Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  There was no hope of relief. Wilde refused to engage with the prison chaplain. He could find no consolation in the Bible, and even less in Pilgrim’s Progress, the one non-liturgical text permitted him.10 Contact with the outside world was impossible. According to the regulations, only at the end of three months would he be permitted to send – and receive – one letter, and to receive two visitors. After that, communication might then be continued at the same rate, each quarter, during the rest of his sentence. In the meantime, though, he was alone, hungry, sleepless and miserable.

  He knew nothing of the world outside, which at least spared him something. The press – which had, over the course of Wilde’s three long trials, almost exhausted its capacity for prurient gloating and moral indignation – had roused itself for one final bout of scorn, before consigning Wilde to an ignominious obscurity that it was hoped would extend well beyond the two years of his ‘well-merited’ but sadly ‘inadequate’ sentence. ‘Oscar Wilde will never again be anything but a memory,’ declared the leader writer of the Western Mail; ‘a beacon light set up to warn youth from the dangers that lurk in a life of ease and pleasure. His personality has been wiped out from the haunts of men, and his name has become a bye-word and a reproach.’11

  Privately there might be some sympathy: Wilde’s fall had been so spectacular, his sentence so harsh. The writer Hall Caine told Coulson Kernahan he thought it ‘the most awful tragedy in the whole history of literature’. But little made it into the print. Reynolds’s Newspaper published an unsigned letter from Wilde’s future bibliographer C. S. Millard, disputing the law’s right to pronounce on matters of private passion. And this view was echoed by the Dutch anarchist Alexander Cohen, in The Torch – a tiny magazine produced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s two nieces. Public expressions of disapproval, though, were widespread: at Portora Wilde’s name was erased from the ‘Honours Board’; he was blotted from the ‘Golden Book’ of the Churchill Masonic Lodge at Oxford; W. P. Frith even offered to paint out the portrait of Wilde from his picture ‘A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881’.12

  Into Wilde’s darkness, however, some light unexpectedly fell. On 12 June, barely two weeks into his sentence, he received an unscheduled visit from the enlightened Liberal MP Robert Haldane. Haldane (two years younger than Wilde) had been a fellow member of the Eighty Club. He was able to arrange the visit, having just served on a departmental committee charged with investigating the deficiencies of the prison system. The meeting took place in a special visiting room. At first Wilde refused to speak. ‘I put my hand on his prison-dress-clad shoulder,’ Haldane recalled, ‘and said that I used to know him and that I had come to say something about himself.’ Haldane – an impressive intellect who had translated Schopenhauer into English – suggested that Wilde had not fully used his great literary gift, because he had allowed himself to live too much for pleasure, and had not made any great subject his own. His current misfortune might, though, give him a great theme, and carry his work to new heights. Although, under standard regulations, prisoners were not allowed access to books – other than devotional texts – until they had served three months (and then only at the rate of one a week), Haldane suggested that he would try to get some more stimulating reading matter for Wilde at once, as well as pen and ink. And then, when his sentence was complete, Wilde might be ready to produce something truly great. At this peroration Wilde burst into tears. Nevertheless he promised to try.

  Certainly he was eager for books. He began to talk about possible titles. Haldane was obliged to turn aside the suggestion that these might include some of Flaubert’s novels, pointing out that an author who had been prosecuted for indecency was unlikely to be sanctioned by the prison authorities. Wilde laughed in recognition of this truth, and became almost cheerful. Their talk opened up into a discussion of literature, and they settled on a list of fifteen non-fiction titles that included St Augustine’s Confessions, Mommsen’s five-volume History of Rome, Cardinal Newman’s Apologia and Walter Pater’s Renaissance. Despite the objections of the Pentonville governor, the books – but not the writing materials – were sanctioned by the home secretary, and, in due course, were delivered to the prison library.13

  There were elements of personal concern and common humanity in Haldane’s visit. But his intervention also revealed that the authorities were taking an interest in Wilde’s case. At the beginning of June fanciful press reports had announced that Wilde was ‘going insane’ and had been ‘confined to a padded cell’. Although the governor had acted quickly to deny such claims, Asquith (the home secretary, at whose table Wilde had dined barely eleven months earlier) asked the prison commissioners to inquire into the truth of the allegations.14

