6

A Capacity for Being Amused

‘Remember my epigrams then, dear boy, and repeat them to me tomorrow.’

esmé amarinth to lord reggie, the green carnation

As the summer advanced Wilde’s thoughts turned to writing a new play. George Alexander, he knew, was interested in taking his next work. He conceived the idea of producing something different: not a comic ‘drama’, like his previous pieces, but an outright comedy, even a farce. After his recent exposure to A School for Scandal, he considered attempting something ‘eighteenth-century’. But he soon settled, instead, upon transposing Sheridan’s comic spirit into a modern setting.1

He mapped out a rough idea of the plot for Alexander:

Act I. Evening party. 10 pm.

Lord Alfred Rufford’s rooms in Mayfair. Arrives from the country Bertram Ashton his friend: a man of 25 or 30 years of age: his great friend. Rufford asks him about his life. He tells him that he has a ward, etc. very young and pretty. That in the country he has to be serious, etc. that he comes to town to enjoy himself, and has invented a fictitious younger brother of the name of George – to whom all his misdeeds are put down. Rufford is deeply interested about the ward.

Guests arrive: the Duchess of Selby and her daughter, Lady Maud Rufford, with whom the guardian [Bertram] is in love – Fin-de-Siècle talk, a lot of guests – the guardian proposes to Maud on his knees – enter Duchess – Lady Maud: ‘Mamma, this is no place for you.’

Scene: Duchess enquires for her son Lord Alfred Rufford: servant comes in with note to say that Lord Alfred has been suddenly called away to the country. Lady Maud vows eternal fidelity to the guardian whom she only knows under the name of George Ashton. (P.S. The disclosure of the guardian of his double life is occasioned by Lord Alfred saying to him ‘You left your handkerchief here the last time you were up’ (or cigarette case). The guardian takes it – the Lord A. says ‘but why, dear George, is it marked Bertram – who is Bertram Ashton?’ Guardian discloses plot.)

Act II. The guardian’s home – pretty cottage.

Mabel Harford, his ward, and her governess, Miss Prism. Governess of course dragon of propriety. Talk about the profligate George; maid comes in to say ‘Mr George Ashton’. Governess protests against his admission. Mabel insists. Enter Lord Alfred. Falls in love with ward at once. He is reproached with his bad life, etc. Expresses great repentance. They go to garden.

Enter guardian. Mabel comes in: ‘I have a great surprise for you – your brother is here.’ Guardian, of course, denies having a brother. Mabel says ‘You cannot disown you own brother, whatever he has done.’ – and brings in Lord Alfred. Scene: also scene between [the] two men alone. Finally Lord Alfred arrested for debts contracted by guardian: guardian delighted: Mabel, however, make him forgive his brother and pay up. Guardian looks over bills and scold Lord Alfred for profligacy.

Miss Prism backs the guardian up. Guardian then orders his brother out of the house. Mabel intercedes, and brother remains. Miss Prism has designs on the guardian – matrimonial – she is 40 at least – she believes he is proposing to her and accepts him – his consternation.

Act III. Mabel and the false brother.

He proposes and is accepted. When Mabel is alone, Lady Maud, who only knows the guardian under the name of George, arrives alone. She tells Mabel she is engaged to ‘George’ – scene naturally. Mabel retires: enter George, he kisses his sister naturally. Enter Mabel and sees them. Explanations, of course. Mabel breaks off the match on the grounds that there is nothing to reform in George: she only consented to marry him because she thought he was bad and wanted guidance. He promises to be a bad husband – so as to give her an opportunity of making him a better man; she is a little mollified.

Enter the guardian: he is reproached also by Lady Maud for his respectable way of life in the country: a JP: a county-councillor: a churchwarden: a philanthropist: a good example. He appeals to his life in London: she is mollified, on condition that he never lives in the country: the country is demoralizing: it makes you respectable. ‘The simple fare at the Savoy: the quiet life in Piccadilly: the solitude of Mayfair is what you need etc.’

Enter Duchess in pursuit of her daughter – objects to both matches. Miss Prism, who had in early days been governess to the Duchess, sets it all right, without intending to do so – everything ends happily.

