The Master

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE EVENING AS HE RODE along in a rattling four-wheeler to go to dinner, an idea came to him for a story whose drama would reside in the peculiar and intense affection between an orphaned brother and sister. He did not immediately have a picture of the pair nor imagine anything about their direct circumstances. What came to him was vague and scarcely distinct enough to write in his notebook. The brother and sister were involved in a union of sympathy and tenderness which meant that they could read each other’s feelings and impulses. They did not control each other, however; rather, they understood each other too well. Fatally well, he thought, and wrote that in his notebook without any idea of a plot or an incident which could illustrate it. Maybe it was too much, but the idea of a fused self stayed with him. Two beings with one sensibility, one imagination, vibrating with the same nerves, the same suffering. Two lives, but close to one experience. Both of them, for example, acutely aware of their parents’ passing, the irrevocable loss involved haunting both of them with an almost paralysing pathos.

Often, ideas came like this, casually, without warning; often, they occurred to him at moments when he was busy with other things. This new idea for a story about a brother and sister developed with a sort of urgency, as something that he barely needed to write down. He would not forget it. It stayed fresh and clear in his imagination. Slowly and mysteriously, it began to fuse with the ghost story told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and slowly he began to see something fixed and exact as though the processes of imagination themselves were as a ghost, becoming more and more corporeal. He saw the brother and sister, lonely and abandoned somewhere, banished siblings in a loveless old house, both of them operating with one mind, one soul, equal in their suffering and unpreparedness for the great ordeal which was to come their way.

Once it became more solid, the emerging story and all its ramifications and possibilities lifted him out of the gloom of his failure. He grew determined that he would become more hardworking now. He took up his pen again – the pen of all his unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. It was now, he believed, that he would do the work of his life. He was ready to begin again, to return to the old high art of fiction with ambitions now too deep and pure for any utterance.

In the idleness of the afternoon sometimes he let his gaze wander through his notebooks again. One day he almost smiled to himself when he saw a few lines, which had seemed so promising less than three years earlier that he had allowed them to fill his workday and his dreams alike, the very lines which were the cause of the months of lethargy and pain and disappointment through which he now was emerging. He forced himself to read them to the end:

Situation of that once-upon-a-time member of an old Venetian family (I forget which), who had become a monk, and who was taken almost forcibly out of the monastry and brought back into the world to keep his family from becoming extinct. He was the last – it was absolutely necessary for him to marry. Adapt this somehow or other to today.

His eye moved quickly to the list of names, ghost names taken from obituaries and death notices, names for characters and places, names which could lie inert in his notebooks or could still be used; he could spend day after day giving life to them. Beague Vena (Xtian name) – Doreen (ditto) – Passmore – Trafford – Norval – Lancelot – Vyner – Bygrave – Husson – Domville. Those last eight letters had been placed on the page in all innocence. He had no memory now of where the name had come from, nor indeed the exact provenance of any of the names which came before it. Nor had he any real idea why that name had been used, and the others, left there, had not. The note and the name seemed distant now, and it appeared extraordinary to him that his play had arisen from such unpromising beginnings and, once it was replaced by a new play by Oscar Wilde, had suffered an equally unpromising end.

HIS PARENTS dying, he thought, had brought with it a strange relief. It was the sense that it could not happen again, his mother’s body could lie in repose only once, she could be consigned to the earth on only one occasion. And that occasion, in all its black brutal sorrow, had passed. With his parents dead and Alice gone, he had believed that nothing could touch him. Thus his failure in the theatre remained a shock, something whose intensity and sharpness he had never thought he would have to deal with again. It was, he had to admit, close to grief, even though he knew that such an admission was a kind of blasphemy.

He knew that he would suffer no further indignity at the hands of theatre audiences; he would devote himself, as he had pledged, to the silent art of fiction. If only he could work now, his days could be perfect, full of the delight of solitude and the pleasure wrought from finished pages.

