The Fall of the House of Wilde (62 page)

Douglas was bewildered by this tirade. He made no further attempt to communicate directly with Oscar but used Ross and Adey to mediate on his behalf. He wrote to Ross on 4 June, agreeing to withdraw the volume of poetry, but he refused to hand back the letters and possessions. ‘Possession of these letters and the recollections they may give me, even if they give me no hope, will perhaps prevent me from putting an end to a life which has now no raison d'être.' Was it not Oscar who was the victim, living a harsh, forlorn, futureless existence while Douglas hung out in Capri? In any event, Douglas had not lost his itch for publicity. Having agreed not to publish in
Mercure de France
, he wrote another article defending homosexuality, and had it published in
La Revue blanche
on 1 June, a few days before he had replied to Ross. Once again he indulges in self-praise. ‘Today I am proud that I have been loved by a great poet who perhaps esteemed me because he recognised that, besides a beautiful body, I possessed a beautiful soul.' He continued, ‘Oscar Wilde is now suffering for being a uranian, a Greek, a sexual man . . . I have already said that such men are the salt of the earth.' He claimed that 25 per cent of all great men are sodomites and repeated the tedious attacks on his father, comparing Queensberry to Nero, Tiberius and Jack the Ripper, among others.
¹⁷
Moderation had never been his strong suit.

This ill-conceived piece made Oscar look ridiculous. It was inevitable that tempers would rise, and rise they did. Douglas expressed himself baffled at Oscar's reaction, and finished off a letter, written on 20 September 1896 to Adey but to be conveyed to Oscar. ‘Of my undying (I use the word in its real sense not in that in which he so often used it to me) love and devotion to him he may rest assured whether he continues to deserve it or not.' This was, of course, just what Oscar wanted to hear. And what Oscar wrote on 25 September about Douglas to Adey says it all in this love-hate battle. ‘It is horrible he should still have the power to wound me and find some curious joy in so doing . . . He is too evil.'
¹⁸
The perfection of Douglas's poison could still bewitch Oscar. This acknowledgement is a rehearsal for his ‘Letter to Douglas', posthumously entitled
De Profundis
, the longest love-hate letter in history.

42

Author of a Legend

Oscar started writing ‘Letter to Douglas', or
De Profundis
, in January and finished it in March 1897. ‘The most important letter of my life,' he said to Ross of this
cri de coeur
, which begins ‘Dear Bosie' and ends eighty-four pages later with ‘Your affectionate friend'. Writing to Douglas was therapeutic, as he explained when he had finished it to Ross. ‘For nearly two years I had within me a growing burden of bitterness, much of which I have now got rid of.'
¹
The letter is a settling of accounts with Douglas. He attributes much of the blame for the course of events to Douglas, and felt that his own fault was to be too weak-willed and to have loved too much. But when writing it, Oscar must have intended the letter to be published, for it also draws up a statement of account of the writer for the public, and thus owes some debt to Newman's
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
. Indeed, he asked Ross to have it typed, to keep the original and send a copy to himself and one to Douglas.

The letter is the closest we get to the private Oscar Wilde, the swings and contradictions in thinking – along with his strategy of puffing himself to mask a wounded ego. But there is also a feverish fear of what is to come. He picks over the dying embers of a ruined life and wonders upon what basis he can build a future. ‘Morality' he dismisses as a foundation – ‘I am a born antinomian'; ‘religion' he finds equally useless, for he cannot believe in that which eludes sight and touch; reason is of no help, for the laws by which he was condemned make no sense.
²
What his new life will embrace, what it hitherto lacked, is ‘suffering' and ‘humility' – these will be his key to understanding life, as art once had been.

He takes Jesus as his model, but this is the Oscar Wilde version of Jesus, itself influenced by Ernest Renan's 1863
La Vie de Jésus
, an account which offered lapsed Christians a portrait of Jesus, worthy of admiration for his human qualities. Oscar's Jesus is an artist, ‘the most supreme of individualists'. He is a man who sees sin and suffering as ‘beautiful, holy things', ‘modes of perfection', and for whom there are no laws and no morality. His Jesus embraces criminals with sympathy. He is a ‘titan personality' who puts his genius into his life.
³
Whether the carpenter's son from Galilee would recognise himself in this idealised
fin-de-siècle
version is another matter.

That Oscar should have forged a portrait of Jesus bearing so many features of his own situation was certainly an artful way of endowing his disgrace with dignity. C.3.3 (his prison tag at Reading) on the metaphorical hill of Calvary next to Jesus Christ, two prophets of an individualistic aesthetic gospel, united in their struggle against the Pharisees of yesteryear and the philistines of the nineteenth century, both punished and martyred for the cause. For a man who invested so much importance in his image, sharing a destiny with Christ was at least better than sharing it with C.3.4.

De Profundis
is also a lament for lost renown. He gives an account of what that involved.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age . . . The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I woke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
⁴

He could hardly have written this without cracking a smile. For a man whose new watchword was humility – ‘there is only one thing for me now, absolute humility' – there seems little sign of it.
⁵
The demon of pride is the spur for this picture of himself as all things to all men. In his self-reckoning, he ranges alone through the world transforming art forms and everyone he touches. He slays falsehoods and rescues truths by entering into dialectical combat with society. He leaves as his legacy a model of being and a way of life – he is the very symbol of fearless independence. Certainly, he had his name to save or lose – better to write his own account. Moreover, writing a legend may also have been his way of shoring up a fragile self. That said, like all legends, it contains much that is true. Oscar did indeed epitomise the era.

