In 1895 in London the personal became political because an Irish playwright pushed his luck. Oscar Wilde, as the year opened, was the toast of London. He had powerful friends among the intellectual and political and social elite. He was slowly winning immense respect as a playwright and an artist, having won in the 1880s notoriety as a wit and social butterfly. He could do as he pleased. His plays were written quickly and effortlessly; he himself seemed to move in the same spirit between intimate family life and, when he became bored with that, a life in hotels and foreign places. He could mingle among the great and the good and then pleasurably spend time with young men from a different, mostly lower, social class. He could also continue his liaison with the young and beautiful Lord Alfred Douglas, also known as Bosie, whom he had met four years earlier, and try to ignore the protests of Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who was sure that his son was being corrupted. He was at the height of his fame and his glory; he must have seemed untouchable. By May, however, he was in prison, abandoned by most of his friends, his reputation ruined, his name a byword for corruption and evil, the Marquess of Queensberry fully vindicated. Wilde’s family life was destroyed, he was declared a bankrupt and he was about to serve a sentence whose severity was beyond his imagination.
In the years that followed, everybody who wrote about Oscar Wilde seemed to have known a different facet of him. W. B. Yeats, for example, remembered Wilde the married man towards the end of the 1880s.
He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler … I remember vaguely a white drawing-room with Whistler etchings, ‘let into’ white panels, and a dining-room all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the middle of the table under a terracotta statuette … It was perhaps too perfect in its unity … and I remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and two young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.1
Oscar Wilde’s younger son, Vyvyan, also remembered those years when his father was ‘a real companion’ to him and his brother, with ‘so much of the child in his own nature that he delighted in playing our games … When he grew tired of playing he would keep us quiet by telling us fairy stories, or tales of adventure, of which he had a never-ending supply.’2
Among the children’s writers whom Wilde admired, according to his son, was Robert Louis Stevenson, whose The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appeared in 1886, the year of Vyvyan’s birth. This was the time when, as Karl Miller wrote in his book Doubles, ‘a hunger for pseudonyms, masks, new identities, new conceptions of human nature, declared itself’.3 Thus Dr Jekyll could announce with full conviction: ‘This, too, was myself’ as he became ‘a stranger in his own house’. Jekyll ‘learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both’.4 Thus as Wilde set to work on the creation of both himself and his character Dorian Gray, he was following an example which was embedded in the spirit of the age.
London at around the time of the publication of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891 was where many artists – including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and Henry James – allowed their doubled selves, and their work full of masked selves, secret agents, secret sharers and sexual secrets, to flourish and further multiply. Wilde in London was both an Englishman and an Irishman, an aristocrat and an Irish patriot, a family man and a man who never seemed to be at home, a dilettante and a dedicated artist. Everywhere he went, he left behind in some attic of the mind an opposite self, recently discarded.
Every man, W. B. Yeats pointed out during this same period, has ‘some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life’.5 In 1909, Joseph Conrad wrote his story ‘The Secret Sharer’, in which the captain of a ship is confronted with his precise double: ‘It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror.’ Conrad’s narrator refers to the interloper as ‘my second self’. No self in these years was stable. In October 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: ‘I am a fictitious article and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my fellow novelists and by boys.’6 In August 1891, while staying at the Marine Hotel in Kingstown in Ireland, Henry James – described by his biographer Leon Edel as someone ‘in search of, in flight from, something or other’7 – had the idea for his story ‘The Private Life’, in which the sociable writer in the drawing room could at the same moment be found alone as his other self working in his study. In those years the writer was either two people, or he was nobody.
A writer’s feelings could reflect this too. James both feared and envied Oscar Wilde. He feared Wilde’s Irishness while seeking to disguise the fact that his own four grandparents were of Irish origin or Irish birth; he feared Wilde’s homosexuality, while seeking to annihilate his own; he envied Wilde’s sociability, while seeking greater and greater solitude; and he envied Wilde’s audience, while bemoaning the dwindling of the income from his own work.
