The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts

“The Wildes is both a powerful family portrait and a verbal delight.”

One might need a library to hold all the works written about Oscar Wilde and the people in his circle. In addition to the many biographies of Wilde and critical studies of his work, the lives of his wife Constance, and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas have been chronicled in print. In addition, there are the novels, stories, plays, and films about Oscar Wilde.

From a man who became after his three trials a pariah, Wilde was transformed into a martyred genius. Louis Bayard’s The Wildes is one of the most imaginative and rich of the sagas built around Oscar and the people closest to him. Bayard has done his homework on Wilde, Constance, their sons, and the infamous Bosie, but he has turned their experience into a witty, elegant tribute to Wilde’s wit and style.

Bayard has, in homage to Wilde’s plays, called his work A Novel in Five Acts. He begins with what might be called biographical fiction, but by the fifth act, he spins a fabric of pure imagination that challenges the morality of Wilde’s time and, perhaps, ours. The brilliant language echoes that in Wide’s plays.

The first and longest act (almost half of the novel), takes place in a rented summer house in Norfolk in August, 1892, and is told from Constance’s point of view. Oscar has brought her and their oldest son there ostensibly so he can get out of London and write A Woman of No Importance. That title will resonate throughout the play. Wilde should be writing but he can’t live without an audience, so he has invited his formidable, eccentric mother, Arthur Clifton, a lawyer friend, and his wife. He has also invited his most recent slender young acolyte and ephebe, Lord Alfred Douglas. It is during this visit to the country that Wilde and Douglas’s relationship becomes sexual.

In Bayard’s rendering, Constance Wilde is bright, tough, and as witty as the men around her. Like the women in Wilde’s plays, she confronts her husband with her knowledge of his secret. There is fury, but no tears. When Wilde refuses to send Bosie packing, she asks him what he is feeling toward the self-absorbed aristocrat and toward what amounts to his coming out to her. He tells her, “There is a shoreline in view, and it is beautiful, and it is nowhere I have ever been.” Constance responds, “The world will find you, as it always does.”

During the stay in Norfolk, Constance has faced her own temptation. Arthur Clifton, who is not getting along with his wife, declares his love for Constance, which she is strong enough to reject.

At the end of “Act I One,” Constance has left the summer house and returned to London with her mother-in-law and her sons. Oscar and Bosie remain behind.

Constance, in this act, seems a sister to the wives in Wilde’s plays, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband. Like them, she moves from innocence about her marriage to painful knowledge. Bayard’s Constance seems more unfettered by the prevailing moral codes than Wilde’s wives.

“Act Two” takes place five years later. Constance, who is suffering from some sort of progressive paralysis, perhaps multiple sclerosis, is living in Italy. She has changed her and her sons’ surnames to protect them from the scandal her husband has caused and sent the sons away to school. Oscar has recently been released from jail. Arthur Clifton arrives with the news that Oscar is living with Bosie in Capri, information that leads her to finally cut him off from their sons and from her money. Arthur has also come to rekindle his affair with her, which was carried out with Victorian discretion. “What earthly use,” he asks, “is a love affair if it can be carried off with such exquisite tact?” Now Constance cannot physically continue their relationship: “My body is becoming a dead land.” Yet she still loves him and wants him in their bed.

When “Act Three” begins, in 1915, Constance and Oscar are long dead, but their sons are haunted by their family scandal and tragedy. Cyril, now 30, is an officer on the French front, obsessed with being manly, the opposite of his weak, effeminate father: “Life in its most collapsed and concentrated form—that is the destiny of a boy whose father acted like a woman, turned other men into women.” After his sniper fire attracted a massive and deadly response from the Germans, Cyril is assigned to the bedside of an injured soldier, the son of Lord Arbuthnot. With his hatred of wan aristocrats, no doubt inspired by Lord Alfred Douglas, Cyril is sure that the young man has faked his injury. This chapter is mostly one long scene as Cyril and the young Lord converse and hardened Cyril briefly softens.

Vyvyan Holland, Oscar and Constance’s younger son, was not in Norfolk on those momentous days before Constance, Cyril, and Oscar’s mother picked him up at a train station and took him back to London. Now, in 1925, he is accompanying Lady Brooke, an avatar of Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, to a performance of Noël Coward’s scandalous new play, The Vortex. Vyvyan, the sole survivor of his family, lives on the meagre royalty income his father’s works provide and some earnings from translating French novels. For the first time, Vyvyan is forced into the company of Lord Alfred Douglas, now a dissolute middle-aged man; as Vyvyan sees him, “Dorian Gray’s portrait, dragged from the shadows.” Douglas invites Vyvyan to a basement gay club, “the sort your father and I used to frequent in our Gilded Age,” and provokes Vyvyan to express his true feelings about Douglas.

Vyvyan, the boy who was not at Norfolk when the family rift began, the overture to the grand opera that became the Oscar Wilde scandal, has always believed that Douglas was the poison that destroyed his family. Nonetheless, he sees Norfolk as “the villain in the whole play.” Could Norfolk have been “two things at once? The place where everything went South and the place where everything found its true North?” It can, of course, in fiction.

“Act Five,” an alternative version of the events of the first chapter, offers the answer to Vyvyan’s question. What if Constance was totally free of Victorian mores and could negotiate a way for the family to remain a family, including the reality of Bosie’s role in Wilde’s life? What if the Wilde’s could “become our own playwrights,” the architects of their own unique social order?

Throughout this dazzling novel of heartbreak, we hear echoes of Wilde. Everyone speaks in witty epigrams even though the subjects are deadly serious. When in the final chapter, Constance negotiates a new set of rules for her husband, he responds, “Who would have supposed emasculation to be so erotic?” The Wildes is both a powerful family portrait and a verbal delight.