The Fall of the House of Wilde (61 page)

41

The ‘Disgraced' Name

Jane was weakening rapidly. With Oscar's imprisonment, she let go of life. Her pride was so intense that she did not want to face people in this humiliating state. The Comtesse de Brémont, for instance, had called at Oakley Street, but could not gain access. Other friends scattered. The house that had once been a destination was now protected from visitors by a brick wall of discomfiture. What made her more miserable was not receiving a line from Oscar, as is clear in this letter she wrote on 29 August 1895 to Oscar's friend, Ernest Leverson: ‘Accept my grateful thanks for your kind attention in bringing me news of dear Oscar . . . I thought that Oscar might perhaps write to me after the three months, but I have not had a line from him, and I have not written to him as I dread my letters being returned.'
¹
He was still ‘dear Oscar' to Jane. A notebook she kept had a bitter entry, perhaps written around this time. ‘Life is agony and hope, illusion and despair all commingled, but despair outlasts all.'
²
Fate had dealt her a poor hand.

A few of Oscar's friends sent Jane gifts from time to time, and they saw to her needs, as he had requested. To this end, Oscar had given Ernest Leverson the £1,000 sent to him from the sympathetic benefactor, Adela Schuster. Out of the pool of Oscar's money, Leverson paid the rent of £39 13s 6d on Oakley Street and contributed £280 in living costs. He also paid £50 to cover medical costs for Lily Wilde, for amidst the turmoil, the last of the Wilde brood was born. On 11 July 1895, Lily bore Willie a daughter, whom they named Dorothy. That Willie relied on Oscar to
pay the medical bills for his wife suggests how bad things had become. The ground had been shifting underfoot for Willie for some time – all evidence suggests his drinking was now truly out of control. In July, an acquaintance of Oscar's, who knew the set-up in Oakley Street, sent some wine anonymously to Jane, and told the intermediary to specify ‘that you wish her [Lady Wilde] and not Willie Wilde to have it'.
³
Edmond de Goncourt, who was not always accurate about who he was damning so long as he was damning someone, had it on hearsay from Alphonse Daudet that Lady Wilde was always drunk on gin and the bedroom was full of bottles. Everything we know suggests this rumour relates to Willie, not Jane. That de Goncourt wrote this snide snippet in his diary in May 1895 about a woman he had never met is telling of public reaction to the revelations about Oscar. Once again Oscar's fate – this time his infamy, not his fame – was borne by his family.

In January 1896 Jane had a severe attack of bronchitis. Sensing the approach of death, she requested that Oscar be brought from jail just once so she could bid him farewell. Her request was refused. Death then came quickly, unopposed perhaps. On 3 February she lost consciousness and died. The death certificate stated the cause as subacute bronchitis. Evidence suggests she did not fear death. She once wrote to a friend, ‘Dying is a sad process though I do not dread death. I rather long for it with an eager yearning for the Higher Life beyond.'
⁴
And what she told another friend was probably never truer for her than at the moment of her death. ‘How can people weep at Death? To me it is the only happy moment of our miserable, incomprehensible existence.'
⁵

The funeral was held on 5 February. Those few friends who had not dispersed were told of her strong wish ‘to be buried
quite privately
and for no one to come to her funeral'.
⁶
She had neither the graveside rhetoric nor the eulogies she would have had in Ireland. Only Willie and Lily attended the burial at Kensal Green Cemetery. The coffin went underground at plot 127 awaiting a headstone, which never materialised. Willie couldn't afford it. The woman whom Ireland thought the Aeolian harp of her age was buried without fanfare – without name or record, in a cemetery to which she had no connection, in soil to which she did not belong. Given the importance she attached to history and lineage, she would have hated it.

As no further payment was made, Jane's remains were dug up after seven years and removed. The whereabouts of her remains, of the woman whom Dublin described as the social magnet of the age, remain unknown.

