Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  An added insult throughout the proceedings was the conspicuous presence of Queensberry. Wilde bitterly described to Bosie how his father attracted attention with his “stableman’s gait and dress, the bowed legs, the twitching hands, the hanging lower lip, the bestial and half-witted grin.”

  Sacrificing Wilde to Victorian homophobia calmed the puritans: there were no more arrests. The aristocrats sacrificed Wilde because he had attempted to rise above his proper station; the legal system punished him because he had perverted the law by lying about his homosexual acts. He had wanted to punish Queensberry to please Bosie but only punished himself. He had put on an extraordinary performance in the dock and truly believed that, like Sir Robert Chiltern in An Ideal Husband, he would triumph over the past and start life anew.

  During sentencing, Sir Alfred Wills upheld centuries of prejudice with his declaration: “People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried. That you, Taylor, kept a kind of male brothel it is impossible to doubt. And that you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossible to doubt.” That the Crown never proved that Wilde was a corruptor went unnoticed.

  “And I? May I say nothing, my lord?” Wilde inquired. Affronted, Wills motioned for the warders to take the prisoner away.

  *The four-act play was forgotten. Charles Frohman, who had both versions, used the London text when he opened in New York at the Empire Theatre on April 22, and this became the revival standard. It was not until November 15, 1985, that the original version was staged at John Carroll University, a Jesuit university in Cleveland, Ohio.

  *The author was Henry Arthur Jones, whose greatest success was in 1898 with The Liars, a play sometimes attributed to Wilde. It was rumored that after The Ballad of Reading Gaol Wilde wrote a final dramatic masterpiece and Jones offered the use of his name to have it produced—a curious but unlikely story since there is no mention of it in Wilde’s letters to Smithers or Ross. Even if good money had been involved, would Wilde have bowed so low? Wilde respected Pinero but ignored Jones: “I know and admire Pinero’s work,” he wrote to George Alexander, “but who is Jones?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Touching Sorrow

  Clergymen, and people who use phrases without wisdom

  sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

  One discerns things that one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint.…

  I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great Art.

  —DE PROFUNDIS

  The gulf between Wilde’s crime and his punishment was enormous. Of suffering, he had only idealistic notions. On his American tour, when he visited a prison in Lincoln, Nebraska, he had found the inmates “mean-looking.” That pleased him. “I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face,” he wrote Nellie Sickert, describing to her the “little whitewashed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them.” When he saw a translation of Dante, he wondered how the words of an exiled Florentine could soothe the sorrow of a modern prisoner.

  In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” he imagines that “even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace.… He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection.” Wilde tried to prove in De Profundis that his personality had undergone similar changes, but prison never brought peace of mind or perfection.

  After his conviction, Wilde was taken to Pentonville Prison and put in a single lime-washed cell thirteen feet long by seven feet wide with a nine-foot ceiling. He passed the cursory medical examination and was declared fit for hard labor. He wore the standard drab gray uniform with thick black arrows and a cap with a face flap, which he had to lower whenever he met another prisoner. He was issued a blanket and a hard pillow and slept for the first months on a plank bed, the object of which he said was to produce insomnia. The prisoner gets used to not sleeping and, even when issued a hard mattress later in his term, still suffers from insomnia. “For sleep,” Wilde wrote, “like all wholesome things, is a habit.”

  Beyond a small table for his personal and eating needs, nothing was permitted. No pictures. No books. No toilet (drainpipes made communication easier). A tin chamber pot could be emptied three times a day, but access to prison lavatories was restricted to the one hour daily for exercise. For a man of Wilde’s fastidious nature to be squatting on a pot in a darkened cell throughout the night when he had chronic diarrhea was torture. He lost twenty-two pounds. By shedding the fat gained from the richness of the Café Royal’s menu, his face regained its angular features. Visitors commented on how fit he looked.

  He was up at six and in bed by seven. The first rule that unnerved him was daily inspection, when utensils had to be precisely arranged. “I had to keep everything in my cell in its exact place,” he said, “and if I neglected this even in the slightest, I was punished.” One warder recalled how Wilde would arrange his tins and then “step back and view them with an air of childlike complacency.”

  Wilde was a physically powerful man, which helped him survive the severities of prison. Otherwise, he would have withered and died, for imprisonment is a form of erosion as the prisoner consumes himself with trying to understand his abandonment. Wilde slid backward, becoming a child again, helpless and abused. Nothing is more moving than his letters of protest on behalf of the children imprisoned beside him. “The terror of a child in prison is quite limitless,” he wrote in a letter to The Daily Chronicle, where he described a boy in the opposite cell: “The child’s face was like a white wedge of sheer terror. There was in his eyes the terror of a hunted animal. The next morning I heard him at breakfast time crying, and calling to be let out. His cry was for his parents.”

