The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  The period between Oscar's arrest and his imprisonment was the high water mark of the love affair between Oscar and Bosie. Never had their love seemed so sweet and so selfless, so mysterious and so profound. And never had Oscar's faith in the wonder and nobility of Uranian love been so steadfast. Oscar put his feelings into words in a series of moving and meltingly beautiful letters to Bosie. `Every great love has its tragedy, and now ours has too,' he wrote just before he was sentenced:

  but to have known and loved youu with such profound devotion, to have had you for a part of my life, the only part I now consider beautiful, is enough for me. My passion is at a loss for words, but you can understand me, you alone. Our souls were made for one another, and by knowing yours through love, mine has transcended many evils, understood perfection, and entered into the divine essence of things.

  Oscar's great transforming love for Bosie explains why he never took any of the many chances he had throughout March, April and May to flee abroad. His friends pleaded with him to flee. Sherard urged him to jump bail. Frank Harris announced that he had a steam yacht ready and waiting at Erith in Kent to take him to France. Constance journeyed up specially from Torquay and, with tears in her eyes, begged him to flee. And from France Bosie wrote daily urging him to fly. Certainly, Oscar was tempted to flee on several occasions. The prospect of spending years, and perhaps the rest of his life, as a convict, was so daunting that he could hardly bear to think about it. But in the end, he always chose to stay. He knew that by fleeing abroad he would be renouncing his epic love for Bosie. Bosie had, Oscar said, taught him `the divine secret of the world'. To hide, to run away to safety would be to lose the divine secret, to unlearn what had been so painfully learnt. It would be a betrayal of love. `A dishonoured name, a hunted life are not for me to whom you have been revealed on that high hill where beautiful things are transfigured,' he told Bosie.

  Sacrifice, suffering and death had always been part of Oscar's vision of a great love. It was only through sacrifice and suffering - and sometimes death - that the high hill where beautiful things are transfigured could be ascended and the divine secret of love could be revealed. `Pleasure hides love from us but pain reveals it in its essence,' he told Bosie. Oscar knew that he would suffer and perhaps even die in prison but he was prepared to pay the price - the highest price to find the philosopher's stone of love, to witness the spiritual alchemy which transformed the base metal of human experience into spiritual gold.

  Besides which, Oscar's love for Bosie was part of a wider Uranian Cause which saw itself as embattled and besieged by what George Ives called `all the powers of evil and ignorance'. Ives, Oscar, Bosie and the other initiates of the Order of Chaeronea were a modern-day Theban Band; warriors and lovers willing and prepared to embrace death rather than surrender. Oscar saw his trials and imprisonment not only as necessary tortures, rites of purification on his revelatory ascent towards the summit of the high hill, but also as trials and tests by fire and water of his Uranian faith. He had lived his Uranian faith and now he was ready to die for it. `To have altered my life,' he wrote to Robbie Ross three years later, `would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble - more noble than other forms.'

  Oscar saw his trials and imprisonment as a `monstrous martyrdom', but nevertheless a glorious one. Seven weeks after Oscar's arrest, in a letter to Henry Labouchere, Bosie declared that Oscar had deliberately chosen martyrdom:

  Mr Oscar Wilde is fulfilling another martyrdom for nature's step-children which if it bears fruit as I think it will, in an outburst of educated feeling which has been smouldering in England for years against laws of senseless cruelty and barbarity will not have been in vain.

  Oscar sensed that his trial was historic, the first great battle of the modern age between Uranian love and an uncomprehending, persecuting world. Though he may lose the battle, Oscar hoped and prayed that he - or his Sacred Band of fellow Uranians and their descendants - would at last win the war.

  Oscar's second trial began on Wednesday 22 May before the seventy-sevenyear-old Mr Justice Wills, who, by a strange coincidence, also lived in Tite Street and must have known Oscar by sight. The day before, in a separate trial, Alfred Taylor had been found guilty of gross indecency with both Charles and William Parker. As four of the eight counts of Oscar's indictment concerned acts of gross indecency with Charles Parker, it was almost certain that Oscar, too, would be found guilty. The trial lasted four days and went over much the same ground as the previous trials. Sir Edward Clarke departed from his usual grave demeanour and went as far as he possibly could to suggest that there was some sort of conspiracy against Oscar. He reminded Lockwood that he was not in court `to try to get a verdict by any means possible'. Clarke also criticised the witnesses who `in testifying on behalf of the Crown, have secured immunity for past rogueries and indecencies'.

  Oscar gave evidence, but he seemed weary and exhausted by the process. He was resigned to the prospect of prison, as he made clear in his last, exquisite letter as a free man to Bosie. `My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies,' he wrote:

  It is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter waters sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you.

  His soul, he said, was `the soul of a man who now weeps in hell, and yet carries heaven in his heart':

  O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the worlds of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration and joy.