  The Pentonville medical officer reassured the commissioners (and the government) that Wilde, whatever minor setbacks he had endured, was neither insane nor dying: indeed, apart from a ‘little relaxed throat’, he was giving ‘no anxiety to any of the officials’ at the prison. Haldane’s visit followed upon this report, and his own findings seem to have been relayed to Lord Rosebery. Subsequently, Haldane maintained a watchful eye over Wilde’s condition. In his concern, he was joined by the newly appointed head of the prison commission, Evelyn Ruggles-Brise. A man of imagination and humanity, Ruggles-Brise had both an admiration for Wilde and an understanding that his experience of prison must be ‘much more severe [than] it would be to an ordinary criminal’. Although he and Haldane did not always share the same priorities, they were two powerful allies to Wilde’s cause. But they had to act with discretion. As Haldane explained to one of Wilde’s friends, ‘they must not be thought to be giving [Wilde] differential treatment further than his Condition requires’.15

  Wilde himself seems to have been too crushed by his new circumstances to register even a hint of this concern. He felt abandoned to the hell of prison life. His misery was compounded by a visit, on 2 July, from ex-police inspector Kearley, who had come to serve Wilde with a copy of Queensberry’s petition for a receiving order in bankruptcy. The proceedings had been initiated on 21 June, as the marquess sought to reclaim his legal costs, and would now continue along their prescribed path through the bankruptcy court. To the grinding horror of the prison regime was now added an anxiety about his financial affairs – an anxiety that he could do nothing to assuage. With Ross, Turner and Douglas all abroad, the overseeing of Wilde’s affairs fell to Ross’s friend, More Adey. Although he had never been an intimate of Wilde’s, he now found himself drawn into the heart of things; it was he who had to liaise with Humphreys.16

  Two days after Kearley’s visit Wilde was moved from Pentonville and transported across London to Wandsworth. Although Haldane may have had a hand in the choice of destination, the move itself had been prompted by ‘suspicions that the Officers at Pentonville Prison were being tampered with by O. Wilde’s friends’. Manning, the Pentonville governor, was glad to see Wilde go. The keen public interest in the prisoner, and the leaked information about his well-being, were a nuisance and an embarrassment.17†

  Wandsworth was designed and run along the same lines as Pentonville, but Wilde seemed unsettled by the move. The prison chaplain, W. D. Morrison, noted that he arrived in ‘an excited flurried condition’. The flurry, however, soon passed, along with any determination ‘to face his punishment without flinching’. Wilde’s ‘fortitude’ gave way beneath the regime. The food, disgusting at Pentonville, was even worse at Wandsworth. Some of the warders were ‘brutes’. His books, although they were supposed to be transferred with him, did not arrive until 17 August. Hunger and lack of sleep took their toll; he began to have ‘wild delusions’ and thought he might be going mad. He wanted to kill himself. Haldane, when he visited Wilde at his new prison, was ‘painfully struck’ by his ‘depressed’ state.’ Morrison considered the prisoner ‘quite crushed and broken’. The doctor was concerned by his physical decline; he had lost 22lbs – over 10 per cent of his body weight – since his reception at Pentonville. Some of the more experienced
prison officers openly doubted that he would be ‘able to go through the two years’.18

  And new cares arrived from outside the prison walls. On 29 July Wilde received a visit from an official of the bankruptcy court. Following a meeting of Queensberry and the other creditors, a Mr Wildy had been appointed as the official receiver of Wilde’s estate. In an interview at Wandsworth, he led Wilde ‘step by step… over every item of [his] life’, enumerating his assets, detailing his extravagances and confirming his debts. ‘It was horrible,’ Wilde recalled. Despite having earned some £4,000 in the two years since mid-1893, Wilde found himself with outstanding debts of £3,591 9s 9d. Besides the £677 3s 8d due to Queensberry, he owed: £1,557 16s 1d to the trustees of Constance Wilde’s marriage settlement (having borrowed £1,000 from the trust on the eve of their marriage, and failed to pay back either the principal or any interest); £500 to Otho Lloyd for another loan, made in 1885; £414 19s 11d to George Alexander for advances against royalties on The Importance of Being Earnest; £70 16s 11d to the Savoy for board and residence between 1893 and March 1894; and over £230 ‘for tobacco, wine, jewellery and flowers’.19