Willie had black-bordered memorial cards printed with the words:

In Memoriam Jane Francesca Agnes Speranza, Lady Wilde, Widow of Sir William Wilde, MD, Surgeon Oculist to the Queen in Ireland, Knight of the Order of the North Star in Sweden. Died at her residence, 146 Oakley Street, Chelsea, London, Feb 3
^rd
1896.

The English papers displayed some show of sympathy for what she had had to bear, and were kinder than hitherto. The
Pall Mall Gazette
on 6 February applauded her poetry, the
Westminster Gazette
her exceptional intellect, and even the
Athenaeum
, which rarely had a favourable word to say of her poetry, wrote more gently. On 8 February it spoke of her Dublin days, ‘when her eccentricities excited little comment and her talents commanded much appreciation', and discerned ‘that she professed to value intellectual culture not only above all else, but as the only object in life'. The
Athenaeum
added, ‘Those of us who can testify from intimate knowledge of her sentiments and who had reason to probe her inmost feelings when the strain of society was not upon her, know well that, under the mask of brilliant display and bohemian recklessness, lay a deep and loyal soul and a kindly and sympathetic nature.' The reporter sympathised with the weight of woe she had to bear, ‘the heavy cross in silence and stoical patience under the cover of darkness and the cloak of oblivion'.
The Times
of 7 February recalled her early days as ‘a distinguished member' of the Young Ireland party, praising her verse ‘of virile and passionate rhetoric'. The Irish newspapers remembered Jane as she might have wished to be remembered, as a woman of ‘genuine intellectual power and commanding character'.
⁷

To Oscar she passed on her itch to play with fire, as she had done in the 1848 uprising. Maybe she had gained sufficient distance from this aspect of herself, for later in life, on 28 May 1897, Oscar told Ross that whenever he felt vulnerable, he would feel Jane's presence like a guardian angel warning him from beyond the grave. ‘I quite see that whenever I am in danger she will in some way warn me.'
⁸

To both her sons, Jane had been a soulmate. In a letter to Adey, thanking him for all he had done for Jane, Willie paid tribute to his mother as his most ‘loyal' friend. ‘I thank you sincerely and all good friends of Oscar's for the token of sympathy with me in my sorrow deeper than you can imagine, for my dear mother was more than a mother to me – she was the best and truest and most loyal friend I had on earth – her loss is irreparable.' In speaking of Jane as his friend, Willie bears witness to the modernity of the Wilde family, to whom the Victorian notions of duty, conformity, patriarchy or matriarchy were foreign. It was the flowering of each spirit as an individual that was encouraged in this family, which was now paying a high price for the promotion of liberal values at odds with contemporary mores.

In the same letter to Adey, Willie fully acknowledged the unfailing generosity of Oscar to Jane. ‘It is useless to disguise from you and Oscar's friends that his sad fate saddened her life. With all his faults and follies he was always a good son to her and even from the prison walls managed to help and assist her, as he always did when he was among us all. This must ever stand to his credit.' Willie thanked Adey for offering to tell Oscar of his mother's death, informing him that Constance had agreed to do so. He added, ‘for many reasons he will not wish to see me'.
⁹
The brothers never met again.

Willie had resorted to selling Oscar's belongings, presumably to pay for drink. He sold the fur coat Oscar wore in America and had kept for sentimental and superstitious reasons – often wearing it on first nights. Lily tried to stop him and sent as many as she could of Oscar's possessions to Adey. She wrote, ‘Kindly understand that I take no responsibility as regards Wily [
sic
] and that any money from sale of [Oscar's] clothes I had nothing to do with. Also, Wily has not earned one farthing for the last ten months and I and my family have had to keep my home over my head.'
¹⁰

Constance applied and was granted permission to see Oscar. She arrived back in England on 19 February. In spite of all Constance had suffered at the hands of Oscar, and in spite of her fragile health, she thought only of him, and of how Jane's death ‘will kill him', as she put it in a letter to Lily Wilde. ‘I am not strong but I could bear the journey better if I thought that such a terrible thing would not be told him roughly.'
¹¹
Thus Oscar did not learn the plain truth until some two weeks after Jane died.
No matter, he had intuited it. ‘I knew it already,' he told Constance. The night she had died, he had sensed she was there in his cell. ‘She was dressed for out-of-doors, and he asked her to take off her hat and cloak and sit down. But she shook her head sadly and vanished.'
¹²

