2

Going South

‘There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.’

oscar wilde

Wilde’s own poetic inspiration remained in abeyance. His belief that the ‘stimulating’ intellectual atmosphere of Paris might restore his creative energy was proving as vain as his previous hope that sunshine and Naples would effect the change. The early assurances that he would soon be starting on ‘a new play’ were not followed through.1 Instead he began referring to The Ballad as his ‘chant de cygne’ – the dying swan’s final lament.2 Nevertheless he refused to abandon all hope. As he reminded Ross, he had ‘done a good year’s work’ since coming out of prison: ‘Now I want to do work again, for the next year,’ even if it was ‘not easy to recapture the artistic mood of detachment from the accidents of life.’3

In the meantime a semblance of literary endeavour could be kept up. To follow on the success of The Ballad, Smithers was advancing plans to bring out editions of both An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, done in the same elegant format that had been used by John Lane for Wilde’s two earlier society comedies. It was decided to publish The Importance of Being Earnest first, since – as Ross pointed out – it was not only ‘far the best’, and most critically acclaimed, of Wilde’s plays, but also the least known: ‘It ran for so short a time that many people would buy it who could not have seen the play.’4

Wilde devoted much of the year to revising the typescript. His ear for comedy remained as sure as ever. He made dozens of small textual changes, improving adjectives and refining speeches. To Lady Bracknell’s pronouncement – ‘Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence’ – he added the resonant closing words, ‘in Grosvenor Square’. The book was to be dedicated to Ross. Wilde had chaffed him over his great enthusiasm for the play with the (patently untrue) remark, ‘There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest best.’5 Wilde’s own name would not be appearing on the title page. It was still, he thought, too soon. He suggested, instead, the formula ‘By the author of Lady Windermere’s Fan’.6

Musing on his past successes brought mingled pain and pleasure. On the future, though, he refused to dwell. He might tell the young English novelist Wilfrid Chesson, who visited him at Nogent, ‘I do not doubt that there are as wonderful things in my future as my past’; but such a claim can only have been made for his own encouragement.7 When Healy asked him about his plans, he replied, ‘I cannot say what I am going to do with my life; I am wondering what my life is going to do with me. I would like to retire to some monastery, some grey stoned cell where I could have my books, write verses, and reverently smoke my cigarettes.’8 He was content, for the most part, to live in the present. The discovery of a stray franc for another cannette of beer was all he asked of the passing moment. ‘You worry too much,’ he admonished Chesson; ‘never worry.’9

He strove to follow his own advice, and for the most part succeeded. Drink helped. The level of consumption begun in Naples was continued, and increased. Beer, wine, champagne, brandy, whisky and soda, advocaat, were all imbibed in quantity. But absinthe now became his drink of choice.10 At Berneval he had discoursed to John Fothergill upon the three stages of absinthe intoxication. ‘The first stage’ he described as being ‘like ordinary drinking’; during the ‘second’ you began to see ‘monstrous and cruel things’; but if you were able to persevere and enter upon the third stage you would ‘see things that you want to see, wonderful and curious things’. He described how, after one long evening of solitary absinthe drinking, he achieved this third stage, just as the waiter came in with his green apron and began to close up the café, piling the chairs on the tables. When he brought in a watering can and began to water the sawdust on the floor, ‘the most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up’ all around. They remained invisible to the waiter, Wilde recalled, but ‘as I got up and passed out into the street I felt the heavy tulip-heads brushing against my shins’.11

Reality, however, could not always be kept in check. Vincent O’Sullivan noted that sometimes, during the course of a conversation, Wilde’s ‘face would be swept with poignant anguish and regret’ or with ‘the apprehension of the future’. At such moments he would ‘pass his large hand with a trembling gesture over his face and stretch out his arm’ as though to ward off the thought.12

He refused, though, to make any provision for the morrow. His monthly allowance was dedicated more to rent boys than to rent. He consoled himself with small extravagances. To the amazement of a group of poets, with whom he was drinking, he sent out a page boy with a 20-franc piece to fetch a packet of gold-tipped cigarettes. The brand proved disappointing when he lit the first one. But, as the boy handed him the change – about 15 francs – Wilde announced, ‘No, keep it. That will give me the illusion that these cigarettes are good.’13 He could run up an impressive bill of over 27 francs for ‘Eau de Cologne’ and other toiletries in just a couple of visits to Jules & Roger in the rue Scribe.14

