Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  In the aftermath of these deaths, William Wilde had done less medical work and spent more and more time in Moytura. When he died, his fortune was much depleted. Many of the properties he owned had been mortgaged. Lady Wilde wrote to Oscar: “How are we all to live? It is all a muddle. My opinion is that all that is coming to us will be swallowed up in our borrowings before we are paid.”

  In June 1877, Oscar wrote to Reginald Harding from Merrion Square: “I am very much down in spirits and depressed. A cousin of ours to whom we were all very attached has just died—quite suddenly from some chill caught riding. I dined with him on Saturday and he was dead on Wednesday.” The cousin was in fact Henry Wilson, William Wilde’s first illegitimate child. In his will he left most of his money to the hospital his father had founded and where he had worked. He left Willie Wilde £8,000, and left Oscar Wilde, whom he felt to be close to converting to Roman Catholicism, only £100, on condition of his remaining a Protestant. Henry and Oscar had inherited Illaunroe from their father and Wilde now also inherited Henry’s half share, on condition that he did not become a Catholic for five years. “You see I suffer a good deal from my Romish leanings,” Oscar wrote, “in pocket and mind . . . Fancy a man going before ‘God and the Eternal Silences’ with his wretched Protestant prejudices and bigotry clinging to him still.”

  The following summer Oscar Wilde wrote a letter to the Jesuit Father Matthew Russell from Illaunroe. The last paragraph read: “I am resting here in the mountains—great peace and quiet everywhere—and hope to send you a sonnet as a result.” That seems to be the last time he went there. In 1881, to keep his life in London going, Wilde mortgaged the property, and three years later he sold it.

  Before Oscar Wilde arrived in London, however, when he was seeking an archaeological studentship at Oxford in 1879, he wrote to A. H. Sayce, professor of comparative philology: “I think it would suit me very well—as I have done a good deal of travelling already and from my boyhood have been accustomed, through my father, to visiting and reporting on ancient sites, taking rubbings and measurements and all techniques of open-air archaeologica. It is a subject of intense interest to me.” As Richard Ellmann wrote in Four Dubliners, “In the process by which Oscar Wilde became Oscar Wilde, his parents must be allowed to have given their impetus.” In the moments when the young Oscar Wilde appears in his father’s Corrib book, and in this letter, and in the letters he wrote from Illaunroe in the summer after his father’s death, we can catch a glimpse of the impetus Oscar Wilde received from his father, an impetus that suggests a sort of shadow path for him, a path that, as he sought fame in England, he did not follow.

  There is a word his father uses twice in his Corrib book, to describe a type of ornamentation. It is the word “fleur-de-lis.” It is used first to describe the decoration on two tombstones William Wilde had uncovered at Annaghdown and later in a description of two tomb flags at Cong.

  It is strange how the word slips and moves and echoes and makes its way into the letter that Oscar Wilde wrote in his cell thirty years later.

  The word “fleur-de-lis” came in the form of a ballad that Lord Alfred Douglas had written in the year before Wilde was imprisoned. It was called “Jonquil and Fleur-de-Lys.” In the poem, two boys meet, the first a shepherd and the other the son of a king, and in a mild homoerotic game they decide to switch identities:

  And after that they did devise

  For mirth and sport, that each should wear

  The other’s clothes, and in this guise

  Make play each other’s parts to bear.

  Whereon they stripped off all their clothes,

  And when they stood up in the sun,

  They were as like as one white rose

  On one green stalk, to another one.

  In the January before he went to prison, Wilde, in an interview, said that his three comedies to date were to each other “as a wonderful young poet has beautifully said—‘as one white rose / On one green stalk, to another one.’ ” He used “Fleur-de-Lys” as an affectionate nickname for Douglas.

  When Lord Alfred Douglas realized that Wilde was to be declared bankrupt and thus would be visited in prison by a solicitor’s clerk, he sent him a message that, in the presence of the warder, was actually conveyed to Wilde in a low voice by the clerk: “Prince Fleur-de-Lys wishes to be remembered to you.”

  In De Profundis, Wilde wrote:

  I stared at him. He repeated the message again. I did not know what he meant. “The gentleman is abroad at present,” he added mysteriously. It all flashed across me, and I remember that, for the first and last time in my entire prison life, I laughed. In that laugh was all the scorn of all the world. Prince Fleur-de-Lys! I saw—and subsequent events showed me that I rightly saw—that nothing that had happened had made you realize a single thing. You were in your own eyes still the graceful prince of a trivial comedy, not the sombre figure of a tragic show.

  Although Jonquil in Douglas’s version of things was a shepherd lad and Fleur-de-Lys the son of a king, and they both became each other, this was not the story of Wilde and Douglas. Rather, this doubling and merging happened within Wilde’s own complex spirit. He merged the talents he had taken from his parents with their sense of nobility and their feeling that they could do whatever they liked. And then, in his own imagination and in his own books and plays, he doubled what he had inherited from them and became, as he wrote in De Profundis, “a lord of language.”

