Wilde Times - Matthew Sturgis

Matthew Sturgis offers an insight into researching his recent biography of Oscar Wilde, which included a traditional and fruitful method of browsing through the Library’s Biography collection.

Do we really need another book about Oscar Wilde? It is hard to escape the question. Certainly I posed it to myself when I embarked on my new biography of the great man. And – over the course of the six years that it took me to research and write the book – many others posed it to me.

He has, after all, been much written about. The London Library lists over 300 titles about him and his work, divided principally between the ‘Biography’ and ‘L. English Lit. ’ sections, together with 17 fictional accounts, a scattering of ‘Pamphlets’ and several appearances on the ‘S. Trials’ shelf. Many aspects of Wilde’s achievement are touched on in these volumes, but the number of full, cradle-tothe-grave ‘biographies’ is relatively small. After an initial flurry of works in the years immediately after his death, generally written by people who had known Wilde personally, the pace slowed to one book every decade or so: Boris Brasol’s Oscar Wilde: The Man, the Artist of 1938, Hesketh Pearson’s The Life of Oscar Wilde in 1946; there were lives by Philippe Jullian in the 1960s and H. Montgomery Hyde in the 1970s. And, in 1987, there appeared Richard Ellmann’s magisterial volume, Oscar Wilde. A wonderful book in many ways, it has pretty much held the field since then.

Inevitably, though, the intervening three decades have altered its status. It became clearer and clearer that a new biography of Wilde was not just possible, but was necessary. A mass of important new material had come to light: the full transcript of Wilde’s celebrated libel trial was discovered, as were the witness statements gathered by the Marquess of Queensberry; many new items were brought together in a magnificent new edition in 2000 of Wilde’s letters put together by Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland (Wilde’s grandson). Wilde’s works began to be published – with copious scholarly notes – in the Oxford English Texts series. Dedicated biographies appeared of Wilde’s wife, his mother, his friends and his collaborators. There were fascinating studies of many specific aspects of his life: his working habits; his reading; his American sojourn; his sex life; his medical condition; his friendships with women; his theatrical ventures; his UK lectures; his love of Paris; his time in prison; his holiday at Worthing in 1894. All this needed to be integrated into the record.

And there was more. Whole new frontiers of research had opened up. The first decades of the twenty-first century had seen the enormous growth of the Internet – with its opportunities for sharing information, tracing articles and conducting debate. There had also been the digitisation of thousands of historic newspapers – now accessible through the Library’s eLibrary hub. For anyone who can recall the long trek out to Colindale to visit the old British Library Newspapers archive, the exhausting hours spent hunched over the microfilm reader in an eye-wearying search for a single stray mention of one’s subject, there seems something almost indecent about the new ability to type in a ‘search term’ and bring up, in an instant, dozens, if not hundreds, of new references.

But, even with all these fresh horizons to scan, I was keen not to ignore more traditional modes of research in my attempt to create the fullest possible picture of Wilde’s life and times. There were also old byways to be explored in the quest for previously overlooked materials. And one of the most promising of these byways led through the Library.

Given Wilde’s great fame during the 46 years of his lifetime (from 1854 to 1900), I reasoned that anyone who had known him, or had encountered him, would – if they had written about their own lives – leave some record of that contact. They might preserve a unique anecdote or aperçu, or give details of an otherwise unrecorded meeting.

My idea was to browse along the shelves of the Library’s extensive Biography section – spread over the third and fourth floors of the main building – looking into every memoir or biography written in the half-century after Wilde’s death in search of such references. This was a plan that could not have been contemplated but for the Library’s unique arrangement of having the bookstacks, ordered by subject, open to the readers. Also fortunate was the Library’s system of stamping the date of publication on the spine of each book. I supposed that the enterprise might occupy a week or so. I was soon disabused.

The first half of the twentieth century was, I discovered, a period when many people not only wrote their memoirs but also got them published: lawyers, actors, men-about-town, society hostesses, minor littérateurs – figures I never knew existed, and whose books would have otherwise remained unknown to me. Over the course of a very full month I became adept at picking out the likely volumes – books, usually brought out in the 1910s and 1920s, with blockish spines, thick rag-paper and titles such as Forty Years at the Bar, Through an Old Stage Door, Memoirs of a Clubman, The Sunlit Hours, Stray Memories, Sword and Stirrup, My Restless Life, Eighty-Eight: Not Out and Time Gathered.

