In PART 1 of this series, we looked at The Benson Case by S. S. Van Dine, with its passing mention of the scandalous novel The Green Carnation. Then in PART 2, we focused briefly on the latter novel. Now in this third and final part, we are taking a quick look at the people involved in all this.
Oscar Wilde, unfortunately, never seemed to understand that he couldn't live as he liked. Wilde felt that he'd married and produced children, and he'd found success as a playwright and witty fellow. Surely what he did in his own home was his business? Well, not in England in the 1890s it wasn't. Things went badly for him when the writer, who was forty-ish, started a romance with Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), who was twenty-five.
Bosie's father was a marquess, which to my ear sounds feminine, like duchess. But a marquess is the title position between a duke and an earl, and in the late 19th century era, social classes were widely separated, with the royals and the entitled very high and mighty.
The marquess began insulting and threatening Wilde. Wilde did not move to France as friends advised, but stood his ground. He was not helped by the publication of The Green Carnation in 1894. The book was taken out of publication the following year, but the cat was out of the bag; people now knew Oscar Wilde was gay.
It's hard now to imagine how unaware many British citizens were that LGBT+ people even existed. That ignorance was one of the factors which had kept Wilde out of trouble for so long. But the publication of Robert Hichens' roman à clef about Wilde and Bosie provided all kinds of "evidence" for the prosecution. Though the charges of "gross indecency" were about sex between two men, the real moral outrage was about love between two men.
We're not doing an in-depth history here, so suffice it to say that Oscar Wilde was put on trial and Bosie was pressured to testify against his lover. Wilde entered a plea of "not guilty" to twenty-five (!) charges of indecency, and was not convicted. However, powerful people were after him and wanted Wilde in prison. Shortly afterward the famed playwright was re-tried and found guilty. He spent a terrible time in two different prisons, one of them being Reading Gaol, the subject of Wilde's best-known poem. A hard-labor sentence ruined Wilde's health and he died before he was fifty.
Bosie, Wilde's younger lover, was also not helped by the publication of The Green Carnation. After Oscar Wilde was sent to prison, Bosie struggled with mental illness. Late in his life he was cut off from everyone, living in poverty, and quite mad. Bosie was jailed more than once -- not for indecency but for libel. He'd become convinced that he, and society as a whole, were menaced by a vast complex conspiracy. It was all the work of the Jews, of course. One famous figure who wrangled with Bosie over libel was Winston Churchill, who Bosie accused of masterminding dark plots in cooperation with a cabal of Jewish evil-doers. Sigh.
It's as if Oscar Wilde had foretold the future when he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. Bosie's acts of betrayal and personal miseries transformed his youthful face into that of a sour man who looked twenty years older than his actual age.
The sad story of the gay couple's life also reads a bit like one of the murder mysteries written by S. S. Van Dine. Van Dine/s amateur detective Philo Vance seeks psychological motivations, rather than physical evidence, for the crimes committed.
As you may recall from Part 1 of this series, in The Benson Murder Case, Van Dine had played up Robert Hichens' novel The Green Carnation. For all the furor and damage to the novel's subjects at the time of publication, the book itself has since faded into the past.
So has its author, who never seemed to be much more than a peripheral hanger-on to the Aesthetes, though he was prolific and moderately successful in his lifetime. Hichens wrote about themes and topics of interest in the early 20th century: Egypt (King Tut's tomb was discovered in 1922), the supernatural (spiritualism peaked after the First World War), and desert life "The Sheik of Araby" was a hit song, while Valentino was robed as "Tghe Sheik" in a silent film. Hichens' The Garden of Allah was made into a movie in 1927, then again a few years later, with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer in the lead roles.
But then, a surprise. Another book by Hichens, written forty years after The Green Carnation, kept the author's name from total obscurity. The Paradine Case was an out-and-out imitation of a typical bestseller by S. S. Van Dine, who'd once hyped Hichens' scandalous novel. Van Dine's Philo Vance mysteries had cookie-cutter titles -- a surname or noun followed by the phrase "Murder Case": The Bishop Murder Case, The Scarab Murder Case, The Kennel Murder Case, The Dragon Murder Case, and so on. Robert Hichens' 1933 mystery about possible spousal poisoning didn't have "Murder" in the title, but still...
This novel might have disappeared into the shifting sands of Hichens' imaginary deserts, but instead Alfred Hitchcock directed Gregory Peck, Ann Todd, and Charles Laughton in a 1947 film version.
By this time, Robert Hixhen, who was born in 1864, was near the end of his life. Hitchens' autobiography, Yesterday, came out the same year as the Hitchcock movie. A last novel, The Strange Lady, appeared in 1950, the year of Hichens' death. The intriguing title inspited me to request this one from the library system. Alas, it was a disappointment. The Strange Lady is the American title; the original British title was Beneath the Magic. You get the whole idea from the dust jacket.
I found Tongues of Conscience, a collection of Hichens' tales of the supernatural, as an e-book at Project Gutenberg
I would also like to read Yesterday, just to see what if anything Hichens says about the flap over The Green Carnation. But alas, even worn-and-torn copies cost about twenty-five bucks plus overseas shipping from London book shops. I'm not quite that interested.
While this series is finished, I do have a bit of a spin-off or an addendum: What happened to S. S. Van Dine? Well, Hollywood kind of did him in. More on that next time. See you in two weeks.
And here are some bonus 1920s cultural artifacts!
King Tut's tomb is opened, 1922:
Rudolph Valentino, Ruth Miller, & Adolph Menjou in "The Sheik":
Alice Faye and Betty Grable sing "The sheik of Araby":
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