Always generous when he was in funds, he expected his friends to provide for him when he was without them. An inability to budget meant that he ended almost every month in want. Ross received regular pleas for early payment of the allowance. After one particularly urgent appeal – in which Wilde described himself as both penniless and ‘dinnerless’ – Ross sold a Beardsley drawing that he owned for £5, and had Smithers send the money anonymously to Wilde.15 Ross did, though, soon become wise to Wilde’s habits of exaggeration and, indeed, deception. Wilde was obliged to apologize, having been caught out in a lie about desperately needing funds to retrieve his impounded luggage from the innkeeper at Nogent: ‘I am so sorry about my excuse,’ he wrote. ‘I had forgotten I had used Nogent before. It shows the utter collapse of my imagination, and rather distresses me.’ And Frank Harris recalled a tragi-comic dinner at Durand’s when – at the beginning of the evening – he had given Wilde a generous cheque with which to pay off his current debts. As they parted (at three in the morning), Wilde – having forgotten the earlier gift – asked Harris whether he might have ‘a few pounds’ as he was very ‘hard up’.16 Wilde, though, in matters of money, had moved beyond either embarrassment or shame. Poverty might be ‘dreadful’, but it was principally a periodic inconvenience.*

He retained hopes for a brighter financial future, if not from the book edition of The Importance of Being Earnest, then from his modern play scenario ‘Love is Law’. Properly developed, it had the potential to earn him thousands. Although nothing had come of Smithers’ approach to Augustin Daly, in October Wilde arranged to sell the British performing rights for the unwritten play to a London theatre producer called Horace Sedger, who was then enjoying a successful run with an adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.17 But if Wilde hoped that signing a contract might stimulate his ability to work, he was disappointed. The advance simply allowed him to indulge himself more.

Paris, though, seemed empty that autumn. He did see a few old friends, even if Ross and Turner – who were making a three-month tour of Italy – bypassed Paris on their way south. Ada Leverson came over for a visit. She had lost none of her bracing wit: when Wilde regaled her with the tale of a devoted young apache who accompanied him everywhere with a knife in his hand, she remarked, ‘I’m sure he had a fork in the other.’18 But Wilde’s regular companions were away. Strong was over in London trying to sell Esterhazy’s story to the British press. Bosie, too, after almost three and a half years in exile, had returned to England, his mother having received assurances from the public prosecutor that he would not face arrest. He remained in London for several months, arranging publication of two slim volumes, one a collection of his poems (not including ‘In Praise of Shame’ or ‘Two Loves’) and the other a gathering of nonsense verse for children; both books were to appear without his name upon the title page. While in England he also attempted a reconciliation with his father. The meeting, in the smoking room of Bailey’s Hotel, went well, with Queensberry embracing him, calling him his ‘darling boy’ and promising to restore his allowance. But when the marquess followed this up with a letter demanding to know what exactly were his son’s relations with ‘that beast Wilde’, Bosie sent back a bitter and intemperate reply, ending all possibility of a rapprochement.19

In the absence of his English cronies, Wilde devoted time to flirtatious correspondence with some of the young men of artistic and/or Uranian inclination, who wrote enthusiastically to him from England: there was Louis Wilkinson, a seventeen-year-old Radley schoolboy who claimed that he was planning to dramatize The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Jerome Pollitt, a wealthy cross-dressing Aesthete who sent photographs with every post.20 Wilde, though, hated being alone in his unlovely and ‘too yellow’ hotel room. He might read for a while in the little back yard of the Hôtel d’Alsace, but he soon sought the sociability of the streets. He would wander through the Latin Quarter. He knew the wares of all the local antique dealers. He was often to be seen in the Luxembourg Gardens. If he walked slowly, with short paces, it was thought – by those who knew him – that he did so in order to allow himself better to enjoy his memories of ‘what he had once been’.21

Although Wilde remained cut off from the currents of ordinary social life, it was sometimes by his own choice. When invited home by his old Oxford contemporary J. E. C. Bodley, he fled at the door on learning that Bodley’s family was there.22 He gravitated instead to French literary circles. The Calisaya American Bar on the Boulevard des Italiens (close to the Opera) became – as he told Turner – his chief ‘literary resort’; at five o’clock he would gather there with is ‘friends’ Moréas, Ernest La Jeunesse, ‘and all the young poets.’23 The ritual of the five o’clock aperitif gave a structure to the day, and a starting point to the evening. And if the excellent champagne cocktails, for which the bar was renowned, were stimulating, so too was the discourse.24 Literary disputes were not infrequent, but there was much fun as well. The science fiction writer Gustave Le Rouge, who first encountered Wilde at the Calisaya, recalled being impressed by his ‘sincere good spirits and by his laughter which rang true, revealing his teeth which were nearly all capped with gold and which gave him a vague semblance of an idol’.25

The crowd at the Calisaya provided Wilde with an audience, and he poured forth an endless succession of parables and stories.26 Though he delighted in entertaining, La Jeunesse suspected that he was also improvising ‘for himself’, to assure himself that ‘he still could, still would, still knew’.27 The heroes of Wilde’s tales were almost ‘invariably’ kings and gods – although one story concerned a king and a beggar. At the close of it Wilde remarked, ‘I have been king; now I will be a beggar.’ The self-dramatization was typical, as was the exaggeration. Whatever Wilde’s periodic financial embarrassments, he remained (as La Jeunesse noted) always the perfect, well-groomed Englishman – ‘and [he] did not beg’.28

