In Dieppe there was some artistic hospitality on Wilde’s arrival. The Arthur Stannards (Henrietta wrote popular novels under the pseudonym John Strange Winter) had him to their salon in the former residence of the Duchess de Berri, near his hotel. The Norwegian landscape painter Fritz von Thaulow invited him to the Villa des Orchides in the Faubourg de la Barre, a meeting place for local and visiting artists. One evening Thaulow asked what Wilde was working on. “I’m writing an essay called, ‘A Defence of Drunkenness.’ ” “Good gracious, my dear Wilde, why always such provoking titles?” Thaulow asked, remembering “The Decay of Lying.”
Wilde replied that the soul can be liberated only by drunkenness or “the Great Silence.” He went on to describe how a waiter brings the silence in a glass of opalescent liquid. “Knock, and the door will always open, the door of le paradis artificiel.”* Consorting with the “green fairy” became more of a need. Soon Wilde had absinthe in the morning to induce a few hours of blessed sleep. “Alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities,” he said, “produces all the effect of intoxication, but the only proper intoxication is conversation.” The difference between a glass of absinthe and a sunset was less important in exile.
At the end of May, Wilde moved to the Hôtel de la Plage, where he took the two best rooms. The hotel was in Berneval-sur-Mer, a village with only twenty homes, ten miles from Dieppe. The only other guest was an elderly gentleman who went to bed at eight o’clock every evening because there was nothing else to do. Wilde aligned his few possessions precisely on the bedroom dresser (prison had made him a compulsive orderer), but there were so many things he needed: cigarettes, The Daily Chronicle, pictures for the wall—and always books. Those he had received in prison had to be left behind in the Reading Library.
He was delighted to receive Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite, an homage to Dorian Gray. He read the satire, he wrote Turner, “beginning at the end, as one should always do” because the end of art is the beginning. Beerbohm reversed the action of Wilde’s novel: the main character, Lord George, is saved by love while Dorian is destroyed by selfishness. “I had always been disappointed,” Wilde wrote Beerbohm, “that my story had suggested no other work of art in others. For whenever a beautiful flower grows in a meadow or lawn, some other flower, so like it that it is differently beautiful, is sure to grow up beside it.”
Wilde found new friends among the Dieppois—the waiters and fishermen and Monsieur O. J. Bonnet, the patron of his hotel, who distracted him with the idea of buying a parcel of land and building his own chalet for five hundred pounds. What he missed was the other society he had in London, artists, poets, his homosexual friends. “I begin to realise my terrible position of isolation,” he wrote Ross. “I thought I was accepting everything so well and so simply, and I have had moods of rage passing over my nature.” He survived by writing detailed, witty, and haranguing letters, rich in the observations that had formerly delighted habitués of the Café Royal. One day he picked up his mail at the Hôtel Sandwich, met Beardsley, and enjoyed an evening with him at the Thaulows’. Later they went shopping. “I have made Aubrey buy a hat more silver than silver: he is quite wonderful in it,” Wilde wrote Turner. In the last stages of consumption, Beardsley was coughing up blood.
The only thing that captured Wilde’s imagination was the thought of his own chalet. Ross received a letter in early June full of optimistic plans.
“I adore this place.… If I live in Paris I may be doomed to things I don’t Desire.… I am frightened of Paris. I want to live here.” He drew Ross a floor plan: three bedrooms, a view of the sea. He casually announced that he was working. “I have begun something that I think will be very good,” he wrote, meaning The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde needed to live like a man of letters, not like a Balzacian lodger. A chalet would provide such a setting.
He waited for friends to make a “pilgrimage to the sinner.” He had grown fond of Ernest Dowson, a poet from the Rhymers’ Club and one of the few who had visited him at his mother’s house in Oakley Street when he was released on bail. Wilde may have heard from Lionel Johnson some talk about Dowson’s obsessive love for Adelaide, a young waitress who married another that year. Dowson was living out his few remaining years as an absinthe addict. A friendship between the two lonely people began and deepened. “I want to have a poet to talk to … tonight I am going to read your poems—your lovely lyrics—words with wings you write always. It is an exquisite gift, and fortunately rare in an age whose prose is more poetic than its poetry.” Wilde delighted in Dowson’s company, called him “le Poète,” praised his verses, and probably had a crush on him. “Why are you so persistently and perversely wonderful?” he asked when inviting him to visit.
