Wilde at Bay: The Diaries of George Ives

John Stokes

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 26, Number 3,1983, pp. 175-186 (Article)

Published by ELT PressDOI: 10.1353/elt.2010.2433

For additional information about this article

Access provided by PUC/RS-PontifÃ-cia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (12 Mar 2013 16:33 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elt/summary/v026/26.3.stokes.html

WILDE AT BAY: THE DIARIES OF GEORGE IVES

By John Stokes(University of Warwick)

Poet and penologist, humanitarian recluse, self-styled "evolutionary anar-chist," George Ives looks set to attract more attention now than he ever sought orrisked in his lifetime. It is probably no more than he expected. The sheer bulkof his legacy—innumerable scrapbooks, endless manuscripts and a gargantuan diary(122 volumes, over three million words)—asserts an unshakeable confidence thatsooner or later his time would come. Ives's unpublished papers are his buriedmonument to himself, and he fully intended that at some stage they be excavated—though if he also assumed that his future readers would be humbled, made uncriti-cal, by what they found, there perhaps he misjudged.

The illegitimate son of aristocratic parents, George Cecil Ives, born in1867, was brought up in England and on the Continent, educated at Cambridge anduntil his death in 1950 lived most of his adult life in London. A dedicatedhomosexual, he looked forward to a future when homosexuals would be free to liveas they wished and, more than that, when they would be able to instruct the restof society by tolerance and humanitarianism. The range of moods in his diaryreflects the extraordinarily idealistic nature of his vision: prophecy, despair,obsessive secrecy, defensive posturing.

Ives found opportunities to indulge his taste for melodrama in his more prac-tical commitment to homosexual rights as well. At some early point in his life,probably in 1893, he founded a secret homosexual society, "The Order of Chaer-onea," and his diaries contain innumerable veiled references to meetings, ritual,insignia, codes and so on, all of them along vaguely Masonic lines. But the mix-ture of portentousness and evasion in the diaries makes it extremely difficult todetermine just how the Order operated and who belonged to it; perhaps in time somescholar of gay history will be able to fathom the mysteries. Meanwhile, for theprimarily literary historian, Ives's main claim for attention must be that he knewOscar Wilde, and for a period of about three years Wilde in turn seems to haveregarded Ives as an acceptable colleague in the struggles to establish a climatein which the "New Hedonism," a new homosexual sensibility, might flourish.

For all its volume, the diary in which their relationship is recorded pro-vides evidence of a peculiarly recalcitrant kind. An interlocutor is oftenpresumed, an anonymous presence who sometimes seems to be actual—perhaps one ofthe several boys with whom Ives lived, sometimes to be imagined—a later readerwho, as a member of the public, is berated for his insensitivity or ignorance,whilst at the same time exhorted to admire Ives's strength and devotion. Leadingcharacters are occasionally apostrophized: both Wilde and Douglas come in forthis treatment. Ives's thoroughgoing display of the rituals of paranoia, histor-ically understandable as it might be, exhausts the defensive opportunities offeredby his chosen genre. By controlling their distribution and reception, a diaristprotects the very secrets that he discloses, so that although ostensibly a reposi-tory of truth, a diary may also easily serve as a protector of self. Only byreading Ives with a measure of the infinite patience he expects of us can we begin

175

to appreciate the sustaining power that the image of Oscar the "superman" couldhave for an obsessively private, but not uncourageous man.

And by lending a cautiously sympathetic ear to Ives we may even hope to learnsomething new about the conduct of his hero. For if, in the sexual battles of the1890s, Ives and Wilde were unlikely allies by virtue of temperament alone, theinherently antithetical nature of their friendship does offer a key to the diary,despite Ives's attempts at concealment. When Wilde wrote The Importance of BeingEarnest in the summer of 1894, he thought of Ives's homosexual menage at E4Albany, Piccadilly, and originally had Ernest Worthing occupy those chambers,thereby converting a den of simmering conspiracy into the beleaguered home of aheterosexual dandy. The joke was at everybody's expense, including the author's,since Ives embodied a movement and a mood which Wilde had sometimes allowed him-self to take with uncharacteristic seriousness.