In another exercise of self-mythologizing Wilde elaborated a tale of how, in his former life, he had reached such a level of success and happiness that he was suddenly seized by ‘a secret feeling of terror, that in reality [he] was too happy, that such improbable bliss could only be a trap set by [his] evil genius’. Recalling the example of the tyrant Polycrates, he determined to make a sacrifice to the gods to assuage their jealousy, and like that Greek king he ‘flung a valuable ring into the sea.’ But, as happened with Polycrates, the ring was brought back to him by a fisherman who had discovered it in the belly of a fish: ‘The unfortunate thing about it,’ Wilde added with a ‘strange smile’, was that the ‘little fisherman’ who returned the ring was ‘far too handsome a fellow…’29

The suggestive allusion to the fisher-boy’s good looks marked a new autobiographical note in Wilde’s storytelling, a hint of his now defiant sexual boldness. He made no attempt to hide his proclivities. Indeed he seems to have introduced some of his pick-ups at the Calisaya. He mentioned to Turner a ‘beautiful boy of bad character’ who was sometimes present, explaining that ‘he is so like Antinous, and so smart, that he is allowed to talk to poets’.30 Such doubtful company, however, unsettled the more priggish of the young Parisian writers. Vincent O’Sullivan recalled how Stuart Merrill and others ‘were constantly begging me to get Wilde’s English friends to make him realize that he was ruining what sympathy was left for him’ among former friends, by appearing at the Calisaya ‘with sodomist outcasts, who were sometimes dangerous in other ways [too]’.31

As a result of such attitudes Wilde found it impossible to build upon, or even sustain, some of the connections and much of the goodwill occasioned by the publication of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He did continue to dine with Merrill, but not often.32 Gide he saw again only twice: both rather awkward chance encounters upon the boulevards, at which Wilde strained to recapture the gaiety of former years, and Gide felt a great sadness lurking behind the attempt.33 Nevertheless there were many who did enjoy his company. He took up with a young American writer called Charles Sibleigh, who was engaged in translating The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from English into French.34 He saw something of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; the diminutive artist found him a ‘most sympathetic companion since he didn’t always stare at him as if he were a monster or a miracle’.35 But it was the twenty-four-year-old critic and novelist Ernest La Jeunesse who became Wilde’s ‘great friend’. A fantastical figure, bushy-haired and eccentrically attired, his face patched with eczema, and in his hand ‘an empire cane’, he and Wilde made a striking pair when patrolling the boulevards.36 Wilde was amused by La Jeunesse’s piercing falsetto voice and his malicious wit.† He was impressed too by his energy. La Jeunesse was forever starting short-lived literary reviews. Wilde promised to contribute ‘a poem in prose’ to one of them. But the ‘great effort’ involved in setting even a very short story down on paper seems to have been beyond him.37

Away from the relative chic of the Calisaya, Wilde – embracing his new bohemianism – also explored the low dives of the Latin Quarter: the student cafés, the ‘wine cellars’, ‘the dens of ill-repute’. There was, of course, a sexual element in these expeditions. But there were artistic rewards too. Wilde’s generosity in buying drinks for – and bestowing praise on – the unknown songwriters, would-be artists and ‘unpublished poets’ that he met along the way gave him an enjoyable status and popularity. He found friends and listeners among the shifting population of American expatriate art students, young Scandinavian painters and popular versifiers. When he attended a poetry recital in a Montmartre café, he was ‘received with great honour’ – and even the waiter, ‘a lad of singular beauty’ asked for his autograph.38

In London, also, Wilde was not completely forgotten. The wider literary establishment, dismayed at the news that he had ‘returned to Paris and to his dog’s vomit’, continued to shun him.39 But some old friends remained true. Among them it was Frank Harris who took the most active interest in his well-being. Flush with funds, having sold the Saturday Review and pursuing ambitious plans to buy a hotel in Monaco, he offered to take Wilde with him to spend winter in the South of France – hoping that the change of scene, and the absence of material care, might enable him to write. It was a very generous offer, and Wilde accepted, despite a certain trepidation about the exhaustion of being in Harris’s company for three whole months.

In the event his worries proved unfounded. Having installed Wilde at the Hôtel des Bains in the picturesque fishing village of Napoule, just outside Cannes, Harris disappeared along the coast to Monaco to pursue his business plans. They met up only occasionally, for bracing evenings of literary talk, philosophical discourse and debate about sexual attraction.‡ After these encounters, Wilde told Turner, ‘I stagger to my room, bathed in perspiration; I believe [Harris] talks the Rugby game.’ Wilde was perspiring again when Harris dragged him on a not-very-long walk to visit a nearby monastery. The old abbé, impressed by Wilde’s manner and bearing, asked Harris if he were a not a ‘great man’. ‘Yes,’ Harris replied, ‘a great man – incognito.’40

