After her conviction, Jean Harris would use the prison mails to provide herself with another, less explosive, release (“I write because there’s no one to talk with, except you, my friend”) and also to do a bit of good from where she was. Her new return address commanded attention when seen by recipients like Barbara Bush, her fellow Smith alumna, to whom Harris wrote about childcare legislation in May of 1990. In her 1981 book about the shooting and trial, Diana Trilling argued that prison might afford Jean Harris an opportunity to be “splendid” than she had never had before. At moments in Marking Time she comes close.
THE BLOATED, graying debtor who died in the Hôtel d’Alsace with a few friends and some champagne (a pleasure he referred to by its slang name “Boy”) had for the previous quarter century dispatched letters with as much deliberateness as he had squandered life. We shall never know how many of Oscar Wilde’s letters were destroyed in 1895 during fits of puritanical rage and fear by their once-delighted recipients, but when Sir Rupert Hart-Davis’s collection of the surviving correspondence appeared in the early 1960s, W. H. Auden—who believed such publications were generally an invasion of privacy and who a decade later would ask that his own letters be destroyed by all who had them—pronounced Wilde’s letters an exception: “From the beginning [he] performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands. Drama is essentially revelation; on the stage no secrets are kept. I feel therefore, that there is nothing Wilde would desire more than that we should know everything about him.”
Wilde’s early letters from Oxford roll along on the gentle sort of humor he would later banish to make room for wit. To his mother and his friends Reginald Harding and William Ward, he writes mostly of college routine, vacation travels, and a flirtation with Roman Catholicism: “I now breakfast with Father Parkinson, go to St Aloysius, talk sentimental religion to Dunlop and altogether am caught in the fowler’s snare, in the wiles of the Scarlet Woman—I may go over in the vac.” He didn’t. At the end of his life he would still be a self-aware sucker for ceremony and costume. From Rome, in April 1900, to Robbie Ross:
Yesterday a painful thing happened. You know the terrible, the awe-inspiring effect that Royalty has on me: well, I was outside the Caffè Nazionale taking iced coffee with gelato—a most delightful drink—when the King drove past. I at once stood up, and made him a low bow, with hat doffed—to the admiration of some Italian officers at the next table. It was only when the King had passed that I remembered I was Papista and Nerissimo! I was greatly upset: however I hope the Vatican won’t hear about it.
In the Oxford letters, Wilde hasn’t yet learned to throw away a line or resist explaining his own jokes, and the bombast still hasn’t gone successfully over the top. What survives from his first brief London period (1879–1881) is still more ambitious than outrageous. (In between responding to and issuing invitations, he sends his verses to Arnold, Browning—and Gladstone.) It’s only during his 1882 trip to America that Wilde discovers his true ability to perform, both on the platform and in the mails. The buoyant poseur and paradox-maker is now up and running. “They were dreadfully disappointed at Cincinnati at my not wearing knee-breeches,” he informs his lecture agent, and his confidence only grows as he moves further west. In San Francisco, where four thousand people meet him at the depot, he is “really appreciated—by the cultured classes.” By the time he is back in Boston, after famously charming the Colorado silver miners, his name is six feet high on the placards, “printed it is true in those primary colours against which I pass my life protesting, but still it is fame, and anything is better than virtuous obscurity.” The same bons mots, self-plagiarized, begin showing up in several letters all at once.
Returning to London, he declares that “society must be amazed,” but for a time, though he’s rising at a fast, steep grade now, he does what is expected of him, editing Woman’s World and marrying Constance. (The only surviving letter of any length to her is a pleasant, entirely conventional, love note.) He so delights in his children that he urges Norman Forbes-Robertson to “get married at once!” But the paradoxes at the heart of his wit begin emptying themselves toward perfection. As he writes Arthur Conan Doyle, “I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth.”
The letters from 1890 often argue the moral case for Dorian Gray, and in a running battle with the St. James’s Gazette, Wilde defends his novel in a way that previews his response to the marquess of Queensberry’s eventual provocation: “To say that such a book as mine should be ‘chucked into the fire’ is silly. That is what one does with newspapers.” The next few years give Wilde his successful comedies, his money and fame, and the spoiled-brat love of his life, Lord Alfred Douglas, first mentioned as being “quite like a Narcissus—so white and gold … he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.” By 1893, Wilde is tossing off homosexual slang (“Who on earth is the editor? He must be rented”) and writing Bosie the purple letter that will be used against him during the Queensberry trial: “it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry.”
The rush to disaster has its giddy charm. Wilde vacations at Babbacombe Cliff in February 1893 with his sons, Bosie, and Bosie’s tutor, Campbell Dodgson, reveling in this all-male world of boys and children. He fantasizes about the “Babbacombe School”—he is the headmaster, and this is the evening schedule:
5. Tea for headmaster and second master, brandy and soda (not to exceed seven) for boys.
6–7. Work.
7.30. Dinner, with compulsory champagne.
8.30–12. Écarté, limited to five-guinea points.
12–1.30. Compulsory reading in bed. Any boy found disobeying this rule will be immediately woken up.
Bosie, however, must be asked not to “make scenes … They kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life.”
By 1894, Wilde understands that in his own novel, “Basil Hall-ward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Just a year later, Queensberry will be throwing down his misspelled but quite unlibelous card (“To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite”), and its recipient will be going off “to fight with panthers.” Only a few emergency telegrams and notes will remain to be written before it’s time for the letters dispatched from Her Majesty’s prisons. “With what a crash this fell!”
The prison commissioners had decreed in 1887 that the “permission to write and receive Letters is given to Prisoners for the purpose of enabling them to keep up a connection with their respectable friends and not that they may be kept informed of public events.” But Wilde pronounces the letters from his friend Robbie Ross “messengers between me and that beautiful unreal world of Art where once I was King,” and in one of his reformist communications to the Daily Chronicle in 1898, he decries the “habit of mutilating and expurgating” prisoners’ mail. Wilde’s own prison letters chiefly concern the debilitating effects of confinement, relations with Bosie, his fears (entirely wrong) about his place in history, and preparations for his release—a trauma complicated by what he considered the legal and financial ineptitude of friends. He picks oakum, suffers from an abscess of the ear, and is harrowed by the everything-in-its-place regulations of cell-keeping: “Dear Robbie, I could not collect my thoughts yesterday, as I did not expect you till today. When you are good enough to come and see me will you always fix the day? Anything sudden upsets me.”
Publication of his letters by the venal, limelight-loving Bosie is a new worry, since “[t]he gibbet on which I swing in history now is high enough.” He resents his ex-lover’s new status as the “Infant Samuel” and imagines the Queensberry family looking “on the whole thing merely as a subject for sentiment or reminiscence over the walnuts and the wine.” At first, trying to stay alive emotionally, he clings to his
love for Bosie, but as time goes on and the latter never visits or writes, Wilde concentrates on Douglas’s treachery. Invective begins to serve him better than expressions of longing, though the high spirits he fakes for his more loyal correspondents make for the most touching letters he writes.
Self-awareness comes and goes. He is frightened, repentant, vindictive, practical, mystical. Nature “will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.” De Profundis spends much time lamenting past glories and shoring up the author’s cultural status, but this long letter is at its best when attacking Bosie, the nominal recipient, and when Wilde is mixing compliments to others into the pity for himself:
When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy between two policemen, Robbie waited in the long dreary corridor, that before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as handcuffed and with bowed head I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.
Wilde’s letters from Berneval on the French Channel coast, written just after his release with much false optimism and a horror of recidivism, are the hardest for a reader to bear. The ex-convict expects the good air, wholesome food and the practice of little personal economies to save him from repeating his “days of gilded infamy.” But even though he will manage to compose “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” within a year he will have to admit: “I don’t think I shall ever really write again. Something is killed in me. I feel no desire to write. I am unconscious of power. Of course my first year in prison destroyed me body and soul. It could not have been otherwise.” In one of his feminine, submissive letters to Frank Harris, he admits that he has “lost the mainspring of life and art, la joie de vivre.”
If this realization was his first real achievement, understanding Bosie came next. The attacks on him in De Profundis could not preclude Wilde’s “psychologically inevitable” return to him in Naples in 1897. At first he would claim it was for inspiration, but the truth comes in an explanation to Robbie Ross: “Of course I shall often be unhappy, but still I love him: the mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him.” One feels that Wilde has finally found a paradox instead of forced one. As predicted, Bosie remains spiteful and profligate as always (“He apparently goes to the races every day … he has a faculty of spotting the loser, which, considering that he knows nothing at all about horses, is perfectly astonishing”) and for much of the time Wilde is alone.
In his last years, he comes to more realistic conclusions about his sexual nature. Shortly after his release, he is “thankful and happy to be able to say” that he has no attraction to a twenty-nine-year-old ex-Reading convict who comes to spend a week with him; the following year he’s back to defending homosexual love to Ross as “more noble than other forms;” and soon after that he simply decides to get what pleasure he can from it. Playing with one of Charles Reade’s titles, he writes: “How evil it is to buy Love, and how evil to sell it! And yet what purple hours one can snatch from that grey slowly-moving thing we call Time! My mouth is twisted with kissing, and I feed on fevers. The Cloister or the Café—there is my future. I tried the Hearth, but it was a failure.” He settles on the café. “I know that there is no such thing as changing one’s life,” he declares toward the end; “one merely wanders round and round within the circle of one’s own personality.” But the reader of his letters gets steadily closer to the center, to what the newspapers, determined to deprive him of even the simple honorific “Mister,” called “the man Wilde.”
