3

Outcast Men

‘My existence is a scandal.’

oscar wilde

Naples in mid-September was still quiet. The fashionable winter season had not yet started, and the big hotels were only just stirring back into life. Wilde and Douglas installed themselves in one of the biggest: the Hôtel Royal des Étrangers, on the waterfront, close to the Castello dell’Ovo, its glorious view across the bay framed by Vesuvius to the left and Capri on the right.1 For Wilde it was thrilling to have escaped loneliness and the drear north, to be together with Bosie, and to be in Naples – a place ‘full of Ionian and Dorian airs’.2 ‘Pleasure,’ as he remarked, ‘walks all around’.3 Wilde felt that in this new environment he would be able to write again. They might take a little villa or an apartment together for the winter, perhaps even for longer.4

In holiday mood, during those first days, they embarked on a campaign of carefree extravagance. Douglas’s plans for raising money from his family had not been fulfilled, or even pursued. His title, however, was good for credit. To an Italian hotel proprietor of the late nineteenth century any English ‘milord’ needs must be also a millionaire. Within a little over a week Douglas and Wilde ran up a bill for £68.5 Even in a hotel of ‘absurd prices’ this was an impressive performance, carrying with it, perhaps, an echo of those lavish days at the Savoy.6

But the elation of the moment could not shut out the concerns of the world beyond. Among the letters forwarded to Wilde from Paris was one from Constance, offering the longed-for meeting, urging him to come to her at the Villa Elvira. She confessed that the children would be away at school, but she enclosed photographs of – and remembrances from – them. It was too late. Wilde had, as he later told Smithers, ‘waited four months in vain’ for just such a letter. But now it arrived after he had committed his hopes and himself to Douglas and to Naples: ‘In questions of the emotions and their romantic qualities, unpunctuality is fatal.’7

He sought some additional justification for his change of attitude from the fact that Constance seemed to have deliberately waited until the children were back at school before sending for him. It was their love that he wanted, or so he claimed. And now he feared it was ‘irretrievable’.8 He told Blacker (a letter from whom had also been forwarded to Naples) that ‘had Constance allowed me to see my boys’ things would have been ‘quite different’ – adding, disingenuously, ‘I don’t in any way venture to blame her for her action, but every action has its consequence.’9

He wrote back to Constance, nevertheless, suggesting that he would come and see her, though not until the following month. The note of urgency and yearning that had dominated his communications over the summer had quite evaporated. Constance, full of happy preparations for what she supposed would be Wilde’s imminent arrival, was completely ‘ballottée’ by this brief and noncommittal reply.10 Vyvyan, on the eve of his departure for school, always recalled how her expectant joy turned to misery when she found that Oscar ‘had other claims upon his time’.11 She wrote at once to Blacker to vent her unhappiness. And although Wilde had carefully avoided mentioning that he was in Naples with anyone, least of all with Lord Alfred Douglas, her suspicions were piqued. ‘Question: has he seen the dreadful person [Douglas] at Capri? No-one goes to Naples at this time of year, so I see no other reason for his going, and I am unhappy.’12

To Wilde she wrote back at once (as she subsequently explained) ‘saying that I required an immediate answer to my question whether he had been to Capri or whether he had met anywhere that appalling individual. I also said that he evidently did not care much for his boys since he neither acknowledged their photos which I sent him nor the remembrances that they sent him.’13 To these blows others were added: Ross and Turner did know that Wilde was with Douglas, and both of them wrote to express their concern at a reunion which they knew must damage Wilde’s chances of rehabilitation – and which might well affect his right to an income.

Wilde countered with a mixture of grand statement and self-pity: ‘My going back to Bosie,’ he told Ross, ‘was psychologically inevitable: and setting aside the interior life of the soul with its passion for self-realization at all costs, the world forced it on me. I cannot live without the atmosphere of Love: I must love and be loved, whatever price I pay for it… Of course I shall often be unhappy, but still I love him: the mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him.’14 While to Turner he claimed that going back to Bosie – who ‘is himself a poet’ – would be good for his work, ‘and that, after all, whatever my life may have been ethically, it has always been romantic, and Bosie is my romance. My romance is a tragedy of course, but it is none the less a romance, and he loves me very dearly, more than he loves or can love anyone else, and without him my life was dreary.’15

