Oscar Wilde (5 page)

“But if you go back there, what will happen?” I asked him. “Do you know what you're risking?

“One should never know that … They're extraordinary, my friends; they advise prudence. Prudence! But can I have any? That would be going backwards. I must go as far as possible … I can not go further … Something must happen … something else …”

Wilde embarked the following day.

The rest of the story is familiar. That “something else” was
hard labor.
²

¹
One of those last Algiers evenings, Wilde seemed to have promised himself to say nothing serious. At length I grew somewhat irritated with his too witty paradoxes:

“You've better things to say than witticisms,” I began, “You're talking to me this evening as if I were the public. You ought rather talk to the public the way you know how to talk to your friends. Why aren't your plays better? You talk away the best of yourself; why don't you write it down?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed at once, “but my plays are not at all good; and I don't put any stock in them at all … But if you only knew what amusement they give!… Almost every one is the result of a wager.
Dorian Grey
too; I wrote it in a few days because one of my friends claimed that I could never write a novel. It bores me so much, writing!”—Then, suddenly bending over toward me; “Would you like to know the great drama of my life?—It's that I've put my genius into my life; I've put only my talent into my works.”

It was only too true. The best of his writing is only a pale reflection of his brilliant conversation. Those who have heard him speak find it disappointing to read him.
Dorian Grey,
at the very beginning, was a splendid story, how superior to the
Peau de Chagrin!
how much more
significant!
Alas! written down, what a masterpiece
manqué
”.— In his most charming tales there is too great an intrusion of literature. Graceful as they may be, one feels too greatly the affectation; preciosity and euphuism conceal the beauty of the first invention; one feels in them, one can never stop feeling, the three moments of their genesis; the first idea is quite beautiful, simple, profound and certainly sensational; a kind of latent necessity holds its parts firmly together; but from here on, the gift stops; the development of the parts is carried out factitiously; they are not well organized; and when, afterwards, Wilde works on his phrases, and goes about pointing them up, he does so by a prodigious overloading of concetti, of trivial inventions, which are pleasing and curious, in which emotion stops, with the result that the glittering of the surface makes our mind lose sight of the deep central emotion.

²
I have invented nothing and arranged nothing in the last remarks I quote. Wilde's words are present to my mind, and I was going to say to my ear. I am not claiming that Wilde clearly saw prison rising up before him; but I do assert that the dramatic turn which surprised and astounded London, abruptly transforming Wilde from accuser to accused, did not, strictly speaking, cause him any surprise. The newspapers, which were unwilling to see anything more in him than a clown, did their best to misrepresent the attitude of his defense, to the point of depriving it of any meaning. Perhaps, in some far-off time it will be well to lift this frightful trial out of its abominable filth.

III

A
S SOON AS HE LEFT PRISON
, O
SCAR
W
ILDE CAME BACK
to France. At Berneval, a quiet little village in the neighborhood of Dieppe, a certain Sebastian Melmoth took up residence: it was he. As I had been the last of his French friends to see him, I wished to be the first to see him again. As soon as I could learn his address, I made haste.

I arrived toward the middle of the day. I arrived without having announced myself. Melmoth, whom the good cheer of Thaulow called rather often to Dieppe, was not to return until evening. He did not return until the middle of the night.

Winter was still lingering on. It was cold; it was ugly. All day long I roamed about the deserted beach, dejected and full of boredom. How could Wilde have chosen Berneval to live in? It was dismal.

Night came. I returned to take a room in the hotel, the same one in which Melmoth was living, and moreover the only one in the place. The hotel, clean, and agreeably situated, lodged only a few
second-rate people, inoffensive associates in whose presence I had to dine. Sad society for Melmoth!

Luckily I had a book. Dismal evening! Eleven o'clock … I was going to give up waiting, when I heard the roll of a carriage … M. Melmoth had arrived.

M. Melmoth was chilled through and through. He had lost his overcoat on the way. A peacock feather which his servant had brought him the evening before (frightful omen) had presaged a misfortune; he was happy that it was not that. But he was shivering and the whole hotel was excited about getting a grog heated for him. He hardly said hello to me. Before the others at least, he did not want to seem moved. And my emotion almost at once subsided at finding Sebastian Melmoth so simply like the Oscar Wilde that he had been: no longer the lyrical madman of Algeria, but the gentle Wilde of before the crisis; and I found myself carried back not two years, but four or five years earlier; the same worn look, the same amused laugh, the same voice …

He occupied two rooms, the two best in the hotel, and had had them tastefully arranged. Many books on the table, and among them he showed me my
Nourritures Terrestres
which had recently been published. A pretty Gothic Virgin, on a high pedestal, in the shadow …

We were sitting near the lamp and Wilde was sipping his grog. I noticed then, in the better light, that the skin of his face had become red and common; that of the hands even more so, though they were again wearing the same rings; one, which he was very fond of, had a setting of an Egyptian scarab in lapis-lazuli. His teeth were atrociously decayed. We chatted. I spoke to him again of our last meeting in Algiers. I asked him whether he remembered that at the time he had almost predicted the catastrophe.

“Isn't it so,” I said, “that you knew to a certain extent what was in store for you in England; you had foreseen the danger and rushed into it?…”

(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 here! Isn't that quite wonderful?…