In the struggle for money, he sells options on the same play to several buyers and turns out some of his most charming prose ever in the form of notes to his shrunken but most essential public—the friends he asks for money. Begging letters become his chief means of expression: “I am going to write a Political Economy in my heavier moments. The first law I lay down is ‘Wherever there exists a demand, there is no supply.’” He reports having made a “pilgrimage” to the chapel of Notre Dame de Liesse—fifty yards from his hotel—and talks of the boy guide Robbie has left him with: “Omero is his name, and I am showing him Rome.” He thanks Reginald Turner for the gift of a clock (part of the optimistic apparatus of Berneval) in sentences as delightful as any in his fairy tales: “It is most sweet of you to give it to me, and you will be pleased, and perhaps astonished, to hear that it is quite beautiful, and has a lovely face and wonderful slim restless hands, yet it is strangely punctual in all its habits, business-like in its methods, of ceaseless industry, and knows all that the sun is doing.” Three days later: “The clock still goes; and is quite astounding in its beauty and industry. It even works at night, when no one is watching it.”
On February 1, 1899, Wilde wrote Leonard Smithers, his last publisher, that he was autographing copies of The Importance of Being Earnest in the hope of making a little money: “One … has a smudge of ink on it, but as I have initialled the smudge, which I made myself, it must count as a remarque. You might ask one and sixpence extra for that copy.” On February 6, 1981, both the smudged copy and the letter were sold at Christie’s in New York. Price: $8,500.
THE STIFFEST UPPER LIP is required to quote, with any real belief, Lovelace’s famous assertion that stone walls do not a prison make. The ordinary mortal is more likely to reverse the proposition and declare that a prison hardly requires walls of stone. The plasterboard of little offices and unhappy homes will do just as well. Charles Lamb, whose “Distant Correspondents” got this book going, marched between two confinements nearly every day for thirty-three years. In the mornings he set off for his clerkly job keeping track of vessels sent forth by the East India Company. He earned what it took to support himself and the sister he came home to—the occasionally mad Mary, who had slain their mother in a fit. Lamb could dispatch his own fanciful ships, gay little skiffs that didn’t betray their turbulent origins, only at night. Some of the essays we best remember, “A Dissertation on Roast Pig” and even “Distant Correspondents,” got started as private communications to friends like Coleridge.
We love Lamb for his constant susceptibility, the excitement of his feelings by food (“how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose!”), tobacco, and certainly drink. But the gusto never proceeds from anything like ease. Unworthiness prompts his sympathies for the wretched (“I killed a rat the other day by punching him to pieces, and feel a weight of blood upon me to this hour”), and melancholy often keeps him from being genial company. The food he loves is usually better eaten alone, and this bachelor so known for his love of teeming London—who writes Wordsworth that man was lucky to have sinned his way out of the too-green Garden of Eden—takes many of his urban delights from a solitary remove: “The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about [London’s] crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.”
His devotion to those who are out of their minds is a kind of propitiation against the threat madness presents to his own shaky nature. With his friend Thomas Manning about to go preach the gospel in China, Lamb resorts to telltale black humor—“perhaps, you’ll get murder’d, and we shall die in our beds with a fair literary reputation”—knowing that the possibilities of sudden violence are probably greater right in Inner Temple Lane. Once Manning has become a distant correspondent halfway ‘round the world, Lamb cries wolf to lure him home. Some of the false alarms are broad enough (“St. Paul’s Church is a heap of ruins”), but others are sufficiently pointed to unsettle even a man doing the Lord’s work: “Scarce here and there one will be able to make out your face; all your opinions will be out of date, your jokes obsolete, your puns rejected with fastidiousness as wit of the last age.” The urgency beneath the comedy comes from Lamb’s desire for Manning’s “steadiness and quiet, which used to infuse something
like itself into our nervous minds. Mary called you our ventilator.”
Mary’s mental episodes, “twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two,” take “a tedious cut out of a life.” Lamb hopes for the best and blames himself for anything else. On one occasion he declines an invitation from Coleridge—hardly a rock himself—by explaining that the poet has “a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary’s being with you.” And yet he credits his childhood friend with developing everything worthwhile in his own character.
When the essayist and poet George Dyer experiences a fit of insanity in 1801, it is Lamb who takes him in: “He came thro’ a violent rain with no neckcloth on, and a beard that made him a spectacle to men and angels, and tap’d at the door,” Lamb tells his friend John Rickman. “I shall not be sorry when he takes his nipt carcase out of my bed … but I will endeavour to bring him in future into a method of dining at least once a day.” When Lamb finds himself living alone, it is usually madness and death that have created the situation. On May 12, 1800, he writes Coleridge:
Hetty [a servant] died on Friday night, about eleven o’clock, after eight days’ illness; Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house with nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for relief.
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