Turner was urged to ‘stick up’ for them.16 He would have been kept busy. News of the elopement, as it spread round Wilde’s circle of friends, was greeted with dismay: W. R. Paton (an Oxford contemporary) was ‘physically & actually sick’ when he learnt of it;17 Blacker felt that Wilde was now ‘beyond redemption’.18 Sherard, probably ‘in his cups’ at the Authors’ Club one afternoon, declared blunderingly that it was ‘an unfortunate mistake’ and that Wilde’s ‘actions would everywhere be misconstrued; that his traducers and enemies would be justified in the eyes of the world, and many sympathies would be alienated’.19 Others wrote ‘long tedious letters’ informing Wilde that he had ‘wrecked [his] life for the second time’.20 Even Ross continued to ‘bombard’ him with admonitory epistles – ‘an unfair thing,’ Wilde complained, ‘as unfortified places are usually respected in civilized war.21

Ross’s reprimands were endured in silence.22 But when the report reached Naples of Sherard’s ill-considered outburst, Wilde wrote a sharp note of reprimand, charging his old friend with playing the moralizing hypocrite ‘Tartuffe’– always one of the strongest terms of contempt in his personal lexicon.23 It marked a sad end to their intimacy, if not quite their friendship. Douglas’s family were no more pleased with the arrangement than were Wilde’s friends. Lady Queensberry had hoped that her son’s attachment to Wilde had dwindled away over the years of enforced separation. But for the moment she forbore from challenging him – perhaps aware of how intransigent he became when crossed.24

Constance, of course, very soon discovered from Blacker that Wilde and Douglas were together. She at once fired off what Wilde described as a ‘terrible’ letter, full of prohibitions: ‘I forbid you to see Lord Alfred Douglas. I forbid you to return to your filthy, insane life. I forbid you to live in Naples. I will not allow you to come to Genoa.’25 Wilde chose to regard such demands as ‘foolish’.26 He refused to apologize, to explain, or to yield to her demands. ‘I wrote to her,’ he told More Adey, ‘to say that I would never dream of coming to see her against her will, that the only reason that would induce me to come to see her was the prospect of a greeting of sympathy with me in my misfortunes, and affection and pity. That for the rest, I only desired peace, and to live my own life as best I could. That I could not live in London, or, as yet, in Paris, and that I certainly hoped to winter at Naples.’27 Wrapped up in his own drama, he refused to acknowledge the feelings of others.28

To Constance his reply came as a final blow. ‘Had I received this letter a year ago,’ she told Blacker, ‘I should have minded, but now I look upon it as the letter of a madman who has not even enough imagination to see how trifles affect children, or unselfishness enough to care for the welfare of his wife. It rouses all my bitterest feeling, and I am stubbornly bitter when my feelings are roused. I think the letter had better remain unanswered and each of us make our own lives independently. I have latterly (God forgive me) an absolute repulsion of him.’29 Her bitterness would soon find a practical expression.

Wilde realised that her silence was ominous, and that he might expect ‘a thunderbolt’ from her solicitor. ‘I suppose she will now try to deprive me of my wretched £3 a week,’ he wrote bitterly to Ross. ‘Women are so petty, and Constance has no imagination.’30 Money was certainly on his mind. It was needed to fulfil the dream of self-realization, and, more pressingly, so that he and Douglas could escape from the expensive hotel and into a rented villa. Douglas received ‘about £8 a week’ from his mother but was, Wilde claimed, ‘of course… penniless as usual’.31 It was left to Wilde to take up the burden. There was the promised £100 from Dalhousie Young for the Daphnis and Chloe libretto, a work that Wilde now conceived as a collaboration with Douglas. And, after various irritating minor delays, the money arrived.32 There were several loans that Wilde had made to friends – notably the £18 or £20 to Ernest Dowson – which might be recalled.33 Wilde also retained his conviction that Leonard Smithers should pay him an advance of £20 for The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he diligently set about convincing Smithers of the fact too.34 And, beyond that, Wilde had dreams of a large US serial rights sale for his poem: ‘I really think £500 should be asked, and £300 taken.’35

On the strength of these sums, actual and wished for, he and Douglas took a ‘gracious apartment’ in a charming villa in Posillipo on the northern edge of the town, paying four months’ rent in advance at the beginning of October.36 Framed by shaded tree-lined alleys and well-kept flower-beds, it had a view over the bay, a terrace, and marble steps leading down to the sea.37 There was even a piano (which Douglas could play).38 It seemed a haven from the chorus of disapproval from across the Alps. Some of the rooms might be adorned with ill-omened peacock feathers, but such things could be (and were) removed.39 There were four servants, who cost little more than their keep: a cook, Carmine; a maid; and two boys, Peppino and Michele. Douglas estimated that the immediate daily outgoings should be less than 10s a day.40

