Yours Ever (45 page)

The prison commissioners had decreed in 1887 that the “permission to write and receive Letters is given to Prisoners for the purpose of enabling them to keep up a connection with their respectable friends and not that they may be kept informed of public events.” But Wilde pronounces the letters from his friend Robbie Ross “messengers between me and that beautiful unreal world of
Art where once I was King,” and in one of his reformist communications to the
Daily Chronicle
in 1898, he decries the “habit of mutilating and expurgating” prisoners’ mail. Wilde’s own prison letters chiefly concern the debilitating effects of confinement, relations with Bosie, his fears (entirely wrong) about his place in history, and preparations for his release—a trauma complicated by what he considered the legal and financial ineptitude of friends. He picks oakum, suffers from an abscess of the ear, and is harrowed by the everything-in-its-place regulations of cell-keeping: “Dear Robbie, I could not collect my thoughts yesterday, as I did not expect you till today. When you are good enough to come and see me will you always fix the day? Anything sudden upsets me.”

Publication of his letters by the venal, limelight-loving Bosie is a new worry, since “[t]he gibbet on which I swing in history now is high enough.” He resents his ex-lover’s new status as the “Infant Samuel” and imagines the Queensberry family looking “on the whole thing merely as a subject for sentiment or reminiscence over the walnuts and the wine.” At first, trying to stay alive emotionally, he clings to his love for Bosie, but as time goes on and the latter never visits or writes, Wilde concentrates on Douglas’s treachery. Invective begins to serve him better than expressions of longing, though the high spirits he fakes for his more loyal correspondents make for the most touching letters he writes.

Self-awareness comes and goes. He is frightened, repentant, vindictive, practical, mystical. Nature “will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
De Profundis
spends much time lamenting past glories and shoring up the author’s cultural status, but this long letter is at its best when attacking Bosie, the nominal recipient, and when Wilde is mixing compliments to others into the pity for himself:

Wilde’s letters from Berneval on the French Channel coast, written just after his release with much false optimism and a horror of recidivism, are the hardest for a reader to bear. The ex-convict expects the good air, wholesome food and the practice of little personal economies to save him from repeating his “days of gilded infamy.” But even though he will manage to compose “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” within a year he will have to admit: “I don’t think I shall ever really write again. Something is killed in me. I feel no desire to write. I am unconscious of power. Of course my first year in prison destroyed me body and soul. It could not have been otherwise.” In one of his feminine, submissive letters to Frank Harris, he admits that he has “lost the mainspring of life and art,
la joie de vivre
.”

If this realization was his first real achievement, understanding Bosie came next. The attacks on him in
De Profundis
could not preclude Wilde’s “psychologically inevitable” return to him in Naples in 1897. At first he would claim it was for inspiration, but the truth comes in an explanation to Robbie Ross: “Of course I shall often be unhappy, but still I love him: the mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him.” One feels that Wilde has finally found a paradox instead of forced one. As predicted, Bosie remains spiteful and profligate as always (“He apparently goes to the races every day … he has a faculty of spotting the loser, which, considering that he knows nothing at all about horses, is perfectly astonishing”) and for much of the time Wilde is alone.

In his last years, he comes to more realistic conclusions about his sexual nature. Shortly after his release, he is “thankful and happy to be able to say” that he has no attraction to a twenty-nine-year-old ex-Reading convict who comes to spend a week with him; the following year he’s back to defending homosexual love to Ross as “more noble than other forms;” and soon after that he simply decides to get what pleasure he can from it. Playing with one of
Charles Reade’s titles, he writes: “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. The Cloister or the Café—there is my future. I tried the Hearth, but it was a failure.” He settles on the café. “I know that there is no such thing as changing one’s life,” he declares toward the end; “one merely wanders round and round within the circle of one’s own personality.” But the reader of his letters gets steadily closer to the center, to what the newspapers, determined to deprive him of even the simple honorific “Mister,” called “the man Wilde.”

In the struggle for money, he sells options on the same play to several buyers and turns out some of his most charming prose ever in the form of notes to his shrunken but most essential public—the friends he asks for money. Begging letters become his chief means of expression: “I am going to write a Political Economy in my heavier moments. The first law I lay down is ‘Wherever there exists a demand, there is
no
supply.’” He reports having made a “pilgrimage” to the chapel of Notre Dame de Liesse—fifty yards from his hotel—and talks of the boy guide Robbie has left him with: “Omero is his name, and I am showing him Rome.” He thanks Reginald Turner for the gift of a clock (part of the optimistic apparatus of Berneval) in sentences as delightful as any in his fairy tales: “It is most sweet of you to give it to me, and you will be pleased, and perhaps astonished, to hear that it is quite beautiful, and has a lovely face and wonderful slim restless hands, yet it is strangely punctual in all its habits, business-like in its methods, of ceaseless industry, and knows all that the sun is doing.” Three days later: “The clock
still goes;
and is quite astounding in its beauty and industry. It even works at night, when no one is watching it.”

On February 1, 1899, Wilde wrote Leonard Smithers, his last publisher, that he was autographing copies of
The Importance of Being Earnest
in the hope of making a little money: “One … has a smudge of ink on it, but as I have initialled the smudge, which I made myself, it must count as a
remarque
. You might ask one and sixpence extra for that copy.” On February 6, 1981, both the
smudged copy and the letter were sold at Christie’s in New York. Price: $8,500.

