The ultimate breakup letter
Wilde did not need to go that hard
Hi,
Last week I was filmed reading some extracts from Wilde’s De Profundis for an exhibition at the Museum of Literature Ireland. It prompted me to return to Wilde’s bitterest of breakup albums, which I’d last read as a teenager.
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De Profundis (‘from the depths’), an extended letter that Wilde wrote from prison in 1897 to his fickle lover Lord Alfred Douglas, is two things: 1. a melancholic mediation on sorrow and enlightenment, and 2. profoundly petty. Try as he might, Wilde cannot forgive himself for two levels of self-betrayal: his artistic soul censures him for loving a superficial person, his bourgeois streak for spending so much money.
He’s not scared to name the sums involved: £12-20 a day, £80-130 a week. £1,340 for three months at the Goring. A ‘very pretty present’ at Christmas worth £40-50, and ten days at the Avondale for £140. £700 in the balance of legal costs for Wilde’s disastrous libel suit against Douglas’s father, eight days in Paris for £150 (‘Paillard alone absorbing £85’). Wilde cannot recall Douglas’s exact words to him or the supposed balmy moments between them with nearly as much precision as he does the ledger book.
His style ascends the further he distances himself from the money-grubbing. De Profundis contains many gorgeous paragraphs pondering the life and artistic legacy of Christ, the ideal conditions in which to produce art and the need to derive meaning from suffering. I felt recognised in his conception of how pain works its way obliquely into literature: ‘I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends. But something must come into my work of fuller harmony of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious colour effects, of simpler architectural-order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate’.
That’s how it is for me. My life never makes it into my fiction in the direct sense of literally using something that has happened to me. But I can observe shifts in sensibility, or even in language, and link them to some bygone ordeal or other.
If I were Oscar Wilde’s therapist (and you must allow I’d knock it out of the park) I would tell him: yes, make meaning of your plight, very good, but do not peg it to Bosie changing. He won’t! You have composed a litany detailing precisely why not! Wilde’s conviction that Bosie must love him, must read the letter, must come away from it changed, ignores the central issue that Wilde was too clever not to have long since rationally grasped: a person capable of deep feeling and moral accountability would not have behaved as Bosie did in the first place. We know, from De Profundis and from basically every contemporary account, that Bosie was a terrible guy. Yet you can practically hear the little voice at the back of Wilde’s head: ah, but if he were truly stupid and shallow then how could I, a genius, love him?
Very easily! Many such cases! Take the L, Oscar, and move on!
Really Wilde writes to two Bosies. The one he chastises about money is the real Bosie, whom such mercantile complaints have the best chance of piquing. But the one he lavishes his philosophical musings on is sheer fantasy. His imaginary pupil will adore and take to heart his fine words, while the real Bosie will stop reading half a paragraph in. (As indeed he did. He burned the letter and claimed not to have received it.) Wilde knew very well at this point that Bosie’s French was terrible, since his translation of Salomé had been a mess. Yet he cites not only French but Italian and Greek in dialogue with his imagined intellectual equal.
Wilde’s reason, or rationalisation, for writing the letter despite Bosie’s inveterate selfish banality is that forgiveness is something one does for one’s own sake. There are points where you can see it really working. Here’s Wilde on the prospect of their one day meeting in exile:
I hope that our meeting will be what a meeting between you and me should be, after everything that has occurred. In old days there was always a wide chasm between us, the chasm of achieved Art and acquired culture: there is a still wider chasm between us now, the chasm of Sorrow: but to Humility there is nothing that is impossible, and to Love all things are easy.
There’s an ugly condescension here, of course. In order to avoid thinking Bosie actively malicious, Wilde must conceive of him as a brute who knows not what he does. The third option — that Bosie is neither wicked nor ignorant, but aware and indifferent — is as devastating to Wilde’s ego as it is to his aesthetic urge. It’s nonetheless a beautiful paragraph whose peacefulness is promptly undone by the subsequent injunction to write back. Now Wilde is moving off the plane of privately searching for meaning and back to letting his closure depend on Bosie’s actions.
He instructs Bosie: ‘Don’t write what you don’t mean: that is all’. It’s befitting, then, that Bosie never responded.
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I’ve been having fun in Dublin. I’m still writing for the papers and doing other bits and bobs, and I’ve been enjoying the events at the Italian Cultural Institute. Shockingly I still have not made it to the Edna O’Brien documentary; I must and will.
One last thing from De Profundis that didn’t fit into the above: ‘But now we know that the Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were bilingual’. This was already not strictly true in Ireland; by 1897, the Irish language had largely disappeared from much of rural life. But it still pleased me to see Wilde using the word ‘bilingual’ to describe the then-stigmatised language combination of Irish/English, given that there are still plenty of racists who’ll use it for people who speak English/German but not, say, German/Arabic.
Speaking of. I am watching the upcoming German election tensely. Nothing articulate to say from Dublin, but my thoughts and solidarity are with everyone protesting against the AfD. Thank you.
Till next time,
N