Their acquaintanceship had begun in 1892. On 30 June, having spent much ofthe day at Lord's watching cricket, Ives proceeded to the Author's Club, where aformal literary dinner was being held :

By one of those rum coincidences which seem my fate, I got talking withOscar Wilde, with whom I have friends in common, and went with him tothe Lyric Club. He was most amenable and has asked me to lunch at theBerkeley—of course the leader of the aesthetic movement is very inter-esting to meet, for it is, so far as I know, a great change for Art inthe age and one with which I have always been in full sympathy. Ourmeeting was quite droll and romantic, and would be pronounced far-fetched in a play but such meetings are not new to me or to W.

A note, probably added years later, comments:

P.S. First meeting with Oscar. I spoke to him as he sat in the passagewaiting (for he arrived very late). He looked at me with his sleepyeyes and said: "What are you doing here?" I replied I was attendingthe literary dinner. "But," he answered, though I forget the words heused, it's so long ago. "Why are you here among the bald and thebearded?"

This double account makes it fairly clear that what drew the two men together inthe first place was a sexual interest, though Ives seems to have known littleabout Wilde beforehand. It was not until September, for example, that he gotround to reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, and when he did he immediately sensedan unbridgeable gulf between its author and himself:

It seems very brilliant as far as I have gone—Lord Henry in particularis a second Chester [presumably Lord Chesterfield], but though admiringthe acting and the cold cutting cynicism I am not of it. Under control,patient, immovable, crushing down good and evil under the ice mantle ofsuppression—with the few exceptions, neither loving nor loved—yet Ihave a Cause: I feel an instrument and in that above the weakness ofmy nature—ah, the world is a terrible school.

176

The passage is characteristically deliberate: Ives often makes a point of scrupu-lously contrasting temperaments as a preliminary to reaffirming the common cause.Although he always took great delight in compiling lists of famous men whom heknew or believed to be homosexual, and was fascinated to hear from Wilde that, forexample, Whitman's homosexuality was beyond question, and that Byron and Shelleyhad been lovers, Ives, throughout his life, found it a challenge to reconcile thevariety of homosexual personalities with his own sombre ideals and retiring na-ture. Thus, on 14 August 1892:

Had letters from two celebrities today, 0. Wilde and E. Carpenter, theauthors respectively of Lady Windermere's Fan and Towards Democracy.,The latter, E. C, criticises my book, i.e. The Lifting of the Veil,saying, "I think among the mystic symbols and aspirations of the bookthere are signs of poetic ore. ..." He seems to complain of theregularity of my metre. Of course Ed. Carpenter, who writes in thestrange metre—or rather, style of Walt Whitman, and that too is a veinfull of life and I must say beautiful idealism, strongly interwovenwith practical life, or, to be more exact, idealised earth-life—canhardly like a book at once mystic gloomy and sombre.

Well, the Cause must be served and followed by all sorts of men,each to work in their particular sphere; the issue and the hope isgreat enough to bind even the most heterogeneous society and, if onlyorganised, which we have never been before, we shall go on to victory.

But the responses of his heroes were often rather less gratifying than Ives isprepared to admit. Carpenter never joined his secret society, and there is noevidence that Wilde did either. A note added later to an entry for October 1892recording Wilde's advice that he set up a pagan monastery on some rocky Mediter-ranean island suggests an early impatience with Ives's clandestine schemes.Nevertheless, in the spring of the following year, when would-be blackmailersthreatened Wilde with exposure of certain compromising letters to Douglas, Wildewent out of his way to consult Ives and even suggested that Ives meet withClibborn, one of their number.

