Oscar Wilde

by Barbara Belford

  Adey sent a wreath from Wilde’s friends, one of the many selfless acts that he took on while Wilde was in Reading. A friend of Ross and a translator of Ibsen, Adey volunteered to draft petitions to the home secretary for Wilde’s release on grounds of ill health. Lily Wilde gave Oscar’s possessions, including manuscripts that Willie had not disposed of, to Adey for safekeeping. But the fact that he visited Wilde caused some problems when Constance found out, because Oscar had promised not to see his homosexual friends.

  Hounded for court costs by Queensberry’s solicitor, Wilde had only a half interest in Constance’s dowry with which to negotiate. An agreement was struck for him to receive £150 pounds annually from his wife and one-third the life interest, with the rest to go to their sons in the event of her death. There was one stipulation: he forfeited payments if he returned to Bosie or any of his disreputable friends. Constance believed that if Oscar and Bosie were kept apart her husband would return to her after prison. In the interim she changed the family name to Holland, which had belonged to Holland Watson, Constance’s great-great-grandfather. Vyvyan dropped his middle name, Oscar. As time passed, reconciliation seemed less likely and divorce more difficult. Constance might be asked to produce new evidence of her husband’s infidelities. She decided on a legal separation.

  In Paris since the criminal trials, Bosie resumed his old life of reckless pleasure. Advised to stay away from England for at least two years, he nursed a wounded vanity and, when it was to his advantage, suffered the guilt of the survivor. He wanted his side of the case to be heard. The Mercure de France asked him to write an article in which he decided to quote from three of Wilde’s love letters written to him during the trial. He interested the magazine’s publishing company in a new edition of his poems dedicated to Wilde. Since he had not heard from Wilde, he interpreted the silence to mean that Wilde no longer loved him, despite the fact that he was still protecting Bosie from scandal.

  If the letters revealed details about the relationship, it would be clear that Wilde had lied in court. Horrified, Wilde told Ross to stop such “revolting and grotesque” folly. Wilde turned against Bosie, promising to “have nothing to do with him.” When Ross was instructed to ask him for the return of all gifts and letters, Douglas refused. “If Oscar asks me to kill myself I will do so, and he shall have back the letters when I am dead,” he replied. Bosie would not be ignored and launched an article in La Revue blanche entitled “Introduction to My Poems, with some remarks on the Oscar Wilde case.” Enjoying himself in Capri, he sent a message through Adey: “Tell him I know that I have ruined his life, that everything is my fault, if that pleases him. I don’t care. Doesn’t he think that my life is just as much ruined as his and so much sooner?” Bosie realized that Ross had taken the opportunity of his absence to reestablish his position as intimate friend.

  Halfway though his sentence, Wilde was so desperate that he discarded his principles and aligned himself with current theories, which held that homosexuality was a medical condition, a kind of madness was the way Constance referred to it. Wilde knew this to be untrue; his nature was homosexual. But by admitting to sexual madness, a disease to be cured, not a crime to be punished, Wilde built the argument that prison was aggravating his madness. The prison surgeon did not, however, agree, and the petition was denied.

  In July 1896, Isaacson was replaced by Major James Osmond Nelson, who “altered every man’s life in this place,” Wilde’s in particular. The writer was given a light in his cell as late as he wanted, and the warders were much kinder, in particular Thomas Martin. Four months before his term ended, he was permitted an unlimited supply of writing materials. The governor agreed, in order to circumvent prison rules, that Wilde would be allowed to write a long letter for medicinal purposes. Between January and March 1897, he wrote De Profundis on thin blue prison paper under “that little tent of blue,” as he called his cell window in The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Each page was supposed to be taken away when it was completed; only at the end was the author allowed to read successive pages and make revisions. Shaw said that “no other Irishman had yet produced as masterful a comedy.”

  Wilde wanted to write an epistle, to tell the gospel according to Oscar Wilde, an apologia pro vita sua in which he would draw up a statement of account, both for himself and for the public, concerning his relationship with Douglas, the reasons for his downfall, and his past, present, and future position in art and in life. In De Profundis, Bosie is cast as the villain and Wilde as a well-meaning intellectual entrapped by the young lord to punish his mad father: “It was the triumph of the smaller over the bigger nature.” As a piece of writing, the work is an intriguing example of the memoir genre. As an account of his relationship with Bosie, it is too clouded with anger to be reliable. As evidence that Wilde had been reborn in suffering and sorrow, it is deceptive.

