Behind Bars
… the prison system—a system so terrible that it hardens their hearts whose hearts it does not break, and brutalises those who have to carry it out no less than those who have to submit to it.
Meanwhile, there was no fishing for boys or mackerel in Pentonville. (Sir Edward Clarke’s demurrer about the prosecution’s conduct in linking the cases of Wilde and Taylor came to nothing by 19 June.) Much nonsense has been written about prison, and some of it, in the days before he experienced it, was written by Wilde. The detachment with which he had once remarked, in a review of Wilfrid Blunt’s poems, that prison had improved Blunt’s style, was not something to be reminded of now. Nor was his admirable but shortsighted argument in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’: ‘After all, even in prison a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace.’ It was just such nonsense that the prison authorities found insupportable. They knew, if Wilde did not, that a man with a pain tearing at his bowels cannot be at peace. They were determined on a course which unwittingly confirmed a wiser remark from the same essay: ‘As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishment that the good have inflicted.’ The chaplain minced in and asked, ‘Mr Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?’ ‘I am sorry. I fear not.’ ‘You see where you are now,’ said the chaplain.5
Wilde had first to suffer the grief of loss. A fellow convict whispered to him as they trod the prison yard in enforced silence, ‘I am sorry for you: it is harder for the likes of you than it is for the likes of us.’6 Such sympathy was scarce. Open contempt had replaced the mockery under which he had learned not to smart in the past, as infamy had replaced fame. It was as if he had never written any of those plays, dialogues, stories, and poems. All his acts had been erased except those memorialized in the courtroom, encounters with male prostitutes in which Wilde, probably rare among their customers, had always behaved kindly and generously. The only things that survived from his earlier life were his love for Douglas and his sense of being loved by him, and these quickly came under challenge.
Besides the wormwood of obloquy, there was physical pain. Wilde’s first month of imprisonment, at Pentonville, introduced him to treatment which outvied in harshness, as he said later, that meted out to animals. ‘Three permanent punishments authorized by law,’ he said, were ‘1. Hunger, 2. Insomnia, and 3. Disease.’ Insomnia was enforced by the plank bed on which Wilde had to sleep until his behavior showed him to be sufficiently cowed to be allotted a hard mattress. ‘I shivered all night long,’ he told Frank Harris. Sleeplessness became an ingrained habit. As for hunger and disease, they were related. Apart from soup—the one thing in the prison diet that Wilde could eat, and that an infrequent one—the staples, weak gruel, suet and water, were measured out ‘ounce by ounce.’ Such food was revolting and insufficient. ‘Every prisoner suffers day and night from hunger,’ Wilde wrote later.7 Given his unusual height and girth, he suffered more than most. As if hunger and nausea were not enough, the disease that came with them was diarrhea. This successfully resisted the two or three daily doses of antidote brought by the prison warders.
Even diarrhea might have been borne had it not been for the prison’s sanitary arrangements. Because of the danger that the prisoners might communicate by tapping drainpipes, pipes and latrines had been removed. A small tin vessel which the prisoner could empty three times a day was substituted. The prison lavatories could be used only during the one hour of exercise allowed daily in the yard, and after five o’clock no prisoner could leave his cell for any reason. To use the tin vessel rather than suffer intolerable pain meant that the cell during the night became ‘indescribable’ as the slops ran over the floor. On three occasions, Wilde said later, he had seen warders become violently sick when they opened the cell in the morning and saw the condition to which the helpless prisoner had been forced to bring it during the night. According to Rebell, someone who had seen Wilde at Pentonville described him as ‘humilié et anéanti,’ shattered by fatigue, malnutrition, and diarrhea. His brother wrote to express his concern, and had an answer from the governor of Pentonville asserting that ‘the convict was perfectly well and that every care was being taken of him.’8 His weight was down from 190 to 168.
R. B. Haldane, who had known Wilde earlier and who, as a member of a Home Office committee investigating prisons, had access to any prison at any time, took it upon himself to be Wilde’s first visitor, 12 June 1895. (Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, an old friend of Wilde,* had urged Haldane to go.)9 The chaplain was summoned first, and acknowledged that Wilde was depressed and would not listen to any spiritual comfort. ‘I could be patient,’ he told someone at the time, ‘for patience is a virtue. It is not patience, it is apathy you want here, and apathy is a vice.’10 Haldane entered Wilde’s cell for a private interview. At first Wilde refused to speak a word. Then, Haldane recalled, ‘I put my hand on his prison-dress-clad shoulder and said that I used to know him and that I had come to say something about himself. He had not fully used his great literary gift, and the reason was that he had lived a life of pleasure and had not made any great subject his own. Now misfortune might prove a blessing for his career, for he had got a great subject. I would try to get for him books and pen and ink, and in eighteen months [in fact twenty-three] he would be free to produce.’ Wilde burst into tears. He responded to Haldane’s analysis of his career, for it was essentially the view he was to take of it himself in De Profundis. He made no effort to deny his guilt, said only that the temptation of such a life had been too great for him. He promised to try to do what Haldane proposed, and asked eagerly for books. Aside from the Bible, he had been allowed only Pilgrim’s Progress, he said. One author he named was Flaubert, whose La Tentation de Saint-Antoine had always accompanied him on his travels. But Haldane half jokingly reminded him that Flaubert’s dedication of his works to his advocate for having defended him against a charge of indecent publication made the granting of such a request unlikely. Wilde laughed for the first time, and cheered up a little. They decided on a decorous list which included:
St Augustine, De Civitate Dei and Confessiones
Pascal, Provincial Letters and Pensées
Pater, The Renaissance
Theodore Mommsen, History of Rome (5 vols.)
Cardinal Newman, Essays on Miracles, The Grammar of Assent, Apologia pro Vita Sua, and The Idea of a University
There were fifteen volumes in all. The governor of Pentonville objected that books were contrary to the Prison Act of 1865, but the Secretary of State had agreed, so they were delivered.11 Pen and ink were still debarred for the prisoner. Haldane had promised him that his wife and children would be looked after, and asked a friend of his, Lady Cowper, for help, which he afterwards said she had given. He also had Wilde transferred from Pentonville to Wandsworth on 4 July. Wilde’s clothes were sent with him, but one waistcoat was missing. Wilde became furious, storming and raving until it was found. Then, pacified, he said to his warder, ‘Pray pardon my ebullition of feeling.’12 Taylor had meanwhile (according to the Home Office records) been transferred to Wormwood Scrubs. On 17 August 1895, Wilde’s books were received from Pentonville and put into the Wandsworth library so they could be issued to him under the usual regulations. They would go with him on his subsequent changes of prison. Three years later, Haldane would receive anonymously in the post The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and would think of it as Wilde’s fulfillment of his promise.
Another visitor who was exceptionally allowed entrance, it appears, was Otho Holland, Mrs Wilde’s brother. He made clear to Wilde that Constance was being urged by her solicitor, J. S. Hargrove, to take divorce proceedings, and would certainly do so if he did not write to her at the first opportunity, which would be in September, when his first three months had been served. Wilde
said he wished at all costs to prevent the parting from wife and children which would follow a divorce. Holland so informed his sister, who had gone with her boys to Glion in Switzerland. At the same time, she received a letter from Robert Sherard pleading for a reconciliation. Mrs Wilde needed little persuading: on 8 September she wrote Wilde from Glion that she had decided to drop the divorce proceedings, and added comfortingly that his son Cyril never forgot him. The next day the hardbitten Hargrove arrived, and she was afraid that he would disapprove; but he produced a letter from Wilde confessing his folly and promising amendment, which in her interests he had already read, and described as ‘one of the most touching and pathetic letters that had ever come under his eye.’ If she called off the divorce, he warned her, she would have to live on ‘the other side of the world.’13 Constance agreed and wrote a second letter to her husband to say that there was forgiveness for him, and at the same time, on 13 September, wrote to the governor of Wandsworth asking permission to see Wilde in prison.
Love and Publicity
… what letters? The letters I had written to you from Holloway Prison! The letters that should have been to you things sacred and secret beyond anything in the whole world.
Wilde’s preoccupation with his family surprised and alarmed Bosie Douglas. He had written to the prison governor in August 1895 for permission to write to Wilde, but was refused because of the correspondence with Constance. Douglas took the rebuff badly, as he indicated to Ada Leverson.14 But she, like the rest of Wilde’s friends, was well aware that the love affair with Douglas had been the center of Wilde’s downfall, so she did not feel much sympathy.
Meanwhile, Robert Sherard, who lived near Wandsworth in southwestern London, had arranged to be Wilde’s next visitor. He had delighted the Wilde circle by challenging Queensberry to a duel on French soil following the trial, but Queensberry was for once prudently silent. ‘Don’t fight more than six duels a week!’ Wilde had cautioned his friend.15 Since Sherard’s ticket of admission for 26 August allowed a second visitor, he asked George Ives and others to accompany him. All, as he afterwards said, pleaded conflicting engagements while expressing sympathy. So Sherard went alone.
He described his visit in detail. There was much unlocking and relocking of metal doors before he was ushered into a vaulted room divided by two rows of iron bars. Between the rows stood a warder watching the clock and making sure that no complaints of prison conditions were uttered by the convict to the visitor. Sherard found Wilde courageous and resigned, as he told a reporter when he emerged; but on reflection he amended this and said that Wilde was ‘greatly depressed’ and on the verge of tears. Probably both were true: Wilde, given any chance at all, had great powers of self-rescue. Still, there were unmistakable signs of what he had endured. Sherard noted that his hands, which clasped the bars, were disfigured, their nails broken and bleeding. His hair was unkempt, and a small straggly beard had been allowed to grow. Wilde’s face was so thin that Sherard could scarcely recognize him.16 They soon began to talk about books: Wilde’s spirits had been lifted a little by his having received the books specified by Haldane and even a few more, including Pater’s Greek Studies, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits.
One piece of literary news proved disturbing. Sherard had learned from a friend on the Mercure de France that the review was about to publish an article on Wilde by Alfred Douglas that quoted three love letters written by Wilde at the time of the trials. What alarmed Sherard was that the article would rupture the delicate negotiations with Constance Wilde for a reconciliation. He asked if it were really by Wilde’s wish that his letters were being published. The subject raised bitter memories. Wilde remembered that the last letters from him which Douglas had made public had led to his imprisonment. If the blackmailing boys had not sold two letters to Queensberry, the Marquess’s case against him would have lacked exhibits. Now his beloved Bosie proposed to offer his later letters, which were fervently and brazenly homosexual, to the gaze of an unsympathetic public in a foreign country, without even asking his consent. To Wilde those letters should have been ‘sacred’ and ‘secret.’17 Douglas had no right in common law to publish another man’s letters, but what Wilde minded was the blatant lack of concern for the ignominy his children would suffer if their father were proved to have perjured himself on the stand. Constance would be outraged and hurt. Then too, the article would preclude any mitigation of sentence, something for which Wilde had not ceased to hope. Without hesitation Wilde asked Sherard to try by every means to stop the publication of Douglas’s article.
It seems from this that he had already turned away from Douglas. On a plank bed he could hardly have failed to review the events of the last months and years, to see again the beautiful fierce face egging him on against Queensberry, calling him a coward if he considered desisting from the prosecution, battening on his precarious income, and marring his calm with constant quarrels and reconciliations, detesting him when he was weakened by illness.
