But he turned from this banter to say to Headlam, ‘I look on all the different religions as colleges in a great university. Roman Catholicism is the greatest and most romantic of them.’ He then wrote a letter to the Jesuits at Farm Street, asking for a six-month retreat. The messenger who took the letter was to wait for an answer. Meanwhile, Wilde resumed the conversation. He talked of Reading as if it had been a resort: ‘The dear Governor, such a delightful man, and his wife is charming. I spent happy hours in their garden, and they asked me to spend the summer with them. They thought I was the gardener.’ Then, with a laugh, ‘Unusual, I think? But I don’t feel I can. I feel I want a change of scene.’
He went on, ‘Do you know one of the punishments that happen to people who have been “away”? They are not allowed to read the Daily Chronicle! Coming along I begged to be allowed to read it in the train. “No!” Then I suggested I might be allowed to read it upside down. This they consented to allow, and I read all the way the Daily Chronicle upside down, and never enjoyed it so much. It’s really the only way to read newspapers.’
By now the messenger had returned. Wilde opened the letter he brought and read a refusal: he could not be accepted on the spur of the moment; at least a year’s deliberation was necessary. ‘At this,’ as Ada Leverson wrote, ‘he broke down and sobbed bitterly.’ But he recovered, as if resigned to accept secular life as a pis aller.1 He talked with Arthur Clifton’s wife (he had once given the Cliftons £120 so that they could get married) and other callers whom he insisted upon seeing. The result was that he missed the morning boat to Dieppe, so in the afternoon he went with Adey to New-haven and then crossed by the night boat.
On the Dieppe pier at 4:00 a.m. were Reggie Turner and Robert Ross. When they saw Wilde’s boat coming they looked for him, and saw his heavy form as he walked with swaying gait in their direction. They too thought he looked well. As he joined them on the pier he handed Ross a bulky envelope, saying, ‘This, my dear Bobbie, is the great manuscript about which you know.’ The arrangement now was for Ross to keep the original and to send a copy to Douglas and one to Wilde at Dieppe. Then he laughed loudly, and talked and talked. His subject was Reading prison, and Ross noted that ‘it had already become for him a sort of enchanted castle of which Major Nelson was the presiding fairy. The hideous machicolated turrets were already turned into minarets, the very warders into benevolent Mamelukes and we ourselves into Paladins welcoming Coeur de Lion after his captivity.’ He went with his friends to the Hotel Sandwich, where he was ushered into a room filled with flowers, with all the books he had asked for arranged on the mantelpiece. Ross had raised £800 for him by subscription, which made for good spirits. There was a great deal more talk, till his friends were exhausted and went to sleep. Wilde wrote a letter to Ada Leverson, thanking her for her morning visit, and describing his present situation with an air of confiding great secrets. Traveling as Melmoth, he said, ‘I have thought it better that Robbie should stay here under the name of Reginald Turner, and Reggie under the name of R. B. Ross. It is better that they should not have their own names.’2
So ended imprisonment. During the last eight months Wilde had contrived to live in his mind beyond the prison, as he had not during the first sixteen months. He would have to discover whether he was in fact free, or still a prisoner. He felt as he had once predicted he would feel, like Rip Van Winkle. But he was also for the moment like Nathanaël in Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres, experiencing nature and life as if for the first time, rejoicing in all he could see, smell, hear, taste, and touch.
Return of Bosie
Always write to me about your art and the art of others. It is better to meet on the double peak of Parnassus, than elsewhere.
Much of the animus in the De Profundis letter to Douglas was dissipated by the time Wilde finished writing it. A solid remnant remained, but even this began to be modified between March 1897, when the letter was handed over to the governor of Reading, and 20 May, when Wilde entrusted it to Ross on the pier at Dieppe. Bosie’s image, however baleful, could not serve forever as whipping boy. On 13 May, Wilde, raging with Adey and Ross over their supposed interference between him and his wife about his life interest in the marriage settlement, vengefully wondered aloud, in a letter to the hapless Ross, whether perhaps he had not been unjust to Douglas.3 He forgot that Ross himself had pleaded Douglas’s cause a few months before. The old lure was still in Wilde’s thought; the love and pain that Douglas had aroused in him were ineradicable. He at once desired and dreaded the moment when Douglas would appear to hand him back his presents and letters. For the moment he could not face the tension of such an interview, and through Ross he instructed Douglas not to come to see him yet, though he was free to write.
