2

Feasting with Panthers

Mrs Allonby: ‘Have you tried a good reputation?’

Lord Illingworth: ‘It is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected.’

oscar wilde, a woman of no importance

Wilde buried his own heartlessness amid the preparations for A Woman of No Importance. He was a constant presence at the theatre over the next three weeks. When Tree was asked if the play was being rehearsed ‘with the assistance of Wilde’, he replied, ‘with the interference of Wilde’. There certainly were moments of tension. But there was also much useful collaboration. Wilde consented to numerous suggested cuts, and made several telling additions to the text. Tree was amazed at the way he would retire ‘into a corner of the theatre and shortly emerg[e] with a completely new scene bristling with wit and epigram’. He also added to the fun. When, one morning, the rehearsal was interrupted by a terrific crash, Wilde responded to the moment by announcing that the crash was merely some of A. H. Jones’s dialogue that ‘had fallen flat’.

It was a convivial time. Wilde often joined the generous-spirited Tree and the other actors for lunch at the Continental Hotel on Lower Regent Street. Among his friends in the cast was ‘Bernie’ Beere, who was playing Mrs Arbuthnot. Tree was relishing his role as Lord Illingworth. Having begun his career imitating Wilde in Where’s the Cat? he could now give an even richer account of Wilde’s manner, as the witty and cynical peer. His performance was inclined to extend beyond the stage. He would jot down Wilde’s impromptu witticisms in his notebook for later use, and even began coining his own variations upon them. ‘Ah,’ Wilde declared, ‘every day dear Herbert becomes de plus en plus Oscarisé; it is a wonderful case of Nature imitating Art.’

Perhaps the imitation needed to go further. When the actor-manager Squire Bancroft inquired whether Tree would be good in the part, Wilde disloyally replied: ‘Good? No.’ ‘Surely not bad?’ Bancroft countered. ‘Bad? No.’ ‘Indifferent, then?’ ‘No, not indifferent.’ ‘Then what on earth will he be?’ ‘In the strictest confidence… but you will not repeat this?’ ‘Not a word.’ ‘Then I will whisper in your deaf ear. Tree will be… we must face it manfully… he will be Tree.’1

The opening night on 19 April quite matched the glamour of Lady Windermere’s Fan. As it was a Wednesday parliament was not sitting, so many leading political ‘notabilities’ were able to be there. Setting aside all differences on the Irish question, Balfour was in Wilde’s own box, together with George Wyndham and the Countess of Grosvenor. Cyril Flower – recently ennobled as Lord Battersea – sat opposite. George Lewis, Burne-Jones, Alma-Tadema, Mrs Jopling, Conan Doyle, Le Gallienne and even Swinburne swelled the ranks of talent. Willie, too, was in attendance.

The audience, it was clear, loved the play. At the end there were calls for the author – although when Wilde appeared to take his bow, some ‘hoots and hisses’ mingled with the cheers. The reasons for this were not given: it has been suggested that Hester Worsley’s line about ‘English society’ lying ‘like a leper in purple… a dead thing smeared with gold’, might have offended the patriotic sensibilities of the pit. There were calls from the ‘gods’ for Wilde to return and speak. But, mindful of his ‘mixed reception,’ he declined. It was left to Tree – having declared his own pride in being connected with ‘such a work of art’ – to report that Wilde had already departed the auditorium.2

Backstage Wilde congratulated the cast, and they congratulated him. He enthused to Tree, ‘I shall always regard you as the best critic of my plays.’ ‘But,’ Tree said, ‘I have never criticized your plays.’ ‘That’s why,’ Oscar answered complacently. The press response was, again, wilfully ungenerous. As one friend noted, ‘How the critics attack gentle Oscar.’ With the exceptions of William Archer in the World and A. B. Walkley in the Speaker ‘the rest have scarcely tried to write about the play at all. They have simply abused Oscar.’ But even hostile critics had to allow that the play would prove popular. And its prospects were further enhanced when the Prince of Wales attended the second night. He was reported to have told Wilde not to alter ‘a single line’, drawing the reply, ‘Sire, your wish is my command’ – and the later observation: ‘What a splendid country where princes understand poets.’3 Wilde, it was clear, had been able to repeat the magic of Lady Windermere’s Fan. With full houses and an advantageous royalty arrangement, Wilde could look forward to earning as much as £200 a week – substantially more than he had taken even from his first success.4

