The Fall of the House of Wilde (49 page)

In Oscar's version of
Salomé
, the play becomes a dispute with morality. He presents a world where God's existence is contested, and religious doctrines questioned. ‘Jews from Jerusalem . . . are tearing each other in pieces over their foolish ceremonies,' a Nubian and a Cappadocian discuss their different religious rituals, and Jokanaan is imprisoned by Herod for prophesying the coming of the Redeemer. Herodias alone is beyond religion – she is a woman who does ‘not believe in miracles'.
¹⁰

The setting of the play is a terrace above a banqueting-hall in the palace of Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Judaea. It is a moonlit night – the moon saturates the atmosphere and instils in the characters a sense of foreboding.

The voice of Jokanaan rings out from a cistern in which he is held captive. Enchanted by his voice, Salomé wants to see him. Herod forbids it; Salomé insists. He yields to her persuasion. Jokanaan is a shocking sight. He is an extreme ascetic. He comes ‘from the desert, where he fed on locusts and wild honey . . . He was very terrible to look upon'. His ‘body is hideous. It is like the body of a leper. It is like a plastered wall where vipers have crawled.' He deems himself ‘not worthy so much as to unloose the latchet of [God's] shoes'.
¹¹
Jokanaan is Christianity's avatar in his disavowal of this world in favour of a higher world. Consistent with his self-imposed humility, and slavery to an ideal, is his need to repress his sexual impulses. Salomé tries one invasion after another. ‘Let me kiss thy mouth.' She repeats this request, ignoring the insults Jokanaan hurls at her. He calls her ‘Daughter of Sodom' and ‘Daughter of Babylon', and castigates her mother, Herodias, for breaking the taboo of marrying her brother-in-law.
¹²
As Salomé is the offspring of an incestuous marriage, she is, in the eyes of Jokanaan, marred by fate.

Jokanaan's prophecy of the coming of the Messiah has thrown Herod into despair. For distraction he bids Salomé to dance for him. She refuses to bow to the Tetrarch's demand until she is allowed to name her price. Herod offers her ‘everything, even to the half of [his] kingdom'. Salomé performs the dance of the seven veils. In return she demands the head of Jokanaan. Though shocked at the barbarity of Salomé's request, Herod nevertheless agrees, having promised to give her whatever she wanted.

Jokanaan's head arrives on ‘a silver charger'. Salomé kisses his mouth. Salomé has had the voice of moral authority killed but she does not have the last words. They have been given to Herod, who commands his soldiers to ‘Kill that woman!'
¹³
Thus both Christian Jokanaan and pagan Salomé, constructs of good and evil, burn up in the fire of Oscar's imagination, in his vision of a world beyond both.

Oscar rewrote the biblical account to make Salomé central. In the bible, Salomé has no name; she is simply Herodias's daughter who asks for John the Baptist's head at her mother's bidding. In the play, it is Salomé who asks for the Baptist's head, having been sexually rebuffed by him. Gustave Moreau's 1876 painting of
The Apparition
, according to Carrillo, influenced Oscar's conception of Salomé.
¹⁴
Moreau's painting of Salomé is the epitome of a
fin-de-siècle femme fatale
. Decked out in nothing but oriental jewels and a crown, she stares provocatively at the radiant and bleeding head of John the Baptist, her forehead bulging at the force of her obstinacy. So too in Oscar's play, the traits defining the biblical daughter of Herodias lose whatever clarity they once possessed, as the difference between ancient and modern, between the biblical princess and the
femme fatale
become blurred. Oscar subjects the Bible to a kind of decadence. His Salomé troubles the senses with an almost too visible and too palpable sexuality, with the directness of her demands and of her tolerating no refusal. Her force comes from the way her lust for power and wilful persistence deviate from the socially prescribed, orthodox image of woman as submissive, caring and sexually coy. The freedom Oscar takes with the usual representation of sex and gender shows how willing he is to push things to extremes – there is often a real danger in Oscar's writing.

