The Fall of the House of Wilde (60 page)

Except there was nothing funny about Pentonville, where the only sound allowed was that of a warden barking orders. Speaking was banned. But the taboo against speech was easy enough to keep, as prisoners were cooped up in solitude all day in a cell, where they had to perform mindless, repetitive tasks, such as separating the fibres in a tarry rope. A thinking mind was an encumbrance, certain to make the dullness of the routine unbearable. Having to sleep at eight o'clock on a plank bed – no mattress – meant fighting off the cold, or worse, in Oscar's case, the remorse, which invariably won out. Later on, with softer conditions at the other prisons to which Oscar was transferred, the kinship he shared with a few inmates and wardens helped him to survive like a castaway clinging to a lifeline.

Perverse as it may seem, this primitive system was consonant with the desire of government to turn prisoners back into ‘human' subjects. Even the government had come to see the need for improving conditions. The Home Office gave Richard Haldane, a liberal MP, the task of looking into the prison system. Oscar had known Haldane, and prompted by news of how badly he was faring, Haldane came to see him in June 1895. He found Oscar hostile. It took time and kind words from Haldane before Oscar let down his guard. Haldane reminded him of his untapped literary potential, untapped because he had drifted off course, and encouraged Oscar to use prison productively. To this end Haldane promised to procure for him books and writing materials. So habituated to cruelty had Oscar become that this rare display of compassion brought tears to his eyes. When asked which titles he wanted, first on Oscar's list was Flaubert's works. Haldane pointed out the irony of his choice of Flaubert, as the French writer had also ended up in the dock over morality, charged with having corrupted the public with his novel
Madame Bovary
. With the doubt that Flaubert's works would get past the censor's eye, Oscar settled instead for Pater's
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
. Many of the other titles Oscar chose were reflective works. The list included Pascal's
Provincial Letters
and his
Pensées
, St Augustine's
De Civitate Dei
and
Confessiones
, Cardinal Newman's
Essays on Miracles
,
A Grammar of Assent
and
Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
Other works were Newman's
The Idea of a University
, and Theodor Mommsen's
A History of Rome
, in five volumes. This allowance of books was a rare dispensation for a system that brooked no exceptions. Typically, inmates were allowed to read the King James Bible, a prayer book, a hymn book, and for those hours of insomnia, a copy of the prison regulations pinned to the wall. So when not picking oakum or marching senselessly around the yard, Oscar spent his time reading one text after another. But stuffing the empty place with erudition failed to seal him off from his remorseful thoughts or from prison life. A bleakness worse than he could endure made Oscar vulnerable to illness, and in the first year he spent more days in the infirmary than in his cell. Once again, Haldane challenged well-entrenched rules and arranged for Oscar to be transferred to the less gruesome Wandsworth, where he went on 4 July 1895. Then on 20 November Oscar was again transferred, this time to Reading, where conditions were less severe and where he could sleep more easily.

For the first three months of the sentence communication with the outside was not allowed. After three months, one was allowed to write and receive one letter, and be visited for twenty minutes by three people but separated from them by wire blinds, and presided over by a warden. An exception was made for Constance's brother, Otho Holland. Otho let Oscar know Constance was considering divorce proceedings, and would certainly do so if Oscar did not write to her at the first opportunity. Oscar did not want this to happen and Otho informed Constance, who at that time was staying at a resort close to Lake Geneva, where she had gone with the two boys after the trial. At the same time, Constance received a letter from Robert Sherard also trying to reconcile husband and wife. With their encouragement, Constance wrote to Oscar on 8 September 1895, promising to stop divorce proceedings, and kindly let him know Cyril was thinking of him. She also sought permission to visit Oscar from the governor of Wandsworth. She wrote afterwards to Robert Sherard of the pain of seeing Oscar in such conditions. ‘It was indeed awful, more so than I had any conception it could be. I could not see him, I could not touch him, and I scarcely spoke.' The next time she hoped, maybe through Haldane, to secure a private room so she could touch Oscar. To Sherard, she said, Oscar ‘has been mad the last three years, and he says that if he saw Lord A – he would kill him. So he had better stay away and be satisfied with having marred a fine life. Few people can boast of so much.' She thanked Sherard for his kindness to a ‘fallen friend'.
³