The idyll was slightly undercut when, on moving in, they discovered that the villa was infested with rats. And Douglas, having sat up in bed for two nights ‘frozen with terror’,41 insisted that they must move to a nearby hotel to sleep.42 The villa’s proprietor undertook to poison the pests, but – as Douglas reported – ‘apparently they live on poison. The more they eat the more active they become. They seem to treat it as a sort of aphrodisiac.’43 Wilde felt that a surer measure would be to call on the services of a local witch – who ‘with two flutes’ would be able to charm the rats off the premises.44 Michele produced a gratifyingly hideous old sorceress, bent double and with a distinct beard, who, he claimed, was ‘infallible’. And certainly Wilde chose to believe that it was her ‘burned odours’ and muttered incantations, rather than the conventional arsenic, that were chiefly responsible for seeing off the vermin.45 The witch also told their fortunes, but it is not recorded what she foresaw.46

Life at the Villa Giudice began in an aura of productive harmony. ‘Oscar and I are getting on capitally,’ Douglas reported to Adey.47 Wilde strove to believe that ‘his old power’ was coming back to him now that he was ‘happy’ and in the south. He felt ‘the bruised leaves’ of his spirit begin to unfold in the light and warmth of the Neapolitan sun and Douglas’s affection. ‘I can write as well, I think, as I used to write,’ he told Smithers. ‘Half as well would satisfy me.’48 His various play plans were all jostling for attention. He was preparing himself for Daphnis and Chloe by reading the libretto of ‘Tristan’.49 Douglas, meanwhile, was setting a good example, producing a ‘lovely’ lyric for the opera,50 as well as three sonnets which Wilde chose to consider ‘quite wonderful’: he dubbed them the ‘Triad of the Moon’. They were sent to Henley at the New Review – though whether as a provocation, a joke or a serious proposition, it is hard to know. They were not published. Another Douglas sonnet, on Mozart, was sent to Robin Grey, the editor of the Musician, but with the same lack of success.51

For Wilde the most pressing task was completing The Ballad of Reading Gaol and arranging the details of its publication. Having been working on the typed-up draft that he had received back from Smithers, he was able to produce, and send off, a much-amended version at the beginning of October. Within days, however, he was dispatching a sheaf of further additional verses (‘four more… of great power and romantic-realistic suggestion’).52 And others followed at regular intervals throughout the month. There was a need to bulk up the poem to book length, and also to balance its various artistic aims.53 He worked hard.54 The task was not an easy one: ‘I find it difficult,’ he confessed, ‘to recapture the mood and manner of [the poem’s] inception. It seems alien to me now – real passions so soon become unreal – and the actual facts of one’s life take different shape and remould themselves strangely.’55 He later pretended that the additional material added during these weeks reflected his life in Naples rather more than his time at Reading.56

He sought – as so often before – Ross’s literary and critical advice on the text, receiving from him ‘a lot of suggestions’, and accepting ‘half of them’. He retained, though, his use of such charged adjectives as ‘dreadful’ and ‘fearful’ for the commonplace incidents and objects of prison life, defending it as being ‘psychologically’ apt: they described not the thing itself, but ‘its effect on the soul’.57 And Douglas – whose poetry Wilde so much admired, and who had himself been working in the ballad form – was also on hand, to act both as a sounding board and as a slightly rivalrous counterbalance to Ross’s editorial ideas. Wilde even paid him the poetic tribute of borrowing one of his couplets to fashion the phrase, ‘That night the empty corridors / Were full of forms of Fear, / And up and down the iron town / Stole feet we could not hear’.58

On the whole Wilde was pleased with his efforts:59 in places he had – as he put it – been able to ‘out-Kipling Henley’.60 Of course there were reservations: ‘Much,’ he told Turner, ‘is, I feel, for a harsher instrument than the languorous flute I love.’61 But this, he acknowledged, was probably inevitable: ‘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 interesting: that it is interesting from more points of view than one is artistically to be regretted.’62

