Wilde felt a new burst of misery and remorse. His mother, he boasted to Douglas in De Profundis, ranked intellectually with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and historically with Mme Roland. Her last year of life had been wracked by illness and by her sorrow for ‘dear Oscar.’ She had never left her room and had seen almost no one. A notebook she kept has a bitter entry: ‘Life is agony and hope, illusion and despair all commingled, but despair outlasts all.’35 Willie Wilde said that Oscar had helped her even from prison, presumably with money. He had good reason to know, for there is evidence that he obliged her to give the money to him. That Oscar knew of this is suggested by a letter from Willie Wilde to More Adey on 4 February, the day of Lady Wilde’s burial, in 1896: ‘For many reasons he wd not wish to see me.’36 On her deathbed she had asked if Oscar might not be brought to see her, but on being told this was impossible, she said, ‘May the prison help him!,’ and turned to the wall. Her death occurred on 3 February 1896. She left a private letter requesting that no one come to the funeral, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. (She had always wished to be thrown in the sea or buried near a rock on some wild coast, lest she lie next to some common tradesman.) Lily Wilde, Willie’s wife, sadly sent all Oscar’s things to More Adey, because, as she acknowledged, ‘I feel sure now his mother is dead he will not wish to hold any further communication with us.’37
The interview between husband and wife on 19 February offered nevertheless some consolation. She kissed him and comforted him. Wilde was touched at her taking so much trouble to tell him the grim news, and he wrote that she had been ‘gentle and good to me here, when she came to see me.’ They talked of their children, and he urged Constance not to spoil Cyril as Lady Queensberry had spoiled Alfred Douglas. ‘I told her,’ he wrote, ‘that she should bring him up so that if he shed innocent blood he would come and tell her, that she might cleanse his hands for him first, and then teach him how by penance or expiation to cleanse his soul afterwards.’38 They agreed that he should have an income of £200 a year after his release, and a third of his life interest in her marriage settlement if he survived her. He also suggested that if the responsibility of looking after the children should prove too heavy for her, she should appoint a guardian for them. Later he learned with satisfaction that her cousin Adrian Hope had been so designated.
Constance, shaken by the interview, wrote to her brother, ‘They say he is quite well, but he is an absolute wreck compared with what he was.’39 During her brief stay in London she paid a visit to Edward Burne-Jones and his wife. Burne-Jones had taken at first a severe view of Wilde’s offenses, but her visit crystallized his growing sympathy. As he noted in his diary for 22 February 1896,
When there was announced a lady by the name of Constance Holland, and lo! it was poor desolate heartbroken Constance Wilde. I was glad to see the poor waif, and so was Georgie [Georgiana, Lady Burne-Jones]. And she had a warm welcome—she had come across from near Bordighera to tell her husband of his mother’s death—which had not been told him—the poor lady had died three weeks ago—and it took ten days to get leave to see him, and four days to come—but she saw him and told him of it. She says he was changed beyond recognition and they give him work to do in the garden and the work he likes best is to cover books with brown paper—for at least it is books to hold in his hand: but presently the keeper made a sign with his finger, and like a dog he obeyed, and left the room.
Constance told the Burne-Joneses that Vyvyan had already forgotten his father, but that Cyril continued to ask about him, and had learned from a newspaper that his father was in prison, ‘he thinks for debt.’ Vyvyan Holland remembered that Cyril knew more about the cause of imprisonment than his mother suspected.40
The small band of Wilde’s constant friends continued to visit him. In February 1896, More Adey accompanied the faithful Sherard, but at the next three-monthly visit, in May, Sherard came with a welcome old friend, Robert Ross. Ross had apparently darted back to London for the bankruptcy hearings in November 1895, and then returned to the Continent. Since he had not seen Wilde for six months, the report he made of his interview, based on notes penciled immediately after it, provides a summary of the effect of a year’s imprisonment. He found Wilde to be much thinner, emaciated even, an effect made more apparent by the shaving off of his beard. His face, from working in the garden in the sun, had turned a dull brick color. His once-thick hair was thinner, streaked with white and gray, and showed a bald patch on the crown. ‘His eyes were terribly vacant,’ said Ross, and ‘he cried the whole time.’41
Wilde said that the doctor was ‘very unkind to him.’ He was constantly suspected of malingering. Nonetheless, he had spent only two days in the infirmary at Reading, as compared with two months at Wandsworth. Though he did not mention the fact to Ross, he was still suffering from the fall he had taken in the chapel at Wandsworth. During the winter his ear ached and often bled a little,42 and his hearing was further impaired. He told Ross of other difficulties, anemia and gout. In the winter, reading by gas jets, he had had trouble with his eyes, but they were a little less painful now. It was easier to sleep at Reading than it had been at Wandsworth or Pentonville. But his main fear was of going mad, and he asked Ross whether his brain seemed all right to him.
