The Neapolitan interlude was as doomed to take place as to end. It could not have been drawn out much longer. Bosie may have been only half a monster, but by that half Wilde had once more been savaged. His relations with Constance, as far as they were personal, were just about finished by the three-month stay with Douglas, although she was too kindhearted ever to desert him and, even after officially withdrawing her subsidy, sent him money through Ross. Wilde did not offer her much excuse after Douglas had left on 3 December, except to say that he had loved too much, and that love was better than hate. She did not agree, and remarked to her brother that unnatural love was worse than hate. She wrote to Arthur Humphreys on 27 February 1898, ‘his punishment has not done him much good since it has not taught him the lesson he most needed, namely that he is not the only person in the world.’ Still, she could relent, and when Ross wrote to her in March a careful letter asking whether her husband’s allowance might not be restored, since he was no longer living with Douglas, she complied, and added a codicil to her will to that effect. Her affection for him never ended, and she knew and wrote that if she saw him again, she would ‘forgive everything.’23
Last Days in Naples
My life cannot be patched up. There is a doom on it.
From now on Wilde’s abode changes, but the change is no longer significant. Once in a while he makes an effort to write something—the last act of his comedy is mentioned, for example—but nothing comes of it. He could still speak magnificently, but mostly repeating what he had said before. The essay he had planned which would have allowed pity into his aesthetic system, making explicit what he had always underplayed—the power of art to exorcise cruelty and to offer a perpetual Last Judgment in which the verdict was always merciful—never got written. He explained to Ross, ‘I don’t think I am equal to intellectual architecture of thought: I have moods and moments; and Love, or Passion with the Mask of Love, is my only consolation.’24 He could not concentrate—his attention span was easily broken—and some sense that his literary life was over had come to him when he was writing some of the confessedly maladroit stanzas of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. If Bosie sought respectability (‘social recognition’), Wilde knew it was no longer available for himself. The slights which occurred almost daily never lost their power to hurt. He had a constant uncertainty over whether people would acknowledge his existence or not. The dramatis personae of his earlier life returned as phantoms of his later life, some pretending not to see him, making him feel he was the phantom from whom they fled. He was reliving his life as if it had all been a failure, not a success. In prison, he said, he had been ‘buoyed up by the sense of guilt.’ Outside, he was weighed down by the sense of exile. Vincent O’Sullivan, who visited Wilde in Naples for a few days after Douglas had left, witnessed treatment that had become almost standard. They were sitting in a restaurant when a crowd of people came in after the theatre. Some of them noisily pointed out Wilde to the rest. He was disturbed beyond O’Sullivan’s expectation. ‘He seemed to strangle,’ O’Sullivan remembered, ‘and then said in a thick voice, “Let us go.” ’ They went some way in silence; then a beggar came up. Wilde gave him money, and murmured in English, ‘You wretched man, why do you beg when pity is dead?’ He told O’Sullivan that in Naples there was a garden where people who wanted to kill themselves went. ‘I never thought seriously of that as a way out. What I felt was that I must drain the chalice of my passion to the dregs. But one night when there were no stars I went down to that garden. As I sat there absolutely alone in the darkness, I heard a rustling noise, and sighing and misty cloud-like things came round me. And I realized that they were the little souls of those who had killed themselves in that place, condemned to living there ever after. They had killed themselves in vain. And when I thought that such would be the fate of my soul too, the temptation to kill myself left me and has not come back.’ O’Sullivan asked, ‘How could you imagine spending all your life after life in Naples?’ ‘No,’ replied Wilde, laughing. ‘The cooking is really too bad.’25
British officialdom took some notice of his situation when the Consul, E. Neville-Rolfe, wrote on 30 December 1897 to Lord Rosebery, who had a villa at Naples, and had once had his own involvement with the Douglas family:
Oscar Wilde calling himself Mr Sebastian Nothwell [sic] is in a small villa at Posillipo [sic] fully two miles from you. He and Alfred Douglas have definitely parted and Wilde lives a completely secluded life. He came here as Mr Nothwell for some business and I let him suppose that I did not know him by sight.