Not long after his return from Ireland, as he settled himself into a routine of reading and letter writing and the creation of domestic order, his young friend Jonathan Sturges came with news, and he was soon followed by Edmund Gosse with the same news. It concerned Oscar Wilde.

Wilde had been much on Henry’s mind over the previous months. His two plays were still running at the Haymarket and the St James’s. Henry had no difficulty adding up the money Wilde had been making. He wrote to William about it, noting one of the new phenomena of London life, the inescapable Oscar Wilde, suddenly successful rather than preposterous, suddenly industrious and serious rather than someone busy wasting his time and that of others.

Both Sturges and Gosse offered information, however, which Henry did not pass on to William nor indeed to anyone else. Both his friends enjoyed knowing and telling fresh news and he allowed each to feel that he was the first, partly because he was not sure that he wanted either of them to know that the antics of Oscar Wilde were matters much discussed under his roof.

Even before he went to Ireland, Henry had heard that Wilde had abandoned all due discretion. He was doing as he pleased in London and telling whomsoever he pleased about it. He was everywhere, flaunting his money, his new success and fame, and flaunting also the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, a boy as deeply unpleasant as his father, in Gosse’s opinion, but rather better-looking, Sturges allowed himself to admit.

Henry presumed that what was relayed to him by his two visitors was known to all. He knew that Wilde’s relationship with Queensberry’s son was common knowledge, but both Sturges and Gosse appeared to feel that they and a mere few others knew the details, and the details, they insisted, were so appalling they could scarcely be whispered. Henry watched them calmly and ordered tea for them and listened carefully to their delicate phrasing of matters which were not, to say the least, very delicate. Boys from the street, Gosse called them, but Sturges amused him more by mentioning, sotto voce, young men whose abode was not very fixed.

‘He orders them as you would a cab,’ Gosse finally made himself clear.

‘For payment?’ Henry asked innocently.

As Gosse nodded gravely, Henry was tempted to smile, but he too remained grave.

It did not strike him as odd or shocking; everything about Wilde, from the moment Henry had first seen him, even when he had met him in Washington in the house of Clover Adams, suggested deep levels and layers of hiddenness. Had Gosse or Sturges told him that Wilde went out every night dressed as a clergyman’s wife to give alms to the poor, it would not have surprised him. He remembered something vague being told to him about Wilde’s parents, his mother’s madness or her revolutionary spirit, or both, and his father’s philandering or perhaps, indeed, his revolutionary spirit. Ireland, he supposed, was too small for someone like Wilde, yet he had always carried a threat of Ireland with him. Even London could not contain him with two plays and many rumours all running at the same time.

‘Where is Wilde’s wife?’ he asked Gosse.

‘At home waiting for him, with unpaid bills everywhere and two young sons.’

Henry could not picture Mrs Wilde and did not think he had ever met her. He did not even know, nor did Gosse, whether she was Irish or not. But the idea of the two boys, who looked like angels, Gosse had assured him, struck him forcibly. He imagined the two sons waiting for their monstrous father to return and was glad he did not know their names. He thought of them, both unaware of their father’s reputation, yet slowly gathering an impression of him and longing for him now that he was away.

Despite the fact that he believed, as the gossip came his way, that he had the measure of Wilde, he held his breath and moved about the room in silence when Gosse told him that Wilde was suing the Marquess of Queensberry in open court for calling him a sodomite.

‘It seems that he could not even spell the word,’ Gosse said.

‘Spelling, I imagine, was not ever his strong point.’ Henry stood at the window glancing out as though expecting Wilde or the marquess himself to appear on the street below.

Gosse managed to imply at all times that his information came from the highest and most reliable source. He suggested somehow that he was in touch with members of the cabinet, or the prime minister’s office, or on certain occasions an informant close to the Prince of Wales. Sturges, on the other hand, made it clear that all he knew came from club gossip, or chance meetings with informants who might not be entirely reliable. The visits of Gosse and Sturges never coincided during these frenzied weeks, which was fortunate, Henry thought, as each of them came bearing precisely the same information.

