Oscar Wilde's Last Stand

Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century

Philip Hoare

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781628727630
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year that Sir Ian McKellen called "a shocking tale of heroes and villains—illuminating and upsetting in equal measure." The first production of Oscar Wilde's Salomé in 1918, with American exotic dancer Maud Allan dancing lead, ignited a firestorm in London spearheaded by Noel Pemberton Billing, a member of Parliament and self-appointed guardian of family values. Billing attacked Allan in the right-wing newspaper Vigilante as a member of the "Cult of the Clitoris, " a feminine version of the "Cult of the Wilde, " a catchall for the degeneracy and perversion he was convinced had infected the land. He claimed that a black book was in the hands of their enemies the Germans, a book that contained the names of thousands of the British establishment who without doubt were members of the cult. Threat of exposure was costing England the war.Allan sued Billing for libel, and the ensuing trial, brought to life in this authoritative, spellbinding book, held the world in thrall. Was there or was there not a black book? What names did it contain? The trial was both hugely entertaining and deadly serious and raised specters of hysteria, homophobia, and paranoia that, like Oscar Wilde himself, continue to haunt us. As in Wilde's own trial in 1895, libel was hardly the issue; the fight was for control over the country's moral compass. In Oscar Wilde's Last Stand, biographer and historian Philip Hoare gives us the full drama of the Billing trial, gavel to gavel, and brings to life this unique, bizarre, and fascinating event.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

1

The Cult of Wilde

In the days before the war there was growing in London, beyond any sort of question, that passion for excitement and for the latest novelty which is always the familiar beginning of a corrupt society … If one of the consequences of the Billing case is to give new value to the ancient virtues … then there may be some compensation after all for the work of a scandalous week.

The Times, 5 June 1918

The moral condition of the country was worrying. That much was clear to the respectable middle-class woman in her fur wrap and picture hat as she hurried along the Strand. Above the hoardings plastered with advertisements for the latest Olympia exhibition, the new six-hour boat to France, and the sensational Miss Maud Allan’s Salome dance at the Pavilion, rose the facade of the British Medical Association. Adorned with Mr Epstein’s stridently modern nude statues, their nether regions alarmingly explicit, this was not a sight for a decent lady. Modern London had become a strange place. Up in Regent Street young men wearing tight suits and nail varnish were sipping creme de menthe in the Café Royal, while down a dark cul-de-sac lurked a new and devilish sort of place where Futurists cavorted: a ‘night club’ profanely named ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’. Vague rumours had reached her that nowadays, the backstreets harboured all manner of such places, attended by members of the social elite. Such intimations confirmed all the suspicions of her class. At the root of these evils lay the name of Oscar Wilde, still unspoken in polite households. He may have been dead for more than a decade, but Wilde’s decadence endured.

To the tabloid-reading middle class, for whom morality was paramount, the country needed saving, and the puritans and patriots of 1914 looked to the war to purge the country of this foreign influence. As Stephen McKenna’s 1917 best-seller, Sonia, would remind them, pre-war Britain

... was a matter for considerable searching of heart. A spirit of unrest and lawlessness, a neurotic state not to be disassociated from the hectic, long-drawn Carnival that … may be traced from the summer of the Coronation [1911]. It is too early to probe the cause or say how far the staggering ostentation of the wealthy fomented the sullen disaffection of the poor. It is as yet impossible to weigh the merits in any one of the hysterical controversies of the times ...

The first decades of the new century were an uncertain time. The violent struggle for Irish Home Rule, trade union disputes and the clamour of the Suffragette movement all threatened the ‘ostensibly law-abiding country’. Many agreed with McKenna that the cause might be the sudden boom after ten years’ post-Boer War depression:

The new money was spent in so much riotous living, and from end to end there settled on the country a mood of fretful, crapulous irritation. ‘An unpopular law? Disregard it!’ That seemed the rule of life with a people that had no object but successive pleasure and excitement and was fast becoming a law unto itself.