Sherard obeyed Wilde by writing at once to both Douglas and the Mercure de France. Douglas in his turn was shocked and disappointed. His article, of which he was proud, began by quoting the letter of Wilde from Holloway which began, ‘This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you’; if others should write that their love was evil, Bosie would write that it was not so. Douglas took this remark of Wilde’s as an assignment: ‘I do not hope to gain any sympathy by lies, so I shall not pretend that the friendship between Mr Wilde and myself was an ordinary friendship nor simply an intellectual friendship, nor even that it was like the feeling which an older brother might have for his younger brother. No, I say now, frankly (let my enemies interpret it as they will!) that our friendship was love, real love,—love, it is true, completely pure but extremely passionate. Its origin was, in Mr Wilde, a purely physical admiration for beauty and grace (my beauty and my grace); it matters little whether they are real or whether they exist only in the imagination of my friend; what must be remarked is that it was a perfect love, more spiritual than sensual, a truly Platonic love, the love of an artist for a beautiful mind and a beautiful body.’ The contradiction between ‘purely physical’ and ‘more spiritual than sensual’ left Plato in tatters. Douglas attested Wilde’s fatherliness in attempting to prevent his addictions to racing, gambling, hunting, and vice; in fact, Wilde’s injunctions had proved useless. Most of all, Wilde had turned him towards art, ‘the art of living as well as the other arts.…’ Douglas explained how all this infuriated his father, and how Wilde had brought the suit for Bosie’s sake. Then Queensberry, aided by a solicitor named Bernard Abrahams, had succeeded, by the use of £2000 or £3000, in securing witnesses. Douglas next reviewed the trials, and accused judges and prosecutors of misusing their authority. He insisted that they had knuckled under to Queensberry’s threats that members of the government would be implicated if Wilde was released. The family connection of Schwabe with the Solicitor General was one that Wilde studiously refused to pursue, even though it would have been to his advantage. Mr Justice Wills was ‘an old woman.’ Douglas then quoted two other letters from Wilde to him, as passionate as the first. ‘Why reveal to the whole world the secret of my life? I have been advised not to do it, prudent friends have told me that I was committing a folly!’ With Plato and Shakespeare invoked as his witnesses, he asked rhetorically why, even if Wilde were guilty of the offenses of which he had been accused, he should be ‘punished for being a man who preferred the physical beauty of man to that of woman.’18 And so on.
As a defense of Wilde this was futile; Hughes Rebell had done it much better than Douglas could possibly do. What it came to was a brag that it was Wilde’s love for him that had brought him down, and a candid admission that this love was on both sides homosexual. When Sherard asked him to withdraw the article, Douglas at first agreed. Then he had second thoughts: in November 1895 he wrote to the governor of Wandsworth asking for permission to publish Wilde’s letters in a French journal ‘corresponding to’ The
Fortnightly Review. Wilde, through the governor, absolutely refused.19 It would seem that Douglas had not yet officially withdrawn the article, for he received a letter from the editor of the Mercure saying that, in view of Sherard’s representations, they wished to know Douglas’s attitude. His reply of 28 September 1895 was written from Capri, where he had taken a villa after moving from Sorrento:
Dear Sir,
I was about to write to you when I received your letter. I am the nearest and dearest friend of Mr Oscar Wilde, and the injuries and insults, and practical social ruin which I have endured entirely on account of my steadfast devotion to him are too well known to make it necessary to recall them. I consider that I am a better judge of what is best for Mr Wilde, and more likely to understand what his wishes would be, than Mr Sherard. I am convinced that the publication of my article would bring nothing but pity and sympathy to Mr Wilde, and that he himself would approve of it. In fact in writing the article I was really fulfilling a request of Mr Wilde’s. Nevertheless, after what has been said by Mr Sherard I will not undertake the responsibility of running the risk of doing what he, as a sincere friend of Mr Wilde’s, thinks so fatal. I think Mr Sherard is quite wrong and I object both to his interference and to his manner of interfering, yet since he has found out prematurely my intentions of publishing the article, and objects to it in such terms, I would rather that the article should not be published.… I was particularly anxious that nobody should know of my intention to write the article before it appeared, as I anticipated that many of Mr Wilde’s friends would think it unwise, and I had written it, well knowing that it would cause me trouble and misunderstanding, because after careful consideration I considered it would be a service to my friend and would be for his good.
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