Gosse began to call every day, Sturges merely when there was news, although once the trial opened Sturges came daily too. There was always some embellishment and some new piece of intrigue. Gosse had met George Bernard Shaw who had told him of his meeting with Wilde, of his warning him not to bring the case against the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde had agreed, Shaw said, that it would not be wise, and everything was settled until Lord Alfred Douglas arrived, brazen and petulant, as Shaw had described him, demanding that Wilde sue his father and attacking those who advised caution, insisting that Wilde leave with him there and then. Douglas was red-faced with anger, Shaw said, a spoiled boy. The strange thing though was that Wilde seemed totally under his power, followed him and appeared to give in to him. He melted under the heat of the young man’s anger.

Sturges was the first to arrive with the news of what the Marquess of Queensberry intended to tell the court.

‘He has, I’ve been told, witnesses. Witnesses who will not spare us any detail.’

Henry looked at Sturges’s young face and his wide-eyed expression. He wanted to pat him on the shoulder and tell him that he was eager to hear the detail, all of it, as soon as it was known, he wanted to be spared nothing.

The story of Wilde filled Henry’s days now. He read whatever came into print about the case and waited for news. He wrote to William about the trial, making clear that he had no respect for Wilde, he disliked both his work and his activities on the stage of London society. Wilde, he insisted, had never been interesting to him, but now, as Wilde threw caution away and seemed ready to make himself into a public martyr, the Irish playwright began to interest him enormously.

‘I HAVE HEARD news of the greatest import.’ Gosse did not wait to sit down before he spoke, and moved as though he were standing on the deck of a ship.

‘I believe that Douglas ’s father will produce a number of scallywags. Young unwashed boys will give evidence against Wilde and, I have been told, their evidence will be irrefutable.’

Henry knew that there was no need to ask questions. He did not, in any case, quite know how to frame the question that needed to be asked.

‘I have seen the names of the witnesses,’ Gosse said dramatically, ‘and they include a number of worms. Wilde, it seems, has been consorting with worms, with thieves and blackmailers. The price must have seemed cheap at the time, but it seems now it will cost him dear.’

‘And Douglas?’ Henry asked.

‘I am told that he is up to his neck in this. But Wilde wants him kept out of it. It seems when Wilde was finished with his filthy young purchases he passed them on to Douglas, and God knows who else. It appears there is a list of those who rented these boys.’

Henry noticed that Gosse was watching him, waiting for his response.

‘It is a dreadful business,’ he said.

‘Yes, a list,’ Gosse said, as though Henry had not spoken.

NEITHER STURGES nor Gosse went to the trial, yet they both seemed to know the exchanges by heart. Wilde, they said, was confident and arrogant. He spoke, Sturges said, like someone who could burn his boats because he was about to go to France. He was witty and lofty, careless and contemptuous. Gosse heard from his usual sources one evening that Wilde had already taken off, but the following day when it was clear that this had not happened, Gosse did not mention it. Nonetheless, both of Henry’s informants were sure that he would go to France and both also had names for the boys who would give evidence and spoke of them as personages, each with his own different character and profile.

On the third day of the trial, Henry noticed a new intensity in the tone of both Gosse and Sturges. They had separately been up late the night before and discussing the case; had waited until they knew that Wilde had turned up in court that day so that they could come with fresh news. Gosse had spent part of the previous evening with the poet Yeats, who, Gosse said, was alone among those to whom he had spoken in his admiration for Wilde and had nothing but praise for his courage. The poet had attacked the public for its hypocrisy, Gosse said.

‘I was not aware,’ he added, ‘that the public had been trawling in the sewers and I told Yeats so.’

‘Does he know Wilde?’ Henry asked.

‘They’re all Irish together,’ Gosse said.

‘Does he know him well?’ Henry persisted.