It was not until October 1893 that Douglas came on to the scene, when Iveswas introduced to him by the poet Theodore Wratislaw at a luncheon on the 14th.Ives "had an idea that we shall influence one another greatly." It was aneventful day in another respect. Apparently at Wilde's request, though he alsorequired the permission of his grandmother, Ives shaved off his moustache."Moving very rapidly now at last but I am prepared, it is well," begins the entry.The following night Ives and Wilde dined at the Savoy, with two other,guests whomIves had invited, probably André Raffalovich and Sir Egbert Sebright. They satfrom eight to eleven, and Ives was bedazzled:

A teacher [i.e., Wilde], he either cannot or will not give the key tohis philosophy, and till I get it I can't understand him. He seems tohave no purpose, I am all purpose. Apparently of an elegant refinednature and talented as few men are, brilliant as a shining jewel, yethe teaches many things which cannot be held and which are so false asnot even to be dangerous.

177

Well, I shall find out in time, no one can conceal their realnature for ever, meanwhile we have one thing in common which covers awhole multitude of differences.

I feel it is a terrible task to fight the battle of Our Truth,weighed down by weakness and all manner of littleness, yet when I lookat the goal, at the wonderful future which will come to Man, then Iremain loyal.

This is, as usual, a garbled explanation of what should nonetheless have been amemorable occasion. Ridden with self-consciousness Ives, even at this early pointin their friendship, could never understand how Wilde could be so flamboyant, socareless of himself.

That night Ives could not sleep, blaming his restlessness on Douglas, "aboutwhom I am spinning a friendly web." Bosie ("X" in the following extract) had per-haps joined the previous evening's gathering or at least been discussed:

I want X to pause, to reflect on himself, to conquer himself and obtainfreedom. I want him to change his life, for his own good, but es-pecially for the Cause, which is sacred to us both: shall I do allthis? I don't know frankly. It is a difficult character, swayed bypassion, shaken by impulse; but people of strong emotions have oftenstrong will, though it may be dormant. All will depend upon this. Butof course the Cause must not be injured by an individual, howevercharming. (16 October 1893)

On the 19th Wilde was again Ives's guest, together with Douglas, who was "decided-ly ruffled" and "so lost some of his fascination." "I felt bound to take a certainline but now I've done my best and must leave matters to take their chance," wasIves's cryptic comment at the time, though he added later: "I believed I warnedLord A. more than once, that he was indulging in homosexuality to a reckless andhighly dangerous degree." A week afterwards he again met with Wilde to considerDouglas's future.

The autumn was spent reading: Charles Pearson on evolution, Moll on homosex-uality , Schopenhauer, Charcot, Lombroso, some historians. Ives found reinforcementof his ideas in all of them, though intellectual convictions were of little helpin curbing Douglas, whose extravagance and promiscuity were on the increase.Wilde's difficult summer had ended with Douglas being dispatched by his family tospend the winter in Egypt, and Ives does not mention any further consultationswith Wilde until a dinner at the Albemarle Club on 13 December, when he sported abuttonhole of lilies of the valley which, if not of green carnations, neverthelesswon approval. The following day the two men lunched at a restaurant, encounteringsome of the staff of the Pall Mall Gazette. On the 15th Ives wrote that the pre-vious day had been "all creativity, laying plans and plots for the great movementof the future." When he left to spend Christmas in France, Wilde came to the NewTravellers' Club to see him off and kissed him goodbye, "passionately" (23December 1893). The sadness of this parting was, it seems, somewhat alleviated byIves's chance meeting with a sympathetic soul on the boat train.

Back in London in January 1894 there was a major crisis, probably involvingone of Ives's boyfriends, with whom he had been living in Albany since mid-July.

178

Ives felt insecure because he could not communicate with "some o"f Us," though hewas in touch with Wilde and Douglas throughout 1894 and frequently entertainedthem in his rooms along with other homosexual guests. On 24 August Douglas spentthe night, and the diary again offers a double perspective, immediate incoherentguilt: "The voice of the Faith came to me and said, 'Thou shalt not play withSouls for they are priceless . . . shame shall come upon thee who has broken thebond of friendship'"; later, rationalisation supported by hindsight: "That miser-able traitor ... I knew he had faults and more or less insanity all along, but Ithought him rather the victim than the villain he proved to be."

