The Fall of the House of Wilde (65 page)

Willie died on 13 March 1899, aged forty-six. Word of Willie's passing reached Oscar two days later in Switzerland. ‘I suppose it had been expected for some time,' wrote Oscar to Ross, who had telegraphed him. ‘I am sorry for his wife, who, I suppose, has little left to live on. Between him and me there had been, as you know, wide chasms for many years.
Requiescat in Pace
.'
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The cause of Willie's death was stated as ‘hepatic and cardiac disease': his liver had finally failed. The death certificate gave his address as 9 Cheltenham Terrace, Chelsea. Only Lily and his daughter, Dorothy, mourned his loss, and where he was buried is not recorded. Mrs Frank Leslie, his first wife, told Robert Sherard she searched for Willie's grave to lay a wreath, but could find no trace. Willie's death passed almost unnoticed in London, save for a three-line mention in
The Times
and not much more in the
Daily Telegraph
, where he had once been hailed as one of its most promising journalists. All those visions of greatness Jane had had for her boys seemed to have melted into thin air. Lily felt the same disappointment, judging by the letter she wrote on 7 May to Oscar. ‘One always has sad memories of what Willy might have been instead of him dying practically unknown.' She told Oscar, ‘Dorothy is well and happy in a country convent and I think will have a good share of the family brains.'
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Had Oscar paused to reflect, Willie's life might have warned him of the trajectory he was pursuing. But the event seemed to pass him by. For one so emotional where love was concerned, death seemed to harden his heart. Or maybe that was the armour with which he clothed himself against a world that had turned against him. Certainly, the loneliness he felt that month was the worst yet. Oscar could no longer count on the limitless friendship he had come to take for granted. He spoke the truth when he said he was no longer a joy to himself or to others. The black cloud that hung over him in Switzerland followed him back to Paris. He was no sooner back in Paris than he wanted to leave. He travelled hither and yon to Trouville in June – ‘too boring' – then to Le Havre – ‘too awful for words'. Wherever he went, Fontainebleau, Chennevières-sur-Marne, the black cloud followed. Hunger and scrounging left him wearied and drained. His torpor was no doubt worsened by regular binges of absinthe, brandy and champagne. Each week the proprietor at the Hôtel d'Alsace secured for him four or five bottles of Courvoisier, at twenty-five and then twenty-eight francs. He would not do without his luxuries.

By August 1899 he was desperate. ‘I am really in the gutter,' he announced to Smithers, and he was not dramatising. He had had to pawn his clothes and was left with nothing but an old flannel suit with a hole. He turned for help to Harris, who immediately sent him £20. In a letter of thanks, he tried to make light of his humility.

I am getting my clothes today from the hotel whose evil proprietor detained them, so I shall be alright. Up to the present I have been, if not ‘in looped and windowed nakedness' (I quote loosely) at any rate dreadfully shabby, and am more than ever in discord with Carlyle on the question of the relations of clothes and Society. A hole in the trousers can make one as melancholy as Hamlet, and out of bad boots a Timon may be made.
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Having been so fastidious about his clothes all through his life, his appearance now advertised his destitution. At this point, few people cared to pretend that Oscar might re-establish himself.

Those who crossed his path in Paris paint a dark picture. The Comtesse de Brémont was one such, Gide another. Bernard Thornton, an American impresario, working for the Grand Opera House in New York, adds a further dimension. He met Oscar at the instigation of the French-Russian arts patron, Mme Mickauleff, and wrote thus of his impression. ‘My heart stood still as this once celebrated personage crossed Mme Mickauleff's threshold. I could not believe that this was the man about whom the whole world had been talking. He was bent with a weight not of years. He had an old man's obesity. His cheeks were flabby and sagging, his eyes were dull. His manner of speech was like a blow to me, for his words came very slowly, and his sentences were timorous. He seemed grateful for the least consideration.' They met several times thereafter, and what struck Thornton was that ‘his courage was gone'. Oscar now used a stick, not for style, but for support. On one occasion they walked together through Père Lachaise cemetery, where Oscar stopped before the grave of Marie du Plessis, and reflected on Alexander Dumas's careless love for the ‘lady of the camellias', no doubt thinking of his own analogous love for Douglas. But more often questions of the commercial viability of art in America were discussed. Thornton remembered Oscar saying, ‘they tell me that in Western America a man is a man to-day, and yesterdays don't count'. Thornton deduced, ‘Even had one paid his passage and furnished him with plenty of money, I doubt if he would have had the courage to go.'
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Oscar spent several weeks in February and March of 1900 confined to bed. He complained of extreme exhaustion and various disorders. Doctors prescribed one thing after another, ‘arsenic and strychnine', but without success. There were occasional reprieves, but ultimately nothing helped – his brain was still ‘a furnace' and his nerves ‘a coil of angry adders'. There were strange things happening to his body, including blotches that made him look ‘like a leopard'. Maurice Gilbert nursed a deeply appreciative Oscar.

