Frontier Visitors

Of all the people who traveled West to see the wild frontier playwright Oscar Wilde was one of the most unique. “To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely-it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world-and as seriousness of manner is the disguise of the fool, folly in its exquisite modes of triviality and indifference and lack of care is the robe of the wise man. In so vulgar an age as this we all need masks.” So wrote Oscar Wilde in 1894, the year before his crowning achievement, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened in London. And for most of his life the Irish born playwright’s cheerful, witty façade held up quite well. It has held up even better since he died, which probably is why Wilde still regularly shows up on lists of favorite historical dinner guests. But in his last years Wilde was welcome at no tables in England. Though married and the father or two children, Wilde was for years involved with a younger man, Lord Alfred Douglas, called “Bosie,” and he engaged in many anonymous scenes with male prostitutes and pickups. His double life proceeded without incident until soon after Earnest opened, when he received a calling card from Bosie’s eccentric father, the Marquess of Queensbury. It read “To Oscar Wilde, posing as somdominte [sic].” The maintain his mask Wilde felt he had to charge the Maquess with libel. And when the trial began in April 1895, Wilde charmed the jury with punchy testimony. But the Marquess had hired private detectives, and when that evidence began to be presented Wilde abruptly dropped his suit. Later the same day he and Bosie were arrested for immorality. Wilde’s new play continued its successful run, but his name was removed from the program. At his own trial Wilde again maintained his witty upper lip. The first jury could not reach a verdict. But the second jury convicted him, and Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labor. He spent the time in solitary confinement, where he was poorly fed and slept on a wooden plank bed. He was put to work sewing mailbags. When he was released in May 1897, Wilde was bankrupt, his manuscripts had either been auctioned or stolen. Friends paid his way to France, where he finally settled in Paris. He wrote a little about prison life, including his famous Ballad of Reading Gaol, and continued to whisk his way through dinner engagements. But he confessed, “I don’t think I shall ever really write again. Something is killed in me.” He picked up boys more frequently than before and began drinking large amounts of absinthe, though doctors had told him it would kill him. Wilde laughed off the warnings, as he did his constant worry about money, quipping, “I am dying beyond my means.” In October 1900, Wilde developed a painful ear infection from an injury he had suffered in prison when he fainted one morning in chapel and perforated an eardrum. Doctors performed surgery, but the infection spread and caused him to develop encephalitis, swelling of the brain. He was taken back to his hotel room, the last in a series of cheaper and cheaper rooms that he could barely afford. The legend is that his last words were “It’s the wallpaper or me-one of us has to go.” But Wilde did not depart with a clever remark. He grew delirious through the month of November. On the thirtieth two close friends near his bed could hear only a painful grinding sound from his throat. A nurse regularly had to dab blood that was drooling from his mount. Slowly his breathing and his pulse weakened until he died at about 2 p.m. that afternoon.