‘My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.’
Wilde left Reading on the evening of 18 May 1897. Before he left, the Governor handed him the manuscript of his long letter to Douglas. Only two reporters were at the gates to see him go. Wearing his own clothes and now addressed as ‘Mr Wilde’ rather than his cell number ‘C.3.3’ by the two accompanying prison officers, he was driven in a cab to Twyford station, where they took the London train. They left it at Westbourne Park and travelled on by cab to Pentonville Prison, where Wilde spent the night.
At 6.15 next morning he was fetched in a cab by More Adey and Stewart Headlam. They managed to avoid the press and drove straight to Headlam’s house, 31 Upper Bedford Place, Bloomsbury, where Wilde changed and breakfasted. Ada Leverson and her husband were among the first to greet him.
We all felt intensely nervous and embarrassed. We had the English fear of showing our feelings, and at the same time the human fear of not showing our feelings. He came in, and at once put us at our ease. He came in with the dignity of a king returning from exile. He came in talking and laughing, smoking a cigarette, with waved hair and a flower in his button-hole, and he looked markedly better, slighter, and even younger than he had done two years previously. His first words were, ‘Sphinx, how marvellous of you to know exactly the right hat to wear at seven o’clock in the morning to meet a friend who has been away! You can’t have got up, you must have sat up.’
Other visitors came and went throughout the morning. For Wilde the opportunity to converse once more was as delightful as his new freedom. Predictably he and Adey missed the 10 a.m. ‘Day Express’ to Newhaven and the day boat to Dieppe. With time to spare, Wilde indulged himself with a visit to Hatchard’s bookshop in Piccadilly where there was an act of kindness which he needed to acknowledge. The manager, Arthur Humphreys, had sent him a lavish parcel of books for his second Christmas in prison. Unfortunately while they were in the shop Wilde was recognised and they had to leave in a hurry.
They took the afternoon train to Newhaven, preferring to board it at East Croydon where there was less likelihood of Wilde being noticed than on the station concourse at Victoria. On their arrival Oscar sent a remorseful telegram to Robbie signed with his new exile pseudonym, a composite of his favourite saint and the hero of his great-uncle Charles Maturin’s Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer.
19 May 1897, 6.25 p.m.
Newhaven
Arriving by night boat. Am so delighted at prospect of seeing you and Reggie. You must not mind the foolish unkind letters. More has been such a good friend to me and I am so grateful to you all I cannot find words to express my feelings. You must not dream of waiting up for us. In the morning we will meet. Please engage rooms for us at your hotel. When I see you I shall be quite happy, indeed I am happy now to think I have such wonderful friendship shown to me.
SEBASTIAN MELMOTH
[20 May 1897]
Hôtel Sandwich, Dieppe
Dear Sphinx, I was so charmed with seeing you yesterday morning that I must write a line to tell you how sweet and good it was of you to be of the very first to greet me. When I think that Sphinxes are minions of the moon, and that you got up early before dawn, I am filled with wonder and joy.
I often thought of you in the long black days and nights of my prison life, and to find you just as wonderful and dear as ever was no surprise. The beautiful are always beautiful.
This is my first day of real liberty, so I try to send you a line, and with kind regards to dear Ernest whom I was pleased to see again, ever affectionately yours
OSCAR WILDE I am staying here as Sebastian Melmoth – not Esquire but Monsieur Sebastien Melmoth. I have thought it better that Robbie should stay here under the name of Reginald Turner, and Reggie under the name of R. B. Ross. It is better that they should not have their own names.
Wilde and Adey arrived in Dieppe at 4.30 the next morning by the night boat. They were met by Turner and Ross on the quay. Wilde, Ross noted, had lost the coarse features of his pre-prison years but none of the conversational stamina:
Wilde talked until nine o’clock when I insisted on going to lie down. We all met at twelve for déjeuner, all of us exhausted except Wilde. In the afternoon we drove to Arques and sat down on the ramparts of the castle. He enjoyed the trees and the grass and country scents and sounds in a way I had never known him do before, just as a street-bred child might enjoy them on his first day in the country: but of course there was an adjective for everything – ‘monstrous’, ‘purple’, ‘grotesque’, ‘gorgeous’, ‘curious’, ‘wonderful’.
[Circa 20 May 1897]
Hôtel Sandwich, Dieppe
My dear Frank, Just a line to thank you for your great kindness to me, for the lovely clothes, and for the generous cheque.
You have been a real good friend to me, and I shall never forget your kindness: to remember such a debt as mine to you – a debt of kind fellowship – is a pleasure.
About our tour, later on let us think about it. My friends have been so kind to me here that I am feeling happy already. Ever yours OSCAR WILDE If you write to me please do so under cover to R. B. Ross, who is here with me.
[Circa 22 May 1897]
Hôtel Sandwich, Dieppe
My dear good beautiful Friend, Your letter has given me so much pleasure. I knew you would always be sweet and good to me – far more now, if that were possible, than ever, for now I need sympathy, and know its value: a kind word to me now is as lovely to me as a flower is, and love can heal all wounds.
I cannot write much 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.
But, dear Bernie, although my life looks ruined to the outer world, to me it is not so. I know you will like to hear that somehow I feel that out of it all – out of the silence, the solitary life, the hunger, the darkness, the pain, the abandonment, the disgrace – out of these things I may get some good. I was living a life unworthy of an artist. It was wrong of me. Worse things might have happened to your old friend, dear, than two years’ hard labour – terrible though they were. At least I hope to grow to feel so. Suffering is a terrible fire; it either purifies or destroys: perhaps I may be a better fellow after it all. Do write to me here – Monsieur Sebastian Melmoth is my name now to the world. With love and gratitude, ever yours
OSCAR
Delighted as he was to be a free man again, Wilde was nonetheless made brutally aware of his status as a social outcast. The English community avoided him as far as possible; one or two former acquaintances, notably the artists Beardsley and Blanche, showed themselves uncomfortable; and the proprietor of a Dieppe restaurant made it obliquely clear that he was not welcome, as his presence might adversely affect business. It was decided that he should live in Berneval, a few miles up the coast, initially in the small hotel by the beach run by the local estate agent, Monsieur Bonnet.
[Postmark 27 May 1897]
Hotel de la Plage, Bemeval-sur-Mer, Dieppe
My dear Reggie, Thank you so much for the charming books: the poems are wonderfully fresh and buoyant: the guide-book 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.
This is my first day here, Robbie and I arrived last night. The dinner was excellent, and we tried to eat enough for eight as we occupy so many rooms. However we soon got tired. Only the imagination of man is limitless. The appetite seems curiously bounded. This is one of the many lessons I have learnt.
I have just read Max’s Happy Hypocrite, beginning at the end, as one should always do. It is quite wonderful, and to one who was once the author of Dorian Gray, full of no vulgar surprises of style or incident.
The population came at dawn to look at my dressing-case. I showed it to them, piece of silver by piece of silver. Some of the old men wept for joy. Robbie detected me at Dieppe in the market place of the sellers of perfumes, spending all my money on orris-root and the tears of the narcissus and the dust of red roses. He was very stern and led me away. I have already spent my entire income for two years. I see now that this lovely dressing-case with its silver vials thirsty for distilled odours will gradually lead me to the perfection of poverty. But it seemed to me to be cruel not to fill with rose-petals the little caskets shaped so cunningly in the form of a rose.
Dear Reggie, it was a great delight seeing you, and I shall never forget your kindness or the beauty of your friendship. I hope before the summer ends to see you again. Do write to me from time to time, and remember me to the Sphinx, and all those who do not know her secret. I know it of course. The open secret of the Sphinx is Ernest. Ever yours
OSCAR WILDE
[Circa 28 May 1897]
Hotel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Max, I cannot tell you what a real pleasure it was to me to find your delightful present waiting for me on my release from prison, and to receive the charming and sweet messages you sent me. I used to think gratitude a heavy burden for one to carry. Now I know that it is something that makes the heart lighter. The ungrateful man seems to me to be one who walks with feet and heart of lead. But when one has learnt, however inadequately, what a lovely thing gratitude is, one’s feet go lightly over sand or sea, and one finds a strange joy revealed to one, the joy of counting up, not what one possesses, but what one owes. I hoard my debts now in the treasury of my heart, and, piece of gold by piece of gold, I range them in order at dawn and at evening. So you must not mind my saying that I am grateful to you. It is simply one of certain new pleasures that I have discovered.
The Happy Hypocrite is a wonderful and beautiful story, though I do not like the cynical directness of the name. The name one gives to one’s work, poem or picture – and all works of art are either poems or pictures, and the best both at once – is the last survival of the Greek Chorus. It is the only part of one’s work in which the artist speaks directly in his own person, and I don’t like you wilfully taking the name given by the common spectators, though I know what a joy there is in picking up a brickbat and wearing it as a buttonhole. It is the origin of the name of all schools of art. Not to like anything you have done is such a new experience to me that, not even for a silver dressing-case full of objects of exquisite inutility such as dear Reggie in his practical thoughtfulness provided for me on my release, shall I surrender my views. But in years to come, when you are a very young man, you will remember what I have said, and recognise its truth, and, in the final edition of the work, leave the title unchanged. Of that I feel certain. The gift of prophecy is given to all who do not know what is going to happen to themselves.
The implied and accepted recognition of Dorian Gray in the story cheers me. I had always been disappointed that my story had suggested no other work of art in others. For whenever a beautiful flower grows in a meadow or lawn, some other flower, so like it that it is differently beautiful, is sure to grow up beside it, all flowers and all works of art having a curious sympathy for each other. I feel also on reading your surprising and to me quite novel story how useless it is for gaolers to deprive an artist of pen and ink. One’s work goes on just the same, with entrancing variations.
