Who Was Dracula? (20 page)

THE ACCUSED, “MONSTROUS AND UNLAWFUL”

O
scar Wilde wasn't finished.

His next literary fillip was his astonishing short novel published in
Lippincott's
Monthly Magazine
in July 1890,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. This was the work that set London buzzing and critics stammering, just at the time that Bram Stoker was constructing his plot for
Dracula
—in the summer of 1890.

“The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
form nearly perfect counterpoints in Wilde's gallery of revelations. Shakespeare's Elizabethan boy-love for Willie Hughes seemed remote and idealized—the sort of thing capable of inspiring the sonnets. But now Wilde told a contemporary story. Lord Wotton's leering fascination with the pretty Dorian Gray was played out in Turkish-tobacco-smoke-wreathed club rooms and thickly carpeted, crystal- and porcelain-adorned salons. It produced an increasing fascination with the lewd and sensual, suggesting mysterious unnamed crimes.

Dorian Gray is a striking young man who has been immortalized in a painting by the artist Basil Hallward. Hallward's friend, Lord Henry Wotton, arranges to meet Gray. Wotton has a powerful reaction to the pretty boy: “When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.”

Wotton seduces him with his witty, carefree, hedonistic philosophy; this has a powerful effect on the young man: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”

Dorian understands that he is at a crossroad, and he chooses to neglect his innocence in search of a life of sensual pleasure. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young . . . I would give my soul for that!”

During the course of the novel, Dorian pledges his love to a pretty actress, then casually abandons her, causing her to commit suicide. He inspires rumors of notorious behavior and leaves friends' reputations ruined through his association. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian's crimes become more horrible for being unspecified.

Young Dorian Gray remains blemish-free and as beautiful as ever, but these crimes have been secretly registering themselves upon his portrait—the cruel expressions, wrinkles, and hard lines of a wicked life. He conceals the painting in a room of his house. Dorian shows the horrifying painting to Hallward, the artist, and then murders him, blackmailing another friend to dispose of the body.

The young man has selfishly dismissed his crimes, but he is horrified to be watching the catalog of sins register on the painting—chronicling the state of his soul. When he slashes at the painting with the knife he used to murder Hallward, his servants hear a blood-piercing scream. They arrive to investigate. The painting is now beautiful again, but a decrepit, hideous corpse is on the floor, with a knife in its heart. Examining the jewelry on the body, they identify it as Dorian Gray.

—

Critics condemned
Dorian Gray
. The
Athenaeum
thought it was “unmanly, sickening, vicious,” and the
Daily Chronicle
thought it was “dullness and dirt . . . a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth.” The
Scots Observer
suggested that “Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style,” but could only manage to write “for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys.”

Wilde visited the offices of the
St. James Gazette
and spoke to the journalist Samuel Henry Jeyes, who had offered a particularly scathing review. Oscar insisted that Jeyes was wrong to make personal assumptions based on a work of art. Jeyes was incredulous. “What is the use of writing . . . hinting at, things that you do not mean?” Wilde parried, “I mean every word I have said, and everything at which I have hinted in ‘Dorian Gray.'” The journalist shook his head. “Then, all I can say is that if you do mean them you are very likely to find yourself at Bow Street [standing in a courtroom] one of these days.”

Lord Henry Wotton became, to most readers, Oscar Wilde—the amusing, diverting bons mots, the wave of the cigarette, the witty, rapid-fire chatter that offers sparkles with laughter, wisdom, or immorality, and the disarming endorsements of rich, sensual pleasures. The novel paints a vivid portrait of the author, which, like Dorian's own, is first beautiful and then frightening. The name Dorian Gray was inspired by a famously pretty young poet, John Gray, who won Oscar Wilde's affections after Clyde Fitch left for America.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
was published as a book in 1891. Wilde made slight adjustments and deleted a few—only a few—of the suggestive lines. Bookseller W. H. Smith refused to sell it, calling it “filthy.” Constance Wilde, Oscar's wife, was haunted by the slender novel, but naively overlooked its significance. “Since Oscar wrote ‘Dorian Gray,'” she said, “no one will talk to us.” It was his only novel.

In 1891, Wilde was proposed for membership in a literary association, the Crabbet Club. There, George Curzon, the politician and an old acquaintance from Oxford, stood to address his qualifications. He ended up frankly detailing Wilde's taste for sodomy at Oxford and then moving on to the hints of this activity in
Dorian Gray
. “Poor Oscar,” a friend observed, “sat helplessly smiling, a fat mass, in his chair.” Wilde gathered his composure and offered a typically witty and insightful defense. But he never went back to the Crabbet Club.

Just as “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” had once seduced Clyde Fitch, Wilde had inspired a particularly adoring fan with
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Lord Alfred Douglas, a student at Oxford, an aspiring poet with blond hair and bright blue eyes, had read the book fourteen times. He eagerly arranged a meeting with the author to tell him so.

—

Stoker must have noticed the story, too. Some of his earliest pages of notes on his vampire story show the influence. He considered the inclusion of a character who was a painter, Francis Aytown, and noted characteristics of the vampire that would make him the anti–Dorian Gray:

Painters cannot paint him [Dracula]—their likenesses always like someone else.

Could not photograph—come out like a corpse or black.

Insensitivity to music.

Power of creating evil thoughts—& destroying will.

Neither the painter nor the failed portrait made it into Stoker's novel, but he was clearly experimenting with supernatural themes that would adorn his vampire. The influence from Wilde's story is seen in more subtle ways.

