Apart from the ballad and the ‘character,’ Wilde devoted himself to enjoying life. With no difficulty he succeeded in making heavy inroads into the £800 his friends had accumulated to help in his return. As always when his resources were limited, he dispensed money with liberality. No doubt he was bored at times, during intervals between visits of friends, and when they visited him he had to cope with silent reproach for idleness or patronizing sympathy for past sufferings. Wilde had dismissed too easily the importance of being married to Constance, with her stable affection and attention.
Even during periods of their marriage when he scarcely saw her for weeks on end, she had provided a structure outside which he could be truant. The devotion of his friends, especially Ross, touched him, but Ross could not offer more than bouts of company, having work in London and too small an income to neglect it. So Constance and his children came often into Wilde’s thoughts. She was still his wife. On his first or second day in Dieppe Wilde wrote her a letter which was like the one he had written two years before, after three months in prison. Though the letter is lost, her description of it as ‘full of penitence’ cannot be doubted. The recognition of wronging her and, worse still, of cutting himself off from his children, preyed on Wilde’s mind. Having failed to become a penitent, he dreamed of retreating into the role of husband and father. His letter begged for a meeting with her and their children, and Constance was touched and tempted. There had, however, been so much trouble over the life interest that she listened to her advisers, who could only warn her that Wilde might be no easier to manage now than before the debacle. She therefore replied guardedly, not refusing but not agreeing, promising to visit him twice a year in any case, and mentioning a possible meeting between him and the boys. She had in mind a period of probation.12 For Wilde, who had succeeded in pardoning Alfred Douglas, the postponement of absolution was intolerable. But for Constance, as for the Queensberry family, Douglas was a difficulty: a continent that contained both him and Oscar Wilde might well prove too small for a vita nuova. Still she wrote to her husband kindly every week, and did not reject the meeting for which he kept supplicating.
What Wilde could not guess from her letters, but learned privately from a letter sent him by their friend Carlos Blacker, was that Constance was in poor health. The spinal paralysis dating from her fall on the stairs at Tite Street had spread, so that a second operation was considered essential even though its results were problematic. In late July, Wilde, perhaps not sure how unwell she was, proposed that she bring Cyril and Vyvyan to Dieppe, after which he would return to live with them. Through Blacker, Constance asked him to wait until she had settled in a house in Nervi. Her letter made conditions, Wilde told Douglas afterwards, and Sherard says that one letter from her advisers to Wilde was ‘slightingly worded.’ Wilde felt keenly the contrast between Constance, all reluctance, and Bosie, all avidity, as he tried to coax one into reconciliation and the other into delay.
With something of his old ability to rise beyond alternatives to a tertium quid, Wilde meditated another plan, entirely detached from wife and lover. This was to continue to live on the French coast. Dieppe, as he had feared, was not the best place for him. His friends might greet him effusively; other English tourists would not. He soon discovered that he could not rely upon the freemasonry of fellow artists, who could be as hypocritical as the inartistic in their gratuitous preference, as Wilde expressed it, for Messalina over Sporus—that is, for heterosexual debauchery over homosexual. As it happened, Dieppe was then full of artists, including three Englishmen and a Frenchman he had known well: Walter Sickert, Charles Conder, Beardsley, and Jacques-Emile Blanche. All were so eager to demonstrate that they were bohemians that they became prigs. Sickert had reason to be grateful to Wilde for many acts of kindness to him and his family: now he shunned his old friend. Beardsley and Conder, walking with Blanche and aware that Blanche wished to show sympathy for Wilde, steered Blanche into a side street to prevent a meeting. Wilde may not have observed this cut, though one feels he observed every cut, but soon after, as he was sitting in front of the Café Suisse, he caught sight of Blanche, walking this time with Sickert, and beckoned to him. (Blanche had begun their friendship in 1883 by painting a picture of a young woman reading Wilde’s Poems, and they had been on excellent terms for years.) But he ignored Wilde’s signal and passed by as if he had not seen it. Wilde took great offense and made no further overtures.13
