Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 15, 1995 TAG: 9507110101
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RON HAYES PALM BEACH POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame,'' the judge, Sir Alfred Wills, declared. ``It is the worst case I have ever tried.''
The severest sentence allowed by law would be totally inadequate, Justice Wills concluded, but he would order it anyway - two years' hard labor for ``acts of gross indecency with other male persons.''
The prisoner blanched. ``My God,'' he murmured, ``my God,'' and swayed as if he were about to faint. A guard took his arm as he was led away.
``Society often forgives the criminal,'' Oscar Wilde had written once. ``It never forgives the dreamer.''
On Valentine's Day 1995, the 100th anniversary of the premiere of his comic masterpiece, ``The Importance of Being Earnest,'' a stained-glass window was dedicated to Oscar Wilde in Westminster Abbey. The Irish writer and wit who had been turned away from good hotels, jeered in the streets, condemned from the pulpits, imprisoned and driven to an exile's death in Paris was being welcomed into the company of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Wordsworth and Dickens.
Everywhere you look, it seems, both the criminal and the dreamer have been forgiven.
In America, the Barnes & Noble bookstores sell his likeness on coffee mugs and T-shirts. Songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are writing a Broadway musical about his life. Classical composer Lowell Lieberman is completing an opera based on ``The Picture of Dorian Gray,'' his only novel. A film biography is in the works, with Liam Neeson and Hugh Grant being sought to play Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas; and in March, a slick new magazine for gay men debuted with the simple title, Wilde.
``We named it after Oscar Wilde because this is his year,'' says Melissa Murphy, the magazine's marketing director. ``He was a great writer, an artist, a wit and one of the very first public queers to be persecuted in modern times.''
A ``public queer'' Wilde certainly was; but he'd been a good many other things first, and his persecution, some would argue, was largely his own fault.
``Would you like to know the great drama of my life?'' he once asked a friend. ``It is that I have put my genius into my life. I have put only my talent into my works.''
The genius may have been genetic. Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on Oct. 16, 1854. His mother, Lady Jane Wilde, composed fiery poetry to further Irish independence; his father, Sir William Wilde, was knighted for his pioneering work in eye and ear surgery.
By the time Wilde arrived at Oxford University in the mid-1870s, the doctrine of aestheticism - ``art for art's sake'' - was in vogue, and he set about to become its personification.
``I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,'' he quipped, and the witticism swept Magdalen College.
In 1878, he left Oxford with the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry - and, it seems likely, syphilis.
``I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist,'' he predicted. ``Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious.''
He became them all. In London, he pursued celebrity with a press agent's passion long before there were press agents.
An artist named Louise Jopling once opened her door to find him waiting with a snake around his neck.
When the great Sarah Bernhardt arrived in London, Wilde was there to meet her boat and scatter an armful of lilies at her feet.
``What has he done, this young man, that one meets him everywhere?'' the Polish actress Helen Modjeska wondered in 1880. ``Oh, yes, he talks well, but what has he done?''
By the time he toured America in 1882, lecturing the miners of Leadville, Colo., on interior design, his reputation had preceded him. Asked at customs if he had anything to declare, he answered, ``Nothing but my genius!''
Throughout the 1880s, Wilde declared his genius in poetry, prose, plays and, above all, society. By all accounts, his written wit was a pale imitation of his conversation, and his paradoxical epigrams were parroted all over London.
In 1884, he married, but while he and his wife, Constance, had two boys, his true nature would be awakened in 1892, when he met Lord Alfred Douglas, son of the Marquess of Queensberry.
Wilde was 38 when they met, Douglas, 22. `Bosie', as he'd been called since childhood, was lazy, extravagant, spoiled and blond.
Douglas introduced Wilde to the world of boy prostitutes, and within a year he had started staying in hotel rooms, ostensibly to write, in fact to play.
By all accounts, he treated his young hustlers kindly, took them to dine in fine hotels and made them gifts of gold cigarette cases as tokens of his affection. Some of the boys returned his kindness with blackmail.
Today, Douglas is remembered only as ``the other man'' and for a single phrase in an otherwise unremarkable sonnet. In ``Two Loves,'' it was Douglas who praised ``the love that dare not speak its name.''
