by Neil McKenna
Late in the afternoon on the day of his release, Oscar and More Adey travelled from London to Newhaven. There they caught the overnight steamer to Dieppe, arriving at four-thirty in the morning. Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner were on the jetty, anxiously scanning the horizon for the first sight of the ferry. Robbie wrote a vivid account of the occasion. `It was a magnificent spring morning,' he recalled. As the steamer glided into the harbour, Oscar's tall figure, dominating the other passengers, was easily recognised:
We began running to the landing stage and Wilde recognised us and waved his hand and his lips curled into a smile. His face had lost all its coarseness and he looked as he must have looked at Oxford in the early days before I knew him.
When the boat finally docked, Robbie recalled, Oscar `with that odd elephantine gait which I have never seen in anyone else, stalked off the boat'. He was carrying a large sealed envelope containing the manuscript of De Profundis, which he straightaway handed to Robbie. `This, my dear Bobbie, is the great manuscript about which you know.' They went directly to the Hotel Sandwich where Robbie and Reggie had filled Oscar's room with flowers and books. After two years of almost continuous solitary confinement, Oscar was desperate to talk. He talked compulsively, a great, raging torrent of words tumbling out of him as fast as they could. By nine in the morning, an exhausted Robbie insisted on lying down. The party reassembled at noon for dejeuner, all of them - with the exception of Oscar - still worn out.
In the afternoon they drove to nearby Arques-la-Bataille and sat down on the ramparts of the castle. Robbie remembered how Oscar was overwhelmed by the beauty of nature:
He enjoyed the trees and the grass and country scents and sounds in a way I had never known him do before, just as a street bred child might enjoy them on his first day in the country: but of course there was an adjective for everything - `monstrous', `purple', `grotesque', `gorgeous', `curious', `wonderful'.
Later that day, or early the next, Oscar wrote to Constance. It was a long letter, and `full of penitence', as Constance described it to her brother, Otho. The text has not survived, but it seems that Oscar begged Constance to consider accepting him back as her husband, but, like his wish to enter a Jesuit retreat, Oscar's desire for reconciliation may have been no more than the mood of the moment, a passing impulse. Constance replied on 24 May. Her letter is lost, but an indignant Oscar later told Bosie that the letter was `calculated to exasperate and embitter him and to make impossible the reunion which she professed to desire'. According to Bosie, Constance offered:
to `take him back' on certain conditions. Oscar did not show me the letter ... but he told me that her `conditions' were insulting, and he turned pale and trembled with anger when he spoke to me about her letter. That letter finished all chance of reconciliation and finally killed all that was left of his love for her.
Oscar may have been exasperated at the tone of Constance's letter, but he was also rather relieved. To have to return to Constance, indigent, penitent and forever grateful for her forgiveness, was a gloomy prospect. He was beginning to enjoy the sweets of freedom. He was delighted when a group of young French poets and students arrived in Dieppe from Paris to welcome him to France, and he entertained them in grand style at the Cafe des Tribunaux. It was a noisy, boisterous evening, so much so that Oscar was warned by the SubPrefect of Dieppe to comport himself with more dignity.
Much of Oscar's conversation in those first days in Dieppe revolved around his experiences in prison. According to Robbie, he was already beginning to weave them into an exquisite fable:
Reading Prison had already become for him a sort of enchanted castle of which Major Nelson was the presiding fairy. The hideous machicolated turrets were already turned into minarets, the very warders into benevolent Mamelukes and we ourselves into Paladins welcoming Coeur de Lion after his captivity.
But this enchantment quickly became tarnished when Oscar heard three days later that Warder Martin had been dismissed from the prison service for the heinous crime of giving `some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child'. Oscar wrote a long and passionate letter to the Daily Chronicle on the treatment of children in prison.