In February 1895, when James’s theatrical disaster Guy Domville was taken off and replaced by Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, James wrote to his brother: ‘Oscar Wilde’s farce which followed “Guy Domville” is, I believe, a great success – and with his two roaring successes running now at once he must be raking in the profits.’8 Wilde’s wealth, however, resided in the attic of James’s imagination. In the real world, or in the world which seemed real sometimes, Wilde was actually on the run from his creditors: ‘I am already served with writs for four hundred pounds, rumours of prosperity having reached the commercial classes.’9 Suddenly, he had managed to be rich and poor at the same time.
‘Wilde,’ Declan Kiberd has written, ‘was the first major artist to discredit the romantic idea of sincerity and to replace it with the darker imperative of authenticity: he saw that in being true to a single self, a sincere man may be false to half a dozen other selves.’10 This may seem accurate in retrospect, if we view Wilde’s career as seamless, planned and fully thought out, as though it were a story or a work of art. If we view him in the few months before he went to prison, however, as he might have seemed to his contemporaries or indeed to himself, his life and his work appear rather more accidental and contradictory, dictated both by forces and feelings beyond his control and impelled by a set of actions and decisions which might easily have been different.
As George Bernard Shaw, who knew Wilde in the years of his fame as a playwright, wrote in 1938: ‘It must not be forgotten that though by culture Wilde was a citizen of all civilised capitals, he was at root a very Irish Irishman, and, as such, a foreigner everywhere but in Ireland.’11 Wilde’s Irish background remains an essential ingredient in his career, just like Stevenson’s Scottishness, James’s New England origins or Conrad’s Polish birth. Like his homosexuality, Wilde’s Irishness left him an outsider in Oxford and London, but much of the time invisibly and ambiguously so. The English upper class he wrote about in his fiction and his plays was, as Karl Miller comments, ‘a class exoticized, eroticised, by an outsider’.12 Henry James shared Wilde’s fascination with the manners and mores of this class. And all of these writers shared one essential ingredient with the people in whose country they had settled – a command of the English language. This operated as a sort of alibi for them, allowing them to shine on the page and the stage, allowing them immense possibilities for invention and disguise. The voyage from one self to another gave them their style; their style, in turn, offered them an easy intercourse with the English themselves. The problem lay in the middle.
Oscar Wilde’s parents were also steeped in ambiguities; they were members of an Irish ruling class who had offered, through his father’s work as an antiquarian and his mother’s nationalism and poetry, their allegiance both to an Ireland of the past, before the English invasion, and to an Ireland of the future, which would be free of England. They belonged to a distinguished group of Irish Protestant aristocrats and bohemians who managed to remain a ruling class in Ireland and an amusing class in London, while seeking, directly or indirectly, the destruction of English power in Ireland.
This set of configured and ambiguous allegiances gave the members of this class enormous freedom and helped to sharpen their wit. They were capable of masquerading as eminent Victorians while having rich sexual lives, just as they were capable of managing their estates and servants and having their rents paid on time while preaching freedom.
Thus Lady Gregory, born in 1852, a leading figure in the Irish revival and a founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, could begin her affair with the English poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt a year after her marriage in 1880 while modelling her dress and bearing on that of Queen Victoria; she could write seditious plays about Ireland while threatening her Irish tenants if they did not pay the rent. Thus W. B. Yeats, born in 1865, could write poems about unrequited love while pursuing an adventurous love life in London. So too the parents of Oscar Wilde: Sir William, born in 1815, could combine sexual licence with a knighthood and membership of the Dublin ruling class; Lady Wilde, born in 1821, could write editorials in nationalist newspapers calling for violent revolt against England and then happily move her salon to London after the death of her husband in 1876.
Oscar Wilde, born in 1854, loved referring to his mother as Lady Wilde. Studying at Oxford in his early twenties, he would have seemed a normal member of the upper classes, and indeed, from priggish letters written during those years, and from friendships with figures such as George Curzon, the future conservative politician and Viceroy of India, it is clear that he bore all the hallmarks of his class with pride and skill. His Irish identity was uncertain, and this very uncertainty meant that he could, while in England, insist on his own Irishness as though for the first time while learning to mimic his new friends’ Englishness.
His heritage, unlike that of his English friends, however, was based on no firm set of morals and manners, no long-held convictions about privileges and rules. His heritage was protean and open to suggestion. He looked like the English ruling class; he could speak like them if it suited him; he enjoyed their company and he entertained them; but, as a writer, what he learned to do best was mock them; and when it came to a crisis he would fundamentally misunderstand them.
