Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  For each man kills the thing he loves.

  There would come a time later when Douglas would ask Wilde what he meant by this line, and Wilde would reply, ‘You ought to know.’48

  * He dedicated ‘The Young King’ to her.

  † On 21 October 1895, Ross wrote to Oscar Browning asking him to contribute to a sum being collected to annul the bankruptcy proceedings. If the sum collected should prove insufficient, the money was to be returned to the donors. But on 12 November he wrote that it had been decided to let the bankruptcy take effect, because new creditors had appeared and the amount collected was not enough. He went on:

  After the proceedings by special privilege the trustee [Arthur Clifton] and myself were allowed to see him in a private room for half an hour each. You may easily imagine how very painful this was for both of us. I have not seen him since the day he was arrested, as you know I was with him at the time. Mentally his condition is much better than I had dared to hope though his mind is considerably impaired. Physically he was much worse than anyone had led me to believe. Indeed I really should not have known him at all. This I know is an ordinary figure of speech, but it exactly described what I experienced. His clothes hung about him in loose folds and his hands are like those of a skeleton. The colour of his face is completely changed, but this cannot be altogether attributed to his slight beard. The latter only hides the appalling sunken cheeks. A friend who was in court would not believe it was Oscar when he first came in. I cannot understand how any human nation, the English being Protestant of course are not Christians, can keep him in this condition. He is still in the infirmary, but told me he wanted to leave as he hoped to die very soon. Indeed he only spoke calmly about death, every other subject caused him to break down.23

  ‡ ‘Je veux bien signer la pétition pour Oscar Wilde, à la condition qu’il prenne l’engagement d’honneur … de ne jamais plus ećrire.’

  § The chaplain, W. D. Morrison, wrote:

  When he first came down here from Pentonville he was in an excited flurried condition, and seemed as if he wished to face his punishment without flinching. But all this has passed away. As soon as the excitement aroused by the trial subsided and he had to encounter the daily routine of prison life his fortitude began to give way and rapidly collapsed altogether. He is now quite crushed and broken. This is unfortunate, as a prisoner who breaks down in one direction generally breaks down in several, and I fear from what I hear and see that perverse sexual practices are again getting the mastery over him. This is a common occurrence among prisoners of his class and is of course favoured by constant cellular isolation. The odour of his cell is now so bad that the officer in charge of him has to use carbolic acid in it every day.… I need hardly tell you that he is a man of decidedly morbid disposition.… In fact some of our most experienced officers openly say that they dont think he will be able to go through the two years.… It seems to me that it would be prudent in case of trouble to have Wilde examined by a first class medical expert.…27

  ‖ Mallarmé, perhaps moved by the situation, thanked Douglas for a copy by saying, ‘Une des rares fois que je me suis félicité de connaître l’anglais, c’est le jour où m’arrivèrent vos poèmes.’46

  CHAPTER XX

  Escape from Reading

  I … wish we could talk over the many prisons of life—prisons of stone, prisons of passion, prisons of intellect, prisons of morality and the rest—all limitations, external or internal, all prisons, really. All life is a limitation.

  Isaacson to Nelson

  That love has a murderous element was a home truth without comfort for the victim of society’s loveless sequestration. Wilde compared himself again with Lucien de Rubempré and Julien Sorel, and said, ‘Lucien hanged himself, Julien was executed, and I died in prison.’1 As long as Colonel Isaacson had authority for Reading prison, Wilde was caught up in a cycle of substantial punishments for small offenses, such as not sweeping his cell quite clean, or uttering a word or two to another prisoner. In Isaacson the now antiquated prison ‘system’ had an efficient instrument: he believed in the Prison Act of 1865, he had risen to the top echelon of wardens within its terms, and he had no intention of relaxing discipline.

  People not familiar with prisons had no idea what their procedures were. That is perhaps the only excuse for Henry James, who wrote to Paul Bourget that Wilde’s sentence to hard labor was too severe, that isolation would have been more just.2 Wilde had no mercy from him. What made James’s finely shaded discrimination particularly repulsive was that Wilde had experienced both hard labor and isolation. Fortunately, Wilde did not have to rely upon the punitive theories of other novelists. As a veteran of four prisons (counting Newgate), he had developed some wariness, and the number of people of consequence concerned about him made at least a few of the warders respect him. Even in prison his personality was overwhelming. But there was also a change in attitude towards prisons on the part of the public which had some effect upon administration.

  During the nineties, with Cesare Lombroso and others considering problems of the criminal, prison reform became a center of attention. The simple-minded theory behind the 1865 act, that ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed’ would deter criminals and make them law-abiding, had lost its persuasiveness. Wilde’s misfortune was to serve his sentence just before prison conditions were officially changed by the 1898 Prison Act. Already in 1895, however, when he began his term, a departmental committee under the chairmanship of H. J. Gladstone declared two years’ hard labor to be an excessively severe sentence, and the 1898 law specifically abolished it. Gladstone’s report said that prisoners should no longer be treated ‘as a hopeless and worthless element of the community.’ This shift in opinion had its effect, even in Reading.

  The case of Wilde was not easily forgotten in the wave of reform. His old sponsor, Haldane, continued to urge the Home Office to provide him with more books and with writing materials, but the Home Office did not want to be accused of preferential treatment. Still, there was a new chairman of the Prison Commission since 1895, Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, who had every intention of implementing the Gladstone proposals. He could not abolish the crank and the treadmill on his own, or put an end to the prohibition of speech among prisoners, but his influence counted in the parliamentary debates that brought about these changes in 1898. Just what could be done at once was not too certain. In the summer of 1896 Wilde’s friends were alarmed for his health, and they decided to ask for mitigation of his sentence on medical grounds. Frank Harris had been out of the country for some months, but it was thought that he could present the Wilde point of view most forcefully to the authorities. Harris accordingly asked for an interview with Ruggles-Brise in June, and urged upon him that Wilde was not likely to survive being in prison for two years. Ruggles-Brise asked Harris to visit Wilde and get particulars of his health, and on 13 June sent an order to Colonel Isaacson that Harris be granted an interview with Wilde out of the warder’s earshot. At the same time he asked for a confidential report about Wilde’s mental condition.

  Isaacson responded to this challenge, and promptly sent the prison doctor’s certification that Wilde was in good health. The two officials received Harris unpleasantly on 13 or 14 June 1896; Isaacson told Harris he wished to knock the nonsense out of Wilde. The interview with Wilde took place in a bare room with two chairs and a table. Wilde struck Harris as looking much older, though on the other hand much thinner, a favorable sign to a lean man like Harris. After a warm greeting, Harris asked Wilde to specify those aspects of prison life which might have a bearing on the reduction of his sentence. Wilde replied, according to Harris, ‘The list of my grievances would be without end. The worst of it is I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me.’ His main fear was insanity: ‘If you resist, they drive you crazy,’ he said, in reference to the dark cell where he had probably more than once been placed and given bread and water. Physically, he spo
ke of his chronic ear pain since the fall at Wandsworth. Why did he not ask the doctor for help? asked Harris. No, he knew prison ways too well for that: no prisoner would summon the doctor or warder for a mere earache. But the interview concluded by his begging Harris not to divulge his complaints, since he would be punished for having made them.3

  While Harris conveyed some of this to Ruggles-Brise, Wilde drew up and sent his own petition to the Home Office; Isaacson inevitably accompanied it with the prison doctor’s report that Wilde’s fears of insanity and physical complaints were groundless. But between them Harris and Wilde had stirred up the authorities. The Home Office dispatched a visiting committee of five men—Cobham, Thursby, Palmer, Hunter, and Hay—to Reading. It may have been on this occasion that Wilde was spied upon in the infirmary; as usual when he had a chance to talk, he enthralled the other patients and gave no sign of being unwell. On 10 July the committee reported that Wilde was in no danger of insanity, and that he had put on some of his lost weight. But Ruggles-Brise pursued the matter further; he had Dr Nicholson, who had examined Wilde at Wandsworth, make an independent examination, and Nicholson’s report showed sufficient concern to justify the Home Office, on 25 July, in ordering more books and, at last, a sufficiency of writing materials, for Wilde. More to the point, Colonel Isaacson was transferred to Lewes Prison, and his successor, Major J. O. Nelson, proved to be a warden of a different stamp. One of Nelson’s first acts was to go up to Wilde and say, ‘The Home Office has allowed you some books. Perhaps you would like to read this one; I have just been reading it myself.’ Wilde melted into tears. He was afterwards to praise Nelson as ‘the most Christlike man I ever met.’4

  Under Nelson’s authority Wilde could learn to distinguish Reading from the Inferno. His imagination at last escaped beyond the walls. He cannot have had great hopes for remission of sentence—the nature of his offense, and the importance of the offender, precluded that—but he began to dream of a day when his name would no longer be the number of a cell. Three lists of his requested books have survived, and they show that he began to turn his mind from the lives of the saints and to accept the visible universe once more. A sense of the future became apparent as he studied Italian systematically, and not only for the purpose of reading Dante; also German, which he had known in boyhood but had largely forgotten, so that on his release from Reading it was reported that he had learned two languages in prison. Wilde probably foresaw that they would be of the greatest use to him on the Continent.

  The first list was submitted quickly to Major Nelson, who passed it on to the Home Office on 28 July after marking the titles he considered inappropriate for the prison library. Wilde was still eager to give his reading a certain solemnity.* The amended list was approved by the Home Office, with the proviso that the total net cost not exceed £10, which was the prison’s allotment for the year. A second list of books (not in Wilde’s hand) was submitted by Nelson on 3 December 1896 and approved on 10 December by the Home Office after More Adey had assumed responsibility for providing the books. This group is entirely secular.†

  A third list in More Adey’s hand, dated March 1897, has the last title and final note in Wilde’s hand.‡

  By 1897 Wilde was reading new books rather than classical ones, bringing himself up to date. He regretted, since the later books were bought at the expense of his friends, that all were doomed to ‘perpetual imprisonment.’ Such was the Home Office ruling. They have since escaped, no one knows where. (One, a book by Pater, is in a private collection.5)

  Important as the books were, the writing materials were more important still. Under Colonel Isaacson, Wilde had been allowed pen and ink only for the purpose of writing letters to solicitors or to the Home Office, or, in very limited quantities, to friends. What he wrote was then collected and inspected, and the writing materials removed. Because of Dr Nicholson’s representations, Wilde was allowed pen and ink all the time under Major Nelson. What he wrote was still to be turned over each night to the warden, however, and not returned to the prisoner next day. At first he was given separate sheets to write on, then a manuscript book. Haldane had hoped he would write something about his imprisonment, but the Home Office obviously did not intend to allow a public exposure of the prison system to come out of Reading. Nor was it a situation congenial for writing a purely imaginative work, even if Wilde had had the stomach for it, since he could scarcely keep all the details of an entire play in mind.

  Letter Writing

  It is the most important letter of my life.…

  Wilde therefore devised a stratagem in which Major Nelson was to indulge him. He would write a letter to Alfred Douglas, as he was allowed to do by rule, but such a letter as would also offer an autobiographical account of his last five years. It would follow, like a parable, his progress from pleasure to pain and then, in the last months, to a change of heart and mastery of pain. Remorse, purgation, and hope would all play their parts, the old life and the Vita nuova. Major Nelson recognized that his prisoner might write something comparable to Pilgrim’s Progress; he appears to have encouraged him, and also to have relaxed the rules by allowing Wilde when necessary to see parts he had completed on earlier days. Because of this concession, the letter is revised almost throughout, and some pages appear to have been totally rewritten and substituted for an earlier version.6

  It took Wilde the better part of three months, from January to March 1897, to write the letter. He suggested it be entitled In Carcere et Vinculis, but Ross took another suggestion and entitled it instead De Profundis.7 The fact that, when it was published posthumously, its true nature as a letter to Douglas was at first concealed by Ross, out of concern for Douglas’s feelings, led to a misunderstanding of Wilde’s intentions in it. De Profundis had its origin as an answer to Douglas’s silence, and draws its force from its author’s sense of being neglected. After Wilde had refused the dedication of his poems, Bosie made no further effort to communicate with him directly. Instead he asked More Adey and Robert Ross, with whom he kept closely in touch by letter, to intercede for him with Wilde. Adey responded in mid-September 1896 that Wilde was obdurate, and insisted on the return of his mementoes. This time it was Douglas’s turn, on 20 September, to be firm and even minatory:

  My dear More

  Thanks for your letter. I am sorry to hear that Oscar continues to be so unreasonable and so ungrateful. But I have determined to regard anything he says now as non-existent. If he continues in the same strain after leaving prison it will be another matter, and it will perhaps become necessary for me to make my side of the question and my indignation heard more forcibly from my own lips in default of those of my friends. In the meantime I say nothing except that I utterly decline to entertain for a moment any proposition relating to the giving up to him of anything which belongs to me, and I prefer that you should tell him so quite frankly if you see him. Of my undying (I use the word in its real sense not that in which he so often used it to me) love and devotion to him he may rest assured whether he continues to deserve it or not, but it might almost be worth while to remind him that if he desires any special favour from me the best way to obtain it is not by insult and undeserved abuse of one who had done so much and suffered so much for his sake.

  Give my love to Bobbie. Yours ever

  BOSIE

  The contents of Douglas’s letter were quickly transmitted to Wilde, who answered Adey on 25 September: ‘From your silence I see he still refuses to return my presents and letters … It is horrible he should still have the power to wound me and find some curious joy in doing so … He is too evil.’ With the same rapidity, Adey wrote to Douglas, who replied on 27 September, ‘When he comes out of prison, if he chooses to say he does not want my friendship, and that he wants his letters back, he can do so with his own mouth.’8

  Though Douglas was later to impute to Robert Ross the most treacherous betrayal of his interests during Wilde’s imprisonment, the correspondence entirely exonerates Ross. He went between the lion and hi
s wrath by warning Wilde in November 1896 that ‘the deep bitterness of the feelings’ he had expressed about Douglas might estrange the sympathies of others from him. Wilde devoted a whole letter in November to answering this hint. ‘Do not think that I would blame him for my vices,’ he said to Ross. ‘He had as little to do with them as I had with his. Nature was in this matter a stepmother to each of us. I blame him for not appreciating the man he ruined.’ He told Ross not to ‘let Alfred Douglas suppose that I am crediting him with unworthy motives. He really had no motives in his life at all.… He had passions merely.’ Yet he felt it was incredible that Douglas should feel and express no remorse, and his letter—which foreshadows De Profundis—ended weakly: ‘So in your letter tell me how he lives, what his occupations are, his mode of life.’9 Ross let Douglas know how ineffectual his intercession on the latter’s behalf had been, but Douglas replied sharply:

  You still seem to cling to the idea that Oscar does not want to see me. The wish is father to the thought. You probably overlook the fact that I am passionately devoted to him, and that my longing to see him simply eats at my heart day and night.… You must, (in the course of your numerous adventures,) have had occasions when forcibly separated from somebody you were in love with by the intervention of kindly friends and relations, and I suppose you suffered then. That is my case, only multiplied by ten, in view of all the tragic circumstances. Then you make no allowance for jealousy, the most terrible of all sufferings. You have seen Oscar yourself, and can see him again as often as you like, and that is all you care.