AFTER AN INTERVAL of two and a half years, the second act of Wilde and Douglas’s ‘tragic romance’ was played out at the Villa Giudice, in the exclusive Neapolitan quarter of Posillippo.1 Their new home overlooked the Bay of Naples and offered superb views of Vesuvius and the islands of Ischia and Capri. It was, in every respect, the opposite of Reading Gaol: salubrious, beautiful and a paradise for the body.
Wilde’s books finally arrived in November, two months after he had dispatched them from Dieppe by ‘long sea’. Over the autumn and winter his collection was supplemented by an old acquaintance, Stanley Makower, who sent his novel, The Mirror of Music, which Wilde praised as a ‘most subtle analysis of the relations between music and a soul’.2 The book was issued by John Lane, Wilde’s former publisher, who advertised his company’s back catalogue at the end of the volume. Wilde, who often browsed book advertisements, would have been saddened, though hardly surprised, to find none of his own books on Lane’s list.*
Wilde struggled to put black upon white at Naples. He completed his Ballad there, but left his other manifold projects unfinished. Perhaps they were not even begun. The warm climate and the pagan atmosphere of the city seduced the ex-convict into a life of sensual ease. After two long years of suffering, during which the puritanical prison system had coerced him into concentrating exclusively on his mind and soul, it was perfectly natural that Wilde should now live entirely for his body. His Neapolitan days and nights were monopolised by brandy and boys.
There were other reasons for Wilde’s artistic sterility. He was wearied by the continual want of money, and depressed by the impossibility of ever again winning artistic or social renown. He was often recognised and reviled at Naples, chiefly by English residents and tourists. Prison had, in any case, kicked out of Wilde the joy and the energy requisite for writing. He was now unequal to the sustained intellectual concentration, and to the sheer physical force and willpower demanded by artistic creation. ‘Something is killed in me,’ he admitted, ‘I feel no desire to write. I am unconscious of power. Of course my first year in prison destroyed me body and soul. It could not have been otherwise.’4
Not that Wilde laid down his pen forever beside the Bay of Naples. He picked it up again later to revise Earnest and An Ideal Husband which had been performed, but not published, before his trials. These were issued in 1899, not under his name, for fear that no shop would stock them, but semi-anonymously, as the work of ‘the author of Lady Windermere’s Fan’. Wilde probably also returned to ‘La Sainte Courtesane’, only to abandon his manuscript – quite literally, by leaving a portion of it in a cab. He is reported to have laughed off the loss; a cab, he commented, was the proper place for the play.5
Wilde’s original inventions were now reserved exclusively for his conversation, and written only on the air. His talk was as extraordinary as ever. During one wonderful flight of fancy outside a café, Wilde’s listener, a journalist of his acquaintance, swore that he saw a resplendent golden angel walking towards Wilde. On closer inspection the figure seemed to be a cross between a Christian messenger and the Greek god Apollo, because in his hand he carried an enormous lyre. Having reached their table, the cherub stood for a while beside the great seanchaí as the marvellous words gushed out of him.6*
Wilde’s listeners urged him to commit his tales to paper, but he demurred. ‘It is enough,’ he said, ‘that they actually exist; that I have been able, in my own mind, to give them the form which they demand . . . if I could hope to interest others as I seem to have interested you, I would; but the world will not listen to me now.’7
Writing was not the only thing that presented Wilde with difficulties. Two years’ hard labour had so enervated him that he now found sustained and intense periods of reading a trial. ‘If I . . . read,’ he said, ‘a book that makes, as all fine books do, a direct claim on me, a direct appeal, an intellectual challenge of any kind, I am utterly exhausted in the evening, and often sleep badly.’8 Wilde had always read with his body as well as his soul and now his body was no longer up to the task.
At the beginning of 1898 Wilde was forced to part from Douglas by Constance, who threatened to stop the allowance she paid him if they continued to live together. Bosie’s mother assailed her son with similar financial threats. In any case, there had been the usual theatrical ructions between the pair, and their Naples reunion probably failed to live up to their expectations. Douglas departed first, leaving Wilde alone with his library in the Villa Giudice. When the time came for Wilde to go, he left his books there. ‘My friends,’ he later remarked, apropos of the volumes he had been given on his release from prison, ‘presented me with a box full of beautiful books – Keats, and so on. They are at Naples. There they lie’.9
When Wilde closed the front door of the Villa Giudice on his golden books, he was shutting tight the portal to his past and the doorway to what was, and had always been, his true home. In his youth, he had frequently moved between cities and residences, but he had always carried his books with him. Wilde was also closing the door on his future as a writer. Without the inspiration and the physical proximity of books, there was no way that an author such as he was would ever write again.
Lines from The Tempest come to mind. At the end of the play the half-man, half-beast, Caliban, urges his fellow conspirators to steal the books of Prospero, his tyrannical master:
. . . Remember,
First to posses his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command.
* With his recently acquired proficiency in Italian, it is also likely that Wilde purchased several works of Italian literature at Naples. He certainly acquired La citta morta [The Dead City] a play by Gabriele D’Annunzio.3 In this rather portentous drama two modern day Italian couples visit the ruins of Argos where, according to Aeschylus’s play, King Agamemnon met his bloody fate at the hands of Clytemnestra (Wilde himself had visited the site during his 1877 tour of Greece). The characters are vouchsafed terrible visions of the events that took place at Agamemnon’s court, as the ancient past intermittently breaks through the fabric of the present.
* After a few moments the journalist realised that the figure was a hallucination: the image of a golden statue of Apollo on a nearby building had somehow been projected into the air and then refracted by the rays of the afternoon sun. Yet this did not dispel the magic of the moment and, ever after, whenever the journalist met Wilde, he always ‘saw’ the golden angel in his mind’s eye.