  In the dim light of his cell, almost a hundred and twenty years after he wrote De Profundis, as I came to the end of my reading, it was hard not to feel awe at the idea of how far he had come, what dark knowledge he had gained, and how much he understood—as his father had understood after his court case when he wrote his book on Lough Corrib—that the only way he could rescue himself was by writing. Thus in this cell each day, Oscar Wilde was busy, as his parents had been, finding the right words. He was working, finishing the letter so that it could be handed to him as he emerged into daylight on May 19, 1897.

  JOHN B. YEATS: THE PLAYBOY OF WEST TWENTY-NINTH STREET

  Somewhere in the great, unsteady archive where our souls will be held, there is a special section that records the quality of our gaze. The stacks in this branch of the archive will preserve for posterity the history of those moments when a look or a glance intensified, when watchfulness opened out or narrowed in, due to curiosity or desire or suspicion or fear. Maybe that is what we remember most of each other—the face of the other glancing up, the second when we are held in someone else’s gaze.

  The idea of gaze does not come to us simply. It is not stable. In the poems of W. B. Yeats, for example, when the word appears, it is often in different contexts. In his early poem “The Two Trees,” the poet calls on his beloved to gaze inwards, to “gaze in thine own heart” in the first and last line of the opening stanza, and in the second stanza the poem proposes that the gaze outwards at the disturbing world is to be avoided:

  Gaze no more in the bitter glass

  The demons, with their subtle guile,

  Lift up before us when they pass . . .

  In “The Folly of Being Comforted,” Yeats evokes a time when his love had all the wild summer in her gaze. In “Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty,” he allows the gaze to be personal and beguiling:

  The poets labouring all their days

  To build a perfect beauty in rhyme

  Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze . . .

  In “The Second Coming,” however, the idea of the gaze is dangerous, frightening, speaking of a world to come in which all comfort will be shattered by

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun . . .

  *

  In June 2004 I was in the Special Collections section of the library of Union College in Schenectady in upstate New York when I heard one of the librarians telling someone on the telephone in a half whisper that someone with my name was in looking at the correspondence of John
B. Yeats, which had been transcribed and donated to the library by William M. Murphy.

  An hour later, I looked up from my reading of the Yeats letters to find a man gazing at me. It struck me immediately who he was. It was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal Father, a biography of John B. Yeats, and Family Secrets, a book about the Yeats family.

  As he watched me, the image of another gaze came into my mind. It was a decade earlier, an early summer’s evening in Dublin, and I was walking home along Capel Street when I saw the novelist John McGahern coming towards me in the distance on the same side of the street. As he spotted me, he held my gaze. For a few minutes as we walked towards each other, it was as though we were meeting somewhere in the countryside, with just fields or a lane between us. Neither of us smiled or gestured, but neither of us looked away. When he finally was eye to eye with me, after a brief conversation, he asked me if I was going anywhere special and when I said that I was not, he suggested that I would turn and walk back towards Dame Street with him and we could have dinner in Nico’s.

  Our friendship was based on the fact that we both liked books and enjoyed talking about them. He tended to read the same books over and over, and took pleasure in expressing his insights into and deep appreciation for the very few books that had met with his approval. One of these books was William M. Murphy’s Prodigal Father, and another was a volume of John B. Yeats’s letters. He liked how good-humored and tolerant Murphy’s book was, how well written, and how much sympathy it contained. (We both marveled over individual sentences in the book, such as “By the end of 1897, Lady Gregory had lined up all the Yeatses she thought important—the three men—for further management.”)

  McGahern also loved Yeats’s letters for their fresh thinking and their charm, their openness to life, their readiness to accept no easy truth. When his French publisher asked him to select an Irish book that had never been translated into French, McGahern chose an edition of these letters and wrote an introduction to it.

  In John Butler Yeats’s letters there was great wit (“I think lots of men die of their wives and thousands of women die of their husbands,” for example, or “I wrote to Willie some time ago and said it was as bad to be a poet’s father as the intimate friend of George Moore”) and large-hearted tenderness (“Without imagination—and of the kind that creates—there is no love, whether it be love of a girl or love of a country or love of one’s friend or even of children, and of our wives”). He had original things to say about being old in New York (“old men are popular here, in the streets and everywhere, a breezy sort of popularity, as if they thought it was jolly to be old and to have so long survived pneumonia and cancer and consumption and drink, and all the evils flesh is heir to”). And rude things to say about Bostonians:

  They are always careful of their dollars. The richer they are the worse they are. And then they are so pleased with themselves. They don’t know that in my eyes they are dirt. They hate England intensely. That is the only interesting thing about them. I am told by everyone that it is terrible to live in Boston, it is so infernally dull. I suppose they have a good side but I have not as yet discovered it.

  While McGahern’s gaze, when he spoke about these letters, was frank and straightforward, polite and mannerly, there was also something stern in it, and something withheld. The suggestion was that he looked inwards as much as outwards. But, since he had been a schoolmaster, there was a sense too from his gaze that he noticed everything and he would forget very little.

