In Search of Family in The Wildes by Louis Bayard

My guest today is Louis Bayard, author of The Wildes listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction.

View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ukomPza-Oh0

• Why write about Oscar Wilde through the lens of his family life?
• Inspiration for the novel from the memoir of Vivian Wilde, the youngest of the two sons of Oscar and Constance.
• Challenges of writing about one of the great wits in the English language.
• Structure of The Wildes as a play in five acts in a high comedy register.
• Constance Wilde as the protagonist of the novel, and how she was very progressive for her time, and very much Oscar's equal.
• Lady Wilde (Oscar's mother), the fiery Irish revolutionary poet named Speranza.
• Oscar Wilde and his relationship to women, seeing them as equals.
• What can contemporary audiences learn from The Wildes, particularly the "fifth act" of the novel?
• Reading from The Wildes.
• One thing that Louis learned from writing this novel that he didn't realize before.

Read more about Louis Bayard on his website: https://www.louisbayard.com/

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Transcript

Carol Cram

Hello and welcome. I’m Carol Cram, host of The Art In Fiction Podcast. This episode features Louis Bayard, author of The Wildes, listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction, and also chosen as one of the top 10 historical novels of the year by the New York Times. 

Louis is also the author of The Pale Blue Eye, adapted into the global #1 Netflix release starring Christian Bale, Jackie & Me, ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top novels of 2022, the national bestseller Courting Mr. Lincoln, and many more. His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Salon, and he is a contributing writer to the Washington Post Book World. A former instructor at George Washington University, Louis was the chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and the author of the popular Downton Abbey recaps for the New York Times. 

Welcome to The Art In Fiction Podcast, Louis. 

Louis Bayard

It is so great to be here. 

Carol Cram

So first of all, I so enjoyed The Wildes. I'm a big Oscar Wilde fan. 

Louis Bayard

Well, who wouldn't be?

Carol Cram

Exactly. I actually him studied way back when I did my master’s quite a while ago. Oh. I studied a lot of Oscar Wilde. I did my Master's in Drama, but I didn’t know very much about his family. So why did you decide to write about Oscar through the lens of his family?

Louis Bayard

For that very reason, Carol, because nobody knew about his family. I can't tell you how many times when I was working on this book, I said, I'm writing a book about Oscar Wilde's wife and children, and people will give me this look of, wait, what? He had a wife? He had children? It is a completely untold story, and that is what attracts me as an historical novelist to telling it because nobody knows. Nobody knows that he had this wife and these children to whom he was very devoted, and they were very devoted to him as well. 

So, it's another weird kind of outing to say, Hey, this guy was a family man, and we need to talk about that too, because his family was swept up in his scandal and their lives were completely changed by it.

Carol Cram

And that's really what the novel was about, is we discover when we get through the whole Norfolk business, we go, oh, okay, so that's what you're looking at is the Lord Alfred Douglas affair. 

I love the way you focused on the boys because I did know about Constance, and I think I vaguely knew that he had children. But those two boys, Vivian and Cyril, become real characters in the novel. So that must have been a lot of fun. How did you find out about them? 

Louis Bayard

Well, I think my major source was a book that Vivian—Vivian was the younger child—and the only one who survived past World War I. And many years, decades later, he would write a book called Son of Oscar Wilde. I think it came out in 52, 53 with his picture on the cover. 

And this was another kind of outing. Carol. because, he was of course known his family and friends knew who his parents were. But until then, he had not ever identified himself publicly as Oscar Wilde's son. But what also came out of this really beautiful memoir that he wrote was how vividly he remembered his childhood, decades after the fact, how vividly and warmly he remembered Oscar and Constance and Cyril and their family life.

And it became clear to me in reading this memoir that all they really wanted, all the Wildes really wanted to do was to remain a family. And that was ultimately the aim of the book, was to kind of reinstate them, restore them as the family they dearly wanted to remain. 

Carol Cram

Yes, exactly. I know it was very touching the way that you did that, and you brought in the boys. And he was really young, wasn't he? I mean, he was only five years old.