Many of the writers of these books had indeed come across Oscar – and they had preserved vivid (if often fleeting) memories of him. It was true that for a while, in the immediate wake of his death when his reputation was still tarnished, people were sometimes wary of mentioning Wilde’s name, or their connection to it. The indefatigable society hostess Mrs Jeune may have been one of Wilde’s great friends and supporters during the years of his success, yet when (as Lady St Helier) she came to write her memoir, Memories of Fifty Years (1909), she avoided all reference to him. Others, though, were bolder. And certainly as the decades passed, and Wilde’s reputation became re-established and his work reappraised, such reticence vanished.

Photograph of Mrs Jeune (Lady St Helier), from her book Memories of Fifty Years (1909).

Turning over the yellowing pages of one time-worn autobiography after another (for few of such books are indexed), I caught sight of Oscar in many a new and unexpected pose: leaning against a door-frame while listening to one of John Ruskin’s Oxford lectures on early Italian art; cutting a dash at a ‘Commem Ball’ in a white top hat; addressing a Dublin meeting on women’s further education – while wearing a pair of conspicuous doeskin gloves; upsetting a tray of biscuits at a St John’s Wood teaparty; ‘mooning about’ eating strawberries at a late-summer garden party; lolling (as ever, it seems) against a pillar, during an interminable performance of Shelley’s verse-drama, The Cenci; sharing a bottle of wine with the writer Arthur Machen and his wife at the modest Florence Restaurant in Rupert Street, Soho; ‘swaggering along the King’s Road dressed in a brown frogged coat, trimmed with cheap fur, [with] on his head an extravagant hat – the brim of which was as much curled as the roof of a Chinese pagoda ’ .

In the pages of the travel-writer Phil Robinson’s Sinners and Saints, A Tour Across the States (1883), I encountered him on his way to Salt Lake City, during his year-long 1882 American lecture tour. (To Robinson’s colourful description of a tribe of ‘Red Indians’ who subsisted on a diet of sunflowers, Wilde replied excitedly, ‘How charming! If only I could have stayed and dined with them. ’)

Photograph of Alfred Noyes, from his book Two Worlds for Memory (1953).

Alfred Noyes in his Two Worlds for Memory (1953) recorded him emerging from a London theatre hotly disputing with W.E. Henley, the irascible poet and editor who, following the amputation of his leg, served as the model for Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The two men parted on the pavement, but when Wilde turned to make one final remark, Henley hurled his crutch at Oscar’s head.

Mrs J.E. Panton (daughter of the painter William Powell Frith), in her 1908 memoir, Leaves from a Life, provided a poignant glimpse of Oscar, during the years of his post-prison exile, standing by a bicycle in a little wood at Aix-les-Bains, looking like ‘a lost soul gazing through the gates of Paradise’ . And Mrs Will Gordon – in Echoes and Realities (1934) – recorded how her friend, the Romanian writer Hélène Vacaresco, visited Wilde in his Paris hotel room during his final illness, bringing with her ‘a bottle of champagne and a few comforts’ . She knocked on the door of his room – number 13 – and hearing someone call ‘Entrez’ went in. Oscar was lying in bed with his face to the wall. When she asked what she could do for him, he replied, ‘Rien’ . She left her comforts on the bare table, and begged him to drink some of the champagne. He didn’t move, but as she left, she heard him whisper, ‘Merci, inconnue’ .

Hidden away in volumes that – from their issue slips – appeared not to have been opened in decades, I discovered numerous long-forgotten Wildean bon mots and flights of fancy : his pleasantly absurd suggestion that ‘There ought to be a specific form of prayer for a baronet’; his expostulation – during a dinner-party discussion on artistic matters – ‘Oh, don’t talk of Rome – it is the Whiteley’s of Art’; or his provocative claim, when asked for directions in Piccadilly, that he was ‘unacquainted with any part of London east of the Albany’ . From Lady Poore’s An Admiral’s Wife in the Making (1917) I learned that, during his last term at Oxford, he told the author (Ida Graves, as she then was) that his notion of a perfect dinner party was ‘very little to eat, very little light, and a great many flowers’ .

