Wednesday, April 5, 2023

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 52 / De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 52 – De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)

There is a thrilling majesty to Oscar Wilde’s tormented tour de force written as he prepared for release from Reading jail

Robert McCrum
Monday 30 January 2017 05.45 GMT

n life and death, Oscar Wilde possessed a unique self-mythologising genius. Long before he secured his place in Britain’s pantheon of great dramatists, he had established himself as the witty icon of an aesthetic ideal. By the spring of 1882, when he went to America declaring his “genius”, he was doubly celebrated in both the United States and England (where Gilbert and Sullivan had just satirised Wilde’s aesthetic movement in the character of the poet Bunthorne in Patience), as much for himself as for his writing. For a tantalisingly brief period, until the summer of 1894, when he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest in three weeks, Wilde blazed like a meteor across Victorian London before crashing and burning at his Old Bailey trial (after the disaster of the Queensberry libel case) in May 1895. A lesser artist might have been broken by that fall, but Wilde was ultimately inspired by it.

In his cell, between January and March 1897, in preparation for his release from Reading jail in April, Oscar Wilde began to write an extraordinary letter. He wanted to address his notorious relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fin-de-siècle romance that had swiftly become a fatal tragedy. “Bosie” had remained aloof from his former lover throughout the two years of Wilde’s sentence (“with hard labour”), and the 80 pages of manuscript written on 20 folios of thin blue prison paper became Wilde’s tormented bid for some kind of rapprochement. What began as an act of would-be reconciliation blossomed into an excruciating, and utterly compelling, chapter of autobiography, an aesthetic apologia (Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis – “Letter: from Prison and in Chains”) , and finally a tour de force of prose by a late-Victorian writer of genius.

Oscar WiIde, photographed at the height of his success, five years before the trial that send him to prison in 1895.

Wilde was always a master of disguises and personas. The Importance of Being Earnest is all about double lives. In De Profundis (its title, “from the depths”, is taken from Psalm 130), he puts on the mask of the disgraced, and penitent, prisoner to review his affair with Bosie, to attempt a kind of confession and then, suitably purged, to assert “a fresh mode of self-realisation”. More than a century after its first appearance (Wilde’s friend Robert Ross both gave the manuscript its final title, and arranged for its publication), the ruthless and often self-lacerating candour with which Wilde lays himself bare is still shocking.

At first, he addresses the heyday of his affair, its carefree and irresponsible passion, and his reckless indulging of the younger man:

“From the very first there was too wide a gap between us. You had been idle at your school, worse than idle at your university. You did not realise that an artist requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, an intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace and solitude.”

As Wilde’s realisation of his self-destruction sinks in, he rehearses the terrible sequence of events that would lead to his downfall, disgrace, and imprisonment: “Everything about my tragedy has been hideous. Our very dress [as convicts] makes us grotesques. We are the zanies of sorrow…”

A famous passage recalls the prisoner’s transfer from London to Reading, by train, on 13 November 1895:

“From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction, in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at. Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me, I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.”

This episode sees Wilde at one of his worst and lowest depths. Thereafter, De Profundis gains vigour and confidence as the prisoner charts his brilliant career as “a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of his age”. He contrasts the high moments of his art and its astonishing success with the humiliation of bankruptcy and jail. Somehow, he must come to terms with the great “Oscar” becoming a drab prison number “C.3.3.”, a cipher. Other parts of De Profundis hint at Wilde’s subsequent campaign for prison reform (“the prison system is absolutely and entirely wrong”), and the fate of the system’s inmates, an obsession that culminated in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his lyrical masterpiece.

Thus emboldened, and with his artistic muscles recovering some of their old potency, Wilde begins to make a comparison between his life as an artist and the life of Christ, a theme that runs fitfully through his earlier prose writing, especially The Critic as Artist (1890) and The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891). For Wilde, the noble artist, the figure of Christ is the supreme archetype of the suffering creator, as well as the ultimate individualist. In the degradation and shame of his 1895 trial, Wilde finds the glimmerings of his role as a martyr, a role he is happy to share with the son of God.

Never let it be said that Oscar Wilde was short of self-belief. “All of this”, he writes, “is foreshadowed and prefigured in my art… A great deal of it is hidden away in the note of Doom that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.”

“I now see that Sorrow is at once the type and test of all great Art. What the artist is always looking for is that mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which Form reveals…”

“To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so...

Having made this grandiose connection, the letter descends into a sustained rebuke of Bosie’s character and behaviour, in which his “horrible habit of writing offensive letters” comes across as perhaps the least troubling quality in a young man whose vanity, greed, treachery and vicious self-centredness dragged Wilde down.

And yet, remarkably, Wilde concludes with instructions for their joint future conduct once he has been released, and ends on a note of reconciliation:

“You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. Your affectionate friend. Oscar Wilde.”

It’s hard not to conclude that the thrilling majesty of Wilde’s prose was wasted on Bosie. Within three and a half years of completing this extraordinary document, Wilde was dead. He was 46.

A Signature Sentence

“Our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship has ended in ruin and public infamy for me, yet the memory of our ancient affection is often with me, and the thought that loathing, bitterness and contempt should for ever take that place in my heart once held by love is very sad to me: and you yourself will, I think, feel in your heart that to write to me as I lie in the loneliness of prison-life is better than to publish my letters without my permission or to dedicate poems to me unasked, though the world will know nothing of whatever words of grief or passion, of remorse or indifference you may choose to send as your answer or your appeal.”