Poetry Book Society

When Henry James decided that he might politely call on a young Irish poet in Washington DC, he had no idea he was about to embed a lifelong thorn in his side.

The year was 1882. Wilde was 26; his American lecture tour was funded by D'Oyly Carte, to create an audience for Aestheticism (and operettas). The great transatlantic novelist paid his call:

then with the small talk: nostalgia on the one hand
for London. The other: really? You care for places?
Dublin-made-Oxford drawls: the world is my home.

The line was drawn. Name-dropping ensued. According to Richard Ellman: "By the end of the interview James was raging".  James' letters - "...and found there [at a party] the repulsive & fatuous Oscar Wilde, whom, I am happy to say, no one was looking at" - betray a strength of feeling slightly out of scale with the offence.
In this gap lies our story. Because Wilde and James were never able to leave each other alone.

Wilde went on to become his glorious Technicolor self, in society drawing rooms, the Café Royal, and the back alleys of homosexual London. James dressed soberly, was known for his discernment, and was a master of decorum. Where Wilde's fashionably outrageous farces drew crowds of theatre-goers, James' novels - acknowledged as great - sold modestly. They seem to occupy different worlds, one in yellow kerchiefs and knee-breeches, and one in black trousers.

When Henry went to live in Rye,
Who did he kiss when he said goodbye?
Mufflers muffle, shawls protect,
And Masters must be circumspect.

Tailoring like a tender shell
Held his heart in very well.
He felt the sea, he watched the sky.
Who did he kiss when he'd said goodbye?

But, as writers and artists know, appearances deceive. James and Wilde were very much inhabitants, and products, of the same milieu. For one thing, they knew all the same countesses. For another, they were both - probably - though only one of them avowedly - homosexual: that is, illegal, blackmailable, vulnerable, and thus inextricably connected.

The playing field is never level
in the playground of the devil.

Wilde, filled with a sense of position, took ever greater risks. James was so punctilious that no one is even sure whether he died a virgin. There are theories about this person or that one, but there's nothing you can pin on Henry James. He withdrew from Wilde in horror. But the point is that he had to withdraw; the starting point was association.

The third, and just as important, way in which they shared their world was artistic. They wrote entirely differently, but about the same people, and the same aesthetic and social concerns. They occupied the same literary habitat, knew everybody, and had their own interlocking and overlapping feuds. They represented different aspects of the Aesthetic movement: indeed, they embodied different philosophical rationales for it.

As James wrote in The Turn of the Screw:

We were too far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our straight mutual stare.

There was envy on both sides. James was needled by Wilde's frivolity and success, and Wilde wanted James' gravitas. (His admiration was critical, though: he remarked that James wrote fiction "as if it were a painful duty". Of The Turn of the Screw, in 1899, he wrote: "I am very impressed. James is developing, but he will never arrive at passion, I fear".)

In 1899 of course Wilde's worst ordeal was past, and he was in France,

having finally learned to do without the frills,
having learned at last that almost everything is frills...

By then he really knew who his friends were. James always said he wasn't Wilde's friend - once, famously, when refusing to sign a petition for his release. But he had sponsored him for the Savile Club. He buttonholed an MP about the ‘Wilde case', and his horror was visceral. During Wilde's trial he wrote to Edmund Gosse of the "little beasts of witnesses. What a nest of almost infant blackmailers!"

For all his refusal of friendship, James took a continuing interest in the Wilde - now Holland - family after the death of their father (and mother; Constance died first). In 1907 he was "one of only 11 guests at a twenty-first birthday dinner for Wilde's youngest son, Vyvyan" - a fact that brought sudden tears to my eyes when I first learned it.

This is the barest-bones account of two writers who now seem as intimately part of each other as they are indispensable. My own sense of their entanglement has been growing for years, and a recent academic book assured me I wasn't dreaming - though it feels like dreaming, it's going on so deep inside my brain. I'm still not sure what it's really about, but I do know that these two characters are embedded in my psyche, and their story has all the power of myth for me.

Despite the usual line that the high Victorians made Modernism necessary, I think both of these men helped to make the modern world possible. Their story, and stories, have resulted in a small pamphlet of poems. It's not a straight narrative; it can't even be a narrative poem. The only way to tell it, I think, is as a glittering prism. There's a collection in there waiting to get out.

 

 

Katy Evans-Bush is the author of Me and the Dead (Salt, 2008) and Oscar & Henry (Rack Press, 2010). She edits the online magazine Horizon Review, blogs at Baroque in Hackney, and will be running a course on poetic technique at the Poetry School in 2010-11.