23 September 1900

 

A postcard has come from Bosie: it is strange that so modern a poet should wish to write in so open a fashion.  It reads: 'I am coming to Paris with Tom next week.  I expect that you will require dinner.'  He has signed it, absurdly, 'Lord Alfred Douglas'.  Really, it leaves very little to the imagination, except for the sudden appearance of a third party: who is Tom?  What is he?  But then Bosie has always believed that life should run ahead of the imagination, and if possible exhaust it, whereas I have always helped the imagination to outstrip life.  That was why we affected each other so fatally: I disproved all of his theories and he could never understand mine.

      Lionel Johnson, the ochre-coloured poet, brought him to see me in Tite Street.  Bosie had read The Picture of Dorian Gray in, I regret to say, a magazine, and had determined to meet its author.  No book has had such fatal consequences for me.  He told me later that he felt he had read in Dorian Gray the secret history of his own life: I was the magus who had provided the words to unlock the mystery of his soul.  He was absurdly romantic, of course, but that was his charm.  And, when I first saw him, I was dazzled.  He had what Pater calls the pagan melancholy of beautiful youth, who sees all the corruption of the world and is yet unsustained by it.

      I was lost as soon as I loved him, because I had transgressed the one commandment which modern society has bound in hoops of brass.  When Christ said, 'Your sins will be forgiven you because you have loved,' the English public says, 'Your crimes will be punished because you have dared to love.'  My affection for Lord Alfred Douglas gave a beauty and a dignity to the love between men which the English could not look upon without horror: that is why they sent me to prison.  I could have had all the renters I wanted; the boys who sell themselves in Southwark or Clerkenwell are of no account, and it was only to be expected that I would shower red gold upon them in exchange for their pale bodies.  That, after all, is the theory of capitalism.  But that I should have conceived of a higher love, a love between equals - that they could not accept, and for that there would be no forgiveness.  Although that love has been celebrated by Shakespeare, by Hafiz and by Virgil in his second ecologue, it is a love that dare not speak its name because it is nameless - like the secret word for God in Indian mythology, to utter it is to be rendered accursed.

      Even when I first knew Bosie, there was a sense of damnation about him, like the perfumed flowers which flourish daily in marshland.  It was that sense of damnation which drew us together just as, finally, it tore us apart.  It made us grow more reckless in our love, but with a recklessness that finally destroyed me.  I, who thought I could mock the world in my essays and epigrams, found my sticking point.

      Bosie wrote to me, some six months after we had met, begging for my help in a strange affair.  He had conceived a passion for a quite young boy.  The parents, it seemed, had not objected to this passion - indeed they actively encouraged it, and even invited Bosie into their own house so that it might continue in a less than platonic manner.  And then the simple thing happened, as the simple thing always does: they blackmailed him, and threatened to expose him to his parents.  It would have been a hideous scandal since the boy was quite the wrong age for such adventures.  And so Bosie wrote to me for assistance, pleading that he had 'sinned only as Dorian Gray sinned'.  It was naïve of him, but then he has always possessed a certain innocence: for innocence is the strongest of virtues, and can exist in the midst of an intensely dissipated life.

      Naturally, I helped him.  I visited Edwin Levy, a 'private agent' whose name never appears in the newspapers, a Jew who knows everyone's business and is therefore in a position to protect his clients admirably.  Through him, a proposition was put to the parents of the boy.  They accepted, and the affair was silenced.  I had only to endure a lecture from Levy, warning me of my association with those who courted danger in so assiduous a fashion as 'the young Lord'.  He knew, or suspected, that I was living in a similar manner, which is why he advised total discretion in all my affairs.  'This young man,' I recall him saying, 'is dangerous for you.'  But it was precisely that which attracted me to him - I loved Bosie as one would love a wounded animal.