But the euphoria of the moment was immediately punctured. On the day after the opening night, Tree passed Wilde a piece of paper. It had been handed to him in the street – headed, ‘Kindly give this letter to Mr Oscar Wilde and oblige yours [signature illegible].’ Tree noted that the sentiments expressed might be open to misconstruction. The missive was a copy of Wilde’s ‘madness of kisses’ letter. To Tree’s suggestion that it could be ‘dangerous’, Wilde affected a laughing unconcern, claiming that the letter was a ‘prose poem’ and ‘if put into verse might be printed in such a respectable anthology as the Golden Treasury’. ‘Yes,’ Tree replied, ‘But it is not in verse.’ ‘That no doubt explains why it is not in the Golden Treasury,’ Wilde replied. Such insouciance, however, was put on. A demand for money, Wilde knew, was sure to follow. And soon enough he was approached in the street by a man who said he wanted to speak about a letter in his possession. Wilde claimed he was too busy with the play to be bothered with such matters. He needed time.5

Following the line that he had taken with Tree, he and Douglas devised a plan. The letter – with its references to Hyacinthus and Apollo – was indeed so effusive as to be more like a work of literature than a regular communication. Its artistic excess could be turned to advantage. Pierre Louÿs was asked to transform the text into a sonnet – a French poetic version of Wilde’s ‘prose poem’. It could then be published, if not in the Golden Treasury, in The Spirit Lamp. By making the letter public, they sought to destroy its power. No one had been blackmailed over a published poem. Louÿs – despite his growing misgivings about Wilde’s relationship with Douglas – agreed to undertake the task. His translation would appear, barely two weeks later, in The Spirit Lamp’s May number, under the heading, ‘A letter written in prose poetry by Mr Oscar Wilde to a friend and translated in the rhymed poetry by a poet of no importance.’

Wilde was so far prepared when, some days later, he received a caller at Tite Street (to which he had finally returned). At about quarter to eight in the evening, shortly before dinner, Wilde’s servant announced that a Mr Allen was in the hall, wishing to see him ‘on particular business’. Wilde went down to meet the caller. As he later told Frank Harris, something in the man’s manner told him that here was ‘the real enemy’. Mr Allen informed him that he was in possession of a letter of Wilde’s that he might want to have back. ‘I suppose you mean my beautiful letter to Lord Alfred Douglas,’ Wilde said. ‘If you had not been so foolish as to send a copy of it to Mr Beerbohm Tree, I should have been glad to have paid you a large sum for it, as I consider it to be a work of art.’ The bravado was impressive; as Wilde later admitted, throughout the encounter, ‘my body seemed empty with fear’. ‘A very curious construction could be put on that letter,’ Allen said. ‘No doubt, no doubt,’ Wilde replied lightly, ‘Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.’ ‘A man has offered me £60 for it,’ Allen countered defiantly. ‘You should take the offer,’ Wilde said. ‘£60 is a great price. I myself have never received such a large sum for any prose work of that length. But I am glad to find that there is someone in England who will pay such a large sum for a letter of mine.’ Allen replied weakly that the man was ‘out of town’. Pressing home what seemed to be his advantage, Wilde said, ‘He will no doubt return, and I don’t care for the letter at all.’ As Wilde sought to terminate the interview, Allen changed tack, and began to plead that he was very poor, and had been put to considerable expense in trying to track Wilde down. Wilde presented Allen with half a sovereign to relieve his ‘distress’, while assuring him that he really had no interest in the letter – which was, indeed, soon to be published in ‘a delightful magazine’. ‘I will,’ he added, ‘send you a copy.’

Despite this brave parting shot, the encounter left Wilde shaken and crowded with ‘vague apprehensions’. And his nerves were further unsettled, when, five minutes later, there was another knock on the door. It was a youth named Cliburn. He had come about ‘a letter of Allen’s’. ‘I cannot be bothered any more about that letter,’ Wilde told him. ‘I don’t care tuppence about it.’ To Wilde’s great surprise, Cliburn then produced the letter from his pocket, saying, ‘Allen has asked me to give it back to you.’ ‘Why does he give it back to me?’ Wilde asked carelessly. ‘He says you were kind to him and that it’s no use trying to “rent” you; you only laugh at us.’ Wilde made a show of inspecting the much-creased and soiled document, remarking, ‘I think it quite unpardonable that better care was not taken of an original manuscript of mine.’ Accepting Cliburn’s apologies, he presented him too with half a sovereign, saying, ‘I am afraid you are leading a wonderfully wicked life.’ ‘There is good and bad in every one of us, Mr Wilde,’ Cliburn stated. ‘You are a born philosopher,’ replied Wilde.6

The incident had been alarming, but Wilde seemed to have survived. And as it receded, he drew from it a sense of power, and even an erotic excitement: he had outfaced ‘the bold scheming enchanting’ panthers. Details of the encounter, however, began to leak out, fuelling the fire of gossip. The rumours about Wilde’s sexual tastes and sexual adventures were becoming increasingly widespread.7 There remained, though, always an element of doubt. There were many – both ‘friends and the friends of friends’ – who dismissed the tales, assuming they were merely part of his pose: that ‘It was only Oscar… He talks about it, but he does not do it.’ For others – rather more worldly – his sexual tastes were a matter for amused discussion, but no more. What he did in private was his own affair.8

