Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

by Colm Toibin

  The domed Reading Room has not changed since the time of Yeats and Joyce. It has the same light and layout, the same noises, perhaps even some of the same people, or maybe they just look similar. And the same sounds: whispered consultations with the librarians; chairs being pushed back; the seagull cries on the outside reminding us how close the sea is and the port; some coughing; and then a sudden pounding silence as heads are bowed low in the holy sacrament of reading.

  These days you have to get a reader’s ticket to use the National Library. In the 1970s, when I came here every day, no one checked your credentials: they presumed that you were doing serious research and treated you accordingly.

  You signed your name in the big old book as soon as you went into the Reading Room. You found a table, making sure that the light worked, and you went about ordering your books for the day, using the old catalogs that were like ledgers. I don’t think that I have ever been as happy as during those first months in the National Library as I read what I could find about the Dublin book trade in the reign of Charles II. I looked around me a lot and I regularly went out for a smoke. In those days the College of Art was sandwiched between the National Library and the Dáil (you could hear the bells calling the members of parliament to come and vote). The art students were as exotic and colorful as jungle birds. They were either very tall or very small; they had either very long hair or very short hair; some of the boys looked like girls and vice versa. We, the readers in the National Library, compared to them, were a dull-looking lot dressed in faded tweeds. The art students, on the other hand, seemed to have made their own clothes, or bought them secondhand. They were perfect in every way.

  I walk now towards St. Stephen’s Green by the side of the Shelbourne Hotel. This, as Roy Foster wrote, was Yeats territory: “the heart of their city was not the plebeian landmark of Nelson’s Pillar (hub of the tramway system) but Stephen’s Green.” John B. Yeats had his studio here in the years when he finally returned to Dublin before he went to New York. It is in St. Stephen’s Green itself, within its railings, in an area hidden by shrubbery with an entrance that is not obvious to the eye, that Henry Moore’s monument to W. B. Yeats is situated. This circle where the bronze stands, in its strange isolation, its purity, its odd nobility, is one of the most beautiful and powerful places in Dublin, full of a secret energy worthy of the great old ghost.

  The statue of Joyce’s head faces Newman House, the site of the Catholic University, opened in 1854 with John Henry Newman as rector until 1858. In 1880, it became University College Dublin. James Joyce studied here from 1898 to 1902. Now his face in bronze stares placidly towards the railings. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he has Stephen Dedalus call Stephen’s Green “my Green.” The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins came to live and teach in Newman House in 1884 and died here in 1889. He wrote his dark sonnets in an upper room in Newman House, where he woke and felt “the fell of dark, not day.” There is a plaque outside now to Newman, Hopkins and Joyce. When Ulysses appeared, a professor who taught at Trinity College said: “James Joyce is a living argument in favour of my contention that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island–for the corner boys who spit into the Liffey.”

  I have news for this professor: we spit no more. We write books now and make software. We travel home peacefully to the suburbs when the day is done.

  I walk out of the green by the Leeson Street exit and cross into Lower Leeson Street. I am going home. The books are waiting, as are the empty pages. Soon I will start writing the story of the three prodigal fathers. I have walked enough. Some city streets, in the wake of these figures and their sons, are haunted.

  AN EMINENT VICTORIAN: SIR WILLIAM WILDE

  The prisoner, an Irish poet and playwright, would later die in his early forties, his reputation blighted by scandal and by allegations of egotism. In a book, he would describe Reading Gaol, where he was incarcerated, as “a handsome building, erected in red brick after the manner of an old castle, with battlements and towers.”

  What surprised him was the abundance of flowers growing in the exercise yard:

  It was an amazing sight. There were not merely flowers, a sight astonishing enough in itself; there was a prodigality of flowers. Then some of us remembered the cause. One of the graves unlocked the secret. It was marked with the letters C. T .W., and the date, 1896, to whom Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Jail” had been inscribed, and in celebration of whose passing the poem had been penned.

  In his book he quoted from Wilde’s poem:

  But neither milk-white rose nor red

  May bloom in prison air;

  The shard, the pebble, and the flint,

  Are what they give us there:

  For flowers have been known to heal

  A common man’s despair.

  So never will wine-red rose or white,

  Petal by petal, fall

  On that stretch of mud and sand that lies

  By the hideous prison-wall,

  To tell the men who tramp the yard

  That God’s Son died for all.

  “So Wilde had sung,” the prisoner wrote, “not in protest, but in bitter acceptance . . . But for us who came after him with the memory of his song in our minds, the miracle had been wrought . . . for the great yard was a lake of leaf and bloom . . .”

  The prisoner who came after Wilde and quoted from his poem was Darrell Figgis, one of a group that had been involved in the 1916 Rebellion in Ireland. Many of them had been held first in other British prisons but now were transferred to Reading, where, together in the small women’s section of the prison, they were allowed to associate freely. They had been selected by the British authorities because they were believed, often wrongly, to be the leaders or the main troublemakers among the Irish nationalists. They included Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin, and Seán T. O’Kelly, later president of Ireland. Despite their reputation, they were, while prisoners, quiet and peaceful, easier to manage than the Irish political prisoners who would be incarcerated in Reading two years later.

