Was Oscar Wilde A Gay Martyr? (Part I)

Yeah, nah.

Note: This was meant to be a standalone piece published last week for paying subscribers, but has grown so large it has occupied more time and space than expected. This piece will continue the biographical focus of the previous post on Oscar Wilde. Next week’s piece will deal with more literary and philosophical matters.

A man whose life appears so contradictory, Oscar Wilde inspires people to view his biography through their own agendas and assumptions. After Stonewall, he’s become a poster-boy for the gay movement, but even within this group the arguments about his life continue: some gay people treat him as a martyr, others dislike him for not speaking more forcefully in favour of gay liberation, and others dislike how his life and work have been reduced to his sexuality.

Oscar Wilde was more varied and colourful than a Mardi Gras. He might now be a figure of myth, but he resists categorisation. Almost everyone today would agree that he was imprisoned for something that isn’t a crime, but that’s not how Wilde himself thought about it.

Reading his long letter from prison, De Profundis — one of the most moving things he wrote — makes it hard to accept the popular ideas about his trial and punishment: that he was a victim only of bigoted laws. Far from attacking Victorian England or its legal system, Wilde scolded himself and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”):

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. As I sit here in this dark cell in convict clothes, a disgraced and ruined man, I blame myself. In the perturbed and fitful nights of anguish, in the long monotonous days of pain, it is myself I blame. I blame myself for allowing an unintellectual friendship, a friendship whose primary aim was not the creation and contemplation of beautiful things, to entirely dominate my life…

You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university. You did not realise that an artist, and especially such an artist, as I am, one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality, requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude.

I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line… Of the appalling results of my friendship with you I don’t speak at present. I am thinking merely of its quality while it lasted. It was intellectually degrading to me.

An intellectual distraction, Bosie was also a spendthrift:

I blame myself again for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin.

Did Bosie want love, or a sugar daddy?

Your insistence on a life of reckless profusion: your incessant demands for money: your claim that all your pleasure should be paid for by me whether I was with you or not: brought me after some time into serious monetary difficulties, and what made the extravagances to me at any rate so monotonously uninteresting, as your persistent grasp on my life grew stronger and stronger, was that the money was really spent on little more than the pleasures of eating, drinking, and the like.

Far from being angry at his wrongful imprisonment, Wilde felt his punishment was self-inflicted:

But most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. The basis of character is will-power, and my will-power became absolutely subject to yours.

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand.  I am quite ready to say so.  I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment.  This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself.  Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

Wilde came close to describing his success and pleasure as a type of pride before the fall:

The gods had given me almost everything.  But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease… I ceased to be lord over myself.  I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it.  I allowed pleasure to dominate me.  I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

In some touching passages, Wilde thought he had to learn from suffering and integrate the experience into the rest of his life:

And exactly as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one’s character.  I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me.  The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one’s finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. 

What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little.  The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance. 

Finally, he penned a line he could never have written in his earlier life, and seems to be a repudiation of it: “The supreme vice is shallowness.”

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in 1893 (source)

The picture becomes even more complicated when it includes Lord Alfred Douglas. (Anyone who wants a complete account should consult Douglas Murray’s excellent biography.) His vocation was as a poet, but today only one of his poems is widely known, “Two Loves,” written in 1892.

Douglas banned republication of it until 1935 (he was bitter about how it was used against him in court) but the last twelve lines are famous. After describing a dream with two beautiful young men (one “joyous,” with bright eyes; the other “full sad and sweet”), the narrator asks the sullen youth:

                                            “Sweet youth,
Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove
These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth
What is thy name?” He said, “My name is Love.”
Then straight the first did turn himself to me
And cried, “He lieth, for his name is Shame,
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.”
Then sighing, said the other, “Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.”

In the 1890s, “shame” was slang for homosexual love, but interpreting the poem isn’t simple: it was dedicated to a woman (Ada Leverson) and the presence of the sad youth mutes any tones of celebration or defiance. Douglas later explained that the poem was “merely the outcome of a classical education and a passion for the sonnets of Shakespeare.” Many homosexuals had to hide behind the mask of ambiguity, though Douglas was more explicit in his poem “In Praise of Shame,” which ends with the line “Of all sweet passions Shame is loveliest.”

Despite the poem’s flagrancy, Douglas claimed that “In Praise of Shame” had been misinterpreted by “wooden-headed lawyers,” and in 1941 wrote that it has “not the remotest connection with or reference to homosexuality.” He did admit the “harmless and decorous” allusions to homosexuality in “Two Loves,” but in later life thought the poem inferior to “In Praise of Shame.” At his trials, Oscar Wilde was unfairly called to account for poems whose author later downplayed their homosexual content.

