Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  After his treason, Judas was on his way to hang himself when some disciples came upon him, and, perceiving his black look and anguish, asked the cause. Judas answered them: ‘What dreadful people these priests are! They offered me ten pieces of silver to deliver up Christ.’

  ‘And what did you do, Judas?’

  ‘Of course I refused. But these priests are terrible. Then they offered me twenty pieces of silver.’

  ‘And what did you do, Judas?’

  ‘Of course I refused. But these priests are terrible, terrible. They then offered me thirty talents, and of course I accepted.’

  ‘Now we understand why you are about to hang yourself, for what you have done deserves worse than death.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not for that, but the thirty pieces of silver they gave me were counterfeit!’22

  Wilde’s stories of this period grandly paralleled his conviction that he was being betrayed in money matters by Adey and Ross, by Ernest Leverson, and others, although they all seem to have behaved irreproachably. He continued his higher criticism of the Bible by reworking the story of Ahab and Jezebel, with the idea that it might be made into a play like Salome. In this version, Jezebel has Naboth (who has refused to sell his vineyard) killed, not as in the Old Testament, by suborning witnesses against him, but by pretending he has made sexual overtures. After he is killed, she gloats over his vineyard. Wilde had learned about mercilessness.

  As if to prove an old contention of his, that ‘a truth in art is that whose contrary is also true,’ he returned after this to his more sympathetic scenario about a woman, devised in 1894. He evidently conceived of returning to the stage with two plays, the one Biblical, the other contemporary. In the latter, the scene is a large house belonging to Mr and Mrs Daventry. As the revised version went, Mrs Daventry idolizes her husband, but it becomes clear to everyone but her, during a party, that Daventry is having an affair with the worthless wife of another man. After the guests leave, Mrs Daventry falls asleep on a couch in the darkened drawing room, with only her blond hair visible in the firelight. Daventry and his mistress enter, see no one, and embrace. Mrs Daventry wakes and makes an involuntary movement; the other woman is terrified, but Daventry assures her that it is only the Pekinese. There is a sudden knock on the door: the mistress’s jealous husband has followed her. The lovers are nonplussed, with nowhere to hide, but Mrs Daventry gets up, goes to the door, and admits the husband, saying, ‘We have been talking by the fire together.’ Daventry, dazzled and relieved by his wife’s sacrificial finesse, gives up his mistress.

  It was the kind of story Wilde loved to tell about women. He used to recall how his mother behaved when his father was accused of seducing a patient, and also how she admitted a veiled woman to the sickroom when he was dying. But most of all, the stories reflected Wilde’s awareness of his wife’s kindness in putting up with his thralldom to Douglas. That was why he called the play Constance.

  Prospects

  I hope abroad to talk about lovely things.

  Although composing unwritten works could assure him that his mind was unimpaired, Wilde had not come to any conclusions about his future life. When More Adey went to see him on 28 January 1897, Wilde said that as soon as he was released he would go abroad. He hoped to wake up ‘the next morning in a little appartement in a French or Belgian town,’ with some books about him, ‘of course Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine among them,’ and some papers and pens, so that he might begin to write again at once. Adey suggested a seaside place in Brittany for the first few weeks. This Wilde declined. ‘I shall have to face the world sometime and I intend to do it immediately,’ he said. Adey reported him to be in excellent spirits. On 27 February, Adey, Ross, and Leverson visited him, and again his health appeared improved, partly because they were giving him meat once a day and he had been sleeping better. It was probably on this occasion that the governor said to Ross, ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.’23

  During April and May he adopted now one plan and now another. One was to settle in Brussels. On 7 April, Frank Harris visited him in prison and proposed that they drive through the Pyrenees to Spain. Harris was feeling affluent, having made thousands of pounds in South Africa, and promised to give Wilde £500 on the day of his release. But the promise faded in the following months, because Harris had unexpectedly heavy expenses, and because Wilde began to feel that a trip with Harris would be too exhausting in his present state. He withdrew from it, much to Harris’s disappointment. The next plan was to go somewhere on the French coast: Boulogne was considered, but Douglas was there, so Le Havre was substituted, though in the end it was rejected too. Wilde also had another plan, put into his mind by Ross and Adey, both Catholics. This was to go first to a monastery, and then to Venice.

