The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Oscar's removal to Reading Gaol had not produced any noticeable improvements in his mental health. Physically, he had stabilised and had only spent two days in the prison infirmary in his first six months. But mentally, he seemed to be getting worse. Matters had not been helped by the death of his beloved mother on 3 February 1896. Apprehensive about the effect that the news of Lady Wilde's death would have on Oscar, Constance made the long journey from Genoa, where she had now settled, to break the terrible tidings. `I believe it will half kill him,' she confided to Lily Wilde, and she was right. Oscar was profoundly grief-stricken by `so irreparable, so irredeemable a loss'. Constance had not seen Oscar for five months and was shocked by what she found. Oscar was `changed beyond recognition', she told the artist, Edward Burne-Jones:

  They give him work to do in the garden and the work he likes most to do is to cover the books with brown paper - for at least it is books to hold in his hand - but presently the keeper made a sign with his finger and like a dog he obeyed and left the room ... it is all inexpressibly dreadful.

  It was to be the last time that Constance and Oscar ever met.

  Over the next weeks and months, Oscar's mental health deteriorated further. In May, when Robbie Ross and Robert Sherard went to visit Oscar, Robbie made notes in pencil immediately after the visit ended. According to Robbie, Sherard was `much shocked by the change for the worse' in Oscar since the last time he had seen him. `He is much thinner, is now clean shaven so that his emaciated condition is more apparent,' Robbie recorded:

  His face is dull brick colour. (I fancy from working in the sun in the garden). His eyes were horribly vacant, and I noticed that he had lost a great deal of hair (this when he turned to go and stood in the light). He always had great quantities of thick hair, but there is now a bald patch on the crown. It is also streaked with white and grey ... He cried the whole time and when we asked him to talk more he said he had nothing to say and wanted to hear us talk. That as you know is very unlike Oscar.

  Oscar's anxieties about his sanity were evident. `Asked did we think his brain seemed all right?' Robbie wrote in his notes. `Feared that confinement' might `deprive him of his mind. It was a constant dread.' Robbie summed up his impression of Oscar's condition. `I do not think they treat him badly,' he wrote:

  but I firmly and honestly believe apart from all prejudice that he is simply wasting and pining away, to use the old cliche he is sinking under a broken heart. I should say that `Confinement apart from all labour or treatment had made him temporarily silly.' That is the mildest word that will describe my meaning.

  Robbie concluded on a sombre note. `I should be less surprised to hear of dear Oscar's death than of Aubrey Beardsley's and you know what he looks like.' Beardsley was dying of tuberculosis.

  It was also clear to Robbie that Oscar had turned against Bosie:

  When I told him that Bosie's poems were coming out and that I had messages in a letter which I showed through bars. He said `I would rather not hear about that just now.'

  Oscar returned to the subject of Bosie in a letter he wrote to Robbie the day after his visit. His once beloved Bosie who, almost exactly a year earlier, he had called `my sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies', he now referred to simply, coldly and curtly, as `Douglas'. `You said that Douglas was going to dedicate a volume of poems to me,' Oscar wrote:

  Will you write at once to him and say he must not do anything of the kind. I could not accept or allow such a dedication. The proposal is revolting and grotesque. Also, he has unfortunately in his possession a number of letters of mine.

  The very idea that Bosie was in possession of any of his letters or his gifts was, Oscar said, `peculiarly repugnant to me':

  I cannot of course get rid of the revolting memories of the two years I was unlucky enough to have him with me, or of the mode by which he thrust me into the abyss of ruin and disgrace to gratify his hatred of his father and other ignoble passions. But I will not have him in possession of my letters or gifts.

  Bosie's intended dedication was to be in the form of a poem `To Oscar Wilde', the text of which surfaced in the 1960s:

  In his own mind, at least, Bosie was suffering dreadfully. `I am not in prison,' he told More Adey, `but I think I suffer as much as Oscar, in fact more, just as I am sure he would have suffered more if he had been free and I in prison.' Bosie's comments were either naive or breathtakingly insensitive. In any event, Oscar's heart was already hardened against him. `Even if I get out of this loathsome place,' he told Robbie, `I will have nothing to do with him nor allow him to come near me.'

  Bosie refused to accept that Oscar's attitude to him had fundamentally changed. `I do not believe that he means what he says, and I regard what he says as non-existent,' he wrote defiantly in September 1896 to More Adey:

  I ignore the cruel insults and the unmerited reproaches which I am told his lips have uttered against me. I attribute them simply to an evil and lying spirit which at present inhabits Oscar's body, a spirit born in an English prison, out of English `prison discipline', and which I hope in spite of everybody and everything to ultimately cast out of him.

