Oscar Wilde Page 4

  (Here I do not think that I can do better than recopy the pages in which I transcribed, a short time later, everything that I could recall of what he had said.)

  “Oh! of course! of course, I knew that there would be a catastrophe—that one or another, I was expecting it. It had to end that way. Just imagine: it wasn’t possible to go any further; and it couldn’t last. That’s why, you see, it has to be ended. Prison has completely changed me. I counted on it for that.—B … is terrible; he can’t understand it; he can’t understand my not going back to the same existence; he accuses the others of having changed me … But one should never go back to the same existence … My life is like a work of art; an artist never starts the same thing twice … or if he does, it’s that he hasn’t succeeded. My life before prison was as successful as possible. Now it’s something that’s over.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “The public is so dreadful that it never knows a man except by the last thing that he’s done. If I went back to Paris now, all they’d want to see in me is the … convict. I don’t want to reappear before writing a play. I must be let alone until then.”—And he added abruptly, “Haven’t I done well to come here? My friends wanted me to go to the Midi to rest; because, at the beginning, I was very tired. But I asked them to find me, in the North of France, a very small beach, where I wouldn’t see anyone, where it’s quite eold, where it’s almost never sunny … Oh! haven’t I done well to come and live in Berneval?” (Outside the weather was frightful.)

  “Here everyone is very good to me. The curé in particular. I’m so fond of the little church! Would you believe that it’s called Notre Dame de Liesse! Aoh! isn’t it charming?—And now I know that I’m never again going to be able to leave Berneval, because this morning the curé offered me a permanent stall in the choir!

  “And the customs officers! They were so bored here! so I asked them whether they hadn’t anything to read; and now I’m bringing them all the novels of Dumas the elder … I have to stay here, don’t I?

  “And the children! aaah! they adore me! The day of the queen’s jubilee, I gave a great festival, a great dinner, to which I had forty school-children—all! all! with the teacher! to fête the queen! Isn’t that absolutely charming?… You know I’m very fond of the queen. I always have her portrait with me.” And he showed me, pinned to the wall, the portrait by Nicholson.

  I got up to look at it; a small library was nearby; I looked at the books for a moment. I should have liked to get Wilde to talk to me more seriously. I sat down again, and with a bit of fear I asked him whether he had read The House of the Dead. He did not answer directly but began:

  “The writers of Russia are extraordinary. What makes their books so great is the pity which they’ve put into them. At first, I liked Madame Bovary a great deal, didn’t I; but Flaubert didn’t want any pity in his work, and that’s why it seems small and closed; pity is the side on which a work is open, by which it appears infinite … Do you know, dear,1 that it’s pity that kept me from killing myself? Oh! during the first six months I was terribly unhappy; so unhappy that I wanted to kill myself; but what kept me from doing so was looking at the others, seeing that they were as unhappy as I, and having pity. O dear! it’s an admirable thing, pity; and I didn’t know what it was! (He was speaking in an almost low voice, without any exaltation.) Have you quite understood how admirable a thing pity is? As for me, I thank God each evening—yes, on my knees, I thank God for making me know what it is. For I entered prison with a heart of stone, thinking only of my pleasure, but now my heart has been completely broken; pity has entered my heart; I now understand that pity is the greatest, the most beautiful thing that there is in the world … And that’s why I can’t be angry with those who condemned me, nor with anyone, because without them I would not have known all that—B … writes me terrible letters; he tells me that he doesn’t understand me; that he doesn’t understand that I’m not angry with everyone; that everyone has been hateful to me … No, he doesn’t understand me; he can’t understand me any more. But I repeat to him in each letter: we can not follow the same path; he has his; it’s very beautiful; I have mine. His is that of Alcibiades; mine is now that of Saint Francis of Assisi … Are you familiar with Saint Francis of Assisi? aoh! wonderful! wonderful! Do you want to do something very nice for me? Send me the best life of Saint Francis that you know …

  I promised him to do so; he continued:

  “Yes—then we had a charming warden, aoh! quite charming! but the first six months I was terribly unhappy. There was a very nasty warden, a German, who was very cruel because he was completely lacking in imagination.” This last remark, said very fast, was irresistibly comical, and as I burst out laughing, he laughed too, repeated it, and then continued:

  “He didn’t know what to imagine to make us suffer … You’ll see how lacking he was in imagination … You have to know that in prison you’re allowed to go outside only an hour a day; you then walk around a court behind one another, and it’s absolutely forbidden to speak to one another. There are guards watching you and there are terrible punishments for the one they catch.—Those who are in prison for the first time can be recognized by their not knowing how to speak without moving their lips … I had already been locked up six weeks and hadn’t yet said a word to anybody—to anybody. One evening we were walking behind one another that way during the recreation hour, and suddenly, behind me, I heard my name uttered: it was the prisoner behind me who was saying, ‘Oscar Wilde, I pity you because you must be suffering more than we.’ So I made an enormous effort not to be noticed (I thought I was going to faint), and I said without turning around, ‘No, my friend, we are all suffering equally.’—and that day I no longer had any desire to kill myself.

  “We talked like that for several days. I knew his name and what he did. His name was P …; he was an excellent chap; aoh! excellent!… But I still didn’t know how to talk without moving my lips, and one evening: ‘C.33! (C.33, that was I)—C.33 and C.48, step out of line!’ So we stepped out of line and the guard said, “You’re going to be brought up before the warden…”—And as pity had already entered my heart, I was afraid only for him; indeed, I was happy to suffer because of him.—But the warden was quite terrible. He had P … brought in first; he wanted to question us separately—because you have to know that the penalty for the one who starts speaking and the one who answers is not the same; the penalty of the one who speaks first is double that of the other; ordinarily, the first gets two weeks of solitary confinement, the second, only one; so the warden wanted to know which of us two had spoken first, and, of course, Pα …, who was an excellent chap, said that it was he. And, when, afterward, the warden sent for me to question me, of course I said that it was I. The warden then got very red, because he no longer understood.—‘But P … also says that he’s the one who started! I can’t understand …’

  “Imagine that, dear!! He couldn’t understand! He was very embarrassed; he kept saying, ‘But I gave him two weeks …’ and then he added, ‘All right, if that’s how things stand, I’m going to give both of you two weeks.’ Isn’t that extraordinary! That man had no sort of imagination.”

  Wilde was enormously amused at what he was saying; he was laughing; he was happy to be telling a story:

  “And naturally, after the two weeks, we had a greater desire to talk to one another than before. You don’t know how sweet that can seem, to feel that we were suffering for each other.—Little by little, as we weren’t in the same line every day, little by little I was able to speak to each of the others; to all! to all!… I knew each one’s name, each one’s history, and when he was to leave prison … And to each one of them I would say, ‘When you get out of prison, the first thing you’re to do is to go to the post-office; there will be a letter for you with some money.’—With the result that, in that way, I continue to know them, because I love them very much. And some of them are quite delightful. Would you believe that already three of them have come to see me her
e! Isn’t that quite wonderful?…

  “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

  WHEN I WAS BACK IN PARIS, 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

  AND SHORTLY AFTERWARD, WILDE 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 recei
ved 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: Intentions1 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.”