23 August 1900

 

But if at Oxford I felt as if I were experiencing the joys of a renaissance, I also knew that in turn I must attempt to bury my own recent past.  I learned to lose, by stealth, the remnants of an Irish accent just as I discarded checks and bowlers for the stripes and variegated neckties of modern life.

      It has been said that I 'posed' in those days - it is an absurd charge.  Those who are aware of their genius, even in childhood, are quite conscious of the disparity between themselves and others.  They do not 'pose', they merely draw their own conclusions.  But the disparity between what they know themselves to be and that conventional demeanour which the world forces them to adopt - that requires thought to resolve.  And so I essayed several personalities, in order to find one which was closest to my own.  I dressed for effect, I admit it, but the only person I wished to affect was myself.

      The English have no sense of occasion in such matters and I was sometimes ridiculed.  I was not, in the jargon of that period, an 'A.1 fellow', a 'top-notcher', and, as a result, I was never on terms of intimacy with my contemporaries.  There were exceptions, of course - indeed, exceptions rule English social life.

      Frank Miles, the painter, was my greatest friend at Oxford.  Alas, he died in a private asylum in Ongar.  I visited him there, just before his death; he had a small room and as I entered, under the watchful eye of an attendant, he bowed low in mock homage to me.  'Ah, I see they have let you out too, Oscar?'  In his conversation he had the strange clarity of the possessed, and I felt helpless before it, like an infant before the thunder.  He slapped me on the back, and roared with laughter: 'Oscar,' he said, 'you must learn to carry a hazelwood stick, to ward off the damned.'  After some minutes of this painful banter, he turned his face to the wall and would not look at me.  'Remember,' he kept on repeating, 'the dog it was that died.  The dog it was that died.'  In my bewilderment, I looked at the attendant, who winked at me and showed me to the door.  I was about to leave when Frank rushed over to a small desk, upon which were a series of drawings.  He handed me one of them: 'Here is your own flower, Oscar.  The flower of forgetting.'  My own name had been traced out in a series of concentric circles, in green and scarlet ink, so that the whole composition seemed to be of some monstrous blossom in which the petals were still unfolding.  I hurried from that wretched place as from ground where blood has been shed, and, as soon as I left the asylum, I threw the thing away.  Lord Ronald Gower, who is the younger son of the Duke of Sutherland, and with whom I was once on terms of the closest intimacy, told me that Frank believed that I had fashioned his personality and then allowed it to fall into ruins.  It is an absurd charge.

      Frank was a wild, agreeable boy at Oxford - I believe that I discerned in him even then the scarlet specks of madness and I have always been interested in the daemonic qualities of others.  But I was attracted to Frank, also, because he was part of that Society which I had glimpsed in my lonely reading; through Lord Ronald Gower, he knew the Duchess of Westminster, and those others of wealth and position who were to me fabulous beings.  For the first time I had met someone of my own age who exercised a fascination over me, and from whom I could learn.

      Indeed Frank actively encouraged the growth of my personality.  He encouraged me in any excess of high spirits, so that I felt myself propelled ever faster towards the character which beckoned to me - alas, that character was myself.  I learned from Frank also the slight drawl which I affected for a few years, and from him also the rhythms of that destructive wit which I found so attractive.

      He would come every morning to my rooms in Magdalen, and examine with ever-renewed satisfaction the figures which he had painted upon the doors.  'You know, Oscar,' he said on one occasion, 'I think I might have to fill this wall here with something in yellow.'

      'I detest yellow, Frank, it looks so calculating.'

      'Green, then?'

      'Green is unnatural.  Do leave the walls alone, Frank, they have been quite happy without you.'

      He would wander around my rooms in a wilful manner, picking up objects and scrutinising them carefully.  'Really, Oscar, you must lose this ashtray.  It is hideous, and you hardly ever smoke.'

      'I am learning to, by trial and error.  But you are right about the ashtray.  I shall replace it at once.'

      'And what do you intend doing about this etching of Raphael's Madonna?  I know you are turning Roman, but Raphael is really de trop.  Do you know nothing about art?'

      'It is not a question of art, Frank.  I have been trying to imitate the Madonna's expression.  It is so useful at tutorials.'  I pretended to be unmoved, but I removed the etching that evening.  I told Frank that it had been assumed into heaven.

      'You assume too much,' he replied.

      We both laughed; in those days we assailed each other with extravagant phrases, and then carefully examined them.  'No, Oscar,' Frank would tell me, 'don't say, "It is a terrible thing that ...” That sounds like an Irish expression.  Simply say, "It is terrible that ..."’  He was immensely helpful to me.

      We were inseparable then and, if I say that we loved each other, I do not intend it in the Uranian fashion.  Even on our holidays, when we shared a bed together, we did not indulge in the practices of schoolboys.  There was romance between us, but it was the romance of young men who find that their ambitions coincide.  Frank was the Painter and I was the Poet: with these gilded words we concealed the hunger for fame that spurred us forward.  But I committed the error of which all great artists are guilty - I believed that the stirrings of my own heart had the wonderful impersonality of genius, and that in the exploration of my own character I might find new subjects for poetry and new forms of art.  I know now that I was wrong, but I went to London armed with the fantasy - for I had come to conquer.