THE REMAINDER OF Wilde’s life would demonstrate the literal truth of Caliban’s claim that a magician without a library is nothing but a ‘sot’. An inveterate drinker, Wilde spent his twilight years in the cafés of Paris (where he eventually settled after leaving Naples) knocking back absinthe after absinthe as he talked of marvellous things or turned the pages of a book.
Wilde had always enjoyed combining the pleasures of the written word with wine, as the wine-splashed pages of one of his undergraduate books attest. Accounts of his final years often depict him with a glass in one hand and a volume in the other. ‘He would sit for hours’ in Parisian cafés, remembered one friend, ‘sipping his apéritif and reading.’1 Another acquaintance portrays him at a roadside café in Cannes with a copy of Virgil for company.2 Wilde himself said, ‘whenever I enter a strange town I always order [The Temptation of Saint Anthony] and a packet of cigarettes, and I am happy.’3 He was even happier when there was a little drop of poison on the table next to his book.
This leisurely course of café reading, fortified by alcohol, was a new experience for Wilde. Previously he had devoured books, metaphorically and literally, scouring the pages that moved so rapidly in front of his eyes for delicious morsels for quotation, or for phrases and images that he could use in his own writings. Speed, intensity, concentration, impatience – these are the defining qualities of his pre-prison reading. Yet now, having put aside his pen, he no longer gobbled up books, but tasted them. Rather than gulping them down in one go, he sipped them along with his apéritif.
Wilde’s style of reading reflects a more general alteration in his attitude to the world, which he summed up during one of the many symposia he enjoyed in the company of his old friends. At a café near the Opéra in Paris, Wilde told a group of acolytes that he liked a particular work of fiction by the English writer Laurence Housman, precisely because ‘a few years ago it would have interested me so much less’. ‘At that time,’ he said, ‘I represented the symbol of my age [and] was only interested in myself. Now, in an age to which I do not belong, I find myself interested in others.’4
Interested in others, interested in others’ books, interested, also, in other sorts of books. Wilde made many new literary discoveries at this time. He delighted in the popular novels of ‘that new strange writer of things impossible in life, who writes under the name of Benjamin Swift’5 – the pseudonym of the Scotch writer W.R. Paterson. He also read the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun and the English fiction writer A.W. Clarke, neither of whom he is likely to have encountered before. Wilde struck up other new bookish acquaintances during his frequent visits to Galignani’s and Brentano’s bookshops, where he would dawdle around the shelves. On one visit to Galignani’s he was gratified to see, inside the front window, his own name blazoned on a placard advertising one of his plays.6 He would also have glimpsed the reflection of his now rather portly frame, superimposed on the display.
At Brentano’s Wilde picked up the following titles, which are itemised on a book bill that has survived.7
The Ambassador by John Oliver Hobbes
Beatrice Harraden and the Remittance Man by Hilda Stratford
A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison
March Hares by Harold Frederic
The last book bill ever made out to Wilde, from Brentano’s.
The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung
Poetical Works (four volumes) by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Colonel Starbottle’s Client by Bret Harte
A Protégé of Jack Hamblin by Bret Harte
Apart from Tennyson’s poems and Hobbes’s play, these were all recently published works of popular fiction. The Amateur Cracksman is a thriller that features Wilde’s old haunt, the Albany in Piccadilly; March Hares is a historical novel that also uses London as a backdrop, and A Child of the Jago is a classic account of poverty in the East End. The Hilda Stratford volume, meanwhile, contains two novels with a Californian setting. The bill supports the idea that Wilde was an intrepid literary adventurer in his final years. This may have been the first time he had ever read the novelists Hilda Stratford and E.W. Hornung. Only Tennyson and Bret Harte could be described as old literary flames.*
Popular fiction no doubt offered Wilde comfort reading, and a distraction from the sorrowful mysteries of his present, in which he was perpetually pestered by pecuniary worries, and cut by erstwhile friends. It may also have diverted his attention from the joyful and glorious mysteries of his distant past, memories of which would only have highlighted the depressing circumstances in which he now lived.
