But the next day Strong sent an article dated 29 March to The New York Times, revealing certain Dreyfusard plans to expose Esterhazy’s guilt. Its publication was preceded by a letter signed ‘Un Diplomate’ in Le Siècle on 4 April, to the same effect, which Blacker was assumed by the anti-Dreyfusards to have written. They launched a smear campaign against him in their newspapers. Blacker thought that Wilde had informed them of his work behind the scenes, and it is possible that he had spoken indiscreetly about Blacker’s business activities in England. Then Blacker wrote two letters to Wilde: the first objected to his continuing to associate with Douglas. Wilde did not reply. The second accused him of writing the anonymous attacks on Blacker. Wilde wrote at once ‘a strong letter’ demanding an apology. None came. It was the end of a long friendship.
There were not many people on whom Wilde could depend for companionship. Gide, a likely candidate in view of their long acquaintance, saw him only twice. The first time was by accident, when he heard a voice call and saw it came from Wilde, sitting outside a café. Gide went over, intending to sit facing Wilde, with his back to the passers-by; but Wilde insisted he sit beside him: ‘I’m so alone these days.’ After a pleasant conversation, Wilde suddenly said, ‘You must know—I’m absolutely without resources.’ Gide gave him some money and they arranged another meeting. That time Gide reproached him for having left Berneval without, as he had promised, writing a play. Wilde replied, ‘One should not reproach someone who has been struck.’ They did not meet again.37
Other incidents fill in a sorry sequence. Henry Davray, Wilde’s translator, passed in front of the Café de Flore one day in May 1898 when Wilde beckoned to him and insisted on his sitting down for a moment. Davray thought his appearance so broken-down and harassed that he yielded, though he was in a great hurry to keep an appointment. Wilde said he had fled the boredom of his hotel room. He became less troubled when Davray sat down, and talked about all sorts of things, at the same time insisting that Davray not go away and leave him. In the end Davray had to telephone to cancel his appointment. Wilde was so afraid of being alone that when Davray got up to go he went with him to the Luxembourg, walked through the gardens with him, and made him sit down at another café, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At last he confessed his embarrassment: ‘I haven’t a sou,’ he said, then laughed. ‘I’ll give you security for some money,’ and he took from his pocket a copy of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which he inscribed to his friend. Another writer, Frédéric Boutet, tells how in July 1899 he and a friend were walking along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and came upon Wilde seated at a café in torrential rain, which poured down on him, turning his straw hat into a candlesnuffer and his coat into a sponge, for the waiter, anxious to be rid of his last customer, had not only piled up the chairs but wound up the awning. Wilde could not leave, because he could not pay for the three or four drinks he had taken to avoid going back to his squalid lodgings. As he wrote to Frances Forbes-Robertson, ‘Like dear St Francis of Assisi I am wedded to Poverty: but in my case the marriage is not a success; I hate the bride that has been given to me.’ And to Frank Harris, ‘A hole in the trousers may make one as melancholy as Hamlet, and out of bad boots a Timon may be made.’38
He could still turn his plight to farce. His friend Jean-Joseph Renaud heard from him how one night, after having gone as usual from the Calisaya to a series of other cafés, he was walking home through the Paris streets. Crossing the Pont des Arts, he stopped to look at the green water rivering enticingly below. Suddenly he noticed a poorly dressed man near him, also looking down at the river. ‘Hein, mon pauvre, êtes-vous désespéré?’ he asked. ‘Non, monsieur,’ came the answer, ‘je suis coiffeur.’§39 But to Maurice Maeterlinck and Georgette Leblanc, who invited him to dine with them in May 1898, he said he was in mourning for his life. ‘I have lived. Yes, I have lived. I drank the sweet, I drank the bitter, and I found the bitterness in the sweetness and the sweetness in the bitterness.’ He added, ‘The cruelty of a prison sentence starts when you come out.’ Maeterlinck mentioned that Huysmans had entered a monastery, and Wilde said approvingly, ‘It must be delightful to see God through stained glass windows. I may even go to a monastery myself.’ When Maeterlinck offered him a wine not to be found in England, Wilde commented wryly, ‘The English have a miraculous power to change wine into water.’‖ In prison, he told them, he was happy, ‘because there I found my soul.’ What he had written there, he said, would one day be read by the world, ‘the message of my soul to the souls of men.’