Oscar was not allowed to forget for long that he was an ex-convict. He was snubbed by people who before his fall had been proud to know him. The French portrait painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, whom Oscar had known since the early 1880s, was in Dieppe and was out walking with the artist Walter Sickert one day when he spotted Oscar sitting in the Cafe Suisse. Oscar beckoned to them. `I pretended not to see,' Blanche recalled. `I know for a fact that he was wounded to the quick by my action, and the recollection of that episode still fills me with remorse.' There would be other wounding moments. Aubrey Beardsley cut Oscar in the street, as did many other English visitors to Dieppe. He was often the target of ugly disapproving looks and, on several occasions, was asked to leave cafes and restaurants when other customers objected to his presence.
Equally there were those like Mrs Arthur Stannard - the writer John Strange Winter - who made a point of showing great attention to him. Oscar could salute her grace, her courage and her charm, but was unable to admire her novels. `I breakfast tomorrow with the Stannards,' he told Robbie in high good humour:
What a great passionate splendid writer John Strange Winter is! How little people understand her work! Bootle's Baby is une oeuvre symboliste: it is really only the style and the subject that are wrong. Pray never speak lightly of Bootle's Baby - indeed, pray never speak of it at all; I never do.
A week in Dieppe was enough. There were too many English people, too many potential slights and embarrassments. Besides which, Oscar needed peace and quiet to write his great poem of prison life, `The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. He chose the small village of Berneval-sur-Mer, three miles outside Dieppe, taking up residence in the Hotel de la Plage on 26 May. Reggie Turner had already left Dieppe, but Robbie accompanied Oscar to Berneval and spent a night or two there before returning to London.
It was here that Oscar had sex with Robbie again: the first time in many years. Bosie told Harford Montgomery Hyde that it was Robbie who `dragged' Oscar back to sex with men while they were staying together at Berneval. Certainly, the day after Robbie left, Oscar wrote him a tender love letter. He was `dear sweet Robbie'. `No other friend have I now in this beautiful world,' Oscar told him:
I want no other. Yet I am distressed to think that I will be looked on as careless of your own welfare, and indifferent of your good. You are made to help me. I weep with sorrow when I think how much I need help, but I weep with joy when I think that I have you to give it to me.
`It is not for nothing that I named you in prison St Robert of Phillimore,' Oscar concluded. `Love can canonise people.' It was hardly the most passionate of encounters. Oscar was in need of comfort, and Robbie obligingly comforted him. It was sex as consolation, sex born out of long and deep affection. It was loving, but it was not love. It would never, could never, scale the same emotional heights as Oscar's love for Bosie, let alone approach the same fiery heat of passion, danger and excitement that Oscar had experienced in his feastings with panthers. But Oscar was nevertheless grateful, and when Robbie left Berneval, he began, he said, to realise his `terrible position of isolation'.
But Oscar soon rallied. `I adore this place,' he declared four days after Robbie's departure. `The whole country is lovely, and full of forest and deep meadow. It is simple and healthy.' Some of Oscar's enthusiasm for Berneval lay in the fact that he was far removed from the sexual temptations of large cities. `If I live in Paris I may be doomed to things I don't desire. I am afraid of big towns ... I am frightened of Paris.' He was also frightened, he said, of the temptations of southern Italy, Egypt and Algiers, all of them in Richard Burton's Sotadic Zone, where sodomy and pederasty were the rule, rather than the exception. `If I lived in Egypt I know what my life would be,' he said darkly. There were sexual temptations close at hand even in Berneval, but Oscar proudly boasted to Robbie of having resisted them. On the last day of May h
e had bathed in the sea. `I went into the water without being a Pagan,' he told Robbie:
The consequence was that I was not tempted by either Sirens or mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus. I really think that this is a remarkable thing. In my pagan days, the sea was always full of tritons blowing conches, and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite different.