      When I was in prison I wrote Bosie a long and terrible letter, in which the affair at Oxford was only the beginning of a chronicle of woe.  Bosie never mentions it now, which is wise and just of him - more just than I deserve.  It was a terrible letter because I placed on him that burden of guilt which belonged on my shoulders only and, in my spite and bitterness, I lent to it a weight which Atlas himself could not endure without groaning.  I appeared in that letter as a victim, an innocent out of a melodrama who walks unsuspecting into the dark forest where giants part the leaves and peer at him.  But it was not so.  I said in that letter that it was necessary for me to look upon the past with different eyes.  Well, now I must try to do so.

      Much has been written about the love of an older man for a younger man, but very little has been said about the passion which the younger man can conceive for the older.  That love is far more dangerous for it breeds pride in him who is loved.  I became Bosie's idol rather than his companion.  He fed my vanity with his attentions, just as I took his character and moulded it into my own image.  As a result, we became inseparable.  I stayed with him at Oxford and, when we grew bored with the country, we would take rooms at the Albermarle or the Savoy.

      Whatever extravagances he may have possessed, I nurtured; whatever base instincts he had, I encouraged; whatever experiences he wished to taste, I provided for him.  The course of our life in London is now public knowledge, I believe.  I took him into the really fashionable world, which was his by right, and then into the darker world of the streets, which became his by choice.  I instilled in him a love of the exotic, in food and drink no less than in more unfamiliar pleasures.  We would dine at the Savoy and have supper at Willis's; after that, I would lead him into the Inferno.

      As we became more frenzied in our pursuit of pleasure, London itself became an unreal city, a play of brilliant lights and crowds and mad laughter.  My boldness infected Bosie for, in order to show his love, he imitated me to the point where he would, in my place, do the things I had only dreamed of - and things I dared not dream of.  He wished to become precisely the portrait of him which I had formed in my imagination and so he became terrible, because my imagination was terrible also.

      I did not reckon then the cost, to him or to others.  I would invite him to dine in Tite Street with Constance and myself, and I forced him to play a vicious double game.  We would talk politely and seriously and then, perhaps after an unfortunate remark by Constance, Bosie would burst out in mad laughter and I would laugh also.  My wife did not understand, of course, and retreated into bewildered silence.  She did not know the truth then, but there were times when she must have suspected it although she said nothing.  She would take Vyvyan and Cyril into the country, and in the house which should have been sacred to me because it had harboured my children I encouraged Bosie to slake his perversities.

      In my trial I was accused of taking boys back with me to the Savoy.  It is true, but I took them there for Bosie's sake.  I did not care to indulge in those sins which he, with the violent passion of youth, enjoyed so freely.  I have explained how great for me was the joy in watching others' pleasure, and it became my habit to watch Bosie and his companions in the acts of love.  Bosie sometimes would look up and smile at me - it was a wonderful cruel smile which I myself had painted upon his face.

      My mother would write to me of Constance's feelings, of her loneliness and unhappiness, and I would write to Bosie about mine.  I would gild our sins with phrases and persuade him that in excess is to be found a terrible purity, the purity of the gods.  I told him to seek the 'liberty of the heart', although there was no such liberty to be found.

      I did no work of an artistic kind: I found the lover's crown of myrtle more satisfying than the poet's crown of bays.  I had thought that, since love is the root of all wonder, it must also be the source of great creation.  Now I realise that love is merely a substitute for such work.  It creates the conditions, but prevents one from employing them.  It provokes the mood, but stifles the desire to express it.  And indeed at this time, some two years before my disgrace, I was tired of my art.  Although others were prophesying for me a marvellous future as a dramatist, I think I knew even then that my work was coming to an end.

      The more fiercely I loved Bosie, the more bitterly I accused myself for allowing my life to come to such a point; and then, by the strange alchemy of passion, I grew to accusing him also.  At one moment I would spur him on to fresh excesses simply, in my delirium, to see to what lengths he would go in order to please me.  And then at another I would grow frightened of him.  I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned, and I became afraid of what Bosie might say or do.  When the mist of pleasure dropped from my eyes, I would counsel caution and he would laugh.  I would suggest a temporary separation, and he would rage at me.

