Once awakened, Wilde’s sense of pity certainly found much to occupy it. He expended his meagre resources in acts of kindness. On one occasion he asked a sympathetic warder to pass on ‘half his bread’ to the prisoner in the next cell, as he was ‘very hungry, and doesn’t get nearly so much food as I do’. As the warder remarked, ‘the giving of half a loaf in prison requires a bigger heart than the giving of half a sovereign outside’. Through such deeds, and by the general tenor of his being, Wilde won a real popularity among the other inmates. By the end of his time at Reading there was ‘a lot of competition’ about ‘who should get beside him on the exercise ring or in the prison chapel’.11
Wilde enjoyed the idea of making friendships across social divides, and he wrote to Reggie Turner mentioning his particular ‘pals’ among the ‘many good nice fellows’ inside. Despite the restrictions imposed by the separate system, he claimed to have ‘seven or eight friends’: ‘they are capital chaps: of course we can’t speak to each other, except a word now and then at exercise, but are great friends’. Although all were young men in their twenties – and one of them, Harry Elvin, was praised as ‘very handsome’ – Wilde’s interest in these youths seems not to have been overtly sexual. Even before his release he was plotting ways in which to assist them with small sums of money.12
Among the glaring injustices of prison life the most distressing, for Wilde, were the routine imprisonment of young children and the brutal treatment of the ‘half-witted’. The latter, often condemned for ‘shamming’ or malingering when they unwittingly infringed minor rules, were continually being punished. One unfortunate young ‘lunatic’ – whose condition was clearly proclaimed by his ‘silly grin and idiotic laughter’, his sudden, silent, tears and his ‘fantastic gestures’– was subjected to a brutal flogging ‘by order of the visiting justices on the report of the doctor’. Wilde cried all night after the ‘horror’ of the incident, unable to get the sound of the man’s shrieks out of his head: ‘At first I thought some animal like a bull or a cow was being unskilfully slaughtered.’13 He determined to try and reform these horrors on his release.
There were cares, too, from outside the prison. He had been upset when Ross informed him (during his May visit) that Lord Alfred Douglas was planning to bring out, in Paris, a volume of poetry dedicated to him. Wilde wrote subsequently to Ross urging him to prevent it: ‘The proposal is revolting and grotesque.’ He also asked that Ross retrieve all Wilde’s letters to Douglas, so that they might be destroyed. He even wanted to get back all the presents he had given – books and jewellery. ‘The idea that he is wearing or in possession of anything I gave him is 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 and gifts.’14
Although the still-exiled Douglas – distraught and bemused by Wilde’s ‘terrible’ tergiversation – did withdraw the book, he refused to part with the letters. He told Ross that ‘possession of these letters and the recollections they may give me, even if they can give me no hope, will perhaps prevent me from putting an end to a life which has now no raison d’être. If Oscar asks me to kill myself I will do so, and he shall have back the letters when I am dead.’15 For the future, Douglas resolved to regard anything that Wilde might say while in prison as ‘non-existent’.16 And, in the meantime, as a record of his ‘undying love,’ he went ahead and published – in the Revue Blanche – a rambling and indiscreet defence of his relationship with Wilde, who, in his estimate, was ‘suffering’ in prison simply for being ‘a uranian’, even though a quarter of all men shared the same tastes. The article – which provoked considerable criticism from French writers – only strengthened Wilde’s animus against his former beloved.17 Ross, Adey and Reggie Turner all strove to plead Douglas’s case; but ‘the deep bitterness’ of Wilde’s feelings was not to be assuaged.18
Wilde was also distressed to receive at the beginning of November ‘a violent and insulting letter’ from Mr Hargrove, announcing that Constance – vexed by the continued attempts of Wilde’s friends to purchase the life interest in the marriage settlement – now wanted complete legal control of the children. She was also threatening to stop any proposed allowance.19 The news fell upon him like a ‘thunderbolt’. He had been under the impression that all had been settled to allow Constance to acquire the life interest, and it was shocking to learn that this had not been done, and that Adey and Ross, ignoring his clear instructions on the point, had continued with their plans to buy the life interest from the official receiver.20 They were motivated by a desire to protect Wilde from having to depend upon the goodwill of Constance’s less-than-friendly ‘advisors’ and family, in the event of her predeceasing him, but the plan was misguided. It shattered the growing accord between Wilde and his wife: unable to believe that he was not party to the scheme, she too wrote a ‘violent’ and bitter letter. Moreover the action was entirely futile.21