He recovered somewhat in April. Mellor convinced him to go to Italy, where he planned to spend a week or so in Palermo before going to Rome for the Easter celebrations. Mellor promised to support Oscar to the upper limit of £50. Oscar went and Italy rejuvenated him. Illness may have made him more alert to the sensual world, and he took a childish pleasure in everything, from milk and daises to Velázquez and the Vatican. Early risers would have found him out with his newly acquired camera, taking photos of cows and architecture. Eager pilgrims would have seen his large torso battling with the crowds for the front row at the Vatican to see the Pope. He did not go once to the Vatican but many times, berating ticket touts for swindling him. As on his first visit to the Vatican, almost a quarter of a century before, the erotic sumptuousness and the theatrical display of the papal court attracted him. In a letter to Adey, on 26 April 1900, he laughed at himself for being a foolish sucker, saying, ‘it is perhaps right that heretics should be mulcted, for we are not of the fold'. To Adey he described his attitude as ‘curious: I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist. No one could be more “black” than I am.'
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His was a godless world.

He left Rome with reluctance. Nowhere had offered him as much sexual pleasure. He wrote to Ross just before he left, on 14 May 1900, ‘How evil it is to buy Love, and how evil to sell it! And yet what purple hours one can snatch from that grey slowly-moving thing we call Time! My mouth is twisted with kissing, and I feed on fevers.' Detached from everything and open to everything, he sold his bitterness as his companions sold their bodies. Spending time with prostitutes suited his mood. And deflecting the incongruity, he announced to Ross, ‘The cloister or the Café – there is my future. I tried the Hearth, but it was a failure.'
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Oscar was still deeply affected by Douglas. Since leaving Naples, Douglas had been back and forth to Paris, and he and Oscar met from time to time. Lord Queensberry had died in January 1900 and had left Douglas a legacy of between £15,000 and £20,000, which he was investing in buying and training racehorses at Chantilly, near Paris. At Ross's suggestion, Oscar asked Douglas in May 1900 if he were willing to grant him an annual income of £150 or thereabouts. The request was met with fury. Mention of money and obligations usually sent Douglas over the edge, and this instance was no exception. Oscar described Douglas's reaction to Ross. ‘He went into paroxysms of rage, followed by satirical laughter, and said it was the most monstrous suggestion he had ever heard, that he would do nothing of the kind, that he was astounded at my suggesting such a thing, that he did not recognise I had any claim on him.'
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With this rebuff, Oscar let the matter drop.

‘Disgust' was what Oscar incited in Douglas. After his spat with Oscar, Douglas met with Harris and said the following about Oscar:

He disgusts me when he begs. He's getting fat and bloated, and always demanding money, money, money, like a daughter of the horseleech – just as if he had a claim to it . . . And I am not going to pamper him any more. He could earn all the money he wants if he would only write; but he won't do anything. He is lazy, and getting lazier, and lazier every day; and he drinks far too much. He is intolerable. I thought when he kept asking me for the money to-night, he was like a old prostitute.
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He went on to deride Oscar's assumption to be a poet, and ripped his poetry apart as vigorously as he extolled his own.

