The Fall of the House of Wilde (64 page)

It seems Constance had not previously refused Oscar permission to visit her, as he had claimed. Indeed, her anger came from the disappointment that the visit could now never take place. As for Oscar, he sneered at the audacity of his wife attempting to control his life. He had always done whatever he liked, when he liked, and would continue to do so. Constance used the one lever she had over him – money. She invoked the clause in the separation deed and stopped his weekly allowance of £3.

Lady Queensberry did likewise – she cut Douglas's weekly allowance of £25. While he lived with Oscar, he would receive no money from her; but were he to part from Oscar, she would restore his income, pay the debts he incurred in Naples and give Oscar £200 compensation. Douglas hesitated but not for long. Penury frustrated both of them; it made Douglas especially sour, and quarrels were frequent. Their relationship was always either blooming or blasted; they would need a different tone for it to last beyond the short term. Besides, Douglas admitted in his biography he wanted ‘social recognition' and Oscar's pariah status now made that impossible.
⁴
Douglas left Naples at the end of November; Oscar remained, as the rent had been paid on the villa until the end of January. From Rome on 7 December Douglas wrote to his mother, ‘I am glad, O so glad! To have got away . . . I wanted to go back to him [Oscar] . . . but when I had done it . . . I hated it, I was miserable. I wanted to go away. But I couldn't. I was tied by honour.' He also told his mother he had ‘lost that supreme desire for his [Oscar's] society' and he was ‘tired of being ill-treated by the world'.
⁵

Oscar curled up into a protective ball. He wrote long letters from Naples to Leonard Smithers, who was then preparing
The Ballad
for publication. Smithers, like many of his correspondents, got to hear about his struggle against starvation, the paralysis of his creative faculty, his loss of friends. ‘My life cannot be patched up. There is a doom on it. Neither to myself, nor others, am I a joy. I am now simply an ordinary pauper of a rather low order: the fact that I am also a pathological problem to German scientists is only interesting to German scientists: and even in their works I am tabulated, and come under the law of
averages! Quantum mutatus!
' (How changed).
⁶
Naples did nothing to replenish his self-confidence. Lovelorn and in despair over his shattered existence, he left for Paris in early February. He wrote to Smithers, ‘My life has gone to great ruin here, and I have no brains now or energy.'
⁷

And if this sounds familiar, then so does his letter to Robbie on 2 March 1898.

The facts of Naples are very bald and brief. Bosie, for four months, by endless letters, offered me a ‘
home
'. He offered me love, affection, and care, and promised that I should never want for anything. After four months I accepted his offer, but when we met at Aix on our way to Naples I found that he had no money, no plans, and had forgotten all his promises. His one idea was that I should raise money for us both. I did so, to the extent of £120. On this Bosie lived, quite happy. When it came to his having, of course, to repay his own
share
, he became terrible, unkind, mean, and penurious, except where his own pleasures were concerned, and when my allowance ceased, he left . . . It is, of course, the most bitter experience of a bitter life; it is a blow quite awful and paralysing, but it had to come, and I know it is better that I should never see him again. I don't want to. He fills me with horror.
⁸

Naples was like a farcical sequel to the tragedy his life had become – a tragedy he was fond of invoking. Although it was of
The Ballad
he said, ‘I have fiddled too often on the string of Doom,' the same could be said of his own life. The drama was going on too long.

45

‘I am really in the gutter'

By mid-February Oscar was in Paris. He spent a few nights in a seedy, unsanitary hotel on the Rue des Beaux-Arts before moving to a cleaner and cheaper one on the same street, Hôtel d'Alsace, where he hired two rooms for 70 francs a month. This would be his home for the next few years.

