The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  I am well aware that in convict prisons especially this vice is prevalent. When I was at Dartmoor, I heard the warders speak about it. In fact these sexual problems presented a never-ceasing worry to the officials and necessitated constant vigilance.

  A year and a half in prison had taught Oscar how to hold conversations with other prisoners without seeming to move his lips. Oscar befriended several prisoners, usually younger and handsome. `There are many good nice fellows here,' he told Reggie Turner:

  I have seven or eight friends - they are capital chaps. Of course we can't speak to each other, except a word now and then at exercise, but we are great friends, they take their punishment so well, so cheerfully.

  One of these friends was a young man called Harry Elvin who was, Oscar wrote, `the one I liked best; a very handsome soldier of twenty years of age'. With the help of the obliging Warder Martin, Oscar communicated with his friends by notes written on torn scraps of paper. Less than a month after Oscar's release, Robert Sherard wrote to Oscar's old friend Carlos Blacker, who had been one of Oscar's witnesses at his wedding, and to whom Oscar had dedicated The Happy Prince and Other Tales. `I had some interesting things to tell you about Oscar's life in prison,' Sherard wrote:

  Would you believe that he actually nouait une intrigue in prison with one of his fellow-prisoners, sending his billets doux through the friendly warder?

  Forty years later, Sherard returned to this subject, writing to A.J.A. Symons about:

  the prisoners in Reading whom O.W. admired and with whom he carried on a surreptitious correspondence, getting Martin to `shove' notes from him under the doors of their cells. Two years hard labour had not been able to cure him of his urge to fondle and caress (without any satisfaction to himself but a mental one) males who appealed to the woman he fancied himself to be when the homosexual craze got hold of him.

  Though Warder Martin denied delivering messages to other prisoners on Oscar's behalf, a few fragmentary notes written to him by Oscar from his cell in Reading seem to suggest the opposite. `You must get me his address some day - he's such a good fellow,' he wrote to Martin in April 1897:

  Of course I would not for worlds get such a friend as you into any danger. I quite understand your feelings. You must get A.3.2 to come out and clean on Saturday morning and I will give him my note then myself.

  On the back of this scrap, Warder Martin replied, `I will ask him verbally for his address if that would suit you as well.'

  After his release Oscar sent money to several of his fellow convicts through Robbie Ross. Robbie kept an account book recording payments of between £1 and £3 to nine former inmates of Reading Gaol: Fleet, Ford, Stone, Eaton, Cruttenden, Bushell, Mullword, Smith and Langley. Oscar wrote letters to each of them, some of them undoubtedly flirtatious. `Please be careful not to mix the letters,' Oscar instructed Robbie. `They are all nuanced.' At least one of these friendships was not sexually motivated. Arthur Cruttenden visited Oscar in France after his release. `I had better say candidly that he is not "a beautiful boy"':

  He is twenty-nine years of age, but looks a little older, as he inherits hair that catches silver lines early: he has also a slight, but still real, moustache. I am thankful and happy to be able to say that I have no feeling for him, nor could have, other than affection and friendship. He is simply a manly simple fellow, with the nicest smile and the pleasantest eyes, and I have no doubt a confirmed `mulierast'.

  `Mulierast' was the opposite of `pederast', and meant a lover of women, rather than a lover of boys. Robbie had coined the word from the Latin word `mulier', meaning a woman or a wife. Oscar was delighted with Robbie's invention and used it frequently.

  As the time of his release from prison drew nearer, Oscar and his friends had to decide on his future. The most pressing question was where he was going to live. To stay in England would, of course, be impossible. Oscar had hinted to Bosie in De Profundis that they might meet soon after he came out of prison, perhaps in June, `when all the roses are in their wanton opulence', in `some quiet foreign town like Bruges'. But Robbie Ross and More Adey had very different ideas. Prompted by the hatred of Bosie that Oscar had expressed throughout his first eighteen months in prison, Robbie and More had agreed that it would be best for Oscar to have nothing more to do with him. It was hard for them not to feel that Bosie was in some way responsible for the appalling situation Oscar now found himself in. And for Robbie, at least, the issue was further clouded by a complex blend of loyalty to Oscar and jealousy of Bosie. More Adey signalled his and Robbie's attitudes at the end of a draft of a long letter he wrote to Constance in July 1896:

  As I have mentioned the name of Alfred Douglas, and as I think that you know he is a friend of mine, I ought to tell you that I and the very few other friends whom he had in common with Oscar, have told him that we should be sorry to see a renewal of (Oscar's and his) their intimacy, and that considering Oscar's expressed wishes to the contrary we could not do anything to forward any renewal, even though Alfred Douglas on his part might wish it.

