The Fall of the House of Wilde (35 page)

His humour and individuality became more pronounced. In an interview with the
Halifax
, late in his tour, he welcomed and charmed the reporter, by turns serious and witty when it suited him. Refusing to divulge his thoughts on the beauty of women, the conversation then alighted on Lillie Langtry, and Oscar said, ‘I would rather have discovered Mrs Langtry than have discovered America.' Likening her to Helen of Troy, he observed to the reporter how much better it would be if countries went to war over who had the most beautiful women than ‘the senseless disputes about getting Egypt and possessing Arabi', adding, ‘when I was young I thought the wars of the roses were to decide whether a red or a white rose was the most beautiful. I learned afterwards that it was a vulgar dispute.'
¹¹
Here is the future writer of the comedies, ridiculing grave matters with a wit and ease that gives off a deep-seated sense of well-being.

25

Marriage: A Gold Band Sliced in Half

Oscar's meteoric rise to fame both pleased and unnerved Jane. She felt it bizarre to walk into the Langham Hotel in central London, an American haunt, and find his photo for sale and all the American newspapers covering his tour. In a letter to Oscar on 18 September 1882 Jane wrote, ‘you are still the talk of London – The cab men ask if I am anything to Oscar Wilde. The milk man has bought your picture!' She hoped the experience of America would have enlarged him and urged him to cap his travels with a book, as Sir William had done after his time in the Near East. Oscar did start something of the sort, but nothing came of it. Over and over again, she suggested he seize the fame he had won to stand for Parliament. More interestingly, she suggested, in December 1882, that he go on stage and thought he would make a splendid Orlando to Lillie Langtry's Rosalind. ‘You would be a charming Orlando. Try it . . . I wish you would act with [Langtry] in America. Orlando and Romeo – you and she would make fabulous scenes.' Langtry was at the time acting in New York as Rosalind in Shakespeare's
As You Like It.
In any case, Jane was correct in saying, ‘you can never go back to the simple bachelor life'.
¹

Jane was projecting her own desires onto Oscar, sensing that he, too, had her overriding impulse to take risks, to seek the high seas rather than the safe harbour. Both lived for public attention. The thought that one's name did not ring a bell would have been as unbearable to her as it would have been to Oscar. Celebrity for Oscar was the goal itself, not the result of success. Sir William had always aimed higher, in that he aimed to please himself. This was Oscar's aim too, but combined with the desire for celebrity, it became potentially a lethal cocktail.

But the other part of Jane feared Oscar would never again fit into the family as he once had; his fame would breach their close-knit bond. ‘I feel as if you had gone out into the infinite. How changed you will be – I feel quite nervous having you to dinner in little Park Street'; she wondered, ‘how shall we entertain the great Aesthete'. Towards the end of 1882, she wrote, ‘You are nearly a year away! How changed you will be, grown so self-reliant & to the full stature of a man. I am half afraid of you.'
²
Never again would they chat together as equals; Oscar's celebrity upset the balance. Never again would Oscar be taken on his own terms. Indeed, the Wilde name had been taken over and interpreted at the family's expense. Jane became known as the ‘mother of Oscar', a label she detested. Likewise Willie became known as the ‘brother of Oscar'. What he felt about this or the endless raptures over Oscar, we do not know, but surely it would have been difficult to dwell so much in the shadow of his younger brother.

Before Oscar returned to London he had secured a contract to write a play. In December, he had signed an agreement with the theatre director Steele MacKaye and the actress, Mary Anderson, which offered him an advance of £1,000 to write a play and £4,000 if Mary Anderson found the completed version acceptable, due on 1 March 1883.

On his return, Oscar spent a few weeks in London before leaving for Paris in January. There he stayed on the Left Bank in the Hotel Voltaire, overlooking the Seine, in a quarter then becoming fashionable with artists. He was invited to some of Paris's bohemian salons, such as one hosted by the painter, Giuseppe de Nittis, in whose company Oscar met Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, and another by Maria Zambaco, an artist who trained at the Slade School and modelled for many artists including Whistler and Burne-Jones. It was at Zambaco's that Oscar first met a twenty-one-year-old English man, Robert Sherard, who would in time write three books on Oscar –
The Story of an Unhappy
Friendship
(1905),
The Life of Oscar Wilde
(1906) and
The Real Oscar Wilde
(1917).

