The Fall of the House of Wilde (56 page)

Meanwhile the audience loved the play. Oscar had two plays running concurrently in the West End, a rare feat. On 15 February, Jane wrote to him, ‘You have had a splendid success & I am so glad. Some one said you are the foremost man of your day, & I am very proud of you.' Jane had closed in on herself. There was no salon and no outings. She said she would be glad to read the play if Oscar could send her a typewritten copy. She did not plan to attend. Her last letter to Oscar was dated 21 March. It ran, ‘My dear Oscar, I shall be glad to see you whenever you have a minute to spare for the Madre. Devotissima.'
¹⁰
The Importance of Being Earnest
ran for eighty-six performances, until 8 May 1895.

Oscar's attention was elsewhere. Queensberry's relentless stalking had left him like a squirrel trapped in a cage. He sought advice from a solicitor, Charles Humphreys, recommended to him by Robbie Ross, but took no action. On 28 February, Sydney Wright, the hall porter of his club, the Albemarle, had handed him a note written on the Marquess of Queensberry's calling card. It read: ‘For Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite [
sic
].' After many attempts to cross Oscar's path in public, Queensberry had handed this none-too-cryptic note to Wright, before putting it in an envelope. That Wright could have read the charge made the statement libellous.

Oscar, in his distress, turned to Robbie Ross, asking him if he could come and see him that night at the Avondale Hotel, where he was staying. He wrote: ‘Bosie's father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it. I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this one man . . . I don't know what to do, if you could come here at 11.30 please do so tonight. I mar your life by trespassing ever on your love and kindness.'
¹¹
Ross advised caution, and suggested Oscar consult Humphreys. Oscar went to Humphreys' chambers the next morning, accompanied by Douglas. Douglas was keen that Oscar press charges against his father, but Oscar was reluctant. He had no money. Indeed, he had not enough to pay the bill at the Avondale. Douglas promised Oscar his family would be only too happy to see the Marquess behind bars and would therefore meet the legal expenses. Then there was the more significant matter of the truth – surely it would be nonsensical to charge Queensberry with libel if what he said were true – that he, Oscar Wilde could be accused of posing as a sodomite. But no, he gave his word to Humphreys that there was no basis in Queensberry's accusation. Legalities proceeded and on 1 March Oscar took out a warrant for the arrest of the Marquess of Queensberry on a charge ‘that he did unlawfully and maliciously publish a certain defamatory libel of and concerning one Oscar Wilde'. Once arrested, Queensberry had himself released on bail of £1,000 and the court was adjourned.

Oscar did not resolve to defend himself ruthlessly. Nor was this the first insult he had received. He had withstood some of the most personally insulting comments a person could receive; one has only to think of the virulence of the American press or even of
Punch
. So why turn to the law to fight his battle, why call upon a jurisdiction he himself did not honour? Frank Harris, to whom he also turned for counsel after he had Queensberry arrested, thought Oscar simply ‘drifted' into a decision, letting Douglas cajole him into acting against his father. Certainly Douglas was publicity-hungry and sparring for a public showdown with his father, judging by the letter of warning he wrote his father after Queensberry had first visited Oscar at Tite Street in June 1894.

I write to inform you that I treat your absurd threats with absolute indifference. Ever since your exhibition at O.W.'s house, I have made a point of appearing with him at many public restaurants such as The Berkeley, Willis's Rooms, the Café Royal, etc., and I shall continue to go to these places whenever I choose and with whom I choose. I am of age and my own master. You have disowned me at least a dozen times, and have very meanly deprived me of money. You have therefore no right over me, either legal or moral. If O.W. was to prosecute you in the Central Criminal Court for libel, you would get seven years penal servitude for your outrageous libels. Much as I detest you, I am anxious to avoid this for the sake of the family; but if you try to assault me, I shall defend myself with a loaded revolver, which I always carry; and if I shoot you or if he shoots you, we shall be completely justified as we shall be acting in self-defence against a violent and dangerous rough, and I think if you were dead many people would not miss you.
¹²

Queensberry did a thorough job in amassing evidence against Oscar. While Queensberry gathered the facts, Oscar, at Douglas's urging, headed down to Monte Carlo on 13 March, where they remained for a week, playing dice with the future. They returned to London a few days before the Old Bailey's proceedings were due to begin. Together they met with Humphreys and were made aware that Queensberry, instead of pleading paternal privilege and minimising his accusation, was determined to justify the libel. But they did not know just what Queensberry's detectives had unearthed, all thanks to the activities of a mole, a Charles Brookfield, who had acted in Oscar's plays. Thus did some of Oscar's friends beseech him to drop the case and leave England. George Alexander was one. Two days before the trial, Oscar, Douglas and Constance attended a performance of
The Importance of Being Earnest,
where they sat conspicuously in a box. At the interval Oscar sought out Alexander, who voiced the opinion that people were sure to see his coming ‘in bad taste'. Oscar dismissed the comment with a insouciant laugh, and when Alexander suggested he withdraw from the case and leave the country, Oscar replied in the same blasé tone: ‘Everyone wants me to go abroad. I have just been abroad, and now I have come home again. One can't keep on going abroad, unless one is a missionary, or, what comes to the same thing, a commercial.'
¹³
As ever, Oscar responded with wit rather than address the matter at hand.

But behind the mask of humour was a man who had lost his will to Douglas, and was radically incapable of acting. Harris tried to intervene and talk sense to Oscar, make him see he was bound to lose, to see the consequences to himself and to his art – but to no avail. On 25 March Harris met Oscar for lunch at the Café Royal, with Shaw and Douglas also present. Just as Harris thought his arguments had persuaded Oscar, Douglas, hitherto silent, got up at once, and ‘cried with his little, white, venomous, distorted face: “Such advice shows you are no friend of Oscar's”'. Worse, Oscar took Douglas's line, as Harris said, ‘parroting Douglas' idiotic words' and walked out after Douglas. Oscar's docility, his passive submissiveness was something Harris had not witnessed before. ‘Like a flash I saw part at least of the truth. It was . . . Lord Alfred Douglas who was driving Oscar whither he would.'
¹⁴
The self-destructiveness of Oscar's own nature, his habit of kowtowing to Douglas, could not be shuffled off at will. Harris thought his ability to act had been ‘destroyed by years of self-indulgence', and added, ‘the influence whipping him was stronger than I had guessed. He was hurried like a sheep to the slaughter.'
¹⁵
Years later, in 1925, Douglas justified, in a letter to Harris, his abrupt departure from the Café Royal, saying he was ‘terribly afraid that Oscar would weaken and throw up the sponge . . . I did not tell you our case for fear I might not convince you, and that you and Shaw might, even after hearing it, argue Wilde out of the state of mind I had got him into.' Douglas thought it was a fight against patriarchy – Oscar defending the son against the father. In
Famous Trials 7: Oscar Wilde
, published in 1962, Montgomery Hyde said, ‘What Douglas described as “our case” was really his private case against his father.'
¹⁶
Douglas failed to see then and subsequently, that his relationship with his father had nothing to do with the issue, which was the truth or otherwise of Queensberry's accusation of Oscar posing as sodomite.

Then again, perhaps Oscar unconsciously willed his own trial. Like some of his characters, he had a self-destructive urge: Dorian commits suicide; Salomé brings on her destruction; Jokanaan is a martyr; and Oscar brought this to his relationship with Douglas. Also, he had an itch to betray himself. One has only to think of ‘bunburying', of Algernon, of Sir Robert Chiltern in
An Ideal Husband
, or of Lord Illingworth lusting after young Gerald in
A Woman of No Importance.
Oscar had already given some thought to constructing an epic around the figure of Christ. And for a man who always inhabited his characters, it is not implausible that he would allow himself to become a martyr to philistine morality. Then there was his belief in fate. As his friend, Richard Le Gallienne, put it, ‘He regarded free-will as an illusion. Destiny from which none could escape ruled us all.'
¹⁷
Like the ancient Greeks before a momentous event, Oscar too turned to the oracle, to Mrs Robinson, a palm-reader popular at the time, whom he dubbed the Sybil of Mortimer Street. She predicted ‘complete triumph'. And Oscar's spirits lifted.

What Jane or Willie thought about Oscar's pending trial is nowhere recorded.

The trial opened at the Old Bailey on 3 April to a room packed with people who had come early to secure a seat. Oscar was fortunate enough to be represented by the well-respected Sir Edward Clarke, QC, while Queensberry had as his QC Edward Carson, known to be a sharp-witted Irishman but who had yet to make his name. Born in 1854 in Dublin, and therefore exactly the same age as Oscar, Carson overlapped with Oscar at Trinity College, where he also read Classics. He also had roots in the west of Ireland, where he holidayed not far from the Wildes.

