The Fall of the House of Wilde (48 page)

Mrs Leslie was a navigator, a Magellan of the world of New Woman. It was a time when everything was up for grabs – sex, sexuality and dress. For Mrs Leslie, everything hitherto assumed in Western marriage could be cast anew. There was no way she would treat Willie as her equal until he did something to earn her respect. Certainly, she was prepared to let him work in ‘
her
office and put him on
her
payroll if only he were willing', but with this put-down, she reminded Willie of the degree to which his life depended on hers.
¹⁴
It was a heady time of redefinition and Jane herself wondered ‘what name she will adopt for her cards'. But Willie was not ready for this modern dawn. In fact, he seemed palpably incurious about the horizon of equality. Still, the issue raised the emotional pitch of this non-love affair.

Meanwhile, Jane hoped a foreign setting might help Willie reassemble himself differently. To Oscar, she had written on 13 October 1891: ‘I think it is altogether a fine & good thing for Willie. Her influence may work great good in him and give him the strength he wants.'
¹⁵
She sent Willie the press cuttings of the stir Oscar had incited in Paris, to which we will return. In December 1891, she wrote to Oscar saying, ‘I have sent both papers (a column in
Figaro
and a sketch in
Écho de Paris
) on to W.C.K. [William Charles Kingsbury] & hope it will stimulate him to action.'
¹⁶
Jane's letter did nothing to motivate Willie, and may even have had the opposite effect.

Come March, Willie had to sharpen his quill, and he started a column, the first appearing in that month's issue of the 1892
New York Recorder
, called ‘Willie Wilde's Letter'. He began thus: ‘At the very serious risk of permanently imperilling that hard-earned reputation for cultivated indolence bestowed on me so lavishly by certain candid critics, I must perforce acknowledge that the
Recorder
has with a falconer's voice lured this tasselled gent back to the old familiar paths that he fears may ultimately lead to honest toil.' Willie's stuttering, complicated way of saying something very simple, together with his habit of trivialising ‘toil', would never take in America. This inauguration did not promise a future, and three more ‘Letters' followed before the column stopped. The endeavour earned Willie the sobriquet ‘Wuffalo Bill'.

The picture from America emerges of Willie wearing himself out, dying of sloth, of
ennui
, of bottled-up artistic urges. It can't have come as a shock to him when Mrs Leslie announced she had had enough. As she put it to one friend in regard to her planned visit to London in the spring of 1892: ‘I'm taking Willie over, but I'll not bring Willie back.'
¹⁷
Oscar certainly was not surprised. Having no faith in the integrity of either party, he said to Robert Sherard that Willie ought to have insisted on a prenuptial. Of Mrs Leslie, he said, ‘When she has glutted her lust on him and used him up, she'll pitch him his hat and coat and by means of American divorce get rid of him legally and let him starve to death for all she'll care,' which, if harsh, had the merit of foresight, if nothing else.
¹⁸

The divorce became a sad, ugly, humiliating affair. Mrs Leslie hired a private detective to monitor Willie's activities. With the evidence he produced she made a case for divorce on grounds of drunkenness and adultery. To support her claim, she used as witnesses her domestic staff, who confirmed Willie was inclined to ‘gross and vulgar intemperance and to violent and profane abuse of and cruel conduct to the plaintiff'. Willie was found to have frequented ‘places . . . of low resort' in London and to have consorted with ‘women of disreputable character'. With zero concern for Willie's feelings, Mrs Leslie let it be known to the press that he ‘was of no use to [her] either by day or by night', and declared her marriage ‘a blunder'.
¹⁹

The marital collapse left Willie looking a pathetic man. Robert Sherard saw the divorce as the breaking of Willie. ‘He went out to America a fine, brilliantly clever man, quite one of the ablest writers on the press . . . [Mrs Leslie] sent him back to England a nervous wreck, with an exhausted brain and a debilitated frame . . . it soon became apparent that his power for sustained effort was gone.'
²⁰
This is a distortion. Willie was far down the path of dissipation before he left for America. The marriage and America offered the last glimmer of hope that he might ever change, take initiative, shape his destiny, and all those other active verbs memoirists avoid when speaking of Willie. It is more accurate to say that Willie went out to America a drinker and returned a drunkard.

