The Fall of the House of Wilde (41 page)

Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, we can realise Hegel's system of contraries. The truth of metaphysics are the truth of masks.
⁶

With this sleight of hand the reader is robbed of assurance by a conclusion that undercuts truth. The change in content and tone is a pointer to the change in Oscar from a man whose writings reflect the politics of the time to one whose style destabilises all truths.

In the intervening years, momentous changes occurred in Oscar's life. Vyvyan was born on 3 November 1886, and during this pregnancy Oscar's feelings for Constance changed irretrievably, as he confided to Frank Harris.

When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily, with dancing eyes and gay rippling laughter like music. In a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed: she dragged herself around the house in uncouth misery with drawn blotched face and hideous body, sick at heart because of our love. It was dreadful. I tried to be kind to her; forced myself to touch and kiss her; but she was sick always, and oh! I cannot recall it, it is all loathsome . . . Oh, nature is disgusting; it takes beauty and defiles it; it defaces the ivory-white we have adored, with the vile cicatrices of maternity; it befouls the altar of the soul.
⁷

That flowers wilt, that the ‘aesthetic girl', an image famously celebrated by Ruskin in
Sesames and Lilies
, becomes a woman, was not something Oscar seemed to have anticipated. Christianity's problem with procreative woman is sufficient to suggest that disgust is not unique to Oscar. Its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and virgin birth express an anxiety at being beholden to woman, a fear that she who gives life also blocks the way to freedom. To surmount nature, Judaeo-Christians and, before them, the Greco-Romans developed transcendental cultures. The Greeks had their Olympian gods, while the Old Testament claims a father god made nature. Despite Greek culture's Dionysian element, the high classicism the Greeks developed is Apollonian, and marks the beginning of Western rationality cutting itself off from Dionysus, the ruler of nature's quagmire.

This made perfect sense to Oscar. For him the sculpted boy's body is the perfect embodiment of Apollonian art. ‘In beauty there is no comparison between a boy and a girl,' Oscar asserted to Harris. To break with nature, Oscar said, the sculptor has to remodel the body of a woman to achieve perfect form. As he put it,

Think of the enormous fat hips which every sculptor has to tone down, and make lighter, and the great udder breasts which the artist has to make small and round and firm, and then picture the exquisite slim lines of a boy's figure. No one who loves beauty can hesitate for a moment. The Greeks knew that; they had the sense of plastic beauty, and they understood that there is no comparison . . . the boy's figure is more beautiful; the appeal it makes is far higher, more spiritual.
⁸

Oscar was quick to emphasise the affinity of his preference for the beauty of male form with such supreme artists as Michelangelo and Shakespeare. When Oscar had finished fulminating about woman's nature, Harris said that he talked ‘as if [he] never loved a woman', to which Oscar replied, only in his ‘salad days when I was green in judgement, cold in blood'.
⁹

Oscar's complex reaction to woman's nature, his fear and fascination, is evident in ‘The Sphinx', as it will be in
Salomé
(1892) – both perfect embodiments of the
femme fatale.

With marriage turning out to be a duller existence than he had expected, Oscar turned his attention elsewhere. It was in his capacity as a theatre critic for
Dramatic Review
that he first corresponded with Harry Currie Marillier. A forthcoming production of Aeschylus'
Eumenides
, at Cambridge's Theatre Royal in December 1885, prompted Marillier, then a Classics scholar at Cambridge, to write to Oscar, inviting him to attend. Marillier had come across Oscar when both men resided at 13 Salisbury Street on the Strand in the early 1880s. Oscar responded warmly and flirtatiously, inviting Harry to come and see him when next in London.