As for Beardsley, he had profited from Wilde’s kindness, which he returned by insisting that Wilde not be published in the Yellow Book if he was to illustrate it. At this time, moreover, he was being supported financially by André Raffalovich (whom he called ‘Mentor’), and that sworn enemy of Wilde would have resented any friendship between them. Yet circumstances threw the two men together, and Beardsley was unable to resist at least one cordial meeting at a dinner party on 19 July 1897. On 3 August Wilde persuaded Beardsley to ‘buy a hat more silver than silver.’ Then Wilde invited him to dinner at his hotel, and Beardsley snubbed him by not showing up and by leaving Dieppe for Boulogne soon after, complaining of some members of the society there. ‘It was lâche of Aubrey,’ Wilde commented, playing snob to Beardsley’s snub: ‘If it had been one of my own class I might perhaps have understood it. I don’t know whether I respect most the people who see me or those who don’t. But a boy like that, whom I made! No, it was too lâche of Aubrey.’14 ‘To be spoken of, and not to be spoken to, is delightful,’ he wrote ironically to Ada Leverson. But to the Ranee of Sarawak he sent a message: ‘Tell her that horrible as are the dead when they rise from their tombs, the living when they come out from their tombs are more horrible still.’15
Of the four artists, only Conder, after his first fluster and flutter, was amenable; he and Wilde saw each other often. Conder’s conversation was ‘like a beautiful sea-mist,’ Wilde said.16† It was probably an invitation of Conder’s, however, that subjected Wilde to another of the ordeals that awaited him in Dieppe. The proprietor of a restaurant, seeing Wilde among the four who were about to sit down at a table, approached them to say that he had food for three only, not for four, and they had to leave. A deputation of young French poets from Montmartre came to Dieppe to see Wilde, and were entertained at a lavish dinner at the Café des Tribunaux, which became so raucous that an official letter arrived from the subprefect warning Wilde that any public misconduct would lead to his expulsion from France.18
But there were those who tried to make good the slights. A Norwegian landscape painter, Fritz von Thaulow, ‘a giant with the temperament of Corot,’ as Wilde described him, showed his sensitivity by booming at Wilde, who had just been insulted by some Englishmen, ‘Mr Wilde, my wife and I would feel honoured to have you dine with us en famille this evening.’ The Thaulow house, the Villa des Orchides, was always open to him. They had a party for him to which they invited, among others, the Mayor of Dieppe and the presidents of the city council and the chamber of commerce. It was sparsely attended. Another friend who rescued him from insult was Mrs Arthur Stannard, ‘John Strange Winter.’ Though her best-selling book, Bootle’s Baby, was not to Wilde’s taste—he mocked it to Ross as ‘une oeuvre symboliste’—he could not help approving of her courtesy. She made her husband call on Wilde soon after he arrived and ask him to dinner at the Pavillon de Berri, where they lived. Soon after, observing him being snubbed by other English people, she crossed the street, took his arm, and said loudly, ‘Oscar, take me to tea.’19
Wilde brought out the best as well as the worst in people living in Dieppe, but no courtesies could make up for the cuts. He was also conscious of another unpleasantness, that of being followed. Queensberry was determined that his son not meet Wilde, and sent out a private detective to keep him informed. Wilde thought he might be freed from pursuit, as well as priggishness, if he moved out of Dieppe. Not being sure where to go, he hired a carriage and drove along the coast with Ross, who had stayed on after Adey left. By chance the white horse pulling the carriage was
native to Berneval, and carried Wilde to that village five miles from Dieppe. Wilde knew the place slightly from previous visits, and decided to respect this equine hint. He moved to Berneval on 26 May. In so small a village, the name of Sebastian Melmoth was a disguise which had a chance of working. In every other way, he drew attention to himself. He took the two best rooms in the Hôtel de la Plage, and the delighted proprietor, one Bonnet, at once put up the rates. The hotel was comfortable, the cuisine—after Wilde had persuaded the chef not to serve him snake for dinner—quite good.
