The Fall of the House of Wilde (51 page)

Each show of affection by Oscar was met with a mixture of surprise, gratitude and relief. When from Paris Constance received the first copy of Oscar's second volume of fairy tales,
The House of Pomegranates
, she was overjoyed to find it dedicated to her, and took it as a reassuring signal she still mattered to him. To Georgina she wrote: ‘The book is dedicated to Constance Mary Wilde, and each separate story to one of his friends,' and enclosed the snippet Oscar had sent to explain the meaning of his dedication, adding:

And now see how the beloved Oscar writes this to me, I shall not tell others, they would not understand, but you will: ‘To you the Cathedral is dedicated. The individual side chapels are to other saints. This is in accordance with the highest ecclesiastical custom! So accept the book as your own and made for you. The candles that burn at the side altars are not so bright or beautiful as the great lamp of the shrine which is of gold, and has a wonderful heart of restless flame.'
¹⁷

Did Oscar mean it? Was Constance still the centre of his life?

We can be more certain of the relief Oscar felt in Constance finding solace and inspiration in Lady Mount Temple, to whom he also sent a copy of
The House of Pomegranates
, with the following accompanying note: ‘You have allowed my wife to be one of your friends, have indeed given her both love and sympathy, and brought into her life a gracious and notable influence, which will always abide with her, and indeed has a sacramental efficacy over her days.'
¹⁸

Under Lady Mount Temple's tutelage, Constance had become a devout Christian. Prior to this, she had looked for salvation in one cult after another. First she had devoted some years in the late 1880s to learning Hebrew and the codes of belief and practice required to gain admittance to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The aims of the Golden Dawn, to revive ancient magic rituals and unlock spiritual truths, attracted many artists, most notably Yeats, who joined in 1890, by which time Constance had moved on. Occult mysticism followed by Rosicrucianism and fairies guided Constance's mind to a cul-de-sac in which she found herself when she met Lady Mount Temple, whose philanthropic Christian socialism motivated Constance to follow suit. In her embrace of Christianity she became, according to Oscar's friend, the poet, Richard Le Gallienne, ‘almost evangelical'.
¹⁹
Constance clasped this chimera as Oscar sought refuge in voluptuousness and luxury.

Together Lady Mount Temple and Constance visited church every day, and took communion together, a ritual they referred to as their ‘tryst'.
²⁰
They read jointly such works as the Gospels, Thomas à Kempis and Dante's
Inferno.
Constance's pursuits during this period show a woman, like Dante in mid-journey, trying to fight her way clear of the dark wood. So while Constance sought moral messages in Dante's
Inferno
, Oscar dared to imagine a world beyond morality in
Salomé.

What did Oscar make of this turn in Constance? Is Constance not ‘The Good Woman' of his play, is she not Lady Windermere, for whom life is a ‘sacrament', and who Lord Darlington fears is trying to ‘reform' him, a woman too suffused with goodness and naivety to see anything other than the best in people, so the whole of London knows Lord Windermere is cheating her, save herself? Oscar's estrangement from Constance seeps into the characterisation of Lady Windermere. And Oscar also imagined what it would feel like to be betrayed. Lady Windermere feels ‘stained, utterly stained' to find her husband has ‘bought' love. Even the house is ‘tainted' after Mrs Erlynne dared to turn up at Lady Windermere's party and rub salt into her wounds. And when Lord Darlington calls her ‘the mask of [Lord Windermere's] real life, the cloak to hide his secret', is Oscar not speaking of the role Constance is playing in his life? But perhaps she is also among the ‘good women' who ‘bore one', as Oscar writes in
Lady Windermere's Fan.
²¹
Certainly Lady Windermere lacks the wicked wit and irony Oscar so admired. Everything we know about Oscar suggests Constance's earnest evangelicalism would not have been to his taste.

The couple that had once shared interests – in aesthetics, in fashion, in being part of
le beau monde
 – were walking on parallel tracks. Then again, the mercurial Oscar catches us by surprise, as in this discussion with Constance in October 1893 about Catholicism, reported by Constance to Lady Mount Temple.