The myth of Wilde as a gay martyr also hides that homosexuality was not the only cause of his downfall: he was caught in the crossfire between Lord Alfred Douglas and his (Douglas’s) father, the Marquess of Queensberry.

By the start of 1894, the relationship between father and son had considerably worsened. Douglas left Oxford without completing his degree, and refused to take on any work, instead living on an allowance. On 1 April, Queensberry wrote to his son regarding this idleness:

Alfred,
It is extremely painful for me to have to write to you in the strain I must; but please understand that I decline to receive any answers from you in writing in return. After your recent hysterical ones I refuse to be annoyed with such, and I decline to read any more of your letters. If you have anything to say, do come here and say it in person. Firstly, am I to understand that, having left Oxford as you did, with discredit to yourself, the reasons of which were fully explained to me by your tutor, you now intend to loaf and loll about and do nothing? All the time you were wasting at Oxford I was put off with an assurance that you were going to the Bar. It appears to me that you intend to do nothing. I utterly decline, however, to just supply you with sufficient funds to enable you to loaf about. You are preparing a wretched future for yourself, and it would be most cruel and wrong for me to encourage you in this. Secondly, I come to the more painful part of this letter — your intimacy with this man Wilde. It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I saw you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I seen such a sight as that in your horrible features. No wonder people are talking as they are. Also I hear on good authority, but this may be false, that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other crimes. Is this true or do you know of it? [It wasn’t true.] If I thought the actual thing was true, and it become public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight. These Christian English cowards and men, as they call themselves, want waking up.
Your disgusted so-called father,
Queensberry

Douglas sent a telegram in reply: “What a funny little man you are.”

Calculated to enrage the Marquess of Queensberry, this response probably triggered the downfall of Oscar Wilde, who, as the older and wiser man in the relationship, could have used his influence to restrain Bosie. But Douglas and Queensberry were equally obstinate, like two halves of a scrum.

Wilde was caught between them, though Queensberry knew that Douglas had been involved with other men. After the annulment of his second marriage and suicide of his heir (Bosie’s brother Francis Archibald Douglas) Queensberry wanted to punish Douglas’s disobedience (he needed “the shit kicked out of him”) and exact revenge on the easiest homosexual target: Oscar Wilde. He tried to provoke Douglas or Wilde to accuse him of libel: “This man,” he wrote to his son Percy of Wilde, “is a cock sucker.” Douglas started carrying a pistol with him; Queensberry a horsewhip; Wilde a sword stick.

Queensberry’s plan worked. Eventually, Wilde did sue him for libel. On the second day of the trial, Queensberry’s counsel asked Wilde about Walter Grainger, a young servant Douglas had brought to a holiday with Wilde. Asked if he had ever kissed Grainger, Wilde replied, “Oh, dear no. He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, ugly.” With this fatal slip, Wilde lost the sympathies of the court and the public.

Here, I must record some instances of good character: one Alfred Taylor, who in Westminster ran a service introducing respectable clients willing to pay unemployed young men for sex, was being tried with Wilde. Taylor was given the opportunity to testify against Wilde in exchange for the case against him being dropped. He refused. Impressed, Douglas gave money to his solicitor to help his defence.

Between the end of the first trial and start of the second, Wilde was set an exceptionally high bail. One half had to be supplied by him, and the other by two sureties. Percy Douglas provided one part. The other was provided by the Anglican priest Steward Headlam, who didn’t know Wilde personally but thought he wasn’t receiving fair treatment or Christian charity. When Wilde was released from prison in May 1897, Headlam was there to meet him at six in the morning

After Wilde’s conviction, Douglas worked hard to defend him, writing in defence of homosexuality, and even petitioning Queen Victoria (who never received the letter) to let him (Wilde) off the rest of his sentence. Douglas lived in exile in France and Italy, staying with whichever friends would have him. His father offered to restore his allowance if he renounced Wilde and agreed to never see him again, but he refused.

Wilde, though, had begun to turn against Douglas. De Profundis contains some of Wilde’s most thoughtful and affecting prose, yet sections of it are uncharitable and vindictive. The sections about his finances are simply untrue: Alfred Douglas and his brother Percy were very generous to Wilde during and after the trial. After Wilde’s release, he did meet Alfred Douglas, angering both their families. (Contradicting what he set down in De Profundis, Wilde wrote to Douglas to say that “I feel my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you… Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all.”) Lady Queensberry threatened to cut Douglas’s allowance if he did not leave Wilde. Both men had been living on Douglas’s money, and Wilde would have been able to publish very little as his name had been tainted. They agreed to separate. When Wilde died, Douglas paid the funeral expenses.

Days after Wilde’s death, Douglas was able to express his grief. He had written many sonnets throughout his life, often with strained rhymes and imperfect technique, but this is one of his more refined and plangent works:

I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress
And all the world was an enchanted place.