  `On the contrary,' he continued. `We are anxious to forward Oscar's desire to conform to your wishes and atone to you in any way he can for the great sorrow he has caused you.'

  More Adey wrote a tactful letter to Bosie in February 1897, suggesting that it would be better if Bosie did not meet with Oscar after his release from prison. Predictably, his letter provoked a storm of invective from Bosie. `All this about it "being better for Oscar and I not to meet" et cet is canting humbug,' he replied furiously. `What you are working for I don't know and I don't understand.' Bosie accused More and Robbie, both converts to Catholicism, of succumbing to `the baleful influence of the Catholic Church':

  The fact of belonging to and really believing in that institution puts such a gulf between you and Bobbie on one hand and real pagans with a real sense of the supremacy of Greek love over everything else such as Oscar and I, that it is impossible for you to understand what I think about, and what Oscar would think if he were in his normal condition. I feel I have been out-witted and out-intrigued all through, and sans amertume I tell you both that when I get the chance I will fight with any weapons I can find.

  For her part, Constance had no intention of allowing Oscar to see Bosie after his release from prison. Despite the best efforts of Robert Sherard to bring about a reconciliation between Oscar and Constance, relations between them had deteriorated very badly. The cause was money. After his bankruptcy, one of Oscar's few assets was a life interest in Constance's private income of £800 a year. If Constance died, Oscar would be entitled to her annual income for the rest of his life. This asset was put up for auction by the Official Receiver and was bought by Robbie and More on Oscar's behalf. It was a shrewd move. `I happened to know,' Robbie wrote later, `that Mrs Wilde was in a very precarious state of health and that it was quite possible that she would die before her husband, in spite of the bad reports of his health in prison.'

  Constance was furious. She considered the purchase of Oscar's life interest in her private income as nothing less than trickery and `double dealing'. Oscar was also furious and instructed Robbie and More to relinquish the life interest and to defer to Constance's wishes in all financial matters. But still they delayed and dithered. By February 1897, as he was writing De Profundis, relations between Oscar and Constance had reached a nadir. Constance had instituted divorce proceedings. `At the present moment,' Oscar told Bosie:

  my wife ... is preparing a divorce suit, for which, of course, entirely new evidence and an entirely new trial, to be followed perhaps by more serious proceedings, will be necessary. I, naturally, know nothing of the details. I merely know the name of the witness on whose evidence my wife's solicitors rely. It is your own Oxford servant, whom at your special request I took into my service for our summer at Goring.

  The `Oxford servant' was Walter Grainger, with whom Oscar had had sex in Oxford and in Goring. The `more serious proceedings' which Oscar feared almost certainly refer to a trial for sodomy, and
the `entirely new evidence' suggests that Sir George Lewis, who was acting for Constance in the divorce, had obtained a statement from Walter Grainger alleging that Oscar had sodomised him. When Robbie and More heard about the divorce, they told Oscar that he would be able to defend himself against the charges of sodomy. Oscar was scathing:

  To talk of my defending the case against Sir George Lewis is childish. How can I expect to be believed on a mere detail? What limit is there to the amount of witnesses he may produce? None. He and Queensberry can sweep Piccadilly for them. It makes me sick with rage when I am told of the opportunities I shall have of defending the case.

  Eventually a compromise was hammered out. In exchange for the life interest in her private income, Constance agreed to drop divorce proceedings. Instead, a `Deed of Separation' was drawn up. Oscar was to receive a small annuity of £ 150 from Constance, in return for which he relinquished all rights over his children, agreed to live always abroad and promised not to `annoy or molest the said Constance Mary Wilde or in any manner compel or attempt to compel her to cohabit with him or live or attempt to live in the same house with her without her consent'. There was a last sting in the tail. If Oscar were to indulge in `any moral misconduct or notoriously consort with evil or disreputable companions', his small income would be instantly forfeit.

  There was no question as to the meaning of the clause. It referred to Uranians generally, and to Bosie in particular. This was spelt out in a letter Constance's solicitor, H.M. Holman, wrote to More Adey on 10 May. `I do hope you will impress upon him,' he wrote, `how absolutely fatal to him any further intercourse with Lord Alfred Douglas will be.' Holman imparted some alarming intelligence. `Apart from the fact that Lord Alfred is a "notoriously disreputable companion",' he wrote:

  Lord Queensberry has made arrangements for being informed if his son joins Mr Wilde and has expressed his intention of shooting one or both. A threat of this kind from most people could be more or less disregarded, but there is no doubt that Lord Queensberry, as he has shown before, will carry out any threat that he makes to the best of his ability.

  When Oscar read the Deed, he knew that he was exchanging one prison for another. `I am to be deprived of my £ 150 if I know any "disreputable" people,' he wrote to More Adey:

  As good people, as they are grotesquely termed, will not know me, and I am not to be allowed to know wicked people, my future life, as far as I can see at present, will be passed in comparative solitude.

  Oscar signed the Deed of Separation with a heavy heart on 15 May, just four days before he was released. He had avoided a divorce with its attendant and very real risk of a further, even more spectacular prosecution for sodomy. But he had paid a heavy price for his freedom. He had signed away any chance of a future with Bosie.

  Comfort and despair

  `No - what consoles one nowadays is not repentance, but pleasure. Repentance is quite out ofdate.'

  At eight-thirty on the evening of 18 May 1897, the night before he was due to be released from prison, Oscar's cell was unlocked and he was handed a paper parcel and told to dress himself quickly. The parcel contained the clothes he had been wearing on the day of his conviction two years earlier. A few minutes later, dressed incongruously in a frock coat that was now a little too big for him, a silk top hat and patent leather boots, Oscar was escorted down the three steep flights of metal stairs and through the echoing central vault of Reading Gaol to the main entrance, where Major Nelson and his deputy were waiting for him. Oscar was, he remembered, `mentally upset and in a state of very terrible nervous excitement'. There were many things he wanted to say to Major Nelson: he wanted to express his gratitude for the Governor's kindness to him, as well as talk to him of the awful, baleful injustices of prison life. But there was only time for a hurried farewell, and for Major Nelson to hand Oscar a bulky envelope containing the manuscript of De Profundis. Along with the Deputy Governor and a warder out of uniform, Oscar was hurried into a waiting cab and driven off at speed to the railway station at Twyford, five miles away. The station at Reading was much nearer, less than half-a-mile from the prison, but was considered too risky. Two journalists were already loitering outside the prison gates, and there might be dozens more at Reading Station, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of Oscar.

  A month before his release, Oscar had petitioned the Home Secretary. He was anxious, he said, to avoid reporters from the `many English, French and American newspapers' who had `already announced their intention of attending the ceremony of release'. He considered that `such interviews at such a moment would be from every point of view unseemly'. More importantly, he begged the Home Secretary not to allow him `under any circumstances' to be transferred from Reading to another prison immediately prior to his release. He was anxious to avoid a repeat of the grotesque and humiliating `ordeal' he underwent when he was brought `in convict dress and handcuffed by a mid-day train from Clapham junction to Reading' and was made to stand on the platform at Clapham surrounded by a jeering mob. The experience was, he wrote in the archaic and stilted third person style of a petitioner:

  so utterly distressing, from the mental no less than the emotional point of view, that he feels quite unable to undergo any similar exhibition to public gaze.

  Oscar was relieved that he was at least allowed to wear his own clothes.

  There was a wait of fifteen minutes at Twyford, and Oscar and the warder were obliged to sit in the waiting room while the Deputy Governor bought the tickets and booked a compartment. One journalist had managed to follow the cab from the prison, and he walked into the waiting room to observe Oscar. `He looked very well,' the Morning reported the next day. `His build and general appearance were - as of old - distinguished and attractive.' The journey to London took a little over an hour. Oscar's party left the train at the suburban station of Westbourne Park and proceeded by cab to Pentonville, the prison where Oscar had begun his sentence. The treadwheel had come full circle.

