That Douglas remained of two minds about the matter, and did not really renounce the temptation of writing Oscar Wilde’s confession for him, would become clear the following year. He brought the matter up again with the Mercure. He also wrote to Sherard complaining that his meddling in the matter had been ‘exceedingly impertinent and in the worst possible taste.’ When Sherard held firm, and mentioned the importance of Wilde’s being reconciled to his wife, Douglas responded that if Sherard did anything to alienate Wilde from him, Douglas would shoot him ‘like a dog.’20 It was the same threat that Queensberry had made to Wilde. Dogs had little to hope for from the Queensberry family arsenal.
Though Wilde’s enforced meditation on Bosie had already swung him round, as is indicated by the contrition he expressed to his wife, the Mercure de France episode provided evidence of Douglas’s ‘hideous rashness’ and incapacity to enter imaginatively into anyone else’s feelings. What Douglas called love was the opposite of wishing the beloved well. In De Profundis Wilde castigated such devotion repeatedly as ‘shallow.’ He had long tried to keep from recriminating, and to imagine that Douglas was suffering; but it appeared that his anguish had an element of self-seeking, that in fact the Wilde case had become simply a subject on which he might publish. In his bitterness Wilde imagined Douglas on Capri, busying himself, in the midst of his local pleasures, with the destruction of any scrap of Wilde’s reputation still surviving. That the Queensberry family consisted not of two totally different beings, but of two very similar ones, both determined to expose him, one out of purported love and one out of evident hate, suddenly became clear. Wilde, as he picked oakum in Wandsworth, could wake in the night to look back on a senseless love.
From now on Douglas could do nothing right. He heard from Ross or Adey that Wilde was to suffer a further indignity of bankruptcy proceedings. There had been some talk of his brother Percy’s paying Wilde’s debts, which came to £3591, Queensberry’s costs being £677 of the total. Percy, after having volunteered, decided to think again. Douglas complained that Wilde’s friends appeared to be unwilling to do anything, and in blaming them he found reason for releasing his own family from the promise they had made to Wilde long before. Douglas wrote privately to his mother that they need do nothing, and she replied, ‘I told Black [her solicitor] of what you told me of the bankruptcy proceedings, he quite agreed you should all get out of it and said he would see to that.’21 But Bosie kept in mind the fact that Wilde would be let out of prison for a few hours, and ascertained from his friends the name of the solicitor’s clerk who would take Wilde’s depositions. He prevailed upon this man to say to Wilde, ‘Prince Fleur de Lys wishes to be remembered to you.’ Wilde stared blankly at the clerk, who repeated the message and added, to be sure he was understood, ‘The gentleman is abroad at present.’ In former times Wilde had spoken of Douglas by this name, borrowed from a fatuous ballad Douglas had written about a prince and a peasant boy who, after changing clothes, are mistaken for each other. But on hearing it now, in those unspeakable surroundings, Wilde laughed aloud, as he wrote later, ‘for the first and last time in my entire prison-life. In that laugh was the scorn of all the world.’ He had occasion to contrast Douglas’s absurd greeting with that of Robert Ross, who waited in the corridor of the Bankruptcy Court on 25 September so that when Wilde went by, handcuffed and with bowed head, he could ‘gravely raise his hat to me.’22†
Wilde’s alienation from Douglas was violently expressed to Constance Wilde, who had obtained the special permission to see her husband which she had requested from Switzerland. The interview took place on 21 September 1895, in the same vaulted room that Sherard had used. Its effect upon her was beyond any expectation. As she wrote to Sherard next day,
My dear Mr. Sherard, It was indeed awful, more so than I had any conception it could be. I could not see him and I could not touch him, and I scarcely spoke.… He has been mad the last three years, and he says that if he saw Lord A. he would kill him. So he had better keep away, and be satisfied with having marred a fine life. Few people can boast of so much.
