You were my enemy, such an enemy as no man ever had…In less than three years you entirely ruined me from every point of view.
(De Profundis, page 181)

While in prison doing two years hard labour for ‘acts of gross indecency’ (May 1895 to May 1897), Oscar Wilde wrote an enormous letter to his erstwhile lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed ‘Bosie’. It is a very long, very detailed indictment of Douglas’s selfish, spoilt behaviour for the entire period of their affair (they were introduced in June 1891), including a detailed description the hectic days leading up to his fateful trial.

Wilde wrote the letter in January, February and March 1897, towards the end of his imprisonment (May 1897). Wilde was upset that Douglas didn’t bother writing to him in prison (‘I waited month after month to hear from you’, p.238) and then had learned to his dismay (as he mentions on the first page) that Douglas planned to publish Wilde’s letters without permission and dedicate poems to him unasked – just the most recent of the many abuses of their friendship which Wilde taxed Douglas with.

Wilde wrote it under the strict prison regime at Reading Gaol, on sheets of prison notepaper which he had to return to the warders every evening. He wasn’t allowed to post it to Douglas but was permitted to take it with him when he finally left gaol. He presented it to his most loyal friend, Robert Ross, who he had selected to be his literary executor, with instructions to have two copies made and send the original to its intended addressee, Douglas. Shrewdly, Ross sent Douglas only a typed copy of the letter with a covering note and Douglas later stated that, after reading the note, he burned the letter unread. Typical.

After Wilde’s death in November 1900, Ross published extracts from the letter in a 1905 edition of Wilde’s letters, under the Biblical title which Wilde himself had suggested. ‘De Profundis’ is Latin for ‘from the depths’ and the phrase comes from the Latin translation of Psalm 130, ‘From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord’, so entirely appropriate if a little melodramatic.

In the preface to the 1905 edition, Ross included an extract from Wilde’s instructions to him which included the author’s own summary of the work:

I don’t defend my conduct. I explain it. Also in my letter there are several passages which explain my mental development while in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place, and I want you and others who stand by me and have affection for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I face the world. Of course, from one point of view, I know that on the day of my release I will merely be moving from one prison into another, and there are times when the whole world seems to be no larger than my cell, and as full of terror for me. Still at the beginning I believe that God made a world for each separate man, and within that world, which is within us, one should seek to live.

The version Ross published in 1905 was incomplete, less than half the manuscript with all references to the Queensberry family removed (for fear of libel from this super-litigious family), in effect removing almost the entire first half. Succeeding editions gave more of text until, in 1962, the complete and correct version appeared in the complete edition of Wilde’s letters, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. Interestingly it appears that the full text version is still not available online as it is still in copyright in the USA. If you Google it, you are taken to variations on the heavily edited, incomplete 1905 version.

Structure

The letter is traditionally divided into two parts but when I read it, I thought it falls into four.

Opening lines

HM Prison, Reading

Dear Bosie,

After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain…

Part 1. Wilde’s time with Douglas

In the first half Wilde describes in excruciating detail the pair’s relationship, with numerous descriptions of Douglas’s unbearably spoilt, selfish and exploitative behaviour, his insensate rages, his addiction to a:

world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed.

How Douglas’s presence and demands for attention prevented Wilde doing a stroke of work, how he destroyed the ‘intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace and solitude’ he needed to work.

My life, as long as you were by my side, was entirely sterile and uncreative.

While you were with me you were the absolute ruin of my art and, in allowing you to stand persistently between Art and myself I give to myself shame and blame in the highest degree.

He describes how Douglas lived a recklessly extravagant lifestyle and expected Wilde to pay for everything. At various points Wilde tots up what this or that escapade cost him, numbers imprinted on his memory since, as a result of the first trial, he had been declared bankrupt and had to go through his accounts line by line with a Bankruptcy Receiver (p.157). He estimates that between autumn 1892 and May 1895 he spent more than £5,000 cash on Douglas, not counting bills.

Every day I had to pay for every single thing you did all day long. (p.228)

I blame myself for having allowed you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin.

You demanded without grace and received without thanks.

According to Wilde he found Douglas’s behaviour so intolerable that they broke up every three months or so, on one occasion Wilde fleeing England altogether to escape him (p.162). Yet always, at that point, Douglas bombarded him with begging letters and his mother (a surprisingly regular presence in the letters) would beg Wilde to be kind to her son and so…he would forgive him and take him back only for the same pattern to repeat itself. Wilde, humbled by prison life, blames himself for his weakness as much as Douglas for his heedless selfishness.