Constance sent Wilde photographs of his sons (“such lovely little fellows in Eton collars”) but wrote nothing about their father seeing them or a reconciliation. If Wilde saw Bosie—and he wanted to—he would forfeit his allowance and his wife’s goodwill. Reading a challenging book, visiting with a friend, or writing a long letter exhausted him. Unless consoled by alcohol, Wilde battled insomnia nightly. Not feeling up to the challenge of intellectual battle, he missed his emotional life as a husband and father. Regardless of time spent at Tite Street, his family was an irreplaceable anchor. “I have now no storage of nervous force,” he wrote Frank Harris.
From paris, Bosie denounced Wilde and his friends for not allowing him to visit Dieppe. “I feel him as an evil influence,” Wilde wrote to Ross, attempting to appear resolute. “To be with him would be to return to the hell from which I do think I have been released. I hope never to see him again.” But Wilde was thinking about how he could meet Bosie without reprisal and gave away his intentions by groveling. “You are made to help me,” he told Ross. “I weep with sorrow when I think how much I need help, but I weep with joy when I think I have you to give it to me.” Ross sniffed a change in the wind.
In June, Bosie received his first letter since the trials. Wilde tried to keep to literary topics. All that is left, he said, “is the knowledge that we love each other.” Filled with “the strange new joy of talking to you,” Wilde wrote daily. “I am so glad you went to bed at seven o’clock,” he wrote. “Modern life is terrible to vibrating delicate frames like yours: a rose-leaf in a storm of hard hail is not so fragile. With us who are modern it is the scabbard that wears out the sword.”
When Gide made a special trip to pay his respects, he found Wilde arranging a celebration for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on June 22. He was relieved that Wilde was “no longer the lyrical madman of Algeria, but the gentle Wilde of before the crisis.” In his room, Gide noticed the woodcut of Queen Victoria with her dog from the recent issue of the New Review and his Nourritures terrestres, whose character Ménalque resembles Wilde. “One should never go back to the same existence,” he told Gide. “My life is like a work of art; an artist never stars in the same thing twice … or if he does, it’s that he hasn’t succeeded. My life before prison was as successful as possible. Now it’s something that’s over.” Repeatedly Wilde said that he was never going to write another play, but his friends refused to listen. After A Woman of No Importance, he told a journalist that he had given the audience what they liked—a virtuous maiden seduced by a wicked aristocrat—so they would appreciate what he liked to give them. That audience no longer existed, and Wilde knew he was not in any position to create a new one. Failure as a poet was better than failure as a playwright.
Fifteen “little gamins” arrived at the Café de la Paix in Berneval for the Jubilee fete. Wilde was as excited that the dear queen had reigned so long as he was to be paterfamilias. It was an occasion for excess, for strawberries and cream, chocolates, and an iced cake inscribed to the queen in pink sugar. The boys had their pick of accordions, trumpets, or clarions. They sang the Marseillaise and “God Save the Queen,” and danced a ronde, waving small British flags. Toasts saluted the queen and Monsieur Melmoth, whom the boys called “the Président de la République.” This
was the life Wilde wanted—except with grown-ups. One of the many pleasures he had lost was that of being a host.
Since Wilde had no prospects of earning money to build a châlet, he decided to rent one—thirty-two pounds for the season. The Châlet Bourgeat was a short walk from the hotel where he took his meals. He hired a valet for thirty-five francs a month and felt more like a literary gentleman. Charles Wyndham visited to ask him to adapt Eugène Scribe’s Le Verre d’eau, set in the court of Queen Anne. Wilde was excited, then anxious, finally declining, explaining that he had “no heart to write clever comedy.” He wondered if he could write in Italy. “I am not in the mood to do the work I want, and I fear I shall never be,” he wrote Will Rothenstein. “The intense energy of creation has been kicked out of me. I don’t care now to struggle to get back what, when I had it, gave me little pleasure.” The exception was writing the Ballad.