‘He told me an extraordinary story,’ Gosse said. ‘He told me of a Christmas Day he spent with the Wildes. The house, he said, was more beautiful than anyone has mentioned, everything white and full of strange and beautiful objects. Chief among them, he said, was Mrs Wilde herself, who is clever and quite beautiful, according to Yeats. And the two boys, he said, were curly-headed pictures of innocence and sweetness, perfect creatures. It was all perfect, he said, a household of infinite perfection, not only great taste, but great warmth, he said, and great beauty and great love.’

‘Obviously not enough,’ Henry said drily, ‘or perhaps too much.’

‘Yeats intends to call on him,’ Gosse said. ‘I wished him luck.’

Sturges listened carefully as Henry, for once, passed on what Gosse had told him.

‘It is all clear,’ Sturges said. ‘Bosie is the love of his life. He would give up anything for him. Wilde has found the love of his life.’

‘Then why can he not take him to France?’ Henry asked. ‘That is where such people are normally taken.’

‘He may still go to France,’ Sturges said.

‘The fact that he has not yet gone is inexplicable,’ Henry said.

‘I think I know why he has not gone,’ Sturges said. ‘I have spent much time discussing it with those who know him, or at least think they do, and I think I might know.’

‘Do pray tell,’ Henry said, placing himself in a chair by the window.

‘In one short month,’ Sturges said, speaking slowly as though thinking ahead to the next phrase, ‘he has sat in an audience for two of his plays and witnessed triumph, universal praise and his name in large letters. For any man it would be unsettling. No man should make a judgement who has recently published a book or put on a play.’

Henry did not say anything.

‘In this time,’ Sturges went on, ‘he has also been to Algeria, if you can imagine, and news of some of his activities there has filtered back. It seems that neither he nor Douglas was shy in making himself known to the local tribes, and the excitement must have been unsettling for Wilde and, indeed, for the tribes, if for no one else.’

‘I can imagine,’ Henry said.

‘And when he returned, he was homeless, he has lived in hotels. And also, he has no money.’

‘That is not the case,’ Henry said. ‘I have calculated his income from the theatre. It is very high.’

‘Bosie has spent it for him,’ Sturges replied, ‘and he had debts to match. I believe that he has not enough money to pay his hotel bill and the manager has captured his belongings, such as they are.’

‘That does not prevent him from going to France,’ Henry said. ‘He can acquire some belongings there, perhaps even make significant improvements to them.’

‘He has lost his moorings, lost his judgement,’ Sturges said. ‘He is incapable of making a decision. The success and the love and the hotel rooms have been too much for him. Also, he believes that it will be a blow for Ireland but I can make nothing of that.’

ONCE THE TRIAL was over, it was clear to Gosse that Wilde, if he did not flee, would be arrested. As each hour went by, since the police knew where he was, his being charged with indecency and worse was more and more likely, with witnesses appearing from the sewers of London, Gosse said.

‘There is a list, as I told you, and there is great fear in the city and a great determination on the government’s side, I am told with some authority, that rampant indecency will be stamped out. I fear there will be other arrests. I have heard names. It is rather shocking.’

Henry studied Gosse and paid attention to his tone. Suddenly, his old friend had become a rabid supporter of the stamping out of indecency. He wished there were someone French in the room to calm Gosse down, his friend having joined forces, apparently, with the English public in one of their moments of self-righteousness. He wanted to warn him that this would not help his prose style.

‘Perhaps a period of solitary confinement will help Wilde,’ Henry said. ‘But not the martyrdom. One would wish that on no one.’

‘Apparently, the Cabinet has discussed the list,’ Gosse went on. ‘The police, it seems, have already questioned people and many have been advised to cross the channel. And I believe that many are crossing as we speak.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘and besides the moral climate I think they will find the diet rather better over there too.’

‘It is unclear who is under suspicion, but there are many rumours and suggestions,’ Gosse continued.

Henry noticed Gosse watching him.

‘It is advised, I think, that anyone who has been, as it were, compromised should arrange to travel as soon as possible. London is a large city and much can go on here quietly and secretly, but now the secrecy has been shattered.’

Henry stood up and went to the bookcase between the windows and studied the books.

