He was consoled, though, for the moment by Constance. In view of the exceptional circumstances they met ‘in a room other than the ordinary visiting room’. She was ‘gentle and good’ to him. And even in his own distress he recognized that her suffering quite equalled his own. ‘My soul and the soul of my wife met in the valley of the shadow of death,’ he later told Ross; ‘she kissed me; she comforted me: she behaved as no woman in history, except my own mother perhaps, could have behaved.’ They talked of the future, and ‘arranged everything’ privately between themselves. Constance was desirous ‘to have nothing done in a public court’. Her plan (sanctioned by Hargrove) was that Wilde, on his release, was to have an allowance from her of £200 a year, and – should she predecease him – one third of the life interest in her marriage settlement. The idea of an immediate and complete reconciliation upon Wilde’s release seems to have been put on hold; it would be something to work towards. Constance, meanwhile, would assume custody of the children. Wilde acquiesced, while imploring her not to spoil Cyril. He suggested that if she were daunted at the prospect of bringing the boys up alone she should ‘get a guardian to help her’.9
Constance touched also on the difficulties that More Adey was creating over the life interest. He was insisting that he and Wilde’s ‘friends’ should buy a third of it on Wilde’s behalf, rather than having to rely on Constance’s goodwill in the matter. Wilde, though, had ‘full trust’ in his wife, and at once undertook to use his next permitted letter to write to Ross and tell him to let Constance purchase the life interest unopposed.10
Besides the tidings of his mother’s death, there was the happier news that his play Salomé had been given its premiere in Paris. It had been mounted not by Sarah Bernhardt, but by the young actor-manager Aurélien Lugné-Poe, whose Théâtre de l’Œuvre had picked up the torch of Symbolist drama from the defunct Théâtre d’Art. This was the fulfilment of a dream; Wilde only wished he could take more pleasure in it. But he felt ‘dead to all emotions except those of anguish and despair’. Even literature, for the moment, seemed to hold no charm for him. He suffered from headaches when he tried to read his Greek and Roman poets.11
Constance was greatly distressed by Wilde’s condition. ‘They say he is quite well,’ she told Otho, ‘but he is an absolute wreck compared to what he was.’ The news of his mother’s death undermined him further. And Constance’s sad assessment of his health was confirmed by Ross at the end of May when, together with Sherard, he paid Wilde his quarterly visit. In a long and vivid letter to Adey, he catalogued the marks of decline: not only was Wilde even thinner, but ‘he had lost a great deal of his hair (this when he turned round 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.’12
More distressing, though, was the vacant look in his eyes. He hardly spoke and cried much of the time. Literary and artistic news failed to interest him. He complained that he could not concentrate on his reading, and was still not allowed writing materials. His pressing fear was that he might be losing his mind. Ross shared the anxiety: he reported to Adey that imprisonment seemed to have made Wilde ‘temporarily silly’. He would not – he said – be surprised if Wilde died within the coming months, not from any specific ailment, but because, ‘he is simply wasting and pining away… sinking under a broken heart’. Sherard’s verdict was scarcely less dire. ‘I thought Oscar very bad indeed,’ he told Adey. ‘All elasticity and resistance seem to have gone out of him, and his state under the circumstances is really alarming. It was very terrible.’13
That Wilde’s deterioration had taken place against the supposedly ‘improved’ conditions of Reading made it perhaps even more shocking. May 1896 marked the first anniversary of Wilde’s incarceration. He was only halfway through his sentence. And if one year’s imprisonment had wrought such an appalling change upon his health and well-being it was frightening to contemplate what a second year might do. Ross’s fears for Wilde’s life did not seem an exaggeration. Certainly that May visit provoked a resolve among Wilde’s friends that something must be done, either to ameliorate his circumstances further, or secure his early release.