And then methought outside a fast locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds.
And so I woke and knew that he was dead.

How did the author of this fine, moving poem to his male lover continue his life? He married another poet with homosexual inclinations, Olive Custance, with whom he had a son (“I believe that everyone is more or less bisexual,” he wrote in 1929.) He wrote some beautiful sonnets to Olive, including this one:

When we were Pleasure’s minions, you and I,
When we mocked grief and held disaster cheap,
And shepherded all joys like willing sheep
That love their shepherd; when a passing sigh
Was all the cloud that flecked our April sky,
I floated on an unimagined deep,
I loved you as a tired child loves sleep,
I lived and laughed and loved, and knew not why.

Now I have known the uttermost rose of love;
The years are very long, but love is longer;
I love you so, I have no time to hate
Even those wolves without. The great winds move
All their dark batteries to our fragile gate:
The world is very strong, but love is stronger.

Like his father and like Wilde, he converted to Catholicism. In doing so, he cut himself off from the events and people involved with the Wilde scandal. Acting eerily like his father, Douglas thought that Wilde and Robbie Ross were acting in conspiracy against him, and called Ross a “bugger and a blackmailer.” For Douglas, homosexuality was something that he and his aristocratic friends did at school and university. After his conversion, he saw it as a sin, and wasted his talents writing bilious diatribes against Robbie Ross, the Asquiths, Jews, and anyone else he thought had wronged him. At the start of the First World War, he wrote a satire called The Rossiad, which ends with a cry to the country:

Two foes thou hast, one there one here,
One far, one ultimately near,
Two filthy fogs blot out thy light:
The German, and the Sodomite.

Near the end of the War, Douglas supported the campaign for “purity in public life” led by MP Noel Pemberton Billing. Like Billing, he thought that society was corrupt and decadent, exemplifying the “cult of Oscar Wilde.” One of the main documents in this outrage was the “Black Book” containing the names of 47,000 “perverts” threatening national security. Douglas took to the stand and claimed that Wilde “had a diabolical influence on everyone he met. I think he is the greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years” (that is, since the Reformation). “He was the agent of evil in every possible way. He was a man whose whole object in life was to attack and to sneer at virtue, and to undermine it in every way by every possible means, sexually and otherwise.”

After being imprisoned for libelling Winston Churchill, Douglas redeemed himself in the Twenties and Thirties.

In his autobiography, published in 1929, he finally admitted his homosexual acts. At this period of his life, he seemed to be thinking more clearly. In a speech to the Catholic Poetry Society, he spoke about his relationship with Oscar Wilde:

In the matter of Wilde I am conscious that I have not been consistent. I began in my very early youth by admiring his work inordinately, at a time when it was not generally admired at all. I thought him a man of transcendent genius. This was largely because I knew him personally and was dazzled by his marvellous and unequalled gifts as a talker. One of the tragedies of Oscar Wilde is that he talked so much better than he wrote. I have never heard anyone come anywhere near his charm and brilliance as a talker. In that line he was supreme. He was the greatest improvisatore that ever existed.

Many years later, after he had been dead twelve years and after I had become a Catholic, I reacted violently against him and against all his works. I actually described him in the witness box on one occasion about 14 years ago as “the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe for more than three hundred years.” I was thinking then more of his life than his writings, but even allowing for this, I consider now that what I said was really absurd. Converts are very apt to be censorious and to make a fatal attempt to be more Catholic than Catholics. I have been a Catholic now for more than twenty years and I hope I am now much more charitable and broad-minded than I was just before my conversion or for a good many years after it. After swinging to two extremes in my estimate of Wilde I have now got into what I believe to be the happy mean.

In 1934, having lost his youthful looks, Douglas wrote a sonnet in homage to Shakespeare. Is it addressed to Oscar Wilde? As the younger man in their relationship, Douglas’s love might have been purer, because less influenced by appearance. (Remember what Wilde said about Walter Grainger.)

If you came back, perhaps you would not find
The old enchantment, nor again discern
The altered face of love. The wheels yet tum
That clocked the wasted hours, the spirit’s wind
Still fans the embers in the hidden mind.
But if I cried to you, “Return! return!”
How could you come? How could you ever learn
The old ways you have left so far behind?

How sweetly, forged in sleep, come dreams that make
Swift wings and ships that sail the estranging sea,
Less roughly than blown rose-leaves in a bowl,
To harboured bliss. But oh! the pain to wake
In empty night seeking what may not be
Till the dead flesh set free the living soul.

So — was Oscar Wilde a gay martyr? Examining the lives of the men involved makes it impossible to give a straightforward answer. As Wilde wrote: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Or, as we say in Australia: yeah, nah.