Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  In such meetings Wilde passed June and July of 1897. Most of his friends paid for their pension in the Hôtel de la Plage, although Dowson not only failed to do this, but borrowed money from Wilde as well. It took months for one hard-up writer to retrieve the money from another. On the other hand, Wilde always defended Dowson. When someone said, ‘It’s a pity he drinks so much absinthe,’ Wilde shrugged his shoulders as he replied, ‘If he didn’t drink, he would be somebody else. Il faut accepter la personnalité comme elle est. Il ne faut jamais regretter qu’un poète est saoul, il faut regretter que les saouls ne soient pas toujours poètes.’§29 A young French novelist was allowed to remain for several weeks at Wilde’s expense, and a French poet borrowed some money to get back to Paris and sent his creditor a sonnet instead of a check. The £800 gradually drifted away in such expenditures, or in celebrations such as the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria on 22 June. Wilde, no doubt pining for his sons, invited fifteen small boys of the neighborhood, along with the curé, the postman, the schoolmaster, and other local worthies. He got Bonnet to decorate the banqueting room at the Hôtel de la Plage with colored lamps and English flags. The children were given strawberries and cream, apricots, chocolates, cakes, and grenadine syrup. A huge iced cake bore the words ‘Jubilé de la Reine Victoria,’ in pink sugar rosetted with green, encircled by a great wreath of red roses. Each child was allowed to choose a present; six chose accordions, five trumpets, and four bugles. The postman got an accordion. They sang the ‘Marseillaise,’ danced a rondo, sang ‘God Save the Queen.’ Wilde proposed a toast to the Queen, then to France as la mère de tous les artistes,’ and finally to the Président de la République, after which the children cried, ‘Vivent le Président de la République et M. Melmoth.’30

  This enthusiasm for Queen Victoria was not new on Wilde’s part. He had said that the three great personalities of the nineteenth century were Napoleon, Victor Hugo, and Queen Victoria. At Fritz von Thaulow’s house the day after his party, he explained that it was not in her imperial character that he admired her, but as a person. Asked if he had ever met her, he replied that he had, and described with admiration her appearance (‘a ruby mounted in jet’), her walk, and her regal behavior.31‖ One effect of Wilde’s prison sentence, as of Dostoevsky’s, was to make him much less radical in politics, as he was to demonstrate at the time of the Boer War, when he enthusiastically supported England.

  The visits continued into late July and August. Charles Wyndham came, anxious to contract with Wilde for a new play. If he did not feel like writing his own, he could adapt one by Scribe about society in the age of Queen Anne. He asked for a free hand in the adaptation, which Wyndham of course granted, but Wilde did not agree to anything, and in September he withdrew, saying he was not in the frame of mind to write comedy. He thought again of finishing La Sainte Courtisane, but could not. Other offers of work came in, one from Fernand Xau to do a weekly chronicle for Le Journal. But to persuade him Xau said, ‘After all the brouhaha of your trial, the chronicles will have a great success.’ Wilde put down his pen and said, ‘My former successes will suffice me.’33 As he told Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘I would rather continue stitching sacks.’ Vincent O’Sullivan was a young writer whom he had known only a little before, and at first they did not get on well, O’Sullivan being inclined, as Wilde said, to view everything from the perspective of the tomb. He also ventured to complain that Wilde had too many people of title in his plays. ‘You would permit at least a Colonial Knight?’ Wilde asked in irritation. But O’Sullivan did better when he remarked that Yeats had said to him that Wilde was meant to be a man of action. Wilde pondered before he replied, ‘It is interesting to hear Yeats’s opinions about one,’ and then complained that English political life, which he had once considered entering, was too much a matter of catch words.34 He invited O’Sullivan to return, as he did.

  Leonard Smithers was the next guest, and one destined to be of great importance to Wilde during the remainder of his life. Smithers had taken the place of John Lane as the principal publisher of nineties work, and they had some discussion about Smithers’s bringing out The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde was amused by the publisher’s inveterate eroticism, in life involving ‘first editions’ of young girls, and in literature expressed in undercover pornography.

