Oscar Wilde and the Confidence Trick

Abstract

Mundus vult decepi [sic]

(‘the world wants to be deceived’)

–– attributed to Petronius¹

Of all the grifters, the confidence man is the aristocrat.

–– David Maurer, The Big Con²

1. DANDIES AND CON ARTISTS

By the early 1880s America had entered the Gilded Age, a period of unprecedented economic boom, opportunity and flux. The New World was teeming with gamblers, tycoons, entrepreneurs, parvenus and confidence artists. In his 1882 American lecture tour, Oscar Wilde was often compared with legendary con artists operative at the time. When Wilde arrived at Denver on 12 April for his lecture, a great swindle had just taken place. Señor Miguel Otero, statesman and Western banker who had travelled to town in order to attend Wilde’s lecture, was swindled out of $2400 by the master of the elaborately plotted confidence game, chameleon and king of confidence men ‘Doc’ Charles Baggs.³ The two events were linked sensationally in the press. Observing Wilde’s affected performance and lucrative enterprise of promoting Aestheticism, the newspapers were quick to compare him to ‘Doc’ Baggs, as this sardonic doggerel in the Denver News reveals:

We hail thee as the most successful humbug of the age,

If thou dost boast of being too,

We will produce Charles Baggs, M. D.

Who is as too as thou art, and a durned sight tooer.⁴

The reporters of the time must have also spotted similarities between Wilde and Baggs in the art of carriage, dashing style and smooth talk. A suave criminal staunchly averse to violence, Doc Baggs, ‘oozed respectability, courtesy and reliability’ in a ‘stovepipe hat . . . cutaway coat and striped trousers’ and armed with a ‘silk umbrella’.⁵ His urbane exterior rivalled Wilde’s flamboyant look.

Later, in New York, Wilde rubbed shoulders with and was swindled by a conman known as ‘Hungry Joe’ Sellick, who impersonated Anthony Drexel, a high-profile J. P. Morgan banker’s son. The account of Wilde’s encounters with Hungry Joe is sampled in the anthology of the confidence trick in literature, Players: Con Men, Hustlers, Gamblers, and Scam Artists (2002), featuring authors as diverse as Baudelaire and David Mamet. Wilde and Sellick shared the same dinner table for a short spell at the Brunswick Hotel. Sellick lured Wilde into a bunco, a parlour game played with dice, where he made him lose more than $1000. Wilde wrote cheques to Hungry Joe but was equally sharp-witted, figuring out before too late that he was being fleeced.⁶ The Head of New York Police who was on the case, Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes, branded Wilde equally a swindler who ‘reaped a harvest of American dollars with his curls, sun-flowers and knee-breeches’.⁷ The New York Daily Graphic entertained the same view with its sarcastic front pages and astringent commentary, calling Wilde a ‘fooler’ who made ‘a pot of money’ by taking over George du Maurier’s well-known caricatured aesthetes in Punch, hence meeting the audience’s expectations.⁸ Some of the lampooneries directed at the young aesthete on his lecture tour described him in language evocative of con artists: ‘as the game now stands’ he is ‘bent’ ‘[u]pon the racket’ where the audiences ‘stake [their] shekels all on the event’.⁹ Even during the 1895 libel trial Le Figaro clearly identified him as a ‘fumiste’ (con artist) who created around him an entire artistic movement and was tailed by a retinue of poor litterateurs desperate to share his celebrity.¹⁰

But it is precisely Wilde’s act so easily identified with trickery that played to his advantage in his American tour. In his tactics of self-promotion and self-fashioning, Wilde understood mass psychology, designing carefully and minutely an extended elaborate act with his modulated, yet foppish and loquacious performances. He opted for ‘a natural style, with a touch of affectation’, Richard Ellmann contends, which ‘might go down well enough with Americans jaded by obvious showmanship’.¹¹ Wilde was sponsored by D’Oyly Carte who marshalled him in order to promote Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Patience (1881–1882) in its New York staging. Instead, Wilde’s stupendous public lectures turned Patience into a publicity stunt for his own celebrity status. When he attended a performance of Patience, the Tribune reported that the moment the character Reginald Bunthorne (played by J. H. Ryley), who represented a parody of the aesthete, came on stage, the audience turned and glanced at Wilde who, with one-upmanship threw the offhand jibe: ‘This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre’.¹² As Kerry Powell puts it, ‘gazing coolly on his double from a stage-side box, Wilde claimed ownership of the very role that J. H. Ryley was performing before his eyes at the Standard Theatre’.¹³ Τhe susurrus in the press, blasting Wilde by purporting to expose his motives, serves as an unwitting contribution to his stratagem.

The contemporaneous insinuations of Wilde as a confidence trickster and his fraternizing with conmen indicate the presence of such an influence. Yet if Wilde is a kind of con artist, it would be wrong, misleading and downright erroneous to claim that he was driven by something as base as money, or his literary career was a sham. Rather, as I will show, the confidence game serves as a trope that intuitively, though unmistakably, heightens the importance of artificiality and performance within an atmosphere of subversiveness. Scholars have long considered Wilde’s fascination with forgery and mendacity, from the perspectives of economic crime, literary authenticity, and history and influence respectively.¹⁴ The confidence game, however, is a wider, multifarious category that encompasses forgery and mendacity in its properties. By revealing its influence on Wilde, I focus on its most elaborate and sophisticated form, the so-called long con as Wilde performs it deftly with ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’. My emphasis is on Wilde as author-trickster and how the figure of the long con is catalytic in understanding how fiction transcends its textual boundaries, spills over into reality and seduces the reader.