His homosexuality, like his Irishness, would also loosen his allegiances to shared principles, would assist further in undermining his loyalty to any set of values held by those who made the laws and those who obeyed them. Ford Madox Ford, who at one point used the same lawyer as Wilde, knew about Wilde’s chameleon qualities and admired his ability, when the crisis came, to exude self-pity in enormous quantities while at the same time being able to see his own self-pity as a kind of play, or further self-dramatization:
He came into Humphreys’s [his solicitor’s] office … and before Humphreys could get words spoken, he had sunk into a chair, covered his face with his hands, and sobbingly deplored the excesses of his youth, his wasted talent, and his abhorred manhood. He spread himself in Biblical lamentation. But when Humphreys, coming round his table, was intent on patting him on the shoulder and telling him to cheer up and be a man … Wilde suddenly took his hands down from his face, winked jovially at [Humphreys] and exclaimed: ‘Got you there, old fellow.’
In the same article, written in 1939, Ford recalls the visits of Oscar Wilde to his grandfather Ford Madox Brown. Wilde, once again, arrived as one of his own doubles:
Mr Wilde was a quiet individual who came every Saturday, for years, to tea with the writer’s grandfather – Ford Madox Brown. Wilde would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest possible things to Ford Madox Brown, who … sat on the other side of the fire in another high-backed chair and, stretching out towards the flames his other hand, disagreed usually with Mr Wilde on subjects like that of the Home Rule for Ireland Bill or the Conversion of the Consolidated Debt.
Wilde, Ford wrote, continued these visits, ‘as he said later, out of liking for the only house in London where he did not have to stand on his head’.13
All of these dualities clearly inspired the wit, the perfect patterning and the pure subversion in his best criticism and his best work for the theatre. They do not help, however, to explain the sheer badness of his poetry, which was full of pre-Raphaelite gloom, archaic phrasing, rarefied poetic diction and sentiments he did not mean. His dualities came in many guises, then: he was not only a married man who was homosexual, an Irishman in London, a wit who was also serious, but a limp and timid lyricist who wrote brave and modern plays.
None of these dualities, however, either caused or can fully explain his frame of mind and what happened to him in the winter and spring of 1895. On 3 January of that year, his play An Ideal Husband opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London to critical acclaim and great popularity. The Prince of Wales and the future prime minister Arthur Balfour were in attendance on the opening night. The Importance of Being Earnest was already written and was set to replace Henry James’s failed play Guy Domville at the St James Theatre on 14 February.
At the beginning of January, Wilde was persuaded by his lover Lord Alfred Douglas to accompany him to Algeria, although he, in fact, wished to stay to oversee the rehearsals of his new play. As André Gide, who met them in Algiers, attested, their time in Algeria was interesting. All three of them found a pleasure and freedom not as easily or cheaply available in London or Paris. The reputation of Wilde and Douglas came before them. Gide wrote to his mother that Wilde was ‘the most dangerous product of modern civilisation’; he seemed to Gide ‘to have corrupted [Douglas] to the very marrow of his bones’. Wilde set about corrupting Gide too, or so Gide wrote much later, introducing him to an Arab boy and accompanying them to an apartment where Gide held in his ‘bare arms that perfect, wild little body, so dark, so ardent, so lascivious’.14 Later, as Gide told his mother (having left out the part about the Arab boy), they met up with Douglas, who had a boy called Ali in tow, who must have been only twelve or thirteen. Although Douglas ‘returned incessantly, and with disgusting obstinacy to things I spoke of with only with the greatest embarrassment, an embarrassment that was increased by his total lack of it’, Gide admitted that he found him ‘absolutely charming’.15
Wilde wrote to his friend Robert Ross about the joys of hashish and the beautiful boys: ‘We have been on an excursion into the mountains of Kabylia – full of villages peopled by fauns. Several shepherds fluted on reeds for us. We were followed by lovely brown things from forest to forest. The beggars here have profiles, so the problem of poverty is easily solved.’16 It is likely that the excitement they found in Algeria, while wonderful in its way, was also deeply unsettling, making English rules and responsibilities seem even more absurd and worth ignoring.