Result

Curtain

Author called

Cigarette called

Manager called

Royalties for a year for author

Manager credited with writing play. He consoles himself for the slander with bags of red gold.

Fireworks.

The ‘scenario’ was, of course, just a first sketch; the ‘real charm of the play’, Wilde suggested, would be in the dialogue. He hoped, though, that the idea would appeal enough for Alexander to advance him £150 to secure the first refusal – the money to be returned should he not care for the finished script. He suggested that – if he were able ‘to go away and write’ – it could be done by October.2

Wilde was able to get away and write. After the excesses of Goring the year before, Constance – working to a budget of 10 guineas a week – had taken a more modest place for the last month of the summer. The Haven was a terraced house belonging to a friend of hers, on the Esplanade at Worthing, on the south coast. She and the boys (now aged nine and seven) – with their governess, and two of the Tite Street servants – went down at the beginning of the second week in August. Wilde arrived three days later and claimed the top-floor room with a balcony as his ‘writing room’.3 It was to be a season of seaside fun and literary endeavour, and not just for Wilde. He had passed on his ‘Oscariana’ idea to Constance. She was to compile an anthology of his epigrams, taken from his plays and other works; and the little book was to be privately printed by Arthur Humphreys, the young manager of Hatchard’s bookshop.

A special rapport had grown up between Constance and the twenty-nine-year-old (married) Humphreys during their collaboration. The recent months of neglect by Oscar had made Constance susceptible to kindness and attention. In one letter to Humphreys she confessed that she considered him ‘an ideal husband, indeed… you are not far short of being an ideal man!’ When he came down to Worthing for the day, to work on the project, she took a moment to write ‘darling Arthur’ (as she now called him) a note, while he was out smoking his cigarette, a note – ‘to tell you how much I love you, and how dear and delightful you have been today’. Whether this romantic friendship evolved into an affair is uncertain, and perhaps unlikely, but it did, perhaps, show Wilde that his wife was desirable to others, and desiring of them too.4

Wilde threw himself into his play, and was only partially deflected by the arrival of Lord Alfred Douglas on 14 August. Although, before coming down to Worthing, Wilde had suggested Douglas might visit, he had then tried to put him off with tales of the boringness of family life (the children’s governess was ‘horrid, ugly… quite impossible,’ and Swiss; ‘also, children at meals are tedious’). Bosie, however, was not to be gainsaid. Despite Wilde’s warnings, he curtailed his travels with Wilfrid Blunt to join the fun at the seaside. Although he seems to have put up at a hotel, he was a regular presence at The Haven, much to Constance’s dismay. He soon became aware that he was a ‘bone of contention between Oscar and Mrs Oscar’, but – with characteristic selfishness – ignored their discomfort and set about enjoying himself. In his own recollection, he greatly contributed to the composition of Wilde’s play, sitting alongside the playwright, approving the jokes as they were read out to him, and suggesting many of his own.5

Douglas’s presence could not entirely dispel the air of the family seaside holiday. Indeed Wilde’s son Vyvyan later remembered that summer as a charmed one, with Oscar ‘at his best’, taking his boys swimming, fishing and sailing – ‘when it was not too breezy’. They established an aquarium in which the day’s rock-pool discoveries could be deposited. Wilde threw himself into sandcastle building, ‘an art in which he excelled’, devising ‘long, rambling castles… with moats and tunnels and towers and battlements’. There were other treats: the Worthing Annual Regatta provided a fine spectacle (marred only for Wilde by the presence of sailing boat, bearing ‘a huge advertisement for a patent pill’). At the lifeboat demonstration the Wilde party was conspicuous in the flotilla, ‘flitting about’ in a small rowing boat. Wilde also took Cyril to at least one concert, in the very full programme laid on at the Assembly Rooms.6 The special bond between Wilde and his older son was reinforced that summer. Indeed Wilde would refer to the ‘beautiful, loving, loveable’ Cyril as ‘my friend of all friends, my companion of all companions’.7