Like Dorian Gray's, Dracula's crimes are sometimes left to the imagination—or suicide signals that a noble man has chosen death rather than disgrace. This is true when the vampire crosses on the
Demeter
; the crew disappears during the voyage, without further explanation. In
Dracula
, the first mate commits suicide, throwing himself overboard. The captain is found dead, lashed to the wheel. The actual threats and the actual crimes are left unstated. Presumably Dracula's very presence creates the danger.

—

Wilde went on to conquer the London theater, not with the lavish spectacles he'd so admired at the Lyceum, or even his poetic
Salome
, which was published but had a difficult time finding its way onto the stage. Instead, he produced a succession of witty, satirical, drawing-room comedies. Florence Stoker accepted a ticket for the premiere of
Lady Windermere's Fan
at the St. James Theatre on February 22, 1892. (Bram was busy that night with
Henry VIII
, starring Irving as Cardinal Wolsey.)
Lady Windermere
was the famous premiere where Wilde arrived wearing a dyed bright green carnation, surrounded by a group of admiring young men who were similarly adorned with green carnations. This was Wilde's little trick to stir gossip, suggesting a special club from which the rest of society had been excluded. After the curtain fell, a loud ovation drew the author to the stage. Wilde appeared, wearing his surreal green flower, indolently holding a half-smoked cigarette in his fingers, and carelessly congratulating the audience on their good taste—“which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself!”—the sort of performance that made him famous.

Surprisingly, it was those green carnations that proved to be the problem.

—

The Green Carnation
was published anonymously in 1894, but it soon became known that it was the work of Robert Hichens, a young journalist and novelist who had befriended Alfred Douglas during a recent trip in Egypt. Just several years after
The Green Carnation
, Robert Hichens entered Bram Stoker's circle of associates when he was hired by Henry Irving to write
The Medicine Man
—the particularly ineffective supernatural play.

The anonymous novel was a parody of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas—a completely transparent parody, from the famous green carnations to the names of the characters, Esme Amarinth and Lord Reginald Hastings. Wilde and Douglas were first amused by it, but in offering a privileged view of their relationship, it surrounded them with scandal. In the book, Amarinth—Wilde—was portrayed as the corrupting influence, like Henry Wotton in
Dorian Gray
. Hastings—Douglas—slavishly imitates his conversation and his morality. Hastings explains the symbol of the green carnation “to have the courage of one's desires, instead of only the cowardice of other people's. . . . Do you love this carnation . . . as I love it? It is like some exquisite painted creature with dyed hair and brilliant eyes. It has the supreme merit of being perfectly unnatural. To be unnatural is often to be great. To be natural is generally to be stupid.”

The book was probably not representative of Wilde and Douglas; it seems that Douglas was far more manipulative than Wilde, actively seeking out “rent boys” for their entertainment, arguing, pouting, or cajoling to keep the relationship going.

The Green Carnation
inflamed Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. The marquess was a mean-spirited, bowlegged little man with pugilistic sensibility—quite literally, as he had devised the Marquess of Queensberry rules for boxing. His wife had divorced him—a highly unusual and difficult procedure in Victorian England, attesting to his abusive treatment of his family. His four sons hated him to various degrees; they had spent their childhood abused or neglected. In 1893, when the marquess first realized that his youngest son was keeping company with Oscar Wilde, he first warned him and then threatened him. When none of that worked, he threatened Wilde.

Alfred Douglas—his friends called him Bosie—encouraged the feud and relished the thought of a definitive showdown with his father. Ironically, it did not have to happen. Wilde's tendency was to make peace. One day when he was lunching with Bosie, the marquess came into the restaurant and saw them together; Wilde invited him to the table and then succeeded in charming the older man completely. “I don't wonder you are so fond of him,” the marquess confessed to his son. “He is a wonderful man.”

But after the marquess left the lunch meeting, the glow of Wilde's charm was forgotten.

The marquess was a crude man of crude threats and simple thoughts; that much is demonstrated by his correspondence. But the urgency of his concern was borne out by a real tragedy. In October 1894, just a month after
The Green Carnation
was published, Queensberry's eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig, the heir to the title and Alfred Douglas's brother, was killed in a hunting accident.

At least, newspapers politely reported that it was an accident. It was almost certainly a suicide; he had shot himself in the mouth. Drumlanrig had been the secretary to the Earl of Rosebery when Rosebery was foreign secretary, and then a junior minister in the House of Lords when Rosebery became prime minister. The two had been suspected of a homosexual relationship. These rumors had been rattling the windows of the government and there was fear that it would ruin Rosebery's career—rumors that may have been made worse by the marquess's writing threatening letters to Rosebery.

Rosebery was the prime minister who would, within the year, be writing to Henry Irving, informing him of his knighthood.

With Drumlanrig's suicide, and the obsession that his sons were being preyed upon by secret, highly placed homosexuals, Queensberry turned up the pressure on Oscar Wilde.

—

Wilde's private life had been intruding into his career. In 1893, for his second play,
A Woman of No Importance
, Fred Terry, Ellen Terry's brother, was engaged to portray Gerald Arbuthnot. He hated the part and the ridiculous, unrealistic dialogue that Wilde used. He recalled one particular line in which Gerald, a young man, said to his father: “I suppose society is wonderfully delightful.” Fred Terry associated the dialogue with the “unhealthy, unnatural” manner of Oscar Wilde, the artificiality of the green carnation. Offstage, Terry and his friends ridiculed Wilde for his obvious homosexuality.

The play was probably Wilde's least successful, but it gave the producer and star Herbert Beerbohm Tree an opportunity to play a larger-than-life, Oscar Wilde–inspired character, Lord Illingworth. The comedy centers around the lord's discovery that his new private secretary, Gerald, happens to be his illegitimate son, which leads to other revelations about his past relationship with Gerald's mother, Mrs. Arbuthnot.