by Alexander Baron

This is a sort of supplement to my essay Oscar Wilde: The Straight Truth About A “Gay” Icon that was published here last month. There are two further points I would like to make: one relating to the decadence of Wilde, the other about the decadence of modern society. To take the first point first; as I pointed out, after Wilde withdrew from the criminal libel prosecution, Lord Queensberry bankrupted him. Mostly it is taken for granted that but for this, Wilde would have been able to keep his head above water. This is not necessarily the case.

According to the Law Report for August 26, 1895 which was published in The Times the following day, at a first meeting of his creditors, Wilde was said to have unsecured liabilities of £2,676 and partly secured debts of £915.

His assets were primarily the royalties on his “literary works” and a “life policy”. He declared his income from these as not less than £2,000 per annum; he had 10% of the gross weekly receipts from his play The Importance Of Being Earnest - gross, not net - and 15% over that.

The bill for his aborted criminal libel action was £677, an enormous sum in those days, but nowhere near as large as his income; according to the Times, “it appeared that the debtor had been insolvent for some time past”.

It is by no means easy to estimate the value of Wilde’s income in today’s money, but a few keystrokes brought me to a calculation someone made in the first half of 2010; £500 in 1895 was said to be worth £43,000 at that time, so it can be seen that while Wilde was in no sense a mega-earner, he had, by his own account, been paid a tidy sum, and could, should, surely have accumulated a small fortune, because his star had been in the ascendant since 1882 when he embarked on a lengthy lecture tour of the United States. On top of that, by the time of his downfall he was a married man with two young sons to provide for.  So how did he run up such enormous debts?

That is a rhetorical question; Wilde’s extravagancies have been well documented by many writers. If he had spent less time composing frivolous epigrams and more making wise investments, he might have avoided total disaster after his well earned imprisonment. Consider the following:

“One must have some sort of occupation nowadays. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about.”

“Moderation is a fatal thing… Nothing succeeds like excess.”

“A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.” – that one must have haunted him.

“The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.”

“It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.” – and end up on Carey Street.

And perhaps most fittingly for Wilde: “Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.” – quite.

With regard to finance, he would have done better to heed the words of his near contemporary Charles Dickens: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

But enough digression, let us return to Wilde’s real world follies. Transcripts or parts thereof of his three trials have now been published on a number of websites, which has saved me a trip to Kew.  The following were extracted from the University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Law website. (1) This is the testimony of twenty-one year old Charles Parker. (2)

“At the beginning of 1893 I was out of employment.  I remember one day at that time being with my brother at the St. James’s Restaurant, in the bar.  While there Taylor came up and spoke to us.  He was an entire stranger.  He passed the compliments of the day, and asked us to have a drink.  We got into conversation with him.  He spoke about men…He called attention to the prostitutes who frequent Piccadilly Circus and remarked, ‘I can’ t understand sensible men wasting their money on painted trash like that. Many do though. But there are a few who know better. Now, you could get money in a certain way easily enough if you cared to.’ I understood to what Taylor alluded and made a course reply.”

Asked where he first met Wilde, Parker replied: “ a restaurant in Rupert Street.  I think it was the Solferino.  We were shown upstairs to a private room, in which there was a dinner table laid for four.  After a while Wilde came in and I was formally introduced.  I had never seen him before, but I had heard of him. We dined about eight o’clock. We all four sat down to dinner, Wilde sitting on my left.”

He continued: “We had plenty of champagne with our dinner and brandy and coffee afterwards.  We all partook of it.  Wilde paid for the dinner…Subsequently Wilde said to me.  ‘This is the boy for me!  Will you go to the Savoy Hotel with me?’ I consented, and Wilde drove me in a cab to the hotel.  Only he and I went, leaving my brother and Taylor behind.  At the Savoy we went first to Wilde’s sitting room on the second floor. ..[where] we had liqueurs.  Wilde then asked me to go into his bedroom with him [where] He committed the act of sodomy upon me.”