This was a new, modern world of aviation, wireless, automobiles and tabloid newspapers. Technology was reinventing society and the way people lived; soon it would revolutionise the way they died. In 1912 – the year of Epstein’s BMA facade, of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionism show, of Madame Strindberg’s Futurist cabaret club – the sinking of the Titanic was a vivid reminder of the speed of progress, and the dangers of placing too much faith in it. While some, like the aesthetic demagogue Marinetti and his Futurist rhetoric, celebrated the machine age, others felt more unsure. Much of the frenzy and apparent dissipation of the young century derived from the inconstancy of modern life and a new-born fear of the technological future. The world was no longer the stable place of the stolid nineteenth century, and no one could be sure of anything any more, not even the rich. The Edwardian era had seen the increasing visibility of the aristocracy, its wealth and privilege on display in the Season, spending the money that the generations of the Industrial Age had earned. It was, however, a last flowering. By 1914, they were rapidly losing their power. Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Liberal government, had campaigned against the power of the House of Lords, and the so-called ‘Peers versus People’ election of 1910 returned a mandate for the Liberals’ reforms. Ironically, it was the Liberal establishment, led by H.H. Asquith, which Billing would accuse of decadence.

Political Liberalism was symptomatic of a general liberality; socially and culturally, a libertine spirit reigned in the houses of the rich and fashionable. ‘Night by night, during the summers of 1913 and ’14, the entertainments grew in number and magnificence,’ wrote Osbert Sitwell. ‘One band in a house was no longer enough, there must be two, three even. Electric fans whirled on the top of enormous blocks of ice, buried in banks of hydrangeas … Never had there been such displays of flowers … lolling roses and malmaisons, of gilded, musical-comedy baskets of carnations and sweet-peas … huge bunches of orchids, bowls of gardenias and flat trays of stephanotis lent … an air of exoticism … mounds of peaches, figs, nectarines and strawberries at all seasons, [were] brought from their steamy tents of glass. Champagne bottles stood stacked on the sideboards … And to the rich, the show was free.’ Their London was enclosed in extravagance; sheltered from reality by the glass verandahs of Park Lane mansions, the pink-and-gold Ritz foyer, the marble cavern of the Royal Automobile Club swimming baths. Opulent Edwardian interiors reflected the overblown age, self-secure in its imperial evocation. While pessimists murmured that the ‘historic calm’ was too good to last and rumours of war were discussed in the salons of the rich or sung in the music halls, a degree of disbelieving fantasy or devil-may-care hedonism reigned. Morality was the preserve – literally – of the middle classes; those at either end of the social scale were not obsessed with the moral glue that gave a new class its sense of cohesion. The rich could afford to flaunt old conventions, and seemed to be dancing on the edge of doom. Even the slang of the time – ‘Isn’t it killing’ – had an inbuilt and not entirely unconscious irony. The Titanic may have been a portent of disaster; but the dance went on.

Its backdrop was provided by modern art: Walter Sickert’s dark chiaroscuro paintings with their vague sense of evil; the perfervid sick colours of Leon Bakst’s designs for the Russian Ballet; Nijinsky’s narcissistic sexuality, falling onanistically to the floor in the closing scene of L’Après-midi d’un faune. Fashions, entertainments, manners still followed the decadent cue of the Nineties, a search for neurotic sensation. A foreign, European spirit invaded London. Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionism show at the Grafton Galleries in 1912 had caused consternation, with its modern art from the Continent likened to that of lunatics. The new -isms espoused by rebellious young artists – Cubism, Orphism, Vorticism – were intimidatingly different, while the lavish gestures of the Russian Ballet heralded another escape from the Victorian century. The influence of Diaghilev – almost impossible to exaggerate – was at its height at the beginning of 1914. Harold Acton wrote: ‘The great galas of colour organised by Diaghileff were being imitated even in private entertainments: fancy-dress balls and tableaux vivants became sumptuous and spectacular to a degree unrealised since … “Persian” balls … Venetian, Egyptian and Russian balls, with pierrots and black dominoes... In some cases, as for the Marchesa Casati, Bakst himself designed the costumes.’ Fabulously beautiful, attenuated, white-faced and kohl-eyed, Casati was a Beardsley illustration come to life, the visual embodiment and extremity of decadence, surrounded by ‘albino blackbirds, mauve monkeys, a leopard, a boa constrictor, and, among Englishmen, Lord Berners ...’.