  In August two old friends arrived, Robert Ross and Robert Sherard. For Sherard this visit did not go well: Wilde and Ross forgot to draw the curtains and he caught sight of them in sexual embrace, or so he said; and to make matters worse, there were telegrams and letters from Douglas arriving all the time to keep Wilde in a constant tremor of irritation and perplexity. The reconciliation with Constance, for which Sherard continued to hope, seemed further off than ever. Wilde evidently caught Sherard’s shift in tone, and treated him coolly in return. Back in London, Sherard met Smithers at the Authors’ Club and alluded to homosexual behavior at Berneval; Smithers told Wilde, who wrote to Sherard with the utmost asperity. Though he followed up this letter with a conciliatory note sending him the Ballad, they never resumed their close friendship.

  In the midst of winds and tides, the firmest bond was that with Douglas. In no time, before May was over, Wilde’s tone towards him changed from coldness and mute reproach to affection. ‘Dear Bosie’ became ‘My darling Boy.’ One element in the change was Wilde’s consternation at hearing from More Adey that Douglas had given another of his interviews to the press, this time to Le Jour, which published it on 28 May. Wilde was alarmed that Douglas was destroying him for a second time, and wrote to caution him. It may have been this letter—now lost—which Douglas returned to Wilde with two poems and a bitter letter of his own, in which he disclaimed the interview (as later he would disclaim his own article in La Revue blanche), and said that on reading it he had written to the editor to that effect, and also challenged the journalist to a duel. The interviewer responded that he had quoted Douglas accurately, but the duel did not take place.35 Wilde was considerably flurried—by the article, until he got a copy and saw it was innocuous—and by the duel, for both Douglas’s sake and his own. He asked Douglas to telegraph him about it. At the same time, in this complex mixture of terror, pleading, and highflown literary discourse, he said he did not greatly like Douglas’s two new poems, and urged him to turn again to ballads.36 This was his last genuine effort to judge Douglas’s powers; after this he would always refer to his friend as the best of the younger poets, and brook no opposition.

  Douglas’s obsessive concern for him had touched Wilde. Douglas was the only person he knew who was not censorious, and who encouraged him to live in the way he had lived before prison. As for Douglas’s faults, De Profundis had already granted an official pardon for them. The alternation of fury and love, two sides of the same coin, was proving as overwhelming for Wilde now as in the old days. By 7 or 8 June he wrote to Lady Queensberry offering what she called ‘conditions’ for a possible meeting with Douglas and asking her consent. She wrote to More Adey on 9 June that she would not accept the conditions—presumably having to do with Douglas’s continued allowance—and that ‘Mr Wilde must decide all matters concerned with seeing or not seeing Alfred entirely for himself and without making me responsible for his actions. Will you kindly show him this letter.’ On 12 June, just three weeks after his debarkation at Dieppe, he issued an invitation to Douglas to visit him on the 18th. He must on no account come under his own name when he visited ‘that strange purple shadow who is known as Sebastian Melmoth,’37 but might well adopt that of Jonquil du Vallon. As a nom d’amour this was obviously preferred to Prince Fleur de Lys, against which Wilde had protested in De Profundis.

  This idyllic reconciliation was not to take place. The solicitor Arthur D. Hansell, whom Wilde had engaged to protect his interest in the marriage settlement, got wind of it, and resigned on the spot. He may have found out from Queensberry’s detective, from Queensberry himself, or from some other correspondent. Wilde had previously been warned that Constance would cut off his £150
allowance, and that Queensberry would descend on Dieppe with a revolver, if he and Bosie reunited. Now, on receipt of Hansell’s letter, he wired in a panic to Douglas that a sudden terrific difficulty had arisen, to be explained by letter. Douglas scoffed when he learned that his father’s arrival was threatened. At the same time, Wilde wrote a postcard to Ross: ‘A.D. is not here, nor is he to come.’ In a letter of the 23rd to Douglas, Wilde promised consolingly that when he had finished his play Bosie and he would meet and Wilde would once again be ‘king of life.’38