  Many of this first batch of Irish prisoners in Reading wrote poetry, enough indeed for one of them, Ernest Blythe, who was later managing director of the Abbey Theatre for more than a quarter of a century, to complain about this in rhymes of his own:

  To Reading Gaol I have been sent

  And must endure the punishment

  That every bloke is writing rhyme

  And I must praise it every time.

  Darrell Figgis and the other prisoners who served time at Reading after the rebellion were released in December 1916. A hundred years later, in 2016, three years after the prison, which had been used in recent years as a place for younger offenders, was closed, I went there in the spring and walked around its empty corridors and bare cells. By this time, the section where the Irish political prisoners had been held had been demolished, but the main prison was as it had been when it was built in 1844, each floor a cruciform shape, which meant that each of the four corridors could be seen from a single, central vantage point.

  That day, there was no hint of the ghosts of the Irish political prisoners, and no hint either of the presence of Oscar Wilde. Instead, it was filled with the atmosphere left by the young offenders, cell after cell with metal bunk beds riveted into the wall, a small table and two stools, a metal sink closer to the window that was high in the wall opposite the door, and then a toilet on the other side of a partition. There was a sense of bleakness and desolation about each cell. The idea of what it might be like to be cooped up here all day and night with another person was fully palpable.

  Outside in the world there were young men walking the streets who had suffered the boredom, the tedium of these confined spaces just three years before.

  The only moment that day when I felt that I could imagine the prison as Oscar Wilde might have experienced it was when we were in the basement close to the exercise yard and the man who was in charge of the building casu
ally mentioned that this room that led to the yard was where prisoners were flogged. I remembered this passage from Wilde’s letter to the Daily Chronicle shortly after his release:

  About three months ago I noticed amongst the prisoners who took exercise with me a young man who seemed to me to be silly or half-witted . . . On Saturday week last I was in my cell at about one o’clock occupied in cleaning and polishing the tins I had been using for dinner. Suddenly I was startled by the prison silence being broken by the most horrible and revolting shrieks, or rather howls, for at first I thought some animal like a bull or a cow was being unskilfully slaughtered outside the prison walls. I soon realized, however, that the howls proceeded from the basement of the prison, and I knew that some wretched man was being flogged . . . Suddenly it dawned upon me that they might be flogging this unfortunate lunatic . . . The next day Sunday 16th, I saw the poor fellow at exercise, his weak, ugly, wretched face bloated by tears and hysteria almost beyond recognition . . . There, in the beautiful sunlight, walked this poor creature—made once in the image of God—grinning like an ape, and making with his hands the most fantastic gestures, as though he was playing in the air on some invisible stringed instrument . . . All the while hysterical tears, without which none of us ever saw him, were making solid runnels on his white swollen face . . . He was a living grotesque.

  For a second as I walked around the bare exercise yard, I could almost imagine Wilde confined here under this sky, and what he saw that day, and the sounds he had heard earlier when he was in his cell.

  Later in the year, on Sunday, October 16, 2016, I returned to Reading Gaol, which was now open to the public courtesy of Artangel, an organization that promotes the showing of art or the making of art in odd and unexpected places. Some of the cells had artworks on display by artists including Vija Celmins and Marlene Dumas. And over the previous weeks there had been readings by actors and others from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.

  I had agreed to be locked in Wilde’s cell, the cell known as C.3.3, on the third floor of Block C, for the entire afternoon of that Sunday to read an almost complete version of De Profundis, which would take five and a half hours. It would be streamed onto a screen in the prison chapel; visitors could also come and look into the cell through a peephole in the door, although I could not speak to them, nor they to me. All I could do was read Wilde’s text in the very space where it was written, written in a time when prisoners were held in solitary confinement, when they were forced to maintain silence even in the short spell each day when they circled the exercise yard.

  De Profundis, a fifty-five-thousand-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, written by Wilde during the final months of his sentence, is a strange literary creation, a hybrid text. It was the only work that Wilde produced while serving his two-year sentence. On April 2, 1897, the prison governor informed the Prison Commission that each sheet of the manuscript “was carefully numbered before being issued [to Wilde in his cell] and withdrawn each evening,” but it is more likely that Wilde was given greater freedom to revise and correct the pages. The governor was informed by the commission that the letter could not actually be sent, but instead should be kept and handed to the prisoner on his departure from the prison.

  Wilde, when he was released, gave the manuscript to his friend Robert Ross, who had two copies made; one he sent to Lord Alfred Douglas, the other he later lodged in the British Museum. Sections from Ross’s copy were published in 1905 and in 1908. Although it had many errors in transcription, a complete version, based on the original manuscript, was published in 1949.

