Oscar Wilde Read online

  PRAISE FOR OSCAR WILDE

  BY RICHARD ELLMANN

  “So brilliant is Ellmann’s account of Wilde’s morning and afternoon that dusk seems to fall swiftly and angrily.… Ellmann is our foremost literary biographer.… Wilde’s life was a work of art, and so is this biography.”

  —Stephen Becker, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Written with consummate elegance and grace.”

  —Denis Donoghue, New Republic

  “Monumental.”

  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

  “The best literary biography of the decade—the best written and the juiciest.”

  —Edmund White

  “A splendid biography … Mr. Ellmann’s interpretations of Wilde’s essays, stories, poems, plays, letters and conversation—filled with ‘pontifical impudence,’ much of it still astonishingly brilliant and unfailingly funny without being cruel—enlarge this excellent book.”

  —Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal

  “The best book of this or many a year … Wilde is brought unforgettably to life with his curious courage, his longing for self-destruction, his vulnerability and his irresistible charm.”

  —John Mortimer

  “Enthralling.”

  —Manchester Guardian

  “A work of biographic art … This portrait of the Victorian Age’s most tragic figure surpasses Ellmann’s well-known life of Joyce.”

  —Leon Edel

  ALSO BY

  RICHARD ELLMANN

  Yeats: The Man and the Masks

  The Identity of Teats

  James Joyce

  Eminent Domain

  Ulysses on the Liffey

  Golden Codgers

  The Consciousness of Joyce

  Four Dubliners

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1988

  Copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Richard Ellmann

  Copyright © 1984 by Richard Ellmann

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd., London, in 1987 and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1988.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Merlin Holland for permission to use previously published and unpublished material by or relating to Oscar Wilde that is in the copyright of the Holland family.

  “Oscar Wilde at Oxford,” by Richard Ellmann, was originally published in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS.

  Owing to limitations of space, all other acknowledgments of permission to use previously published material will be found following the index.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ellmann, Richard, 1918–

  Oscar Wilde.

  Bibliography: p.

  1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854—1900—Biography.

  2. Authors, Irish—19th century—Biography.

  I. Title.

  [PR5823.E38 1988b] 828′.809 [B] 88-40040

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5112-2

  v3.1

  To Lucy Ellmann

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  BEGINNINGS

  I Toil of Growing Up

  II Wilde at Oxford

  III Rome and Greece

  IV An Incomplete Aesthete

  ADVANCES

  V Setting Sail

  VI Declaring His Genius

  VII Indoctrinating America

  VIII Countering the Renaissance

  IX Two Kinds of Stage

  X Mr and Mrs Wilde

  EXALTATIONS

  XI Disciple to Master

  XII The Age of Dorian

  XIII Hellenizing Paris

  XIV A Good Woman, and Others

  XV A Late Victorian Love Affair

  XVI Sailing into the Wind

  DISGRACE

  XVII ‘I Am the Prosecutor in This Case’

  XVIII Doom Deferred

  XIX Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading

  XX Escape from Reading

  EXILE

  XXI Prisoner at Large

  XXII The Leftover Years

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  About the Author

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Illustrations appear following pages this page, this page, this page, and this page

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been under way for a long time, and I have been helped by many people. From the time I began, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, whose edition of Wilde’s letters is a landmark in modern scholarship, was prodigal of his assistance; he allowed me to use his invaluable Wilde archive and to tap his profound knowledge of the period. He has also kindly read the manuscript, and I have respected his blue pencil. He has my heartfelt thanks. Dr Mary Hyde (Viscountess Eccles) graciously put at my disposal the largest collection of Wilde materials in private hands, and I owe much to her generosity. The largest institutional collection is at the William Andrews Clark Library of the University of California at Los Angeles; its successive directors, William E. Conway and Thomas Wright, as well as John Bidwell, have never failed to give the utmost help. The Ross Collection at the Bodleian Library has been a principal source. I want to thank Donald J. Kaufmann for letting me use his Wilde collection before he donated it to the Library of Congress.

  Merlin Holland has kindly allowed me to quote from published and unpublished material, and has also offered other kinds of valuable assistance. Edward Colman, the holder of Lord Alfred Douglas’s copyrights and his literary executor, has kindly allowed the many quotations from Douglas.

  Owing partly to the dispersal of Wilde’s papers at a bankruptcy sale, many libraries have important holdings. I mention here the Berg Collection and the Manuscript Room of the New York Public Library (NYPL in notes), the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at Yale (and Miss Marjorie Wynne), the Library of Congress (LC), the Trinity College, Dublin Library (TCD), the National Library of Ireland (NLI), the British Library (BL), the Morgan Library, the Rosenbach Museum, the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the Reading University Library, the Dartmouth College Library, the Princeton University Library (especially the Taylor Collection), the Radcliffe College Library, the Eastbourne (Sussex) Area Library, the Bibliothèque Doucet. In many city libraries in the United States the staff unearthed press accounts of Wilde’s lecture tour. The archives of the Royal Literary Fund and of Magdalen and Brasenose colleges at Oxford have been useful.