Nevertheless, for at least some of the time Wilde allowed himself to be monopolized by Douglas. They would go off sailing together, often accompanied by a trio of local lads who they had picked up on the beach: the sixteen-year-old Alphonse Conway and his friends Stephen and Percy. The boys would swim naked off the boat, diving for prawns and lobsters. Wilde characterized Alphonse – or ‘Alphonso’, as he dubbed him – as a ‘bright, happy, boy’ without any obvious occupation, and his brightness added to the attractions of the holiday. He and his friends became part of the summer scene. After one outing Wilde and Douglas took Alphonse and Stephen to lunch at the Marine Hotel. The boys would also join in the family activities, taking Wilde’s sons out ‘prawning’ in the boat. Alphonse even attended a children’s tea party for Cyril at the Esplanade.8

Wilde developed a particular fondness for ‘Alphonso’, who lived with his widowed mother close to the seafront. He encouraged his ambition to go to sea, and stimulated his imagination with gifts of Treasure Island and a book called The Wreck of the Grosvenor. He also bought him a blue serge suit and a straw hat with a red and blue ribbon, so that he need not be ashamed of his ‘shabby’ clothes during the summer festivities. But, although there seems to have been a certain affection in all this, there was also a definite sexual element.9 According to Conway, shortly after they became acquainted, Wilde suggested that they meet on the parade at about nine in the evening. They walked out of the town together on the little coastal road towards Lancing. In a quiet place Wilde suddenly ‘took hold’ of ‘Alphonso’, and, putting his hand inside his trousers, masturbated him until he ‘spent’. He did not ask Alphonse to ‘do anything’. The incident did not seem to perturb the boy, and was repeated a few nights later. Whether Douglas also had sex with Alphonso, or with either of his friends, is unknown, but it is certainly possible.10

There was a heightened sense of sexual danger that summer. News arrived from London of a police raid on a house in Fitzroy Street (just round the corner from Cleveland Street), during which eighteen men had been arrested, two of them in ‘fantastic female garb’. Among those taken into custody were Wilde’s friends Charlie Parker and Alfred Taylor. Although, in the end, no charges were brought due to lack of evidence, the court reports indicated that the premises had been under surveillance for some time, and that many of those arrested were ‘known’ to the police. Although there is no suggestion that Wilde had ever visited the house, it was worrying to learn that the police were taking an active interest in such places. Certainly Wilde was distressed at the news: ‘a dreadful piece of bad luck’, he called it, that spelt ‘real trouble’ for ‘poor Alfred Taylor’. But, as the incident resolved itself, he adopted a lighter tone. ‘Do tell me all about Alfred,’ he asked a mutual friend, ‘Was he angry or amused? What is he going to do?’ (Taylor went back to doing what he always did: not very much. Charlie Parker, though, reacted to the scare by enlisting in the Royal Artillery).11

Bosie left Worthing at the beginning of September, allowing Wilde to re-devote himself to his play, with regular breaks for bathing. He had not heard back from George Alexander about the project, and suspected that the scenario had been ‘too farcical’ for his tastes and his theatre. It turned out, though, that Alexander’s letter expressing interest had simply got lost in the post. This was revealed when Alexander wrote again, anxious for news of the piece, and concerned to know whether he would be able to have American – as well as British – rights, as he was planning to tour the States for the first time the following year.12

Though Wilde pleaded that he was too poor to come to London to discuss the project, Alexander lured him up for lunch at the Garrick. It was a satisfactory meeting: Wilde was able to get some money out of Alexander in exchange for allowing him the ‘first refusal’ of the finished script. But he dissuaded him from his idea of taking the play to America, where, rather than being given a proper premiere and run in the major cities, it would serve simply as an occasional repertory item on Alexander’s tour. Wilde envisaged selling the American rights separately to an American producer for perhaps as much as £3,000.13