But for Hugh Chesson he had a more melancholy fable: ‘A man saw a being, which hid its face from him, and he said, “I will compel it to show its face.” It fled as he pursued, and he lost it, and his life went on. At last his pleasure drew him into a long room, where tables were spread for many, and in a mirror he saw the being whom he had pursued in youth. “This time you shall not escape me,” he said, but the being did not try to escape, and hid its face no more. “Look!” it cried, “and now you will know that we cannot see each other again, for this is the face of your own soul, and it is horrible.” ’40
A Widower
It is difficult for me to laugh at life, as I used to.
Constance Wilde submitted to a second operation on her spine at the beginning of April 1898, and on the 7th she died, at the age of forty. Douglas came to console her husband, who told him, ‘I dreamt she came here to see me, and I kept saying, “Go away, go away, leave me in peace.” ’ The next day he had learned that she was dead. His reaction was complicated: he begged Robert Ross to come over because he was ‘in great grief,’ but proved not to be when his friend arrived. On the other hand, he said to Frank Harris with elegiac finality, ‘My way back to hope and a new life ends in her grave. Everything that happens to me is symbolic and irrevocable.’41 Access to his sons was not granted. He now received £150 a year from her estate without conditions. If he had not had a taste for luxury, it might have been enough to live on. A letter from Ross to Smithers, written during his Paris visit, gives a sense of Wilde at this time, still capable of resilience, still unable to launch out into any future:
My dear Smithers, I ought to have written to you ages ago, but it is quite impossible with Oscar to get anything done.… You will have heard of Mrs Wilde’s death. Oscar of course did not feel it at all. It is rather appalling for him as his allowance ceases and I do not expect his wife’s trustees will continue it. He is in very good spirits and does not consume too many. He is hurt because you never write.…
… Oscar has only seen Douglas once. I went to see his lordship. He is less interested in other people than ever before, especially Oscar. So I really think that alliance will die a natural death.
Oscar is very amusing as usual but is very abstracted at times. He says that The Ballad of Reading Gaol doesn’t describe his prison life, but his life at Naples with Bosie and that all the best stanzas were the immediate result of his existence there.42
Ross was relieved to find that Wilde and Douglas were living apart, but Wilde’s relations with all his friends, including Ross, were less close. Ross remarked to Frank Harris after Wilde’s death that he had never felt that Wilde really liked him. His own attitude towards Wilde was equally complicated. There would be periods during the next three years when Ross kept his distance, as when, in September and October of 1898, he and Reggie Turner took a trip to Florence, Rome, and Naples, during which they avoided stopping to see Wilde in Paris. Fortunately, Charles Conder had Wilde visit him at Chantemerle, near La Roche Guyon (Seine et Oise), in late September. Conder wrote to Mrs Dalhousie Young,
For some time after I saw you it was very difficult to do anything for a good many people came and Oscar stayed here some time. I think some people were rather annoyed at my bringing him—but he turned Chantemerle into a charming little state made himself king and possessed himself of Blunt’s boat—for his barge—and got little boys to row him from Chantemerle to La Roche every day there he took his aperitif and returned laden w
ith duckham & wine usually which served as extras to the frugal dinners we get here.
He is much more serious than when we saw him in Dieppe—very depressed at times poor fellow.