  Wherever he was to go, he must be properly equipped. One of his requests in April was for his friends to provide him with books, some that they had written and others—by Flaubert and other favorites—which he did not feel he could do without. While he was still considering Harris’s journey, he asked for some Spanish-language books and plays. Clothing was another problem: what had happened to his fur coat, which he had worn all over America? It had been left with Willie, unfortunately, and pawned along with two rugs, two portmanteaus, and a hatbox. He had himself measured for new clothes, and arranged with Ross to obtain an ulster and a blue serge suit from a tailor named Dore. Frank Harris offered other clothes. Wilde asked Adey to buy a brown hat from Heath, at Albert Gate, eighteen collars, two dozen white handkerchiefs and one dozen with colored borders, some dark-blue neckties with white spots and other designs, eight pairs of socks (‘coloured summer things’), size 8, some gloves (size 8!—‘as my hand is so broad’). From Pritchard, St James’s, could be bought some good French soap such as Houbigant, kept for him there in the past. He must have scent, preferably Canterbury Wood Violet, and a hair tonic called Koko Marikopas, apparently intended to tint his graying hair a little. ‘I want, for psychological reasons, to feel entirely physically cleansed of the stain and soil of prison life.’24

  On 22 April, Wilde petitioned the Home Secretary to allow him to leave prison on 15 May instead of 20 May, when his term came to an end. He hoped thereby to avoid the press, including the American newspaper which had offered him £1000 for his reminiscences of prison life. On 7 May this, like all other such requests, was refused. Max Beerbohm proposed a decoy brougham which should be driven out of the prison yard with blinds drawn down on each side to lure the journalists away.25

  There were other last-minute upheavals. Wilde grew increasingly incensed at Ross and Adey over the matter of his life interest, and began to think that Reggie Turner would be a more appropriate person to see on his release. But Turner said everything had been arranged with Adey and the Reverend Stewart Headlam, the latter as irreproachable at the end of Wilde’s prison sentence as he had been before it began. Where to get money for the next months? Wilde urged that Lord Douglas of Hawick be approached and reminded of his earlier promises, but nothing came of this idea. The thousand pounds Adela Schuster had given Wilde two years before had been left with Ernest Leverson, but this money had almost all been spent in Wilde’s interest, if not always with his consent. Yet, amid much despair over destitution, Wilde experienced kindness from a number of people. Adey and Ross never ceased their efforts in his behalf. Turner gave him traveling bags initialed ‘S.M.,’ for Sebastian Melmoth, for Wilde had decided at Ross’s suggestion, to adopt the name of his favorite martyr and of his great-uncle’s solitary wanderer. Constance sent him money to pay for food and traveling expenses. Ricketts gave him £100. It had been settled that the best place to go for the moment was Dieppe, even though it was full of English people who would recognize him.

  His last days in prison were clouded by two incidents. He had been aware for three months of a certain halfwitted inmate, A.2.11, a soldier. It was clear to the other prisoners that he was
demented, but the doctors regarded him as a malingerer, and some visiting justices sentenced him to twenty-four lashes. On Saturday, 15 May, Wilde heard from the basement prison ‘revolting shrieks, or rather howls’ and ‘I knew that some wretched man was being flogged.’ It was the soldier, whose name—as Martin informed him—was Prince. When Prince appeared at exercise the next day, he was in still more wretched condition; the following day he did not appear; and when he did show himself, on Wilde’s last day in Reading, 18 May, he looked close to insanity.

