[A] story wanders far like thistle-down, and somebody hearing it […] might unexpectedly feel himself called upon to write it.
George Moore In his 1912 study of Oscar Wilde, the writer and journalist Arthur Ransome wrote that ‘the flowers of his [Wilde’s] talk bloom only in dead men’s memories, and have been buried with their skulls’.1This somewhat romantic notion was by no means the case, especially as regards Wilde’s oral stories, a range of which were recorded in memoirs and biographical sketches about him, with some being devel-oped into imaginative fictions of somewhat dubious literary merit.
Two of the biblical tales, ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ and ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’, considered in some detail in the previous chapter, under-went extensive refashioning in writings published well into the twentieth century, gradually losing all connection with the original teller. This chapter examines how three writers, Coulson Kernahan, Cyril Ranger Gull and Frank Harris, developed Wilde’s spoken heterodoxies into their own forms of fiction and to serve their own literary and ethical purposes. These three authors were connected through their professional lives: Gull worked for the Saturday Review under Harris’s editorship, and published several of his novels with Ward Lock, a company that for many years employed Kernahan as principal reader. They also had associations of varying degrees of closeness with Wilde himself. Gull, the youngest of the three, was not one of Wilde’s immediate circle, being barely twenty the year Wilde was tried and imprisoned. However, his close and abiding friendship with Leonard Smithers, one of the principal publishers of 1890s’
writing and of Wilde’s work in the years immediately following his release from prison, ensured that he was very much in touch with the
world of the British decadents.2 Kernahan was rather more closely acquainted with Wilde thanks to his work for Ward Lock. Liaising with Wilde in the early 1890s over the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, he came to be on friendly terms with the author, devoting a substantial chapter to him in his book of reminiscences, In Good Company. However, of the three authors it is undoubtedly Frank Harris who would be most immediately associated with Wilde, not least because of the highly colourful account he gives of their years of friendship in Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions(1916).
In tracing the relationship between Wilde’s biblical tales and the later fictions of his friends and acquaintances it is crucial to bear in mind contemporary notions of literary ownership and borrowing. In recent years, one of the consequences of a rapidly expanding internet has been the perils of plagiarism, with students in all sectors of educa-tion using – or misusing – the work of others. At the same time, the very concept of plagiarism has become an increasingly compelling focus for academic consideration, with Wilde as one of its major authors. In a recent study of intellectual property and the literary world, Paul K. Saint-Amour gives this analysis of the creative borrowing in Wilde’s circle:
Wilde not only plagiarized, but created a community of plagiarists;
by scattering his literary ideas and expressions around him for others to seize freely, he united writers in theft. In doing so, he endowed a private print culture with the dynamics of an idealized oral culture: stories received as gifts were passed on as gifts; narra-tives branched in abundant retellings, limning a community through circulation rather than reinforcing private ownership through accumulation.3
Saint-Amour’s description of Wilde ‘scattering his literary ideas’
echoes Richard Ellmann’s comment that the ‘ideas and themes he scat-tered were sometimes reaped by his young admirers’.4Yet, as Ellmann suggests in an anecdote following this statement, not all of Wilde’s ideas were available for others to ‘seize freely’:
The novelist W. B. Maxwell […] had heard many stories from Wilde, and wrote one of them down and published it. He confessed to Wilde, whose face clouded, then cleared as he mixed approval with reproach, ‘Stealing my story was the act of a gentleman, but
not telling me you had stolen it was to ignore the claims of friend-ship.’ Then he suddenly became serious, ‘You mustn’t take a story that I told you of a man and a picture […] I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.’5
It is a story that alerts us to the complexities of what Saint-Amour terms an ‘idealized oral culture’ at a time when publishing practices were becoming increasingly regulated and complex.6 Of the texts examined in this chapter some – to use Julia Kristeva’s memorable metaphor – smell more strongly of Wilde’s texts than others, yet all share with him an equally pressing desire to explore Christian ideas through imaginative writing.
