‘What if Oscar Wilde had never been arrested?’ – Rewriting Queer Histories with Tom Crewe
‘I wanted to recreate in fiction this moment of optimism and bravery, and then show how it ran into the horror of the Wilde trial.’
Photo Credit: Jon Tonks
First, what was your initial inspiration for your writing of The New Life? What’s the story behind the story?
A decade ago, I began to read about the experiences of gay men at the end of the 19th century. I had realised that the story of what happened to Oscar Wilde was the only one I knew, and when I looked beyond it, I was surprised and invigorated by what I found. I was particularly taken with the figure of John Addington Symonds, who had made a torturous journey to self-acceptance, and in the 1880s and 1890s became a campaigner for what we would now call gay rights. He seemed to me a wonderful character for a novel, and I decided I would build a story around his partnership with Havelock Ellis, with whom he wrote the first ever book published in English about homosexuality, which argued that it should not be stigmatised or punished as a crime. I wanted to recreate in fiction this moment of optimism and bravery, and then show how it ran into the horror of the Wilde trial.
Although The New Life is set in the late 19th century and you draw on two characters from history, it seems to blend fact and fiction in many ways. I read that you didn’t feel any particular loyalty to the historical records of any of the real people you write about, but there does seem to be a strong sense of accuracy in the historical context. Could you tell us a little bit about how your process on working out which elements of history were important to you, and which you felt able to reimagine?
My main ambition for the novel is there in the last line of my previous answer. It was a general ambition, to dramatise a hinge moment in history, not a specific one, to dramatise the real lives of John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis. These two ambitions might have been reconcilable had the history been different – but the history was what it had always been. Symonds died in 1893, two years before the Wilde trial, and though his and Ellis’s book was eventually published, it was not until 1897, and in a rather messy and only intermittently dramatic way. To write the novel that I could see, in some vague but tantalising way, in my head, I would need to leave the facts behind. My Symonds character could not be Symonds, or my Ellis character Ellis. I would have to invent a parallel world. But there was no reason for the nature of that world to change. It is, as far as I could make it, an accurate picture of Britain in the 1890s. It only has a John Addington and a Henry Ellis living in it, rather than a John Addington Symonds and a Havelock Ellis. This liberated me to tell a new, ‘untrue’ story, but not one, I hope, that falsified.
On the theme of reimaginings, I think books that place certain characters into a reimagined version of history tend to be asking some ‘what if?’ questions of the past and how it might have impacted our present – if that resonates with you, what were the ‘what ifs’ you wanted to explore?
A historian of this period, after reading the book, told me that really it was an exploration of only one ‘what if’: what if Symonds had not had tuberculosis, and therefore not died in 1893? What if this brave, perhaps reckless man had lived to see the Wilde trial threaten everything he believed in; and what if he had been in a position to publish his and Ellis’s book regardless? This was indeed my starting point, as I have explained in my last answer. But there are many other ‘what if’s in the book. My characters are reformers, radical thinkers, idealists: ‘what if?’ is the question that all their visions of a better world start from. What if homosexuality, for both men and women, was normalised and legalised? What if we stopped feeling ashamed about sex, about our bodies? What if we don’t have to get married, or what if we do it in a different way? What if we had social justice? What if men and women had equal rights? Most of these questions are still active ones, wherever you live in the world: I hope the book encourages readers to keep asking them.
Of course, the ‘what if’ that I have been asked most frequently in the past year is ‘What if Oscar Wilde had never been arrested? How would it have affected the course of gay rights?’ I have my own answer to that question, but I hope my novel allows readers to come up with other ones.
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Read the full interview in the our Innocence Issue, coming soon.
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