The Fall of the House of Wilde (53 page)

owed most of his celebrity to his height and his easy-going manner and, above all, to his excellent imitations of his brother, the Aesthete. These latter were simply killing. You know, Oscar had a fat, potato-chocked sort of voice and to hear Willie counterfeit that voice and recite parodies of his brother's poetry while he struck appropriate and aesthetic attitudes was a rare treat.

These stand-ups, devoted to satirising Oscar's Aesthetic poses, pushed laughter over the edge into scorn, jealousy, rage – rage against himself. Not surprisingly, they enraged Oscar. He retaliated by damning Willie in public. One memoirist, a Lady Benson, remembered Oscar abusing his brother one day for his meanness and unwashed appearance, winding up with, ‘He sponges on everyone but himself.'
²⁸
This oft-repeated, dusty anecdote has the merit of capturing two aspects of the Willie of the 1890s – his physical dissipation and his shameless habit of scrounging off anyone and everyone. Abysmal anecdotes of Willie survive from this period. One host chanced upon him in the smoking room filling his pockets with cigars. Drink was aggravating his temper.

Willie had taken up with another woman, Sophie – or Lily, as she was known – Lees. Lily, born in 1859 in Dublin, was the youngest daughter of a William Lees. Jane had serious misgivings about her. To Oscar she wrote, ‘He seems bent on Lily Lees – and who can say how all will end?'
²⁹
Her question was answered shortly afterwards when Lily Lees got pregnant. A certain Miss Mynous, a friend of Jane's, wrote to Constance to warn her of an appalling state of affairs that will cause Lady Wilde to:

utterly break down and die if something is not done to prevent the tormenting worry. It seems that Miss Lees has confessed that she and Mr W. Wilde have been living together as man and wife at Malvern and Broadstairs and the wretched woman has actually asked Mrs — to give her powder to prevent the birth of a baby! And she says [Willie] has treated her with great brutality . . .

She went on to say that Willie ‘is always asking his mother for money and stamps his foot and swears at her if she hesitates'. ‘Lady Wilde,' she added, ‘is worried to death . . . please destroy this letter.'
³⁰
Constance showed the letter to Oscar, who wrote harsh words to Willie, as one gathers from Jane's correspondence with Oscar.

Jane reacted by closing ranks against a gossipy world. She thought it inexcusable that such a letter would come into the hands of Constance. Her main concern, however, was to avoid aggravating the rift between Willie and Oscar. On 8 October 1893, she replied with calm hauteur to Oscar:

I am not at all miserable about the affair, for I don't believe it, & Miss Lees acknowledged to Willie that she told an untruth, & never consulted the Dr (as she had said) on a certain point. I believe Miss Lees got up the whole story just to try to force on the marriage, which will never be now – Willie was very angry with her – & she will not come to this house again.

Jane did not want to be in a position to side with one son against the other. She urged Oscar in the same letter to make up and help Willie. ‘But do meet Willie in a family way, & give him your advise, & tell him [with?] all your heart that he may defend himself against his enemies.' She cared less about the blow to the moral order than she did about the fraternal bond. In the same letter, she assured Oscar that the American report of Willie impersonating him was all a heap of lies. ‘I showed him [Willie] the American cutting & he says it is all lies . . . Indeed, Willie has always a good word for you, & I never heard him say anything against you in my life – The American paper is all a mass of impertinent lies.'
³¹

Willie wrote Oscar a contrite and warm letter that sheds some light on his disposition and perspective.

My darling Boz, forgive me. You have no notion of the fuss and fever I am in till all this is done [the divorce from Mrs Frank Leslie] – we have hot tempers all of us, but we love each other – God grant it – all through . . . I am much more lonely in the world than you are Oscar and I fret over things – that is all . . . a quarrel would be a device of the devil – I am older than you are and my words are the wrong ones . . . so forgive me for the sake of love we have for each other . . . affectionately always. Willie.
³²

Oscar did not budge. Nor did a follow-up letter from Jane, where she reiterated her plea for peace, do anything to soften his resolve. On 9 October 1893, she wrote:

I have read your letter carefully, & now make my reply –

You are, I know, anxious to aid the happiness of my life, but it will not make me happy to know that my two sons meet in society & are hostile to each other, while all the world will look on & sneer, & make sarcastic remarks on you both. Already several have done so & it is commonly said
you hate
your brother. Now this does not make me happy. Nor to find that you will not come here for fear of meeting him. On the contrary, I would suggest quite a different line of conduct on your part. Try &
do Willie good
. Be a friend to him. Speak truly & wisely, but
kindly
.