Remarkably, bitterness does not appear to have affected Constance. She wrote to one friend of loneliness and of being ‘broken hearted'. Altogether unwell herself, she spoke little of her ailments. Nor did she make a deal of the depletion in her family fortune, which was significant. That autumn Constance and the boys lived with her brother, his wife and his two children, all seven occupying the top floor of a two-storey chalet, with the proprietor living on the ground floor. The days of Hyde Park or Tite Street were over for Constance, who was photographed around this time wearing a plain dark skirt and white shirt, a far cry from the Pre-Raphaelite beauty she had once been.

Robert Sherard was Oscar's most regular visitor, coming once every three months as permitted. Sherard had a pass for a second visitor, but he could find no takers among Oscar's friends. Sherard told Oscar of an article Douglas had placed with the
Mercure de France
, entitled ‘On the Case of Mr Wilde', which would make liberal use of the three letters Oscar had written to Douglas at the time of the trial. Douglas's flaunting of their love for public attention infuriated Oscar, who saw it as a sure way of reigniting controversy. Oscar, at this stage, knew Douglas's real motive was to tell the world ‘that I had been too fond of you'.
⁴
Sherard asked Douglas, on Oscar's behalf, to hold back from publishing. Douglas agreed, but neither buried the article nor his
amour propre.

What Douglas had pushed across the desk of
Mercure de France
would have made Oscar look shabby. It would have shown that he had lied in court about the nature of their love. This is what Douglas had intended to publish:

I do not hope to gain any sympathy by lies, so I shall not pretend that the friendship between Mr Wilde and myself was an ordinary friendship, nor that it was like the feeling which an older brother might have for a younger brother. No, I say now frankly (let my enemies interpret it as they will!) that our friendship was love, real love – love, it is true, completely pure but extremely passionate. Its origin was, in Mr Wilde, a purely physical admiration for beauty and grace (
my
beauty and
my
grace); it matters little that they are real or whether they exist only in the imagination of my friend; what must be remarked is that it was a perfect love, more spiritual than sensual, a truly Platonic love, the love of an artist for a beautiful mind and a beautiful body.
⁵

Douglas's claim that his disclosing the real nature of their love was an act of courage was dubious. Behind this simulacrum of honesty was a scarcely veiled attempt on Douglas's part to tell all of his astonishing conquest of one of the dominant personalities of the age. Equally misjudged was his decision to include in the article another tireless account of his family, of being the victim of his tyrannical father, of Queensberry paying two or three thousand pounds to secure witnesses to testify against Oscar, of the partiality of the judges, all designed to shock and surprise. Douglas cannot have thought this article would do Oscar any favours in the puritanical world of 1895, especially as Oscar was living in hope of a mitigation of his sentence.

Worse, it turned out Douglas had not withdrawn the article from
Mercure de France
, as he claimed, for the editor wrote to him again to know if he still intended to publish. Writing from Capri, Douglas responded in a letter in which, among much else, he painted himself as a poor creature in exile, facing a ruined life. He fired off:

I am the nearest and dearest friend of Mr Oscar Wilde, and the injuries and insults, and practical social ruin which I have endured entirely on account of my steadfast devotion to him are too well known to make it necessary to recall them. I consider that I am a better judge of what is best for Mr Wilde and more likely to understand what his wishes would be, than Mr Sherard. I am convinced that the publication of my article would bring nothing but pity and sympathy to Mr Wilde, and that he himself would approve of it. I was really fulfilling a request of Mr Wilde's.
⁶

