Strange Fruit, Oscar Wilde and the Queensberry Rules
In 1909 Oscar Wilde’s body was reinterred in Pere Lachaise, Paris. Helen Carew, the wife of the national MP for Kildare, secretly paid two thousand guineas for a monument by Jacob Epstein. Paris called it the flying demon : a hell-bent creature with the weight of the world on his back crawls over the tomb, trailing strange fruit. Epstein modelled it on the Assyrian Sphinx. But the body is definitely not a lioness’s. The riddle it answers is Wilde’s own. ‘I’ve ended up on my hands and knees, my crutch kicked from under me. But I’m a man for all that’.
The silver plate inscription read ‘Oscard Wilde, 1854 –1900’, which prompted Helen Carew to say, ‘Oscard rhymes with discard’. Her book of poems, Red Roses, Orange Blossoms (1915) was reviewed in The Times ‘Mrs Carew has the trick of rhyme and runs of easily rhapsodical commonplaces’.
Her second husband was James Lawrence Carew, a descendant of Bamfylde Moore Carew (1693 – 1759), who lived with the Red Indians and wrote a dictionary of ‘current tramp cant’, published twenty five years after his death. JL Carew was known in Ireland as John Stuart Parnell’s ‘milch cow’, raising large sums for the cause of Home Rule. Despite being a leading Catholic layman he did not abandon ‘The Chief’ when the Kitty O’Shea affair came to light. Parnell’s decline and fall broke his heart and he died of apoplexy in a Swiss chalet in 1903.
Helen Carew was the only daughter of the Anglo-Irish Wyllies, who owned most of the seafront from Juan des Pins to Antibes (the main street is Avenue James Wyllie). She married into the Kennards who were press barons. Coleridge Kennard was far too young for her, and after three years of ‘incessant quarrelling about trivialities’, he ran away to sea and was drowned, leaving her with a little Coleridge to bring up in the South of France.
Coleridge Two grew up to become a Bloomsbury aesthete who privately published Bunthorpian vapidities. When he came of age in 1904 he had, like Proust, his portrait painted by Jacques Emile Blanche in the style of Gainsborough. ‘Sir Coleridge Kennard sitting on a sofa’ (haughty quiffed poseur, right hand on hip, the other limply stroking a dead cat). His mother refused to allow it exhibited until 1925 when it was shown in the Palais Royal, Paris, retitled ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’.
Coleridge Two smoked opium and gambled heavily, and in 1940, when his Persian prose poems were taken to be coded intelligence, he was interned in a concentration camp in Compierge. So his nanny could stay with him, he promptly married her, and they remained together until his death (and her’s two weeks later) in 1947.
Epstein’s monument in Père Lachaise caused as much trouble in France as his British Medical Association frieze of eighteen nudes in bare feet a few years later (it now graces the front of the Zimbabwe Embassy, London). The genitalia of the flying demon were covered with plaster tarpaulin by the cemetery committee and became a snitch for student rags. So a bronze codpiece was fabricated (subsequently stolen by Aleister Crowley, the Satanist, and worn at a fancy dress in the Café Royal).
Helen Carew’s nephew, Lt. Col. George ‘Loopy’ Kennard, friend of Churchill and everybody else (his Daily Telegraph obituary, 1999, described him as the “the best loved regular officer of his generation”) said in his memoirs that she ended her days ‘‘in the Claridges Hotel, badly loved, and died surrounded by parasites who she maintained at the expense of a disappointing son.”
Wilde’s epitaph on the back of the flying demon,
And alien tears will fill him
pity’s long broken urn
for his mourners will be outcast men
and outcasts always mourn
drew bucket loads of weeping pilgrims. In 1961 two English ladies, KOed the offending parts with a hammer. Nobody knows why.
In 1909 Oscar Wilde’s body was reinterred in Pere Lachaise, Paris. Helen Carew, the wife of the national MP for Kildare, secretly paid two thousand guineas for a monument by Jacob Epstein. Paris called it the flying demon : a hell-bent creature with the weight of the world on his back crawls over the tomb, trailing strange fruit. Epstein modelled it on the Assyrian Sphinx. But the body is definitely not a lioness’s. The riddle it answers is Wilde’s own. ‘I’ve ended up on my hands and knees, my crutch kicked from under me. But I’m a man for all that’.
The silver plate inscription read ‘Oscard Wilde, 1854 –1900’, which prompted Helen Carew to say, ‘Oscard rhymes with discard’. Her book of poems, Red Roses, Orange Blossoms (1915) was reviewed in The Times ‘Mrs Carew has the trick of rhyme and runs of easily rhapsodical commonplaces’.
Her second husband was James Lawrence Carew, a descendant of Bamfylde Moore Carew (1693 – 1759), who lived with the Red Indians and wrote a dictionary of ‘current tramp cant’, published twenty five years after his death. JL Carew was known in Ireland as John Stuart Parnell’s ‘milch cow’, raising large sums for the cause of Home Rule. Despite being a leading Catholic layman he did not abandon ‘The Chief’ when the Kitty O’Shea affair came to light. Parnell’s decline and fall broke his heart and he died of apoplexy in a Swiss chalet in 1903.
Helen Carew was the only daughter of the Anglo-Irish Wyllies, who owned most of the seafront from Juan des Pins to Antibes (the main street is Avenue James Wyllie). She married into the Kennards who were press barons. Coleridge Kennard was far too young for her, and after three years of ‘incessant quarrelling about trivialities’, he ran away to sea and was drowned, leaving her with a little Coleridge to bring up in the South of France.
Coleridge Two grew up to become a Bloomsbury aesthete who privately published Bunthorpian vapidities. When he came of age in 1904 he had, like Proust, his portrait painted by Jacques Emile Blanche in the style of Gainsborough. ‘Sir Coleridge Kennard sitting on a sofa’ (haughty quiffed poseur, right hand on hip, the other limply stroking a dead cat). His mother refused to allow it exhibited until 1925 when it was shown in the Palais Royal, Paris, retitled ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’.
Coleridge Two smoked opium and gambled heavily, and in 1940, when his Persian prose poems were taken to be coded intelligence, he was interned in a concentration camp in Compierge. So his nanny could stay with him, he promptly married her, and they remained together until his death (and her’s two weeks later) in 1947.
Epstein’s monument in Père Lachaise caused as much trouble in France as his British Medical Association frieze of eighteen nudes in bare feet a few years later (it now graces the front of the Zimbabwe Embassy, London). The genitalia of the flying demon were covered with plaster tarpaulin by the cemetery committee and became a snitch for student rags. So a bronze codpiece was fabricated (subsequently stolen by Aleister Crowley, the Satanist, and worn at a fancy dress in the Café Royal).
Helen Carew’s nephew, Lt. Col. George ‘Loopy’ Kennard, friend of Churchill and everybody else (his Daily Telegraph obituary, 1999, described him as the “the best loved regular officer of his generation”) said in his memoirs that she ended her days ‘‘in the Claridges Hotel, badly loved, and died surrounded by parasites who she maintained at the expense of a disappointing son.”
Wilde’s epitaph on the back of the flying demon,
And alien tears will fill him
pity’s long broken urn
for his mourners will be outcast men
and outcasts always mourn
drew bucket loads of weeping pilgrims. In 1961 two English ladies, KOed the offending parts with a hammer. Nobody knows why.
- I’d like to acknowledge James Robinson’s ‘Oscar Wilde’s Friend and Benefactor, Helen Carew’ (lecture to the Genealogical Society of Ireland) for much of the information in this piece.