It is crucial to note that at the heart of Wilde’s performances is the art of the raconteur. John Stokes aptly describes Wilde’s parables, records of his impromptu talk, as ‘confidence tricks’ devoted to the ‘materiality’ of the world.¹⁵ Wilde’s storytelling performances are no different from ‘flimflamming’, a term that originally describes a ‘piece of nonsense or idle talk; a trifle, a conceit’ and evolved to be associated with the confidence trick.¹⁶ Frank Tarbeaux, a cosmopolitan vagabond and one of the greatest conmen of all time, was a flimflammer whom Wilde befriended after he was released from prison. Tarbeaux was skilled at the tall tale, excelling ‘at reinventing himself by writing pure mythology’,¹⁷ just like Wilde who was a renowned raconteur and fashioned his own life as an extraordinary fiction. But how far do the similarities between the dandy-aesthete and the con artist go?

Both types are urban cosmopolites, seemingly belonging to social circles but at odds with society. Both are cynics, socialites, perspicacious observers, polymaths, debonair, master impersonators. The dandy is the artist of life in the way the con artist is the artificer of life. They both put on a performance with aplomb, and both are excellent manipulators through cultivated taste. The con artist has the charming roguery of the gentleman thief, such as E. W. Hornung’s Arthur J. Raffles, a character partly inspired by Wilde – Hornung’s Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1899) was a book that even piqued Wilde’s curiosity.¹⁸ Nonetheless, the con artist is no thief. His weapon is persuasion; his art is that of inveigling, seducing. His is the crème-de-la-crème of crime as he sways his victims into offering him their money. Yet, he shares with the gentleman thief in targeting social hypocrisy. In Guy Boothby’s ‘The Duchess of Wiltshire’s Diamonds’ (1897), for instance, Simon Carne is not planning a robbery ‘but an artistic trial of skill, in which he pitted his wits and cunning against the forces of society in general’.¹⁹ Likewise, Doc Baggs swindles strictly the paragons of the financial world and never the ‘ordinary man’.²⁰ John Blair states that the con artist ‘is the swindler raised to the second power, reserving his blandishments for would-be swindlers’.²¹ This is also, of course, a hallmark of Wildean dandyism. Overdressed and standing out, the dandy never challenges the underprivileged. His affected appearance and demeanour mock the hypocrisies of middle-class respectability.

The con artist was already a well-defined species of refined criminal in the nineteenth century. Wilde could have come across one of the annual reprints of Charles Dickens, Jr.’s Dictionary of London: An Unconventional Handbook (1879), which classifies ‘con-men’ and their activities as a distinct category of lawbreaking but frames them in the underbelly of Victorian working-class London. However, the con artist has a predominantly American legacy that shrouds him in legend. Contrary to Dickens Jr.’s encyclopaedic profiling, Edgar Allan Poe’s essay ‘Raising the Wind; or, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences’ (1843/1850) flippantly glamourizes the con artist, focusing on the psychological flair of the ‘diddler’. The swindler figure Poe describes as diddler shares the same pedigree as the type Baudelaire describes in his essay on ‘The Dandy’ (1863). Both types are self-regulated by strict codes of conduct and dress; yet, both live on the fly and in the moment. Baudelaire aptly remarks that dandyism is ‘an institution beyond the laws, itself has rigorous laws which all its subjects must strictly obey’.²² It parallels the ‘science’ of diddling, which, although violating the law, is self-checked by an ‘established code’.²³ The dandy is pokerfaced; referring to Constantin Guys, Baudelaire writes that the ‘dandy’s beauty consists above all in an air of coldness which comes from an unshakable determination not to be moved’.²⁴ Correspondingly, the diddler ‘is never seduced into a flurry . . . [he is] cool as a cucumber’.²⁵ This quality is close to what Wilde defines in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) as cynicism: the ‘cynic’, as opposed to the ‘sentimentalist’, is ‘[a] man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’.²⁶ In this well-known aphorism Wilde incidentally sums up the worldview of the conman, or of the dandy who evokes the financier without the latter’s base urge for profit. The con artist’s aim is not amassment of wealth, but the ‘thrill’²⁷ of swindling for its own sake, just as the ‘dandy’, for Baudelaire, ‘does not aspire to money as to something essential; . . . he would be perfectly content with a limitless credit at the bank’.²⁸ Consistent with the cult of personality, the dandy is motivated by ‘the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions’; and one of the diddler’s key qualities is ‘[o]riginality’: ‘His thoughts are his own’ and ‘a stale trick is his aversion’.²⁹

