by Neil McKenna
It was the first time he had ever seen the Pope: and he transferred to me his adoration of the successor of Peter: would I fear have kissed me on leaving the Bronze Gateway had I not sternly repelled him. I have become very cruel to boys, and no longer let them kiss me in public.
Just before he left Rome, Oscar wrote to Robbie to tell him that he had bidden goodbye `with tears and one kiss, to the beautiful Greek boy' Robbie had introduced him to.
In the same letter, Oscar spoke about the erotic intensity of his life since his release from prison. `In the mortal sphere, I have fallen in and out of love, and fluttered hawks and doves alike,' he wrote:
How evil it is to buy Love, and how evil to sell it! And yet what purple hours one can snatch from that grey slowly-moving thing we call Time! My mouth is twisted with kissing, and I feed on fevers.
It was almost as if Oscar sensed that time was running out, that he would soon pass from the mortal to the immortal sphere. Death had stalked him ever since he had gone to prison. Speranza had died, and Trooper Wooldridge had been executed in prison. Aubrey Beardsley had died -'at the age of a flower', Oscar wrote - in March 1898, less than a month after Oscar's arrival in Paris. Three weeks later, Constance was dead. The following year, Oscar's older brother, Willie, died of alcoholism. Ernest Dowson had died in February 1900, two months before Oscar's trip to Rome. Even Queensberry, the scarlet Marquis, had died, convinced to the last that he was being `persecuted by the OscarWilders'.
`You must not think of me as being morbidly sad, or wilfully living in sadness,' Oscar had told Carlos Blacker soon after he came out of prison. `I often find myself strangely happy.' During the last three years of his life Oscar was to remain strangely happy. According to Vincent O'Sullivan, who knew him well during the last years, the legend of Oscar's life `ebbing out in squalor and destitution and abandonment' was wrong. `I give it as my firm opinion that Oscar Wilde was, on the whole, fairly happy during the last years of his life,' Bosie wrote later:
He had an extraordinarily buoyant and happy temperament, a splendid sense of humour, and an unrivalled faculty for enjoyment of the present. Of course, he had his bad moments, moments of depression and sense of loss and defeat, but they were not of long duration.
There were times when Oscar was penniless and went hungry for a day, or even two, but such occasions were rare. He lived in cheap but clean and comfortable hotels, and ate well in inexpensive - and sometimes expensive - restaurants. His appetite for life was undimmed. Everything he did, he did to excess. He drank prodigiously, because he wanted to. He was a self-declared and unapologetic sexual pagan who indulged his appetite to the full. He was an outcast, an outlaw, but he gloried in his notoriety. His life was, for the most part, joyous and affirming.
Yet occasionally, the shadow of death would pass over him and his face would, according to Vincent O'Sullivan, sometimes `be swept with poignant anguish and regret' when he talked about the past, or contemplated with apprehension his future:
which he saw as a mountain-pass under darkling shadows falling ever thicker - becoming in fact, save by miracle, impracticable for him. At such moments he would pass his large hand with a trembling gesture over his face and stretch out his arm as though to ward off the phantom of his destiny.
At other times, Oscar would ponder his future with equanimity, almost curiosity, and his large grey-blue eyes would take on an abstracted faraway look. It was, O'Sullivan wrote, `a looking out, a looking beyond, a stare that would penetrate to the invisible'.
The end of life was indeed contemplation.
November 1900
Late on the evening of 29 November 1900, a printed visiting card bearing the name `Mr Robert Ross, Reform Club' was brought up to Father Cuthbert Dunne, a young Irish priest at St Joseph's Church in the Avenue Hoche. On the back of the card, Robbie had written:
Can I see one of the fathers about a very urgent case or can I hear of a priest elsewhere who can talk English to administer the sacraments to a dying man?
In great haste, Father Dunne went with Robbie to the Hotel d'Alsace in the Rue des Beaux-Arts, where Oscar had lived since August 1899. As they drove through the dark, wintry streets of Paris, Robbie told Father Dunne that the man he was about to see was Oscar Wilde. Reggie Turner and a male nurse were asked to leave Oscar's small room while Father Dunne, assisted by Robbie, administered baptism and the last rites.
Earlier that day, Robbie had rushed back to Paris from the South of France in response to a telegram from Reggie Turner telling him that Oscar's condition was `almost hopeless'. After what was supposed to be a routine operation on his ear on 10 October, Oscar had gradually become sicker, but then appeared to be slowly recovering and was well enough to get up and take several drives in the Bois de Boulogne. He was managing to consume as much champagne as he wanted, as well as the occasional glass of absinthe. On one of these drives, in early November, Oscar caught a chill and developed an abscess in his ear, which eventually led to cerebral meningitis.