In these painful circumstances, she promised Wilde that on his emergence from prison he might rejoin her and their sons. The news cheered him very much, as Sherard learned in a long interview, this time in a private room, two or three days later. Constance Wilde held to her decision: on 15 October she wrote to Hannah Whitall Smith from Neuchâtel that, although she was changing her name to ‘Holland,’ she was withdrawing from divorce proceedings. ‘My poor misguided husband, who is weak rather than wicked, repents most bitterly all his past madness and I cannot refuse to him the forgiveness that he has asked.’24
Unfortunately, Wilde’s state of health did not respond to her generosity. On 15 October the Daily Chronicle reported that he was in the infirmary; his brother’s wife, Lily, visited him there on 22 October, and afterwards wrote, ‘He is in the Infirmary as he is suffering from dysentery brought on I should say by great bodily weakness. He is hungry but cannot eat the food and at present is only allowed a little beef tea. Mentally he is very unhappy.… He is very altered in every way.’ Wilde told Sherard, who managed to see him again, that he would be dead before long. On 12 November he was well enough to attend the second and final stage of his bankruptcy hearing. His friends not having raised enough to meet all his debts, he was officially declared bankrupt and his affairs were put in the hands of a receiver. The Labour Leader on 16 November commented sympathetically on his appearance: ‘They have cut his hair in a shocking way and parted it down the side and he wears a short, scrubby, unkempt beard.’
Aspects of Wilde, by Max Beerbohm. (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
Sketch of Wilde in the dock, by Ralph Hodgson (‘Yorick’).
Caricature of Wilde, by Beerbohm.
Playbill for The Importance of Being Earnest.
George Alexander as John Worthing and Rose Leclerq as Lady Bracknell in a scene from the original production, 1895. (Courtesy of The Hyde Collection)
Wilde, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. (Collection Guillot de Saix, H. Roger Viollet, Paris)
Berneval, the village near Dieppe where Wilde stayed for several months after leaving prison in 1897.
Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas in Rome, 1897. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
Wilde visiting St. Peter’s, Rome, 1897. (Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Library)
In front of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Campidoglio, Rome, April 1900.
Constance Holland in Heidelberg, 1897, after changing her name.
Wilde on his deathbed, photographed by Maurice Gilbert, 30 November 1900.
Wilde’s monument, by Jacob Epstein, in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (photographed by Jack Oppenheim).
A Change in Mood
All this took place in the early part of November of the year before last [1895]. A great river of life flows between you and a date so distant.
The popular revulsion against Wilde’s ‘crimes’ had begun to be checked by compassion. His friends in London and Paris took advantage of the shift by circulating petitions for mitigation of sentence. The one drafted in London by More Adey at the beginning of December 1895 argued that Wilde, being a man of intelligence, had already suffered enough punishment. In Paris, Stuart Merrill’s petition was to the same effect. But both experienced difficulties: Adey secured the signatures of Frederick York Powell, Regius Professor of History at Oxford, and probably of Selwyn Image and Walter Crane. But W. Holman Hunt declined without a trace of Pre-Raphaelite nostalgia for his old defender:
I must repeat my opinion that the law treated him with exceeding leniency, and state that further consideration of the facts convinces me that in justice to criminals belonging to other classes of society I should have to join in the cry for doing away with all personal responsibility for wickedness if I took any part in appealing … and while such a course might seem benevolent to malefactors, it would scarcely be so to the self restrained and orderly memb
ers of society.
Henry James, asked by Merrill to sign, gave a prudent answer through Jonathan Sturges on 27 November: ‘James says that the petition would not have the slightest effect on the authorities here who have the matter in charge, and in whose nostrils the very name of Zola and even of Bourget is a stench, and that the document would only exist as a manifesto of personal loyalty to Oscar by his friends, of whom he was never one.’ Bourget may have signed, but Zola refused; Gide signed, but Sardou said, ‘This muck is too vile for me to get mixed up in it.’ Jules Renard, never friendly to Wilde, wrote in his journal, ‘I shall be glad to sign the petition for Oscar Wide, on condition that he give his word of honor … never again to use his pen.’‡25 François Coppée agonized over the matter in a column of print before saying he would sign, but only as a member of something corresponding to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. ‘A writer pig is still a pig,’ he said. Discouraged by reluctance and refusal, neither Adey nor Merrill presented a petition. Later Frank Harris was to draw up another and confidently ask George Meredith to start it off, only to receive a direct refusal. Douglas, continuing to find his subject in his friend’s cause, inscribed a sonnet to the French writers who had refused to sign Merrill’s petition and sent it to Merrill for publication in La Plume. Merrill did not use it.