I have been having wonderful talks with Oscar lately and I am much happier about him. But he thinks it would be ruin to the boys if I became a ‘Cat'. No Catholic boy is allowed to go to Eton or to take a scholarship at the University . . . imagine my surprise to find that Oscar goes to Benediction at the Oratory sometimes & other things that he does surprise me more still! He will not go himself with me there, but he would like me to go & burn candles at the Virgin's altar and offer up prayers for him. Remember that I can never broach these subjects to him myself and it may be years before he speaks to me again like this, but I shall not forget that he has these moods, and last evening he said a great deal to me. I shall go to the Oratory tomorrow and I shall burn a candle for Oscar and one for Mother.
²²

Hedonism, it seems, had not freed Oscar from the influence of Catholic demonology. Haunted by guilt, though he knew and had shown in his work that the taboo on homosexuality was only a convention of a society at a particular time, Oscar could neither repent nor cease to want repentance. In this he is consistent – still the poet of guilt and shame.

35

Fatal Affairs

It was not just Constance who saw little of Oscar – he had become more distanced from Jane, too. He visited her less often, and for the first time, in June 1892, she asked if he would come ‘for a talk'.
¹

In early 1891 Oscar was introduced to Lord Alfred Douglas, but the young lord did not take over his life until the summer of 1892. Oscar first met Douglas when the poet Lionel Johnson brought him to Tite Street. Douglas, then a twenty-two-year-old Oxford undergraduate, was keen to meet the author of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, but Oscar was the one smitten. What he saw in this infatuated state was a young ephebe, with ‘red-rose lips', ‘gilt-silk hair', full petulant mouth and a girlish build.
²
Some might have thought, as Shaw did, that Douglas's ‘flower-like sort of beauty must have been a horrible handicap to [him] . . . probably nature's reaction against the ultra-hickory type in [his] father', but Oscar found it instantly flawless.
³
As he put it in one letter to Douglas, ‘I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.'
⁴
The delicate and ephemeral beauty of a flower always put Oscar in mind of Douglas, whether it was a ‘Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse'.
⁵
The myth of the Grecian icon on the shore unfolded before Oscar's eyes when he spotted Douglas in a restaurant shortly after meeting him. He instantly put his thoughts into a sonnet, ‘The New Remorse', and handed it to Douglas. It begins with ‘The sin was mine; I did not understand' and ends with:

But who is this who cometh by the shore?

(Nay, love, look up and wonder!) Who is this

Who cometh in dyed garments from the South?

It is thy new-found Lord, and he shall kiss

The yet unravished roses of thy mouth,

And I shall weep and worship, as before.
⁶

The poem was printed in the December 1892 volume of the
Spirit Lamp
, an Oxford literary journal, then edited by Douglas. Douglas was daring about homosexuality and used his editorship of the
Spirit Lamp
to publish audacious poems on the theme. He wrote many himself, including ‘The Two Loves', with the well-known line, ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name.'

Douglas might have remained for ever at a distance had
Lady Windermere's Fan
not brought Oscar to such public prominence in 1892. Oscar knew his fascination for Douglas rested in his ‘position in the world of art', together with his money, or, at least, his luxurious living. Douglas's mother confirmed as much; as she put it in a letter to Oscar, the friendship ‘intensified' her son's ‘vanity'.
⁷
Anyway, what clinched the relationship was Douglas's coming to Oscar for aid. Having found himself in the late spring of 1892 the target of blackmail, Douglas thought Oscar would not flinch from paying the sum demanded, £100. In that he was right. Money played a large part in their relationship. Douglas was the object of adoration and he took money as a sign of his specialness. The disproportion between giving and taking in the relationship was vast. Oscar was willing to pay for what seemed to him the concentrated form of Beautiful Boy, of desire. It was part of Douglas's charm to make demands, and to court danger – he was a lord who loved to dabble in the underworld of prostitution. That seeming contradiction made him all the more attractive to Oscar.

Thus began a pattern of financial dependency, with Oscar playing the role of surrogate father but without the authority of the true patriarch. That role was reserved for Douglas's real father, the Marquess of Queensberry, and he and the velvet-gloved Oscar were polar opposites. John Sholto Douglas, eighth Marquess of Queensberry, was, among much else, an avid sportsman, who made his mark as author of the rules of amateur boxing, which bear his name. An equally avid atheist, he earned a degree of notoriety for refusing, in his role as a representative peer of Scotland, to take the oath in the House of Lords, declaring it an act of ‘Christian tomfoolery'.
⁸
He administered a despotic rule over his children: the Marquess's whim was law, and he thought nothing of using his henchmen to enforce it, with violence if necessary. He fought a continual battle with Douglas over his relationship with Oscar, threatening him with the only lever he could wield – to cut off his annual allowance.

