The Fall of the House of Wilde (33 page)

Certainly he had a genius for seeing the bright side of things, as he was still subjected to press abuse. But he was honest about the upsurge in interest his new lecture fostered. In Chicago he spoke to an audience of 3,000 people, and evidently aroused the public's appetite for beauty, as shortly afterwards newspapers devoted large columns to describing rooms done in the new Aesthetic style.

Letters still show an emotionally fragile Oscar, no matter how hard he tried to conceal his feelings. He did not want people to pity him. When Forbes-Robertson and Helen Sickert defended the hideous portrayal of him in the British press, and wrote comforting letters to reassure him, it punctured his pride. His way of responding was to claim that he was widely admired and that the press simply skewed things. To Helen Sickert he wrote, on 25 April 1882:

They do not in any way mirror the feeling of the people of America, who have received me with love and courtesy and hospitality. Nothing could be more generous than their treatment of me, or more attentive than my audience . . . I am doing really great work here, and of course the artists have received me with enthusiasm everywhere.

A few days earlier, on 20 April, he had written to Forbes-Robertson, also insisting on his success. ‘My tour here is triumphal . . . there were 4,000 people waiting at the “depot” to see me, open carriage, four horses . . .'
²⁰
He was neither delusional nor did he lack the faculty of self-examination; he just chose to avoid giving voice to dark thoughts that might damage his self-esteem. He had been raised in stoic Roman style, and like his mother, he kept his pain hidden.

The American press never reconciled itself to him. They reported drily on the gist of the lecture, but undermined the sincerity of the content with such headlines as ‘Oscar Dear, Oscar Dear'. He gave fewer interviews but gained nothing as they shifted to focus on his personal appearance. The following scurrilous comment stands for many he had to face: ‘Divest him of his flowing locks, add crispness to his enunciation and vigor to his tone, and there would be nothing about him to give ground for ridicule, except, perhaps, his expressive and languidly poetic eyes, the almost boyish fullness and effeminacy of his face, and the full lips that speak of voluptuary.'
²¹
Oscar's inner steeliness helped him to soldier on, and his unfailing optimism convinced him his crusade was paying dividends.

23

Looking to America

The 1880s were a tense time in Irish politics, with the ‘land war', as it came to be known, and the question of Home Rule. Michael Davitt formed the Land League with the slogan, ‘The Land for the People'. At the more extreme end, Davitt called for a policy of land nationalisation, and, at the more moderate end, Parnell called for tenant ownership. Either way, solving the land question was seen as the first step towards legislative independence. But the eruption of protests in the early 1880s could hardly have come at a less favourable time for Jane, who relied on the rent from Moytura to supplement what she could earn by way of her pen. Thus did she watch closely as tenant agitation swept across the country, and threatened to erupt into social revolution. The cause, however, had enough moral force to win her sympathy.

The general election of 1880 had given Parnell and the Home Rule party unprecedented power in Westminster. Gladstone was eager to buy peace but not at any price. He first introduced a Coercion Bill to restore law and order. The bill left the Irish indignant. He tempered this punitive legislation with the Land Act of 1881, but the new decree fell far short of what was needed and a war of words broke out between Gladstone and Parnell. For Gladstone, Parnell was behaving like Moses in trying to ‘extend the plague', and, for Parnell, his opponent was nought but a ‘masquerading Knight Errant'. Things escalated and Parnell found himself behind bars in Kilmainham jail. This move, not surprisingly, turned Parnell into an ‘agrarian martyr', and a hero in Jane's eyes. Jane saw Parnell as ‘the predestined saviour of [the] country', according to Frank Harris, in his biography of Oscar. Harris wrote of an evening he spent with Willie at Park Street, where there were also a dozen or so people sitting around a table, replete with empty tea cups and cigarette butts, embroiled in heated discussion of Parnell and the Land League. Harris remembered Jane declaring Parnell ‘the man of destiny', the only man who could ‘free Ireland'.
¹