THE STIFFEST UPPER LIP
is required to quote, with any real belief, Lovelace’s famous assertion that stone walls do not a prison make. The ordinary mortal is more likely to reverse the proposition and declare that a prison hardly requires walls of stone. The plasterboard of little offices and unhappy homes will do just as well. Charles Lamb, whose “Distant Correspondents” got this book going, marched between two confinements nearly every day for thirty-three years. In the mornings he set off for his clerkly job keeping track of vessels sent forth by the East India Company. He earned what it took to support himself and the sister he came home to—the occasionally mad Mary, who had slain their mother in a fit. Lamb could dispatch his own fanciful ships, gay little skiffs that didn’t betray their turbulent origins, only at night. Some of the essays we best remember, “A Dissertation on Roast Pig” and even “Distant Correspondents,” got started as private communications to friends like Coleridge.

We love Lamb for his constant susceptibility, the excitement of his feelings by food (“how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose!”), tobacco, and certainly drink. But the gusto never proceeds from anything like ease. Unworthiness prompts his sympathies for the wretched (“I killed a rat the other day by punching him to pieces, and feel a weight of blood upon me to this hour”), and melancholy often keeps him from being genial company. The food he loves is usually better eaten alone, and this bachelor so known for his love of teeming London—who writes Wordsworth that man was lucky to have sinned his way out of the too-green Garden of Eden—takes many of his urban delights from a solitary remove: “The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about [London’s] crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.”

His devotion to those who are out of their minds is a kind of propitiation against the threat madness presents to his own shaky nature.
With his friend Thomas Manning about to go preach the gospel in China, Lamb resorts to telltale black humor—“perhaps, you’ll get murder’d, and we shall die in our beds with a fair literary reputation”—knowing that the possibilities of sudden violence are probably greater right in Inner Temple Lane. Once Manning has become a distant correspondent halfway ‘round the world, Lamb cries wolf to lure him home. Some of the false alarms are broad enough (“St. Paul’s Church is a heap of ruins”), but others are sufficiently pointed to unsettle even a man doing the Lord’s work: “Scarce here and there one will be able to make out your face; all your opinions will be out of date, your jokes obsolete, your puns rejected with fastidiousness as wit of the last age.” The urgency beneath the comedy comes from Lamb’s desire for Manning’s “steadiness and quiet, which used to infuse something like itself into our nervous minds. Mary called you our ventilator.”

Mary’s mental episodes, “twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two,” take “a tedious cut out of a life.” Lamb hopes for the best and blames himself for anything else. On one occasion he declines an invitation from Coleridge—hardly a rock himself—by explaining that the poet has “a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary’s being with you.” And yet he credits his childhood friend with developing everything worthwhile in his own character.

When the essayist and poet George Dyer experiences a fit of insanity in 1801, it is Lamb who takes him in: “He came thro’ a violent rain with no neckcloth on, and a
beard
that made him a spectacle to men and angels, and tap’d at the door,” Lamb tells his friend John Rickman. “I shall not be sorry when he takes his nipt carcase out of my bed … but I will endeavour to bring him in future into a method of dining at least once a day.” When Lamb finds himself living alone, it is usually madness and death that have created the situation. On May 12, 1800, he writes Coleridge:

A sheet of stationery would often suggest itself. On it, the cheer he prepared for others could also be sent to himself. Lamb is letter writing’s great whistler in the dark, his productions a singing kettle put on for both writer and recipient. We grab for their gossip; their overstuffed descriptions (“each individual flake presents a pleasing resistance to the opposed tooth”); their harmless japes, in which a man so hemmed in by circumstance can tinker with reality. In April 1829, he complains to Henry Crabb Robinson: “I have these three days been laid up with strong rheumatic pains, in loins, back, shoulders. I shriek sometimes from the violence of them. I get scarce any sleep.” In his next letter, he admits that this was all just one-upmanship to irritate the genuinely rheumatic Robinson: “I have no more rheumatism than that poker … The report of thy torments was blown circuitously here from Bury. I could not resist the jeer.” Nor, one suspects, the chance to provide himself with relief, if only from an affliction he must imagine in order to banish.

Lamb deprecates his letters for a tedium they never have (“dull up to the dulness of a Dutch commentator on Shakespeare”) and more honestly apologizes for the scarcity of time he has to write them. Innumerable distractions keep him from “epistolary purposes;” chief among them is his job, which he curses to Wordsworth in 1822:

He wishes “for a few years between the grave and the desk,” but when they finally arrive, he makes a difficult adjustment. He now
writes letters to pass the time he never had: “I pity you for overwork,” he writes Bernard Barton in 1829, “but I assure you no-work is worse. The mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome food … I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl.”

But Lamb had always hated getting to the end of a letter. “Things come crowding in to say, and no room for ‘em,” he’d written Manning decades earlier before returning to the difficult life beyond the margins of his stationery. If the letters of Keats, his younger contemporary, are prescriptions for living, tickets into the world, Lamb’s mood-driven miniatures are respites
from
it, little globes unto themselves, complete and welcoming and, for all that, still hard to bear: