Oscar Wilde
Page 81
During this summer, George Alexander, who had snubbed him at Cannes, came to see him with an offer of help. At the bankruptcy sale of Wilde’s effects, Alexander had bought the acting rights to The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan, and he now proposed to make Wilde some voluntary payments on these plays, which were beginning to be staged again, and to bequeath the rights to Wilde’s sons. Wilde was touched. He was offered a novel form of charity by Frank Harris, who said to him, ‘If you can’t write your play, why not let me do it for you, and we can share the royalties?’ Wilde signed an agreement to that effect, but did not tell Harris that he had signed agreements for the play with Charles Frohman on 4 October 1899, with Ada Rehan about 7 February 1900, and with Smithers. Harris efficiently put together the play, or a play, and Mr and Mrs Daventry was staged in the autumn of 1900 in London with some success. Wilde said, ‘You have not only stolen my play, you have spoiled it,’ and when he demanded his share of royalties, Harris explained that he had had to settle the claims of the others who had advanced money to Wilde on the unwritten play. Wilde agonized over what he considered Harris’s perfidy, though Harris as always was being generous to him.73 Harris’s perfidy replaced Douglas’s as something to ruminate about as the autumn proceeded.
Decline
I did not know It was such a pain to die: I thought that life Had taken all the agonies to itself.…
Everyone is born a King, and most people die in exile—like most Kings.
The other subject which became alarming in these months was his health. The mussel poisoning—as he persisted in calling it—which had begun in the summer of 1899 had brought great red splotches on his arms, chest, and back. It was impossible not to scratch himself, and he said to Ross, ‘I am more like a great ape than ever, but I hope you will give me a lunch and not a nut.’ One doctor thought it was neurasthenia, not mussel poisoning. There was little time left for diagnosis. It was not syphilis, for syphilitic rashes do not itch. But Wilde’s final illness was almost certainly syphilitic in origin. By late September 1900 he was bedridden, if his own calendar of events is accurate. Maurice a’Court Tucker, the thirty-two-year-old Embassy doctor, entirely misunderstood Wilde’s case, according to Ross, though in the last days he diagnosed it more precisely. But he was attentive, and made sixty-eight visits to his patient, beginning 27 September, as his bill dated 5 December 1900 shows. Wilde wrote to Harris on 26 September, ‘It is outrageous your leaving me as I am, ill in bed, operated on twice a day, in continuous pain, and without a penny.’74 Dr Tucker advised an operation on his ear. This time Wilde hesitated, because he had no money to pay, but on being warned that further delay might be dangerous, he borrowed from friends and had it performed by a surgeon named Cleiss in his hotel room on 10 October. It may have been, as a modern surgeon suggests, paracentesis of the eardrum or removal of polyps. Although Ross spoke of it as a minor operation, Wilde—perhaps to exaggerate his plight—spoke of it to Harris as a ‘most terrible’ operation, requiring a male nurse day and night, a doctor in the hotel, and much medication. Sir William Wilde had written in Aural Surgery (1853), ‘So long as otorrhoea [discharge from the ear] is present, we never can tell how, when or where it will end, or what it may lead to.’75 The ear was dressed daily by a man named Hennion. Wilde telegraphed the news of the operation to Ross, always his faithful friend in emergencies, and asked him to cross the Channel: ‘Terribly weak. Please come.’ He had written to Harris some time before, ‘The Morgue yawns for me. I go and look at my zinc bed there.’76 He had in fact visited the morgue. Thoughts of death were never far away, and his friends could not distinguish his real fears from his pleas for their sympathy. ‘One should live as if there were no death,’ he had written. ‘One should die as if one had never lived.’ But such prescriptions were easier to make in health.