Bringing Wilde back to faith:
Coulson Kernahan and Guy Thorne
In the penultimate chapter of In Good Company, Kernahan recollects:
My friendship with Wilde was literary in its beginnings. Flattered vanity on my part possibly contributed not a little to it, for I was young and – if that be possible – a more obscure man even than I am now, Wilde, already famous, was one of the very first to speak an encouraging word.7
While the contrast here between the youthful Kernahan and the famous Wilde is somewhat overstated (Wilde was Kernahan’s senior by a mere four years), the master–disciple relationship it implies rings true: Kernahan was an aspiring writer and journalist, doubtless in awe of a literary author approaching the height of his celebrity.8Yet it is clear from Kernahan’s mature reflections on his friendship with Wilde that, with respect to religious belief, and Christian morality in partic-ular, the younger man considered himself the more enlightened.
Though by insisting that his friend was ‘not an irreligious man’
Kernahan resists the image of the ‘pagan’ Wilde propagated by the likes of Gide and Harris, it is evident that he is uncomfortable with what he clearly regards as the deceased author’s immorality.9 The more Kernahan extenuates, the more obvious this discomfort becomes; he conjectures that though Wilde ‘talked and wrote much nonsense […] about there being no such thing as a moral or an
immoral book’, such sentiments were mere ‘pose’, and he views his homosexuality as coming from ‘powers and forces of darkness outside himself’ that propelled him into ‘a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life’.10 While Kernahan may have entered the world of the decadents in writing about Swinburne and managing the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, his devout Christianity ensured that he would always be on the outside looking in, and that the treatments that Wilde’s oral tales would receive under his authorship would draw back from the heterodoxy of the originals.
In Good Companytells of how, during a discussion about religion, Wilde related the opening of a scenario featuring the ‘finding to-day of the body of the Christ in the very rock-sepulchre where Joseph of Arimathea had laid it’.11Though Kernahan claims not to have heard the story – presumably ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ – through to its conclusion, his later writings suggest that he was eventually acquainted with at least one complete version of it.12Kernahan had the heightened awareness of literary ownership that comes with the expe-rience of working in the world of publishing, and had already been punctilious in asking Wilde’s permission to use a phrase of his in one of his collections of short stories, published in 1893, three years before his reworking of the resurrection story appeared under the title The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil.13In the same spirit of honesty, he directly addresses the question of Wilde’s influence in his account of their relationship:
The idea appears to have occurred to both, but whereas, in Wilde’s mind, it was clear and defined, in mine it was then no more than an idea. I sometimes wonder whether his words did not make vivid to me what before was vague. Of one thing at least I am sure, that he was the first to speak of such an opening scene, which fact in itself constitutes some sort of previous claim.14
Given the public attention that biblical archaeology was attracting at this time, Kernahan’s claim that the idea of the tale might have occurred to them both at the same time is not unreasonable. However, his religious fiction is more deeply interconnected with Wilde’s story than he would have the reader believe, and while his relationship with Wilde might only have lasted a few years, the ideas that emerged from it endured in publications spanning three decades.
The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil(1896) takes the form of a
series of dream-visions, a choice of form that places its author within the literary tradition of ‘Bishop Bunyan’ and signals a desire to rein in Wilde’s heterodoxy. In this Pilgrim’s Progress manqué, Kernahan conducts his narrative through the voices of allegorical figures reacting to the discovery of Christ’s body in ‘the rock hewn sepulchre whither it was borne nineteen hundred years ago by Joseph of Arimathea’.15 The end of Christ’s dominance is marked by a great ceremony in which the long-established rituals of Christianity are destroyed and the ‘Reign of Sorrow’ is replaced with the ‘Reign of Joy’. However, the new order is short-lived as members of this post-Christian society begin to realize what they have lost; life without Christ is described by one despairing man as akin to being ‘held captive at the will of an Unknown Gaoler’ (CWD 54), and the token fallen woman laments that she can no longer live without the hope of forgiveness. Kernahan wastes little time in bringing out the ultimate deus ex machina: God himself, who berates the people for their unbe-lief and leaves them in a world described by the anonymous dreamer in imagery reminiscent of Arnold’s great poem of agnosticism, ‘Dover Beach’: ‘Below me, as on a midnight plain, that stretched away into infinite darkness, lay the wounded in life’s battle – the widowed, the orphaned, the friendless, the sick, the halt, and the sin bound’ (CWD 42–43). In a sentimental final scene, the desolate grief of a father at the death of his small child prompts the reappearance of Christ, whose
‘streaming eyes’ (CWD 80) confirm that he is, indeed, God made flesh and whose promise never to forsake the earth again, however many times he is despised and rejected, ensures that the tale ends on a note of peaceful optimism in contrast to the joyless, hopeless apathy that prevails at the close of Wilde’s version. And where the rationalism of the bespectacled scientists of Wilde’s story succeeds in driving away the figure of Christ for all eternity, Kernahan’s equivalent ‘wise men’
are clearly marked out as of the Devil’s party, and left in a state of delusion, believing themselves to have destroyed the ‘Religion of Sorrow’ for all time, and not realizing that ‘many a little child was wiser […] than they’ (CWD 82) and ultimately invincible.
‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ and The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devilare both typically fin-de-siècle texts: the former in its emphasis on art, beauty and the individual consciousness, the latter in its contemplation of a future stripped of the old certainties of Christi-anity and looking to the potential problems of democratization and scientific development. Whereas Wilde’s tale ends with a world
doomed to unrelenting scientific materialism, having rejected the worship of beauty and individualism, Kernahan’s concludes with a stark warning of the consequences of rejecting the more traditional Christ. Where Wilde conjures up an image of perpetual limbo, Kernahan presents the reader with an image of hell averted. The narrator of the tale might have seen terrifying glimpses of a dystopia where ‘a mob, scrambling and fighting’ (CWD 55), deprived of the moral restraints of Christianity, grows ever more vicious and threat-ening, but the reader can rest safe in the knowledge that it is only a nightmare vision from which any true believer is free to wake up.
Perhaps inspired by the relative success of Kernahan’s dream-vision, the journalist and popular novelist Ranger Gull, writing under the pseudonym ‘Guy Thorne’, would further develop the central idea of Wilde’s resurrection tale into a novel entitled When It Was Dark.16 It was a work of fiction straddling several popular genres, offering elements of mystery, crime and sensationalism; it was also a work of Christian propaganda on a par with that of Marie Corelli, a writer Gull considered ‘a great modern force’.17Indeed, it was just the kind of orthodox writing that might have been expected from the son of a Church of England clergyman. Yet Gull was by no means the typical vicar’s son. Described by the poet and novelist Richard Aldington as a ‘tubby little bon vivant who never refused a double whisky’, he moved in fashionable decadent society, as likely to be attending a dinner at the Café Royal as a church service.18Gull’s taking on a nom de plumewould seem, then, to be in keeping with his Janus-like char-acter, enabling him to be both Guy Thorne, the minister’s son on a mission to save men from the ‘apathy of despair’ by way of his fiction, and Ranger Gull, the fast-living man about town.19
Inevitably, though, bearing two such contrasting identities brought its difficulties, and Gull’s self-confliction is apparent in both his fiction and non-fiction writings. Not yet publishing under a pseu-donym, his first attempt at religious fiction was a selection of Bible stories from both the Old and New Testaments, adapted for a modern audience and collected under the title From the Book Beautiful: Being Some Old Lights Relit (1900). Gull insists in the preface that he has written in the ‘reverent and proper spirit’ of the best fictional treat-ments of the Scriptures, and follows in the footsteps of Corelli in his desire ‘to clothe […] living facts with a picturesque dress’, so that his readers might appreciate the ‘aesthetic pleasure that can be found in the narratives of Holy Scripture’, too often lost through
over-famil-iarity.20Yet he also warns that he has allowed ‘a certain modernnote to creep into them here and there’ and the reader does not have to venture too far into the work to discover that what the author defines as ‘modern’ in his writing could be more accurately defined as fin-de-siècle decadence. In ‘The Slave’s Love’, for example, the erotic allure of Potiphar’s wife is clearly modelled on that of the Salome figure that flourished in the literary imagination of the 1890s, her jewelled tortoise attached ‘by a tiny silver thread to one of the gold rings fastened in her breasts’ recalling Des Esseintes’ ill-fated turtle in the fourth chapter of Huysmans’ À Rebours.21Paterian influence is also evident in ‘The Young Man with Many Possessions’, a retelling of the Synoptists’ story of the aspiring disciple unable to obey Jesus’s instruction that he must give up all his wealth before joining his followers. Gull’s rich young man seems like a poor parody of Pater’s Marius. He shrinks from the idea of having to renounce the delights of good wine and fine books in order to share the company of unedu-cated illiterates, who are unable to appreciate ‘the beauty of art or discuss a hexameter’.22Having enough self-knowledge to realize that he could never survive a life of dirt, poverty and ‘horribly vulgar […]