  The jury was out for two hours. Oscar stood as they filed back into the court. There was a profound, expectant hush. Oscar's face was white with anxiety. When the first of the seven verdicts of `Guilty' was delivered, Oscar clutched at the front rail of the dock and his body seemed to shake convulsively. Mr Justice Wills did not mince his words in passing sentence on Oscar and on Alfred Taylor, who had joined him in the dock. `It is the worst case I have ever tried,' he said. It was impossible to doubt that the prisoner Wilde had been at the `centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men'. Under the circumstances, he said, he would be expected to pass the severest sentence the law allows: two years with hard labour. `In my judgement it is totally inadequate for such a case as this,' he added.

  There were a few gasps at the sentence and some cries of `Shame' from the public gallery. Oscar seemed temporarily stunned by the sentence. `And I?' he said hoarsely. `May I say nothing, my lord?' But Mr Justice Wills merely waved his hand dismissively to the warders who hurried the two prisoners out of sight. Oscar's trials were over. But trials of an entirely different kind awaited him in prison.

  Afoul

  and dark latrine

  -Anonymous street ballad

  Though he had spent four weeks on remand in Holloway, Oscar was utterly unprepared for life as a convict. Many years earlier, he had compared the experience of prison to `a sickness or a spiritual retreat'. `It purifies and ennobles,' he wrote, `and the soul emerges from it stronger and more contained.' Now he was about to find out that there was nothing spiritual about prison, that it contaminated rather than purified, degraded rather than ennobled.

  Oscar was transported to Pentonville Prison by Black Maria. On arrival there, he was marched to the reception office where his clothes were removed and his personal belongings taken away and catalogued. He was weighed and measured, and then taken to a room where he was told to strip and immerse himself in a large vat of brownish water which smelt strongly of disinfectant. `It was a fiendish nightmare, more horrible than anything I had ever dreamed of,' Oscar later told Frank Harris. `They made me undress before them and get into some filthy water they called a bath and dry myself with a damp brown rag and put on this livery of shame.' Next came the prison barber where, once again, Oscar had to strip while his hair was cropped and then closely shaved to remove any possibility of headlice entering the prison. According to an eye witness, he looked `an a
wful sight, more like a well-to-do butcher who has served a sentence for fraud than the great dramatic genius of the nineteenth century'.

  After the relative comfort of his large, light and airy `special' cell at Holloway, into which he had been allowed to bring rented furniture, Oscar's cell in Pentonville came as a shock. It was indescribably bleak. `The cell was appalling,' Oscar told Harris. `I could hardly breathe in it.' There was only a plank bed - a bare board with no mattress, raised a few inches above the floor - where Oscar would be forced to sleep for the next three months. He was given a sheet, two blankets and a coverlet. There was a small bucket in which he could urinate and defecate, which had to be slopped out each morning. Often, these buckets became so full and overflowing that many warders reported retching when they first opened the cells in the mornings.

  Oscar was examined by the prison doctor and passed as sound for `first-class hard labour'. Hard labour was designed to punish the prisoner physically and, perhaps more importantly, to elevate him morally. Oscar was forty when he went to prison. He had taken no exercise for years and was in no fit state to undergo a gruelling programme of hard labour. During his first month in prison, he was expected to spend no less than six hours each day on the treadwheel, a giant fixed wheel, like the wheel of a watermill, only propelled by the steps of prisoners rather than by the flow of water. It was a pointless exercise, rather like climbing an endless flight of stairs, and never reaching the top. Prisoners were expected to tread the wheel twenty minutes on and five minutes off. For the first three days, Oscar trod the wheel diligently and without complaint. On the fourth day he succumbed to a violent and prolonged attack of diarrhoea. `The food turned my stomach,' he told Harris. `The smell and sight of it were enough':

  I did not eat anything for days and days and days, I could not even swallow the bread; and the rest of the food was uneatable; I lay on the so-called bed and shivered all night long ... After some days I got so hungry I had to eat a little, nibble at the outside of the bread, and drink some of the liquid; whether it was tea, coffee or gruel I could not tell. As soon as I really ate anything it produced violent diarrhoea, and I was ill all day and all night.

  When he eventually came out of prison, Oscar met George Ives in Paris and talked extensively about his prison experiences. `The first year of prison killed me, body and soul,' he told Ives. `Prison,' he said, `was a four-fold torture: insomnia from the plank bed, starvation, "sanitation", insanity.' Ives went on to explain in detail what `dear Oscar' had meant by `sanitation':

  It seems that diarrhoea is common if not universal from the prison food. And after rpm no man may leave his cell until the next morning upon any pretext. There are three utensils: one for washing, one for drinking and water, one for purposes of nature. The last only may be used for that purpose and it is too small, so that with bowel trouble pressing there's no means of evacuation.

  Oscar's diarrhoea was accompanied by what newspaper reports called `mental prostration and melancholy'. According to the Morning of 6 June, the prison authorities paid little attention to his condition:

  It was put down to what is known as `a prison head' - a complaint most new prisoners suffer from owing to the preliminary dose of bromide of potassium. This drug is said to produce in some people extreme melancholia. As soon as Wilde's case was diagnosed, the doctor discontinued the use of the drug, but his condition did not improve, and he was thought to be in such a bad state that he was removed to the infirmary, where he was placed in a bed surrounded by screens, and watched night and day.