  De Profundis is a cross between an intimate address, filled with accusation and urgent statement, and a set of eloquent meditations on suffering and redemption and self-realization. It is a love letter and a howl from the depths. Its tone is hushed and wounded. It is written with passion, intensity and some wonderfully structured sentences. It is lofty, haughty, proud, and also humble, soft-toned, penitent. It was written in a range of different moods rather than composed by a stable imagination. It darts, shifts and often repeats itself. It was created for the world to read and composed for the eyes of one man and written to satisfy the prisoner himself, sometimes all at the same time. It is a great guilty soliloquy about love and treachery, about despair and darkness. It is also often wise and filled with sorrowful, eloquent, melancholy truth.

  When I was alone in Wilde’s cell that October Sunday with the pages in front of me, pages I had already read over and over in silence, I still had a problem. I did not know what sound the sentences Wilde had written in this solitude should make when read aloud. I did not know what the voice should be like when spoken to these cold four walls.

  Theatrical? Angry? Passionate? Dramatic? Or quiet? Hushed? Whispering? Or should I try to find a real voice, a voice that urgently wanted to be believed or heard, or, maybe even more importantly, a voice in the wilderness seeking to reestablish its own sound so that the speaker’s identity and sense of self, so crushed by solitude and prison rules, could find a space again, a clearing where the speaker could find comfort, even if no one actually attended to the words he spoke or wrote?

  The letter was written by a prisoner to someone who was free, by an older man to a younger one, by a writer to an idler, by the son of a man who had earned his privilege to the son of a man who had inherited his. It was written in the tone of a letter that desperately needed to be written but might never be sent.

  But it was also written by an Irishman to an Englishman. And it was that last idea that gave me a clue about how to start speaking the words that Wilde had written. I would begin by speaking them in my own voice. And I would speak as though I were talking to one person only, one person whose spirit was close at hand, and see as I went along if I would find out something new about the text that might have eluded me in all my silent readings of it.

  What I noted as I read was not only the venom that came to the surface at any mention of Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, but also a sort of disdain Wilde felt for Queensberry, as though he were a figure from a lesser culture or indeed a lower species. The conflict in De Profundis was not only between the writer and the putative recipient, but also between Wilde’s pride in his own class, his own family, and his contempt for Douglas’s father and indeed the entire world that produced him.

  As a result of his imprisonment, “your father,” Wilde wrote scathingly, “will always live among the kind pure-minded parents of Sunday school literature.” Douglas’s mother, he wrote, saw that “heredity had burdened [Douglas] with a terrible legacy, and frankly admitted it, admitted it with terror: he is ‘the only one of my children who has inherited the fatal Douglas temperament.’ ” Being the son of the Marquess of Queensberry was, Wilde wrote, a kind of doom: “Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its own life, or on the lives of others.” In De Profundis, Wilde also alluded to the general dislike of Queensberry by his own family when he recalled their offer to pay Wilde’s costs if he brought a case against him, writing “that [Douglas’s] father had been an incubus to them all: that they had often discussed the possibility of getting him put into a lunatic asylum so as to keep him out of the way: that he was a daily source of annoyance and distress to your mother and to every one else.” But this was nothing to Douglas’s personal, particular hatred for his father, which was, Wilde wrote, “of such stature that it entirely outstripped, overthrew, and overshadowed your love of me. There was no struggle between them at all, or but little: of such dimensions was your hatred and of such monstrous growth.”

  Later in the letter, he saw connections between father and son: “Whenever there is hatred between two people there is bond or brotherhood of some kind. I suppose that, by some strange law of the antipathy of similars, you loathed each other, not because in so many points you were so different but because in some you were so like.”

  Wilde resented being used as a pawn in the ga
me between father and son and insisted “that I had something better to do with my life than to have scenes with a man drunken, déclassé, and half-witted as he was.”

  The word “déclassé” is interesting here. In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde refers to Lord Alfred Douglas as “a young man of my own social rank and position.” But this view, in a country acutely alert to differences in rank, would not have been widely shared. Wilde was merely the son of an Irish knight while Douglas came from two aristocratic families and had a title. While Wilde’s father worked for a living, Douglas’s father had inherited his wealth. In Douglas’s world, Wilde was an outsider, an interloper.

  In the message he left at Wilde’s club, the message that would cause the famous libel action, the Marquess of Queensberry alleged that Oscar Wilde was “posing as a somdomite,” as he spelt it. He might have added that Wilde was also posing as someone who held a social rank and position higher than it really was. This, in the England of 1895, might have been seen by many as a rather more serious accusation.

  Wilde came from a long tradition of Irishmen who had created themselves in London. He was an artist, he moved freely in society, often using an English accent. He had been to Oxford. He invented himself in England much as his parents had invented themselves in Dublin. In De Profundis, he suggested that his own wit and cleverness were not merely attributes, but were themselves a sort of social rank.

  This idea of rank coming from words and wit had belonged to his parents too. In the absence of any other aristocracy in residence in Dublin, Sir William and Lady Wilde represented a type of grandeur that they had built with their books and their brains, their independence of mind and their high-toned eccentricity.