If Oscar armed himself with wit, Carson chose sarcasm. So brilliant was Carson's cross-examination of Oscar that it entered the annals of advocacy as a forensic model. Indeed, Carson won as many plaudits for his performance as Isaac Butt did in the Travers vs Wilde trial, thirty years before. Carson scored the first point when he revealed Oscar's real age as forty-one and not thirty-nine, as he had just told the court. This inevitably threw the integrity of the man in the witness box into doubt. Carson moved on to Oscar's writings and argued that
The Picture of Dorian Gray
was a book execrable from the point of view of morality, noting that it focused on the passions between men. ‘Perverted', Carson called it. Oscar deftly turned Carson's shafts against the archer and fortified his defence by invoking similarities with Shakespeare's sonnets, famous for painting such love between men. If one could justify such irreverence in the name of classical imitation, then surely
The Picture of Dorian Gray
could have no harmful effect on public morals – such was the gist of Oscar's defence.

Carson made a strong impression if only by virtue of his bark. Oscar's argument, that the book was a matter of pure art, ‘a work of fiction', made the question of Dorian Gray's morality or immortality an absurdity. It was based on a confusion of purpose. A book does not need a lofty subject to achieve stature – if it is beautifully written, Oscar argued, it is a good book. But Oscar's high-handed manner of pouring scorn on Carson's indictment, added to his explicit traducing of philistine values, would in all likelihood have irked the jury. To speak of philistines as ‘brutes and illiterates', for whose opinion he did not ‘care twopence', was a sure way of alienating the jury and the court. Still, guilt or innocence would not hinge on conclusions about the novel's moral fitness. The novel, though stigmatised by moralists, had not been banned, having been available for purchase for years. The case for judging him on this novel was weak.

Carson was on firmer ground with Oscar's letters to Douglas, those that had made their way into hands of blackmailers. Oscar justified the pouring of huge feelings into one of the letters by describing it as a ‘prose poem', whose eloquence, by implication, was employed only to dramatise the illusion of love. Here the cross-examination got so heated that Oscar took refuge in ad hominem attacks:

Carson
:  I can suggest, for the sake of your reputation, that there is nothing very wonderful in this ‘red rose-leaf lips of yours'?

Oscar
:  A great deal depends on the way it is read.

Carson
:  ‘Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry' . . . Is that a beautiful phrase?

Oscar
:  Not as you read it, Mr Carson. You read it very badly.
¹⁸

Carson, who had not lost his Irish brogue, was rattled at this insult, and perhaps it wounded him more sharply coming from the smooth, seductive voice of a compatriot. In any case, ‘this clash caused a buzz of excitement in the courtroom' and led to Edward Clarke ticking off Oscar, ‘Pray do not criticise my learned friend's reading again.'
¹⁹

Carson got one back by inviting Oscar to read aloud to the court another of his letters to Douglas, an offer Oscar unsurprisingly declined. This letter, revealing the supplicatory, needy, masochistic nature of his love for Douglas could not be argued away.

You must not make scenes with me. They kill me . . . I cannot listen to your curved lips say hideous things to me . . . I must see you soon. You are the divine thing that I want. Why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy? I fear I must leave – no money, no credit, and a heart of lead.
²⁰

There was worse to come.

What Oscar did not know was that elsewhere in the Old Bailey waited a band of youths, ready to give evidence, content in the knowledge they were to be handsomely rewarded by Queensberry for their cooperation. That their testifying should have shocked and wounded Oscar so deeply indicates just how naive he was. One definition of a prostitute is he or she who, publicly and without love, gives him or herself to the first comer for a pecuniary remuneration. But the difficult aspect of Oscar's relations, difficult as least for those judging him, was that some of the boys with whom he engaged were not boys to be rented for money but were solicited by Oscar himself, and rewarded with gifts. What shocked Carson was the fact that they came from the lower social orders: one worked as an office boy, another was a newspaper-seller. This mixing of classes, this disrupting of the social order, left Carson confounded, judging by his obsessive focus on the issue. It all had something to do with Oscar's attempt to engage with these men in a way that exceeded the concept of prostitute. Again and again Carson raised the issue of the boys' social class, and again and again Oscar stated he did not give a fig for social position.