  Oscar had warned him, he said, that `all sorts of influences would be brought to bear on me to make me change'. And the last time he had seen Oscar in prison, in Holloway:

  he kissed the end of my finger through an iron grating. . . and begged me to let nothing in the world alter my attitude and my conduct towards him.

  Bosie was convinced that Oscar still loved him and that they would finally be reunited. `Nothing in the world can keep us apart,' he declared. `All the friends and relations, all their plots and their plans, will go to the winds when once I am alone with him again and holding his hand.'

  While Bosie was professing his faith, Oscar was losing his. His changed attitude to Bosie and his repudiation of Uranian love were symptoms of a profound crisis of faith. Before he went to prison, he told Bosie that he was going to test the power of love, to see if he could not make the bitter waters of shame, ignominy and imprisonment sweet by the sheer intensity of the love he felt. Oscar had indeed tested the power of love and, amidst the terrible sufferings and mental tortures of his first year in prison, had found it wanting. However hard he had tried to keep it alive in his heart, the sacred flame of love had flickered and died, to be replaced by the prison's flaring gas jets. The bitter waters had engulfed him.

  From the depths

  'A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys.'

  Oscar's salvation - physically, mentally and spiritually - was brought about by a change of Governor at Reading Gaol. When Oscar arrived at Reading, the stern disciplinarian Major Isaacson was in charge. Oscar called Isaacson a `mulberry-faced Dictator', and Robbie Ross found him `haughty and impatient' and `not unlike the headmaster of a public school'. Frank Harris, who visited Reading in June, at the request of Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, Chairman of the Prison Commission, to ascertain the state of Oscar's physical and mental health, thought Isaacson was `almost inhuman' with his boasts that he was `knocking the nonsense out of Wilde'. Oscar told Harris that he was `perpetually being punished for nothing'. `The Governor loves to punish,' he said, `and he punishes by taking my books away from me.' In `The Ballad of Reading Gaol', his great poem of prison life, Oscar was referring to the regime of Isaacson when he wrote:

  The concerns expressed by Robbie Ross, More Adey and Frank Harris led to a decision being taken at the highest levels to replace Isaacson. Ruggles-Brise told Harris that the Home Secretary himself thought `it would be a great loss to English literature', if Oscar `were really injured by prison discipline'. Accordingly, in July 1896, Major James Osmond Nelson became Governor of Reading Gaol.

  The change in Oscar's circumstances was immediate and apparent. The number of punishments meted out to prisoners dropped dramatically, and Ruggles-Brise personally drafted a set of confidential instructions for Nelson on the treatment of Oscar. He was to be allowed
paper, pen and ink, and as many books to read as he wanted, within reason. If there were books that Oscar particularly wished to read that were not in the prison library, then these were to be obtained. Oscar was overwhelmed when Nelson told him the news. According to George Ives, Nelson came to Oscar in his cell and said: `The Home Secretary says you are to have books. Here is one you may like; I have just been reading it myself.' At this, Oscar burst into tears. `Those are the first kind words that have been spoken to me since I have been in gaol,' he told Nelson.

  Oscar put the pen and ink to good use, and in the months before his release from Reading he wrote what has come to be known as De Profundis, an epic and extraordinary letter to Bosie of fifty thousand words. According to Thomas Martin, a prison warder who befriended Oscar during his last months in Reading Gaol, Oscar wrote De Profundis mostly in the evenings, when he knew he would be undisturbed:

  In his cell were two wooden trestles, across which he placed his plank bed. This was his table, and, as he himself observed: `It was a very good table, too.'

  Oscar wrote De Profundis under a severe misapprehension. He believed that Bosie had made no attempt to write to him in prison, that he no longer cared about him and that he had left him to rot in prison, out of sight and out of mind. Oscar's bitterness and resentment at Bosie's apparent neglect is evident at the beginning and the end of De Profundis. `Dear Bosie,' Oscar began:

  After long and fruitless waiting, I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain.

  `What I must know from you,' Oscar wrote in his peroration, `is why you have never made any attempt to write to me. I waited month after month to hear from you.' Oscar was being grossly unfair. It was he who had refused to countenance a letter from Bosie in the first place, and it was he who became angry and refused to listen whenever visitors told him that they had a message from Bosie for him. Robert Sherard's mischief-making had succeeded only too well. Oscar was completely unaware of Bosie's heartbreak at his sufferings in prison, and at what he perceived as Oscar's changed attitude to him.

  After completing De Profundis, Oscar told Robbie that he earnestly hoped that reading it would do Bosie `some good':

  It is the first time that anyone has ever told him the truth about himself .. . the letter is one he thoroughly deserves, and if it is unjust, he thoroughly deserves injustice. Who indeed deserves it more than he who was always so unjust to others?

