The Fall of the House of Wilde (63 page)

Ross handled all Oscar's financial affairs, allocating a monthly allowance from the £800 raised, so as to ensure all was not spent at once. Ross took a tough line, and Oscar took it lightly, blessing Robbie for the amorous tyranny he exercised over him. Though that would change. Having little did not stop Oscar's thinking of those who had even less. Over the next few months, he sent small sums of money, £2 to £4, to prisoners, so they had some ready cash on their release. He paid for one former prisoner, Arthur Cruttenden, to come and stay a week with him in Berneval. He asked Turner, on 7 June, to arrange his ticket, to get him some clothes, ‘a blue-serge suit, a pair of brown leather boots, some shirts and a hat'. And in case Turner thought this was a cover for tender feelings, Oscar wrote, ‘I had better say candidly that he is not “a beautiful boy” . . . I have no feeling for him, nor could have, other than affection and friendship.'
⁵

Oscar wrote to Constance shortly after his release. That letter is lost, but Constance described it as ‘full of penitence'. The couple stayed in regular correspondence through the summer, all of which is lost. There was talk of Constance coming to Berneval, of Oscar being allowed to see the boys, but Constance remained hesitant. Oscar also wrote to Douglas on 7 June. He suggested meeting on 12 June but then thought again and resisted, knowing the trouble it would cause Constance and many of his friends.

During those summer months in France Oscar's social life revolved around Dieppe, then a haven for French and English artists. Some former friends snubbed him – the artists Walter Sickert and Jacques-Émile Blanche, certainly. And some restaurants refused to serve him. For company he had visitors in Berneval from time to time, including the painters Charles Conder and Will Rothenstein, the poet Ernest Dowson, and André Gide. At Dieppe he was introduced to a publisher called Leonard Smithers, with whom he instantly gelled. Smithers published risky, erotic works, such as Beardsley's – Oscar described him in a letter to Turner as ‘the most learned erotomaniac in Europe'. And added, ‘He is also a delightful companion, and a dear fellow, very kind to me.'
⁶
Smithers would publish
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
in February 1898.

Oscar wrote most of
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
in July 1897. The poem is inspired by an event he had witnessed a year earlier, on 7 July 1896, at Reading – the hanging of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a soldier in the Royal Horse Guards. Wooldridge murdered his wife, Laura Ellen. She had incited his jealousy and he slit her throat with a razor. Remorse followed and Wooldridge immediately gave himself up to the police. He attempted to get the charge reduced to manslaughter because of her unfaithfulness, but the court refused to consider anything less than premeditated murder – the jury took but two minutes to reach this conclusion. The scaffold at Reading had been used only once since its installation eighteen years earlier. Pillars of rectitude in the press supported the execution. Oscar took a different stance. He turned what was reported in the papers as a cold-blooded premeditated murder into a hot-blooded impetuous act of passion.
The Ballad
sympathises with the man who exhibits the all-too-human tendency to kill the one they love. To write this poem, with its leitmotif, ‘for each man kills the thing he loves', nothing served him better than his own experience with Douglas.

The poem asks, what right has one man to pass judgement on another? All humans are capable of sin, but few of forgiveness. The poem also asks, what do we achieve by destroying the criminal? And answers nothing, other than destroying something in ourselves. Degrading the human brings all humanity down. Humans live with the inevitability of death, but certain kinds of death break the human contract and this execution is one of them, says
The Ballad
. Life should not end in the way it does here – ordered by a system, done at the striking of a clock. These deaths are obscene and, according to
The Ballad
, unjust.

But the poem does not end on a hopeless note. In an echo of his early poems, Divine justice is invoked. ‘God's eternal laws are kind/ And break the heart of stone.'
⁷
Not unlike a Catholic, he seemed to believe one would be rewarded for the fate of having suffered in this world. Or was this a tic from which he could not free himself? Certainly, fate is a dominant note in the poem. Though each man sins in ‘killing the thing he loves', not all men pay the price.

We waited for the stroke of eight:

Each tongue was thick with thirst:

For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate

That makes a man accursed,

And Fate will use a running noose

For the best man and the worst.
⁸

Man is defeated by fate; as in the legend of Marsyas, one suffers the wrath of the gods.

Oscar was uncertain about the work – he disliked the ‘propaganda' element of the poem, as he put it in a letter to Ross on 8 October 1897. And to Harris, he wrote, ‘I, of course, feel the poem is too autobiographical and that
real
experiences are alien things that should never influence one, but it was wrung out of me, a cry of pain, the cry of Marsyas, not the song of Apollo. Still, there are some good things in it. I feel as if I had made a sonnet out of skilly [broth].'
⁹
For years Oscar had considered form and colour an end in itself, had stuffed his palette with gold, wanting to disappear into his jewelled style. But if style is truth, as he often said, then he was simply following life's course.

Oscar attempted to write a play but could not. He thought of finishing
A Florentine Tragedy
or
La Sainte Courtisane
but drifted off course. A plan to write a new play he called ‘Pharaoh' evaporated once he realised a religious play could run only for a few nights and would never be a money-spinner. George Wyndham offered to produce a new play, but Oscar could not deliver. He told one friend, ‘I simply have no heart to write clever comedy . . .'
¹⁰

More often than not he was lonely. He had a succession of affairs but none of much importance. He was still hoping to see Constance. Her reluctance to allow him to see the children made him feel ‘disgraced and evil', he told Robbie.
¹¹
What Constance never mentioned in their correspondence was the severity of her spinal paralysis. Oscar was told on 4 August by Carlos Blacker, whose family had been holidaying with Constance and the boys at Nervi in Italy, that Constance's back condition would make travel difficult.