Although Wilde was travelling incognito as Sebastian Melmoth, rumours of his, and Douglas’s, presence in Naples soon began to circulate. The first Italian paper to announce the fact managed, however, to confuse Lord Alfred Douglas with the young writer Norman Douglas who, retiring from a brief diplomatic career at the age of thirty, had recently moved to a villa also in Posillipo. Norman Douglas had staying with him an aged and infirm Spanish count (who was duly confused with Wilde) and as a result it was reported that Wilde was in Naples very much broken down in health. The British consul in Naples, Eustace Neville-Rolfe (who was a aware of Wilde’s presence) wrote to the Corriere di Napoli to point out the error of their account, and a brief correction duly appeared.63 The false report of Wilde’s decrepit state had, however, already been taken up by numerous British and foreign newspapers, and was much recycled – though without any mention of an accompanying Douglas, whether ‘Norman’ or ‘Lord Alfred’.64

Other articles in the Neapolitan press soon followed.65 Some papers dismissed Wilde with a few slighting references to ‘the English décadent’ and his trial.66 Others, though, sensed a story. Journalists began to ‘dog his heels’.67 A reporter from one of the city’s evening papers tricked his way into the villa in the hope of an interview. Wilde dismissed him, irritated by the intrusion. A report of the brief non-encounter duly appeared.68 Wilde, who had once delighted in playing on the press, no longer desired to play. He was annoyed by the unwanted attention, and by the ungenerous assessments of some of the articles; Il Mattino referred to him as ‘the most insufferable kind of bore that contemporary chronicles have inflicted upon the patient public’.69 ‘I don’t want to be written about,’ he complained ‘I want peace – that is all.’70 When he learnt that there were no newspapers on Capri, he half-jokingly suggested moving to the island.71

The fashionable expatriate community, increasing as the autumn advanced, chose to ignore him. ‘It is very curious,’ he told Ross with mock innocence, ‘that none of the English colony here have left cards on us.’72 There was, however, always the danger that indifference might shade into hostility. Wilde was made uncomfortably aware of this when he and Douglas (using the £10 received from Smithers) took the short trip across the bay to Capri in mid-October. They planned to stay three days: ‘I want,’ Oscar explained, ‘to lay a few simple flowers on the tomb of Tiberius. As the tomb is of someone else really, I shall do so with the deeper emotion.’73 The exact details of the expedition are unclear, but it seems they intended to stop at the Hotel Quisisana, and were just settling down to dinner there, when the proprietor appeared and ‘with perfect ceremony’ asked if they might leave. Some British guests, recognizing Wilde, had complained of his presence. They moved on to a second establishment only for the same awful charade to be repeated. Rather than risk a third rebuff they contemplated the tedium of sitting up all night, without dinner, waiting for the dawn steamer to take them back to Naples.74

From this sorry vigil they were, it seems, rescued by the island’s Swedish-born doctor, Axel Munthe. Chancing upon the two ‘lost souls’ wandering in the piazza, Munthe hailed Douglas, whom he had come to know the previous year. He had no objection to being introduced to Wilde, indeed was shocked that Douglas could suppose him ‘so ignorant and so brutal as to be unkind to anyone who has suffered so much or been so shamefully treated’. The conviction of Wilde had always seemed to him ‘utterly absurd’.75 He insisted that both men accompany him home to dinner and rest.76 Wilde was delighted with the art-filled villa at Anacapri, and with Munthe himself, finding him ‘a wonderful personality’ and ‘a great connoisseur of Greek things’.77 Douglas stayed on at Capri the next day, to dine with the American socialite Mrs Snow, but Wilde, chastened perhaps by the experience at the Quisisana, returned at once to the greater anonymity of Naples. He chose not to mention the distressing incident to Ross.78

There were, though, a few English friends and acquaintances who, on passing through Naples, did not shun them. John Knapp, an Oxford contemporary of Douglas’s, spent some happy hours in their company,79 while the campaigning journalist Harry de Windt (who wrote – approvingly – about Russian prison camps) hailed Wilde when he came across him ‘seated in solitary state, with a Bock before him, outside the Café Gambrinus’; and there was a subsequent dinner together with Douglas one evening.80 Both these visitors, however, noted the slightly claustrophobic devotion of the two exiles, isolated as they were from the wider social scene. Knapp remembered Douglas as being ‘quite infatuated with Oscar’, while to de Windt Wilde delivered a ‘long eulogy’ on Douglas, saying how he had ‘stuck to him through thick and thin and was his best and most faithful friend’.81

But if English companionship was often limited, other diversions were to hand. Wilde, to his great gratification, was taken up by a coterie of young Neapolitan writers. Of these the most enthusiastic was a twenty-five-year-old poet and sometime magazine editor G. G. Rocco (the initials stood for ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi’), who had sought Wilde out within days of his arrival. An excellent English speaker, he undertook to teach Wilde Italian, coming three times a week for sessions of ‘Italian conversation’.82