In case you should feel anxious about me, let me assure you frankly that the difference in colour between the two sheets of paper that compose this letter is the result not of poverty, but of extravagance. Do send me a line, to my new name. Sincerely yours
OSCAR WILDE
Despite the social snubs, there were some who went out of their way to show kindness to Wilde. The Norwegian painter, Frits Thaulow, and his wife had Wilde to dine on several occasions. Mrs Stannard, a prolific and popular novelist under her pseudonym John Strange Winter, and her husband invited him frequently to breakfast and lunch; once she even went out of her way to counter the ostentatious snubbing of Wilde by some English visitors to Dieppe, by crossing the street and suggesting in front of them that Wilde take her to tea.
[28 May 1897]
Hotel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer
Dear Mrs Stannard, Your kind husband gave me a very sympathetic and touching message from you yesterday, for which pray accept my most sincere thanks: he also asked me from you to call, a privilege of which I hope to avail myself tomorrow afternoon.
Of course I have passed through a very terrible punishment and have suffered to the very pitch of anguish and despair. Still I am conscious that I was leading a life quite unworthy of a son of my dear mother whose nobility of soul and intellect you always appreciated, and who was herself always one of your warmest and most enthusiastic admirers.
I am living quietly in a little auberge by the sea, and for the moment am quite alone. France has been charming to me and about me during all my imprisonment and has now – mother of all artists as she is – given me asile. To escape the foolish tongue and the prying eye I have for the moment taken the name of Sebastian Melmoth, a curious name which I will explain to you tomorrow.
Pray let my name and place of sojourn be quite a secret to all. I hope to live in solitude and peace. Accept these few flowers as a slight token of my gratitude and believe me truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
One of the first things that Wilde did when he reached France was to write a long and contrite letter to his wife asking to see her and the boys. The letter, since lost or probably destroyed, was described by Constance as one of the most beautiful he had ever written her. He also wrote for publication to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, Henry Massingham, about the ill-treatment of children in prison which he had witnessed, about the dismissal of his own warder, Thomas Martin, for taking pity on the children and giving them biscuits, and about the case of a mentally disturbed prisoner by the name of Prince in cell A.2.11. who was being flogged regularly. His letter was published on 28 May under the heading ‘The case of warder Martin, some cruelties of prison life’.
[28 May 1897]
Hotel de la Plage, Bemeval-sur-Mer
My dear Robbie, This is my first day alone, and of course a very unhappy one. I begin to realise my terrible position of isolation, and I have been rebellious and bitter of heart all day. Is it not sad? I thought I was accepting everything so well and so simply, and I have had moods of rage passing over my nature, like gusts of bitter wind or storm spoiling the sweet corn, or blasting the young shoots. I found a little chapel, full of the most fantastic saints, so ugly and Gothic, and painted quite gaudily – some of them with smiles carved to a rictus almost, like primitive things – but they all seemed to me to be idols. I laughed with amusement when I saw them. Fortunately there was a lovely crucifix in a side-chapel – not a Jansenist one, but with wide-stretched arms of gold. I was pleased at that, and wandered then by the cliffs where I fell asleep on the warm coarse brown sea-grass. I had hardly any sleep last night. Bosie’s revolting letter was in the room, and foolishly I had read it again and left it by my bedside. My dream was that my mother was speaking to me with some sternness, and that she was in trouble. I quite see that whenever I am in danger she will in some way warn me. I have a real terror now of that unfortunate ungrateful young man with his unimaginative selfishness and his entire lack of all sensitiveness to what in others is good or kind or trying to be so. I feel him as an evil influence, poor fellow. To be with him would be to return to the hell from which I do think I have been released. I hope never to see him again.
For yourself, dear sweet Robbie, I am haunted by the idea that many of those who love you will and do think it selfish of me to allow you and wish you to be with me from time to time. But still they might see the difference between your going about with me in my days of gilded infamy – my Neronian hours, rich, profligate, cynical, materialistic – and your coming to comfort me, a lonely dishonoured man, in disgrace and obscurity and poverty. How lacking in imagination they are! If I were rich again and sought to repeat my former life I don’t think you would care very much to be with me. I think you would regret what I was doing, but now, dear boy, you come with the heart of Christ, and you help me intellectually as no one else can or ever could do. You are helping me to save my soul alive, not in the theological sense, but in the plain meaning of the words, for my soul was really dead in the slough of coarse pleasures, my life was unworthy of an artist: you can heal me and help me. No other friend have I now in this beautiful world. I want no other. Yet I am distressed to think that I will be looked on as careless of your own welfare, and indifferent of your good. You are made to help me. I weep with sorrow when I think how much I need help, but I weep with joy when I think I have you to give it to me.
I do hope to do some work in these six weeks, that when you come I shall be able to read you something. I know you love me, but I want to have your respect, your sincere admiration, or rather, for that is a word of ill-omen, your sincere appreciation of my effort to recreate my artistic life. But if I have to think that I am harming you, all pleasure in your society will be tainted for me. With you at any rate I want to be free of any sense of guilt, the sense of spoiling another’s life. Dear boy, I couldn’t spoil your life by accepting the sweet companionship you offer me from time to time. It is not for nothing that I named you in prison St Robert of Phillimore. Love can canonise people. The saints are those who have been most loved.
I only made one mistake in prison in things that I wrote of you or to you in my book. My poem should have run, ‘When I came out of prison you met me with garments, with spices, with wise counsel. You met me with love.’ Not others did it, but you. I really laugh when I think how true in detail the lines are.
8.30. I have just received your telegram. A man bearded, no doubt for purposes of disguise, dashed up on a bicycle, brandishing a blue telegram. I knew it was from you. Well, I am really pleased, and look forward to the paper. I do think it will help. I now think I shall write my prison article for the Chronicle. It is interested in prison-reform, and the thing would not look an advertisement.
Let me know your opinion. I intend to write to Massingham. Reading between the lines of your telegram I seem to discern that you are pleased. The telegram was much needed. They had offered me serpent for dinner! A serpent cut up, in an umber-green sauce! I explained that I was not a mangeur de serpents and have converted the patron. No serpent is now to be served to any guest. He grew quite hot over it. What a good thing it is that I am an experienced ichthyologist!
I enclose a lot of letters. Please put money orders in them and send them off. Put those addressed to the prison in a larger envelope, each of them, addressed by yourself, if possible legibly. They are my debts of honour, and I must pay them. Of course you must read the letters. Explain to Miss Meredith that letters addressed C.3.3, 24 Hornton Street are for you. The money is as follows. Of course it is a great deal but I thought I would have lots:
| Jackson | £1. | |
| Fleet | £1.10s. | |
| Ford | £2.10s. | |
| Stone | £3. | |
| × Eaton | £2. | The letters must go at once. |
| × Cruttenden | £2. | At least those marked × |
| Bushell | £2.10s. | |
| × Millward | £2.10s. | |
| Groves | £3.10s. | |
| ——— | ||
| £20.10s. | ||
| W. Smith | £2. |
How it mounts up! But now I have merely Jim Cuthbert December 2, Jim Huggins October 9, and Harry Elvin November 6. They can keep. On second thoughts I have sent only one to the prison. Please be careful not to mix the letters. They are all nuanced.
I want some pens, and some red ties. The latter for literary purposes of course.
I wrote to Courtenay Thorpe this morning: also to Mrs Stannard and sent her flowers.
More forwards me a poem from Bosie – a love-lyric! It is absurd.
Tardieu has written mysteriously warning me of dangerous friends in Paris. I hate mystery: it is so obvious.
Keep Romeike on the war-trail.
The Figaro announced me bicycling at Dieppe! They always confuse you and me. It really is delightful. I will make no protest. You are the best half of me.
I am very tired, and the rain is coming down. You will be glad to hear that I have not been planting cacao in plantain swamps, and that ‘Lloyd’ is not now sitting on the verandah, nor is ‘Fanny’ looking after the ‘labourboys’, and that of ‘Belle’ I know nothing. So now, dear Colvin (what an awful pen!) I mean dear Robbie, good night.
With all love and affection, yours
OSCAR
The penultimate paragraph is a parody of R. L. Stevenson’s Vailima Letters to Sidney Colvin. The references are to Stevenson’s stepson, wife and stepdaughter.
[28 May 1897]
Hotel de la Plage, Bemeval-sur-Mer
Dear Major Nelson, I had of course intended to write to you as soon as I had safely reached French soil, to express, however inadequately, my real feelings of what you must let me term, not merely sincere, but affectionate gratitude to you for your kindness and gentleness to me in prison, and for the real care that you took of me at the end, when I was mentally upset and in a state of very terrible nervous excitement. You must not mind my using the word ‘gratitude’. I used to think gratitude a burden to carry. Now I know that it is something that makes the heart lighter. The ungrateful man is one who walks slowly with feet and heart of lead. But when one knows the strange joy of gratitude to God and man the earth becomes lovelier to one, and it is a pleasure to count up, not one’s wealth but one’s debts, not the little that one possesses, but the much that one owes.
I abstained from writing, however, because I was haunted by the memory of the little children, and the wretched half-witted lad who was flogged by the doctor’s orders. I could not have kept them out of my letter, and to have mentioned them to you might have put you in a difficult position. In your reply you might have expressed sympathy with my views – I think you would have – and then on the appearance of my public letter you might have felt as if I had, in some almost ungenerous or thoughtless way, procured your private opinion on official things, for use as corroboration.
I longed to speak to you about these things on the evening of my departure, but I felt that in my position as a prisoner it would have been wrong of me to do so, and that it would or might have put you in a difficult position afterwards, as well as at the time. I only hear of my letter being published by a telegram from Mr Ross, but I hope they have printed it in full, as I tried to express in it my appreciation and admiration of your own humane spirit and affectionate interest in all the prisoners under your charge. I did not wish people to think that any exception had been specially made for me. Such exceptional treatment as I received was by order of the Commissioners. You gave me the same kindness as you gave to everyone. Of course I made more demands, but then I think I had really more needs than others, and I lacked often their cheerful acquiescence.
Of course I side with the prisoners: I was one, and I belong to their class now. I am not a scrap ashamed of having been in prison. I am horribly ashamed of the materialism of the life that brought me there. It was quite unworthy of an artist.