He is susceptible to kindness & he would greatly appreciate you taking an interest in him.

He feels your coldness most bitterly . . . He is reckless and extravagant. Preach to him, but do it
kindly.
Willie has some good points & do try to help him to be better . . .

He has a high opinion of you but feels bitterly your open and profound hatred – while the condition of affairs between my two sons makes me
wretched . . .
I feel so desolate when you say you will not come here & that you hate Willie.

He has never
injured
you – Why should you hate him? If he has taken help from me in money, why that does not injure you & I don't want you to hate Willie on my account.

She concluded with a final plea to ‘come then & offer him your hand in good faith & begin a new course, not insulting him by coldness before your friends, & so causing the horrid reminder that you hate your brother'.
³³

Oscar refused.

That Willie had become violent and deceitful could not have been more obvious. Lily Lees's stepmother did not want her to marry Willie. Nevertheless, they did marry, in a register office on 11 January 1894. Jane took it badly. Worse, they planned to live with her. In her distress, she reached out to Oscar. She wrote on 4 February: ‘Willie is married to Miss Lees . . . they look forward to coming to live here in March next – with me. But as they have no income I am alarmed at the prospect & I feel so bewildered & utterly done up that I would be glad to have a talk with you all about it.' Bills were raining in on her, she wrote, ‘Unless I get at least £30 to meet them I shall be utterly crushed.' This time she was more unforgiving of Willie's exploitation of her generosity. ‘Willie is utterly useless & just now when my income has fallen so low, he announces the marriage and the whole burden of the household to fall upon me.' She didn't say it once, she repeated, ‘so all is left upon me'. The whole business cut like a dagger through her and she thought of leaving, giving up Oakley Street. She added, ‘I have an immense dislike of sharing the house with Miss Lees, with whom I have nothing in common. The idea of having her here is quite distasteful to me . . . The whole thing is making me quite ill & I tremble at the whole household being left to me to support, especially now that I have lost a £100 a year.'
³⁴
(The £100 had been kindly given to her by Mrs Leslie.)

Jane now rarely left Oakley Street. She wrote to Yeats to resign her membership of the Irish Literary Society – she, Willie and Oscar were founding members. The committee insisted she stay on and elected her an honorary member.

36

An Un-Ideal Husband

Meanwhile Oscar's life was out of control. He decided the only way to save himself was to get emotional distance from Douglas. Douglas had left Oxford in June 1893, having failed to take his degree. His father was furious and blamed Oscar. He demanded Douglas stop seeing him. Oscar took the opportunity to discuss the matter with Lady Queensberry. Driven as much by self-interest as interest for Douglas, he wrote in November 1893 to Douglas's mother in confidence, suggesting her son spend time in Egypt as an honorary attaché or some such. He wrote of Douglas wasting his life:

He does absolutely nothing, and is quite astray in life . . . His life seems to me aimless, unhappy, and absurd . . . Why not try and make arrangements of some kind for him to go abroad for four or five months, to the Cromers in Egypt if that could be managed, where he would have new surroundings, proper friends, and a different atmosphere? I think that if he stays in London he will come to no good, and may spoil his young life irretrievably . . . You will not, I know, let him know
anything about my letter
.'
¹