  William Murphy’s gaze, on the other hand, was softer, but also more guarded and quizzical. As I watched him from my desk in the library of Union College, I realized what his problem was. If he came over and found that I was in Schenectady for a few days, with evenings free, he might feel that he had to invite me to his home for supper or for a drink. He seemed, as he stood there, to be weighing up the consequences of that.

  In other words, quietly and carefully, he was trying to ascertain, just by looking, if I might be someone who would frighten his dogs, or undo his lawn, or spread false and malicious rumors about him and his family when I got back to Ireland, or tell him and his wife the long and melancholy story of my next novel.

  In order to put him out of his misery, I stood up and walked towards him and thanked him for the great work he had done on the Yeats family and for depositing his papers in the library. And then, as his gaze further softened into a look of kindness and ease, he invited me to have supper the following evening.

  At the table with him and his wife, I discovered that they both had the same charm and good humor and tolerant view of the world as Prodigal Father did. He spoke warmly of other, younger biographers, such as Roy Foster and Adrian Frazier, who had approached the same material. Among the many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father, and also to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family—Fianna Fáil being at the time the main political party in Ireland, but also a political movement that was unfashionable, to say the least, and an organization that very few Yeats scholars knew anything about. Michael Yeats had been a Fianna Fáil senator and a member of the European Parliament for the party, of which my father had also been a loyal member.

  Thus a few months later, I found myself having lunch with Michael Yeats and his wife, Gráinne, at Cliff House, their home in Dalkey in the suburbs of Dublin. While Michael’s gaze was hooded and guarded, his wife often gave me a beady glance across the table. She was used to people coming to the house looking for something. All I wanted, however, was to see some sketches for a self-portrait that John B. Yeats had made in New York towards the end of his life.

  After lunch, Michael Yeats motioned me to follow him out to a hallway with a stairway leading to a floor below. He opened a long drawer in an old chest of drawers and began to rummage until he found, wrapped in tissue paper, some unframed drawings by his grandfather, self-portraits done in old age. As soon as he removed the tissue paper and put them on a table, the face of his grandfather looked out at us, filled with urgent life. The gaze was vivid, piercing, questioning, the gaze of a spirit that was fully alert both to its own power and to the fierce amount of inner energy that lay behind it.

  For as long as I thought polite, I looked at these drawings, remembering how Lady Gregory had remarked that since John B. Yeats had so much difficulty finishing paintings, then he should be encouraged to do as many drawings as possible, drawings that could be done in one sitting.

  As I turned, my eye was instantly caught by a long oil painting that was hanging on the stairwell. For a second, I imagined it had to be a reproduction, since I thought that the original, having been owned by the New York lawyer and collector John Quinn, was in the United States. But as I looked more closely, I realized that this was the actual self-portrait that Yeats had worked on for the last decade of his life.

  It was commissioned by John Quinn in New York in 1911 and worked on between then and the artist’s death in 1922. In 1919, Yeats wrote to Quinn: “It is like watching a blessed ghost of a long lost beloved slowly materialising. I think of nothing else and I dream of it.” It was done in Yeats’s small bedroom, also his studio, at his boardinghouse on West Twenty-Ninth Street. Mary Colum described in her autobiography the iron bed and cheap worn rug, and the easel on which was “always erected a portrait at which he tinkered day after day.”

  John B. Yeats’s preoccupation with this late self-portrait accounts for its heavily worked surface, as he often scraped off and reworked what he had done. It was part of his restless, paradoxical spirit that he would spend more than a decade on a single image so that he could all the more capture a sense of spontaneity.

  It made me think of a moment from a letter written in 1906 from Yeats to his son William, quoted by William Murphy in his book:

  I think every work of art should survi
ve after all the labour bestowed on it, and survive as a sketch. To the last it must be something struck off at a first heat. This is the meaning of impressionism. I have lately been reading Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and it has all the pregnancy of a sketch, because it is a sketch. The details are not filled in. No conscientious labour has been spent on it. It is all a riot and extravagance. Now, the essence of a sketch is that it leaves much to the imagination.

  In his preface to Early Memories, W. B. Yeats wrote how his father in his letters “constantly spoke about this picture as his masterpiece, insisted again and again . . . that he had found what he had been seeking all his life.” In a letter to a friend in January 1917, John B. Yeats wrote: “Now I mean as soon as possible to finish my portrait, on which I have been working for many years . . . I want it to be ‘great’—an immortal work—that’s why I put off finishing it.” The painting also became one of Yeats’s excuses in old age for not returning to Ireland since he insisted that the self-portrait in progress “must not be endangered by a change of light.”

  Now, in the scarce light of this landing, this painting, which was still unfinished at the time of the artist’s death, had come home to Ireland. As I stood there, I gazed at his gaze, a gaze even more arresting and engaging than the ones in the drawings. It was like something in motion rather than fixed; it suggested a deep originality of spirit. It was a portrait of someone who had been lit up by life. Filled with curiosity itself and vitality, it provoked a response. It made you want to know who this man was.