The existing marriage settlement, and the attendant life interest, would be rendered obsolete in the event of a divorce. And in the face of Adey’s continued intransigence, Constance and her solicitors resolved to begin proceedings. These would bring Wilde into fresh danger. There would be a new trial. Although the law allowed a husband to divorce his wife for adultery alone, a wife could divorce her husband for adultery only if he were also guilty of incest, bigamy, bestiality, rape, cruelty, desertion (for two years), or sodomy. Constance’s lawyers – Wilde learnt, to his alarm – seemed to have got a statement from Walter Grainger, Douglas’s young Oxford servant, admitting that, among various intimacies, Wilde had sodomized him. If this were brought out in a divorce court, Wilde might – potentially – find himself re-arrested and charged anew in the criminal court. Sodomy could carry a much longer sentence than the two years attendant upon mere acts of ‘gross indecency’. Here was a fresh horror to contemplate.22
Once he perceived the precariousness of his position, Wilde strove to draw back from the precipice. Dispensing with the services of the ineffectual Mr Humphreys, he engaged a new solicitor, Arthur D. Hansell, to try to resolve the debacle without the need for a divorce. As a first step (and with great sadness) he agreed to surrender his guardianship of the children to Constance and her cousin, Adrian Hope.23
Wilde was trying to put the pieces of his life back together again. During the first three months of 1897 he worked daily on what began, at least, as a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. In some 50,000 words he sought to explain to his former lover – and to himself – what had brought him to his current position, and then to draw some spiritual lesson from his situation.24† In unsparing detail he chronicled the history of his relationship with Bosie, through all its worst phases: the ‘reckless’ extravagances; the coarse debaucheries; the ‘loathsome’ and petty rows. And everything was laid to Douglas’s account. The tenor of their affair had – Wilde asserted – been set by the ‘shallowness’ of his character; a character dominated by vanity and a sexual fascination with the ‘gutter’. These were things that should have rendered him an unfit companion for an artist of Wilde’s stature and stamp, ‘one, that is to say, the quality of whose work depends on the intensification of personality… the companionship of ideas… quiet, peace, and solitude’. Certainly Wilde’s indulgence of his friend had led to the ‘absolute ruin’ of his art. Anything he had managed to create had been despite, not because of, their friendship.
There was almost no trace of Wilde’s great love for Bosie. And though Wilde admitted that Douglas had, after a fashion, loved him, that love, he suggested, had been ‘entirely outstripped’ by the hatred that Douglas had for his father. It was Douglas’s insistence on drawing Wilde into his own hate-fuelled family conflict that had brought Wilde to the narrow confines of cell C.3.3. ‘I am here,’ Wilde declared, ‘for having tried to put your fat
her into prison.’ But for his ill-fated libel case, Wilde insisted (with some truth), neither ‘the Government’ nor ‘Society’ would have taken any interest in his sexual peccadillos.
For all this Wilde – with dramatic magnanimity – ‘forgave’ Douglas. He accepted that he himself must bear responsibility for his own downfall, if only because he had – through his amiable nature – allowed himself to fall in with Douglas’s base desires and mean designs: ‘It was the triumph of the small over the bigger nature,’ he declared; the ‘tyranny of the weak over the strong’. Wilde blamed himself terribly for it. Nevertheless the utter despair that he had felt on entering prison had now passed away and, as he explained, he had begun to perceive the positive aspects of his predicament. He boasted of his newfound ‘humility’, as he called it. ‘To reject one’s own experiences,’ he declared, ‘is to arrest one’s own development.’ He had been awakened by prison life to a ‘new world’ of pity and sorrow, and he wanted to explore it. ‘I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man capable, is at once the type and test of all great Art. What the artist is always looking for is that mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which Form reveals.’ And although there were several such modes – ‘youth and the arts preoccupied with youth’, ‘modern landscape art’, ‘music’, ‘a flower or a child’ – ‘Sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and Art.’ While pleasure might produce ‘the beautiful body’, it was ‘pain’ that produced ‘the beautiful Soul’. And in this perception Wilde aligned himself with Christ.