For much of the time, though, Wilde was left to his own devices. But still he wrote nothing except the occasional letter. The days were passed in happy idleness, enjoying the aromatic air of the pine trees, ‘the high sapphire wall of the sea’ and ‘the gold dust of the sun’. He read much. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw impressed him particularly: he thought it ‘a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale, like an Elizabethan tragedy’.41 His evenings were spent picking up young men. He would go into Cannes or Nice, where ‘romance’ was ‘a profession plied beneath the moon’.42 But even at Napoule he found that the fisher-lads had ‘the same freedom from morals as the Neapolitans have’.43 By the beginning of the new year he was boasting to Ross that he was ‘practically engaged to a fisherman of extraordinary beauty, age eighteen’.44 And when Harris chivvied him about his writing, he suggested that he might undertake The Ballad of a Fisher Boy as a sort of joyful companion to The Ballad of Reading Gaol; it would ‘sing of liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution’. The poem, however, never got beyond a few verses, and even these were not consigned to paper.45

There were many British visitors to the Riviera, and Wilde’s days were marked by the occasional unexpected encounter. George Alexander passed by on a bicycle but did not stop, giving only ‘a crooked sickly smile’. Wilde thought it ‘absurd and mean of him’.46 The Prince of Wales did better: having driven past Wilde in his carriage, he turned and raised his hat.47 Wilde befriended a wealthy young Swiss-domiciled Englishman called Harold Mellor, who was staying at Cannes together with his handsome young Italian servant. Mellor, though depressive and often depressing, provided welcome companionship and the occasional champagne supper. It was Mellor who took Wilde to Nice to see Bernhardt in Tosca. ‘I went round afterwards to see Sarah,’ Wilde told Ross, ‘and she embraced me and wept, and I wept, and the whole evening was wonderful.’48

As the new year advanced, however, Wilde grew restless. He presumed increasingly upon Harris’s generosity, moving from Napoule to Nice to Monte Carlo and back again, each relocation occasioning importunate demands that his hotel bill be paid at once. Harris might not have minded but for Wilde’s failure to work. When Harris finally pointed out that ‘everyone grows tired of holding up an empty sack’, Wilde took umbrage. As an escape he accepted an invitation to spend March with Mellor at his villa in Gland on the shores of Lake Geneva. Mellor, at least, did not expect him to work.49

Before departing for Switzerland, however, Wilde crossed the Italian border and travelled to Genoa. There, in the gleaming cemetery outside the town, he visited Constance’s grave. ‘It is very pretty,’ he told Ross, ‘a marble cross with dark ivy-leaves inlaid in a good pattern… It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb – her surname, my name, not mentioned of course – just “Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd, QC” and a verse from Revelations. I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected – with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.’50

At Gland, soon afterwards, Wilde received news of another loss: the death of his brother Willie, aged forty-six. He left a widow and an infant daughter. The ‘wide chasms’ that had existed between the brothers could now be closed. By Willie’s death Wilde inherited the ‘absurd’ and much impoverished family property at Moytura; but the meagre asset was almost immediately claimed by that ‘octopus of the law’, the official receiver.51

If this was a disappointment, there were more telling ones to hand. The publication of The Importance of Being Earnest in February had been greeted by a resounding silence in the press and meagre interest from the public. Its failure did not come as a surprise to the author. Wilde had suggested to Harris that the play was ‘so trivial, so irresponsible a comedy: and while the public like to hear of my pain – curiosity and the autobiographical form being the elements of interest – I am not sure that they will welcome me again in airy mood and spirit, mocking at morals, and defiant of social rules’. In confirmation of his view, The Ballad of Reading Gaol continued to sell so well that Smithers was arranging for a large (2,000-copy) printing of a new edition, bearing Wilde’s name, in brackets, on the title page.52 But, while it now seemed commercially astute to acknowledge authorship of his prison poem, Wilde thought it best to maintain his anonymity on all other fronts.§ He was furious at Horace Sedger for announcing in the press that he would be producing ‘a new comedy by Oscar Wilde’ on the London stage. As he explained to Ross: ‘My only chance is a play produced anonymously. Otherwise the First Night would be a horror, and people would find meanings in every phrase.’53

Despite the minimal sales of The Importance of Being Earnest Smithers courageously continued with plans for an edition of An Ideal Husband; Wilde spent some of his time at Gland amending and correcting the typescript of the play, and fussing over the details of publication. He planned to dedicate the volume to Frank Harris – as ‘A Slight Tribute to his Power and Distinction as an Artist, his Chivalry and Nobility as a Friend’. The editorial work proved a diversion from the tedium of Swiss life. A month chez Mellor was altogether too long. By the beginning of the third week Wilde was ungraciously complaining that ‘Mellor is tedious, and lacks conversation: also he gives me Swiss wine to drink: it is horrid: he occupies himself with small economies, and mean domestic interests. So I suffer very much.’ The vaunted beauty of the Swiss landscape was ‘obvious’ and ‘old fashioned’, the Swiss themselves ‘so ugly to look at’ as to ‘convey melancholy’ into the soul, and a terrible ‘chastity’ into the body.54

At the beginning of April Wilde fled back to the Italian Riviera, in search of sunshine, beauty, cheap lodgings and convenient sex. ‘I am going to try and find a place near Genoa,’ he informed Smithers, ‘where I can live for ten francs a day (boy compris).’55 This modest ideal was achieved in the ‘quite delightful’ little port village of Santa Margherita, just a mile out of Genoa, where Wilde took rooms above the Ristorante Christofero Colombo. But, whatever the charms of the place, it was not stimulating. Boredom and loneliness soon set in. Even ‘the lad’ Wilde was in love with proved a disappointment.56 Only a lack of money for the rail fare back to Paris kept him tethered there.

A diversion, and the chance of escape, was provided by the arrival of Leonard Smithers. There had been developments concerning Wilde’s proposed play. Sedger, impatient at Wilde’s failure to deliver a script, and in financial difficulties himself, had transferred his rights in the project to a fellow producer called Roberts. New terms were discussed. Roberts agreed to pay Wilde £100 on the delivery of each act, besides defraying his expenses.57 It was an excellent deal, and it seems that Roberts, together with Smithers, came out to Italy to finalize the plan. There was a dinner at the Café Concordia in Genoa, but it appears not to have been entirely satisfactory. Roberts returned ‘home in utter disgust and offered to transfer his contract’ to Smithers at a price that ‘tempted’ the publisher.

Smithers duly succumbed to the temptation. He wrote to Wilde proposing to take over the project. He would ‘square’ Wilde’s hotel bill at Santa Margheritia, pay his return fare to Paris and provide a weekly stipend, allowing Wilde to work free from daily financial care – at least until ‘I find that you are not serious in promising to write’.58 Wilde readily accepted, but then almost immediately fell ill. Ross – summoned by a series of plaintive telegrams – came, once again, to the rescue. Taking charge of the situation he managed to convince Wilde that many of his health problems related to his ever-increasing intake of alcohol. With dire warnings he was able to scare Wilde off drinking – at least for the present.59 He then piloted the patient back to Paris.60

Having overcome a short-lived misunderstanding with Smithers about the business arrangements, Wilde was soon at work on the play. By the beginning of June he claimed to have written ‘more than half of the Fourth Act’.61 He had started with the play’s ‘serious’ and ‘tragic’ denouement since he found it difficult ‘to laugh at life’ as he used to, and ‘the comedy of Acts I and II’ frightened him ‘a little’.62 Nevertheless he was in optimistic mood when he ran across the American producer Augustin Daly, together with his wife and also his star actress, Ada Rehan, in a Paris restaurant. The encounter was a happy one. Wilde joined their table, and ‘talked so charmingly’ – Rehan later recalled – ‘it was just like old times’.63 Theatrical plans were discussed. Daly was ready to make a ‘large offer for the American rights’ to ‘Love is Law’, the play on which Wilde was working, but he and Rehan also wanted him ‘do something’ new for them too.64 Unfortunately Daly died almost the next day before any arrangements could be made. Wilde with typical generosity put himself at the service of Mrs Daly and Ada Rehan, helping them to deal with the French authorities. He ‘was more good and helpful than I can tell you’, Rehan related, ‘just like a very kind brother’.65

If Wilde was shocked and disappointed by Daly’s death, he did have other projects to contemplate. On his return to Paris he had found a letter from an old London friend, the actor Kyrle Bellew, who wanted him to collaborate on a play about Beau Brummell, possibly to be put on by the wealthy society actress Mrs Brown-Potter.66 Wilde, who had always been stimulated by working concurrently on multiple projects, encouraged the idea. And, having received a draft typescript at the beginning of July, he accepted Bellew’s proposal that they meet at Boulogne, or one of the other Normandy summer resorts, to discuss the undertaking.67

The meeting led to a slight amendment of plans over the course of the summer. Wilde – who passed most of the season just outside Paris at Chennevières-sur-Marne – became gradually disillusioned with Smithers’ ability to produce any play by him. The publisher, after all, had no experience of the London theatre. As an alternative Wilde persuaded Bellew that, rather than proceeding with the Beau Brummell project, he should buy out Smithers’ interest in ‘Love is Law’, and that he – and Mrs Brown-Potter – should produce the piece. Smithers apparently agreed to this plan on one of his visits to Paris. Wilde offered to repay him the £160 he had thus far received, but not immediately; the money would come ‘out of the proceeds of the play’. In the meantime Wilde was already getting £5 a week from Bellew to continue work on the piece, an arrangement that was superseded after five weeks when Mrs Brown-Potter paid an initial advance of £100 for the play, with more due on completion.68

Although all this could be construed as progress of a sort, there was no doubt that Wilde’s second year of freedom had not been as productive as his first. His literary output from Chennevières-sur-Marne consisted largely of begging letters to friends and acquaintances about his Parisian living arrangements. He was anxious to move back to the Left Bank, but his bill at the Hôtel Marsollier – where he was installed – remained unpaid, and his luggage was impounded.69 Nevertheless he did have one new publication to celebrate. An Ideal Husband (‘By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan’) was issued that July. If it received no reviews, Wilde could bestow complimentary copies on his friends in England and in Paris. Major Nelson and Toulouse-Lautrec were among those to be sent copies.70

At the end of the summer Wilde returned to Paris, effecting his escape from the Hôtel Marsollier, and moving back across the river to rooms at the congenial Hôtel d’Alsace, where the proprietor, M. Dupoirier, was sympathetic, provided breakfast and extended credit.71¶ He re-established his Parisian daily round of late rising and light reading, of the five o’clock aperitif and the long evening of talk and drink. Often he was lonely, sometimes he was sad. Although never drunk, he was not always sober.72 He could present a sorry figure. One French writer recalled the sight of him sitting alone outside a café late one evening as the waiters cleared up around him, and the rain poured down.73

Certainly he had his moments of depression, and even despair. But it was ‘part of his pose to luxuriate a little in his tragic circumstances’. The cries of woe that dotted his letters and his conversation had a rhetorical flourish: ‘I am going under,’ he told Frank Harris: ‘the morgue yawns for me.’74 Douglas, who saw him often, considered that throughout his time in Paris Wilde was ‘on the whole, fairly happy’. His buoyant temperament remained largely unimpaired; his sense of humour and ‘unrivalled faculty for enjoyment of the present’ continued to sustain him.75 The young Augustus John recalled two weeks he spent in Paris that autumn (together with Conder and the Rothensteins) when he saw Wilde regularly. He was impressed that, for all he had endured, Wilde was so untouched by ‘bitterness, resentment or remorse’.76 Surrounded by attentive listeners, there was ‘nothing lugubrious or sinister about him. He fancied himself a kind of Happy Prince, or, admitting a touch of vulgarity, the genial although permanently overdrawn millionaire’. Although he kept up an easy – and impressive – ‘flow of practical wit and wisdom’ there was nothing middle-aged about him. He had, instead, ‘the frank, open, friendly, humorous face’ of a young man; for – as John noted – ‘he had too much sense to grow old’.77

Laurence Housman – also in Paris that autumn – left a vivid record of Wilde’s talk, as he entertained the young disciples who gathered around his café table. He amused them with his conceits (that he had chosen a particular boîte because the decor complimented his complexion) and he fascinated them with his tales: of the ‘Man who sold his Soul’ only to find – to his great disappointment – that he could no longer sin; or of a hell in which a poet, by the power of his verse, was able to convince his former muse that she was, in fact, in heaven.78

The wit and invention remained; only the ability to write any of it down was missing. It was almost two years since he had completed The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he had composed nothing – neither a Symbolist drama nor a social comedy; neither a poem nor a parable. He had also turned down, or failed to honour, several lucrative journalistic commissions as either too vulgar or too tedious.79 There had been practical setbacks. The notebook containing his draft of La Sainte Courtisane – which had been in the safekeeping of Ada Leverson, and which might have provided a ready-made template for a short Symbolist play – was brought over to Paris, and promptly mislaid in a cab (Wilde laughingly told Ross that he thought ‘a cab was a very proper place for it’).80 But the real failure was one of will. The mainspring seemed broken. When Housman quizzed Wilde about his literary plans, he replied, ‘I told you that I was going to write something: I tell everybody that. It is a thing one can repeat each day, meaning to do it the next. But in my heart – that chamber of leaden echoes – I know that I never shall. It is enough that the stories have been invented, that they actually exist: that I have been able, in my own mind, to give them the form which they demand.’81

He ascribed his continuing incapacity to the fact that, when he took up his pen, his past life sprang up too vividly before him, and ‘made him miserable and upset his spirits’. Douglas, though, suspected that the real reason for his ‘literary sterility’ was that his great gift was as ‘an interpreter of life’, and that his bohemian existence in Paris was simply ‘too narrow and too limited to stir him to creation’. It was not worth reflecting in the ‘magic mirror’ of his genius. He needed the stimulus of ‘a gay season in London’. Indeed Wilde often told Douglas that what he missed most in his Parisian exile was ‘the smart and pretty women’ who in the old days had sat at his feet and listened to his words.82

Faced with his inability to produce new work, Wilde began to elaborate a philosophy of failure. He claimed that artists might be successful ‘incidentally’ but ‘never intentionally’:

If they are, they remain incomplete. The artist’s mission is to live the complete life: success, as an episode (which is all it can be); failure, as the real, the final end. Death, analysed to its resultant atoms — what is it but the vindication of failure: the getting rid for ever of powers, desires, appetites, which have been a lifelong embarrassment? The poet’s noblest verse, the dramatist’s greatest scene deal always with death; because the higher function of the artist is to make perceived the beauty of failure.83

Such a theory might entertain a dinner table but it was poor company during the long days and weeks of an often solitary existence. As winter drew on and visitors became less frequent, Wilde’s spirits sank. He was diagnosed as suffering from ‘neuresthenia’, the catch-all medical term of the period, designating nervous exhaustion and depression. He found himself ‘quite unable to get out of bed till the afternoon, quite unable to write letters of any kind – beyond the occasional flirtatious missive to Louis Wilkinson’. Even his begging letters to Smithers were ‘reduced to postcards’.84 Drink, which seemed to offer a release, merely exacerbated the condition.85

Working on the ‘Love is Law’ script was entirely beyond him. He was alarmed, though, to discover that the American-based producer Louis Nethersole – brother of the actress Olga Nethersole – considered that he, too, had bought the ‘scenario of the play’ and was anxious to see the script.86 Nethersole had acquired his ‘stolen’ copy of the plot outline from Sedger’s former partner, ‘a scoundrel’ called Arthur Eliot.87 It was a fresh and unwelcome difficulty. The stress did nothing to improve Wilde’s health. At the beginning of 1900 his neuresthenia was compounded by an uncomfortable and mysterious skin rash that itched terribly and made him look ‘like a leopard’. Wilde considered that it was due to mussel poisoning.88 In February, as a further blow, he developed a serious infection that attacked ‘the throat and the soul’. And it seems to have been accompanied by ‘a sort of blood-poisoning’ (current medical scholarship suggests that Wilde was suffering with ‘septicaemia from a streptococcal sore throat’).89 To recover from this low ebb he was obliged to spend ten expensive days in a private hospital.90

His own condition, though, was put into perspective by the news from London of Ernest Dowson’s death (on 23 February), aged just 32. The poet had been in Paris only that summer. Wilde asked Smithers to put some flowers on the grave of the ‘poor wounded wonderful fellow’.91 Dowson had been nursed during his final days in Catford by Sherard. And when Sherard was next in Paris, he made a point of calling on Wilde to let him know some of the details of the poet’s end. Wilde, though still in his dressing gown, received his old friend. He was saddened by Dowson’s death but confident that ‘much of what he has written will remain’. To Sherard’s inquiry about the progress of his own ‘work’ – which lay in a litter upon the table – he replied, ‘One has to do something. I have no taste for it now. It is a penance to me, but, as was said of torture, it always helps one to pass an hour or two.’ He was cheered by Sherard’s quick assertion (echoing his own verdict on Dowson) that, even if he never wrote another line, he had done enough to ensure ‘immortality’.92

The new year had also carried off the Marquess of Queensberry, who died in London on 31 January, aged 55. On his deathbed he effected an improbable return to the Christian faith of his childhood, receiving ‘conditional absolution’ from his brother Archibald, a Catholic priest. There had been, though, no such rapprochement with either Bosie or Percy. Indeed the marquess had roused himself from his pillow to spit in Percy’s face, when the heir to the title had appeared at his bedside. Nevertheless, neither son was cut out of the will. Even as a younger son Bosie inherited some £15,000 (£8,000 came to him immediately, the rest was to follow); Percy received considerably more.93

For Wilde this was excellent news. There was now a real chance that he would get the remaining money owing to him from the Douglas family, for the legal expenses he had incurred at the time of his ill-fated court case. Bosie and Percy came over to Paris briefly at the end of February. ‘They are in deep mourning and the highest spirits,’ Wilde reported. ‘The English are like that.’94 Bosie promptly paid Wilde £125, as his share of the ‘debt of honour’(together with an additional £20). Percy, however, dragged his heels.95

Wilde, meanwhile, was increasing his resources in other ways. At the beginning of February he had agreed terms with Ada Rehan for ‘a new and original comedy, in three or four acts’ – a different play, it seems, from ‘Love is Law’. He was to receive an advance of £100, with a further £200 due on delivery of the manuscript, on or before 1 July.96 He had hopes that the playwright Maurice Donnay might adapt one of his plays for the French stage.97 He was also in contact with Herbert Beerbohm Tree, hopeful of receiving some royalty payments for a touring production of A Woman of No Importance that had recently been mounted. Tree regretted that the play had only been given once, and that any monies would have to be sent to ‘the Trustees in Bankruptcy’. He did, though, mention that George Alexander held some ‘fees’ that he would be ‘glad to settle’.98

Having bought the performing rights to both Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest from the official receiver, Alexander offered to make some discretionary payments to Wilde. Both plays, though rarely performed in London, had become fixtures of the touring repertoire.99 It was a generous gesture, and one that Wilde readily appreciated. The unfortunate bicycling encounter outside Napoule was forgotten. Alexander also pushed forward plans to produce cheap acting editions of the both plays, to encourage amateur productions.100 Nor were these Wilde’s only ties to the London theatrical world. Charles Wyndham continued to solicit work. Wilde was flattered by his persistence, and though he turned aside a suggestion that he adapt Dumas’s La Dame de Monsoreau, he did promise to try and think of an alternative.101 Thought, however, seems to have been almost as difficult as serious application for the ailing Wilde.

Perhaps to spur his recuperation, Wilde accepted an invitation from Harold Mellor to make an Italian tour of Sicily, Naples and Rome. Although Mellor’s company was less than stimulating, Wilde had lost none of his power of enjoyment, and was able to draw great pleasure from the spring sunshine, the dark eyes of young men and the wonders of art. ‘Sicily was beautiful’, he told More Adey; the mosaic-covered Cappella Palatina at Palermo was a ‘marvel of marvels: when one was in it one felt as if one was in a precious shrine, consecrated almost in a tabernacle’. Naples was ‘evil and luxurious’.102 Among other diversions Wilde ‘fell in love with a Sea-God, who for some extraordinary reason [was] at the Regia Marina School instead of being with Triton’.103

Rome, though, was ‘the one city of the soul’.104 They arrived there just before Easter, recalling the visit of Wilde’s student days. While Mellor returned to Switzerland, Wilde immersed himself in the ceremonies and pageantry of the Catholic Church. He was blessed by the pope, not once but seven times.105 One happy effect of the papal benediction was that he was ‘completely cured’ of his ‘mussel-poisoning’. The miracle he thought deserved a ‘votive’ picture: ‘The only difficulty,’ he mused, ‘is the treatment of the mussels. They are not decorative, except the shells, and I didn’t eat the shells.’106 Wilde was also amused at the sight of John Gray, who was now studying for the priesthood in Rome: ‘mockery dangled’ in the air, as the new seminarian passed by without speaking.107

The pleasures of the Roman holiday were increased by the fact that Ross was also in the Eternal City, wintering with his mother. He and Wilde spent much time together, picking up young men and looking at classical statues. Despite the miraculous rash cure, Ross was struck by the ‘great change’ for the worse that had come over his friend’s general health in the previous six months. Nevertheless he found Wilde ‘in very good spirits’. Amid the round of fun Wilde asked Ross to introduce him to a priest with a view to being ‘received into the Church’. Ross demurred. He was still not convinced that Wilde was serious – though, as he admitted, Wilde himself was never quite sure when he was serious either. His refusal allowed Wilde to joke that ‘whenever he wanted to become a Catholic [Ross] stood at the door with a flaming sword’ barring the way.108**

After Ross’s departure Wilde idled on in Rome for a couple of weeks, diverting himself with his latest hobby. Having acquired a camera he took innumerable photographs ‘with a most childlike enthusiasm’. He was particularly thrilled with a picture of some cows in the Borghese Gardens, telling Ross that ‘cows are very fond of being photographed, and, unlike architecture, don’t move’.109

* Poverty had, too, its paradoxical side. Wilde liked to tell of the occasion when he had been forced to get out of an omnibus because he did not have the few sous for the fare, and – instead – hail a cab, because this could be paid for by the doorman at the apartment building to which he was heading.

† Wilde liked to recount how, when La Jeunesse discovered that a noted publisher had suggested that his high-pitched voice was an indication that he was ‘completely impotent’, he had plotted revenge. After a long campaign, La Jeunesse had succeeded in seducing the publisher’s wife. In due course she had a child by him. And the publisher was perturbed to find himself bringing up a child with a very distinctive and very high-pitched wail. Wilde called it ‘the greatest repartee in history’.

‡ Harris was working on a series of articles about Shakespeare, and had embraced the notion of the playwright’s homosexuality. While holding forth on the subject one afternoon in the Café Royal dining room, he had boomed to the Duc de Richelieu, ‘No my dear duke, I know nothing of the joys of homosexuality. You must speak to my friend Oscar about that.’ A profound silence descended upon the room. ‘And yet’, Harris mused, in a more subdued but still reverberating tone, ‘if Shakespeare had asked me, I would have had to submit.’

§ Wilde still registered at his hotels as ‘M. Sebastian Melmoth’. When, in Italy, a local newspaper announced his presence as ‘Oscar Wilde’, stirring up a great deal of interest and excitement, Wilde refused to drop his incognito with the students who flocked to his café ‘to talk – or rather to listen’. As he explained to Ross: ‘To their great delight I always denied my identity. On being asked my name, I said every man has only one name. They asked me what name that was. “Io” [the Italian for “I”] was my answer. This was regarded as a wonderful reply, containing in it all philosophy.’

¶ Wilde liked a boiled egg for breakfast: ‘An egg is always an adventure,’ he declared; ‘it may be different… there are a few things – like the Nocturnes of Chopin – which can repeat themselves with-out repetition.’

** Adela Schuster thought that Wilde’s ‘one chance of redemption’ – if he were unable to resume writing – would be to convert. ‘He would make a splendid preacher,’ she told More Adey. ‘This is not meant flippantly,’ she added, ‘though I fear it may sound so.’