He looks thoroughly abashed, much like a whipped hound.
He has written a volume of poems, but no one in London would publish them and I hear he is printing them at his own expense.
I really cannot think he will be any trouble to you, and after all the poor devil must live somewhere.26
Needless to say, they did not meet.
After O’Sullivan left, Wilde was persuaded by a Russian Elder to accompany him to Taormina. While there he met Baron von Gloeden, who photographed naked boys and sold the photographs to homosexuals. The trip is unrecorded but not its sequel—Wilde’s return to Posilipo to find that a servant left in charge of the villa had run off with all his clothes. Nothing was left except those books carefully gathered by his friends at the time of his release. Wilde did not take them, and twenty-five years later a visiting Englishwoman who rented the villa found them still there.27 Wilde would refer to their loss afterwards as of no consequence, but it meant that he had forsworn his place beside his favorite authors.
He stayed through January in Naples. In February 1898, perhaps because of the expense of maintaining the Villa Giudice, he moved to 31 Santa Lucia, the Palazzo Bambino.28 Necessity made him resourceful: Graham Greene tells how his father and another schoolmaster were sitting in a Naples café when a stranger, hearing them speak English, asked if he might join them over coffee. He looked vaguely familiar, but they did not recognize him during the hour and more that they were charmed by his conversation. He left them to pay for his drink, which was ‘certainly not coffee.’ The elder Greene used to tell of this meeting with Wilde and conclude, ‘Think how lonely he must have been to have expended so much time and wit on a couple of schoolmasters on holiday.’ But, as Graham Greene comments, Wilde ‘was paying for his drink in the only currency he had.’ His plight was so serious that Le Journal in Paris solicited contributions for him early in December 1897, but these, if any were received, were meager.29
A Last Triumph
… it is my chant de cygne, and I am sorry to leave with a cry of pain—a song of Marsyas, not a song of Apollo.…
It must have been a satisfaction to Wilde to know that all the time people were speaking of him with contempt at Naples, his Ballad was nearing completion and publication. Perhaps it would prove an earnest of future masterpieces; this hope never quite left him. Smithers had proved cooperative about the design of the book, and both had agreed that the author’s name should appear on it only as ‘C.3.3.’ Wilde had quieted Smithers’s fears of a possible libel action by prison officials. He had written a dedication which was to run:
When I came out of prison some met me with garments and
with spices and others with wise counsel
You met me with love
This was probably intended to allow Wilde to say to Douglas as well as to Ross, Adey, and perhaps others that the dedication was to each of them. Ross was convinced that it would do no good, either to the poem or to them; Smithers and eventually Wilde agreed. There was no dedication. The book was to be published on 9 February 1898, and this date probably spurred Wilde to return from Naples to Paris, where he could at least hear promptly about the poem’s reception. He arrived on 13 February, and took a room at one of those cheap hotels where he was to spend most of his remaining days. This one was the Hôtel de Nice in the rue des Beaux-Arts, the street that would eventually serve as his final address, at the Hôtel d’Alsace.
He was greeted by good news: Th
e Ballad of Reading Gaol was selling as no poem had sold for years. One shop sold fifty copies on the morning of publication. Smithers had only risked printing four hundred out of a projected eight hundred copies in January, but early in February he ordered four hundred more, and the same month had to print another thousand.
In March there was a deluxe edition of ninety-nine copies signed by the author (with his real name), and then two more printings, of twelve hundred and one thousand copies. In May a sixth impression was printed, of a thousand copies. It was not until the seventh regular printing, in June of 1899, that at Smithers’s suggestion Wilde inserted his own name as the author, in brackets beside ‘C.3.3’ on the title page.