The experiment of Berneval seemed to work, and M. Melmoth thought of staying permanently. Bonnet, who dabbled in real estate, offered to find a piece of land and build a chalet to Wilde’s specifications for £500. For a few days Wilde dreamed of becoming a small landed proprietor in Picardy. He wrote to Robert Ross, then serving as his treasurer but shortly to be relieved of the post, pointing out the advantages of such a step after his first play was finished. Ross responded soberly that Wilde might have difficulty keeping up the mortgage payments, and that in any case he was bound to spend most of his time in Paris rather than in Berneval.20 To this Wilde protested that Paris would not suit him, that Berneval, so obscure and distant and tedious, was an ideal place for him to write. For the moment it did seem ideal, as the sun shone and he took his daily swim in the sea. (The weather and the mood changed in August.) Still, not having the £500 or the finished play, he gave up the idea of building a chalet and compromised by renting the Chalet Bourgeat, from 15 June 1897. He filled it with the books provided by his friends, asked Ross to send over his pictures, and made himself as comfortable as he could. He permitted himself a valet, but the problem of finding the right one gave him some amusement: ‘He was very clever,’ said Wilde of the first candidate. ‘But he became impossible. It was my own fault; I am very unhappy about it. I gave him a blue uniform, a thing I ought not to have done. Of course he got conceited about it at once. He went to a ball, and made quite a hit with his blue uniform. Naturally he wanted to go to dances every evening. Then, of course, he wanted to sleep in the mornings. And I had to wait and wait for my hot water. One morning I got up myself and took him hot water. That helped for one day, but no more. Now he is dismissed and I have found another one. The next book I write will be about the effect of the colour blue on men.’21
Following the first week, when Adey and Turner left, then Ross, a series of people came to see the wounded lion of Berneval. Lugné-Poë, whose production of Salome in Paris in February 1896 had so splendidly signaled that Wilde was still a living author, wrote and asked if he might call. The response on 24 May was in Oriental style: ‘L’auteur de Salome prie le Tétrarque de Judée de lui faire l’Honneur de déjeuner avec lui demain matin à midi.’ They talked of Wilde’s next play, Pharaoh, which Lugné-Poë was eager to produce. Wilde still hoped to make a comeback with a Biblical play in Paris. His enthusiasm paled, however, when it became clear there was no money to pay the playwright.22
On 3 June there arrived three men whom Wilde denominated as the Poet, the Painter, and the Philosopher. They were Ernest Dowson, Charles Conder, and Dalhousie Young. Young was more composer than philosopher, but he had written his Apology for Oscar Wilde, which Wilde promoted (for the sake of a third P) to the status of philosophy. Young and his wife were so moved by Wilde’s situation that they offered to pay for a chalet, at Bonnet’s current price of £700.23 Wilde apparently felt uneasy at so large a gift from a comparative stranger, and did not accept it. Dowson was the most congenial of the three: Wilde liked his verse and valued his company, which he enjoyed not only at Berneval but from time to time at Arques, where Dowson lived, and at Dieppe, where they sometimes met. The friendship moved quickly towards intimacy, tinged at least on Wilde’s side with eroticism:
My dear Ernest, I arrived safe, under a cold white moon, at one o’clock in the morning.… There is a fatality about our being together that is astounding—or rather quite probable. Had I stayed at Arques I should have given up all hopes of ever separating from you. Why are you so persistently and perversedly wonderful?
Do I see you tomorrow? … Come with vine-leaves in your hair.
I suppose I shall see you in ten minutes from this. I am looking out for the green costume that goes so well with your dark hyacinth locks.
Dowson was his first hyacinth since Douglas. But this flower was wilting, and had not much longer to live. Another letter to Dowson said, ‘You were wonderful and charming all last night.’ This may have been the night that Dowson persuaded Wilde to try sexual relations with women again. On his return from a Dieppe prostitute, Wilde said to Dowson with distaste: ‘The first these ten years, and it shall be the last. It was like chewing cold mutton.’ Then as an afterthought, ‘But tell it in England, where it will entirely restore my reputation.’24
A week later, on 10 June 1897, Will Rothenstein and Edward Strangman came. Strangman worked in the office of the publisher Leonard Smithers. He asked Rothenstein about Ricketts and Shannon and was told that they were doing much better and even making a little money. Wilde considered the matter for a moment and then said, ‘When you go to sup with them, I suppose they have fresh eggs now.’25 He took to Strangman at once, and after the two men left he wrote to him on 11 June to thank him for his visit, and then, four days later, to urge him, while in Paris, to meet Alfred Douglas. Wilde’s description of that young man was not in tune with that in De Profundis: ‘He is a most delicate and refined poet, and has a personality of singular charm. I have not seen him yet, but I am going to let him come and see me in a few days. Our lives are divided, but we love each other deeply and our souls touch in myriad ways through the estranging air.’ Strangman and Douglas did become friends as well as creditor and debtor, for Strangman lent him money for gambling. (On 22 July Douglas was still apologizing for his inability to repay it.) Rothenstein stayed a day or two longer, and met another visitor, Arthur Cruttenden, fresh from Reading prison, where he too had been confined. Wilde was his host for a week, then sent him back to England with letters asking friends to help him find a job. Dowson paid a second visit later in June, this time for three days. On the 16th he took Wilde to lunch and Wilde brought him back to Berneval for dinner. Dowson found him in ‘gorgeous spirits,’ and wrote, ‘I was amused by the unconscious contrast between his present talk about his changed position and his notions of economy and his practice, which is perversely extravagant. He does not realize in the least that nobody except himself could manage to spend the money he does in a petit trou de campagne. He is a wonderful man.’26 A visit that Wilde paid to Aubrey Beardsley in Boulogne was less well received: Beardsley wrote requesting him not to repeat it.