Equally important is Oscar's questioning of Christian morality. Only a man with an axe to grind could transform John the Baptist into an ascetic fanatic and puritan, the Jokanaan who judges the morals of others. Nietzsche too, in
On the Genealogy of Morals
, tries to understand asceticism and its need to renounce the world and to live in a transformed one, immune to the senses. What, Nietzsche asks, could destroy the ascetic ideal? Art was his response. ‘There is still only one kind of enemy who is capable of causing the ascetic ideal real
harm
: those play-actors who act out this ideal . . .' Nietzsche proposes the comedic or parodic overcoming of the ascetic ideal as positive remedies to the nihilism of the age.

We can no longer conceal from ourselves
what
this willing directed by the ascetic ideal actually expresses in its entirety: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, of the material, this revulsion from the senses, from reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this yearning to pass beyond all appearance, change, becoming, death, desire, beyond yearning itself. All this represents – may we be bold enough to grasp this – a
will to nothingness
, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental preconditions of life . . .
¹⁵

For Nietzsche, as for Oscar, ascetic ideals are paradoxical, for they involve a lively passion for what is contrary to life. It is for art to give form to this human tendency.

Also new is Oscar's use of language. The language of the play in French is erotic, musical and mesmerising. It is also impersonal. This is presumably because he was writing in a foreign language. Distance made a difference for Oscar because he was a prodigiously skilful minter of words; sentences became beautiful too quickly for him. He had ‘a theory' that ‘it is often genius that spoils a work of art', and the best way to overcome the proficiency is to make the work ‘intensely self-conscious'.
¹⁶
Writing in French forced him to abandon easy satisfactions, to invest more time. And out of this came the whole strange voice and being of the human body, using nothing but language's means, its incantatory archaic tone, and its patterns, but all of them a means to an end.

Salomé
: 
Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche, Jokanaan.

Jokanaan
: 
N'avez-vous pas peur, fille d'Hérodias? Ne vous ai-je pas dit que j'avais entendu dans le palais le battement des ailes de l'ange de la mort, et l'ange n'est-il pas venu?

Salomé
: 
Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche.

Jokanaan
: 
Fille d'adultère, il n'y a qu'un homme qui puisse te sauver. C'est celui dont je t'ai parlé. Allez le chercher . . .

Salomé
: 
Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche.

Jokanaan
: 
Soyez maudite, fille d'une mère incestueuse, soyez maudite.

Salomé
: 
Je baiserai ta bouche, Jokanaan.

Jokanaan
: 
Je ne veux pas te regarder. Je ne te regarderai pas. Tu est maudite, Salomé, tu est maudite.

  
Il descend dans la citerne.

Salomé
:  Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.

Jokanaan
:  Art thou not afraid, daughter of Herodias? Did I not tell thee that I had heard in the palace the beating of the wings of the angel of death, and hath he not come, the angel of death?

Salomé
:  Suffer me to kiss thy mouth.

Jokanaan
:  Daughter of adultery, there is but one who can save thee. It is He of whom I spake. Go seek him . . .

Salomé
:  Suffer me to kiss thy mouth.

Jokanaan
:  Cursed be thou! daughter of an incestuous mother, be thou accursed!

Salomé
:  I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.

Jokanaan
:  I will not look at thee. Thou art accursed, Salomé, thou art accursed.

  
He goes down into the cistern.
¹⁷

Repetition and directness confer on what Salomé says an oracular quality, so that the words, no matter how mundane they might be, generate an archaic throb. Repetition also adds to the sense of inevitability and doom that permeates the play. Oscar knew what he wanted to achieve with repetition; he explained in a letter that the ‘recurring motifs' were ‘the artistic equivalent of the refrains of old ballads', that they ‘bind it together like a piece of music'.
¹⁸

This lyrical quality replaces the action typical of traditional drama, while the attention of the audience is held by the conflict between uninhibited eroticism and ascetic denial, accentuated by the presence of inevitability, of fate.

Oscar returned to London at the end of January. Jane had written, in December 1891, to tell him Constance ‘is very lonely'. Jane saw a lot of Constance. Constance was always attentive to Jane, and she deeply appreciated it. She wrote to Oscar, ‘Constance was here last evening. She is so nice always to me. I am very fond of her. Do come home. She is very lonely & mourns for you.' Jane had sensed Oscar's neglect of Constance, and wrote again later that month. ‘Finish your drama now & come back to us, though London is very dull & dark & wet & cold & foggy.'

