Mrs Wilde
Peter Ackroyd
The Importance of Being Constance Joyce Bentley (Robert Hale £8.75)
For almost a century Mrs Oscar Wilde
has remained precisely that: only the s, of her title prevents a total absorption in the name and personality of that man who, as one contemporary remarked, looked 'like a Roman emperor carved out of suet'. The characteristic description of her, in part created by Wilde's more catty friends, is of a demure but unimaginative woman, with i
little sensitivity and even less wit, whose in- comprehension and philistinism helped to drive Wilde onto the streets. She has become, as Joyce Bentley puts it here, history's fall girl' (although Wilde might have taken the phrase for himself). The Picture we have of her is an unfair one, and Joyce Bentley has decided to redress the balance. But the unfairness of that picture stems in part from its vagueness — many letters have been destroyed, in the general holocaust of guilt which followed Wilde's imprisonment — and, in the absence of reliable documentary evidence, Constance's first biographer has attempted a most imaginative reconstruction. If there which .facts, we must rely upon fancy — h, in so melodramatic a life, is perhaps as reliable a guide as any.
What we do know, and what Joyce Bentley has discovered, about Constance certainly contradicts the impression of the taciturn and malleable wife of Wildean legend. Even before her marriage she was not inexperienced in the ways of scandal and concealment: the Holland family, from which she sprang, had almost as good a record in that area as the Wildes. Her grandfather exposed himself in Temple Gardens; her father was a gambler and wastrel. Her mother was worse — she was a bore: 'a young lady of considerable ac- complishment', Joyce Bentley says in what I take to be a humorous spirit, 'though in what it is not clear'.
It was partly to get away from such hor- rors that Constance attached herself to two most extraordinary women — Lady Mount Temple, whose statue adorns a drinking fountain near her house, and the Ranee, Lady Brooke who was a luminary of what Joyce Bentley calls the 'Borneo Scene': 'There was nothing feminine about Margaret'. Both of these forbidding old parties were fond of parrots (indeed, a par- rot graces Lady Mount Temple's wrist on the drinking fountain), but they were also women of considerable energy and wit; as Joyce Bentley suggests, they were not the types to suffer fools gladly and, to maintain their friendship, Constance could hardly have been the wimp which Wilde's biographers have often assumed her to be. Joyce Bentley describes her, in fact, as something of a wit; she did not always laugh at her husband's little quips because `she had probably heard them so often that they no longer amused her'. And she was also a rather clever woman, we are told she wrote articles on Rational Dress and reached the Senior Philosopher's grade in the Order of the Golden Dawn (perhaps she had no sense of the ridiculous, which would explain everything).
For those who are more interested in Mrs Wilde's husband, the portrait of him as a young and rampant heterosexual — a sex- uality fully and indeed hotly reciprocated by Constance — may still come as something of a surprise. They remember Kraft-Ebbing, and forget human nature. Joyce Bentley is, perhaps understandably, veiled about the nature of Wilde's later sins, allowing herself only the luxury of describing Constance's thoughts on the subject: 'she spent many a sleepless night wondering why he was avoiding making love to her'. Joyce Bentley subscribes to the old theory that Wilde had contracted syphilis from a female prostitute while at Oxford (for which there is not a scrap of evidence), and then goes one further by describing the scene in which he confesses his malady to his wife. Afterwards, however, 'he went out of his way to pay her extra little attentions, which he knew would make her feel like a goddess'.
I am not convinced; biographical inter- pretation, however, does demand certain novelistic tricks and we may forgive Joyce Bentley's occasional caprices. She is herself rather stern with previous biographers notably in their treatment of Constance —
but she ought, I think, to have followed some of the more conventional habits of that genre and, for example, given sources for her innumerable quotations from memoirs and letters (and, indeed, conversa- tions). This is not to suggest that she has failed in her research: for reasons of my own, I once steeped myself in Wildeana but this biography contains material which I have never encountered before.
She also evokes very well, by guess and by intimation, the pain and isolation of Constance's life from the mid-Nineties, im- mediately after Wilde's arrest. The fear of scandal prevented any firm action on her part, just as the nature of the terrible rumours surrounding her husband's life im- posed a peculiar form of silence between them. That, at least, is Joyce Bentley's in- terpretation and it is a perfectly sound one. The evidence available could, however, sug- gest a different one: she appeared with both her husband and Lord Alfred Douglas after the charges had been made public, and she borrowed money from her relatives in order to pay for the trial. It is possible that she had known all along about Wilde's sexual indiscretions, and that she had countenan- ced them. But this is speculation merely.
Joyce Bentley does give a most convinc- ing and poignant account of Constance Wilde's life after her husband's arrest how she was 'cut' by her acquaintances, and how abuse was hurled at her on the streets of the city. Since rumours of the scandal had already reached the schools which her sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, attend- ed, they were taken out of the country and placed in the care of a most incompetent governess. Eventually she joined them, and while her husband was serving his prison sentence, the three of them became the itinerants of Europe. The two boys conceal- ed their real identity (she had given them the surname of Holland now), but were ex- pelled from two German schools because of their aggressive behaviour — they were frightened, and fought back against the world. Constance herself was suffering from creeping paralysis contracted after a fall but provoked in part, I suspect, by the unhappiness and pain which her husband had inflicted upon her. The photographs of her when young show an intelligent woman, attractive rather than beautiful but with a remarkable serenity of expression; in her later photographs, she looks worn and haunted.
She died in 1898 (two years before her husband); she was only 40 years old. It is clear from her letters that she knew her death was coming, and I believe she welcomed it. Her grave in Genoa bears no trace of her husband's name, although he was the dominant influence upon her life. One of his own lines might have served for her headstone: 'For each man kills the thing he loves'.
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