On the 20th of the month, in the early evening, Andre Gidé arrived unannounced. Wilde was away, so Gide had a taste of what life in Berneval was like, there being no one in the hotel with whom he could talk. But at half past ten a carriage rolled up, and in came M. Melmoth, ‘chilled through and through.’ At first Wilde scarcely spoke to Gide: he was taken up with an overcoat he had somehow lost during the evening, a misfortune he blamed on his servant’s having brought him a peacock feather the evening before. But after he had drunk some hot grog, he became his animated self, not swaggering as in Algiers in 1895 but simple as in Paris in 1891. Gide explained his visit to Wilde on the ground that, being the last of Wilde’s French friends to see him, he wanted to be the first to see him again. He must have been curious to find out if Wilde, whom he chose to regard as satanic, was still throning it now that he was in hell. He was also curious to know what Wilde had made of what was obviously his portrait, Ménalque, in Les Nourritures terrestres, which Wilde pointed to in the bookcase.
As Wilde sat by the fire, Gide took in the redness and coarseness of his face and especially his hands, though he wore the old rings.‡ They talked of their last meeting in Algiers, and Gide reminded Wilde that he had then predicted his own catastrophe. Wilde replied, ‘Oh, of course, of course! I knew that there would be a catastrophe, tha
t way or another.… It had to end that way. Just imagine: it wasn’t possible to go any further, and it couldn’t last.’ As for his time at Reading, he described some of the injustices he had suffered, and then said, ‘Prison has completely changed me. I counted on it for that.’ Their mutual friend Douglas, who came up often in the conversation, was in error in supposing that Wilde had been changed by friends in England, presumably by the Catholics Ross and Adey. No, it was prison that had wrought the change. He could not lead the same life as before. With something of his old manner, he said, ‘My life is like a work of art. An artist never starts the same thing twice.’ He would go to Paris, but only when he had written a play and could present himself as playwright rather than convict.
Gide spoke of Dostoevsky, who had served a four-year penal sentence and had then written The House of the Dead. Wilde said that he had come to admire the Russian writers for a quality totally lacking in Flaubert, their pity. This was a great change for him. It was pity, he said, that had kept him from killing himself, for he could not help pitying prisoners in the same misery. His friend Douglas could not understand this feeling, and wanted Wilde to be bitter and angry, but Wilde had purged himself of bitterness and anger. Still, he could understand Douglas’s position: ‘I repeat to him in each letter: we cannot follow the same path; he has his, it’s very beautiful. I have mine. His is that of Alcibiades, mine is now that of St Francis of Assisi.’ When Gide proved to be knowledgeable about St Francis, Wilde asked him to send the best book he knew on the saint.
They retired very late for Franciscans, and in the morning Wilde took Gide to see the Chalet Bourgeat, which he was beginning to furnish. It was here that he planned to write first his Pharaoh and then his Ahab and Jezebel, the plots of which he recounted ‘marvellously.’ They walked together to the train, and Wilde suddenly reverted to Les Nourritures terrestres, about which he had so far spoken only in general terms. ‘Listen, dear,’ he said to Gide, ‘you have to make a promise now. Les Nourritures terrestres is fine … it’s very fine.… But dear, promise me from now on never to write I any more. In art, don’t you see, there is no first person.’28
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