All very sordid. Asked if Wilde had given him any money on that occasion he answered:

“Before I left, Wilde gave me £2, telling me to call at the Savoy Hotel in a week.  I went there about a week afterwards at eleven o’clock at night.  We had supper, with champagne.  Wilde on that occasion committed the same acts as on the first occasion.  I stayed about two hours.  When I left, Wilde gave me £3.  I remember subsequently going with my brother to 13 Little College Street.  We slept there with Taylor.  Taylor told us on that occasion that he had gone through a form of marriage with a youth named Mason.”

So at the end of the 19th Century, young men in London would sell their honour for £2 cash in hand and a dinner.  Wilde also gave him a silver cigarette case and a gold ring, both of which he pawned.

The rest of Parker’s testimony is no more edifying. Wilde’s first criminal trial from which the above is extracted, opened on April 26, 1895, so at the beginning of 1893, Parker would have been around nineteen years old. Granted he degraded himself voluntarily, but most people would regard Wilde’s behaviour as predatory. Certainly few contemporary parents would be happy if either a son or a daughter were to relate them such a tale.

A few words re the legal position at that time. The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act raised the age of consent for girls to sixteen; prior to that it was thirteen. Today, we have a word for grown men who have sexual relations with thirteen year old girls. Are boys any less worthy of protection?

Although Wilde’s countless defenders – including the noisy homosexual lobby – continue to portray his prosecution and subsequent social ostracism as Victorian hypocrisy, the truth is very different. Law or no law, homosexual encounters were tolerated up to a point. As long as they didn’t do it in the street and frighten the horses, and as long as they didn’t set out to corrupt the young – however willing they were to be corrupted – homosexuals and bi-sexuals (such as Wilde) were largely tolerated. Obviously this sort of thing is not desirable; perverted acts between consenting adults should either have been rigorously outlawed or legalised in the name of the rule of law. (3)

Clearly, Wilde over-stepped the mark, he corrupted the young, lied about it, and then tried to have a concerned father gaoled for exposing his despicable behaviour.

It should be noted that some, perhaps many, contemporary homosexuals also regard this sort of behaviour as despicable, as The Sun newspaper discovered to its cost in the 1980s when it made similar (and totally baseless) allegations against a certain Elton John.

Before we leave this degenerate for the moment, it is worth mentioning Sex, Lies, And A Sealed Fate: The Fourth Trial Of Oscar Wilde. (4) This well-argued essay by Douglas Linder condemns Wilde in forthright terms: Wasteful-Indecisive-Lawless-Dishonest-Exploitative. We will return to Lawless shortly, but let us now contrast the “ostracism” and “hypocrisy” meted out to Oscar Wilde by the Victorians with the reaction of contemporary “liberal democracy” to the Mike Tyson rape scandal.

Actually, scandal is rather a strong word; the allegation, court case and finally his conviction was treated as at best a shocking inconvenience by the vested interests of the sports world, and at worst as a joke. Tyson was arguably the biggest thing to hit boxing ever, becoming the youngest ever world heavyweight champion, unifying the title with an awesome 91 second knock out of formerly undefeated Michael Spinks, and was surely destined for bigger and greater things. Yet he was himself knocked out by a 35-1 underdog, and then, while awaiting a big money fight with Evander Holyfield, he was charged with rape. Tyson lured an eighteen year old beauty contestant up to his hotel room, and had his way with her.

For whatever reason(s), rape was and remains one of the most controversial of crimes; the wimmin’s movement is and always has been largely uncritical of any allegation made by any woman against any man at any time under any circumstances, often spouting ludicrous self-serving statistics about the “low conviction rate” for the crime. But none of that applied here. If Desireé Washington had been white, it would have been an entirely new ball game, but somehow the rape of a black woman by a black sporting superstar didn’t seem to matter. Some parties who had a long history of crying racism at every opportunity even made jokes about it. Why would any woman go to Mike Tyson’s hotel room at 4am if not for sex?