When set against this background of continuing private turmoil—of failure inhuman relationships and faith in humane ideals—Ives's most public action of 1894takes on greater import. In March Grant Allen, novelist, journalist and Spencerianphilosopher, had published a provocative article in the Fortnightly Review: "TheNew Hedonism." Taking as his motto the Greek precept "self-development is greaterthan self-sacrifice," Allen had argued that "self-development" included the freeexpression of sexuality, but only within the family. This limitation so incensedIves that he wrote a reply, which appeared in the Humanitarian in October. In-voking Plato, John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater in support of the proposi-tion that, in Pater's words, the figure of the Greek hero shows "the material andspiritual . . . fused together," Ives maintained that the true Greek ideals hadbeen wholly obscured by modern prejudice. Genuine "hedonism" must embrace alllove and all pleasure, including—the implication was unmistakeable—homosexual-ity. Ives's article caused some stir, and played a part among, the polemics ofwhat was, for the homosexual vanguard, a remarkably active year.

The combative mood was soon further intensified by tragedy. The suicide ofLord Drumlanrigg, Douglas's brother, in October, which, it was strongly suspectedon all sides, had homosexual implications, prompted a letter from Wilde describinghis lover's grief and congratulating Ives on having been criticised for his "NewHedonism" article: "When the prurient and the impotent attack you, be sure youare right." Later that year Ives was sufficiently reconciled to Douglas topraise him, "if he has made Oxford what it is" (15 November 1894), and to join inwith plans for the fateful Uranian magazine that, at Ives's suggestion, was tobear the title the Chameleon. When Ives expressed reservations about the politicalwisdom of publishing overtly homosexual material, Wilde, who had initially voicedsimilar doubts about Ives's reply to Grant Allen, was now able to riposte: "'Youhave thrown a bomb and you object to a cracker. ... It will do a great deal ofharm—that is good.'" (12 February 1914). Ironically the greatest harm done bythe Chameleon was, at it turned out, to Wilde himself, for his association withthe magazine was used against him at his trial to great effect.

The diary insists that all through his life, but particularly in the nine-ties, Ives brooded on little else but what he identified as "the Cause." This maybe somewhat misleading, since Ives had several longstanding passions, includingsport. Certainly his faith in the homosexual ideal led him in directions whichmight at first glance seem incongruous. A convinced Darwinist, he studied themany pseudo-biological treatises which attempted to diagnose contemporary prob-lems , and he became especially fascinated with the "non-functional" or "extra-organic" habits of animals: actions which seem not to correspond with inheritedphysical structure—fish that retained their eggs in their mouth, for example, orthat swam upside down—seeing in such phenomena clues to an evolutionary process

179

based on the interchange between structure and function. He cherished zoologicaloddities that demonstrated the diversity of the animal world: friendships betweencats and dogs, apparently homosexual ties observed in mammals and birds. Theinterest in biological oddities clearly became compulsive, yet the motivation wasalways to assimilate the strange rather than simply to accumulate a collection offreaks. All provided him with parallels for the essential "naturalness" of thatother "anomaly," the human homosexual, who followed his instincts irrespective ofprocreative "purpose." Exhaustive documentation of the surrounding world wasIves's "rational" way of understanding himself.

He was correspondingly drawn to progressive criminology, developing a life-long compassion for the unjustly treated which he backed up with wide reading.Continuous but unmethodical research enabled him to produce a series of short butencyclopaedic books: A History of Penal Methods (1914), The Continued Extensionof the Criminal Law (1922), Obstacles to Human Progress (1939). Lacking rigour,these deal chiefly with attitudes to offenses which legal opinion had long agolearnt to consider as obviously anachronistic (witchcraft, for example) or asmedically or biologically endemic. Although Ives maintained a conventional dis-tinction between "crimes of impulse" and "crimes of circumstance," he restrictedthe first to behavior which it was fairly easy to claim as harmless to others—homosexuality and suicide, for example—while he treated the second—theft, murderand so on—as the products of an entirely undifferentiated "environment." Hishumanitarian aspirations tended to lead him to underestimate the question of jur-isdiction over offenses in which he was not personally interested.

