When there was little change in Wilde’s condition after ten days, Tucker and Cleiss wrote and signed a report, describing Wilde’s worsening condition without mentioning syphilis: “The diagnosis of encephalitic meningitis must be made without doubt.… Surgical intervention seems impossible.” The abscess in his ear had spread to the brain and he was dying of cerebral meningitis, an infection of the lining of the brain. His face was florid from an unbroken fever, his breathing labored. Leeches were placed on either side of the forehead to relieve pressure on the brain. Now it was simply a matter of waiting and watching. Ross arrived on November 29, after receiving Turner’s telegram that Wilde’s state was ALMOST HOPELESS. The pain was so great that when Wilde tried to speak to Ross he jammed his fist into his mouth to stifle a cry.
Some sign might have passed between them to have Ross rush to bring Father Cuthbert Dunne of the Passionist Order from St. Joseph’s in Paris to Wilde’s bedside. Ross judged that Wilde was never serious about converting, but he had promised to bring a priest if Wilde were dying. Wilde called Ross “the cherub with the flaming sword, forbidding my entrance into Eden.” Wilde affirmed his wish to be received into the Catholic Church and was baptized. The following day, Father Dunne administered Extreme Unction, the last rites. Since he was in and out of coma and could not swallow, Wilde was unable to take Holy Communion. Father Dunne wrote that “when roused Wilde gave signs of being inwardly conscious” and knew that he was being received into the church. When the priest repeated the Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope, and Charity close to his ear, Wilde tried to say the words after him.
On the afternoon of November 30, he struggled for air, and Dupoirier helped him to sit up. Just before two o’clock, he gasped, sighed, and sank back on the pillow. Catholicism was not a religion Wilde could live in, but Ross was right in assuming that it was the religion he wanted to die in. His decision was probably the best he ever made for his friend. Wilde’s conversion also made possible a Catholic funeral.*
Maurice Gilbert photographed Wilde laid out in white, holding a rosary, surrounded by lilies and palm branches. He looked peaceful, like a child taking a nap after Holy Communion. “Oscar’s end was as quiet and peaceful as that of an innocent child!” said Turner. There were no last words. Days earlier Wilde had told visitors that he was dying above his means and fighting a duel to the death with his wallpaper.
Bosie arrived for the funeral on December 2. He paid all expenses but selected an ordinary sixth-class interment. At nine o’clock the funeral cortege left the hotel, making its way along the rue Bonaparte to the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés. Black horses pulled an unadorned hearse topped with lilies, orchids, and roses. A low Requiem Mass, without music or choir, was said in the chapel by the church’s vicar and Father Dunne. The church itself, the oldest in Paris, was special to Wilde. Situated across from the Café Les Deux Magots, it was a convenient retreat. The purple and gold of Catholicism had always greeted his imagination when he entered and sat in the coolness, thinking, perhaps praying.
Following services, a group of fifty walked behind the four carriages and the hearse, which bore the number thirteen, to the burial in suburban Bagneux Cemetery. There were wreaths from close friends and one from Dupoirier, inscribed “À mon Locataire.” Many French friends, old and new, were in attendance. Wilde once told a friend that “if a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.” At Bagneux, he had a simple stone with an iron railing around it and an inscription in Latin from the Book of Job that translates: “To my words they durst add nothing, and my speech dropped upon them.”
*Harris ended up appropriating from Wilde a short story, “The Irony of Chance,” and the scenario for Mr. and Mrs. Daventry. Wilde had the idea for Daventry as early as 1894, when he offered it to George Alexander. Harris took the idea and wrote the play on his own, but not before Wilde sold options to at least five other people: Mrs. James Brown-Potter, an American socialite; Horace Sedger; Ada Rehan; Louis Nethersole, a theatrical manager; and Smithers.
*“Wife of Oscar Wilde” was added in 1963.
*Entry 547 in the register of St. Joseph’s Church on the avenue Hoche in Paris reads: “1900: Nov. 29. Today Oscar Wilde, lying in extremis at the Hôtel d’Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris, was conditionally baptised by me. Cuthbert Dunne. He died the following day, having received at my hands the Sacrament of Extreme Unction.”
EPILOGUE
Nine years after his death, Wilde’s remains were moved from Bagneux to a grave at Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Ross received a gift of two thousand pounds from one of Wilde’s friends, Mrs. Helen Carew, mother of Sir Coleridge Kennard, to erect an elaborate monument on the site. Will Rothenstein recommended the American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein for the commission. Inspired by Assyrian and Egyptian depictions of the sphinx, Epstein carved a flying demon-angel across the stone’s face. On the back are lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Regulations required that disinterment be in a case made in the workshops on the Bagneux Cemetery premises, although Ross had an elegant casket available. The coffin was plain oak, with a silver plate on the lid, on which was engraved OSCARD WILDE 1854–1900. Once again Wilde’s name was given a new twist—this time rhyming with discard. Ross exploded when he noticed the mistake, and the undertaker chiseled out the D. When the tomb was erected in 1912, French officialdom stepped in and banned public viewing because of the figure’s prominent genitalia, which were subsequently covered in plaster, and the entire work was hidden under a tarpaulin. Epstein refused to modify the carving or hide its sexuality with a fig leaf. It remained wrapped until the outbreak of World War I.