But how to proceed? Ross and Adey solicited the help of Frank Harris who, as the editor of the Saturday Review, was deemed to carry influence with the authorities. Harris (recently returned from South Africa) swung into action. He secured from Ruggles-Brise permission for a special ‘interview of one hour’s duration with the prisoner Oscar Wilde in the sight but not within the hearing of an officer’.14
At the meeting, which took place on 16 June, Harris confirmed the sorry changes in Wilde’s appearance and manner. Even if the loss of weight gave him a superficially trimmer look, it could not disguise his worn and depressed state. Wilde regaled Harris with his woes: his want of writing materials; the harshness of the regime; and, particularly, a persistent pain, and occasional bleeding, in his right ear. Although Wilde traced this debility back to his fall in the Wandsworth chapel, its seems more likely that it was a recurrence of his chronic middle-ear disease, the bleeding caused by a perforation of the eardrum.15
Nevertheless Harris’s presence would have reassured him of the interest being taken in his case by the prison commissioners. And, being out of the warder’s hearing, Harris was able to suggest plans for using this interest. He could explain to Wilde that the only allowable reason for a prisoner’s early release was on medical grounds – whether physical or mental. And this understanding, doubtless, lay behind the tenor and detail of the long self-dramatizing ‘petition’ that Wilde addressed to the home secretary shortly after Harris’s visit.
He opened his appeal with a frank admission of ‘the terrible offences’ of which he had been ‘rightly found guilty’ – offences that he characterized as ‘forms of sexual madness’. He suggested, indeed, that in many European countries such ‘horrid’ and ‘revolting’ forms of ‘erotomania’ as he had indulged in were now considered to be more properly the concern of the medical rather than the judicial powers. Continued incarceration, however, he suggested, would only exacerbate his disturbed mental state: the extended periods of solitude, without books, left him prey to morbid thoughts and sexual imaginings, and in constant ‘apprehension lest this insanity… may now extend to his entire nature’. At the same time his ‘bodily health’ was failing: he had ‘almost entirely lost the hearing of his right ear through an abscess that has caused a perforation of the drum’, while his eyesight – so important to a ‘man of letters’ – was strained by ‘the enforced living in a whitewashed cell with a flaring gas-jet at night’.16
Although Isaacson forwarded the petition together with a terse report from Dr Maurice pointing out that ‘prisoner Wylde’ [sic] had in fact put on ‘flesh’ since arriving at Reading, and that the very cogency of his letter ‘gave clear evidence of his present sanity’, the Home Office did decide to institute further inquiries. Ruggles-Brise, having been briefed by Frank Harris, arranged for the prison’s five-man ‘visiting committee’ to interview Wilde. Sherard and Ross, on their visit (speaking in French to avoid detection by the guard), had tried to explain that, should he be interviewed by the authorities, Wilde must try to appear as ill as possible. They, like all his friends, recognized that Wilde’s natural ‘vanity’ would probably lead him ‘to conceal any signs of weakness, whether mental or physical, from medical men’ sent to find evidence of either. And this, it seems, is what happened. Certainly the committee members found nothing obviously wrong with the prisoner.