You must certainly come and see me when you are in town, and we will talk of the poets and drink Keats's health. I wonder are you all Wordsworthians still at Cambridge, or do you love Keats, and Poe, and Baudelaire? I hope so. Write and tell me what things in art you and your friends love best. I do not mean what pictures, but what moods and modulations of art affect you most. Is it five years ago really? Then I might almost sign myself an old friend, but the word old is full of terror.
¹⁰

Marillier's versatile life as a student embodied everything Oscar once had and wished again for himself. A man in his early thirties grasping for deliverance from the moral devotions and domestic duties of marriage, was that how he saw himself? At this juncture, which coincided with the beginnings of his rupture with Whistler, he looked to younger men for companionship and adulation, intellectual stimulus and artistic inspiration. He had willingly played Whistler's disciple, but the asperity of Whistler's recent published remarks about Oscar made the preservation of any bond seem improbable. While friendships with masters unravelled, friendships with disciples became an increasingly seamless thing. Oscar did not play master in the vampiric spirit of Whistler. Rather, the relations he formed with young men were of reciprocal trust and love. There are masters who need disciples for inspiration – indeed, masters who cannot survive without their disciples – and Oscar was one such. Little wonder he admired Jesus and Socrates; both had loving disciples.

There is no indication that Constance perceived any threat in Oscar's associations with young students. That they gave Oscar an audience seemed to please this selfless, caring woman who lost no time organising dinners and soirées where young men could gather and sit wide-eyed around her husband. Far from resenting his attention to them, she helped to build up under the family roof a circle from which she was not excluded. Oscar was thus at liberty to moon over the likes of Marillier in his smoking room, where poetry was explored ‘petal by petal', to use his phrase.
¹¹
While Constance attended to the infants, Oscar could retire with one of his acolytes to stretch out on his ottoman divan, blowing smoke rings and spinning gold from plain yarn in the dimly lit Arabic room.

Certainly Constance made no objection when a precocious seventeen-year-old boy with feminine looks came to live with them sometime in 1886. Quite possibly nobody knew that Robert Baldwin Ross and Oscar were in fact lovers at this time, and much about the beginnings of their relationship remains obscure. Robbie Ross was a Canadian from Toronto, born in 1869 to John Ross, a Toronto lawyer who rose to become attorney general and Conservative senator, and Elizabeth, whose father, Robert Baldwin, led Canada to autonomy from Britain in 1840. John Ross died in 1871 and Elizabeth brought her family to England the following April. When Oscar first met Robbie he was attending a crammer to prepare him for Cambridge. At seventeen he was a practising homosexual, and an habitué of London's underground, exploring the public conveniences in pursuit of sexual encounters. The year before, in 1885, the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, prohibiting any sexual activity between men. But Ross made no secret of his inclination and was courageous enough to write articles in university magazines on homosexuality and to confront prejudice when he met it, as he did at Cambridge. There he sought the dismissal of a professor, who was implicated in intimidating him. When the college failed to take action, Ross left.

How Oscar met Ross is not certain. It may have been through Robbie's brother, Alec, a literary critic, or equally likely, Ross may have propositioned Oscar at a public convenience, as Harris suggests. However the meeting came about, Oscar soon discovered that this captivating Canadian, at least a head shorter than he and fifteen years younger, was a glittering addition to his circle. Robbie moved into Tite Street, remaining for at least two months, during which time he was a lover to Oscar and a charming friend to Constance. Thus began a ménage à trois two years into Oscar's and Constance's married life, mirroring the time when Mary Travers came between Jane and William, when Jane was pregnant with Oscar. What is the significance of this similarity and coincidence? Are they rebuses of the memory, or rather signs of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, pertaining to the living and the dead, which lie beyond our comprehension?

Whether Oscar's admission of his sexuality unleashed his creativity is impossible to say. But his creative productivity increased and his style changed. Certainly he attributed the spur for his essay ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.' to Ross. In a letter to Ross, dated July 1889, Oscar wrote, ‘the story is half yours, and but for you would not have been written'.
¹²