Of Martin, and the subjects of my letter, I of course say nothing at all, except that the man who could change the system – if any one man can do so – is yourself. At present I write to ask you to allow me to sign myself, once at any rate in life, your sincere and grateful friend
OSCAR WILDE
[29–30 May 1897]
Hôtel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Robbie, Your letter is quite admirable, but, dear boy, don’t you see how right I was to write to the Chronicle’? All good impulses are right. Had I listened to some of my friends I would never have written.
I am sending a postscript to Massingham – of some importance: if he publishes it, send it to me.
I have also asked him if he wishes my prison experiences, and if he would share in a syndicate. I think now, as the length of my letter is so great, that I could do three articles on Prison Life. Of course much will be psychological and introspective: and one will be on Christ as the Precursor of the Romantic Movement in Life, that lovely subject which was revealed to me when I found myself in the company of the same sort of people Christ liked, outcasts and beggars.
I am terrified about Bosie. More writes to me that he has been practically interviewed about me! It is awful. More, desiring to spare me pain, I suppose, did not send me the paper, so I have had a wretched night.
Bosie can almost ruin me. I earnestly beg that some entreaty be made to him not to do so a second time. His letters to me are infamous.
I have heard from my wife. She sends me photographs of the boys – such lovely little fellows in Eton collars – but makes no promise to allow me to see them: she says she will see me, twice a year, but I want my boys. It is a terrible punishment, dear Robbie, and oh! how well I deserve it. But it makes me feel disgraced and evil, and I don’t want to feel that. Let me have the Chronicle regularly. Also write often. It is very good for me to be alone. I am working. Dear Robbie, ever yours
OSCAR
Monday Night, 31 May [1897]
[Hôtel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer]
My dearest Robbie, I have decided that the only way in which to get boots properly is to go to France to receive them. The douane charged three francs! How could you frighten me as you did? The next time you order boots please come to Dieppe to get them sent to you. It is the only way, and it will be an excuse for seeing me.
I am going tomorrow on a pilgrimage. I always wanted to be a pilgrim, and I have decided to start early tomorrow to the shrine of Notre Dame de Liesse. Do you know what Liesse is? It is an old word for joy. I suppose the same as Letizia, laetitia. I just heard of the shrine, or chapel, tonight, by chance, as you would say, from the sweet woman of the auberge, a perfect dear, who wants me to live always at Berneval! She says Notre Dame de Liesse is wonderful, and helps everyone to the secret of joy. I do not know how long it will take me to get to the shrine, as I must walk. But, from what she tells me, it will take at least six or seven minutes to get there, and as many to come back. In fact the chapel of Notre Dame de Liesse is just fifty yards from the hotel! Isn’t it extraordinary? I intend to start after I have had my coffee, and then to bathe. Need I say that this is a miracle? I wanted to go on a pilgrimage, and I find the little grey stone chapel of Our Lady of Joy is brought to me. It has probably been waiting for me all these purple years of pleasure, and now it comes to meet me with Liesse as its message. I simply don’t know what to say. I wish you were not so hard to poor heretics, and would admit that even for the sheep who has no shepherd there is a Stella Maris to guide it home. But you and More, especially More, treat me as a Dissenter. It is very painful, and quite unjust.
Yesterday I attended Mass at ten o’clock and afterwards bathed. So I went into the water without being a Pagan. The consequence was that I was not tempted by either Sirens, or Mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus. I really think that this is a remarkable thing. In my pagan days the sea was always full of tritons blowing conches, and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite different. And yet you treat me as the President of Mansfield College: and after I had canonised you, too!
Dear boy, I wish you would tell me if your religion makes you happy. You conceal your religion from me in a monstrous way. You treat it like writing in the Saturday Review for Pollock, or dining in Wardour Street off the fascinating dish that is served with tomatoes and makes men mad. I know it is useless asking you. So don’t tell me.
I felt an outcast in chapel yesterday – not really, but a little in exile. I met a dear farmer in a cornfield, and he gave me a seat in his banc in church: so I was quite comfortable. He now visits me twice a day, and as he has no children, and is rich, I have made him promise to adopt three – two boys and a girl. I told him that if he wanted them, he would find them. He said he was afraid that they would turn out badly. I told him everyone did that. He really has promised to adopt three orphans! He is now filled with enthusiasm at the idea. He is to go to the curé and talk to him. He told me that his own father had fallen down in a fit one day as they were talking together, and that he had caught him in his arms, and put him to bed, where he died, and that he himself had often thought how dreadful it was that if he had a fit there was no one to catch him in his arms. It is quite clear that he must adopt orphans, is it not?
I feel that Berneval is to be my home. I really do. Notre Dame de Liesse will be sweet to me, if I go on my knees to her, and she will advise me. It is extraordinary being brought here by a white horse that was a native of the place, and knew the road, and wanted to see its parents, now of advanced years. It is also extraordinary that I knew Berneval existed, and was arranged for me.
M. Bonnet wants to build me a chalet! 1000 metres of ground (I don’t know how much that is, but I suppose about 100 miles) and a chalet with a studio, a balcony, a salle-à-manger, a huge kitchen, and three bedrooms, a view of the sea, and trees – all for 12,000 francs, £480. If I can write a play I am going to have it begun. Fancy one’s own lovely house and grounds in France for £480! No rent of any kind. Pray consider this, and approve, if you think right. Of course not till I have done my play.
An old gentleman lives here in the hotel. He dines alone in his rooms, and then sits in the sun. He came here for two days, and has stayed two years. His sole sorrow is that there is no theatre. Monsieur Bonnet is a little heartless about this, and says that as the old gentleman goes to bed at eight o’clock, a theatre would be of no use to him. The old gentleman says he only goes to bed at eight o’clock because there is no theatre. They argued the point yesterday for an hour. I side with the old gentleman, but Logic sides with Monsieur Bonnet, I believe.
I had a sweet letter from the Sphinx. She gives me a delightful account of Ernest subscribing to Romeike while his divorce suit was running, and not being pleased with some of the notices. Considering the growing appreciation of Ibsen I must say that I am surprised the notices were not better, but nowadays everybody is jealous of everyone else, except, of course, husband and wife. I think I shall keep this last remark of mine for my play.
Have you got back my silver spoon from Reggie? You got my silver brushes out of Humphreys, who is bald, so you might easily get my spoon out of Reggie, who has so many, or used to have. You know my crest is on it. It is a bit of Irish silver, and I don’t want to lose it. There is an excellent substitute called Britannia metal, very much liked at the Adelphi and elsewhere. Wilson Barrett writes, ‘I prefer it to silver.’ It would suit dear Reggie admirably. Walter Besant writes, ‘I use none other.’ Mr Beerbohm Tree also writes, ‘Since I have tried it I am a different actor. My friends hardly recognise me.’ So there is obviously a demand for it.
I am going to write a Political Economy in my heavier moments. The first law I lay down is ‘Wherever there exists a demand, there is no supply’. This is the only law that explains the extraordinary contrast between the soul of man, and man’s surroundings. Civilisations continue because people hate them. A modem city is the exact opposite of what everyone wants. Nineteenth-century dress is the result of our horror of the style. The tall hat will last as long as people dislike it.
Dear Robbie, I wish you would be a little more considerate, and not keep me up so late talking to you. It is very flattering to me and all that, but you should remember that I need rest. Goodnight. You will find some cigarettes and some flowers by your bedside. Coffee is served below at eight o’clock. Do you mind? If it is too early for you, I don’t at all mind lying in bed an extra hour. I hope you will sleep well. You should, as Lloyd is not on the verandah.
Tuesday morning [1 June 1897], 9.30.
The sea and sky one opal, no horrid drawing-master’s line between them, just one fishing boat, going slowly, and drawing the wind after it. I am going to bathe.
Six o’clock
Bathed and have seen a chalet here, which I wish to take for the season – quite charming: a splendid view: a large writing-room; a dining-room, and three lovely bedrooms, besides servant’s room, also a huge balcony.
I don’t know the scale of my drawing. But the rooms are larger than the plan is.
1. Salle-à-manger. All on ground floor, with steps
from balcony to ground.2. Salon
3. Balcony
The rent for the season or year is what do you think – £32. Of course I must have it: I will take my meals here, separate and reserved table: it is within two minutes’ walk. Do tell me to take it: when you come again your room will be waiting for you. All I need is a domestique. The people here are most kind.
I made my pilgrimage. The interior of the chapel is of course a modern horror, but there is a black image of Notre Dame de Liesse. The chapel is as tiny as an undergraduate’s room at Oxford. I hope to get the curé to celebrate Mass in it soon. As a rule the service is only held there in July-August: but I want to see a Mass quite close.
There is also another thing I must write to you about.
I adore this place. The whole country is lovely, and full of forest and deep meadow. It is simple and healthy. If I live in Paris I may be doomed to things I don’t desire. I am afraid of big towns. Here I get up at 7.30. I am happy all day. I go to bed at ten o’clock. I am frightened of Paris. I want to live here.
I have seen the terrain. It is the best here, and the only one left. I must build a house. If I could build a chalet for 12,000 francs – £500 – and live in a home of my own, how happy I would be. I must raise the money somehow. It would give me a home, quiet, retired, healthy, and near England. If I lived in Egypt I know what my life would be. If I lived in the South of Italy I know I should be idle, and worse. I want to live here. Do think over this, and send me over the architect. Monsieur Bonnet is excellent, and is ready to carry out my ideas. I want a little chalet of wood and plastered walls, the wooden beams showing, and the white squares of plaster diapering the framework, like, I regret to say, Shakespeare’s house: like old English sixteenth-century farmers’ houses. So your architect has me waiting for him, as he is waiting for me.
Do you think this idea absurd?
I got the Chronicle: many thanks. I see the writer on Prince – A.2.11 – does not mention my name; foolish of her; it is a woman.