Wilde had scarcely established himself in his hotel room in Dieppe when the first letter from Douglas arrived. It said that he had heard that Wilde had changed from loving him, and now hated him. His own attitude had not changed at all, and he asked for a meeting. Wilde’s reply was intended to be Christian, but to Douglas sounded like cant. It said he did not hate Douglas but on the contrary still loved him very much; nevertheless they had better not meet for a time. This was the kind of provocation to which Douglas invariably responded: a few years later he would marry Olive Custance when he heard that she was engaged to a friend of his. He had had to put up with Ross’s being a welcome visitor and correspondent, while he himself was unwelcome in either role, but he had always warned that when Wilde was released he would win him back. His jealousy, his competitive fury, and his awareness of his beauty were roused by rejection. Perhaps fortunately, he had no idea of the detailed charges against him in the De Profundis letter, which because of its length Ross could not get typed—so that he could keep the original—until August. In a libel suit (the Ransome case) in 1913, during which the whole of De Profundis was read aloud, Douglas testified that he had received a copy of Wilde’s letter from Ross. Having read Ross’s note about it, he did not read the letter, but threw it in the fire. He asked Wilde how he had come to write such a letter to him, and Wilde replied, ‘Please don’t reproach me. I was mad with hunger, and in other ways.’4 Still later, Douglas denied that Ross had sent it to him.
Douglas knew how to wheedle, and how to wound. He denied that there was anything in his conduct to extenuate or excuse. He alone of all Wilde’s intimates had stayed in London throughout the Queensberry trial, up to the eve of Wilde’s own trial. So he berated Wilde for being ‘unfair and ungrateful,’ for behaving in a manner ‘unworthy of him,’ and for being deranged by his prison experience. The letters struck Wilde as ‘revolting’ and even ‘infamous.’ But Douglas could change his tone. He sent Wilde a poem, through More Adey, and this proved to be ‘a love lyric’ Wilde was startled and commented, ‘It is absurd,’ without being altogether displeased: Bosie’s obvious passion, though ferocious, was impressive. The two men exchanged letters frequently, but the prohibition on visits remained to nettle Douglas, who could remember how they had been together in Dieppe in the old days. Wilde smoothed him down, and Douglas then began on an opposite tack, begging Wilde to live with him for the rest of his life, and promising to atone by a lifelong devotion for the disaster that he and his family had brought about.5
Last Writings
The two long years of silence kept my soul in bonds. It will all come back, I feel sure, and then all will be well.
Wilde was seeking with some earnestness to reassemble his life. Of course he was badly in need of enjoying all that he had been deprived of for two years, but he still planned to do great things. The possibilities before him were all attended with difficulties, some arising from his temperament, some from his dubious status in the world. The plan of becoming a six-month penitent at a retreat had been thwarted. Then there was the plan to reestablish himself as artist. As Haldane had suggested to him long before, he wanted to write about the great subject of imprisonment. While he refused to exploit his prison reminiscences by paid journalism, within days
of leaving Reading he wrote his long letter to the Daily Chronicle about children in prison. He did not mind contradicting ‘The Decay of Lying,’ where he had criticized Charles Reade for ‘a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public opinion to the state of our convict prisons,’ or his reproof of Dickens for trying ‘to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administration.’ Now such subjects preoccupied him too. His friend Martin had been dismissed for kindness to child prisoners, and he took the occasion not only to defend him but to describe the harshness of prison for children. The letter carefully avoided details of his own sufferings, and Wilde—with his old hatred of autobiography—felt that if he was to describe prison at all, it must be obliquely. He envisaged three essays, of which two were to describe prison, and the third, as foreshadowed in De Profundis, to deal with Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in art. As in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ Wilde would subsume prison and religion under one rubric. To mistreat the guilty, as to mistreat the innocent, was contrary to the canons of art as expressed by Christ the supreme artist and Wilde his prophet. These three essays were never written, and only a second letter to the Daily Chronicle the following year—Wilde’s last work—discharged his obligation to speak for the prisoners in Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading.
There were plans to write a play, mentioned in his letters of 31 May and 2 June 1897. Either he would do his Pharaoh or he would finish A Florentine Tragedy, the verse drama he had started long before. A letter he wrote to Douglas on 2 June, in which he urged the young man to write ballads, suggested that the idea of writing one himself had been gathering in his mind. Meanwhile, he talked away other ideas: when a friend asked him on 22 June what he was doing, he answered that he was writing an essay entitled ‘A Defence of Drunkenness,’ to shock the English, the theme being ‘that the soul is never liberated except by drunkenness in one form or another.’ He went on, ‘Here in a small place like Dieppe one’s soul can listen to the words and harmonies and behold the colours of the Great Silence. But one is not always at Dieppe. And it is difficult to find the Great Silence. But a waiter with a tray will always find it for you. Knock, and the door will always open, the door of le paradis artificiel.’6
This was only Baudelairean high talk, probably necessary to him because, at the moment he was celebrating drunkenness, he was struggling to realize pathos. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a name that Ross suggested, was occupying his thoughts. ‘He owed his inspiration to Her Majesty’s Government,’ the judge in one of Douglas’s libel actions said of it. Wilde had determined to focus it upon the trooper Wooldridge but to make clear that his own case and Wooldridge’s were parallel:
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.