Louis Bayard

Five years old in the very beginning of the book. He's not even there when they were on holiday in Norfolk, but yes, yes. He was very young. But yeah, so even though a lot of this stuff happened before he even hit puberty, he still had very strong memories of that life and that world. And it was a wonderful resource for the book because it was a real window into the Wilde family as they were. 

Carol Cram

It was another side of Oscar because we were always used to him as the Bon Vivant and so witty. But he was a very fond father. And I got a huge kick of how witty the novel is. I mean, you must have drawn a lot on Oscar Wilde’s many von vivants. Bon mots. 

Louis Bayard

They certainly inspired me. Most of the bon vivants are mine, uh, bon mots. Most of them are mine, but they're certainly inspired by Oscar. Here’s the thing. When you write a book about one of the great wits in the English language, you can't hope to compete with him. There's no competing with Oscar Wilde, so you just hope to kind of collaborate with him in effect. And tell this story in a way that he might've approved of.

So, the book is structured as an Oscar Wilde play in five acts in a very high comedy register with kind of two Lady Bracknell figures. So anyone who's seen The Importance of Being Ernest will recognize this register, this high speech. Nobody actually talks like this in the real world, but in Oscar Wilde World, that's how people talk.

They say the wittiest possible things at every given moment. So, to me it was a great challenge to kind of live in that world and try to stay equal to it. 

Carol Cram

So, what I'd like also was how witty Constance was. I mean, you really imbued Constance with the personality because she's always been in the background.

Louis Bayard

I know, and that's another thing that always pissed me off about evocations of Oscar. There was a 1996 movie with Stephen Fry called Wilde. Stephen Fry played Oscar and Jude Law at his most beautiful was Bozie, his lover. And Constance was just this sort of marginal figure who was just looking sad on the sidelines.

And I remember thinking as I watched this movie, it's like, okay, who is this woman? What sort of woman would've married Oscar Wilde? What sort of woman would Oscar Wilde have married? What did she bring to this partnership? And the more I read about her and the more I realized that she was this very progressive feminist reformer.

She was trying to free Victorian women of their corsets. She had very strong views about raising children and about all Victorian society. And that has all been lost. She's just this little sad house frau watching as her husband goes off with Bozie. So, part of my pleasure in doing this to put her back in the front. 

If you look at the cover of the book, for instance, Oscar and Constance are very much side by side, very much equals, and that's kind of what I wanted to present in this too, is to make her an equal. I consider her the protagonist of the book.

And I'm very fond of her, at least my Constance. I'm very fond of her. I was very happy to spend time in her company and very sorry to say goodbye. 

Carol Cram

So, did you have a lot of research materials for Constance? Were there letters or that kind of thing? 

Louis Bayard

Some letters for sure. And there was a really fine biography of her that came out a few years ago by a woman named Franny Moyle. I don't know if it was published outside of the UK, but again, it really brought home what a sort of independent life she was living and how much involved in that whole world, that Bohemian world of late 19th century England.

She was a part of that. She was friends with James Whistler, and she was a real presence, and she wrote herself; she edited some of Oscar's stuff and they were very much a partnership. 

That's one of the things I try to get across in the book is that he wasn't just writing these books, these plays in absentia. He was very much collecting input from her, and she was very much a part of his world artistically and culturally.

Carol Cram

 I just love reclaiming women from the 1890s because there were a lot of really strong ones. I know they get kind of sidelined.

Louis Bayard

Right?

Carol Cram

These, these were pretty badass women, right? 

Louis Bayard

Oh my gosh. They had to be badass women because the world did not allow for that. So yeah, the ones who were badass, you go, my queen. Thank you. 

Carol Cram

Yes. And there are a lot of really intellectual ones like his mom.

 I didn't actually know very much about Lady Wilde. She's a wonderful character. So, tell us a little bit about her.

Louis Bayard

So, Oscar's Mother, Lady Wilde, she had a fascinating life. She began as a fiery Irish revolutionary poet named Speranza. And then she married Sir William Wilde, who was a knighted ophthalmologist. And she kind of had to tone it down from there on, but she never quite lost it.

And toward the end of her life after Sir William died, she resettled in London and became a famous salon hostess. And she conducted her salons in near total darkness. And there were mediums and there were strange folk singers and whoever.

