ‘typical’ characteristics of ‘congenital inverts’ (his term for homosexuals). They often display, he says, an artistic temperament, and are frequently prone to paranoia, temporary insanity and pathological emotional states; his general conclusion is that homosexuality is an innate disease.
Wilde seems to have read Psychopathia Sexualis in the early 1890s,17 but it is hard to imagine him having much sympathy with the German’s thesis. He may well have been thinking of Krafft-Ebing when, after his imprisonment, he bemoaned the fact that his personality and sexual habits had become ‘problems’ of interest to German psychologists.18
For his part, John Addington Symonds was appalled by the prevailing medical definition of homosexuality. He eschewed the scientific approach in favour of a historical and sociological exploration of the subject, believing that this would offer greater intellectual scope and provide him with far more powerful ammunition in his struggle against intolerance. Symonds waged that war in his landmark 1883 pamphlet A Problem in Greek Ethics, which argues that, far from being a ‘disease’, homosexuality was the norm in Greek society. In contradiction of the German sexologist Karl Ulrich, who had characterised homosexuals as an effeminate ‘third’ sex, Symonds maintained that homosexuals were typically ‘manly’ and ‘martial’ in character.19 It was an idea that he had previously rehearsed in Studies of the Greek Poets (First Series). Wilde glossed the relevant passage in his copy of the volume with the word ‘good’.20
Symonds continued his attempt to free homosexuals from the prison of scientific classification in the pages of A Problem in Modern Ethics, which was published in 1891. He argues that, though homosexual passion is universal, both the expression and the understanding of it are specific to different cultures; historical context rather than biology, is all.
Wilde must have been familiar with Symonds’s pamphlets. Both were published in private editions of only a few copies, but their first readers reprinted them. The reprints were then circulated among the faithful and sent to a number of prominent social figures with the author’s blessing. It is inconceivable that Wilde, who regularly corresponded with the author, failed to see these ‘Problem’ polemics.
Wilde was also aware of Edward Carpenter’s pleas for homosexual rights. In Towards Democracy, a long and mystical prose poem published, in various sections, between 1883 and 1902, Carpenter made an impassioned appeal for tolerance. He suggested that Whitman’s ideal of ‘comradeship’ between men of diverse back grounds could undermine the English class system – an idea for which Wilde may have expressed some sympathy.21 Wilde enjoyed the same author’s Civilisation: its Cause and its Cure, telling a friend that the book was so ‘charming’ and ‘suggestive’ that he read it ‘constantly’.22 Carpenter argues there that ‘male friendship carried over into the region of love’ was the ‘ideal passion of the Greek period’.23
Many of the books mentioned in this chapter are likely to have found a place on the bookshelves of Wilde’s close friend George Ives. Ives was in his mid-twenties when Wilde encountered him at an Authors’ Club dinner in 1892; ‘why,’ Wilde asked, striking up a conversation with the young man, ‘are you here among the bald and the bearded?’24 Ives was at the epicentre of London Uranian society, and an indefatigable campaigner for homosexual rights. He amassed, in his bachelor apartments at E4 The Albany, Piccadilly, London (the original address of Jack Worthing in Earnest), an enormous literary collection of books, articles and press cuttings relating to homo sexuality. As the author of several volumes of Uranian poetry, Ives must have possessed countless works of that genre. He also collected scientific studies of homosexual passion such as Die homogene Liebe (1895–1900) and A. Moll’s Les Perversions de l’instinct genital (1893).25 In addition, his collection included copies of the writings of his friend, Edward Carpenter.26
Ives’s Albany rooms provided a meeting place for London homosexuals and a base for their literary and political operations. The Order of the Chaeronaea, a secret, quasi-Masonic homosexual order Ives founded, probably convened there. Wilde may have been one of its two hundred and fifty members, as he provided some of the lines for the vow sworn by new recruits to the group. Ives hoped that Wilde would be influential within the movement for homosexual rights and he certainly attended many ‘purple’ gatherings in Ives’s rooms, and often helped out, with money and advice, homosexuals who had fallen foul of the law.27
Wilde was also involved in a literary enterprise dedicated to what became known as the ‘new culture’. In the autumn of 1894, in Ives’s rooms, Wilde and Douglas assisted at the birth of the homosexual magazine the Chameleon, another Oxford undergraduate organ for Uranian writers. They offered suggestions concerning its title and contents, and contributed to the first issue. That issue would also prove to be the last: the publishers refused to print any further numbers of what they probably regarded as an obscene magazine. The unique issue of the Chameleon boasted a series of Wildean epigrams, such as ‘Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.’28 It included ‘Two Loves’, Douglas’s most famous poem, at the conclusion of which a figure who represents homosexual passion laments: ‘I am the Love that dare not speak its name.’ There was also a story by the editor, the Oxonian John Bloxam, entitled ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’, which vividly describes the love between the eponymous pair and their tragic end in a suicide pact.*
Ives seems to have loaned out his volumes to his homosexual friends. He sent Wilde a copy of Carpenter’s Civilisation,30 and, somewhat reck lessly, entrusted Douglas with an unidentified tome which the latter absent-mindedly left at the Cadogan Hotel.31 Ives’s book collection may even have been a ‘purple’ equivalent of Mudie’s circulating library. As a ‘subscriber’, Wilde had access to all the important homosexual literature of the day. His membership of the Ives circle, along with his long-standing interest in Uranian verse, places him at the centre of a group of late Victorian homosexual readers.