Moreover, as a young man at least, Ives also considered himself something ofa poet, and he produced several books of Uranian verse, all of it unusually maud-lin even by the standards of the genre. The Lifting of the Veil, which containsverses on his other habitual themes, prison and suicide, was followed by Book ofChains (1897) and Eros' Throne (1900), both of which have evangelical poems onWilde.

Ives was always unshakeable in his beliefs, always, in his melancholy way,concerned for others. Yet even in the optimistic early nineties he sometimesfound it hard to derive much comfort from the growing solidarity among his homo-sexual friends in London. His forebodings were soon to be brutally confirmed. On1 January 1895, revealing a tendency to self-fulfilling prophecy which was toenmesh even Wilde himself, he confided to his diary: "After going among that setit is hard to mix in ordinary society, for they have a charm which is rare andwonderful. I wish they were less extravagant and more real; so gifted and so niceyet ... I see the storms of battle coming. . . ."

Ives's comments on the trials are fairly scanty. This may be attributedeither to caution or to Ives's exclusion from the support groups because of somerecent quarrel, the nature of which he does not disclose. On 5 April the caseagainst Queensberry was withdrawn, and later that day a warrant was issued forWilde's arrest. On 6 April, not for the first time, Ives considered suicide,peering down the barrel of his revolver at the "little messenger" it contained:

What are thou, such a little thing, but it is thine to save me from theforce of all the State, it is thine perhaps to convince many, and to

180

open the gates of justice. Who shall understand, who reads this pas-sage, what matter, for I understand and think on the words of Seneca ofRome. Thanks little minister, remain patiently until 1 call for thee,it may be soon or not for many years, God knows . . . meanwhile I mustgo forth into the hatch of life, even for the good of many. . . .

April passed. Ives suffered in sympathy and meditated on the meaning ofevents: "There is nothing to be done yet, though it may do good in the future—Ihave been so grieved about it, but the great movement will go on, though individ-uals fall: if it were a true case of the Faith we should stand side by side butthis would be impolite and useless now" (25 April 1895).

The second trial ended with the jury unable to agree, and Ives's relief wasmatched by his hope that in the next hearing the witnesses would finally be re-vealed as blackmailers and Wilde would be saved. Come 5 May and Wilde's speech on"the love that dare not speak its name," which Ives transcribed from the DailyTelegraph, he was hailing Wilde as "a man who sticks to his colours" and one of"the great of the earth" (5 May 1895). Wilde was put on bail, retried, convicted;and for Ives, the transfiguration from master to martyr was well underway. Wildewas one of those who "though they may have erred, at least created no actualvictims or sorrow" (26 May 1895); his enemies "do not know how brutal they havebeen, and if we could show them the truth I believe they would be both sorry andashamed" (2 July 1895). Ives thinks of visiting Wilde in gaol but manifestsrelief when he hears that Robert Sherard has made the journey: "The whole affairwould have been painful and more or less imprudent for me and no use for the vic-tim" (27 August 1895).

Throughout 1896 he reassured himself that Wilde was not, would never be, for-gotten. Sometimes he despaired:

I do not love now; I am dead once more, 0[scar] and B[osie]awakened me out of my sleep, the one of charm, the other of pity andbeauty, now it is over; but the Ideal of Faith still leads me. If itplease the Great Power to try me, then It will give me strength. Ithink the body can be cured and overcome—as a means of freedom forothers not as an end of an ideal. ... (26 March 1896)

A deepening trust in the "ideal" was accompanied by heady fantasies: he wouldacquire a yacht with "a grand Greek crew" and sail away "from man and tyranny"(17 March 1896); if he had been with Wilde in the spring of 1895 he would havedied—whether with or for Wilde is unclear (18 April 1896); he would have chal-lenged Queensberry to a duel (18 April 1896). There were practical gestures too:he sent an article to the Echo on prison conditions (14 May 1896), and he sup-plied Frank Harris with evidence from parliamentary papers to help with the peti-tion to the Home Secretary then being planned (26 August 1896). As a privateprotest he refused to go to the opera while Wilde was in gaol (26 November 1896)and renounced alcohol for life. At last he was rewarded with a poignant messagefrom the prisoner himself, sent via Sherard:

Please remember me very kindly to George Ives. I was greatly touchedat hearing of his desire to come and see me. In the terrible solitudeand silence in which one lives a message or a memory means a great

181

deal. I hope he is hard at work writing books. I am very glad youknow him. He is such a good fellow and so clever.

This tribute consoled its subject in entirely characteristic ways: it freed himfrom a lurking sense of betrayal, and it made him feel part of history. Reinvig-orated, he dreamed of infinite prospects for his "Cause": "'We' are disciplined,careful, fanatical, a power that one day must be known; but for the victims, ahthe poor victims (11 December 1896).

When May 1897, the time of Wilde's release, finally came round, Ives offeredhis home, sent a message via Harris that he would meet Wilde anywhere, but for thetime being stayed where he was, in Cambridge, reading Max Nordau, whom he was sur-prised to find prophesying homosexual marriages (18 May 1897).

The essence of Ives's devotion is best revealed In a later episode which isrecorded with unusual care. Early in October 1897 he set out for Berneval, thevillage near Dieppe where Wilde had spent the summer. He travelled second class,slept in his boots and high collar, and arrived in Dieppe at 4 a.m. After a cupof hot milk he strode through the rainy gas-lit streets, a thornstick in his hand,a loaded revolver in his pocket. He climbed the hill of Le Pollet and left thetown:

Ferns were growing out of the thatch and the lanes were wooded andmuddy; it was like a home hamlet all over, and the people so nice, manyof the urchins saluting me just as they would at home, and of course, Iraised my hat in reply—then over a cliff and down a steep path, sosteep, and then I saw a little village nestling in a cove in the cliffsand the great rose chalk headlands, meadow-covered right up to theirj agged uncompromising edges, and without any guard rail or protectionwhatever. The road down to the sea was through a deep cutting, and thebeach seemed just a sort of opening in the line of interminable cliffs,a little homely sheltered spot. (3 October 1897)

On arrival in Berneval he discovered that Wilde had left. But the diary doesnot register disappointment, for it was enough simply to have made the effort:

But he whom I sought had been gone three weeks; and all my long journeywas vain; how good and kind he was, the woman said: he is. Well, Iwent up to the "shrine" and saw the room he had and his chair—see howa great man carries honour through all that man can lay upon him; andafter a run to the shore, I started back by a different road, throughBraqueraont and Puy and such lovely lanes, such dear little shell-cemented cottages; all seemed so fair and restful in the beautifulearly morning. I felt so glad he had been there; to drink in the deeptranquillity and receive the scene into his soul, and be strengthenedby Old Mother Earth, who cares for us all. (3 October 1897)

That the word "shrine" should be singled out does not necessarily imply a totalself-awareness in Ives's narrative. Nevertheless, it was at this point that Wilde,about whom Ives had repeatedly expressed grave moral doubts, achieved apotheosisin Ives's erratic typology. The visit to Berneval was even more gratifying once

182

it became a pilgrimage to a departed scene. Eager for witnesses, Ives began cor-responding with Warder Martin, who had been sympathetic to Wilde in Reading Gaol(19 November 1897).

It was not until the spring of the following year that Ives saw Wilde again.The place was Paris, and the gaucheness of the diary is strikingly revealed whenoffset aginst Wilde's own account. After receiving Ives's anonymous volume ofpoems, Book of Chains, late in 1897, Wilde had written to Ross: "George Ives hassent me his poems—of course without an .inscription. His caution is amusing. Hemeans well, which is the worst of it."