Ross had planned to come at the end of the month, but on learning Wilde’s condition hurried over from London on 16 October, Wilde’s birthday. He found his friend in good spirits, speaking of his sufferings as dreadful but laughing about them. ‘Ah Robbie,’ he said, ‘when we are dead and buried in our porphyry tombs, and the trumpet of the Last Judgment is sounded, I shall turn and whisper to you, “Robbie, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.” ’77 Fortunately, just at this time he had plenty of company: Reggie Turner was in Paris, and Ross’s brother Alex. To Willie’s widow, Lily, and her new husband, Teixeira de Mattos, Wilde said, ‘I am dying beyond my means. I will never outlive the century. The English people would not stand for it. I am responsible for the failure of the Exhibition:c the English went away when they saw me there so well-dressed and happy. The English know this too, and they will not stand me any more.’ Lily remarked, a little unfeelingly, that her first husband, Willie, had made similar prognostications on his deathbed. To Alice Rothenstein Oscar remarked, ‘I can’t even afford to die.’ He had always said that, in the life of Napoleon, St Helena was ‘the greatest theme of all,’ and to St Helena he had come. He told Ross his drama had lasted too long.78
At midday on 29 October, Wilde for the first time in weeks left his bed; the doctor had told him he might do so sooner. After dinner in his room in the evening, he insisted on taking a walk with Ross. With some difficulty he made his way to a café, where he drank absinthe, then walked laboriously back. Wilde said to Claire de Pratz, ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.’ Ross said, ‘You’ll kill yourself, Oscar. You know the doctor said absinthe was poison for you.’ ‘And what have I to live for?’ Wilde asked.79 Next day, as Ross had feared, he had a cold and complained of great pain in his ear. Dr Tucker thought a drive in the Bois in the mild weather would do him no harm, but during their ride he told Ross he felt giddy, and they returned at once. His ear developed an abscess; he had otitis media. This the doctor now diagnosed, according to Turner, as a ‘tertiary symptom of an infection he had contracted when he was twenty.’ It led directly to meningitis, the legacy, as Ross said, of an attack of tertiary syphilis. The wound dresser (panseur) warned Ross that Wilde was getting worse. Ross arranged to see Dr Tucker privately on 6 November, and was somewhat reassured by his cheerful manner. But that afternoon Wilde declined to listen to the doctor’s views, and was greatly agitated. He said he did not care if he had only a short time to live; he asked Ross to pay off a portion of his debts, which came to £400, after his death. He asked him to see that De Profundis was one day published, for he felt it would to some extent put him right with the world. He felt he was having a relapse. The morphine which had been prescribed, and injected by Dupoirier, no longer helped him; only opium and chloral had any effect.80 He also drank champagne by day. The pain in his ear had increased, and the wound dresser poulticed the wound against Tucker’s orders.
Wilde said to Reggie Turner and Ross, who were in almost constant attendance, ‘I dreamt I was supping with the dead,’ to which Turner replied ‘My dear Oscar, you were probably the life and soul of the party.’ Wilde became high-spirited again and almost hysterical, but Ross was growing anxious. On 2 November he had gone to Père Lachaise; Wilde asked if he had picked out a burial place for him. Ross wrote a letter to Douglas on 6 November saying that Wilde was very ill, and troubled by his debts. On the following Monday, 12 November, Ross went to say goodbye to Wilde, having promised his mother to meet her in the south of France. Wilde begged him not to go away, saying that in the last few days he had felt a great change, and would never see Ross again. When Ross said he had to go, Wilde said, ‘Look out for some little cup in the hills near Nice where I can go when I am better, and where you can come and see me often.’81 He also talked about his children—about Vyvyan, who had suddenly said to his tutor, ‘I am a Catholic.’