She just brought them in. And she was to the end a remarkable, very colorful, unapologetically strong woman, another really strong woman who needed to be recognized. So it was my great pleasure to hang with her too. 

Carol Cram

Oh, I bet, I bet. Like I think what you've really accomplished is showing that Oscar Wilde did not exist in isolation.

Louis Bayard

Oh, no. And he loved women. And that's, that's the other thing about Oscar. He, he loved women. For a time in the 1880s, he edited a women's magazine, which was not simply like a Ladies Home Journal thing.

It was very much a sort of intellectual cultural kind of talking about women's issues. So, and the fact that he was willing to do that, that that was interesting to him. I think it was one of the reasons Constance would've been drawn to him is because he completely understood why she was interested in these issues.

And he accepted that and rolled with that. I see them as a real egalitarian partnership in that way. 

Carol Cram

So how do you see the Wildes speaking to people today? What can we learn from looking at their lives?

Louis Bayard

Gosh, I think speaking today. Well, I speak to you from the perspective of being one of two dads of a nonconventional family here in 21st century Washington, DC. So, we're creating our own family. I think the Wildes kind of helped give us a template for how that might work. Yes. And I think Oscar was, again, a devoted father, but also very much into exploring his own sexual destiny and figuring out what that looked like and getting in a lot of trouble as a result. 

But I guess the idea is that you don't have to close down one avenue to explore the other, I guess is an interesting thing. And that through it all, you can still be a family even when 

Carol Cram

It's not conventional.

Louis Bayard

Yeah. Unconventional. Yes, yes, yes. Unconventional. 

Carol Cram

So not getting no spoilers, but your last act is just lovely.

Louis Bayard

Thank you. 

Carol Cram

I won't say what it is, so I want people to read the book, but the way you bring it all together and actually you do show that if only it could have been possible.

Louis Bayard

Exactly. Well, I wasn't originally planning to write that last act. It was supposed to be a novel in four acts because almost all of Oscar’s plays were in four acts. So I thought, okay, let's do it in four. 

And then I got to the end of the fourth act and I was like, well, this is a bummer.

This is super sad. I don't think I want to end here. So it was by then that I kind of realized what the book was about and it took me a while. As it sometimes does when I'm writing a book to figure out what it's really about—a book about a family that wanted to be reunited.

So the fifth act is a kind of imaginative depiction of how that might've worked. 

Carol Cram

How it might have been. Well, they  are a family that was trying to navigate a time when they couldn't be the kind of family they needed to be. Yes. Which maybe nowadays they could, I don't know.

Louis Bayard

But maybe nowadays they could. Certainly there wouldn't have been the kind of scandal that there was. Also, you know, homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1968, I want to say. A felony. So we're still kind of, I think, dealing with the aftermath of all that stuff, of all demonization and criminalization.

I think we're still.  I say that as myself as a 62-year-old gay man, I'm still, you know working through all the implications.

Carol Cram

Well, because you grew up in the sixties and seventies. 

Louis Bayard

I grew up, yeah. I grew up seventies and eighties. It was considered a mental illness until 1973 in America.

All that stuff we absorb as children and we still work through decades later.

Carol Cram

Oh, we're very much a product of what we heard growing up. I know, oh, God. And people like my age a little slightly older than you. Yeah. But yeah, we still have to kind of deal with those little voices from the distant past.

Louis Bayard

I know. They won't go away. And so Yeah. You have to deal with it however you might. Yeah. And try not to pass those voices down to the next generation. 

Carol Cram

Exactly. So would, would you like to do a reading?

Louis Bayard

Sure. I will do a reading. So this is the very beginning of the book, so there won't be any exposition required except to say that Oscar and  Constance, this is the very beginning of the book.

The whole Wilde family has gone on holiday in Norfolk. So when we come into this very, the very beginning, the first chapter, Oscar and Constance are strolling through the Norfolk countryside as they do every day. I should apologize because I have to do the dialogue in English accents because if I don't, it just sounds really weird. 

Carol Cram

I just wrote a novel set in England. I get it. 

Louis Bayard

So my mother was English, so I sort of try to channel her accent when I do this stuff. Anyway, so Constance is the first one to speak, and then Oscar will follow, and this will be very short, I promise.

“Tell me,” she says, “if I've met this one.”

“Well now,” answers Oscar. “I didn't know that I can unless I know which one you mean.”

“Oh,” she says, already inclined to leave it alone. “The chap who’s coming tomorrow.”

“Why yes, my love, you met him last summer. His cousin, Lionel Johnson, brought him round and the three of us had a delightful chat. And then just as he was leaving, I said, you should come meet my wife.”

“And you brought him upstairs.”

“Don’t I always?”

He does, always. She tasks herself once more with sorting through the stream of acolytes, the procession of narrow chested young men each younger than the last, each astonished by his privilege. The vast majority she will never see again, but she greets them in the opposite spirit. You must promise not to remain a stranger. Oscar so enjoys the company. 

“How was this one dressed?” she asks.

“Cream-colored linen suit. Straw boater.”

“You have described nearly three quarters of the male population under the age of twenty-two.”

“So I have.”

“Was he rather small boned?”

“In relation to me, yes.”

“And flaxen?”

“Just so.”

They pass under the canopy of a chestnut. She can hear a stone curlew making rapier like calls. 

“I remember now,” she says. “His father is the Marquess of Queensbury.”

“Indeed.”

“Oh dear. It makes no more sense now than it did then. Isn't the Marquess this rather ferocious sportsman? Rude with animal health? Always writing about or striding about…”

“We've never met him, my dear.”

“Oh, but one pictures him all the same. Barking at groomsman, wading into mud. Dressing his own stags, right there in the field. When can't imagine the son doing any of that.”

“The son does other things, that is all.”

She gazes at him, a light slowly dawning. 

“Another poet,” she says.

“Now, my dear.”

“Oh, Oscar, I don't mind them as individuals, but as a category they’re—”

“What?”

“Well, pale and malnourished. I always want to send them away with a good beefsteak, only Cook would be cross. Wouldn't it be rather more practical to bring him a young banker now and again?”

“Bankers require no help. Indeed, they are the reason the poets do.”

That is just the beginning. 

Carol Cram

It's so witty. That must have been so much fun to write that it was fun to write that.

Louis Bayard

It was. And I don't know if you do this too, Carol, but I always like to read my stuff out loud because I feel my ears catch things that my eyes don't. But in this case if I made myself laugh, I knew that I would keep it. Or if I made myself cry, which I did quite a bit of during the book too. I would keep that. So, but I was basically turning myself into my own audience through the through the writing of this. 

Carol Cram

We have to be our first audience. We're our first editors. So, I listened to the audio book and you're one of the narrators. 

Louis Bayard

I am. 

Carol Cram

Which one did you do? 

Louis Bayard

I did the kind of the stuff I didn't actually write, which is the interstitial stuff, the letters, court testimony. 

Carol Cram

Okay. I wondered about that. 

Louis Bayard

That was great fun to do. In my case, I've always had to audition to read my own books.

So I was pleased to pass the audition this time around, but, but we also have really wonderful narrators. Elizabeth Rogers does the bulk of it as she's the Constance chapters and then two wonderful guys to Vivian and Cyril. I was so fortunate to have this group and the, and the audio book has won awards and stuff too, so I'm, I'm very proud of it.

Carol Cram

No wonder. 

So, so what's one thing you learned from writing this novel that you didn't know before? 

Louis Bayard

Um, one thing I learned gosh, I think that. It's okay to do stuff that scares the shit out of you. Can I swear? Can I swear in your show, Carol? 

Carol Cram

Of course. You can swear in the show. 

Louis Bayard

So, I've always felt that a book isn't worth doing unless there's a possibility of failure. And because it's the possibility of failure that makes it interesting to me. And that's what gets me up in the morning.

It's like, okay, let's, let's try to make this happen. But when I told myself that I was going to write basically an Oscar Wilde Play with Oscar Wilde as one of the characters, I was like, oh my God, what are you thinking? Right? What are you thinking? It just seemed crazy, but it also seemed weirdly attractive.