  Not for the last time, the prison authorities were worried that Oscar might attempt to take his own life. There was no doubt that he had strong suicidal impulses. `For the first six months I was so dreadfully unhappy that I longed to kill myself,' Oscar told Andre Gide after he came out of prison.

  It was rumoured in some newspapers that Oscar had already become insane. News of his mental collapse reached the ears of Asquith, the Home Secretary, who had been a friend of Oscar's before the fall. Asquith ordered an immediate medical examination. This was carried out by the prison's Medical Officer, who denied that Oscar had been placed in the prison infirmary or in the padded cell kept for prisoners who were insane or violent. Oscar's condition had `given no anxiety', the Medical Officer reported to Asquith:

  He was placed under observation on first reception for seven days to be specially watched, as is frequently done with prisoners owing to depression and mental strain of their trial and sentence. With the exception of a little relaxed throat, for which he had been treated, he is in good health and perfectly sane.

  But still the rumours persisted that Wilde's physical and mental health were deteriorating. Some of the more experienced prison officers doubted that Oscar would survive his two-year sentence.

  As Oscar's health deteriorated, that of Lord Rosebery improved dramatically. Right up to the time of Oscar's imprisonment towards the end of May, it seemed that Rosebery's health was worsening. Newspapers reported that Rosebery's `memory suddenly failed him in a very painful fashion, leaving him unable to proceed with his argument' in the middle of a speech at the National Liberal Club on 8 May. `What was I saying?' he floundered. `What was it I have just said?' To his audience, Rosebery's lapse of memory was disturbing and suggested that he was losing his grip on reality. In the week of Oscar's second trial, the press was full of stories of the Prime Minister's illhealth, and there were strong rumours that he was on the brink of resignation. Then, on Tuesday 28 May, just three days after Oscar's conviction, Sir Edward Hamilton recorded in his diary, `Rosebery seems better.' On the face of it, it seemed a miracle. But to Bosie, Trelawny Backhouse, More Adey and others who believed that there was a government conspiracy behind Oscar's prosecution and conviction, Rosebery's sudden and coincidental return to health and spirits lent further weight to their case.

  Suspicions were fuelled when, after sacrificing Oscar to save himself, a remorseful Rosebery sought to help the man he had destroyed, or so Trelawny Backhouse claimed. Rosebery's closest political ally was Richard Burdon Haldane QC MP, who had recently served on a Parliamentary enquiry into the country's penal system. On 14 June Haldane went, supposedly at Rosebery's request, to Pentonville to see Oscar. `I had a long talk with him,' Haldane wrote to his mother the same day. `He broke down and cried. I think I put a little hope into his heart and have been able to make some arrangements for him.' Four days later, on 16 June, Haldane spent the morning closeted with Rosebery before going on to meet with `the family of Oscar Wilde' in the afternoon. Haldane does not specify which members of the family were present, but Constance was almost certainly there. She had not, in fact, gone abroad but had stayed in London for Oscar's second trial and for the first weeks of his imprisonment. Other family members may well have included Constance's brother Otho and Oscar's brother Willie. `This is a sordid case,' Haldane told his mother after the meeting, `and one wishes to lighten the burden as far as one can.'

  `Make arrangements' and `lightening the burden'. Was Haldane carrying out the wishes of his friend and political ally, Rosebery? Certainly what fragments of correspondence remain strongly suggest that Haldane's role during Oscar's imprisonment was much more substantial than he later admitted publicly. He seems to have acted as Oscar's unofficial advocate, quietly pressurising the prison authorities to grant him extra privileges and liaising with Oscar's friends and family, advising them what steps to try and take to secure his early release. `I have been in private communication with the authorities,' Haldane wrote to More Adey in December 1895. Four weeks later, he wrote to Adey again in terms which suggest that there were behindthe-scenes efforts being made on the part of the government to look after Oscar's health and well-being. `The authorities are looking carefully after him but they must not be thought to be giving differential treatment further than his condition requires,' wrote Haldane. When Adey sent a copy of this letter to Oscar's friend Adela Schuster, or `Miss Tiny' as Oscar had dubbed her on account of her largeness, he swore her to secre
cy and asked her to destroy the letter.

  The following year Adey wrote to Constance suggesting that she make a private appeal to the Home Secretary for Oscar's release. A draft of Adey's letter survives, written in his spidery handwriting with many crossings-out and emendations:

  For the last 10 months I have been working hard to obtain Oscar's release and was in private communication with the Home Office as long ago as last November. Circumstances have since placed me in further communication with several Members of Parliament and other influential people who have already done [much] on Oscar's behalf since his imprisonment. They urge me to represent to you that a private letter from you to the Home Secretary is likely, especially at this particular time, to have great weight with him. At the same time, they impress upon me the necessity for strict secrecy concerning any appeals, as being essential to their success.

  It is clear from this letter that there was a considerable amount of secret political activity to try and free Oscar, or at least to curtail his sentence, as well as to ease the terrible daily discomforts of prison life.