Wilde sent copies to many old friends, with suitable inscriptions. Ada Leverson’s read, To the Sphinx of Pleasure from the Singer of Pain Oscar Wilde’; Major Nelson’s, ‘Major Nelson from the author in recognition of many acts of kindness and gentleness Feby ’98’; and there was one for ‘Alfred Bruce Douglas From the Author.’* Constance read about the book in the Daily Chronicle and, on receiving an uninscribed copy, wrote, ‘I am frightfully upset by this wonderful poem of Oscar’s.… It is frightfully tragic and makes one cry.’30 Robert Sherard’s copy was accompanied by a letter: ‘I am sending you a copy of my Ballad—first edition—which I hope you will accept in memory of our long friendship. I had hoped to give it to you personally, but I know you are very busy, tho’ I am sorry you are too busy to come and see me, or to let me know where you are to be seen.’31
Cunninghame Graham, who had been in prison himself, wrote Wilde a letter full of praise, and Wilde, in thanking him, replied, ‘I … wish we could meet to 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, are prisons—walls, and life is a limitation.’32 He was moving towards a generalized and impersonal point of view, detaching himself from his poem.
There were many notices of the Ballad. Most expressed reservations but recognized that a literary event of importance had occurred. None of the reviewers mentioned Wilde by name, although everyone knew he had written the poem. The attention it received was too much for Henley, whose own book of verse had done less well: he dismissed the Ballad in Outlook on 9 March as a jumble ‘of excellence and rubbish,’ complained that the details lacked veracity (one of his own claims to distinction in his hospital poems), and concluded that ‘the trail of the Minor Poet is over it all.’ Wilde replied, but his letter is lost. Henley’s review was sandwiched between one in the Academy on 26 February, which pronounced the poem to be good if not great literature; one in the Daily Telegraph of the 27th, which spoke of it as ‘moving’; and a handsome notice by Arthur Symons in The Saturday Review for 12 March. Symons had not until then been one of Wilde’s friends—there had been jokes about the productive Symons as a joint stock company in which Wilde proposed to take shares—but Symons was not jealous or mean-spirited like Henley. He said of the poem that it ‘had the value of a document’; and that it was ‘not really a ballad at all, but a sombre, angry, interrupted reverie; and it is the subcurrent of meditation, it is the asides, which count, not the story.’ He delighted Wilde with his praise for the poem’s insistence that all men kill the thing they love: ‘This symbol of the obscure deaths of the heart, the unseen violence upon souls [a phrase Wilde particularly liked], the martyrdom of hope, trust and all the more helpless among the virtues, is what gives its unity, in a certain philosophic purpose, to a poem not otherwise quite homogeneous.’ It was an idea that was ‘singularly novel,’ and yet arose naturally from the experience described. On 19 March the Pall Mall Gazette said the Ballad was ‘the most remarkable poem that has appeared this year,’ with ‘beautiful work in it.’
The publication of his poem in England, followed by its publication in Paris by the Mercure de France late in the year in a translation by Henry Davray, could have given Wilde the impetus he needed. Robert Ross faithfully sent him handsome copybooks in which he could write, but Wilde began to say, with ominous repetitiveness, that he no longer felt the inclination. He even said he had a ‘cacoethes tacendi’ (an incurable itch not to write). He did tell Mrs Weldon he would translate Ce qui ne meurt pas by the aged dandy Barbey d’Aurevilly. Robert Ross says he never did, though a translation was published and has sometimes been attributed to him.33 He was persuaded to have Smithers publish two of his own plays which, because of his disgrace, had never been printed, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband. The proofs of Earnest show Wilde very much in command of himself and of the play. As he corrected them he said to a friend, ‘I can write, but have lost the joy of writing.’† He took account of Robert Ross’s praise of this play by saying, ‘There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest. To prove to posterity what a bad critic you are I shall dedicate the play to you.’ When it appeared in February 1899, the dedication ran:
To Robert Baldwin Ross
in appreciation
in affection
An Ideal Husband, published in July 1899, bore a dedication to another old associate:
To Frank Harris
A slight Tribute to his Power and Distinction as an Artist
His chivalry and nobility as a friend.
These publications brought Wilde a little money.
Sociability and Solitude
Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin? Why has destruction such a fascination?