Meanwhile Douglas kept writing him letters of love, and by August they were writing to each other almost every day. Eventually they met in Rouen on 28 August, and after tears and embraces, spent the night together. Douglas had promised to join his mother at Aix-les-Bains and would thereafter be free, so he suggested meeting in six weeks' time in Naples. Oscar agreed. On 31 August 1897, he wrote:

My own Darling Boy, I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send you a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really create in me that sense of energy and joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don't understand us. I feel it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.
¹²

Though Oscar had long thought of Douglas as the anti-muse that had paralysed his art, saying as much in letters and in
De Profundis
, he somehow hoped things would be different. But Oscar was going back to Douglas as an impoverished, saddened outcast in his forties, not the celebrated artist he had once been. What would he have to offer Douglas, who was better at taking than giving?

And there is some evidence to suggest Oscar was wary of such a move. He knew going back to Douglas would alienate Constance, cost him his allowance, and disappoint Ross and other friends who were helping him to re-establish himself. He tried to justify his action by blaming everyone but himself. Constance for not coming to visit and for depriving him of his boys, Ross and others for not giving him the love his temperament craved. Thus did Oscar write to Ross, on 21 September:

I cannot live without an atmosphere of Love: I must love and be loved, whatever price I pay for it. I could have lived all my life with you, but you have other claims on you – claims you are too sweet a fellow to disregard – and all you could give me was a week of companionship. Reggie gave me three days, and Rowland [John Rowland Fothergill] a sextette of suns, but for the last month at Berneval I was so lonely that I was on the brink of killing myself. The world shuts its gateway against me, and the door of Love lies open. When people speak of me going back to Bosie, tell them that he offered me love, and that in my loneliness and disgrace I, after three months' struggle against a Philistine world, turned naturally to him. Of course I shall often be unhappy, but still I love him: the mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him. ‘
Je t'aime parce que tu m'as perdu
' is the phrase that ends one of the stories in
Le Puits de Sainte Claire
 – Anatole France's book – and it is a terrible symbolic truth.
¹³

In an age that produced volumes defending free will against determinism, Oscar insisted he had no choice. To Adey, he wrote, ‘I know you all think I am wilful, but it is the result of the nemesis of character.'
¹⁴
For Oscar, people just have to do what they have to do. In one version of the philosophy of self, all people operate at some point on a line between the twin poles of episodicism and narrativism. Episodicists feel and see little connection between the different parts of their life, have a more fragmentary sense of self, and tend not to believe in the concept of free will. Narrativists feel and see constant connectivity, an enduring self, and acknowledge free will as the instrument forging their self and their connectedness. Narrativists feel responsible for their actions and guilt over their failures; episodicists think that one thing happens and then another thing happens. Oscar in his personal life was as pure an example of an episodicist as one can find. He always acted on impulse, and was not in the least bit introspective. When we reflect on his art, we see it manifests this episodicism. Each of his works may be seen as a furiously concentrated episode, written rapidly without much forethought. There is little overall connectivity in the oeuvre. One work does not lead logically to another; there is no obvious connection between the fairy tales,
Salomé
and the drawing-room comedies, for instance. The extent of the genre- and theme-hopping in his work is rare for an artist. He often said he was driven by whim. His life is evidence of the truth of that statement.

44

‘I have fiddled too often on the string of Doom'

Oscar left Berneval abruptly and arrived in Paris on 15 September. There he met Vincent O'Sullivan, a writer of Decadent poetry, who gave him the money to get to Naples. He and Douglas checked into the Hotel Royal des Étrangers. Oscar immediately set about trying to earn money. He obtained a commission to write the libretto for an opera on Daphnis and Chloé from a composer he had met in Dieppe, Dalhousie Young. He asked for an advance of £100, something he had not done before, but indicative of his straitened circumstances. The money allowed him and Douglas to rent a villa on via Posillipo. He wrote a few verses for ‘Daphnis and Chloé', but the project went underground and never resurfaced. He petitioned publishers to print some poems by Douglas, but was met with contempt. He added a few stanzas to
The Ballad
. He took Italian lessons and surprised himself with his progress. Other than that, he and Douglas visited Capri, sat in cafés, went to the opera, and caused a scandal simply by who they were. He dropped the name Sebastian Melmoth and lived openly as Oscar Wilde, but he did not feel a free man. People whispered when he came into restaurants. The Neapolitan papers splashed as much mud on him as the American press had, writing ‘interviews of a fictitious character'. He wanted to reassert himself as an artist and tried to get
Salomé
performed. He asked an Italian poet to translate the play and succeeded in getting Eleanora Duse, then performing at the opera house in Naples, to read it. As he put it more light-heartedly to Leonard Smithers, ‘I want the Italians to realise that there has been more in my life than a love for Narcissus, or a passion for Sporus, fascinating though both may be.'
¹
Nothing came of
Salomé
.

It is difficult to track Constance's changes of heart, but by September she wanted to see Oscar and was hoping every day that a letter would arrive announcing he was to visit. He wrote on 26 September telling her he could not come until late October. Worse, the letter was postmarked Naples. That could only mean one thing to Constance. She dashed off a letter to Carlos Blacker, who understood the misery of her union with Oscar. ‘I have this morning received a letter from Naples . . . Question: has he seen the dreadful person 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 . . . Write to me and tell me what to do.' This was one blow too many for Constance: if proof were needed, it showed how little he cared for his children. To Blacker she dismissed her husband ‘as weak as water'.
²
Seething with anger, she wrote Oscar a letter of reproach, which has been lost. ‘My wife wrote me a very violent letter,' Oscar told Adey on 27 November and proceeded to quote as follows. ‘“I
forbid
you to see Lord Alfred Douglas. I forbid you to return to your filthy insane life. I forbid you to live at Naples. I will not allow you to come to Genoa.”'
³