That Oscar Wilde personified the
fin-de-siècle
was a view held not only by himself but by many of his fellow travellers. Richard Le Gallienne, for instance, wrote of him:

[Oscar] summed up completely the various aspects and tendencies of his time, he has become its symbolic figure. He is, beyond comparison the incarnation of the spirit of the '90s. The significance of the '90s is that they began to apply all the new ideas that had been for some time accumulating from the disintegrating action of scientific and philosophic thought on every kind of spiritual, moral, and scientific convention, and all forms of authority demanding obedience merely as authority. Hence came the widespread assertion and demonstration of individualism which is still actively progressing. Wilde was the synthesis of all these phenomena of change . . . In him the period might see its own face in the glass. And it is because it did see its own face that it first admired, then grew afraid, and then destroyed him. Here, said the moralist is where your ‘modern' ideas will lead you, and the moralist, as often, was both right and wrong. Wilde did gaily and flippantly what some men were doing in dead earnest, with humour and wit for his weapons. What serious reformers had laboured for years to accomplish Wilde did in a moment with the flash of an epigram . . . Indeed, he made dying Victorianism laugh at itself, and it may be said to have died of the laughter.
⁶

But the disadvantage is that the legend of the man is capable of existing in the absence of his art. It is Oscar Wilde the man that gets talked about. As with Byron, public interest is more about the man than the writings. That was what Oscar wanted. His claim, to have put his genius into life and his talent into his writings, speaks to that, and unlike Jesus, he at least wrote his own legend.

*

The history of the publication of
De Profundis
was complex. Ross published an abridged version in 1905 and a longer one in 1908. He donated the manuscript to the British Museum on the condition it would not be made public until 1960. Douglas had fought against its publication, but his death in 1945 removed that obstacle. The complete and correct version was eventually published in 1962 in
The Letters of Oscar Wilde
, edited and compiled by Rupert Hart-Davis.

43

‘We all come out of prison as sensitive as children'

Leaving prison ‘unnerved' Oscar. On 22 April 1897 he appealed to the home secretary to be released on 15 rather than 20 May to avoid the press. He was refused. Constance sent £100 and Ross raised £800 from various friends to meet his needs over the next few months.

Anxiety became more like panic attacks in quarrels with Adey, who was orchestrating his departure. He dreaded being seen in public. He wanted to have clothes waiting for him in a hotel where he could change out of his prison garb, and gave Adey a long list of items to purchase, including ‘eighteen collars' and ‘neckties: dark blue with white spots and diapers'.
¹
His instructions to Adey ran to many pages. He planned to go to Dieppe in France, but first he had to get through London without being identified. He took on a new name, Mr Sebastian Melmoth. Combining the Christian name of the martyred saint associated with the plague with that of the anti-hero of his great-uncle's novel,
Melmoth the Wanderer
, this new alias had all the melodrama and black humour characteristic of Oscar.

So on 19 May 1897, having served his two-year sentence, Oscar was taken from Reading to Pentonville, where he was discharged the next morning. Adey and the Reverend Stewart Headlam came in a closed brougham to take him to Headlam's house in Bloomsbury, where friends had gathered to welcome him. Being met by Headlam, the vicar who had paid his bail, unsettled him. The kindness of strangers left him feeling awkward. He was equally distressed at the idea of friends getting together to meet him. No matter, he came alive immediately and talked books throughout in a self-intoxicated state, cloaking his nerves with talk of literature. But if he was nervous, so were his friends, according to Ada Leverson in
Reminiscences
. ‘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.' But Oscar ‘came in with the dignity of a king returning from exile. He came in talking, laughing, smoking a cigarette, with waved hair and a flower in his button-hole, and he looked markedly better, slighter, and younger than he had 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.”' Few knew how much the suave raconteur they saw that morning trembled inside. And indeed, before the morning was over the pristine mask of the public self cracked and Oscar ‘broke down and sobbed bitterly'.
²
For someone so expert at hiding moods and sensibilities behind his public persona, someone so in control of his ego, this outburst is the measure of his loss of confidence.

At 4.30 the next morning Oscar arrived at Dieppe, where Robbie Ross and Reginald Turner were waiting for him. Ross and Turner had booked a room for him at the Hôtel Sandwich. He walked in to find it adorned with flowers and books. Their kindness reduced him to tears.
³
He had written in
De Profundis
of his dread of living in the world without books and had prodded friends for volumes. In this, as in much else, Ross acted as his factotum, and put together many of the titles suggested by Oscar. Flaubert was at the top of a list of favourites that included, among others, Stevenson, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas
père
, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Coleridge, Anatole France, Gautier, Dante and Goethe.

Ross and Turner spent a few days with Oscar at Dieppe, and when they returned to London, he moved ten miles on to Berneval on 27 May. There he set himself up in a rented chalet, £30 for the season, and was alone and free for the first time. His mood swung between bliss and despair. When he needed love and support, as he often did, he invariably turned to Robbie. Robbie became his ‘financier' and friend, and, once again, his lover. To Robbie he voiced fears that he had lost his creative power, wrecked his life, embarked on a lunatic existence – ‘my Neronian hours, rich, profligate, cynical, materialistic' – and it was for Robbie to comfort and encourage him. On 28 May, he wrote, ‘You can heal me and help me. No other friend have I now in this beautiful world. I want no other. 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.' He promised Robbie he would write, and did not think it beneath him to say, ‘I want to have your respect . . . your sincere appreciation of my effort to recreate my artistic life.'
⁴