I will begin by telling you that I blame myself terribly. (p.154)

Most of all I blame myself for the entire ethical degradation I allowed you to bring on me. (p.157)

Ethically you had been even more destructive to me than you had been artistically. (p.159)

The accusations lead up to a detailed description of their stay, in October 1894, at the Grand Hotel in Brighton (pages 164 to 167) where Wilde tenderly nursed Douglas through a bout of flu with flowers and books and choice food; but then, when he was better and Wilde, having moved to lodgings, went down with it, Douglas disappeared off to entertain himself, only returning to demand more money, leaving Wilde, weak and feverish, to fend for himself, and at one point uttering the famous words: ‘When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting. The next time you are ill I will go away at once.‘ (p.168).

At one point Douglas became so furiously angry with Wilde for cramping his pleasures and approached the sick man’s bed in such a threatening manner, that Wilde fled the bedroom and didn’t return until he’d summoned the landlord for safety (p.166). Later Douglas wrote to him that it was an uglier moment than he imagined (p.167). Did he mean he intended to kill Wilde? Wilde thinks so. He wonders whether he had the pistol on him which he often brandished around, one time letting it off in a restaurant by mistake (p.175); or had seized a paperknife?

Wilde is portentous. The letter loses no opportunity to elevate this sordid and pathetic affair and his wretched exploitation by a spoilt brat, to the rank of some great work of art or a tragedy supervised by the Greek gods:

The gods are strange. It is not of our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place. (p.169)

The Fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our divided lives… (p.173)

He describes how, when Douglas sent him an undergraduate poem, Wilde replied with a letter intended to be a prose poem invoking the Greeks, how Douglas gave this letter to a friend who passed it to blackmailers who tried to extort money from Wilde and distributed letters round society, to the manager of a theatre staging one of his plays, how it was produced in court against him, used as evidence of his corrupting influence, and helped convict and send him to prison.

The story of his gift of the Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young to a magazine set up by an undergraduate friend of Douglas’s, who then published it alongside a number of gay stories, which were read out as evidence against him at the trial.

The centrality of HATE for his father, much stronger than love for anyone else, in Douglas’s character (pages 174 to 180).

Details of the selling-off of Wilde’s belongings including priceless presentation volumes by all the authors of his day (p.179).

Part one ends with Wilde concluding that the only way to deal with such a monster of selfish ingratitude is to forgive him. He must forgive Douglas for his own sake. Otherwise he will carry the poison of bitterness in his heart forever and it will kill him.

I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world. (p.195)

The notion of forgiveness is the hinge into the second part of this long, long letter, which deals with what Wilde has learned through his two long years of intense suffering.

Part 2. Court, goal, suffering and enlightenment

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

Having raked over their relationship and the events which led up to his arrest, trials and imprisonment, Wilde turns to consider the spiritual aspects of the experience, what he has learned, how he is managing it.

I have to make everything that has happened to me good for me. (p.197)

The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days one maimed, marred and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to accept it without complain, fear or reluctance. (p.197)

To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. (p.197)

I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. (p.207)

I am simply concerned with my whole mental attitude towards life as a whole (p.199)

I write this account of the mode of my being transferred here simply that it should be realised how hard it has been for me to get anything out of my punishment but bitterness and despair. I have, however, to do it, and now and then I have moments of submission and acceptance. All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. So perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement, and humiliation. I can, at any rate, merely proceed on the lines of my own development, and, accepting all that has happened to me, make myself worthy of it. (p.219)

For a while this striving of acceptance of everything which has happened to you reminds me of Nietzsche and the myth of eternal recurrence. But then he changes the tone by moving to a whole hearted consideration of Jesus. With typical Wilde bravado, and consistent with the depiction of him in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde portrays Jesus as a romantic, individualist artist (much like himself).

Christ’s place indeed is with the poets. (p.205)

Like everyone else, he appropriates Jesus for his ideology, in this case his aesthetic and poetics. Thus Wilde interprets Jesus’ entire life as ‘the most wonderful of poems’, rewriting Jesus’ entire career in his late-Romantic purple prose.