In Paris in March 1898 Ives reported a rather different opinion: "Thursdayand I am still here but the place this time is full of interest. I have seen himthe poet and he likes my book. Yes and I have told him so much, it is well, atlast, that we met after that terrible block of time and are unchanged" (9 March1898). Wilde told Ives about his prison experiences and sent him a letter withthe celebrated prophecy: "Yes: I have no doubt we shall win, but the road islong, and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but the repeal of the CriminalLaw Amendment Act would do any good. That is the essential. It is not so muchpublic opinion as public officials that need educating."

Away from Wilde, Ives reverts to his old doubts. "Not exactly intimatefriends," he admits (25 September 1899), but "much as we disagree in the philo-sophy of life," even so "there is nothing in the wide world would give me greaterjoy than would thy happiness" (30 November-1 December 1899).

They met again in Paris in 1900. One evening early in February they talkedpast midnight. Ives drank his customary hot milk, Wilde took whisky, talked aboutwitchcraft, and told parables:

But he would not let me go home to his door, nor could he see me theretoday; some café, he said! And that means a crowd where all must besaid in public (all the more as he is growing a little deaf.) In theend, I declined, and am going home tonight so it is uncertain if wemeet again. ... (6 February 1900)

But Ives must have attempted a further meeting, for on 12 February 1900 Wildecomplained that he had called twice at the Hôtel d'Alsace without leaving hisaddress. It was an angry, impatient letter—the kind of rebuke that Wilde fre-quently issued during the awful last days, but surely faithful to the maddeningeffect that Ives now had upon him:

Don't have with me the silly mania for secrecy that makes you miss thevalue of things: to you it is of more importance to conceal your ad-dress from a friend than to see your friend. . . . Also, when you senda petit bleu to ask me to make an appointment with you, please put youraddress: otherwise I can't reply. ... On the whole, George, you area great baby. One can't help be angry with you.

Back in London Ives told his diary that he found Wilde's handwriting "mostdifficult to make out" (13 Febraury 1900). In September a letter arrived askingfor a loan of ten pounds; Ives sent five ¡(8 September 1900). Then on 30 November

183

1900 Wilde died. Ives announced the event several times over, contributed a hal-lowing poem to Reynolds Newspaper ("Some day on history's page/Shall his mournfulfate be told"), and lamented at length:

1 December 1900. Oscar Wilde, victim and martyr, died yesterday inParis.

2 December 1900. . . . The greatest tragedy of the whole nineteenthcentury makes me pause and think. But there is no justice in the worldI have seen, that the land is full of tears I know: we must leave totime and evolution and then our day will come.

Like almost everyone else, he had the partial revelations of De Profundisstill to confront, though these did little but confirm his dedication to thesacred memory—"like a fifth gospel"—and justify his feelings about Douglas, whohad now become a "courtesan" and "cockatrice" (4 March 1905). For the next fiftyyears Ives was to perpetuate his contact with the "victim and martyr" by thesimple expedient of adding or repeating anecdotes in his diary, that narcissisticproject which served as the dark mirror of his state. The secret life remained agloomy secret, largely because he was less interested in reflecting the brightsurface of daily exchange than in perusing his own subterranean self-involvements.Time and again, he half-remembers some Wildean epigram, fumbles to repeat it,fails, resorts to cliché and then passes the moment off with an unapologetic"words to that effect." "Morbid" was what Wilde called him on one occasion (27December 1893). Just as telling was Wilde's observation that he was "systematic"(6 April 1896). The diary was Ives's systematic substitute for literay expression:the "morbid" form taken by his desire. Despite the few years of programmaticallegiance, Ives had become everything that Wilde could not accept. Their mainpoint of agreement: a firm conviction that, in Edward Carpenter's words, "theOutcast of one age is the Hero of another."