Douglas also had said some of the above to Oscar. Little wonder then that Harris reported Oscar saying:

Once I thought myself master of my life; lord of my fate, who could do what I pleased and would always succeed. I was a crowned king until I met him, and now I am an exile and outcast and despised. I have lost my way in life; the passers-by all scorn me and the man whom I loved whips me with foul insults and contempt. There is no example in history of such a betrayal, no parallel. I am finished . . . I hope the end will come quickly.
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Far from trying to rehabilitate Oscar, Douglas was putting him into a coffin. Behind the ‘fat', ‘lazy', ‘begging' Oscar was a tender and vulnerable creature who still loved Douglas. As to the myth propagated by the courts that Oscar led Douglas astray, Oscar had this to say to Harris: ‘It is not true. It is he who always led, always dominated me; he is as imperious as a Caesar.'
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And his true nature was a far cry from the caricature of Oscar the blasé, superior, Lord Henry in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, in command of his emotions: the public would hardly believe that Oscar was, in fact, as timid and elegiac in love as an adolescent preserving faded mementos.

Douglas's belligerent attack on Oscar stirred Harris's sympathy. Harris proposed they write a play together and share the royalties. Harris wrote the entire play,
Mr and Mrs Daventry
, and it was staged in the autumn of 1900 with some success. However, he found that the royalties had to go to pay back advances Oscar had accepted from others to whom he had promised a play. During September and October, Oscar wrote furious letters to Harris, accusing him of having swindled him. Oscar suffered another bout of illness, and with medical bills mounting his jeremiad grew louder. He alternated between recrimination and emotional blackmail, and blamed Harris for impeding his recovery. This time pleas of poverty did not earn him Harris's lenience. That Oscar had no right to the money, that Harris was himself short of cash, that he had already been so generous to him, seemed irrelevant to Oscar, who had become deaf to reason. Physical pain may have sharpened his words.

Oscar sent Ross a telegram on 11 October: ‘Operated on yesterday – come over as soon as possible.' Then he sent a follow-up. ‘Terribly weak – please come.' Ross arrived in Paris on 16/17 October and stayed almost a month. Reggie Turner was also in Paris at the time. Oscar revived somewhat in their presence. Propriety kept him in good spirits when Willie's former wife, Lily, visited with her new husband. He joked about ‘dying beyond his means'. Sure enough, he drank champagne every day, adding it to the morphine he was prescribed to dull the pain.

But behind the mask of mirth was a man who had given up on life. When Ross took him out on afternoon drives to the Bois de Boulogne, Oscar would stop the victoria at almost every café en route and drink an absinthe. When Ross protested, Oscar retorted, ‘What have I got to live for?' When Ross had to leave on 13 November to meet his mother in the south of France, Oscar became quite ‘hysterical', and begged Ross not to leave. They spoke alone and Oscar expressed concern about his debts. He also asked Ross to see
De Profundis
published, wanting it to set the record straight with the world.

Dr Tucker, who had been looking after him, confirmed he was dying. Turner stayed put in Paris and, along with the proprietor of the hotel and a nurse, kept vigil over Oscar. His penultimate delirium was a polyglot gesture of sorts – a babble of French and English. His final cry was ‘could you get a Munster to cook for me?' And added that ‘one steamboat is like another'. Munster is one of Ireland's provinces and the name of the steamboat that carried passengers across the Irish Sea.
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Like many nearing death, perhaps he was picturing a return to the womb of origin.

Turner summoned Ross back to Paris, and he arrived on the morning of 30 November. Oscar was still conscious and, after some hesitation, Ross decided to call a Catholic priest. A Father Cuthbert Dunne came and administered baptism and Extreme Unction. Ross held his hand until he felt the last ‘flutter' at ten minutes to 2 p.m. on 30 November 1900. Most likely the cause of Oscar's death was meningitis or a brain abscess following an ear infection he had caught in prison. Oscar was forty-six when he died – the same age as Willie.

In calling a priest Ross acted of his own volition. Himself a Catholic, Ross had once said to Oscar, Catholicism was true, and Oscar replied, ‘No, Robbie, it isn't true.' Was Ross trying to mollify public opinion? That decision served at least to fortify his posthumous reputation as ‘Saint Oscar', a whitewashing to which Oscar contributed in
De Profundis.
Ross dressed Oscar in white, with a rosary around his neck, and on his breast a Franciscan medal, looking every inch the saint, not the sybarite that he was. The turn to Rome, if nothing else, would at least be in accord with what he said on release from prison to Turner, ‘the Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do.'
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