Christ, like all fascinating personalities, had the power of not merely saying beautiful things himself, but of making other people say beautiful things to him…

The Letter morphs into The Soul of Man Under Socialism when Wilde declares that Jesus was, above all, ‘the most supreme of individualists’ in fact ‘Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.’ (p.207) All his alleged teachings and philanthropy really were about just one thing – perfecting oneself.

But Wilde’s (mis)interpretation also generates new insights:

With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppression, and ‘whose silence is heard only of God,’ he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose tongues had been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found no utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven. And feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and sorrow were modes through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in doing.

That Wilde could conceive and write this while ill and depressed, imprisoned, shamed and bankrupted, having lost his belongings, reputation, career and family, is impressive. What it shows to me is that his aesthetic philosophy wasn’t an add-on which he worked up for public effect, but ran through him to the core.

What it also indicates is a substantial change in style from the first ‘half’. There Wilde had come close to whining in a text dominated by autobiographical reminiscences. Here, as you can see, the text feels much more worked-over, burnished and melliflous, to reflect a careful development of thought very similar to his critical essays.

He has been reading the four gospels in their original Greek and quotes from them with his own translations.

He moves on to explain the superiority of Christ’s all-encompassing compassion to the brutality of most of the Greek gods and their myths. And then gives an aesthetic explanation for the entire conception of ‘prophecy’ (i.e. that Jesus was the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies) by saying:

Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.

This has the neatness, stylishness, of his essays. If he ever writes anything artistic again, he will take as his theme ‘Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life’ (p.213). In his hands Jesus comes perilously close to sounding like Oscar Wilde:

If the only thing that he ever said had been, ‘Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much,’ it would have been worthwhile dying to have said it. His justice is all poetical justice, exactly what justice should be.

And goes on to say that Christ ‘preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment’. I won’t quote it all but his rewriting of the antinomian Jesus is extremely persuasive. His interpretation of the salvation of Mary Magdelen just for a moment of pure love is moving, as is his reading of Jesus’s special mode of understanding the sinner:

In a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection.

This strikes me as a very profound insight, the most profound thing I’ve come across in Wilde. And yet, the next minute, he sounds a little silly, too like the provocative poseur of his pre-prison days:

There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.

You can see how that has been worked-up to arrive at the provocative punchline. Or:

Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.

What is pretty obviously missing from all this is any sense of divinity, of God the father and Creator who, if you read the Gospels, Jesus is very much at pains to invoke. Wilde describes an almost secular Jesus, a preacher of self-awareness and self-development, even at the cost of personal pain. It’s no surprise that the Catholic Church refused to accept him when he left prison, despite repeated attempts. It was quite simply because he wasn’t a Christian.

Nowadays this type of positive self-overcoming is called mindfulness or resilience, and Wilde gives the same basic thought a number of very powerful expressions:

And for the last seven or eight months, in spite of a succession of great troubles reaching me from the outside world almost without intermission, I have been placed in direct contact with a new spirit working in this prison through man and things, that has helped me beyond any possibility of expression in words: so that while for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing 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. If it does I shall owe much to this new personality that has altered every man’s life in this place.

This was due, as the notes tell us, to the arrival of a new governor of the prison. The governor for Wilde’s first year had been a martinet who kept the letter of the law and subjected the inmates to fierce discipline. In July 1896 he was replaced by Major James Nelson who immediately set out installing a more humane regime.

In a structured passage he rejects morality, reason and religion. ‘My Gods dwell in temples made with hands’. Wilde reworks his doctrine of the acceptance of experience: all of it must be accepted and transformed, whatever its origin.

Part 3. Back to Bosie

These repeated exhortations to acceptance reach a climax and then there’s a transition to what I take to be the third part of the letter. This returns to the subject matter and style of part 1, namely a return to wringing his hands over the entire wretched Queensberry family, and a return to the more factual, documentary and accusatory tone of part 1. This time round it’s Douglas’s mother who gets extended criticism for her cowardice in refusing to speak directly to her son but writing Wilde begging him to do her dirty work – i.e. telling her son to pull himself together – for her, and ending all her letters with the same refrain: ‘On no account let Alfred know that I have written to you.’