Very soon Oscar and Douglas became inseparable. On 3 July 1892 Oscar went with Douglas to Bad Homburg. There the doctors put him on a diet and forbade him to smoke. He hated it and left promptly. He had promised Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor and producer at the Haymarket Theatre, a new play, and to write it he took a farmhouse during August and September at a village called Felbrigg near Cromer in Norfolk. What emerged was
A Woman of No Importance.
Meanwhile, Constance went with the children to Lady Mount Temple's house, at Babbacombe Cliff, near Torquay in Devon. Oscar had invited Edward Shelley to Norfolk but he declined. Douglas came instead and was ill. Oscar used his illness as a pretext for not joining his family in Devon as planned. Constance wrote on 18 September 1892, ‘Dearest Oscar, I am sorry about Lord Alfred Douglas, and wish I was at Cromer to look after him. If you think I could do any good, do telegraph for me, because I can easily get over to you.'
⁹
Her offer was declined.

Oscar and Douglas had a tempestuous relationship. Douglas was either adorable or in one of his ‘epileptic' rages, as Oscar called them. A pattern soon developed where every couple of months they split. Douglas would then became contrite and beg forgiveness, and Oscar would welcome him back with joy. Here is Oscar's response to the first of Douglas's entreaties, at least of those that survive. It was written from the Savoy Hotel in March 1893, one of the handful of hotels where Oscar now regularly stayed.

Dearest of all Boys, Your letter was delightful, red and yellow wine to me; but I am sad and out of sorts. Bosie [Douglas was called ‘Bosie' by his mother, a contraction of ‘Boysie'], you must not make scenes with me. They kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life. I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion. I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me. I would sooner [be blackmailed by every renter in London] than have you bitter, unjust, hating. I must see you soon. You are the divine thing I want, the thing of grace and beauty; but I don't know how to do it. Shall I come to Salisbury? My bill here [Savoy Hotel, London] is £49 for a week. I have also got a new sitting-room over the Thames. Why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy? I fear I must leave; no money, no credit, and a heart of lead. Your own Oscar.
¹⁰

Oscar's letters to Douglas were declarations of financial recklessness and uncontrollable, anguished love. Money and Douglas went hand in hand.

Intense and fractious as their relationship was, it was not possessive. Douglas liked to have casual affairs with boys who were good for an evening or two. Through Douglas, Oscar met Alfred Taylor, a former pupil at Marlborough public school, who ran a male brothel in Westminster. Taylor introduced Oscar to many young men. Freddy Atkins, for instance, was not yet eighteen when Oscar met him in October 1892. Many of the boys were prostitutes, but Oscar treated them as individuals. He got to know them, took them out to lunch, to tea and took at least one on a shopping trip. He lavished gifts of clothes and silver cigarette cases on them, and entertained them in such restaurants as Kettner's, with champagne and other extravagances.

He became known in the trade for his generosity, which, more often than not, was exploited. For example, one boy, a seventeen-year-old named Alfred Wood, blackmailed him. Oscar had dined with Wood at the Florence in Rupert Street in February 1893, and had taken him back to Tite Street to have sex. Wood had been Douglas's lover, and found a letter Oscar had written to Douglas in the pocket of Douglas's jacket, and used it to extract money. Wood demanded £60 and threatened Oscar he would publish the letter if he did not pay. Oscar gave him £25 and a day later sent him another £5, but he failed to secure a return of the letter. Edward Shelley also extracted money from Oscar. Oscar told Douglas, in a letter written in April 1894, ‘I had a frantic telegram from Edward Shelley, of all people! asking me to see him. When he came he was of course in trouble for money. As he betrayed me grossly I, of course, gave him money and was kind to him. I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it.'
¹¹
Did Oscar give money out of guilt, out of thanks for favours rendered, or just out of kindness?