Oscar knew that he was going to die. `Somehow I don't think I shall survive to see the new century,' he told Robbie. `If another century began and I was still alive, it would really be more than the English could stand.' He woke one day and said to Reggie Turner, `I dreamt I was supping with the dead.' `My dear Oscar,' Reggie answered. `You were probably the life and soul of the party.' To another visitor he remarked, `My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.' By 25 November, it was clear that Oscar was not going to recover. He was being injected with morphine and lapsed in and out of consciousness, his mind seeming to wander.
When Robbie arrived on the morning of 29 November, Oscar's appearance was `very painful':
He had become quite thin, his flesh was livid, his breathing heavy. He was trying to speak. He was conscious that people were in the room, and raised his hand when I asked him whether he understood. He pressed our hands.
At dawn on 30 November, Oscar's final struggle began. `There was the socalled death-rattle, or roughness of breathing in his throat,' Reggie recalled. `I have never heard anything like it before,' Robbie told More Adey. `It sounded like the horrible turning of a crank, and it never ceased until the end.' At approximately a quarter to two that afternoon, Oscar's breathing eased. Robbie held his hand and felt his pulse fluttering. Five minutes later, Oscar heaved a profound sigh. He exhaled one last, long, deep breath, and then was silent.
Bosie arrived too late to be with Oscar at the end but was the chief mourner at his funeral four days later. `I am miserable and wretched about darling Oscar,' he told More Adey afterwards:
It seems so beastly that I couldn't have seen him before he died ... It seems to get worse every day. I try to think that perhaps it is better than when he was in prison, but then one had the hope of seeing him again, and now I don't believe I ever shall.
Oscar was only forty-six when he died. He had lived `more lives than one', vividly, intensely and passionately. `I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age,' he wrote in a remarkable and prophetic passage of self-obituary in De Profundis:
The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder ... to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
A year after Oscar's death, Bosie composed his personal obituary in the form of a moving sonnet, `To Oscar Wilde', which perhaps comes close to capturing the billowing cloud of infectious joy and wonder that surrounded Oscar:
Above all el
se, for Bosie, Oscar was the first and the greatest `martyr' to the cause of Uranian love. In `The Ballad of Reading Gaol', Oscar wrote what was to become his own Uranian epitaph:
Oscar died an outcast and was mourned by `outcast men'. But he also knew that he was a martyr in an epic struggle for the freedom of men to love men, and he was confident that Uranian love would, in time, be seen as `noble'. `Yes. I have no doubt we shall win,' he told George Ives, `but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms.'
A hundred years and many monstrous martyrdoms later, Oscar's men are outcast men no more and the love that dared not speak its name has at last found its joyful voice.
Permissions and picture credits
Permissions
The author would like to thank the following: Merlin Holland for permission to quote extensively from Oscar's letters, to reproduce Oscar's untitled and unpublished poem, and to use other materials copyright to his family; Caroline Gould for permission to quote from the letters of Robbie Ross; the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland for permission to quote from the letters of Richard Burdon Haldane; Father Bede Bailey for permission to quote from the letters and writings of John Gray and Andre Raffalovich; Chris Furse for permission to quote from the writings of John Addington Symonds; Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster for permission to quote from the diaries of Laura Troubridge, and from the letters of Laura Troubridge and Adrian Hope; and Editions Gallimard in Paris for permission to quote from the journals and letters of Andre Gide. Excerpts from The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis 002000 by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. The correspondence and poems of Lord Alfred Douglas, OLord Alfed Douglas's Literary Executors, are reproduced courtesy of John Rubinstein and John Stratford. All rights reserved. Extracts from the witness statements are copyright and reproduced by courtesy of the owner in 2003. All rights reserved.
The author and publisher have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright holders for permission and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections can be made to future editions.
Picture credits
`Oscar and friend, c.1877', `Oscar and Bosie in Norfolk', `Oscar and Bosie in Oxford, Spring 1893', `Oscar and Bosie in Naples', `Constance two years before her death' all courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles; `Neronian Oscar' courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; `Robbie Ross' courtesy of the late Mary Viscountess Eccles; `John Gray' and `Andre Raffalovich' courtesy of Father Bede Bailey; "`Stella" Boulton, "Fanny" Park and Lord Arthur Clinton' courtesy of the Essex Record Office; `a card with hideous words' courtesy of the Public Record Office; `Oscar c.1890' and `Oscar's Uranian photograph of two boys' courtesy of the Neil Bartlett Collection; `Oscar's Uranian photograph of five boys' courtesy of Simon Watney; `Oscar in Rome' courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
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