Through Dowson, Wilde met Leonard Smithers, who was Beardsley’s publisher and had launched The Savoy in 1896, when Beardsley was dismissed from The Yellow Book following Wilde’s arrest. Wilde knew about Smithers, a Sheffield solicitor turned bookseller and publisher with a penchant for pornography. One of his titles had been the homosexual novel Teleny. “I will publish,” he told Vincent O’Sullivan, “anything the others are afraid of.” Wilde called him “the most learned erotomaniac in Europe.” Smithers agreed to publish Wilde’s work in progress, receiving at the end of August a partial draft to be typewritten. But Wilde still had no advance. Smithers was, Wilde told Dowson, “personally charming, but at present I simply am furious with him, and intend to remain so, till he sends me the money.” This would be a familiar refrain in his dealings with the amenable but tightfisted Smithers.
Bosie’s planned arrival in Dieppe was abruptly canceled when Wilde’s solicitor intervened, warning that Queensberry would raise a new scandal if he discovered them together. A meeting in Rouen a month later was postponed because Bosie claimed he had no money for the train fare. “I am greatly hurt by his meanness and lack of imagination,” Wilde told Ross. The momentous date became August 28, 1897. “Poor Oscar cried when I met him at the station,” Bosie recalled. “We walked about all day arm in arm, or hand in hand, and were perfectly happy.” They spent the night at the Grand Hôtel de France, parting the next morning with pledges of mutual love.
Wilde wanted to be with Bosie; no further meetings were necessary to test his feelings, once so bitter in prison. “I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you,” he wrote him. “It was not so in old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us.” Wilde begged Bosie: “Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.” Tersely he informed Ross, “Yes: I saw Bosie, and of course I love him as I always did, with a sense of tragedy and ruin.”
Bosie was not one to remake anyone’s ruined life. Constance was, but she had wavered, listened to her counselors, and waited to see if her husband had reformed. When she waited too long, Wilde chose Bosie over his sons. He had lied to himself about enjoying French provincial life. As fall came, he was bored and cold in his châlet. On September 14, he left for Paris and a few days later met Bosie in Aix-les-Bains, where they caught the overnight train to Naples. The Normandy exile had lasted less than four months.
Lovers imagine they can live on love. Wilde and Bosie were no exception, escaping family and society, hoping to keep on breaking the rules. Wilde had an allowance of three pounds a week from his wife, with a termination clause if he returned to Bosie. Bosie had eight pounds a week from his mother and a warning to stay away from Wilde. In the beginning they were kind to each other. Bosie had not read the hateful parts about him in De Profundis and would not, by his account, until twelve years after Wilde’s death. Using Bosie’s title, they established credit at the Hôtel Royal des Étrangers and went off to rent a furnished villa.
The fashionable area of Posillipo curves around the Bay of Naples north of the city. Pine and palm trees frame the terraced villas hugging the rocky cliffs, looking out to the astonishing view of Mount Vesuvius. At the Villa Giudice—the most beautifully situated of Wilde’s writing houses, rivaling Babbacombe Cliff—the two would write poetry and be happy together. Wilde had put together £120 to cover rent and servants; £100 was a commission from the composer Dalhousie Young, who had visited in Berneval. Wilde affected a schoolmaster’s role, hoping to direct Bosie’s imagination toward something other than sex. Arising in the morning, he announced, “I think I’ll do a libretto for an opera on ‘Daphnis and Chloe’—and you’ll help me.” Bosie was not without musical talent, and the villa had a piano, but the two produced only a few lyrics, not a libretto. Wilde began lessons in Italian conversation, mixing his Dante with modern slang. He engaged his teacher to translate Salome. Working on the terrace, shading his downy good looks from the sun like a blond Byron, Bosie composed three sonnets. Wilde christened them “The Triad of the Moon.”
