The Importance of Being Authentic

Despite the seductive capacity of a forgery, such as the portrait of Mr W.H., to activate (if not to satisfy) aesthetic desires and fantasies, a duplicitous representation in art or literature remains tethered to its conceptual counterpart. In other words, forgery has no meaning without authenticity. There is no such thing as a fake without at least the idea of the real thing; both inhere in how we perceive authorship, the creative human presence behind the work. But what does the real thing look like when it emanates from Oscar Wilde, a writer who, as we have seen, not only championed the artistry of the unreal and the inauthentic but also was at times culturally marked as an impostor and a charlatan? Before we explore the Wilde forgeries that proliferated in print and in manuscript in the 1920s, we need to understand the unique state of affairs that made the mass of forgeries possible and perhaps even inevitable. This state of affairs had a momentous impact on the production and circulation in the 1900s and 1910s of texts bearing Wilde's name – not all of which were authored by him – before the mass of forgeries appeared. Such an understanding demands, in the first instance, a full accounting of the Wilde legend that flourished after his death in 1900, especially its rhetoric of martyrdom and sainthood. It also requires, in the second instance, an accounting of the dispersal and constitution, or reconstitution, of the Wilde archive, the hallmark of which was authorial authenticity. This chapter traces the bibliographical history of Wilde (and non-Wilde) books at the moment his canon was being assembled by a small group of gay men, and recovers their production of yet another Wilde legend, that of "real Oscar Wilde," to borrow a term from the biographer Robert Sherard. Before we encounter the fakes, we need to acquaint ourselves with the real thing.

In the first decade of the twentieth century the name Oscar Wilde was for many a byword for legend and scandal. It was indelibly associated with the 1895 trials' judicial finding of "gross indecency" and with the collapse of a stellar literary career into exile, poverty, and early death. According to the painter Walford Graham Robertson, "in the years that have passed since [Wilde's] death, the memory of the real Oscar Wilde has faded and has been replaced by a strange simulacrum, half invented by the curious, half dictated by the man himself." Far from being forgotten by literary history, Wilde retained a powerful influence (albeit a contested one) over the early-twentieth-century imagination. His status as a legend – that "strange simulacrum" identified by Robertson – inheres in two indelible facets of his reputation: first, the sense that Wilde both illustrates and embodies the total merger of life with literature and was thus a player in his own drama; second, that he was the representative figure of an era in literary history. Wilde said as much of himself in De Profundis when he opined, "I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me." (This statement certainly proved a prophetic description of the next century as well.) His contemporary Richard Le Gallienne famously echoed this portrait of Wilde as a "symbolic figure" in his 1926 book The Romantic '90s. For Le Gallienne, since Wilde "summoned up so completely the various aspects and tendencies of his time, he has become its symbolic figure. He is, beyond comparison, the incarnation of the spirit of the '90s." Le Gallienne's view was an influential contribution to what, by the 1920s, was the growing – but not always accurate – print record of Wilde's afterlife. In elaborating the records of this legacy, and their vulnerability to false representations such as forgery, I emphasize the supernatural resonances of the notion of an afterlife: like a revenant spirit, the early-twentieth-century Wilde was defined by damnation and redemption, by loss and recovery; he was conjured into being by defenders and detractors alike, and his legacy was more often met with strong feelings than with indifference. His was a memory, in sum, that inspired considerable partisanship, and throughout the 1900s and 1910s that partisanship (and the legends that informed it) contributed to the building, and the purging, of the Wilde archive.

In the years following the death of Wilde, his most vigorous defenders sought to revivify the writer's status by intervening materially into an afterlife that they tried to frame and, predictably, to control, but not always with full success. However, as subsequent chapters of Beautiful Untrue Things will show, a diverse and inventive suite of forgers could prove equally compelling keepers of Wilde's memory. The Wilde legend thus inspired intersecting forms of fandom, for it had the capacity to accommodate forgers' criminally imitative homage, on the one hand, and partisans' hyper-protective admiration, on the other. It is the hope (and challenge) of this book to reveal the surprising parallels between these two sets of Oscar Wilde aficionados, both of whom produced texts that had a material impact on Wilde's afterlife. This chapter attends to the first set, whose members included the bibliophiles Robert Ross, Christopher Millard, and Walter Ledger. The key difference between Ross's, Ledger's, and Millard's respective approaches to constructing and exhibiting the "real Oscar Wilde" to the world can best be described as one of tone, which might also index personal (queer) politics. This group of loyalists often worked as a collective, but their respective investments in Wilde and his literary legacy were nonetheless marked by their distinct personalities. Ross, the Establishment art critic, is persistently but cautiously defensive; Millard, the outspoken individualist, protests vocally and aggressively; and Ledger, the retiring suburban bachelor, shuns publicity altogether. In the vein of the original forgery at the centre of "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.," the legend of the "real Oscar Wilde" is forged by a collective homosocial enthusiasm shared by a trio of men.