At the time of this case, Tyson was already an acknowledged wife-beater; his testimony gave the jury the wrong – or some would say the right – impression, and after his conviction and sentencing it became clear that he could be back on the streets in a mere three years, and back in the ring shortly after that.  At the time I followed boxing fairly closely, and it was equally clear to me, disgustingly so, that the entire boxing world had only one thing on its mind, the day he returned. Could this be the making of him? What sent Tyson off the rails? This poor, troubled man, how will he cope in prison? Never mind that Tyson was wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, and never mind about the victim, either she cried rape or she deserved it.

After being knocked out by a six stone teenage girl, Tyson would never regain his former glory, and although he made even more millions, he was ruthlessly exposed by both Evander Holyfield (twice) and by Lennox Lewis before ending up in gaol again, this time for a double assault; he punched a sixty-two year old man in the face, and kicked another man, a fifty year old, in the groin. And guess what, he was still in demand. True, he didn’t have the same appeal as the nineteen year old hot prospect who spoke softly and loved pigeons, but with very few exceptions the whole boxing world, most of the sports world and the world in general was only too prepared to forgive and even excuse his transgressions.

If Tyson had been just another black street punk from New York, or a white one for that matter, what would have been the world’s response to his rape of Desireé Washington? If he’d been a labourer, a mechanic, or even an accountant, no one would have given him the time of day, and he would very likely have been ostracised by his neighbours and former workmates/business associates. What makes the likes of Tyson so special? Oscar Wilde had the answer in his long whining letter from prison to his catamite Lord Alfred Douglas.

“ I am a born antinomian.  I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.  But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.  It is well to have learned that.” (5)

Antinomianism is the belief that the law does not apply to a particular group; socialists, communists and self-styled anti-fascists and “anti-racists” fall into this category, especially the latter two. For them, the means always justifies the end, fighting the mythical fascist menace or racism – read White Survival. In short, it is itself a form of fascism.

It is amazing that today so many people, including those who go gaga over any suggestion of racial superiority – in whatever context – or of any suggestion that one racial, ethnic or social group should be permitted to dominate another in any way, manner shape or form, accept, almost uncritically that some people: geniuses (as evidently Wilde thought he was), world-beating sportsmen or even simply celebrities – however defined – are somehow above the law, that they are in some way superior to the rest of us, that if they sodomise teenagers, lie gratuitously under oath during legal proceedings, or even if they rape women, that somehow it doesn’t matter. (6)

If Mike Tyson had not simply raped Desireé Washington but had murdered her, there would still have been people clamouring to his defence, petitioning the court to show him mercy so that his career, and the associated circus should not have been unduly interrupted.

In summary, Oscar Wilde was the vexatious author of his own misfortune, he and no one else. Whatever their many faults, the Victorians at least had the decency to realise that celebrity – such as it existed then – was not a licence to run riot, and that those who were rewarded with fortune and more particularly fame had a moral obligation to if not set an example then at the very least not to engage in obnoxious and predatory behaviour. Wilde did, was found out, and punished. Was that society really so inferior to ours, one that makes heroes out of drug addicts, violent thugs, and even the abusers of vulnerable young women? (7)

Notes And References

(1)I should point out that there appear to be a number of errors in said transcripts, minor spelling mistakes, etc, which I have corrected here.

(2)Archived version at: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/Crimparker.html

(3)Ie to avoid selective prosecutions, persecution of individuals or groups for whatever reason. As a committed Libertarian I have no problem with the concept of consensual sex between of age sodomites as long as they don’t expect me to join in.

(4)Archived version at: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/sexlies.html

(5)Wilde wrote this in Reading Gaol between January and April of 1897; archived version at: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.gutenberg.org/files/921/921-h/921-h.htm

(6)Incredibly, Tyson followed in Wilde’s footsteps in another fashion; in 2003 the man who had grossed an estimated three hundred million dollars from his ring career filed for bankruptcy.

(7)As usual there is room for the honourable exception; in January 2000, Tyson flew into the UK to fight Julius Francis at Manchester – another easy pay-day. “Wimmin’s groups” petitioned the Home Secretary to keep him out as an undesirable and a danger to women, but to no avail. Another case of money talks.