Although Wilde’s trials had been widely reported in Italy, knowledge of his actual work remained very limited. There had – extraordinarily – been a production of Vera at the Teatro Diana in Milan in 1890, which closed after three performances; and a few passages from ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ had appeared, in translation, in 1892, as a supplement to a Sicilian anarchist magazine.83 Rocco suggested that he might translate Salomé into Italian. Wilde was delighted. He wanted to be recognized in Naples not merely as a notorious celebrity but also ‘as an artist’.84 He did not, however, have a copy of the play with him, and had to write to London in the hope of borrowing one. Ada Leverson, with typical generosity, lent hers.85

Rocco was also convinced that, once the play was translated, it would be possible to mount a production in Naples.86 This was an exciting idea. ‘It would help me greatly to have it done,’ Wilde informed Turner.87 His only concerns were practical; it would be necessary to find ‘an actress of troubling beauty and flute-like voice’ for the title role, and (as he explained to Stanley Markower) ‘unfortunately most of the tragic actresses of Italy – with the exception of Duse – are stout ladies, and I don’t think I could bear a stout Salome.’88 The religious objections that had stymied the London production did not hold in Italy. Indeed Rocco was friendly with Giovanni Bovio, a Neapolitan writer and MP, whose own biblical drama, Cristo alla festa di Purim, had already enjoyed a nationwide success.89 And when Rocco completed his first draft of the translation, under supervision from Wilde, he organized a reading of it at Bovio’s home. The play was enthusiastically received by the assembled crowd of writers, poets, students and journalists – and most especially by Signora Bovio, who, according to Rocco, was unstinting in her praises.90 It was an auspicious start. And another of the guests, Luigi Conforti, impressed by the vigour of Wilde’s writing, suggested a rather more public second reading at the Circolo Filologico di Napoli; sadly, though, nothing came of the plan.91

Conforti, a poet and historian, was also the secretary of the Museo Nazionale at Naples, and had just published a guide to its collections. Wilde was a frequent visitor to the museum, delighting in its incomparable gathering of antiquities from Pompeii and Herculaneum, Stabiae, Cumae and Rome. He was drawn particularly to the gallery of ‘lovely Greek bronzes’.92 There, among the emperors, dancers and philosophers, he could ponder the lithe and naked Wrestlers, the so-called Narcissus, and Mercury Reposing (described by Baedeker as ‘a beautiful picture of elastic youth’).93 These were wonderful things. ‘The only bother,’ as Wilde reported archly to Dowson, ‘is that they all walk about the town at night.’ But, as he added, ‘one gets delicately accustomed to that – and there are compensations.’94

If that solitary night with Ross at Berneval had re-introduced Wilde to ‘the delights of homosexuality’, Naples offered something more. Although celebrated as a place of fashionable resort, it had also a darker reputation as a land of sexual opportunity. The old pagan morality of the Greeks seemed to persist in its shaded alleys and sunlit streets. Young men were readily available for sex. As one foreign visitor recorded, it was only necessary ‘to show an interest in a half-grown youth, to remark on his curly hair or his almond-shaped eyes, and the young man begins to flirt… and with unmistakable intentions’.95 And as long as public decency was not offended, the law did not concern itself with such encounters. Douglas had confirmed the truth of all this during his visit the previous year, and was now eager to introduce Wilde to the city’s sexual underworld. Wilde’s assertions, made in the weeks after his release, about how his former promiscuous life among the London renters had been ‘unworthy of an artist’, were soon modified, and then forgotten. Over the coming months he – in Ross’s phrase – ‘reverted to homosexual excesses’.96 The pleasure of bought casual sex was as piquant as ever. If Wilde noted that, with age, ‘one is more difficult to please’ in sensual matters, he also found that ‘the sting of pleasure [was] even keener than in youth and far more egotistic’.97

Rocco seems to have joined Wilde and Douglas in these sexual adventures, along with a new English friend, I. D. W. (‘Sir John’) Ashton – described by Wilde as ‘a most charming and delightful fellow’, astounding ‘in his capacity for pleasure, grand in his cups, and with a heart of gold’.98 Having sex with Neapolitan youths was stimulating for Wilde’s language skills: he talked to them about the aesthetics of attraction, and they taught him the idiom of the streets. ‘I am getting rather astonishing in my Italian conversation,’ he boasted to Adey. ‘I believe I talk a mixture of Dante and the worst modern slang.’99