Not that Wilde was averse to literary trips down memory lane: Gautier, Flaubert and Balzac were his constant companions, just as they had been in his youth. Youthful reading was indeed very much on Wilde’s mind at this time: with one friend he discussed Lucien de Rubempré and Julien Sorel, his favourite boyhood characters. Wilde concluded his comments with a melancholy reflection: ‘Lucien hanged himself, Julien died on the scaffold, and I died in prison.’10
Wilde also accepted as gifts some evocative book relics of his former days. After the 1895 auction of Wilde’s goods, the dealers who snapped up his books put them on the open market, and some were secured by his friends. Wilfrid Chesson, a Tite Street neighbour, purchased from a Chelsea bookshop Wilde’s bible, a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets replete with his annotations, and his working copies of Vera and The Duchess of Padua, his early dramatic efforts.11
In the summer of 1898 Chesson travelled to France to restore the books to their former owner. Wilde welcomed all of the titles with the exception of Vera, in which he would not ‘profess the slightest interest’.12 Over coffee and cigarettes in the courtyard of a café, he rewarded Chesson for his kindness by regaling him with tales, and witty snippets of literary criticism, that may have reflected his recent reading. Wilde seems to have called a truce with his old enemy, Dickens: ‘There have been no such grotesques,’ he said enthusiastically of the novelist’s characters, ‘since the Gothic gargoyles.’ He also lavished praise on Kipling, supporting his candidacy for the office of Poet Laureate. It would, he commented, be ‘such a change, so artistic. There was Tennyson, with his idylls, . . . his dainty muse, and here is Kipling, who makes his muse say, “Go to Hell”.’ Wilde was caustic, however, about the level of detail contained in Kipling’s novel Captain Courageous, which is set partly on a schooner: ‘I object,’ he said, ‘to know all about cod fishing.’13
Wilde was equally grateful when his friend, the Irish-American poet Vincent O’Sullivan, returned to him another batch of his books. Yet the sight of his old copy of G.L. Craik’s two-volume History of English Literature among them, which had been awarded to him as a prize at Portora school, provoked only scorn. ‘However could you imagine?’ he said. ‘Do take those dreadful things away. Don’t keep them yourself. Give them to a cab-driver.’14
Wilde was ‘charmed’ with a similar gift from the journalist and publisher George Bedborough, who sent him a copy of one of his ‘dear father’s’ books and a Salome with ‘dainty’ pencil drawings in it by Max Beerbohm.15 How strange it must have been to leaf through these volumes on the Paris boulevards – they would have seemed like archaeological remains from a lost world.
Paris was the base to which Wilde always returned after his periodic trips away: in a bid to prove that he was worthy of his Melmothian pseudonym, he wandered around Geneva, Rome, Genoa and Sicily in his final years. In the various Parisian hotel rooms he rented, Wilde amassed a sizeable collection of books, which were impounded whenever he defaulted on his rent.* His library was comprised of personal classics, presentation copies and new gifts from old friends.
A steady stream of presentation copies continued to flow to Wilde from England, courtesy of writers such as George Ives and Bernard Shaw. A substantial number of French authors too, such as André Gide and Pierre Louÿs, continued to pay homage to the ‘Lord of Language’ and former ‘King of Life’.17 Leonard Smithers regularly sent Wilde parcels of the books he published, such as the beautiful edition of Ben Jonson’s play Volpone which contained illustrations by the recently deceased Aubrey Beardsley and a eulogy of Beardsley by Robbie Ross.18 Wilde was curious to see Ross’s essay because he knew that his devoted Horatio would be writing his own eulogy one day.
Wilde continued his custom of showering books on his lovers, past, present and future. They were either mementoes of passion, or talismans that would, if he was lucky, help to incite it. When he presented Douglas with An Ideal Husband he touchingly inscribed it ‘To Bosie: the beautiful poet’.19 He sent copies of the Ballad to the other great loves of his life: Robbie Ross and Constance. Wilde’s wife, who was ‘frightfully upset’ by the ‘wonderful poem’,20 died a few weeks after receiving it, in consequence of an unsuccessful operation on her spine. With her died Wilde’s last hope of seeing ‘his poor dear boys’ again; Cyril and Vyvyan were now under the guardianship of Constance’s family and attended school in England. When he visited Constance’s grave in Genoa’s Staglieno Cemetery in 1899, Wilde was overwhelmed by regret and ‘with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets’.21
Wilde in Rome in 1900.
So far as new loves were concerned, Wilde had frequent recourse to his old strategy of seduction by books. During one of his trips to Italy he displayed wicked ingenuity by tempting a Sicilian seminarist with a prettily illustrated book of devotion.22 He also sent a number of his own works to a young man called Louis Wilkinson, along with a collection of short stories by the French author Paul Adam, one of which featured a homosexual prisoner.23 Wilkinson had contacted Wilde to ask his permission to put on, at his public school, a dramatised version of Dorian Gray. Wilde accompanied his gifts with some delightful letters in which he charms the young man with book chat.
Wilkinson’s replies reveal that Wilde had lost none of his old magic. With every fresh book he received, the young man felt ‘more and more’ in love with ‘the genius who wrote’ them.24 He was also very appreciative of Wilde’s suggestions regarding his reading. ‘I shall always,’ he wrote, ‘be grateful to you if you trouble to recommend me particular poetry to read: I am thankful to say that I play neither football nor cricket, so I am really comparatively at leisure.’25 It is a shame that the pair were destined never to meet, because Wilkinson sounds exactly Wilde’s type.
* Another author Wilde reacquainted himself with at this time was Henry James. A decade previously, Wilde had gently mocked the American novelist’s efforts, remarking that he seemed to write ‘fiction as if it were a painful duty’.8 While he continued to regard James as one of those authors ‘one ought to read’ but was ‘not bound to like’, Wilde was greatly impressed by the ghost story ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (published in 1898). He described it as a ‘most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale, like an Elizabethan tragedy . . . James is developing,’ he added, ‘but he will never arrive at passion, I fear.’9
* There was another connection between Wilde’s debts and his books during this period. When he was more than usually hard up, Wilde would give his books to friends as security for loans. He handed his copy of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi over to Henry Davray for this purpose.16