On 13 February 1898
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
was published under ‘C.3.3.', omitting Oscar's name. He was nervous about public reaction. Smithers risked only 400 copies on the first printing. They sold out, so 400 more were printed. In March, a deluxe edition of 90 copies was printed, signed with the author's name. In 1898 alone, six impressions were issued, amounting to 5,000 copies. The advert Smithers put in the
Athenaeum
, ‘3,000 copies sold in three weeks', prompted a relieved Oscar to say, ‘When I read it I feel like Lipton's tea!'
¹
The Ballad
received much attention. The poet William Ernest Henley, writing in
Outlook
on 9 March, described it as a muddle of ‘excellence and rubbish'. What offended him more, he declared, was the want of truth in the details, and he hailed it the work of a minor poet. Oscar would hitherto have responded, but he thought twice and resisted. Many critics saw it as the work of an author who had plumbed the emotions, of love and death in particular. The
Pall Mall Gazette
, 19 March, proclaimed it a ‘beautiful work' – ‘the most remarkable poem that had appeared this year'. Constance, still fulminating against her husband, thought it ‘exquisite'; she told Otho that it had reduced her to tears.
²
If Oscar experienced any grief, it was due to the silence of those to whom he had sent complimentary copies.

And yet, he had no real peace of mind with destitution never far away. He lived from day to day with scarcely any income, save the 3d a copy he received for
The Ballad.
Going two or three days without a franc was not uncommon. Ross wrote to Constance on Oscar's behalf, asking if she would reinstate Oscar's allowance. Suffering deprivations herself to afford it, she did. Constance sent Oscar £40, only to hear from Carlos Blacker, who met Oscar a few times in Paris, that it was less than the amount owing, even though he had forfeited entitlement by living with Douglas. Constance's letter to Blacker on 20 March 1898 shows uncharacteristic anger: ‘I do not wish him dead, but considering how he used to go on about Willie's extravagance and about his cruelty in forcing his mother to give him money, I think he might leave his wife and children alone . . . But Oscar has no pride.'
³
As Constance astutely observed, Oscar had started to resemble Willie; his profligacy with money not his own, his torpor, his resignation in the face of life.

Telling nobody, Constance checked herself into hospital for an operation on her spine. Yet she must have had some presentiment of danger, as a few days earlier she wrote this note to Vyvyan. ‘Try not to be hard on your father. Remember that he is your father and he loves you. All his troubles arose from a hatred of a son for his father, and whatever he has done he has suffered bitterly for.' Then from the hospital on 5 April Constance telegraphed Otho to come immediately. Otho arrived in Switzerland two days later only to be told his sister was dead. News of her passing reached Oscar on 12 April. Constance's death gave him pause, but not for long. Certainly that was the impression of Otho, who told Georgina he had heard a friend who had met Oscar say he ‘had not given a hang for the death of his wife'.
⁴
Ross, whom Oscar had bidden on news of Constance's death to come to Paris to comfort him, supported this view.

Cyril and Vyvyan, then aged thirteen and twelve, were sent back to England, to be brought up by Constance's aunt, Mary Napier.

*

The success of
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
could have motivated Oscar to write; it did not. He found every excuse imaginable, from a want of copybooks to a loss of ‘
la joie de vivre'
. He idled away his days, feeling lonely and looking for fleeting passions to fill the void. He told Ross on 14 May 1898, ‘Of course I cannot bear being alone, and while the literary people are charming when they meet me, we meet rarely. My companions are such as I can get, and of course I have to pay for such friendships, though I am bound to say they are not
exigeants
or expensive.' One semi-permanent lover was Maurice Gilbert. Little is known about Gilbert other than his allure, and that he became the lover of Ross, Turner and Douglas.

Oscar grew defensive when Ross ‘lectured' him about his priapism and his sloth. This response on 3 December 1898 stands for many Oscar gave around this time. ‘I have no future, my dear Robbie. I don't think I am equal to intellectual architecture of thought: I have moods and moments; and Love, or passion with the mask of Love, is my only consolation.'
⁵