The press began to take note of Wilde’s assignations. There were knowing references to his ‘nocturnal walks… in search of adventure’.100 One scandal sheet carried a fanciful account of Wilde passing the night at a hotel with five young soldiers, each from a different regiment (the hotel porter was concerned that, with Wilde seducing so many of the military, there might be a danger to national security).101

In the wake of such stories and ‘all sorts of unpleasant gossip’, Douglas’s ‘people’ – his mother and brother – increased their efforts to break up the ménage. At their prompting Denis Browne, an attaché from the embassy and an Oxford friend of Douglas’s, came down from Rome. After an apparently jolly luncheon at the villa, he took Douglas aside and urged him to abandon Wilde and leave Naples. Douglas, characteristically, bridled at this interference. Browne called him ‘a quixotic fool’, and they ‘parted in anger’.102

In truth, though, life at Posillipo was beginning to show signs of strain. The bright start could not be maintained. The lack of money was a constant source of stress and division. They lived in a wearying state of ‘daily financial crisis’.103 Douglas’s modest allowance was – as Wilde announced more than once – ‘not enough for his own wants’, let alone for both of them.104 The ‘hand to mouth struggle’ was only ‘kept up by desperate telegrams to [Douglas’s] reluctant relations, and pawning of pins and studs’.105 When they were totally without cash they had to dine back at the Hôtel Royal des Étrangers, where they could at least eat on credit.106

Dowson did send Wilde £10 of what he owed;107 an unexpected £9 arrived as a gift from Ross (‘a miracle of a very wonderful kind’);108 and Turner, if he did not send money, paid for a £2 10s postal order to be left, in Wilde’s name, for the handsome Harry Elvin on his release from Reading.109 But the £20 advance due from the always cash-strapped Smithers only arrived in piecemeal fashion, and only after numerous (expensive) telegrams and many fruitless visits to Cook’s. ‘I calculate the expenses incurred by waiting for [your] £20 at £34 up to the present,’ Wilde told his publisher at the beginning of November, when half of it was still owing. ‘The mental anxiety cannot be calculated. I suppose you think that mental anxiety is good for poets. It is not the case, when pecuniary worries are concerned.’ In desperation Wilde even wrote to Ernest Leverson, reviving his claim to the money he felt was due to him. He received no reply.110

Adding to the sense of anxiety and frustration was the lack of progress in selling the rights to The Ballad of Reading Gaol in America. ‘I keep on building castles of fairy gold in the air,’ Wilde told Dowson. ‘We Celts always do.’111 But the golden castles, as is so often the case, were slow to materialize. No offers arrived, and all the feedback was discouraging. It was both a shock and surprise. ‘I had no idea that there were such barriers between me and publication in America,’ Wilde lamented to Ross. ‘I thought I would romp in, and secure a good lump sum. It is curious how vanity helps the successful man, and wrecks the failure. In the old days half of my strength was my vanity.’112 As a final ploy he suggested contacting his wonderfully efficient American play agent, Elisabeth Marbury, in the hope that she would be able to do something.113

The silence from across the Atlantic – and the ever-pressing need for money – persuaded Wilde to revisit his decision about British serial rights. Having assured Smithers that he would let the publisher have ‘the perfect virginity of my poem for the satyrs of the British public to ravish’,114 he now suggested a simultaneous publication in a newspaper. He claimed to have been offered £50 by Robin Grey at the Musician, and he told Ross that he would, indeed, be prepared to ‘accept any English paper’ – the Sunday Sun, the Saturday Review or even Reynolds’s Newspaper – ‘it circulates widely amongst the criminal classes, to which I now belong, so I shall be read by my peers – a new experience for me’.115

Smithers was horrified by the notion and, supported by Ross, issued an ultimatum, threatening to abandon plans for the book’s publication if any such arrangement were made.116 Wilde backed down: ‘I dare say you will think me very unpractical and all that,’ he told Smithers, ‘but I candidly confess that if I have to choose between Reynolds and Smithers, I choose Smithers.’117 And, although he sought to excuse himself to Ross by claiming that Smithers had written to him ‘several times’ saying ‘he did not mind the thing appearing elsewhere’ he was obliged to abandon the plan: ‘I quite see that it would spoil the book.’118