Seven years younger than Oscar, Sherard was the great-grandson of Wordsworth. His father was the Reverend Bennet Sherard Kennedy, whose restlessness led him to take his family to live on the Continent and later to Guernsey, where they shared a house with the French writer Victor Hugo, then in exile from Paris. Proximity to Hugo instilled in Sherard a staunch republican spirit, which endeared him to Oscar, who often addressed his friend as ‘Citoyen Robert Sherard'.
³
Sherard had been sent down from Oxford in his first year for non-payment of debts; his blasé attitude to money also struck a chord with Oscar, who often reminded Sherard of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's adage ‘
La propriété, c'est le vol
' [Property is theft].
⁴
Since 1882 Sherard had been living in Paris, where he was trying to make a living as a writer. His output would in time include biographies on Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant, as well as fiction, poetry and works on the impact of poverty on society.

When Robert Sherard first crossed Oscar's path he was ready to ridicule him, convinced his ‘success had been won by unworthy artifices'. This perception was only reinforced when he saw Oscar at Zambaco's dressed as an extravagant dandy in a costume fashioned after the Count d'Orsay, the Bonapartist general and dandy, immortalised by Disraeli in his novel
Henrietta Temple
. Worse, Oscar was waxing endlessly on the
Venus de Milo
at the Louvre. Sherard interrupted Oscar, saying: ‘When the name is mentioned, I always think of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, where I can get the cheapest ties in Paris.'
⁵
Oscar obviously took the hint, immediately warmed to Sherard, and invited him to dine the next evening.

On that first evening, Oscar took Sherard to the fashionable Foyot's in the rue de Tournon, where he announced they were dining ‘on the Duchess';
The Duchess of Padua
was the title he gave the play he was writing for Mary Anderson.
⁶
Words and wine flowed freely and English etiquette departed when Oscar bid Sherard address him as ‘Oscar': ‘If I am your friend, my name to you is Oscar. If we are only strangers, I am Mr Wilde.' That night they traversed Paris, walking until two in the morning, and when they passed the dismantled palace of the Tuileries, Oscar said to Sherard, ‘there is not there one little blackened stone which is not to me a chapter in the Bible of Democracy', echoing the republican sentiment of his mother.
⁷

The two took an immediate liking to each other and spent the best part of their time in Paris in each other's company. Sherard knew Oscar as an older friend who could not do enough to assist him in his literary endeavours. For instance, Oscar suggested Sherard write on the French poet, Gérard de Nerval, whose work and life Oscar thought deserved to be better known in English. To this end, Oscar spent a day scouring Paris's bookshops for Alfred Delvau's
Life of Gérard de Nerval
, eventually found it and paid a high price for the rare work, though ‘his purse was nearly empty'.
⁸
Sherard stored this memory as one that taught him a depth of friendship he had hitherto not experienced.

The advance from Mary Anderson focused Oscar's energies. He was not the type of artist who needed solitude to work – on the contrary, company quickened his thoughts. Oscar talked his works into being – discussing progress, reciting sentences, asking friends to find words to complete a rhyme.
⁹
‘At that time,' Sherard wrote, ‘he was striving in earnest to school himself into labour and production.' He took the prodigiously productive Balzac as his model, and often recited Balzac's passage from
La Cousine Bette
, where he declares that ‘labour is the law of art as it is the law of life'.
¹⁰
But Sherard was in no doubt that social recognition was more important to Oscar than literary distinction. At the time Oscar was compiling a list of aperçus for conversation, including the following: ‘Artist in poetry, and poet; two very different things: cf. Gautier and Hugo'; ‘To write, I must have yellow satin'; ‘Poetry is idealised grammar'.
¹¹
Many of the sayings impressed Sherard enough for him to lace his copy of Rochefoucauld's
Maxims
with Oscar's remarks.