A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.
The parallels were not limited to two men. Like Baudelaire, he would insist that his hypocrite reader was in the same image. As in his plays, sin was shown to be evenly distributed round the globe, though justice was not. The trooper had slit his wife’s throat on the road (on the bed in his poem). Wilde daringly insists that all men commit the same crime of killing their love, whether by sword or kiss—that is, by brutality or cowardice. ‘Treachery is inseparable from faith,’ he wrote to Ada Leverson in 1894. ‘I often betray myself with a kiss.’ In his comedies the miscreants were always pardoned, but in the Ballad, while ultimately forgiven, they are treated vindictively by their fellows, who are equally guilty. The poem had a divided theme: the cruelty of the doomed murderer’s crime, the insistence that such cruelty is pervasive; and the greater cruelty of his punishment by a guilty society.
By 8 July Wilde had started on the Ballad and by 20 July it was, he thought, nearly finished. He was to revise it with Ross’s help in August, and to expand it later. The length of the poem was necessary, he said, to shake confidence in the penal system; he knew that it must fall between poetry and propaganda, but he was prepared to face some artistic imperfection for the sake of changing what was intolerable. ‘Catastrophes in life bring about catastrophes in Art,’ he told O’Sullivan. Ross always preferred its first, shorter version, and Yeats, in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, took much trouble to cut out almost all the message, feeling that the strength of the poem lay in its ballad narrative. But Wilde intended more. As he said to Chris Healy, ‘It is the cry of Marsyas and not the song of Apollo. I have probed the depths of most of the experiences in life, and I have come to the conclusion that we are meant to suffer. There are moments when it takes you like a tiger, by the throat, and it was only when I was in the depths of suffering that I wrote [i.e., ‘conceived of’] my poem. The man’s face will haunt me till I die.’7
The Ballad is strongest when it concentrates on the trooper and prison conditions, weakest when it deals with capitalized abstractions like Sin and Death, and imports imagery from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. At its best the sharp details and colloquial language carry conviction:
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’
With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.
Wilde consciously imitates Coleridge, both in the stanza form* and in imagery, though his emphasis is on universal guilt rather than universal love:
Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
• • •
The grey cock crew, the red cock crew
But never came the day
And crooked shapes of Terror crouched,
In the corners where we lay:
And each evil sprite that walks by night
Before us seemed to play.
or what he called ‘out-Kipling Henley.’8
That the governor should have the ‘yellow face of Doom,’ or that none can tell ‘to what red hell / His sightless soul may stray,’ are among many purple passages. (The latter was added in a subsequent revision.) Yet if we grant that the poem is, as Major Nelson wrote when Ross—perhaps fearing legal trouble—let him see it in advance, ‘a terrible mixture of good bad and indifferent,’ there is no doubt that Wilde had once again touched a great subject and left his fingerprints on it:
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved
And murdered in her bed.
And if, as so often in life, he lacks restraint and bedizens his poem, a residue of it, as Yeats showed in his Oxford Book, is an almost great poem.9 Once read, it is never forgotten.
This was the only creative work he was able to bring himself to write. He was uncomfortable about drawing the poem ‘from personal experience, a sort of denial of my own philosophy of art in many ways. I hope it is good, but every night I hear cocks crowing … so I am afraid I may have denied myself, and would weep bitterly, if I had not wept away all my tears.’10 But otherwise the poem was consiste
nt in thought with his work from the beginning. In fact, the theme of The Ballad of Reading Gaol is closely similar to that of ‘Humanitad’ in his first book, the Poems of 1881. Writing the ballad had the virtue of restoring him to literature, and of showing that his creative powers remained intact in spite of their lack of exercise. He wrote one other thing that summer, a ‘character’ of his sometime friend Henley, to go with a drawing of Henley by Will Rothenstein. He served up some old and new witticisms in paradoxical form:
He founded a school and has survived all his disciples. He has always thought too much about himself, which is wise; and written too much about others, which is foolish. His prose is the beautiful prose of a poet, and his poetry the beautiful poetry of a prose-writer. His personality is insistent. To converse with him is a physical no less than an intellectual recreation. He is never forgotten by his enemies, and often forgiven by his friends. He has added several new words to the language, and his style is an open secret. He has fought a good fight, and has had to face every difficulty except popularity.
Though Max Beerbohm liked the ‘open secret’ of Henley’s style, and savored the rest, he concurred in Rothenstein’s view that Henley would regard the evaluation as hostile, and would detect the author at once.11
Life in the Country
Civilizations continue because people hate them. A modern city is the exact opposite of what everyone wants.
Oscar Wilde Page 74