On returning to Worthing Wilde dashed off a scenario for another play that he thought might be more suitable for Alexander to take on tour to the States: a ‘comedy-drama’ with more drama than comedy. The scenario neatly reversed the dynamics of Lady Windermere’s Fan: an unfaithful husband is rescued from a compromising situation by the smart action of his ‘simple sweet’ wife. But she then deserts him to run off with the husband’s friend, to whom she has become passionately attached. ‘You have made me love you,’ she tells him. ‘All this self-sacrifice is wrong, we are meant to live. This is the meaning of life.’ Compared to the cheerfully convoluted absurdities of his farce, this was to be a drama of real power and passion, and – as such – much better attuned to Alexander’s ‘romantic’ acting style. ‘I see great things in it,’ Wilde told the actor-manager, ‘and, if you like it when done, you can have it for America.’14

In the meantime, though, he returned to his farcical comedy. He was ‘quite delighted’ with the piece. It was imbued with his own deliciously subversive philosophy: ‘That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’15 The original scenario had been enriched over the summer: now both the male characters were engaged in living ‘double lives’. Just as the ‘guardian’ (renamed Jack Worthing in honour of the seaside resort) had invented his imaginary reprobate brother (now renamed Ernest) to provide an excuse for coming up to town, so his friend (transformed from Lord Alfred Rufford to plain Algernon Moncrieff, perhaps to lessen his resemblance to Lord Alfred Douglas) had invented an imaginary invalid friend called Bunbury to give him a pretext for avoiding tedious social obligations. In a further elaboration, parodying the involved coincidences of popular romantic fiction, Jack became Algernon’s long-lost brother (actually called Ernest), having been abandoned as an infant by his nurse (the young Miss Prism) and raised by a kindly old gentleman in ignorance of his true identity.

Wilde doubtless enjoyed the echoes that the plot provided with his own increasingly involved ‘double life’ as respectable husband and clandestine lover of young men. Indeed the whole piece was shot through with subversive intimations of Wilde’s sexual interests and connections. The renaming of Jack’s imaginary brother as ‘Ernest’ did, of course, provide a satirical comment upon conventional Victorian notions about the virtues of ‘earnestness’, and allowed for the play to be called The Importance of Being Earnest, but it also offered a coded reference to a recently published volume of ‘Uranian’ verse, entitled Love in Earnest, in which the author, John Gambril Nicholson, had proclaimed his love for a schoolboy named Ernest. ‘Ernest Worthing’, moreover, is described as living at E4, the Albany – the very rooms inhabited by George Ives.16

But not all of Wilde’s sly allusions were to his secret sex life. He renamed Jack’s pretty young ward ‘Cecily Cardew’ as a tribute to the infant niece of an old Oxford friend.17 To honour Max Beerbohm he inserted into a list of British generals beginning with ‘M’, the improbable ‘General Maxbohm’. He named the play’s two butlers ‘Lane’ and ‘Mathews’ to vent his annoyance at his publishers (though he later relented and changed ‘Mathews’ to ‘Merriman’). The imaginary invalid ‘Bunbury’ was perhaps a disparaging allusion to Charles Brookfield, who had played a character of that name in his recent comedy, Godpapa.18

Throughout everything, though, there was a sense of Wilde’s pleasure in the work. The dialogue – absurd, light and paradoxical – was, he thought, the best he had ever written. Nevertheless the play itself still needed shaping. ‘It lies in Sibylline leaves about the room,’ he told Douglas. Arthur, the young ‘butler’ who they had brought with them from Tite Street, had ‘twice made a chaos of “tidying up”’ – though Wilde claimed to detect dramatic possibilities in this random re-ordering: ‘I am inclined to think that Chaos is a stronger evidence for an Intelligent Creator than Kosmos is.’ 19

Constance left Worthing on 12 September to prepare the boys for school. Cyril was being sent away to Bedales, the progressive boarding school recently established by Harry Marillier’s Cambridge friend J. H. Badley, while Vyvyan was going to a prep school in Broadstairs (the money from Alexander arrived just in time to allow Wilde to pay the fees).20 Wilde remained at The Haven to work. There were, of course, some distractions. Wilde had, during his weeks of residence, achieved the position of a local celebrity, and was asked to give out the prizes at the ‘Venetian Fete’ that ended the town’s season of waterborne festivities.

