Graffiti and candles have damaged Oscar Wilde’s memorial but lipstick may ruin it forever, his grandson says Stuart Jeffries
Oscar Wilde’s grave in Paris has put up with a lot in its first century the flying angel headstone has been castrated (twice), commemorative candles have scorched the front and multilingual graffiti are regularly scrawled over the tomb. But now it’s suffering from its most damaging assault: hundreds of lipstick kisses.
“It’s been going on for decades, but the lipstick is just the final straw. Unthinking vulgar people may have defaced Wilde’s tomb forever,” said Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson. “If these people want to honour Oscar Wilde’s memory, then they should leave the bloody tomb alone. It’s made me very angry.”
Hundreds of Wilde fans are expected to visit the grave at Pre Lachaise cemetery to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of the poet, dramatist and wit.
Graffiti include: “You are the best! You can never die!”, “Oscar forever and more smack!”, alongside misquoted lines from his poems. Only on the back of the tomb is there elegantly chiselled a poignant verse from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “And alien tears will fill for him/Pity’s long broken urn/For his mourners will be outcast men/And outcasts always mourn.”
Holland, who is partly responsible for the upkeep of the famous tomb with its distinctive angel relief carved by Jacob Epstein, said that the rash of kisses some hand-painted, others lip-applied are the biggest threat to its future.
“Marker-pen graffiti can be cleaned off and anything that is scratched into the tomb can be rubbed down with sandpaper, but lipstick contains animal fats which sink in to the stone and also leave horrible marks. Even the monumental masons aren’t sure if that can be removed. At the cemetery’s conservation office they just give me Gallic shrugs and say: “What can you do?”
The only other tomb at Pre Lachaise to suffer similar damage has been Jim Morrison’s. The Doors’s singer was buried there after his heart attack in a Paris hotel room aged 28 in 1971. His grave became covered with colourful graffiti. Morrison fans also damaged neighbouring graves, painting arrows and scribbled notes (such as “This way to Jim”). Now, though, apart from rolled-up joints and flowers, Morrison’s grave is as sombre as that of a Second Empire banker’s. Wilde’s has become something he would have hated gaudy.
Wilde died aged 46 in poverty at the Hotel d’Alsace, 13 Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris, and was buried in a tomb paid for by an anonymous “lady”. The headstone a winged, naked and initially well-hung angel was considered so offensive that the cemetery’s head keeper castrated it and for several years used the testicles as a paperweight. Genitals were later restored to the angel, but they were stolen during the Sixties.
In the early Nineties, Holland and the family of Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, paid for restoration work and a plaque at the base of the tomb that reads (in English and French): “Respect the memory of Oscar Wilde and do not deface this tomb. It is protected by law as an historical monument and was restored in 1992.”
“For years after that people would leave notes and bits of card which were elegant and touching. Then somebody thought it would be a nice idea to kiss the tomb. Then everybody else joined in. I don’t know what to do now. Perhaps I should write to L’Oral asking them to put warnings on their lipsticks. But I’ve got to find a way to restore the tomb and it’s going to cost money. I don’t mind because he’s my grandpa and I love him.”
The damage is upsetting to Holland, who this year marks the centenary of his grandfather’s death with an exhibition at the British Library called Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts that opened on November 10.
“For the past 20 years I had been compiling information about the whereabouts of manuscripts, photographs, cartoons and lots of Wilde’s ephemera. It was a sort of finding list if you wanted to know where to find the manuscript of his first play Vera, for example, which was inscribed to the actress Ellen Terry, then I knew how to do it. Then three years ago I was asked by the British Library to put an exhibition together about his life. I was in an ideal position to do it.”
On display are 250 items, including an autographed manuscript of De Profundis, Wilde’s long confessional letter from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover, whose father brought about Wilde’s fall from grace. Holland now devotes himself to writing about his grandfather and editing his letters. Fourth Estate published The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, a sumptuous 1?200-page volume that includes hundreds of hitherto unpublished letters.
The book includes a letter to Douglas. Written in March 1893 from London’s Savoy hotel, it describes his financial difficulties and his fondness for “Bosie” who was, for Wilde, “red and yellow wine”. The letter was used as prosecution evidence at Wilde’s trial for gross indecency.
“I’m sure he could have said that this letter was just poetic licence, written to a young friend. It was only when the prosecution started to drag in the rent boys that that line of defence collapsed,” said Holland, who is now writing a book about Wilde’s posthumous reputation and the squabbles between his friends.