Photograph of Lady Poore, from her biography An Admiral’s Wife in the Making (1917).

Many authors had, it was clear, long cherished their encounters with Wilde and his wit, setting them down years after the event. According to Walter Sichel – in The Sands of Time (1923) – when he described Lady Dorothy Neville as being like an exquisite piece of porcelain, Wilde had readily concurred, adding that, indeed, he was always anxious in her company, ‘because he momentarily expected a large van to arrive and carry her off to the British Museum’ . In My Restless Life (1909), the campaigning journalist Harry de Windt, who in 1893 had published a defence of the Russian prison-camp system, recalled meeting Wilde soon afterwards. Oscar attacked the book, declaring that ‘Any Englishman who defends such a barbarous system, should himself be banished to Siberia’ . To the Anglo-French de Windt’s protestation that he was ‘only half an Englishman’ , Wilde countered sternly, ‘Then half of you should be exiled’ .

But, of course, as with all memoirs and memories there is the question of accuracy. How much of this stuff was actually true? Just as there had been a moment, immediately after Wilde’s death, when memoir-writers – even if they had known Wilde well – might fail to mention him at all, as the twentieth century advanced – and Wilde’s reputation recovered – there was a tendency to claim a closer connection with the celebrated author than perhaps existed. Or indeed to claim a connection when none existed at all.

Photograph of Harry de Windt, from his book My Restless Life (1909).

Wilde originally wrote his Symbolist drama Salomé in English and then got it translated by a professional in Paris, is demonstrably false; the original manuscript survives. And it was hard to accept, too, the story that Wilde disdained to take Field’s bet that ‘he couldn’t write a page of French in a locked room’ as anything other than a malicious fantasy.

Other anecdotes required a degree of old-fashioned connoisseurship to assess. Did the story feel right? Was it in keeping with the man – and his times? Or did it, perhaps, contain a half-remembered truth, passed on and slightly mangled in the second-hand retelling? Given that the eminent lawyer Sir Patrick Hastings was born in 1880, it is difficult to credit fully the account – from his 1948 Autobiography – of an uproarious 1887 dinner chez Herbert Beerbohm Tree at which he claimed to have been present, when both Oscar and his brother Willie gave their views on how Hamlet should die. Together with their host ‘they each rose from the table in turn to demonstrate their preferred mode of extinction – and were all lying on the floor of the dining-room when the butler brought in the fish’ . Yet it may well preserve, at second hand, the partial memory of a real event.

Photograph of Hervey de Montmorency, from his book Sword and Stirrup (1936).

And the same could perhaps be said for Hervey de Montmorency’s recollection of an evening at the Corinthian Club when, during a discussion of the latest dramatic success of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Oscar was asked why, in his own work, he had never tackled the interesting subject of incest. According to de Montmorency – in Sword and Stirrup (1936) – Wilde replied, ‘I never write on any matter of which I have not had personal experience. And, you see, ’ he continued, indicating his brother and sister, who happened to be present, ‘I am awkwardly situated, as my nearest relations are so very plain’ . The details are certainly awry: Oscar and Willie Wilde’s only sister, Isola, died in 1867, aged nine. Nevertheless Oscar’s reply foreshadows his ill-advised admission in the witness-box, during his first trial, that he had not kissed the serving-boy, Walter Granger, because he was, unfortunately, ‘very plain’ .

That month spent patrolling the narrow walkways between the shelves of the two Biography floors – A to Neh and Nei to Z – taught me many things: how to take notes while perched on a narrow w Photograph of Hervey de Montmorency, from his book Sword and Stirrup (1936).ndow ledge; how to operate the camera device on my iPad; the virtues of wearing rubber-soled shoes to avoid static-electric shocks from the metal shelving. But most of all it taught me how closely woven Oscar Wilde was in the lives of his contemporaries - and, also, what an extraordinary institution is The London Library.