Oscar Wilde

OSCAR WILDE

Philosophical eLibrary Editions

of works by André Gide

Autumn Leaves

The Notebooks of André Walter

Notes on Chopin

White Notebook

A Philosophical eLibrary Edition

O
SCAR
W
ILDE

IN MEMORIAM

(REMINISCENCES)

DE PROFUNDIS

by

ANDRÉ GIDE

With a New Introduction by

J
EANINE
P
ARISIER
P
LOTTEL

Translated from the French by

B
ERNARD
F
RECHTMAN

PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY

New York

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ANDRÉ GIDE QUOTES

IMAGE GALLERY

OSCAR WILDE QUOTES

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

FOREWORD

IN MEMORIAM

PART I—EARLY PERIOD

PART II—TRAGIC MEMORIES

PART III—“SEBASTIAN MELMOTH”

PART IV—
THE KING OF LIFE

PART V—PARIS

APPENDIX

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

André Gide and Oscar Wilde met for the first time when they were at a crossroad of their lives. The year was 1891, a year that was an
annus mirabilis
for both men.
¹
The Frenchman, born on November 22, 1869 was 22 years old and the Irishman, born on October 16, 1854, was 37, fifteen years older. Oscar was already the celebrated author of many works, including poems, stories, criticism,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, and near the top of his form—a form that would yield his great plays
Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, Salomé, An Ideal Husband,
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
. André became part of the Paris literary milieu with the publication of his first works,
Les Cahiers d'André Walter (The Notebooks of André Walter),
a book purporting to be a journal and filled with poems, and
Traité du Narcisse
,
a long essay that presents his own version of the myth.
²
He left a copy of the
Cahiers
at Stéphane Mallarmé's home, 89 rue de Rome. Mallarmé then invited him to join the famous Tuesday evening group. Oscar, who seems to have been present at Mallarmé's on Tuesdays in November 1891,
³
may well have met André there. Still, a note in a recent edition of Gide's
Journal
indicates the two met for the first time at the home of the poet Henri de Régnier.
⁴

Be that as it may, André felt at once dazzled and overwhelmed by his new acquaintance. Here, for example, dated November 28, 1891, is the very first written mention he made of Wilde as an esthete: “Oh, an admirable, admirable man.”
⁵
A few days later, in a December 1891 letter to Valéry (the words “De profundis” appear in front of the day Friday, i.e. “Vendredi”) he wrote: “Wilde is piously intent in killing whatever remains of my soul, because he says that to know an essence, you must stifle it: he wants me to yearn for my soul. Its value depends on how much exertion it takes to destroy it.”
⁶
In a social whirlwind the two dined several times in December at the home of Princess Ourousoff, the wife of the Russian ambassador to Paris, and they shared other meals with poets Marcel Schwob, Stuart Merrill,
⁷
Henri de Régnier and the poet/chansonnier Aristide Bruant.
⁸
On Christmas Eve, Gide found himself apologizing to Valéry for his silence. “Since Wilde,” he wrote, “I exist almost not at all.”
⁹

The manuscript of Gide's
Journal
has evidence of pages torn out, and these are the pages that deal with the three weeks, November to December 1891, presumably with the beginning of the friendship with Oscar. While we can only surmise about their content, their destruction is significant. An echo can be found at the end of Gide's
Les nourritures terrestres, The Fruits of the Earth
(which we will take up a little later here), when he beseeches his interlocutor Nathanaël, and also his readers, to destroy the pages and abandon the book. What is certain is that Gide was impressed, not by the literary quality of his elder's book, but by his legend and the seduction of his conversation and personality. In the essay at hand,
In Memoriam
, Gide notes that he was wrong to dismiss the literary quality of Wilde's books.

Wilde's lessons in hedonism, his praise of evil, his contempt for Christian morality and Victorian values seem to have shaken his would-be-disciple and destroyed all his convictions. Gide's
Journal
entry of January 1, 1892 is categorical: “Wilde was, I believe evil for me. With him, I had unlearned how to think. My emotions were more and more diverse, but I didn't know how to organize them; above all, I could no longer follow other persons' deductions. A thought, here and there. But my clumsiness in shifting them led me to abandon them. Now I am taking up again, with difficulty, but real pleasure, my history of philosophy, and study the problem of language that I will take up with Müller and Renan.”
¹⁰