I, as you, the poem of my days, are away, am forced to write poetry. I have begun something that I think will be very good.
I breakfast tomorrow with the Stannards: what a great passionate splendid writer John Strange Winter is! How little people understand her work! Bootle’s Baby is une oeuvre symboliste: it is really only the style and the subject that are wrong. Pray never speak lightly of Bootle’s Baby – indeed, pray never speak of it at all; I never do. Ever yours
OSCAR Please send a Chronicle to my wife, Mrs C. M. Holland, Maison Benguerel, Bevaix, près de Neuchâtel, just marking it, and if my second letter appears, mark that. Also one to Mrs Arthur Stannard, 28 Rue de la Halle-au-Blé, Dieppe. Also, cut out the letter and enclose it in an envelope to Mr Arthur Cruttenden, Poste Restante, GPO Reading, with just these lines:
Dear Friend, The enclosed will interest you. There is also another letter waiting in the Post Office for you from me, with a little money. Ask for it, if you have not got it. Yours sincerely
C.3.3
I have no one but you, dear Robbie, to do anything. Of course the letter to Reading must go at once, as my friends come out on Wednesday morning early.
Michael Davitt, Irish writer and socialist MP, had suffered frequent bouts in prison for Fenian and similar activities. He had already asked questions in the House of Commons about the dismissal of warder Martin.
[Late May or early June 1897]
Hôtel de la Plage, Bemeval-sur-Mer
Private and Confidential
Dear Mr Davitt, I have been sent a cutting from a Liverpool paper which states that you intend to ask a question about the treatment of A.2.11 in Reading prison. I do not of course know if this is true, but I sincerely hope that you are in some way stirring in the matter. No one knows better than yourself how terrible life in an English prison is and what cruelties result from the stupidity of officialism, and the immobile ignorance of centralisation. You suffered for what was done by someone else. I, in that respect more unfortunate, for a life of senseless pleasure and hard materialism and a mode of existence unworthy of an artist, and still more unworthy of my mother’s son. But you know what prison-life is, and that there is no exaggeration in what I say. Everything that I state about the treatment of A.2.11 is absolutely true. With my own punishment I have nothing to do, except so far as it is the type of what is inflicted on much better, nicer fellows than myself. I have no bitterness at all, but I have learnt pity: and that is worth learning, if one has to tramp a yard for two years to learn it.
In any case I don’t think they will flog A.2.11 again, and that is something. But of course I am quite powerless to do any more. I merely wrote as any other of the prisoners might have written, who had a pen he could use, and found a paper sufficiently large-minded to publish his letter. But with the letter I am forced to stop. It is part of my punishment – the new part that I have to face, and am facing very cheerfully and without any despair or making any complaint. I prefix to this letter my name for the present, and my address: but my letter requires no answer. It is simply the expression of a hope. I remain, yours faithfully
OSCAR WILDE PS Enclosed letter has just been forwarded to me, through my solicitor. A.2.11 has apparently been flogged again – see postscript. I think it is simply revolting. After you have read the chap’s letter, of course tear it up. I have his address.
Douglas, who had been abroad on the Continent since Wilde’s first trial, was now living in Paris. He gave an interview to Le Jour, which appeared on 28 May, in which he described Wilde’s sufferings in prison and blamed English hypocrisy. The editorial comment was hostile, declaring that in Paris the name of Oscar Wilde was synonymous with ‘pathologie passionnelle’.
[?2 June 1897]
Hotel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Boy, If you will send me back beautiful letters, with bitter ones of your own, of course you will never remember my address. It is as above.
Of Lugné-Poe, of course, I know nothing except that he is singularly handsome, and seems to me to have the personality of a good actor, for personality does not require intellect to help if: it is a dynamic force of its own, and is often as superbly unintelligent as the great forces of nature, like the lightning that shook at sudden moments last night over the sea that slept before my window.
The production of Salomé was the thing that turned the scale in my favour, as far as my treatment in prison by the Government was concerned, and I am deeply grateful to all concerned in it. Upon the other hand I could not give my next play for nothing, as I simply do not know how I shall live after the summer is over unless I at once make money. I am in a terrible and dangerous position, for money that I had been assured was set aside for me was not forthcoming when I wanted it. It was a horrible disappointment: for I have of course begun to live as a man of letters should live – that is with a private sitting-room and books and the like. I can see no other way of living, if I am to write, though I can see many others, if I am not.
If then Lugné-Poe can give me no money, of course I shall not consider myself bound to him. But the play in question – being religious in surroundings and treatment of subject – is not a play for a run, at all. Three performances are the most I think I could expect. All I want is to have my artistic reappearance, and my own rehabilitation through art, in Paris, not in London. It is a homage and a debt I owe to that great city of art.
If anyone else with money would take the play, and let Lugné-Poe play the part, I would be more than content. In any case I am not bound, and, what is of more import, the play is not written! I am still trying to finish my necessary correspondence, and to express suitably my deep gratitude to all who have been kind to me.
As regards Le Journal, I would be charmed to write for it, and will try and get it regularly. I do not like to abonner myself at the office as I am anxious that my address should not be known. I think I had better do it at Dieppe, from where I get the Echo de Paris.
I hear the Jour has had a sort of interview – a false one – with you. This is very distressing: as much, I don’t doubt, to you as to me. I hope however that it is not the cause of the duel you hint at. Once you get to fight duels in France, you have to be always doing it, and it is a nuisance. I do hope that you will always shelter yourself under the accepted right of any English gentleman to decline a duel, unless of course some personal fracas or public insult takes place. Of course you will never dream of fighting a duel for me: that would be awful, and create the worst and most odious impression.
Always write to me about your art and the art of others. It is better to meet on the double peak of Parnassus than elsewhere. I have read your poems with great pleasure and interest: but on the whole your best work is to me still the work you did two years and a half ago – the ballads, and bits of the play. Of course your own personality has had for many reasons to express itself directly since then, 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. If I were asked of myself as a dramatist, I would say that my unique position was that I had taken the Drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the Lyric or the Sonnet, while enriching the characterisation of the stage, and enlarging – at any rate in the case of Salomè – its artistic horizon. You have real sympathy with the Ballad. Pray again return to it. The Ballad is the true origin of the romantic Drama, and the true predecessors of Shakespeare are not the tragic writers of the Greek or Latin stage, from Aeschylus to Seneca, but the ballad-writers of the Border. In such a ballad as Gilderoy one has the prefiguring note of the romance of Romeo and Juliet, different though the plots are. The recurring phrases of Salomé, that bind it together like a piece of music with recurring motifs, are, and were to me, the artistic equivalent of the refrains of old ballads. All this is to beg you to write ballads.
I do not know whether I have to thank you or More for the books from Paris, probably both. As I have divided the books, so you must divide the thanks.
I am greatly fascinated by the Napoléon of La Jeunesse. He must be most interesting. André Gide’s book fails to fascinate me. The egoistic note is, of course, and always has been to me, the primal and ultimate note of modern art, but to be an Egoist one must have an Ego. It is not everyone who says ‘I, I’ who can enter into the Kingdom of Art. But I love André personally very deeply, and often thought of him in prison, as I often did of dear Reggie Cholmondeley, with his large faun’s eyes and honey-sweet smile. Give him my fondest love. Ever yours
OSCAR Kindly forward enclosed card to Reggie, with my address. Tell him to keep both a secret.
Thursday [3 June 1897], 2.30
[Hotel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer]
My dear Boy, I have just received three copies of Le Jour, that I ordered from Dieppe; not knowing what day the supposed interview with you had taken place, I had ordered the numbers for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
The interview is quite harmless, and I am really sorry you took any notice of it. I do hope it is not with the low-class journalist that you are to fight, if that absurd experience is in store for you. If you ever fight in France let it be with someone who exists. To fight with the dead is either a vulgar farce or a revolting tragedy.
Let me know by telegram if anything has happened. The telegraph office is at Dieppe, but they send out on swift bicycles men in fantastic dresses of the middle-class age, who blow horns all the time so that the moon shall hear them. The costume of the moyen-âge is lovely but the dress of the middle-class age is dreadful.
Let me beg one thing of you. Please always let me see anything that appears about myself in the Paris papers – good or bad, but especially the bad. It is a matter of vital import to me to know the attitude of the community. All mystery enrages me, and when dear More wrote to say that a false interview with you of no importance had been published, I hired a voiture at once and galloped to Dieppe to try and find it, and ordered, as I have told you, three separate numbers. It wrecks my nerves to think of things appearing on me that are kept from me. If More had enclosed it in his letter, I would have been happy and satisfied. As it was, I was really unnerved. The smallest word about me tells.
If Le Journal would publish my letter to the Daily Chronicle it would be a great thing for me. I hope you have seen it.
Ernest Dowson, Conder, and Dal Young – what a name – are coming out to dine and sleep: at least I know they dine, but I believe they don’t sleep. Ever yours
OSCAR
Ernest Dowson, a poet whom Wilde had met with Sherard in 1890, Charles Conder, the painter, and Dalhousie Young, the pianist and composer, all of them about thirty and living in Dieppe, were to give Wilde their unstinted friendship for the next months. Dal Young, although unacquainted with Wilde at the time of his conviction, bravely published his Apologia pro Oscar Wilde in May 1895 and later, when Wilde was in Naples, paid him to write a libretto, probably aware that the commission would never be completed, but afterwards complaining that Wilde had obtained the advance under false pretences.
Thursday 3 June
2.45 p.m. (Berneval time)
AD 1897
Latitude and Longitude not marked on the sea
Dear Robbie, The entirely business-like tone of your letter just received makes me nervous that you are a prey of terrible emotions, and that it is merely a form of the calm that hides a storm. Your remark also that my letter is ‘undated’, while as a reproach it wounds me, also seems to denote a change in your friendship towards me. I have now put the date and other facts at the head of my letter.