He says with so much sorrow this [sic] he can never go into society again and feels I think that he is rather old for the volatile poets of the ‘quartier.’43
The only one of the group permanently resident in Paris was Alfred Douglas, and Wilde was very glad of what company he could get from him. In May 1898 Wilde had an operation on his throat, the nature of which is unknown, but during this month he saw much of Douglas. To furnish Douglas’s new flat in the avenue Kléber, Wilde went to the Paris branch of Maples and with £40 bought suitable furniture, including a green bed. Douglas managed this outlay, but otherwise he kept himself poor by gambling on the races with the money he got from his mother. ‘He has a faculty of spotting the loser,’ Wilde wrote, ‘which, considering that he knows nothing at all about horses, is perfectly astounding.’44 He told Claire de Pratz that one day he got into the Montparnasse-Etoile tram to go to Alfred Douglas, in the avenue Kléber. He suddenly realized that he had forgotten his wallet, or spent his last sou. On the tram he loudly confessed it and asked, ‘Will anybody lend me 30 centimes?’ Total silence followed. Then he made the driver stop, got down, hailed a cab, and sat down in triumph while he waved ironically to the tram passengers, knowing that Douglas’s porter would pay his coachman. ‘The moral of the story,’ said Wilde, ‘is that people have more confidence in someone who takes a cab than in someone who uses a public conveyance.’ Saix also reports a story of Wilde that perhaps dates from this time. ‘A young man in London contracted large debts and was living a dissolute life. His friends resolved to rescue him. They joined in paying his bills and gave him a hundred pounds with which he promised to go to Australia and get a fresh start. Two months later, one of his friends came upon the young prodigal in Piccadilly, and said indignantly, “You here? You took a hundred pounds to go to Australia, and you’re still here! You’re breaking your word.” The other replied by asking only, “Tell me, old boy, if you had a hundred pounds, would you go to Australia?” ’45 He was perhaps recalling his father’s unsuccessful effort to pack Mary Travers off to that country.
During this spring of 1898, Douglas spent about half his time at Nogentsur-Marne, where the hôtelier indulged the delay in paying his bills. A letter from Douglas to Wilde on 22 July attempts to extract a louis from him. In June and July Wilde went there too. Douglas had with him the Napoleonesque Maurice Gilbert, now his lover but fascinating to all the group, the darling of Ross and Turner in London as of Douglas and Wilde in Paris. In August and September Douglas went with his mother to Trouville and then to Aix, where once again he lost all his money gambling. In this year he published a book of nonsense verse, and seems to have thought the moment was propitious for his rehabilitation in England. He sounded out the authorities, and was sufficiently encouraged to go back in November.
Douglas now made his supreme effort at reconciliation with his father. He wrote a letter to a cousin, Algernon Bourke, saying he was ready to express contrition. He clung to shreds of his old friendship: ‘I cannot undertake not to see Wilde from time to time. I can, however, give you and my father my word that my relations with him are entirely harmless and only dictated by my feeling that I cannot abandon him now that he is poor and broken after being his friend when he was rich and flourishing.’ He gave Wilde money when he could, but he had promised his mother never again to live under the same roof with him. He asked his father to ‘consider the sort of dog’s life I have had for the last few years and to meet me half way.’ Bourke showed the letter to Queensberry, and within a day reported to Bosie that his father would be happy to see him.46
Queensberry’s own life had been much affected by the Wilde trials. His initial pride at having won a glorious victory over subverters of morality, over a son and a son’s defiant lover, had soured as lifelong friends began to avoid his company. The Marquess’s brief spell of respectability as defender of public morals bore no relation to his career as prizefighter, gambler, adulterer, and atheist. His money troubles had increased: Wilde had gone bankrupt but Queensberry had had to sell his great house at Kinmount, where Bosie had grown up; his paintings by Kneller, Lely, Stubbs, Reynolds, Gilbert Stuart, and others; and other property. He was on wretched terms with all his children except Edith, who had been married in April 1898 to St John Fox-Pitt. His first wife and he had not spoken for years. Bosie’s letter sounded sincere, and his father agreed to meet him in the smoking room of Bailey’s Hotel, where he was living. It was a scene of high emotion, with Bosie contrite and the Marquess calling him ‘my poor darling boy,’ embracing him with tears, and promising to restore his allowance. He even wrote on the spot a letter to his financial manager arranging it. But he had second thoughts—the bitterness of the old quarrel was not so easily blotted out—and a week later he wrote saying he would not give Bosie a penny until he knew exactly what his relations were with ‘that beast Wilde.’ Bosie, irascible when in health, doubly so because of influenza, retorted that there could be no peace between them, and renounced the allowance as he had done four years before.
