Oscar Wilde (6 page)

“The one who replaced the nasty warden was a very charming man, aoh! remarkable! quite
pleasant to me … And you can't imagine how much good it did me in prison that
Salomé
was being played in Paris precisely at that time. Here it had been completely forgotten that I was a man of letters! When they saw here that my play was a success in Paris, they said to themselves, ‘Well! that's certainly strange! so he has talent.' And from that moment on, I was allowed to read all the books I liked.

“I thought at first that what would please me most would be Greek literature. I asked for Sophocles, but I couldn't take to it. Then I thought of the Church Fathers; but they didn't interest me either. And all at once, I thought of Dante … oh! Dante! I read Dante every day; in Italian; I read him all through; but neither the
Purgatory
nor the
Paradise
seemed to be written for me. It was his
Inferno
especially that I read; how could I have helped loving it? We were
in
Hell. Hell was the prison …”

That same evening he told me his plan for a drama about Pharaoh and an ingenious story about Judas.

The next day he took me into a charming little house, two hundred yards from the hotel, which he had rented and was beginning to have furnished; it was there that he wanted to write his dramas, first his
Pharaoh,
then an
Ahab and Jezebel
(he pronounced it
Isabel
), which he related marvelously.

The carriage which was taking me away was harnessed. Wilde got into it with me, to accompany me a moment. He spoke to me again about my book and praised it, but with a certain indefinable reticence. Finally the carriage came to a stop. He said farewell to me, started to get off, but suddenly, “Listen, dear, you've got to make me a promise now.
Les Nourritures terrestres
is fine … it's very fine … But dear, promise me: from now on don't ever write
I
any more.”

And as I appeared not quite to understand him, he went on, “In art, don't you see, there is no
first
person.”

¹
This term, which may here seem unexpected to the reader, appears in English in the original text. (Translator's note.)

IV

W
HEN
I
WAS BACK IN
P
ARIS,
I
WENT TO TELL
B … what was happening to him. B … said to me, “But that's all utterly ridiculous. He's quite incapable of putting up with boredom. I know him very well: he writes to me every day; and it's my opinion too that first he has to finish his play; but afterwards, he'll come back to me; he's never done anything good in solitude; he constantly needs distraction. All the best things that he's written were written when he was with me.—Just look at his last letter …” B … showed it to me and read it to me.—It begged B … to let him finish his
Pharaoh
in peace, but said, in effect, that, once the play was written, he would come back, would join him again—and ended with this glorious phrase: “… and then I shall again be
the King of Life.
”

V

A
ND SHORTLY AFTERWARD,
W
ILDE CAME BACK TO
Paris.
¹
His play was not written; it never will be. Society knows quite well how to go about it when it wants to dispose of a man, and knows means subtler than death … For two years Wilde had suffered too much and too passively. His will had been broken. The first months, he could still delude himself, but he very soon gave way. It was like an abdication. Nothing remained in his shattered life but the mournful musty odor of what he had once been; a need every now and then to prove that he was still thinking; wit, but artificial, forced, crumpled. I saw him again only twice.

One evening, on the boulevards, when I was strolling with G …, I heard my name called. I turned about: it was Wilde. Ah! how changed he was!… “If I reappeared before having written
my drama, the world would insist on seeing only the convict in me,” he had said to me. He had reappeared without the drama, and, as a few people had shut their doors to him, he no longer tried to return anywhere; he roamed about. Friends, again and again, had tried to save him; they used all their ingenuity, they took him to Italy … Wilde very quickly escaped; relapsed. Among those remaining faithful the longest, some had repeated to me so often that “Wilde was no longer fit to be seen”… I was somewhat ill at ease, I confess, at seeing him again in a place where so many people might be passing by.—Wilde was sitting at a table on the terrace of a café. He ordered two cocktails for G … and me … I was going to sit down facing him, that is, in such a way as to turn my back to the passers-by, but Wilde, perturbed by this gesture, which he thought was due to an absurd shame (he was not, alas! completely mistaken):

“Oh! sit down here, near me,” he said, pointing to a chair beside him; “I'm so alone these days!”

Wilde was still well dressed; but his hat was no longer so glossy; his collar had the same shape, but it was no longer so clean; the sleeves of his frock-coat were slightly frayed.

“When, in times gone by, I used to meet Verlaine, I didn't blush for him,” he went on, with an attempt at pride. “I was rich, joyful, covered with glory, but
I felt that to be seen near him did me honor, even when Verlaine was drunk …” Then, afraid of boring G …, I think, he abruptly changed his tone, tried to be witty, to joke, and became dismal. My recollection here remains abominably painful. Finally, my friend and I got up. Wilde insisted upon paying for the drinks, I was going to say good-bye to him when he took me aside and, confusedly, in a low voice, “Look,” he said, “you've got to know … I'm absolutely without resources …”

A few days later, for the last time, I saw him again. I want to quote only a word of our conversation. He had told me of his difficulties, of the impossibility of continuing, of beginning a task. Sadly I reminded him of the promise he had made himself not to reappear in Paris except with a finished play:

“Ah!” I began, “why have you left Berneval so soon, when you were supposed to stay there for such a long time? I can't say that I'm angry with you, but …”

He interrupted me, put his hand on mine, looked at me with his most dismal look:

“One shouldn't be angry,” he said to me, “with
someone who has been struck.
”

 

This last interview is of 1898; I left shortly afterward to travel and never again saw Oscar Wilde who died only two
years later. Robert Ross, his faithful friend, has just given to the public a few highly interesting documents which shed light on the poet's last days. He appears to us there less alone, less forsaken than my account led one to suppose. The devotion of Reginald Turner in particular, who watched over him those last days, did not slacken for a moment.

