The Fall of the House of Wilde (59 page)

As soon as Oscar lost the libel trial in early April, Constance made a set of decisions to protect the boys and herself. She kept Vyvyan with her, but took Cyril out of Bedales school and dispatched the nine-year-old to family relatives in Ireland, to Borris in County Carlow, in an effort to keep him remote from revelations about the sexual life of his father. Oscar was just a year older than Cyril when Jane, too, had tried to protect him and Willie from the Travers case by sending them off to a school remote from Dublin. Cyril, however, remembered having seen placards with the name of Wilde, and of being concerned as to what had prompted his rapid departure from school. Before the second trial opened, on 26 April, Constance, with financial help from friends, arranged for a French governess to take both boys to an isolated Swiss resort above Montreux. Concerned for the children's future, she had earlier that month inquired about the navy as a suitable career for Vyvyan. That she should have thought of a career so alien to Oscar's sensibility shows her determination to act independently.

Accordingly Constance sought legal advice on her position of liability with respect to Oscar's debts. Her friend Philip Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter's son, contacted George Lewis on her behalf. Philip reported back ‘you have nothing to do with any debts incurred by him', ‘don't think about the house in Tite Street again – simply leave it'. And about the more fundamental questions raised by Constance, Philip Burne-Jones continued:

Sir George was most anxious that as soon as ever the result of the trial is known, you should sue for a judicial separation . . . not only for the sake of yourself and your family but for the children's sake – the children must be made wards of Chancery and you could apply for the custody of them, & Oscar could never reach them or interfere with them. Something you should certainly do before Oscar is liberated – for he will be sure to come for money to you (who he knows has a settled income) & you should protect yourself from this . . . You
cannot
go on labelled as the wife of this man. I urge you to change your name & that of the children as soon as ever you have got this separation . . . remember you owe it to them to start them in life with a clean record – and if they bear their father's name this can never be. Also if anything were to happen to you yourself, dear Constance – (which God forbid) Oscar could claim a life interest in your money, & might leave the children stranded – with nothing to support them at all. There would be nothing to prevent him spending all the money on himself.
¹⁴

How much is the direct advice of George Lewis and how much filtered through Burne-Jones is difficult to say. But the recommendation was clear.

Meanwhile Oscar left Oakley Street on 18 May, Ada Leverson having invited him to stay at her house. Constance came to visit him at the Leversons'. She spent two hours with Oscar, and it is not known whether she told him of her intentions. However, she did join the chorus of friends pressing him to ‘jump' bail and go abroad. She failed to persuade him, and left in tears.

Frank Harris, too, supported Oscar during this month. He had offered bail, but the offer was deemed invalid, as he was not a householder. In his biography of Oscar, Harris tells of calling at Oakley Street in early May to take him to the Savoy or the Café Royal for lunch. But fearful of the outrage his presence would cause, Oscar declined. Harris persisted and eventually they settled for an inconspicuous place on Great Portland Street, where they dined in a private room. For Oscar, dinner in a restaurant in London had become an extinct ritual. Harris was not alone among his friends in finding Oscar uncharacteristically silent. ‘It was painful to witness his dumb misery.' For Harris, the deterioration in Oscar was shocking to behold. ‘He seemed mentally stunned by the sudden fall, by the discovery of how violently men can hate.'
¹⁵

Harris did his best to comfort him, picking over pieces of evidence, dismissing that which blackmailers had given as tainted and therefore weightless before the law. Then Harris stumbled upon a truth. With both having conceded the importance given to the chambermaid's testimony, Oscar revealed to Harris that it was false, that she had mistaken him for Douglas, and that Clarke wanted to raise it, but he refused. ‘I told him he must not, I must be true to my friend. I could not let him.' Harris wanted to get the chambermaid to retract and was struck dumb when a bemused Oscar said, ‘You talk with passion and conviction as if I were innocent.' That Harris was so astonished that Oscar was homosexual is itself truly astonishing. Twenty years later, he recalled the scene, and remembered asking Oscar, ‘Why on earth did Alfred Douglas, knowing the truth, ever wish you to attack Queensberry?' ‘He is very bold and obstinate,' was Oscar's rather pathetic reply.
¹⁶

More convinced than ever that Oscar would be convicted, Harris arranged for a yacht to be ready on the Thames to take him to France. This time Oscar had made up his mind and would not budge. Harris put it down to Oscar's inertia, but if that were true earlier, and it appears it was, it was not so by the third trial. Oscar was going to live out his fate. He firmly refused to leave, as evidenced by the letter he wrote to Douglas on 20 May: ‘I decided it was nobler and more beautiful to stay . . . I did not want to be called a coward or a deserter. A false name, a disguise, a haunted life, all that is not for me . . . Let destiny, Nemesis, or the unjust gods alone receive the blame for everything that happened.'
¹⁷
Yeats perceptively remarked, ‘[Oscar] made the right decision, and . . . he owes to that decision half of his renown.'
¹⁸
Oscar may have rejected the public's judgement, and but he was not going to avoid it.

In the same letter, he also wrote to Douglas:

I think of you much more than myself, and if, sometimes, the thought of horrible and infamous suffering comes to torture me, the simple thought of you is enough to strengthen me and heal my wounds . . . Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you . . . I am determined not to revolt but to accept every outrage through devotion to love, to let my body be dishonoured so long as my soul may always keep the image of you . . . pleasure hides love from us but pain reveals it in its essence.
¹⁹

Everything we know suggests that in the matter of masochistic tendencies, of self-immolation and self-mortification, few could equal Oscar. If human behaviour were always rational and purposeful, then Oscar's succumbing to Douglas's amorous tyranny would be inexplicable. That Oscar could forget himself and think only of Douglas, that his love affair had become a suffocating case that ultimately robbed him of his self, is the irrationality of love. And for a man who was no stranger to contradiction, he suffered the ultimate paradox of becoming enslaved to love while advocating and practising free love.

Then again, something of that public self-mortification in love he expressed in his art –
Salomé
is the clearest example. It was unquestionably his own predicament he described in having Salomé pursue Jokanaan even though she knew him to be insensitive to human love, incapable of reciprocating. Love in Oscar's writings is exposed as a real calamity, if you give yourself up wholly to it. As an artist, Oscar tended to identify with the victims of love – not only with Salomé but with Jokanaan in his love for God and, as he admitted himself in his letters, with Basil Hallward in his love for Dorian Gray. Before Oscar had met Douglas, he wrote about what it felt to feel enslaved. Oscar wanted to love deeply, madly, fanatically, but the works he wrote expose ruin as the inevitable outcome of succumbing to mad, passionate love. Imagining the doomed Salomé exposed to a grim public ceremony anticipated the punishment dealt him. He was suffering the fate of his characters.

That Oscar would be convicted looked even more likely when Whitehall replaced Charles Gill with the solicitor general, Sir Frank Lockwood, as prosecutor. Lockwood would have the decisive advantage of the last word in addressing the jury. The decision incited even Edward Carson to protest on Oscar's behalf. ‘Can you not let up on the fellow now?' he asked Lockwood. ‘He has suffered enough.' To which Lockwood responded, ‘I would, but we cannot: we dare not.'
²⁰

The trial began on 22 May and went through the motions. Oscar had to answer for eight charges, four of which related to committing acts of gross indecency with Charles Parker at the Savoy Hotel, at St James's Place, and elsewhere; two related to committing similar offences with unknown persons at the Savoy Hotel; one to an alleged indecency with Alfred Wood at Tite Street; and the final charge concerned his association with Edward Shelley. All the particularities were rehashed for a new jury. Sir Edward Clarke successfully disposed of Shelley's evidence. But by the time a dishevelled Oscar was put in the witness box, the outcome was widely anticipated, and Oscar's performance did nothing to change it. The man had lost his nerve. At his counsel's request, he was permitted to remain seated while giving evidence. So hostile and malicious was the solicitor general's cross-examination that interventions were made to remind him of the obligation to impartiality. Lockwood focused on Oscar's letters to Douglas, dwelt on the word ‘decency' and, echoing the homilies of the earlier prosecution, made sure the court be left in no doubt that these letters came from the pen of an ‘indecent' man. Oscar scarcely retorted. Lockwood took up that bourgeois bugbear that Carson had dwelt on and condemned Oscar for trespassing upon class distinctions. ‘They [Oscar and Taylor] call each other by their Christian names . . . Does he not say to Taylor: “Bring your friends: they are my friends: I will not inquire too closely whether they come from the stables or the kitchen.”'
²¹
In the eyes of Lockwood, to cross the magic threshold of class was to flout one of the iron prohibitions by which society maintained its order. This making of Oscar's familiarity with the lower social orders an offence must be one of the most egregious cases of Christian hypocrisy of the nineteenth century.

On the fourth and last day of the trial, having summed up the evidence, Lockwood tried to settle the argument in advance of deliberation by telling the jury, ‘You cannot fail to put the interpretation on the conduct of the prisoner that he is a guilty man, and you ought to say so by your verdict.' Nor would the personal and emotional language of the judge's final summing-up have given Oscar much faith in British justice. ‘Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor,' he began, ‘the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon oneself to prevent oneself from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise to the breast of every man of honour who has heard the details of these two terrible trials.' And like a stern father, he lectured the prisoners:

It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried. That you, Taylor, kept a male brothel it is impossible to doubt. And that you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossible to doubt. I shall, under the circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgement it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the Court is that each of you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years.
²²

Taylor apparently remained impassive, but not Oscar. As the meaning of the words sank in, he almost lost his balance. He tried to speak, ‘And I? May I say nothing, my lord?'
²³
With a gesture of dismissal Mr Justice Wills beckoned the warders to lead him out to the awaiting Black Maria, ready to take him to prison.

The lights went out on an era. And Oscar himself lost the spark that ignited the spirit of Oscar Wilde.

That Oscar's trial echoes that of the Wilde vs Travers case one cannot fail to notice. As Isaac Butt, a friend of the Wildes, made a name for himself at their expense, so too did Edward Carson at Oscar's expense. Though both cases were over issues of libel, both became ones of sexual scandal. The awkward ménage à trois Sir William made with Mary Travers and Jane was not so dissimilar to the trio of Oscar, Constance and Douglas. At the zenith of their careers, both Sir William and Oscar were pulled down by sexual scandal. Mary Travers had cast a spell over Sir William with sufficient allure for him to tolerate her sadistic tendencies, as Douglas did with Oscar. With a tendency for masochism and kindness, both father and son were disposed to let themselves be carried along by their lovers. Both men were riding high and it is tempting, but too easy, to put it all down to hubris, as Oscar later did about his own case. ‘It is the sin of pride which has always destroyed men. I had risen too high, and I fell sprawling in the mire.'
²⁴
His explanation omits temperament and love, and the fact that the sentiment of love does not lend itself to rational explanations.

40

Impotent Silence

Oscar was taken from court to Holloway and during the week of 9 June 1895 was removed to Pentonville, reserved for convicted prisoners. He once wrote, in the ‘Soul of Man under Socialism', ‘After all, even in prison a man can be quite free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace.'
¹
He was soon to learn the naivety of that remark. No normal human being could have accepted the Victorian prison system, least of all a man such as Oscar, conditioned to comfort and congenitally intolerant of solitude. The day at Pentonville began when a bell rang at 5.30 a.m., at which time the convict had to rise and empty the slop bucket and clean the cell. Thin cocoa and hard bread were handed around at 7.30. Prisoners were dressed in loose grey uniforms imprinted with arrows, with a cap on their heads, and marched around a yard, never daring to touch each other, much less tumble over. ‘Our very dress makes us grotesques,' Oscar said. ‘We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are especially designed to appeal to the sense of humour.'
²