A few days later, on 3 June, Oscar entertained the first of many visitors to Berneval. Ernest Dowson, the poet, Charles Conder, the water-colour artist, and Dalhousie Young, a composer who had written a passionate defence of Oscar after his conviction, came together to Berneval to dine and sleep - `at least I know they dine,' Oscar wrote, `but I believe they never sleep'. Dowson was thirty years old, and an alcoholic, but still darkly handsome. Oscar had first met him in 1890. He had been an ardent supporter of Oscar, lambasting `English hypocrisy' and sympathising with Oscar's `torture'. `Cher Monsieur le Poete,' Oscar wrote to Dowson after his departure from Berneval:
It was most kind of you coming to see me, and I thank you very sincerely and gratefully for your pleasant companionship and the many gentle ways by which you recalled to me that, once at any rate, I was a Lord of Language and had myself the soul of a poet.
Dowson enjoyed the visit equally. `The other day I met Oscar and dined with him at his seaside retreat,' he told a friend:
I had some difficulty in suppressing my own sourness and attuning myself to his enormous joy in life just at this moment - but I hope I left him with the impression that I had not a care in the world. He was in wonderful form, but has changed a good deal - he seems of much broader sympathies, much more human and simple.
They met frequently, and their friendship suddenly seemed to deepen into love. It is unlikely that the relationship was ever sexual, but there may have been drunken embraces and declarations of undying love. `There is a fatality about our being together that is astounding - or rather quite probable,' Oscar told Dowson:
Had I stayed at Arques I should have given up all hopes of ever separating from you. Why are you so persistently and perversely wonderful?
A week later Oscar told him that he was `wonderful and charming all last night'. Dowson's sexual interest lay in young girls, but he appears not to have been disconcerted by Oscar's sexual choices and even introduced Oscar to a young friend of his, a French officer who seemingly shared Oscar's Uranian tastes. On 13 June Oscar wrote to Dowson to tell him how `charming' he was at Berneval, and how much he liked `your friend, and mine, the dear Achille', who was `a most noble and splendid fellow'.
It was Dowson who persuaded Oscar to visit a brothel in Dieppe. Dowson told the poet W.B. Yeats that he had persuaded Oscar of the need to acquire `a more wholesome taste in sex' and how they had `pooled their financial resources and proceeded to the appropriate place, accompanied by a cheering crowd'. When Oscar emerged from the brothel, he whispered to Dowson: `The first these ten years, and it will be the last. It was like cold mutton.' Addressing the crowd of curious onlookers in a louder voice, Oscar added, `But tell it in England for it will entirely restore my character.'
Another visitor to Berneval was the twenty-one-year-old John Rowland Fothergill, a student at the London School of Architecture, whom Oscar christened poetically - before he even met him - `the architect of the moon'. Fothergill was a young Uranian, and Oscar had invited him for the pleasure of his company as well as for some professional advice on a house he was thinking of building in Berneval. Fothergill's first impressions of Oscar were not encouraging. Looking down from the railings of the steamer, he saw `a huge and fat person in white flannels with a comical little red beret on top of it all'. Fothergill thought him `rather vulgar'. Fothergill met several of Oscar's friends at Berneval. There was Dowson, Oscar's `first hyacinth since Douglas'. The publisher and pornographer Leonard Smithers was also there. Smithers was `sea green' with absinthe, Fothergill recalled, and was constantly complaining `that Aubrey Beardsley with whom he had a contract for all his work had sent him nothing'. Oscar reproved Smithers. `My dear Leonard,' he said, `you are a monstrous person. You have bought his soul and what more can you ask for?'
Oscar told Fothergill that he was lonely in Berneval and confided to him that he was missing Bosie desperately. Oscar expressed his feelings in verse to Fothergill:
Oscar was talking about Robbie and Bosie. Robbie represented the comfort of love, Bosie love's despair. Comfort or despair? The safe, predictable and consoling homespun of Robbie's love, versus the dazzling and dangerous love of Bosie Douglas, the love he had so vehemently disavowed. Oscar was literally as well as poetically on the horns of a dilemma.