The qualities of sangfroid and original personality are paramount in Wilde’s conception of dandyism and crime as art forms. In ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green’ (1889) Wilde discerns them perfectly integrated in the poisoner, forger, aesthete-author Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, whom Nick Groom has described as ‘con-artist’.³⁰ For Wilde, like the charismatic public personage Benjamin Disraeli, Wainewright was ‘determined to startle the town as a dandy’ with ‘his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves’.³¹ Wainewright forges wills and defrauds banks and insurance companies in elaborate machinations in order to fund his lavish lifestyle and expensive taste in fine art. He compares insurance ‘speculations’ with crime (CW4, p. 119), and so by targeting insurance brokers he is a swindler ‘raised to the second power’. He is not interested in money as such but derives a wicked thrill from his fraud schemes as imaginative works of art. Charles Dickens, fascinated with Wainewright as a criminal mastermind, echoed his designed frauds and deceptions in the Ponzi schemes of Tigg Montague in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844) and Mr Merdle in Little Dorrit (1855–1857). Although Wilde nods to the Dickensian large-scale fraud, he eschews Dickens’s sanctimony. Wainewright’s cynicism and originality are heightened by his practice of murder by poisoning, an essential component of his schemes that pushes the aesthetic criminal’s boundaries of invention.³²

Wainewright epitomizes the author-trickster, the litterateur as con artist. Wilde underscores his art of writing in relation to pecuniary value when he quotes Charles Lamb who ‘speaks of “kind, light-hearted Wainewright,” whose prose is “capital”’ (CW4, p. 107). In his prevaricating journalism Wainewright draws attention to his personality by draping it under dazzling layers of literary style, like the corona of an eclipsed sun. Wilde refers to the noms de plume, ‘Asiatic prose’, ‘pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations’ by which Wainewright ‘intensified his personality’ (p. 114). By ‘hav[ing] a style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject’, he ‘invented’ an entire school of Fleet Street journalists; he made ‘the public interested in his own personality, [telling] the world what he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in what state of health he is’ (p. 114). Wainewright stands as a consummate metaphor for the melding of the figures of conman and writer-aesthete. What is perforce inferred from this melding is the authorial act as a hoodwinking performance, approximating the pinnacle of the art of confidence, the long con.

2. WILDEAN ‘LYING’ AND THE LONG CON

The long con – or long game – is a premeditated, elaborate role-playing game of high stakes, often extended over days. Doc Baggs, Hungry Joe, Frank Tarbeaux, and Wainewright were masters of the long con. The long con combines all the elements that also typify Wildean aestheticism: illicitness, amorality, crime, deception, ingenuity, theatricality, and bravura. Whilst forgery generally implies a static entity (whether this be an artifact or an abstract concept such as history), the long con is more like a dynamic event that unfolds along the dimensions of time and space, a playacting show encompassing forgery. In its knotted, polished design and aura of illegality the long con is a frequent theme in Wilde. It exemplifies Wilde’s celebration of artificiality through the paradigm of fiction-as-reality. It is ultimately a comment on the self-reflexive quality of literary fiction. ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, as I argue in the last third of this essay, performs it on the reader, turning it into a multilevel authorial tactic in which the ‘tale’ subsumes both the textual fiction and our objective reality.

The aim of the long con is to coax the mark to part from their money on their own accord. With intricate plot manoeuvres and attention to detail, crucial in achieving verisimilitude, the long con is of such sophistication that the mark ends up playing the part scripted for him, unbeknownst to him. It is almost a science in itself, subject to its own argot and standardized scenarios. David Maurer, a linguist, literary scholar and world authority on the confidence game, was the first to systematically map out its lingo in The Big Con (1940), the inspiration behind the cinematic bible of the art of confidence, The Sting (1973). Maurer compares perspicaciously the long con with a piece of theatre. It is played by a team of grifters or confederates who, like professional actors, are assigned specialized parts to play; the roper, for example, steers the mark into the con, and the inside man ‘tells the tale’; shills or background extras may complete the ensemble:³³

Big-time confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly. The insideman is the star of the cast; while the minor participants are competent actors and can learn their lines perfectly, they must look to the insideman for their cues; he must be not only a fine actor, but a playwright extempore as well. . . . The victim is forced to go along with the play, speaking approximately the lines which are demanded of him; they spring unconsciously to his lips. He has no choice but to go along, because most of the probable objections that he can raise have been charted and logical reactions to them have been provided in the script. Very shortly the victim’s feet are quite off the ground. He is living in a play-world which he cannot distinguish from the real world.³⁴

The success of the long con depends on forward planning, careful manipulation and stagecraft. With the long con, real-life situations turn into an artificial spectacle with the mark resembling an automaton, whose seemingly free decisions are an illusion. His fate is sealed as his actions are minutely anticipated. The long con culminates in a big store, a mock-setting painstakingly fitted out. Big stores are ‘[s]o realistically . . . manned and furnished that the victim does not suspect that everything about them – including the patronage – is fake’.³⁵ The big store in Doc Baggs’s legendary con played on Otero in Denver, for instance, was a bogus state lottery shop (known as policy shop). Inchoate versions of the long con in this format did exist in Victorian Britain. Charles Dickens Jr describes the ‘mock auction’ – the equivalent of the big store – a fake shop wherein fake (worthless) merchandise that has been spruced up is sold handsomely to the unsuspicious passer-by. Wilde’s ministry of the creed of Beauty resembles an extended confidence trick in which an individual (Wilde) spellbinds a multitude, as opposed to a team tricking an individual, in a sense mirror-reversing the long con format as described by Maurer. The lecture venues and salons in his 1882 America tour seem to be a series of ‘big stores’ segued within the world stage, itself a colossal big store.

