Oscar Wilde Blows It (1894)

At the breakfast table on this day, Oscar Wilde opened the newspaper and destroyed his life.

After a disastrous stay at a seaside hotel in Brighton, he had decided to break up with his beloved Bosie, aka Lord Alfred Douglas, the slender Oxford student with the perfect pale skin and blond hair. Douglas was charming, but also a spendthrift and spoilt, and the brilliant wit, poet and playwright had been besotted with the lad for three years.

In addition to the strains over Bosie’s bad behavior, the relationship was threatened by his father. John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquis of Queensberry, may have given his name to the rules of boxing, but he was not a fan of fair play and sportsmanship. He was rough and crude and every bit as iconoclastic as Wilde, raging publicly against Christianity and alienating himself from his fellow aristocrats. He supported his sons financially, but got along with them like cats in a bag. He objected to Bosie being seen with Wilde, and Bosie, in return, went out of his way to flaunt the relationship.

Matters came to a head in 1894 when Queensberry began haunting Wilde’s favorite public places in an attempt to create a scandal. In June, he showed up at Wilde’s Tite Street house with a boxer as bodyguard and, as Wilde wrote, “stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of, and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried out.”

But it was Douglas’ behavior during their hotel stay that caused the break. Wilde had spent the summer with his family at Wrothing, working on his latest play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” playing with his sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, and enjoying the company of his wife, Constance. Bosie joined the family in October, but tensions between he and Constance were too great and she packed up the children and returned to London.

Wilde and Bosie took rooms at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Bosie caught influenza and spent the week in bed with Wilde devotedly nursing him.

But when Wilde fell ill, Bosie was revolted by Wilde’s coughing and fever and left him alone to suffer, coming back only to demand money. When Wilde was unable to go out at night, Bosie threw a violent fit that scared Wilde. Bosie concluded this bout of bad behavior by moving out, and sending a taunting letter from London: “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.”

Enough was enough. “Need I tell you . . . that I recognized that the ultimate moment had come, and recognized it as being really a great relief? And that I knew that for the future my Art and Life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way? Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was irrevocable gave me peace.”

But at breakfast, Wilde read in the newspaper that Queensberry’s eldest son and heir, Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig, had been found dead in a ditch with his shotgun beside him. It was, Wilde wrote to a friend, “the first noble sorrow” of Bosie’s life.

” . . . the wings of the angel of Death have almost touched him: their purple shadow lies across his way, for the moment: I am perforce the sharer of his pain.”

He telegraphed to Bosie that all was forgiven. “My own griefs and bitternesses against you I forgot. What you had been to me in my sickness, I could not be to you in your bereavement.” Bosie and Wilde were together again.

That alone was enough to enrage Queensberry, but his son’s death turned irrevocable his decision to see Wilde destroyed. Rumors had floated about that Francis’ death was not an accident, but suicide. The viscount had been having an affair with his friend and patron, the prime minister, Lord Rosebery. A furious Queensberry had found evidence of the liason and threatened Rosebery with exposure. Although a jury had ruled the death a hunting accident, there was no doubt that Drumlanrig had killed himself to protect his lover.

Queensberry set out to destroy Wilde. He appeared at the opening night of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” with a bouquet of carrots and cucumbers to present to the playwright. But Wilde was warned and hired police officers to keep Queensberry away. Four days later, Queensberry left his card at Wilde’s club, accusing him of “posing as Sodomite.”

Goaded by Bosie, who offered to pay all legal expenses, Wilde sued for libel, but lost when Queensberry produced witnesses who testified that Wilde had not been posing as a sodomite with them. Wilde was convicted of homosexuality and sentenced to two years in prison. On his release in 1896, he was broke in spirit and bankrupt, estranged from his wife and children and his reputation smeared. He died in exile in Paris in 1900.

“The gods are strange,” Wilde wrote from jail, “It is not of our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.”

Born today: Thomas Browne, physician, scholar, author, London, 1605; Leigh Hunt, poet, essayist, critic, Southgate, Middlesex, 1784; Adam Gordon, poet, Faial, Azores Port, 1833; Lewis Mumford, historian, urban planner, architect, critic, Flushing, N.Y., 1895; Miguel Ángel Asturias, poet, novelist, diarist, Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1899; Jack Anderson, journalist, Long Beach, Calif., 1922; John LeCarré (ps. David Cornwell), spy, novelist, Poole, England, 1931; Philip Pullman, children’s author, Norwich, England, 1946.

Died: Thomas Browne, physician, scholar, author, Norwich, Norfolk, 1682; Jonathan Swift, essayist, author, Dublin, 1745; Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet, Austerlitz, N.Y., 1950; Penelope Mortimer, novelist, London, 1999.

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