Jane's death set him on a tailspin of guilt. He turned to thinking of what history would say of the damage he had inflicted on his parents' legacy. He dwelt on the intellectual eminence of his parents, of the name his father had devoted so much toil to make ‘noble'. Painfully aware of the ‘disgrace' he had brought upon the name ‘Wilde', he wrote in
De Profundis
:

I . . . have no words to express my anguish and my shame . . . She and my father had bequeathed me a name that they had made noble and honoured not merely in Literature, Art, Archaeology and Science, but in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.
¹³

While he was always the poet of shame and remorse, on this occasion he had ample justification. He had not made himself a martyr to art, to a political cause, or to the free choice of sexuality. He was condemned to servitude because he made a foolish misjudgement. Worse was the sheer tastelessness with which he fell from fame to infamy. ‘Everything about my tragedy had been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style.' And he had only himself to blame – ‘I ruined myself.'
¹⁴

Constance was still furious with what she saw as Ross's and Adey's attempt to get hold of the life interest in her dowry. So when she was over in London to tell Oscar of Jane's death, she changed her will. Divorce was not the issue, her inheritance was. On 29 February 1896 she granted her whole estate to her family friend and relative Adrian Hope, on the basis that on her death he invest her assets and hold them in trust for the boys until they reached twenty-one. The will expressed her wish that Hope act as the boys' guardian, with sole authority over them. She offered Oscar £150 as an annual allowance after prison, but included a clause allowing her to withdraw it if he lived with ‘disreputable' people. Her solicitor, Hargrove, brought the document to Reading for Oscar to sign. Unknown to Oscar, Constance accompanied Hargrove but remained outside.

Oscar knew he had only himself to blame and understood her wish to secure financial independence. He wrote to Ross on 10 March 1896, urging him not to interfere in Constance's financial affairs. ‘I feel that I have brought such unhappiness on her and such ruin on my children that I have no right to go against her wishes in anything.'
¹⁵

In May 1896, Ross came to visit him. Ross was shocked to see how he had aged, with his hair streaked grey and white, and he had grown leathery from labouring in the garden. Oscar was still tender and raw and the least unkindness by the warden or the doctor in the infirmary left him wounded. He cried a lot, according to Ross, and nothing freed him from his tormenting thoughts. When Ross told him of Douglas's intention to bring out a volume of poetry dedicated to him, it distressed him. The thought of it must have been like a nail in his plank that night, for the following day he poured out his frustration in a letter to Ross, declaring, among much else, that Douglas had ruined his life. In a letter dated 23 or 30 May, he bade Ross to tell Douglas that ‘he must not do anything of the kind'. Oscar still feared Douglas would publish the three love letters. He asked Ross to secure them. ‘The thought that they [the letters] are in his hands is horrible to me, and though my unfortunate children will never bear my name, still they know whose sons they are and I must try and shield them from the possibility of any further revolting disclosure or scandal.'

His concern about the letters was understandable. Less characteristic of Oscar, who always gave generously without regret, was the demand for the return of his possessions, made in the same letter. He itemised the presents he wanted back from Douglas, ‘the gold cigarette-case, pearl chain and enamel locket', adding, ‘I wish to be certain that in his possession he has nothing that I ever gave him . . . The idea that he is wearing or in possession of anything I gave him is peculiarly repugnant to me.' He continued, even more acrimoniously:

I cannot of course get rid of the revolting memories of the two years I was unlucky enough to have him with me, or the mode by which he thrust me into the abyss of ruin and disgrace to gratify his hatred of his father and other ignoble passions . . . Even if I get out of this loathsome place I know that there is nothing before me but a life of a pariah – of disgrace and penury and contempt – but at least I will have nothing to do with him nor allow him to
come near me. In writing to Douglas you had better quote my letter fully and frankly . . . He has ruined my life and that should content him.
¹⁶