Reporting Wilde’s whereabouts, the French papers made it sound as though the villa belonged to Douglas when, in fact, Wilde was paying for everything. They hired four servants to cook and clean but continued to take evening meals on credit at the hotel. Wilde did not need bliss, only contentment and companionship. He kept working on the Ballad, eager to have money from Smithers. “He laboured over it in a manner which I had never known him to labour before,” Bosie recalled. “Every word had to be considered; every rhyme and every cadence carefully pondered. I had The Ballad of Reading Gaol for breakfast, dinner, and tea and for many weeks it was our sole topic of conversation.”
Wilde justified his actions to Turner, writing that Bosie loved him “more than he loves or can love anyone else.” Going back to him “was psychologically inevitable.” To Ross he explained: “I cannot live without the atmosphere of Love. I must love and be loved, whatever price I pay for it. I could have lived all my life with you, but you have other claims on you … and all you could give me was a week of companionship.” As for his wife, he wrote to Carlos Blacker: “I must remake my maimed life on my own lines. Had Constance allowed me to see my boys, my life would, I think have been quite different.” Wilde should have been patient and waited longer before seeing Bosie, if seeing his sons was that important to him.
Easily bored, Bosie sought out his friends on Capri, arranging for lunch at Axel Munthe’s villa at Anacapri. Munthe was a Swedish doctor who had treated the foreign colonies in Paris and Rome. He fell in love with Capri on his honeymoon in 1880 and spent the rest of his life building his home on a mountaintop of volcanic rock, an act of endurance that made him a revered figure on the island. He knew anyone of importance who had ever needed a doctor while on the Grand Tour, and he never hesitated to mention that he was one of five present at the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen. “A wonderful personality,” said Wilde after viewing Munthe’s extensive Greek collection, giving his host the highest praise. Guests made the arduous climb to Anacapri for conversation, not feasting. Munthe believed that eating was a physiological need, not a pleasure. He set his table as if for a banquet with antique Venetian glasses but served macaroni or a kind of hash composed of eggs, potatoes, and vegetables. Wilde and Bosie were not tempted to duplicate such abstemious fare at the Villa Guidice.
Naples was known for its ragazzi di vita, boys of the street. The Greek bronzes of Naples rest by day in the museums, Wilde remarked, and are seen on the streets at night. Names of supposed conquests tumbled out in letters to Ross and Turner. “I am engaged to a fisherman of extraordinary beauty, age eighteen.” Didaco had “a face chiselled for high romance.” Pietro was “like a young St. John. One would have followed him into the desert.” Wilde did not lack for Ganymedean muses, but they inspired no writing. Wilde and Bosie had re-created their London life as it was before the trials.
When she learned a
bout his living arrangements at the villa, Constance stopped Wilde’s stipend. More Adey was caught in the middle when he told Wilde that his wife was acting within her rights. Wilde launched a semantic battle about Bosie not being a “disreputable person” because he had never been convicted of anything. He rebuked Constance for a “terrible letter” and for using words such as “forbid,” “require,” and “not allow.” “How can she really imagine that she can influence or control my life?” he stormed to Ross. “She might just as well try to influence and control my art.… Women are so petty, and Constance has no imagination. Perhaps, for revenge, she will have another trial: then she certainly may claim to have for the first time in her life influenced me. I wish to goodness she would leave me alone.” And she did.
The money ran out and Bosie left. Wilde was too exhausted to ask Ross for a loan, which he could never have repaid anyway. There were scenes and tantrums but modulated, unlike those that drove Wilde to despair in the old days. Bosie had achieved his goal—getting Wilde back. That obstacle cleared, there was little excitement in their day-to-day existence. It was a quiet rather than a chaotic ending. Douglas told his mother that he had “lost that supreme desire for his society which I had before, and which made a sort of aching void when he was not with me.… If I hadn’t rejoined him and lived with him for two months, I should never have got over longing for him.” Of course, the society he had had with Wilde was lost forever because Wilde’s position was no longer that of a married, successful playwright. Wilde understood. Bosie felt the same as Dorian had when he reproached Sibyl: “I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art.” Without her art, she was “nothing.”
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