Douglas went to Egypt and Oscar saw Constance more often than he had during the previous two or three years. The thaw in relations between husband and wife may not have been complete, but to some extent they enjoyed each other's company again. Constance cancelled plans to leave London and did what she could to make Tite Street a home again. She resumed her hospitality and was delighted when Oscar consented to take his place at a dinner party in Tite Street. She wrote to Georgina, ‘To-night I have some friends to dinner only 4, but this is quite an excitement to us, as Oscar never cares to have anyone.' Oscar had taken rooms in St James's to write undisturbed, and also to be free. But evenings were often spent with Constance. They attended a lecture given by William Morris on printing, and in one week in November 1893 they saw
Love's Labour's Lost
,
Measure for Measure
and Sheridan's
A School for Scandal.
Only the production of Sheridan's play impressed Oscar. Indeed, the wit and satire of Oscar's plays owe some debt to those of Sheridan's, his Anglo-Irish ancestor. ‘We are both of us very happy at these times,' Constance informed Georgina, ‘and he [Oscar] is writing a wonderful little play (not for acting but to be read).'
²
One can assume Constance was referring to either
A Florentine Tragedy
or
La Sainte Courtisane
, both of which were written during these months but left uncompleted. That November Oscar also finished
An Ideal Husband.

Oscar put much of what he observed in the society around him into his drawing-room plays, and a good part of himself. He told one memoirist, ‘I became engrossed in writing [
An Ideal Husband
] and it contains a great deal of the real Oscar.'
³
The ‘Ideal Husband's' financial fraud and the way he thinks about the disclosure of this secret to his wife, the scandal and ruin to his political career that seems imminent, are of a piece with Oscar's thoughts on his own life. The setting of
An Ideal Husband
is the home of Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern, in Mayfair's Grosvenor Square, the same setting as in
Lady Windermere's Fan
. Sir Robert's life threatens to unravel when Mrs Cheveley, one of Oscar's feisty women with a dubious past, demands that he give political support to what he knows to be a sham project – the building of a canal in Argentina in which she has a financial stake. When Sir Robert refuses, Mrs Cheveley reminds him of how he fouled himself at the onset of his political career in a similar speculation. Back then, Sir Robert passed on confidential Cabinet information to a speculator over the Suez Canal deal, from which he gained £110,000, a sum he subsequently trebled through speculation, and which provided the foundation of his fortune. Mrs Cheveley threatens to disclose this breach of ethics to the press unless Sir Robert agrees to make a speech in the House of Commons in support of the Argentine deal. Faced with the choice of a public scandal if his past misdeeds are revealed or compromising his integrity if he supports the Argentine deal, Sir Robert opts for the latter. But through one thing and another, he is first forced to confess this past misdemeanour to his wife, one of Oscar's ‘good women', who is so unyielding in her principles that she leaves her husband no option but to take the moral high ground and confess all to the House of Commons.

Oscar pitches the ideal perspective of Lady Chiltern against the Machiavellian one espoused by Sir Robert. Focusing more on the personal emotions than on abstract argument, the dialogue between husband and wife concentrates on secrets, disclosure and the sense of betrayal. Thus is Lady Chiltern's reaction to the discovery of her husband's past, and Sir Robert's defence of his actions, a barely veiled rehearsal for a discussion Oscar might have, maybe wanted to have, with Constance on his homosexuality – but didn't. So when Sir Robert tells his wife of the crime he committed in youth, Lady Chiltern replies:

Don't come near me. Don't touch me. I feel as if you have soiled me for ever. Oh! what a mask you have been wearing all these years! A horrible painted mask! You sold yourself for money. Oh! a common thief were better. You put yourself up to sale for the highest bidder! You were bought in the market. You lied to the whole world . . . And now – oh, when I think that I made of a man like you my ideal! the ideal of my life!
⁴

Selling oneself on the market for money is about as close a definition of prostitution as one can get.

Brought to account, Sir Robert Chiltern replies: ‘There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit . . .Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely.' And in one of the longest passages in any of his plays, Oscar avenges himself on the ‘good' wife by putting into Sir Robert's mouth a monologue on Christian love with such phrases as ‘Love should forgive' or ‘true Love should pardon', adding, ‘A man's love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman's.'
⁵
With this ruthless exposure, Oscar fights the good woman with her own weapons, the Christian spirit she is supposed to embody. These satires on the good woman were connected to his estranged relations with Constance, who had over time become more committed to the high ideals of Christianity. But he also universalised the blackness in his own heart, letting his feelings of fear out in a burst as he pictures Sir Robert's future.