Wilde intuitively though unequivocally inserts the long con in his comedies. He casts it in the form of political corruption and large-scale swindling as a background plot in The Ideal Husband (1895). The play could have been partly inspired by Jabez Balfour, former MP who operated a mammoth long con, an investment swindle involving numerous banks and companies which collapsed in 1892.³⁶ Both Sir Robert Chiltern and his adversary, Mrs Cheveley, are involved in ‘International Canal schemes’ (SPPE, p. 493). Sir Chiltern had been the secretary to a member of the Cabinet when the British Government ‘bought the Suez Canal shares’ (p. 493). His wealth is the result of selling a financial top-secret to a rich investor, Baron Arnheim: that is, inside information of the Suez Canal purchase ‘three days before’ its announcement (p. 495). Likewise, Mrs Cheveley is privy to Chiltern’s secret and too invests in the ‘Argentine scheme [which] is a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle’ (p. 493). Hijacking Sir Chiltern’s past scheme and possessing hard evidence of its taking place, her racket focuses on blackmailing him into influencing the government to invest in the Argentine canal so that the value of her shares increase. She is an adroit con-woman who manipulates Chiltern (whilst hinting at statecraft as a con game), and even instructs him in the art of deception: when he addresses the House, ‘[a] few ordinary platitudes will do’ (p. 494). Her game strategy is further glimpsed at in her telling poker reference: ‘One should always play fairly . . . when one has the winning cards’ (p. 496). A stock market fraud or a ‘brilliant, daring speculation’ (p. 493) as Mrs Cheveley calls it, in con parlance became known as the ‘rag’ and, as Maurer informs us, by the early 1880s it was widely practiced.³⁷

The long con is shrewdly worked into The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), where the object target is matrimony as a façade, arguably, for securing a double lifestyle (as is the case with the married decadent dandy, Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray). Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing are fellow bilkers of the highest order who strive to outmanoeuvre each other. Algernon is an amoral dandy as well as a Tartuffean opportunist. Jack calls him ‘young scoundrel’.³⁸ He possesses the cavalier ethos of the con artist: ‘No gentleman ever has any money’ (Importance, p. 198). He has ‘invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may go down into the country whenever I choose’ (p. 77). With textbook-like discipline, as outlined in Maurer’s study, his ‘Bunburying’ is dictated by ‘rules’ (p. 78). Likewise, Jack has invented an alter ego invalid brother named Earnest, who lives assumedly in Albany, in order to escape his burdensome role of being a guardian to Miss Cecily Cardew in his country estate. And in an uncanny association of the play with the culture of the long con, the name Earnest ‘inspires absolute confidence’ (p. 83).

Within the play’s amplified theme of imposture, the Gribsby episode, which was excised from the original running performance, crystallizes superbly some aspects of the long con. Jack owes £762 to the Savoy Hotel under the name of Earnest who ‘is one of those chaps who never pay a bill. He gets writted about once a week’ (p. 196). Algernon, who vies for Cecily, cleverly hijacks Jack’s own game by assuming the identity of Earnest. But this backfires when the solicitors Parker and Gribsby turn up at the estate either to settle Earnest’s massive debt or order his committal. Both Jack and Algernon have ulterior motives and so both hold up the pretences, despite the fact that they have conflicted interests. Jack pays the bill in order to stop Cecily from doing so. Yet, both Jack and Algernon gain through their collusion: Algernon as Earnest avoids paying the bill without giving away his identity, and Jack ends up paying his own debt whilst, in the eyes of the other characters, forges a (dishonest) image of himself as magnanimous and caring towards his (imaginary) invalid brother. The machinations of the two men in their pursuits of Cecily and Gwendolen are not noble means to romance; curiously, through delicate punning, Algernon suggests that their meddling is a ‘business’ comparable to that of ‘stockbrockers’ (p. 125).

These comedy plots capture the long con’s essential aspect: the confusion of spontaneity and scripted performance, of random reality and premeditated fiction. Correspondingly, by attacking philistine hypocrisy and artfully foisting Aestheticist tastes on society whilst cashing in at the box office, both the performances of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest could be perceived as real-life long games. Wilde is the insideman, the audience (society) is the mark, and the Haymarket and St James’s stages and auditoria double up as theatrical settings and big stores. Wilde the conman-dramatist ensures press publicity and draws the applause and money of the largely Philistine audience whose hypocrisy his play exposes. This association of a con within a con (representational art) is suggested by Chiltern’s scam and Jack’s trickery which in turn become the groundwork for Mrs Cheveley’s and Algernon’s games respectively. The long con approximates fiction; conversely, when literature features the workings of the long con, itself becomes suspect. By qualifying the long game, Wilde’s fraud reduplications enhance the ambiguity and illusoriness of literary presentation.