And the more I kind of got into it's like, okay. I'm enjoying this a lot. I'm terrified, but I'm also having a lot of fun. So, I think it's that it's just like you kind of dare yourself to fail because this could have been a big old fail, right out of the drawer.

Carol Cram

Yeah. It wasn't. 

Louis Bayard

Well, thanks, I'm glad to hear that. Thank you for that. But that's why I don't write in a series. Even though I enjoy reading books series, but no, I always want to feel like I haven't done this before. How am I gonna do this? Is this gonna work?

So, the terror, in a weird way, fuels the writing process in a way I can't always explain. 

Carol Cram

Carol Cram

I like that. I like that description though because I think that's very true. I think we should be a little scared when we start to write. 

Louis Bayard

Yeah. Because if you're not scared, it means you've already done it, you know how to do it.

Carol Cram

Yeah. And if it comes too easily. I don't think it's gonna have any sort of strength

Louis Bayard

And the thing is part of the process is that I wind up surprising myself, or the story I should say winds up surprising me. Because, as I said, that fifth act wasn't even in my head. And then suddenly it's like, oh, but what if we did this? So that's what I really love. That's why I don't, there are authors, and I've met them who will write extensive outlines of their books in advance, like 30,000 words.

For a, for an 80,000 Word book. They've, like, they know everything that's gonna happen before they start writing it. And I think why would you even wanna write it at that point? If you know everything's gonna happen? Wouldn't it be, so that would be so boring just to just like, all right, and this scene, blah, blah, blah.

Carol Cram

 I, I know I don't get that either. The, the, yeah, I mean a little bit outlining like, I have a vague idea I've just started to do 

Louis Bayard

I have vague ideas too. I know my ending. I try to know my ending, so I know I've gotten there. But yeah. 

Carol Cram

Because then when you get up in the morning and you sit down, okay, I'm gonna write a scene, you don't really know. I mean, you kind of know what's gonna happen, but not really. That's the fun of it. 

Louis Bayard

But I think for some people it's a little terrifying, I think. I think thriller writers are really good at outlining because they need, yeah, well they have to be, they need to luck down that plot, those plot elements, and they need to make it kinda race. 

But for something like this, which is more character driven, I just kind of let the characters talk to me a little bit and about, about where they want to go. And sometimes they correct me in a quite rude way. It's like, no, you idiot. No, this is not. This is not what I would be doing.

What were you thinking. 

Carol Cram

I'm a historical novelist as well, so you, you do have the parameters of your research, but I'm learning, I'm on my number seven, so, you know, slow learner to just kinda write it and not worry too much about, make sure it's correct. Like get the character first and then make sure of the research. 

Louis Bayard

Oh yeah. No, yeah. I abandoned that a long time ago, Carol. I mean, yes, there are historical novelists who insist that they don't mangle fact, or they don't, and I do it all the time with no apology because to me that's the whole pleasure and privilege of being a historical novelist is you can take these real-life people and do things that didn't actually happen. And you can go into rooms where nobody was around to record what was happening and figure out what might have happened. And that, to me, the joy of it. 

Carol Cram

It's much more fun than being a biographer. I don't think I could ever be a biographer, you know? 

Louis Bayard

No, I think biography is really hard work. First of all, my God, it takes years. Yeah. And then you have to be naming everything and footnoting everything. And I just, I would go mad I think, unless I had like a whole, like a research team kind of helping me. 

Carol Cram

Yeah. So, would you like to share what you're working on right now? 

Louis Bayard

You know, I can't, I've been legally enjoying from sharing that, but it will probably be, it will probably be another Victorian novel. Uh, involving another Victorian marriage because I sort of enjoy that period. And I think a lot of, I think that's one of those worlds that readers can sort of travel to very quickly.

I think we all carry around Victorian. London in our heads, thanks to Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps it's there. We don't need to kind of travel. 

Carol Cram

So, thanks so much, Louis. This has been really interesting conversation. 

Louis Bayard

Such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Carol Cram 

I've been speaking with Louis Bayard, author of The Wildes, listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction at www.artinfiction.com. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Louis’s website at www.louisbayard.com.

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