The Marchesa would have been at home in the newly-decorated rooms of Lady Drogheda, commissioned from the Omega apostate Wyndham Lewis. Silver-foil ceilings and matt black velvet walls were bordered by a Vorticist frieze; blue glass witch-balls stood on columns in the centre of the room; all bathed in the unnatural glow of yellow alabaster lamps. The effect was cultish and pagan, a room set for a seance; its tenant, like many society ladies of the time, dabbled in the occult. Guests invited to view the rooms in February 1914 included Mrs Keppel, Baroness d’Erlanger, Lady Ponsonby, Jacob Epstein, Sir Ernest Cassel, Augustus John, and Wyndham Lewis himself, subject of whispered rumours about his relationship with their hostess. The rebel artist, with his centre-parted hair, dark eyes and cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, shared with Lady Drogheda a passion for technology, aviation, speed and sensation. The spirit of modernity was upon their age; for Wyndham Lewis, identifier of ‘the enemy within’ whose art protest magazine, Blast, appeared that summer, war was ‘anticipated in the militant mood of the avant-garde’. In July 1914, he declared his own hostilities: ‘Kill John Bull with Art.’

For socialite bohemians such as Diana Manners, famously beautiful daughter of the Duke of Rutland, and her aristocratic friends this rebellious modernity was a clarion call. Their generation were the daughters and sons of Empire, end products of a century’s history. Anthony Powell’s classification of the ‘third generation type’ applies as much to them as to its subject, Ronald Firbank, last in ‘that trio of descending individuals in which the grandfather makes the money, the son consolidates the social position, the grandson practises the arts (or sometimes merely patronises them) in some “decadent” manner, thus expressing the still-existent, yet by now failing and feverish energy that suddenly, unexpectedly, welled up in the race.’ They were also, crucially, the heirs of Oscar Wilde, modern icon and exemplar for their age. Diana Manners’ account of her ‘Corrupt Coterie’ is consciously Wildean, flagrantly toying with convention. ‘There was among us a reverberation of the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Baudelaire and Max Beerbohm. Swinburne often got recited. Our pride was to be unafraid of words, unshocked by drink and unashamed of “decadence” and gambling – Unlike-Other-People, I’m afraid.’

The spirit of Wilde seemed invested in this society; to outsiders, it was tainted with it. Members of Asquith’s Liberal society had been, and continued to be, associated with Wilde, the avant-garde, and the foreign. They spoke French, holidayed in Venice and had German friends – as a de Meyer photograph of Diana in a fancy dress group with Kuhlmann, the Counseller to the German Embassy firmly at its centre, confirms. The social elite of 1914 mixed with the likes of Kuhlman and rich German Jews like Sir Edgar Speyer and his American musician wife. The Asquiths were specifically pro-German, as were their friends: the Bavarian-educated Lord Haldane, Asquith’s best friend and Foreign Secretary, had in 1912 visited Berlin in an abortive attempt to defuse antipathy between the two countries. Yet the sons of this group, Diana’s young beaux, were among the first to die in the dirt of the trenches: the Tennants, the Charterises, the Grenfells, doomed members of the Corrupt Coterie. Serving officers such as Raymond Asquith (the Prime Minister’s son, with whom Diana was hopelessly in love) and Duff Cooper (whom she would eventually marry) were often the first over the top: ‘Our generation becomes history rather than growing up’, wrote Cooper. These golden youth were exemplars of Aryan Britishness (many, like Diana, were unconsciously anti-semitic, or, in the case of the Grenfell brothers, actively so). Their male role models were the pre-war dandies: Raffles, Sherlock Holmes, Anthony Hope’s ‘charmingly bored young men’, A.E. Housman’s ‘handsome young men in uniform’, and the smart-talking wits of Saki’s epicene stories. These young men looked forward to an abbreviated future: ‘... I really think that large numbers of people don’t want to die ...’ wrote Rupert Brooke, ‘which is odd … I’ve never been quite so happy in my life’. Where the decadents of the 1890s had celebrated romantic death, their modern inheritors faced the reality. The mauve opium poppy of Chelsea became the blood-red corn poppy of Flanders.