  The manuscript has been read by Catharine Carver, from whose criticisms I have greatly profited; by Lucy Ellmann, who made many improvements; and by Mary Ellmann, with considerable advantage. Maud Ellmann took time from her busy life to help me with the notes. Dr Paul Cohen, acting director of the Library of the New-York Historical Society, hunted down many seemingly untraceable sources. Dr John Stokes and Professor Ian Fletcher have made available to me their extraordinary knowledge of the Wilde period. J. Robert Maguire furnished me with many details of Wilde’s relation to the Dreyfus case. R. E. Alton deciphered for the first time the message on Queensberry’s visiting card which set off the libel suit. He and Professor Donald Taylor helped with Wilde’s sonnet on Chatterton. Professor Barbara Hardy made many valuable suggestions. Malcolm Pinhorn, Quentin Keynes, and Jeremy Mason opened their collections to me. Dr Owen Dudley Edwards was especially kind and helpful. Rosita Fanto, with whom I collaborated on
Oscar Wilde playing cards, gave me some useful hints. H. Montgomery Hyde took a benign interest.

  Dr Mary Reynolds put me under great obligation by composing the elaborate index for this book.

  I have many specific acts of kindness to record from the following: Professor Marcia Allentuck, Anna and Karen Bamborough, Michael Bassan, Dr John C. Broderick, Professor J. E. Chamberlin, Professor Morton N. Cohen, Dennis Cole, Roger Dobson, Robert Ellmann, Professor Charles Feidelson, Bobby Fong, Professor Peter Gay, John Hamill, Barbara Hayley, Sir William and Lady Hayter, Patrick Henchy, Tim Hilton, Michael Holroyd, Dr Roger Hood, Robert Jackson, Jeri Johnson, Professor Emrys Jones, Professor Alex de Jonge, Dr Alon Kadish, Professor John Kelleher, Dr John Kelly, Professor Roger Kempf, Clinton Krauss, Trudy Kretchman, Professor Henry Lethbridge, Professor Harry Levin, Lee Ann Lloyd, Professor J. B. Lyons, W. S. G. Macmillan, Dr Wolfgang Maier, Professor Thomas Mallon, Professor E. H. Mikhail, Professor W. M. Murphy, Milo M. Naeve, Dr Eoin O’Brien, Eileen O’Byrne, Seán Ó Mórdha, Johan Polak, Professor Martin and Mary Price, Ellis Pryce-Jones, Michael Rhodes, Dr. Bernard Richards, Julia Rosenthal, Professor Ernest Samuels, Professor George Sandulescu, Dr Keith Schuchard, Professor Ronald Schuchard, G. F. Sims, Professor W. B. Stanford, Dr J. I. M. Stewart, Tom Stoppard, Andrew Treip, Ruth Vyse, Elizabeth Wansborough, Wade Wellman, Terence De Vere White.

  I must thank also the universities I have been associated with, Northwestern, Yale, Oxford, and Emory, for facilitating my research.

  R.E.

  St Giles’, Oxford

  Ides of March, 1987

  Introduction

  Oscar Wilde: we have only to hear the great name to anticipate that what will be quoted as his will surprise and delight us. Among the writers identified with the 1890s, Wilde is the only one whom everyone still reads. The various labels that have been applied to the age—Aestheticism, Decadence, the Beardsley period—ought not to conceal the fact that our first association with it is Wilde, refulgent, majestic, ready to fall.

  From as early as 1881, when he was in his late twenties, to the middle of 1895, when he was forty, literary London was put out of countenance by this outrageous Irishman from Dublin (via Oxford), who declared he was a socialist and hinted he was a homosexual, while patently mocking wise saws on all subjects. He declined, in a public and ceremonious manner, to live within his means, behave modestly, respect his elders, or recognize such entities as nature and art in their traditional apparel.

  He won admiration, and denigration. Legends sprang up about him, and unsavory rumors too. He was accused of sins from effeminacy to plagiarism. That he was the kindest of men was not so widely known. Instead, at the very moment he was writing his best and The Importance of Being Earnest had crowned his career, what the law picturesquely calls sodomy was imputed to him. He was sentenced in the end to two years of hard labor for the lesser charge of indecent behavior with men. So much glory has rarely been followed by so much humiliation.

  The hardships of prison life, and of subsequent exile in France and Italy, left Wilde a broken man. A spendthrift on his uppers, slighted by old acquaintances, he pursued on his release the life for which he had been jailed. He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol and after that nothing. In 1900 he died in an obscure Paris hotel. He left behind him a sort of testament, De Profundis, in the form of a prison letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. It skirted penitence and, while acknowledging faults (not those cited in the courtroom), vindicated his individuality. Published bit by bit over sixty years, it reawakened the quarrels of old friends, who continued to dispute their sometime place in his life as long as they lived.

  Other contemporaries snubbed Wilde as an ex-convict, but entertained him gladly enough in their memoirs. Many a dull chronicle, as in life many a dull table, was posthumously enlivened by this boulevardier. As for the reading public, it never failed in devotion to him, within the English-speaking countries or abroad, where his genius shines through translation.