Frank Harris was tireless in reminding Oscar of his talent, hoping it would spur him to write. When Oscar claimed he could not write in Paris, Harris offered to subsidise him for three months on the French Riviera. Harris intended to winter in Cannes, as he was overseeing a hotel he had just bought in Monaco. In mid-December Oscar left Paris for Cannes, where he stayed on the coast at Hôtel des Bains, in Mandelieu-la-Napoule. But the Riviera did not lift his spirits. Smithers had convinced him to publish the two plays,
The Importance of Being Earnest
and
An Ideal Husband
, left in abeyance because of the trial. When he reread the plays, his enthusiasm for the idea waned. He feared public reaction. He said to Harris, ‘While the public like to hear of my pain . . . I am not sure they will welcome me again in airy mood and spirit, mocking at morals, and defiance of social rules. There is, or at least in their eyes there should be, such a gap between the two Oscars.' If
The Ballad
had gone some way to generate sympathy for Oscar,
The Importance of Being Earnest
would wipe it out. Oscar himself found the play somewhat ‘trivial'. He dedicated
The Importance of Being Earnest
to Robbie and apologised for not having a better work to bestow on him: ‘To the Mirror of Perfect Friendship: Robbie: whose name I have written on the portal of this play. Oscar. February '99.'
An Ideal Husband
he thought still ‘read well', but he was taken aback when he saw how ‘some of its passages seem prophetic of the tragedy to come', and he had to hurry past the ‘ideal husband's' disaster to the reconciliation scene.
An Ideal Husband
he dedicated to Harris. ‘To Frank Harris / A Slight Tribute to / His Power and Distinction / As an Artist / His Chivalry and Nobility / As a Friend.' It was published in July 1899. Both plays were met with critical silence. Being ‘boycotted by the press', as Oscar put it to Ross, bothered him, for Smithers' sake as much as for his own.
⁶

There was indeed a chasm between the two Oscars. That December at Cannes, George Alexander came upon Oscar but rushed away. Whether Alexander's reaction came from embarrassment or disapproval, Oscar could not forgive him. As Oscar put it to Ross on 27 December, ‘He gave me a crooked, sickly smile, and hurried on without stopping. How absurd and mean of him!' Seeing Alexander did not restore Oscar's appetite to make a comeback. Nor did seeing his old muse Sarah Bernhardt perform in
La Tosca
in Nice on 2 January. ‘She embraced me and wept, and I wept, and the whole evening was wonderful,' Oscar wrote. All he had come to ask of life were the basics – the satisfaction of physical needs. He spent time with olive-skinned Adonis-like boys he found loitering on the beach or on street corners, and gave his heart away countless times to one or other of them. He bemoaned the ‘softening' of his brain, and found the intensity of Harris's literary conversations draining. When Harris was elsewhere on the Riviera, as he often was, Oscar acted like a helpless child. He wrote a frantic letter from Nice to Harris, asking for money to pay the bill of a hotel that was making a scene of his non-payment in front of English guests, which must have tested Harris's patience: ‘You cannot, you will not abandon me.'
⁷
Surprisingly, Oscar did not exhaust Harris's goodwill – at least for the time being.

While in Cannes, Oscar met a Harold Mellor, a twenty-six-year-old Englishman about whom he knew little other than that he had been ‘sent away from Harrow at the age of fourteen for being loved by the captain of the cricket eleven'. Mellor invited him to spend March at his residence in Gland, in Switzerland. Oscar went and they did not get along. Indeed, Oscar took exception not only to Mellor but to almost everything in Switzerland: Mont Blanc, the dauntless ‘spinsters and curates' who climbed it, the appearance of the Swiss – ‘cattle have more expression'. Boredom kept his cigarettes lit. But what hospitality Mellor bestowed made Oscar feel like the recipient of charity. A chill, tight-fisted, provincial Mellor had infiltrated the debonair friend he had known briefly at Cannes. Did Oscar feel his requests for loans, his presumptiveness, were a symptom of this alteration? His misjudgement did prompt some self-reflection, as evident in the letter he wrote Ross, on 29 March, having spent a month as Mellor's guest:

I could not stay any longer at Mellor's . . . I never disliked anyone so thoroughly. My visit has taught me a curious and bitter lesson. I used to rely on my personality: now I know my personality really rested on the fiction of
position.
Having lost position, I find my personality of no avail . . . I feel very humble, besides feeling very indignant: the former being my intellectual realisation of my position, the latter an emotion that is a ‘survival' of old conditions.
⁸

En route from Cannes to Switzerland, Oscar had stopped in Genoa to visit Constance's grave. He wrote the following to Ross. ‘It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb – her surname, my name, not mentioned of course – just “Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd, Q.C.” and a verse from Revelations. I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected – with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.' For many, actions have consequences, but not for Oscar who lived, as we have noted already, as though life were a series of episodes. Constance's death was just another episode come to an end.