First, though, he must recuperate, and for that he needed to buy time. Although he was still uncertain about his wife’s plans for his allowance, Ross and Adey assured him that they had gathered from among his friends and supporters enough money to give a ‘breathing space’ for ‘eighteen months or two years’.48 The exact details were left vague, but Wilde understood that the sum was ‘not small’, and he looked forward to being able to repay some of his ‘debts of honour’ to friends and relations.49 There was also what remained of the £1,000 that Adela Schuster had given him at the time of his trials and which Ernest Leverson had been looking after. Even if there had been some disbursements from it – for his mother’s rent, her funeral costs, the expenses of Lily Wilde’s confinement – the remainder, Wilde imagined, must still be a fair amount.50 And beyond this there was the prospect of £500 or £600 from Percy Douglas – the contribution promised towards Wilde’s legal costs and supposedly ‘set aside’ at the time of his bankruptcy to await his release.51
These glowing financial expectations grew even brighter when, on 7 April, Wilde received another ‘special’ visit from Frank Harris. Harris, flush from a successful speculation in South Africa (which, he claimed, had made him some £23,000) insisted that he would set Wilde free from all ‘money anxieties’ with a cheque for £500. He also proposed whisking Wilde away, immediately upon his release, for a month’s driving holiday in the Pyrenees. Wilde, overcome with emotion, accepted both offers.52
He was greatly touched by the solicitude of friends as he contemplated the various practicalities of his life ‘outside’. He asked Ross to put together a collection of books for him: gifts solicited from his literary confreres, either their own recent works or enduring classics: ‘You know the sort of books I want: Flaubert, Stevenson, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas père, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Coleridge, Anatole France, Gautier, Dante and all Dante literature: Goethe and ditto and so on.’53 He was delighted to learn of several items – pictures, manuscripts, trinkets – which had been salvaged by friends from the sale at Tite Street and were to be returned to him.54 And then there was a new wardrobe to be thought of. Robbie had got him a blue serge suit at Doré, but there was much else to be done. Wilde delighted in specifying the details of handkerchief borders, tie designs and collar shapes. He requested ‘two or three sets’ of mother-of-pearl shirt studs, announcing, ‘I want to make “nacred” an English word’.55
Adey was sent a long list of toiletries to be bought: ‘some nice French soap’ (either ‘Peau d’Espagne’ or ‘Sac de Laitue’ would do); ‘Canterbury Wood Violet’ scent and ‘Eau de Lubin’ toilet water (‘a large bottle’); Pritchard’s tooth powder; and, as a tonic for his greying hair, a ‘wonderful thing called Koko Marikopas, to be got at 233 Regent’s Street… the name alone seems worth the money’. Wilde explained that, ‘trivial as they may sound’, these items were of ‘really great importance’, as ‘for psychological reasons’ he needed ‘to feel entirely physically cleansed of the stain and soil of prison life’.56 He learnt with pleasure that Reggie Turner was giving him a beautiful ‘dressing bag’ in which to keep his things (it was to be monogrammed with his new initials: ‘S.M.’).57 The one annoyance, amid all these preparations, was the disappearance of his fine fur coat, which had been left at Oakley Street and pawned by the indigent Willie and his wife.58 Otherwise all seemed set fair.
Then, in the week before his release, things began to unravel. Prior to a meeting on Tuesday 11 May with Ross and Adey, Wilde had pressed for precise details about his financial position: they finally admitted that there was no great fund. There was only £50 – all that remained of the £150 that Adey had raised from well-wishers in 1895 and then spent on securing the life interest. Wilde was stunned. There was worse to come. On their visit to Reading, Adey and Ross relayed a verbal message from Frank Harris that he was ‘very sorry’ but he was unable to contribute anything at the moment. Neither could Percy Douglas help.59
On top of these blows Wilde learnt that there was barely £100 left of the money given him by Adela Schuster. Over £300 had gone to paying his former solicitor Humphreys. But Wilde’s real shock was ‘discovering’ that Ernest Leverson had, back in 1895, taken £250 from the fund to redeem his outstanding debt. This, of course, was exactly what Wilde had insisted he should do. But he had forgotten it. And now, in his fragile and anxious state, it struck him as a betrayal. He insisted on regarding Leverson’s action as an ‘outrageous’ piece of financial dishonesty akin to ‘fraud’.60
It suddenly seemed to Wilde that he might have no money at all when he came out prison, not even enough to escape to the continent. It was an appalling thought. He wrote tersely to Leverson asking for a full statement of account, and the immediate handover of all monies,61 while to Ross and Adey he fired off a succession of intemperate letters accusing them of gross incompetence and stupidity in all business matters. Poor Adey was castigated as a ‘solemn donkey’ who would be ‘quite incapable of managing the domestic affairs of a tom-tit in a hedge for a single afternoon’.62 Whatever ‘mistakes’ had been made, this was a poor return on so much selfless work. Reggie Turner felt obliged to write, telling Wilde he was being unjust to two ‘dear and devoted friends’; and, as far as Ross was concerned, ‘I fear, dear Oscar, that you have gone very near to breaking his heart.’ Reggie was confident, though, that ‘in a day or two crooked things will be put straight’.63
Amid all these distressing developments there had been one great relief: the troubled question of the marriage settlement was finally resolved.64 Hansell had been able to report that a divorce, with the attendant scandal of court proceedings, could be avoided if both parties agreed to a voluntary ‘mutual separation’. Such an arrangement, while legally binding, had the additional benefit of being reversible. It allowed the possibility of a future reconciliation. Wilde readily acquiesced to the plan, and on whatever conditions Constance desired. A ‘deed of separation’ was duly drawn up by Hargrove and Hansell and acceded to by Adey’s solicitor, Mr Holman. Under its terms Adey and Ross were obliged to assign to Constance the ‘life interest’ (which they had bought for £75); and in return Wilde was to receive a yearly allowance of £150 from his wife. There was an assurance that this arrangement would be maintained in the event of her predeceasing him. The quarterly payment of the allowance, however, was to be dependent upon Wilde’s good behaviour: he was not to approach Constance or the children without her permission, nor could he ‘be guilty of any moral misconduct or notoriously consort with evil or disreputable companions’.
Wilde balked rather at such conditions. As he remarked, since ‘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’.65 What constituted an infringement was to be left to the discretion of Mr Hansell – an arrangement that Adey thought most inadvisable. But it was allowed to stand. The solicitor, when he brought the ‘deed of separation’ down to Reading for Wilde to sign on 17 May, explained that ‘moral misconduct’ would certainly include any resumption of Wilde’s relationship with the thoroughly ‘disreputable’ Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde did not imagine that this would be a problem.66
Constance accompanied Hansell on his visit to Reading, though Wilde was unaware of the fact. She remained outside the ‘consultation room’ where Wilde ‘sat at a table with his head in his hands’ going through the details of the deed with his solicitor. She did, however, ask the warder at the door if she might have ‘one glimpse’ of her husband. He silently stepped aside, allowing her a lingering – and unobserved – look at the sad scene. Then, ‘apparently labouring under deep emotion’, she drew back. The warder considered it perhaps the ‘saddest’ incident of Wilde’s prison life.67 With typical thoughtfulness Constance ensured that the first quarterly instalment of Wilde’s allowance – £37 10s – should be available to him when he came out of prison.68 Amid the collapse of all his other financ
ial hopes, it was a real comfort, although he did remark with some wonderment that he would now have ‘to live for a year on what I used to spend in one week’.69
Things were not quite as bad as that. He heard the following day from Ernest Leverson, who – while defending his right to have repaid himself the £250 – was happy to make a ‘fresh loan’ of the same amount. But not all at once. As a first ‘instalment’ he had given £80, in bank notes, to Adey, along with a cheque for £111 11s 6d (the amount remaining from Adela Schuster’s fund).70 Miss Schuster had also sent Adey a further cheque, for £25, anxious that Wilde should have something ‘actually in his pocket – directly he comes out’.71