  When Wilde left Oxford in 1878 he called himself a professor of aesthetic, and aestheticism is the creed which is usually attributed to him. Yet his theme is not, as is often supposed, art’s divorce from life, but its inescapable arraignment by experience. His creative works almost always end in unmasking. The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes an admonitory finger. While the ultimate virtue in Wilde’s essays is in make-believe, the denouement of his dramas and narratives is that masks have to go. We must acknowledge what we are. Wilde at least was keen to do so. Though he offered himself as the apostle of pleasure, his created world contains much pain. In the smashup of his fortunes rather than in their apogee his cast of mind fully appeared.

  Essentially Wilde was conducting, in the most civilized way, an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration of its ethics. He knew all the secrets and could expose all the pretense. Along with Blake and Nietzsche, he was proposing that good and evil are not what they seem, that moral tabs cannot cope with the complexity of behavior. His greatness as a writer is partly the result of the enlargement of sympathy which he demanded for society’s victims.

  His language is his finest achievement. It is fluent with concession and rejection. It takes what has been ponderously said and remakes it according to a new perspective and a new principle. An older generation’s reassuring platitudes and tired certainties are suddenly infused with youthful intransigence, a sort of pontifical impudence that commands attention. We have the pleasure of affirming the ancien régime and of rebelling against it at the same time. Long live the king, we cry, as we cut off his head.

  As for his wit, its balance was more hazardously maintained than is realized. Although it lays claim to arrogance, it seeks to please us. Of all writers, Wilde was perhaps the best company. Always endangered, he laughs at his plight, and on his way to the loss of everything jollies society for being so much harsher than he is, so much less graceful, so much less attractive. And once we recognize that his charm is threatened, its eye on the door left open for the witless law, it becomes even more beguiling.

  Some of his interest lies in a characteristic that, along with his girth, he shared with Dr Johnson. He occupied, as he insisted, a ‘symbolical relation’ to his time. He ranged over the visible and invisible worlds, and dominated them by his unusual views. He is not one of those writers who as the centuries change lose their relevance. Wilde is one of us. His wit is an agent of renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred years ago. The questions posed by both his art and his life lend his art a quality of earnestness, an earnestness which he always disavowed.

  Beginnings

  CHAPTER I

  Toil of Growing Up

  The soul is born old, but grows young. That is the comedy of life. The body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.

  LADY BRACKNELL: Prism! Come here, Prism! Prism! Where is that baby?

  First Words

  Oscar Wilde first emerges for us into articulate being in 1868, when he was thirteen, in a letter he wrote to his mother from school. Portora Royal School, in Enniskillen, which prepared pupils for Trinity College, Dublin, was a good school, though to call it ‘the Eton of Ireland,’ as the headmaster and Wilde’s mother did, was pretentious.1 In later life Wilde told D. J. O’Donoghue, the tireless compiler of an Irish biographical dictionary, that he had spent ‘about a year there.’ The actual period was seven years, from age nine to sixteen. Facts were for bending: interviewed for The Biograph, an English annual which published his ‘life’ in six pages when he was only twenty-six, Wilde said that he had been privately tutored at home.2 Portora was not a resonant name, and it seemed preferable to have attended no school rather than one that had to be laboriously identified. ‘I have forgotten my schooldays,’ says Mrs Cheveley in An Ideal Husband. ‘I have a vague impression that they were detestable.’ Then too, Wilde found it imaginatively seductive to deconstruct his nurture, to obliterate by whim all those sums and paradigms. No school on earth produced Oscar Wildes. But Portora, which
flourishes still, must be credited with having prepared not only Wilde but Samuel Beckett.

  The letter Wilde wrote from there unfortunately survives only in a fragment. Still, as a hieroglyph of his adolescence, it is valuable:

  September 1868

  Portora School

  Darling Mama, The hamper came today, and I never got such a jolly surprise, many thanks for it, it was more than kind of you to think of it. Don’t please forget to send me the National Review.… The flannel shirts you sent in the hamper are both Willie’s, mine are one quite scarlet and the other lilac but it is too hot to wear them yet. You never told me anything about the publisher in Glasgow, what does he say? And have you written to Aunt Warren on the green note paper?3

  The rest of the letter is said to have referred to a cricket win over a regimental side, and to ‘that horrid regatta.’ Accompanying the letter was a sketch, now lost, captioned, ‘ye delight of ye boys at ye hamper and ye sorrow of ye hamperless boy.’

  The person we think of as Oscar Wilde is assembling here. He is on excellent terms with his darling mother, and keen to be on better ones, perhaps because his elder brother Willie is distinctly a rival for her attention. Oscar will unseat him later. With a precocious sense of the ridiculous he pictures the scene of felicity and misery which the delivery of the hamper had created. His appetite for dramatic presentation is whetted. Other predilections are clear: cricket interests him mildly, rowing not at all. Since the school was situated on the river Erne, the antipathy to regattas must have been unfashionable and individual. His liking for cricket was to flag, and later he would tease his robust biographer, Robert Sherard, by pretending to find the players’ attitudes ‘indecent’ and ‘not Greek.’4 Eventually he dismissed these two team sports as ‘bats and boats,’ preferring riding, shooting, and fishing.