Reggie Turner took Ross’s place at Wilde’s bedside, and it became clear in ten days that Wilde was getting no better. A consultation on 25 November held out little hope; the doctors feared that the inflammation would go to his brain. They stopped the morphine, though they kept up a
pretense of injecting it. On 27 November the doctors thought Wilde’s mind was gone, but he gathered himself to talk coherently again and seemed better.d ‘Poor Oscar has ceased to worry about anything except Tucker,’ Turner reported. From 26 to 28 November there were periods of delirium, and nonsense spoken in English and French. He suffered Turner to apply an ice pack to his head, but after forty-five minutes asked, ‘You dear little Jew, don’t you think that’s enough?’ He said suddenly, ‘Jews have no beautiful philosophy of life, but they are sympathique.’ He was less cooperative about mustard plasters on his feet, which he would not allow anyone to apply. ‘You ought to be a doctor,’ he said to Turner, ‘as you always want people to do what they don’t want to.’ A further operation was out of the question, and he was taking no nourishment. He asked Turner if he would get a Munster to cook for him and added that one steamboat was like another. The Munster was one of the ships that plied between Holyhead and Kingstown, so Wilde was imagining a return to Ireland. On the 27th, Turner wrote to Ross:
Today he asked for paraffin—finally we learned that he meant Patrie. When he got the newspaper he was overjoyed to see the picture of Kruger in a fur coat. He mispronounces certain words now. It is very hard to tend him, since he refuses to obey the doctor’s orders.
On the 28th he appeared slightly better, and declared that his unwritten play was worth 50 centimes.82 Turner would recall how in his last conversation he spoke of Gertrude Atherton’s novel Senator North, which Turner had put in his hands the week before: ‘This is a fine study of the American politician,’ he said, ‘and possesses the quality of truth in characterisation. What else has the lady written?’83 His temperature was very high, and Turner wired to Ross, ‘Almost hopeless.’ Ross caught an express from the south of France and arrived on the morning of the 29th to find Wilde thin, his flesh livid, his breathing heavy. He had a fortnight’s beard. He tried to speak to Ross and Turner, but could only press their hands. He put his own hand into his mouth to keep from crying out with pain.
Robert Ross hesitated about bringing a priest to his dying friend. He was not at all sure what Wilde’s wishes were. Long before Wilde had said, ‘Catholicism is the only religion to die in.’ And three weeks before his death he had said to a correspondent for the Daily Chronicle, ‘Much of my moral obliquity is due to the fact that my father would not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic side of the Church and the fragrance of its teaching would have cured my degeneracies. I intend to be received before long.’ (He had told Latourette the same thing.) Ross knew that Wilde had ‘kneeled like a real Roman’ to a priest in Notre Dame in Paris, to another in Naples, as to the Pope in Rome.84 But his views were scarcely orthodox. He said to Percival Almy that Christ was not divine: ‘It would place too broad a gulf between him and the human soul.’ He told George Ives that he hoped we would have tremendous passions in the next world. When another friend talked of life in the spirit, he replied, ‘There is no hell but this—a body without a soul, or a soul without a body.’85 Shortly after leaving prison, he said to Turner, ‘The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do.’ And when Ross fervently declared that Catholicism was true, Wilde said in an avuncular tone, ‘No, Robbie, it isn’t true.’ Wilde had known of Ross’s anxieties about conversion, and on one occasion asked to see a priest. But Ross decided he wasn’t serious, and was thereafter dubbed ‘the cherub with the flaming sword, forbidding my entrance into Eden.’86
The sight of Wilde’s pathetic state now decided Ross. As he later told Max Meyerfeld, when Wilde was unconscious he made up his mind to get him a priest so there could be formal obsequies and a ceremonious burial. Otherwise the body might be taken to the morgue and an autopsy performed. He rushed to the Passionist Fathers and brought back Father Cuthbert Dunne.e Ross asked Wilde if he wished to see Dunne, and Wilde, unable to speak, held up his hand. Dunne asked him if he wished to be received and he once more held up his hand. On this sign Dunne gave him conditional baptism, and absolved and anointed him. ‘He was never able to speak and we do not know whether he was altogether conscious,’ said Ross. ‘I did this for my own conscience and the promise I had made.’87 The application of sacred oils to his hands and feet may have been a ritualized pardon for his omissions or commissions, or may have been like putting a green carnation in his buttonhole.