At this stage, Jane might have wished Willie would disappear from her life altogether, though this was not the case. She became a mother again in her seventies, providing for Willie, encouraging him, doing everything she once did, except nursing the illusions she once had. And Willie clung to what he still had: Jane's unconditional love and his corner of Oakley Street. Meanwhile, she scoured the American press for negative comments on Willie and found plenty to justify her comment to Oscar, ‘as to the American business [his divorce] it is a crisis & a catastrophe which I cannot help thinking of'. One newspaper column was headed in large capital letters, ‘Tired of Willie', followed by a synopsis of the divorce. As Jane put it in a letter, in February 1893, around the time of the divorce, ‘All, because “Willie won't get up & won't work”.'
²¹
Mrs Leslie, as a major proprietor of the press, was going to make damned sure this image of Willie stuck.

33

Salomé
 : The Breaking of Taboos

While Willie was in America, Oscar went to Paris sometime in October or November 1891, wrote
Salomé
, and returned to London in late January 1892. His presence in the city caused quite a stir. The
Écho de Paris
, on 19 December 1891, proclaimed Oscar Wilde as ‘
le
“great event”
des salons littéraires parisiennes
'. Not only was he known for being Oscar Wilde, but his fairy tales and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
allowed him to count himself as an artist in a city he described as ‘the abode of artists; nay, it is
la
ville artiste
'. When he said to the reporter of
Écho de Paris
, ‘I adore Paris. I also adore your language,' he meant it. He came to life in its cafés, on its boulevards, where his ‘ample' frame could be instantly recognised, not least for the ‘“loud” waistcoats of smooth velvet or flowered satins', and the ‘rare blossom in his button-hole'.

He quickly attracted a flock of admirers, many of them younger males – poets and writers mainly. Henri de Régnier was one. He professed himself ‘astounded' by Oscar, and believed others shared his admiration. ‘People grew enthusiastic about him; people were fanatics where he was concerned.' For de Régnier, Oscar embodied the animation and gaiety of Parisian life. As an inveterate lover of public life, Oscar, he said, would move ‘from cab to cab, from café to café, from salon to salon . . . for he was curious about all kinds of thoughts and manners of thinking'.
¹
André Gide, then twenty-one, also looked up to Oscar, and spoke of his arrival in the capital thus: ‘At Paris, no sooner did he arrive, than his name ran from mouth to mouth . . . Some compared him to an Asiatic Bacchus; others to some Roman emperor; others to Apollo himself.' But Gide was astute enough to add, ‘For, Wilde, clever at duping the markers of worldly celebrity, knew how to project, beyond his real character, an amusing phantom which he played most spiritedly.'
²
Gide was not blind to Oscar's strategies of making himself larger than life. The English press turning
The Picture of Dorian Gray
into a scandal only made it easier for him to present himself as outré.

Whatever the inflated image, Oscar had any number of young men willing to act as his disciples. Gide certainly. After Oscar left Paris, Gide found himself dumbstruck. In a letter to Valéry, he put his not having written down to Oscar. ‘Forgive my being silent: since Wilde I exist only a little.' And added, ‘Wilde, I believe, did me nothing but harm. In his company I lost the habit of thinking.'
³
Whether or not Gide had some vision of himself as Dorian Gray imbibing Henry Wotton's paganism, Oscar, it appears, ruptured the enclosed cage of Gide's puritan existence. Bred into Gide's bones was the staunch Protestantism Oscar hated, and it seems this new acquaintance with Oscar was the measure of his growing disaffection with religion. Many of Gide's books involve a flight from puritan strictures and a celebration of the sensual.
L'Immoraliste,
for instance, is the story of a young man, Michel, who travels through Europe and North Africa, attempting to transcend the limitations of conventional morality by surrendering to his appetites, including his attraction to young Arab boys.

Gide found it impossible not to be struck by Oscar's breadth of erudition and the artful way he couched his opinions, speaking in parables, veiling his thoughts and ‘caressing' his words. Fun for these literary men involved probing the Bible, with Oscar composing stories to explore and to parody the Gospels. Oscar, it appears from the examples Gide quotes, came up with ornate metaphors and elaborations, pushing over the edge the riddling nature of the Bible. Gide found Oscar more original in performance than on the page and said, ‘The best of his writing is but a pale reflection of his brilliant conversation. Those who have heard him speak find it disappointing to read him.'
⁴
Oscar needed the adoration and attention of people in order to excel, and this troubled French Protestant seemed an ideal protégé.