Not only Wilde theorizes, but stage-manages this illusoriness in ‘The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue’ (1889), revised in 1891 and subtitled ‘An Observation’. This famous attack on Realism is a piece of criticism about the paradoxical truthfulness of ‘the telling of beautiful untrue things’ (CW4, p. 103) in the face of the chaos of Nature. By defining imaginative literary style as ‘lying’, Wilde emphasizes literary expression as an illicit act whose goal is to trick the reader into falling for something that does not correspond to reality. The argument is played in the form of a theatrical dialogue between Cyril and Vivian who converse leisurely in ‘the library of a country house’ (p. 72), a big store for the reader. Vivian dwells on the ubiquity of ‘lying’, a term that encompasses all forms of mendacity and is distinguished only by aesthetic criteria: at the bottom end of the scale are venal politicians and Fleet Street journalists ‘[l]ying for the sake of a monthly salary’, and at the top and most desirable end is the art of literature itself, which reaches back to Odysseus’s ‘sly devising’ (pp. 101, 100). Within the literature tier, at the bottom Vivian places Realist fiction, because ‘by writing novels which are so like life . . . no one can possibly believe in their probability’ (p 77). At the top he hails literature that is highly improbable. This is the kind of literature that is failproof and self-justified; in no way can it be exposed as false, exactly like a well-planned confidence game. As Vivian puts it in his elegant circulus in probando (circular reasoning), ‘a fine lie’ is ‘[s]imply that which is its own evidence’ (p. 74).

Vivian divulges to Cyril that he is working on a treatise to be entitled ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest’ (p. 74). Vivian’s text-within-a-text, with its combative subtitle, comes through to us in the form of a more tactful ‘Observation’ in the subtitle of the actual dialogue. With its self-reflexive theme, the textual showground of ‘Decay of Lying’ is a theatrical stage, where a long con is played by the author on his readers. Vivian and Cyril are Wilde’s confederates. Cyril is a shill; his conversion to Vivian’s ideas is deceptive, for the purpose of magnetizing the readers or marks to Wilde’s scintillating, radical thesis. Curiously, though, the author of the dialogue seems to trick the reader into entertaining his Aesthetic views by doing the opposite of tricking: by exposing the mechanism of the art of lying. The candid context of discussing ‘lying’ works its way into the readers’ minds through a spate of rhetorical flourishes: ‘It is style that makes us believe in a thing—nothing but style’ (p. 99). Even more so, ‘Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire’ (p. 74). The steering of attention to literary ‘lying’ is Wilde’s most inventive throwing the reader off the scent. Through the subterfuge of revealing the secrets of the make-believe trade, Wilde’s textual performance gets insidiously under the skin of the most stiff-necked Victorian readers. It is worth noting that Thomas Mann’s unfinished novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954), emulates this striking Wildean subterfuge. Set in the fin de siècle, it falsely divulges the titular conman-narrator’s (and by extension Mann’s) intention by airing its narrative strategies, spelling out that Felix’s goal is to entertain ‘the reader’ with ‘fine-spun quiddities’.³⁹

When employed in literature, the long con, with its qualities of acting and plot-making (as well as plotting), draws attention to the fictitiousness of fiction. Therefore it automatically suggests a continuity between the real with the fictional realms. In The Confidence Man in Modern Fiction (1979), a study which tracks the evolution of the confidence trickster’s presentation to the reader, John G. Blair posits that the trickster ‘generates fictions for his victims while himself inhabiting a fiction generated by the writer for his readers’; he ‘serves as figure for the writer whose artistic medium must manipulate pretenses and falsehoods even in order to probe the nature of true and false in the larger world it depicts’.⁴⁰ Likewise, K. K. Ruthven, referring to Felix Krull, writes that ‘[i]f con man is to victim as author is to reader, then to include a confidence trickster in a novel is to create ample opportunities for self-reflexive writers to explore at one remove the duplicities of fiction as a medium’.⁴¹ On the surface, the literary trope of the trickster’s deceptions operates as an analogy, heightening the sense of narrative manipulation. On a deeper level, it saturates the text to such an extent that the line between fiction and reality collapses. In ‘The Decay of Lying’ Wilde targets and tricks the reader without him or her even realising. This raises the question of whether the most flawless long con in the form of a literary narrative is invisible to and indeed undetectable by the reader.

Blair is aware of this fascinating problem of the confidence trick: its detectability in literature. He writes that ‘[i]f a fiction is built on the con man’s own strategy of shifting appearances, he remains invisible because his habitual protective colouration takes over the background as well as the foreground’.⁴² This is strikingly reflected in Wilde’s maxim, ‘[t]o reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim’ (SPPE, p. 17). So if the con envelops the entire text, we are not able to detect it. It becomes a mental stage show targeting us. The novelist Angus Wilson, another admirer of Felix Krull, deduces aphoristically: ‘All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery – a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn’t’.⁴³ Then how can we tell the illusion apart? Fiction and reality are epistemic categories that are demarcated only when contrasted with one another. When this dichotomy is not noticeable, then all that exists is fiction which undergoes a semantic leap and becomes the only reality. Vivian pronounces: ‘The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is Lying for its own sake’ (CW4, p. 101). The self-reflexive nature of ‘The Decay of Lying’ indicates that the text is true in itself, but turns into a piece of ‘magic and trickery’ if it can be conceived as such from outside its own textual confines. However, here, with the long con trope in literature there is no way out; we are sucked into a whirlpool of paradox: even when we as readers become aware of the trick, we turn out admiring its stunning ingenuity, still hooked and remaining hypnotized.