The months following Wilde’s bankruptcy had not been easy for Douglas. He came to perceive that Wilde did not love him any longer, and while he could put this down to treachery on the part of their mutual friends, he could not accept it. There were frantic letters to Sherard, to Ada Leverson, to Ross, to Adey. When some of Wilde’s new detestation reached him through these filters, he responded on 30 November to Adey, from Capri, where Ross was staying with him.
I am not in prison but I think I suffer as much as Oscar and in fact more, just as I am sure that he would have suffered more if he had been free and I in prison. Please tell him that.… Tell him I know that I have ruined his life, that everything is my fault, if that pleases him. I don’t care. Doesn’t he think that my life is just as much ruined as his and so much sooner?
He wished that he and Wilde were both dead. Adey responded that he had seen Wilde on 30 November, that there had been no general complaints against Douglas, only a specific one about a letter—presumably the one requesting permission to publish Wilde’s love letters—sent by Douglas to the governor of Wandsworth, which Wilde had been told about but not allowed to see. He said that Wilde’s revulsion from Douglas was ‘a passing delirium of gaol moral fever,’ which Douglas could overcome if only he had patience.26 Good advice, but to the wrong man.
Transfer to Reading
A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
Haldane, who had visited Wilde at Pentonville, came to see him in Wandsworth too. It was clear that things were not going well. The deputy chaplain on visiting him had smelled semen, and wrote on 11 September 1895 that Wilde had degenerated into masturbating§—a charge the authorities indignantly denied (attributing the smell to Jeyes’s disinfectant)—and answered by sending the chaplain to another post. Wilde, deathly weak from dysentery and hunger but suspected by the prison doctor of malingering, had been forced to attend chapel. He had fainted there and fallen, and the fall had injured his right ear, in which the hearing was already impaired. The result of this accident and dysentery was that he remained for two months in the infirmary. He had also come short of being a model prisoner, his oakum pickings being very skimpy, his obedience to the prescribed silence among prisoners desultory. As he told Frank Harris, some of the warders at Wandsworth were brutes.28 Haldane heard enough of this to conclude that Wilde would be better off at Reading prison, and he arranged for him to be transferred there. The move took place on 21 November, and proved to be the single most humiliating experience of Wilde’s prison life. Handcuffed and in prison clothing, he had to wait on the platform at Clapham Junction from two to half past two on a rainy afternoon. A crowd formed, first laughing and then jeering at him. One man recognized that this was Oscar Wilde, and spat at him. ‘For a year after that was done to me,’ Wilde wrote in De Profundis, ‘I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.’
There was some stir at Reading about his arrival. At the time there were 170 inmates, thirteen of them female. The governor, Lieutenant Colonel J. Isaacson, was flattered at Haldane’s preference for Reading over Wandsworth. He addressed the staff: ‘A certain prisoner is about to be transferred here, and you should be proud to think the Prison Commissioners have chosen Reading Gaol as the one most suitable for this man to serve the remainder of his sentence in.’ He did not tell the prisoner’s name, but any doubt of the identity of the man placed in cell C.3.3 was dispelled when Wilde was brought forward. One warder was assigned to cut his hair, which at Wandsworth had been allowed to grow out a little. ‘Must it be cut?’ asked Wilde, with tears in his eyes; ‘you don’t know what it means to me.’ It was cut. ‘The horror of prison-life,’ Wilde wrote later to Leonard Smithers, ‘is the contrast between the grotesqueness of one’s aspect, and the tragedy in one’s soul.’29
That the new prisoner was unfit for any hard manual work was evident from the start. Wilde was assigned to work in the garden, and to act as ‘schoolmaster’s orderly.’ This involved taking charge of the library and bringing books to other prisoners, but he did not perform even these light duties in the prescribed manner. He was allowed, by special favor, to spend time in his cell reading, but still not allowed to write. He thought of returning to the books he had loved at Oxford, and in January 1896 he requested and received Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, the Corpus Poetarum Latinorum, Short’s Latin Dictionary, Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Poetae Scenici Graeci, and an Italian dictionary and grammar. But his attention wandered from the classical poets, and only Dante’s Inferno fixed his mind.