Wilde began making his way back to England at the end of January. The ferry from Algeria to France was twenty hours late because of a storm; the outgoing journey had also been rough. From Marseilles Wilde travelled to Paris, where he visited the artist Edgar Degas before returning to London to attend final rehearsals and prepare for his opening night. In the shadows always was his family whom he did not see – his sons were at boarding school, but he stayed in hotels in any case, his wife uncertain of his whereabouts – and Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who wished to sever the connection between Wilde and his son. Wilde was anchorless, rudderless and increasingly famous. He dined out and stayed out late. There is no evidence that he read quietly in his hotel room. He was not producing any new work and letters written during this time are brief and hurried. When The Importance of Being Earnest opened, the New York Times commented: ‘Oscar Wilde may be said to have at last, and by a single stroke, put his enemies under his feet.’17 But it was not true. His enemies lay both within, among the warring factions of his unsettled self, and outside himself, as the Marquess of Queenberry became more determined to save his son.
Queensberry had bought a ticket for the opening night of his play. On 14 February, Wilde wrote to an unidentified correspondent: ‘Bosie’s father is going to make a scene tonight. I am going to stop him.’18 A few days after the opening he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas:
the Scarlet Marquis made a plot to address the audience on the first night of my play! … he was not allowed to enter.
He left a grotesque bouquet of vegetables for me! This of course makes his conduct idiotic, robs it of dignity.
He arrived with a prize-fighter!!19 I had all Scotland Yard – twenty police – to guard the theatre. He prowled about for three hours, then left chattering like a monstrous ape.20
And there were other enemies too in the city where Wilde had reinvented himself: the young men, less rich and privileged than he, whom at this time he still considered his friends and whom he entertained lavishly. They would soon prove all too ready to blackmail him and inform Queensberry about his activities.
It cannot be overstated how much raw fame was attached to the author of two successful new plays running at the same time in London in these years. Nor can it be overemphasized how Wilde’s highly charged time in Algeria and the stresses of travelling there and back had further upset his equilibrium. A hundred years later, his behaviour would have been perfectly understood as deriving from a mixture of jet lag and crazed celebrity. In 1895, there were so such understandings, nor terms to describe them.
Wilde, in any case, was already, when he received the famous calling card, someone on the run, someone whose judgement on any important matter would have been seriously impaired. The card, left at the Albemarle Club, was dated 18 February, four days after his play’s opening night, but he did not receive it until ten days later. It read: ‘For Oscar Wilde posing somdomite [sic]’ and it was from the Marquess of Queensberry.
The card had been handed first to the porter at the club, who had held it for Wilde. What would the author of ‘The Decay of Lying’ or The Importance of Being Earnest say about it? How would he reply? Wilde, as he carefully read the card, lost all the flippancy and clever carelessness which he paraded in print and on the stage. Instead, he became the son of Sir William Wilde, friend to the most powerful figures in the London of his day, and a distinguished writer whose opening nights were attended by the Prince of Wales. He was elated and exhausted, bubbling with success and fame. The mask was pulled back. The card did not amuse him, or cause him to respond as readers of his work might have expected – with laughter or disdain, mockery or insouciance. It caused him to adopt a new tone, one that was pompous and hurt and self-important. His letter to Robert Ross, written on that day, uses words like ‘hideous’ and ‘ruined’ and terms like ‘criminal prosecution’. He had ceased to mock the ruling class as he strove now to present himself as an indignant member of it.
‘His swelled head,’ George Bernard Shaw later wrote, ‘led him to believe that, as he himself put it, there was nothing he could not carry through successfully: a delusion which seems to have taken possession of him when his success as a playwright brought him plenty of money for the first time.’21 The excitement of the previous two months had impaired his judgement; his status as aristocratic Irishman to whom London had pandered would not help him now as he sought to defend his good name, something about which he had been, both in his actions and his attitudes, extremely careless in the years leading up to 1895. ‘It is his vanity that has brought all this disgrace upon him,’ his brother Willie told W. B. Yeats at the time. ‘They swung incense before him. They swung it before his heart.’22 Wilde was one of the very few who did not realize that he was, as the trial began, the most vulnerable man in London.