I get no cuttings from Paris, which makes me irritable when I hear of things appearing. Not knowing the day of the false interview with Bosie I ordered, fortunately, copies of the paper for three successive days: they have just arrived, and I see an impertinent démenti of Bosie’s denial.
Bosie has also written to me to say he is on the eve of a duel! I suppose about this. They said his costume was ridicule. I have written to him to beg him never to fight duels, as once one does it one has to go on. And though it is not dangerous, like our English cricket or football is, still it is a tedious game to be always playing.
Besides, to fight with the common interviewer is to fight with the dead, a thing either farcical or tragic. Ernest Dowson, Conder, and Dal Young come out here this afternoon to dine and sleep – at least I know they dine, but I believe they never sleep.
I think the Chronicle are nervous. They have not answered yet or anything. Of course with them I am all right, if they take my work. Who is my Receiver? I want his name and address. Ever yours
OSCAR
Saturday, 5 June [1897]
[Hotel de la Plage, Bemeval-sur-Mer]
My dear Robbie, I propose to live at Berneval. I will not live in Paris, nor in Algiers, nor in southern Italy. Surely a house for a year, if I choose to continue there, at £32 is absurdly cheap! I could not live cheaper at a hotel. You are penny foolish and pound foolish – a dreadful state for any financier to be in. I told M. Bonnet that my banker was M. Ross et Cie, Banquiers célèbres de Londres: and now you suddenly show me that you have really no place among the great financial people, and are afraid of any investment over £31.10. It is merely the extra 10/- that baffles you. As regards people living on me in the extra bedrooms: dear boy, there is no one who would stay with me but you, and you will pay your own bill at the hotel for meals, and as for your room the charge will be nominally 2 fr. 50 a night, but there will be lots of extras, such as bougie, bain, and hot water: all cigarettes smoked in the bedrooms are charged extra: washing is extra: and if any one does not take the extras, of course he is charged more. Bain 25 c. Pas de bain 50 c. Cigarette dans la chambre-à-coucher, 10 c. pour chaque cigarette. Pas de cigarettes dans la chambre-à-coucher, 20 c. chaque cigarette. This is the système in all good hotels. If Reggie comes, of course he will pay a little more. I cannot forget that he gave me a dressing-case. Sphinxes pay a hundred per cent more than anyone else. They always did in ancient Egypt. Architects, on the other hand, are taken at a reduction. I have special terms for architects.
But seriously, Robbie, if anyone stayed with me, of course they would pay their pension at the hotel. They would have to: except architects. A modern architect, like modern architecture, doesn’t pay. But then I only know one architect, and you are hiding him somewhere from me. I am beginning to believe that he is as extinct as the Dado, of which now only fossil remains are found, chiefly in the vicinity of Brompton, where they are sometimes discovered by workmen excavating. They are usually embedded in the old Lincrusta-Walton strata, and are rare consequently.
I visited M. le Cure today: he has a charming house in a jardin potager: he showed me over the church: tomorrow I sit in the choir by his special invitation. He showed me all his vestments: tomorrow he really will be charming in his red. He knows I am a heretic, and believes that Pusey is still alive. He says that God will convert England on account of England’s kindness to the prêtres exilés at the time of the Revolution. It is to be the reward of that sea-lashed island. Stained-glass windows are wanted in the church: he only has six: fourteen more are needed. He gets them at 300 francs (£12) a window in Paris! I was nearly offering half a dozen, but remembered you, and so only gave him something pour ses pauvres. You had a narrow escape, Robbie. You should be thankful.
I hope the £40 is on its way, and that the £60 will follow. I am going to hire a boat. It will save walking, and so be an economy in the end. Dear Robbie, I must start well. If the life of St Francis awaits me I shall not be angry. Worse things might happen. Ever yours
OSCAR
Sunday night, 6 June [1897]
[Hôtel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer]
My dearest Boy, I must give up this absurd habit of writing to you every day. It comes of course from the strange new joy of talking to you daily. But next week I must make a resolution to write to you only every seven days, and then on the question of the relations of the sonnet to modern life, and the importance of your writing romantic ballads, and the strange beauty of that lovely line of Rossetti’s, suppressed till lately by his brother, where he says that ‘the sea ends in a sad blueness beyond rhyme’. Don’t you think it lovely? ‘In a sad blueness beyond rhyme.’ Voilà ‘l’influence du bleu dans les arts’, with a vengeance!
I am so glad you went to bed at seven o’clock. Modern life is terrible to vibrating delicate frames like yours: a rose-leaf in a storm of hard hail is not so fragile. With us who are modern it is the scabbard that wears out the sword.
Will you do this for me? Get Le Courier de la Presse to procure a copy of Le Soir, the Brussels paper, somewhere between the 26th and the 31st of May last, which has an article on my letter to the Chronicle, a translation of it, I believe, and notices. It is of vital importance for me to have it as soon as possible. My Chronicle letter is to be published as a pamphlet with a postscript, and I need the Soir. I don’t want to write myself for it, for obvious reasons. Dear boy, I hope you are still sweetly asleep: you are so absurdly sweet when you are asleep. I have been to Mass at ten o’clock and to Vespers at three o’clock. I was a little bored by a sermon in the morning, but Benediction was delightful. I am seated in the Choir! I suppose sinners should have the high places near Christ’s altar? I know at any rate that Christ would not turn me out.
Remember, after a few days, only one letter a week. I must school myself to it.
En attendant, yours with all love
OSCAR
Poète-forçcat
13 June 1897
Hotel de la Plage, Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Frank, I know you do not like writing letters, but still I think you might have written me a line in answer, or acknowledgement of my letter to you from Dieppe. I have been thinking of a story to be called ‘The Silence of Frank Harris’.
I have, however, heard during the last few days that you do not speak of me in the friendly manner I would like. This distresses me very much.
I am told that you are hurt with me because my letter of thanks to you was not sufficiently elaborated in expression. This I can hardly credit. It seems so unworthy of a big strong nature like yours, that knows the realities of life. I told you I was grateful to you for your kindness to me. Words, now, to me signify things, actualities, real emotions, realised thoughts. I learnt in prison to be grateful. I used to think gratitude a burden. Now I know that it is something that makes life lighter as well as lovelier for one. I am grateful for a thousand things, from my good friends down to the sun and the sea. But I cannot say more than that I am grateful. I cannot make phrases about it. For me to use such a word shows an enormous development in my nature. Two years ago I did not know the feeling the word denotes. Now I know it, and I am thankful that I have learnt that much, at any rate, by having been in prison. But I must say again that I no longer make roulades of phrases about the deep things I feel. When I write directly to you I speak directly. Violin-variations don’t interest me. I am grateful to you. If that does not content you, then you do not understand, what you of all men should understand, how sincerity of feeling expresses itself. But I dare say the story told of you is untrue. It comes from so many quarters that it probably is.
I am told also that you are hurt because I did not go on the driving-tour with you. You should understand that in telling you that it was impossible for me to do so, I was thinking as much of you as of myself. To think of the feelings and happiness of others is not an entirely new emotion in my nature. I would be unjust to myself and my friends, if I said it was. But I think of those things far more than I used to do. If I had gone with you, you would not have been happy, nor enjoyed yourself. Nor would I. You must try to realise what two years’ cellular confinement is, and what two years of absolute silence mean to a man of my intellectual power. To have survived at all – to have come out sane in mind and sound of body – is a thing so marvellous to me, that it seems to me sometimes, not that the age of miracles is over, but that it is only just beginning; and that there are powers in God, and powers in man, of which the world has up to the present known little.
But while I am cheerful, happy, and have sustained to the full that passionate interest in life and art that was the dominant chord of my nature, and made all modes of existence and all forms of expression utterly fascinating to me always – still, I need rest, quiet, and often complete solitude. Friends have come to see me here for a day, and have been delighted to find me like my old self, in all intellectual energy and sensitiveness to the play of life, but it has always proved afterwards to have been a strain upon a nervous force, much of which has been destroyed. I have now no storage of nervous force. When I expend what I have, in an afternoon, nothing remains. I look to quiet, to a simple mode of existence, to nature in all the infinite meanings of an infinite word, to charge the cells for me. Every day, if I meet a friend, or write a letter longer than a few lines, or even read 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. And yet it is three whole weeks since I was released.
Had I gone with you on the driving-tour, where we would have of necessity been in immediate contact with each other from dawn to sunset, I would have certainly broken off the tour the third day, probably broken down the second. You would have then found yourself in a painful position: your tour would have been arrested at its outset; your companion would have been ill without doubt; perhaps might have needed care and attendance, in some little remote French village. You would have given it to me, I know. But I felt it would have been wrong, stupid, and thoughtless of me to have started an expedition doomed to swift failure, and perhaps fraught with disaster and distress. You are a man of dominant personality; your intellect is exigent, more so than that of any man I ever knew; your demands on life are enormous; you require response, or you annihilate. The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the débris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor. I might have driven on the white roads, or through the leafy lanes, of France with a fool, or with the wisest of all things, a child; with you it would have been impossible. You should thank me sincerely for having saved you from an experience that each of us would have always regretted.
Will you ask me why then, when I was in prison, I accepted with grateful thanks your offer? My dear Frank, I don’t think you will ask so thoughtless a question. The prisoner looks to liberty as an immediate return to all his ancient energy, quickened into more vital forces by long disuse. When he goes out, he finds he has still to suffer. His punishment, as far as its effects go, lasts intellectually and physically, just as it lasts socially. He has still to pay. One gets no receipt for the past when one walks out into the beautiful air.
There is also a third thing. The Leversons kindly bought for me and presented to me my own life-size portrait of myself by Harper Pennington, and some other things, including a large pastel by my dear friend Shannon. These things they promised to store, or keep for me during my imprisonment. I knew, and realised with some natural amusement, that Leverson considered that Shannon’s beautiful pastel might be demoralising to the female servants of his household. He told me so with tears in his eyes; his wife with laughter in hers. I was quite conscious of the very painful position of a man who had in his house a life-sized portrait, which he could not have in his drawing-room as it was obviously, on account of its subject, demoralising to young men, and possibly to young women of advanced views, and a pastel of the Moon, no less demoralising to housemaids on account of the treatment of the subject. I often felt the strongest sympathy with Leverson: a sentimentalist confronted with a fact either in Life or Art is a tragic spectacle to gods and men. Accordingly, the week before my release, as a slight token of my sympathy with him, I wrote to my friends to ask them to engage a small room in Hornton Street, Kensington, at my expense, where for a few shillings a week I could store the art of Pennington and of Shannon, in a seclusion where they would be as harmless as Art can be. I considered it, I may say, a plain act of manners and morals to do so. I asked them to relieve Leverson from his terrible charge: a portrait that was a social incubus, and a pastel dangerous to chambermaids.
I have now spent the whole of my Sunday afternoon – the first real day of summer we have had – in writing to you this long letter of explanation.
I have written directly and simply, and I need not tell the author of Elder Conklin that sweetness and simplicity of expression take more out of one than fiddling harmonics on one string. I felt it my duty to write, but it has been a distressing one. It would have been better for me to have lain in the brown grass on the cliff, or to have walked slowly by the sea. It would have been kinder of you to have written to me directly about whatever harsh or bitter or hurt feelings you may have about me. It would have saved me an afternoon of strain, and tension.
But I have something more to say. It is pleasanter to me, now, to write about others, than about myself.
The enclosed is from a brother prisoner of mine: released June 4th. Pray read it; you will see his age, offence, and aim in life.
If you can give him a trial, do so. If you see your way to this kind action, and write to him to come and see you, kindly state in your letter that it is about a situation. He may think otherwise that it is about the flogging of A.2.11, a thing that does not interest you, and about which he is a little afraid to talk.
If the result of this long letter will be that you will help this fellow-prisoner of mine to a place in your service, I shall consider my afternoon better spent than any afternoon for the last two years, and three weeks.
In any case I have now written to you fully on all things as reported to me.
I again assure you of my gratitude for your kindness to me during my imprisonment, and on my release, and am always your sincere friend and admirer
OSCAR WILDE With regard to Lawley. All soldiers are neat, and smart, and make capital servants. He would be a good groom; he is, I believe, a Third Hussars man. He was a quiet well-conducted chap in Reading always.
Wednesday, 16 June [1897]
Bemeval-sur-Mer
My dear Boy, I am upset with the idea that you don’t get my letters, or that the post goes wrong, or something. I daresay it is all absurd, but your last three letters dated the 10th, 11th, and 12th (whereas we are now at the 16th) contain no references to things I asked you, especially as regards our meeting.
I have asked you to come here on Saturday. I have a bathing costume for you, but you had better get one in Paris. Also bring me a lot of books, and cigarettes. I cannot get good cigarettes here or at Dieppe.
The weather is very hot, so you will want a straw hat and flannels. I hope you will get quietly out of Paris. On arriving at Dieppe, take a good voiture and tell him to drive to the Hôtel Bonnet, Berneval-sur-Mer, and go by the road by Puys, not by the grande route which is a straight line of white dust.
If you want a café at Dieppe on arriving, go to the Café Suisse.
It takes an hour and a half to get here, so arrive if you can at Dieppe about three o’clock and be here at five o’clock.
I hope to be in my chalet by Saturday: so you will stay with me there. I have a little walled-in place in the garden of the hotel where I have déjeuner and diner – a bosquet of trees.
On Sunday I go to Mass, in a dark blue suit.
You must not have your letters sent on under your own name. It might do me serious harm. I still suggest – for the third time – Jonquil du Vallon, but any name you like will do.
Pray do not fail to write at once on receipt of this, and be careful of the date. Your last letter is dated the 12th: which was last Saturday.
It is lovely here today, and I am going to bathe at 10.30. Yesterday I drove Ernest Dowson back to Arques. I like him immensely.
Thanks for the Soir. You ask me other questions in your letter that I have answered in letters of my own to you: but I don’t know if they reach you. I will wait for today’s post, and write again tomorrow.
Bring also some perfumes and nice things from the sellers of the dust of roses.
Also bring yourself. Ever yours
OSCAR
Arthur Hansell, Wilde’s solicitor, had got wind of the proposed meeting with Bosie, possibly from Ross who was trying to protect his friend’s interests and who realised that if it became known, Wilde would immediately lose the allowance his wife was making him.
Thursday, 17 June [1897] 2 o’clock p.m.
Café Suisse, Dieppe
My dearest Boy, I have been obliged to ask my friends to leave me, as I am so upset and distressed in nerve by my solicitor’s letter, and the apprehension of serious danger, that simply I must be alone. I find that any worry utterly destroys my health, and makes me horrid and irritable and unkind, though I hate to be so.
Of course at present it is impossible for us to meet. I have to find out what grounds my solicitor has for his sudden action, and of course if your father – or rather Q as I only know him and think of him – if Q came over and made a scene and scandal it would utterly destroy my possible future and alienate all my friends from me. I owe to my friends everything, including the clothes I wear, and I would be wretched if I did anything that would separate them from me.
So simply we must write to each other: about the things we love, about poetry and the coloured arts of our age, and that passage of ideas into images that is the intellectual history of art. I think of you always, and love you always, but chasms of moonless night divide us. We cannot cross it without hideous and nameless peril.
Later on, when the alarm in England is over, when secrecy is possible, and silence forms part of the world’s attitude, we may meet, but at present you see it is impossible. I would be harassed, agitated, nervous. It would be no joy for me to let you see me as I am now.
You must go to some place where you can play golf and get back your lily and rose. Don’t, like a good boy, telegraph to me unless on a matter of vital import: the telegraph office is seven miles off, and I have to pay the facteur, and also reply, and yesterday with three separate facteurs, and three separate replies, I was sans le sou, and also mentally upset in nerve. Say please to Percy that I will accept a bicycle with many thanks for his kindness: I want to get it here, where there is a great champion who teaches everyone, and has English machines: it will cost £15. If Percy will send me £15 to enclosed name and address in a cheque, it will make me very happy. Send him my card.
Ever yours (rather maimed and mutilated)
OSCAR
Wednesday, 23 June [1897]
Café Suisse, Dieppe
My darling Boy, Thanks for your letter received this morning. My fête was a huge success: fifteen gamins were entertained on strawberries and cream, apricots, chocolates, cakes, and sirop de grenadine. I had a huge iced cake with Jubilé de la Reine Victoria in pink sugar just rosetted with green, and a great wreath of red roses round it all. Every child was asked beforehand to choose his present: they all chose instruments of music!!!
6 accordions
5 trompettes
4 clairons
They sang the Marseillaise and other songs, and danced a ronde, and also played ‘God save the Queen’: they said it was ‘God save the Queen’, and I did not like to differ from them. They also all had flags which I gave them. They were most gay and sweet. I gave the health of La Reine d’Angleterre, and they cried ‘Vive la Reine d’Angleterre’!!!! Then I gave ‘La France, mere de tous les artistes’, and finally I gave Le President de la République: I thought I had better do so. They cried out with one accord ‘Vivent le Président de la République et Monsieur Melmoth’!!! So I found my name coupled with that of the President. It was an amusing experience as I am hardly more than a month out of gaol.
They stayed from 4.30 to seven o’clock and played games: on leaving I gave them each a basket with a jubilee cake frosted pink and inscribed, and bonbons.
They seem to have made a great demonstration in Berneval-le-Grand, and to have gone to the house of the Mayor and cried, ‘Vive Monsieur le Maire! Vive la Reine d ‘Angleterre. Vive Monsieur Melmoth!’ I tremble at my position.
Today I have come in with Ernest Dowson to dine with the painter Thaulow, a giant with the temperament of Corot. I sleep here and go back tomorrow.
I will write tomorrow on things. Ever, dearest boy, yours
OSCAR
6 July [1897]
[Chalet Bourgeat] Bemeval-sur-Mer
Dearest Robbie, I have had no time to write lately, but I have written a long letter – of twelve foolscap pages – to Bosie, to point out to him that I owe everything to you and your friends, and that whatever life I have as an artist in the future will be due to you. He has now written to me a temperate letter, saying that Percy will fulfil his promises when he is able. Of course he will. But the occasion of his ability is certainly distant, and my wants were pressing.
I also wrote to him about his calling himself a grand seigneur in comparison to a dear sweet wonderful friend like you, his superior in all fine things. I told him how grotesque, ridiculous, and vulgar such an attempt was.
I long to see you. When are you coming over? I have a lovely bedroom for More, and a small garret for you, with my heart waiting in it for you.
The photograph of Constance has arrived. It was most sweet of you to send it. She writes to me every week.
Ernest Dowson is here for a few days: he leaves tomorrow. He stays at Arques-la-Bataille.
Could you send me my pictures? Would it cost much? I long for them.
Today is stormy and wet. But my chalet is delightful, and when I pass through Berneval-le-Grand they still cry “Vivent Monsieur Melmoth et la Reine d’AngleterreV It is an astonishing position.
With best love. Ever yours
OSCAR
I hope you will be firm with Bosie.
Carlos Blacker had been an old friend of Wilde’s since the 1880s when Wilde dedicated The Happy Prince to him. In 1890, having been accused (unjustly as it turned out) of cheating at cards, he went abroad and lived mostly in Paris for the rest of his life. His American wife strongly disapproved of Wilde and was ultimately the cause of their friendship ceasing. Messalina was the faithless and depraved wife of the Emperor Claudius, and Sporus the effeminate favourite of the Emperor Nero, with whom, according to Suetonius, he went through a form of marriage.
12 July 1897
[Chalet Bourgeat] Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear old Friend, I need not tell you with what feelings of affection and gratitude I read your letter. You were always my staunch friend and stood by my side for many years.
