The Fall of the House of Wilde (58 page)

Worse, Queensberry demanded the immediate payment of £600 owing. Douglas had promised his family would pay court costs; they did not. Queensberry forced a bankruptcy sale of his effects. Other creditors followed suit. The contents of Tite Street were auctioned on 24 April 1895, and so avid was the crowd to get mementos of the ‘beast' that a scuffle broke out and the police had to be called. The sale of the library devastated the bibliophilic Oscar, who later mourned the loss of the collection of volumes he had received from ‘almost every poet of [his] time' and the ‘beautifully bound editions' of his father's and mother's work. Letters went missing, thus damaging the record of the Wilde family. Twenty-five beautifully bound volumes of the classics were sold for the price of a Victorian novel. The entire collection was sold for about £130. Savvy dealers were on hand, paying a pittance for paper editions of his works, which they subsequently sold for a handsome profit on the open market. Some of Oscar's friends tried to buy them back, with the intention of returning them to him. He spoke of the ransacking of his library as ‘the one of all my material losses the most distressing to me'.
²
The proceeds did not cover his debts.

Robbie Ross, named in the newspapers as having been with Oscar at the time of his arrest, left for France, his mother having pleaded with him to go, promising £500 towards Oscar's defence. Many of Oscar's homosexual friends and acquaintances also fled in fear of arrest. In a characteristic show of courage and impudence, Douglas remained. A handful of friends stayed loyal to Oscar. Robert Sherard wrote many warm letters from France expressing sympathy, and came over to London to see him. Ada Leverson was steadfast. Oscar had known Ada and her husband, Ernest Leverson, since 1890. Ada was a contributor to
Punch
,
Saturday Review
and
Referee
, among others, and by her own admission Oscar had helped her career to expand. Leverson, whom he christened ‘Sphinx', shared Oscar's love of fantasy, and he wrote her the first note from Holloway. ‘With a crash this fell! Why did the Sibyl [Mrs Robinson, the fortune-teller] say fair things? I thought but to defend him from his father: I thought of nothing else and now—'
³
Willie also tried to communicate with Oscar. The details of his letters remain unknown, although Oscar wrote to Ada saying, ‘Willie has been writing me the most monstrous letters. I have had to beg him to stop.'
⁴

Those friends who corresponded with Oscar were told of his undying devotion to Douglas. For instance, on 23 April, Oscar wrote again to Ada, ‘My life seems to have gone from me. I feel caught in a terrible net. I don't know where to turn. I care less when I think he is thinking of me. I think of nothing else.'
⁵
Douglas wrote in protest to the
Star
on 20 April 1895, accusing the press of convicting Oscar before the trial had began. ‘I submit that Mr Oscar Wilde has been tried by the newspapers before he has been tried by a jury, that this case has been almost hopelessly prejudiced in the eyes of the public from whom the jury who must try the case will be drawn, and that he is practically delivered over to the fury of a cowardly and brutal mob.'

Brief meetings with Douglas, limited to fifteen minutes, took place daily. But in the time allotted, Oscar's love struggled to make itself heard in the ‘humiliating' conditions of prison, and the sight of Douglas pressed against the iron grille was enough to bring on tears. Sir Edward Clarke encouraged Douglas to leave before the trial. Douglas refused until he had Oscar's consent, and demanded it in writing, presumably to ward off detractors ready to charge him with the abandonment of Oscar. Of their last meeting Douglas wrote, Oscar ‘kissed the end of my finger through an iron grating at Newgate, and he begged me to let nothing in the world alter my attitude and conduct towards him'.
⁶
Douglas left on 25 April, stopped at Calais and went on to Paris. Oscar wrote to him on 29 April 1895.

My dearest Bosie, This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you . . . If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently . . . Our love was always beautiful and noble, and if I have been the butt of a terrible tragedy, it is because the nature of that love has not been understood . . . I am writing you this letter in the midst of great suffering . . . Dearest boy, sweetest of all young men, most loved and most lovable. Oh! wait for me! wait for me! I am now, as ever since the day we met, yours devotedly and with an immortal love.
⁷

He had dispelled from his mind the fact that their love affair had been a tempestuous ordeal. Confined to the four walls of his cell, he focused on the rapture, not the pain. That he had become the sacrificial victim of the whole affair would in time dawn upon this inveterate masochist.

Sir Edward Clarke's sympathy for Oscar had grown to the extent that he was willing to represent him again and waive his fee. Charles Gill, another Trinity man, replaced Carson as prosecutor. As Alfred Taylor had procured many of the young men involved in Oscar's case, the authorities decided on a joint trial. Clarke objected on the basis that association with the ‘notorious' Taylor would prejudice Oscar's case, but to no avail.

The trial began on 26 April. A range of witnesses ready to testify had been assembled. From the Savoy there was a masseur, who claimed to have seen a young man in Oscar's bed, a chambermaid said the same, and the housekeeper spoke of faecal stains on the bed sheets. Then there were the men procured by Taylor. The evidence given by Charles Parker, the most brash and jaunty of the lot, stands as a model, if perhaps the most extreme, of what the court were told of Oscar's priapic exploits. Parker said, ‘I was asked by Wilde to imagine that I was a woman and that he was my lover. I had to keep up the illusion. I used to sit on his knees and he used to play with my privates as a man might amuse himself with a girl.' The court got to hear about how they would ‘toss' each other off and sodomise each other in the Savoy, and in Tite Street. He spoke of Oscar bidding him to hold his genitals under the table at Kettner's.
⁸
Parker depicted a sexual spectacle that might have made the court wonder whether Oscar had confused Victorian London for the dying days of the Roman Empire.