If some old friends did begin to detach themselves, new ones hurried to replace them. There were young actors and recent graduates who surrounded Wilde with a chorus of approval and even adoration. But there were also artists and writers of the rising generation, who – besides admiration – offered something more challenging. William Rothenstein had returned to England, and to London. At rehearsals for A Woman of No Importance, Wilde came to know Tree’s diminutive half-brother, Max Beerbohm, then an undergraduate at Oxford. Beerbohm, an extraordinarily precocious talent as both a writer and caricaturist, had a sort of cult of Wilde, borrowing aspects of his style, his wit and his pose. But this admiration was always tinged with a subversive gloss. ‘Did I tell you about Oscar at the Restaurant?’ he asked his friend Reggie Turner:

He ordered a watercress sandwich: which in due course was brought to him: not a thin, diaphanous green thing such as he had meant but a very stout satisfying article of food. This he ate with assumed disgust (but evident relish) and when he payed [sic] the waiter, he said, ‘Tell the cook of this restaurant with the compliments of Mr Oscar Wilde that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf of bread with a field in the middle of it.’

And it was not only food in which Wilde overindulged. ‘I am sorry to say that Oscar drinks far more than he ought,’ Beerbohm also reported. ‘Indeed the first time I saw him, after all that long period of distant adoration and reverence, he was in a hopeless sate of intoxication… I think he will die of apoplexy on the first night of the play.’ Something of this tone of ironic appraisal informed a spoof essay – ‘Oscar Wilde by An American’ – that Beerbohm produced for the Anglo-American Times. Wilde pronounced it ‘incomparably brilliant’ – even if he was stung by its lightly satiric touch.9

No less precocious, and no less prone to ironic appraisal, was the twenty-one-year-old artist Aubrey Beardsley, a recent ‘discovery’ of Robbie Ross’s. Beardsley, then at the outset of his career, had produced an extraordinary drawing in pen and ink depicting the climax of Salomé. Wilde was impressed by the highly stylized ‘japonesque’ image of the princess preparing to kiss the severed head of John the Baptist. He was impressed too by the angular, consumptive, yet poised figure of the artist. In acknowledgement of both he presented Beardsley with a copy of the French edition of the play, inscribed, ‘March 93. For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance. Oscar.’10

Wilde at once began to consider Beardsley’s potential as an illustrator of his own work. When Gray’s Silverpoints was published that month, with its elegant Ricketts cover, its modishly sparse text and its modishly wide margins, Ada Leverson suggested that Wilde should go a step further and produce ‘a book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts’. Wilde approved, telling her, ‘It shall be dedicated to you, and the unwritten text illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. There must be five hundred signed copies for particular friends, six for the general public, and one for America.’ Soon afterwards, when Wilde convinced Mathews and Lane to bring out an English-language edition of Salome, it was arranged that Beardsley would provide ten pen-and-ink illustrations and a cover design.11

The commission did not mark a desertion of Ricketts and Shannon by Wilde. They remained involved in his other publishing projects of the moment. Despite certain irritations over late payments and advertising budgets, Wilde had been impressed by Lane and Mathews’ handling of his books, and negotiations were entered into for the Bodley Head to produce his entire oeuvre. Besides the English version of Salome, there was to be a uniform edition of Wilde’s plays – Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance and The Duchess of Padua (Vera seems to have been consigned to obscurity) – with bindings designed by Shannon. The Duchess of Padua, having not yet been performed in Britain, would have an introduction by Wilde’s friend, the American poet Edgar Fawcett. It was also envisaged that Ricketts, once he had finished work on ‘The Sphinx’, would design a cover and initial letters for an edition of ‘The Incomparable History of Mr. W. H.’. The scheme – if it could be achieved – seemed to offer Wilde an impressive literary permanence.12

Douglas, however, took precedence. Wilde spent a succession of weekends at Oxford, staying at the rooms on the High Street that Douglas shared with his friend Lord Encombe. There were almost nightly dinners in his honour, given by members of The Spirit Lamp coterie. Wilde was delighted to be back at his alma mater, surrounded by eager young listeners. He regaled them with ironic tales of self-sacrifice: of Lydia and Metellus, patrician lovers and converts to the early church, who were condemned to death as Christians, but, despite each having lost their faith in prison, felt they could not save themselves by renouncing their religion, as they believed it would break the other’s heart. ‘And so when the appointed day came, in their turn Lydia and Metellus were thrown to the wild beasts in the Circus – and thus they both died for a Faith in which they did not believe.’ He told of Pope John XXII, who, on his way to meet his mistress, stops at a little church where, sitting in the confessional, he hears the confession of a man who has undertaken to assassinate him. Having assured the would-be killer that God will forgive him even for this great crime, the pope then proceeds to his tryst. As he embraces his mistress, the assassin steps from the shadows and stabs him. ‘With a groan he fell to the ground – a dying man. Then with a supreme effort he raised his hand, and, looking at his assailant, said in the last words of the Absolution: “Quod ego possum et tu eges, absolve te.”’