  Douglas was enraged by the contretemps and blamed More Adey for allowing such a clause to be included in Wilde’s agreement with Constance. Adey was ill, so Ross replied that Adey had had nothing to do with the insertion of the clause, which had been forced on them by events, and by the concern of all parties that Wilde not resume his old life. Ross urged on Douglas the importance of encouraging Wilde to write a play. Douglas answered on 20 June, accusing Ross of jealousy. An angrier letter came from Ross, saying that Douglas had much more money than he or Adey, though Adey had given Wilde £100, and that since he was so casually proposing to lose Wilde £150 a year, he could easily settle the same amount on him. In that case, Wilde would ‘have the added pleasure of your perpetual society and your inspiring temper for the future.’ He enclosed an exact account of the stewardship, which showed that neither Ross nor Adey had initiated the offending clause.39

  Incensed by this unaccustomed candor in an old friend, Douglas counterattacked in letters to Ross, Adey, and Wilde. His argument was that as an aristocrat he had a different attitude towards money from Ross. It was as natural for him to gamble as for Ross to live within his means.40 Wilde replied on 6 July with an eloquent defense of Ross, rejecting Douglas’s claim of better blood. At this point Lady Queensberry, who had a suspicion that a meeting was about to take place between Bosie and Wilde, invited her son to Le Havre or Boulogne or wherever Wilde was not. She also sent £10 to Wilde by way of More Adey, in partial fulfillment of what Douglas had described as a debt of honor to Wilde for his court costs incurred by his brother Percy.

  In August, letters went thick and fast between Berneval and Paris. Douglas told Gide that Wilde wrote to him every day. Constance’s weekly letter was overshadowed by this more pressing exchange. She could not bring herself to allow the meeting for which Wilde pleaded. According to More Adey’s letter to Adela Schuster of 12 March 1898, she wrote to her husband ‘too late, saying that she could see him, as she had then got their children out of the way.’ She felt that their lives could only be ‘more ruined’ by seeing him. He was so irritated by what he considered insensitivity that, contrary to the advice of his friends, he refused to go to her, and apparently wrote to the effect that he was utterly lonely, treated like a pariah and worn out with her perpetual procrastination, and was therefore going to live with the only person ready to give him his companionship, Alfred Douglas. He was blaming her (as she realized) for forcing him back to Douglas. Constance’s reaction was recalled by her son Vyvyan, who wrote to Frank Harris, ‘I remember my mother’s joy when he was supposed to be coming back, and I remember her misery when she found he had other claims upon his time.’41 Wilde had managed to justify his momentous decision. He wrote to Douglas on 24 August offering to meet him at Rouen at the Hôtel de la Poste.

  Douglas—at last sought, not seeking—sent a surprising reply: he said he had no money and could not come. His power over Wilde restored, his wish to see him lessened. Wilde complained to Ross that this showed meanness and lack of imagination. Douglas thought better of it and telegraphed his acceptance of the rendezvous. They met at Rouen, almost certainly on 28 August. Wilde wept at the station, they held hands, they walked arm in arm. Bosie suggested that, since he had promised his mother that he would go with her and his sister to Aix-les-Bains for a cure, they might meet in six weeks’ time at Naples. They stayed overnight in Rouen and parted on the most affectionate terms. Douglas sent a loving telegram to Wilde, and Wilde replied in a way that contradicted most of De Profundis: ‘I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.’42

  This was a second fall for Wilde. Ovid says ‘Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor [I see the good and value it; I follow the bad].’ But Berneval had failed Wilde, Constance had failed Wilde, all his friends had failed him, and there was only Bosie left. It seemed conceivable, for the moment, that the joy of life, which foggy Berneval had failed to disclose, might reappear in the Neapolitan sun.

  * Coleridge’s poem includes a number of six-line stanzas.