His speech, dilating upon the charms of Worthing, was enthusiastically received. He praised the town’s amenities – its beautiful surroundings and many ‘lovely long walks, which he recommended to other people, but did not take himself’. It is unclear whether the be-suited Alphonse Conway was present in the Pier Pavilion to hear this partial untruth. Wilde concluded his remarks by saying that ‘he was delighted to observe in Worthing one of the most important things… the faculty of offering pleasure’.21

Constance’s departure seems to have been a signal for Bosie to re-appear. He and Wilde even made a fleeting visit across the Channel to Dieppe (‘very amusing and bright’ during the summer season).22 They returned, however, to find themselves illuminated in the glare of an unwanted new notoriety. During their absence there had appeared, anonymously, a book entitled The Green Carnation. Published by Heinemann, it was creating a sensation with its thinly veiled, and very funny, depiction of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas – as the epigrammatic ‘Esmé Amarinth’ and his gilt-haired disciple ‘Lord Reggie Hastings’ – a young man who ‘worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth’.

The book was less a caricature than a photograph. It showed a quite startling familiarity with the details of Wilde and Bosie’s life. On receiving a fulminating letter from his irate and bewhiskered father, the insouciant Lord Reggie replies by telegram, ‘What a funny little man you are’. Although the plot – such as it was – centred on Lord Reggie’s unsuccessful courtship of ‘Lady Locke’, there were broad hints about the heroes’ real sexual interests. Both men follow ‘the higher philosophy’ elaborated by Amarinth: ‘To be afraid of nothing, to dare to live as one wishes to live, not as the middle classes wish one to live; to have the courage of one’s desires, instead of only the cowardice of other people’s.’ And, as Amarinth made clear, while the middle classes celebrated what was ‘natural’, he favoured the ‘unnatural’ in all aspects of life. Wilde was more amused than alarmed at it all. He considered the book ‘very clever’, even ‘brilliant’ in many places.23

There was much discussion – both in the press and down at Worthing – as to who could have written it. Wilde suspected Ada Leverson, who had parodied him so nimbly in Punch, but she assured him of her innocence.24 They had discovered by then that the culprit was Robert Hichens. He had absorbed all that Douglas had told him during their trip down the Nile, and embellished it with what he had learnt since returning to England, both from meeting Wilde and from listening to Beerbohm. Wilde called him ‘the doubting disciple who has written the false gospel’; Douglas complained that ‘all the best jokes in the book were really [his]’ and had been stolen ‘without acknowledgment’. They both sent off comic telegrams, Wilde to tell Hichens that the secret was discovered, Bosie advising him to flee from their righteous wrath.25

Wilde also sent a humorous letter to the Pall Mall Gazette dispelling a suggestion, made by the paper, that he himself was the author of The Green Carnation. ‘I invented that magnificent flower,’ he declared, with a slight amplification of the truth. ‘But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not.’ And to the manuscript of his play he added a line in which Lady Brancaster mentions having received a copy of the book, before dismissing it as ‘a morbid and middle-class affair’ seemingly about ‘the culture of exotics’.26

Wilde’s levity was misplaced. The book, which romped through three editions before the end of the year, greatly increased the awareness of, and prejudice against, his friendship with Douglas. ‘The Green Carnation ruined Oscar Wilde’s character with the general public,’ Frank Harris recalled. ‘On all sides [it] was referred to as confirming the worst suspicions.’ Certainly it ‘inflamed’ the Marquess of Queensberry.27

Douglas returned to town on 22 September, allowing Wilde a week of uninterrupted work at The Haven. Or almost uninterrupted: he had Alphonse Conway to dinner at the house on two, perhaps three, occasions. Afterwards, as Alphonse recalled, Wilde ‘took me to his bedroom and we both undressed and got into bed’.28 Wilde also fulfilled a promise of taking Alphonse on an overnight trip, ‘as a reward for being a pleasant companion’ to Wilde and his children over the summer. They went to Brighton, and put up at the Albion Hotel. Wilde ensured they had connecting rooms, and that night – after dinner in the hotel restaurant – he took Alphonse to bed. ‘He acted as before’, Alphonse said, although on this occasion he also ‘used his mouth’. It was perhaps on the following day that Wilde presented Alphonse with a signed photograph, a fancy walking stick and a cigarette case inscribed ‘Alfonso from his friend Oscar Wilde’.29