‘I wondered if you, if perhaps…’ Gosse began.

‘No.’ Henry turned sharply. ‘You do not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about.’

‘Well that is a relief, if I may say so,’ Gosse said quietly, standing up.

‘Is that what you came here to ask?’ Henry kept his eyes fixed on Gosse, his gaze direct and hostile enough to prevent any reply.

STURGES CONTINUED to visit in the period leading up to Wilde’s trial, when Wilde was in custody and all possibility of going to France had faded.

‘His mother, I am told, is jubilant,’ Sturges said. ‘She believes he has delivered a great blow against the Empire.’

‘It is difficult to imagine him having a mother,’ Henry said.

Henry asked his two visitors and anybody else whom he saw in these weeks if they knew anything about Wilde’s two golden children whose very name was disgraced for ever. It was Gosse who came with the news.

‘Although he is bankrupt, his wife is not. She has her own money and has moved to Switzerland, as far as I know. And she has changed her name and that of her sons. They no longer bear their father’s name.’

‘Did she know about her husband before the trial?’ Henry asked.

‘No, I understand that she did not. It has been an enormous shock to her.’

‘And what do the boys know?’

‘I cannot tell you that. I have not heard,’ Gosse said.

For days he thought about them, watchful, beautiful creatures in a country where they could not understand a word of the language, their very names obliterated, their father responsible for some dark, nameless crime. He thought of them in some turreted Swiss apartment house in high rooms with a view of the lake, their nurse refusing to explain why they had come all this way, why there was so much silence, why their mother kept apart from them and then suddenly came close to them as though they were in danger. He thought of how little they would need to say to each other about the demons that were around them, their new name, their great isolation, the upheaval which had resulted in their spending days alone together in those cold rooms, as though waiting for a catastrophe to unfold, their father a ghostly memory, standing smiling at them on the bare half-lit landing as they climbed the staircase, beckoning in the shadows.

WHEN WILDE had been sentenced and the scandal surrounding London ’s dark underworld had died down, Henry’s relationship with Edmund Gosse returned to what it had been, as Gosse himself underwent a restoration of his old self. Immediately after Wilde was imprisoned, Gosse ceased to sound like a member of the House of Lords.

One afternoon, as they sat in Henry’s study drinking tea, an old subject of theirs, which had been much on Henry’s mind, arose. The subject was John Addington Symonds, a friend and correspondent of Gosse, who had died two years earlier. Of all the people, Henry said, who would have been fascinated by every moment of the Wilde case, surely JAS, as he called him, would have been the most intrigued. It would almost have made him come back to England.

‘He would have loathed Wilde, of course,’ Gosse said, ‘the vulgarity and the filth.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said patiently, ‘but he would have been captured by what came into the open.’

Symonds had lived mainly in Italy and had written with great, perhaps too great sensuousness about the landscape and the art and the architecture. He became a connoisseur of Italian light and colour, but he also became an expert on another more dangerous matter, what he called a problem in Greek ethics, the love between two men.

Ten years earlier, Henry and Gosse had discussed Symonds as avidly as they discussed Wilde during the trial. This was when Gosse moved less freely among the powerful, and there had been a tacit understanding between them that these preoccupations of Symonds mattered to both of them personally, an understanding which had lessened as the years passed.

Throughout the 1880s Symonds, writing from Italy, made no secret of his own leanings. He wrote explicit letters to all his friends and many who were not his friends. He sent his book on the matter to those in England whom he thought might initiate a debate. Many who received the book were infuriated and embarrassed. Symonds wanted it brought into the light, discussed openly, and this, Henry remarked to Gosse at the time, was a sign of how long he had been out of England, how many years he had been basking in Italian sunshine. Gosse was interested in public life and wished to discuss the implications of what Symonds was saying for legislation or public attitudes. Henry, on the other hand, became fascinated by Symonds. By this time Henry had received several letters from Symonds about Italy, and had by chance, several years before, sat beside Symonds’s wife at dinner. He remembered her as mostly silent, quite dull, and he failed to recollect, when he became interested in her case, a single word she had said.