Months afterwards he saw his father in a cab, looking so haggard that he was seized with compunction. From friends he learned that his father thought that the ‘Oscar-Wilders’ were persecuting him, shouting abusive epithets at him and driving him out of various hotels. Bosie wrote to his sister Edith’s husband declaring that he felt nothing but kindness and affection for his father and regretted the feverish letter he had written. This letter was shown to the Marquess, who may well have felt that there was too much bad blood to mop up; he made no comment.
Wilde had his own black days to record. First there was Beardsley, dead at twenty-five on 16 March 1898. Wilde, shocked, wrote to Smithers, ‘there is something macabre and tragic in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower.’ The next death was his brother Willie, on 13 March 1899, the news of which reached Wilde in Switzerland. He expressed sympathy for Willie’s wife, but could not bring himself to mourn his brother. Dowson’s death, on 23 February 1900, hurt him more. ‘Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene,’ he wrote to Smithers. ‘I hope bay-leaves will be laid on his tomb, and rue, and myrtle too, for he knew what love is.’47 His sense of the nineties’ coming to a doomed end was sharpened by these deaths.
Homelessness
But all is right: the gods hold the world on their knees. I was made for destruction. My cradle was rocked by the Fates.
During Douglas’s absence in London, Wilde was approached by Frank Harris with a renewed proposal for a trip. He had refused to go with him to the Pyrenees, and when Harris took offense, wrote to him, ‘You are a man of dominant personality; … you require response, or you annihilate. The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the débris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor.’48 He told Mrs Weldon, ‘His [Harris’s] treatment of the women of Shakespeare would have made Falstaff weep.’ Now Harris reminded him that he had said he could not write in Paris during the winter months, but that he would write as naturally as the bird sings in a warmer climate. Harris was about to sell The Saturday Review for £40,000, and offered to treat Wilde to three months on the Côte d’Azur. When he arrived in Paris in mid-December and proposed to leave in three days’ time, Wilde stalled for three extra days, repeatedly asking Harris for money to pay his ‘debts.’ On Sunday night at the Gare de Lyon he kept his rendezvous with Harris, but was romantically inconsolable at having had to part with Maurice Gilbert, for whom he had bought a nickel-plated bicycle with Harris’s money. This incident set
the tone for many discussions during the next weeks, Wilde insisting that male beauty was finer than female, women being dumpy, as Schopenhauer had said, while Harris defended the Venus de Milo against Antinous. Wilde now spoke habitually for ‘Uranian’ love, and he does so redundantly in his letters to Ross, as well as in the conversations reported by Harris. The best defensive aphorism was ‘A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys.’49
Such were the themes as the two friends in December 1898 talked at the Hôtel des Bains at La Napoule, on the sea near Cannes. Harris’s idea was that La Napoule would be quiet and restful, and good for concentration, while Cannes would be only ten miles away to relieve ennui. In the end, Harris spent much of his time in Monaco, buying a hotel and a restaurant, so Wilde was left to his own devices. He formed a close association with an Englishman, Harold Mellor, who delighted in his conversation. On one of his infrequent visits to La Napoule, Harris overheard Wilde say to Mellor that his own place in society had been quite different from Harris’s, that Harris was proud of having met Balfour, whereas Balfour was proud of having met Wilde. It was the kind of social boasting that Wilde had stooped to even in better days, with his constant insistence on playing gentleman.50
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