Before September was quite over, Douglas was back once again at Worthing, on another fleeting visit. He arrived with a ‘companion’ so unsuitable that Wilde refused to allow them to stay, preferring to put them up at a hotel. Only the following day, after the companion (presumably a London ‘renter’) had ‘returned to the duties of his trade’ did Douglas move into The Haven. The holiday season, however, was over, and the little town was emptying. Douglas soon became bored with the limited domestic routine. He insisted that they relocate to the brighter lights of Brighton.30

It was not a happy interlude. Soon after they arrived at the Hotel Metropole, Douglas fell ill with influenza. Wilde nursed him diligently, filling the room with flowers and sending for exotic fruits from London, since Bosie did not care for the grapes at the hotel. ‘I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life,’ Wilde reported to Ada Leverson. ‘They fill him with surprise.’ After four days of expensive hotel life, and with Bosie recovered, they moved into lodgings. Wilde hoped the setting might allow him to finish his play. But, instead, he himself succumbed to the flu. Douglas was not inclined to nurse him; he went off to London for a couple of days, leaving Wilde ‘entirely alone without care, without attendance, without anything’ (as Wilde bitterly recalled it). When he did return, he amused himself in the town until the early hours. At Wilde’s mild remonstration he flew into a fury, accusing Wilde of incredible ‘selfishness’ in expecting him to give up his pleasures to sit in a sick room. And the following morning he appeared in Wilde’s bedroom, not to apologize, but to renew this attack. Wilde, alarmed at the almost hysterical fury, felt in actual physical danger and, scrambling out of bed, fled downstairs to the common sitting room. Bosie then departed, although not before ‘silently’ gathering up what money he could find in Wilde’s rooms.

Even in a relationship regularly vexed by Douglas’s temper, this was an exceptional row. Wilde was left badly shaken. Perhaps ‘the ultimate moment’ really had arrived. Wilde recalled that the thought came as ‘a great relief… I knew that for the future my Art and Life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way… Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was irrevocable gave me peace.’ He had, of course, made such resolutions before. But this time his determination was strengthened a few days later, when, on his fortieth birthday, amid the various messages of goodwill, he received a letter from Douglas, rehearsing once more all his bitter ire: taunting Wilde with ‘common jests’, bragging at how he had run up Wilde’s tab at the Metropole, ‘congratulating him on his panicked “flight” from his sick bed, and concluding, ‘When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.’ In the face of such ‘revolting… coarseness and crudity’ Wilde settled ‘with himself’ to see George Lewis immediately on his return to London that Friday (19 October); he would get him to write to the Marquess of Queensberry, stating that he was breaking off all relations and communications with Douglas.31*

On the Friday morning, though, he opened his morning paper to discover the shocking news that Bosie’s eldest brother, Lord Drumlanrig (‘the real head of the family, the heir to the title, the pillar of the house’) had been killed in an ‘accident’ during a day’s shoot down at Quantock in Somerset. He had been found, by other members of the party, in a ditch, with his gun beside him, half his face blown away. Wilde’s resolve evaporated in the instant. He cabled to Bosie, full of sympathy for his terrible loss. They met a few days later at Tite Street. No allusion was made to Bosie’s terrible behaviour at Brighton, nor to his yet more terrible letter. Everything was washed away by the tragedy of Drumlanrig’s death. ‘Your grief,’ Wilde later reminded Bosie, ‘seemed to me to bring you nearer to me than you had ever been. The flowers you took from me to put on your brother’s grave were to be a symbol not merely of the beauty of [Drumlanrig’s] life, but of the beauty that in all lives lies dormant and may be brought to light.’ All thoughts of terminating the friendship were swept aside in the face of this new intimacy.32

Although at the inquest, held in Somerset on 20 October, a verdict of accidental death had been returned, many of those connected with events suspected suicide. Only the motive remained mysterious. Drumlanrig had been on the verge of announcing his engagement to the young niece of his host. Had something perhaps gone wrong? Queensberry wrote with typical intemperance to Alfred Montgomery on the subject, blaming him and his daughter, along with the ‘The Snob Queers like Rosebery & canting Christian hypocrite Gladstone’, for making ‘bad blood’ between him and his eldest son over his peerage. Otherwise things might have turned out differently:

I smell a Tragedy behind [Drumlanrig’s death] and have already got wind of a more ghastly one if it is what I am led to believe, I of all people could & would have helped him, had he come to me with a confidence, but that was all stopped by you people – we had not met or spoken hardly for more than a year & a half. I am on the right track to find out what happened. Cherchez la femme, when these things happen. I have already heard something that quite accounts for it all.33

Sadly there is no further record of Queensberry’s suspicions and discoveries. Was the ‘femme’ behind the tragedy Drumlanrig’s fiancée Alix Ellis? Or another? And what role did she play? Queensberry’s assertion that he ‘of all people’ would have been able to help his son is intriguing, but hard to fathom. Did it perhaps relate to his own recent and ill-fated marriage, which was ended on the 24 October at a hearing held in camera – annulled ‘by reason of the frigidity impotency and malformation of the parts of generation of the said Respondent’?34 It is impossible to know. Then (as now) the mystery of Drumlanrig’s death encouraged speculation. There were persistent rumours that the forty-six-year-old Rosebery (a widower since the death of his wife in 1890) was sexually interested in young men. His tendency to take on good-looking private secretaries was noted, and inclined some to ‘believe the worst’. His habits of opening his own letters, and of going on holiday to Naples, also counted against him. Queensberry certainly relished such gossip: ‘Bloody Bugger’ to ‘Snob Queer’ were among his rich arsenal of Rosebery insults. Although there is little in Queensberry’s initial reaction to suggest that he connected Rosebery’s supposed proclivities with the ‘catastrophe’ of Drumlanrig’s death, others certainly did make such a link. And it may be that, in time, he came to share their suspicions.35†

Certainly the tragedy did nothing to deflect the marquess from his pursuit of Wilde. He talked of the matter – and the distress it was causing him – to his son Percy, now returned from Australia. Percy counselled bringing the ‘miserable business… to a head’. Time seemed pressing. For anyone, like Queensberry, who suspected that the upper reaches of British society were being corrupted by a secret network of sodomites there had recently been a number of disturbing signs. The ‘new culture’ seemed to be asserting itself with increasing boldness. In response to debate in the press about Victorian social conventions regarding marriage, several articles had appeared suggesting that complete personal liberty should extend to same-sex relations. In April Charles Kains Jackson was sacked as editor of The Artist after making this point in an outspoken essay on what he termed the ‘New Chivalry’. In October, George Ives penned a similar piece in the Humanitarian (after his article was savaged in the Review of Reviews, Wilde congratulated him: ‘When the prurient and the impotent attack you, be sure you are right’).36

At Oxford, although The Spirit Lamp had not survived Douglas’s departure, plans were being laid for a new periodical that would continue to promote the ‘new culture’ at the university. At Ives’s rooms in the Albany Wilde met the young editor, ‘an undergraduate of strange beauty’ called John Bloxam. They discussed possible names for the magazine, eventually fixing upon The Chameleon. Pressed to provide something for the inaugural number, Wilde offered a page of ‘aphorisms’. Douglas offered a pair of sexually charged sonnets, one of them, ‘The Two Loves’, with the memorable last line, ‘I am the Love that dare not speak its name.’ Wilde’s contribution – ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ – was less obviously contentious. Many of the maxims were borrowed from An Ideal Husband, and framed a vision of intellectual, rather than sexual, inversion, but a few did carry more dangerous suggestions. ‘Wickedness’, Wilde asserted, ‘is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.’37

Wilde may have been inclined to include these aphorisms in Oscariana, along with those from another gathering published in the Saturday Review under the title ‘A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated’. He had been disappointed with the initial selection put together by Constance: ‘The plays are particularly badly done,’ he complained to Humphreys. ‘Long passages are quoted, where a single aphorism should have been extracted.’ He was now busy amending and augmenting the text himself. As he tried to impress upon Humphreys, the book needed to be ‘a really brilliant thing’.38