  Oscar wanted to hurt Bosie, to humiliate him and punish him, just as he himself had been hurt, humiliated and punished. `You must read this letter right through,' he instructed Bosie at the beginning of De Profundis, `though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed.' He wanted Bosie to confront his `supreme vice of shallowness' and all his lesser vices of egotism, selfishness, temper, greed and lust. Especially lust.

  Oscar excoriated Bosie for opening up to him a world of purely sexual gratification, for luring him, as he put it, `into the imperfect world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed'. He was again being unfair. Their love affair had always been driven not only by unbridled sexual licence but also by a profoundly idealised, spiritual love. Oscar had been as eager as Bosie to plumb the depths of lust and scale the heights of love. `Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations,' he wrote in De Profundis:

  What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.

  Oscar began writing De Profundis in January 1897 and finished it three months later in March. What started as a letter of recrimination and reproach became, in the course of three months, a kind of autobiography, an apologia for Oscar's life and his love affair with Bosie. Oscar recognised it as such. `Well, if you are my literary executor,' Oscar told Robbie Ross two months before his release from Reading Gaol:

  you must be in possession of the only document that really gives any explanation of my extraordinary behaviour with regard to Queensberry and Alfred Douglas. When you have read the letter, you will see the psychological explanation of a course of conduct that from the outside seems a combination of absolute idiocy with vulgar bravado.

  De Profundis was also an exercise in catharsis, an expelling of all the feeling of pain and humiliation, injustice and anger that Oscar experienced in prison. He began writing his letter of `changing, uncertain moods' in the bleak depths of an endless winter. By the time it was completed, he could look out from the window of his cell and see the first, tremulous signs of spring in `some poor black soot-besmirched trees that are just breaking out into buds of an almost shrill green'. `Of the many, many things for which I have to thank the Governor,' he told Robbie:

  there is none for which I am more grateful than for his permission to write to A.D. and at as great a length as I desired. For nearly two years I had within me a growing burden of bitterness, much of which I have now got rid of.

  What was begun in bitterness, ended in hope. By the time he had reached the end of De Profundis, Oscar had rediscovered his love for Bosie. It was clear, indeed, that he was anticipating a future of sorts with him. `Incomplete, imperfect, as I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain,' he told Bosie in the closing sentences of the letter:

  You came tome to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.

  In the course of writing De Profundis, Oscar had not only rediscovered his love for Bosie, he had also rediscovered his attraction to other men. The storm of sexual repudiation and self-loathing that had battered him in the first eighteen months of his imprisonment had subsided. The frantic language of sexual self-revulsion that Oscar had used in his petitions to the Home Secretary, his talk of this `most horrible form of erotomania', his `monstrous sexual perversion' and his `most revolting passions', had given way in De Profundis to a calmer, altogether more rational acceptance and assessment of his sexual tastes. `Sins of the flesh are nothing,' he wrote. `They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured.' Only `sins of the soul' were shameful.

  Oscar came to realise that, while there was nothing wrong in loving men and in having sex with men, there was a moral choice about how and where love and sex were bestowed. To wallow in the immoral universe of `coarse uncompleted passions' and unbridled lust which he had inhabited for so long was essentially a sin of the soul. Not only was it behaviour unworthy of an artist, but it was also self-centred and selfish. It revolved around his own sexual pleasure, his own sexual gratification, crucially ignoring the feelings of his sexual partners. `I grew careless of the lives of others,' he wrote:

  I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops.

  But Oscar also rediscovered his faith in the nobility of Uranian love and recognised once again that he was a victim of discriminatory laws against men who loved men: `Reason does not help me,' he wrote. `It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws.' It was a theme Oscar would return to soon after he left prison in `The Ballad of Reading Gaol'.

  Under the benign regime of Major Nelson, it was not long before Oscar started to put his refound sexual attraction to men into practice. It was difficult - almost impossible - for prisoners under the system of cellular isolation to have sex in convict prisons. But there were always ways and means. `There is no prison on any world into which love cannot force an entrance,' Oscar wrote in De Profundis. Despite the best efforts of the prison authorities, sex between prisoners did present a problem. The Report of the Departmen
tal Committee on Prisons in 1895 dealt with the issue circumspectly, concluding that, `when prisoners of all kinds were collected together', it undoubtedly `led to much evil':

  It has been generally assumed that the chief risk lay in the corruption of young by old offenders. We are of the opinion that there is at least as much danger of contamination among the younger prisoners. They are of the age when curiosity stimulates the inherited or acquired depravity which is so often found in young criminals. However this may be we agree that great care is necessary with respect to all classes of prisoners, in order to prevent mischief arising from anything like intercourse.

  Long after Oscar's release from prison, Warder Martin told Robert Sherard: