Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  When Wilde described himself in De Profundis as “a lord of language,” he was suggesting then that this title is loftier by far than Lord Alfred Douglas’s title.

  In De Profundis, Wilde was alert to his own inheritance, to who his parents were and what they had achieved, as much as he was concerned to denigrate and undermine and insult the family of Lord Alfred Douglas. He quotes Douglas’s own disparagement of his mother’s hospitality as “the cold cheap wine of Salisbury.” Indeed, he presented Douglas’s parents as quite tedious and vulgar, involved in some dreary and unnecessary and primitive dispute.

  How he referred to his own parents is notably different. When he listed what he lost at the time of his bankruptcy, he included the “beautifully bound editions of my father’s and mother’s works.” In passing, he referred to lines by Goethe, which his mother often quoted, “written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him,” as though it were the most natural and ordinary thing for Carlyle to give a book to his mother.

  But the most significant passage about his parents comes when he wrote of his mother’s death, which occurred while he was in prison: “She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.”

  Thus when he wrote the passage in De Profundis describing his own importance,

  I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realized this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realize it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged . . . The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring . . .

  he was echoing the tone he had used to describe his parents’ achievements. He was not only establishing his own importance in the world, but in emphasizing that he had “a distinguished name” and “high social position,” as opposed to the “terrible legacy” of the Douglases, he was asserting his own parents’ importance, and integrating his own achievement with theirs, an achievement that, he notes, included Ireland’s evolution as a nation.

  In the way he presented his parents in his letter to Douglas, Wilde was invoking a sense of his own evolving country as a place that could confer honors in a manner that was more authentic and meaningful than the neighboring island.

  Thus in his cell, as Wilde wrote his long letter, he was in no doubt about what he thought of Douglas’s parents. He also managed to describe with hushed grief the memory of receiving the news that his mother had died:

  No one knew better than you how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death was terrible to me . . . What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than I should hear the news from indifferent or alien lips, travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irredeemable, a loss.

  As I go on reading the letter, I am interested in the silences that lurk between the words in De Profundis, the things that Wilde does not say, that he glosses over, that he seems almost to avoid. While Wilde had time to say everything he needed to say, there is one figure almost missing from the pages of his letter, a figure whose life has a considerable number of similarities with that of Wilde himself.

  This figure is his father, more than twenty years dead when Wilde wrote De Profundis. Since Wilde put so much energy into letting it be known that he had invented himself, it is easy to understand how having a father might have seemed at certain moments quite unnecessary for him. Posing as a fully fledged orphan was another of his modes. And like Lord Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, his father does not need to appear. While Sir William’s books and the name he bequeathed to his son are mentioned in De Profundis, there is no moment when Wilde’s father is fully evoked, no moment when anything particular is said about who Sir William Wilde was, and what he did, nothing about how his own search for fame, his own notoriety, has strange echoes with events in the life of his son, nothing about how Oscar Wilde emerged not, like Jay Gatsby, from his Platonic conception of himself, but from a family, and that many of the ambiguities in his personality, many of his sweet talents, came from his father.

  William Wilde, the son of a doctor, was born in County Roscommon in Ireland in 1815. He studied medicine in Dublin, where he became friends with Robert Graves, a doctor and painter nineteen years his senior. It was Graves who recommended him to a patient about to embark on a cruise of the Mediterranean in 1837. Wilde’s first book, entitled Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean, Including a Visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Tyre, Rhodes, Telmessus, Cyprus, and Greece, in two volumes, was an account of this journey.

  This book set a tone that made clear how omnivorous William Wilde’s interests were. As Terence de Vere White wrote in The Parents of Oscar Wilde:

  Everything interested him—the appearance of the people, their lives, the state of each place, its history, commerce, antiquities, girls, dress, public institutions . . . He was a census-maker born, but his interests were too wide and his imagination too vivid to be a mere statistician . . . Wilde had the eye of the scientific explorer. Very little escaped him.

  In Egypt, Wilde was assailed by the local youth:

  The whole body of donkey boys, with their animals, rushed upon us with one accord, pushing, jostling and abusing each other in a most unintelligible jargon; and a half a dozen laying hold of us at once attempted to place us, nolens volens, on their donkeys. I was literally lifted off and on three of them, before I could employ my stick to any advantage, to deter others from plucking me off the one on which I had at last secured a seat . . . The whole scene is really so ludicrous, that it is worth witnessing for once, after which I would advise all travellers to provide themselves with a good stout koorbag, which is made of the hide of the hippopotamus, and forms a staple article of commerce with the inhabitants of Upper Nubia, and on the Blue River; it is the only remedy for an Alexandrian ass-boy.