His reputation as a writer proved to be more tenacious than he had imagined at Pentonville. Some of his books were republished, notably The Soul of Man (omitting the words Under Socialism) by Arthur L. Humphreys at 187 Piccadilly (Hatchard’s) on 30 May 1895. Then, in October, Ward, Lock published a 6-shilling edition of Dorian Gray. Meanwhile, in Paris, the Théâtre Libre and the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre both wanted to stage Salome. The request of the former was sent back by Colonel Isaacson with a curt notation that the prisoner was not entitled to receive it. But Lugné-Poé produced it at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on 11 February 1896, and himself took the role of Herod. Ernest Dowson and Aubrey Beardsley attended, and Dowson wrote a long letter to Constance describing the enthusiasm of the audience for this ‘triumphant performance.’30 The production was reported in the English press, and Wilde said that it modified the attitude of the prison officials towards him.
But Isaacson found his distinguished inmate difficult. Wilde reciprocated, describing the governor to Chris Healy: ‘He had the eyes of a ferret, the body of an ape, and the soul of a rat.’ To someone else he said, perhaps more mildly, that Isaacson was, like Sulla, ‘a mulberry-coloured Dictator.’ The prisoner’s infractions of the rules continued. Wilde gave an example to André Gide later. After he had been at Reading for six weeks, as he and the other prisoners were walking silently in single file during the exercise hour, he heard someone murmur, ‘Oscar Wilde, I pity you because you must be suffering more than we are.’ Wilde almost fainted at the human sound. Without turning, he said, ‘No, my friend, we are all suffering equally.’ That day, he told Gide, ‘I no longer wished to kill myself.’31 Though they were absolutely forbidden to talk, Wilde managed on subsequent days to find out the man’s name and what he did. He had not yet learned, however, to talk without moving his lips, and their conversation was observed. One evening a warder called out, ‘C.3.3 and C.4.8, step out of line! You’re going to be brought up before the warden.’
The question Isaacson had to resolve was which of the two had spoken first, since the one who started th
e conversation would receive greater punishment. He called in C.4.8, and the man confessed to having spoken first. But when Wilde came in, out of pity for the other man, he made the same confession. Isaacson went redder than usual: ‘But he says he started it! I can’t understand.… All right, if that’s how things stand, I’m going to give both of you two weeks.’ Wilde complained to Gide not that Isaacson was cruel, but that he had no imagination, as once he would have said that Isaacson was absurd. To someone else, he said that Isaacson could not eat his breakfast until he had punished someone.32
The smallest thing would be reported to the warden, or governor. One day the prison chaplain, the Reverend M. T. Friend, was visiting Wilde, and the prisoner spoke sorrowfully of the ‘thickly-muffled glass’ in the cell window which allowed him no view of the sky. The chaplain, to comfort him, said ‘Oh my friend, let me entreat you to desist from such thoughts and not let your mind dwell on the clouds, but on Him who is above the clouds, Him who—’ ‘Get out, you damned fool!’ Wilde shouted, and pushed him towards the door.33 This too reached the governor’s ears. Yet some of the men assigned to watch the prisoners were less cruel. Since Wilde, like Wainewright (who refused to sweep his cell), was most inefficient at cleaning his cell, one of them was sweeping it when a spider darted across the floor. The warder stepped on it, only to see Wilde gazing at him with horror. ‘It brings bad luck to kill a spider,’ he said. ‘I shall hear worse news than any I have yet heard.’ He said later that he had heard the cry of the Banshee, and that he had had a vision of his mother. She was dressed for out-of-doors, and he asked her to take off her hat and cloak and sit down. She shook her head sadly and vanished.34 The next day, 19 February 1896, he was summoned to talk to his wife in a private room. Constance herself had not been well but, notified by Willie of Lady Wilde’s death, she had traveled from Italy to tell her husband the news, which she knew would be excruciatingly painful to him. ‘I knew it already,’ he said, and told her of his vision.
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