It is only with the recent publication of the full transcript of the questioning of Wilde by the lawyer Edward Carson in Wilde’s case against the Marquess of Queensberry23 that we have an idea of precisely the sort of life he had been leading in the years before his trial: the time spent in restaurants and hotels with numerous young men from a lower social position, and the upper-class world he otherwise inhabited as a family man, famous author and frequenter of respectable clubs and drawing rooms. The transcript gives us a sense of the risks Wilde was taking in bringing the case in the first place.
Robert Ross advised him at the time not to bring an action. Frank Harris, another close friend, agreed. ‘You are sure to lose it,’ Harris is reported to have said to Wilde. ‘You haven’t a dog’s chance and the English despise the beaten.’ When Wilde had lunch at the Café Royal with Harris and George Bernard Shaw, he was urged by both to drop the case. ‘You should go abroad,’ Harris told him, ‘and, as ace of trumps, you should take your wife with you.’24 George Bernard Shaw, remembering that lunch, wrote in 1938 how Wilde ‘miscalculated the force of the social vengeance he was unloosing on himself’.25 Harris, meanwhile, claims that as the lunch came to an end ‘Oscar seemed inclined to do as I proposed’. Then Lord Alfred Douglas arrived. ‘At Oscar’s request, I repeated my argument and to my astonishment Douglas got up at once, and cried with his little white venomous, distorted face: “Such advice shows you are no friend of Oscar’s.”’26
In his preface to Harris’s book on Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw makes clear that neither he nor his associates, including Harris, knew of Wilde’s homosexuality as a matter of fact until Wilde was cross-examined in the case.27 They knew of his decadence, of his flaunting a sort of sexual ambiguity, but they did not know that he was consorting with younger men of the lower classes nor that he had actually had sexual relations with Lord Alfred Douglas. In the preface to Harris’s book, Shaw insists that the warning they gave to Wilde at the Café Royal was on the basis that a jury would not rule against a father who seemed to be protecting his own son’s reputation.
Harris’s subsequent blaming of Lord Alfred Douglas for forcing Wilde to sue for libel and, indeed, his description of Douglas’s physiognomy at the time, deserve to be taken lightly and treated with care. It was easy with hindsight to demonize Douglas; but it was Wilde who sued and it was Wilde who chose to stay in London rather than flee to France when he had lost the case against the Marquess of Queensberry and when it became inevitable that the Crown would bring a criminal charge against him.
There is no simple, clear reason why Wilde chose to remain in London once his libel action against Queensberry had collapsed and it had become apparent that, as a result of information offered in the libel case, he would be arrested on charges of gross indecency with enough evidence to convict him. As the time grew near for the decision to be made, when there was still a possibility of catching a train and boat to France, he could not make up his mind. ‘A half-packed suitcase lay on the bed, emblem of contradictory impulses,’ Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann writes. ‘He was tired of action. Like Hamlet, as he understood that hero, he wished to distance himself from his plight, to be the spectator of his own tragedy … A man so concerned with his image disdained to think of himself as a fugitive, skulking in dark corners, instead of lording it in the limelight … Suffering was more becoming than embarrassment.’28 Calling at Wilde’s house, Yeats remembers Willie Wilde saying to him: ‘If he is acquitted, he will stay out of England for a few years, and can then gather his friends about him once more – even if he is condemned he will purge his offence – but if he runs away he will lose every friend that he has.’29 Yeats later heard, ‘from whom I forget now’, that Lady Wilde had told Oscar: ‘If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you again.’30 Wilde’s family, it seemed, somehow saw their own destiny as rebels, as belonging to Irish history, in Oscar’s martyrdom; they believed their honour was at stake. ‘He is an Irish gentleman, and he will face the music,’ his brother is reported to have said.31 ‘I have never doubted,’ Yeats continues in his own account, ‘even for an instant, that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that decision half of his renown.’32
For Irish patriots of even the mildest hue, a prison sentence, especially one served in England, was a badge of honour and a cause for celebration. Willie Wilde was wrong, however, when he said that Wilde would lose every friend he had if he absconded. Most of his friends, including his wife, were English enough to favour his leaving. His refusal to do so was prompted not so much by the advice of his mother and brother, or his Irish disrespect for the law, or his prevarication, but by the fact that he had not the slightest idea what a prison sentence would entail. Prison, for him, remained an abstract thing until – after two devastating trials at the Old Bailey, in which young men whom he had trusted gave evidence against him and he was found guilty of ‘acts of gross indecency with other male persons’ – he was actually sentenced to two years in gaol with hard labour. He served those two years to the day.