Restorative Bibliography and "the Real Oscar Wilde"

This chapter focuses on the books crafted in the early 1900s by Wilde's self-designated guardians. Wilde's literary executor Robert Ross, Christopher Millard, and Walter Ledger all countered false representations of Wilde by articulating an authorized version of the writer: they insisted on the importance of being authentic. Their "real Oscar Wilde" would be a literary figure that was distinct, they hoped, from the scandalous biographical narratives to which he remained sutured. These Wilde partisans, according to Ellen Crowell, were "colourful individuals who supervised the flow of information about their beloved subject through the obsessive cataloguing, controlling, and concealing of a queer past." Their endeavour to remake – better still, to reforge – Wilde through research and publishing can best be understood as a cluster of material interventions into Wilde's place in literary history. This is a process I call restorative bibliography. To rehabilitate Wilde they needed to restore an archive – a body of texts – that had been both literally and figuratively dispersed (along with Ricketts's portrait of Mr W.H.) at the chaotic auction of his literary property. With the common goal of recuperating Wilde's literary reputation from the formative and lasting damage of his 1895 trials, this cast of restorative bibliographers, in Jacques Derrida's terms, exerted "the power of consignation," which is paired with "the functions of unification, of identification, of classification": they "aim[ed] to coordinate a single corpus" by "gathering together signs" into a new Wilde archive. They supervised a collaborative enterprise of preserving and listing books and writing others, correcting historical misperceptions, and above all deriving cultural respectability for Wilde from textual order (an established canon of texts) and writerly authenticity (verified authorship). Wilde's restorers thus saw literary history as revisable, not fixed; historical wrongs – such as Wilde's shaming and marginalization – could, with effort, be righted. The politics of their collective archival work were conservative by definition: they believed in undoing history's mistakes by restoring the influence and prestige of an older (literary) order in which Wilde held a place of respect. But theirs was also a queer conservatism that sought for a measure of respectability in disavowing the sexually scandalous; they insisted on a textual, as opposed to a sexual, register for apprehending Oscar Wilde. Such disavowals, as we shall see, did little to undermine the fact that they were also establishing a queer literary history – not unlike what Wilde himself had initiated in the Shakespearean speculations of "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." Among Ross, Millard, and Ledger, restorative bibliography demanded co-operation, scholarly commitment, and strong feelings of loyalty to Wilde's memory. It also, ironically, enabled their worst nightmare: an astonishing efflorescence of Wilde forgeries.

For this tightly knit group of gay men, the work of editing, compiling, cataloguing, and publishing Wilde's writings could be employed as a rebuke to what Ross dubbed "the demonstrations of knaves and fools." The knaves and fools they wished to counter operated in print, and so print was the appropriate medium for their response. During the first decade of the twentieth century such "demonstrations" were most readily discernible in unauthorized Wilde publications – in other words, false and misleading representations of Wilde's authorship. These publications were not what we might call the "true forgeries" that we shall encounter in later chapters, but instead included pirated printings of Wilde's writings and disreputable apocrypha like the homoerotic tale The Priest and the Acolyte, which had been sensationally misattributed to Wilde following the trials. Although piracies and misattributions do not conform to a narrow definition of literary forgery, which, as we have seen in Harold Love's formulation, is a "work composed with the intention to deceive and then promulgated under the name of another," they do, like forgeries, reorganize the coordinates of authorship along dubious and deceptive lines. In other words, they could produce similar effects. Such disruptive items had no place in the official story that Ross and his colleagues wanted to tell, and distinctions between piracies, misattributions, and forgeries mattered little to them. These unreliable texts were seen to be just as damaging to the textual authenticity of the "real Oscar Wilde." Laying the scholarly and archival foundations for Wilde studies, these men worked to rehabilitate Wilde by consolidating his body of work, and they pursued this task by making (and repudiating) books, thereby refashioning and repackaging the dead writer. Robert Ross, for instance, carefully edited and abridged the 1897 prison letter he called De Profundis, which met with considerable commercial success when he published it posthumously with Methuen in 1905. De Profundis was followed in 1908 by a massive edition of Wilde's writings, the Collected Works. This fourteen-volume project was made possible by Ledger and Millard's extensive bibliographical research into Wilde's literary career. It established previously unpublished texts as part of the Wilde canon and reintroduced texts that had fallen out of print. With these books in circulation, Ross and his colleagues hoped that the Wilde canon would be both complete and accurate, with the name of the author affixed to a recognized corpus of texts under the unassailably respectable Methuen imprint.