And Wilde did want a book. He kept up a close correspondence with Smithers about the physical form of the volume. The challenge was to make something distinct and distinguished: ‘The public is largely influenced by the look of a book,’ Wilde declared. ‘It is the only artistic thing about the public.’119 His initial idea was for a ‘very artistic’ production – with a wonderful cover (paper of course), frontispiece, initial letters, culs-de-lampe etc. But his hopes of a frontispiece – something ‘sombre, troubled and macabre’ by Paul Herrmann, an ‘interesting genius’ he had met in Paris – gradually dwindled as no drawing arrived. He accepted that the first edition at least would have to be without illustration.120

The sense of distinction would be created by the choice of materials and the use of typography. In order to give the book ‘thickness and solidity’ and prevent it looking too like ‘a sixpenny pamphlet’, it was decided to print the text on alternate pages.121 This, together with the thick Dutch hand-made paper chosen by Smithers, gave sufficient bulk to warrant a cloth binding. And – on Wilde’s recommendation – a ‘cinnamon’ colour was chosen, with white cloth (and gold lettering) for the spine. The proposed format, rather taller and thinner than the standard, also ‘delighted’ the author.122

On receiving the first set of proofs, Wilde approved of Smithers’ choice of typeface, though he considered the question marks ‘lacking in style, and the stops, especially the full-stops, characterless’.123 Much additional care, though, had to be expended upon the wording and layout of the title page. It was agreed that Wilde’s name was not to appear, but rather the author should be designated solely by his prison number, C.3.3. The public, Wilde remarked, ‘like an open secret’.124

Although there was to be an epigraph commemorating Trooper Wooldridge as the subject of the poem, Wilde wanted to add also a personal dedication to Ross: ‘When I came out of prison / some met me with garments and spices, / and others with wise counsel. / You met me with love.’125 Ross, however, demurred, partly because he thought the wording both ‘unsuitable’ and untrue – he had met Wilde with garments and spices, to say nothing of wise counsel – but also because, as he pointed out to Smithers, since his name was not mentioned (nor even indicated by initials), ‘everyone will believe rightly or wrongly that Bosie Douglas is intended. This will damage the reputation of the poem everywhere and immediately prejudice everyone against it directly they open the book.’ Indeed Ross half suspected that Wilde had worded the dedication so he could ‘tell me and Douglas and two or three other people that each was intended’.126

What sort of market the book might have remained unclear. The size and pricing of the first edition was much debated between author and publisher, with the former tending towards optimism, and the latter counselling caution. Wilde dismissed Smithers’ early suggestion of ‘an edition of 600 copies at 2/6!’: ‘If the thing goes at all it should certainly sell 1500 copies, at that price. If on the other hand 500 is the probable sale, it should be 5 shillings.’127 Money dominated Wilde’s thoughts.

As the autumn drew on, the daily anxiety about ‘ways and means’ was taking its slow toll on the mood at Villa Giudice. Douglas felt sure that Wilde could earn good money from writing plays, as he had in the past, and could not understand why progress was so slow. He became sullen and resentful at Wilde’s failure to produce a commercial drama. He was not accustomed to want. And when the local tradesmen began to turn up demanding payment for small debts, Douglas’s temper ‘went to pieces’.128 The hoped-for idyll of domestic happiness and creative productivity receded with every day. Both Wilde and Douglas grew increasingly unhappy with their predicament, yet neither was prepared to confess it to the other. Having fought so hard, and sacrificed so much, to achieve their reunion, any admission that it was not ideal was too painful to contemplate. Nevertheless the great emotional fact was unignorable, even if it remained unspoken: their old love could not be rekindled.

Douglas did at least admit to himself: ‘I had lost that supreme desire for [Wilde’s] society which I had before, and which made a sort of aching void when he was not with me.’129 But this knowledge merely made him feel even less able to abandon Wilde. It could not be done without a loss of honour: an excuse was needed. He sought to provoke a crisis. There were – as he put it – ‘several quarrels’.130 Crockery was thrown.131 Wilde recalled the horror of one row, when Douglas, smarting from having been ‘dunned’ for an unpaid laundry bill, raged and ‘whipped’ Wilde with his acerbic tongue: ‘It was appalling.’132 But Wilde – without other options, worn down in spirit, and naturally non-confrontational – had neither the energy nor the inclination to rise to the bait. ‘I could only stand and see love turned to hate,’ he later told Frank Harris; ‘the strength of love’s wine making the bitter more venomous.’ Only once, it seems, did he snap. When Bosie asked him what he had meant by the line, ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’ he answered, without emotion, ‘You should know.’133