Soliciting society's ‘pity and sympathy' was loathsome to Oscar, who later wrote to Douglas, ‘This urging me, this forcing me to appeal to society for help, is one of the things that makes me despise you so much, that makes me despise myself so much for having yielded to you.'
⁷
Douglas's self-obsession confirms Oscar's remark that he had absolutely no capacity to see things from the perspective of anyone but himself. Douglas finally told the editor of
Mercure de France
not to publish but then let slip that his intention had been to act independently. ‘I was particularly anxious that nobody should know of my intention to write the article before it appeared, as I anticipated that many of Mr Wilde's friends would think it unwise . . . I considered it would be a service to my friend and would be for his good.' Infuriated at not getting his own way, Douglas lashed out at Sherard, threatening to ‘shoot him like a dog', accusing him of coming between Oscar and himself.
⁸
Douglas must by this stage have realised that the Queensberry tactics did little to enhance the feminine ‘grace' and ‘beauty' of which he was so proud. Still, painting himself as a poor creature in Capri, crying over the debris he had himself strewn, or promoting the cause of homosexual love on Oscar's behalf, hardly matched the plight of Oscar, then mulling over the sums he had wasted on Douglas.

Oscar had to appear in court on 25 September 1895 to face bankruptcy proceedings. His debts amounted to £3,591, including court costs owed to Queensberry of some £600. Having promised his family would pay the court costs, Douglas now advised them to do nothing. Ross and the art historian and dealer More Adey were handling Oscar's financial and legal affairs. Adey and Ross succeeded in getting the court hearing adjourned to give them more time to raise money from Oscar's friends to cover his debts. One of the assets they wanted to procure, now in the receiver's hands, was Oscar's life interest in Constance's income. As it stood, Oscar would receive Constance's income if she were to predecease him. But one of Constance's reasons for considering a divorce was her mistrust of Oscar's handling of money. She saw divorce as the only way to protect the income for the children. As she put it in a letter to Emily Thursfield, ‘The way he has behaved with money affairs, no one would trust him to look after the boys if anything should happen to me and he got control of my money.'
⁹

It annoyed Constance mightily that Oscar's friends should interfere, and led her to suspect that Oscar's rapprochement might have an ulterior motive, at least judging by this letter to her friend Georgina, to whom she now spoke of her husband as ‘Mr Wilde'. ‘I am again being urged to divorce Mr Wilde and I am as usual blown about by contrary winds. Everyone who knows anything about him believes that he wants my wretched money and indeed it seems from his present actions as tho it were so.' On this assumption, Constance was mistaken. She was subsequently to learn that More Adey and Ross were acting on their own volition, for communication with Oscar was intermittent. Their attempt to salvage some income for Oscar, but at Constance's expense, exacerbated things enough to make her think once again that divorce would be the better option. She concluded her letter to Georgina, ‘It will be his own fault and that of his friends who are forcing on me a step in connection with money of which I do not approve.'
¹⁰

Constance's own life stood on spindly legs, literally and metaphorically. Her back problems made walking difficult, and she was struggling to adjust to her new life. The manager of a hotel near Lake Geneva, where she was staying with the boys, had asked her to leave, an incident that led her to change her surname by deed poll from Wilde to Holland.
¹¹
She had moved on from Switzerland to Germany, to Heidelberg, at the suggestion of a friend, the Ranee of Sarawak, then residing there. She tried to get the boys schooled in Heidelberg, having found English schools unwilling to take them. They entered a German school, but a punishment meted out by a master to Vyvyan incited Cyril to defend his brother by kicking the master on the shins. Both boys were expelled. They repeated their behaviour in the next school, this time choosing as their targets fellow pupils rather than masters. Once again they were expelled. Constance had more luck with the third school, an English establishment called Neuenheim College, where the boys boarded. At least Jane might have been consoled that even if the boys lost the name of Wilde, they held fast to the rebellious nature.

In Heidelberg Constance fetched up at a pension in the town, where she took two rooms and lived frugally. Gone were the gowns, the servants and the maids. Gone too were the Whistler painted ceilings, and the antique brocade she so dearly loved. She saw few people and spent her days reading, learning German, corresponding, putting together her photo album, and no doubt mulling over painful memories. She bore the weight of illness and sadness, as was her wont, thinking of others rather than herself. To Georgina she wrote, ‘Some nights here I have had visions of how near the sea was and of how “life's fitful fever” might soon be ended, but then there are the boys and they save me from anything too desperate!'
¹²
Her recent meetings with Oscar had been amicable enough to kindle hope of a reunion. Even though Oscar had done everything to justify a separation, she insinuated that she might not divorce him after all. Such was her capacity for love, constancy, forgiveness and naivety.