‘People not familiar with prisons had no idea what their procedures were,’ Richard Ellmann comments. ‘That is perhaps the only excuse for Henry James, who wrote to Paul Bourget that Wilde’s sentence to hard labour was too severe, that isolation would have been more just.’33 Wilde’s misfortune was to serve his sentence just before prison conditions were officially changed by the 1898 Prison Act. Until that act was passed, the isolation to which all prisoners were subjected was harsher than anyone, including Wilde himself or Henry James, could imagine.
In isolation, Wilde slept on a plank bed with no mattress. He was allowed one hour’s exercise a day, walking in Indian file in the yard with other prisoners but not allowed to communicate with them. He could not sleep, he was permanently hungry and he suffered from dysentry. For the first month, Wilde was tied to the treadmill six hours a day, making an ascent, as it were, of six thousand feet each day, with five minutes’ rest after every twenty minutes. Towards the end of his sentence, when the regime had eased somewhat because of a change of governor at the gaol, the new incumbent, Major Nelson, remarked to Robert Ross: ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a sentence of this kind, he will be dead within two years.’34
In the outside world, Constance Wilde planned to take the children to Ireland, but as Vyvyan recalls:
the hue and cry after the Wilde family was just as bad, if not worse, in Ireland, the land of my father’s birth; so our plans were changed. It was thought better, after all, that we should go and hide ourselves abroad [in Switzerland]. There at least we could live unmolested … My mother remained behind, to be of what assistance she could to my father, until she too was driven from her home by the entrance of the bailiff’s men, and the subsequent sale of all the contents of the house. The sale was a scandalous piece of barefaced robbery … For months afterwards, my brother and I kept asking for our soldiers, our trains and other toys, and we could not understand why it upset our mother … It was only when I saw the catalogue, many years later, that I realised why my mother had been so upset. The sale consisted of 246 lots; number 237 was ‘A large quantity of toys’; they realised thirty shillings.35
Neither Vyvyan nor his brother ever saw their father again. Lady Wilde, the boys’ grandmother, would die during the first year of her son’s imprisonment. Constance would die within a year of his release.
In the meantime, Lord Alfred Douglas was in France, feeling as sorry for himself as he did for Wilde, with no understanding either of what a sentence of two years’ hard labour would be like. Wilde’s prison sentence was bound to change his relationship with Douglas. The affair between them, which had transformed both of their lives, had always been tempestuous. While their arguments and Douglas’s tantrums, such as they were, are well documented, their ordinary life together, the fierce attachment between them and their love for each other, must be, much of the time, taken for granted. In April and May 1895, however, before he went to prison, Wilde had made his love for Douglas absolutely clear to his friends and in a series of letters. He wrote to his friends More Adey and Robert Ross, for example: ‘Bosie is so wonderful. I think of nothing else. I saw him yesterday.’36 A week later, he wrote that ‘nothing but Alfred Douglas’s daily visits quicken me into life’.37 Douglas, in turn, corresponded with him from Paris: ‘I continue to think of you day and night and send you all my love. I am always your own loving and devoted boy.’38 Before he was sentenced, Wilde penned two last passionate and tender letters to Douglas in which he stated that ‘Never has anyone in my life been dearer than you, never has any love been greater, more sacred, more beautiful’ and ‘O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loved, my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the worlds of pain and pleasure, you are my ideal of admiration and joy.’39 He did not, indeed, could not, write to him again for nineteen months and it was during this time he began to rethink what had happened between them. The next letter is the one that came to be known as De Profundis.40
The writing of De Profundis during the final months of Wilde’s sentence was only possible because of the gradual relaxation in the severity of the prison regime, beginning in July 1896 with the arrival of Major J.O. Nelson as governor of Reading Gaol. Wilde was later to praise Nelson as ‘the most Christlike man I ever met’.41 Under the previous regime, Wilde had been allowed to write to solicitors and the Home Office, and to a limited extent to friends, but his letters were inspected and the writing materials removed as he finished each letter. Now he was to be allowed pen and ink all the time, and while what he wrote was removed each evening, it was handed back to him in the morning. De Profundis, written in the form of a long letter, a clever stratagem devised by him and agreed to by Nelson, was never sent and thus remained his property. It took him three months, with much revision.