Ross returned to London after Wilde’s death and opened the Carfax Gallery in St. James’s, exhibiting the work of Max Beerbohm and Aubrey Beardsley and enhancing his reputation as an art dealer and critic. In 1912 he was appointed assessor of pictures and drawings for the Board of the Inland Revenue, with the responsibility of visiting estates to estimate the value of art for death duties; in 1917 he was selected a trustee of the Tate Gallery.
As Wilde’s literary executor, Ross published an abridged version of De Profundis in 1905; by the following year he had rescued the estate from bankruptcy. He died in his sleep on October 5, 1918, at the age of forty-nine. His will instructed that his ashes be placed in a special compartment he had asked Epstein to design on the back of Wilde’s tomb. This ceremony was delayed until after Bosie’s death; it took place in 1950, on the fiftieth anniversary of Wilde’s death. There was no provision for an inscription.
Bosie lived a long and litigious life, dying on March 20, 1945, at the age of seventy-four. He had converted to Catholicism and renounced homosexuality, wed the poet Olive Custance, had a son, and separated after ten years of marriage. He was the editor and owner of the literary magazine Academy and published three books (one ghostwritten) that deal unevenly with the Wilde years.
In 1918 he testified in the sensational libel trial brought by Maud Allan, an erotic dancer who was appearing in private performances of Wilde’s Salome, against the Independent member of Parliament Noel Pemberton Billing. Billing had published in his newspaper, The Vigilante, an article alleging the existence of a Black Book containing the names of 47,000 perverts in high places. He suggested that the police might find several of that number, who shared Wilde’s sexual inclinations and therefore were susceptible to blackmail by German agents, watching Salome do her dance of the seven veils.
Billing brought to court—among others—Bosie, who self-righteously seized the opportunity to reproach Wilde. “I think [Wilde] had a diabolical influence on everyone he met. I think he is the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years,” he told the court. �
�He was the agent of the devil in every possible way. He was a man whose whole objective in life was to attack and to sneer at virtue, and to undermine it in every way by every possible means, sexually and otherwise.” Caught up in a wartime hysteria of prejudice and fear, Billing proved his case.
In 1921, Bosie instigated legal action against the Evening News after it published a scathing obituary, being mistakenly informed of his death. His most notorious case involved a pamphlet in which he claimed that Winston Churchill accepted a bribe from a German-born financier, Sir Ernest Cassels, to publish a misleading report of the battle of Jutland. Arrested in November 1923, and convicted of criminal libel, Bosie spent six months in Wormwood Scrubs. It had been his fondest wish to go to jail like Wilde. While there he wrote a poem, In Excelsis, his answer to De Profundis.
Reggie Turner returned to England and set about producing twelve novels in ten years, but without critical interest. From 1912 until his death in 1938, he lived mostly in Florence, where he was the life of the party. Somerset Maugham regarded him as the most amusing man he had ever met. Lionel Johnson, who had brought Wilde and Bosie together, died of alcoholism in 1902, as did Leonard Smithers five years later. John Gray, the putative model for Dorian, died a canon of the Diocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh in 1934. More Adey died insane in 1945. Arthur Symons spent two years in mental hospitals, dying in 1945.
In 1936, Yeats gave the world his version of The Ballad of Reading Gaol in his anthology The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. By cutting seventy-one stanzas and removing some of Wilde’s famous lines, such as those passages beginning with “Yet each man kills the thing he loves,” Yeats eliminated what he regarded in the poem as “artificial, trivial, arbitrary,” convinced that he had brought “into light a great, or almost great poem, as [Wilde] himself would have done had he lived.” When Bosie realized that he was not included in the volume, he wrote a scathing letter to the editor of The Daily Express.
Willie Wilde’s only child, Dolly, had a chaotic upbringing after her father died when she was four years old and her mother married Alexander Louis Teixeira de Mattos, a Dutch translator. She looked very much like Oscar and inherited the Wildean wit and fondness for alcohol. As a young woman in Paris, she was the lover of the American heiress Natalie Clifford Barney, a poet and notorious seducer of women who ruled over a salon on the rue Jacob, a street away from the hotel where Wilde had died. Despite encouragement from established authors, she refused to write. She died in 1941, three months before her forty-sixth birthday, the same age that her father and uncle had died.
Life changed slowly for homosexuals in England. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended that a homosexual act committed in private between consenting adults should no longer be a criminal offense. A decade passed before the legislation was enacted. Wilde had predicted that the road would be long with monstrous martyrdoms.
Stripped of reputation and honor a century ago, Wilde has been regilded and brightly burnished, like the statue of “The Happy Prince,” all transgressions forgiven, with a stained-glass window in Westminster Abbey and public statues in London and Dublin. His work has grown in popularity and importance; his plays are the gaiety of nations. His aesthetics still comfort the solitary artist who struggles against intolerance. His words demonstrate the value of graciousness, charm, and wit, which we all seek in relationships with people. Nowhere can these be taught so enjoyably as through the reading of Wilde. He stands for the right of art and language to shock, to undermine, and to unsettle, and for the right of a person never to apologize for love.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Amor, Anne Clark. Mrs. Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983.
Bartlett, Neil. Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin, 1993.
Beckson, Karl. London in the 1890s. New York: Norton, 1992.
———,. The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia. New York: AMS Press, 1998.
———, ed. I Can Resist Everything Except Temptation and Other Quotations from Oscar Wilde. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Beerbohm, Max. Around Theatres. London: Hart-Davis, 1953.
———,. Letters to Reggie Turner. London: Hart-Davis, 1964.
———,. A Peep into the Past. Brattleboro, Vt.: Stephen Greene, 1972.
Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. New York: Knopf, 1996.
———,. Violet: The Story of the Irrepressible Violet Hunt and Her Circle of Lovers and Friends—Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham, and Henry James. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Bell, Archie. The Clyde Fitch I Knew. New York: Broadway, 1909.
Birnbaum, Martin. Oscar Wilde: Fragments and Memories. London: Elkin Mathews, 1920.
Blair, David Hunter. In Victorian Days and Other Papers. 1939; reprint, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
Borland, Maureen. Wilde’s Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross. Oxford: Lennard, 1990.
Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Brough, James. The Prince and the Lily. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975.
Cahill, Thomas. How the Irish Saved Civilization. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography. London: HarperCollins, 1998.
Cecil, David. Max: A Biography. London: Constable, 1964.
Clive, H. P. Pierre Louÿs: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Coakley, Davis. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish. Dublin: Town House, 1994.
Cohen, Ed. Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1993.
Croft-Cooke, Rupert. Bosie: Lord Alfred Douglas, His Friends and Enemies. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
Curry, Wade Chester. “Steele MacKaye: Producer and Director.” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana, 1958.
d’Arch Smith, Timothy. Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English “Uranian” Poets from 1889 to 1930. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
de Jongh, Nicholas. Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage. London: Routledge, 1992.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Donoghue, Denis. Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Douglas, Alfred. The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas. London: Martin Secker, 1929.
Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Duncan, Barry. The St. James’s Theatre: Its Strange and Complete History. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964.
Fawkes, Richard. Dion Boucicault: A Biography. London: Quartet Books, 1979.
Fryer, Jonathan. André and Oscar: Gide, Wilde and the Gay Art of Living. London: Constable, 1997.
Gagnier, Regenia A. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1987.
Gide, André. Oscar Wilde. Bernard Frechtman, trans. London: William Kimber, 1951.
Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. 1916; rev. ed., London: Constable, 1938.
Hoare, Philip. Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War. London: Duckworth, 1997.
Holland, Merlin. The Wilde Album. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.
Holland, Vyvyan. Son of Oscar Wilde. London: Hart-Davis, 1954.
Hyde, H. Montgomery. Oscar Wilde: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Kohl, Norbert. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Lawler, Donald L. An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde’s Revisions of The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Garland, 1988.
Leverson, Ada. Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde and Reminisc
ences of the Author. London: Duckworth, 1930.
Lucie-Smith, Edward. Symbolist Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1985.
Mason, A.E.W. Sir George Alexander and the St. James’s Theatre. London: Macmillan, 1935.
McCormack, Jerusha Hall. John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991.
Melville, Joy. Mother of Oscar. London: Murray, 1994.
Munthe, Gustaf, and Uexküll Munthe. The Story of Axel Munthe. New York: Dutton, 1953.
O’Sullivan, Vincent. Aspects of Wilde. London: Constable, 1936.
Pearson, Hesketh. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit. London: Harper, 1946.
Pine, Richard. The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1995.
Powell, Kerry. Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Price, R.G.G. A History of Punch. London: Collins, 1957.
Raby, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Redman, Alvin, ed. The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde. London: Senate, 1952.
[Raymond, Jean Paul], and Charles Ricketts. Oscar Wilde: Recollections. London: Nonesuch, 1932.
Mrs. Robinson. The Graven Palm: A Manual of the Science of Palmistry. London: Arnold, 1911.
Ross, Margery, ed. Robert Ross: Friend of Friends. London: Cape, 1952.
Rothenstein, William. Men and Memories. New York: Coward-McCann, 1951.
Sandulescu, George, ed. Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. Princess Grace Irish Library, vol. 8. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Shaw, George Bernard. Our Theatres in the Nineties. London: Constable, 1932.
Shaw, George Bernard, and Alfred Douglas. A Correspondence, ed. Mary Hyde. London: Murray, 1982.
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