  It took Wilde many months to adjust to the prison diet of gruel, beans, soup, and cold meat once a week. Diarrhea was so endemic that the smell made the warders ill when they opened up the cells in the morning. Wilde’s first visitor, R. B. Haldane, a Liberal politician, arranged for him to have access to books other than those in the prison library, which Wilde described as consisting chiefly of “third-rate, badly-written, religious books, so-called, written apparently for children, and utterly unsuitable for children or for anyone else.”

  To do nothing is difficult. In “The Critic as Artist,” Gilbert talks about contemplation—Plato’s noblest form of energy—and concludes that modern man is “too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself.” Prison life was about being, not doing, about memory, “the diary that we all carry about with us,” as Cecily says in Earnest. Nothing prepared Wilde for the realization that in prison he had to learn to communicate with himself in a vastly different way.

  Previously Wilde’s moments of solitude, whether in the bath or lying on the sofa thinking of epigrams, were in preparation for talk with others. Family, friendship, art, work—things that he had taken for granted—were the exceptions in prison, where disappointment and pain are everyday emotions. Now interior monologues led to bitterness toward Douglas, but Wilde remained loyal to his principles. “To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble,” he wrote to Ross. “I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms.” Only when Wilde understood ruin could he accept those imperfections he had shunned. Retreating from un-Christian positions, he became humane: illness and ugliness no longer revolted him.

  On June 21, a representative of Queensberry’s solicitor arrived to serve Wilde with a bankruptcy notice. The marquess wanted his £677 in costs for the libel trial, which Bosie had promised would be paid by his mother and brother. A new friend—malice—joined him in his solitude. On July 4, perhap
s through Haldane’s intercession, Wilde was transferred to Wandsworth Prison. He hated it more than Pentonville. The food was worse. “It even smelt bad,” Wilde said. “It was not fit for dogs.” Put on the treadmill to grind flour six hours a day (twenty minutes on and five minutes’ rest), he stood in a cubicle holding on to iron circular handles; his left foot was placed on the higher step, the right foot on the lower, and in that position he paddled and moved the treadmill, making an ascent of six thousand feet. After three days, his diarrhea was so bad that he was moved to the infirmary.

  After his release from the hospital, which he quite enjoyed since there he was allowed to talk with the other patients, Wilde was taken off the treadmill and assigned work in his cell. He was supposed to pick four pounds of oakum daily. His long fingers became scarred from separating loose fibers by untwisting old ropes, which were then mixed with tar to caulk the seams of ships. But he had books. Haldane provided editions of some of his favorite authors: Pater, Cardinal Newman, and St. Augustine. Madame Bovary, which he requested, was judged inappropriate.

  Wilde had served three months at Wandsworth and was entitled to receive and send one letter and to have one visitor. He put family responsibilities over Bosie and accepted a letter from his brother-in-law, who hinted at a reconciliation with Constance if Wilde showed repentance. Wilde wrote his wife a tender, penitent letter that moved her to apply for a special visit, since Robert Sherard had been first. Visits from family and friends, allowed only four times a year and for only twenty minutes, were medieval in atmosphere and left the inmates more depressed than ever. “The prisoner,” Wilde said, “is either locked up in a large iron cage or in a large wooden box, with a small aperture, covered with wire netting, through which he is allowed to peer. His friends are placed in a similar cage, some three or four feet distant, and two warders stand between, to listen to, and, if they wish, stop or interrupt the conversation such as it may be.”

  Proceedings for Wilde’s bankruptcy necessitated his leaving Wandsworth for hearings at Bankruptcy Court in Carey Street, where he was handcuffed and paraded before waiting crowds. One day he turned his head in chapel, and his mattress was removed as punishment. Another morning he was too weak to dress himself and fell on the stone floor of his cell, striking his right ear. “One of the tragedies of prison life,” said Wilde, “is that it turns a man’s heart to stone. The feelings of natural affection, like all other feelings, require to be fed.” Used to living in a world where nothing was what it seemed, Wilde learned in prison, he said, “that things are what they are and will be what they will be.”

  On November 20, 1895, he was transferred from Wandsworth to Reading, largely thanks to Haldane’s concern. Wilde had received no preferential treatment at Pentonville or Wandsworth, but his idleness at oakum picking and infractions of the silence rule militated for a change. At Reading he worked in the library (he enjoyed putting brown wrappers on the books) and tended the garden. Rather than be transported in a prison vehicle, Wilde was taken handcuffed and in prison uniform by train. He had to wait half an hour on the platform at Clapham Junction, where he was recognized and ridiculed. It was a humiliation that he never forgot.

  Reading was a small county prison, similar to many built in the mid-nineteenth century. Cruciform in shape, with four wings, it opened in 1844 on the site of a jail dating from 1571 and housed men from children to the aged and some women. At Wilde’s time there were 13 women out of 170 inmates. The chapel, with opaque leaded windows and a cathedral ceiling, had seating arranged so that prisoners could see only the chaplain. At Reading, Wilde learned to obey the rules and criticize the system. His long, wavy hair was cut to a regulation length. His warder recalled him asking, “ ‘Must it be cut? You don’t know what it means to me,’ and tears rolled down his cheeks.”