  It was still very cold when, at six-fifteen the next morning, a closed carriage swept out from the massive gates of Pentonville Prison and drove off at speed southwards towards the centre of London. In it were Oscar, More Adey and the Reverend Stewart Headlam, the Church of England priest who had bravely stood bail for Oscar two years earlier. There were good reasons for the secrecy surrounding Oscar's release. Oscar needed protecting, not just from the hordes of clamouring journalists who were desperate to see him and talk to him, but rather more seriously from the Marquis of Queensberry. Robbie Ross and More Adey had got wind of a devilish plot by the Scarlet Marquis to ambush and physically attack Oscar on his release from Pentonville. A few days earlier, More Adey had written to the Home Office asking for permission for the carriage that was to collect Oscar to be allowed to drive inside the prison gates. `We have received several warnings that the Marquis of Queensberry proposes to assault him,' he wrote, and `we shall be glad to know if suitable protection will be afforded until Mr Wilde reaches the boat for Dieppe.'

  Oscar was taken to Stewart Headlam's house in Bloomsbury. It was, Ada Leverson recalled, a house full of:

  Burne-Jones and Rossetti pictures, Morris wallpaper and curtains, in fact an example of the decoration of the early eighties, very beautiful in its way, and very like the Aesthetic rooms Oscar had once loved.

  Ada and Ernest Leverson had gone to Headlam's house to mark the occasion of Oscar's return to the world. `Everyone was intensely nervous and embarrassed,' she recalled. `We had the English fear of showing our feelings, and at the same time the human fear of not showing our feelings.' Oscar put everyone at their ease immediately. `He came in with the dignity of a king returning from exile,' Ada wrote:

  He came in talking, laughing, smoking a cigarette, with waved hair and a flower in his button-hole, and he looked markedly better, slighter and younger than he had two years previously.

  `Sphinx!' Oscar exclaimed. `How marvellous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at seven o'clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been
away. You can't have got up, you must have sat up.'

  Oscar kept up a seemingly effortless flow of inconsequential chatter. But behind the facade, he was nervous, uncertain and anxious. Before his imprisonment he had been supremely confident of his place in the order of things. `The gods had given me almost everything,' he wrote in De Profundis. He had been a dandy and a wit, a poet, a playwright and a prophet of the Uranian gospel. He had been a husband and a father and a lover of young men. But what the gods had given, the gods had taken away. Certainty had been replaced by uncertainty, fame by infamy. Now Oscar was an ex-convict: estranged from his wife, his children and his lover, disgraced and disavowed. He was no longer sure of who or what he was. Constance compared his fate to Humpty Dumpty's: `quite as tragic and quite as impossible to put right'. His brilliant life had been broken and fractured into a thousand iridescent shards.

  Before prison, Oscar had been a joyous pagan, a Greek out of time. Now there were moments when he acted like a penitent Christian. During his first hours of freedom at Headlam's house, he announced on the spur of the moment that he would like to go on a Catholic retreat, and there and then dashed off a letter to the priests of the Jesuit Church in Farm Street asking if he might spend six months on retreat with them. Before he left prison, he had discussed converting to Catholicism with Robbie, who had been very sceptical. `I did not believe in his sincerity and told him if he really meant it, to go to a priest, and I discouraged him from anything hasty in the matter.' Oscar did not have to wait long for an answer to his request to go on retreat. It was turned down. He could not be accepted on `the impulse of a moment'. Oscar was distraught at the refusal. According to Ada Leverson, `he broke down and sobbed bitterly'.

  Before he left prison Oscar had decided that he would live abroad under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth. It was a resonant and revealing conjunction of names. Sebastian was the beautiful young martyr whom Oscar had spoken of as `a lovely brown boy with crisp, clustering hair and red lips'. Sebastian was traditionally venerated as the patron saint of men who loved men because of the persistent legend that his martyrdom had not so much involved being pierced by the arrows of the Praetorian Guard as being penetrated by their penises. He was supposed to have been gang-raped and then to have bled to death. The surname Melmoth was taken from the Gothic horror fantasy, Melmoth the Wanderer, written by Oscar's maternal great-uncle Charles Maturin, and first published in 1820. In the novel, Melmoth sells his soul in return for a hundred and fifty years of perpetual youth but from then on is doomed to restlessly roam, trying to extend his life even further by stealing the souls of others. As Sebastian Melmoth, Oscar was simultaneously a saint and a sinner, a martyr and the murderer of his own soul. Like Dorian Gray, he had become `a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead'. Oscar must henceforth live, he said, as the `Infamous St Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr'.