ON THE AFTERNOON of 18 May 1897, Wilde left Reading gaol for Pentonville, the prison from which he would be released at dawn on the following morning. In the company of two warders he took a cab from Reading to Twyford station where he waited on the platform for the London train. He was overwhelmed there by the sight of a blossoming laburnum tree – the first he had seen in two years. Opening his arms to its yellow petals, he exclaimed, ‘Oh beautiful world! Oh beautiful world!’ The warders, anxious that the prisoner should remain incognito, begged him to be quiet. ‘Now, Mr Wilde,’ one of them admonished, ‘you mustn’t give yourself away. You’re the only man in England who would talk like that in a railway station.’1
In De Profundis, Wilde had eagerly anticipated the prospect of reading and owning ‘beautiful books’ on regaining his liberty: ‘what joy,’ he asked, ‘could be greater?’2 For that reason, along with his horror of ‘going out into the world without a single book’, he once more turned, on the eve of his release, to his faithful friends, asking them to purchase for him a library of choice volumes. He sent Robbie Ross, now installed as his literary executor as well as his all-round Sancho Panza, a list of specific requests (reproduced in Appendix II e., pp. 321–2) and invited him to add to it other titles by ‘Flaubert, Stevenson, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas père, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Coleridge, Anatole France, Gautier, Dante (and all Dante literature); Goethe (and ditto) . . . you know the sort of books I want’.3
Wilde told Robbie that he would regard it as ‘a great compliment’ if his friends clubbed together to buy him the volumes. The little library would be a symbol of their solidarity as well as a collection of golden books.4 Once again friends such as Ross, Humphreys, Adey, Beerbohm, and the journalist and wit Reginald Turner (whom Wilde described as ‘wonderful . . . purple and perfect’), responded to his appeal with generosity. Adela Schuster, a society hostess who had assisted Wilde financially during his trials, and whom he described as ‘one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known’, sent him over ten volumes.5
At dawn on the morning of 19 May the gate of Pentonville prison opened and Wilde stepped out into the Caledonian Road. Before he was discharged, his personal possessions were returned, and among them he would have found the volume that had been sent to him by the anonymous Irish well-wisher.6 And so Wilde’s imprisonment ended, just as it had begun on the night of his arrest, with a book.
Outside the prison, Adey and Stewart Headlam, the socialist author and defrocked vicar who had stumped up part of Wilde’s bail in 1895, awaited him in a cab. As soon as they sped off down the hill towards King’s Cross Wilde started talking books. ‘He was eager to talk about Dante,’ Headlam said, ‘and insisted on writing down for me the best way to study him and the best books to read.’7 The cab carried them to Headlam’s house in Upper Bedford Place, Bloomsbury, where a number of Wilde’s intimates awaited him, the Sphinx among them. After washing and changing, Wilde talked and laughed the morning away in their company. ‘The dear Governor . . . and his wife,’ he told them, ‘asked me to spend the summer with them . . . Unusual, I think? But I don’t feel I can. I feel I want a change of scene.’8
Wilde planned to take a cab to Croydon and then go on, by train, to Newhaven. There he would board the steamer for Dieppe, which he had settled on as a suitable place for his residence. He could not, however, resist the temptation of stopping off at Hatchard’s bookshop on his way. He wanted to make a few quick purchases, his very last on English soil; he may also have wished to see the shop’s manager, Arthur Humphreys. The visit turned out to be a poignant epilogue to Wilde’s English career as a reader and book collector. To his distress, someone in the shop recognised him and pointed him out to a number of the other customers.9
Wilde crossed the Channel by the overnight boat. At 4.30 on the following morning he arrived at Dieppe harbour where Robbie Ross and Reginald Turner awaited him. They had engaged a room for Wilde at the Hôtel Sandwich, under his new pseudonym, Sebastian Melmoth, which combined the first name of the Christian martyr whose iconography he adored with the surname of the hero of Melmoth the Wanderer. ‘In his room,’ Turner informed his friend Max Beerbohm, ‘we have put a lot of flowers. All the books we have collected are on the mantelpiece, and your own two works are in the centre to catch his eye.’10
