Wild About Writing

 

 Here’s another installment of my Ragtime era articles that I’m putting up as companion pieces to my new book Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime:

 

 

Oscar Wilde – All the World Was His Stage

 

Oscar Wilde could be excused if he allowed himself a grunt of satisfaction as he checked over the final sets for the opening of his latest play, The Importance of Being Earnest. It was to begin a hoped-for long run this night at the St. James’ Theatre in London. He reminded the theater manager, George Alexander, exactly how he wanted the stage props arranged for the first act.  “We must take great care to ensure our patrons are comfortable with what their eyes will behold,” he said. Wilde’s face would have crinkled with a smile as he added, “Remember, the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.” As the pre-eminent author, playwright and critic of his time, the Irish-born Wilde was at the peak of his career. He had two plays running at once – An Ideal Husband had opened in January – and the critics and social arbiters of the day were hailing him as a comedic genius for the delightful repartee and clever social insights his plays offered theater-goers.

 

Ticket sales for the opening performance had gone well and Wilde would have expected the St. James’ to be crowded this night. It was a small but prestigious theatre “sumptuously and elegantly decorated,” long given over to the presentation of French dramas and musicals. Located on King street in the heart of the aristocratic St. James’s district, it backed onto Pall Mall which led directly to St. James’s Palace. A short walk away was The Mall, the long and stately avenue now connecting Buckingham Palace to Trafalgar Square via the Admiralty Arch. Here was the hearth and home not only of British royalty but of proper English club land.

As top-hatted gentlemen and bejeweled ladies descended from their hansom cabs to enter the St. James’, the doors were being carefully watched by officers of Scotland Yard. They were there at the behest of Wilde who had alerted them to the possibility of trouble. The police had instructions to bar the admission of the Marquess of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas, an ill-tempered and perhaps unbalanced Scottish nobleman who had been known to show up at various theatres to protest plays he considered immoral. Something of a hypocrite, Douglas had a reputation both as a party-goer and an atheist. Little did Wilde realize that soon after this triumphal day, February 14^th, 1895, he would face the greatest crisis of his life amid the splendor of London’s literary and theatrical scene.

 Oscar Wilde

 

TONIGHT’S VISIT BY THE MARQUESS OF QUEENSBURY to the St. James’s Theatre was not the nobleman’s first confrontation with Wilde. Not long before, the Marquess had gone to the author’s house at 16 Tite Street in Chelsea, having arranged to be accompanied by a well-known prizefighter. This was the same Marquess of Queensberry who had developed the “Queensberry rules” that would govern the sport of boxing, giving it gentlemanly rules that outlawed the ruffianly behavior for which boxing was notorious. He threatened to thrash Wilde if he ever again caught him in public with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, or “Bosie” as the young dandy, then twenty-eight, was usually known. “I do not know what the Queensberry rules are,” Wilde responded tartly on that occasion, “but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight.” Tonight, the officers from Scotland Yard, dutifully following Wilde’s insistence, kept Queensberry from entering. Three days later, Wilde would write to Bosie:

 The Scarlet Marquis made a plot to address the audience on the first night of my play! Algy Bourke* revealed it, and he was not allowed to enter. He left a grotesque bouquet of vegetables for me! This of course makes his conduct idiotic, robs it of dignity. He arrived with a prize-fighter! I had all Scotland Yard – twenty police – to guard the theatre. He prowled about for three hours, then left chattering like an ape.

 The Marquess of Queensberry felt he had good reason to be upset with Wilde. He was convinced the celebrated writer had seduced his son into an indecent relationship – nobody called it homosexuality at the time. Queensberry had first met Wilde when he encountered him lunching with Bosie at the fancy Café Royal one day in 1892. That meeting went well enough, aided by Oscar’s cigars and liqueurs. As the months passed, however, Queensberry became convinced that Wilde’s interest in his son was not entirely proper. He knew that between trips abroad with Bosie, Wilde was often seen at hotels like the Savoy escorting young men not of his class. Queensberry’s apprehension about what Wilde and Bosie were up to was heightened by the fact he had lost an older son, Francis Douglas, who was killed in a “hunting accident” but was probably a suicide. Queensberry suspected Francis of having had a homosexual affair with none other than the Earl of Rosebery, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Now Queensberry warned Bosie in a letter: “Your intimacy with this man Wilde must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyze this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it.”  Bosie despised his father and he showed his contempt when he replied by telegram: “What a funny little man you are.” Two days after the incident at the St. James’, Queensberry showed up at the Albemarle Club looking for Wilde. Not finding him, he gave the porter his calling card, on which he had written: “To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite (sic ).” He had misspelled the word, intentionally or accidentally. Wilde was given the card when he visited the club ten days later. He immediately jotted off a note to his Canadian friend, the Cambridge student Robert Baldwin Ross:  “I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution.” Encouraged by the young Lord Douglas, Wilde charged Queensberry with criminal libel and on March 2, the Marquess was arrested and taken to the Vine Street police station.

The role that Robbie Ross played in Oscar Wilde’s life calls for some examination. As a seventeen-year-old, Robbie had boarded with Wilde and his wife at their Tite Street home. Both would later admit they had engaged in sexual experimentation, with Robbie being the first object of Wilde’s homoerotic desires. The two would remain lifelong confidantes, and Robbie, the recipient of some two hundred letters from Wilde, would serve as his literary executor.

For Robbie, flirtation and seduction were savored as part of the spice and variety of life — something which Oscar Wilde was now determined to enjoy, with the energy of one who was making up for lost time.

Robbie was the youngest of five children of Eliza Ross, the daughter of the prominent Canadian politician, Robert Baldwin. She had come to London shortly after the death of her husband John Ross, and while casting about for suitable living quarters was introduced to Wilde by another Canadian, Frances Richards, a well-known portrait painter. Frances Richards had met Wilde in Ottawa when he toured North America in the 1880s, and later painted the picture of Oscar that served as the inspiration for his novel, The Picture of Dorion Gray. When Wilde first looked at the painting, he would later recall, “I said in jest, ‘What a tragic thing it is. This portrait will never grow older and I shall. If only it was the other way!’” No one knows what became of that painting.

As Wilde’s recognition grew, his dissolute life style – justified by his status as an artist – seemed to have little affect on his work. For five years, from 1890 to 1895, he flooded England with his genius. The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1891 after parts of it had appeared in the American magazine, Lippincott’s. It was followed the next year by Intentions, Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime and Other Stories, and A House of Pomegranates, all finished within six months. At year’s end, during a sojourn in Paris, he wrote the scandalous Salomé, later banned from performance in England on orders of the Lord Chamberlain. The following year Wilde wrote Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance. The works that are generally considered his two best, An Ideal Husband and the Importance of Being Earnest, were written in the next two years.

IT WAS A CONSIDERABLE ACHIEVEMENT FOR WILDE to have penetrated the closed circle of the British establishment at such an early age. Born in 1854 in Dublin to an eccentric couple – his father Sir William Wilde was a prominent eye surgeon knighted for his work on the Irish census, his mother an ardent nationalist who wrote seditious diatribes against English rule – Oscar was sent to Oxford where he performed brilliantly, then came down to London determined to establish himself as a celebrity. He published a collection of poetry in 1881 and dressed himself up in eccentric manner, including knee breeches, silk stockings, and a velvet coat with a green tie. He let his hair grow long.

Wilde presented himself as an art critic and a professor of aesthetics, the school of philosophy dealing with fine arts and beauty, then very much in vogue in Britain. The producers of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas sent him on a lecture tour of the United States and Canada to promote their latest production of Patience.

He succeeded brilliantly, delivering more than one hundred lectures. The press hung on his every comment. “I have nothing to declare but my genius,” he announced on his arrival in New York. His comment to newsmen that the sea was “not so majestic as I had expected” generated a headline, “Mr. Wilde Disappointed with the Atlantic.”

Returning to England, Wilde supported himself through more lecture tours before marrying the beautiful Constance Lloyd, with whom he would have two sons. He spent two years as editor of The Woman’s World, reshaping it as a more modern and relevant magazine, before publishing The Picture of Dorion Gray. From then on, Wilde found himself “feasting with panthers,” as he later described this phase of his life. The relationship Wilde had begin in 1886 with Robert Ross, the young Canadian who was making a name for himself as an art critic and writer, grew closer as Ross introduced him to the murky world of British homosexuality.

The most fateful introductions would be to Alfred Taylor, a procurer of “rent boys” as the young male prostitutes were then known, and to “Bosie” Douglas. Immediately infatuated, Wilde began his long affair with Bosie by cavorting across Europe when not lounging at homes he would rent in the countryside. Wilde drank too much, ate too much, and loved too much. His six-foot three-inch frame grew fattened and coarse, but this did not prevent the flowering of his literary creativity. He lived to the full his doctrine of the artist’s right to individualism, even if it led to amorality.

Oscar Wilde’s fatal mistake, as everyone would admit, was to have the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel. It was as if he was compelled to court tragedy through risky behavior while knowing full well what could befall him. To defend him, Queensberry retained the brilliant Edward Carson, a rival of Wilde’s since they’d been together at school in Dublin. With the help of private detectives, Carson had learned enough of Wilde’s homosexual habits to be able to threaten in court to call witnesses who would justify Queensberry’s allegation. “It will be my painful duty to bring before you young men, one after another, who have been in the hands of Mr. Wilde, to tell their unhappy tales.”

The case collapsed and Queensberry was acquitted. Wilde was then arrested and charged with gross indecency, a violation of section II of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885. He was given time to flee the country but refused to do so. Wilde’s failure to escape when he could has never been adequately explained. He may have been confident that his fame as an artist and his privilege as a libertine would keep him above the law, or he may have expected the worst and prepared himself to endure whatever may come.  It is said that on the night of Wilde’s arrest six hundred men, apparently less sure of their status, left England on the boat for Calais that departed with three times its usual passenger load. When Wilde came to trial, along with Alfred Taylor who was accused of procuring, much was made of a poem by Douglas that concluded with the line, “I am the love that dare not speak its name.” Wilde testified “It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect … There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.” More damning was the evidence of Alfred Wood and Charles Parker, who each testified to Wilde having sodomized them. After a trial that ended in a hung jury, Wilde and Taylor were convicted in the re-trial at Old Bailey, the main courthouse in London, and sentenced to two years in prison. Mr. Justice Wills, said in passing sentence, told them:

Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor, the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self 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. That the jury have arrived at a correct verdict in this case I cannot persuade myself to entertain the shadow of a doubt …

I shall, under such circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment 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.

To cries of “Shame” in the court, Wilde asked, “And I? May I say nothing, my lord?” Justice Wells dismissed him with a wave of the hand to the guards, who escorted the prisoners from the courtroom.

Wilde was punished under a law that would remain untouched until 1967.  George Bernard Shaw, finding time between launching the socialist Fabian Society and working as drama critic for the Saturday Review, circulated a petition to free him.  Wilde suffered physically as well as mentally from the punitive treatment meted out in the three prisons in which he was confined. Ever afterward, his conviction would be seen to exemplify the atmosphere of bigoted sexuality that pervaded Victorian England, where adulterous affairs and homosexual relationships, common among the upper class, were tolerated provided they did not produce scandal. The case would become a landmark for change, and a strong influence on the shaping of twentieth century attitudes.

Released from Reading Gaol on May 19^th, 1897, Wilde left England that day for France, never to return. He was separated from Constance, who died shortly after. Although briefly reunited with Bosie, he lived the rest of his short life in loneliness in various hotel rooms, subsisting on a meager allowance from his late wife’s estate. He had few public supporters, and even his most proper works found a market only among publishers of pornography, so great was the public distaste for anything bearing Oscar Wilde’s name.

Wilde died, tragically and alone, of complications of meningitis and possibly syphilis on November 30^th, 1900, in his room at the Hôtel d’Alsace on the rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was buried at Bagneux Cemetery as fourteen mourners, including Robert Ross and Bosie Douglas, looked on.* Wilde named Ross as his literary executor, and left him two literary testaments. In a long letter to Douglas which Ross had published under the title De Profundis, Wilde conceded that “nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand.” The gods had given him almost everything. “But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion … I allowed pleasure to dominate me.” Nevertheless, he stoutly maintained, “the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system.” Wilde left to the world what was possibly his greatest poetic work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. One stanza read:

I walked with other souls in pain,

Within another ring,

And was wondering if the man had done

A great or little thing,

When a voice behind me whispered low,

“That fellow’s got to swing.”

 

After his death, Oscar Wilde’s works would become among the most widely circulated of any English writer. His defiance of the sexual hyprocrisy of his time cost him his career, his reputation and ultimately his life, but his work assured him  a vast readership in the new mass culture now being formed. The ideas that would shape the modern world were being thought out and talked about by the writers, artists and thinkers of Wilde’s day. It would take longer – much longer – for them to be acted on.

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