3. CONNING THE READER: ‘THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W. H.’

Published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in July 1889, ‘W. H.’ is a camouflaged confidence game that confounds fictitiousness with authenticity. Literary criticism masquerades as a quasi-detective short story, just as ‘The Decay of Lying’ (its theoretical signature, published six months prior) was a philosophical treatise in the guise of a fictional dialogue. Joseph Bristow and Rebecca Mitchell offer an exhaustive analysis of ‘W. H.’, surveying the historical sources that inspired Wilde’s text, especially William Henry Ireland and his Vortigern as a spurious Shakespeare play, and John Payne Collier and the Perkins Folio debacle. Bristow and Mitchell show how ‘W. H.’ fabricates literary history, and ‘what matters in the end is the inspiring performance of the forgery (its elaborate staging), not what it tries to prove as the literal truth’.⁴⁴ The long con embodies this idea perfectly. Yet, while Bristow and Mitchell focus on how ‘concealed homoeroticism’ is coded in ‘the repeated acts of forgery’ that pass from character to character,⁴⁵ I here address how through the lens of the long con, ‘W. H.’ draws the reader in, perpetuating the beauty of its ingenuity for its own sake.

‘W. H.’ builds up a long con around a forged picture in the service of ‘the cultured and fascinating liar’ (‘The Decay of Lying’, CW4, p. 88). The portrait is not a free-standing forgery detached from the spatiotemporal flux; it is a MacGuffin that reaches its full impact when it both supports and is propped up by the narrative, a carefully calculated concatenation of events. Wilde’s story showcases the psychology of tricking as a theme and simultaneously itself forms the basis of an operative, intertextual long game that succeeds in casting its net beyond the text. His aim is to help pass off a bold hypothesis regarding the origin of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. As Matthew Sturgis puts it in his recent biography of Wilde, it managed in a ‘respected’ journal to present ‘a strikingly frank exposition of pederastic love, and its artistic benefits . . . connecting them to England’s greatest poet’.⁴⁶ The text’s cogent revamping of an old hypothesis had conservative Victorian society buzzing and that was an astounding feat.

In the opening paragraphs, the narrator and a character by the name of Erskine engage in after-dinner banter on ‘the question of literary forgeries’.⁴⁷ They discuss famous literary forgers: James Macpherson, Ireland, and especially Thomas Chatterton, the icon of Romantic genius, whose biographer compared him to a ‘confidence trickster’⁴⁸ and on whom Wilde’s lecture had taken place in 1888. Chatterton’s efforts to get his literary forgeries published had been part of a larger scheme aiming at self-promotion. The narrator in ‘W. H.’ states that Chatterton’s forgeries were ‘the result of an artistic desire for perfect presentation’ and that ‘all Art’ is ‘to a certain degree a mode of acting’ as the artist’s personality is transmediated in the ‘imaginative plane’ of art (CW8, p. 259). From the outset, by emphasizing that Chatterton’s personality saturates his forgeries, Wilde half-gestures that in ‘W. H.’ he smuggles his own personality.⁴⁹

The narrator legitimizes Chattertonian literary forgery by asserting that its censure means ‘to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem’ (CW8, p. 259). At the ripe moment in the conversation when the narrator is primed for deception, Erskine piques his curiosity: ‘What would you say about a young man who had a strange theory about a certain work of art, believed in his theory, and committed a forgery in order to prove it?’ (p. 259). Erskine proceeds to tell the story of his friend,⁵⁰ Cyril Graham, who subscribed to the already known, yet formerly rejected theory (in the layperson’s and not the scientific sense of the term) that Shakespeare’s Sonnets are addressed to a boy-actor by the name of Willie Hughes.⁵¹ Before imparting his tale, Erskine produces the forged painting for the first-person narrator, ‘a small panel picture set in an old and somewhat tarnished Elizabethan frame’, in the manner of ‘François Clouet’ (CW8, pp. 259, 260). Erskine’s action is not putting the cart before the horse, as it were; rather, by dangling the forged picture before the narrator, he gains his trust. When the narrator says that he believes the Sonnets are addressed to Lord Pembroke, the exchange follows:

‘Well, I agree with you,’ said Erskine, ‘but I did not always think so. I used to believe – well, I suppose I used to believe in Cyril Graham and his theory.’

‘And what was that?’ I asked, looking at the wonderful portrait, which had already begun to have a strange fascination for me.

‘It is a long story,’ said Erskine, taking the picture away from me – rather abruptly I thought at the time – ‘a very long story; but if you care to hear it, I will tell it to you.’

‘I love theories about the Sonnets,’ I cried; ‘but I don’t think I am likely to be converted to any new idea. The matter has ceased to be a mystery to any one. Indeed, I wonder that it ever was a mystery.’