  When Wilde writes about the excitement of walking through the narrow streets of Algiers, and when he offers descriptions of the sheer exotic nature of Algiers (“The day was the most exciting I had experienced since I left England. Nothing can exceed the variety and incongruity of costume, and the appearance of the people you meet with in the narrow streets of Algiers”), it is difficult not to think of the account his son would give of a stay in the city with Lord Alfred Douglas almost sixty years later, just months before his downfall, in a letter to Robert Ross from Algiers: “There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilized guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish [sic]: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love.”

  William Wilde had interests other than peace and love. His son’s frivolity as revealed in his letters (and in the account of André Gide, who was with him and Douglas) was matched by the father’s seriousness. While Oscar Wilde’s interest in the local youth occupied him to the exclusion of much else, William was fascinated by monuments and the diverse ethnicities, by the religions and traditions he came across, by local politics, as well as by the wildlife. On the ship he had a dolphin dragged on board and he dissected it over three days, thus gathering material for a scientific paper.

  On his return to Dublin, William Wilde worked as a doctor, but also gave lectures on any subject that interested him, from anatomy to geology to archaeology to ethnology. He began to write for the Dublin University Magazine, whose editors included the lawyer and politician Isaac Butt, who became a regular dinner guest at Wilde’s house in Westland Row, and the novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. (His son Oscar would also contribute to the magazine in 1877, when, at the age of twenty-three, h
e wrote an account of the opening exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in London.)

  William Wilde also traveled to London, where he delivered lectures about his travels to the British Association, which he had joined in 1839. He then proceeded to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies, visiting also Prague, Munich and Brussels, where he stayed with Charles Lever and visited the site of the Battle of Waterloo. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life.

  Jane Elgee, whom William Wilde married in 1851, began to publish poetry in the Young Ireland journal the Nation in 1846, when she was twenty-five. The Nation was a radical, nationalist journal. Charles Gavan Duffy was one of the founders and the first editor. As Jane got to know the editors and contributors, she wrote to a friend: “There is an earnestness almost amounting to fanaticism in the Patriotism of all the Young Ireland Party combined with great genius and a glowing poetic transcendentalism. They are all poets and I know of no genius outside their circle in Ireland.”

  In 1848, while Charles Gavan Duffy was being held for sedition, Jane Elgee wrote editorials in the Nation under her pen name, Speranza. One began: “The long pending war with England has actually commenced,” and included the line: “O! for a hundred thousand muskets glimmering brightly in the light of Heaven.”

  The charges against Gavan Duffy included the writing of this seditious editorial. In a protracted trial, he was represented by Isaac Butt, who refused to allow Elgee to appear to admit that it was she who had written it. In court, when Elgee tried to speak from the gallery and state that she was the culprit, she was silenced. Isaac Butt pointed out to the judge that the editorial could not, in fact, have been written by Charles Gavan Duffy, who was in prison at the time of its publication. According to newspaper reports:

  The Solicitor-General observed that it had been intimated to him that this article was written by a lady . . . [He] then said that he would not press the matter. He should be sorry the lady who wrote it should incur any risk by coming on the table; she was a lady of respectability and most respectably connected, and if she had been led into this folly [then] if the lady had been his sister or his daughter [he would not want to put her in the witness box].

  The charges against Charles Gavan Duffy were dropped. In 1852 he was elected to the House of Commons, resigning his seat some years later to emigrate to Australia. Isaac Butt would feature subsequently in the life of William Wilde and his wife, and would also be a friend of John B. Yeats. His name would appear twice in Ulysses and once in Finnegans Wake, and the bridge over the Liffey named after him was invoked in Ulysses. He also, it seems, had a connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son in 1921, John B. Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: “When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs. Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.”

  Butt was two years older than William Wilde. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, where Oscar Wilde would also be a student, and became a professor of political economy there and a lawyer. A staunch conservative, he opposed Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, but his experiences in the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1847 changed his politics, making him into a Federalist rather than a Unionist. His work defending various Irish revolutionaries, including the Young Ireland leaders and the leaders of the Fenian Rebellion of 1867, also softened his conservative views. He was a member of the British Parliament from 1852 to 1865 and from 1871 until his death in 1879. He was the first to use the phrase “Home Rule” to describe the need for political separation between Ireland and Britain and was the leader of the political group in Westminster that supported Home Rule. His political influence waned over the last years of his life, as younger members, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, wishing to use more radical measures, took over the Irish Parliamentary Party. Besides his fame as a lawyer and a politician, Butt also enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the mothers of his illegitimate children.

  As a young man, William Wilde fathered a child, known as Henry Wilson, born in 1838. By the time of his marriage, he had also had two further illegitimate children, Emily and Mary, born in 1847 and 1849, who were taken care of as wards by William’s eldest brother, Ralph. (John B. Yeats believed that the mother of these two girls kept a “black oak shop” in Dublin.)