  Wilde’s assets were minimal. More Adey drew up a list of them. His possessions had been dispersed for a fraction of their true value at the disgraceful sheriff’s sale at Tite Street. There remained his various copyrights, along with his unpublished (and, indeed, unfinished) manuscripts The Florentine Tragedy, La Sainte Courtisane and The Cardinal of Avignon. There was a mystery as to the whereabouts of the extended ‘Portrait of Mr W. H.’. Lane claimed that he had returned the manuscript to Tite Street, though Wilde knew nothing of it. But, as Adey noted, ‘I don’t fancy much can be got out of it. Difficulties as to publication now enhanced.’ His one other asset was his ‘life interest’ in Constance’s marriage settlement – although, given that she was younger than he was, and, as a woman, had a greater life expectancy, its actuarial value was considered small.20‡

  As his mind turned obsessively over the events that had brought him to ruin, incarceration, disgrace and humiliation, Wilde came to see that everything led back to Douglas. It was he who had antagonized Queensberry; it was he who driven forward the fatal legal action; it was he who (together with his family) had promised to pay Wilde’s legal costs, and failed to do so. In brooding incessantly on these points, the great love that had carried him through the previous months curdled into hate. The change was abrupt and total. From now on every action that Douglas made (and had made) seemed to confirm, in Wilde’s eyes, his shallowness and unworthiness. The impassioned phrases of his recent love letters were forgotten. When a solicitor’s clerk who had come to take a deposition relating to his bankruptcy leant across the table and said in a low voice, ‘Prince Fleur-de-Lys wishes to be remembered to you,’ Wilde stared at him blankly. Only after the phrase had been repeated, with the qualification ‘the gentleman is abroad at present’, did Wilde grasp that the message must have come from Douglas. The name ‘Fleur-de-Lys’, borrowed from one of Douglas’s ballads, had only weeks before been a sacred currency between them. Now, in the hideous setting of Wandsworth prison, it struck Wilde with horror. A bitter laugh escaped him. ‘In that laugh,’ he later recalled, ‘was all the scorn of the world.’21

  The repudiation of Douglas was accompanied by a dawning recognition of Constance’s great love for him, and his own love for her and his children – affections that he had abused and damaged through his ‘mad’ infatuation with Douglas. And it was against this background that Wilde received his first scheduled visit, on Monday 26 August, from Robert Sherard. While so many of Wilde’s close companions remained on the continent, Sherard had travelled in the other direction, feeling unable to stay in Paris while his friend suffered in England.

  The twenty-minute encounter took place beneath a loudly ticking clock, in a bare vaulted room divided by two rows of iron bars. In the passage between the bars patrolled a warder, poised to intervene should the conversation stray on to forbidden topics. As they stood facing each other – each clinging to the bars ‘for support’ – Sherard was shocked to see his friend’s sorry condition: his hands disfigured, the nails broken and bleeding from the oakum picking; his face ‘untidy’ with stubble. Wilde’s depression was obvious, even before tears welled in his eyes. Sherard strove to affect a cheerfulness he did not feel, and was thrilled to have drawn a laugh before their twenty minutes were up.22

  He was perhaps able to tell Wilde something of the French reaction to his imprisonment. A succession of writers had sprung into print to denounce, variously, the barbarity, the stupidity and the hypocrisy of English ‘justice’ in its treatment of Wilde. There were rousing and supportive articles by Henri Bauer in L’Echo de Paris, by Octave Mirbeau in Le Journal, by Paul Adam in the Revue Blanche and by Louis Lormel, Laurent de Tailhade and Henri de Régnier. Indeed it was asserted in some quarters that, if Wilde could only be got to Paris, ‘he would be cheered in the streets’.23