After some months in prison, Parnell negotiated a ‘truce' with the government, known as the Kilmainham Treaty. The Treaty conveyed a political message that satisfied few. Michael Davitt, who had wanted land nationalisation, took umbrage and left for America in a spirit of defiance. The Chief Secretary of Ireland, W. E. Forster, who had drafted the Coercion Bill, saw patriarchal order threatened, and resigned in protest. His replacement, Frederick Cavendish, arrived in Ireland only to end up stabbed to death on 6 May 1882, along with the under-secretary, T. H. Burke, as they walked in Phoenix Park. So embarrassed by the Phoenix Park murders was Parnell that he offered Gladstone his resignation. Gladstone declined, but the murders made it clear to Gladstone that a policy of conciliation had not worked and another Coercion Bill was introduced. Social revolution was averted. And Parnell, faced with the choice between force and pragmatism, opted for pragmatism and tried to inch his way towards legislative independence.
²

In correspondence with Oscar, Jane showed herself more convinced than ever that Ireland would boil over, that it was spoiling for Armageddon. In a letter to Oscar two days after the Phoenix Park murders, 8 May 1882, Jane wrote:

All London is in horror over the two murders. Poor Tom Burke! What a fate! No one knows what will be next. Some papers think there will be a general massacre and smash. Today great work is expected in Parliament. Callan the MP came here and O'Donnell . . . politics now are so interesting.
³

If, as Jane elsewhere implies, it was not a good time to be Irish in London, where hatred of the Irish was in danger of turning inward, it was otherwise in America, where nostalgia for the lost homeland among the Irish-Americans shifted the wind in Ireland's favour. During the land agitation of the 1880s, Parnell's visits to America yielded £30,000 for relief of tenant distress.
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This success was but a token of what was to come from an ever-widening circle of Irish-American sympathisers, a force that would come to play a pivotal role in Irish politics.

These circumstances may have encouraged Oscar's inflated display of patriotism in Minnesota, on St Patrick's Day, 17 March 1882. Introduced by a Father Shanley as the son ‘of one of Ireland's daughters – of a daughter who in the troublous times of 1848 by the works of her pen and her noble example did much to keep the fire of patriotism burning brightly', Oscar rose to epic heights in praise of the Irish race. They were once the ‘most aristocratic in Europe' when Ireland served as Europe's university. ‘Rhyme, the basis of modern poetry, is entirely an Irish invention,' he asserted. ‘But with the coming of the English, art in Ireland came to an end, and it has had no existence for over seven hundred years. I am glad it has not, for art could not live and flourish under a tyrant.' So said the lilac-gloved Oscar, who was probably avenging himself on an English press that declared him, among much else, ‘The Aesthetic Monkey'.
⁵
Oscar reassured his American audience that the artistic impulse still lived on in Ireland in the esteem for great Irishmen of the past, and that ‘the Niobe of Nations', as he called Ireland, would, once it gained independence, find again its artistic voice.
⁶
His extravagant opus probably won him as many friends in America as foes in England.

Did he believe it? Perhaps not, but the Irish Question was too relevant an issue for him to ignore. By the time of the Phoenix Park murders in May 1882, the situation did not warrant bravado. To a reporter who asked him for his opinion, he replied, ‘When liberty comes with hands dabbled with blood it is hard to shake hands with her.' Then breezily added, ‘We forget how much England is to blame. She is reaping the fruit of seven centuries of injustice.'
⁷
Oscar deplored the murder while justifying the reason, and thus spoke for and against violence. If this salvo was unlikely to draw blood, it would at least have given him the inestimable satisfaction of being controversial.

The month before, in April 1882, he had pulled together another lecture, ‘The Irish Poets of 1848', first given in San Francisco and subsequently in a few other places. As the native son of an ‘1848er', he indulged in nostalgia, remembering the men of 1848 – Charles Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel and Smith O'Brien – coming to Merrion Square when he was a child. His peroration honoured the memory of Thomas Davis and James Clarence Mangan, describing them, like many before and since, as the greatest Irish poets of their century. He put in a word of praise for the country's contemporary poets, Ferguson and de Vere, and finally came to his mother. Then, in a rare show of bashfulness, he abstained from commenting on her poetry, as he could only view it through rose-tinted glasses. ‘Of the quality of Speranza's poems I perhaps should not speak – for criticism is disarmed before love – but I am content to abide by the verdict of the nation.'
⁸

Oscar's lecture boosted Jane's spirits momentarily. She thought of putting together a collected volume of her poetry for publication in America. Oscar did what he could, writing to John Boyle O'Reilly, the editor of the
Boston Pilot
, to see if he could promote the idea. ‘She is very anxious to have them brought out, and if you will induce Roberts to do it she will send you her later work, which is so strong and splendid . . . I think my mother's work should make a great success here: it is so unlike the work of her degenerate artistic son.'
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Nothing came of the effort. Distance from his mother, whose photo Oscar carried with him to America, seemed to bring them closer. From her Oscar received the unqualified support only an adoring mother could give. He returned the affection and esteem she bestowed upon him with a friendship that bridged the distance normally observed in Victorian filial relations.