Often in prison I used to think of you: of your chivalry of nature, of your limitless generosity, of your quick intellectual sympathies, of your culture so receptive, so refined. What marvellous evenings, dear Carlos, we used to have! What brilliant dinners! What days of laughter and delight! To you, as to me, conversation – that υερπκακ [delightful wickedness] as Euripides calls it – that sweet sin of phrases – was always among the supreme aims of life, and we tired many a moon with talk, and drank many a sun to rest with wine and words. You were always the truest of friends and the most sympathetic of companions. You will, I know, wish to hear about me, and what I am doing and thinking.
Well, I am in a little chalet, with a garden, over the sea. It is a nice chalet with two great balconies, where I pass much of my day and many of my nights: Berneval is a tiny place consisting of a hotel and about twenty chalets: the people who come here are des bons bourgeois as far as I can see. The sea has a lovely beach, to which one descends through a small ravine, and the land is full of trees and flowers, quite like a bit of Surrey: so green and shady. Dieppe is ten miles off. Many friends, such as Will Rothenstein, the artist, Conder, who is a sort of Corot of the sunlight, Ernest Dowson, the poet, and others have come to see me for a few days: and next month I hope to see Ricketts and Shannon, who decorated all my books for me, dear Robbie Ross, and perhaps some others. I learnt many things in prison that were terrible to learn, but I learnt some good lessons that I needed. I learnt gratitude: and though, in the eyes of the world, I am of course a disgraced and ruined man, still every day I am filled with wonder at all the beautiful things that are left to me: loyal and loving friends: good health: books, one of the greatest of the many worlds God has given to each man: the pageant of the seasons: the loveliness of leaf and flower: the nights hung with silver and the dawns dim with gold. I often find myself strangely happy. You must not think of me as being morbidly sad, or wilfully living in sadness, that sin which Dante punishes so terribly. My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world. The hard heart is the evil thing of life and of art. I have also learnt sympathy with suffering. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy. I think I am in many respects a much better fellow than I was, and I now make no more exorbitant claims on life: I accept everything. I am sure it is all right. I was living a life unworthy of an artist, and though I do not hold with the British view of morals that sets Messalina above Sporus, I see that any materialism in life coarsens the soul, and that the hunger of the body and the appetites of the flesh desecrate always, and often destroy.
Of course I am troubled about money, because the life of a man of letters – and I hope to be one again – requires solitude, peace, books and the opportunity of retirement. I have, as I dare say you know, only £3 a week: but dear Robbie Ross and some other friends got up privately a little subscription for me to give me a start. But of course they are all quite poor themselves, and though they gave largely from their store, their store was small, and I have had to buy everything, so as to be able to live at all.
I hope to write a play soon, and then if I can get it produced I shall have money – far too much I dare say: but as yet I have not been able to work. The two long years of silence kept my soul in bonds. It will all come back, I feel sure, and then all will be well.
I long to see you, dear friend. Could you come here with your wife? Or to Dieppe? The hotel here is a charming little auberge with a capital cook: everything very wholesome and clean, and daintily served besides. I must talk over my future, for I believe that God still holds a future for me, only I must be wise, and must see my way.
Will you do this? It would help me very much to see you – more than I can say.
And now, dear friend, I must end my letter. I have only said a little in it, but writing is strangely difficult for me from long disuse.
Write to me as Monsieur Sebastian Melmoth. It is my new name. I enclose a card. Pray offer my homage to your wife, and believe me, ever gratefully and affectionately yours
OSCAR WILDE
On Wilde’s release, an ex-convict, William Dixon, wrote offering his secretarial services. Wilde must have discussed earlier with Ross the possibility of having Dixon proof-read the typescript of De Profundis. Strangely, given the importance which his prison letter seems to have assumed for him, this is the last time that Wilde refers to the letter in his correspondence. He began work on The Ballad of Reading Gaol in the second week of July.
20 July [1897]
Chalet Bourgeat, Berneval-sur-Mer
My dearest Robbie, Your excuse of ‘domesticity’ is of course most treacherous: I have missed your letters very much. Pray write at least twice a day, and write at length. You now only write about Dixon. As regards him, tell him that the expense of bringing him to London is too heavy. I don’t think I would like the type-written manuscript sent to him. It might be dangerous. Better to have it done in London, scratching out Bosie’s name, mine at the close, and the address. Mrs Marshall can be relied on.
The pictures, as I said, insure for £50.
As regards Bosie, I feel you have been, as usual, forbearing and sweet, and too good-tempered. What he must be made to feel is that his vulgar and ridiculous assumption of social superiority must be retracted and apologised for. I have written to him to tell him that quand on est gentilhomme on est gentilhomme, and that for him to try and pose as your social superior because he is the third son of a Scotch marquis and you the third son of a commoner is offensively stupid. There is no difference between gentlemen. Questions of titles are matters of heraldry – no more. I wish you would be strong on this point; the thing should be thrashed out of him. As for his coarse ingratitude in abusing you, to whom, as I have told him, I owe any possibility I have of a new and artistic career, and indeed of life at all, I have no words in which to express my contempt for his lack of imaginative insight, and his dullness of sensitive nature. It makes me quite furious. So pray write, when next you do so, quite calmly, and say that you will not allow any nonsense of social superiority and that if he cannot understand that gentlemen are gentlemen and no more, you have no desire to hear again from him.
I expect you on August the First: also, the architect.
The poem is nearly finished. Some of the verses are awfully good.
Wyndham comes here tomorrow to see me: for the adaptation of Scribe’s Le Verre d’Eau: which of course you have to do. Bring Esmond with you, and any Queen Anne chairs you have: just for the style.
I am so glad More is better.
The sketch of Frank Harris in John Johns is superb. Who wrote the book? It is a wonderful indictment. Ever yours
OSCAR
Constance was suffering increasingly from spinal problems and, with much restricted movement, was finding it hard to lead a normal life. Although both she and Oscar seem to have been keen to meet, it appears to have been the meddlesome but well-meaning family and friends who kept them apart, as much as anything to avoid the social dilemma they would have faced, had Oscar and Constance remade their life together. Cyril and Vyvyan spent much of July and August with Carlos and his wife in the Black Forest before returning to Italy and taking a house at Nervi on the Italian Riviera, just outside Genoa. Neither she nor the two children ever saw Oscar again.
Thursday, 29 July 1897
Café Suisse, Dieppe
Dear Friend, I am terribly distressed about what you tell me about Constance. I had no idea it was so serious.
Of course she could not come here. I see that. She would require the attendance of a maid, and I have only my man-servant, and the journey would be too much.
Do you think I should go and see her in about three weeks? I really think it would be better for her to see me, and have it over. I would only stay a couple of days. I think that she is afraid I am fearfully altered. I don’t think I am in appearance. My friends say I am not. Just try and advise me.
I am so glad she is with you and your charming, brilliant wife.
For myself, I really am quite heart-broken. Nemesis seems endless.
With many thanks, dear old friend, ever yours
OSCAR
Saturday [Postmark 31 July 1897]
Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Reggie, The most lovely clock has arrived, and I hear it is from you. It is most sweet of you to give it to me, and you will be pleased, and perhaps astonished, to hear that though it is quite beautiful, and has a lovely face and wonderful slim restless hands, yet it is strangely punctual in all its habits, business-like in its methods, of ceaseless industry, and knows all that the sun is doing. I hope you will come here and see it. It has been greatly admired by all the inhabitants. Come any time you like. I am not responsible for the architecture of the chalet: all that I am responsible for at Berneval are the sunsets and the sea.
I don’t know if you are with Bosie, but send this to his care. Affectionately yours
OSCAR
Tuesday [3 August 1897]
Berneval-sur-Mer
Dearest Reggie, I am so sorry you are ill: I was in hopes of seeing you here soon. Do get well, and come over. I long for your delightful companionship and sympathetic friendship. The horizon of the English stage seems dark with Hichens. Do finish your play and stop him.
Robbie was to have come here yesterday, but has not arrived. I suspect a conspiracy with ramifications. I suppose ramifications are a sort of dagger?
I wrote to you care of Bosie to thank you for the lovely clock: I hope he forwarded my letter. The clock still goes: and is quite astounding in its beauty and industry. It even works at night, when no one is watching it.
Aubrey, and Conder, and Dal Young are at Dieppe, and the place is very full. I have made Aubrey buy a hat more silver than silver: he is quite wonderful in it.
Do get well soon. Ever yours affectionately
OSCAR
[Postmark 4 August 1897]
Café Suisse, Dieppe
My dear Friend, I am simply heart-broken at what you tell me. I don’t mind my life being wrecked – that is as it should be – but when I think of poor Constance I simply want to kill myself. But I suppose I must live through it all. I don’t care. Nemesis has caught me in her net: to struggle is foolish. Why is it that one runs to one’s ruin? Why has destruction such a fascination? Why, when one stands on a pinnacle, must one throw oneself down? No one knows, but things are so.
Of course I think it would be much better for Constance to see me, but you think not. Well, you are wiser. My life is spilt on the sand – red wine on the sand – and the sand drinks it because it is thirsty, for no other reason.
I wish I could see you. Where I shall be in September I don’t know. I don’t care. I fear we shall never see each other again. But all is right: the gods hold the world on their knees. I was made for destruction. My cradle was rocked by the Fates. Only in the mire can I know peace. Ever yours
OSCAR
Laurence Housman had just sent Wilde All-Fellows, his book of imaginary legends. A. E. Housman, his brother, had published A Shropshire Lad in 1896, which he sent to Wilde on his release and parts of which may have influenced Wilde’s choice of metre for his own Ballad.
9 August [1897]
Chalet Bourgeat, Berneval-sur-Mer
Dear Mr Housman, I cannot tell you how gratified and touched I was to receive your charming letter, and the beautiful book that it so gracefully heralded.
Your prose is full of cadence and colour, and has a rhythmic music of words that makes that constant appeal to the ear, which, to me, is the very condition of literature. The ‘King’s Evil’, the ‘Tree of Guile’, and the ‘Heart of the Sea’ are quite beautiful: and their mysticism, as well as their meaning, touches me very deeply: and while they are of course dramatic, still one is conscious—as one should be in all objective art—of one personality dominating their perfection all through.