  † Rothenstein says that Wilde was much taken with Conder’s painted fans and wondered why people were not tumbling over one another to acquire them. Conder, always hard up, was anxious to sell his work at any price. Wilde commented, ‘Dear Conder! With what exquisite subtlety he goes about persuading someone to give him a hundred francs for a fan, for which he was fully prepared to pay two hundred!’17

  ‡ Wilde was wearing two emeralds, engraved with cabalistic signs, one on the little finger of each hand. That on the left was the efficient cause of all joys, that on the right of misfortunes. Asked why he continued to wear the one on the right, Wilde said, ‘One needs misfortunes to live happily.’27

  § ‘Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn’t mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.’

  ‖ Many renderings of Wilde’s conversation stultify his wit, and for the way he really talked one has to fall back on his letters. For example, this description of a pilgrimage which he sent to Ross:

  I am going tomorrow on a pilgrimage. I always wanted to be a pilgrim, and I have decided to start early tomorrow to the shrine of Notre Dame de Liesse. Do you know what Liesse is? It is an old word for joy. I suppose the same as Letizia, laetitia. I just heard of the shrine, or chapel, tonight, by chance, as you would say, from the sweet woman of the auberge, a perfect dear, who wants me to live always at Berneval! She says Notre Dame de Liesse is wonderful, and helps everyone to the secret of joy. I do not know how long it will take me to get to the shrine, as I must walk. But, from what she tells me, it will take at least six or seven minutes to get there, and as many to come back. In fact the chapel of Notre Dame de Liesse is just fifty yards from the hotel! Isn’t it extraordinary? I intend to start after I have had my coffee, and then to bathe. Need I say that this is a miracle? I wanted to go on a pilgrimage, and I find the little grey stone chapel of Our Lady of Joy is brought to me.32

  CHAPTER XXII

  The Leftover Years

  DUCHESS: They say the common field-flowers of the field

  Have sweeter scent when they are trodden on

  Than when they bloom alone, and that some herbs

  Which have no perfume, on being bruised die

  With all Arabia round them.

  Life with Douglas

  Wilde’s situation framed itself in terms of the Greek tragedies he knew so well. In De Profundis he had made Douglas the Helen of his tragedy, but he had also a sense of doom, early and late. The passions which his own life had allegorized were ambition and sloth, blending his character with his fate. His was not, like many tragedies, an allegory of mere pride, though in casual moments he would say, ‘I had risen too high, and I fell sprawling in the mire.’ But pride held its own in the chastened De Profundis, as it had in his American tour.1 He never abjured pride in his family or pride in his genius. Nor was he severe with pride’s outward show, vanity, as displayed in his delight in clothing and appearance, in the turn of a phrase or the cut of a coat. What he regarded as his weaknesses were his inability to choose the greater pleasure over
the lesser and to avoid giving way to the most trifling of temptations. In him hubris had taken this seemingly innocuous form. He knew himself to be generous, sympathetic to the poor, the thwarted, the excluded, and his self-esteem valorized his guilt. He only felt apologetic, as a playwright, because there were fifty-five acts to his tragedy. In the United States, according to Thomas Beer, at least nine hundred sermons were preached against him between 1895 and 1900.2

  As he yielded to the entreaties of Bosie to live with him, entreaties which echoed his own inclinations, Wilde could feel that the return was a coup de théâtre not calculated to propitiate the unseen directors who allot tragic parts. The fall in 1895 was spectacular; a second fall was of lesser importance. But the second fall confirmed the pattern of his destiny. Wilde’s letters to his friends acknowledged the force of their disapproval, but saw no alternative. ‘I daresay that what I have done is fatal,’ he tells Robert Ross, who alone had read the whole of De Profundis, ‘but it had to be done.’ ‘I love him as I always did, with a sense of tragedy and ruin.’ ‘My life cannot be patched up. There is a doom on it.’ ‘It is the result of the nemesis of character, and the bitterness of life. I was a problem for which there was no solution.’ ‘My going back to Bosie was psychologically inevitable: and, setting aside the interior life of the soul with its passion for self-realisation at all costs, the world forced it upon me.’3 Blame fell equally on the gods, the psyche, and the world, working towards a prearranged conclusion.