‘As I don’t believe in the theory, I am not likely to convert you to it,’ said Erskine, laughing; ‘but it may interest you.’ (pp. 260–61)

In this big store scene, Erskine pulls psychological levers with calculated precision, seemingly siding against his own goal, as if to nonplus and distract the narrator. Erskine at this point may or may not pretend to reject Cyril’s theory of Shakespeare’s addressee. Timing and delivery are paramount. By rejecting the theory himself, but baiting the narrator with the supposed ‘evidence’, the painting, which he flashes and is quick to take away from his gaze, Erskine gets him interested. In confidence game terminology, Erskine here gives the narrator ‘the convincer’.⁵² Simultaneously, through Erskine, Wilde gives us (the readers) the convincer, arresting our attention and subconsciously forcing us to consider the possible validity of the Willie Hughes theory.

Erskine proceeds to rope the narrator by telling him how Cyril convinced him of the Willie Hughes theory, his uncovering of the portrait as a forgery, and Cyril’s suicide. In order to convert Erskine to the theory, Cyril deploys ‘not so much . . . demonstrable proof or formal evidence’ (CW8, p. 265) but a forensic-linguistic analysis of secret puns and cryptic readings embedded in the Sonnets which forms the backbone of Wilde’s text (for example, the homophonic masking of ‘Hughes’ in ‘hues’ and ‘hews’ in the Sonnets). When Erskine posits as his only objection that Hughes’s name does not appear in the list of actors in Shakespeare’s company in the first folio (see p. 265), Cyril has an answer at the tip of his tongue: by providing evidence from the Sonnets themselves again, he claims that, on the contrary, the absence of the name from the list ‘really corroborated the theory’ as Willie Hughes had left in order to join the company of a rival theatre, probably Chapman’s (pp. 265–66). Erskine, however, shatters the magic of the compelling evidence of the portrait by giving away to the narrator that Cyril, in fact, forged the Elizabethan painting of Willie Hughes by employing a young painter by the name of Edward Merton (pp. 267–68). Erskine and Cyril quarrelled as a result of the chicaneries of the latter. Then, as an extraordinary countermeasure to the quagmire which the theory had turned into, Cyril committed suicide in order to prove the theory, or so Erskine alleges, claiming that he has a letter that proves it, as the public at the time thought it was an accident (p. 269). Cyril’s purported suicide is Wilde’s masterstroke because it is a second, more powerful convincer for the main narrator who by that moment is completely hypnotized and converted to the theory. The narrator at that point comes to embody Wilde’s aphorism in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that ‘Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable’ (CW4, p. 100). Even when Erskine points out that the logic of the theory is fallacious because it lacks hard evidence and is based only on cryptic puns in the sonnets, the narrator is still converted to it. He declares: ‘It is complete in every detail. I believe in Willie Hughes’, to receive Erskine’s response: ‘I assure you the theory is entirely fallacious. It is plausible up to a certain point. Then it stops’ (CW8, p. 269). Paradoxically, the more the cogs and springs of the mechanism of deception are revealed, the more the deception has an enchanting, je ne se quoi effect on the narrator.

There are long confidence games of various types, related to real estate, financial pyramids, fake auctioneering, quackery, sexual relationships, and of course art forgery, to name a few. Although the theme of ‘W. H.’ is art (literature and painting), the trope it really focuses on, even repeatedly, is confidence itself.⁵³ Erskine gains the narrator’s confidence by exposing the confidence trick, by a show of honesty, dishing out to the narrator the tale of how Cyril tricked him. Bristow and Mitchell underscore adeptly the ‘frenetic process of passionately believing and then abruptly disbelieving’ in adeptly the hypothesis;⁵⁴ but why does the narrative do that? The con turns into a meta-con, propelled by its own self-exposure. This ploy of contrived counter-intuitiveness provides that failsafe resistance necessary for a ‘fine lie’, a lie ‘which is its own evidence’. Wilde’s spectacular set-up offers a meditation on an astonishing paradox by Baudelaire in ‘The Generous Gambler’: ‘the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist!’⁵⁵

In an unexpected twist, right after dispatching a detailed thesis-letter to Erskine defending the Willie Hughes hypothesis, the narrator’s initial enthusiasm wears off: ‘something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say. Perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion, I had exhausted the passion itself’ (CW8, p. 278). The narrator cannot explain his volte face. Steered by a mysterious force, he is an automaton. He plays the part that is scripted for him by Wilde. Moreover, he turns from mark to Wilde’s confederate, roping in turn the reader: it is the process of the beautiful conversion to what is improbable, ‘the passion’, that is the goal of the author-trickster. Cyril’s fake portrait of Willie Hughes is here replaced by the narrator’s admission of the investigative literary scrutiny of the Sonnets as erroneous. In further deflating the theory, the narrator grasps that ‘[p]erhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence’ (p. 278). In line with the strategy of exposing the mainspring of tricking, he is able to flout contrived justification by even spotting the circulus in probando fallacy: ‘The one flaw in the theory is that it presupposes the existence of the person whose existence is the subject of dispute’ (p. 279). At this point, as if Wilde palters by managing a radical character reversal, Erskine now comes to defend the theory: ‘But that is exactly what we don’t know’: this ‘is rather a proof in favour of the existence of Willie Hughes than against it’ (p. 280). In the enlarged version of the text, Erskine adds a sly, equivocatory sophism: ‘Of course it is a hypothesis, but then it is a hypothesis that explains everything’ (p. 255). The flaw in Erskine’s logic overlooks that the burden of proof falls to the party that makes the claim. His economical manner of supporting one fallacy with another, however, is psychologically and stylistically stupefying.