By this time, his love for Douglas had turned into a sort of bitterness, and the tone of his long letter manages to capture that bitterness as well as the extraordinary attachment he felt for Douglas. De Profundis is neither fair-minded nor consistent; it is, at times, greatly bloated in its comparisons and its rhetoric. But in the prose there is also, much of the time, a beautiful, calm eloquence; the balance comes in the way the sentences are constructed rather than in the quality of the humility or the accusations. There is a sense of urgency, of matters newly understood being said because there might not be time or opportunity to say them in the future. Wilde’s old skill at paradox and phrase-making is no longer there to amuse his audience or mock his betters but to kill his own pain and grief. He writes not as art, but as a desperately serious matter.
‘The only beautiful things,’ his character Vivian tells us in Wilde’s essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889), ‘are the things that do not concern us.’42 Eight years later, in his cry ‘from the depths’,43 he wrote of what most deeply concerned him: ‘If there be in it one single passage that brings tears to your eyes, weep as we weep in prison when the day no less than the night is set apart for tears’ (p. 46). And then, in what is perhaps the most shocking sentence in the whole letter, he writes: ‘The supreme vice is shallowness’ (p. 46). Once upon a time it would have been the supreme virtue.
He accuses Douglas of distracting him from his art, of spending his money, of degrading him ethically, of constant scene-making, of deliberately and then thoughtlessly mistreating him. He goes over Douglas’s bad behaviour in matters large and petty, often citing dates and places and details, but all delivered in a tone which is fluent and sweeping, full of carefully controlled emotional cadence and measured elegance. The change in his voice is astonishing, like a tenor becoming a baritone, with a new range and depth and a new attention to feeling, but the old skills and tricks with pitch and paradox are still in place, despite his circumstances; even perhaps because of them.
The letter cannot be read for its accurate account of their relationship nor taken at its word. While some of the accusations are valid, others are petty and foolish and untrue. But that is not the point. It was not written by an historian attempting to set the record straight. Nor can it be read, as Wilde’s poems can be read, as efforts at the creation of a purely beautiful music. De Profundis has neither the informality of a personal letter nor the art of a piece of imaginative writing. Its seductive, hurt and passionate tone places it in a different category. The letter remains Wilde’s greatest piece of prose-writing because of the change it marks in his imaginative procedures. The high priest of flippancy and mocking laughter has set himself suddenly and shockingly against shallowness; he is desperately hurt and wounded, but he is still in command of his sentences, their structure and their sweep. In the dim light of the prison cell and with the memory of his suffering fresh, it was as though he sought a new sort of tension in his writing between breathlessness and breath-control. He writes long and highly wrought sentences, loving lists of adjectives and clever, Latinate diction and elaborate punctuation. To be followed by a pure, plain statement, full of the clipped sharp tone of the Anglo-Saxon.
‘Of course I should have got rid of you,’ he states at one point in the letter (p. 54). The reader will want to know why he did not, and the answer comes in the length and the complexity of Wilde’s relationship with Douglas, in the very intimate and immediate tone of De Profundis itself, in the letters written to Douglas in May 1895 and in the fact that both of them, once Wilde was released, made an effort to live together and stay together, to the horror of both Constance Wilde and Douglas’s family. De Profundis, then, despite everything, is a sort of love letter, even though it might not have been meant like that, nor indeed greatly welcomed by its recipient in time to come.
Wilde’s problem, on his release, was akin to his problem on being arrested: the general lack of understanding of what such a prison sentence would be like and what damage it would cause. Some of his friends presumed that he would begin writing again, not realizing that something essential in him had been broken. In June 1897, he wrote to Frank Harris: ‘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 still has to suffer. His punishment, as far as its effects go, lasts intellectually and physically, just as it lasts socially. He still has to pay.’44 In ‘The Decay of Lying’ he had criticized the writer Charles Reade for ‘a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public opinion to the state of our convict prisons’ through his novels written with a social conscience.45 Now, he himself, in two long and eloquent letters to the Daily Chronicle (pp. 188 and 201), made clear the levels of cruelty exercized in the prison system, what he had witnessed and what he had personally suffered. In his exile he had become a social reformer.