Of his life in prison Wilde could not bring himself to speak, and Ross thought his relative silence not only uncharacteristic but ominous. He did say that he was forbidden to write anything except a quota of letters, but was allowed to read; he had read every book in the prison library several times. Ross asked him what books he would like, if permission could be secured for them, and Wilde asked for Chaucer; a prose translation of Dante; Pater’s new book, of which Ross had spoken (Gaston de Latour); and some large volume of Elizabethan dramatists. He was pleased to have messages from French and English friends, commented on them briefly, and asked that his thanks be conveyed. On leaving, Ross and Sherard encountered the forbidding Colonel Isaacson, and Ross steeled himself to speak to him about Wilde. At first Isaacson was haughty and impatient, but softened when Ross said Wilde’s health was better at Reading than at Wandsworth. To Ross’s vivid concern, Isaacson replied that he knew Wilde felt imprisonment more than other people, but thought that he was doing as well as could be expected. If he felt ill, he could see the doctor every day if he liked. The Home Office had sent books for him. His friends would be notified of any serious change in his condition. Ross felt that Wilde was not being singled out for maltreatment.
The most important information that Ross imparted to Wilde had to do with something outside the prison. This was that a book of poems by Alfred Douglas was about to appear in English under the imprint of the Mercure de France, with accompanying prose translations by Eugène Tardieu, the editor of L’Echo de Paris. The book was to be dedicated to Wilde. Wilde replied curtly, ‘I would rather not hear about that just now.’43 The next day (23 or 30 May 1896) he wrote to Ross a firm answer, in which he referred to Bosie distantly as ‘Douglas’:
You said that Douglas was going to dedicate a volume of poems to me. Will you write at once to him and say he must not do anything of the kind. I could not accept or allow such a dedication. The proposal is revolting and grotesque. Also, he has unfortunately in his possession a number of letters of mine. I wish him to at once hand all these without exception over to you; I will ask you to seal them up. In case I die here you will destroy them. In case I survive I will destroy them myself. They must not be in existence. The thought that they are in his hands is horrible to me, and though my unfortunate children will never of course bear my name, still they know whose sons they are and I must try and shield them from the possibility of any further revolting disclosure or scandal.
Also, Douglas has some things I gave him: books and jewellery. I wish these to be also handed over to you—for me. Some of the jewellery I know has passed out of his possession under circumstances unnecessary to detail, but he has still some, such as the gold cigarette-case, pearl chain and enamelled locket I gave him last
Christmas [1894]. I wish to be certain that he has in his possession nothing that I ever gave him. All these are to be sealed up and left with you. The idea that he is wearing or in possession of anything I gave him is peculiarly repugnant to me. I cannot of course get rid of the revolting memories of the two years I was unlucky enough to have him with me, or of the mode by which he thrust me into the abyss of ruin and disgrace to gratify his hatred of his father and other ignoble passions. But I will not have him in possession of my letters or gifts. Even if I get out of this loathsome place I know that there is nothing before me but a life of a pariah—of disgrace and penury and contempt—but at least I will have nothing to do with him nor allow him to come near me.…
In writing to Douglas you had better quote my letter fully and frankly, so that he should have no loophole of escape. Indeed he cannot possibly refuse. He has ruined my life—that should content him.
Douglas was staggered when Ross transmitted Wilde’s message: he wrote on 4 June,
My dear Bobbie—I have just got the terrible letter from Oscar. It has deprived me of all power of thought and expression. There is no need for me to tell you how terrible it is, for you must guess it. Tell him that my book, which was to have appeared in three or four days, and is practically ready, I will withdraw. I could not publish it if it were not dedicated to him. The idea that he will not have it dedicated to him stabs the book and kills it.… With regard to the letters, I cannot give them up to anyone. Possession of these letters and the recollections they may give me, even if they can give me no hope, will perhaps prevent me from putting an end to a life which has now no raison d’être. If Oscar asks me to kill myself I will do so, and he shall have back the letters when I am dead.… Morning and evening I have kissed them and prayed over them.