fat’ women, he settles on what he terms a ‘third way’: a beautiful suicide.23
From the Book Beautiful would seem to mark a turning point in Gull’s writing career in its blend of orthodoxy and aestheticism. In an essay published in 1907, he dismisses his affiliation with the decadents as a youthful infatuation and confirms his allegiance to the wisdom of his father, to traditional Christianity and to Guy Thorne, his second self:
The theory of modern criticism is that Art is a thing by itself and owes no duty to Ethics. The reason for Art, is art. Ten years ago I think I would almost have gone to the stake for this doctrine […] I well remember the indignant anger with which I repudiated the suggestion of my father, a clergyman, that when I grew older […] I should think very differently. He was perfectly right. Art is the essential part of fiction, but it is not destroyed because it is employed as the handmaid of an ethical standpoint.24
However, notwithstanding such public disavowals, Gull continued to take a keen interest in the decadents. Writing under yet another pseu-donym, Leonard Cresswell Ingleby, Gull authored two lengthy, if
otherwise undistinguished, monographs on Wilde, one largely concerned with the work (Oscar Wilde, 1907) and one with the man (Oscar Wilde: Some Reminiscences, 1912);25and 1915saw the publica-tion of his translapublica-tion of Théophile Gautier’s Charles Baudelaire, with the addition of a lengthy essay on Baudelaire’s influence on British writers, a substantial part of which concentrated on the literary life of Wilde.26
When It Was Darkwas perhaps Gull’s way of pursuing his interest in Wilde’s work while at the same time keeping at a safe distance from it. That he managed to keep any decadent influences at bay is confirmed in Albert Guérard’s Art for Art’s Sake, a polemic decrying aestheticism in literature, and in religious literature in particular, in which Gull’s novel is singled out as a shining example of a ‘thrilling and most edifying tale’.27The story begins in what was for Gull a most familiar setting: a vicar’s study. The vicar in question is Ambrose Byars, a broad-minded and well-read minister of the Church of England, whose bookshelves allow for the peaceful co-existence of works by the heretical Renan and the devout Edersheim. In his initial portrait of the clergyman, Gull goes out of his way to convince the reader that not all members of the Church are blinkered and old-fash-ioned, and that a strong Christian faith need not be shaken by the claims of the Higher Criticism:
As year by year his knowledge grew greater, and the scientific crit-icism of the Scriptures undermined the faith of weaker and less richly-endowed minds, he only found in each discovery a more vivid proof of the truth of the Incarnation and the Resurrection.28 But the faithful are soon to be sorely tested. The villain of the novel, Constantine Schaube, a wealthy Jew, and his sidekick, Sir Robert Llwellyn, an eminent biblical historian and expert on the Holy Sepul-chre, conspire to prove that the resurrection was an egregious fraud. A new tomb is discovered by a member of the PEF, bearing the inscrip-tion: ‘I, Joseph of Arimathea, took the body of Jesus, the Nazarene, from the tomb where it was first laid and hid it in this place’ (WIWD
As year by year his knowledge grew greater, and the scientific crit-icism of the Scriptures undermined the faith of weaker and less richly-endowed minds, he only found in each discovery a more vivid proof of the truth of the Incarnation and the Resurrection.28 But the faithful are soon to be sorely tested. The villain of the novel, Constantine Schaube, a wealthy Jew, and his sidekick, Sir Robert Llwellyn, an eminent biblical historian and expert on the Holy Sepul-chre, conspire to prove that the resurrection was an egregious fraud. A new tomb is discovered by a member of the PEF, bearing the inscrip-tion: ‘I, Joseph of Arimathea, took the body of Jesus, the Nazarene, from the tomb where it was first laid and hid it in this place’ (WIWD