Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture - Ohio University Press & Swallow ...

of course, deceived Harris about the whole matter,” having used the scenario to
raise sums of £100 on repeated occasions.²₁ To make matters worse, the aggrieved
parties “threatened Harris with proceedings.” Such information troubled Ross
because he had been doing his best to support Wilde by administering an allowance
of £150 a year from Constance Holland’s estate.
In any case, Harris had his own reasons for not fulfilling his side of the bargain.
Like Wilde, Harris—a habitually extravagant man—was hard up. Pressed
for funds, in 1898 Harris sold the Saturday Review, in which he had made space
for some of the most gifted authors of the day. During his four-year editorship,
Harris had brought George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Max Beerbohm into
the public eye; there, too, he had published Wilde’s “A Few Maxims for the
Instruction of the Over-Educated” (1894). Meanwhile, among Harris’s riskier
business ventures was the recent acquisition of a costly hotel in Monte Carlo,
which ended up emptying his pockets. With his finances at a breaking point,
Harris sensed that he had been swindled, and he “wrote rather sharply to Oscar
for having led [him] into this hornets’ nest.”²² He had little faith in how Wilde
might dispose of any monies he might send to the Hôtel d’Alsace, where Wilde
had been staying since August. In his memoir about Wilde’s last days, Harris’s
secretary, T. H. Bell, recalls that the only solution to Wilde’s writer’s block was
to have had a “combination nurse, guardian, and amanuensis” to ensure that
Wilde completed his part of the collaboration.²³ Above all, in Bell’s view, Wilde
should “have been kept encouraged and from getting drunk too early in the day”
and “kept in good humor” (143). (During his exile in France, Wilde indulged his
taste for absinthe and cognac.)²⁴ Whether fairly or unfairly, all that Harris would
part with before Wilde’s death was £25, a fact that Wilde repeats in letters that
enumerate his surgeon’s fee (£50), the bill for his consulting physician (£35), and
his bill at the chemists (£35) (Complete Letters, 1201, 1204). Ross records that in
November 1900, Wilde’s hotel expenses stood at £190 (Complete Letters, 1223).
After Mr. and Mrs. Daventry enjoyed the best part of a month’s performances,
Harris capitulated to the demands that Wilde made in an urgent letter dated 21
November 1900. Harris dispatched Bell to travel from London to Paris with the
sum that was owing to Wilde. Even at this stage, Harris suspected that Wilde
was feigning illness. (The truth of the situation became known to Harris at the
eleventh hour, for on 27 November Ross wired him about Wilde’s perilous condition.)
Bell recalls the instructions that his employer wanted him to follow once
he reached the Hôtel d’Alsace:
Introduction 7