Also significant among the other young admirers was the poet Pierre Louÿs, then compiling a book of poems,
Astarté
, one of which he dedicated to Oscar. Louÿs addressed his letters ‘Cher Maïtre' and by his own admission, Oscar shaped his art. But the influence was not all one way. Oscar solicited his help for
Salomé
, sending him the first draft of the manuscript – which was in French – asking him to erase his anglicisms. Oscar regularly got together with Louÿs, the American poet Stuart Merrill, the Spanish diplomat Gómez Carrillo, and the French poets and writers Adolphe Retté and Henri de Régnier. He was, needless to say, the animating spirit of this informal group. Price of admission to this heterogeneous circle was a willingness to listen to Oscar's stories. Consumed in a haze of smoke, Oscar's ‘utterly toneless voice, yet melodious in its monotony . . . was to be heard in the darkness', entrancing his listeners. De Régnier entered fully into the charade and lavished praise on his style of talk.

His causerie was all purely imaginative. He was an incomparable teller of tales . . . this [his storytelling] was his way of saying everything, of expressing his opinion on every subject . . . One might not press M. Wilde too closely for the meaning of his allegories. One had to enjoy their grace and the unexpected turns he gave to his narratives, without seeking to raise the veil of this phantasmagoria of the mind which made of his conversation a kind of ‘Thousand and One Nights' as spoken.
⁵

Not everyone took to Oscar fantasising himself Schéhérazade. Edmond de Goncourt had little patience for his ‘tall-stories'. Having dined with Oscar back in the spring of 1883, and now seeing him feted by
le tout Paris
, de Goncourt took the opportunity to publish the earlier journal entry in
Écho de Paris
. Then he had referred to Oscar Wilde as an ‘individual of doubtful sex, with a ham-actor's language, and tall stories'.
⁶
It is fair to say few entered the de Goncourt journal unscathed. Flaubert and Zola had also been panned, like Oscar, on ad hominem grounds. Anyway, memoirists who knew Oscar at this time speak of a man wild with the joy of life. Few would dispute Gómez Carrillo's remark that the early 1890s were ‘one of the happiest times of his life'. De Régnier thought even ‘his eyes smiled'.
⁷

Gaining distance from London, family and friends gave Oscar greater freedom to self-fashion. Being a natural imposter, Oscar was most himself in the guise of another. Jacques Daurelle, a reporter for
Écho de Paris
, thought him an exact replica of Gautier: ‘in his demeanour, his tastes, and his talent, he recalls Théophile Gautier almost exactly'. He reminded another memoirist of Baudelaire; Oscar had all his ‘hoaxing cynicism'. Another thought of the French symbolist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam when they listened to his stories. Oscar was becoming more and more adroit at fashioning his image. For the interview with the reporter from
Écho de Paris
, he positioned himself stretched out on a divan, ‘smoking Egyptian cigarettes' and conspicuously laid out beside him the books French writers had given him, or as the reporter put it, ‘flocked to give him, with admiring dedications'.
⁸
He entered the annals of French literary life, which ever since reading Balzac as an adolescent had been his aspiration.

Leaving England, where, as he put it, ‘the public always confuses the man and his creation', he breathed more freely.
⁹
He always held it was incumbent upon everyone to hold nothing back in art. Thus Oscar's answer to all the charges of immorality hurled at him over
The Picture of Dorian Gray
was
Salomé
, a work in which he rides brutally over ethical and sexual taboos. They are kindred works in asking what happens when pagan naturalism and Christian idealism are brought face to face. The answer is, both remain locked in their own worlds, incapable of dialogue.

The short factual accounts given in the Gospels (Matthew 14: 1–12; Mark 6: 14–29) of Herod Antipas, the dance of Herodias's daughter – later to be named Salomé – and the beheading of John the Baptist have yielded rich fruit in art, music and literature, from medieval mysteries through to Botticelli and Gustave Moreau. In the nineteenth century Heine, Mallarmé and Flaubert had all made the tragedy of the Baptist familiar.