Financially, things were getting worse at Park Street. Jane wrote in July 1882 to Oscar, ‘all the old thing, debts, and deeds & misery & no hope . . . You probably now think of how steadily we are drifting to ruin.'
¹⁰
She thought of quitting London and returning to Ireland, but nothing came of the idea. Willie had been asked by
Punch
to act as their drama critic. Jane was relieved that he had accepted, telling Oscar he was to receive £100 a year. From Jane's correspondence to Oscar it appears Willie was becoming increasingly work-shy. ‘Willie still “at the play” [the title of
Punch
's theatre column] & nothing else – very sad.' He was also running up debts. The contrast between Oscar's boisterous arrivisme and Willie's circumstance of living hand-to-mouth in London could not have been more glaring. Jane put it in a nutshell in a letter to Oscar in August 1882: ‘you appear to have a career of triumph – we a career of endless descent'.

Everything about Willie's life went against the bourgeois order – which may well have been the point. Ever the playboy, he openly consorted with courtesans and prostitutes. More than one liaison turned difficult. Oscar got wind of some imbroglio involving Willie. In these circumstances, the younger Oscar played the sensible brother, taking it upon himself to call Willie to account. Indeed, so harsh was one letter Oscar sent to Willie that Jane intercepted it. ‘It was so severe,' she wrote to Oscar in August 1882, ‘I did not give it to him. I burned it.' Incapable of condemning Willie, she pleaded with Oscar to encourage, not admonish, his brother.

He is very sad just now & feels at last how foolish he has been & he is really trying for work . . . He feels very bitterly your animadversion & I would rather you wrote a few kind words to him, appealing to his good sense to try earnestly for something to do – Bitter words are very sad to get coming from a far away land.

Deciphering Jane's cryptic account to Oscar of one of Willie's affairs would require a sleuth. But what is clear is that the embarrassment involved a ‘Miss Pattison', a ‘chère amie in a wrong sense', who appeared to be holding Willie to ransom. ‘Money', owed by Willie presumably for services rendered, along with references to ‘pawn tickets' and ‘bailiffs', indicates that Willie was no stranger to the underworld. Once apprised of Willie's misdemeanours, Jane intervened and wrote to Miss Pattison to come and see her so they could sort things out.

Living in such close quarters with Willie meant Jane could not draw a curtain over his affairs. Willie had taken up with an actress, Hetty Drew, and Jane was hoping they would get on with it, take over the house in Park Street and allow her to leave. ‘Willie talks of being married . . . Mystery is insurmountable. I ask no questions – only I can't go on keeping up this house – impossible.' Nothing came of this liaison. If Oscar's ear had been available, Jane might have filled it with the suspicions she had confirmed a few weeks later, in July 1882. ‘Tis said,' as Jane put it to Oscar, ‘people no longer look upon Miss Drew as a lady – only one of Mrs B's set.'
¹¹
Whether Hetty Drew was a courtesan or a prostitute, or whatever one was not supposed to be, Jane did not recoil before the formidable apparatus of moralisation. But whether Jane saw Hetty Drew as the ideal match for Willie Wilde is another matter.

Willie was opting out of the world of ambition – he once put his refusal to work down to his belief that there were too many people working and too much work going on already.
¹²
Ostensibly he said this in jest. In reality he said it in self-defence, for he admired Oscar's go-getting determination in America, judging by this letter. ‘Well dear old Oscar goodbye – you are working bravely and you are wise and you have not made devils for yourself as I have.'
¹³
Jane tried, against all odds, to have faith in him. To Oscar, she wrote in September 1882, ‘I know and trust he will get sane & awake to the full consciousness of his life, & what has come of it – I have hopes of him – but where the light will come from I know not – but it will come, I believe.'
¹⁴