      There were hideous scenes between us, both in London and in the country.  Bosie's fury was demented - it was the fury of a creature caught in a trap which is not of its devising.  He knew only too well what I had made of him, what scenery I had painted for him, and what lines I had given him to speak.  But he had grown to love the worst part of himself, and that worst part was me.

      I recall one occasion when we were lunching in the Berkeley Hotel.  I told him that I had received a letter from his father, the Marquess of Queensberry.

      'And what did the little man say?  Did he say anything about me?'

      'It was an entirely personal letter - he only spoke about himself.  He says that he is being made a fool of, and that our conduct is humiliating him.'

      'He's an oaf to think that anyone cares tuppence for him.'

      'He also accuses me of practising unnatural vices.  That is absurd of him: I never practise.  I am perfect.'

      'And what else?'

      'He says I have corrupted you.'

      Bosie grew angry: it was extraordinary how his features changed under the impress of passion.

      'We must be more careful, Bosie.'

      'You are a coward, Oscar.  You look like a woman, and you have the manners of a woman.'

      'But I think he means to watch for us.'

      At that Bosie laughed, but it was a terrible laugh.  To my horror, he produced a pistol from his pocket and waved it in the air.

      'He's a dog!' he shouted.  'And I will shoot him like a dog if he comes near me.'

      And then, to my astonishment, he fired at the chandelier in the middle of the dining room.  It provoked the most dreadful scene, of course, and we were asked to leave the restaurant.

      The event was paraded in the newspapers, and I believe the Chronicle suggested that it was I who had fired the shot.  I was in great agony of mind, for I knew that something evil had come into my life.

      In London we were pointed at in the streets.  I pretended indifference - I am used to such attention - and naturally Bosie imitated me.  But he was hurt, deeply hurt, to become an object of derision among the common people and, in his arrogance, he decided to surpass even their conception of his infamy.  It was, I believe, the bad blood of his race that spurred him forward - like Julien Sorel, the only thing that seemed real to him was his fear of ridicule.

      And so we fled from our companions and our familiar haunts.  We travelled to Algiers, and at peril to our lives visited low dens where wreaths of opium curled around the blackened roofs.  We visited Florence, and by our behaviour scandalised even the Italians.  It was here that I began my Florentine Tragedy.  I fashioned a plot in which a wife spurs on her lover to kill her own husband: in passion, for me, only the doom remained, and the red mist of doom which hides men from each other's sight.  We were lost, both of us lost.

      When we returned to England, Bosie, like a guilty thing, turned upon his accusers.  The strange pride of his race reasserted itself, and he vented his fierce scorn, no longer upon me who led him forward in the paths of vice, but upon his father, who now goaded him with threats and abuse.  I became part of the war between Bosie and Queensberry but, like a glass, I simply magnified the rays of their mutual enmity - although I was the one to burn.

      But Bosie never betrayed me: he stood by me during the trials and, after my imprisonment, never ceased to write letters on my behalf.  But, alas, in my own letter from prison I betrayed him.  I knew that it was within my power to show him an image of himself that was so cleverly conceived that he would accept it at once - just as he had once accepted Dorian Gray as his own picture.  When I wrote in my ballad that one kills the thing one loves, I meant it precisely.

      Of course I have gone back to him.  It is part of the terrible symmetry of fate that I should need Bosie now when he no longer needs me.  He scatters banknotes in my direction, although I believe he knows that he is giving alms to the man who destroyed him, and that he is kissing the lips of the man who betrayed him with his words.  But I shall see him next week, and he will buy me dinner.  No doubt I shall charm Tom, and he will grow jealous.  It is curious how, when the most fiery passions have passed, there is left only a strange emptiness.