  His cell number was C.3.3., indicating the third cell on the third landing of C block. For the next eight months, until he was transferred, the governor, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Isaacson, made Wilde’s existence no less miserable. “He had the eyes of a ferret, the body of an ape, and the soul of a rat,” Wilde said. It was said that Oxford students going back and forth to London saw the turrets of Reading as they passed by and yelled “Hi, Oscar!” from the windows of the train.

  Recognized as a new inmate because he had not learned to talk without moving his lips, Wilde spent his first six weeks in silence until one exercise hour, when the prisoner behind him said, “Oscar Wilde, I pity you, for you must suffer more than we do.” Wilde whispered, “No, my friend, we all suffer alike.” Wilde later told Gide that from that moment he no longer thought of killing himself. Once he learned to communicate, Wilde befriended prisoners. Always fascinated by the criminal element, although from a distance, he now took a personal interest in the lives of his fellow inmates and arranged to have money sent to them when they were released.

  Gradually, through the loss of speech and audience response, Wilde suffered the loss of imagination: his storytelling talents stopped. “I like hearing myself talk,” he often said. “It is one of my greatest pleasures.” Once afflicted with laryngitis, he regretted that without voice he could not even listen with appreciation. Observed talking, Wilde took responsibility for starting the conversation and was given two weeks’ solitary confinement. Another time he broke the rules when he responded to a prisoner who made “the sign of the widow’s son,” an appeal from one brother Mason to another, which cannot be ignored. Isaacson had his books removed for minor infractions. Wilde began a parallel identification between Christ’s sufferings and those of prisoners.

  Salomé was staged in Paris at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on February 11, 1896, and praised in the English press. Wilde said that Isaacson treated him with more deference thereafter, but he always saw the governor as the kind of man who could not eat his breakfast until he had punished someone. That Wilde wanted to write more than authorized letters did not move Isaacson. Verlaine, who served two years in a Belgian prison for shooting his lover Rimbaud, wrote poetry on scraps of paper and ground coffee, a more pleasant task than picking oakum. The Marquis de Sade, who spent many years off and on incarcerated, produced his best writing from a cell, but he also received unlimited writing supplies for his plays and stories.

  Wilde was aware of Constance’s efforts to rebuild her life in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. She had good friends in the Carlos Blackers, who lived in Switzerland, and Lady Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, who had a villa near Genoa; it was Lady Brooke who had urged her friend Haldane to visit Wilde in prison. Reconciliation was very much on Constance’s mind after she received Wilde’s letter. She wrote Emily Thursfield that, because he was “very repentant,” she was willing to humble herself. “By sticking to him now,” she said, “I may save him from even worse and I believe that he cares now for no-one but myself and the children.” She rationalized that “if I find it impossible to live with him I can always leave him.”

  No less than when she married, Constance believed in the healing power of love. “I think we women are meant for comforters,” she told Emily, “and I believe that no-one can really take my place now, or help him as I can.” However, her health problems persisted; a second operation in January 1896 restored partial mobility and increased hopes of reconciliation. In a nostalgic mood, Constance told Emily that she wanted her husband to take her again to the place where she “first heard a nightingale’s song. I have never forgotten the magic of it all.”

  During this time, Cyril and Vyvyan attended several European boarding schools until they were placed in separate academies. Cyril knew his father was in prison because he had read the newspapers at a relative’s house, and he may have known the charge, but he never discussed it with his younger brother. In Son of Oscar Wilde, Vyvyan recalls many idyllic periods during their exile. The boys learned German and Italian, while in prison their father taught himself the same languages; they knew the pasta maker and the wine maker, and they had far more freedom to explore and get into trouble than the
y would have had living in England.

  Wilde realized that his ailing mother would not live to see him released from prison. His sister-in-law, Lily, visited him with the news, a gesture Wilde appreciated since his brother had not asked to see him. Wilde paid for her confinement when his niece, Dorothy lerne Wilde, was born on July 11, 1895. Lady Wilde had asked the prison authorities if Oscar might see her, but the request was denied. When told, she said: “May the prison help him!” and turned her face to the wall. Lily wrote Constance that Lady Wilde died on February 3, 1896; Oscar was not told. Constance wanted to be the one to break the sad news. Negotiating with the prison authorities for a special visit took ten days and the journey four. She wrote Lily that she was on her way, that “such a terrible thing could not be told to him roughly.”

  Aware of the circumstances, the governor arranged for the couple to meet in a private room. Constance began to talk, but Wilde interrupted her. “I knew it already.” On the night his mother died, he said he heard the cry of the banshee and saw a vision of her dressed to go out. Oscar had lost the best of himself. This was the last time that Constance talked with her husband. Lady Wilde failed to reunite Willie and Oscar before her death. And Willie never wrote or visited his brother in prison. “For many reasons he wd [would] not want to see me,” Willie wrote More Adey. (One reason was Wilde’s anger that Willie had sold his beloved fur coat from the American tour.)