*

With the outbreak of war in August 1914, life turned upside-down. Diana Manners became a V.A.D. at Guy’s Hospital. It was a schizophrenic life: dealing by day in death and disease, while at night, ‘I would fly out of the ward … Five minutes would see me painted and powdered and dressed (as I hoped) to kill, and into the arms of friends or friend.’ They held parties dubbed the ‘Dances of Death’. War turned the make-believe decadence of the Corrupt Coterie into the real thing. ‘The young were dancing a tarantella frenziedly to combat any pause that would let death conquer their morale … Wine helped and there was wine in plenty ...’ Parties ‘became more frequent as leave became regular from the training centres and the trenches of France and the Middle East ...’ It was, perhaps, the beginnings of youth culture: ‘Parents were excluded. We dined at any time. The long waits for the last-comers were enlivened by exciting, unusual drinks such as vodka or absinthe. The menu was composed of far-fetched American delicacies – avocadoes, terrapin and soft-shell crabs. The table was purple with orchids.’ It was a stark contrast to the ordinary lives around them; lives which had no access to American delicacies to assuage the pain of war and loss. ‘The dancing, sometimes to two bands, negro and white (and once to the first Hawaiian), so that there might be no pause, started immediately before dinner.’ Such nights presaged the dance-mad decade of the 1920s.

Their hedonism was not confined to private parties. In 1912, Madame Strindberg, the sexually-liberated former wife of the playwright, decided to create an alternative to the Wildean Café Royal. Taking her cue from Marinetti’s Futurist performance art rhetoric and the Kaberett Fledermaus of her native Vienna, she leased a draper’s basement in Heddon Street, a cul-de-sac behind Regent Street, and created the Cave of the Golden Calf. This ‘low-ceilinged nightclub, appropriately sunk under the pavement’, was decorated by Spencer Gore in Russian Ballet-inspired murals, with contributions by Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis; Eric Gill designed the club’s motif, a phallic Golden Calf, symbol of biblical dissipation and idolatry. Here the cult of Wilde could continue to worship. The club’s self-advertised aim was to be ‘a place given up to gaiety’, its art-subversive interiors ‘brazenly expressive of the libertarian pleasure-principle ...’ It was intentionally international and unEnglish, full of modern young artists and poets like Gaudier-Brzeska and Ezra Pound with their quiffed hair and razor-point sideboards, sipping anisette as they watched the Spanish dancers and fire-eaters. Osbert Sitwell witnessed bohemian artists drinking with Guards officers in a ‘super-heated Vorticist garden of gesticulating figures, dancing and talking while the rhythm of the primitive forms of ragtime throbbed through the wide room’. ‘Exotic gentlemen sang ballads,’ noted another observer. ‘A young actor with a beautiful voice recited Wilde’s story of “The Happy Prince”. Then a lank-haired, aquiline-featured youth with a Cockney accent strolled nonchalantly on to the stage and delivered a serio-comic homily on the Cave of the Golden Calf, its objects and reasons. He made very personal references to all the protagonists in this enterprise, not forgetting to remind his audience that Gore’s uncle was a bishop.’

The Cave of the Golden Calf set the precedent for the modern night-club. ‘London is in the midst of another new movement,’ the Sketch announced in January 1914. ‘It is evident she desires to keep later hours … Hence the fact that there have risen three Supper Clubs … the Four Hundred, Murray’s, and the Lotus … At all the clubs of course, members may sup as they please.’ And more than just sup: ‘A very bad fellow, Jack Mays, is the proprietor of “Murray’s Club” in Beak Street – quite an amusing place,’ wrote one Captain Ernest Schiff to Sir John Simon. ‘But for vice or money or both he induces girls to smoke opium in some foul place. He is an American, and does a good deal of harm.’

It was a startling new environment. First to strike a visitor was the raucous music: strident jerking jazz, faster than anything that had gone before; it was the sound of speed. Yet more striking were the dancers: thin young women, diaphanous short skirts showing their legs, their heads crowned with iridescent feathers twitching in time to the music. To those used to Strauss waltzes, these ‘flappers’ seemed to be suffering from some new nervous disorder. This was dancing from the hip – as one visiting French diplomat remarked, never had the derrière been so prominent on the dancefloor. Girls made up in public, their encardined lips pursed in contemptuous social flagrancy, sipping newly-invented cocktails and smoking Turkish cigarettes held in languid hands, ostentatiously modern against a Futurist backdrop...