The essay, published in April 1889 in
Blackwood
, is the story of two men and a narrator who try to identify Willie Hughes, the purported muse for Shakespeare's sonnets. It opens with the narrator and Erskine talking about literary forgeries. Conversation turns to Erskine's school friend, Cyril, and his theory on the addressee of Shakespeare's sonnets. Cyril believes Shakespeare's muse was a boy actor whose name was Willie Hughes. The clue to the existence of such a person lay in the punning use of the words ‘Will' and ‘hew/hue' in Sonnets 20, 135 and 143, a theory first put forward in 1766 by Thomas Tyrwhitt. Though Cyril cannot prove Hughes's existence, he wants to convince Erskine he was Shakespeare's muse. With this objective, Cyril commissions a painter to do a portrait of the imagined Hughes in the style of Clouet, a French painter living at the time of Shakespeare. Cyril tells Erskine he found the painting quite by chance. Erskine can see it is a fake. Erskine challenges Cyril, who, after a violent quarrel, kills himself. But not before he bequeaths a letter to Erskine in which he explains his motivation for the forgery. He had done it to persuade Erskine, but the act in no way invalidates the truth of his theory. Far from it, his conviction is so great ‘he offer[s] his life as a sacrifice to the secret of the Sonnets'.
¹³
Having more certainty, Cyril suffered more anguish. It is as if the unattainable created a prison.

The pattern set up holds good for the rest of the essay. The narrator takes up Cyril's thesis and resolves not to rest until he has convinced Erskine of its truth. Thus does he persevere for years, torn from his life, devoting himself with a growing hunger for knowledge beyond the scope of the sonnets. Having worked arduously on the theory for some time, he sends the revised version to Erskine, but no sooner does he send it, than he loses ardour and indifference sets in. Not so for Erskine, who now catches the bug of conviction from reading the narrator's version. Two years pass, and still there is no resolution. At his wits' end, Erskine sends a letter from Cannes to the narrator, declaring his intention to commit suicide, again ‘for Willie Hughes' sake'. The narrator rushes to Cannes only to find providence has interfered and consumption has killed Erskine.

The credulous will go overboard in an ostensible groping for certainty and knowledge in this essay that parodies scholarly pedants. Oscar's erudite rampage through philological criticism of Shakespeare splashed a little mud on scholarship, and generally impugned the serious objective criticism in which his brethren invested such prestige. Asked by William Blackwood to write a paragraph advertising the work for the
Athenaeum
, Oscar wrote: ‘The July number of
Blackwood
will contain a story by Mr Oscar Wilde on the subject of Shakespeare's sonnets. We hear that Mr Wilde will put forward an entirely new theory as to the identity of the mysterious Mr W.H. of the famous preface.'
¹⁴
Stating that he will advance a new hypothesis leads the reader to believe that the work connects with the general convention of scholarship. Instead he offers a farce – riddled as it is with lies, forgeries and suicides.

In blurring the line between fact and fiction, theory and story, authentic and fake, Oscar refuses to give the subject any coherence. The essay has at its heart indeterminacy. If knowledge is a tool of the ruling class, then Oscar's perverting it is a strategy of opposition. Indeterminacy and ambiguity undo the structures of thought upon which power's operation rests. The language in Oscar's essays ‘The Critic as Artist' and ‘The Decay of Lying' is, we will see, even more suggestive of an active subject who sets out to juggle with meanings, switch codes and lay false trails. Arguably, Oscar in these works is one of the progenitors of the epistemological relativity that permeated modernist art at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Equally important, Oscar can be seen as a point of origin for an approach with which he is less often associated, and which might in the most general sense be labelled post-structuralist. The dyadic structure of the relationship between fact and fiction, between art and life, is undone – shown to be unstable – by Oscar's work. By inserting himself into the dominant discourse, but ironically, in such a way as to destabilise its structures, he was a pioneer of a tactic that became run of the mill in the 1970s – just think of the way Cindy Sherman takes on the dual role as the photographer and the subject, challenging the myths of originality and authorship.

Displaying the homosexual attraction in Shakespeare's sonnets under the banner of certainty, referring to Plato's
Symposium
, to the eighteenth-century homosexual art critic Winckelmann and portraying Erskine drooling over the beauty of Cyril, did not please his Victorian readers. Frank Harris thought the publication did Oscar ‘incalculable injury'.
¹⁵
If criticism is, as Oscar would claim, ‘a record of one's own soul', then undoubtedly he wanted to reveal his sexuality to the public. This was the first of what would be many attempts to betray himself.