Not quite trusting their own judgement, however, they did suggest that ‘an expert medical enquiry’ should be made into Wilde’s physical and mental condition. As a lesser measure Wilde’s ‘remarkable petition’ was, instead, sent to Dr Nicolson, one of the two Broadmoor doctors who had interviewed Wilde at Wandsworth. Nicolson, who was now the ‘visitor in lunacy’ attached to the Home Office, saw ‘no indication of insanity or approaching insanity’ in the documen
t, but did think that ‘it would be well to give [Wilde] increased and exceptional facilities as to books and writing materials’. At the end of July a set of instructions to this effect was issued by Ruggles-Brise.17
These developments were played out against the background of two significant events in the life of Reading gaol. On 7 July one of Wilde’s fellow inmates – a young soldier, Charles Thomas Wooldridge – was hanged on the gallows erected in a shed in the prison exercise yard. The event was exceptional: it was only the second execution at Reading in eighteen years. Trooper Wooldridge had been convicted, as the local paper described it, of cutting ‘his wife’s throat in a very determined manner, she having excited his jealousy and (so far as the evidence went) greatly annoyed him’. The sight of the now-remorseful young man at exercise in the days before his execution had a profound effect on Wilde, as did the awful atmosphere of foreboding that hung over the whole prison throughout that time. The morning when the prison bell tolled to announce Wooldridge’s impending death made ‘a terrible impression’ on Wilde’s mind, as his imagination ‘conjured up’ the awful scene. Of all the hateful incidents of his two years in prison, this – Wilde averred – was the one that affected him most: ‘It was horrible, horrible!’18
Overseeing the execution was almost the last act at Reading carried out by Lieutenant-Colonel Isaacson; shortly afterwards he was promoted to a new job at Lewes Prison in Sussex. His place was taken by the thirty-seven-year-old Major James O. Nelson. It was a piece of extraordinary good fortune for Wilde: very possibly it saved his life, and certainly it restored his spirit.19
* In Paris, despite the apparent support for Wilde, Stuart Merrill had fared scarcely better with another proposed petition by French writers in December of 1895. There was no great rush from Wilde’s old literary friends. Although Bourget, Bauer and Maurice Barrès agreed to sign, Zola refused. Alphonse Daudet and Sardou begged to be excused. Jean Lorrain – although known to share Wilde’s homosexual tastes – claimed that his employers at Le Courrier Français had threatened to sack him if he lent his name. The playwright François Coppée wrote an article in Le Journal calling Wilde ‘un insupportable poseur’ but offering to sign the petition ‘as a member of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’. Goncourt disingenuously claimed that, following an article by Bauer in L’Echo de Paris castigating Maurice Donnay and Lucien Descaves for their ‘pharisee-ism’ in not signing, it was now impossible for him to do so, as it would look like he has been intimidated into it. Even Marcel Schwob (so helpful to Wilde during the composition of Salomé) made the cheap jest that the had agreed to sign the petition ‘only on the condition that [Wilde] should never again... write’. In the face of such responses the petition was abandoned.
3
From the Depths
‘There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.’
oscar wilde
Major Nelson was a man of entirely different stamp to his predecessor. Imaginative, gentle and humane, Wilde characterized him as ‘the most Christ-like man I ever met’, and although he could not alter the rules of the prison system, he could alter the spirit in which they were carried out. Under Nelson the whole ‘tone’ of prison life altered completely, and for the better. He achieved a rapport with both the warders and the prisoners. Recognizing that here was an exceptional case, he went out of his way to befriend and help Wilde, administering the new instructions for the prisoner’s treatment with sympathetic intelligence. He ensured that Wilde received spectacles for his eyesight, and daily treatment for his ear (the unsympathetic, if not incompetent, Dr Maurice, having previously declared Wilde’s ear infection untreatable, was obliged to alter his views). Wilde’s diet was increased and improved. He was allowed the ‘luxury’ of white bread. He was also given more exercise, sometimes being taken out of his cell four times in a day. And although he continued with his gardening work, he was not expected to do any other ‘manual labour whatever’ beyond keeping his cell clean.1