The closing paragraphs of ‘W. H.’ perform a psychological sleight of hand in plot-making. As in a con lensed within a con, the narrator is informed that Erskine, like Cyril before him, committed suicide. Erskine informs the narrator by letter that his suicide was a desperate effort to convert him to the theory. It turns out that the cause of his death was consumption, a fact Erskine exploited for one final deception (and one that casts a backward-looking doubt on his account of Cyril’s suicide earlier in the story). The narrator is left with the forged portrait of Willie Hughes in his possession. A duplicated exposed deception turns into a possible double bluff, a subliminal trick that, correspondingly, reaches for the reader, the second target, past the narrator. The reader’s mind is beleaguered by the nagging suggestion that the Willie Hughes hypothesis as a beautiful lie is not necessarily to be corroborated but legitimized. This suggestion is locked in perpetuity by the story’s closing sentence, an indeterminate, open-ended insinuation: ‘I think that there is really a great deal to be said for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s sonnets’ (p. 281). This impish hanging statement in the game of winning over supporters to the Hughes hypothesis is a coded invitation to the press to produce reviews of ‘W. H.’ whilst precipitating out of Wilde’s text and into our reality: we know that the theory is flawed but are already cajoled into entertaining it.

Further clues that point to the reader as the ultimate target of the Willie Hughes hypothesis are located in the epitextual dimension of ‘W. H.’: documents such as related advertisements, letters or memoirs outside of the text’s publication. The Structuralist theorist Gerard Genette explains that the epitext is ‘any paratextual element not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space’.⁵⁶ Wilde planned a book-length version that keeps the frame story but expands the aesthetic ideas and critical reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The enlarged version was published by Mitchell Kennerley in New York in 1921.⁵⁷ Charles Ricketts, illustrator and Wilde’s occasional collaborator, in his Recollections of Oscar Wilde (1932) offers background information to the making of Wilde’s story that serves as the latter’s epitext.⁵⁸ Re-enacting the set pieces of the story itself ahead of the planned publication of the enlarged version (the Blackwood’s and the enlarged versions are also epitexts of each other), Wilde approached Ricketts and commissioned him to make a ‘small Elizabethan picture’ in the manner of Clouet to be used as a frontispiece to his standalone ‘W. H.’ volume as ‘a great deal depends upon this’.⁵⁹ In their private conversation, as if sliding into the role of Cyril Graham, a grandstanding Wilde attempted to motivate Ricketts by positing that he has ‘found from evidence in the Sonnets that Mr. W. H. was a young actor named Willie Hughes’.⁶⁰ He told him that even Arthur Balfour and Andrew Lang are half-swayed.⁶¹ He encouraged Ricketts to inscribe his picture with the aphorism ‘ARS AMORIS AMOR ARTIS’,⁶² a near-palindromic phrase that signposts the counter-mirroring effect of the world of the text in the real world. When Ricketts ‘painted the portrait of Mr. W. H. upon a decaying piece of oak and framed it in a fragment of worm-eaten moulding’ pieced together by Charles Shannon,⁶³ the next day Wilde, as if fabricating authentic evidence, responded in a letter: ‘It is not a forgery at all – it is an authentic Clouet of the highest artistic value. It is absurd of you and Shannon to try and take me in – as if I did not know the master’s touch, or was no judge of frames!’⁶⁴ Wilde’s incognito role-playing interludes are sponged up by an imperceptible epitextual narrative that delivers a spurious archaeological backstory, serving as crucial window-dressing to the text.

A very real case of a literary long con that parallels and, in fact, instantiates the repercussive aura of ‘W. H.’ is the so-called ‘Leonainie’ hoax and its afterlife. In 1877 an Indiana newspaper, Kokomo Dispatch, published what it claimed was a lost poem by Edgar Allan Poe entitled ‘Leonainie’. This was the work of James Whitcomb Riley, a young poet desperate to attain literary fame. Riley emulated Chattertonian practices in order to break into publishing. In spite of the eventual, well-documented debunking of this minutely planned fraud, the famous biologist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1903 became convinced that ‘Leonainie’ was really composed by Poe, and strove to explain away the poem’s status as forgery by arguing that Riley claimed authorship of Poe’s lost poem later for publicity.⁶⁵ ‘W. H.’ with its attached epitextual paraphernalia and mythology projects an analogous legacy as the ‘Leonainie’ hoax. The difference is that in ‘W. H.’ the trick is self-conscious, executed imperceptibly, and designed to be an ever-unsolved teaser. The reader rises to the bait and does not even realize it. Wilde’s story is a self-reflexive metaphor for literature as a trick of deception that bears semblance to sublimated crime. Its ingenuity lies in pointing out the deception to the readers, yet using it to manipulate them. It is the perfect con because it cannot be exposed but only suspected, just like Wilde’s life.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Footnotes