Wilde’s new vision of his prison existence – coupled with his daily reading of the Greek gospels – had drawn him back to the contemplation of Jesus. Formal religion continued to hold no interest for him. He passed the daily chapel service sitting ‘in a listless attitude with his elbow resting on the back of his chair, his legs crossed’, as he ‘gazed dreamily’ about himself with an air of exaggerated ennui.25 Nevertheless he considered the chaplain, Rev. M. T. Friend, a perfectly ‘nice fellow’.26 There had been one unfortunate incident when the clergyman had responded to Wilde’s complaint that his cell window gave no view of the sky with the pious observation, ‘Let your mind dwell [not] on the clouds, but on Him who is above the clouds’; at which Wilde, losing his temper, had pushed him towards the door, shouting ‘get out you damned fool’.27 But for the most part they got on well enough. Friend was certainly impressed by the ‘spiritual side’ of Wilde’s nature, and recalled how during their regular interviews his eye would sometimes light up as he talked, ‘his body would straighten, and he would pull himself together and seem… almost to endeavour to project himself physically back into his old intellectual life’.28
And it seems to have been in discussion with Friend that Wilde elaborated his idea of Jesus as ‘the supreme Artist’. Wilde admitted that he did not, ‘of course’, believe in ‘the divinity of Christ, in its generally accepted sense’, but he had ‘no difficulty in believing that [Jesus] was as far above the people around him as though he had been an angel sitting on the clouds’. In Wilde’s personal creed, Christ was fashioned in his own image: ‘a supreme Individualist’, ‘an artist in words’; ‘it was by the voice he found expression – that’s what the voice is for, but few can find it by that medium, and none in the manner born of Christ’. He was a teller of beautiful tales, a master of paradox, a genius of imaginative sympathy to equal Shakespeare, a poet who had made of his own life the most wonderful of poems.29
Initially Wilde was reluctant to proselytize his ‘unique creed’ – insisting that ‘the moment I discovered that anyone else shared my belief I would flee from it’. But he had come to think that it was a subject on which he might write, perhaps after his release.30 The fact of composing his letter to Douglas gave him a more immediate opportunity, and he interrupted his gazetteer of Douglas’s failings to devote several pages to an imaginative panegyric to this vision of Christ as the ‘precursor of the romantic movement in life’ through his ‘union of personality and perfection’.
The letter was an exercise in catharsis. It gave Wilde an outlet for his resentment against Douglas and his disappointment in himself. It offered him a means of comprehending his own imprisonment, and finding a way past it. It also allowed him to feel again the joy of literary creation. The glorious flow of language, and of thought, confirmed that neither his mind nor his spirit had been impaired by two years on a plank bed. The rhetorical effects of his prose, the obvious relish ‘of sound and syllable’, might seem to overwhelm the looked-for sincerity of his sentiments, but Wilde had always donned a mask to express a truth.