When he greeted his friends at the port, Wilde was in childish high spirits; it was only on entering the hotel room, full of beautiful books and flowers, that he broke down and wept.11 His distress was short-lived, however. Throughout the following day he regaled his two friends with witty anecdotes about life in Reading Gaol, which had already become, in his imagination, ‘a sort of enchanted castle of which Major Nelson was the presiding fairy’.12
A few days later Wilde and his friends visited Berneval-sur-Mer, a little coastal village west of Dieppe, and decided that it would be the ideal place for him to live. Wilde would pass the summer of 1897 there swimming, sunbathing and enjoying the company of the locals. Gradually he reacclimatised himself to freedom and to the natural world, which, at first, overwhelmed him with its splendour. ‘I cannot write much,’ he confessed, ‘for I am nervous – dazed with the wonder of the wonderful world: I feel as if I had been raised from the dead. The sun and the sea seem strange to me.’13
During his first few weeks at Berneval Wilde took rooms in the Hôtel de la Plage, after which he rented the two-storey Chalet Bourgeat.14 He set out his little library in his new home, and visitors remarked on the profusion of books throughout the rooms.15 Much of his summer was spent reading in the chalet or in the long grass on Berneval’s chalk cliffs, or on its brilliant white stony beach.
Wilde greatly enjoyed the volumes Max Beerbohm had donated to his store. Among these were the ‘inimitable’ Max’s novel The Happy Hypocrite and Works, a collection of witty essays, both of which displayed Wilde’s marked influence on Beerbohm’s prose. ‘I cannot tell you,’ Wilde thanked him, ‘what a real pleasure it was . . . to find your delightful present for me.’16
Reginald Turner sent Wilde a number of volumes including a guidebook to Berkshire, which doubtless included references to Reading Gaol, widely regarded as the architectural jewel of the town. Turner must have bought it as a joke – the joke being that Wilde could consult it whenever he pined for jail. ‘Thank you so much for the charming books,’ the recipient wrote with heavy irony: ‘the guidebook to Berkshire is very lax in style, and it is difficult to realise that it is constructed on any metrical system. The matter, however, is interesting, and the whole book no doubt symbolic.’17
An old friend of Wilde’s parents, the Irish poet Aubrey de Vere, showed his support by giving Wilde a copy of Volume V of his Poetical Works.18 Expressions of solidarity came from other Irish quarters – Shaw sent the books he had written since Wilde’s imprisonment.19
The Hôtel de la Plage, Berneval.
A host of French men of letters presented Wilde with books. André Gide’s novel Les Nourritures terrestres [The Fruits of the Earth],20 which contains many passages that were directly inspired by Wilde’s conversation, found its way to Berneval via an acquaintance. Wilde found the book self-indulgent; he did not think Gide’s personality sufficiently interesting to justify his navel-gazing. ‘To be an Egoist,’ he remarked dryly to a friend apropos of the book, ‘one must have an Ego’.21 To the author himself Wilde offered the following advice: ‘dear, promise me . . . never to write I anymore. In art, don’t you see, there is no first person.’22
Wilde’s library of French literature was augmented by Henry Davray, ‘a charming fellow’ and a ‘good English [Literature] scholar’, who would later translate some of Wilde’s writings into French.23 Davray collected a number of volumes of contemporary literature for Wilde, all of which had been inscribed to him by their authors. Wilde was overjoyed at receiving the books: ‘I am greatly touched,’ he said, ‘by the sympathy and attention shown to me by you and other French writers. I hope to thank each of the authors individually.’24 These gifts demonstrated to Wilde that the French continued to regard him as an artist, and not simply as a notorious ex-convict. That was his reputation in England, where many libraries and shops boycotted his books.