Wilde, however, was not just any author. His association with extra-literary legend and homosexual scandal rendered him uniquely vulnerable to a set of market conditions that fostered spurious texts published under his name. Christopher Millard suggestively termed the miasma of misunderstanding that surrounded Wilde "a vague fog of obscenity." Clearing that fog was the challenge undertaken by these restorative bibliographers. During the Edwardian years and beyond, Ross and his allies were trying to purify a situation largely beyond their control. They had two big problems. The first was the dispersal of many of Wilde's manuscripts in 1895 at the Tite Street sale and during the associated looting of literary property housed there. The second was pirates. Almost everything Wilde had written had been pirated within a few years of his death by two publishers, Leonard Smithers in London and Charles Carrington in Paris, both of whom issued numerous Wilde titles as so-called private printings in limited runs. In defiance of copyright, piracies masquerading as "private printings" effectively robbed the Wilde literary estate (of which Ross was executor) of income. Doubtful attributions, moreover, such as Latin and French erotic texts translated purportedly by "Sebastian Melmoth" (Wilde's post-prison alias) and issued by the flamboyant Carrington, traded on Wilde's reputation as a sexual outlaw. In an ironic echo of the actions of the publishers, whom they saw as their opponents, under the management of Ross and his set the books by Oscar Wilde remained books about Oscar Wilde – although theirs was the Wilde they wanted the world to see. By foregrounding authentic Wilde texts, the official canon excluded the inauthentic ones – those that Ross called "risky books" because they told the wrong stories. Nevertheless, as Joseph Bristow notes, "the more that disciples such as Ledger, Millard, and Ross tried to establish a firm bibliographical basis on which to appreciate Wilde's career, the more readily this legendary author became the object of peculiar fantasies, including their own."

One of the major difficulties for these men, whom Ellen Crowell dubs "the gatekeepers of Wilde's posthumous legacy," was that, when Wilde died in 1900, most of his books had fallen out of print. (A few Wilde titles, such as The Happy Prince and The Soul of Man, remained in print with their authorized publishers despite the collapse of Wilde's reputation.) Their scarcity is suggested in a 1905 auction-sale catalogue of the collection of Richard Butler Glaenzer, which notes that "his books are sought by the collector and bibliographer at almost fabulous prices." Despite its attenuated hyperbole ("almost fabulous"), this claim draws attention to the association of Wilde's books – his material traces – with fables and legends and with commercial value; it also points to the borders between truth and fiction, the believable and the unbelievable. When it came to many of the Wilde books then in circulation, acquiring information about what had been published, when, and by whom was crucial for Ross and his fellow "gatekeepers" to retake editorial and financial control of his literary legacy. By assessing the work of restorative bibliography undertaken by Wilde's posthumous champions, I explore the complex responses that such "risky books" provoked in the individuals whom the Glaenzer sale catalogue terms "the collector and bibliographer." I argue, moreover, that the work of curating, compiling, and collecting supervised by this coterie of Wilde admirers sought to remake literary history by transforming their private Wildean treasures into (bookish) public monuments. By means of books and a public memorial they effectively turned Wilde from reviled sexual outlaw to saint.

The Curator: Robert Ross

Writing to Wilde's son Vyvyan Holland in 1908, Robert Ross confessed that "[e]verything connected with your father has a sort of sacrosanct halo around it for me." As Richard Kaye observes, "an exalted, sometimes semidisguised rhetoric of sainthood determined Wilde's twentieth-century afterlife." Of course, this affiliation with martyrdom began with Wilde himself; it can be seen in his choice in 1897 of "Sebastian Melmoth" as an alias for his exile on the European continent, which combines the name of a favourite saint redolent with homoerotic associations and the surname of the hunted protagonist from his great-uncle Charles Maturin's 1820 gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer. As Michèle Mendelssohn notes, such devotional rhetoric has only intensified over the years, for "today Wilde's sainthood is secure. He has become gay history's Christ figure." That Wilde could be seen as saintly, however, could also be turned against his defenders, and a full understanding of Ross's confession requires us to acknowledge the jealous and competitive struggle over Wilde's memory between the literary executor and Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the lover for whose sake Wilde arguably went to prison. Although he was an outspoken homosexual apologist in his youth – the famous poetic line that Wilde defended in court about "the love that dare not speak its name" is Douglas's, not Wilde's – Douglas became increasingly homophobic and alienated from the circle of Wilde loyalists surrounding Ross after the death of the writer whom they both loved. By around 1910, Laura Lee records, "those who had been attracted to Bosie for his youthful idealism and his sexual boldness no longer related to him, and as their feelings about him changed, in many cases so did their memories. The further Bosie moved from the homosexual community, the more they were inclined to blame him for Wilde's downfall." Ross and Douglas each felt betrayed by the other, and as Ross's restorative projects on Wilde's behalf progressed through the 1900s, Douglas went from devoted disciple of Wilde to aggressive antagonist of Ross, refusing to play the role of Judas that he felt Ross had scripted for him. Anxious to dissociate himself from Wilde's queer following, Douglas snidely referred to Ross and his associates as a "coterie of long-haired persons who weep at the mention of 'dear Oscar's' name and hold him up for a saint and martyr."