  At its best, De Profundis is a meditation on the metaphysical aspects of art and memory. Deprived in prison of the amoral Greek worship of the visible world, Wilde lost his muscular voice and became sentimental. Deprived of enjoying pleasure, he embraced suffering. “There is a luxury in self-reproach,” Dorian observes. “When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest that gives us absolution.” The process cleansed him of “much perilous stuff,” he told Ross.

  Three days before Wilde’s release, Charles Ricketts visited him at Reading. Wilde’s friends had started a fund, which grew to eight hundred pounds, to help him get started in France, and Ricketts, when he could barely afford to, contributed one hundred pounds. He recalled the surroundings with the eye of an artist—the small putty-colored waiting room decorated with a chocolate dado and an ebonized clock, the ocher corridors, the green-baize-covered table at which Wilde sat with his back to the window. He talked about entering a monastery, but Ricketts suggested Venice as the place for work and privacy. “No!” Wilde exclaimed. “Privacy! Work! my dear Ricketts. I wish to look at life, not to become a monument for tourists.… France understands the value of an artist for what he is, not for what he may have done.”

  But the French literati who had welcomed Wilde during his Paris sojourns had not rallied for him; a petition circulated in his defense failed to secure enough signatures. Numerous journal articles had protested the verdict. Rachilde (Marguérite Eymery), whose novel Monsieur Vénus dealt with male homosexuality, protested Wilde’s imprisonment with an article in La Revue blanche. Entitled “Questions brûlantes” (Burning Questions), it criticized hypocritical British morality and endorsed the right to express same-sex love, but ultimately took refuge in the familiar rhetoric of idealized platonic love.

  Wilde had one other visitor before his release. His solicitor Arthur Hansell arrived with papers for him to sign, turning over the guardianship of Vyvyan and Cyril to Constance and her cousin Adrian Hope. Wilde looked at the documents and signed, unaware that Constance was in the next room. She asked the warder to let her have “one last glimpse” of her husband. He moved away from the glass portion of the door he was guarding. Constance took a brief final look and wept.

  When Wilde left Reading Prison on the evening of May 18, 1897, Nelson handed him the packet containing De Profundis, eighty close-written pages on twenty folio sheets. His reactions to the death of a fellow prisoner inspired The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written over six months in France and Italy. On July 7, 1896, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a thirty-year-old trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, was hanged in Reading Prison. He was convicted of the premeditated murder of his twenty-three-year-old wife, whose throat he slit three times with a razor. The refrain that haunts the poem—“For each man kills the thing he loves”—formed in Wilde’s mind as he watched the hangman cross the courtyard. A political tract and a humanist plea, the Ballad celebrates an individual’s desire for freedom and is remarkable for the content of selected stanzas rather than its metrical cleverness.

  Wilde wrote two letters to The Daily Chronicle condemning the prison system,
one when he was in Dieppe and the other in Paris. He wrote them quickly and with the same energy that had produced his sonnets to Lillie Langtry and Ellen Terry. The first, published on May 28, 1897, took issue with the dismissal of Warder Martin, who by his repeated kindnesses had made Wilde’s last months in Reading bearable. His infraction was giving a few biscuits to a hungry child. Poignantly Wilde described the hardships a child endures in prison. The second letter, dated March 23, 1898, objected to a proposal of the home secretary to appoint more prison inspectors. Wilde viewed such reform as useless. Inspectors visit prisons, he wrote, only to see that regulations are followed, to enforce an inhuman code. “No prisoner has ever had the smallest relief, or attention, or care from any of the official visitors.” Reform, he pleaded, should be directed toward alleviating the three punishments authorized by law: hunger, insomnia, and disease.

  Wilde had served every day of his sentence; a petition for release a few days early to avoid the newspaper reporters had been denied. Accompanied by two prison officers, he was taken by cab to Twyford Station and boarded the London train; they left the train in Westbourne Park and went the rest of the way to Pentonville Prison by cab. Only two reporters were at Reading to record his departure, and the rest of the trip was without incident. Wilde had to spend the night at Pentonville because rules called for a prisoner to be released from the prison to which he was admitted.