With even these modest sums in prospect, Wilde’s thoughts turned at once to others. On the same afternoon that he signed the deed of separation he had been greatly distressed by the sight of three very small children who had just been brought into the prison for stealing rabbits. The following day Wilde managed to pass a note to Warder Martin asking him to find out the details of their case; he wanted to pay their fine and ‘get them out’. ‘Please, dear friend, do this for me. I must get them out. Think what a thing for me it would be to be able to help three little children. I would be delighted beyond words. If I can do this by paying the fine, tell the children that they are to be released tomorrow by a friend, and ask them to be happy, and not to tell anyone.’ (Wilde did, in due course, secure their release.)72
As Wilde’s time in prison approached its end there had been a growing anxiety among his friends about unwanted attention from the press or the public. Despite several requests to have his sentence shortened, if only by a few days, so that he could be got discreetly out of the country, the authorities were adamant that he would have to serve his two-year term in full. Nevertheless they did accept that it would be a good thing if his release on 19 May were handled without the glare of publicity. Reading, it was known, was filling up with journalists. Major Nelson had already received at least one letter, from an American reporter, ‘offering any sum’ for an interview with Wilde over breakfast on the morning of his release.73 So, at almost the last moment (17 May), Wilde was informed that on the following day he would be taken from Reading to Pentonville, and released from there the next morning. The indignities of his earlier transfer were not to be repeated. Wilde would travel ‘under humane conditions as regards dress and not being handcuffed’.74 He had wanted to avoid London; instead he would be plunged into its midst. Nevertheless, from there he hoped to be spirited – by Adey or Turner – over to France. After his disappointment over the £500 he could no longer face the thought of travelling with, or even seeing, Frank Harris.
On the same day that he learnt about the plans for his return to liberty, he received a visit from Rev. James Adderley, a high church clergyman and devotee of the stage. An acquaintance of Wilde’s, he was also a close associate of Stewart Headlam, and may have been making arrangements for Wilde to find a temporary refuge at Headlam’s London home in the immediate aftermath of his release. Wilde would need a place to wash and change and breakfast before setting off for the continent. Adderley recalled that, when he confessed that he had never visited a prisoner before – despite Jesus’s admonitions on the subject – Wilde remarked, ‘Then, bad as I am, I have done one good thing. I have made you obey your Master.’ Adderley was also amused at Wilde declaring that, during his time in prison, he had learnt ‘a wonderful thing called “humility”’, immediately before describing his own prose as ‘the finest prose in the English language – with the exception of Pater’s’.75
On the evening of 18 May, having employed an element of deception to put off the journalists waiting at the gate, Wilde left Reading prison in a closed carriage, accompanied by the deputy governor and Warder Harrison.76 Despite all the stresses of his final few days, Major Nelson recalled that he ‘went out full of hope’ and even ‘grateful for his terrible punishment’.77 And he took with him his long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde’s physical condition seemed to have improved alongside his mental powers during the ten months he had passed under Nelson’s care, and he had regained some of his stoutness. One friend even described him as, apparently, ‘radiant with health’.78
Wilde and his companions headed for Twyford station, where (exceptionally) the express train was to stop and pick them up. Waiting on the platform, Wilde nearly blew his cover by throwing open his arms at the sight of a budding tree, and exclaiming, ‘Oh beautiful world! Oh beautiful world.’ ‘Now, Mr Wilde,’ interjected Warder Harrison, ‘you mustn’t give yourself away like that. You’re the only man in England who would talk like that in a railway station.’79 On the journey to London, Wilde, though still not officially allowed to read a newspaper, was permitted to squint at an upside-down copy of the Morning Chronicle (‘I never enjoyed it so much,’ he claimed. ‘It’s really the only way to read newspapers’).80 Avoiding the terminus at Paddington, they alighted at Westbourne Park, and took a cab to Pentonville, the site of Wilde’s first unhappy weeks of incarceration.
* According to report, at one of these interviews Nelson, giving Wilde news of the outside world, mentioned the recent death of one of his relatives, as well as informing him that Edward Poynter had been elected president of the Royal Academy. Wilde solemnly thanked Nelson for telling him about his poor aunt, but suggested that he might perhaps have broken the news about Poynter more gently.
