AFTER HIS RELEASE Wilde picked up a volume of Baudelaire’s letters only to abandon it half-way through. He found the poet’s correspondence ‘unpleasant’: it was, he complained, ‘all about publishers and money’.1 Wilde had probably experienced more than his fill of the tedious and the mundane in prison. His Berneval reading, with its emphasis on poetry and fantasy, suggests a desire to escape from the commonplace and the realistic to the shores of old Romance.
Wilde had a particular craving for that fantastic masterpiece, The Temptation of St Anthony. Flaubert’s youthful production vividly evokes the psychedelic visions of the hermit saint, and his bizarre conversations with a number of historical and mythical figures. It is closer to a prose poem, or indeed to a film script, than it is to a conventional novel. The book was an integral part of Wilde’s post-prison plans. He placed it at the top of the list of requests he drew up a month before his release; around the same time, he told a friend that he hoped to rent a little apartment, for the coming summer, in ‘some French or Belgian town, with some books about him, of course Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony among them’.2 At Berneval Wilde also renewed his acquaintance with many other old literary friends.3Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal had been a golden book of his youth, as had Maeterlinck’s Plays.
Some of the titles Wilde read suggest that he wanted to prepare himself, through his reading, for the role of the saint or outcast. His pseudonym, Sebastian Melmoth, captures the dual elements of this new persona and testifies once more to his desire to turn his life into an imitation of literature. W.B. Yeats’s short story collection The Secret Rose4 contains ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’, a tale in which a Bard of the olden times is martyred. Wilde also perused various mystical books, and a number of biographies of St Francis. Wilde had always revered the saint of Assisi: ‘With the soul of a poet,’ he commented, ‘and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection.’ The life of St Francis was for him ‘the true [Imitation of Christ]: a poem compared to which the book that bears that name is merely prose’.5 On his release, Wilde identified the saint as his role model: ‘My path is now that of Saint Francis,’6 he told a friend, with all the sincerity of an actor entirely, albeit only momentarily, absorbed in his role. With greater irony and considerably more accuracy, he referred to himself as the ‘Infamous Saint Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr’.7
Wilde hoped his books would reawaken an imaginative faculty that the prison system had tried to paralyse, and inspire in him ‘literary (i.e. creative) longings’.8 He had in mind a play about Pharaoh and Moses, and he would dazzle friends by outlining its plot and evoking its scenes. ‘The King is marvellous,’ he would say, ‘when he cries to Moses, “Praise be to thy God, O prophet, for He has slain my only enemy, my son!”’9 In order to put it down in black on white, he required, he said, ‘books about Egypt, full of the names of beautiful things, rare and curious meat for the feast’.10 This is why, on the eve of his release, he had asked his friends to purchase Flinders Petrie’s Egyptian Decorative Art11 for him and any ‘good book on Ancient Egypt’.
Wilde probably requested Thäis,12 the novel of his acquaintance Anatole France, for similar reasons. He intended to return to his ‘beautiful, coloured, musical’ drama ‘La Sainte Courtesane’, which he had left unfinished in 1893. Wilde’s play is set in the African desert soon after Christ’s death, and features a hermit and a courtesan. It draws heavily on Thäis and on Flaubert’s Temptation, for both its subject and style. In prison the courtesan had, Wilde said, occasionally whispered ‘wonderful things’ in his ear; now he was determined to write her words down. France’s novel would serve him as a model and help him re-enter the imaginative world of his play.
In Reading Wilde had eagerly looked forward to taking up his writing career again. After a period of reading ‘beautiful books’ he would, he believed, be able to rediscover his ‘creative faculty’.13 Yet he was acutely aware of what a challenge this would be: ‘the two long years of silence,’ he said, ‘kept my soul in bonds. [But] it will all come back, I feel sure, and then all will be well.’14
And come back it certainly did. At Berneval Wilde began his last original work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which recounts the execution of the murderer Charles Thomas Wooldridge, hanged in Reading during Wilde’s incarceration there. The rousing 650-line composition is part poetry and part propaganda against the Separate System. It fulfilled a promise he had made to a warder friend at Reading: ‘if I write any more books,’ he had said, ‘it will be to form a library of lamentations . . . for those who have suffered . . . I shall be a mouthpiece for the world of Pain.’15
The Ballad was written under the influence of the creative mood induced by Wilde’s reading. It was also directly inspired by two poems that he had with him in his Berneval library: A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, and Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, both of which he quarried for stylistic effects. As ever, Wilde’s own distinctive ideas, images and lines, crystallised around phrases that he read.
And so Wilde spent the summer of 1897 with his head in books. They amused him, healed him, revived his desire to write, and gave him a new, and dramatically appropriate, sense of himself. The elation he had felt on his release remained with him for much of the summer, during which he was filled ‘with wonder at all the beautiful things that are left to me: loyal and loving friends: good health’ and ‘books’ – ‘one of the greatest of the many worlds God has given to each man’.16
Yet Wilde had countless hardships to endure. At Dieppe he was frequently insulted by English tourists, and cut by some of his former friends. ‘I staggered as though I had been shot,’ he said of one such encounter, ‘and went reeling out into the street like a drunken man.’17 Around three months into his stay, the remoteness of Berneval began to depress him. After two years in prison, Wilde wanted more than the intermittent companionship offered him by those English friends of his who occasionally came on what he called ‘pilgrimages to the sinner’. Finally, there was the weather, which became ‘too British for anything’ as summer turned to autumn.18
So it was that in September, when Alfred Douglas held out to him the offer of a home in Naples, Wilde found the temptation impossible to resist. In returning to Bosie he knew that he would alienate many of his friends, who thought a reunion would be damaging to Wilde from a legal and a social point of view. He was equally aware that he would infuriate Constance. After his release Wilde’s wife had written him several cordial letters, which suggested that she had not entirely ruled out the possibility of a reconciliation. However, seeing in Douglas’s company the ‘only hope of again doing beautiful work’, and the possibility of constant, loving, companionship, Wilde left for Naples, arranging for his books to be sent on after him by ship.19