  At 6:15 A.M. More Adey and the Reverend Stewart Headlam, who had put up part of Wilde’s bail, met him with a cab and went to Headlam’s home in Bloomsbury. Wilde was exhausted, but he knew what was expected of him: to be the Oscar of old, to put everyone at ease, to pretend that life would go gaily on. He appeared in new clothes, cigarette in hand, buttonhole in place, and had his first cup of coffee in two years. Ada and Ernest Leverson arrived to see Wilde emerge anew “with the dignity of a king returning from exile.” Wilde saluted the Sphinx with his memorable greeting: “Sphinx, how marvellous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at seven o’clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been away! You can’t have got up, you must have sat up.”

  Headlam was not a close friend but a clergyman who felt he had to step forward when Wilde was denied bail. Suddenly Wilde changed the subject to religion, perhaps in deference to his host. “I look on all the different religions as colleges in a great university,” he said. “Roman Catholicism is the greatest and most romantic of them.” He then sent off a letter to the Jesuits asking to be admitted for a six-month retreat. The messenger delivered the request to the rectory at Farm Street and waited for a reply. There must have been an initial shock when the priests realized who was making the request. They replied that Wilde could not be accepted without at least a year’s deliberation. That there was such a rule for a short-term stay seems doubtful. When Wilde realized that there was no alternative to exile, “he broke down and sobbed bitterly,” Ada Leverson recalled.

  The last time Wilde missed the boat to France, he was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel and taken to prison. To miss the last boat now would disappoint Robert Ross and Reggie Turner, his remaining best friends, awaiting his arrival at Dieppe. Wilde met with some more well-wishers, took a cab to the station, and boarded the Newhaven train. His thoughts were only of Bosie.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Misbegotten Yesterdays

  It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.

  A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

  —THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  Years earlier Cheiro had read Wilde’s palm and foretold that he had the hand of a king who would send himself into exile.

  Leaving England forever, Wilde forfeited reputation, family, marriage, and country. His few close friends could afford to visit him only if he stayed close to shore. In five months he would be forty-three. His body was as trim as it had been when he arrived from Dublin on his way to Oxford, but he looked older. His hair was streaked with gray, and there was the beginning of a bald spot on the crown; his complexion, never robust, was ashen, his eyes dull, his hearing impaired by the fall in prison. Inside he wanted to feel young again. He immediately went below, avoiding the traditional farewell to Newhaven’s chalk cliffs, insignificant beside those of Dover but still inspiring sadness for those never to return. His only wish was not to be recognized. Speech, after a long silence, startled him. He was not used to the sound of his own voice and wanted no conversation with strangers.

  He had made this channel crossing many times. As a young man, he had visited Walter Sickert and his sister Nellie at their home. He had ended his honeymoon in Dieppe and returned a happily married man. There had been visits to the casino with Bosie, and overnight revels with other poets. The Rhymers, when not meeting at the Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street, had often gathered at Dieppe, sometimes walking around London waiting to catch the early-morning boat train to Newhaven. The Normandy resort catered to the Anglo-French, with salons for the wealthy and cafés for the artists.

  As the ferry arrived at 4:00 A.M. on May 20, dawn silhouetted the citadel and the Arques hills. From the jetty, Ross and Turner saw Wilde’s towering form outlined in the translucent light. They waved and ran along the quay to greet him as he walked down the gangplank, clutching the original copy of De Profundis. He unburdened himself of the manuscript, giving Ross the responsibility for making copies and sending the original to Bosie. (Fearing that he might destroy the original, Ross sent him a copy.) The letter began “Dear Bosie” and ended “Your Affectionate Friend.”

  A room was reserved under his nom de plume Monsieur Sebastian Melmoth at the Hôtel Sandwich, behind the promenade on the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville. In the French tradition, the hotel was a bar where the patron let some rooms. Wilde’s new luggage, a gift from Reggie Turner, bore the initials “S.M.” Considerable thought was given to what name to use so as not to frighten the mailman. The symbolism was more inspired than Wilde realized: Sebastian for the patron saint of the plague, and Melmoth from his great-uncle’s book Melmoth the Wanderer.