For all the bitterness of its early passages, the letter (addressed to ‘Dear Bosie’ and signed ‘your affectionate friend, Oscar Wilde’) both expected an answer and assumed a rapprochement of sorts following Wilde’s release. ‘At the end of a month, when the June roses are in all their wanton opulence, I will, if I feel able, arrange through Robbie to meet you in some quiet foreign town like Bruges, whose grey houses and green canals and cool still ways had a charm for me, years ago.’ But if the mood of the letter had shifted over the course of its composition, so too had Wilde’s vision of his creation. He had come to regard the epistle as a piece of literature, to take its place among his other works. (Although his own thought was that the text might be called ‘Epistola: in Carcere e Vinculis’, it would come to be known to posterity as De Profundis.) 31
Rather than dispatch the manuscript directly to Douglas, he planned to send it to Ross as his ‘literary executor’, that he might have two typed copies made, one for Ross and one for himself, with a view to its eventual publication – ‘not necessarily in my lifetime or in Douglas’s’. He also hoped that additional copies of those passages relating to his spiritual development might be made and sent to such special friends as ‘the Lady of Wimbledon’ (Adela Schuster) and Frankie Forbes-Robertson. But these plans had to be put on hold, when, at the beginning of April, the prison commissioners declined Major Nelson’s request for permission to send out the letter. It was stipulated, instead, that the document should be handed to Wilde on his release the following month.32
The end of Wilde’s sentence no longer seemed impossibly distant. From the beginning of the year they had ceased to crop his hair in preparation for his release; much to his delight he felt it growing back over his ears33 (he amused the warders by insisting that his hair – very slightly tinged with grey – was now ‘perfectly white’).34 There was a further lightening of the mood with the arrival at this time of a sympathetic new warder, Thomas Martin. Belfast-born, he had a great admiration for Wilde, and took considerable risks to improve his lot, smuggling him newspapers and additional food. Wilde was introduced to ‘Scotch scones, meat pies, and sausage rolls’ – those improbable delicacies which he had wondered at in the King’s Road only two years before.35 ‘My dear friend,’ Wilde scribbled in one clandestine note, ‘What have I to write about except that if you had been an officer in Reading Prison a year ago my life would have been much happier. Everyone tells me I am looking better – and happier. That is because I have a good friend who gives me the [Daily] Chronicle, and promises me ginger biscuits.’ To which Warder Martin added the superscription, ‘Your ungrateful I done more than promise.’
Wilde’s mind turned increasingly on what he might do after his release. The prospect filled him with both excitement and apprehension. He realized that he would be leaving one prison to enter another, returning ‘an unwelcome visitant to that world that does not want me… Horrible as are the dead when they rise from their tombs, the living who come out from tombs are more horrible still.’36 Neither England nor society could have any place for him. He planned to go abroad quietly, and under an assumed name. Donning the mantle of the damned and wandering hero of his ‘Uncle’ Maturin’s novel, he resolved to call himself ‘Mr Melmoth’.37 To this he appended the Christian name Sebastian, taken from the beautiful martyr, whose image, by Guido
Reni, he had so admired in Genoa, all those years ago. He had a vision of taking a little flat in Brussels.38 Or perhaps he might go to the remote coast of Brittany, where he could enjoy the twin benefits of ‘really bracing air’ and ‘freedom from English people’.39 He had no plans, he assured Adey jestingly, of taking up Ricketts’s ‘kind offer’ to join him in a Trappist monastery.40
He thought that if he could have ‘at least eighteen months of free life to collect [him]self’, he might be able to work again.41 He had been heartened to learn that imprisonment had not quite obliterated his artistic reputation; that in England, as in France, his books were still being read and his plays produced.‡ He chose to believe that the improvement in his circumstances should be traced back to the Parisian production of Salomé, which had obliged the ‘Government’ to accept that he was an artist of enduring and international repute.42 It was a base upon which to build. Frank Harris had assured him that he might find a regular outlet for his prose in the Saturday Review.43 There were projects he wanted to attempt. Comedy might have to be given up. ‘I have sworn solemnly to dedicate my life to Tragedy,’ he informed Warder Martin. ‘If I write any more books, it will be to form a library of lamentations.’44 He hoped to return to the subject of ‘Christ as the precursor of the Romantic Movement’, as well as addressing ‘the Artistic life considered in relation Conduct’ – taking Verlaine and the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin as exemplars.45 He saw possibilities in making more ‘beautiful coloured musical things’ in the biblical-Symbolist manner of Salomé.46 And although prison was, he considered, ‘too terrible and ugly to make a work of art of’, he wanted to write about it ‘to try and change it for others’.47
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