The Fall of the House of Wilde (31 page)

Leonard Cresswell Ingleby's book is impressionistic and dateless. Nonetheless, he is good at bringing out their different personalities, though it is clear he is more drawn to Willie for the warmth he emitted, for his ‘charm and geniality of spirit'.

In his own fashion [Willie's] talk was as memorable as his brother's. It did not astonish as much as it charmed. When Oscar Wilde talked one went away with . . . the
mot juste
, the
mot d'ordre
, a crystallised brilliancy that one can tell again as having come from him, and very often little more. When Willie Wilde had talked to you for an hour or two, you always went away chuckling with pleasure, rather than stumbling in mental amazement . . . He had a large and genial outlook upon life. It was quite unprejudiced, untrammelled by much that the Puritan or the rigid moralist would consider to be necessary confines of talk, but it was eminently kindly and human.

Ingleby speaks of Oscar's ‘studied attitude' and that ‘there was nothing he would not do to attract attention'.
²⁰
Another memoirist spoke of Willie's ‘breezy cordiality that contrasted so markedly with the stately manner' of Oscar: ‘[Willie] set one completely at ease.' His manner was ‘frank and natural', whereas Oscar's ‘impersonal tone' discomfited.
²¹
Willie ‘always consolidated a party of friends', according to Ingleby, whereas Oscar ‘only too frequently disintegrated it'. Willie, it appears, sympathised with human failings, ‘he said kind things of every one, and if he referred to a friend or acquaintance, it was always with an excuse for the failings of that friend or acquaintance . . .'

Ingleby contrasted Oscar's ‘wit' with Willie's ‘humour'; the one biting and self-aggrandising, the other comic and populist. ‘When Oscar talked in Regent Street,' according to Ingleby, ‘his arrogance and frequent bitterness of phrase left one astonished but cold. When Willy talked one always went away with a feeling that here was a really kind heart.' Willie's humour, it appears, was predicated on the common man, on universal foibles and frailties. It was a convivial humour that bonded, the winks, chuckles and nudges found in Chaucer or depicted in Hogarth's
The Rake's Progress.
Oscar was more at home in irony.

If Oscar tried to cultivate the
savoir-faire
of a European gentleman, the gallantry and refinement of Parisian worldliness, Willie was content to remain ‘a typical Irishman'. ‘His voice was one of those soft Irish voices, full of cadence and not innocent of blarney.' Ingleby speaks of his ‘lumbering' frame, standing gauche and indecisive over which table to join at the Café Royal, needing an aperitif to relax into conversation, only then thawing enough to banter; ‘he then gave the group something of what he got from his Irish breeding' – blarney.
²²

Not everyone warmed to Willie. Max Beerbohm described him thus:‘Quel monstre! Dark, oily, suspect yet awfully like Oscar: he has Oscar's coy, carnal smile and fatuous giggle and not a little of Oscar's esprit. But he is awful – a veritable tragedy of family likeness!'
²³
Many spoke of Willie as always out of pocket. A member of the Spoofs Club said Willie was ‘the personification of good nature and irresponsibility, and with ten thousand a year would have been magnificent; without other income than that which his too indolent pen afforded, the poor fellow was frequently in straits which must have proved highly repugnant to his really frank and sunny disposition'.
²⁴

The want of money was also an issue for Oscar. He and Miles had moved to No. 1 Tite Street in early 1880 and once again Oscar spent what he had decorating his rooms. He was soon out of money and out of sorts. However, few who met Oscar would have detected the lonely soul behind the exuberant carapace. To his new friend, the actor and drama critic Norman Forbes-Robertson, Oscar wrote, in March 1880:

I don't know if I bored you the other night with my life and its troubles. There seems something so sympathetic and gentle about your nature, and you have been so charming whenever I have seen you, that I felt somehow that although I knew you only a short time, yet that still I could talk to you about things, which I only talk of to people whom I like – to those whom I count my friends. If you will let me count
you
as one of my friends, it would give a new pleasure to my life. I hope so much to see you again. Till I do, ever yours.

A few months later, he unmasked himself once again to Forbes-Robertson, ‘As for me I am lonely,
désolé
and wretched. I feel burned out.'
²⁵

Since leaving Oxford in 1878, apart from getting himself known, Oscar had written
Vera
, a play he was trying to get performed, and some more poems. He tried to interest a publisher in a collected volume of poetry, and in May 1881, wrote to David Bogue, who ran a minor publishing house, ‘Sir, I am anxious to publish a volume of poems immediately,' and ended with the half-confident statement, ‘possibly my name requires no introduction'.
²⁶
But his name did not convince David Bogue enough to invest in the poems, so Oscar paid for the collection himself, spending heavily on the cover, binding, paper and type, hoping the book would be a collector's
objet d'art
. The volume went to five editions of 250 copies each in the first year.

The poems explore politics, Christianity, Aestheticism, paganism and piety. One of the more successful and audacious poems, ‘Charmides', anticipates motifs that will reappear much later in
Salomé
and ‘The Sphinx'. ‘Charmides' tells of a Greek youth who breaks into the temple of Pallas Athene to be near the statue of the goddess. There he loosens her robes and kisses her cold marble breast. But the theme of love degenerates into a sterile eroticism, which the speaker feels is unnatural and perverse: ‘Enough, enough that he whose life has been/ A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame.'
²⁷
In the conflict between the positive quality of adjectives and the negative moral judgement, Oscar reveals a morbid streak, which will become a distinct feature of his later work, most pronounced in
The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Critically, the poems were damned. Most reviews accused the poet of plagiarism, insincerity and indecency. The
Athenaeum
, on 23 July 1881, said the poems had no ‘distinct message' and the language was ‘inflated and insincere'; the
Spectator
, on 13 August 1881, doubted he was a poet, for he had no ‘genuine lyrical feeling'; and the
Saturday Review
, on 23 July 1881, found it reprehensible that the poems were stuffed with ‘profuse and careless imagery'. More vexatious was the response from the librarian of the Oxford Union, to whom Oscar had sent a complimentary copy. Typically such gifts were accepted without fanfare, especially from a former winner of the Newdigate Prize for poetry. Oscar's was not. The librarian, Oliver Elton, refused to hold a copy, claiming it was like a compilation of other poets – Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne, Byron, Morris and Swinburne, among others.
²⁸
More publicly damaging was the satire of
Punch
, 23 July 1881, where the reviewer jeered at the incongruity between the beautiful appearance of a book and its risible content. It reads:

The cover is consummate, the paper is distinctly precious, the binding is beautiful, and the type is utterly too.
Poems by Oscar Wilde
, that is the title of the book of the aesthetic singer, which comes to us arrayed in white vellum and gold. There is a certain amount of originality about the binding, but that is more than can be said about the inside of the volume. Mr Wilde may be aesthetic, but he is not original. This is a volume of echoes – it is Swinburne and water, while here and there we note the author has been reminiscent of Mr Rossetti and Mrs Browning.

Oscar was shaken by this derision. Of the complimentary copies he sent, including one to Gladstone, only the novelist Violet Hunt was kind enough to reply. In his response to Hunt, it is easy to see wounded pride under the haughty tone:

[I] am infinitely delighted that you have thought my poems beautiful. In an age like this when Slander, and Ridicule, and Envy walk quite unashamed among us, and when any attempt to produce serious beautiful work is greeted with a very tornado of lies and evil-speaking, it is a wonderful joy, a wonderful spur for ambition and work, to receive any such encouragement and appreciation as your letter brought me, and I thank you for it again and again.

And to an Unidentified Correspondent, he wrote, ‘As for modern newspapers . . . I have long ago ceased to care what they write about me – my time being all given up to the gods and the Greeks.'
²⁹

Whatever humiliation Oscar felt after the critical panning of his poems, his confrontation with Frank Miles humiliated him further. Frank's father joined the chorus of prosecutors and urged his son to cut his friendship with the writer of vulgar work, poetry objectionable enough to force his wife to tear out a poem from her copy. The dean also wrote to Oscar, charging him with having written poetry that ‘is licentious and may do a great harm to any soul that reads it'. Worse, Miles complied with his father's entreaty to end their friendship. Oscar had recently protected Miles from police who had come to Tite Street to investigate his relations with young pubescent girls. Oscar had told the police Miles was abroad, giving him time to escape over the rooftops of Tite Street. Miles's willingness to comply with his father incensed Oscar, and for a man who typically kept his poise, his temper flared. According to Sally Higgs, then one of Miles's models, Oscar dashed upstairs, hurled his clothes into a trunk, which he flung downstairs, breaking an antique table into fragments, and left in a cab.
³⁰
This marked the end of their friendship and the end of their bohemian set-up in Tite Street.

This would not be Oscar's last brush with patriarchs. His tireless and not necessarily tongue-in-cheek demonstration of a poetic and Aesthetic persona, the suavity of his talk, the eccentricity of his dress and his effete manner incited mockery. But Jane was always there, seeing the sunny side of negative criticism. Jane, Willie and Oscar were three émigrés united in their loyalty to each other, each giving the others a leg up when they could – though it would not always be thus.

22

Divergent Paths

Though the Wildes did not reside
en famille
, all three always lived close to each other. When Oscar left Tite Street he went to live with Jane and Willie in Ovington Square in Knightsbridge, before moving to 9 Charles Street, off Grosvenor Square in Mayfair. A few months afterwards, in late 1881, Jane and Willie moved to 116 Park Street, also near Grosvenor Square. Proximity allowed easy communication. Jane was, as ever, attentive to books newly published – reading Zola's
Nana
shortly after it was published in 1880, telling Oscar she thought it ‘the greatest sermon of the 19
^th
Century'.
¹
She was also making the most of London's eclectic offerings. She had joined what she called a ‘German group', went often to the theatre, attended play readings, and welcomed callers, new and old. Then towards the end of 1881, fortune turned in a way that would set the family on divergent paths. Oscar received a cable from the New York office of Richard D'Oyly Carte asking him to give fifty lectures on Aestheticism in America. The lectures were to run alongside the performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera
Patience
.

Patience
had opened at the Opera Comique in London on 23 April 1881. The opera satirised contemporary Aestheticism. The character of Bunthorne, an effete and fleshy poet who flounces down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand, was generally taken as a caricature of Oscar. After the production opened in New York on 22 September 1881, Colonel W. F. Morse, Carte's American representative, thought the appearance of Oscar might provide useful publicity. Mindful that British humour might not travel, that
Patience
's satire on Aestheticism might not be understood in America, Morse supposed that the appearance of Oscar would help the audience understand the mockery and satire. Had Morse wanted a credible exponent of Aestheticism, he could have chosen Ruskin or William Morris. The fact that he chose Oscar, the man
Patience
figured as the Prince of Doodads, the epitome of all the frivolous impudence and effusive nonsense of the time, was a wise financial move from an entrepreneurial genius, but not one that augured well for Oscar's reputation.

That was not how Oscar saw it, however. He cabled back the next day, ‘Yes, if offer good.' He was in desperate need of money and had mortgaged his lodge at Illaunroe. Carte was offering to cover his expenses and provide an equal share of the profits from the lectures. The tour also promised fame. He had once said to his friend at Oxford, Hunter-Blair, ‘I won't be a dried up Oxford don, anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.'
²
Carte's offer made fame or notoriety more of a possibility.

Oscar left London on the
Arizona
on 24 December 1881, and landed in New York on 2 January 1882. From the moment his steamship docked, the press were on his trail. They were not disappointed with his larger-than-life appearance, the ample gestures and conspicuous figure he cut. The long ulster of olive green reaching to his feet, with collar and cuffs trimmed with fur, invited less comment than the patent leather shoes, the turban
à la turque
, and the décolleté shirt worn Byronic style. His long, flowing hair added to the consternation he aroused. Better still, he affected the ennui fashionable with the decadents by saying he had been bored by the Atlantic. For the next ten months he would become an object of public fascination and scorn. The press followed his every move: what he drank, not ‘the dew from a rose petal' but gin; how he stood, ‘toes in'; his increasing girth. And then there were the knee breeches he wore for dramatic effect, his most flagrant affront to masculinity, and the source of outrage up and down America.
³
His fame preceded him to every city, his sayings cabled in advance. This boded well for Carte's takings.