Yet he brought away a sense of her, as someone with fixed opinions, hardened attitudes, and as Gosse continued to tell him more about Symonds, Henry began to work his imagination on Mrs Symonds, as though he were a portrait painter. She was, Gosse said, in no sort of sympathy with what her husband wrote, she disapproved of his tone when he wrote about Italy, the hyper-aesthetic manner he had developed appalled her, and then she loathed his entire concern with love between men. She was, to start with, Gosse said, of a narrow, cold, Calvinistic disposition, as morbid in her search for moral purpose as her husband was in search of ultimate beauty. One of them, Gosse said, seemed to aggravate the other so that as time went by Mrs Symonds increasingly craved the sackcloth while her husband longed for Greek love.

Gosse spoke idly of the Symondses and did not realize how Henry was taking this in. The story came to Henry, in any case, so quickly and easily that he did not have time to tell Gosse. He set to work.

What if such a couple had a child, a boy, impressionable, intelligent, alert to the world around him and deeply loved by both his parents? How would the child be educated? How would the child be taught to look at life? He listened to Gosse and asked questions and from the answers began to construct his story. His first ideas emerged later as too stark and so he abandoned the ambitions of the parents for their son – one wanting the child to serve the Church, the other, the father, wanting the child to become an artist. Instead he dramatized the idea that the mother merely wanted to save her son’s soul, and in order to do so she needed to protect him from his father’s writings.

He wondered at first if he should allow the child to grow up a lout and an ignoramus, as far away as possible from his mother’s hopes and his father’s ambitions. But as he worked, alone, away from Gosse’s conversation, he decided to deal only with the boy, and to make the time frame of the story short and dramatic. And he would bring in an outsider, an American, an admirer of the father’s work, one of the few who understood the father’s true genius. The father, he thought, could be a poet or a novelist or both. The American is very kindly received, he remains near the family for some weeks, weeks which coincide with the child’s illness and death. The American understands something which the father does not know – that during the night, as the child lay ill, his mother made up her mind secretly that it were better he should die, and she watched him sink, holding his hand, but doing nothing, allowing him for very tenderness to fade away. The American never imparts this information to the author he so much admires.

Henry wrote down the bones of the story one night after Gosse had departed and then worked steadily, daily. He knew that it would take prodigious delicacy of touch, and even then would probably be too gruesome and unnatural. Nonetheless, the story intrigued him, and he thought he would try it, for the general idea, corruption and Puritanism and innocence, was also full of interest and typical of certain modern situations.

Gosse, he remembered, had been frightened by the appearance of the story in the pages of the English Illustrated magazine. Most people would recognize the Symondses, he said, and those who did not would imagine that the subject was Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry told him that the story was now written and published; it did not cost him a thought who recognized themselves or others. Gosse remained nervous, knowing how much he had contributed. He insisted that writing a story using factual material and real people was dishonest and strange and somehow underhand. Henry refused to listen to him. In retaliation, Gosse began to refrain from providing him with his usual store of gossip. Soon, however, his friend forgot his objections to the art of fiction as a cheap raid on the real and the true, and began once more to tell Henry all the news he had picked up since their last meeting.

As Sturges told Henry that Wilde’s wife had travelled from Switzerland to tell her prisoner husband personally of his mother’s death, he mused once more on the fate of the children of a union between two opposing forces. He pictured himself and William at the window of the Hôtel de l’Ecu in Geneva when he was twelve and William thirteen and their time in Switzerland seemed to him an eternity of woe: infinite hours of dullness, the dingy streets, the courtyards and alleys black with age. He imagined Oscar Wilde’s two sons, their names changed and their fate uncertain, watching from a window as their mother departed. He wondered what they feared most now when night came down, two frightened children in the unforgiving city, its shadows steep and sombre, half knowing why their mother had left them in the care of servants and haunted by unnamed fears and barely grasped knowledge and the memory of their evil father who had been shut away.