Part 4. Practicalities

In the last few pages Wilde turns to two practical issues. First he describes the details of his bankruptcy which is genuinely harrowing. He can scarcely believe that Douglas thought it would be ripping good fun if Wilde was declared bankrupt because it would stop his father claiming his court costs. I.e. he didn’t think for a minute of the impact on Wilde, just about spiting his hated father. That’s motivated from start to finish of their wretched affair, Douglas’s hatred of his father, and Wilde found himself trapped in the middle, and was ruined for it.

Then he describes what he plans to do at his release, namely go straight to France to stay with close friends who have remained true and commune with nature. There is no place for him in England. He wants to be beside the sea and praises the ancient Greeks’ attitude to the primal elements of nature.

Then he reiterates the need for him to accept his past in order to move into the future. It has been an epic read. What it must have cost him to write! And so it ends.

Subjects

Prison life:

‘We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain and the record of bitter moments. Suffering – curious as it may seem to you – is the means by which we exist because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing, and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity’ p.164)

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing…

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more… (p.186)

To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day’s experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy. (p.219)

The terrible incident at Clapham Junction where he was made to stand in prison clothes, in chains, waiting for the train to Reading while trainload after trainload of scurrying passengers mocked and jeered and then spat at him (p.219). Compare and contrast with the incident of Robert Ross doffing his hat to Wilde after his conviction.

What you learn from prison:

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are, and will be what they will be. (p.185)

Philosophising:

To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life which we realise at every moment (p.172)

Fine writing (p.176)

Literature the greatest art (p.188)

The purple pageant of my incommunicable woe (p.186), laurel and bayleaf )p.187).

Douglas’s appalling character

‘So full of terrible defects, so utterly ruinous both to yourself and to others’ (p.162)

Douglas takes advantage of his ‘proverbial good nature and Celtic laziness’ (p.158).

Douglas’s extravagance (pages 156 to 157, 172).

Douglas stops Wilde working (pages 154, 155, 156).

Douglas’s rages (pages 158, 166).

Douglas’s terrible translation of Salome (pages 155, 160, 161).

I knew quite well that no translation, unless one done by a poet, could render the colour and cadence of my work in any adequate measure… (p.161)

Douglas gives careless gifts of suits away to his gay lovers and rent boys, their pockets still filled with incriminating letters. Some of the recipients used them to try and blackmail Wilde, and then were produced in court, linking him to the world of rent-boys which his young lover had led him into.

You had left my letters lying about for blackmailing companions to steal, for hotel servants to pilfer, for housemaids to sell. (p.182)

The Marquess of Queensbury – epileptic fury (p.167), vendetta (pages 174 to 175).

I who appealed to all the ages have had to accept my verdict from one who is an ape and a buffoon. (p.184)

Details of the days surrounding the trials – ‘Blindly I staggered as an ox into the shambles’ (p.158), ‘You forced me to stay to brazen it out’ (p.159). Douglas taunts into launching the action against Queensbury; when Wilde says he has no money, Douglas says his family will pay the costs so that ‘I had no excuse left for not going. I was forced into it’ (p.171)

At one point Wilde anticipates W.H Auden’s great poem, Musee des Beaux Arts:

There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest,

Thoughts

Gripping

De Profundis is by far the most gripping and ‘real’ thing Wilde ever wrote. All his letters are wonderful, and reading Wilde’s correspondence is to be touched and inspired by such a warm, humane, literate and educated presence – but ‘De Profundis’ is something else. It plunges you straight into a realistic depiction of a tortured, modern relationship with none of the artifice or elaboration which makes the plays or essays or Dorian Gray so artificial and false. (OK, there’s a fair amount of artifice in the description of his philosophy, invoking Jesus and the Greek gods, but in the core passages devoted to Douglas and his terrible father, and Wilde’s litany of humiliations, it feels immediate and lacerating.) I half expected rereading it for this blog to be a chore but I was absolutely gripped and absorbed.

Beggars

Was ever such an extensive character assassination committed to paper? After reading the content, it is astonishing that – as if deliberately dramatising his ongoing addiction to this vile young man – despite the letter’s vivid portrait of Douglas’s despicable character which emerges, Wilde starts the letter ‘Dear Bosie’ and ends it ‘Your Affectionate Friend’.

And it quite beggars belief that after writing the longest indictment any writer ever wrote of their one-time lover – decrying his extravagance, selfishness and ruinous improvidence – Wilde got back together with Douglas. He wrote asking to see him as soon as he was freed from prison and the pair went to briefly live together in Naples, until the friends and family of both men forced them to part. Among countless other passages of flaming criticism, Wilde writes:

It would be impossible for me now to have for you any feeling other than that of contempt and scorn, for myself other than any feeling of scorn and contempt. (p.192)

And yet…he went running back to this object of scorn and contempt. If the letter itself didn’t convey this, the fact that he reunited with such a worm suggests it was a profound psychological addiction, like heroin or cocaine, rather than a healthy, reciprocal relationship.

But why, that’s the great question. Bosie was a monster of selfishness, given to epic rages, nowhere near Wilde’s intellectual equal, completely unsympathetic to his artistry and utterly ruinous for his concentration and writing – why did Wilde keep going back to him, and went back after the wretched worm had utterly ruined his life? It absolutely wasn’t his personality or intellect or even looks. Was he great at some particular sexual kink? But Douglas, in his later memoirs, denied that they even had sex, saying most of what they did was kissing and cuddling and Bosie’s main activity was lining up rent boys and like-minded young men for Wilde to take his pleasure with. Why? Why did he go back to him?

Letters to be published

That said, there’s something peculiar about baring one’s soul, and listing every argument from a long and stormy relationship, with a view to its eventual publication. The letter is a gruesomely detailed description of a deeply troubled relationship but, you can’t help wondering, even here, was Wilde performing? Was he writing with an audience in mind? Yes, most definitely. It combines a detailed chronology of their affair and of the events leading up to the trials with passages of moralising about love and beauty and art and the soul which are quite clearly aimed at a wider audience, as crafted as anything (as I suggested above).

Homosexual absence

Initially I thought the letter completely suppressed any mention of homosexuality or the acts of ‘gross indecency’ Wilde was convicted of, probably for legal, social, all kinds of reasons. But slowly I realised I was wrong. The ‘issue’ is referred to half a dozen times, most clearly in an anecdote towards the end.

First of all, Wilde refers four or five times to the reason he and Douglas met in the first place, which is that Douglas, while an undergraduate at Oxford, wrote him a letter asking for his advice and help with a problem of a particular nature.

I told her [Douglas’s mother] the origin of our friendship was you in your undergraduate days at Oxford coming to beg me to help you in very serious trouble of a particular character. I told her that your life had been continually in the same manner troubled… (p.163)

Our friendship really begins with you begging me in a most pathetic and charming letter to assist you in a position appalling to anyone, doubly so to a young man at Oxford… (p.169)

I would not have expected or wished for you to have stated how and for what purpose you had sought my assistance in your trouble at Oxford… (p.184)

When Edward Levy, at the very beginning of our friendship, seeing your manner of putting me forward to bear the brunt, and annoyance, and expense even of that unfortunate Oxford mishap of yours, if we must so term it, in reference to which his help and advice had been sought, warned me for the space of an hour against knowing you, you laughed. (p.190)

Ten seconds searching on the internet tell me that in the spring of 1892 Douglas was being blackmailed by a young man over an indiscreetly gay letter he had sent him. Douglas wrote to Wilde asking for help, Wilde travelled down to Oxford and spent the weekend at Douglas’s lodgings. Back in London he consulted his solicitor, George Lewis, who advised resolving the problem by paying the blackmailer £100.

But this sequence of events is nowhere referred to in De Profundis and this leads to several thoughts. One is that, if course Wilde doesn’t make anything explicit in the letter: 1) he was a gentleman and gentlemen don’t discuss sex of any variety; 2) he regarded it as beneath his dignity and certainly beneath the moral purpose of the letter; 3) anything he wrote could possibly be used against him in yet another prosecution.

The second thought arises from something intriguing I read about ‘De Profundis’ which is that gay consciousness had barely begun. A man was a gentleman and he may or may not have peculiar tastes but a) no-one talked about it b) there was a less clear-cut line between gay and straight than was to be drawn during the twentieth century (and now, in the 21st century, is being blurred and elided again). So Wilde may never have thought of himself as homosexual but merely a gentleman who enjoyed Uranian activities.

The third thought is that this absence of sex does something funny to the text. It’s packed with accusations against Douglas, including lots of financial details, descriptions of his horrid family etc, then moves on to discuss spiritual and psychological development. And yet, all the time, it (almost completely) ignores the elephant in the room. A huge letter rotating around his prosecution and conviction and imprisonment and yet which…never directly addresses or refutes the prosecution case or evidence.

But as you read on, slowly slowly the love that dare not speak its name does make an appearance in asides and references. Is homosexuality what he’s referring to here, where he writes of a meretricious article Douglas had written for the Mercure de France, that:

Along with genius goes often a curious perversity of passion and desire?…[that] the pathological phenomenon in question is also found amongst those who have not genius. (p.183)

Later:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. (p.194)

And, in one of the rare references to the actual court case:

When your father’s Counsel desiring to catch me in a contradiction suddenly produced in court a letter of mine, written to you in March ’93, in which I stated that, rather than endure a repetition of the hideous scenes you seemed to have such a terrible pleasure in making, I would readily consent to be ‘blackmailed by every renter in London’, it was a very real grief to me that that side of my friendship with you should incidentally be revealed to the common gaze. (p.185)

‘That side of my friendship with you’ = gay sex. The entire long letter could be seen as Wilde’s attempt to deny ‘that side of my friendship with you’ (sex) and focus overwhelmingly on love, psychology, and then Christ and penitence. But according to modern accounts Wilde had lots of sex with lots of rent boys, servants and others, and he often coerced them into the act. In De Profundis Wilde suppresses all of that. Or, by his own lights, was he simply being a civilised gentleman and not mentioning it, preferring (still) to come across as artist by concentrating on character, emotion and so on?

When I told you that even that unfortunate young man who ultimately stood beside me in the Dock had warned me more than once that you would prove far more fatal in bringing me to utter destruction than any of the common lads I was foolish enough to know, you laughed, though not with much sense of amusement. (p.190)

‘I was foolish enough to know‘? He did a bit more than ‘know’ them. Later in life, Douglas said that the pair rarely if ever had sex and the relationship was mostly restricted to kissing and stormy arguments, but at the same time frankly admitted that the pair mostly procured gay partners for each other.

The references build up. Wilde describes how boring Douglas’s conversation was:

…and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me… (p.161)

Since he was not an intellectual, pretty uncultivated and not interested in Wilde’s work, would this one fascinating topic have been…gay sex? Did Bosie beguile Wilde not by any physical acts at all, but with his knowledge of forbidden sins i.e. gay sex and the gay underworld?

Towards the end of the long letter comes the only place (I think) where Wilde directly addresses the issue:

A great friend of mine — a friend of ten years’ standing — came to see me some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice, still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures and strange passions, and that unless he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his friendship on false pretences. (p.230)

Justification for consorting with lowlife

And then the danger – Wilde wanted to walk on the wild side, to play with fire.

People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But they, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approached them, were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement… They were to me the brightest of gilded snakes. Their poison was part of their perfection…I didn’t feel at all ashamed of having known them. They were intensely interesting… (p.221)

This is fine as artistic justification but it doesn’t address the central accusation, that he had widespread and systematic gross indecency with lots of young men, many of them boys, some borderline children (aged 15 and younger).

Wilde the abuser

For unscholarly but modern indictments of Wilde’s exploitative behaviour, see:

• It’s Time For The Left To Stop Idolizing Oscar Wilde. He’s A Pervert by Nick Sheppard
• Just Wilde about the boys (review of ‘Andre and Oscar: Gide, Wilde and The Art of Gay Living’) by John R. Bradley

Getting over it

Towards the end of ‘De Profundis’, Wilde launches into another sequence of pages trying to analyse how Douglas created such havoc in his life. He keeps coming up with formulations and saying ‘That’s it’, and being content for half a page… before coming round to the subject again and setting off on a whole new analysis. It is clear that, in writing the letter, Wilde was still very much working it through and this is what gives it – despite the artful passages I’ve mentioned – its psychologically gripping quality. He writes that at moments he has accepted the past and is ready to move on, but the sheer length of the letter, not to mention its repetitive analyses of the same traumas and wounds, shows that he was far from cured.

Credit

Page references are to the 1979 Oxford University Press edition of the Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.

Related link

As explained above, you can read the bowdlerised, short version of ‘De Profundis’ at any number of places on the net, such as Planet Gutenberg – but this is the short version Robbie Ross prepared with all references to the Queensberry family removed. The full text is still not available online as it is still in copyright in the USA.

• Oscar Wilde online

Related reviews

• Oscar Wilde reviews