It had taken just four weeks for Oscar's love for Bosie to re-ignite. Immediately after Oscar's release from Reading Gaol, Bosie had sent him a furious, accusing letter. Though the text does not survive, it was sufficiently unpleasant and vitriolic for Oscar to describe it as `revolting'. `I have a real terror now of that unfortunate ungrateful young man with his unimaginative selfishness,' he told Robbie on 28 May:
I feel him as an evil influence, poor fellow. To be with him would be to return to the hell from which I do think I have been released. I hope never to see him again.
A day or so later he wrote to Robbie again, telling him that he was `terrified about Bosie'. Bosie had apparently given an interview about Oscar and his prison experiences, sending Oscar into a tailspin of panic. 'Bosie can almost ruin me,' he wrote. `I earnestly beg that some entreaty be made to him not to do so a second time. His letters to me are infamous.'
Infamous or not, Oscar could not resist the temptation of answering them. He wrote `a beautiful letter' to Bosie in Paris towards the end of May, which Bosie promptly returned with another letter of his own full of bitter invective. `My dear boy,' Oscar replied teasingly on 2 June. `If you will send me back beautiful letters, with bitter ones of your own, of course you will never remember my address. It is as above.' Though there could be no question of their meeting, Oscar enjoined Bosie to `always write to me about your art and the art of others. It is better to meet on the double peak of Parnassus than elsewhere.' By the end of the letter, Oscar was reverting to the Uranian language of love he had so often used with Bosie before the fall, speaking of `dear Reggie Cholmondeley, with his large faun's eyes and honey sweet smile'.
Just two days later, it was obvious that the embers of Oscar's great love for Bosie were quickening into flame. `Don't think I don't love you,' he declared:
Of course I love you more than anyone else. But our lives are irreparably severed, as far as meeting goes. What is left to us is the knowledge that we love each other, and every day I think of you, and I know you are a poet, and that makes you doubly dear and wonderful.
Two more days and Oscar and Bosie were almost as of old, in print at least. Bosie was his `dearest boy' again. `I must give up this absurd habit of writing to you every day,' Oscar wrote, jokingly declaring that they must try and write to each other only once a week. `I am so glad you went to bed at seven o'clock,' he wrote, adding a witty allusion to Bosie's predilection for buggering boys:
Modern life is terrible to vibrating delicate frames like yours: a rose-leaf in a storm of hard hail is not so fragile. With us who are modern it is the scabbard that wears out the sword.
It was now inevitable that they should meet. On 15 June, barely four weeks after his release from Reading Gaol, Oscar wrote to confirm that his `dear honey-sweet boy' was to come to Berneval incognito four days later. `Your name is to be jonquil du Vallon,' he added insouciantly.
The stage was set for an epic and romantic reconciliation when, on Thursday 17 June, Oscar received a letter from his solicitor warning him that the meeting could not take place. Not only would it be in breach of the terms of the Deed of Separation from Constance and would result in Oscar forfeiting his small allowance, it would also bring down the wrath of Queensberry on his head. `At present it is impossible for us to meet,' an agitated Oscar told Bosie:
If Qcame over and made a scene and a sc
andal it would utterly destroy my future and alienate all my friends from me ... I think of you always, and love you always, but chasms of moonless night divide us. We cannot cross it without hideous and nameless peril.
It was almost certainly Robbie who had tipped off Oscar's solicitor about Bosie's planned visit to Berneval, and Bosie was furious, sending a `long indictment' of Robbie to Oscar. Oscar was forced to steer a middle course. He desperately wanted to see Bosie again, but he knew that Robbie was dead set against the idea. He knew, too, that Robbie effectively controlled what meagre capital he possessed and could easily intervene to stop his allowance from Constance. Oscar tried to keep both of his `two loves' sweet, telling Robbie how he had written `a long letter - of twelve foolscap pages - to Bosie to point out to him that I owe everything to you and your friends, and that whatever life I have as an artist in the future will be due to you.'