  Wilde saw himself not as the Sebastian with too many arrows but as the Sebastian who cheated death, as he had in prison. He had early recollections of the Christian martyr—his body tied to a tree and pierced by arrows—from portraits by Ribera and Giordano in the permanent collection at the Dublin National Gallery. After his first trip to Italy, he often mentioned the Guido Reni at Genoa’s Palazzo Rosso.* The Melmoth Wilde identified with roams the earth looking for someone so eager to get away from worldly tortures that he will sell his soul to the Devil in order to rid himself of earthly miseries. Melmoth drives men to despair and then asks his victims: “Will you take my place in Hell for all eternity if I rescue you from Hell on earth here and now?”

  Wilde arrived in Dieppe with an £800 collection from friends to set up a new life. He could count on £150 a year from Constance, and beyond that he was dependent on Ross. Once a lover and then a friend, Ross became Wilde’s financial adviser and banker. Always jealous of Douglas, he now had the power to keep the former lovers apart. Throughout Wilde’s exile, Ross nagged him like a stern nanny to be prudent; he liked to be the jockey reining him in whenever Wilde wanted to express or enjoy himself. Wilde thought that the coffers would be replenished by anonymous friends, but Ross doubted that their small band could afford to adopt long-term debt to keep Wilde living beyond his means. Wilde was furious when Ross reluctantly distributed a total of £20 to his warders and fellow prisoners.

  Ross and Wilde’s friendship was complex and control-driven. Each used and exploited the other. Following Wilde’s death, Ross told Will Rothenstein that he “had grown to feel, rather foolishly, a sort of responsibility” for Wilde, “for everything connected with him except his genius.” Wilde had become to him like an “adopted prodigal baby.” Wilde suggested that Ross join him in exile. Ross led an active homosexual life despite his devout Catholicism and his vulnerability to the same law that had sent Wilde to prison. Wilde migh
t not fall in love again as he had with Bosie, but he would become smitten with younger boys. Ross could never sparkle in Paris.

  Dieppe was not a large enough place for Ross, Turner, and Wilde. Everybody met everybody else, morning, noon, and night. Ignoring the disdain of the English who recognized him, Wilde went to his favorite haunts. He had coffee in the morning at the quayside Café Suisse spread out under five eighteenth-century arches, and aperitifs in the evening at the Café des Tribuneaux in the central square. He was seated at the Suisse when he saw Aubrey Beardsley walking along the dock with his fellow illustrator Charles Conder. Panicked at the sight of Wilde, Beardsley shoved Conder into a side street. Beardsley found himself in an uncomfortable situation. His patron was André Raffalovich, who demanded as he had with John Gray that no friend of his could be one of Wilde’s.

  “He is sure to make trouble here,” Conder told a friend. “He’ll harangue the ignorant under the Arcades. He’ll use the Café Suisse as his platform and he’ll make an exhibition of himself.” Wilde was nearly arrested after a drunken party with visiting French poets at the Café des Tribuneaux. The police warned him that he would have to leave Dieppe if he sponsored another riotous evening. But Wilde wanted to feel joy. “Laughter is the primeval attitude towards life,” he said, “a mode of approach that survives only in artists and criminals!”

  Wilde’s drinking habits changed after prison. He had spent several decades as a heavy drinker, aided by a prodigious tolerance that impressed even the Colorado miners. He was seldom perceived as drunk. The term alcoholism was not in general use in his time; in fact, there was no understanding of alcoholism as an addiction or as a serious, often inherited, disease. Wilde might have shared a genetic predisposition. His brother was an alcoholic by the standards of denial, binges, and blackouts. Willie had mood changes associated with alcoholism, terrifying his mother by stamping his foot and swearing at her if she hesitated to advance him money. Sir William was rumored to have become a compulsive drinker after the Mary Travers libel trial, but there were no public incidents. During Wilde’s stay at Oakley Street between his trials, Robert Sherard observed Willie drunk and Lady Wilde taking to her bed with a bottle of gin. He reported the goings-on to Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote in his diary: “Pitiful family, where the mother of the two brothers is always drunk, the bottles of gin filling her room.” Before prison Wilde drank to celebrate life, not to forget it. As a successful poet and playwright, he had no need to create an alternative reality to feel good or normal—until imagination failed him.