Wilde had only enough energy to live out the day—or, rather, the night, for, like his mother, he did not get up till afternoon. Increasingly he sought assistance from stimulants, the favorite being the Dutch liqueur Advocaat, though he then switched to brandy and absinthe.‡ They did not make him drunk, but they offered consolation. So did the young men he picked up. ‘How evil it is to buy love,’ he remarked to a friend, ‘and how evil to sell it! And yet what purple hours one can snatch from that grey slowly moving thing we call Time.’35 One favorite was Maurice Gilbert, a young soldier in the marine infantry. They played many game of bezique together. Wilde was seen embracing Gilbert by Jacques Daurelle, of L’Echo de Paris, who accused him of having ‘retourné à son vomissement.’ Wilde merely replied, ‘Il est si beau. Regardez-le. Il a le profil de Bonaparte.’
Yet the lonely moments, intensified by sporadic penury, multiplied. An old friend, Carlos Blacker, fell away after an unpleasant sequence of events. Blacker, whom Wilde had regarded as ‘the best dressed man in London,’ and with whom he had often heard the chimes of midnight, remained loyal after the prison sentence. During the first summer of Wilde’s freedom, Constance went to stay with the Blackers at Freiburg. None of them liked Wilde’s going to Naples with Douglas, but when Wilde came to Paris in February 1898, Blacker visited him a number of times and they exchanged letters. Early in May, Wilde asked him for a loan, which Blacker gave; but something went wrong towards the end of the month. Ross heard from somebody—Wilde suspected it was Blacker—that the authorities were forcing Wilde to leave Paris. Evidently Blacker had shown signs of disapproval of Wilde’s behavior in Paris, which made Wilde think he had spread the ‘canard.’
The immediate cause may well have been the acquaintance Wilde had struck up, soon after he came to Paris, with Commandant Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, the man who had actually done the spying of which Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted. The Dreyfus case and the Wilde case had been tried within a few months of each other, and Dreyfus was sent to Devil’s Island about the time Wilde was sent to Pentonville. So Wilde had a particular interest in what all France was buzzing about. Esterhazy had succeeded in being whitewashed by a court-martial on 11 January 1898. Two days later, Wilde’s sometime friend Zola published his letter, ‘J’accuse,’ in L’Aurore. In February, just as The Ballad of Reading Gaol was being published, Zola was convicted of libel and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, but later escaped to England.
Esterhazy was one of those dubious crimin
al figures who continued to fascinate Wilde. At one of their meetings the Commandant said to him, in a Dantesque dialogue, ‘We are the two greatest martyrs of humanity—but I have suffered the most.’ ‘No,’ Wilde replied, ‘I have.’ ‘At the age of thirteen,’ Esterhazy went on, ‘I had a profound conviction that I would never be happy again.’ ‘And he never was,’ said Wilde in recounting the conversation.
Wilde wrote to Blacker about this meeting, perhaps not considering how much his friend had at heart the injustice Dreyfus had undergone. Since 1897, when the first reports of Dreyfus’s innocence reached Blacker, he had worked indefatigably to free him. By now he had learned from the Italian military attaché in Paris that the traitor was Esterhazy. In context, Wilde’s letter to him could hardly have been more maladroit. Epigrams such as Wilde is reported to have tossed off in conversation—‘Esterhazy is considerably more interesting than Dreyfus who is innocent. It’s always a mistake to be innocent. To be a criminal takes imagination and courage’—were all very well, but here was a man suffering on Devil’s Island.
Wilde and Esterhazy met several more times. On one occasion at which Frank Harris claimed to have been present (though it seems likely that Rowland Strong—the correspondent of The New York Times and the London Observer—was there instead), Esterhazy fell into his usual denunciation of Dreyfus. Wilde leaned across the table and said, ‘The innocent always suffer, Monsieur le Commandant; it is their métier. Besides, we are all innocent until we are found out. It is a poor, common part to play and within the compass of the meanest. The interesting thing surely is to be guilty and wear as a halo the seduction of sin.’ Esterhazy, so weary of his own falsehoods that he swallowed Wilde’s bait, suddenly said, ‘Why should I not make my confession to you? I will. It is I, Esterhazy, who alone am guilty. I put Dreyfus in prison, and all France cannot get him out.’ To his surprise his dinner companions merely laughed.36
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