This coterie of ‘purple’ Londoners was by no means homogeneous, as it encompassed temperaments as diverse as those of Ives and Wilde. Although they were united by their interest in the ‘new culture’ the two men could not have been more dissimilar. The intensely earnest Ives, who thought of himself, in quasi-religious terms, as an ‘instrument’ for ‘the cause’, was at a loss to understand Wilde’s mercurial personality; nor could he fathom the characteristically paradoxical, and ironic, form in which it found expression. ‘He seems to have no purpose,’ Ives complained in his diary, whereas ‘I am all purpose . . . He [has] not the gift of responsibility . . . he [is] all Art, and all Emotion.’32 This voluminous diary consists of the deadly serious whisperings of its author’s ‘authentic’ inner self, at the centre of which lay his homosexuality. It is impossible to imagine Wilde adopting either Ives’s tone or his attitude: he rejected outright the notion of an ‘essential’ self and was keenly aware that his identity had many other sources, such as his race, class, culture and profession. Indeed, the man who often appeared to his friends to have no ‘interior life’ whatsoever would never have kept a diary in the first place.33 One day Wilde leafed through the pages of Ives’s diary; ‘How systematic!’34 was his only comment.
The fundamental discrepancy between the two men is revealed in their contrasting approach to literature. Ives sent Wilde Eros’ Throne, his third volume of Uranian verse, which, like its predecessors, was essentially propaganda for ‘the cause’. While he found it ‘powerful’, Wilde complained that the book lacked style. ‘Between Truth and Style,’ he tried to explain to its author, ‘there is always a désaccord, unless one is a poet. The ideas in the book are excellent, but the mode of presentation lacks charm. The book stimulates but does not win one.’35
For all his sympathy with the volume’s message, Wilde was too much of an artist to overlook the inadequacy with which Ives had handled his medium, and his failure to bring content and style into harmony. While Wilde simultaneously adopted a number of readerly personae when he encountered a book – in this case, those of the ‘homosexual’ and the ‘aesthetic’ reader – his aesthetic persona was always paramount.
* The term ‘Uranian’ was coined by the German sexologist Karl Ulrichs, who took it from Plato’s Symposium. In that dialogue heavenly and earthly love are personified through the two Aphrodites of Greek mythology: Aphrodite, daughter of Uranus, whose love was pure and spiritual, and Aphrodite, the daughter of Dione, whose passion was sensual. Homosexual love is characterised as spiritual and therefore ‘Uranian’, in contrast to the more ‘earthly’ love enjoyed by heterosexuals.
* In some fragmentary notes on his 1877 trip to Greece, Wilde makes an intriguing allusion to the ancient literature of the Greek islands. He claims that it is far ‘more impassioned and erotic’ than the literature of the mainland, attributing this difference to the superior beauty of the boys who populate the islands. ‘Two youths of about twenty’ he encountered in Corfu were, he says, far more ‘sensuous’ and richly ‘coloured’ than normal Greek boys. Wilde probably had the homoerotic literature of poets such as Sappho (whom he called ‘the marvellous singer of Lesbos’) and Anacreon in mind, when he made this observation.15
* Bloxam, whom Wilde described as ‘an undergraduate of strange beauty’, makes a comic cameo appearance as an old lady in the first act of Earnest. Jack Worthing tells Lady Bracknell that his house in Belgrave Square is ‘let by the year to Lady Bloxham . . . a lady considerably advanced in years’ who ‘goes about very little’. ‘Ah,’ comments Lady Bracknell, ‘nowadays that is no guarantee of respectability of character’.29