Whether the court listened as attentively to acts of kindness Oscar showed to these young men is another matter. Alfred Wood, who had blackmailed Oscar with a letter he had written to Douglas, spoke of the several occasions Oscar had taken him to lunch, and of one impromptu afternoon when Oscar called at his flat to take him out to tea and crowned it with a shopping spree, buying the young man ‘half a dozen shirts, some collars and handkerchiefs, a silver watch and chain'. Oscar was known in the trade as a man ‘who was good for plenty of money'.
⁹

Needless to say it was a nervous Oscar who took his place in the witness box. He admitted he knew the men who had testified but denied the alleged indecent practices. The prosecution then tried to nail him on work he had not written. Gill dwelt on two poems, ‘In Praise of Shame' and ‘Two Loves', both written by Douglas, and tried to make Oscar account for them. When Gill pressed Oscar for an explanation of a phrase, the ‘Love that dare not speak its name', he defended it with the emotion of one who knew whereof he spoke.

The ‘love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood as it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name', and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
¹⁰

Oscar's peroration met with a burst of applause. But hisses broke out and the judge threatened to clear the court if the manifestation of feeling continued. Nevertheless his grave and heartfelt oration paved the way for Clarke, who argued principally that the evidence produced by the prosecution could not be relied upon as it was uncorroborated and came from blackmailers, ‘tainted witnesses'. Clarke spoke for an hour to a hushed court and so splendid was his address, it brought tears to Oscar's eyes.

The jury were asked to consider whether Wilde and Taylor had committed indecent acts with the persons who had testified, and whether Taylor had procured the commission of these acts. The jury took four hours to deliberate and reached an inconclusive verdict. A new trial was ordered, and this sad and sorry saga continued into its third act.

This time Oscar had to be granted bail, as it was in accordance with statutory law. Mr Justice Charles fixed bail at £5,000, more than twice as much as expected, stipulating that Oscar give his personal securities for £2,500 and that two guarantors, each for £1,250, make up the balance. Douglas's brother, Percy, offered himself as a guarantor; the other backer was a Reverend Stewart Headlam, a Christian socialist scarcely known to Oscar. There were other displays of kindness. A Miss Adela Schuster, having heard of Oscar's bankruptcy, offered him £1,000. He thanked her, saying he would use some of the funds to help his mother, who had nothing. Ada Leverson also gave him £1,000, reassuring him it was but a small payment for the pleasure she got from his company.

Oscar was released on bail on 7 May. Percy Douglas took him to the Midland Hotel, St Pancras, where he had reserved two rooms. But no sooner had they sat down together for dinner than the manager demanded they leave at once. They tried to get into other hotels, those on the outskirts of London, but everywhere Oscar was met with the same degrading response. About midnight he ended up at Oakley Street, ‘like a wounded stag', as Willie put it. ‘Let me lie on the floor, or I shall die in the streets,' was what Oscar uttered as he stumbled across the threshold.
¹¹

That May of 1895 there could hardly have been a more wretched home in the whole of London than 146 Oakley Street. Oscar lay recumbent on a camp bed for much of the day, reluctant to go out lest people jeer at him. Nor could there have been a starker contrast with the Wilde home at Merrion Square. For Jane, who had so wanted her sons to commune again like brothers, this must have been the most morose reunion imaginable – one son chronically inebriated and work-shy; the other the most reviled ‘monster' in the British Isles. But Jane was not the type of creature to wail about events, or escape them. She had been courageous in 1848. She had not been afraid to admit her responsibility in the uprising and risk imprisonment, nor had she shirked the witness box in the Travers vs Wilde case. Adversity brought out her strength, she had once said. Even so, she could not have failed to read accounts of the first two trials, and could thus scarcely have hoped for a positive verdict.

About Oscar's decision to stay and stand trial or jump bail, Yeats, in his
Autobiographies
, alleged Jane to have said, ‘If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you again.'
¹²
Yeats wrote this almost thirty years after the event, and could not remember who was supposed to have told him. He had called at Oakley Street but did not meet Jane. Prompted by his father, Yeats visited the Wildes sometime in May to deliver to Oscar letters of sympathy from Irish friends, but had spoken only to Willie. This, in addition to many other factual inaccuracies apropos the Wildes in his account, throws doubt on the accuracy of the statement. The declaration speaks more to Yeats's image of the heroic fate of the Irish émigré in England – as in his story ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast', which had received high praise from Oscar – than to Jane's nature. From what we know about Jane, we can assume she would have preferred Oscar stand and face the charges rather than abscond. But had he bolted, I suspect she would not have cut him off – she was nothing if not steadfast in her devotion to her beloved Oscar, and nothing would alter that. Cutting him off would have been unthinkable – her maternal love was unconditional. One has only to be reminded of her tolerance of Willie. No matter how callous and cruel Willie was towards her, he still enjoyed a secure place in her heart. When it came to family, at least her own family, Jane showed herself a deep-dyed loyalist.

Thus was Jane irate when Constance had come in April to tell her of her intention to divorce Oscar, and to change her name, and that of the boys. Jane wrote to Constance, on 22 April, regarding her proposal, ‘I do not like the idea of the boys changing their names – it would bring them much confusion. But at all events wait till the trial is quite over.' Jane was much concerned with lineage. The idea of no heir to the Wilde name she could not accept. Undoubtedly she saw Oscar rather than Willie as the truer issue of the Wilde name Sir William had made illustrious. That this eminent name be extinguished was for her out of the question. She likewise, in the same letter, dismissed a suggestion Constance made that Vyvyan attend a school to prepare him for the navy. ‘Neither do I approve of the Navy for Vyvyan. I think it quite unfit as he is a born writer, made for literature alone.'
¹³
But Jane's bidding Constance to wait till the trial was over also suggests she had not given up all hope, whereas Constance had.