Some English authors were, however, extremely sympathetic. Along with Beerbohm’s offerings, Wilde received the Verses of Ernest Dowson, perhaps the greatest volume of English lyric poetry of the 1890s.25 Wilde was impressed by the work of the ‘sweet singer’, a resident of the nearby village, Arques, who, he said, wrote ‘words with wings’. He was equally drawn to Dowson’s ‘persistently and perversely wonderful’ (if occasionally morose) personality.26 They drank and talked away several mornings and evenings together and, after one session, legend has it that the poet took Wilde to a Dieppe brothel, where he had sex with a woman for the first time in years. ‘Tell it in England,’ Wilde is reported to have said of the incident, ‘where it will entirely restore my reputation.’27
The most momentous English book Wilde received over the summer was Alfred Douglas’s Poems, which the author sent along with numerous volumes by other authors.28 Bosie had spectacularly fallen out of Wilde’s favour during his imprisonment. Yet, typically, although their rift was dramatic, it also proved to be short-lived. A week after his release Wilde was again addressing Douglas as ‘My dearest Boy’; by the end of the month ‘dearest’ had blossomed into ‘darling’.
Wilde’s darling boy, who was desperate to get back into his lover’s good books, dispatched a copy of his verse collection as a peace offering at the start of June. It was one of an edition of only thirty copies, printed on Dutch hand-made paper.29 Wilde’s copy of Poems is in a far from immaculate condition, so it was probably well thumbed by him, even though he was already familiar with the bulk of its contents, which had been composed before his trials.
As a poetry reader, Wilde typically focused on the stylistic and technical qualities of verse, but he found it difficult to ignore the biographical resonances in Poems. The verses are littered with sobriquets such as Narcissus, Jonquil and Fleur-de-Lys, which Wilde had, in happier days, conferred on his lover. The volume includes Bosie’s famous poem ‘Two Loves’ and verses such as ‘Vae victis’, which alludes to Wilde’s incarceration. And then there is the blank dedication page. Just before the volume’s publication in 1896, Wilde had discovered, via a friend who visited him in Reading, that Bosie intended to dedicate Poems to him. At the time, full of venom towards his former lover, Wilde thought the idea revolting, and vetoed it.
These intimate biographical associations diminished Poems as a work of art in Wilde’s eyes. He also objected to its occasionally forthright tone. ‘Of course,’ Wilde commented, alluding to the social ostracism Bosie had suffered because of his association with his imprisoned lover, ‘your . . . personality has had . . . to express itself directly . . . but I hope you will go on to forms more remote from actual events and passions. One can really, as I say in Intentions, be far more subjective in an objective form than in any other way.’30
Over the course of the summer, Wilde’s friends continued to supply him with books. They were, he said, especially welcome to him because ‘Dieppe, like all provincial towns in France, not merely has no books, but does not know in what garden those yellow flowers grow’.31 Wilde was not the only one who bemoaned the dearth of books in the town: the customs officials at the harbour were also bored for want of decent literature. Wilde remedied the situation by passing on to them his copies of the elder Dumas’s novels after he had read them.32
Wilde was particularly touched by the munificence of Leonard Smithers, who sent him a ‘prize-packet’ of books.33 The redoubtable publisher became a regular drinking partner of Wilde’s in August, and the pair could often be seen wandering around Dieppe with ‘monsters to the sound of music’, as Wilde put it, and wearing ‘vine-leaves’ in their hair (Wilde’s phrase, borrowed from Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, for intoxication). Wilde described Smithers as ‘quite wonderful and depraved’ and as a ‘delightful companion, and a dear fellow, very kind to me’.34
As well as becoming friends, the pair formed a literary alliance which would bear fruit in the publication of Wilde’s last three books – The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Earnest and An Ideal Husband – all of which Smithers courageously brought out, between 1898 and 1899, when no other publisher would touch them. The publisher’s gift to Wilde probably included a number of titles that he himself had recently issued, such as Beerbohm’s Caricatures of Twenty-Five Gentlemen and Dowson’s playlet The Pierrot of the Minute35 which had been beautifully illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.