  Sherard was heartened to learn of Wilde’s changing attitudes to Douglas and to Constance. He determined to do what he could to foster a possible reconciliation between husband and wife. It was, he believed, the best hope for Wilde’s salvation. Constance, in a quest for anonymity, had left London, taking the children to Switzerland, and adopting – like her brother – the family name of ‘Holland’. On the advice of her family solicitor, Mr Hargrove, and also of George Lewis, she was planning to divorce her ‘poor misguided husband’. It was not that she no longer cared for him – indeed, her love and solicitude seem almost to have been quickened by his fall – but it was a practical necessity. If she should die, Oscar, having the life interest in her marriage settlement, would receive all the income from the fund, leaving the children technically penniless. Although he might very well want to provide for his sons, his debts and, above all, the ‘way he has behaved about money affairs’ convinced everyone concerned that this must not happen. And the easiest way to ensure that was by a divorce.24

  Sherard wrote to her, urging her to reconsider; and he perhaps encouraged Wilde to do likewise. Certainly when Wilde was permitted, at the end of August, to send a letter, he wrote – full of humility and contrition – to Constance. Her solicitor, to whose care he addressed the missive, considered it ‘one of the most touching and pathetic letters that had ever come under his eye’.25

  That it might find a receptive audience was confirmed when, only days after it had been dispatched, Wilde received his first letter. It was from Otho Holland in Switzerland. Although it had clearly crossed with his own, it suggested that Constance was prepared to reconsider her decision about the divorce. And then, barely a week after that, on 21 September, Wilde had a visit, by special dispensation, from Constance herself. She had travelled from Switzerland, having received his letter, to tell him that ‘there was forgiveness for him’ and the hope of a future together – in another country, under an assumed name, but with their children. Cyril, she reported, ‘never forgets him’. From her account, it seems that she may have had to talk to her husband from behind a screen. She informed Sherard that the whole experience had been more awful than she could have believed: ‘I could not see him and I could not touch him, and I scarcely spoke.’ Nevertheless for Wilde it provided a small chance of relief. He told her that ‘he had been mad the last three years’ and that, if he saw Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘he would kill him’. Constance sincerely hoped he never would see Douglas again.26

  Sherard found Wilde ‘greatly cheered’ by the interview when, two days later, he paid his own specially sanctioned visit. He had claimed that he was about to depart for Madagascar and had urgent business matters to discuss with the prisoner. And, because it was nominally a business interview, they met, without a fixed time limit, in the prison offices, rather than in the barred visiting room. At the end of the meeting Sherard seized the opportunity to embrace his old friend. Having seen Constance shortly after her visit, he was able to reassure Wilde that his wife’s ‘heart was altogether still with him’ and that
there was the real possibility of a life together ‘once his punishment was over’.27

  He also brought news from Paris. Through his contacts there he had learnt that Douglas, in his desire to strike a blow for his friend, had written a long polemic for the Mercure de France, detailing the background to the Wilde trials, proclaiming the virtues of ‘Greek love’, and quoting extensively from the passionate letters that Wilde had sent him from Holloway. Wilde, in his new mood, was appalled. Publication of such ‘foolish’ expressions of ‘misplaced, ill-requited, affection for one of crude and callous nature, of coarse greed, and common appetites’ would only add to his shame. ‘The gibbet on which I swing in history now is high enough,’ he declared. ‘There is no need that [Douglas] of all men should for his own vanity make it more hideous.’ He urged Sherard to prevent publication. And Sherard – who had never cared for Douglas – was only too happy to oblige.28§

  The excitements of the week were not over. On the following day Wilde was taken out of prison to attend the bankruptcy court. He was dressed in his old clothes, but they hung about him now. It had been expected that he would have to face his ‘public examination’ in court that day, but he was not called. His counsel successfully asked for an adjournment. Falling in with Constance’s desire to avoid a divorce, Mr Hargrove had come up with an ingenious plan that might annul the bankruptcy and obviate the need for Wilde to be examined at all, while also addressing the question of his ‘life interest’ in the marriage settlement. According to this scheme, the trustees of Constance’s marriage settlement would withdraw their claims to both the £557 16s 1d interest and the £1,000 loan, in exchange for Wilde surrendering his ‘life interest’ for a nominal £5, and allowing a charge on all his existing literary and dramatic rights. His remaining debts of £2,033 13s 11d might then be met by a subscription from among his friends and sympathizers. More Adey had already got promises for £1,500, and was confident that the rest could be raised before the court reconvened on 12 November.29