At 5:30 a.m., to the consternation of Ross and Turner, a loud, strong death rattle began, like the turning of a crank. Foam and blood came from his mouth during the morning, and at ten minutes to two in the afternoon Wilde died. (The death certificate says the time was 2:00 p.m. on 30 November.) He had scarcely breathed his last breath when the body exploded with fluids from the ear, nose, mouth, and other orifices. The debris was appalling.f88 Dupoirier laid Wilde out, clothed in a white nightshirt and with a white sheet over him. Dunne put a rosary in his hand and palm branches over him. At Ross’s request, Maurice Gilbert took a flashlight photograph.
Douglas, to whom Ross had telegraphed, arrived on 2 December. He was chief mourner at the funeral, ‘un enterrement de 6e classe.’g The coffin was cheap, and the hearse was shabby. There were a number of wreaths, from Douglas, Adey, Turner, Ross, Adela Schuster, Clifton, Maurice Gilbert, Louis Wilkinson, Mellor, Teixeira de Mattos and his wife, Dr Tucker, and even from Dupoirier, ‘A mon Locataire.’ The Mercure de France also sent a wreath. At the funeral itself were Stuart Merrill, Paul Fort, Armand Point, Jean de Mitty (editor of Stendhal), Charles Lucas, Marcel Bataillant, Charles Gibleigh [?], Marius Boisson, Ernest La Jeunesse, Michel Tavera, Henry Davray, Frédéric Boutet, Léonard Sarluis, Henri Davenay. Raymond de la Tailhède and Jehan Rictus are said to have come every day to see Wilde in his last illness, and La Tailhède was at the funeral. Boutet says an American painter named Peters was there. Also attending were Dr Tucker, Ross, Turner, Pierre Louÿs (who had not seen Wilde for years), Anna de Brémont and her maid, an old servant girl of Constance, Mme Stuart Merrill in a heavy veil, an American woman, Miriam Aldrich, and a few journalists. The Reverend Cuthbert Dunne said the Requiem Mass at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, only a side door being opened for the mourners. Four carriages followed the hearse. (It bore the number 13.) The first was occupied by Ross, Douglas, Turner, and Dupoirier; the second by a priest and a choirboy; the third by Mme Stuart Merrill, Paul Fort, Davray, and Sarluis; the fourth by people Ross did not know. Gunnar Heiberg says he was at the grave. Gide said seven people followed the coffin, but Miriam Aldrich said there were fourteen, including herself.89 At the graveside there was an unpleasant scene, which none of the principals ever described—perhaps some jockeying for the role of principal mourner. When the coffin was lowered, Douglas almost fell into the grave.90 John Gray, who was not there, wrote a poem in 1931, ‘The Lord Looks at Peter,’ which is a kind of elegy for Wilde:
A night alarm; a weaponed crowd;
One blow, and with the rest I ran,
I warmed my hands, and said aloud:
I never knew the man.91
He was buried in the eleventh grave in the seventh row of the seventeenth section at Bagneux on 3 December. A simple stone, with an iron railing around it, bore the inscription from the Book of Job:
OSCAR WILDE
RIP Oct 16th 1854–Nov 30th 1900
Job xxix Verbis meis addere nihil audebant
et super illos stillebat eloquium meum.
That is, ‘To my words they durst add nothing, and my speech dropped upon them’ (Douai Version). Ross wrote to one of Wilde’s friends, ‘He was very unhappy, and would have become more unhappy as time went on.’92 Wilde’s humiliations were at an end.
* Wilde also inscribed copies: ‘Ernest Dowson from his friend and admirer the author Feby 98 Naples’; ‘Lionel Johnson from Oscar Wilde: 1898 Miserere Deus scriptori amico meo’; ‘To Laurence Irving with the compliments of the author Naples ’98 Feb’; ‘To York Powell with the compliments of the author Naples ’98’; ‘R. C. Tillingham from the author in gratitude and affection Osca
r Wilde Paris ’98’; ‘Robert Buchanan, from the author, in admiration and gratitude. Paris ’98.’ Copies also went to Walter Sickert, Ross, Turner, Adey, Rowland Fothergill, Fritz von Thaulow, Will Rothenstem, Charles Ricketts, Beerbohm, O’Sullivan, Shaw, Archer, Henry Harland, and Headlam.