In June 1897, soon after his release, he began work on The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he described to Laurence Housman in a letter of 22 August:
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 … so I am afraid I may have denied myself, and would weep bitterly, if I had not wept away all my tears.46
Both Yeats and Richard Ellmann preferred those parts of the poem that told the story directly and dealt with the specific narrative. Yeats cut out the more abstract sections in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935. ‘The Ballad,’ Ellmann writes, ‘is strongest when it concentrates on the trooper and prison conditions, weakest when it deals with capitalised abstractions like Sin and Death, and imports imagery from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. At its best the sharp details and colloquial language carry conviction.’47
Yeats himself made well-wrought poems with a single tone and a sharp finish; his style as a poet, even when he was at his most lyrical, was decisive and definitive. Wilde managed such a tone in The Importance of Being Earnest, with seamless patterning and no room for untidy diversions or parts of the plotting which were less than perfect. It was almost unimaginable, however, that he could have produced such a work in the summer of 1897.
He had previously written poems with elaborate verse and rhyme schemes, and he was, as the plots of his plays show, a great magpie with the work of other writers, to which he added an enormous fluency of his own. Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads had appeared to great popularity in 1892. Now Wilde chose the ballad as his form – six-line stanzas with the last line often coming in a more startling and flat rhythm than the rolling rhythms of the previous five. The poem has none of the self-pity of De Profundis; there is instead a tone of terror which comes in some of the stanza-endings and then not in others. The variety in the narrative, moving from stanzas about the general plight of the condemned to the specific story of one man who is to be executed and back again, delivers moments of pure shock which would not be there were the poem more singly focused. Wilde himself realized that it was not a perfect work of art. He wrote to Robert Ross in October 1897 about his misgivings: ‘The poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic; some poetry, some propaganda. I feel it keenly, but as a whole I think the production is interesting.’48
The poem was published in February 1898 under Wilde’s Reading prison number, ‘C.3.3’, but the seventh edition, in 1899, had his name in brackets under the number. The first six editions sold five thousand copies in England within three months of publication. In 1954 when Vyvyan Holland, as he was called after his father’s disgrace when the family fled to the Continent, wrote his memoir Son of Oscar Wilde, he remarked that he did not see a copy of the poem until he went to Cambridge in 1905. Until then he had not even known of its existence. ‘I do not think that my mother ever saw it at all. The conspiracy of silence around my father was very efficient and I doubt whether anyone would have called her attention to it.’49 But he was mistaken; she merely kept it hidden from her children. On 19 February 1898, Constance wrote to her brother: ‘I am frightfully upset by this wonderful poem of Oscar’s … It is frightfully tragic and makes one cry.’50 A month before she died, she wrote about the poem again to her friend Carlos Blacker: ‘if you do see [Oscar] tell him I think The Ballad exquisite, and I hope that the great success it has had in London at all events will urge him on to write more.’51 Wilde himself died two years later, in November 1900. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was his last work.
Had Wilde died peacefully in his bed in the opening months of 1895 before bringing a case again Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, before serving his sentence, he would still be a great playwright. His work, especially The Importance of Being Earnest, would be as central in our repertoire as it is now. The man who suffered would not have come to light; the mind which created and the art he made would have been everything. What happened to him over the next five years has changed our response to his work, however. His name became a byword for martyrdom, for the fall from grace, for the gap between the salon and the prison cell which he made seem both so narrow and so wide. His plays would have survived without his notoriety, and yet when we watch them we cannot erase the knowledge that such cleverness led to prison. We hold our breath at his cheek; the laughter he provokes has a dark and unsettling edge.
Such cleverness placed under the pressure of suffering also led directly to Wilde’s greatest poem, and one of the greatest ballads written in the language, The Ballad of Reading Gaol; it also led to the astonishing and enticing cadences of De Profundis, and the reforming, steely eloquence of his letters to the Daily Chronicle, letting the wider world know what the narrow world of the prison did to its inmates. The man who had revelled in duality became in these writings quite singular, and all the more interesting and intriguing for that. He moved from being a writer of the 1890s to becoming our contemporary by adding in his work from prison new, strange and deeply affecting aspects to his old duality, a new mask which came to look more like a face than any which he had worn before.
Colm Tóibín, 2013