But even in Victorian England that love's name was known, if never spoken, and Wilde's friendship with the young aristocrat raised eyebrows, and suspicions. When Douglas failed to graduate from Oxford, his tyrannical, possibly insane father blamed Wilde.
Denied entry to the opening night of ``Earnest,'' the Marquess of Queensberry left a phallic bouquet of vegetables at the stage door.
Four days later, he left his calling card at the Albemarle, Wilde's club. On the back were written the now immortal words, ``To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite.''
In his rage, or ignorance, Queensberry had misspelled ``sodomite.'' In his arrogance, Wilde sued for libel. . . .
During the cross-examination, he was asked about a servant boy.
``Did you ever kiss him?''
``Oh, dear, no!'' Wilde replied. ``He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly. I pitied him for it.''
Even in the witness stand, he couldn't resist a well-turned quip.
Queensberry's detectives had compiled a list of 12 boys Wilde had solicited. That all the boys were over 17, and most already prostitutes or blackmailers, made no difference. Queensberry was found not guilty of libel, and two days later Wilde was charged with gross indecency.
That same night, one report claimed, 600 men had suddenly taken the night boat to France, when normally only about 60 would have done so.
During the ensuing trial, Wilde was asked to define ``the love that dare not speak its name.''
Standing tall, he showed the courtroom why he deemed himself ``a lord of language.''
The love that dare not speak its name, he said, was ``a deep, spiritual affection,'' and ``as pure as it is perfect.'' It was ``beautiful, fine ... the noblest form of affection.'' And so on.
When he was done, the courtroom audience burst into applause. Wilde had been eloquent. He had been moving. He had been lying.
The trial ended in a hung jury. A second trial found him guilty.
In England, almost all newspapers praised the verdict and sentence.
For some observers, the passing years have made Wilde the quintessential martyr to Victorian prudery and hypocrisy, but not all gay commentators agree.
``All the time I was young and waltzing about the West End of London, we thought he was a sort of saint of homosexuality,'' recalls Quentin Crisp, 86, the flamboyant raconteur who's often seen as a gay free spirit after Wilde's own heart. ``He was nothing of the sort! I don't think Mr. Wilde ever came to terms with just how sordid his life had become. And he never admitted anything. He was nothing like a hero.''
Despite calls for compassion, Wilde served his entire term in prison. He picked oakum, worked in the library and wrote, with the permission of a kind warden, the 50-page love letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that was published after his death as ``De Profundis'' - ``from the depths.''
On May 20, 1897, the same day he left prison, Wilde fled to France, to live the final three years of his life as ``Sebastian Melmoth,'' an alias that fooled few.
He never saw England - or his children - again. His wife, Constance, died in 1898. His hope of ever recovering his reputation had died in prison.
In the U.S., according to Thomas Beer, at least 900 sermons were preached against him between 1895 and 1900.
In France, he was turned away from hotels and restaurants and snubbed in the street by former friends. He lived off the kindness of strangers, and the occasional advance for plays which his friends well knew he would never write. His only writing after prison was a long poem, ``The Ballad of Reading Gaol,'' attributed only to ``C.3.3.,'' which had been his cell number.
In the sidewalk cafes, he cadged absinthe and paid for the drinks with charming conversation, when his spirit allowed.
``I have discovered,'' he said, ``that alcohol taken in sufficient quantity produces all the effects of drunkenness.''
Toward the end, the writer Frederic Boutet discovered him seated outside a cafe in a torrential downpour. The chairs had been turned upside down at their tables, the awning rolled back. Wilde was sitting alone in the rain because he could not pay for the three or four drinks he'd ordered.
By late September 1900, he was bedridden in Paris' Hotel d'Alsace. His biographers differ, but the meningitis that would kill him may have resulted from the syphilis he allegedly contracted in college.
Even at the end, his wit remained.
``I am dying beyond my means,'' he told one friend, and scanning with distaste the walls of his hotel room, he told another, ``Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.''
On Nov. 30, 1900, at 1:50 p.m., he went. He was 46.
He is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where his monument carries a single verse from ``The Ballad of Reading Gaol'':
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
\ Ron Hayes etc. writes for the Palm Beach Post.
by CNB