That is not the whole story. Wilde's profligacy, his self-indulgence is the source of one of Gide's important characters, Ménalque—that is to say Menalcas, also a character of Virgil's
Eclogues
. Gide published his “Portrait of Ménalque” in the 1896 issue of
L'Ermitage
. Although he stated it would never be reprinted,
¹¹
it appears in all editions of
Les nourritures terrestres
. In addition to the famous “Families, I hate you! closed circles round the heart; doors fast shut; jealous possession of happiness,”
¹²
the Menalcas/Wilde utters other characteristic words. Here is one of its most celebrated passages, one that reflects the lesson Gide drew from Wilde. The remarkable Dorothy Bussy translation should be noted. Dorothy Bussy, a lifelong friend of Gide, was born Dorothy Strachey, a sister to Lytton and James Strachey, and was a teacher at the Allenwood Academy in England where Eleanor Roosevelt was among her students:

Some people taxed me with selfishness; I taxed them with stupidity. My claim was not to love anyone in particular—man or woman—but friendship itself, or affection, or love. I refused to deprive another of what I gave to one, and would only lend myself – just as I had no wish to appropriate another's body or heart. A nomad here too, as in nature, I took up my abode nowhere. A preference seemed to me an injustice; wishing to belong to all men, I would not give myself to anyone.
¹³

The first part of
In Memoriam
then, depicts the brilliant 1891 Oscar Wilde without revealing the extent of the psychic possession he had upon the young man, evidence of which has just been cited. The second part where the “tragic memories”
(p. 13)
begin is set in North Africa at the end of January 1895 when Gide left Algiers for Blidah, and chanced upon the names of Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas on the hotel register.
¹⁴
He began by erasing his own name, but was sorry for the act of cowardice, had his trunk carried back up again, and stayed to dinner with them.
¹⁵
While the essay gives a relatively respectful account of the meeting,
Si le grain ne meurt (If It Dies)
, Gide's autobiography published twenty years later, gives another far less delicate account of the events. It explores Oscar Wilde's role and responsibility in initiating Gide and others into the culture of homosexual and heterosexual brothels, venereal diseases, drugs, and lavish hedonism. Jean Delay, the eminent psychiatrist already cited, is definite about the fact Gide was fascinated by the insolence, the extravagance, the provocations, and pretensions Wilde and Bosie had of being above the laws and morals of ordinary persons.
¹⁶

Total disgrace for Oscar would follow when he returned to London. It came about when the Marquis of Queensberry sent him an insulting card at the Albemarle Club that he received from a footman on 28 February 1895.
¹⁷
Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquis, lost it, was put on trial twice, and was convicted and sentenced to two years hard labor. In Paris, Stuart Merrill circulated a petition in Paris—a petition was also circulated in London—for mitigation of his sentence. Gide was among the few to sign it,
¹⁸
a harbinger of his stances in standing fast by his moral convictions, unpopular though they might be.
¹⁹

The third part of
In Memoriam
is a moving account of the lugubrious changes that prison wrought upon Wilde. Gide was among the first to visit Sebastian Melmoth, the alias he adopted when he was released from prison and took up residence in a small hotel in Berneval, a village near Dieppe in Normandy. The two men saw each other for the last time in Paris shortly before Oscar Wilde died in a small discreet hotel, rue des Beaux-arts, destitute, penniless and scorned by the literary world, while his friend would become one of the most successful authors in the western world, the recipient of a Nobel Prize in 1947, and in France, his generation's most important conscience. Today, posterity may have rebalanced the equation: Wilde's tales are widely read, his plays performed everywhere, and he ranks at the very top of the pantheon of English-speaking authors.

¹
That is the phrase used by Richard Ellman, Wilde's biographer: “… in 1891, his
annus mirabilis
, he published four books (two volumes of stories, one of critical essays, and a novel) and a long political essay (“The Soul of Man under Socialism”) and wrote his first successful play,
Lady Windermere
'
s Fan
as well as most of
Salomé
.” Richard Ellman,
Oscar Wilde
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) 307.

²
The work contains the subtitle, “theory of the symbol,” and it is dedicated to the poet Paul Valéry. Earlier in the year, the two friends had cemented their friendship with a visit to “Narcisse's” tomb in Montpellier. Alan Sheridan,
André Gide
:
A Life in the Present
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) 73.

³
Ellman 337-9.

⁴
André Gide,
Journal I
1887-1925,
ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1996) 1389
.

⁵
André Gide and Paul Valéry,
Correspondance 1890-1942
, ed. Robert Mallet (Paris: Gallimard 1955) 139.

⁶
Correspondance
141. “Wilde s'étudie pieusement à tuer ce qui me restait d'âme, parce qu'il dit que pour connaîitre une essence, il faut la supprimer: il veut que je regrette mon âme. L'effort pour la détruire est la mesure de cette chose.”