PRISONERS TYPICALLY RETURN, in their imagination, to the past: ‘we have’, Wilde commented, ‘nothing else to think of’.1 Some seek in it relief from the tyranny of the motionless present, which Wilde compared to ‘one long moment of suffering’, drawing comfort from their store of recollections. Others turn to it in an attempt to understand what has brought them to the prison gates.
It was probably for these reasons – and also because new readerly challenges may have seemed too daunting – that Wilde travelled back in time through his prison reading. Many of the titles on his request lists had been familiar to him from his youth, their pages redolent with memories. When he took up his Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon and his Greek Testament, they may have reminded him of the copies of the same titles that had once stood in his father’s library. The volumes of Tennyson, Keats, Chaucer, Spenser, Wordsworth, Arnold, John Dryden, Malory and Robert Burns that Wilde read in prison would likewise have taken him back to Merrion Square, where his mother’s poetry collection had doubtless contained them all.
Wilde could also return to the past with the help of the vast library he carried around with him in his head. During exercise in the prison yard he paced around ‘with bended head . . . usually muttering snatches of prose or verse from his favourite authors’.2 In ‘his lonely cell’, too, ‘night after night’, he would pass the wakeful hours continually talking to himself, as though ‘laughing to imaginary visitors’.3Perhaps he was acting out scenes from plays, or passages of dramatic verse.
And, when Wilde intoned poetry, did he hear an echo of the voice that had first recited verse to him? Many of the phrases Speranza had quoted to her boy certainly came back to him in prison. He recalled, in particular, four lines from Goethe, translated by Carlyle, which his deceased mother had loved to chant:
Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent his midnight hours
Weeping and wailing for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye Heavenly powers.
As a youth Wilde declined to ‘admit the enormous truth hidden’ in the quatrain. Now, however, he drew consolation from it.4
The works of classical literature and the commentaries on ancient culture Wilde read in prison would have reminded him of Trinity and Oxford. His requests suggest that, along with his Dublin childhood, it was to his ‘flower-like’ time as an Oxonian that he most devoutly wished to return (he ordered the works of a number of authors, such as Newman and Pater, whom he had read there). It is possible that he trod the backward path to Oxford in order to return to his intellectual point of departure. Having reached it, he hoped to set forth again on a new adventure.
As well as evoking memories of the past, the books Wilde requested helped him make sense of it. When he opened Poetae Scenici Graeci, the gargantuan folio volume containing the surviving body of Greek poetry and drama, he re-read a passage in the Agamemnon and discovered in it a key to his personal history. It appears in a speech of the Chorus concerning Helen of Troy. The beautiful Helen was the cause of the war described in Homer’s Iliad, fought by the Greeks in order to recover her from the Trojans.
In the passage Aeschylus compares Helen to a charming lion’s whelp who is welcomed into the house of a generous lord and nurtured there with loving indulgence. In its infancy, the whelp returns the lord’s love, but when it grows into a lion it reveals the fierce nature of its race, turning on its master and devouring his children. So too would Helen, now pampered at Troy, where Prince Paris had sequestered her after stealing her away from the Greek noble Menelaus, one day prove to be the agent of the city’s destruction. As an undergraduate, Wilde had been irresistibly drawn to these lines. In an Oxford essay he paraphrases and then praises them as ‘the highest triumph of Greek genius’.5 Now, as he sat in his prison cell at Reading, he realised that they had a striking autobiographical resonance.
In the early 1890s, Wilde had metaphorically, and literally, invited into his house and spoilt Alfred Douglas. Bosie had been the god of Wilde’s romantic idolatry; he had also, or so Wilde now came to believe, been one of the instruments of his downfall. ‘In the most wonderful of all his plays,’ Wilde wrote to Douglas from prison, ‘Aeschylus tells us of the great Lord who brings up in his house the lion-cub . . . And the thing grows up . . . and destroys the lord and his house . . . I feel that I was such a one as he.’6*
Such reflections prompted Wilde, during the first year of his sentence, to turn violently against his former ‘dearest of all boys’. He never regretted the homosexual nature of his relationship with Douglas, but during his imprisonment he came to the conclusion that the life of ‘studied materialism’ and ‘sensual excess’ he had shared with Bosie had been ‘unworthy’ of him both as a man and as an artist. He also attributed much of the blame for his incarceration to Douglas, who had urged him to take legal action against his father.
Wilde also turned to literature to make sense of the present. Dante’s Divina commedia, above all other books, helped him understand the hideous world of the prison. Wilde read the famous account of the poet’s visionary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in the original medieval Italian, with the aid of a prose translation and various commentaries, and an Italian grammar and dictionary.
On his odyssey, the Florentine poet, guided first by the Latin author Virgil and then by his Platonic love Beatrice, travels up through the circles of the different dimensions of the afterlife, inter viewing, on his way, the souls who dwell there. In the Inferno, the spirits he encounters are plagued by terrible tortures: the carnal are caught up in ceaseless winds, the gluttons are lashed by the rain, and the heretics rend their own flesh. The souls that live forever in Paradise bask in the glory of God.
Wilde’s sufferings in prison were heightened by the monotonous simplicity of his surroundings. It was this, together with its ultra-rational uniformity, that made life in jail so inhuman and so impossible to describe. Describing a prison was, Wilde said, ‘as difficult as describing a water-closet . . . one could merely say that it was well, or badly, papered: or clean or the reverse: the horror of prison is that everything is so simple.’7 Words could get no purchase on the spartan world of the prison; nor could emotions or ideas. This opened up a chasm between the inmates’ tragic feelings and the banal character of the environment around them: ‘everything is so commonplace’, as Wilde put it, yet ‘so degrading, and hideous’ and so ‘revolting in its effect’.8 In consequence, realistic descriptions were completely inadequate to the task of evoking prison life – how could an objective account convey the horror and anguish that ate away at the convict’s soul?
Yet where realism failed, fantastic and visionary literature could succeed, as Wilde discovered when he opened one of the books in the Divina commedia. ‘Dante!’ he remarked after his release, ‘I read Dante every day in the Italian, every page of him; neither the Purgatory nor the Paradise was intended for me . . . But the Inferno! What else was I to do but adore it? Hell – were we not dwelling in it? Hell: that was the prison.’9
Wilde was familiar with the author he hailed as ‘the supreme modern poet’ long before his incarceration.10 With characteristic disdain for historical facts, his mother had actually claimed descent from Dante. Wilde had referred frequently to the Florentine poet in his youthful verse and his Tite Street library contained an English translation of the Divina commedia with John Flaxman’s sinuous black and white illustrations.
During his 1882 lecture tour of America Wilde had visited a jail in Nebraska. There he found a prisoner engrossed in the pages of Dante’s masterpiece. ‘Strange and beautiful,’ he commented after wards, ‘that the sorrow of a single Florentine should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol.’11 Now that he himself languished in prison, he recalled the portentous incident. He told More Adey that he finally understood how Dante could have charmed the American convict because the Italian poet ‘was the greatest consolation that he had.’12
The Inferno articulated for Wilde the full horror of his experience, conferring significant form on the hell that was prison life. It was one of those great works that used imaginative and poetic ‘lies’, and visionary fantasies, to tell a truth that realistic literature could not even begin to hint at. As a man who always came to life through books, Wilde had to place his sufferings in a literary context – to fashion and to fix them with burning poetic words. The Divina commedia offered Wilde the script that he required in order to under stand and to survive his sentence.
When Wilde came to describe prison life, and his own experience, he frequently alluded to Dante’s poem. He compared the suicidal despair he had felt at Wandsworth to that of certain characters in the Inferno who succumbed to the sin of wilful sadness.13 Yet, in some respects, the prison world was so appalling that not even Dante’s words could adequately express it. Next to a Victorian jail, indeed, some aspects of the Florentine’s hell seemed positively congenial. In the Inferno, as Wilde remarked, ‘people could [at least] move about, could see each other, and hear each other groan. There was some human companionship.’14
After his release Wilde often acknowledged his enormous debt to Dante. He told one acquaintance that the Florentine had ‘saved’ his ‘reason’;15 to another he vividly evoked the pleasure that he had derived from the Divina commedia. ‘You can imagine,’ he said, ‘how I tasted every word.’16 Of all the figurative comparisons Wilde made between food and literature this is the most poignant, for what else was there to taste in prison but words?
* This is yet another case of Wilde’s life imitating art. It is also an example of the way in which time seems to bend in his biography. In his youth, he was fascinated by a passage in a play; later he came to realise that it had been an omen – not unlike the ones that appear throughout Aeschylus’ works. Could it be that he was unconsciously drawn to the lines as an undergraduate, precisely because they were premonitory?