Ross must have replied that Wilde felt Douglas had sponged on him for years, and Douglas answered on 15 July, ‘I had nothing to contribute and Oscar contributed everything. What difference does it make? Everything that I had and was going to have in the future was and always will be his.’44
The refusal was embarrassing for another reason. Douglas, after first giving up his article in the Mercure de France, had written a second one, also without consulting anybody. It was entitled ‘Introduction to my Poems, with some remarks on the Oscar Wilde case,’ and had just been published in La Revue blanche on 1 June 1896. This time he omitted Wilde’s letters, but the tenor was the same as in the earlier article: ‘Today I am proud that I have been loved by a great poet who perhaps esteemed me because he recognized that, besides a beautiful body, I possessed a beautiful soul.’ ‘Oscar Wilde is now suffering for being a uranian, a Greek, a sexual man.… I have already said that such men are the salt of the earth.’ Twenty-five percent of all great men are sodomites, he said. As for his father, Queensberry, he was as interesting as Nero or Tiberius or Jack the Ripper or Gilles de Retz. More directly than before, Douglas accused Rosebery, whose name had appeared somewhat equivocally in one of Queensberry’s letters, of threatening Asquith with the loss of the next general election if Wilde was allowed to go free. The article concluded weakly with a swipe at André Raffalovich, who had followed Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895 edition) in exploiting the Wilde case, by rushing into print first with a pamphlet and then with a book, Uranisme et unisexualité. There he had condemned not only Wilde, for rampant and catastrophic egoism, but Douglas too, for being ‘un jeune homme pâle et artificiel.’45 Douglas seemed to feel he was making a great riposte by proclaiming that Raffalovich was himself a sodomite, and that the rancor of the attack stemmed from Wilde’s open contempt for its author. Douglas’s article was incoherent enough to register his extreme agitation over the loss of Wilde’s favor. He had to defend it the next month, because some French journalists demanded that he say exactly what kind of love he and Wilde had enjoyed, and charged him with swelling a scandal just to advertise his poems. Henry Bauer wrote that Douglas, having made life impossible for Wilde in England, was now making it impossible for him to live in France on his release. ‘My friend’s love for me was Platonic, that is to say, pure,’ Douglas declared. As for advertising his book, he had by now learned of Wilde’s refusal to allow the dedication, and, without mentioning that, could say tersely, ‘My poems will not appear.’ Like other decisions of Douglas, this one was susceptible to reconsideration, but Wilde’s firm letter had at least the effect of slightly deferring publication. The volume appeared in 1896, without dedication.‖
If Douglas was agitated, so was Wilde. He began in June to write his most anguished plea for release: ‘The Petition of the above-named prisoner humbly sheweth that he does not desire to attempt to palliate in any way the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty.’ He acknowledged that he had been suffering from sexual madness, but hoped that this might be considered a disease for cure rather than a crime for punishment. He called attention to Nordau’s analysis of his behavior in this light in Degeneration. It was insanity, he said, of which he was particularly terrified; the insufficiency of books, the closing-off of the world of ideas in ‘this tomb for those who are not yet dead,’ had encouraged the most morbid and polluted thoughts. His mind could not bear any more, and the purpose of prison is not to destroy the reason. ‘Though it may not seek to make men better, yet it does not desire to drive them mad.’ As for his body, his abscessed ear had never been properly treated and his eyesight had become blurred from the gas jets, so that blindness and deafness were probably to be added to the certainty of insanity.
There are other apprehensions of danger that the limitation of space does not allow the petitioner to enter on: his chief danger is that of madness, his chief terror that of madness, and his prayer that his long imprisonment may be considered with its attendant ruin a sufficient punishment, that the imprisonment may be ended now, and not uselessly or vindictively prolonged till insanity has claimed soul as well as body as its prey, and brought it to the same degradation and the same shame.
OSCAR WILDE
Colonel Isaacson was duty-bound to transmit this letter, surely one of the most clear-headed predictions of impending insanity that could be written, but he attached a report by the prison surgeon, Mr O. C. Maurice, attesting that Wilde was in good health.47
An Execution
In Memoriam
C.T.W.
Five days after Wilde submitted this petition, an event occurred which focused his sufferings vicariously. A man of thirty, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, was hanged in Reading prison. He was a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. The crime for which he had been promptly condemned to execution was the murder of his twenty-three-year-old wife, Laura Ellen Wooldridge, on 29 March. She had roused his jealousy; he had deliberately waited for her on the road near her house, between Windsor and the village of Clewer, and slit her throat three times over with a razor borrowed from a soldier friend for the purpose. Pleas in his behalf for a respite had been rejected by the Home Secretary because of the obvious premeditation of the crime. The scaffold at Reading had been used only once since its installation for a double execution eighteen years before. Wilde saw the hangman crossing the yard with gardener’s gloves and a little bag. At eight o’clock on the morning of 7 July, the hangman Billington fastened Wooldridge’s feet, adjusted the cap, and drew the bolt. Wooldridge died bravely, without a struggle or a cry.
The execution of a fellow prisoner brought together many of Wilde’s thoughts. He could remember what he had told Constance of the importance of helping their sons, if they shed human blood, to penance and expiation. But he had also written long before in ‘Humanitad’ that in killing Christ men killed themselves:
And we were vain and ignorant nor knew
That when we stabbed thy heart it was our own real hearts we slew.
Wooldridge’s crime was appalling, but so was his execution, and, like Wilde’s punishment, inhuman for a crime that was human. But he thought also of something else: in August of 1895 he had rejected Douglas’s article celebrating their love, and
then in May of 1896 he refused to accept Douglas’s dedication of his poems, an insult he knew would wound to the marrow. The gesture grew out of the feeling that Douglas had destroyed his life, a feeling which—as he said in a letter—had first crystallized in his mind as he stood up in court to hear his sentence. The moral pressed upon him, though he would not write it down at once: Wooldridge as a real image, and Douglas and himself in parable, had all conformed to an unwritten law:
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