Following this publication, certain German or English papers accused me of having tried to stylize my last recollections, of taking pleasure in forcing the antithesis between the triumphant “King of Life” of the glorious days and the pitiful Sebastian Melmoth of the dark days.

Everything I have related is simply and strictly accurate. Historical truth, insofar as one can achieve it, has always seemed to me infinitely more moving and far richer in meaning than the romantic element that might be drawn from it. The precious information of Mr. Ross completes mine and is a continuation of it, and moreover it is not he who has ever tried to oppose them to one another. His is of 1900 and mine of 1898, a period in which Wilde, little or poorly befriended, was letting himself go.

Howbeit, here is the letter which I wrote, already some years ago, to Mr. X … who, likewise, thought that he had found a certain contradiction between my account and the recognition of that generous fidelity from which certain friends never departed:

“As far the pecuniary question goes, Lord Alfred Douglas' explanation is the only plausible one—I believe, in effect, that Wilde, on leaving prison, would have had enough to live on tolerably well, if he had not been ‘incurably extravagant and reckless.' But it is none the less true that, the last times I saw Wilde, he seemed deeply miserable, sad, impotent and hopeless—as, in fact, he is portrayed, for example,
in this letter which he wrote to me a short time before he left for Cannes (winter of '97-98), and which I cite, however beautiful it may be, only to help you set things straight:

‘
… However, at the present moment I am very sad—I have received nothing from my publisher in London who owes me money: and I am in extreme want … You see how wretched the tragedy of my life has become—suffering is possible—is perhaps necessary—but poverty, destitution—that's what's terrible. It soils man's soul …

Howbeit, I should be deeply grieved that something in my article might in any way have displeased Lord Alfred who conducted himself in that whole affair with the greatest nobility, as I shall one day set down in writing, and for whom I have retained a keen affection. Be so good as to tell him that if you see him again …”

In the space of a few months, two of Wilde's books have just been published in our language:
Intentions
¹
and
De Profundis;
²
the first dates from the most brilliant period of his success; the second, dated from prison, stands facing it, seems its antithesis or palinode. I should have liked, in this article, not to separate these two books, to discover one in the other, the memory of the first in the second, and, especially, the promises of the second in the first. But
Michel Arnauld, in this very place,
³
has spoken of
Intentions
too excellently for me to have to recur to it; I refer the reader to the high praise he has given this most remarkable book and turn to
De Profundis.

De Profundis
can hardly be considered as a book; it is, disengaged from some rather vain and specious theories, the sobbing of a wounded man who is struggling. I was unable to listen to it without tears; I should like, however, to speak of it without any trembling in my voice.

“
Life cheats us with shadows,
” wrote Wilde six years before his trial. “
We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train.
”

And further on: “Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillments or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.
”

What, at least, is this mean secret that Wilde, experienced as he nevertheless was, had to purchase at so monstrous a price?—From page to page, in his
De Profundis,
he repeats it: “
That something
hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility.
” That was not perhaps what the essayist was seeking; but what is to be done about it? For the present, he must cling to it since that is all he has. “
There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
” And if at first he calls his state
a horrible disgrace,
shortly afterwards, regaining his self-possession, or pretending to regain his self-possession, he writes: “
It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development
…” When, in the case of an artist, for external or inner reasons, the creative spring runs dry, the artist settles down, renounces and makes of his weariness a wisdom which he calls: having found the Truth. For Tolstoi, as for Wilde, this “truth” is approximately the same—and how could it be otherwise?

“
The starting-point for a fresh development!
”… My mind is made up: I shall mix my voice as little as possible with Wilde's, that is, shall, as often as possible, content myself with quoting him; the sentences which I shall extract from the book will illuminate it better than anything I might say about it.

“
I hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty,
” writes Wilde desperately. While waiting, he covers over the only retreat left to him with all the sophistries that he can muster: “
I have got to make
everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.
” And again: “
Whatever is realised is right.
” And finally: “
While for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember nothing else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!' now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!' It may really be so. It may become so
” Then without quite realizing, or admitting to himself, that he is going cruelly counter to that “absolute humility” which he is extolling: “
In the very fact that people will recognize me wherever I go and know all about my life, as far as its follies go, I can discern something good for me. It will force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce only one beautiful work
of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.
”