Monumental bore, monomaniac among the devious and the complex, class casualty—all these Ives certainly was though he commands sympathy, admiration even, forcommitment and perseverance. Only to the half-invited reader of his querulousdiary, who is above all eager to discover Wilde, is he sometimes hard to forgive.In 1899 he attempts to cite The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and with his customarymaladroitness blunders into banality: "Is that terrible sentence true, 'we canalways be kind towards those we don't love'?" (2 March 1899). Later, when he seesAn Ideal Husband, he finds himself in sympathy with a sentiment not actually ex-pressed in that play nor, fortunately, anywhere else in Wilde's works. "Love is atragedy. ... If you think about a thing you kill it . . . yes, to think, is todestroy" (30 November 1899).

Not that Ives ever stopped thinking in his own particular way, gratefullyappropriating each new intellectual discovery—whether Bertrand Russell, Shaw,Havelock Ellis, Freud, D. H. Lawrence or A. S. Neill—for "the Cause." But theconfirmation he found in the opinions of others was of dubious assistance when itcame to the daily tribulations of his own life. "St. George" to Robert Ross(29 July 1893) but a "great baby" to Wilde in 1900, Ives never managed to achievehis master's ironical perspective on his own fate:

184

Oscar meant well, to all. He had not the gift of responsibility,he could not estimate consequence, he was all Art, and all Emotion, andI looked up to him as to a superman (and db still, while utterly dis-agreeing with his written philosophy, and even with his life, on manysides). (23 February 1905)

In the tragic context of universal homosexual repression Ives, a man who alwaysmissed the joke, could find no place for paradox and public wit. Now that his dayhas come, scholars who persevere with his interminable ruminations must add totheir trials the thought of Oscar's derisive smile.

NOTES

I am grateful to the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas,Austin, in their capacity as owners of the physical manuscripts, for permission toquote, from Ives's diaries, to Mr. Anthony Reid, and Mrs. Erika Wilson, who iscurrently preparing a biography, for advice concerning Ives. Since the numberingof folios is sometimes erratic, my quotations are identified by date of entryonly. Portions of the diary are virtually illiterate and I have frequently cor-rected punctuation and spelling, while attempting to preserve Ives's idiosyncra-cies. Occasionally he uses a variety of alphabetical codes, although none of thepassages quoted here make use of them.

A selection from Ives's scrapbooks was published in 1980: Man Bites Man.The Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric, ed. Paul Sieveking (London: Jay Landes-man, 1980). There is an informative review by E. S. Turner in the Times LiterarySupplement, 19 December 1980. There are also accounts of Ives in Timothy d'ArchSmith's Love in Earnest (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), Brian Reade'sSexual Heretics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), and Jeffrey Weeks'sComing Out (London: Quartet, 1977).

2The best, fullest treatment is in Weeks s Coming Out.

3 Ives kept in contact with Carpenter and visited him in April 1897. Seed'Arch Smith, p. 113; Weeks, pp. 119-20.

4Ives's first book of verse, published under the pseudonym "C. Branco" by

Swann Sonnenschein in 1892.

André Raffalovich (1864-1934), a rich poet of Russian origin who later de-veloped a close friendship with the poet John Gray. His relationship with Wildewas always uneasy and culminated in a hostile account of homosexuality, publishedafter Wilde's imprisonment.

Sir Egbert Sebright, 10th Baronet, born 1871, died off Batavia, Java, in1897.

See d'Arch Smith, pp. 110-11; Weeks, p. 120.

185

Q

See Reade, pp. 52-53: "1894 could be described as a golden year for homo-sexuals in England, for the very reason that it was the last year for a long timein which they could take shelter in public ignorance or tolerance to propagate anon-hostile climate of taste and opinion."

q[Postmark 22 October 1894], The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-

Davis (London: Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 375.10,

Man.There are innumerable examples among the cuttings included in Man Bites

"Moral Effects of Imprisonment," 28 May 1896.12

Wednesday [26 August 1896], Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 407.13

Tuesday, 16 November 1897, Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 673.14

[Postmark 21 March 1898], Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 721.

12 February [postmark 1900], Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 815.

169 December 1900.

186