  The other incident was the imprisonment of three children convicted of snaring some rabbits and unable to pay their fine. Wilde saw them as they were waiting to be assigned to cells. He knew only too well the terror they were feeling, and the hunger they would feel. He wrote to Martin on 17 May with something like desperation: ‘Please find out for me the name of A.2.11. Also: the names of the children who are in for the rabbits, and the amount of the fine. Can I pay this, and get them out? If so I will get them out tomorrow. Please, dear friend, do this for me. I must get them out.’ Martin was himself touched by their condition, and gave a biscuit to the smallest of them. For this he was dismissed from the service, as Wilde found out a few days later.26

  Wilde was even more troubled by these incidents because he felt sure of the general benevolence of Major Nelson. He would have liked to mention the soldier and the children to him, on the assumption that he was not aware of them, but it did not seem appropriate to do so on his last evening at Reading. He was not inhibited from taking up the topic a few days later, in a fiery letter to the Daily Chronicle, where he excoriated prison injustice while praising Nelson.

  For his departure, arrangements had been made so that he would not find himself being stared at as he had been at Clapham Junction on his transfer to Reading. He was allowed to wear ordinary clothes and was not handcuffed. Before he left, on 18 May, the warden handed him his momentous letter to Alfred Douglas. Two reporters had come to observe his departure, and to one of them he said, as quoted in The New York Times, that he ‘coveted neither notoriety nor oblivion.’ Then he and two prison officials took a cab to Twyford Station. Wilde almost gave the game away when he opened his arms towards some budding bush saying, ‘Oh beautiful world! Oh beautiful world!’ The warder implored him to stop: ‘Now, Mr Wilde, you mustn’t give yourself away like that. You’re the only man in England who would talk like that in a railway station.’27

  * [The first list:]

  A Greek Testament

  Milman’s History of the Jews and Latin Christianity

  Stanley’s Jewish Church

  Farrar’s St Paul

  Tennyson’s Poems (complete in one volume)

  Percy’s Reliques (the collection of old ballads)

  Christopher Marlowe’s Works

  Buckle’s History of Civilisation

  Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick, the Great

  Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects

  A Prose translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy

  Keats’s Poems

  Chaucer’s Poems

  Spenser’s Poems

  Letters of R. Louis Stevenson (edited by Sidney Colvin)

  Walter Pater’s posthumous volume of essays

  Renan’s Vie de Jésus and Les Apôtres (the chaplain sees no objection to these if they are in the original French) [‘In French,’ wrote Nelson in the margin]

  [E. B.] Tylor’s Primitive Culture [1871]

  Ranke’s History of the Popes

  Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman

  En Route [by J. K. Huysmans]. Translation from the French by C. Kegan Paul. I would of course prefer it in the French if it would be allowed. If not I would like to read it in the translation. It is a book on modern Christianity.

  Lecky’s History of Rationalism

  Emerson’s Essays (if possible in one volume)

  Cheap edition of Dickens’s Works. The Library here contains no example of any of Thackeray’s or Dickens’s novels. I feel sure that a complete set of their works would be as great a boon to many amongst the other prisoners as it would certainly be to myself. [‘Cheap Edition of Dickens’s Works,’ wrote Nelson in the margin]

  †[The second list:]

  Gaston de Latour by Walter Pater, M. A. (Macmillan)

  Milman’s History of Latin Christianity

  Wordsworth’s Complete Works in one volume with preface by John Morley (Macmillan. 7/6)

  Matthew Arnold’s Poems. One volume complete (Macmillan. 7/6)

  Dante and Other Essays by Dean Church (Macmillan. 5/-)

  Percy’s Reliques

  Hal lam’s Middle Ages (History of)

  Dryden’s Poems (1 vol, Macmillan. 3/6)

  Burns’s Poems ″ ″

  Morte d’Arthur ″ ″

  Froissart’s Chronicles xx

  Buckle’s History of Civilisation

  Marlowe’s Plays

  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (edited by A. Pollard, 2 vols. 10/-)

  Introduction to Dante by John Addington Symonds

  Companion to Dante by A. J. Butler

  Miscellaneous Essays by Walter Pater

  An English Translation of Goethe’s Faust

  EDUCATIONAL

  Ollendorff’s German Method. 5/6

  Key to the same. 3/6F.

  Wilhelm Tell. Hamiltonian System.

  German-English Dictionary

  Faust by Goethe (in the original)

  Key to Mariotti’s Italian Grammar. 1/-

  Guide to the Italian Language by A. Bioaggi[?]. 5/-

  Biaggi’s[?] Prosatori Italiani. 5/-

  Italian-English Dictionary

  Norgate 5/-44 Shaftesbury Ave. London, W

  ‡[The third list:]

  A French Bible

  German Grammar

  German Conversation Book

  French-Italian Conversation Book

  Dante: Vita Nuova

  ″ Vita Nuova. English Translation

  Goldoni. Commedie.

  Auguste Filon. L’Art Dramatique en Angleterre [18]

  Journal de Goncourt. Latest volume

  [François de] Preslense. Vie du Cardinal Manning [18]

  Huysmans. En Route [1895]

  This is the religious novel of which Mr Gladstone wrote in terms of such high commendation [Wilde’s footnote].

  Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [1895]

  George Meredith. Essay on Comedy [1897]

  ″ ″ Amazing Marriage [1895]

  Thomas Hardy. The Well-Beloved. [1897]

  Harold Frederic. Illumination [1896]

  Nineteenth Century for 1896

  Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island.

  § An example is a letter he sent to the French novelist Rachilde, who had taken an interest in him:

  Toute tentative d’intervention entre quelqu’un qui aime et l’objet de son amour est une persécution.… Je ne suis pas un monstre.… [J]e suis tout à fait sain et grec, et ce sont eux, les autres, les gens qui se disent normales [sic] qui sont des monstres, des dégénérés.… Je ne suis pas un Dorian Gray pour avoir un portrait sur lequel se masqueraient les signes d’une âme corrompue.… Si à 27 ans j’ai la figure d’un enfant de 18 ans, c’est que mon âme est saine et belle et serein, quoiqu’un peu fatiguée et martyrisée …11

  [Any attempt to intervene between someone in love and the object of his love is a persecution.… I am not a monster.… I am quite healthy and Greek, and it is those other people, who call themselves normal, who are monsters, degenerates.… I am no Dorian Gray with a portrait on which the signs of a corrupted soul are kept hidden.… If at twenty-seven I have the face of a child of eighteen, it is because my soul is healthy and beautiful and serene, although a little tired and martyred …]

  ‖ In 1894 he told an interviewer (Almy), ‘Never attempt to reform a man. Men never repent. To punish a man for wrong-doing, with a view to his reformation, is the most lamentable mistake it is possible to commit. If
he has any soul at all, such procedure is calculated to make him ten times worse than before. It is a sign of a noble nature to refuse to be broken by force.’12

  a He would write to Leonard Smithers in December 1897, ‘Half of the success of Marie Corelli is due to the no doubt unfounded rumour that she is a woman.’

  Exile

  CHAPTER XXI

  Prisoner at Large

  It is always the unreadable that occurs.

  The Visible World

  From Twyford, Wilde and the two prison officials took a train to London. At Westbourne Park they left it and traveled by cab to Pentonville, from which he was discharged the next morning. At 6:15 a.m., 19 May 1897, he officially completed his two-year sentence. There had been some discussion of who should meet him. He had refused to have Ernest Leverson, and Frank Harris had refused to go. In the end, More Adey and Stewart Headlam greeted him and put him into a cab. They avoided the press and drove to Headlam’s house, where Wilde changed his clothes and had his first cup of coffee in two years. He talked of Dante. It was suggested that he might take up the offer to travel with Frank Harris. ‘It would be a perpetual football match to be with him,’ said Wilde. The Leversons arrived, and were shown into the drawing room. They felt ill at ease, but Wilde came in, as Ada Leverson recalled, ‘with the dignity of a king returning from exile. He came in talking, laughing, smoking a cigarette, with waved hair and a flower in his buttonhole, and he looked markedly better, slighter, and younger than he had two years previously.’ He greeted Ada Leverson by saying, ‘Sphinx, how marvellous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at seven o’clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been away! You can’t have got up, you must have sat up.’