The whole book, with its studied and imaginative decorations and its links of song, is a very lovely and almost unique work of art. Your title pleases me little, but every one has some secret reason for christening a child: some day you must tell me yours. Ricketts and Shannon, those good kind friends of mine, are coming to see me this month. It would be charming if you came with them.
I have lately been reading your brother’s lovely lyrical poems, so you see you have both of you given me that rare thing happiness. With renewal of my thanks, believe me truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
Tuesday, 10 August [1897] [Dieppe]
My dear Reggie, Will you come over here on Saturday next, by the afternoon boat? Robbie is here, and we want you so much. It is quite quiet and the weather is charming. Also last night acrobats arrived. Smithers, the publisher and owner of Aubrey, comes over on Sunday and we all dine with him: then we go to Berneval.
I do not know if you know Smithers: he is usually in a large straw hat, has a blue tie delicately fastened with a diamond brooch of the impurest water—or perhaps wine, as he never touches water: it goes to his head at once. His face, clean-shaven as befits a priest who serves at the altar whose God is Literature, is wasted and pale—not with poetry, but with poets, who, he says, have wrecked his life by insisting on publishing with him. He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion. He is the most learned erotomaniac in Europe. He is also a delightful companion, and a dear fellow, very kind to me.
You will on arrival proceed without delay to the Cafe Suisse, where Robbie and I will be waiting for you.
If you don’t come I shall be quite wretched. I long to see you again. Ever yours
OSCAR
Rothenstein’s book, published the following year and entitled English Portraits, was to consist of twenty-four lithographed drawings, with a brief note on each sitter. These were to be anonymous and by different hands; Wilde had been asked to describe W. E. Henley. Wilde’s humorous restraint, given Henley’s earlier attacks on his work, is remarkable.
14 August 1897 Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Will, I don’t know if the enclosed will suit. If so, pray use it. Also don’t forget to come and see me as soon as possible. I simply long for your delightful companionship. Robbie Ross and Sherard are here at present: the latter goes away today. We all go to Dieppe to dine with Smithers. Ever yours
O. W.
He founded a school, and has survived all his disciples. He has always thought too much about himself, which is wise; and written too much about others, which is foolish. His prose is the beautiful prose of a poet, and his poetry the beautiful poetry of a prose-writer. His personality is insistent. To converse with him is a physical no less than an intellectual recreation. He is never forgotten by his enemies, and often forgiven by his friends. He has added several new words to the language and his style is an open secret. He has fought a good fight, and has had to face every difficulty except popularity.
!!! !!!
Despite Wilde’s previous correspondence with Smithers, it seems they did not meet until introduced by Ernest Dowson at Dieppe in July. Smithers published Dowson’s poems and a number of his translations from the French, but Louys’s Aphrodite was never done. Vincent 0’Sullivan, an Irish-American poet and novelist, was a good friend of both Dowson and Smithers, and lived most of his life in France. His anecdotal memoir Aspects of Wilde is one of the most perceptive and reliable books on the subject.
18 August [1897] Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Ernest, I think your translating Aphrodite a capital idea: I do hope you will get someone to make good terms for you. Why not Smithers? The Bacchic, the Dionysiac!
You should make a lot of money by royalties. The book, if well puffed, might be a great succes.
Robbie Ross is here with me, and Sherard left on Saturday. Smithers is devoted, and breakfasts here every Monday. I like him immensely. He is a most interesting and, in some respects, a charming personality.
I have not yet finished my poem, but I hope to do so soon. I wrote four splendid stanzas yesterday. I am going to try and get a lot of money for it from the New York World. Robert Sherard will, he says, arrange it for me.
Vincent O’Sullivan has been twice here to dine. I now like him. At first I loathed him.
As for the cheque: I know, dear Ernest, you will send it as soon as you can. I scramble on somehow, and hope to survive the season. After that, Tunis, rags, and hashish! Ever yours
OSCAR
Sunday, 22 August 1897 Chalet Bourgeat, Berneval-sur-Mer
My dear Smithers, I look forward to seeing you on Saturday, and thank you for your kind letters.
Your wife, whose sweetness and kindness to me I shall never forget, came out to tea on Wednesday: the Stannards and Dal and others were here. I don’t think you will do much with Dal’s art, but Anquetin is a different thing: however Les Trois Mousquetaires is too obvious, and Stanley Weyman has rewritten Dumas for the British public—I must say, very well indeed. From what Thaulow tells me (I dined on Friday with him) Anquetin’s art is at his best with nymph and satyr; he is a sort of erotic Michelangelo. Would an edition of Beckford be any use? Perhaps you have already done one.
Will Rothenstein, as I expected, is too nervous to publish my little appreciation of Henley. He says he is the editor of ‘a paying magazine’. That seems a degrading position for any man to occupy. I have recommended Symons: he will do just what is unnecessary: it is his metier.
I enclose you a letter for Daly, which you can read. I don’t feel really at liberty to take his money, though I would like it. I have never done that sort of thing, and I can’t begin. It is merely the weakness of the criminal classes that makes me refuse.
Conder is now a vineyard: the Youngs are very serious about him, and there is a moral atmosphere about Dieppe that you should come over and dissipate. Sincerely yours
OSCAR WILDE
22 August 1897 Chalet Bourgeat, Berneval-sur-Mer
Dear Mr Housman, Thank you for your kind letter. I hope some day to see you here, or elsewhere.
It is absurd of Ricketts and Shannon not to see the light lyrical beauty of your brother’s work, and its grace and delicate felicity of mood and music. I can understand Ricketts not liking them, for he is dominated by the sense of definite design and intellectual architecture, nor can he see the wonderful strangeness of simple things in art and life: but Shannon is inexcusable: you must get him alone, and read them to him: you can tell him I think your brother’s poems exceedingly like his own lithographs!
With regard to what you ask me about myself – well, I am occupied in finishing a poem, terribly realistic for me, and drawn from actual experience, a sort of denial of my own philosophy of art in many ways. I hope it is good, but every night I hear cocks crowing in Berneval, so I am afraid I may have denied myself, and would weep bitterly, if I had not wept away all my tears. I will send it to you, if you allow me, when it appears. Believe me truly yours
OSCAR WILDE
Wednesday, 25 August 1897 Dieppe
My dear Smithers, Will you do me a great favour and have the poem I send you type-written for me, and bring it over with you on Saturday, or, if you cannot come, send it by post to Sebastian Melmoth, c/o Hotel Sandwich, Dieppe, where I shall be? I want it done on good paper, not tissue paper, and bound in a brown paper cover. If you will let me know what it will cost—or rather has cost—I will let you have the money on Saturday. It is not yet finished, but I want to see it type-written. I am sick of my manuscript.
I hope you are doing wonderful things in Art and Life. Always sincerely yours
OSCAR WILDE
Throughout the summer Oscar and Bosie had been corresponding, Bosie anxious to meet but Oscar fearful of the consequences. By the end of August Oscar’s resolve weakened; his wife still vacillated about seeing him and giving him access to the children; his friends had come and gone; the summer season in Dieppe was drawing to a close; Berneval seemed more remote and lonely than ever. The prospect of spending the winter in Naples with Bosie was mad and therefore irresistible.
Tuesday, 7.30 [?31 August 1897] Café Suisse, Dieppe
My own Darling Boy, I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send you a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.
I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other. Goodnight, dear. Ever yours
OSCAR
4 September 1897 Café Suisse, Dieppe
My dearest Robbie, The pictures arrived safe.
I am delighted you have come back, as you will now be able to join me in Rouen – Hotel d’Angleterre, I go in half an hour. I simply cannot stand Berneval. I nearly committed suicide there last Thursday—I was so bored.
I have not yet finished my poem! I really want you. I have got in about the kiss of Caiaphas: it is very good.
I am going at Rouen to try to rewrite my Love and Death—Florentine Tragedy.
Yes: I saw Bosie, and of course I love him as I always did, with a sense of tragedy and ruin. He was on his best behaviour, and very sweet.
Do come to Rouen at once. Ever yours
OSCAR
Monday [Postmark 6 September 1897] Grand Hôtel de France, Rouen
My dear Carlos, The weather has been so dreadful at Berneval that I have come here, where the weather is much worse. I cannot stay in the North of Europe; the climate kills me. I don’t mind being alone when there is sunlight, and ajoie de vivre all about me, but my last fortnight at Berneval has been black and dreadful, and quite suicidal. I have never been so unhappy. I am trying to get some money to go to Italy, and hope to be able to find my way to Sicily, but the expenses of travelling are frightening. I don’t suppose I shall see you before I go, as I think you said you could not come to France before the end of September, and the journey from Basle is, I suppose, very long and tedious.
I am greatly disappointed that Constance has not asked me to come and see the children. I don’t suppose now I shall ever see them. Ever yours
OSCAR
Write to me at Berneval-sur-Mer.
Tuesday [Postmark 14 September 1897] Café des Tribunaux, Dieppe
My dear Smithers, It has been a great blow not seeing you again. I hope your leg is better.
I leave here for Paris tomorrow—address Sebastian Melmoth, Hôtel d’Espagne, Rue Taitbout, Paris—and from there I want to get on to Naples, in three days. At Naples I intend to finish my poem, and begin my play. I have now only three stanzas to add to the poem, and I intend, by the advice of Clyde Fitch, to ask the New York Journal for £200. In the meanwhile I am, of course, fearfully hard up. I suppose you are the same, but could you advance me £20 on my poem? I think I am sure to get at least £100 from the New York paper. They offered £1000 for an interview, so for poetry they could not give less than £100. If you can do this I would of course tell Pinker to hand you over whatever sum he gets for the poem, and you could send me the balance. But if you can do this, will you let me have the £20 at once, to Paris. I don’t want to stay in Paris: I want to get away to Italy, but must have money. Sincerely yours
OSCAR WILDE