For Wilde, though, the most pressing concern was The Importance of Being Earnest. At the end of October he sent the finished typescript – under the disguised title of Lady Lancing – to George Alexander. He did so with reservations. ‘Of course, the play is not suitable to you at all,’ he told him: ‘you are a romantic actor’; here was a farcical comedy, well outside ‘the definite artistic line’ usually followed at the St James’s Theatre. Wilde suggested that the piece really wanted comic actors like Charles Wyndham or Charles Hawtrey. And it is possible that Wilde had already sounded out both these men about the play. Certainly when Alexander failed to commit at once to the piece Wilde took the play to Wyndham, securing his commitment to put it on at the Criterion Theatre in the new year. With this agreement he seems also to have received an advance of £300 – although, from this, he probably had repay whatever he had already received from Alexander.39

It was good news at last. After more than twelve months without a new production, Wilde now had two plays in prospect for the coming year. Rehearsals for An Ideal Husband began in the second week of December; the play was to open on 3 January at the Haymarket. Wilde was a constant presence at the theatre. Julia Nielson, the actress playing Lady Chiltern, recalled him there, always accompanied by three young men, who stood beside him in descending height ‘like the Three Bears’ (where the 5ft 9in Bosie ranked in this line-up is not recorded). Wilde remained doubtful of the play’s prospects. Constance reported him as very ‘depressed about it’.40 After the conviviality of Beerbohm Tree’s company the previous year, he found the cast less sympathetic. There was an unfortunate dispute with Waller’s wife, Florence, who insisted on playing the part of Mrs Cheveley, in the face of Wilde’s reservations. Charles Hawtrey (who had lampooned him in The Poet and the Puppets) was playing Lord Goring; and although Wilde admired Hawtrey’s comic talent, the actor had retained an unspoken resentment against him. When an interviewer – seeking a general answer – asked Wilde, ‘What are the exact relations between the actor and the dramatist?’ Wilde replied, with a smile, ‘Usually a little strained.’ And to the follow-up question, ‘But surely you regard the actor as a creative artist?’ Wilde answered, with a touch of pathos, ‘Yes, terribly creative – terribly creative!’41

The tension between actors and playwright was heightened by the presence in the cast of Charles Brookfield. The author of The Poet and the Puppets had taken the minor role of Goring’s valet – because, as he ungraciously explained, he did not want to learn too many of Wilde’s lines. By not rising to such provocations, Wilde of course antagonized the actor further. He was adept at such ploys. When Brookfield, furious at having to rehearse over the Christmas holiday, asked, ‘Don’t you keep Christmas, Oscar?’, Wilde replied, ‘No, Brookfield, the only festival of the Church I keep is Septuagesima. Do you keep Septuagesima, Brookfield?’ ‘Not since I was a boy,’ Brookfield replied. ‘Ah,’ said Wilde, ‘be a boy again.’42

* Douglas had taken himself off to Oxford, putting up at the Clarendon together with Beerbohm and Reggie Turner. ‘Bosie is still in the hotel, and is very amusing,’ Beerbohm reported to Ada Leverson. ‘It appears that he has had a very serious quarrel with Oscar. Oscar fell ill at Brighton. Bosie went to a music-hall in the evening and, returning at 2 in the morning, sang loudly. Oscar was furious and called him inconsiderate. Bosie left the next morning – and Oscar does not answer Bosie’s telegrams.’

† Although definite information about Rosebery’s supposed homosexual relations remains elusive, it is clear that the rumour of them was well established in the period. André Gide reported a conversation he had with Reggie Turner on the beach at Dieppe in August 1902: moving on from a discussion of Wilde, they touched on others (some unexpected) who had shared his sexual tastes:

Lui [Turner]: ‘Balfour… Kitchener… Rosebery.’

Moi [Gide]: ‘Kipling.’

Lui: ‘Non.’

Moi: ‘Je vous assure.’

Lui: ‘C’est la première fois que je l’entends dire.’

Silence