During those months in Paris, Oscar was in buoyant spirits and if Sherard harboured any doubt that he was in the orbit of a virtuoso, he had Oscar's assessment of himself to reassure him. ‘Amazing' was one of his pet words at the time and no one was more amazing than himself, at least so he told Sherard as they strolled along the Paris boulevards, while Oscar glowed with satisfaction after his performance at Giuseppe de Nittis's salon. At another salon, this one hosted by Madame Lockroy at the home of her father-in-law, Victor Hugo, he again found himself surrounded by listeners as he discoursed on Swinburne and English literature, though his eloquence failed to stir the aged divinity, Hugo, who remained throughout ‘asleep by the fire'. As Sherard put it, his conversation was ‘as exhilarating as wine', and he had a presence that ‘diffused a stimulating atmosphere', leaving all ‘exalted by his joyous enthusiasm'.
¹²

Oscar was so sure of himself yet so impressionable. Indeed, he was like a sponge in the way he absorbed the ideas of others. Someone who impressed Oscar at this juncture was Maurice Rollinat, a musician as well as performance poet, who often appeared at the cabaret Le Chat Noir. His collection of poems,
Les Névroses
, published in 1893, take murder, rape, theft and parricide as their subject matter. One poem, ‘La Vache au taureau' spoke deeply to Oscar at this juncture. He wrote to Rollinat, with whom he often dined, stating he had remained awake until three in the morning to read it. ‘It's a masterpiece,' Oscar wrote. ‘There is a true breadth of Nature in it. I congratulate you on it. Not since the De Natura of Lucretius has the world ever read its like: it is the most magnificent hymn ever received by Venus of the Fields, because it is the simplest.'
¹³
The poem draws an analogy between the mating of a cow and a bull and the copulation of a peasant boy and girl. The animating spirit of ‘La Vache au taureau' makes it way into ‘The Sphinx', which, according to Sherard, Oscar wrote in 1883 in Paris, though the poem was not published until 1894.

In Oscar's poem the speaker invites the half-human, half-animal Sphinx to take possession of his imagination. Erotic pariah thoughts flood the poet's consciousness. This ‘exquisite grotesque' makes ‘gilt-scaled dragons writhe and twist with passion'.
¹⁴
Repeated dismissals – ‘Away to Egypt!', ‘Back to your Nile!' – are the poet's attempts to free himself from illicit thoughts inspired by the Sphinx, whose tongue is compared to a ‘scarlet snake that dances to fantastic tunes' and whose lubricious poses lure the ‘ivory-horned Tragelaphos' to her bed.
¹⁵
The poem is a battle between unbridled eroticism and guilt. Blind instinct and godliness fight it out in a psyche. After an orgy of pagan sensuality, law and taboo, the institutional edifices of Christianity exert their power, and the poem ends with the image of the crucifix.

Wordsworth's idea of nature's nobility is contested in ‘The Sphinx', a poem that journeys into the sexual heart of darkness. Oscar is following the pagan vision of such poets as Rollinat, Poe, Baudelaire and Swinburne, all of whom picture nature as cruel and malevolent.

Oscar must have riffled through books on botany and Egyptian and Greek mythology to come up with such fabulous beasts as the hippogryph, tragelaph or basilisk, while his use of such rhymes as ‘catafalque'/ ‘Amenalk' or ‘sarcophagus' / ‘Tragelaphos' certainly subverted the Romantic call of Wordsworth for poetry to evoke a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. The unemotional artistry and deliberate manipulation of language in ‘The Sphinx' are consistent with the ‘art for art' creed.

On 15 March Oscar sent
The Duchess of Padua
to Mary Anderson. A week later he sent a follow-up note to say, ‘I have no hesitation in saying that it is the masterpiece of all my literary work, the
chef d'ouvre
of my youth.'
¹⁶
Mary Anderson did not agree. At the end of April, she wrote:

The play in its present form, I fear, would no more please the public of today than would ‘Venice Preserved' or ‘Lucretia Borgia'. Neither of us can afford failure now, and your Duchess in my hands would not succeed, as the part does not fit me. My admiration for your ability is as great as ever. I hope you will appreciate my feelings in the matter . . .
¹⁷

Gone was £4,000 he would have received had it been accepted. Ultimately the play did not receive a staging until 1891, and then not under its original title nor under the name of Wilde, and it closed after three weeks on Broadway. Anderson's rejection ended the life of luxury he had been living in Paris. Oscar returned to London. But the experience of Paris would pay rich dividends in his life and work. By May 1993 Oscar was back in London, and once again living at 9 Charles Street, near Grosvenor Square.