Wilde’s room to manoeuvre was further reduced when, on 16 November, the long-dreaded ‘thunderbolt’ finally struck: a letter arrived from Hansell informing him that he was to be deprived of his allowance from Constance because he was living with Douglas. He railed against the decision: ‘I do not think it fair to say that I have created a “public scandal” by being with him… my existence is a public scandal. But I do not think I should be charged with creating a scandal by continuing to live: though I am conscious that I do so.’ He railed against Hansell – who was, after all, his own solicitor, rather than Constance’s – for accepting the definition of Douglas as a ‘disreputable person’; he had, after all, never been convicted of any crime. He railed against Ross and Adey for not opposing Hansell’s view: ‘I do not deny that Alfred Douglas is a gilded pillar of infamy, but do deny that he can be properly described in a legal document as a disreputable person.’134 He railed against the world: ‘I wish you would start a Society for the Defence of Oppressed Personalities’, he told Smithers. ‘At present there is a gross European concert headed by brutes and solicitors against us.’135

There was, though, little that could be done. Forces were massing against them. Douglas received a letter from his brother urging him to separate from Wilde (‘You have gained your point and proved you are not to be interfered with’).136 And this was followed up by letter from Lady Queensberry announcing that she would be stopping Douglas’s own allowance if he continued to live with Wilde.137 Wilde wondered whether, if Douglas moved out of the Villa Giudice, and they no longer shared a roof, that might satisfy the powers, and restore their respective allowances: ‘To say that I would never see [Bosie] or speak to him again would of course be childish – out of the question.’138 But there was no support for this idea. It was clear that they would ‘be forced to compromise the matter… and separate at least for the present’.139 There was perhaps a sense of relief in this for both Wilde and Douglas: a termination for which neither of them would have to take responsibility.

Certainly Douglas claimed that he finally ‘felt and saw’ that Wilde did not really wish him to stay ‘and that it would really be a relief to him if I went away’. Even so he felt unable to abandon the now allowance-less Wilde without some provision. He persuaded his mother that he would leave Naples only if she arranged payment of at least some of the £500 ‘debt of honour’ that the Douglas family owed Wilde for the costs of his case against Queensberry. She promised £200 on receipt of written declarations from both Wilde and Bosie that they would never live together under the same roof – declarations that were duly made.140 She sent also an immediate £68 to pay the bill at the Hôtel Royal. This account having been settled, Bosie departed for Rome in the first week of December with – as he put it – ‘a clear conscience’.

He insisted to his mother that he still loved and admired Wilde: ‘I look on him as a martyr to progress. I associate myself with him in everything. I long to hear of his success and artistic rehabilitation… at the very summit of English literature.’ He declared his intention of writing to him occasionally and seeing him ‘from time to time in Paris and elsewhere’. But he confirmed that the experience of Naples had been both chastening and ‘lucky’: ‘If I hadn’t rejoined him and lived with him for two months, I should never have got over the longing for him. It was spoiling my life and spoiling my art and spoiling everything. Now I am free.’141

Wilde too was free, left alone at Posillipo to ‘try to get to literary work’.142 There was, at least, a small flurry of last-minute editorial problems to occupy his attention, as The Ballad of Reading Gaol advanced towards the press. The printers (the ‘idiotic’ Chiswick Press) became anxious that the descriptions of the prison doctor, chaplain and governor – variously designated in the poem as coarse-mouthed, shivering and yellow-faced – might be libellous. They needed to be reassured that the figures were generic, not specific.143 And Wilde himself had a sudden doubt about the resonant opening description of Trooper Wooldridge: ‘He did not wear his scarlet coat, / For blood and wine are red.’ Wooldridge’s regiment was the Royal Horse Guards – famously known as the ‘Blues’. Did they, Wilde wondered, actually wear blue uniforms? ‘I cannot alter my poem if they do,’ he told Smithers; ‘to me his uniform was red.’144 He conceded also that it would be best to wait until the new year before bringing out the book: as he remarked, ‘I am hardly a Christmas present.’145

In these deliberations and decisions Wilde no longer had the informed support of Robbie Ross. There had been an unfortunate falling-out (provoked by Douglas) over what was deemed to be Ross’s unsupportive attitude to the sale of serial rights in the poem.146 Ross had written to Smithers declaring that he felt he no longer had Wilde’s ‘confidence in business matters’ and so did not wish to be connected with his affairs any more. Wilde was at once contrite, begging Ross for forgiveness – and telling Smithers that if Ross ‘will kindly send me a pair of his oldest boots I will blacken them with pleasure, and send them back to him with a sonnet’.147 Ross, however, was not to be wooed back at once.