† According to the prison regulations Wilde should have received only one sheet of paper per day, which had to be handed in upon its completion. And although the internal evidence of the manuscript (now in the British Library) suggests that this rule was not always enforced, the letter, as a whole, was composed without the benefit of Wilde being able to refer back to what he had written previously.
‡ Ada Leverson had reported to More Adey the previous year of a ‘really beautifully played and staged’ touring production of An Ideal Husband, in which ‘Cossie’ Gordon Lennox was playing the part of Lord Goring. It had been ‘splendidly received’ at Brighton (where she had caught it). She had seen Cossie, who had told her of a ‘very curious incident’ that had occurred in Newcastle, when a man had called on him at the theatre: ‘[He] was like a shadow of Oscar, an exact imitation and great likeness. He adores Oscar and always has his photograph in a silver frame covered with forget-me-nots. He kissed Cossie, once for Oscar’s sake, once for Lord Goring’s and once for his own.’
-PART X-
The Fisherman
And His Soul
1897–1898
age 42–44
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Naples, 1897.
1
Asylum
‘I think [Oscar’s] fate is rather like Humpty Dumpty’s, quite as tragic and quite as impossible to put right.’
constance wilde to otho lloyd
The press had been successfully put off the trail. Wilde was released at quarter past six the following morning, into the brightness of a cold spring day. More Adey and Stewart Headlam were there to meet him, having received special permission to drive their curtained brougham into the prison courtyard. They brought him back to Headlam’s house in Bloomsbury. As they drove down the Euston Road they saw a newspaper placard announcing ‘Release of Oscar Wilde’. At Upper Bedford Place, with its tasteful decor of Pre-Raphaelite pictures and Morris wallpapers, Wilde bathed and changed into his new clothes. After two years of prison cocoa, he relished his first cup of coffee.1
Ada and Ernest Leverson arrived together with several other friends, including Arthur Clifton and his wife. Ada recalled how Wilde at once dispelled the awkwardness of the moment. ‘He came in with the dignity of a king returning from exile. He came in talking, laughing, smoking a cigarette, with waved hair and a flower in his button-hole.’ He looked, she thought, not only ‘markedly better, slighter, and younger’ than he had before his incarceration, but somehow, ‘transformed and spiritualized’. His first words were, ‘Sphinx, how marvellous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at s
even o’clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been away! You can’t have got up, you must have sat up.’2 Everyone was put at ease. Wilde’s irritation with More Adey and his anger at Ernest Leverson were forgotten. He was eager to talk of books and ideas. He discoursed on Dante, insisting on writing down for Headlam the best authorities to read on the poet.3
There was some discussion of immediate plans. Although all had been made ready for him to go over to Dieppe, where Ross and Turner were waiting, he seems to have been assailed by doubts (he would be too well known in Dieppe; he had too little money). According to Ada Leverson, his thoughts turned to the possibility of going on a religious retreat – if not actually entering a Trappist monastery. He had been talking about religion, telling Headlam that he looked on all the different religions of the world as ‘colleges in a great university’, with Roman Catholicism as ‘the greatest and most romantic’ of these colleges. And, prompted perhaps by this idea, he broke off to send a short letter by special messenger to one of the Catholic priests at either Farm Street or the Brompton Oratory, asking whether they might be able to provide him with a refuge.4
While waiting for a reply, Wilde talked gaily on, walking up and down the drawing room. One of his conceits was that ‘the dear Governor’ at Reading – ‘such a delightful man, and his wife is charming’ – having noticed him working in their garden, and supposing him to be the gardener, had invited him to spend the summer with them. ‘Unusual, I think? But I don’t feel I can,’ he declared. ‘I feel I want a change of scene.’ His flow of humorous chat was broken by the return of the messenger. As Wilde read the letter he brought, his face assumed a sudden seriousness. Then he broke down and sobbed bitterly. The priests had replied that they could not accept him at a retreat on the impulse of the moment; such a step must be thought over for at least a year. It was the first rejection of his new life.5
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