  William Wilde, in the years before his marriage, was emerging not only as a famous doctor, specializing in diseases of the eye and ear, founding the first eye and ear hospital in Dublin, but also as an important antiquarian, topographer, folklore collector and archaeologist in a time when the study of ancient Ireland was becoming both fashionable and politically resonant. On his return to Dublin from his voyage in the Mediterranean, he became friendly with George Petrie, twenty-five years his senior, who had done much to revitalize the antiquities committee of the Royal Irish Academy, and was responsible for its acquisition of important Irish manuscripts. Petrie painted in watercolor, made sketches, collected music and wrote extensively on archaeology and early Irish history.

  William Wilde worked with Petrie in County Meath, north of Dublin, discovering the remnants of lake dwellings, known as crannógs, and recovering a large number of artifacts, which were put on display in the Royal Irish Academy. William delivered a paper to the academy on the finding in Meath in 1839 and was soon elected as a member. He was twenty-four years old. He was part of a group that traveled to the Aran Islands, where they collected stories and songs and studied customs and manners.

  In the preface to his book The Beauties of the Boyne, and Its Tributary, the Blackwater, published in 1849, William wrote:

  It may be regarded as a boast, but it is nevertheless incontrovertibly true, that the greatest amount of authentic Celtic history in the world, at present, is to be found in Ireland; nay more, we believe it cannot be gainsaid that no country in Europe, except the early kingdoms of Greece and Rome, possesses so much ancient written history as Ireland.

  The Beauties of the Boyne, written shortly after the Great Irish Famine, is a detailed and meticulous guidebook, but it is also a way of suggesting, in a time when the very name of Ireland carried a burden of poverty and misery, that the Irish landscape itself possessed grandeur and nobility, and that the archaeology of the Boyne Valley offered resistance to any idea that Ireland could be easily integrated either spiritually or politically with England.

  While the parliaments of the two countries had merged in 1801, it was evident from Wilde’s book that the essential spirit of Ireland stayed implacably apart. That spirit was held in graves and churches and towers, signs in the landscape of a rich and complex life fully intact many centuries before the English efforts to civilize the country, so to speak, began.

  The tone of the narrative is engaging—“of all the modern towns in Ireland, of our acquaintance, we know few to vie with Trim in dirt, laziness and apathy”—and filled with interesting speculation:

  It is very remarkable . . . how frequently we find some of the earliest Christian remains in the vicinity of pagan mounds, tumuli and other ancient structures, as if the feeling of veneration remained round the spot; and, though the grove of the Druid was replaced by the cashel of the Christian, still the place continued to be respected, and the followers of the early missionaries raised their churches and laid their bones in the localities hallowed by the dust or renowned by the prowess of their ancestors.

  Wilde’s observations on the difference between the treatment of pagan and Christian monuments remain fascinating as he wrote about the complexities surrounding respect and belief in the Ireland of his time: “It is a fact, strange but true, that the peasant, who will not . . . for love or money, touch a stone, or remove a mound believed to be of pagan origin, will wantonly pollute, or, for ordinary building purposes, dilapidate the noblest monastic structure, or the most sacred Christian edifice.”
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  Wilde’s Boyne Valley was a set of layers, a palimpsest of competing cultures. Near Navan, he found a decaying castle, “marking the boundary of the English Pale: it tells of the worst days of misrule in this unhappy land, where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs, neither civilized nor enriched the country, resided amongst us.”

  It is clear from his book that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political neutrality. Any reader in the aftermath of the Famine would be alert to the contemporary implications of his comment on the decaying castle. Wilde, however, wanted it both ways. In his preface, he wrote like a true and loyal subject:

  Her Majesty Queen Victoria, with her illustrious consort, has just visited this portion of her dominions, and by their coming amongst us, have done more to put down disaffection, and elicit the loyal feelings and affections of the Irish people, than armies thousands strong, fierce general officers, trading politicians, newspaper writers, and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act etc, etc. Let us hope that her welcome visit will be soon repeated.

  One wonders what Jane Elgee would have made of his views on the queen and her illustrious consort. One possibility is that she would have understood completely the need for duplicity or at least careful ambiguity, or seen the unease within the text as natural, part of a dual inheritance. Also, in the aftermath of the trial of Gavan Duffy, the trial that refused to try her, she had become disillusioned and abandoned the direct seditious rhetoric apparent in the editorials she wrote.

  This idea of unstable and gnarled allegiances, of some beliefs as a sort of veneer, was something that would become, in turn, an essential element in the life of Sir William Wilde himself and the lives of his wife and his son. It was their very instability and unpredictability from which they would get much of their notoriety and power. No one was ever sure what they believed in, where their loyalty lay. Their identities were fragile, wavering, open to suggestion, and open also to pressure.