Wilde’s presence in Oxford provoked a satirical attack in an undergraduate periodical, the Ephemeral, produced on successive days during Eights Week. One of the two editors (Arthur Cunliffe) contributed a parodic account of ‘Ossian Savage’s New Play’ (‘[it] was progressing fast and well as usual, though it had not yet got a plot. The plot came afterwards in Ossian’s plays with the “finishing touches”,’ etc.). The skit, though gentle enough, described the playwright as ‘a man of coarse habit of body and of coarser habits of mind’, a ‘spiteful’ jibe that provoked Douglas into a ‘full blooded correspondence’ over the paper’s subsequent issues. And although both editors offered qualified apologies, Cunliffe defended his use of the adjective ‘coarse’ in relation to Wilde’s ‘mental tendencies’ as revealed in his published works.

Nevertheless Hamilton Grant (Cunliffe’s co-editor) agreed to meet Wilde at dinner in Douglas’s rooms; like so many others, he was soon won over. Wilde greeted him winningly with, ‘I hear that you are called “Gragger.” But this is dreadful. It must not go on. We must find a new name for you, something beautiful and worthy and Scottish.’ And when, at the end of the meal, Grant produced a cigar (to distinguish himself from the ‘perfectly dressed effeminate types’ who had been smoking gold-tipped cigarettes throughout the proceedings), Wilde stilled the cries of protest, saying, ‘How too terrible of you! But we shall call it a nut-brown cigarette – and you shall smoke it.’ After another dinner, held in rooms on St Giles’, when Wilde’s presence on the first-floor balcony had attracted a small but rowdy crowd of townspeople, shouting ‘Hoscar – let’s ’ave a speech, Hauthor, Hauthor, Hoscar, Hoscar!’, Grant and a friend had sallied forth to disperse them. Wilde hailed their triumphant return with, ‘You are magnificent – you are giants – giants with souls.’13

Soulful Scottish giants were not the only attractions of Oxford. At Douglas’s lodgings there was a seventeen-year-old servant boy called Walter Grainger. It is hard to suppose that Douglas had not already had sex with him; Wilde certainly did so during his regular weekend visits. Grainger later recounted how, over successive days, when he took a morning cup of tea to Wilde’s bedroom, Wilde first kissed him, then played with his ‘private parts’, and finally induced him to lie on the bed where ‘he placed his penis between my legs and satisfied himself’. On giving Grainger ten shillings after one of these encounters, Wilde stressed the need for discretion. His own behaviour, though, was anything but discreet.14

Pierre Louÿs had been upset by what he had seen in London. He had not cared at all for Douglas, and disapproved of his relationship with Wilde. The shared (or adjoining) bedrooms at the Albemarle left no room for doubt about its nature, even before Wilde’s boast that he had been ‘married three times in [his] life, once to a woman and twice to men’. Worse, though, than this reckless flaunting of convention, was the thoughtless cruelty to Constance that Louÿs witnessed. He confided these misgivings to Henri de Régnier, who wasted little time in sharing them with others. Goncourt delightedly recorded in his journal on 30 April: ‘Ah you don’t know?’ (said de Régnier, when Oscar Wilde’s name was mentioned), ‘Well, he’s not hiding it himself. Yes, he admits that he is a pederast… following the success of his play in London, he left his wife and three [sic] children and set himself up in a hotel, where he is living conjugally with a young English lord.’

In a city dedicated to gossip, Wilde’s sexual proclivities became, henceforth, an abiding theme. Goncourt suspected that his pederasty was an hommage to – if not a plagiarism of – Verlaine (of whom Wilde often spoke eulogistically); or perhaps a tribute to the perverted English nobleman ‘Lord Annandale’ in Goncourt’s own novel La Faustin. There was much debate as to whether Wilde was ‘actif’ or ‘passif’ in his sexual relations with men – the majority supposing the former; though one commentator declared that he must be ‘passif’ as only then does a man ‘encounter a pleasure that he does not enjoy with a woman’.15

For Louÿs, though, Wilde’s behaviour was the cause of real anguish. When Wilde was over in France at the end of May, Louÿs called on him at his hotel and urged him to break the connection with Douglas. It was a futile interview. Forced to choose between Louÿs and Bosie, Wilde – as he later put it – ‘chose at once the meaner nature and the baser mind’. ‘Adieu, Pierre Louÿs,’ Wilde said sorrowfully at the close of the encounter, ‘Je voulais avoir un ami; je n’aurai plus que des amants’ (‘I had hoped for a friend; from now on I will have only lovers’).16