But Jane also liked to see her darling son, her ‘
figlio mio carissima
', celebrated in Paris. She wrote to Oscar, again in December:

Your fame in Paris is becoming stupendous! A column in the
Figaro
& then a charming sketch in the
Echo de Paris
. The sketch is written nicely, so appreciative, & also written with knowledge and a kind of awe in approaching you. You are really favoured to have two such articles about you in the greatest & most cultured city in the world . . . You are indeed taking a high place in the literature of the day, & I am most proud of you.
¹⁹

Jane, like Oscar, saw Paris as the pinnacle of culture.

In June 1892 rehearsals for
Salomé
began at the Palace Theatre in London. Sarah Bernhardt agreed to take on the role. This was a real coup, and it swelled Oscar's ego. But no sooner were rehearsals under way than the Lord Chamberlain refused to grant a licence, as the law forbade the depiction on stage of biblical characters. An incensed Oscar pointed out the ludicrous inconsistency in a ruling that gave painters, sculptors and writers free rein to depict biblical subjects, but not actors. In an article, ‘The Censure and
Salomé
', published in the
Pall Mall Budget
on 30 June 1892, Oscar said: ‘What can be said of a body that forbids Massenet's
Hérodiade
, Gounod's
La Reine de Saba
, Rubinstein's
Judas Maccaboeus
, and allows
Divorçons
to be placed on any stage?' The action gave him further opportunity to lash the English, who he described to a French reporter as ‘essentially anti-artistic and narrow-minded'. He added, ‘Moreover, I am not at present an Englishman. I am an Irishman, which is by no means the same thing.' He went on, ‘No doubt, I have English friends to whom I am deeply attached; but as to the English, I do not love them. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in England which you in France very justly find fault with. The typical Briton is Tartuffe seated in his shop behind the counter. There are numerous exceptions, but they only prove the rule.'
²⁰
And on the back of this tirade, he threatened to become a French citizen. The insulting depiction of the English as a nation of Tartuffes was not likely to win sympathy to his cause, and among the literary fraternity only William Archer and George Bernard Shaw supported his case.
Punch
got even and caricatured him dressed in military uniform, having been subjected to French conscription. As for
Salomé
, it had to wait until 1896 to get its first performance in Paris, at the Théâtre de L'Oeuvre in Paris, with Lugné-Poe as director.

34

‘Truly you are a starling'

Oscar was on a creative roll. He had been asked by George Alexander to write a play, and given £50 in advance. Alexander had taken over St James's Theatre in 1890. So in the summer of 1891, Oscar had secreted himself in the Lake District, and returned having written most of a play that would eventually be called
Lady Windermere's Fan
. Before he left for Paris, Oscar had read the play to Alexander, who had immediately offered Oscar £1,000.
¹
Oscar opted instead for a percentage of takings.

As soon as Oscar returned from Paris rehearsals began, in January 1892. He attended every day, and from the strident tone of his letters to Alexander, it is safe to assume his proximity was overbearing. Indeed, the two almost fell out. Though Oscar appeared super-confident, he was a bundle of nerves before the opening night, and decided not to attend. Jane insisted he must. ‘It would be right & proper & Constance would like it. Do not leave her alone . . . It would give courage to everyone & I advise you to keep in good cordial terms with your manager, Mr Alexander. If you go away it will look as if you fear the result – So do make up your mind to be present.'
²
The play opened on 20 February and Oscar attended. The audience loved it – he had struck gold.

Lady Windermere's Fan
manages to be modern, accessible and amusing – not an easy feat to achieve. By depicting Mrs Erlynne as a
courtisane
, Oscar dealt with modernity in one of its most familiar aspects. It had for many decades become a commonplace, in Paris certainly, that women of this kind, hitherto confined to the edges of society, had more and more usurped the centre of things, and were making society over in their own image. The characteristics defining the
courtisane
were losing whatever clarity they had once possessed, as the difference between the centre and the periphery of the social order became hazy, and Oscar's play revels in this state of affairs, in the frisson caused by Mrs Erlynne's presence among the upper classes of Mayfair. The play derives its energies from the audaciousness of Mrs Erlynne, of her insistence on coming among the lords and ladies of Grosvenor Square, marked by shifting and inconclusive speculations as to her identity, her provenance, her social and marital status. It is a play that delights in its own material – the art of illusion. Deception is its subject matter, and its meaning.