Instead he was to have greater access to books. Nelson encouraged him to draw up a list of volumes that might be added to the prison library. The twenty or so titles included a Greek Testament, Keats’s poems, the works of Chaucer, and Renan’s Vie de Jésus, which the chaplain was prepared to allow so long as it was ‘in the original French’. Even more importantly, Nelson applied for Wilde to be allowed not only a daily allowance of foolscap paper but also a ‘strong, coarsely bound manuscript book for his use’. Wilde was thrilled to have regular access to writing materials: ‘The mere handling of pen and ink helps me,’ he told Adey. ‘I cling to my note-book.’ He felt his mind and spirit reviving. It was wonderful to be treated once again as a human being. Regulations permitted prisoners a short daily interview with the governor, and Nelson ensured that Wilde availed himself of this privilege every day. It gave him a chance to converse, and to be appreciated. As Nelson later recalled, ‘I looked forward to those morning talks. I always allowed Wilde to stay the full quarter of an hour to which a prisoner is entitled – or, rather, I kept him the full time. For it was a pleasure to me. Wilde was certainly the most interesting and brilliant talker I have ever met.’2*
Wilde’s health began to improve almost immediately. Adey, having visited Wilde at the end of July, saw him again on 4 September and reported that he seemed ‘wonderfully better in appearance and in spirits’. And the amelioration was maintained. After a third visit (on 28 January 1897), Adey informed Adela Schuster that Wilde was not only ‘in excellent spirits’ but actually ‘playful’. Wilde’s upward curve even survived the formal refusal (towards the end of the year) of his petition for early release. He would console himself by reading Dante. And he proposed to take up German again, telling Ross that ‘indeed this seems to be the proper place for such a study’. Freed from his other duties, he was able to spend most of his time in reading and writing. Rather than the regulation weekly allowance of two books, he was permitted ‘quite a library’ in his cell.3
Nelson’s benign regime encouraged the warders to behave with greater humanity towards their charges. Wilde began to make friends. As one warder noted, ‘no one I think could have had daily intercourse with Oscar Wilde without growing to like him. He was as simple as a child in many things, but he was always the gentleman.’ Although extended conversation with inmates was forbidden, ways were found to snatch moments of talk during the daily round. The constant challenge was keeping Wilde’s enthusiasm in check. One of his gaolers recalled, ‘I had often considerable difficulty to prevent him from raising his voice above a whisper. He would at times forget that he was in a prison cell… and would… commence to declaim on some subject that I would have given anything to hear, had I dared. But it was too risky and so I had to put up a warning hand.’ This particular warder was an autodidact, always eager to consult Wilde about ‘knotty problems’ in his studies. He had a keen interest in literature, and Wilde cherished the memory of some of their exchanges.4
‘Excuse me, sir, but Charles Dickens, sir,’ the warder asked on one occasion, ‘would he be considered a great writer now, sir?’
‘Oh, yes, a great writer indeed. You see he is no longer alive.’
‘Yes, I understand, sir. Being dead he would be a great writer, sir.’
On another occasion, the popular novelist of army life, John Strange Winter, was mentioned.
‘Would you tell me what you think of him, sir?’
‘A charming person,’ Wilde replied, ‘but a lady you know. Not a man. Not a great stylist, perhaps, but a good simple storyteller.’
‘Thank you, sir. I did not know he was a lady, sir.’
The warder later touched on another popular woman novelist.
‘Excuse me, sir, but Marie Corelli. Would she be considered a great writer, sir?’
This, Wilde later recalled, was more than he could bear. Putting his hand on the warder’s shoulder, he answered gravely, ‘Now don’t think that I have anything against
her moral character, but from the way she writes she ought to be here.’5
When unable to converse, Wilde would provide his student with extensive written answers on sheets of foolscap passed under his cell door each morning.6
Other warders would consult Wilde over newspaper prize competitions that required witty or ingenious responses. Wilde told Ross that during his time at Reading he had ‘won a silver tea-service and a grand piano’ as well as several guinea and half-guinea prizes.7 The tea set had been secured for a recently married warder with a list of punning ‘reasons’ as to why the man and his new wife needed such an item: ‘(1) Because evidently spoons are required, and my girl and I are two. (2) Because it would suit us to a T. (3) Because we have good “grounds” for wanting a coffee pot. (4) Because marriage is a game that should begin with a love set. (5) Because one cannot get legally married without a proper wedding service.’8
In this new atmosphere Wilde’s whole attitude to his incarceration started to shift. His all-consuming ‘loathing’ for the prison ‘and every official in it’ began to abate. Bitterness and hatred ceased to dominate – and poison – his spirit.9 He perceived that there might actually be a transformative power in imprisonment. Having held that incarceration ‘turns a man’s heart to stone’ he came to recognize that, in fact, it could teach one pity – ‘the greatest and most beautiful thing in the world’. Before his sentence he had, so he claimed, thought only of himself; now he was developing sympathy for the sufferings of others. To a man in the exercise yard who whispered to him, ‘I pity you, for you are suffering more than me,’ he replied simply, ‘No, my friend; we all suffer alike.’10
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