Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers (10 page)

The Savoy Hotel

22
Letter from Bram Stoker to his wife, Florence, delivered by messenger at 11.45 p.m. on Friday, 14 March 1890

Lyceum Theatre,

Strand,

London

Friday, 11 o’clock

Florrie –

Forgive me. The night has been unruly. We had drunken louts in the gallery again. I was called to deal with them personally and then obliged to submit a written report to the police. I pray that you have not waited up for me. I shall not be home.

You will not be surprised to learn that Mr Henry Irving presents his compliments to you, my darling, and asks that you allow him to keep his general manager at his desk and about his duties until the early hours – yet again! I have so much still to do here. I shall be working until two in the morning – at the very least. I have the books to do – business tonight was good:
The Dead Heart
once more – and then a letter to draft on behalf of
my lord and master to the London County Council. They are threatening to impose a stamp duty on theatre tickets! Irving is incandescent. In civilised countries, well-conducted theatres are heavily subsidised by the state. In England, Kemble, Macready, Charles Kean and the rest have been driven to ruin through their commitment to their craft. Mr Irving does not wish to be laid to waste by the philistine members of the LCC.

Before I turn in for the night, I have to marshal his arguments for him – or he will be faced with penury and I with the workhouse! That’s what he told me – before setting off, in full evening dress, for a late supper with the Prince of Wales. He is dining with HRH and the Duke of Fife at the Marlborough Club while I am enjoying a cheese sandwich, a pickled onion and a glass of beer at my desk. (I laugh that I may not weep.)

The good news is that this afternoon I made real progress with my book. I have ‘the plan’ complete.

Goodnight, Florrie dearest. I must be about my labours now. Sleep sweetly, angel. Think of me as dawn breaks, curled up here on the narrow divan beneath that old rug your mother gave us.

I shall at least breakfast well. Oscar sent me a wire tonight, summoning me to breakfast at the Savoy. He wishes for a master class on vampirism – and says that I am the man for the job. He will reward me with as much eggs and bacon and devilled kidneys as I can consume. He’s an odd fellow. Witty, but wayward. Brilliant, but too strange. I think you did well to prefer me, my sweet. When I am not with you, I am here at my desk. When Oscar is not with his long-suffering Constance, there is no telling where he may be.

Goodnight, my darling. May your dreams be gentle ones.

Bram

23
Notes from the journal of Arthur Conan Doyle on the subject of ‘Hysteria in Women’

Origins

Hippocrates gives us the word ‘hysteria’ – derived from
hustera
, the Greek for ‘uterus’. Hippocrates teaches that the condition stems from uterine disturbance – a dislodged and wandering uterus exerts upward pressure on the heart and lungs and diaphragm, leading to sensations of suffocation and manifestations of irrational and lunatic behaviour. Hippocrates died in 370 BC.

Symptoms

Personally observed by ACD since January 1889 in female patients aged between fifteen and thirty-five (all English women from the Portsmouth and Southsea area):

difficulty in breathing

chest pains and chest constriction

palpitations

tumultuous heartbeats

heaviness in limbs

severe cramps

swelling of the neck and jugular veins

headaches

clenched teeth

tearfulness

involuntary sighing

In one woman (aged twenty-eight, married but childless), violent outbursts, convulsions, uncontrollable shrieks and cries, involuntary movements, including wild, windmill-like waving of the arms.

In another (aged eighteen, a virgin), the hysteric outburst involved severe chorea – spasmodic movements, repeated, rapid and jerky: her left hand beat upon her knee as though on a drum while her right scratched upon her left breast as though she was bent on tearing out her own heart. The sight was pitiful. The attack lasted upward of an hour and was followed by a trance lasting two days and two nights.

On examination (by ACD) all the women reported feelings of perpetual sadness, a craving for love and a need for sympathy.

Cause

No one knows! The most penetrating anatomical investigations have shown that Hippocrates was wrong. Hysteria is not brought about by a wandering uterus. It is as likely to be brought on by a full moon (there is some evidence to suggest as much).

Is hysteria a form of lunacy then? It leaves no material trace behind. Examine the internal organs of an hysteric and you will find no lesions. Is it (as many good men believe) a self-induced state
conjured up in a disturbed mind? Or is it, as Jean-Martin Charcot – ‘the great Charcot’ – now tells us, an organic disease of the nervous system?

Treatments

The traditional treatments include the dousing of the reproductive organs with water and the application of physical pressure on the patient’s ovaries – pressing hard upon the abdomen until the symptoms abate.

There are also
many
cases reported (notably from Germany and Holland) of a complete cure being effected by the physician introducing his line of life to the patient to satisfy her gross bodily appetites! (This remedy seems somewhat extreme for Southsea.)

Charcot is forcing us to reconsider all that we know of hysteria – the cause and the cure. At La Salpêtrière in Paris he has anatomised the malady – observed and analysed its ‘four stages’ – and developed the only reliably effective treatment reported to date: hypnosis.

24
From the diary of Rex LaSalle

Oscar spoke to me of his mother and I talked to him of mine, telling him of my mother’s death. He said, ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’ He called Lady Wilde ‘Speranza’. She, too, is a writer. ‘Speranza’ is her
nom de plume.
The word means hope. Oscar said, ‘She is full of hope and life and rare intelligence. She has genius – and beauty. And beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius as it needs no explanation.’ He loves her dearly and sees her often. Now that she is a widow, she lives not far from him in Chelsea, in Oakley Street – one of the streets I trawl.

Oscar spoke of his mother exactly as I speak of mine – with admiration and adoration and fierce, burning loyalty. I asked him whether she had any faults – even one.

‘Yes,’ he answered, earnestly, ‘just the one. She is a dreamer.’

‘Is that a fault?’ I asked. ‘Are you not a dreamer, also?’

‘I am,’ he replied, ‘more’s the pity – for a dreamer is one who can find his way only by moonlight, and
his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.’

When he asked me about my father, I said nothing. When I asked him about his, he told me, ‘Sir William Wilde was a great man, in his small way. He had genius without beauty. He was neither tall nor handsome. He had the energy of the little man and, in this world, energy is everything. And he had a special gift. He could make the blind see – in reality, not metaphor. He pioneered the operation to remove cataracts from men’s eyes. In his time, as an ophthalmologist and ear surgeon, he was without equal. And not without recognition. He was oculist-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria in the early years of her reign. She was possibly the only young lady with whom he managed to behave respectably. Sir William Wilde had a weakness where drink and women were concerned. He was never led astray into the paths of virtue. Old wine and young girls were his temptations of choice. He littered Ireland with his natural children. Did you know that he was accused of the rape of a female patient anaesthetised under chloroform? My mother was well aware of his constant infidelities, but she survived by simply ignoring them. She rose above such things. She is a woman of stature, in every sense, and she knows that sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured.’

He spoke of Sir William easily, without rancour but with a casual, almost humorous contempt. ‘Fathers should be neither seen nor heard,’ he said.
‘That is the only proper basis for family life. My mother gave me life and hope and my philosophy.’

‘But your father gave you your name.’

‘That cannot be denied.
Nomen est omen.
And our fates lie in our names, we’re told.’